Table of contents for June 2022 in Maximum PC

THE GREAT GRAPHICS card drought is nearly over and to highlight this, Nvidia’s marketing campaign, dubbed restocked and reloaded, is spreading the word that its GeForce RTX 30 Series cards should be in stock. In theory, you have a chance of getting cards at list price, though some opportunistic scalpers are still at large, especially for the ‘hot’ cards. A quick survey of resellers shows a trend of increased availability and falling prices. The Radeon RX 6500XT and 6900 XT are now selling at just shy of list price though, on average, you can still expect to pay an extra $200. Nvidia’s 40 Series cards and AMD’s RDNA 3, are due at the end of the year. Both companies will want to shift the previous generation before they are rendered…

LENGTH OF TIME: 4-5 HOURS LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY: MEDIUM 1 DISMANTLING RIGHT PEOPLE, we need as much room as we can possibly get out of this case. Liquid-cooling can be a fiddly operation with tight angles and impossible gaps. To make life easier, we start off by taking as much of the case apart as possible. You may be thinking, “well why have you left the front radiators in?” These work in our favor as we’ll be installing a 360mm radiator behind them. Other than that, the side panel wing doors come off with one screw holding each one. The front panel pops off with a gentle pull from the bottom and the same applies to the top panel. Now that’s stripped, on to some more tearing down. 2 GPU TEARDOWN…

The big two GPU names are about to get some muchneeded competition from Intel’s Arc, or at least in theory. Arc, formerly DG2, aka Xe-HPG, has seen quite a few delays. We originally thought it would launch by the end of 2021, but now it’s looking like a mid-2022 launch for the desktop parts. It could be too little, too late for gamers, though the media aspects of the chips remain promising. Intel recently revealed the initial lineup for laptop Arc A-series models, which will inevitably be paired with Intel CPUs. Given Intel dominates the laptop landscape in sales, it’s probably a smart business move, but it doesn’t give us a lot of hope for high performance. Intel compared its lowertier A370M part against its own integrated Iris Xe Graphics,…

It’s easy to get carried away looking at the top-performing cards and thinking it’s time for an upgrade. Resist the temptation, at least until the games and applications you’re using warrant the expense. Even then, make sure that your ‘upgrade’ actually represents a true leveling up of performance. The oft-quoted rule of thumb is that a previous generation GPU represents one step down in performance, but that’s not entirely accurate. For Nvidia, the RTX 2080 lands midway between the 3060 and 3060 Ti, the GTX 1080 performs about on par with the RTX 2060, and the GTX 980 lines up with the GTX 1060. That’s two steps down, but if you look at the – 70 cards, it’s maybe one to one and a half steps down, and among the…

Let’s be honest with ourselves: gamers can be a notoriously difficult bunch. The same can be said for virtually every audience within the entertainment industry, but toxicity and vitriol are often widespread in gaming communities, whether that manifests itself as homophobia-riddled region chats or outright death threats aimed at individual developers on social media. The echo chambers of subreddits and private Discord servers are no help, especially when they are populated by gamers who have little idea of how the game production process actually works, or worse, have huge misconceptions about how that process can realistically be conducted. It stands to reason, then, that some games are shut down not due to any fault of the developers, but because the players themselves are simply uncooperative and unruly. One of the…

1 FEATURE-RICH As well as looks, the Beoplay Portals provide plenty of compatibility and functionality. With touch sliders and gesture controls on each cup, it’s easy to control your audio on the go. Alternatively, you can control the headphones via the app, which allows you to fine-tune the sound EQ and switch profiles when you’re listening to music or gaming. 2 MATERIALISTIC To match the high-end design, you’d expect a similar quality of materials and that’s certainly the case with the Portals. The earpads are made of soft lambskin leather, while a bamboo knit headband cushions the top of your head. The main construction is aluminum and even the plastic parts are soft to the touch, matching the craftsmanship B&O has put into these cans. 3 EFFORTLESS COMFORT Weighing just…

YOU’LL NEED THIS WINDOWS 11 plus a Registry backup—use System Restore or a drive image tool. Optional extra: third-party Registry editor, such as O&O Registry Editor. IF YOU’RE LOOKING TO GET MORE from your Windows 11 setup, you’ve come to the right place. In this issue, we’ll take a deep dive into your Windows Registry, which has been a vital component of Windows since the days of Windows 95. Basically, it’s a glorified database stored across several files (known as ‘hives’) containing various configuration settings that cover all aspects of your PC: its hardware, the apps you’ve installed, and—of course—Windows itself. To simplify matters, most Registry changes can be made via other Windows tools such as Settings or Device Manager, or within an application’s own dialog boxes. However, other settings are…

WITH INTEL’S Alder Lake CPUs now firmly entrenched in the PC hardware market, we’ve been keen to see how far custom PC manufacturers can push them. Enter Velocity Micro, which has taken the already fearsome Intel Core i9 12900K, overclocked the eight Performance cores to 5.1GHz, and taken the eight Efficient cores to 4GHz. That maxes out the performance of this already impressive chip while pairing it with other bleedingedge components, including a PCIe 4.0 SSD, DDR5 RAM, and a 3080Ti GPU. If you’re reading those specs and struggling to imagine what the price could be, let us put you out of your misery—the Raptor Z55 costs $4,999. That’s a healthy chunk of change, but it’s in the same ballpark as the similarly-specced HP Omen 45L ($4,700) and Corsair One…

LAST YEAR’S LENOVO Legion 5 Pro laptop won many fans by packing an AMD Ryzen 5 5600H processor, RTX 3070 GPU, and 16-inch 16:10 display into a 15-inch chassis and a $1,600 price tag. It was released at a time when being able to buy a desktop 3070 was near-impossible, and it marked itself out as one of the best value gaming laptops on the market as a result. The 2022 version of the machine is here, albeit in Intel form (the “5i” moniker signifying the Intel version—an AMD model will follow later this year). The Legion 5i Pro is a significant step forward from a tech perspective, with Intel’s 12th gen i7-12700H also allowing for the inclusion of DDR5 RAM as well as a PCIe 4.0 SSD. Other improvements…

WHAT DO CONTROLLERS have over the reliable old keyboard-and-mouse combo? How can they hope to match the unerring precision of the mouse? How can they keep up with less than 20 buttons to press? Pfft. There’s absolutely no reason to use a controller, no sir. No reason whatsoever. Except… Yeah, alright, analog sticks are great. Variable input force has long been an advantage of rocking a gamepad in all sorts of games, from racing titles to shooters and fighting games. The ability to move your avatar or turn your vehicle slowly, delicately, with a single sustained input rather than constant anxious keytapping, can be an oft-underrated boon. Fortunately, keyboards are catching up. The Huntsman Mini Analog isn’t Razer’s first foray into using analoginput key switches, nor its first attempt at…

A CURIOSITY IN FORM as well as function, Ghostwire Tokyo is in some ways a callback to Japanese horror games of the early 2000s (although this is much more of an action game), and also a graphical monster capable of serving up spectacular slices of neon lights and raytraced reflections. To call the story outlandish would be something of an understatement, but it’s a good word to start the review off with. Everyone in Tokyo is dead, or at least gone, reduced to piles of clothing that lay where they fell when the body was somehow removed from them. Instead of its once bustling population, Tokyo is now home to a huge population of escaped pets looking for attention and rather a lot of ghosts and other visitors taken straight…

> Keeping a Low Profile > Unclear Windows > RAM Raider > Desktops vs. Laptops Tackling TKLs I feel that you missed a few important items in your review of the MSI Vigor GK50 Low Profile TKL in the March 2022 issue. Now, I’m no expert, but I’m sure adherence to functional consistency and standardization are paramount to a keyboard’s success and usability. I am versed enough to have experienced proper QWERTY keyboards (even TKLs), where the individual key’s functions are arranged vertically, so the normal function is the bottom character, and the shifted key function is the upper one. This allows for easy comprehension of functional operation. Lately, I’ve seen many keyboards (including the TKL I’m typing on now) where the key characters are arranged horizontally and the functional…

THE CROWN for making the world’s fastest gaming chip may ultimately be a hollow one, but Intel and AMD take it seriously. AMD’s Zen architecture may give Intel a hard time in many areas, but that final accolade never quite falls into its grasp—and Intel is keen to make sure it doesn’t. When AMD’s cacheheavy Ryzen 7 5800X3D was announced, you knew Intel would answer back. It has, with the Special Edition Core i9-12900KS: a chip that only really exists to break records. It’s a classic Intel response that we’ve seen before: take an existing chip, carefully ‘bin’ it (essentially use quality control testing to pick only the most robust silicon), and you have a new halo processor, without producing any new silicon. The Core i9-12900KS is a faster i9-12900K,…

TRIUMPHS FASTEST CARD LANDS Nvidia’s RTX 3090 Ti has launched, with a monster 10,752 CUDA GPU, 24GB of GDDR6X, 450W, and a $2,000 price tag. OPEN SOURCE BIOS A project to build Coreboot, a configurable open source BIOS, has got it running on an Alder Lake board, albeit a Linux one. 3D MODEL YOUR STUFF Epic did a beta test of RealityScan, which makes 3D models using smartphone images. TRAGEDIES NO E3 THIS YEAR Last year’s E3 was held online but this year there’s no show. It will return “reinvigorated” next year, organizers say. DRONE CRASHES Amazon’s $2bn drone program is struggling with “safety issues”. Insiders claim delivery speed has been prioritized. SMART HOME BRICKS Insteon shut its servers, killing all its smart home gadgets and showing how transient the…

AMD SEEMS DETERMINED not to let a month go by without launching something. This month, we have a new set of 6000 Pro series laptop processors. These feature Rembrandt architecture with 6nm Zen 3+ cores, and integrated RDNA 2 promising “ultimate performance for professionals”. The top chip is the Ryzen 9 Pro 6950 in H (45W), and HS (35W) flavors. You get eight cores, a 3.3GHz base clock, and a boost speed of 4.9GHz, with 20MB of L2/L3 cache. Below this is the Ryzen 7 Pro 6850 and the 12-core Ryzen 5 Pro 6650, then two ‘U’ low power 28W versions: the Ryzen 7 Pro 6850U, and Ryzen 5 Pro 6650U. The Zen 3+ core brings DDR5 memory, Wi-Fi 6E, USB 4, and Thunderbolt support. There are also three less…

> BSOD-plagued PC > CPU for Windows 11 > Rekindle old magic Strange BSODs Ever since Windows 11 was announced, I’ve started experiencing the notorious Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) at least once a day. I’m still running Windows 10 Pro 64-bit and have kept up to date with Windows Updates. In fact, that’s often when I get a BSOD crash—just checking for updates. Is this Microsoft’s new policy to force us off Windows 10? According to Microsoft, my laptop will support Windows 11, so I assume it should continue to support Windows 10 until the Windows 10 end date. I’ve thought of switching to Linux and even looked at Apple briefly. If I do switch, I don’t want anything to do with Microsoft, but I can’t find anything that…

Going all out on pure performance might sound great, but most people need to strike a balance between framerate and cost. Putting everything together, we’ve picked the four best options for various budgets, keeping in mind that graphics card prices still aren’t completely back to normal. If you need something right now, here’s what we recommend, though waiting for the next-generation cards to arrive later this year should provide more bang for your buck. BEST EXTREME GPU GEFORCE RTX 3090 TI ($1,999) When your only goal is to get the fastest graphics card possible, the choice is simple. Nvidia’s latest and greatest might not be particularly efficient, and your wallet might go on strike, but there’s no question this represents the current pinnacle of GPU performance. The law of diminishing…

It’s always sad news when a game gets canceled, but some titles don’t even get that closure, remaining on development death row indefinitely. The term ‘development hell’ was coined long before the rise of the games industry, referring to media that ends up trapped in a state of limbo for any number of reasons, whether due to lack of funds, creative differences, legal disputes, or something else entirely. The tech and gaming industry actually has its own term for projects like this; ‘vaporware’ refers to games and software (and sometimes hardware) that is officially announced but releases late or doesn’t release at all. Some games stagger through development hell only to be released in a lackluster final form, such as the infamous Duke Nukem Forever, which spent a whopping 15 years in…

NAILING DOWN the exact launch date of the very first color LCD monitor for the PC isn’t easy. But one of the earliest was certainly the NANAO F-1020 from Eizo. Launched way back in 1993, the F-1020 spanned a mighty 10.4 inches and rocked no fewer than 640x480 pixels. Count ‘em! As it happens, by Eizo’s own estimations, it was a sales flop. Yet here we are nearly 30 years later drowning in LCD panels. The technology absolutely owns the PC monitor market. But is everything about to change? The arrival of the awesome new Alienware OLED gaming panel (see page 78) certainly suggests so. At last, per-pixel lighting is actually a thing for the PC and not just smartphones and TVs. Plus far faster response, not to mention much…

TIP OF THE MONTH TEMPORARY FILE DELETE If it feels as though your PC is getting a little sluggish, clearing temporary files can help to make things run faster and smoother. Press ‘Windows + R’ to open up the run application, then search ‘temp’ and then hit OK. This will open up a load of temporary files, most of which will be unnecessary. To clear all of these files, press ‘CTRL + A’ and then hit delete. Hopefully, this will help speed your computer up a little. MAKE – USE – CREATE 58 Get the most out of the Registry Editor in Windows 11. 62 Japan’s 1980s home computer, the NEC PC-9800. 66 Build It, using one manufacturer’s components only. submit your How To project idea to: editor@maximumpc.com…

1. ADDRESS BAR This recent addition to Registry Editor allows you to type or paste in Registry addresses to quickly jump to the specified subkey. 2. FAVORITES Registry Editor allows you to store frequently accessed subkeys in its Favorites menu, giving you one-click access. Make sure you give them a suitably descriptive name. 3. NAVIGATION PANE This left-hand pane allows you to move up and down through the various keys and subkeys that make up the Windows Registry. 4. SUBKEYS A key or subkey that has a > next to the folder signifies that it contains further subkeys inside. Double-click on the arrow icon to open the subkey and reveal its contents. 5. REGISTRY VALUES Each subkey contains one or more values that are used to record preferences and other…

YOU’LL NEED THIS A COPY OF THE NEKO PROJECT http://nenecchi.kirara.st/ THIS MONTH’S COMPUTER may be unfamiliar, but NEC’s PC-9800 series, usually shortened to PC-98, was arguably Japan’s most important computer and played an integral part in developing both Japanese language computing and video games. Despite the potential gaming fun offered by this system, there are technical hurdles to be overcome. So after a brief history of the PC-98, let us show you how to emulate the machine as easily as possible. 1 DEVELOPMENT AND LAUNCH The PC-98 was a strategically brilliant move by NEC, beating Western competition by exploiting their inept support for Kanji: the complex characters inherited from Chinese, used in any formal writing. NEC recognized the limitations of Western rivals and designed its machine from the ground up…

THIS IS THE DAWN of a new age of screen tech. We give you the Alienware 34 AW3423DW, the first true OLED monitor for the PC. That’s a qualified ‘true’ because it’s not, strictly speaking, the first OLED monitor of any kind. Instead, it’s the first aimed at consumers and marketed at a vaguely attainable price. The AW3423DW is designed for gaming, where OLED promises much thanks to response times an order of magnitude faster than any LCD. But the basic form is entirely familiar. The 34-inch panel has a gentle 1800R curve, 21:9 ultrawide aspect ratio, 175Hz refresh, and 3,440x1,440 native resolution. It’s right at the sweet spot, striking a balance between detail and frame rates. Nothing radical so far, but make no mistake, this screen is special. Enhanced…

IT’S ALL TOO EASY in this job to become blasé, to think you’ve seen it all before. So, in that sense, the Acer ConceptD 7 Ezel Pro is thoroughly refreshing. It’s not truly unique, nor is it entirely issuefree. But it is unusual and it does some things so well that it makes conventional clamshell laptops seem clunky. The showbiz bit involves the clever dual-hinged display. It’s an ergonomic design that unlocks an entire universe of input options you didn’t even know existed. Combined with the bundled Wacom EMR input pen, which slots neatly into the side of the screen, the result is a rather remarkable productivity tool for digital artists and other content creators. The not-quite-unique bit involves the Microsoft Surface Laptop Studio, which offers a similar—but not quite…

LIVE STREAMING is no longer just a niche corner of the internet, with the huge increase in its popularity over the past decade puhing it to vast global audiences and making it one of the most popular forms of online video. The live aspect of streaming brings in the anticipation and excitement offered by live TV but with the opportunity for anyone to create their own content. Whether it’s live streaming games, tournaments, chatting, IRL videos, talk shows, podcasts, music, and even ASMR, there is an almost infinite amount of content available. As a result, the production side of streaming has gone way beyond just hitting a broadcast button and talking down the microphone—audiences expect more. To stand out from the crowd, you’ll need to use live streaming software to…

MICROSOFT has a new security system dubbed Smart App Control, which aims to make Windows as secure as possible for ‘hybrid’ working from home. The new system uses cloud servers to monitor an application’s behavior, employing AI to spot anything potentially malicious. Sounds good, but the problem is that it won’t work on any application you’ve already installed, so you’ll need to wipe and start again. Ouch! Having to reinstall Windows and all your applications is a big price to pay for that extra layer of security. There are other issues too, because it doesn’t like unsigned or unrecognized applications. Meaning your obscure utility or elderly application will set alarms off. Until Microsoft figures out how to enable Smart App Control without a clean system and adds more control, this…

1 LOGITECH G560 These Logitech speakers look great and sound fantastic, thanks to serious volume levels and a bulky subwoofer that creates an immersive soundstage. The RGB lighting is based on Logitech’s Lightsync system and it also works with your phone over Bluetooth. $240, www.logitechg.com 2 CREATIVE PEBBLE PLUS If you primarily use headphones but want a speaker option, the Creative is a fantastic choice. It’s a full 2.1 system with a separate subwoofer to drive the bass. The two pebble speakers are small, but sound crisp and go relatively loud. They’re powered by USB, saving plug sockets at your desk. $50, www.creative.com 3 RAZER NOMMO CHROMA This stylish offering is a 2.0 speaker system with no subwoofer, making it the best option for those short on space. The speakers…

LIQUID COOLING MACHINES are the show cars of the PC world—striking setups that grab your attention. However, the benefits of switching to a water-cooled system go way beyond just the aesthetics—it can cool down your build while performing at a whisper-quiet volume. There are some downsides to water cooling your build though. It gets complex, so there’s more planning involved than in your regular PC build, but we’re going to show you that anyone can give it a go. There are two types of water cooling setups, soft tubing, and hard tubing—the latter requiring heating and bending pipes into position. Mixing fundamental plumbing with PC building might sound like the stuff of night terrors, but it’s not that scary once you get into it. We’re going straight into the deep…

THE PAST TWO YEARS of pandemic-induced scarcity and supply chain disruption, coupled with cryptocurrency mining mania, have for many dashed hopes of a new graphics card. Nearly 18 months after the launch of AMD’s Radeon RX 6000-series and Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 30-series GPUs, Steam data shows only 15 percent of gamers use Ampere cards, and under one percent use AMD’s RDNA 2 chips. But plenty of graphics cards are still fast enough to play today’s demanding games. To help put things in perspective, we rounded up all the major GPUs from the past six years (plus a few from further back) and put them to the test. Which cards still have staying power and which have fallen by the wayside? Our requirement is that each card needs to work with Windows…

Depending on the game, the difference in visual fidelity between medium settings and ultra settings may not be worth the performance penalty. Those running extreme GPUs, like the RTX 3090 or RX 6900 XT, can safely set phasers to vaporize and carry on. But if your GPU is long in the tooth, dropping the settings a notch or two can do wonders for performance—particularly if you’re using a graphics card that doesn’t have at least 4GB VRAM, and some recent games even want 8GB just for 1080p ultra. Take the GTX 1050, which sits at the bottom of the rankings in terms of 1080p ultra-performance and delivered just 15fps on average. Dropping to 1080p medium doubled its performance, and while a few games still struggled— Warhammer 3 and Flight Simulator still failed to break…

All our testing has focused on desktop graphics cards. It allows us to test the various GPUs while keeping all other hardware constant, but there are also mobile variants of most graphics cards. As you can guess, packing something like a 450W RTX 3090 Ti into a laptop just isn’t going to happen, not without drastically cutting the power use. That results in the latest mobile GPUs from Nvidia and AMD generally being at least one step down in performance from their desktop counterparts. Take the mobile RTX 3080, for example. It uses the GA104 chip, whereas the desktop 3080 uses GA102. It also has 8GB of memory on a 256-bit bus instead of 10GB on a 320-bit interface and comes with 48 SMs and 6144 CUDA cores compared to…

We’ve all been there; watching a trailer for a newly-announced game, streamed live from a major show such as Gamescom or (should it ever return) E3, setting the mighty wheels of the hype train turning. ‘What’s the release date?’ ask the fans. ‘Coming soon’, teases the pre-rendered reveal video. It’s a hotly-anticipated title and the developers are remaining tight-lipped about their new project. Maybe you’ll get a less-than-concrete release window in six months’ time. A year passes, then two, then three. Radio silence. No second trailer, no new screenshots, no dev diaries. If you’re lucky, you might see a senior member of the development team pop up on social media, assuring eager fans—without any actual proof of life—that the game is very much still in production. However, nothing arrives and,…

In cases when a game has been canceled or left unsupported, fans are usually left with nothing to fill the void. There have been rare cases, however, where publishers have seen fit to release additional media outside the game to tie up loose ends. One such example was Mass Effect: Andromeda, the fourth entry into BioWare’s beloved sci-fi series. Andromeda suffered from a buggy launch version and character writing that many fans felt was lackluster compared with the original trilogy, dooming it with mediocre review scores from the outset. Although BioWare worked quickly to patch the game’s worst issues, it underperformed in sales and the Edmonton-based team was reassigned to work on the studio’s new IP, Anthem (which ironically also bombed on release). Attacks on social media targeting individual members of the dev team and EA…

It’s the flat panel to rule them all, the ultimate display tech—we give you MicroLED. But it’s not coming to the PC anytime soon. It’s still years away, which is a pity because when it does hit the PC, it’s going to be awesome. Like OLED, MicroLED is a self-emissive technology that offers true per-pixel lighting. So, each individual pixel can be turned off completely. That means essentially infinite contrast and true black tones. The difference is that MicroLED sidesteps organic compounds and so doesn’t suffer from burn-in. The latter is a major issue with OLED displays because of the differential degradation within the RGB subpixels. In an OLED panel, the blue subpixels wear out faster than the red and green subpixels. That eventually causes permanent color distortion seen as burnin. It’s…

With Intel’s latest NUC 12 Extreme Dragon Canyon gaming Mini PC in my possession, you can bet your bottom dollar that it’s found its way into my living room—at the expense of my Wii console. The Intel NUC 12 is so compact it sits and hides neatly under my TV unit, and with the RGBs turned off, it’s actually a discreet little monster. I’ve also been testing SCUF’s Instinct Pro, so I essentially have a console-killer combo that I can use in the evenings. I’m not too thrilled about having to return the NUC back to Intel—the performance is just so impressive. Though I do feel guilty that I’m not pushing it to its absolute limits when playing older titles, I’m having a blast. As sad as I’ll be when…

YOU’LL NEED THIS GIMP 2.1 OS: Windows 7 or newer. FOR THIS TUTORIAL, we ‘ll be turning our attention to 3D image placement and how to bring two images together while maintaining the same 3D perspective. We’ll be using GIMP for this tutorial and a royalty-free image by Jurre Houtkamp on Unsplash (unsplash.com) to show how to build your photo manipulation skills. Practicing using sites like Unsplash allows you to play around with high-quality images with plenty of manipulation potential. We’ll also be using a flat graphic site called the Noun Project (thenounproject.com) for a flat sign we’ll be adjusting. This should build your knowledge of perspective and help you blend images together while maintaining a natural finish. We’ll also be touching on textures, as we bring the texture from…

THIS MONTH, a certain game has been taking up my life and all I can think about is when I next get to play it. Regular readers will know about my love and nostalgia for this type of game, but I haven’t spoken about this particular title as frankly I didn’t want to jinx it. As you might have seen from the image to the right, the game is Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga. I’ve been waiting excitedly for it for a year and a half now and, in the meantime, I tried to park the idea of it to one side. This plan worked pretty well as, all of a sudden, the release date crept up out of nowhere. I’ve only had a few days playing the game…

MORE THAN A YEAR and a half has now passed since Nvidia launched its Ampere GPUs, including the RTX 3090 and RTX 3080. Ampere was supposed to bring the GPU empire under control but it was plagued by shortages in the ensuing time, an unforeseen weakness in Nvidia’s plans. However, things are finally starting to improve and you might be able to find an RTX 3080 for under a grand. This is apparently unacceptable because the RTX 3090 Ti doubles that price, kicks performance per watt considerations to the curb, and goes for a no-holds-barred implementation of the GA102 processor. The 3090 Ti, like its 3090 predecessor, packs 24GB of GDDR6X memory, but Nvidia has improved things with this update. Specifically, it’s using 16Gb modules and only needs 12 of them,…

AFFORDABLE GAMING laptops (and we use the word ‘affordable’ loosely here) are a tricky proposition. Of course, you could spend upwards of $3,000 on a high-end laptop with a powerhouse GPU and a 4K screen, but plenty of gamers want a desktop alternative that won’t break the bank. Unfortunately, many of these laptops have, over the years, struggled to perform well enough to justify their price tags, with GPUs like the GTX 1650 and now the RTX 3050 just not quite measuring up. Thank goodness, then, for the GeForce RTX 3060. It’s the perfect budget GPU, balancing top-notch 1080p performance with relatively low power consumption and a sensible price—assuming you can get one at RRP. This is the graphics card at the heart of Acer’s latest Nitro 5 laptop, a…