Table of contents for Holiday 2022 in Maximum PC

WELL, HERE WE ARE. We’ve spent the last few issues teaching you how to build budget PCs under $1,000—a great exercise, as that hasn’t been possible for the best part of two years thanks to inflated prices. But with that anomaly behind us, this issue we’re able to welcome a brand new generation of CPUs and GPUs and put them into a new high-end build, starting on page 16. We’re talking top-of-the-line products from Nvidia and Intel powering the fastest gaming PC currently available. We already gave the Nvidia RTX 4090 our highest score in the form of a ‘Kick-Ass’ award in our last issue, so we knew we were dealing with a gaming powerhouse there. But we were relieved to find Intel building on the success of its excellent Alder…

WHILE THE RUMORED 600W+ power requirement for the RTX 4090 didn’t quite pan out, Nvidia does recommend at least an 850W power supply for this generation’s top card, up from 750W for the 3090. So there are probably quite a few people out there looking to upgrade their rig. Regardless of whether you’re buying a new system or upgrading though, it’s always a good idea to have a good PSU at the heart of your system. These are five of the ones we recommend for gamers. 5 SILVERSTONE SX1000 PLATINUM www.silverstonetek.com, $305 The best small-form PSU on this list doesn’t stop it from having every connector a gaming PC builder needs, at least for the next few years. It’s completely modular, which is handy for compact builds as you can leave…

SPECIFICATIONS FOR INTEL’S ARC A-SERIES GRAPHICS CARDS Specifications for Intel’s Arc A-series graphics cards, built on TSMC’s N6 process node—the A770 8GB has the same specs as the 16GB, except with 16 Gbps VRAM. Intel has two different GPUs for Alchemist, and our table shows the specifications for the four desktop graphics cards that use these chips. Besides the desktop models, Intel also has five mobile variants plus three ‘Pro’ models—though they aren’t really aimed at professionals, given all three use the smaller ACM-G11 die that offers rather mediocre performance. Intel’s first iteration of Arc GPUs ends up a bit unbalanced in some areas, for example, the 128 ROPs (Render Outputs) and 256-bit memory interfaces that are present on the three higher-tier GPUs. Power efficiency is also a little way behind…

Graphics cards have included support for video decoding and encoding for a while, with a few notable exceptions such as AMD’s Navi 24-based cards. The most popular video codec is still H.264, first released back in 2003 before Blu-ray even became a thing. H.264 has been updated a few times over the years, but the core features have been around since 2005. One of the reasons for the proliferation of H.264 is that MPEG LA, the group in charge of administering patent licenses, declared in 2010 that internet video that was available for free viewing didn’t need to pay licensing fees. Coupled with the explosion of YouTube, nearly every new device for over a decade has had H.264 support. But H.264 has long since been surpassed by newer codecs. H.265…

BORDERLINE UBIQUITOUS, but a little bit baffling. That’s HDR or high dynamic range image rendering. It’s everywhere, but also quite confusing, especially on the PC. With numerous competing and overlapping standards, all manner of supporting screen technologies, and patchy software support, using HDR on a PC can be a frustrating experience. Even knowing if HDR is working correctly can be tricky. That’s a particular problem on the PC, given that many so-called HDR monitors can’t actually display HDR visuals. Meanwhile, enabling HDR can do weird things to conventional SDR content and graphics. It’s a patchy experience. But here’s the thing. When it’s done right, HDR is spectacular. Good enough that once you’ve gone HDR, you won’t want to go back. From eye-popping in-game sizzle to deep, dark moody cinematic thrills,…

If you want to tweak the speeds and timings of your RAM, be prepared for plenty of trial and error, as it may not be immediately obvious if you’ve pushed too far. The odd single-bit glitch here and there might not have any noticeable effect until it happens in the middle of a system process and causes Windows to abruptly blue-screen. If you’d rather not find out the hard way, you can use Windows’ built-in Memory Diagnostic tool to thoroughly test that your RAM is working as it should. Just open the Start menu and type its name to find it. The catch is that, because this tool needs access to the full expanse of installed RAM, it has to run outside of Windows—you will need to reboot the system…

WINDOWS 11 AND THE 22H2 UPDATE If you’ve not yet received it, check the box for troubleshooting tips, or email doctor@maximumpc.com. 1 SHELL IMPROVEMENTS Let’s start our look at Windows 11 22H2 by acknowledging the ongoing process of streamlining and modernizing the Windows user interface—a seemingly endless process dating back to the launch of Windows 10. Press Alt + Win + K to reveal a new control for muting the mic during calls in supported apps in Teams. The redesigned flyout, which pops up above the taskbar, extends to other hardware controls such as volume and brightness—if your keyboard supports these, try them now. >> The biggest beneficiary of this ongoing facelift is Task Manager [Image A]. If Task Manager isn’t yet an option when right-clicking the taskbar, press Ctrl…

The Windows 11 22H2 update opens with a major cultural shift. You’ll have noticed this if, after first updating, you discovered the long-awaited tabs in File Explorer were missing because Microsoft held the feature back. That’s the bad news; the good news is you won’t have to wait 12 months for it to finally appear in 23H2. That’s because Microsoft has unveiled a new way of rolling out feature updates. It was quick to demonstrate this new approach when it announced the first of these so-called ‘Moments’ on 18th October. Not only were tabs finally implemented, but additional improvements also saw the return of the ‘Task Manager’ option to the Taskbar’s context menu as well as additions to the Accounts section under Settings, like the ability to review and manage…

Like all good media servers, Audiobookshelf can do the hard work of locating metadata and covers for your audiobook collection based on how you organize your files. The basic folder structure is this: Author > Series > Title > files You can skip both Series and Title folders if you wish and simply store audiobook files in the Author directory—the name of the file is considered the name of the book. However, many audiobooks are split across multiple files, so storing these inside separate Title folders makes sense in these circumstances. The Author folder supports various naming types from First Last (such as Stephen King) to Last, First (King, Stephen), and Title folders can be named in various ways too—navigate to www.audiobookshelf.org/docs/ and select ‘Directory Structure’ under Books for details.…

Stop me if I’m repeating myself… Intel’s new Raptor Lake CPUs have a power guzzling problem THIS SHOULDN’T COME as much of a surprise. Raptor Lake is, after all, a tweaked version of the Alder Lake just with more cores and higher clocks. And Alder Lake was already seriously pushing the wattage. Intel can say all it wants about the 3rd-gen SuperFin process tech used to manufacture Raptor Lake, now branded as Intel 7. But the reality is that it’s still a 10nm process in a world where the likes of TSMC have just started producing 3nm chips for commercial applications. Of course, process nodes aren’t directly comparable between competing fabs. So, Intel’s 10nm is actually a bit more dense than TSMC’s 7nm technology. But however you slice it, Intel…

LAST MONTH, we looked at the Intel Arc A770 Limited Edition (see Dec 2022 issue); this month we get to check out its little brother that wants so badly to play with the big boys but sometimes just ends up being annoying. Everything good and bad said about the A770 still applies, but this time, you only get 8GB of memory and there’s no RGB lighting to brighten your day. The latter may not matter much to a lot of people, but the former can definitely put a dampener on performance. Using the same suite of games and settings, this provides about 90 percent of the A770’s overall performance, for 83 percent of the price. That’s a win as far as pure value goes, at least if you’re only looking…

The five launches are, of course, new CPU families from Intel and AMD respectively, graphics cards from AMD and Nvidia, and Intel’s long-awaited entry into the gaming GPU market. As I write this, we’ve had at least partial launches of everything bar AMD’s upcoming Radeon RX 7000 series graphics. And it’s been pretty patchy so far. So, what happened—apart from me simply being wrong? There hasn’t been a single overarching theme. It’s a mix of failure to execute, unrealistic expectations, unusual market conditions, and cynical production planning. It’s just unfortunate that it has all come together at the same time. The failure to execute obviously applies to the dumpster fire that is Intel’s Arc graphics launch. Had those GPUs rolled out on time, they would have been merely disappointing. But…

Arc might be the first dedicated GPU from Intel since the late 1990s, but it’s already looking toward future offerings. According to Intel Fellow, Tom Petersen, most of the Arc team has now moved on to the next generation Battlemage, which is well underway. However, having learned a lesson or two from the Alchemist launch, Intel isn’t giving any firm dates for Battlemage yet. What we do know is that Intel will be looking at ways to improve performance and will likely move to a newer process node. Alchemist uses TSMC’s N6, which is a refined version of the N7 process that was launched back in 2019. AMD and Nvidia are moving on to 5nm-class nodes for their latest GPU architectures, and next year, it would be unthinkable for Intel to…

AMD was the first to support PCIe’s Resizable BAR (Base Address Register) feature, which had existed for some time as an option to potentially improve the performance of integrated graphics solutions. With its Radeon RX 6000-series graphics cards, AMD discovered that it could boost performance by around 10 percent using ReBAR to provide the CPU with direct access to all the GPU memory—instead of the usual 256MB at a time. It called the feature Smart Access Memory (SAM) and enabled support on its 500-series motherboard chipsets. Intel and Nvidia eventually followed suit, with the RTX 30-series and Intel chipsets going as far back as the 300-series (mostly Z390 and later) getting support. ReBAR requires both motherboard BIOS support as well as a compatible graphics card to provide any benefit—and that’s…

IF YOU BUY a new computer today, it may well be using DDR5 memory. As the name suggests, this represents the fifth generation of the DDR (double data rate) RAM standard, originally laid down in the year 2000. Of course, if you want to delve into the history of memory you can go much further back than that—the Joint Electron Device Engineering Council (JEDEC) has been developing standards for electronic storage since 1944. For now, though, let’s focus on how DDR5 builds on its predecessor. DDR4 is a versatile standard that officially comes in seven varieties, dubbed DDR4-1600, 1866, 2133, 2400, 2666, 2933, and 3200. You might assume that the numbers indicate the speed at which the different variants run, and that’s basically right—although since DDR transfers data at twice…

As you’ll have gathered, it’s impossible to say that DDR5 is x-percent faster than DDR4. Even two DDR4 modules can perform very differently. However, with a spread of tests, we can get a sense of the range of performance offered by the two RAM families. Our sister title Tom’s Hardware recently did just this, carrying out a series of benchmarks on high-end modules running at different speeds, with their testers using the SiSoftware Sandra. EVIDENTLY, DDR5 has a big technical advantage, with the faster frequencies directly translating into increased bandwidth. But before you ditch your DDR4 system, remember that everyday computing tasks may spend only a fraction of their time waiting for memory access. Since the timings for DDR5 are much higher than for DDR4, workflows that involve continually switching between RAM locations…

A PC OR SERVER RUNNING UBUNTU, DEBIAN OR DOCKER plus Audiobookshelf and a collection of digital audiobooks 1 SET UP YOUR FOLDERS If you’re not familiar with docker, start by checking out the four-page tutorial in the October 2022 issue of Maximum PC. There, we set up a dedicated ‘dockeruser’ user for security purposes, and we’ll be using that user for this tutorial. Let’s start by setting up any required folders. Assuming you followed our September 2022 build feature, you’ll be accessing your server through the cockpit web interface. Log into your dockeruser account, select Terminal in the left-hand pane, and issue the following commands: cd containers mkdir audiobookshelf >> This creates the/home/dockeruser/containers/audiobookshelf folder, which is where your Audiobookshelf settings will reside. Now create two more subfolders inside here: cd…

THIS IS IT, then. Intel’s reply to AMD’s 5nm beast, the Ryzen 9 7950X. We give you the new Intel Core i9-13900K, all 24 cores of it. Yes, you read that right. For the new Raptor Lake 13th-generation family of CPUs, the most obvious upgrade is a doubling of efficiency cores from eight to 16. With eight high-performance cores retained, that takes the total core count to 24 and the threads to 32. That makes for an uneasy comparison between AMD and its 16-core rival. Hold that thought while we consider the rest of the Raptor Lake upgrades. You get more L2 cache per core on those powerful P cores and more shared L2 cache across the low-power E-cores. As for the cores themselves, the P cores get minor tweaks…

WHEN IT COMES DOWN to computing, the keyboard is (in most cases, literally) your right-hand man. Your typing instrument of choice needs to be reliable, comfortable, aesthetically pleasing, and a strong performer. Not every keyboard is going to tick all of these boxes, especially when it comes to the budget end of the market, but the SureFire Kingpin M2 looks promising. So, how many boxes does this full-sized mechanical model tick? The first thing we picked up on when testing was the weight. Weighing in at 2.25lbs, it feels sturdy and well put together. Unless you want a portable wireless keyboard, this extra weightiness is an added benefit as it keeps the board from sliding around on your desk. That’s handy because the rubber feet on this keyboard are pretty small.…

GONE ARE THE DAYS of sending a USB stick containing work, photographs, or other important documents over to your colleagues via snail mail or carrier pigeon. If you are clinging on to the old ways, then fair enough, but times have changed and there are now much quicker and more efficient ways of sharing your files across the internet. Thankfully, using the cloud is a much more effective and secure method of sharing data. There are plenty of cloud services out there, but two of our favorite methods are Google Drive and WeTransfer—the two titans of the datasharing world. Although both platforms differ in many ways, at their core, they both allow you to send and receive files for free. Paid options are also available for both services and we…

That’s not particularly surprising, given the new king of GPUs has a base power draw of 450W and custom cards can push that up to nearly 600W. But there’s a potentially bigger problem, and it involves Nvidia’s ‘quadropus’ 8-pin to 16-pin adapter cable. All RTX 4090 cards appear to come with the same adapter cable, bearing an Nvidia logo. On one side is the new 16-pin 12VHPWR ATX 3.0 PCIe 5.0 connector and, on the other, are four traditional 8-pin PEG connectors, each capable of providing up to 150W of power—potentially up to 600W of power through a single cable. How convenient! Except when you look at the 16-pin connector and compare it with the existing 8-pin connector, you’ll notice that the new connector is physically about two-thirds the size…

> Which mesh system? > Archive emails offline > Noisy fans Confusion over mesh I’ve got a couple of dead spots in my home network. The obvious solution would appear to be a mesh network, but there’s so much choice—even from the same manufacturer sometimes. What sort of things should I be looking for when shopping for a mesh network? —Joel Dawson THE DOCTOR RESPONDS: There are many things to consider when looking at mesh networks. If you’re looking to futureproof your mesh network, then make sure it supports WiFi 6 as a minimum, and WiFi 6E if you have lots of devices where competing demands for network bandwidth could exacerbate your problems. WiFi 6 adds an additional 160MHz channel to the 5GHz spectrum, so those devices capable of using WiFi…

AH YES, it’s that time of the year when we can take a glance back over our shoulders and pick out our favorite pieces of tech from the last 12 months. Well, our favorite pieces of tech that we managed to get our hands on, at least. This year has been nothing short of thrilling—packed with great new tech and a return to glory for the tech industry after a couple of pandemic-affected years. Thankfully, it’s now far easier to acquire a GPU than this time last year. You were probably more likely to strike oil than get your hands on an Nvidia 30 series card at the end of 2021. However, times have changed and we are now at the start of another new generation of hardware. We welcome…

Considering Arc GPUs have only been shipping for a little over a month now—not counting the ‘for China only’ mobile and A380 launches that happened this past spring—things aren’t looking too bad for XeSS adoption. The XeSS SDK is publicly available, and we were able to give it a shot in a handful of games. It’s important to note that XeSS can run in two modes: XMX mode for Arc GPUs, and DP4a (a form of INT8) for all other GPUs. The quality of the two modes is not identical. That’s because DP4a generally means far less computational power, which in turn, means it needs to strike a different balance between quality and compute. The DP4a support is interesting as it means XeSS, like AMD’s FSR and FSR2, can run on…

TIP OF THE MONTH NAVIGATE WINDOWS 11 WITH YOUR VOICE Apart from being incredibly useful, voice navigation is a nifty feature that can easily be enabled in Windows 11. Go to Settings → Accessibility → Speech (in the interactive section), and then toggle the Voice access switch to on. To get started, just say the words “Voice access wake up” and you’re away. There is an interactive guide within the program too, so check that out to help you learn some of the most useful commands. MAKE – USE – CREATE 62 Windows 22H2 update: all new features explained. 66 Build an audiobook or podcast server. 70 Install and uninstall GPU drivers correctly. STAFF WRITER FROM DESKTOP TO HANDHELD? It may seem like a strange time to buy an 11-year-old…

1. LIVE CAPTIONS PANEL By default, the Live Captions panel sits at the top of the screen. The first time you open it, you’ll be prompted to download the processing software required. 2. ENABLE LIVE CAPTIONS If you prefer, you can toggle Live Captions on or off via Settings > Accessibility > Captions, but it’s far easier to learn its keyboard shortcut: Ctrl + Win + L. 3. CAPTION STYLE Don’t like the caption’s font, style, or color? Then there’s a handy dropdown menu offering you five quickfire choices; alternatively, click Edit to set up your own style from scratch. 4. CAPTION POSITION Choose Settings > Position should you wish to either place your captions at the bottom of the screen or have them in a floating semi-translucent window that…

1. NAVIGATION The Home view shows recently added and played material. Switch to Library for the view shown here, with additional views (Series and Collections) available alongside a list of authors. 2. SWITCH LIBRARY If you have more than one library configured, click here to switch between them. Libraries are self-contained and isolated from each other. 3. VIEW STATS Click the graph button to access key stats about your library, including insights into who’s listening to what. The upload button next to it allows you to quickly add new content to your library. 4. FILTER VIEW Use the ‘Title’ dropdown to change the way your library is sorted, author is a popular alternative. Click ‘All’ to apply various filters to the view. 5. AUDIOBOOK PLAYER You can stream audiobooks directly…

AN NVIDIA, AMD, OR INTEL GPU Display Driver Uninstaller. 1 ALL GOING SWIMMINGLY? You might think updating to new drivers is a relatively simple and painless process, and on the surface, it is. All three major GPU manufacturers provide the option to uninstall their respective drivers via the Control Panel. Furthermore, you can elect to do a ‘clean install’ when updating to the latest release. Most of the time, things will go swimmingly, with your PC and OS none the worse for wear. >> But occasionally, things don’t go so well. Sometimes you end up with corrupted drivers that won’t uninstall properly, or they uninstall but leave behind undesired cruft. We’ve experienced situations where performance inexplicably drops, and the only way to ensure your drivers are working properly is to…

AT FIRST GLANCE, the AMD Ryzen 7 7700X is the safest option of AMD’s new Zen 4 lineup. It’s an 8-core CPU with 16 threads, coming in at just under $400 and, specs-wise, nothing out of the ordinary. Compared with the other chips in the lineup, such as the Ryzen 9 7950X, which has the highest thread count of any chip out there and is cheaper and speedier than its predecessor, and the Ryzen 5 7600X, which is the highest-clocked mainstream CPU around at just under $299, the Ryzen 7 7700X begins to look like it may be a bit of a gap filler. But a gap filler it most certainly isn’t. Earlier in the year, AMD made a huge deal when it crammed a ludicrous amount of L3 cache…

ACTION ROLE-PLAYING GAME A BATMAN GAME without Batman is a bit of a hard sell. Perennial sidekick Robin may be strong enough to lead the Teen Titans, but can he helm an ARPG? Robin (the Tim Drake version) is joined by Nightwing, Red Hood, and Batgirl (Barbara Gordon), and can be played in online co-op. Batman may be absent, but there’s no shortage of vigilantes to take his place. While Gotham Knights might look and sound like it comes from Batman: Arkham Asylum developer Rocksteady Studios, it’s not that either. This game was made by WB Games Montreal, the developer behind Batman: Arkham Origins. Jim Gordon’s dead too, though exactly how terminal death can really be when you’re a famous comic-book hero is a matter open to question. This leaves…

> Remember XMP > Balancing Builds > Decoding Hard Drives MHz Mismatch I went ahead and built a PC based on your budget blueprint (December 2022), and after doing some research on the CPU (Intel Core i5-12600), I discovered that it did not support the 3,600MT/s DDR4 RAM you’d used in the blueprint. I therefore had to send the RAM back and re-order the 3,200MT/s RAM that it supports. I just thought you should know so that other people don’t make the same mistake! –D. Yeager EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, GUY COCKER, RESPONDS: Thank you for contacting us about this issue, and sorry to hear you had problems. You are correct in saying that Intel’s website says that its Core i5-12600 CPU supports a maximum DDR4 RAM speed of 3,200MT/s. However, the motherboard…