Table of contents for February 2023 in Maximum PC

LG HAS a range of monitors called UltraGear, aimed directly at gamers, and it has announced a new flagship model, the 45-inch 45GR95QE. Big, and now, for the first time, curved with an 800mm radius, so your head won’t be far away from the action, it features the world’s first 240Hz OLED panel, exclusive to LG. This has a resolution of 3,440x1,440, a fast response of 0.03ms, and a contrast ratio of 1,500,000:1, thanks to the OLED panel, meaning you get proper blacks. There’s an anti-glare coating to limit any annoying reflections. Connection is via Display Port 1.4, and a pair of HDMI 2.1 ports. There’s also a USB 3.0 hub and a headphone jack. It has a typical DCI-P3 of 98.5 percent (the color space), so you’ll get a rich…

ONCE YOU’VE CHOSEN your hardware and apps, it’s time to record your first podcast. Ideally, you should know what it’s going to be about before you begin—and who your intended audience is—as well as whether your podcast is going to be a one–off or an entire series with a workable plan for each episode. In other words, think about the starting point, the journey and the destination. It’s important for you and your guests to know what the key talking points are, then structure each podcast accordingly. That will vary according to what works best for you, and indeed this may evolve over time. Some people will want to have every discussion point written down, complete with links to further reading if needed, and notes for each contributor ahead of time.…

YOU’LL NEED THIS MICROSOFT SAFETY SCANNER from https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/ IS YOUR COMPUTER MISBEHAVING? This isn’t always a sign of something serious—a sluggish system might be caused by updates downloading in the background and a stuck cursor could be the result of the batteries in your mouse running flat. However, it could also be the result of malware, which is serious, because it might be performing unauthorized tasks in the background, such as feeding your activity back to a remote server controlled by hackers, or encrypting your files so it can demand a ransom to release them. To combat threats like these, you should already be running the security tools built into the version of Windows you’re using, which for 10 and 11 means Microsoft Defender Antivirus. These keep a look out…

LIKE THE PLUCKY Rebel Alliance preparing to attack the Death Star, AMD has been gearing up to try to take down Nvidia once again. The RDNA 3 architecture (see January issue) sounds promising and comes with some innovative new ideas. The hype has been building for months, and it’s time to see whether the Force can be with AMD for a change. Rather than a spectacular explosion, unfortunately for AMD, it feels like the torpedoes have once again impacted on the surface. The performance takes a healthy step forward, which is good news. The 7900 XTX beats AMD’s previous generation RX 6950 XT by 40 percent in overall performance at 4K, and in a few instances, it can even deliver 70 percent more. But at 1440p, the advantage shrinks to…

WE REVIEWED THE SK Hynix Platinum P41 in our October 2022 issue, calling it “one heck of an SSD”, scoring it a 9 and officially welcoming manufacturer SK Hynix to the big leagues. We now have the Solidigm P44 Pro, which is built on the same Platinum P41 components, but adds new software and cuts the price to even more competitive levels. Has Solidigm stood on the shoulders of giants and achieved perfection? The drive sits on the cutting edge of SSD technology, although that target is set to move shortly with the release of the first PCIe 5.0 drives. In the here and now, though, the Solidigm P44 Pro still packs a punch with its PCIe 4.0 specification, a quoted 7,000MBps sequential read and 6,500MBps sequential write speed, and…

THE CALLISTO PROTOCOL begins like all good prison films, with a mood of unbearable doom. Workingman pilot Jacob Lee has crash-landed on the dead moon of Callisto after his cargo ship is boarded by a notorious terrorist group. Someone else has died a bizarrely gruesome death during the crash, and we are given plenty of opportunity to study this misfortune. Lee is arrested and it’s made clear that he has a life spent in the moon’s Black Iron prison to look forward to. But almost immediately, the prison falls foul of some mysterious disaster that turns its inhabitants into crazed mutants. What better way to set the tone of a relentlessly gory survival horror game than with a disaster, an injustice, and then the abrupt invasion of some walking pus buckets?…

> Windows Adverts > Costly ‘Budget’ Builds > Storage Solutions Windows Thin Edge of the Wedge I am getting concerned about the number of adverts I’m seeing on Windows these days. It feels like the ‘thin end of the wedge’ principle happening in real-time—one small change, if not opposed, can lead to greater changes later on. For example, those ‘offers’ from Microsoft in the Start menu seem innocuous enough, and closing them is easy. But why would Microsoft stop placing them? It can hardly cost Microsoft any money to put them there, so any orders they get from the ad count as pure profit. At this point, the wedge remains thin. But it’ll start to get thicker once people get used to the ads, encouraging Microsoft to go and sell…

NVIDIA’S GeForce RTX 4090 is a power-hungry giant of a card that sets new performance standards. It’s also a buck shy of $1,600 at retail and requires a monster of a rig to give it room to work. The RTX 4080 isn’t any smaller, but can’t reach the same performance highs, yet still costs $1,199. What many are waiting for are the more affordable mainstream Ada Lovelace-based cards. These are due to appear this year—the RTX 4060, 4060 Ti, 4070, and the RTX 4070 Ti. The specifications for these have appeared across several sources, although they do not all concur, and none have been confirmed by Nvidia yet, bar the 4070 Ti. The RTX 4060 and 4060 Ti are based around the AD106 GPU with either 3,840 or 4,352 CUDA…

NOT LONG AFTER AMD’s RDNA 3 GPUs landed inside 7000-series cards, there were reports that the shader pre-fetch on some versions didn’t work. Cue accusations that AMD shipped unfinished cards. AMD said that RDNA 3 fully supports shader pre-fetching and claims that the errant code is for an experimental function that was not “targeted for inclusion in these products”. Including hidden features on a chip is common practice, but that doesn’t explain how this mistake ended up out in the wild. Meanwhile, others have found their early cards have a fluctuating base clock, with one tester seeing speeds range from 2.4GHz to 2.9GHz, playing havoc with benchmarks. Some speculate that flawed A0 silicon is to blame and that design goals were not met. Getting a new architecture right the first…

> Wireless Bands > OneDrive Storage > Win11 downgrade? Megahertz Madness I was recently exploring my router’s settings—more through curiosity than any particular need. While there, I found an option to adjust channel widths. It was preset to 20/40/80MHz, but there was a tick box to enable 160MHz. What does this mean and what’s the difference between them? Bigger usually means better, so should I enable the 160MHz option? —James McCarthy THE DOCTOR RESPONDS: It can, but this is a complex area where sometimes less is more. By necessity, we’re going to have to simplify matters. Though not a perfect analogy, think of Wi-Fi bands such as 2.4GHz and 5GHz as freeways. In this context, the channels are lanes. Each lane can carry only so much data—or vehicles, to stretch…

PODCASTS have become incredibly popular in the many years since they started on Apple’s iPod, and from which they derive their name. These days, you can listen to a podcast anywhere, streamed to your phone while on the move, or even on your Watch or Smart TV. The variety of subjects they cover ranges from Advertising to Zoology, and that’s because with a little time and the right equipment, almost anyone can create and publish their own podcast that could potentially reach an audience of thousands. Maybe you’re passionate about a certain TV series or a particular sport. It’s never been easier to share your interests with the world. But podcasts don’t just happen. In addition to a good idea for the subject and a potential target audience, you’ll need…

YOU’LL NEED THIS UNINTERRUPTIBLE POWER SUPPLY (UPS) Cellphone with hotspot feature OPTIONAL: Router with SIM card support WHILE POWER CUTS are still relatively rare for the majority of us in cities and towns, there are still lots of ways the power you take for granted could be interrupted or cut off. In many regions of the US, such as California, earthquakes can knock out the grid for days at a time, and while there are often signals they’re about to happen, they can still strike with little warning. There are also weather events such as storms and tornados that many areas deal with regularly and, of course, criminal damage to substations and other infrastructure. And there is always the potential for that most modern of activities, cybercrime, to threaten our…

APOLOGIES to anyone who might be sick of my regular gushing over Samsung devices this year. It’s a recent phenomenon—I spent the last ten years before joining Maximum PC as a card-carrying iPhone fanboy, but this year, I had my head turned—first by the S22 Ultra, then by the Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra, the latter of which I reviewed in the May 2022 issue. But now I have a new device that’s so good and so versatile, I’m going to happily trade both of them in. That device is the Galaxy Z Fold4, which this month has comfortably replaced my mobile, tablet, and nearly my work laptop as well. If you’re familiar with the device, you probably know one thing—that it’s outrageously expensive, with a launch price of around $1,650.…

IN THE PAST, both AMD and Nvidia have had halo products with extreme prices and only moderately higher performance than the penultimate GPUs. With the latest generation of hardware, that approach seems to have been kicked to the curb and we’re now looking at only minor cost savings for a potentially large performance deficit. Nvidia blazed the trail with the RTX 4090 and 4080, with the latter shaving 25 percent from the asking price while also dropping performance (at 4K) by 25 percent. Now AMD is following suit, except the 7900 XT drops the price by just 10 percent while performance drops by 14 percent. That’s an odd change of pace, and it immediately leads to the conclusion that the 7900 XTX is the better value—because it is. We’ll have…

NEVER HEARD of Nextorage? Neither had we before this 2TB SSD landed in the Maximum PC labs. However, Nextorage is no obscure startup, even if its recent history is a little complicated. The company was born in 2019, founded by Sony as a direct subsidiary of Sony Storage Media Solutions Corporation, the idea being to produce SSDs for the PlayStation series of consoles. However, in early 2022, none other than Phison—a company famous for SSD controller chips—acquired a controlling stake in Nextorage and here we are reviewing the Nextorage NEM-PA 2TB, an M.2 with a broader remit that includes the PC. Specs-wise, this is a high-end PCIe Gen 4 model. It packs 2TB of TLC 3D NAND flash memory and 2GB of DDR4 cache memory, all running over a quad-link interface.…

THERE WAS a time when Need For Speed was a guaranteed chart-topper. Before there was Forza Horizon, all festivals and physics, there was this. A Fast and Furious analog with spoilers on its spoilers, every year exactly the same super-accessible arcade racer about underground tuner culture and corrupt cops. And we didn’t care that it became as formulaic as that other long-running bestseller, Call of Duty. Until one day, finally, we did. Need For Speed grew too big and popular to sustain itself. The sales were too good for EA to start tinkering with the formula, but the yearly releases oversaturated us with cars in widebody kits and stories of betrayal told exclusively through the medium of checkpoint races. The world that Need For Speed Unbound emerges into has changed.…

THE TOP FIVE USB WI-FI ADAPTERS WHILE IT’S TRUE that most laptops and desktops these days come with Wi-Fi on board, there are still plenty of budget motherboards that don’t. There are also many instances where your home network becomes more technologically advanced than that available from your devices, meaning you can’t take advantage of the increased speed and range. Or some of you might have finally set up that home office in a shed at the end of the garden. Whatever the reason, we’ve listed five of the best ways to add Wi-Fi to your setup through the good old medium of USB. 5 LINKSYS WUSB6300 www.linksys.com $37 This is the adapter to go for if size is key, as this thing is absolutely tiny—even Linksys itself calls it ‘micro’. It’s…

WE DIDN’T HAVE the easiest time with this machine, but that’s nothing to ward you away from using either the RTX 4080 or one of the latest AM5 chips. PC building isn’t always fun and games. We’d been looking forward to testing the founder’s edition RTX 4080 in a machine, especially since Nvidia unreleased the initial 12GB model. Although we didn’t rate it as highly as the RTX 4090, there’s no denying you’ll get a great gaming experience from it. Our humble CPU got a warmer reception when we reviewed that, so we were as excited to add this into its first build as we were with our GPU. This AMD Ryzen 7 7700X boasts great eco-performance and impressive bang for your buck. As it sits in the middle of…

THERE ARE MANY ways you can judge how a PC performs and sometimes stats and figures can often make you think differently about a product depending on what it’s compared against. That’s why we pitted this machine against our Ultra 4K machine from our July 2022 issue. That benchmarking PC was one of the best showcases of the last generation and came in around the $3.5K price point. If we can better these figures, then this will be a great success for this build as we have managed to piece this RTX 4080 machine together for less than $3,000. After running our new system through the same resource-demanding tests, we did indeed better the Ultra 4K machine on all but two benchmarks, now we’re more than happy with this outcome.…

Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 SAMSUNG’S Neo G9 is almost as known for its glitchy mini-LED backlight and buggy image processing as it is for its 49-inch proportions and 1000R curve. So, this latest iteration of the smaller Neo G8 comes with plenty of baggage. It’s just 32 inches in diagonal and runs a conventional 4K pixel grid, however, things get much fancier. The refresh rate is 240Hz, currently as good as it gets at 4K. Then there’s the mini-LED backlight and its 1,196 zones and crazy 2,000 nits peak brightness. Throw in quantum dot tech, 1ms response times, an RGB lighting system, and lots of glossy white plastic and you have a stellar overall proposition. We’re not sure about that 1000R panel curve. On a super-size ultrawide panel like the G9,…

TIP OF THE MONTH FOCUS Are you five hours deep into an assignment and getting bombarded with Windows notifications that keep distracting you? We’ve certainly been in that situation ourselves, but to put some virtual tape over Windows OS’s mouth, either search for Focus within the search bar, or go to settings, system, and then Focus. From here, you can fine-tune your notifications to receive only those you need to keep zoned into your work. WI-FI WOES What’s fragile, incredibly frustrating, and lets you down? No, not the current economy, but my personal internet solution, an LTE modem. As usual, nothing ever goes as planned—when I moved into my new property, the Wi-Fi wasn’t activated on the day it should have been live. My internet provider has been unreliable, but…

YOU’LL NEED THIS TV OR MONITOR WITH VESA MOUNTING POINTS Mini PC (we used the Chillblast WAP Ultimate AMD 3500U Micro) Mounting Plate or Cradle (we used the Suptek Mini CPU Holder) Screwdriver ONE OF THE MAIN BENEFITS of buying a mini PC is the space you can reclaim on your desk. These miniature machines take up much less room than a conventional tower PC, or even an open laptop plugged into your monitor. To increase the benefit even further, you can go beyond this setup and tuck your mini PC behind the screen itself, creating a totally clean workspace and something that looks akin to having an all-in-one, at least when viewing from the front. And compared to buying most all-in-ones from manufacturers like HP and Apple, buying a…

IF YOU EVER DROP by the r/pcmasterrace subreddit, you’ll find plenty of posts with titles like “Noblechairs vs. Secret Lab”, where a newbie asks the companies’ many fans to evangelize for their chair manufacturer of choice. It’s pretty close and, based on our experience, you can’t really go wrong with either brand. But can Noblechairs finally pull away from its competitor with its new Legend model, which promises to take the best features of its other offerings and combine them into one brand new super chair? Our review model of the Legend is the Black Edition, which is much stealthier than most gaming chairs with its dark matte finish in faux leather material (fabric is also available for around $50 less). Noblechairs sells other colors of the Legend, including the…

CHOOSING A TRUSTY motherboard for your new build is like building a solid foundation for your house. If you don’t quite get it right, everything will inevitably go wrong. The motherboard pieces together all of your components so they work as efficiently in tangent, so having a top-quality mobo with lots of compatibility options is important. They are also a pain to swap out if you need to change them around—unfortunately, it’s not like changing your RAM—so, it’s best to get it right in the beginning. The board we have here is the Asus ROG Strix B650-A Gaming WiFi, the cheapest Strix mobo in the lineup for the new AM5 socket. It sits at the bottom of the current Strix lineup, mainly because the chipset is a B650. Above that are…

AS WELL AS the likes of the Naga, Viper, Death Adder, and Orochi, Razer also has the mythical Basilisk in its mouse lineup. The Basilisk V3 Pro sits toward the high end of the Razer mouse range, with the Pro suffix meaning it should have all that was great about the previous Basilisk V3 plus some improved internals and functionality. Starting from a foundation as strong as this, surely that’s a recipe for success in itself? But there’s more… This bundle from Razer comes in at just under $200 and contains the Mouse Dock Pro, a wireless charging docking system to keep the Basilisk V3 Pro juiced up. So, for this hefty price, is this Razer duo a worthy addition to your setup? The Pro model is similar in design…