Table of contents for April 2023 in Maximum PC

WE PROMISE it’s nothing personal, but we’ve been maligning AMD and its GPUs for the past six issues. True, it’s mainly because Nvidia has been drip-feeding its Lovelace-powered 4000-series cards to market, starting with the flagship 4090 and then running down to last issue’s 4070Ti build. Nvidia is also the undisputed king when it comes to discrete GPUs, claiming 88 percent of the market in Q3 2022. But we don’t need to tell you that there’s been a collective sigh when it comes to Nvidia’s pricing this generation, with the RTX 4080 ($1,199) being a particular disappointment in the price-to-performance department. With AMD’s RX 7900 XT being cheaper than the RTX 4080, but promising similar performance, is it time for people to ditch Team Green and head over to the…

A MERE MONTH after investing $10 billion in OpenAI—the developer of DALL-E and ChatGPT—Microsoft has added an AI chatbot to Bing and has plans to add it to a Sidebar in its Edge browser too. Currently, the new AI Bing is available as a limited preview, which illustrates it at work on a dozen example questions. You can also join a waiting list for fuller access. It can write poems, help plan holidays, write code, and make a pretty good attempt at intelligent conversation. It’s eerie. The Bing version has been customized for search results, enabling you to easily refine your criteria, saving you from wading through too many answers. Since this is an AI chatbot on the Internet, obviously some people tried to make it spiral into disturbing or confusing…

Here’s the thing. Nvidia is pathologically pushy, for better and for worse. The same mindset that drives the company forward with aggressive, relentless innovation is also at the root of Nvidia’s occasionally questionable commercial policies and prickly interactions with outside observers. On the one hand, you have Nvidia’s technical might and its passion for pushing forward with new technology. Take DLSS, or Deep Learning Super Sampling. When it was first mooted back in 2018, it looked like tech straight out of the classic Nvidia playbook—proprietary, superficially seductive but, ultimately, of dubious real-world value. Upscaling tech that looks as good as native rendering but runs faster, enabled by some secret AI-enhanced snake oil? Give me a break. Except, DLSS has evolved into a fantastic technology and has made upscaling an essential…

CPU $550, www.amd.com AMD RYZEN 9 7900X The other 7000 Series AMD chip we tested in a build, the Ryzen 7 7000, impressed us both with its performance and efficiency, especially at its price point. This time around, though, we are taking things up a notch to the Ryzen 9 lineup. The Ryzen 9 7900X has a total of 12 Zen 4 cores, 24 threads, and a max boost clock of up to 5.6GHz. That should offer some shockingly fast performance and make using this machine effortless. As if that’s not enough for you, with AMD’s EXPO technology at hand, overclocking this CPU is certainly an easy option too, for even more out-of-the-box speed. GPU $1,100, www.asus.com ASUS RADEON RX 7900XT TUF GAMING OC 20GB We can finally add one…

SO YOUR NEW PC is up and running, your BIOS is updated, Windows 11 is installed and updated, and you’ve been over to Ninite (www.ninite.com) to download some of your favorite applications. But before you try them out, you need to update and check your system is running as it should. If you’re using an all-AMD PC like ours, then AMD’s Adrenalin software should be your first destination. This application provides the latest driver updates, performance monitoring, and Hotkeys. On the landing page, one of the most important things to check before starting to use your system for gaming is whether your CPU or GPU drivers are up to date. On the right-hand side, there is Driver & Software window, hit the check for updates button here and install if…

ANYONE WHO WANTS to know what you’ve been doing on your computer—both online and offline—can find out in just a matter of seconds. Your PC stores details of all your Windows and web activities, including the files you open, the sites you visit, and the software you use, and makes this information easy for you to access. However, this also makes it easy for others to access, which significantly compromises your privacy, even if you have nothing to hide. Manually deleting personal data from all the programs you use can be time-consuming and confusing, and traces of your activities are inevitably left behind, allowing savvy snoopers to see exactly what you’ve been up to. To completely erase all these elements so they can’t be recovered, you need a dedicated privacy…

PROJECTORS HAVE COME a long way in a short time. Long gone are the days when they required expensive, fragile bulbs and a roll-down screen. Using a projector as your main source of media consumption isn’t such a crazy idea these days—it’s become a viable option for lots of people. There are also benefits to using a projector over a standard television—the screen size can be adjusted to suit your surroundings; you can indulge in a spot of childhood nostalgia; and they are just flipping cool. The picture quality is now also so impressive that they’ve closed the gap even on high-end TVs. XGIMI already has a plethora of impressive projectors that combine great functionality, ease of use, and lots of features into a well-built, all-in-one media masterpiece. Take the…

The instructions for this tutorial are based on our NAS build from the September 2022 issue. This assumes you’ll install your password server on a headless Ubuntu Server-powered PC running docker, accessed through a remote web browser via its web-based cockpit user interface. You can install docker on other systems, including Windows through the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL 2), in which case, you can administer it through the Windows Terminal command line interface using the same commands listed here. To find out more about installing and using docker, check out our top tips on page 66 of the October 2022 issue. We’ve chosen Vaultwarden (https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden) because it’s a well-established unofficial fork of Bitwarden that’s been optimized for use on low-powered servers—we have entrusted it with our passwords for the…

YOU’LL NEED THIS WINDOWS PC Wi-Fi Router Time required: 1 hour WHEN DATA IS SENT across the internet, it rarely travels in one big chunk. Instead, every email, photo, or streamed song is chopped into smaller pieces called packets, which bounce from one server to the next until they reach your PC. There’s no guarantee they will all take the same route, nor that they arrive in the right order. Therefore, each packet carries additional data, a bit like the address on an envelope, that makes clear which other packets it goes with, and where it fits in the overall collection. Your computer uses this data to reconstruct the original file or stream, before sending it on to the email client, photo viewer, or audio player that requested it. For…

As with Firefox, Mozilla’s otherwise brilliant email program Thunderbird has telemetry enabled by default. This means it shares ‘technical and interaction’ data with the company to help improve the software. It’s not a major privacy intrusion and can be disabled in Thunderbird’s ‘Privacy & Security’ settings, but if it bothers you there is a forked version called Betterbird (www.betterbird.eu). Described as “Thunderbird on steroids”, this offers extra features including a choice between plain-text or HTML messages, more search filters, and the ability to attach recent files—see the full list at (www.betterbird.eu/#featuretable)—and it disables telemetry by default (see screenshot). However, with something as sensitive as your emails, using a fork that may not be maintained in the long term could pose a security risk. Currently, Betterbird follows Thunderbird’s release schedule and…

PHILIPS HAS been mostly absent from the pages of this magazine in recent years, but its new Evnia range of products, including mice, headsets, mouse pads, and this monitor, are tailored to the PC gaming crowd. Philips’ approach is aimed at modern gamers who eschew the gamer aesthetic, meaning there’s no RGB lighting, no skull icons, and none of the other ‘gnarly’ touches that usually adorn gamer gear. Instead, there’s a cool, sleek look to this 27-inch, 1440p, 240Hz monitor—’understated’ is the theme. If you’re a fan of the futuristic look and inoffensive grey coloring, then the 27M2C5500W makes a great first impression. It’s easy to set up, with a tool-free stand that takes little room up on your desk and offers lots of flexibility in vertical height and angle…

OUT OF THE LATEST Galaxy Book selection, this convertible model is the one that caught our attention. It’s a conventional laptop but also features a tablet mode. Not only that, it contains the Galaxy S Pen, making this tablet great for use as a productivity device or for unleashing your creative side. For its $1,699 price tag, is this quirky device a better option than buying a conventional high-end laptop? A quick look at this 16-inch laptop gives you an idea of how thin it really is. At just half an inch wide and weighing only 3.6lbs, it’s light and easy to pick up and carry around. With this type of device being aimed at the creative and productivity market, portability is an important factor and the Galaxy Book3 Pro…

AT THIS YEAR’S Consumer Electronics Show, AMD’s Lisa Su made the usual slew of announcements, but the most anticipated was the official launch of its new Zen 4 V-cache chips. These are expected to be gaming monsters. Selling the best gaming chip is a hotly contested achievement that has flipped between AMD and Intel. On release, AMD’s V-cache chip, the Zen 3 Ryzen 7 5800X3D, immediately took the title, a feat AMD is keen to repeat with its more powerful Zen 4 versions. There are three offerings, the Ryzen 7 7800X3D ($449), the Ryzen 9 7900X3D ($599), and the Ryzen 9 7950X3D ($699). The 7800X3D has eight cores, a boost of 5GHz, and 104MB of L2. The 7900X3D has 12 cores, a boost of 5.6GHz, and 140MB of L2. The 7950X3D…

AMD’S NEW DRAGON RANGE has been outclassed a week after its launch by Intel’s i9-13980HX and 13900HX, both destined for power-mad gaming laptops. Both use eight P-cores and 16 E-cores, so we have 32 threads in a laptop for the first time. The 13980HX can buzz along at a maximum boost of 5.6GHz, while the 13900HX is 200MHz behind and has 100MHz slower E-cores. Otherwise, the 55W chips are the same, and even have the same price: $668. These prove to be about 10 to 15 percent faster than AMD’s best. Only the forthcoming 16-core Ryzen 9 7945HX could rival these. Intel also has two new F-series Raptor Lake chips—a Core i7-13790F ($441) and an i5-13490F ($235), with the ‘F’ denoting the lack of an integrated graphics engine. The i7-13790F…

Earlier this year, OpenAI previewed and then eventually provided public access to its text-to-image Dall-E 2 tool. To say that people have taken note would be an understatement. In just two months since its launch, ChatGPT has reached over 100 million users. That’s the fastest ramp in users of any internet app, with Tiktok coming in second at nine months, while Instagram required two and a half years to reach that number. People are asking it for advice, letting it write essays and poetry, asking it to tell jokes, and attempting to play text-based games (though it cheats at Hangman). In February, Microsoft announced an updated version of its Bing search engine, with a customized ChatGPT-powered ‘chat’ function codenamed Sydney and Google revealed its rival Apprentice Bard AI. Where Microsoft…

> TPM and Win11 > Audiophile PCs > New mobo issues TPM chip needed? I have two i7 computers that fail the Microsoft Windows 11 requirements test: the problem is TPM and Secure Boot. I am starting to look at motherboards for an i9 build next year. From what I’ve seen so far, none come with TPM, but all say they are capable of running Windows 11. I notice in your Blueprints section, the build says “Windows 11 Compatible” but makes no mention of TPM. I also see in your October i5 build, it used the Win 11 OS, but again no mention of TPM. Are we in a situation of having to buy a TPM card if we want Windows 11? Why aren’t manufacturers including TPM? Is it safe…

That old laptop gathering dust in the corner has plenty of life left in it yet. Windows may have moved on, but you’ll be surprised just how much you can still do with it. The same is true of your old smartphone and tablet too. Official support may be a thing of the past, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be kept updated and secure while it continues to serve a new purpose in your home. The built-in obsolescence in tech is staggeringly wasteful. Not everyone needs—never mind wants—to upgrade every year or so, and unless you’re ruthlessly organized, it’s easy to accumulate a pile of supposedly redundant tech that, with just a bit of thought, can continue to serve your needs for many a year yet. In this feature,…

Privacy Eraser and PrivaZer have very different interfaces but work in a similar way. You can perform an initial scan from both home screens using their default settings—just click the big red Scan button in the former (see screenshot 1) and ‘Scan in-depth in 1 click’ in the latter 2. Once the scan is complete, click either Quick Clean or Clean to remove all privacy traces, junk files, and other unnecessary elements in one fell swoop. The drawbacks to this method are that full scans and clean-ups take a long time and they may remove more or less data than you originally intended to. This makes it useful to know which boxes to tick or untick among the privacy options offered by both tools. Privacy Eraser is the more user-friendly…

INTEL’S ARC GPUs officially launched at the end of 2022, though the exact launch date for some models is hard to nail down. The A380 first appeared in China in the spring, but it wasn’t available to purchase in the US until August. The faster A770 and A750 cards launched in October, but it was another six weeks before the A770 8GB could be found. We’ve talked about the fundamentals of the Arc Alchemist architecture (see Holiday 2022 issue), and all our Arc graphics cards reviews over the past few months (including the ASRock A770 8GB this issue, page 76) have mentioned drivers as a potential pain point. But Intel says things have improved a lot over the past four months and claims significant performance gains with the latest drivers.…

Our focus was on the performance of Intel’s most recent drivers compared to launch drivers, but it’s also interesting to look back at our data from the launch. We’ve seen minor to major updates to several games in our test suite, which means we can’t directly compare results today with what we recorded in October, but while you’d hope for continued improvements, reality is a bit harsh. We never tested the Arc A770 8GB prior to this issue, but the A770 16GB, A750, and A380 all show a lot of performance regressions. The problem is that the games with the biggest changes are also games that had major updates. Cyberpunk 2077 had a patch to enable DLSS 3 Frame Generation, Reflex, and FSR 2.1. Flight Simulator got a patch for DLSS 3 and FSR…

MY IDEAL PC CONFIGURATION I’ve just wrapped up building the Intel NUC 13 Extreme PC with an RTX 4070 Ti inside—check it out in our previous issue, because that machine rocks! Anyway, this has to be my ideal form factor for a PC—I love tech that can either hide or fit into your living space without standing out. The Intel NUC 13 Extreme is bigger than the previous gen but it’s a minimalistic box with incredible power lurking underneath—an Intel Core i9-13900K, a Zotac Gaming GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Trinity OC, 64GB of Corsair Vengeance DDR5 SODIMM RAM running at 4,800MHz, and an SK Hynix P41 Platinum 2TB SSD. That’s one heck of a list of components in something as compact as this. It’s an outright console killer, which it…

Your Vaultwarden server gives you access to all of Bitwarden’s features, including its range of password-auditing reports. These enable you to discover which passwords are weak, re-used, or involved in known breaches. Follow the prompts via the Reports menu and a list of logins that fail the audit will be displayed. Updating passwords is time-consuming, but we recommend using the Bitwarden browser plugin. Leave the main web vault open in its own tab, then work through the list one by one: log into the relevant website using your existing credentials, then navigate to the account section and look for the option to change your password. Use Bitwarden’s password generator (use a minimum of 14 characters and a mix of letters, numbers, and symbols) to create a strong, randomly generated password…

YOU’LL NEED THIS A WINDOWS PC Hasleo Backup Suite 3 External hard drive or SSD Time required: One hour AS WE’VE MENTIONED before, the excellent Macrium Reflect Free is being retired, taking with it one of our favorite (and free) ways of backing up. Thankfully, there is an excellent alternative in the form of Hasleo Backup Suite 3. It’s a powerful yet easy-to-use backup tool with all the essential features most people, even power users, will need. In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to use Hasleo Backup Suite 3 to back up both individual files and your entire Windows installation. The only other thing you’ll need is an external hard drive or SSD, but you can buy the Seagate Portable 2TB 2.5-inch hard drive for $70, or a Toshiba…

AS FALLS from grace go, Samsung’s has been precipitous of late. For two weeks running, the South Korean tech giant was forced to release firmware updates to fix flaws on its premium SSDs. First, the 980 Pro had to be patched to address an apparent epidemic of spontaneous drive deaths, themselves reportedly caused by an earlier flawed firmware update. Then the latest 990 Pro model had to be patched following widespread reports of declining drive health as registered by Samsung’s own Magician SSD tool. For a brand that a few years ago was the gold standard in solid-state storage, both from a reliability and a performance perspective, this is a pointedly parlous state of affairs. Samsung SSDs have gone from the default choice to a brave roll of the dice.…

WE WERE MORE than impressed by NZXT’s H7 range of cases last year, and after using and reviewing all three of them, the Flow variant was the one that took our fancy. It offered the best bang for your buck, maximizing the potential performance of your build through its improved airflow while still retaining NZXT’s clean design aesthetic. But does the same apply to the slightly larger dual-chamber H9 mid-tower cases? At the time of writing, there isn’t a standard edition of the H9, just the H9 Flow we have here and the more expensive range-topping H9 Elite. The latter costs $80 more, so on paper, the Flow represents the better value for money, but is this the, er, case in the real world? Compared with the H7 models we’ve…

SOME OF THE first outsiders to know about new cards from Nvidia are its partners, and the company has given notice that it is to launch the GeForce RTX 4070 in April. It will be the lowest-spec desktop version of its new Ada Lovelace architecture yet. Details are to be confirmed, but the 4070 will use the same GPU as the 4070 Ti, the AD104, but cut to 5,888 CUDA cores. If correct, it’s quite a drop as the Ti has 7,680 cores. It means yields on the wafers should be near 100 percent though. It’ll also have 12GB of memory on a 192-bit bus, but availability and pricing will depend on how many unsold 30-series cards there are. Next on the schedule will be the RTX 4060 Ti. This is…

WHEN BUILDING A RIG, it can be tempting to use your case fans and leave it at that. But if you’re maxing out your graphics card and CPU, it pays to spend a little more attention on the airflow. Cool hardware is essential for optimal PC use and good PC fans are so important we often recommend checking the fans first in the event of any issues. So, if you want the best fans for your PC, we’ve listed five of our favorite options below. 5 NZXT AER RGB 2 120MM NZXT makes gorgeous hardware—not always the cheapest or the most efficient—but certainly great to look at. Even at low speeds, this is louder than other fans here—that’s why it isn’t higher on the list—but look at it! Sure, it’s RGB,…

After running through a brief setup wizard, you’ll find yourself at the main Chrome OS desktop, not unlike that of Windows or macOS. Sadly, despite appearances, this isn’t a full-blown copy of the OS found on Chromebooks—there’s no Android app support for starters, but you may get lucky and find Linux support is forthcoming: navigate to Settings > Advanced > Developers and, hopefully, the magic switch won’t be grayed out (as it was on our aging HP Pavilion g6-1d67cl laptop). If it is, check to see if your laptop’s processor supports virtualization and if so, you may need to enable it in the BIOS to gain access to Linux. If you’re able to enable Linux support, you’ll be able to run commands from the Terminal, and even install desktop apps…

Intel first announced its intention to create a modern dedicated graphics card back in November 2017, when it hired Raja Koduri shortly after his departure from AMD. This wasn’t going to be a quick and easy task, though the initial plan was almost certainly supposed to be something competitive before 2022. And there was a precursor to Arc, even if most people never saw it. First shown off at the start of 2020 during CES, Intel’s DG1 test vehicle (Discrete Graphics 1) felt more like a way to drum up hype rather than something substantive. The hardware started shipping, in a limited fashion, in mid-2021, with cards from Asus and Gunnir. The hardware basically consisted of the integrated graphics used in Intel’s 10th Gen Tiger Lake mobile processors, minus the…

1. FOLDER As your collection of logons grows, take the time to organize them into folders and subfolders. You can manage these via the main web vault screen. 2. PASSWORD View or copy the password from here—you can also generate a new password or check to see if the password has been breached using the blue buttons. 3. AUTHENTICATOR KEY (TOTP) Bitwarden can also be used to store 2FA authentication codes—simply add the key displayed beneath the QR code into this field when setting up 2FA. 4. URIs These link logon items to websites or domains. You can link a single logon to multiple URIs. Click the ‘+ New URI’ button to add more. 5. MATCH DETECTION In most cases, Bitwarden’s default match detection ensures the logon is offered when…

YOU’LL NEED THIS A WINDOWS PC Internet connection WANT THE BENEFITS of your favorite programs without them collecting your data? Well, the good news is you can, by using ‘forked’ versions. The code for open-source software is made freely available to other developers, so they can help improve programs by identifying bugs and suggesting new features. This collaboration often involves ‘forking’, which allows you to modify somebody else’s project, share the changes you’ve made and let the original developer decide whether to incorporate your modifications. But some ‘forks’ result in software being turned into a completely new project because users are unhappy with the direction the original developer has taken. Privacy concerns are among the most common reasons for forking, which has resulted in some interesting open-source alternatives. Here we…

HOW BIG IS TOO BIG for a gaming monitor? Competitive gamers prefer them small and fast, while single-player gamers tend to go big and colorful. The BenQ Mobiuz EX480UZ aims to cater to the latter group, combining all of the benefits of an OLED TV with the features of a gaming monitor. The EX480UZ is a massive 48-inch 4K OLED screen with a refresh rate of 120Hz and support for HDR10. This monster OLED does a great job of making PC games pop while also offering the sort of insane scale that benefits cinematic, story-driven titles. The big difference between these large OLED monitors and similar TVs is connectivity. This has a more PC-friendly DisplayPort and two console-friendly HDMI 2.1 ports. It also has two USB 3.0 ports, a 90W…

TEN-KEY-LESS or TKL is often seen as the sweet spot for keyboard form factors. Not too big, not too small, and no messing around with function keys. They’re compact enough so they don’t hog all of your desk space, yet fast enough for a good gaming experience. However, if you work on spreadsheets or use the calculator app, then look elsewhere. SteelSeries offers a range of TKL boards, the Apex 3 TKL we’ve reviewed previously, the Apex 7 TKL, this Apex 9 TKL, the Apex Pro TKL, and the range-topping Apex Pro TKL wireless. There’s a lot to choose from, with prices ranging from $45 to $250. This Apex 9 TKL sits in the middle at $140, so is this the model you should focus your attention on? When it…

AFTER GETTING our hands (well, our right hand, at least) on the SteelSeries Aerox 5 Wireless not long ago, we were impressed by its ultra-lightweight, nine programmable buttons, pinpoint accuracy, and snappy wireless tech. It wasn’t perfect, though, and it featured some below-par RGB lighting and, more importantly, an RRP of $140. There was no creaking or rattling, but it didn’t feel as premium as the price tag suggested and, unfortunately, the lack of weight—despite being one of the reasons it performed so well—resulted in it feeling a little bit on the cheap side. Regardless, we concluded that at a slightly lower price, it would make an excellent choice for your desktop. Thankfully, there’s a slightly lower priced variant of the same mouse, the non-wireless Aerox 5 model on test here.…

WORLD WAR II still looms large more than 80 years after it all began—from school history lessons to cinematic epics. Even when we’re looking for some video game escapism, it’s there, making us replay the Normandy landings or the Battle of Stalingrad, deafening us with a cacophony of artillery and exploding tanks. For Company of Heroes 3, developer Relic has taken us further south to the vineyards of Italy and the north African desert. And a lot has changed since the previous games, with the studio’s ambition and desire for experimentation growing. This is something new, but it’s not the novelties that impress the most. Company of Heroes 3 is a beast of a game, cramming in two campaigns and four factions. Its proportions are fitting for this devastatingly massive conflict.…