Table of contents for August 2023 in Maximum PC

IT TOOK NVIDIA over two and a half years, but we finally have a successor to the RTX 3060Ti in the form of the new RTX 4060Ti. I’m sure many of you will have already seen the online discourse about the merits (or not) of the $399 card, but we have our full verdict on it in our review on page 74. The main concern for most people will be the 8GB VRAM on the card, which seems a little limited in 2023. I won’t spoil the review, but if you’re gaming at 1080p, you shouldn’t have much to worry about—it’s the higher 1440p and 4K resolutions where you’d be wise to wait for the 16GB version to arrive this month. We couldn’t wait to get started on a 4060Ti…

WHEN INTEL’S ARC GPUS surfaced, there were expected to be three initial chips. So far, we’ve seen the ACM-G10, which powers the mid-range Arc 750 and A770 cards, and the ACM-G11, which features in the low-end A380. Now, a third chip has emerged: the ACM-G12. This 6nm chip is to debut in the Arc Pro A60 and Pro A60M cards. Despite the G12 nomenclature, this sits between the G10 and G1. It has 16 Xe cores, 256 vector engines, 16 ray tracing units, 2,048 FP32 cores, and a maximum of 12GB of GDDR6 on a 192-bit bus, making for a maximum bandwidth of 384GB/s. These numbers hit the mid-point between the existing chips, bar ray tracing, which is slightly under halfway. This should give us a good idea of projected…

The purpose of the Toolkit is straightforward: it allows unmodified Windows games to run on MacOS and therefore the latest Macs and MacBooks with Apple silicon. In other words, M1 and M2 chips. It’s essentially the same as Valve’s Proton technology, which lets you run Windows games on the Steam Deck’s Linux-based OS, right? Yes and no. Proton translates Windows code to run on Linux, but the underlying hardware in the Deck remains traditional PC fare. So that’s an x86-compatible processor and a GPU designed for the Microsoft DirectX API. What Apple is doing with the Toolkit is a whole different ballgame. Not only is the code being translated on the fly from x86 to ARM instructions; Apple’s M1 GPUs are not DirectX compliant, so it’s incredible that modern games…

WHEN IT COMES TO NOSTALGIA, you can’t beat a bit of retro gaming. Why dig out your old computers and consoles when—armed with the right tools, tips, and know how—you can recreate your old favorites using your own PC? Emulation—the art of recreating one type of computer in another—is nothing new, as anyone who has attempted to play old 8-bit games on 16-bit hardware will attest. But as PCs grow ever more powerful, their ability to emulate older machines has only got easier over time. These days, you can emulate just about any gaming machine from yesteryear on your PC, including arcade games. The more powerful your PC, the more options you have, but you don’t need anywhere near the latest hardware to relive games released in the 80s and 90s.…

We’ve covered virtually every home computer and gaming console platform in this feature, but what about your classic PC games? Chances are that you’ve spent a fair portion of your life playing on your PC—and many old favorites may now be gathering dust on your shelves as new models and updates to Windows rendered them obsolete. The good news is that there are ways to resurrect these too. For those who remember 16-bit PC computing and DOS, the obvious choice is DOSBox (www.dosbox.com), which works brilliantly with old classics from the 90s. Install the program to the root of your C drive, then create a folder alongside called oldgames, into which you copy the games you own from your original disks and CDs (or from websites like www.dosgames.com) into their own…

1. SWITCH WORKSPACES AND TABS Use these buttons in order to set up, manage, and switch between workspaces, as well as the currently selected workspace’s tabs. 2. VIEW AND NAVIGATION Here, you can switch between list and grid layouts, plus navigate through previous directories quickly and open the context menu for the current folder without having to go back one level to select it. 3. FILTER Click here to generate filters based on filename or filetype, size, directory item count, and modified date. You can also toggle hidden files and folders. 4. CONTEXT MENU (ICONS) Two options stand out from the row of icons at the top of Sigma’s context menu: Protect prevents Sigma from being able to modify or delete the item, while Pin affixes the file or folder…

YOU’LL NEED THIS SCANNER, SOME OLD FAMILY PHOTOS Also recommended: VueScan scanning software, Paint. NET, Photoshop Express, and VanceAI PC app IF YOU’RE FORTUNATE ENOUGH to possess a trove of old family photos, then you’ll know that they rarely come down to you in the best possible condition. In addition to dust, scratches, and other blemishes, photos fade over time, becoming washed out and losing color. In an age where you didn’t have the luxury of instant review and unlimited second chances, many photos may be less than perfect—if not blurred or badly framed, then suffering from poor exposure. If you have an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription, dig out your copy of the January 2023 issue and follow Ian Evenden’s excellent tutorial on tapping into Photoshop’s increasingly powerful photo restoration…

The history of photo colorization goes all the way back to the 19th century and hand-coloring techniques invented in Europe, but popularized in Japan. The rise of computers introduced tools for injecting color back into photos, but the same process remained: people making judgments about what colors to use. The rise of machine learning means that AI has made recoloring a quick, hands-off affair. Early AI models like the Colorful Image Colorization project (richzhang.github.io/colorization/) relied on humans to evaluate the AI’s attempts to recolor photos, but our innate conservatism resulted in AI models often choosing brown as a ‘safe’ color. A breakthrough occurred when the DeOldify (www.deoldify.ai) model put the evaluator or ‘critic’ role in the hands of a different neural network. This GAN (Generative Adversarial Network)—where generator plays a…

Do You Think I’m 6E? THIS MONTH, I took a look at Netgear’s Nighthawk A8000 (see review, page 87), a USB dongle that allows you to upgrade any Windows 11 device to WiFi 6E. The problem is that I don’t even have WiFi 6 at home, let alone the latest WiFi 6E standard (let’s just leave WiFi 7 out of this for now). Luckily, Netgear were kind enough to loan me their Orbi 960 system, a top-of-the-line ($1,100 for the two-satellite kit I needed to cover my apartment) mesh system that looks as good as it is easy to set up. But then again, for that money it should probably make me a caramel latte as well. Anyway, I digress. Like many people, I’ve come to take WiFi for granted—I absolutely…

FOLLOWING THE RELEASE of AMD’s Radeon RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 XTX, you might have expected AMD to follow a traditional release cadence and produce an RX 7800 or RX 7700-series card. Not this time. Surprisingly, the second desktop RDNA 3 GPU is the Radeon RX 7600. After years of massively inflated GPU pricing, is the RX 7600 the card the market has been crying out for? At $269, the RX 7600 is easily the cheapest of the current generation of GPUs from either AMD or Nvidia, though it’s important not to overlook Intel’s Arc cards either, at least from a value perspective. Nvidia is set to respond with the pricier $299 RTX 4060 in July, so for now, the RX 7600 is touted as being a solid option…

TO CALL ANYTHING the best is a strong opinion, to say the least. Of course, it’s a very subjective thing to say, and will vary depending on your personal preferences, but if you’re looking for a mini motherboard, this one has plenty of tricks up its sleeve. With a mobo, you must consider an element of futureproofing too, as it’s the most awkward component to swap out for obvious reasons. You can trust us on that one too—we’ve taken a fair few mobos out of builds in our time! Selecting a dependable one for your system is vital—you need to pick the right backbone for your PC to ensure your components work in harmony with one another. This MSI Z790I Edge may be one of the best to choose from…

IF YOU’VE EVER tried to mix audio digitally, you’ll know that it can be an absolute nightmare. It’s achievable to set up a working streaming setup with nothing more than a mic, some software, and a dream, but be prepared to have to sacrifice easy-to-use sound settings on your PC to get it done. The other option is an external mixing device, like this Razer Audio Mixer. There are many mixers on the market, and the Razer Audio Mixer is a lot like one of the most popular today, the GoXLR Mini. I’ve used both, and they share a relatively similar shape, button layout, and connectivity. They’re a match in most ways, bar software support. The Razer Audio Mixer is controllable via Razer’s Synapse app, which offers output mixing, routing,…

AS WE EXPECTED, Intel is to refresh its Raptor Lake chips before the switch to Meteor Lake. A round of BIOS updates for existing motherboards for a ‘next generation’ chip pretty much gave it away—Meteor Lake uses a new socket, so there’s no need for them otherwise. The refresh covers both desktop and mobile chips. The mobile parts cover the range, from low-power ‘U’, to performance ‘HX’ flavors. We’re unlikely to see anything drastic—mostly tweaked clock speeds and core counts. If Intel is true to form, there will be a new halo chip, a binned example pushed to the limit that can grab headlines. The chips will make decent upgrades for LGA1700 boards if you’re not ready to go big, which would mean switching boards and investing in DDR5. The…

THE PRO VERSION of processors often lag behind the mainstream consumer chips in their core technology. AMD’s new Ryzen 7000 series Pro chips—in the mobile versions, anyway—offer the latest 4nm Zen 4 Phoenix silicon with RDNA 3 graphics to its business customers, and claim to be the world’s fastest professional processors for ultra-thin systems. Being a Pro chips means extra security, deployment, and management features, as well as guarantees on software, availability, and validation. There are six mobile chips: three ‘U’ low-power, and three ‘HS’ high-power. The top model is the Ryzen 9 Pro 7940HS. This eight-core chip has a clock of 5.2Ghz, and power consumption of 35-54W. The ‘U’ have similar hardware specifications as the ‘HS’, core counts are the same, and clock speeds not far behind. They run…

The cheapest HDDs now start at under $0.015 per GB. The cheapest SSDs start at $0.03 per GB, with more desirable M.2 PCIe 4.0 models that don’t use QLC NAND starting at $0.06 per GB—about four times the cost of an HDD. Even though you could buy ten 2TB SSDs for $650, good luck packing ten or more M.2 drives into a single PC. There are also more expensive HDDs, some potentially costing as much per GB as a cheap SSD. The WD Black tops out at 10TB and costs $240, for example. That might be fine for the capacity, but most HDD users focus on cost per GB over modest improvements in performance. HDD technology isn’t sitting still. Sure, the first 8TB HDDs appeared in 2014, and like so…

> Fix STOP errors > Faster video encodes > Is Hasleo crap? Blue screen of death I recently booted into Windows, only to encounter the dreaded blue screen of death. On rebooting, the same error popped up again—something about a page fault in a non-paged error. Windows booted to a recovery screen, but I tried one last restart, and this time Windows loaded with no problems. However, Malwarebytes reported that its ransomware protection component had been switched off. Could the two be related, and should I reenable it? —Robert M Hagan THE DOCTOR RESPONDS: You can find out more about any blue screen of death error with the help of a tool called WhoCrashed. Download and install the free Home edition from www.resplendence.com/whocrashed to access past logs that provide you…

If your nostalgic yearnings only venture as far as one or two computers or consoles from yesteryear, then both Batocera.linux and LaunchBox might be overkill. All you need to do is source one emulator for each platform you want to recreate, then configure them directly. That would be simple enough if there was a single emulator for each platform, but when the Commodore 64 has 16 different options to choose from, how do you know which one to try? A good starting point is EmuGen (https://emulation.gametechwiki.com)—select your computer or console from the list, and it’ll display a list of emulators, complete with a ‘Recommended’ column helping you narrow down which ones are worth checking out. Simply click the version number of ‘Latest Version’ to go direct to its home page. If…

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Corsair Xeneon 27QHD240 OLED PANEL TECH is finally a thing on the PC desktop. Give it up for the Corsair Xeneon 27QHD240, the latest in a growing army of OLED gaming monitors. It uses LG WOLED technology, which comes with plenty of upsides, even if it thus far hasn’t proven entirely optimal for the PC, mainly due to limited full-screen brightness. Corsair quotes 1,000 nits for peak brightness, which is mega. However, that figure is for a three percent window, and Corsair doesn’t detail what the panel can sustain full screen. Anyway, the main speeds and feeds besides brightness involve a 27-inch 1440p screen running at 240Hz. Factor in the outrageous pixel response of modern OLED screens, in this case rated at 0.03ms, and you have a recipe for sizzling…

TIP OF THE MONTH AVOID STICKY KEYS Although it can be useful for people who are having issues typing with their keyboard, sticky keys can be annoying if accidentally activated. To avoid this, head into the Settings app > Accessibility > Keyboard, and find the sticky keys. Turn off the toggle switch for ‘keyboard shortcut for Sticky Keys’. Now, you can spam your Shift, Control, or Alt keys as much as you please. GAMES OR MUSIC? Last month, I was interested in picking up an ASUS ROG Ally, and I still am—I just haven’t pulled the trigger yet. From upwards of $600 my heart says yes, but my brain is being more sensible. This is mainly because I’m lucky enough to get my hands on all sorts of gaming PCs…

If you’re looking for a quick way to tweak old photos, install Adobe Photoshop Express for free through the Microsoft Store. Once installed, open the app to sign up (or sign in with an existing Adobe ID) to gain access to its simple fixes. Select Pictures Library to locate and open your first file. Use the Crop section of the app to crop in and straighten skewed images, then select Corrections to access a wide range of tools—again, focus in on specific sections (Light, Color, Effects, and Details) for tweaks that can improve your photos. Select one, then use the slider at the bottom to apply the effect. Photoshop Express also offers a Spot Heal brush for removing small blemishes. It’s simpler to use than Paint.NET’s clone stamp tool, but…

THE ASUS ROG ALLY is really, really good. So good, in fact, that it might just be the best budget gaming PC you can buy right now, and may even make cheap gaming laptops an irrelevance, too. Asus has made a genuinely next gen Steam Deck in the ROG Ally. That’s probably the highest praise you can give a modern handheld gaming PC. It might sound mean, but I’m surprised that Asus has really got what made the Deck such a good machine. It has priced it smartly, delivered a fantastic user experience—occasional Windows-based niggles aside—and made it a very open platform. The performance of the system itself is what sets it apart from Valve’s inaugural handheld, though. That AMD Z1 Extreme APU is a stunning piece of mobile silicon,…

NOT ONLY IS Alienware’s alternative OLED monitor, the Alienware 34 AW3423DWF, better than the existing AW3423DW; it’s cheaper. How does that work, exactly? For the most part this is the same monitor, so it’s a 34-inch ultrawide model sporting Samsung’s QD-OLED technology. It’s not just the same technology; it’s the same panel, with one alteration, more on which momentarily. Once again, the resolution is 3,440 by 1,440, the peak brightness remains at 1,000 nits, the claimed pixel response of 0.1ms is carried over, and so on. There are one or two detail changes, and the refresh rate has been dropped from 175Hz to 165Hz. There’s likely no technical reason for this ultimately inconsequential change. Instead, Alienware is probably putting a bit of on-paper space between the two screens to justify…

HYPERX HAS FINALLY replaced its popular Cloud II gaming headset with… drumroll, please… the Cloud III. It’s the company’s new mid-range wired gaming headset for $99, putting itself in the middle of a very crowded field of gaming headsets that all cost less than $100. That’s a field that includes HyperX’s own headsets as well. The HyperX Cloud III retains the overall design of its predecessor, the Cloud II, with notable upgrades to enhance comfort. The plushier headband and slightly angled ear cups give the Cloud III a nicer fit, making it perfect for wearing during long, marathon gaming sessions. Personally, I find the plush leatherette-covered memory foam earpads to be a delight, especially when wearing glasses. I’ve worn them throughout my entire work shift for a few days now,…

MICROSOFT, Google, and others have tried augmented reality headsets and failed. Now, Apple is having a go, and has pulled no punches. The Apple Vision Pro is an astounding piece of kit, powered by an M2 chip—enough for a decent desktop. Inside are two 90-96Hz micro OLED 4K screens offering unparalleled resolutions with 23 million pixels. It’s covered in sensors, including 12 cameras, IR, and LiDAR. The tracking is accurate and responsive, too. The display on the front can show a digital avatar of your face, making interaction with others more natural, albeit spooky. There are no physical controllers—it’s gesture and voice controlled. A rotary knob controls a graduated switch from AR to VR. When in AR, your surroundings are melded with the new visionOS, which places icons, windows, and…

AN NVME SSD will breeze through loading screens and make day-to-day PC use a smoother experience. They’ve been steadily falling in price over the last few months—one Maximum PC staffer even bought his first 4TB model this month. There are loads of manufacturers and models, though, which can make it difficult to figure out where to start, or which ones are worth a premium over others. Thankfully, we’re here to help sort the wheat from the chaff. 5 SILICONPOWER XS70 2TB No, we hadn’t heard of Silicon Power until recently either, but with the latest Phison controller, high-performance NAND flash memory, and a high-value price point, this really is an SSD worth buying. The XS70 is designed with PS5 compatibility in mind, so the heatsink isn’t as bulky as some others…

GOOD THINGS come not only in small packages, but also obscure and unique ones. Take the Corsair 2000D case, a new mini-ITX small form factor chassis that quickly grabbed our attention. Shaped similarly to the Xbox Series X, it has the potential to fit into a multitude of setups without sacrificing performance. This chassis follows Corsair’s design language from the 4000D and even the behemoth 7000D, but compresses it into a compact and aesthetically pleasing box that will take up less of your valuable desktop or under-TV real estate. Now, if you know us, you’ll understand that we are fairly accustomed to small form factor machines, and we love seeing what we can build within them (although they aren’t as easy to build in as chassis like the aforementioned huge…

Today’s small-factor computers are the perfect candidates for building a dedicated PC for retro gaming. They’re small enough to tuck under your big-screen TV and come with all the ports you need to plug in controllers, keyboards, and mice. But what model should you buy? The good news is that the latest and most powerful CPUs aren’t required for anyone looking to emulate classic platforms from the 70s, 80s, and early 90s. A Raspberry Pi 3 can handle these emulators with relative ease, so when shopping for a mini PC, you can keep your cost below $250 by opting for the low-powered Celeron N5105 chip like this example from Intel ($242, www.newegg.com/p/2SW-000B-003S1). If you can afford a better CPU, then you can expect to bring more recent consoles into play, including…

BE MORE PRODUCTIVE, they say. Work smarter. Do five days’ work in the space of four! Now, we’re not suggesting that this article is going to shave two hours from your working day, but even if you find two tips out of these 50 that make a difference, we think that’s worth celebrating. Never has been this subject been more topical, either. On the one hand, we have generative AI tools popping up all over the place that promise the world—even if that world has six fingers and dresses the Pope in a white puffer jacket. As we will see, there are practical ways to take advantage right now. On the other hand, companies such as Adobe and Microsoft are desperate to keep you subscribing to their software. To do…

YOU’LL NEED THIS TWO OPEN-SOURCE APPS, WHICH REQUIRE WINDOWS 10 OR LATER: Files (https://files.community/) and Sigma File Manager (https://github.com/alekseyhoffman/sigma-file-manager). FILE EXPLORER HAS COME ON LEAPS AND BOUNDS in recent years—the recent introduction of tabs in Windows 11 is just one example—but despite its many improvements, File Explorer is still little more than a basic tool for navigating and managing your files and folders. The good news is that you’re not stuck with Windows’ choice of file manager. There are plenty of alternatives, and we’ve sourced two great free and open-source examples. Both are designed to work alongside File Explorer, so you can try them without committing to a new way of doing things. Files aims to follow File Explorer in looks and feel, but still manages to offer plenty of…

To create a workspace, click the Workspaces button, followed by the edit (pencil) button. Click + to add a new workspace. Name it and type the full path to the directory you want this to point Navigator to—for example, E:/Photos. Now, click ‘Add New Action’ beneath this to create your first action. After giving it another suitably descriptive name, choose your action type (three are supported: open url opens a web address in your browser, while open-path lets you open a specific file or application—in the case of the latter, simply enter the full path to the app. The final option—‘terminal-command’—can be used to invoke any command supported by the Run (Win + R) box, as well as Powershell, command prompt or Terminal commands, or scripts (select which one to…

1. EXIT Click the Close button to exit without making any changes to your photo, or the Undo All button to reverse all your recent changes and start again from scratch. 2. TOOL SELECTION Click these to access different parts of ImageColorizer’s image editor. Use Crop to reframe your image, while Filters perform a variety of color effects, so can be skipped. The section to focus most of your efforts on is Finetune. 3. UNDO AND MAGNIFICATION You can undo changes one at a time (plus reapply them). By default, the photo will be resized to fit inside the window, but you can increase its magnification from here or by using your mouse wheel. 4. VIEW UP CLOSE After you increase magnification, you will have a better look at how…

IT’S FINALLY HAPPENED. We’ve hit an Ada Lovelace GPU that’s actually priced at the same level as the equivalent last generation card. Yes, the Nvidia RTX 4060 Ti is on sale with a $399 MSRP that matches the RTX 3060 Ti of the Ampere generation. That was one of the best GPUs of the whole Ampere range, and one of the best mid-range cards ever made. With this Ada equivalent of the RTX 3060 Ti, then, we ought to be looking at another stellar, almost-affordable green team graphics card. The RTX 4060 Ti is a card that offers more in terms of performance and features than the one it’s ostensibly replacing. My issue, however, is over what counts as GPU equivalence in these complex times. Should you classify a GPU…

AMD’S NEW RANGE of Zen 4 mobile chips are the finest number crunchers that you’ll find in a gaming laptop. That makes this Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 one of the most powerful gaming laptops I’ve ever tested. This is also the most affordable RTX 4090 machine I’ve seen in this generation, and one of the best performing RTX 4090 machines I’ve seen, which is a combination that makes this laptop easy to recommend. Just bear in mind that this isn’t at the top end of Asus’s ROG offerings. That means there’s no ROG Nebula Display like on the excellent Zephyrus G14, meaning this Scar 17’s display looks dull, and maybe a little tired. I also feel like the machine doesn’t quite have the quality I’ve been used to from…

DIABLO IV TRIES to ground us in its dark fantasy world, but that’s an impossible task in a game where you can pull a legendary two-handed axe out of a wolf. The storytelling is as subtle as a Marvel movie, and about five times as long, and no matter what Diablo IV’s cast of dour characters tell you, you are a superhero born with an empty inventory and the desire to fill it. The title of Blizzard’s latest action RPG hides what’s really going on: Diablo IV is a reboot. An unnecessary reboot, but one with a recognizable goal: to reconfigure the series’ strengths into a modern live service format that fits into the lives of players who probably have a handful of other games to play. Once you finish…