Table of contents for September 2023 in Maximum PC

IT’S TAKEN A WHILE, but this month we’ve finally been able to build a current-gen RTX gaming PC for under $1,000! We’ve done quite a few valueoriented gaming builds over the last year, but we’ve had to use Intel’s Arc card (May 2023 issue) or the ageing RTX 3050 (November and December 2022) to hit a three-figure price point. While we might often bemoan Nvidia in these pages, we’re very aware that they still dominate the graphics card market with an 84 percent market share, so it’s the manufacturer most PC gamers care about. For the first time ever, we’ve been able to spec up and build a machine with a cutting-edge 40-series Nvidia graphics card at under a grand. The RTX 4060 itself may not have fared as well…

AMD’S V-CACHE TRICK, sticking a wedge of L3 cache onto its chiplets, turns a good Ryzen processor into a gaming monster. AMD has a new version coming, the Ryzen 9 7945HX3D, this time aimed at laptops via a member of its Dragon Range of high-end mobile processors. It’s a 16-core, 32-thread Zen 4 flagship chip with a maximum boost of 5.4Ghz. Dragon Range chips are selectively binned and have a voltage frequency curve tuned for lower voltages, meaning less heat for the same speed. ROG is reportedly preparing a version of the Strix Scar 17, which is to be armed with the new chip. AMD has not confirmed the new X3D Ryzens, but there are three leaked listings showing the chip is on the way. If this pans out, it’ll…

MICROSOFT RELEASED the DirectStorage 1.2 SDK last April, and it has finally reached PC. Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart from Insomniac Games will be the first PC game to make use of it—specifically GPU decompression to boost loading times and offer real-time asset loading. The title was originally on PlayStation 5, and requires a beefy system to play with all the options ticked. If you play at 1080p or better, then it asks for 75GB of SSD space. The game features jumping between dimensions, which involve loading lots of graphical elements quickly. This is usually handled by the CPU, which is already busy shifting data. Using DirectStorage, this job can be passed over to the GPU, which can shift assets from storage to GPU, and decompress them in the background.…

Perhaps the most conspicuous bargain involves storage. SSDs are pretty much being given away, with decent 512GB drives at under $30, a high-performance 1TB model like the WD SN850X for $55, and quality 2TB options for under $100. I even saw a 4TB that was going for just over $150. Okay, it was an older Gen 3.0 model from TeamGroup that tops out at about 3GB/s. But outside of a few edge-case workflows, you’re never going to tell the difference in experiential terms next to a Gen 4 SSD that’s twice as fast on paper. Meanwhile, 32GB of DDR5-6000 can be had for about $75. As for CPUs, $200 or so buys you something decent, like a six-core AMD Ryzen 7600. Spend a bit more, and you can have an…

CPU $109, www.intel.com • INTEL CORE I3-13100F The humble gateway into the 13th generation Intel line-up. This quad-core processor is the cheaper variant of the standard Intel Core i3-13100, as it doesn’t feature integrated graphics, but this saves us some extra bucks! Plus, we’ve got something better than integrated graphics lined up for this build. This chip should be a great starting point for a next-gen system. GPU $300, www.msi.com • MSI GEFORCE RTX 4060 VENTUS 2X BLACK 8G OC Here it is then, the better alternative to integrated graphics: our MSI RTX 4060 GPU. Like the Intel chip, this is the gateway into the next-generation Nvidia 40 series line-up. With DLSS 3.0 support, we should be able to get some high FPS on supported titles with this budget card.…

WHEN WE BENCHMARK, we make sure not to overclock the system (although if the GPU is an OC model, it comes slightly clocked out of the box). This ensures that we’re getting a fair test of what the system will be like as you’ll buy it. We also make sure DLSS/FSR and V-sync are turned off as these can benefit the results and we want our test to be on a fair playing field. However, if you’re like us, you will want to get the most out of what you’ve paid for, and you should be able to achieve noticeable jumps in performance by doing a few quick tweaks to the GPU. Why wouldn’t you at least want to give these a go? These little helpers aren’t strictly limited to…

DUCKDUCKGO’s Private Browser app for Android (tinyurl.com/5687vvb5) and iOS (tinyurl.com/ykzfvbej) offers many of the same features as the new Windows browser, including tracker-blocking, cookie-pop-up management, the Fire Button, and Email Protection. We often recommend Brave as the best private browser, but with DuckDuckGo flying into view, there’s a new contender for Brave’s crown. Here, we examine how the two browsers and their respective search engines compare. Browser features and performance Brave is a Chromium-based browser, but disables nearly all the Google features built into that code “for privacy/security reasons” (see tinyurl.com/52vkbwhd). Its powerful Shields system blocks ads and trackers, invasive cookies, potentially dangerous scripts, and fingerprinting. Other options include automatically upgrading websites to HTTPS (Brave was the first browser to offer this), protection against malware and phishing, and a private…

WHEN WINDOWS 10 was released, Microsoft quite clearly said that this would be the final version of the OS. This turned out to be a poor marketing strategy, and soon rumors of Windows 11 began to circulate. The software was eventually released at the end of 2021, and many Windows 10 users now live in fear of a phantom forced update to the new release by night. Windows 10’s hardware requirements were quite low, largely on account of Microsoft understandably wanting to get as much of its userbase on to the same version. If you want to install Windows 11, though, it’s a different story. We can forgive the 4GB of RAM and dualcore, 64-bit processor stipulations—that’s in line with what you’d want to run a modern desktop environment on…

1. DOWNLOAD THE IMAGE The LMDE download page is at https://linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php (or go to the main page for the official Ubuntu flavor). Hit Download, then fetch the torrent or choose a mirror (further down the page) to download the ISO file. You may have a tool for writing it to USB; if not, grab the cross-platform Balena Etcher from https://etcher.io/. 2.FLASH THE IMAGE Start Balena Etcher (if you downloaded the AppImage, you need to chmod +x it; see the Etcher page for info), and point it to the LMDE image. Select your USB storage (hard drives and SSDs are marked with exclamation marks, so you don’t do something you regret) and hit Flash. Wait for it to finish and verify, then reboot the machine. 3. BOOT THE LIVE ENVIRONMENT If…

THE WINDOWS TASKBAR is an essential part of any PC’s desktop. It’s where you pin shortcuts to apps, access the Start menu, and monitor your system via a range of icons in the Notification area (or system tray, as it used to be called). With the release of Windows 11, Microsoft has rewritten the Taskbar’s underlying code, so if you’re unhappy with changes it has made, there’s not a lot you can do about it with the help of third-party tools. Or is there? In this tutorial, we’ll examine two different approaches. The first is to tweak the Taskbar as it is, plus look at how you can bring back the ‘classic’ Taskbar (which still lurks under Windows 11’s hood for now) to provide you with additional options to customize…

While the Item Wizard is undoubtedly a convenient way to add items to your collection, there are several ways in which you can speed up the process. If you click the globe icon to the left of the chart button, you’ll open an alternative search box—one that gives you greater control over the process, and which allows you to add items with a single click. Simply enter your search terms in the usual way, select your game from the list, and click Add Item(s)—as the name implies, if the search results include two or more items from your collection, you can speed things up even further by holding Ctrl as you click on each one to select them before clicking Add Items(s). You can also import items—say, a list of…

EXTRACT AUDIO You can use Icecream Video Converter’s presets to extract audio from a video file. Let’s say you have a video of a friend or relative playing in a band and you wanted to create an MP3 of the music—you can do this by adding the clip as described in Step 2, then clicking the arrow next to MP4 Video Full HD in the bottom left. Now, click the Audio tab at the top of the panel that opens, and select the quality setting you want for your MP3 audio file from the options. Click the Convert button when you’re ready. WATERMARK YOUR VIDEO If you want to prevent others from copying or distributing your video file, you can add a watermark, such as your name. Click the Watermark…

NVIDIA’S RTX 40-series is almost complete. Apart from a probable RTX 4050 and potential RTX 4090 Ti, this GeForce RTX 4060 is shaping up to be one of the final RTX 40-series offerings. It’s a major release—as the de facto mass-market Ada Lovelace GPU—and an important piece of the larger PC gaming puzzle. Should the RTX 4060 be a good performer, it has the potential to drive a wave of upgrades. But that’s the thing—it needs to be a good performer. At $299, Nvidia is positioning the RTX 4060 as a capable 1080p card, which is already a little problematic given you can now buy a decent high-refresh 1440p monitor for around $200. But with no RTX 4060 Founders Edition, we have MSI’s RTX 4060 Ventus Black 2X OC for review.…

THE LENOVO Legion Tower 5i is as much of a fully integrated gaming PC as you’re going to find in the pre-built market. From top to bottom, it looks and feels like a Lenovo-built machine, yet unlike one of its biggest competitors in this space, this tower doesn’t come with any non-standard parts to make upgrades a hassle. No, this is a smart-looking and convenient gaming PC. Lenovo is taking advantage of the relatively new Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 in this machine. It’s a powerful GPU, but fits into a smaller space than the hulking behemoths that most RTX 4070 Ti, RTX 4080, and RTX 4090 cards are. The actual card that Lenovo has slotted into this machine is made to its own design. But it’s compact, quiet, cool, and…

Even worse, while listings showed up as planned, everything showed “auto-notify” or “back ordered” for at least the next week. Cards are finally starting to be available, but reviews are few and far between. You might think it’s no big deal, but Nvidia’s RTX 40-series graphics cards have received a lot of negative press over the past few months. The consensus tends to be that while the RTX 4090 is an excellent halo product, everything else has been cut back too far, with prices that are out of touch with the current market conditions. It’s almost like all the planning and design of Ada Lovelace happened during a time when you couldn’t find any graphics card in stock at a reasonable price. As we’ve noted, the various product tiers do…

> Fix toner error > Android backups > Retro tidy up Safe mode networking I want to perform a full security scan in Safe mode to be sure that there isn’t something nasty buried in my system (nothing shows up in normal mode, but I’m not convinced). I want to boot into Safe mode with networking so I can update all my scanners, but while I did this with no problems a few years ago, I’m now unable to access the internet after rebooting into Safe mode via msconfig using the ‘Safe boot’ check box with Network selected. I checked my network adapter (Realtek PCIe GbE Family Controller) in Device Manager, and it has thrown up the following error: “The driver was not loaded because the system is booting into…

ALL MECHANICAL products require maintenance to keep them running. You get your truck or car serviced at regular intervals to ensure that failing parts are spotted and replaced, while tuning the engine to improve performance and efficiency, so why not your PC too? In this feature, we’ve developed a simple program to help you ensure that your PC’s hardware is running as well as it possibly can. We’ll start by showing you how to audit your system so you can identify everything that’s in it, from the stuff you should already know about (like your graphics card model or CPU), to more obscure components (what USB controllers is your motherboard using, for instance?). From there, we’ll put in place tools that can help you monitor your system, providing you with early…

When you first launch the DuckDuckGo browser, it will offer to import your bookmarks and passwords from “less private browsers”. Click ‘Import’ to start this process or—if you skipped it by clicking ‘Maybe later’—click the three-dot menu button and choose ‘More tools’, followed by ‘Import Bookmarks and Passwords’. Select the browser you want to import items from in the dropdown menu—be it Chrome, Firefox, Brave, or Vivaldi, though strangely not Edge. DuckDuckGo also lets you import passwords from managers such as Bitwarden, LastPass, and 1Password by exporting them as a CSV file. Choose whether to import Bookmarks, Passwords, or both, select a profile, then click the Import button. Access your imported bookmarks by clicking DuckDuckGo’s menu button and choosing Bookmarks. To view, edit and delete your imported usernames and passwords, and select…

DUCKDUCKGO has a well-deserved reputation as the best private alternative to Google’s search engine, but it has many other advantages besides letting you browse the web anonymously. Here, we reveal our favorite tricks for making the most of DuckDuckGo’s search engine, whether you’re using its new browser or another one. Search specific websites using ‘bangs’ DuckDuckGo has a unique search feature called Bangs, which lets you search within specific sites directly from its search engine. Bangs are shortcuts you type before your search queries, which consist of an exclamation mark followed by a site’s first letter, an abbreviation of its name, or a keyword. Examples of bangs include !auk to search Amazon.co.uk, !w for Wikipedia (see screenshot below), !r for Reddit, !nf for Netflix, and !yt for YouTube. The results open…

WE’VE BEEN LOOKING to get our hands on a Skytech PC ever since the Ontario-based system builders rocked up on the scene with supremely affordable pre-built gaming PCs. These machines seemed to be absolutely acing the expected gaming PC spec for the price. At around $1,500, this Skytech Chronos 2 config comes in right where we’d like to see a RTX 4070 gaming PC. The fact that there are still RTX 3080-powered gaming PCs with price tags almost as high just underlines the value on offer here. Anyway, while the last-gen AMD Ryzen 5 5600X in the Chronos 2 is a couple of years old, it still manages to shine today when it comes to gaming. Likewise, Skytech could have slapped an AIO cooler on the CPU, but we found…

If you’re looking to restore compatibility with earlier versions of the Taskbar in Windows 11, there’s a simple path you can follow. Once you’ve taken a fresh backup of your system drive (just in case), head over to https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher/ and click Releases. Expand Assets under the latest version and save ep_setup.exe to your hard drive. Once done, double-click the file and click ‘More Info > Run anyway’ when prompted by the SmartScreen filter. Explorer will blank as it restarts and after a short pause a ‘new’ (or rather, ‘old’) Taskbar will appear. At first, it’ll appear non-functional, but be patient—after a minute or so it’ll suddenly pick up where the previous Taskbar left off. It’ll look like a hybrid of old and new, but will function well, and can be…

IF YOU’RE LOOKING for a means to quickly build a database of your precious collections, then Data Crow is that tool. When we last featured it in early 2020, it was on life support and on the verge of falling into disrepair. Fast-forward to now, however, and not only has the original developer returned to the project, he has spent the last nine months updating and refining Data Crow so that it’s better than ever. Data Crow is designed to work with a wide range of collections, from books, music, and movies to newly added modules that allow you to organize your board games and comic books, too. You can input details of your items manually or make use of Data Crow’s support for online databases, allowing you to input a…

Data Crow is all about customizability, so if there’s anything wrong with the modules on offer, you can change them—or go the whole hog and build your own from scratch. Everything you need can be found on the Modules menu—there are wizards to step you through the process of creating new modules from scratch or using an existing module as a template (‘Copy Module Wizard’), plus wizards for altering existing modules and grouping related modules together. Let’s focus on amending an existing module: choose ‘Modules > Alter Module Wizard’. Select the module you wish to modify (you’ll see there are lots of sub-modules available for editing too—these are related to parent modules, like Actors for Movies, or Designer for Board Games). Step one of the wizard lets you rewrite the…

VALVE’S STEAM DECK is one of those devices that somehow adds up to more than the sum of its parts. Its custom AMD APU is looking pretty elderly, especially since AMD rolled out the new Phoenix chip with far better graphics performance. But of all the burgeoning arm of handheld gaming PCs, the Deck remains the one to buy. The reasons why have been discussed ad infinitum, so I’m not going to rehash them. You know the drill, it’s about things like long-term support, game validation, a vibrant ecosystem, a critical mass of users, and how all of that outweighs performance or a slightly substandard screen. Instead, what’s more interesting is to ask who is going to buy all of the new handhelds that seem to appear on an almost…

YOU CAN BUY OLED PC monitors from a growing list of brands. Ultimately, however, the actual OLED panels that go into those screens are sourced from just two companies: LG and Samsung. It’s the former that provides the 27-inch OLED panel in the new Corsair Xeneon 27QHD240. Unfortunately, that’s an issue. Hold that thought while we cover speeds and feeds. This 27 incher runs the same 1440p native resolution as similar OLEDs from Asus and LG. They use the same LG WOLED technology and offer similar specifications. Corsair rates the panel at 0.03ms for pixel response, with peak brightness at 1,000 nits. Again, that’s some serious punch, though it only applies to a three percent or smaller window and Corsair doesn’t quote full-screen brightness, the latter arguably being what you…

THE ALIENWARE M16 is a new 16-inch beast designed to take over from its 15.6-inch predecessor. With Nvidia’s RTX 40-Series graphics and the choice between Intel and AMD’s latest processors, there’s plenty to dig into here. Engineering-wise, we’re seeing more machines moving away from the slimline build of late to accommodate new-generation components and deliver better thermals as opposed to slick style. So while this remains a chunkier laptop by historical standards, in this new landscape the M16 feels almost thin. Almost. When the Asus ROG Strix Scar 16 weighs in at 2.5kg, the Alienware’s 3.25kg heft is certainly something to consider if you’re after true portability. The rest of the design is firmly within the established Alienware M-Series’ wheelhouse. The centered keyboard, embossed ‘16’ on the back, and additional…

THIRD PERSON SHOOTER I AM A SPACE NINJA, carving up robot sentinels on an artificial planet stranded in time. A few hours ago, I was blasting British-accented elves off a dilapidated clocktower with a gun that fires cubes. Before that, I was having my life drained by a cursed board game in an antechamber of a vast golden palace. If variety is the spice of life, then Remnant 2 is a blazing hot videogame chilli and a deceptively complex bit of game design. It takes the over-theshoulder shooting of Gears of War, welds it to Dark Souls' twitchy dodge-rolling and checkpointed level progression, then feeds it through a procedural generation algorithm that randomizes not just level layouts, but the entire structure of the campaign. All this was true with 2019’s Remnant:…

Sponsored by EACH MONTH we try to reduce the overall price points of our builds. Thankfully, time is on our side, and plays an important role here. As the year continues, more sales are popping up while the current-gen gear increases with age. The cycle will inevitably repeat itself, but for now, we find ourselves being able to pick up the latest generation of components at reasonable prices. Retracting from our statement slightly already, we are keeping DDR4 RAM in the budget systems. This is due to our motherboard choices: these are powerful enough for these budget PCs, but bring our costs down significantly compared to using DDR5 RAM and compatible mobos. Speaking of our RAM, we brought the PNY XLR8 Gaming EPIC-X RGB 16 GB DDR4-3600 in a few issues…

A NEW GEFORCE—time for trumpets, or perhaps not. This launch was a rather muted affair from Nvidia, who slipped out a 16GB version of its GeForce RTX 4060 Ti. It didn’t send out the usual round of samples for review, and there was no Founders Editions either. Nvidia’s partners were also quiet, and some haven’t even announced versions yet. This is the same card as the 8GB version, but with extra memory. Nvidia did give out some bar charts to show performance. Oddly, these were all at 1080p, when 16GB should give enough headroom to go for 1440p. The previous generation of cards at this level were certainly marketed for 1440p gaming. Nvidia’s figures show the 16GB card giving, for the most part, the same performance as the 8GB version.…

EXCELLENT AUDIO without the anchor of a cable tying you to your desktop. That’s the starting point for a good wireless headset for gaming. Next up, there’s battery life. Some will last a few days on a single charge. 30 hours of battery life is a decent starting point, but others will go hundreds of hours. Yes, really. Then there’s the whole Bluetooth versus Wi-Fi thing. Bluetooth is often used only as a battery-saving option because, as a gamer, you want that essentially lag-free 2.4GHz WiFi connection instead. 5 JBL QUANTUM TWS Not too bad price-wise, the JBL Quantum TWS earbuds come with dual-connection, great noise cancelling, and easy touch controls. Thanks to ultra-low latency, they’re fantastic for gaming and less bulky than a headset. They’re not the best-sounding buds we’ve…

WE’VE MADE IT to the end of our building process. These smaller builds are less stressful than some of the mini-ITX ones—certainly less than the custom water-cooled systems. Watch this space though, as we want to hop on that train soon! Anyway, this budget-end system, like most, is fairly straightforward to put together. We luckily had no real issues, aside from the SSD, as we couldn’t use the uppermost SSD slot due to the pre-existing heatsink. It just wouldn’t fit with the NZXT heatsink covering it. This led to us using the second slot instead, which does have its drawbacks. We’d always recommend using the top slot. However, when we tested our SSD on our read/write speed benchmarks, it still performed very well. The Adata XPG Gammix S70 Blade is…

A key part of your hardware is your network—so when it comes to auditing and maintaining it, you need to cast a wider net than just your main PC. We recommend the open-source NETwork Manager (https://github.com/BornToBeRoot/NETworkManager), which has all the core tools you need. On first launch, you’ll get an overview listing your PC, router, and public IP addresses, along with any DNS information. Below this is Network Interface providing three tabs. Information is self-explanatory, while Bandwidth allows you to monitor downloads and uploads. Configure provides a section for configuring the various network interfaces on your machine. Beneath this is Wi-Fi, which is useful, as it lists all visible networks and helps you see which channels are congested via its Channels tab. If you want to move your Wi-Fi network to a…

Compared with rival browsers, there currently aren’t many ways to customize DuckDuckGo’s browser. You can’t add new tools by installing extensions, and—unlike Edge, Firefox, and Vivaldi—it doesn’t include a bunch of themes for tailoring its appearance to your taste. You may find this simplicity refreshing, especially when Microsoft and Mozilla keep stuffing their browsers with bloat, and it certainly makes DuckDuckGo easy to use. But if you like tweaking browser settings, there are a few things you can do. To activate DuckDuckGo’s dark mode, click its menu button, select Settings, and find the Appearance section. Choose ‘Dark’ under Theme (see screenshot) to apply the Dark theme to the browser’s toolbars, menus, Home/New Tab page, and the DuckDuckGo search engine. It won’t darken the background of other sites. Click the Zoom dropdown menu…

TIP OF THE MONTH RUN APPS AS ADMINISTRATOR If an application isn’t running normally or you’ve just downloaded a new program and the installation isn’t going well, opening the app as an administrator may solve your woes. This allows you to gain full access to the app with the highest privileges. One of the easiest ways to do this is to right-click it and select ‘run as administrator’. Alternatively, right click, select properties, then in the compatibility section tick ‘Run this program as an administrator’ to always run it in this way. SAM LEWIS STAFF WRITER THE WINNER IS… I had a dilemma. The choice was essentially between choosing a new handheld gaming system—the Asus ROG Ally—or swaying away from games and towards music by picking up a pair of…

1. BROWSE AVAILABLE OPTIONS If creating a new item by right-clicking on the dock, you can browse available commands via category. Alternatively, choose ‘New Dock Item > Item’ and switch ‘Item type’ to ‘Internal Command’ to browse the full A-Z list. 2. SWITCH OFF DISPLAY These two buttons let you either replace the current display with a screensaver that shows the current time, or simply power off your display(s) with a single click (just click again to switch them back on). 3. SYSTEM SHORTCUTS You can place a variety of shortcuts to various hard-to-find system tools and settings. Here, we’ve placed shortcuts to the Run command, Task Manager, and Game Controllers configuration dialog. 4. MEDIA PLAYER Drag and drop compatible audio files (MP3, WMA or WAV) into the Media Player…

1. SEARCH TERMS Most online databases restrict you to a single keyword search, but some—like the Discogs music search tool—allow you to search using multiple criteria to create more filtered searches. 2. PICK A SEARCH PROVIDER Several modules—including Books, Movies, and Music—offer a choice of different search engines to try. Compare results to see which offers the best fit. 3. RESTART Click Find to search using your criteria. If you’ve found what you’re looking for or want to edit your terms, click Stop before making changes. 4. BROWSE RESULTS Card View effectively lets you comb through the results using their artwork to help steer you to a possible match. Switch to Table View to view multiple results at once. 5. VIEW DETAILS If you have multiple matches to choose from,…

IF YOU’RE FED UP with attempting to play video files on your smart TV, tablet, or phone, only to find that the video format isn’t compatible with your device, then you should try Icecream Video Converter. This free tool converts video files from one format to another, and its latest version (1.28) adds handy presets that ensure your converted videos can play on specific devices, including iPhones, iPads, and certain brands of smart TV. Here, we explain how to use the program to convert, trim and add watermarks to your video files. –NICK PEERS 1 DOWNLOAD AND GET STARTED Visit www.icecreamapps.com/Video-Converter/ and click the Free Download button. Your download should start automatically, depending on the browser you’re using [Image A]. In Edge, you’ll need to click the ‘Save as’ button…

ANOTHER DAY, another uber-sized OLED gaming monitor. It’s an occupational hazard in this game to become blasé about $1,000-plus OLED panels. Enter the new LG UltraGear 45GR95QE, which arrives with plenty of baggage. I say that because personally I’ve yet to see an OLED gaming monitor with an LG panel that’s any good. Whatever the brand of OLED monitor, it’ll either have one of LG’s WOLED panels (where the “W” refers to a white subpixel designed to increase brightness) or Samsung’s QD-OLED tech. Of course, the part of LG that makes monitors is far removed within the LG empire from the bit that makes OLED panels, but the LG branding robs this monitor of mystery. I was confident of what to expect, and the huge 45-inch LG UltraGear 45GR95QE didn’t…

AS GAMING LAPTOPS with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 stuffed inside go, the Acer Predator Helios 16 isn’t the fastest. But it does have redeeming qualities, and then some. It’s a 16-inch laptop, which means it joins the likes of the Alienware X16, Asus ROG Strix Scar 16, Asus Zephyrus M16, Lenovo Legion Pro 7i, and Razer Blade 16 in a very competitive market. Like those laptops, the Helios’ 16-inch frame and slim bezels make for a better compromise between screen and chassis size than most 17-inch devices. Speaking of that screen, it’s absolutely lush. It’s a mini-LED panel with 1,000 dimming zones for relatively precise lighting control, plus 240Hz refresh and 2,560 by 1,600 pixels in a 16:10 aspect ratio. Admittedly, Mini LED is no microLED OLED, it’s not capable…

IF YOU WANT PROPER pro-level audio recording, you’ll need what’s known as an XLR mic, a device that’s becoming increasingly popular on PC thanks to the boom in streaming and podcasting. Enter an increasing number of brands jumping on the XLR bandwagon, the latest of which is Elgato Wave DX. As an XLR mic, the Wave DX was a little fiddly to set up. It’s not a case of plugging in one cable and the mic works. Instead, it’s a multi-stage procedure that relies on you having a few things to hand. To get the Wave DX working, you’ll need the mic itself, as well as an XLR cable (sold separately, but any XLR cable should do) and an interface of some form for the mic, which in turn plugs…

GEN 5.0 PCIE SSD technology is here and among us. It’s lightning fast, there’s no denying that, but with any new technology, it comes at a premium. It will be a while until it’s available at more of a budget price point. What this means for our humble industry-standard PCIe 4.0 SSDs is that prices are more affordable than ever. A top-end PCIe 4.0 SSD is still no slouch by any means, and is plenty fast enough for most computing tasks. Lexar’s latest NM790 drive claims to provide a speedy performance while consuming 40 percent less power than DRAM cache-enabled PCIe Gen 4 SSDs. Should you hold off from PCIe 5.0 and add this PCIe 4.0 drive to your setup? Visually speaking, there’s nothing too groundbreaking on this drive. It doesn’t…