Table of contents for Holiday 2023 in Maximum PC

IT’S FAST BECOMING Maximum PC Holiday issue tradition to go all-out with our cover build and put together the fastest machine possible. Perhaps it feels in keeping with the excess of the Holidays, or the fact that we’re more inclined to let the purse strings go, or we feel the need to reward ourselves. Of course, it’s actually more to do with the fact that this is the time of year when Intel tends to release its latest top-end consumer CPUs, which we’re more than happy to pair with the other vanguard PC components of the day. This year, that’s the 14th generation Meteor Lake processor line, topped off by the $589 Core i9-14900K, which is the star of our cover build on page 16, and our lead review on…

The tipping point, when we look back years from now from our brain-embedded Arm PCs, will likely be 2024. That’s the year that Qualcomm’s exclusive deal with Microsoft to provide chips with the Arm-compatible version of Windows expires and we see just what the market is capable of. Qualcomm will be first out of the gate with a CPU for Windows on Arm. After years of lazy chip designs using off-the-shelf cores provided by Arm itself, Qualcomm has cooked up a radical new processor with cores designed in-house. Strictly speaking, the Oryon cores inside Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X Elite chip were designed by a startup known as Nuvia, populated by the same ex-Apple engineers who helped make its silicon the most powerful Arm-based hardware you can buy in consumer computing…

CPU INTEL CORE I9-14900K This pivotal piece of the puzzle packs some potent performance buried deep within its refreshed Raptor Lake architecture. There are eight performance cores with hyper-threading, and 16 efficiency cores without. A 3.2 GHz base has a 6 GHz boost clock, and 68MB of L2 and L3 cache across the board. Couple that with an overly impressive memory controller and an incredibly aggressive price, and you’re left with a versatile processor that is more than capable of handling any game or heavily threaded workload task without breaking a sweat. $598, www.intel.com Motherboard ASUS ROG MAXIMUS Z790 DARK HERO With a great processor comes great responsibility—and that responsibility is simple enough. You need a motherboard capable of flooding the chip with a stable current, and one that packs…

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TIP OF THE MONTH QUICK SETTINGS To make changes in Win11, there are plenty of tricks we can apply. One is quick settings, which can be found in the bottom right-hand side of your taskbar or by pressing the Windows key + A. You’ll find Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, brightness, and other quick access settings here. To customize, hit the pencil icon next to the settings, and add your most-used tools. SAM LEWIS STAFF WRITER NVIDIA WOW FACTOR! After prolonged access to Nvidia’s latest AI tech, DLSS 3.5, it was inevitable that I’d fall into a trance of gaming paradise. For me, it’s lived up to its high expectations, and makes the argument to pick up a compatible budget-end 40 series GPU even more compelling. Using an Intel Core i5-13600K paired with…

THE CRUCIAL T700 sets a new bar in performance for consumer SSDs, pushing speed higher than any other PCIe 5.0 NVMe drive on the market. It reigns as the king of the hill for sequential bandwidth and random IOPS, at least for now. Its native DirectStorage firmware optimization is an added benefit over almost all PCIe 4.0 SSDs for future gaming. Crucial departs from the reference heatsink design with its own solution, while also offering a cheaper, bare-drive variant for easier installation with motherboard and custom M.2 heatsinks. Together, this makes it a great option for enthusiasts and early adopters. The T700 is part of a wave of PCIe 5.0 SSDs about to deluge the consumer SSD market, all based on the same Phison E26 controller and Micron flash. Competing…

THE HP OMEN 16 finds itself surrounded by a multitude of 16-inch premium gaming laptops featuring Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 GPUs. However, it takes more than having a powerful 40-series GPU to stand out in this competitive market, particularly in the higher price range of over $2,000. You still need the performance to back it up. This HP Omen 16 is a top-of-the-line 16-inch gaming laptop with an Intel Core i7 13700HX processor. For memory and storage, you’re looking at 32GB DDR5-4800 RAM and a 2TB NVMe SSD (in some territories that’s 1TB). Currently, it is available at a discounted price of $2,359 on the HP website, but without the discount, the system would cost $2,790. The HP Omen 16 boasts a sleek and minimalist design that aligns with the…

WHILE THE LOFTY dreams of an all-encompassing digital universe have yet to materialize fully, the Meta Quest 3 represents a recalibration of the metaverse vision proposed by Mark Zuckerberg. Instead of a dystopian portrayal akin to Ready Player One, it refers to the fundamentals: playful arm-waving, immersive gaming, and watching sports in VR. And honestly, that’s perfectly fine. The Meta Quest 2 was hands-down the best VR headset on the market, which has seen a lot of competition since then. The headset, released in 2020, has started to feel a little dated, as its once impressive Gen 1 Snapdragon XR2 was starting to feel like an ancient relic, especially against newer, fancier headsets. The Meta Quest 3 is a massive upgrade from the Quest 2. It’s more powerful, its stunning…

IN THE FIRST PLAYABLE moments of Alan Wake 2, you control a nude, balding, middle-aged man stumbling around a forest. After a few seconds of staring at his hairy ass while I guided him around, it dawned on me that this wasn't going to be your typical big-budget videogame. Even by Remedy's own quirky standards, Alan Wake 2 is idiosyncratic. You could call it self-indulgent, even, as it dives headfirst into its every strange idea. Weaving a winkingly meta journey through all corners of the studio's lore, at times it feels like watching Remedy get high off its own fumes, which is exactly what makes it so enthrallingly brilliant. The game picks up 13 years after writer Alan Wake's disappearance at the end of the first game, following both his…

WITH MODERN LIFE refusing to slow down, it’s now almost impossible to manage your life on paper, never mind in your own head. Juggling personal and professional projects, all with competing deadlines demanding you give them priority, requires third-party help, and there are a raft of cloud-based services offering to help everyone from individuals to corporations manage themselves better. We’ve focused on two services that offer usable free tiers for individuals, and our remit was to see how they fared managing a single person’s work and home lives. In one corner is Todoist, a tool with a narrow focus on helping you manage projects through simple to-do lists and deadline-based tasks, while in the other, Notion offers a wider range of productivity tools with project management just one part of…

THE RACE to have AI is over. Every big tech company now has an AI department, and is busy adding AI software and hardware to nearly everything in its portfolio. The race has now turned to building those large-scale models into really large-scale ones. The thinking is that the winners will be the ones with the biggest models: a lot of expensive hardware is currently being screwed together in server farms, and massive data sets collated. The biggest AI application by far is OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and it’s estimated that 92 percent of Fortune 500 companies use it. Apparently, it boasts over 2 million developers. A new version is under testing, GPT-4 Turbo, which uses a new, larger data set, and can accept 300 pages worth of text prompt. Amazon is…

An estimated 37 percent of internet users run them—among the more technically savvy it’ll be more than that. Some haven’t seen the internet without a blocker for years, which makes seeing it in all its ad-festooned glory a shock. Blocking ads blocks potential revenue, so it’s not popular with tech firms, especially Google, who gets about 80 percent of its revenue from them. YouTube has been experimenting with banning ad blockers, and now it’s gone global, claiming ad blockers violate its terms of service. A pop-up asks you to turn ad blocking off, or pay for a premium service. Otherwise, there’s no more (relatively) ad-free YouTube. Needless to say, this has not been popular. It is a staple service for many, and been viewed as free for years. YouTube Premium…

Eight years later, there’s little doubt about which technology won out. G-Sync still exists, but the number of new ‘true’ G-Sync displays—as opposed to G-Sync Compatible options—has dwindled to almost nothing. For example, Nvidia lists just 23 G-Sync Ultimate monitors. Those are supposedly the best displays Nvidia and its partners offer, and most of these are several years out of date. If you want a 4K monitor, there are only ten G-Sync Ultimate options, compared to 79 G-Sync Compatible Solutions, all with a maximum refresh rate of at least 120Hz. I’ve used G-Sync displays for most of the past eight years, and they’ve been mostly fine—for Nvidia GPUs. On AMD and now Intel GPUs, those same displays only work as fixed refresh rate solutions. Even worse was the Acer X27…

> Which OC tool? > Self-hosted chat > Fix botched cleanup Overclocking conflict I reinstalled my old RX 570 graphics card in a rig for my brother, and wanted to give him a free speed boost as an extra present. While I can overclock the memory to 1,750 MHz with MSI Afterburner, if I install AMD’s Adrenaline on to the system, it’ll crash—black screen, followed by the PC freezing. However, if I raise the voltage controller memory setting in Adrenaline before applying the change in Afterburner, it works okay. Why is it doing this? No voltage settings are required when it’s just MSI Afterburner installed. —Phil Strader THE DOCTOR RESPONDS: This sounds like a classic software conflict where one application (Adrenaline) overwrites the changes of another (Afterburner), resulting in the…

The curse of photoshoot deadlines strikes again, this time in the memory department. We did intend to run a slightly different memory kit with this build, but due to time constraints and shipping being mildly problematic (our kit spent two whole weeks in Hong Kong), it didn’t make the cut. So what’s the recommendation? 32GB (2x16GB) Corsair Dominator Titanium DDR5 in black at a whopping 7200 MT/s. Why does that matter? Simply put, we’ve heard a lot of reports that Intel’s 14th gen is a monster when it comes to memory overclocking. With the right memory, some of our colleagues and competitors have managed to take that same kit and ramp it up to 8,000 MT/s, and with some mild tweaks, push it to 8,600 MT/s. Finally, DDR5 is starting to…

Interestingly, AMD is in a bit of a unique position where it currently has market dominance, and a whole swathe of processors in its arsenal to counter Intel. There is, however, an argument to be had as to whether that’s a good or bad thing. On the one hand, Team Red has a swathe of processors perfectly suited to any task. Only care about gaming? Get an X3D processor. Want something that delivers the best performance in multithreaded workloads? Get a standard X series processor instead. Looking for a computational powerhouse that will give you the best enterprise-level performance? A Threadripper chip is the way to go. The only problem is that each one of those has its drawbacks compared to Intel’s offerings. The X3D processor might have a massive cache…

AT THE START of September this year, almost 200,000 people descended upon Berlin for the world’s biggest trade show dedicated to consumer electronics and home appliances: IFA. It’s a show with a long and glistening history, too. This is where Philips unveiled the CD, Telefunken the first widely available TV sets, and Sony the world’s first video cassette player. Unless we somehow missed it, nothing to match the importance of those releases happened at this year’s show, which celebrates its 100th anniversary next year, but it was a bustling event—one that suggests trade shows are on their way back to full health after three difficult years because of Covid. Here, we pick out the key trends from the showfloor, and give our thoughts on the products that caught our eye.…

IT’S THAT TIME OF YEAR again when Microsoft rolls out a major update to Windows. Despite claiming it was moving away from such huge announcements, Windows 11 23H2 (also dubbed ‘Moments 4’) contains a surprising number of new features, as well as welcome tweaks to existing ones. By now, you may be aware of some of them, as features have been rolling out quietly since September. But with the flick of the switch at the end of October, all users should now be able to access the vast bulk of what Windows 11 version 23H2 has to offer. You’ll have seen the headline splashes, but what do these new features actually do, and what smaller—but no less important—updates may have escaped your attention? In this feature, we’ll give you a…

YOU’LL NEED THIS FREE AND OPEN SOURCE IMMICH SERVER SOFTWARE AND MOBILE APPS (https://immich.app). The server software requires a PC running Docker with Docker Compose or Portainer also installed. FED UP WITH HAVING TO BUY a monthly subscription to keep your photos and videos backed up online? If you’re willing to use your own backup server—whether your own PC or the NAS build we featured back in September 2022—then you can back up your entire family and friends’ photos and videos for free. Immich is a fresh, open-source server that’s rapidly developing to rival the likes of Google Photos and Apple iCloud. First, Immich supports video, motion photos, and panoramas. You can upload from your computer (and thereby your digital camera) as well as your mobile devices, and it’ll recognize…

To make use of Immich’s Maps view, your photos need to have geocoordinates attached to their metadata. If your photos lack this, you can add it using digiKam. Select all the photos needing tags, then choose ‘Item > Edit Geolocation’ to open a view of the world. You can zoom into the map manually or click Search to find a location. If the location is where the photo was taken, select the photo(s), right-click the search result, and choose ‘Move selected images to this position’ to apply the geocoordinates as shown in Image G. Click Apply to write the geocodes to the files. If you need a more precise spot, position the crosshairs where the photo was taken, then right-click and choose ‘Copy Coordinates’. Select the relevant photos, right-click and…

FOR THE FASTEST CHIP ever to grace a gaming PC, the Intel Core i9 14900K is about as boring a CPU refresh as one could be. We’ve seen it all before: the massive core count, the architecture, the 6GHz clock speed. The 14900K might do some things better than the 13th Gen, but it rarely matters. That doesn’t make it any less of an awesome gaming chip—it just doesn’t push the needle forward much. The 14900K struggles to deliver anything new. It’s marginally faster than its predecessor, the 13900K, though its minor improvements do not deliver significant improvement in games. You may see marginally bigger numbers in synthetic benchmarks, but those are the only times you’re going to feel that performance boost. The important factor is price. The 14900K is…

THE NEW FRAMEWORK AMD mainboard is finally here, and now I love the Framework 13 laptop. I’ve liked previous versions of this upgradeable portable PC, but while it’s a good office laptop, it never really sung to me as a device. Dropping the new AMD Ryzen 7 7840U board into this old chassis, however, has made me fall in love with this laptop in a way none of the Intel upgrades ever did. My first experience with this laptop was as a Tiger Lake-based system with an 11th Gen Intel chip inside it, and it was fine. The 13-inch scale is great for a predominantly office-focused notebook—the design is slim and simple, the modular ports are great, and I love the 16:10 aspect ratio of the sharp, glossy 2256 x…

THE AVERMEDIA Live Gamer Ultra 2.1 (try quickly saying that three times) is an external capture device that allows you to record HDMI video at 4K resolution and 60 frames per second. So, what’s new? The important bit is right there in the name: 2.1. This is the first mainstream capture box on the market to support the HDMI 2.1 standard, but only in passthrough, and without 8K. The benefit of a capture box like this is that you can pass a 4K, HDR, VRR video stream from a PC (GeForce RTX 3000/AMD RX 6000 or newer) or current-gen console through to a compatible monitor via the HDMI output, as long as every device in the chain is HDMI 2.1 compliant, while capturing a 4K/60 video stream via a USB-C…

VALVE’S STEAM DECK has received an overhaul. Obviously the screen changes from LCD to OLED, but there’s much more than just that, as almost every part has been redesigned. The upgrade is not focused on raw performance—more a better version of the original. This means the processor specification remains the same, as does memory and storage. The list of changes, however, is huge, as almost no components have been carried over. The HDR screen is 7.4-inch, 90Hz, and 1,000-nits. That’s a big upgrade over the old LCD, which was a 7-inch, 60Hz, 400-nit unit. The new screen has a considerable expanded color gamut, too. Battery life is said to be 50 percent better, thanks to better efficiency and a 20 percent size increase. The AMD silicon is now on a…

UNTIL VERY RECENTLY, the handheld gaming PC market was essentially just the Steam Deck, with not enough contenders to round out a Top 5 list. However, over the last six months, rarely an issue has passed where we’ve not had one feature in our reviews section. The ability to play your favorite PC games wherever you are clearly appeals to a lot of buyers, but how do you make sure you get the best bang for your buck? By buying one of our picks below, of course. 5 AYANEO AIR 1S Go for the Ayaneo Air 1S because it’s incredibly portable, coming in at just 21.6mm thick and weighing only 450g. You needn’t worry about its inclusion in your luggage if you’re traveling long distances. Its size isn’t at the…

Another year, another Intel CPU refresh, complete with all the fanfare, bells and whistles, and general hubbub we’ve come to expect from Team Blue over the last few generations. 14th gen has arrived, and with it, a fresh batch of already well-aired processors are now available for you to purchase. At first glance, these new processors aren’t quite as impressive as the PR furor suggests. Let’s take the Intel Core i9-14900K as an example, and compare it to the last gen’s 13900KS. It features the same core count, boost clock, cache, memory support, and a fairly similar TDP. The only comparable differences between the two come in the form of the E-Core clock speeds being slightly higher on the 14th gen (we’re talking a couple of hundred MHz). Likewise, the base…

LENGTH OF TIME: 1-2 hours DIFFICULTY: Easy Building your own system has come a long, long way in the last few years, and it’s something we highly recommend. Yes, you could buy a prebuilt rig from the likes of Origin, iBuyPower, or any of the other reputable manufacturers out there, and you can customize that too, but there’s just something about getting your hands dirty and building your own machine that is just so rewarding. There’s more to it than that, of course. Over time, you’ll discover that those same components (as ridiculous as this may sound) have a personality, like that old car that you love, or a padlock that you have to shake a certain way to get it to budge. These processors and parts are unique. Pushing…

Our zero-point consists of the 8K Gaming Monster from our Holiday 2022 issue, featuring an Intel Core i9-13900K, MSI GeForce RTX 4090 Gaming X Trio 24GB, Asus ROG Maximus Z790 Hero Mothernoard, 32GB (2x16GB) of Corsair Vengeance DDR5-5200, and 1TB PNY XLR8 CS3140 PCIe 4.0 M.2 SSD. All games tested at 4K ‘Ultra’ graphics presets with DLSS and V-sync turned off and XMP for RAM speed turned on. No manual CPU overclocking.w INTEL’S 14TH GEN has been a pretty poorly received product since its launch. From a step-change standpoint, there’s not really a lot to shout about. Yes, Intel has managed to do some interesting stuff when it comes to thread scheduling via its new APO tech (Application Optimization), but even that’s a fairly minor addition at this point given…

HOW TO SUM UP 2023’s hardware highlights? It definitely wasn’t the year of the GPU. Every graphics card this year has either been a bit disappointing or a lot overpriced. Storage tech hasn’t exactly blown us away in 2023, either. Sure, you can now buy a PCIe Gen 5 drive, but while the peak numbers look amazing, more nuanced metrics of storage performance, like random access, aren’t all that. And what’s with the Gen 5 drives needing active cooling? The CPU side of the equation has been a bit better, especially thanks to AMD’s nifty X3D chips with gaming-friendly 3D V-cache. However, we’ll have to wait for late next year for something really compelling from Intel. Screen technology took a huge step forward, too, and not just with the arrival…

Two things makes Jackery’s off-grid power supplies stand out. One is the design of the chargers, with an orange flash that breaks up the monotony of what would otherwise be a dull, gray box. The second is the maturity of its solar panels, which can charge the all-new Solar Generator 300 Plus in four hours if you buy the 100W solar charger. The 300 Plus is designed for camping in particular, and at 5kg it’s carryable. With a capacity of 288Wh, and output of 300W, it can recharge a laptop up to three times and a phone 13 times. It’s available from $399.…

Gone are the days when a major Windows feature update rolled out in a single package, often gigabytes in size. Since the release of Windows 11 version 22H2, Microsoft has switched to a new means of rolling out updates, one that staggers new features and results in major update files being placed on your PC in advance of the “big date”. In the case of 23H2, most of the files making up the update were on your system before the official update began rolling out in November. They were downloaded as part of a monthly security update, and some of the features were enabled prior to the official announcement—two were Copilot and the redesigned Settings home page. Other features were kept deactivated until the official 23H2 update rolled out. You may…

The new update isn’t just about splashy headline features; you’ll find lots of little improvements of the ‘blink and you’ll miss them’ variety. Let’s start with expanded support for compressed formats. It’s been over 20 years since Windows first built in direct support for opening, editing, and creating zip files, and now 11 formats have been added, including .7z, .rar, and various iterations of .tar files. The desktop, taskbar, and system tray are littered with minor tweaks too—if you make use of Windows Task View to run multiple desktops, a label appears identifying each desktop as you cycle between them using the Win + Ctrl + arrow keys. Laptop users with supported sensors can configure their laptop to act more proactively to reduce energy consumption and boost security. Visit Settings >…

1. BROWSE COLLECTION Immich offers four ways to browse your collection—the default Photos view arranges your photos by date, with the most recent at the top. 2. ARCHIVE ITEMS Individual photos can be removed from the main view by being archived (click the ellipsis button and choose Archive after selecting them). Click here to view them. 3. SWITCH THEME At present, Immich supports two themes: light and dark—click this button to switch between them. Further customization (via Administration > Settings > Theme Settings) requires knowledge of CSS. 4. SELECT ITEMS QUICKLY Roll your mouse over a photo and check the box to select that photo, or check the box next to a day to select all photos on that date. Use the options that appear at the top of the…

YOU’LL NEED THIS THE EVERYTHING APP voidtools.com, free THE LONGER YOU USE YOUR PC, the more it fills up with files and the greater the need to quickly find them. After all, there are few things more frustrating than knowing that you stashed a document somewhere on your computer, but having no idea where it actually is. You could use the built-in search tool in Windows, but it’s hardly the most reliable option. It has a habit of missing boatloads of files, even when you’re certain they exist, or are staring right at them. Simply put, Microsoft’s search is not dependable enough for everyday use. What is reliable, then? Enter Everything, a fantastic free search tool that leaves no stone unturned in its quest to find your missing docs. Not…

AT RISK OF SOUNDING like a fanboy, I wasn’t surprised when the updated Steam Deck appeared. The changes for the revised model were near exactly what I would have specified had you asked me to list them. Valve is one of the few companies that has a fairly purist approach to product. By that, I mean the company isn’t driven by marketing guys dreaming up ruses, then giving the engineering guys as little money as possible to come up with something that they can just about get away with selling. Instead, Valve is product driven, making the best product they can, and more or less let the marketing take care of itself. This is an interim product, so it makes sense to keep the outside the same and maintain backwards…

THE K-SERIES CORE I5 is usually the easiest recommendation from any new Intel generation. I’m less sure of the Core i5 14600K. On the one hand, this new chip is a couple of frames faster than the Core i5 13600K it replaces, and remains extremely competitive versus AMD’s mid-range. On the other, it’s a touch more expensive than the 13600K, and paying extra for near enough the same thing doesn’t feel great, though that’s mostly because the older chip is discounted on its way out the door. Due to Intel’s decision to stick with a largely unchanged Raptor Lake architecture for the 14th Gen—the same used throughout most of the 13th Gen—there are few differences between the Core 14600K and 13600K. That includes the launch price, which remains at $329.…

THE RASPBERRY PI, the little single-board computer beloved of those for who ‘electronics project’ means more than replacing a lightbulb, is now on its fifth iteration. It’s come a long way in that time, replacing a text interface with a full Linux desktop and even being able to run Windows if you ask it really nicely. The fifth release takes things up a level. While the Raspberry Pi 4 was usable as a desktop computer if you stuck to low-power versions of Linux and SATA SSDs connected over USB, the Pi 5 offers as much as three times the processing power of its immediate predecessor, and has a 1x PCIe 2.0 interface that, with the appropriate add-on, could be used to connect an NVMe SSD. With 8GB of RAM, the…