Table of contents for February 2024 in Maximum PC

AS I WRITE THIS, I’ve just returned from this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where I saw enough laptops, desktops, and monitors to easily fill these pages for the next 12 issues. Coming away knowing a bit more about the lay of the land in PC tech for 2024, I can say that the future looks exciting, even if there’s no identifiable ‘next big thing’ set to revolutionize the industry this year. The clear highlight for most will be the release of Nvidia’s SUPER series of graphics processors. The RTX 4080, RTX 4070 Ti, and RTX 4070 SUPER cards don’t look to be huge upgrades in terms of performance, but they do look to right some of the wrongs of the vanilla 40-series cards when it comes to…

ABOUT ONE PER CENT of Chrome users—that’s 30 million people—have had third-party cookies disabled, dubbed Tracking Protection. This is part of a project by Google that will have major implications on internet advertising. Google will slowly increase that number over the next few months, and by the end of the year it’ll be everybody. Third-party cookies are beloved by advertisers, but not always by the rest of us, as our activities are monitored so we can be targeted more effectively. Google has been under pressure to do something for a while, and announced in 2020 that it would, even promising not to invest in any alternative tracking systems. Now, it is putting its plan into action. You will have the option to turn them back on—some sites will get obstreperous…

WHILE THEY LOOK LOVELY, OLED screens have been something of a luxury. But prices have been falling, and we’ve reached the third generation of panels, with numerous releases timed for CES. They’re bigger and brighter, but burn-in still exists, even if it’s nowhere near the problem it was once feared to be. Just before the holidays, LG announced five new UltraGear models, including the 32GS95UE, a 32-inch screen that can switch between 4K at 240Hz, and 1080p at 480Hz. Now, Samsung has announced the Odyssey G6 G60SD, G8 G80SD, and the G9 G95SD, the latter more of an update than an all-new panel. The smallest is the 27-inch G6, a 2,560 by 1,440 panel with a game-friendly refresh rate of 360Hz, and a response time of 0.03ms. The G8 is…

BY THE TIME you read this, Intel will have rolled out a whole new roadmap, the next waypoint on its journey to renewed technological dominance. Except I can’t help but notice that the company hasn’t come close to delivering on its existing roadmap. You know, the one that has Intel delivering five new chip production nodes in four years? It was February 2021 that Pat Gelsinger returned triumphantly to the helm of Intel. It was a winning narrative. Intel had lost its way after years of marketing-biased leadership. At last, an engineer was returning to the top job—and not just any engineer, but a former Intel devotee who’d joined the company aged just 18 in 1979 and worked his way up through the firm to become CTO, only to be…

Our zero-point consists of the 14th gen Gaming PC from our last issue, featuring an Intel Core i9-14900K, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090, Asus ROG Maximus Z790 Dark Hero Motherboard, 32GB (2x16GB) of Corsair Vengeance DDR5-4800, and 1TB Adata Legend 960 Max 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. “Core Price” refers to the key components generating performance (CPU, GPU, Mobo, SSD, RAM), not accessories. LET’S BE CLEAR, our zero-point graphs above provides a bit of an unfair comparison. The RTX 4090 featured in it is an absolute monster, and clearly demolishes the RTX 4070 when it comes to 4K gaming performance. Those figures aren’t wrong here. You’re talking…

FSR 3 right now is very much in its infancy. At present, there are only four games shipping with FSR 3 frame generation. We’ve tried three of them, and had very different experiences with the end results. Forspoken and Immortals of Aveum were first out the door, and felt a bit raw—turning on FSR 3 frame generation would boost average fps, but often the minimum fps wouldn’t change, and the games would still feel choppy. There were also issues with having vsync disabled, or with using variable refresh rates alongside frame generation. Initial impressions were decidedly lackluster. Then Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora came out, and FSR 3 frame generation seemed to work much better. In fact, unlike most games, even generated results of 40 fps remained playable. This flies in the face of how frame generation is supposed…

WE’RE HUGE FANS of containers. They’re a great way to run self-hosted services on your network, and over the past few years we’ve covered them extensively, from Nextcloud (cloud storage, chat and web office suite) and Immich (photo storage), to Vaultwarden (password managing) and Motion (home surveillance). In the past, we’ve focused on Docker as the tool for running these, but there’s a new pretender on the block. What Podman lacks in finesse it makes up for by offering superior performance and security with ‘rootless’ containers—see our head to head in the December 2023 issue. Having come out in Podman’s corner, we thought it only fair to give you a lowdown of the basics of using it on your Windows PC. In this feature, we’ll introduce you to the concept of…

Podman is a relatively new product, and is still undergoing rapid development—both the desktop app and underlying engine were updated as we were writing this feature. Because it’s a child of Red Hat Linux, development is focused primarily on Linux (and Fedora/Red Hat Linux), which shows in how the project is developed for Windows. The need to use an underlying WSL instance creates unique problems—we’ve covered the two major issues (automatic container restarting and remote network access) here, but you’re likely to run into other problems too. Remember, you can destroy and recreate containers, but if you mangle your underlying WSL instance, you can destroy and recreate that, too: navigate to ‘Settings > Resources’ in Podman Desktop and click the stop button underneath the Podman machine, before clicking the trash…

When Apple migrated the Mac platform from Intel CPUs to its own ARM-based chips in 2020, it spelt the end for the Boot Camp utility. Windows simply couldn’t boot on the new M1 hardware, so the popular dual-booting tool was quietly ditched. However, if you still want to run Windows applications on your Mac, there is a way. For more than a decade, Microsoft has been working on bringing Windows to the ARM platform, and its latest releases are now more than mature enough for day-to-day use. If you want to try out some cross-platform action on your own Apple Silicon Mac, you can buy an ARM edition of Windows 11 from the Microsoft online store (tinyurl.com/5c7t89rp)—or download the latest Insider Preview release and run it for free. Here’s how.…

TIP OF THE MONTH STOP WINDOWS RESTARTING ON CRASH Ever shut down your PC and gone to bed, only to find your rig back on in the morning? Want a fix? Type in ‘settings’ in the Start menu, then go to ‘System’, then ‘About’. Click ‘Advanced System Settings’, make sure you’re in the ‘Advanced’ tab, then click ‘Settings…’ in ‘Start-up and Recovery’, and make sure ‘Automatically restart’ is unchecked under ‘System failure’. Hit ok, click out, and you’ll be good. GAMING CHAIRS, WHAT? WHY? I’m in the market for a new office chair. Mine is dying, and it’s not a pretty sight. The faux leather material has chipped off at the base, the foam stuffing has fallen apart, and the internal strapping has all but given up its hold on…

YOU’LL NEED THIS LOCALSEND www.localsend.org For Windows, plus iOS or Android CLOUD SERVICES, like Google Drive and iCloud, simplify the task of sharing files between your phone and computer. The trouble is that when you share this way, it’s easy to end up with loose files cluttering your cloud storage once you’ve completed the transfer. This wastes disk space, so unless you tidy up after yourself, you may one day need to pay for additional storage. Alternatively, you could use LocalSend, which rather than routing files via the cloud, sends them directly across your network. It’s free, with no restrictions, and works a lot like Apple’s AirDrop, without requiring all your devices to be made by Apple. 1 DOWNLOAD AND INSTALL Open www.localsend.org and click Download [Image A]. Click ‘Windows’ on…

IT’S FAIR TO say that Hyte’s Y70 Touch has impressed us—it’s a chassis unlike any we’ve seen before. That angular design, touchscreen display, and rich feature set has made it one of the nicest cases we’ve had the pleasure to work in. There’s a lot to love here—a lot of sweet little touches that make the Y70 Touch a thing of beauty. However, it’s not without fault. Throughout our time building with it, there were hiccups; moments where we questioned design choices, decisions that baffled the mind, and slight build inconsistencies that lack the refinement of a more mainstream chassis builder. Let’s start with the good. It’s a full-sized ATX case, capable of holding E-ATX boards in its girthy housing, complete with some serious cooling potential. In total, you can…

MEMORY FREQUENCY has long been the realm of marketing gurus and PR specialists, those whose task it is to upsell RAM and keep that monetary train flowing. After all, in every other component, frequency has a significant impact on performance and progress. By that definition, it’s surely logical that memory follows the same route? Not quite. For a long time, Intel’s processors benefited little from memory speed. It was only AMD with its Ryzen processors, which tied its own PCB interconnect to memory speed directly, that led to frequency being worthwhile for CPU performance. That’s not to say memory speed wasn’t warranted, just that capacity and real-world latency were king. If you were rendering massive video files or dabbling in complex database tasks, frequency did have an effect. Today, we’re reviewing…

ACTION ADVENTURE GAME A SLOW BURN TO A FAULT, Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown’s early hours are mired by overly simple and unremarkable platforming, not to mention a disjointed narrative that kind of kills your investment in the story. Based on the first 15 hours alone, we'd be very sour. Thankfully, the game’s second half does a much better job, but by the time the credits roll, you can't help wishing that the entire game had been this way. At its core, The Lost Crown essentially takes a tilt at metroidvania, a portmanteau of the names of the videogame series Metroid and Castlevania, and a sub-genre of action-adventure games focused on guided non-linearity and utility-gated exploration. It’s also the Prince of Persia franchise’s first appearance in a long 14…

NVIDIA’S 40-series card brought us the technical marvel that is the RTX 4090. Sure, it chewed through power, occasionally melted cables, and cost $1,599. It hogged the limelight, and we all wanted one. Further down the 40-series range, things weren’t as rosy. The RTX 4080 was deemed overpriced. Anybody who was after the ultimate gaming card sprang for a 4090 if they could. Others looked around for a better deal, or waited. The RTX 4070 Ti was originally going to be a 12GB 4080, but was ‘unlaunched’, as Nvidia claimed, because the performance didn’t warrant the ‘80’ brand. As a 4070 Ti, it was thought pricey compared to the previous generation’s 3070 Ti. Further down the range, Nvidia faced stiff competition from AMD, and the 40-series struggled to be competitive. Nvidia…

INTEL’S CEO, Pat Gelsinger, is an engineer, and when he got the job back in 2021, he had an engineer’s solution to the company’s floundering development schedule. He released a roadmap that promised five nodes in four years. The plan hasn’t gone entirely smoothly: that Raptor Lake refresh wasn’t part of the deal, Intel 4 barely made it on time, and both the 20A and 18A ‘Angstrom era’ nodes seem in the balance. In a few weeks, we’ll have another roadmap. Intel plans to get a trillion transistors on a ‘package’ by 2030. The company still plans to jump to the cutting-edge in barely four years. This year, we’ll allegedly see Intel 3 in volume, with 20A production supposedly by the end of the year. Part of the strategy has…

NVIDIA’S RTX 40-SERIES Ada Lovelace GPUs have had a rocky reception, mostly on account of their significantly higher generational prices, reduced memory interface widths, and reliance on DLSS 3 frame generation to make performance look better. It’s all reminiscent of the RTX 20-series, which had similar complaints. Just like the 20-series, Nvidia will trot out a mid-cycle refresh in the form of new Super models. The RTX 4070 Super has specs that put it close to the existing RTX 4070 Ti. It will feature 56 Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs) and 7,168 CUDA cores—just seven percent below the 4070 Ti and 22 percent above the RTX 4070. More importantly, it will inherit the $599 MSRP of the RTX 4070, which will get a price cut to $549. The memory will be the same…

INTEL’S RAPTOR LAKE chips have been an interesting generation compared to some of the iterative updates we’ve seen from Team Blue over the years. The 14th gen in particular hasn’t exactly knocked the socks off the team here at Maximum PC. Comparatively, the 14600K only had a clock speed bump compared to last gen, the 14900K got a clock-speed bump and access to APO (application optimization), which was fairly underwhelming at launch, and the 14700K, the only chip to receive a clock speed increase plus significant hardware changes (namely four additional efficient cores), has only helped to blur the lines between the Core i7 and the Core i9 even further, particularly given APO’s lackluster arrival. So what is the strategy from Team Blue? Well, it’s hard to tell. This generation does…

Here’s a thought: what if you have an Nvidia card and you enable DLSS upscaling and frame generation alongside FSR 3 upscaling and frame generation? There have been a few hacks that attempted to do just that, but in general this isn’t allowed in the game engines. Upscaling an already upscaled frame would be like making a photocopy of a photocopy. Each extra level of copying would become worse. But it’s more than just the potential for artifacts. Game engines pass the frame buffer, previous frame, depth buffer, and motion vectors to the upscaling algorithms. Most of those buffers would be at the lower rendered resolution, but the previous frame would be at the final output resolution. If you wanted to do upscaling twice, the engine would need to also spatially upscale the…

If you’ve been happily setting up Docker containers following our guides over the past few years, you’ll be pleased to learn that moving them across to Podman is simple—if you point your Podman container to the same physical folders you used for Docker, the switch should be seamless. Before going further, bookmark https://docs.podman.io/en/latest/index.html—this provides a handy reference to all supported Podman commands. Most work in virtually the same way as those issued using the ‘docker’ command—this is by design, as Podman’s developers are keen to make transitioning from Docker as smooth as possible. That’s the theory, but we’ve already seen problems with networking and automatically restarting containers that are unique to Podman in Windows. This is down to both the daemonless approach and Podman’s support for rootless containers. Another consequence of…

Many services you set up work best when they can be accessed from outside your home network. We’ve covered reverse proxies before—they basically make it possible to redirect traffic from outside your network to the appropriate service. Our favorite proxy is the user friendly Nginx Proxy Manager, which comes in container form. For this to work, you need to configure both Vaultwarden and the Nginx Proxy Manager to be able to communicate with each other. This can be done by running both containers in a ‘pod’. Assuming your Vaultwarden instance is up and running, the next step is to set up Nginx Proxy Manager. First, navigate to Images in Podman Desktop and click Pull. Type the following into the Image Name field: docker.io/jc21/nginx-proxy-manager:latest. Once the image is downloaded, click Play…

We’ve said that the Raspberry Pi 5 is fast enough to use as an everyday desktop machine, but what does that really mean? We used the Geekbench 6 benchmark to compare its performance to other low-cost computers. We started with a mini PC with 16GB of RAM, running Windows 11 Pro on an Intel N100 processor and costing around $215. We then repeated the test on a second mini PC, this time on a much meatier quad-core AMD Ryzen 5 system with 8GB of RAM, costing around $600 and running Ubuntu Linux. Next, we tested the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B revision 1.4, with its 1.8GHz ARM processor and 8GB of memory—previously the most powerful model available, before the arrival of the Pi 5. We fitted an anodized aluminum heatsink…

YOU’LL NEED THIS VIVALDI https://vivaldi.com web browser GIVEN HOW MUCH TIME we spend on the web, whether it’s shopping, research, or just following our favorite sports team as they head towards another crushing defeat, it’s criminal that we don’t pay much attention to our web browser. If you’re looking to maximize your web browsing experience, you need to investigate Vivaldi. With new features being added all the time, its claims of being the world’s most customizable browser are well-founded (helped by ready access to the Chrome web store, allowing you to add all manner of extensions and other plugins). In this tutorial, we’ll investigate how Vivaldi can be set up to deliver on its promise. We’ll focus on its main tab management tools that bring order to chaos and allow…

Sessions serve two purposes in Vivaldi: their primary purpose is provide backups of your open tabs, stacks, and workspaces, but they can also be used to allow you to set up multiple configurations for different purposes, allowing you to switch between them with ease. A recent addition to Vivaldi is the Sessions manager, accessible via the side pane. This makes it far easier to create and edit these sessions, making them painless to manage. From here, you can click + to back up the current session—give it a name, choose whether to include all workspaces or windows, and click Save. The session will appear in the Sessions pane—to tweak it, select it from the list, and click Edit to the right of the +/-buttons. The contents of the saved session…

1. VOLUME CREATION Click to launch the volume creation wizard. This is used for creating VeraCrypt encrypted volume files, as well as external drives. The wizard also supports configuring key files and creation of hidden volumes. 2. SELECT FILE If you’ve created an encrypted volume (.hc format), use ‘Select File’ to point to it in explorer. You can also use ‘Select Device’ to choose entire external drives or partitions encrypted via VeraCrypt. 3. VIRTUAL DRIVES Once the correct passphrase is entered, mounted volumes/drives are accessed as virtual drives. On Windows, each is assigned its own letter and can be accessed via Explorer just as with an external disk. 4. MOUNT/DISMOUNT Once all file operations complete, click ‘Dismount’ to unmount the virtual drive and erase the passphrase from RAM. If no…

WHEN IT COMES to PC technology, this year’s CES in Vegas was dominated by new OLED screens. Depending on how you measure it, we’re on to the second or third generation of OLED display technology in gaming monitors, and the show was rammed with new models in all shapes and sizes. Want higher refresh rates? Have some. More pixels? No problem. Improved fullscreen brightness? Kinda. Arguably, it’s a new generation of 32-inch 4K OLED monitors running at 240Hz that seem to tick the most boxes. Remarkably, these aren’t prototype displays. By the time you read these words, you’ll be able to jump on Dell’s website and order the Alienware 32 AW3225QF for $1,199. It’s real and it’s here. It uses Samsung’s second-gen QD-OLED technology, produced via inkjet printing to enable…

IF THE OG STEAM DECK was a beta, the new Steam Deck OLED is its finished form. It’s not a sequel, not a beefed up ‘pro’ version, nor a major redesign. Heck, it’s hard to tell the difference between the old new models, save for the new orange accents. But there are differences, and they make, well, all the difference. For instance, it has better battery life, more storage capacity, and weighs a tad less. Then there’s that sharper, brighter screen, upgraded from LCD to OLED and running at 90Hz instead of 60Hz. But there are surprises, too. The touchscreen is way more responsive, the thumbsticks have an improved grip, and the bigger fan purrs more softly than before. The main result? You won’t want to go back to the…

THE NEW YORK TIMES has become the first big media organization to sue OpenAI over copyright infringement. The lawsuit claims OpenAI has been trained on content it produced, and now competes with them using the results. It claims OpenAI should be liable for billions in statutory and actual damages, giving examples of ChatGPT quoting and paraphrasing copyright material. The ire of the New York Times is understandable, but can this go anywhere? Copyright laws are lagging behind the rapid development of AI, and there’s no clear precedence. The whole AI industry has been lax over where it gets training material. Haphazardly scraping it off the internet means masses of copyright material has been fed into the machine, so we shouldn’t be surprised that the output looks suspiciously familiar. Purging the models…

MSI BUILDS LAPTOPS and now PC gaming handhelds too. The new Claw promises smooth 1080p gaming on AAA titles, thanks to the first use of an Intel Core Ultra processor in such a device. At its heart is an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H, a Meteor Lake hybrid design. It boasts six performance cores and eight efficiency cores. The P cores max out at 4.8GHz, the E cores at 3.8GHz. It has integrated Arc graphics, with eight Xe cores, and XeSS upscaling. Intel’s recommended customer price is $503. MSI isn’t the first to try Intel in a gaming handheld, but it is the first big player to go Team Blue for this round. You view the action on a 7-inch touchscreen (1,920 by 1,080) running at 120Hz. There’s a PCIe 4.0…

NVIDIA HAS BEEN pushing so-called ‘neural rendering’ techniques since the launch of DLSS in 2018. While DLSS had a bit of a slow burn at launch, there are now more than 500 games and applications that use Nvidia RTX features. The core idea of neural rendering is to leverage AI models to improve the quality and performance of games and other graphics applications. As pixels become increasingly complex to render, figuring out ways to reduce the number of fully rendered pixels and then interpolating to fill in the gaps can provide a better overall experience. However, Nvidia’s solutions are designed to only work on Nvidia GPUs. Enter teams red and blue with alternatives that can work on a wider set of hardware. Upscaling and frame generation are here to stay,…

XeSS doesn’t offer frame generation, but Intel says it’s working on a different algorithm: frame extrapolation. Rather than interpolating between two generated frames, frame extrapolation would attempt to generate—via AI—the next frame after the current frame. It’s ambitious, but making it work will require some clever algorithms. Still, we can see the benefits. There would be no added latency, and the creation of the generated frame could run concurrently with the rendering of the next frame. How would extrapolation work? In its Siggraph paper, ‘ExtraSS: A Framework for Joint Spatial Super Sampling and Frame Extrapolation’, researchers discuss methods of ‘warping’ to generate a future frame from the current frame. Early results seem promising, though it could be a year or more before a public version is available. Besides making extrapolation viable, Intel faces…

Recreating containers using Podman Desktop is a faff. The good news is that if you learn how to use Podman from the command line, you can recreate containers in seconds rather than minutes. Even better, Podman can be invoked from any shell, including both Powershell and the Command Prompt. Simply right-click the Start button, choose Terminal (Windows 11) or Command Prompt (Windows 10), and you’re good to go. Containers are created (and recreated) using the ‘podman run’ command. Rather than type these in manually each time, we recommend setting up text files, inside which you store commands like so: If this is difficult to follow, you can break this into multiple lines using the ` symbol (see the screenshot). You can then simply amend the command as required before copying…

Gigabyte Aorus Gen5 12000 SSD TO BE AT the cutting edge requires sacrifice. It doesn’t matter if that’s in sport, life, or PC hardware. To operate at the very edge of what’s possible is a give and take matter. It’s not smart, clever, or the sensible thing to do, but it’s not meant to be. To be a pioneer, early adopter, or explorer requires you to take risks. Nowhere is there a better example of this than with Gigabyte’s Aorus Gen5 12000 SSD, the company’s second generation of its prestigious PCIe 5.0 M.2 SSDs. This glorious 2TB solid state drive packs in some serious firepower, with 3D TLC NAND Flash ripping and roaring along at incredible speeds, peaking at 12,400 MB/s on the read, and 11,800 MB/s on the write.…

1. ADD SPEED DIAL FOLDERS Too many favorites to list on a single Speed Dial page? Click the + button to add a subfolder inside the Speed Dial. Move existing entries to the new folder by right-clicking one and choosing Edit. 2. OPTIONAL ELEMENTS Both Search bar and privacy stats can be removed from the Start page if you don’t want them—open Quick Settings to do so. 3. SPEED DIAL CUSTOMIZATION Update or replace a Speed Dial’s icon or thumbnail by rolling your mouse over it and clicking one of two buttons in the top left. Rearrange Speed Dials using drag and drop. 4. QUICK SETTINGS PANE Click the cog button in the top right corner to show this panel. Change the Start page’s background image, plus customize (or hide)…

YOU’LL NEED THIS VERACRYPT https://veracrypt.fr, available for Windows, macOS and Linux IT’S HARD TO GET ENCRYPTION RIGHT. Criminals using the supposedly end-to-end encrypted app Encrochat discovered this the hard way in 2020 when law enforcement was given permission to infect the service’s servers with malware, allowing messages to be read. VeraCrypt seeks to solve the problem of how to encrypt data at risk. It was originally developed in 2013 as a fork of the discontinued ‘Truecrypt’ project. Since then, it has made considerable improvements on Truecrypt’s original labyrinthine and occasionally buggy code. For Windows users, the software can encrypt your OS and external disks. It can also be used to create encrypted ‘volumes’—ordinary files that can be placed on your device. When mounted as a virtual disk, VeraCrypt functions as…

YOU’LL NEED THIS BITWARDEN www.bitwarden.com PASSKEYS, which are set to largely replace passwords over the coming years, are strings of code synchronized between your devices that are used to prove who you are. As we’ve covered previously, they’re more secure than passwords and easier to use, because you don’t need to remember them. Traditionally, they were stored on specific devices like a phone or security key, which you’d need to keep with you to log into a website. However, password managers—like Bitwarden—are now adding support for passkeys. Here, we explain how to use Bitwarden to log into websites without using passwords. 1 SET UP AN ACCOUNT If you don’t already have a Bitwarden account, set one up by visiting www.bitwarden.com and clicking ‘Get started’ [Image A]. You’ll need to provide…

DO NOT ADJUST YOUR SETS; your eyes do not deceive you. This is a high-refresh gaming monitor from RCA, a company that pioneered early radio and TV tech, and is now essentially a piece of branding IP licensed by several companies. In this case, it’s DTI Services, a company that primarily makes TVs, but is now branching out into PC gaming monitors. Enter the new RCA Evolution Premium M27PG135F, a 27-inch 1440p 240Hz model, and our first taste of the brand’s new foray into gaming hardware. Out of the box, it’s pretty familiar. RCA isn’t trying to reinvent the gaming monitor with the M27PG135F. The build quality is a little hollow and plastic, but that’s typical for this class of display. You get a reasonably sturdy stand with a metal…

THE TOUCHSCREEN has a precarious place in the hierarchy of PC input devices. It’s obviously brilliant on a cellphone or tablet—you can see this in the way it’s impossible to buy one that uses anything else—but in the world of the Windows PC, it’s less clear. Sure, being able to tap a file to open it sounds like a much easier way to do things, but in practise it rarely works that way, having to reach over the keyboard, only to have your finger miss its target and leave a smear on the screen. Apple hasn’t bothered making touchscreen MacBooks despite having a certain amount of expertise in the area, and this perhaps tells us something. The Asus Zenscreen Ink offers a sort of halfway house, being a touch-sensitive external…

HONESTLY, that strapline is perhaps the best summation this journalist has ever written for a product. Western Digital’s Black SN770M is designed with one thing in mind: to massively expand your handheld device’s storage. Yep, we’re talking Steam Decks, Asus ROG Allies, and the numerous new devices launching at CES and Computex this year. The handheld PC has arrived, this time with more graphics and minuscule amounts of internal storage. We bet SSD manufacturers are counting their lucky stars regarding the latter. Here we have Western Digital’s WD Black SN770M PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSD, and it is seriously tiny. It’s the M.2 2230 form factor, and comes in at 29.97 x 22.1 x 2.29mm. It’s also available in capacities ranging from 500GB all the way up to 2TB, and…

> Water Bored > Replace Tablet Battery > Building Ideas > Super Bad? Trickle Down Effect I may be wrong, but I don't recall seeing a feature on water cooling recently—real water cooling with a custom loop. It’s something that I feel is just outside of my reach, and even though I could YouTube and Google it, I think having a sever alpage feature that compares the options and pathways to completing it might be nice. Thanks for producing the magazine. I’m an old enthusiast that has enjoyed the title since the days of Gordon. If any of you speak to him, wish him well from me. I've been very sad to see him recently, but I'm glad that he is continuing his fight. –S. Rakestraw EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, GUY COCKER, RESPONDS: Mr…