Full text of "Maximum PC Almost Complete"

See other formats

We build the world's most advanced PCs. 


Баж: 


Experience а new level of performance with ап award-winning Digital Storm PC. 


Built with the latest technology, highest quality components and backed by lifetime 
Ed ors support. Visit our website and build your dream PC today. 


$ DIGITALSTORM | LEARN MORE: WWW.DIGITALSTORM.COM 


The Electronic Frontier Foundation is the leading nonprofit 
organization defending civil liberties in the digital world. 
Founded in 1990, EFF champions user privacy, free expres- 
sion, and innovation through impact litigation, policy 
analysis, grassroots activism, and technology development. 
We work to ensure that rights and freedoms are enhanced 
and protected as our use of technology grows. 


E F F DR Es 


Protecting Rights and Promoting Freedom on the Electronic Frontier 


table of contents 


SCAN TO GET THE 
TOM'S HARDWARE 


inside Шш, 
QUICKSTART JULY 2024 E 


THE NEWS of 
Microsoft's new Al PCs; AMD's 
gaming woes; Apple's M4 chip 
makes iPad Pro debut. 


THE LIST 


The best gaming monitors. 


$250 buys youa 
lot more today 


miem TINY | 

TOWER 
ULTIMATE 
POWER 


38 SUBSCRIBE TODAY 
Subscribe to Maximum PC 
and instantly get access to over 
100 back issues. 


48 CENTERFOLD 


The lowdown on the 
Netgear Orbi 970. 


Al your photos in Luminar 
Neo; Master LibreOffice 24; 
Use your tablet as a 

second screen. 


ARBOK PUBLISHING 


32 40 50 
REAL WORLD BEST FREE [HOW TO BACK UP 
LETTERS BENCHMARKING SOFTWARE [EVERYTHING 
Nate Drake on how Robert Irvine reveals the [Nick Peers talks us 
[% DOCTOR | 3DMark, UNIGINE and best ways to maintain you hrough how to best 
more can measure your online privacy without protect your data should 
94 COMMENTS PC's potential. paying a cent. [һе worst happen. 


IN THE LAB 


80 90 
HP SPECTRE — |HOMEWORLD 3 
FOLDABLE 


76 88 
2TB LEXAR NM790 CHERRY 
PCIE 4.0 M.2 SSD| XTRFY K5V2 


& | mmng | JUL 2024 


i3 


ITU 


GET GIG-READY 
YOUR PLAYING 


* The world's most comprehensive technology website 


* An unrivalled mix of news, opinions, reviews and fe 
* All-new design, new homepage, new features and s 


* Backed by over 300 years of editorial ex 


techradar … 


the technology experts 


www.techradar. 


MANIMUMPE 


eni 


aird, Chris Lloyd, Nick Ра 
Rawlinson, Jacob Ridley, Zak Storey, Jarred Walton 


SUBSCRIBES cuen 


Next issue On Sale July 16, 2024 


Балад DIGITAL FEATURES 
I ё a 


AUDIOFILE PHOTOGALLERY — VIDEOFILE 


(© 2024 Future US, Inc. Al rights reserved. No part of his 
magazine may be used or reproduced without the written 
permission af Future US, Inc [owner]. Al 

as far as Future [owner] is av 

The time of press. Rea 


By submitting materials к 
royalty-fre, perpetual, n 

mission in any form, 
‘and ether information 


FUTURE 


Connectors. 
Creators. 


Experience 
‘Makers 


(cor Suck change Chie Franc! and egy Ofc Benny Laan rand. 


Tess ops 442244 


editorial 


Guy 
Cocker 


FALLING DOWN 
THE RABBIT HOLE 


JUST WHEN it felt like we were seeing 
the end of new graphics cards this 
year, AMD surprised us by importing 
its RX 7900 ‘Golden Rabbit Edition’ from 
China for a worldwide audience. True, 
AMD's gaming business is struggling 
in the face of strong competition from 
Intel and particularly Nvidia (see news 
on [page 9), but that hasn't stopped 
Team Red from releasing some stellar 
products, helping keep the market 
more competitive in the process. 

The RX 7900 GRE, then, is the 
star of this month's cover build, as 
masterminded by our resident master 
builder, Zak Storey. We reviewed the 
card in our last issue, and gave it a 
score of 8, leading me to ask Zak to 
prioritize it for a build. The card sits 
in between AMD's RX 7800 XT and RX 
7900 XT at what is now sadly the mid- 
range price point of $550. That's the 
same as an RTX 4070, and $50 lower 
than the newer RTX 4070 Super. As 
you'll read, those are comparisons 
that work out quite favorably for AMD's 
bunny-themed card, even against the 
more expensive Nvidia model. AMD is 
still behind when it comes to ray tracing 
and Al-based upscaling, but the raw 
performance is there. It makes things 
a lot more interesting if you have $550- 
&00 to spend on a graphics card. 

As write this, Computex in Taiwan is 
just days away. Could Nvidia announce 
new consumer graphics cards? If they 
do, it'll undoubtedly be at the higher 
end, possibly either a 5080 or 5090— 
see[page 10 for the latest speculation. 
As for Intel, they'll no doubt be falling 
over themselves to talk more about Al, 
but will they tell us more about the next 
generation of desktop CPUs? You'll be 
able to read all about it in these pages, 
whatever happens. 


The other theme running through 
this issue is OLEDs. | saw lots of them 
out at the Consumer Electronics 
Show in January, but they're now 
here, storming the gates. We have 
the Alienware 4K model leading this 
month's reviews section, plus a 1440p 
screen from Acer. Next month, I'm 
hoping for another OLED from Philips. 
Ive been effusive about OLED for 
gaming for a while now, along with our 
resident display specialist, Jeremy 
Laird, but will your next monitor be an 
OLED? Let me know by emailing me on 


editor(imaximumpc.com; 


In reviews, it's a real tale of beauty 
and the beast for our reviewer, Zak. 
He's found the best-value PCle 4.0 SSD 
ever—good news for someone like me, 
who's still not convinced by the benefits 
of PCle 5.0 at current prices. He's also 
taken a look at a foldable laptop that 
isn't quite ready for primetime. I've 
been a big fan of foldable phones, and 
had been looking forward to similar 
portable PCs, but it seems like we're 
not quite there yet. Turn to 
onwards to find out more. 

A more efficient idea is probably 
to use a tablet as a second screen for 
your laptop, something you can do by 
reading our how-to on[page 70] We also 
show you how to back up everything, 
stay private online, and choose the best 
web browser, all for free. 

Enjoy the issue! 


Guy Cocker 


Guy is Maximum PC's editor-in-chief. 
He built his first gaming PC in 1997 to 
play Tomb Raider on 3dfx, and has been 
obsessed with all things PC ever since. 


* submit your questions to: 


JUL 2024 к 


quickstart L™ 


the beginning of the magaz: 


where the articles are small 


Welcome to the AI PC 


IF Al IS BASICALLY MATH, then 
computers are obviously going 
to be good at it. The basic idea 
is nothing new, of course, 
what with a paper published 
in 1943 that outlined the first 
model of a neural network. 
Since then, we've been waiting 
on hardware that can really 
deliver on that notion. Well, 
Al is suddenly everywhere, all 
at once, and every technology 
company is falling over 
themselves to incorporate it 
into every process imaginable. 
Inevitably, that includes the 
PC. Microsoft's partnership 
with ОрепА! is at the forefront 
of the Al industry, and with 
that comes not only a whole 
slew of new Al features for 
Windows, but a whole class 
of machines—there is now an 
official Microsoft AI PC. 
Before we get too excited, 
there is nothing terribly 
revolutionary here. The Al 
PC is a set of hardware and 
software — specifications 
some utterly trivial, some a 
little trickier to achieve. All you 
need is an approved processor 
capable of 40 TOPS of Al 
processing (that's the tricky 
bit, more on which later], 
16GB of DDR5 and 256GB of 
SSD storage. Oh, and you'll 
also need a Copilot key on the 


keyboard. Microsoft heralds 
the result as the "fastest, 
most intelligent Windows 
PCs ever built", a grandiose 
piece of flummery. Arguably, 
what is really being sold is the 
integration of Al into Windows. 
So far, the Al PC consists of 
Surface, Surface Pro laptops, 
and an army of new laptops 
from the usual suspects: Acer, 
ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and 
Samsung. Microsoft expects 
50 million Al PCs to be sold 
over the next 12 months 

If that's pretty predictable, 
there's a catch. All of those 
systems are powered by the 
Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite 
processor, an Arm-based chip. 
There isn't an Intel or AMD 
x86 CPU in sight. This is also 
arguably the first truly serious 
attempt to get Windows 
running on Arm hardware. 
That TOPS metric, Trillions 
of Operations Per Second, 
is used to measure the 
performance of Al, specifically 
the hardware NPU. It's the 
NPU specifically that must 
deliver 45 TOPS to qualify 
for Microsoft's Al definition. 
Thats why AMD's Phoenix 
APU and Intel's Meteor Lake 
laptop chips don't qualify, with 
their NPUs delivering 16 and 
11 TOPS respectively. Nvidia's 


For now, only laptops with 
the new Snapdragon X Elite 
SoC meet the standard 


B | mw | JUL 2024 


Microsoft unveils a new type of computer 


Microsoft reckons the Copilot 
key is the Al-powered answer 
toany question you may have. 


latest RTX 40 GPUs, including 
its mobile chips for laptops, all 
far exceed 45 TOPS, but simply 
do not qualify. 

For now, only laptops with 
the new Snapdragon X Elite 
SoC meet the standard, and it 
does rather seem like that was 
intentional. Later this year, 
AMD's new Strix Point APU 
and Intel's Lunar Lake chip 
will meet the standard. There 
have also been rumors about 
Nvidia and AMD getting into 
Arm-based PC processors. 
In a recent interview, Michael 
Dell was asked about an Al PC 
with Nvidia hardware. He said, 
“Come back next year” Jensen 
Huang, Nvidia's CEO, added, 
"Exactly". Nvidia certainly 
has most of the silicon it 
would need, the engineers, 
and funding, so Qualcomm's 
dominance is unlikely to 
survive for long. 

However, the question 
remains whether the Al 
PC is all marketing fluff or 
something more substantial. In 
a lengthy blog post, Microsoft 
tries to explain that the 
initiative is about pushing the 
integration of Al, rather than 
trying to invent a new class of 
PC. Microsoft wants Copilot 


front and center whenever 
you use your Windows rig, and 
with much of the Al running 
locally. Every task will have А! 
help at hand: searching, image 
editing, writing, and more. With 
that omnipresent approach, 
however, come concerns. 
For instance, "Recall is a 
new Windows Al feature that 
tracks nearly everything you 
do, the sites you've visited, the 
images you've viewed, and so 
forth, taking snapshots as it 
goes. This creates a digital 
timeline you can explore and 
search. Can't find that picture 
of the cute cat you saw a few 
weeks ago? Recall takes you 
to it. Useful? Yes. Private? Not 
really. It has been dubbed a 
privacy nightmare by some, 
and prompted calls for 
regulation. The snapshots are 
stored locally and encrypted, 
but anybody with access 
to your system can view 
your activities for months, 
including financial, personal, 
embarrassing, and just plain 
private stuff. At least you can 
turn it off. 

AlLof this makes Microsoft's 
AI PC initiative a curious thing. 
Therearesomeuseful features 
being touted underneath the 
marketing and hyperbole, but 
equally, pretty soon every new 
PC will have the qualifying 
hardware, and it's yet to be 
seen if there will be any truly 
compelling applications that 
run locally on those NPUs, as 
opposed to the cloud. In the 
meantime, the new Copilot+ 
PC starts at $999, and is 
available to order. -CL 


AMD'S GAMING 
DIVISION 


STRUGGLING AM D a | 


THE FIGURES FOR AMD'S earnings for the first quarter of the year have arrived, and the 
gaming division doesn't make for happy reading. Numbers are down by 48 percent 
year on year. Sales, in both discrete graphic cards and custom GPUs, have tanked. 
Remember when we had trouble buying cards at all? No more. The market is flooded, 
and most of them are wearing green badges. Nvidia currently has about 80 percent of 
the discrete card market, while Intel has pinched a percentage or two in the bottom 
tiers. This doesn't leave much room for AMD. Nvidia is flush with cash and resources, 
so going head to head in premium GPUs is a reach. The rumor is that AMD will abandon 
the high-end graphic card market for its next-gen RDNA 4 GPUs, leaving Nvidia to play 
alone. It'll follow the money, meaning data centers, clouds, and Al. There is one weapon 
left in its arsenal, though: drop prices until you can sell everything you make. -CL 


ARROW LAKE 
GETS 21 SKUS 


Tech Triumphs and Tragedies 


A monthly snapshot of what's good and bad in tech 


NEW STANDARD FOR 
TRACKERS LAUNCHED 
Dubbed DULT, it warns ifa 
tracker is following you, so it's 
not used to stalk people. 


TAPE ISN'T DEAD 
Shipments are up three percent 
to 152.9 compressed exabytes— 
that's a billion gigabytes each. 


MIND READING 
Researchers have turned brain 
activity into words, thanks to 
electrodes. Well, certain words 
ata77 percent accuracy. 


SILENT RUNNING 

The silence of an electric car 
isn't good for pedestrians: a 
study shows that twice as many 
people are hit by EVs over ICE. 


AI'S POWER PROBLEM 
By 2026, it's estimated that 
LLMs will burn through as 
much power as Japan. 


GOOGLE'S SEARCH SNAFUS 
Using Al to search has a few 
problems. Users have been told 
that staring into the sun is safe, 
and to eata rock every day. 


of Intel's Arrow Lake CPU is 
a big deal. We have a new socket, process, 
tile-based construction, features, core 
architecture in Lion Cove, Al hardware, 
and more. Intel plans to release 21 SKUs 
(Stock Keeping Units). It's the biggest 
launch since Alder Lake in 2021 

There's new branding, too—no more 
77, as Arrow Lake is to be the Core Ultra 
200-series. The Ultra 100-series was the 
mobile Meteor Lake, a tile-based design 
that never made it to a desktop. Top dog 
is expected to be the Core Ultra 9 285K 
with 24 cores. That's eight performance 
and 16 efficiency cores, or '8P+16E' in Intel 
speak. It has a base clock of 3.6Ghz, and 
a maximum boost of 5.5GHz. Then there's 
Ultra 7 265K, with 8P+12E cores running 
at a base clock of 2.8GHz, and the Ultra 5 
245K with 6P+8E cores, on the same clock. 

These are ‘leaks’, not official specs. 
But with a launch expected later this year, 
the odds are high that these are accurate. 
Along with those are the usual mainstream 
65W workhorses and 35W low-power 
models. Partnered with Arrow Lake will 
be a new mobile CPU: Lunar Lake. This 
sports a 4P+4E configuration, and will face 
competition from Snapdragon, Apple's 
new M3 chip, and AMD's finest. 

Notably, Arrow Lake will debut the 
20A process, while 18A is due for volume 
production next year. The catch is that only 
the CPU die within Arrow Lake will be made 
on Intel 20A silicon. Even then, it's rumored 
that most Arrow Lake SKUs will use a 
TSMC process for the CPU die. That would 
mean a pure TSMC chip, as the other tiles 
are already made by TSMC. As for Lunar 
Lake, that's pure TSMC. Even with the 
arrival of Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake, Intel 
will be nowhere near the technological 
driving seat in chip manufacturing. But 
depending on how good those Lion Cove 
cores are, it could still look decent when it 
comes to performance. -CL 


JUL 2024 к 


quickstart ==" 


мл 


APPLE'S 
NEW M4 CHIP 
ARRIVES 


New SoC makes its 
debut in the iPad Pro 


MERE months after the M3 first appeared, 
there's already a new Apple M chip—this 
time in an iPad, the first time new silicon 
hasn'tdebutedina Mac. The SoC uses a 2nd 
gen 3nm process courtesy of TSMC, and is 
the first time Apple has given its M silicon 
CPU cores a major overhaul. Single-core 
performance is improved thanks to both 
improved IPC and higher clock speeds. 
There's improved branch prediction, and 
wider decode and execution engines. You 
also get two extra efficiency cores—six in 
all, but the same four performance cores. 
The GPU sticks to ten cores, albeit tweaked 
with Dynamic Caching, and hardware- 
accelerated ray tracing. In the new iPad 
Pro, the new silicon is partnered with what 
Apple claims is the world's most advanced 
display: the Ultra Retina XDR, a dual-layer 
OLED panel. There's also a ‘pro’ camera 
system, including a LiDAR scanner, 12MP 
still, and 4K video. 

Apple claims the M4 can match the 
M2's performance while using half the 
power, as well as the ‘leading’ laptop 
chip, while consuming a quarter of the 
power. That chip is the Intel Core Ultra 7 
155H. Obviously, there is a strong Al angle. 
The M4's neural engine is capable of 38 
TOPS. Apple has the red and blue teams 
comfortably beaten, although Qualcomm's 
45 TOPS Snapdragon X Elite is no slouch. 
More immediately important is the single- 
core Geekbench score—the M4 reached 
over 3,700, leaving Intel's Core i9-14900KS 
behind at 3,300. That means the tablet is 
now mightier than the desktop, sort of. If 
we switch to multi-core, then the 32-core 
Intel trashes it. Still, for a tablet, that's 
impressive. The M4 iPad Pro starts at 
$999, and if you play with the configuration, 
ticking all options, it tops $3,000. -CL 


10 | imme | sui 2024 


Fat New HDD Drives 


EVERY TIME WE THINK THE magnetic hard drive 
is dead, new life is breathed into them. We 
haven't seen a new 2.5-inch drive for years, 
the format seemingly peaking at 5TB. However, 
Western Digital has squeezed an extra terabyte 
in. Its new 6TB versions are available across 
WD's external My Passport range—four in all, as 
well as ScanDisk's ArmorATD. Prices range from 
$185 to $230, depending on the enclosure and 


compatibility. This is, according to WD, enough to store 150 AAA gaming 
titles. The drive is taller than the 5TB version, hence it's external rather 
than internal, not that there are many laptops with spinning drives anymore. 

More useful, perhaps, are big 3.5-inch drives, as the last three HDD 
manufacturers fight for what's left of the market by building the biggest 
drives. Toshiba is planning drives of over 30TB, and claims to have 
demonstrated working 32TB and 31TB drives using НАМЕ and МАМЕ (Heat 
Assisted Magnetic Recording and Microwave Assisted Magnetic Recording). 
The 32TB model has ten platters, while the 31TB uses 11—the first to do 
so. It has plans for 35TB by 2025, and 40TB in 2026. Conventional magnetic 
recording tops out at a capacity of around 22TB, and the three players are 
in a race to get the new recording methods into drives for the data center 
business. Seagate managed this with its 32ТВ НАМЕ drives last year, and 
has plans for 30TB. Western Digital has a 28TB drive, and plans for 36TB 
HAMR drives. If you want a consumer version, you'll have to wait, as the data 
centers will take everything built for the foreseeable future. -CL 


New 
ChatGPT 


OpenAI has 
GPT- 

is for omni, hinting that 
this fast new multi-modal version 
of the Al bot does a lot more than 
chat. It uses the same LLM (Large 
Language Model), but is a lot 
more potent. The original has a 
latency of about three seconds— 
reasonable for text chat, but 
too sluggish for speech. GPT-4o 
reduces that to a level suitable for 
verbal and visual prompts in real 
time, as the video demonstration 
proved. The system is shown a 
roomandthenasked to guess what 
might be going on. It guesses that 
the room is rigged for video work. 
It was then told an announcement 
was going to be made. It correctly 
postulates that this might involve 
OpenAI (the demonstrator is 
wearing a branded top]. This was 
all pre-prepared, but still spooky. 
OpenAl claims that it is better at 
audio and visual translation than 
allthe current rivals. The speed of 
Al development remains dizzying. 
CL 


RTX 5080 to 
come first? 


Nvidia usually launches a new 
GPU family with a bang. Its next 
GPU architecture is Blackwell, 
and is expected to appear this 
year. Nvidia has shown a 2025 
roadmap, but nobody appears 
to believe that. The 4000-series 
Lovelace cards were stunning, 
but Nvidia's clumsy handling of 
their price and configurations 
knocked their appeal. Blackwell 
is hotly anticipated, and we'd love 
to see it before next year. But what 
Blackwell cards could land first? 
Earlyrumors suggested allwemay 
get is an RTX 5090. More recently, 
that's changed to the RTX 5080, 
with the biggest gun saved for next 
year. Since AMD isn't providing hot 
competition at the top level, Nvidia 
isn’t under any pressure to drop 
the 5090 first, but we still wouldn't 
be surprised to see both 5090 and 
5080 announced together. Indeed, 
there is a small chance that by the. 
time you are reading these words, 
Nvidia will have pulled the covers 
off something at the Computex 
trade show in Taiwan. -CL 


^» 
FI 


Jarred Walton 


TECH TALK 
For Sale: Cheyenne 


Supercomputer 


IF THERE'S ONE THING WE KNOW about PC hardware, it's that it becomes 
outdated. The Cheyenne supercomputer is testament to the rapid 
improvements over the past decade in the world of extreme scalability, 
coupled with a warning about things not always going as planned. 
Apparently, ongoing reliability, repair, and maintenance issues reached 
the point where the best option was to pull the plug and start afresh. 


Deployed in 2016, Cheyenne was the year's 21st 
fastest supercomputer, with a score of 4.79 
petaflops. Today, it's number 160 on the Top500 
list—or was prior to being decommissioned. While 
it's not clear how much it cost, it replaced one 
that was around $25-$30 million, and its Derecho 
replacement is an HP-built setup that cost $35-$40 
million. It seems reasonable, then, that Cheyenne 
fell in the $20-$40 million range. Eight years later, 
it sold at auction for $480,085. 

It's interesting to read the auction notes, which 
state that “the system is currently experiencing 
maintenance limitations due to faulty quick 
disconnects causing water spray.” This on its own 
wouldn't be terrible, except that approximately 
one percent of the 4,032 nodes were experiencing 
ECC memory errors. Washing its hands in the 
150 gallons or so of propylene glycol coolant, the 
NCAR-WY Supercomputer Center decided to let 
someone else worry about parting things out. 

The 32 petabytes of storage that the system 
used aren't included, but there are 14 E-cells, each 
containing two racks of quad-node server blades. 
There are 8,064 Intel Xeon E5-2697 v4 processors, 
4,890 64GB DIMMs, plus power supplies, cooling, 
motherboards, networking switches, and more. 
There are also two management racks that added 
52 1U servers and 8TB of DRAM. Altogether, the 


The gulf between Cheyenne and 
modern supercomputers shows 
how far things have come 


Cheyenne began service in 2016. Ultimately, it 
was sold ata fraction of the original cost. 


supercomputer 
26,000 pounds. 

The gulf between Cheyenne 
and modern supercomputer 
hardware shows how far things 
have come since 2016. Cheyenne 
used around 1.727 MW of power 
fully assembled, or around 2.77 
petaflops per megawatt. Its 
Derecho replacement delivers 
roughly twice the computational 
power (10.32 petaflops), though 
it also includes 382 Nvidia A100 
GPUs. There's a discrepancy 
between what NCAR says about 
Derecho and the Top500 result, 
however, as it's supposed to be a 
19.87 petaflops supercomputer. 
With a 40 percent higher power 
draw than Cheyenne, that would 
yield 8.22 petaflops per megawatt. 

Contrast that with the fastest 
supercomputer today. The AMD- 
based Frontier supercomputer 
holds pole position, with 1,206 


weighs around 


petaflops of compute 
and a power use of 
22.79 MW-—nearly 
53 petaflops рег 
megawatt. AMD's El 
Capitan supercomputer 
should be finished in the 
near future, providing 
roughly double the 
performance of 
Frontier. It's notallabout 
raw compute, however, as the 
Green500 list ranks the most 
efficient supercomputers. The 
current leader, JEDI, isn't even as 
fast as Cheyenne in raw compute, 
boasting ‘only’ 4.50 petaflops. 
However, its power draw is only 
67kW—about four percent of the 
power consumption of Cheyenne 
for the same level of performance. 
These figures use LINPACK 
results that focus on FP64 
compute, however, and a lot of 
supercomputers are turning 
toward Al calculations using 
FP16 or FP8 operations. New 
supercomputers sporting Nvidia 
Grace Hopper superchips will 
bring 200 exaflops of Al compute 
within the next year. No wonder 
Cheyenne got kicked to the curb. 


Jarred Walton has been a 


PC and gaming enthusiast 
for over 30 years 


JUL 2024 к 1 


quickstart 


12 


WHILE MOST PC COMPONENTS have been getting 
pricier, many gaming monitors are cheaper. $250 
buys you a lot more than it did five years ago, though 
a new class of OLED panels has made things pricier 
at the top end. In between, there's more choice than 
ever before, including resolutions, aspect ratios, 
panel types, backlight tech and plenty more 


PIXIO PXC277 ADVANCED 

=) Don't know Pixio? Seen the pricing? Don't panic. 
Corners haven't been cut where it counts. It 

feels a bit cheap, but looks slick enough, and when 

it comes to image quality and gaming experience, 

there are no horrors. You get a 1440p VA panel, 1ms 

response, and 165Hz refresh. It's not true HDR, topping 


out at 320 nits and lacking local dimming, but that's 
fine. $240] www. pixiogaming.com 


ASROCK PHANTOM 
PG34WQ15R2B 

A contrasty VA panel, plenty of backlight 
punch if you run it in HDR mode, reasonable 
pixel response, and high enough refresh for 
most gamer's purposes. $350 barely touches 
the sides when it comes to graphics cards 
these days, but here it buys you 34 inches of 
real estate, 165Hz refresh rate, 1ms response, 
and even HDR support. Nice for ASRock's first 
gaming panel. $350, jyww.asrock.com] 


шш | JUL 2024 


THE BEST GAMING MONITORS 


GIGABYTE M28U 
a Looking for a slightly 
—/ larger alternative to that 
LG panel for not much extra cash? 
Try this alternative. Gigabyte's 
more affordable 4K monitors go 
down a treat—they're fast and bright, 
and you even get a USB-C hub 
thrown in. Between the resolution, 
144Hz refresh rate, and IPS panel, it's a great 
all-rounder for 4K. Even beyond PC gaming, an 
HDMI 2.1 port offers 120Hz gaming for consoles, so 
it's quite the package. $429, Www.gigabyte.com] 
2 The LG UltraGear 27GR93U is LG's IPS tech 
at its best. It's absolutely gorgeous, with 
colors that are accurately calibrated, crispy 4K 
visuals, and a zippy refresh 
rate. You will need a mighty 
graphics card to run this 
UltraGear gaming monitor at 
its fullest, of course. It runs 
up to 144Hz, which is a tough 
task even with modern GPUs. 
Upscaling will help with that, 
meanwhile the 4K precision 
makes this a great panel for 
getting serious stuff done, too. 
Overall, this is a very strong all-rounder, even 
if it comes at quite a price. $425, Www.lg.com] 
| Another day, another 32-inch, 4K, 240Hz QD- 
OLED stunner. Except this one's cheaper and 
every bit as good as the competition. An easy choice? 
For once, yes. This offers the same Samsung- 
sourced QD-OLED panel as more expensive 
monitors, including 
the Asus ROG Swift 
OLED PG32UCDM, 
the Alienware 
32 AW32250F 
and the Gigabyte 
Aorus СО4900, 
but it's hundreds 
of dollars cheaper. 
As no-brainer 
recommendations 
= go, this is as 
straightforward as it 


gets. $899 [www.msi.com] 


LG ULTRAGEAR 27GR93U 


СЕЕ сеагд 


MSI MPG321URX 


РГУ 


; TRADE CHAT 


How to emulate 
x86 s success 


Jeremy Laird 


LAST MONTE, | touched on the fact that the first official Microsoft Al PCs 
would be running a Qualcomm Arm-based CPU. This begs one obvious 
question: what about old software? Arm chips tend to be more efficient, 
but what good is that if you can't use your favorite apps? 


The CPU cores in Apple's new M4 chip are scary, as 
in scary fast. Seriously. The M4 cranks out about 
3,800 points in Geekbench 6 single core. That 
compares with roughly 3,300 points for an Intel 
Core i9-14900K. Remember, that's an M4 running 
in a tablet. It's only in the iPad Pro for now, not in 
any Mac computer. 

The point is that you can forget about assuming 
that Arm chips are efficient but feeble. They 
can be competitive and then some for raw 
performance. The problem is that you can have all 
the performance in the world, but it doesn't count 
for much if there's no software to run. Historically, 
Microsoft hasn't done a great job of supporting old 
x86 software on Windows for Arm chips. 

Supposedly, it's going to be different this time. 
For starters, some key apps, including Chrome and 
Adobe Photoshop, will be available in native Arm 
format. For a lot of users, native Chrome alone 
is almost enough. For everyone else, emulation, 
performance, and efficiency will be key. 

Critically, there are two aspects to any attempt 
to emulate another CPU architecture, in this 
case Arm emulating x86, the software, and the 
hardware. The upcoming 24H2 update for Windows 
11 has a new translation layer known as ‘Prism, 
which will convert code on the fly from x86 to Arm. 

Inevitably, there's another comparison to be 
made with Apple and its Rosetta 2 emulation 
layer, which was introduced when the Mac itself 
moved away from Intel x86 CPUs to Apple's in- 


Some key apps, including 
Chrome and Photoshop, will be 
available in native Arm format 


house Arm silicon. But the same 
applies to the hardware side of 
the equation. Apple's Arm-based 
chips have hardware features and 
optimizations designed to improve 
x86 emulation. 

For instance, the way Arm and 
x86 order memory is based on 
different models, known as weak 
and strong respectively. Apple 
silicon incorporates both models, 
and that apparently makes a big 
difference for performance and 
efficiency when emulating. It's 
not clear what, if any, hardware 
elements the X Elite chip has for 
improving emulation. 

However, there's one reason to 
think there may be some. The CPU 
cores in the X Elite were actually 
designed by a startup called Nuvia, 
which Qualcomm snapped up in 
2021. But here's the real kicker: 
prior to co-founding Nuvia in 2019, 
its CEO, Gerard Williams, was none 
other than Chief CPU architect 
at Apple for nearly a decade. The 
company was staffed by other 
former Apple engineers involved 
in the company's transition to Arm. 
It's safe to say that Nuvia, and 
therefore Qualcomm, knows all 
about what it is in Apple silicon that 
makes emulation run so well. 

Exactly how good the X Elite 
will be remains to be proven. 
Qualcomm has previously claimed 
that even games will "just work" 
on the X Elite, and we recently 


The 7th Gen Microsoft Surface will 
reveal just how well the Snapdragon 
XElite can emulate x86 software. 


found that the MacBook Air can 
be surprisingly good for gaming 
in some narrow scenarios. But 
there's much to be proven. 

Qualcomm can make a fantastic 
chip for emulating old code, but 
it won't be any good if Microsoft 
doesn't play its part. Put simply, 
Qualcomm doesnt control the 
entire stack, and that's a clear 
disadvantage compared to Apple. 
All that said, as | explained last 
month, Microsoft seems to be 
pretty tight with Qualcomm right 
now. It has chosen the latter to 
partner with and promote the first 
Al PCs, something that Intel and 
AMD can't be happy with at all. 

It certainly seems like Microsoft 
is keen to promote the Arm 
platform, which implies that it 
might have put the work in to get 
x86 emulation running well. It 
won't be long before we find out. By 
the time you read these words, the 
first laptops with the X Elite chip 
will be out, and the tech community 
will be poring over every aspect of 
performance. Things are certainly 
getting interesting. 


Six raw 4K panels for break- 
fast, laced with 
of x86.. Jeremy Laird eats 


and breathes PC technology. 


хіта 


к 13 


JUL 2024 | sun 


quickstart | = 


“А 


JJ 


\ Sz 


Mi 
SU, 


110) © 


Are VPNs toast? 
I've been reading a news 
story on the TunnelVision 
vulnerability for virtual 
private networks. 
Apparently, this—excuse 
the pun—tunnel-sized 
hole in VPN security has 
existed since 2002. It says 
the vulnerability allows 
attackers to force VPN apps 
to send and receive at least 
some of your traffic outside 
of the encrypted tunnel. The 
claim is that you're only safe 
when the VPN runs on an 
Android device or Linux PC. 
Is this true, and if so, does 
it mean the VPN networks 
Гуе been using for all these 
years have been utterly 
useless in all that time? 
—Caitlin H Tracey 


THE DOCTOR RESPONDS: The 
headline of this vulnerability 
does make for grim reading. 
That said, in practical terms, 
the risk can be minimized 
and even eliminated 
completely. That's because 
this vulnerability targets the 
network you're connecting 
through. It makes use of 

a weakness in how DCHP 
servers, which allocate 

IP addresses to devices 

that aren't configured 

to manually set these 
themselves, work. 


THIS MONTH THE DOCTOR TACKLES. 


> VPN vulnerability 
> Application tabs 
> Podman acceleration 


The weakness is known 
as Option 121, and allows 
networks to change the 
route traffic takes to certain 
IP addresses or websites, 
basically giving bad actors 
the opportunity to reroute 
traffic outside of the VPN's 
encrypted tunnel. 

The attack requires 
someone to have 
administrative control over 
whichever local network 
you're connecting to, which 
is the first piece of good 
news. If you connect through 
your phone's cellular 
network, or you're using a 
VPN at home through your 
own local network, then you 
should be immune from this 
type of attack. 

The risk comes when you 
connect through third-party 
Wi-Fi networks, such as 
public hotspots. If you 
rely on the DHCP server 
to provide you with an IP 
address to connect to that 
network, you would be 
vulnerable if the network 
itself has been configured to 
use Option 121 to re-route 
traffic. There are, however, 
workarounds. 

First, check your VPN 
provider doesn't offer 
protection against this kind 
of attack. For example, 
ExpressVPN's Network Lock 


switch is designed to protect 
against attempts to force 
your traffic to bypass the 
VPN. Therefore, if the lock 

is switched on, you're safe 
now—and were in the past, 
too. Any attempts to bypass 
the VPN would result in an 
error or blank webpage. 
Even if your VPN provider 
offers such a kill switch, 
make sure it's robust enough 
to block the TunnelVision 
vulnerability. 

A fiddlier workaround 
involves connecting to the 
local network to obtain an IP 
address and other network 
details, then switching your 
network settings so they're 
manually configured. You 
can use the same connection 
details, but because you've 
specified these yourself 
instead of using the DHCP 
server, you're protected 
from any bad actor. 

As for Android and 
Linux users being safe, 
that's not quite true. 

You're certainly protected 
against TunnelVision when 
connecting through your 
Android mobile, because the 
platform doesn't support 
DHCP Option 121. However, 
while Linux has a setting 
that minimizes the effects, 
it's not immune thanks to a 
side channel. 


One final thing: if you 
followed last month's 
feature to set up a 
WireGuard VPN server 

to allow you to dial home 
into your network, you're 
immune too. That's because 
the only way into it is 
through your VPN tunnel, so 
any traffic re-routed outside 
the VPN can't get to it. 


Tabs for any app 

1 have so many application 
windows open it can be a 
real pain switching between 
them all. Do you have any 
tips or tools that could help 
me bring a bit of order to the 
chaos? —Gerald L Bromberg 


THE DOCTOR RESPONDS: 
The Doc's recommended 
solution, which he uses 

ona day-to-day basis, is a 
program called TidyTabs 
(Fww.nurgo-software.com/] 


[products/tidytabs]. As the 
name implies, it basically 
lets you merge multiple 
application windows into 
а single tabbed window. 
It's what Microsoft's Sets 
feature would have offered 
in Windows 10 had it not 
been canceled back in 2019. 
There are two versions 
available—one that's free 
for personal use, and a 
professional license for $29. 


N submit your questions to: 


doctor@maximumpc.com 


14 | mane | ou 2024 


The big restriction in the 
free version is that you can 
only group three windows 
together at any one time— 
once installed and running, 
roll your mouse over the 
top left-corner of a window 
to reveal a small colored 
tab. Simply click and drag 
this on to another window 
to group them together—if 
the windows haven't been 
extended to the full height of 
the screen, you'll see semi- 
translucent tabs appear 
above the window when it's 
in focus with the name of 
the app or open document 
on each one. Just click a tab 
to switch to it, or click and 
drag the tab to separate the 
windows again. 

You can combine windows 
from different applications, 
allowing you to group items 
by whatever criteria you 
choose. You can also create 
whitelists and blacklists to 
automatically set up tabs for 
certain windows, as well as 
exclude certain applications 
from working with TidyTabs. 

The free version gives 
all the core functionality 
you need to evaluate 
TidyTabs, but upgrading to 
the Pro version does more 
than simply remove the 
three-tab limit. You gain 
access to smart grouping 
options, which make it 
easy to combine windows 
from the same application 
(great when working on 
multiple Word documents, 
for example]. You also 
get to choose a tab color 
Scheme, rename or reorder 
tabs, define hotkeys, and 
open a file in a window by 
dragging it on to its tab. If 
you're juggling lots of open 
windows, then TidyTabs is 
definitely worth giving a go. 


Jellyfin Podman 
problem 

l've migrated my Jellyfin 
media server from a native 
instance on my Linux server 
to a Podman container. 
Everything appears to be 
working okay, except | cannot 
get it to use hardware 
transcoding. Whenever it's 


Most decent VPN providers offer a kill switch. 


unable to direct play files, it 
fails with an error unless I 
disable the feature, at which 
point it'll transcode using the 
CPU. What am | doing wrong? 
—Edward Sundberg 


THE DOCTOR RESPONDS: 
The Doc was able to get 
transcoding working in both 
Jellyfin and Plex containers 
with what can only be 
described as a bit of a botch 
job. It basically boils down to 
giving the container access 
to the GPU via the /dev/dri/ 
renderD128 directory. By 
default, your container is 
unable to access this folder 
because of a combination 
of user restrictions on 
that folder with the way 
user namespace mapping 
works in rootless Podman 
containers. 
Access to the folder is 
through the ‘render’ group, 
which has the necessary 
permissions. Ona native 
Jellyfin install, a user is 
created that's automatically 
added as a member of the 
group. Docker users are told 
to use the ‘--group-add' flag 
to link Jellyfin, but it had 
no effect on either Plex or 
Jellyfin in our experiments. 
Instead, the Doc 
recommends taking some 
liberties with security and 
widening access to the /dev/ 
dri/renderD128 directory. 
You can test this with the 
following command, which 
changes user permissions to 
allow all users to read and 
write to the directory: 
sudo chmod -R 666 /dev/dri/ 
renderD128 


Now, as long as your 
Jellyfin Podman script has 
the following line, you should 
be able to enjoy the benefits 
of hardware transcoding: 
~-device=/dev/dri/ 
renderD128:/dev/dri/ 
renderD128:rwm V 

Test by playing back a 
video that requires hardware 
transcoding—for example, 
by using your mobile phone 
and changing the playback 
settings to reduce the 
bitrate. Confirm transcoding 
is taking place from the 
Jellyfin server's web-based 
dashboard (click the ‘i’ 
button under the device's 
entry], then keep an eye 
on CPU usage—it should 
be 30-40 percent rather 
than 95-100 percent when 
CPU transcoding is taking 
place. Cockpit users can 
monitor CPU usage from the 
Overview section. 

Once you've confirmed 
the fix works, you can enjoy 
hardware transcoding—until 
you restart your server, 
as this is one of those 
permissions that doesn't 
survive a reboot. You can 
either manually run the 
‘chmod’ command after 
every reboot in future, or you 
can make it stick by editing a 
single file: 
sudo nano /lib/udev/ 
rules.d/50-udev-default.rules 

Locate the following lines: 
SUBSYSTEM=="drm', 
KERNEL--'renderD"", 


Change '660' to '666' in 
both lines, save the file 
and exit. The fix is now 
permanent, and hardware 
transcoding should always 
be available going forward. 


Remote inspection 
A friend is offering me his old 
gaming PC for what he says 
is a ‘knock-down’ price. Не 
lives about 30 miles away, so 
I don't want to travel over to 
view it before I've done a bit 
of due diligence. He doesn't 
know much about PCs, so 
ideally, I'd like to check out 
its spec remotely. Any ideas 
how this could be done? 
—Timothy Ramos 


THE DOCTOR RESPONDS: Why 
not set up a video conference 
with your friend using a tool 
that allows desktop sharing? 
Most tools support this, 
including Microsoft Teams. 
Once the meeting is set up, 
ask your friend to look for an 
option to share his desktop 
with you, then walk him 
through accessing Settings 
» System » About so you can 
Look. If you like it, ask him 
to download and run the 
portable version of HWiNFO 
Hjyww.-hwinfo-com]. Get him 
to launch the tool and make 
sure both Sensors-only 
and Summary-only are 
unchecked before clicking 
Start. This will let you take a 
deeper dive into his system. 
Alternatively, if you'd 
rather be left alone to 
check the PC yourself (and 
your friend is happy to let 
you poke around], suggest 
setting up a Quick Assist 
session in Windows. Launch 
the tool and click ‘Help 
someone’. Sign into your 
Microsoft account, then 
ask your friend to open 
Quick Assist on his PC. 
Communicate the security 
code on your screen to your 
friend, who should input it 
at his end, and click Submit. 
Once connected, request to 
take full control. You're now 
free to perform whatever 
checks you need to learn 
what you can about your 
prospective purchase. () 


JUL 2024 | ишми | 15 


the transplant build "enr | 


TINY TOWER 


ULTIMATE POWER 
THE TRANSPLANT BUILD 


Zak Storey takes the RX 7900 GRE out for a spin in a tiny E-ATX Tower 


WHEN IT COMES TO the ITX form factor, 
most will end up in one of two camps. 
Either you love them because of the 
minimalist aesthetic, small footprint, and 
that basic concept of absolute power in a 
ridiculously small build. Alternatively, 
you hate them because of the lack of 
connectivity, limited case choices, and 
often poor cooling as a result. 

Is one of the most controversial 
form factors out there. With components 
getting larger, more power hungry, and 
requiring more cooling to get the most 
out of them, it's becoming increasingly 
difficult to find support for it across the 
board as we move from generation to 
generation. 


But what if we were to tell you there 
was another way? What if we could mix 
the very best of both worlds? A small 
form factor case that didn't compromise 
on cooling, with full E-ATX motherboard 
support, and an intuitive layout that 
allowed you to squeeze in some serious 
power, without sacrificing in any one 
area? Well, that would be perfect, right? 
But surely it doesn't exist? 

Well then, with 24 cores, 32 threads, 
32GB of 6,000 MT/s memory, one of the 
best value 4K GPUs you can pick up right 
now, a super-premium cooling solution, 
1200Ws of power delivery, and no less 
than 6TB of PCle 4.0 and 5.0 storage, all 
cooled via six 120mm fans and a 360mm 


radiator, this build here ticks all of the 
above boxes and then some. What's 
more impressive is that it fits all of that 
in a tower chassis that measures, at its 
smallest, just 15.6 x 8.5 x 16.1 inches. To 
putthat into perspective, at Maximum PC, 
our first ever ITX liquid-cooled PC was 
built inside the incredible NZXT Manta, 
a case that by contrast measured 16.7 x 
9.6 x 17.7 inches—over an inch larger in 
every measure. 

Well then, ladies, gentlemen, 
friends, colleagues, and everyone else 
in between, Maximum PC is proud to 
present the Tiny Tower Ultimate Power 
build. Let's geodesically weave our way 
into the feature, shall we? 


INGREDIENTS 

PART | PRICE 
CPU | Intel Core i9-14900K $549 
Motherboard Asus ROG Maximus 7790 Dark Hero $595 
CPU Cooler | Phanteks Glacier One 360D30 White $170 
RAM 32GB (2x16GB) Crucial Pro Overclocking DDR5 @ 6000 C36 $105 
5501 | 1TB Crucial T700 M.2 PCle 5.0 x4 $172 
5502 2TB Kingston Fury Renegade М.2 PCle 4.0 x4 $173 
5503 2TB Lexar NM790 M.2 PCle 4.0 x4 $147 
GPU Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 7900 GRE 166B $550 
Case | Geometric Future M4 Caliburn ATX Mid-Tower $109 
PSU 1200W Corsair RM1200x Shift 80+ Gold $206 
120mm Fans | Phanteks M25-120 PWM D-RGB Fans 3 Pack $30 


PRICES CORRECT AT THE TIME OF PUBLICATION 


JUL 2024 


JUL 2024 | mmm | 17 


Intel Core i9-14900K $549 
www.intel.com] 

Time and time again, we keep coming back 
to the Intel Core i9-14900K, and with good 
reason. At its core, this build is the very 
heart of the Maximum PC testbed. It's our 
go-to chip for GPU, RAM, and SSD testing, 
and delivers incredible performance for 
the price. It's effectively the pinnacle of 
what Intel has managed to achieve with its 
Rocket Lake architecture. 

It's not perfect, and if you've kept your 
ear to the ground on this one, you've 
likely seen news articles regarding 
motherboards producing ргеМу 
aggressive overvolts and clock-speed 
boosts. However, you can now pick up an 
Intel default performance profile in most 
mobo BlOSes, and even with that slight 
drop in overall potency, the 14900K still 
delivers supreme CPU performance, 
circumnavigating any potential 
bottlenecks you can imagine for any other 
component in your build. You're still likely 
to see those 100 C running temperatures 
and high clock speeds, but it'll at least be 
a touch more stable. 

Fun news cycle data aside, the 14900K 
has some serious hardware at its core (ha, 
puns), including eight performance cores, 


with hyperthreading, 
plus 16 efficient-cores, 

for all of those low- 
priority application processes that need 
managing. Combine that with 36MB of 
mixed smart-cache, and the 14900K quite 
happily dominates any task you throw at it. 


Asus ROG Maximus 7790 Dark Hero 
$595 

www.asus.com 

Т5 a bit odd when your motherboard 
costs more than your CPU, and this one 
has arguably been the cause of a number 
of headaches for us lot in the labs over the 
last few months. 

On the surface, it's an incredible piece 
of hardware. One PCle 5.0 M.2 slot, four 
PCle 4.0 M.2 slots, a phenomenal amount 
of USB connectivity both in the rear I/O and 
on the board itself. Wi-Fi 7 as standard, 
2.5Gb Ethernet, anda seriously hefty 20+1 
VRM solution as well. It's given Asus the 
opportunity to push these chips to the 
nines when it comes to performance, 
and that has certainly come with some 
drawbacks in terms of system stability 
(we're looking at you, Core i7]. Still, with 
a few tweaks here and there, and some 
adjustments to some of the Asus Al auto- 


overclocking nonsense in the 
BIOS, the Z790 Dark Hero is a great 
board for any connectivity aficionado. 

The only thing that does look a bit 
awkward [for a $595 motherboard] is that 
weird ‘Aura Grid' rear 1/0 LED thing. It's 
not a display, so don't get your hopes up— 
this isn'ta Formula board, unfortunately— 
but you can turn it off in the BIOS, and 
leave yourself with a clean mirrored finish 
here instead. 


Phanteks Glacier One 360D30 $170 
www.phanteks.com] 

For this build, we wanted to step away 
from all of the crazy display AlOs currently 
out there topping $300, complete with 
messy cable management systems and 
nightmarish surrounds, and instead opt 
for something a little more low-key. This 
time, we've gone for the Phanteks Glacier 
One 360D30 in white. 

There's no pomp or fanfare here—just 
simple, clean, elegant design, mixed with 
an intuitive mounting system, and one 
seriously hardcore backplate. It comes 
with support for pretty much every socket 
since the LGAT15x series and above, and 
also includes a set of Phanteks’ daisy- 
chainable D-RGB fans. 


STEP-BY-STEHP.22] I 5 


It's a fantastic pick, and performance 
on those fans in particular is killer, 
clocking in 3.01 mmH20 and 64.3 CFM 
at full tilt, while still only registering 30.2 
dBA at maximum RPM. That's not too 
shabby. Impressively, we found that the 
pump was actually the noisiest element 
once we had it all set up to our fan curves 
correctly, and even then, once the system 
got a little settled, it soon faded away. 
We've gone with white this time to provide 
a little contrast against the dark black 
of the motherboard and its supporting 
components. It's a small change, but 
it really gives the build a bit more of a 
three-dimensional feel because of it, 
particularly when you start illuminating 
that interior with a touch of LED lighting. 


32GB (2x16GB) Crucial Pro 
Overclocking DDR5 (a 6000 C36 $109 
www.crucial.com| 
Itwas only the May 2024 issue that we used 
this same Crucial kit in another build, that 
one featuring the RTX 4080 Super among 
other things, and we've turned to it and 
Crucial once more for one simple reason: 
memory profiles. 

Sounds mundane, right? We've got all 
these illuminated parts internally, and so 


much going on, and yet, somehow we've 
gone with a bland low-profile memory 
kit that clocks to just 6,000 MT/s? Well, as 
this build is more transplant than a fresh 
take, and its core is predominantly our 
testbed, versatility is key. 

A good review, and a good set of 
benchmark results, relies on consistency. 
Testing CPUs in particular requires every 
other component in that loop be of a 
similar caliber. GPU, SSD, motherboard 
if possible, but the biggest challenge 
is memory. If you're using two very 
different kits of memory for both Intel 
and AMD, you're immediately going to 
invalidate your results. Searching around 
for two similar or identical kits, with 
timings that are parallel to one another, 
with the same frequency and capacity, 
can be challenging. For a long time, 
manufacturers produced kits with only 
either Intel's XMP settings or AMD's EXPO 
settings embedded on them. Got an AMD 
system? Buy this kit, but you'll be up a 
certain creek without a paddle if you swap 
to Intel later down the line. 

Excuses were used about storage space 
on the DIMMs [for timings—can you feel 
our frustration there?), but finally, Crucial 
broke the mold, and put both Intel and 
AMD profiles on a single kit of memory. 


That's why the Crucial Pro Overclocking 
kit is so valuable. 32GB of pristine DDR5, 
at 6000 MT/s (the sweet spot for AMD and 
Intel) plus consistent timings between 
both platforms? Consider us sold, and for 
only $109 as well. 


1TB Crucial T700 M.2 PCle 5.0 $172 
www.cruciaL.com 

Sometimes, the fastest parts arent 
the most useful parts when it comes to 
building a decent testbed, and nowhere 
is this more apparent than with our OS 
SSD. Because we're utilizing that Asus 
Dark Hero as our motherboard of choice 
for SSD, RAM, GPU, and Intel CPU testing, 
we needed an SSD that'd fit comfortably 
in that PCle 5.0 slot and one that you could 
remove from its heatsink. 

With that in mind, we've gone with the 
T700 over the T705 with one reason in 
mind: you can remove it from its heatsink. 
Sadly, although the T705 is significantly 
faster than the T700, its lack of an easily 
removable heatsink makes it a challenge, 
particularly if we want to secure it in place 
and take advantage of the 2790 Dark 
Hero's gargantuan SSD heatsink. 

It's still a good drive, with top-tier 
sequential performance, and decent 


random 4K [pretty much in line with the 
bulk of that generation of PCle 5.0 drives], 
but it's not the quickest. That said, TB at 
just $172 represents good value right now. 


2TB Kingston Fury Renegade 
M.2 РСІе 4.0 $173 

www kingston.com] 

Our second key drive is the Kingston Fury 
Renegade M.2 РСІе 4.0 SSD. This is where 
we store all of our software and games for 
the copious amount of benchmark runs 
we perform here at the mag and when 
testing hardware. 

We've waxed lyrical enough about the 
Fury Renegade over the last few issues, 
but to cut a long story short, its got some 
seriously intuitive engineering behind it, 
coupled with a significantly chonky full-fat 
DDR4 cache, giving it quite the competitive 
edge in random 4K performance versus 
even some of the larger PCle 5.0 drives out 
there right now. Yes, it's predominantly 
designed for consoles like the PS5, but 
its pure performance grunt makes it a 
surefire pick as our secondary drive. 


2TB Lexar NM790 M.2 PCle 4.0 $147 
Www.lexar.com] 

Three SSDs? In one build? Impressively, 
we've still got space for another two SSDs 


if we want with that motherboard. Still, our 
third SSD drive predominantly operating 
as a backup drive, and for any tertiary 
games we might need to download, or 
video content we may need to store], is 
the rather impressive 2TB Lexar NM790 
PCle 4.0 SSD. For testing purposes, we'll 
be reporting on this drive in particular, as 
it's a seriously top-spec PCle 4.0 SSD, but 
with the caveat that it's currently available 
atan incredibly low $147. 

That's phenomenally cheap for a drive 
of this size on the PCle 4.0 standard, and 
given that we know the results as we write 
this, you won't be disappointed if you do 
pick this up for your primary drive. 


Sapphire Pulse Radeon 
RX 7900 GRE 16GB $550 
Twww.sapphire.com] 
Peak RDNA 3 GPU-—thats how you 
should see the RX 7900 GRE. Also, we're 
starting to wonder if AMD's going to run 
out of suffixes with the rate it's releasing 
these GPUs. The RX 7900 GRE is designed 
to fit nicely in the power vacuum laying 
between the 7900 XT and the 7800 XT. Why 
isn't it called the 7900? Good question. 
That said, for its reasonable $550 price 
tag, you get access to 80 Compute units, 
5,120 shader cores, 160 Tensor cores, and 
80 ray tracing cores, as well as a fairly 


STEP-BY-STEP|P.22) | 3 


healthy 2,245 MHz boost clock. It also 
packs in 16GB of VRAM to round it all off. 

There's a lot of similarities between 
how the 7900 GRE has been handled and 
the RTX 4080 Super. On the one hand, 
compared to the 7800 XT, there's a not 
insignificant hardware bump, particularly 
going from 3,840 shader cores up to 5,120 
(25 percent more, if you're counting]. Yet, 
the clock speeds are actually significantly 
lower than the 7900 XT and the 7800 
XT, both of which break that 2,400 MHz 
barrier, while the GRE slides in at just 
2,245 (about an eight percent drop, at least 
on reference cards), which will inevitably 
mute that hardware bump we've seen. 

Either way the GRE looks to be the 
perfect entry-level 4K gaming GPU or top- 
tier 1440p graphics card, if you've got that 
kind of cash, and don't mind the slightly 
less potent ray-tracing performance, 


Geometric Future Model 4 
Caliburn ATX Tower $109 
[vww.geometricTuture.corr] 

Here, we have that 35L masterpiece, 
the Model 4 Caliburn. This isn't the first 
chassis we've seen from Geometric 
Future, and likely won't be the last either, 
as the case manufacturer continues to 
impress us with its incredibly innovative 
design full of clean, crisp details. 


The Model 4 has an incredibly small 
form factor, that much we've already 
established, but you may have spotted 
we listed ‘in its smallest configuration’ 
as a caveat, as it can have four separate 
configurations, depending on how you 
want to manage your build. Simply by 
raising the roof and its associated bracket, 
or removing a plate here and there, 
you can dramatically adjust everything 
from SSD placement and PSU support 
to vertical GPU mounting and radiator 
support, all without losing any of those 
beautiful style elements, including the 
L-shaped smoked glass window, mirrored 
front panel, and perforated ventilation. 
Similar to the Model 8 we looked at in 
the May 2024 issue, the Model 4 takes 
advantage of a similar chimney airflow 
design to alleviate heat build-up, leaning 
into natural convection rather than 
fighting it, as you'd find in other cases. 

For top-line stats, you get up to E-ATX 
motherboard support although we'd stick 
with ATX for optimal cable management), 
upto 1x 360mm, 1x 240mm, and 1x 120mm 
radiator support, mounting locations for 
nine fans total, and PSUs (dependent on 
install orientation) up to 180mm in length. 
It'll also house up to four x 2.5-inch SSDs, 


or 2x 2.5-inch and 2x 3.5-inch hard drives 
instead, and lastly, GPUs will clock out 
at around 405mm long, although slightly 
shorter will make your life a little easier if 
you're running an AIO in the floor. It's a lot 
of case for $109, that's for sure. 


1200W Corsair RM1200x 
Shift 80+ Gold $206 

[vww.corsair.com] 

Big graphics cards require big power 
supplies to support them, and with the 
way things are going [bearing in mind 
that Nvidia's 12VHPWR connector/cable 
and the initial design of the 4090 was to 
support up to 600W of power draw before 
manufacturers kicked up a fuss], we don't 
see that changing any time soon. 

For a solid testbed, then, having a big 
PSU is key. To that end, we're sticking 
with the RMx Shift. It's been a staple in a 
number of our builds now, and will likely 
remain so. Corsair has built the Shift a 
little different, as it's shuffled all of the 
modular power connectors to the side of 
the unit, rather than the rear. It actually 
works rather well in our build here [you'll 
see why in a bit), but it can lead to some 
compatibility issues with other cases, so 


do bear that in mind if you decide to make 
the jump to the shift life. 

Why the shuffle on the power 
connectors? Simply put, in any other 
traditional case, with the PSU in the floor, 
this will place the connectors right in 
front of you as soon as you remove the 
rear side panel on your chassis, meaning 
you don't have to fumble around, trying to 
disconnect or connect a power cable for 
that extra SSD you've just bought 


Phanteks M25-120 PWM D-RGB Fans 3 
Pack $30 
Ieww.phanteks.corr] 
For our backup fans lor exhaust fans, in 
this instance), weve gone with a set of 
Phanteks M25-120 PWM D-RGB units in 
white. These aren't the most glamorous 
of solutions, but if we're honest, they 
still look great, and pack plenty of 
performance. Here's the thing, though: 
they're still A-RGB, and can daisy-chain 
into our D-RGB units on our AIO too, so it's 
all controlled off a single RGB header for 
ease of access. 

On top of that, this triple 120mm kit 
here is just $30—a great price for a good 
quality fan kit. What's not to love? 


LENGTH OF TIME: 2-3 hours 
DIFFICULTY: Hard 


his is probably one of the hardest 

builds we've had to create here at 

Maximum PC, and that's a heavy 
statement for us to make. After all, we're 
veteran builders here, with hundreds of 
published build logs to our name, and 
multiple liquid-cooled rigs under our belt, 
including a few in some seriously space- 
restricted cases. 

Yet, throughout this process, working in 
the Model 4 had to be approached with an 
open mind. We've always been advocates 
of the notion that your build process 
should be fluid. Take a look at your chassis 
before you start installing anything. Try 
to identify where you might hit a snag or 
bottleneck. Think about your clearances, 
and where your hardware will sit. Would 
it be easier to install the fans first? Where 
will your cables go? Should you wire 
everything earlier or later, or chop off 
those front panel headers entirely? 

System building at the upper-most 
level is an intricate puzzle. That's not to 
say that the Model 4 is a bad case, but If 
you're installing some seriously insane 
componentry, you're going to have to 
think like this. Mid-range and entry-level 
systems with smaller power supplies, 
less chunky GPUs, and smaller coolers 
will be easier to work around, but if you 
intend to push this chassis to its absolute 
limit, then buckle up, because it's going to 
take some thought. 

Fortunately, whenever we thought a 
problem was about to occur, the Model 4 
quickly pointed out a way it could adapt to 
that problem. More often than not, it was 
us overlooking a particular element of the 
chassis (and not reading the manuals that 
came with it] that led to the issues. 

As for the core of this build, it's 
effectively a — transplant; moving 
one testbed system over to another. 
Downsizing, without compromise, in an 
attempt to reclaim a bit of desk space, and 
build a kick-ass system that doesn't quite 
dominate the entire workspace. 


Unlike our typical build order, with 
a transplant build, things are a little 
different. You'll likely recognize that 
system there in [ ]—thats our 
feature build from the May 2024 issue, 
with a few minor alterations to make it 
suitable for our testbed scenario. Yep, 
we ditched the NZXT board in favor of the 
PCle 5.0-supporting Z790 Dark Hero— 


perfect for SSD testing and beyond. You'll 
also notice that we swapped those fans 
around on the AIO mounted to the ‘rear’ of 
the Model 8 to act as intakes instead, and 
shifted the Corsair iCUE Link H150i LCD 
block around by 90 degrees. The former 
was to help keep our cooling in check, and 
help while benchmarking GPUs (a couple 
of degrees won't hurt you and your build, 
but when benchmarking, consistency 
is key]. As for the latter, that helped 
straighten out those tubes a touch, along 
with clearance with our larger GPUs. 

Still, first things first: а complete 
disassembly of our Model 8 system. 
Removing the RTX 4080 Super, along with 
the memory, and removing the cooler, 
before finally getting the motherboard 
and the power supply out as well. We've 
left a few components in here, too. The 
CPU and the primary and secondary M.2 
SSDs can stay put during the transfer. 

An interesting snag here was on- 
board removal. We'd taken out all the 
screws securing it in place, but forgot 
the additional motherboard standoff 
screw underneath that big bulky PCle 5.0 
aluminum M.2 heatsink. Many frustrating 
minutes later, it clicked, and we removed 
the M.2 heatsink and that final screw. 

With all the kit finally retrieved from the 
Model 8, we set aside the motherboard for 
later, making sure to install the NM790 into 
the PCle 4.0 M.2 slot below the Kingston 
drive [ ]. One thing to note: you 
can see our motherboard's M.2 Thermal 
pads are getting a little battered. You 
can buy replacements from Amazon for 
around $10. This is highly recommended 
if you're an SSD reviewer, but less so if 
you're just changing SSDs now and again. 


“Hey Zak, why don't you take a chassis 
with an incredibly compact internal 
layout, and use a bespoke shifted power 
supply that wasn't designed for it?" That's 
pretty much how you can sum up this next 
segment. The Model 4 has a unique side 
panel and chassis design. We, of course, 
did the usual teardown. The side window is 
an L shape of toughened smoked glass— 
simply lift that off at the hinges. The rear 
panelis a folded perforated structure that 
sits on top and slides into notches on the 
rear, secured up top with push pins. 

You remove that via a tab at the top back 
of the case [just push it up and off). With 
that out of the way, you can then begin 
to configure your PSU solution. The PSU 
will sit at the front of the Model 4, and 
you can mount it in two orientations: one 
with the PSU power connector facing up 
(requiring you to raise the roof and rear 
radiator bracket], or one with the PSU 


o2. | mme | 23 


power connector facing into the back of 
the chassis [to the right in [ ] 1. 
Either way, it'll require you to remove 
a number of panels to facilitate that, 
including that front mirrored panel. There 
are six screws that hold it in place—you 
can simply slide it out. It's a right-angled 
unit, and it took some manual reading and 
investigating to find out how to do that. 

If you want to go the top connector 
route, you have to then remove a couple of 
screws in the rear of the case. Back there, 
you'll find a thumbscrew on a sliding 
mechanism that will let you lift up that rear 
metal housing for the radiator housing 
(the bit with the Geometric Future logo on 
10. Once that's up, secure it in place, and 
that's your new roof. Then, the L-shaped 
roof/rear panel will sit on and attach to 
that. It all looks flush, connects perfectly, 
and everything fits, but now you'll have 
that PSU power cable pointing up, ready 
to connect to the included passthrough. 

Rather interestingly, although it's a 
tight squeeze, the RMx Shift is probably 
the best PSU for the job for a clean build. 
The power connector faces out to the rear 
of the case, and the Type 5 modular power 
connectors for your internal cables are 
facing down, ready to be cable managed 
through that rear cable hole. It is snug, 
though. [ ]. 


You'll have noticed at this point that we're 
going with the power supply first for this 
build. Clearances are going to be tight, so 
we know we need to take advantage of this 
as best as we can. Our build order will be 
power supply, initial cable management, 
motherboard in, followed with complete 
cable install and routing, then bottom 
CPU cooler in [with a test fit of the GPU), 
before finishing with the top fans, and 
lastly the GPU, before a final round of 
cable management 

So on we go [ ]. Here, you can 
see we're going ahead with that plan and 
have plugged in pretty much every cable 
we're going to need for our system. We've 
then threaded those cables through 
the cable management hole below, and 
wrapped them up as best we can with 
the included velcro straps that Geometric 
provides in an attempt to keep them tight 
and hidden out of the way. One thing to 
note: after this shot, we've actually gone 
back and added the 12VHPWR600 cable 
as well. We'll be tucking that away around 
the back of the chassis. It won't be used in 
this build, as the RX 7900 GRE still uses 
old faithful PCle power connectors, but if/ 
when we do swap back to an RTX card, it's 
going to help to have that connector there. 
But yes, cable management is going 


to be your friend big time on this build, 
particularly with that mildly awkward 
L-shaped back panel. 

With our PSU now safely secured in 
the chassis, weve gone ahead and re- 
attached that front panel, making sure 
to get as many smudges on the glass as 
possible to annoy the photography team. 
It does look super clean though. 

Installing the motherboard in the 
chassis was next on the list. We ve already 
got the 14900K installed from our last 
system [as we're just transferring the 
motherboard), so that's not a problem. 
We're not sure what, but something was 
causing clearance issues with the board, 
not sitting quite flush with its rear 1/0 
panel, and the mount-off screws. With 
the chassis laying on its side [admittedly 
mildly wedged up by a plethora of cables], 
we just couldn't secure more than three 
of the nine screws into it. However, with 
those three in, we placed the chassis 
upright, the board lined up, and we could 
install the other six screws [ 1. 


So, motherboard in (sort of—we didn’t 
spot that we could install those screws 
until later), we got to work installing the 
cables. Interestingly, the ROG Dark Hero 
has an additional 8-pin PCle power port 
located below the 24-pin. This is to help 
deliver additional power to the graphics 
card if it needs it. Honestly, it's overkill, 
so we're going to ignore it for this build. 
There's no discernible difference іп 
plugging it in when running stock, and 
where space is a luxury, extra cables can 
make or break a rear panel [ ]. 

The last piece of the puzzle is the 
remaining cables, and installing the 
final items of motherboard hardware we 
need. We've installed the two 8-pin EPS 
CPU power cables at the top left, and 
taken the opportunity to install the front 
1/0 connectors as well. Even the USB 
3.2 connectors are installed thanks to a 
sneaky 3.2 header on the bottom of the 
board. Given the positioning of the USB 
Type C header, however (again just below 
the 24-pin ATX power], and the lack of any 
cutout, we've opted not to install the USB 
Type C connector for the time being. HD 
audio also bit the bullet [ j 

With that sorted, it's time to move on to 
the CPU cooling, and boy does it come with 
a backplate. Check out [ ]—that 
thing is colossal for an Intel backplate. Is 
it needed? No, it's not a heavy water block 
by any means, but we appreciate the extra 
metal. There's just something about it 
that's incredibly reassuring, particularly 
with that etched-in diagram showing you 
where the threads need to go. 


mn 
ninm 


PHANTEXS 


с 


With that done, we installed the 
radiator into the bottom of the case. That 
was a fairly painless process—it mostly 
involved tilting the case onto its side, then 
installing four screws into the bottom of 
the radiator through the floor. We could 
install the fans on top after that. Given that 
they're a set of the D120 daisy chain units, 
they're more finicky than some of the 
other daisy chain solutions, so first we're 
going to install that CPU block. There's 
not a lot to report on here, though. Take 
off the plastic cover, line up the block with 
the pre-installed plate with the mounts 
you popped in when installing that hefty 
backplate, then secure in place with the 
pre-springed thumb screws. Do this in a 
diagonal pattern, a little at a time by hand 
until you can't turn the thread, and you're 
all done. We ran the two slim cables up 
by the memory around the VRM heatsink 
and into that top cable management hole. 
There's just a daisy-chainable D-RGB 
cable and a single pump fan header— 
that's it [ j; 


Now onto those D fans. They clip together 
seamlessly—the only issue is that they 
can be a bit finicky to click in, particularly 
the single cable part. However, once in, 
we flipped them over and attached them 
to the radiator, making sure the cable ran 
out into the chassis through that cable 
management hole up front. 

Make sure you don't preinstall the 
screw covers on the wrong side—they're 
annoying to remove. We definitely didn't 
do it. Also, rather more impressively, 
Phanteks sells a ‘reversed’ version of 
these fans, with the blades oriented the 
other way around in the housing. This 
means that the intake has the guard on 
it, and the exhaust is unprotected, so you 
can get a really clean look, and avoid that 
pesky aesthetic problem where the guard 
is facing up into your pristine-looking rig, 
with voltage labels and exposed wires. 

One other note, because these are 
clipped in securely, we installed six 
screws: one on the top left and bottom 
left, and then three more in the middle 
fan, leaving the far right fan with just 
one screw in the top left corner. It's 
secure enough, but unfortunately, due 
to a minor oversight (the power supply 
was installed, and we didn't have a small 
enough screwdriver to get underneath it), 
we couldn't install the last screws to the 
right of the fan [ 

With the AIO fans in place, we moved 
on to our budget offerings acting as the 
exhausts. These are far more traditional 
in their design than the D variants, but 
even despite the low price, still support 


daisy chaining RGB and fan speeds. 
We installed these in the roof with the 
included fan screws, then ran the cables 
around the back [ 

With the bulk of our cabling now in, 
and cooling sorted, it was time to install 
the GPU. The Model 4 has an odd vertical 
bracket plate that sits over the PCle 
slots that you have to remove with a 
thumbscrew in the rear of the PCle slot 
covers. Once that's done, you can remove 
your traditional Philips screws to get rid 
of the two PCle slot covers to install your 
7900 GRE. With that done, its simply a 
case of slotting the GPU into position and 
resecuring it in place. We then grabbed 
the two PCle power cables, ran them 
underneath [where the front panel header 
cables аге routed), and installed them in 
place, before re-attaching that vertical 
GPU plate in the rear [ 


Almost, but not quite. So the GPU is in 
Now, it's time to get to some more cable 
management done before we pop those 
final panels on. This time, it's those fans 
again. Fortunately, the vast majority of 
it can be daisy-chained together. Sadly, 
unlike some fan solutions out there, 
Phanteks doesn't have the dedicated 
software suite or bespoke cable solutions 
to allow for individual fan control just yet 

We've daisy-chained as much of it 
together as we can, certainly on the 
lighting front. The three D fans in the floor, 
and the M fans acting as exhausts, along 
with the pump block are running off a 
dRGB header on the 2790 Dark Hero. 

We could have run the fan speeds off 
a single header, but decided against it 
Instead, all three M fans are running off 
the CPU optional header, and the three D 
fans are on the CPU fan, with the pump 
3-pin cable on the AIO pump header on 
the board itself. 

We've kept the side panel off while we 
do final checks on the system to make 
sure all the RGB is working correctly 

]. We've even taken this build 
a step further and left it like this before 
grabbing a mouse, monitor and keyboard, 
to configure the RGB. 

With all that done, it's a case of laying 
the case down on its side, and carefully 
sliding the rear/roof panel back on. The 
best way to do this is to lay the case 
down on its side, with the components 
side facing down on your desk. Cable 
management options in the rear are much 
better than that in the Model 8, but you've 
still only got а few cable tie-offs to work 
with, so getting the extra leverage in 
that old-school traditional ‘lean-on-the- 
panel’ solution works a treat here. 


Блан 


2, | umm |27 
JUL 2024 


one super 
pristine, clean, black and white, high- 
contrast, powerful testbed transplanted 
intoa ridiculously small chassis, complete 
with all the bells and whistles you can 
possibly ask for, plus 6TB of delicious PCle 
4.0 and above storage. It's not pulling any 
punches, that's for sure. 

On the whole, the chassis was a joy 
to work in. There's just something about 
it that's massively endearing. We're not 
sure if that's because it's not a massive 
manufacturer releasing one or two 
slightly different mass produced cases 
every year, but it's got spirit 

It's not perfect, let's be clear with that. 
airflow could be better, flexibility on how 
you build in it (although, of course, that is 
limited by the lack of internal space], and 
things like the rear cable management 
could use some channeling or extra 
strapping taken into consideration. That 
said, where it flies, it absolutely soars. 


TheGPUsagonthe bottom 
rightofthe graphics cardis 
mildly annoying. Getting a 
support bracket to give this GREa 
little boost would helpaton. 


Phanteksactually sellsa 
‘reversed’ Dfan solution, 
wherethebladesare 

oriented the other way around 

inthe housing, sothe guard protects 
theintake, not the exhaust. 

This would give these bottom fans 

amuchcleaner look, without 

sacrificing performance. 


Speaking of that bottom 
radiator, the color matching 
withit and the white fans 

aboveisn'tgreat (the problem with 

matching plasticto metal) andthe 

Phanteks logois upside down. 

Thisisa shame, but there's nota ton 

wecandohere. 


Obligatory Maximum PC 
"would Look better with 
acustom cablekit 

commentinserted here [that's 

ajoke, butstill true). 


You cantucka nice 24-inch 
white LED strip in the 
roof heretoreallymake 

thewhole build shine just that 

little bit more. 


The mirrored front panel, L-shaped glass, 
and versatile internal chassis design do 
wonders. 

E-ATX is supported as well. We're 
using an ATX board here, but you can 
theoretically chuck an E-ATX inside. 
However, you'll lose access to some of 
the cable management grommets, which 
we're not sure is a good choice. 

If you're worried about space, though, 
we can confirm that its more than 
spacious. Even with that bottom AIO 
installed, weve managed to install an 
RTX 4080 Super Founder's Edition in here 
without a problem, and there's a good 
three inches of room to the right to allow 
for longer cards too, if you so desired 
It would be real cramped, though, and 
internal airflow might benefit more 
from that rear exhaust being switched to 
operate as an intake to help chuck some 
cool air over the CPU Block and top most 
PCle 5.0 SSD. 


We also had some concern over the 
12VHPWR cable making contact with the 
side panel, but there seems to be just 
enough space to avoid that cable-bending 
conundrum for the time being. 

So, aside from that, is there anything 
we'd change about this build? Well, 
aside from aiming for something more 
premium on the GPU front, changing out 
those topmost M fans would certainly be 
on the list, or the bottom D fans. They're 
not bad by any length, but the color of the 
LEDs between the two differ by a small 
amount, and it's mildly annoying. 

Also, to really break up the internal 
color monotony, if you do go with a single- 
color solution like we have with that bright 
orange on the cover, a white LED strip 
hidden around the roof would really help 
make the build's internals pop, without 
being too visible either. And of course, 
sleeved cables, but that's a Maximum PC 
given at this point 


BENCHMARKS 


ZERO-POINT 
Cinebench R23 
Single-Core (Index) 21031 [99 
Cinebench R23 
CC (ee) 14,545 34,869 (140%) 
CrystalDisk QD32 
Sequential Read (MB/s) 5787, ЕЛА 
CrystalDisk 0032 
Sequential Write (MB/s) CRE 66v [296] 
3DMark Fire Strike Ultra (Index) | 11,135 13,596 (22%) 
Cyberpunk 2077 (fps) 29 72 (45%) 
Cyberpunk 2077 RTX (fps) 20 15 [-25%) 
Metro Exodus (fps) 46 53 (15%) 
Metro Exodus RTX (fps) 34 34 (0%) 
Total War: Three Kingdoms (fps) | 48 51 (6%) 
Core Price ($) $1,368 $2,329 (70%) 
0» 10% 20% 30% 0% 80% ё% 70% BOX 9% 1009 


Our zero-point consists of the Hyte Y40 build from our March 2024 issue. Featuring an AMD Ryzen 5 7600X, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super, Gigabyte X670 Elite AC 
motherboard, 32GB of Corsair Vengeance DDR5 (à 5600 MT/s, and a 2TB Crucial Т500 PCIe 4.0 M.2 SSD. All games tested at 4K "Ultra" graphics presets with 0155 
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, 05 550, RAM], not accessories. 


FALLING DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE 


BUILDING THIS THING was a challenge, 
with lots of cable management, a ton 
of chassis disassembly, and more, but 
what was performance like? First things 
first, we need to caveat those sequential 
scores. We've already extensively tested 
the Kingston and Crucial T700 in these 
hallowed pages, and if you were after the 
best bang for buck, that 2TB Lexar NM790 
is challenging to beat. With that in mind, 
we decided to test that in our sequentials 
instead of the two other drives. 

That said, all in all, performance was 
pretty consistent across the board. We've 
compared our Model 4 build against 
the Stealth Hyte Ү40 system we built in 
our March 2024 issue, so we can take 
a closer look at the GPUs at play here. 
However, it's worth mentioning just how 
much performance has dropped on the 
Core i9 14900K since its debut. Again, this 


is mostly down to those BIOS changes 
and tweaks slowly reeling the voltage 
and clock speeds back. A quick glance 
at our initial Core i9 build from way back 
when and you'll see CineBench R23 has 
dropped from 2,204 to 2,094 on single 
core, and 36,815 down to 34,869 in multi. 
That's a huge drop, and just goes to show 
how aggressively these boards were 
overclocking the chips to hit those speeds. 

Still, compared to the Ryzen 5 7600X 
system, single core wasn't quite as potent 
as we'd hoped either, with the i9 only 
three percent ahead. Our SSD, however, 
performed admirably against the T500, 
beating it on sequential reads, and losing 
by a similar amount on sequential writes. 

That aside, it's with the GPUs where 
we see far more interesting results. 
The 7900 GRE managed to keep up and 
even surpass the 4070 Super in some 


scenarios, beating it in Cyberpunk and 
Metro comfortably, but falling shy in 
the ray-tracing department, which is a 
common complaint of AMD cards. At 4K, 
it's certainly capable of holding its own, 
particularly if you lean into AMD's FSR 2.2 
tech, which is great to see for a $550 card, 
andit's nice that AMD has that competitive 
edge on Nvidia, at least for the time being, 
although it's worth caveating the core 
price difference between these two. 

Ultimately, the performance is pretty 
much where we'd expect, particularly at 
this price, althougha lot of thatis leveraged 
on the CPU and the motherboard driving 
that price up. Arguably, the 4070 Super 
should perform much closer if it has 
those extra cores to play with. Either way, 
if you're after a solid 1440p or entry-level 
4K gaming GPU, the 7900 GRE is definitely 
a good pick. 


the transplant build 


ATX TO ITX, 


PC BUILDING is only possible because 
of consistency. The entire industry, 
the ecosystem, the very hardware, is 
dependent on that fact. From the humble 
transistor firing on a 1 or a 0 each and 
every time to DRAM producing the correct 
instruction to a CUDA core completing 
a physics calculation correctly, 
predictability and consistency is key. 
Without those, everything falls apart. 

Even the componentry has to abide by 
a certain set of criteria, and there are a 
number of organizations ensuring that 
is the case. Most notably, the JEDEC 
conglomeratesetsoutmemorystandards, 
PCI-SIG declaring PCle specifications for 
the last 20-odd years, and many others 
ensure that componentry meets similar 
specs, voltages, speeds, and dimensions. 
Across the board, this has led to the 
industry evolving rather smoothly, and 
stopped manufacturers from introducing 
all manner of proprietary and bespoke 
componentry, connectors, and form 
factors as a result. 


RELEVANT PC MOTHERBOARD FORM FACTORS 


EVOLUTION OF FORM FACTORS HOW DID W 
EVERY THING IN B 


Just take a look at the trouble Intel's 
been having with its 14900K, and 
motherboard manufacturers bypassing 
its recommended specifications for its 
chips, and you can see why these limits 
and specifications are important. 


BUT MOTHERBOARD 
FORM FACTORS? 


Then there's motherboard and case form 
factors, and oh boy, what a whole mess 
that is. Check out the 
table below to see just 
how many form factors 
are out there. 

As you can see from 
our table, the whole 
motherboard form factor 
sizing debate has had its 
fair share of launches over 
the years, and we've seen a 
ton of them at Maximum PC, 
too. Perhaps unsurprisingly, 
IBM launched the form factor 
race with its XT, AT, and then 


GET FROM 


ETWEEN, AND BEYOND? 


Baby-AT form factors, before Intel seized 
the reigns in 1995 with the ATX form factor 
that we know and love today. 

Micro-ATX followed the year after, 
with Mini-ITX landing in 2001, although 
it wouldn't become popular until the late 
2000s, with the likes of Intel's Sandy 
Bridge architecture finally starting to 
bring down power demands. 

Although certain form factors have 
stayed with us, a number of them have 
been one-hit wonders. EVGA debuted 
the HPTX form factor, measuring 
in at 13.6 x 15 inches in 
2008, but only utilized it 
for two motherboards: the 
SR2 and SRX. The SR2 
supported dual Intel Xeon 
processors on the LGA 

1366 socket, with an 


The problem with E-ATX 
isthatasa form factor, 
itsort of doesn't exist, 
atleast not consistently. 


Year Acronym Expanded Origin Dimensions 

Introduced 

1983 xr Extended Technology IBM 8.5x 11 inches 

1984 AT Advanced Technology вм 12x 11/13 inches 

1987 Baby-AT Baby Advanced Technology IBM 8.5 x 10/13 inches 

1995 AX Advanced Technology Extended Intel 12x 9.6 inches 

1996 Micro-ATX Micro Advanced Technology Extended Intel 9.6 x 9.6 inches 

1998 wrx Workstation Technology Extended Intel 14.0 x 16.75 inches 

2001 Mini-ITX Mini Information Technology Extended МА Technologies — 67, 6.7 inches 

2003 Nano-ITX Nano Information Technology Extended МА Technologies — 47,7 inches 

2004 BTX Balanced Technology Extended Intel 12.8 x 10.5 inches 

2007 DTX N/A AMD 8.0 x 9.6 inches 

p p Extra Large Advanced Technology EVGA, Gigabyte, | 
2009-2010 XL-ATX Fue Rs 13.5/13.6 x 10.3/10.4 inches 
2015 Mini-STX Mini Socket Technology Extended Intel 5.79 x 5.51 inches 
, Extended Advanced Technology : | 

m E-ATX елен Various 12 x 10/13 inches : 

ЗО | mmu | JuL 2024 


Intel 5520 Chipset, and up to 12 sticks of 
triple channel DDR3, and came with seven 
PCle slots, supporting up to 4-way SLI 
or CrossFireX. The SRX supported twin 
LGA2011 Intel Xeon's on the C606 chipset, 
with up to 12 DIMMs of quad-channel 
DDR3 (for up to 96GB of RAM), and sported 
7-PCle 3.0 slots, with capacity to handle 
4-way SLI or CrossFireX as well. 


THE PROBLEM WITH E-ATX 
ThenwegettoE-ATX (Extended, Advanced, 
Technology, Extended). This is not really 
a form factor, as few manufacturers 
stick to any one set of dimensions for 
it. It launched as a form factor for rack 
mount servers measuring in at around 12 
x 13 inches. However, the standoff mount 
locations were considerably different to 
that of ATX. Eventually, two variants of the 
form-factor emerged: one for dual-CPU 
systems championed by Supermicro and 
Asus, with bespoke mountoff locations 
{with a few in the same position as the 
ATX form factor], but with others custom 
positioned, requiring a specialist case. 
Then, a number of other manufacturers 
jumped on the wagon, creating larger 
ATX boards, and labeling them as E-ATX. 
Typically, these range in size, with a 
height of 12 inches, followed by a width of 
anything from 10.1 to 13 inches, depending 
on specification and added extras. 


Micro ATX 


Standard ATX 


CASE ADVANCEMENT 
The development of cases has been fairly 
steady. Although the majority of case 
modifications you see as the halo products, 
or what we'd call ‘glory’ features (such 
as vertical GPUs, integrated distribution 
plates, and LED strips) have mainly come 
from the modding arena, the bulk of 
chassis modifications and development 
has arrived as hardware has advanced. 
However, the biggest change-drivers 
have originated from a three-pronged 
spear of user cases. Habits have changed 
since the early 2000s, as the majority of 
the community has moved away from 
physical media, no longer requiring 5.25- 
inch drives. Then there's the shrinking of 
certain component elements, as 3.5-inch 
and even 2.5-inch storage solutions are 
superseded by M.2 form factor devices, 
and we've lost common use of SLI and 
CrossFire graphics solutions. More 
pressing than that is the end of Moore's 
"law, which has led to an increase in 
component waste heat generation, as 


IS BTF A FORM FACTOR? 


Pico ITX 


Nano ITX 


Motherboard form 
factors are, let's be 
blunt, a mess. 


manufacturers look to circumvent the 
difficulties imposed by the limits of our 
current silicon lithographies. 

This has led to manufacturers having 
more wiggle room when it comes to 
internal case layout, as they no longer 
need to accommodate for 5.25- and 3.5- 
inch devices. However, the flipside is 
that cooling and aesthetics have become 
increasingly dominant in this field. 

Internal space and efficiency in design 
has increased dramatically, and cooling 
and glass windows have become more 
important. Tempered glass panels, for 
instance, can now be found on chassis as 
low as $50, while a decade ago you'd be 
lucky to get a perspex window for that. 

Interestingly, no other company has 
cracked a new form factor that's better 
than the ones wehave. ITX, ATX, and Micro- 
ATX, the most dominant motherboard 
forms, are all pre-2002. BTF looks 
promising, but its more a connection 
standard, rather than something that will 
radically alter what our PCs look like. Ù 


BTF is in a way a very unique 
form factor. It's still early 
days in its lifecycle to truly 
understand how as a form 
factor it's going to develop, 
however. The one advantage 
ITX, ATX, and Micro-ATX 
have had is the fact that 
there's flexibility when it 
comes to the placement of 
the componentry on the PCB 
itself. Yes, the socket needs 
to go in the top-left center 
of the board, and certain 
elements have a rough radial 
area they need to be placed 
in, but time and time again, 
we've seen EPS power shift 
from the top-left to the top- 
right, the 24-pin move up and 
down to accommodate other 
elements, and USB headers, 


SATA headers, and more 
shuffle about, depending 
on the size, PCIe slots, and 
power design requirements 
of the board in question. 

Unlike that, BTF by its 
nature [still technically based 
on the ATX sizing standard], 
with power connectors facing 
backward towards the ‘rear 
side’ of the chassis, means 
that case manufacturers will 
need to provide large cutouts 
for these components. 

There are two angles 
those case manufacturers 
can go down when it comes 
to this one: abide closely 
to the BTF form factors 
requirements for where 
those cutouts need to be 
for the power connectors, 


or make larger cutouts. 
The issue is that if you 
make the cutouts too large, 
particularly as we already 
have chunky CPU backplate 
cutouts, you'll compromise 
the integrity and strength of 
the internal structure. 

That might be fine on 
the first batch of products, 
butif BTF continues to gain 
precedent and we see it 
expand into more budget- 
friendly componentry and 
cases, it could lead to some 
rather tentative situations 
with structural integrity 
failing, particularly if a 


systemis being transported. 


The BTF is technically a form factor, 
just notin the traditional sense. 


For BTF to succeed, it 
needs to be inflexible in 
its design and ratified and 
adhered to by motherboard 
manufacturers. Whether that 
Will be the case, however, is 
yet to be seen, particularly 
given the competitive nature 
of the partners behind it. 


JUL 2024 


real world benchmarking |" 


Nate Drake explores 
how tools like 3DMark, 
Geekbench 6, UNIGINE, 
and Superposition 
reveal your device's 
true capabilities 


IN THEORY, using tools to run 'synthetic' benchmarks is a great 
way to test specific components like GPUs through carefully 
crafted workloads. A whole industry has sprung up around this. 
Each developer claims to offer the best kinds of tests. Some, like 
Geekbench é or 3DMark, even have their own scoring system. 

Still, winning 10,000 points and a gold star from any one 
benchmark doesn't necessarily mean your gaming rig will 
perform optimally with specific applications. This is particularly 
true for resource-intensive games like Cyberpunk 2077, and 
precisely what makes titles like these popular with reviewers, 
who like to subject devices to ‘real world’ benchmarks. 

In this feature, we'll explore some of the most popular 
benchmarking software available, and discuss how to run some 
‘real world’ tests of your own. 


32 | mame | 20: 2024 


& Simulates real world scenarios. 

& Scores Single Core/Multi-core 
Performance separately 

© Mobile version 


GEEKBENCH is one of the best-known 
benchmarking platforms, and a favorite 
of hardware review sites. 

Speaking to Ars Technica in 2023, 
Geekbench creator John Pool explained 
the inspiration for creating a new series 
of benchmarks came in 2005 when he 
purchased a Power Mac 65. Dissatisfied 
with existing tests, which consisted of 
running arithmetical operations on small 
amounts of data, Poole developed his own. 

When it comes to scoring, Geekbench 
uses a baseline of 2500 based on 
benchmarks run on a Dell Precision 
3460 with an Intel Core i7-12700. A higher 
Score indicates better performance. 
According to Geekbench's documentation, 
theoretically this means that if one device 
has double the score of another, it will 
perform twice as well. 

Geekbench 6 provides two composite 
scores of both single-core and multi- 
core performance. These are calculated 
using a weighted average of the 
subsection scores. In turn, these scores 
are worked out through using the 
geometric mean of workloads contained 
in that subsection. 

Although this sounds quite involved, 
the results are easy to interpret, and 
it's relatively simple to compare the 
performance of your device to others. 
The only downside is that if you choose to 
use the free version of Geekbench 6, your 
results will automatically be uploaded to 
the main website. 

On the plus side, Geekbench is a 
truly cross-platform application. Mobile 
versions are available, and it can even run 
on Linux, albeit from the command line. 

If you're running Windows, once the 
software has been downloaded from 
and installed, it 
will automatically display key information 
about your OS and hardware. At this 
stage, all you need to do is click "Run 
CPU Benchmark'. 

Unlike many other benchmarking apps, 
there's no graphics rich video or mini- 
game to play, but Geekbench offers some 
of the very best workloads for real world 
benchmarking. 

The software will first attempt to run 
"productivity workloads. This includes 
a test of how your device handles file 


© Not ideal for benchmarking servers 

© Benchmarks aren't comparable to 
other Geekbench versions 

© Free users forced to upload results 


а уо ӨЮ 


PU Purchase Unlock Нер Мем 


System information 


Operating System: Microsoft Windows 11 Home (64-bit) 


Modet Acer Nitro ANS15-46 
Motherboard: RB Jimny RBH 
Memory: 160 GB DORS SDRAM 
CPU Information 
Name: AMD Ryzen 7 6800H 
1 Processor, 8 Cores, 16 Threads 
Codename: Rembrandt 
Package: Socket FP7 
Base Frequency: 320GHe 
Maximum Frequency: 4738 Me 


CPU Benchmark 
Running CPU Benchmark 


[^] Running CPU Benchmark 


HIMLS Browser 
о; pied 


| ST 


the Lua interpreter to 
simulate programmers 
building their own code. 
The ‘Text Processing’ 
workload uses Python 
and C++ to load multiple 
files, then parses their 
contents using regular 
expressions. It also 
stores metadata in an 
SQLite database, then 
exports the content to a 
different format. 


The ‘machine 
learning workloads 
involve detecting 
and highlighting 
objects in multiple 
photos. ^ Geekbench 
also measures 
5 CPU performance 
by separating Һе 
background and 
foreground in а 


video stream. 

The final set of CPU 
workloads focus on how 
your device manages 
editing and synthesis 


н 


Geekbench measures GPU compute performance for everyday tasks, including 
machine leaming and computer vision, using tests that model real-world 
applications. The GPU Benchmark takes several minutes to complete. 


Geekbench 6 runs ‘real world’ workloads like simulating 


of images. These again 
simulate real world 
tasks like removing 
objects from images and 


opening multiple web pages. 


compression, using a 75 MB Ruby source 
archive with LZ4 and ZSTD compression 
codecs. There's also a ‘Navigation 
workload that generates directions over 
24 routes in two different locations via 
OpenStreetMap. 

Special mention should also go to 
the HTMLS workload, which uses a 
‘headless’ browser to simulate typical 
internet activity by opening, parsing, and 
rendering texts for various web pages like 
Instagram and Wikipedia. There's also a 
"PDF render’ workload, which uses park 
maps from the American National Park 
service and a ‘Photo Library workload 
to categorize and tag images based on 
objects they contain. 


filling the gap left behind, 
as well as correcting the 
horizon in crooked photos. 

Other workloads include applying 
filters to images to improve their 
appearance, blending six photos to create 
a single HDR (High Dynamic Range] 
image, and using a custom ray tracer to 
render the Blender BMW Scene. 

Upon completion of CPU benchmarks 
in the free version of Geekbench 6, your 
browser will automatically open and 
display the uploaded scores for both 
single-core and multi-core performance. 

By default, these scores aren't shown 
in relation to anything else, but you can 
use the 'search' feature at the top right to 
search for your specific CPU to check other 
uploaded scores. You can also visil hitps:/ 


Geekbench next runs a series of 


browser.geekbench.comprocessor 


"Developer Workloads' on your device. 
These include using Clang to compile 


[Denchmarks]to view current CPU scores 


from highest to lowest. 


real world benchmarking | ™ 


© Useful for measuring overclocking 
€ GPUtemperature/clock monitoring 
© Mini-game 


IF THE NAME of developers UNIGINE 
sounds familiar to readers, it's because 
they're the authors of a number of other 
excellent benchmarking tools, such as 
Heaven, which displays a jaw-dropping 
representation of a steampunk village 
guarded by an ornate dragon statue. 

On downloading the 1.268 installer for 
this benchmarking software fron[https:// 


benchmark.unigine.com/superposition 


setup offers three options. This is where 
we discovered that the ‘Basic’ version of 
Superposition supports running ‘Virtual 
Reality’ benchmarks for Oculus and 
SteamVR HMDs (Head-Mounted displays]. 
Superposition also displays a helpful 
bar at the bottom indicating how much 
VRAM is required for the next round of 
benchmarks. If you try to exceed the 
available virtual memory, the program 
will display a warning and suggest you 
lower the settings or use another ‘preset’. 
The default preset is 1080p medium’. 
Readers may take exception to the fact 
that we've noted this as a disadvantage, 
given that any program can crash 
your device if it has insufficient virtual 
memory. Still, we feel that rather than 
display a warning, it would make more 
sense for Superposition to default to the 
least demanding preset (720p Low), then 
allow users to adjust settings upwards 
accordingly, eg. the '8K Optimized’ preset 
requires 6241MB of VRAM by default. 


© Limited customization in Basic version 

© Can crash if VRAM limit reached 

© ‘Leaderboards’ submissions denied 
for modified preset 


You can further customize your 
benchmarks by selecting ‘Custom’. From 
here, you can switch the Graphics API 
between DirectX and OpenGL. You can 
also toggle fullscreen, change the video 
resolution, and adjust quality for shaders/ 
textures. Bear in mind, however, that if you 
create a custom preset, you cannot upload 
your results to UNIGINE's Leaderboards. 

Once the settings are to your liking, 
the fun begins. The standard benchmark 
in Superposition works by displaying a 
detailed video using SSRTGI [Screen- 
Space Ray-Traced Global Illumination) 
dynamic lighting technology. 

Theclipinquestionisa 1950s classroom 
filled with the dangerous inventions of a 
seemingly mad Professor. The experience 
is akin to shooting a film scene in a single 
take. As the camera pans and zooms, 
Superposition will display key stats at the 
top right. These include GPU clock speed, 
temperature, and ‘utilization’. 

As the scene progresses, the camera 
goes from simply displaying high-res 
scientific equipment to having objects 
levitate and move around the room, which 
in our tests caused a big spike in GPU load. 

Other useful information includes 
the minimum, maximum, and average 
FPS [frames per second], as well as the 
current scene number: 17 in total. 

It’s clear why Superposition is a favorite 
of overclockers. Displaying information 


SUPERPOSITION 
BENCHMARK 


| 


^ 


RESULTS (720P Low) 


in a standardized way makes it easy to 
measure the effects of modifications like 
increasing the GPU power limit. 

Once the video finishes playing, 
Superposition will display a summary of 
your benchmark settings, as well as your 
system configuration. Your overall score 
will also be displayed, along with key stats 
like the minimum and maximum FPS, 
GPU temperature, and utilization. 

You can also click "Compare Results 
Online toviewthe UNIGINE Leaderboards. 
However, this won't display your results in 
relation to others. Make sure you select 
the correct ‘preset’ to be sure youre 
looking at the right score set. You can also 
use the search box to enter the make and 
model of your hardware. 

Superposition ^ "Advanced! does, 
however, support posting your results 
on the Leaderboards, as well as looped 
stress testing to check hardware stability. 
If you don't want to pay $20 for this, you 
can get an approximate idea of how 
your hardware would handle graphics- 
intensive titles by selecting the ‘Game 
option from Superposition. 

Before playing, choose a ‘Preset’ that 
your system can handle or ‘Custom 
graphics settings to your needs, then 
choose ‘RUN’. Doing so will transport you 
tothe same lone scientist's classroom/lab 
but this time you'll be able to navigate the 
room and interact with over 900 objects. 

The controls follow the traditional 
WASD format, with the mouse used to 
change the view. Objects with which you 
can interact have a helpful tag explaining 
what you can do, eg. ‘Take’. 

The main advantage of interacting with 
Superposition in this way is that it can give 
you a clearer idea of how your system 
performs when you're carrying out in- 
game activities such as moving from 
one area to another. Key information like 
FPS, GPU clock speed, temperature, and 
utilization is still displayed at the top right. 

Unlike the regular benchmark, there's 
no set ending, nor will you see an average 
of all results during gameplay, but it's a 
way to see how your GPU performs under 
specific circumstances. For instance, 
to push the graphics performance to its 
extreme, you can activate the gravity 
vortex’ at the far end of the lab. 


€ Many different types of benchmarks 
© Transparent scoring system 
© Stress tests available 


, 3DMark is an extremely 
popular benchmarking platform. Its 
scoring system is also similar in that 
higher marks mean better performance. 

There are ‘Advanced’ and ‘Enterprise’ 
editions for $34.99 (one-off) and $1,695 
(per year], respectively. These contain 
the most comprehensive sets of tools, as 
well as features like custom benchmark 
settings and game performance 
estimates. 3DMark also offers free 
demos of three tools. In order to access 
these, though, you'll need to have a Steam 
account to search for and install the '3D 
Mark Demo' via the Steam Store. 

Time Spy is used for testing DirectX 
12, so will only work with Windows 10 
and 11 platforms. The tests are run at 
2560 x 1440 resolution. The demo version 
consists of two graphics tests and one 
CPU test, which are run in that order. 

According to 3DMark, the first 
graphics test consists of a great deal of 
transparent content, particle shadows, 
and tesselation. The second features ray- 
marched volumetric illumination, with 
hundreds of lights and small particles. 

During all three tests, the current 
frame, FPS, and video duration are 
displayed at the bottom of the screen. 
You'll then see an overall score, as well 
as one for your GPU and CPU. Unlike 
certain popular benchmarking platforms, 
3DMark gives you an idea of where your 


Limited free demos 
Free versions must be installed via Steam 
Scores only apply to specific 
3DMark versions 


hardware stands by displaying both the 
average and best score for each tool. 
Although the ‘Basic’ edition doesn't 
allow you to estimate game performance, 
you can scroll down further to see a 
detailed view of system performance. 
This includes the FPS for individual tests 
as well as graphs displaying the same, 
along with GPU temperature and load. 
The final section contains the ‘Run 
Details’. This is an extremely well-laid out 
comparison between the performance of 
your device and others, such as a budget 
gaming PC or gaming laptop. Your device 


Time Spy (pictured) runs two GPU benchmarks and one CPU benchmark. 


is ranked along with a percentage result 
of its performance—for instance, our 
Acer Nitro laptop only performed better 
than 20 percent of all results. 

If you have a less modern device, the 
3D Mark demo also includes ‘Fire Strike’ 
for DirectX 11 benchmarking, as well as 
"Night Raid'—a DirectX12 benchmarking 
tool for devices with integrated graphics. 

If you choose to upgrade to the 
"Advanced' version, you can access the 
‘Extreme’ edition of both Time Spy and 
Fire Strike. These raise the rendering 
resolution to 3840 x 2160 (4K ОНО). 


While testing your CPU, RAM, 
and GPU performance is 
vital, it's easy to overlook 
your storage. 

Recent years have seen а 
decline in the sale of old-style 
magnetic HDDs in favor of 
SSDs (Solid State Drives), 
which are capable of much 
faster read and write speeds. 

One of the most popular 
SSD-testing tools is 
CrystalDiskMark, an 
open-source tool designed 
for Windows. Based on 
Microsoft's Diskspd, this 


can simulate read/write 
operations in both sequential 
and random positions with 
various numbers of both 
queues and threads. 

Head tqhttps7À 
crystalmark.into/en/] 
[download/&CrystalDiskMark 
to view the downloads. As 


readers will see, the ‘Shizuku’ 


and 'Kurei Kei' editions 
are 200MB and 120MB 
respectively, possibly due 
to the themes containing 
scantily clad anime girls. 
Fortunately, the ‘standard’ 


version is cleaner, containing 
a basic Ul and is just 5MB. 
CrystalDiskMark runs five 
tests on the main hard drive. 
The first two use sequential 8 
MiB blocks of data, while the 
remainder use 4 KiB blocks. 
Use Ctrl + Q to fine tune 
these settings, or access 
other batteries of tests 
via the ‘Profile’ menu. The 
options include 'Real World 
Performance’, which focuses 
more on random data blocks. 
In the ‘Theme’ menu, you 
can choose from a variety of 


palettes. You can also enlarge 
the window— the default 
size makes it difficult to see 
individual numbers. 

There's no option to 
upload the results to 
CrystalDiskMark's website, 
nor does the tool indicate that 
your SSD is performing within 
acceptable parameters. 

You can, however, install 
it via the main website. This 
provides detailed information 
of SSD functions, as well 
as the temperature and the 
drive's overall health. 


real world benchmarking = 
POSITIVES NEGATIVES 
Very small install footprint © Not designed specifically for benchmarking 
© Clear information © Hard to compare stats with other devices 


© Free version has excellent features 


HWMONITOR is developed by CPUID, the 
same people behind the excellent system 
profiling/monitoring application CPU-Z. 
It's available as both a free and a ‘Pro’ 
edition, though as we've noted, the free 
edition is likely to offer all the features 
required to monitor your system. 

Admittedly, HWMonitor stands out, 
as its not specifically designed for 
benchmarking. There's no clickable 
button to stress-test your hardware, no 
scoring system, and no automatic way to 
compare what you see with other devices. 

However, if you visit 
[Sownloads/hwmonitor, you will finda free 
utility for viewing key information like core 
temperature, power consumption, GPU & 
CPU utilization, and so on. 

This is what makes HWMonitor such a 
popular tool with overclockers, as if your 
device is heating and/or shutting down 
unexpectedly, it can give you some insight 
into why this might be happening. 

The installer itself is only around 
1.5МВ and the interface is very simplistic, 


© Takes time to load 


Use HWMonitor when running 
benchmarks to monitor key system 
performance indicators. 


BATTERY BENCHMARKS 


so its unlikely that HWMonitor itself 
will contribute significantly to CPU/GPU 
load. You'll gather the most meaningful 
data by running it at the same time as 
one of the other benchmarking tools listed 
in this feature, ideally in windowed mode, 
so you can monitor your system stats in 
real time. 

Before running any benchmarks in 
HWMonitor, open the ‘View’ menu and 
choose ‘Clear Min/Max’ to make sure 
the results only apply to this specific 
test. From here, you can also enable the 
‘dark theme’. 

When it comes to checking 
temperatures, HWMonitor defaults to 
listing these in Centigrade. If you prefer 
to use Fahrenheit, go to ‘Tools’ > ‘Options’ 
to switch. From here, you can also limit 
utilization’ to 100 percent, though if you're 
overclocking, you may prefer to leave it. 

If you need to share your results with 
others, go to ‘File’ > ‘Save Monitoring 
Data’, or hold Ctrl + S to store the stats as 
aplain text file. 


There used to be various 
free dedicated programs for 
testing battery endurance. 
One example was PCMark10 
(ака PowerMark], but sadly 
this is no Longer available. 

If you're running Windows 
10 or 11, you can use the 
OS's internal diagnostics. 
Type 'cmd' into the search 
bar to open the command 
prompt, then run powercfg 
/batteryreport. This will 
generate an html battery 
report, which will be saved to 
your home folder. 

Open the html file in your 
browser, and you'll see a 
record of your active battery 
usage over the past few days. 
The ‘Installed Batteries’ 
section lists the ‘design 
capacity'—the maximum 
charge the battery could hold 
when brand new. Contrast 
with the ‘full charge’ capacity 


to determine how much 
charge the battery can hold. 
Scroll down to the ‘Recent 
Uses' section to view power 
states over the last three 
days. This can give you an 
insight into how quickly 
the battery is draining. By 
scrolling down to the ‘Battery 
Usage' section, you can see 
the duration your device was 
unplugged, as well as energy 
drain during that time. 
Theoretically, you can use 
this to calculate the battery 
efficiency, but the report 
has a dedicated ‘battery life 
estimates' section. Here, 
you can viewan aggregate 
of all the battery data since 
Windows was first installed. 
This data will change over 
time. Even small changes 
can make a difference—for 
instance, Microsoft Edge 
consumes less power than 


other mainstream browsers, 
like Chrome and Firefox. This 
is why independent review 
sites like TechRadar also test 
the battery capacity of laptops 
by playing a high definition 
video in a continuous loop. 

To go down this route, try to 
find an HD video of sufficient 
length, and decide on a media 
player. We favor VLC [fhttps:7] 

[get.videolan-org). Not only 

is it free and open-source, it 
can also make use of DirectX 
Video Acceleration (DXVA] for 
hardware acceleration. Tests 
run by Microsoft Program 
Manager Pierre LaGarde 
found that a GPU-enabled VLC 
is 70 percent more energy 
efficient than using the CPU. 

To run a fair test, you need 
to configure your battery 
settings. Enter ‘Power and 
Battery' into the Windows 
search bar to open the 


relevant window. By default, 
Windows 11 will hibernate 
when the battery reaches a 
‘Critical’ level of two percent. 
To change, this enter 'Edit 
Power Plan' into the search 
bar to open the relevant 
section of the Control Panel. 
Choose 'Change advanced 
power settings’. Expand 
‘Battery’ > ‘Critical Battery 
Level’ and change this to 0 
percent. You can also change 
"Reserve Battery Level to 0 
percent, if you wish. 

Once you've clicked 
‘Apply’, we recommend 
setting system brightness 
and volume to an arbitrary 
level, eg. 50 percent. Close all 
other apps and disconnect any 
external devices. When you 
open the video in VLC, before 
starting your stopwatch, click 
the ‘loop’ button at the bottom 
to play it continuously. 


© MICROSOFT 


& Nothird-party programs required 
© Easy to implement 
© Based on ‘real’ performance 


tools that we've 
reviewed so far are the best ones we 
found for simulating ‘real world’ 
performance of devices. For instance, 
Geekbench 6 actually uses а 
headless browser to simulate web 
browsing activities. 

Additionally, software like 3DMark's 
Time Spy carefully measures metrics 
while rednering footage similar to 
what you would find in a graphically 
rich videogame. 

Still, it only takes a quick search 
on forums like the /r/overclockers 
subreddit in order to see that users are 
often baffled by the results. The chief 
complaints are that their device will pass 
popular benchmarks with flying colors, 
but games will still not perform to a 
sufficient standard. 

This is an excellent demonstration of 
the old English adage, "The proof of the 
pudding is in the eating.’ In other words, 
the quality of your hardware is best judged 
on direct experience 

Sometimes, this is easier to resolve, 
as certain games, like Cyberpunk 2077, 
contain internal benchmarking tools, 
which you can use to assess system 
performance, particularly in light of any 
modifications you've made. 

If you arent fortunate enough 
to be using a game that supports 
benchmarking and configuration, you 
can still perform your own tests by 


Stress tests are harder 
Less customizable tests 
Cantake more time 


installing MSI Afterburner [[wwmsi] 
com/Landing/atterburner}. 

Afterburner is best known as a 
graphics overclocking utility. However, 
during setup, you will be prompted to 
install RTSS (RivaTuner Statistics Server), 
a performance monitor for graphics 
cards and APIs. Once the installation is 
complete, open MSI and click the settings 
icon on the Left. Use the "General tab to 
select your principal GPU from the top 
drop-down menu. Next, click into the 
"Monitoring! tab. 

Hover your mouse over the ‘Active 
hardware monitoring graphs’, and read 
through the tooltip. As you will learn, you 
can click the tick mark next to each graph 
name, eg. 'CPU1 Clock’, then check the 
box marked ‘Show in On-Screen Display 
to have it appear in-game. Do this for 
other key data like GPU temperature and 
CPU usage. 

The default polling period is one 
second, but you can adjust this from 
the top of the window if you wish. 
Click "Apply to save changes. We 
noted during our research for this article 
that MSI can take a few moments to 
do this. 

Next, find the RTSS launcher among 
the ‘hidden icons’ at the bottom right of 
your desktop. First, adjust the ‘On-Screen 
Display Zoom' slider to make sure the 
text is large enough. Click and drag your 
mouse on the ‘60° in the bottom box to 


By default, RTSS displays key performance monitors in a transparent overlay in-game. 


Gerd Motore OnSowen Daly Bevhmak Somen captus [i] 


Show n Logach heyto LCD dc 


Click the tick mark next to the performance 
indicators you want to see. 


set where the game data will appear on 
screen. You can also click into the 'On- 
Screen Display palette' to adjust the text 
color. By default, the stats appear as a 
transparent overlay in-game, but you 
can enable ‘On-Screen Display Fill’ if 
you wish. 

RTSS cautions that some anti-cheat 


systems in games may detect the 
kind of application code hooking/ 
on-screen display required ог 
benchmarking, and falsely assume 


that youre playing unfairly. |f this 
happens then we recommend enabling 
‘Stealth Моде, which supposedly 
makes RTSS harder to detect. Once you ve 
done this, it's simply a matter of firing 
up your chosen game to view your 
chosen stats. 

Unfortunately, MSI is focused on 
graphics and CPU performance, so there's 
no way to monitor hard drive read/write 
speeds while youre playing. However, at 
the very least, you can identify actions 
and areas in-game that subject your CPU, 
RAM, and GPU to the most usage. Ù 


| direct.com 


Over 100 brands to choose from 


pu [ 3 == 


= ШИНИ 
SIDENT EVIL 4 RE VIEWEL 


GAMER 


3 GREAT REASONS TO SHOP WITH US 


From tech and gaming titles to fashion and celebrity 
magazines there's something for everyone. 

Immerse yourself in our specialist one-off publications about 
your favorite hobby or interest. 

Exclusive Offer - Get 15% Off Guides and Specials - MDMAG15 


Convenient home delivery Save on shop price Never miss an issue 1.4m subscriptions sold 


RX 7900 GRE ў BUILD YOUR 3 THE BEST | 7, 
REVIEWED OWN VPN AI PCs 


RTX 4080 SUPER ў, 
RE ) d 


BUILD AN 
GAMING PC 


AMD's game-ready 
8600G CPU tested 


Benched against 
Arc A750 & 7600XT 
Get the most frames 
for your money 


DON'T GET 
HACKED! 


MASTER 
PHOTOSHOP'S 
". NEW FEATURES 


"Price in US $. Offer is valid on US orders only, visit us affwww.magazinesdirect corr]or call 1-844-779-2822 for other subscription options. 
Offer valid until July 30 2024. 


best free software |" | 


SOFTWARE 


Don't compromise your privacy by using the same old 
tools. Robert Irvine reveals the best new ways to block 
web trackers, protect your data, and stay anonymous 


40 | me 


Privacy is such an important aspect of 
our online lives that it's often exploited 
to promote software that's not private. 
"Keep your privacy under control, 
says the download page for Chrome, 
despite Google being court-ordered to 
destroy user data it collected through 


Maintain your online 
cy’ promises CCleaner, whose 

privacy policy states that i 

personal data in order to personalize 

ads for you’ [tinyurL.com/S8ksk3f]] 


JUL 2024 


Popular though these programs are, 
they undermine your privacy rather 
than boostit, while some lesser-known 
tools are more trustworthy. Rather 
than collect and share information 
about your web activities, they protect 
you from companies who engage 
in intrusive practices by blocking 
trackers, disguising your identity, 
and letting you easily delete your 
private data. 

In this feature, we reveal the best 
secretsoftware for staying anonymous 


online, as well as highlighting new 
features and hidden privacy settings in 
programs you may already use. 

Unlike Chrome's Incognito mode, 
which doesn't stop sites collecting 
your data—as Google now adi 
these tools work exactly as promised, 
allowing you to browse the web 
discreetly without being spied on. 

We've chosen a mix of free Windows 
software, browser extensions, and 
mobile apps to keep you 100 percent 
private on every device. 


Block more trackers in web pages 
Allthe main web browsers now 
include tracking protection, 
though some (Brave and 
Firefox] do a better job than 

others [Chrome and Edge] through their 

‘strict’ or ‘aggressive’ settings. However, 

to stay completely private online by 

blocking every hidden tracker, you need 
uBlock Origin [ublockorigin.com]] 

This extension now has around 55 
million users worldwide, but it's still not 
as well known as inferior rivals such as 
AdBlock and Adblock Plus. Even if you 
already use uBlock Origin to block ads, 
trackers, and annoyances, you may not 
realize that it has additional options for 
blocking further privacy risks. 

Right-click the add-on's toolbar button, 
choose Options, and click the ‘Filter lists" 
tab. Click the arrow next to Privacy and 
tick the AdGuard Tracking Protection 
and AdGuard URL Tracking Protection 
boxes—as well as Easy Privacy, if it isn't 
enabled (Ш in our screenshot below]. 
These augment uBlock Origins own 
filters with rules from freemium service 
AdGuard to provide comprehensive, and 
constantly updated protection against the 
latest trackers—including those hidden 
in web addresses. Click "Apply changes’, 
then ‘Update now В. 

Annoyingly, Google's new Manifest V3 
system, which it's introducing this year, 
will limit content blockers to using 30,000 
filtering rules—uBlock Origin currently 
uses around 300,000—which will make 
them less effective at blocking ads and 
trackers. To beat this restriction, uBlock 
Origin has created a Lite version for 
Manifest V3 [tinyurLcom/mrx2udcp]] that 


[IU 
[go 


[go 
E юс mers- 


Bl сормо © À О 


п 2 ез 


ng Protec 


Boost uBlock Origin's tracking protection 
using additional filters from AdGuard. 


Y Fiter lists 


Settings 


Zen sets up a proxy to block tracking 
requests in Windows software. 


lets you configure its filters on a site- 
by-site basis by choosing from Basic, 
Optimal, or Complete filtering modes. 


Block trackers in 
Windows software 
— Tools such as uBlock Origin 
make it easy to block trackers 
in your browser, but it's more 
difficult to avoid them in other 
software on your PC. Many programs now 
include tracking elements that connect to 
the internet in the background to share 
details of your activities with developers, 
advertisers, and data brokers—and 
potentially criminals. 
You can block these using a new 


open-source tool called Zen 
сот/усі19204-до to the Downloads 


section under the program description), 
not related to Zen Internet. This free ad- 
blocker and privacy guard sets up a proxy 
that intercepts tracking requests from 
internet servers and blocks any containing 
ads, tracking scripts, malware, and other 
unwanted content. By working at a system 
level, Zen protects your PC against threats 
that browser extensions miss, such as 
trackers embedded in Windows software 
and system components. 

Download and run either the x64 
installer or portable version of Zen, 
clicking "More info’ then ‘Run anyway’ 
when you see the Microsoft Defender 
SmartScreen warning—it's safe to use. 
When you first open the program, click 
Start then Yes to install its root certificate, 
which allows it to check and modify HTTPS 
requests. This certificate is privately 
generated and stored on your PC. 


Once thisis done, Zen will start showing 
blocked requests on its Home tab. To 
boost its protection, click the ‘Filter lists’ 
tab and switch on ‘Peter Lowe's Ad and 
tracking server list—further filters can 
be enabled in the drop-down menu. If you 
have trouble loading a particular website 
or program, click Stop to disconnect from 
the proxy. 

Although Zen isn't as powerful as paid- 
for solutions, such as AdGuard's Windows 
app [inyurLcom/Zwdc7rkv]] its easy 
to use, and you don't need to sign up for 
an account. 


Remove tracking elements 
from URLs 
Many URLs on websites— 
including Google ^ search 
results, Amazon product 
pages, and social-media 
posts—contain extra code after the main 
web address. This is usually for analytics 
purposes, to tell site owners when you 
clicked the link, the country youre 
browsing from and the device youre 
using, but the code can also be used to 
track you around the web. 

To stop this happening, install the 
extension ClearURLs in your Chromium 
[inyurLcom/Zkws77pz] ог Firefox 
browser [ünyurLcom/77vn7hen]] This 
protects your privacy by removing 
tracking elements from URLs, and letting 
you click through to pages without being 
redirected through a third-party service. 

You can see how many elements the 
extension has blocked by clicking its 
toolbar button and checking the Statistics 


Statistics 


Elements 
Blocked 


fox - 
Rules-Status. 


ClearURLs removes tracking code from 


URLs, including Google search results. 


JuL 2024 | mmm | 41 


best free software 


section in the information panel. If 
ClearURLs prevents some sites from 
loading properly, click the Settings cog 
and switch off ‘Allow domain blocking’. 

Brave and Firefox let you remove 
tracking elements when you copy links. In 
the former, right-click the link and choose 
"Copy clean link’; in the latter, select Copy 
Link Without Site Tracking. 


Don’t get tricked by cookie 
consent pop-ups 
Cookie-consent pop-ups are 
supposed to give you more 
control over the data websites 
collect about you, but are often 
so confusing that you end up agreeing to 
be tracked. The popular extension | Don't 
Care About Cookies solves the annoyance 
of these pop-ups by hiding them, but it 
also allows sites to install cookies. 
Consent-O-Matic is a lesser-known 
but more private alternative, which 
rejects all cookies by default and hides 
consent banners. Available for Chromium 
browsers [ünyurLcom/tdwkdus8]]Firefox 
and Safari on 
iOS [пушт сот TST] it lets you 
configure its settings to permit essential 
cookies while blocking tracking ones. 
Click its toolbar button, choose More 
Add-On Settings, and on the Your Choice 
tab, select the categories of cookies 
you're happy to allow. For example, 
"Preferences and Functionality’ ll enables 
sites to store data such as your login 
details and personalization settings, while 
"Ad selection, delivery, and reporting’ El 
gives them permission to track you. 


à; Consent.O-Matic 


42 


unctionality 


Ad selection, delivery, and reporting 


Consent-0-Matic rejects tracking cookies 
while allowing essential ones. 


ишн | JUL 2024 


@ vecentrateyes 


17) Google Hosted Libraries 


jQuery 


2 


Counter for locally injected resources 


° 


Decentraleyes replaces web content that 
could track you with its own files. 


You can add rules to Consent-O-Matic 
to improve its detection and blocking. 
Click the Rule Lists tab and copy the URL 
of a rule list into the Add List box—get the 
one used by 1 Don't Care About Cookies 


companies, not only within the apps 
themselves, but in other apps installed on 
your phone or tablet. This is why you often 
See ads and sponsored content relating to 
things youve looked at in one app 
appearing in a completely different tool. 

The DuckDuckGo Private Browser for 
Android prevents 
this from happening using its App 
Tracking Protection feature. As well as 
blocking hidden trackers in sites you visit, 
it refuses tracking requests in other apps 
on your Android device. This stops them 
collecting data about you while allowing 
the permissions they require to work. 

To activate this, tap the three-dot 
menu in DuckDuckGo Private Browser, 
select Settings, and enable App Tracking 
Protection. Tap ‘OK’ to allow DuckDuckGo 
to set up a VPN on your device. This allows 
the browser to block trackers ata network 
level. DuckDuckGo will tell you how many 
tracking attempts it's blocked in apps 
in the past seven days, and the apps and 
tracking companies responsible. 


from[tinyurl.com/7xwvjdan] 


The — iOS browser туо] 
com/Ay5Bua3h] doesn't include this 


Stop content-delivery 


networks tracking you 

s Lots of websites rely on third- 
party services to provide some 
content, including images, 


videos, and fonts. Known as 
content-delivery networks (CDNs], these 
services help speed up page-loading 
times, but they're also able to track you 
This is because once you've viewed their 
content, they can follow you to the next 
site that uses their network 
Blocking CDNs may cause sites to 
break, but you can stop them tracking 
you by installing Decentraleyes in your 
Chromium or 
Firefox browser [tnyurL.com/3r7árhan]] 


This cuts out the CDN middle man by 
tricking websites into loading its own, 
locally stored files to display content. By 
doing so, Decentraleyes protects your 
privacy without affecting browsing—you 
can see how many resources it's replaced 
on pages by clicking its toolbar button. 

It works in tandem with content 
blockers such as uBlock Origin, and 
without you needing to configure its 
settings. If you have trouble loading a site, 
click the power button to disable the add- 
on's protection. 


Block hidden trackers in 

mobile apps 

С Some trackers embedded in 
mobile apps collect data about 
your activities to share with 
advertisers and other 


feature, but your 105 device has its own 
setting for blocking app tracking. Select 
Privacy & Security’ in the Settings app, 
tap Tracking, and switch off ‘Allow Apps 
to Request to Track’. All new app tracking 
requests will be automatically denied. 


< App Tracking Protection 


DuckDuckGo's Android browser stops apps 
tracking what you do in other apps. 


Make websites forget 
you visited them 
It's no secret that the incognito 
or private mode in your 
browser doesnt keep you 
anywhere near anonymous 
online—as Google was recently forced to 
clarify. But Brave E 
has a secret feature called Forget by 
Default’, which goes further than standard 
private-browsing modes by preventing 
websites from identifying you. 

"Forget by Default’ works by logging 
you out of a site and deleting all its cookies 
and other stored data when you close its 
browser tab. This means that next time 
you visit that site, it won't automatically 
recognize you, and tailor its content—and 
ads—accordingly. 

To access the feature, click the Shields 
(lion head] button on Brave's toolbar, 
and switch on the option, ‘Forget me 
when I close this site’ (see screenshot 
below). This will sign you out and delete 
all cookies and other data as soon as you 
close the current tab. 

To enable ‘Forget by Default’ for 
every site you visit, click Brave's three- 
line menu button, choose Settings, then 
Shields, and switch on ‘Forget me when | 
close this site’. You can disable the option 
on specific sites to stop them logging you 
out by clicking the Shields button and 


switching it of 
Visit [brave://settings/content/all] to 


confirm that ‘Forget by Default’ is wiping 
stored data when you leave a site (some 
unremovable cookies may remain]. 


browser tig 


Block ads. Save даі 


© brave.com 


Trackers, ads. and more blocked 


(Q) эмет ore uP or bravacom 


ита ме seers broken гу Shade down 


Upgrade connections онт. 


Forget me when | close this site 


romememmiconemne (CN 


{Tor Cir 


Tor Circuit 


This browser 
M France (guard) 
V kaly 22.7 
WE Romania 2 


torproject.org 


New Tor circuit for this site 


X | & TorProject| Anonymity Online X + 


v.torproject.org 


Circuit for torproject.org 


2 


New Tor circuit for this site 


Your guard node may not change 


Tor Browser routes your internet connection through a series of global relays. 


Browse the web anonymously 
using Tor 
Brave also has a private- 
browsing mode that uses the 
Tor network to stop websites 
tracking and identifying you. It 
recently improved this mode by 
automatically loading the onion address of 
sites when available, and by redirecting 
you to Tor when you try to visit an onion 
address in standard-browsing mode. 
However, to stay completely anonymous 
online, you should use the dedicated Tor 


e» os «со. 


o =: 


Use Brave's new ‘Forget by Default’ option to stop websites identifying you. 


Browser [forproject.org]] which works in 
permanent private-browsing mode. 

Tor Browser redirects your internet 
connection through an encrypted circuit 
of ‘relays’ around the world, which 
prevents websites, hackers, and other 
snoopers from seeing where you are 
and what you do online. It automatically 
deletes cookies, site data, and browsing 
history when you close it, leaving no trace 
of your activities, and offers a choice of 
security levels to disable web features 
that compromise your anonymity. 

Tor simplified the browser's circuit 
system to make it easier to check which 
relays (also called nodes] your connection 
is being diverted through to disguise your 
IP address. Click the Tor Circuit (squiggly 
line] icon to the left of the address bar (illin 
our screenshot above] to view the nodes’ 
locations and IP addresses. If you suspect 
your anonymity has been compromised, 
perhaps because you've entered personal 
information on a website, click 'New Tor 
circuit for this site’ И to be redirected 
through a new series of relays. 

Tor recently introduced a powerful 
privacy feature called  WebTunnel, 
Which stops anyone—including your 
ISP—knowing that youre using its 
encrypted network. 

Although Tor Browser lets you access 
the so-called dark web, you need to 
enter 56-character onion addresses to 
visit such sites, so you won't accidentally 
stumble across anything illegal. Besides, 


JuL 2024 | mee | 43 


best free software 


many reputable websites, including 
BBC News and Amnesty International, 
have onion versions to help visitors beat 
censorship and surveillance. The main 
drawback is that loading standard sites 
can be slow— especially at the browser's 
Safest security level. 

Tor Browser also has an Android 
app [ünyurLcom/7tzd&nr]] that lets you 
browse the web anonymously on your 
phone or tablet. Apples restrictions 
prevent it from working on an iPhone or 
iPad, so Tor recommends you combine 
Onion Browser 
which was "developed by someone who 
works closely with the Tor Project", with 
its VPN Orbot [ünyurLcomSEShI8271] 


Hide your online activities 
with a free VPN 
A virtual-private network 
(VPN] is the most reliable way 
to access the web 
anonymously, because it 
encrypts your internet connection across 
your entire device, not just within your 
browser (like Tor Browser does). But VPN 
subscriptions can be expensive, and free 
services usually have catches—from tight 
data limits and poor choice of servers to 
dubious privacy policies that let them 
collect and share your data. 
One of the best options is the free 


version of ProtonVPN [protonvpn.com/] 


[Iree-vpnI]which offers unlimited monthly 
data, with no ads and a strict no-logs 
policy. It has a ‘kill switch’ that takes 
you offline when you lose your encrypted 
connection, so your anonymity is never 
compromised, and a ‘stealth mode’ that 
disguises the fact you're using a VPN. 


v= 


Change server 


d Fastest 


OnionShare lets you share and receive files privately over the Tor network. 


However, this mode is currently only 
available in the mobile and macOS apps, 
not the Windows program. 

Previously, ProtonVPN's free plan 
let you choose from servers in the 
Netherlands, Japan, and the US, but it 
now randomly assigns one when you 
click its Quick Connect or ‘Change server’ 
buttons [see screenshot below]. 

This makes it less useful for 
unlocking geo-restricted content than 
for disguising your online activities, 
though it recently added free servers 
in Poland and Romania. Upgrading to 
ProtonVPN Plus for $9.99 a month gives 
you access to over 4,500 servers in more 
than 90 countries, and lets you use the 
service on up to 10 devices (the free 
version limits you to one]. 

Alternatively, Windscribe’s free VPN 
offers 106B of 


ProtonVPNis one of the few free VPNs to offer unlimited monthly data. 


44 | ишш | JUL 2024 


Copy Address 


data a month (2GB until you confirm your 
email address] and access to servers in 10 
countries, including the US, UK, Canada, 
France, and Germany. Its stealth mode is 
available in its desktop and mobile apps, 
and its ‘split tunneling’ feature lets you 
exclude programs from its protection. 


Share and receive files 
anonymously 
m, \ You can use Tor Browser—or a 

VPN—to download files from 

websites without revealing 

your identity or location, but 
its less easy to share files without 
compromising your privacy. For that, you 
need OnionShare [onronshare-org]] which 
lets you send and receive files securely 
and anonymously over the Tor network. 

Install the OnionShare app on your 
PC [it's also available for macOS, Linux, 
Android, and iOS], click ‘Connect to Tor’, 
and select Start Sharing on the Share 
Files tile. Add the files or folders you want 
to share, and click ‘Start sharing’. This will 
generate an onion address your intended 
recipient can enter in Tor Browser to 
access the shared items—click Copy 
Address to paste it into an encrypted 
email or chat message. You also need 
to send the other person the private key 
generated by OnionShare, so they can 
unlock the download. Click ‘Stop sharing 
to remove the files once downloaded. 

To allow someone to send you files 
through Tor Browser, click Start Receiving 
on the Receive Files tab, then Start 
Receive Mode to generate another onion 
address and private key. They can enter 
these in the browser to upload files to you. 

It may sound convoluted, but 
OnionShare is easy to use, and ensures 
that no third parties can intercept the files 
you're sharing—or detect where you and 
the other person are located. 


Fake your email address 

using an alias 

There are lots of temporary 
email services you can use to 
sign up with websites, so you 
can avoid having to share 
your real name and email address. The 
trouble is that some don't let you return 
io your inbox later when you need to 
retrieve important account information. 
Free services also tend to be swamped 
with trackers, so aren't as private as 
you'd hope. 

One solution is to create email aliases 
using — SimpleLogin 
which is powered by the Swiss privacy 
company Proton. Use an alias to register 
with a site or service, and SimpleLogin 
will forward all messages sent to the 
fake email address to your real one— 
without revealing the latter to spammers, 
scammers, and snoopers. You can 
even reply to emails using your alias, to 
maintain your disguise. 

SimpleLogins free plan lets you 
create up to 10 aliases, either using 
your preferred prefix and domain or by 
generating a random one (see screenshot 
below). Its browser extensions and 
mobile apps let you access your aliases 
on the fly, and disable them as required. 
SimpleLogin's Premium plan [to which 
you get a seven-day free trial) costs $30 
a year, and includes unlimited aliases and 
mailboxes, as well as custom domains. 


DuckDuckGo includes a similar 
feature, Email Protection 


|wy|zbvbsI] in its mobile apps, desktop 
browser, and extensions. This lets you 
create an unlimited number of [@duck] 


comladdresses, which forward messages 
to your real email account and remove 
embedded trackers. It's currently in beta, 
but works very well. 


EXsinpletogin аш € 


R create a totally random alias |4 ~ 


Keep your real email address private by 
creating aliases with SimpleLogin. 


Encrypt your private 
emails in Thunderbird 
ProtonMail 


otonme/mal] a 
and Tuta 


сот] provide free 
encrypted email services, 
but limit you to 16B of 
storage. To keep your current 
email address, protect 
sensitive messages, and 
never run out of space, use 
the encryption features in 


Mozilla Thunderbird 
thunderbird.net]] 
Click the  three-line 


menu button in the top-right 

corner of the main Thunderbird window, 
choose Account Settings, then End-to- 
End Encryption (KM in our screenshot). 
Click ‘Add Key' El, select ‘Create a new 
OpenPGP key and Continue. Choose 
your email address in the Identity menu, 
specify how many years your key should 
work for, and click ‘Generate key’. Click 
"Confirm', and Thunderbird will generate 
your OpenPGP key, consisting of public 
and ‘secret’ parts. 

To send someone an encrypted 
message, you first need them to send 
you their public encryption key. Open the 
email that contains this key, double-click 
the ‘asc’ attachment, and click Import to 
save the key to Thunderbird. When you 
compose a new message to that person, 
click the Encrypt button, then write and 
send your email. Your public encryption 
key will automatically be attached, so the 
recipient—but no one else—can decrypt 
and read the message. 

To share your public key with people 
you haven't privately messaged before, 
click the arrow next to Attach and select 
My Open PGP Public Key. This sends them 


Login with passkey 


Bitwarden now lets you sign into websites and your 
web vault using passkeys. 


End-To-End Encryption 


EI 


Thunderbird's built-in encryption tools keep 
your emails completely private. 


an email attachment containing your key, 
so they can reply with their key and you 
can exchange encrypted messages. 


Protect your online 
accounts using passkeys 
Passkeys let you log into 
websites and apps using your 
fingerprint, face, or screen- 
lock PIN, in the same way you 
unlock your PC or phone. Because this 
data is stored on your device rather than 
with the respective services, they're more 
secure and convenient than passwords. 
Our favorite free password manager, 
Bitwarden now 
supports passkeys to give you a simpler 
way to protect your data. Install the 
extension [пуст соттуу 8 73У sign into 
your account, and visit a site that supports 
passkeys [see the list at passkeys. 
directory. Go into the Security section 
of your account settings, find the option 
to set up a passkey, and choose a login 
method—phone, tablet, Windows Hello, 
or security key. Bitwarden will offer to 
save the passkey—type Bitwarden when 
asked. The next time 
you visit, you'll be able 
to login via the passkey. 
Bitwarden recently 
introduced the option to 
sign into your vault with 
a passkey rather than 
a master password— 
click “Turn on’ under 
"Log in with passkey’ 
in its Security settings 
(see screenshot left]. 
It has also added 
passkey support to 
the beta version of its 


105 app [UnyurLcomy] 


JuL 2024 | mmm | 45 


best free software 


Delete all your browsing 
data in one click 
One ofthe most useful features 
in DuckDuckGo's browser is 
the Fire button, which closes 
your open tabs and deletes 
your browsing data. This includes details 
of the sites you've visited; their cookies, 
caches, and favicons; and any permissions 
you granted them. It saves you the hassle 
of wiping these elements manually, keeps 
your activities private, and allows you to 
start your next browsing session with a 
clean slate. 

You can add a Fire button-style 
function to other browsers by installing 
Clear Browsing Data for Chromium 
[inyurLcom/Zxh7lyr] and Firefox 
This lets you 
delete your cookies, cache, form data, 
history, and more by clicking its toolbar 
button and choosing the relevant option. 
Alternatively, wipe all browsing data in 
one go by selecting ‘All data types’. 

To specify which data to include, go 
into the extension's Options and tick the 
boxes in the left-hand menu. You can 
more closely replicate DuckDuckGo's 
Fire button by setting Clear Browsing 
Data to delete all data types and close all 
tabs H from its toolbar button El—switch 
off ‘Ask before removing data' to skip the 
confirmation prompt. 


Clear data from all 
your browsers in one go 
If you switch between multiple 
browsers, it's easy to forget 
how you may have 
compromised your privacy, 
such as by failing to sign out of a personal 
account or delete details of sensitive 
searches. Rather than open each browser 
in turn, wipe everything in one go using 
BleachBit ([yww.Bleachbitorg]. 
This clean-up tool detects which 
browsers you have, and lists the types of 


ъ 


[oem 


Бане Tenge batras 
Brave TES Cars 
Brave Web Applications 

~ Mirosott tage 2 


ge ооматы kons ar 
Edge Browser Ба Codes 
fag Boner Helper Objet 
Wipe private data from all your 
browsers in one go using BleachBit. 


46 | mmm | JUL 2024 


С O Oeu koming Osta choofobpnigcadidbe/on 


Data types Tabs 


Close tabs 


All tabs BH 


Ө cookies 

Ө browsing story 

Cached images and file Disable . 

aha onn dil (3 Cache storage 

Ө ao form dota Miscellaneous (B Form data 

© Downoad history 4. Downloads 

System defaut = 

Ө smew © Service Workers 
Local storage data 

o From browser toolbar + S Local storage 

о 


Plugin data. 


© 


Web SOL data 


Clear Browsing Data deletes all your browsin 


data you can delete, including cookies, 
caches, searches, browsing history, and 
site preferences. For additional options, 
and to include browsers not identified by 
default, click the menu button, choose 
Preferences, and tick "Download and 
update cleaners from community. Click 
‘Save’, and you'll see a list of browser 
settings, including ‘blob ^ storage" 
(unstructured data from online services). 

Tick the boxes nextto the items youwant 
to wipe—or the box next to a browser's 
name—and click Preview. BleachBit will 
list the elements to be removed and tell 
you how much drive space you'll recover. 
Click ‘Clean’ to purge your browsers of 
private data and junk files 


Remove private data 
from photos and videos 
Digital cameras and 
smartphones record 
information about photos you 
take in the form of EXIF 
metadata. This is stored in the image file, 
and includes details of when and where 
the shot was taken and the device used. 
Although this metadata is useful for 
organizing photos by date and location, 
it poses a privacy risk. Strangers who 
study the EXIF data can identify where you 
live and where you've been from the GPS 
coordinates. For this reason, it's wise to 
remove location data from these images. 


Clear all data types 


From browser toolbar 


Show notification on success 


information with a single click. 


The best free tool for this is ExifCleaner, 
which you can download from [ünyurl] 

click the ‘ExifCleaner- 
3.6.0.exe’ link under Assets. Drag 
and drop images into the program 
window, or click Open in the File menu to 
select them manually, and ExifCleaner 
will automatically remove EXIF data 
from the file, and show ‘before’ and 
after’ figures. 

The program supports all main image 
formats, including JPEG, PNG, BMP, GIF, 
and TIFF, and can strip metadata from 
videos. Although it hasn't been updated 
since 2021, it has a clean bill of health on 
VirusTotal [EnyurL.com/yc3xT27d]] 

You can remove metadata from 
photos on your mobile device using free 
apps such as Photo Metadata Remover for 
Android [inyurl.com/Sepwh8i]| and Exif 
Metadata for 10S 


Selected те 


El PI0 006006 
CES 
ge 


Use ExifCleaner to remove metadata 
from photos before sharing them. 


Test the privacy 
of your web browser 
Dont assume that your 
browser's own privacy settings 
Will prevent websites from 
identifying and tracking you. 
Instead, Electronic Frontier Foundation's 
Cover Your Tracks 
[ora]]tick the box ‘Test with a real tracking 
company, and click Test Your Browser. 
The site will tell you if your browser is 
blockingtrackingads, invisibletrackersand 
fingerprinting, and how much identifying 
info you're leaking—scroll to the Detailed 
Results section to learn what they are. 
In our tests, only Tor Browser and Brave 
(with ‘aggressive’ fingerprinting enabled) 
offered complete protection. 


Confirm your ad blocker 

and VPN are working 
Although we recommend 
uBlock Origin, there are lots of 
good alternatives—just make 
sure your choice works as 

promised. Adblock Test [UünyurLcom/] 


[wy3nuhac]tests the effectiveness of your 
blocker against ads, tracking scripts, 
analytics tools, social-media trackers, and 
other intrusive elements, and gives it a 
protection percentage score. Try carrying 
out its test with your ad blocker enabled 
and disabled to compare the difference. In 
our test, uBlock Origin achieved 99 percent 
protection, blocking 139 out of 140 
elements, but without it, Chrome scored 
only three percent, blocking just four. 
Similarly, you can check that your VPN 
or other anonymity tool is disguising your 
ІР address by visiting [[РТеак пере: 
[iplesk:ne]. If your real location and ISP are 
shown in the ‘IP address details’ box, your 
privacy isn’t being properly protected. 


‘See how trackers view your browser 


tracking 


locking trating ate? 


Cover Your Tracks tests your browser's protection against 


tracking and fingerprinting. 


Our testdindicate that you have you 
have strong protection against Web 


99% 
© 


Q Retest 


© Total : 140 


© 139 blocked 


© 1 not blocked 


Testyour ad blocker to make sure it's 
effectively blocking trackers. 


Check if your data 

has been breached 
Mozilla _ Monitor — [monitor] 
mozilla.org] formerly called 


Firefox Monitor, checks your 

email address against the Have 
1 Been Pwned database to determine if it's 
been involved in any data breaches. Ifso, it 
displays ‘Action needed’ warnings, tells 
you what info is affected, and lets you click 
‘Fix all exposures’ to get advice on securing 
your accounts. Mozilla Monitor works in all 
browsers, and is integrated with Firefox's 
password manager to alert you when your 
details have been compromised. You need 
a Mozilla account to use the free tool. Italso 
has a paid-for Plus plan, which removes 
your personal info from data-broker sites. 


Let's protect your data 


CAN YOU CHAT 
PRIVATELY WITH 
AI TOOLS? 


The rise of Al chatbots, such as 
ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot, 
has led to privacy concerns over 
the way they collect your data. 
Queries and commands you enter 
are stored and shared to train 

Al models, but they're also 
linked to your online identity, 
including your location, email, 
and phone number. 

Last year, ChatGPT's owner, 
OpenAl, addressed privacy 
worries by adding the option to 
let users switch off ‘Chat History 
& Training’. You'll find this in the 
Data Controls section of the tool's 
Settings on the ChatGPT website 
and its mobile app, where you can 
also clear your chat history. But 
this merely stops your chats being 
used for training purposes— 
OpenAl will still store them for 30 
days, and link them to you. 

Brave's new Leo chatbot 


[com/leo]]is more trustworthy, 
because it doesn't require an 
account, collect information 

such as your IP address or, store 
your chats. You could also try 

the Android app ‘Chat with AI - 
Incognito’ 
which claims to provide ‘complete 
anonymity’ by not requiring an 
account, storing your data or 
allowing third parties to track you. 


Mozilla Monitor alerts you when your passwords are 
involved in data breaches. 


JuL 2024 | mmm | 47 


Centerfold |** | 


PERFORMANCE GEAR LAID BARE 


APP OOPS 

The Orbi's hardware 
'es are state of the 

it the app is a mixed 


Netgear Orbi 970 


NETGEAR WAS QUICK off the mark with 
its RS700S, one of the first routers we've 
seen supporting the latest Wi-Fi 7 standard. 
The Netgear Orbi 970 mesh system was 
announced around the same time, and 
promised to be one of the best mesh Wi-Fi 
systems on the market. It's taken a while 
to hit retail, but it's finally ready to ramp up 
your home networking performance. 

The Orbi 970 goes further and faster than 
the standalone RS700 with a three-piece 
"whole home' mesh system. Capable of a 
top speed of 276bps and covering areas of 
up to 10,000 square feet, there is one catch: 
It's phenomenally expensive, with the three- 
piece system coming in at $2,299. Ouch. 

The cost of the Orbi 970 will probably 
rule it out for most home users, especially 
those with domestic broadband services 
running at around 150Mbps. However, Wi- 
Fi 7 isn't just about speed; it also brings 
improved capacity and reliability, and the 
Orbi 970 claims to provide fast, reliable 
connections for up to 200 devices on your 
home or office network. It also includes 
new Wi-Fi 7 features, such as ‘preamble 
puncturing’, which helps to reduce outside 
interference and improve the reliability of 
your Wi-Fi connections. 

While there aren't that many computers 
or mobile devices that currently support 
Wi-Fi 7, the Orbi 970 will still be backward- 
compatible with older devices that are still 
using Wi-Fi 5or 6, soit’s agoodwayoffuture- 
proofing the Wi-Fi network in larger homes. 
-MAXIMUM PC 


BUILD YOUR NETWORK 


MD This three-piece system can cover areas of up to 10,000 


square feet. However, there's also a two-piece option available, 
which covers up to 6,600 square feet for a still rather hefty $1,699. 
If you're a Silicon Valley zillionaire, you can extend coverage even 
further with add-on units for a mere $900 each. 


МУ А 
how to back up everything | = 
‘x vs NES 8 А S г 


Let 
T 


Fe į ' 
La Ў - ` М 
TZ EDO | 


EVERYTHING 


Want to back up 
your important 

data for free? 
Nick Peers has 
your safety net 


WE ALL KNOW how priceless our 
personat data is. You can't recreate photos 
and hand-crafted documents from thin 
air. Another crucial commodity is time: 
how damaging would it be to spend more 
than a few hours {never mind 2-3 days] 
recovering your system to a usable state? 

Armed with the right backup regimen, 
you'll never have to worry about losing 
more than a few minutes’ work again. 
Over the next seven pages, we'll reveal 
howto protect not just your main Windows 
PC and everything on it, but your Linux 


machines, too. For good measure, we'll 
help you back up key photos, settings, and 
apps on your iOS and Android devices, too. 
Better still, for the most part, we'll 
show you how to do all this at no cost to 
yourself. We'll even reveal a trick for 
swapping backup space with a trusted 
friend or family member so you can avoid 
monthly fees for securing a copy of your 
data offsite. Should the worst happen, 
we'll show you how to get your PC and its 
contents up and running, too. Read on to 
banish data loss to the annals of history. 


how to back up everything | == 


LET'S START with the most important device of all: your main 
Windows PC. What we're looking for is a multi-layered solution. 
First, there's the need to protect all your personal files and 
folders. You might also want to back up selected apps and 
settings, such as email. Finally, you want a fail-safe backup of 
your entire system, so you can quickly get up and running again in 
the event of disaster. 

In the past, all the tools you needed could be found in Windows: 
File History for files, and Windows Backup and Restore for the 
fail-safe backup. Now, Microsoft has decided to focus exclusively 
on its cloud sync to the point where the ‘new’ Windows Backup 
tool in Settings is little more than a front-end for syncing key 
personal folders, Microsoft Store apps, and selected Windows 
settings to your OneDrive storage. 

The problem is twofold. First, its not particularly 
comprehensive, which might explain why File History still lives 
on behind the scenes. Second, it assumes that you want to store 
your data on Microsoft's servers. Even if you have a Microsoft 365 
subscription to use, can you trust Microsoft with keeping your 
personal data safe? 


BACK UP PERSONAL FILES A! OLDERS 


When it comes to protecting your personal data, you have two 
choices: a traditional regular backup of specific files or folders to 
a local hard drive using a schedule, or a sync-based option that 
typically backs up data to the cloud or on a network device in real 
time. The latter ensures your critical backups are always virtually 
up to date, while also retaining earlier versions for additional 
redundancy. Examples of sync-based storage include OneDrive, 
Google Drive, and the self-hosted Nextcloud. 

We recommend mixing both methods for additional 
protection—OneDrive users should consider using the main 
client rather than rely exclusively on Windows Backup. Like all 
cloud-based clients, you'll need to ensure all data you wish to 
be backed up resides in the client's parent directory, such as СА 
Users\Username\OneDrive or D:\Nextcloud). 

When it comes to backing up files locally, you have a choice 
of two approaches: Duplicati [[https:/duplicaticoml, or Hasleo 
Backup Suite (fywweasyuefi.com], both of which are free. 


Duplicatiinstalls as a web-based service, so is configured through 
your browser—see the May 2023 issue for a complete tutorial on 
using it. One compelling reason to choose Duplicati is that you 
can store backups both locally and online through many cloud 
storage services, including OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, and 
Mega.nz ]Better still, these backups can be encrypted separately, 
so you don't need to trust your cloud provider's own security. 

However, if you don't want to use your cloud storage in this 
way—or you have no cloud storage subscription at all, and would 


ЕШ 


Ud data backup - remote 


Duplicati can handle local and offsite backups. 


52 | mmm | лл 2024 


Windows 11's latest backup tool is intrinsically linked to OneDrive. 


like to store your files remotely in a different way, as outlined in 
the free remote storage box—then Hasleo Backup Suite could be 
a better choice, particularly as you'll be using it to take fail-safe 
image backups. 


BACK UP FILES WITH HASLEO 


Launch Hasleo and choose Backup » File Backup. The folder pane 
provides a means of browsing your computer for folders and/or 
files to back up. You may wish to create a single all-encompassing 
backup job or individual jobs for certain folders. Whichever option 
you choose, select what to back up before giving your task a 
suitably descriptive name. 

Click the folder icon next to choose where to store these 
backups—it goes without saying that this should be a 
separate physical drive to your original data. Next, click 'Backup 
options’. Click Edit under ‘Image retention policy’, followed by 
'Add backup schedule'. 

Hasleo supports both differential and incremental backups 
to save space, so we recommend running three separate tasks: 
one monthly full backup, a weekly differential backup, and as 
many incremental backups as you need. Start by creating the 
monthly backup—be sure to change Backup mode to Full, and 
check ‘Run missed schedule at the next system startup’, before 
clicking OK. Next, create a weekly differential backup, followed by 
a daily incremental backup. With this last backup, you can create 
a single daily backup or choose ‘Run at intervals’ to take multiple 
backups between two specific points (say, working hours]. The 
more frequently you back up, the less data you risk losing. 

Once your backup schedules are in place, examine the image- 
retention policy to determine how many of each type to keep. 
Check each box (Full, Incremental, Differential], and choose 


Make sure your data is backed up at least once a day. 


Create a searchable (and easy to back up) archive of your email. 


whether to keep a select number of backups, or for a specific 
period (days, weeks, months or years]. Check ‘Always retain the 
first backup’ to keep the oldest backup you create. How long you 
keep backups is up to you—if youre only interested in having 
access to recent versions of files, then 1-3 months for each type 
will prevent your backup drive from filling up. Click OK. 

Work your way through the other options—your backups will 
be stored in compressed files to save more space, which you 
can encrypt with a password using AES256 encryption. You can 
also receive email notifications if backups succeed [ог fail]. Most 
settings are optional, but do select "Check the integrity of the 
backup image files on completion’—after all, a corrupt backup 
isn't any better than having no backup at all. 

Once done, click OK, click ‘Backup schedules’ to verify that 
it's noted your schedule, then click OK, followed by Save. Finally, 
click Backup to take your first backup. 


What about other key data, including personal settings? Don't 
be fooled by the promise that your preferences are backed up in 
Settings under Accounts > Windows backup. These cover just a 
small selection of Windows settings. 

Let's start with your email. Whether your mail is stored in the 


cloud or on your PC, MailStore Home [[vww.mailstore.com7en/] 


allows you to archive old emails from 
a range of sources, including Outlook and Thunderbird, as well as 
Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, or indeed, any POP3 or IMAP account. After 
connecting your account, you can also choose to free up space by 
deleting any emails after they've been downloaded to your new 
archive. However, if you do this, make sure your MailStore Home 
archive file is backed up separately—given the potential size of 
the file, we recommend using Duplicati or Hasleo rather than 
entrusting it to your cloud provider. 

Most browser settings can now be backed up by signing into an 
account in the browser Edge is linked to your Microsoft account, 
and Chrome to Google, while the likes of Firefox, Opera, and 
Vivaldi offer their own proprietary accounts. If you don't trust the 
cloud or want the added security of an offline backup, consult your 
browser's documentation or forums for details of locating your 


profile folder—for example, Firefox users should visit[https: 


ozilla-orq/en-US/kb/back-and-restore-intormatio 
for full step-by-step instructions. 

When it comes to other programs, you may be able to quickly 
and easily store their settings for free with the help of CloneApp 
[https://github.com/builtbybeUCloneApp), which supports 
around 250 apps and tools. Failing that, Look for an export settings 
option or consult its documentation and support forums. 


Syncthing manual fhitps://docs.syncthing. net] 
EZ Trusers/antrusted. him] 


FREE REMOTE 
BACKUP STORAGE 


Ifyou don't trust the cloud or can't afford to pay for 
a cloud storage plan, then one way to get secure 
offsite storage is through a mutual arrangement 
with a friend or family member. That way, you get 
to store your data in a remote location without 
having to pay an ongoing fee for the privilege. 

From here, you have two choices: you can 
agree to trade storage space, with each person 
giving up some of their own storage to the other. 
Alternatively, you can look into swapping hard 
drives—choose a network-attached model for 
24-7 access and ease of setting up. This could be 
your own self-built server, or a NAS from the likes 
of Synology or QNAP, basically one capable of 
running Syncthing[[https://syncthing.net]. 

The beauty of Syncthing is that you can set 
things up at home, complete the initial sync of your 
data over your own network, and then pass on the 
drive to your friend. Once powered up at their end, 
Syncthing will continue to keep your data in sync 
going forward. For a complete guide to setting up 
and using Syncthing, check out the July 2023 issue. 

What's the best way to set up Syncthing for 
this purpose? Ideally, you back up toa local drive 
first, then simply use Syncthing to transfer the 
compressed backup to your remote storage. 

One additional security feature is that Syncthing 
allows you to designate this remote storage as 
‘untrusted’ in the Sharing tab when setting up 

the connection. Choose a strong but memorable 
password or passphrase, and your data will be 
encrypted making it unreadable at the other end. 
For more details on trusted connections, including 
the steps you'll need to follow should you ever 
have to decrypt this data to recover it, see the 


Thie Device 


Remote Devices 5) 
Й 


Syncthing makes it easy to share backups between 
friends and family. 


JuL 2024 | mmm | 53 


how to back up everything 
v *.-— 


SYSTEM 
SNAPSHOTS 


A. pu 


It doesn't matter how diligent you are—over time, 
your Windows installation starts to get bogged 
down with leftover files, Registry entries, and other 
unwanted elements from long-forgotten program 
installations. And then there's the aftermath of a 
Windows Update or driver install gone wrong, leaving 
your system in a semi-working state. How can you 
marole of a complete Windows reinstall? 
n is to restore your last drive image, but 
if that’s more than a few days old, you could end up 
losing more than you bargained for. Windows has one 
solution in the form of System Restore, but it's rarely 
switched on by default. To use it going forward, type 
"System Restore’ into the Search menu and choose 
‘Create a Restore Point’. Select your system drive 
and click Configure to verify it's switched on, and 
that it's been allocated enough space [typically 5-10 
percent, depending on the size of your drive]. Going 
forward, it should take regular system snapshots, as 
well as snapshots before key events like application 
installations and updates. 

Should you need to roll things back, click the 
"System Restore... button from the same dialog. 
You'll be shown a recommended [the most recent) 
Restore point—click "Scan for affected programs’ to 
see what changes will be reversed, followed by Close 
and Next to undo those changes. If necessary, select 
"Choose a different restore point' to go further back 
in time. 

System Restore isn't comprehensive, so there may 
be times where it can't fix things to your liking—in 
those situations, you may be forced to rely on an 
older image-based backup. Alternatively, take a look 
at RollBackRx (around $100 after free trial[https:71 
[Rorizondatasys.com/roliback-rx-time-machine) that 
provides you with the ability to roll back your entire 
PC in seconds, even when Windows refuses to boot. 


System Restore remains a viable way to undo certain 
system changes. 


шшш | JUL 2024 


Create a full fail-safe backup of your entire hard drive. 


BACK UP YOUR ENTIRE SYSTEM 


Our final backup is the fail-safe one. It will create an exact 
cloned copy of your Windows system drive and everything on it. 
This will allow you to restore Windows to a working state with 
minimum disruption—even if your entire installation is lost. You 
can even use it to restore Windows to a new hard drive if your 
original drive fails. 

Once again, we're using Hasleo, and the process is broadly 
similar to the folder-based backup you created earlier. This 
time, choose System Backup under Backup to pre-select all the 
partitions required to run Windows. As before, give it a suitably 
descriptive task name and choose a location on your backup 
drive. Work through the backup options as before. Again, we 
recommend setting up the same three schedules—monthly full, 
weekly differential, and daily incremental backups. This means 
that you'll never have to roll back more than a single day. 

Once the initial backup has completed (and been verified], 
Switch to the Tools section. Here, you'll see an Emergency Disk 
option—click this to set up your emergency boot media. In most 
cases, you won't need to add any additional drivers, so simply 
check "Download WinPE components' if they're not already on 
your PC, and click Next. Hasleo will build the emergency boot 
media and then give you the option of writing it to an empty USB 
flash drive (8GB or larger], or exporting it as an ISO file for either 
burning to DVD or adding to your Ventoy [[https://ventoy nel) 
bootable flash drive. 

Ideally, you won't rely on a single backup location for your drive 
images—if you have a second drive, then repeat the above steps 
to set up a second backup job pointing to the second drive. Make 
sure it runs on a different day or time of day to avoid conflicting 
with the other backups that you're performing. If you have 
network-attached storage, an easier option might be to set up a 
Syncthing job to keep the contents of your backup folder synced 
to your network rather than trying to save directly to the network 
drive each time. 


If you have Linux installed somewhere—either as a complete 
installation with desktop environment, or as a minimal server 
install—you'll be wanting to protect that, too. When it comes to 
your personal data, you should find that everything you need 
to back up is in your personal home folder (/home/usernamel. 
In addition, a system snapshots tool provides you with System 
Restore-like functionality. When it comes to taking a full drive 
image of your system, however, things get a little more involved. 


IcROSOFT 


АЗЕ, 


Back in Time covers your file and folder backup needs in Linux. 


Let's start with file-based backups. If you're running a server, 
then we recommend Duplicati, because it provides you with a 
web-based interface to simplify backup management. Desktop 
users should use Back In Time, which isn't included by default in 
either Mint or Ubuntu. Install this through the Synaptic Package 
Manager or Terminal (sudo apt install backintime-qt]. 

Once installed, launch the app and select your backup drive 
as the location for your snapshots, plus set a schedule—typically 
five minutes to an hour. Once done, switch to the Include tab to 
select the folders and/or files you want to back up. Use the Auto- 
remove tab to manage backups to prevent your drive filling up. 

You can create multiple profiles, too, allowing you to parcel out 
your backups so that those folders that change more frequently, 
like your Documents folder, are backed up more often. 


When it comes to system snapshots, TimeShift is our tool of 
choice. It comes preinstalled in Mint (Look under Applications > 
System], while Ubuntu users can install it through the App Store 
[search for timeshift under ‘Debian packages’). Follow the wizard, 
selecting RYSNC if prompted. Wait for TimeShift to estimate how 
much space is required to back up your system, then choose 
where to save your snapshots and how often they should be 
run. RSYNC ensures that after your first backup, snapshots only 
record the changes to your hard drive to minimize the storage 
used. Once done, click Create to set up your first snapshot. 

TimeShift can also be used from the command line (sudo apt 
install timeshift). Use the --help flag (timeshift --help) to see 
how to use it, but start by determining which drive to store your 
snapshots on: 
sudo timeshift -listdevices 

The following example sets up TimeShift to take daily 
snapshots of your system and store them on the sdb! drive: 
sudo timeshift -create -comments "Daily backup' -tags D 
~snapshot device /dev/sdb1 


LINUX DRIVE IMAGES 


If you want to take a complete drive image, you can only do so 
safely from outside Linux. This means creating bootable media— 


RECOVER OLDER 
FILE VERSIONS 


Both our recommended backup regimens for files 
| and folders come with an added benef 
| just storing the latest version of your files, you're 
| © saving different versions, too. Sometimes, data 
loss isn't the complete loss of a file, but the fact 

that you've made changes that you regret doing 

in hindsight. 

If you're backing up files and folders through 
Hasleo, rolling back involves clicking Actions next 
to your data backup job on the main screen and 
choosing Restore. Hasleo will show you the date 
and time the backup was taken. To restore an earlier 
revision, click ‘Change version’ to reveal a popup 
menu showing all previous backups by date and 
time. Pick the one you want to restore from, then 
use the folder picker to browse to the file you wish 
to restore. Once selected, we recommend using 
‘Restore to... to select a different folder, so you 
can compare this version with your current one. 

If it's not what you're Looking for, try a different 
version. This principle is the same when restoring 
individual files through other backup tools offering 
multiple versions, including Duplicati and Back in 
Time in Linux. 

If you're backing up your files to the cloud— 
including your own self-hosted Nextcloud instance— 
then you'll have more flexibility over which version 
to restore, as more frequent backups result in 
more file versions to choose from, particularly with 
more recent changes. Restoring these files usually 
requires you to log in to your account through your 
web browser—in the case of OneDrive, for example, 
locate your target file and click ... next to it before 
choosing Version History. Depending on the file type, 
you'll be able to compare versions on screen, then 
= choose to either download a copy or restore it as the 

current version. 


D - E GR 


m 


Restore earlier versions of OneDrive-hosted documents 
through your browser. 


JUL 2024 к 


how to back up everything 


RESTORE YOUR 
SYSTEM 


The unthinkable has happened: disaster has 
struck, and you need to restore your PC to its 
previous working state. This is where your backups 
prove their worth. If you're restoring your Windows 
system and are unable to boot into any flavor of 
Windows including Safe mode), simply boot from 
your Hasleo rescue media, pressing any key when 
prompted to boot from CD or DVD. 

You'll see the familiar Hasleo interface appear, 
and it should scour your drives looking for backups. 
Locate your most recent system backup by its time 
and date and click the Actions button, selecting 
Restore. By default, all the partitions required to 
run Windows should be selected—click Next to 
verify that ‘Restore to original location’ is selected, 
as well as your Windows drive. Click Next, followed 
by Proceed, in order to restore your PC toa 
working state. 

Ifyou run into problems with your Linux 
installation, then your first port of call is TimeShift 
to see if you can simply roll back to the last working 
state (or indeed, an earlier state, if required) from 
within Linux itself. Launch the app, select your last 
working snapshot, and then click Restore—make 
sure your boot device is selected under / while 
/boot, and /home can be left as ‘Keep on Root 
Device’ in most cases. You can run TimeShift from 
the command line or install it from live Linux media 
if necessary: 

sudo timeshift --restore 

Ifyou plan to restore an entire disk image, then 
you'll need to use your Linux live media as before 
to access Disks. This time, however, you click the 
vertical ellipsis button and choose ‘Restore Disk 
Image...’ Click the folder button to locate your 
latest backup image, and click Open, followed by 
‘Start Restoring...” 


Hasleo's rescue media works in the same way 
asthe main program. 


ишш | JUL 2024 


Select Snapshot Levels 


wecky 
Bo 


Bost 


9 Scheduled snapshots are enabled 


Use TimeShift to add System Restore-like capabilities to Linux. 


one option would be to boot from your Ubuntu installation media 
and choose to ‘try’ Linux. Once you're at the familiar desktop, 
open the Disks utility, select your boot drive, and click the vertical 
ellipsis button above it. From the popup menu that appears, 
choose ‘Create Disk Image...’ and then select your backup drive 
as the destination. 

You'll also find that Linux is well stocked for other forms of 
backup and sync—Ubuntu users should visit Settings » Online 
Accounts, where you'll find options for connecting to Google, 
Microsoft 365 (OneDrive), and Nextcloud. Other cloud providers, 
including Dropbox (fiww.dropbox.com/instal-Unux), may offer 
official clients. If yours doesn't, see if an unofficial client has been 
developed elsewhere, or consider switching to another provider 
who does support Linux. 


BACK UP YOUR MOBILE 


Both Android and iOS come with built-in backup tools from Google 
and Apple respectively, while some Android manufacturers— 
including Samsung—may offer their own proprietary backup 
services. These should be treated with care, as while they'll get 
you up and running again, they may not be a good choice if you 
plan to change phone [and manufacturer] in the near future. 

While it's tempting to assume that all is being taken care of 
behind the scenes, it pays to verify what's going on, plus where 
gaps may need filling with specific apps or data. Apple users 
should navigate to Settings, then tap your account name, followed 
by iCloud. You'll need to tap iCloud Backup to back up your iPhone 
or iPad to the cloud, but you'll almost certainly need to be on a 
paid storage plan for this to be effective. It's also not a full backup. 

A cheaper—and more comprehensive—option is to use your 
PC. Apple recently retired iTunes in favor of separate apps: Apple 
Music, Apple TV, and Apple Devices. You'll need to first uninstall 
iTunes, then install Apple Music (and Apple TV if you've purchased 
movies or shows from it]. Once done, install the Apple Devices 
app to back up your iPhone or iPad. 

Start by connecting your 105 device to your PC with a USB or 
USB-C cable, then open Apple Devices. Select your device in the 
sidebar, followed by General. Select ‘Back up all the data on your 
iPhone/iPad to this computer’, check 'Encrypt local backup', and 


E DEVICES, FOL 


Back up your iPhone or iPad to your PC. 


enter a suitably strong—but memorable—password. Finally, 
click Apply, followed by ‘Back Up Now’. 

Afull backup can use hundreds of gigabytes of space, and Apple 
Devices doesn't let you choose where to store those backups. 
Instead, it places them in separate folders [опе per backup) 
inside C:\Users\Username\Apple\MobileSync\Backup. If—like 
us—your C drive is relatively small, you'll want to store them 
elsewhere, but there's no option to do so. The workaround is to 
create a junction link to C:\Users\Username\Apple\MobileSync\ 
Backup. Rather than fiddle around with the command line, use 
a user-friendly tool like Symbolic11 [fhttps://github.com/Benisgo 
to link that folder to another drive. 

Once your first backup is complete, you'll need to remember 
to periodically connect your 105 device to your PC for a fresh 
backup. Apple Devices is also where you go to restore backups, 
while clicking ‘Manage backups’ allows you to remove older, 
redundant backups to free up space. 


BACK UP ANDROID 


Android users should open Settings > System > Backups to verify 
your current settings and schedule. You should see confirmation 
that your backup is stored online in your Google One account, 
along with a breakdown of how much space it takes—the vast 
bulk of this will likely be your photos and videos. 

All Google users get 15GB of storage space for free, shared 
across your Google services. If you're running out of space, tap 
‘Photos and videos’ to see how much your photos take up. If 
they're responsible for the bulk of your storage, you have a couple 
of options. The first is to tap Plan Settings to investigate upgrading 
your plan: a Basic 100GB plan costs $1.99/month ($19.99/year], 
while Premium offers 2TB for $9.99/month or $99.99/year. 


If you can't justify the extra expense, then see if changing 
Backup quality to ‘Storage saver' is enough to free up enough 
storage. If not, you can disable photo and video backup from your 
device using the switch at the top of the page, then investigate 
other options. 


BACK UP MEDIA ELSEWHERE 


If you're happy with backing up to the cloud, but don't want to 
put more money in the hands of either Apple or Google, then 
the good news is that you can upload your device's photos and 
videos elsewhere. If you're a Microsoft 365 user, for example, 
open the OneDrive app and tap Photos to see a notification that 
"Camera backup is off”. Tap ‘Turn on’ to back up your photos to 
OneDrive instead. 

If you've set up your own self-hosted Nextcloud instance 
[see the October 2023 issue], then you can back up to here, too. 
Another self-hosted option supporting both Android and iOS is 
immich [tps Zimmicnepn), which we featured in the Holiday 
2023 issue. 

Also, remember that initial backups can take some time— 
check the app for any additional requirements. You may need to 
leave your phone plugged in and the app active for several hours 
in order to complete the initial upload, for example. 


Not all apps are backed up by default to Google One or iCloud. 
If you're not using your phone's standard calendar, contacts 
and email app, check to see if it's backed up elsewhere [or is 
otherwise hosted in the cloud, in which case it's not an issue]. You 
might also want to investigate what happens with your messaging 
apps—some, like Messenger, will store your messages in the 
cloud, while others require extra steps. 

WhatsApp users should navigate to Settings » Chats » Chat 
backup to verify backups are on and to choose backup frequency 
(weekly by default) and whether to include videos (no by default]. 
Signal users on Android (but not iOS] can also back up their chats 
from within the app, but only to a local folder: tap your profile icon 
and select Chats > Chat backups. Flick the switch to on—you'll 
be prompted to select or create a backup folder, then record the 
passphrase before enabling backups. 

Another option, which can be used to back up any folder on your 
Android device, is FolderSync. The app is free (ad-supported) 
through Google Play, or you can purchase a Personal license 
covering five devices from its website [https://foldersyne.ip] for 
around $11. This supports a wide range of popular cloud services, 
as well as network protocols, allowing you to set up a fail-safe 
backup for just about any file on your phone. Ù 


e 
с 

E 
в 


| 


Take the time to check—and tweak—your phone backups. 


Back up any folder on your Android phone to the cloud with FolderSync. 


JuL 2024 | mmm | 57 


gamesradar+ 


One-stop destination for games, movies, TV, and more! 


New Channels: Movies, TV and Cool Stuff! 
www.ga esradar.com 


" R&D 


STEP-BYSTEP GUIDES TO IMPROVING YOUR PC 


TIP OF THE MONTH 


Apps » Startup 


ZAK STOREY 
CONTRIBUTOR 


TEST BED 
TWEAKING 


Its been a busy year for me, or at 
least the last six to eight months. 
Пена job that wasn't really 
working out and pivoted to being a 
freelance writer. It was terrifying 
at first—the lack of security, the 
piecework lifestyle, and pay. But 
as | reflect, it's given me a host of 


STARTUP PURGE opportunities and knowledge that 
: 1 wouldn't have otherwise had. 
Want to speed up your login time? Fed up with every app under One of those is now being a 
ы И: ? top CPU, GPU, and SSD reviewer 
the sun launching within 2.5 seconds of you signing in? Us too. for multiple different outlets. 
Fortunately, there's a super-quick and simple way of stopping That means from Jan 2024, I've 
cis А i been testing Intel's 14th gen, 
apps from opening up in Windows Head to the Start menu, moving on to AMD's latest X3D 
and type Startup Apps’. Hit Enter, and you'll get a list of all the chips, every GPU you could think 
EHE nachi А ; of, and too many SSDs to count. | 
programs installed on your machine, with the option to disable needed a testbed to get the most 
them from loading on Windows launch/login. out of those components without 


creating bottlenecks. Enter the 
Gigabyte RTX 4080, Dominator 
Titanium Memory, Asus 2790 ROG 

MAKE - USE - CREATE Maximus, and a host of iCUE stuff. 

It worked a treat, but as 

Computex approaches, I'm 

Driver Console. starting to rethink things. 

There are two approaches: an 

approximation of an ‘average’ 

high-end system, complete with 

RGB lighting, and over-the-top 

‘gamer’ branding and kit. Or, | 

- could dump the RGB, pick up the 

66 70 best Noctua kit | can find, a decent 


Е, SPACEDESK 


Es AIO, and test bed 
Edit your photos in || Master Use your tablet as S D SI anh th M m 
Luminar Neo LibreOffice 24 a PC monitor pias ip ADM Йу 


Pro Overclocking memory. Having 
XMP and AMD EXPO timings on a 
single kitis a lifesaver. 


maximum pc.com] 


м submit your How To project idea to:[editor( 


JuL 2024 | am | 59 


presents: 


THIS MONTH WE DISSECT... 


Rabbit Rl vs Humane 


oh 


There's a lot of empty 
space inside the Rabbit 

R1, which is surprising, 

considering how bad the 
battery life is. 


n 


The Rabbit's non-clicky scroll wheel turns 
out to be a Hall Effect sensor, and has a 
magnet inside a roller wheel. 


The R1 runs a low-end smartphone chip, 
so it's not capable of doing any Local Al 
processing—it's all running in the cloud. 


Humane's 
laser projector З 
uses a pair of ťi 
tiny mirrors to 
generate a scan- 
line image—a 
bit like an old 
CRT TV. 

гче 


60 | umm | JUL 2024 


(GD) 


The mainboard powers all the local hardware, with the LLM being based in 
the cloud and only accessible with a Wi-Fi or cellular data connection. 


The Humane Al Pin is physically the higher-quality device. Apparently, it 
was engineered by ex-Apple engineers, and it shows. 


BACKGROUND 


Are Al-powered hardware assistants a gimmick, or the 
beginning of the end for smartphones? Let's find out. 


RABBIT R1 
MAJOR TECH SPECS 


+ 2.3-GHz MediaTek P35 MT6765 eight-core SoC 

+ 2.88-inch touchscreen 

+ 4GB RAM, 128GB storage 

+ BMP stills camera (3,264 x 2,448) with 1080р 24fps video 
+ Bluetooth 5.0, Wi-Fi with 2.4 GHz + 5 GHz, 4G LTE, GPS 

+ 1,000mAh battery 

+1159 


KEY FINDINGS 


+ The battery is lithium-polymer, clocking 1,000mAh. A bigger 
one is needed, given how fast it goes through a charge. 


* The main housing contains a large motor and gear combo 
that powers the swivel mechanism on the R1's camera: 
Attached is the camera sensor and Hall Effect sensor. 


* The camera, LCD panel, and small components run by the 
mainboard. Everything Al-based is on the cloud. There isn't 
enough processing power for a local LAM or LLM. 


HUMANE AI PIN 
MAJOR TECH SPECS 


+ 2.1-GHz Octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon SoC 

* 720p monochrome laser projector, 7cm by 9.6cm display at 
30cm projection distance 

+ 48B RAM, 32GB eMMC storage 

+ 13MP stills camera (4,160 x 3,120] with 1080p 30fps video 

+ Bluetooth 5.1, Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac] with 2.4GHz + 5GHz, MIMO 
LTE, plus GPS, GLONASS, Galileo 

+ 1x internal battery, 2x booster batteries 

* 54.79 (with battery booster) 


* The back cover is essentially a charging coil wrapped in 
plastic, but what really stands out is the level of care that 
has gone into beautifying the interior. 


* The MEMS laser projector uses two piezoelectric mirrors in 
a galvo configuration, reflecting light off two perpendicular 
mirrors that rotate slightly. There are two mirrors for the X 
or Y dimension, which change the laser location. 


+ The mirrors are nicknamed Castor [Circular] and Pollux 
(Rectangular). Castor moves back and forth at a set 
frequency, while Pollux is quasi-static and can be precisely 
positioned. To display an image, a laser shines and reflects 
off the resonant mirror to create horizontal scanlines, then 
reflects off the quasi-static mirror. 


* The mainboard powers the local hardware. The LLM is 
based in the cloud and only accessible via Wi-Fi or cellular. 


CONCLUSION 


As with any first-generation device category, we don't have 
anything to compare the Rabbit R1 or Humane AI Pin to, so 
we're not going to score either of these devices. We hope that 
any future iteration of similar devices will provide easier 
access to their respective batteries. But for now, let's just 
admire the things that Humane and Rabbit did right, cringe at 
its shortcomings (like awful battery life), and wait to see how 
this new class of hardware evolves. Ù 


JuL 2024 | mmm | 61 


R&D == 


Edit your photos 
in Luminar Neo 


YOU'LL NEED THIS 
LUMINAR NEO 


Some image files 


MANY IMAGE EDITING APPS have been jumping on the Al bandwagon, but for Luminar, it was 
less of a leap. The app, from Ukraine-founded [but now New York-based) Skylum Software, was 
already heavily algorithmic, notable for its ability to easily replace skies in photos, as well as 
providing the sharpening and color adjustments you'll find in many raster image editors. 

The app has gone through a few name updates since its inception, and now goes by Luminar 
Neo, but things have moved on since we last touched on it in 2022. It's available as a standalone 
app, and as a plugin for Adobe Photoshop (including Elements] and Lightroom. One thing it's 
very good at is spreading its processing load across all the cores available to it, including the 
GPU. This means its performance is excellent, and its non-destructive approach to image 
editing means edits can easily be rolled back if necessary. 

It's easy enough to install, and comes with a free trial if you provide your email address. Here 
are some of the things you can do using the newly added features. -IAN EVENDEN 


has introduced an ‘Al’ version of the tool that attempts to 
choose a pleasing composition for you. In our experience, 
[image B] it's capable of doing this, placing the subject in 
this image nicely according to the rule of thirds, but in 
other image we tried, it seemed to get confused, placing 
one subject's face down into the bottom right corner of 
the image, preferring to make the clouds that made up 
the background the centerpiece of the composition. 

» Before you can do any of this, however, you'll need to 
find the tools—Luminar likes to open with its Presets to 
the fore, encouraging you to enter its marketplace and 
spend money. To enter the Edit mode, you'll need to click 
the Edit button at the top. 


ENHANCEMENTS 
The Crop tool is at the top of the Edit toolbar, 


but there's plenty underneath. The Al tools are 
distinguished by a little ‘Al’ icon in superscript to their 


GET THE APP 
Luminar is easy to install 


5 just a case of downloading 
the installer file гота ium com/Iuminar-iriator 


the free demo version. There are a couple ways to pay for it if 
you like it—a one-off lifetime payment or various subscription 
plans—but the seven-day trial should be enough for you to work 
out if it's an app that you want to pay for. 

» There's little that Luminar can do that you couldn't achieve in 
Photoshop, but Luminar's secret sauce is to make it all smoother, 
easier to approach, and hides all its technical workings behind a 
minimal interface. 


GET STARTED 
There are a couple of ways to get your images into 


Luminar. You can add entire folders, including raw images 
from your camera, or one image at a time. Both of these options 
are found on the File menu, which is hidden behind the Luminar 
star logo in the top left-hand corner of the interface [Image A]. As 
you work on more images in Luminar, they will be added to the 
Catalog section, which is also found at the top of the interface. 
You can slip into this at any time, and it's an impressively smooth 
and fast transition—your work is automatically saved, so you can 
switch between images at any time. 

» Once you've settled on an image to work with, one of the 
first things to look at is the Crop tool. This is a staple of image- 
editing apps, and allows you to trim away the edges of your 
photo, altering the aspect ratio and the composition. Luminar 


62 | mmm | suL 2024 


right, and the first of these on the list is Enhance. It's not 
a new tool for Luminar, but the Al implementation brings 
a fresh twist. Essentially, it's content-aware sharpening 
with contrast and saturation tweaks, and by default 
it's applied to the entire image. There's a Masking tab, 
however, and this is where the new Al smarts are applied. 
You can automatically select the subject or background 
of an image just by hovering your mouse pointer over 
them, and add and subtract from the selection, too. 


LASH/ ANDREY 2VYAGINTSEV/SUAD KAMARDEEN/LARM RMA HI HENDRIK CORNELISSEN 


Once youve got your selection, you can move the 
Enhancement slider and see what it does—there's only one, so 
you don't get much control over the changes it makes apart from 
how strong they are. 


SKIES 
One thing Luminar is famous for is its ability to replace 
the sky in an image. Photoshop can do it now too, but 

for a while this was purely Skylum's area of expertise. Sky is 

the next choice on the Edit sidebar list, and you get a lot more 
options. There's a masking tab here too, and while it's generally 
fine, we found that, like many automatic tools, it was unable to 
cope with fuzzy edges, such as the interface between hair and 

the background [| 1, so using a manual tool, such as a 

brush or gradient, or the refinement sliders, on these will give 

you a better result. A new addition to this section is a Luminance 
mask, which allows you to select only the bright or dark parts of 
an image. This is particularly useful for skies. 

Once you've told the app what part of the image is the sky, or 
allowed it to make up its own mind, you can select from a list of 
new skies or upload your own, and they will be inserted into the 
composition. From there, you can move back to the Adjustments 
panel and play with the lighting of the scene. The three Scene 
Relighting sliders affect the brightness and color in the image. 
The first two, Strength and Saturation, affect the whole image, 
but mostly the background, while the third, Relight Human, picks 
out any people in the photo. There are also adjustments that can 
be made to the sky, whether you've replaced it or not, allowing 
you to throw the clouds out of focus or add an atmospheric haze 
effect, as well as tweaking the brightness and color saturation. 


ESSENTIALS 
The Essentials section of the toolbar contains 


tools that you'll be familiar with from other 
image-editing apps. There's little new here, but the 
ability to increase or decrease exposure and contrast 
across the whole image, or selectively alter the 
highlights and shadows, is always useful when you're 
touching up photos 

There is an Al tool here in the form of Structure, 
though the Al influence is once again only felt in the 
masking, where it can select the photo's subject with 
all the usual caveats about soft edges. In our testing, 
it couldn't manage the border between hair and sky, 
and even missed a fairly strong boundary between the 
side of a face and the background. Structure is a detail- 
enhancing tool that will bring out the texture of skin, but 
begins with the slider halfway along, so it can be pulled 
back to soften details and produce a less harsh—and 
often more flattering—look. 


THE TWILIGHT ZONE 
If your tastes run more toward landscape 
images, there's something for you in Luminar 

alongside all the portrait effects. The app's Al-powered 

masking can recognize elements such as trees, water, 
or mountains in an image, and select them at the press 
of a button, so you can work on them separate from the 
rest of the image. 

Top of the list is the Twilight Enhancer, which has 
the same Al-powered masking that works a bit better 


JuL 2024 | mme | 63 


on the sharp delineations between mountains, trees, and skies. 
There are plenty of tools—some, such as the Twilight Enhancer, 
will add a color cast to your image that can simulate shooting at 
sunset [the Golden setting), dawn [Blue], and all sorts of colors 
in between, while others are designed to only affect the sky, or 
water. There's an Atmosphere slider that adds a haze, and you 
can control how it interacts with the objects in your image, while 
the Al Water Enhancer [i ] can pick out the wet bits and 
alter their color and brightness, though it sometimes needs a 
little help in the parts where water passes across rocks. 


64 ш 


JUL 2024 


THE CREATIVE ZONE 

The next set of tools are merely labeled ‘creative’, 

which really should apply to the entire app. 
These options are essentially one-shot filters in that 
they can be applied to the whole image, or masked, and 
their strength adjusted, but there aren't always lots of 
options for changing how they look. A good example of 
this is Dramatic, a contrast and saturation boost that 
has two sliders: Amount and Local Contrast. The next 
tool on the list, Mood, offers more control, as it applies 
Look Up Tables (LUTs] to the image that can change the 
appearance of your photo quickly and consistently [I 

]. From the Mood menus, you can find film simulation 

looks, or cross-processing effects that can be applied 
with a few clicks to multiple images, speeding up your 
workflow if you find yourself making the same changes 
regularly. The ability to use your own LUTs makes this 
especially powerful if you have a lot of files. 


PORTRAITS 
The Portrait section of the toolbar offers more 
new Al capabilities, but also offers tools that skirt 

the boundaries of what's acceptable in photo editing. 

There are lighting tools that can make a big difference to 


the look of a photo, but also options that can enlarge, reduce, or 
‘enhance’ particular body parts, particularly in the face. Editing 
photos in this way is nothing new, and many magazine cover 
images bear little relation to reality, but tools like this do raise 
the question over whether it's right to digitally reshape someone. 
The facial tools [| ] pay particular attention to the eyes, 
enabling you to change their color and increase the visibility of the 
iris, as well as increasing the size of the whole eye and whitening 
them. There are some more general ‘enhancer’ tools, one of 
which will sharpen and darken eyebrows, and another that can 
brighten and soften skin, plus remove what it calls ‘defects’. Are 
they really defects, or do they just make a face more interesting? 
That's a long-running debate. It's worth noting that the Slim Face 
slider starts at zero, meaning there's no option to go backwards 
and actually make a face wider, which possibly says something 
about modern beauty standards. 

The ability of Luminar to slim and ‘enhance’ a face is also 
available for the rest of the body. Under Body you're presented 
with two sliders, one for Shape and the other for Abdomen, plus 
the usual masking to make sure you're applying the changes to 
the right part of the image. Shape is effective across the whole 
body, and allows you to widen or narrow it, while Abdomen is 
mainly applied around the stomach and hips. It's a very easy tool 
with which to make something that looks unnatural and comical, 
so is best applied sparingly, if at all. 


MORE TOOLS 
Underneath the Portrait section sits a group of tools 
marked as Professional, perhaps suggesting they're not 

for casual users. In fact, there are some digital darkroom tools 


that will be familiar if you've used Photoshop, including 
dodge and burn brushes to selectively lighten and darken 
sections of your image, as well as contrast sliders and a 
Color Harmony section that changes the way the various 
colors of your image mix and interact. This section feels 
more analog than the rest of the app, but despite this, it 
allows you a greater degree of control over the final look 
of your image. It's ideal for finishing off when the more 
automatic tools above haven't quite produced the look 
you want, and thanks to the way Luminar works, this 
means you can produce multiple versions of an image 
quickly. There's also a Clone Stamp tool, which you 
can use to paint over sections of the image you'd like to 
remove in much the same way as Adobe's version. 


LAYERS 

In common with a lot of image-editing apps, 

Luminar supports layers, which divide your 
image into vertical slices that can be stacked, blended, 
and otherwise forced to interact in interesting ways. The 
Layers palette is on the other side of the interface from 
the Tools, and consists of a number of graphical effects 
that can be stacked over the top of your image, including 
some that you can add yourself or purchase from the 
Luminar store [! ]. Each layer can have its opacity 


and blend mode altered, and masks can be used to 
control where it is visible over the main image. They can 
also be dragged around so that the order in which they 
appear is changed, and it's possible to flip and stretch 
them so they better fit your composition. Ù 


JuL 2024 | mme | 65 


R&D! = 


Master LibreOffice 24 


LIBREOFFICE BEGAN its life in 2010 as a fork offOpenOffice.org, which was itself an open-source 
fork of StarOffice. This productivity suite is developed and maintained by TDF (The Document 
Foundation], which remains loyal to its open-source roots. This means that unlike Microsoft 
Office, LibreOffice is cross platform as ports exist for Windows, macOS, and Linux. 

The suite consists of a word processor (Writer), spreadsheet software (Calc), presentation 
program (Impress), a vector graphics editor (Draw), an application for editing mathematical 
formulae (Math), and a database management program (Basel. LibreOffice defaults to the 
OpenDocument Format when saving files, but can also open, edit, and save Microsoft formats 
like Microsoft Word [.docx). 

The most recent release of LibreOffice (24.2.3) was made available in early May, and comes 
with some promising new features. While TDF doesn't seek to emulate Microsoft Office exactly, 
LibreOffice does have very similar functionality, with the exception of offering a free online 
version in the vein of Office 365. Self-hosted solutions are available for ‘LibreOffice online’ for 
those with the time and patience to set up the suite on their own server. 

In this tutorial, we'll discuss the basics of setting up and customizing your LibreOffice install, 


YOU'LL NEED THIS 


A RECENT INSTALL OF 
LIBREOFFICE 24.2 

Java Runtime Environment 
(For certain Base features] 


as well as becoming familiar with the user interface of the principal apps. -NATE DRAKE 


[98 тосе 24232 - talon Wizard 
сомот Setup 
Select the program testun you want alle. 


Chek onan icon inthe t below to change how a feature stad. 


Engi (Unted Sates. 
Esperanto 


Cs] Estonian 


Finnan 


Setting up LibreOffice is a case of pointing your browser 
to [hips/übreclice.orj and clicking ‘Download’. The 
installer is available for both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows systems. 
» Sharp-eyed readers will see that there are in fact two 
versions for download. LibreOffice 24.2.x is the focus of this 
tutorial, and contains all the latest features. However, you can 
also download LibreOffice 7.6.7. This version is older, but has the 
benefit of being more stable due to the longer testing period. 

» The default download is for the US English version of Office. 
If you want another language or regional variation, such as 
British English, click 'Need Another Language?' to download the 
relevant installer. [Image A] 

» If you need LibreOffice to support multiple languages, 
during the install process change the setup type from ‘Typical’ 
to "Custom. Now, you can install features like language packs. 

» The custom install is divided into two main sections: 
"Optional Components’ and ‘User Interface Languages’. If youre 
happy with the default interface language and just want to install 
extra language dictionaries, expand ‘Optional Components’ > 
"Dictionaries. By default, LibreOffice installs dictionaries for 
English, French, and Spanish. 

» Take the time to explore other optional features by clicking 
on each and reading the feature description. If it's not enabled 
already, as a minimum we recommend installing the "Windows 
Explorer Extension’, which enables File Explorer to display key 
information about LibreOffice documents, display thumbnails, 
and make the text searchable. 


] CUSTOMIZE YOUR INSTALL 


» If you require the LibreOffice interface itself to be 
available in multiple languages, expand ‘User Interface 
Language' to install the packs of your choice. By default, 
the English version of LibreOffice supports US, British, 
and South African English. 


Once the install process is complete, open 
LibreOffice via the shortcut on the desktop. 

» The main window works in a similar way to Microsoft 
365's App Launcher in that you can use it to open existing 
files or create new LibreOffice apps. 

» This is a good chance to get used to the naming 
conventions for LibreOffice apps. ‘Writer’ is used 
for word processing, while ‘Calc’ is an excellent 
spreadsheet program. ‘Impress’ can be used to create 
presentations in the vein of Powerpoint, while Base is 
broadly equivalent to Microsoft Access in that it can be 
used to create and edit databases. 

» Click on ‘Templates’ [Image B] to view some sample 
LibreOffice documents. Use the ‘filter’ drop-down menu 
at the top left to narrow templates down to specific apps 
like Writer. 

» Double-click to open the very first of these, which is 
a template for a business letter. Once Writer launches, 
choose ‘Release Notes’ at the top right. This will launch 
your default browser, allowing you to learn all that's new 
in the latest version of LibreOffice. 


e LAUNCH YOUR LIBREOFFICE APPS 


© LIBREOFFICE 


66 | amus | JuL 2024 


F 
| **8-à8 ©. деч B-Gh B HB-0.&0505 ов 
Burs rx A 4-2. 


^Ш 


PPVS” 


ue ty te tad ad you X SST Oe nt t 
Mantia te шэ рови Ра ж eet б» | A ште 


Large House 

E 
— 9 p T 

» Once you've done this, click ‘File’ > ‘Save As’ from the top left 
menu. Once the save dialog opens, you'll note that under Save As 
Type’, Writer defaults to its native OpenDocument Format [.odt). 
Using this format means your documents will have the best level 
of compatibility with LibreOffice features. 

» However, sending documents in LibreOffice format can 
sometimes cause issues for Microsoft Office users. While Office 
nominally supports the OpenDocument Format, files that you 
send to users may not display correctly. 

» Fortunately, there's an easy fix. Just click the ‘Save as Type" 
drop-down menu, and choose ‘Word 2010-365 document’. This 
will save the document in .docx format. 

» If you want LibreOffice to default to saving in Microsoft 
Formats, go to ‘Tools’ > ‘Options’. In the new window, expand the 
"Load/Save' section, and select ‘General’. 

» In the section on the right, choose the drop-down menu 
‘Always Save As’, and select your chosen format. Change 
"Document Type' to do this for other LibreOffice apps. 

3 LibreOffice Writer is the suite's answer to Microsoft Word 
in that you can create and edit text documents of all kinds. 

» Although the interface has received online criticism for 
being ‘traditional’, it's very simple to navigate. 

» If youre starting out with Writer, first make sure to visit the 
dedicated help page [[https-//help.Ubreotfice orq/latesten-U9/ 
for a full rundown of all features. 

» The current document spelling/grammar language is 
displayed in the bottom pane, e.g. English (USA). To change this, 
right-click and select ‘More’. In the new ‘Character’ window, 
select the ‘Language’ drop-down menu to switch to a different 


LIBREOFFICE ONLINE 


The existence of online office suites 
like Google Docs and Office365, can 


WORKING WITH WRITER 


version on their own servers, so you'll 
need to self-host to make use of it 


5 пап ш-*ют ош 


———————— a 
RSONAL BUDGE] = 


ж HE MR AR T 
pans mens рю mimm | 
} wem mnm мыш — wem 
3c wooo яюю мп» т \ 
sunm smemo soo заа] юш 
ГЕ ne ME —— nt ———M— ám 


dictionary, then choose ‘OK’. Your chosen language 
will appear on the bottom pane. You can also manually 
initiate a spell check by choosing F7. 

» Unlike Microsoft Office, LibreOffice documents 
aren't automatically saved with your personal details. 
To change this, go to ‘Tools’ > ‘Options’. From here, 
expand ‘LibreOffice’, and choose ‘User Data’. Enter your 
personal details in the right hand pane, then click ‘Apply’. 

» Entering your personal information in this way lets 
you make full use of the ‘Comments’ feature. Simply 
highlight any section of text and use Ctrl + Shift + C to 
add a comment. Writer will display your name and the 
timestamp for each one. In LibreOffice 24.2, comments 
can also now use Styles. Access the ‘Styles’ menu to 
view options to edit font, size, and formatting. 

» Press F5 at any time to open the Navigator window. 
This allows you to easily navigate different sections of 
the Writer document. The best way to see this in action 
is to click the ‘Default Paragraph Style’ drop-down 
menu at the top left of the Writer window [Image C], then 
choose one of the headings. 

» As you add more sections, they will appear in the 
Navigator window, along with objects like hyperlinks. 
4 As with Writer, Calc has a help page on the main 

LibreOffice website (https://help.libreotfice.ora] 
latest/en-US7texU/scalc/main0000.htmÜDbPAR-CALC) 
with an introductory video and a list of all Calc features. 

» We do recommend reading through this. While 
Writer can be picked up easily by anyone with a passing 


BE CRAFTY WITH CALC 


repository, though the code is freely 
available. The current version is 


make offline software seem quaint. Of 
course, this can also be a strength if 
you're in an area with patchy internet 


connection, but there's something to 

be said for knowing all your documents 

are stored safely in the cloud. 
LibreOffice online offers a solution 


in the form of server software built 
using the suite's source code. Bad news 
first: LibreOffice don't offer the online 


On its website, The Document 
Foundation explains that LibreOffice 
Online doesn't include a file system, 
which is necessary for accessing files 
and authorizing users. It's also missing 
any load balancing tools or features 
that would need to be developed for a 
viable online version of the suite. 

At the time of writing, TDF 
has frozen the LibreOffice online 


designed for personal use only, so 
you'll see an 'unsupported' notification 
if you open 10 concurrent documents 
and/or 20 simultaneous connections. 
Compiled LibreOffice online 

packages are available via Collabora 
and the suite can also be installed via 
Docker Images. Visi! 


to discover more. 


JuL 2024 | mmm | 67 


R&D | = 


ES 


ра 


familiarity with Microsoft Word, Calc is Less intuitive. Although it 
can replicate most Excel features, these are usually accessed in 
a slightly different way. 

» LibreOffice 24's Calc now includes a new search field in the 
"Functions' sidebar. To access this, click the dedicated button in 
the right-hand pane, or hold down Alt + 5. 

» From here, you can enter a function into the search bar at 
the top, eg. 'SUM' [Image D], then double-click the corresponding 
function in the pane below to enter the full formula. 

» As with most spreadsheet programs, when you click on a 
cell, the corresponding row number, e.g. 9, and column, eg F, are 
highlighted. If you still find this hard to follow, the latest version 
of LibreOffice also now supports highlighting the entire row or 
column each time you click on a cell. To enable this feature from 
Calc, go to View’ > 'Column/Row Highlighting’. 

» You can also use the ‘View’ menu to choose ‘Show Formula’. 
As the name suggests, this will display actual formulae used in 
sheets. LibreOffice 24 now supports copy and pasting of formula 
directly. In other words, once 'Show Formula' is enabled, if a 
cell's contents are pasted into a plain text editor, the formula will 
appear, not its result. You can also paste formulae into Writer via 
‘Edit’ > ‘Paste Special > Unformatted Text. 

» If you're working with multiple spreadsheet tabs, Calc now 
handles cycling through them a little more intuitively by going 
from last to first. Use Ctrl + Tab to switch sheets. 


INNOVATE WITH IMPRESS 
E Although you can go to[httpsy/helplibresttice.orh to 
view the comprehensive help guide for Impress, we feel 
readers may not need this, as the interface is very intuitive. 

» Upon loading, Impress shows the current slide in the main 
pane. The sidebar on the left lists all available slides. You can 
click into these [Image E] or right click inside the sidebar to add 
a ‘New Slide’. 

» The right-hand pane displays slide ‘Properties’. From here, 
you can make changes to fonts, text color, spacing, and so on. 

» If you're fond of adding ‘clipart’ to slides, you can view 
Impress's offline offerings at ‘Insert’ > ‘Media’ > ‘Gallery’. There 
are some shapes and icons, but if you want more, click the button 
at the bottom right to ‘Add More Galleries by Extension’. 

э Scroll through the gallery sets, then click ‘Install’ next to any 
you want made available when using Impress. During our tests, 
we found that in order to view the newly installed Clipart, users 
must close and reopen Impress after installing extensions. 

» Aligning slide objects works in a very similar way to 
Powerpoint: simply click and drag or hold shift to select multiple 
objects, then right-click. From here, you can access the ‘Align’ 
option, e.g. to align the centers of text boxes and images. 

» Ifyou want to use animation when switching between slides, 
choose View > ‘Slide Transitions’. Various transitions will now 


68 | samme | 20. 2024 


appear in the right-hand pane. Click on each of these to 
preview the effect. Click the button at the bottom of the 
pane to ‘Apply [this] Transition to All Slides’. 

» To configure more global options, go to ‘Slide Show" 
> ‘Slide Show Settings’. This allows to enable options 
like animated images, remote control support and the 
presentation mode, e.g. fullscreen. 


DOWN WITH DRAW 
Draw is a vector graphics editor. It's particularly 


good for making flowcharts and technical 
drawings, though it can also be used to design media 
like posters and brochures. It's also an excellent tool for 
editing PDFs. [Image F] 

» This appis notable in that it has no obvious equivalent 
Microsoft Office app, though Draw can open Microsoft 
Publisher [.pub) files. By default, files are saved in the 
Open Document Format .odg]. 

» If you've never used ‘Draw’, repeat the instructions 
in Step 1 to access the LibreOffice App launcher and 
open the template flowchart. As you'll see, the current 
page is always featured in the center of the window. 

» The left-hand pane allows you to scroll through 
current ‘Pages’. Use right-click to add ‘New’ or ‘Delete’. 

» By default, the right-hand pane shows the current 
page properties, such as the font and spacing, though as 
with Impress, this can change depending on the specific 
feature you're using. For instance, if you wish to add 
images from the media gallery via ‘Insert’, the pane will 
change accordingly. 

» The current version of Draw hasn't changed much, 
though the release notes mention that multi-page TIFF 
images are now supported. If you add a picture in this 
format (via ‘Insert’ > "Image'l, Draw will place one image 
on each page. 


[мене 
Be fos Hep 


[n 


Open File 


Remote Fies 


Becent Documents 


À ъа 


Writer Document 


[m] Cate spreadsheet 
| impress Presentation 
2) Draw Drawing 


[3] mam Forma 


Base Database 


Г] Libreoffice 


ADDICTED TO BASE 
In theory, Base is an excellent app for opening, viewing, 
and editing databases. Users can work with tables, 
queries, forms, and reports, much like Microsoft Access. 
In practice, it's best to check the online documentation first 


to make sure it's compatible with your existing database [Mtips: 


help Tibreoffice.org/latest/en-US/text/sdatabase/main.ntmU] 


We say this, as some database types are read-only in Base, 
such as spreadsheet files, text files, and address book data. 

If you don't have any existing files then upon opening, Base 
will launch its "Database Wizard'. From here, you can create a 
new embedded database in HSQLDB format. Base also supports 
acting as a frontend to a variety of external types of database 
like MySQL/MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Microsoft Access, and JDBC. 

Assuming you proceed to create a new embedded database, 
you have the option of choosing to register it with LibreOffice. 
By default, once you click ‘Finish’, the database can be 
opened for editing, though you can check ‘Create Tables using 
the Table Wizard’. 


This is an excellent and intuitive way to create 
database tables, but in order for this feature to work, 
you'll need to have JRE (Java Runtime Environment) 
installed. Make sure to choose the correct JRE for your 
architecture, e.g. 64-bit. 

Once this is done, the Table Wizard allows you to 
choose from two broad categories [ ]: Business’ 
or ‘Personal’. You can also choose from a number 
of ‘Sample Tables, such as "Tasks, ‘Events’, and 
‘Employees’. 

Each of these have their own sample "Available 
Fields’, e.g. 'StartDate'. You can add these to your own 
table by clicking on the corresponding entry, then on the 
relevant button to list under ‘Selected Fields’. 

You can use the ‘View’ menu to switch between 
tables, queries, forms, and reports, or just click on the 
corresponding icon in the left-hand pane. In each case, 
you can use a wizard or ‘design view’ to create your 
data set. Ù 


JuL 2024 | mmm | 69 


R8DI = 


Use your tablet as a 
second PC monitor 


YOU'LL NEED THIS 
SPACEDESK 


Download the PC software 


from[spacedesk.net] 


WHAT DO YOU DO IF YOUR MONITOR feels a bit cramped, but you don't want to pay for a bigger 
one? Or need to keep an eye on a website or video stream? Fortunately, if you have a tablet or 
smartphone going spare, you can expand your desktop space without spending a penny. 

Spacedesk can turn your unused phone or tablet into an extension of your computer screen 
It does this with two programs: one that sends images to your tablet or phone from Windows, 
and one on your mobile device that makes it behave like a connected monitor. 

Itworks by making Windows think the remote device has a physical connection. That way, you 
can drag program windows on to your device's screen and work on them as you would on your 


primary display. We'll refer to tablets in the 


e instructions because the bigger screen makes 


them more suitable as monitors, but our steps work the same for phones. -NIK RAWLINSON 


IP spacedesk Windows DRIVER Setup 


Firewall Configuration 


IMPORTANT: V you are wing» ri party Arewa st or eg 


Pene re to the coded documentation tor complete eta 


Start by downloading Spacedesk's PC software from 
spacedesk.net]where you'll find options for 64-bit and 32- 
bit Windows in the section called 'Spacedesk Driver Software for 
Windows Primary PC (server). Most modern PCs will need the 
64-bit version, but if you're not sure, open Settings by pressing 
Windows key+l, then click System followed by About, and check 
the version beside ‘System type’. 

» Click through the installation instructions and, when you 
reach the Firewall Configuration page, leave the box ticked 
beside ‘Add an exception to the Windows firewall for spacedesk' 
[image A]. If you disable this, connections between your PC and 
your tablet will be blocked, and you won't be able to use the 
device as an extension of your main PC screen. 

» When you've completed the last screen of the instructions, it 
will proceed with the installation. This throws up a User Account 
Control alert asking if you're happy for the program to make 
changes to your PC. On our machine, this alert was minimized 
in the taskbar, so it wasn't easy to spot, and gave the impression 
that the process had stalled. Keep an eye on your taskbar in case 
this happens. Once installation has completed, click Finish. 


] INSTALL SPACEDESK ON YOUR PC 


tablet 


INSTALL SPACEDESK ON YOUR TABLET 
Download ^ the app on your 


from (Android); 
(05, iPadOS]; or [tinyurLcom]wZ3dbady 
(Kindle Fire], then launch it. If you've installed the program on 
your PC, dismiss the message telling you to download it. 

» The app will now start searching your local network for your 
PC and, when it recognizes it, display its IP address. It's made up 


70 | mw | JUL 2024 


of four sets of digits, with the first three generally being 
the same across the whole network, while the final set 
will be anything between 0 and 254 [to accommodate a 
maximum of 255 devices on your network]. 

» Our tablet found a PC using the IP address 10.0.0.68. 
We checked this was correct by comparing it to the 
information shown in the Spacedesk Driver Console 
software that we installed on Windows. You can launch 
this from the Start menu and, when it appears, check 
the address in the Communication Interfaces section. In 
[image B], we can see the same IP address: 10.0.0.68 1. 

» To double-check, we make sure our computer's 
name (GOGOL El] is displayed at the top of the right- 
hand column in Driver Console, as well as at the top of 
the home screen on the Spacedesk app on our tablet. 


Tap the computer's address in the app, and 

the devices will connect, your tablet's display 
behaving like a touch-sensitive extension of your screen. 
» You can now drag windows from your PC to your 
tablet. However, because Spacedesk can't automatically 
work out where your tablet is sitting in relation to your 
computer screen, you may need a little trial and error. 
We found that dragging windows to the right of our main 


3 MOVE WINDOWS TO YOUR TABLET 


qq 


— 
OFF GOGOL 


spacedesk Driver Console 
CE Ш 


display, slightly above halfway, transferred them to the tablet's 
screen, even though our tablet was to our left, flat on its back. 

» Once the window is on your tablet's screen, control it by 
clicking with the mouse or tapping it with your finger. If you want 
to use your fingers on the tablet and your mouse and keyboard to 
control your computer, you don't need to make more changes, as 
long as you're happy with how the screens are configured. 


RECONFIGURE YOUR SCREENS 
4 If you want to move your cursor off the edge 
of the main screen nearest to your tablet 
screen so that it travels toward it, tell Windows where 
they sit in relation to one another. This makes working easier 
when sweeping the cursor off your PC's screen and back again. 

» To do this, click the up-arrow on your Windows taskbar to 
reveal your hidden icons, then right-click the Spacedesk driver 
icon, followed by ‘Windows Display Control Panel’. 

» This will take you to the Display pages of the Windows 
Settings program, where you'll see a graphic of your screens. 
The larger one, [Image C] labeled 1, @ is your PC screen. The 
smaller screen lin the top-right corner (labeled 2) is your tablet. 

» If this is less clear in your setup, you can ask Windows to 
identify each one. Click the Identify button, Ei and it will display 
the relevant numbers in the corner of each display. 

» Use your mouse to click and hold the number 2 (tablet) box 
in the Settings window, then drag it around the number 1 box. 
Let go when its location roughly equates to your tablet's position 
relative to your PC screen. When you ve finished, close Settings. 

» You're not restricted to just one external tablet, nor to 
working with tablets. We installed Spacedesk on an iPad Pro, 
Kindle Fire 8 tablet, Google Pixel 5 phone, and iPhone 15 Pro, 
and set them all running simultaneously. 

» You can see the result in [Image D], where our primary 
monitor is surrounded by four smaller screens. This allowed us 
to move our cursor and program windows from one to the other. 


Now that you're set up, you can use your second screen as 
a place to put programs that might get in your way. 

» If you prefer not to use your finger to control a program on 
your tablet screen, you can use your mouse. Your PC's keyboard 
will work just as well in any program on the second screen—just 
make sure the program is active and selected. 

» Spacedesk also has its own on-screen keyboard—you'll find 
it by tapping the three-line menu button on the tablet screen, 
followed by Keyboard [you can move this menu around by tapping, 
holding, and dragging it to any position you want). However, using 
the on-screen keyboard in wireless mode is a premium-only 
feature, which requires an upgrade to the commercial business 
licence on an Android device for an additional fee. 


E USE PROGRAMS ON YOUR SECOND SCREEN 


System > Display B 


m tena tee gtr 


System > Display - 


Ent deo oth aly 


» Spacedesk hasn't yet added this licence to the iPad, 
iPhone, or Kindle Fire editions of the software, although 
you can use the keyboard for free on Android or Kindle 
Fire by connecting via USB rather than wirelessly. 

» If you do connect with USB, open the 
Spacedesk Driver Console software on your PC and 
click the Communication Interfaces header. Now, untick 
the box beside Local Area Network, and click in the box 
below it. 

» When the connection has refreshed, tap the three- 
line menu button on your device, then tap Keyboard. Tap 
within the window of your active program, and you can 
use the on-screen keyboard in place of the keyboard 
attached to your PC. Ù 


USE AN OLD LAPTOP 
AS YOUR SECOND 


At the start of this feature, we downloaded Spacedesk 
to our primary PC (or 'server' in Spacedesk terms). This 
handles the sharing of the virtual display connection with 
a secondary device [called the client‘). So far, we've only 
used a phone and tablet as the client, but you could use an 
old laptop. Rather than download another copy of the server 
software to the Laptop, go to the Microsoft Store at 

and install the client software. 

Once launched, it should spot your main PC across 
your wireless network. Click the primary PC's IP address 
in the Spacedesk client on your laptop, and the two will 
connect, with the Windows desktop of your main machine 
extending into the window now shown on your laptop (ER 
in our screenshot). Hover over that window, and click the 
Fullscreen button Hso it fills the whole display. 


JUL 2026 | mmu | 71 


in the labl” 


/ 


JEREMY LAIRD, CONTRIBUTOR 


FIRST, A TERRIBLE confession. My daily 
driver is not a PC. It's a Mac. But before 
you gather the pitchforks, hear me out. For 
starters, my main fun rig is, of course, а 
powerful desktop PC. | also use a laptop PC 
to drive my home cinema. 

The Mac really only gets used for web 
browsing and text editing, plus some casual 
content creation. But the main reason it's 
a Mac is because it needs to be portable. 
| want to be able to pick it off my desk and 
take it into the office while maintaining its 
working state. Right now, only Apple offers 
atruly solid state laptop, or at least one that 
offers good performance and features as 
opposed to a glorified tablet PC running 
Atom cores or something similarly hideous. 

1 speak, of course, of the MacBook Air 
with Apple silicon. Once you've lived with 
a truly solid state laptop, one with not only 
solid state storage—which has long been 


Solid state 
laptops 


Portable PCs with moving parts 


the norm—but also no active cooling, fans, 
or pumps, every other portable seems 
awfully clunky. It actually makes you 
wonder how anyone thought it was a good 
idea to have laptops that screamed under 
load while they cooked their innards. It's all 
a little bit silly. 

Well, for most mainstream laptops, that 
could all soon be history. The first Windows 
laptops using Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 
X Elite CPU have been released. You'll no 
doubt see coverage of them in these pages 
over the coming months. It's yet to be seen 
just how good the X Elite is, but critically, it 
uses the same basic Arm CPU architecture 
that allows Apple silicon laptops to be so 
efficient. 

As far as | know, all of the first X Elite 
laptops do actually have active cooling. 
But then, so does a MacBook Pro—it's just 
it barely ever activates. In any case, the X 


Want to experience the future of PC laptops? 
Try a MacBook Air. 


Elite is just the first of what you might call 
a new generation of ‘proper’ Arm chips for 
PCs. Several other companies, including 
Nvidia and AMD, are rumored to be working 
on their own Arm chips for the PC. I'd be 
amazed if you couldn't buy a totally solid 
state PC laptop with excellent performance 
very soon. 

Of course, the absolute highest 
performing portables are always going 
to use active cooling. My Razer Blade 15 
gets so hot just above the keyboard that it 
can actually burn skin, but that's mostly 
because of its powerful GPU, something 
that can't be solved with Arm CPU cores. 
But | fully expect to be able to have a solid 
state daily driver PC to replace my MacBook 
pretty soon. 


Editor-in-Chief 


GUY COCKER 


72 | umm 


The upside of building your 
own PC is the flexibility to 
create a system to your 
specifications. The downside 
is that there's no one to call 
when things go wrong, which 
in my experience, they do. 

For the last two months, 
my year-old rig had been 
crashing about twice a day, 
and it was impossible to play 
a game without it stalling. Our 


JUL 2024 


resident building expert, Zak 
Storey, suggested it was down 
to either my NZXT C1000 
power supply or Gigabyte 2790 
GAMING X AX motherboard. 

In our photo studio, | 
grabbed a few spare parts to 
try and diagnose the problem. 
First, а replacement C1000 
PSU was installed into the 
existing system, but my PC 
refused to boot. 


Frustrated, | looked at 
motherboard options. Sadly, 
all | had were older Z690 
boards, which would require 
BIOS updates to support my 
Intel Core i5-13600K CPU. 
Firstly, an Asus ROG STRIX 
7690-Е Gaming WiFi seemed 
like an easy swap, but it didn’t 
boot either. Next, an EVGA 
7690 DARK KINGPIN, which 
wouldn't even fit in my NZXT 


H7 Elite case, thanks to its 
larger E-ATX form factor. 

My final option was 
an NZXT N7 Z690 mobo, 
which worked like a charm. 
True, | had to pair it with 
older DDR4 RAM, but this 
has little impact on gaming 
performance. The main thing 
is | have a working desktop 
again, and one | can play 
games on. Such luxury! 


DAPPLECORP 


RCOMPANY 


The Eufy L60 Robot 
Vacuumis a potential 


Editor's Pick: 


life-changer. 


Eufy L60 Robot Vacuum 
& Self-Emptying Station 


The cleaning revolution is here 


AS You MAY know from 
my many ramblings on 
these pages, |now work 
as a barista during the 
day for a local coffee 
shop, andasa freelance 
journalist in the evening 
and on days off (terrible work-life balance, 
would not recommend). When | started 
doing this, it took quite a toll. Not only on 
my fitness and health, but on my home life 
as well. I'm a massive contributor in the 
Storey household when it comes to chores. 
Cooking, cleaning—l do the bulk of it. 

Changing jobs and how you work is 
never easy, and adjusting to that new way 
of living takes time. | knew this was going 
to be the case—going into freelance, in fact, 
it usually takes around six months to really 
get settled. 

Anyway, in late January this year, | was 
still very much adjusting to the new flow. | 
have a heavy shift at the coffee shop of бат 
to 3pm on weekdays. It's busy, and I'm very 
tired. My bosses are kind enough to let me 
get parcels delivered directly to the store, 
which is really helpful, as I'm only home 
one day a week. Generally, | walk to work 
as well. It's only about 10 minutes each way, 
but going home requires me to climb up a 
massive hill. On this particular day, | got 
three parcels delivered—all of them brand- 
new Super graphics cards. 

Because | have so many parcels, out 
of kindness, a close colleague of mine, 
Lauren, offers me a lift home. | knew at this 
point that a) my dog has been home for five 
hours on her own, and b] the house is in a 
bit of a state. l've got far too many parcels, 
packaging, cardboard, and washing. It's 
all over the place. Still, it's three heavy 
boxes, Lauren is adamant that accept, and 
wants to see the dog (she's the best kind of 
person: a dog person). So reluctantly | say 


yes, but pre-warn her that the house is a bit 
ofa state and not to judge me. 

Lauren gives me a lift home and comes 
in to see the dog, who gets overly excited 
because she loves people, and decides 
to accidentally urinate on Lauren's foot. 
Great. Real swell time for me. apologize 
profusely, clean up, keep apologizing (still 
to this дау), and Lauren goes on her way 
(we're still friends, don't worry]. 

So at this point, | am wracked with guilt 
and shame. My other half rings me up on 
her way home, | explain the situation, she 
calls me an idiot because | knew the house 
was a mess, and then promptly takes me 
to McDonald's to alleviate my suffering. At 
this point, | go out and buy a Eufy L60 Robot 
Vacuum with Self Emptying Station. 

Aside from getting my life in order, and 
the work-life balance being a lot smoother, 
this thing has changed everything. | used to 
vacuum once a week on my day off—now, 
Hugh (my 1.60) does it daily at Spm, and it is 
incredible. It doesn't always get everything, 
but the fact that it goes around once a day 
means it picks up pretty much everything 
dog hair-related, and just takes the 
stress away from it. Every day | get 
home, take an hour or two to relax, and 
at 5pm like clockwork, me and the dog 
sit on the couch and watch as Hugh does 
his rounds, vacuuming up my Labrador's 
double-layer coat from the floor. 

It wasn't cheap, but chit is eaper than a 
lot of similar options. It's quiet, although 
you can ramp up the suction speed. It 
detects obstacles, scans the room, has 
LIDAR, and does a pretty good jab on both 
wood flooring and on carpet. | always 
wanted a Roomba, but they're so expensive. 
Honestly, if you have a dog, and you've not 
got a robot vacuum, you definitely need one. 
| guarantee it will change your life. -ZS 


$400, fuww.eufy.com 


76 2TB Lexar NM790 
PCle 4.0 M.2 SSD 


78 Acer Predator X27U 


82 Acer Predator Helios Neo 16 


84 BenQ X500i 4K Short| 
Throw Projector 


87 Phanteks XT Pro 


88 Cherry Xtrfy 
K5V2 
89 HyperX 


Cloud Ш 
Wireless 


ee EEE 


90 Homeworld 3 


92 Arc vs 
Chrome 


JuL 2024 | mmm | 73 


74 


JUL 2024 


vorn 


p 


M pn a 


vn 


Alienware 32 AW3225QF 


Demanding but stunning 4K OLED gaming 


ALL NEW TECHNOLOGIES come with a 
learning curve. With the cataclysmically 
desirable Alienware 32 AW3225QF, we're 
taking some lessons about OLED as a 
display solution for PC gaming. Yes, this 
is another of the brave new 4K monitors 
running a Samsung QD-OLED panel. 

We've cast our eyes across several of 
these now, and the wow factor remains. 
But with familiarity comes a slightly more 
grounded sense of what these monitors 
offer gamers. However, let's kick off 
with the basic speeds and feeds. Again, 
we're talking 32 inches of 4K QD-OLED 
glory. Response is rated at 0.03 ms, peak 
HDR brightness at 1,000 nits, full screen 
brightness at 250 nits, and color coverage 
comes in at 99 percent coverage of the 
DCI-P3 gamut. The subpixel structure 
also remains the same. In other words, 
it's still not a conventional RGB stripe, but 
a triangular RGB arrangement. 

That mattered in the past for 
sharpness and font rendering, because 
Windows addresses monitors under the 
assumption of the RGB stripe. But with 
the increased 140 DPI density of this new 
32-inch 4K class of OLEDs, it's no longer 
an issue. Fonts look nice and crisp. 

The other headline feature is the 
240Hz refresh, of course. Obviously 
you'll need one heck of a GPU to feed all 
those pixels at 240Hz. Other highlights 
include DisplayPort 1.4 plus two HDMI 
2.1 connections and a USB hub. What you 
don't get is USB upstream for video input 
or laptop charging. Nor is there an audio 
out for headphones or speakers, which is 
a slightly odd omission. 

Rounding things out is Alienware's 
signature aesthetic, with the familiar 
white cladding on the rear of the chassis. 
I'm not a huge fan of the Look, but it's well 
put together. But what about the image 
quality itself? No surprise, it's a stunner. 
The triple whammy of perfect per-pixel 
OLED lighting with 4K pixel density and a 
glossy panel coating is to die for. 

In SDR mode, there's no brightness 
variability. You can move or resize 
windows as much as you want—the 
brightness stays at the same 250- 
nit level. That said, the Alienware 32 
AW3225QF has even more рор in HDR, 
and that applies to SDR content, too. 

As for HDR, the Alienware 32 
AW3225QF gives very different results 
depending on which of the nine HDR 


modes you choose. Making matters 
Worse, when switching between some, 
but not all, of the HDR modes, the display 
may resync with your PC. 

Then there's the fact that the HDR 400 
mode looks best for outdoor scenes, but 
crushes details for darker indoor and 
night-time game scenes, while HDR 1000 
looks spectacular for the latter, but dull 
for brighter images. 

If that wasn't enough, you also have to 
contend with OLED burn-in. Alienware 
covers the panel for three years, but you 
still have to put up with burn-in mitigation 
measure prompts popping up, and 
generally stress over whether you should 
toggle the ‘Pixel Refresh’ or ‘Panel 
Refresh’ protection algorithms. Life was 
a lot simpler with an SDR LCD monitor. 

The upside, of course, are visuals 
that no LCD display can match, not even 
the latest and greatest IPS models with 
full-array local dimming. The contrast 
this Alienware delivers is awesome. 
Then there's the very fast pixel response. 
There's a clarity to movement on these 
OLED screens that no LCD panels can get 
close to, so this is undoubtedly a seminal 
gaming experience. Despite the slight 
complications, this is as good as OLED 
gaming gets. -JEREMY LAIRD 


Alienware 32 AW3225QF _ 


SCREEN QUEEN 
Stunning QD-OLED panel; 
4K pixel density. 


EI DRAMA QUEEN Not exactly cheap; 
Complicated to use. 


[57799 [www.dell.com] | 


SPECIFICATIONS 


Screensize 
Resolution 3,840 x 2,160 


Brightness. 250 nits fullscreen, 
1,000 nits max HDR 


Color coverage | 99% DCI-P3 


Response time 


DisplayHDR 400 True 

Black, Dolby Vision. 
Features. Samsung QD-OLED ard 

Gen panel, Adaptive Sync, 

1x DisplayPort 1.4, 

2x HDMI 2.1 


© UNSPLASH 


Lexar's NM790 not only 
looks the part, it's an 
absolute value king. 


2TB Lexar NM790 
PCle 4.0 M.2 SSD 


Flawless pricing gives this 
drive a competitive edge 


THIS MIGHT be the best-value PCle 4.0 
SSD we've found to date. Usually, when 
we say something like that, there's a 
massive trade-off to be had at the same 
time. Like, "Oh wow, this GPU drives 
some seriously impressive frames and 
is super affordable, but by the way, it's 
louder than a jet engine”. With the NM790, 
though, that's not the case—for a PCle 4.0 
SSD, it's seriously impressive. Not only 
are the performance metrics up there 
with some of the best PCle 4.0 drives 
we've tested, but it trounces some of our 
favorite drives from a value perspective, 
both for gigabytes per $ and sequential 
read performance per $ as well. 

Let's talk numbers and what you get— 
top-line specs. 2TB of total capacity on 
the PCle 4.0 standard, with an M.2 2280 
form factor. It's utilizing 232-Layer YMTC 
TLC NAND flash memory. YMTC (Yangtze 
Memory Technologies) is a relatively 
new Chinese semiconductor company 
that's just been launched onto the scene 
with its own 232-layer TLC. Lexar's 
combining that with the Maxio MAP1602 
controller, and impressively no DRAM 
or cache whatsoever. The drive is also 
entirely single-sided, even in its 4TB 
configuration, making it perfect for use 


BENCHMARKS 


| 278 Lexar NM790 
PCle 4.0 M.255D 


in consoles or similar devices where the 
bulk of your cooling is situated on top. 

The drive is available in capacities 
ranging from 512GB all the way up to 4TB 
respectively, and our variant comes with 
a 1500 TBW endurance rating and a five- 
year warranty. Advertised specs top out 
at 7,400 MB/s read 6,500 MB/s write, and 
10Ps at 1000K and 900K. 

But stats only get you so far, and 
fortunately, we can report that the 
NM790 doesn’t exactly disappoint 
when it comes to testing performance, 
either. CrystalDiskMark saw sequential 
reads and writes at 7,092/6,621 MB/s 
respectively, with random 4K topping 
out at 70 and 263 MB/s as well. That puts 
it on par, at least in terms of sequential 
performance, with the likes of our 
tried and true favorite, the Kingston 
Fury Renegade. However, it also pulls 
ahead when it comes to the random 4K 
performance as well. 

Crucials T500 is also an intriguing 
comparison, as similarly, it pulls away 
significantly on the sequential read 
front, and on random 4K performance as 
well. This is likely due to a lack of cache 
and DRAM, hindering the Lexar NM790, 
although that reduces power draw and 


| 2TBcrucialTs00 | 278 Kingston Fury 
| ProPCle4.0 Renegade PCle 4.0 
2550 | mass 


TT _ ee __ 


AS SSD Sequential Read / Write (MB/s) 
AS SSD Random 4K Read / Write (MB/s) 


AS SSD Access Time [ms] 


CrystalDiskMark Sequential 0032 p 


Read / Write (MB/s) 


euer Oe 
Max Temp Under Load (C) ЕЗ 
Gigabyte per $ (GB) 

Sequential Read MB/s per $ (MB/s) зв. 


bold. Our test bed со 
RTX 4080, 
marking process. Prices correct at tim 


an Nvidia GeF 
during b 


| 5,955/5,152 
| 77.18 / 144.08 
| 0.016 / 0.045 


an Intel Core i$ 
Corsair H150i AIO, and an А: 
f writing (Lexar NM790 pricing metrics listed at $121) 


5,631 / 4,455 
| 81.37 / 217.15 
018 / 0.017 


5,598 / 3,970 
| 85.21 / 281.32 
0.062 / 0.016 


| 7,879 Г 6,783 | 6979/6874. 


92/331 98/387 


im E 


1439 1156 


56.58. | 40.34 


(900K, 32GB of Corsair Dominator Titanium (à 7200, 
790 Dark Hero. Max Temp recorded via HWMonitor 


sustained temperature peaks as a result, 
certainly over longer file transfers. In our 
testing, the NM790 topped out at around 
75 C during our benchmarking process, 
which is well within healthy parameters. 

However, it's when you start to dig into 
the pricing for this beautiful little thing 
that the coin drops, and that's for one 
reason: the value is insane. Okay, when 
we picked this up for our feature build, 
it was available for $147. At time of 
writing, it has fallen to $121. That's 
cheaper than the Kingston Fury 
Renegade ($187) and T500 ($139), in no 
small part thanks to YMTC’s TLC NAND 
being somewhat cheaper. 

It's that $121 that really swings the 
needle. That said, even at $147, it's 
still phenomenally good value. At that 
price, gigabyte per $ hits 13.61, close 
to the T500's 14.39 and higher than the 
Kingston's 11.56, and sequentials clock 
in at 48.25 versus the T500's 56.68 and 
the Kingston's 40.34 respectively. Drop 
the price to that $121 mark, though, 
and gigabyte per $ shoots up to 16.53 
(surpassing the T500), and sequentials to 
58.61 MB/s, making this by far the best- 
value SSD we've tested to date, as long as 
it holds its price lower than the T500. 

The Lexar NM790m then, is the 
whole package. Performance? Check. 
Hardware? Check. Endurance? Check. 
Price? Near perfect. What's not to love? 
-ZAK STOREY 


ШОШ 2TB Lexar NM790 PCIe 4.0 


9 M.2 SSD 


K NATURALLY MAGNIFICENT 
KICK Flawless price point if it holds; 
ASSI 


Strong PCle 4.0 performance; 
Decent temperatures and power draw. 


Solid endurance rating; 


© NEVERMIND Unproven TLC NAND; 
Lower 4K performance. 


$121 - $147 [www lexarcor] 


SPECIFICATIONS 


Form Factor 
Interface 


Protocol | Pcie 4.0/ NVMe 


Flash Memory | 232-Layer TLC NAND Fla: 


Sequential Read | 7,400 MB/s 


Sequential Write | 6,500 MB; 


RandomRead | 1000K OPS 
RandomWrite | 900K IOPS 
Endurance (TBW) | 1500 


Warranty ear limited warranty 


78 | ишы | JUL 2024 


© UNSPLASH 


Acer 
Predator 
X27U 


The latest in a long line 
of gaming monitors 
embraces the OL 


WE LIKE OLED monitors, their thinness 
and brightness appearing contradictory 
yet strangely alluring. Add the 240Hz 
refresh rate of this Acer Predator, and 
you have a winning combination. 

The resolution of 1440p looks like a 
wise choice, even though it's a step down 
from the old Quantum Dot Predator X27's 
2160p. By showing restraint and dialing 
it back a bit, Acer is able to increase the 
chances that today's GPUs will be able to 
supply the high frame rates a screen like 
this deserves. It'll display them without 
tearing, too, thanks to Freesync Premium 
and VRR support, though it drops the 
G-Sync certification of its predecessor. 

You also get plenty of ways to feed it 
those frames. At the back of the X27U, 
there's an array of ports that includes 
a useful USB hub, alongside the usual 
HDMI and DisplayPort options. They're 
not particularly easy to get to, as while 
there's a thicker part of the monitor inset 
from the extremely thin edge, it's a long 
way up, and the ports are quite close 
together. It's best to plug some cables in 
and leave them there, especially as you've 
got a USB-C port for compatible laptops 
lit provides 90W of power to charge them, 
making a tidy single-cable solution], 
which can switch USB data—perhaps a 
flash drive, wireless keyboard receiver, 
orwebcam—with the Type-B/A hub. Hook 
your desktop PC up to the DisplayPort, 
use the HDMIs for a streaming stick and 
your Nintendo Switch dock, and you've 
gota complete media hub. 

Audio is taken care of by SW speakers, 
which are surprisingly clear considering 
how slender the edge of the monitor is. 
You'll still be better off using headphones 
or external speakers, but they're good 
enough fora video call. A handy accessory 
screw socket at the top of the monitor 
stand allows the attachment of cameras 
or ring lights, so you can look your best. 


That stand allows for a decent degree 
of adjustment, though there's a six-inch 
VESA mount at the back if you want to 
connect it to an arm. There's almost six 
inches of vertical adjustment, as well 
as the ability to swivel the screen into a 
portrait orientation. The foot features 
widely splayed supports, which take up 
a chunk of desk space, but the rear leg 
is small enough that you're not forced to 
place it too far from the edge. 

The screen is the main draw. Switched 
off, it appears as a pure black portal to 
another dimension where the stars never 
ignited, but feed it the requisite signal, 
and you're treated to some excellent 
color saturation, with up to 400 nits of 
brightness if you've got HDR switched on. 
The blacks are deep, too, offering the kind 
of contrast LCD screens can't manage. 
It can display 93 percent of the P3 color 
gamut [in our tests—Acer’s claim is for 99 
percent), which is very respectable. 

АЦ 3.68 million of those OLED cells 
combine to produce a picture that's 
sharp and responsive, the benefits of 
the technology making themselves clear 
behind the anti-glare matte coating. The 
only real problem is its price. At close to 
$1,000, you need to really want it to buy it, 
andthe eyeis easily drawn by LED-backlit 
IPS screens that offer 90 percent of the 
OLED's performance for half the price. 
Acer's screen is the complete package, 
offering size, resolution, and speed, but it 
sure does cost a lot. -IAN EVENDEN 


Acer Predator X27U 


VERDICT 
9 E PREDATOR Excellent 
OLED display; USB hub; 
Plenty of inputs. 


E PREY Very expensive; ‘Only’ 1440р; 
External power brick. 


$999 [www.acer.com] 


SPECIFICATIONS 


Screen size 
Panel 

Resolution 

Brightness 

Refresh rate 

Audio | 
“Connectivity — | ZxHDMIZQ, —————— 


| 1% DisplayPort 1.4, 
USB Type-C (90W PD), 


Weight 13.45 lb (with stand] 


HP Spectre Foldable 


All the gear, no idea 


FOLDABLE SCREENS are everywhere 
now. We first saw them pop up in the 
mobile world, then they made their way 
to monitors with the likes of Corsair's 
Xeneon Flex, and now we have them in 
laptops, too [if this can even be called a 
laptop). You see, the HP Spectre Foldable 
is technically a laptop, an all-in-one, and 
a tablet. Its downfall is that it's a $5,000 
tablet with sub-$1,000 performance. 

Yeah, that's kind of the problem with 
the HP Spectre Foldable. On the surface, 
it is an incredibly versatile device. You've 
got a crisp, beautiful OLED panel with 
some solid pixel density, that is entirely 
foldable, with a detachable, magnetic 
wireless keyboard and mouse combo. 
That allows you to do a few things: first, 
you can just use it as a full-on display 
plus a wireless media keyboard. There's 
a kickstand embedded into the back of 
the product—pop that out, and you get a 
full-size 17-inch 2560x1920 16:10 display. 
Alternatively, flatten it out entirely, turn 
the keyboard off, and you've got a chunky 
17-inch tablet instead. 

The real party trick comes when 
you bend the screen in half, however. 
Fold that into a laptop shape, and you 
can attach the keyboard in a number of 
different ways: either on the bottom half 
of the screen entirely to turn it into a 
remarkably compact laptop, or pull that 
keyboard down a touch, and you can give 
yourself a bottom half display as well. HP 
has included a bit of software wizardry 
here, too, that will shift the resolution 
and Windows display to compensate, 
accurately detecting the keyboard on 


BENCHMARKS 


HP Spectre Foldable 


top, which also simultaneously charges 
wirelessly when in position. 

Overall, the design is solid. The 
materials are great, and that display 
is crisp and vibrant— exactly what 
you'd expect from an OLED. It's a little 
disappointing that its only 60Hz, but 
that's not the end of the world. There 
are two USB Type-C connectors on the 
Foldable, both supporting Thunderbolt 
andcharging. HP also includes a USB Hub, 
зо you can connect additional devices and 
displays to it if you need to. That said, 
the ports are a bit oddly placed. If you do 
decide to use it as a laptop, there's only 
one 'portrait' orientation you can use the 
screen in [the device does automatically 
rotate the screen, depending on how 
you're holding it), and in laptop mode, 
you get one USB-C port at the top left of 
the primary display, and one on the right- 
hand side of the screen, making it a bit 
awkward to plug things into. 

Those are minor foibles that really 
don't detract from the overall device. 
There's a problem, however, and it's the 
internal spec. As standard, there's only 
one SKU for the foldable. You get 166B 
of LPDDRS RAM soldered onto the unit, 
an Intel Core i7-1250U CPU (theoretically 
capable of 4.7 GHz with 12 threads), and 
a 1TB PCle 4.0 SSD, and, well, that's it. 
On the one hand, this is great, as it does 
extend the battery life fairly comfortably 
(which changes, depending on how much 
of the screen you're using]—on the 
other, performance is poor; very poor. 
We won't go too deep into the numbers 
here, but compared to a $1,200 entry- 


Huawei MateBook D 16 2024 
(EU Only] 


———— À— ———— 


Crossmark Aggregate {Index} 1,405 


GeekBench 6.2.1 Single-Core / Multi- 
Core (Index) 

Blender (Index) 

CrystalDiskMark 8 Read/Write (MB/s) 
3D Mark 


ildlife Extreme DNC 


Total War: Warhammer 3 Low (à Native 
Resolution (avg fps) 


| DNC 


Borderlands 3 Ultra (à Native 


Resolution (avg fps) к= 


All benchmarks performed with a clean install of Window 
lled. bold. Games tested at device 
tal War: Warhammer 3 tested at Low 


| 2210/6635 


26.81 / 17.14 / 11.69 


1,938 
2,605 / 12,568 


70.22 / 40.94 / 21 


10.27 


11, with the latest updat 
alive resolution. Borderlands 3 tested at Ultra, 


level laptop, outside of CrystalDiskMark, 
it consistently performed worse across 
pretty much every benchmark we ran it 
on. For our gaming benchmarks, it failed 
every single one, often loading the game 
menu, but crashing when attempting to 
run it, even on the lowest settings. 
Here's the thing: it's not designed for 
that, and we kind of forgive it. If light 
desktop work is your thing, and internet 
browsing and some Netflix streaming is 
your aim, then it's perfect. The problem, 
however, is that Asus actually has an 
almost identical model to this (spec, 
foldable panel, internals—the lot) for 
$2,000 less lyes, you did read that right) 
called the Asus Zenbook 17 Fold OLED. 
What we're left with is a very impressive 
tech demo that costs far more than it 
should, and performs worse than most 
$1,000 laptops. It may be cool, but that's 
not really good enough. -ZAK STOREY 
Milli HP Spectre Foldable 
C3 FOLDINGIaHOME Intriguing 
tech demo; Beautiful screen; 
Solid design. 


Performance is massively underwhelming; 
$2,000 cheaper options. 


$5,000 juwrw-hp.cor] 


SPECIFICATIONS 


Intel Core 7-12 
Inte Iris Xe Graph 

| 1608 LPODRS-5200 
Storage 178 D 
Screen À VI-in 2560x1920 OLED 


Connectivity 
WiFi 6€, 


en: | 103x 14.80 «0.33 in 


Weight 


© UNSPLASH 


If only HP could fold that 
price in half. They might 
be on to something. 


JUL 2024 81 


GAMING LAPTOPS come and go, but some 
things stay the same. The combination of 
a hot CPU and capable GPU, along with 
plenty of RAM and some fast storage, 
always adds up to a potent gaming 
experience that can't last long away from 
a wall socket, and so it is with Acer's 
latest, the Predator Helios Neo 16. 

It's packing a 14th-gen Raptor Lake 
Refresh CPU, rather than one of the 
Meteor Lake Core Ultra chips, which 
means 20 cores [eight of them P cores], a 
maximum boost frequency of 5.5GHz, and 
a TDP of as much as 157W. Add to that the 
140W that the RTX 4070 GPU is capable of 
slurping, and this doesn't go well on the 
battery, which in our tests can scrape just 
three hours and 19 minutes, even in our 
relatively gentle test, which keeps the 
screen on and subjects it to a series of 
office tasks. 

Still, once you get it plugged in and 
actually start gaming on it, the Helios 
Neo is pretty good to use. It's fairly heavy, 
which grounds it on your desktop and, as 
a 16-inch laptop should, it takes over the 
space you put it in more than a smaller 
model would. The weight means it's sub- 
optimal when you put it on your lap, but 
there's another reason that it belongs on 
a hard surface: it gets hot. The fans spin 
up just from the Windows login page, 
and it gets warm even when sitting idle. 
Start pushing up the processors, and the 
cooling system is called upon to dissipate 
a lot of heat, leading to plenty of fan noise. 

You'll no doubt have a headset or 
pair of Bluetooth headphones attached, 
however, or even use the built-in speakers 
which, like a lot of their kind, are fine, but 
not great. The keyboard is RGB backlitand 
feels somewhat cramped, as a numpad 
has been squeezed in alongside it, but 
the keys have plenty of travel. It's notable 
as one of the first devices we've seen to 
sport Microsoft's new Copilot button on 
the keyboard between the spacebar and 
the arrow keys, which is alongside the 
Predator button at ће top of the numpad. 
This didn't seem to do anything in our 
tests, but we suspect this may be meant 
to launch the PredatorSense software 
that controls performance profiles, RGB 
lighting, and other personal settings. 

The screen is an IPS with a 240Hz 
refresh rate and 1600p 16:10 resolution, 
which is going to attract fans of esports 
and online shooters, where quick 
reactions are paramount. To make a 
connection, you have the choice of Wi-Fi 
6E and a 2.5Gbps Ethernet port, although 
you'll need compatible equipment all the 


Acer Predator 
Helios Neo 16 


With the latest tech comes 


the same old problems 


way along the network chain to make the 
most of this. It also has an array of USB 
ports, including two Thunderbolt 4s with 
lightning bolt logos next to them. We 
couldn't get it to charge through them, 
although Acer says it should be possible, 
and the power brick that comes in the box 
is very large—even the flex that attaches 
to the laptop's charging port seems 
thicker than others. You'll need that 
power adapter, as the battery life isn't 
great. Start gaming, and it will only get 
Worse: we saw it run out in just over an 
hour after one session. 

The Acer Predator Helios Neo is a 
well-specced gaming laptop that's been 
released into a competitive marketplace 
in which there are a lot of other options at 
the same price. Its performance is good, 
but it doesn't always look like a bargain. 
-IAN EVENDEN 


ЫЛ Acer Predator Helios Neo 16 


O HELIOS Good processor 
choices; Nice screen; Keyboard 
has great feel. 


E HEINOUS Poor battery life; Heavy; Gets 
hot underneath. 


Storage 


Screen 


Connecti 


Dimensions | 1.1 x 14.2x tin 


Weight 


© UNSPLASH 


The black plastic casing picks. 
up fingerprints easily, so you 
might need to carry a cloth, 


PROJECTORS ARE STILL difficult to justify 
on so many levels. The biggest reason 
is what kind of screen tech we have 
available to us. No matter how you spin it, 
a 4K gaming projector's main advantage 
is screensize. Everything else, from color 
accuracy and latency to image clarity, is 
superseded by the monitor tech we have, 
typically at far lower prices, too. 

If you're looking at a projection unit 
like this to replace your desktop monitor, 
we'd say that it's not worth considering. 
If you want a beefy 42-inch monitor, then 
you can grab something like Asus's ROG 
Swift OLED PG42UQ, complete with 137 
Hz refresh rate, 0.1ms response time, 
and 4K 41.5-inch panel for less than 
$950. If you want something ultrawide, 
then Alienware's AW3423DW, complete 
with 34-inch form factor, 3440x1440 
resolution, 0.1 ms response, and 175 Hz 
refreshrate, comesinatjust shy of $1,100, 
and you can find even cheaper solutions 
from Samsung and other manufacturers. 
No matter how you spin it, the humble 
monitor is better if you want the absolute 
best experience on your PC on your own. 

But that's the twist—a projector isn't 
really designed for that kind of use. It's 
not meant to be a desktop replacement, 
nor is it best enjoyed alone. No, this is a 
product that really makes itself at home 
in a dedicated gaming den, man cave, 
home theater, or family room. When it 
comes to getting a top-tier 4K gaming 
experience, very few projectors come 
close to what the X500i can achieve. 

We've been using the X500i for a 
few weeks now, and out of all of Benq's 
projector product stack, we're not 
sure why you'd go with anything else. 
Admittedly, out of the three brand new 
projectors from the company, there's not 
alotto choose from—just the X3100i, with 
its vast $2,400 price tag, the X500i, or the 
portable X3006 4K gaming projector at 
$1,800. The X500i sits in comfortably at 
$1,700, but in our opinion, is far superior 
to its X3100i counterpart. 

Why? It comes down to a mixture of 
features, price, and form factor. Out of 
the box, the X500i's image quality is top- 
tier. One of our tests involve shining our 
projectors against a dark gray wall to 
see how they handle the color difference 
comparedtoa white screen, and the X500i 
dominated that test. Colors are crisp, 
vibrant, and accurate. On a relatively 
short 18-foot throw, the X500i produced 
a fantastically clear image, and latency 
was almost non-existent. Benq has also 
included some serious connectivity 
[we'll let the spec box do the talking), 
and Google TV is built in for a super- 
smooth setup. The chef's kiss, however, 


is the configuration menu. There's a lot 
on offer, including everything from high- 
altitude mode to keystone adjustments, 
game modes, and HDR tweaking. It also 
packs some impressive audio, certainly 
in contrast to some of the competition. 

The best thing about the X500i, though, 
is the form factor. It's sleek, slender, and 
more traditionally rectangle-shaped, 
rather than the cuboid that the X3100i and 
X5006 offer. That allows you to mount 
it to the ceiling without worrying about 
walking into it at night. Build quality is 
solid, and the remote is slick. 

It's not flawless, however. Fan noise 
is an issue, particularly if you're on 
Netflix or YouTube, and the Google TV 
implementation feels flimsy [it's a dongle 
that you insert into the back, hidden 
behind a plastic cover, with a bendy 
Micro-USB cable, and HDMI connector]. 

Still, the X500i easily contends with 
the likes of the X3100i for image quality 
and then some, and that's what makes 
this thing so impressive. If you're after a 
4K gaming projector to dabble in some 
casual gaming with your friends and 
family on a long weekend, then the X500i 
more than fits the bill. -ZAK STOREY 


мекост Benq X500i 4K 


9 Short Throw Projector 


2 XCEPTIONAL Solid image 
clarity and color accuracy; Easy setup; 
Decent form factor; Good pricing. 


E XCREMENT Noisy fans; Janky Google TV 
implementation; Bigger screens may need 
the X3100i. 


$1,700, iww- beng.com] 


SPECIFICATIONS 


Resolutions 


1080p@240Hz. 60Hz limited 
to 16.7 
2 


lay Colors 
Contrast Ra 


htness 


TK USB 
Type A, 1x USB Type 

| lDisplayPortl, 1x RS232 In, 
1x TOSLink Optical Audio 
Ош, 3.5mm Analog Audio 


731 


Dimensions 4.6 x 14.4 x 9.6 inches 


Benq 
X500i 

АК Short 
Throw 
Projector 


4K gaming 
projection just 
got cheaper... 
Sort of 


The X500i really makes 
us question why the 
X3100i exists. 


JUL 2024 


85 


Find your next great read 


Subscribe today and get instant access 
on your iPad, iPhone or Android device. 


Phanteks 
XT Pro 


$50 goes a long 
way these days 


THERE'S NO DOUBT that we here at 
Maximum PC spend a lot of time looking 
at expensive products. Whether that's а 
$400 chassis with screens in it, or $2,000 
graphics cards, a lot of them really have 
no right to be as expensive as they are. 
Often, budget options are by far the 
more interesting products. Discovering 
the best-value chassis, CPU, or SSD 
is far more challenging than seeing 
that fps number climb ever higher (this 
journalists discerning eyes aren't as 
sharp as they used to Бе). Still, Phanteks" 
XT Pro is one such product. 

Straight out of the gate, this thing 
comes in at $50. That is incredibly low for 
a case. It's been a very long time since 
we've seen a chassis at that price that 
wasn't covered in fingerprint-inducing 
plastics, "gamer" design choices, or bare 
steel panels. The XT Pro is a nice change 
of pace in that regard, and really does 
go to show how far case manufacturers 
have come in terms of design and 
manufacturing in the last decade or so. 

On the surface, the XT Pro is a 
sleek, smooth, crisp black tower, with 
a tempered glass side panel and plenty 
of support for your componentry inside. 
It can house up to an 11-inch E-ATX 
motherboard, and has some serious 
cooling support baked in as well 

It's that cooling potential that really 
tips the scales in its favor. By default, 
you can fit it out with a 4.7-inch rad in 
the rear, a 14-inch in the roof, and a 9.5- 
inch up front. In fact, you can do that and 
still have a ton of clearance both top and 
bottom. It gets even more impressive 
when you look at the number of fans you 
can stick in this thing, as there's support 
for up to 10 4.7-inch fans total, including 
three on top of the PSU shroud, to draw 
coollish] air up from that compartment 
directly into your GPU and above 
componentry. Couple that with a decent- 
sized 5.5-inch up front, drawing cool air 
into that compartment, and it gives you 
an incredibly potent cooling solution. 

Alternatively, you could run three 
4.T-inches on that PSU shroud, an AIO 
with three 4.7-inches in the roof, one 


5.5-inch in the rear as an exhaust, and 
three 5.5-inches up front as an intake 
to really maximize on that potential. 
It's just glorious, and a real nice touch, 
particularly when most cases at this 
price point really don't support anywhere 
near as much cooling. 

The XT Pro is somewhat limited 
on what you get with it as standard, 
however—there is only one fan included, 
although you can pay $20 extra for the 
XT Pro Ultra [available in either black or 
white], and that comes with a total of four 
M25-140mm D-RGB fans as standard 
too. This is an impressive saving (we 
actually included the triple 4.7-inch kit in 
our feature build this issue on[page Té]. 

Otherwise, it's not entirely dissimilar 
to something like the Corsair 4000D 
Airflow. The internal layout is very 
similar. There's a huge amount of 
compatibility here for GPUs, CPU towers, 
and more, but all at a super-low price. 

You can tell where corners are cut— 
some of the materials are on the lower- 
quality end—but it's not distracting by 
any means. If Phanteks had pitched this 
case in its standard config as $70, we'd 
have thought this was a good deal. At 
$50, it's outstanding. -ZAK STOREY 


МШШ Phanteks XT Pro 
9 BXENEPHON OF GREECE Strong 
pricing; Easy to build in; Insane 
cooling potential; Excellent compatibility. 
EIXYLOPHONE OF KINDERGARTEN Materials 


do feel cheap; Could use one extra fan in 
$50 contig 


$50, [www.phanteks.com| 


‘SPECIFICATIONS 


Support | ITX, Micro-ATX, ATX, 
| EATX(2 x 11 inches} 


2x28 inch, 1x35 


Motherbc 


2.5-inch / 2.5-inch 


Support inch/2 x 3.5 inch 
Max Radiator [AT inch rear, 14 inch 
Support | root, 95 inch front 


Fan Support | 3x47 incN2 x88 

inch roof, 3 x 4.7/5.5 
| inch front, 3 x 47 inch 
| PSU cover, 1x 4.7/5.5 


inch rear 


Dimensions | 73197 9.1 inches 
Graphics Card 

Clearance 16.33 inches 

CPU Tower Clearance | 7.24 inches 


Warranty | 5 years limited 


JuL 2024 | mmmw | 87 


in the lab L 


Cherry Xtrfy K5V2 


New switches, who dis? 


CHERRYS SWITCHES are dependable, 
unwavering, and the standard by which 
many of us judge all other switches. So 
what happens when Cherry changes 
them? You get the MX2A Red switches 
inside the Cherry-made Xtrfy K5V2—a 
new and improved version of the Cherry 
MX Reds we've come to know and love. 

The MX2A Reds are an improvement 
in a number of ways. First and foremost, 
they're factory lubed. If you're a regular 
reader of our keyboard coverage, you'll 
know that lube makes for smoother 
switches with a satisfying clack. That's 
certainly true of the MX2A Reds, too. 
Each key glides effortlessly with each 
strike from my fingers. 

The MX2A switches come with ‘pin 
point ring lubrication’ applied to the new 
‘socket dome’ in the bottom housing. If 
that sounds like jargon, it sort of is, but 
in effect means each switch leaves the 
factory floor with a big dollop of grease in 
it, and which should stick around for the 
lifetime of the switch. 

Other upgrades with the MX2A 
switches factor into the more consistent 
key press, including a new barrel spring, 
housing socket dome, guidance ribs, 
and stem geometry. That last one is 
important, as the MX2A are significantly 
less wobbly than older MX Reds. 

All of those changes make for a much 
smoother key press than with previous 
Cherry MX Red switches. Overall it’s a 
much better switch than the original MX 
Reds. That's good news for gamers, as 
we're likely to see a lot of them end up in 
gaming keyboards from multiple brands. 

But how does the typing experience 
on the Cherry Xtrfy K5V2 compare to our 


88 | mmm | JUL 2024 


favorite keyboard of the moment, the ROG 
Strix Scope ll 96 Wireless? Put simply, we 
prefer the Scope Il 96 for typing. The lack 
of wobble in the PBT keycaps through the 
ROG NX Snow switches is as impressive 
now as the day we first tried it. 

Onward to the keyboard itself. This is 
a compact slab with a 65 percent layout. 
That means it's only 12.8 x 4.4 inches, 
and doesn't come with a numpad or the 
usual cluster above the arrow keys. It 
does retain arrow keys, however, along 
with Page Down, Page Up, and Delete 
keys. The rest of the missing keys can be 
accessed via the many, many shortcuts 
on this keyboard. 

End, Home, and the F1-F12 keys are 
accessed with a press of the Function key. 
To make up for the lack of physical media 
keys, there are some shortcuts thrown in 
along the top alphabet row. What I find a 
little overwhelming are the many more 
shortcut keys for functions with unclear 
intentions. There's one key of mysterious 
machination with a fingerprint blazoned 
on it, another says K-LED. BG Color, 
K-Slow, K-Fast, K-Mask, E-speed+, the 
list goes on. All those we've mentioned 
control the RGB lighting on the board, 
and the reason why there are so many 
pre-programmed keys to do so is due to 
the lack of dedicated Cherry software to 
control this keyboard. That may appeal to 
some, though if you want simplicity, we'd 
look elsewhere. 

The keycaps are made from ABS 
plastic, which feels like a bit of a miss for 
the money, but they're easily replaceable 
thanks to MX cross stems. The switches 
themselves are also hot-swappable, 
and the USB Type-C to Type-A cable 


removable. All of this should see this 
keyboard last a long time—at least until 
those switches wear out around the 100 
millionth click mark. 

You'll have to part with $140 to get 
yourself in on the Xtrfy action. It's a 
neatly packaged gaming keyboard with 
plenty of functionality for its lack of 
software, which for some may be all they 
need to hear, but nevertheless feels like 
a lot of money for fewer keys than most. 
There are nicer-feeling—and cheaper— 
compact keyboards. Nothing about the 
Xtrfy makes it sing for us. -JACOB RIDLEY 


СОШО Cherry Xtrfy K5V2 


EXTRFY Steady switch; Good 
typing experience; Great for 
gaming; Software free; Hot-swappable 


EIXTNCT RGB lighting controls are finicky; 
Cheaper wired compact boards available. 


$140 preccherryamertess com] 


SPECIFICATIONS 


1 
size | an 


Connectivity | USB Type-C to Type-A 


Keycaps | ABS 


Switches. | Cherry MX2A Red 


Hot-swappable | Yes 


Shortcuts via Function 


Media controls 
key 


Lighting 1 RGB lighting modes 
| + onboard contrat 


Software None 


HyperX Cloud Ill 


Wireless 


These are not the 
headphones you're 


looking for... 


LET'S BE GENEROUS and start with the 
positives. The Cloud Ill Wireless offers 
a sturdy build that didn't creak, bend, or 
break during two weeks of regular usage. 
The headset's earcups are held in place 
by a robust metal frame bathed in red, 
and the surrounds are all plastic. The ear 
and head cushioning is an initially comfy 
and uniform leatherette. 

Avolume wheel with a smooth, tactile 
action sits on the right earcup, with a 
microphone mute button, power button, 
and USB Type-C charging port on the 
left. The removable microphone extends 
out from the left earcup, connected via 
a slotted 3.5mm jack. This particular 
microphone comes with a small red light 
on the tip of the boom arm to indicate 
when it's muted—a handy visual cue and 
a good way to avoid talking to yourself. 

It captures a tone favoring the 
upper ranges and with a subdued bass 
response. It's not a particularly natural- 
sounding microphone, but it is extremely 
clear. For gaming over Discord or in- 
game voice chat, boosting the higher 
frequencies is not a bad thing—the Cloud 
Ils mic cuts through game audio like 
a knife through butter. However, if you 
want a headset that's better suited to 
streaming or recording your voice, you'll 
want to look elsewhere. 

The 120-hour battery life brandished 
by the Cloud Ill Wireless is good 
compared to the wider market, and in a 
few weeks of testing it barely required 
charging at all. The dedicated wireless 
dongle, meanwhile, will work across PC, 
PlayStation, and Nintendo Switch thanks 
to an adapter in the box to change it from 
a native Type-C connection into a Type-A. 

If that sounds useful, the dongle is also 
where the worm begins to turn. It seems 
to suffer interference issues with other 
wireless peripherals, including mice, 
causing repeated rogue disconnections 
and lost or distorted audio. That was 
solved by relocating the dongle into a port 
further from other wireless dongles, but 
it remains a concern. 


Then there are the ergonomics. We 
weighed the Cloud Ill Wireless at 0.75 
pounds, but four hours of usage left us 
desperate to get the things off. The same 
can't be said about, say, the AceZone 
A-Spire, over a similar period of usage. 
They're much more comfortable. 

This leaves us with the final and most 
important factor: sound quality. The bass 
feels more pronounced on this headset 
than some more neutral headsets, yet 
lacks precision and definition. It's really 
trying to highlight the lower frequencies, 
yet the drivers just aren't capable of it. 
As a result, when the bass is kicking, it 
detracts from the rest of the mids and 
highs. Without any bass thumping, the 
high-end is better, and for a closed- 
back headset, it doesn't sound pointy or 
harsh. But the high-end response, too, is 
nothing to write home about. 

The Cloud Ill is certainly better suited 
to gaming than music. It's reasonably 
easy to hone in on individual cues in- 
game, and while the soundstage isn't 
terribly impressive, this headset provides 
a decent enough gaming experience. 
But if you want to mix in some music 
listening, there are definitely headsets 
that do a better job of that broad remit. 

All told, the Cloud Ill Wireless 
highlights an uncomfortable truth with 
wireless gaming headsets: you can pick 
up a fantastic-sounding pair of wired 
headphones for less than $100, but it 


costs a lot more for similar cable-free 
headphones. I've not been blown away by 
any wireless headset beneath the $150 
mark. In that sense, and compared to 
similarly priced competition, such as the 
Corsair HS80 Max, the HyperX Cloud III 
Wireless is decent enough. Yet, it doesn't 
feel anything close to a legend in the 
making, like its more expensive sibling, 
the HyperX Cloud Alpha Wireless. 


OB RI 


207 The HyperX Cloud Ш Wireless 


GIN THE CAN Good battery life; 

Decent build; Okay for gaming 
BICAN IT Connection issues; Tinny 
microphone; Muddy sound. 


$150 FRERE 


SPECIFICATIONS 

Connection 2.4 GHz wireless Ма 
| USB Type-C dongle 
| with Type-A adapter] 

Type | Closed back 


Frequencyresponse | 10 Hz - 21 kHz 
Drivers Dynamic, 53mm with 
neodymium magnets 


Connector | USB Type-C 


Microphone Electret condenser 
microphone 


— Án 
Weight 0.75165 [with mic) 


JuL 2024 | mum | 89 


Sleek, indomitable mothership = — 
jetting off into the unknown? 
It must be Homeworld. 


Homeworld 3 


The Hiigaran fleet returns for a third outing 


THE SIGHT OF THE SLEEK, indomitable 
mothership preparing to jet off into 
the unknown, accompanied by radio 
chatter and a moody score, feels like a 
homecoming. For newbies, it's a striking 
scene. For veterans, it calls to mind the 
original mothership getting ready to 
leave Kharak and the beginning of one 
of the best strategy games ever created. 
Welcome to Homeworld 3. It's enough to 
make you tingle. 

Homeworld 3 wants to remind you 
of its legacy, a lot. After the events 
of Homeworld 2, Karan S'jet, the 
mothership's navigator, was sent on a 
mission to deal with a looming crisis, 
but never returned. 20 years later, her 
protege, Imogen S'jet, is following in her 
footsteps, with a new mothership and a 
new fleet that must strike out on their 
own, once again without support. 

But where the original Homeworld 
often took a minimalist approach, 
Homeworld 3 is comparatively busier, 
with maps full of debris and terrain, 
and a story that constantly breaks from 
the fun stuff to boring conversations in 
hideous cutscenes that look ripped from 
a bad '905 sci-fi game. The plot is mostly 
forgettable nonsense, so thank goodness 
the missions are largely brilliant. 


90 | umm | JUL 2026 


Each puts the fleet in a new kind of 
peril. You'll be hiding from enemies in 
nebulae, commandeering gargantuan, 
monolithic space complexes, setting up 
elaborate blockades, using turrets and 
mines to create corridors of death, or 
sabotaging factories in kamikaze strikes. 

The original Homeworld felt 
revolutionary thanks to its truly 3D 
battles, but Homeworld 3 makes you 
appreciate the cosmic conflicts so much 
more thanks to space terrain. Every 
single mission is laden with screen- 
filling structures and asteroids, creating 
defensible positions, chokepoints, and 
ambush spots. How you approach a fight 
matters much more because while you 
have this complete freedom of movement, 
you also have maps that give you both 
advantages and limitations. 

The complexity of the terrain- 
dense maps makes it harder 
to control your fleet, but it's 
easy enough to hop around, 
focusing on specific ships 
and groups. The attack move 
order means you can keep up 
the aggression, and being able 
to select groups of enemies to 
attack gives you room to deal 
with the big picture 


Still, some maps simply set in deep 
space would have been welcome. Full 
3D movement already gives you plenty to 
deal with, and its predecessors’ purity of 
Space combat is missing. Sometimes, it 
feels like Homeworld 3is trying too hard. 

There's also a new mode: War Games. 
It's an RTS take on roguelikes, where each 
run gives you only a specific ship loadout 
which can be buffed by artifacts you earn 
along the way. Every mission sees you 
bombarded by enemy incursions, which 
only grow in intensity. It punishes you for 
taking your time. The Al isn't any more 
reactive than the campaign's, but it's 
certainly more unrelenting. 

Despite ostensibly allowing you to play 
Solo, it just doesn't make sense without a 
co-op buddy. But even with a co-pilot in 
tow, the appeal is limited. You get fewer 
options, less time and more threats. None 

of this really plays to Homeworld 3s 
strengths. It's good that developer BBI 
has tried something new, it shouldn't 
be entirely beholden to the past, but 
this ain't it, unfortunately. 
Homeworld was such a 
formative title for gamers 
of a certain generation 
that it's hard to imagine 
anything knocking it 


New play mode War 
Games is a spacefaring 
take on roguelikes. 


Clunky cutscenes and a 
forgettable plot are offset 
by thrilling missions. 


While playing solo is possible, 
we definitely recommend complex, but it's easy to zoom 
buddying up with someone. in on ships and groups. 


off its pedestal, but Homeworld 3 does 
make it wobble—a bit. Watching dogfights 
in the canyons of a frozen moon or a 
formation of bombers boosting up the 
wall of an industrial complex, while 
praying some of them survive the turret 
fire, is undeniably thrilling stuff. But then 
you sit through another terrible cutscene, 
babysit your capital ships or do another 
run of War Games, the wobbling passes. 
This isn't quite the Homeworld 3 we 
dreamed of, then. But there are times 
where it gets pretty close. -FRASER BROWN 


Homeworld 3 


us EW Wo 
Intoxicating nostalgia hit; 
Brilliant missions; Intriguing space terrain. 


much 
A bit too complicated; Unsatisfying 
new play modes. 


SPECS CPU, Intel i5-9600K 


1080 TI, AMD RX5700, or Intel ARC A580. 
RAM, 16GB. 40GB stora! 


oe, 


Й Homeworld 3 is busier, with 


maps full of debris, terrain, 
huge structures and asteroids. 


This sequel is a notable How you choose to 
step up on the original approach a fight is 
incarnation. important than eve 


JUL 2024 


more 
г. 


шине | 91 


in the labi 


um The best laptops for video editing 


06000 


for masochists 


Men of War 2 review: A rewarding but flawed RTS 


Arc vs Chrome 


A new challenger enters the battle of the browsers 


THINGS HAVE BEEN relatively quiet in the 
world of web browsers for a while, if you 
overlook Microsoft's constant pressure 
on Windows users to switch to Edge. 
The MS browser has greatly improved 
since the switch to Google's rendering 
engine, Blink, itself a fork of Apple's older 
Webkit engine used in Safari. Microsoft 
also has Trident (Internet Explorer] and 
EdgeHTML (older versions of Edgel, 
while Firefox runs on Gecko. There are 
others, too. 

These engines affect the way websites, 
which exist as lines of code and image files 
on a server somewhere, are displayed on 
your computer. The differences between 
them mean they don't always render web 
content identically, especially in these 
days of embedded content, multiple 
coding languages, and plugins that mean 
a browser may be pulling information 
from many different sources to create the 
site you see. 

What this means is that despite there 
being lots of different browsers, many 
of them are running on the same engine, 
and may not be as different under the 
hood as you expect. While this is good 
for consistency, and makes it easier to 
create standards-compliant web pages 
that will load well in any browser (cross- 


92 | www | JUL 2024 


browser testing is an artform in itself], it 
does mean that there has been a distinct 
lack of innovation in the browser market, 
with things like chatbots being the biggest 
step forward since online accounts and 
syncing of bookmarks across computers. 

There's a new browser on the block, 
though: Arc, and it attempts to shake up 
the web despite using the same Blink 
rendering engine as many of the other big 
players. What's different about it, though, 
is the way it changes the interface of the 
browser, which has remained largely the 
same since Windows 95. 


ARC 

Arc comes from The Browser Company, 
a startup founded by former White 
House director of product Josh Miller 
and software developer Hursh Agrawal. 
It differs from other browsers, which 
usually have a similar layout with an 
address bar at the top of the screen, by 
moving things to a sidebar on the left. This 
makes a lot of sense on our 16:9 or 16:10 
screens, which have more space in the 
horizontal plane. 

It's easy to install—just download the 
installer from[arc.net]run it, and let it do 
its thing. Once the app is installed and you 
open it up, you'll be prompted to create 


an account, which means putting in an 
email address and creating a password. 
That sadly means signing up to marketing 
communications, but they're easy to 
unsubscribe from. 

Arc's use of the Blink engine also 
means that all your Chrome plugins are 
compatible, and if you choose to transfer 
your bookmarks into the new browser, 
they'll come along, too. Once up and 
running, Arc added large buttons in its 
sidebar for Gmail and Google Calendar, 
bundled all our imported Chrome 
bookmarks into a folder, and provided a 
folder of tutorials for the browser itself. 
Under the bookmarks sit your tabs, each 
of which runs in a separate instance of 
the browser, meaning Windows’ Task 
Manager shows alot of running processes 
for the app—we spotted 16 with two tabs 
open, using about 650MB of RAM 

If, like us, you've been using browsers in 
largely the same way since the days when 
modems wailed and screeched to connect 
us to the web, doing things another way 
can come as a shock. Arc looks different 
to Chrome, Edge, and Firefox, but it brings 
with it some good ideas that are surely 
destined to be absorbed by its rivals. 

One of the first that strikes us is the 
way you can snap tabs side by side in a 


magazinesdirect.com 


Maximum PC Magazine 


BEST VALUE 


PC 20231 
т 


AS PUBLISHERS OF THIS MAGAZINE WE PROMISE 


similar way to app snapping in Windows 
11. If you want to change one of those 
tabs by typing a web address rather than 
following a link, you click on the title bar, 
and a pop-up appears into which you type, 
which is also how new tabs are dealt with. 
It can feel a bit clunky, but makes sense 
if your browsing is more mouse-driven. 

With bookmark folders driven to the 
left-hand bar, there's more vertical space 
in Arc—you don't even get the familiar File 
or Edit menus, and just small forward, 
back, and refresh buttons, so there's 
often more of a web page on the screen at 
once, while tiling two side by side makes 
text-based pages easier to read. 

Elsewhere, there are built-in mini- 
apps, Note and Easel, which in the 
case of the former, simply let you write 
things and share them, while Easel is 
a digital whiteboard through which you 
can collaborate with others, embedding 
videos and even whole web pages into 
your creations. 


CHROME 

Old favorite Chrome has 65 percent of 
the desktop browser market, and comes 
backed by a web store that hosts over 
123,000 extensions and another 30,000 
themes. It may be a traditional browser 
that can trace its UI back to the beginning 
of Internet Explorer and beyond, but it's 
highly customizable and runs extremely 
smoothly. The way it works with Google 
services such as Gmail and Drive is a 


boon for those who like to work in the 
web apps. 

Chrome's reputation as a RAM hog is 
fading, as Google added a memory saver 
option back in 2023 that puts tabs to sleep 
when they're not being used—hovering 
your pointer over the inactive tab tells you 
how much has been saved. Edge does a 
similar thing, but you'll still see memory 
gobbled up in all browsers if you have lots 
of resource-hungry tabs open. 

Despite strong competition from 
Microsoft and Mozilla, Chrome remains 
oneofthe bestgeneral-purpose browsers. 
It's secure, with a built-in password 
manager that will suggest strong 
passwords and remember them for you, 
syncing them across all the devices youre 
signed into with your Google account. It 
has other tricks, too, such as advising you 
if your passwords are likely to have been 
compromised in a data breach, the reader 
mode that strips a page of distractions so 
you can concentrate on the text, or tab 
management features that allow you to 
pin, close, reopen and remember whole 
windows’ worth that can be reopened 
from the History listing after you've 
closed them. 

Whatit lacks are features such as Arc's 
sidebar or Edge's vertical tab layout— 
Chrome keeps things very traditional, 
with the tabs and address bar at the top— 
but for those who like to keep a lot open at 
once, there's a drop-down menu that lists 
your tabs and allows you to search them. 


a orage my sors 


Chrome remains the most popular 
browser thanks to its ease of use and 
reputation for speed and security, and 
the fact it's the de facto browser on a lot 
of mobile devices probably doesn't hurt, 
either. Despite Microsoft baking begging 
messages into Windows to try out Edge, 
Chrome is one of the first things many 
new PC owners install. 

Switching browsers is a bit like moving 
house—you sometimes have to do it, 
but you'd rather not, and it can take a 
lot of time and effort, so it's no wonder 
many users stay with Chrome or Edge. 
Trying something new, however, costs 
you nothing, and with Arc, we may have 
seen a little glimpse of the future of 
web browsing. -IAN EVENDEN 


vERDICT arc 


сново Exciting new kid on the 
block; Bursting with new ideas. 


EI TANGENT Inertia may work against it; Yet 
to prove itself regarding security. 


Free [arera] 


DIN Google Chrom 


A CHROMIUM Incredibly popular; 
Fast; Secure and easy to use. 


E 0010М Complicated; Starting to Look 
left behind. 


Free /fgoogie.com/chrome 


JuL 2024 | mmm | 93 


comments | vou write, we respond 


Gaming for $1,000 

I really enjoyed your $800 
Gaming PC cover feature in 
the June 2024 issue. While 
1 wasn't surprised to see 
that a PC without a GPU 
wasn't great for playing 
games, it did get me 
thinking about what | might 
be able to build myself on 
the budget end of things. 
I'm about to start my first 
year of college, and I think 
1 can just about convince 
my parents to give me the 
money to build a PC if | 

can keep it under $1,000! 
What can | reasonably 
expect in terms of gaming 
performance for that 
money, and what are the 
key components | should be 
lookingat? -B. Duggan 


EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, 

GUY COCKER, RESPONDS: 
Thanks for the feedback on 
last issue's cover build— 
while we are ‘Maximum 
PC’, we do try to keep 
things balanced with a 
few value builds per year. 
When AMD's 86006 CPU 
arrived promising basic 
gaming performance 
without the need for a 
GPU, we were intrigued, 
to say the least. However, 
as you remark, its real- 
world gaming frame rates 


WE TACKLE TOUGH READER QUESTIONS ON... 


> Budget gaming 


> Stealthy office builds 
> Modern benchmarking 


were passable at best in 
the major titles we use for 
benchmarking. It really 
shouldn't be thought of as a 
GPU replacement—rather 
something you can use 

to play casual or eSports 
titles now and again, if for 
some reason you can't have 
a dedicated graphics card 
in your system. 

The good news is that 
it's very possible to meet 
your request and build 
a gaming PC on a $1,000 
budget. This would also 
be a system capable of 
running modern titles at 
playable frame rates— 
even graphically intensive 
ones like Cyberpunk 2077. 
You can obviously look at 
the alternative builds Zak 
featured in last month's 
cover feature, as well as 
the blueprints he compiles 
at the back of each issue. 
The key component for 
you to look at is obviously 
the GPU. Zak recommends 
you look at an Intel Arc 
A750 ($200), AMD RX 
7600 ($260), or RX 7600XT 
($330) at this budget, and 
just this week, I've seen the 
RTX 4060 Ti hit around the 
$300 mark, so | would add 
that to your list. 

From there, I'd suggest 
looking at the components 


from his cover build last 
issue, particularly the 
Phanteks XT Pro case 
($50). | have a slight 
preference for Intel CPUs 
at the moment, given how 
cheaply you could then 
pair it with a Z690 or 2790 
motherboard—the Intel 
Core i5-14400F is $200, 
a mobo the same price or 
less, plus you can choose 
between DDR4 or DDR5 
memory. Get a decent air 
cooler [no more than $50], 
power supply like 
the models Zak suggests 
($60), and SSD storage 
($70-100, depending on 
capacity) and you should 
just about come under 
that $1,000 sweet spot. 

The caveat here is that 
with these components, 
you shouldn't expect to be 
gaming at 4K—I'd suggest 
either a 1080p or 1440p 
monitor, but the good news 
is that there are plenty of 
decent screens that don't 
break the bank. Again, the 
Nvidia GPU option might 
help you here thanks to 
its upscaling tech. And 
of course, don't forget 
to budget in a keyboard, 
mouse, and maybe even a 
gamepad, too. 

If you want more 
discussion of the current 


state of the budget market, 
be sure to watch Zak and | 
discuss it in our 'Story of 
the Build’ video, a link to 
which you can find on page 
17 of last issue. 

Oh, and good luck in your 
studies! 


Dark future 

1 don't know about you, 
but I've gotten weary of 
the whole RGB thing. It's 
actually quite difficult 

to find case fans that 
possess both good cooling 
performance and good 
lighting performance. 

1 wonder what you think 
of the idea of doing a 
compact ATX workstation 
build (not HTPC build, 
but mini ATX for ease of 
build and maintenance] 
that is high-powered for 
standard needs, but is 
dark, and maybe even 
skips the tempered glass 
for a closed side panel, 
going old school? I've been 
thinking that this may well 
be my next build if | don't go 
with a laptop and docking 
station. -R. Matlow 


EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, 

GUY COCKER, RESPONDS: 
Thanks for another build 
request—l always love 
hearing what sort of 


s submit your questions to: Editorema 


imumpc.com 


94 | mumwe | suL 2024 


machines you want to see 
us turn our hand to next. 

I'm slightly confused by 
the first paragraph in your 
email—it sounds like the 
fans you're buying at the 
moment are indeed RGB, 
but neither the lighting 
nor performance are up 
to scratch. From personal 
experience, the fans 
I've used from NZXT and 
Corsair have offered both 
good airflow and lighting, 
although they're not cheap. 

On the other hand, if you 
want great fans, but 
without the lighting, I'd 
personally be looking at 
those from Noctua. They're 
famous for their brown- 
colored products, but you 
can get nearly everything 
in their chromax black 
colorway, if you prefer a 
stealthier look. 

In terms of the compact 
ATX workstation, | think 
this is a great theme for an 
upcoming build. | also think 
a compact size is a good 
idea, as if it's for an office, 
no one wants something 
that's going to completely 
take over what might be a 
small amount of space. | 
love NZXT's H1 case (which 
| built in for the August 
2022 cover feature], but 
1 suspect that's maybe a 
little small—I found it quite 
fiddly, so it might not tick 
your boxes there, although 
it did have a large 3070Ti 
GPU in there. 

NZXT's H5 Flow might 
be a better choice, as it's 
a compact mid-tower that 
comes with a quiet non- 
RGB fan, and is available in 
black, as you've specified 
It's also pretty good value 
at$95 

Of all your requests, 
the most difficult is the 
case that doesn't feature 
a tempered glass panel! 
You're definitely going 
against the current fashion 
in PC case design there. 

I'd suggest Looking at the 
Fractal North case, which 


Non-glass side panels are hard 
to find, but the Fractal North 
comes with a mesh option. 


can be specified with a 
mesh panel instead, or 
the Corsair 2000D Airflow 
Mini-ITX, although the 
latter might be too small 
for your needs. If you find 
anything suitable, be sure 
to let us know! 


Make my PC sweat 

| recently received a 

bonus at work, and decided 
to spend it on that high-end 
gaming PC I've always 
wanted. It boasts an Intel 
Core i9-14900K 

and an Nvidia RTX 4090, 

so it's as advanced as it 
gets right now. 

However, I've been out 
of the PC gaming world 
for a few years, and I'm 
interested in what titles 
the Maximum PC team 
uses to push their 
machines hard. Of course, 
| see the games you use 
for benchmarking, like 
Cyberpunk 2077, Metro 
Exodus, and Total War: 
Warhammer III, but 
they're all a couple of 
years old now! 

Basically, what can | use 
from the last year or so to 
make my system sweat and 
my console-owning friends 
green with envy? 

-S. Baxter 


EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, 

GUY COCKER, RESPONDS: 
You make a fair point about 
our benchmark titles. It 
was our July 2022 issue, 
when we built three PCs 

at three different budgets, 
that we last took the 
opportunity to overhaul our 
benchmarking software. 

The truth is, though, 
that most of those games 
would remain the same 
even today. It feels to me 
like a truly revolutionary 
PC game only comes 
around once every few 
years or so. l'm sure many 
of you remember how 
long the original Crysis 
remained the leading 
benchmark for PC gamers, 
with the question of, "Can 
it run Crysis?" remaining 
relevant for years after its 
release. 

To me, Cyberpunk 2077 
feels like the current 
generation's equivalent— 
it's graphically intensive, 
has an incredible visual 
style, and thanks to all the 
post-release support that 
developer CD Projekt Red 
has put into it, it's a really 
enjoyable game to play 
as well. 


I think the game that's 
been released since we 
last updated our test suite 
that we'd definitely add 

to the list today is Alan 
Wake 2. It fulfils all the 
same criteria | listed for 
Cyberpunk above, but it 
also has the most absurd 
system requirements if 
you want to run it at 4K 
with high settings and ray 
tracing. You'll need an 
RTX 4080 or higher, and 
even then, you'll need to 
enable DLSS to keep things 
running smoothly. The 
resulting visual spectacle 
is a joy to behold, however, 
and is probably the best 
justification for splashing 
the cash on a high-end PC 
as you've done. 

1 also recently played 
Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2 
on my personal RTX 4090, 
and as our sister title PC 
Gamer noted, it's visually 
spectacular—the closest 
I've seen a playable game 
come to recreating those 
amazing Unreal Engine 5 
tech demos that have been 
around for a few years 
now. Sadly, as PC Gamer 
also notes, as good as the 
visuals are, it's narratively 
limp. Still, it's a short 
game, and you can play it 
on Xbox Game Pass if you 
don't want to pay full price. 

Dragon's Dogma 2 has 
also become a popular title 
for PC users wanting to 
benchmark their systems, 
although I've not played 
it personally. It got a 
positive review in our May 
2024 issue though, so it's 
worth playing! 

Other than that, my two 
personal favorites are Red 
Dead Redemption 2 and 
Metro Exodus Enhanced 
Edition. They're not the 
brand new titles you 
requested, but they both 
look spectacular. Red Dead 
features the most beautiful 
open world I've ever 
experienced, and Metro 
comes with all the Nvidia 
ray tracing and DLSS 
features you want to 
try when you get a new 
GPU. Enjoy! 


JuL 2024 | mmm 95 


y-part guide to building a bette 


a par 


blueprint |” 


BUDGET 


WE'RE BEING very aggressive with our budget builds this issue. 
There have been a number of tweaks and changes to really try 
and make the most out of the budget we have, and see if we can't 
drop the price to sub-$900 without compromising too heavily on 
performance while we do it. 


THIS MONTH'S STREET PRICES... 


Our AMD build had a few subtle changes in price, with 
last month's spec dropping by $2. Still, weve swapped the 
motherboard for the ASRock B650 PG Lightning to save even 
more. It's stilla full-fat ATX board, with suitable power solutions, 
plenty of connectivity, and decent memory support, too. 

Also, after seeing how aggressively prices have fallen on the 
DDR front, we've upgraded to a 32GB kit of DDR5 as our minimum 
budget spec moving forward. Admittedly, 5600 C46 isn't the best 
spec out there, but it's $12 extra for double the capacity. The final 
tweak comes in the form of our secondary 1TB PCle SSD, where 
we've gone for the Crucial P3 SSD, as it's slightly cheaper [Бу $4) 
than the MSI Spatium from last issue. 

You might also be tempted by AMD's latest 8400F chip. Six 
cores, 12 threads, no iGPU, and a full PCle complement sounds 
tempting, but clock speeds are lower, and the cache has been 
halved compared to the 7600. 

As for Intel, the memory bump pushed our price up by around 
$20, and the RX 7600 is still more costly than the A750, so we've 
dropped down to the cheapest B760 board we could find. PCIe 
support is solid (with 4.0 as standard), but you only get two DDR5 
slots, and 1/0 is a bit slim, so you might need a USB hub. 

You could also swap the 14400F for something like the 12400F 
for a $76 saving, or even grab a 12600K for $175 instead. Of 
course, the biggest saving would be to swap out the chassis for 
something like Phanteks' XT Pro (reviewed on[page 87), which 
would save you another $45 on each of these builds. 


AMD INGREDIENTS INTEL INGREDIENTS 
PART PRICE PART PRICE 
Case | Corsair 4000D Airflow $95 Case Corsair 4000D Airflow | $95 
PSU 600W Thermaltake Toughpower PSU 600W Thermaltake Toughpower 
GX2 80+ Gold $60 GX2 80+ Gold $60 
Mobo ASRock B650 PG Lightning ATXAMS NEW $150 Mobo ASRock B760M-HDV/M.2 Micro-ATX NEW | $95 
CPU AMD Ryzen 5 7600 $189 CPU Intel Core i5-14400F NEW | $200 
GPU | ASRock Challenger D Arc А750 86B $200 GPU ASRock Challenger OC RX 7600 86B $260 
RAM 32GB (2x16GB) TeamGroup T-Create RAM 326B (2x16GB) Silicon Power 
Classic @ 5600 C46 NEW | $84 DDRS @ 5600 C46 NEW | $76 
5501 5126В ADATA Legend 840 PCle 4.0 М.2 $45 SSD1 | 512GB ADATA Legend 840 PCle 4.0 M.2 i $45 
SSD2 | 1TB Crucial P3 PCle 3.0 M.2 NEW | $61 SSD2 ` 1TB Crucial P3 PCIe 3.0 M.2 NEW | $61 
os Windows 10 Home 64-bit OEM os Windows 10 Home 64-bit OEM i 
(Windows 11 Compatible) $32 (Windows 11 Compatible] E 


Approximate Price: $916 


96 | mme | JUL 2024 


Approximate Price: $924 


BOUNCING PRICES are wreaking havoc with our mid-range builds. 
Just take a look at our AMD build, with the componentry we had 
last issue. The GPU went up by $40, the RAM by $35, and the SSD 
by $10. The price drops were $3-5 at most. That's frustrating, 
which is why we've gone aggressive on the parts swap this time. 


Sponsored by T Bgg- 


For our AMD rig, we've swapped to a new GPU, the best-value 
RX 7800 XT we could get in the form of the Asus Dual OC. That 
alone shaves $20 off last month's price. 

We couldn't skimp on memory, particularly as our 
requirements for the mid-range are a minimum of 6,000 MT/s 
and a decent CAS latency. Still, for only $15 extra, we managed 
to hit that frequency and tighten up the CAS to C30, versus last 
month's 34 (it's still $20 cheaper than the Vengeance kit). Lastly, 
our SSDs also got a revamp, swapping out to the Lexar NM790 
(which you can read about more on [page 78), and the Patriot 
P400 Lite as our back-up 2TB drive. The heatsink variant for the 
NM790 is cheaper than the non-heatsink version, so grab it while 
you can. All that has helped us shave $36 off the AMD build. 

Our Intel build has also been hit hard. We didn't feel that it was 
right to have the same CPU in both budget and mid-range builds, 
so have gone for the 14600K with its higher clocks and more 
cores. That bumps up the price by $95, so to offset that we've 
dropped the motherboard down to the 7790-5, and switched out 
the GPU to a PNY Verto edition, saving $35 here. The build is $46 
more than last month's, but that's only $5 a thread, and you get 
tighter memory timings. 

Right now, that H7 Flow is incredible value, and a bit of a 
beauty for a build like this. There are a number of cheaper 
options, but you give up a bit of build quality, so we'll stick with 
the H7, although the Hyte Y40 is also a nice alternative if you're 
looking for something a little more bespoke. 


INTEL INGREDIENTS 
PART PRICE PART PRICE 
Case — NZXTH7 Flow $97 Case NZXT H7 Flow. | $97 
PSU 850W Thermaltake Toughpower PSU 850W Thermaltake Toughpower 
GF1 2024 80+ Gold $95 GF1 2024 80+ Gold $95 
Mobo | Gigabyte X670 Gaming X AX V2 - AM5 $205 Mobo — MSIZ790-S Wifi ATX NEW | $170 
CPU AMD Ryzen 7 7700 $277 CPU Intel Core i5-14600K NEW | $306 
Cooler | NoctuaNH-Di2LChromax.Black NEW $100 Cooler: Enermax Шатах Ill 360 ARGB | $80 
GPU Asus Dual OC Radeon RX7800XT NEW : $460 GPU ZPNY Verto OC ВТХ 4070 Super NEW | $565 
RAM | 32GB (2x16GB) Silicon Power Xpower — RAM — 326B (2x16GB) Silicon Power Xpower i 
| Zenith Gaming @ 6000 C30 NEW | $95 | Zenith Gaming @ 6000 C30 NEW | $95 
SSD1 | 1TB Lexar NM790 w/Heatsink 5501 1TB Lexar NM790 w/Heatsink 
M.2 PCle 4.0 SSD NEW $85 M.2PCle 4.0 SSD NEW : $85 
SSD2 | 2TB Patriot P400 Lite SSD2 | 2TB Patriot P400 Lite 
1 M.2PCle 4.0 SSD NEW | $105 M.2PCle 4.0 SSD NEW : $105 
os Windows 10 Home 64-bit OEM os Windows 10 Home 64-bit OEM 
(Windows 11 Compatible) $32 (Windows 11 Compatible) $32 


Approximate Price: $1,551 Approximate Price: $1,630 


JuL 2024 | mmmw 97 


blueprint |" 


їт'5 50 CRAZY how different the marketplaces are depending on 
your budget. If you take a look at our mid-range and entry-level 
builds, it's so aggressively priced, and there are these huge 
pricing swings—it's hard to keep up. Yet, if you have $3,000, 
there's a constant deluge of deals, savings, and price drops. 
There's depreciation occurring on all the hardware. 


AMD INGREDIENTS 


Take our AMD build in this issue. The CPU received a $50 price 
drop, and the GPU we swapped out to the same model of graphics 
card from a different partner (complete with insane cooling 
and RGB), saving $130. Then there's the Intel build, where we 
changed very little. The SSD was $10 cheaper, the CPU $20, the 
GPU $30, and the cooler fell by $10. It was a constant stream of 
deals and offers that added up to some big savings. For instance, 
our AMD build, with an identical spec, dropped in price compared 
to last issue by $179. Our Intel build, even with one slight tweak 
to the PSU and SSD, dropped by $90. That's close to 10 percent of 
the budget we have for the entry-level builds. 

The biggest shuffle came in the form of the power supply, 
as that had a price increase of around $30 [pretty much every 
1200W PSU and above seems to be at the $180 mark), so we 
switched that for its 1000W cousin instead. You still get that 80+ 
Platinum efficiency rating, and it's still enough for both builds, 
with the AMD build topping out at around 685W and the Intel 
hitting around 720W, so you'll be more than comfortable. 

There is one caveat—as we write this, Computex is occurring, 
and there are rumors of Nvidia launching a new barrage of GPUs, 
and AMD with a set of 9000 series CPUs. If the former does 
decide to leverage the might of the 12VHPWR600 connector, we 
could finally see 5000 series cards with a 600W ТОР. That would 
boost power requirements if you do want to upgrade in future. 

On that note, you may be better off holding fire for a moment. 
If the big three do launch new platforms and processors, we'll 
see a deluge of performance boosts, and older part deals land 
with us around September or just before it, which will be an ideal 
time for any budding system builder looking to revamp their rig. 


INTEL INGREDIENTS 


PART PRICE PART PRICE 
Case PhanteksEnthooPro2TemperedGlass $150 Case PhanteksEnthooPro2TemperedGlass | $150 
PSU Super Flower Leadex Platinum PSU Super Flower Leadex Platinum SE 

SE 1000W - 80+ Platinum NEW | $140 1000W - 80+ Platinum NEW | $140 
Mobo | Asus Prime X670E Pro WiFi - AM5 $300 Mobo Gigabyte 2790 Aorus Elite AX-W ATX $366 
cpu AMD Ryzen 9 7950X $500 CPU Intel Core i9-14900KF $512 
Cooler F Astis ROG/Ryito (350 АНӨВ eomm АӨ (AUN Cooler | Phanteks Glacier Опе 360D30 360mm AIO $170 
GPU ASRock Phantom Gaming OC Radeon GPU PNY Verto Overclocked RTX 4080 Super 166B | $970 

RX 7900 XTX 246B NEW | $900 
RAM 64GB (2x32GB) TeamGroup T-Create EAM PE (2x 24GB) G Skill Ripa $150 

Expert (à 6000 C34 $185 H 
SSDi | 2TB Crucial T700 PCIe 5.0 M.2 NEW | $240 EE). Ae RESO: MEW S240 
SSD2 | 2TB Crucial T500 PCIe 4.0 M.2 $139 reus качсын аА S 
т Windows 10 Home 64-bit OEM | ps Windows 10 Home 64-bit OEM 

[Windows 11 Compatible) $32 {Windows 11 Compatible) $32 


Approximate Price: $2,776 Approximate Price: $2,869 


Maximum PC [ISSN 1522-4279) is published 13 tim 
monthly plus a Holiday issue following the December issue, by 
Future US LLC, 120 West 42nd Street, 7th Floor, New York, NY — whale 


10036. USA. Websitf= www Tutureus.com.]Future US LLC also 


a year, 


publishes MaciLife, and PC Gamer. Entire contents copyright 


with the companies or products covered in Maximum РС. 


Reproduction on the Internet of the articles and pictures in 
this magazine is illegal without the prior written consent of 
Maximum PC. Producis named in the pages of Maximum PC are 
trademarks of their respective companies. 


Reproduction in 
is not affiliated 


PRODUCED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 


98 шн 


WE | JUL 2024 


UNEARTH THE FULL STORY 
BEHIND THE LEGEND OF ZELDA 


Explore every gare in the series and what makes each one so great. If you're a fan, you'll 
enjoy the trip through time. If you're a newcorner, we offer you this sage advice: "It's 
dangerous to go alone, take this!" 


CHOICE 


TIT 


We build the world's most advanced PCs. 


Experience a new level of performance with an award-winning Digital Storm PC. 
Built with the latest technology, highest quality components and backed by lifetime 
support. Visit our website and build your dream PC today. 


$ DIGITALSTORM | LEARN MORE: WWW.DIGITALSTORM.COM 


Digital Storm PCs featu Core