Maximum PC

Editor-in-Chief: Guy Cocker Staff Writers: Christian Guyton, Sam Lewis Contributing Writers: Jeremy Laird, Chris Lloyd, Ian Evenden, Jarred Walton, John Knight, Nick Peers, Matt Hanson Production Editor: Jon Crampin Editor Emeritus: Andrew Sanchez Ar

I STARTED my journalism career on a home theater publication, where I cut my teeth reviewing televisions, speakers, and amplifiers. So, when our writer Sam pitched the idea of building a living room PC for this issue, naturally, I said yes. The resul

Japan has developed a new material that reduces capacity loss from battery recharging. Quaise Energy group is digging the world’s deepest holes (over 12 miles) to tap geothermal heat as a renewable energy source. DirectStorage, a form of SSD accelera

TOP-FLIGHT GRAPHICS cards are notoriously power-hungry. The next generation of Nvidia RTX 4000 cards will continue this trend, and rumor has it that the AD102 GPU will debut with 450W and 600W versions, but talk of an 850W version is wild (think of t

A recent preview build of Windows included a neat new feature: tabs in File Explorer. The Mac has had these for years, but in Windows, you have to resort to opening multiple copies of File Explorer. The feature is currently hidden, and it’s not clear

A while ago, Nvidia announced a new ‘halo’ card, the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti. This was a beast, with over 40 TFLOP of shading power, and 78 TFLOP for ray tracing. It also has a tasty 24GB of GDDR6 running at 21Gbps. It should have finally landed by the t

Built with 80 billion transistors on a custom TSMC 4N process (4nm Nvidia, not to be confused with the generic N4 that TSMC also offers), Hopper ups the ante in many ways. It supports a PCIe 5.0 interface, the first GPU to do so, as well as 4th gener

For great audio without all the bells and whistles, Blue has you covered with the Yeti Nano. The brand of choice for professional podcasters, Blue’s latest mic has a smaller footprint than the original Yeti, fewer recording options (cardioid and omni

Actually, GPUs will probably be cheaper still by the time you read these words. Reports of graphics card prices falling off a cliff are coming in from across the globe. In Australia, the Asus GeForce RTX 3080 TUF Gaming OC plummeted from AU$2,299 to

SIX SPEEDY M.2 SSDS. A zillion benchmarks. And a whole hill of specs. But what have we learned? Firstly, the quality of current SSDs is very high. There absolutely isn’t a dud here. Every single drive would be an electrifying upgrade for a system bas

SEARCH ONLINE FOR “why I need a VPN” and you’ll find flashy websites framing all sorts of shoddy prose on the perils of “unprotected” browsing. Such diatribes should be taken with a pinch of salt. Yes, there are companies that sell your data. Yes, th

VPNS ARE ADVERTISED as being a boost for privacy, security, and anonymity. Those nouns may well apply in particular situations. But it’s hard to call a VPN an anonymous service when you have to sign up with a very un-anonymous credit card. And it’s h

WHEN YOU CONNECT to a VPN, as well as proxying your traffic and setting the corresponding updates to your routing table, it may also provide you with different DNS settings. On paper, this was a reasonable idea. Traditional DNS requests (for example,

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If you’d like to keep Process Explorer running in the background, click Options to open the menu and tick both ‘Hide When Minimized’ and ‘Allow Only One Instance’. This means you’ll always be able to access Process Explorer from the Taskbar notificat

Throughout Task Manager and Process Explorer, you’ll find references to programs, processes, handles, and threads. What do they mean and how do they relate to each other? Programs are sets of files required to run an application, whether it’s a game,

Joplin allows you to extend its feature set further using plugins, which provide all kinds of additional functionality. There are formatting plugins to expand Joplin’s markdown support as well as tools for extending existing functions and adding new

> Virus Scanner Slowdown > Moore Fans > Accessibility for All In the January 2022 edition of Maximum PC, Edward posed a question in his letter titled “Hard drives and the theory of speed”. To summarize, he was not reaching close to the stated speed o

WE’RE FINALLY BRINGING the budget AMD build up to the current generation, replacing the Ryzen 5 3600 with the 5600X—at a price increase of just $15. This should net us around 10-20 percent better performance, depending on the workload. Since this is

BARELY A MONTH goes by without AMD or Intel releasing something juicy. This month, it’s AMD’s turn with the launch of the first chip to use its innovative 3D V-Cache technology. The new Ryzen 7 5800X3D is a regular Ryzen with a slab of extra cache st