Maximum PC

Editor-in-Chief: Guy Cocker Staff Writer: Sam Lewis Contributing Writers: Alex Blake, Lincoln Carpenter, Barry Collins, Tim Danton, Shane Downing, Ian Evenden, Dave James, Harish Jonnalagadda, Jeremy Laird, Chris Lloyd, Nick Peers, Nik Rawlinson, Jac

WE’VE BEEN A BIT down on 2023’s graphics cards, thanks to a pretty toxic combination of inflated prices, lackluster performance, and a lack of a generational improvement over previous GPUs. Thankfully, we’ve finally been able to dish out a positive r

STUDENTS AS WELL AS educational establishments love Chromebooks. It’s a big market, which more than doubled after the pandemic. In 2020, over 30 million were sold. Apple is rumored to be planning an affordable MacBook to cut itself a slice of those s

The IRS is to use AI to check taxpayers’ returns for compliance. The new Atari 2600+ console will play the original cartridges, this time via HDMI. A start-up is making claims about its nanolayer ceramic storage, including a 5,000-year life and 100 p

UNITY HAS DECIDED THAT from 2024, it will charge 20 cents every time a game is installed; the Unity Runtime Installation Fee. However, there will be a threshold before it applies. For Unity Personal and Unity Plus, it kicks in when you have made over

Intel has revealed the specifications for Thunderbolt 5, which offer an increase over version 4’s 40Gb/s. Version 5 can reach 80Gb/s on bi-directional transfers, and 120Gb/s using a new boost mode for video. This is the first speed increase since the

Asus has developed a new way to deliver power to graphics cards. Instead of plugging power cables into the card, they go into the motherboard. The power gets to your card via an extra edge connector behind the PCIe slot, known as the HPCE connector (

It’s a safe bet that GDDR7 will end up in the next-generation AMD, Nvidia, and Intel GPUs. We don’t expect any of those to start shipping until 2024 at earliest—Intel’s Battlemage architecture will almost certainly be the first “next-gen” GPU to arri

The most recent example of this involves AMD’s hot new Radeon RX 7700 XT and 7800 XT boards, but we’ll come back to those GPUs in a moment. The overarching problem here, aside from the more obvious issue of painfully high pricing, involves comparativ

Battery life ranks as a very important metric for any gaming handheld. Depending on the games you play, the Steam Deck can last anywhere from around 90 minutes to as long as five hours or more. The more complex the game, mostly in terms of graphics,

Whether it’s your PC, laptop, smartphone, or tablet, nearly every form of flash storage likes to have a bit of elbow room. That’s especially true of QLC NAND devices, as they typically use a chunk of free space as a pseudo-SLC cache to speed up short

Valve’s new handheld has also done more to spur adoption and support for Linux gaming than any other system we’ve seen. Tons of servers already run Linux, but after the failed Steam Machine and SteamOS initiative from 2015, it felt like Windows might

Strip the x86 versus Arm contest down to its essentials, and you arrive at instruction sets. Neither x86 or Arm are CPU designs or architectures. Indeed, Intel and AMD produce their own bespoke CPU core designs. They share compatibility with the same

Is this entire discussion about x86 versus Arm missing the point? In an important regard, yes, because the future of computer chips is almost certainly heterogeneous. In that context, whether they’re x86 or Arm isn’t really relevant. That’s because t

Arm versus x86 is a battle for the ages, but is it already irrelevant? Is the real threat from another CPU instruction set altogether? Enter RISC-V, an open-source alternative to Arm, and many industry observers’ pick for the long-term future of gene

• Easy to upgrade • No upper limit to speed • 100% compatible • Big upfront investment • Power hungry • Can be noisy Although this feature celebrates the many forms of gaming PCs available now, there remains one clear choice if you need the last word

Family history is the ultimate detective experience: gather evidence (known as sources), and then use the information to fill out your family tree. This information is often referred to as ‘facts’ in family history circles, but a more accurate term i