Maximum PC

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INTEL’S 14th generation is to be joined by the Intel Core i9-14900KS Special Edition, which buzzes along at a maximum boost speed of 6.2GHz, breaking the 6GHz barrier and becoming the world’s fastest processor. The base clock is a more pedestrian 3.2

FIGURE AI is a start-up robotics company that has attracted investments of $675 million from such players as Microsoft, Nvidia, Intel, OpenAI, and Jeff Bezos himself. The robot, Figure 01, is billed as an autonomous AI-powered multi-purpose humanoid

LENOVO has proved rumors true and built a laptop with a transparent screen. The augmented reality machine is just a concept for now, but has an undeniable cool factor. The screen is 55 percent transparent when the pixels are off—switched on, they bec

AMD’S RDNA 3 family of graphics cards still isn’t complete, as we have another midrange(ish) offering: the RTX 7900 GRE. It’s been available in China since last July—what AMD has done is give the rest of the world a chance to play with one. It’ll cos

INTEL’S CEO PAT GELSINGER had a big plan in 2021—that the company would produce five process nodes in four years, giving it process leadership. That time is nearly up, with Intel 7 appearing in Alder Lake and then Raptor Lake, and Intel 4 appearing a

IF YOU’VE EVER WONDERED whether what was missing from your first-person shooters was the smell of gunfire, then GameScent is here to fix that. As you play, it puffs out an odor. It’s basically a fancy essential oil diffuser. The hexagonal box holds s

OVER THE LAST FEW ISSUES, we’ve built a cornucopia of different styles of PC. Whether that’s high-end glamorous RGB monsters with enough displays and gifs to make your eyes melt, cooling-challenged ITX towers, or super stealth blacked-out builds feat

The Ryzen 7 7800X3D is an incredibly interesting processor. At its heart, think of it as a slightly lower-clocked Ryzen 7 7700X. Indeed, it features the same eight cores, the same 16 threads, and the overall chiplet composition is similar, too, with

Another Kingston pick, our SSD for this build is none other than the Fury Renegade PCIe 4.0 SSD. This is by far one of the most impressive PCIe 4.0 drives we’ve tested, even beating the Crucial T500 in a number of our real-world tests (in fact, it ac

LENGTH OF TIME: 2 HOURS LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY: MEDIUM SO, THE HARDWARE has been selected—a fairly stock-standard mid-tower ATX build. There won’t be a lot to write about, then? Not quite—there are still some decisions to be made that are open to person

SO THEN, cable management aside, what was it like to build this beauty? Honestly, it was a fairly simple process. The biggest issues we faced mostly revolved around those cable management considerations. The H6 Flow is an incredibly well-designed cha

WE LOVE a confusing set of numbers here at Maximum PC, and oh boy, do we have some below. Performance across the board for our build was generally pretty good—the main highlights were Total War: Three Kingdoms finally reaching above that 60 fps mark,

CABLES—LOVE THEM or hate them, they’ve been a critical part of PC building since, well, we were building PCs. Over the years, these pesky connectors have developed considerably. From the humble days of the MOLEX and IDE connectors, to modern-day SATA

This new BTF standard, although looking great, presents some significant challenges for the industry at large, notably when it comes to case design. We’re already hearing of significant challenges from case manufacturers regarding the compatibility o

ONE SERVER to rule them all. That’s our dream—a single, centralized PC designed for always-on action, but which won’t run up huge electricity bills. It needs to be able to run multiple services simultaneously, from media streaming to cloud sync and b

If all is well, you shouldn’t run into any problems with your build. But if you do experience issues, then the PRIME N100 board supports troubleshooting via the N2 case’s power light to potentially guide you to a solution. For a guide to how it works

The last thing you want is for a power outage to disrupt all your running services and potentially corrupt your entire Debian installation. To protect your server 24-7, therefore, you need to plug it into a UPS so it survives brownouts or simple trip

Another upgrade is the addition of a second Ethernet port. Thanks to Linux’s support for ‘bonding’, you can combine two separate Ethernet interfaces. It doesn’t double transfer speeds, but it does double throughput. It also provides a measure of redu

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LONG AGO, before the reign of the Supers, there was a graphics card. It was bold, gauche, and built with the blood of a Titan, with gaming in mind. Its heart was near identical to the goliath it was born from, yet it lacked the memory, spirit, absolu

The PC has gone through a lot of changes, branching out in myriad ways and names. But whatever they’re called, every computing device needs certain features: CPU, GPU, RAM, storage, the mainboard, and power. Take any one of those away, and the functi

For desktop integrated graphics, there’s really no competition between AMD and Intel. Intel’s graphics solutions in 12th through 14th Gen Core processors use the same Xe-LP architecture as the 11th Gen Tiger Lake laptop processors that launched in 20

We normally test using native resolution benchmarks, but for integrated graphics solutions, it can be beneficial to look at other tweaks that can boost performance. AMD HYPR-RX provides a quick way to boost performance across virtually every game, al

Could AMD or Intel make a substantially faster integrated graphics solution than what we’ve seen so far? Absolutely! The difficulty isn’t with making such a chip, but rather finding a target market for the chip as well as turning a profit. A great ca

Less of a tip and more general advice: how many of us have sat there with a blank or default start menu in Windows 11? Take advantage of it. Right-click and remove the default junk programs Microsoft loads on there by default, and pin genuinely usefu

Standalone password managers would seem to be a moot point when every modern browser can save your credentials for you. Why, then, would you want to install a separate product? The answer here lies in the question: browsers are not specifically desig

YOU’LL NEED THIS A COMPATIBLE WEB BROWSER Administrative rights to set up the password manager IN LATE 2023, cybersecurity blogger Brian Krebs reported on the November 2022 breach of LastPass’ database, wherein the password vaults of 25 million users

Your password manager should allow you to create multiple independent databases, each secured with their own master key. For instance, you can have one for your web logins and another for sensitive financial information. If you have a lot of credenti

YOU’LL NEED THIS NVIDIA GRAPHICS CARD Some games ACOLYTES OF TEAM GREEN have had an array of GPU-focused software to contend with since GeForce Experience arrived in 2013. It’s the app you’d open to update drivers or optimize the graphics settings of

Using a reliable password manager means you’re protecting all your credentials using ‘zero knowledge’ via your master passphrase. Our first advice is to make sure this isn’t the only way you secure your password database—all the software in this guid

YOU’LL NEED THIS SHORTWAVE A Google/Google Workspace account SHORTWAVE IS THE CREATION of a number of ex-Google developers, who seem to be reaching for the holy grail of helping users organize their email inbox once and for all. The good news is that

I’M NOT A huge fan of traditional gaming laptops. I want them to be good to the extent that I’ve run about 10 of them long-term, but they’ve all disappointed. However, the last few months have given me a new perspective. It turns out I was using the

YOU’LL NEED THIS VIVETOOL AND WINDOWS 10 OR 11 github.com/PeterStrick/ViVeTool-GUI WINDOWS IS BEING CONSTANTLY DEVELOPED, and Microsoft makes new beta features available on a rolling basis. However, many are available only to Windows Insiders signed

A 27-INCH 1440p panel has been the sweet spot for gamers for as long as I can remember. Arguably, that hasn’t changed. Okay, I’d favor a 34-inch ultrawide version of the 1440p thing. But at the very least, a high-refresh 27 incher remains one of the

IT GENUINELY FEELS like we’re turning a corner in the world of PC gaming. Finally, we’re leaving the shackles of 1080p behind, and heading to the clear, glossy-coated clarity of 1440p and beyond. The likes of the RTX 4070 Super and 4070 Ti Super real

THIS IS NOT a great card to be writing about, unfortunately. AMD’s low-end budget model is something of an oddity. It comes with a rather lackluster launch all things considered—on its own, solo, in Q1. Where Nvidia is launching multiple Supers, and

IN CASE YOU HAVEN’T noticed, graphics cards are expensive, but AMD has a solution. Maybe. The Ryzen 8000-series APUs include the most powerful integrated graphics ever, and this Ryzen 7 8700G is the top chip of the lot. The basic idea? You won’t need

FORMERLY KNOWN as Eve, Dough has had a shaky start. The internet is littered with tales of product non-delivery and delayed refunds, but it’s hanging in there with this revision of its 27-inch 4K gaming panel. It started off as a fairly conventional

FOUR YEARS AGO, gaming handhelds were barely on the radar. Today, there are numerous options from some of the biggest manufacturers around. You can now add Lenovo to that list, thanks to what is one of the sleekest-looking gaming handhelds so far. Th

THERE’S SOMETHING magical about this case, and we can’t quite place our finger on it. It might be the glass paneling, the multitude of cooling options, or the simple, yet elegant PC building features included with the Y40, but it may well be one of t

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THIS MIGHT JUST BE the best-value M.2 PCIe 4.0 SSD we’ve found—one that not only delivers big on the storage per $ front, but doesn’t sacrifice performance while it does it. Yep, we’re talking about the Crucial T500. We might not have been quite as i

LET’S FACE IT, if there’s one thing Corsair should be good at, it’s memory. The company built itself off the back of the great memory race of the '90s and early '00s, and has since held a dominant position in the industry. Look at any industrial sect

PROJECTION is often overlooked as a format for a good gaming display, and with good reason. Over the years, they’ve been held back by a multitude of factors: poor brightness, space requirements, lens burn-in from static imagery (OLED says hello), low

PICTURE THE SCENE: four soldiers make a desperate scramble for their dropship on an alien planet, pursued by enormous, dagger-clawed bugs. Machine gun fire rattles, green goo erupts, the landing pad teems with beasts as the quartet piles through the

WHATSAPP AND SIGNAL have a lot in common: they’re both messaging apps that support text, voice, and video. They can also make use of group chats, status updates, and share much of the same codebase for encrypting communications. Still, WhatsApp’s the

> All-AMD Build > Windows Where? > UK Pricing Woes I was wondering if there was any reason why you haven’t done a $1,300 AMD build for a while, and if there was any likelihood you’ll be doing one in the near future? That would be very much appreciate

IF THIS MONTH has taught us anything, it’s that the market is unstable. We’re seeing price fluctuations all over the place—not surprising given we’ve just got past the holiday rush, and this time is notorious for big businesses to struggle to push th