Oh the big boogeyman, artificial intelligence. We’ve certainly had enough warnings about it over the years in all forms of pop culture, and early science fiction. But the advent of AI is finally here. Or is it? What is classed as AI? Do we truly have

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TECH GIANTS Microsoft and Google each offer their own respective cloud storage services and web apps. OneDrive is built into Windows, so requires minimal setup. Windows 11 actually requires you to sign in via a Microsoft account during setup. This me

OLED DISPLAY TECH and 4K resolutions make a potent combination, and the Samsung QD-OLED panel that this Aorus monitor is built around has become a bit of a favorite among manufacturers. You’ll find it in screens from Samsung itself, as well as Asus,

IN MID-MARCH, the PC world got a new CPU king with the release of the Intel Core i9-14900KS, touted as the fastest processor in history. This was in light of a dedicated team of enthusiasts at Asus using a combination of liquid helium and elbow greas

WHAT can we say about the Hyte Thicc Q60? At its core, you might be thinking that it’s just another CPU cooler. It’s not some grand graphics card capable of flinging thousands of frames a second to your monitor, and it’s not some wonderful OLED panel

Since 2022, Western Digital’s SN850X SSDs has been wowing us. We were particularly amused with a review of the 1TB NVMe SSD, calling it “face-meltingly fast.” This is hardly surprising, as WD acquired SanDIsk in 2016. The company has now released an

HELLO AND WELCOME to this very forward-looking edition of Maximum PC. This issue, we’re giving you our take on two of the latest developments in the PC world. The first is a deep dive into the world of AI: what you can do with the tech everyone’s tal

OKAY, we’ve got the build process wrapped up. What about the performance? What can a $4,821 machine do? Turns out quite a bit. Now, we do want to point out that we have limited this system somewhat. When we installed Windows, we always make a point o

Editor-in-Chief: Guy Cocker Contributing Writers: Steve Cassidy, Barry Collins, Tim Danton, Nate Drake, Ian Evenden, Darien Graham-Smith, Lee Grant, Jon Honeyball, Dave James, Jeremy Laird, Chris Lloyd, Heather Newman, Nick Peers, Nik Rawlinson, Jaco

Although AGI and true artificial consciousness is still a long way off, the threat AI could present is still no less tangible with generative ANIs. Disinformation in the digital age has become incredibly common in recent years, with bad actors taking

DDR5 MEMORY is in a very peculiar place right now. When it launched, it really did suffer from some ridiculous pricing, with 4,200 MT/s kits featuring atrocious latencies that were actually slower than the average DDR4 kit, yet being way more expensi

OKAY, THIS THING isn’t a cheap laptop. At near enough $4,100, it’s eye-wateringly expensive. MSI has flooded its Stealth 16 AI Studio A1V (seriously, who picks these names?) with as much hardware and toptier kit as it can find, and yet still, it leav

Windows Repair offers fixes for many problems, but it’s not the only tool you need in your armory. Start with recovery media—something you can boot into should the worst happen and Windows refuses to boot. Check out our last issue’s guide to building

> Rad locations > Inching ahead > Musical PCs > SSD beats HDD In your July 2024 cover build (Build this AMD Marvel), I’m curious as to why the heat exchanger is mounted to the bottom of the PC, and not the top. Aren’t you adding heat into the case?

FINDING A BUDGET wireless headset that actually delivers well-balanced, well-rounded audio has always been a challenge. Let’s face it, we’ve only just got wired gaming headsets that fit the bill at the $100-150 mark, never mind ones that have to navi

TWEAKING.COM’S WINDOWS REPAIR (www.tweaking.com) This comes in Free and Pro versions: we’re focusing on the free version in this tutorial IT DOESN’T MATTER how carefully you look after your Windows installation; things can—and do—go wrong. Whether it

DESPITE the popularity of NVIDIA chips, the company has had a contentious relationship with the open-source community. Linux developers were frustrated by NVIDIA’s refusal to provide code to develop open-source drivers for the OS. In a 2012 interview

WE LIVE IN HOPE. Hope that Microsoft commits to a full new operating system this fall, rather than yet another feature update, as some predict. But most of all, we hope that Microsoft creates an operating system that solves our frustrations, stops hi

AI can do remarkable things, but it’s not always bang on in its answers. Most services will openly acknowledge this, and warn that you should check your AI-generated answers before relying on them. However, the speed at which the technology is improv

ON JULY 19, ITsecuritycompanyCrowdstrike unveiled a ‘sensor configuration update’ for Windows systems. This triggered a logic error, resulting in a system crash and blue screen for any customers running Falcon Sensor on Windows 7.11 or above. Microso

LENGTH OF TIME: 2-3 hours DIFFICULTY: Hard We’ll admit, there’s no small amount of apprehension when it comes to building a system like this. Not only is it remarkably expensive, as good as $5,000 worth of hardware sat in a giant metal box that weigh

Windows Repair offers built-in tools to fix system reparse point and environment variable problems, but if you come across any package file errors, you’re expected to fix these manually. The first step is Windows’ DISM tool, which you can run from an

THIS MIGHT BE ONE of the most exciting notebooks we’ve ever taken a look at. There’s something quite unique about it, and it’s all to do with processing. Don’t let the buzzwords and marketing hype get to you first; yes, it does have AI features baked

CHATGPT-3.5 (free) CHATGPT-4.0 (from $20) chat.openai.com SHORT FOR ‘CHAT GENERATIVE PRE-TRAINED TRANSFORMER’, it’s no exaggeration to say that ChatGPT has changed the world. In this feature, we explain how it can transform your life in some very spe

While the underlying architecture for the CPU may be the same, there are plenty of differences between the two families that could significantly impact performance in various workloads. Granite Ridge desktop CPUs will take over from the Ryzen 7000 se

“Windows Updates are great,” said no one, ever. Quite a lot of users complain about the updates that seem to plague every Windows 11 restart—it’s not just you. Users understand that they’re a necessity with a modern OS, but if Windows 12 is going to

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During the Viasat attack, hundreds of wind turbines stopped functioning. Although they weren’t the intended target, such attacks reveal how cyberwarfare can badly disrupt a country’s energy supply. The Guardian demonstrated this in December 2023 afte

Step-By-Step Guide  PG. 22 WE ALL KNOW that PC building at its core is effectively a giant puzzle filled with pieces painstakingly placed into position, to create a product that’s far greater than the sum of its parts. It’s not been an easy road to g