APC

Right now I’m immersed in my favourite part of this job – along with the rest of the team we’re putting together our annual Australian PC Awards. The best thing about PC tech has always been the extraordinary pace of innovation and technological adva

Please note that these exclusive downloads will only be available for a limited time, from 17/05/21 to 04/07/21 Ashampoo Backup 2021 backs up and restores entire disk partitions, including bootable Windows installations, in just a few clicks. Increm

APC is Australia’s oldest consumer technology magazine – having been consistently in print for forty years, since our first issue way back in May 1980 – and we take that heritage and responsibility very seriously. While our focus is obviously on the

VESA released a statement denying recent claims that two monitors are “DisplayHDR 2000” certified because, well, there’s no such thing as DisplayHDR 2000. The statement was issued in response to listings on Taobao, a popular Chinese retailer, for an

Alienware is releasing its first laptop with an AMD CPU since 2007. Its parent company, Dell, announced the Alienware m15 Ryzen Edition R5 laptop in April. The Alienware m15 Ryzen Edition R5 will use AMD’s Ryzen 5000 H-series chips paired with Nvidia

Apple’s successor to the M1 chip, commonly referred to as the M2, has now entered mass production, better positioning the tech giant in its goal of completely replacing Intel chips in Macbooks with its own bespoke hardware. Reported by Nikkei Asia, t

It seems that Realtek has joined the long list of supply chain bottlenecks. DigiTimes has reported that the company is struggling to meet demand for the various chips manufacturers use in their notebooks, automobiles and other kinds of devices. In th

With the emergence of the Chia cryptocurrency, miners in China are reportedly frantically snatching up every hard drive and SSD they can find. Unlike other cryptocurrencies, you don’t mine Chia with a processor, graphics card or ASIC miner. Instead,

It probably won’t make the list of best CPU coolers for end users anytime soon, but Microsoft’s data centre servers could be getting a massive thermal management upgrade in the near future. Right now, the software giant is testing a radical new cooli

SHAUN PRESCOTT Author, PC Gamer editor and passionate technology observer, Shaun covers trending tech topics for APC. Loot boxes in videogames aren’t a new phenomenon, and predate even those titles most strongly associated with them – Overwatch, Cou

JOEL BURGESS When not reviewing PCs for APC and writing our funny pages, Joel likes to ponder tech and how it’s used. Facebook made a mistake in April when a Belgian PR rep for the company accidentally sent a journalist a copy of an internal memo th

JARRED WALTON Jarred Walton has been a PC and gaming enthusiast for over 30 years. Intel launched its Broadwell desktop processors in 2015. Those were the very first 14nm chips to hit the market, and even after delays, Intel was basically two years

CHRIS SZEWCZYK A life-long PC tech enthusiast, Chris has worked acoss the industry in many areas as a product and technology expert. In this issue we cover four 11th Generation-supporting Z590 motherboards. They bring a lot to the table, but still,

The Backbone One sneaks into the mobile gaming market with a handful of interesting features, including a pass-through Lightning port, headphone jack, and some dedicated controls, such as gameplay recording and instant muting. But is this compact iPh

Bluetooth controllers can be annoyingly limited when it comes to compatibility, but the new N30 Pro 2 manages to cover all bases by connecting to Windows, Android, MacOS, Steam, Switch and Raspberry Pi. As the second generation of 8BitDo’s NES-inspir

$899 | www.amd.com Here we go again. There are a lot of very nice gaming cards on the market right now*. Note the asterisk. The RX 6700 XT is ostensibly a mid-range card but with the GPU market and the wider semiconductor market in a state of shock,

$1,799 | Lenovo.com/au The Yoga range from Lenovo has been one of the most consistently standout convertible ultrabooks over the last few years, and while the new Yoga Slim 7i Carbon borrows its namesake form this long lineage, it’s not actually a c

$3,009 | lg.com/au As the name may suggest, the Gram is an extremely lightweight laptop from LG, even among some of today’s most portable Ultrabooks. It’s been a long time since LG has had a laptop in the local market, but it’s not shying away from

$499 | au.msi.com In a world of increasingly commoditised technology, computer monitors represent an area where you’ll want to avoid buying the wrong thing. Prices vary wildly, many specialise at displaying certain types of media in a way that’s det

$345 | thermaltake.com.au The Thermaltake Toughpower PF1 with 850-watt max power is a decent PSU that packs many good features. With 850W capacity, this PSU can handle a power-hungry CPU and GPU combo, for example, an Intel i9-10900K or AMD Ryzen 9

$2,399 | lcgs.thermaltake.com.au Thermaltake’s latest gaming tower, The Citadel, is a carefully considered system that balances performance against cost for a great overall configuration. The Citadel comes in just one model that features an AMD Ryze

$149 | www.mercusys.com/au With TP-Link moving from budget brand to one of the best on the market, it left a gap at the cheap end of the market. Say hello to its new junior brand, Mercusys. Forget the new-fangled, fancy apps for setup, Mercusys embr

$179 | consumer.huawei.com/au One of the many things that Huawei is synonymous with is computer networking. So, it’s strange that this is the first consumer router we’ve seen from the company. It is also unusual in that it eschews the industry’s tra

$550 | www.draytek.com.au Networking for small to medium businesses can be a remarkably complex affair, so Draytek aims to make life a little simpler with a range of routers and other hardware designed to be fast and easy to manage. The Vigor2927 is

$200 | samsung.com Samsung’s SSDs are widely regarded as among the most reliable and best-performing in the market, and the company hopes to extend that reputation with the introduction of the 980 NVMe SSD. Samsung’s 980 is designed for everyday PC

$220 | msi.com MSI is on a mission to impress with its ever-expanding lineup of cases. Unlike some makers that flood the market with a large and confusing range, MSI is taking things slowly and carefully. The new MPG Sekira 100R is a well-designed a

$200 - $400 | Second-hand market The IBM Model M is a classic. First introduced in 1985, it is the successor to the Model F, which is an equally sought-after vintage keyboard, if not more so. The Model F had a more difficult layout, but the Model M

$299 | rog.asus.com Little keyboards have never really taken off, and I’m not sure why. Using one, initially the mind will trick you into thinking everything is smaller, but the keys are generally the same size as you’d see on a full size keyboard,

Tenda is a big-in-China brand that’s steadily increasing its footprint on these shores. So far, its products have impressed us with their value and ease of set-up. Now, here’s the company’s Wi-Fi 6 PCIe adapter for connecting desktop PCs to Wi-Fi 6 w

$159 | huawei.com It was only recently that wireless buds gave you more than three or so hours of listening time before running flat. Apple’s AirPods are good for around five hours – but the newest iteration of Huawei’s budget line of FreeBuds deliv

Duolingo $Free or US$7 per month | http://duolingo.com Babbel $9.99 per month | http://babbel.com Learning a new language as an adult can be a tricky proposition, especially if you live in a monoglot culture and don’t get the chance to practice. App

Needs macOS 10.15 or later | US$99 for single-use licence | softobe.com/kinemac Kinemac 2.0.3 is a 3D modelling and animation app that’s designed to help you create motion graphic sequences for video projects. You can use it to present clips or stil

From $3.49/month | moleskinestudio.com | Needs iOS 13 or later Flow is an artist’s sketchpad with customisable brush presets and gestures, and an endless canvas for images of any width. The second major version brings a lower price tag: if you buy t

Android | Free If, like me, you’re not having much luck with food for yourself, perhaps try food for others. Meals of Mercy is an app set up by the Muslim Australian Aid charity and lets you make micro donations to help feed those in need. You can c

Android | Free This app is incredibly niche and may only be truly helpful for developers, but I think it’s something interesting for anyone tech-curious to play with. What it does is allow two phones with the appropriate chips to connect, and relay

$479 | www.asrock.com Say hello to the Asrock PG Velocita! It’s a new product family and an evolution of the Phantom Gaming brand. It sits in between Asrock’s mainstream ranges and the high end Taichi. Much like the MSI and Asus boards, it aims to f

$379 | www.asus.com The Asus TUF Gaming Z590-Plus Wi-Fi is Asus’ entry-level gaming board. It slots in below the high-end ROG and mid-level Strix series. The focus of TUF products has shifted away from the earliest military-themed Sabretooth branded

$649 | www.aorus.com Gigabyte’s Aorus Master boards usually impress us. They’re unmistakably high-end boards, but they sit in a price range that hits a good balance of pricing and premium features without resorting the extreme cost that burdens boar

$549 | www.msi.com The MSI MPG Gaming Carbon sits right in the middle of its Z590 product stack, below the expensive flagship MEG boards and above the affordable MAG range. Its upper mid-range positioning aims to strike a nice balance of affordabili

Assuming you’re interested in trying out cryptocurrency mining, there’s a lot of conflicting advice on how to go about tuning for optimal performance. Many tutorials throw caution to the wind and look to maximise hash rates, with little heed to the d

We’ve focused most of our efforts on the description of mining with GPUs, but originally Bitcoin was designed to be mined using CPUs. It just so happened that with GPUs becoming increasingly programmable, software developers figured out they could ge

Arguably the easiest way to get started at mining cryptocurrencies is with NiceHash. We’ve noted that it’s no longer profitable to mine Bitcoin directly using a GPU, because ASICs are so much faster and more efficient. That doesn’t mean you can’t get

Back in 2018, when Bitcoin exploded onto the public consciousness, we were in the process of writing a feature on whether you could subsidise the purchase of an epic gaming laptop by using it to mine Bitcoin. This was something of a necessity because

The first thing you’ll need to do is update your laptop’s graphics driver (which can be different to standard desktop drivers). Doing this manually and getting it wrong can cause major driver failure that will require a tool like Revo Uninstaller to

MARK WILLIAMS Mark is an IT professional with a strong interest in voiding warranties. We must give credit where credit is due. Nvidia kicked off the Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) monitor revolution back in 2013 with its G-sync initiative – a propriet

This stunner of a system goes to town on the white theme, and does it well. Relative to the equally priced Aftershock system this month, it drops some GPU performance with an RTX 3070 instead of an RTX 3080 class card, but what it loses there it make

Another month of drought, another month of ridiculous prices. Unfortunately, there’s no longer any stock of graphics cards at their recommended retail prices, so what we’re going to do is just list what GPU we would recommend you buy, and with a curr

Again, we’re recommending the graphics card we believe is best suited to the build’s position in our charts (aka 1080p, 1440p, or 4K gaming at 60fps plus), and giving the current street price. GPU situation aside, our trusty Ryzen 5 3600 has seen no

Every few years, cryptocurrency returns to the spotlight with a surge in prices, and everyone suddenly wants to invest. This time, anyone with even a passing interest in computer hardware should know what Bitcoin is at some level, but how does it act

Ridiculous prices aside, even if everything was fine, and there were plenty of chips to go around, we still wouldn’t recommend the RTX 3090. It’s a beast, but the performance gain over the 3080 is 10-15 percent for a card that costs near twice as muc

LENGTH OF TIME: 1 hour LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY: Easy The concept around this is pretty simple – we just love the idea behind the Core i3-10100. When this editor first joined the tech industry, the crème de la crème of desktop processors was whatever qua

Although their appeal has been somewhat diminished by the wide availability of streaming services, a network attached storage device is still a great addition to any home. It can keep your data, media and documents stored in a central location that i

The Finder is such a core component of macOS, used by everyone every day, that we often take it for granted. Yet there are a lot of ways you can customise it to perfectly suit your needs, adding extra features or removing those you do not need to cre

If you’re willing to sacrifice the ability to receive attachments then there are several command-line utilities that provide similar functionality as tmpmail. One such utility, which also uses the 1secMail service is called, unimaginatively, 1secmail

While there are some reports of people receiving unsolicited messages in their mailbox as far back as the late 19th century, spam as we now suffer it dates back to the early iterations of the internet. Regardless of how careful you are in choosing wh

Users of Raspberry Pi and Arduino SBCs are familiar with these boards’ GPIO (general purpose input/output) ports that enable them to interface to real-world electronic devices. PCs are devoid of GPIOs, but boards are available that provide that facil

Our emphasis here has been the types of interfaces normally associated with GPIO ports, namely digital and analogue input and outputs. These will probably meet most of your needs for interfacing with electronic components and sensors, but there are o

If nothing else, the last year or so has shown just how much our world now relies on the STEM disciplines – the collective areas of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (remember, maths is the foundation of the other three). That’s why it

At last, we’re featuring the machine we’ve been teasing for months: the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. The machine was a cultural icon. Far cheaper than anything Americans were exporting, the homegrown Spectrum was a working-class hero that spawned a generati

Capcom has announced a VR port for Resident Evil 4, releasing exclusively for Oculus Quest 2 later this year. It’s not just a simple port: The most obvious change is that the third-person horror now plays in first-person, but along with the perspecti

The studio best known for Apex Legends, Titanfall and Jedi Fallen Order is working on a brand new game. According to new job listings on the Respawn Entertainment website, the studio is kicking off a “new IP from scratch.” That’s good news for fans o

Call of Duty: Warzone. Activision has released an update on its Call of Duty: Warzone anti-cheat progress, detailing how many permabans have been issued and how the team roots out cheaters. According to the official Call of Duty blog, over 475,000 p

The new claim comes from storied leaker Dusk Golem, who has a track record of accurately leaking Resident Evil-related information ahead of time. They reveal that they’ve heard talk of Capcom developing an experimental difficulty mode for Resident Ev

DEVELOPER HUMONGOUS ENTERTAINMENT PUBLISHER IN-HOUSE RELEASED 1996 WEB humongous.com I’m not afraid of the dark. I’m not! But I am afraid of what PC gaming would look like without Pajama Sam. A whole generation of PC gamers grew up after the heyday

Coder and YouTuber Alfredo Sequedia posted a video in April of his project to turn a Fortnite Nerf gun into a controller for Call of Duty on PC. Sequedia connected a smartphone with custom code that allowed it to output data from its accelerometer to

Intel’s 11th Generation of processors have landed! If you read our review of the i9-11900K in our previous issue, you’d have seen that while it performs well for the most part, it runs hot and it consumes a lot of power. The i5-11600K and likes of th

Android | Free I often find my guts to be unhappy with me but rarely can I decipher the cause. When I stumbled across this app, I was actually pretty excited. Maybe I could finally work out what food is setting me off, or at least start to nail it d

$479 | en-au.sennheiser.com After spending so long in a True Wireless state for music on the go, it’s almost quaint to unroll the IE 300 from their carry case. Sporting an over-the-ear ‘flexible hook’ cabling system, getting the IE 300 on and locked

Manage a space station fuelled by nostalgia. Realmforge Studios’ Spacebase Startopia is a homage to one of my favourite management games. More than an homage, really, as it lifts pretty much everything from the original Startopia, even the name – it

It says a lot that when we first priced this system up a month ago, it was about $120 cheaper – four weeks later, and the thing sits at $545. Honestly, we feel like a broken record at this point, but the market is absolutely volatile right now, as un

Linux | https://neon.kde.org Despite the plethora of KDE distros around – from Kubuntu to KaOS to PCLinuxOS – some people still haven’t heard of KDE neon. Any distro working on a fix release cycle is going to have problems keeping current with KDE.

Intel and Microsoft are collaborating on a new project to help enterprise and small business customers avoid security issues that may involve others using PCs on your network to mine cryptocurrencies, known as cryptojacking. The protection will be bu