Maximum PC

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GOOGLE USES ITS annual I/O event to set out its plans, and this year the theme was simple: whatever the product, it was about how AI can improve it. Like it or lump it, you’ll be interacting with Gemini, Google’s brand for its LLM AI engine. There ar

Dubbed DULT, it warns if a tracker is following you, so it’s not used to stalk people. Shipments are up three percent to 152.9 compressed exabytes—that’s a billion gigabytes each. Researchers have turned brain activity into words, thanks to electrode

THE ARRIVAL of Intel’s Arrow Lake CPU is a big deal. We have a new socket, process, tile-based construction, features, core architecture in Lion Cove, AI hardware, and more. Intel plans to release 21 SKUs (Stock Keeping Units). It’s the biggest launc

EVERY TIME WE THINK THE magnetic hard drive is dead, new life is breathed into them. We haven’t seen a new 2.5-inch drive for years, the format seemingly peaking at 5TB. However, Western Digital has squeezed an extra terabyte in. Its new 6TB versions

WHILE MOST PC COMPONENTS have been getting pricier, many gaming monitors are cheaper. $250 buys you a lot more than it did five years ago, though a new class of OLED panels has made things pricier at the top end. In between, there’s more choice than

LAST MONTH, I touched on the fact that the first official Microsoft AI PCs would be running a Qualcomm Arm-based CPU. This begs one obvious question: what about old software? Arm chips tend to be more efficient, but what good is that if you can’t use

> VPN vulnerability > Application tabs > Podman acceleration I’ve been reading a news story on the TunnelVision vulnerability for virtual private networks. Apparently, this—excuse the pun—tunnel-sized hole in VPN security has existed since 2002. It s

WHEN IT COMES TO the ITX form factor, most will end up in one of two camps. Either you love them because of the minimalist aesthetic, small footprint, and that basic concept of absolute power in a ridiculously small build. Alternatively, you hate the

www.intel.com Time and time again, we keep coming back to the Intel Core i9-14900K, and with good reason. At its core, this build is the very heart of the Maximum PC testbed. It’s our go-to chip for GPU, RAM, and SSD testing, and delivers incredible

LENGTH OF TIME: 2-3 hours DIFFICULTY: Hard This is probably one of the hardest builds we’ve had to create here at Maximum PC, and that’s a heavy statement for us to make. After all, we’re veteran builders here, with hundreds of published build logs t

THERE YOU HAVE IT, FOLKS: one super pristine, clean, black and white, high-contrast, powerful testbed transplanted into a ridiculously small chassis, complete with all the bells and whistles you can possibly ask for, plus 6TB of delicious PCIe 4.0 an

BUILDING THIS THING was a challenge, with lots of cable management, a ton of chassis disassembly, and more, but what was performance like? First things first, we need to caveat those sequential scores. We’ve already extensively tested the Kingston an

PC BUILDING is only possible because of consistency. The entire industry, the ecosystem, the very hardware, is dependent on that fact. From the humble transistor firing on a 1 or a 0 each and every time to DRAM producing the correct instruction to a

BTF is in a way a very unique form factor. It’s still early days in its lifecycle to truly understand how as a form factor it’s going to develop, however. The one advantage ITX, ATX, and Micro-ATX have had is the fact that there’s flexibility when it

IN THEORY, using tools to run ‘synthetic’ benchmarks is a great way to test specific components like GPUs through carefully crafted workloads. A whole industry has sprung up around this. Each developer claims to offer the best kinds of tests. Some, l

IF THE NAME of developers UNIGINE sounds familiar to readers, it’s because they’re the authors of a number of other excellent benchmarking tools, such as Heaven, which displays a jaw-dropping representation of a steampunk village guarded by an ornate

LIKE GEEKBENCH, 3DMark is an extremely popular benchmarking platform. Its scoring system is also similar in that higher marks mean better performance. There are ‘Advanced’ and ‘Enterprise’ editions for $34.99 (one-off) and $1,695 (per year), respecti

HWMONITOR is developed by CPUID, the same people behind the excellent system profiling/monitoring application CPU-Z. It’s available as both a free and a ‘Pro’ edition, though as we’ve noted, the free edition is likely to offer all the features requir

THE BENCHMARKING tools that we’ve reviewed so far are the best ones we found for simulating ‘real world’ performance of devices. For instance, Geekbench 6 actually uses a headless browser to simulate web browsing activities. Additionally, software li

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Privacy is such an important aspect of our online lives that it’s often exploited to promote software that’s not private. ‘Keep your privacy under control’, says the download page for Chrome, despite Google being court-ordered to destroy user data it

It’s no secret that the incognito or private mode in your browser doesn’t keep you anywhere near anonymous online—as Google was recently forced to clarify. But Brave (www.brave.com) now has a secret feature called ‘Forget by Default’, which goes furt

One of the most useful features in DuckDuckGo’s browser is the Fire button, which closes your open tabs and deletes your browsing data. This includes details of the sites you’ve visited; their cookies, caches, and favicons; and any permissions you gr

Don’t assume that your browser’s own privacy settings will prevent websites from identifying and tracking you. Instead, Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Cover Your Tracks (coveryourtracks.eff.org), tick the box ‘Test with a real tracking company’, an

1 The upright rectangular design of the Orbi range is a familiar sight in many homes and offices, but the Orbi 970 has had a bit of a facelift. The sheer speed of Wi-Fi 7 requires more power than previous models, so the new Orbi units have a taller,

WE ALL KNOW how priceless our personal data is. You can’t recreate photos and hand-crafted documents from thin air. Another crucial commodity is time: how damaging would it be to spend more than a few hours (never mind 2-3 days) recovering your syste

Want to speed up your login time? Fed up with every app under the sun launching within 2.5 seconds of you signing in? Us too. Fortunately, there’s a super-quick and simple way of stopping apps from opening up in Windows. Head to the Start menu, and t

presents: iFixit is a global community of tinkerers dedicated to helping people fix things through free online repair manuals and teardowns. iFixit believes that everyone has the right to maintain and repair their own products. To learn more, visit w

YOU’LL NEED THIS LUMINAR NEO Some image files MANY IMAGE EDITING APPS have been jumping on the AI bandwagon, but for Luminar, it was less of a leap. The app, from Ukraine-founded (but now New York-based) Skylum Software, was already heavily algorithm

Luminar is a non-destructive editor, which means your original file is kept safe, and edits are only applied to a new file that you export at the end of your session. The app makes it easy to export an image, with a button at the top of the interface

Kept very small and in the corner, this is where you’ll find File, Edit, and all that sort of thing. This is used for putting overlays, such as light leaks and other effects, over your images while maintaining control. This is where you switch betwee

Luminar’s selection of presets are one-shot filters that can be quickly applied to an image. There are plenty included with the app, covering everything from high-contrast monochrome portraits to cinematic film looks, and some appropriate for soft la

YOU’LL NEED THIS A RECENT INSTALL OF LIBREOFFICE 24.2 Java Runtime Environment (For certain Base features) LIBREOFFICE BEGAN its life in 2010 as a fork of OpenOffice.org, which was itself an open-source fork of StarOffice. This productivity suite is

Click here to locate office documents on your system. LibreOffice supports both the OpenDocument Format (ODF) files and Microsoft Office documents. Choose ‘Remote Files’ to open documents stored on servers. If you’re working with a large number of do

YOU’LL NEED THIS SPACEDESK Download the PC software from spacedesk.net WHAT DO YOU DO IF YOUR MONITOR feels a bit cramped, but you don’t want to pay for a bigger one? Or need to keep an eye on a website or video stream? Fortunately, if you have a tab

At the start of this feature, we downloaded Spacedesk to our primary PC (or ‘server’ in Spacedesk terms). This handles the sharing of the virtual display connection with a secondary device (called the ‘client’). So far, we’ve only used a phone and ta

Portable PCs with moving parts FIRST, A TERRIBLE confession. My daily driver is not a PC. It’s a Mac. But before you gather the pitchforks, hear me out. For starters, my main fun rig is, of course, a powerful desktop PC. I also use a laptop PC to dri

AS YOU MAY know from my many ramblings on these pages, I now work as a barista during the day for a local coffee shop, and as a freelance journalist in the evening and on days off (terrible work-life balance, would not recommend). When I started doin

ALL NEW TECHNOLOGIES come with a learning curve. With the cataclysmically desirable Alienware 32 AW3225QF, we’re taking some lessons about OLED as a display solution for PC gaming. Yes, this is another of the brave new 4K monitors running a Samsung Q

WE LIKE OLED monitors, their thinness and brightness appearing contradictory yet strangely alluring. Add the 240Hz refresh rate of this Acer Predator, and you have a winning combination. The resolution of 1440p looks like a wise choice, even though i

FOLDABLE SCREENS are everywhere now. We first saw them pop up in the mobile world, then they made their way to monitors with the likes of Corsair’s Xeneon Flex, and now we have them in laptops, too (if this can even be called a laptop). You see, the

PROJECTORS ARE STILL difficult to justify on so many levels. The biggest reason is what kind of screen tech we have available to us. No matter how you spin it, a 4K gaming projector’s main advantage is screen size. Everything else, from color accurac

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THERE’S NO DOUBT that we here at Maximum PC spend a lot of time looking at expensive products. Whether that’s a $400 chassis with screens in it, or $2,000 graphics cards, a lot of them really have no right to be as expensive as they are. Often, budge

GAMING LAPTOPS come and go, but some things stay the same. The combination of a hot CPU and capable GPU, along with plenty of RAM and some fast storage, always adds up to a potent gaming experience that can’t last long away from a wall socket, and so

THE SIGHT OF THE SLEEK, indomitable mothership preparing to jet off into the unknown, accompanied by radio chatter and a moody score, feels like a homecoming. For newbies, it’s a striking scene. For veterans, it calls to mind the original mothership

CHERRY’S SWITCHES are dependable, unwavering, and the standard by which many of us judge all other switches. So what happens when Cherry changes them? You get the MX2A Red switches inside the Cherry-made Xtrfy K5V2—a new and improved version of the C

LET’S BE GENEROUS and start with the positives. The Cloud III Wireless offers a sturdy build that didn't creak, bend, or break during two weeks of regular usage. The headset’s earcups are held in place by a robust metal frame bathed in red, and the s

THINGS HAVE BEEN relatively quiet in the world of web browsers for a while, if you overlook Microsoft’s constant pressure on Windows users to switch to Edge. The MS browser has greatly improved since the switch to Google’s rendering engine, Blink, it

> Budget gaming > Stealthy office builds > Modern benchmarking I really enjoyed your $800 Gaming PC cover feature in the June 2024 issue. While I wasn’t surprised to see that a PC without a GPU wasn’t great for playing games, it did get me thinking a

Sponsored by WE’RE BEING very aggressive with our budget builds this issue. There have been a number of tweaks and changes to really try and make the most out of the budget we have, and see if we can’t drop the price to sub-$900 without compromising