Table of contents for September 2017 in PC & Tech Authority

I’m curious about the smart watch scene. When Apple announced the Apple Watch there was much ohhh and ahhing from the faithful, and the wannabe Dick Tracy crowd (of which I count myself), but how many of you actually bought one – and more to the point – how many of you still have them on your wrists? Not many, according to the sales numbers. Smart watch sales declined 51% last year (according to IDC), but ‘bounced back’ in the most recent figures by 16% (IDC, to March 2017). However, that positive gain was fuelled almost entirely by a huge surge from Chinese company Xiaomi, which recorded a sales increase of over 90% in the period, which of course helped inflate the numbers – albeit to a barely-there 16% overall…

The firefox browser has been given a long overdue performance boost by increasing the number of memory processes it uses for the first time. Version 54 of Mozilla’s browser delivers – after eight years of development – separate processes for each tab, which theoretically improves performance and stability. Multiple process browser tabs have been an important part of Chrome for years, but have the downside of swallowing system memory as each tab requires a separate instance of the browser’s rendering engine. Mozilla restricts multiple processes to four threads, which it claims is the optimal number for systems equipped with 8GB of RAM. “If a browser uses too much memory, your computer may not have enough left to the run the other apps,” claimed Mozilla’s Ryan Pollock. “Conversely, if a browser…

CPU THE TORTOISE AND THE HARE Information has leaked about Intel’s upcoming and unreleased Threadripper contender. The 12-cored 24-threaded i9-7920X will be going head-to-head with AMD’s Threadripper 1920X featuring the same core and thread count. The problem is that Intel’s part allegedly runs at just 2.9GHz base clock speeds. Threadripper on the other hand has a base clock of 3.5GHz giving it a massive 600MHz speed advantage under full load. This is quite surprising as AMD has been behind on the MHz front even with their new Ryzen processors. It seems adding extra cores in Intel’s design has severely hamstrung available power or more likely thermal limits. No doubt Turbo Boost speeds while currently unknown for Intel’s part will likely exceed AMD’s by a good margin thanks to its Turbo…

Peter, Impact Systems: “Yes – drastically. The demand for GPU based cards are so high in demand that we are getting requests not only locally but even overseas. The demand is outstripping supply by far, as such our local market is certainly being deprived of supply and yes, it’s a? ecting PC builds.” Jaimie, Leader Computers: “We have seen a huge spike in demand and price for AMD RX560, RX570 and to a lesser extent Nvidia GTX 1060 cards. The major vendors chose to limit supply as they are concerned with higher warranty returns due to the 24/7 always-on nature of Crypto mining. Massive shortages have also hit the market on certain motherboards with 6 PCI-E slots, and high end 1000W and larger power supplies as well, as each mining…

It’s hard not to see the topic of AI pop up in your news feed at the moment, it’s more than the subject de jour -- it’s occupying the mind space of everyone from entrepreneurs and technologists to business leaders and politicians. It helps, or perhaps doesn’t help, when luminaries like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking predict doomsday scenarios of what could happen in the near future if AI gets out of hand. One fear is what’s known as The Singularity, where an AI gets to the stage that it can self-improve and enter a cycle of ever-accelerating run away self-improvement that results in a super intelligence far beyond our own capabilities, leading to potentially catastrophic changes for human civilisation. Despite the sci-fitropes, Skynet from The Terminator is an example…

Whether you need to worry about antivirus’ inherent flaws depends on your risk profile. If you’re a potential target of state-sponsored hacking or other serious, targeted attacks, the bugs in antivirus may well present a serious risk. But what about the rest of us? We asked resident security guru Davey Winder for his thoughts. “Remember, all software has bugs. Would I suggest you don’t use any AV software? No, of course not. Similarly, I wouldn’t suggest you reply upon any antivirus software alone to protect your networks and data. A multi-layered security posture is the way forward for most people, most of the time; and antivirus remains a valid layer within that posturing.” The antivirus firms also seem to be stepping up their own security. They are wisely starting to…

T_his is Seagate’s premium hard drive for use in a NAS. As such, the design priorities are reliability, capacity and speed. Low power consumption is also important, as is data security. And the IronWolf Pro delivers on all counts. Capacity is no issue, with six models spanning 1 to 10TB. Spindle speeds vary per model, with the 6, 8 and 10TB running at 7200RPM and the others at 5900RPM. We tested the 10TB model in a Synology DS916 using Crystal Disk Mark and recorded average sequential read speeds of just over 250.2MB/sec and write of 230MB/sec. One advantage of running this in a Synology NAS is its support for Seagate’s IronWolf Health Management (supported in DSM 6.1 or higher), which allows notifications covering drive health and also o¥ ers up…

An overclockable quad-core CPU for $230 sounds too good to be true, but the Ryzen 5 1400 is just that. It offers four physical cores for $4 more than the dual-core Core i3-7350K – and thanks to AMD’s SMT (simultaneous multi-threading) technology, it can actually handle eight threads simultaneously, which is twice what you’ll get from a Core i5 chip. The sacrifices are obvious: there’s only 8MB of L3 cache, and the Ryzen 5 1400 has a base frequency of just 3.2GHz, capable of boosting up to a maximum of 3.45GHz. That relatively slow stock speed didn’t do the Ryzen 5 1400 any favours in our image-editing test, but it regained ground in rendering tests, where its quad-core design raced ahead of the Core i3-7350K. And things looked up when…

Why does the Ryzen 5 1600X cost $50 more than the Ryzen 5 1600? Both have six cores and 12 threads, plus identical cache allocations. One di? erence is TDP – this X-edition is rated at 95W, versus the 65W of the regular Ryzen 5 1600. That in turn supports higher speeds: the 1600X has a nippy 3.6GHz base frequency, with a 4GHz maximum Precision Boost. The higher base figure is significant, as it represents the point where Precision Boost kicks in. Above this frequency, multi-core performance no longer scales linearly, as parallelism is sacrificed in order to achieve higher speeds. As well as higher base and Precision Boost frequencies, the Ryzen 5 1600X has a 100MHz XFR boost, giving a maximum frequency of 4.1GHz in lightly threaded workloads. That’s…

Corsair’s MP500 is an expensive SSD. Of this month’s crop of M.2 drives, only the Samsung 960 Pro costs more. However, the Samsung somewhat justifies its high price with best-inclass performance; the MP500, not so much. To be fair, the MP500 easily outpaces any SATA drive. For sequential read and write operations, no 2.5in model can come close, and the Corsair proved a strong performer at multi-threaded random reads too. Among its NVMe peers, however, the MP500 ranked fourth in a field of five. There is one area where the MP500 excels, and that’s write endurance. Corsair claims that the drive will handle a huge 698TBW – equivalent to writing around 190GB a day for ten years. Obviously that’s far in excess of what a domestic role requires; frankly you’re…

If you’ve just read our review of the M.2 version of this drive, the SATA version holds no great surprises. Performance is unsurprisingly similar, and the price is pretty much the same. Like all Samsung drives, it supports hardware encryption (so long as this is enabled in your BIOS and/or operating system), and it also comes with a useful Data Migration tool, which walks you through the disk cloning process so you can easily transfer your system from an old hard disk. One difference is the capacities available. While the M.2 range tops out at 500GB, SATA models are available in sizes up to a preposterous 4TB – if you’re willing to spend a cool $2,249. The pricing scales more or less linearly with capacity, with the 500GB model we…

SanDisk was one of two manufacturers who supplied capacious 1TB drives this month, the other being Western Digital. Nominally, the two drives are targeted at quite different markets. The WD Blue is a mainstream solid-state drive, with a price to match. The SanDisk Extreme Pro, on the other hand, is very much positioned as a premium drive – something that’s certainly reflected in the much steeper price. As we’ve seen repeatedly during this month’s Labs, however, the SATA interface is a great leveller. These days, even a fairly cheap SSD can easily saturate the connection. You can invest in high-end flash memory and fancy custom controllers all you like, but transfer speeds won’t get any higher. And so, the Extreme Pro yields performance that’s all but identical to the Western…

Western Digital’s Black M.2 SSD targets a similar market to the Corsair MP500. It doesn’t aim to be the fastest SSD on the market, but to provide performance a step up from SATA. Unlike the Corsair, however, the WD Black is priced cheaply enough to make the proposition interesting. The halfterabyte model comes in at $110 more than the SATA-connected Crucial MX300 – and when you note that it o? ers more than double the sequential read speeds, and close to double the write speeds, that doesn’t sound like an unreasonable premium. It’s just a shame there’s no 1TB model for digital hoarders. The WD Black doesn’t feature hardware encryption, but you get the same downloads as with the WD Blue, namely Acronis imaging and backup software, and WD’s own…

WIRELESS ROUTER Synology RT2600ac Wi-FiRouter SUPPLIER www.synology.com This router really does do it all, and at a great price point. We’d go so far as to say it’s the best 2600AC router on the market, with blazing speeds, a rich feature set and that oh-so-amazing interface. Highly recommended for both novices and network engineers alike. SPECIFICATIONS dual channel (2.4GHz – 800Mbps; 5GHz – 1.73Gbps); EEE 802.11a/b/g/n/ ac; twin USB ports (1 x 2.0, 1 x 3.0); MU-MIMO compatible; beamforming NAS QNAP TS 253B SUPPLIER www.qnap.com A true powerhouse equally capable as a home media server or office NAS. Fully-featured and a delight to use. SPECIFICATIONS Twin Gigabit Ethernet ports • 5 x USB 3.0 • Intel Celeron J3455 quad-core CPU • 4GB system memory upgradeable to 8GB LASER PRINTER Dell B1160w…

SECURITY Kaspersky Total Security SUPPLIER www.kaspersky.com Kaspersky Total Security is the only security package on test that achieved both perfect protection and falsepositives scores. BACK UP Acronis True Image 2015 SUPPLIER www.acronis.com.au The 2015 version adds full-system backup and dual backup. OFFICE SUITE Microsoft Office 365 Home Premium SUPPLIER www.microsoft. com.au The easiest to use Office to date. WEB DEV Adobe Dreamweaver CS6 SUPPLIER www.adobe.com.au This edition makes PHP and CMS its core focus. AUDIO Cubase 7.5 SUPPLIER www.steinberg.net The addition of better filters solidifies this program’s continued place on the A-List. VIDEO Sony Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum 11 SUPPLIER www.sony.com.au May not have the bells and whistles of other consumer editing packages, but its tools are efficient. PHOTO Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 6 SUPPLIER www.adobe.com.au Lightroom 6 doesn’t add…

LIVING COMPUTER HISTORY I enjoyed the Excellent Working Wonders article by Nicole Kobie, in the June 2017 issue of PC & Tech Authority, please compliment her for me. It took me back to my early days of working with computers and revived many old memories. They were exciting times—it didn’t feel like work. I was being paid for what I enjoyed doing; it went on for years; a very stimulating time; always learning and computers evolving fast. These days when people ask what career I followed, I say, ‘I worked through computer history, when computers filled rooms and data input was via punched cards’ I started in 1966 on a very basic IBM 1401, it consisted of only 4K bytes of memory, with punched cards in, punched cards out, and…

Intel released a new set of processors that are so “extreme” it broke out the i9 branding for the first time. Until now, Intel’s Core processors have been streamed into the i3 (entry-level), i5 (mid-range) and i7 (high-end) categories. The new X-Series processors, which run up to 18 cores and 36 threads, push performance beyond those. The Core i9 has an extreme price to match its extreme performance, with the 18-core i9-7980XE chip costing around US$2,000. “I think the 18-core beasts will be of interest to people who perform regular CPU-intensive tasks that are parallel in nature, [such as] 3D design and rendering, video editing and ultra-high resolution photographic work,” said Ben Miles of system builder Chillblast. “People using virtual machines for software testing will also find them useful.” At…

THE GLASSHOUSE Umart 1600 Ryzen5 1070 Gaming PC $2,067 • http://tinyurl.com/ya5gtpqg Gull-wing doors to me evoke the Mercedes SLS class of car, but on a PC? They don’t hinge upward like the SLS but the side panel and window does curve all the way over the top for a unique viewing experience. Also unique about this case is the HAL-like RGB “matrix” on the front. Something fancy to look at I guess. Apart from looks, under the hood this is quite a capable machine. A hexa-cored CPU gives you 7700K beating multi-threading muscle and the GTX 1070 provides solid brawn for 1440p gaming. Sizable mass storage and memory make for a well-rounded system that is great value for money. KEY SPECS CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 1600 Cooler: AMD Wraith Spire…

MWE PSU SERIES 450/550/650W 80+ BRONZE Cooler Master’s family of power supplies feature a line of stable, quality, 80 Plus Bronze power supplies. The MWE Bronze series is compact and available in outputs suitable for most systems. On top of safety regulations, the MWE Bronze includes Cooler Master’s three year warranty. Inside, the Silencio fan blades run with less turbulence while sealed LDB bearings are used for longer service life. High quality components keep up with daily power demands, while delivering rated output even at 40°C temperatures cool and quietly. MASTERBOX LITE 5 RGB CASE The MasterBox Lite 5 RGB ATX Case is your straightforward option for your PC build that doesn’t ignore good looks, customization, or performance. It comes standard with 3 pcs 120 mm RGB Fans, installed behind…

There are two main complaints against antivirus: it’s riddled with bugs and the way it’s designed gets in the way of other software measures. Let’s start with the first. Head over to Google’s Project Zero (bugs.chromium.org/p/project-zero) and search for antivirus under “all issues” – you’ll find a long list of reported bugs from a host of vendors. You’ll also quickly notice that the vast majority of reports are filed by one Tavis Ormandy, Google’s belligerent and persistent security researcher. The infamous bug hunter and antivirus critic last summer uncovered flaws in Symantec products that he said were “as bad as it gets”, and has also dug out bugs in Kaspersky, McAfee, Trend Micro and Sophos. In a statement to PC&TA, Symantec said that it “continually improves the protection delivered by…

IN THE LABS Where gear is tried and tested The smartphone market is changing, and it’s great fun to watch. When once the choice was limited to brands we’ve been familiar with for many years, and the transaction happening either at a telco or mobile phone store, or consumer electronics superstore, buying online – maybe from outside Australia – is now a valid alternative. Chinese smartphones are here, shaking things up with products that are far cheaper, spec for spec, than the bigger brands we’re used to from Korea or America. In this issue I’ve reviewed an Oppo and a Xiaomi, last month another Oppo and the issue before that a Huawei. And, they’re all generally excellent phones, sold for hundreds of dollars less than a Samsung or Apple, with,…

There are two things that hit you when you first sit down with the Surface Laptop. The first: its oddly sized screen. I’m so used to the 16:9 aspect ratio that a 3:2 feels like a step back into an olde world of laptops that’s so olde we still called them notebooks. The slim bezels give away this machine’s 2017 birth, though, and there are advantages: with that super-high res screen, it’s easy to view spreadsheets side by side. The other is that weird, much-talked about keyboard fabric. If you’re expecting something that feels furry then you’ll be disappointed. It’s almost a halfway house between plastic and short-haired carpet, that feels firm and soft, solid but textured at the same time. Weird, but not at all unpleasant. And while I…

OnePlus has demonstrated over the past few years that it has a keen eye for what consumers want from a smartphone – a fast, no-frills device for a reasonable cost – and despite a big rise in price compared to the OnePlus 3T, the OnePlus 5 delivers once again. The company builds everything around Qualcomm’s new 2.45GHz/1.9GHz Snapdragon 835 chip and supplements it with a generous dollop of “more e. cient” LPDDR4x RAM. If you choose the 128GB model you’ll get 8GB of RAM; the 64GB model includes 6GB. Just note there’s no microSD slot for storage expansion. You also forgo the long, tall screen of the Samsung Galaxy S8 and LG G6; instead, OnePlus sticks with its eminently sensible 1080p, 5.5in AMOLED panel and has focused instead on improving…

I_ntel’s response to AMD’s Ryzen 7 tencore CPU came faster than anybody could have imagined. At this year’s Computex, the company announced the new Core-X series of processors, based on the Skylake-X and Kaby-Lake X architectures. Now, Intel had originally planned to release Skylake-X at the end of this year, or even early 2018, so rushing it forwards by six months means it likely hasn’t undergone the rigorous testing that Intel usually does, as we’ll discuss soon. However, it does mean that it has a range of new products that compete with the Ryzen processor, though purely on performance, not price. It’s a rather odd launch, with Skylake-X being a relatively major upgrade to Intel’s design, while Kaby-Lake X isn’t. Let’s see what’s the deal with Skylake-X first. SKYLAKE-X FOR…

When we put the call out for X299 motherboards, we initially asked for entry-level boards for the PC & Tech Authority roundup, with a price point of no more than $400. Unfortunately it appears that no such X299 boards yet exist; this $469 product was the most a. ordable we could find. It seems that once again Intel is charging a very high premium for products based on its HEDT (High End Desktop platform) segment. This is in stark contrast to the $300 and even cheaper boards that are Ryzen 7 compatible, making the cost of ownership of the new Core-X series even higher. As you’ll see, the costs rise dramatically, so we’ve ordered the boards in this article based on price – just what does a $469 X299 board…

The quad-core Ryzen 5 1500X costs only $46 less than the six-core Ryzen 5 1600. That might make it look like an i. y proposition: after all, the 1600 delivers 50% more processing power for your buck. However, this is an X-edition CPU, which means it holds advantages elsewhere. In particular, it has a huge 16MB L3 cache – the same as the most expensive Ryzen 7 CPUs. It runs fast too, with a base frequency of 3.5GHz, a Precision Boost clock of 3.7GHz and the highest XFR boost of any Ryzen CPU, at 200MHz. Together, these features make it quicker than the Ryzen 5 1600 at stock speed – as long as the workload doesn’t rely too heavily on multithreading. The 1500X also compares favourably to Intel’s quad-core opposition.…

Hopes were high when Intel revealed its overclockable Core i3-7350K at the start of the year. With Hyper-Threading, 4MB of L3 cache and a base frequency of 4.2GHz, it looked like the perfect CPU for enthusiasts on a budget. Sadly, its appeal has always been undermined by its price. An extra $110 will net you a Core i5-7600K with four physical cores – and the Ryzen 5 1400 o? ers twice the physical cores at almost the same price. The Core i3-7350K does have its strengths. One is the onboard GPU, making it cheaper and simpler to build a system around. And with a TDP of just 60W, you can get away with using a cheap CPU cooler even if you overclock it. It’s also true that Intel’s Kaby Lake…

It’s hard for a SATA SSD to distinguish itself. The SATA interface itself acts as a bottleneck on bandwidth, so no matter how fast and flashy the technology inside your drive, it’s simply impossible for a drive to race ahead of its rivals. That’s not to say that all drives are identical. The Adata Ultimate SU900 was this month’s fastest SATA drive in our sequential read benchmark. However, look at the collated results on p80 and it’s clear that we’re dealing with small margins. For most practical purposes, the SU900 delivers the same overall performance as any other drive in its class. That being the case, you might wonder what makes it a winner compared to, say, the Corsair Force LE. One factor is the price: if 256GB of solid-state…

Samsung’s “Evo” SSDs are aimed at shoppers who don’t need the flat-out speed of a top-tier drive. Accordingly, the 960 Evo isn’t as fast as the 960 Pro. But it’s still a great performer and the price is lower, making it a compelling proposition. It’s still not cheap: the 500GB model we tested costs $130 more than the Crucial MX300, and that drive gives you an extra 25GB. But fire up the benchmarks and it’s clear that you get what you pay for. It put in a superb performance in CrystalDiskMark, with a sequential read speed of 1,931MB/ sec – only Samsung’s own 960 Pro did better. We also tried a multi-threaded sequential read test, and saw an huge transfer rate of 3,049MB/sec, indicating that there’s bandwidth to spare. Sequential…

If you’re looking for a drive that truly unlocks the potential of NVMe, this is it. The Samsung 960 Pro is the fastest consumer SSD we’ve ever tested, easily seeing o¡ all-comers in our sequential read and write benchmarks. We’re talking about four times the read speed of your typical SATA drive, and more than three times the write speed. Admittedly, the 960 Pro didn’t do quite so well in the multithreaded tests; here it kept pace with the competition, but didn’t stand out. Overall though it has an undoubted edge in realworld workloads, as attested by a string of first-place results in the PCMark 8 storage benchmarks. That stunning performance is partnered with hardware encryption and a decent five-year warranty. A 400TBW endurance rating for this 512GB drive is…

It might seem that SATA SSDs are much of a muchness, but Samsung has evidently sought to give its high-end 2.5in drive a character of its own. The 850 Pro uses the company’s upmarket MEX controller, rather than the 850 Evo’s MGX, and the slightly different capacity – 512GB rather than 500GB – bespeaks a different arrangement of flash memory. These technical variations, however, make little difference to performance. With crushing predictability, any clever technical advantage the internals might offer is obliterated by the limitations of the SATA interface. We can say with confidence that you will not notice any difference in performance between this drive and the Crucial MX300. That’s a bit embarrassing, in light of the 850 Pro’s weighty price tag – on a per-gigabyte basis, it’s one…

The SanDisk SSD Plus is a low-cost drive originally released back in 2015. That might not sound very long ago, but the market has moved on quite a bit in two years. What might once have seemed like a tempting balance of price and performance now looks very much like a bum deal. Let’s look at the performance side of the equation first. Spoilt as we are these days, we’ve been taking it more or less for granted that a SATA SSD will approach the maximum read and write speeds supported by the interface. The SSD Plus confounded that expectation, with a dismal sequential write speed of 216MB/ sec; we’ve actually seen mechanical drives do better. In the multi-threaded tests too, the SSD Plus placed right at the bottom of…

If your PC is more than a few years old, it probably won’t have an M.2 slot. You might assume this means you can’t take advantage of the latest, fastest SSDs. If you’re using a desktop, however, you may be able to add M.2 support via a cheap PCI-E card. After all, M.2 is effectively just a compact PCI-Express connector. You can buy an M.2 adapter card for less than $30 online, but there are a few caveats to be aware of. It goes without saying that you’ll need a spare PCI-Express slot, with at least four data lanes. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a PCI-E x4 slot, though – you can happily plug an x4 card into an x8 or x16 slot. A more niggly issue is chipset…

You might not think of mapping as an everyday computing task, but the technology is becoming ubiquitous. Google, Apple and Microsoft each have their own mobile platforms, which draw in geographical data to help us navigate from A to B, geotag our photos and pull in weather reports from the web. Those basic functions, however, represent only a fraction of the potential on hand. We literally have the world in our pockets – and there are a lot of things we can do with it. The possibilities include creating your own customised maps; navigating and exploring more e? ectively; and even promoting your business through Street View. EMBED A MAP IN EXCEL If you’re putting together a report or presentation that relies on geographical data – such as country populations…

VALUE Asus T100HA PRICE $399 SUPPLIER www.asus.com.au Performance that delivers everything typical day to day computing demands short of intense gaming, combined with a fantastic screen and a solid and we think, rugged design makes this the value king. SPECIFICATIONS 10.1in IPS panel • Intel Quad-Core x5- Z8500 processor • 64GB eMMC SSD • 2GB LPDDR3 memory GAMING Asus GL502VS PRICE $2,995 SUPPLIER www.asus.com.au Asus has built a very solid machine around an incredible new GPU. This has totally revolutionised the performance we can expect from a laptop, putting many regular desktops to shame. SPECIFICATIONS GeForce GTX 1070 GPU • Intel i7-6700HQ CPU • 8GB DDR4 • 15.6-inch IPS display • 1TB HDD • 256GB SSD PROFESSIONAL Microsoft Surface Book PRICE $2,299 – $4,206 SUPPLIER www.microsoft.com.au Truly beautiful, undeniably powerful…

Now this is a curious thing. Curious indeed, said Alice. I’m typing these words into Word, which shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. I’m typing it into Word running on Android; again, not the world’s biggest shock. Except I’m using a mobile phone, a proper keyboard and mouse, and a full-sized screen. And the Android unit is a phone sat in a cradle. The phone screen itself is blank, but I have a full monitor to work with. It has a desktop that looks remarkably like Windows 10 (but isn’t, obviously). The icons are sensible; I can find all the things I need to work with. System-level stu. is just like Android on the phone itself. It’s a pretty seamless experience and it does all that I need it…

Regular readers will know of my fondness for IFTTT (IF This Then That), an online glue that you can use to link numerous devices and services together. People often believe it’s just for switching on the lights and other home automation tasks, but IFTTT goes beyond that. For example, I use it to log to a Google spreadsheet every time my phone goes on and o? charge, recording the time, the charge level, and the charge type (AC or USB). So, if someone asks me about battery life, I can back up my answer with real-world evidence. More usefully, perhaps, I also use IFTTT to send me an alert if the share prices of the stocks in my ISA start to tank. IFTTT is an incredibly simple system, but that…

Over the past few years, getting coding back into schools has become big news and big business. A growing number of schools has been offering it for a few years now, while others still don’t offer it beyond the age of 13. What constitutes Computing inschools then? Well, it’s mostly programming. Schools often have to ask for help online, or buy clunky off-the-shelf packages that demoralise the kids. School leaders and pupils often think Computing is “too hard” and so avoid it. A growing number of schools are dropping it in favour of league table, target-friendly choices – and I expect to see a contraction in candidate numbers next year. At Rendcomb College, we deliver Computing differently. Kids learn at their own pace and have fun. This approach appears to…

I’ve recently added a Samsung Galaxy S8+ to my collection of smartphones. Mainly because, at the time of writing, it’s quite simply the best smartphone available on the market. Sorry iPhone lovers, but until the iPhone 8 hits the shops and we can compare the two handsets, that’s the honest truth. I was also keen to put the triple-lock of security smarts included with the S8+ to the test: fingerprint, iris and facial recognition for user authentication. All three had come under some negative scrutiny before the device was even available for pre-order. This being the real-world section of the magazine, and me having seen it all before during almost three decades covering IT security issues, I thought I’d put the features tothe test to see if there was any…

Being in Singapore on Star Wars day has more impact than it might in other places. This has both a simple and a complex cause and, as I’m sure you can guess, I do like my complex causes. The simple bit is that Lucasfilm has a Singapore office (in the “Sandcrawler building”, inevitably) and therefore a few props from the movies are easy to grab for an impromptu street exhibition. The more complicated cause is that the Singaporeans have a huge interest and investment in “the future”, which means they’re almost inevitably going to be sci-figeeks. Much to the amazement of our visiting press pack, this enthusiasm went far enough for the Supertree sculptures in the Gardens by the Bay to be temporarily converted into the largest “light sabres” in…

GAMING NEWS Just for the fun of it A few years ago if you’d told me I’d be drooling over some HP hardware – that’s Hewlett Packard – I’d assume you were either pulling my leg, or taking advantage of my bizarre appreciation for powerful workstations that I’ll never, ever make the most of. But, here we are in 2017, and I am incredibly excited by HP’s newest gaming line-up, which is a testament to how seriously the company is taking the segment. It’s a complete range, too, including desktops and laptops, mice and monitors, and even a very elegant video card enclosure to power up any laptop into a gaming powerhouse. It’s all slick, aggressively designed, and primed to take advantage of the ongoing groundswell in PC gaming hardware…

Antivirus vendors defend their efforts. We asked several major players for a response, and the strongest came from PandaLabs. “We know that Project Zero researcher Tavis Ormandy likes analogies so we would like to put one forwards,” said Luis Corrons, technical director of PandaLabs. “It is a fact that medical vaccines work and have saved millions of lives, virtually eradicating some of the nastiest diseases ever known. However, you will always find some ‘bright spark’ who says it is much better not to inoculate the population, just use knowledge to avoid the infections, and we always have antibiotics if we feel sick.” Corrons added: “Anti-malware solutions are one of the most efficacious methods of detecting and protecting against hundreds of millions of known security threats. Not using anti-malware exposes you…

2D TESTS Desktop PCs and laptops are tested using our own custom bench testing suite, which has been carefully designed to test all aspects of a system and rate them in a way that’s useful to you. Our benchtesting cover three main tests: a typical video editing test, a demanding 4K video editing test and a multitasking test that stresses all aspects of the system. We look at the time it takes for each test to run, which is then compared to our reference PC to produce a normalised result. This score is shown on a graph, and to help you understand just where the PC we’re reviewing sits in the grand scheme of things, we will often include other system’s scores. PC&TA LABS BENCHTEST PC Intel Core i7-7700 CPU;…

W_hen we put the call out for X299 motherboards, we initially asked for entry-level boards for the PC & Tech Authority roundup, with a price point of no more than $400. Unfortunately it appears that no such X299 boards yet exist; this $469 product was the most a. ordable we could find. It seems that once again Intel is charging a very high premium for products based on its HEDT (High End Desktop platform) segment. This is in stark contrast to the $300 and even cheaper boards that are Ryzen 7 compatible, making the cost of ownership of the new Core-X series even higher. As you’ll see, the costs rise dramatically, so we’ve ordered the boards in this article based on price – just what does a $469 X299 board…

The final board to hit our test bench also proved to be the most expensive. We’re sure Gigabyte will have cheaper o? erings in the future, but we were quite surprised that this was the most a? ordable board they had at the time of the roundup, at 50% higher price than the Asus board. But just because it’s vastly more expensive doesn’t always means this is a thoroughbred. Aorus has really gone to town with the RGB lighting on this board, with the memory modules, PCIe lanes, I/O cover and bottom heatspreader all lit up like a Christmas tree. It calls its lighting solution ‘RGB Fusion’, and is compatible with most RGB products on the market. If you’re looking for bling, look no further. Considering this is a standard…

The Ryzen 5 1600 is the second most powerful CPU in the Ryzen 5 family, behind the 1600X. On paper, the speed gap is quite wide: its 3.2GHz base and 3.6GHz Precision Boost frequencies are 400MHz slower than those of the Ryzen 5 1600X, and XFR only pushes this up to 3.65GHz, compared to the 1600X’s 4.1GHz. Otherwise, though, the two are largely identical, offering six cores (12 threads) and 16MB of L3 cache. As you’d expect, the 1600 lagged slightly behind the X-edition CPU in every one of our benchmarks. The 1600’s lowly clock speed also left it behind the Intel CPUs, and AMD’s own 1500X, in our image-editing and game tests. The multithreaded tests, however, allowed the six-core design to show its power, outstripping the Core i5-7600K and…

Intel’s K-series Core i5 chips have long been mid-range favourites, o? ering unlocked overclocking potential at a reasonable price. Now, like many of Intel’s o? erings, they’re challenged by Ryzen chips with more cores and threads. Still, the Core i5-7600K is a powerful CPU. It has a base frequency of 3.8GHz and a turbo frequency of 4.2GHz – faster than any Ryzen – plus 50% more L3 cache than the i3-7350K. That pays o? when it comes to lightly threaded work: in the image-editing test, it bettered all our stock-speed Ryzen CPUs by a big margin. Elsewhere, though, the story was mixed. In our Handbrake encoding test, its stock speed score was just 239,176, compared to 319,637 for the six-core $295 Ryzen 5 1600. There’s impressive headroom for overclocking. We…

The XPG SX8000 is Adata’s topof- the-range M.2 SSD, and it exploits the NVMe interface to deliver speeds in excess of anything over a SATA connector. But It’s far from this month’s fastest drive: the Samsung 960 Pro is 70% faster when it comes to sequential reads, and around 80% faster at sequential writes. Even the mid-range Evo outpaced the XPG. Still, in real-world usage the XPG SX8000 feels snappy. That may be partly down to its hybrid buffer, which uses DRAM for short-term caching but can also address MLC cells in simulated SLC mode for faster access. With such tricks under its hood, the SX8000 bested every other drive in the multi-threaded read test. The drive impressed us in PCMark 8’s storage tests: these exercises aren’t always revealing, as…

The SU800 is sold in both SATA and M.2 formats – but there’s no performance advantage to this M.2 version. Rather than using the superfast NMVe interface, it runs a SATA connection over the high-speed connector. Modern motherboards should support this arrangement without issue, but if you’re planning to install an M.2 expansion card into an older desktop, it may not work – check before you buy. The slower interface means the SU800 is left behind by most other M.2 SSDs, with read and write speeds more comparable to regular 2.5in SATA drives. Performance isn’t quite identical, though: in the multi-threaded random write test, the SU800 surprised us with an excellent throughput of 357MB/ sec, which represented more bandwidth than any other drive on test. There’s no support for hardware…

No, it’s not a typo. The Samsung 850 Evo is a modern M.2 SSD, and it’s also a traditional SATA drive (see right). It makes a bit more sense when you realise that the two drives are internally identical. The second notch on the M.2 connector betrays the fact that – like the Adata Ultimate SU800 (see opposite) – the 850 Evo uses a regular SATA connection over PCI-E, rather than taking advantage of the faster NVMe standard. As a result, the M.2 version of the 850 Evo is disappointing in exactly the same way as the SU800. Its performance figures are absolutely fine – for a SATA drive. By M.2 standards, they’re pretty disastrous. Sequential read and write operations tick along at less than half the speed you’d get…

We frequently see the Canvas SL308 in custom systems from British PC builders. And why not? It’s a decent SATA drive, delivering performance that keeps up with the competition, and it’s no more expensive than any other drive of similar capacity. When you open the box, the Canvas does feel rather like an OEM drive, with no accessories or glossy brochures to welcome you to the world of SK hynix. Drop by the website, though, and you can download the manufacturer’s Drive Manager and Data Migration tools, which are nicely put together, with friendly and attractive front-ends. It’s just a shame that these utilities don’t give you any control of overprovisioning – and the migration tool is pretty basic, so if your old hard disk contains more data than will…

Not many years ago, a terabytesized SSD would have cost more than your entire computer. Today the WD Blue delivers that gargantuan capacity for a very a? ordable $440. To be strictly accurate, 24GB is kept aside for overprovisioning, so its usable capacity is 1,000GB, which formats down to 931GB in Windows – but that’s still a good chunk of space, even for compulsive downloaders. Although Blue is WD’s mid-range brand, the drive is fast enough to saturate the SATA interface, as our benchmark results show. In other words, it’s just as speedy as “high-end” SATA drives from Samsung and SanDisk. It also comes with Acronis True Image software – in this case a special WD edition. This not only helps you migrate your old disk onto the new SSD…

Installing a new SSD is the perfect opportunity to perform a clean installation of Windows, to clear out old junk and stay up to date. To install and activate, you may need to dig out your original product key. If you don’t have this to hand, you can use a tool such as NirSoft ProduKey to view all the product keys in your Registry. Windows 10 may not need a key, depending on how it was activated. If you need new installation media, you can now download ISO files for Windows 7, 8 and 10, directly from the Microsoft website. You can write these ISO files to a DVD, or a USB flash drive, using the free media creation tool at tinyurl.com/ juws8as. UPGRADING TO WINDOWS 10 Microsoft’s free Windows…

SMARTPHONE OnePlus 5 PRICE $759 SUPPLIER www.oneplus.net the OnePlus 5 offers amazing value for money. Nothing can touch it at this price. SPECIFICATIONS Octa-core 2.45GHz/1.9GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor • 6GB/8GB RAM • Adreno 540 graphics • 5.5in AMOLED screen, 1,920 x 1,080 resolution l 64GB/ 128GB storage • dual -lens 20MP/16MP rear camera • 16MP front camera TABLET Apple iPad Pro 10.5in PRICE $979 (64GB) SUPPLIER www.apple.com/au It bridges the gap between a tablet and a portable work machine so beautifully. SPECIFICATIONS Apple A10X Fusion processor • 4GB RAM • 10.5in IPS screen, 1,668 x 2,224 resolution • 64/256/512GB storage • 12MP/7MP rear/front camera • 802.11ac Wi-Fi EBOOK READER Kindle Paperwhite PRICE $119 SUPPLIER www.amazon.com The premium Kindle goes the extra mile, with a more attractive design, lower weight,…

FEATURES + ESET INTERNET SECURITY + ASHAMPOO PHOTO MAILER + PDF COMPRESSOR + WEBSITE X5 START 13 DRIVERS + ATI CATALYST + NVIDIA FORCEWARE HELP + DISCLAIMER + DAMAGED OR FAULTY DVDS + USING THIS DVD + INSTALLING SOFTWARE EDITORIAL + BURNING AN ISO IMAGE + PC&TA EDITORIALS TROUBLESHOOTING + SERIAL CODES + BLANK REGISTRATION WEBSITE + CAN’T FIND A FILE? + INSTALLATION ERROR WINDOWS + 7ZIP + CCLEANER + CLASSIC SHELL + CUTEPDF + DEEPBURNER + DEFRAGGLER + FLUX + FOXIT READER + GREENSHOT + APPLE ITUNES + LIBRE OFFICE + OPEN OFFICE + MALWAREBYTES’ A/M + SANDBOXIE + VLC MEDIA PLAYER MAC + ALFRED + BETTERTOUCHTOOLS + APPLE ITUNES + DROPBOX + FLUX + GOOGLE CHROME + MOZILLA FIREFOX + PLEX + SKYPE + TEAMVIEWER + VLC INTERNET…

“Something has been bothering me lately: the lazy expectation of people for ongoing updates for their chosen platform. This wasn’t a problem in the old days when there were structural, architectural reasons why you had to move forward, when there were natural breakpoints in the flow of hardware and thus the OS and apps that ran on top. A good example of this was the move from 16-bit to 32-bit. If you didn’t have a 386 or later CPU, then you couldn’t run the latest OS code. It created a natural fire break that helped flush the old 286 world out of the system. In contrast, little really changed with the move to 64-bit on desktops. Worse still, Moore’s law has applied with a vengeance, and I would argue that…