Inhaltsverzeichnis für December 2020 in APC

It’s a time of huge excitement in the PC world, with Nvidia delivering a beyond-expectations level of performance with the RTX 3080 and 3090, at below-expected pricing, and, AMD finally beating Intel in the all-important IPC stakes with its Zen 3-based 5000 series CPUs. That’s all covered in the pages ahead, and in the issues to come we’ll have proper-deep APC reviews of the new Ryzens. But I wanted to take a moment, here, to thank you for helping us get through a very tough year. It’s not over yet, and the COVID drama will continue well into next year, but I think it’s ok to now take a small breather and be grateful. “It’s not over yet, and the COVID drama will continue well into next year, but I…

Intel’s 11th-Gen Rocket Lake is headed to the launch pad in the first quarter of 2021, and it couldn’t come at a better time. AMD’s Zen architecture has thundered into the desktop PC market, steadily taking chunks of market share in a segment long dominated by Intel. Intel’s response will come in the form of Rocket Lake, but unlike the forward progress we see with the company’s 10nm Tiger Lake chips for laptops, the chips are 14nm’s last hurrah on the desktop. Rocket Lake could bring Intel’s first new microarchitecture to the desktop PC in five years. We already know with certainty that Rocket Lake will come with support for the PCIe 4.0 interface, which provides twice the bandwidth as PCIe 3.0. That addresses a key weakness exacerbated by AMD’s…

Starting with the new Alpha 3.11 patch, Star Citizen officially requires AVX instruction support if you want to play the game. This means all CPUs predating Sandy Bridge and AMD’s Bulldozer architecture are no longer supported. Even worse, all of Intel’s modern Celeron and Pentium CPUs (including the latest generation) can’t run the game as they do not support AVX instructions, either. For now, there’s no word from CIG on creating an SSE compatibility layer for AVX instructions on older CPUs, but the chances of that are probably nill. There’s little incentive for CIG to implement a compatibility layer as the game requires high-performance systems in the first place to run the game at playable frame rates (and all of today’s CPUs that qualify support AVX instructions).…

If you’ve ever locked yourself outside of your house, you probably know the pain, cost and time associated with hiring a lockpicker to help you get back in. Similarly, if you’ve ever locked yourself out of an important file, you might know the even greater cost and time of using a password recovery program to regain access to it. Also called Password Crackers, these are intended for legitimate purposes and aren’t necessarily anything new. Still, they tend to be expensive affairs that take longer than a human lifetime to get through well-designed passwords. With Ampere and Big Navi GPUs starting to hit the public, though, companies like Passcovery are advertising that they’re more useful. Which could be helpful or threatening, depending on the user. According to its LinkedIn profile, Passcovery’s…

If you’ve been reading up on RTX 30-series cards, you may have come across some alarmist reports of crashes, usually in situations where the card is clocked above 2,000MHz. Some attribute this to poorly validated designs involving the choice of capacitors located on the rear of the PCB behind the GPU. EVGA believes this is the case, while other manufacturers believe that capacitors are not the cause. “The manufacturers claim they are following Nvidia’s design specifications. A cynic might say Nvidia wanted first wave reviews to look more impressive by allowing the cards to clock to the very edge of stability and beyond specification to artificially get benchmark wins over a possible AMD competitor.” I don’t pretend to be an armchair electrician but sadly many youtubers and tech press seem…

Microsoft 1980 Something weird clearly happened at Microsoft as it transitioned out of the 70s, hence this funky logo that looks heavily inspired by metal bands. Sony 1955 Sony has sported essentially the same classic logo since 1957, but before that came this odd, stretched-out, rather lopsided iteration. Acer 1987 What’s going on here? Acer kept this logo for over a decade, despite it weirdly swapping between lowercase and uppercase. A lowercase e followed by an uppercase R, really? Corsair 2015 Corsair had a pretty solid base design here, but including the questionable “Do Your Thing” slogan in branding material was an odd call in our opinion… Samsung 1979 This was Samsung’s logo for close to two decades, and yet it’s unrecognisable today. 1992 brought the logo we know now,…

$1,139 | www.nvidia.com Founders Edition cards took a big step forward last generation thanks to the move to a dual axial fan design and away from blowers. The RTX 3080 FE takes another step forward with a unique fan implementation and PCB design. One of the eye-catching design choices is the use of a new 12-pin power connector. The downside of this cable is the placement of the connector. It doesn’t lend itself to perfect cable management. Physically the card is two slots only and its height doesn’t protrude above the PCIe bracket. This means it will remain compatible in the vast majority of cases, even compact ones that won’t accommodate huge RTX 3080 partner cards. It comes with the standard three DP 1.4a ports and a single HDMI 2.1…

Google Docs | Free | www.google.com LibreOffice | Free | www.libreoffice.org Office suites are a hard thing to get excited about. They represent actual work, which nobody likes, rather than messing around or playing games, and they’re also nothing special to look at. There’s not even an exciting war going on, such as that which once took place between Microsoft and Lotus/IBM over spreadsheets. No, the office front is a very quiet one. These comparisons, between Google’s cloud-based suite and The Document Foundation’s LibreOffice, are of features in free software. If you need Microsoft Office, ensuring 100-percent compatibility with Office users and the other premium features you can only get with a 365 subscription, then you need it, and no alternative suite is quite going to be right for you.…

Why should you care about privacy? Well, Google, Amazon, and Facebook know everything about you – probably because you told them. Google, because it owns your life now; Amazon, because it owns your shopping habits; and Facebook, as it owns your social networks. The idea that you should use a Google-branded browser that helps you to log into your Google account before you browse anywhere should be ringing alarm bells. The same should go for a browser produced by the company that also developed your operating system. This sort of duality of function is begging for total surveillance. In terms of privacy, Mozilla’s Firefox is hard to beat. Firefox, based on the Gecko engine, has been around in one form or another since 1998. Mozilla is an open-source organisation dedicated…

Memory is one of the most common issues when trying to get a fresh build up and running. But if your RAM is giving you the runaround, don’t despair: There are many possible causes, and it’s generally not too difficult to identify the issue. First of all, go to the motherboard manufacturer’s website and double-check that your motherboard definitely does support the capacity and frequency of memory you’re using. If it does, check for a BIOS update; if you’re running an outdated BIOS, that could be the source of your problems. If neither of those are the issue, try testing each stick individually, or moving them to any open DIMM slots. Ensure that you’re using the correct DIMMs; the motherboard manual should explain which slots to prioritise when installing memory.…

“Hype and pent-up demand were so high – and the usage of bots for automatically purchasing any stock by scalpers – was so rife that the whole launch has turned into something of a farce.” After Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, announced the RTX 30-series back in early September from his kitchen, there was a disturbance in the PC market. Up until then the RTX 2080 Ti was the king of the hill for performance, but unlike previous generations it cost substantially more than what we’d ever seen previously for a gamer-focused graphics card. In the order of over $1,000 more than previously seen. The 20-series set a new bar for cost to performance in a bad way, and while we complained about it at the time, the introduction of…

Move Windows 10 license I have three licenses attached to three computers. One is an OEM laptop. The other two are Pro licenses I purchased. It’s time to upgrade one of the Pro machines, which will be a full rebuild, making the jump from an Intel 6700K to AMD. How do I transfer the license? Thanks. PAINFLAME APC responds: The key is to link your Pro license to your Microsoft account as a digital license. Open “Settings > Update & Security > Activation” on the PC you’re replacing and check the activation status – if it simply says “Windows is activated with a digital license” you should see a prompt for “Add an account” – click this and follow the prompts to link it to your Microsoft account. Once…

WordPress is the most popular platform for setting up a personal blog. If you’re new to Wordpress we’re here to show you how to start using your new site’s tools to produce the content you’ll be showcasing to others. Content on WordPress consists of two basic types: Posts and pages. Posts are primarily the stuff of blog posts: Time-sensitive material like an ongoing diary, where everything is published in a single feed and is date and time-stamped, with the most recent post at the top. Posts can be assigned categories and tags, to enable your readers to create their own filtered feed based on specific topics or areas of interest. Pages are for static content with no expiry date: There’s no publish date attached, and they’re useful for providing information,…

There are many things to consider when shooting portraits of people, and you’ll want to start by shooting in good light, with a natural-looking subject on a sympathetic background. Even great Raw images will need some post production, and less great ones considerably more. That’s where Luminar comes in. It has a whole section of tools dedicated to manual as well as AI-assisted portrait enhancement. The artificial intelligence can really help if you’re not an experienced retoucher, since it is able to automatically detect which areas of an image contain skin, eyes, lips, teeth and more. You can even change head shape or remove shimmer from shiny skin. What used to require hours of masking can now be done in a few minutes and the results are excellent. Of course…

$36 | PC, Switch, Mac | supergiantgames.com Roguelikes usually put story in the back seat – the back seat of one of those cars with a window separating it from the driver. Not so in Hades, where every character is fully voiced and has more to say with every run. You’re Zagreus, son of the lord of the underworld, who believes ruling in hell is overrated. With the help of your distant Olympian family you’re going to fight through every mythic monster between you and escape. Hades paints its characters in broad archetypal strokes. My favourite is Dionysus, god of wine, hedonism, and everybody just being like really cool, but everyone from long-suffering fury Megaera to layabout Sisyphus is brought to life with a solid vocal portrayal and art like…

$29 | PC, XB1, PS4 | bulletsperminute.com Here, we have a game that forces disparate genres into an unholy tryst, and the sweaty aftermath is as attractive as it is unnerving. Please, let me explain. The main hook is that the actions of your weapons, both firing and reloading, are tied into the synth-tinged rock soundtrack. You need to act in time to the beat of the music. Try to shoot out of sync, and your gun jams. Attempt to reload outside of the beat, and nothing happens. It makes sense, then, that enemy attacks are also tethered to the music. It’s a system that takes some getting used to, but once I feel that I’m on top of it, it provides some uniquely satisfying moments. This blissful feeling of…

“The base model at launch this time around is the Ryzen 5 5600X, with a single chiplet of six cores and twelve threads, running a base frequency of 3.7GHz and turbo frequency of 4.6GHz.” The new family, known as the Ryzen 5000 series, includes four parts and supports up to sixteen cores. The key element of the new product is the core design, with AMD’s latest Zen 3 microarchitecture, promising a 19% raw increase in performance-per-clock, well above recent generational improvements. The new processors are socket-compatible with existing 500-series motherboards. AMD is keeping a similar structure to the previous generation. The first four processors to market will include products in the key Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 segments, as well as a pair of high-performance parts with Ryzen 9. These…

In what could be a move to broaden its attack on rival chipmakers Intel and Nvidia, the Wall Street Journal reports that AMD is in advanced talks to buy FPGA-maker Xilinx in a deal that could top US$30 billion. The talks are said to have resumed after a recent pause, so it’s unclear if they will result in a successful acquisition. Xilinx is primarily known for its FPGA products. The two companies have a history of working in close collaboration on deep learning projects, such as the Xilinx deep learning solution on AMD EPYC processors (among other pursuits). FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) are semiconductor devices that can be rapidly reconfigured on the fly. They offer certain advantages over other types of devices, like CPUs and GPUs, in a wide…

There’s a saying from the days of DOS: Wait for the point release, or the inevitable first service pack. That was about software, but there’s a corollary for PC hardware: Skip the first generation of any radically new hardware, or don’t set your hopes too high. Turing was Gen1 ray tracing. Ampere is Gen2, and it’s looking like an absolute beast. Nvidia has doubled just about everything. Let’s start with transistor counts. The TU102 GPU found in the RTX 2080 Ti had a then-impressive 18.6 billion transistors (via TSMC 12FFC 12nm). GA102, which is used in both the RTX 3090 and RTX 3080, tips the scales at 28 billion transistors, fabricated on an optimized Samsung 8N 8nm process. Yeah, it’s not quite double, but it’s a much bigger jump than…

Mac OS X 10.7 or later | $59.95 | anthropics.com We tend to share portraits every day via social media sites. However, capturing a portrait that we’re pleased with can be a challenge. If the camera is too close, lens distortion can stretch the shape of our face in unflattering ways (thanks to barrel distortion). High-definition shots produced by the latest iPhones can reveal lines and wrinkles that don’t tally with our perception of how we look. Fortunately, we can counteract common problems by retouching our photographs in PortraitPro 19. What’s new? Version 19 of PortraitPro sees improvements across a range of tools such as Fix Lighting. Unflattering lighting can cause harsh shadows that accentuate features such as bags under the eyes. A strong light source can create shiny hotspots,…

Linux | https://windowsfx.org We’re always a tad sceptical of distros that seek to imitate Windows. If you want a distro to be like Windows, why not just use Windows? But there are some things that Windows does right and perhaps it would be nice if a distro did just a couple of such things. In fact, the ReactOS team have for the last ten years dedicated themselves to recreating the Win32 API in Linux, so if you need low-level compatibility you should check that out. Musing on Microsoft-ian merits aside, Linuxfx is a distro by Brazilian developer Rafael Rachid. Slightly confusingly, this particular release of Linuxfx is called Windowsfx and the documentation tends to use these *fx monikers interchangeably. Nomenclature aside, we tend to caution against one-person-distro efforts, but Linuxfx…

This was a surprisingly easy build. The Enthoo Pro 2 needs more cable-management solutions, but it’s a big case with a bunch of useful tricks up its sleeve to make the build process run smoothly. Installing extra drives or case fans is a cinch; the upgrade potential for this build is nearly unlimited. There’s a tonne of space for extra HDDs and SSDs, and our power supply has more than enough juice for them. The M.2 Aero riser card packaged with the motherboard means we could have up to seven M.2 SSDs – excessive for us, but perhaps not to those who routinely handle vast quantities of data. The Threadripper 3970X dominated our benchmarks, surprising nobody. Those 64 threads made short work of every CPU-bound task we threw at it,…

$3,849 tinyurl.com/APC487JWC JW Computers GMR Apex 3080 Coming in as the cheapest of this month’s roundup, it looks like the price reduction has taken an axe to the CPU capabilities in order to keep the new fangled RTX 3080 onboard to deliver that sweet next-gen graphics performance – ideal for high FPS 1440p or 4K gaming. The CPU will be a bottleneck at 1440p or lower if hunting for 144Hz+ gaming, but if you like visual quality over FPS quantity, it will be perfect. A good size SSD, power supply and motherboard with lots of IO options make for a well-rounded system. Some higher speed RAM would’ve been nice to see at this price point for the Ryzen processor, but these RTX 3080s don’t come cheap so some pennies have…

Ah delidding, that old, terrifying procedure, usually only recommended for the elite. For the uninitiated, delidding is the act of separating the integrated heat spreader (IHS) from the top of the processor, and then replacing the stock thermal paste that the manufacturer has used with something a little more premium – usually liquid metal or a better thermal paste. Once upon a time it used to be quite the daunting procedure, involving all sorts of razor blades and torture devices, with a myriad of techniques used to carefully splice your processor away from its IHS, hopefully without damaging the silicon underneath (or yourself for that matter). For many, it was rarely ever worth it. As temps on the high-end parts remained resolutely below that 70C mark, even with the weakest…

Contrary to popular belief, you don’t actually need to spend a whole wallet full of cash to make your PC run silently with liquid cooling and big radiators – which is great, because with the human malware that is Covid-19 going around, chances are your local PC shop won’t accept cash, and you’ll also prefer to save it for a rainy day. But now we’ve come to a non-metaphorical rainy day, and you’ve decided it’s time to do something about that loud PC of yours. So here’s how you can silence your PC for under $20 (your results may vary). A wonderful thing is that almost every PC – laptops not included – comes with cooling gear that is, at least moderately, over-dimensioned for the task. Like your car, it…

Surely the most mercurial of PC components, solid-state drives have long presented a moving target when it comes to benchmarking. Early SSDs were all about headline transfer speeds. Then it became apparent that performance fell off rapidly as the drive’s capacity was used. As solid-state technology matured, random access to small data sets emerged as a more relevant measure of real-world performance. But even now, the best test regimes can’t fully capture the character of an SSD. After all, there’s no substitute for hammering a drive with day-today storage for years. However, it is possible to capture a pretty good idea of the performance of a drive in relatively short order using freely available software. Our approach involves testing both peak throughput and arguably more relevant 4K performance, along with…

There are some apps that really benefit from the portability and ease of access that you get with the Apple Watch, and Fantastical is a prime example. With it installed on your wrist, there is no need to reach for your iPhone or Mac to see what is coming up on your schedule – just raise your wrist and get organised in a few taps. The Fantastical Apple Watch app is not just limited to checking details that have been entered elsewhere. You can create new events, mark tasks as complete, and add useful complications to your Watch face. It is well engineered for working on a small display and never feels too cramped or overstuffed. Learn to use it and it will become a handy part of your daily…

You probably think of the Raspberry Pi as a useful computing tool that can also handle a bit of emulated gaming. But there are plenty of games that you can install on the Raspberry Pi without needing an emulator. Open source games for Linux, classic games that have had the source code released, and games written in Python are all available. If an Arm-compatible build has been distributed, the game should run. First person shooters, shoot-’emups, strategy games and more are all ready to install on the Raspberry Pi. While simple to install, though, configuration can be tricky – especially when it comes to finding a suitable controller. You already know of one Raspberry Pi game that runs natively: Minecraft Pi. Many others are available and can be downloaded from…

Riot Games to close Sydney office and dissolve OPL THE OCEANIC PRO LEAGUE HASN’T MET THE COMPANY’S GOALS FOR THE LEAGUE. When Riot Games opened its Sydney office in 2015 it did so with a literal splash: in addition to creating an actual artificial reef for Nautilus, it also founded the League of Legends Oceanic Pro League. Five years later, alas, things are different, with Riot announcing yesterday that its Sydney office will be closed, and the OPL will be dissolved. In a statement co-signed by North America and Oceania managing director Malte Wagener and Global Esports director Tom Martell, it’s made pretty clear that Riot’s hopes for the OPL haven’t come to fruition. “At Riot Games, we want to build competitive and sustainable leagues that drive commercial growth and…

Free | PC, Mac cathroon.itch.io/the-devil An enigmatic survival horror game, The Devil is set in a big tower that’s all brutalist concrete and askew camera angles. You play as a nameless shlub who is sent to investigate a disappearance, so off you go, fathoming your way down the structure, the tension building with every ladder you descend, with every cryptic conversation with your fellow drones, and with all the worryingly numerous ammo boxes you collect. It’s a wonderfully bleak, oppressive setting, primarily thanks to the camerawork: a mixture of Resident Evil-style close-ups, over-the-shoulder following shots, and super-distant long-shots where you can barely make out the protagonist. Combat is simple, but functional. You don’t have enough ammo for everyone, of course. Exhilaration turns to boredom, and then frustration as you die…

$56 | PC, XB1, PS4 | kingart-games.com Iron Harvest graduates from the Relic school of real-time strategy circa 2006. The basic formula sticks close to that established by Relic in Company of Heroes, but there is one crucial difference: the setting. Iron Harvest takes place in an alternate 1920s conceived by Polish artist Jakub Różalski and also used for the critically acclaimed boardgame Scythe. Its story revolves around three factions that emerged from Iron Harvest’s version of World War I, namely Saxony, Rusvia, and Polania. Iron Harvest focuses on the war’s aftermath, where a truce between Saxony and Rusvia threatens to collapse under the pressure of a cabal of malicious instigators. The main difference, however, is the existence of mechs – towering, diesel-powered combat walkers armed to the teeth with…

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 personal computer the very definition of the PC has changed and shifted markedly since the early 1980s. As such, we touch on many other areas of tech, too, from smartphones and apps to peripherals, accessories, and beyond. We have two goals: to find the best modern tech and to help you make the most of it. We’re also an open church in terms of platforms. We know most people aren’t wed to a single brand’s products and use a variety of devices. And, like you, APC’s journalists want…

Intel has now listed the Core i3-10100F, a processor that wasn’t part of the chipmaker’s initial 10th Generation Comet Lake-S launch, on its ARK website. The chip still isn’t on the company’s master price list, but it’s perfectly positioned to compete against AMD’s Ryzen 3 3300X that has largely been absent from retail channels since its launch five months ago. The Core i3-10100F is poised to be the new budget gaming champion. The 14nm Comet Lake chip arrives with four cores and eight threads clocked at 3.6GHz and a boost clock speed of 4.3GHz. With a 65W TDP (thermal power design), the quad-core part has relatively low cooling requirements, which is good news for budget builders.…

Microsoft has confirmed that the new Radeon RX 6000 Series GPUs from AMD would support the all-new AV1 codec designed by Alliance for Open Media (AOM). This marks the point where all three graphics manufacturers, AMD, Nvidia, and Intel, support the encoder. Naturally, that should accelerate its popularity and support and seemingly indicates that the rival H.266 spec isn’t receiving as much uptake. Regarding the encoder, AV1 is 50% more efficient than H.264 and 20% better than VP9, which means AV1 video sizes are cut in half compared to H.264 encoding, but they still have the same level of quality. This is great news as more people continue to shift away from smaller resolutions like 1080P and upgrade to 4k and even 4k 60FPS, which can be expensive to store…

While last year’s AMD CPUs were better on multi-threaded processing tasks and basically every raw CPU benchmark against Intel’s similarly priced chips, its slower single-core performance meant that Intel still had the edge in most gaming circumstances. This, however, is no longer the case following AMD’s announcement of its Zen 3-based Ryzen CPUs in October. “While the PC is perhaps the most prestigious battleground for performance gaming prowess, it’s worth recognising that AMD will be supplying both Sony and Microsoft with custom processors for their next gen consoles.” A 19 percent bump in Zen 3 instructions per cycle, a doubling of the L3 cache memory access and a max 4.9GHz boost frequency on the top tier Ryzen 9 5950X CPU, combines to provide enough power for this chip to beat…

The Nintendo Game Boy was originally released in 1989. And while it wasn’t the first handheld game console to hit the market, it popularised the category and kickstarted the portable gaming industry. Let’s take a look! Major tech specs • Sharp LR35902 4.19 MHz CPU • LSI Logic LH5264N4T 8KB VRAM • 2.6-inch 160 x 144 LCD display • Sharp IR3R40 amplifier Key findings • Denoted by model number DMG-01 (which stands for Dot Matrix Game), the Game Boy can be powered by either four AA batteries or an AC power adapter, the latter of which has, quite unsurprisingly, disappeared somewhere into the clutter abyss. • Despite the one model number, the Game Boy came in a handful of different models over the years, with subtle differences to the circuitry.…

$2,969 | www.gigabyte.com As if the performance of the RTX 3080 wasn’t enough, may we present to you the flagship of the RTX 30 range, the RTX 3090! Given its GeForce branding you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s a gaming oriented card, and truly it’s the best gaming card on the market, but actually it’s more appropriate to consider the RTX 3090 as this generation’s Titan. The RTX 3090 uses the GA102 GPU, the same as the one the RTX 3080 uses, however it utilises 10496 cores compared to the 8704 of the 3080 and it has a wider memory bus, at 384 bits vs the 320 of the 3080. Clearly it’s a powerful card. Whereas all Titan cards were exclusively produced by Nvidia, this time around partner designs are…

$1,589 | lg.com We know what you’re thinking: $1,600 for a 34-inch ultrawide 1440p monitor? Hold that thought for a moment while we consider what the LG UltraGear 34GN850 does give you. First up there’s 160Hz refresh. That’s enough for the vast majority of semi-pro esports aficionados. It ties in neatly with the claimed 1ms response of the LG’s Nano IPS panel. LG is one of the few monitor makers that actually produces LCD panels. In fact, it’s the world’s leader in IPS production, and thus has the pick of the latest and greatest of its own panels. Long story short, LG reckons its new Nano IPS tech is comparable to TN panels for pixel response, while maintaining all the usual IPS advantages, such as superior colour accuracy and viewing…

$229 | www.samsung.com.au When Samsung announces a new generation of SSD, we definitely sit up and take notice. The company’s drives always make it onto prospective SSD buyers’ shortlists. 960 and 970 series NVMe drives are no slouches today, but the 980 Pro seeks to raise the bar to an all new level. PCIe 4.0 drives have been trickling onto the market ever since the launch of AMD’s Ryzen 3000 series in mid-2019, but we haven’t seen one from the big SSD players. Now that Samsung has released the 980 Pro, PCIe 4.0 drives are set to hit the big time. If you consider things like the recently announced Nvidia RTX I/O and Microsoft’s DirectStorage API, the want and need for fast storage will become more important not just for…

Lots of us are trying to use our time to complete big projects, whether personal or professional. It might be something new for your job, or a home improvement idea, or that novel you just never got around to starting. Whatever your goal, there are great tools for iPhone and iPad that can help develop your ideas, and work through the tasks p-b that will lead to success. These apps walkthroughs grips are just with as techniques help suited you get to creative tasks as they are to professional ring . ones, helping you turn nebulous ideas into concrete steps. Often, the biggest challenge for climbing that new-project mountain is finding the first hand-hold, but try one of these and you’ll soon be striding ahead. MATT BOLTON Evernote Free (IAPs)…

With the major browsers all tending toward one or two rendering engines, and the advent of Web Assembly reducing the importance of any JavaScript engine superiority – though, again, many browsers also reuse the same JavaScript engine – the question does arise as to what differentiates browsers today. We’ve already covered a key difference, and that’s privacy. Simply not being Microsoft or Google should be an attractive feature in itself. There’s a group of browsers out there that utilize the Google Blink engine and the V8 JavaScript engine, but offer a set of unique extra features to lure users in. The original alternate browser is Opera. Still going strong, it switched from its own Presto engine to Blink around 2003, maintaining both options for some time. Opera has retained a…

Yes, we know: This machine is monstrously expensive. So let’s talk about some more affordable alternatives. First up, you can eliminate RGB altogether and cut down to less memory; 32GB is a safe minimum for a system like this, but 64GB kits are also becoming more affordable. Sticking with Corsair, the Vengeance LPX is slightly more basic but a bit cheaper. Alternatively, you could opt for a lower-price brand, like G.Skill. Making the change from AIO cooling to air cooling is always an option, but sTR4-compatible air coolers aren’t common and tend to be fairly expensive. A more realistic money-saver would be to downgrade the SSD, either to a 3rd-generation M.2 drive or a 2.5-inch SATA. Depending on how often you need to move large files around, a SATA SSD…

Overclocking boosts your performance, but what about your street cred? You can boast about your achievements to friends, but when you’re ready to show the world your skills, there’s competitive overclocking. Competitors enjoy a vast community online and at events worldwide. There are also prizes for winning competitions and breaking records. Competitive overclockers’ ultimate destination is HWBot, which hosts global overclocking competitions and maintains a database of world records. Place near the top of one of its ranking boards, and you’ve made it. Sound exciting? For those new to overclocking or interested in competing, we’re here to help. Here are successful professional overclockers’ best tips for getting started. Start with CPUs or RAM, not graphics cards. Premium graphics cards are usually more expensive than CPUs or RAM kits, so you’ll…

Budget Spending wisely. Although we considered properly swapping out the motherboard in our AMD Budget build this issue, Asrock’s Phantom Gaming 4 remains a most affordable full-ATX scale B550 motherboard. Stock availability has seen it come off sale though, so we’ve made a slight swap over to the AC model, adding Wi-Fi to this machine. We’ve got a new chip too; high demand for the Ryzen 5 3600 has seen it jump in price, while its big brother the 3600X is just a few dollars more so we’re not resisting that temptation. We’ve left the GPU as is: MSI’s RX 5600 XT is still the best-value version of the card. The AMD build has been peeking at the Intel build’s notes, and is following suit with the same GeiL Evo…

When it comes to delidding a Skylake-X processor it’s a bit more complicated. For one you’re going to need to use the Delid Die Mate-X. This is designed to ensure you don’t knock off the RFID chip that sits on the outside the IHS of the processor. However, follow the instructions included in the box, and you’ll soon realise that the procedure’s almost identical. To apply the liquid metal, attach the hypodermic needle end to the syringe, then carefully push out a small drop of it onto the silicon itself. You don’t want too much, as a small amount covers a surprisingly large area, and as this is conductive any spillages onto the PCB are bad news. If you push too much out onto the silicon, use the syringe to…

Are you looking to replace your AirPort Time Capsule? If you’ve been relying on it as a network router, then it’s long overdue an upgrade. Choose a router with Ethernet ports, such as the Eero, and convert your Time Capsule into a standalone network drive to retain Time Machine support – the annotation above summarises the steps you need to follow. If you’d like to have a centralised Time Machine backup drive without a Time Capsule, then you have several options: the first is to purchase an external USB hard drive to plug into your Mac, then configure it for use as a shared Time Machine backup location – as the first three steps in the guide opposite indicate. Direct connection The downside of this approach is that the drive…

Whether we’re executing your favourite commands, frequently accessing certain directories, websites, or signing off email messages, we do a lot of repetitive typing during the course of the day. A lot of this effort can be saved by using text expansion tools such as Espanso. Espanso is an Italian word meaning ‘expand’ – and that’s precisely what the tool does. It lets you create a list of keywords or snippets which you can associate with longer words, expressions or even sentences. Any time a configured keyword or snippet is encountered, Espanso automatically replaces it with the text. A versatile tool Released under the GPLv3, this minimalist utility also supports just about all graphical applications such as email clients, browsers and so on. It also has extensive support for the command…

$57 | PC, XB1, Stadia, Linux, Mac | serioussam.com While Serious Sam 4 feels like an old game, it isn’t a retro throwback. It’s just full of jank: battle music that ends the moment the last enemy is killed, cutscenes that start the instant a boss dies, clothing, dirt, and rock textures that pop in and out, and level events that occasionally fail to trigger, or won’t happen until you hunt down that one last enemy who got stuck running into a wall. At least the jank is endearing (mostly), and Serious Sam 4 is fun – like the other Serious Sam games it’s still about murdering overwhelming hordes of aliens with enormous guns while moving backwards at the speed of a figure skater. You’re always on the verge of…

Chased by swords. Free | PC dev-dwarf.itch.io/fewar-dvd When the world of Game of Thrones invents computer games, I reckon FEWAR-DVD will be among its first wave, as it resembles a fever dream about the Iron Throne and its many pointy swords. In each nightmarish stage, your goal is to grab a key, bust a lock, and reach the exit before being done in by the swarm of Excaliburs waggling menacingly in your direction. Most of these swords are essentially walls, but every so often one will get up and fly headlong towards you, making horrible, er, swordy noises as it lunges through the air. It’s a claustrophobic setting: a pulsating black void reminiscent of Devil Daggers, and offering a similarly focused experience. You’re drawn into its procedurally generated blade mazes…

Male chastity toys hacked for permanent cockblock Sex toy security flaw could mean you have to ‘cut it off’. Security researchers from Pen Test Partners found some serious security flaws in the male chastity device known as Cellmate. Qiui Chastity designed the deadlockable Cellmate sex toy to enclose a user’s penis and lock or unlock it using a Bluetooth key stored on a partner’s mobile phone without any mechanical override. This hard lock was triggered by an unprotected API, which meant anyone who knew their way around a network protocol could permanently clamp the ‘toy’ without too much difficulty. Because of a metal ring that attached around the user, the researchers said that you’d likely have to use heavy-duty bolt cutters or an angle grinder to cut it off. GPT-3…