Indice dei contenuti per December 2018 in APC

Hello readers. I’m the new editor and it’s an honour and privilege to be here. Dan has been the editor of APC since June 2013, which, as it happens, was roughly the same time I took over as the editor of PC & Tech  Authority magazine. For each and every month of those years since, we’ve been engaged in a friendly rivalry and it’s been good fun. I would studiously pore over each new issue of APC magazine to see what they were up to, and I respected and admired everything Dan and APC did. It was a very friendly battle, with hardly a month passing when I didn’t bump into one of the APC team at an event and share a laugh about who had the nicest issue that…

GOPRO HERO 7 BLACK Fade to Black. $599.95 | SHOP.GOPRO.COM GoPro’s latest flagship camera might look a lot like its predecessors on paper, but the the new Hero 7 Black seems to have turned its attention from boosting picture quality to addressing customer feedback. Chief among its hotly requested features is a video stabilisation mode, dubbed HyperSmooth, which builds on former video stabilisation to allow you to shoot gimbal-level footage in 4K 60fps. GoPro is not shy about claiming this is “the best in-camera video stabilisation ever” and have naturally used the tech’s kickbacks for bonus features like stabilised time lapse images. It’s even added direct live streaming for all those influencers out there and there’s a number of audio and microphone tweaks that’ll help the new voice…

Google’s Chrome 69 update caused quite a kerfuffle when it rolled out in September, for one fairly innocuous-sounding reason. In theory, the company had intended to streamline the log-in process across its various sites, including Gmail and YouTube. While previously you’d need to sign into each of these entities individually, 69 made it so a single log-in via any of these channels would sign you into the associated Google account on the browser level. This means that once you’ve signed into one account, you’d be signing into Chrome with a Chrome account. According to Google Chrome engineer and manager Adrienne Porter Felt, these changes were made “to prevent surprises in a shared device scenario”. She continued: “In the past, people would sometimes sign out of the content area and think…

SSD $189 (250GB), $269 (500GB), $569 (1TB SEAGATE.COM When you put ‘Fast’ in your product name, you’d better hope it lives up to that promise. Thankfully, there are no worries here – this is one of the zippiest SSDs we’ve ever reviewed. Over USB-C (on a Mac that supports USB 3.1 Gen 2), the drive delivered mean average transfer rates of 447.2MB/sec when reading and 411.7MB/sec when writing. That puts it on par with the fastest single-drive portable SSD we’ve tested – CalDigit’s Tuff – with the bonus of being notably smaller. We also observed maximum read and write speeds of 537.4MB/sec and 502.6MB/ sec, which are in line with Seagate’s claims. If your Mac or PC doesn’t have USB-C, fear not. Transfer rates over USB-A (limited to…

34-INCH QLED DISPLAY $1,599 | WWW.SAMSUNG.COM/AU Pitched as the world’s first ’Thunderbolt 3’ display, this 34-inch quantum-dot LED (QLED) monitor begs one immediate question: what the hell is a Thunderbolt 3 display, and why would you want one? Well, as part of its spec, Thunderbolt 3 includes a DisplayPort 1.2 connection, which lets you utilise basically any video standard you like — be that HDMI, DVI, VGA or DisplayPort itself. Thunderbolt 3 also has plenty of leftover bandwidth in its 40Gbps of total bandwidth to allow for lots of other devices to connect alongside that video stream, so you can get your USB peripherals, storage devices, audio and so on all through the one cable. What this means is that it’s very quick and easy to plug any…

GRAPHICS CARD $1,339 | WWW.GIGABYTE.COM.AU The Gigabyte RTX 2080 Gaming OC aims to strike a good balance of performance and affordability, being one of the cheaper 2080s. It manages to undercut the pricing of the competing MSI and Asus models while still delivering on the most important metric: Performance. Its overclock mode is set to 1830 MHz boost clock, though it can boost to well over 1900MHz. It uses the compact Windforce 3X cooler which does an acceptable job, and is certainly capable enough though it does mean maximum boost clocks are a touch lower and noise levels are higher, though far from unacceptable. The Gigabyte Gaming 8G comes with clock profiles that can be activated via the simple-to-use Aorus Engine. This app controls the RBG functionality of…

GRAPHICS CARD $2,049 | WWW.GIGABYTE.COM.AU Yes, 2080 Tis are insanely expensive, but at least Gigabyte’s 2080 Ti Gaming OC comes in at the lower end of the price spectrum. Like its non Ti sibling, it omits the bells and whistles of the higher end models while offering all the performance that a 2080 Ti can deliver. After all, cranking out FPS is what we want from a 2 grand GPU. The Windforce 3X cooler is able to keep the demanding TU102 GPU cool enough to keep its boost clocks at high levels, without having to resort to high noise levels. We were somewhat surprised at how it performs, as the cooler certainly lacks surface area compared to the bigger cards. Like the 2080, The Gigabyte Gaming 2080 Ti…

Now that we’ve gone over the ranging, let’s take a look at how our sample i7-9700K compares to its predecessors, the i7-8700K and i7-7700K. We ran a few simple benchmarks to compare them. To be honest, we expected the 8700K to maintain a lead in multithreaded benchmarks due to its twelve logical cores vs the eight physical cores of the 9700K. We were surprised to see that the 9700K maintained a healthy lead in every circumstance. Less surprising was the single threaded Cinebench test, where the superior boost clocks of the 9700K saw it take the lead. This strong single threaded performance bodes well for gaming, which will make use of the strong single thread performance on offer. “Pushing our sample to 5.1GHz was exceptionally easy, but once you start…

Asus has been churning out ROG motherboards since 2006 and here we are with the 11th iteration of the venerable Maximus. A visual inspection of the board clearly shows that Asus is targeting water cooling users with the Formula. The VRM is cooled by an EK waterblock while we counted seven fan headers plus additional water cooling specific headers. Of course there’s plenty of RGB onboard as you’d expect, but the most eye-catching feature is the LiveDash OLED panel. It can be used to display various monitoring information or even your own custom image or animation. It’s really cool. The storage features consist of an average set of six SATA ports and a pair of M.2 slots. There’s also a quality metal backplate. This is a really heavy motherboard that’s…

So, you’ve just taken delivery of your brand new gaming laptop. You’ve installed a couple of your favourite games and you can’t wipe the grin off of your face as you load one of them up for the first time. What if your frame rate is not quite what you expected it be though? Fear not. There are a tonne of things you can do to help you reach that FPS level needed for smooth gameplay. We’ll go over a range of topics, aimed at helping you understand some of the basics before taking a look at key applications and settings. The goal is to have your laptop humming along with some sim-ple, easy to use methods and tools. GAMING LAPTOPS ARE DOMINATED BY A KEY CHARACTERISTIC: TEMPERATURES Firstly, it’s…

The internet is full of applications that promise to supplement or enhance your gameplay. Some of them are complete rubbish, while others are essential. We’ve chosen some great applications that are essential for any gaming system. One of the best applications in the business is GPU-Z. It’s a lightweight app that provides basic in-formation about the GPU. It also has a simple and accurate ‘sensors’ tab which provides useful in-formation such as the GPU clock speeds and temperatures of both the CPU and GPU. MSI’s Afterburner is a complete overclocking and monitoring tool that’s suitable for all Nvidia and AMD graphics processors, not just MSI’s. While overclocking a laptop GPU is possible, temperature monitoring is critically important and it should not be attempted by an inexperienced user. When a new…

Let’s finish off with some simple tips that will help you to maximise your gameplay experience. If you’re gaming online, use an Ethernet network connection wherever possible. Wi-Fi is convenient and mostly adequate but using it leads to an increased likelihood of random packet loss and latency spikes. Use a simple FPS monitoring tool such as FRAPS or enable the Steam FPS counter (Steam Menu > Settings > In-Game). If you’re looking to hit 60FPS or even 120FPS with a high spec display, keeping an eye on the frames per second will indicate if you need to tweak your graphical settings to reach your desired figure, hopefully without having to drop the resolution! “Try to keep your environment as clean as possible. Try to keep your pets away too, though…

Annoyingly, Windows 10 ships without DVD-playing software. However, Microsoft offers an app from the Microsoft Store called Windows DVD Player, but it costs $22.45. The best bet if you want to watch DVDs is VLC Media Player, which is free to download, and fully supports Windows 10. VLC Media Player also supports a host of other file formats – even the weird ones – making it a very useful tool. Many of us have moved on from DVDs to the wild world of media streaming. Netflix and Amazon Prime both work on Win 10’s default browser, Edge, but may need an update to Silverlight, an application framework that Microsoft created and maintains. If you’ve upgraded from a Win 7 PC, you could well suffer from this issue, as the older…

Windows Update is designed to keep your copy of Windows up to date through the delivery of special files that “patch” it. The most obvious updates are security hotfixes, which patch vulnerabilities and security holes that could be exploited by malware, as well as bug fixes to resolve specific issues. Windows Update also delivers bigger updates—what once were Service Packs, then point releases (Windows 8.1), have now evolved into feature updates, delivered bi-annually to add new features, and change the way existing features work. The latest feature update is the April 2018 Update (version 1803), set to be superceded by the October 2018 update. There are also “optional” updates, which include other Microsoft tools, such as the .NET Framework, as well as signed hardware drivers, which have been tested and…

WINDOWS STRANGE ENTRIES APPEAR AT STARTUP I’ve noticed a strange phenomenon at startup – command-prompt windows briefly flash up and disappear. I ran AutoRuns and have discovered a long list of entries marked ‘Uninstall 17.x.x.x’ listed as ‘Windows Command Processor’. What are these, and is it safe to delete them? Jackie Kent They’re all linked to OneDrive. They’re small scripts designed to clean up old versions of OneDrive after it’s updated. They’re supposed to delete a redundant folder, then remove themselves from startup, but often they get left behind and the entries start to mount up. This is a bug with OneDrive itself, but despite several references online, there’s no definitive way to stop it happening. Thankfully, you can at least clean them out periodically using AutoRuns or a similar…

If sharing is caring, then iOS cares a lot. It has lots of ways to share your stuff with other people and your other devices. It all starts with the Share sheet, which pops up whenever you tap the Share icon, or the word Share on some devices. The sheet is context-sensitive, which means the available options change depending on what app you’re using, and it’s full of useful tools. For example, in Safari it doesn’t just enable you to share web pages, but also allows you to save a page as a PDF, or request the desktop version of a mobile site. As you’ll discover, you can share by email, messaging apps, wirelessly to another Apple device, and further afield using cloud storage services such as Dropbox. In this…

Any file storage system, whether it’s a CD-ROM, a hard drive or a USB stick, is essentially a device for storing a long chain of 1s and 0s. When we interact with it, however, we don’t see this; instead, we see files, directories, symbolic links and so on. The software that makes the translation for us is called a file system. There’s one step in between, though, and it’s often overlooked. A particular file system need not take up the whole of the disk it lives on. Instead, the disk may be split up into individual sections, called partitions, each of which can have its own file system — or none at all. The disk keeps track of its partitions through its partition table, which tells it how many partitions…

PS4, XBOX ONE, PC | $90 | WWW.KONAMI.COM Continuing a trend that has defined the series in recent years, PES 2019 brings joy on the field while wholly disappointing off of it. It’s the Diego Maradona of football games if we’re being generous. The Jamie Vardy if we’re not. There’s a beautiful fluidity in the movement and actions of the players, a feeling that nothing is being corrupted or guided by underlying algorithms that are robbing you of your freedom to fully express yourself. Passing is crisp and playful, the ball going where your kick determines as opposed to being magically, magnetically pulled in by your intended recipient. Shooting is rewarding thanks to its diversity, while dribbling requires a careful touch to prevent the ball slipping from your…

“It was the sum total of all of these mechanics combining to create a wholly new gaming experience that shows the true innovative spirit of the game” DEVELOPER: KONAMI COMPUTER ENTERTAINMENT TOKYO PUBLISHER: KONAMI RELEASED: 20 MARCH 1997 SYSTEM: PSONE, SEGA SATURN Hindsight being what it is, we can look back now at the launch of Castlevania: Symphony Of The Night and see beyond its initial poor sales figures and the fact that neither Konami or Sony seemed interested in supporting its PlayStation release with much advertising, and see how important and timely its arrival was for the future of gaming. While the industry at large (and most gamers with it) was intoxicated by the allure of 3D graphics and the new technical feats that could be achieved, the KCET…

$139million ESTIMATED COST OF DISNEY’S NEW LIVE-ACTION STAR WARS TV SERIES – or $13.9 million per episode for each of the ten episodes in the first season. The aim is to create a series that will have the same high production values as Disney’s Star Wars cinema releases, making it one of the most expensive TV productions ever created. 32 terabytes MAXIMUM STORAGE CAPACITY OF INTEL’S FORTHCOMING DC P4500 SOLID-STATE DRIVE (SSD). Destined for datacentres, the ruler-shaped drive boasts an ultra-thin form factor and needs half the airflow of a regular SSD. It also uses one-tenth of the power. $27 BILLION AMOUNT OF MONEY SAMSUNG’S PLANNING TO INVEST IN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI), 5G MOBILE AND CAR TECH OVER THE NEXT THREE YEARS.  The Korean tech giant is also recruiting over…

Samsung is at it again with the Galaxy Note9, right on schedule. Amid a brutal anti-Apple ad campaign, it’s hoping a cool new S Pen is enough to carry the day. Could there be more waiting for us under the hood? We’ll tear down to find out! MAJOR TECH SPECS ■ Notchless edge-to-edge 6.4-inch Super AMOLED display with 2960×1440 resolution (516 ppi) ■ Octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 845, with 6GB/8GB RAM ■ 4,000mAh battery ■ 12MP OIS dual rear camera, with dual-aperture f/1.5–f/2.4 wide-angle and f/2.4 telephoto modules, plus 8MP selfie cam ■ 128GB/512GB storage, extra 512GB available via microSD ■ S Pen stylus with Bluetooth connectivity ■ IP68 dust and water resistance rating KEY FINDINGS ■ The Note9 looks very similar to the Note8—and in principle, we’re fine with that.…

ROUTER $399 | AU.NORTON.COM Norton has intruded into the wireless router space like one of the cyber-nasties that it’s traditionally known for keeping away. But its presence is a breath of fresh air: not just because it has thumbed its nose at the history of router dogma by forcing all configurations to go through a mobile app instead of fiddly browser settings, but because it looks so dang good. The geodesic dome looks more like something you’d want to show off than hide and, for some, this alone will be reason to buy it. Setting it up resembles the process we’ve come to expect with wireless mesh networks in that the mobile app sets the password, automatically updates the firmware and then everything just works straight away. Norton…

“It’s a 15.6-inch external display, with a FullHD 1080p pixel grid that connects via a single USB-C interface to supply both power and video. ” HIGH RESOLUTION DISPLAY $249 | WWW.AOC.COM Portability and plenty of screen real estate don’t normally see eye to eye. However, a recent development is enabling those two ancient foes to become a little more pally. We speak, of course, of USB-C, in all its single-port, multi-function glory. It’s an enabler thanks to three key properties. First is loads of bandwidth, which is essential for driving high-resolution displays. Second is support for DisplayPort alternate mode, and thus the ability to function as a video port without the need for special drivers. Third is the ability to supply much higher power output. USB-C maxes out…

SSD USD$249.99 (60GB), USD$69.99 (240GB), USD$129.99USD 480GB | WWW.CORSAIR.COM Corsair’s Force series SSD line has a strong lineage tracing back to 2010. Having gone through multiple controllers, NAND types, and recently evolving from strictly SATA to the PCIe interface with multiple form factors, Corsair’s decisions and products have been on the leading-edge year after year, getting better every step of the way. Today, that history is what drives the company’s latest SSD, the Force MP510. With a blacked-out PCB, Phison’s E12 controller, and Toshiba’s BiCS3 TLC NAND flash, the MP510 looks good--and brings the performance to match. The drive is flat-out fast, rated up to 3,480/3,000MB/s of read/ write throughput. And to top things off, it comes with a longer warranty, greater endurance, and cheaper pricing than its…

The PC world watched as Nvidia took the covers off of its highly anticipated new generation of cards in September. It talked up some of the impressive technologies on offer, and while ray tracing and DLSS look great, we are yet to see what they can really do in the real world. For now, we have the usual assessment criteria. How do they perform in today’s games? Are they leaf blowers? What’s the pricing like? Are RTX cards a big jump over their predecessors? We were very impressed with the Founders Edition cards this time around. They made a big jump in PCB quality and cooling performance. This means the aftermarket cards aren’t the no brainer they once were. “A wise man once said, there are no bad graphics cards,…

GRAPHICS CARD $1,499 | WWW.AU.MSI.COM The MSI RTX 2080 Gaming X Trio really impresses with its RGB adorned cooler and build quality along with its competitive pricing. It comes with a 1515MHz base clock and 1860MHz boost clock. The MSI 2080 Gaming X Trio is built like a tank with a solid back plate and monstrous triple fan cooler that’s easily capable of taming the TU104 GPU. Large sections of the shroud have RGB lighting, making this one a really good choice to show off in a windowed case. The MSI features the standard set of video ports which consist of three DP 1.4 ports, a HDMI 2.0b port and the Type-C port. It’s powered by six and eight pin power connectors. The MSI comes with several utilities…

GRAPHICS CARD $2,099 | WWW.AU.MSI.COM The MSI RTX 2080 Ti Gaming X Trio is almost identical to the highly recommended 2080 version. Of course the Ti packs in the more powerful TU102 GPU. It comes with a 1515MHz base clock and 1860MHz boost clock. The MSI 2080 Ti Gaming X Trio uses the same cooler as the 2080 version, and it’s every bit as effective at cooling the hotter Ti GPU. MSI seems to have tuned it for acoustic performance above all as it stayed quiet under every circumstance. It looks terrific with its RGB adornments. Do note that it’s a very tall card, so it will not fit in slim cases as the NV-Link shroud pokes a good four cm above the backplate. The MSI 2080 Ti…

“Predictably, the 9900K sets a new standard for mainstream chips when it comes to multithreaded performance, too.” CPU $859 | WWW.INTEL.COM Cast your mind back to late 2006. That’s when Intel introduced its first desktop quad-core CPU. Fast-forward nearly 11 years later to summer 2017, and what had changed? In terms of core counts, not much. Intel’s mainstream desktop socket was still limited to just four cores. OK, you could buy so-called desktop chips with more than four cores, but they were part of what was and remains today a series of rebadged server platforms, complete with costly multi-channel memory controllers and other features that up the price but do little to enhance the desktop computing experience. Yet here we are in late 2018, reviewing a mainstream eight-core…

“It packs in a twelve phase PWM powered by dual eight pin connectors, which when combined with the cooling assembly, meansthere’splenty of grunt on hand even if you’re into extreme overclocking.” Gigabyte has rejigged its branding. It’s a little difficult to know if a ‘Master’ is higher than an ‘Ultra’ in the product stack, for example. We have the Z390 Aorus Master on hand for review. Take one look at it though, and you know this is high end. It just oozes quality craftsmanship. While many high-end boards these days focus on aesthetics ahead of function, Gigabyte has managed to do both. The heatsink is a work of art. It makes use of a traditional finned structure for maximum surface area, while retaining an eye-catching metal design with RGB elements;…

One of the best things you can do for your laptop is upgrade to an SSD. Most modern gaming lap-tops come with some type of SSD, but older or cheaper models may not. Even an older system will gain an incredible and tangible speedup. You’ll see massive improvements in overall system responsiveness and game startup times but you’ll also largely overcome those annoying level loading screens and area transitions. After all, who wants to spend time looking at a spinning loading icon? RAM is another upgrade option. You’ll want to have 8GB as a minimum these days. Moving to 16GB will help with particularly demanding modern games, but it will also help if you frequently alt-tab out of games and into other applications. Upgrading the graphics card is impossible on…

If you’ve just taken delivery of your new gaming laptop, the chances are there is a lot of useless pre-Installed software, that is, well, crap. It’s also likely that your system has a bunch of miscellaneous programs running in the background. Pre-installed bloatware, or programs that got installed along with some other software take up valuable system resources and uninstalling these, or at least disabling them at startup will free up RAM and CPU cycles, leaving more resources for your game. Firstly, head to the Control Panel, then apps and features. If there are apps there you know you will never use, then simply uninstall them. You might be surprised about just how much space you’ll free up, particularly if you’re using a space limited SSD. Note that you should…

2018 has been another big year for laptop development with chip manufacturers funnelling even more resources into making compact devices for ultra modern consumers. Nvidia announced its Max-Q laptop GPU range back in 2017, but the slightly curbed output performance has meant that they were slower to be adopted than many GPU updates in the past. That said, they’re now in full swing with early 2018 builds shifting the majority of available gaming laptop GPUs to Max-Q. This trend means that laptops require fewer heat pipes and less intensive fan structures, which has the overall effect of slimming everything down considerably. Max-Q comes at a 10% or so peak performance cost to configurations that maintain the same tier GPU, but the reduced power and space requirements means that, in many…

One may be brighter than the other, or have more yellow in its output, and while these discrepancies may be forgivable in a simple office machine, if you have a twin-screen setup, you’ll want the displays to output the same brightness and color temperature. This is especially true if you’ve mixed and matched your monitors, because the Asus 4K model on the right you got for gaming may not match the BenQ 1080p screen on the left you use for Google Docs and email. The color output of your screen becomes an issue if you’re printing, too. While no amount of ink on paper, which is dependant on the light it reflects, can reproduce the color intensity of an image backlit by thousands of tiny glowing cells, a calibrated screen…

The iWork apps for iOS can share documents for easy collaboration. After you create a document in Pages, Numbers or Keynote, tap the ellipsis and choose ‘Collaborate With Others’ to share a link with people — they’ll need an Apple ID. The link takes them to the doc in iCloud.com, where they can edit or comment on it. Any changes they make are applied to your original copy, which means that everybody has the most up-to-date version. You can also specify who can do what to your file, and whether or not it’s shared publicly.…

“It’s a spectacle of how beautifully your machine can push pixels around, shaming every other open world racer with its graphical prowess. ” PC, XBOX ONE X | $99.99 | WWW.FORZAMOTORSPORT.NET Ladies and gentlemen, we have only good news, if not the best of news: Forza Horizon 4 may be the most perfect driving and racing games going. It is the gamer’s game, boasting lush graphics and encapsulates the social nature of games. Forza Horizon 4 is polished and generous in spirit, adding in new features and reworking familiar ones from every previous Horizon. It’s a spectacle of how beautifully your machine can push pixels around, shaming every other open world racer with its graphical prowess while showing off the depth and breadth of its systems. This is…

Alucard The half-human, half-vampire son of Dracula takes the lead here, but first appeared in Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse, challenging and then assisting Trevor Belmont in his quest to take down Dracula. His subsequent guilt over killing his own father leads him to go into a sort of hibernation until the events of SOTN. Richter Belmont The hero of Castlevania: Rondo Of Blood returns at the start of Symphony Of The Night to retell the conclusion of his previous adventure, only to disappear shortly afterwards and then return claiming to be the new lord of Dracula’s castle. He is, in fact, under an enchantment by Dracula’s dark priest servant Shaft. Dracula The classic villain of the Castlevania series is once again resurrected, only to be put down, but this time…

Brightly coloured tech will make you happier Look at your tech through rose coloured glasses. Choosing a colourful piece of tech has its risks. According to a new study many of us hold back on picking fruity flavours due to the fear that we’ll regret the decision later. The study, published in the Journal of Consumer Research, suggests that consumer satisfaction is actually much higher and longer lasting for your first choice of colour. Scientists found that responders overestimated their irritation levels over time of vibrantly coloured devices and underestimated the amount of satisfaction they brought over time. So, in short, if you want colorful tech, don’t whatever you do. Coding error sends hundreds of new cars to be crushed SUBAROOTED! A costly software error on the production line for…

Apple’s teen hacker escapes jail time EIGHT-MONTH PROBATION REPLACES CONVICTION. The Melbourne youngster who broke into Apple’s so-called secure mainframe has been granted an eight-month probation, with the judge ruling that no conviction will be recorded. The teenager was 16 when he hacked into Apple’s network, but the now 19-year-old will not serve any time in jail. Instead, he has been accepted into university, where he will study criminology and cyber safety. SS Google+ is being scuttled following disastrous data breach STRUGGLING SOCIAL NETWORK GETS A MINUS FOR SECURITY. Google has announced it’s kicking its floundering social media platform Google+ to the curb after a Wall Street Journal report revealed that the tech giant had been hiding the news of a massive security breach on the platform. The breach, caused…

Everyone loves to take a picture, and equipped with one of the latest smartphones, everyone indulges, even if it’s just selfies. The photography industry is booming, changing just as fast as any other tech, with innovations in both software and hardware taking photographers – amateurs and pros alike – on an exciting journey through a changing landscape. Smartphones seem to be gaining more lenses with each passing year, mirrorless cameras are giving DSLRs are run for their money, and action and aerial photography are becoming more and more mainstream. Then there’s the tech powering the cameras – the use of machine learning is adding additional dimensions to this artform, giving photographers the means to be creative without too much effort. And, with the final product on hand, you’ll need to…

“Future Publishing is focussed on www.techradar.com for online PC and tech content, as well as pcgamer.com for gaming and tomshardware.com and anandtech.com for deep PC coverage” WHEN TWO BECOME ONE I have just received my monthly magazine and discovered it has changed to APC, although the magazine seems to be good the APC website is very sparse compared to the PC & Tech Authority website. Will the PC & Tech Authority website be incorporated into the APC website as it provides a lot of great information for readers to use. Also, many years ago before I subscribed to PC & Tech Authority I looked at APC and decided that PC & Tech Authority suited my needs, I hope that aspects of PC & Tech Authority are incorporated into the APC…

CAMERA $320 | INSTA360.COM This camera is a small lozenge with 4K, 180° cameras on each side, combining to create 360° footage. The device feels solidly made, and operating it standalone is relatively straightforward – one press of the single button to turn it on, another press to take a photo, a double-press to begin video recording, and three presses to start 120fps ‘bullet time’ recording. Connecting it to an iOS device reveals the Insta360 One’s true power, though. The integrated Lightning connector is tidy, and the app works well, bar a few translational mistakes. From the app, you can start and stop 360° recording and set shutter speeds and ISO. In relatively dim light, footage is impressively crisp and clear. In good light our videos were outstanding.…

“BenQ’s new gaming monitor combines all of the above, and more. In fact, it throws USB-C into the mix, along with a 32-inch diagonal LCD panel, and a gaming-friendly quad-HD 2560x1440 native resolution. ” MONITOR $799 | WWW.BENQ.COM Struggling to keep up with the latest must-have features for gaming monitors, such as 144Hz refresh rates, adaptive sync, curved panels, and low input lag modes? Then prepare to be even more baffled. HDR, or High Dynamic Range, visuals have arrived, and represent perhaps the most complex and confusing technology to yet hit the monitor market. BenQ’s new gaming monitor combines all of the above, and more. In fact, it throws USB-C into the mix, along with a 32-inch diagonal LCD panel, and a gaming-friendly quad-HD 2560x1440 native resolution. On…

GRAPHICS CARD $1,699 | WWW.ASUS.COM.AU The Asus 2080 Strix Gaming is the most feature-packed 2080 in our test. It’s no surprise it comes with by far the highest price, too. It has the joint highest overclock of the bunch with a 1515MHz base clock and 1860MHz boost clock. In OC mode, the boost clock is increased to 1890MHz. The Strix cooler is monstrous. It has excellent build quality and rigidity, though users with space considerations need to take note of its triple slot form factor. It delivered the coolest temperatures of the roundup and was second only to the MSI in fan noise, though the difference is minor. The Asus comes with a unique pair of fan headers suitable for controlling adjacent system fans. It’s the only card…

GRAPHICS CARD $2,249 | WWW.ASUS.COM.AU The Asus ROG Strix 2080 Ti shares many of the characteristics and features of its cheaper 2080 sibling, though of course it comes equipped with the more powerful Turing TU102 GPU. It comes with a 1350MHz base clock and 1650MHz boost clock. In OC mode, the boost clock gets a minor bump to 1665MHz. The Strix cooler is the same as the one employed by the 2080 version and it’s easily capable of handling the increased demands of the Ti GPU. Again it delivered the coolest temperatures among the 2080 Ti cards. The Strix 2080 Ti design is otherwise identical to its non Ti sibling with its unique set of twin HDMI 2.0b ports along with the pair of DP 1.4 ports and…

With Intel’s 9th-gen desktop CPUs we see the i9 come to the fore, replacing the i7 as the hero product and joining the mainstream consumer line, where once it was a ‘prosumer’ CPU. It is still a premium CPU, but by the looks of Intel’s marketing and product positioning the i9 is the new i7 in terms of it being the likely choice for gamers and home power users. There are three new lines in the 9th-gen range: the regular mainstream Core series (i5, i7, and i9), the prosumer X-Series, plus a new Xeon. Gaming continues to be the central focus of the regular Core line. The X-series are for prosumers, with Intel banging the content creation drum for this potential set of customers. Separating the two families on a…

Z390 Labs-tested With a new CPU generation comes a new chipset.Chris Szewczyk. ASRock’s Z390 Taichi stands alone as the only ‘normal’ motherboard in our roundup. The Taichi brand successfully targets non-gaming users who aren’t interested in gaming bells and whistles. The Z390 Taichi closely follows the design cues of its predecessors. The chipset heatsink has a particularly nice look. It has some of splashes of RGB lighting around the chipset heatsink, I/O cover and audio section. The VRM heatsinks for most Z390 boards have really been beefed up and there’s a heatpipe connecting the two large, screw-down heatsinks. To cope with the increased demands of eight-core 9th generation processors, ASRock incorporated a twelve-phase power delivery system powered by eight plus four pin power connectors. It’s the only board in the…

“One of the first things to catch your eye is the dial at the bottom right of the board.This is an automatic overclocking dial that can actually go to 11!” MSI is also changing its branding by simplifying its gaming motherboard naming scheme. The high end is now known as the MEG series (MSI Enthusiast Gaming), then there’s MAG (MSI Arsenal Gaming) and finally MPG (MSI Performance Gaming). We have the MEG Z390 Ace on hand. There’s no doubt this is a high end board and it really does look terrific. At this price, you’d expect some serious hardware. The PWM is a quality 12+1 phase system cooled by chunky metal PWM heatsinks linked by heatpipes. There’s also dual eight pin power connectors so there’s no doubt the board is…

The release of Intel’s 9th Generation Core processors raises the bar by offering up to eight cores and sixteen threads of processing horsepower. Power users, content creators, multitaskers and gamers have an amazing array of new processors to choose from, and to extract the most from them, Asus is ready with a new family of Z390 motherboards. Whether you’re a hardcore overclocker looking to tweak your way to records, a gamer striving to dominate the battlefield, a professional needing rock solid reliability, or some combination of the above, Asus has a motherboard to suit you. GET THE MOST FROM YOUR 9TH GENERATION SYSTEM Asus makes overclocking easier and more seamless than ever thanks to AI Overclocking. When paired with a K-series 9th generation processor, AI overclocking uses an algorithm to…

“Nvidia’s GeForce Experience features a good performance optimization tool” Most games attempt to automatically set your graphics settings. This may take the form of a ‘auto-detect’ or it may set the quality to the likes of ‘low’, ‘high’ or ‘ultra’ etc. A hardcore gamer will prob-ably end up tweaking the individual settings manually, but for the less experienced user, there are plenty of ways to optimize a specific game to run as well as it can on your system. Many users will consider Nvidia’s Geforce experience and AMD’s Gaming Evolved apps to be unnecessary bloatware, but they do have pretty decent game optimisation tools. These apps will show the officially supported games, however, you can manually add them as well. After pressing Optimize in the Nvidia or AMD tools, you’ll…

When it comes to tech, a little knowledge goes a long way. Windows 10, especially as it becomes more mature, is growing in stability, and it’s a long way ahead of its predecessors, but – and it’s a big but – it is still beset by little niggles and gripes that can make it difficult to use. However, you’re the master of your own domain, and you can be the master of your own PC. Those problems can be banished by a little knowledge, either of the right thing to do or the right place to look. So, we’re bringing you a collection of the most common Windows 10 problems and the best ways to solve them. We’ve broken them up into categories to help you find your way around,…

Losing files after disaster hits because you didn’t back them up is hugely frustrating, but it can be easily avoided. To create a backup, buy an external storage drive (larger in size than the data you want to store on it). You can copy your files across to this disk manually, or you can set up File History in Windows. To do the latter, ensure the drive is connected to your PC, left-click the “Start” menu, then click “Settings.” Click “Update & Security,” and navigate to “Backup.” See the “Add a Drive” button next to the “+” sign? Click this. Windows scans for available drives, and you should select the one you want to use from the list it brings up. The OS now gets to work; an “On” toggle…

Updating Windows is an incredibly important part of your day-to-day maintenance, but many people put off the updating experience – if they can. This isn’t laziness – Microsoft has quite the reputation for releasing patches before they are ready for general consumption, and there are horror stories of Windows installations falling over. Despite this, in most circumstances it pays to ensure you’re at least up to date with the latest security hotfixes, so opting out of updates altogether – even where possible – isn’t practical. Let’s see what you can do about ensuring the Windows Update process works with you and not against you. TAKE BACK CONTROL When Microsoft released Windows 10, it took control away from the end user running Windows 10 Home, and now forces updates to be…

Ideally, Windows Update should be virtually invisible – other than alerting you when updates are ready to be installed, and while they’re being configured on startup. In the real world, we all know better, of course. Some Windows updates might require two or three attempts before finally installing, while others may stubbornly refuse to install, period. Windows Update might even stop functioning completely, or your PC may suddenly refuse to reboot after you’ve installed the latest updates. So, what’s the solution? GENERAL TROUBLESHOOTING If Windows Update refuses to work correctly – it throws up errors when you attempt to install or scan for updates, for example, or you’re struggling to install a specific update – start by running the Windows Update troubleshooter. In Win 10, go to “Settings > Update…

Intel’s 14nm production lines have reached maximum capacity. In fact, they’re over capacity. So delayed is Intel’s 10nm node, that it’s had to push product schedules back, move focus to higher profit margin parts and to even push some chips back up onto the old 22nm process to clear manufacturing throughput. The way Intel typically operates is that CPUs get moved onto the new manufacturing node when it comes online, then less profitable chips (such as NICs and motherboard chipsets) get moved down to the now well-established outgoing node. This keeps those parts just one generation behind and costing less to produce than the more expensive CPUs that helped refine the manufacturing process. So confident was Intel that the 10nm issues would be solved by now that it moved the…

Mac users fall into two groups. There are those who set up their desktop and workspace exactly the way they want it to make them as productive as possible. The rest of us leave almost everything as it is and promise ourselves that one day we’ll get round to setting it up properly. This tutorial is aimed squarely at the second group, which we’d wager easily makes up the bulk of Mac users. The good news is that there are lots of ways you can configure your Mac so it’s easier to navigate, simpler to access the files, folders and tools you need, and make you much more productive. We’ve described tips here that can be carried out without any additional software or knowledge. However, if you want to go…

Caring about your online privacy and actually following best practices to protect it are two different things. As APCreaders, it’s likely that you know the principles of what we should do to avoid the great data collectors and geo-locators in the sky, but maintaining constant vigilance is an effort that soon gets tiresome, if not downright impossible. For example, you know that you should be using a VPN to avoid ISPlevel filters imposed by various pieces of the law. Setting up and using a log-free VPN service from your PC’s desktop is straightforward enough, but what about all the other devices in your home? For example, if you use a games console to watch Stan, Netflix or YouTube on your TV, how do you route traffic from there effectively? No…

Machine-learning is fast becoming the buzzphrase of the age. Few areas of endeavour have escaped its charms over recent years. It’s the subset of artificial intelligence that mixes computer science, statistics and mathematics, promising to make sense of the mountains of data we generate every day. All the major software players have cloud-based machine-learning services on offer. But while it can all seem quite daunting, the top two machine-learning tools continue to be programming languages Python and R. We introduced you to R last month via Kaggle’s Titanic competition. This month, we begin looking at how to code your own R scripts from scratch. SETTING UP R ON YOUR PC If you missed last month’s issue, we’re using a combination of the R programming language and the RStudio integrated development…

PC | USD$34.99 | WWW.TWOPOINTHOSPITAL.COM Make no bones about it, this is Theme Hospital 2.0. It pays such close homage to its inspiration that we should by all rights be criticising it. From the grid-based room construction to the quirky machines to cure equally quirky ailments, Two Point Hospital does nothing that Theme Hospital didn’t already. The core elements remain the same, starting out with a reception desk and assistant alongside a GP’s office before adding to and expanding the hospital with various contraptions, treatments and the janitors to maintain them all. The meta has been brought to the forefront, with close attention needed for items that bolster some function or value by a matter of slight percentages. The staff system is a great example of this, where…

PC, PS4, XO, SWITCH | USD$25 | WWW.GHOSTTOWNGAMES.COM Like the original, Overcooked 2 is a cheerful, nonviolent co-op game that’s simple enough for the whole family to enjoy. It also happens to be one of the most stressful games you’ll ever play. As before, your goal—whether you’re playing alone, or with up to three other chefs—is to successfully serve as many dishes as you can within four minutes: chopping, mixing, frying and steaming ingredients according to the recipe. There’s a wider variety of orders this time, including sushi and nuggets and fries but the processes themselves are still very simple. Multitasking so you can fulfil as many orders as possible in good time is where it gets tricky. On top of that you’ve got stage hazards that force…