Indice dei contenuti per July 2022 in APC

It’s finally time – albeit with some caution in reserve – to declare the GPU crisis over. The team and I have been checking graphics card prices daily for many months, and at last it seems that sanity has returned to the market. You can now buy, as an example, an RTX 3080 in the $1,200-range, while just a few months ago they were $2,200 or more. We hope this is the end of those bad old days, though to be realistic, while the crypto demand for GPUs has all but vanished, the supply and logistics issues that also contributed to insane pricing are still very much present. So perhaps now is the time to buy. Prices are good and there’s stock for most items just waiting to be added…

Microsoft announced that third party widgets will be enabled in Windows 11 beginning “later this year.” Widgets are a handy way to present bite-sized bits of information without hogging screen real estate. They’re easy to summon and dismiss, letting you quickly check some news or other real-time information and get back to your main task(s). At present, Microsoft is the sole provider and publisher of Windows 11 widgets. This obviously limits the scope of the offerings, but there are still some useful widgets designed to show snippets of news, to do lists, weather, traffic, your Outlook calendar, and stock prices. However, most if not all of the existing widgets won’t work if you use a local account to sign into Windows 11, rather than a Microsoft account.…

With a new Top Gun: Maverick expansion released in late May, we’re now invited to perform ridiculous, high-skill manoeuvres in a specially decked-out F/A-18E Super Hornet, thus eliminating every trace of “chill” this game normally offers. The free update is a promotion of sorts, but there’s no Tom Cruise skin. Instead, it adds a bunch of missions and challenges. The three new training missions teach players how to pull off “radical flight manoeuvres”. There’s a carrier deck landing challenge, and most excitingly, “a never-before-unveiled hypersonic aircraft that can attain speeds of Mach 10 and altitudes greater than 150,000 feet above sea level.” Elsewhere, there’s a mission to reach the stratosphere, as well as five “high-speed, low-level” challenges. Heck!…

Something that feels distinctly 21st century is the way all mass market entertainment feels like it belongs to the same world. As a child of the 1990s, the prospect of say, Star Wars, DC Comics, and the Wu-Tang Clan all inhabiting the same cultural universe would have seemed ridiculous, and also, I guess, pretty damn cool. But here we are in 2022, and the shrinking of the boundaries between many and all imaginary worlds is starting to have a disillusioning effect. If you vigilantly avoid the world of videogames it may come as a surprise that Star Wars, DC Comics and the Wu-Tang Clan have, in fact, shared the same universe, and that universe is Fortnite. Epic Games’ unfathomably popular free-to-play battle royale ostensibly has its own lore, but aside…

“It’s possible that Amazon might pull the plug on the entire Alexa infrastructure.” The news that Insteon, purveyors of IoT smart home products, has suddenly shut down will come as an unpleasant surprise to its erstwhile customers. The servers are gone, as are the website’s support pages. There is some hope that it will be possible to resuscitate the service to a minimal level, if only to allow existing customers to migrate data to a different service, but that remains a hope at this stage. I’m not surprised that there has been a casualty like this. Any product that relies on an intimate relationship with a cloud service for it to function is at risk of that service failing or disappearing altogether. We might wonder how this situation has come…

1 LOGITECH G560 These Logitech speakers look great and sound fantastic, thanks to serious volume levels and a bulky subwoofer that creates an immersive soundstage. The RGB lighting is based on Logitech’s Lightsync system and it also works with your phone over Bluetooth. $300, www.logitechg.com 2 CREATIVE PEBBLE PLUS If you primarily use headphones but want a speaker option, the Creative is a fantastic choice. It’s a full 2.1 system with a separate subwoofer to drive the bass. The two pebble speakers are small, but sound crisp and go relatively loud. They’re powered by USB, saving plug sockets at your desk. $70, www.creative.com 3 RAZER NOMMO CHROMA This stylish offering is a 2.0 speaker system with no subwoofer, making it the best option for those short on…

"Since this device is intended to be a thin and light 17-inch Ultrabook it doesn’t have the cooling apparatus to run a GPU that powerful." $5,499 | au.msi.com SW11 Pro; Intel Core i7-12700H CPU; Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Ti GPU (95W); 32GB RAM; 2TB SSD; 88Wh battery (5h 8min 1080p movie playback); 38.2 x 26 x 2.6cm; 2.49kg. We love it when tech manufacturers attempt to break new ground and try something outside of the products that usually make them money, but we feel like MSI’s attempt to capitalise on the creative laptop market should probably be nearing an end. The 2021 Creator Z16 that we tested in APC 501 was a substandard imitation of a two year old MacBook Pro 16 and while the new Creator Z17 doesn’t suffer…

$719 | www.msi.com MSI Radeon RX 6650 XT Gaming X. 2048 Shader Cores; 2,523MHz Game Clock, 2,694MHz Boost Clock; 8GB 17.5Gbps GDDR6 memory, 280GB/s Memory Bandwidth; 3x DisplayPort 1.4a, 1x HDMI 2.1; 1x 8-pin Power Connector, 175W TDP. It wasn’t too long ago that $700 would get you a high end graphics card. While we’d all like to have a 3090 Ti or 6950 XT in our rigs, they are priced at levels most gamers won’t even consider buying. Even though the prices of graphics cards have dramatically fallen, building a high-performance gaming PC is still very expensive. At $719 for the MSI RX 6650 XT Gaming X we have for review, it’s still an expensive card, particularly when you compare it to a console. Is it worth the money?…

$399 | www.tp-link.com.au Wi-Fi: 802.11ax5400 WiFi 6; LAN: 4x Gigabit WAN/LAN; Modem: ADSL2+/VDSL2; VoIP: 2x FXS ports; Management: Deco App; Warranty: 3 years; Dimensions: 130 x 123 x 210.5mm. Aimed at higher end home users, the TP-Link Deco X73-DSL router supports the latest Wi-Fi 6 spec, has a VDSL modem, and sports two FXS VoIP ports. Importantly, the X73-DSL is fully backwards compatible with other TP-Link Deco products, so can easily be added into an existing mesh network. The X73-DSL sports AX5400 spec Wi-Fi, which gives up to a huge 4,804Mbps of bandwidth on the 5GHz band, and 574 Mbps on 2.4 GHz. The VDSL modem supports 35b supervectoring, for speeds up to 350Mbps, but can also handle ADSL2+ and WAN connections. You also get four Gigabit WAN/LAN ports, and…

$TBA | www.gskill.com One of the weaknesses of DDR5 memory is its relatively high latency compared to DDR4. In most cases, a good set of either type will serve you well, but lower latency can give you an extra little boost, particularly in games that are latency sensitive. With that in mind, G.Skill has released what we believe to be the first sub CL30 DDR5 kit. At DDR5-5600 28-34-34-89, it’s a high-quality kit designed for users specifically hunting for low latency. The G.Skill Trident Z RGB DDR5-5600 CL28 memory kit comes with SK Hynix IC’s which are common to the highest performing DDR5 memory kits. The G.Skill kit looks fantastic. It’s sleek design and RGB implementation features a slightly subtler diffused light that won’t burn out your retinas. Looks aside,…

MacOS 10.15.7 or later | US$129 | dxo.com DxO PureRAW 2 uses DeepPRIME machine learning to counteract a range of artefacts that can spoil a Raw format photo. It will reduce noise, correct optical lens distortion and colour fringing, counteract vignetted edges and sharpen details. It does this more effectively than the native tools in apps such as Adobe Lightroom Classic. And once PureRAW 2 has preprocessed a shot, you can use Lightroom Classic or Photoshop’s Camera Raw tools to process other picture properties such as colour, composition and tone. The app enables you to revisit old Raw files in apps such as Lightroom Classic. For example, some of your old Raw shots may have been rejected by a stock photography site’s inspectors for suffering from too much ISO noise.…

Nailing down the exact launch date of the very first colour LCD monitor for the PC isn’t easy. But one of the earliest was certainly the NANAO F-1020 from Eizo. Launched way back in 1993, the F-1020 spanned a mighty 10.4 inches and rocked no fewer than 640x480 pixels. Count ‘em! As it happens, by Eizo’s own estimations, it was a sales flop. Yet here we are nearly 30 years later drowning in LCD panels. The technology absolutely owns the PC monitor market. But is everything about to change? The arrival of the awesome new Alienware OLED gaming panel (see APC 506 for the review, where it scored a perfect 5/5) certainly suggests so. At last, per-pixel lighting is actually a thing for the PC and not just smartphones and…

The past two years of pandemic-induced scarcity and supply chain disruption, coupled with cryptocurrency mining mania, have for many dashed hopes of a new graphics card. Nearly 18 months after the launch of AMD’s Radeon RX 6000-series and Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 30-series GPUs, Steam data shows only 15 percent of gamers use Ampere cards, and under one percent use AMD’s RDNA 2 chips. But plenty of graphics cards are still fast enough to play today’s demanding games. To help put things in perspective, we rounded up all the major GPUs from the past six years (plus a few from further back) and put them to the test. Which cards still have staying power and which have fallen by the wayside? Our requirement is that each card needs to work with…

Those running extreme GPUs, like the RTX 3090 or RX 6900 XT, can safely set phasers to vaporise and carry on. But if your GPU is long in the tooth, dropping the settings a notch or two can do wonders for performance – particularly if you’re using a graphics card that doesn’t have at least 4GB VRAM, and some recent games even want 8GB just for 1080p ultra. Take the GTX 1050, which sits at the bottom of the rankings in terms of 1080p ultra-performance and delivered just 15fps on average. Dropping to 1080p medium doubled its performance, and while a few games still struggled – Warhammer 3 and Flight Simulator still failed to break 30fps – most games are at least playable. What can you expect from medium-quality visuals…

It allows us to test the various GPUs while keeping all other hardware constant, but there are also mobile variants of most graphics cards. As you can guess, packing something like a 450W RTX 3090 Ti into a laptop just isn’t going to happen, not without drastically cutting the power use. That results in the latest mobile GPUs from Nvidia and AMD generally being at least one step down in performance from their desktop counterparts. Take the mobile RTX 3080, for example. It uses the GA104 chip, whereas the desktop 3080 uses GA102. It also has 8GB of memory on a 256-bit bus instead of 10GB on a 320-bit interface and comes with 48 SMs and 6,144 CUDA cores compared to 68 SMs and 8,704 CUDA cores. It typically runs…

CENTRE COM PANDORA $2,999 – tinyurl.com/APC508COM This great-looking system uses a case that riffs on the iconic Lian LI O11 Dynamic. Peering inside you’ll see six RGB fans that keep the chassis well ventilated, two of which cool the AIO radiator to keep the beastly Intel 12700K temperatures tamed. Paired with an RTX 3070 Ti you’re getting a lot of compute performance for your dollar. The motherboard, 750W PSU and 1TB of SSD storage are all adequate for the target audience, however, there is one glaring issue with the build, the memory. Sure, DDR5 is expensive at the moment, but it seems that to bring this build in on budget Centre Com decided to match the CPU with the slowest available RAM on the market and only provide one stick…

In this issue, we’ll take a deep dive into your Windows Registry, which has been a vital component of Windows since the days of Windows 95. Basically, it’s a glorified database stored across several files (known as ‘hives’) containing various configuration settings that cover all aspects of your PC: its hardware, the apps you’ve installed, and – of course – Windows itself. To simplify matters, most Registry changes can be made via other Windows tools such as Settings or Device Manager, or within an application’s own dialog boxes. However, other settings are hidden more deeply. Many Windows tweaking tools such as Ultimate Windows Tweaker (www. thewindowsclub.com) offer an easy way to make meaningful Registry changes without risk but doing so means you never understand what’s going on beneath the hood.…

"Unlike most other CLI tools, nnn doesn’t have a man page. But you can learn all about working with the feature-rich file manager from the GitHub hosted wiki" Previously we discussed the FFF file manager, which scoffs at traditional file managers in its appearance and functionality. Our tool of choice this issue, nnn, is cut from the same cloth. The project was originally forked from Noice, which is a small ncurses-based file manager, hence the name Noice is Not Noice (nnn), but the project has since dropped the acronym and now prefers to be known only as nnn, or n³. Many distributions carry nnn in their software repositories and the project’s GitHub page (github.com/ jarun/nnn) provides a list of these, and the version of nnn on offer. Unfortunately, many distributions…

Canonical offers a Raspberry Pi build of Ubuntu Linux, but what’s it like to run? In most respects, it’s the standard Ubuntu experience. Most differences between Raspberry Pi OS and Ubuntu stem from the fact that Canonical don’t seem to have made that many concessions to the more constrained specifications of the Pi, but bear in mind that with 4GB of shared memory, the Pi isn’t constrained for light desktop use. Having been in use for a few hours, with the official operating system and four browser tabs in Chrome, two LibreOffice Writer documents and the Dolphin file manager, a total of 1GB of memory was used up. Under a similar load, in Ubuntu, 1.5GB was used up. Ubuntu took around 53 seconds to boot up, compared to around 30…

"The resonant-cavity magnetron was one of most revolutionary inventions of the war and helped tip the balance in favour of the Allies." It’s unlikely the Australian government knew at the time how important this factory would become, but it must have been at least relieved when the Amalgamated Wireless Australasia (AWA) and Radio Corporation of America (RCA) joint-venture to make radio valves in Australia became a reality in 1932. Events during the 1930s made it clear war clouds were gathering and in the event of war, Australia couldn’t guarantee the supply of the overseas technology components it now relied on. Made in Australia The first Amalgamated Wireless Valve (AWV) factory in Ashfield in Sydney’s inner west began production in 1933, delivering over 350,000 valves the following year. By 1937, that…

$74.99 | PC | galciv4.com This latest sequel in the long-running strategy series bills itself as the most accessible entry yet. This is true, in the same way that the tail is the most accessible part of a tiger. Stardock’s long running 4X series officially has a tutorial now, in the form of a little robot helper accursedly nicknamed ‘Space Clippy’. But Space Clippy doesn’t help much when a game explains everything as if it’s arrived from another dimension. The irony is GalCiv IV is not as obtuse as it seems. It’s just terrible at communicating, which means that enjoying the game at its best involves a lot of false starts. This isn’t merely about understanding individual systems: it’s also about how key features are presented. Take the game’s biggest…

Alan Sugar made a startling confession when writing the opening text for the Amstrad NC100 Notepad’s manual: “I am embarrassed to say that, as the chairman of one of Europe’s largest manufacturers of computers, I have never been able to use one!” It was 1992 and Amstrad was indeed a huge player in the still fledgling computer market. Having entered the industry with the CPC 464 in 1984, it had introduced the popular PCW range, bought rival Sinclair, got burned in the video-game industry with the GX4000 console and launched affordable PCs including a successful series of portables. The NC100, however, encapsulated everything Amstrad desired. The company was always talking about creating tech that focused less on what was inside and more on what could be achieved at the lowest…

Microsoft has announced new hardware at Build 2022! Given that Build is a developer conference, it should come as no surprise to hear that the hardware being announced today is a developer kit designed to help devs to build apps that take advantage of new AI capabilities via an onboard neural processing unit (NPU,) as well as add support for Windows 11 on ARM. The developer kit is called “Project Volterra,” and is powered by an as-yet-unnamed Snapdragon processor. The device is a mini-desktop PC, similar in shape and size to that of a Mac mini or the base of a Surface Studio, just without the display attached. This developer kit is also Microsoft’s first ‘desktop’ PC, though it doesn’t plan to sell the device as a consumer product.…

"Frontera leverages 448,448 CPU cores courtesy of 16,016 units of Intel’s Xeon Platinum 8280 chips, a Broadwell-class CPU leveraging 28 Intel cores." The image released in May showcasing the supermassive black hole in the centre of our galaxy, the Milky Way, owes its existence to human ingenuity – and to our old friend, the CPU. Achieved thanks to a five-year partnership and research between the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) array, the Frontera supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) and NSF’s Open Science Grid. The galactic-level task took around 100 million CPU hours and the concerted efforts of 300-plus researchers to coalesce into the released image. But how does one “see” a black hole that’s so massive its gravitic forces trap even near-lightspeed moving particles? Well, one can actually…

“I hope that Intel doesn’t resort to a brute force approach to beat AMD, especially in the all-important marketing dot point of having the fastest gaming CPU.” Computex made a return in 2022. Though it wasn’t on a pre-pandemic scale, it still provided an opportunity for companies to show off some of their upcoming tech, much of which you can read about in our Computex special on the previous pages. From a PC perspective, the biggest reveals were from AMD. What can we expect from Ryzen 7000 CPUs and AM5 motherboards when they launch later in 2022? Firstly, is it just me or do the heat spreaders of Ryzen 7000 processors look seriously cool? I hope they’re functional and that thermal goo isn’t easily trapped under the edges. On top…

Drones deployed to spot weaknesses in columns of tanks. Presidential addresses via Instagram, ministers asking favours via Twitter. A military using crowdfunding and cryptocurrency to buy equipment. The mismatched military might of Russia and Ukraine has sparked creative uses of technology by the latter, hinting at the future of warfare. The Ukraine war is still dominated by traditional methods of massacre, be it missiles or tanks or even Molotov cocktails. But like the rest of our lives, war has been upended by the digital revolution. “I think this is the reality of war in the digital age, the world we live in now,” said Neil Ashdown, researcher in cyber security at Royal Holloway, University of London. Indeed, defence contractors and military organisations are often the first to shift to new…

OBS STUDIO | Free | www.obsproject.comXSPLIT BROADCAST | XSplit Broadcast, free. XSplit Broadcaster Premium, $7/month, $84/annually or a one off payment of $280 | www.xsplit.com Live streaming is no longer just a niche corner of the internet, with the huge increase in its popularity over the past decade puhing it to vast global audiences and making it one of the most popular forms of online video. The live aspect of streaming brings in the anticipation and excitement offered by live TV but with the opportunity for anyone to create their own content. Whether it’s live streaming games, tournaments, chatting, IRL videos, talk shows, podcasts, music, and even ASMR, there is an almost infinite amount of content available. As a result, the production side of streaming has gone way beyond just…

$3,599 | msi.com W11 Home; 15.6-inch 165Hz display at 2560x1440 pixel resolution; Intel Core i7-12700H CPU; Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 GPU (140W) GPU; 32GB RAM; 1TB SSD; 86Wh battery (3h 7min PCMark 10 Home Office); 35.9x25.9x2.7cm; 2.25kg. The Crosshair is one of MSI’s newer gaming laptop ranges that launched alongside the recent Creator series devices. Other than the unique yellow paint job, which is a Rainbow Six Extraction collaboration, the most unique feature on this gaming rig is the display. The 15.6 inch QHD screen offers full DCI-P3 colour coverage according to the marketing material, which would be a great feature for more immersive gaming if there was any way for the system to actually use it. Unfortunately there must’ve been some miscommunication within MSI’s engineering department, since this colour…

$289 | www.sapphiretech.com Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 6400; 768 Shader Units; 1,923MHz Base Clock, 2,321MHz Boost Clock; 4GB GDDR6 16Gbps memory, 128GB/s Memory Bandwidth; 1x DisplayPort 1.4, 1x HDMI 2.1; 53W TDP. The AMD Radeon RX 6400 is the most affordable RDNA 2 card yet. It’s very much an entry level card for general display purposes or casual 1080p gaming, including browser style games or e-sport titles. The similar RX 6500 XT was poorly received, and it’d be easy to bash the RX 6400, but there’s still a market for cards like these. It exists to do a job in a variety of systems, as long as you don’t ask too much of it. The RX 6400 is an RDNA 2 based card based on the 6nm Navi 24 GPU.…

$599 | www.synology.com Speed: AX 6,600Mbps | Connectivity: 3 x Gigabit Ethernet WAN/LAN, 1 x 2.5Gbps LAN, 1 x Gigabit 2.5Gbps WAN/LAN, 1 x USB-A 3.1 Gen 1 | Features: SRM OS 1.3, multi-SSID & network segmentation; enhanced QoS, Firewall, VPN, VLAN, mesh and Family controls. Synology routers are not well known in Australia, but the company is making a big push with its first Wi-Fi 6 unit, the RT6600ax. At first glance it may look rather uninspiring, but it doesn’t take long to realise this is simply its Clark Kent disguise. "It’s fast, well-featured and secure. It’s not just perfect for SMBs and smart homes, it’s changed the whole market." Those familiar with Synology’s NAS boxes will know that operating systems are very-well featured (with multiple package downloads), frequently-updated,…

$TBA | razer.com What do controllers have over the reliable old keyboard-and-mouse combo? How can they hope to match the unerring precision of the mouse? How can they keep up with less than 20 buttons to press? Variable input force has long been an advantage in all sorts of games, from racing titles to shooters and fighting games. The ability to move your avatar or turn your vehicle slowly, delicately, with a single sustained input rather than constant anxious key-tapping, can be an oft-underrated boon. Fortunately, keyboards are catching up. "It should go without saying that you need to be comfortable with the 60 percent layout to get the most out of this keyboard" The Huntsman Mini Analog isn’t Razer’s first foray into using analog-input key switches, nor its first…

Android | Free Google had plenty to share during its I/O 2022 Keynote, and that of course includes the world of Android. Unlike last year’s Android 12 announcement, there aren’t nearly as many drastic additions coming to Android 13. However, there are quite a few impressive changes that aim to improve your experience across the best Android phones and tablets. As we expected, Google took some time to focus on security and privacy settings. With Android 13 Beta 2, we’re getting an all-new photo picker, providing more controls over the files that can be accessed by different apps. There are also new categories for “Files and media,” “Photos & videos,” and “Music & audio.” This photo picker allows you to select specific files to share with different apps, as opposed…

It’s the flat panel to rule them all, the ultimate display tech – we give you MicroLED. But it’s not coming to the PC anytime soon. It’s still years away, which is a pity because when it does hit the PC, it’s going to be awesome. Like OLED, MicroLED is a self-emissive technology that offers true per-pixel lighting. So, each individual pixel can be turned off completely. That means essentially infinite contrast and true black tones. The difference is that MicroLED sidesteps organic compounds and so doesn’t suffer from burn-in. The latter is a major issue with OLED displays because of the differential degradation within the RGB subpixels. In an OLED panel, the blue subpixels wear out faster than the red and green subpixels. That eventually causes permanent colour distortion…

Arc, formerly DG2, aka Xe-HPG, has seen quite a few delays. We originally thought it would launch by the end of 2021, but now it’s looking like a mid-2022 launch for the desktop parts. It could be too little, too late for gamers, though the media aspects of the chips remain promising. Intel recently revealed the initial lineup for laptop Arc A-series models, which will inevitably be paired with Intel CPUs. Given Intel dominates the laptop landscape in sales, it’s probably a smart business move, but it doesn’t give us a lot of hope for high performance. Intel compared its lower-tier A370M part against its own integrated Iris Xe Graphics, from a Core i7-1280P. That’s a 28W mobile chip with 96 Execution Units (now called XVE, for “Xe Vector Engine”),…

Resist the temptation, at least until the games and applications you’re using warrant the expense. Even then, make sure that your ‘upgrade’ actually represents a true leveling up of performance. The oft-quoted rule of thumb is that a previous generation GPU represents one step down in performance, but that’s not entirely accurate. For Nvidia, the RTX 2080 lands midway between the 3060 and 3060 Ti, the GTX 1080 performs about on par with the RTX 2060, and the GTX 980 lines up with the GTX 1060. That’s two steps down, but if you look at the –70 cards, it’s maybe one to one and a half steps down, and among the –60 series chips it’s sometimes less than a single step, albeit muddied by the Turing GTX 16-series GPUs. AMD…

1. ADDRESS BAR This recent addition to Registry Editor allows you to type or paste in Registry addresses to quickly jump to the specified subkey. 2. FAVORITES Registry Editor allows you to store frequently accessed subkeys in its Favourites menu, giving you one-click access. Make sure you give them a suitably descriptive name. 3. NAVIGATION PANE This left-hand pane allows you to move up and down through the various keys and subkeys that make up the Windows Registry. 4. SUBKEYS A key or subkey that has a > next to the folder signifies that it contains further subkeys inside. Double-click on the arrow icon to open the subkey and reveal its contents. 5. REGISTRY VALUES Each subkey contains one or more values that are used…

Windows Update is surely the least loved part of Windows. Since automatic updates were introduced back in the XP days, they’ve doubtless been blamed for millions of postponed presentations and lost essays, as the OS has repeatedly chosen the worst possible times to apply updates, or to ditch open documents and restart. Unfortunately, a piece of software as complex and as fundamental as Windows does need periodic updates. With an estimated 1.5 billion people using it every day, bugs and security holes are going to be discovered that urgently need plugging. Microsoft has another incentive to keep everyone current: Windows releases have a long lifespan, with Windows 8, 10 and 11 all still officially supported. That’s a lot of different code streams to maintain, and the company certainly doesn’t want…

CPU: Intel 8086 @ 5MHz VRAM: 12KB & 256 KB RAM: 128KB, upgradeable to 640KB Launch price: ¥298,000 (approx. $1,600) Graphics: 2 x NEC µPD7220 graphical controllers, 8 colours @ 640x400 Sound: PC speaker Storage: 8-inch, 1.232MB external floppy drives OS: N88-BASIC(86), CP/M-86, MS-DOS, OS/2, PC-UX, Microsoft Windows up to Windows 2000 Released: October 1982 Production: 1982-1997, 2003 Worldwide sales: 18.3 million. This month’s computer may be unfamiliar, but NEC’s PC-9800 series, usually shortened to PC-98, was arguably Japan’s most important computer and played an integral part in developing both Japanese language computing and video games. Despite the potential gaming fun offered by this system, there are technical hurdles to be overcome. So after a brief history of the PC-98, let us show you how to emulate the machine as…

$31.90 | PC | teardowngame.com It would be so, so easy to write off Teardown as just a tech demo. A simple framework of maps, tools, and missions built to show off developer Dennis Gustaffson’s incredible voxel destruction technology. But over its 18-month stretch in Early Access, Teardown has proven itself not only a stunning display of technical prowess, but also a bloody good little heist-’em-up, and the most creative sandbox platform since Garry’s Mod. Teardown is, first and foremost, all about that destruction. It’s a game of wooden shacks, concrete walls, metal catwalks, and plaster corridors – all of which respond appropriately to being wailed on with a sledgehammer. Despite its blocky appearance, Teardown’s worlds break in wonderfully convincing ways. Metal pipes bend when supports are removed, while plaster…

Free | PC, Mac | bippinbits.itch.io/orbles In peculiar RTS Orbles, you’re not trying to beat another faction operating with the same tools as you. No, your enemy is a horde of giants, advancing upon you from every direction. As the giants constrict the map, they will also demolish any of your structures standing in their way. On a fixed map, you have to build up your little town so that you have enough workers to gather food and metal, and warriors to thin the encroaching hoard. All with the ultimate goal of acquiring three shiny Solar Orbs, which are spread out in a triangular fashion around the map. Unlike most RTS workers, the humanoid orblings will only walk on set paths. You need a path between the farm and the…

$35.95 | PC, XBN1/X/S | roguelegacy2.com In this sequel to the 2013 game, once again you step into the shoes of a randomised hero tasked with navigating the levels of a procedurally generated castle. Said castle is a gruelling gauntlet teeming with tough enemies to defeat, tricky obstacles to overcome, and valuable gold to steal. If, or more likely, when your hero reaches the bottom of their health bar, you’ll swiftly find yourself in the footwear of their descendant. At the start of each run, you’re given a choice of three characters from an array of unlockable classes. Old favourites such as the Knight and Barbarian are mixed with exciting new options like the Gunslinger and Valkyrie. Classes now come with their own unique stats, weapons, talents, and passive abilities,…

Activision Blizzard has faced severe backlash after announcing a tool its devs will use to balance diversity in game characters. The Diversity Space Tool was widely criticised online, with many pointing out the bureaucratic oddity of “creating a tool when you could just hire diverse designers and listen to them”. The scale has as its zero-point the typical middle-class white cis male videogame protagonist, but how exactly do you score something like ‘race’ out of 10? Overwatch character artist Melissa Kelly commented, saying, “God I swear our own company tries so hard to slaughter any good will the actual devs who make the game have built.” THIS ALGAE-POWERED COMPUTER PROBABLY CAN’T RUN CRYSIS It may help wean us off fossil fuels and rare earths, however. A team at Cambridge University,…

"Championing technology doesn’t mean we’re unrelenting yes-men and -women, however, and APC aims to be as objective as possible in all our coverage." 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.…

The release of Intel’s Arc Alchemist desktop graphics cards could be postponed, according to a new report published by Igor Wallossek on his Igor’s Lab tech site. Multiple sources have contacted Wallossek, and all agree that these desktop GPUs will be late, but how late isn’t clearly defined, with the release window now expected to fall between the beginning of July to the end of August. Intel’s official position concerning the release of its Arc Alchemist desktop graphics cards is that they will start to roll out in Q2 2022. However, we are now firmly into Q2, and Q3 begins at the beginning of July. So a hard launch at the beginning of July would be a little late, but the end of August is quite a severe delay. In…

Computex 2022 ran from May 23 - May 27 in Taipei, Taiwan, and it’s the biggest and most exciting computing event in the calendar. Unlike last year, which was online-only (with Computex 2020 being cancelled altogether), Computex 2022 happened in-person. But because Taiwan is still limiting international visitors due to the Covid-19 pandemic, press from other parts of the world weren’t there in the kind of numbers we’ve been used to seeing pre-pandemic. And that includes us. APC has remotely covered Computex 2022 via a full week of virtual press briefings and announcements. Here’s all the biggest breaking news from the show. There were keynote presentations from Nvidia and AMD, as well as showings from Asus, Gigabyte and more. A great many of these big players all have headquarters in…

"AMD claims an average boost of around 15 percent, but in our test suite, we measured a 28 percent improvement in average frame rates at 1080p compared to the Ryzen 7 5800X." We’ve known for ages that large caches can help improve performance, though larger caches can also increase latency and counteract those gains. It’s a balancing act, and L1 caches have been sitting in the 32KB to 96KB range for quite some time now. L2 caches have grown from around 128KB per core in the 90s to today’s 512KB to 1MB, sometimes even 2MB, per core. But it’s the L3 cache sizes that have really ballooned. Intel’s various mainstream Core processors have included 8MB of L3 cache going back to the Bloomfield and Lynnfield chips in the late 2000s.…

PREMIUM LAPTOPS APPLE MACBOOK PRO 14IN STUNNING CREATIVE POWER Alongside its 16-inch sibling, this is simply the world’s best laptop for demanding users. The amount of power on tap via the M1 Pro or M1 Max processor is staggering, and it’s backed up by a terrific screen and stunning battery life. With all the ports you could ask for, the only negatives are its relative bulk (especially compared to the Air) and high price. From $2,999, apple.com/au ALTERNATIVES LG GRAM 17 (2021) The combination of a 2,560 x 1,600 17-inch screen and 1.3kg weight – as well as a well-rounded specification – make this a great buy for homeworkers. $2,998, lg.com APPLE MACBOOK AIR If you don’t need the power of an M1 Pro or M1 Max, “make do” with…

$1,059 | www.msi.com MSI Radeon RX 6750 XT Gaming X Trio. 2560 Shader Cores; 2554MHz Game Clock, 2623MHz Boost Clock; 12GB 18Gbps GDDR6 memory, 432GB/s Memory Bandwidth; 3x DisplayPort 1.4a, 1x HDMI 2.1; 2x 8-pin Power Connector, 250W TDP. Much like the RX 6650 XT and RX 6950 XT, the RX 6750 XT is a refresh of the RX 6700 XT. As mid-range RDNA 3 cards are perhaps a year away, it makes sense for AMD to give it a mid-life tizzy up. Add some faster memory, up the clocks and TDP a little and make a few firmware level tweaks, and voila, meet the RX 6750 XT. Its purpose is to compete with Nvidia’s GA104 models, the 3060 Ti, 3070 and 3070 Ti. At this tier, it needs to…

$189 | www.deepcool.com Deepcool LS720 360mm AIO liquid CPU cooler; 410mm Tubes; AMD AM5, AM4, TR(X)4, Intel LGA 1700, 1200, 115x ,2066, 2011(-3) compatible; 3x 120mm fluid dynamic bearing PWM fans; max 32.9 dB(A) Noise Level; five year warranty. The importance of capable cooling can easily be overlooked. If a modern processor gets too hot, it will undervolt and downclock, costing you performance. But you don’t need to spend $400 or more on a cooler with an LCD screen if you just want your cooler to, well, cool. An AIO like the Deepcool LS720 aims to offer a blend of ARGB good looks, quality component design choices and an affordable price. Does it hit the cooling sweetspot? "The DeepCool LS720 isn’t the cheapest 360mm AIO you’ll come across, but it’s…

Windows 7, 8.1, 10 or 11 | www.faststone.org FastStone Image Viewer is one of the most popular free programs for browsing photos stored on your computer. This latest version is its best yet, adding several welcome features and making the program speedier to use. You’ll notice an improvement in performance from the moment you launch FastStone Image Viewer 7.6, because it now loads more quickly and displays its ‘tree’ of folders instantly, as well as their contents when clicked. Select an image, and FastStone helpfully shows its size in the status bar at the bottom of the program window, as well as in the preview pane in the bottom-left corner. If you find the default interface too bright, you can switch to the dark or grey theme – both of…

Released after almost a year of development, the OpenMandriva developers didn’t plan to have a 4.3 release, but decided to create it to push the changes made behind the scenes without keeping users waiting a few more months for version 5.0. OpenMandriva Lx 4.3 is available as an installable live media. In addition to the generic 64-bit release, there’s also a version built specifically for the current generation of AMD processors including Ryzen, ThreadRipper and EPYC. The developers claim this version outperforms the generic 64-bit release by taking advantage of new features in the AMD camp. This is also the first OpenMandriva release that’s available for 64-bit ARM devices. Installable images for popular ones such as the Pinebook Pro, as well as for single-board computers including the Raspberry Pi, are…

BEST EXTREME GPU $3,500 GEFORCE RTX 3090 TI When your only goal is to get the fastest graphics card possible, the choice is simple. Nvidia’s latest and greatest might not be particularly efficient, and your wallet might go on strike, but there’s no question this represents the current pinnacle of GPU performance. The law of diminishing returns is in full effect, so paying about three times as much as our high-end pick will only get you around 35 percent more performance. Thanks to Nvidia’s DLSS, however, you can generally break 60 fps at 4K even with demanding ray tracing games. BEST HIGH-END GPU $1,400 RADEON RX 6800 XT One and a half years after launch, AMD’s Radeon RX 6800 XT is a compelling option, particularly if you’re not convinced of…

1973 1973 XEROX ALTO The cabinet-sized Alto may have stretched the definition of “personal computer” (only its portrait screen and keyboard are shown here), but it also defined many of the things we take for granted today. It ran the first GUI-based OS controlled by a mouse, it hosted the first WYSIWYG document system, the first email client, the first network-based games. When Steve Jobs was shown its latest features in 1979, he described it as a “veil being lifted from my eyes”. 1974 1974 MITS ALTAIR 8800 Although it looks more like a prop from a bad 70s sci-fi movie, the Altair 8800 was the first minicomputer kit. It came in various configurations, but the base spec included a 1,024-byte memory board and Intel’s 8080 processor. Fripperies such as…

Strange BSODs Ever since Windows 11 was announced, I’ve started experiencing the notorious Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) at least once a day. I’m still running Windows 10 Pro 64-bit and have kept up to date with Windows Updates. In fact, that’s often when I get a BSOD crash – just checking for updates. "Your BSODs won’t be the result of some Microsoft conspiracy, Frank. It’s likely to be a coincidence when the issue began, but you don’t say what you’ve done to troubleshoot the problem" Is this Microsoft’s new policy to force us off Windows 10? According to Microsoft, my laptop will support Windows 11, so I assume it should continue to support Windows 10 until the Windows 10 end date. I’ve thought of switching to Linux and even…

IT WILL TAKE 10 minutes YOU WILL LEARN How to tweak notifications and widgets to suit the way you work YOU’LL NEED macOS 12 or later With so many apps loaded on to our devices, it’s easy to get overwhelmed with the sheer number of notifications fighting for our attention. That’s particularly true on the Mac, a device where so many of us do our daily work – and where we really need to concentrate the most. Luckily, macOS Monterey has several built-in features that can rein in the chaos and let you get back to the things that matter. From Focus mode to fine-grained notification controls, there are plenty of ways to get more control over the information thrown your way. It’s also worth looking at widgets, as these…

"The Pi 400 itself has similar specifications to a Raspberry Pi 4, but the whole thing is contained inside the keyboard unit." We’ve decided to see how viable a Raspberry Pi 400 is as a Linux-based ‘daily driver’ machine, and attempt to use it for day-to-day tasks in place of a standard desktop PC. The Pi 400 itself has similar specifications to a Raspberry Pi 4, but the whole thing is contained inside the keyboard unit. As part of the test, the bulk of this article was written on the Pi. We’ll start at the beginning, by looking at the device itself. Sat on a desk, the Pi looks like a white compact keyboard, but it’s a tad heavier and fuller once you turn it over in your hands. Around…

Free | PC, Mac | gate.itch.io/ghost Ghost doesn’t boast about its intricate puzzle boxes, but they’re some of the most original I’ve come across. There are often a lot of tools in play, but they’re introduced at a manageable rate, and come together in a careful way, with every icon being legible and easily distinguishable in the game’s low-res environments. One of my big stumbling blocks with puzzle games is the amount of information I’m expected to store in my head, but Ghost is considerate enough to present as much information as possible within the actual game. I can see the outcome of many actions, without having to test them over and over. Somehow, it’s not visually overwhelming as a result. There really isn’t much to criticise about Ghost. I…

$34.95 | PC, PS4/5, XBX/S, Switch | stanleyparable.com I’ve never given much thought to the ‘skip dialogue’ button in a videogame, but after playing The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe I can’t stop thinking about it. The button is just one of several new features explored in the “expanded reimagining” of 2013’s The Stanley Parable, which once again turns the act of playing a game into a hilarious, surprising and thoughtful examination of games and game development, players and player choice, and yes, even simple buttons. It’s not just a remaster, though the original game has been faithfully rebuilt in Unity. You can play through it once again as office worker Stanley, who realises he’s the only one in the building and sets out to discover why while a gentle storybook-style…

Free | PC | wardius.itch.io/pebble I admire the unassuming nature of the protagonist in Pebble. You are literally a pebble, with only a pair of boots to add an element of anthropomorphism. Everything about Pebble is minimalist, and that’s refreshing in a genre stuffed with collectibles and radical marsupials. Here’s a small, sunny world for you to explore, while enjoying a relaxing soundtrack. Pebble does have one idea – any more would be overkill. The little pebble can acquire green gemstones, attaching them to its body for later use. You’ll come across inactive platforms that will accept the gemstones as currency, allowing you to unfurl bridges or shift floating platforms so you can use them. The clever bit is that you will often need to circle back to retrieve the…

Release: February 20, 2007 Developer: Gas Powered Games Publisher: THQ Link: bit.ly/3vfgWbJ There is no high quite like the emasculated agony of graphics envy. It was 2007, I was 16 years old, and still fully bound to the limitations of the Xbox 360 and PS3 in the bedroom. The hand-me-down laptop whirring on the desk could barely handle Battlefield 1942, much less the relentless tempo of speedy processors dutifully obsoleting the seventh generation of home consoles. Still, I voraciously tore through the games press, reading up on the mouthwatering vistas that were enthusiastically unavailable on a Dualshock, essentially as a way to torture myself. The primary object of my obsession? Supreme Commander. Gas Powered Games’ watershed RTS arrived with exactly one selling point; this thing was a beast, and you…