Indice dei contenuti per July 2016 in Maximum PC

Maximum PC: We’re here with Ruben Mookerjee, Razer’s general manager and vice president of User Interfaces and Gaming Peripherals. Wow— what a title! So, can you tell us a little about what inspired Razer to develop the Ripsaw? Ruben Mookerjee: That’s a good question. We realized, actually a couple of years ago, that there was this whole sort of meta community around gaming: people who are watching people who are gaming. And so, you know, it started off with people doing video blogs on YouTube and stuff, and since Twitch has really taken off now, people are watching live streams and interacting with people as they’re playing games, so we realized the whole sort of broadcaster segment was actually pretty interesting. And a lot of them were spontaneously using our…

THE LOWLY COOLING FAN doesn’t get half the credit it deserves. There’s one on almost every serious piece of hardware, and that’s a good thing. Without them, your pricey CPU, laptop, or graphics card would overheat and become a paperweight in a few short minutes. The hotter the hardware, the harder it is keep cool and quiet: competing goals that aren’t easy to satisfy simultaneously. Turn up the RPM and temperatures drop fast, but get ready for a racket; beyond 1200 RPM the noise from conventional fans goes from noticeable to noisome. While most fans are judged by how much air they can move, measured in CFM (cubic feet per minute), there’s another factor to consider. Cooling units frequently require fan installation against a radiator, heat sink, or dust screen.…

VIRTUAL REALITY has finally arrived, with both the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive available for pre-orders for those willing to live on the virtual bleeding edge. The Vive, spawned from a partnership between HTC and Valve, has the earlier lead, thanks to a more immersive experience. Termed “room-scale” VR, it uses a pair of base stations to track where you are in your room—enabling you to walk around your virtual worlds, instead of being stuck in front of your PC (although that works just fine, as well). The other feature that’s giving the Vive the edge at the moment is on the controller front. The pair of controllers is designed for use in virtual worlds, which is key when you have the freedom to wander. And while you’re wandering, the…

YOU’LL NEED THIS RASPBERRY Pi 2 The brilliant mini-computer costs under $45. See www.raspberrypi.org. MINECRAFT Download the latest version from http://pi.minecraft.net ARGUABLY MORE FUN THAN the generously provided Wolfram Mathematica: Pi Edition is Mojang’s generously provided Minecraft: Pi Edition. The latter is a cut-down version of the popular Pocket Edition and, as such, lacks life-threatening gameplay, but it does include more blocks than you can shake a stick at, and three types of saplings from which said sticks can be harvested. This means that there’s plenty of stuff with which to unleash your creativity, then, but all that clicking is hard work, and by dint of the edition including an elegant Python API, you can bring to fruition blocky versions of your wildest dreams with just a few lines of…

LOGITECH’S G900 Chaos Spectrum seeks to innovate in one of the most difficult markets to master—that of the wireless gaming mouse. Long despised by true gamers, wireless mice have earned themselves a reputation fraught with woe. Whether that’s jitter bugs, interference issues, sluggish battery life and charging methods, or a clunky design, there’s always been something to put off gamers on the hunt for a truly cable-free experience. Can Logitech shake off the brutal dogma attached to wireless mice? Is this Chaos Spectrum enough to finally decimate the wireless competition? Unboxing the G900 is a messy affair. Removing the outer sleeve and opening the single-hinged container, you’re greeted with a plethora of angled cardboard shapes; shapes that look more akin to desktop wallpaper than something designed to protect the intricacies…

FOR YEARS, the gaming notebook arena was dominated by large and bulky systems that performed well, but were an albatross around your neck when you had to lug them about. Razer’s Blade line changed that, packing gaming hardware into a very sexy chassis. Now Gigabyte has upped the ante by including a GTX 980M instead of the slightly less potent GTX 970M. The result is almost a gaming laptop rather than a gaming notebook, though you probably don’t want to game with it on your lap. All that performance in a 21mm thick chassis that weighs just over 5lb means it can get toasty under load—we measured surface hot spots in excess of 60oC while gaming, though mostly at the back-middle (near the power button), where you’re not as likely…

“YOU DIED.” Any player of From Software’s games will see those words burned into their retinas. The Dark Souls series has specialized in being the most hardcore action RPGs available. Dark Souls III is the latest in the series, and possibly the last. Like its predecessors, Dark Souls III is set in a thinly-sketched world, where some of the dead come back to life. At every turn of its twisted world, once-human revenants wait to jump out, items lure you into traps, and giant abhuman or inhuman leviathans are walled away in cathedrals, castles, and caves. Oh, and you’re dead, too. Players again take the role of an undead character, doomed to never die. This time, you’re the Ashen One, tasked with rekindling the fire in the new area of…

“Reaction from the tech industry has been swift and largely uncomplimentary. A DRAFT SENATE BILL has been published—the Compliance with Court Orders Act of 2016— aimed squarely at the providers of end-to-end encryption. It would compel all providers of such services to be able to decrypt data if presented with a court order. The breadth of the proposed bill is huge; it asks that data must be presented in an “intelligible format to a government pursuant to a court order, and for other purposes.” That’s not just the FBI chasing terrorists, but any court order on any matter. Not only would tech companies have to break their own encryption, but they would have to design systems to ensure that they could retrieve all encrypted data. The bill’s sponsors are Senators…

The Registry has been a vital component of Windows for the last 20-odd years. It’s a central database, where all kinds of settings and preferences are stored, and not just by Windows, either. The vast majority of applications installed on your PC store their own data in the Registry, too, as do many hardware devices. In this feature, we’ll examine how the Registry is constructed, plus reveal how you can access its data—not just to view its contents, but also to tweak settings. Why do this? It all boils down to personal preference, and the fact that Windows is built with a wide range of hardware in mind, so many settings are configured to just work, rather than push your PC’s performance, or give you granular control over various aspects…

YOU’LL NEED THIS CONSOLE You need the muscle of a current-gen box running the absolute latest firmware. WINDOWS 10 Xbox One requires Win 10, but Win 8.1 will do the trick for PS4. WHY, DEAR READER, should you be chained to your TV when you want to play a console game? And—sacrilegiously—why should you feel tied to the (awesome) cycle of constant upgrades your PC requires to keep up with the latest gaming standards? Maybe you’ve got a laptop, a supremely portable but doggedly non-upgradeable machine. What then? Well, fear not. If you’re happy with the quality of console gaming, and you’ve already kitted out your lounge with a modern console, you can stream your gaming to your PC, and play anywhere in the house (or, in the case of…

GAMING HEADSETS are funny things. Nothing beats a room full of speakers, especially for surround effects and bass, but often it’s just not possible, thanks to inconsiderate sleeping relatives, noise abatement orders, or because you’re playing games in the office. In these situations, a headset makes a lot of sense, and they’ve improved greatly in recent years, offering noise cancelation and various flavors of surround sound. Built-in mic booms enhance your trash-talking abilities, and you’ll need a separate gaming headset from the headphones you use to listen to music, because what is the purpose of life other than to accumulate more stuff? There is one other context in which a headset is essential, although fewer gamers experience it these days, thanks to high-speed Internet connections: the LAN party or tournament.…

THIS IS ODD. A game that seems like it’s going to be very much like the movie Gravity manages to look amazing, and exhibits stunning environmental design that makes the most of its zero-gravity setting, but it’s robbed of all drama and tension with a mechanic that was surely intended to do the opposite. First, that name. The numeric interloper, likely put there for SEO reasons, draws attention to the second syllable. It’s clear what the developers are aiming at, and this is one of the first games we’ve played that’s so clearly built with VR in mind. Should you not have your helmet in your hands right now, you’ll have to make do with playing Adr1ft on a monitor, and that’s where one design choice lets it down. Set…

TRIUMPHS AMD’S NEW CHINESE DEAL AMD is to license its top-tier x86 server chips to a new Chinese company, creating a serious rival for Intel’s offerings. A big step. IS VR GOING MAINSTREAM? VR sales are set to skyrocket, as market analyst IDC forecasts they will triple every year to 2020. BACK TO THE ’90S Sega will let you run old Genesis games on Steam, even if modded. Its Classic Hub comes with over 50 games, and free entry if you own any. TRAGEDIES JOB CUTS AT INTEL Intel is feeling the pinch; thousands of jobs, including execs, are to go following poor first quarter results. MOBILE MARKET FLOP Microsoft’s acquisition of Nokia is looking like a poor deal, as handset sales fell by 73 percent quarter on quarter. Ouch.…

SO VIRTUAL REALITY IS FINALLY HERE. Well, it’s on sale, at least. Waiting lists are pretty long too. Plenty of us won’t have been able to afford the $600–800 for the headset, or in fact the cost of the computer upgrade you’ll need to run it on your system. Of course, we’re only talking about the biggest, best applications here, running on the best hardware. That said, we’d heartily recommend any interested parties try out the headsets before buying—we’re already seeing them used extensively for marketing stands in malls, and it’s likely that some of the phone and computer retailers will have demo stations soon enough. Even so, they’re still expensive, especially when you factor in the cost of the computer hardware most people will need—a new Oculus Ready computer…

THIS MONTH WE DISSECT... XIFIXIT presents: About iFixit iFixit is a global community of tinkerers dedicated to helping people fix things through free online repair manuals and teardowns. iFixit believes that everyone has the right to maintain and repair their own products. To learn more, visit www.ifixit.com. Oculus Rift CV1 BACKGROUND: We’ve had our eyes on Oculus since the beginning, having dismantled (and re-mantled) both development versions of its VR headset. But, today, we’ve got the real deal: the consumerready, OMG-it’s-finally-here Oculus Rift. After four long years of development, what’s changed? What’s stayed the same? And can we put it down long enough to take it apart and find out? Grab your tools and join us at the teardown table, because the future is now—we’re deconstructing the Oculus Rift. MAJOR…

YOU’LL NEED THIS ADOBE PHOTOSHOP Subscribe to various Adobe packages at www.adobe.com. AN APPROPRIATE PHOTOGRAPH A picture including water is most obvious. A REFLECTION OCCURS when a surface bounces back enough of the light that has, in turn, bounced from another object, without distorting or diffusing it so much that it becomes unrecognizable. The blue of the sea is said to be a reflection of the sky above, while in Oregon, a lake reflects Mount Hood so perfectly it’s been called Mirror Lake. Not everything is a mirror, however, and that distortion and diffusion can be harnessed by digital artists to make reflections that look natural—the great pitfall of trying to add a reflection to an image is ending up with an unrealistic result, and it’s a very easy state…

ULTRABOOKS have carried a stigma since their inception. Arguably, the only acceptably powerful one for a long time was Apple’s MacBook Air—yes, we said that. Spec-wise, it was more powerful than any Ultrabook, especially with Apple offering PCIe SSD way before others did. But things have changed. Companies have caught on; they’ve realized that people want a powerful, svelte notebook, with great design and performance. And Dell has delivered just that, plus so much more. The new XPS 13 is the smaller brother of the XPS 15, but it’s certainly not smaller in terms of performance, and it also takes on the beautiful and striking design of the XPS 15. Right off the bat, you get a superthin machine wrapped in aluminum that can compete with anything Apple has to…

WE’RE GETTING THERE. We’re getting mighty close to the perfect monitor. The Acer Predator XB271HU is a frankly gorgeous display, and ticks almost all the boxes for the ideal gaming monitor. But, sadly, it’s turned up to the party the wrong side of fashionably late, and wearing the same outfit as the host. Though not quite as well. Acer has got so much right with the new Predator; it’s rocking a high-end-GPUpleasing 2560x1440 native resolution, lovingly laid out on a 27-inch IPS panel. It comes sporting Nvidia’s G-Sync frame synchronisation tech, and is capable of hitting a top refresh rate of a kitten-smooth 165Hz. The beefy GPU brigade may be hankering for a 4K IPS panel in there, like the Asus RoG Swift 27AQ, but we’re still some way off…

THE MECHANICAL KEYBOARD market continues to be vibrant, with entries from Asus, Corsair, and all the usual suspects, as well as more leftfield brands. Razer continues its campaign to confuse the hell out of anyone looking for a keyboard, with the BlackWidow X Chroma joining the likes of the Deathstalker Expert, Deathstalker Chroma Membrane, BlackWidow Tournament Edition Essential, BlackWidow Tournament Edition Chroma, BlackWidow Ultimate Stealth, Anansi and more. The “Chroma” in the name means it offers multi-colored lighting, which won’t be on everyone’s wish list. The BlackWidow X does, however, have a lighting mode that we almost approve of—a reactive system that lights keys as you press them, and leaves them lit for a few seconds, before gracefully fading them out. As ever, the best use for such a lighting…

WELCOME TO YAUGHTON, population: you. This exploration game from the makers of Dear Esther was a hit on PlayStation 4 last year, and we feared it would never make its way to our greener-grassed side of the fence, thanks to funding and co-development from Sony. But one sudden announcement later, and here we are. Yaughton is a village in England, blessed with bucolic charm, a splendid observatory, and a population obsessed with stargazing, as well as the usual concerns of country folk, such as extramarital affairs and escaping a flu epidemic. The year is 1984, it’s apparently June, and just after 6am something mysterious happens that causes everyone to vanish. You’re still there, though, along with some weird floating balls. You may well be a weird floating ball yourself, as…