Indice dei contenuti per May 2015 in PC & Tech Authority

The latest trends and products in the world of technology Today we can access blogs, tweets, photos and other files from anywhere, thanks to the cloud – but will we still be able to access them in the not too distant future? Vint Cerf, Google vice president and co-creator of the TCP/IP protocol, warned in The Guardian that as the programs needed to view certain file types fall out of use, data will become inaccessible to future generations. “When you think about the quantity of documentation from our daily lives that’s captured in digital form – such as our interactions via email, people’s tweets, and all of the world wide web – it’s clear that we stand to lose an awful lot of our history,” he told the newspaper. “If…

In issue 209 we inadvertently cut short some text from the Windows Annoyances feature on page 26. We apologise for this error. The complete text is below. My music library is full of files with names such as “albumart {e6043 a1c-bbeb-49c5-b3f0-5259b6312 c34} large.jpg” – how do I get rid of them? These are the thumbnail art files for your music tracks; they’re downloaded by Windows Media Player on all recent versions of Windows, and they’re usually hidden, so there isn’t normally a need to get rid of them. The bad news is that, at present, there’s no way to stop Windows Media Player from creating these files (disabling “Retrieve additional information from the internet” ought to do it, but doesn’t). Pending a new version of the software, the best course…

CPU TOM SKU REBRAND With the launch of its new Atom lineup Intel have taken the opportunity to simplify the model numbers a bit and bring them more into line with how their “Core” (i3, i5, i7) range of products are marketed. The Atom range will now also be segmented into 3 parts and will be branded as x3, x5 and x7 parts. This is more than just a rebranding though. It ushers in Cherry Trail, the 14nm shrink of Bay Trail (x5 and x7 parts) and merges Intel’s SoFIA products under the Atom brand name too (x3 parts). The Atom x3’s are Intel’s push into the cheap smart device market, specifically with Asia and India in mind. With dualcore 1GHz CPUs up to quad-core 1.4GHz CPUs paired with ARM…

How do online stores convince you to buy products that you really don’t need? Barry Collins exposes the secrets of the online retail industry We’re all wise to the tricks that bricks-and mortar stores use to tempt us to buy. Wafting the smell of freshly baked bread through the supermarket, knocking a penny off prices to make them appear a pound cheaper than they really are, and using bright lighting to make goods seem fresh and inviting. Less familiar, however, are the subtle – and sometimes not-so-subtle – techniques that are now used online to make us part with our credit card details. Online stores deploy all manner of psychological triggers to ensure that you don’t leave the site without putting a couple of items in your basket – the…

DEMAND THE DIFFERENCE IF THE PRICE DROPS Retailers such as Amazon might fiddle with the price of a product several times a day to ensure they’re never undercut by rivals. This means you can miss out on a discount in the time it takes for the product to be shipped, especially on expensive electronics. Remember that stores generally give you a 14-day cooling-off period to return goods bought from any online store, and Amazon in particular gives you 30 days to return unused items. Use this to your advantage: contact customer services and threaten to return the goods unless they refund the difference between what you paid and the new price. There’s a good chance the retailer will acquiesce, because they don’t want the hassle and expense of handling returns.…

At the end of last year, Microsoft unveiled its vision for the future of Windows: not only the desktop, but also on smartphones, tablets and other connected devices. Until now we’ve only been able to get a feel for Windows 10 on the desktop – what’s changed is that the next piece of the puzzle has been made available: Windows 10 for phones. Just like the desktop OS, the smartphone version is a Technical Preview, available to anyone with a compatible Windows Phone 8.1 handset who registers with the Windows Insider Programme. We’ve installed it on a Nokia Lumia 630, but you can also try it out on the compatible phones listed above. SO WHAT’S NEW? At first glance, you’d be forgiven for wondering what all the fuss is about.…

Another company known for impressive silent computing solutions is Fractal Design, whose bitumen-based audio-damping material may add weight to its cases, but boy does it work. The R5 is the latest in this popular series. Side by side with the P380, the cases are very similar. Both boast modular drive cases to make the most of space for either gamers, or those who really like a LOT of drives. There’s room for any combination of air and water-cooling you might wish for, all built into a sturdy body. What sets it apart, though, is what counts. It uses metal caddies for its drive bays, in a contrasting white that matches the included fans and expansion brackets, and it’s a bit shorter in height, though squatter by comparison, too. Overall, while…

Corsair has entered an SSD market that’s saturated with brands and models, with little to differentiate. Ever the image-proud company, Corsair is playing at the top end, with its new Neutron XT SSDs, up against the best Samsung, SanDisk and Intel have to offer. Raw speed is the target, and that’s borne out clearly by the choice of Phison S10 controller, which is a quad-core chip used so far only by Phison-branded drives, which are as good as invisible in the market. The memory is Toshiba A19nm, exactly the same as used in the budget OCZ drive opposite, and proving that the controller is everything when it comes to performance. Corsair claim 560MB/s read and 540MB/s write, which is at the upper limit of what is possible through SATA III.…

IBM farmed off its server brands to Lenovo last year, but thankfully it’s been business as usual in terms of quality. The ThinkStation P500 is evidence of this, rivalled only by the HP Z640 for tool-free access. The inside is littered with red flashes showing where to pull to release components, which slide out in a matter of seconds. Our review sample didn’t have the most impressive specifications, however. Its Xeon E5-1620 v3 is the bottom of the new Haswell Xeon E5 range, with a nominal clock speed of 3.5GHz, rising to only 3.6GHz in Turbo Boost. It’s a quadcore CPU, so Hyper-Threading provides only eight virtual cores, where the top systems offer 40. There is support for DDR4 memory, though, and there’s 16GB of 2,133MHz RAM included, spread across…

Intel’s Haswell-E chips are the company’s high-end, high-power CPUs for people that want absolutely the best performance. It should come as no surprise that they’re also the most expensive desktop chips that Intel manufactures. Haswell-E chips use the LGA2011-3 socket, which means you’ll have to buy a new X99 motherboard to use them. ARCHITECTURE Haswell-E chips use the same Haswell architecture internally, although there are some changes. For starters, these chips all use Hyper-Threading and they have six or eight cores, making them well suited to complicated multithreaded applications. Intel has also boosted Level 3 cache to 15MB or 20MB, again reducing the amount of time the chips have to access slow system RAM. While all other Intel chips use DDR3 RAM, Haswell-E chips use the newer DDR4 RAM instead.…

In 1989 a dedicated designer set a new benchmark for side scrolling platform games. Prince of Persia, created by a single programmer named Jordan Mechner. Using an animation technique known as rotoscoping – tracing over actual footage - Mechner brought a new level of realism to animations. Apotheon doesn’t follow Prince of Persia in terms of animation, but in style and spirit it is a direct descendant. Rather than going for realistic animation, Alientrap has instead opted for a much more stylistic approach, making the game look as though it is being played out on the side of a Greek vase. Solid, almost silhouetted characters that move in a manner akin to shadow puppets move and fight their way across an earthenware world, each area taking on a slightly different…

As well as revealing the inner details of your hardware, Speccy Professional can deliver insight into the state of your operating system too. Click to open the Operating System pane and you’ll be presented with a huge report, detailing your Windows Update settings, antivirus status, power profile and much more. Two entries are particularly revealing. Under Scheduler, you’ll find details of all the processes that have been set to run automatically at periodic intervals on your computer – these may include automatic updaters for installed applications, and nag screens that ask you to upgrade bundled software to the full edition. You can remove these items within the Windows Task Scheduler – indeed, you can audit them here too, but normally it’s a case of out of sight, out of mind.…

If the worst should happen, and your laptop, tablet or smartphone is stolen, it may not necessarily be lost for good. There are various utilities available that use a device’s geolocation capabilities to track it down: these include Apple’s “Find my device” service and Google’s Android Device Manager. A more integrated option is a software utility called Prey, which provides a single dashboard from which you can track Android, iOS, OS X, Windows and Linux devices. What’s more, since it doesn’t cost a penny, there’s no good reason not to give it a try. To set it up, simply visit preyproject.com, install the software and register each device in turn. Thereafter, if a device is subsequently stolen, simply flag it as such on the Prey website. After that, whenever the…

FEATURES + PANDA ANTIVIRUS PRO + ASHAMPOO WINOPTIMIZER + AUSLOGICS DISK DEFRAG PRO DRIVERS + ATI CATALYST + NVIDIA FORCEWARE HELP + DISCLAIMER + DAMAGED OR FAULTY DVDS + USING THIS DVD + INSTALLING SOFTWARE EDITORIAL + BURNING AN ISO IMAGE + PC&TA EDITORIALS TROUBLESHOOTING + SERIAL CODES + BLANK REGISTRATION WEBSITE + CAN’T FIND A FILE? + INSTALLATION ERROR WINDOWS CCLEANER + CLASSIC SHELL + CUTEPDF + DEFRAGGLER + FOXIT READER + GOOGLE DRIVE + GREENSHOT + APPLE ITUNES + LIBRE OFFICE + OPEN OFFICE + MALWAREBYTES’ A/M + SANDBOXIE + VLC MEDIA PLAYER + WIN PEN PACK + FLUX + 7ZIP MAC + ALFRED + BETTERTOUCHTOOLS + APPLE ITUNES + DROPBOX + FLUX + GOOGLE CHROME + MOZILLA FIREFOX + PLEX + SKYPE + TEAMVIEWER + VLC INTERNET…

How much? I can’t possibly have used that much!” These are words we often hear at the end of a month, when we reveal to our rural wireless-broadband subscribers the amount of bandwidth they’ve used. Here at Village Networks, we encourage our subscribers to conserve bandwidth. We explain that it’s a limited resource, and that our ability to provide equal access to all our subscribers relies on everyone’s adherence to the agreed allowances. A truth of ISP management is that the faster the connection, the more users will download. With 2Mbits/sec, it isn’t worth trying to watch anything from Netflix. With a 24Mbits/sec connection, you can watch two Netflix movies, over the same connection – and if you can, you will. So, as we’ve followed market forces and upped our…

● Our tests are performed by experienced reviewers in our Labs in accordance with strict benchtesting procedures ● Our brand new benchmarks have been tailor-made to reflect real-world computing needs ● We put tech through its paces – seriously. From processing power to battery life, from usability to screen brightness, our tests are exhaustive ● We will always offer an honest and unbiased opinion for every review THE TEAM... Digital Editor David Hollingworth E dhollingworth@nextmedia.com.au T @atomicmpc Senior Labs Editor Bennett Ring Advertising Manager Jo Ross E jross@nextmedia.com.au Art Director Tim Frawley E tfrawley@nextmedia.com.au CONTACT US... Call us (02) 9901 6100 E-mail us inbox@pcandtechauthority.com.au Facebook www.facebook.com/pcandtechauthority Twitter @pctechauthority…

In the lead up to the commencement of this year’s Formula 1 season, Epson announced that it had signed a multi-year sponsorship deal with the world champions of the sport, the Mercedes AMG Petronas team. As well as an undisclosed sum of sponsorship money, Epson will be providing the team with key products from Epson’s product range. Ian Cameron, General Manager of Brand and Communications at Epson told PCTA that Epson would be the, “…primary supplier of printers, projectors, scanners and wearables – pulse sensing and GPS watches, as well as our smart glasses.” We were invited to the Mercedes AMG Petronas pre-race breakfast, held in St Kilda during the week before the Melbourne race, where we had a chance to sit down and chat with current world champion Lewis…

Bluesmart This product answers one simple question: in a world of smartphones, smartwatches, smart bands, and a plethora of other smart devices: where can I find smart luggage? Bluesmart is a super-stylish, light, and ingenious carry-on suitcase for the modern traveller or tech head looking to show off that started life as the 11th most funded project of all time on Indiegogo, raising just over $1.9 million dollars from 7000 backers around the world. Bluesmart can be locked remotely via a Bluetooth connected iOS or Android device, provides alerts and will automatically lock if you drift too far away from your bag, and in the event that your bag is lost or stolen can utilise other Bluesmart owner’s devices to track down its location. If that’s not enough to solve…

Robert B Cialdini, author of Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, characterises “influence” as the cumulative effect of six factors. It’s striking how clearly these align with the triggers exploited by online retailers: websites play on our fears of scarcity, draw on social proof and appeal to authority. Influence ReciprocIty “They’ve been good to me, so I feel I owe them.” Commitment & consistency “I’ve said I’m interested – I can’t back out now.” Social proof “Friends say it’s fine; friends say it’s good.” Liking “These seem like nice guys – why not help them out?” Authority “The experts seem convinced, and they should know.” Scarcity “I don’t want to risk missing out.”…

A word or two on pricing, to kick things off. The last time we ran a CPU roundup I recieved a few letters from PC&TA readers pointing a few errors in our $ numbers. That they couldn’t . find the same CPU for sale at the same price that we’d published, being the issue. Most were kind, but one bloke was really angry because the difference was $4. Well, I can assuredly say with reasonable confidence that most if not all of the prices we have quoted will probably be wrong within a month! But I’m sure most of you won’t be surprised to hear that. CPU prices fluctuate like crazy. You won’t find any that stick by Intel or AMD’s RRP, or probably even find the same CPU at…

This basic All In One would suit social use and casual gaming, as well as serving in a SOHO environment running Office, or, would pass with flying colours as the veritable ‘kid’s homework machine’. Its specifications are basic, with no frills internally, or in useability features. As such, for the price, it’s an unremarkable but solid general purpose machine. Many corners have been cut to keep the price down. There is no volume control button or dial at all for the built-in speakers (leaving you to use Windows software controls), and brightness adjustment is via a single button that resets everything to darkest when pushed, with multiple taps needed to level it up as you cycle through the options, and no OSD to let you know if you’re a push…

To buy a set of gaming cans at the $60-80 price range usually means compromise. With the Siberia Raw Prism Steel Series has managed to defeat the big trade-o. s. They’re comfortable, and this is something you just never see at this price. Large earcups enclose even large ears without overlap, and the material is a soft mesh with soft foam underneath. Typically they’d be too small, with hard foam and sweat-inducing shiny plastic covers for this sort of money. Sound quality is acceptable. The sonic landscape is wide enough to make these good for gaming and music. There is some slight background hiss, but once the game or music starts it’s smothered anyway. There’s no boom for the mic, which is embedded into left cup, but in testing voice…

Antec’s always delivered remarkably good solutions for PC enthusiasts looking for quiet solutions to highpowered computing, and the new P380 is the latest in one of Antec’s flagship case families. While it is a classic of the P-series, it also takes a few interesting steps forward, however. The all-black interior is well finished and provides lots of room, especially alongside the versatile HDD caddies – there are eight of these tool-less, slide-in models, spread over three drive cages, which must be removed to make room for long video cards and powerful SLI setups. There are dust-filters, spacious room for cable-management, extra-cooling, and watercooling, all in a solid, well-built chassis that just exudes class and comfort for future upgrades. Interestingly, it seems Antec has joined the no-optical-drive movement, and have removed…

It’s easy to fall in love with the Apple Mac Pro’s dinky cylindrical chassis, which will sit happily next to your monitor without spoiling your working environment. Yet its attractive exterior hides a surprisingly powerful set of components: it can be specified up to a 12-core Intel Xeon processor, 64GB of RAM, 1TB of flash storage and dual graphics cards. Our sample was the midrange eight-core model, using an Intel Xeon E5-1680 v2, offering 16 virtual cores. The native clock speed is 3GHz, and with a top Turbo Boost frequency of 3.9GHz, it’s good for raw speed as well as parallel processing. It’s from the Ivy Bridge era, so it supports only DDR3 rather than the latest DDR4 memory, but Apple has supplied 32GB of fast 1,866MHz DIMMs. These occupy…

HP’s Z640 is the second most expensive workstation on test this month, and in many areas the most highly specified. Sporting a pair of Intel Xeon E5-2667 v3 processors, it offers 32 virtual cores with Hyper-Threading enabled, second only to the Dell Precision T7810 and the Workstation Specialists RS-D render node. HP’s processors are faster, though, with a nominal frequency of 3.2GHz, boosting to 3.6GHz in Turbo Boost. Since the Xeon is from the latest Haswell generation, it supports DDR4 memory, and HP has installed 64GB of 2,133MHz DIMMs. Surprisingly, the manufacturer hasn’t opted for a top-of-the-range graphics card: the PNY Quadro K4200 is no slouch, but a K5200 would have been a better match for the rest of the specification. Although PCI Express solid-state storage is an option for…

The AM1 range contains AMD’s super-budget processors, designed for low-cost computers that are capable of simple tasks. Prices really are low: even the top-end Athlon 5350 costs just $80. All the chips draw incredibly low amounts of power, and are rated at just 25W TDP. That’s a fraction of the power required by the high-end AM3+ chip. AMD has abandoned its usual cooler mount, creating a new one for AM1. The tiny chips don’t need as much cooling, and the new design means it’s possible to make smaller motherboards for smaller computers. We’re not overly impressed with the new cooler’s design, though. It uses just two clips diagonally opposite each other; they don’t make the cooler feel as secure as Intel coolers do, which use four clips. The instructions don’t…

Speccy Professional isn’t only for examining your PC in-place: it’s also useful to save or share system information – for example, if you’re selling a PC, seeking technical support or auditing PCs. Select “File | Save Snapshot…” and enter a filename to save a speccy file another user can inspect on their own PC using either Speccy Professional or the basic free Speccy package. If you prefer, you can share a snapshot of your system configuration with a friend or colleague directly over the web, by selecting “File | Publish Snapshot…”. This will generate a report and host it for you at speccy.piriform.com, from where you can simply share the URL. There’s no privacy protection here – anyone with the address can see the details of your PC – but…

WHAT DOES YOUR JOB INVOLVE? I’m a senior support engineer at an IT support consultancy called Microbyte. We work with a variety of small- and medium-sized businesses. I handle daily support requests from these companies; my jobs might range from sorting out printing issues to setting up Wi-Fiand internet access, as well as more complicated tasks such as configuring guest networks, provisioning broadband lines and VoIP services, and even building new servers and migrating data across from older systems. WHAT DOES A TYPICAL DAY LOOK LIKE? The first thing I do when I get into the office is look at my tasks for the day: we use a bespoke call-management system to assign tasks to specific engineers. We have a chap in-house who develops and does all the programming for…

Rumour has it that Google gave Project Loon its name because it’s such a loony idea, but trials have suggested it may just work. Project Loon sends a network of 15m-tall polyethylene balloons – more like weather balloons than those you’d find at a birthday party – up to the edge of space. There, they move around by rising or lowering in the wind, and provide an LTE signal to users below. People can connect directly to the helium-filled balloons via any LTE device, with the signal routed via a 10kg box that sits at the bottom of the balloon, housing the necessary circuitry, antennae and solarrecharged batteries. Loon was first piloted in New Zealand in June 2013, and has since seen successful trials in California and Brazil. It may…

Here are some words I wasn’t expecting to type any time soon: I’m genuinely excited by the Windows 10 announcements. There, I’ve said it. I’d been excited by Windows before - excited enough by Windows 3 to jack in my full-time job and launch my own firm specialising in supporting it. Windows NT was a joyous thing too, and NT4 was a positive delight. In the business arena, Windows XP was strong and became well understood, controlled and deployed. I didn’t particularly like Windows 7, but its 64-bit version was certainly a solid update to XP. I didn’t enthuse about it simply because it didn’t move anything forward in a meaningful way. The rest have been disappointing, verging on garbage (let’s not talk about versions 8 and 8.1, whose limitations…

The Internet of Things (IoT) has opened up a new can of insecure worms, a subject I’ve commented on before. The usual response is that the threat of devices such as smart power meters becoming vulnerable to back-door attacks – or clever heating thermostats being ramped up to create National Grid havoc – is merely alarmism, a kind of science fiction. However, the fact is that there have already been real cases of baby monitors being hacked into for spying purposes, and connected cars becoming liable to interference by remote hackers. Tim Rains, Microsoft’s director of cybersecurity and cloud strategy, has stated that, “some of these devices lack basic security capabilities, while others have security capabilities but they’re inappropriate for all the scenarios that the device can be used in.”…

Is a CEO with a background in technology and supply chain the key to driving disruption from the top down in a retail setting? Myer hopes so. The retail giant surprised many this week when it revealed Bernie Brooks would immediately step down as CEO and managing director, replaced by CIO and supply chain officer, Richard Umbers. The company couched the CEO change in no uncertain terms: they wanted someone to oversee a complex, multi-year transformation project that would reshape Myer “for a profitable, sustainable future”. “It has become clear that to thrive in a modern retail environment, Myer must adapt more quickly and be closer to its customers,” chairman Paul McClintock AO said. “A transformation project of the scale required to achieve the Board’s vision will take a number…

LETTER OF THE MONTH MORE DESKTOPS! Good to see some reader inspired change to the mag. However there still not much on desktops and again plenty of individual component reviews have been done (especially SSDs). I acknowledge the comment you sent some months ago in regards to vendors tweaking systems regularly. But surely a line can be drawn somewhere and a review of some good dektops can just occur. Like any piece of tech it will surely become outdated. However people will have to buy at some point otherwise they will never purchase anything because of always waiting for the next “big thing”. I now can’t easily recall when the last time a full desktop system was reviewed outside of Kitlog. Please find a couple of good systems that can…

HOT NVIDIA TITAN X Yes, it’s super -premium and quite expensive, but Nvidia’s new single-GPU monster reminds us of the good old days when a 30-40% jump in performance for a new generation wasn’t uncommon. Having all this oomph in a single GPU makes 4k feasible, and without the headaches of SLI or Crossfire. NOT AMD DRIVER SUPPORT Four long months between graphics driver updates, while Nvidia has been churning them out regularly to support all the important new games. Four months, and all we get is a beta driver that supports just six new games, including Project Cars which isn’t even out until May. Not good enough AMD.…

Customer data can be an incredibly powerful tool for online stores seeking to maximise sales. Amazon is now so confident in its ability to predict customer behaviour from data that it’s filed a patent for delivering items to customers before they’ve even ordered them. Dubbed “Speculative Shipping”, the idea is to minimise the frustration of postage delays and reduce the amount of time stock spends sitting in Amazon’s warehouses. Let’s say, for example, that you’ve pre-ordered the past three Call of Duty games from Amazon. Based on that history, the company can make a good guess that you’re likely to be interested in the next episode, and which console you’ll want it for. If you’ve looked at the page for the forthcoming release six times in the past fortnight, that’s…

FIGHT BACK Are you sitting comfortably? Then you should probably get up and walk around a bit. Scare stories that draw a parallel between the ill effects of sitting and smoking may be overstating the case a little, but not by as much as you’d think. After all, while you can give up tobacco, it’s a lot tougher to renounce your workstation or find the e-cigarette equivalent of a chaise longue. Since most modern jobs involve hours of sitting down, the obvious questions are: what’s causing the damage? And what can you do about it? One problem is what researchers call non exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT). The more you sit, the lower your NEAT, the fewer calories you burn: 1.36 calories per minute fewer, according to studies. According to Dr…

2D TESTS We test desktop PCs, netbooks and laptops with our own, custom-built, 2011 Real World Benchmarks. We split the results into three categories: Responsiveness, Media and Multitasking, with the Overall score an average of the three sub-scores. For instance, responsiveness replicates light browser and productivity workloads. The Media test involves running iTunes for audio conversion, Photoshop CS5 to crunch large images and Sony Vegas 10 to edit home video. This then gets run simultaneously alongside Cinebench 11 in order to get a handle on the multitasking ability of the system. BENCHMARKS 3.4GHz Intel Core i7-2600K, 4GB DDR3 = 1 3D TESTS We use pre-recorded demos in Crysis and DIRT 3 to test gaming performance where relevant. We have three standard test settings, depending on the power of the graphics…

This is the most powerful NUC that’s been through the Labs, and its $799 price reflects the components and features included in this little gem. The included CPU is an i7 5500u (which is not upgradeable as it’s soldered to the motherboard as part of the standard NUC design), with a base frequency of 2.4GHz and Turbo of 3GHz. As is the way with NUCs (all Gigabyte NUC’s are branded ‘Brix’), you will need to add a drive (2.5-inch SATA HDD or mSATA SSD), which will of course also need an OS, as well as RAM (SO-DIMM DDR3L). Considering that the current cost of a 4GB DDR3L SODIMM is around $50 (PC Case Gear, Kingston KVR16LS11/8), or $99 for 8GB, and a 1TB 2.5-inch HDD can be had for less…

AMD’s R9 290X has been around long enough to see some quality cooling systems and bespoke designs tame the heat and noise of the early reference design. With 290X cards now around $200 cheaper than Nvidia’s GTX 980 cards, and offering almost identical performance (slightly better in some games, slightly worse in others), it’s a very good choice for gamers. Sapphire has always impressed us with its Vapor-X cooling, and the company has been an AMD-only maker for many years, and the expertise shows. It’s very quiet and very effective. The 4GB version (the company also offers an 8GB model) runs AMD default speeds (1030MHz core, 5300MHz memory), but you can realistically expect 10-20% overclocking headroom should you want to push for it, or, Sapphire also have a factory OC…

The OCZ ARC 100 is one of the cheapest SSDs you can buy, generally matching Crucial’s MX100 for cost by capacity. It sports quality hardware, running parent company Toshiba’s A19nm MLC flash (also utilised by the premium Corsair opposite). The Barefoot 3 M10 controller isn’t the fastest or the newest, but is certainly good enough to deliver a claimed 480MB/s write and 430MB/s read. Your results will vary, as SSD performance is very much a. ected by the SATA controller on your motherboard. We tested this drive on an AMD system with the newer A75 chipset and recorded 420MB/s write and 386MB/s read. Those are certainly respectable numbers and at the cheap end of town for SSDs it all represents a good value drive. The SSD market is now totally…

In order to give the broadest possible workstation advice, we’ve used a wide variety of software for testing. Our Real World Benchmarks suite assesses the general speed at which the system runs Windows, how good it is at running more than one application simultaneously, and how it runs a selection of common media tasks including video and 3D rendering. In addition to this, we run tests specifically aimed at higher-end workstation activities. To test 3D modelling, we use SPECviewperf 12, which runs a number of tests representing graphics content and real-world behaviour from a number of popular 3D, engineering and medical applications. Maxon Cinebench R15 contains another OpenGL modelling test, alongside a highly multithreaded 3D-rendering test, which benefits greatly from multiple processor cores. We also test GPUaccelerated 3D rendering with…

The Dell Precision T7810 on test this month is configured primarily for use with engineering software, rather than for content creation. As such, it uses a pair of ten-core Xeon E5-2650 v3 processors, which major on core count rather than frequency: they run at a nominal 2.3GHz, hitting 3GHz in Turbo Boost, but Hyper-Threading yields an enormous 40 virtual cores for parallel-processing tasks. Dell compensates for the low clock speed by including an Nvidia Quadro K5200. With 8GB of 6GHz GDDR5 memory and 2,304 CUDA cores – 960 more than the K4200 – this is a hugely powerful GPU. The Xeon processor also supports DDR4 memory, and Dell has equipped the T7810 with 32GB of the 2,133MHz variety. The four 8GB DIMMs leave four slots free. Dell takes the usual…

In some me areas of the computing world, PCs have become capable enough for most things we want to do with them. But the professional user remains hungry for powerful new technology that will enable more complex work, quicker production times, and the opportunity to realise ever more sophisticated creative ideas in the shortest time possible. The broad selection of machines in this month’s Labs is ample evidence that this sector of the PC market is in rude health. At one end of the spectrum we have the Apple Mac Pro, which packs a huge amount of power into an unfeasibly small and delectably shaped package. At the other, we have the overbuilt chassis of the HP Z640. And where the market for consumer desktop PCs is in the doldrums,…

One of the issues with Intel’s Haswell processors was that they weren’t that much faster than the previous generation. However, the company has looked to fix that with its Devil’s Canyon line of CPUs. ARCHITECTURE Although the internal architecture of Devil’s Canyon CPUs remains the same as it is for Haswell chips, Intel has used a new thermal interface material. This reduces the heat of the CPU, increasing how far the clock speed can be pushed. This is particularly important for the ‘K’ variety of the chips: when we tested the Core i7-4790K, we managed to push it to 4.7GHz using the stock Intel cooler. Turbo Boost technology lets the processor over clock itself when there’s enough thermal headroom; with Devil’s Canyon, the chips can boost higher for longer. DEVIL’S…

Here’s how to annoy rural Aussies: give Martians faster broadband access. Elon Musk, the forward-looking mastermind behind SpaceX and Tesla electric cars, wants to build a satellite internet system that could reach Mars – and he has competition from Richard Branson’s Virgin Media. The idea may sound crazy, but broadband networks have taken to the skies of late, with Google testing connectivity via weather balloons and, along with Facebook, investing in internet-delivering drones (see Broadband by balloon, opposite). Here’s how the new breed of satellites will deliver broadband from space. IMPROVING SATELLITE INTERNET Satellite internet already exists, but Musk’s proposed system is different: it would use thousands of micro-satellites, which is around ten times as many satellites as Iridium’s network – currently the largest in the world. Each of Musk’s…

Facebook is turning to drones to deliver internet around the world – but these won’t be toy-like devices. Facebook expects them to be the size of 747s and fly for years at a time. Like Google’s Project Loon balloons (see Broadband by balloon, right), they’ll take to the air above commercial aircraft and weather. Yael Maguire, engineering director at Facebook’s Connectivity Lab, told a Mashable conference that the company hopes to test its internet drones in the US this year, but it’s also looking at other countries. To help it achieve that, Facebook last year bought Ascenta, a British firm that holds the record for the longest-flying solar-powered drone. It expects to have the planes delivering internet connectivity within three to five years. Facebook isn’t the only company looking at…

I’m going to start this month’s column with a plea from reader Andy Young, who writes: “I’ll soon be upgrading my laptop, but one of the things I always dread when I get a new PC is moving across all of my data and software from the old machine to the new one. Are there any products available that actually work for this?” Well, there are a few bits of software on the market that claim to migrate both your data and software from one machine to another, and I’ve tried a fair few of them over the years with varying degrees of success, often experiencing niggling doubts about how (or, indeed, whether) they actually work. Copying documents, music, photo and video files isn’t problematic, but it’s usually email archives…

And so to Cambridge, the hoar frost fresh upon the withies beside the track from Liverpool Street station. There’s something about visiting an 800-year-old institution by train that makes me think of powdered wigs, clay pipes and quill pens, and while I realise that’s a heap of anachronisms bundled into a foggy overview, that’s actually my point. Eight-hundred years of deep thinking is the hallmark of a federated mass of colleges, and their approach to information technology can’t remain immune to this effect. So how was it that a single professor’s presentation led me from high-performance computing (HPC), InfiniBand and gamers’ graphics cards, right through to the pathos and high drama of sick children, family breakup and ruined lives? This trip to Cambridge was all about supercomputers. Back in the…

“Poor Samsung. In mid-February, its name was at the front and centre of news reports across TV, the internet and papers, with screaming headlines such as the BBC’s “Not in front of the telly: Warning over ‘ listening’ TV”. The news that smart TVs might be monitoring what you say should come as no surprise. After all, if a device offers the capability for voice recognition and voice control, what do you expect? I guess most people would assume that the technology for this was embedded within the TV itself. But voice recognition works best when it has huge datasets to work with, and that means comparing your words with those of other people, which means running a cloud service where all the data can be compared. The real disaster,…