APCの September 2019 の目次

A study commissioned by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has revealed that several ISP-supplied modems are incapable of handling 100Mbps speeds on a fibre-to-the-node/building(FTTN/FTTB) connection. The study has also found that several of these modems have poor Wi-Fi performance, further lowering the average download speeds the end user can expect. 43 modems from 11 manufacturers and 10 ISPs were tested in laboratory conditions during December and January and not one was able to deliver 100Mbps download speeds over a 450m copper stretch (the average length of copper on an FTTN connection). Most devices could only deliver 80% of the advertised speed. In terms of Wi-Fi performance, 30% of the modems were unable to achieve 100Mbps on 2.4GHz over a range of 5m, which is unexpected as 2.4GHz is…

All the buzz around 5G makes it seem like the next must-have technology. However, because it requires a new phone and a top-tier unlimited plan, it can be hard to know when it makes sense to make the jump to 5G. While 5G still isn’t ready for everyone, there are some people that will benefit from everything on offer. 5G is in its early stages, but there are still some advantages to getting in on it now. You live in a covered city So take advantage. This is the biggest “if” when it comes to 5G. If you live in an area that currently has or will very soon have 5G coverage then you will be all set to receive every benefit. While connected to 5G, data will be faster…

Conversations around digital goods, and whether consumers “own” the digital products they purchase or not, have been raging for years. But in 2019 they’re especially pertinent, with the growing encroachment of cloud-everything occurring alongside the steady decline of physical distribution. There are few areas where this shift is felt more than in video games. When Telltale Games shut down in 2018 a big question mark hovered over the future of their serialised, narrative driven games, in particular The Walking Dead, Minecraft Story Mode and Tales of the Borderlands (among others). The fate of each has varied. For example, The Walking Dead was wrapped up by Skybound Games, rather than Telltale, and is still available to purchase digitally. By contrast, Minecraft Story Mode has had a curious and alarming fate. Minecraft…

The last Razer Blade Pro launched back in 2017 so this year’s update is a big step forward. The new Blade Pro 17 jumps from a 7th generation Intel Core i7 CPU to a 9th generation i7-9750H, which boosts the computer’s raw CPU performance by between 18 and 24%. This translates to a slightly more conservative improvement of between five and 18 percent in general home and work tasks, bit it’s still enough to justify the upgrade. “Since it’s not powerful enough to fully utilise the fast screen we wouldn’t recommend the entry level $4,299 Blade Pro 17” The GPU saw a similar generational jump with the predecessor’s Nvidia GTX 1060 and 1080 GPUs being replaced by RTX 2060, 2070 or 2080 (Max-Q) cards. Since we tested the 2017 Blade…

Seagate is better known for its hard drive range, but the industry is increasingly transitioning over to solid state. Can it take on the likes of Samsung and Western Digital in performance and price? The Barracuda 510 512GB is a typical NVMe M.2 2280 (80mm) drive with a PCIe 3.0 x4 interface. It won’t be winning any beauty contests thanks to its blue PCB and unattractive text crammed onto its white sticker. Looks aside though, it has a decent set of specifications. Sequential performance looks good with 3400 MB/s read and 2180 MB/s write speeds. An endurance rating of 320 terabytes written is also decent for a mid-range drive. Seagate’s Seatools app is a good piece of software, which along with its DiscWizard cloning and migration app is among the…

Despite the rather huge size of this, Asus’ gargantuan gaming router only has four Gigabit Ethernet ports though there is a 2.5Gbps W/LAN port to complement the primary WAN. The main features lie inside and a quick glance at the browser-based Dash Board is instructive. The homepage displays the all the main statuses plus live graphs showing network traffic, average network pings, ping deviation(!), global game server pings plus Aura RGB lighting effects for the top logo and settings that configure a programmable button on the chassis. This is in addition to 21 other submenus. Automated port forwarding is an impressive gaming feature. Rather than researching your favourite game’s ports and fiddling with IP addresses, the Rapture shows you a picture of the game, lets you choose which platform(s) you’re…

Thanks to their range and performance, AX routers have been destroying the mesh Wi-Fi market so our first thought was, “What’s the point of having AX-based mesh Wi-Fi?” Could this be more Asus overkill? It didn’t take us long to find out what the fuss was about. We’ve been testing Wi-Fi equipment in various Sydney premises for a long time. In recent years, testing has distilled into running Ookla’s Speedtest over WLANs because it provided the simplest, most relatable and most reliable method of comparing relative networking performance across devices. Throughout this time, however, our primary home PC has been sat, two floors up, connected via powerline adapters because the resident gamers could not rely upon the best wireless devices to beam a robust-enough gaming signal up two flights of…

The Oculus Rift S should represent the next leap forward for the company’s high-end, PC-based virtual reality experiences. But in practice, this is more of a baby-step – the Oculus Rift S is not a true “Oculus Rift 2” successor. First, the fit. Whereas the Rift (and Quest) used a thin rubbery strap that went over your crown and around the back of your head to two firmer points over your ears, the Rift S adds a padded plastic curved mould where your forehead and base of the skull are. There’s still a velcro strap for positioning the headset, but it’s now primarily tightened by a dial on the back headrest. It’s comfortable enough, though it in fact feels heavier than the original Rift in terms of its frontal weight…

$2.99 | CHROMANOIR.COM | NEEDS IOS 11 OR LATER (AUTO SCENE DETECTION REQUIRES IOS 12) Spectre Camera enables you to create images with light trails, dreamy-looking water or shots which appear to have no people or traffic in them. Rather than your iPhone’s camera running a single exposure for a long time, it shoots hundreds of exposures for your chosen time, then blends them. You just compose your frame, press the shutter and let it go to work. You can cycle through shutter speeds, and the on-screen stabiliser uses a device’s accelerometer to let you know when the camera’s stable enough to get going. Our test images were adequately (rather than extremely) sharp – fine for online sharing or small-scale printing. The app also records the entire process and saves it…

$629 | WWW.AMD.COM The RX 5700 XT makes use of the full Navi GPU. Its 2,560 processors are clearly a massive efficiency step forward compared to the much higher shader count of the aging Vega architecture. The card makes use of a stylish blower style cooler, but again we feel it’s a bit too loud for our liking and we’d rather wait for the partner cards which should be cooler and quieter. The 5700 XT comes with a standard set of outputs, consisting of three DP 1.4 and a HDMI 2.0b port. Given how much AMD talked about its power efficiency gains, we wish it could have kept this card under 200W. It certainly would have helped keep temperatures under control as our sample went up to into the 80s…

“Topping the range are the Ryzen 93900X and 3950X. These models pack 12 and 16 cores into a very respectable 105WTDP.” Back when first generation Ryzen CPUs launched, we lauded their newfound competitiveness, particularly under highly threaded workloads. Power efficiency was also strong, but it lacked that bit of single-threaded performance that kept Intel in the overall lead. 2nd generation Ryzen closed that gap, but only a tiny bit. Now we have 3rd generation Ryzen. It’s just as important for AMD and the market as the first generation was. If the first generation was laying a foundation, then third generation is more like the culmination. Straight up, Ryzen 3 is the real deal and it brings AMD to a level of competitiveness not seen since the Athlon 64 glory days.…

$649 | WWW.ASUS.COM In years past, a ROG Hero board would have been positioned as one of the value ROG offerings. The fact that this is a $649 board goes to show how expensive X570 models can really be. Perhaps we’ll see an even more expensive Crosshair Extreme or Apex board down the line? You’d expect such a board to have a comprehensive feature list, and it does. 8 pin and 4 pin power connectors feed a 16 phase VRM, with each MOSFET being rated to handle 60 amps. Overclockers wanting to shove hundreds of watts through the CPU won’t face any issue here, though all the boards shown here also have strong VRM solutions. The Crosshair VII Hero had beefy heat sinks but those on the VIII have even…

The next generation of AMD Ryzen CPUs is here, pairing Zen 2 architecture with PCI Express 4.0 connectivity across multiple models that are based on the ASUS X570 chipset. This is the first desktop chipset to give you PCI Express 4.0 connectivity, granting you greatly expanded throughput – an extraordinary 2GB per lane! These motherboards are designed for the future – you’ll be prepared for any SSDs, graphics cards, and other peripherals you might want to plug into down the track. Here’s our rundown of ASUS’ X570 range. THE REPUBLIC OF GAMERS CROSSHAIR SERIES The Crosshair VIII boards are designed for the serious overclocker and the gamer who wants to eek every bit of power from their system. These boards will push your PC to the next level, and future-proof…

$205 ($175 WITHOUT DEMO MODULES) | WWW.AORUS.COM Gigabyte made a surprising push into the DRAM market in mid-2018 with its Aorus branded modules. What sets these apart is that a standard dual channel kit comes with optional dummy modules, which are perfect for making it look like your system is fully decked out with four. The simply named Aorus RGB memory comes with 16-16-16-38 2T timings, where the TRAS of 38 is a little higher than some of the other competing kits. We found that the Aorus memory was the weakest performing kit in the test and sometimes by some margin. The reason for this is several notably slower XMP sub timings. While this makes the kit widely compatible, it does have some performance impact, which is revealed in several…

$329 | WWW.HYPERXGAMING.COM Kingston’s HyperX Predator is the second of two 3200MHz 32GB kits in our roundup. A 2x16GB kit is perfect for demanding users or those limited to two memory slots such as you’d find on an ITX motherboard. Its primary timings are 16-18-18-36 at 1.35v. The Kingston HyperX Predator is a non RGB kit. While it’s perfectly suitable for a gamer thanks to its inherent double rank performance advantage (albeit a small one) its lack of RGB means it probably won’t find its way into a blinged up system. That will suit many people just fine. The Hyper X kit shares quite a lot in common with the Crucial kit. In fact other than a few secondary sub-timings, the entire list of timings we could read were identical.…

$169 | WWW.TEAMGROUPINC.COM Take one look at Team’s Night Hawk memory. It’s definitely got the most extravagant design of all the kits in the roundup. If you’re after something eye catching, it’s one that you’ll want to strongly consider. The Team Night Hawk RGB memory has impeccable build quality. It just feels solid, weighty and well made. The white heat sink of our test kit extends well beyond the top of the modules so this will be something to keep in mind of you’re planning to use a large air cooler. We can’t imagine you’d be doing that though. This is a show off kit for a water-cooled build! It’s also got an interesting default RGB effect with a fast pulse to go along with rotating colors. The Night Hawk…

SELECT TEXT QUICKLY Double-click a word once to select it, or triple-click to select an entire paragraph. In Word, hold Ctrl as you click to select the sentence. Hold down Alt and click and drag to select a block of text. SUPER-SMART SELECTIONS There’s a handy option under Editing on Word’s Home tab called Select – click this and you’ll see an option to ‘Select Text with Similar Formatting’, which enables you to quickly select all text with the same style as the current selection. The feature isn’t available in LibreOffice Writer, but it is available when editing documents online in Google Docs – position your cursor, right-click and choose ‘Select all matching text’, which produces matches based on font, style and colour as well as styles. INCLUDE MISSPELLED WORDS…

“Stuart has made this project a relatively classic design, going for an elegant and classy look that is both high mod art, and a practical, powerful PC that could be used daily.” To celebrate the release of its WD Black SN750 NVMe M.2 SSD, Western Digital commissioned Australia’s most highly regarded professional modder Stuart Tonks to create a very special one-off PC that looked incredible and had the gaming chops to match its high-end components. Stuart has earned a reputation as one of the world’s best modders, having exhibited his work in many countries, winning many awards. His professional approach has helped elevate modding into the mature art form it is today. Through the following pages you can see how Stuart created the PC and realised his creative vision. We…

KEY COMPONENTS 1 Before we cover the completed build, let’s check out some of the jaw-dropping hardware used. As mentioned early, I wanted to create a small system that was also relatively quiet when running. But that wasn’t all, I also wanted the system to pack a punch. So, inside it has Intel’s latest 9th-gen i5 9600K processor, a Zotac RTX 2070 video card, a top of the line Asrock ITX motherboard and of course the WD Black 1TB SN750 NVMe SSD all has us off to a good start for a PC that can play any modern game as well as be a highly capable general-purpose machine. The star of the show and the whole reason for this build is the beautiful WD Black SN750 NVMe SSD. Not only…

The build for this month is laser-focused on performance. We barely looked at the price tag during its construction, and didn’t pay much heed to it when we did add it all up. We did, of course, have a pretty good idea what the best value components were, and what sort of ballpark we were going to end up playing in, but on the whole, money wasn’t a factor. No, this machine was all about one thing: performance. “We barely looked at the price tag during its construction, and didn’t pay much heed to it when we did add it all up.” Specifically, we wanted to build a machine that wouldn’t be constrained by bottlenecks. From the off, we wanted to give the Asus GeForce RTX 2080 Ti ROG Strix…

There’s no doubt about it – 1980s’ tech is having a moment. Hipsters are apparently (re) discovering the compact cassette and many are reliving the era of microcomputers and gaming consoles from the ‘80s, thanks to big-brands and start-ups alike. Nintendo got the ball rolling with the Classic Mini NES and SNES consoles, Sony’s had a lash with the PlayStation Classic, not to mention the rash of Atari Flashback consoles. Then there’s the C64 Mini, a mostly-useable shrink of the venerable Commodore 64 that even comes with Commodore BASIC to code your own apps. However, if you’re feeling the urge to either relive childhood memories or just see what all the fuss is about, there’s an alternative that’s a fraction of the cost and is as close as your Android…

We’ve said a few times that machine-learning is the intersection of mathematics, statistics and computer science. However, it’s fair to say that for some, these three areas are sufficient kryptonite to stay well away from the whole thing – and that’s a pity because ML can be successfully applied to many different fields. But if you’ve decided coding isn’t your thing, it doesn’t have to mean giving machine learning a wide berth. This month, we look at a programming-free way to implement machine learning techniques and how it can be used in email spam detection. WAIKATO ENVIRONMENT FOR KNOWLEDGE ANALYSIS While much of machine learning does rely on having good coding skills (particularly Python or R), there is an alternative developed by the University of Waikato in New Zealand called…

$25 | PC, PS4 | WWW.NOCODESTUDIO.COM The space station Observation has broken away from its Earth orbit and is drifting somewhere near Saturn. Its systems are malfunctioning, a fire has broken out, and the on-board artificial intelligence, SAM, is acting strangely. Things are not looking good for Dr Emma Fisher, the reluctant hero of this sci-fi thriller from the studio behind Stories Untold. But what’s interesting about Observation is that you don’t play as Fisher, but SAM. The station is an extension of you, and its cameras are your eyes and ears. You can, when asked, open doors, cycle airlocks, assess damage, and all manner of functional duties. But something seems to have awoken in you. A flicker of self-awareness, perhaps. And an ominous command from an unknown party has…

$36 | PC, MAC, XB1 | WWW.VOIDBASTARDS.COM Void Bastards is described as a strategy shooter inspired by System Shock 2 and BioShock, and it features the talents of some former Irrational staff who previously made 2013’s Card Hunter. You are a prisoner, travelling across the galaxy to fulfil the whims of an HR computer that might eventually grant you your freedom. You get across the map with an FTL-style interface, and while most locations are enemy spaceships that you can board, loot and escape, there are also stores, asteroid ranges and deadly hazards to be aware of. Mostly, though, your time is spent navigating ships in first-person, looking for specific items to progress, then escaping before you’re killed. While there is a stealth element to Void Bastards and you do…

Smartphone operating systems have ramped up their privacy settings in recent years to let users pick and choose what information apps can get, but it seems those permissions aren’t ironclad. A new study revealed that over 1,300 Android apps can scrape certain personal data anyway, even if a user explicitly denied access to it. Researchers at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) created a controlled environment to test 88,000 apps downloaded from the US Google Play Store. They peeked at what data the apps were sending back, compared it to what users were permitting, and found that 1,325 of them were forking over specific user data they shouldn’t have. Among the test pool were “popular apps from all categories,” according to ICSI’s report. The researchers disclosed their findings to both…

SMACH Z Portable PC Gaming: the perfect Smach. FROM $999 | WWW.SMACHZ.COM The Smach Z is a Switch-like handheld console that claims to be powerful enough to play any game you can buy from the major PC game stores. While its initial crowdfunding campaign was way back in 2016 the Smach Z is now finally ready to launch. Whether it’s Dark Souls 3 or the Witcher 3, the team behind this Kickstarter reckon the Smach’s AMD Ryzen Embedded V1000 chip is powerful enough to run them at 40+fps on medium 720p settings. In fact the company claims it can play any game available in the major PC game stores. Not a bad proposition for gaming on-the-go. SONY WF-1000XM3 Sony’s latest true-wireless buds take on the sound around you. $399 |…

There’s plenty to choose from right now in the world of gaming GPUs. With Nvidia recently releasing the GeForce GTX 1660 series, choosing a card for 1080p gaming is a challenge. So, we have nailed down the three best 1080p cards currently available – the new GTX 1660 6GB, the older GTX 1060 6GB, and AMD’s Radeon RX 590 8GB – and we’re going to break down their pros and cons. Round 1 VALUE At a first cursory glance, the GeForce GTX 1060 is the victor here. It’s the cheapest card of the three, after all, costing $370 on average, although the Radeon RX 590, at around $390, is extremely close. Looking at price-per-gigabyte, the RX 590 beats out both the other cards, packing 8GB of GDDR5 memory against the…

Gigabyte’s Aero 15 XA is the first laptop we’ve seen to utilise an AMOLED screen and while our expectations were high, the 15.6-inch 4K display is somehow even better than we could have imagined. Whether you’re in the depths of a Metro: Exodus tunnel or floating above the Total War: Warhammer 2 campaign table it’s hard not to be impressed by the distinct vibrancy of this Xrite Pantone-certified colour calibrated AMOLED screen. One of the coolest things about OLED for gaming is the extremely low (sub 1ms) latency. Unfortunately, the Aero 15 XA OLED display only runs at 60Hz, so anyone needing an ultrafast competitive screen will have to look elsewhere. While it would have been nice to see a faster panel, even if you get the Aero 15 YA…

While the Barracuda is aimed at mainstream users, the higher end Firecuda is aimed at enthusiasts and gamers. It comes with some seriously competitive specs. Can it compete on price though? The Firecuda 510 1TB is of course an NVMe M.2 2280 (80mm) PCIe 3.0 x4 drive. It still has the rather unattractive blue PCB, though at least the sticker isn’t covered in text so it’ll blend in a little better. Its specifications are in line with other top drives. Sequential performance is pretty much at the max of the PCIe 3.0 x 4 interface at 3,450 MB/s read and 3,200 MB/s write speeds. IOPS are rated at over 620k and 600k read & write while the endurance rating goes up to 1,300 TBW. That’s a very good number indeed…

Ever one for classy designs, Oppo’s latest handset is truly stunning. The Reno 5G sports an iridescent, yet predominantly matte finish on its rear – a welcome aesthetic and tactile change to all the high-gloss that arrived on flagship phones with the introduction of glass bodies. A clever addition to the phone’s back is a small bump (dubbed the ‘O-Dot’) that effectively raises your phone from a flat surface to avoid damaging the cameras and sensors that are flush with the handset’s rear. Flip the phone over and you’ll immediately notice how dazzling the display is as well. Measuring 6.6-inches and fitting in an impressive 2,340 x 1,080 pixels, this AMOLED wonder offers plenty of vivid colours and detail. While there is a tiny bezel that surrounds all four edges…

If you’ve made the decision to build a new system around a Ryzen 3rd gen CPU, you could go with an existing chipset thanks to backwards compatibility, or you could jump up to what are clearly some of the most advanced and feature packed motherboards ever created. PCI Express 4.0 might be the headline grabbing feature, but that’s far from all X570 boards bring to the table. This is a platform that’s premium in pretty much every way and many of these new boards come with features that not even the most expensive HEDT boards can match, with the exception of their high PCIe lane counts. “We’re personally thrilled that faster than Gigabit LAN is slowly becoming mainstream. Gigabit is one of those technologies that should have been superseded a…

$629 | WWW.AORUS.COM Gigabyte’s gaming products are now well established under its premium Aorus gaming brand. The X570 Aorus Master we’re reviewing here is a reasonably priced fully featured offering at $629 (strictly relatively!). It has many of the Aorus traits we’ve come to expect are here including a lovely RGB look and a well-engineered audio implementation. One of the things we really like about the Aorus Master is the use of proper finned VRM heat sinks. This greatly increases the cooling surface area, and Gigabyte has managed to combine functionality with aesthetics. Long may this continue! “Gigabyte has completely overhauled the VRM compared to the X470 Master.” Gigabyte have included three M.2 slots, each with their own isolated cooling unlike many other boards which have a fiddly installation procedure.…

When you’re building a new PC, sometimes the memory can be almost an afterthought. Many buyers don’t look beyond three key parameters: capacity, speed and price. These are obviously important, but there’s more to it than that. Read on as we take a deeper look at some of the things you need to keep in mind when purchasing that shiny new kit of RAM. We’ve also got a roundup of kits from the biggest names in the market. HOW MUCH RAM DO YOU REALLY NEED? “Whether you go for 32GB depends on your usage habits. 32GB is cheaper than ever and we aren’t far away from 32GB offering a better dollar per GB ratio.” This is an age old question frequently found on tech forums. As DRAM prices continue to…

$179 | WWW.CORSAIR.COM The Corsair Vengeance Pro is of course a DDR4-3200 kit with 16-18-18-36 timings. Though a look at the many tight XMP sub-timings reveals why the Corsair kit is often in near the top of the benchmarks leaderboard. While looks are always objective, the Vengeance RGB Pro has a lovely design with its nice and dare we say simplistic metal heat sink. Our kit came with a black finish, though Corsair also offers it in white. The top section of the module is lit with RGB LEDs and the colors are notably distinct and rich. Corsair’s iCUE software deserves a mention. Of course it controls the RGB effects of the Vengeance Pro kit and it can control other Corsair products too. It also offers additional functionality such as…

$219 | WWW.GSKILL.COM G.Skill is well known in overclocking circles for its willingness to push the envelope with ever faster memory kits. If you’re after maximum performance, G.Skill is usually in the shortlist. The Trident-Z range has been available in one form or another for many years, but never has it looked like this. It comes sheathed in a magnificent mirror like silver or gold finish. It really does give that wow factor when you open the box for the first time. Even the packaging is a premium match for the kit. The gorgeous finish is complemented by a sparkling crystalline light bar. As it’s a clear plastic material, the colors are especially vibrant and accurate. Colors bounce around everywhere. Look are always subjective, but this is the best looking…

DUPLICATE DATA ENTRY Want to enter the same data into more than one cell at once? Enter your first cell’s data, then click and drag the selection right (columns) or down (rows) to fill those cells with the same information. Once done, click and drag again if you want to duplicate the data across multiple cells or columns at once. To duplicate data across multiple sheets, select all the sheets (use Shift-Ctrl as you click each one), then type your data. It’ll be replicated in the equivalent cell across your selection. FREEZE ROWS AND COLUMNS When you work in large spreadsheets, it’s common to define the first row and/ or column as headings or titles to help you navigate your data. Of course, as your spreadsheet grows, those header fields…

CREATING THE WD BLACK SN750 SSD THEME 1 With the hardware out of the way, I then worked on implementing the mods into the build. I had one rough idea for the theme and that was to replicate the WD Black SN750 SSD’s heatsink design on the case itself. Originally I was going to go with aluminium panels for the front and the side, but the added weight and mounting methods were not going to work. I looked high and low for off the shelf heatsinks that had a similar design to the WD Black SN750 SSD’s unique heat spreader, but nothing existed. Going with CNC-cut Acetal (a high-performance engineering polymer) was a much better choice as it was already black, easy to work with and much lighter. Having the…

GAMING COMPATIBILITY ISSUE IN WINDOWS 10 An old game called Train Dispatcher doesn’t work properly on my Windows 10 laptop – nothing happens when I click Permits or Trains. Yet it works perfectly on my Windows 10 desktop. Can you help please? Gerald Gibson We were unable to replicate the issue on any of our Windows 10 machines, suggesting that it’s an incredibly rare glitch. Instead, we offered Gerald the following workaround: set up a virtual machine running Windows 95. To do that, download and install VirtualBox (www. virtualbox.org) and then download the free Windows 95 virtual hard drive (https://archive.org/details/ windows_95_vdi). Open VirtualBox and choose Machine > New. Name it Windows 95, set its type to ‘Microsoft Windows’ and its version to ‘Windows 95’ and allocate it 256MB of R…

Cloud storage means total convenience. Content saved to iCloud is available on any device that’s signed in to your account. It’s a great way to store and access everything, from calendar data to getting at whatever is on your Mac’s desktop by using the Files app on iOS. Unfortunately,, Apple only provides a miserly 5GB of space for free. Upping that to 50GB costs $1.49 per month. 200GB and 2TB cost $4.49 and $14.99 per month respectively. The problem is if you hit your limit, things will just stop working. iOS devices may no longer backup. Apps and documents will stop syncing data. Apple will, of course, suggest you throw more money its way. However, there is an alternative to simply paying more. If you want to keep costs down…

Last September Athlon Games announced it was working on a free The Lord of the Rings MMO. You’d be forgiven for not having the date and news etched into your memory, but the whole thing just got a lot more interesting with the news that Amazon – and its very deep pockets – is joining the project. Amazon Game Studios – which has so far launched The Grand Tour Game and a number of Amazon App Store titles – will “jointly develop the game for PC and consoles” with Athlon Games. We know from Athlon’s original announcement that the game will be set way before all the shenanigans with Frodo Baggins and Gollum. “You won’t see human characters from The Lord of the Rings in our game,” Dave Miller, president…

$44 | PC, PS4, XB1 | WWW.APLAGUETALE.COM Amicia De Rune is out on a hunt with her father and the family dog, a scene so warm and tranquil you just know things are going to go very wrong very soon. That doesn’t make it any less shocking when Amicia suddenly comes face to face with the Plague, which manifests itself not only as a horrible disease, but as a teeming mass of rats that devours everything in its wake. Amicia and her father make their way home, only to find the Inquisition at their doorstep. For reasons unknown they want Amicia’s little brother Hugo and are not above slaughtering their way through to him. A Plague Tale starts off strong with a completely heartrending intro to the linear stealth action-adventure…

FREE | PC | CRAWLSPACESTUDIO.ITCH. IO The Interlude will consume only ten minutes of your time, the game ending suddenly once those 600 seconds are up. Your job, as perhaps a getaway driver, is to make contact with an associate, but what you do before that happens is up to you. As you’re stuck in the driver’s seat, you can’t get up to stretch your legs, but you can take a sip of coffee, play a game of Snake on your phone, or read your messages for a few tantalising scraps of history. Initially, the thrill is in playing with your environment, as you mess about with the wing mirrors, or flip your wipers on and off to see if you can. A few minutes later, it’s in figuring out…

$39 | PC, PS4, XB1 | WWW.PATHOLOGIC-GAME.COM Pathologic 2 is “supposed to be almost unbearable” according to devs Ice Pick Lodge, who created the obtuse, near-unplayable original Pathologic, and purgatorial horror game The Void. Pathologic 2 challenges you to survive 12 in-game days in a town that’s going completely to hell. Disease, paranoia, mob justice, and paranormal happenings unfold in real time as you plod through brown, foggy districts, invading people’s houses for scraps and occasionally meeting important figures. It’s a deliberately exhausting experience. An egg is not just an egg in Pathologic, it’s an “empty illusion of possible life”. The survival systems constantly get in the way of a fascinating mystery game. When you chat to key figures in the town, they drop motes of information that form a…

$70 | PS4, XB1 | SNK-CORP. CO.JP/US A return-to-form for SNK’s decades-old 2D fighting franchise, Samurai Shodown is a Street Fighter IV-style reinvention that’s instantly accessible to newcomers while also providing enough depth for veterans. Unlike many other popular fighters, the weapons-based Samurai Shodown isn’t all that focused on combo systems and juggling – instead, attacks are swift and powerful, forcing players to proceed with caution in their offensive approach, lest they leave themselves open for a devastating counterattack. While the game is simple enough for button mashers to pick up and play, additional complexity comes from the ability to deflect and dodge attacks, and also in choosing the right moment to unleash a furious Super Special move or Lightning Attack, which has the capacity to kill your opponent with…

There have been enough controversial applications of DeepFake technologies to make it clear that it can be a powerful tool for malice if not used appropriately. One YouTuber, however, is keen to show that Deepfakes can also be a powerful tool for good by retroactively recasting iconic movies with different actors. While his latest target was to throw comedian Jim Carrey into the iconic horror thriller The Shining, the animation programmer known at Ctrl Alt Face has put Silvester Stallone into Terminator 2, swapped the Joker from the Dark Knight into other Heath Ledger films and merged Fight Club’s narrator and Tyler Durden for an even weirder plotline. Mob burns home of crypto Ponzi scheme founder CRYPTO SCHEME PROMISED TO DOUBLE MONEY IN 15 DAYS. A man believed to be…

In March this year, Facebook released a tool called “Why am I seeing this?”, which allowed users to take a deeper look at the ads they were being shown and the reason they were being targeted. The service was created in response to the public outcry following events like the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which raised concerns about the abuse of user data by giant tech companies and the lack of privacy that it entails. Today, Facebook has announced that it’s further improved the tool, claiming to have increased the amount of transparency offered overall. This includes much more intricate detail on the reason for being targeted, a clearer list of the companies that own and sell your data, and a direct link to a page where you can change your…

Huawei CEO, Ren Zhengfei, has said that the company’s home-grown mobile operating system (OS) will be faster than both iOS and Android... but it could struggle when it comes to apps. Zhengfei made the claim during an interview with French magazine Le Point, and the Huawei chief remains bullish about his company’s chances in the market, no matter the long-term outcome of the current US-China trade war. It’s no secret that Huawei is working on its own OS, which it could employ on smartphones if the US follows through with its Huawei ban, a ban which would see the Chinese manufacturer lose access to Google’s vital Android services such as the Play Store, security updates and suite of Google apps. While Huawei’s HongMeng OS (also known as Ark OS) may…

It came to a climax when benchmarking X570 motherboards. M.2 SSDs are just horrible. There I was, removing tiny screws, pulling off a heatsink half the size of the motherboard, dropping said tiny screws just a little too often, all to connect one SSD. Surely there has to be a better way? And there is! It’s called U.2. Let me just state that there’s nothing wrong with the M.2 interface itself. It’s perfectly suited for a lot of devices. Wi-Fi? Bluetooth? Those kinds of devices are compact, use little power and are perfect for adding functionality in constrained spaces where a PCIe add-in card isn’t feasible. The problem is that the M.2 form factor, specifically the 2280 sized one that’s easily the most prevalent, just isn’t suited to huge throughput,…

The Lenovo’s Yoga series has a premium pedigree to lean on, but in a space as competitive as the 2-in-1 convertible scene, you need more than just good quality components to stand out. The C930’s headline feature is a new hinge design that manages to maintain smooth, fully-rotatable functionality, while incorporating a set of Dolby Atmos speakers. This novel hinge speaker design is perfectly positioned for general laptop audio, but it also manages to improve speaker positioning when in tent, picture frame or tablet modes. The Yoga C930 doesn’t just look business ready, it’s also got a nicely weighted 10-keyless keyboard and a dedicated fingerprint scanner that offers enhanced productivity and security. The trackpad is soft to touch and there’s also a stylus that resides in a sealed charging compartment…

Apart from being 4mm thinner, Dell’s new G7 15 is basically identical to the G5 15 that we reviewed back in APC 467. Dell has never been one to miss a niche and often have a number of products with overlapping component sets, but the entire G7 range almost perfectly matches that of the G5 so don’t be surprised if you get a little déjà vu reading this review. Half of the available Dell G7 15 2019 range are running on 8th generation Intel Core i7-8750H CPUs (a trait we first encountered in the Aorus 15 from APC 470) while the other half are running 9th generation Core i7-9750H CPUs. We’ve only had the opportunity to test one device with the new i7-9750H CPU so the scores may be a…

Isn’t it refreshing to see a case that doesn’t look like it belongs in a Transformers movie! Thermaltake’s H200 Snow is a case that’s delightfully modern and subtle. The Thermaltake H200 is a white mid-tower chassis capable of holding a full sized ATX board and GPU. It comes with one 120mm fan. It can house two dual fan radiators, giving it excellent cooling capabilities. It’s also got a tempered glass full window and a PSU shroud to hide ugly cables. Building a system with the H200 was a breeze. The case is full of thoughtful cable management features with well-placed holes and indentations meaning even thick PSU cables can be routed and hidden with ease. The H200 comes with an attractive RGB light bar along the left front of the…

Surprise! Mid-year is not a traditional release date for a Raspberry Pi. In fact, this new version of the Pi breaks a few traditions. Firstly, it was released far earlier than predicted due to the BCM2711 System on Chip (SoC) being ready for production some nine to 12 months early. Secondly, there’s the price: there is now not just one price for a Raspberry Pi Model B, but three. At $59.95, the basic model comes with 1GB of RAM; for $77.95 there is a 2GB model; and for $94.95 there is a 4GB model. For this review we have chosen to look at the 1GB model as we can directly compare it to previous models of Pi. No matter the version of Pi 4, all come with a 1.5GHz 64-bit…

FREE, OFFERS IN-APP PURCHASES | AGILETORTOISE.COM | NEEDS MACOS 10.13 OR LATER Drafts claims to be the quickest way to capture ideas and tasks, and it’s been a big hit on iOS. It’s now available for Mac, letting you create new notes (‘drafts’) in several ways: you can click on the menu bar icon to bring up the Drafts pop-up; you can create a note in the main app window; or you can highlight an item in another app and use the share sheet to send it to Drafts. This option creates a new draft without switching into the Drafts app. You can also create your own keyboard shortcuts to send whatever’s in your Mac’s clipboard to the app as a new draft. Drafts has automatic syntax highlighting: Markdown (the default),…

$1.49 A MONTH | DELICIOUSLYELLA.COM Deliciously Ella – which has been around for a while, but seems to have recently revamped its app – is focused on clean eating and yoga. It’s got a nice clean UI that’s easy to navigate, and the food – which focuses on simple recipes with easy-to-find ingredients – looks great in the pictures. The recipes are all vegetarian, and although there’s no calorie information given the app focuses on health and wellbeing. Recipes come with full instructions as well as videos, making them easy to follow, and the simple swipe controls mean that keeping track of what you’re doing while in the kitchen is easy. All in all, it’s a pretty great source of vegetarian recipes, whether you’re a vegetarian yourself or just looking…

$549 | WWW.AMD.COM The RX 5700 uses a slightly pared down version of the full Navi GPU found in the 5700 XT. It’s not the first 7nm GPU (The Radeon VII takes that honour) but it is the first to use AMD’s new RDNA architecture. Clearly AMD has done its job as Navi trounces Vega and AMD feels confident it can go head to head with Nvidia given the relative price increases over similar Polaris based RX 500 GPUs. The RX 5700 makes use of a blower style cooler. We understand why AMD chose to go with this, but having experienced the Nvidia Founder’s Edition cards, we feel that AMD’s reference coolers are still too noisy and inefficient. The incoming partner cards should address this and turn the 5700 into…

$860 | WWW.NVIDIA.COM Given its name, you’d assume the RTX 2070 Super has a lot in common with its non-Super sibling, but actually it has a lot more in common with the RTX 2080. Where the RTX 2070 uses the TU106 GPU, the Super version comes with a lite version of the TU104 GPU as found in the RTX 2080. This means more Cuda, RT and Tensor cores (2,304, 26 and 288 for the 2070 vs 2,560, 40 and 320 for the 2070 Super). As expected, the 2070 Super Founder’s Edition we’re testing here is physically the same as the RTX 2080 FE, though it comes with a nice mirror effect on the face. We were very impressed with the step forward that Nvidia made with the RTX FE coolers…

$499 | WWW.ASROCK.COM Asrock’s Taichi brand stands out as a competitive option that doesn’t scream gaming. Taichi boards usually offer an excellent combination of useful features and affordable price. Can the X570 Taichi keep its value reputation intact with X570 pricing moving upwards? “It’s not bad at all but it lacks a couple of key features that we’d expect from Asrock at this price.” The X570 Taichi has taken a step up in looks from the X470 Taichi. It really is lovely looking with the chipset heatsink’s gears and cogs being a nice retro analogue artistic touch. Of course there are healthy splashes of RGB around the heatsink as well as above the I/O cover and the right hand side of the board. Like the other X570 boards in the…

$589 | WWW.MSI.COM You can always count on MSI to deliver the strongest gaming message, but that doesn’t tell the whole story as its engineering and quality control have come a long way in the last several years. The X570 Ace looks every bit a seriously high end product. It’s one that caught our eye when we first saw it on display at Computex. It offers good value too at $589. The X570 Ace is a great looking board with its infinity effect RGB mirror combined with its black and gold theme. The M.2 slots are separate from the PCH cooler which makes drive installation a breeze. The MSI is the only board in the test to feature a heat pipe, which links the VRM cooling to the fan cooled…

$159 | WWW.XPG.COM In such a crowded and competitive market, sometimes memory products have little to differentiate them. When a product like the Adata Spectrix D60G manages to undercut the competition on price, you simply have to sit up and take notice. At $159 the Spectrix D60G offers the best value of the all the RGB kits in the roundup. Normally that alone would be enough to take out a winners gong, but this Adata kit is not some bargain basement kit. The Adata Spectrix kit comes with primary timings similar to the other kits in this test at 16-18-18-36- 2T. It’s good to see Adata hasn’t taken the easy option by equipping poor memory ICs. Its performance was consistently at or near the top of the 2x8GB kits thanks…

$268 | WWW.CRUCIAL.COM Here we have the first of two 2x16GB kits in our roundup. Crucial’s Ballistix Sport LT doesn’t have any RGB lighting and is in fact quite subtle with its simplistic design, but that’s something that won’t bother a user who doesn’t care about looks. The Ballistix Sport LT kit is the only standard profile kit in our test. This makes it well suited to users who use very large air heat sinks. While it’s not as big a problem as it used to be, tall RAM can still interfere with air coolers that don’t take RAM height into consideration. As a 2x16GB kit with a dual rank design, the Crucial was actually the best performing kit in the entire roundup. The margins as always are small but…

$149 | WWW.PATRIOTMEMORY.COM Patriot is a brand that doesn’t have the Australian market presence of the likes of Corsair or G.Skill, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not well regarded in the global PC market. The company is also popular amongst gamers with its Viper Gaming brand. The Patriot Viper Steel we have on hand to test is the cheapest kit in the roundup. It matches all of the other kits with its CL 16-18-18-36 primary timings so stock performance doesn’t suffer in any way. Of course as a value oriented kit it doesn’t come with RGB or an extravagant heat sink. Its grey metal covering is well suited to a neutral color build. As a budget kit, these modules are likely using more affordable Hynix ICs which aren’t known…

SAVE TO COMPUTER BY DEFAULT Microsoft is incredibly keen for you to save directly to OneDrive in later versions of Office, but it’s sluggish and slow. Open File > Options > Save and ensure ‘Save to Computer by default’ is ticked, then pick a default folder. From the February 2019 update you can do this via the new Save This File dialog that pops up when saving a new document: click the Location drop-down menu for a list of recent folders, right-click one and choose ‘Set as Default Location’. MORE DEFAULT SAVE OPTIONS File > Options > Save is where you go to also change the default location for any personal templates you create in each separate Office application – here, however, you need to manually type (or copy and…

PHOTOGRAPHIC BACKGROUNDS You can embed a photo into a slide’s background in PowerPoint by clicking Format Background on the Design tab. Select ‘Picture or texture fill’ then choose to insert a picture from a file, the clipboard or online. Once done, you can adjust its transparency, type (tiled or stretched) and position on-screen. Like what you see? Click ‘Apply to All’ to apply the background to all your slides. Impress users should simply select Slide > Set Background Image to select a suitable image – it’ll be stretched to fit by default. Another way to add the image is by right-clicking on a slide’s existing background and choosing Properties. Select ‘Bitmap’, click ‘Add/ Import’ to import your image, then use the controls to tweak its position and size – choose…

WESTERN DIGITAL I’ve been working with Western Digital for a while now and have been using its SSDs, HDDs and NVMe drives since as long as I can remember. The company reached out to me to create a one of kind themed system that would be featured and given away in APC magazine. For me, this was a fantastic opportunity to talk about modding and the sometimes tricky challenges I face for the APC readers. I don’t expect anyone to try and replicate this build – but there may be ideas and tips here that may spark your imagination to do something similar yourself, even on a small scale. “The theme for the build was to create and design a system based around Western Digital’s new WD Black SN750 NVMe…

It’s been over ten years since AMD has been able to beat Intel. And now, like then, it has made the CPU landscape very exciting for those looking to upgrade. One of the amazing things about Ryzen since its launch two years ago is AMD’s commitment to the AM4 socket. That commitment has created a wonderful ecosystem for those that bought in early to the AM4 platform, as it allows simple drop in upgrades to the latest processors without needing to rebuild your system around a new motherboard, but it also provides a plethora of choices for those new to the platform. Here are some things to keep in mind when looking to upgrade or switch to the new Ryzen CPUs. Choose wisely. Currently, the 3600X and 3800X products are…

Some of the components in this budget build dropped in price of their own accord, and while we briefly dabbled with the idea of swapping over to an Intel processor, ultimately it wasn’t worth the change. We did spot the BitFenix Nova TG case for just $49 at CPL and MSY, which is considerably less than the $75 most other shops sell it for, so that’s a nice saving. The only change we did see fit to make was to switch from the 3000MHz Patriot Viper memory to a Kingston Fury kit. RAM pricing is in constant flux, and right now prices are relatively high. As such we’ve taken the decision to go with a slightly slower 2,666MHz kit, because sticking with 3,000MHz memory while prices are so high just…

There is certainly a great deal to be said in favour of web-based email services such as Outlook.com, Gmail and the like, but that does not mean you should limit yourself to accessing your email account through your web browser. There are numerous reasons why you might want to consider using a desktop app to send and receive emails – just as you do on your phone – and it should come as little surprise that Windows 10 includes its own email client. Called simply Mail, the app can handle any of the major webmail services such as Yahoo, iCloud and Gmail, and you can use it to work with a single email address or several. In fact, this is one of the reasons using an app for email makes…

Cyberpunk 2077 minigames will fill out your time in Night City beyond the eternal chase for eurodollars and near-future romance. Though developer CD Projekt Red is remaining cagey in just how much gameplay it shows off for its new open-world RPG, it allowed a pair of its employees to answer fan questions about the game submitted via Tumblr. One of those questions was about what kind of Cyberpunk 2077 minigames players can participate in, and it sounds like there will be all kinds of ways to fruitfully while away the hours. Senior level designer Miles Tost started off by expanding on how the hacking minigame will work in Cyberpunk 2077. Don’t worry, this isn’t another perfunctory “wiggle the thumbsticks until you find the sweet spot” filler segment. Tost said Cyberpunk…

FREE | PC | BIT.LY/ SPEKTGAME In Spek.Takl you wake up one day in a flat that you’re unable to escape from, and where a TV set plays ancient propaganda films on a loop. These freaky videos are unsettling artefacts in their own right: evidence that someone or something has been in the flat before you, or worse, that they’re in it right now. But they’re also a clever tool to guide the player from room to room, as clues to your next objective are hidden inside the footage. As you investigate further – as you obey the videotapes, but also puzzle-solve by using items found in the environment – you’ll finally reach its beating heart, where brick walls have transformed into pulsating flesh. As you delve into its fleshy…