PC & Tech Authorityの October 2018 の目次

I have a secret vice. Handheld gaming. As much as it shames me, I played Terraria to endgame not on PC, but on the PS Vita. I mastered Binding of Isaac on PS Vita. I finished Cat Quest on the Switch. I’ve only ever played Stardew Valley and Oxenfree on the Switch. These handhelds give me something, the only thing, the PC can’t: the ability to curl up with a game in the same way I curl up with a book. Yes, I know these handhelds are hopelessly – even deliberately – underpowered. But after eight hours of working in front of the machine, the last thing I want to do is flick over to Steam and boot up a game that demands 100 hours of my time just to…

When it comes to PCs, bigger numbers are always better. Higher clock speeds, more cores, larger amounts of system memory, SSD capacity, even fan sizes. However, bigger numbers can result in trade-offs in other areas, often leading to smaller numbers; for example more CPU cores typically means lower per core clock speeds. This is particularly true when it comes to monitors. While there’s a somewhat amusing false economy where people buy 27in inch monitors thinking bigger is better, not realising some have the same screen resolution as any 22in monitor making for a less dense display with not one pixel more detail to show for it. Screen resolution when it comes to gaming in particular, has a direct impact on frame rates. With a few rare exceptions, 4K (aka Ultra…

Buying the latest gear or booking flights and accommodation overseas can be a royal pain in the butt. There are the hassle of exchange rates, foreign exchange fees, shipping charges that often seem exorbitant and then there’s the “Australia Tax” which seems to be levied whenever you try to book something from outside the country you’re purchasing from. So, how can you get past some of these barriers and snaffle up a bargain. USE YOU VPN SOFTWARE Booking travel and accomodation overseas can cost a heap but your VPN software can help. As well as protecting your communications, you can use a VPN to pretend you’re in a different place. Airline or accommodation websites can determine where you are by recognising your location based on the DNS server, IP address…

Remember the days when not everything everyone bought was an Apple product? It really wasn’t that long ago. There was a time in the not-too-distant past when Apple struggled to sell to anyone other than the design industry or showy marketing companies. Its presence in industry and enterprise was limited, and to many consumers Apple was perhaps better known as a means of keeping a doctor away. In 1998, the firm introduced a new kind of iMac: the iMac. A non-beige box that the company could see ending up in the home, as part of the family, or indeed in a classroom as part of education. What’s more, it came in all the colours of the rainbow. You know you wanted one, or you knew someone that did. The machine…

The release of AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper platform in 2017 well and truly changed the high end desktop CPU market. Just a few years ago, 6 and 8 core CPUs were considered flagship offerings. Threadripper changed all that. Last year’s stunningly powerful 1950X redefined what the high end desktop was capable of. A full 16 cores meant content creators, multi-taskers, power users and professionals alike had access to options that destroyed anything outside of the ultra-expensive enterprise realm. Threadripper 2nd Gen brings options including the 2990WX with its unprecedented 32 cores. That’s not all though. There’s also the powerful and high frequency 16 core 2950X which will be joined later on by the 12 core 2920X and the 24 core 2970WX. THREADRIPPER EVOLVED The Ryzen Threadripper 2nd Gen processors bring all…

Is AMD facing a perception issue? After a decade in the doldrums the company has come roaring back. There’s no doubt that both Ryzen and Threadripper offer performance and value, and yet I still face questions from friends and colleagues that look past the price lists and the benchtesting results (both ours and the many others). They tell me that AMD CPUs run hot, and that they’re behind Intel for raw performance. When neither is true. It’s telling just who has these mindsets. It seems to me that the prejudice comes from people who only occasionally look closely at the CPU market and rely too much on the oft-repeated heat and performance claims that were valid at various points in the last decade pre-Zen. A decade is a very long…

“It’s no surprise that the 2990WX absolutely dominates the heavily threaded benchmarks.” Yep, Threadripper 2 CPUs are beasts! Obviously we know from their apt names that they will perform very strongly with multi-threaded workloads. With that in mind, benchmarking Threadripper 2 proved to be a challenging undertaking for several reasons. As we discovered when testing both the 2990WX and 2950X, and let’s not forget Intel’s i9-7980XE, as many of our consumer focused benchmarks that make use of multi-threading simply don’t scale up to the insane core counts we’re seeing here. The key takeaway is that you MUST have a use-case for a CPU like the 2990WX. Things like rendering, encoding and hashing algorithms perform magnificently when supported, but if you can’t use all the cores, then the lower priced models…

Seagate is one of the biggest names in the storage business. With a few exceptions, it has largely steered clear of the consumer SSD market, instead concentrating on enterprise SSD solutions as well as its mechanical hard drive businesses. The trends are undeniable though. SATA SSDs are cheaper than ever and have well and truly become mainstream devices, even in entry level systems. Seagate can’t sit by and watch its share of the storage market erode, so it’s good to see it come back into play with the Barracuda line of SATA SSDs. While Seagate is a huge player, the SSD market is an exceptionally competitive one with the likes of Samsung, Intel, Crucial and its traditional competitor Western Digital all being well established. The Barracuda might be a ferocious…

One of the great things about Thunderbolt 3 is the massive amount of bandwidth it provides for external devices. With up to 40Gbit/sec on tap, it theoretically acts as an external PCI Express slot. Thanks to all that bandwidth, devices like external graphics cards are possible and Blackmagic, an Australian company making some of the best professional video gear in the world, has taken advantage of Thunderbolt 3’s capabilities with their new external graphics card, creatively dubbed eGPU. Blackmagic’s eGPU is an 8GB AMD Radeon Pro 580 installed in a thick aluminium case specifically designed for the graphics card inside, with large fans that allow heat to be dissipated without a lot of noise. Aesthetically it fits in nicely with all the other aluminium themed Apple gear, so it looks…

Mostly, the RGB phenomenon has been all about making things look dazzling, very few applications utilize the addressable lighting capabilities for useful purposes. Many integrated systems like Asus Aura Sync can be used to show lighting colour or intensity based on CPU load, so that’s handy. The ROG Aura Terminal is designed to take the lighting outside your box, and do so in a beautifully unique way. You see, it can cast the colours you are watching in a game (or media) back against the wall the PC is sitting against. Philips threw a similar technology into the TV market many years ago and the faithful swear by it. The idea is that you, of course, aren’t really looking at the colours behind the screen because you’re focused on the…

“It fared particularly well in our multithreaded benchmarks, where it frequently came out on top…” If you’re looking to buy a motherboard that offers great bang for buck, ASRock is usually right at the top of the list. We often wonder how ASRock manages to churn out motherboards that undercut the competition by such large amounts. Perhaps it’s because it doesn’t spend mega millions on marketing? Whatever the reason, offering value is what ASRock does best, especially in the lower end of the market where a board like the B450M Pro4 is primed to compete well. If you looked at the B450M Pro4, you’re unlikely to believe it costs around 145 bucks. It doesn’t have the bling of high end boards but at the same time, it compromises very little…

Tired of your slow, flaky internet connection? It’s time to look into a new router. Today’s models use the latest wireless technology to deliver lightning-fast downloads even at long range. They’re smart too, with built-in features such as VPNs, guest networks, remote file access, parental controls and more. This month we’ve put 9 routers to the test so you can directly compare performance and features. We’ve tried out each one’s Wi-Fi capabilities in a real-world setting, dug through the spec sheets and got hands-on with their interfaces to find the best, most versatile and most user-friendly routers on the market. If you’re ready to upgrade your home network, read on.…

The EA9500 is an imposing slab of a router, festooned with no fewer than eight (non-removable) antennae. It’s not quite this month’s biggest model – that’s the D-Link DIR-895L – but it fits into the plussized category, alongside the Netgear R9000 Nighthawk X10. A big case with lots of aerials usually implies strong wireless performance, and on paper, the EA9500 is capable of 1,000Mbits/sec on the 2.4GHz band, and a whopping 2,167Mbits/sec on each of its two 5GHz radios. By default, these appear as a single 802.11ac network, but a band steering option works behind the scenes to balance clients across the two 5GHz connections, keeping contention to a minimum. Needless to say, we didn’t get anywhere near those speeds in our tests, but the EA9500 still served up an…

Synology is a name more usually associated with NAS drives than routers – and when you first open up the RT2600ac’s web portal you’d be forgiven for thinking you’d accidentally logged into a storage device, because it looks an awful lot like the company’s DiskStation Manager software. That’s no bad thing: the intuitive mouse-driven interface makes many rivals look clunky and outdated. Icons, live graphs and illustrations help you find your way around with ease. But this is no Fisher-Price front-end, and as you click through the tabs you’ll find no shortage of technical stats and network settings. These include upmarket features such as a true wireless repeater mode, email and SMS notifications for specified errors and events, and the option to fall back to a connected 3G/4G USB adapter…

If you’re planning to set up a new website – or even migrate an existing one – it’s highly likely WordPress has crossed your mind. It’s the CMS that powers more than half of the world’s websites (where a CMS is identifiable), but that familiarity has its downsides. One is a misconception over your hosting options. If you were planning anything more challenging than a basic blog, you might have thought a self-install of WordPress on third-party hosting was the only way forward. WordPress.com is for teenagers who want to pour out their thoughts on Fortnite using a boilerplate template, right? Actually, that’s not even remotely the case these days. WordPress.com now hosts some of the world’s biggest websites and it’s arguably the perfect host for anyone looking to set…

There is a sequence, late in Unavowed, where everything finally clicks together. The choices you’ve made thus far are drawn into sharper contrast, the story turns a fascinating corner, and the reasoning behind numerous design decisions is suddenly clear. The scope of the game’s ambitions is brought into focus, and it’s a wonder to witness. This is not a spoiler, but it’s worth knowing up front that Unavowed – a game that sometimes feels constrained by its focus on choice and narrative over puzzles – has tremendous payoff. It’s a good adventure game that becomes great if you stick with it. Unavowed opens with you choosing the gender and previous occupation of your character – choices that will affect how the game plays out – during an exorcism. Your protagonist…

In a move widely criticised in web development forums, Google reduced how much sites could use the Maps API without payment, and massively bumped up the price for 1,000 map loads from 50 cents to $7. The move has seen rafts of websites abandon Google’s offering in favour of rival providers such as Apple Maps, Mapbox and TomTom, causing significant pain for web developers. “Google decided to make Maps its next billion dollar business by raising prices 14 times and decreasing the free usage limit almost 30 times, all with minimal notice period,” explained Tomasz Nawrocki in a blog post from the German pharmacy-finder service In der Apotheke. According to the pharmacy locator, the changes would have seen its costs for mapping leap from $0 to $5,000 per month, a…

I’ve always loved technology. The very definition of it implies possibility, and the possibilities portrayed by technology in science-fiction books and movies I gorged on as a child pretty much sealed my fate as future geek. What’s not to love? Imagination made manifest. If it’s not world building in fiction, it’s realising dreams in fact. We once looked to the stars and figured we’d never be able to go there, but we’ve since landed on the moon and sent a probe beyond the Heliopause into interstellar space. I was reminded of this recently when the No Man’s Sky NEXT update hit, finally putting the game into a reasonable state and sparking my curiosity. I had previously written about NMS in this column with respect to the nature of (and lack…

Google Chrome’s “incognito” mode used to open up with a warning that, even while you were supposedly surfing anonymously, secret agents could still be tracking your online activity. Most of us smiled and dismissed the idea as fantastical; then Edward Snowden broke cover and wiped the smiles from our faces. That specific disclaimer no longer appears, perhaps because we’ve all learned our lesson. It certainly doesn’t mean the issue has gone away. Online surveillance is still a constant threat, and there are plenty of legitimate reasons for wanting to stay anonymous online. So how can we ensure that what we do in the privacy of our browser really does stay private? The short answer is that we can’t What we can do, however, is minimise our exposure and make life…

There are few companies that innovate like Asus. While some of the company’s more ‘out-there’ creations are probably best kept from the marketplace, occasionally something new and interesting appears. In this instance, Asus has transformed the traditional notebook touchpad into a 5.5-inch Full HD touchscreen. So is it a gimmick fit for a tradeshow or a revolutionary new technology? Before we dissect the touchpad it’s worth noting that the host machine is extraordinary in its own right. It sports a 15.6-inch, Pantone-certified 4K TouchScreen which offers bright and vibrant colours. There’s some ghosting with fast-moving content, but it’s no deal breaker. The glossy screen is responsive to touch and a glass coating deflects fingerprints impressively. The chassis is remarkable. Both the main body and the lid are solid metal and…

All-in-one PCs haven’t historically been the gamer’s first choice, but as people move into smaller living spaces and hardware becomes increasingly power efficient, all-in-one PCs are a serious contender for those seeking a neat and compact gaming rig. A new entrant to the Australian market, Aftershock PC, hopes itsAeon 32R all-in-one machine grabs a hefty chuck of that market. Despite being an all-in-one PC, the Aeon 32R packs the latest 8th-gen Intel Coffee Lake CPUs, a full selection of Nvidia GeForce graphics cards, SSD & HDD storage options, up to 32GB of DDR4 RAM, 802.11ac Wi-Fi and the option of closed loop water cooling. Yes, water cooling in an all-in-one PC! Aftershock put a nice cherry on top by including a 2-year warranty (most in the industry only offer 1-year),…

Back in the early days of wireless routers, Asus would typically arrive late to market with a product crammed so full of features that it put all rivals to shame (once you managed to get it working). Now, not-so-hot-on-the-heels of its competitors, is the Lyra Trio Wi-Fi mesh system and this time it works straight out of the box. We’ve already seen impressive mesh offerings from Linksys, Google, D-Link and others so what does Asus bring to the table? It’s hard to tell at first glance – you have to scratch the surface to find out. But firstly it’s worth clearing up the confusing nomenclature. While many will be tempted to think that the Trio refers to three mesh nodes, there are only two in this pack. There are, however,…

Google’s big bad Home Max speaker is now onsale in Australia (Harvey’s JB, Officeworks, Good Guys etc – basically everywhere). It builds upon the now quite refined Google Assistant and Google Home tech and lumps in some serious audio engineering. It’s the largest, most sonically powerful (and most expensive) Google Home speaker. The aim – to make it the complete home music machine that also exists as the centerpiece of your home AI network. It’s a machine of two parts. There is its job as a speaker, and how good that sounds at that, and also its functionality as a Google Home device. Because Google Home is a technology you get in this box, but is in actuality is something that umbrellas across many products – including your Android phone…

In years past, budget chipsets have tended to be associated with OEM systems, office machines or generally cheap systems. That’s all been changing in recent years, particularly in the case of AMD with its consumer-friendly, unlocked ecosystem. B450 is now pretty much X470 lite. You can overclock, run your memory at whatever speed the system is capable of, and all you give up is a bit of connectivity, SLI, and a few PCIe lanes. So if you’re running a typical system, with a single GPU, an NVMe SSD and a SATA hard drive or two, there’s really very little between X470 and B450. Except the price! B450 motherboards support all AM4 Ryzen processors. This includes first and second generation Ryzen, and Ryzen APUs with Vega graphics. B450 isn’t anything revolutionary,…

It’s kind of difficult to think of a $229 motherboard as expensive, but, relatively, the B450 Aorus Pro WiFi is exactly that. It is by far the most expensive board in the roundup. We were chasing one of the lower-priced Gigabyte boards, but time constraints made this impossible. Normally a 20% or more price premium would count against many boards, but this is one that is brimming with features and has specs that truly illustrate what a ‘budget’ chipset-equipped motherboard is capable of. If looks justified pricing, then the Aorus Pro should be $300+. It’s the only board in the roundup to feature M.2 drive heatsinks. We usually like to see an M.2 slot above the first PCIe slot, but the beefy heatsink means your M.2 drive should stay at…

Routers are unassuming things. They sit quietly in the background and, save for a few flickering LEDs, they don’t directly communicate with us at all. You probably don’t think about yours for months on end. Yet a modern router is a highly sophisticated bit of technology. No two models are quite alike, and their capabilities go far beyond the basics of hosting your home Wi-Fi network. Upgrading can bring huge performance benefits, as well as a range of useful extra features. This month we’ve tested the best, fastest and most feature-packed routers on the market, to give your network the boost it deserves. Here’s our guide to choosing the right one. 1 MAKING THE CONNECTION When you’re buying a new router, the very first question is whether it will work…

Netgear’s futuristic-looking Nighthawk X10 is advertised as the “world’s fastest router”, with a claimed wireless bandwidth of 7,133Mbits/sec. That’s fast enough to download 50GB of data in less than a minute – and if you think that sounds like an impossible feat even for 802.11ac, you’re right. Uniquely among this month’s routers, the X10 includes a 60GHz 802.11ad radio, allowing compatible devices to communicate at up to 4.6Gbits/sec. That sounds great, but the catch is that 60GHz networking only works well over very short distances, so it’s mostly useful for same-room devices like smart TVs; you won’t find it on mainstream laptops or tablets. Still, even over regular 802.11ac, the Nighthawk X10 is an exceptional performer. Its chunky illuminated antennae deliver fantastic 5GHz penetration: even in the bathroom at the…

Where some routers go for flashy stylings, Billion’s high-end offering looks aggressively functional. That makes sense, because this is clearly a business-first router. That’s not to say you can’t buy one for home use: it’ll happily work with all your tablets and smart gadgets, and it even comes with a convenient internal DSL modem. The single USB socket meanwhile permits media streaming over DLNA, although since it’s only USB 2 it’s probably intended more for a printer, or for local file sharing. Similarly, while Billion doesn’t provide a parental control service of its own, it lets you hook into OpenDNS to take advantage of category-based web filtering. And the access scheduling feature is actually pretty versatile, letting you configure up to 32 blocking periods of any duration throughout the week.…

This month we’ve focused on conventional standalone routers, but what about mesh networking systems? The promise of a consistent signal coverage throughout your home sounds great, but there are reasons why it may make sense to pick a conventional router instead. 1 HIGHER PRICE High-quality mesh networking gear isn’t cheap. And that’s hardly surprising – the best systems use no fewer than nine Wi-Fi radios, spread across three nodes. While mesh prices are generally higher; you might be better off with a cheaper router and a separate extender. 2 LIMITED CONNECTIVITY Many mesh systems have only two Ethernet sockets per node, which is hardly ideal if you have lots of wired devices. They normally lack USB connections too, so you can forget about file and printer sharing, and while WPS…

Whether you use WordPress.com or WordPress.org on a third-party host, the editor is about to undergo a massive revamp. Part of the reason for WordPress’s success is that it has a gentler learning curve than many rival CMSes, especially for users who aren’t of a technical bent. Gutenberg promises to make creating eye-catching posts even easier. First, it brings a much cleaner WYSIWYG editor to WordPress posts and pages. Content is organised in blocks. So, you might have a headline block, followed by a photo, followed by an introductory paragraph, and each block can be edited without having to bother with intimidating shortcodes, custom post types, meta-boxes or hand-cranked code. Insert a featured image, for example, and a box appears on the right-hand side of the editor letting you control…

Sometime in the near future, a hail of asteroids smashes into the surface of one of the most mysterious bodies in the solar system – Jupiter’s icy, yet possibly watery moon, Europa. On Earth, our best and brightest decide this is a great opportunity for exploration, so a probe is sent to investigate. It’s a pretty hard sci-fi premise, but Ice Caves of Europa manages to marry that sense of cutting edge, but plausible technology with a touching and at times challenging narrative. I’ve got to be honest – the thing I love most about the game is just how much I got attached to the game’s protagonist, an artificial intelligence called Verne. Ice Caves dives straight into some of the deeper questions that science fiction can ask, while also…

This month the new Asus Lyra mesh Wi-Fi (review page 56) takes over from the previous champ, D-Link’s (still excellent) Covr system. PREMIUM LAPTOPS DELL XPS 13 9370 Ultraportable This 2018 update to the all-dominant Dell XPS 13 keeps tweaks to the minimum: slimmer bezels, eighth-generation Intel Core processors and the promise of even longer battery life are the key benefits. Just note that Dell has embraced USB-C ports at the expense of the old-fashioned Type-A. ALTERNATIVES MICROSOFT SURFACE BOOK 2 A unique and versatile laptop with a screen that detaches to become a tablet. LENOVO YOGA 920 An ultra-thin convertible from Lenovo that not only looks great, and has supreme power, but lasted for over 12 hours in our battery tests. MSI STEALTH THIN 8RF It’s powerful, but not…

Don’t tell Intel, but Microsoft is working on a custom CPU design, called E2. Not much is known about it, but researchers have been working on the project for some time. And they’ve ported Windows and Linux to it, along with a bunch of development tools. The big chip firm Qualcomm might be involved, too. The work is being done at Microsoft Research, and it published a paper about it – it’s since been deleted (you can grab a view on the web archive attinyurl.com/yasp3br3). The paper says: “At the heart of E2 is an advanced Explicit Data Graph Execution (EDGE) instruction set architecture (ISA), which, unlike conventional ISAs, encodes the data dependencies between instructions, freeing the microarchitecture from rediscovering these dependencies at runtime, and groups instructions into atomic blocks…

From Pete’s email, he has Cat6 cabling through parts of his home, but has been forced (due to changing ISP’s over the years) to change his main router from time to time too. He expects to receive another (Cable) Router again soon with the NBN being rolled out in his area. His question is a common one I hear from many customers, as often these router changes involves a ton of ‘other’ changes across people’s home networks in a cascading effect that ends in the customer often having to virtually reset and re-build their entire network from scratch again. People end up spending many hours trying to remember every device on their network, the IP addresses, the passwords for each device, and then having to reconfigure them all to work…

A MD is on a roll that started with the Zen-core Ryzen, and now we have what is potentially the most powerful consumer/prosumer CPU you can buy. I say potentially, because while the new Threadripper 2 (‘TR2’) now stands as the record holder in the core department with up to 32 of them plus another 32 threads, it still isn’t a clean-sweep winner because in gaming in single core performance it still lags just behind Intel’s 8th-gen, though we’re talking virtually insignificant single-digit percentage margins, and this isn’t a CPU intended for gaming, strictly speaking. Getting that slightly tiresome and mostly irrelevant point out of the way, for people that do run apps that can leverage this abundance of processing power, Threadripper 2 is true wonder of the computing world.…

All the way back in June 1978, Intel released its 8086 CPU. Little did it know at the time, the fundamentals of this little chip would go on to become the dominant CPU architecture and reshape computing as we know it in the decades that followed. To celebrate 40 years since the occasion, Intel have released the aptly named Core i7-8086K. Interestingly, the 8086K, with its 5GHZ maximum turbo boost, is exactly 1000x the frequency of the original 8086, which came with a 5MHZ clock speed. THE 8700K – BUT BETTER The 8086K is a limited edition six core/twelve thread CPU based on the Coffee Lake architecture and can be considered a higher binned version of the already excellent i7-8700k. It comes with a higher base clock and a more…

H P’s marketing material raves about HP’s first 13-inch notebook-tablet combo. In conjunction with AMD’s gushing claims about performance and battery life, we were expecting the real deal. But is this x360 13 really enough to inspire a deadly sin? At 1.3KG there’s no mistaking the Envy’s ultraportable nature. That’s an impressively-slight frame to be sporting a 13-inch Full HD display. It looks classy and feels solid too. There’s minimal flex in the screen although it can wobble on the hinges a bit if you type too vigorously. It’s coated with Corning’s super-tough Gorilla Glass which should protect it well. It does a good job of repelling fingerprints to boot which is always very useful for a touchscreen. The glass extends well above and below the screen but this makes…

Acer is back with another Predator themed accessory for your gaming rig, the Predator X34P monitor. Aesthetically, it fits in with all the gamer gear on the market, with red accents and sharp angled styling. A narrow bezel keeps things tidy and a fully adjustable stand means you can have the monitor at the correct height, so you aren’t slouching during your gaming sessions. An aggressive 1900R curve makes for a more immersive experience than a bland flat panel. This is a 34-inch wide unit, with a UltraWide QHD resolution of 3440x1440 and an IPS panel for deep, rich colours. This shows with a very commendable 100% sRGB colour gamut coverage - something not typically seen on high refresh rate gaming monitors. The Predator X34P has a refresh rate of…

Corsair is a name that’s synonymous with all-in-one liquid coolers. Having built a strong reputation over the years, it’s time for us to take a look at the latest Corsair AIO, the H100i Pro The H100i Pro is a 240mm design, which of course makes use of 2x 120mm fans. This is a popular size that that performs significantly better than a single 120mm design, but is far more case friendly than the high end 3x120mm models. Corsair have added a little dose of RGB lighting, though we feel the pump/head is a touch plain looking compared to some of the competitors newer designs. Features include an improved base plate, a quieter and adjustable pump, and perhaps our favourite feature: magnetic levitation fans. The Corsair ML120 fans are a real…

We often look at higher-end Asus boards such as the ROG and Strix ranges. There’s something else that’s interesting from Asus though: the TUF series. The so called TUF Gaming Alliance is a collaborative effort between many component manufacturers that aims to provide improved compatibility, reliability, and aesthetics. The TUF B450M-Plus Gaming we’re reviewing certainly looks the goods, but of course the competition is red hot in this price range. Is it tuf enough to compete? The TUF B450M is a micro-ATX board, which is okay for most users who don’t even use more than a single slot anyway. It comes in at $179. Though we wouldn’t call it a powerhouse of a motherboard, it’s got a couple of key features that will appeal to some users. As mentioned, the…

There’s a familial resemblance between this Nighthawk router and the top-of-the-line X10. Not only do both come in low-profile cases with four antennae, they each sport the same pair of USB 3 sockets tucked away on the left-hand side, along with Wi-Fi and WPS buttons on the top and a switch at the back to disable the status LEDs. The XR500 is a slightly different proposition to its high-end sibling, however. For a start, it eschews the 60GHz radio, substituting a second 5GHz radio for better performance under high load. It also loses the 10-Gigabit Ethernet port, which is probably wise, and cuts the regular Ethernet ports down from six to four. All of this has a salutary effect on the price: the XR500 Nighthawk Pro is a full $295…

The EXO AC2600 is a very sensible router. The design is compact and scrupulously sober, and the technical specification carefully ticks all of the important boxes, without wasting too much effort and expense on niche features. Needless to say, that begins with 802.11ac, powered by a single 5GHz radio and partnered with a secondary 2.4GHz transmitter for legacy devices and long-range connections. D-Link claims a maximum throughput of 1,733Mbits/sec on the 5GHz band, which in theory ought to mean it’s as fast as the Netgear Nighthawk X10. But, in practice, the EXO’s smaller antennae and cheaper internals have an inevitable impact, and the EXO AC2600 consistently placed towards the back of the pack in each one of our tests. That doesn’t imply terrible performance, but if you need to fill…

All of this month’s routers support the current Wi-Fi standards, but technology never stands still for long. Do you need to worry about your new router becoming obsolete? Here’s our guide to three emerging network standards, and what they mean. 802.11AD This ultra-high-speed wireless networking specification isn’t exactly new – the standard has been knocking around since 2009, and indeed it’s already built into the Netgear R9000 Nighthawk X10. 802.11ad uses very high frequency radio waves – on the 60GHz band, to be precise, versus the 5GHz band used by 802.11ac – to achieve speeds of up to 8Gbits/sec. Unfortunately, it’s an inescapable rule of physics that the shorter a radio wave gets, the less able it is to penetrate solid objects. In the case of 802.11ad, the signal can…

TRULY THE ULTIMATE MONITOR The Asus PG27UQ packs in all of the premium features you expect, and adds in never seen before technology that will leave you in awe. This screen is perfection. It’s a super-premium 27-inch 4K IPS panel with Quantum dots for outstanding crispness, and rips along at 144Hz as well as being fully G-Sync compatible for luxuriously smooth gaming. And, perhaps best of all it is VESA DisplayHDR™ 1000 Certified and fully supports G-Sync HDR. Once you see supported games on this, you won’t want to play on anything else. Aura Sync lighting dresses it off beautifully. Be sure to have a close look at this at Upgrade! MAXIMUM AUDIO Come and have a listen to the new ROG Strix Fusion 700 and ROG Strix Fusion Wireless…

About a year ago, a mate of mine asked me to do an informal audit of the IT systems of a local company where he’d just been hired as head of technology. What I found can best be described as a colossal mess. The server room had around 30 servers of various makes and vintages, some in racks, but many just piled on top of each other. All of the machines were switched on, consuming lots of electricity and creating an ear-splitting amount of noise. The servers were all plugged into unmanaged switches via a bird’s nest of tangled network cables, none of them labelled. Many of the machines were also plugged into domestic four-way extension leads! There certainly weren’t any power management devices to be seen. The whole thing…

I found myself at a crossroads, one no doubt familiar to many PCTA readers. I’d taken the IT function within my employer’s business as far as it could go and, in doing so, put myself in a position where I’d have to take a step back with a new employer and do it all over again – or set off on my own in a specific area. The fact you’re reading this suggests the route I chose, but what about the area? It helped that I had a long-running interest in data protection and cybersecurity, along with the relevant certifications. It was time to put those to use in my own business. But that makes it sound like my education stopped, which is far from the truth. I’ve had some…

Never have I looked forward to the end of a travel season as I have this one. Madrid, Bremen, Vegas, San Francisco, San Jose, Oakland, Stuttgart, Schaffhausen, Munich, Hanover, Cologne; truly a case of wherever I lay my hat. Although, this time, it wasn’t jetlag or weird diseases that had me eyeing the last trip with keen anticipation. It was the prospect of a sitdown and chat with Serguei Beloussov. Serguei is CEO of Acronis. We met at the firm’s new HQ in Schaffhausen, at the northern tip of Switzerland. This isn’t our first encounter, because the Russian group that includes Acronis also includes Parallels – fine suppliers of web control panels and virtualisation software. Serguei used to run Parallels back in the initial days of cloud computing, so we’ve…