PCWorldの August 2017 の目次

Tech and trends that will affect you today and beyond. AMD HAS REVEALED the prices for some of its Threadripper CPUs, using the same effective strategy that it executed for its mainstream Ryzen chips: set eye-popping discounts compared to Intel’s own Core i9 family, and probably earlier release dates, too. Recently, AMD disclosed the model numbers, price, and rough availability of both the 12- and 16-core AMD Threadripper chips, designed for the upper echelons of gaming and content-creation PCs: The $999 16-core, 32-thread 3.4GHz Threadripper 1950X The $799 12-core, 24-thread 3.5GHz Threadripper 1920X Given that information, we also know the difference between what Intel and AMD will charge for their respective offerings. You’ll pay $700 less for a 1950X than for Intel’s 16-core, 32-thread Core i9-7960X, and a thousand dollars…

IT’S DAMNED NEAR impossible to buy a reasonably priced graphics card right now. First AMD’s Radeon cards disappeared (go.pcworld.com/rcd), then GeForce cards began to dry up too (go.pcworld.com/gfc). The culprit? Cryptocurrency miners chasing price bubbles in Etherium, Zcash, et cetera. But new mining-dedicated graphics cards from AMD and Nvidia’s hardware partners might help ease the dearth of gaming hardware. Maybe? Hopefully? Okay, probably not. A swarm of coin-mining cards have hit online e-tailers recently, as AnandTech (go.pcworld.com/ant) reports. Most are based on AMD’s more mining-friendly Radeon “Polaris” GPUs, but you’ll also find a couple of cards based on Nvidia designs. Notably, those use “GP106” branding—that’s the name of the GPU itself—rather than being called GTX 1060 cards. We’ll get to other crucial differences in a bit. First, here’s a rundown…

TESTED IN PCWORLD LABS In this section, hardware & software goes through rigorous testing. WE’RE REVIEWING THE first Core i9 chip—Intel’s 10-core Core i9-7900X ($1,000 on Newegg, go.pcworld.com/1on)—as a veritable CPU storm looms. Sure, Core i9 blew in as the most powerful CPU the company has ever sold to consumers, and it’s currently the fastest Core-series CPU available. But an ill wind is blowing: AMD’s Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 chips offer stiff competition in the low end, while its massive 12-core and 16-core Threadripper CPUs loom on the high end. Because there’s so much to say about Core i9, we put the prices, features and FAQs (go.pcworld.com/pff) into a separate story you’ll want to read for background. For this review, we’ll walk through some of the under-the-hood issues directly…

GIGABYTE’S AERO 15 is a powerhouse laptop that hits a lot of high notes. Quad-core Intel Core i7-7700HQ CPU? Check. Dual M.2 SSD slots? Check. Up to 32GB of RAM? Check. Nice 15.6-inch screen? Check. Powerful Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 GPU? Check. It’s this last point (well, and the garish colors) that will have many calling the Aero 15 a gaming-laptop rather than what it really is: a powerful, portable laptop that can do it all, and with decent battery life to boot. Even the weight’s bearable at 4.6 pounds. We have some objections to its design, but it’s still well worth a look. A splash of color in a brushed-metal world The Gigabyte Aero 15 comes in three colors: A standard low-profile black ($1,899), Hemi Orange (also $1,899), and…

MICROSOFT’S XBOX ONE X presents an interesting challenge for PC builders. Sure, if you want raw power, nothing beats the PC. But can you put together an Xbox One X (go.pcworld.com/xo) equivalent for $500? At that price point (and outside of that golden window (go.pcworld.com/gw) of Black Friday sales and stellar combo/bundle deals on PC components), you’re pushing the limits of what’s possible, particularly if you want to completely replicate the same experience Microsoft is promising hardcore console fans. Given today’s high RAM prices, the low availability of certain GPUs, and the dearth of 4K UHD drives, the results don’t come out cleanly in favor of a DIY PC. Build #1: A basic 4K/30-fps gaming PC To start, we’ll walk through a baseline build, which makes a few sacrifices but…

THE BIGGER AND uglier your Excel spreadsheet gets, the more you need to use certain features or tricks to keep a handle on the data. The seven features covered here will help you navigate, organize, and readjust your spreadsheet with as little hassle as possible. 1. Split Screen One of the most helpful features for large spreadsheets is the Split Screen command. Split Screen allows you to view two, three, or four windows of your spreadsheet at one time. Use this feature to work on one section of your spreadsheet while you view another section; or use it to compare (side by side) two sections of the spreadsheet. Once you try it, you’ll find lots of reasons to use it. a. First, position your cursor where you’d like the screen…

AMD CONTINUES ITS quest to democratize multicore computing. It recently revealed hard details about Ryzen 3 processors with twice as many CPU cores as their Intel rivals. Only a pair of Ryzen 3 chips will be available when the lineup launches on July 27. Both the Ryzen 3 1200 and the Ryzen 3 1300X rock four cores and four threads, meaning they have double the physical cores as Intel’s dual-core i3 chips, but lack the simultaneous multi-threading that allow AMD’s Ryzen 5 (go.pcworld.com/ry5) and Ryzen 7 (go.pcworld.com/ry7) CPUs to press their core count advantage even further. The Ryzen 3 1200 has a 3.1GHz base clock capable of boosting to 3.4GHz when needed, and the Ryzen 3 1300X hums along between 3.5GHz and 3.7GHz. AMD didn’t reveal any fresh performance comparisons…

USUALLY I START these mid-year lists of the best PC games with “Can you believe it’s already June?” But I think I speak for everyone when I say, “Wow, we’re only halfway through 2017? Seriously?” This has been one of the busiest spring release windows I’ve ever seen, with dozens of major PC games already released this year. Sure, a few we were looking forward to turned out to be high-profile flops (cough Mass Effect: Andromeda [go.pcworld.com/mea] cough), but there have also been some instant classics—NieR: Automata, Prey, Thimbleweed Park, and more. Look for those and more inside, as we round up the best PC games of 2017—so far, at least. This fall’s looking even more packed. Prey It’s not the story you tell, it’s how you tell it. You…

OUR SURFACE LAPTOP review considers Microsoft’s new notebook in three ways: first, as a stylish ultrabook, designed to compete with Apple’s MacBook Air on college campuses. It’s also a showcase for Windows 10 S, limiting users to Windows Store apps but with an unexpected benefit to battery life. But if you want more flexibility, you can upgrade to Windows 10 Pro—and we’ve tested that, too. After using the Surface Laptop as a Windows 10 S machine, I can say it does a great job of addressing exactly what college students need. More sophisticated users might want to look a bit further afield, though, or at least bail out of Windows 10 S early on. An ultrabook with style The Surface Laptop follows in the formidable footsteps of the Surface Pro,…

Watch the video at go.pcworld.com/vrti THERE ARE BIG laptops, and then there’s MSI’s Titan series. Weighing in at 9.7 pounds and featuring a dozen cooling pipes, an Nvidia GTX 1080, and a full mechanical keyboard, the GT75VR Titan can’t quite match the $9,000 decadence of Acer’s Predator 21 X (go.pcworld.com/21x), but it’s still one of the largest and most feature-packed laptops around. The feature I expect will make the most difference, though not necessarily the one that will be most talked about? An HDR-ready display (go.pcworld.com/drr)—two, actually, because you can get the GT75VR in 1080 and 4K variants. HDR is still a rarity in desktop displays, let alone in laptops—we’ve only seen one or two announced with the capability so far. MSI actually dropped from an 18-inch Titan down to…

How to build, maintain, and fix your tech gear. Watch the video at go.pcworld.com/nap MOVING TO A new phone can be a pain. Android might have the edge over iOS when it comes to tight integration with cloud services, but Google still has a ways to go when it comes to effortlessly transferring all your data off your old phone and onto the new one. But it has gotten better. You’ll need to rely heavily on Google’s services, of course, but with Android Nougat, moving your personal info has never been easier. It’ll still take a some vigilance and a little work, but you don’t need to be an Android whiz anymore to ensure your data is ready to move the next time a catastrophe hits your phone—or you just…

AS WINDOWS 10’S next big release date nears, the latest Insider Preview Build 16241 gives us a solid sneak peek at what the Fall Creators Update will look like. You’ll see a some significant new features, including Ubuntu support, update delivery options, and improved Task Manager visibility. But tellingly, Microsoft also opened its final “bug bash” challenge. That means the Windows 10 team is just about ready to button up the OS for its promised September debut. Build 16241 also shows it’s serious because of the nature of its new features, emphasizing nuts-and-bolts improvements over new capabilities. For example, Windows 10 now offers a great deal more granularity into how Windows updates will be delivered, and how you can manage their bandwidth. Task Manager adds deeper insights into what’s going…

HOW MUCH TOTALWar is too much? It seems like Creative Assembly’s determined to discover the answer, recently announcing yet another spin-off of the strategy series. In addition to the mainline historical Total War and the fantastical Total Warhammer, we’ll now see Total War Saga games. And soon. While Total Warhammer 2 releases this fall, the first Total War Saga game will release “before the next major historical release in the franchise,” as this press release puts it. Sometime next year, probably. So what is Total War Saga? I’ll let Creative Assembly’s Jack Lusted give you the short of it. From the announcement: There are key, pivotal points in history which don’t necessarily revolve around a single character, and only lasted a few months or few decades at most. Such moments…

MEET THE NEXT great budget SSD. Intel’s 545s is an affordable yet reasonably fast SSD that finally demotes Samsung’s EVO (go.pcworld.com/sevo) from the top spot in the consumer space. At $180 for 512GB, the 545s offers all the capacity and cost advantages of TLC NAND plus the sustained write speed of MLC NAND. Design and specs Our first glimpse of the 545s with its raised edges had us thinking ‘sardine tin’ in a positive way: sleek and shiny. The drive’s 7mm profile appears thinner thanks to the indented upper and lower surfaces. Inside our test unit was a Silicon Motion SM2259 controller and 512GB of Intel’s new 256-gigabit, 64-layer stacked (3D) floating-gate type NAND. Perhaps it’s the gate that’s responsible for the performance—Intel wasn’t saying, and in fact the company…

Watch the video at go.pcworld.com/rvfs AMD’S RADEON VEGA Frontier Edition may be a graphics card for workstations, but gamers are just as eager to see what this GPU can tell us about the coming consumer version. AMD has already made a splash with its Ryzen and Ryzen Threadripper CPUs, and now Vega can help complete a high-performance puzzle. To show how the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition could benefit workstations, AMD officials gave us a hands-on preview of one of the first production cards. What it is We’ve published full details on the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition (go.pcworld.com/rvf), but here’s the short story: The Frontier Edition is based on AMD’s new Vega core and features 16GB of advanced HBM2 RAM. And it’s a doozy in every way possible: The air-cooled card…

SETTING UP A wireless router doesn’t have to be an ordeal. And while router manufacturers must be commended for making it easier to install their products, these tips will make the process even simpler. I’ll also show you how to make sure your home network is as secure as it can be, and I’ll explain some networking details that user manuals often gloss over. The majority of router manufacturers now offer smartphone and tablet apps that you can use for first-time installation and subsequent tweaking. In fact, some companies no longer bother with browser-based user interfaces at all. I think it’s best to have both options so youcan decide which approach is best (personally, I prefer using the browser because the display connected to my PC is bigger and easier…