Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2020 i APC

There’s so much going on in the world of the PC that it’s almost ridiculous. For yet another month the CPU takes centre-stage – this time as AMD kicks down the door into the budget segment, while Intel has its long-standing relationship with Apple hitting the brakes. I’ll spare you my usual CPU rant this time and let Chris tell the Ryzen 3100 and 3300X story in his reviews, which is a good new tale, along with his round-up of B550 motherboards – which is less rosy as we see motherboard prices continue on their relentless upward trajectory. A couple of reviews that really stand out are the Intel NUC 9 Extreme and Microsoft Surface Go 2. Both teeny little things – one immensely powerful, the other far less so,…

Intel has published a news release on its website stating that Jim Keller has resigned from the company, effective immediately, due to personal reasons. Jim Keller was hired by Intel two years ago to the role as Senior Vice President of Intel’s Silicon Engineering Group, after a string of successes at Tesla, AMD, Apple, AMD (again), and PA Semiconductor. As far as we understand, Jim’s goal inside Intel was to streamline a lot of the product development process on the silicon side, as well as providing strategic platforms though which future products can be developed and optimised to market. We also believe that Jim Keller has had a hand in looking at Intel’s manufacturing processes, as well as a number of future products.…

In response to heated criticism for not disclosing that some of its hard drives use slower SMR technology, WD penned a blog post outlining its plans to release a new line of WD Red Plus drives that use standard conventional magnetic recording (CMR) tech as an alternative to its slower SMR drives. WD’s change in course comes after widespread criticism from its customers about its surreptitious use of slower shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology in some of its hard drives without disclosing that fact in marketing materials or specification sheets. Those claims of false advertising touched off a wave of class-action lawsuits, with one even calling for a ban to block WD from selling SMR drives for NAS usage.…

The Virtual Boy is a strange piece of gaming history. Nintendo called it a “32-bit, 3D experience” that “eliminates all external stimuli, totally immersing players into their own private universe.” Even so, Time magazine listed it as one of the worst inventions of all time, and PC World called it one of “the ugliest products in tech history.” So let’s delve into the mystery behind the Virtual Boy. Major tech specs • 20 MHz, 32-bit RISC Processor • 128KB dual-port VRAM • 384 x 224 pixel resolution • 2-bit monochrome display (black and three shades of red) • 16-bit stereo sound Key findings • Taking the Virtual Boy apart is no walk in the park. Our 1/4” drive gamebit didn’t fit into some of the recessed screw holes, so we…

What’s the best audio solution for PC users? Audiophile headphones are designed with music in mind, aiming to deliver the ultimate audio quality for professional and enthusiast users, while speakers – that’s proper 2.1 speakers, not the tinny ones built into your monitor – are more about loud, room-filling sound. Then there’s gaming headsets, brimming with cool features and designs to benefit PC gamers. All are good, but which option is best? Value This is a tricky one, since there’s a broad price range for all three options. The more you spend, the better quality you get – mostly, anyway. So we’re going to consider price against purpose, and price against performance. Gaming headsets take an early lead here, as they almost always include a built-in or detachable mic, and…

“Dropping in six Seagate Ironwolf Pro drives is the work of minutes, and the Synology software walks you through your desired setup.” $3,600 | www.synology.com Aimed at small to medium businesses that need a lot of performance, the $3,600 Synology DS3617xs is not your average NAS. Think Rackstation server in a NAS form factor, optimised for virtualisation and performance intensive tasks, as well as backing up loads of data. While the underlying hardware is getting a little long in the tooth, the Synology software is continually updated with new features. The flexibility of the NAS server and associated ecosystem and add ons also means it can perform well across a broad range of businesses. Accessible via lockable hot swap bays, the DS3617xs has 12 drive bays that can handle up…

$2,099 | www.asus.com/au We’ve been fond of Asus’s TUF (‘The Ultimate Force’... oh please, Asus) branded gaming laptops ever since they emerged in 2018 with a reengineered fan design that repelled small particles to prevent dust build up and help prolong the life of the unit. This strive for longevity continues today in the TUF Gaming A15 which sees the return of an upgraded version of this self-cleaning cooling system and novel features like an optional 90Wh battery to keep the device running longer in day-to-day use. The most striking feature of the A15 is a new chassis design that marries a number of interesting elements into one cohesive design. The top shell can either be a flat silver polished piece of aluminium or an angular brushed metal and carbon-fibre-looking…

$379 | logitechg.com For some, less is more when it comes to their gaming or work space. Less clutter, fewer cables means more space on your desk for moving your mouse or having a snack. The Logitech G915 TKL wireless gaming keyboard frees up space in multiple ways, including a tenkeyless design that saves space by dropping the numpad and G macro keys. It also brings an ultra-slim build and the option to connect via Bluetooth or a wireless USB Type-A dongle. The G915 TKL is a near replica of the full-sized G915 Lightspeed. That means it embodies the same svelte, classic and mature tone, with a layout thoughtfully designed for the functionality gamers need. The first thing you’ll notice is that the G915 TKL doesn’t have a numpad or…

The launch of 3rd generation Ryzen alongside X570 motherboards brought AMD many well deserved plaudits, but that success has mostly been restricted to the enthusiast segment. Until now there’s been no way to buy into 3rd generation Ryzen without spending several hundred dollars for a Ryzen 5 3600. We’ve been waiting for more affordable 3rd generation options and that time is now here. With the launch of B550 motherboards and quad core Ryzen 3000 series processors, mainstream buyers can now build systems that offer levels of performance, connectivity and I/O that promise to shake up the ‘budget’ end of the PC market. Note the inverted commas around the word budget. B550 is something of a curious beast. Motherboard pricing across all Intel and AMD product lines has taken a large…

$439 | www.aorus.com Say hello to the Gigabyte B550 Aorus Master. It might ostensibly be based on a budget chipset, but this is no budget-oriented motherboard at $439. One look though and you’d never mistake it as such. You wouldn’t be alone in assuming that this was a good quality X570 board. As expected, the Aorus Master easily features the best specification in the lineup. There’s plenty of fan and RGB headers, six SATA ports, debug LED and Gigabyte’s audio implementations are usually impressive like the one here. In the past Gigabyte really went all out on the RGB lighting, but this is a much more tasteful and mature design. Perhaps we have passed peak RGB! “It’s the only board in the roundup to feature three M.2 slots, all of…

MACOS 10.12 or later | US$4.99 | FROM John Siracusa, hypercritical.co Way back in the days before OS X, when you clicked on a window in a Mac application, all the windows for that application were brought to the front. In OS X and now in macOS, only the window you click is brought to the front, the others remain in the background. For applications that have a separate window for each document, like Word and Excel, that’s an issue. Front and Center fixes that by restoring pre-OS X behaviour and bringing all the windows in an app to the front when you click one. Front and Center’s interface is a menu bar item with two options: Classic and Modern. The former restores pre-OS X, aka classic behaviour, while the…

You could win this stunningly built and immensely powerful PC! Western Digital generously approached APC at the outset of this project asking if we wanted to be involved, and to run a competition to give it away to one of our readers. That could be you! The PC is valued at over $6,600, and that’s for the parts alone which is not taking into account Stuart’s time and talents in creating a PC that is beautiful and unique. To enter, head to TechRadar, the home of APC online, and enter at www.techradar.com/news/apcmag Closing date for entries is Sunday August 9th at 11:59pm. The winner will be chosen on Monday August 10th 2020 and notified by email and phone (if a phone number was provided on the entry form). Full terms…

It’s possible to encrypt an existing data drive without wiping it in VeraCrypt using Encrypt in place. But there are drawbacks. Unlike encrypting your Windows installation, the drive won’t be available while it’s being encrypted. Also, when done, you’re prompted to assign it a different drive letter – this isn’t necessary as we’ll explain shortly. Choose Encrypt in place, click Next, read the warning, and click Yes. You’re prompted to set encryption and authentication options, then asked to move your mouse randomly to strengthen the encryption keys, before ending up at the ‘Wipe Screen’. This allows you to shred unencrypted files after the drive has been encrypted to prevent them from being recovered by undelete tools later. Only the most paranoid should consider anything other than None (fastest) or 1-pass…

There’s no excuse not to school yourself in the ways of Linux command-line operations. Whether you’re accessing the Terminal on your Linux desktop, logged directly into the Bash shell, or intrigued by Windows 10’s support for CLI-based Linux distros, you’ve come to the right place. We’re going to assume you know the basics of Linux’s Bash shell and command language. As a quick reminder, Bash uses a relatively straightforward syntax for each command: $ utility command -option The utility portion of the command is the tool you wish to run, such as ls for listing the contents of a directory, or apt-get for triggering the package management tool. The command section is where you specify exactly what you want the utility to do. Typing apt-get install instructs the package management…

Aftershock PC Ultracore Set in a showy Lian Li O11D, this system has all the underpinnings of a great gaming rig. A water-cooled i7-10700K has much of the speed of an i9 for gaming and with some minor overclocking tweaks, equal performance. With eight cores you’d think it wouldn’t be as competitive in multi-threaded productivity tasks, but with such high clock speeds it does rather well. A speedy RAM pairing is nice to see, as is a comfortably sized 1TB NVMe SSD for all your OS, gaming and project needs plus a 2TB hard drive for everything else. With ample custom cosmetic choices at checkout, this could be the glitzy system you’ve been waiting for. CPU: Intel Core i7-10700K, COOLER: Aftershock Spectra Glacier 240mm, MOTHERBOARD: Asrock Z490 Steel Legend, GRAPHICS:…

Last issue, we showed you how to benchmark your CPU just like the system-testing impresarios here on APC. Never let it be said that we can’t follow a theme; this time, we’ll be running through the tests we often use to benchmark GPUs, for both builds and reviews. Unlike our CPU benchmarking process, some of this software isn’t available for free. Free trials are available for certain programs, but GPU testing ideally uses multiple gaming benchmarks, which could cost you. We’ll go through some of the games we use for testing later on, but if you don’t have any of those you may want to look into whether any of the titles you already own include a benchmark. Plenty of games have one nestled away in the graphical settings to…

Let’s face it, we’re all busy enough that we don’t want to be wasting precious time micro managing our schedules and wrestling with planning apps. Yet all too often keeping on top of our daily calendars becomes a time-consuming task itself, eating into the hours we really should be spending on more important things. “Use it to manage your team’s workflow and you’ll find it makes your work life run that much smoother” For years, Fantastical has been a staple of Apple fans everywhere, with Flexibits’ organisational apps making serious waves on Mac, iOS and even the Apple Watch. Now, the popular app has been updated to version 3, which brings a new level of organisational nous to the table. Get familiar with its tools and your calendar will never…

Known to be over 1,200 years old, chess remains a key test of strategy, mental ability, computational power and is generally a good way of passing the time. If you can represent an eight by eight grid with suitable symbols for the pieces then you can have a game of chess. So why not play chess in your terminal? Partly this was all kicked off by stumbling across a dreadfully written bespoke open source chess game, which had some ginormous fixed-state machine built from an unfathomable number of nested if statements. So, stuff that for a party. There’s no need to reinvent the chess-shaped wheel. There are a host of accomplished open source chess engines which any front-end that feels the need can plug into. The most common is one…

Electronic Arts announced FIFA 21 at its EA Play showcase in mid-June, and it looked impressive: vague improvements such as improved “player humanisation” and a “deferred lighting system” seemed to suggest that the glacially iterative soccer game might receive a dramatic facelift. But if that proves to be true, PC owners will not benefit from the “next-gen” visual upgrades in the same way owners of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X will. Following the announcement an FAQ appeared for the game, which seemed to confirm that PC players will be stuck with the last-gen version of FIFA. In a statement sent to APC, EA confirmed it directly. “The PC version will be the same experience as the Xbox One and PS4 versions of the game,” the statement said, “so…

The latest Destiny 2 expansion, Beyond Light, will support free cross-gen upgrades for PS5 and Xbox Series X players, alongside all expansions for the game. Announced as part of a recent Destiny 2 reveal stream, players who buy Beyond Light on PS4 and Xbox One can expect to upgrade their copies of the expansion for free when they move onto next-gen consoles. Game director Mark Noseworthy confirmed that all content you own, past and present, will also be cross-gen. Destiny 2: Beyond Light will be part of the Xbox Smart Delivery service, which ensures that your purchases will play best on whatever platform you’re running them on. Bungie also confirmed that PS4 purchases will upgrade to PS5 for free. The studio will share more Destiny 2 next-gen news over the…

$29.95 | PC, Xbox | xbox.com/en-AU/games/minecraft-dungeons It’s safe to say that Minecraft Dungeons doesn’t take itself too seriously. It’s set in the same universe as its sandbox predecessor, but there’s no crafting or building in his world. It’s a dungeon crawler that challenges you to furiously hack-and-slash your way through hordes of enemies with an arsenal of fun enchantments and items. I’ve cleaved a swathe through hordes of slime cubes, shot a mass of burning (and exploding) arrows at spiders, and gone toe to toe with sinister, teleporting Endermen. It’s bombastic, frantic fun, and it offers four-player local or online co-op so your friends can get in on its blocky brawls too. The story is fairly straightforward. The main villain is the evil Arch-Illager, who finds a powerful artefact called…

Facebook and Oculus announced that it will discontinue its Oculus Go VR headset to allow the company more room to work “on the next chapter in VR”. The announcement came in a blog post on Oculus’ website as well as an email to Oculus owners that thanked them for their interest in the headset and gave them a timetable for when the headset will set off for greener pastures. Oculus will continue to maintain the system software with bug fixes and security patches through 2022, according to the post. However, it also says that it won’t be adding or updating apps and games after December 4, 2020. If you have one, now’s the time to load it up with software.…

The 4GB size limit for video recording has been removed For a long time, Android has had a file size limit of 4GB whenever you record a video. That wasn’t so bad when you were shooting a low-bitrate 1080p video and saving it to an SD card that couldn’t process files larger than 4GB anyway. But with 4K capable cameras, it meant that even a 15-minute video would be chopped into more than one file because it’s too big. With Android 11, that’s all a thing of the past as the software classes and APIs that write media has been moved to use a 64-bit file size versus the original 32-bit. That means the theoretical maximum size is about 2,305,843,009 ((2^64)-1) Gigabytes. Android 11 has a hidden Recycle Bin If…

$1,000 | www.synology.com/en-au Synology’s four-bay DS920+ NAS is the follow-up to 2017’s incredibly popular DS918+. At a glance, not much has changed and the fact it runs the Synology’s constantly updated software means there’s virtually no difference in operation, either. Nonetheless, the improved memory and processor speeds make this a welcome update to Synology’s vast army of enthusiasts and if you’ve been thinking of buying a NAS, this may be what you’ve been waiting for. The NAS has four, lockable 3.5-inch drive bays which offer easy, hot-swappable access to what’s inside. There are also two, M.2 2080 NVMe drives for fast caching and increased storage. At the rear is an eSATA port which can be used to connect additional drive bays plus a USB 3 port that can connect storage,…

$199 | www.tendacn.com/au/ We reviewed our first Tenda Wi-Fi device a few months ago. It was mesh system most notable for the fact it was available from Officeworks and, subsequently, could be purchased on a whim (or in an emergency) when shopping-around wasn’t an option. Now here’s another Tenda device and this one will be available primarily via amazon.com.au. It’s a dual-band, AC1200 router that uses 4G as the primary internet source. It resembles a kind of robot rabbit, replete with bunny-ear antenna. We slotted a full-sized SIM-card into the bottom, powered it on and it worked. Even in a world where Wi-Fi set-up has become a ‘few-click’ process – thanks to well-designed apps – Tenda wins the simplest set-up award for basically having no set-up. It just works. There’s…

$389 | steelseries.com Steelseries’s Apex keyboards are all respectable offerings – high-quality peripherals for the discerning PC enthusiast. Each model has a dinky display and textured wheel for multimedia controls, and the same degree of overall design polish. But the Apex Pro brings something more than build quality and RGB lighting; it offers an end, finally, to the key-switch debate. Mechanical or membrane? Linear or tactile? Clicky or quiet? The arguments may rage across reddit forever, but Steelseries has provided the answer with the new OmniPoint mechanical switch. This switch already ticks all the boxes for performance, with an incredibly fast 0.7ms response time an actuation point below 1mm, but here’s the kicker: the Apex Pro’s OmniPoint keys (which includes the entire main keyboard block, save the function keys, arrow…

$399 | www.asrock.com As the name suggests, the Asrock B550 Phantom Gaming ITX/ax is a mini-ITX motherboard, the sole such entry in our roundup. The mini-ITX form factor has a loyal following and B550 ITX boards should sell well as they are suited to the lower power characteristics of the Ryzen platform. Being a mini-ITX board, you’ll always have a lack of PCB real estate to fit heaps of extras in, but surprisingly the little Asrock competes well against the bigger boards. You still get dual M.2 slots, though only the primary slot is equipped with a heatsink. The other slot is on the back side of the board. Asrock managed to include the premium ALC1220 audio codec, though surprisingly there’s no optical output on the rear panel. The little…

$309 | www.msi.com At $309, MSI’s MAG B550 Tomahawk is a reasonably priced ATX B550 entry. It’s priced far below the luxuriously appointed Aorus Master but it’s hardly a barebone budget board. The B550 Tomahawk comes across as a no frills type of board. The design and presentation is rather unassuming. You won’t see it on display in an all out water-cooled show rig, but you will find it powering plenty of gaming rigs. Like the impression you get from a burbling V8 at low RPM, the Tomahawk’s got it where it counts. The B550 Tomahawk has two M.2 slots, both of which feature heatsinks, and the second one is thoughtfully placed away from the hot air of a GPU. It’s got six SATA ports, plenty of fan headers along…

“The BlueHarvest app sits in your menu bar and can work automatically on any storage device you connect, or you can set it to prompt you for action.” MACOS 10.12 or later | US$4.99 | FROM John Siracusa, hypercritical.co One of our favourite things about Mac developers is that if something annoys you, a developer feels your pain too and will create an app to soothe it. With BlueHarvest, the pain is all the stuff your Mac (or a Windows PC) leaves on external drives – vital for the OS but a pain if you’re sharing content with your in-car audio or your smart TV, or if you work with PCs as well as Macs. The BlueHarvest app sits in your menu bar and can work automatically on any storage…

For real-time tracking of frame rates in games, you may need some extra software. While some games include live fps counters (like Destiny 2), you’ll likely need to activate a separate overlay to monitor your frame rate while playing. If you’re on Steam, then good news: Steam packs an in-game overlay that includes an fps counter. You can turn it on under “Settings >= In-Game,” and then it’ll activate automatically in any game you boot up. You can’t turn it on while playing, though. Otherwise, you’re going to need some external software. Unfortunately this does mean there’s a bit of extra load on your CPU, but you shouldn’t notice much of a difference on modern systems. The GPU overclocking software MSI Afterburner is our go-to program for this, as it…

Bonus features to boost your workflow Fantastical is full of other great collaboration features. For instance, while you can assign each calendar its own colour, you can also set colours for certain events within an individual calendar. That’s useful if you have a shared work calendar and want to easily differentiate team meetings from your own tasks, say. Just control-click an event and click Color. You can also attach files to events. Double-click an event, click the down arrow to expand it, then click Add Attachment. Everyone on the event will now get a copy of the attachment.…

The creator of PlayStation 4 exclusive The Order 1886 and Oculus Rift VR series Lone Echo has been acquired by Facebook. Vice president of AR/VR content at Facebook, Mike Verdu, shared the news today in a blog post, where he confirmed that the studio will continue development on Lone Echo 2. The acquisition follows Facebook’s 2019 purchase of Beat Saber studio Beat Games. Like Beat Games, Ready at Dawn staff will continue to work from their current offices situated in California and Oregon, but all will be absorbed into Oculus Studios. “The tight-knit community at the studio and their focus, in turn, on cultivating passionately engaged gaming communities are aspects of the company we admire and intend to maintain,” Verdu wrote. Ready at Dawn was founded in 2003 and cut…

Repetitive tasks take a big bite out of the fun. $TBA | PC, PS4, XB1, Switch | tripwireinteractive.com Sharks only do three things, according to Matt Hooper in the 1975 film Jaws. They swim and eat and make little sharks. In Maneater, Tripwire’s action-RPG, you just swim and eat (and sometimes bellyflop onto a golf course), which doesn’t sound like enough to propel you through an entire open world RPG. And, unfortunately, it isn’t. There’s a lot of appeal in growing from a little shark to a hulking leviathan, but there’s just not enough variation in the things you do along the way. Eating ten of something – humans, turtles, fish, seals, other sharks – is initially fun. Humans scream, animals struggle, blood fills the water and coats beaches and…

Free | PC, Mac, Linux dmullinsgames.itch.io Here you’re running a train all by yourself, by shovelling coal to keep the engine running, aiming a pistol to shoot those hangers-on, and pumping the big freaky heart you’re transporting across the wasteland – keeping it alive, as per the title. This is a one-screen game where you have to keep those multiple plates spinning, on each leg of a journey between the wasteland’s surviving stations. If the heart slows down, you’ll need to dart back to pump it up, and if the engine slows down, a zombie-style monster will attempt to jump onboard. Your energy might be limitless, but your bullets and coal reserves are unfortunately not, and these will only replenish when you arrive at a train station. Keeping the trains…

Free | PC | playvalorant.com It’s wild how quickly Valorant has captured the collective consciousness of FPS fans. Riot’s competitive shooter is just barely out of beta, yet it already stands toe-to-toe with the biggest games in its genre. It helps that Valorant comes from a gigantic studio and that its deviously smart partnership with Twitch streamers to selectively hand out beta access gave it a running start. But that enormous marketing push wouldn’t mean much if Valorant weren’t also very good. Valorant manages to reproduce Counter-Strike’s greatest qualities while tossing magical ice walls and drones into the mix. The deliberate detachment from reality allows traditional support tools like smoke, flash, and fire grenades to become playful abilities with varied uses. It’s been especially cool to see Sova’s tricky recon…

For many Brits, the BBC Micro would be their first experience using a computer, inspiring new coders across the country. With a production run reaching into the mid-90s, it was a national institution. Indeed, it was the BBC Micro that inspired both the Raspberry Pi and its Model A and B naming scheme. Although the BBC Micro was too expensive to be a popular home games machine, those who indulged it were rewarded with a beautiful version of BASIC and lots of great games, such as Chuckie Egg, Exile, Citadel, and 3D Dotty. Nevertheless, BBC Micros are hard to find in Australia, leaving emulation as Australians’ only real option. So, join us as we take you through a history of the BBC Micro, and provide instructions for getting you gaming…

Visit a Minecraft photo exhibition during lockdown Aussie photographers document 2020 bushfires in the online virtual gallery. A photographer from the south coast of NSW held a photographic exhibition to raise money for bushfire relief entirely in a built Minecraft arena. The exhibit, titled Still Burning, was intended as an online fundraiser to help those affected by the 2019/2020 bushfires and can be accessed at ‘still_burning.apexmc.co’. While the Minecraft gallery setting was initially intended as a joke, it was also one of the only ways to hold such an event during the COVID-19 lockdown conditions. It might seem straightforward enough to host a Minecraft exhibition, but the game doesn’t actually allow you to insert image files into it, so the host, Jason De Freitas, had to convert each photograph into…

It is no longer a matter of if Apple will make a switch from using Intel hardware to ARM-based processors for its Mac lineup, but when, and the answer is soon... very soon. Apple made the announcement at this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), saying it is embarking on a two-year transition to its own custom silicon, calling it a “truly historic day for the Mac.” To be clear, the transition is already well underway. Apple will ship the first Mac with “Apple silicon” inside by the end of the year, some 15 years after making the switch from IBM’s PowerPC hardware to Intel’s x86 processors. That will be the beginning of the transition period. “With its powerful features and industry-leading performance, Apple silicon will make the Mac stronger and…

AMD has fired back at Intel’s Comet Lake processors with three new XT-series Ryzen 3000 processors that slot in as the new leading chips for the Ryzen 9, Ryzen 7, and Ryzen 5 families. The new processors bring AMD’s Radeon XT branding to its desktop processor line, but they are physically similar to their respective predecessors. That means they come with the same 7nm process and Zen 2 architecture, number of cores and threads, L3 cache capacity, and TDP ratings, but serve up an extra 100 to 200 MHz over the standard boost frequency. Base frequencies remain unchanged. AMD says the incremental clock speed improvement provides up to four percent higher performance in single-threaded Cinebench benchmarks. In a shift from AMD’s standard practice, the Ryzen 9 3900XT and Ryzen 7…

Optoma UHD50X A speedy gaming screen that’s 30 times bigger than your average monitor. $3,199 | optoma.com While for many the fact that Optoma’s UHD50X is a 4K projector capable of throwing a 302-inch picture across a wall in your house is impressive enough, but it also happens to be the world’s first 240Hz gaming projector. Now, pro gamers shouldn’t get their hopes up just yet since there’s still a 15ms+ response time on its fastest setting, but for more casual console gaming this shouldn’t be much of an issue. The UHD50X even supports HDR10 using its 3000 lumen peak brightness to display many more colours than conventional SDR TVs this is one of the closest things we’ve seen to a fully fledged cinema at home. Fitbit Charge 4 Fitbit’s…

$879 | microsoft.com As our most used work applications continue to be integrated into web browsers, our files become increasingly stored in the cloud, and the advanced processing power required for gaming or technical work can now be easily outsourced via remote desktop subscription, the need for having a really powerful laptop is decreasing by the day. Well-priced compact devices like Microsoft’s Surface Go 2 are perfectly positioned to cater to that seemingly inevitable future, and we honestly couldn’t be happier about it. The price and performance balance The most affordable Surface Go 2 you can grab locally starts at $598 and comes with an Intel Pentium 4425Y processor, 4GB of RAM and 64GB of onboard storage, which is an offering that seriously competes with some of the best Chromebooks…

$1,299 | www.viewsonic.com A quick glance over the specs list suggests there’s not actually a lot of new tech here; we’ve had 165Hz, QHD, IPS gaming monitors with G-Sync for some time now. But there’s more to the Elite XG270QG than that. It’s a combination of design aesthetics and some new tweaks to the technology that makes it truly impressive. It all comes down to the panel at its heart. Viewsonic’s taking advantage of LG’s pioneering IPS Nano Color tech. It’s actually a relatively new panel type, first debuting in about 2018, and we’ve seen very few manufacturers actually take it up in the gaming monitor space. The reason for this is that it adds a fair amount of cost to a screen, but improves colour accuracy quite remarkably. With…

$729 | www.asus.com/au Traditionally the ROG Hero line of motherboards has been aimed at the mid to high-end gamer. Whether that’s with Intel or AMD, usually you can see these floating around the $400-$500 mark. The current one we’re reviewing? $730 at the time of writing. That’s a lot of cash to drop on a motherboard, and it’s honestly hard for us to swallow. Even taking a step back in time for a moment, on launch the X470 Crosshair VII Hero was $379. Sure, X570 is more complex to produce than previous iterations, and there is PCIe 4.0 to consider, which we’ve been told since the beginning is far more advanced and therefor more expensive to manufacture, but can you really justify a price increase of $350 over the course…

AMD Ryzen 3 3100 - $175 | AMD Ryzen 3 3300X - $205 | www.amd.com Remember that time just a couple of years back when a quad core CPU was regarded as high end? How far things have come! The new Ryzen 3 3100 and 3300X bring 4-core/8-thread computing to the masses. Along with 10th Generation 4c/8t i3’s, serious multi-threading power will now be found in all but the very cheapest PCs. The bar has been raised. Zen 2-based Ryzen 3000 processors launched in July 2019, with the range slowly filling out over the following months. Curiously, AMD hadn’t address the low end of the market until now, with discounted Ryzen 2000 series and the Zen+ APUs filling this market segment. That’s all changed with the release of the $175…

$279 | www.asus.com It’s nice to see fans of mATX get some love! Asus’ TUF brand has expanded to include partnerships with many different manufacturers who sell products to match the yellow tinged aesthetic. Though we wouldn’t call it a particularly attractive board, it has a rather understated and subtle appeal that users opposed to RGB lightshows will appreciate. It also offers very good value, something we don’t always see from Asus. “Though we wouldn’t call it a particularly attractive board, it has a rather understated and subtle appeal that users opposed to RGB lightshows will appreciate.” The mATX form factor means PCB space isn’t as limited as it is with mini-ITX, but with M.2 slots taking a lot of room, the PCB is still quite packed with components. The…

WINDOWS | From $13.50/month | myob.com MYOB has been a dominant provider of Australian small business accounting software for decades. With the 2020 release of MYOB Essentials, you get the latest cloud-based tech in an accounting package that draws from the maker’s long history of supporting SMEs. With functionality to cover micro and growing business, Essentials offers all of the key components required to remain compliant and competitive if you’re doing business in Australia. The platform rolled out a new look and feel in March of this year, which new subscribers will see immediately upon registering; existing users should expect to see the upgrade rolled out to their accounts before September. Every small business needs a strong understanding of its cash flow – ideally, you want to use a combination…

If you’re using a higher-end version of Windows – Professional, Education, or Enterprise – and you’re looking to encrypt an entire drive, you might like to use the built-in BitLocker tool. It can be used to encrypt fixed and removable drives, as well as your Windows boot drive, making it possible to protect the contents of your laptop should it be stolen. Type “bitlocker” into the Search box and click Manage BitLocker. You’ll see a list of all available drives in the main window. Expand one and click Turn BitLocker on. If you’re looking to encrypt the main system drive, you may see an error about your PC not having a compatible Trusted Protection Module. Check your motherboard specifications – you may be lucky and simply need to enable TPM…

You’ve encrypted the files on your hard drive, but what about your backups? By default, backup tools store your files unencrypted on a local or network drive, which is fine if the drives have been encrypted with VeraCrypt or BitLocker, but what if you just want the backups to be encrypted; perhaps you’d like to store them securely in the cloud? The answer lies with the free and open-source backup tool Duplicati, currently in beta (www. duplicati.com). This has been engineered like Cryptomator for the cloud, but specialises in file-based backups. After downloading and installing, let Duplicati launch – configuration is done through a browser window. Click Add backup to work your way through the backup wizard. You’re prompted to set your encryption level (the default AES-256 is more than…

AMD USB problems I have an AMD R9 3900X build with an MSI X570 MPG Gaming Pro Carbon motherboard. I was having thermal issues with the voltage regulator modules, which meant the CPU was being throttled when the VRMs hit 95 degrees Celsius. I decided to replace the mobo with an Asus ROG X570 Crosshair Hero VIII, which runs a lot cooler. I originally stuck with the same Windows install, which settled down after several reboots and driver updates, but have now run into some weird issues. USB flash drives are only recognized 50 percent of the time when plugged into any USB 3.0 port, forcing me to unplug and reinsert them. Sometimes I get an error saying the USB device wasn’t removed properly, even when nothing is plugged into…

While most of the software and games we’ve listed here aren’t free, there are still ways to test your GPU’s capabilities without spending a dime. 3DMark has a free edition with limited features, but if you don’t want to pay, we’d recommend Unigine’s Heaven benchmark. The Heaven benchmark is a heavy-duty graphics test that can be used for systems running DirectX 11 and OpenGL 4.0, testing all the usual elements, such as ambient occlusion and real-time lighting. A free “gamer: edition” of the benchmark is available online, with the paid versions offering additional (often unneeded) features, such as benchmark looping and frame-by-frame analysis. Heaven is straightforward to set up and run, and comes with a few useful GPU monitoring tools too. Another way to benchmark your system is to use…

At a glance, Safari for iPad in iPadOS might not seem that different from Apple’s browser in iOS 12, but a lot has changed. The latest version is packed full of new features, a dozen of which we’ll explore in the walkthrough. The main underlying change, however, is that Safari for iPad is now effectively a desktop-grade browser. What this means is that instead of taking the iPhone’s version of Safari and blowing it up for iPad, what you get on your tablet is now akin to the browsing experience on a Mac. So when you’re using the likes of Google Docs and WordPress, you’ll get full-fat versions rather than cut-down mobile equivalents. Of course, there may be times when you want the mobile version of a site on your…

A deep-dive into Pi networking solutions resulted in this tutorial. The goal was to uncover a Pi configuration that would enable the routing of network traffic from a wired network to a wireless network. The aim is to build a network router using a Raspberry Pi. The Pi router would be responsible for moving network traffic between a wired Ethernet network and a wireless Wi-Fi network. The Ethernet network is a local area network (LAN) with hosts (PCs) connected. The Wi-Fi connects to a larger network via a network access point (AP). A router is required to move traffic between the two networks. We’re going to build that routing device while exploring the network theory. Strap in, people! The Pi router will use a number of networking services. The LAN…

Over the last couple of months, we’ve covered simple PSU ratings and how you’d choose between anchored, semi-modular and modular designs. Now that we’ve considered the basics, we’re moving into ‘PSU201’ and some deeper concepts. Buying a PSU on watts alone is like buying a car just by its colour, except with PSUs, colours actually do mean something. This month, we talk PSU power efficiency – we investigate those ‘Gold’, ‘Silver’ and ‘Bronze’ ratings, what they mean and why they matter to your hip pocket. Power efficiency Back in PSU101, we said a PSU’s role is to convert the mains outlet AC voltage into a series of low-voltage DC sources or ‘rails’ to power your PC components. Now that we’re in PSU201, we can flesh that idea out and now…

Microsoft’s answer to Twitch is an answer no more: as of July 23 the service will be closed. The news comes less than a year after Microsoft paid millions of dollars to popular Twitch streamers in order to secure their exclusivity. Ninja, a popular Fortnite streamer, is reported to have been paid up to $30 million dollars to switch to Mixer. These streamers are now free to return to Twitch, or else to Facebook Gaming, which will honour existing partnership agreements, though it appears the streamers themselves will be under no obligation to accept. “Ultimately, the success of Partners and streamers on Mixer is dependent on our ability to scale the platform for them as quickly and broadly as possible,” Microsoft said in a statement. “It became clear that the…

Free | PC, Mac, Linux | bit.ly/SwallowSea You play as a little cell that levels up by swallowing orange, blobby things, before using your newfound power to smash through barriers, and reach new parts of the world. You’ll do this a fair few times, gathering even more blobby things, and breaking down bigger barriers, all the while increasing in presence until you resemble a human embryo encased in a bubble. But the sea isn’t kind to people, even when they’re weird fish-baby creatures, and most of the things down here are keen to gobble you up – or at least to trap you in place so you’re easier prey for their carnivorous mates. So, you have to dodge and dash to give these increasingly horrible sea creatures the slip, while…

$44.95 | PC | deeprockgalactic.com You’ve no doubt heard that Deep Rock Galactic is like Left 4 Dead, if Valve’s co-op classic swapped zombies for alien arachnids and took place exclusively in dark, confounding tunnels. That’s more or less accurate, but Deep Rock Galactic’s eponymous depth is more than just environmental. The breadth of approaches possible here makes Vermintide 2 look like Desert Bus, and frankly it’s all a bit much for the first few hours. An opening tutorial mission does a fantastic job of conveying the basics, though – this is your pick, use it to hack away at valuable minerals and carve tunnels. Right. Cool. Shoot the gun on the bad spiders – with you there. Call the M.U.L.E. to you and deposit mined resources, press 3 to…