Table of contents for special issue 2018 #1 in PC Powerplay

Sending your data to the cloud is currently all the rage, but what can you do if you aren’t comfortable having your personal and private information stored in the cloud, but want to enjoy the benefits using the cloud provides? Fortunately, handing over your data and entrusting it to a multi-national company to do whatever they like with it, is not the only option. Fighting back against the abuse of your private information has turned into a trend called self-hosting. Many of the services typically used in the cloud, such as music and video streaming, file synchronisation, photo libraries and more, can be run locally, on your own server either at home or on a paid web host. Regardless of where you run self-hosted software, it’s your server and you…

Not everyone can afford to shell out for a new PC every few years to stay at the cutting edge of PC gaming, but for relatively little money you can markedly improve the performance of your PC one component at a time. REINSTALL YOUR OS Backup all your data, wipe your primary drive and reinstall your OS. This is the cheapest and easiest way to get some extra performance from your PC. After a few years of running, your OS will build up a whole load of cruft that takes up valuable cycles, hogs RAM and generally makes your machine run slower than it should. These files aren’t necessarily malignant or malicious, but they are a royal pain in the butt. Regular maintenance can keep your OS running smoothly, but…

2017 was a big year for AMD. The release of the Ryzen series of processors really shook up the market. Finally PC enthusiasts had a compelling option after years of Intel domination. Four, six and eight core processors were cheaper than ever before and though they were not able to match Intel on single thread performance, Ryzen CPUs are highly competitive when multiple threads are needed. One of the little bonuses provided by AMD is that all Ryzen processors have unlocked clock multipliers. Why settle for stock operation when overclocking is so easy? With a little bit of knowledge and an understanding of some of the jargon, overclocking is easier than ever. We’re here to take a look at Ryzen overclocking. How do you do it? Is it worth it?…

It’s been a long time coming, but Japanese developers are finally starting to truly embrace the PC as a platform. It seems like just yesterday when PC fans were desperately petitioning Bandai Namco Games and From Software to release the megahit Dark Souls on PC, begging the bewildered developers to put the game on a platform that seemed tailor-made for it. Flash forward to now, and most Bandai Namco releases are getting day-and-date simultaneous PC releases, including very distinctly Japanese-flavoured games like the Tales series and Ni no Kuni II. Bandai Namco’s not the only one joining the party, either. We’ve seen a host of major Japanese developers and publishers step up their PC publishing game. Sega, Capcom, and Koei-Tecmo have been committing to more PC releases of their major…

Everyone who works for a gaming or tech magazine has something in particular they have more of a passion for than any other product. For some people it’s GPUs, other people it’s storage. For me it’s keyboards. I’m a bit of a keyboard fetishist. Every time a new one comes in to test I can’t wait to get it hooked up and start typing. There’s something special about a good keyboard. It adds an extra level of pleasure to work when you are typing on something that gives the right amount of bounce and feedback, making your hands feel agile and fast and giving the impression that words are just flowing freely from your fingertips. It’s a bit of a weird thing to be passionate about, but everyone has their…

You may have the tools you need to put a PC together, but there are some others you should think about getting your hands on if you want to keep your PC running smoothly. The essential tools fall into two distinct categories: software and actual physical tools. While the software may require updating or re-downloading every now and then, after you buy them they’re yours forever. SOFTWARE AUTORUNS Free Autoruns is a free Microsoft software package that shows you every program that autoruns at Windows startup letting you know what is stealing cycles from your gaming and giving you different options for how to deal with them. The layout is a little busy, and you can’t be too cavalier about what processes you kill, but when it comes to freeing…

Sniper sensitivity. That’s what I brazenly dubbed the incredibly high mouse sensitivity I used to use in online shooters of yesteryear. The logic was simple. When zoomed in, minimal hand movement could result in faster, snap-to headshots. At least, that was the theory. In execution, it led to a lot of cries of “bullshit!” as I felt I’d been robbed of yet another frag. The reality was this: I was likely missing. Fast-forward a few years, and I started messing around with a moderate mouse sensitivity. Back then, mouse mat sizes ranged from tiny to average, and I was determined to use all of the cloth real estate. The problem with impossibly high mouse sensitivity, for those who swear by it and miss out on easy kills, is the inherent…

Doom is back on people’s minds. The 2016 release was well received - even making its way onto the family friendly Nintendo hardware. In an era where the stamp of success is so often how “innovative” a game is - Doom 2016 didn’t just tear up the rule book, it took petrol and a lighter to it, and dared us to step out from behind cover and stare into the flames. Doom turned its back on the stale state of the modern FPS, and doubled down on the fast frantic action that blew so many minds, and frightened so many parents, back in the ‘90s. The irony of course is that Doom 2016 was “innovative” precisely because it looked to its roots - and deftly reinterpreted them. It sounds easy,…

The process of recording sound pre-dates the modern computer by almost a century. And for most, if not all that time, recording sound and music involved the use of analog technology. Beginning with wax cylinders that were used to record audio translated into electrical currents via an old timey microphone, through to those complicated and huge mixing desks you see in movies. You know the ones, from that one scene set in a music studio. Dials and knobs and volume sliders everywhere. Meanwhile, as computers shrunk in size from something that could fit inside a large room, to a small room, to eventually a desk - processing power, storage, and even display capabilities were nowhere near at a level that could replicate the growing amounts of gear that made up…

When I was in school (1993-2005), computer game sessions were restricted to rainy lunch times playing Sim Town in the lab, and huddled Game Boy Pokémon matches that stopped being ‘cool’ after fifth grade. In high school, friends of mine would travel into the city to play Counter-Strike together at LAN cafes (but I would not come; I was worried about developing a reputation as a nerd). It’s not something any of them dreamed of being able to do at school, and still something many of them would likely think of as pure fantasy. Years later, when I was working as a tutor in a video game focused topic at Adelaide University, I found my students surprisingly resistant to the idea of using games for learning and development in the…

DANIEL WILKS: It would be really good to figure out what gaming hardware is because if you believe the ads, you believe the things they say in print magazines or on splash pages on websites, gaming technology just means there’s more RGBs on it. That’s obviously not true. To my left I have some people who actually designed and know far more about gaming, designing gaming technology and what actually it is. They might be able to guide us through what it means. I’ll get them to introduce themselves and then we’ll kick it off. JOE OLMSTED: Sure. Given that I’m in the pole position right here. Joe Olmsted, I’m the director for Alienware and Dell Gaming worldwide so all products with an Alienware badge come through my team and…

“online shooters are the best examples for latency, because they’re the most impacted by it” Let’s get this out of the way up front. What you call ‘ping’ is actually called ‘latency.’ It’s a common vernacular mistake in gaming circles but, in fairness, the terms are actually linked. In simplest terms, ping is the test, and latency is the result. Whether you erroneously call it ‘ping’ or you properly call it ‘latency’, ultimately, matters very little, because that distinction doesn’t help you to ensure the value stays as low as possible. For games that still include latency as numerical values (thanks, devs!) and not coloured bars – or, worse, nothing at all – the number is indicative of the time, in milliseconds, it takes for data to be sent from…

In the age before the internet, DVDs, and CD-ROMs, there were two reasons to want sound from a computer – for games and computer music. Even so, it was years before sound factored into the design of the PC. Early computers that included dedicated sound hardware, like the Commodore 64, were content to limit audio output to beeps that would indicate system changes and memory access. Beeps that were then incorporated into games. It wasn’t until companies like AdLib, Creative Labs, and Roland released MIDI and audio capable devices for both gaming and early computer music that computer sound became an actual thing. In this time before tiny, plastic speakers adorned the sides of PCs around the world, early sound hardware connected to a pair of existing bookshelf speakers: the…