Innehållsförteckning för March 2023 från APC

It’s Awards time folks! That magical time of the year when the editorial team here sits down in a room with Diet Coke and biscuits, the big boss here bricks up the door, and we then argue for several days, ultimately concluding with a list of things that are more excellent than the rest. This year’s session went quite well, and it was generally peaceful agreement on all counts. It’s been a banner year for tech, so it really wasn’t hard tapping what shone brightest. You can read about all the finalists, highly commended and ultimate winners in the next issue of APC, when we reveal all. It wasn’t just a banner year for great tech and products, either. Over the days that we examined all potential finalists, it became…

It’s not even news to point out that PC graphics card pricing is ridiculous. And yet to merely complain about over-priced graphics boards fails to capture the disconnected, unhinged state of the GPU market. The way AMD and Nvidia priced their new cards makes no sense. It cannot go on. How we got here is well documented. It was a perfect storm of spiralling crypto-fuelled demand, multiple Covid-induced market shocks and distortions including supply chain disruption, stay-at-home induced consumer behaviour, and a new generation of GPUs that delivered a big boost in performance after several years of relative stagnation. That explains why Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 30 Series and AMD’s Radeon RX 6000 went through the roof following their launch in late 2020. It all made sense, even if didn’t make…

While it’s true that most laptops and desktops these days come with Wi-Fi on board, there are still plenty of budget motherboards that don’t. There are also many instances where your home network becomes more technologically advanced than that available from your devices, meaning you can’t take advantage of the increased speed and range. Or some of you might have finally set up that home office in a shed at the end of the garden. Whatever the reason, we’ve listed five of the best ways to add Wi-Fi to your setup through the good old medium of USB. 1 TRENDNET AC1900 www.trendnet.com $70 One glance is enough to confirm this is the professional choice for USB Wi-Fi adaptors – just look at this thing! It’s clearly not meant for…

$469 | www.asus.com Though AMD’s AM5 motherboards and Ryzen 7000 CPUs have a lot going for them, the pricing of high end motherboards is a weakness. Let’s face it, $1,000+ X670E boards aren’t going to attract many buyers. Fear not! AMD’s B650E and B650 motherboards are plentiful, bringing Socket AM5 down to an affordable price point. B650/E differs from X670/E in that it comes with just one ‘chipset’ as opposed to the two of X670/E. This means B650 has fewer PCIe 4.0 lanes and a generally trimmed down I/O. Unlike B650E, B650 boards forgo PCIe 5.0 graphics support, with most retaining PCIe 5.0 M.2 support. The Asus TUF Gaming B650 Plus WiFi is just such a board. The TUF B650 costs around $469 at the time of writing. That’s not…

$299, plus optional $169 LCD kit | www.thermaltake.com.au If you’re after a high-quality case to house a 2023 build, there are two key criteria to keep in mind. Heat and capacity. CPUs need capable cooling, and graphics cards, well, they’re big! Your choice of case is more important than ever. Enter the Thermaltake Ceres 500 TG ARGB. At $299 it’s a premium case designed with just these things in mind. The Ceres 500 is a mid-tower with a steel construction and tempered glass side panel. Our sample is the snow version, though it’s also available in black. At 525 x 245 x 508mm it is close to full tower territory. It weighs in at 10.5KG. Along with its quality feet, size and weight, it has a really solid feel about…

$1,499 | www.gigabyte.com It’s safe to state that the RTX 4070 Ti is a mid-range card hiding beneath a high-end price. Premium tier cards like the Aorus Master or MSI Suprim really are overkill for this class of GPU. A card Gigabyte RTX 4070 Ti Gaming OC might not appeal like the flagship options, but it’s got it where it counts. As is the case for all RTX 4070 Ti’s, the Gigabyte includes the 4nm AD104 GPU, with 7,680 cores, 60 RT Cores and 240 Tensor Cores. The Gaming OC version comes with a small factory overclock at 2640MHz though as we saw in testing, the card boosts a lot higher than that in reality. It comes with 12GB of 21Gbps GDDR6X memory connected to a 192-bit bus. We can’t…

LABS macOS 11, macOS 12 (12.4 or later); Windows 10/11 | $145.19 | adobe.com Photoshop Elements 2023 is designed to help photographers create eye-catching images with the minimum of time and effort. It focuses on overcoming common photo problems such as revealing missing tonal detail or removing unwanted objects. Thanks to the Adobe Sensei AI machine learning technology it also enables you to give your images a creative makeover without requiring years of experience using the full version of Photoshop (Photoshop CC). In times when budgets are tight Photoshop Elements 2023’s one-off purchase price should make it an attractive alternative to Photoshop CC’s rolling monthly subscription costs. Unlike the black and dark grey panels of most current photo-fixing apps (including Photoshop CC), Photoshop Elements 2023 still sports the light grey…

Dutch engineer Lou Ottens isn’t a household name – but he should be. Reel-to-reel tape recorders were fast becoming commodity items by the early-1960s and while the transistor had been responsible for new portable designs, the tape system itself still required the dexterity of a surgeon, as users navigated lacing the tape around pinch-rollers, guides and heads. Efforts to encase the tape reels into a simple snap-load cartridge system weren’t new. However, it would eventually take two technology giants playing ‘hardball’ to get Ottens’ new technology its place in history. Musical chairs Work on an audio-cassette began back in the 1950s, with the huge Radio Corporation of America (RCA) releasing the ‘Sound Tape Cartridge’ in 1958. However, despite its clear convenience over reel-to-reel tape, the format disappeared six years later.…

Megahertz madness I was recently exploring my router’s settings – more through curiosity than any particular need. While there, I found an option to adjust channel widths. It was preset to 20/40/80MHz, but there was a tick box to enable 160MHz. What does this mean and what’s the difference between them? Bigger usually means better, so should I enable the 160MHz option? James McCarthy APC responds: It can, but this is a complex area where sometimes less is more. By necessity, we’re going to have to simplify matters. Though not a perfect analogy, think of Wi-Fi bands such as 2.4GHz and 5GHz as highways. In this context, the channels are lanes. Each lane can carry only so much data – or vehicles, to stretch our analogy. A standard channel on…

CHIP CHATJOEL BURGESS REPORTS ON THE UNUSUAL SIDE OF TECH NEWS Many still believe that cryptocurrencies are a good exchange for criminal activity because they are untraceable, but Chainalisis has been working for the better part of the last decade to develop software that easily tracks money flow through the public blockchains. Each year it estimates the total value of cryptocurrencies used in known criminal activity and 2022 was a boomer even when the company excludes transactions from potentially criminal activities of collapsed crypto companies like FTX. The total estimate was around US$20Bn, with 44 percent of the transaction volume coming from operating sanctioned entities, around 30 percent from hacks and 20 percent from scams. SHOWCASE HOLOGRAM PC SIDE PANEL Fill the hollow of your PC with holograms. RGB is…

AI-generated fake videos featuring familiar faces – deepfakes – have the potential to scramble our perception of what is real. But as the technology has improved and refined, the deepfake detectors have been fighting back. Now, Intel has invented what may be a significant step forward in helping us separate the living, breathing humans from the AI-puppets. Intel calls its creation FakeCatcher, and it works by taking a very close look at the blood flow in our faces, using a technique that is known as photoplethysmography – or PPG for short. “I said, there should be some priors that we can trust in real videos. What are those priors?” said Dr Ilke Demir, senior staff research scientist at Intel Labs, who invented the system. “And then I saw an MIT…

FUTURESWE EXPLORE THE TRENDS AND TECHNOLOGIES THAT ARE SET TO SHAPE THE FUTURE Logging on to a work meeting in the metaverse with your legless avatar. Emptying the vacuum bag of your humanoid robot butler every day after it’s finished the floors. Having to call the police to tell them you’re on a rollercoaster, not in a fender bender. And paying for it using a cryptocurrency with such fluctuating value that you’re never sure how much it’s worth. Welcome to our dull, uninspired version of the future. There are exciting visions of the future in the making: driverless cars could rework cities, augmented reality could upend everything from entertainment to education, and robots could release us from physical labour. But right now, we’re building a suburban dystopia. Why are we…

1 SENNHEISER CONVERSATION CLEAR PLUS The non-hearing-aid aids for your hearing. $1,399.95 | en-au.sennheiser.com If you’re reading this because the volume on your TV doesn’t go high enough for you to hear movies properly anymore then it’s probably time to go out and get a hearing aid. One in five people with hearing loss never actually get one, even though services and products are often entirely covered by the Hearing Services Program for a large portion of the population. If you’re hearing is great, but you just wish you could turn up the volume on the world a little when you want, then the Sennheiser Conversation Clear Plus is the $1,400 pair of voice enhancing headphones for you. 2 LEKKER JORDAAN GT EBIKE An e-bike built for Aussie…

$379 | www.amd.com "The 7600 holds up very well in gaming, even notching up some wins against the 13600K." AMD has traditionally offered some excellent value for money CPU options, particularly when combined with its B series motherboards. But for several reasons, that hasn’t been there since the release of Ryzen 7000 and accompanying B650 motherboards. The Ryzen 5 7600 CPU is one piece of the puzzle that’s needed to bring the performance of Zen 4 down to a lower price point. The Ryzen 5 7600, like all Ryzen 7000 series CPUs, is built with the recently released Zen 4 architecture. It’s a chiplet based design with a 5nm core compute die (CCD) and a 6nm I/O die. AMD claims the Zen 4 architecture delivers an average 13 percent IPC…

$190 | msi.com MSI has been going hard with expanding its range of cases, and its designers have learned much from some early mis-steps. Airflow was sometimes an issue with many early MSI cases, and indeed the company still favours solid front panels in many models, but we’re increasingly seeing mesh or grille fronts – and this Velox 100P ‘Airflow’ is indeed a version of the standard glass-front 100P with an open grille. Another huge general improvement is access. The 100P uses a hinged tempered glass door with a magnetic latch. Simplicity and ease. Nice. It comes with a vertical graphics card mounting bracket, though you’ll need to find a PCIe riser cable yourself (around $80 on Amazon), as there’s none in the box. Using it will cover all the…

Windows 7, 8.1, 10 or 11 | https://picpick.app The developer of this brilliant tool for capturing and editing screenshots has been very busy this year. PicPick 6, released in March, completely redesigned the program’s interface and added a dark mode, while version 6.2 in June introduced a feature called Screen Recorder that lets you capture videos and animated GIFs of your screen, including audio. To round off 2022, PicPick has been updated again with even more great features, to strengthen its status as the best free (for personal use) software of its kind. The most notable addition in PicPick 7.0 is the ability to delay capturing screenshots by three, five or 10 seconds. This is very useful when you want to illustrate a specific action, or capture content that’s not…

WHAT YOU CAN DO • Prevent companies from targeting you with adverts• Stop websites using ‘fingerprinting’ to identify you• Block all hidden trackers embedded in emails• Bypass cookie-consent pop-ups automatically• Stop Google breaking your tracker-blocking extension• Block trackers that collect your data in mobile apps• Avoid online surveillance by encrypting your connection It would be nice to think that 2023 will be the year that tech companies finally start respecting our private data, but – spoiler alert – that’s not going to happen. Old tracking habits die hard, and in the last few months alone we’ve seen Google settle a $392 million lawsuit for tracking its users’ locations, Apple accused of collecting data through built-in iOS apps, and TikTok forced to deny that it’s tracking US citizens using GPS. Even…

It’s hard to believe that DJI’s first drone, the Phantom, launched just ten short years ago. In that brief period of time over five million consumer drones have sold around the world, made possible by a confluence of several key technologies: the global GPS network; affordable ultrasonic, laser, and vision sensors; miniaturised gyroscopes and accelerometers; and increased battery capacity. Until recently, most of these drones were purchased by drone enthusiasts, photographers and videographers, but in the very near future we can expect to see them becoming part of a global robotic workforce. Advancements in machine learning allow these drones to autonomously perform jobs ranging from package deliveries for Amazon, to patrolling the interior of your home for burglars. Let’s take a look at some that are nearing release. Skydio Dock…

YOU’LL NEED BootRacer and Autoruns Wise Game Booster (for on-the-fly optimisation) Process Lasso (to rein in resource hogs) Does your PC take longer to boot than it used to? In most cases, you can trace this to the growing number of apps on your system, thanks to their tendency to insert themselves into the start-up process even when they’re not essential. What about other parts of your system? Does your PC suddenly struggle to play certain games, or have you started to notice things grinding to a temporary halt every now and then for no obvious reason? If the answer to any of these frustrations is yes, it sounds as though Windows needs streamlining to eliminate the resource hogs and divert precious system resources to where they’re most needed. In…

YOU’LL NEED THIS • Robot kit• Soldering iron and accessories• Flush cutters• Safety goggles• Screwdriver PROJECT! PART 1 OF 3 As a kid, I loved robots. From Robbie the Robot and Metal Mickey to the Terminator and the robots from The Black Hole, if it had a CPU and a tendency to run rampant and threaten the destruction of the world, I was there. Now middle-aged, my love of robots has never waned, but I would rather see them as companions than overlords bent on our destruction. Robots are still awesome and over the past decade they have become easier and cheaper to create, largely thanks to the Raspberry Pi and Arduino. Building a robot is a right of passage for an aspiring maker. By building your own, you learn…

In the days following Elon Musk’s accidental US$44bn purchase of Twitter, it briefly felt like a great migration was underway. Scores of Twitter users announced that because of the uncertainty, or a distaste for the mercurial new proprietor, they were jumping ship, and moving away from the bird app – and will be using the elephant one instead. At a brief glance, Mastodon appears and functions much like Twitter: users can post short messages – or ‘toots’ (not ‘tweets’), but with a limit of 500 instead of 280 characters. And you can follow people with no obligation for them to reciprocate, just like Twitter. Under the hood, the system is very different – it is not only open source, but it is ‘federated’, meaning that there is no singular Mastodon…

One of the brand spanking new features of AMD 600 series and Intel’s 700 series chipsets is support for PCI Express 5.0 devices. Simply put, PCIe 5.0 doubles the maximum transfer rate over an equivalent PCIe 4.0 connection. After covering many such boards, I’ve come to realise just how irrelevant PCIe 5.0 is. Not just right now (with a lack of devices) but for a couple of years at least. I’m not criticising PCIe 5.0 itself, just its relevance to a desktop PC user. Depending on the specific implementation, AMD’s X670E and B650E motherboards include support for both a 16x PCIe 5.0 slot and a PCIe 5.0 supporting M.2 slot. Intel boards have up to 16x lanes, which can be allocated to the PCIe slot, or shared with an M.2…

$2,698.30 | dell.com/en-au The 2-in-1 market certainly isn’t what it used to be, and with so many players dropping out of the race Microsoft has been left with little competition to its Surface Pro range, but Dell might be about to change that with a new XPS 13 2-in-1 detachable tablet and cover keyboard. The new device could be just good enough to sway users from the Surface Pro 9, with Dell promising a 5G variant to be released following the initial Wi-Fi 6E version release – though local Dell people tell us there are sadly no plans to have that model sold here. Dell sent us a WiFi XPS 13 2-in-1 with an Intel Core i7-1250U CPU, 16GB of RAM and a 512GB PCIe SSD that retails for $2,698.30.…

$689 | www.amd.com "If you need some extra performance, you can do away with the 65W limitation and essentially turn the chip into a fully-fledged 7900X." The Ryzen 5 7600 is an impressive chip for users on a budget, but it’s just one of three 65W CPUs that AMD launched in January. The others are the Ryzen 7 7700 and the Ryzen 9 7900. We have the latter chip on hand for a review and if it’s anything like the 7900X, it’s going to be a powerful chip, but will its 65W TDP constrain it too much? The Ryzen 9 7900 is a Zen 4 chip with two 5nm Core Compute Dies and a single 6nm I/O die. It can be thought of as a doubled 7600X. That means it…

$1,599 | www.msi.com Slowly but surely, Nvidia’s Ada Lovelace architecture is coming down to lower price points, though at over $1,500 it’s very much relative! The first of two cards we have for review is MSI’s RTX 4070 Ti Gaming X Trio. It sits in the middle of MSI’s GPU range, between the Ventus and Suprim ranges. The MSI, and indeed the Gigabyte 4070 Ti contain the third Ada Lovelace GPU to be released, the AD104. It’s a 4nm GPU with all of its features enabled. It includes 7,680 cores, 60 RT Cores and 240 Tensor Cores. MSI set the boost clock of the Gaming X Trio to 2,745MHz, a decent increase of 135MHz over the Nvidia reference speed. The card comes with 12GB of 21Gbps GDDR6X memory connected to…

Various licences available | https://voyagerlive.org In 1901, chef Julia Chandler pioneered the first peanut butter and jelly recipe. What once were two delicious spreads in their own right had now been combined into one of the greatest sandwiches of all time. French developer Rodolphe Bachelart has pioneered his Xubuntu-based Voyager Live OS in a similar way, bringing together both Gnome 43 and Xfce 4.16. This version is based on Ubuntu 22.10 (Kudu). As can be expected with a system with two pre-installed desktops, the ISO weighs in at a hefty 3.8GB. This means a much longer installation process than regular flavours of Ubuntu. Still, this is done via the regular Ubiquity installer, so there are no surprises. The Voyager website also offers pre-packaged live versions to run on USB via…

LABS FEATURE There’s an argument that the tablet is the ultimate personal computer: no other computing device balances mobility, speed and ease of use so effectively. But the word “tablet” is deceptive in its simplicity. Tablets can be cheap and functional, but others deliver a high-spec, premium experience. And they’re also incredibly customisable: add a keyboard or stylus and the same device you used to watch Elf can be transformed into the perfect tool to edit your own 4K video. A tablet is at once a media player, an ebook reader and a handheld games machine – or simply the perfect vehicle for browsing and social media. Perhaps the most confusing thing about tablets is their sheer diversity. While the basic format has changed little since the iPad launched, even…

IT WILL TAKE 5 minutes YOU WILL LEARN How to open and navigate System Settings to configure your Mac YOU’LL NEED macOS 13 Apple’s ongoing plan to bring its operating systems closer together and form a single all-purpose ecosystem took another step forward with macOS Ventura, as System Preferences got an iOS-inspired makeover. Now called System Settings, it functions in much the same way as the old System Preferences, but instead of being arranged in a grid of preference panes, it’s now far more like the Settings app in iOS and iPadOS, with a long list of individual settings options. In macOS, this list is set into a sidebar, with the settings options themselves in the main window. Unlike Apple’s mobile devices, it doesn’t offer settings for individual apps that…

$43.95 | PC | bay12games.com The ever-evolving life’s work of brother developers Tarn and Zach Adams, Dwarf Fortress is entering a new age, shedding its text-based graphics for proper pixels and the basic modernity of native mouse support. Still inscrutable Dwarf Fortress remains a treasure trove of procedural myth-making for those delving into it. At its most basic level, Dwarf Fortress is a settlement sim. With a small group of dwarves, you embark from the Mountainhomes to stake your claim on a plot of distant wilderness. It’s up to you to establish a fortress capable of lasting the ages, from the ground up – or down, in dwarven fashion. At first, Dwarf Fortress can be deceptively simple. Clunky to control, maybe, but when you’re marking out tunnels to mine and…

Popular perception suggests that Japan is at the cutting-edge of consumer electronics, robotics and aerospace research. It’s also a country where you can whizz around at high speed on a bullet train then sit on a toilet that checks your blood pressure before cleaning the bowl. In that sense, you’d think it would have no trouble letting go of the past. So when Japan’s government ministers finally called time on floppy disks, the world was surprised. Surely they had disappeared from the land of the rising sun many moons ago? As it turned out, the country has more than 1,900 regulations determining how data should be shared, and loads of them still require the use of floppy disks. It led a perplexed Taro Kono, Japan’s minister of digital affairs, to…