Table of contents for August 2019 in APC

Computex is a battleground. It’s where companies fight to make the biggest splash and drown out any noise coming from their competitors. Many different tactics are employed so journos like me can write about what left the strongest impressions, which in turn gets your attention here. In theory. Retail and reseller buyers are there in force, too, and are much fawned upon for the potential wins they can bring. In years when there is no new motherboard chipset Computex is noticeably lower in energy. It is, after all, the annual PC show and Taiwan is home to Asus, Gigabyte, MSI and Asrock. It is true that the heartbeat of the entire show is the motherboard. This year was heaving with X570 activity. There were, I believe, 57 new motherboards launched…

Microsoft announced during the Build developer conference in May that it was rethinking Windows 10’s command line tool. The new utility, which the company unimaginatively dubbed the Windows Terminal, has now been released as a “very early preview” on the Microsoft Store. The new app features an updated interface with support for custom themes, multiple tabs, and numerous other personalisation options. Because text is such a core part of the app, Microsoft has also included GPU-accelerated text rendering as well as support for multiple fonts and emoji.…

Social media giant Facebook has revealed plans to launch a new Libra cryptocurrency as part of its blockchain-powered Calibra digital wallet, with the latter expected to arrive on Messenger and WhatsApp in 2020. Facebook says you’ll be able to send Libra to “almost anyone with a smartphone” quickly and easily, and at a low cost — and the new cryptocurrency can be used for anything from paying for a coffee to riding public transport. While Facebook has promised that Calibra will use verification and anti-fraud processes similar to those currently being used by banks and credit card providers, and that it will be a completely separate subsidiary to Facebook as a social media platform, it isn’t without its critics. French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said that it was “out…

In the age of Galaxy smartphones and tablets, Samsung adds a Galaxy Watch to its universe. There was already some gear floating in space, forming a belt around the Samsung sun, but a few months ago, this new celestial body emerged. Today we’ll go where no tinkerer has gone before, and probe the depths of this timepiece with a teardown. MAJOR TECH SPECS ■ 1.3-inch (33mm) circular Super AMOLED 360 x 360-pixel display (1.2-inch/30mm on the smaller 42mm version) ■ Dual-core, 1.15GHz Exynos 9110 processor ■ 1.5GB RAM and 4GB internal memory (768MB RAM for the Bluetooth version) ■ Wireless charging and 5ATM IP68 water resistance ■ 472mAh battery (270mAh for the 42mm version) KEY FINDINGS ■ A quick survey reveals twin mechanical buttons on one side, with a small…

For many media companies, social media is a capricious ally: in order to disseminate content, it’s increasingly important – nay, necessary – to have a substantial following on platforms like Facebook and Twitter. In an era when these sites serve as homepages for many users, the bulk of users are more likely to “click through” from a social media platform than they are to access content from the homepage of a media outlet. Over the last decade, media companies have poured money and resources into bolstering their social media presence. This usually involves parsing Facebook’s constantly changing and ambiguous algorithms: sharing content isn’t as easy as posting a link on Facebook and expecting a response commensurate with the public’s interest: there are many factors at play, most of which are…

“The latest 15-inch gaming laptop from Aorus is now, seemingly, cutting Gigabyte’s grass” Aorus has traditionally been Gigabyte’s outlet for its top-specced gaming laptops, but the company blurred that line by releasing an Aero 15 model with an Intel Core i9 CPU and a Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 GPU earlier this year. The latest 15-inch gaming laptop from Aorus is now, seemingly, cutting Gigabyte’s grass; the Aorus 15 is not only more affordable but it’s also running an entry level gaming CPU. We were disappointed to see a big reduction in material quality of the chassis, with a thin, tinnie keyboard surround and a cheaper plastic screen bezel and undercarriage. The perforated air vents and angular black-on-black detailing isn’t the worst we’ve seen on a gaming laptop, but the overall…

Those looking for a no-frills monitor that displays a great image and nothing else can move on to the next review in this magazine, as the Asus Designo Curve MX38VC is more than just a monitor. It’s a sound system, a phone charger and an art piece that takes pride of place on your desk. The MX38VC has an IPS panel with 99% sRGB colour gamut coverage that’s factory calibrated. For general purpose computer use (non-pro photo editing, web browsing, office apps, software development), it’s great and most users would have no complaints regarding image quality. That said, at this price point it would be nice to include some level of VESA DisplayHDR certification. Coming in at 37.5-inches, the MX38VC is unlike most other 21:9 monitors in this size range,…

US$24.99 | PUBLICSPACE.NET | NEEDS OS X 10.11 OR LATER Readers who are familiar with the Pomodoro Technique are halfway to understanding what Vitamin-R is all about. The time management method developed by Francesco Cirillo in the late 80s aims to break down work into manageable chunks. The general idea is to decide on a specific achievable objective, work for 25 minutes, and then take a short break when the timer rings, before resuming the task for another 25 minutes. Working in short time slices like this aims to make it easier to stay motivated and focused, and many swear by the method. Vitamin-R is a means to implement the technique on your Mac desktop, but it’s also so much more, as it integrates several tools that accompany you along the…

It’s hard to not be impressed by the aesthetic of the MacBook Pro. The honed aluminium unibody looks great in space grey or silver, the tenkeyless keyboard is neatly centered by two perforated grills containing a high dynamic range stereo system, and the super-sized trackpad offers as much silky smooth cursor control as anyone could want. Apple was keen to talk about its Core i9 variation of the 2019 MacBook Pro in briefings, but we got our hands on the more affordable $3,499 model, with a Core i7-9750H CPU. This unit comes with 16GB of RAM and a 256GB PCIe SSD, but can also be configured with 32GB of RAM and up to 4TB of PCIe SSD storage. One of the benefits of the 15-inch MacBook Pros over their 13-inch…

While Razer is generally considered a gaming company the Blade Stealth range has always been tailored to a professional market since it ditches the dedicated GPU for a compact ultrabook profile. That said, the units have always featured Thunderbolt connections that can be attached to Razer’s GPU accelerator and the latest model gets its own discrete GPU for a serious uptick in home office graphics. This year’s Blade Stealth has an updated Intel Core i7-8556U CPU and the Advanced model comes with 16GB of RAM, a 256GB PCIe M.2 SSD and a Nvidia GeForce GTX MX150 GPU. While the new CPU offers up to 50% boosts on 1080p media encoding and other CPU heavy tasks over its predecessor, the discrete GPU is three times more powerful than Intel’s 620 Graphics.…

If you’re going to settle on just one device for all your tablet and laptop needs, then it really should be something that has enough premium features to enhance the experience across both formats. Whether it is the 8th generation Intel CPU, the generous 16GB RAM or the vivid 4K screen, there’s no doubting that the flexible Yoga 920 from Lenovo packs some premium parts. The 13.9-inch UHD IPS touchscreen sees the return of 5mm vertical bezels that allow it to occupy almost the entire top half of the unit. This vibrant screen is tied to a premium keyboard and powdery trackpad by the company’s signature watchband hinge, which gives excellent stabilisation and balance to the screen, while maintaining the flexibility to flip a full 180 degrees. Not only do…

If you loved MSI’s 2018 GS65, but don’t quite think you could get away with its gold grills in the office then you’ll be jonesing for MSI’s Prestige series P6 58RE. It’s clear from the vent design and identical physical specifications that MSI has used the chassis of the GS65 to build the new P65. The MSI P65 has an Intel Core i7-8750H CPU, 16GB of RAM and comes in two variations locally. There’s either the silver P65 Creator 8RE, with a GTX 1060 (Max-Q), 60Hz FHD IPS display and a ludicrously small 256GB PCIe SSD. Alternatively, there’s a much more sensible limited-edition white P65 8RF, fitted with a GTX 1070 (Max-Q), a 144Hz FHD IPS display and a far more reasonable 512GB PCIe SSD. The latter of these devices…

While AMD has received many plaudits for its Ryzen CPUs in recent times, the company has been relatively quiet on the GPU front. We’ve been hoping AMD would have a ‘Ryzen GPU’ moment with its long awaited new Navi range of graphics cards. So has that moment arrived? We’ll have to wait until we’ve got review samples in hand to know for sure, though it does indeed look like AMD has a solid foundation from which to launch an attack on the mainstream gaming GPU market. AMD’s CEO Dr Lisa Su revealed the first Navi details at a keynote at Computex, followed by a series of technical briefings held in Los Angeles, culminating in a keynote at E3. We were present at all of these events, and there was a…

It’s easy for us to forget sometimes that people use computers for more than just gaming, benchmarking, and editing magazines. And that, sometimes, people might even plug their computers into a screen other than a monitor. So, when we got our hands on Fractal Design’s Node 202 case, we knew what we had to do: build a sleek, powerful but inexpensive media centre, designed to sit snugly beneath the television. The brief for this PC Builder masterclass was a little tricky, though – it needed to be a PC that didn’t look like a PC. We needed a Mini-ITX motherboard, HDMI port, and a processor with onboard graphics. Oh, and to keep the price as low as possible, thank you very much. “Media centre PCs are nothing new, but the…

$55 | PC | WWW.UBISOFT.COM/EN-GB/GAME/ANNO-1800 This is comfortably the most engrossing city-builder I’ve played since Cities: Skylines, one that combines an intriguing theme with some enjoyably complex production chains and trading mechanics. It also has a wealth of buildings to construct and resources to produce, letting you create some truly impressive and enormous urban sprawls. Anno 1800 puts you in the hobnailed boots of an up-and-coming business magnate in the burning heart of the industrial revolution. There are three ways to play: Campaign, Sandbox, and Multiplayer. Structurally, they’re all basically the same – the campaign is itself a gigantic sandbox that happens to feature a chain of missions to follow. Whichever way you choose to play, you start out in charge of a western-European island with nothing but a trading…

FREE | PC, MAC | TUYOKI. ITCH.IO/ESCAPED-CHASM Here’s a short, sad game from Undertale artist Temmie Chang. You play as an unnamed girl who has developed a fear of leaving the house and strange things have started happening. For one thing, a mysterious traveller has appeared, spouting cryptic messages about her missing mum and dad. For another, her house appears to reside inside a gradually collapsing void. To put things right she’ll need to make a terrible choice, with no real clue what the repercussions might be. There’s sadness everywhere, from the distinctly blue colour palette to the mournful soundtrack and the girl’s almost heartbreaking interactions with her environment. You examine her pet snake, and of course it’s nearly dead. You look at pictures of her parents, who left her…

Huawei has found itself at the centre of a global tussle between the US and China after the Trump administration placed the Chinese brand on the ‘entity list’, limiting the business US companies could do with it, with global implications. It led to Google blocking Huawei’s future access to Android updates, UK-based chip designer ARM has ceased all activities with the brand, and multiple retailers and networks around the world have had to stop dealing with Huawei for fear of sanctions from the US government. Huawei has been granted a temporary license to continue its US dealings while negotiations are ongoing, but this only lasts until August 19 and it’s unclear how the company will be able to regain access to its US partners while the government considers it a…

$ MILLION 730 AMOUNT OF MONEY SPOTIFY IS PLANNING TO SPEND ON PODCAST-RELATED ACQUISITIONS THIS YEAR – FROM SIGNING UP PODCASTERS TO BUYING APP STARTUPS. THE MOVE CERTAINLY MAKES SENSE: THE INTERACTIVE ADVERTISING BUREAU RECKONS THE PODCASTING INDUSTRY WILL BE WORTH $1.5 BILLION A YEAR BY 2021. 9 HOURS OF REAL-WORLD BATTERY LIFE ACHIEVABLE BY FUTURE LAPTOPS THAT ADHERE TO INTEL’S PROJECT ATHENA CONCEPT. Project Athena is the successor to Intel’s 2012 Ultrabook program, which many PC makers went on to emulate. 3.5k NUMBER OF XBOX GAMES THAT CAN ALREADY BE STREAMED BY XCLOUD WITHOUT DEVELOPERS NEEDING TO MAKE ANY CODING CHANGES. xCloud is Microsoft’s forthcoming games streaming service, and is being built to compete with Google Stadia. 100 NUMBER OF TITLES YOU’LL SOON BE ABLE TO PLAY WITH AN…

Asus launched its TUF Gaming laptops last year as a reengineered entry level gaming laptop for those wanting a little more durability at an affordable price point. A year later this is still the message, but the revamp has a number of new features that make it stand out in other ways too. Top of this list is a new set of AMD Ryzen CPUs that deliver similar performance for a considerable price cut. Backing this up is the inclusion of Nvidia’s latest GTX 1650 and 1660 GPUs, which jettison the ray tracing and DLSS perks introduced on the 20-series RTX GPUs to get near 2060 performance with another solid price cut. If that wasn’t enough, the device also has a 120Hz 15.6-inch screen for super smooth gaming and it’s…

VR has been readily available for the past few years now and while many people have experienced some form of VR, the initial expense of a headset and a capable PC is still far beyond the means of the majority of those who want one. The just-released Oculus Quest headset offers an entirely mobile VR experience – one that doesn’t need to be driven by a powerful PC, dedicated gaming console or expensive smartphone to work – and it costs a reasonably-affordable $649 to get great quality ‘drive-away’ VR. The headset is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor – the top of the line 2018 mobile processor that was used in many of last year’s flagship smartphones, like the US version of the Samsung Galaxy S9. While there are…

$9.99 | GOODREADER.COM | NEEDS IOS 9 OR LATER GoodReader is one of the most popular PDF apps for iOS. The latest upgrade brings an overhauled interface, better security and improved performance. The core app is $9.99, plus $9.99 for the Pro pack. This adds split-screen PDF viewing on iPad, secure email/export of PDFs and extracts and a feature called Secure Photocopy, which removes all traces of hidden or redacted information in a PDF, making it safer for distribution. Both versions let you crop, annotate and rearrange pages, and the PDF Reflow feature works like Safari’s reading mode, pulling out text for easier reading. When you’re in this mode, you can copy the entire page’s text to the clipboard. The app supports PDF, docx, HTML and text files. It can handle…

As smartphones continue to become more important for our web searching and social media needs, the personal laptop is undoubtedly losing favour, but there’s still nothing that can better accomplish the dynamic needs of the modern worker than a professional ultrabook or 2-in-1. Depending on your line of work, the tasks required by such a device will range from simple internet browsing to advanced graphical and video rendering. The vast majority of laptops these days will be able to adequately run demanding applications like Photoshop, but having enough RAM and a GPU that can accelerate OpenCL tasks could give you the option of working entirely from your laptop. Laptops with dedicated gaming-level graphics cards have come down in size enough over the last few years to fit into an ultrabook…

A few years ago Asus’s ZenBook range were really pushing the ultrabooks spec, but today it really looks like Asus are more concerned with creating the largest number of Zenbook variations possible. The ZenBook 14 is currently sold as either a UX431, which comes in Utopia Blue (silver) and has a 47Wh battery, or a UX433 that comes in Royal Blue or Icicle Silver and weighs roughly 300g less, has smaller speakers and features a three-cell 50Wh battery. There’s an additional suffix on both of these variations that denotes whether it has an Intel UHD Graphics 620 GPU (FA) or an Nvidia GeForce MX150 GPU (FN), but if that wasn’t enough, there also seems to be a number of minor model variations that differ depending on the outlet it is…

The Acer Spin 5 misses out on a 4K screen, opts for a smaller, slower 256GB or 512GB SATA SSD and it doesn’t splurge on the excessive 16GB RAM allocation seen on many professional 2-in-1 competitors. This might seem like a disadvantage, but in many ways the Spin 5’s concessions make it a much better value device. The 13.3-inch FullHD screen doesn’t have quite the same vibrancy as some of the 4K convertibles we’ve seen and it’s framed by relatively large black bezels, but on a screen this size the distinction isn’t as great as you might think. The lower resolution cuts down on energy consumption, meaning the smaller 52.4 Wh battery can last four hours and 15 minutes during movie playback. Combine this with an excellently optimised quad-core i5-8250U…

At a glance, the Surface Book 2 is nigh-indistinguishable from its predecessor – both 2-in-1s offer a main detachable 13.5-inch (3,000 x 2,000-pixel) tablet alongside a matching keyboard base, which smartly houses a second battery and (optionally) graphics processor, with the latter ostensibly included to help beef-up the machine’s multimedia-editing chops. The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 GPU in the base means the Surface Book 2’s good for a bit of gaming, but what that chip’s really intended for is GPU-accelerated media rendering and encoding and, frankly, there are better laptops out there if you’re after one primarily for games. That chip combined with the Core i7-8650U CPU in our review unit did help ramp up encoding speeds, giving you about twice the power of what’s in say, the Acer Switch…

The Windows 10 May 2019 Update started its rollout in May, and while Microsoft has gone to great lengths to try to make sure that this latest major update to Windows 10 is not plagued by the same level of problems that the October 2018 Update suffered, there have been some Windows 10 May 2019 Update problems spotted already. So, we’ve gathered up all the update problems and fixes right here, so you don’t have to search the internet if your PC isn’t behaving itself. CHECK MICROSOFT’S LIST OF KNOWN WINDOWS 10 MAY 2019 UPDATE ISSUES Unlike previous Windows 10 Updates, Microsoft has created a webpage (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/ windows/release-information/status-windows-10-1903) where you can view current Windows 10 May 2019 problems, along with details on what it is doing to fix them. Make…

PC Case Gear Lancool 2060 $1,799 TINYURL.COM/APC470PCC If the Night King from Game of Thrones owned a computer, I reckon this is what it would look like. This cool build is well themed and lit, and packages together a reasonably powerful system for the price. It’s capable of 1080p gaming with high details and refresh rates, even with some ray tracing if managed properly. The CPU will handle any modern game easily. No Hyper-Threading, overclocking or iGPU combined with the stock HSF will curtail what any enthusiast might want from a system, but if you just want a PC that works and don’t want to play around with configuration options, this is a solid pick. A no-nonsense rig that looks the part. KEY SPECS: CPU: Intel Core i5-9400F…

SOFTWARE UNABLE TO TRANSCRIBE AUDIO RECORDING I recently interviewed a family member for my genealogical research, but when I came to write up the transcription using Express Scribe (www.nch.com.au/ scribe/) it says I need a pro licence because the audio files have been recorded in M4A format. Can I avoid this unnecessary expense? Anna Young What you need to do is find a tool that can convert the M4A file into one supported by the free version of the program, such as MP3. We recommend Pazera Free Audio Extractor (www.pazera-software.com/products/audio-extractor/),which not only supports a wide range of audio files, but can also be used to extract audio from video too. Download and run the portable version, then simply open the folder containing your audio files in File Explorer and drag…

When you sell your Mac, it’s wise to back up everything from it so that you don’t lose important documents or apps. You should also clean it to ensure its new owner doesn’t get handed any sensitive information, such as your passwords and data. Before following these steps, remove any firmware password you may have set (see bit.ly/mffwpwd), re-enable System Integrity Protection if you turned it off (bit.ly/mfsipen), and remember to make that backup! Then check through any apps which are licensed by serial numbers or authorisation schemes, and deauthorise the copy on that Mac. You may need to consult the vendor’s support site for info. This is now simpler with products from Adobe and Microsoft, which normally only require you to log out of your online account. Apps from…

Charging your phone each night for the day ahead has long been part of the daily grind. There’s no doubt phones are improving their energy efficiency, but no matter how well you plan, there’ll always come a time when you’re caught short and your phone is out of charge, you’ve lost the USB cable or even the USB adapter itself. No worries – any USB port in a storm, you say. Not if you want to maximise your phone’s charge speed, you don’t. There are plenty of fast-charging tricks available these days, but here’s the thing – every phone might be different, but no matter the brand, they’re all bound by the basic laws of electronics and if you understand the basics, you can put them to work for you.…

$24 | PC | WWW.ZODIACINTERACTIVE.COM Tales of the Neon Sea borrows from well-known cyberpunk sources but, alongside its brighter aesthetic, it takes a deeper look at the technical aspects of cyberpunk, rather than the moral ones. The plot itself is conventional. One day the alcoholic augmented P.I. Mr Mist stumbles onto the corpse of his elderly neighbour, well-known for her hate of androids. At first the case seems clear: the household android must have done it. But the evidence you uncover paints a much more gruesome picture. Weirdly enough, you’re not so much interested in the killer as you are in the android and what could have driven it to become a possible accomplice. And so you dive into the underworld to find out more, aided by the helping paw…

The first thing you’ll notice upon playing Rise of Industry is that it’s absolutely gorgeous. The boxy shapes and flat colours of the low-poly style are a perfect fit for the city/factory builder genre. This, combined with bright colours and sticker-like icons, makes the game looks less like a real city and more like a child’s play set. Unfortunately that’s also how the game plays, like a toy. Something that’s fun to play with, but lacks direction. It’s fundamentally about supply and demand. There are a handful of towns of various sizes spread across the map, each of which has two to four stores which will buy a certain good. Your job is to fulfil that demand. This can be as simple as mining some coal and shipping it directly…

GAME: Falcon 3.0 DEVELOPER: Spectrum Holobyte RELEASED: 1991 NUTSHELL: Despite not having textures, it brought (claimed) military-grade flight modelling to the PC, with such extreme prejudice that for the first time, it made people upgrade their computers just to play this single game. The PC didn’t become the tech-leader for gaming just because of hardware. After all, what’s the advantage of a PC that can play games just as well as other platforms, if it costs five times as much? The PC needed to show there was a reason for all that grunt. And at the dawn of the 1990s, that reason was the PC owner’s thirst for insanely detailed combat flight simulators. For the first few years in the market, gaming on an 8086-based, “IBM-compatible” PC was a distraction,…

Pakastani politician holds press conference behind a cat filter Facebook’s funny feline filter applied to political livestream. They say any publicity is good publicity, but one regional Pakastani politician put this to the test when he accidentally delivered a weekly press conference behind a Facebook cat mask filter. Shaukat Yousafzai appeared to be wearing whiskers, a fuzzy nose and pink cat ears in a livestream that was posted to his political party’s official Facebook page. The mistake was reportedly caused by ‘human error’ and the party has taken precautions to prevent the activation of comedic filters on future livestreams. While undoubtedly embarrassing, some online commentators are now requesting that all political proceedings be subject to funny cat filters. AI creates petition to ‘put a baby on Mars’ NEURAL NETS USED…

Ubuntu-maker Canonical has been forced to do an abrupt about-face, after Valve has announced that it will no longer support Steam on the popular Linux distro. Ubuntu was set to drop support for 32-bit packages in its upcoming 19.10 release, but after Linux gamers revolted and Valve chimed in, the OS devs have backtracked. Valve will no longer name Ubuntu as “the best supported” Linux platform for Steam, however.…

Internet bots are a touchy subject these days, especially when it comes to social media. How many of that celebrity’s Twitter followers are real people, and how many are fake? Who in the comments section of that Facebook post has a genuine opinion to share, and who is just trying to send a debate into disarray? The answer isn’t always clear – and according to Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, Nathaniel Gleicher, it’s that uncertainty that’s likely to cause trouble in the coming years. Gleicher spoke on the subject of online security at the 360/OS conference in London, saying that organisations attempting to destabilise online debate — and influence the outcome of political elections — would no longer have to conceal their efforts to be successful. At this point, with…

KAT LOCO A VR tracker with a kick. US$139 | KATVR.COM/LOCO The Oculus Quest (see our review on page 28) has cut the wires on room scale VR, but the six degrees of freedom only extends to your hands via the Touch controllers. KAT Loco is a Kickstarter hoping to get its foot in the VR door by… well, putting your feet in VR. Three remote sensing devices attached to each of your ankles and your waist record relative movement in order to translate it into room-scale steps in VR. This supposedly universally-compatible VR accessory is promising to allow you to do things like run backwards or strafe while shooting, and to look in a different direction to where you are moving. AWAKE RAVIK ESURFBOARD Electrify your surfing setup. €18,900…

Computex. It’s the annual showcase of the entire PC industry and it’s one of the most important events we attend, if not the most important. Vendors all jump at the chance to show off their wares, with booths competing to be the biggest, boldest and brightest. This year there was a clear trending theme of catering to content creators, with subtlety, discrete performance and refinement being a refreshing change over gamerfied Optimus Prime-style products. A refreshing change. We touched down in Taipei on the Monday morning that the show began its week-long run, after an overnight flight from Sydney that was surprisingly comfortable thanks to a lovely China Airlines Airbus A350. There was no time to rest as after dropping into the hotel, it was off to AMD’s eagerly awaited…

RACV is known for being an automobile club, but its Home Division has become the exclusive Australian distributor for Samsung SmartThings products. The Smart Home Starter Kit consists of a Wi-Fi hub, three motion sensors and two ‘general purpose’ sensors which monitor door and window status plus temperature and vibrations. They can be used as a basis of home automation and monitoring or for security. Installation is simple and involves plugging the hub into your router, downloading the Samsung SmartThings app and using QR codes to install the sensors. The sensors communicate with the hub via Z-Wave and Zigbee wireless technology which uses significantly-less power than Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. Battery life isn’t stated but similar devices can last years before a change is required. Our hub comfortably communicated with a…

On paper the Asus ROG Swift PG35VQ is excellent, with all the right specs and features any hardcore gamer could desire. 35-inch curved panel, 3440x1440 resolution, 200Hz refresh rate, G-Sync support, DisplayHDR 1000 certification – you couldn’t ask for more. All those wonderful specs don’t come cheap, so let’s take a look to see if the PG35VQ is worth the big bucks. Without turning the monitor on you can tell that this is a flagship Asus product. The stand isn’t a flimsy plastic thing, but is sturdy and includes a set of LED light covers to project different images out of the base onto your desk. Three of the covers are blank, presumably to etch your image into. The PG35VQ has a large light up logo on the rear too…

$70 | BITDEFENDER.COM.AU From the first time we started testing Bitdefender we were impressed. This antivirus software stops malicious files before they have a chance to start downloading. In fact, Bitdefender often beat the browser notifications asking us to verify the download, displaying a large warning message and securely removing the threat. Bitdefender recognised the URL of where threats were hidden and let us know those sites were tagged as malicious, too, so we could avoid them. It easily caught phishing schemes, including those designed to look like Facebook and PayPal account logins. We allowed several threats to infect our test computer, then used Bitdefender to find and clean them. Bitdefender did an excellent job finding each one. In fact, often during our testing, we would reinstall Bitdefender to gather…

Dell’s XPS 13 has been at the top of our best value ultrabook list for the past few years, but this winning formula hasn’t changed much during that time. The new XPS 13 (9380) does have a couple of minor updates like the camera placement and the Frost White limited edition, but newcomers like Huawei and the Razer Blade Stealth are doing much more by driving down price expectations. The XPS 13 comes with either an Intel Core i5-8265U or a Core i7-8565U CPU, 8 or 16GB of RAM, and one of the three sizes of PCIe connected SSD storage (256GB, 512GB and 1TB). These units range in price from the one Core i5 model at $2,299 to $3,599 for the top of the line Core i7 model that has…

The Spectre Folio was one of the first devices we tested with an eighth-gen Y-series CPU, which were announced back in August of 2018. The hyper-efficient dual-core Core i7-8500Y CPU in the Spectre Folio is passively cooled. The vast majority of today’s premium 2-in-1s use U processors, which have transitioned to four cores over the last year, so pretty much any other 2018 convertible will offer roughly double the raw compute power of the Spectre Folio. This device does punch above its weight in general home and work tasks by boosting to a speedy 4.1GHz over short periods, but it scores 45% less than a Lenovo Yoga 920 with a quad core i7-8550U CPU in Geekbench multi-core CPU tests. This chip also takes a hit in the graphics department with…

The Aero 15 is one of the few true gaming laptops that is compact enough for us to genuinely consider it as a good professional ultraportable option. Wrapped in a neat matte black chassis the 2019 Aero 15 was one of the first local devices to get an Nvidia RTX GPU into a device with a 1.9cm profile. The Aero 15 comes in a range of variations but the X9, featured here, came with an Nvidia RTX 2070, 16GB of RAM and a 1TB PCIe SSD. While it can be configured with either an Intel Core i7-8750H or a Core i9-8950HK CPU, the X9 is only available as a Core i7 locally. You can also choose between a 15.6-inch FHD 144Hz IPS display or a 15.6-inch UHD 60Hz IPS display,…

EVERY YEAR FOR A WEEK IN THE BLAZING TAIWAN HEAT, THE PC HARDWARE INDUSTRY GATHERS TO SHOW OFF ITS WARES. COMPUTEX IS THE MOST IMPORTANT EVENT ON THE PC CALENDAR, AND MORE NEW PRODUCTS ARE LAUNCHED HERE IN THIS WEEK THAN AT ANY OTHER TIME IN THE YEAR. HERE’S WHERE WE SEE EXCITING NEW TECHNOLOGIES COME TO LIFE AS PRODUCTS, IT’S WHERE THE PEOPLE BEHIND THE DESIGN AND ENGINEERING ARE ON HAND TO DISCUSS THEIR GEAR AND WHAT MAKES IT WHAT IT IS. IT’S ESPECIALLY IMPORTANT FOR THE GREAT MANY TAIWANESE PC COMPANIES BECAUSE THIS IS THEIR HOME BASE. ALL THE BIG PLAYERS LIKE ASUS, MSI, GIGABYTE AND ASROCK, SYNOLOGY, QNAP, COOLER MASTER, THERMALTAKE AND THE VAST SEA OF PERIPHERAL MAKERS ARE HERE IN FORCE, WITH ABSOLUTELY EVERY NEW PRODUCT…

Computex sure served up some great headline product announcements this year, most notably from AMD. But it was the nifty little things that caught my eye this year. M.4 After all the strange and unique connector and format types that emerged early on in the development of SSDs, post-SATA it’s the M.2 format that has won out as the main standard for consumer drives. Inherent in its design was the connector that only allowed for a 4x wide PCIe 3.0 bus at the end of a “gum stick” sized PCB. The physical size of the M.2 PCB also constrained how much flash memory could be placed upon it. And with just a 4x PCIe bus electrically limiting bandwidth, NVMe drives have hit an inevitable bandwidth ceiling of 3500MB/s. Silicon Motion…

The only thing we saw fit to trade out this month was the power supply and the RAM, and these were only minor changes. Power-wise, there was no need to step above 450W, but despite PSU prices still sitting quite high, we were lucky enough to spy EVGA’s 450 BR, trading out the previous Corsair PSU to save ourselves 15 dollars. Those aren’t the only savings we made here, though; the price of the Ryzen 5 2600 processor has dropped by $13, and the Crucial BX500 SSD has slightly dropped in price, saving us a crisp four dollars. Lastly, we managed to find cheaper memory than the T-Force kit that’s stayed in this build for such a long time. Now it appears Patriot is the price leader, so we’ve dropped…

To believe some sections of the press today, it’s impossible to go on the internet without having your computer taken over by hackers, who will use it to mine pornography using something called a “blockchain”, stealing your credit card details, and those of your 94-year-old grandmother who’s never been online, in the process. Things might not be that bad, but the threat of malware, unwanted apps that can hijack your PC or hold it to ransom, is real. There’s plenty you can do to protect yourself, and your grandmother, however. Some of it involves adding additional programs to your PC, but there are steps you can take that need nothing more than a web browser and your operating system. We’ll also touch on both ad and cookie blocking, and on…

Rather than being some sort of a skin cream, Lutris (https://lutris.net) is a gaming client for Linux, with a focus on gaming preservation and centralisation. From a single interface you can run anything from old Sega games to modern AAA games using Wine or Proton. According to its website, “integration with stores like GOG and Steam allow you to import your existing game library, and community maintained install scripts give you a completely automated setup”. The Lutris downloads page has instructions for installing on a wide variety of distributions, as well as links and recommendations for playing most Windows games through Wine. BLANK SLATE Open Lutris and you’ll be presented with a lot of blank white space – so other than changing the colour scheme to black, you’ll want to…

The term ‘information radiator’ is a typically obscure tech way of saying ‘device that displays information on a screen’. This information can range from simple news feeds and adverts to complex service status. They are typically used in hotel lobbies to display news, weather and adverts, and in tech offices where developers need to see the status of their work at a glance. In this project we’re going to make our own simple information radiator using DAKboard and a Raspberry Pi. The best type of Pi for this project is any of the Pi 3 models or a Pi Zero W, as they all come with built in Wi-Fi connectivity – but if you have an older model you can easily add your own Wi-Fi dongle. DAKboard is a customisable…

If E3 2019 had a theme, it was that 2019 is a year at the threshold of seismic change for the games industry. The convention, which took place in Los Angeles in early June, risked feeling underwhelming due to the unusual absence of Sony (not to mention showroom floor activities from the likes of EA and Activision). But as we approach the release of next-generation consoles in late 2020, it feels like everyone’s bracing for what comes next. E3 2019 felt like the coy beginnings of the next-gen sales pitch. CONSOLE WARS: 2020 Streaming and services are definitely in our future. While Sony revealed the first details of its next PlayStation console earlier this year, it was very specs oriented. Microsoft, on the other hand, is doubling down on its…

FREE | PC, MAC | MANAGORE. ITCH.IO/BREAKER As in the arcade classic Breakout, in Breaker you play as a sort of featureless paddle-thing here, without the ability to fire your own bullets. Instead, you have to repel enemy spaceships’ projectiles back at them, as you rotate around a circular playing field. Even without the devious colour twist, Breaker would be a satisfying shoot-’em-up, with fluid, kinetic pixel art, and one of the best soundtracks I’ve heard all year. As bullet-hell-style games go, this is also one of the more approachable, peppering the screen with only handfuls of bullets at a time, while giving you plenty of empty space with which to manoeuvre yourself out of trouble. You can absorb a few hits before the Game Over screen appears, and you’ll…

The stuff that defines Mortal Kombat is here in gore-soaked, self-aware spades. The fighting is the best it’s ever been. The fatalities are sickeningly inventive. There are enough unlockables to keep you busy for ages. But it’s the story mode that stands out, putting together 27 years of MK lore into something that’s like the best bits of a Marvel movie. The new villain, Kronika, feels like Thanos and Galadriel’s lovechild. Her plan is to rewrite time to prevent an authoritarian Raiden from upsetting the balance of the universe by beheading Shinnok. It’s an effective, morally-ambiguous setup, similar to what NetherRealm did with Injustice. The temporal gymnastics also mean that classic versions of the game’s heroes return, alongside the revenant versions seen in MK X. It’s an absolute thrill for…