Table of contents for Volume 1 2016 in Maximum PC Specials

If you thought Broadwell’s pair of mostly ignored desktop chips were the last gasp for that gen, you’ve forgotten that Intel’s high-end desktop parts are always a generation behind. So next we have Broadwell-E, scheduled for the second quarter of this year. As you might expect, Broadwell-E is the 14nm die shrink of the Haswell-E processors, cribbed from the highend Xeon server parts of the range. As such, it’s all about multi-core performance, and this is where Intel has continued its core push, leaving the standard desktop chips to stagnate at four cores. Haswell-E brought the first straight eightcore consumer CPU from Intel, and Broadwell-E is set to deliver us a 10-core/20-thread monster in the Core i7-6950X—reportedly for a monstrous, Titan-shaming price, too. But that also means that at the…

For much of recent history, water cooling has been shunned. Only a select few could afford to merrily dance with computing death, taking their chances with water-cooling hardware and components that weren’t even designed to work in the silicon environment. They’d graft plumbing fittings onto hardware and hand-mill various water blocks, all in the hope of creating a leakproof, watertight system that could efficiently and effectively transfer heat away from their component parts, to a far greater degree than traditional air coolers ever could. That was back in the times when the average PC enthusiast was less concerned about how a PC looked. More important was how many frames per second they could squeeze from their beige box of dominance in Unreal Tournament. It was a terrifying time. But over…

YOU’LL NEED THIS WINDOWS 10 Though you’ll find this equally useful if you’re still using Windows 8. ANYONE WHO’S BEEN USING WINDOWS 10 for a while will know the pain of trying to find a particular setting. Anything more involved than changing the screen wallpaper, or turning Wi-Fi on and off again, can be done in any of three places. And the Control Panel, despite its new stripped-back white minimalist loveliness, isn’t always completely helpful when it comes to pointing you toward the settings you need. Wouldn’t it be great, then, if you could gather all the settings together, like cattle in a Texas corral? A single place where you could look for troublesome system settings or motherboard properties. Well, you can. Once you’ve created the God Mode folder, you’ll…

YOU’LL NEED THIS WINDOWS 10 There are solutions for other versions of Windows . WHEN YOU’RE A PC, everything is out to get you. You need to learn how to shut the door on malicious software, and clean it out if it does take hold. We already know that you don’t browse movie streaming sites, frequent dating services populated by young ladies from the former Soviet Union who occasionally use stock photos as profile pictures, or merrily execute every .exe attachment you discover in your email spam folder—but even though you’re a paragon of online virtue, there are still things you can do to protect your PC. As a responsible Windows 10 user, you’re probably already doing them. You chose “Express Settings” at install or flicked the button marked “Help…

THE GRAPHICS CARD is the component most responsible for PC gaming performance. Above everything else in your PC. You could have the most powerful, $1,000 octo-core Haswell-E CPU in your rig, but if you’ve got a weedy GPU backing it up, you’re never going to be hitting the graphical heights that today’s PC games deserve. And it’s a great time to buy a new graphics card right now. Both the leading lights of GPU development—Nvidia and AMD—have finally released their graphics card lineups for this year, with highend, ultra-enthusiast GPUs and superefficient, lower-end offerings. And by the way, for ultra-enthusiast, read: eyewateringly "wtf-how-much?!" expensive. While Nvidia has had it pretty much all its own way since the GTX 980 was released almost a year ago, AMD has finally responded with…

WE’RE AT A WEIRD MOMENT in the history of graphics cards. On the one hand, it’s a fantastic time to go out and buy a new GPU because there’s simply never been this amount of polygon processing power available at any price. On the other hand, though, you’ve got a vast number of cards still rocking aging graphics architectures with potentially hugely updated versions on the way. That means, of the cards we’ve got in our test this month, only a few of them could genuinely be recommended for purchase right now. The top-end of the market is the toughest, mostly because, and we can probably all agree on this, pricing has become utterly insane. At the top of the pile is Nvidia’s GTX Titan X, at $999. Crazy. And…

LET’S FACE IT, MEMORY isn’t the sexiest component in your computer. It’s not a beautiful polygon-rendering graphics card from the metallurgic factories of AMD or Nvidia. It’s not a gigahertz-crunching, hairtingling, multithreaded CPU. Nor is it a speed-freak of a PCIe SSD solution—M.2 or otherwise. It’s memory. RAM. And if we're honest, while it’s without doubt one of the most important cornerstones currently fixed within every PC system on the planet, it’s simply not that exciting, nor particularly easy to understand—beyond the concept of capacity, of course. That said, the questions we are asked here in the Maximum PC office most often tend to revolve around that volatile yet thought-provoking component. “How much RAM do I need?” and “What’s the best upgrade for me?” Well, that’s what we’re here to…

ASRock Fatal1ty B150 Gaming K4/D3 Odd upgrade decisions WE DON’T UNDERSTAND ASRock’s naming scheme. Fatal one ty? What’s that? Well, it’s a brand that’s proudly paraded as the gamer’s motherboard of choice from this particular company. But how does it compare with the world of Skylake, particularly with the B150 chipset? You’ll notice that this model is backward compatible with the aging yet dependable DDR3 standard. Of course, if you choose that path, you’ll lose out on the additional bandwidth, lower voltages, and higher capacities of DDR4. That choice aside, this motherboard’s a little too thin on features. There’s a total of six SATA 6Gb/s ports, support for DDR3 at 1,866MT/s, Killer LAN, and a fancy audio solution, but that’s about it. In fact, the PCB appears to be a…

Yes. It’s true. Overclocking doesn’t just mean tinkering with your CPU. Other avenues exist if you’re keen to shove the boat out a little bit more. RAM speeds over the course of the last few years have almost tripled in frequency, meaning performance can be improved quite dramatically in certain computational programs. It’s important to bear in mind, however, that the higher you push your RAM frequency, the more your CPU will suffer. In other words, it might mean an overall lower final overclock for your little powerhouse. On the other hand, AMD’s APUs, despite being a lower-end graphics solution, will benefit hugely from an increase in those same frequencies. So, what does all this come down to? 1 WHAT’S THE FREQUENCY? Identifying the frequency of your RAM on purchase…

MYTH 1 If I use deionized water in my loop, then leaks won’t matter or cause any damage. Answer Unfortunately, no. As soon as the water is introduced to the system, it will begin making contact with the various metals inside of the water blocks. It will soon be picking up positive ions, meaning it’ll be conductive within a couple of hours, at the very least. MYTH 2 What If I blow it up when I switch it on? What if there’s an instant leak? Answer Honestly, you’re not going to damage anything. The best way to fill and test a loop is to make sure everything’s unpowered by using a PSU bridge. By using this bridge, you can switch on just the pump and that’s it. Leave this on…

The motherboard may not be the sexiest of components, but it's the part of your PC that you build your system around. It dictates more about the rest of your rig than anything else, so making the right decision about your motherboard is arguably the most important choice you make when building or upgrading. With Intel's latest 6th Generation Core processors, code-named Skylake, we’ve shifted from the 9-series motherboards of Haswell and Broadwell, to the new 100-series. And that’s partly because we’re also talking about a whole new socket design—a move from the previous LGA 1150 socket to the new LGA 1151 design. Yeah, a whole extra pin. But the new 100-series boards offer more than a subtle new socket design; there are important new features across all the different…

AS YOU CAN PROBABLY TELL by our extensive benchmarks table, the variance in performance between these mighty mobos was almost non-existent. Don’t get us wrong—it’s still there, and you can notice it in places, but at most it only ever amounted to 3 or 4 percent. In reality, you’re just not going to notice a difference that small outside of benchmarking or particularly lengthy simulations, at which point, these kinds of motherboards just wouldn’t even be considered. So what are the criteria that really differentiate a winner from the rest here? Well, it’s all down to feature set, ease of use, and style, with feature set being the more important of the three. After all, what use is a Z170 motherboard if you can’t take advantage of all that the…

Overclocking. It’s long been a part of a PC enthusiast’s toolkit when it comes to wringing every last ounce of power from our beloved machines. Whether you’ve opted to run AMD or Intel, overclocking has been a staple food group of the techie’s diet for as long as there have been chips in PCs. The basic principle is very simple: Add more voltage to the component part, provide it with sufficient cooling, either through water or air (or Ln2 for the more adventurous among us), and increase the Hz output of the hardware you’re trying to improve. But this doesn’t come without risk. While we’ve come a long way in the world of overclocking, it is still possible to fry your CPU, GPU, RAM, or motherboard to the point where…

With DirectX 11, at least, OCing the GPU is the area of most benefit to gamers. But it’s also where overclocking has most dramatically changed. That’s because, with Nvidia’s GPU Boost and AMD’s Power Tune, it’s no longer possible to simply up the voltage and in turn increase cards’ core clock speeds. It’s now often better to ignore the voltage and let the proprietary software do its own thing. This way, you can avoid reaching the artificial power limits set by our GPU overlords—cores won’t throttle themselves in an attempt to control imaginary temperatures, that may or may not be present, even if they’re running on an aftermarket cooler, or water. Sounds ridiculous, right? You’re not wrong. Still, we’ll show you how far you can go with these cards. 1…

YOU’LL NEED THIS RASPBERRY Pi 2 The brilliant mini-computer costs under $45. See www.raspberrypi.org. A PRINTER ISN’T THE MOST CONVENIENT OF PERIPHERALS. They look out of place on most desks and create a racket when spitting out pages. You could throw a few hundred dollars on a snazzy new network printer that sits in a corner somewhere, and can receive print orders from any computer on the local network. Or you could just hook up your regular USB printer to the Raspberry Pi and enjoy the same conveniences offered by top-of-the-line network printers. If you haven’t already used your printer on Linux, head to www.openprinting.org/printers to check whether your printer is compatible with the CUPS printing server software. If your printer is listed, hook it up to the Raspberry Pi…

1. THE CUPS DASHBOARD The CUPS print server includes a built-in web server that powers its configuration panel. It’s running on port 631 on the Raspberry Pi, which in our case is 192.168.3.111:631. Access the address from any browser on the network. You have to accept its security certificate, and then log in to the interface using the credentials of the user you’ve added to the “lpadmin” group, which in our case is the “pi” user. 2. ADD A PRINTER Once logged in, switch to the “Administration” tab, and click the “Add Printer” button, which brings up a list of printers. Toggle the radio button next to your printer, and head to the next step. Here you’re asked to add or edit the name, description, and location of the printer.…

1. SELECT PHOTOS Click this button to discard the currently loaded images and choose a new photo, or set of photos. 2. PREVIEW WINDOW Use this window to crop your image, plus preview the effects and image edits as you select them. 3. USE PREDEFINED FRAMES Each preset comes with a recommended frame. Use it, rather than select your own, by ticking this box. 4. EDITING CONTROLS Options for editing your photo are hidden behind five tabs: Effects, Crop, Rotate, Color Adjustment, and Resize. 5. TAB CONTROLS This area displays different options (or instructions, when Crop tab is selected), depending on which tab you have selected. 6. PRESET EFFECTS Vintager has 17 different aging and coloring effects. Click one to apply it to the photo. Fine-tune until you’re happy.…