APCNovember 2020的目錄

Some commiserations are due, this month. First, pity the poor reseller... when the new Nvidia RTX 3080 was announced it immediately rendered the 20-series cards unsellable. While it did take a couple of weeks before Australian pricing was known, the global launch – brought to us from Jensen’s now-famous kitchen – included US pricing and that was enough to make it clear that not a single 20-series card would ever be sold again at full price. Overnight pretty much every online store was forced to slash prices. Perusing most of them, I saw cuts of around $300, typically. Today as I look around the price drop is more like $1,000 or more for a 2080 Ti. Lordy. I don’t personally know exactly what the margin is for that particular product…

Apple has unveiled its latest internally-developed silicon, the A14 Bionic. It’s built on a 5nm processor and has six CPU cores, four GPU cores and a 16-core neural engine. The chip will debut in the new iPad Air, which will go on sale in October. The SoC has 11.8 billion transistors, which Apple said was quite the challenge, considering you’re getting into measurements made in atoms. The CPU’s six cores are broken into four high-efficiency cores and two high-performance cores. Apple claimed the offering is 40 percent faster than the previous generation and that graphics, via four cores, are 30 percent faster. Apple’s neural engine has 16 cores for 11 trillion operations per second, and, for the first time on iPad, is paired with a machine learning accelerator for matrix…

EA is underway with a company-wide rebranding that dropped the Access and Origin names in favour of EA Play, before expanding EA Play to Steam and then even including EA Play in Xbox Game Pass Ultimate at no additional cost. Now, EA has announced that it’s working on an all-new desktop application appropriately named the EA Desktop app, which has been built from the ground up to offer a much faster, better looking, and easier-to-use experience than the older, and often criticised, EA Origin software. The EA Desktop app promises to include overall faster performance and a less cumbersome UI, along with PlayTime controls to monitor how much time is spent in games, including friends and family, and, most importantly, Dark Mode.…

Intel’s slow trickle of information on its Tiger Lake processors recently turned into a veritable flood as the company shared information about its first salvo of 10nm SuperFin chips, but one detail was missing: Any official disclosures of chips with more than four cores. That changed in a decidedly low-key way, as a blog post from Intel fellow Boyd Phelps on Medium reveals that the company will introduce eight-core models soon, saying: “We also added a 3MB noninclusive last-level-cache (LLC) per core slice. A single core workload has access to 12MB of LLC in the 4-core die or up to 24MB in the 8-core die configuration (more detail on 8-core products at a later date).” Intel claims that its four-core Tiger Lake models, by virtue of their 10nm SuperFin Process,…

What a time it is to be a PC enthusiast or a gamer! Between now and the end of the year we’ve got new GPU ranges from Nvidia and AMD and a new CPU platform from AMD. There’s even the possibility of 11th Generation Intel desktop CPUs too, though they’re likelier to arrive in early 2021. Oh, then there’s the small matter of new Playstation and Xbox consoles! It doesn’t get much better. It all begins in this very issue with our review of Nvidia’s all new RTX 3080. It redefines the top end of the GPU market, and it’s not even the highest tier model! If you’re a 4K gamer, use multiple screens or really want to test out that 240Hz monitor, it’s the card to get – at…

Epson EH-TW5700 Cast your smartphone screen on the wall with Epson’s new FullHD projector. $1,599 | epson.com.au Projectors are fun gadgets for when you have friends around and want to display stuff on a bigger screen, but most current projectors lack software that makes it easy to actually access any modern streaming content. Epson’s new FullHD projector, on the other hand, offers baked in Google Chromecast functionality allowing you to easily share anything on your Android device or Chrome web browser with the projector. With a maximum display size of 330 inches and 2,700 lumens of brightness to play with, there should be plenty of screen for any lockdown-sized group to gather around. GoPro Hero 9 Black Screen, battery life, stabilisation and resolution all get levelled up. $699.95 | gopro.com/en/au…

$TBC | lenovo.com AMD’s CPUs have spent the last few years shaking up the desktop space by giving Intel a run for its money, but we’re now into the second generation of Ryzen CPUs for laptops and these chips are unequivocally thrashing anything Intel can put forward. We recently crowned Asus’s ROG Zephyrus G14 as the best ultrabook on account of its reasonable price and surprisingly high CPU performance. Lenovo’s Ideapad Slim 7 isn’t running the same chip as the G14, but it does have an AMD Ryzen 7 4800U CPU and 16GB of RAM on board, which wipes the floor with any 10th Generation Intel Core i7 CPUs we’ve benchmarked. Most high performance i7 CPUs are hexa-core arrangements, so we’re not too surprised the octa-core 1.8-4.2GHz Ryzen 7 4800U…

$300 | www.dlink.com.au A few months ago we reviewed D-Link’s first budget Wi-Fi 6 router, the EXO AX1500 Wi-Fi 6. We complemented it for being the cheapest Wi-Fi 6 router on the market and for offering blistering, close-range speeds (although performance dramatically declined at distance). Now, here’s D-Link’s EXO AX1800. It costs $50 to $100 more (depending on where you buy it) and has an RRP of $299. So, what does the extra, nomenclatorial 300 get for the money? Both devices resemble traditional, four-pronged Wi-Fi routers and use D-Link’s standard Wi-Fi app. Setup requires scanning a QR code (in the box) which walks you through the connection. The 2.4GHz band and 5GHz band are combined into one network so you simply choose a network name and password (plus a device…

Cost is generally the driving force that motivates someone to consider a Chromebook, and while cost generally equates to compromise, Google’s Chrome OS has developed into an elegant and versatile operating system that can be even more efficient than Windows 10 for certain workflows. In much the same way MacOS fits into Apple hardware so seamlessly, you get a similar feeling of continuity and ease of use from a Chromebook running ChromeOS. For those with an Android phone, or anyone that’s used the GSuite web apps it won’t be a surprise to hear that Google is on top of the game when it comes to simple to use cloud software design, and Chrome OS is perfectly suited to make the most of Google’s online document processing tools. Sure, more intensive…

$1,699 | samsung.com/au Samsung is a master in the phone space and when you consider that top end phablets are almost as powerful as entry level laptops, it makes a lot of sense for Samsung to be dipping its toe into the 2-in-1 space. The main benefit of using a mobile processor like the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx is that it’s light on power consumption drawing just 7W, which means it doesn’t need any fans for active cooling. This is how Samsung can claim ‘multi-day battery life’ with the 42Wh battery apparently holding enough juice to offer 25 hours of movie playback. “The main benefit of using a mobile processor like the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx is that it’s light on power consumption.” Despite the efficient design Qualcomm claims performance that approaches…

macOS 10.14 or later | $614 | painterartist.com/en/product/painter Corel’s graphics applications were among the first to ever become available to users with personal computers. Several decades on, Painter 2021 represents the latest evolution of what it is possible to achieve in digital art without ever going near a real paintbrush. A powerful package with a dizzying array of tools and options, Painter rewards skill, like any professional creative software, but is also accessible for less experienced users to experiment and learn to create. At its heart is a configurable canvas into which you draw content using a massive selection of over 900 brushes, each with its own settings and, if required, a number of types of layers. These layers – watercolour, liquid or thick paint, have their own tools and…

PLE Computers Apex Spitfire $2,388 | tinyurl.com/y5gnjd9j This system is a little off kilter. For a gaming system, it will do well at 1080p with frame rates in the 70-100fps range in most titles. For this cost-tier of a system that really isn’t great, but that’s because PLE decided to focus most of the budget on CPU performance, so CPU heavy titles like Assassins Creed Odyssey will do better on this system. Expect to upgrade the GPU sooner rather than later as it is the primary bottleneck here. The storage subsystem could be better too. Consider dropping the HDD and upgrading the SSD to a 1TB NVMe option at check out for the same price for better load times and system responsiveness. CPU: i5 10600K, Cooler: Sweden Series SE-224-XT, Motherboard:…

Memory 16GB (2x8GB) Corsair Vengeance LPX @ 3200MHz $115 Memory prices may have been skyrocketing a few years back, but now it’s a whole other ballpark. 16GB of high-speed memory for just $115? Count us in. Ryzen’s infinity fabric interconnect (the stuff that connects the core complexes in the die) runs at the same speed as the memory. Ryzen 3rd gen typically disconnects after 3600MHz, but as our Ryzen 5 3400G is running on the old 2nd-gen architecture, it’s not quite as quick, and only sees benefits up to 3200MHz. For our Intel solution, you’ll have to opt for slower memory, as the Asrock B365M-HDV is only rated to support up to 2666 MHz. CPU AMD Ryzen 5 3400G $239 Yes we’ve gone with AMD for this build, purely because…

Random freeze part 2 Regarding my earlier email about random freezes, by the time you responded, the whole PC had broken down: When I power on, the fans light up, and so does the RGB, but nothing else lights up, and the ROG logo does not light up when the machine is off. It was supposed to be on all the time. About the corrupt R AM, I have seen several blue screens with the stop codes “SYSTEM_THREAD_ NOT_ HANDLED” and some other memory management error. I mainly play Terraria and Geometry Dash on the PC. I could try buying a new set of R AM from a different manufacturer, or is it the mobo? Finally, to answer your earlier question, I have a 750W PSU. RECTOR-STINGRAY APC responds:…

Battery life is the Achilles heel of any laptop and, while Apple has made huge strides with batteries, there’s always room for improvement. That’s why it introduced an iPhone-style Battery Health feature in macOS 10.15.5, although you’ll only see it if your laptop has Thunderbolt 3 ports: older Macs don’t have the necessary hardware. Battery Health monitors your battery temperature and its charging patterns, and it optimises charging in order to make your battery last as long as possible. We don’t mean last as long as possible between charges; we mean last as long as possible before you have to buy a new battery. Batteries become less efficient as they age, and Battery Health aims to reduce the speed at which that efficiency degrades. Power anxiety Doing that is a…

01 RECORD YOUR IDEA Tap the Tuner icon in the top right to check you’re in tune and then either tap the big Record button or Auto. That latter option automatically monitors the internal mic or external device and starts recording when it detects sound. 02 BRING IN THE BAND Music Memos can play along with your song. If you look at the bottom of the screen you’ll see the icons for Bass and Drums to turn them on or off. If you long-press (shown here) you can choose the type of bass and the playing style. 03 DICTATE THE DRUMS You can change the drums in the same way. This is a simplified version of GarageBand’s Drummer; you simply drag the dot to make your drums louder, quieter, simpler…

The Raspberry Pi 4, thanks to its faster processor, USB connectivity and networking, is oft-touted as a desktop replacement. Be that as it may, we’re going to show you how even an early model Pi can run a desktop… of sorts. We’re going to use the community ARM port of Arch Linux to set up a lightweight desktop running i3. To add insult to injury, we’ll combine the w3m browser, the mpv media player, and the popular youtube-dl script. This will enable you to browse YouTube (its many adverts and other streaming sites) from the comfort of a terminal window. Arch Linux is generally recognised as being hard to install, and its ARM counterpart is certainly a far cry from installing Raspberry Pi Linux. However, once we’ve minted our SD…

No Man’s Sky was a hugely ambitious project for UK-based Hello Games: it offered a virtually infinite universe to explore, and since its initial release in 2016 it has evolved from a slightly boring survival game into something more akin to Minecraft. In September, Hello Games released its first new project since No Man’s Sky in the form of The Last Campfire – a charming, relaxing and comparatively easy-to-develop puzzle adventure. But that’s not how the studio plans to proceed into the future. In an interview with Polygon last month, studio head Sean Murray promised that planning has commenced on another “huge, ambitious game like No Man’s Sky.” How a small independent studio follows up delivering a whole virtual universe, will be interesting to see.…

$TBA | PC, PS4, XB1 | mortalshell.com Set in the dismal fantasy world of Fallgrim, Mortal Shell puts you in the role of a nameless, skeletal creature arisen from an abyssal plain for purposes that are typically opaque. The only clarity you receive is provided by a giant trapped in a tower, who asks you to retrieve three “sacred glands” from various points in the world, which contain a hallowed substance known as Nektar. Combat is as you’d expect from a game of this ilk, a mixture of light and heavy attacks, blocking, dodging and getting the shit kicked out of you. But there are some differences that, when combined, have a profound impact on the flow of battle. In your natural, skeletal form, you’re about as robust as a…

Free | PC | thunderlotusgames.com Spiritfarer is a life sim about dying. You play as Stella, an upbeat ferry master who’s responsible for finding and helping wandering spirits pass on into the afterlife. After inviting the spirits to stay on your boat, you take care of them and make sure they live comfortably. Then, when they decide they’re ready to move on, you take them to a huge, ominous portal called the Everdoor and see their journey through to the end. Sometimes the goodbyes are easy, but, more often than not, they are bittersweet farewells to characters you’ve grown to love. You’re tasked with crafting a personal space for each resident, preparing their preferred foods, and keeping them happy with plenty of hugs. Very much in keeping with the life…

DEVELOPER GREMLIN INTERACTIVE PUBLISHER IN-HOUSE RELEASED 1991 WEB bit.ly/30LzS36 I don’t feel nostalgia for many things, but when I fire up HeroQuest and the music suddenly flips into Golden Brown (imagine being a composer, told you only have 30 kilobytes for your entire musical score and thinking, “Cool, that means I can fit this harpsichord solo by The Stranglers in”), I feel a full-blown Proustian rush. “HeroQuest was one of those games where, as the kid who owned it and knew the rules, you’d have to be the bad guy and never get to actually play one of those rad heroes on the cover.” The ad for the board game version of HeroQuest has the same effect. Like a whole generation of baby dorks I saw those kids saying “I’ll…

Getting organised with Google’s huge array of web, mobile and tablet apps goes way beyond syncing your emails and calendars and setting up a few bookmarks for your favourite sites. It is now possible to shift your entire life onto Google, utilising its free services to better manage everything from everyday tasks, to the running of your business, and keeping up to date with your stocks. The key is how you implement these into your life. A lot of what’s available through Google’s web browser, Chrome, is not always hugely advertised. There are a lot of great unknown tricks and tips for speeding up your workflow and streamlining the way you and your devices communicate with Google. In the following tutorials you will learn how to make the most out…

01 Gmail Offline lets you read and respond to emails offline by storing emails as they are received on your computer. Emails written offline are delivered when online. 02 Ad Block prevents pop-ups and spam sites from disturbing you. It also has a great selection of filter options and the ability to hide sections of certain pages. 03 FVD makes downloading video files through your browser easy. Once a video is detected on a webpage, click the FVD widget and a download link appears.…

01 In a Google Document, highlight a piece of text you’d like to get more information on. Right-click and click ‘Explore Highlighted text’. This will open a research pop-up window within Google Docs. 02 Depending on the content of the text you selected, you’ll get varying results. At the top of the pop-up will be a summary of the wording as best compiled by Google, followed by web results. 03 Use the tabs at the top of the ‘Explore’ column to access web info, pictures and any related content from your Google Drive. It’s a handy way to access key information quickly to help with any project.…

An interesting new player in the Single Board Computers (SBC) scene is the Banana Pi BPI-M5, offering the power of the Raspberry Pi 4 with onboard eMMC flash storage. The Banana Pi BPI-M5 has at its heart an Amlogic S905X3 System on Chip which features an ARM Cortex-A55 processor running at 2GHz and a Mali-G31 MP2 GPU running at 650MHz. RAM comes in the form of a single chip of 4GB of LPDDR4, so is mid-range when compared to the three memory options for the Raspberry Pi 4. What is most welcome is 16GB of eMMC flash storage soldered to the board, with options available for models featuring up to 64GB of eMMC.…

The new device is 10 percent lighter than the first Oculus Quest at 503g and with a 50 percent sharper LCD screen (1832 x 1920 resolution per eye) than its OLEDbased predecessor, it comes with an improved processor (the Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2, which will allow the screens to run at 90Hz), more RAM (up from 4GB to 6GB), controllers with twice the battery life and room for thumb rests, and built-in speakers and hand tracking. Again, thanks to external sensors, there’s no need for additional tracking stations or PC equipment, with everything powered by the Oculus Quest 2 headset itself. Expect two to three hours of battery life, charged over USB-C, depending on the VR software you’re using.…

Consoles are changing. Microsoft and Sony are both releasing next-generation offerings in November, and as you’d expect the main selling point is the power they’ll bring to the table: 4K is an advertised benchmark, ray-tracing will be supported, and more generally, everything will look prettier and run more smoothly – at least until the consoles start to grow long in the tooth. But Sony and Microsoft are diverging in significant ways when it comes to their approaches to what next-gen means in 2020. At the time of writing, Sony is releasing one SKU, simply called the PlayStation 5, and the pitch isn’t wildly different from the pitch that accompanied PS4: prettier games, first-party exclusives. This time a yet-to-be-specified degree of backwards compatibility will be supported with its predecessor, but Sony’s…

Razer’s new Kishi Universal Controller is here to turn your smartphone into a play-anywhere system, with real buttons and joysticks. Join us as we tear down this stretchy controller to take a closer look at its inner workings. Major tech specs • Standard A-B-X-Y buttons, two clickable analog thumbsticks, one eight-way D-pad, plus a shoulder button and trigger button on each side • Connectivity to a phone via USB-C or Lightning connector • No internal battery, no Bluetooth, and no headphone jack • Compatible with Android 8 Oreo/iOS 9 or higher, supporting device dimensions of 145.3-163.7mm (H), 68.2-78.1mm (W), and 7.0-8.8mm (D) Key findings • Two slide locks on the back of the Kishi secure both halves of the controller, keeping it compact when there’s no phone attached. Pulling outward…

$2,499 | consumer.huawei.com/en Huawei’s MateBook 13 scored full marks when we looked at it last year, and with new 10th gen Intel CPUs, upgraded discrete graphics and a bigger battery, everything looks in place for this to be another impressive offering. The most obvious difference is the new 14-inch screen, which returns with the same 2160 by 1440 pixel resolution in a 3:2 aspect ratio that is good for viewing web pages. At 300nits it isn’t the brightest screen available, but it’s bright enough for general work tasks and media playback when cranked right up. The screen also has a decent 90% screen to body ratio with 4.9mm bezels on the top 3 edges after it followed the MateBook Pro X in dropping the webcam to a popup keyboard button.…

$2,725 | business.panasonic.com.au Field workers often find themselves in harsh environments where a standard consumer grade tablet just wouldn’t be able to withstand the cold, heat, rain or other conditions they encounter, which is why they turn to rugged tablets such as Panasonic’s new Toughbook A3. The company’s latest rugged tablet is the successor to its Toughbook A2 that launched back in 2016 and a number of upgrades have been made to the device that make it an even better fit for those in working in industries such as the military, construction, government, law enforcement, healthcare and enterprise. Although the device weighs 0.9kg it doesn’t feel overly heavy. The tablet is a little bit more than half an inch thick at 1.65cm and the device feels very sturdy with no…

“The 11.6-inch touchscreen offers FullHD resolution and is bright enough to be easy to work on.” $329 | kogan.com The Kogan Atlas 11.6in 2-in-1 was by far the most affordable laptop of the roundup, so you have to be willing to give it a few concessions on this basis alone. The most noticeable of them is that while it isn’t the most compact keyboard of the roundup, it does feel like it thanks to an awkwardly small spacebar that sits too far to the left. There’s also an obvious flex in the soft plastic chassis and sharp edges that’ll press on your hands, particularly on the left since the keyboard skews that way. The hinges have an unnaturally tough feel to them and the power cable is a thin pinhole…

Kogan’s Atlas 11.6in C500 might not have the nicest exterior or interface, but the device performed as well as anyone could hope for, being only around 27% behind Lenovo’s Ideapad Duet Chromebook in Geekbench 5. This means that it was capable of running any of the browser-based tasks we threw at it without any major stalls or noticeable lag. Of course 4GB of R AM isn’t going to stretch too far if you do happen to download more demanding applications and fire them up on the unrestricted Windows OS, but as long as you’re aware that the device isn’t going to be able to do it all, you’d be surprised by how much it can actually achieve. What is perhaps the most poignant take home message of this roundup is…

No one would have believed in the last years of the 20th century that the processor world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than Intel’s. Yet in the UK, intellects vast and cool regarded the processor market with envious eyes, slowly and surely drawing their plans against Intel… Apple is dumping Intel processors for its own design of silicon. How did this happen, and what, if any, are the ramifications to the wider PC market? How can a processor design that started life in an obscure, failed British home computer of the 1980s now challenge the entire Intel empire? We’re going to delve into the ARM microarchitecture, have a look at how it’s advanced over the years, how those architectural advances have borne out in benchmarks, and…

High-end videography work (whether that’s live streaming, post-production editing, or something else entirely) often demands a powerful PC. 4K video editing, exporting, and encoding are all resource-intensive tasks, and trying to do them with a sub-par or ageing machine is sure to lead to lengthy processing times and general frustration. Such powerhouse machines are also often pretty chunky. It’s part of the reason that Apple’s desktop products have become successful within the creative industry; the all-in-one form factor of Macs is a great space-saver, tucking a purpose-built compact machine away behind a large monitor. But for those who prefer PCs, a system that can comfortably handle demanding video tasks is often going to be large, heavy, and potentially quite loud. “Whether you would choose PC over Mac for software and…

When Jenson Huang, CEO of Nvidia officially revealed the RTX 3000 series at the start of September, it ushered in the hotly anticipated next generation of graphics cards we have been long waiting for. It has been two years since the launch of the RTX 2000 series. While it was an improvement over the GTX 1000 series in that it brought us real time ray-tracing and DLSS for the first time, these were extras; niceties, or the cherry on the top of the meat and potatoes that is the raw rasterisation performance of a card. With the RTX 2080 merely equalling the rasterisation performance of the now somewhat legendary GTX 1080 Ti, it came as a bit of a let down, as effectively for the same price as the GTX…

PC BUILDER Budget Spending wisely. SATA SSD storage has never been cheaper. TeamGroup has further reduced the price of its GX1 2.5-inch drive, and we couldn’t be happier about it: 120GB of SSD storage for under 35 dollars? A few years ago, that would’ve been impossible to find. Both budget builds have stuck with their drives this month, as the HDD kept its price and the SSD was cheaper. We’ve made changes elsewhere, though: A good deal on MSI’s RX 5600 XT GPU saw us making the switch from Asrock’s Challenger D model for our AMD machine. Overall, we’ve made a modest saving on the AMD system. The Intel build is a slightly different story. Our CPU fell in price by almost $70. The EVGA GPU we used last month…

Since bringing back the Start menu with Windows 10, Microsoft has tweaked and updated its app launcher numerous times. But if it still doesn’t quite hit the spot for you – and if you really miss the old-style Start menu – there is an alternative in the form of Open Shell. This free app brings back the pre-Windows 7 Start menu, giving some retro flavor to your PC. Open Shell gives you lots of different styles to play with, includes several different Start button options, and can even tweak other elements like the taskbar. It spun off from Classic Shell, which ceased development in late 2017. You can still download Classic Shell, but it is better to stick with Open Shell since it is actively updated by a team of…

01 MAKE IT DARKER One of the biggest power drains on any laptop is its display; eke out a bit more life from your battery by turning its brightness down. Unlike recent iPhones, Dark Mode won’t help here: Macs use different display technology. 02 ADJUST ENERGY SETTINGS System Prefs >= Energy Saver is your friend here. This screen lacks a Battery Health button as this is an old Mac, but we can make changes. Under the Battery tab, disable Power Nap and make the display turn off more quickly. 03 PLUG IN BABY The settings that work best for long battery life don’t always work for your Mac when it’s plugged in. In the Power Adapter tab, you can specify different settings for your Mac when it isn’t using its…

The Occam’s Razor principle is often paraphrased as ‘the simplest answer is often correct’. Although this has long been thought as something that applies to science, this principle can also be used to determine the best software solution to a given problem. This is why tools like Cron and At remain so popular for automating recurring tasks. Cron is used for tasks you wish to perform repeatedly, such as installing updates, or performing backups. The At utility, on the other hand, can be used to run tasks only once, at the specified time. But that’s something that would only appeal to system administrators, we can hear some of you earnest readers complain! Although a critical skill for any administrator, automation of recurring tasks can be every bit as useful for…

Ray-tracing makes a remarkable difference when applied to age worn titles: take Minecraft for example, which is truly impressive. Now Nvidia and Epic Games have teamed up to implement ray-tracing and DLSS tech in Fortnite. The patch applied ray-traced reflections, global illumination and more to the game’s core battle royale experience, as well as to its creative and ‘Save the World’ modes. If the patch doesn’t make immediate sense after booting it up, Nvidia has created its own Fortnite map dedicated to showcasing the new tech – much as it did with Minecraft. The ‘RTX Treasure Run’ map is basically an interactive museum exploring the potential of ray-tracing in the popular free-to-play shooter, and you can access it completely free providing you own an RTX card that can actually run…

$28 | PC, PS4 | fallguys.com Each round of Fall Guys begins with 60 players rushing through an obstacle course in a chaotic mob of jumping, diving, whooping, and ragdolling bodies. Only the first 30 or so across the finish line qualify for the next round, which is randomly chosen from about two dozen different levels. Each level eliminates more players until the final round, where anywhere from a handful to more than a dozen compete to be the sole winner. For most of a match I’m content to goof around, take reckless chances and stop to celebrate with emotes before crossing the finish line. Getting ragdolled out of contention usually just makes me laugh. But as the end of the final round approaches I’m suddenly taking things seriously as…

Getting organised with Google’s huge array of web, mobile and tablet apps goes way beyond syncing your emails and calendars and setting up a few bookmarks for your favourite sites. It is now possible to shift your entire life onto Google, utilising its free services to better manage everything from everyday tasks, to the running of your business, and keeping up to date with your stocks. The key is how you implement these tools into your life. A lot of what’s available through Google’s web browser, Chrome, is not always hugely advertised. There are a lot of great unknown tricks and tips for speeding up your workflow and streamlining the way you and your devices communicate with Google. In the following tutorials you will learn how to make the most…

“Nvidia will gain access to a treasure trove of IP and engineering talent that could enable the company to quickly develop custom CPU architectures for its own use.” After months of speculation and reports, Nvidia announced that it is acquiring ARM Limited from SoftBank in a transaction valued at US$40 billion. SoftBank “will remain committed to ARM’s long-term success through its ownership stake in Nvidia, expected to be under 10 percent,” signaling that Nvidia will gain full control of ARM. However, the transaction does not include ARM’s IoT Services Group, which remains with SoftBank. The deal ranks as the largest semiconductor acquisition in history and marks the second-largest tech acquisition in history, behind Dell’s US$64 billion purchase of EMC. As expected, the ARM/Nvidia deal will be subject to regulatory approval…

Tiger Lake will power Intel’s next generation of notebook-class devices. These new 11th Generation Core processors use four of Intel’s latest cores built with the Willow Cove microarchitecture – a slightly modified version of the Sunny Cove microarchitecture found in Intel’s 10th Generation Ice Lake processors. These new cores offer more performance than before, peaking at 4.8GHz compared to the 4.0GHz seen in the previous generation, a 20 percent improvement. However the underlying clock-for-clock performance improvements are minimal, with Intel instead focusing on that frequency gain. The reason for the frequency gain comes from the manufacturing process – formerly Intel’s 10++ process, renamed once to 10+ and then again during Intel’s recent Architecture Day to its new name: Intel’s 10nm SuperFin technology. The goal with this manufacturing process was two-fold:…

Apple Music 1 GB/hr British company Uswitch recently revealed which apps are chowing down on the most bandwidth in homes under lockdown. Apple Music clocks in at number eight. Tidal 1.27 GB/hr Jay-Z’s high-definition music-streaming service certainly demands more bandwidth than the likes of Spotify. Lossless audio and music videos are largely responsible for this. Disney Plus 1.5 GB/hr Fun fact: Disney’s new-on-the-block streaming platform uses 50% more bandwidth on average than Netflix, and 87.5% more than Amazon Prime Video. iHeart Radio 1.65 GB/hr Podcasts and live radio shows have evidently been popular in lockdown, and iHeartRadio (formerly known as Clear Channel) has been hogging the Wi-Fi a bit. SoundCloud 1.65 GB/hr More complex features like embedded widgets and downloads, as opposed to streaming, means that SoundCloud is a bandwidth-intensive…

$1,469 | www.msi.com The GeForce RTX 3080 is the lead card of the brand new Ampere range. It’s joined by the RTX 3090 (a consumer level Titan replacement) and soon the RTX 3070 and RTX 3060. Ampere cards incorporate everything great about the Turing architecture and improve on it. The RTX 3080 is faster in games, offers better AI performance, it packs in cutting edge technology support and features improved ray tracing capabilities. If Turing served as a teaser of the possibilities of ray tracing, the Ampere generation may be the one that elevates it from a technology with potential into one that becomes as commonly enabled as anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering. What’s under the hood At the heart of the RTX 3080 lies the GA102 GPU. This is actually…

$1,399 | www.netgear.com.au For some months now we’ve been using Asus’ Zen Wi-Fi products to power the internet around our home. The system essentially has two primary nodes that have a dedicated backhaul channel between them, reserved for a direct, high-performance connection between the two. This was so robust and fast that we were finally dissuaded from relying on a powerline connection to connect our main, gaming PC to the internet at the other end of the house. It’s been peerless. Until now. Netgear’s Orbi Wi-Fi 6 Mesh system is a similar beast, but with nodes that are twice the size (25cm tall each!) Set-up is simple: download the app, scan a QR code and follow the prompts. The app offers some good insights into the network and correctly identified…

From $189 | shop.westerndigital.com Western Digital’s lineup of direct-attached storage (DAS) products targets a range of markets and form-factors. After the acquisition of HGST / G-Technology and SanDisk, the company now offers similar products under multiple brand names. Portable bus-powered SSDs are an example. Subtle differences in the feature sets of the products enhance their appeal to the brand’s target market. Late last year, the WD_Black P50 was introduced as the fastest non-Thunderbolt portable SSD in the market, thanks to its USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 interface. The branding clearly indicated that gamers were the target market. The regular WD branding is reserved for the My Passport series. The first model in the My Passport SSD series was back in 2017, and it used the planar TLC-based SanDisk X400 M.2 SATA…

$1,945 | dell.com/en-au If you think all Chromebooks are budget PC alternatives then the Latitude7410 Chromebook Enterprise 2 in 1 will come as a bit of a shock. This business-focused laptop has the same Intel Core i5-10310U CPU and 16GB RAM as you’ll see in today’s premium ultrabooks and the device can be upgraded further to include a 10th Gen Core i7 chip. Up front, most configurations offer a FullHD 14in 300nit display, but it does range to a 400nit 4K screen. Whether it’s the sleek metal chassis, the skinny edge bezels, the polished convertible hinges or the pinhole HD webcam everything else is pretty much what you’d expect from a flagship ultrabook. “Unsurprisingly this device had some of the best benchmark scores across the board, so it’ll be more…

“While this model only offers Wi-Fi networking and doesn’t carry a heap of storage space, the Surface Go 2 does feature a MicroSD card expansion slot, to allow you to add cost effective storage as you see fit.” $879 | microsoft.com 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 available. While this model doesn’t carry a heap of storage space, the Surface Go 2 does feature a MicroSD card slot. The next tier up doubles the RAM and storage allocations for a total of $879. This clearly moves the device out of the budget Chromebook space…

Premiere Pro | $45.99 per month | www.adobe.com DaVinci Resolve | $FREE or $475 | www.blackmagicdesign.com Two great titans enter the arena. Only one will leave triumphant. These kinds of multi-camera, effects-laden scenes are precisely what Adobe’s Premiere Pro and Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve were designed to cope with, and it also neatly describes the battle between pro-level non-linear video editing apps. There must be a word for that. There’s room in this arena for both contenders, however. Nobody has to get hurt. In the red corner we find Premiere Pro, the shinobi from Adobe, famous for work such as Deadpool, Terminator: Dark Fate, and Sharknado 2: The Second One. Meanwhile, in the blue corner sits Australia’s finest, DaVinci Resolve, fresh from working on Deadpool 2, The Last Jedi, and…

Linux | www.bunsenlabs.org Sooner or later you become fed up of seemingly bloated desktop environments and turn to something lighter, be it OpenBox or i3. These are great – a gift in fact – but the learning curve is steep and a considerable amount of configuration may be required to get them into a state that meets your needs and desires. Even then, there’s the temptation to delve into further rabbit holes, be they compositing and transparency effects, or setting up a custom applications menu. And let’s not even talk about setting up Conky perfectly. Now imagine if a distro came with all of these set up out of the box… Well good news, BunsenLabs does. And the new release is named after everyone’s favourite rare earth metal. It’s based…

Length of time: 2-3 hours | Level of difficulty: Medium 01 SHIELDS DOWN Let’s kick things off with a case stripdown. The cooler and PSU come screwed into the case, and cables are pre-routed, so there’s no need to mess with them. First pop out the front glass panel and rear perforated panel. These secure the U-shaped metal casing that forms the top and side panels of the case; once they are free, it should simply lift off the frame. Carefully remove the polystyrene that’s cushioning the AIO cooler. That’s all you need to do for now; removing the side panels is a completely screwless process, so ignore the tiny screws around the frame. The entire case can be disassembled (the long edges of the frame are plastic struts secured…

1. There are three main Start menu styles to choose from, including Windows 7 style, Classic style, and Classic with two columns. 2. Open Shell has a whole host of options to customize your Start menu. Tick the “Show all settings” checkbox to see them all. 3. Open Shell can also change the visual style of Windows Explorer. Click the logo in the top-right corner to access its settings. 4. The Windows Explorer Settings window contains useful tweaks, including changes to the status bar, file paths, toolbars, and more.…

If you’re musically minded, you’ve probably used Voice Memos to capture ideas. But while Voice Memos is a great app it’s also very basic. Apple’s Music Memos for iPhone and iPad takes Voice Memos and adds stacks of musician-friendly features to create a brilliant and useful app for guitarists and piano players. The first thing you’ll need to do is record your tune – and to do it in tune, thanks to the built-in acoustic tuner that works for all kinds of stringed instruments. When you play, Music Memos works out what chords or notes you’re playing and enables you to add bass and drums to it: these automatically follow the tune, and you can adjust the sound and the playing style and get them to drop in and out…

Xbox Game Pass for PC has been bizarrely cheap since it launched into beta last year: an initial $1 trial month rolled into a $5 per month subscription, which was more than worth it for a library of over 100 games. But all good things must come to an end, and since mid-September, Xbox Game Pass for PC has exited beta and its monthly price is now double. It’s not unexpected: the $5 per month was always a limited offer and the usual $10.95 is about what you’d expect to pay for a subscription service. For reference, in the US Netflix Standard is US$13, and Spotify is US$10. According to an official tweet, the service will enter ‘General Availability,’ which seems to suggest that it’ll be available in more regions,…

$99.95 - $179.95 | PC | microsoft.com Do you ever wonder how it’d feel to take a few years away from games, and then peek back through the curtain once you’d become out of touch? Quite often, Microsoft Flight Simulator feels like that peek. In its scope and fidelity, it seems to be visiting from the future, when it’s commonplace to have access to a photorealistic Planet Earth and the freedom to explore it. When you can hop in a plane and fly over your own town, in the same weather conditions and lighting you can see outside your window. What a dramatic way for the Microsoft Flight Simulator series to reappear, and what a towering achievement from Asobo Studio. We’ll be talking about the impossible detail of its 1:1…

Students tricked AI marker into perfect results Online AI marking tool Edgenuity is vulnerable to cunning students. After receiving a mark immediately after submitting a history paper online, US elementary student Lazare Simmons realised that his paper was being marked by an algorithm rather than his teacher. With the help of his mother, a history professor, the two used subsequent tests to work out that the algorithm gave marks for target keywords rather than coherent short-answer explanations. This meant that full marks could be achieved for simply including a jumbled list of potentially relevant key words at the end of a response. The online education company Edgenuity didn’t comment on how it grades students, but clearly it’s got some work to do to keep students from gaming its marking criteria.…

01 Omnibox can do much more than access websites. If you don’t know the name of the site you’re after, type in some relevant keywords and let Google find it. 02 You can do equations in Omnibox, using the +, –, * (multiply) and / (divide) icons. Type in an equation for an instant result, then continue with more operations. 03 It can do weight and measurement conversions too. Phrase the conversion in the form of a question using numerals; eg ‘How many gallons are in 4 litres?’…

01 Click on New conversation at the top of the Hangouts column and all of your current Google+ circles will be listed. Tick a box and you can start a text or video chat. 02 In the box at the top of the Hangouts menu, start typing in names. Google+ will match them with other people on Google+, even if they aren’t in your circles. 03 Click on the box beside a person’s name and you will add them to your Hangout. You can either send them a text message or invite them to a video chat.…

Most people use Google Search every day and accept the results that are presented. This is perfectly reasonable because the results are almost always accurate and fit the search term that has been inputted, but there are ways to improve your results. Google offers many tools that will let you search for images, locations and other non-text references with ease and even these can be expanded upon to let you find exact image sizes and the type of images you require. The Advanced Search option lets you specify more than one term and you can choose what to include and what to avoid, which should bring results that are as near to your requirements as possible. The simplistic search page also lets you compare the prices of products, find books…