Table of contents for Xmas 2018 in APC

Declaring winners is problematic. One could argue that anointing a thing to be the very best of its class does great injustice to many other almost-there products. And rightly so. The many factors that determine what’s best include value, and that changes as time passes and prices drop, thus reordering the podium. Or perhaps a product we’re looking at right now gets a firmware update that enables it to do new and more fantastic things, thus elevating it a little further up the ladder. But that’s time and change for you. Always messing things up. What is true is that in any given moment of time, given sufficient expertise, it is indeed possible to make lists and rank things. And, that process is entirely accurate in a given moment. That…

30 MILLION DUCKDUCKGO’S DAILY SEARCH VOLUME HAS INCREASED BY 50% SINCE LAST YEAR Although it took privacy-centric search engine DuckDuckGo 7 years before it hit an average of 10 million daily searches, its next two milestones didn’t take quite as long. In the next year, traffic doubled to 20 million daily searches and, as of today, has hit 30 million, marking a 50% increase over this time last year. The intention of DDG is to offer a search engine that doesn’t track user activity or serve targetted ads. 000000 KANYE WEST EXPOSES HIS ALARMINGLY SIMPLE iPHONE PASSWORD IN THE WHITE HOUSE While visiting the White House to chat to President Trump, Kanye West accidentally revealed to live TV cameras that his iPhone password is just a series of zeros. We…

BACKGROUND ■ Last year’s iPhone X had a weird name and the most advanced internals we’d ever seen. Now Apple turns it up to 11 with the iPhone XS and XS Max. We’re taking apart the XS, so grab hold of your Roman numerals, and let’s get started. MAJOR TECH SPECS ■ • Hexa-core A12 Bionic SoC with a “next-gen” Neural Engine ■ • 5.8-inch (2,436 x 1,125-pixel) 458 ppi Super Retina OLED display with True Tone, wide color gamut, and 3D Touch ■ • 12MP rear cameras (wide-angle and telephoto) with f/1.8 and f/2.4 apertures and OIS, and 7MP selfie cam paired with TrueDepth Face ID hardware ■ • 64GB of onboard storage (256 and 512GB optional configs) ■ • Gigabit-class LTE (not 5G), as well as 802.11a/b/g/n/ac Wi-Fi,…

Intel’s Optane storage technology has all the potential to be a game changer. According to Intel, Optane products have the capability to be orders of magnitude faster than traditional SSD solutions, never mind traditional hard drives. While there are already large capacity Optane drives that serve as NAND SSD replacements on the market, their cost relegates them to those with deep pockets or for use with professional applications. Intel’s plans for the mainstream market are much more grounded in reality. The excellent low latency read performance characteristics of Optane products makes them ideal cache drives. Pairing a low capacity Optane drive with a mechanical hard drive promises to massively accelerate performance, while keeping costs to a minimum. These are lofty promises, and in this article we’ll go over why a…

GRAPHICS CARD $999 | WWW.NVIDIA.COM.AU High end graphics cards have generally trended upwards in size. Triple slot cooling and PCBs protruding well above the PCIe bracket are the norm. With this in mind it’s a real surprise to see just how compact the RTX 2070 Founders Edition is. Small doesn’t mean cheap and ineffective though. We were pleasantly surprised at how much of a jump in quality the RTX 2080 and 2080Ti Founders Edition cards were over their predecessors. At a glance the RTX 2070 Founders Edition looks like a good step forward too. From the outside, the RTX 2070 Founders Edition looks like a compact version of its big brothers. Gone is the old noisy blower cooler. In its place is a totally redesigned cooler featuring twin…

GRAPHICS CARD $1,069 | WWW.AU.MSI.COM Comparing the RTX 2070 Founders Edition to the MSI RTX 2070 Gaming Z is almost like comparing a Tonka truck to a Hummer. The MSI is a huge card that positively dwarfs the Founders Edition. The Gaming Z is MSI’s highest tier of Gaming card, surpassed only by the limited edition OC focused Lightning series. It comes with an out of the box boost clock of 1830MHz. This is a big jump over the Founders Edition card, though it does come with a power consumption penalty as MSI states the 2070 Gaming Z can use up to 225W. To put that into perspective, that matches the RTX 2080 Founders Edition power consumption. The PCB is a fully custom design featuring an 8+2 phase…

$649 | WWW.KOGAN.COM/AU Kogan is known for slapping its name on otherwise expensive tech and selling it in Australia at a low price, which is exactly what the company has done with the KAMN341FQULA. Most 34-inch curved monitors sell for around $850 to $1,000, but the KAMN341FQULA is only $649. For your money you get a rather stylish 3440x1440 1800R curved Samsung VA-type panel that’s capable of 100Hz refresh rates and FreeSync support. Kogan don’t mention the colour gamut this display is capable of in its spec-sheet, but in normal use it seems to line up with other 99% sRGB panels for adequate colour accuracy. The lack of a USB hub or multiple HDMI inputs to switch between may bother some people, but there’s a reason this monitor…

$3,499 | WWW.ASUS.COM Out of the 14 monitors getting reviewed here, the Asus ROG Swift PG27UQ is the best one, by far. Just look at these specs: 4K, 144Hz, DCI-P3, HDR and G-Sync – fantastic stuff that’s as good in person as it is on paper. Unfortunately, the $3,499 asking price for the PG27UQ is more than double the price of the second most expensive monitor in this review. Forgetting price for a minute, the PG27UQ is an excellent display. With other monitors you need to decide between high refresh rates or high-quality colour. With the PG27UQ, you get both! A resolution of 3840x2160 on a 27-inch screen results in a 163 PPI that makes game graphics razor sharp. The DCI-P3 colour gamut and HDR support (HDR10 &…

$999 | WWW.PHILIPS.COM.AU The Philips 436M6 is a TV masquerading as a computer monitor. At 43-inches diagonal, it’s more suited to people’s living rooms than their desks. Unlike most TVs however, the 436M6 is the first monitor to receive VESA DisplayHDR 1000 certification, which considering the $1,000 price point and 4K resolution, makes for a very interesting display. One of the benefits of having a 4K resolution on such a large screen is the lack of window scaling or zooming, so Windows won’t have a fit when using an app incompatible with window scaling. The downside however, is the loss of pixel density, resulting in a lack of clarity and detail, particularly with text, that you get at 4K resolution on a smaller monitor (i.e: 34-inch or 40-inch).…

$879 | AU.AOC.COM 27-inches wide, 1440p resolution,IPSpanel, 165Hz refresh rate and Nvidia G-Sync support for $900? No that’s not a typo. With those specs and pricing, the AOC AG271QG makes a very compelling argument for the Nvidia gamer looking for cutting edge display tech without breaking the bank. Being an AHVA IPS panel, colour uniformity and viewing angles are excellent. It’s fantastic AOC has packed an IPS panel into the AG271QG and still made it pump out 165Hz. By default, the AG271QG operates at a maximum of 144Hz. If you want 165Hz goodness, go into the monitor’s OSD and turn on ULMB (ultra-low motion blur). Be warned though, enabling ULMB has the side-effect of disabling G-Sync, so unless you’re confident your rig can pump out 165fps consistently, you…

You’ve made it. You’ve got a brand new rig, and you’re ready to start winning and enjoying the sights in those 1080p games. But how do you get there? How do you install an operating system on your new machine? You haven’t installed an optical disc drive in your chassis, and you don’t seem to have one laying around either, so where do you go from here? No need to worry – we’ve got your back. The last time we used one of those DVD readers was way back in 2016, and even then that was only to see whether the coverdisc of our friends over on PC PowerPlay would read properly. Spoiler: It did, then they trashed our DVD drive. Typical, right? But enough waffle. You’re here to install…

Moleskin Timepage Free moleskin.com/timepage Timepage is an absolutely gorgeous and hyper functional calendar that interfaces with AI to give you tips around travel and weather to ensure you are always on time. Very clean and well designed. Hyperlapse Free instagram.com Hyperlapse allows users with phones that don’t feature image stabilisation to take long, beautiful timelapses, featuring both 10 and 30 second reductions as well as the ability to vary the speeds. Halftone 2 $4.49 www.juicybitssoftware.com Think your dog, cat, or toddler deserves their own comic book? Halftone 2 allows you to create custom comics using your own photos and images. Fun, simple and easy to use. Civilization VI for iPad Free with IAP www.aspyr.com Although it has a preview mode, Civ VI on iPad is one of the most expensive…

Once upon a time, applying patches to your Windows operating system meant waiting for a service pack to come out. Big hulking installers that not only plugged security holes and fixed bugs, but also added new functionality and features. These typically took years to become available, making for systems that could be vulnerable to exploits for long periods of time. When patching Windows via the internet became more popular it certainly sped up the frequency in which Microsoft could react to vulnerabilities and fix or add features. However, up until Windows 10, online update installation was always somewhat controllable by the end user. Sure, you could allow Windows to auto apply updates when they became available, but you could also choose if or when to install each individual patch manually…

Last month we gave this machine a major shake-up, and it’s performing well, so no need for any radical changes this month. In fact, there’s only one change, and that’s due to the Kingston SSD we used last month being difficult to find in shops. So instead, we’ve turned to Adata, and its SU650. Not exactly a performance offering, but it’s incredibly affordable for a 120GB boot drive, and it’s still faster than a traditional spinning drive. With only one hardware change, you’d expect the overall price to remain largely the same, but the new Adata SSD we’ve popped in here is $21 more than the Kingston A400 120GB from last month, which pushes the overall cost just north of $800. With second-gen Ryzen chips now doing the rounds, we…

Kodi is an extremely versatile open source application. It offers a very elegant way to manage all your TV shows, films and music in one place. Each aspect of Kodi can be changed from its themes (known as ‘skins’) to the addition of various plug-ins, which support extra features such as YouTube playback. One particularly useful feature concerns Kodi’s video and audio scrapers. These scour the Internet to match your media files to a particular movie, TV programme or song. The resulting metadata is displayed in the app. The aim of the Kodi project is to turn your PC into a home media centre. To this end, the application also supports a number of remote controls, including official touchscreen apps for mobiles and even game controllers. Point your web browser…

There was a time when, for most people, the greatest fear of the modern world was catching a cold on public transport. But times have changed, and now our common dread is losing irreplaceable data – either accidentally, or through it being stolen. As more people opt for digital banking transactions done from the comfort and convenience of a cellphone, the manufacturers have had to resort to measures such as fingerprint sensors to help you guard your secrets on the mobile device. But what about all the other data on your laptops and desktops? One easy solution to gain peace of mind is to use encryption to forever lock away all your precious secrets, whether it’s files, bank statements, or family photos. Using Tomb, you can easily store all important…

USD$29.99 | PC | WWW.FROZENSYNAPSE2.COM Taking control of a security force tasked with eliminating a sentient AI, Frozen Synapse 2 sees you battle your way through isometric maps, while planning, testing and routinely reworking your combat strategy. After deploying your troops, you issue a series of intricate commands to each individual soldier, giving them orders to move into position, shoot at or ignore enemies, or duck for cover. These delightfully tactical turn-based encounters take place in increments of five seconds, meaning that acute attention to detail and meticulous execution is the order of the day. Fortunately, you’re granted the gift of foresight for concocting your segmented plan of attack: you can issue endless orders to your units and watch the resulting scenarios without having to commit until you’re…

The rate at which technology is advancing is rapid – it’s changing the way we communicate with friends and family, the way we work, and the way our children are educated. And it’s all on the back of the internet. Yet, there are nearly four billion people in the Developing World who still have no access to the internet. Being unable to take advantage of the a connected world is not restricted to African and Asian nations, however – there are millions of people in rural America and in remote communities in Australia that are still offline. Large, extremely well-funded tech companies like Facebook, Elon Musk’s SpaceX, and Google are, however, trying to bridge the digital divide, finding new and innovative ways to connect the remote corners of the world.…

“Other forms of PC get coverage in the mag already, it would be good if some page space is put aside for the humble desktop PC” WHERE KODI GOES I refer to APC magazine December 2018 Issue 460, and the Kodi Setup Guide on page 50. In section 14 The Perfect Startup on page 52 the advice from the magazine is to copy the Kodi.exe file into the Startup folder. Doing that is setting the system up for a possible future bug. The problem is that you now have two copies of Kodi.exe. If Kodi gets an update you can bet that the Kodi.exe in the Startup folder is still at the old level. It would be better practice to instead create a shortcut to Kodi.exe and put that in…

LAPTOP FROM $1,499 | WWW.MICROSOFT.COM/EN-AU The original Surface Laptop from Microsoft was a gallant first attempt in the professional ultrabook space, but it was too light on power to be useful for creatives and Windows 10 S was a bit restrictive for a professional laptop (it works much better on the new Surface Go 2-in-1 tablets). Fast forward a year however and Microsoft has transformed the Surface Laptop line from a promising category into a refined and on point device that meets all of our initial expectations. The heart of the new Surface Laptop 2 is a quad-core Intel processor which starts with a Core i5-8250U (there’s no Core m3 model this year) and ranges to include a Core i7-8650U (the same CPU on Microsoft’s gaming-capable Surface Book…

CPU 2920X $999, 2970WX $1,999 | WWW.AMD.COM AMD came roaring back into the HEDT market with the release of first generation Threadripper processors in mid-2017, topped by the 16 core 1950X. 16 cores was just a tease though as the 1950X used only two of the four dies present. This design left open the possibility that we’d eventually get a full 32 core option, which is exactly what we got with the release of the 2990WX a couple of months back. Now we have the final two second-generation Threadripper models making their debut. The 2970WX is a 24 core/48 thread CPU. It’s joined by the 12 core/24 thread 2920X, which promises a good blend of single and multi-threaded grunt and is more accommodating of 2018 consumer-level software and…

GRAPHICS CARD $1,199 | WWW.ASUS.COM.AU The ROG Strix 2070 is the flagship Asus 2070 offering. The bar is always set high for any ROG product and if you take one look at the ROG Strix 2070 you’ll know it’s a premium offering. It packs in a premium PCB, a beefy cooler and plenty of unique ROG features. The competition is tough though and the Asus has a significant price premium that needs to be justified. The Strix 2070 is outwardly similar to the other Strix RTX cards. The build quality is superb with a large brushed aluminium back plate that’s enhanced by an RGB-lit ROG logo. There’s also a large PCB baseplate that helps to cool the components while offering additional rigidity. The shroud features some RGB highlights…

There’s no point dropping thousands of dollars on a sweet gaming rig, only to pair it with a basic monitor that can’t show off the full capabilities of the machine you spent all that money on. A quality monitor is essential for getting the best out of your gaming experience and the right purchase can last you many years and be attached to many GPUs over that time. In 2018 there’s a plethora of self-declared gaming monitor choices, in every price range you can imagine. Monitors starting at $150 that reckon they’re good for gaming and other monitors that will set you back thousands are also gaming centric. What’s the go then? What should you get to make sure it’ll be useful for years to come? WHAT TO LOOK FOR…

$399 | WWW.LG.COM It’s quite difficult to class the LG 27BK550Y as a gaming monitor. For starters, it “only” has a refresh rate of 75Hz despite the 1080p resolution, doesn’t seem to support FreeSync or G-Sync, has no particularly gamer-esque features like in-game crosshair overlays or a low response time. The 27BK550Y doesn’t even have a cool dragon or tribal symbol on it to denote its gamer worthiness! The only thing that could make this a gaming monitor is the “game” picture setting. That’s about it. The 27BK550Y isn’t even that good of a monitor for desktop use, with only a 1080p resolution at 27-inches, text isn’t as crisp as it could be like on a WQHD resolution display at the same screen size. Despite being an IPS…

$198 | WWW.ACER.COM 2 4-inch monitors aren’t as glorious as the 49-inch or 34-inchmonsterson the market these days, but for the gamer on a budget who just wants to enjoy some fast paced 1080p gaming, they can still provide a robust gaming experience. Acer’s VG240Y is just the type of monitor for that type of gamer. For a relatively cheap gaming monitor, it’s interesting Acer went with an IPS panel in the VG240Y. This is partly why the refresh rate tops out at 75Hz, which isn’t awful, but the main benefit of 1080p gaming is the high frames per second you can achieve, but this monitor won’t be of any use if your FPS goes above 75. Acer claims the VG240Y has a 1ms response time, despite its…

$329 | WWW.BENQ.COM Benq’s Zowie XL2411P claims to be the “premiere e-Sports monitor”, which is probably stretching things, but it definitely is well suited for those damaging their posture and wrists in the name of e-Sport glory on a budget. At only 24-inches wide, this smaller size allows Benq to pack in the gaming features people want, at a price they can afford. The headline feature is 144Hz support at a 1080p resolution. This is the sweet spot for gamers without 6 figure setups, who prize smooth frame rates over high resolutions. At 1080p, 144fps comes way easier than at 4K. To make the most of those 144 frames per second, a blur reduction feature can be enabled to strobe the backlight and reduce perceived motion blur and…

For the experienced, building a PC is an easy, often therapeutic experience. Each part fits into its designated slot, each cable is carefully woven around the frame, and each power-on is successful. However, for a vast swathe of folk, it’s nothing of the sort. PC building can be a daunting task, especially if it’s your first time. After all, you’re messing around with delicate parts that can cost upward of half a month’s paycheck. One little slip, one jolt of static, one cable in the wrong place, and boom – you’re out of pocket and out of luck. So, why bother? You can pick up a pre-built PC for a similar amount of cash as building your own – and let someone else worry about everything. It’s convenient, easy, and…

BEST ULTRABOOK Dell XPS 13 (2018) From $2,099 dell.com.au Moving the webcam position, adding facial login and a four-mic array, giving Intel’s chips more headroom to perform even better and adding a 4K screen have all evolved the XPS into an even more formidable flagship laptop. In directly addressing the concerns of users, the Dell XPS 13 laptop is refined further than ever before. With all of the improvements made to the XPS 13 for this year, the rest of the laptop world had a lofty benchmark to measure itself against. BEST BUDGET GAMING LAPTOP Acer Nitro 5 (NH. Q3XSA.001-C77) From $1,499 acer.com.au While there are a handful of laptops in the budget space that offer great gaming solutions for those who are tight on cash, the Acer Nitro 5…

Youtube Music Free with IAP music.youtube.com Google’s long overdue revamp to Youtube Music features AI tuned playlists, video, chromecast support and a custom auto-generated offline playlist based on your activity. Requires Youtube Premium. Wish Free | wish.com If you want cheap... anything.. Wish is a must have shopping experience. Millions of products, absurdly cheap pricing and shipping. Warning, quality may vary, but that’s part of the fun. Beem IT Free beemit.com.au Beem IT allows instant and easy payments to anyone with an Australian mobile number. Split a dinner bill or pay back for a sixpack, or send requests for a payment. Ola Free ola.com A new alternative to Uber, Ola offers drivers a fairer commission system as well as cheaper prices and regular discounts. Availabily is wider although the app…

World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth $44.99 worldofwarcraft.com We love that WoW flashes between serious and goofy. Battle for Azeroth embraces that tonal duality with conviction. The end result is a landscape full of moments that are sometimes bleak, sometimes hilarious, and always fun. Battletech US$39.99 battletechgame.com Harebrained Schemes has taken the hard sci-fi tabletop game (best known to PC players as the basis of the MechWarrior series) and married it to the XCOM formula in a way that brings out the best qualities of both. Phantom Doctrine US$39.99 goodshepherd.games Phantom Doctrine is a solid strategy game, but it manages to make a convincing case that we need more spy games that lean into the mechanics and meaning of espionage. Total War Saga: Thrones of Brittania US$39.99 www.totalwar.com A bold…

On the surface, this should be a fairly straightforward “Build It.” The remit is simple enough: Piece together a reasonable home for Nvidia’s latest and greatest graphics card, the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti. Having said that, the word “reasonable” takes on a slightly different angle when said graphics card is going to set you back over $2,000. Plus, there’s the added fun that we don’t know for sure which processor is going to give this new silicon the necessary room to strut its stuff, because we’re in unknown territory when it comes to ray tracing. Do we want more cores, faster single-core performance, or some hitherto unknown combination of the two? We briefly toyed with the idea of pairing this new graphics card with Intel’s even newer Core i9-9900K. We…

ADD-ONS Any one of a number of apps designed to enhance Kodi, such as YouTube support. Some add-ons are maintained by the Kodi developers. Others are created by the community. SKIN The visual interface for Kodi. You can change the default skin, Estuary, via the Add-ons browser. KRYPTON The codename for the current version of Kodi. The layout and menu options are different to previous releases. POWER BUTTON Click here to show the power menu. You can use this to exit Kodi, as well as reboot, hibernate or shutdown your PC. SETTINGS Click to configure settings, such as your chosen skin, and whether to autoplay music, videos and more. CATEGORIES These are useful if you have a lot of videos. You can sort content by genre, alphabetically and much more.…

FROM $95 | PC, PS4, XO | ASSASSINSCREED.UBISOFT.COM Odyssey sheds so much of what Assassin’s Creed is known for to fully embrace the core concepts of a roleplaying game – and it’s all the better for it. Even though the story doesn’t live up to its initial premise, the additional layer of choice, breathtaking scenery, and colorful sidequests make Odyssey not only the best Assassin’s Creed to date, but one of the best RPGs since The Witcher 3. Unlike previous Assassin’s Creeds, dialogue options now let me influence major and minor quests – sometimes with horrific consequences. I refused to intervene when a priest wanted to put a plagued family to death, incited more than one rebellion, and even spared a shamed general from what should have been…

DEVELOPER: NEVERSOFT PUBLISHER: ACTIVISION RELEASED: 30 SEPTEMBER 1999 SYSTEM: PSONE, NINTENDO 64, DREAMCAST Just how much did Neversoft’s take on the tricks and friendly competition of skateboarding go on to influence the concept of the wider sandbox playground experience in gaming? It’s hard to quantify, but we’re going to say quite a lot. It may have been driven by specific cultural and sporting traditions to create the game that it did with Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, but through it and the games that would follow, it helped to develop a benchmark for what it means to create a fun, anarchic and free-form space to just play in an open-world game. And all of this because it decided to stick skate parks at the end of race courses in an early…

Apple refreshes MacBook Air and Mac Mini FOR THE FIRST TIME IN YEARS. Although both the MacBook Air and Mac Mini have lacked considerable refreshes for quite a number of years at this point, they both continue to have a dedicated fanbase. These fans have been appeased with the announcements of newer iterations (alongside another iPad Pro) at Apple’s most recent hardware event, with both refreshes sticking to the form factor that brought them their initial attention, but with beefed-up internals. HD IBM buys Red Hat in biggest software deal ever SET TO BECOME WORLD’S LARGEST HYBRID CLOUD PROVIDER. IBM has acquired open-source software company Red Hat, a move it describes as a “game-changer” in the world of hybrid cloud computing. Red Hat will continue to exist as a distinct…

NANOLEAF CANVAS Not just another brick in the wall. $320 | SHOP.NANOLEAF.ME Nanoleaf’s prism lighting panels have long been the go-to setup for anyone looking to make a feature of their smart lights, but the company has a new panel that it’s hoping to square-off for anyone wanting a more uniform arrangement. The new Canvas LED panels have a squarer, 8-bit aesthetic and come with touch sensors so that you can interact directly with each panel. You’ll be able to sync the Canvas panels with any games you have running on your PC or with ambient music in the home, and there’s a raft of new schemes and animations to light up your home life. FITBIT CHARGE 3 Fitbit’s finest fitness tracker gets further finessed. $229.95 |…

Elon Musk announced in November that he was putting in 120 hour work weeks to get the Tesla Model 3 out the door in time. He did so with the usual braggadocio, but added, in an interview with Recode, that it was the “worst year of [his] entire career” and that he felt like he’d aged five years. More recently, Rockstar Games CEO Dan Houser boasted to Vulture that the studio was working “100 hour” weeks in the lead-up to Red Dead Redemption 2’s much-anticipated launch. It won’t come as a surprise to anyone that, completing tasks the likes of which Musk and Houser do, require more hours than a regular weekday 9-to-5 could accommodate. As luminaries in their respective industries, both have a huge investment in their work –…

NVME SSD $330 | WWW.CRUCIAL.COM NVMe SSDs have been available for years now, many of them featuring Micron NAND flash memory. Curiously, Micron has not released NVMe drives under its own Crucial brand until now. We have high expectations given Crucial’s track record and reputation for value. Can it shake up the market like it did with the excellent MX500 series? The Crucial P1 is a typical NVMe M.2 2280 (80mm length) drive that makes use of a PCIe 3.0 x4 interface. The drive contains Micron’s 64-Layer QLC NAND. Quad-level cell NAND stores four bits per cell. This means more data can be stored per die, in turn leading to higher capacities and/or cheaper prices. While QLC NAND should lead to lower SSD pricing, it does have some…

GRAPHICS CARD $1,079 | WWW.GIGABYTE.COM.AU The Gigabyte Aorus 2070 Xtreme really is a bit different. In addition to a custom PCB, factory overclock and hefty triple fan cooler, the Aorus Xtreme manages to pack in seven(!) video outputs and comes with a spectacular RGB implementation. We knew we were looking at something different the moment we took the Aorus 2070 Xtreme out of its box. Gigabyte calls its new cooler the Windforce Stack 3x. It utilises three 100mm double ball bearing fans that spin in alternate directions. The cooler’s shroud is also interesting. Most GPU coolers are quite closed but the 2070 Xtreme features a wide open shroud that should theoretically be better for heat dissipation. Normally we wouldn’t devote too much time to talking about RGB, but…

$1,199 | WWW.KOGAN.COM/AU This is the largest display in our roundup, at a whopping 49-inches diagonally. Don’t be fooled by the large size however, the Kogan unit only has a 3840x1080 resolution – the equivalent of two 1080p displays side-by-side. That resolution on such a wide display results in a low DPI, more like a TV than a computer monitor. When sitting on a desk with the viewer approximately 60cm-70cm away, the image is rather blocky and text fuzzy, particularly for desktop use (web browsing, etc.). When gaming however, the massive curved display creates an immersive experience like no other. Playing a flight sim or motorsports game is a delight thanks to the enveloping 49-inch display. You could get the same resolution as the KAMN49F14UHLA by placing two…

$599 | WWW.PHILIPS.COM.AU Philips has been releasing some excellent value for money displays lately and its 328M6 looks like it continues that trend, providing a 32-inch, 1440p, 1800R curved VA-type panel, with 144Hz refresh rate, 4ms response time, 3000:1 contrast ratio and 120% sRGB coverage for $599. Image quality at 144Hz is solid, response times of 7ms are low for a VA panel and input lag is minimal. Out of the box, colours are well calibrated and unlike many other gaming monitors, are suitable for basic photo editing, making the 328M6 a great display for those using their computers for more than just gaming. The 328M6 has a neat party trick Philips called Ambiglow, which is a strip of LEDs on the bottom the case that light up…

$1,099 | WWW.BENQ.COM On paper, the Benq EX3501R seems to tick all the boxes. 35-inches with an 1800R curve and 3440x1440 resolution make for a perfect combination of screen size and pixel density. 100Hz refresh rate with FreeSync support, whilst not the 144Hz gold standard, is more than enough for most people, particularly at this resolution. The EX3501R even supports HDR10 for richer colour in supported applications. Design wise, the EX3501R is sleek, without the usual adornments a “gaming” monitor brings – but don’t let that fool you, as with FreeSync and 100Hz refresh rate support, this monitor has some proper gaming cred. Full black to white transition is very low for a large curved ultrawide display, at only 11ms. Anyone except the most demanding of gamers will…

$1,299 | WWW.ACER.COM The Acer Predator X34Pisthefollow-up to Acer’s much lauded Predator X34. This new model retains the 3440x1440 resolution and G-Sync capability but adds a 120Hz refresh rate and a more aggressive 1900R curved panel. Endowed with an IPS panel, you can be off-centre with the X34P and still enjoy excellent colours and brightness. The X34P is also a very even display, with no bright spots or backlight bleeding. 100% sRGB colour gamut however, is a bit old school. It would be nice to have an IPS panel achieve 120Hz refresh rates and support DCI-P3. That said, there aren’t exactly loads of HDR-compatible gaming titles on the market now, so we aren’t missing much. The target audience for the X34P will appreciate the 120Hz refresh rate at…

Back to basics—how on earth did we come up with this one? Well, as graphics card prices have fallen, and the cost of memory is more reasonable than it has been of late, we thought it was time to see what you could do with an absolutely minimal budget. You’ll notice we keep referring to a “hardware budget” in particular – that’s because the operating system cost is one of the biggest variables. In reality, this system is designed with Windows 10 in mind. You could game on Linux for free (or by paying a donation of your choosing), and we’ve covered that before – unfortunately, though, for now, Microsoft very much holds the keys to the kingdom. If you have a license already, it makes this build ridiculously affordable.…

Google Messages Free messages.android.com Google’s Messages has evolved rapidly over the past year and is now hands down the best SMS app on the platform, with new support for RCS, search, AI quick replies, a new fresh interface alongside a very handy web app. Microsoft Launcher Free microsoft.com Microsoft has surprisingly pulled out the stops with its Android launcher which effectively turns your device into a fully Microsoft experience. It’s smooth, quick, useful and very customisable. Great for anyone who primarily uses MS services. Daydream Free (Requires Hardware) daydream.com VR on Android has evolved over the past few years to be surprisingly good, and Daydream is easily the best rendition of it. The 2018 headset is great and there are heaps of great apps and games to play. Android Auto…

Red Dead Redemption 2 $99.95 rockstargames.com The result of eight years hard graft by a handful of Rockstar studios, Red Dead Redemption 2 offers an ornately populated reimagining of the wild west, and a Hollywood-aping narrative to boot. It’s a bravely slow and meditative action game, rewarding patience and careful roleplaying. Chasm $29.95 chasmgame.com Chasm is a procedurally generated Metroidvania with beautiful pixel art and a grand sense of adventure. In development for five years, it’s comfort food for anyone reared on 16-bit consoles in the 90s. State of Decay 2 $49.95 stateofdecay.com Most open world survival games have you punching trees for hours, but State of Decay 2 takes a streamlined approach, opting for human drama instead of hunting and gathering. Three times bigger than its predecessor, it manages…

SECURITY WHAT’S ADAWARE’S WEB COMPANION? I’ve suddenly become aware of an icon in my Taskbar notification area – clicking it brings up a screen pointing to Adaware Web Companion, with some kind of security tool for my web browser. What is this, and is it safe? Stuart Fenton This almost certainly got on to your computer alongside another program – in other words, a Potentially Unwanted Program or PUP. The first warning can be found on the program’s own FAQ, with “How do I uninstall Web Companion from my computer” the second article in the list. Click Start > Settings > Apps and scroll down until you find and entry for Web Companion near the bottom of the list – you’ll see when it was installed, giving you an idea…

Spotlight searches more than just the folders and files (and files’ contents) on your Mac. These days, it can look up pages on the web (and supports advanced syntax used by the likes of Google), Wikipedia, word definitions, and much more. The trouble with Spotlight’s power is that its results can get a bit crowded. Sometimes you won’t be able to think of good keywords to get better results on the spot. It’s more likely that you’ll move a hand to your mouse or trackpad to scroll through the long list and look for whatever it is you want. However, you can quickly inspect the list of results without reaching for another input device, and save even more time if what you want is a web page, a Wikipedia entry,…

As a learning tool, Minecraft is awesome. Kids play the game and learn how to create blocks of lava, diamond and water. But for younger players, the syntax of the commands is difficult. So for our project this issue we shall create an easy-to-use series of commands, cheekily called Minecraft Zero after GPIO and GUI Zero libraries, that enable kids to simply have fun, and learn a little Python along the way. On your Raspberry Pi, open the Python 3 editor, found in the Programming menu. Once opened, click File>New to create a new blank document. Now click File>Save and call the file mczero.py. Remember to save your progress regularly. Our project is made up of a series of functions, blocks of Python code that we can use by calling…

If there’s a topic that grabs attention, it’s real estate. Whether you’re trying to up-size, down-size or just plain get into any size, real estate in Australia isn’t for the feint-hearted. If you’ve ever been to a home auction, even if you’re just there to sticky-beak, no doubt you’ve tried to predict the final sale price. Real estate agents probably get closer than most of us, thanks to their background or ‘domain’ knowledge. The question we ask this month is can we predict a house sale price using just machine-learning. CLASSIFICATION VS REGRESSION So far in this series, the prediction tasks we’ve worked on have all been about predicting a category class. For example, in the Kaggle Titanic competition dataset, we were looking to predict whether a particular passenger survived…

FROM $69 | PC, PS4, XO | WWW.CALLOFDUTY.COM Call of Duty: Black Ops 4’s take on battle royale, Blackout, feels like an unintentional commentary on the series as a whole. It’s a nakedly sales-driven version of one of the most popular trends in gaming right now, expertly-tuned to the whims of a capricious gaming community. Treyarch has jettisoned the usual glossy eight-hour corridor campaign from this year’s game. Its absence leaves the singleplayer relatively meager this time around, limited to solo zombie-stomping with bots or lone missions that star the game’s cast of multiplayer ‘Specialists.’ Black Ops 4 is solely a game about shooting your friends or shooting with your friends, and if the battle royale mode weren’t so fun, it’d feel a little thin. Compared to its…

FROM $79 | PC, PS4, XO | WWW.EASPORTS.COM/AU/FIFA It’s often said that football’s a game of cliches. Commentators and pundits are only too happy to lean on a lexicon of well-worn expressions to describe the game, and after two decades of fierce rivalry between FIFA and its perpetual adversary Pro Evolution Soccer, there’s a glossary of cliches just for their relationship. They all ring absolutely true of each series’ latest installments, too: PES is once again superior on the pitch but remains twenty years behind in presentation, while FIFA’s wealth of official licenses and modes will make for a superior overall package. Those high production values are especially apparent in FIFA 19’s story mode, The Journey. This is the concluding chapter of Alex Hunter’s earnest and enjoyable rags-to-riches…