Table of contents for September 2015 in PC & Tech Authority

Studies show that 70% of us sleep for fewer than seven hours a night; a third of us get only five hours in the Land of Nod. Sleep deprivation is associated with issues ranging from impaired cognition and weakened memory to reduced immunity, so getting a good night’s rest really is as important to your wellbeing as regular exercise and a healthy diet. Enter the growing range of apps and gadgets aimed at helping you understand your sleep patterns and to get not only more shuteye, but a better quality of rest. SMARTPHONE APPS The simplest way to track your sleep doesn’t require dedicated hardware. Leave your smartphone lying on the bed overnight and its built-in accelerometers can monitor your nocturnal movements. An app such as Sleep Cycle ($2; Android…

Fitness goals are easily quantifiable, whether you’re shooting for 10,000 steps a day or 1,000 calories burnt. So if you’re trying to get fit by running, swimming, riding a bike or playing sport, there’s probably already a wearable device on the market to help. RUNNING Running pace is one of the easier things for modern gadgets to measure: rattly pedometers have been doing the same job (albeit less accurately) for years. You don’t even need a dedicated device: a smartphone with MapMyRun (free; Android, BlackBerry & iOS) installed will chart where you go on your runs, how long it takes, your pace, and how many calories you burned doing it. Even apps that ostensibly have nothing to do with running are getting in on the act: an in-theworks update to…

AMD could do with a win right about now. The recent launch of the Fury X graphics card failed to put Nvidia’s GTX 980 Ti back in its place, and it has consistently lagged behind Intel in the CPU and APU race. This month saw the release of Intel’s i7 5775C, which we’ve reviewed opposite, at the same time AMD has dropped the new A10 7870K APU into our laps. With Intel going all out on the 5775C’s integrated GPU, we were very keen to see if AMD had brought anything as important to the arms race. Sadly it appears not. The architecture of this APU has been codenamed Kaveri Refresh, as it’s simply an updated version of the existing Kaveri architecture. Much to our dismay, it does not feature…

When stuffing around with Cisco or Juniper gear isn’t appropriate or too expensive, network engineers tend to get DrayTek equipment instead. DrayTek’s Vigor firmware is generally full featured, relatively easy to setup and the price is quite reasonable. The Vigor2925 is neat little unit that continues the DrayTek tradition of heaps of features at a comparatively low price for both home and business use. The Vigor2925 range has a few different con figurations - the base 2925 is a router with dual WAN ports, USB ports for 3G/4G modem connectivity and 5 gigabit Ethernet ports for switching. There’s the 2925n and 2925n-Plus, which are the same as the 2925, just with 802.11n Wi-Fi (the n has a 2.4GHz radio, the n-Plus packs 5GHz and 2.4GHz radios). If you want 802.11ac…

Last month we were lucky enough to publish the Aussie exclusive review of AMD’s new premium graphics card, the Fury X. Based on the existing Graphics Core Next (GCN) 1.2 design but built to a scale never seen before, as well as incorporating brand new High Bandwidth Memory, this speed demon sadly failed to quite beat Nvidia’s GTX 980 Ti, though it came close. While we’re still waiting to see what AMD does with the Fiji chip used in the Fury X, with cut-down versions due in two upcoming air-cooled products, the company has released a range of new R9 300 series graphics cards. The thing is, they’re not actually new – AMD has once again gone the rebrand path, rehashing GPUs from the last couple of years and slapping…

In the midst of so many mediocre reviews, it’s nice to be able to tell a story that isn’t so glum. This product from value-oriented PowerColor finally delivers the AMD experience we’re so used to – good performance at a great price. Offering much of the power of an R9 390X but with a hugely slashed price, this is a solid piece of kit. At the heart of the R9 390 is the same Hawaii GPU used in the R9 290. Once again we see AMD rolling out an identical piece of silicon compared to its predecessor, with the same 2560 Stream Processors, 160 Texture Units and 64 ROPs between the two parts. A rather minor frequency increase gives the 390 a boost frequency of 1000MHz, up from the 947MHz…

The MacBook Pro is a familiar design: it hasn’t received a significant makeover for a few generations, but it still strikes the right balance between practicality and poise. The 13in model is heavier than most laptops here, and that’s compounded by a chunkier charger. But you get plenty for your money. For a start, it’s exceptionally comfortable to work on. A MacBook Pro on your lap feels like a deceptively expansive workspace; even at a desk, it feels generous, rarely leaving us tempted to plug in an external screen. That’s partly down to the vast 2,560 x 1,600 resolution of the built-in panel – and OS X’s clever graphics technology, which scales applications for a high-DPI screen considerably better than Windows. Another reason we’re happy to forgo the external display…

The ThinkPad Carbon is this month’s most businesslike laptop, offering enterprise-grade features that even Apple’s “Pro”-branded laptop lacks. For one, it’s the only laptop here with an integrated 4G adapter,so you won’t be left scouting for a Wi-Fi hotspot or faffing with smartphone tethering. Then there’s the fingerprint reader, now tucked to the right of the keyboard rather than on the palm rest as on previous Carbons. Intel’s vPro technology lets IT departments remotely secure a stolen laptop, and unlike Apple’s highly nickable MacBook Pro, the X1 Carbon comes with a security lock slot, so you can bind it to your desk or a sales stand. With a top-end Core i7 processor and 8GB of RAM to play with, we had high expectations of the X1 Carbon – but in…

Formula One is often regarded as the pinnacle of motorsport. The thrills, the glamour and the death-defying peril of 20 cars hurtling nose to tail at insane speeds has captivated millions of people worldwide for decades. In the gaming world, developers have attempted to recreate the world of F1 as close to the real thing for over 30 years. Today, Codemasters are the sole holders of the official F1 license, and F1 2015 marks their seventh F1 game. This is a reboot of the franchise, with updated visuals, audio, car physics and AI being touted by the developers. For the most part, these aims have been achieved. The visuals on the console versions have seen a noticeable bump from the older titles, with the game running at solid 60 frames…

The death of a contractor assembling a robot in a Volkswagen plant has seen an outpouring of “scapegoating” directed at robots and automation – despite “human error” being officially blamed. The 22-year-old worker was “grabbed” and crushed against a metal plate. The robot was designed to grab auto parts on a production line, according to news reports. However, academics have taken issue with the accident being branded as a robot “killing” the worker – suggesting that it gives robot technology far too much credit. “It’s important to understand that with present technology we cannot ‘blame’ the robot,” said Dr Blay Whitby, a lecturer in computer science and artificial intelligence at the University of Sussex. “They are not yet at a level where their decision-making allows us to treat them as…

Here Active Listening Connected to an accompanying smartphone app, Here Active Listening is an amazing piece of wearable tech, two discrete looking wireless earbuds to be precise, that offers you control over the sounds coming into your ears. MOST WANTED: Developed by Doppler Labs, equipping Here Active Listening essentially transforms you into your own personal audio-engineer. You can adjust the volume of what’s coming into your ears in near real-time, and modify certain frequencies to eliminate specific sounds like crying babies – live the absentee parent dream without ever leaving the house! NOT WANTED: While we won’t be seeing the first shipment until December, and those initial units will be going direct to Kickstarter backers, there are two big factors that may limit device’s usability: the echo-like sensation experienced when…

Portable data storage very much has a place in the modern tech world, yet typical flash drives lack the speed and storage capacity that we have been enjoying with internal Solid State Drives (SSDs). Samsung has an external drive solution that combines zippy performance, generous capacity and sleek design. FAST READ/WRITE PERFORMANCE The Samsung Portable SSD T1 external drive is a speedy storage solution out of the box. Its USB 3.0 compatibility means sequential read/write speeds of up to 450MB/s*, care of TurboWrite Technology and enhanced data transfer speeds with UASP. The T1 external drive is designed specifically for Windows and Mac operating systems (Windows 7 or higher and Mac 10.7 or higher recommended), with a default exFAT file system for read/write functionality across platforms. In lay terms it means…

If ever an operating system has grown up in public, it’s Windows 10. Since the first preview release appeared last October, its every tweak and transformation has been pored over by hordes of volunteer testers – almost five million of them, according to Microsoft’s own stats on its Windows Insider Programme, feeding back usage reports and feature requests. But on 29 July, Windows 10 makes its real debut. On that date, retailers will be selling PCs with Windows 10 preinstalled, and users of Windows 7 and 8 who have claimed their upgrades – more about this later– will be able to move up to the final release of the software. Except that in the case of Windows 10, there’s no such thing as a final release. The new version of…

Broadwell has been a long time coming to the desktop, but it’s finally here in the form of Intel’s i7 5775C. It’s the codename for Intel’s move to a 14nm manufacturing process, known as a tick in Intel’s tick/tock cadence, and has been long overdue thanks to production issues. While laptops have bene fited from Broadwell’s powersipping process since late-2014, it’s only now that desktop users get to see what all the fuss is about. And while the move to 14nm is impressive, it’s the beefed up Iris Pro graphics in this processor that steals the show. First, the basic specs. This is a quadcore, HyperThreaded CPU, with a base frequency of 3.3GHz and Turbo Boost speed of 3.7GHz, and 6MB of L3 cache. The TDP of just 65W shows…

Last year’s Creative Cloud update was the most significant since the inauguration of Adobe’s subscription payment model; 2015’s “milestone” release is less extensive. The applications do benefit from updates, but the biggest development doesn’t relate to the suite’s major applications. Instead, the major addition in CC 2015 is a new service that plugs into those apps: having already extended the suite with the Typekit font library, Adobe is now getting into stock photography. ADOBE STOCK AND LINKED ASSETS If the bank of imagaes, illustrations and vectors in Adobe Stock looks familiar, there’s good reason. Its 40 million or so images come directly from Fotolia, acquired by Adobe earlier in 2015. It won’t have had much chance to stamp its own ethos on the content just yet. Rather, the work has…

Welcome to the crustiest GPU in AMD’s new R7 300 series. While the name sounds all shiny and new, the GPU residing underneath its heatsink is anything but. While the performance isn’t too bad for this price point, the age of the GPU brings some severe limitations to the party. Those with excellent memories will recall AMD’s Pitcairn architecture, which first debuted in 2012 in the form of the Radeon 7800 series. This means it’s limited to AMD’s GCN 1.0, and thus doesn’t support FreeSync, TrueAudio (AMD’s hardware accelerated audio codec, which is used by a mere handful of games) or hardware decoding of videos above 1080p. Like most of the products in the rebadged 300 series, it shares much in common with its predecessor, which is the Radeon R7…

Welcome to the flagship in AMD’s new 300 series, which shouldn’t be confused with the flagship of its new Fury range. The R9 390X is priced at a premium of almost $700, and is being pitched by AMD as a 4K-ready card. Considering twin GTX 980 Ti cards struggle to maintain 60fps at 4K resolution, we find this claim to be rather laughable, but AMD isn’t the only one who claims certain single-GPU solutions are 4K ready. Now that we’ve put your expectations back in place, let’s take a look to see what makes the R9 390X tick – thankfully it’s not just another stock standard rebrand. The GPU at the heart of this product is the Hawaii chip that launched back in late 2013 as the R9 290 and…

Apple ditched the suffixes when it launched the 12in MacBook – but if you want to trace its pedigree, it’s a laptop that’s much closer to the Air than the Pro, in terms of both performance and panache. Without question, the MacBook is the laptop we’d want on a business trip. It’s light, at 0.92kg, and perfectly proportioned. Most compact laptops are tough to type on, but the MacBook’s backlit keyboard is a delight: well spaced, with just enough travel beneath the keys; our only gripe is the half-sized Enter key. The trackpad is great, too. It’s huge in comparison to the rest of the laptop, roughly the size of a compact smartphone, yet it responds to every glide of the finger with precision and doesn’t get in the way.…

Microsoft touts the Surface Pro 3 as “the tablet that can replace your laptop”, but in terms of raw performance, it falls rather short. An overall benchmark score of 29 represents less than half the performance of the MacBook Pro, even though the two cost more or less the same – once you add the cost of the Touch Cover keyboard to the $1399 asking price. That price gets you a 1.9GHz Intel Core i5 from the Haswell generation, and only 4GB of RAM, which explains why the Surface struggled in our multitasking benchmark. You can step all the way up to a Core i7 with 8GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD, but that will set you back a handsome $2699. The Surface Pro 3 is also light on…

While the Serial AT Attachment (SATA) interface continues to deliver extremely fast read and write speeds for a standard SSD, those seeking the next level of extreme performance now have a very appealing option. There are several new storage standards available, but delving into those can be confusing, and there’s really no need to explore those alternatives when the fastest technology is already here. INTRODUCING NVME The Intel 750 Series is the first solid-state drive (SSD) specifically built for consumers that takes advantage of the brand-new Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) technology. Compared to SATA, NVMe has impressive performance improvements. Random and sequential read/write speeds are significantly improved, latency is reduced, and storage parallelism is boosted. On top of this, a drastic upgrade to the command queue, compared to SATA’s Advanced…

Videogames are by necessity a very visual medium not only due to the nature of the art form but also because of the fact that the most easily demonstrable element of advances in gaming is increasingly higher resolution graphics running at increasingly higher framerates. That said, the fact that gaming is a visual medium does not stop enterprising developers from exploring different facets of the sensory spectrum. Beyond Eyes is such a game, in which the graphics are used to illustrate how a blind person perceives the surrounding world through their remaining senses. It’s a strange and beautiful thing. Beyond Eyes initially started as a graduation project for a bachelor’s degree in game design but transformed into a three and a half year solo labour of love for designer Sherida…

We had some small hope that AMD’s sort-of-but-not-really ‘new’ R9 video cards might provide something to consider for the Game Box. But, no. As you can see in our group test (starting on page 52), AMD has disappointed us. But the wonder that is the Nvidia GTX 980 TI continues to astound. This month we have reviewed the MSI take on te Maxwell GPU – the Gaming 6G card. It’s faster than the Gigabyte GV-N98TG1 Gaming 6GD that went into the Perfect PC just last month thanks to a higher clock speed (1178MHz Base vs 1152MHz for the Gigabyte, and 1279MHz Boost vs the Gigabyte’s 1241MHz). These are more than slivers of difference, but really it’s still splitting hairs and you won’t be disappointed with any variant of the 980Ti,…

A maintenance drone buzzes through the air, scanning every inch of the surface of the aircraft. On the ground, engineers viewing images from the drone discover the problem: the exact spot where lightning struck the plane, weakening the structure and forcing it to be grounded. This is a scenario European airline EasyJet is trialling, in an attempt to reduce groundings of aircraft from days to only hours. It’s but one of a series of cutting-edge techniques the budget airline is testing to ensure its fleet remains in the air as much as possible. EYES IN THE SKY Lightning and bird strikes can ground a plane for days. Engineers must inspect the entire body of the aircraft, going up in cherry pickers to enable them to examine the plane from every…

“Telstra is testing just how much of its network it can get away with asking its own customers to run. The carrier joins Optus and other international players in having customers host network access points or become edge sources of network performance data. The question is: How much of this operation and responsibility for infrastructure can telcos get customers to take on – before they start to fight back? Telstra last year revealed plans to build out a $100 million Wi-Fi network. After a period of trials, the network was launched last week under the brand ‘Telstra Air’. While Telstra is deploying about 8000 Wi-Fi hotspots into public areas, it wants to convince up to 1.9 million customers to also host a publicly-accessible hotspot from their house. Customers need a…

While fitness gadgets can help you live longer, some see that as a mere step on the road to a far more ambitious goal. Scientists are talking seriously about pushing back the final frontier, enabling humans to live vastly longer lives – possibly even forever. The idea might sound outlandish, but the replacement of old cells with new ones is a regular biological process. There’s no reason why, with technological know-how, we shouldn’t be able to prolong it indefinitely. There’s evidence to suggest that ageing isn’t an inevitable part of being alive. Back in 1993, in a groundbreaking research paper, Professor Cynthia Kenyon showed that disabling a specific gene in worms led to their living twice as long as normal. At the University of Southern California, gerontologist Dr Valter Longo…

You’d be forgiven for thinking that HTC and Sony and other big brands make up what’s left of the global smartphone market after Apple and Samsung’s share has been accounted for – except you’d be wrong. It’s a good bet that you’ve probably never heard of many of the brands that follow the top two global smartphone players. Ten of the top seventeen top global smartphone brands in the world are Chinese. They rarely rate a mention in the west, but are household names in China. BIG BRANDS, BIG MARKET Xiaomi (pronounced she-a-ow me), ranked third in terms of global smartphone shipments is probably an exception to this, as is Huawei. Chinese brands have also gained ground in the Chinese market at the expense of western brands according to Mark…

Thanks to Nvidia’s focus on power efficiency, today’s gaming laptops are smaller than ever. The Maxwell design found in many of Nvidia’s GPUs are extremely conservative when it comes to power consumption and thermal output, enabling a range of ultra-thin gaming laptops that won’t break your back if you decide to lug them out of your home. MSI has gone against the grain with the new GT80 gaming laptop, harking back to the good old days when a gaming laptop required extra supports to stop your desk from collapsing. This thing is massive; it’s a good thing that it’s also massively overpowered. This is the first gaming laptop we’ve seen that comes with a full-sized mechanical keyboard, and Cherry MX Brown switches provide sublime tactile feedback. The touchpad to the…

When someone spends big money on a BMW with the same power as, say, a Commodore, there’s this general understanding that the BMW is, in some way, worth the massive premium. There’s a perception (possibly exaggerated) that it has superior engineering, a nicer interior, maybe better handling. Most importantly, it has a badge that tells everyone you’re “getting ahead”. The Bimmer might not actually, empirically be better than the SV6, but the point is that enough people think it is. So the money is at least understandable, if not necessarily worth it. I’m not sure the same applies to desktop PCs. This latest snazzy iteration of Dell/Alienware’s venerable Area-51 demands a fairly enormous extra chunk of cash over a machine with identical performance but none of the style, built by…

The surge of bespoke versions of Nvidia’s GTX 980TI continues. For maximum single-GPU performance, the mighty Maxwellpowered 980Ti is the one to have at the moment, as we saw in our testing of cards over the last two issues (with the Gigabyte GV-N98TGI Gaming 6G earning a place in our Perfect PC). Until (and if) AMD releases a whole lot more performance with drivers, the 980Ti has bested the Fury. MSI’s card pushes the clocks even higher than the Gigabyte we tested. The Base speed is 1178MHz (Nvidia default is 1000MHz and the Gigabyte is 1152MHz), Boost is 1279MHz (default is 1075 and the Gigabyte is 1241MHz). So MSI has really pushed this GPU, and so far it has the highest factory overclock of any 980Ti we’ve seen. For low-load…

If there’s one product in the new range of AMD cards that offers stiff competition to Nvidia, it’s got to be the 380. As you’ll see it gives the GTX 960 a very good run for its money, but sadly this Asus variant scrimps on memory, causing it to drop behind similarly priced R9 380s. Like all of the new cards, it’s actually an older product with a new name. In this case, the R9 380 is actually a rehashed R9 285, which released at the tail end of 2014. Thankfully it’s one of the newest GPU designs in the R9 300 family, as it’s based on the Tonga GPU. This comes with full GCN 1.2 support, which avails users of all AMD’s features. It’ll also be fully DirectX12 compliant…

The luxurious laptops in this month’s Labs are the finest portables money can buy. All are stylish and capable – but within this elite group there’s a variety of processors, storage options, display technologies and other variables. Here’s our guide to what gives each of these laptops its unique character, and how to decide which will work best for you. PROCESSORS AND GRAPHICS Five of the six laptops on test stick with Intel’s tried-and-tested Core i5 and i7 processors. One, however, opts for Intel’s low-power Core M design. It’s intended specifically for ultrathin devices, and no laptop comes thinner than Apple’s 12in MacBook. Built on a 14nm process, the tiny Core M is designed to run cool, removing the need for an internal fan. That means the MacBook is the…

The Dell XPS 13 is the closest rival to the MacBook and MacBook Pro in this group. In fact, it’s probably the closest Windows-based alternative to a MacBook there is. Although it shares the same nominal screen size as the MacBook Pro, it’s almost a halfway house between the two Apple laptops in terms of both performance and size. We have to applaud Dell’s attention to detail in the design of the XPS 13. Its aluminium casing is virtually indistinguishable from the MacBook’s, giving this dinky laptop a reassuringly solid feel. Look more closely and thoughtful design touches can be found all over. On the left-hand flank there’s a discreet five-LED battery indicator, allowing you to press a button and check how much juice remains without firing up the laptop.…

Wargaming is on the edge of officially releasing the final part of its free to play empire, World of Warships. But before that, the game’s now in open beta phase, where anyone can download and sign up for the game. For a free to play title, it may seem, like a soft release, but there’s a few differences to the game we’re loving now (more on that in a bit), and the final release. The big one is that, when the game goes officially live, chances are all your current ships and XP will be erased. You may get a Premium ship for time served (Closed beta testers did), but everyone will be reset back to starter ships. Also, for now, there’s only two complete technology trees to research –…

When you’re the captain of the most powerful ship in a sector of space you are, by default the most powerful person in that sector, so it’s not surprising that there is a long line of mutineers willing to eject the captain into space for a chance to sit in the big chair. This conga-line of mutineers forms the crux of Defect, the Australian made ‘Spaceship Destruction Kit’. Build a ship to complete a combat mission only to have it taken from you by the crew at the end of the mission, build a new ship to tackle the next mission only to face the last ship you lost. It’s this idea of having to face your last ship in combat that informs the title. Players must build a ship…

3d printing has been used to build apartment blocks and create body parts – and now it’s being used to construct lunch. XYZprinting’s food printer was on show at January’s CES, enabling coffee shops to offer bespoke cookies and the rest of us to create a meal via tubes of ingredients that are sprayed onto the plate. We spoke to CEO Simon Shen to find out if this is a tasty idea or a weirdly complicated way to make a pizza. XYZprinting isn’t new to printers. How did you come to develop a printer for food? “We started in paper printers, meaning inkjet and laser printers, and we’ve been doing that for 15 years,” said Shen. “We still produce 15 million printers per year.” Two years ago, the company asked…