Table of contents for April 2017 in PC & Tech Authority

Portal Wi-Fi So the trend for 2017 is clearly “smart routers”. Wi-Fihubs that manage spectrum for you, promising maximal throughputs no matter how crowded with network s your townhouse complex has become. We’ve reviewed the Netgear Orbi on p.58, now here’s a slightly different take. MOST WANTED: Portal promises to use an “exclusive band” that’s immune to interference or congestion from all the cheap generic routers in your building. Really, that means supporting more 5GHz channels. It also “optimises data lanes” via system called AutoPilot. Additional Portals extend the network, and naturally there’s an app for tweaking settings. NOT WANTED: Not that there are many settings to tweak. Much like the Orbi, Portal wants to do all the bandwidth management itself. Current firmware does not allow manual channel selection, which…

BEST OF CES 2017 AWARD WINNERS Asus ZenFone AR 27 Cooler Master MasterCase 5t 28 Dell XPS 13 2-in-1 24 Dell Precision 5720 AIO 24 HP EliteBook x360 25 HP Sprout Pro 25 Lego Boost 28 Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon 25 Lenovo Miix 720 25 LG 32UD99 26 LG MEB-500 Wireless Mouse 28 Linksys Velop 27 Norton Core 27 Razer Project Ariana 29 Samsung Chromebook Pro 24 Samsung UH750 26 Sevenhugs Smart Remote 29 ViewSonic VP3881 26 If there’s a capital of weirdness, it’s Las Vegas. This makes it the natural home for CES, the world’s biggest technology show, because it’s also an oddity: a show that gets bigger every year, at a time when trade shows seem to be losing relevance. Maybe this is because CES has never stood…

Imagine visiting your doctor and, instead of leaving with a prescription, you come out with a small device implanted in your body and a new app on your phone. No more worrying about what time you must take a pill – all you need do is let technology take its course. As implausible as it sounds, this day may not be too far away. This is the promise of bioelectronic medicine – a field where our nervous system is treated like a hackable, electrical infrastructure. It’s an area of study that asks: what if, instead of using drugs to treat a condition, implants could control and tweak our bodies? What if, somewhere down the line, you could combat a tumour by harnessing your own neural signals? HACKING THE NERVOUS SYSTEM…

Dell’s XPS 13 blew us away when it first arrived at the PCTA labs, being one of the thinnest and lightest ultraportable laptops around. Yet it didn’t scrimp on quality in the process, with a beautiful screen, sturdy construction and relatively powerful hardware within. Well, Dell has figured out how to make this beauty even better; by converting it into a 2-in-1. According to Dell, this is officially the world’s smallest 13-inch 2-in-1 convertible. In fact, it’s even thinner than the already-anorexic XPS 13, dropping to a mere 13.7mm. It’s also incredibly light, as you’ll only have to lug a total of 1.24kg around all day, despite the chassis being built from rugged machined aluminium. The impeccably accurate 13.3-inch touch-screen features Dell’s InfinityEdge borderless design, allowing it to squeeze the…

You know a gaming laptop is going to be rather powerful when it ships with not one, but two power bricks. They’re joined together via a special Y-shaped adaptor which plugs into the rear of this brute of a laptop, suggesting that it sucks down oodles of power. The huge 18.3-inch screen dominates the overall form factor of this beast, but it’s also darned thick, at 69mm at its deepest point. Breaking your back at 5.5kg, it’s not the kind of machine you’ll be taking in your check-in luggage. Obviously it’s this big for a reason, and MSI has absolutely crammed it with cutting edge hardware… for the most part. If there’s one rather strange oversight, it’s the screen. Sure, it apparently covers the full 100% sRGB colour range, though…

Oppo would have you believe that you can have a top-tier phone for a mid-range price, and on the surface, its R9s certainly looks the part. Save for the oval-shaped capacitive home button – which houses the blisteringly fast fingerprint sensor – it looks and feels just like Apple’s offerings, even possessing Corning’s Gorilla Glass 5. Round the back, the stylish design continues, with the guitar string-inspired antenna lines at the top and bottom. It hides its large 5.5in display well, with barely-there side bezels and its surprising lack of thickness. It has an AMOLED 1080p display and is just as bright and pretty as you’d expect. A Snapdragon 625 CPU is sufficient for most applications, the 4GB of RAM is plenty, and the 3,010mAh battery is charged with the…

The router is probably the most underutilised IT product in the average home, if you think about it. Sure, it works 24/7, but how do most people use it? They plug it in and leave it. Every now and then one of the green lights might turn orange, so the router gets switched off , and then switched back on again. Yet the average router can be configured in deep and subtle ways. Band assignment, channel restrictions, various weird packet management settings no one really understands, and the mystic “QoS” that haunts the dreams of so many network administrators. Netgear’s Orbi “home Wi-Fisystem” offers almost none of that. It is designed to be simple. Plug in both units, let them sync, attach the Router to a WAN of some kind…

It seems as though everyone is getting into the peripherals market. Creative, the company better known for sound cards, external DACs, speakers and headphones, has recently released its first mouse and keyboard. While the company may be new to the gaming peripherals market, it still has ample experience with gamers, having worked with and sponsored pro gamers for years. This feedback seems to have worked well, as the Siege M04 is an excellent, well made gaming mouse that should appeal to a wide range of gamers, as well as non-gamers in the market for a very accurate and fast mouse not cluttered by too many buttons. Under the matte plastic chassis with rubberised side grips sits a powerful 12,000 DPI, 1000Hz refresh PixArt PMW3360 optical sensor, making for some fast…

Asus’ ROG line-up of motherboards has received a shakeup this time around, with two board series we’ve known and loved transplanting from the official ROG brand into Asus’ new Strix Gaming brand. One is the Maximus Gene – Asus’ micro-ATX offering, and the other is the Maximus Ranger – they’re now known as the Strix Z270G Gaming and Strix Z270F Gaming respectively. As a result, they lose one or two ROG-exclusive features, such as Keybot, but we had felt for a while that the budget-conscious Ranger was making it difficult for Asus last year. Thankfully, the Strix Z270F Gaming is the same price as the current Z170 Ranger, at just under $279, and it still has plenty to offer. First and foremost, this board is all about the RGB LED…

With a price tag of around $390, there’s very little cost difference between the Gigabyte Z270XUltra Gaming, Asus Strix Z270F Gaming and MSI Z270 Gaming Pro Carbon, so it all comes down to performance, features and aesthetics. All the boards look roughly similar, with the Strix Z270F Gaming just winning the beauty contest, but the Z270XUltra Gaming packs some pizzazz when it comes to lighting, with illuminated DIMM slots, PCI-E slots and PCB areas, along with two different programmable areas for RGB lighting. It also has a customisable cover on the PCB near the 24-pin ATX connector, plus smart black heatsinks on the VRMs and PCH. Gigabyte has made a rare decision to include a U.2 port with the Z270X-Ultra Gaming as well – a feature that’s arguably unnecessary in…

HOW WE TEST We test each motherboard with a Core i7-7700K CPU, 16GB of Corsair Vengeance LED 3200MHz DDR4 RAM and an XFX Radeon R9 390X graphics card. We use a 512GB 960 Evo M.2 SSD and a Samsung 850 Pro SSD, along with CrystalDiskMark’s 32-queuedepth storage test to record sequential speeds. To measure on-board audio performance, we run RightMark’s Audio Analyzer software using 24-bit/192KHz settings, with the line-out connected to the line in-jack to obtain noise and dynamic range levels. We load optimised default settings and set the XMP profile in the EFIfor stock-speed tests, but touch no other settings, which sets the correct memory speed and timings, and ensures the board is set up for the best stock-speed performance. When overclocking, we find the maximum stable CPU frequency…

With a seemingly bargain price of close to $200, the Asus Prime Z270-P is the second cheapest motherboard on test, costing considerably less money than most of the Z270 motherboards we’ve seen so far. However, the low price tag does mean numerous features have been cut from the specifications. There are only three fan headers, for example, although they’re at least well positioned for powering a rear case fan, CPU cooler fan and either a pump or front/roof fan. There’s also only one power circuitry heatsink, just four SATA 6Gbps ports (you usually get six) and there are no USB 3.1 Gen 2 ports either. Like most of the other boards on test this month, Asus has also opted for the older Realtek ALC887 audio codec, which isn’t as good…

Silicon is the wonder material that enabled the computing revolution, but challengers are stepping up as we hit its fundamental size limit. Researchers are developing alternatives to silicon-based designs such as graphene, quantum and even biologybased creations, and we may turn their way if computing continues to leap in processing power as per Moore’s law. “The current cutting-edge silicon circuits use transistors, which are approximately 10nm [10 billionths of a metre] in size,” said Philip Thomas, a PhD student from the Graphene NOWNANO course at the University of Manchester and author of a recent paper on future computing materials. “That’s ludicrously tiny: a thousand of these transistors lined up back to back would still be far shorter than the width of a human hair.” Nevertheless, silicon can shrink even further.…

PC DESKTOP ALL-IN-ONE Apple iMac 27in with Retina 5k display PRICE $2,799 SUPPLIER www.apple.com/au The Apple 27in iMac with Retina 4K display is great. The best all-in-one computer around, and by a furlong. SPECIFICATIONS Quad-core 3.1GHz Intel Core i5 processor; Intel Iris Pro graphics 6200; • 8GB RAM • 1TB HDD • 27in 4096 x 2304 Retina 5K IPS display • SDXC card slot • 4 x USB 3 • 2 x Thunderbolt 2 • Gigabit Ethernet • 802.11ac Wi-Fi…

Not Bad Santa. On this occasion I was working with two file systems that, on the surface, are much later developments than Windows NTFS. One was VMware’s VMFS, controlling the basic disks that added together made my Windows VM’s mirror. The other was the quite opaque and achingly under-documented file system inside a Synology NAS box. Neither of them quite like to behave the way we’ve become unconsciously used to when dealing with Windows, especially when it comes to error messages. When hacking into a misbehaving VMware server, you have five ways to link with the storage subsystem. You can use the basic vSphere GUI client; the web client; VMware vCenter; the vSphere management assistant; or PowerShell with the VIX extensions. The list is almost overwhelming, but the problem is…

Just for the fun of it There are two common kinds of switch on the market – mechanical and rubber dome. Rubber dome keyboards hold the lower end of the price spectrum, and consist of a rubber sheet over a PCB. Keycaps on sliders depress the rubber domes over the PCB to o er some type of feedback or resistance for every keystroke. Mechanical keyboards, on the other hand, have individual key switches for each key. Di erent makes, models and brands of mechanical switches have di erent components in a finished switch, but all contain some core components: Keycap: The plastic or metal top of a switch. This is the part you press. Stem: The part the keycap is mounted on. While some manufacturers have proprietary connectors for their…

The rollout of the NBN has caused not end of grief for many people. Stories of long service interruptions during the changeover from old services to new are common. So, it was refreshing when one of our readers, Carl, sent this through. I recently switched over from ADSL to a NBN FTTN service. I have no complaints with the actual service - there was only a 10 minute interruption during the transfer and my speed has gone from 5.6Mb/s down, 0.7Mb/s up to 28Mb/s down 6Mb/s up. But Carl’s story doesn’t end there. Getting his connection was the easy part. Customers have to use the supplied gateway because the VOIP service is hard wired into the gateway. Telstra does not provide any information for VOIP setting. In fact you would…

It probably sits in a corner, silently. It’s the beating heart of your network and you scarcely give it a second thought. But your router is more than a device that shares your internet connection to the devices on your network. Your router is the hub of your home automation system. When Bill Gates and Steve Jobs started their businesses back in the 1970s, they saw the computer as the hub of the home. What they didn’t foresee was the proliferation of devices we would be using in our homes. A scan of my own network (I use the iOS app Fing on my iPads and iPhone) reveals more than 25 devices. Of those, just four are computers (a Mac mini, two Surface Pros, and a MacBook). But there are…

When Intel released its seventh-generation Core processor range in January, many were left unimpressed by the performance of its topend desktop processors. Kaby Lake, Intel’s codename for the range, provided a significant boost for mobile devices, but the desktop risks being left to fester, despite Intel’s assurances to the contrary and the re-emergence of AMD as a force in the CPU market. “We know performance matters,” said Intel’s client computing vice president, Navin Shenoy, talking about the latest generation of chips. “It’s why we continue to focus on improved performance, delivering doubledigit productivity performance increases – up to 20% for performance and gaming notebooks and 25% for desktops.” Yet most third-party benchmarks published to date have found that the high-end processors are not significantly faster than existing CPUs, especially if…

You won’t find better reviews anywhere in Australia! Why would you upgrade your motherboard? It’s not quite the relatively simple plug and play process like putting a new graphics card in, or some extra storage, or more RAM – or even a new CPU. These small tasks usually yield great results and won’t take you more than a few minutes. But a new motherboard necessitates rebuilding your entire PC. It means a few hours of toil, and the chances of something not working as you expected are high. As if you didn’t want further disincentive, a new motherboard means Windows may decide it is installed on an all-new PC and thus pain you with annoying messages about running an unlicensed operating system, which at best involves calling Microsoft for a…

We We were huge fans of the first Razer Blade Stealth, Razer’s entry into the ultraportable market in 2016, to the point where this author now relies on one as his daily laptop. It was super thin and light, with one of the sexiest screens we’ve seen, yet came with a relatively affordable price point. Razer has just released the second itineration of the Stealth, but it’s now facing stiff competition from the likes of Dell and Acer. Can the latest version live up to the reputation of the original? It appears that the new Stealth uses an identical chassis to the original, which is a mere 13mm deep. This means it’s not the thinnest ultraportable around, but it does have one of the most rugged cases in this category,…

We’ve been inundated with mini-PCs of late, with tiny towers packing SLI systems, shoeboxes that are VR ready, and now this relatively affordable PS4-sized package. We can thank both Intel and Nvidia for dropping the energy requirements – and resulting thermal output – of its products for this revolution in PC shrinkage. And yet, we still end up paying quite a lot more for a system that underperforms similarly priced, yet larger, PC gaming towers. The Asus ROG GR8 II is the perfect example of this quandary. With an interior capacity of just four litres, this PC is smaller than a Playstation 4. You might think that makes it the perfect PC to stash in your AV unit, but there’s a slight hitch. It can only be operated in an…

This is a router that does everything you could ever ask for, whether you’re a network noobie who just wants to run the setup wizard and have everything running in seconds, or you’re an advanced user who wants to fiddle with the deepest of settings. Not only that, but it’s wickedly fast, has a very attractive price and one of the best user interfaces we’ve ever seen on a router. The twin channels combine to deliver a total of 2.53Gbps of bandwidth. The 2.4GHz channel delivers up to 800Mbps of bandwidth, while the 5GHz boosts this to 1.73Gbps. These are both powered by the Qualcomm IPQ8065 802.11ac radio. It’s no record-breaker compared to the AC5300 routers that are on the market, but this bandwidth is more than enough for your…

Although Creative may have played it relatively safe with its first gaming mouse, the Siege M04, it has done anything but when it comes to the company’s first keyboard, the Vanguard K08. Rather than opting to use one of the commonly accepted, all but ubiquitous switches preferred by many other keyboard manufacturers, such as Cherry MX, Kailh or Topre, Creative has instead opted to work with a switch manufacturer to create its own unique mechanical switch. The result is the PRES (Perceive- React-Execute Switch). Made by Omron, a company best known for excellent mouse switches, the PRES has an actuation force of 45g – the same as a Cherry Brown or Red switch – but a very short travel distance of 1.5mm. The action is entirely linear with no kind…

With the demise of Asus’ Maximus Ranger in its ROG form, the Maximus IX Hero is now the cheapest ROG motherboard we’ve seen in Asus’ preliminary price lists, although there are two newcomers that may work out cheaper in the future. With the previous Hero retailing for $329 at the time of writing, the new Hero is clearly much more expensive. Thankfully, it also offers a few more features, such as an all-black colour scheme to show off the RGB lighting, which sits under the large PCH heatsink and I/O shield, and the lighting is independently tweakable in both areas. As with the Strix Z270F Gaming, there are two 4-pin RGB LED headers at the top and bottom of the board, allowing you to add a pair of your own…

MSI’s Z270 Gaming Pro Carbon offers a plethora of RGB lighting effects, with several areas of the PCB, including the PCH heatsink and I/O panel logo, all illuminating and offering independent control of a full range of colours and effects. There’s also a 4-pin RGB header at the bottom of the PCB for hooking up your own LED strip, plus some extension cables in the box too. The light colour seems more accurate than on this board’s predecessor too, as with Gigabyte’s efforts this month as well. Only the Asus Strix Z270F Gaming manages better lighting with its RGB LED strip. The MSI’s M.2 ports, DIMM slots and two of the 16x PCI-E slots sport steel shrouds too, which give a smart look as well as some security. One unique…

We’ve seen some fantastic budget boards from ASRock over the years, and the company sent us two sub-$200 motherboards to do battle this month. The more expensive of the two boards is the Z270 Killer SLI; as its name suggests, it supports Nvidia SLI as well as the usual AMD CrossFire – a feature that’s quite rare at this price. However, it has cut a few corners to get there, and they’re corners that many enthusiasts would be unhappy to cut. For starters you only get ALC892 audio as opposed to the superior ALC1220 audio codec on the Gigabyte board. Also, part of what made ASRock’s Z170 Extreme4 such a great board, sitting on our Elite List for a good chunk of time, was its full complement of overclocking and…

Gigabyte does have some cheaper Z270 offerings than the Z270- Gaming K3, but this is the board it chose to compete in our budget Kaby Lake motherboard Labs this month. At $259, it’s the same price as the MSI Z270 Tomahawk and more than the ASRock Z270 Killer SLI and is definitely not as good-looking as the former. It lacks the I/O panel shroud that jazzes up both the other boards, although it sports extensive red lighting, so it claws back some pizzazz points when it’s powered on. The Z270-Gaming K3 is more about features and performance than looks though. It’s the only board on test to use the new Realtek ALC1220 audio codec, which provides noticeably better results in RightMark’s Audio Analyzer software than older Z170 motherboards, so if…

There’s another way to speed up processing power that has nothing to do with chips: in-memory processing. “It’s based on the idea that it’s quicker to access data stored in RAM than on a hard disk, and has become more widespread in recent years as the cost of RAM has decreased and as 64-bit CPUs have become the norm,” said UWE’s Philip Thomas. That’s the idea behind HPE’s The Machine, an attempt at memory-driven computing. “In today’s computers, memory and processing are entirely separate, and as much as 90% of the work is devoted to moving information between tiers of memory and storage,” said HPE spokesperson Patrik Edlund. “HPE believes that only by redesigning the computer from the ground up – with memory at the centre – will we be…

MAXIMUM POWER ANYWHERE GAMING LAPTOPS MSI goes above and beyond, unleashing the power of the 7th Generation Intel Core i7 Platform; Kaby Lake, to reach new heights for 4K gaming and the ultimate VR Experience. Gamers are expected to experience 15% (non-OC) to 25% (OC) increase in CPU performance. This newfound power promises significantly increased performance in multitasking, 4K video, multimedia, and an improved virtual reality experience. In addition to the new CPUs, MSI will be implementing Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 Ti & GTX 1050 graphics into the arsenal so that all users, from casual gamers to eSport professionals can enjoy an even more personalized gaming notebook for work, school, or for killing hordes of zombies, anywhere. The GTX 1050 Ti brings 15% higher performance compared to the predecessor GTX965M,…

Sometimes there are advantages to having two of something. This is especially true of laptops and desktop computers. Those with long memories will recall how I bought two Dell XPS 13 laptops about a year ago, and how the initial updating with Dell was somewhat fraught with issues. To say it was amateurish would be an understatement – the updater app not updating drivers, Dell shipping a full UEFIfirmware upgrade that wasn’t digitally signed, and so forth. Over the course of 2016, though, things improved, and the arrival of the summer release of Windows 10, along with the ongoing raft of fixes and drivers, turned these two laptops into solid workhorses around the lab. That was, up to the point where one of them decided not to boot. The Windows…

The latest trends and products in the world of technology Blackberry is pinning its hopes of an unheralded comeback on licensed handsets and a fledgling security consultancy, the company has told PC & Tech Authority. The one-time market leader in business handsets lost its way when touchscreens transformed the smartphone market, but it claims a new business model will revitalise the range of BlackBerry phones, while the company looks to build a new business based on its reputation for corporate security. The company says it still sees growth potential for BlackBerry-branded phones, although it won’t be building them itself. “We continue to have a handset business, but my handset business is changing a little bit now,” BlackBerry CEO John Chen told PC & Tech Authority. “Now BlackBerry will be licensing…

CPU RYZEN BUSTS OUT Information about AMD’s new CPU line up dubbed Ryzen as gone from a trickle to a full-on tsunami. Not only are there pictures; there’s alleged benchmarks, specifications and even motherboard images now o. cial and public. Let’s get the important stu. out of the way first, the models coming and specs. AMD have seven models lined up for a March launch, Australian pricing for the top three have been o. cially announced, and US pricing for the rest are as follows: • 1800X - 8 cores, 16MB L3, 95W TDP, 3.6GHz base - 4.0GHz turbo, $699 • 1700X - 8 cores, 16MB L3, 95W TDP, 3.4GHz base - 3.8GHz turbo, $569 • 1700 - 8 cores, 16MB L3, 65W TDP, 3.0GHz base - 3.7GHz turbo, $469…

A change is coming. We are the cusp of technologies that include driverless cars, robot lawyers, AI doctors and computers that can program themselves. We’ve seen tremendous technological change during our lifetimes, but it’s going to pale in comparison to the acceleration of change that’s rapidly approaching – and most of it thanks to machine learning and big data. It’s not just the problems we know about that we can throw machine learning and big data at, it’s all the problems we didn’t necessarily know we wanted to solve, like teaching computers to identify skin cancer. You can just imagine in the not too distant future kids being taught at school that there was a time people drove cars on the roads, and things called tra c lights were needed…

While our main article covers the basic goodies that cover the majority of home automation products, I was lucky enough to attend this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas. It’s the world’s biggest show of technology aimed at home users, and as such, home automation covered a huge part of the 3800 different booths. I had a mere two days to run around several square million of feet of conference space, but somehow managed to stumble upon a myriad of different home automation products that show just how far and wide the technology is growing. YOUR AI ASSISTANT While most of today’s home automation systems are controlled by you, the home owner, that is changing fast. Several companies debuted AI-controlled systems that are hooked into every device in the house,…

EXPERIENCE FULL PERFORMANCE WITH MSI’s 200-SERIES MOTHERBOARDS With the recent release of 7th Generation Intel Core processors, MSI has expanded its award-winning lineup to bring on better performance. Drawing inspiration from tanks, starships, and fast cars. MSI’s new 200-series motherboards ooze style, speed, and reliability. Under the new coat of paint, however, they have equipped their new range with lots of tricks to edge out the competition. FLAWLESS SUPREMACY One of the most powerful motherboards in MSI’s Enthusiast gaming range, the Z270 Gaming M7, is a versatile and complete foundation for a high-end gaming system. Features such as Audio Boost 4 PRO and Nahimic 2 provide gamers two sets of audio modules with isolated circuits for a pure sound experience to deliver the competitive edge on the digital battlefield. All…

HOW WE TEST We test each motherboard with a Core i7-7700K CPU , 16GB of Corsair Vengeance LED 3200MHz DDR4 RAM and an XFX Radeon R9 390X graphics card. We use a 512GB 960 Evo M.2 SSD and a Samsung 850 Pro SSD, along with CrystalDiskMark’s 32 queue depth storage test to record sequential speeds. To measure on-board audio performance, we run RightMark’s Audio Analyzer software using 24-bit/192KHz settings, with the line-out connected to the line in-jack to obtain noise and dynamic range levels. We load optimised default settings and set the XMP profile in the EFIfor stock-speed tests, but touch no other settings, which sets the correct memory speed and timings and ensures the board is set up for the best stock-speed performance. When overclocking, we find the maximum…

With the launch of the Z270 chipset, Gigabyte has rebranded many of its premium motherboards under the Aorus brand, which already includes laptops and peripherals. The Aorus Z270X-Gaming 7 shows Gigabyte sprucing up its premium range, which were previously lacking in a few areas. It isn’t a cheap motherboard, doing battle with the Asus Maximus IX Hero in terms of price, but the Z270X-Gaming 7 packs in a few more features. It has a U.2 port along with a pair of M.2 ports, potentially enabling you to add three super-fast SSDs, even if U.2 isn’t a popular format for SSDs at the moment. Meanwhile, the two VRM heatsinks are linked by a heatpipe for balanced cooling and, when it comes to lighting, the Aorus Z270X-Gaming 7 puts most Christmas trees…

MSI’s on its own in the $500 price bracket this month, with the luscious Z270 Xpower Gaming Titanium costing a few notes more than the other premium offerings on test. No doubt we’ll get to see similarly premium boards from the other big players in the future, but at the moment, this board is as top-end as it gets in Z270 land, and it looks as though it’s worth every penny of its asking price too. Like MSI’s cheaper Z270 Gaming Pro Carbon, the Z270 Xpower Gaming Titanium sports MSI’s M.2 shield, which helps to cool toasty PCI-E M.2 SSDs. Our testing showed a 10°C difference and may well have helped MSI to top the tables in the M.2 speed tests too. MSI sensibly removed the U.2 port from the…

The ASRock Z270 Pro4 goes head to head with the Asus Prime Z270-P (see page 78), and the stakes seem fairly evenly matched, as does the price tag. That said, the ASRock board does sport a snazzy logo on the PCB and has more CPU power phases than the Asus, in addition to two additional SATA 6Gbps ports and an extra fan header. It also has a third M.2 port, which is specifically intended for Wi-Fimodules, along with the necessary mounting point for the antennae. What’s more, the Z270 Pro4 has both USB 3.1 Type-A and Type-C ports, which are both absent on the Asus board, and it features Intel Gigabit Ethernet rather than the Asus’ Realtek LAN port. There’s a nod to legacy hardware too, with the inclusion of…

While Asus undeniably has some swanky looking motherboards in its current line-up, MSI has come out with unique and great-looking examples as well. The Z270 Tomahawk is one of them, and it’s amazing that MSI has managed to get such a strikinglooking board onto the retail shelves for under $260. There’s a black version too, if white isn’t to your tastes, but the icy design of the Arctic model looks fantastic to our eyes. The PCB is coated in white and grey, and there are large heatsinks on the CPU power circuitry and chipset, with the latter being illuminated with clean, white LEDs. You also get a silver I/O panel shroud to hide those ugly ports, and the isolated audio circuitry is illuminated too. Even the DIMM slots are coloured…

Want to know where harbour seals go? Give them a mobile phone and let them call home. That’s exactly what researchers at the University of St Andrews’ Sea Mammal Research Unit (SMRU) have done with the animals in Scotland, creating an internet of seals via data-collecting sensors and mobile phone technology that’s glued to their heads in order to study diving population numbers. However, don’t worry that these seals are now the laughing stock of the sea, with antenna hats for the rest of their lives. The animals moult once a year, shedding the device. As it’s impossible to predict if the hardware will end up in the sea or on the shore, the seal data has to be collected live, with snippets uploaded from the sensors at predetermined times…

For the ultimate in NAS performance – whether at home or in your office – the Qnap TVS-x73 has it all. Built with a state-ofthe- art metal design and topped off with a stylish gold finish, the business-class TVS-x73 series is available in 4, 6, and 8-bay models. It is powered by an AMD RX-421BD quad-core APU (2.1 GHz base, 3.4 GHz boost) and dual-channel 8GB/16GB/64GB DDR4 RAM (up to 64GB), supports four Gigabit LAN ports and two built-in M.2 SSD slots (which can benefit from Qtier Technology to optimize storage efficiency across M.2 SSDs, SATA SSDs and HDDs), and is capable of delivering up to 1,172 MB/s throughput. Two PCIe slots are available for greater system flexibility. One is pre-installed with a dual-port USB 3.1 Type-A card and the…

Arkane Studio’s upcoming game Prey has a rather long, rather… convoluted history, one that’s worth exploring before going into our recent hands-on session with the game. The first Prey came out in 2006, and in it you played ex-soldier and Cherokee Indian, Domasi Towadi, who’s been abducted by a giant planet-destroying alien spaceship. It was pretty highconcept, especially with the introduction of spirit-based powers based on Towadi’s ancestry. It was also pretty unique, and a lot of fun. Prey 2 was revealed with much fanfare and hype at E3 in 2011. I actually saw the demo at the show, and like everyone else at year I thought it was pretty much game of the show. It followed a different character – a US Marshall this time – but followed a…

WE LOVE MEECES TO PIECES You could buy either the Logitech G610 or Steel Series Apex M500 keyboard that we’ve been recommending for the Perfect PC today, or in a year, and still be as happy as can be. Equally, the tried and tested CM Storm Reaper mouse is a rock solid gem that we still use day to day here in the office. But time marches on and new product comes along that at least equals the best. So we’re shuffling the keyboard and mouse recommendation around this issue, bringing in some new plastic and metal. The Razer DeathAdder pitches itself as a gaming mouse, because everything is a gaming thing these days it seems. But it’s far more than just a niche filler. It’s simply a really nice…

We’re all being encouraged to save for our old age, and with good reason – I think many of us now realise that the basic state pension probably won’t provide sufficient income to live comfortably when we retire. This means we’re faced with a number of options: plough money into workplace or private pensions, invest in property, play the stock market, or simply never retire. I suspect many of us will be forced down the latter route. Actually, most of us will probably end up with a combination of these things – I know I will. As part of this, I dabble a bit in stocks and shares, all made conveniently tax-free by being wrapped up in an ISA. But if you try to build a retirement pot using the…

I wish I were a better photographer. I’ve spent a tonne of money in blaming the equipment, and each time I try to take a decent picture, it’s a disaster. Which is my excuse, really, for not being able to back up the content of this article – much of it on the topic of nasty failures in SATA disks – with firm photographic evidence. My first SATA failure happened at home, where I found a dead server one morning. I desperately tried to take pictures of what the problem turned out to be, but swirls of black smoke deposits across shiny interior metal don’t photograph well, at least not when Cassidy is holding the camera. Instead, you’ll have to make do with what I share below and across the…