Table of contents for August 2019 in PCWorld

As the U.S. Government’s ban on Huawei grinds on, the biggest questions consumers likely have are whether that Matebook laptop on Amazon is safe to buy, or whether the Huawei machine they’ve already bought is safe. After all, if Intel, AMD, Nvidia, Qualcomm and other U.S. tech companies can no longer sell chips to the Chinese tech company, isn’t the company basically dead to you? The answer likely depends on whether you care about Huawei’s future as a PC maker, or if you only care about your particular future with a Huawei laptop. WHAT THE U.S. BAN ON HUAWEI MEANS The ban on Huawei, enacted in May, essentially forbids U.S. companies from doing business with the tech giant. Obviously, if Huawei is unable to buy CPUs from Intel or AMD,…

While U.S. broadcasters are still mired in 1080p, foreign markets are already looking at 8K video—and that’s exactly what the new generation of DisplayPort technology, DisplayPort 2.0, is designed to address. In late 2020, the first products incorporating the new DP 2.0 standard are expected to be made available, according to the Video Electronics Standards Association, or VESA. DP 2.0 can use the existing DP connector that appears on many high-end desktop PCs, or be carried over cabling that uses the standard USB-C connector—though you’ll still need a PC with DP 2.0 silicon to support it. DP 2.0 offers three times as much bandwidth as DP 1.4a, the current standard. While DP 2.0 keeps the four available data lanes as its predecessor, the available link rate has been increased up…

Our review of AMD’s 12-core Ryzen 9 3900X CPU, in five words: Damn, this CPU is fast. But keep reading, because the Ryzen 9 3900X is likely as significant, and likely as game-changing, as AMD’s original K7 Athlon-series of CPUs that crossed the 1GHz line first, or its Athlon 64 CPU that ushered in 64-bit computing in a desktop PC. You’d think the Ryzen 9 3900X would have a hard time achieving the same greatness. It’s true that it doesn’t quite shake all the gaming-performance bugaboos of past generations. But we think when the dust settles, the CPU series will easily be a first-ballot, CPU hall of fame entry. It is, after all, the first consumer x86 chip to be produced on a 7nm process node. Intel’s current desktop chips…

If you’ve been wondering about whether a long-life Qualcomm Snapdragon PC is for you, Dell would like a word. Dell’s new 14-inch Latitude 7400 2-in-1 achieves a simply incredible 18 hours of battery life using a powerful Intel 8th-gen Whiskey Lake processor. It also offers a full complement of ports and a slightly gimmicky feature called ExpressSign-in (yes, it’s really spelled that way). As our review shows, Dell has designed a stylish business notebook optimized for life on the road. It’s also optimized for IT rather than personal budgets, as our review unit clocked in at a whopping $2,800. But if you want a business laptop with all-day battery life and performance, the Dell Latitude 7400 2-in-1 delivers. SPECS Other than a surprisingly subpar webcam, Dell’s Latitude 7400 2-in-1 is…

When you own an Amazon Kindle, the cost of supporting a voracious reading habit can get very steep, very quickly. A quick glance at Amazon’s list of the Best Books of the Month shows that a decent read can set you back between $13 and $15 for a Kindle edition book. Sure, Amazon offers deals on great ebooks, but waiting for a deal could take forever. Many titles can be had for two bucks or less, but it takes work to find the gems among the dross. What you need are some solid options for finding free, absorbing content to devour on your Kindle. We’re more than happy to point you in the right direction. (And if you need a new e-reader, find one among our reviews of the best…

Finally, we know what Microsoft’s teasing Twitter posts have all been about: the release of Windows 1.11, an app that mimics the look and feel of an early version of Windows in conjunction with the Netflix show, Stranger Things. Microsoft’s Windows 1.11 app opens a Windows 1.0-like shell where users can dig through file trees and open up clips and teaser stills from the show. The app warns of “glitches” that you’ll experience, which manifest almost immediately; clicking on a file opens a cascade of images that indicates something is very wrong. Microsoft touts the app as “1985 nostalgia with a special edition Windows 10 PC app inspired by Windows 1.0, but one that’s been taken over by the Upside Down from Stranger Things.” Microsoft makes no attempt to hide…

Nokia is doubling down on home networking. Just last year, the former smartphone titan acquired mesh networking startup Unium and bowed its first wireless router, the Beacon 3. Now the company is back with a sleeker, cheaper mesh router that can work in tandem with its pricier sibling. On sale as of July 9, the $129 Beacon 1 (or $299 for a bundle of three) uses the same mesh-networking technology that powers the $199 Beacon 3, along with a new intelligent channel-hopping feature and a bridge mode that’s compatible with an existing router. Dubbed “Intelligent Channel Selection” by Nokia, the Beacon 1’s smart channel-switching feature lets the router pick the best channels for the 2.4- and 5GHz frequency bands by analyzing nearby wireless usage patterns over time, rather than simply…

Nvidia promised something Super is coming well over a month ago, and it finally delivered. Spoiler alert: The wait was worth it. The $399 GeForce RTX 2060 Super and $499 GeForce RTX 2070 Super pack fresh graphics chips and other improvements that help propel speeds far beyond their non-Super namesakes, shoring up weaknesses found in the original RTX 2060 and effectively shifting the entire RTX 20-series product stack up a performance tier—all for at or near the same price as before. These Ti-upgrades-by-another-name kick a whole lot of ass, and that’s with an even more powerful GeForce RTX 2080 Super variant waiting in the wings for a July 23 launch. The GeForce RTX 2060 Super and 2070 Super will launch on July 9, in both the Nvidia Founders Edition models we’re reviewing…

I must admit, I wasn’t expecting all that much from Addlink’s S70 SSD. I’d never heard of the company before, and a 1TB NVMe SSD for the stunningly low price of $120 raises every red flag I know concerning performance. Well, pickle me and call me ridiculous if the S70 didn’t run rings around the other budget drives, and many pricier models in our testing, easily earning an Editor’s Choice. The market just got very interesting. SPECS AND DESIGN There’s not a whole lot to say about the design of the S70 other than it’s your average M.2 NVMe SSD, which is in the standard 2280 form factor (22 mm wide, 80 mm long). It’s PCIe 3.0 x4 (using four lanes), and it uses a Phison PS5012 controller and 64-layer…

Ever since Google Photos and its unlimited high-quality cloud storage arrived, Google has included a handy backup method with your Google Drive. As long as you had the Google Drive toggle flipped in the Google Photos settings (and enough space in your Drive), everything added to Google Photos synced back to Google Drive, so you could create a personal library of photos in their original quality. On July 10, that changed. Google said that Drive sync was causing confusion with users, so Photos will no longer include an option to sync with Google Drive. You’ll still be able to back up your photos in original quality if you choose, but you’ll no longer see new photos appear on your Drive. Similarly, anything you add to the Photos folders in Google Drive…

That long line you see in the photo above isn’t for the latest Avengers movie or a new pair of Jordan sneakers going on sale. Instead, the lines outside your local computer store on July 7 were PC enthusiasts waiting to buy AMD’s hotly anticipated Ryzen 3000 CPUs. Yes—a desktop CPU. Micro Center officials confirmed to PCWorld the next day that several of its stores had PC DIYers lined up to buy AMD’s muchhyped CPU when they went on sale early in the morning. AMD, for its part, has described the launch of the new Ryzen 3000 series as “historic” and described demand as “significant.” For Joe and Jane DIY, the excitement meant queuing up for AMD’s 6 a.m. Eastern launch. Fortunately, as our Ryzen 9 3900X review demonstrates (see…

Steam is enormous, and growing more so by the day. And that presents a problem: How the hell do you find anything that isn’t already on your radar? It’s less a needle in a haystack, more a needle in a hayfield—and that’s after Valve tried to solve the problem once already, with 2014’s Discovery Update. Five years later, it’s time to try again. This time, Valve’s approach is a bit more advanced—and a bit more scattershot. Under the umbrella of Steam Labs, Valve’s rolling out three new experiments that should hopefully streamline the discovery process and help you find the odd diamond among Steam’s 30,000 game library. GOGGLES ON “Behind the scenes at Steam, we create many experimental features with codenames like The Peabody Recommender and Organize Your Steam Library…

The Radeon RX 5700 and Radeon RX 5700 XT graphics cards represent a fresh start and a bright future for AMD, brimming with technologies that have never been seen in GPUs before. The Radeon RX 5700 series are the first mainstream GPUs built using the bleeding-edge 7nm manufacturing process (hence their July 7 launch). They’re the first graphics cards packing the ultra-fast PCIe 4.0 interface. They’re the first graphics cards crafted with AMD’s all-new “RDNA” architecture, which delivers a massive power efficiency boost that Radeon’s been needing for years. They’re packing fresh display technologies to enable 4K, 144Hz monitors without the need for messy chroma subsampling. They’ve upgraded to GDDR6 memory. Heck, AMD even managed to tame their blower-style cooler design, learning from the mistakes of the frankly unpleasant-to-be-around Vega…

Wondershare’s PDFelement 6 Pro has been one of our favorite PDF editors, combining essential business features with a simple but sophisticated interface. Version 7 isn’t a major overhaul, thankfully, introducing only a few user interface tweaks for even better usability while keeping the features that made its predecessor so great. A USER-FRIENDLY UI Version 7’s refreshed user interface puts all the program’s main functions on its Home screen in large clickable tiles. From here you can jump-start the process of editing, creating, converting, combining, or batch processing PDFs, as well as access a library of PDF templates. A separate tile on the left lists your most recent documents along with a big, blue Open File button. The top of the interface features a Microsoft Office–style toolbar containing master functions such as…

Netflix offers an embarrassment of video riches considering its modest monthly price tag, but picking just the right TV show or movie on a given night isn’t the chillaxing experience it should be. Indeed, the busy Netflix interface frequently pushes the same recommendations over and over, leaving the false impression that instead of having thousands of videos to choose from, you have just a few dozen. Once you know what you’re doing, though, you can take a deep dive into Netflix’s collection of movies and TV episodes, slicing and dicing its categories to pinpoint the perfect video for the moment. You can also help Netflix make better guesses at what you’ll like. Finally, you can easily save your picks for later, making it easy to fire up a favorite flick…