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1. camis que jene ba eye iar crum Pets ama com UC Y WT STR quem The ur a Uem vorm umi amr ed Bee sae Taree i mori metu ee TIF CETTE imm eee u eed ed ws amici Hunc uncis zu uy re 15 rum wa Fumo em o Lay T pmom m wcmE Las mr Soper y wur eT premem comet Sm cum mmm Par ed hoe amen direc Mg 4 De Lage ri You ll be given a PIN to give TweetMyPC authorization so type this into the Enter PIN for Authorization dialog box Image GET TWEETING Click Save and Hide and then you are ready to get started To see a list of available commands that d you can send to your PC Image B right click the icon in the notification area and select Edit settings When the window appears click About then select Basic Command List iit ww Here are suma papala sou migli enigy Kalipang ari dm 5 Tionde maw hila Bae Gss es beet ndm own egens li gh Tete binial Sisi a a am ik n daniam Cech bn Fag Si I ah L lt m e nomm p Del AUNT W b Sim
2. 20 30 40 50 scored an average 57 9 the extreme benchmark whereas the Shield Tablet again got roughly half that frame rate While the Shield is able to handle most games well it s still a mobile chip and does have its limitations We fired up The Talos Principle which is a port of the PC first person puzzle game and even at its default 1080p settings the game struggled to run with a smooth frame rate and was downright choppy at times The Shield may not be our first choice for a gaming system though you can certainly have tons of fun with it Its real power lies in its strength as a media player it s the most impressive set top box we ve seen to date JIMMY THANG VEADICT Nvidia Shield 2 METAL SHIELD Small and sleek awesome media player good peripherals easy to use E WOODEN SHIELD Lackluster Android games local game stream issues 200 www nvidia com SPECIFICATIONS Nvidia Tegra X1 with 3GB of RAM Size 8 3x5 1x1 inches Weight 23 ounces Storage 16GB Gigabit Ethernet 2 0 2x USB 3 0 micro USB 2 0 microSD slot UT 790101 0 10 60 70 80 90 100 Our zero point is the Nvidia Shield tablet which uses a Tegra K1 SOC clocked at 2 2GHz with 2GB of RAM maximumpc com NOV 2015 MAXIMUMPE in the lab Asus 21 0 A MAM cae lage Zu 01 Ime ner ace cel you actually need REMEMBER WHEN LIFE WAS SIMPLER When there were only
3. W r 1 i z LECTION REMASTERED ct 3 4 ORIGIN s r oc ARE 2 1 fF fy j Pim F L E m ITE iy ES L Li E E 4 ORIGINPC COM Online Financing Available gearbox _ originpc f DE gt HomeworldGame HomeworldGame Nvidia GTX Titan X Not winning this clash of cards NVIDIA S GTX TITAN X is the pinnacle of today s graphics card technology a position it s likely to maintain until Pascal tips up waving its 16nm transistors all up in the GM 200 GPU s silicon face But that doesn t make it the best card around At launch the 999 price tag seemed insanely almost offensively high Sure it was the first time we d seen the much vaunted GM 200 GPU appear in a form we could cram into our desktop machines and it is most definitely head and shoulders above the GTX 980 in terms of gaming performance but it didnt have the same feel as the original Titan It lacked the supercomputer double precision capabilities for a start and we never warmed to the black shroud of the X either The big problem however is that card sitting nonchalantly to its right the GTX 980 Ti It was always going to happen GPU history has taught us that much But the release of the GTX 980 Ti has re
4. ges gt 1 jeT d MSI GTX 980 Gaming IT SEEMS FUNNY TO THINK the GTX980 is almost a year old It doesn t seem that long since we first plugged the big Maxwell chip into our test rig and were blown away by the unprecedented mix of performance and efficiency Despite still being built of the same 28nm transistors as the Kepler generation of graphics cards Nvidia had managed to tweak its architecture enough that you effectively got all of the benefits of a die shrink without having one Imagine what it would ve been like had Maxwell hit the 20nm lithography we expected Imagine what Pascal is going to be like when it arrives next year A year down the line the 980 is still a great card especially since the release of the Fury and Fury X has encouraged its first real price drop With this outstanding card being almost 100 cheaper than the Fury and a great deal less than the Fury X it s a fantastic GPU for your 1440p gaming rig The GPU here is seriously overclocked as the GTX 980 is generally capable of and comes with a OdB cooler that only really needs to kick in at peak gaming performance Right now though 1440p is the limit of the 4GB frame buffer the GTX 980 sports So 4K gaming is possible but too much of a compromise for this card It s a toss up between this and the Fury and in the end it s going to come down to finances and personal preference The Fury is quicker and has superior
5. Built in Onkyo Hi Fi speakers NP7155 Notebook 999 After 100 Instant Savings Windows 10 Home 64 bit Edition Ath Generation Intel Core i7 4720HQ Processor 6MB L3 Cache 2 60GHz 15 6 Full HD LED Display 1920x1080 with Matte Finished Screen Also available in 17 3 Full HD LED Display with model NP7170 2GB DDR5 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M GPU with Optimus Technology 8GB DDR3 1600MHz Memory TB 7200RPM Hard Drive 8X DVD R RW 4X DL Super Multi Drive Hard Drive 1 M 2 SATA SSD Drive or M 2 PCle SSD Drive capable Full sized Keyboard with white LED backlight Integrated Wireless LAN 802 11N Bluetooth Built in 2 0M FHD Camera amp Fingerprint Reader Built in Onkyo speakers Graphics Cards Supertest L 26 MAXIMUMPG NOV 2015 maximumpc com T M Uf f FII FFF Fr AF f FE f i T AMI eee eee F Ai rf FJ ri fy Fi lj j Fr reer eee Ya nre Wis i d y fie Hi j ui IPM HH fi Wr ry a ae Frag FF gy Fi Fi P It could be the perfect time to upgrade your current graphics card but what do you need to prepare for the GPU future THE GRAPHICS CARD is the component most responsible for PC gaming performance Above everything else in your
6. The Z170 motherboards on the other hand have been making the rounds for quite some time now debuting with a wide variety of manufacturers showing off their The biggest and most exciting feature is the support for DDR4 RAM the final advancement beyond 2 400MHz DDR3 was more than enough to put most people off their dinner Fortunately kits have been around since October 2014 and have slowly dropped in price since then with the launch of the extreme edition processors With Skylake s release and dual channel support comes a wide variety of dual channel kits at almost a comparable price long awaited products at Computex back in June And man do they look good Most mainstream motherboard partners have had these things ready since last Christmas or thereabouts so if you really must have the latest hardware or are thinking it s about time for an upgrade you ll be more than spoiled for choice maximumpc com NOV 2015 MAXIMUM 45 DirectX 12 could well game changer literally Skylake _ 3 J ss x 0 0 0 0 0 000 Power and Performance o how does Skylake actually perform Well it isnt the absolute be all and end all of chip advancements If you re only one generation behind with Devil s Canyon youll only see around a 10 15 percent improvement in benchmarks and rendering times clock for clock In Cinebench we saw an outright 11 percent increase in perform
7. file to load the contents of this file when the interfaces are activated You can now enable the Tor service with sudo service tor start and update the relevant boot scripts with sudo update rc d tor enable That s it Now restart the Raspberry Pi When it s back up you ll be able to connect to the Raspberry Pi hotspot TorSpot as before However your traffic will now be routed through the Tor network You can verify this is happening by heading to check https torproject org from any device that s connected to TorSpot The page will also list your IP address which will not be that of your ISP You can visit this page from another device that is connected to TorSpot and it will show a different address Congratulations it s all done You can now anonymously browse the Internet on all of your devices WwWwW anonabox com PEG NOV 2015 maximumpc com https github com grugq portal RAID Your SSD tor More Speed YOU LL NEED THIS ONCE UPON A TIME RAID 0 used to be a dirty word An infamous acronym associated with corrupt OS drives and little gain A lot has changed since the days of HDDs however and today it s an TWO SSDs They need to have identical capacity Also an Intel mobo that supports RAID 0 JU Ge ET NIS a UEA BIG Utility Acynancr anane 44 459 Favoriit Main If you re planning on utilizing this as an operating system drive you ll need to have bo
8. you activate Windows 10 forthe After burying Windows Media first time you can clean install on Player Microsoft released an the same machine again and again official Windows 10 DVD Player without ever having to reactivate app in the Windows Store for 15 Tom Halfhill FAST FORWARD Are We Living in sim City IS OUR UNIVERSE an immense computer simulation Is everything we perceive an illusion rendered in super resolution pixels Are we mere pixels too Lately seen these questions debated more often in Internet forums and often by reputable scientists Its not Just another crackpot conspiracy theory Usually I m far too busy to waste attention on trending Internet debates which can seem as pointless as medieval arguments over the number of angels that could fit on the head of a pin But the universe simulation hypothesis intersects my knowledge of computers And one thing often missing from the debate is a realistic forecast of future computing power Many though not all simulation proponents assume essentially that Moore s Law is forever They take for granted that computers will keep getting more powerful on a steep curve and will eventually be capable of simulating a universe as complex as ours appears to be Whoa say In past columns l ve described the fallacies that sprout like weeds around Moore s Law To recap Moore s Law is not a scientific law it s an astute observation of semico
9. 242 Core 15 www intel com SPECIFICATIONS Base Clock Speed Maximum Turbo Clock Cores Threads L3 Cache Graphics Graphics Clock TDP maximumpc com i i7 6700K 4GHz 4 2GHz 8MB HD Graphics 530 350 1 150MHz 91W Core i5 6600K 3 56Hz 3 96Hz ET 6MB HD Graphics 530 350 1 150MHz 91W NOV 2015 77 Mac Life Subscribe now Anywhere anytime 105 9 is here the E Never lose a file od touc firs e things to try on again the ultimate review can it keep Apple s new O5 plz backup quide p38 the iPod alive p62 amp T ies UPGR YOUR APPS Discover the best free and paid apps for Mac and iOS to get you doing more faster pee YOUR APPS J r the best free and pas ams for Mae and IOS to get 5 more faster p22 s wen www maclife com anywhere That shiny plasticky chassis wouldn t be an issue for a second were we Looking at a larger panel Viewsonic iili VX2475 Smhi 4K Whats a few inches between friends THIS WHOLE 4K THING is all about compromises right now Forgetting the fact that running games at the mighty 3840x2160 native resolution of 4K monitors 15 incredibly demanding on your graphics hardware just trying to find the right monitor in the first place can be incredibly tough The first 4K panel we checked out was
10. DDR4 Support OX SANA Storage i Express Se USB AO xX S30 USB 3 1 1x USB 3 1 Type C MSI s Gaming M7 is a tasty looking number maximumpc com NOV 2015 85 in the lab Dm E RES 4 ee NN CSS Gigabyte s new gaming lappie packs both Intel Broadwell and Nvidia Maxwell tech PEG NOV 2015 maximumpc com Gigabyte P55K V4 Two chips one amazing laptop FOURTH TIME LUCKY The Gigabyte P55K in this revised v4 format does come with plenty of interesting newness Don t let its familiar threads fool you For starters the fancy Core i7 5700HQ CPU debuts Intel s new Broadwell architecture in quad core format for laptops In outright performance terms it s not a dramatic step forward over older Haswell models It s a sweet chip with Hyper Threading and a top Turbo speed of 3 5GHz It s just not going to rock your world if you ve experienced a Haswell mobile quad Well apart from battery life Your mileage will vary depending on usage but our testing suggests you get up to five hours HD video playback in flight mode That s pretty solid for a 15 6 inch gaming laptop The P55K s other intrigue involves its graphics chip the nifty new Nvidia GTX 965M Right away you should be wondering exactly what GTX 965M means There is no GTX 965 desktop card just 960 and then 970 Fire up GPU Z and the first numbers you ll spot are the 1 024 CUDA cores and
11. GRAPHICS SUPERTEST wy AY AS Future FOR HARDWARE Digital Storm Bolt 3 Asus 2170 PACORSAIR GAMING SOUND YOU CAN SEE Enter the VOID The innovative and exciting new family of advanced gaming headsets from Corsair N VOID Res WIRELESS gt 2 4GHz wireless freedom up to 40ft gt Genuine Dolby 71 Surround gt 50mm neodymium drivers gt InfoMic LED audio status indicator LO DIES USB gt Genuine Dolby 71 Surround gt 50mm neodymium drivers gt InfoMic LED audio status indicator VOID STEREO gt 50mm neodymium drivers gt Universal compatibility with PC Xbox One PS4 and mobile gt Microfiber wrapped ear pads Whether you choose Wireless USB or Stereo powered audio gear you will always be one step ahead of your enemies 6 team dignitas eet Epic Audio Custom tuned oversized 50mm neodymium drivers and genuine Dolby 7 1 surround deliver innovative sound quality for a truly immersive audio experience InfoMic RGB Lighting Fa Sync with other Corsair RGB devices or light your own path Everything you need to know about your audio status instantly Yellow Special Edition sold exclusively at Best Buy f Corsair Ej Corsair CorsairGaming Corsair iBUYPOWER Recommends Windows Our battle ready gaming 2Isegeature Windows 10
12. EMAIL SETTINGS If you want your PC to email you files when you re away from it enter in your email settings here It has to be a Gmail account command you want to send to your PC Your PC will then receive the command and act accordingly 6 PROFILE This purple icon with the egg silhouette represents your Twitter profile To change the icon to a photo or picture select Settings From here you can also alter your privacy settings maximumpc com NOV 2015 MAXIMUM PE 67 121000120 MAE ALEX CAMPBELL ASSOCIATE EDITOR into an Old Box An upgrade can give your aging PC a new round of usefulness even with older architectures LENGTH OF TIME 1 HOUR LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY EASY HERE AT MAXIMUM we often build new rigs from scratch We have the option of using just in bleeding edge nerd porn worthy parts or remixing a fresh build idea from our selection of parts we ve already built and reviewed Either way builds are usually using newer generation parts New Shiny This isn t one of those builds We know that not everyone can or has the desire to go out and build a whole new PC every time In fact one of the best parts of building a PC is the fact you can upgrade a system as it begins to show its age We were digging around in the pile of parts that is the Maximum PC Lab and we found a frumpy looking gem former editor in chief Gordon Ung s Budget Battle build
13. Fractal art like Mandelbrot mostly exists as an outgrowth of using iterative methods to solve polynomial equations and that really requires a computer Looking at generative pieces it s hard not to agree that theyre art but the artist has at most set the parameters for their creation not hand crafted the piece or in this case hand solved the math Similarly generative music can be constructed without direct user input One could also argue that Bach s fugues were generative given that they were based on a strict underlying mathematical process out of the control of the creator There s even generative writing which has grown from the cut up techniques of writers such as William Burroughs or Georges Perec and France s mechanical writing Oulipo school Thats the heart of procedural generation It s grown out of math through art and music and it s taking over gaming Where will it stop NOV 2015 maximumpc com a Oo ah iii Few procedurally generated games have had the success of Minecraft recently bought by Microsoft for 2 5 billion maximumpc com NOV 2015 MAXIMUM FG 51 Procedural Generation 2 W People have always been fascinated with creating unpredictable things by following rules explains Michael Cook an academic who specializes in procedural game design Even childrens games where you pass along bits of folded paper and each write part of a story It s all about
14. Haswell E remains the performance focused consumer platform and enthusiasts can overclock the six or eight cores to 4 5GHz hello Dream Machine 2015 It s more power hungry and costs more but there s no beating the performance TIME TO BUY A BOAT Skylake meanwhile is only 10 20 percent faster than Haswell and 5 10 percent faster than Devil s Canyon Processor graphics performance is up 20 percent as well but that won t matter for anyone with a graphics card Overclocking is a bit more interesting as Skylake is hitting 4 6GHz 4 8GHz around 200MHz higher than Haswell but it s still only a minor bump in performance Also note that Skylake doesnt include a cooler presumably because overclockers will have their own The more interesting aspect of Skylake isnt even the CPU it s the chipset For the past several generations of CPUs Intel has used a DMI 2 0 interface that provides effectively 16Gb s of bidirectional bandwidth between the CPU and the PCH considering the PCH has multiple USB 3 0 ports SATA 6Gb s ports and now M 2 PCle and SATA Express that ends up being a big bottleneck Enter DMI 3 0 Corei5 6600K Core i7 6700K 161 E 582 866 120 542 547 3 770 3 891 Best scores are bolded Our test systems used 2x 86B DDR3 or DDR4 G Skill memory Samsung 850 Pro 1TB SSD GTX Titan X with be quiet s Dark Rock 3 Silent Base 800 and Dark Power Pro 11 850W Skylake and the Z170 ch
15. L pa AEN 3 Who needs GPS when you ve got a buddy with a notebook the Renault 5 Maxi Turbo and maybe an Alpine A110 then Dirt Rally s car selection would be sublime But its the rally locations that need addressing first What s included is well modeled and immersive but we need quantity as well as quality You ve got Greece for gravel stages the tarmac and ice of the Monte Carlo rally Germany s countryside backroads plus damp and muddy forest tracks in Wales It s a good variety but many of the stages are simply reverse runs of others and even more fun could be had with the addition of Finland s super fast dirt or an all snow rally like Sweden RACE FEVER If you re after more variety there s always different disciplines like rallycross or hill climbing The latter is restricted to just a single venue but it is the best Pikes Peak with both the classic dirt and the present paved configuration Three cars are available and Codemasters hasn t messed about There s the fearsome Peugeot 205 So eighties If 4 EF only KITT was reading the ce notes i Fast and furious but with better dialogue D C Jte ae T16 405 T16 and Audi S1 Quattro each in full on Pikes Peak spec wearing wings outrageous enough to make a Plymouth Superbird look subtle Rallycross currently includes two tracks one Sweden the other in England In a break from the eighties G
16. NVLink can just dedicate all its available bandwidth to GPU to GPU connections which is what will potentially enable it to bear fruit in our gaming PCs Right now we re a fair way off saturating the available PCle bandwidth on our rigs The current interconnect is fine for our present day needs but boosting SLI scaling could be a real bonus In terms of HPC applications however there are times when programs are doing large pro level processing on the GPU such as image processing for astronomy or seismic processing and the PCle interface becomes a serious bottleneck For our machines that s not going to be a problem and AMD shows no sign of wanting to shift interfaces either We can t see PCle going dodo anytime soon at least not in the next couple of years maximumpc com NOV 2015 MANIMUM PE 29 THE MOST ADVANCED AND CUSTOMIZABLE SYSTEMS ORIGIN He FREE Lifetime 24 7 Service amp Support HIGH PERFORMANCE PCS 2015 Battlestar LLC Published and distributed by Gearbox Software Homeworld Gearbox amp the Gearbox Software logos are registered trademarks and the Homeworld logo is a trademark all used courtesy of Gearbox Software LLC 2015 ORIGIN PC Corporation All rights reserved ORIGIN O Symbols are trademarks of ORIGIN PC Corporation All other trademarks are property of their respective owners 4 RECORD SETTING BENCHMARK PERFORMANCE MAXIMUM PC
17. You could even zero fill the drive before installing Windows from your own disc and you d still end up with Lenovo s software How so It s down to a BIOS feature that lets OEMs hide executables in a system s firmware Microsoft supports the feature in Windows which runs the code during booting While that may seem reckless it s intended for OEMs to install anti theft software that can t be circumvented by wiping a drive clean and reinstalling Windows However Lenovo s been using the feature to pre install various other software and utilities on some of its laptops and desktop PCs It s been doing this since October of last year through what it calls Laptop Service Engine LSE Lenovo stopped shipping LSE on PCs when it found out it could be exploited by an attacker in a number of ways leaving affected systems susceptible to things such as buffer overflows and compromised connections Furthermore when Microsoft found out it updated its security guidelines to make clear the feature is only for critical software not bloatware According to Lenovo the feature is no longer present inthe BIOS firmware included on all PCs shipped since June For those that are affected Lenovo released a disabler tool that once executed automatically stops the SEservices deletes all files installed bythe LSE module and disables the UEFI variable that enables LSE in Win8 8 1 and 10 in UEFI mode For users running Win7 in any mode along
18. bots Best of all it s simple to get back into another game so very little time is spent lingering in lobbies If playing online isn t your thing there are exhibition matches and full seasons you can do solo The length and difficulty can be altered and while it doesn t offer much depth cars and soccer remember we still found ourselves bonding with pretend teammates Perhaps werre lonely The offline modes do reveal the game s minor inadequacies Team Al can be flaccid especially against tougher opponents and the same simplicity that makes Rocket League so playable can cause things to get repetitive when played alone a criticism that only becomes apparent precisely because it s so damn addictive It s a simple thing done brilliantly well kept interesting by the thrill of competition MATT ELLIOTT Rocket League H Fast fun simple relentlessly enjoyable best soccer game without feet 2 0 GHz quad core CPU Nvidia 260 series graphics 4GB RAM 20 www psyonix com ESRB E 10 90 MAXIMUM PE NOV 2015 maximumpc com There s no time to admire the scenery Matches are addictively frantic i 3i te jq RA T dd Wheel vroom ball GOAL You can tinker with unlockable goodies in the garage ES T ball Go e hit it Plot done Eg m im Games take place in giant cages more gaol than goal ALL STAR ACTIONS Five silky skills every MVP shou
19. colony builder with a Lovecraftian twist and Dungeons of Dredmor rely on having a lot of replayability and a good way to get replayability into a game is to have it change every time You really want to have random geography and random levels and random stuff being thrown at you But why use procedural generation Surely weve got by perfectly well handcrafting them so far People want giant experiences and value for money says Vining AAA games deal with this by giving them 100 hours of hand massaged content Dragon Age Inquisition is the most recent example but that doesnt scale unless youre making you know Dragon Age And then you ll end up probably having to make money by DLC Being indies we have to cheat And frankly hand massaging 100 hours of content is more laborious than it needs to be Vining is also keen to make the game easy to share and non repetitive not just for the end user but to attract the YouTubers who mostly drive a game s fame today The Mandelbrot set produces infinite complexity from a simple formula and many of its results Look like abstractart GENERATING ESCAPISM Procedural game design academic Michael Cook said something very interesting Depending on how VR designers want to take the tech procedural generation could be the defining tech of the VR age As we ve explored in recent months AR and VR are taking lessons from games and growing them into whole new fields
20. k gq Sapphire R9 Fury Tri X www sapphiretech com 563 Fiji Pro 3 584 4 096 bit 275W 79 8 MSI GTX 980 Gaming www msi com 470 GM 204 2 048 256 bit 165W 75 8 XFX R9 390X WWW Xfxforce com 435 Grenada XT 2 816 512 bit 275W 80 7 Sapphire R9 390 Nitro www sapphiretech com 340 Grenada Pro 2 560 512 bit 275W 71 9 Gigabyte GTX 970 G1 Gaming www gigabyte com 359 GM 204 1 664 256 bit 145W 64 8 Asus GTX 960 STRIX www asus com 201 GM206 1024 128 bit 17208 64 a MSI R9 380 Gaming 46 www msi com 240 Antigua 1 792 256 bit 190W 78 8 1920 X 1080 BENCHMARKS 1080p Battlefield 4 Total War Attila GRID 2 GTAV Shadow of j Mordor Nvidia GTX Titan X 64 122 21 43 180 12 103 49 108 Zotac 980 Ti Arctic Storm 87 134 120 177 48 123 AMD R9 Fury X 60 100 29 39 114 146 10 88 47 98 Sapphire R9 Fury Tri X 61 97 28 37 100 134 31 85 29 93 MSI GTX 980 Gaming 62 113 23 36 129 162 21 87 42 89 XFX R9 390X 48 90 18 31 62 77 21 78 40 83 Sapphire R9 390 Nitro 47 82 21 30 91 118 20 74 38 79 Gigabyte GTX 970 G1 Gaming 47 90 21 30 104 131 21 75 50 74 Asus GTX 960 STRIX 31 55 9 18 71 88 9 49 17 36 MSI R9 380 Gaming 4G 34 53 73 87 12 48 18 45 38 MAXIMUM PE NOV 2015 maximumpc com 2560 X 1600 BENCHMARKS 1600 Heaven Battlefield4 TotalWar GRID2 GTAV Shadow of
21. lovers And let s face it we ve sorely needed it The last three generations of Intel CPUs have hardly seen a vast improvement over the original Sandy Bridge chips and it s about time we were given CPUs that mopped the floor with that dusty old dog Yes Intel s cores may generally run rings around the competition when it comes to compute performance but a 5 percent performance increase and 10 percent power reduction year after year just isn t exciting enough to warrant tattooing the Intel logo on the inside of our thighs Not just yet Intel needs to knock this one out of the park And although it s pretty much cemented itself in the world of enthusiast grade CPUs another 5 percent performance boost just isn t that interesting especially when most games currently struggle to utilize anything more than four cores anyway Hell we d still recommend the i5 2500K if it were still available for sale So what was it that kept Intel behind for so long What do these chips represent to us And what shiny new features will it bring to the table Read on to find out what we discover in our in depth report and then turn to page 76 for our full review maximumpc com NOV 2015 okylake Gh Skylake and the Z1 0 Chipset Ea start with the basics At this point we have the Intel Core 15 6600 and the Core i7 6700K the premium overclocking CPUs for enthusiast users These are the flagship models of Intel s consu
22. microarchitecture Its a chip that s situated in the brand spanking new 1151 socket yes one whole extra pin alongside the Z170 chipset Although not the consumer s first access to a 14nm chip it ll be the most commonly sought after processor line going forward the go to buy for us PC enthusiasts overclockers and system builders looking for the best midrange processors for our towers of power To build a processor like Skylake you have to start from the ground up and that s with the silicon Essentially a wafer thin slice of computing crystalline goodness silicon provides the basis for what the CPU will become before its cut out and embedded into the CPU superstructure that we re all so familiar with Utilizing a 193nm ArF lithography basically a high powered laser Intel has to etch in all of the details for each and every processor from each transistor upward essentially crafting every detail that makes a CPU a CPU The difficulty lies in the lithography Itself The laser in its most minute form is 193nm wide To put that into perspective the width of a human hair is 75 000nm across So to get that tiny beam of light small enough to even create one single transistor it s necessary to utilize a variety of different technologies and optics to split the beam into even more ridiculous molecular sizes without necessarily losing any of the additional power that comes from the original beam The smaller you go the SP
23. to degrade over 1m than over 2m or Unfortunately you re living on the bleeding edge running 3 way SLI with HDMI 2 0 connected to a 55 inch HDTV In theory it should all work all the companies involved are supposed to test this stuff In practice things get overlooked and no one wants to officially take the blame Is it Nvidia s hardware Nvidia s drivers Sony s hardware or something else The only time youre likely to see a company step up and say Hey this was our problem is when it has a working fix Double the Fun l ve been the proud owner of an Nvidia GTX 690 since March of 2013 However it seems that since then dual GPU cards have been few and far between Is this an industry trend My 690 teamed with my i7 4770K and Asus Maximum VI Hero motherboard have made for some awesome gaming sessions Why was there seemingly no love for the 690 while the similar Titan was met with much praise Thomas Hoek SENIOR EDITOR JARRED WALTON RESPONDS Hi Thomas AMD had the R9 295X2 last year and Nvidia s alternative was the Titan Z Both were limited run cards as we understand it mostly for bragging rights Part of the problem is it s often easier to cool two GPUs on separate cards than to make one monolithic card plus the maximum power you can give to a single PCle card is 375W and that s with two 8 pin connectors plus the 75W from the mobo Both the 295X2 and Titan Z are able to
24. 1 472 1 805 22 6 x264 HD 5 0 fps 33 8 10 3 69 5 Batman Arkham City 1440p fps 204 70 65 7 Tomb Raider 2160p fps 87 5 28 6 67 396 Shadow of Mordor 2160p fps 70 1 30 6 56 3 3DMark FireStrike Ultra 2 484 69 0 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 Our desktop zero point PC uses a 5960X CPU three GTX 980s and 16GB of RAM Arkham City tested at 2560x1440 max settings with PhysX off Tomb Raider tested at Ultimate settings Shadow of Mordor at Max settings maximumpc com NOV 2015 MAXIMUMPG 71 New Channels Movies TV and Cool Stuff www gamesradar com reviews of the latest hardware and software EMS TESTED REVIEWED VERDICTIZED AA AAAA RRR TAR INSIDE 74 76 Digital Storm Bolt 3 Intel Core i7 6700K amp Intel Core i5 6600K Skylake Viewsonic VX2475Smhl 4K Nvidia Shield Asus Z170 A MSI Z170A Gaming M7 Gigabyte P55K V4 Dirt Rally Rocket League Lab Notes DIGITAL STORM BOLT 3 PAGE 74 maximumpc com NOV 2015 MAXIMUMPE 73 For a small form factor PC the Bolt 3isa little on the large side NOV 2015 44 2 f i Pa 22 ME e Pd A a maximumpc com Digital Storm Bolt 3 17 bola and the beautiful MINI ITX MACHINES are the hotness right now and have been for a while And why wouldn t they be We think that it s super sexy to be able to stuff Loads of power into a small form f
25. 128 bit memory bus Ah it ll be a GM 207 chip as per the GTX 960 then But hang on GPU Z also shows a GM 204 chip ticking away That s the much bigger beast that powers the GTX 970 and 980 desktop boards Long story short the 965M is a GM 204 chip with half of the good bits turned off Why not just use the GM 207 chip Who knows As it happens the 965M chip makes for a nice match with the P55K s rather lovely 1080p LCD panel As our benchmarks show at native res and maxed out most games are pretty playable That applies even to Shadow of Mordor with its ubertextures enabled You re still looking at average frame rates in the 30s Wind back on just a few settings for serious smoothness The bad news involves noise The P55K is whiney under full gaming load SMOOTH OPERATOR While we re talking graphics what about mobile G Sync Thats Nvidia s game smoothing tech that syncs graphics output with display refresh rates For G Sync to be functional in a laptop system you need the Nvidia graphics directly connected to the laptop s LCD panel via embedded DisplayPort This immediately throws up an incompatibility with Nvidia s Optimus tech which routes the discrete GPU s output through the Intel integrated video port And thus no direct connection between the Nvidia graphics and the panel The P55K does indeed implement Optimus And so our take Is that you ll likely never be able to switch on G Sync As for the rest of
26. Attila Mordor Nvidia GTX Titan X 19 8 60 4 46 83 19 28 105 138 7 70 481 74 Zotac 980 Ti Arctic Storm 19 6 70 7 118 157 AMD R9 Fury X 19 4 49 9 36 73 18 27 90 111 10 62 35 71 Sapphire R9 Fury Tri X 19 8 46 9 40 69 18 25 82 105 16 61 32 67 MSI GTX 980 Gaming 18 2 48 6 42 73 13 23 93 118 16 57 36 61 XFX R9 390X 16 7 38 8 35 61 14 21 62 77 17 55 29 58 Sapphire R9 390 Nitro 15 9 37 8 34 58 13 20 70 88 15 52 28 56 Gigabyte GTX 970 G1 Gaming 15 4 38 4 57 13 19 76 96 19 49 38 51 Asus GTX 960 STRIX 10 5 2381 23 37 6 11 48 59 6 31 14 24 MSI R9 380 Gaming 4G 11 23 6 25 39 7 12 46 57 11 34 10 35 3840 X 2160 BENCHMARKS 4K Heaven Battlefield4 Total War 2 GTAV Shadow of Attila Mordor Nvidia GTX Titan X 155 265 25 43 6 14 59 78 11 36 29 38 Zotac 980 Ti Arctic Storm 13 3 29 3 AMD R9 Fury X 116 227 21 40 3 12 57 70 3 35 18 38 Sapphire R9 Fury Tri X 10 8 21 3 23 38 7 12 50 66 1 33 14 36 MSI GTX 980 Gaming 10 3 20 6 23 38 6 11 46 67 6 23 26 33 XFX R9 390X 95 173 19 31 6 10 44 55 12 28 22 31 Sapphire R9 390 Nitro 9 3 16 4 17 30 6 10 41 52 12 26 7 31 Gigabyte GTX 970 G1 Gaming 9 2 16 2 17 29 4 9 39 54 12 24 19 27 Asus GTX 960 STRIX 5 8 9 6 6 12 1 4 27 35 2 8 6 12 MSI R9 380 Gaming 4G WT 10 19 1 6 29 36 4 11 8 20 Best scor
27. EST ACK Chain IMPUT policy ACCEPT target prat opt source destination Chaln amp ITPUT palicy ACCEPT target prot ppt source destination Chain POS TRC IMG palicy ACCEPT target pra pt Source http bit ly AdaOnionPi SS DNSListenAddress 192 168 12 1 These settings will inform Tor about the IP address of your access point and asks that it anonymizes any traffic that flows over it Next up we ll change the routing tables so that connections via the Wi Fi adapter wlanO are routed through Tor First flush the existing redirection and NAT rules with sudo iptables F Go on to sudo iptables t nat F Since we ll still want to be able to SSH into the Raspberry Pi we ll add an exception for SSH s Port 22 with sudo iptables t A PREROUTING i wlanO p tcp dport 22 j REDIRECT to ports 22 We ll now add two rules 1 The first is a passthrough rule for DNS lookups The second directs all TCP traffic to Tor s port 9040 sudo iptables t nat A PREROUTING i wlanO p udp dport 53 j REDIRECT to ports 53 sudo iptables t nat A PREROUTING i wlanO p tcp syn j REDIRECT to ports 9040 Like previously these rules won t be carried on to the next session To load them on reboot all you have to do is save them to the NAT save file like before with sudo sh c iptables save 3 etc iptables ipv4 nat In the previous section we ve already configured the etc network interfaces
28. Eight gigabytes should be enough to satiate them in most circumstances These two 4GB 1 600MHz sticks of Patriot s Viper 3 line were taken from a four stick 16GB kit we had on hand here While that kit is a bit more pricey we looked up the 8GB kit and found it to be around 50 That s about par for the course as far as RAM prices go so we didn t hesitate to use these two modules Another thing to notice is that this mobo only has two DIMM slots so more RAM would require DIMMs with higher capacity That costs money another reason to keep it at 8CB INGREDIENTS GPU 970 354 Patriot Viper 3 86B DDR3 1600 50 PSU Rosewill Photon 650W 80 Plus Gold 90 HDD Seagate Barracuda 1TB 50 SSD Samsung 850 Evo 250GB 100 Fan Corsair AF140 White 17 Total 661 maximumpc com NOV 2015 MANIMUMPE 69 RED 70 INCREASED LUNG CAPACITY IF THERE S ONE THING we wanted to upgrade it was the SSD Solid state media has gotten cheaper so we thought it would be reasonable to put money into a higher capacity and performance SSD While the Samsung 850 Evo won t blow your hair back it s still very speedy At 250GB we thought is well worth the 100 For that money you can have your OS Steam library and a good number of apps all on one drive We left in the original 500GB WD Caviar Blue and added in a 11B Seagate Barracuda Hard drives can and will fail Us
29. GTX 960 goes head to head with the R9 380 we ve again got to hand the glory to the Radeon offering And yet again that s down to the additional frame buffer The 4GB capacity of the R9 380 isn t going to mean you can suddenly nail super high resolutions but it does mean that at a more standard resolution it s going to cope with even the most demanding of future titles 1 40 MAXIMUM PE NOV 2015 maximumpc com techradar The home of technology techradar com Skylake PE NOV 2015 maximumpc com Skylake Deep Dave Intel s latest architecture is finally here SO we got investigating sy zax storey ell here you have it folks Skylake hath cometh to the people and with it comes the absolute pinnacle of Intel s micro processing technology Let s just forget about Broadwell Its short lifetime has been invaluable to us PC enthusiasts but alas it was never meant to be Taking us from that blasted 22nm architecture down to 14nm was an incredible feat But it was too little too late Ultimately the little chip paid the price doomed to retire to an early death A victim of its own architecture s difficult production methods Broadwell s glorious sacrifice however has given us one phenomenal gem Skylake If the X99 chipset and Haswell E was the premium grade reboot that PC enthusiasts needed it s safe to say that Z170 and Skylake is about to do the same for the rest of us lowly four core
30. Oculus is even employing ex Pixar staff to make VR kids movies Of course like AAA games VR has to be 52 mumume Nov 2015 maximumpc com convincing to work and the hardware cant do it alone It needs tons of content a lot more than any game because it has to be all around the player and in great detail Procedural generation might not just be helpful it seems essential Valve and HTC s Vive system adds even more complexity given that it uses extra cameras to map the dimensions of the room That means shifting the size and shape of the rooms youre experiencing through the device which means the designers will have to create the game with variable locations for cues and objects Your fantasy tavern might just be a few feet across and need a keg in the middle to hide your coffee table or it might be very big and absolutely clear Cook has ideas on how this will be dealt with The way well solve these problems I believe is by having procedural generation systems that are intelligent enough to redesign games to fit inside your room So the game designer specifies what needs to be in this tavern a bar table a door and then your HTC Vive automatically detects where these things should go It generates the layout of the room to make sure you don t walk into that vase you have in the corner or accidentally put your knee through the TV To me VR is an amazing new environment to do p
31. account Simply click the Sign in with Twitter button to begin A window will then pop up to tell you Twitter s website will open Click OK then log into Twitter unless you re already logged in Note that you ll probably want set up a new Twitter account to just use for remotely controlling your PC otherwise your followers will see all of your commands AUTHORIZE THE APP On the page that opens click Authorize app It says the app will Post Tweets for you butit won t post anything you don t want it to it just needs this to send the remote controls to your PC hist we graniti acess fo Tweet iy PEI a a g E m 5 limes and Hale 66 mum Nov 2015 maximumpc com Supported Comment eril an 3 Cope Dil yu liabi Tim omean m ne REO cm B Gn GU n AAPA us ILEI LPP pE mee amg aai sama ee prr BiN LAR EFF r Kal HUM GEL QI FE LE EH OC sa EN trare Th pemer Ahr ERAF AF Eg pna FF RE LS I IE hu S m ER I UTE I numis iki aka ages pr rg fn es rum mal bem mori Pol eerily eae reas pr korr fus un 1 LIS Dr ee 4 Dl mew wr a
32. and GPU space nothing moves that needle further forward more than games Games are about to get a major rejuvenation in how theyre made and designed thanks to DirectX 12 coming in with Windows 10 Lower level APIs allow game code to get much closer to the metal than they do today giving developers greater headroom to create more astonishing and realistic effects A technique called procedural generation is becoming more popular as a way to create dynamically generated worlds and play mechanics in games Imagine a game world that looked different every time you played it or that modified levels on the fly based on how you play It s all been done before but is increasing in popularity among developers as we find out on page 50 Instead of demanding more from the CPU and GPU we should demand more from devs After that everything else will fall into place Tuan Nguyen is Maximum PC s editor in chief also known as the pointy end of the stick He s been writing marketing and raising hell in the tech industry for 19 years m Y Jhb fk maximumpc com NOV 2015 quickstart the beginning of the magazine where the articles are small gU NWS Windows 10 Update Headaches Is the greater good worth the potential grief AFTER MONTHS of anticipation prerelease testing and nonstop hype Windows 10 is finally here The reception so far has been much more positive than it was for Windows 8
33. entire universe on this scale would require a computer that s larger and more complex than the simulation The view from Maximum PC s window is definitely real Therefore reject fully detailed simulated universe However we could be living in a partial simulation Just as today s computer games simulate only one or a few main characters in some detail and fake the rest it s possible our universe works the same way Maybe the simulation creates a local instance of subatomic level detail only when a sclentist peers through an electron microscope or operates a particle accelerator Or maybe only one person is a fully detailed simulation for which everything else is either faked or created on the fly A fully simulated Paris wouldn t exist until this person goes there and it s faked again when they leave Maybe that person is me Maybe it s you But if our universe is as vast and complex as it appears the physical limits on computer power tell me it must be real Tom Halfhill was formerly a senior editor for Byte maga zine and is now an analyst for Microprocessor Report maximumpc com NOV 2015 MAXIMUMPE 1 Build your ultimate PC system with the epitome of SSD performance endurance and reliability Designed from the enthusiast heritage of the Vector Series the pedigreed Vector 180 comes enhanced with OC s Power Failure Management Plus PFM ensuring that you and your system are up and running after sudd
34. far smoother and more enjoyable Lastly you ll need the right kind of Windows 10 an ISO or DVD as the Windows 8 upgrade process replaces your Windows 8 product key with a Windows 10 one IAN EVENDEN VMWARE PLAYER Download it for free for non commercial use from http vmw re 1J8x5At CREATE A VIRTUAL MACHINE Once in VMware Player hit Create a New Virtual Machine and choose whether you re installing from an ISO ora DVD It s worth noting that although this tutorial covers Win10 you can also use this process to test any OS that can be downloaded from the net such as Linux if you 3 VMware Player for Windows 64 bit About This Product don t have a spare and don t fancy dual booting imas TY VERI IE Seow Catala Dicis Hien a A KEY DECISION Meare Player for Liriux 64 bit Linus Domis HFF AAT d VMware will ask for your Windows product key on the next page and you can type itin if you like or wait until later We found with a Windows 10 preview build that putting the key in at the beginning led to an unrecoverable error later on which we ll get to shortly Put in your name and a password then click Next FH Dia While your CPU may be capable of virtualizing an operating system there s no guarantee it ll be able to do it without some tinkering AMD chips should have AMD V on by default but our Asus 277 motherboar
35. firmly believe these incidents are simply growing pains for an exciting new advancement in operating system technology Its still early in the game though we suspect the next few months will decide if Microsoft sticks with this approach or gives back control to users PL 12 MAXIMUMPG NOV 2015 maximumpc com CyberPower recommends Windows Windows 10 Home AMD FX 6300 Processor GIGABYTE GA970A D3 AMD 970A USB 3 0 amp SATA Ill CORSAIR 8GB DDR3 1600Mhz Dual Channel Memory 2TB SATA Ill 7200 RPM HD 32MB Cache AMD Radeon R7 370 4GB Direct X 12 Video Zalman Gaming Headset NZXT Source 340 Orange Asetek Liquid Cooling System Liquid Cooling Windows 10 Home AMD Athlon X4 840 AMD A88 Chipset MB USB 3 0 and SATA III CORSAIR 4GB DDR3 1600 Mhz Dual Channel Memory 500GB SATA Ill 6 0 7200 RPM 32MB Cache AMD Radeon R7 360 4SGB Video Logitech Wireless Game Controller Syber Mini ITX Gaming Case 350Watt XY AMDZ Tan Yn we afi did Get 8 Cores in your System DFRSEATE THE FL OF YOUR DREAMS Windows 10 Home AMD FX 6300 Processor GIGABYTE AMD FX990 USB 3 0 amp SATA Ill CORSAIR 16GB DDR3 1600Mhz Dual Channel Memory 2TB SATA Ill HDD 7200RPM 64MB Cache AMD Radeon R9 380 4GB Direct X 12 Video Zalman Gaming Headset Thermaltake Core V31Gaming 600Watt 80 Power Asetek Liquid Cooling System Liquid Cooling Window
36. for Windows 10 basically sets all kinds of legal restrictions on your use of the software The restrictions are draconian by many counts and actually look like the polar opposite of rights granted in free software licenses The real concerning details are in the Microsoft Privacy Statement http aka ms privacy The standard set of data collection applies here If you use Microsoft s services they have to collect any data you supply in order to deliver them to the recipients make them searchable by Cortana and provide alerts and smart searches The problem with this is that Microsoft says it shares that data with Microsoft controlled The BitLocker recovery key is automatically backed up in your OneDrive account affiliates and subsidiaries with vendors working on our behalf when required by law or to respond to legal process to protect our customers to protect lives to maintain the security of our services and to protect the rights or property of Microsoft So if you let Cortana see your emails an FBI subpoena can get them too Sounds great My favorite part is that if Microsoft has to protect its property and rights it will happily share your data Tell me more oh electronic scroll of impending doom opened up the Windows heading to look at what the operating system itself had in store Sure Bing and Outlook com collect your stuff but wanted to know what the OS itself did What found in the device encr
37. from our June 2013 issue Gordon s LGA1155 based Core 15 build won the battle which pitted three 750 rigs against one another The battle was over two years ago and this already less than attractive case didn t get any prettier with time But with a little TLC we were able to resurrectthis rig and get ita little more up to speed L4 E LJ Ld _ Li zz 68 MAXIMUM PE NOV 2015 maximumpc com INHALE IN GORDON S ORIGINAL BUILD the PC had a quad core i5 3350P at its heart The CPU served the rig well in the competition two years ago and cost 176 back then If you can still find it it now runs about 185 He mounted the CPU onto a 65 ECS H77H2 M3 mobo which is a basic board that gets the job done The same mobo is 40 today For memory Gordon went with a low profile Kingston 4GB kit of DDR3 1333 The kit was 26 back then and is around 22 now The Gigabyte GeForce GTX 660 OC got replaced with a more modern GTX 970 in our upgrade The old GTX 660 cost 216 two years ago and can be found for 150 online today The storage options were modest as well The A Data 32GB SSD 900GB WD Caviar Blue and Lite On iHAS DVD RW didn t exactly set the world on fire and cost 45 55 and 16 respectively The SSD costs nearly the same now at 40 while the WD Caviar Blue Western Digital has since dropped the Caviar from the product name is available for about 55 as well We found the
38. full web browser and no email client As a matter of fact many of the Google Play apps are walled off and only curated Android TV apps are downloadable from the Google Play store on the device Measuring 8 3x5 1x1 inches the Shield is smaller than you expect The little device is running Android Lollipop and has two USB 3 0 ports and an Ethernet port Our 200 unit came with 16GB of internal storage which isn t much but considering most Android games and apps are quite small coupled with the fact it has a microSD card slot ensures it isn t the end of the world Setting it up is pretty easy You simply log into your Gmail account with the included wireless Shield controller essentially the same controller that Nvidia packaged with its Shield tablet last year You ll be using the controller s built in mic a lot as Android TV is largely designed around voice commands If you don t want to use voice commands there s also an onscreen keyboard As a _movie video watching machine the Shield is the best set top box out there It supports Hulu Netflix Plex Kodi YouTube and more The device also acts as a Chromecast To top it off the box supports 4K video at 60fps over HDMI 2 0 When it comes to gaming the Shield is largely a mixed bag When we reviewed the original Shield portable back in 2013 we complained that AAA Android games were few and far between The situation hasn t improved much in the past two year
39. gen is always a sort of collaboration between the programmer the program code and the player You cant dictate the outcome as precisely as you can in traditional production methods and that makes it more interesting Also in terms of art and music generative proc gen work has its own sort of aesthetic that comes from its ability to produce large numbers of variations on a theme all of which are different but maintain a shared style Several of Dr Bettss games have involved procedural generation Sir Are d Angelina generates entire games though they can look quite plain kkrieger used procedural generation to shrink the game to just 96kb You Being Hunted for example uses a procedural system to generate all the terrain housing flora and fauna in its open world Procedural generation can aid the creation of all kinds of game worlds especially in the case of large open world games or anything with roguelike aspects It can help smaller teams build larger environments and it can automate or assist many of the processes involved in larger studio production pipelines We ll undoubtedly see the usage of PCG tools and methods grow as games increase in complexity and production cost Cook has yet another motivation to use procedural generation the reintroduction of genuine exploration to games Minecraft showed an entire generation of gamers how procedurally generated worlds could inspire a sense of discove
40. iHAS online for 6 As for the Rosewill case it s now out of stock on Newegg When Gordon got it the basic steel case cost 61 With a copy of Win8 the rig cost 750 Without the OS 90 the total dropped to 660 With current pricing and without an OS Gordon s rig would cost 579 today That s about the same price as a reference model GTX 980 As for our upgrades we gave this little rig new wings at a cost of 661 EYE IN THE SKY THE GTX 970 WE UPGRADED to was by far the most expensive investment in the upgrade At 354 this GPU is a good 150 more than a GTX 960 that has nearly the same form factor Since Gordon went with a 660 OC in his original build we wanted to put in a card that had clear performance gains but wouldn t let the modest Core i5 hold it back Even though we regularly build with GTX 980s and above the GTX 970 is still a very capable graphics card for 1080p gaming The GTX 970 s modest TDP of 145W meant that we didn t have to go crazy with our power supply either The card only takes a single 8 pin power connector which is nice considering the lack of cable management options in the case ALITTLE MORE LIFT WE KNOW THAT it could be argued that 4GB of memory is plenty for a budget rig but we really feel that 8GB makes the OS and any games feel a lot more comfortable After all there s a good chance you won t be gaming all the time Browsers photo editing and audio applications all get memory hungry
41. making up their face is that this particular neural network called Deep Dream has been fed data from ImageNet a database of 14 million human labeled images But Google only uses a small sample of the database which contains fine grained classification on 120 dog sub classes It s the opposite of Mandelbrot s images Instead of seeing the same pattern as we go deeper into the image the computer sees the same pattern everywhere it looks Sadly the pattern happens to be that of a dog Maximum PC s Tuan gets the Google Deep Dream treatment Yes this is terrifying We re off to scratch our eyes out maximumpc com NOV 2015 MAXIMUM PG 53 interested in the development of aids to game development which also come under the heading of procedural generation There s a lot of interest in building software that can help people design games either by learning how humans design or using a big database of rules For example imagine feeding every Team Fortress 2level into a machine learning system and then using that System to evaluate comment on and even adjust levels designed by modders The other big thrust is the automation of new areas of game design moving out of the same old areas like dungeons and levels and looking into generating other harder kinds of content I m really excited by this move There are genres out there that we can t imagine right now because we re waiting for new generators to come a
42. memory tech but the GTX 980 is cheaper and less power hungry SPECIFICATIONS GPU GM 204 CUDA Cores 2 048 Memory Capacity 4GB GDDRS MSI GTX 980 Gaming E3 GAME ON Still a great GPU quality cooling sterling 1440p perf El GAME OVER Not a 4K gamer with that 4GB 470 www msi com MAIMUMPG NOV 2015 maximumpc com Graphics Cards Supertest XFX Radeon R9 390X ITS REALLY EASY to get caught whining about feeling misled about this generation of AMD cards The Fury cards and their Fiji GPUs are the only new graphics silicon AMD has really put the time into for this year s launch Everything else is essentially a rebranded version of the last gen option with a few light tweaks here and there But those tweaks have made a real difference While this Grenada XT GPU is little more than the Hawaii XT chip from the oU R9 290X AMD has squeezed a little more speed from its clocks an extra 50MHz and doubled the memory Whether thats enough to mean the GPU deserves a new name is neither here nor there While the R9 390X is a lot quicker than the R9 290X it s replacing it s also effectively the same price Now before we get ahead of ourselves that 8GB frame buffer isn t going to suddenly deliver 4K gaming performance for this aging architecture there s almost no difference between the 290X and 390X at the highest resolution but it does deliver p
43. not fully satisfied we will issue a full refund upon the return of all original equipment 1 Year Parts and Labor Limited Warranty Lifetime Toll Free Technical Support Sager One Year Limited Warranty Two Year Limited Warranty and Three Year Limited Warranty Policy Applies to End Users in the United States of America only Extended Warranty Available Check out this comprehensive package of service support Sager Corporate Offices 18005 Cortney Court City of Industry California 91748 Tel 626 964 8682 Fax 626 964 2381 Hours Monday Friday 7 30a m 6p m PST American Express VISA MasterCard amp Discover Credit Cards Accepted No Surcharge Cashiers Checks Welcomed 2015 by Midern Computer Inc All rights reserved Ultrabook Celeron Celeron Inside Core Inside Intel Intel Logo Intel Atom Intel Atom Inside Intel Core Intel Inside Intel Inside Logo Intel vPro Itanium Itanium Inside Pentium Pentium Inside vPro Inside Xeon Xeon Phi and Xeon Inside are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U S and or other countries This PC is preloaded with trial version of Microsoft Office 365 Purchase an Office Product Key to activate full version Office software All company and or product names mentioned herein are trademarks and or registered trademarks of their respective companies Prices and specifications are subject to change without notice Opened software and shipping charges are non refundable 30 Day money back guarantee does not includ
44. on the fly so that we could get more use out of the samples we were able to squish in the package The levels were not procedurally generated we didn t experiment with that until our 2010 game Microbot Naked Sky s latest game Scrapforce has mostly avoided procedural generation save for an interesting sounding stochastic Al system And RoboBlitz isn t the smallest game made using procedural techniques that prize almost certainly goes to kkrieger a 2004 shooter that s only 96KB but is very impressive for its size HARD LIMITATIONS Despite all these positives there are limits to procedural generation Firstly it can be processor intensive Dwarf Fortress can take several minutes to get a game going despite only displaying its graphics in ASCII Gamers who are used to the rapid loading of mobile games might find this frustrating And it s power hungry too as Cook explains If you re generating things like stories or special abilities for an you want to know that they make sense that they re balanced that they re fun That s an extremely difficult thing to test and it often needs a lot of playtesting That means more computing power Another problem is that procedural generation works best in clearly delineated areas Because it s so hard to define things like beauty or fun proceduralgeneration often stays in areas where it knows it can perform In those areas it s commonplace Procedural art syst
45. powered card aiming squarely at the same price point as the GTX 950 Ti It will essentially be using the same Pitcairn GPU that AMD filled out the R9 270X with and it will be interesting to see who comes out on top in the battle at the bottom of the market There are also rumors that AMD is hard at work putting together a full range of HBM supported graphics cards to follow the Fiji model used in the Fury cards Whether that will be as part of an interim refresh of the current chips isn t known but that s probably unlikely We expect the current lineup to last until the next AMD GPU architecture drops next year With the Maxwell GPU architecture having been around for a good long while now since early 2014 with the GTX 750 Ti Inna Li dem Li d mom acm n 9 pm aS mA pa iE ga EM n The Nvidia Pascal demo board is some seriously small silicon from last September with the full fat GTX 980 cores it s time to start thinking about what s coming next The next gen of graphics cards from both Nvidia and AMD is going to see a major cut in the production process This is the big news from the next round of architecture updates and the reason for this current gen being slightly different to what we expected When the two companies first started talking about their Maxwell and Pirate Islands GPU ranges it was largely expected that these would be the fir
46. s GeForce GTX 950 Mainstream gamers rejoice IF THERE S ONE THING we love more than fast GPUs it s affordable and fast GPUs The best selling graphics cards of all time have generally come from the 150 200 sweet spot and for those users looking to balance price and performance skipping a couple of generations between upgrades is generally the way to go You ll miss out on some features and performance but even moderate hardware from a few years back can still run most games well at 1080p Nvidia is going after these infrequent mainstream upgraders with its latest Maxwell 2 0 graphics card the GTX 950 We re now into our third generation 28nm parts Nvidia has worked around the problem by focusing on efficiency spearheaded by its Maxwell architecture Its first Maxwell GPU was the GTX 750 Ti which offered extremely impressive performance in a 75W part From there we jumped to the Maxwell 2 0 parts but these have so far targeted enthusiasts with the least expensive part being the 200 GTX 960 The 960 is a great card for 1080p gaming but what if you re willing to settle for lower performance if it means saving some cash Enter the GTX 950 Until now the 150 price point has been ruled by the GTX 750 Ti and while it s around 79 percent faster than the GTX 650 plenty of people held off upgrading According to the July 2015 Steam hardware survey the GTX 650 is still the fifth most popular dedicated GPU just ahead of
47. size Today were growing accustomed to an endless increase in our computer s storage capacity drives are now commonplace But in areas of constraint procedural generation can massively reduce file sizes even eliminate the need for in game assets When Naked Sky Entertainment s game RoboBlitz launched on PC and Xbox 360 in 2006 Microsoft decided that the largest downloadable game it would allow on the system was a tiny 50MB to fit on one of their tiny for the time memory sticks Yet RoboBlitz was the first game to run the then revolutionary Unreal 3 engine As Naked Sky s chief technical officer Joshua Glazer told us they used lots of tricks to get the game down to under 50MB among them procedural generation All those levels would have loaded a lot faster if it weren t for Microsoft s 90MB requirement coupled with the requirement that we couldnt have any kind of install process that unpacked the game after download says Glazer We procedurally generated the textures for everything except Blitz the hero and the baddies Pretty much every single square inch of the levels and most of the props were procedurally textured using Allegorithmic s cool procedural texture gen tools Also all the animation was procedurally driven by physics We also Minecraft s genius is in combining a procedural world with user customization Procedural Generation procedurally modified our sound effects
48. the only high performance card worth spending money on right now The 6GB frame buffer and exceptional gaming performance will mean that even when the 16nm GPU Zotac GTX 980 TI Arctic Storm Graphics Cards Supertest 1 1 revolution happens next year it will still be able to hold its head up high in the performance stakes Nvidia s old GTX 980 could still be worth a go if you can find it for closer to 400 again it s not going to cope well with the 4K future with its older GPU and 4GB frame buffer but it s an absolute rock at 1440p Many versions come super quiet and super cool Surprisingly the rebranded Hawaii cards specifically the excellent R9 390 have made themselves more worthy than we initially expected The 390X is impressive for the fact it outperforms its 290X forebear But then so does the straight 390 and for considerably less cash And that 8GB memory capacity means the 390 is going to still be gaming happily at 1440p for a good while to come even when the Arctic Islands and Pascal GPUs arrive sometime next year This Sapphire R9 390 Nitro is the other bright spot in our supertest and is the one we d recommend for a midrange card Down atthe bottom of the pile the much maligned GTX 970 still has some skills but with the performance of the 390 and its hefty frame buffer the GTX 970 is not going to be able to stand out against the AMD card And propping things up at the real budget end where the
49. the GTX 950 arrives to replace the ol GTX 750 GPUs at any rate And what that means is were talking about a resolutely 1080p gamer s card You can of course run a monitor from this GPU but even at 1440p settings you ll struggle to play the latest games at top settings with any semblance of buttery smooth gaming Throw this Asus STRIX card at anything running on a 1080p screen though and that s exactly what you ll get BFZ runs like a dream at top settings and you can get great performance out of V too Shadow of Mordor s texture pack though is still seriously demanding even at 1080p so we only saw 36fps on average which is still just about acceptable The big issue with this card is that 2GB frame buffer Where once that was plenty in this brave new resolution heavy world of ours it s simply not enough for the most demanding of games and is likely to leave you wanting when new titles drop in the big gamegasm this fall But when it s coated in Asus s STRIX armor it s still a tempting 200 GPU The OdB cooler only spins up when you get up to gaming speeds and even then this card stays seriously cool and quiet At this end of the market though AMD has got it sewn up again The competing R9 380 is similarly priced and rocks that 46B frame buffer to give it some much needed longevity SPECIFICATIONS GPU GM 206 CUDA Cores 1 024 Memory Capacity i 26B GDDR5 Mz Asus GTX 960 STRIX E STRUCK OUT Weedy
50. the GTX 750 Ti The most popular discrete GPU right now is the GTX 970 But at 330 it remains out of reach for many Now the GTX 950 takes over the 150 market and unlike the first generation 750 Ti it has the Maxwell 2 0 features like MFAA VXGI and third generation delta color compression So what can you expect from the GTX 950 Nvidia is showing up to 3x the performance of the GIX 650 with 2x the performance per watt Note that the GIX 950 does require a 6 pin PEG connector thanks to its 9OW TDP though that should also give it plenty of overclocking headroom Nvidia has also been working on GeForce Experience and one of the new features 15 low latency optimizations for MOBA games like LoL Dota 2 and Heroes of the Storm For competitive gamers looking for every possible advantage Nvidia used a high speed camera to show that its low latency optimizations were able to reduce the latency from 80ms on a GTX 650 to 45ms on a GTX 950 even with the GTX 950 running higher quality settings Getting back to features and reasons to upgrade Maxwell 2 0 has some useful additions probably the most beneficial being MFAA Multi Frame Anti Aliasing Using some special sauce MFAA is able to provide 4x MSAA quality with the performance hit of 2x MSAA Depending on the game the benefit is a 10 30 percent increase in frame rates The catch is that MFAA is still more demanding than no AA at all and with hardware like the GTX 950 th
51. to both CPU and GPU In traditional interfaces that would introduce latency issues across the PCle connection Stacked high bandwidth memory is the future of video memory when communicating between CPU and GPU But with Pascal Nvidia 15 introducing a new Interface called NVLink On our PCs however NVLink proper still looks a while off see Is NVLink the end for PCle right AMD s Arctic Islands architecture also due in 2016 could be AMD s first new GPU architecture since the inception of the Graphics Core Next design at the beginning of 2012 It has mentioned a doubling of the performance per watt efficiency of its high performance range of GPUs It s unlikely to be too radical a departure from the current GCN architecture though especially given mixing a new production process with a brand new architecture can be a recipe for disaster Though that is also the route that Nvidia happens to be taking with Pascal What we do know is that the successor to the top Fiji GPU of today will have the Greenland codename and will sport the same second gen memory architecture as the Nvidia cards HBM 2 0 That will mean huge potential frame buffers all around The Arctic Islands range will also utilize the 16nm FinFET technology which is arguably how it s going to be able to nail the 2x perf per watt target that AMD has set itself With the introduction of the new lithography and the promise of HBM being used througho
52. you ll end up trying to achieve a 126Hz overclock Which we think is theoretically impossible at this point in time Tf DX12and Skylake gaming capable TM laptops anyone next phase may change how we look at the world entirely It s an exciting time to be a tech enthusiast that s for sure Don t forget to check out our review of the Skylake chips on page 76 5 maximumpc com NOV 2015 MAXIMUM 47 Centerfold allal 220 PERFORMANCE GEAR LAID BARE ue DDR4 Support Skylake supports up to 64GB of dual channel DDR4 memory with this board remaining stable at memory frequencies higher than 3 600MHz 2 Rear 1 0 Cover The addition of a rear 1 0 cover hides all of the ugliness of those connectors and gives your motherboard and rig a cleaner all around look Build yourself a PC you can be proud of 48 uu NOV 2015 maximumpc com SKYLAKE HAS DROPPED and with it comes access to a whole new plethora of mobo options from the common names we all know and love None so more than MSI a company renowned for its military grade components This MSI Z170A Gaming M7 is no exception and it s one of many in MSI s renewed gaming lineup Being the middle child in a product series is always difficult for any component part and thats never more true than in MSI Z170A Gaming M7 Steel PCle Slots The main PCle slots come plated in MSI s Steel Armor tech That adds strength plus p
53. 2V rail s can also be manually configured PLATINUM quickstart JUAN La SUN ILE The Reality of HoloLens Draws Near MPC talks to Microsofts AR mastermind The tech world has excitedly watched virtual realitys ascent so it was a big moment when Microsoft announced its augmented reality contender the potentially game changing HoloLens earlier this year Eager to learn more we spoke to Microsoft corporate vice president Kudo Tsunoda of Kinect fame who has now taken the HoloLens reins HoloLens will really change the way people communicate work and play says Tsunoda 20 MAXIMUMPG NOV 2015 maximumpc com Maximum Can you tell us more about HoloLens Kudo Tsunoda Sure HoloLens is a fully untethered holographic computer powered by Windows 10 What that means 15 that instead of having your digital apps digital assets locked to the boundaries of screens were able to break them out turn them into holograms and put them right into your real world And this has some amazing applications and will really change up the ways people can communicate the way they can work the way they can learn One of the things we found now that youre able to create 3D assets in 3D 15 that people can get in and sculpt their own holograms It s really unlocking people s creativity in a new way l m just happy to show off how holograms can really impact the world of gaming MPC Can you delve into t
54. 4 0 207 042 4000 London Tel 444 0 1225 442 244 Bath 2015 Future US Inc All rights reserved No part of this magazine may be used or reproduced without the written permission of Future US Inc owner All information provided is as far as Future owner is aware based on information correct at the time of press Readers are advised to contact manufacturers and retailers directly with regard to products services referred to in this magazine We welcome reader submissions but cannot promise that they will be published or returned to you By submitting materials to us you agree to give Future the royalty free perpetual non exclusive right to publish and reuse your submission in any form in any and all media and to use your name and other information in connection with the submission LL 1 1 1 j I thing or two about thing or two e dito Tl al luan ITS THE APPLICATION PUSHING HARDWARE THERE ARE TWO major components inside a PC that usually garner the most attention when the news hits the wires the CPU and the GPU and rightly so Both components can truly make or break a great PC experience considering they handle just about every task Coincidently both AMD and Intel have new parts on the scene for graphics and general processing respectively Consider then AMD s new Fury and Fury X the company s latest flagship cards based on the Fiji architecture Unlike the Fury X w
55. 4K QFHD LED Display 3840x2160 30 days No Dead Pixel Guaranteed Insurance 3GB DDR5 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970M GPU with Optimus Technology 8GB DDR3 1600MHz Memory 120GB Samsung 850 EVO M 2 SSD 7200RPM Hard Drive 2 Hard Drives 2 M 2 SATA SSD Drives Capable with Raid 0 1 Function Full sized Keyboard with white LED backlight Killer Dual Band Wireless AC 1525 Bluetooth Built in 2 0M FHD Camera amp Fingerprint Reader Built in Onkyo speakers Sound Blaster X Fi MB3 Sound System Slim design with only 25mm 0 98 inch thin Customize and Instant Pricing at SAGERNOTEBOOK COM NP9752 Notebook 1 799 FREE UPS GROUND SHIPPING Windows 10 Home 64 bit Edition Ath Generation Intel Core 17 4790 Processor 8MB L3 Cache 3 60GHz 15 6 Full HD IPS LED Display 1920x1080 with Matte Finished Screen Opt 15 6 QFHD LED Display 3840x2160 w NVIDIA G SYNC Technology model NP9753 6GB DDR5 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970M GPU Optional NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M GPU Quadro M3000M M5000M GPU 8GB DDR3 1600MHz Memory 128GB Micron M600 M 2 SSD 1TB 7200RPM Hard Drive 2 Hard Drives 2 M 2 SATA SSD Drives or 2 M 2 PCle SSD Drives capable Hardware Raid 0 1 Function capable with SATA Interface Full sized Keyboard with color LED backlight Intel Dual Band Wireless AC 7265 Bluetooth Built in 2 0M FHD Camera amp Fingerprint Reader
56. 5 sec X264 HD 5 0 fps and monitor temps In case you want to access the inside of the chassis both the glass panel and the panel on the opposite can be removed via four thumb screws Once you re inside you ll notice a unique placement for the 600 watt SFX power supply Normally PSUs are tucked into the corners of a case but here it s just about smack dab in the middle and has slick Digital Storm branding on its top side Tucked behind it is the slim slot loading Blu ray player At the top of the case is a 240mm radiator and there are also two Corsair static pressure fans to go along with it All of this is wrapped up in a chassis with a black brushed aluminum finish On the front of the case you ve got headphone and mic input two USB 3 0 ports and the power button And in case you were wondering the Bolt 3 can be used standing up or laid flat on its side EYE FOR DETAIL While Digital Storm enables you to customize your rig the company sent us a configuration with a Core i7 4790K CPU overclocked to 4 6GHz 16GB of Corsair Dominator Platinum RAM clocked at 1 866MHz and a GeForce GTX 980 Ti from EVGA that was overclocked by 200MHz across the board All of this was sitting atop an Asus Maximus VII Impact motherboard For storage we ve got 250GB Samsung 850 EVO 55 and a 1 7 200rpm hard drive from Seagate For a little bit more future proofing we would have liked a 2TB HDD considering our configuration cos
57. 600K Processors with Intel 2170 Chipset Only nherently this generation of chips is vastly different than Haswell and the Devils Canyon offering that we received last year Primarily this is up to Intel s decision to remove the FIVR from the chip design The FIVR or Fully Integrated Voltage Regulator was a component piece of the CPU found in any previous generation of Intel processor Its sole purpose was to regulate and control the overall voltage that went directly into each part of the compute portion of the CPU such as the DRAM controller and the VCore By removing this Intel has handed voltage control to the motherboard manufacturers This means that instead of a standardized level of voltage operating across the entire platform its now possible for board partners to implement specific voltages for each of those compute portions we mentioned earlier BASE CLOCK BATTLES But are they cooler than Devil s Canyon Skylake is quite cold no doubt partly due to the removal of the FIVR we mentioned earlier This enables you to ramp up the core clock frequency considerably without worrying about thermally throttling the chip But youre still going to need an Conclusion Se what does Skylake mean to PC enthusiasts like us Well probably that if you re a few generations behind or building a new rig Skylake should be a strong consideration Intel is still top dog when it comes to single and multithreaded processor performa
58. 65M RAM 8GB DDR3 Screen 2 15 6 inch IPS 1920x1080 Chipset Intel HM97 m 1286B mSATA SSD 3 1TB HDD Weight Slb 8oz Asus N550J 10 51 12 33 6 23 9 27 7 29 658 573 Best scores are bolded All tests run at each laptops native resolution maximumpc com NOV 2015 m DIONE MICHELIN Downforce matters YT when you re inches from death Dirt Rally tll leave skid marks on more than your screen Codemasters s smooth running Dirtseries hit a filthy great pothole otherwise known as Dirt Showdown Sure this wasn t necessarily the greatest disappointment in racing game history it s up against Need for Speed ProStreet and Test Drive Unlimited 2 for that honor but it marked a low point in the series s decline from rally simulator to arcade smash em up So just as any movie or game franchise still worth a buck inevitably gets a reboot Codemasters is back to repair the damage Dirt Rally is nothing like its predecessor It harks back to the original Colin McRae Rally games that started the series way back in 1998 focusing squarely on realistic rallying with none of the capture the flag antics of Dirt 3 If you re after that kind of arcade experience Rally won t get your motor running This is Codemasters gunning for sim status and the result is far more like a spiritual successor to 2004 s uncompromising Richard Burns Rally What made that game great as well as ea
59. 8220688 40612608 Subscriptions do not include newsstand specials POSTMASTER Send changes of address to Maximum PC PO Box 5852 Harlan IA 51593 1352 Standard Mail enclosure in the following editions None Ride Along enclosure in the following editions None Returns IMEX Global Solutions PO Box 25542 London ON N6C 6B2 Canada Future US Inc also publishes Gamer MaclLife The Official Xbox Magazine and PC Gamer Entire contents copyright 2015 Future US Inc All rights reserved Reproduction in whole or in part is prohibited Future US Inc is not affiliated with the companies or products covered in Maximum PC Reproduction on the Internet of the articles and pictures in this magazine is illegal without the prior written consent of Maximum PC Products named in the pages of Maximum PC are trademarks of their respective companies PRODUCED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA techradar pro IT INSIGHTS FOR BUSINESS Top tablets for nate takin We pan aur hpa nob To Pese Tos esr n Nf Best practices Up to the and solutions 4 minute news http www techradar com pro HEHA GEFORCE GTA CUSTOMIZE NOW WWW DIGITALSTORM COM DIGITALS TORM 799 A 1 TR 5 a B Pr mx LET i mo S AME 99106 0006
60. AMER 0245 Windows 10 Home AMD A10 7700K Processor AMD Radeon R9 370 4GB Gigabyte F2A88X D3H MB 8GB DDR3 1600 Corsair Memory 1TB SATA III Hard Drive 24X DVD RW Drive 120 mm Liquid CPU Cooling System ARC 647 Gaming Case 600W Power Supply Customizable GAMER MAGE D295 Windows 10 Home 3 AMD FX 9370 Processor AMD Radeon R9 390X 8GB Video Card Gigabyte GA 990FXA UD3 MB 8GB DDR3 1600 Corsair Memory 120 GB SSD 1TB SATA II Hard Drive 24X DVD RW Drive 120 mm Liquid CPU Cooling System Noctis 450 iBUYPOWER Edition Gaming Case 00W Power Supply 1299 Customizable Call Us Customize Online 888 462 3899 ibuypower com AMD the AMD Arr daga AMID FA AND Pleat T and combinstipns heredi ase trademarks af Advanced Micro Devices Mni SKINY levels with the first native 8 core desktop processor built with dynamic tuneable performance These 5 feature Windows 10 to deliver new enhancements that make it easier to find your games music and settings along with some of the familiarity of Windows that you know and love REVOLT A660 Windows 10 Home AMD A10 7 700K Processor AMD Radeon R7 360 2GB Gigabyte GA F2A88XN WIFI ITX MB 8GB DDR3 1600 Corsair Memory 1TB 7200RPM Hard Drive 6x LG Slim Slot Load DVDRW 802 11 b g n WIFI Bluetooth evolt Mini Tower Gaming Case 350W Power Supply 799 Customizable GAMER
61. As a child remember being fascinated by Mandelbrot didn t at that time know what the word meant except that in the corner of our IT room at school was a single fast Macintosh SE that the IT teacher treasured and guarded The only thing he seemed to run on it was a Mandelbrot simulation which we used to sit and watch over our lunch break It would take ages to draw each screen as it zoomed in on each part of the structure which would always reveal more structure and even more complexity Eventually sometimes it would repeat A Mandelbrot drawing is a representation of a mathematical set the set of complex numbers that do not tend to infinity which is to say equations involving imaginary numbers which is to say numbers that involve the square root of 1 Which is to say that didn t take math past high school and this is really difficult to understand So promise there won t be any more equations in this article Really More interestingly for our purposes is that whatever else Mandelbrot is it s an equation that throws up astounding complexity and beauty without the user having to create anything themselves Look closely and you can see it features spirals valleys seahorses tentacles antennae double hooks islands The mind s eye sees cityscapes ships people holding hands trees and organic structures that have never existed And all this is created from an equation Well only with a computer
62. B SSDs that operate independently and a 2TB disk N submit your questions to doctor maximumpccom 22 Nov 2015 maximumpe com Meanwhile the PC he uses to capture uncompressed video for GPU benchmarking has four Crucial m4s in RAID 0 Their sequential throughput is imperative to avoid dropped frames at 2560x1440 despite the risk of a failed drive bringing down the whole array This is a judgement call Matt but ina daily driver machine the Doc avoids striped configurations Minimizing vulnerability is key to maximizing uptime and with so much performance available from drives like your 850 Pros the risk hardly seems worthwhile Yes you ll see significantly higher sequential transfer rates To what end though And if one drive goes out your data is lost Then again you did call out video editing If you re truly serious about that why not snag another smaller SSD for Windows and use the two 850 Pros in RAID 0 for working with those large files Where Are They Now Doc built my current system a Core i7 960 with 6GB of RAM on an MSI Big Bang Xpower mobo about five years ago and it s served me well updated the videocard from a Radeon HD 5870 to an R9 290X But with consumer HMDs around the corner and Win10 out it s time for a new system I d like to cut costs without sacrificing much performance so l m going to keep using the R9 290X Is there any reason couldn t also reuse my P
63. C Power amp Cooling Turbo Cool 1 200W PSU Also what happened to PC Power and Cooling Back in the day they were the company for PSUs But after they were acquired by OCZ they seemed to fade away Philip Hodgdon THE DOCTOR RESPONDS Indeed Philip PC Power and Cooling made great hardware The Doc Is still using its Pro Source 1500 uninterruptable power supply in fact When Toshiba acquired OCZ it wanted to focus on the SSD business So PC Power and Cooling was sold to athird party called FirePower Technology FirePower is supporting OCZ s previous customers by honoring their warranties With that said by all means continue using your Turbo Cool 1200W It s a beast of a power supply Fresh Windows 10 Dear Doctor have a home built PC running Win8 1 Recently signed up to get the free Win10 upgrade l m also planning on upgrading my mobo CPU GPU and memory within the next six months How then perform a clean install of Windows 10 Do have to first install Windows 8 and then upgrade again Or can create 150 once upgrade my hardware and boot from that am soooo confused Thank you Carlos Lozano THE DOCTOR RESPONDS Microsoft makes available a media creation tool Carlos which you can use to fashion your own bootable flash drive or DVD Download it here http bit ly 1lIFygh Once you upgrade it s no longer necessary to start with Win8 Alternatively if you plan to keep yo
64. ECIFICATIONS 2170 Chipset PCle Lanes 20 lanes Gen3 0 SATA Connectivity 6x SATA Ports eSATA USB Support 10x USB 3 0 14x USB 2 0 Ethernet 10 100 1000 MAC more difficult it becomes to split the laser down further Ultimately this 15 why it s taken Intel so long to go from the 22nm die size to 14nm and thus why Broadwell has had such a brief and rather unexciting shelf life We can only hope that this will not be the case for the 10nm chips PRICE POINTS But alas not all is lost If it wasn t for Broadwell s sacrifice we wouldn t have Skylake Thankfully its here and on schedule ensuring Intel s latest flagship dodged a similar fate We can only speculate about release dates at this point but rumor has it the full desktop lineup should be available by the end of this year with mobile laptop processors making it to market by early 2016 Again speculation and rumor on our part DDR4 memory is a crucial part of Intel s marketing strategy here Although it s the next natural progression the launch price 297 Chipset 8 Lanes Gen2 0 amp x SATA Ports eSATA amp x USB 3 0 8x USB 2 0 _10 100 1000 MAC This wafer is probably worth quite a bit point to DDR3 If you re still unsure what memory to choose however don t worry Intel has you covered Memory kits from the likes of Crucial Corsair G Skill Patriot Kingston and Adata have all been approved by Intel just to give you peace of mind
65. MAGE D355 Windows 10 Home AMD FX 8320 Processor AMD Radeon R9 380 4GB VC Gigabyte GA 970A D3P MB 8GB DDR3 1600 Corsair Memory ESD Wes SAV A TIBI 120 mm Liquid CPU Cooling System Chimera 5 Classic Phantom 240 Gaming Case 7OOW Power Supply Customizable Jain us b i Bipureower fot hange MAXIMUMPL EDITORIAL Editor in Chief Tuan Nguyen Executive Editor Alan Dexter Online Managing Editor Jimmy Thang Senior Editor Jarred Walton Associate Editor Alex Campbell Contributing Editors Chris Angelini Andrew Westbrook Contributing Writers Ben Andrews Matt Elliott lan Evenden Daniel Griliopoulos Tom Halfhill Matt Hanson Dave James Jeremy Laird Paul Lilly Kevin Parrish Mayank Sharma Zak Storey Copy Editor Mary Ricci Editor Emeritus Andrew Sanchez ART Group Art Director Steve Gotobed Art Editors Nick Aspell Fraser McDermott Photography Future Photo Studio Mark Madeo BUSINESS Vice President Sales Stacy Gaines sgaines dfutureus com Vice President Strategic Partnerships Isaac Ugay iugay afutureus com Account Director Michael Plump mplump afutureus com Account Director Tad Perez tperez dfutureus com Account Director Austin Park apark afutureus com Account Director Jessica Reinert jreinert afutureus com Account Director Ryan Lamvik rlamvik dfutureus com Account Director Elizabeth Fleischman efleischman afutureus c
66. PC You could have the most powerful 1 000 octo core Haswell E CPU in your rig but if you ve got a weedy GPU backing it up you re never going to be hitting the graphical heights that today s PC games deserve And it s a great time to buy a new graphics card right now Both the leading lights of GPU development Nvidia and AMD have finally released their graphics card lineups for this year with high end ultra enthusiast GPUs and super efficient lower end offerings And by the way for ultra enthusiast read eye wateringly wtf how much expensive While Nvidia has had it pretty much all its own way since the GTX 980 was released almost a year ago AMD has finally responded with a slew of new and some not so new GPUs to try and put it back in the game Correspondingly Nvidia has updated its range and dropped the prices hereand there Who wins Wealldo of course You can now go and bag yourself a quality high end graphics card for some pretty reasonable sums of money Which is why this month we got them all into one room for a GPU battle royale If this is the state of play in the graphics card market right now though what does the future hold for this pedigree racehorse of components Are we likely to have By Dave James genuinely affordable genuinely capable GPUs delivering the 4K experience on the next generation of high resolution gaming monitors And is the end nigh for the classic peripheral comp
67. Pi is 192 168 2 100 Fire up a terminal that s connected to the same router as the Pi and enter ssh pi a192 168 2 100 to connect to it After authenticating yourself into the Pi use iwconfig to make sure the wireless adapter is recognized by the device Now refresh its package list with sudo apt get update and install the software that will make it start to act as an access point with sudo apt get install hostapd isc dhcp server When it s installed it s time to set it up Begin by editing the etc dhcp dhcpd conf file that controls the DHCP and automatically assigns IP addresses to all connected devices Open it in the nano text editor with sudo nano etc dhcp dhcpd conf and comment out the following two lines by adding a in front of them so that they read option domain name example org option domain name servers ns1 example org ns2 example org In the same file scroll down and uncomment the word authoritative by removing the in front Then scroll down to the end of the file and add the following lines subnet 192 168 12 0 netmask 255 255 255 0 1 DO YOU USE TOR to prevent Big Brother tracking you online If so you ll know that while straightforward to use it can be a hassle to configure Tor on all of your Internet enabled devices You can save yourself a lot of hassle by using a Raspberry Pi as an anonymized wireless access point The Pi will dole out an IP address and then any device that s conne
68. TX 970 4GB VC 8GB DDR3 1600 Corsair Memory 1TB 7200 RPM HDD 120GB SSD Chimera 5 Phantom 240 Gaming Case 600W Power Supply FLU dele 4 74 Call Us Customize Online 888 462 3899 ibuypower com gt table of contents here we put stuf P 1 Gee d Nh poc a Y C 4 N ay E mp 1 WR 4 NOVEMBER 2015 QUICKSTART 12 THE NEWS gt Windows 10 update headaches E Lenovo bloatware Verizon s 10GB s service Intel Xeon for laptops XU T estis i EE 10 features 20 TALKING TECH _ Microsoft s Kudo Tsunoda gives us the lowdown on HoloLens HoloLens will feature a custom piece of MS silicon 58 Ripping into the GoPro Hero4 Session 60 Set up a Tor network on a Raspberry Pi RAID your SSD for more speed run Windows 10 on a virtual machine 68 26 42 50 Picking the right upgrades to breathe GRAPHICS CARD SKYLAKE LANDS PROCEDURAL SUPERTEST IN DEPTH REPORT GENERATION It s a great time to upgrade Become an Intel expert From Mandelbrot to LETTERS your graphics card so we ve as we investigate the new Minecraft we explore how put 10 of the best through architecture DDR4 memory math has become the new their paces in the Lab and the Z170 chipset game developer in town 22 DOCTOR 94 COMMENTS 6 MAXIMUMPE NOV 2015 maximumpc com POSEIDON Z THE POSEIDON Z RGB MA 3 MECHANICAL GAMING KE
69. YBOARD t Featuring 16 8 million colors with customized lighting controls Tt Certified blue or brown switches and the It ESPORTS 5 year warranty Learn more at ttesports com Tess LINES IL LII CyberPower recommends Windows gt experience for everything E M inyour life PC of Your Dreams Trinity 200 Windows 10 Home Intel Core i5 6600K Processor Gamer Xtreme XT Windows 10 Home Intel Core i7 5720K Processor GIGABYTE X99 Chipset Mainboard CORSAIR 16GB DDR4 2400MHz Quad Channel Memory 256GB SSD 2TB SATA III 6 0 7200RPM HD 32MB Cache Nvidia Geforce GTX 980 4GB Direct X 12 Video Card Zalman Gaming Headset NZXT Source 340 Gaming Case with 600 Watt 80 Power Asetek Liquid Cooling System GIGABYTE 7170 Chipset Mainbaord with UBS 3 1 CORSAIR 166B DDR4 2400 Mhz Dual Channel Memory 2406B SSD 2TB SATA II 3 0 7200 RPM HD Nvidia Geforce GTX 960 46B Video Card Zalman Gaming Headset Deepcool Tri Stellar Mini ITX Gaming Case 600Watt Ce 1 8X x RW HD7 1600W CoolerMaster CoolerMaster amp gt 4 EL Blu ray 14x HD 7 1600 W CoolerMaster amp CoolerMaster amp FREE Liquid Cooling All Desktop systems come with 3 year Limited Warranty lifetime toll free techsupport Your Unlimited Caming Solutions Celeron Celeron Inside Centrino Centrino Inside Centrino Lo
70. a few kinds of coffee When the lower orders knew their place And when a USB port was just a damned USB port Well wake up and smell the bandwidth because things have become a lot more complicated Enter the Asus Z170 A and its plethora of USB ports Part of the problem is avoidable and entirely the fault of motherboard makers You see they ve taken to dressing up the USB 3 0 5Mb s standard as USB 3 1 gen1 at the same time as calling what used to be USB 3 1 10Mb s USB 3 1 gen2 It s all baffling and making a bad situation worse Check out the rear panel on the new Asus Z170 A It packs no fewer than three different types of USB port You ve got your common or garden USB 2 0 ports Then there s some USB 3 0 ports USB 3 1 gen1 ports if you re a silly mobo maker and a lone USB 3 1 socket Rounding it out is the real newbie a USB 3 1 Type C port which is much smaller than a standard Type A port and reversible which means you can just stuff the connector in and it ll work like Apple s Lightning connector Of course that USB complexity applies to all of the Z170 boards we ve seen So what marks out Asus s Z170 A Not its build quality that s for sure The PCB is skinny and cheap looking A bit of white plastic surrounding the panel of rear ports doesn t change that Actually it probably wouldn t hurt airflow to get rid of it It s not exactly bursting with features either though the price point makes that inevitab
71. a frighteningly expensive Asus 32 inch IGZO panel great looking but wallet destroying From there it was either weaker panel tech in trim for the larger screen sizes or too expensive IPS technology Or you could compromise and go forasmaller screen space paired witha finer panel This is the route Viewsonic has taken with its latest 4K monitor Matching Samsungs PLS panel technology IPS by any other name would smell as sweet with a 24 inch screen size means Viewsonic can offer lovely looking image fidelity for around 400 In 4K terms that s a bit of a bargain Pretty much any other 4K panel you d care to mention at that price will be resolutely TN Not that today s twisted nematic tech 15 as bad as the old days both the color reproduction and viewing angles are much improved but it s still nowhere near the image quality you ll get from a bona fide IPS screen And the oh so similar PLS technology in this Viewsonic panel is top end 8 bit style so it s rocking 16 7 million colors and full SRGB color depth The white reproduction on this screen then is pretty much immaculate and the contrast levels typically excellent As is the way with this sort of panel tech however the black levels aren t quite up there with the depth you d get from an MVA screen like the lovely and large Philips BDM4065UC But when youre talking about color reproduction and viewing angles the Viewsonic s got it So all is rosy then rig
72. actor box Digital Storm no stranger to SFF builds is trying to raise the stakes even further with its latest Mini ITX offering the Bolt 3 Measuring 18 3x15 1x5 8 inches the Bolt 3 ups the ante in the size stakes witha new case designed by Lian Li It s roughly 25 percent larger than the Falcon Northwest Tiki we reviewed in our September issue page 78 While the box isn t huge and is smaller than mid tower cases it does feel a little too beefy to act as a console replacement Luckily though the Bolt 3 is a sexy beast and it s got a clear acrylic window to show off its innards We think that if you ve got a window it had better be super clean on the inside The Bolt 3 s interiors are damned near immaculate Inside the Bolt 3 features a custom loop cooler for the CPU with a slick LED backlit Digital Storm logo on the water block Our configuration s liquid came with yellow liquid and yellow ribbon cables Truth be told the color may not be for everyone as there were mixed opinions about it in our Lab Fortunately the Bolt 3 has the option of red dye variants too The case sports LEDs along the bottom and back which really make the inside pop You can change the color of these lights and the LED logo on the front of the case to your heart s content using Digital Storm s pre installed software The software also allows you to change fan speeds BENCHMARKS ZERO POINT Stitch Efx 2 0 sec Proshow Producer
73. ames and productivity oriented apps on it as well Moving user data should be easy Movies music pictures and documents can live on the disk they re not particularly performance sensitive and tend to eat up lots of capacity Software isn t always as modular Try removing programs through Windows s Control Panel Then when you reload them pay attention to the install path If One SSD is Good Doctor first and foremost love the magazine and read every issue from cover to cover do have a question concerning SSDs in RAID 0 l ve found so much conflicting information about the benefits of striping SSDs that l m now rethinking my purchase of two 512GB Samsung 850 Pros to run this way Please set the record straight What kind of speed increase can expect What are the chances of data loss if a member falls out If it helps in any way this is a brand new rig that will be used for general computing photo and video editing and gaming specifically Star Wars Battlefront I ll be using a WD Black 3TB drive as my photo and video repository and mass storage have a Core i7 chip on an Asus Maximus VII mobo with 16GB of RAM and Win10 Thank you very much in advance I m freaking out that I m going to do something to hurt performance rather than giving me an advantage over a single SSD Matt Sembrat THE DOCTOR RESPONDS The Doc uses systems configured both ways His personal workstation hosts two 256G
74. ance over Intel s Core i7 4790K Not too shabby to say the least but not exactly beyond the realm of what we expected What is interesting is how far we can push the powerful four core Skylake s overclocking potential is well documented as being far greater than that of its last three predecessors And once we cranked our chip all the way up to 4 8GHz we actually managed to push this core to perform just With features galore it could be time for an upgrade a little under that of an 17 5820 extreme edition processor at stock Interested You should be It s unlikely to be impossible to get this processor even higher than that We achieved these benchmarks on an entry level Asus motherboard EFFICIENCY DRIVE in all this chip provides us with a very unique insight into what the 14nm processor series can do But let s cut to the chase Why is 11 percent good Is it really worth it Well consider it this way If it s 10 percent better than an 17 4790K it ll be roughly 20 percent better than a 4770K and 30 percent better than a 3770K and so on If you re still stuck on the ever faithful Sandy Bridge architecture like some of our editors here are cough then this might be Intel Core POOR Processor purae z i L i ce rem Li the perfect time for you to upgrade that CPU and take advantage of all of those additional chipset features and processing power When it comes to power co
75. ancement from the previous generation of Graphics Core Next chips It s just got a lot more logic inside If that had been paired with the die shrink things might have been rosy As itis the 28nm GPU generates a lot of heat note the water cooler on the vanilla reference board Even with the huge 4 096 Radeon cores inside it can t perform as well as the slightly more expensive reference GTX 980 Ti It has got the first generation of HBM in there that s allowed for the smaller form factor but seemingly little else at the top resolution At 1440p and 1080p you get a nice uplft over the old Tahiti powered R9 290X but when you hit 4K that 4GB frame buffer just runs out Because of the limits of first gen HBM AMD could only fit 4GB onto the Fiji GPU With hugely detailed games such as Middle earth Shadow of Mordor Total War Attila and GTA Vdemanding well above that limit the Fury X quickly bumps into its performance ceiling SPECIFICATIONS GPU Fiji XT CUDA Cores 4 096 Memory Capacity 4GB HBM aU AMD Radeon R9 Fury X El FURIOUS Can t catch the GTX 980 Ti only 4GB frame buffer relatively expensive 649 www amd com Sapphire R9 Fury Tri X SUCH IS THE WAY with AMD graphics cards they will almost always arrive two by two When AMD creates a class of GPU it will generally offer a higher end XT version and a slightly cut down Pro version The R9 Furythen is the slightly cut down Pro version of
76. annel DDR3 1600MHz Memory 120GB Samsung 850 EVO M 2 SSD 2 Hard Drives 2 M 2 SATA SSD Drives Capable with Raid 0 1 Function Full sized Keyboard with white LED Backlight Killer Dual Band Wireless AC 1525 Bluetooth Built in 2 0M FHD Camera amp Fingerprint Reader Built in Onkyo speakers and a sub woofer Sound Blaster X Fi MB3 Sound System Slim design with only 29 9mm 1 18 inch thin NP8672 Notebook 1 899 FREE UPS GROUND SHIPPING Windows 10 Home 64 bit Edition Ath Generation Intel Core i7 4720HQ Processor 6MB L3 Cache 2 60GHz 17 3 Full HD IPS LED Display 1920x1080 with Matte Finished Screen 4GB DDR5 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M GPU with Optimus Technology 16GB Dual Channel DDR3 1600MHz Memory 250GB Samsung 850 EVO M 2 SSD 1TB 7200RPM Hard Drive 2 Hard Drives 2 M 2 SATA SSD Drives Capable with Raid 0 1 Function Full sized Keyboard with white LED backlight Intel Dual Band Wireless AC 7265 Bluetooth Built in 2 0M FHD Camera amp Fingerprint Reader Built in Onkyo speakers and a subwoofer Sound Blaster X Fi MB3 Sound System Slim design with only 29 9mm 1 18 inch thin NP8651 S Notebook 1 399 After 130 Instant Savings Windows 10 Home 64 bit Edition Ath Generation Intel Core i7 4720HQ Processor 6MB L3 Cache 2 60GHz 15 6 Full HD LED Display 1920x1080 with Matte Finished Screen Opt 15 6
77. ant Array of Independent Disks is a way of taking multiple disks and configuring them to provide a diverse and great deal of utility to the PC enthusiast Here we ll be visiting RAID 0 also known as data striping The principle is simple Take a couple of identical SSDs split up the data between them then read and write the data from both drives at the same time ZAK STOREY from data striping Hit Tab again to reach disk selection If you have more than two drives running you ll be asked to select which disks you want to RAID However if you re only running two this should be blanked out Next choose the Strip Size using the arrow keys We want 128KB for RAID 0 Finalize your capacity and select Create Volume Youre all set DRIVE TIME 5 Return to the BIOS and change your first boot option to USB stick and install a clean version of Windows or Linux for you hipsters onto your new lightning quick RAID 0 array Once you re all set up you want to make sure you have all the SATA drivers and rapid storage drivers installed Download the latest ones from your motherboard manufacturer s website Then you want to grab the ATTO and AS SSD benchmarks PASS THE TEST 2 Run a few benchmarks see how do Make sure you select the main RAID array every time it should be and you should see numbers close to ours SSD Benchmarks or even faster depending on what drives you re using or if you re utiliziing t
78. ardware and upped the VM s CPU usage to two cores and allocated it 8GB of RAM which speeded things up INSTALL Hit Finish and VMware will create your virtual machine First it writes the files that will house the PC to your hard drive then it installs Windows to those files This 15 the point at which if it s going to go wrong it will WINDOWS CANNOT READ If you put your product key in at the start of the process and Windows now claims it can t read it there s a workaround Go back to the beginning and tell VMware you ll install the operating system yourself later Set everything else the same and you ll get a virtual PC with a blank hard drive ready to go Before starting it right click the VM in VMware s list then point its DVD drive to the location of your Windows ISO or DVD When you start the machine the Windows install process should begin PC INSIDE A PC Now Windows is installed you can select the virtual PC from VMware s menu and start it up any time you like The virtual PC will have access to USB peripherals attached to the host machine but can t access its hard drives outside of the space you allocated it at setup It can t harm your host PC so is a great chance to experiment 16 PE E i i i TAY 2 JU m aximumpc com NOV 2015 mum 65 R amp D Control your PC with Twitter YOU LL NEED THIS TWEETMYPC Download the free a
79. being delighted at something strange coming from nowhere in particular We ve dreamed of machines that make things for a very long time Ada Lovelace wondered about machines that could write music long before Alan Turing was even billions of worlds ships and creatures Roguelike indie game Dungeons of Dredmor has procedurally generated dungeons as well as items fa Serres born think there s just something magical about the idea of something coming from nothing and still feel that magic each time work on a new generator A ROGUE S HEART Cook s main project Angelina is a special case which we ll talk about later But he s right about our love of the emergent outgrowth of rule structures There s nothing better at following rules than a computer so it didnt take long for programmers to give computers recipes for generating complex beautiful things Computers let us transform theoretical patterns and ideas into amazing machines with moving parts that could be poked and examined and executed again and again The most standard usage of procedural techniques modern gaming is in roguelikes and indie games such as Minecraft Dwarf Fortress and NetHack It s an area that Nicholas Vining s Gaslamp Games specializes in and he s adamant that it s essential for certain genres For the games we make says Vining you have to have procedural generation Both Clockwork Empires a steampunk
80. bers only Overseas savings may vary Prices correct at point of print and subject to change DIGITAL EDITION Free trial available to new subscribers only 30 day free trial available via Apple Newsstand Google Newsstand and Kindle Fire 14 day free trial on Nook No free trial via Zinio ws examining technology and putting it to use M RSD 1060 STEP BY STEP GUIDES TO IMPROVING YOUR PC WINDOWS TIP OF THE MONTH ANDREW WESTBROOK CONTRIBUTING EDITOR THE KEY TO SUCCESS So everyone updated to Windows 10 Happy Good But have you gone all the way and given yourself the freshest start possible I m referring of course to the hassle of doing aclean install an experience that generally ranks alongside tax returns in the get your pulse SCRUB DRIVES WITH CIPHER racing thrill stakes And Windows 10 bless it has proved to be little Selling your computer or its disks This Windows tool ensures different If you ve been putting it eps off don t bLame you they re squeaky clean by securely deleting files by overwriting AE S them rather than just removing the index Cipher IS simple upgrading your current OS or have to use via Command Prompt Type cmd and hit Enter Next Se Mg M n doubt stacked with bloatware it s type cipher w x where x is the letter of the drive you wish always worth starting afresh One to empty Close
81. blueprint INGREDIENTS PART PRICE Case Corsair Vengeance C70 130 PSU EVGA SuperNOVA G2 850W 150 Mobo MSI 497 Gaming 5 NEW 150 CPU Intel Core ib A4690K 240 Cooler Corsair H100i 104 GPU XFX Radeon R9 390 330 8GB 2x 4GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600 NEW 50 Optical Drive Samsung SH 224DB BEBE 20 SSD 250GB Samsung 850 EVO NEW 100 HDD Western Digital Black Series 2TB 122 05 3 Windows 8 1 64 bit OEM 3 100 Approximate Price 1 496 WE CHANGED the mobo to MSI s Gaming 5 board because it offers PCle 3 0 on all three of its slots though it s still limited to x8 with two cards and x8 and dual x4 for three As for memory we went with Corsair s Vengeance line This kit only has two DIMMS while the board offers four slots so adding another kit to up the RAM to 16GB is a worthy upgrade We dropped the SSDs to a single 850 EVO A 250GB drive was selling for 100 so we snapped it up You could get two 120GB 850 EVOs at 75 each We re holding off on Skylake for this build right now since upgrading means a big change to RAM and chipset Taken together you ll throw down an extra Andrew Jackson for Skylake We figured that Devils Canyon has plenty of juice left maximumpc com NOV 2015 MwuwME 97 blueprint WHEN WE LOOKED at the Turbo build after Dream Machine it made sense to use the Dream Machine s mobo as a base The motherboard served us wel
82. can still access the Control Panel Not only is shopping now better but purchased apps are windowed on the desktop You can now open full screen programs on more than one desktop LM Wmm lakan on Sry ale ASUS TT Lon as ERG Light on looks and fast on browsing Edge brings fun back to surfing 18 mue Nov 2015 maximumpc com This is a social network and a client for Streaming Xbox One to Windows 10 It s back from the grave packed with both your program links and tile based apps Weiminmgbon wanes ta name hndge atte Trooper Lucky Swartz EZ kben amp iMh tentur sabe n es weeters in imit Phan calls lad gallice ta fap in murder Case Woman ani posdirserid m raped rar an hour She s your new virtual PA but without the curves of the Halo version WWW enermax com ENERMAX SIMPLY QUIET TECHNICALLY ADVANCED Ss ee SS gt Fanless and Full Power 40 Fanless design creates a 0 dBA soundless operation for home theater noise sensitive systems with a full power output 40 C 104 F ambient Individual Sleeved Cables Full modular cabling design with individual sleeved wiring for flexible and refined cable management The proprietary ZDPMS software allows user to read the real time PSU power consumption efficiency and internal temperature The DC output current voltage protection warning points and 1
83. cheap it feels cheap but it s probably all you actually need maximumpc com NOV 2015 83 84 MANIMUMPE MSI 2170 Gaming M7 An upmarket 2170 board for the well heeled gamer IT S THE QUESTION that just won t die And MSI s new Z170A Gaming M7 is going to have to answer it Is there any point in spending more on an upmarket motherboard Not that the Gaming M7 is massive money At around 230 it s far from the most expensive board you can buy that s based on Intel s new Z170 chipset Not with mobos priced beyond 650 like Gigabyte s crazy ass GA Z170X Gaming 61 it ain t But it s still a good 60 more than the other Asus we ve seen and 50 pricier than MSI s own Z170A Gaming M5 So it ll need to sing that little bit louder for its dinner The good news is that if aesthetics are near the top of your list the M7 will be a winner well worth the extra cash It looks expensive Part of that is the matte finish of the main PCB which instantly separates it from the Asus board and its shiny cheapness It s utterly superficial but subjectively it s the difference between something that feels like an escapee from a south east Asian sweatshop and a more premium product Elsewhere the LED debug display plus power and reset switches along with a knob for automated overclocking add to the upscale vibe as do the more generous component cooling and metal clad PEG 16 graphics slots We can t help but notice t
84. cted will be able to access the web via the Tor network To get this up and running you ll need a Pi along with an SD card with the Raspbian distro You ll also need an Ethernet cable Hook one end into the PI s Ethernet port and the other into your wireless router You ll also need a USB Wi Fi adapter that s compatible with the Pi If you haven t got one of those check out the list of compatible adapters that are known to work on the Pi You can find that here http elinux org RPi USB Wi Fi Adapters MAYANK SHARMA range 192 168 12 5 192 168 12 50 option broadcast address 192 168 12 255 option routers 192 168 12 1 default lease time 600 max lease time 7200 option domain name local option domain name servers 8 8 8 8 8 8 4 4 In these lines we define the IP address of our Pi access point 192 168 12 1 the range of the IP addresses it ll hand out to connected devices from 192 168 12 5 to 192 168 12 50 as well as the address of the domain name servers 8 8 8 8 and 8 8 4 4 You can change any of these as per your preference Hit Ctrl X to save the file SETTING UP A STATIC IP We ll now edit the etc default isc dhcp server to specify the interfaces our new DHCP server should listen to Open the file and scroll down to the line that reads INTERFACES 2 Insert wlan0 between the quotes so it now reads INTERFACES 2 wlan0 and save the file Now we ll set up the wireless adapter wlan0 and give it a s
85. d CPU and wondering if you should upgrade to a Skylake processor Depending on your needs the answer may surprise you Join us online as we benchmark a seven year old processor against Intel s top of the line Skylake CPU to see if the upgrade will be worth the investment You ll also get a brief history lesson on some of Intel s past i7 CPUs Find it online here http bit ly MPC bloom Seven years of separation N submit your questions to NOV 2015 maximu npc com might need a better cable But 3840x2160 at 60Hz is four times the data as 1080p60 and twice as much as 1080p120 so signaling is a real concern 1 have a 10ft DisplayPort cable that basically won t work above 1440p75 regardless of GPU Some of this might be things you ve already tried but bear with me Looking through your thread the problem is almost certainly on the cable connector side of the equation The ShadowPlay video capture looks fine because that s the content before it goes over the HDMI DP cable to the monitor So something is going wrong the question is What is happening and who is to blame Sony s manual doesn t list 3840x2160 at 60Hz as an option for any connection which is odd as the display is advertised as 4K and 120Hz Likely running 1080p 3D content or 48Hz 4K don t know looked around online and found a reference to the display supporting HDMI 2 0 but I can t find anything at Sony s site wh
86. d Cooling System Windows 10 Home Intel Core i5 6600K Processor GIGABYTE 7170 Chipset Mainboard with USB 3 1 CORSAIR 86B DDR4 2400 Mhz Dual Channel Memory 2TB SATA 111 7200 RPM HD Nvidia Geforce GTX 950 2GB Video Card Zalman Gaming Headset Nzxt Source 340 Gaming Tower Case 430 Watt 80 Power gt It A DVD En m EN GC Eg 2 Asetek qu My System C 4 m 1 Blu ray 14x 0 CoolerMaster amp CoolerMaster 24X RW 7 1600 W CoolerMaster CoolerMaster me NE FREE Liquid Cooling 7 FREE Liquid Cooling Windows 10 Home Intel Core i7 5700HQ Processor Windows 10 Home Intel Core i7 5700HQ Processor Intel HM87 Chipset Intel HM87 Chipset 15 6 Full HD Display 1920x1080 17 5 Full HD Display 1920x1080 86B DDR3 1600MHz Memory 86B DDR 3 1600 MEMORY 1TB SATA300 Hard Drive 1TB SATA300 Hard Drive Nvidia Geforce GTX 965M 26B Direct X 12 Video Card 10 100 1000 Mbps Network Card 802 11 AC Wireless Network Nvidia Geforce GTX 960M 26B Direct X 12 Video Card 8X DVD RW Rewriteable Drive 10 100 1000 Mbps Network Card 802 11 AC Wireless Network C22 RW 3x USB 3 0 Aint ie m X J Built in 130 Baldwin Park Blvd City of Industry CA 91746 800 707 0393 www cyberpowerpc com iBUYPOWER Recommends Windows G
87. d with an Ivy Bridge Core i7 CPU had Intel s VT x PREPARE YOUR PC Welcome to VMware Playe Rame Hee Virtus Machine virtualization technology switched off meaning a trip to the BIOS Mt remet wu to for vnd machine hen be in order to enable it was required After hitting Delete at startup to access the BIOS we found Intel Virtualization Technology under will than te Advanced gt CPU Configuration but every motherboard is likely to differ slightly Save your BIOS settings and restart your PC then let Windows boot normally Now its time to Download and install VMware Player to a drive that has plenty of free space Image A If you re using a Windows 10 retail DVD chuck it in the DVD drive Otherwise remember to make a note of where your Windows 150 file is saved WHAT IS VIRTUALIZATION 2 INSTALL VMWARE PLAYER Simply put it s allowing one OS to run inside another ina kind of digital Russian doll arrangement It s something that s long been possible through software emulation but modern CPUs Intel since 2005 AMD since 2006 have made the process faster and easier by moving it to hardware Virtualization is common on servers as it s more efficient for a powerful piece of hardware to run multiple instances of server software all managed by a hypervisor to do many easy tasks at once The capability has trickled through to desktop CPUs tho
88. e had to write about a certain room in a certain building with certain people and objects interacting in every chapter Perhaps because of that it comes across as a weird jigsaw puzzle of a book And somewhat long winded Fact book Philip M Parker Professor Philip M Parker has patented a method that automatically produces books from a set template which is then filled with data from Internet searches He claims to have produced over 200 000 books ranging from medical science to dictionaries about just one word with most of them being print on demand only he s also started generating factual books for under served languages in collaboration with the Bill amp Melinda Gates Foundation Music Brian Eno Back in 1996 Brian Eno used Intermorphic s SSEYO Koan software to create his album Generative Music 1 which was in fact a piece of software itself The music ran off a floppy disk and improvised within the 150 parameters that Eno had set to create a different track every time He s continued to experiment throughout his life Film WETA and Massive The armies in the conversion of Tolkien s trilogy were generated by a collaboration between WETA and a special effects firm called Massive which created convincing representations of thousands of actors unless you looked closely and noticed they all looked like Andy Serkis joke Cartoon Toy Story 3 It might seem old school now but Toy Story 3 used a ton of gro
89. e Z170 A s price point is its overclocking prowess It achieves exactly the same 4 7GHz overclock as the other Z170s we ve seen including MSI s Gaming M7 What s more like every other board that 4 7GHz can be achieved using either the 6700K s unlocked multiplier or via the base clock With an unlocked chip like the 6700K you may as well use the multiplier But the base clock performance bodes well for possible future Skylake processors that Asus Z170 Pro Gaming MSI Z170A Gaming M7 915 883 58 55 26 26 7 T 7 a7 3 1 008 1 011 Best scores are bolded All boards tested with an Intel Core 17 6700 and a Corsair Hydro H100i water cooler PEG NOV 2015 maximumpc com come at lower price points The age of clocking the hell out off a cheap CPU may be about to return If it does it makes sense to have a cheap motherboard capable of decent overclocks itself The Asus Z170 A wouldn t be a bad choice JEREMY LAIRD VERDICT STAR TREK Has at least one of everything you actually need great all around performance El GALAXY QUEST Little by way of fun features and frills looks and feels as cheap as it is 165 www asus com SPECIFICATIONS Chipset Intel Z170 Socket LGA1151 Form Factor Support DDRA 6x SATA 1x M 2 1x SATA Storage Express 2x USB 2 0 2x USB 3 0 1x USB 3 1 1x USB 3 1 Type C It looks
90. e freight or shipping and handling charge Free UPS Ground Shipping valid to contiguous US order only NP9772 Notebook 2 499 FREE UPS GROUND SHIPPING Windows 10 Home 64 bit Edition Ath Generation Intel Core i7 4790K Processor 8MB L3 Cache 4 0GHz 17 3 Full HD IPS LED Display 1920x1080 with Matte Finished Screen 4GB DDR5 NVIDIA Quadro M3000M GPU Opt NVIDIA Quadro M1000M M5000M GPU 16GB Dual Channel DDR3 1600MHz Memory 250GB Samsung 850 EVO M 2 SSD 1TB 7200RPM Hard Drive 2 Hard Drives 2 M 2 SATA SSD Drives or 2 M 2 PCle SSD Drives capable Hardware Raid 0 1 Function capable with SATA Interface Full sized Keyboard with color LED backlight Intel Dual Band Wireless AC 7265 Bluetooth Built in 2 0M FHD Camera amp Fingerprint Reader Built in Onkyo Hi Fi speakers and a sub woofer Sound Blaster X Fi MB3 Sound System NP8652 Notebook 1 699 FREE UPS GROUND SHIPPING Windows 10 Home 64 bit Edition Ath Generation Intel Core i7 4720HQ Processor 6MB L3 Cache 2 60GHz 15 6 Full HD IPS LED Display 1920x1080 with Matte Finished Screen 30 days No Dead Pixel Guaranteed Insurance 4GB DDR5 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M GPU with Optimus Technology 8GB DDR3 1600MHz Memory TB 7200RPM Hard Drive 2 Hard Drives 2 M 2 SATA SSD Drives Capable with Raid 0 1 Function Full sized Keyboard with white LED backlight Killer Dual Ba
91. ed Pana i aer pan the s i DI ITI ap TX en SHUT DOWN 5 Go to your Twitter homepage and in the text box type shutdown Image C Send the tweet and a warning will appear on your computer saying it will shut down It will then wait one minute and then actually shut down If you change your mind tweet abortshutdown CHANGE VOLUME 5 A neat use for TweetMyPC is for controlling your PC when you listen to music or watch movies on it If you want to turn down the volume without going over to your PC just tweet voldec and to turn it up tweet volinc To mute the volume tweet volmute and to unmute it tweet volunmute Fares mm k reTmg reir LE 18763719 mec Serre Vinrkstamion to MI gd shandby madi mrmi EW edm 2 MET S Rak aharediry reus nepr SEND FILES E 2 You can also send files from your PC to your email You ll peni proe need to know where on your PC you saved the file Type ciicusty the sezond ih getfilelist then the drive letter to get sent a list of files and their c wenn locations You can then type getfile and the location of your file ME For example C Users Matthew Documents myfile doc Er Arras mej KEEP TRACK You now know the basic functions of TweetMyPC and can use itto remotely control your PC It can sometimes take a wh
92. eds more locations and authentic car liveries ra RECOMMENDED SPECS FX 8150 Core i5 4670K 8GB RAM R9 290 GTX 780 46 www codemasters com ESRB NR maximumpc com NOV 2015 MAXIMUM PG 89 They call me the man that gravity ignored Rocket League Cars and soccer for people who care about neither exploring why soccer should replace its paper chain of squalid billionaires with cars and accept it as fact A fact that Rocket League proves with simple and immediate ease Yes this is a game about cars playing soccer That s as developed a plot as you ll require We ve never played a game that needed a tutorial less Drive car at giant ball hit ball into net score points Rocket League is a celebration of distinction through simplicity Driving is delicious Cars ease around like butter in a heated pan but always feel under control You accumulate boost by driving over markers and unleashing it is a thunderous rush firing you across over and around the pitch Matches take place in smooth enclosed spaces so you can drive up walls and over ceilings as a shimmer of perpetual motion Cars can also jump and dodge which can be used defensively and offensively The weight of the cars as well as your ability to apply boost to jumps adds a pleasingly haphazard element something like athletic soccer players leaping above the opposition to header high balls but with zero chance of flattening a 2 000
93. ems for trees and rocks are really popular you probably dont even notice the games they re used in half the time says Cook People don t really notice if a branch is slightly out of place and trees follow quite clear natural rules that we can give to a computer so it s a perfect use case For example SpeedTree the games industry standard tree generator has appeared in nearly every AAA game for the last few years The Witcher 3 Shadow of Mordor Destiny Far Cry 4 Cook explains that when using generative software in music art or films we mostly use it to target things where imperfections are hard to see abstract art instead of portraiture things that aren t the focus of attention crowd scenes instead of big centerpieces and preferably things where there are clear patterns and rules think electronic music benefits here Games however often allow procedural content to be closely scrutinized increasing the quality threshold hugely The game combining all these elements is Dwarf Fortress currently the high point of procedurally generated games One of the strengths of Dwarf Fortress a huge 54 MAXIMUM PE NOV 2015 maximumpc com Thisis nota photo but an example of how real SpeedTree s tech can look inspiration for Clockwork Empires was that everything is procedurally generated says Vining History terrain monsters gods The newer stuff in the upcoming Dwarf Fortress patch with pr
94. en power loss Your data is who you are store it with Vector 180 Solid State Drives SA Up to 550 MB s Available upto 960GB Cloning Software a Up to 100 000 IOPS Toshiba A18nm flash 3 5 Desktop Adapter OC SHIELDPLUS WARA ARTY VECTOR 188 s D STATE WE OCZ A Toshiba Group Company ocz com STORAGE SOLUTIONS Alex Campbell OPEN SOURCE Broken Windows The Ugly Side of Microsofts OS ONE OF THE BIGGEST PROBLEMS with proprietary software isnt the black box nature of its inner workings but the nature of the agreements that users give their consent to When you begin using a new piece of software or an online service how often have you actually read the terms of use and privacy policy If you re like me you ve all too often scrolled to the bottom and clicked I agree without giving it a second thought Give me my software experience Here have my firstborn child need to be able to do this one thing We ve all done it and few of us are proud of it For all of the outrage surrounding services that have wronged users most of it was hidden within the dark depths of an unread end user license agreement user agreement or privacy policy As the saying goes if you want to do something evil hide it in something boring After reading Microsofts user and license agreements for Windows 10 that hinted evil is very boring Most of the Microsoft Software License Terms document
95. er efficiency gains too On the Nvidia side we re looking at an architecture called Pascal named after the French physicist Blaise Pascal and the rumor that the successor to the full fat GM 200 GPU could have as many as ad The next step for AMD s GPUs is to drop to the 16nm lithography i p 7 i The upcoming GTX 950 Ti could well come passively cooled double the transistor count That would give it somewhere upward of 16 billion transistors That phrase needs to be read In your head one more time with Carl Sagan s wondrous tones The Pascal GPU will be the first of Nvidia s cards to offer 3D memory and 15 set to use the second generation HBM 2 0 to achieve the purported 32GB maximum frame buffer One of the struggles with the current HBM tech used on AMD s Fiji cards is that it has a limit of 2Gb per DRAM die making a maximum of 1GB in a stack and only four memory stacks per GPU interposer That s why the Fury cards have a slightly miserly though speedy 4GB frame buffer HBM 2 0 though is designed to massively boost that upper limit with a limit of 8Gb per die and stacks offering four or eight dies on top of each other That will give each stack either 4GB or 8GB in capacity With four of those stacks arrayed on the interposer around the GPU itself you re looking at either 16GB or 32GB frame buffers depending on the SKU Pascal is looking to unify its memory too making it available
96. erNOVA G2 850W 150 has been capacity With Mobo Asus ROG Rampage V Extreme NEW 480 Samsung s introduction um x peram of 2TB capacities in the Intel Core I 850 EVO and Pro lines Cooler NZXT Kraken X61 NEW 130 SSD replacement of hard drives is now a viable GPU MSI GeForce GTX 980 Ti 6GB 660 l option You ll still pay a TT 2x 16GB 4x 4GB G Skill Ripjaws 4 Series 230 premium for having the DDR4 2133 solid state memory over Optical Drive LG Blu ray Burner WH16NS40 59 the cheaper spinning platters but if youre SSD 2x 500GB Samsung 850 EVO 356 willing to shell out for it HDD 3TB Western Digital Black 151 you can say sayonara to your desktop HDD 05 Windows 8 1 64 bit 100 750 www samsung com us Approximate Price 2 896 MAXIMUM PC ISSN 1522 4279 is published 13 times a year monthly plus Holiday issue following December issue by Future US Inc 4000 Shoreline Court Suite 400 South San Francisco CA 94080 Phone 650 872 1642 Fax 650 872 2207 Website www futureus com Periodicals postage paid in San Bruno CA and at additional mailing offices Newsstand distribution is handled by Curtis Circulation Company Basic subscription rates one year 12 issues US 19 95 Canada US 24 95 Foreign US 34 95 Canadian and foreign orders must be 98 NOV 2015 maximumpc com prepaid Canadian price includes postage and GST GST R12
97. ere are going to be cases where you ll want to disable all AA in order to improve performance The arrival of GTX 950 doesn t mark the end of the GTX 750 Ti thanks to the higher TDP With online prices now hovering around 120 the 750 Ti remains Nvidia s fastest sub 75W GPU for those that don t have a 6 pin PEG connection or a PSU capable of handling higher performance devices The GTX 950 also looks to be slightly faster than AMD s similarly priced R9 370 Until we start seeing 16nm GPUs next year GTX 950 is likely to hold the 150 gaming crown JW NOT APPROVED Polar A300 Fitness and Activity Tracker IF YOU RE NOT READY to drop a couple of Benjamins on a smart watch and just want a fitness band Polar hopes to fill that void with its 140 A300 activity tracker The band looks fairly stylish and is comfortable to wear The device is also waterproof so you can track yourself while swimming In addition to swimming the A300 also supports a wide variety of workouts that include running walking cycling biking and weight training But here s the rub It doesn t use GPS It just tracks wrist movements so its not terribly accurate Also while you can purchase a separate 50 Bluetooth heart rate sensor for the device the A300 itself doesn t track your heart rate The A300 isn t a bad fitness tracker and we love that it can last for over three weeks on a single charge Unfortunately its shortcomings keep us fr
98. erformance improvements almost across the board at lower levels Almost because we did experience some weird issues with this card and GRID 2 But for everything else even the demanding GIA it delivered impressive performance figures Most obviously in the minimum frame rates especially with Rockstar s modern classic But its lil brother the straight R9 390 is the issue here It s practically as good with a notable saving too SPECIFICATIONS GPU Grenada XT CUDA Cores 2816 Memory Capacity 8GB GDDR5 Radeon R9 390X E GRENADA Hefty frame buffer quality 1440 performance El GRENADE Re branded GPU R9 390 is almost as good 435 www xfxforce com ea Sapphire R9 390 Nitro Hawaii Pro with added nitrous AMD ALWAYS SEEMS to pull off the same trick release two cards based on very slightly different GPUs with very slightly different performance numbers and demand a lot more for one than the other Inevitably we then look at the lower spec card with almost the same gaming prowess and question why anyone would pick the pricier option Such is the way with the Fury and Fury X Such is the way with the 290 and 290X And so it is with the 390 and 390X And when you throw into the mix that this new Sapphire Nitro branding means this overclocked card gets a Tri X cooler attached to it you know things aren t looking too good for the 390X Couple all that with the fact the 390 also perform
99. es Angelina produces aren t procedural he explains Allthe generation happens during the design of the game but Angelina releases static games like you or might if we made a game It s all about how we can procedurally generate a game design ideas art mechanics music and put it all together rather than generating what happens in the players computer when they re playing Angelina is interested in generating everything in a game which means we have to tackle the hardest problems like aesthetics and emotions as well as the more rule based stuff like mazes androcks want Angelina to generate program code and game mechanics and systems of meaning so it can tell you a story with its games or make you think Thesetwotypesofcomprehensiveness Dwarf Fortresss obsessive inclusiveness and Angelina s procedural game design are core to the story here Games and their successor VR see Generating Escapism page 52 are a universal experience They can contain everything else in the world so they take in every other part of generative art if everything s not to be handcrafted at great expense The only way to do that without us all becoming developers is procedural generation PROC GEN MEDIA Fiction book Life A User s Manual Written by Georges Perec in line with the Oulipo manifesto this book isn t strictly speaking programmatic but Perec wrote it in line with formulaic constraints that meant h
100. es are bolded Overall winner is highlighted Game results are all minimum average fps maximumpc com NOV 2015 MAXIMUM PG 39 And MEIN MN WE RE AT AWEIRD MOMENT in the history of graphics cards On the one hand it s a fantastic time to go out and buy a new GPU because there s simply never been this amount of polygon processing power available at any price On the other hand though you ve got a vast number of cards still rocking aging graphics architectures with potentially hugely updated versions on the way That means of the cards we ve got in our test this month only a few of them could genuinely be recommended for purchase right now The top end of the market is the toughest mostly because and we can probably all agree on this pricing has become utterly insane At the top of the pile is Nvidia s GTX Titan X at 999 Crazy And now it s not even the fastest card only holding its 12GB frame buffer over the rest of the graphics market Then weve got AMD s only genuinely new GPUs of this latest late generation The top Radeon Fury X simply doesnt do enough to make it worthwhile It is cheaper than the top Nvidia cards but it loses out in the performance stakes despite having that brand new memory technology The Fury and Fury X only have 4GB each as well and that s simply too little to expect to hit high res gaming speeds in the future of gaming CHAMPION CARD Up top then and probably overall the GTX 980 Ti is
101. frame buffer fails at 1440p top settings the 380 takes it 201 www asus com 36 MMIMUMPE Nov 2015 maximumpc com ___ _________ 2 MSI R9 380 Gaming 4G Something old something new WE VE GIVEN AMD a little bit of grief for the whole rebranding thing with this current generation of GPUs And it does feel a little Like the company is treading water until either TSMC or Global Foundaries get their 16nm acts together and provide it with a production process for the future Which is all to say the R9 380 is another old school GPU though this is actually the second most modern after the Fiji chips The Antigua GPU at the heart of the R9 380 is essentially the Tonga chip from the previous generation That means it s got the latest class of GCN architecture rocking the same 256 bit memory bus as the R9 285 because of the lossless color compression tech boosting its memory performance Thats some modern AMD goodness that s missing from the higher end 390 cards The real big win for this card is and we know we keep harping on about it the chunky memory buffer With 4GB on this relatively low end GPU youre getting a quality 1080p gaming card thats more than capable of mixing it with the most graphically demanding games of now and tomorrow The 2GB buffer of the GTX 960 is what s holding it back but with double that capacity the R9 380 is a far more capable gamer even offering very playable performance at 1440p to
102. go Core Inside Intel Intel Logo Intel Core Intel Inside Intel Inside Logo Intel Viiv Intel vPro Itanium Itanium Inside Pentium Pentium Inside Viiv Inside vPro Inside Xeon and Xeon Inside are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U S and other countries All prices are subject to change without notice or obligation CyberPower is not responsible for any typographical and photographic errors Copyright 2013 CyberPower All rights reserved NVIDIA nForce GeForce SLI are trademarks or registered trademarks of NVIDIA Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries CyberPower PCs use genuine Microsoft Windows e www microsoft com piracy howtotell Gamer Infinity 8800 Pro SE Windows 10 Home Intel Core i7 5820K Processor GIGABYTE X99 Chipset Mainboard CORSAIR 32GB DDR4 2400MHz Quad Channel Memory 256 GB SATA III SSD Boot Drive 3TB SATA 111 DATA Hard Drive x 0 Nvidia Geforce GTX 980Ti 6GB Video C _ Blu ray 14x HD 7 1600 W CoolerMaster amp CoolerMaster Zalman Gaming Headset NXZT H440 Design by Razer Gaming Case Asetek Liquid Cooling System FREE Liquid Cooling Gamer Xtreme 3000 Windows 10 Home Intel Core i7 6700K Processor GIGABYTE 7170 Chipset Mainboard with USB 3 1 CORSAIR 166B DDR4 2400Mhz Dual Channel Memory 2TB SATA III 6 0 7200 RPM HD Nvidia Geforce GTX 970 4GB Video CORSAIR Spec 01 Case with 600Watts 80 Power Asetek Liqui
103. go beyond that with overclocking but it s not officially within spec Right now we know AMD has plans for a dual GPU Fury card later this fall As for Nvidia now that it s given us the Titan X and 980 Ti about the only thing left between now and Pascal about a year away isa dual GPU GM 200 card or maybe a dual GPU GM 204 with 16GB GDDR5 Anyway we haven t heard anything official from either company in terms of specifications for future products but if were a betting man l d say Nvidia will create a modern version of the GTX 690 at some point before the end of 2015 5 Facebook Polls Will you upgrade Now that Intel has finally released Skylake what do you think of the new CPU Do you think you ll upgrade Scott Richardson Meh Hossein Mansouri Dear chipmakers stop introducing a whole new architecture every six months The problem is every time someone goes for the upgrade he sees that something newer is coming in six months so he waits and after six months the same thing happens Bill Gilbert I m debating whether it s 6700K or 5820 It s only 40 more for six cores but the motherboards are about 80 or so more Chris Ditchburn My first gen 17 runs all my programs and games so why upgrade Ron Carson Skylake more like Byelake Alex Martin If Intel wants my money they gotta work harder Affordable eight cores Brendan Patrick Lyon It s great if you re building a new PC but
104. hairdo The vehicles feel light and buzzy somewhere between Micro Machines and those slidey RC cars that only seem to appear on Christmas Day This contrasts nicely with the fat beefy bounce of the ball which gormlessly invites impact like a punchable cousin And that s it We almost feel guilty reducing a review to ball and car but there are only ever those two things in play Crucially they both feel great There are no weapons but certain markers fill your boost and let you obliterate other players Mercifully it s the generous instantly respawning type of obliteration Destruction is the only conspicuous deviation from the clean and simple business of driving around and scoring goals but in most of the games we played it was a rarity and certainly never frequent enough to be irritating Alternatively you can set teams of four against each other in matches that become so frantic that theyre less like soccer and more like a lost confused beach ball bashed between bumper cars Playlists of duels doubles standard 3v3 matches and the appropriately named Chaos 4v4 mode are all available online with ranked playlists limited to duels doubles and 3v3 There s a reason why online play is the first option as heres a game that feels designed to be played with real people and this is absolutely where it thrives We rarely had to wait long for a game and if players dropped out they were immediately replaced by
105. hat doesnt require a case But will the sealants on this Session keep it far from a 10 on our repairability scale Grab your board because this teardown is about to hang 10 MAJOR TECH SPECS e Rugged waterproof design e 1 030mAh rechargeable lithium ion battery e Built in Wi Fi micro USB and microSD slot expandable up to 64GB e Video capture 1440p at 30fps and 1080p at 60fps e 8MP wide field of view stills KEY FINDINGS e t looks like we have our work cut out Look a batch of T4 Torx screws on the front You had us worried for a second there GoPro Screws out and the lens cover comes free revealing access to an o ring The glass lens cover is probably the most likely part to break on the Session but it s also the easiest to replace It s good to see that GoPro had repairability in mind for the lens cover Strange that it sells a complete lens cover replacement kit After savaging most of the exterior we aren t surprised to find the GoPro s battery soldered to the motherboard and glued into a bracket No more removable batteries presumably in the interest of waterproofing With an estimated two hour battery life you re going to be recharging often increasing the number of charge cycles on your camera and decreasing its life before you need to but can t replace the battery With a flick of the wrist goes the display and the power capture button everything a user needs to operate the GoPro on one confusi
106. he extra SATA Express port compared to the Asus boards too Is it all irrelevant given SATA Express s DOA status Probably So try this for size The Gaming M7 has two 2 slots That s handy plus raises the prospect of M 2 RAID arrays Can you imagine the bandwidth bomb that could drop We can But sadly imagining is all you can do This board BENCHMARKS MSI Z170A Gaming M7 Cinebench R15 index 915 x264 HD Video Encoding fps 58 Memory Bandwidth GB s i 26 Shadow of Mordor min avg fps Maximum Multiplier Overclock GHz Maximum Base Clock Overclock GHz Cinebench R15 at Max Overclock index 1 008 doesn t support both M 2 slots running in PCle at the same time When installed the second M 2 drive drops into SATA mode WORTH THE MONEY While we re talking big bandwidth you also get both USB 3 1 and USB Type C support Like with all Z170 mobos the USB situation is complicated with the back panel offering three USB 2 0 ports two USB 3 0 a standard USB 3 1 port and a new fangled USB 3 1 Type C port Phew Elsewhere you get the usual refinements including properly isolated audio circuitry and military class five components including titanium chokes and support for both Nvidia SLI and AMD Crossfire multi GPU graphics setups Of all the added extras then it s arguably that Game Boost rotary knob that s most intriguing The idea is you dial up the level of overclock you fancy reboo
107. he specs When s it coming out How much will it cost KT We haven t announced a time that were shipping or a price yet As far as when it ships it s in the Windows 10 timeframe BY JIMMY THANG so its definitely not years in the future Holograms are something always thought were more like science fiction that s going to happen way in the future but we ve got working units It s definitely not years in the future MPC One of the biggest complaints from the early model was the field of view Can you talk a little bit about how youre tackling the FoV with the HoloLens KT We re not talking specific degrees yet think a lot of the time the questions youll get is Hey what is the difference between mixed reality and virtual reality Obviously mixed reality being more of blending your digital assets with your real world virtual reality being more of a fully immersive experience And so you get asked lots of times about FoV Hey is the FoV for HoloLens ever going to be this fully immersive panoramic kind of view And it s not because it s definitely different technologies different things that you re trying to do As wanting to incorporate the real world and the holograms HoloLens has no release date but it Will launch within the Windows 10 timeframe together we re not going to build a fully immersive digital kind of experience like you d see with virtual reality so it s different tech
108. hich took most of the headlines the smaller Fury card is interesting because it contains most of the Fury X but for 150 less Between the two then Fury would seem to be the card most should go for But should you We address that question in our GPU supertest which gets going on page 26 Switching streams to the CPU space Intel finally has its new 6700K Skylake on the market which follows the recently released Broadwell architecture The community as a whole has been waiting for both architectures which might seem strange this time around as they were launched so closely together During our tests Skylake proved to provide advantages over its predecessor in some areas and not so much in others More of what makes Skylake attractive has to do with external features such as better support for USB 3 0 and more SATA ports There s certainly an improvement but even I m still on Sandy Bridge E a Core 17 3970 to be exact which still rocks If your CPU is generations old there are several reasons to upgrade But should you Find out on page 42 S 1 8 N submit your questions to ct With the CPU and GPU the majority of people are concerned about performance in the sense of speed But doing more is just as vital as how fast a component can accomplish what it s tasked to do Which is why the industry as a whole relies on the applications to move things forward and in the CPU
109. hone and authenticate using the password that you specified in the hostapd conf file Once you ve connected you should be able to browse the Internet normally Once you ve tested the new access point it s a good idea to cement the settings so that they re activated as maximumpc com NOV 2015 m 61 62 soon as the Raspberry Pi boots Start the hostapd DHCP services with the command sudo service hostapd start Then use sudo service isc dhcp server start Update the init scripts with sudo update rc d hostapd enable And finally sudo update rc d isc dhcp server enable Now restart the Raspberry Pi with sudo shutdown r now When the Raspberry Pi is back up again you ll be able to connect to the new access point and browse the Internet normally TORIFY ACCESS Your Raspberry Pi is now fully functional as a wireless hotspot However the data is still not anonymized yet So let s get Tor added to the mix SSH back into your Raspberry Pi and then install Tor with sudo apt get install tor When it s installed edit Tor s config file etc tor torrc and add the following at the top Log notice file var log tor notices log VirtualAddrNetwork 10 192 0 0 10 AutomapHostsSuffixes onion exit AutomapHostsOnResolve 1 TransPort 9040 TransListenAddress 192 168 12 1 PREERCRTTING A PREROUTIMG 1 A PRERDRTIMG destination re tcp dpt ssh redir ports 23 re wda dpt damain redir port anywhere teetiags FIN
110. hree or more Now sit back relax and enjoy your super fast transfer speeds and boot times Once you get past that pesky Intel RAID check first of course SSD BENCHMARKS Before RAID After RAID ATTO SSD Read MB s 558 1 099 ATTO SSD Write MB s 537 746 AS SSD Sequential Read MB s 500 1 012 AS SSD Sequential Write MB s 481 643 30GB Folder Transfer secs 135 150 5GB File Compression secs 131 128 Best scores are bolded Tests were carried out on 2x Kingston HyperX Savage 240GB SSDs an Asus RoG Z170 Hero Motherboard and a stock clocked Core 17 6700K with 16GB DDR4 at 2 400MHz maximumpc com NOV 2015 MAXIMUM PG 63 R amp D Run Windows 10 on a Virtual Machine YOU LL NEED THIS WINDOWS 10 On DVD or an ISO YOU CAN T HAVE FAILED TO NOTICE that there s a new version of Windows on the block looking kind of cool but mysterious and a bit frightening If you want to take it for a test drive without jeopardizing your cuddly and familiar Windows 8 1 installation then try running it as a virtual machine You ll need a fairly beefy PC to manage this successfully your CPU must support virtualization if you re unsure there s a utility that can tell you at www grc com securable htm and running two operating systems at the same time will eat up RAM so it s a good idea to have plenty You ll be able to manage with 4GB for each OS but we found that upping the guest OS s allocation to BGB made things
111. ht THE SCALING SITUATION If this monitor was just a little bit bigger say 27 inch we d be all over it With a quality display we d say 27 inch is about the minimum screen size you can really get away with for a 4K monitor And even that is pushing it You don t really get the same stunning effect that the extra pixel count has on image depth with a 27 inch panel that you do with something like that 40 inch Philips let alone a 24 inch screen such as this Viewsonic At that size you re simply not getting the most out of the 4K resolution when were talking gaming The incredible demands that native resolution makes upon your graphics card are only worth the GPU effort when yourre really getting to see the full benefit from the extra texture detail And on the desktop the native font on a 24 inch display is eye straining to say the least Windows 10 has of course improved its scaling efforts but you ll inevitably come across older software that simply doesnt work with the new UI scaling boost We use FRAPS in hardware testing almost constantly and if you ever try running that classic app on a scaled desktop you ll see what we re talking about With a 400 price tag we can forgive it the flimsy plasticky chassis There s no height adjustment or twisting here this is a basic setup Until you get to the inputs that is Incongruously this is the first panel we ve had in the lab that rocks the new HDMI 2 0 interface
112. i dhr Jan 27 14 49 58 raspberrypi dhe CPHAK 132 108 2 187 t 24ia CPDISCOVER from 24 22 c01 006 3ec ela I 192 168 127 959 to 243 eghas iPad via wlana lan 2 14 49 58 raspberrypki dhcpd JHCPDISCOVER from 4 1 vla wlan Jan 27 14 49 58 raspberrypi dhcpd DHCPOFFER on 192 168 12 9 to 24 eghas LPad via wlang Jan 27 14 49 51 raspberrypi dhcpd DHCPREQUEST for 192 168 12 9 19 AAA TET IETF Meghas iPFad via wlang Jan 27 14 49 51 raspberrypi dhepd DHCPACK on 192 168 12 9 to 24 22 as iPad via dT 14 50541 raspberrypl wlan 24 63 66 66 Soc lated Raspberry Pi To make them permanent first run sudo sh c iptables save 3 etc iptables ipv4 nat Then edit the etc network interfaces file Scroll down to the very end and add up iptables restore etc iptables ipv4 nat This will load the rules when the devices are activated on boot Your Raspberry Pi access point is now all set To test it restart the DHCP server with sudo service isc dhcp server restart and manually enable the access point with our configuration with the following command Refer to the Your Own Hostapd box below if you get an unknown driver error at this stage sudo usr sbin hostapd etc hostapd hostapd conf If everything goes well the wireless access point TorSpot will be detailed in the list of available Wi Fi hotspots You can connect to it from another computer or a smartp
113. ich is a bit of a mess so didn t Look too hard Assuming the display does support 4Kp60 over an HDMI 2 0 connection have you tried all the HDMI ports on the TV Maybe only one works correctly And of course Sony likely won t take responsibility because yourre trying to run 4Kp60 from a PC and it doesn t officially list support for that anywhere that can see in their manual Ugh The other possibility is that the TV is totally fine its connections are fine and even the cable is fine but your GPU connection is the problem The Titan X is one of only a handful of GPUs to even support HDMI 2 0 but I m not even aware of any PC monitors that support the spec yet Which means Nvidia may not have fully tested and validated the connection or maybe itis justa driver issue that needs fixing This appears to be your assumption but don t have the display to test do know that DisplayPort connections to a 4Kp60 display have worked fine even in 3 way 980 Ti SLI so most likely it s related to HDMI 2 0 l ve had two R9 390 390X cards where only one of the DisplayPort connectors worked with my XB280HK display so don t discount that as a possibility try swapping GPUs try just one GPU and so on See if there s some combination that works And I m sure you ve heard it plenty but try a different cable specifically try a high quality HDMI 2 0 cable that s only a meter long Signals are less likely
114. if you have really any i5 or i7 since Sandy Bridge there s no real point in dropping 250 for a new CPU and 120 for a new board for 20 percent improvement Ethan Fougner Skylake think not I m pretty sure my 5930K will spank the crud out of this wanna be processor Wayne Johnson Yawn Emilio Garcia Waiting on mine to arrive Domms Eightysix Meh At 1440p or greater compared to Devils Canyon the difference in games is in the single digits Beyond your rig what tech accessory is most important B 50 Display 6 Keyboard 11 Mouse 13 Speakers Headset B 2 NAS 7 Chair 7 Router 4 Other Like our page at www facebook com maximumpc NOV 2015 MU 95 naximumpc com SUBSCRIBE TO ANY TIME ANYWHERE PRINT AND DIGITAL BEST GPUs ers m 5T GPUs 7 EET 99 2 PER ISSUE pent F aha PRINT DIGITAL Save up to 84 From only 99 a month 12 issues from just 19 95 For instant digital access Get every issue of to Maximum PC in your Maximum PC choice of Apple Newsstand delivered to your door at Or enm a fraction of the cost rua ONE EASY WAY 10 SUBSCRIBE Visit www maximumpc com click More info in the bottom right then click Subscribe or head straight to http bit ly 1JslVcK TERMS AND CONDITIONS Your print subscription will start with the next available issue and your digital subscription will
115. ile REMOTE CONTROL gus for the commands to come through so be patient Once a command successfully completes you ll get a tweet telling you what has happened Image D 5 Matt Hanson i c o r TH MES Singe About Martin Bristol City C Haly Willau vut i taping wiki Fairy Faargt end us 4 Son in with Twrtrer ien Fotlow a Follow Follow Tale of Two Trialz hy H Shoe nan _ Siri ma aly math ndr D C Lise Mattie Document zamfllg doc Ead Settings i zx enar may eso 10 Gull pilara rer eer CETTE Ert i 1 k Hj my me and Hide Washingion Natnnalz senec Erawes Kodas paid of z Ekman Madison Bumgama Carnes 2014 Veo Serie Bannar ida 1 ABOUT Click this menu option and select 3 TIMELINE This area is where you ll see yours 5 TWEET BUTTON Hit the blue button to tweet the Basic Command List to get a list of commands that you can send to your PC with TweetMyPC 2 TWEET BOX For the few Twitter virgins remaining this is where you type your tweets When using TweetMyPC it s also where you ll type in the commands to send to your PC and other people s tweets This isa new account so it s empty Once your PC has successfully completed a command TweetMyPC will post here letting you know 4
116. ile by pointing to it in the etc default hostapd file Open the file find the commented outline that reads _ and uncomment and edit to read DAEMON CONF etc hostapd hostapd conf NAT SETUP We now need to set up NAT to allow multiple clients to connect to the Raspberry Pi s access point and route all of their traffic through the single Ethernet IP Edit the etc sysctl conf file and at the bottom add the following line net ipv4 ip_forward 1 Save the file and then enter sudo sh c echo 1 3 proc sys net ipv4 ip forward to activate the forwarding You ll now have to specify the routing rules that will connect the Ethernet port eth0 that s connected to the Internet and the Wi Fi access point wlan0 which is exposed to the devices within your network sudo iptables t nat A POSTROUTING o ethO j MASQUERADE sudo iptables A FORWARD i eth0 o wlanO m state state RELATED ESTABLISHED j ACCEPT sudo iptables A FORWARD i wlan0 o eth0 j ACCEPT By default these rules will be flushed when you restart the http bit ly RealtekWiFiDrivers C 7 nmraspberrypl pigraspberrypi i tall f fvar log syslag Jan ZT 14 49 49 hostapd wlan STA 24te2 e1 e 3e fd handshake completed RSH Jan 27 14 45 49 raspberrypl dhepd DHCPREQUEST for 192 168 2 167 cfd via wlanB wrong network lah EE a T EE Jan 27 14 49 49 raspberryp
117. ing the Barracuda as a backup for the WD is reasonable On the flip side hard drives have a lifespan of about five years Since this rig is two years old we could also use the Barracuda as primary storage and the WD as backup for three more years This should minimize writes and extend the drive s life a little more 8 THE JET STREAM ONE THING WE NOTICED was the lack of a front fan With the original configuration heat wasn t a big issue And to be fair the rear fan has a healthy air flow rate However we felt that with an extra HDD and a stock CPU heatsink and fan a little extra air couldn t hurt To install the 140mm Corsair case fan we had to pry off the plastic front panel From there we were able to use case fan screws to attach the white LED fan Easy enough What we didn t anticipate was the lack of an extra PWM fan connector on the mobo The H77H2 M3 only has two PWM pinouts one for the CPU fan one for a case fan Lucky for us the SATA power cables for this PSU have Molex connectors on their ends We found a Molex to PWM connector and plugged it into one of the SATA cables without a problem INTO THIN AIR WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME you saw a case that mounted the power supply up top For us it s been quite a while With few exceptions modern cases place PSUs on the bottom There are plenty of reasons for this to make way for exhaust fans and cooling radiators to help dissipate heat more effectively and because ins
118. ipset use a DMI 3 0 link with an effective 32Gb s bandwidth bidirectional Putting the added bandwidth to good use Intel has dramatically increased the features of the Z170 compared to Z97 Z170 supports 10 USB 3 0 ports plus USB 2 0 and SATA and it has 20 PCle 3 0 lanes compared to eight PCle 2 0 lanes 297 We ve seen Z170 motherboards with multiple M 2 PCle ports and four way SLI CrossFire with x8 connections on all cards is possible And while Skylake supports DDR3L and DDR4 memory most boards are going the DDR4 route not necessarily for performance but because DDR4 allows for higher density DIMMs Those who like a calm and peaceful existence will appreciate Skylake as it doesn t rock the boat If you re planning on building a new midrange desktop 1 500 Skylake is a great choice but if you bought such a PC in the past several years Ivy Bridge or later or if you re running Haswell E there s no rush to upgrade Skylake and the Z170 platform have some nice features that might entice you but unless you re after multiple M 2 NVMe SSDs or USB 3 1 ports Haswell owners can just sit back and relax JARRED WALTON VEADICT Intel Core i7 6700K and Intel Core ib 6600K SPEED BOATS Good performance overclocks well Z170 platform offers new features EI TUG BOATS Requires purchase of aftermarket heatsink needs new motherboard and RAM Haswell E still has more cores and higher performance 339 Core i7
119. ive support for USB 3 1 both Type A and Type C Intel has stated that it s banking on Thunderbolt 3 being the more appealing solution for this particular platform Although this seems a Little short sighted going forward only time will tell whether that will hold true Who knows maybe 3D Xpoint memory sticks will be powered by Thunderbolt and Intel will become our silicon overlord But the biggest and most exciting feature by far is the support for DDR4 RAM the final advancement beyond the limited 2 400MHz SPECIFICATIONS Intel Core i7 6700K Intel Core i7 4790K Lithography 14nm 22nm Frequency 4GHz Turbo to 4 2GHz 4GHz Turbo to 4 4GHz Cores Threads 4 8 4 8 Cache 8MB 8MB TDP NW 88W DDR Support DDR4 DDR3L 646B DDR3 DDR3L 32GB Max PCle Configuration Intel Graphics MAXIMUMPG NOV 2015 maximumpc com 1x 16 2x 8 1x 8 2x 4 Gen3 Intel HD Graphics 530 1x 16 2x 8 1x 8 2x 4 Gen3 Intel HD Graphics 4600 Hello Z170 aren t you a pretty Little thing DDR3 band Z170 motherboards will support up to 64GB of memory from 2 400MHz all the way up to 4 000MHz and beyond advancing the aging platform far past that of its Broadwell and Haswell cousins MEMORY MUSCLE But don t fret if DDR4 prices are still a little too steep and you have a few DDR3L RAM sticks kicking around Skylake is backward compatible albeit only with the low voltage economy version as opposed to the last p
120. ke architecture The first in the new mobile family will be the Xeon Processor E3 1500M product series Note that this is fundamentally different from the use of desktop Xeon processors we ve previously seen in high end notebooks For example the Clevo P5 gt 70WM uses LGA2011 processors and companies have supported up to the Xeon E5 2687 v2 12 core 2 7 3 5GHz 130W in the likes of the Panther 5 These new parts will be mobile focused which among other things will mean lower TDPs In addition to taking advantage of built in Intel vPro Technology Xeon mobile workstations will support Thunderbolt 3 Intel will also offer certifications for CAD and engineering apps as well as digital content creation KP Tech Tragedies and Triumphs A monthly snapshot of what s up and down in tech IRIUMPHS RUN WIN10 ON APPLE PCs Apple updated its dual booting Boot Camp utility to support Windows 10 64 bit on select MacBook Pro MacBook Air and iMac systems IRAGEDIES LENOVO PREPS PINK SLIPS Slumping sales at the world s top PC supplier have prompted plans to slash 3 200 jobs TRIPPING OVER EDGE NEW STORAGE RECORD Mozilla wrote a whiney blog post Using third gen 3D V NAND memory accusing Microsoft of favoring its Samsung built a 16TB 2 5 inch SSD Edge browser and purposely the most capacious drive in the world disregarding user preference MICROSOFT CHANGES RULES PAY TO PLAY DVDs
121. ker way to end up balls deep in a bush And not in a good way Then if you throw out the anchors too aggressively you ll skid even further into the undergrowth This may all seem more like motoring masochism but persevere listen to your co drivers pace notes like your life depends on them and with a little luck you ll make it to the finish with a sense of achievement that few racing sims can match Make no mistake Dirt Rally is tough but it s exactly this sense of all or nothing pressure that also makes it immensely rewarding and addictive No rally game is complete without the Ferrari powered style icon that is the Lancia Stratos and along with this you re treated to its seventies stablemates like the Ford Escort Mark Il and Fiat 131 Abarth However you ll only have enough cash probably skill at the start of your career to pilot an original Mini or Lancia Fulvia but it doesn t take long to earn enough for something fruitier All the most mental Group B rocketships are on offer plus several rear wheel drive cars from the period such as the Lancia 037 Ford Sierra Cosworth and E30 BMW M3 Nineties Group A options aren t quite so well represented with just the Escort Cosworth Lancia Delta Integrale and a 1995 Subaru Impreza to choose from If Codemasters add the legendary Castrol Celica GT Four and Tommi Makinen s Lancer Evo VI plus more retro metal like 88 MAXIMUM PE NOV 2015 maximumpc com
122. l when we built the DM and has plenty of options to boot It s got PCle bandwidth for days and an impressive eight DIMM slots for memory To fill up all the slots we got a whopping 32GB of memory That s overkill but we felt the need to fill those slots The G Skill Ripjaws 4 Series kits come in Ripjaws s signature red to match the board s theme At 115 per kit you can definitely and legitimately save a lot of money by sticking with 16GB That said at 326B using memory intensive programs like the Adobe Creative Suite Creative Cloud will be a lot snappier We also replaced the Cooler Master Nepton for the NZXT Kraken X61 a favorite of ours The Kraken keeps our CPUs ata nice and chilly 29 C at idle We re dying to grab another 980 Ti for SLI but at 660 a pop it s a high price to pay The reference 980 Ti s are selling at just 10 cheaper per card so there s not a whole lot of savings to be had there You can still get mind blowingly good frame rates in most games with a single 980 Ti Instead we put our money toward RAM and storage which will yield better returns for the creative pros who don t necessarily need 4K gaming at 60 frames per second For more of our component recommendations visit www maximumpc com best of the best UPGRADE OF THE MONTH 21B SAMSUNG 850 EVO INGREDIENTS PART PRICE Case Corsair Graphite 780T 190 One of the biggest limiting factors in SSDs PSU EVGA Sup
123. latform s DDR3 offerings That means that If you d rather just use a DDR3L enabled motherboard you can do just that That said these motherboards do seemto be few and far between The only manufacturer we know of that has boards with this feature for the foreseeable future is Biostar a company that scored a miserable four for its Z97W Gaming mobo last time it graced the pages of Maximum PC September issue Motherboard Supertest page 34 If you re considering the outlay to build a new rig you really should be looking at DDR4 Prices have dropped by roughly half since it was launched in October last year which means you re now paying hardly any extra for the same capacity of RAM at a far higher frequency than you once were Still not interested Consider yourself a bit speed freak but memory just doesn t float your boat Well ladies and gents we have one last nugget of juicy information for you that s the inclusion of PCle RAID Q 1 and 5 support allowing end users to RAID multiple NVMe drives together This has the potential to increase transfer read and write speeds all the way up to 3 500MB s and beyond approximately six times faster than a traditional SSD A New Architecture kylakes new architecture has been painstakingly woven from Intel s manufacturing plants and engineering genius Having to drop Broadwell even just to make its production deadlines Skylake is the first widely available 14nm CPU
124. ld master Boost Jump Dodge Slide Ram Helps you to whack Hop up to hit high Flip forward P Powerslide around Fill your boost the ball with some balls or block lobbed sideways and the arena to change meter and slam into vigor but also allows balls Press twice for backward for an direction easily and an enemy vehicle for excellent mid a probably impossible extra boost of knock shots sideways destroying them air acrobatics when double jump Hell momentum which will Also looks cooler than utterly It s not even applied during a jump _ it s all impossible send the ball flying disco cucumbers a cardable offence maximumpc com NOV 2015 MAXIMUM PG 91 in the lab yale NOES JARRED WALTON SENIOR EDITOR YOU D THINK I D LEARN MY LESSON but every time a new platform launches get excited about testing all the new hardware Sometimes everything goes as planned But most of the time brand new platforms especially when youre testing prerelease samples come with plenty of glitches that need to be ironed out Broadwell DT motherboards required firmware updates before they ran properly and Skylake is clearly no different Our initial review of Skylake was decidedly more ho hum in nature with performance that failed to really put any distance between Devil s Canyon and the new hotness No one expected Skylake to be a huge jump in performance those days are long past but we were l
125. le Frills like LED debug displays power and reset buttons switches to toggle auto overclocking none of that appears BENCHMARKS Asus Z170 A Cinebench R15 index i 914 x264 HD Video Encoding fps 57 Memory Bandwidth GB s 26 Shadow of Mordor min avg fps Maximum Multiplier OC GHz 4 7 Maximum Base Clock OC GHz 4 7 Cinebench R15 at Max OC index 1012 On the other hand the Z170 A delivers pretty well on the stuff you actually need Apart from all those USB ports there s an M 2 slot for super speedy SSDs with NVMe support The PEG 16 graphics slots have support for both Nvidia SLI and AMD Crossfire multi GPU graphics too Look even closer and you might spot the dedicated header for a CPU water pump which is genuinely useful now that water cooling has become both mainstream and relatively affordable OVERCLOCKING PROWESS Chuck Asus s fantastic UEFI BIOS interface into the mix then and you have a strong all around package especially if you re the sort that tends to build a PC close the door and just get on with it rather than gazing lovingly at LED lit innards through a window That applies when you take performance into account too At stock clocks with an Intel Core i7 6700K on board the Z170 A trades blows with MSI s much more expensive Z170 Gaming 7 It s millimetrically behind in Cinebench and x264 encoding but marginally ahead in Shadow of Mordor Even more impressive given th
126. long and show us the way Last month at a conference saw systems which can generate metaphors cocktails dancers fables and jokes l d love to see all of these things built into games games that can generate new kinds of content beyond trees and rocks want games to write theme songs for my MMO character want games to write myths about my epic journey want games to procedurally generate me a best friend can talk to want to see new things coming out of our computers BRIDGE OF SIZE Vinings agrees particularly when it comes to music Repetitive music drives me nuts once you ve listened to Dungeons of Dredmors entire soundtrack good as it is you ve heard it all We tried to modulate this in Clockwork Empires by having the soundtracks adjust themselves as your mood changed and while it does work pretty well it doesnt work as well as it could if we iterated on the technology for a few more rounds The problem is that you have to have somebody who is a musician and a programmer and you have to build tools It s a very complex process that requires specific sorts of individuals How do you Cook 15 also Clockwork Empires aims to become a more accessible Dwarf Fortress teach a computer about orchestration Despite that we have taught computers about things like image recognition see Dream of the Deep on page 53 One of the most interesting procedural generation benefits has to do with file
127. mer brand Processors that by their very nature are designed to be pushed to the limits in the hunt for number crunching benchmark rendering overclocking perfection But what does Skylake bring to the table that Haswell didn t Well a 14nm processor for starters Similar to the now redundant Broadwell yet a lot more promising Intel has dropped the FIVR Fully Integrated Voltage Regulator from the CPU die and left voltage control entirely up to to the motherboard manufacturers This allows aftermarket partners to control how they supply power to each individual voltage controller located onboard the chip What s exciting about this is how much variance we may start to see in the motherboard market once again It s an area where for a long time it s been very difficult to differentiate between or even justify the cost of a 300 board over a 150 one It might make choosing your motherboard about more than just buying the prettiest one for your budget And that s fantastic especially for competition s sake On top of all this loveliness the Z170 chipset has a vastly expanded array of storage options including Intel s new U 2 PCI Express connector an additional 12 PCle lanes to allow greater performance when running NVMe and PCle M 2 drives an upgrade from gen2 to gen3 There s also continued support for six SATA 6Gb s devices up to 10 USB 3 0 ports and 14 USB 2 0 ports Rather surprisingly however there isn t any nat
128. nce and this looks unlikely to change anytime soon Hopefully AMD will bring back some competition via the Zen cores but who knows when that will be What these K series processors have shown us however is that Intel s famously weak integrated graphical horsepower has been upped considerably Although those running overclockable chips are hardly likely to be utilizing integrated graphics alone this does give us insight into the capability of the more mainstream chips being released later this year which is especially interesting for those running laptops and other Intel powered mobile devices As much as Skylake is still incredibly competitive ature Fully Unlocked Turbo Yes Ratio based 100 125 166 DDR Ratio Override GOR Capabilities Up to 2667 MTjs Base Clock RELE DDR Granularity Steps 200 266 MHz 100 133 MHz Yes Sottware Blc s controled rata Full Full Range 1 MHz increments DDR4 Up to 4133 M Ability to increase memory frequency Finer grain increments The Core i7 still rules the roost when it comes to overclocking potential aftermarket cooler for the majority of your overclocking attempts as it will provide a great deal more headroom when trying to achieve those higher clock speeds In our testing we found the Core i7 6700K to be a solid 3 4 degrees Celsius cooler than the Devils Canyon refresh under load Andalthough Intel has promised to reimplement the FIVR this doesn t seem likely
129. nd Wireless AC 1525 Bluetooth Built in 2 0M FHD Camera amp Fingerprint Reader Built in Onkyo speakers Sound Blaster X Fi MB3 Sound System Slim design with only 28 8mm 1 13 inch thin NP9377 S Notebook 1 999 After 200 Instant Savings Windows 10 Home 64 bit Edition Ath Generation Intel Core i7 4710MQ Processor 6MB L3 Cache 2 50GHz 17 3 Full HD LED Display 1920x1080 with Matte Finished Screen 30 days No Dead Pixel Guaranteed Insurance 8GB DDR5 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M GPU Optional Dual NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970M 980M GPU with SLI Technology 16GB Dual Channel DDR3 1600MHz Memory 250GB Samsung 850 EVO mSATA SSD 1TB 7200RPM Hard Drive 8X DVD R RW AX DL Super Multi Drive 2 Hard Drives 2 mSATA SSD Drives Capable with Raid 0 1 Function Full sized Keyboard with color LED backlight Intel Dual Band Wireless AC 7260 Bluetooth Thunderbolt Port amp HDMI 1 4 output Port Built in Onkyo speakers and a sub woofer Sound Blaster X Fi MB3 Sound System NP8671 S Notebook 1 499 After 200 Instant Savings Windows 10 Home 64 bit Edition Ath Generation Intel Core i7 4720HQ Processor 6MB L3 Cache 2 60GHz 17 3 Full HD IPS LED Display 1920x1080 with Matte Finished Screen 30 days No Dead Pixel Guaranteed Insurance 3GB DDR5 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970M GPU with Optimus Technology 16GB Kingston HyperX CL9 Dual Ch
130. nd the desktop parts boast Intel s fastest Iris Pro 6200 Graphics coupled with lower clock speeds and a 128MB eDRAM L4 cache Skylake is more like Haswell no eDRAM Intel HD Graphics 530 and clock speeds similar to Haswell sort of The i5 6600K is clocked the same as i5 4690K while i7 6700K is clocked at 4GHz 4 2GHz just shy of i7 4790K s 4 4GHz turbo clock Architectural changes make up for any deficit and the result is that Skylake continues Intel s slow but steady performance improvements the same story we ve heard since the second generation Sandy Bridge parts Determining which processor is best comes down to intended use If you re just floating around on a lake and enjoying the scenery there s no need for a giant yacht or fast speedboat and if you re not doing some serious number crunching just BENCHMARKS Core i7 4790K CB15 1CPU i 173 15 5 833 x264 5 0 2nd fps ProShow Producer 5 sec Premiere Pro CS6 sec Stich Efx sec PCMark 8 Home PCMark 8 Creative PCMark 8 Work GTA V fps Metro Last Light fps Shadow of Mordor fps The Witcher 3 fps i 55 2 3DMark FireStrike Ultra 3 3 944 Core i7 5775C 155 767 119 55 9 3 956 about any modern CPU is fast enough it s why laptops have been gaining ground Desktops are still faster but not everyone needs all that performance As our charts show Skylake doesn t radically alter the landscape
131. ndered the Titan X almost entirely irrelevant The higher clock speeds of most iterations of its younger sibling made the difference between core count vanish and often delivers the GTX 980 Ti a performance lead And yet the Titan X is still 200 more expensive only buying you an extra 6GB on top of the 980 Ti s frame buffer By the time you need 12GB of graphics memory the next generation of midrange GPU tech may well be making this ol ultra enthusiast card look tired SPECIFICATIONS GPU GM 200 CUDA Cores 3 072 Memory Capacity 12GB GDDR5 MS Nvidia GTX Titan X El TITCH No double precision doesn t offer value at super expensive price 999 www geforce com 32 MAXIMUMPE NOV 2015 maximumpc com Zotac 980 Arctic Storm ANYTHING YOU CAN DO can do better says Zotac s super chilled GTX 980 Ti waving its water cooling block in the Fury X s general direction This is one of the finest examples of the Titan killing 980 Ti and shows AMD a thing or two about high end GPUs Rocking almost the same GM 200 GPU as the Titan X the GTX 980 Ti is missing only 256 CUDA cores and a 66B chunk of VRAM but has the same number of ROPs and 336 bit memory bus Coupled with that beast of a GPU Nvidia has let each manufacturer put their own stamp on the GTX 980 Ti too Most cards you see will be factory boosted units with new cooling arrays bolted on That means cards like this Zotac one here really
132. nductor progress that was first made in 1965 and modified in 1975 l ve charted its course using all three common variations doubling component density every 12 months 18 months or 24 months Analyzing it by any measure were already falling behind the predicted curve Just as todays computer games simulate one or a few main characters in detail and fake the rest its possible our universe works the same way Similar curves are common in science It took only 44 years for airplanes to advance from the Wright brothers wood and canvas contraption to the first supersonic flight At that rate airliners should be hypersonic by now but the curve has flattened since the 1960s Yes future breakthroughs carbon nanotubes quantum computing whatever could breathe new life into Moore s Law or even surpass it Computers will keep getting more powerful for a long time However that doesnt guarantee they will eventually grow powerful enough to simulate our entire universe Consider that to simulate a single atom in all its marvelous complexity requires simulating its subatomic particles such as protons electrons neutrons and the even smaller quarks within them Simulating a particle requires computer memory to store its properties plus computing elements such as transistors to express its behavior and its interactions with other particles Even tiny amounts of matter would demand enormous computer resources To simulate an
133. ng bracket Like everything else on the Session these components are smaller and feature more complex intertwined flex cables than in models past Just like the Hero4 cameras that came before the Session features an f 2 8 glass lens with an ultra wide angle field of view with reduced distortion Let s hope the waterproofing protection really works it ll be pretty much impossible to replace this lens without destroying your camera The 8MP sensor drops the 4K capability found in the Hero4 Black Silver 12MP sensors instead supporting resolutions up to 1440p at 30fps Repairability Score 1 out of 10 10 is easiest to repair The front bezel is held in place with T4 Torx screws and is easily replaceable Accessing the device for internal repairs means ripping through a rubber band plastic casing and lots of glue making reassembly infeasible The inner components are assembled in a web of circuitry and adhesive maximumpc com NOV 2015 59 R amp D Set Up a Tor Network on a Raspberry Pi 2 YOU LL NEED THIS RASPBERRY PI 2 The great mini computer costs less than 42 See www raspberrypi org MICRO SD CARD You ll need a blank card to hold Raspian the Pi OS ACCESS POINT PI Once you ve set up your Raspberry Pi Image A see our i October issue for detailed instructions you can configure it from a remote machine via SSH For the rest of this tutorial we ll assume the IP address of your
134. nologies that do different things and you know we ll have a different field of view for sure MPC So you haven t locked down what the final FoV will be KT That s right MPC Do you know what it is right now KT dont have the exact degrees In general it s notthose types of specifications and stuff that we re putting out We really want to stay focused on the experiences and what you can do with the holograms more than just the tech specs MPC We were really blown away by the fact that when the HoloLens projected something on the table we could barely see the table behind it Could you delve into the secret sauce What s going on there KT Yeah mean its really custom optics that we build to allow you to see the holograms and we want the holograms to feel like theyre real world objects So that s part of not only what we do visually but just making sure that when we put a hologram into the world that it sorts properly with all the real world physical objects But then also stuff that we do with our spacial audio systems So without having any kind of headphones able to provide you with a 360 degree spacial audio soundscape When you have holograms behind you and the holograms make a noise you can hear the sound coming from behind you with no headphones at all think those are all parts of the things that we do to make holograms feel like a part of your real world something that
135. nsumption Skylake stands comfortably head and shoulders above the competition We decided to build a basic test system to give the new girl a run for her money The test bed consisted of an Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 four sticks of Kingston HyperX memory one 240GB Samsung EVO and a more traditional 2TB Seagate something or other Under load Prime 95 amp Furmark the rig pulled a total of 340W from the wall utilizing only half of the 750W power supply we had it running on If nothing else these chips will be fantastic for small form factor builds and Steam Machines Hell if you really wanted to you could run SLI on a 750W power supply with little to no worries at all INTEGRATED GRAPHICS The biggest area of improvement for Intel has been in the integrated graphics department That may not mean much for those of you buying into the K line processors as youll probably also be investing in a dedicated GPU However utilizing DirectX 12 to leverage the CPU effectively could improve frame rates considerably in games That may not be so beneficial for Twitch and streaming enthusiasts but it harks back to what AMD was trying to implement with its Mantle API allowing Intel to carefully leverage the processing power for what computational tasks each core is better suited to handling 46 MAXIMUM PE NOV 2015 maximumpc com Overclocking Potential IMPROVED OVERCLOCKING CAPABILITIES Supported on Intel Core i7 6700K and i5 6
136. o Where you do need to be careful though is with the 2GB versions of the R9 380 that are floating around Those are definitely to be avoided SPECIFICATIONS GPU Antigua CUDA Cores 1 792 Memory Capacity 4GB GDDR5 J MSI R9 380 Gaming 4G E3 GAMING Beefy buffer decent at 1080 great MSI cooler El SHAMING Avoid the 2GB 4GB is pricey 240 www msi com f j SITE LIVE lt NOW We ve upgraded v Designed to suit every screen v Complete round the clock news v The best PC reviews and features v In depth hardware coverage GAMER THE GLOBAL AUTHORITY ON PC GAMES Our test bed comprises an Intel Core 17 5960X in an Asus X99 Deluxe motherboard with 16GB of 2 133MHz DDR4 memory under Windows 8 1 All of the graphics cards are tested with the latest release drivers on Graphics Cards Supertest HOW WE TESTED the same benchmark settings to ensure a fair test We ve included the minimum frame rate results as well as the overall average to indicate how smooth an experience youre getting from each graphics card SPECIFICATIONS Website 3 GPU Cores Memory Bus TDP l Peak Temp C Score Nvidia GTX Titan X www geforce com 999 200 3 072 384 bit 250 83 7 Zotac 980 Ti Arctic Storm WWW Zotac com 384 bit AMD R9 Fury X www amd com 649 Fiji XT 4 096 4 096 bit 275W _
137. oad Nvidia s GTX 750 Ti has a 60W graphics card power specification Together they add up to less than 150W and that s with both subsystems under load Now the memory hard drive SSD and mobo all use power too But you can see how DONC ALOR THIS MONTH THE DOCTOR TACKLES gt Future Proofed PSU gt Storage Dilemmas gt Windows 10 Upgrade The GTX 960 is aimed at 1080p gamers Its 128 bit memory bus is narrow yet ample for smooth frame rates at that resolution even a 280W supply could be considered ample Worry about the PSU when it comes time to upgrade Swapping out your graphics card for something faster say a GTX 980 would put you close to the supply s ceiling and fall well short of Nvidia s 500W requirement Optimizing Storage Dear Doc as an avid reader of Maximum PC find myself needing your advice Last year bought a loaded system from CyberPowerPC Although I m not a gamer love its performance It has a 256GB SSD and 1TB hard drive Foolishly assumed the SSD would host my OS and the applications would install to the mechanical disk Needless to say that s not what happened Now my SSD is almost full and my hard drive almost empty How dol transfer the programs What should do John Digilio THE DOCTOR RESPONDS Getting the most out of solid state storage is a balancing act John Naturally you want Windows on that SSD But there s a good chance you ll want other g
138. ocedurally generated libraries full of procedurally generated books and poetic forms 15 completely insane in the best way possible THE APEX Developed by two brothers Tarn and Zach Adams Dwarf Fortress procedurally generates almost everything you could imagine According to Tarn in their previous game Slaves to Armok You could zoom in on your character and it d tell you how curly his leg hairs were and the melting and flash points of various materials It was insane Dwarf Fortress goes further The entire world and its history is generated epoch by epoch before you play with kingdoms rising gods falling and magical items being lost for centuries Then it generates the terrain youre in the dwarves you re nominally in command of the local flora and fauna and a hundred other things including art and poetry that reference in game events Dwarf Fortress is so impressive and rigorous but also insane that people have built working computers inside it That s right a virtual machine running inside a game Michael Cook s Angelina simulation can t claim to be as complex as Dwarf Fortress but its increasing comprehensiveness Sir You Are Being Hunted used procedural generation to replicate the British countryside most of the time in a different direction Thats because Angelina www gamesbyangelina org is an experiment in computers designing and evaluating video games autonomously The gam
139. of the good stuff Unfortunately it didn t disclose this and we saw games using over 3 5GB of VRAM struggling on the GTX 970 But then this isn t a GPU you d use for seriously taxing 4K gaming anyway You can get up there in the VRAM stakes with gaming at 1440p GTA Vand Mordor s texture packs do that but elsewhere the GTX 970 really fits the bill for a midrange graphics card And Gigabyte s version comes with the excellent triple fan Windforce cooler which allows this card to be seriously overclocked without melting a hole in your motherboard Even at its hottest it doesn t top 64 C Its biggest rival is that impressive R9 390 These two GPUs trade blows across most of our benchmarking suite with AMD taking the lead in one test and Nvidia winning others Where the 390 does win though is in the more modern games which need over and above the 4GB frame buffer this card is sporting even at 1440p That and the fact the AMD card is often slightly cheaper means we give the nod to the 390 here SPECIFICATIONS GPU 3 GM 204 CUDA Cores 1 664 Memory Capacity 2 3 5 0 56B GDDR5 J Gigabyte GTX 970 G1 Gaming El M25 Pricier than the 390 suffers at top settings in modern games frame buffer gate 359 www gigabyte com maximumpc com NOV 2015 MAXIMUMPE 35 Graphics Cards Supertest Asus GTX 960 STRIX THE GTX 960 IS PRETTY MUCH the bottom of the ladder when it comes to the modern Maxwell lineup until
140. of the market but we re also the people paying through the nose for that privilege and we re being essentially ignored When you add to that the latest year and a half of broken SLI drivers The Witcher 3 was a Gameworks game and has a completely broken SLI driver you start to see a pattern of Nvidia being good NOW ONLINE WE TACKLE TOUGH READER QUESTIONS ON at hardware engineering and marketing and bad at software engineering and customer service No one is speaking up about this and it s gone on for far too long Alex Chevallard SENIOR EDITOR JARRED WALTON RESPONDS Hi Alex l ve had personal experience with certain DisplayPort cables and even DisplayPort connection on a GPU not working right at higher refresh rates and resolutions For example have a 4Kp60 Acer XB280HK that runs fine with my Nvidia GPUs but some of my AMD GPUs barf on it the screen will black out and come back on and sometimes AMD s Catalyst Control Center will pop up and tell me it s having problems and drop the refresh rate Both my 290X GPUs only work with 4Kp24 on this display and there s no fix l m aware of l ve also seen this with 1440p144 Basically when we re trying to push that much data over a cable the quality of the cable and other connectors start to matter a lot more For 1080p60 Sure use whatever you want Or 1080p120 You BLOOMFIELD TAKES ON SKYLAKE Are you sitting on an old Bloomfiel
141. olt out and get one right away but it s definitely worth your consideration JIMMY THANG VEADICT Digital Storm Bolt 3 E BOLTS Beautiful excellent cable management some sweet LED options NUTS for modern SFF not cheap 3 070 www digitalstorm com SPECIFICATIONS Processor Intel Core i7 4790K Mobo Asus Maximus VII Impact RAM 16GB DDR3 1866 Graphics EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti 250GB Samsung 850 EVO 1TB ed i Seagate HDD Optical Slot loading Blu ray player Lian Li PC 05S Silverstone Case PSU SX600 maximumpc com NOV 2015 m 75 in the lab Intel Core 17 6700K and Core 15 6600K Welcome to Skylake lifejackets optional Skylake is more about features than pure performance it s a good choice if you re building a new PC PEG NOV 2015 maximumpc com SKYLAKE The name invokes images of a serene outdoor setting with clear water surrounded by forests and blue skies overhead a peaceful place where all your hopes and dreams come true You can go swimming fishing water skiing or any other number of activities Skylake is also the name of Intel s sixth generation Core series of processors conjuring visions of higher performance and improved efficiency Which makes us wonder If CPUs were boats which one would you buy Intel has launched two desktop processor updates in as many months June brought us Broadwell for Desktops aka fifth generation Core a
142. om Director of Marketing Robbie Montinola Sales Operations Manager Tracy Lam PRODUCTION Production Manager Mark Constance Production Controller Vivienne Calvert Project Manager Clare Scott Production Assistant Emily Wood FUTURE US INC 4000 Shoreline Court Suite 400 South San Francisco CA 94080 Tel 650 872 1642 www futureus com Senior Vice President Charlie Speight Vice President Marketing amp Operations Rhoda Bueno Vice President Product Development Bart Jaworski SUBSCRIBER CUSTOMER SERVICE Maximum PC Customer Care P O Box 51592 Harlan IA 51593 1352 Website www maximumpc com customerservice Tel 800 274 3421 Email MAXcustserv dcdsfulfillment com BACK ISSUES Website www maximumpc com shop Tel 800 865 7240 REPRINTS Future US Inc 4000 Shoreline Court Suite 400 South San Francisco CA 94080 Website www futureus com Tel 650 872 1642 Fax 650 872 2207 Next Issue on Sale 20 October 2015 Future is an award winning international media group and leading digital business We reach more than 49 million international consumers a month and create world class content and advertising solutions for passionate consumers online on tablet amp smartphone and in print Future plc is a public company quoted on the London Stock Exchange symbol FUTR www futureplc com Chief executive Zillah Byng Maddick Non executive chairman Peter Allen Chief financial officer Richard Haley Tel 4
143. om wholeheartedly recommending it JT 140 www polar com r a I maximumpc com NOV 2015 93 94 wu It s Tough to Lead I m a longtime reader of Maximum PC and have an issue with a company that is simply ignoring its obligation to its loyal customers Nvidia has a bug in its video drivers that it has known about as far back as 12 12 14 This bug causes those who have purchased multiple Nvidia graphics cards to experience a rapid full screen green strobe like effect that makes it impossible to play any games in 4K at 60fps have three Titan Xs and can t play anything over 1440p This issue has been well documented over at the Nvidia forums Dozens of people across multiple websites have shared detailed information with Nvidia about this issue We ve followed its requirements We ve placed support tickets with it l ve personally spent 20 collective hours in live chat windows with Nvidia about this issue Nvidia claims it s working on it but no progress has been made since last Christmas and no timeline or explanation as to why this is happening has been given and many others have opened tickets with Nvidia for this issue and V gt gt been told we re working on it but by all accounts it simply isn t For a company that s routinely touted as having better drivers than its rivals this is concerning Granted people gaming in 4K comprise a small segment
144. om silicon called our holographic processing unit and then you know were not really talking about the particular chips or anything else were putting In the device today MPC More recently you guys are jumping into the PC bandwagon a lot more for gaming Can you talk about that initiative What was the turning point for that KT think that everything were doing with Xbox is a big focus on providing a high value for gamers Finding out from our fans and finding out from our community what gamers really want and what they re looking for And as far as what we re doing for Windows 10 you can see games like Fable Legends that s enabling crossplay between Xbox One and Windows 10 PCs So a game like Fable Legends it ll ship on both platforms If you re on Xbox One you can play with or against people on Windows 10 PCs and vice versa think that s one of the big pushes Gamers want to play games with the people they want to play with It shouldn t have to matter Oh are you on PC or are you on console think for too long there s been that PC gaming kind of community and the console gaming community Theyre all people who love playing games so they should be able to play games together Thats one of the big pushes were doing with Windows 10 It s just trying to bring those communities together so we can all play games together and have fun And also play games on every device have You want
145. onent interconnect express PCle interface Both Nvidia and AMD are set for big new GPU architectures on incredibly tiny production processes in the next year having both missed out on the bonanza that 20nm lithography was meant to offer It s set to be a very intriguing time for the not so humble GPU then and with the rise in screen resolution and the burgeoning VR industry s insatiable thirst for GPU power it needs to be Let s do some digging and see if we can figure it out what s going on NOV 2015 maximumpc com 28 mum Nov 2015 Graphics Cards Supertest Before we go too far into a future filled with high bandwidth memory HBM new component interconnects and new GPU architectures there are still a few holes to be plugged in AMD and Nvidia s respective graphics card lineups By the time you read this the GTX 950 will be Nvidia s new entry level gaming card The 950 see First Look page 93 sports a slightly cropped version of the GM 206 GPU found in the current GTX 960 It offers impressive power efficiency and 1080p gaming performance Interestingly the GTX 750 Ti will continue to coexist with the GTX 900 cards with prices now hovering just above 100 Where the 950 and above all require a 6 pin PEG connection the 750 Ti is able to draw all the power it needs from the motherboard To counter it AMD is looking to try and spoil the low end GPU party with its own Radeon 370X a Trinidad GPU
146. ooking for 5 10 percent gains There were a few of those but also quite a few cases where performance only matched Here in the Maximum PC ALEX CAMPBELL Associate Editor hands down As it turns out Im not a 4 Welcome to the bleeding edge the 17 4790K and even a few tests with a 10 20 percent drop in performance Despite running stable and having no major issues it turns out our initial test platform needed some fine tuning before we could unlock Skylake s full potential It s still not clear if the issue was simply mobo BIOS related or if our use of DDR4 3000 memory actually hurt rather than helped The boost in bandwidth from many enthusiast memory kits often comes with a slight increase in latency which can cause performance to go the wrong way Regardless a change in motherboard and the use of DDR4 2666 memory suddenly brought the expected gains though we plan on doing additional investigations into DDR4 clock speeds with the hope of figuring out where Skylake thrives Moral of the story When youre living life on the cutting edge glutton for Skylake has proved it s not immune to the usual new platform teething problems prepare for the occasional flesh wound New platforms and higher memory clocks are not a guarantee of vastly improved performance The teething problems generally get sorted out over the first couple of months after a platform launches at which point it becomes easier to
147. other apps to speed up the process decida need to start with a fresh install of your previous OS whether that be Windows 7 or 8 Just download the ISO from http bit ly 1lIFygh MAKE USE CREATE At some point in the process Windows will need to access your product key Don t worry though you won t have to scurry around the back of your PC scramble through drawers or trawl through endless emails trying to find it This is because Windows stores that all important 25 digit product key in the UEFI firmware these days 60 7 ca Set up a Tor Run Win10 on a Build it Updating fe a network ona Pi 2 virtual machine VOU Ole DO motherboard Upgrade it and you ll need to buy yourself a new copy of Windows Or call Microsoft support N submit your How project idea to comments maximumpc com maximumpc com NOV 2015 MAXIMUMPE 57 R amp D THIS MONTH WE DISSECT a GoPro Hero4 session maos CX KA www ifixit com 58 mumm NOV 2015 maximumpc com You re better off buying a new one than trying to get into this thing Although not as powerful as the GoPro Hero4 Black you ll still be able to film at 1440p 30fps with the Session It s insane how much hardware GoPro has packed into the Session BACKGROUND Surf s up The new GoPro Hero4 Session just dropped in and it s totally tubular It s GoPro s first waterproof camera t
148. pp from http bit ly TeD8JmT Start by downloading the TweetMyPC application for free from http bit ly 1eD8JmT Once done click Run to begin the SETTING UP TWEETMYPC TWITTER HAS TAKEN THE PLANET BY STORM with people increasingly desperate to share their 140 character musings Part of its appeal is its simplicity but underneath the hood it s a powerful tool This has allowed services such as TweetMyPC to create tools a world away from Twitter s original goals TweetMyPC lets you remotely control your PC via Twitter If you re away from home for instance and have left your PC on you can use Twitter to switch it off You just send a shutdown command through Twitter and your PC will close your programs and shut down Or if you ve forgotten a document you can tweet getfile with the name and location of the file and your PC will email it to you MATT HANSON SSP liom My P installation process After installation the configuration settings of TweetMyPC will be displayed which will allow you to configure the program The Show in notification area box keeps an icon in the bottom right hand side of the screen as a reminder that TweetMyPC is running If you want it to automatically start when you load up Windows you guessed it check the tick box next to Start automatically with Windows CONNECT TO TWITTER e For the app to work you ll need to let it access your Twitter
149. put the Titan X in its place It also sits well above AMD s R9 Fury X its closest rival from the red side The issue with factory overclocked cards however is that they have a hefty price premium attached though you can still get more affordable GTX 980 Ti s that give the Titan and Fury X ers a bloody nose for under 650 With this card you can get genuinely playable frame rates from the likes of GTA V and Shadow of Mordor even at the most strenuous of 4K settings if not quite maxed out This still feels like a ludicrous amount of money to spend on a new graphics card but for value it beats the Titan X hands down The high end 4K performance you get with this GPU makes it a mightily tempting proposition and avery aspirational card SPECIFICATIONS GPU GM 200 CUDA Cores 2816 Memory Capacity 6GB GDDR5 y Zotac GeForce GTX 980 Ti Arctic Storm El COLD FISH Still expensive not much faster than other 980 Ti s 780 www zotac com AMD Radeon R9 Fury X WE GENUINELY HAD HIGH HOPES for the Fiji GPU in the latest Pirate Islands range of flagship AMD graphics cards And then the tantalizing promise of the first sub 28nm GPU vanished along with the 20nm process it was supposed to use leaving us with just the hopes that high bandwidth memory HBM might lift this new Radeon high enough to compete with Nvidia s finest The struggle with Fiji is that to all intents and purposes it represents very little adv
150. rading an old PC can feel like reuniting with an old friend you ve lost contact with Some things carry over from the past but new additions make it much different However this wasnt a single cheap upgrade The total cost of parts we used in the upgrade almost exceeded the original cost of the PC That said upgrading the CPU and motherboard would have added another several hundred dollars By holding on to a slightly older mobo and CPU we still got a respectable PC for less than the price of a new one That s not bad if budget is an issue And speaking of budget these upgrades are totally doable as incremental upgrades over time Adding a fan storage and RAM is relatively cheap and easy to do The graphics is more expensive to modernize especially since the PSU upgrade is a good idea for the new GPU As time goes on upgrading the case motherboard and CPU are doable upgrades that could make this PC more current This rig really chugged along in our timed benchmarks It took half an hour for itto finish the ProShow export and almost 20 minutes to finish stitching photos Even though it had four cores the modest CPU crunched numbers at a pokey 10 3 frames per second in our X 264 benchmark In our graphics benchmarks We didn t bother adding an aftermarket cooler for this Core i5 3350P The locked CPU doesn t allow for overclocks and is plenty cool as is c f f We didn t go with a Blu ray and instead st
151. rame rate down If none of those help consider replacing your MSI board Data Cramming Hey there Doc just subscribed and l m already a big fan owned a GeForce GTX 960 for two weeks before returning it for a 970 primarily because of the 960 s narrow 128 bit bus Doesn t this make the 4GB version of the card just about as good as the 2GB variant understand Nvidia s Maxwell architecture has good compression but it would still seem to me that at the very least the last gigabyte of GDDR5 is next to useless Austin Hickey THE DOCTOR RESPONDS While it s certainly possible to debate certain design decisions the Doc finds it easier to categorize graphics cards by target resolution and pick the right specs from there Nvidia s GTX 960 is decidedly optimized for 1920x1080 gaming In most titles 2GB of memory is plenty at that resolution and spending more for 4GB isn t necessary While it s true a 128 bit memory bus isn t particularly wide the Maxwell architecture s efficiency enables the GTX 960 to keep up with boards endowed with much more theoretical throughput In short you re correct But the reasons why go beyond just the memory bus Meanwhile your GTX 970 sneaks its way into the 2560x1440 category wider bus and more GDDR5 are instrumental in maintaining the balance needed to push an additional million and a half pixels per frame Moral of the story don t get fooled into buying mains
152. rly Colin McRae titles was its ability to convey the butt clenching tension and merciless nature of stage rallying Threading a 300 plus BHP turbocharged missile through twisting loose surface lanes often little wider than the car and lined with unforgiving trees and rocks isn t a sport with second chances Consequently Dirt Rally ditches the flashback gimmickry you got in earlier instalments Even restarting is discouraged with a 5 000 event bonus awarded for completing a rally without a restart And the unrelenting realism doesn t end there Slide off course and you ve got 10 seconds to get back on track In that time you can try and scramble your own way out of the weeds or opt to have your car recovered with a resulting time penalty added Launch yourself so far into the wilderness that virtual helping hands can t reach you and thats it stage over Plus unlike circuit racing where youre never more than a lap away from your pit crew crashing or even getting a puncture in Dirt Rally means youve got no choice but to limp to the end There s just one 30 minute service session for repairs in a four stage rally and while this can be stretched to an hour the resulting time penalty is only worth incurring if your chariot is closer to death s door than Bill Cosby s career With so many roadside hazards and tough penalties for hitting them using full throttle at speed in all but the most mundane machines is often just a quic
153. rocedural generation in We re now making games for players who want to also show themselves playing the game on YouTube and doing stuff think youre stuck with that nowadays think Minecraft did it to us So you have to make a game where YouTuber X playing the game can have a completely different experience than YouTuber Y f you look at the stuff that gets put up on large YouTube Channels it s things with a creative element a procedural element and also Goat Simulator Procedural content gives you just enough hooks upon which a good storyteller can hang their own hat I think that s something that Minecraft either got or stumbled upon There s a certain level of crudity needed where you can then have a child just stick their imagination on it and have something wonderful happen and a lot of the people gunning in the same space have never really figured that one out LIMINAL PROCEEDINGS By contrast Dr Tom Betts s motivations are less about speed or fame and more about interesting outcomes He started as an arts student I was interested in the idea of creating systems that would make art work for me l d always been into computers and games so it made sense to combine those interests taught myself to program and l ve been making generative and proc gen software ever since He s created art performed music and has been the lead programmer at indie games company Big Robot since 2008 Working with proc
154. rotects your GPUs against any extra electromagnetic interference which means higher overclocks motherboards So what makes this MSI mobo so special Simply put overclocking balls This motherboard comes with titanium chokes and highly efficient capacitors It overclocks our happy chip all the way up to 4 7GHz But more than that it s a stunning board The PCB features a matte black finish topped off with glorious metallic heatsinks and a rear 1 0 cover that s rarely seen at this price point ZAK STOREY wm 49 NOV 2015 maximumpc com MANIMUMPE Procedural Generation GENERATION ROC How games have learned from art music and math and how the world might learn from games By Daniel Griliopoulos nd on the third day God made the world And He saw that it was quite crummy And He then looked at the other worlds that He d made and thought They suck a bit too infallible aslam So He pondered for silent indefinites as the void drifted tetchily on waiting for time space gravity bicycles and all the other concomitants of virtue and vice Eventually He got a bit frustrated Balls to it all He thought blasphemously Handcrafting a universe is for losers lll procedurally generate an infinity of them and just choose the best one And lo that was the morning of the third day and He saw that it was good So He went and watched fractal zooms on YouTube for the rest of the week
155. roup B theme your choice of wheels are the bang up to date Ford Fiesta VW Polo and Peugeot 208 packing over 550BHP a piece Racing is close and aggressive with a minimum of three opponents plus there s a longer joker lap in every race to spice things up Missing this will get you a time penalty as will corner cutting and while rubbin s definitely racing ramming will damage your ride and as always repairs don t come easy It s exhilarating with the only slight criticism being that there are only four opponent skill settings Once you ve nailed each course even the Very Hard difficulty isn t quite hard enough Of course as Dirt Rally is still Early Access there s scope for tweaks as well as extra cars and locations But what you get now is as polished as any fully fledged Codemasters title with very few glitches Graphical quality isn t quite on a par with Project Cars but the visuals are easy on the eye and also your rig with a single GTX 960 able to run most settings maxed out at 2560x1440 while maintaining 40 plus fps However what s most impressive is the superb handling stage design and a car line up that ll give most gear heads a stiff shifter Dirt Rally may still be a work in progress but it s already more than just a return to form It s quite possibly the most accomplished rally sim ever BEN ANDREWS yzi Dirt Rally g E BHP Handling realism selection tough tracks KICK ASS E DMV Ne
156. ry exploration and awe There are similar revolutions around the corner for generated game mechanics generated stories and so on It s incredibly exciting Part of that is there can be no walkthrough to a proc gen world at most some recipes and best practice recommendations SpeedTree can generate believable trees and foliage using mathematical formulae It s been used in The Witcher 3 Shadow of Mordor and Far Cry 4 among many others DREAMS OF THE DEEP There are ways other than procedural generation and handcrafting to generate content The most spectacular in recent months has been the frankly terrifying and hallucinatory images coming out of the Google Deep Dream project This project works by starting with a neural network These are typically piles of 10 30 stacked layers of artificial neurons The team starts training the neural network using millions of examples and then adjusts the network parameters gradually over time so that fidelity isn t lost but random noise is Each layer of the network extracts higher level features than the previous one until the final layer decides what the image looks like So the first level might detect edges then intermediate layers might detect recognizable shapes while the final layers assemble them into complete interpretations This is exactly how Google Photo works too The reason these horror pictures have been going around of people with hundreds of dog s eyes
157. s Sure there are some decent Android titles but most of them are casual games or are ports of existing console PC games To mitigate the dearth of deep Android games Nvidia is pushing its Grid game streaming service Right now there are about 60 streamable PC games You ll need a good Internet connection however and we recommend a 56Hz router The Shield also lets you stream from your gaming PC as long as you re on the same network This doesn t however work as well as Valve s own In Home Streaming service as it only officially supports a couple of titles GAMING LIMITATIONS The Shield s X1 chip is a quad core 64 bit SOC based on a 20nm process In conjunction with its SOC is 3GB of RAM Unfortunately the Shields closed off Android TV ecosystem doesn t support that many benchmarks so we only had a handful of comparisons to go by In GFX OpenGL an OpenGL graphics benchmark the Shield garnered 43fps in the Manhattan test We used our Shield Tablet as our zero point and Nvidia s 2014 tablet s 2 2GHz K1 processor only managed 29fps For a compute benchmark we used CompuRS to calculate megapixels per second picture rendering The Shield garnered a score of 4 7MP s beating the Shield tablet by 104 percent Synthetic tests out of the way we fired up Tainted Keep an Android hack and slash game with a built in benchmark Here the Shield BENCHMARKS GFX OpenGL fps CompuRS MP s Tainted Keep fps
158. s 10 Home AMD FX 8320 Processor GIGABYTE 970 USB 3 0 amp SATA III CORSAIR 8GB DDR3 1600Mhz Dual Channel Memory 1TB SATA Ill HDD 7200RPM 64MB Cache AMD Radeon R9 380 2GB Direct X 12 Video Cyberpower X Nova with 600Watt 80 Power Zalman Gaming Headset Asetek Liquid Cooling System FREE JE Liquid Cooling www cyberpowerpc com 800 707 0393 730 Baldwin Park Blvd City of Industry CA 91746 All Desktop systems come 3 year Limited Warranty lifetime D free techsupport AMD the AMD Arrow logo AMD Phenom Il AMD Phenom ATI Radeon Graphics 790 Series and combinations thereof are trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices Inc All price or registered trademarks of NVIDIA Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries CyberPower PCs use genuine Microsoft Window are subject to change without notice or obligation Cyberpower is not responsi n any hid ical and dire errors Copyright 2013 Cyberpower All rights reserved vin GeForce SLI are trademarks microsoft com piracy howtotell Don t be surprised to find crapware on your Lenovo PC even after a clean install PCs VULNERABLE DUE TO LENOVO BLOATWARE IT WAS RECENTLY discovered by an Ars Technica forum user that some Lenovo laptops are configured to download the firms s pre installed software and utilities read crapware even after wiping the storage drive and performing a clean install of Windows
159. s better than the top AMD GPU of the last generation and we have a great midranger on our hands With most games youll get excellent 1440p performance out of it and for a pretty impressive price too That Sapphire cooler on this version means it maintains a chilled disposition even in the most aggressive of gaming arenas and the 8GB frame buffer means it can take every high res texture that GTA V or Shadow of Mordor cares to toss its way It may be another exercise in rebadging GPUs for AMD but the little tweaks the team has made to this card s silicon have made it very much worth the effort We may not be hugely impressed with the Fury X but the work it has done on the 390 almost makes up for it SPECIFICATIONS GPU Grenada Pro CUDA Cores 2 560 Memory Capacity 8GB GDDR5 J Sapphire R9 390 Nitro NITROUS Faster than the 290X almost as quick as the 390X enormo buffer El NOXIOUS Old architecture drops frames to the 970 340 www sapphiretech com Gigabyte GTX 970 G1 Gaming THERE S GENUINELY lot to like about the GTX 970 despite all the grumbling surrounding its offset frame buffer It s a good gamer and comes at a decent price too The issue is that Nvidia didn t disclose the smart work it had done with the GPU and the VRAM To ensure it kept more of the actual GPU logic Nvidia s engineers did some clever stuff splitting the frame buffer Had it not done so the chip would have lost a lot more
160. sort the winners from the wannabes JIMMY THANG Online Managing Editor pathways that lead you to the 92 Lab when we get to testing things out in systems we can make completely unexpected discoveries started testing SSD performance for a series of RAID articles l m working on and learned something very interesting about SSDs SATA and NVMe When you test NVMe and SATA you expect NVMe to win NOV 2015 the very good SATA Samsung 850 Pro outperformed the NVMe Kingston HyperX Predator in sequential reads and writes with record lengths At 128K record lengths the NVMe drive beat the formidable 850 Pro Odd indeed especially since NVMe SSDs are billed as faster better and stronger maximumpc com punishment which is why l ve held off on playing the brutally challenging Dark Souls games Recently however Bandai invited me to play a demo of the upcoming Dark Souls 3 So figured why the hell not The game starts you off at the top of a castle and from there you travel the multiple end boss Every trail went down led to the same thing however death got killed going to the left and got killed going to the right Maybe its the old man in me but I m beginning to feel like can t keep up with kids these days If you re a masochist however Dark Souls 3 is the game for you Y Bn Y mA 2 mE Mm Pes Nvidia
161. st chips to hit the market rocking the new 20nm production process And it wasnt just us expecting that either both the GPU makers thought they d be making the move However the 20nm process turned out to be a nightmare for the silicon makers to produce chips with at a consistent yield without losing a bunch to defective parts in the baking process This made the whole 20nm lithography seriously expensive Tied to the fact that it wasn t actually delivering Sticking with a 28nm GCN chip requires some serious cooling maximumpc com much in the way of performance or efficiency gains it isn t surprising that the switch wasn t deemed worth it So Nvidia and AMD have been stuck on the existing 28nm process for at least one generation longer than either really expected Nvidia however seemed to see the writing on the wall and with the already efficient Maxwell architecture it was still able to deliver improved GPUs AMD on the other hand has stuck with its existing architecture and simply piled more and more silicon into the design to boost performance But the new 2016 GPU architectures from AMD and Nvidia wont be on the 20nm process either That ship has sailed Were now expecting both companies to move their chip production process to the new 16nm FinFET similar to Intel s Tri Gate 3D transistors lithography This will allow far more transistors to be packed into the same or smaller die size and yield great
162. start with the current issue Prices correct at point of print and subject to change For full terms and conditions please visit www maximumpc com terms_and_conditions Sponsored by ewegg lt BUDGET GAMER del ET _ ___ __ PART PRICE Case Rosewill Neutron 60 PSU Corsair CX500M 500W 55 Mobo ASRock H97M ITX ac NEW 90 CPU Intel Core i5 4460 NEW 190 GPU EVGA 3962 KR GeForce GTX 960 SC 210 RAM 8GB 2x 4GB G Skill Ares blue DDR3 1600 NEW 46 SSD 240GB SanDisk Ultra 11 90 HDD Seagate Barracuda 1TB 51 os Ubuntu Desktop Linux 14 04 LTS 64 bit 16 Approximate Price 808 WITH THE EXCEPTION of the Neutron case prices have dropped pretty much across the board EVGA s shorty GTX 960 fell by about 15 Combined with the price drop of 15 on SanDisk s SSD and 5 on the PSU we had a little wiggle room We chose to go with G Skill s Ares over the Ripjaws The timings are Identical the heat spreaders are lower profile and these models are blue which match the mobo Since we re OK with a locked CPU we dropped the Z model ASRock mobo in favor of an H model It keeps the AC Wi Fi and most of the other Z97 features at the cost of OCing options With the spare cash we got two more cores by upgrading to a Haswell Core i5 Of course we save more money by keeping Ubuntu Linux as the OS a part by part guide to building a better pc E
163. t and presto easy idiot proof overclocking up to 5GHz It sounds fantastic but in practice it doesn t always deliver To cut a long story short the highest stable overclock we achieved with our Core 17 6700K using the Game Boost dial was the 4 4GHz That s less than what we managed using traditional methods The good news is that a quick trip into the BIOS will allow you to hit 4 7GHz with ease which is as good as any other motherboard will manage with this particular 6700K MSI s Gaming M7 also knocks out some very nice numbers in our stock clocked benchmarks across the entire rendering video encoding and gaming gambit So the M7 has no easy answers for that value conundrum Like all premium AsusZ170 Pro Gaming Asus Z170 A 883 914 55 57 26 26 1011 1012 Best scores are bolded All boards tested with an Intel Core i7 6700K and a Corsair Hydro H100i water cooler NOV 2015 maximumpc com motherboards it can t fully justify its lofty price in performance terms But it s definitely an appealing proposition If it was within our budget we d probably pull the trigger JEREMY LAIRD VERDICT 5 2170 7 E QUAKE III Excellent feature set looks like a quality item great all around performance El DOOM III Difficult to fully justify the price Game Boost unimpressive 227 www msi com SPECIFICATIONS Chipset Intel Z170 Socket LGA1151 Form Factor Memory
164. talling a heavy PSU above a bunch of pricey components Is an unnecessary risk Gordon used a cheapo PSU that came with the case we decided to replace it with a 650W unit from Rosewill The PSU is 80 Plus Gold certified which means that it will actually use more of the power it draws from the wall not just dissipate it as spare heat The unit also comes with a five year warranty which means that by the time you upgrade the CPU and motherboard in this rig it will probably still have plenty of life Left in it NOV 2015 maximumpc com GASP IMMEDIATELY OBVIOUS with this case was the utter lack of cable management In terms of PC cabling this is the stuff of nightmares What seems like an obvious route for cables over the horizontal rail and behind the drive bays is made impossible by a side panel that has an inward inward bevel When we tried to keep cabling tucked behind the mobo tray we felt like the case was making fun of us Oh that s cute it would say I bet you d just love an extra centimeter Tough luck hotshot Coupled with the woefully insufficient zip ties that came with the PSU this cable job could have you waking up in cold sweats We had to stuff the cables behind the drive cage doing our best to keep them out of the way of the front fan s air flow The wiring still looks like a mess EXHALE WHEN WE SET OUT on this project we specifically wanted to revisit an older build Oftentimes upg
165. tatic IP address First deactivate the wireless adapter with sudo ifdown wlanO Then open the etc network interfaces file In the file remove every existing entry associated with wlan0 such as the following iface wlanO inet manual wpa roam etc wpa_supplicant wpa_supplicant conf iface default inet dhcp Then add the following lines below the line that reads allow hotplug wlan0 to set the static IP address for the new access point iface wlan0 inet static address 192 168 12 1 netmask 255 255 255 0 Save the file and activate the interface with sudo ifconfig wlanO 192 168 12 1 MAKE YOUR POINT 3 Now that we ve defined the wireless access point it s time to configure it Create a new file called etc hostapd hostapd conf with the following contents interface wlanO 2 60 MAXIMUM PE NOV 2015 maximumpc com ssid TorSpot hw_mode g channel 6 macaddr_acl 0 auth_algs 1 ignore_broadcast_ssid 0 wpa 2 wpa_passphrase Your_Passphrase wpa_key_mgmt WPA PSK wpa pairwisezTKIP rsn_pairwise CCMP We ve set up a password protected network called TorSpot You can specify a different name for the access point if desired by specifying it in the ssid string Also change the wpa_ passphrase string to incorporate a custom password You ll need to enter this password to authenticate yourself to the Raspberry Pi s access point Next up well tell the Raspberry Pi where to find this configuration f
166. th drives already completely formatted You cannot create a RAID array within Windows for your OS drive without cloning the OS onto an additional hard drive and then formatting and copying it back across To format your drives boot into a Windows media disk select Install Custom installation then Format and delete all partitions on both of your drives FIND YOUR PORTS e Once formatted you need to make sure your SSDs are plugged into the correct RAID 0 compatible SATA ports on your motherboard Refer to your manual but these will be under Intel s chipset usually the far right hand side closest to your RAM CHANGE STORAGE TYPE 3 Next head into the BIOS Image Al Annoyingly this step will vary depending on your motherboard manufacturer but you need to find Storage Configuration in advanced setup At this point change the storage type from AHCI to RAID then save changes and reboot CREATE RAID VOLUME d Hit Control l to get into the Intel Rapid Storage Technology driver Once in you should see an in depth Intel user interface At the top you ll have six options Select the first Create RAID Volume STRIP SIZE 5 Now give your RAID array a name Hit Tab and make sure RAID 0 is selected You can select another array here but for the time being you ll get the most performance gains FORMAT YOUR DRIVES effective way of gaining PCle like storage speeds from 2 5 inch SSDs RAID or Redund
167. the Fiji XT in the Fury X The Fiji Pro has 512 fewer Radeon cores than its bigger brother and a 50MHz drop in base clock but is happily sporting the same 4GB of HBM for a super speed frame buffer It s also almost 100 cheaper than the Fury X Which leaves us scratching our heads This Sapphire Tri X cooled version of the Fury actually clocks just 10MHz behind the Fury X and yields almost identical gaming frame rates as the more expensive water cooled reference card Yes the air cooled card inevitably runs hotter by around 15 degrees but when you re dropping only a few fps on average but saving 100 it becomes a bit of a no brainer It s still over 550 for effectively a third tier graphics card but it will deliver excellent gaming performance and if you re not going 4K yet will make your 1440p screen sing The Fury also goes toe to toe with the GTX 980 often taking a performance lead That has led to some price drops on the older card though so you can find great deals on the Nvidia side now But when the price is close we d recommend staying with the more advanced card that s rocking HBM if you re chasing a purchase SPECIFICATIONS GPU 3 Fiji Pro CUDA Cores 3 584 Memory Capacity 4GB HBM VEADICT Sapphire Radeon R9 Fury Tri X E TRUSTY Almost as quick as the Fury X decent cooling TRIXSY Expensive only just faster than 980 563 www sapphiretech com maximumpc com NOV 2015 MAXIMUMPE 33
168. the P55K it s a pretty nice portable The chassis sports some really nice plastics Of course they re still plastics The likes of a MacBook have nothing to fear Still the keyboard is seriously slick free from flex and deftly backlit Even better however is the LCD BENCHMARKS Gigabyte P55K v4 Bioshock Infinite min avg fps 10 52 Shadow of Mordor min avg fps 14 35 Metro Last Light min avg fps 14 23 Heaven min avg fps i 7 30 Cinebench 15 index 675 Gigabyte P35K v3 13 52 22 53 display It s a wide angle IPS effort with a 1080p native and it s absolutely glorious Games movies and even the Windows desktop look gorgeous If we re being really picky we d say the mSATA Liteon SSD is a bit disappointing given the advantages of the latest M 2 drives And at 128GB it s not exactly huge even if there s a 1 magnetic drive to back it up But the fact that all of this is yours for around the 1 500 mark means we re willing to allow a little leeway It s a very appealing all around package and a nice little gaming portable JEREMY LAIRD VEADICT Gigabyte P55K v4 FINE WINE Fancy new Broadwell CPU nice graphics performance good battery life KICK HEB AWFUL WHINE CPU not a huge performance bump Nvidia s G Sync tech probably not an option Loud Price 1 500 www gigabyte com SPECIFICATIONS CPU Intel Core i7 5700HQ GPU Nvidia GeForce GTX 9
169. to be able to play the games you love on these different devices When I m at home I m definitely playing on my console on my big screen TV But then you know if l m going to work or well no Christ l m not playing games at work I m at Microsoft working but if Im at work and I ve got my Windows 10 PC there can now go in and just start playing Fable Legends on my PC and have everything that l ve earned or anything that l ve bought while playing Fable Legends on my console just work seamlessly on my Windows 10 PC 1 NOV 2015 MAXIMUM PG 21 quickstart PSU Prebuilt Peril Hey Doc purchased a great system at a great price Lenovo s K450e with a Core i7 4790 12GB of RAM a 1TB hard drive a 1286B SSD DVD R W drive 802 11ac Wi Fi a GTX 750 Ti 2GB and an Intel B85 based mobo for 840 But I m freaking out after discovering its PSU is only rated for 280W Should be concerned Andy Anderson THE DOCTOR RESPONDS As enthusiasts we tend to over budget in anticipation of the future If the Doc builds a PC today he wants it to handle tomorrow s upgrades too But tier ones like Lenovo put cost above expansion and understandably so Fortunately a little bit of math will help you rest easy Two components use a majority of your machine s power its CPU and graphics card The Core 17 4790 is rated for 84W That s its average with all cores active under a taxing Intel defined workl
170. to deliver new enhancements that make it easier to find your games musi SME SEltings along with some of the familiarity of Windows that you know and love GAMER PALADIN E 5 0037 iM 829 Windows 10 Home Intel Core 15 4690 Gigabyte GA Z97 D3H MB Customizable NVIDIA Geforce GTX 750 Ti 2GB VC 8GB DDR3 1600 Corsair Memory 24X DVD RW 1TB SATA III HDD Raidmax Horus Gaming Case 600 W Power Supply REVOLT RS7O 1099 Windows 10 Home Intel Core i5 4690K NVIDIA Geforce GTX 960 2GB VC 8GB DDR3 1600 Corsair Memory ASUS Z971 PLUS SLIM DVD RW Customizable 120GB SSD 1 7200 RPM HDD Revolt Case 350W Power Supply hd GAMER PALADIN A 201 1749 Windows 10 Home Intel Core i7 5820K MSI9 99 SLI PLUS MB Customizable NVIDIA Geforce GTX 980 4GB VC m 8GB DDR4 2400 Corsair Memory 24X DVD RW 240GB SSD 1TB SATA III HDD NZXT Noctis iBUYPOWER Edition Gaming Case 600 W PSU Work ensy Play hard f Windows Intel the intel logo intel Core and Core inside are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries All cantent and proces are subject io change with ut notice or obligation gt GAMER PALADIN im Customizable 1 1 99 s Windows 10 Home Intel Core i7 4790K PS i TIC GIGABYTE Z97 D3H MEIBUFPOWER e 4 50 NVIDIA Geforce G
171. to happen until the iteration after Lake known as Ice Lake All in all though we re not too sure whether losing the FIVR is a bad thing Another change that s come with Skylake is the ability to alter the base clock frequency however it still doesn t hold pace with Haswell E The extreme edition CPUs benefit hugely from the extra cores and no amount of Hyper Threading or core performance will beat that for the time being What we did find during testing was that if overclocked up to 4 8GHz the CPU actually matched performance with that of the entry level model 17 5820K at stock For enthusiast grade chip that s one hell of an achievement PROMISING FUTURE Over the next few years we ll no doubt see some incredible advancements when it comes to computational power If Intel keeps up this progress 10nm processors might not be as far away as many may think And with 3D Xpoint landing next year the in 1MHz increments The base clock frequencies are currently 100 125 166MHz on Devil s Canyon However Skylake scraps the ratio based system entirely allowing higher overall overclocks for those willing to eke out every millimeter of power from their otherwise beastly new CPU It s important to note however that you ll need to adjust the core ratio to coincide with what target clock speed you re attempting to achieve For example if you change the base clock to 300MHz and leave the core ratio at default
172. tream graphics cards loaded with more memory than makes sense They re great for vendors looking to charge a premium but rarely return much on your extra investment 1 NOV 2015 MWMIM E 23 NOTEBOOK COMPUTERS 5 20 S Sal Sager recommends Windows NP9773 S Notebook Windows 10 Home 64 bit Edition Ath Generation Intel Core 17 4790 Processor 8MB L3 Cache 3 60GHz 17 3 Full HD IPS LED Display 1920x1080 with Matte Finished Screen 30 days No Dead Pixel Guaranteed Insurance 8GB DDR5 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M GPU NVIDIA G SYNC Technology 16GB Kingston HyperX CL11 Dual Channel DDR3 1866MHz Memory 250GB Samsung 850 EVO M 2 SSD 1TB 7200RPM Hard Drive 2 Hard Drives 2 M 2 SATA SSD Drives or 2 M 2 PCle SSD Drives capable Hardware Raid 0 1 Function capable with SATA Interface Full sized Keyboard with color LED backlight Killer Dual Band Wireless AC 1525 Bluetooth Built in 2 0M FHD Camera amp Fingerprint Reader Built in Onkyo Hi Fi speakers and a sub woofer Sound Blaster X Fi MB3 Sound System Intel Inside Windows 10 Extraordinary Performance Outside Dealer VAR Government and Corporate pricing are available Please call for details Sager One Year Limited Warranty Policy 30 Day Money Back Guarantee If the equipment does not work as promised or if you are
173. ts over three grand 15472 1 184 Tomb Raider fps 3DMark FireStrike Shadow of Mordor fps 0 10 20 30 40 50 8 016 4 602 60 70 80 90 100 Our desktop zero point PC uses a 5960X CPU three GTX 980s and 16GB of RAM Arkham City tested at 2560x1440 max settings with PhysX off Tomb Raider tested at Ultimate settings Shadow of Mordor at Max settings Performance wise the Bolt 3 s overclocked Devil s Canyon chip was able to give our zero point s 5960X CPU a run for its money besting it by 14 24 percent in our single threaded benchmarks Of course the octo core CPU gave the quad core a proper 40 percent thrashing in our thread heavy X264 benchmark And in the GPU tests it s not really a fair comparison pitting our ZP s three 980s against the Bolt s single 980 Ti where it got beat by roughly 30 40 percent Just know that you will be able to play games at 4K with a single 980 Ti but expect to have to turn down a few settings or run under 60fps You could certainly build the Bolt 3 yourself for several hundreds of dollars less without Digital Storm s service and warranty and yes it is bigger than we would like but the system still has a lot going for it It s a beautifully put together rig and it s got excellent cable management across the board Digital Storm has got an eye for detail and it shows It also runs extremely quiet which is a huge plus for a SFF machine We wouldn t b
174. uck with a basic DVD RW We popped in a basic Plextor model because when we found this box the original drive was missing EES tatt n Onlytwo of the six SATA cables have horizontal ports which excluded Longer GPUs from being used on this mobo Luckily our GTX 970 is pretty short The long gray ribbon cable is for the front panel audio We had to make sure we disconnected this before removing the panel to prevent bent pins the GTX 970 made a respectable showing In 3DMark FireStrike Ultra this build beat our 800 web Blueprints budget build that sports a GTX 960 and 15 4590 The build scored about 700 points lower than our 1 500 web Blueprints midrange build that has a 17 4790K and GTX 980 That midrange PC s CPU and GPU combo costs 305 more than what s in this entire box not to mention the midrange s CPU is sitting on a more expensive Z97 board All things considered these upgrades provide a marked improvement in performance at a reasonable price As for the game benchmarks Batman Arkham City showed an enjoyably playable 70fps at 1440p which lets us know that other games will fare well at 1080p even at higher settings The GTX 970 couldn t really keep up when it came to 4K gaming as both Tomb Raider and Middle earth Shadow of Mordor were barely smooth at 28 6fps and 30 6fps respectively at 2160p 9 BENCHMARKS ZERO POINT Stitch Efx 2 0 sec 806 1 165 44 5 ProShow Producer 5 0 sec
175. ugh some tech is still held back for server chips such as and allows us to pull clever tricks such as running multiple OSes at the same time 64 MAXIMUM PG NOV 2015 maximumpc com HOME FOR THE MACHINE You ll be asked to name your new virtual PC and find it a home on one of your hard disks You ll need 60GB of free space as a minimum for Windows 10 or more if you intend to use it fully and install lots of applications on it Virtual Windows 10 starts up pretty swiftly we discovered even when installed on a lumbering data dump of a spinning hard drive rather than an SSD SPACE TO THINK There s an option to have your virtual PC stored as one or multiple files but this only matters if you re allocating it a lot of space We chose the default multiple files and hit Next to bring up a summary of the settings that will be used to create the virtual machine VMware does a good job of choosing options but this wouldn t be Maximum PC if we didn t fiddle IMPROVE THE HARDWARE The default virtual PC is an underpowered beast Windows 10 can run on lean hardware but just because you can do something doesn t mean you should We tested the default settings and found it was a sluggish experience like running Windows on a netbook We could hear Win10 running its chipped enamel mug up and down the bars of its 2GB RAM prison The quad core Core i7 in our test machine is barely troubled by Win8 so we hit Customize H
176. undbreaking procedural generation techniques to animate large scale scenes The scene where the toys find themselves in a garbage incinerator Most of the trash was procedurally generated from the other trash around it Similarly the plastic bags wafting through the wasteland and how Barbie tore up Ken s vintage clothing collection Art No Man s Sky Yes it s a game but Hello Games s No Man s Sky plans to procedurally generate an entire universe from the flora and fauna to the planets and stars Then it generates alien landscapes and lets you land on them and walk about Amazing TROP 2015 mw 55 ul N BON hae 7 2 RPG EPIC DROPS f Uy 0 15 f d ins leads e s killer lineup pe 4 i d Xbox One S killer r 30 PAGES OF NEW INFU lic OF WAR 4 j 6 HITMAN DIVISION r ROT E i f ARS OF WAR amp Ta ps E J r WALA 8 m bh rt 1 E cy THE Division NET NEN J gt ERI m jT T GEARS OF WAR 4 F RZA B iMINECRAFT THE DIVISION 3 kb Nr E 6 SAVE TODAY Get your print or digital subscription at bit ly LIKTdXT Download to your phone or tablet and try two issues with a 30 day trial PRINT EDITION Savings compared to buying 12 full priced issues from US newsstand This offer is for new US print subscri
177. ur existing storage subsystem it s possible to Reset this PC cleaning up the The K450e wasn t built for expansion Its 280W power supply supports Lenovo s stock configuration just fine though existing installation and saving you the trouble of reformatting Hit Start select Settings click Update amp security and choose the Recovery option It s a Scream Hey Doc l ve had a Corsair AX850 since 2010 and never had a problem with it However recently upgraded my graphics card from a Radeon HD 7870 to an MSI GeForce GTX 970 and noticed the new card emits a significant amount of coil whine used to hear this occasionally from my 7870 but not to the same extent Searches online suggest it could be attributable to the PSU Is that true Is there a way to alleviate it Bradley Burr THE DOCTOR RESPONDS According to the Doc s contacts at Nvidia your PSU probably isn t the problem That sa well built PSU and a good match to the GeForce GTX 970 More likely is that you re hearing the whine in a menu or an older DirectX 9 based game where your frame rates are up in the hundreds run Fraps in the background to verify The GTX 970 is significantly faster than your old Radeon which is maximumpc com why the issue is more apparent now Try dialing in more demanding settings running a higher resolution or turning on Adaptive V Sync in the Nvidia Control Panel to bring your f
178. ut the GPU stack were pretty confident that Arctic Islands won t suffer from the same rebrand a thon woes that have somewhat blighted the current Southern Islands R300 series release All in all 2016 looks to be a seriously exciting year in terms of graphics cards The efficiency gains from the 16nm lithography will keep things highly chilled in the midrange but also allow for some absolute monster GPUs at the top end Hell we could be looking toward 8K gaming by then guys and gals IS NVLink the end tor PCle ALONG WITH the announcement of the Pascal architecture Nvidia CEO Jen Hsun Huang also introduced the world to NVLink an interconnect for its GPUs that could potentially offer between five and 12 times the bandwidth of the current PCle 3 0 connection Nvidia s talking about NVLink offering DRAM class speed and latency which will allow for the use of Pascal s unified memory across the entire PC It will also improve performance between GPUs so multi GPU systems could end up getting a far more linear scaling terms of gaming speed As well as the NVLink connection on the GPU itself it will also require dedicated silicon in the CPU if it wants to bypass the PCle interface completely From the outset though that looks likely to be restricted to supercomputer class high performance computing HPC Intel is unlikely to start dropping Nvidia silicon into its designs But if there s no path to the CPU
179. where a patch breaks the endpoint Its already happened A recent mandatory update had trouble installing on some Win10 PCs causing affected users to be stuck in an endless reboot loop Until Microsoft could issue a patch the only way out was to apply a registry tweak someone posted online Dn L Despite the risk Microsoft has the greater good in mind and the company isn t alone in that thinking Auto update is the way to go for patching consumerdevicesandoperating systems Amol Sarwate director of vulnerability management at Qualys told Maximum PC Most consumers don t have the time or ability to keep track of security issues and to apply patches Sarwate also suggested Microsoft could give users the option of rolling back or temporarily disabling updates as a good compromise But this isn t just an issue for consumers OEMs and boutique builders fielding support calls have to deal with the fallout Do they mind Windows 10 Home users don t havea choice when it comes to applying updates As a custom computer manufacturer who has thoroughly evaluated the new OS we see a tremendous upside said Travis Bortz VP of Business for AVADirect Its capability to support the user s experience while maintaining flexibility toward mobile platforms coupled with its DX12 integration has gamers enthused And although the new automatic update system can cause the occasional glitch we
180. which tried to force its touch friendly Modern UI down the throats of desktop users and as the market share numbers reveal Microsoft s strategy didn t work Windows 10 s renewed focus on the desktop experience including mouse and keyboard input is recognition that Microsoft learned its lesson Or did it Instead of pitching the virtues of a universal Ul Microsoft is trying to sell customers on the benefits of mandatory updates If youre a Windows 10 Home user security and app updates are downloaded and applied automatically Win10 Pro users can defer updates for up to eight months Your only choice is whether Windows automatically reboots afterward This is part of Microsoft s transition to a Windows as a Service WaaS model From here Microsoft will dole out upgrades on an ongoing basis The question is what happens when a buggy update causes problems with thousands or even millions of PCs Simon Crosby CTO of endpoint security outfit Bromium told us the majority of breaches last year exploited vulnerabilities for which a m apaga patch existed but that It s not quite as simple as it seems The Windows ecosystem unlike Apple s has massive diversity of hardware and a long legacy of potentially incompatible applications Though Microsoft is caught in a balancing act Crosby said it needs to ensure there is an easy escape route for IT teams and even consumers who find themselves in a situation
181. which will support the 4K resolution over HDMI at 60Hz for the first time providing you ve got a compatible GPU With just a few extra inches across the diagonal we d have a seriously impressive package Unfortunately at 24 inches the screen size is too small It s just too big a compromise DAVE JAMES J Viewsonic VX2475Smhl 4K 4K Great panel decent price HDMI 2 0 NO WAY Screen size too small for 4K plasticky chassis limited adjustment 400 www viewsonic com SPECIFICATIONS Screen Size i 24 inch Native Resolution 3840x2160 Panel Technology PLS Response Rate 2ms GtG HDMI 2 0 DisplayPort 1 2a MHL 2 0 Connections maximumpc com NOV 2015 MAXIMUM PG 79 1n the Nvidia 5 More hield Android TV than game console The Shield may be the best set top box out there NOV 2015 maximumpc com THE 2015 NVIDIA SHIELD marks the third entry into the company s Shield lineup Confusingly Nvidia is once again simply calling this iteration Nvidia Shield Because of its new form factor many are referring to it as the Nvidia Shield gaming console but in our opinion it s more of a set top box than a gaming machine The brains behind the operation is Nvidia s new Tegra X1 SOC but it s Google s Android TV UI that s really at the heart of this device The Shield s main purpose here is for watching movies and TV shows plus gaming This means there s no
182. with Win8 8 1 and 10 in legacy mode Lenovo released updated BIOS versions You can find them on Lenovo s website PL 14 mum Nov 2015 maximumpc com VERIZON TESTS 10GB S FIOS INTERNET SERVICE LEAVING GOOGLE FIBER IN THE DUST WHILE MOST OF US would be thrilled to have 1Gb s Internet service such as what s offered by Google and amp in a handful of territories Verizon is testing a next generation fiber optic technology that s 10 times faster FiOS The technology is called NG PON2 or next generation passive optical network And get this while the thought of 10Gb s service certainly gets our attention Verizon s already looking ahead way ahead with claims that NG PON2 has the legs to reach 80Gb s That s 80 times faster than Google Fiber folks That s not to say that 80Gb s or even 10Gb s service is coming to your residential neighborhood anytime soon but the potential technology for such mind boggling speeds is there and doesn t just exist in a lab Verizon tested the ultra fast service with a business customer and also with a residential home located three miles away from the company s central office in Framingham Massachusetts PL 1 intel Xeon INTEL READIES XEON FOR LAPTOPS Workstation performance in a poweririendly package inside INTEL IS BRINGING its server focused Xeon processors to notebooks for the first time These mobile chips will be based on Intel s sixth gen Skyla
183. you can count on as being persistent in your world and really giving people a fun time having fun playing with holograms MPC Just to reiterate it s going to be a self contained Windows computer on your head right KT That s right It s completely untethered You have no cords or cables tied to other devices Theres no use of any other markers or any other cameras or anything else you have to put in the environment Everything that you need to see and hear holograms with 15 all contained in Microsoft HoloLens MPC Have you guys talked about the specsatall Something like that needs to be light and powerful with great battery longevity surely KT One of the big things we had to do because there are so many different sensors and pieces of technology and data coming into the device that allows us to have the holograms pinned to your real world is that we did have to create a custom piece of silicon Our holographic processing unit And that s just one of the great things about working at Microsoft You can take problems that are seemingly impossible like putting holograms Into the real world These are all things that when you ve got the amazing talented team of people at Microsoft were able to do these kinds of things and make them happen MPC So you guys aren t using an Intel processor or anything like that It s all fabricated in house at Microsoft KT No we have one piece of cust
184. yption paragraph under the Security and Safety Features subheader made the previous statement about information sharing chilling Device encryption helps protect the data stored on your device by encrypting it using BitLocker Drive Encryption technology When device encryption is on Windows automatically encrypts the drive Windows is installed on and generates arecovery key The BitLocker recovery key for your device is automatically backed up online in your Microsoft OneDrive account Youread that right Microsoft stores a backup copy of your encryption key on your OneDrive account that it can give to the FBI or anyone else it deems Win10 s privacy policy presents significant security holes worthy if it is in Microsoft s interests What s not to love Needless to say this flies in the face of the very purpose of encryption Why lock your house if you store a spare key along with your name address shopping habits and late night browsing preferences in some shopkeeper s locked box for him to do with as he pleases There is hope Although TrueCrypt was abandoned by its original authors the code has been audited and deemed good without backdoors for one wont be considering Windows 10 or BitLocker secure Alex Campbell is a Linux geek who enjoys learning about computer security 17 maximumpc com NOV 2015 LE e Ti 2 P B Most settings are crammed in this but you

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