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Maximum PC - Holiday 2015

1. MINIMUM BS HOLIDAY 2015 www maximumpc com SOLID STATE MINUS gma qu T e eee MOBILE GAMING S ERN CREATE YOUR OWN ARJ BUILD ENDISSE DREAM MACHINE OPEN AIR MACHINE 9 MEDIA CENTER is K Nvidia s GTX 980 gives A Don t hide those beautiful Suns Stream TV movies and a laptops a huge boost components any longer music on the cheap Build the perfect storage setup Speed amp space diste BIA NVMe TE amp NAS round up FIIHMELmRIHE What the future holds for those manic miners Future j CORSAIR CLEARLY LI ol O1Ol QUIET COOL GORGE US A MASSIVE PANORAMIC WINDOW PANEL GIVES YOU A WIDE VIEW OF YOUR HIGH POWERED COMPONENTS U _ at p mi m u aet ae Dial REA ieee GETTE IDETANES CORSAIR COM 600C QUIET ELEGANT EXTERNAL DESIGN MEETS PRECISE ACOUSTIC ENGINEERING IN AN UNRIVALED BLEND OF 2 BEAUTY POWER AT QUIET e i oft ea CORSAIR GET Ta HE IDETA ES CORSAIR COM 600Q 4 iBUYPOWER Recommends M indows find your games GAMER PALADIN WE 959 Sa Windows 10 Home Intel Core i5 6600 GIGABYTE GA Z170 HD3 MB NVIDIA Geforce GTX 960 2GB VC 8GB DDR4 2400 Memory 24X DVD RW 120GB SSD 1TB SATA III HDD Customizable PF a aoe EP MSI APACHE PRO NO ifi GAMING GE72 c m 67
2. _ AS SSD 4K PC Mark 8 _ File Transfer ED IOMeter OTIC Storage Bandwidth Copy Speed 128K Sequential Average 4K Random Average 645MB s 260MB s 334MB s 1 019MB s 124MB s 254MB s 622MB s 560MB s 1 008MB s 267MB s 1 067MB s 495MB s 564MB s 1 605MB s 454MB s 292MB s 280MB s 190MB s 496MB s 222MB s maximumpc com HOL 2015 MAXIMUM PG 45 SUBSCRIBE TU MAX hits THE GO TO RESOURCE FOR PC ENTHUSIASTS CHOOSE YOUR PERFECT PACKAGE DES ae vs UMP 5 P i 5 intel 3960 E T GHG D Sm 3 rot ene eiiis t m d 5 PG RJ m Instant digital access on your Every issue delivered to your door iPad iPhone and Android device at a fraction of the cost sh a pass m LS a pm BH 1 et ea a r B nl PACHME Ez EUR eu Man ids ERI KB MAII E x E pq EET pel at tea CH MED CENT AE 3 fu oa cai f 1 4 L JL Get the print edition of Maximum PC delivered direct to your door and instant access on your iPad iPhone or Android device be ee me ONE EASY WAY TO SUBSCRIBE ONLINE 2 http myfavm ag MaxPCSubs TERMS AND CONDITIONS Savings compared to buying 13 full priced issues from US newsstand This offer is for new US subscribers only You will receive 13 issues in a year If you are dissatisfied in any way you can write to us to cancel your subscription at any time and we will refund you for all unmailed issues Prices correct at point of print and subje
3. making it still clunky at times Be which channel is least occupied move across accordingly honest when was the last time you clicked one of them So what can we do to make Windows 10 more like Windows 7 while keeping the features we do enjoy such as task view and DX12 First thing is removing those pesky Windows 8 cast offs Right click and unpin the lot of them Then hover the mouse over the right hand edge of the Start menu and pull it to the left This gives you a very functional compact Start menu just like the good old days but with 60 T fewer links Then of course it s time Stream TV with Make Minecraft What Gloriousness b LE a Raspberry Pi Beautiful Really Looks Like ide taskbar head up to Cortana and select Hidden from the drop down menu Voila a clean simple taskbar N submit your How To project idea to comments maximumpccom maximumpc com HOL 2015 MUMUIME 57 presents Ear Dunn THIS MONTH WE DISSECT Google OnHub The guts and glory of Google and TP Link s in home Wi Fi hub The world s largest speaker for a router Wait what 58 MANIMUMIG HOL 2015 maximumpo com Stunningly good looking for a router wWww ifixit com BACKGROUND Google is on a mission to reinvent the router and we got our hands on its first foray into the home networking market the Google OnHub With a sleek design hefty price tag and a host of unique
4. 1 505MB s 2 063MB s 2 201MB s 496MB s Traditional SSDs are cheap and readily available for you to take advantage of AS SSD Sequential Write 1 258MB s 901MB s 1 315MB s ATIMB s volatile and stackable makes it a potentially revolutionary invention depending of course on whether Intel can bring it to the consumer market And of course we ll need an additional storage interface to be able to even transfer that amount of information because read and write speeds topping a whopping 550 000MB s might be a bit much even for PCI Express SSD STILL BEST So SSD is still king of the hill It s still the most diverse storage solution out there today It has successfully supplanted the old school HDD and cemented its way into our hearts by being the stealthiest good looking drive out there As an interface U 2 is still far too clunky looking and for gaming honestly you dont need more than that certainly not for the time being Perhaps today the best setup is a RAID 0 array for your OS and then a standard 500GB 1TB drive for your games and media What ever happens well be glad to hear the last of the inevitable whir of a mechanical drive as it spins into history alongside the great noises of our technological past Farewell platters farewell dial up farewell motherboard beeps l AS SSD 4K 64Thr Read T28MB s 1 021MB s 1 445MB s 371MB s
5. 799 DIGITALSTORM Ah AA 2 tt ata tet A SL ML 1 NM CUSTOMIZE NOW WWW DIGITALSTORM COM The Digital Storm Logo and World s Most Advanced PCs are trademarks of Digital Storm HN GEFORCE G GTX EN
6. ur Sager recommends e Windows LE ai a Te Si NP9870 S Notebook E E 6th Generation Intel Core i7 6700K Processor 8MB Smart Cache 4 0GHz Windows 10 Home 64 bit Edition Us 17 3 Full HD IPS Matte Display 1920x1080 with NVIDIA G SYNC Technology 30 days No Dead Pixel Guaranteed Insurance se 8GB DDR5 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 GPU aa et ee Optional Dual NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970M ee ee ee oe ee ee ae B m Or GTX 980M GPU with SLI Technology QE ce z g 32GB Dual Channel DDR4 2133MHz 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 Full sized Keyboard with color LED backlight Killer DoubleShot X3 Pro 2X Killer E2400 LAN Killer Dual Band Wireless AC 1535 with Smart Teaming USB 3 1 Thunderbolt Gen3 Combo Port Built in 2 0M FHD Camera amp Fingerprint Reader Built in Foster speakers amp a sub woofer tuned by SoundBlaster Sound Blaster X Fi MB5 Sound System F JF a menm F E Intel Inside Extraordinary Performance Outside EM Windows10 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 not fully satisfied we will issue
7. Additional fan support 2x 120mm Noise Level 29 5 dBA maximumpc com HOL 2015 m 83 in the lab HOL 2015 maximumpc com Aorus X7 Pro Sync AS loud as it Iueautitul LADIES AND GENTLEMEN a new dawn is upon us G SYNC laptops are coming thick and fast so it s with great pleasure that we introduce the Aorus X7 Pro Sync Unearthed from the heart of Gigabyte s notorious Aorus factories comes this marvelous wonder of a tiny gaming powerhouse Arguably the noisiest dual GPU laptop ever witnessed the X7 packs two Nvidia GeForce GTX 970M processors alongside an Intel Core i7 5850HQ 16GB of DDR3L RAM anda RAID 0 setup This is the kind of laptop dreams are made of Let s start with the good The design of the Aorus is stunning It s clean it s sharp and it s low All traits we normally see from the Ultrabook side ofthe divide as opposed to the pro gamer That being said the Aorus is a total of 0 9 inches thick in comparison to the Asus ROG G751JY which comes in at BENCHMARKS Aorus X7 Pro Sync Cinebench Index 677 Heaven avg fps i 83 Bioshock Infinite avg fps 82 Metro Last Light avg fps 51 Shadow of Mordor avg fps i 73 Best scores are in bold Smooth as a baby s butt As loud as a screaming toddler more than 0 8 inches thicker when closed The keyboard although featuring the scissored variety of key switch is backlit and contains five dedicated macro k
8. Intel NASPT HD Playback Intel NASPT Directory Copy to NAS Intel NASPT Directory Copy from NAS Intel NASPT Photo Album 50GB Write to NAS MB s 50GB Read from NAS MB s of the OS installed To test for outright speed the latest 3 05 version of the ATTO benchmark was used and to test how the NAS dealt with the small 4K files of everyday use they were tested with the 4K read write test in Crystal Disk Mark 5 0 2 Intel s NASPT was used to give a better idea of the multimedia performance as well as the write to read from the NAS of a file directory Finally we tested the real life performance of the NAS by writing a 50GB 36 601 files folder to and from the NAS using the FileCopy app to give a MB s figure and the time taken Asustor AS5002T 118 105 6 803 9 496 108 8 10 3 14 2 12 9 62 49 48 43 D Link DNS 327L ShareCenter 116 95 6 357 5 208 71 2 4 0 s 7 8 43 55 30 46 D Link DNS 327L ShareCenter 115 97 5 556 5 843 84 6 3 8 4 7 8 2 42 32 30 04 Netgear ReadyNAS RN202 118 9 485 9 566 105 5 8 8 10 9 48 73 49 76 Netgear ReadyNAS RN202 116 8 930 7 223 105 2 8 6 48 75 41 89 QNAP TS 231 118 118 5 058 9 775 99 0 13 4 61 23 48 18 QNAP TS 231 116 118 4 801 7 112 100 8 12 9 10 4 62 11 45 33 Synology D
9. 6 wor HOL 2015 maximumpc com MOBILE GAMING CONTROLLER 1 ie ttes port S Com Pod HiPhone _ iPad 3 Bluetooth CyberPower recommends Windows 5 rience for everything in your life Cortana available in select markets at launch experience may vary by region and device FN ok 1 B 4 External monitor must support HDMI input If Continuum compatible accessory is not d T ail ai included add Accessories sold separately App availability and experience varies by i E OO CE UM Re P e ae device and market Office 365 subscription required for some features Limited to select premium phones at launch 3 Feature and app availability and experience may vary by market and device A T Windows Hello requires specialized hardware including fingerprint reader illuminated IR mM 0 Ini B v1 e sensor or other biometric sensors Create The PC of Your Dreams Gamer Xtreme XT Trinity 200 Windows 10 Home Windows 10 Home Intel Core i7 5720K Processor Intel Core i5 6600K Processor GIGABYTE X99 Chipset Mainboard CORSAIR 16GB DDR4 2400MHz Quad Channel Memory 2566B SSD 2TB SATA IIl 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 1
10. installed and on our test notebook the GTX 980 came from the factory with a modest 110MHz bump in core clocks Even with a 230W AC adapter the combination of CPU and GPU overclocking will push the power limits we measured over 220W peak power draw during gaming tests without overclocking the CPU though PSU efficiency means there s still another 50W or so before the system truly hits its theoretical limit When it comes to gaming performance in a notebook the GTX 980 is the new champion and memory isn t a problem as most vendors will be using the 8GB model The GT72S smokes our zero point laptop and leaves it sucking dust but even a high end GTX 980M SLI rig like MSI s GT80 will be hard pressed the GT80 we looked at last month is only 10 20 percent faster in two of our graphics tests but it trails by 12 percent in Metro Last Light Even against desktops like our GPU testbed which uses an overclocked 4 2GHz i7 5930K the GT72S holds its own Our desktop with a GTX 980 card posted average performance that s only 7 percent faster than the GT72S albeit with the factory overclock A THIN REDLINE Not content with the out of box performance we set out to see how far we could push both the CPU and GPU with overclocking We were basically redlining the system and stability wasn t totally there but a 4GHz CPU clock with 220 300 GPU core RAM was close The factory overclock netted a 5 percent increase in gaming perform
11. Associate Editor than traditional SATA drives using the NVMe protocol over M 2 up to 4 5 times as fast to be precise These aren t your grandmother s SSDs folks While the speed is super nice Samsung also revealed that its V NAND technology aka 3D NAND will enable the company to have a 4TB consumer SATA SSD out in 2016 Truth be told from my perspective I d rather have the 4TB SATA drive over the 212GB M 2 SSD any day of the week It s true that speed kills but bigger is always better Why isnt Samsung releasing the M 2 drive in higher capacities was told that the M 2 s smaller size simply makes it very difficult to fit that much storage in a drive without the drive getting too expensive Samsung also told me that according to its data 256GB and 512GB are its two best selling SSD sizes so the company wanted M 2 Stick It g to the Man Not huge but super fast No 16TB SSD on the horizon for consumers but there s still plenty to get excited about to tackle those first Regardless it will be really interesting to see how this stacks up against Intel and Microns recently announced 3D XPoint SSDs which purport to be 1 000 times faster and more reliable than traditional NAND solutions JARRED WALTON Senior Editor One of the items on my to do list lately has been to replace my home Arch Linux server with a lower power model My current servers running an old AMD Phenom II Black Edition which draws t
12. GG maMum HOL 2015 maximumpc com Pick the perfect desktop storage for your machine Are you willing to pay for premium storage Does your motherboard support M 2 NVMe NO HDD it is then but NO get yourself an SSD for your OS Do you want to give T up a PCIe slot wl Do you want to run 2 3 way SLI or Crossfire M 2 PCle NVMe SSD PCle NVMe Invest in RAID O is your answer or AHCI drive is for you with two 256GB SSD drives Willing to invest in X99 Z170 YES PRACTICAL BUDGETING Choosing the perfect storage for your setup will ultimately always come down to how much cash you have to spare If you re looking for the absolute pinnacle of flash storage performance today then no question you need to utilize those PCle lanes That being said even this chart isnt IE representative of how you should actually go about YES your storage selection If you re a multimillionaire and money is no consequence then of course Money no object Intel s 750 PCle drive is a sure fire bet But in the YES Do you want to store games on SSD storage YES Want more than 1TB of solid state storage real world that s less likely to be the case You have to ask the questions What does premium mean to you How much budget do you have And go from RAID O 512GB SSDs or there This is more a set of rough guidelines 2TB Samsung drives Intel 750 SSD 1 2TB drives
13. M RSD Ig OOV 1060 STEP BYSTEP GUIDES TO IMPROVING YOUR PC WINDOWS TIP OF THE MONTH Acrylic Wi Fi Home GO Pro amp a win 2 Hc m ms sa ZAK STOREY B uem RN LE v run STAFF WRITER E ts sale mob Ti ERIES Pd 3 ij m 5 CCR lt EE i i a lien 09 ss i I PES ios i CU WIN 10 STILL aa D CLUNK Y rhin Do you remember Windows 7 How o oe nice it was booting up for the first time tr y and having that slimline interface Y X oo GO Pro TA No awful tiles or confusingly located power options Those were the days Overall Network Quality ye xe dr yer conto Tom ie LE m i Although Windows 10 has taken the best of that world and merged it with the pinnacle of Windows 8 1 it still has FIND THE BEST WIRELESS CHANNEL FOR YOU envoie for improvement Take the Start menu it s the There s nothing more annoying than getting home throwing cornerstone of Microsoft s operating your laptop on to your 75Mbps Wi Fi and achieving a D di DLE quick easy access to a wide array connection comparable to dial up quick way to alleviate this of features at the click of a button is to move your router across to another wireless channel To make do with dragging 8 1 s wanton get a glimpse of which channels are busiest go to http bit ly tiles kicking and screaming to the WiFiAn and download Acrylics WiFi analyzer This will reveal dac a Ee eg
14. TRECE Pu emt ul T n 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 N m Y JL fk maximumpc com HOL 2015 quickstart the beginning of the magazine where the articles are small eus INDE WS Microsoft Reboots Theres more at stake than market share WHEN IT COMES to mobile Microsoft is a little like Rocky Balboa The company has taken some hearty blows from heavyweight contenders such as Android and iOS and even BlackBerry a former champ that now finds itself on the ropes But given Microsoft s size and persistence it s proven a tough opponent to actually knock out Even now against all odds and swinging a meager 3 percent share of the smartphone market Microsoft is back on its feet and looking as though it could be a contender again Maybe not for the title but at least for a bigger purse That s really the goal at this point By the time you read this Microsoft will have launched or soon will its new flagship Lumia devices the 950 and 950 XL both running a version of Windows 10 for smartphones Its an important launch for Microsoft because it kicks off a new era in mobile one that s focused on extending the Windows 10 ecosystem rather than running alongside it Microsoft has been trying to do that since Windows 8 only now its better equipped to exe
15. Xeon Processor E5 2660 v2 and E5 2683 v3 1 amp 1 Cloud Server is available free for one month after which regular pricing starts from 4 99 month No setup fee is required Visit Tand1 com for full offer details terms 1 n d 1 m and conditions Intel the Intel Logo Intel Inside the Intel Inside logo Intel Experience What s Inside are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U S and or other countries a C O 1 amp 1 and the 1 amp 1 logo are trademarks of 1 amp 1 Internet all other trademarks are property of their respective owners 2015 1 amp 1 Internet All rights reserved quickstart 14 MAXIMUMPS There s a router virus that s helping infected routers fight off malware ROUTER VIRUS SEEMS TO FIGHT THE GOOD FIGHT Great you have a virus CYBER CRIMINALS are beginning to take an increased interest in home routers and the Internet of Things market as a whole It s not that there s a lot of personal data on such devices but the allure of controlling all these gadgets is what s attractive especially when plotting a distributed denial of service attack However a newly discovered virus that s taken up residence on thousands of routers may have your welfare in mind Security firm Symantec is calling the virus Linux Wifatch or just Wifatch It came to light in 2014 when a security researcher noticed unusual activity on his home router He discovered a sophisticated piece of code that turned his router into
16. devices we need to download and install a driver This is easy From the Raspberry Pi command Line type wget http www sundtek de media sundtek_netinst sh chmod 777 sundtek_netinst sh sudo sundtek_netinst sh The final line will execute the script that s downloaded in the first line It will then detect the system you re running and install the latest version of the drivers It will leave the drivers running and configured to launch at boot For users of the DVB T version you will also need to execute this command opt bin mediaclient setdtvmode DVBT This will ensure the card is configured for terrestrial reception rather than a cable source which the device is also capable of INSTALL TVHEADEND The piece of software were going to use to record and stream the digital television signal is called d Tvheadend There s a plugin for Kodi http kodi wiki view Tvheadend PVR that will turn this awesome media player into a fully fledged digital video recorder with Tvheadend doing the hard work in the background from 60 MAXIMUM PE HOL 2015 maximumpc com External storage your Raspberry Pi Because Tvheadend is a tool that s constantly being developed we used the development version but you could just as easily use the OpenElec distribution instead of Raspbian if you wanted to skip this step Fortunately building it is easy First install the development and DVB tools sudo apt get update sudo apt get in
17. http atherys com pack WWW curse com maximumpc com HOL 2015 MAXIMUM PG 67 Pp ALEX CAMPBELL ASSOCIATE EDITOR Caged Power All on Displav If you ve spent loads of cash on cool components why hide them away in an enclosed case LENGTH OF TIME 2 HOURS LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY MEDIUM IT S BEEN A GOOD YEAR for new PC products and we thought that including some of them in our end of the year issue would be more than appropriate It also helped that Max from our video team wanted to build a new rig into an open air case by In Win that he d bought So we figured Why not This is the Holiday issue after all so we decided to get into the spirit Most of the time our builds end up in PC cases that enclose the guts on all six sides Even if there is a side panel window five out of six sides remain mostly or totally opaque That means that the case is on display not the parts inside Seeing as the case costs only a fraction of the price of the PC it s a shame to hide all those parts away behind sheets of black steel and aluminum We wanted to try out this open air case because it gives us a chance to look at those parts that are too often hidden away But with beauty comes pain An open air case like this one presented some unique challenges for our build Even with those challenges we were ha
18. known as the specialist studio creating digitally distributed episodic adventure games mostly from famous licensed properties Now it s working on Minecraft Telltales background is working on extensions of old LucasArts series such as Sam amp Max and Monkey Island but it has also worked on adventure game series based on movies such as Back to The Future and Jurassic Park comics such as The Walking Dead and Fables and TV series like Game of Thrones It was when it started working on a spin off of the Borderlands series of co op shooting games that it realized it could do a Minecraftgame and Mojang was delighted So is the Mojang team excited that someone else has got their hands on Minecraft finally Yes said chief word officer Owen Hill when we spoke with him Seeing new interpretations of the Minecraft world is a great thing for us whether they maximumpc com HOL 2015 m 53 Minecraft Isthata giant pumpkin Minecraft s Like dwarves This isn t the Grim Reaper you never seea mod you are female villager looking for come from a piece of machinima a music parody or a narrative driven video game Although the project was only formally EA announced in December 2014 its been AM F d going on in the background for quite a while nn r i i es E of mines dx P nn according to Hill as far back as 2012 m A a Telltale Games have had their
19. low cost digital video recorder complete with media streaming scheduling and time shift The appropriate hardware is the key phrase in the previous paragraph because a painless installation is mostly dependent on your television grabbing hardware just working Fortunately Linux has support for a great many such devices built in to the kernel so many will work without modification And while these instructions start from the command line we ve split the entire tutorial into 10 different steps hopefully making the project as easy to follow as possible GRAHAM MORRISON drive as the constant read write access will test the average SD card to its limits To add storage like this simply plug the device into a spare USB port and check the output from the system logs by typing tail var log messages You ll see output similar to usb 1 1 3 4 2 New USB device and you ll need to look for the device identifier which should look something like sda sdal where sda is the device itself and sdal is a partition Type sudo mkdir mnt storage to create a mount point and sudo mount dev sdal mnt storage to connect it to your external device Image B INSTALL THE DRIVERS Depending on the television hardware youre using this step might be unnecessary If you ve chosen a device that s compatible with Linux and requires no additional driver files then you can simply plug in your device and move on to the next step For our Sundtek
20. remember U 2 still features the same access that M 2 has utilizing four PCle 3 0 lines and still promises the same speed just in the traditional 2 5 inch form factor The only downside is that for the time being at least the cable is rather bulky and Intel plus a few other select board partners are the only ones supporting it PCIE PERORATION In the end these drives are no doubt the future of storage expansion As more memory chip manufacturers migrate to PCle based devices it s inevitable that these devices especially those utilizing NVMe will become the SSDs of tomorrow With stunning performance low cost low power usage and small form factors is there any doubt as to which storage solution has won the war ith companies such as W Samsung and other storage conglomerates pushing memory chips with up to 48 layer V NAND it was surely only a matter of time before a smaller form factor storage device was achieved Indeed long gone are the days of clunky 3 5 inch drives In fact if you were to buy any modern Ultrabook there s no doubt that you d be picking up one of these bad boys with it whether you knew it or not Although we ve spoken about M 2 in depth already theres more than just the traditional all out speed demons In fact you can t Ahhh the M2 form factor the golden era of uetus following Moores law admirably as transistors get smaller and smaller memory follows suit per gigaby
21. that although archaic by todays standards developed exponentially for its time First there was IDE then there was SATA then the second generation of SATA and finally SATA revision 3 0 the pinnacle of SATA By Zak Storey HOL 2015 maximumpc com technology An interconnect designed and developed to help support and provide compatibility for all future storage devices and drivers for the next generation of HDD devices But something happened an event that would shape mankind throughout the ages An event we like to call SSD Gate Actually no that was a lie A bad one We just made that up But still it was pretty revolutionary In 2008 Intel released the X25 M SSD one of the first commercially available SSDs Featuring mind blowing speeds of up to 250MB s read and 100MB s write PC enthusiasts were hooked and so the craze began Soon we would all be running the typical combo as SSD storage was so ridiculously expensive at the time the most common setup was to use an SSD for your OS and a traditional hard drive for all your games media and other files However even SATA 3 had its limits Eventually SSD speeds would overtake that now aging platform decrepit well ahead of its time forcing the powers that be to find new and inventive ways around this annoying problem Fast forward to 2015 and the nature of the beast has changed entirely It turns out that manufacturers dont like bottlenecks Indee
22. where editing the world is extremely limited but you can explore it Spectator mode makes you invisible and able to move anywhere in the world by flying And Hardcore mode Is a version of Survival mode where the difficulty level is set to Hard and the map is deleted when the player dies or if everyone on a server dies Most significantly the team released an update enabling Realms in 2013 This was a server hosting system that enables players to run server multiplayer games easily without having to set them up by themselves Unlike the existing servers Realms is invite only can host a maximum of 10 players and doesn t support user made plugins A Realms server costs 13 a month and is only available for original Minecraft Realms also has an interesting optional feature where players can replace their server saved world with two different types ofmap Thefirstisapermanentreplacement where you can use an established map template or an adventure map built by the community The second is for mini games which are temporary replacement maps and change the game entirely These range from a version of Solitaire to a version of Bomberman to a version of Platoon and are all fun and original Realms is also going to come to Pocket and Windows 10 soon Mojangs lead maximumpc com HOL 2015 MAMMA 51 Minecraft Minecraft Pocket developer Tommaso Checchi told us After a beta that was very well rec
23. 147 483 647 It s also not up to the same feature level as original Minecraft with the team endlessly playing catch up However it does have the bonus that it supports a good range of inputs Xbox controller keyboard and mouse or touch because Windows 10 is going to be running on all those platforms Eventually we d like it to reach feature parity with the original Minecraft and gain some modding support while remaining able to play with Pocket Edition and Xbox too when that gets Windows 10 Yes that s a reminder that the Xbox One user interface is undergoing a substantial redesign to look like Windows 10 so that every platform console PC and phone looks the same So thats three separate editions of Minecraft out there all running on different code and being developed in parallel by three different teams core Minecraft by Jens Bergenstern s team Minecraft Pocket Edition by Tommaso Checchi s team and Minecraft Console Edition by 4J There are two more editions we know of that 1 TES l M E Uu As good if not a miner gd better than The you until 1 T Walking Dead are incoming Minecraft Story Mode and E Minecraft Hololens Edition Ultima Unfortunately Underworld you won t be what a classic j playing LoC today Telltale Games has established its credentials over the past 10 years Starting as a bunch of ex designers from LucasArts it s made itself
24. 380 for less than 200 should still be playable at 1920x1080 Be aware though that your aging processor will increasingly get in the way of optimal performance Get The Most From M 2 Hi Doc I m going to build my son a gaming PC as soon as he achieves the weight challenge set for him He s getting close so need to put together a list of parts now Corsair Graphite Lj re LT T E 5 W NAND SSD 950 M 2 im 51268 THIS MONTH THE DOCTOR TACKLES gt Upgrade Issues gt Intel Or AMD gt Three Way Displays 68 66066 SAMSUNG VAT a NEN ATEN Expect M 2 SSDs to get more popular in light of their 1GB s plus sequential throughput blowing past the limits of SATA s 6Gbps 780T case EVGA SuperNOVA P2 1 200W PSU X99 PRO USB 3 1 or Rampage V Extreme motherboard Intel Core 17 5930K CPU Corsair Hydro H110 cooler EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti Hybrid 6GB GPU 4x 4GB Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 3000 RAM 2x 500GB Samsung 850 Pro SSD and or M 2 SSD Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit or Windows 10 haven t pieced a system together since 1999 and after doing some homework realized that there s more reading need to do in order to catch up with the latest technologies would like to take advantage of an M 2 SSD installing my operating system there and booting from it There are some instructions l ve found on gaming forums but was hoping you could give me a better list to improve
25. Samsung SM951 1 2TB 2566B 2 362 1 320 1 973 1 155 36 205 49 140 1 446 1 041 1 105 338 1 605 1 200 454 350 564 629 5 069 511 5 092 654 pure performance but with better pricing and availability than the SM951 it s an easy win for anyone looking for an M 2 NVMe drive It s a jump in pricing compared to SATA offerings and it s clearly geared toward recent hardware platforms but if you ve got the funds and the necessary connector it can make even the best SATA drive look sluggish JARRED WALTON VEADICT Samsung 950 Pro E GREAT FIND Great performance good warranty retail availability NEVER MIND Expensive requires M 2 slot and NVMe BIOS needs Z170 motherboard 200 www samsung com SPECIFICATIONS Interface M2 PCle x4 Gen3 Form Factor M2 2280 Capacity 2566B Controller Samsung UBX Memory Type Samsung V NAND Max IOPS Read Write 270 000 85 000 Endurance 200TB Warranty 3 Five years 3 Kingston HyperX Samsung 850 Pro Predator 480GB 1TB 1 008 743 525 496 39 92 29 76 446 247 380 279 580 502 E E 429 242 5 010 324 4 987 284 Best scores are in bold all figures except PCMark 8 Score are in MB s The test platform consists of an Intel Core i7 6700K processor Asus Z170 A motherboard and 2x 8GB G Skill DDR4 3000 maximumpc com HOL 2015 mme 81 y OS a Gee gt F P a I EK Wa
26. 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 include freight or shipping and handlin
27. a thing or two e dito T1 al luan NOUS YOU CAN NEVER HAVE ENOUGH STORAGE LET S BE HONEST storage companies know what people use their products for Yes there are legitimate cases such as storing your photos work related files personal backup and holiday videos But a large number of users those who have multi terabyte needs for home use are saving files that are less federally sanctioned Whatever your cup of tea there s a real demand for more capacity I m a huge fan of storage have multiple PCs at home and do hourly daily and weekly backups across multiple NASes And in case you ve been living under a rock and didn t get the memo You should do regular backups too With multi terabyte drives available on the cheap there s just no excuse any more We round up a heap of NAS drives this issue that will satisfy all but the most prolific downloader What does my storage infrastructure look like First have three independent eight bay NASes for different purposes One of them stores media another stores my personal and work files and the last acts as a backup target for the five computers have at home All three then back up using Rsync to a 12 bay NAS All NASes utilize a mix of consumer and enterprise NAS HDDs depending on the purpose of the NAS Having capacious storage isn t enough You re going to need fast storage as well Does anyone remember the parallel IDE days with unsightly thick ribbo
28. a zombie connected to a P2P network of infected devices Symantec did some digging of its own and found that much of Wifatch s code is in Perl It targets several architectures and ships its own static Perl interpreter to each Once a device is infected it connects to a P2P network that distributes threat updates The further we dug into Wifatch s code the more we had the feeling that there was something unusual about this threat For all intents and purposes it appeared like the author was trying to secure infected devices instead of using them for malicious activities Symantec explains Symantec hasn t found any evidence to suggest Wifatch is shipping payloads for malicious purposes Just the opposite it appears that Wifatch is making routers more secure by blocking outside hacks and attempting to remove any malware it finds So it appears there s a vigilante hacker However Symantec notes that Wifatch is still being installed without consent It also contains backdoors that the author could use for malicious purposes if desired PL HOL 2015 maximumpc com OCULUS PCs TO FEATURE RADEON GPUs VR WITHOUT THE MOTION SICKNESS HEAD OVER TO OCULUS VR S Oculus Ready PCs page and you ll see three manufacturers listed at the bottom Alienware Asus and Dell Asus will have the cheapest starting price of the trio at 949 while the other two will sell Oculus Ready systems for 999 and up Dell s been tight lipped on t
29. and heavy multitasking Gaming At QHD Hi Doc have a PC with InteUs Core i7 5820K 86B RAM and a GeForce GTX 970 want to buy a 27 inch Acer XB270HU G Sync capable monitor but will my system play the latest games smoothly at their highest settings at 2560x1440 Bob Ingber THE DOCTOR RESPONDS Expect average frame rates in the most graphics bound titles to fall below 60 Bob Fortunately that s where you ll notice G Sync s variable refresh capability improving your experience to a point Should the minimum frame rates become unbearable consider adding a second 970 in SLI or dial down your detail settings If One SSD Is Good Pt 2 Dear Doctor read your reply to f one SSD is good a couple of months back noticed that the Doctor put four Crucial M4s in RAID 0 and wondered why you didn t put them in RAID 10 RAID 1 0 instead use quad Seagate 3TB drives in RAID 10 to get the sequential performance benefit of striping and the data security of RAID 1 in my main production rig RAID 10 has saved my data Intel Cere i7 Processor family ants g 36 anos DORI memory 8 5 Gb s DDR3 memory 8 5 Gis OP 25 5 Gus F EBis DAI v Jo MLS Lith push 500 MBs mtel integrat 1100 1000 MAC maj ua METTI Inter Ligant JN Canin late High Ceimition Audio Serial ATA Ports eSATA iri Disable Iriel Peta tree SiomMge Tecnnol gy intet Turba Memany with
30. and you lose half of your storage capacity in the process but it s the most effective and efficient way to use SSDs just not for those looking at cost effective storage solutions RAID REASONING Ultimately RAID 0 provides a cheap fast easy eye pleasing solution to modern day storage woes Although the synthetic benchmark speeds often dont transfer well into gaming scenarios the snappiness you ll find on desktop file transfers will be enough to make any PC enthusiast crumble The only problem with it is boot times If you re looking for a super fast startup youre more than likely still going to want to utilize just a single SSD Intel s rapid storage boot manager does take a considerable amount of time to get past and even though you benefit from those speedy read times youre still going to suffer because of it maximumpc com HOL 2015 MAXIMUM PG 41 Super Speed Storage me 42 MWIMUMPE PCIE SSDS The most exciting advancement that we ve seen over the last year or so has been the continued push into the PCIe SSD allow us to explain why tilizing the PCI Express interconnect to deliver stunning storage speeds is a fantastic step forward and undoubtedly where the future of storage lies Originally hampered by insane levels of cost the price of the PCle SSD has dropped dramatically over the last year Indeed per gigabyte it s now half the cost of the most expens
31. do you want to find in your stocking this holiday season Patrick McCullough 850 EVOs are under a hundred bucks now so almost into stocking stuffer territory Amazon Newegg or pizza gift cards work well Low end Kindles thumb drives Plantronics folding USB headset Michael Flynn Hoping for another 970 but considering nobody in my family knows what that is l m probably out of luck Yi Long A 27 inch Wacom Cintiq would be mighty swell Santa Matthew Blevins Maybe a nicer card to max out Fallout 4 My 760 is a little weak though at least it s a 4GB model Montana Webb would love just about anything that s not my GTX 570 John Kevin Marquez want a whole new system need to retire my X58 setup James Williams 16GB of Crucial Ballistix Sport RAM 2x 86B for my Gigabyte GA X99 UD4 The 16GBs that are now installed look awfully lonely and could use some friends Terry Matthews If could find an affordable one l d like another 770 GTX or one of the newer Titans Patrick Mienke AMD R9 Nano How big will your next SSD be 0 3 0 Under 128GB Bl 3 128GB 14 240 256GB M 49 480 512GB M 23 1 1 2TB Bl 4 2TB M 7 Over 2TB Like our page at www facebook com maximumpc maximumpc com HOL 2015 MAXIMUMPG 95 The home of technology techradar com Sponsored by BUDGET GAMER A PART PRICE Case Cooler Master Elite 110 40 PSU EVG
32. get over it other than to dive right in Should you find problems the standard troubleshooting steps consist of checking all connections reseating the memory and add in boards and clearing the BIOS settings unplug from wall power first Problems range from minor a BIOS setting needs to be changed to catastrophic the system won t turn on but the former is often more difficult to diagnose If you press power and nothing happens there are only so many things that could be wrong missed cable a dead power supply or a gt gt bad motherboard are pretty much the only options One thing that can helpis to buy a motherboard with a POST code debug LED on it Examples for Skylake include the Gigabyte GA Z170X UD3 and the ASRock Z170 Extreme4 The NOW ONLINE WE TACKLE TOUGH READER QUESTIONS ON debug LED shows codes as the system boots and if something goes wrong and the system fails to boot looking at the POST code then checking the motherboard manual gives an idea of where things went awry Even without a debug WHAT I LEARNED ABOUT VR AT OCULUS CONNECT Are you into virtual reality but are bummed that you couldn t get to Oculus s second annual Connect event No worries because associate editor Alex Campbell attended and wrote an in depth article in which he breaks down some of the technical talks shares his experience sculpting in VR with Oculus s new Medium application
33. gpg4win org and use either Kleopatra or GNU Privacy Assistant to create a keypair Just be sure to use a strong passphrase and a key depth of at least 2 048 bits Alex Campbell is a Linux geek who enjoys learning about computer security ue 17 maximumpc com HOL 2015 MAMI quickstart i Ingela JSI epee 3DFX VOODOO3 2000 AGP 8MB 1999 Boasting a whole 16MB of onboard memory this trusty LLL i PCI version could power Quake III Arena 1997 Features h removable memory Ve and a coaxial m connector Sweet E AGP 256MB PNY a GEFORCE FX 5900 ULTRA 2003 Check this out is that a Molex connector m E NVIDIA abi GEFORCE2 GTS ES AGP 2000 This natty Nvidia card sports 64MB of memory over the initially shipped 32MB ji un Lt MATROX 576 04 REV A PCI VIDEO CARD 1995 A classic Comprising a whopping 4MB of memory and the IS Storm R2 graphics processor AGP 256MB SAPPHIRE RADEON X800 PRO TOXIC 2004 Complete with obnoxious Lo LN ne anii 25 on orange air cooling ad 128MB HERCULES ATI 3D PROPHET 9700 PRO 2002 This devilish card came complete with overclocking software 18 mme HOL 2015 maximumpc com MEL pe UNDEFEATED AWAITS Play like a pro with the new Alienware X51 featuring an Intel Core i7 processor reengineered with optional liquid cooling and amplified graphics for the power to win the tournament alienware c
34. have the power to be able to deal with the demands an office environment would place on it and it has avery small list of apps to work with It isn t a bad place to start if you don t need anything too complex for the home but there are better offerings out there Synology s DiskStation DS215 is the next one you can pass on it s actually a great NAS but unfortunately it s yet another unit for which the memory can t be upgraded despite its hefty price tag The Netgear ReadyNAS RN202 is interesting because its the only NAS in this roundup not to use the EXA file system instead using the Btrfs system which opens up a whole new level of data protection for business use WD s My Cloud Business DL 2100 is as the name suggests an out and out business NAS and although it performs well we can t get over the noise our model made The Milestone ARCUS software is a very useful inclusion mind you which turns the DL2100 into the control center for a pretty impressive surveillance system with its 16 camera support QNAP s TS 231 runs the Asustor AS5002T close but once again the memory isnt upgradable and although the OS supports some impressive tools it doesnt offer the same hardware connectivity to external devices that the AS5002T does But it does have a very large number of downloadable apps to support it Ultimately its the Asustor AS5002T that gets our vote Its a powerful NAS and although Asustor markets it as a home powe
35. instant gameplay you dont have to own an expensive rig you just pay a monthly subscription fee and you get to play all 50 games instantly in less than 30 seconds Even some of the latest games like Witcher 3and Shadow of Mordor You can just purchase the game and start playing the game in under 30 seconds while your friends are sitting and downloading gigabytes of data for hours ata time MPC Can you tell us a little bit more about the design process behind the Shield SR Sure It all started with the Tegra X1 It s a really powerful processor It has eight CPU cores and 256 GPU cores and the GPU is basically based on our Maxwell GPU architecture which powers some of our highest end gaming PCs We took that chip and we looked at what the competitive landscape is Today were living in a smart TV revolution and it s fundamentally changing the way we interact with our TV With Android and iOS coming into the living room with the apps and the channel ecosystem everything is in the right place for us to bring a device like Shield to the market so that you can enjoy all those apps in 4K You can enjoy the best gaming experiences You ll get to play games straight from the cloud The Shield is also a media enthusiasts dream because it supports pretty much all the audio and video codecs If you have gigabytes of downloaded movies and music in your NAS server you can stream them at full resolution original frame
36. j Ethernet SD reader 6x USB Connectivity 3 0 one charging 1x USB 3 1 i Type C Killer 802 11ac Wi Fi Bluetooth 4 0 Dimensions 3 16 85x11 57x1 89 inches Weight Lap Carry j 8 lb 5 9 oz 10 lb 6 3 oz ws teu ProShow Producer 5 sec 1 629 1 784 x264 HD 5 0 2nd fps BioShock Infinite fps Metro Last Light fps 3DMark 11 Perf mum 107 usa 235 Dor 4 170 14 115 238 302 29 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 Battery Life min Our zero point notebook is an Alienware 14 with a 2 4GHz Intel Core 17 4700MQ 16GB DDR3 1600 256GB mSATA SSD 750GB 5 400rpm HDD GeForce GTX 765M and Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit BioShock Infinite tested at 1920x1080 at Ultra DX11 settings and Metro Last Light tested at 1920x1080 at DX11 medium quality settings with PhysX disabled HOL 2015 77 maximumpc com techradar pro IT INSIGHTS FOR BUSINESS Top tablets for note takin Vie Cher Court OA npe po Pai frase Inest nr aking Cabra ie Best practices Up to the and solutions minute news http www techradar com pro Razer BlackWidow ChromaTE Best keyswitch known to man probably IF THERE WAS EVER a switch thats made us go holy macaroni it s this one Razer has deviated from its traditional choice of Cherry key switches and instead gone with its own custom designed mechanical switch a switch that you ll currently find in all the mechanical keyboards in it
37. labelled Autorec is more interesting It sets up a search based on the same program data so you can record a full series without relying on series link data being embedded within the EPG Depending on the number of channels and the amount of EPG data this view can get unwieldy quickly To solve this you can filter what s shown using the row of options at the top of the list You can search for part of a title or limit the List to a single channel or filter tag If you find a filter you like clicking on the Create Autorec button will add that search to Tvheadend which will then record everything it finds that matches the search To remove scheduled recordings click on the Digital Video Recorder tab Upcoming recordings can be removed from the first page while Autorec filters can be removed from the last The centre pages can be used ng Vidas 2E 0n Fra pi Se HAT TI ME Ties Minister i 1 LE Vidag 12 00 i Tea iru rd naa to play or delete recordings that have been made or check why a recording might not have worked WATCHING RECORDINGS AND LIVE TV Install the VLC browser plugin and you can watch your recordings and live TV in your browser We ve only tried this feature in Firefox but when you click on a program that s being broadcast you get the option to Play If the VLC plugin isn t installed you ll be asked if you want to install it With the plugin installed an embedded window appears showing the program
38. on Head over to each of the forum links and take a look to see which ones appeal to you the most Then download as many as you like as you can actively swap between them in game INSTALL SHADER PACKS After traversing through myriad AdFly browsers and other garbage to retrieve your downloads head back over to your Yappdata minecraft folder Create a folder inside the minecraft directory called shaderpacks then inside this folder place the zipped downloaded shader packs but do not unzip them AVOID GRAPHICAL ERRORS If you encounter any graphical errors when playing HEADING BACK IN GAME Minecraft it may be that the shader pack just Open up the Minecraft launcher This time hit the drop doesn t support the graphics drivers you re using If this down menu next to Profile select 1 7 10 ShadersMod is the case you re going to have to swap them out for a and launch the game Load up a new world or one of your previous different set In our testing using a GTX 980 we found that ones and hit Escape Select Options and you should have a new Continuum and Sildur s shaders worked best while Sonic tab below Video Settings called Shaders Click that then choose Ether s were a little hit and miss depending on which which shader pack you wish to try out from the list on the left and version we used Additionally we did try to get it to work you re good to go with OptiFine but found more bugs than answers
39. on this one is great props to MSI for ensuring that the water cooling enthusiasts are taken care of The big downside is the price At 400 it needs to deliver on all fronts and there s a small problem with performance you don t get as much overclocking potential as you would from the more affordable Z170A Gaming M7 This should give you pause for thought as to whether the additional features are worth the drop in overall overclock stability On top of that you re limited to two way SLI or three way CrossFire in contrast to the vast majority of competitor boards at this price point that support three way Nvidia graphics solutions and quad CrossFire setups This M9 doesn t come without flaws but the integrated audio solution is second to none And although the Killer networking solution won t see much advantage over gigabit Ethernet sockets it s a fantastic innovation in an area that s otherwise not seen a great deal of advancement beyond Asus Maximus VIII Hero 911 57 29 802 11ac in the last few years If you ve got the money and really want the best audio you can get outside of an external DAC setup and a stunning motherboard to boot the MSI Z170 Gaming M9 ACK is the board for you ZAK STOREY VERDICT VEFAT cenit BE Ree HANS ZIMMER Fantastic audio solution water cooling support stunning heatsinks strong UEFI experience El ONE DIRECTION Lack of support for tri SLI phenomenal price isn
40. previous XD eXecute Disable extension which prevents malware from executing code in a protected memory region but doesn t prevent it from accessing the data stored there So Skylake has a little something for everybody and that s a good thing Wouldn t you rather have better stability and security than a swifter computer that crashes or steals your identity twice as fast Tom Halfhill was formerly a senior editor for Byte maga zine and is now an analyst for Microprocessor Report maximumpc com HOL 2015 MAXIMUMPE 15 Windows 10 Home AMD FX 6300 Processor GIGABYTE GA970A D3 AMD 970A USB 3 0 amp SATA II s CORSAIR 8GB DDR3 1600Mhz Dual Channel Memory m 2TB SATA Ill 7200 RPM HD 32MB Cache AMD Radeon R7 370 2GB Direct X 12 Video Zalman Gaming Headset NZXT Source 340 Orange Asetek Liquid Cooling System SYBER VAPOR E Windows 10 Home AMD Athlon X4 740 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 HD 32MB Cache AMD Radeon R7 360 2GB Video Logitech Wireless Game Controller Syber Mini ITX Gaming Case 350Watt 0 S AMD 7 1 d Oh wat we already did Get 8 Cores in your rsystem One experience for everything in your life Cortana available in select markets at launch experience may vary by region and device External monitor must support HDMI input If Continuum compatible accessory is not includ
41. stay a little cooler under load I L md rig p Po A fiat i M as ant LT enami poems bi LT Plow IER ij LE ET A t amp BEI T j 2 SIDE MOUNTED THE PSU is the heaviest component in nearly any build so mounting it on the side of the case might seem counter intuitive Not so with the D Frame The PSU happily occupies a bracket on the side of the cage but doesn t make the cage feel off balance To make things neater we went with individually sheathed cables which are easier to manipulate Routing the cables was a bit tricky with a smooth aluminum plate instead of a motherboard tray rife with cable management tie loops Luckily the cage came with a few accessories that helped We used a modular power supply so there s no need to stash unused cables That s a big deal ina case where there are no hiding places for your cabling maximumpc com HOL 2015 MAXIMUM PG 69 R amp D So 3 70 MAXIMUMPG HOL 2015 maximumpc com USB 3 0 WOES IF THERE WAS ONE BEEF we had with this motherboard it was the positioning of the USB 3 0 front panel connection After you figure in the presence of a GPU it became clear that there was no sexy clean way to attach the cable To the left you have the R9 Nano and routing under the GPU between the PCle slot and the back panel was too tight a squeeze If we came from below the cable would have routed across the
42. t as stable for overclocking as the M7 400 http us msi com SPECIFICATIONS Chipset Intel Z170 Socket LOA 1151 Form factor ATX Memory support DDR4 3600 Storage EX SATA 2x M 2x SATA Express 5x USB 2 0 6x USB3 0 6x USB USB 3 1 Type A 2x USB 3 1 Type C You got yourself a pretty mou therboard maximumpc com HOL 2015 m 87 Sennheiser RS 175 Wireless Headphones Gaming jargon no Hifi yes IF YOU WERE TO ASK us about gaming headsets we wouldn t be able to give you a definitive answer as to what they really are Essentially they re just headphones with a mic attached and usually it s a pretty bad mic at that Instead what we tend to do is focus on getting a really good set of headphones When it comes down to it the auditory part of a game is just as crucial as what you see on the screen In some cases it could be even more important Gaming aside we want headphones to perform exceptionally well with a variety of other content too such as music and movies For these purposes we ve yet to find any gaming headsets that are fully up to the task Which is why we are more likely to go with something like Sennheiser s RS 175 wireless headphones Sennheiser s name has been synonymous with high quality audio since the company s beginnings and that still holds true today The RS 175 is a middle range unit in the company s line of wireless headphones but it perform
43. that can be said against the Chroma TE it all comes down to personal preference Can you handle a tenkeyless keyboard Can you deal with not having the additional macro keys And do you really need the audio and USB passthroughs found on its bigger brother On top of that Razer has still yet to implement dedicated media keys across the range instead sticking with merged F keys and the Fn modifier Apart from this the finish feel and overall build quality of the Chroma TE is fantastic Enough said ZAK STOREY SOS Razer BlackWidow Chroma TE Q E KNIFE S EDGE Affordable excellent key switches great LED lighting highly responsive compact good software UI experience KICK ASS El RUSTY SAW Lack of dedicated media keys no USB passthrough no wrist rest 139 www razerzone com SPECIFICATIONS r Razer Mechanical Switch Switch Connectivity USB Size 14 4x6 1x1 2 inches Individually lit RGB EEO i 16 8 million colors Macro Keys 3 All of them Matrix i 100 anti ghosting with 10 key rollover maximumpc com HOL 2015 MAXIMUM Pt 79 RE is i113 33 TZ s 1313 SE ILE SAMSUNG 54L MD S841 SCC NEU ROT The 950 Pro is Samsung s first retail NVMe drive Yes it s tiny m HOL 2015 maximumpc com Samsung 950 Pro M 2 SSDs dont get the short end of the stick NEVERMIND THE SMALL SIZE M 2 drives have the potential to deliver a ton of performance in a compact form factor
44. that can feel overwhelming The main plot can happily be ignored despite Chumbucket s nagging leaving you to explore the environment and pick up side 90 MAXIMUM PE HOL 2015 maximumpc com Their sightseeing vacation wasn t what they d expected and cut Tho Der Mg Your GPU may feel the strain with some of the effects missions In many ways this is where the game is at its best there are some fine sights to be seen in the ugly beauty of the wasteland with terrifying storms testing your GPU s ability with particle effects and the smoking towers of Gastown looking like nothing more than a cut price Mordor The side missions also provide welcome upgrades to both Max and his weapons BEYOND THUNDERPOON The harpoon quickly becomes the game s signature weapon used to pluck snipers out of nests drag down the scarecrow towers that War Boys use to mark their territory and when upgraded becomes a rocket launcher the Thunderpoon that makes a mess of vehicles It opens up an all guns blazing approach to objectives that s highly satisfying although sneaky options are still available friendly locals are mysteriously well informed about the secret back doors into bandit camps This shouldn t come as too much of a surprise when you consider that Mad Max was engineered by Avalanche maker of amp butchers 5 idels Tr i ar the Just Cause games which equipped their protagonist with a grapplin
45. that s the beauty of it It s so easy to use and navigate that you don t feel like you need to have spent years in an IT department to make sense of it all Setting up user accounts and assigning storage space and access limits takes no time at all and the same is true of setting up shared folders which makes the DL2100 ideal for small offices without any dedicated IT staff MAKING AN APP EARANCE Compared to other NAS boxes in this roundup and elsewhere the number of add on apps for the DL2100 is minimalist to say the least The number is growing slowly though and currently includes WordPress SqueezeCenter Dropbox Joomla Icecast the Plex Media Server and Acronis For backing up data the DL2100 supports WD s SmartWare Pro and Apple s Time Machine as well as cloud based backups such as Amazon S3 and ElephantDrive The DL2100 supports Milestone ARCUS software so you could turn it into a pretty powerful surveillance system supporting up to 16 cameras it comes with two free camera licenses and is compatible with a huge number of cameras Ports to connect up to external devices are limited to a pair of USB 3 0 ports one in the rear panel and one in the front bezel The front one has a direct copy function via a button that sits just above it What was a surprise was how noisy the thing was when it came to certain tasks Turning the unit on or rebooting from a firmware update produced one hell of a racket from the fan
46. the fastest SATA 6Gbps attached SSDs which are held back by the interface to a max just over 500MB s Alternative Solution Doctor a long time ago there were programs that didn t work correctly on AMD processors Is this the case in today s world only tried AMD one time and ran into issues But am tired of paying out the nose for Intel processors l m wondering because AMD s CPUs are less expensive Michael Filyaw THE DOCTOR RESPONDS Intel and AMD host processors share a common instruction set so you should see no difference in application support between them The issues you refer N submit your questions to doctor maximumpc com 22 MAXIMUMPG HOL 2015 maximumpc com to might have been related to platform drivers The Doc does remember various times when third party chipsets from AMD Nvidia SiS and VIA caused headaches But Intel wasn t immune to problematic hardware either The short of itis this Modern CPUs from both manufacturers enjoy broad compatibility And you re right in that AMD s portfolio is predominantly less expensive However the FX CPUs and A series APUs don t do as much work per clock cycle In other words at any given frequency and core count expect them to be slower Enthusiasts looking to get the most from an AMD processor should pick a model with more cores than Intel s equivalent at the same price There sa good chance you ll see better performance in threaded apps
47. the keyboard as well This is all a bit inconsequential when compared to the biggest and by far the most impressive feature on the entire Chroma line up the way Razer has handled the lighting CUE WERTY Following the current trend for lighting individual key switch yes you get the standard 16 8 million colors what is interesting here is the lighting controller itself Similar to Corsairs latest CUE iteration it features a wide variety of modes from reactive to ripples and waves color cycling breathing and the traditional static Unfortunately what it does lack is the in depth customization that Corsair s RGB tech is well known for You won t be able to code any fancy coruscating color combos into the Chroma What Razer has brought to the table though is a fantastic user interface experience For the less code savvy users you can simply change what colors you want to see how fast or slow you want the color options to cycle and which keys you want to have the effects on and then you re all set For day to day use it s perfect On top of that despite the fact each key is lit up using one single LED below each switch the base of the board is coated in a thin translucent white plastic layer This means that when the LED activates it not only illuminates the key cap but also the surrounding area with it It s a feature that looks great when used with reactive type mode As far as negatives go there s not a great deal
48. they came covered in a lovely shade of green PCB On top of this you lose out on a PCle slot which for more aesthetically minded system builders can ruin the look of a good build M 2 PCle drives do little to alleviate the situation Raised above the board they suffer from the same drawbacks with the vast majority including that signature shade of grass green PCB Indeed it s only recently with the launch of Samsung s 950 Pro that the first all black consumer grade PCB has been seen in this department U 2 AND 2 5 INCH So for a while now the industry has been looking for a way to improve the connectivity speeds of the traditional 2 5 inch drive and although M 2 drives are incredibly powerful and efficient they still have flaws namely thermal limitations and drive capacity Although Samsung has just announced its first 1TB M 2 drive these devices will no doubt come at a great cost to the user and aren t going to be available in the market untilsome time It s all about utilizing those PCle lanes Who d have thunk The Intel 750 SSD is one of the fastest performing drives to date later next year Welcome to SFF 8639 A connection standard that s been used in enterprise grade systems for some time now it s finally making its way to the consumer side Notably with a rename U 2 not the band it s pronounced you dot two bringing it more in line with M 2 and making it a little easier to
49. to 1 7 10 Image A This is currently by far the most up to date and easiest version to set up shaders on After you ve changed the version to 1 7 10 hit Save profile and load up the game SHADER TIME Once you re at the main menu close the game Now you want the core shader mod You re going to have to traverse your way through shark infested waters filled with advertising P RUN THE EXE AND SET UP VERSION Minecraft both game and launcher is closed then right click on the Shaders Mod file you downloaded earlier and select Open with Java It asks you whether you want to install it into your Minecraft directory click Yes Hit OK atthe license screen and then OK one more time as it informs you what profiles it has added And you re done Now you have the mod installed you need to grab 5 DOWNLOAD THE RIGHT SHADER PACK yourself some shader packs The easiest way to i 66 MAXIMUM PE HOL 2015 maximumpc com do this is to head back to http bit ly MCShader1710 and click the Shaderspack tab in the top right Continuum Shaders are incredibly taxing on your system remember our 20fps earlier Sonic Ether s Unbelievable Shaders are the standard go to shaders theyre quite the system drain but nowhere near as severe as Continuum and they still look stunning Sildur s shaders are a little less system draining yet still make the game much more enjoyable and so
50. 0 Website www futureus com Tel 650 872 1642 Fax 650 872 2207 Next Issue on Sale 15 December 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 44 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 LI 4 1 i a f I I 7 a thing or two about
51. 0 hardware you re likely to have problems If you want to stream a high quality 4K video you need a good network connection You also need sufficient hardware to decode and view the video stream Most modern GPUs are sufficient for 4K H 264 content see below but the new H 265 HEVC High Efficiency Video Coding videos area beast to decode The latest Skylake processors and AMD APUs are supposed to be able to handle 4K HEVC using the processor graphics but older systems need a modern and fairly potent GPU In fact from Nvidia only the GM206 processor GTX 960 950 has full hardware support for 4K HEVC decode all the other Maxwell GPUs use a hybrid mode where some of the work has to be done on the CPU If all you need is 4K AVC H 264 support Nvidia has PureVideo Anything in the Fermi or later generations of Nvidia hardware should work but lower end GPUs may struggle at times Kepler and later should be fine for most content With AMD UVD is the decoder hardware and the HD 7000 Rx 200 and later GPUs should be able to do 4K video If you want 4Kp 0 think only the R9 285 and Fury GPUs support that in hardware though it might work on the Hawaii GPUs There are levels associated with AVC however and sometimes hardware only supports up to a certain level e g Main 4 1 AVC If the level you want to decode exceeds your hardware capabilities you ll get stuttering Facebook Polls What
52. 08 lOmeter Mixed Read Write Random i 267 File Copy 20GB 560 PCMark 8 Storage Score Bandwidth 5 089 622 you need a Z170 motherboard with an M 2 slot that supports x4 PCle Gen3 lanes anything less and you ll potentially run into a performance ceiling STORAGE TUG O WAR The 950 Pro is fast but it can t quite top the Intel SSD 750 in many of our benchmarks Part of the reason for this is the smaller form factor of M 2 part of it is due to Capacity and some of it just comes down to controllers and features The SSD 750 is a performance monster but it also takes up a PCle slot and has a heatsink In contrast the 950 Pro is tiny and tucks away between PCle slots on most motherboards The 512GB 950 Pro also improves performance thanks to the increased parallelism the additional V NAND chips offer Even at 256GB however Samsung wins out in the real world file copy and PCMark 8 tests Both the earlier SM951 and the new 950 Pro have a feature called Dynamic Thermal Guard In heavy workloads it s possible for the NAND chips and controller to heat up and potentially malfunction so the 950 Pro can throttle to avoid overheating Samsung states that it does not anticipate any performance drops due to thermal throttling but we found that performance was up to 10 percent higher in random write tests when we had a fan blowing at the drive Something to keep in mind Samsung s 950 Pro may not win out in Intel SSD 750
53. 1349 Windows 10 Home Intel Core i7 6700HQ NVIDIA Geforce GTX 970M 3GB VC 8GB DDR4 2400 Memory 8X DVD RW 1TB 7200 RPM HDD 17 3 Full HD 1920x1080 Customizable SSS a GAMER PALADIN yd wv a ee 799 Windows 10 Home Intel Core i3 6100 GIGABYTE GA Z170 HD3 Mother Board NVIDIA Geforce GTX 950 2GB VC 8GB DDR4 2400 Memory 24X DVD RW 120GB SSD 1TB SATA III HDD Raidmax Horus Gaming Case 400 W PSU Customizable intel the intel logo Intel Core and Care Inside are trademarks or registered trademarks ol intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries All cantent and proces are Subject 1a change wilhoul no ce ar obligation Our battle eue E pi no PCs feature Windows 10 to delive SIC and settings along Mit some of the familiaritOlWMODWE Chimera 5 Flame Gaming Case 500 W Power Supply A Hebmake it easier to that you knowie n e enhan Tiedt NZXT S340 DESIGNED BY RAZER Uu QT E d ALIN U JOY DE 5 SIG INED BY CE DA 7ED Br FA cy E a E u E E n n i id NZXT and Razer has joined forces again to bring all the gr at dediuron of the S3 40 together with the pre aisr design from Razer Forged to match your Razer arsenal the new custom design features a bac KI dit triple headi ed snake logo tinted window illuminated LED power Eton underglow and green USB ports IBUYF OWER is p r
54. 231 is aimed at the SOHO market andis an upgraded version of the company s TS 231 two bay NAS This device has a faster processor twice the memory and SSD cache support which is something of a surprise in a NAS in this segment It looks identical to the TS 231 with the same dual Ethernet LAN ports which support link aggregation and three USB 3 0 ports but surprisingly the TS 231 does away with the eSATA port found on the TS 231 The CPU is an Annapurna Labs Cortex A15 dual core chip with a clock speed of 1 46Hz 200MHz faster than the A9 in the TS 231 This is backed by 1GB of DDR3 RAM and again that s your lot as the memory is soldered on to the mainboard Performance is good with strong read write figures in the ATTO benchmarks though it s a bit slow reading 4K files as shown by the CrystalDiskMark scores However its write performance dealing with these small files is strong in both RAID arrays This is another front loading NAS The drive doors cant be locked though and the hot swappable drive trays are not tool free needing screws to fix in the 3 5 inch or 2 5 inch drives it supports including SSDs The unit supports up to 8TB drives and a list of compatible drives is on the QNAP website The front USB 3 0 port has a one touch copy button enabling everything on the plugged in drive to be copied to the NAS automatically without powering up a PC If there s one thing that all the NAS units in this roundup sh
55. 6GB 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 4 5 8X RW HD 7 1 CoolerMaster CoolerMaster ae 5 CoolerMaster amp CoolerMaster 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 Logo 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 Intel Inside Extraordinary Performance Outside 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 SA
56. 70M GPU 16GB Dual Channel DDR4 2133MHz 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 Killer Dual Band Wireless AC 1535 Bluetooth Built in 2 0M FHD Camera amp Fingerprint Reader Built in Onkyo speakers and a sub woofer Sound Blaster X Fi MB5 Sound System Slim design with only 29 9mm 1 18 inch thin Customize and Instant Pricing at SAGERNOTEBOOK COM NP9758 Notebook 1 999 FREE UPS GROUND SHIPPING 6th Generation Intel Core i7 6700 Processor 8MB Smart Cache 3 40GHz Windows 10 Home 64 bit Edition 15 6 Full HD IPS Matte Display 1920x1080 with NVIDIA G SYNC Technology Opt 15 6 4K QFHD Matte Display with G SYNC 6GB DDR5 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970M GPU 8GB DDR4 2133MHz 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 Full sized Keyboard with color LED backlight Killer DoubleShot Pro Killer E2400 LAN Killer Dual Band Wireless AC 1525 with Smart Teaming USB 3 1 Thunderbolt Gen3 Combo Port Built in 2 0M FHD Camera amp Fingerprint Reader Built in Onkyo Hi Fi speakers Sound Blaster X Fi MB5 Sound System NP8657 S Notebook 1 499 After 190 Instant Savings 6th Generation Intel Core i7 6700HQ Proces
57. A GS 550W 80 Plus Gold 70 Mobo ASRock H170M ITX ac NEW 100 CPU Intel Core i5 6400 NEW 190 GPU EVGA 3962 KR GeForce GTX 960 SC 230 RAM Kingston HyperX Fury 8GB DDR4 2133 NEW 57 SSD 500GB Crucial MX200 NEW 140 os Ubuntu Desktop Linux 14 04 LTS 64 bit 16 Approximate Price 843 PRICES FOR MOST COMPONENTS stayed the same so the Cooler Master Elite and EVGA parts return However with the release of more Skylake SKUs we updated this rig with the latest Intel architecture With modernity comes price and we had to spend a little more for our motherboard and RAM While the switch from ASRock s H97M model to the H170M model was only 4 more upgrading from DDR3 8MB of Crucial Ballistix at 45 to DDR4 added 12 We did save some big money by steering clear of Skylake K model SKUs and settling for locked clocks The Core 15 6400 will still serve users well One big change was to ditch the 1TB of storage and opt for a bigger SSD By going with Ubuntu 14 04 LTS users have a lower storage requirement for the OS At time of writing the 500GB Crucial MX200 was priced lower than the less desirable BX100 so we took advantage of the better performance at a good price point a part by part guide to building a better pc E blueprint SU TANTO MIDRANGE INGREDIENTS PART PRICE Case Corsair Carbide 500R 110 PSU EVGA SuperNOVA G2 850W 140 Mobo Gigabyte Z170X Gaming 3 150 C
58. Advanced Micro Devices Inc 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 Alex Campbell OPEN SOURCE Why You Need OpenPGP THE BAD SIDE TO ENCRYPTION is that it can seem like a rabbit hole that keeps going down further and further into the obscure realm of advanced mathematics and computer science theory Choosing an encryption method can be daunting for the newbie On the bright side encryption tools can be fairly easy to use even if they are a bit inconvenient For email and personal communication there are two main schemes you can use Open Pretty Good Privacy OpenPGP and S MIME While there are definitely advantages to using S MIME OpenPGP doesnt rely on an X 509 hierarchy for signature validation X 509 is the same methodology that OpenSSL TLS uses for certificate verification To get an idea of how pretty good Pretty Good Privacy is all you have to dois look at a few highlights from history The author of PGP Phil Zimmerman was criminally charged for unauthorized weapons export in 1993 because encryption with more than 40 bit
59. Blu ray 14x HD 7 1 E amp 5 RE Blu ray 14x HD 7 1 CoolerMaster amp CoolerMaster amp Ae FREE Liquid Cooling Fangbook III BX7 100 Windows 10 Home Intel Core i7 5700HQ Processor Intel HM87 Chipset 17 3 Full HD Display 1920x1080 86B DDR 3 1600 MEMORY 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 Ez 0RW 3x USB 3 0 5 3 Lb Aint fests CP Built in OLD IS BACK 3uveowen NOCTIS 450 GAMER MAGE D245 Windows 10 Home AMD FX 6300 Processor AMD Radeon R9 370 2GB Gigabyte GA 970A D3P 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 500W Power Supply 749 Windows 10 Home AMD FX 8320 Processor AMD Radeon R9 380 4GB Video Card Gigabyte GA 970A D3P Mother Board 8GB DDR3 1600 Corsair Memory 1TB SATA II Hard Drive 24X DVD RW Drive 120 mm Liquid CPU Cooling System Chimera 5 Flame Gaming Case 500W Power Supply 899 Customizable 888 462 3879 ibuypower com PA AM Phonon Il dnd combdnations there am trademarks of All BUY POWER Systems Come with a FREE 3 Yaar Waranty amp Lifetime Toll Froe Tech Support ALL Systems are Assembled in the USA GAMER MAGE D295 y vanced Mirrg Devices lnc All content and pri
60. D for Steam games or media files and there s one less moving part to fail from frequent moves to and from LAN parties or events It s easy to forget that an enclosed case muffles the sound of fans and hard drives searching for reading and writing data The high speed clicks of the hard drive disappear when using an SSD leaving only the CPU cooler and GPU as noise sources The black finish on the 850 EVO is similar to the finish of the aluminum mount of the D Frame which makes the slim SSD seem to disappear The downside is that the drive is a little too far from the edge of the plate two or three millimeters which made it a bit hairy when we tried using an L shaped SATA cable ONE COOL CAGE ONE OF THE NEAT THINGS about this build was the way the cage accommodated our cooling solution It comes with a bracket for a 240mm closed loop cooler which sits out of the way at the bottom of the cage We were able to get our Deepcool Maelstrom 240 snugly in the bracket with nary a screw to secure it in place Other coolers might not stay put with friction alone so the eight screw holes can be used The Deepcool chiller was our backup choice though We tried using a bigger cooler but for some reason it wouldn t have good enough contact with our CPU which resulted in some problems booting The main gripe we had using a 240mm cooler with this mobo was the lack of PWN pinouts There s no CPU OPT or second case fan pinout meaning we
61. G HOL 2015 maximumpc com prepaid Canadian price includes postage and GST GST R128220688 PMA 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 GIGABYTE ATRE ME GABIME GEFORCE GTX 950 XTREME GAMING EDITION GV N950XTREME 2GD WINDFORCE 2X with 3D ACTIVE Fan for silent cooling 9 Super Overclock GPU with Gauntlet Sorting Technology Factory Overclocked at Base 1203MHz Boost 1405MHz Memory clock 7Gbps Aerospace grade PCB Coating for Best Protection Titan X grade Chocks and Capacitors for Extreme Durability e Multi color Illuminated LED 90166 9000 MAMMA HH 4 Starting At
62. Luckily it doesn t last too long The fan also makes itself known when the disks are pushed hard as they are when the unit is being tested In a similar and perhaps more worrying vein is the weird grinding noises that were produced when the unit was checking the disks before building an array very scary to listen to VERDICT WD My Cloud Business DL2100 E IN THE CLOUDS Easy drive replacement My Cloud OS El DOWN TO EARTH Noisy fan 350 www wdc com SPECIFICATIONS CPU Intel Atom C2350 Cores 2 Speed 1 7GHz Installed memory 16B DDR3L Memory upgradable i Up to 5GB os WD My Cloud USB ports 2x USB 3 0 HDMI ports i None Ethernet ports 2x Gigabit Others 2x power in only one adapter supplied Warranty 2 years maximumpc com HOL 2015 MAXIMUM PG 33 NAS Supertest T5 HOW WE TESTED To test these two bay NAS devices we used a pair of 4TB Red Pro drives built into RAID 0 and RAID 1 arrays The latest firmware was installed where possible and the latest version BENCHMARKS RAID 0 ATTO 3 05 Read ATTO 3 05 Write CrystalDiskMark 5 0 2 4K Read CrystalDiskMark 5 0 2 4K Write Intel NASPT HD Playback Intel NASPT Directory Copy to NAS Intel NASPT Directory Copy from NAS Intel NASPT Photo Album 50GB Write to NAS MB s 50GB Read from NAS MB s BENCHMARKS RAID 1 ATTO 3 05 Read ATTO 3 05 Write CrystalDiskMark 5 0 2 4K Read CrystalDiskMark 5 0 2 4K Write
63. MONTH INTEL CORE ib 6700K SKYLAKE INGREDIENTS PART PRICE Case Corsair Graphite 780T 190 PSU EVGA SuperNOVA G2 850W 140 Mobo Asus X99 A USB 3 1 NEW 250 CPU Intel Core i7 5820K 390 Cooler Corsair H100i NEW 110 GPU 2x EVGA GTX 980Ti 4991 KR ACX2 0 NEW 1 300 RAM 16GB 4x 4GB G Skill Ripjaws 4 Series ve Last month we featured the Core 19 6600K as our upgrade DDR4 2133 of the month The i7 6700K is the bigger i7 brother to the 15 m meum m s mm so you get a higher clock 46Hz and more threads eight iiio You ll also spend about 120 more for those features and HDD 1TB WD Black NEW 70 30 more than the i7 4790K Devil s Canyon Just make sure you know that going with Skylake means upgrading to an 1151 os Windows 8 1 64 bit OEM 100 socket and DDR4 as well 370 www intel com Approximate Price 3 001 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 MAXIMUM P
64. NAS Indeed at first glance it appears to be incredibly basic and devoid of features While that s true of the hardware there s only a single Ethernet port and just one USB 3 0 port on the rear the software more than makes up for it It also looks quite stylish compared to most other NAS boxes The build quality isn t as good as the rest of the units here though The first thing to notice about the DNS 327L is the lack of drive bay doors That s because the drives are loaded from the top There are no bays or trays asthe drives are just dropped into place A couple of plastic straps have to be screwed in beforehand to aid getting the drives back out again Hard drives up to 6TB are supported or rather 6TB drives are the largest capacity listed on the DNS 327Ls compatibility list Installing the ShareCenter OS can be done via the provided CD or via a web browser and the process is quick and trouble free via a step by step wizard The simple three tabbed interface Home Applications and Management may not be as advanced as some of its competitors but its easy and quick to navigate around accounts and their privileges UPnP which is DLNA compliant and iTunes media servers along with a BitTorrent server combine with the neat inclusion of MySurveillance to make for a versatile device As the name suggests MySurveillance is a package that enables the DNS 327L to act as the heart of a security center albeit with supp
65. PU Intel Core i5 6600K 260 Cooler Corsair H100i 110 GPU Asus Radeon R9 390 Strix NEW 320 RAM G Skill Ripjaws V Series 8GB DDR4 2133 red 55 SSD 500GB Samsung 850 EVO M 2 NEW 175 HDD Western Digital Black Series 1TB NEW 70 os Windows 8 1 64 bit OEM 100 Approximate Price 1 490 AT THE TIME OF WRITING most prices were holding steady so we had to find a way to change things up a bit We hoped we could finagle in a Core i7 6700K but the extra 110 just wouldn t fit in our 1 500 budget The Core i5 6600K is still a sexy new unlocked Skylake so we don t feel too bad on that count One thing that did change was the prices of R9 390 implementations EVGA s prices went up by about 10 Luckily the Asus Strix version of the GPU landed at 320 the price point we saw last month One thing we changed quite a bit was storage While we stayed with the Samsung 850 EVO we decided to double the capacity and go with the M 2 form factor This particular SSD model sports the same specs as the 2 5 inch SATA 850 EVO so don t get too excited about speeds To afford the bigger EVO we had to decrease the capacity in our spinning drive One terabyte is still plenty and hard drives are cheap to add if the need arises maximumpc com HOL 2015 mxmume 97 blueprint WHEN WE SET OUT TO CREATE our Turbo build the goal was to keep it under 3 000 We came close really close But we wanted to do something truly awesom
66. SSD And of course who could forget the pair of GeForce GTX 980 Tis in SLI These cards are overclocked to carry a base GPU clock of 1 195MHz a memory clock of 1 853MHz and a boost clock of 1 271MHz Powering all of this is a 1 000W PSU from Corsair Now for the most pressing question How does the Skylake CPU perform Quite well as it turns out Its aggressive 4 8GHz overclock enables it to beat our zero points eight core 5960X CPU by about 21 28 percent in our single threaded benchmarks In our multithreaded CPU benchmark however the octa core was able to flex its extra cores to thrash the quad core part by roughly 30 percent If youre wondering how it compares to Devils Canyon we saw roughly a 2 to 12 percent difference in single threaded tests compared to the Digital Storm Bolt 3 s quad core part we reviewed recently We surprisingly saw a 14 percent bump in our multithreaded benchmark as well GPU performance was good too The two overclocked 980 Tis were able to best our ZP s three 980s by roughly 3 20 percent in all of our game tests It did fall behind 5 percent in 3DMark Firestrike but thats most likely due to the fact that the BENCHMARKS ZERO POINT Stitch Efx 2 0 sec Proshow Producer 5 sec x264 HD 5 0 test leverages multiple CPU cores in its physics tests There salottolikeaboutthis Millennium but there are a fewthings that keep us from wholeheartedly recommending it Aside from the terrible door
67. Screen Storage Weight 6lb 1002 maximumpc com HOL 2015 m 85 86 nuum MSI Z170A Gaming M9 ACK Fantastic feature set at a phenomenal price MSI S Z170A GAMING series has impressed us It s a solid lineup boasting a variety of feature rich gaming motherboards at a fairly sensible range of prices The M9 ACK sits at the top end of this spectrum but can it possibly warrant such a high price tag Well that s what we re here to find out Let s start with the M9 s biggest selling point namely its audio Undeniably stunning the M9 ACK features multiple headphone amplifiers a high quality audio processor and insane audio capacitors all rounded off with a nice chunk of high spec EMI shielding The sound quality is beautiful If you ve ever thought your headphones are too quiet this board will quickly jump to the rescue On top of that MSI has collaborated with Nahimic to provide an audio enhancing software suite similar to THX s now long antiquated Crystallizer software except a lot lot better Honestly it isn t easy to get across how impressive this audio solution is so we ll sum it up this way instead Unless you have an external DAC your audio is terrible in comparison And honestly that s high praise for an integrated sound solution This isn t the only area where the M9 shines On top of all of this audio wizardry MSI has an incredibly well thought out network subsystem Partnering With K
68. TA III SSD Boot Drive 3TB SATA III DATA Hard Drive Zalman Gaming Headset Asetek Liquid Cooling System Windows 10 Home Intel Core i5 6600K Processor GIGABYTE Z170 Chipset Mainboard with USB 3 1 CORSAIR 8GB DDR4 2400 Mhz Dual Channel Memory 1TB SATA III 7200 RPM HD Nvidia Geforce GTX 970 26B Video Card Zalman Gaming Headset Cyberpower X Saber Case with 600 Watt Power Supply Asetek Liquid Cooling System Cz 3 SY h v uu 24X RW HD 7 1 CoolerMaster CoolerMaster 1 Ae FREE Liquid Cooling Windows 10 Home Intel Core i7 5700HQ Processor Intel HM87 Chipset 15 6 Full HD Display 1920x1080 86B DDR3 1600MHz Memory 1TB SATA300 Hard Drive 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 Aint yet 130 Baldwin Park Blvd City of Industry CA 91746 800 707 0393 WwWw cyberpowerpc com Nvidia Geforce GTX 980Ti 6GB Video NXZT H440 Design by Razer Gaming Case 46 5 CoolerMaster amp CoolerMaster Ae FREE Liquid Cooling Gamer Xtreme 3000 Windows 10 Home Intel Core i7 6700K Processor GIGABYTE Z170 Chipset Mainboard with USB 3 1 CORSAIR 166B DDR4 2400Mhz Dual Channel Memory 2TB SATA II 6 0 7200 RPM HD Nvidia Geforce GTX 970 46B Video CORSAIR Spec 01 Case with 600Watts 80 Power Asetek Liquid Cooling System GC
69. This makes them ideal for Ultrabooks and thin and light laptops and desktop motherboards are getting in on the action as well With SATA topping out at a theoretical 6Gbps PCle is the way forward and M 2 leverages the PCle bus to deliver up to 32Gbps Add in support for NVMe Non Volatile Memory Express an optimized protocol designed to let SSDs reach their full potential and this Looks like the way of the future So whats the problem Until now finding retail M 2 NVMe drives has been difficult and expensive Samsung was the first to offer an M 2 PCle SSD with its XP941 and it followed that with the SM951 earlier this year Then it released the SM951 NVMe a second iteration of the drive with NVMe support Unfortunately these were designed as OEM only products going primarily to laptop vendors where the OEM was responsible for ensuring the necessary features were in place You could find those drives online but without a Warranty and at high prices The Samsung 950 Pro aims to change all that with a five year warranty plus some stellar performance for good measure The change of heart likely stems from Intel s launch of Skylake and the Z170 chipset which allows desktop M 2 to reach its potential For optimal performance BENCHMARKS Samsung 950 Pro 2566B AS SSD Sequential Read Write 2 063 901 AS SSD Random Read Write i 52 160 AS SSD QD64 Random Read Write i 1 021 254 lOmeter Mixed Read Write Sequential 1 0
70. User Pinning BE Optional Older X58 based platforms have PCI Express controllers in their 1 0 hubs Intel architectures that followed integrated this functionality in the CPU dies improving performance when one or even two drives failed and it s amazing to watch the array rebuild after replacing a failed disk Is the sequential performance difference between RAID 0 and 10 such that you d choose to forgo the extra data security you could get for free read that RAID 10 may cause some performance degradation due to parity calculations but haven t noticed this on my six core Core i7 3930K at 4 6GHz even when working with massive multi gigapixel pano images Mike Iantosca THE DOCTOR RESPONDS In the Doc s specific application capturing uncompressed video at 2560x1440 RAID 0 is necessary While the loss of one drive takes out the entire array files are quickly analyzed and deleted Meanwhile RAID 0 confers the dual benefit of multiplying capacity and write performance RAID 10 a striped set of mirrored drives would be safer but the Doc would also give up two SSDs worth of space and enough throughput to cause dropped skipped frames in the recordings It s simply not an option The good news in your case Mike is that RAID 10 sounds like areasonable balance of speed and resilience Processing overhead won t be an issue for you since there are no parity calculations involved in RAID 10 pe
71. VA n 1128 d You need to open these files with the Java applet If fara WAT aap Aiba you don t have this on your system get yourself over EM eet Hui et rti Men CC ph 3 ET to http ninite com select Java 8 from the Runtimes is tab and click Get Installer Run the installer and let Ninite install the latest version of the Java applet for you Ensure Executabis Misenum Taumas MM OUT You re going to want to get yourself a legitimate copy of Minecraft Unless you already have an account head over to https minecraft net and purchase a copy of the game Once you have done this download the exe If you already have an install it s advisable to remove the entirety of the minecraft folder by typing appdata in the file explorer and deleting the minecraft folder Remember this will delete your Local saves too but you can back these up by copying the save folder found in the minecraft folder to your desktop then returning it after the clean install GET A FRESH COPY OF MINECRAFT Next you want to run the Minecraft exe To make life easier on yourself move the executable somewhere you wont lose it My Documents is a good start Once you ve run the exe and logged in click Edit profile at the bottom left of the window This should open a new window with a whole range of options Two thirds of the way down the page you should see a drop down menu called Use version You need to change this
72. With the controls at the top of this window you can watch full screen or pause the current broadcast You can watch programs you ve recorded in the same way from the DVR page If you d rather not use a browser drag and drop the network URL into VLC on a different machine or read one of our file sharing tutorials to learn how to share the recordings folder across your network HOL 2015 m maximumpc com e3 R amp D Turn your PC into an Android tablet YOU LL NEED THIS THERE ARE SOME THINGS YOU CAN DO WITH A PC that may not serve a great deal of practical use but are just satisfying to do Guest operating systems and virtual machines come under this header for most people although there are serious applications of the technology for those developing phone or tablet apps and looking for a safe environment to test them in AMIDuOS is one such thing It s a paid for app 10 that comes with a 30 day free trial and it simply runs an Android session as a desktop app on your PC You interact with the app just as you would with your phone tapping and sliding your way across the screen as though the mouse and keyboard somehow werent the finest way to interact with an electronic device PC users of a certain age will be delighted to see the program is made by venerable BIOS manufacturer American Megatrends too IAN EVENDEN WINDOWS 7 OR NEWER HDD or SSD with additional unused space AMIDuOS and Google account as If
73. als and trees for a couple of hours and marveling at all the stuff you re collecting Then the sun starts to set And it seems very very dark without it If you re a big wuss you ll crank up the gamma on your screen but that doesn t help much when the daytime farmyard noises give way to creepier sounds Distant hisses and groans can be heard all around you You can see things moving between the trees and before you know it there s a strange snicker behind you You turn to see what looks like a walking hedgerow for a second before it explodes You re badly hurt and you need to find shelter while you heal up But there are groans all around you which turn into humanoids walking relentlessly aggressively toward you Running in the dark you fall into a hole in the ground possibly the one from which the creature exploded and a whole new array of items are in your inventory bits of wood and stone Using the crafting panel you hurriedly make a workbench and with the workbench you then make a pick You start digging That s the classic Minecraft experience we all know But it s set to change and change fast Microsofts purchase of Minecraft and its developer Mojang has worked like Disney s purchase of LucasArts its rejuvenated a much loved project that was in danger of getting stagnant Many new projects are coming which are expanding Minecraft in familiar and unfamiliar directions and we re going to take a closer
74. an be pulled out to mount the drives This caddy is made of plastic the two side rails being pulled apart to mount the drive The drive itself is held in place by tiny plastic pins and although it seems flimsy it works well The bays support 2 5 inch drives as well but these need fixing in place with screws Unlike all the other NAS units in this roundup the RN202 doesn t use the EX4 file system but instead it uses the latest Btrfs system Btrfs B tree file system is a copy on write file system for Linux that has been around since 2007 and it s been slowly developing ever since Btrfs offers better data recovery from crashes and better data security because of the way it writes the data With traditional file systems if data is overwritten the new data is written over the data it s replacing destroying it Btrfs works differently the new data is written to a free space on the drive keeping the old data in place and only then does the files metadata change to point to the new data IT S A RAID Setting up the RN202 can be done via a web browser with ReadyCLOUD or offline by using Netgear s RAlDar utility By default drives are set up using X RAID which allows for automatic volume expansion Choosing Flex RAID allows manual configuration of traditional RAID arrays RAID 0 and 1 The RN202 uses Netgear s ReadyNAS 0S 6 the latest version being 6 3 5 which is an easy to use UI While it doesn t have the immediate
75. ance and we increased that to a 15 percent boost The system can get moderately noisy under load 48dB from 18 inches away but that s actually better than other gaming notebooks and it also stays surprisingly cool And its not just great performance The GT72S is loaded with extras such as multicolored backlighting switchable graphics with five hours of video playback a USB 3 1 Type C connector for future proofing and a 75Hz G SYNC enabled display elevating the GT72S to lust worthy BENCHMARKS ZERO POINT Stitch Efx 2 0 sec status It s a true desktop replacement that you can dropinto the included backpack for some intense gaming away from home The GT72S isn t the sort of system you want to lug around as a daily driver and a higher resolution display might be nice but for the target audience it doesn t get much better The only thing faster would be two GTX 980 cards in SLI or wait for the next generation GPUs in 2016 JARRED WALTON VERDICT BOC eels g Pro G Dragon EJ REDLINE Insanely fast good KICK build quality overclockable ASS great features i MELTDOWN Insanely expensive large and heavy only 1080p 3 099 www msi com SPECIFICATIONS CPU Intel Core 17 6820HK RAM 4x 8GB DDR4 2133 GPU GeForce GTX 980 86B e 17 3 inch 1920x1080 Matte zd 75Hz G SYNC enabled IPS 2x 1286B Samsung SM951 RAID 0 1TB Hitachi 7 200rpm HDD BD Combo Storage i 1x Mini DP 1x HDMI
76. and ponders the amazing potential and negative repercussions of VR You can check it out here http bit ly MPC_VRConnect Alex shares his thoughts and experience of VR online N submit your questions to HOL 2015 maximumpc com LED most motherboards beep in a pattern if something is amiss There s not a lot that can go wrong if you follow the components instructions The most difficult part can be connecting the case s front panel wires power reset and power storage activity LEDs If you forget to connect the power switch wires to the mobo or connect wires to the wrong pins nothing happens If you do have problems drop me an email and I ll be happy to help There sa small chance you might get a flaky part and have to do an RMA but over the past 20 or so years can count on one hand the number of new components bought that were DOA Windows 10 Drivers upgraded to Windows 10 know should have waited but had a new SSD and was itching to install not realizing had to upgrade first then do a clean install oh well Of course there are loads of driver issues so much so that am getting a new soundcard because Creative Labs always drops the ball with driver releases Without proper driver support my front panel connections don t work took out the SB card and enabled onboard audio to get my front panel connections working Gigabyte released proper drivers for the onboard
77. angs of War Boys who attack without a second thought While this incarnation of Max may look more gentle than Mel Gibson s with his Nathan Drake good looks and genuine Australian accent courtesy of an actor appearing in tedious Adam Baldwin vehicle The Last Ship and who played two characters in Aussie soap Home and Away he s still handy in a fight with an upgradeable punch a range of finishing moves and a shotgun that is a one hit kill for low level enemies Voice acting elsewhere is sadly something of a mixed bag If your series is set in Australia with an Aussie protagonist why would you decide to randomly sprinkle the world with Americans While the melee combat system owes a debt to the Arkham games it has little of their finesse or fluidity Dodge parry attack combo special The notes are all there but it doesn t settle into a satisfying rhythm until enough upgrades have been found to turn Max into an iron fisted brawler capable of taking apart a gang of War Boys in seconds The same is true of the car combat as the first hours of the game pit your underpowered jalopy against some stiff opposition Fuel the precious commodity coveted by everyone in this vehicle obsessed playpen is sprayed around set on fire and used to blow stuff up with wild abandon rather than being hoarded as a scarce resource You ll need it though as the map is a Ubisoft style riot of objectives item pickups races and missions
78. arate the next steps for more clarity For satellite receivers carry on For terrestrial reception jump to step 7 maximumpc com HOL 2015 MAXIMUM PG 61 P HTS Tvheadend 33 402 ga558415 el GP 1921681236 estj htm Q Maria Firefox ls free and open source software from the non profit Marilla Foundation d Tuerm Progen Canker ey Dal Wibi Flac rit g Configuranan i wan i ro ne Fa hearer G Crurmen e EPE onte S Che Tage si Dighal video Arinde er V SATELLITE RECEPTION Bs TV reception is easiest to configure With the adapter selected the General page will show an overview of the configuration First click on the Enable tick box followed by Save We want to add some channel information and this is done by adding the data for finding a satellite and the multiplexes it provides and then searching these multiplexes for channels that can be received Tvheadend bundles the data for satellite Location so you just need to click d cau te WU Goo Cemi lE a e hes wv Boemie NM rimes lines Pees he P Is MEUS m mcm n be zi Pepan Hg FOSTER Beni Hi f you already know the details for each multiplex you can add them manually This can be done from the Multiplexes tab for the adaptor by clicking on Add muxles manually In the window that appears you will need to en
79. are it s ease of set up and the TS 231 doesn t spoil that impression as it takes hardly any time to get up and running and QNAP s QTS v4 2 OS is another impressive icon rich UI FEATURE CREATURE It not only looks good its got some really useful features built in as well Storage Manager is a powerful tool for volume management offering storage pooling using multiple RAID groups thin provisioning including reclamation of any free space ISCSI and snapshot support to provide data protection For further data protection volumes and folders can be encrypted and the TS 231 supports AES 256 encryption of external drives Also provided is the ClamAV antivirus toolkit FileStationisapowerfulfilemanagement tool that supports CIFS FTP and WebDAV Once the Connect to Cloud Drive app has been installed there is a choice of six cloud based storage services Google Drive Dropbox Microsoft s OneDrive Box Amazon Cloud Drive and Yandex Disk File Station also supports smart zonal streaming to a DLNA compatible TV media player Apple TV or Chromecast For backing up there s a comprehensive list of local and remote options plus a large number of cloud options Folders can be synchronized between the TS 231 and the cloud via Microsoft OneDrive for Business Microsoft Office for Dropbox Amazon Cloud and Google Drive for Work Download Station has a built in BitTorrent search engine and any downloads continue to
80. at they re also bringing their solution to the market GeForce Now is another solution in that market and we are approaching it in a different way and were really excited for the future MPC What about VR Are there any plans to introduce that at all SR We re heavily invested in VR would say that we are the technology leaders in VR and we work closely with Oculus and all the other VR players in the market mean GeForce GPUs are powering some of the most advanced VR systems So VR is growing but for Shield for now think GeForce Now is important Android gaming is important and 4K is obviously a big thing so were really excited about what Shield offers HOL 2016 MINIMUME 21 i quickstart DONC ALOR Time For An Upgrade Doctor have an older CyberPowerPC Gamer Xtreme GXi240 with an Intel Core i7 Currently it includes an AMD Radeon HD 6950 video card with 2GB of RAM and 12GB of system memory What would be a good graphics upgrade for it William R Miller II THE DOCTOR RESPONDS All of the links the Doc found for your system reference a Core i7 960 William That s a quad core Westmere based CPU with a 3 26Hz base clock rate While it s no slouch the 960 does predate Intel s Sandy Bridge architecture which is about the oldest platform the Doc would upgrade If you re serious about dropping a new card on to the X58 chipset s second gen PCle links a GeForce GTX 960 or Radeon R9
81. ations OpenPGP can also let you sign messages using your private key which can be verified using your public key This lets you know that a message or file came from the person who owns or has access to the associated private key An email signed with OpenPGP can append the signature as a small text attachment this is called PGP MIME or simply add it as inline text at the end of your message Text or files can be both signed and encrypted too Cool huh The fact that you can authenticate messages should by itself be a good reason to use OpenPGP If the recipient doesnt use OpenPGP the signature can just be ignored Email could be a little more secure if banks government agencies and receipt mailers from places such as Amazon used OpenPGP or some other cryptographic signatures Sure not everyone uses the technology but those who do can be more confident that the message comes from the place the From field says it does So how can you get started with OpenPGP If you re a Linux user theres a good chance that your distribution comes with GNU s implementation of OpenPGP called GNU Privacy Guard GnuPG Some package managers e g Arch s Pacman program use OpenPGP public keys to verify the signatures on software packages Once OpenPGP is installed on their machine Linux users just need to run a single command to create a key pair gpg create key Windows users can download GPGAWin from the web http
82. audio and it works fine but it hammered home what l ve said all along onboard sound sucks With that said the PCle interface doesn t appear to be the end all of interfaces we need something else PCle SSDs M 2 PCle soundcards PCle RAID controllers and multiple video cards dedicated storage interface is in order or a new video interface or something Paul SENIOR EDITOR JARRED WALTON RESPONDS Hi Paul Creative drivers are often a concern so much so that many people have abandoned ship Whether they re worth the cost of an add in card is another matter It s something we should look into again but for many the onboard audio is now good enough and some of the better motherboards even have Creative audio onboard can t recall the last time used anything besides onboard audio PCI Express is most certainly going to hit a limit at some point but for most of what we do it s not so much the speed of PCI Express that s a problem rather it s the total number of lanes available If you re trying to push a bunch of data to a couple of NVMe SSDs while running two GPUs in SLI CF you ll hit a bottleneck Most likely it will be on the SSDs since they usually come off the PCH rather than the CPU PCle lanes For home users it s rarely a problem but for supercomputers it can be serious That s why Nvidia has a solution in the works NVLink www nvidia com object nvlink html enable
83. ch as Battlefield 4s multiplayer component Overclocking the FX won t completely neutralize an imbalance but if you see average frame rates level off where you d expect better scaling try bumping up the CPU s multiplier a couple of notches provided your cooling setup allows for it An unlocked ratio is one of the reasons to own an FX processor after all Multi Monitors Long time reader here Doc l respect your opinions have a laptop application that want to run on three screens using a Matrox TripleHead2Go device know it would work great on a desktop with ample hardware to drive three Full HD displays But given that don t need to run at 1920x1080 are there any laptops that would work Theodore Rosenthal THE DOCTOR RESPONDS Matrox s system requirements are fairly conservative Ted The company sells three versions of its TripleHead2Go capable of taking dual link DVI VGA and DisplayPort inputs and outputting the same signals You need a powered USB port and relatively modern GPU too There is a compatibility wizard to check a specific configuration www matrox com graphics en support compatibility gxm but Matrox needs to update it The Doc spent some time looking though and even a two generation old Intel graphics engine can do 3840x1024 MMM 23 HOL 2015 NOTEBOOK COMPUTERS ENGINE Sr SO 0 zu 2 0 ery Pe FORIMUANICIE
84. completion if the computer is shut down To customize your TS 231 there is a whole host of downloadable apps available The list is long enough to give the Asustor download store a run for its money and there aren t many that can do that GA QNAP TS 231 El QNASTY Memory can t be upgraded 285 www qnap com SPECIFICATIONS CPU Annapurna Labs Cortex A15 Cores 2 Speed i 1 4GHz Installed memory 16B DDR3 Memory upgradable No os QTS 4 2 USB ports ox USBia0 HDMI ports None Ethernet ports 2x Gigabit Others None Warranty 2 years maximumpc com HOL 2015 MAXIMUM PG 31 NAS Supertest The software has plenty going on AIMED AT SMB USERS Synology s DiskStation DS215 comes out swinging It features dual Ethernet ports that not only support adaptive link aggregation but also feature failover support leaving the NAS connected to the network should one connection fail To further enhance its business credentials it also boasts a hardware encryption engine that offloads the task from the main CPU Speaking of which the DS215 uses an Annapurna Labs Alpine AL 212 a dual core processor clocked at 1 4GHz This comes with 1GB of DDR3 1600 memory to aid multitasking jobs Unfortunately that s all it supports because the memory modules are soldered to the mainboard Looking at the performance figures for the unit shows that it can deal with most things thrown at it in a normal office environm
85. ct to change For full terms and conditions please visit http myfavm ag magterms Offer ends 01 31 2016 Centerfold NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti SLI Looking to game at 4K No problem Just take a look at these two stunning GTX 980 Tis more than enough to power any AAA title at 1440p and even 4K Pb HOL 2015 maximumpc com Php is 7 X J Si ES E RE ci x uv Oe E an an Lm PN ym u e m m exe Se am Lm P a Custom Origin 3 PC chassis Although this case is identical gt to the Genesis it s still stunning Littered with RGB remote control LED lighting and a sleek elegant design despite the plastic build quality it ll look gorgeous practically anywhere you need to sit it mMmaximumpc com HOL 2015 Minecraft Minecraft has now sold over 70 million copies and is the biggestselling one man game of al time Where next tor the Swedish behemoth BY DAN GRILIOPOULOS 50 MANIMUMPG HOL 2015 maximumpc com o one expected that the dominant game of the early 21st century would be a retro exploration game from a shy obscure Swedish developer But then Minecraft surprises everyone who plays it You start in on it and it seems a bucolic little world you ve dropped into It s a joy to run around punching anim
86. cute The question is can Microsoft truly compete with Android and iOS when starting from so far behind We posed that question to William Stofega program director of Mobile Device Technology and Trends for IDC who told us that Microsoft s focus on enterprise gives them a shot to slowly build up support for Lumia devices He also pointed out that market share isn t the ultimate auditor of success With Windows 10 now on more than 110 million devices and garnering favorable reviews Stofega says there s an opportunity for Microsoft to increase its profit on other services through universal apps that work on multiple devices Tuong Nguyen principal research analyst for Gartner shared a similar perspective noting that Microsofts recent hardware event featured a variety of gadgets not just phones I think this is a big indicator in their overall strategy It s not one specifically focused on any single device such as the Lumia phones To date consumers have associated Windows too strongly with PC Tuong Nguyen Mobile With Win 10 Using a 99 DisplayDock accessory you can attach certain Windows 10 phones to a monitor and use them like a PC but rather its positioning in the broader market Nguyen said Nguyen doesn t see Windows 10 for mobile drastically changing Microsofts market share position but thinks it does present an opportunity to expand Windows 10 s brand impression across different device
87. d they hate them We now live in a time when there are RAID 0 arrays M 2 drives PCle cards and all sorts of future tech right around the corner that makes the revolutionary SSD look as good as Donald Trump s hair Forget Moore s law let s talk about SSD speed and capacity acceleration And which wonderful and lovely storage options are available to you today Which one should you choose And how much bang are you getting for your buck Read on to find out more m F l maximumpc com HOL 2015 Super Speed Storage OVER THE LAST 20 YEARS storage has changed A lot From hard disks and IDE connectors to all three generations of SATA ultimately it s always been the connection standards that have been the bottleneck hen SATA 6Gbps was first developed it wasn t expected that we would reach today s speeds so quickly Indeed with SSD and NAND flash far outstripping SATA 3 s rated connectivity speeds it seems far fetched to believe that SATA 3 would have kept us going for this long And so as is often the way when PC enthusiasts are presented with a bottleneck the manufacturers tried to find solutions around this gargantuan wall to pry our hard earned cash out of our wallets and into their pockets The initial quick and easy solution was to use an old trick the RAID array More often than not used for redundancy rather than speed RAID 0 provided break neck connectivity by splitting data a
88. d with white LED backlight Intel Dual Band Wireless AC 8260 Bluetooth Built in 2 0M FHD Camera amp Fingerprint Reader Built in Onkyo speakers and a subwoofer Sound Blaster X Fi MB5 Sound System Slim design with only 29 9mm 1 18 inch thin NP9775 Notebook 2 199 FREE UPS GROUND SHIPPING 6th Generation Intel Core i7 6700 Processor BMB Smart Cache 3 40GHz Windows 10 Home 64 bit Edition 17 3 Full HD IPS Matte Display 1920x1080 4GB DDR5 NVIDIA Quadro M3000M GPU Optional NVIDIA Quadro M1000M or M5000M GPU 8GB DDR4 2133MHz Memory 1TB 7200RPM Hard Drive 2 Hard Drives 2 M 2 SATA SSD Drives or 2 M 2 PCle SSD Drive capable Hardware Raid 0 1 Function capable Full sized Keyboard with color LED backlight Killer DoubleShot Pro Killer E2400 LAN Killer Dual Band Wireless AC 1525 with Smart Teaming USB 3 1 Thunderbolt Gen3 Combo Port Built in 2 0M FHD Camera amp Fingerprint Reader Built in Onkyo Hi Fi speakers and a subwoofer Sound Blaster X Fi MB5 Sound System NP8677 S Notebook 1 599 After 190 Instant Savings 6th Generation Intel Core i7 6700HQ Processor 6MB Smart Cache 2 60GHz Opt Unlocked Intel Core i7 6820HK Processor Windows 10 Home 64 bit Edition 17 3 Full HD IPS Matte Display 1920x1080 with NVIDIA G SYNC Technology 30 days No Dead Pixel Guaranteed Insurance 3GB DDR5 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 9
89. e We kept the Core 17 5820K and Asus X99 A as the base and went with EVGA s GTX 980Tis due to price fluctuations While we can get this rig up and running with the 850W power budget things will get a bit tighter when overclocking To keep things under 850W staying with modest overclocks or prioritizing overclocks GPU versus CPU will keep power demands under control We also changed up the cooler from the NZXT Kraken X61 to the Corsair H100i We wish we could have gotten an H110i but we pulled back to make room for our storage solution If there sone theme in this month s builds it s an emphasis on SSD storage With a 1TB 850 EVO you ll be able to fit most if not all of your programs OS and games This lets us get away with a smaller HDD so we scaled back to 1TB on the spinning drive We felt this was justified because fewer people are cramming their desktop hard drives with music and movies when NAS and external HDD solutions are plentiful Still a spinning drive is useful for backups and archiving less often used items in a Steam library We were unwilling to drop one of the 980Tis in this build iteration so we weren t sure we could hit our budget target But at the time of writing we found the 850 EVO on sale Going over budget by one dollar is close enough for us For more of our component recommendations visit www maximumpc com best of the best d s te FFE ELT Tr 1 ae ie P Pupi i ri rd ea E UPGRADE OF THE
90. e does look good It s crisp easy to use and comes with plenty of screen real estate to really take advantage of that dual GPU SLI solution The two GTX 970Ms are a powerhouse when it comes to gaming If you re looking for that perfectly smooth gaming experience from today s latest AAA titles the Aorus won t let you down This makes the Aorus X7 Pro a stunning all round laptop jam packed with enough hardware to make your eyes bleed It could easily run as either a workstation or a gaming laptop depending on your preference And that really brings us round to who exactly this laptop was designed for It s the gamers duh but more specifically the streamers If you re the kind of person who travels a lot but just can t resist the temptation to get yourself out there into the digital stream the Aorus X7 Pro Sync is a solid choice It ll act as your rendering station your gaming platform and your traveling partner Just remember to make sure your microphone is facing away from the cacophony that is the X7 s fans and youre all set ZAK STOREY VEADICT Aorus X7 Pro Sync E PRO GAMER Powerful sleek G SYNC IPS screen chunky RAID 0 array Ei BOTTER It s so loud so so loud 3 399 www aorus com SPECIFICATIONS CPU Intel Core i7 5850HQ RAM 16GB DDR3L 1 866MHz Chipset Intel HM97 GPU 2 2x Nvidia GeForce GTX 970M SLI 173 inch IPS 1920x1080 i G SYNC 2x 256GB RAID 0 mSATA SSDs 1TB HDD
91. e water pump runs at full speed while connected to the two pin adapter Normally you d connect the pump to a four pin pinout for the same reason you d attach the radiator fans to them However we needed the pump to work so we put up with this while we ran our benchmarks Our caged rig did pretty well in some aspects while relatively poorly in others In the single threaded CPU benchmarks the 17 6700K Skylake performed well outpacing the 17 5960X in our zero point With a 240mm cooling setup we believe this CPU could score even higher with overclocking When we reviewed the CPU the 6700K got a 17 percent boost from overclocking Not bad at all When it came to the 3D application benchmarks the little R9 Nano put up a good fight Considering our beefy zero point The blue rubber bumpers onthe D Frame Mini enable youto position the cage in any orientation you like They also stopthe case from sliding around in your car strunk on the way toaLAN party The extra room below the PCle slot allows for full length video cards In our build the Nano leaves this area sparse and clear Thumb screws allow for the attachment and removal of hard drive and cooler brackets for tons of modularity The front panel isa bit of a misnomer in this cage where there is no clear front back up or down machine has three GTX 980s in SLI a single GPU can hardly expect to beat it Despite having less than half the 3DMar
92. ed add Accessories sold separately App availability and experience varies by device and market Office 365 subscription required for some features Limited to select premium CREATE THE PO Feature and app availability and experience may vary by market and device Windows Hello requires specialized hardware including fingerprint reader illuminated IR sensor or other biometric sensors GAMER SCORPIUS 9000 Windows 10 Home AMD FX 9590 Processor GIGABYTE AMD FX990 USB 3 0 amp SATA Ill CORSAIR 16GB DDR3 1600Mhz Dual Channel Memory 21B SATA Ill HDD 7200RPM 64MB Cache AMD Radeon R9 390 8GB Direct X 12 Video Zalman Gaming Headset Thermaltake Core V31Gaming 600Watt 80 Power Asetek Liquid Cooling System Aet Liquid Cooling Windows 10 Home AMD FX 8320 Processor GIGABYTE 970 USB 3 0 amp SATA II CORSAIR 8GB DDR3 1600Mhz Dual Channel Memory 1TB SATA Ill HDD 7200RPM 64MB Cache AMD Radeon R9 380 4GB Direct X 12 Video Cyberpower X Nova with 600Watt 80 Power Zalman Gaming Headset Asetek Liquid Cooling System 24X RW AMD 7 1 Keyboard Optical Mouse Liquid Cooling www cyberpowerpc com 800 707 0393 730 Baldwin Park Blvd City of Industry CA 91746 All Desktop systems come with 3 year Limited Warranty lifetime toll free techsupport AMD the AMD Arrow logo AMD Phenom Il AMD Phenom ATI Radeon Graphics 790 Series and combinations thereof are trademarks of
93. ed and even surveillance feeds monitored all from your mobile device The app also sends real time event messages should problems occur with the NAS Remember that HDMI port Well by connecting to a TV and using the Kodi 14 2 XBMC home theater software the AS5002T turns into a media center supporting up to 1080p output One nice feature is the ability to preview video files when browsing content with the ADM File Explorer As well as all those ports to use to back up data on an external device the AS5002T also supports the Rsync Remote Sync function This means data can be More ports than you can shake a stick at programmed to automatically back up to another Asustor NAS or indeed any other Rsync supporting NAS on the network And with over 100 apps in Asustor s App Central covering pretty much everything from backups to web hosting you can customize the AS5002T to your own needs VERDICT Asustor AS5002T Ei MEATY Performance feature set ADM OS El VEG Drive bays not tool free 298 www asustor com SPECIFICATIONS CPU Intel Celeron Cores 2 Speed 2 416Hz Installed memory 1GB DDR3L Memory upgradable Up to 8GB os ADM 2 4 2 USB ports axis Dus HDMI ports 1x 1 4a Ethernet ports 2x Gigabit Others 1x S PDIF 2x eSATA Warranty 2 years 28 MAXIMUMPG HOL 2015 maximumpc com ourprisingly feature rich software D LINK S DNS 327L SHARECENTER is a no nonsense two bay
94. ed extensive testing with a fresh OS on each and every one Ninite com helped out no end and is a personal favorite of mine Choose what programs you want on your new clean OS click the Get installer button and Ninite installs the latest versions of those programs bloatware free to your default operating system directory This way you can save time and avoid messing about heading to each individual website Its great if youre regularly corrupting OS installs like we do Or if you have a habit of overclocking things just a little further than they really want to go Sound too good to be true Don t worry theres nothing malicious about it Ninite earns its living by operating a more premium subscription based update service for larger corporations including NASA and Harvard Medical School And if you really want you can opt for its customer facing premium option ensuring you get all the latest updates for the programs you ve installed as soon as they re available APPROVED UE Boom 2 IT WASN T LONG AGO that we gave the original UE Boom our Geek Tested seal of approval but Ultimate Ears apparently isnt one to rest on its laurels The company has upped the ante with its UE Boom 2 How do you make arguably the best portable Bluetooth speaker better Simple make it louder and tougher The original UE Boom was plenty loud but the UE Boom 2 really well booms The sequel ups its volume by 25 percent and it s defi
95. eived a long time ago we ve been pretty silent on it but finally we re working to reintroduce Realms as soon as possible It s very important to us because Pocket players don t even have dedicated servers yet or true online play so it s a way for them to play together when not in the same room Of course traditional multiplayer is still there as well it wouldn t be the same without the large public servers that allow players to recreate the entire Came of Thrones world or build the USS Enterprise or create working microcomputers in game WINDOWS 10 Users of Microsoft s new Windows 10 we say new but it s an upgrade to Windows NT via Windows 7 and 8 will have noticed something strange about the games setup Sure the usual Solitaire is there though Minesweeper is sadly absent and its heavily upgraded but it s part of the new Xbox gaming application And all official gaming on Windows 10 is meant to go through this always online application Similarly existing users of Minecraft can go to the Mojang website and get a code PLATFORMS 52 MANIMUMPG HOL 2015 maximumpc com It s beginning to Look a lot Like Christmas which they can put into the Xbox gaming application on Windows 10 and download the Minecraft Windows 10 Beta And if they do they ll find something very strange because its not the same Minecraft we know of yore Now of course Minecraft has been on other platfor
96. en the two When Prime 95 load temp C 86 66 3 67 Cinebench R15 load temp C 74 55 56 Star Citizen Hangar Walk C 61 51 51 you consider the Kraken has a total surface area of 280mm versus the Predator s Shadow of Mordor C m 20 90 240mm that s a serious achievement Best scores are bolded Tested using an Intel Core i7 6700K and Windows 10 64 bit all power saving turned off Sounds like this is heading for a top Temperatures measured after five minutes or after benchmark completion score right Not quite On our Skylake CPU we found you had to remove the to see EKWB expand and improve in an backplate from the motherboard entirely enthusiast area that s otherwise become a SPECIF CANONS which also included removing the socket little stagnant ZAK STOREY Dimensions EN brace You then had to reattach it with including fans AN ui EKWB s included backplate It remains coo guum 2x 120mm PWM uncertain whether this will be the final Res Predator 220 Stock fans DIMUS o SR rss EKWB Vardar Fans mounting system but it s incredibly fiddly E PREDATOR Powerful and has the potential to damage your pins performer innovative and Socket support Intel Only while you re fiddling interesting design silent expandable The Predator is a phenomenal piece of El PREDATORS Mounting setup hardware Although the mounting system could do with some improvement it s nice 200 http predator ekwb com
97. ent with the standard memory anyway It s a consistent performer producing practically the same 118MB s figure for reads and writes in the ATTO benchmark in both RAID 0 and RAID 1 It produces figures of over 100MB s for the HD tests in Intel s NASPT regardless of whether it was RAID 0 or RAID 1 It s not only quick in synthetic tests its one of the fastest units here when tested writing to and reading from it using a 50GB folder of mixed file types The DS215 is a front loading unit with two hot swappable drive bays A neat touch is that the bay doors can be locked for extra security Synology supplies a pair of keys The drive trays are tool free with the drives being secured by a pair of pinned side panels It s a very simple but neat design holding the drives in place without the need for screws Screws are needed however to mount 2 5 inch drives The DS215 supports drives up to and including 8TB capacity and a full list of compatible drives can be found on the Synology website EASY PEASY Synology s award winning DSM DiskStation Manager is one of the best NAS operating systems around and the icon rich GUI is very well designed and easy to navigate To test the DS215 we used the 5 2 552 version and setting up accounts is really straightforward and fast DSM has a host of really useful features including File Station which lets you drag and drop files from both Windows and Mac It has built in FTP and ema
98. ess use Fully upgradable memory and more WD S MY CLOUD Business DL2100 is a business oriented two bay NAS not to be confused with the My Cloud series aimed at the home user That s not to say it can t be used in the home but why WD didn t drop the My Cloud moniker for its latest line of business NAS is a mystery As you might expect from something aimed at the business end of things it s a much more solid affair than the consumer My Cloud Metal replaces the plastic casing and it comes with more professional features such as dual Ethernet ports that support link aggregation and a pair of power inputs WD only supplies one power adapter though so you will have to buy a second to make use of the power redundancy that having two inputs offers Powering the DL2100 is a 1 7GHz dual core Intel Atom C2350 backed by 1GB of DDR3L memory The memory is upgradable to 5GB via a full size DIMM slot There is no external access to this but the design of the DL2100 makes getting to it simple once the units cover is removed The DL2100 supports DDR3 1 600 or 1 333MHz DIMMs Installing hard drives is as easy as it can be as there are no drive trays just unlatch a bay door in the front push the drive in and shut the door That s it It s a very neat design as the drives fit in pretty snugly to reduce the effects of any drive vibration At first glance the My Cloud UI appears pretty simple compared to some of its competitors but
99. ew processor motherboard and the DDR4 memory needed to see those gains But Skylake is typical of today s processors it has lots of little improvements that benchmarks don t measure In the first place 10 percent better performance doesn t stink It s what we should expect from an improved microarchitecture built in the latest fabrication technology 14nm FinFET The good old days of big leaps are over Besides most people are still using processors based on older technology such as the 22nm lvy Bridge or 32nm Sandy Bridge Intel s CPU performance has more than doubled in the past five years The PC replacement cycle now averages about seven years although Maximum PC readers are certainly more active than that Compared with the Haswell microarchitecture Skylake can decode more program instructions per clock cycle five versus four juggle more instructions while reordering them 224 versus 192 and schedule more instructions for execution 97 versus 60 It can also allocate up to 64 instructions per thread whereas Haswell could allocate only 56 instructions for both threads These improvements may be small but they do add up Other new features The popular languages C and C were designed to make it easy for programmers to create bugs and malware Not really but it seems that way are equally important By some measures Skylake s integrated GPU is up to 50 percent faster reaching one teraflops one trillion 32 bit f
100. eys to top it all off it s quick responsive and easily set to purpose And now the bad If you re looking for a silent stealthy laptop this isn t the one for you Although the X7 Pro packs a wonderful amount of hardware into its sleek stealthy body the one thing it hasn t managed to control is the fan speed The fans are so phenomenally loud and sporadic that even when sitting on the desktop they have a habit of whirring into life as soon as you open any program worth its salt At first glance this seems to be due to the method Gigabyte has used to chill those mighty processors Both GPUs and the CPU are cooled using one single system heatpipes and all meaning that if the CPU temp ramps up the fans that are designed to cool both of the two GPUs also spring into life regardless of the temperature of the graphics processors THE GOOD THE BAD AND Gigabyte has included a fan controller but unless you enjoy switching back and forth between the two constantly you re going to encounter some serious thermal throttling in game Headsets headsets headsets and closed back ones at that that s what you ll need Although God forbid anyone else isin the room with you at the same time as you do anything with this wee beastie And finally back to the good The screen Gigabyte P55K V4 658 2 52 23 B its stellar In short Aorus has thrown in a 17 7 inch 1080p AH IPS G SYNC panel and it sur
101. features we re excited to see what it s rockin MAJOR TECH SPECS e Dual core 1 4GHz CPU e 4GB e MMC flash storage e IEEE 802 11b g n ac e Dual band 2 4GHz and 56Hz 12 antenna array e Congestion sensing radio and antenna e USB 3 0 port and Bluetooth 4 0 e 1GB DDR3L RAM KEY FINDINGS e Luckily the outer cowling comes off with a simple twist As you can t plug any cables in without shucking that shield it has to be simple Under the hood we see the real branding on this guy Google has contracted with TP Link for the first iteration of the OnHub We also get a peek at some of the components there are plenty of antennas here e There are 12 cables across the top of the device six 2 4GHz antennas and six 5GHz plus the congestion antenna along the side and a final coax cable on the other side Google seems to have some kind of color coding system which might help for repair but the board markings give no hints e Peeling off the second half of the shell we find an interesting antenna arrayed in a double diamond The OnHub s antenna array is revealed in all its Lovecraftian glory the antenna leads looking spookily like tentacles e Look at that enormous speaker Why does Google s router need a 3 watt speaker Turns out OnHub uses a loud tone to pair with Android devices running Google s companion app but will it feature sick beats in the future The hexagonal speaker enclosure has disturbing similarities to the Ga
102. g charge Free UPS Ground Shipping valid to contiguous US order only NP9778 S Notebook 2 399 After 160 Instant Savings 6th Generation Intel Core i7 6700K Processor 8MB Smart Cache 4 0GHz Windows 10 Home 64 bit Edition 17 3 Full HD IPS Matte Display 1920x1080 with NVIDIA G SYNC Technology 30 days No Dead Pixel Guaranteed Insurance 8GB DDR5 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M GPU 16GB Dual Channel DDR4 2133MHz 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 Full sized Keyboard with color LED backlight Killer DoubleShot Pro Killer E2400 LAN Killer Dual Band Wireless AC 1535 with Smart Teaming USB 3 1 Thunderbolt Gen3 Combo Port Built in 2 0M FHD Camera amp Fingerprint Reader Built in Onkyo Hi Fi speakers and a sub woofer Sound Blaster X Fi MB5 Sound System NP8678 Notebook 1 799 FREE UPS GROUND SHIPPING 6th Generation Intel Core i7 6700HQ Processor 6MB Smart Cache 2 60GHz Opt Unlocked Intel Core i7 6820HK Processor Windows 10 Home 64 bit Edition 17 3 Full HD IPS Matte Display 1920x1080 with NVIDIA G SYNC Technology 8GB DDR5 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M GPU 8GB DDR4 2133MHz Memory TB 7200RPM Hard Drive 2 Hard Drives 2 M 2 SATA SSD Drives Capable with Raid 0 1 Function Full sized Keyboar
103. g hook a parachute and an explosive tropical playground That parachute with its odd ability to drag its wearer up into the sky rather than just dropping round his feet like a discarded tutu would come in damn handy in Mad Max scooping him out of situations where he s outnumbered You can usea flare gun to summon Chumbucket and your vehicle for an extraction however Sharing a release date as well as an open world approach to mayhem and a sandy setting with Metal Gear Solid Vwas always going to make life difficult for Mad Max They are very different games though with Metal Gears missions a front for a base building metagame rather than the plot drivers they are in Mad Max but they are doomed to be compared to each other Metal Gear is the deeper experience the collection of parts for Mother Base and its online multiplayer base raiding gifting it longevity beyond the main thrust of the story something Mad Max claims through its bewildering supply of side missions Scabrous Scrotus takes ages to get ready in the morning but he s worth it Color coordination never was Max s strong point Gibbering homunculus Chumbucket is no Quiet either although horrifyingly he wears almost as little clothing This is certainly a good stab at Mad Max more engaging than an 80s action movie of an FPS would have been For all its lack of direction and occasionally inconsistent world its a solid take on a great story wh
104. gon 79 Razer BlackWidow Chroma TE 80 Samsung 950 Pro 62 EK Water Blocks Predator 240 84 Aorus X7 Pro Sync 86 MSI Z170A Gaming M9 ACK 88 Sennheiser RS 175 Wireless Headphones 90 Mad Max 92 Lab Notes maximumpc com HOL 2015 in the lab Origin PC Millennium The Skylakes the limit AS THIS MAGAZINE GOES TO PRINT Intels new high end Core i7 6700K Skylake CPU is still hard to track down You can however find it in prebuilt OEM machines and Origin PC proudly sent us its new Millennium Skylake system to test The system uses the same chassis designed by Origin PC as the Genesis we reviewed back in April The key difference is that unlike the Genesis it does not include the bottom bay expansion with radiator and extra fans and is thus a midtower build to the Genesis s full tower setup You can still orient the motherboard 90 degrees or have it reverse mounted to face the other door but ours has a traditional setup The case comes in a wide variety of colors ours is black and grey The Origin PC logo in the front glows red and to topit off there are RGB lights inside the chassis that you can tweak through a variety of 16 colors with a wireless remote The front of the case has a swinging door that opens to reveal the Blu ray burner and five 5 25 inch front bays which is pretty cool Inside our particular configuration was a single 6TB WD Red drive On top of the case you ve got a fan controlle
105. had to do something to get three PWM connectors fit on two pinouts BREAKING OUT THROWING ALL OF THESE PARTS together in a cage was a lot of fun and was quite a different building experience Such a build requires you to think more about the aesthetics of the build s entirety since there s no hiding of cables or extraneous accessories here Like we said though an open air case build is not without its challenges One of those was the cooling system We started off with a larger cooler that ended up not maintaining good contact with our CPU for some reason so we had to go with the Deepcool we had on standby Once we had the radiator and pump in place we had three PWM connectors to plug in but only two pinouts to work with We solved this in a roundabout way First we plugged the two fans for the radiator into the CPU and case fan pinouts We then connected the pump to a two pin Molex to PWM adapter This had two consequences which we weren t fond of First the two fans ran at different speeds since each PWM pinout runs as a function of a different temperature sensor The CPU fan is a function of CPU temps as you d expect but the case fan takes temps from the motherboard itself While we stayed at acceptably cool temperatures due to the large radiator we wouldn t do this when overclocking as the fan plugged into the case fan connector wouldn t revup astemperatures increase Not good The other side effect was that th
106. hands on the IP for some time now though we ve worked closely with the studio to ensure Story Mode is something that s going to be fun for both new and existing players The story ahem of Minecraft Story Mode seems very traditional The protagonist is Jesse a newbie player who sets off with his friends to find The Order of the Stone four adventurers who slew an Ender Dragon one of Minecraft s newer end bosses in the hope of enlisting them to prevent the destruction of the video game world he ecraft cor 1s been holdinc Con ye conventior Players will travel throughout the eting up to swap stories and reveal new content Minecraft world including to The End and MinecraftCon 2010 was a simple get together of around 50 people in the Nether in a game that s very similar to t t 1 Separate virtu Telltale s previous work such as award titi includi winning The Walking Dead but also draws much from the 1980s a golden age of PG 13 films The tone according to Job Stauffer g step uj 4 500 attendees a e concer Telltales director of communications 5 T l ficially rel t should be reminiscent of The Goonies or Ghostbusters but with Telltales branded hard choices you will have to make the first free convention there were 10 tickets on sale at 129 around 200 which decisions to leave friends behind even if sold out within three minutes Some ich will have been because the tickets came it s not as violen
107. hat rely on tilt inputs such as Real Racing 3 Support for mapping controls to gamepad inputs is currently being worked on CAMERAS AND OTHER INPUTS AMIDuOS can use your PC s camera microphone and speakers if they re connected using them just as it would on a phone Your PC s keyboard is fully supported too so you don t have to try to use a touchscreen keyboard with a mouse and if your PC is hooked up to Ethernet it appears to the emulated OS as the strongest of Wi Fi signals PIN TO START MENU For a speedy way to access an Android app you can add a shortcut to Windows Tap and hold an app and the Android Uninstall and Info buttons appear with a new addition Drag the app to Pin to Windows and a shortcut is made rm ARC Welder co Dawn JMMORTALS IMDb Pintores at mema in i maximumpc com HOL 2015 m Em EJ E 65 R amp D Making Minecraft Beautiful YOU LL NEED THIS POSSIBLY ONE OF THE MOST POPULAR GAMES of all time Minecraft has provided a platform to make all sorts of weird and wonderful constructions However in comparison to some games MINECRAFT ACCOUNT power users play today it seriously lacks graphical fidelity Vanilla Minecraft even with the most You need a legitimate account high of high resolution texture packs is hardly comparable to any modern graphical wonder Until version 1 7 10 now You ve probably seen shader and light pack
108. he GT72S comes with eye catching MSI Dragon Army styling devouring our benchmark suite m HOL 2015 maximumpc com FOR THE PAST YEAR the fastest notebook GPU has been the GTX 980M With AMD and Nvidia both stuck on the 28nm process node for 2015 most didn t expect to see any significant changes until 2016 Shoehorning a mobile version of GM200 into a notebook seemed unlikely as the 980M isn t even using a fully enabled GM204 and yet it still runs into the 100W TDP limit of mobile GPUs Faced with such an obstacle Nvidia decided to change the game and release a notebook version of the desktop GTX 980 using a fully enabled GM204 chip How has this been accomplished Simple The TDP for the notebook GTX 980 is quite a bit higher than the previous 100W target Nvidia won t disclose precisely how much higher but we estimate it s in the 130 140W range MSI is first out of the gate with GTX 980 in a notebook with updated GT72 and GT80 models see December 2015 review p 74 but select Asus and Clevo based notebooks will also support the new GPU The GTX 980 is a 500 upgrade over the GTX 980M but Nvidia is also giving notebook vendors a lot of leeway in terms of what they do with the GPU and MSI takes its newfound freedom and runs with it Sporting a multiplier unlocked Skylake i7 6820HK processor MSI allows for BIOS overclocking of the CPU and GPU overclocking via utilities such as MSI Afterburner The latter comes pre
109. he specifics but thanks to an announcement by AMD we now have a hint of what s to come The chip designer said it partnered with Oculus and Dell to equip the PC maker s Oculus Ready line with Radeon GPUs The VR experience will be backed by AMD s Graphics Core Next architecture and LiquidVR technology which was introduced back in March as a way to combat motion sickness in VR gaming Slated to arrive in Q1 2016 the Oculus Rift is expected to cost more than 350 for the consumer version KP MICROSOFT ATTEMPTS TO SOOTHE PRIVACY CONCERNS IN WIN 10 Privacy and Win 10 together MICROSOFT S TERRY MYERSON says that from the very outset Windows 10 was designed with two straightforward privacy principles in mind The first is that Windows 10 collects information so the product will work better for you and the second is that you are in control with the ability to determine what information Microsoft collects Expanding on the latter Myerson says Windows 10 limits data collection to things like anonymous device IDs types of devices being used and application crash data Windows 10 supposedly steers clear of users personal content and has steps in place to prevent collecting data that can directly identify users Myerson s comments aren t likely to sway users who believe Windows 10 is little more than a mass spying platform for Microsoft but it does show that Microsoft is aware of the negative privacy perception surro
110. ich doesn t do anything particularly new but does it with a level of heart and honesty that in a parched landscape can be refreshing IAN EVENDEN UERDICT E MAGNUM OPUS Huge map loads to do plenty of explosions E JUST HOPELESS You ll have seen a lot of it before elsewhere 4 RECOMMENDED SPECS Intel Core i7 3770 3 4GHz or AMD FX 8350 4 0GHz 8GB RAM Nvidia GeForce GTX 760 or AMD Radeon HD 7970 3GB VRAM or higher 32GB hard drive space 60 www madmaxgame com M rated maximumpc com HOL 2015 muumumre 91 in the lab yee NIONU SS JIMMY THANG ONLINE MANAGING EDITOR I RECENTLY TRAVELED to Seoul to attend Samsungs 2015 SSD Summit and while was largely impressed by the company s offerings a part of me also felt slightly let down was really hoping that the Korean technology giant would reveal a 16TB SSD for consumers considering that only a few short months ago the company revealed that it had one in the works for enterprise Yes it s true that the cost would be insane so perhaps it was simply wishful thinking on my part What the company did reveal however was its new 950 Pro SSD which is a beast in and of itself check out Jarred s review on page 80 for more details While the newest offerings will be limited to 256GB and 512GB capacities out of the gate which are paltry numbers compared to the aforementioned 16TB enterprise drive they are much faster ALEX CAMPBELL
111. il clients with HTTPS and SSL TLS encryption for secure transfers FIP NFS SMB2 WebDAV Windows AD and LDAP all aid local file sharing across a network The DS215 also boasts DLNA support an iTunes server and direct support for Samsung TV Apple TV Google Chromecast and Roku players The Video Station feature enables you to take total control of your movies home videos and TV content stored on the DS215 It also allows sharing of content without the need for any passwords There s a full range of mobile apps including DS Note which includes a web clipper so you clip and save content directly DS Video which allows streaming to a TV Uses Synology s award winning DSM OS and DS Audio which lets your cell phone act as a remote control for music DS Photo and DS Cam are useful if you have your DiskStation set up as a surveillance center as they allow monitoring of live streams from any security cameras VERDICT Synology DiskStation DS215 Ei DISKO Great OS data security for business use El DIRGE Expensive no front USB memory not upgradable 400 www synology com SPECIFICATIONS 3 Annapurna Labs Alpine ide E Cores 2 Speed 146Hz Installed memory 1GB DDR3 Memory upgradable No os DSM S 2 552 USB ports 2X 05850 HDMI ports None Ethernet ports 2x Gigabit Others 1x eSATA Warranty 3 2 years 32 MAXIMUMPG HOL 2015 maximumpc com Well built NAS for busin
112. iller Micro Star International has developed software that utilizes both 802 11ac and traditional Ethernet What this does is successfully prioritize application bandwidth effectively between the two data streams ensuring your games are transmitted via Ethernet and your VolP web pages and other less important applications are sent over wireless Admittedly this does feel like a solution to a problem that doesn t exist After all who s transmitting 1Gbps of data BENCHMARKS MSI Z170 Gaming M9 ACK Cinebench R15 Index 928 x264 HD Video Encoding fps 58 Memory Bandwidth GB s 28 Shadow of Mordor min avg Maximum Overclock GHz Cinebench R15 at max OC Index Best scores are in bold HOL 2015 maximumpc com down an Ethernet cable at any given one time anyway Even Killer s advertising for its shield tech states that it has a 0 2 millisecond edge over its competitor But we d be surprised if you ever noticed that Like seriously no you won t don t even joke it s not a thing To give you some clarity here that s essentially 1 5 000 of a second advantage over the non Killer users for latency Just seriously stop WATER COOLING YOUR JAM Taking a leaf from the Asus Maximus Formula the M9 also features integrated water cooling connectors for the voltage regulators They may look stupidly jazzy but they feature G1 4 threads which means you can use any fitting you like to cool your VRMs The flexibility
113. impact of say Asustor s ADM or Synology s DSM icon heavy Uls everything is easy to find from the admin page thanks to the top navigation bar Once inside the various sections there are a lot more detailed settings that can be tinkered with but everything is laid out in such an uncluttered way that changes can be made quickly and easily To help the wary some features even have explanations as to what they are for To enhance its business credentials there s a lot of data protection provided with the RN202 Thanks to Btrfs support of snapshot technology data can be continuously monitored with point in time If nothing else it Looks the part recovery should anything nasty happen Unlike many of its competitors that rely on a third party app the RN202 comes with a real time antivirus scanner too it has to be enabled and it also has bitrot protection to protect against random data bits switching from 1 to 0 or the other way around UERDICT Netgear ReadyNAS RN202 El UNSTEADY No HDMI or audio ports memory not upgradable 299 www netgear com SPECIFICATIONS CPU Annapurna Labs Cortex A15 Cores 2 Speed 1 46Hz Installed memory 2GB DDR3 Memory upgradable No os ReadyNAS OS 6 3 5 USB ports 3x USB 3 0 2 rear 1 front HDMI ports None Ethernet ports 2x Gigabit Others 1x eSATA Warranty 3 years 30 MAXIMUM PS HOL 2015 maximumpc com Feature rich and easy to use OS QNAP S TS
114. is Minecraft In the E3 demo players got to look at a beautiful 3D representation of the world they were playing with the detail was astounding Own up everyone loves steampunk smoking chimneys wandering tiny cows In this reality mode the player was limited to voice commands tied to their point of focus so looking at a cow and saying lightning strike would zap the poor bovine beastie There are problems The simulation only works in the center of the headset s visual field so as you get closer to its adorable world it disappears at the edges of the headset And while it looks amazing it s more challenging to play so a second more interactive version was accessed via an Xbox controller and a separate Hololens projected screen on the wall Was this just a demo or something we ll get to play one day It s definitely meant to be a full product says Checci In fact it s based on the Windows 10 Pocket edition from the start so it will also be compatible with those versions when it comes out Minecraft is also due to arrive on Facebook s Oculus Rift platform using the Windows 10 edition early next year We ve got very few details on that but it s guaranteed to be working in true 3D presumably given the prep from the Hololens work that s relatively easy That s all we know is coming to Minecraft in the near future beyond the Minecraft movie which is still in pre production Unless Mojang s Owen Hill k
115. iskStation DS215 118 118 9 290 9 804 105 5 61 84 50 57 Synology DiskStation DS215 118 117 8 601 9 687 62 26 49 43 WD My Cloud Business DL2100 118 117 8 407 10 03 103 9 p 61 31 50 56 WD My Cloud Business DL2100 117 114 6 231 5 261 8 8 62 59 48 41 34 MAXIMUM PE HOL 2015 maximumpc com getit now at predator ekwb com Cooling performance from another world Offering top tier quality performance and acceptable noise levels the EKWB Predator 240 has set itself apart from the competition This pre assembled kit is as close as it can be to purchasing liquid cooling components and creating your own liquid cooling loop o Fredek CPU Cooler compatible only with intel PREDATOR ES EK Water Blocks PERFORMANCE LIQUID COOLING SOLUTIONS Designed and Made in Europe NAS Supertesti ASUSTOR AS5002T are making steady inroads into the home the two bay NAS is still the weapon of choice for a great number of people in the SOHO Small Office Home Office market especially because the likes of the Asustor AS5002T QNAP TS 231 and Synology DiskStation DS215 support the latest 8TB hard disks All the NAS units here with the exception of the D Link DNS 327L ShareCenter could be used in either the home or the office The DNS 327L ShareCenter just doesn t
116. ive SSD Still sounds like a lot but ultimately it s far cheaper than when it debuted back in 2012 Currently it s around 92 cents per gigabyte for an Intel 750 SSD or 86 cents per gigabyte on Samsung s OEM SM951 versus 54 cents per gigabyte for a Samsung 850 Pro SSD But considering youre getting almost four times the performance by using an M 2 drive its more than cost effective and if SSD prices are anything to go by it s not going to be long until these drives cost the same as SSDs do today AVAILABILITY Hardware and connection speeds haven t been the only problems manufacturers have had to face In fact they re only the start The biggest conundrum has been 750 SERIES INTEL SOLID STATE BOL 2015 maximumpc com how to surpass the aging AHCI protocol Essentially a software interface to help convert the physical interface s information AHCI was designed for spinning drives and high latency devices nothing comparable to todays NAND flash storage Although SSDs still work quite efficiently on this a new software interface was needed Welcome to NVMe a collaborative project worked on by over 80 members of a consortium directed by Samsung and Intel NVMe Non Volatile Memory Express was designed to work with both SSDs and PCle going forward AESTHETICS Ultimately the biggest problem in the enthusiast arena has been aesthetics When manufacturers first introduced their lineups of PCle SSDs
117. k score in Fire Strike Ultra the Nano delivered playable frame rates in Tomb Raider and Shadow of Mordor at 4K In Batman Arkham City at 1440p the 92fps means that there s plenty of power there to keep a FreeSync 1440p monitor synced and happy at 60Hz In the multithreaded test x 264 the octa core 5960X still reigns supreme but for most gamers and enthusiasts who dont encode video all day this build would perform nicely And with its portable unique form factor it can be quite the conversation starter BENCHMARKS ZERO POINT Stitch Efx 2 0 sec 806 781 3 196 ProShow Producer 5 0 sec i 1 442 2 096 x264 HD 5 0 fps 33 8 19 54 42 9 Batman Arkham City T 1440p fps 204 92 54 9 Tomb Raider 2160p fps 87 5 36 6 58 2 Shadow of Mordor 2160p fps 70 1 40 2 42 7 3DMark FireStrike Ultra 8 016 3 362 58 1 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 at Ultimate settings Shadow of Mordor at Max settings maximumpc com HOL 2015 MAXIMUM Pt 71 One stop destination for games movies TV and more New Channels Movies TV and Cool Stuff www gamesradar com TESTED REVIEWED VERDICTIZED MSI DOMINATOR PRO G DRAGON PAGE 76 in the lab INSIDE 74 Origin PC Millennium 76 MSI GT72S Dominator Pro G Dra
118. lactic Empire s logo e The heatsink serves asa reflector dish pushing that extra bit of Wi Fi to the far corner of your house where you need it most The components in this thing have been pretty big so far and the heatsink is no different Prizing up the metal mass reveals some equally hefty thermal pads e OnHub Repairability Score 4 out of 10 10 is easiest to repair The speaker is replaceable The device is mostly assembled with clips better than adhesive but can break during disassembly With all ports on a single board fixing a loose USB port means soldering Tiny antenna connectors are fragile and prone to breaking during disassembly This is a fairly complex device and with no repair documentation disassembly and reassembly are especially difficult maximumpc com HOL 2015 wie 59 R amp D otream TV with a Raspberry Pi YOU LL NEED THIS RASPBERRY PI 2 The brilliant mini computer costs under 45 See www raspberrypi org USB PORTABLE DISK Ideally a self powered disk that doesn t draw power from the Raspberry Pi THE HARDWARE We tested and configured two USB receiver devices one for grabbing terrestrial digital television through an aerial and another for grabbing the data from a satellite feed We ll include instructions for both For DVB T terrestrial reception we used a Sundtek MediaTV Pro for DVB S satellite reception we used the Sundtek SkyTV Ultimate The latter includes a 12v
119. loating point operations per second That may not matter to avid gamers who scorn integrated graphics in favor of discrete graphics cards but it competes with entry level cards and encourages new software to offload tasks to the integrated GPU Non gamers will welcome a processor that doesn t need discrete graphics to display some razzle dazzle Many users like me value security and stability over incremental performance Skylake has goodies for us too Its new Software Guard Extensions SGX can encrypt a program and its data in a secure section of main memory which Intel calls an enclave New program instructions can transfer control to this code which can perform vital tasks that must remain secure Because the enclave is encrypted malware cant alter the code or read the data without generating errors Another feature is Memory Protection Extensions MPX The most popular languages for writing commercial software are C and C designed to make it easy for programmers to create bugs and malware Not really but it seems that What it lacks in speed boosts Skylake makes up for in security way C C programs use lots of pointers memory locations that point to other memory locations If a program accidentally or purposefully misuses these pointers it may crash or gain access to data that should be off limits MPX sets boundaries that protect the data from buggy or malicious software It goes beyond the
120. look at them all Procedural generation at its finest Rather amazingly considering it started development in 2009 basic Minecraft still receives updates every few days That sbecause whenitwas deemed finished in 2011 way before the creator Markus Notch Persson left he handed over development to Jens Bergenstern who originally worked on two other Mojang games Cobalt and Scrolls Jens has led a small development team building on Notch s work for the last four years So if you don t know the game now hasan ending where you fight a giant Ender Dragon This is located in a new airy region The End which has End cities End ships and strange beasts called Shulkers that are disguised as blocks and make the player levitate It also has the Nether an underground world of lava horror and pigmen that you can only get to by building an obsidian portal but which allows you to travel between distant areas of the overworld much more quickly Players can craft a huge amount of new stuff and can fly sail teleport and map everything automatically as they go The game has been heavily improved too including differentiation into five modes There s traditional Survival mode where you have to fight off monsters explore the world for resources and deal with thirst and hunger Creative mode lets you fly and do anything you want with limitless resources Adventure mode has you play ona map made by another player
121. m You don t just play your casual Android games you also play PC and console quality games you know like Contrast Borderlands Pre Sequel and Half Life 2 In addition to that were also bringing out GeForce Now which is a new way of gaming Its basically cloud gaming at its best So youre streaming all these high end PC games from the cloud from our GeForce GTX GPUs into your living room and your Shield So you get a connected PC gaming experience without spending a lot of money on buying a high end gaming PC or a console It s really revolutionizing your living room experience with 4K with great apps and a great gaming experience MPC Whats the minimum download speed requirements for something like this SR The minimum download speed we recommend for GeForce Now is 10Mbps So if you have 10Mbps you get 720p 30fps but if you want higher frame rates and higher resolutions for example 720p 60fps we recommend 20Mbps and for 1080p 60fps we recommend 00Mbps Although you won t be needing all of that 50 you will probably get a great experience at 25 30Mbps but if someone else is playing Netflix or downloading stuff in your house you need to have enough buffer so you can still have that great gaming experience MPC Surely there s going to be a problem with latency With the games being rendered in the cloud there must be some lag Issues with a product like this SR The latency is actually ver
122. mely easy as long as you ve followed step one Point your browser at www amiduos com download the latest version of AMIDuOS you ll want Android Lollipop unless there s a reason to go for an older version download the file install it then double click the shortcut It s that simple You re taken through the first time setup procedure IHE GOOD SHIP LOLLIPOP HIT THE BIOS Lu Lollipop is Android 5 Google s habit of naming its OS releases after sweet treats is seen by some as friendly and by others as teeth gnashingly awful If given the choice between installing Lollipop or its predecessor KitKat as you download AMIDuOS you should always choose the newer operating system unless you have a very good reason for stepping back in time One such reason might be app testing While Google s statistics show that around 20 percent of Android users are on Lollipop almost 40 percent use KitKat and another 30 percent still use the even older Jelly Bean iteration and these users need to be supported If you re just using it to run apps on your PC though stick to the latest version it s a much better looking and slicker running experience all round 64 MAXIMUM PG HOL 2015 maximumpc com selecting Apply to DuoS It then installs just like any other Android app Speaking of which INSTALL APK FILES Should you find yourself with any legally acquired Android apps in the form of APK files pe
123. memory and CPU We decided to run the cable over the top which places it over a pair of USB ports and the Wi Fi antenna connectors The result was the best of a bunch of less than ideal options If there s an upside it s that the USB cable is braided which makes it at least Look good even if it is in the way Then again some may like the appearance of cables jutting out of the mobo giving it a cybernetic look We won t judge D DOMINATING THE CAGE WHEN WE LOOKED for memory we wanted to go big on capacity but we noticed that most of our DDR4 kits are 16GB but in 4x 4GB kits Bummer As we searched we remembered We had a machine that could donate a few sticks We grabbed two 8GB sticks of Corsair Dominator RAM from our 2015 Dream Machine and used them As with most X99 systems our Z170 board from Gigabyte defaulted to setting the RAM clocks of the 2 666MHz sticks at 2 133MHz The problem was solved by upping the multiplier for the RAM clock Leaving it at 2 133MHz wouldn t have hurt performance much as RAM clocks are rarely a bottleneck now In other mini ITX builds going with 2 133MHz DDR4 RAM would be fine in most cases and you ll save a little coin by forgoing higher RAM clocks SILENT STORAGE WITH THE RECENT RELEASE of the 2TB Samsung 850 EVO we thought it would be perfect for a mini ITX build Having two whole terabytes available on an SSD is pricey but it has its advantages It eliminates the need for a small HD
124. mp and reservoir unit is situated at the top of the radiator while an Evo Supremacy CPU block is connected to the bottom of the expandable tubing complementing the whole unit nicely MOD MAX The design of the Predator has some nifty new features a few of which we haven t seen in the CLC world before One of the more innovative additions is in part thanks to the positioning of the pump and the fans All of the power cables fan connectors and pump controls are located on the radiator itself This means you can avoid all that awful cable management nonsense around your CPU block and route the cables around the back of your chassis instead Also the loop is entirely expandable If you want to change the tubing for clear tubing you can Fancy putting some better fittings on there You can do that too You can also grab a GPU water block and WI Vardar Predan throw that into the mix if you really want Additionally if a dual radiator isn t enough BENCEMERRE for you EK is also bringing a 360mm edition EKWB Predator EKWB Predator NZXT Kraken X61 to the US market which also includes quick EELMA HE ee ce disconnect fittings Idle temp C 23 22 21 Ultimately though it s the performance that matters most We tested the Predator against our current favorite the NZXT Kraken X61 and saw at most one or two FireStrike Ultra 4K load temp C 52 52 degrees difference betwe
125. ms from the PlayStation 4 to the iPhone there s a version of Minecraft for it but the Windows 10 Beta is unusual Firstly you can only play it when you have signed in online Secondly it hasn t been built on the original Minecraft but on the Pocket version Mojang s Checci who runs the Pocket development tells us why it s just a beta It s doing OK but there is a lot to fix People have complained about the UI not being PC friendly and some other omissions like key remapping being missing and were working on that stuff which unfortunately we didnt have enough time to work on before But the good news is that it s a beta so it will improve over time Pocket Edition has been around since 2011 and is actually the biggest selling version of Minecraft having sold over 30 million copies by January 2015 It s available on iOS Android Smart TVs and Windows Phone The latter is significant because Windows Phone is now Windows 10 which explains why that s the version we ve got on Windows 10 though you can of course The easiest way to surviveis through farming still run the original Minecraft on Windows 10 instead for the moment There are big limitations to this edition of Minecraft It doesn t support modding and would be harder to mod even if it did being built on C rather than Java code It only allows you to play with seven other players compared with a theoretical cap on original Minecraft of 2
126. my chance of success l m also aware that without an optical drive l ll need to install the OS using USB Could you help me prepare a thumb drive for the task too Is booting from M 2 really a better way to go or should leave the slot empty and stick with SATA Joey L THE DOCTOR RESPONDS Congratulations to your son Joey The M 2 connector will accept SATA 6Gb s and PCle based drives depending on the specific implementation Asus s X99 PRO USB 3 1 motherboard as an example only takes the PCle based variety Its slots are also four lanes wide indicated by the M key giving you up to 20Gb s of throughput So be sure to pick an SSD matching that description such as Samsung s XP941 which shows up in the board s compatibility list Next you have to decide between Windows 7 and Windows 10 If you choose the former you may need to enable the CSM Compatibility Support Module in the X99 PRO s firmware You ll find that under the Boot submenu after entering Asus s UEFI Aside from broader compatibility with PCle based storage devices Windows 10 is also easier to install from a USB thumb drive Simply jump to www microsoft com en us software download windows10 and run the media creation tool Why go through the trouble of figuring M 2 out at al In a word performance Most of the four lane drives you d drop into Asus s board are rated for sequential reads and writes in excess of 1GB s Compare that to
127. n cables Solid state storage was just a concept back then These days the domain of speed belongs squarely to SSDs In the speed realm you re going to be looking at more than just capacity An DATES CEDE Be TEE EAT AAG Eee ES n N submit your questions to Ci area of intense development is the actual drive interface which connects your drive to your PC The most common is SATA 6Gbps but M 2is onthe rise The majority of users won t have an M 2 interface on their motherboard so breaking through SATA s ceiling requires using RAID Don t let yourself be confused by M 2 though It s an interface that replaces mSATA and supports multiple buses including SATA PCI Express USB 2 and 3 NVMe and others Buying an M 2 storage stick doesn t guarantee you the latest NVMe speeds you could end up with an M 2 drive operating in legacy AHCI mode You want NVMe Then there are some high end motherboards shipping with Intel s new Thunderbolt 2 interface delivering a blistering 20Gbps in both directions With all the options which is best We take all four approaches to speed for a spin and figure out which is the right balance between price performance and availability When it comes down to it the best setups will have a combination of all types of storage fast solid state drives gigantic HDDs and NAS solutions And in case you were wondering the 12 bay NAS backs up to Amazon 53 mm R ur a aec RU E
128. n for you M 2 is great for small form factors but again suffers from the same problem currently the only way BENCHMARKS 3x Samsung 850 Pro 128GB SSD RAID 0 Samsung 950 Pro NVMe SSD Intel 750 SSD 1 2TB Samsung 850 Pro 2TB Best scores are in bold of hiding these drives is by using a motherboard with thermal armor here s looking at you Asus otherwise you re stuck with it staring you in the face RAID arrays are another great solution less useful for gamers but all in all quite easy to set up and in today s climate exceedingly stable In fact some of our writers have used RAID 0 SSD arrays for years with little to no problems whatsoever FUTURE TECH All of that being said this isn t the end of storage speed and indeed this year saw Intel and Micron announce 3D Xpoint the first new memory storage technology invented within the last four decades Touting performance figures 1 000 times greater than traditional NAND flash and endurance to match these devices are set to hit the stage sometime in 2016 Although Intel hasn t let on as to how exactly 3D Xpoint works no doubt in an attempt to fend off potential competitors roughly speaking Iit forsakes the transistor in favor of a resistive material where the resistance between two points indicates whether the bit of information is a 1 or a 0 Although still not as fast as today s DDR4 just the fact it s non AS SSD Sequential Read
129. nd files in half between two disk drives theoretically allowing data to be pulled off both of the drives at the same time Then came the push to utilize PCle an interface that we still havent managed to saturate You can easily transfer upward of 120Gbps nearly 20 times more than SATA 3 After that came M2 a smaller form factor laptop drive originally designed to operate in a similar way to mSATA The M 2 interconnect had one NT interesting asset it My integrated directly into the PCle bus giving it the ability to take full advantage of the expanded LN bandwidth and increased speeds of that platform increasing NAND flash performance almost fourfold Impressive DEPENDENCY Ultimately storage connectivity has always depended on one component the motherboard The more modern the motherboard the more likely you are to be able to support these new storage standards Intel s latest Skylake chipset the 7170 supports 20 PCle 3 0 lanes This is in direct response to the increased number of people using those same PCle lanes for storage as well as graphical horsepower Because the storage utilizes PCle lanes you lose out on the number of lanes available for your GPUs in some scenarios if youre using SLI or Crossfire it may not be possible to install an M 2 PCle card without the additional lanes provided in the latest Z170 chipset With Intel increasing the number of PCle lanes in its chipsets and processo
130. nitely noticeable In a small room the speaker can be almost deafening it s certainly loud enough to keep a small house party going all night long And all night long it will go because the battery life is still rated to last up to 15 hours on a full charge despite the extra oomph The device is also sturdier this time around Not only is it IPX 7 rated which enables it to stay one meter under water for up to 30 minutes but its chassis can also survive five foot drops In conjunction with the revised hardware Ultimate Ears has updated its UE Boom app which enables you to power on off your UE Boom 2 and adjust EQ set an alarm and pair multiple UE Booms if you please Itisn t cheap 200 is lot foraspeaker but you re getting a ton of high quality firepower out of a very portable speaker which is sturdy enough to survive some pretty rugged adventures JT 200 www ultimateears com maximumpc com HOL 2015 MAXIMUM PG 93 94 uu First Timer thought might try to build my own computer I m reasonably competent with programming skills tools and boxes of spare parts My only hesitancy is what to do if it doesn t work after put all the parts together Who do people call when the computer has been put together from off the shelf parts with no one responsible for the whole Bob Tamarin SENIOR EDITOR JARRED WALTON RESPONDS Hi Bob Many people are hesitant for the same reason but there s no way to
131. nows anything else Of course we re still focussed on maintaining Minecraft and there are lots of exciting things to come but the studio is packed with talent so who knows what we might create in the future maximumpc com HOL 2015 55 SAVE 10 81 AND x GIVE A GIFT f i JS ST THE DEI Loci IM eS AMD RADEON Ag RECLAIM YOUR s sanc FURT b nEn E PRIVACY TODAY m MILITE yaru umbo From psum epe LE e l3issues per year delivered to your door or device e Save up to 81 off the cover price e Subscribe from just MIHI J ny mn mm E TREAT YOURSELF UR SOMEONE ELSE out of thie wa PC pa aaa amg L a Titan SUBSCRIBE 7 WS LAC TO DAY Lit 2 EASY WAYS TO ORDER CJ Visit myfavouritemagazines co uk Z604 rer 2 Or cal us toll free on T 844 119 2822 se quote Z604 when ordering by phone y US print subscribers c ny ind Sat am 7pm ELIT any time and we will refund you for all You will receive 13 Lines are open Monday to Friday Sam Tpm i s offer is for neu ETES ared t b uying 13 full priced issues die newss gue Thi yrite to canci eue iur subscnption at a iubes it to change For full terms and conditions please visit mytavm ag magterms aay ings issues in a year IT you are dissatisfied in any way you can urn mailed is SSUES Pric es correct at point of print and Offer ends 31st January 2016 examining technology and putting it to use
132. oller meaning you don t lose out on those valuable PCle lanes in smaller form factor builds Something that s become null and void over the last year or so maximumpc com HOL 2015 MAXIMUM PG 43 Super Speed Storage CONCLUSION And there you have it folks thats the vast majority of super fast storage solutions available to you today and wow does it look like a doozie AID 0 provides some R impressive figures for its low price but PCle storage solutions will be the clincher going forward If it wasn t for the innovations we ve seen with manufacturers using the PCle physical interface RAID 0 may have taken the win Alas its limitations have been reached and spooling more and more drives together isn t a viable solution to our speed woes With SSD capacity ever increasing say hello to 4TB Samsung drives coming soon its only a matter of time before they replace the aging hard disks of yesteryear They re far more responsive energy saving and noise reducing than their ancient counterparts and even using the SATA 3 interface still very potent PERSONAL CHOICE What it comes down to is personal preference and what you need A 1 2TB Intel PCle card might be ideal for a workstation grade computer rendering 3D models every day but if you don t need the horsepower or detest the ugliness of the drive consuming another of your cherished PCle slots it s probably not the solutio
133. om desktops Alienware is a trademark of Dell Inc Intel the Intel Logo Intel Inside Intel Core and Core Inside are trademarks of the Intel Corporation in the LI S and or other countries Intel Inside Extraordinary Performance Outside quickstart JUS BY ZAC STOREY Nvidia s console killer MPC talks to Sridhar Ramaswamy about the Nvidia Shield what it brings to the living room marketplace and if the end of the console is nigh We ve all heard the rumors of gaming directly from the cloud and with the advantages that cloud storage and processing have brought recently Nvidia believes it s about time that those whispers became a reality We spoke with Sridhar Ramaswamy Nvidia s director of Technical Product Marketing to see what makes the Shield so special 80 percent of the market wants to play games on a big screen without investing in that ecosystem GeForce Now brings that to them says Sridhar 20 MAXIMUMPG HOL 2015 maximumpc com Maximum PC Can you tell us exactly what we re looking at here with the Nvidia Shield Sridhar Ramaswamy Sure Shield is the most powerful streaming box in the marketplace Powered by our Tegra X1 processor which brings really high end graphics processing capabilities to the streaming box market we really designed Shield so that you can enjoy an interesting pool of apps all at AK 60fps it brings amazing gaming experiences to the living roo
134. onward supports the SSD Trim command although unfortunately you ll need a screwdriver to fix them in place By using 2 4 and above versions of the ADM OS drives up to 8TB are also supported making for some hefty storage options If you are used to looking at the rear panel of a NAS box and seeing nothing but an Ethernet port and maybe a USB port the rear of the AS5002T will certainly get your attention Its loaded with ports to connect it with any other devices that might be available There are two Ethernet ports which support link aggregation for faster transfer speeds and better load balancing and a couple of USB 3 0 ports there s a third in the front bezel The front one can be used for one touch backups to an external drive The rest of the ports comprise a pair each of USB 2 0 and eSATA ports a single HDMI 1 4a output and last but not least an S PDIF port That s plenty of options Once the drives are installed it takes very little time to set up the unit and load the ADM Asustor Data Master software ADM at the time of review it was version 2 4 2 Is one of the best GUls out there being both graphically rich and easy to navigate which is good as there s a lot going on OUT AND ABOUT Need to hook up to the AS5002T on the move Not a problem Asustor s AiMaster is its NAS management app which enables control of the NAS from a mobile device The unit can be set up managed backups performed files access
135. oo much power for something l d like to keep running 24 7 found an old Celeron and P67 board to replace it and I ll be taking a look at FreeNAS to see whether it should supplant my trusty Arch install The real hassle will be taking my encrypted volume and transferring its contents to the new set of drives That means keeping the old server alive long enough for the transfer and for checksums to be run on the copied files Its a good thing someone invented rsync spent much of the past month revising our SSD testing and working on reviews of new M 2 NVMe SSDs Of course love the speed that comes with PCle NVMe drives but honestly having a gigantic SSD in my machine so that never have to worry about whether there s enough room to install another new game is simply awesome Samsung s 950 Pro may be the new hotness but bang for buck the 1TB Samsung 850 EVO is really tough to beat and the 2TB model is big enough for my entire current gaming collection and then some With 50GB plus game installs becoming increasingly common nom nom nom need every gigabyte can lay my hands on 92 MAXIMUMPG HOL 2015 maximumpc com Editors Picks Updaters Jimmy Thang online managing editor and Zak Storey staff writer introduce two time saving tools DRIVERUPDATE If you build new PCs or install Windows as much as do DriverUpdate from SlimWare Utilities can be a godsend The software
136. ore comprehensive seven day EPG These can be enabled by selecting the EPG Grabber page followed by clicking on either service in the Over The Air Grabbers section Don t forget to click on Save Configuration ZI AUIDITUEDETTNEITUNTE Es intera rga m uiu mrs E U LE RSS RE anaa aa a 2 rrr Po aen lis aij cam A peo tomo sdb w TEL s RE CS rom D em een s Le re CA Tv ie ce GTA SR T mp rrr i m iim uum ama Pai wem a I ug i pf idi z 1 Lis 62 MANIMUMPG HOL 2015 maximumpc com BiTi Episode Gan Dinion Chaani Frikbr 14382 HS min M Jazeera Erg Me uere Li Friis Lai ims Binnie z Ei Asia TV zer Frekr 1415 2 ii tna p Bconry Hits Friby 1400 2 hr Can TV MERE Friis Ls te E boue P emn T3 Lee Student View Policy Lords Student Visa Policy prm Jit Pies brel Grade ol Pe debile sd ue Hause ol Loss on Fs TRE Of skedend is policy or 5 5 E irm teh LE uf bpm Thee Em 3 Dates um Le 1 are Cris Sapa NO RC C Lt lei LI des aspici amp z E Va Posi gt FM HHT Pru Fri 151 jh FExgrtuc Ta Fri 15 39 lms price depp Fri 15 17 2 hes g nir UP Movies RECORD A PROGRAM After a while you should notice the Electronic Program Guide page starts to populate itself with the broadcasts you can now watch or schedule to record Clicking on any program will open another window allowing you to set up a recording A secondary option
137. ort for only four cameras D Link Cloud Cameras Even so it enables real time monitoring recording and playback and supports motion detection and scheduled recording A neat addition to a capable package BACKUP BEAUTY The mydlink Access NAS app enables you to access the NAS from any location using a mobile device to download and upload photos movies and music files as well as backing them up speaking of backups the DNS 327L supports local and remote backup auto backups to a USB storage device and it supports Time Machine and Amazon 5S3 Compared to the vast library of apps that competitors such as Asustor offer the optional download list for the DNS 327L looks pitifully short but there are some useful tools Examples are phpMyAdmin aMule P2P file sharing that works with Edonkey and Transmission which looks after BitTorrent downloads Photo Center enables you to share photos over the web while AjaXplorer does the same for files as well as supporting video audio streaming For website creation there is Joomla while Blog is basically just WordPress D Link Vault powered by ElephantDrive adds another backup tool which enables automated remote backups of shares or other folders to a secure cloud via the NAS With the slowest processor and least amount of memory amongst the units featured here you might expect to see the DNS 327L fall behind its competitors when it comes to how it performs For the most
138. ot bothered about appearances have a non windowed case or are utilizing a NUC or some other small form factor device WAIT WHAT HAPPENED TO SATA EXPRESS PCle storage or SATA 100W of power to find originally did at least something to do There were a couple with it of SATA Express To wrap up serial SSDs out there but ATA we ve got to nowhere near enough look at mSATA which to provide any form stands for mini SATA of available market Essentially a smaller Indeed companies form factor SSD such as Asus have now mSATA was most taken that interface and commonly found in even created front bay notebooks and early devices using USB 3 1 small form factor and providing up to devices before being Well as you probably already know SATA 3 has always been the problem child of storage speeds Hell we ve hit on that enough during this very feature However M 2 and tapping into PCle lanes wasn t the first solution to the problem An additional physical interface came in the form of SATA Express Essentially taking up two SATA 6Gbps lanes and some additional power it s an interface that enables speeds of up to 1 959MB s read and write by utilizing the same PCle lanes that M 2 and U 2 now occupy Unfortunately as a Standard it just never took off certainly not in the way that replaced by the higher speed M 2 devices It does however utilize the SATA host controller as opposed to the PCle host contr
139. ou re likely to be using When you know you simply need to click on the Add DVB Network button from the adaptor s General tab and find the transmitter By location Our local transmitter wasnt listed If youre not sure what you need to recieve digital TV transmissions the FCC has a guide at http www fcc gov guides antennas and digital television 4 PLE RI BELL LL 1 Lm a Sy a chi eo Los Ern 4e Ane in y ps eh C OI DE Toda M SE lm Bes 12 MW entr Dh d 5 mw Mis sara b FU me Druna m SB DU F Grane B TO 03M Das d OW CCR EI Uu Zzbamwh deu Dd E Lou Tiis m 4 em DSTI maman step is to allow Tvheadend to divine TV channels from those services and this can be done from the adaptor s General tab by clicking on the Map DVB Services To Channels button You ll hopefully be left with a list of channels to watch in the Channels page outside of the adaptor configuration area The default location for recordings will need to be changed probably to the mount point we created at the beginning The location can be changed by selecting the Digital Video Recorder page and changing the Recording System path You must save the configuration on this page for any changes to take effect Image F You will also need to configure the electronic program guide There s usually a minimum of What s On Now and What s On Next embedded within each channel but plenty of services transmit a much m
140. oud to be the firs st system integrator for the NZXT S340 Designed by Raz Configure yours today ALL IBUYPOWER Systems Come with a FREE 3 Year Waranty amp Lifetime Tech Support ALL Systems are Assembled in the USA Call Us Customize Online 888 462 3899 ibuypower com GAMER PALADIN mp Customizable 1 499 Windows 10 Home Intel Core i7 5820K GIGABYTE GA X99 UD4 NVIDIA Geforce GTX 970 4GB VC 16GB DDR4 2400 Memory 1TB 7200 RPM HDD 240GB SSD ye S340 Razer Gaming Case 600W Power Supply EB cem table of contents Les ve patent aside HOLIDAY 2015 12 Router virus fights back Oculus PCs feature Radeon GPUs Microsoft 7 attempts to soothe privacy concerns 18 TOES Seven old expansion cards N 20 J We talk to Nvidia about its console killing Shield The 3dfx Voodoo3 2000 er Google s OnHub gutted for your pleasure 26 amp 38 60 HOW TO STORAGE Stream live TV on a budget install Android on your PC make Minecraft more beautiful 26 38 50 68 BU LD IT NETWORK SUPER MINECRAFT 2 0 i no ATTACHED STORAGE What does the future STORAGE SOLUTIONS hold for those manic Ei LETTERS Looking for the perfect NAS Flash PCle M 2 we solve miners We get the We ve got you covered all your storage woes inside info 22 DOCTOR COMMENTS 76 sailings 90 MSI GT725 DOMINATOR SAMSUNG 950 PRO MSI 2170A GAMING MAD MAX PRO G DRAGON M 2 NVME M9 ACK
141. part that s true but its read performance under the ATTO benchmark sees it almost keep pace with all the other units tested GUN D Link DNS 327L ShareCenter EJ STYLE Quiet operation good software feature set El VILE Lacks performance against others around this price point 259 www dlink com SPECIFICATIONS CPU Marvell ARM 88F6707 Cores 1 Speed i 1 2GHz Installed memory 512MB Memory upgradable No os ShareCenter 1 0 1 USB ports 1CUSBS 0 HDMI ports None Ethernet ports 1x Gigabit Others None Warranty 2 years maximumpc com HOL 2015 MAXIMUM FG 29 NAS Supertest Does away with EX4 in favor of Btris NETGEAR S READYNAS RN202 is a more powerful successor to the company s popular ReadyNAS RN102 From the outside it s identical to its predecessor All the changes are to be found inside with a more powerful CPU and a lot more memory The RN202 also has a second Ethernet port supporting link aggregation and all three USB ports have been uprated to USB 3 0 The new unit also supports 6TB drives instead of the ATB limit of the RN102 At the heart of the RN202 is a dual core 1 46Hz Cortex A15 processor backed by 2GB of DDR3 memory Should you feel that s not enough tough luck the four memory chips are soldered directly on to the motherboard The drive bays have a novel tool free mechanism to hold the drives A catch on the front of the bay releases the inner drive caddy so it c
142. power adaptor that also needs to be connected But here s the most important requirement these USB devices must be attached to the Raspberry Pi Image A through a powered USB hub We wasted two days trying to configure the system firstly without a hub and secondly with an incompatible hub In both cases everything appeared to work but the devices wouldnt find any television channels in a scan Switching to a powered hub compatible with the Raspberry Pi solved the problem so we cant emphasise this point enough Plug a hub into a power supply connect your USB receiver to the hub and the hub to the Pi And don t forget to connect the aerial or satellite feed to your receiver e We re assuming you ve got a Raspberry Pi pre configured and updated with the Raspbian distribution Were also assuming it s connected to the internet and that you re typing your commands into the console directly or over an SSH session Our next consideration is going to be where you store the television recordings We d recommend connecting an external USB hard EXTERNAL STORAGE MANY OF THOSE SET TOP BOXES hidden under televisions are already running Linux And despite their lack of CPU power they re all more than capable of recording and playing several channels at the same time as well as streaming the data across your local network The Raspberry Pi is perfectly suited to this too and with the appropriate hardware it can be turned into a powerful
143. ppy with the final result and hope that Maxisn t too upset when we have to take back some of the parts and keep them in our lab Sorry Max 68 mame HoL 2015 maximumpc com ROUNDING UP THE PARTS INGREDIENTS WHEN WE SET OUT to do this build we wanted to include some shiny STREET new parts This of course meant we had to go with Skylake we ve PART PRICE been overdue for a build that used InteUs latest architecture For graphics though we had a choice We could go lower end with the Case In Win D Frame Mini orange 250 recently released GTX 950 or go bigger with the AMD s R9 Nano 3 Guess which way we went More power Is sexier So we chose the Motherboard 3 Gigabyte GA Z170N 3 165 Nano which fitted wellin this mini ITX build The CPU and GPU found a home on the Gigabyte GA Z170N motherboard which supports CPU Intel Core i7 6700K 360 DDR4 and offers wireless networking too with its mini PCle Wi Fi ij card We had an EVGA 7170 board but the included Wi Fi was a good Memory _ 16GB 2x 8GB Corsair Dominator 3 170 reason to pick this board over the other We just wish that the mobo Buses ss came with on board power and reset buttons like the EVGA model GPU AMD Radeon R9 Nano 650 As this is a Z170 board we had to go with DDR4 memory We got a couple of 8GB sticks of 2 666MHz Corsair Dominator EU BitFenix Fury 750G 80 Plus Gold 121 All of our parts fo
144. r and four USB 3 0 ports Inside the chassis the cable management and wiring is top notch This isn t to say the case is perfect however While the chassis uses a steel frame the doors are plastic feel flimsy and are a huge pain to take off and put back on To open up the case you have to Lift up a latch on the back and the doors just fall off without warning On top of that we felt as though we were weakening the doors every time we took them off INSIDE JOB Once you re inside the case you ll notice the new star of the show Intel s Core i7 6700K is a 95 watt TDP processor based on the 14nm production process While the CPU carries a base frequency of 4GHz and a turbo speed of 4 2GHz it s a heavily overclockable part Origin PC pushed this chip to 4 8GHz While we ve experienced some over aggressive overclocking from Origin PC in the past this time around we encountered no blue screens For cooling Origin has gone with a 360mm closed loop cooler designed by Asetek While it keeps the PC cool and quiet it s a little disappointing to pay over m HOL 2015 maximumpc com four grand for a computer and not get a custom loop Regardless all of this sits atop an Asus Maximus VIII Hero With this mobo we re getting USB 3 1 and USB Type C Filling the RAM slots you ll find 16GB of DDR4 clocked at 2 666MHz in a dual channel configuration For speedy storage Origin PC outfitted our config with a 5126B Samsung SM951 PCle M 2
145. r in and of itself A NAS can act as a backup target but ideally it should be seen as a device that enables you to organise your data See it as a centralized storage space A space that is easy to access from any of the machines on your network Importantly this is a space that is easy to back up as well So make sure you do And so it s time to look at the state of the current entry level NAS see what it offers and which device is right for you I antl VAN N TO 9 T Y p j _ ONAP asustor maximumpc com HOL 2015 m NAS Supertest Meaty two bay NAS for home or office ASUSTOR HAS A NUMBER of two bay NAS units under various guises in its lineup This model the AS5002T sits very nearthe top of the tree when it comes to both performance and feature set and although it s aimed at the home power user it wouldn t be out of place in a small office It certainly doesn t lack for power as at its heart lies an Intel 2 41GHz 2 586Hz Burst dual core Celeron J1800 backed by 1GB of DDR3L memory There are two easily accessed SO DIMM slots allowing the memory to be expanded to 8GB if needed Straight out of the box the performance is pretty impressive with the possible exception of its 4K read performance however the 4K write performance is strong in both RAID 0 and RAID 1 The two drive trays support both 3 5 inch and 2 5 inch drives including SSDs ADM 2 4
146. r user two bay device it would equally serve as the storage backbone in a small office without any problems This is especially true as the memory can be upgraded to help keep up with the demands of a growing office The Asustor Data Master OS is just superb easy to use and navigate and its heavy use of icons makes it pleasing on the eye The fact that it has an HDMI port so it can connect to a TV and by using home theater software be turned into a fully functioning 1080p media center is another string to an already impressive bow With the support of a huge store of downloadable apps behind it the great thing about the AS5002T is that it can be tuned and customized to fit anyone s personal needs and that s what makes it a great all rounder O 36 MAXIMUM PS HOL 2015 maximumpc com Em Eig 2 z T 7 UNIVERSE Ud SEU M S j Em cC C PT Ad IEECE amp TU Lp Wl i Calculus c LN WESTERN E Uo MINDS ag a ar Cities of the SeiviuizaTion TTD Ez a met T gt Ancient World MAGE CLEAR E f Fundamer H Ee UNDERSTANDING r Sao LS NA URAL j INVESTMENTS Optimizing BRAIN Fitness a i j UNDERSTAND BU SINESS UOTE EROR Oc TAI 4 pg 21 NS 3 THE pe GREAT COURSES Access a World of Knowledge with Your of The Great Courses The Great Courses Plus is a revolutionary new video learning service featuring nearly 5 000 videos presented by the world s greatest professors It s
147. rate through your Shield and enjoy it on your big screen 4K TV MPC Where is the future of gaming going Do you see this as the end of the desktop SR Not really there s always going to be a set of gamers who love playing the latest and greatest games at the best resolution and the best graphics quality And that segment is thriving and in fact growing The number of PC gamers is growing worldwide So that segment is continuing to grow and console gamers are going to continue to game on consoles But the masses like 80 percent of the market today who are gaming on Android devices such as tablets and phones want something more want to play their games on a big screen want to get a console or a PC like experience without investing in that Need your 4K Netflix hit Don t worry Shield s got you covered E P LIMBO m E NETFLIX E B b huluews ART LITT Tobe T 1 a a P ii x WITHER rh nt a war mi A bii Aiii My ee pst x a ey vevo MLB m f PREMIUM E px maximumpc com Nvidia s Shield promises to hit 1080p gaming at 60 frames but how well will it cope outside of Nvidia s testing facilities ecosystem GeForce Now brings that to them MPC What about Steam 0S Is that going to be a problem for Nvidia SR Anything that helps gaming think is good mean Steam we are partners with Steam we work closely with them and we re glad th
148. re from 1 200MB s to 1 500MB s read and 1 000MB s to 1 100MB s write This solution really shines in desktop copies and transfers reducing overall copy time by half making for a much smoother experience and an instantaneous response when moving folders with photos ALTERNATIVE RAID But wait theres more RAID 0 isnt your only option RAID 1 uses exactly two drives and mirrors your data across both at the same time The benefit here is that if one of your devices fails there s always a backup A hardware RAID controller can also potentially read from both drives for improved speeds too RAID 5 is a little more complex It requires a minimum of three drives and stripes the data across the drives along with a rotating parity block It detects when there may be problems on either of the other drives and migrating system critical information from the damaged or decaying drive on to one of the others This is often used in NAS devices or servers where multiple people may be using the array at any given time Then there s RAID 10 the king of money spending storage and dependability It takes the best parts of both RAID 0 and RAID RAID 0 provides arapid alternative to storage woes Setting up a RAID is as easy as it comes nowadays 1 and merges them together simultaneously mirroring and striping the data between the number of drives you have available You need a minimum of four disks to do this
149. rhaps ones you ve developed yourself you can apply them to AMIDuOS in exactly the same way SHARE FOLDERS WITH WINDOWS Within your virtual Android tablets Settings app is an AMIDuOS section that allows Android to access folders on your PC Tell it the location of your music photos and videos and they appear as if they were saved on the tablet s built in storage you can even edit pictures and save them back to your PC The virtual machine hives off 16GB of storage for itself but anyone who s bought an iPhone recently will know that s not enough and this feature allows it to use your expensive high speed PC storage as a giant microSD card J ACTUALLY USING THE THING Anyone with a Surface or other touchscreen laptop can interact with Android as God intended but those with a mouse or trackpad have to use the pointer as a finger substitute Pinch to zoom is a little more complex because you need to activate gestures using Ctrl Alt T then use and O to zoom SCREEN ORIENTATION Android is displayed by default as if a tablet was being held in the portrait orientation A button in the top left corner allows you to switch it to landscape If you re using it on a Windows tablet with tilt controls however you might find they don t have any effect as this is an area of ongoing development instead you can map keyboard commands to do the job using the Input Mapper you ll find in the Settings This is the best way to play games t
150. rhaps you re thinking of RAID 5 or 6 which do employ distributed parity to protect against drive failures Bottlenecks Dear Doc few years ago won a PC at CES that included an AMD FX 6100 16GB of RAM an MSI 990FXA GD80 motherboard and a Diamond Multimedia Radeon HD 7970 video card added a Samsung SSD and it now has Windows 10 My machine was running well until a month or so ago when its graphics card died After much hemming and hawing made the decision to buy Gigabyte s GeForce GTX970 as a replacement for the 7970 know the 970 isa respectable upgrade but now I m wondering when my CPU becomes a bottleneck What is meant by bottlenecking and how would identify it Is AMD s FX 6100 too old If so do have any good upgrade options on this platform am a gamer so performance does matter to me Brad Pool THE DOCTOR RESPONDS Great question Brad It s relatively maximum DC com easy to test for and identify bottlenecks in a lab full of components to swap in and out but they re more difficult to troubleshoot in the wild Based on the Doc s experience though there are a couple of scenarios where you ll notice an FX 6100 limiting the performance of a GeForce GTX 970 If you re gaming at 1920x1080 or a resolution lower than that Nvidia s GPU won t always be fully utilized shifting the bottleneck to your CPU The FX 6100 will also slow you down in games heavily reliant on host processing su
151. rs the til There are always limitations when it comes to storage Don t believe what they tell you you can t download more RAM uptick of PCle storage seems almost inevitable OLD SKOOL SSDS Unless youve been stuck under a rock for the last three years youre probably aware that 2 5 inch SATA SSDs have dramatically dropped in price Its now possible to pick up a 500GB drive for a third of the cost of what it was in 2011 The thing is while the 2 5 inch form factor a is fantastic in smaller builds it is now limited by its interconnect throughput Performance w although far better than the now almost defunct spinning hard drive lacks in comparison to today s PCle based storage In fact the only way to alleviate D these problems with SSDs is by removing the sticky SATA barrier To do this solution build a RAID array there s only one EE The X99 platformis the pinnacle of storage perfection If you want it it can runit 40 mumw Hoi 2015 maximumpc com RAID O ARRAY Theres a plethora of RAID arrays to choose from however the most common ones youll come across are RAID O 1 5 and 10 RAID O possibly the most interesting of the four requires a minimum of two drives ssentially the principle E Is fairly basic split the data across both hard drives then read or write off both ofthem simultaneously to provide an impres
152. s the PC is over priced For 4 370 you d think you d get a Haswell E processor with more physical cores and a custom loop cooler As it is it should be a couple of hundred dollars cheaper but perhaps that s just pie in the Skylake wishful thinking JIMMY THANG VERDICT MITTIT ree ich ete E1 LAKE SUPERIOR Bold styling good performance plenty of storage LAKE ERIE Overpriced terrible doors no custom loop 4 370 www originpc com SPECIFICATIONS Processor 3 Intel Core i7 6700K 4 8GHz Mobo Maximus VIII Hero RAM 16GB of DDR4 2666 Graphics 2x GeForce GTX 980 Ti Storage 512GB M 2 Blu ray burner Optical Case PSU Origin Millennium 52 28 58 15472 1 216 21 196 Batman Arkham City GOTY fps 214 4 996 Tomb Raider fps 3DMark Firestrike Shadow of Mordor 0 10 zT 8 016 7 566 TI 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 Our desktop zero point PC uses an Intel 5960X CPU three GTX 980s and 16GB of RAM Arkham City tested at 2560x1440 max settings with PhysX off Tomb Raider at Ultimate settings Shadow of Mordor at Max settings s p S i LJ oe A WE i LJ P T TIT TU GEFORCE GTX tQa l GN amp Ne AP EFORCE GT B The Millennium uses a great chassis but has terrible doors me 75 maximumpc com HOL 2015 in the lab MSI GT 72S Dominator Pro G Dragon dhot G1725 is ready to dominate T
153. s in Skyrim Witcher even GTA but have you seen them in Minecraft It s a game that can benefit the most from an increase in graphical fidelity WINDOWS OS After all when your entire game consists of square blocks the opportunity for shadows and other Whatever version of Windows lighting to affect this voxel based universe is astronomical It can change your experience entirely youre running it needs to be If you re looking to really max out your system there s no better way than throwing shaders into on a powerful gaming PC Minecraft Our test system for Minecraft shenanigans consists of a lowly Core i5 4670K running alongside 166B of RAM and a GTX 980 We still only managed to pull 20fps at 1440p with some of the best shader packs out there ZAK STOREY and AdFlys Head to http bit ly MCShader1710 Image B b to go to the Minecraft Shaders website Then you want to Prise into scroll down to the bottom and select the Download tab Fick SoS Next simply hit Link 1 Shaders Mod v2 3 29 Non Forge 3 renes WA am Edition This takes you to an AdFly page simply wait five Le aunnmaricait aci 4j ne aciem with fang crochet ETT ms lusor aus SEP seconds and hit Skip ad in the top right hand corner then rue Selection the ShadersMod file downloads Enable eserimentel developement verani Caracas 7 alice wi i old ein Macra mra oriri 2910 4011 7 icu es el Mua Mall verlor GPa 20D FALLING IN LOVE WITH JA
154. s like it s at the top tier At 280 at the time of publication you wouldn t expect anything less The first thing we noticed is that the unit is big and well made Construction feels thoughtful and solid and the same is true of the base though we found m HOL 2015 maximumpc com ourselves wishing it was weightier The headphones themselves are over ears and fit comfortably for long hours of use There are replaceable rechargeable batteries in each ear compartment andthe headphones charge when on the station WI FI WOES The RS 175 headphones have exceptionally long range In a 2 000 square feet home they can easily go from end to end provided you have line of sight Sennheiser claims a range of up to 100 meters and we can believe that but in a real world scenario it s much less unless you live in an entirely open space Another drawback was that we experienced disrupted audio when the station was placed in the vicinity of a wireless router With a dual band AC router in the same room the RS 175 dropped signals depending on the direction our head was facing in relation to the station And for the record we were only five feet away from the station in this setup If your RS 175 transmission station is in the same room as your wireless router you may have to play around with your router s settings It was annoying enough that we moved ours into a different room altogether So how does the RS 175 sound In a word fanta
155. s of protection was considered a munition back then During prosecutions courts have subpoenaed for keys instead of trying to break the crypto And famously OpenPGP was one of the technologies that made Edward Snowden s communications with Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras possible By the way if you haven t seen Citizenfour go see it At the end of the day think most people should have an OpenPGP keypair made But if you re like me you ll rarely use it To be able to use OpenPGP encryption the other person you re communicating with must use it as well That means the more OpenPGP users you know the more useful it is In its most basic setup OpenPGP uses a single pair of keys to function a private key and public key Public keys are well public while private keys should be closely held secrets In some people s opinions private keys and passphrases should be In some peoples opinions private keys and passphrases should be more secret than your Social Security number GNU Privacy Assistant makes it easy to create OpenPGP keys in Windows even more secret than your Social Security number To encrypt a message or file to Alice you use Alice s public key Alice can then only decrypt the message using her private key If you want to be able to read the message later you have to encrypt it with your own public key as well So why on earth would you want to use OpenPGP even if you don t need to hide your communic
156. s range It provides a highly responsive soft tactile typing experience that s ideal for gamers and typists alike Admittedly this isn t the quietest key on the market as it still retains the signature click of a mechanical switch But honestly the pleasure your fingers are going to feel from these little things is second to none It has a higher actuation point when compared to Cherry s world famous red switch yet it s still more responsive than the blue while retaining that tactile click This gives it a classy feel and a beautiful noise Razer provides four different editions of the BlackWidow Chroma line up The TE edition which is a tenkeyless variant a stealthed version of the TE which is presumably a great deal quieter than its clicky cousin and both clicky and stealthed full sized Chromas featuring all the doohickies you d expect The TE cuts the nonsense however For the price and size you lose out on both USB and audio passthroughs as well as an additional five macro keys although honestly how often do you use those things In addition there s no wrist rest at this price point it would ve been nice to have seen Razer include one The keyboard naturally sits at a fairly high angle when resting on a flat surface No doubt in part to the large amount of hardware buried inside of this miniature behemoth Yet the Chroma still has more to give with the traditional pair of angled risers found at the back of
157. s up to 12x the amount of data to be sent between the CPU and GPU Games don t need that yet but if you have a cluster of Tegra GPUs working on a scientific problem in some workloads Nvidia is reporting more than a doubling of performance over PCle Gen3 Note that NVLink is still in the works it s being developed for a future supercomputer and is not yet available It sounds like the upcoming Pascal architecture will include NVLink and it might even make it into consumers hands but we ll have to wait until some time in 2016 to see How Much Oomph Every TV in my home has a media center hooked up to it two TVs upstairs and one in the living room Recently we bought a 4K TV for the upstairs living room gaming room and the video lag Netflix Amazon etc was atrocious We have a 50MB s connection through the house so know it s not a speed bottleneck especially when all the other TVs are seamless It had to be the video card had an extra gaming system in the attic with an Nvidia GTX 780 i7 950 processor and 126B of RAM hooked it up and it worked perfectly However that s a hefty system just to hook up to a TV want to upgrade all my TVs and can t justify that kind of cost in building media centers for them all What do you recommend Lora Shanks SENIOR EDITOR JARRED WALTON RESPONDS Hi Lora What GPU and CPU did you use initially If you re hoping to run 4K displays on 30
158. se if there s one thing this desert wasteland needs it s lunatics with guitars strapped to the front of lorries or convoys of motivated female characters What you do get is movie bad guy Immortan Joe s son Scabrous Scrotus who wasn t hugged enough when he was younger and a whole lot of War Boys looking like Moby wearing Marcus Fenix s pants Taking a little of Assassin s Creed a chunk of Shadow of Mordor and a sprinkling of Arkham City Mad Max sets you loose in an open desert world on a quest to get your car back Because if one thing can be guaranteed to survive the end of the world it s the concept of private property There s a plot of sorts with Max s desire to reach the Plains of Silence being what gets him into trouble in the first place as well as the motivation to get out of it Youre fairly soon introduced to Chumbucket a mechanic cum hanger on who will repair your car when parked but spends much of the game telling you what to do to the point where you start to wonder who s playing what Happily this disgusting mechanic literally the first person you run into after losing your Interceptor has a car he needs a driver for It s not much to look at however and a lot of the game after that Is spent seeking out upgrades for it such as boosters spikes exploding harpoons and flamethrowers There s also a lot of punching in the face as the food fuel ammo and scrap metal you need to collect is guarded by g
159. sive performance boost The one major downside to this is that if one of your drives fails you lose all of your information with no chance of recovery Although in today s climate thats a pretty rare occurrence its still advisable to keep the vast majority of your valued files offsite After all you want to make sure that you ve got at least one backup and ideally you want to have a backup for your backup as well we wouldn t want to be around when your primary system and your backup fails Heh Star Trek Anyway back to the point keeping your OS and some games on your array is often the best solution especially in today s modern age of cloud storage and super fast download speeds when reinstalling an OS doesnt take a week To set up and install a RAID 0 system you need to use your BIOS Intel s Rapid Storage Technology and at least two drives Instructions can be found in your motherboard s user manual however changing the PCH Storage option from AHCI to RAID should do the trick Then it s a simple case of rebooting and mashing Ctrl I to get into the Intel Rapid Storage Driver and creating your RAID array from there SPEED SPECS As you can see from our benchmarks on page 44 our array performance is right around where wed expect to find it Three Samsung 850 Pros in RAID 0 provide us witha grand total of 384GB of storage and performance speeds in synthetic benchmarks ranging anywhe
160. sor 6MB Smart Cache 2 60GHz Opt Unlocked Intel Core i7 6820HK Processor Windows 10 Home 64 bit Edition 15 6 Full HD Matte Display 1920x1080 NVIDIA G SYNC Technology optional 30 days No Dead Pixel Guaranteed Insurance 3GB DDR5 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970M GPU 16GB Dual Channel DDR4 2133MHz 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 8260 Bluetooth Built in 2 0M FHD Camera amp Fingerprint Reader Built in Onkyo speakers Sound Blaster X Fi MB5 Sound System Slim design with only 25mm 0 98 inch thin NP8658 S Notebook 1 899 After 190 Instant Savings 6th Generation Intel Core i7 6700HQ Processor 6MB Smart Cache 2 60GHz Opt Unlocked Intel Core i7 6820HK Processor Windows 10 Home 64 bit Edition 15 6 Full HD IPS Matte Display 1920x1080 with NVIDIA G SYNC Technology Opt 15 6 AK QFHD Matte Display with G SYNC 30 days No Dead Pixel Guaranteed Insurance 8GB DDR5 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M GPU 16GB Dual Channel DDR4 2133MHz Memory 250GB Samsung 850 EVO M 2 SSD 1TB 7200RPM Hard Drive 2 Hard Drives 2 M 2 SATA SSD Drives or 1 M 2 PCle SSD Drive capable Hardware Raid 0 1 Function capable with SATA Interface Full sized Keyboard with white LED backlight Intel Dual Band Wirele
161. ss AC 8260 Bluetooth Built in 2 0M FHD Camera amp Fingerprint Reader Built in Onkyo speakers Sound Blaster X Fi MB5 Sound System Slim design with only 28 8mm 1 13 inch thin NP7255 Notebook 1 199 FREE UPS GROUND SHIPPING 6th Generation Intel Core i7 6700HQ Processor 6MB Smart Cache 2 60GHz Windows 10 Home 64 bit Edition 15 6 Full HD Matte Display 1920x1080 Also available in 17 3 Full HD Matte Display with model NP7270 2GB DDR5 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M GPU with Optimus Technology 16GB Dual Channel DDR3 1600MHz Memory 250GB Samsung 850 EVO M 2 SSD 1TB 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 Intel Dual Band Wireless AC 3165 Bluetooth Built in 2 0M FHD Camera amp Fingerprint Reader Built in Onkyo speakers Network Attached Storage NAS devices aren t dumb boxes full of hard drives they re smart servers that can handle data in game changing ways Let s take a look 5y Alan Dexter and Simon Crisp torage isn t the sexiest topic we admit but that doesn t stop it being important After all you need somewhere to put all those lovely programs you use on a daily basis You need space for all those videos photos games and documents you ve spent so long working on So while graphics cards and proce
162. ssors get most of the tech love there s something fundamental about storage that ensures it s a major part of our computing lives even if it doesn t tend to set the heart aflutter Of course storage solutions have changed quite a bit recently thanks to the emergence of the SSD Storage is no longer something that is measured purely in capacity Performance is now also a factor On the flip side reliability has reared its head as well early adopters of SSDs will be painfully aware of the downsides of the first batch of drives coupled with the fact that everyone in of business types of all of us have the transition too these aren t simply dumb devices that look after your files 24 7 they can act as media streamers and torrent servers and offer up your files for external access as well We ve looked at high end NAS devices before so for this group test we ve gone back to the basics focusing on more affordable consumer grade NAS devices These are the kind of boxes you should look at if you haven t already got a NAS They re affordable capable and expandable Note that if your data is really important if it s your livelihood say we recommend going up a level in both performance and redundancy to make sure that your data is indeed safe and secure Whatever sort of NAS you go for let s just reiterate that you need to have a proper backup scheme in place Having a NAS gives you options but it isn t the answe
163. stall unzip libcurl4 openssl dev pkg config git build essential dvb apps gcc 4 7 The final step you need to perform here is to download the latest version of Tvheadend from the developer s repository using git You ll then be able to build it using the build trinity of configure make and sudo make install CC gcc 4 7 configure make sudo make install CONFIGURING TVHEADEND Now we need to start the actual program As this is the first time were going to run the service in Configuration mode and as a daemon which means it becomes http kodi wiki view PVR TV receiver TV aerial satellite USB hub Power Raspberry Pi a background process To do this type the following tvheadend C d Now open a browser preferably from another machine on the network and enter http ip of rpi 9981 extjs html You can discover the IP address of your Raspberry Pi by typing ifconfig and looking for the value next to the inet addr field for the eth device Your browser will load the default front end to Tvheadend This is where you ll eventually see all your program data and set up and view recordings We need to tell it how to use the TV hardware we ve connected This can be done by clicking Configuration TV Adaptors and selecting your device from the drop down menu on the left As the next steps are going to depend on whether youre receiving a satellite signal or a signal through your aerial we re going to briefly sep
164. stic These headphones are of the closed circumaural variety which means the sound stage is not as expansive as open headphones Those who game a lot might want to consider open headphones instead and of course dont forget a decent mic too But the RS 175 set does the job well in almost every situation In a variety of music bass is not overbearing and boomy Low frequencies are tight and never overpower vocals either If you need extra thump there s a bass mode that can be triggered For most people the RS 175 is a big step up in terms of sound quality especially if youre a gamer and want to upgrade beyond puny gaming headsets There s the issue of signal interruption in some situations but it s not a show stopper Besides the RS 175 base enables you to share the love with another person We ll take two head units please TUAN NGUYEN VERDICT Berea CES Wireless Headphones E HIGHS High quality sound good battery life very comfy i LOWS Can be affected by Wi Fi routers pricey 280 http en us sennheiser com The RS 175 headphones look great fit comfortably and sound great no matter what you re listening to maximumpc com HOL 2015 89 Pi Cie LA Lo OO Vehicle combat is reminiscent of Rage but it s a more reactive world The Road Warrior returns to prove hes Hardy enough LET S GET ONE THING out of the way first this is not Fury Road The Game And that s a shame becau
165. t ange WOE ns akiiata P pens Take Your PC S moga ilitiesdO e levels with tf first native 8 core de Ew builtwfth dynamic tuneable p ait ICs feature Wifidows 10 to delive sthat mak it easier to fim 4 settings along with 5C Vs moi dj ze that fe A 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 SATA III 7200RPM Hard Drive 6x LG Slim Slot Load DVDRW 802 11 b g n WiFi Bluetooth Revolt Mini Tower Gaming Case 350W Power Supply Customizable i qt GAMER MAGE D355 Windows 10 Home AMD FX 8350 Processor AMD Radeon R9 390X 8GB VC gt Gigabyte GA 970A D3P MB k 8GB DDR3 1600 Corsair Memory Bw EAVES SSD AMIE SPS mI DIDI IE 12X DVD Si 120 mm Liquid CPU Cooling System I I 99 NZXT S340 Razer Gaming Case Customizable 00W Power Supply Join us on OF OEipureowen 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 Simon Crisp lan Evenden Daniel Griliopoulos Tom Halfhill Paul Lilly Kevin Parrish Mayank Sharma Zak Storey Copy Editors Katharine Davies Mary Ricci Editor Emeritus Andrew Sanchez ART Art Editor Fraser McDermott Photograph
166. t as the studios Game of i jo Thrones or Wolf Among Us titles ich as Stampy Longnose and the Yogscast were in attendance whilst the The cast is an interesting mix including lojang team briefed the audience al new upcoming features Paul Reubens aka Pee Wee Herman Corey Feldman The Goonies Gremlins John i 54 MAXIMUMPG HOL 2015 maximumpc com Hodgman Coraline The Daily Show Ashley Johnson What Women Want Avengers Assemble and Martha Plimpton The Goonies Parenthood with either comedian Patton Oswalt or actress Catherine Taber as Jesse depending on which gender you choose Billy West Futurama Ren amp Stimpy acts as a narrator Minecraft Story Mode is going to consist of five episodes initially and the first should be out by the time you read this It ll be on all the consoles PC Mac and mobile phones Microsofts Hololens IS an experimental project designed to compete with the wow factor of the forthcoming VR revolution Revealed at GDC In 2014 it consists of a headset connected to a powerful computer much like the Oculus Rift The difference is that this is augmented reality not virtual reality so the headset isn t opaque but transparent Its big trick is detecting your location and head position and overlaying what appears to be a 3D image in the room which moves as you move Essentially it makes you hallucinate So of course the killer app Microsoft has demonstrated for it
167. te Alternatively the Don t let its size honest with you we haven t even get M 2 drives that are as fast as speedier MX200 250GB can be fool you M 2 seen the latter sized drive todays standard SSDs Now we had for 95 or 38 cents GB is more than know what you re thinking why The downside is motherboard enough to LA D on earth would you want that and device compatibility You ll take on any There s another downside to Well simply put M 2 drives are need to ensure your motherboard 2 5 inch drive M 2 and that s how it looks With ridiculously less complicated to build than their 2 5 inch form factor counterparts and because of this it makes them extremely affordable and accessible to the vast majority of us Indeed you can get your grubby little hands on a Crucial BX100 500GB M2 SSD for roughly 160 making it the cheapest out of all our storage solutions at just 32 cents has at least one M2 slot that it can support the size of M 2 drive that youre going to purchase and that you re willing to give up those PCle lanes as necessary Additionally theres a whole assortment of NGFF next generation form factor sizes depending on your needs ranging from 2242 2260 and 2280 all the way up to 22110 although to be only a select few companies utilizing black PCBs they can stand out rather dramatically in comparison to the more traditional SSD They do however provide a fantastic solution if youre n
168. ter Blocks Predator 240 Could this be the new king of the watercooling jungle IF YOU VE SPENT any amount of time around the depths of the custom water cooling world you ll have come across one name in particular EK Water Blocks Along with Bitspower EK is one of the most popular water cooling componentry firms globally And for good reason Providing top notch cooling capacity and an aesthetic design style so clean you could eat your dinner off of it it s easy to stick with EKWB throughout any of your water cooling projects That being said not everyone is into water cooling an entire system Despite that however offloading our woes into an all in one closed loop cooler has become m HOL 2015 maximumpc com undeniably popular So let s leave the worry and the warranty to companies such as Corsair NZXT and Thermaltake all of which provide some very impressive and easy to install cooling solutions Indeed its about time EKWB finally tapped into that market And boy has it The Predator is the culmination of everything that enthusiasts have ever wanted from a 240mm all in one liquid cooler You get one of EK s 240mm radiators coming in at 38mm thick The radiator boasts a fin density of 38 FPI fins per inch That means you ll need some seriously beefy fans to power it But don t worry EK has you covered with the inclusion of two of its custom designed Vardar high static pressure fans Plus an integrated pu
169. ter the frequency bandwidth and constellation for each multiplex while setting everything else as Auto This data can be gleaned from the FCC website You ll typically need to do this for three or four muxes depending on your location Tvheadend will scan them for services and the Add DVB Network by location button on the left This will ANOTHER add them to your configuration Image E open a window containing a global list of satellites Image D RPi TUTORIAL After selecting the satellite Tvheadend will add a list NEXT ADDING CHANNELS of multiplexes associated with that satellite to the MONTH z You ve hopefully got a healthy list of services Multiplexes tab These will now be scanned for channels extracted from the multiplexes The next and you can watch the scanning progress in the Capabilities box on the right of the General page If everything is working properly you should see plenty of services channels detected and added to the Services page For our chosen satellite we detected 970 services from 98 muxes Unless you want to also configure your system for terrestrial viewing skip to step 8 TERRESTRIAL RECEPTION First enable the receiver in the general page Tvheadend includes a broad database of transmitters pre configured with the details for each multiplex You ll need to know which transmitter your aerial is pointing at We ve found that www antennapoint com is a convenient site for telling you which transmitter y
170. the best way to learn anything e Thousands of hours of exclusive No homework no tests no e New subjects new lectures and new in depth content on fascinating pressure just the pure joy professors added every month subjects of learning Companion guidebooks to aid your e Brilliant award winning professors e Experts from National Geographic understanding of the subjects from the Ivy League and other top the Smithsonian The Culinary Uniedecces tro d schools Institute of America and more stream from our website or via your tablet smartphone or connected tv a App Store Google play Roku kindle chromecast y Dover mers cation s Inc Colin A nders son Bra ind X P ictu Images courtesy of Shutterstock O Radius Images Cort IAE er and A Loll Arizona State University es etty Images Corbis Rightdisc Alamy Courtesy of N zu J TRY THE GREAT COURSES PLUS FREE FOR 30 DAYS WwWw TheGreatCoursesPlus com 4 max Super Speed Storage 38 Suner 5SpBPBD storage Whats the best storage option for you m nce upon a time there was just one simple solution when it came to computer storage The ever reliable infallible spinning hard drive That signature sound of those platters whirring into life undoubtedly roused the spirit of many a gamer knowing that within mere tens of minutes they would be sitting comfortably ready to load their favorite 32 bit game It was a technology
171. tool automatically scans your system for the latest drivers and you can update all of them with a press of a button Sure motherboards come with a CD with the basic drivers but they re often out of date out of the box With DriverUpdate you get the latest drivers without having to dig around your motherboard s maze like website According to SlimWare Utilities it has a library of millions of drivers DriverUpdate also keeps an eye out and notifies you when there are newer drivers for your system as they become available and again allows you to update to the latest version with a simple button press While SlimWare Utilities offers a free SlimDrivers equivalent which is super helpful in its own right that app has an issue You have to manually download each driver separately which can be a bit of a chore The full version of DriverUpdate costs 30 a year which acknowledge isn t nothing but think it s totally worth it if you build a lot of systems and value your time That 30 is really just chump change in comparison to the time you ll save hunting around for drivers lawn Ben B di teres Cul of Hain E cere gt 9 ret Suit ime ibidem a Tren aem fortum rae oa aaa Que SEE SoS Que S ue 6 S NINITE Oh Ninite you beautiful thing As you can imagine we do our fair share of benchmarking In fact this issue is jam packed with a massive array of storage reviews and every device requir
172. types At the same time he notes certain challenges Microsoft will need to overcome To date consumers have associated Windows _ too strongly with PC Conversely they tend to think of Android and iOS when it comes to mobile Nguyen explained This could also make it difficult for Windows to get a foothold within the enterprise Carolina Milanesi chief of research and head of Kantar Worldpanel ComTech US summed it up nicely in a recent blog post Many will be tempted to look at the Lumia 950 and 950 XL in relation to their potential to convert users from IOS and Android Yet the focus for Microsoft has changed and these devices have more to do with giving those Windows 10 PC users a phone to go with their PC and complement their experience rather than feeling they can only use a smartphone on a competing OS Milaensi stated Microsoft declined our request to comment on its mobile strategy and expectations which isnt Surprising as we approached the company pre launch We ll just have to wait and see how things develop PL 12 MAXIMUMPG HOL 2015 maximumpc com 1 amp 1 CLOUD SERVER TEST TH TOP PERFORMER CLOUD SPECTATOR Easy to use ready to go The 1 amp 1 Cloud Server provides superior CPU RAM and SSD performance Give your cloud projects the perfect combination of flexibility and efficient features V Load balancing V SSD storage V Billing by the minute V Intel
173. und a comfy airy home in the In Win D Frame Mini While Max chose the orange and blue frame it also comes in een Samsung 850 EVO 2TB 900 black and red The cool thing about it is that there s no clear top or i bottom you only need to worry about access to ports and buttons ERO SUM e corn a E The 750W power supply is plenty for the parts we chose and as mini ITX is limited to one GPU there s no need to worry about extra Total 2 693 headroom for SLI or Crossfire However the extra wattage does allow for single GPU upgrades or the addition of spinning drives HOT STUFF ni THE RADEON R9 NANO is quite a powerful GPU given its z ET tiny form factor However we noticed that it got pretty toasty when we ran our graphics benchmarks While normal closed cases could solve this by channeling air A T HIF through the case we were low on options because there ml nio was no way to effectively push extra air over the card The air coming from our CPU radiator was nice and cool but the slight offset of the motherboard meant that the Nano wouldn t get any of the cool breezes Placing the front glass panel on the case helped a little bit but the Nano breathes best with a little extra air flow from a case fan If we were to redesign the case we d like to see an extra removable bracket for a case fan just below the GPU mount This would better support the use of extra toasty GPUs which would usually have more forced air to
174. unding its OS PL Tech Tragedies and Triumphs A monthly snapshot of what s up and down in tech TRIUMPHS ONE BILLION OR BUST With Windows 10 reaching 110 million devices in just two months Microsoft may hit its goal of 1 billion installs in two to three years after all CARRY ON COMPUTER Lian Licreated a compact case that when combined with an optional trolley cart accessory can be pulled through the airport like a suitcase STORAGE WHIPLASH Samsung s 950 Pro line joins the NVMe M 2 camp reading and writing at up to 2 500MB s and 1 500MB s TRAGEDIES COSMIC BUZZKILL Edward Snowden says contact with aliens is unlikely as encrypted signals would sound like cosmic microwave background radiation Drat MORE PINK SLIPS HP plans to slash up to an additional 30 000 jobs on top of 55 000 already planned as it splits into two SKYPE GOES SILENT A Skype bug temporarily broke the service by preventing users from signing in or if signed in from making calls or group chatting Tom Halfhill FAST FORWARD So What if Its Not Pie in the Skylake SOME POWER USERS are disappointed that Intel s new Skylake processors arent crushing the performance of their Haswell predecessors For typical PC applications Skylake delivers about 10 percent more throughput at the same clock speed That s not a big leap for the high cost of a n
175. y 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 dfutureus com Account Director Jessica Reinert jreinert afutureus com Account Director Ryan Lamvik rlamvik dfutureus com Account Director Elizabeth Fleischman efleischman afutureus com 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 Future Publishing PO Box 2024 Langhorne PA 19047 Website www maximumpc com customerservice Tel 1 844 779 2822 toll free Lines open Monday to Friday 8 a m to 7 p m and Sat 10 a m to 2 p m EDT Email contactfamyfavouritemagazines 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 9408
176. y good have been using GeForce Now for the last three months and its perfect for someone like me used to be a hardcore PC gamer but once had kids hardly had time to play on the PC get my gaming fix from GeForce Now and found that the latency is comparable to most consoles So what happens is when you press a button on your controller that signal goes all the way to our GeForce cloud gets rendered in the cloud and gets streamed back to the Shield and the whole process happens within 150ms which is comparable to watching it on a console So its a very connected experience You get a great gaming experience you know games like Grid Autosport and Street Fighter are totally playable and you get a good gaming experience MPC Is this for the PC enthusiast or console gamers SR We are actually targeting this at mainstream gamers who are just not happy with the casual gaming experience that we have today Many mainstream gamers are looking for something more and you know mobile gaming basically brought gaming to the masses in a sense mobile gaming made it easy for the masses to game But now that they are used to the casual games like Angry Birds they want something more They see their gamer friends gaming on consoles and PCs but theyre still kinda hesitant to invest in a high end gaming PC or go into the full console experience so with GeForce Now the key convenience you get is that it s
177. you d got a new Android device for Christmas which involves signing in with a Google account creating a new one if like a Frenchman in a castle you ve not already got one GET SOME APPS By default your new virtual Android tablet will have a minimum of apps installed there s a web browser email app calculator and that s about it Happily it also comes with the Amazon App Store app which often gives away free apps via its new Underground cousin and this is your initial gateway to Android functionality You need an Amazon account to get anywhere though but it s a simple matter of signing up with an email address and password d You can get the Google Play app store too and it s only a bit more complex this involves downloading a ZIP file to your PC right clicking it in Windows and UN yi 1 E Just like running multiple copies of Windows inside one another GET GOOGLE PLAY like a Russian doll of Bill Gates you can only run AMIDuOS if your CPU supports virtualization and has it enabled in the BIOS Any recent Intel or AMD chip should manage this but it s worth checking that it s switched on Poking about in the Z77 chipset of an old PC we use to keep the door open on warm days we found the option nestling under Advanced CPU Configuration Other motherboards will almost certainly differ DOWNLOAD AND INSTALL e What sounds like it s going to be a torturous procedure has actually been made extre

Maximum PC - Holiday 2015

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