Maximum PC

Editor: Zak Storey Staff Writer: Christian Guyton Contributing Writers: Dave Alcock, Jonni Bidwell, Ian Evenden, John Knight, Jeremy Laird, Chris Lloyd, Neil Mohr, Nick Peers, Jarred Walton Copy Editor: James Price Editor Emeritus: Andrew Sanchez Art

WE’VE FINALLY MADE IT to 2021! And with that, I’ve gathered the very best technological minds I could find to figure out what exactly is going to launch in the next 12 months. From GPUs, to processors, to SSDs, cooling, and more, 2021 is going to be

APPLE’S MOVE away from x 86 architecture has begun in earnest with the release of the first batch of machines sporting the Apple-designed M1 processor. This isn’t the first time Apple has jumped horses—it started out using Motorola chips in 1983, and

SILK ROAD WAS A HIGHLY CONTENTIOUS dark-web marketplace launched in 2011, and shut down by the FBI in 2013. Payments for its dubious offerings were made in Bitcoin. Its creator, Ross Ulbricht, was hit by hackers, and had over 70,400 Bitcoins stolen.

INTEL’S ASSAULT on the GPU market took another step with the release of discrete GPUs for system builders. At the bottom of the stack is the Xe-LP, branded Intel Iris Xe Max. This is essentially what we’ve seen coupled to a CPU on the Tiger Lake chip

Researchers have 3D-printed a “micro-swimmer” USS Voyager just 0.015mm long, with its own chemical propulsion system. Nvidia has upgraded its A100 cards to 80GB of HBM2E memory, capable of shifting data at over 2TB per second. Micron has started ship

Can we live-stream from your house? THE POLICE IN JACKSON, Mississippi have asked residents to connect their Ring smart doorbells to its Real Time Crime Center as part of a trial. Amazon, keen to create some space, says it is not involved in any way

Earlier this year customers of Western Digital uncovered that some of its 5,400rpm drives were in fact 7,200 drives, thanks to some investigation using clever acoustic analysis. Yep, the drives were spinning faster than WD had claimed. The company ha

If you sell through Apple’s App Store the company takes a 30 percent share, a bone of contention with many developers, notably Epic Games, which got into a fight with Apple over in-game purchases in Fortnite. The game was suspended from the Apple and

MOORE’S LAW MIGHT BE DEAD, or at least seriously slowing down, but progress hasn’t stopped. 2019 saw AMD launch Ryzen 3000 CPUs and Radeon RX 5000 GPUs on TSMC’s then cutting-edge N7 process, and 2020 brought us the Ryzen 5000 and Radeon RX 6000 chip

One of the many highlights of the two new games consoles from Microsoft is a new approach to storage and indeed a greater focus on storage performance. Happily, the technologies involved are going to spill over to the PC. Most notable is Microsoft’s

We’ve spent a lot of time working with Mayhems over the last few months on its XTR coolant. It still continues to impress us as far as coolant goes, but it’s fair to say that it is very niche, especially for the mass market. However, perhaps it might

You heard it here first: Mechanical switches are dead, long live optical switches. These nifty key switches use light beams broken by depressed keys to register input. This has a few different advantages over conventional mechanical switches. Obvious

IN AN OLD REDDIT THREAD someone once asked, “If you were locked in a room with a PC with no OS, could you write one from scratch?” Among all the joke replies, someone actually answered that question—Kragen Javier Sitaker, who worked for Canonical (th

JITSI MEET IS A FREE, open-source video-conferencing program that you can connect to via a browser or smartphone app. You can use it by visiting https://meet. jit.si and choosing a name for your virtual meeting (or accepting one of the amusing ones t

WHEN YOU’RE RUNNING a home server or VPS, Docker is pretty great because you can add services without messing (too much) with the underlying system configuration. As we’ve seen with Nextcloud, though, even with just four Docker containers things beco

STAFF WRITER Windows 10’s support for gamers has been steadily improving over the years. Hit Windows + G to access a suite of handy features, such as capture tools, customizable integrated widgets (including stuff like Spotify or Asus’s ROG Armory Cr

LOOK, I get it, historical accuracy and video games isn’t really a thing. So when Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla was first announced, I knew, given my obsession with Nordic culture I was going to be playing a lot of it, most likely frustrated. Now, there