Maximum PC

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IT’S BEEN A STRANGE few months in the world of PC building. As you’ll have read in these pages, Intel had been quiet about a crucial flaw that was discovered in its 13th and 14th-gen CPUs, a flaw that was so serious, some game developers said it was only a matter of time before all those chips became useless. Intel was fairly quiet on the subject, which resulted in us taking the affected models out of our Blueprint systems at the back of this magazine until we found out more. Thankfully, Intel has acknowledged the issue, rolling out system updates to at least provide a temporary fix. They’ve also extended the warranty on these chips by two years, allowing users to get a replacement if they experience structural degradation. It’s…

MONTHS AGO, some gamers in South Korea reported problems with their unlocked high-end Intel Core i9 processors, typically Core i9-13900K and 14900Ks. While playing Tekken 8, the game would shut down. More reports emerged involving other games, particularly titles using the Unreal engine. Chips were returned for replacement. Underclocking the chip slightly appeared to fix things. Motherboards were suspected of using overly aggressive voltage settings, while some claimed the chips weren’t capable of sustaining the frequencies Intel stated. In April, Intel issued a statement that it was “conducting analysis of the reported issues”. In May, Intel issued another statement blaming the motherboard manufacturers. A BIOS update calmed down the default settings, which Intel claimed were not in line recommended defaults. Things improved, but the issue never went away. Then, in…

NVIDIA’S GEFORCE RTX 4070 is a popular card in the Ada Lovelace 40 series. It’s the cheapest of what you might call ‘proper’ gaming GPUs in the Ada range, though it’s still not truly affordable. The RTX 4070 was joined by a zippier Ti, Super, and Ti Super versions. Now, we are to get a new variation of the vanilla RTX 4070. The new card swaps out the GDDR6X memory used in all 4070 or higher series cards for regular GDDR6, as used in the 4060. As far as we know, everything else remains the same. The change means 20Gb/s modules with a maximum bandwidth of 480 GB/s, rather than 21Gb/s and 504GB/s. Performance is expected to drop by a sliver. Rumor has it that a batch of Micron GDDR6X…

SOMEONE GOING BY ‘Skatterbencher’ has been overclocking AMD’s new Zen 5, and pushed a Ryzen 7 9700X to 5.8GHz on single-core. This is impressive, as it has a Fmax (frequency maximum) limit of 5.55GHz. He also reached 6.0Ghz using AIO water cooling. Much of this was achieved via AMD’s Precision Boost Overdrive 2 toolkit. Meanwhile, the Zen 5 halo chip, the Ryzen 9 9950X, has received a lukewarm reception. The $649 16-core chip is no slouch, but not fast enough to match Intel’s current finest, the Core i9-14900K. Games, by some measures, are barely one percent faster. Multi-core productivity is decent, but for a top-dog chip, it failed to enthrall many early reviewers, and AMD’s Zen 5 launch has fallen a little flat. See what we think of its sister…

TRIUMPHS ✓ MAGNETIC GATES A paper has suggested that magnetic tunnel junctions could be used as faster and more efficient transistors. ✓ MASSIVE DRIVES SanDisk has revealed the world’s first 8TB SD card, and 16TB external SSD drive. ✓ CONSOLE COLLECTION A retro gaming enthusiast has connected 444 consoles to a single TV—a Guinness world record. TRAGEDIES × ARIZONA FAB WOES Production at TSMC’s Arizona plant has slipped. Practices like 12-hour days have not gone down well. × DON’T TAKE AI SERIOUSLY Microsoft updated its Service Agreement to remind that AI is not “to be used as substitutes for professional advice”. × RAM TO GET EXPENSIVE High-bandwidth memory demands mean DRAM production is scaling back.…