We’re truly in a glorious new
age of streamed entertainment
media, aren’t we? Gone
are the days of going to the
store to buy DVDs, gone is
the time of borrowing from
your audiophile friend’s CD
collection. Watching four
episodes of The Witcher with
zero adverts being pushed
in your face is glorious (no,
this totally isn’t based on realevents). However, it seems as
though gaming just hasn’t quite
caught up yet. Stadia has been
on the market for a while now,
and I think I speak for the whole
Maximum PC team when I say
that it gets a resounding “eh.”
At the time of writing, there are
fewer than 40 games available
on the platform, most of which
have to be purchased from the
Stadia store, and the pricingisn’t great. It’s no Steam, that’s
for sure.
There’s a certain divide
between Google’s Stadia and
streaming services for other
forms of media. For instance,
I don’t need to buy any new
hardware to use Prime Video
or Spotify; they work directly
with the TV and smartphone
I already own. But for Stadia,
I’m expected to drop over 100dollars on hardware first? Not
for me, thanks.
There’s always Stadia Pro,
right? Ten bucks a month for
two free games a month. One
of the recent games is free-
to-play on other platforms,
actually. Cheaper than Netflix,
but if Netflix only gave me two
shows a month and one of
them was on YouTube, I’d be
reconsidering my subscription.CHRISTIAN GUYTON
Staff WriterLIKE MOORE’S LAW, all good things must
come to an end. I came to MaximumPC
nearly five years ago, when most desktops
were still limited to four-core/eight-
thread processors, and the top enthusiast
chip was the eight-core/16-thread Core
i7-5960X. I arrived just in time for the
GTX 980 Ti launch—my first GPU review
for the magazine. It’s been a wild ride,
testing the latest and greatest hardware,
and it’s amazing to see how far we’ve come.
2015 was the year we got Intel’s late-to-
the-party Broadwell desktop CPUs, which
became effectively obsolete just two
months later with the arrival of Skylake.
Dream Machine took us to the moon with
four Titan X (Maxwell) GPUs, the i7-5960X,
64GB RAM, and a RAID 0 set of Samsung850 Pro 1TB SSDs. That would still be a
good PC, but 2020’s kit not only performs
better, but prices have plummeted.
Today, you could buy a Core i9-9900K
for half the price of the old 5960X and get
about 50 percent higher clock speeds.
Alternately, for the same thousand-dollar
asking price, Intel’s Core i9-10980XE
Cascade Lake-X CPUs are available with
18 cores, or you’ll soon be able to go nuts
with the Threadripper 3990X, packing a
whopping 64 cores. For the GPU, the old
Titan X is about as fast as today’s GTX 1660
Super, and SLI is basically dead. Oh, how
the mighty have fallen. The SSDs are still
plenty fast, but instead of $640 for a 1TB
SATA SSD, today you can get a much faster
1TB M.2 drive for about $150. 64GB of RAMis still more than you’ll find inside most
PCs, at least....
I’m not totally gone from MaximumPC—
you’ll still see me in “Tech Talk.” I’ll be
joining our sister website Tom’s Hardware,
covering—yep—GPUs and graphics. 2020
should be an exciting year for that market.A lot has happened in the last five years
Help, I’ve Been
Assimilated!
JARRED WALTON, SENIOR EDITOR©^
NZXT
,^ LITEONTECHNOLOGY
CORP92 MAXIMUMPC MAR 2020 maximumpc.com
in the lab