Maximum PC - USA (2022-03)

MAR 2022MAXIMU MPC 9

TRIUMPHS TRAGEDIES

PC SALES STILL BOOMING

The PC boom continued in 2021,

with sales up by between 9.9 to

14.8 percent over 2020.

WASHERS ARE COOLER

Alder Lake’s design can cause

warped heat spreaders, but

using four 1mm washers to raise

the ILM can cool the chip by 5°C.

UNIFIED MEMORY, AGAIN

A new experimental UltraRAM is

claimed to be good for 10 million

write/erase cycles. It uses

resonant tunneling to store data.

R.I.P. BLACKBERRY

Once ubiquitous, the

Blackberry phone service has

now been switched off for good.

CRASH FOR VIEWS?

A YouTuber is being investigated

by the FAA after bailing out of his

plane and leaving it to crash. All

caught on camera, of course.

THE STATE IS WATCHING

Surveillance is so prevalent

in China that US athletes have

been advised to use burner

phones at the Winter Olympics.

A monthly snapshot of what’s good and bad in tech

Tech Triumphs and Tragedies

ONE CASUALTY of the chip shortage is the little DRM chips used in Canon’s

official printer cartridges. Normally, if you use a non-Canon cartridge, your

printer pops up warning screens to complain. It also tells you the cartridge

may be faulty and refuses to reveal how much ink or toner you have left.

Obviously, the people who make your printer want you to buy their highly-

profitable cartridges, especially as they can hard-code page limits into them.

Canon has now run out of these chips in some markets, meaning genuine

Canon cartridges cannot be recognized and may malfunction. The company

has issued instructions on how to go through the multiple warning screens:

by just closing and ignoring them. This exposes them for what they are:

simple scare tactics to dissuade you from using anything Canon didn’t sell

you. As Canon said, “there is no negative impact on print quality when using

consumables without electronic components”. Canon is not alone here, but it

is notorious for being particularly onerous in such measures. –CL

Printers identify official

cartridges as frauds

CANON’S GENUINE

COUNTERFEITS

MICROSOFT’S $69BN

ACTIVISION DEAL

CANDY CRUSH is now owned by Microsoft, along with partner

gaming brands including Call of Duty and Warcraft. In a huge

deal, MS spent $68.7 billion to buy Activation Blizzard. This is good

news if you held Activision stock, as Microsoft paid a healthy premium for the privilege.

The deal makes Microsoft the third largest gaming company in the world, with many

new titles to add to Game Pass’ 25 million subscribers. It has also left gamers wondering

what will happen to their favorite titles. Phil Spencer, CEO of Microsoft Gaming, said it

will “honor all existing agreements”, adding a non-committal “desire” to keep Call of

Duty on PlayStation. Microsoft has history here. After it bought ZeniMax for $7.5 billion,

multi-platform games, such as Starfield, became PC and Xbox only.–CL

BIGGEST EVER ACQUISITION

FOR THE GAMES SECTOR

OVERCLOCKING IS GREAT. Take a chip you

know can do better and, with a few tweaks,

you’ve made it faster for free. It used to be

easy, but the market shifted and chips were

sold locked so you couldn’t change the

stock settings. But there’s always some

wriggle room, especially with specialist

motherboards, but to overclock an Alder

Lake processor you need an unlocked

K-series chip, right?

Apparently not, as overclocker Roman

Hartung discovered with his Asus ROG

Maximus Z690 Apex (above) and a regular

Core i5-12400. Using the BIOS setting only

revealed when you fit a non-K chip, he

unlocked the base clock, ramped up the

multiplier, tweaked memory speeds and

voltages, and made a 4.4GHz chip a 5.2GHz

chip, benchmarking about a third faster

on Cinebench. Things got even weirder

when he tried it out on some lesser chips.

A Celeron G6900 was bumped from 3.4GHz

to 5.3GHz, while an i3-12100 hit over 5.4GHz

on all cores, setting four-core benchmark

records in the process.

Which boards support this overclocking

is still being figured out, but it’s over half

a dozen Asus ROG boards so far. And that

is one factor: the board he used cost $720.

Some cheaper boards can do this trick,

including the ROG Strix B660-G Gaming

WiFi, which costs $429. How long will

this last? Intel could lean on Asus or it

could just take a small hit and make a few

people happy. If this sort of overclocking is

enabled on more mainstream boards, we

can probably expect a response from Intel.

In the meantime, Intel has warned that

overclocking could damage the CPU and

cause system instability. The experiment

highlights one annoyance—owning a

processor that has been hobbled to fit a

price point. There’s going to be a lot more

to come from this story. –CL

It voids your warranty

but goes fast... really fast

OVERCLOCKING

THE ‘IMPOSSIBLE’

© ACTIVATION BLIZZARD, ASUS, CANON