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Super ≥ Creative’s Super X-Fi is the best virtual surround sound X-Fi Amp experience we’ve ever had, by far. They’re definitely worth vs. Air checking out if you care about audio quality. Our Adam Patrick Murray reviews both the Amp and the Bluetooth headphones to discuss which one is right for your situation.

132 PCWorld MAUOGNUTSHT 201179 PLUS: NVIDIA’S NEW RTX GPUs CHANGE THE GAME, AGAIN

AUGUST 2019 RYZEN 3000 AMD’S 12-CORE CPU CONQUERS ITS PAST ,I\RXÚUHWKLQNLQJRI÷QLVKLQJ\RXUKLJKVFKRROGLSORPD\RXKDYH PRUHVXSSRUWWKDQ\RXUHDOL]H)LQGWHDFKHUVDQGIUHHDGXOW HGXFDWLRQFODVVHVQHDU\RXDWFinishYourDiploma.org. CONTENTS

AUGUST 2019

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AUGUST 2019 PCWorld 5 EVERY AMERICAN WASTES 290 POUNDS OF FOOD A YEAR TECH NEWS AND TRENDS THAT WILL News AFFECT YOU TODAY AND BEYOND.

Are Huawei laptops safe? Intel, Microsoft promise support, but the future remains uncertain If you already own a Matebook or Matebook Pro, or are eyeing one on Amazon, here’s what you need to know. BY GORDON MAH UNG

s the U.S. Government’s ban on the Huawei machine they’ve already bought is Huawei grinds on, the biggest safe. After all, if Intel, AMD, Nvidia, Qualcomm questions consumers likely have and other U.S. tech companies can no longer are whether that Matebook sell chips to the Chinese tech company, isn’t Alaptop on Amazon is safe to buy, or whether the company basically dead to you?

IMAGE: DAN MASAOKA AUGUST 2019 PCWorld 7 NEWS ARE HUAWEI LAPTOPS SAFE?

MICROSOFT AND INTEL WILL SUPPORT HUAWEI LAPTOPS The best news for potential buyers of Huawei laptops (and those who have them already) is Microsoft’s promise that those all- important Windows Updates will still get to you. “We remain committed

Huawei’s Matebook 14 has one of the most unique ways ever to to providing exceptional hide a camera in a laptop. customer experiences,” a Microsoft spokesperson said The answer likely depends on whether in a statement given to PCWorld. “Our initial you care about Huawei’s future as a PC maker, evaluation of the U.S. Department of or if you only care about your particular future Commerce’s decision on Huawei has with a Huawei laptop. indicated we may continue to offer Microsoft software updates to customers with Huawei WHAT THE U.S. BAN ON devices.” The company didn’t detail any more HUAWEI MEANS of its policy, but that should ease fears that The ban on Huawei, enacted in May (go. your Huawei laptop will develop unpatched pcworld.com/hwbn), essentially forbids U.S. security holes. companies from doing business with the tech Security risks can happen at the giant. Obviously, if Huawei is unable to buy CPUs motherboard level, too. With scary-sounding from Intel or AMD, or graphics chips from AMD exploits like Zombieload (go.pcworld.com/ or Nvidia, let alone memory and storage from zmld), you may be wondering whether other U.S.-based companies, it likely means the firmware updates for the UEFI/BIOS will also future of Huawei PC laptops are in limbo. be available for a Huawei laptop. More important for consumers is what The news there also looks good, as Intel happens to the Huawei laptop in your hands, has confirmed with PCWorld that it will or the Huawei laptop sitting on the store shelf provide security updates and drivers to end in front of you. users running Intel chips.

8 PCWorld AUGUST 2019 ARE HUAWEI STILL NOT FOR LAPTOPS SAFE? NERVOUS NELLIES With OS and firmware security updates out The problem for Huawei is that it can’t prove a of the way, the only other concern is whether negative, and few will believe the company to Huawei laptops are “spying on you.” That be blameless at this point. It’s also impossible lingering question is probably what has to know whether the U.S. companies tarnished Huawei’s reputation even more currently trying to be flexible might be forced than the possibility of being cut off from to shift their stances. Combine all that fear, Windows updates. It didn’t help when uncertainty, and doubt, and it’s probably fair Microsoft found that Huawei’s Matebook X to say a Huawei laptop isn’t for those who like had a factory-installed “backdoor” (go. to play it safe. You just don’t have to worry pcworld.com/bkdr; a hidden way for about these issues with a Dell or HP anyone to get access to the computer’s computer. Tariffs, well, that’s another thing data). Huawei patched the exploit in January (go.pcworld.com/trif). and denied accusations that the backdoor But for those who don’t care about the was intentionally installed. The company also politics of it all, the situation for Huawei pointed out that it’s not the first tech firm laptops—at least those already on store that’s had to patch security holes or suffer shelves—doesn’t look quite as dire as it did a embarrassing security exploits, which is true. month ago.

The Matebook X Pro was one of the sleeper laptop hits of the year. But should you still buy one?

AUGUST 2019 PCWorld 9 NEWS

Microsoft’s retro Windows teasers emerge as a Stranger Things SURPRWKH:LQGRZVƴƴƴDSS Between Windows 1.1, two retro theme packs, and a Stranger Things 3 game, Microsoft is really going all out on nostalgia. BY MARK HACHMAN

inally, we know what Microsoft’s 1.0-like shell where users can dig through file teasing Twitter posts (go.pcworld. trees and open up clips and teaser stills from com/teas) have all been about: the show. The app warns of “glitches” that the release of Windows 1.11, an you’ll experience, which manifest almost Fapp that mimics the look and feel of an early immediately; clicking on a file opens a version of Windows in conjunction with the cascade of images that indicates something Netflix show, Stranger Things. is very wrong. Microsoft’s Windows 1.11 app (go. Microsoft touts the app as “1985 nostalgia pcworld.com/w111) opens a Windows with a special edition Windows 10 PC app

10 PCWorld AUGUST 2019 inspired by Windows 1.0, but one that’s been taken over by the Upside Down from Stranger Things.” Microsoft makes no attempt to hide that it’s cashing in on some sweet nostalgia: the Netflix tie-in is A file tree is just one of the entry points into the Upside Down inside Windows 1.11 apparent on the splash screen that opens the game. arms reaching toward the characters or their The trail leads through a number of classic local mall. Want more? How about the Windows apps, such as Paint, where the Windows Throwback theme (go.pcworld. “glitches” open up promotional materials com/thrw) pack instead? On the other hand, from the show. (Small warning: These if you can’t get enough of the Stranger Things promotional materials appear to include experience, clicking About in the Windows some spoilers and a bit of language, though 1.11 app will open up a link to the $19.99 nothing really beyond what you might expect Stranger Things 3 game (go.pcworld.com/ in a trailer.) srg3), a much deeper expedition into the All in all, it’s a well-done little experience Stranger Things world. No, it doesn’t stop that’s worth a minute or two of your time, here: Microsoft is featuring Stranger Things 3 especially if you yourself invested in an early in Camp Know Where (go.pcworld.com/ Windows PC. Unlike the fairly compact camp): two programs for students 13+ at Windows 1.1, however, the download is a Microsoft Stores in the United States, with fairly hefty 400MB or so. tutorials in coding and mixed reality. And yes, If you don’t have time for the Windows (enough already!) there’s a custom Xbox and 1.11 app itself, Microsoft has also made even an arcade cabinet, too. available a 4K theme pack (go.pcworld. Can we be a little disappointed that com/4kpk) of stylized images from the there’s not a (literal?) Blue Screen of Death, Stranger Things show, complete with creepy though?

AUGUST 2019 PCWorld 11 NEWS

People lined up to buy AMD’s QHZ5\]HQƶƳƳƳGHVNWRS&38V How excited are PC fans for AMD’s new Ryzen chips? They lined up to buy the CPUs on launch day. BY GORDON MAH UNG

hat long line you see in the had PC DIYers lined up to buy AMD’s photo above isn’t for the latest much-hyped CPU when they went on sale Avengers movie or a new pair of early in the morning. AMD, for its part, has Jordan sneakers going on sale. described the launch of the new Ryzen TInstead, the lines outside your local computer 3000 series as “historic” and described store on July 7 were PC enthusiasts waiting to demand as “significant.” buy AMD’s hotly anticipated Ryzen 3000 For Joe and Jane DIY, the excitement meant CPUs. Yes—a desktop CPU. queuing up for AMD’s 6 a.m. Eastern launch. Micro Center officials confirmed to Fortunately, as our Ryzen 9 3900X review PCWorld the next day that several of its stores demonstrates (see page 25), the wait was

12 PCWorld AUGUST 2019 IMAGE: DAN MASAOKA worth it. AMD’s Ryzen 3000 series is made up of the first consumer x86 CPUs built on a 7nm process. To celebrate the company soundly beating Intel to a smaller process node, AMD released the 7nm Ryzen chips on the 7th day of the 7th month. The lines weren’t just at Micro Center either. Several people posted pictures of long lines for Ryzen 3000 PC builders lined up outside of multiple Micro Center’s Minneapolis from around the world, and store for a chance to buy AMD’s much hyped 7nm Ryzen 3000 CPUs in conditions that would on July 7th at 6 a.m. make many people just give up. At Tokyo’s famous Akihabara electronics globe. While Ryzen 3000’s hoopla is certainly district, for example, buyers waited in the rain less than Windows 95’s was, it’s also fairly to buy Ryzen CPUs. unusual for any CPU or GPU on this side of the You may want to dismiss the relevance of millennium. the fans lining up but it’s a testament to the “It has been many years since I can excitement AMD has built up around its latest remember consumers waiting in line for a PC CPU launch. component. I have seen it for shrink-wrapped These days, outside of block buster PC games and even a Windows OS but not for a movies or the chance to mob a Walmart on processor or graphics card,” said analyst Patrick Black Friday, consumers hardly turn out at all. Moorhead of Moor Insights and Strategy. Even iPhone buyers rarely stage the camp out Moorhead cautions that you shouldn’t routine anymore, instead buying the phones read too much into the lines, but it is certainly online or making appointments to pick them a good sign. up instead. “There’s more than long lines as an And on the PC, it’s probably not a scene indicator to real sales but it certainly does seen since the 1990s, when Microsoft’s reflect the amount of hype for a desktop part,” Windows 95 launch caused much hype and Moorhead said. “I do believe if AMD can long lines (go.pcworld.com/lw95) round the deliver volumes and Intel doesn’t change its

AUGUST 2019 PCWorld 13 NEWS QUEUES FOR RYZEN 3000 DESKTOP CPU

pricing or promotions, the hype will translate into sales.” Neither AMD nor retailers have released any initial sales figures but if selling out is an indicator, the company has certainly succeeded. Besides reports of the Ryzen 3000 CPUs being sold out from Brazil (go.pcworld.com/brzl) to Tustin, a check of Newegg. If you didn’t wait in line at a Micro Center like many did on July 7 com and Amazon.com at 6 a.m., it looks like you’ll have to wait for the next shipment of showed zero availability of any Ryzen CPUs. of AMD’s new Ryzen 3000 chips by themselves. It looks like the only way high supply. And—for fans who were left to snag a Ryzen 3000 at this point is to buy it empty handed—more parts are on the way. packaged with a motherboard or more. “This is a historic launch for AMD with And while pent-up demand for AMD’s eight CPU and GPU products for gamers other 7nm product, the Radeon RX 5700 launching simultaneously,” AMD told series graphics cards (see page 60), probably PCWorld in a statement. “We are providing contributed as well to the lines, we’ll note that significant product volumes to our retail and they’re fairly easy to buy today (go.pcworld. e-tail partners. We’re excited to see the com/bytd) at the same stores. overwhelmingly positive reaction to Radeon It’s not just e-tailers either. An inventory 5700 Series and Ryzen 3000 series desktop spot check of all 25 Micro Center locations on processors. AMD is working quickly to the afternoon of July 8 showed Ryzen 3000 restock e-tail and retail partners globally CPUs out of stock. following significant launch day demand.” While getting your customers enthusiastic If your money’s burning a hole in your enough to line up for the products is a good pocket, AMD’s last-gen Ryzen 2000 look, that enthusiasm can quickly turn into processors have received massive price cuts frustration when they can’t actually buy the (go.pcworld.com/ryz2) now that the newer hardware, either. AMD officials said they are parts have arrived. The huge single-thread aware the chip parts are in high demand and performance gains in Ryzen 3000 might be denied comments that the parts weren’t in very worth waiting just a bit longer for, though.

14 PCWorld AUGUST 2019 'LVSOD\3RUWƵƳODXQFKHV SURPLVLQJƻ.YLGHRVXSSRUW E\bODWHƵƳƵƳ HDMI 2.1 versus DP 2.0: Fight!. BY MICHAEL HACHMAN

hile U.S. broadcasters are the new DP 2.0 standard are expected to be still mired in 1080p, made available, according to the Video foreign markets are already Electronics Standards Association, or VESA. DP looking at 8K video—and 2.0 can use the existing DP connector that Wthat’s exactly what the new generation of appears on many high-end desktop PCs, or be DisplayPort technology, DisplayPort 2.0, is carried over cabling that uses the standard designed to address. USB-C connector—though you’ll still need a PC In late 2020, the first products incorporating with DP 2.0 silicon to support it.

IMAGE: JARED NEWMAN AUGUST 2019 PCWorld 15 NEWS DISPLAYPORT 2.0 LAUNCHES

DP 2.0 offers three times as much 2.1 also supports just 48Gbps, versus the bandwidth as DP 1.4a, the current standard. 77Gbps DP 2.0 allows. While DP 2.0 keeps the four available data lanes as its predecessor, the available link rate PAVING THE WAY FOR 8K has been increased up to 20Gbps per lane VESA noted that Japanese broadcaster NHK with 128-bit/132-bit channel coding. That has already begun broadcasting in 8K, translates into a maximum of 77Gbps, with including plans to broadcast the 2020 Tokyo support for 8K video: 7680 x 4320 at 60Hz, Olympics in that resolution. Not a single U.S. with full color 4:4:4 resolution at 30 bits per broadcaster offers a 4K package, though pixel for HDR. some Netflix content can be delivered in 4K with the appropriate subscription. VESA said DP? HDMI? WHAT’S THE it hopes the new standard will help move DIFFERENCE? things forward. As TechHive’s Michael Brown has noted (go. “Like the previous versions of DisplayPort pcworld.com/mbrn), the differences that helped pave the way for major inflection between HDMI and DisplayPort boil down points in video technology such as UHD, 4K, to this: HDMI was designed primarily for 5K, video over USB-C and HDR, DP 2.0 will consumer electronics applications: Blu-ray help take the industry to the next level— players, TVs, and video projectors. enabling even higher frame rates and Meanwhile, VESA designed DisplayPort resolutions up to and beyond 8K, greater to be the ultimate display interface for flexibility in display configurations including computers, so it complements rather than multiple monitor setups, as well as improved replaces HDMI. But the two standards still power efficiency,” said Alan Kobayashi, the compete in the PC space. VESA board chair and VESA DisplayPort Task More USB-C implementations now Group chair, in a statement. include support for DisplayPort, but the legacy HDMI connectors are still a staple of WHAT VIDEO RESOLUTIONS laptops and desktops. Here are the WILL DP 2.0 ENABLE? differences between the two video standards VESA provided a list of supported video (go.pcworld.com/2vid). configurations that DP 2.0 will enable, so you HDMI has also moved to a next-gen can begin thinking of what your PC of interface. In 2017, HDMI 2.1 was released (go. tomorrow might look like. pcworld.com/hd21), with support for up to Single-display resolutions: 10K resolutions and dynamic HDR. But HDMI • One 16K (15,360 x 8,460) display

16 PCWorld AUGUST 2019 traditional DisplayPort cabling, also offers a PC maker the option of splitting the four data lanes up in pairs. One pair can be used for general I/O and one utilized specifically for video. What this means is that essentially 38.7Gbps will be allocated for video and another 38.7Gbps

HDMI 2.1 supports higher resolutions, new HDR features, and game- for data, cutting down smoothing variable refresh rates. the available video configurations to this: @60Hz and 30 bits per pixel (bpp) 4:4:4 HDR • Three 4K (3,840 x 2,160) displays (with Display Stream Compression, or DSC) @144Hz and 30 bpp 4:4:4 HDR (with DSC) • One 10K (10,240 x 4,320) display • Two 4K x 4K (4,096 x 4,096) displays @60Hz and 24 bpp 4:4:4 (no compression) (for AR/VR headsets) @120Hz and 30 bpp • One 8K (7,680 x 4,320) display @60 Hz 4:4:4 HDR (with DSC) and 30 bpp 4:4:4 • Three QHD (2,560 x 1,440) @120Hz Dual-display resolutions: and 24 bpp 4:4:4 (no compression) • Two 8K (7,680 x 4,320) displays • One 8K (7,680 x 4,320) display @30Hz @120Hz and 30 bpp 4:4:4 HDR (with DSC) and 30 bpp 4:4:4 HDR (no compression) • Two 4K (3840 x 2160) displays @144Hz The open question now is how desktop, and 24 bpp 4:4:4 (no compression) notebook, and chip makers will implement Triple-display resolutions: DP 2.0, or whether they’ll choose HDMI • Three 10K (10,240 x 4,320) displays over DP, or vice versa. About the only @60Hz and 30 bpp 4:4:4 HDR (with DSC) answer we have comes from Intel, which • Three 4K (3,840 x 2,160) displays publicly touted its contribution of the @90Hz and 30 bpp 4:4:4 HDR (no Thunderbolt 3.0 standard to support DP compression) 2.0. That, at least, should mean you’ll see Using the USB-C connector in what’s DP 2.0 support in products powered by known as DP Alt Mode, as opposed to the Intel’s Core processors.

AUGUST 2019 PCWorld 17 NEWS

1RNLDŞVQHZ%HDFRQƴPHVK:L)L URXWHUOHDUQVZKLFKZLUHOHVV FKDQQHOVDUHWKHOHDVWFRQJHVWHG It’s smaller and cheaper than the Beacon 3, but just as smart. BY BEN PATTERSON

okia is doubling down on home On sale as of July 9, the $129 Beacon 1 (or networking. Just last year, the $299 for a bundle of three) uses the same former smartphone titan mesh-networking technology that powers the acquired mesh networking $199 Beacon 3, along with a new intelligent Nstartup Unium and bowed its first wireless channel-hopping feature and a bridge mode router, the Beacon 3. Now the company is that’s compatible with an existing router. back with a sleeker, cheaper mesh router that Dubbed “Intelligent Channel Selection” can work in tandem with its pricier sibling. by Nokia, the Beacon 1’s smart

18 PCWorld AUGUST 2019 IMAGE: NOKIA channel-switching feature lets the router pick the best channels for the 2.4- and 5GHz frequency bands by analyzing nearby wireless usage patterns over time, rather than simply picking the clearest channels at the moment the unit is first configured. The Beacon 1 also Nokia’s Beacon 1 mesh Wi-Fi router features a smart channel-hopping boasts a bridge mode, feature, a bridge mode, and an app with a heat map detailing the signal handy for turning the strength for connected devices. Beacon into an access point that you can use with, say, the combo more of an oval shape compared to the modem/Wi-Fi router your ISP supplied. cylindrical Beacon 3. The new bridge mode and intelligent Besides its standard setup and network channel-switching features are coming to configuration settings, the mobile app that both Beacon models, Nokia said. accompanies the Beacon 1 and 3 routers The dual-band AC1200 Beacon 1 features a heat map detailing the signal supports the 802.11ac Wi-Fi standard and strength for any connected devices, perfect multiuser MIMO, and it comes equipped with for pinpointing spotty wireless coverage a gigabit ethernet WAN port and a gigabit areas. The app also comes with a signal ethernet LAN port. The larger, more powerful indicator that helps you place the Beacon AC3000 Beacon 3 sports one WAN port and units in optimal spots in your home. three LAN ports. Nokia says the three-pack Beacons will Like many other mesh Wi-Fi devices on come pre-paired, meaning that you’ll need the market, Nokia’s Beacon routers eschew only to configure the router that’s connected the clunky black shells and external antennas to your modem; once that’s done, the of traditional wireless routers for a sleek satellites should connect to the main router white design, with the Beacon 1 boasting as soon as they’re powered on.

AUGUST 2019 PCWorld 19 NEWS

Valve’s intriguing ‘Steam Labs’ experiments help you find new games in a sea of releases Gabe Newell, the Science Guy. BY HAYDEN DINGMAN

team is enormous, and growing advanced—and a bit more scattershot. Under more so by the day. And that the umbrella of Steam Labs (go.pcworld. presents a problem: How the hell com/labs), Valve’s rolling out three new do you find anything that isn’t experiments that should hopefully Salready on your radar? It’s less a needle in a streamline the discovery process and help haystack, more a needle in a hayfield—and you find the odd diamond among Steam’s that’s after Valve tried to solve the problem 30,000 game library. once already, with 2014’s Discovery Update (go.pcworld.com/14up). GOGGLES ON Five years later, it’s time to try again. “Behind the scenes at Steam, we create many This time, Valve’s approach is a bit more experimental features with codenames like

20 PCWorld AUGUST 2019 IMAGE: VALVE The Peabody Recommender and Organize Your Steam Library Using Morse Code. For the first time, we’re giving these works-in- progress a home called Steam Labs, where you can interact with them, tell us whether you think they’re worth pursuing further, and if so, share your thoughts on how they should evolve.” That’s how the announcement starts, and no, that Morse Code sorting technique isn’t real—or at least, it’s not part of this initial batch of experiments. The three debuting alongside Micro Trailers. Steam Labs are dubbed “Micro Trailers” (go. pcworld.com/mcro), “The Automated Show” I’m not sure. (go.pcworld.com/ashw), and “The Interactive It sounds neat though. Developers have Recommender” (go.pcworld.com/rcom). enlisted similar tactics to great effect on Keep in mind that I haven’t seen any of these Twitter and Reddit, using flashy GIFs to sell in action yet, and am relying on Valve’s (fairly games like Clustertruck and Falcon Age. A perfunctory) descriptions. good GIF doesn’t always mean a great game, So, Micro Trailers. Of the three Steam Labs but it’s an interesting way to window browse experiments, this is probably the most self- and see what catches your eye. explanatory. Valve has scraped a bunch of The Automated Show is also pretty simple trailers for six-second clips, the titular Micro to explain, though I admit that of the three it’s Trailers, and “arranged [the trailers] on a page the one I’m least interested in. Described as a so you can digest them all at a glance.” “half-hour video featuring the latest Steam What’s unclear from this description is launches,” I have to assume it’s automatically how large the pool of Micro Trailers is, and scraping trailers (or parts of trailers) from either how automated the process is. Micro Trailers the Popular New Releases or New Releases are broken down by genre—“adventure tabs on the store, then playing them back for games, RPGs, builders, and more” according you in order. to the description—but whether Valve Given the heaping piles of shovelware reached out to specific high-profile games released on Steam these days, sitting through and developers for highlight clips, snipped half an hour of even the Popular New Releases clips internally, or let an algorithm handle it, sounds pretty tedious. And if it’s just a firehose

AUGUST 2019 PCWorld 21 NEWS VALVE’S ‘STEAM LABS’ EXPERIMENTS

“Just because you play a lot of Beat Saber, doesn’t mean we should only ever recommend you VR rhythm games.” That is sort-of how Discovery shakes out though. Valve’s new Interactive Recommender instead draws connections based on players, The Automated Show. not games. “This model takes a of New Releases, without even accounting for different approach. It disregards most of the popularity or some minimum quality usual data about a game, like genre or price standard? That sounds like a nightmare. In any point. Instead, it looks at what games you case, I can’t imagine it’s more efficient than play and what games other people play, then simply going to Steam and clicking on the makes informed suggestions based on the games that sound even marginally interesting, decisions of other people playing games on watching two seconds of trailer footage, and Steam. The idea is that if players with broadly closing out of the ones you aren’t into. similar play habits to you also tend to play another game you haven’t tried yet, then that WELCOME TO THE MACHINE game is likely to be a good recommendation The Interactive Recommender is Valve’s for you.” biggest play, though, a replacement for the That’s the gist of it. There’s more detail in current Discovery system that sounds—at least Valve’s announcement, discussions of neural on paper—significantly smarter and more networks and machine learning, but basically adaptable. “While existing store features like the Interactive Recommender will suggest tag-based searching can work well, we think games that aren’t necessarily similar to the we can do better,” writes Valve. ones in your library, but are found in libraries And I certainly hope so. The current similar to yours. Discovery system is better than nothing, but in You’re also able to filter its recommen- my experience recommendations tend to fall dations, which is intriguing. You can sort by into two categories, either serving up the tag of course, and by release date. However top-selling games on Steam or playing it really you can also sort by what Valve’s calling safe. Valve remarks on the latter, noting that “Popularity.” Via Valve:

22 PCWorld AUGUST 2019 games in a system such as this one have a chicken-and-egg effect known as the ‘cold start’ problem” writes Valve. “The model can’t recommend games that don’t have players yet, because it has no data about them.” Thus the Discovery Queue will still be the place to find the newest games—or the new Automated Show, if you’ve got the patience.

BOTTOM LINE Interesting ideas, all of them. Perhaps what’s most interesting about this announcement, though, is Valve’s caution. Valve’s often been Interactive Recommender. criticized for implementing big ideas without soliciting feedback first. Hell, it just happened “We chose ‘popularity,’ but you could last month, as poorly explained details also think of it as ‘mainstream-ness.’ One regarding the latest Summer Sale led to person wants to know the newest and most widespread Wishlist purges and raised the ire popular games around, and the next person of developers. wants the opposite: games that are But maybe Valve’s got it right for once. interesting and relevant but not necessarily From the announcement: “Rather than well-known. We think this tool will be helpful introducing a big change to the way to those on both ends of that spectrum.” customized recommendations are It sounds interesting. I have a fairly large determined on Steam, we’re introducing this Steam library, and doubtless play more niche new recommender as an experiment games than the average person. That said, I’ll customers can seek out and try. This will help be curious what recommendations the new us get better usage data while avoiding any tool serves up, and whether it at all addresses sudden shifts that we know can be frustrating the feeling that amazing indie games are for customers and developers who are getting lost in the shuffle these days. accustomed to Steam.” It’s worth noting also that while I called the It’s a surprisingly responsible approach, Interactive Recommender a replacement for and one I hope pans out. I could certainly use the Discovery system, Valve sees it as a few more rafts to survive the flood that is additive—for one reason in particular. “New Steam these days.

AUGUST 2019 PCWorld 23

TESTED IN PCWORLD LABS WE PUT HARDWARE & SOFTWARE Reviews & Ratings THROUGH RIGOROUS TESTING

5\]HQƶƳƳƳ$0'ŞVƴƵFRUH 5\]HQƼƶƼƳƳ;FRQTXHUVLWVSDVW With its ground-breaking 7nm process, AMD’s Ryzen 9 3900X leaves very little room for Intel’s best CPUs. BY GORDON MAH UNG

ur review of AMD’s 12-core have a hard time achieving the same Ryzen 9 3900X CPU, in five greatness. It’s true that it doesn’t quite shake words: Damn, this CPU is fast. all the gaming-performance bugaboos of past But keep reading, because generations. But we think when the dust Othe Ryzen 9 3900X is likely as significant, and settles, the CPU series will easily be a first- likely as game-changing, as AMD’s original K7 ballot, CPU hall of fame entry. Athlon-series of CPUs that crossed the 1GHz It is, after all, the first consumer x86 chip line first, or its Athlon 64 CPU that ushered in to be produced on a 7nm process node. 64-bit computing in a desktop PC. Intel’s current desktop chips are still all built You’d think the Ryzen 9 3900X would on a 14nm process node, and the company

IMAGE: GORDON MAH UNG AUGUST 2019 PCWorld 25 REVIEWS RYZEN 3000

will just begin to move to 10nm later this year. We suspect the chip giant is a little envious that AMD reached this tiny die shrink first. With that production technology lead,

AMD breaks out a AMD said it has improved its floating point performance by 2X on its Ryzen redesigned 3000 series of CPUs. 2nd-generation “Zen” core for the Ryzen 3000 that promises toward reducing memory latency on the Ryzen double the floating point performance over 3000s. It also tends to boost gaming the previous Ryzen 2000 series, as well as a performance dramatically on the CPU, so AMD 15-percent increase in “instructions per clock” feels that calling it Game Cache can help the (think overall efficiency per clock). average consumer understand its benefits. Yes, On an even deeper level, AMD said it has that larger L3—err, Game Cache, will also help improved instruction pre-fetching, further application performance, but no one gets enhanced the instruction cache and doubled excited about App Cache we guess. the micro-op cache. Besides doubling the Besides the cores, AMD has also floating point performance, AMD has now significantly rejiggered its chiplet design. adopted AVX-256 (256-bit Advanced Vector While the original Zen-based Ryzens featured Extensions; and yes, Intel fans, we know Core two 14nm CCDs along with their memory and has AVX-512). AVX’s impact is mostly seen in PCIe controller joined with Infinity Fabric, the video encoding today, but it can rear its Zen 2–based Ryzen 3000s actually separate performance head elsewhere too. the memory controller and PCIe 4.0 AMD has essentially doubled the L3 cache controller on separate IO dies. Unlike the 7nm on the Ryzen 3000 chips, and the company is compute cores, the IO die is built on a 12nm going for some Apple-esque marketing by process. This helps lower the overall cost of calling it Game Cache. The cache, up to 70MB the CPU because it saves AMD’s fab partner, on the Ryzen 9 3900X, goes a long way TSMC, from using even more valuable 7nm

26 PCWorld AUGUST 2019 another feather in its cap, as Intel continues to stick with PCIe 3.0 speeds on its CPUs. Nvidia, likewise, “only” has PCIe 3.0–based GPUs. While the actual performance of PCIe 4.0 outside of

The Ryzen 3000 features two 7nm CCDs, which feed into an IO die that has the SSDs today won’t memory controller and PCIe controller. be easily realized, the new standard process wafers to build the IO dies. does help free up more lanes and more ports The thousand-dollar question is whether elsewhere in the PC. If you want to take gaming—which has dogged Ryzen advantage of PCIe 4.0 SSDs, AMD’s Ryzen performance from Day One—has finally been 3000 and the new X570 chipset is the only erased in situations where the GPU is not the game in town. limiting factor. We can say from what we’ve You can read all about PCIe 4.0 in this seen that Ryzen 3000 doesn’t quite win all of explainer (go.pcworld.com/pci4). If you’re the time, but it’s so close now, even with Nvidia’s brutally fast RTX 2080 Ti driving it, that it just won’t matter 99 percent of the time.

PCIE 4.0?! Yes, we said PCIe 4.0, which is the next iteration of PCIe. PCIe 4.0 essentially doubles the clock speed and throughput over PCIe 3.0. AMD’s lineup of Ryzen 3000 seems poised to push Intel’s entire AMD’s move to PCIe 4.0 is lineup off the field of battle.

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confused about the simultaneous presence of mapped out the CPUs based on how much PCIe 5.0 (go.pcworld.com/5pci) and PCIe each thread costs. As you can see, AMD 6.0 (go.pcworld.com/6pci) in earlier stages owns Intel in this category. At $21 per thread of development, remember that it takes time for the Ryzen 9 3900X, the $31 for the Core to go from initial spec to actual hardware. i9-9900K isn’t even in the same ballpark. PCIe 4.0 is basically the only answer today None of the cost-per-thread or fancy 7nm and a decent bragging point for AMD. process matters, though, if the performance isn’t there. Let’s get on with what you came BOATLOADS OF VALUE here for: to find out how fast the Ryzen 9 And yes, there’s still value. While Intel charges 3900X is. $488 for its flagship 8-core Core i9-9900K, AMD will give you 12 cores it claims are just as HOW WE TESTED fast, if not faster, for $499, with a bundled For this review we decided to focus in on RGB cooler too. three key CPUs. First we use AMD’s How much value? To find out just how 2nd-generation Ryzen 7 2700X as a baseline. much buck per thread you’re getting, we Second we bring in the main competitor at

Cost per thread

28 PCWorld AUGUST 2019 $488: Intel’s mighty Core i9-9900K. The last chip is none other than AMD’s $499 Ryzen 9 3900X. We tested each CPU in parallel, with the Ryzen 7 2700X mounted in an MSI X470 Gaming M7 AC, the Core i9-9900K into an Asus Maximus XI Hero, and the Ryzen 9 3900X into an MSI X570 Godlike. For graphics, the initial CPU and some game testing were AMD’s new 12-core Ryzen 9 3900X is the new leader among performed with Founders mainstream performance CPUs. Edition GeForce GTX 1080 cards. We ran additional game testing with crossing between the two clusters of cores Founders Edition GeForce RTX 2080 Ti cards. instead of simply dispatching both threads to All three builds used the latest available the same cluster of CPU cores. That’s now UEFI/BIOS and drivers and fresh installs of fixed, and Windows 1903 will send threads Windows 10 Professional 1903. This version the same cluster of CPU cores when possible. of Windows is particularly important, because This, AMD claims, can yield up to a AMD says 1903 now includes scheduler 15-percent boost. Officials also say it’s not optimizations that help it dispatch threads in a uniform in all applications, however, so your more efficient manner on Ryzen 3000. mileage will vary. Remember: AMD’s CPUs are constructed While we used the same amount of DDR4 with small cities of CPU cores and high- in dual-channel modes in all three builds, we speed, but slower access between the cities did vary one aspect by running the Core of CPU cores. In older versions of Windows, i9-9900K and Ryzen 7 2700X with 16GB of the scheduler would dispatch one thread to a DDR4/3200 CL14, and the Ryzen 9 3900X city in one cluster. Because it was never with 16GB of DDR4/3600 CL15. We wanted designed for multi-die designs, it would send to test the Ryzen 9 with its optimal memory a second thread to a different cluster of CPU clock, which is 3,600MHz. We intend to test cores. This would sap some performance, as it at 3,200MHz as well. Due to time the threads would then have to deal with constraints, we’re initially showing only

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DDR4/3600 performance and will update it with DDR4/3200 once time permits. We are told by AMD, however, that DDR4/3200 CL14 should yield roughly single-digit performance differences compared to DDR4/3600 CL15. The other variable here is storage. For the Ryzen 7 and Core i9, Corsair’s MP600 supports PCIe 4 on AMD’s new Ryzen 3000 CPUs. both were tested with very fast MLC-based Samsung 960 Pro 512GB violation of the letter of Intel’s law and SSDs at PCIe 3 Gen 3 speeds. The Ryzen 9 considered an “overclock.” 3900X, however, is the first CPU and platform You’d think that makes turning it off an we’ve seen to support PCIe 4.0. Because it is easy decision. The problem is, just about a key feature of the new platform, we used a every mid- to high-end Intel motherboard 2TB Corsair MP600 PCIe 4.0 SSD plugged implements MCE set to auto out of the box. directly into the CPU’s PCIe lanes. For the That means that any reviews of these new tests we’re running, storage should not CPUs with the feature explicitly set to off, is impact CPU performance. not quite an honest portrayal of the true nature of the Core i9-9900K’s speed that TO MCE OR NOT? most consumers will experience. For this review, as with our original Core Leaving it on gets even stickier, i9-9900K review (go.pcworld.com/i99k), we because every motherboard maker were torn as to whether to enable the “multi- implements it slightly differently. There’s core enhancement” feature. MCE is a no easy way to draw an exact bead on motherboard-enabled feature that runs Intel performance with MCE on. “K” CPUs at higher clock speeds, while using In the end, our tests are all run with MCE more power and producing more heat. What off on the Intel CPU, and AMD’s somewhat offends some is that MCE is technically a similar Precision Boost Overdrive turned off as

30 PCWorld AUGUST 2019 well. We’ll explore this in greater depth in In the no-surprise category, we see the another story, but for now note that running 12-core Ryzen 9 3900X simply demolish the with MCE off tends to hurt Intel CPUs more 8-core Core i9-9900K to the tune of 42 than running with PBO off on AMD CPUs. percent. With 40 percent more threads at its disposal, we kinda expected this. Still, this is MODELING PERFORMANCE impressive performance and to be lauded. Up first is the old standby of Maxon’s Perhaps more important is the single- Cinebench R15. This benchmark is built on threaded performance of the Ryzen 9 3900X. the same engine used in Maxon’s Cinema 4D With a boost clock of 4.6GHz on the Ryzen 9 modeling and animation application. Cinema 3900X versus the boost clock of 5GHz on the 4D is also built into Adobe’s Premiere and Core i9-9900K, that gives the Intel part about an After Effects applications. 8 percent clock advantage in pure clock speed.

Cinebench R15 nT Cinebench R20 nT MCE/PBO Oﬀ MCE/PBO

Ryzen 9 3900X Ryzen 9 3900X Zen 2 (12/24) 3,123 Zen 2 (12/24) 528

Core i9-9900K Core i9-9900K Coﬀee Lake R (8/16) 2,026 Coﬀee Lake R (8/16) 509

Ryzen 7 2700X Ryzen 7 2700X Zen+ (8/16) 1,846 Zen+ (8/16) 436

LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE

No surprise: 12 cores easily outguns 8 cores, Shifting to Cinebench R20, the Ryzen 9 3900X making the Ryzen 9 3900X the easy winner here. pulls ahead in single-threaded performance.

Cinebench R15 nT Cinebench R20 nT MCE/PBO MCE/PBO Oﬀ

Ryzen 9 3900X Ryzen 9 3900X Zen 2 (12/24) 213 Zen 2 (12/24) 7,063

Core i9-9900K Core i9-9900K Coﬀee Lake R (8/16) 218 Coﬀee Lake R (8/16) 4,584

Ryzen 7 2700X Ryzen 7 2700X Zen+ (8/16) 177 Zen+ (8/16) 4,017

LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE

That’s impressive single-threaded performance The Ryzen 9 3900X essentially runs the Core i9 off for the Ryzen 9 3900X. the field in multi-threaded performance.

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Not all megahertz are the same, though. bump in single-threaded performance. That’s With AMD’s much-improved instructions per a nice shift for AMD. clock—essentially how efficient the chip The tables turn for multi-threaded is—the Ryzen 9 is but 2 to 3 percent slower performance. The 12-core AMD part smashes than the Core i9. the 8-core Intel part by 42 percent. Cinebench R15, however, is fairly old, having We also tested the chips using Chaos come out in 2013, so we also measured all Group’s Corona Renderer benchmark. three CPUs using the new Cinebench R20 (go. Corona is a “modern unbiased photorealistic pcworld.com/cr20). Intel generally is a bit faster renderer,” which refers to the precision in in this updated test—against older Zen+ cores. which it renders the scene—not unbiased The situation changes for the Zen 2 cores based on the hardware it’s run on. In this in the Ryzen 9 3900X, resulting in a 3-percent multi-threaded test, we see the Ryzen 9

Corona Renderer 1.3 Blender 2.79 (Rays per second) BMW CPU MCE/PBO Oﬀ (Sec)

Ryzen 9 3900X Ryzen 9 3900X Zen 2 (12/24) 6,575,170 Zen 2 (12/24) 117

Core i9-9900K Core i9-9900K Coﬀee Lake R (8/16) 4,776,200 Coﬀee Lake R (8/16) 181

Ryzen 7 2700X Ryzen 7 2700X Zen+ (8/16) 4,139,060 Zen+ (8/16) 216

LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE SHORTER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE The Corona modeler likes 12 cores more than 8 cores. Dayum! The Ryzen 9 3900X is fast.

POV-Ray POV-Ray 3.7 nT Next Render MCE/PBO Oﬀ (Pixels per second)

Ryzen 9 3900X Ryzen 9 3900X Zen 2 (12/24) 19,736 Zen 2 (12/24) 6,081

Core i9-9900K Core i9-9900K Coﬀee Lake R (8/16) 14,377 Coﬀee Lake R (8/16) 3,871

Ryzen 7 2700X Ryzen 7 2700X Zen+ (8/16) 12,230 Zen+ (8/16) 3,631

LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE

Bored yet? V-Ray Next reinforces what we’re What a shocker: The Ryzen 9 mops the floor with seeing in other modeling apps. the Core i9.

32 PCWorld AUGUST 2019 4-percent win over the 4.6GHz Ryzen 9. A win POV-Ray 3.7 1T is a win, but most are likely to say big whoop. (Pixels per second)

Ryzen 9 3900X ENCODING PERFORMANCE Zen 2 (12/24) 488 These next tests are for those who edit or Core i9-9900K Coﬀee Lake R (8/16) 508 transcode video. First we use the latest version

Ryzen 7 2700X (1.2.2) of the free and popular HandBrake app 409 Zen+ (8/16) to convert a UHD 4K video that was originally LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE encoded in MPEG4 in a .MOV container using the H.265 preset at the same resolution. The The 5GHz boost clock of the Core i9 gives it a very slight edge over the Ryzen 9 in POV-Ray when set original file is about 6.3GB in size, which to test a single thread. compresses down to about 600MB. HandBrake loves CPU cores and threads, and it typically outrun the Core i9 by about 32 percent. And scales nicely as you up the core count. yup, the body blows keep coming. The Ryzen 9 3900X finishes an impressive We run V-Ray Next, which is another renderer 43 percent ahead of the Core i9-9900K on our from the Chaos Group. The result? About 31 conversion. Even on the Ryzen 9 3900X, it’s a percent in favor of the Ryzen 9 over the Core i9. beefy 30 minutes to finish the conversion. What about the free and popular 3D It’s another big, big win for the Ryzen 9 modeler Blender 2.80, using the intensive 3900X for CPU-based encoding. But we’d be Gooseberry test file? How about 43 percent remiss if we didn’t also mention that the one ace in favor of the Ryzen 9 over the Core i9. the Core i9-9900K has up its sleeve is We’ll close off the 3D tasks with the oldie, QuickSync encoding. Rather than using the but goodie POV-Ray 3.7 benchmark. The Persistence of HandBrake 1.2.2 Vision Raytracer is an open-source, 4K Transcode from MP4 to H.265 MCE/PBO Oﬀ (Sec) free tool that has roots in the Amiga Ryzen 9 3900X Zen 2 platform. Using the application’s (12/24) 1,845 built-in test, we saw the Ryzen 9 Core i9-9900K Cofee Lake R (8/16) 2,830 about 44 percent faster than the Ryzen 7 2700X Zen+ Core i9 in multi-threaded mode. (8/16) 3,671 POV-Ray also has a single- SHORTER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE threaded benchmark, in which the The Ryzen 9 3900X easily wallops the Core i9 when doing a Core i9 and its 5GHz clock ekes out a 4K encode using the H.265 codec.

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general-purpose CPU processors to convert the edited for the video you can view here (go. video, the Core i9 has a built-in GPU with fixed pcworld.com/a7ii). For this test, we use the function processors that do only one thing, but latest version of Premiere CC 2019 and export do it stupidly fast. it using the Blu-ray preset using the Maximum Convert the video on the eight CPU cores Render quality flag. All three projects were of the Core i9, and you’re looking at a read and written to the same Plextor M.2 SSD 47-minute wait. Convert it on the 12-CPU to remove storage as a variable in the test. cores of the Ryzen 9 and you’re looking at We exported video using HEVC as well. The about 30 minutes—just enough for a short Ryzen 9 3900X continues to blow by the Core i9, lunch. But use QuickSync’s H.265 fixed but the gap closes up a little. Still, a shorter bar function, and you’re looking at 4 minutes. Just means less time wasted no matter how you cut it. barely enough time to grab a cup of joe. Not all features or Adobe Premiere CC 2019 profiles in HandBrake CPU Export 4K Video Project to Blu-ray (Sec) use QuickSync, but Ryzen 9 3900X Zen 2 when it does—damn. (12/24) 162

In the end though, Core i9-9900K Cofee Lake R (8/16) 232 when you’re doing a Ryzen 7 2700X Zen+ CPU encode, Ryzen 9 (8/16) 256 wins hands down. SHORTER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE

We’ll end our The Ryzen 9 3900X’s extra cores let it beat up on the Core i9 in Premiere CC encoding test with 2019. Adobe’s popular Premiere CC 2019. Adobe Premiere CC 2019 For this test we use CPU Export 4K Video Project to HEVC (Sec) footage shot by Ryzen 9 3900X Zen 2 PCWorld’s video (12/24) 317

department for a story Core i9-9900K Cofee Lake R (8/16) 396 on HP’s Chromebook Ryzen 7 2700X Zen+ 13. The video was (8/16) 447 shot at 4K resolution SHORTER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE

using a Sony Alpha We also exported our Premiere project using the Premiere’s HEVC encoder, A7 II, which was then which is licensed from MainConcept.

34 PCWorld AUGUST 2019 PHOTOSHOP run in single-threaded mode. The results PERFORMANCE show a big boost for the new Ryzen 3000 We don’t normally use Adobe’s popular chips over the Ryzen 2000 chips, as the new Photoshop as a performance test because, 4.6GHz boost Ryzen 9 3900X draws fairly well, you don’t normally net the same close to the 5GHz Core i9-9900K. dividends you do with modelling or video Things go sideways when we shift to encoding. It’s an application that’s mostly multi-threaded performance. While the Ryzen balanced on single-threaded performance. 9 3900X actually turns in a decent result, it With the increased IPC and slightly higher falls slightly behind the Core i9-9900K clocks of the Ryzen 9 3900X, we did want to despite having four more cores. see if it could hang with the mighty Core i9’s We’ll note that WinRAR typically hasn’t high clocks. For this test, we used Puget liked Ryzen-based CPUs (nor Intel’s Skylake X System’s free Photoshop benchmark script chips either). This result is a pretty decent and selected the Photoshop Extended script uptick for the Ryzen 9 3900X overall, just not (go.pcworld.com/pugt) run. The Ryzen 9 the victory we expected after seeing how well 3900X’s score of 992 is very respectable and the CPU performed elsewhere. about 6 percent faster than the Core The good news for Ryzen 9 3900X is its i9-9900K’s overall score of 932. performance in the far more popular 7Zip is pretty damn good. COMPRESSION TESTS The test reports compression performance Moving on to compression, we’ll kick it off and decompression performance. The app’s with RARlab’s WinRAR 5.71. The program creator has said compression speed is mostly features a built-in benchmark, which we first tilted to memory latency as well as data cache/

Puget Systems Photoshop CC 2019 18.10 beta benchmark GeForce RTX 2080 Ti FE

Ryzen 9 3900X Zen 2 (12/24) 992

Core i9-9900K Cofee Lake R (8/16) 932

Ryzen 7 2700X Zen+ (8/16) 807

LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE

We exported our Premiere project using the Premiere’s HEVC encoder, which is licensed from MainConcept.

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size and speed performance. How a CPU can In single-threaded performance, the deal with out-of-order execution also helps. 5GHz Core i9, with its roughly 8-percent Decompression performance is largely clock advantage over the 4.6GHz Ryzen 9, reliant on integer performance and how well yields about a 7.5-percent performance the CPU handles branch mispredictions. advantage in the compression portion. In We run 7Zip 19.00 using the default multi-threaded performance, we see the dictionary size of 32MB. We also run the Ryzen 9 gain a 36-percent advantage over amount of threads equal to the CPU’s available the Core i9. threads, as well as testing single-thread. Moving over to the decompression test, the gap between the Core i9 and Ryzen 9 WinRAR 5.71 1T closes to 5 percent in favor of the Intel CPU. MCE/PBO Oﬀ When you factor in all of the CPU cores

Ryzen 9 3900X Zen 2 (12/24) 2,996 7-Zip 19.00 Core i9-9900K Coﬀee Lake R (8/16) 3,310 Compressing 1T (MIPS) Ryzen 9 3900X Ryzen 7 2700X Zen 2 (12/24) 6,895 Zen+ (8/16) 1,815

LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE Core i9-9900K Coﬀee Lake R (8/16) 7,427 The Ryzen 9 3900X actually offers up a very Ryzen 7 2700X decent uplift over the previous Ryzen 7 2700X. Zen+ (8/16) 6,590

LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE WinRAR 5.71 nT The single-threaded performance in 7Zip slightly MCE/PBO Oﬀ favors the Core i9 chip.

Ryzen 9 3900X Zen 2 (12/24) 28,404 7-Zip 19.00 Core i9-9900K Coﬀee Lake R (8/16) 29,630 Compressing nT (MIPS) Ryzen 9 3900X Ryzen 7 2700X Zen 2 (12/24) 83,457 Zen+ (8/16) 13,281

LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE Core i9-9900K Coﬀee Lake R (8/16) 57,983

This WinRAR result can be seen as good or bad in Ryzen 7 2700X some ways. WinRAR has traditionally favored Intel Zen+ (8/16) 50,241

CPUs, as we can see from the dismal performance LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE of the Ryzen 7 2700X. The fact that the Ryzen 9 3900X is just about tied with the Core i9 can be Multi-threaded performance sees the Ryzen 9 seen as an improvement. dominate easily.

36 PCWorld AUGUST 2019 available, the Ryzen 9 sprints past to the Core for the Ryzen 9 3900X so far. The final i9 by a whopping 46 percent. question is its gaming performance. Ever While the Core i9 has a single-digit since the original Ryzen 7 1800X launch, advantage in single-threaded tasks, we have gaming, especially at lower resolutions where to say the Ryzen 9 is so close it doesn’t the game isn’t bottlenecked by the GPU, has matter. When you open it up to all cores—it’s been nothing but controversy. It’s also been an epic beating. the one shining area for Intel. As we said earlier, for our tests, we used GAMING PERFORMANCE GeForce GTX 1080 FE cards and also RTX 2080 It’s pretty much been all sunshine and roses Ti cards. We did our primary testing at 1920 x 1080 resolution and also tested at 2560 x 1440. To save you space, we pretty much omitted the 7-Zip 19.00 results at 2560 x 1440 resolution because, well, Decompressing nT (MIPS) you don’t want to look at a bunch of results Ryzen 9 3900X Zen 2 (12/24) 135,971 where they’re all nearly the same. Even in tests where the Ryzen 7 2700X might fall behind, it’s Core i9-9900K 85,474 Coﬀee Lake R (8/16) not really that big of a deal. Ryzen 7 2700X We also wanted to mention that during Zen+ (8/16) 80,451 our tests two games we used, Deus Ex: LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE Mankind Divided and Far Cry 5 stopped Decompressing is traditionally greatly limited by integer performance and how good a CPU can working. Why? With modern copy protection handle branch misprediction. schemes, launching and authenticating the games apparently have a limit, and we seem 7-Zip 19.00 to have hit the limit of our licensed games. Decompressing 1T (MIPS) First up is Shadows of the Tomb Raider, which we run on the GeForce GTX 1080 FE Ryzen 9 3900X Zen 2 (12/24) 8,504 card using the Highest Quality setting. As you

Core i9-9900K can see, it’s a tie! Win, right? Well, not really. Coﬀee Lake R (8/16) 8,991 The real issue is using the Highest Quality Ryzen 7 2700X Zen+ (8/16) 8,661 setting is enough to make the now ancient LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE GeForce GTX 1080 FE seem downright slow. It’s the bottleneck with these CPUs. In integer performance, the results indicate single- threaded performance is nearly a tie between all You can see why the minute we swap in the three, with the Core i9 squeaking out ahead. mean, lean GeForce RTX 2080 Ti FE: The Ryzen

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7 2700X immediately falls to a distant third an 8-percent higher clock speed.) It’s certainly place. But how does that Ryzen 9 3900X do? better than the Ryzen 7 2700X, which exhibits We’d have to say pretty good,as it’s about 7 the same problems with 1080p gaming that the percent slower than the Core i9-9900K (that has original Ryzen 7 1800X suffered as well.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider 19x10 Highest Quality Setting, DX12, GeForce GTX 1080 FE (Fps)

Ryzen 9 3900X Zen 2 (12/24) 93

Core i9-9900K Cofee Lake R (8/16) 94

Ryzen 7 2700X Zen+ (8/16) 92

LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE

As you can see, Shadows of the Tomb Raider, even at 1920 x 1080 resolution, is bottlenecked by the GPU.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider 19x10 Highest Quality Setting, DX12, GeForce GTX 2080 Ti FE (Fps)

Ryzen 9 3900X Zen 2 (12/24) 136

Core i9-9900K Cofee Lake R (8/16) 146

Ryzen 7 2700X Zen+ (8/16) 101

LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE

Playing modern games with the new Ryzen 9 or Core i9 needs a fast GPU too.

Rise of the Tomb Raider 19x10 Very High Setting, DX12, GeForce GTX 1080 FE (Fps)

Ryzen 9 3900X Zen 2 (12/24) 138

Core i9-9900K Cofee Lake R (8/16) 141

Ryzen 7 2700X Zen+ (8/16) 131

LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE

The GeForce GTX 1080 FE is the bottleneck here on gaming.

38 PCWorld AUGUST 2019 Moving on to the slightly older Rise of the tie on the 1080, and you’d likely see that on Tomb Raider, we again see just how a “slow” any card short of an RTX 2080 and up. card like the old GeForce GTX 1080 FE is the Fortunately, Nvidia makes that handy bottleneck in RoTR. It’s basically a three-way $1,200 GeForce RTX 2080 Ti card, which still

Rise of the Tomb Raider 19x10 Highest Quality Setting, DX12, GeForce GTX 2080 Ti FE (Fps)

Ryzen 9 3900x Zen 2 (12/24) 182

Core i9-9900K Cofee Lake R (8/16) 186

Ryzen 7 2700X Zen+ (8/16) 154

LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE

The Ryzen 9 3900X doesn’t beat the Core i9, but it’s pretty close.

Counter Strike: GO. 19x10, High, FPS benchmark, GeForce GTX 1080 FE (Fps)

Ryzen 9 3900X Zen 2 (12/24) 355

Core i9-9900K Cofee Lake R (8/16) 370

Ryzen 7 2700X Zen+ (8/16) 328

LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE

CS:Go is a game we only needed to break out the GTX 1080 FE for. It’s not like you need more than 300 fps.

Far Cry 5 1920x1080, Ultra, GeForce RTX 2080 Ti (Fps)

Ryzen 9 3900X Zen 2 (12/24) 123

Core i9-9900K Cofee Lake R (8/16) 148

Ryzen 7 2700X Zen+ 104 (8/16) LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE

We’re not sure why, but the Ryzen 9 loses by a decent amount in Far Cry 5 to the Core i9. We couldn’t run Far Cry 5 on the Ryzen 7 2700X because the copy protection of the legal copy we used would no longer run.

AUGUST 2019 PCWorld 39 REVIEWS RYZEN 3000

slightly favors the Core i9 but only by about 2 Ryzens have trailed Core i7 and Core i9 by percent. The Ryzen 7 2700X can’t say the double digits in the vast majority of games at same as it trails by the familiar amount we’re 1080p resolution. To see the Ryzen 9 close to used to with older Ryzen CPUs against Core. striking distance in just about every game we If you’re here to see the Ryzen 9 3900X leave ran is a major upgrade. the Core i9-9900K eating its dust in gaming In Far Cry 5, we actually saw a fairly big gap benchmarks, prepare to be disappointed. For of about 15 percent between the Ryzen 9 and the most part, in all of the games we tested, the Core i9. We would have explored this further Ryzen 9 3900X generally trailed by single-digit but we have to blame the copy protection ranges of 1 percent to 7 percent in most games system Ubisoft employs. Apparently it gave up using that wicked GeForce RTX 2080 Ti FE. on us after we had run it too many times for it to Ryzen fans shouldn’t take that as a failure. be able to tell we legally obtained it. In many ways, we see it as a win for Team Red. That graphic above might give you a Remember: The two previous generations of heartache, but most of the games looked like

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided 19x10 Ultra, DX12, GeForce RTX 2080 Ti FE (Fps)

Ryzen 9 3900X Zen 2 (12/24) 112

Core i9-9900K Cofee Lake R (8/16) 121

Ryzen 7 2700X Zen+ (8/16) 85

LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE

Deus Ex: Mankind United also broke on us.

Rainbox Six Siege 19x10 Ultra Setting, GeForce RTX 2080 Ti (Fps)

Ryzen 9 3900x Zen 2 (12/24) 336

Core i9-9900K Cofee Lake R (8/16) 354

Ryzen 7 2700X Zen+ (8/16) 265

LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE

Rainbow Six Siege favors the Core i9 as well, but not by much.

40 PCWorld AUGUST 2019 Deus Ex: Machina, which gave the Core i9 using from 1 thread to 24 threads. Cinebench about a 7-percent lead over the Ryzen 9. (Yes, R20 is a 3D modeling benchmark that doesn’t the copy protection for Deus Ex gave up the predict gaming performance or other application ghost during our test runs too, so the Ryzen 7 performance, but a lot of games and applications 2700X was not tested with the RTX card.) just can’t take advantage of all the threads in We ran the popular game Rainbow Six modern CPUs. That’s why Cinebench R20 has Siege with similar results. Sure, Ryzen 9 is in value in demonstrating performance when the second place, but not by much. Compare its CPU is loaded up from 1 thread and up. results to the Ryzen 7 2700X. On the chart to the right, AMD typically If we had to call a victor based solely on dominates the right side of the chart, where it gaming, we’d give it to the Core i9. But the almost always has an advantage in the number slim victory makes it hardly a victory at all, of cores over Intel chips. because even the Core i9’s wins are by such Intel, on the other hand, typically loses on small margins—certainly far smaller than the right side but wins on the left side, because against any older Zen or Zen+ CPU. And we it usually has a clock speed and IPC advantage have to move all the way to a $1,200 graphics over AMD chips. That’s basically given Intel’s card to see the separation. We really think Core chips their only edge, because the vast anything below an RTX 2080 will likely make it majority of applications and games rely on nearly impossible to tell the difference performance on the left side of our chart. Well, if between the two CPUs at 1920 x 1080. you look at our chart today between the Ryzen 9 3900X and the Core i9-9900K, that last reason BOTTOM LINE is essentially gone now. To close off our review, we like to run Cinebench For another view of the same data, we’ve

Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation DX12, Crazy, CPU Focused, GeForce RTX 2080 Ti FE (Fps)

Ryzen 9 3900X Zen 2 (12/24) 50

Core i9-9900K Cofee Lake R (8/16) 56

Ryzen 7 2700X Zen+ (8/16) 43

LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE

The CPU Focused Test in Ashes is indeed a CPU test, because we barely saw frame rates budge going from a GeForce GTX 1080 to GeForce RTX 2080 Ti.

AUGUST 2019 PCWorld 41 REVIEWS RYZEN 3000

When you run Cinebench Core i9-9900K (8/16) vs. Ryzen 9 3900X (12/24) R20 using Thread scaling with MCE On/PBO Oﬀ in Cinebench R20 1 thread to 24 threads, CORE I9-9900K (8/16) we can see RYZEN 9 3900X (12/24) the Ryzen 9 3900X’s real strength as it gives up no quarter to the mighty Core i9.

whipped up a chart that shows the performance out of 10 consumers looking at a high-end CPU, advantage as a percentage. As you can see, the they’ll want to buy the Ryzen 9 3900X. simple math of 12 cores > 8 cores wins big time. Percent performance increase The worst news for Intel’s Core i9-9900K (MCE On) vs. Ryzen 9 3900X (PBO Oﬀ) Core i9 is once again on the left side of the chart. There’s nothing left here. The two are at a dead tie up to six threads, where the Ryzen 9 takes over. On those low-thread-count loads, the Ryzen 9 3900X is every bit as fast as the Core i9-9900K. This basically means there are very few reasons left to The Ryzen 9 is basically dead-even with the Core i9 when loaded up buy a Core i9 today. The reasons to 8 threads. After that, the 12-core chip pulls away at warp speed left are real, but for probably 9 from the 8-core chip.

42 PCWorld AUGUST 2019 1YLGLD*H)RUFH57;ƵƳƹƳ 6XSHUDQG57;ƵƳƺƳ6XSHU Changing the game, again They completely redefine the landscape for high-end graphics cards. BY BRAD CHACOS

Nvidia promised something help propel speeds far beyond their non- Super is coming (go.pcworld. Super namesakes, shoring up weaknesses com/spcm) well over a month found in the original RTX 2060 and effectively ago, and it finally delivered. shifting the entire RTX 20-series product stack Spoiler alert: The wait was worth it. up a performance tier—all for at or near the The $399 GeForce RTX 2060 Super and same price as before. $499 GeForce RTX 2070 Super pack fresh These Ti-upgrades-by-another-name kick graphics chips and other improvements that a whole lot of ass, and that’s with an even

IMAGE: BRAD CHACOS AUGUST 2019 PCWorld 43 REVIEWS NVIDIA GEFORCE RTX 2060 SUPER AND RTX 2070 SUPER

more powerful GeForce RTX 2080 Super Are the Super upgrades super enough to variant (go.pcworld.com/rtsp) waiting in the spoil Radeon’s big day? Let’s find out. wings for a July 23 launch. The GeForce RTX 2060 Super and 2070 Super will launch on SPECS, FEATURES, July 9, in both the Nvidia Founders Edition AND PRICE models we’re reviewing here as well as Nvidia equipped all its Super variants with customized versions by board makers like bigger, badder GPUs, and in the case of the EVGA, Asus, and Gigabyte. GeForce RTX 2060 Super, a more robust The timing’s no coincidence. AMD’s memory configuration as well. The original long-awaited Radeon RX 5700 and 5700 XT $350 GeForce RTX 2060 (go.pcworld.com/ (go.pcworld.com/57xt) are scheduled to rt60) will remain available, though Nvidia release on July 7 with all sorts of cutting-edge expects the new Super variants to replace the technologies, from PCIe 4.0 to an all-new vanilla RTX 2070 and 2080 in the market. Our “RDNA” graphics architecture to 7nm coverage of the Nvidia Super and FrameView transistors. AMD showed its duo knocking off benchmarking tool releases (go.pcworld. the non-Super RTX 2060 and 2070 in early com/fmvw) details how the rejiggered RTX teasers, and priced its cards to take on 20-series product stack will look heading into Nvidia’s entry-level ray-tracing options. the summer.

44 PCWorld AUGUST 2019 Before we dive into things, let’s hit you Finally, on pages 46 to 49 is a deeper with the specs. The table below reveals how glance under the hood of each of the two the GeForce RTX 2060 Super compares new GPUs. against the GTX 1060 and the RTX 2060 Let’s start with the $399 GeForce RTX non-Super. 2060 Super, which received a more Overleaf is how the GeForce RTX 2070 substantial upgrade. Nvidia stuffed the card Super compares against the GTX 1070 and with an upgraded version of the TU106 GPU the RTX 2070 non-Super. found in the original, bestowing it with four

GEFORCE GTX 1060/RTX 2060/RTX 2060 SUPER SPECS

GPU GEFORCE GTX 1060 GEFORCE RTX 2060 GEFORCE RTX 2060 (PASCAL) (TURING) SUPER (TURING)

SMs 10 30 34

CUDA Cores 1,280 1,920 2,176

Base Clock 1,506 MHz 1,365 MHz 1,470 MHz

GPU Boost Clock 1,708 MHz 1,680 MHz 1,650 MHz

FLOPS 4.4 TFLOPS 6+6 TOPS (6.5 TFLOPS 7+7 TOPS (7.2 TFLOPS FP32/6.5 TFLOPS FP32/7.2 TFLOPS INT32) INT32)

TensorFLOPS N/A 51.6 TFLOPS 57.4 TFLOPS

Rays Cast 0.4 Giga Rays 5 Giga Rays 6 Giga Rays

Texture Units 80 120 136

Texel ﬁll-rate 120.5 Gigatexels/sec 201.6 Gigatexels/sec 224.4 Gigatexels/sec

Memory Interface 192-bit 192-bit 256-bit

Memory Data rate 8 Gbps 14 Gbps 14 Gbps

Memory Bandwidth 192 GB/sec 336.1 GB/sec 448 GB/sec

Memory Size 6 GB 6 GB 8 GB

Max L1 Cache Size 480 KB 1,920 KB 2,176 KB

TGP 120 Watts 160 Watts 175 Watts

AUGUST 2019 PCWorld 45 REVIEWS NVIDIA GEFORCE RTX 2060 SUPER AND RTX 2070 SUPER

additional Streaming Multiprocessors that combination increases overall memory ratchet up performance in traditional gaming bandwidth to 448GB/second in the RTX and real-time ray-tracing tasks alike. Better yet, 2060 Super, a 112GB/s increase over the while the vanilla RTX 2060 came with 6GB of non-Super. Yes please! GDDR6 VRAM and a 192-bit memory bus—an The improvements are enough to boost underwhelming combo for a $350 GPU—the the GeForce RTX 2060 Super’s performance RTX 2060 Super bumps that up to a full 8GB to roughly the same level as the original RTX capacity across a broader 256-bit bus. The 2070, as you’ll see in our benchmarks. That’s

GEFORCE GTX 1070/RTX 2070/RTX 2070 SUPER SPECS

GPU GEFORCE GTX 1070 GEFORCE RTX 2070 GEFORCE RTX 2070 (PASCAL) (TURING) SUPER (TURING)

SMs 15 36 40

CUDA Cores 1,920 2,304 2,560

Base Clock 1,506 MHz 1,410 MHz 1,605 MHz

GPU Boost Clock 1,683 MHz 1,620 MHz 1,770 MHz

FLOPS 6.5 TFLOPS 7.5+7.5 (7.5 TFLOPS 9+9 TOPS (9.1TFLOPS FP32/7.5 TFLOPS FP32/9.1 TFLOPS INT32) INT32)

TensorFLOPS N/A 60 TFLOPS 72 TFLOPS

Rays Cast 0.6 Giga Rays 6 Giga Rays 7 Giga Rays

Texture Units 120 144 1846

Texel ﬁll-rate 180.7 Gigatexels/sec 233.3 Gigatexels/sec 325.7 Gigatexels/sec

Memory Interface 256-bit 256-bit 256-bit

Memory Data rate 8 Gbps 14 Gbps 14 Gbps

Memory Bandwidth 256 GB/sec 448 GB/sec 448 GB/sec

Memory Size 8 GB 8 GB 8 GB

Max L1 Cache Size 720 KB 2,304 KB 2,560 KB

TGP 150 Watts 175 Watts 215 Watts

46 PCWorld AUGUST 2019 a heck of an GEFORCE RTX 2060 SUPER upgrade for the AND RTX 2070 SUPER SPECS* extra $50. The $499 GPU GEFORCE RTX 2060 GEFORCE RTX 2070 GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER SUPER Super, on the other Graphics Processing 3 5 or 6 hand, achieves its Clusters gains by graduating Texture processing 17 20 to a whole new GPU Clusters family under the Stream 34 40 hood. While the Multiprocessors original RTX 2070 CUDA Cores (Single 2,176 2,560 rocked the TU106 Precision) processor also Tensor Cores 272 320 found in the RTX RT Cores 34 40 2060, the Super upgrades to a Texture Units 136 184 cut-down variant of ROP Units 64 64 the more powerful Rays Cast 6 Giga Rays/sec 7 Giga Rays/sec TU104 GPU that originated in the Base Clock 1,470 MHz 1,605 MHz

$699 GeForce RTX Boost Clock 1,650 MHz 1,770 MHz 2080. Don’t let that Memory Clock “cut-down” fool 7,000 MHz 7,000 MHz you: Like the RTX *Continued on the next page. 2060 Super, the RTX 2070 Super includes more streaming higher base clock speeds than before, and multiprocessors, CUDA cores, and dedicated the RTX 2070 Super gets a whopping ray-tracing hardware than its vanilla namesake. 150MHz boost clock bump, too. The GeForce RTX 2070 Super doesn’t quite The extra oomph doesn’t come free, close the performance gap with the RTX though. Both Super versions consume more 2080, but it comes awfully damned close— power than their cousins, especially the RTX and for $200 less. 2070 Super. While the RTX 2060 Super sticks The Super variants include substantially to the same small form factor and single 8-pin

AUGUST 2019 PCWorld 47 REVIEWS NVIDIA GEFORCE RTX 2060 SUPER AND RTX 2070 SUPER

power connection GEFORCE RTX 2060 SUPER as the original, the AND RTX 2070 SUPER SPECS CONTINUED RTX 2070 Super’s requirements GPU GEFORCE RTX 2060 GEFORCE RTX 2070 SUPER SUPER blossomed to match the increased Memory Data Rate 14 Gbps 14 Gbps performance. The L2 Cache Size 4,096 K 4,096 K formerly tiny Total Video Memory 8,192 MB GDDR6 8,192 MB GDDR6 Founders Edition version has Memory Interface 256-bit 256-bit expanded to Total Memory 448 GB/s 448 GB/s standard length, and Bandwidth now demands a Texture rate (Bilinear) 246.2 Gigatexels/sec 325.7 Gigatexels/sec 6-pin and an 8-pin Fabrication Process 12 nm FFN 12 nm FFN connector on the side edge of the Transistor Count 10.8 Billion 13.6 Billion board, rather than a Connectors 2x DisplayPort, 1x Dual- 3x DisplayPort, 1x single 8-pin Link DVI, 1x HDMI, 1x HDMI, 1x USB Type-C USB Type-C connector on the rear. It’s a small price Form Factor Dual Slot Dual Slot

to pay for the faster Power Connectors 1x 8-pin 1x 6-pin, 1x 8-pin speeds, but still Recommended Power 550 Watts 650 Watts worth noting. Supply The move to the Total Graphics Power 175 Watts 215 Watts TU104 GPU also affects the RTX 2070 Super’s port selection. While Founders VirtualLink USB-C connection.) Edition cards based on TU106, including both There’s another perk to the GPU upgrade: RTX 2060 models and the original RTX 2070, Nvidia didn’t include SLI connectors on the include a DVI connection, the TU104-based original RTX 2070, but added it to the RTX 2070 Super drops that for an extra GeForce RTX 2070 Super Founders Edition. DisplayPort, matching the RTX 2080’s (It’s still missing on the RTX 2060 Super.) configuration. (Both Supers also come with an Speaking of the Founders Edition models, additional pair of DisplayPorts, HDMI, and a Nvidia stuck to the same basic all-metal,

48 PCWorld AUGUST 2019 dual-axial fan design introduced with the RTX 20-series, but with one notable change: The area between the fans is shined to a mirror polish now, instead of being jet black. It’s striking, and perfect for nerdy artistic selfies, but you won’t see the shroud inside a standard PC case unless you mount your graphics card vertically. pcworld.com/e319). As mentioned before, Nvidia equipped Several smaller titles also plan to bake in the Supers with more dedicated ray-tracing real-time ray tracing now that all the major hardware than before. Company game engines support it. Ray tracing is still representatives pushed the ray-tracing angle niche, but it’s truly revolutionary and picking hard in briefings with the press, citing up speed with the arrival of hardware capable numerous blockbuster game franchises that of running the ultra-intensive tasks. have announced real-time ray-tracing support. While the AMD-powered next-gen Xbox Metro Exodus is the current gold standard Project Scarlett (go.pcworld.com/scrl) and (go.pcworld.com/mtro), with ray tracing PlayStation 5 (go.pcworld.com/ply5) will substantially changing the look and feel of the include ray-tracing hardware in some form, game, but Shadow of the Tomb Raider, current Radeon graphics cards do not, nor Battlefield V, Assetto Corsa, and Quake II RTX will the upcoming Radeon RX 5700 and 5700 (go.pcworld.com/quk2) also support the XT. To press its technological advantage, technology. Ray tracing got a huge vote of Nvidia’s bundling free copies of a pair of confidence at E3 2019 as well, with Cyberpunk ray-traced games—Control and Wolfenstein: 2077, Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare, Doom Youngblood—with all RTX Super sales when Eternal, Wolfenstein: Youngblood, Vampire: these cards hit the streets. Youngblood is The Masquerade—Bloodlines 2, Remedy’s scheduled to launch on July 26, and Control Control, and Watch Dogs: Legion confirmed at the end of August. to include the technology. Most of those Now, to answer the real question: Just how cracked our favorite games of E3 2019 (go. super are these? Let’s head to the test bench.

AUGUST 2019 PCWorld 49 REVIEWS NVIDIA GEFORCE RTX 2060 SUPER AND RTX 2070 SUPER

OUR TEST SYSTEM rear fan installed for improved airflow ($130 Our dedicated graphics card test system is on Amazon at go.pcworld.com/crst) packed with some of the fastest • 2x 500GB Samsung 860 EVO SSDs ($78 complementary components available to put each on Amazon at go.pcworld.com/smev) any potential performance bottlenecks We’re comparing the $399 GeForce RTX squarely on the GPU. Most of the hardware 2060 Super and $499 RTX 2070 Super was provided by the manufacturers, but we Founders Edition cards against the Founders purchased the cooler and storage ourselves. Edition models of Nvidia’s original RTX • Intel Core i7-8700K processor ($350 on 20-series lineup: The $350 RTX 260, $600 Amazon at go.pcworld.com/700k) RTX 2070, $800 RTX 2080, and $1,200 RTX • EVGA CLC 240 closed-loop liquid cooler 2080 Ti. Note that aside from the RTX 2060, ($120 on Amazon at go.pcworld.com/c240) all other non-Super Founders Edition cards • Asus Maximus X Hero motherboard come overclocked and more expensive than ($395 on Amazon at go.pcworld.com/c240) reference models for each respective GPU. • 64GB HyperX Predator RGB We also tested AMD’s comparable DDR4/2933 ($420 on Amazon) Radeon options: the $700 Radeon VII (go. • EVGA 1200W SuperNova P2 power pcworld.com/rdv2), $500 Vega 64, and supply ($230 on Amazon at go.pcworld. $400 Vega 56. All prices cited are launch com/mxmc) MSRP. You can often find these cards cheaper • Corsair Crystal 570X RGB case, with on the streets these days, particularly the front and top panels removed and an extra Radeon Vega options as AMD partners clear stock ahead of the impending Radeon RX 5700 and 5700 XT launch. Each game is tested using its in-game benchmark at the highest possible graphics presets, with VSync, frame rate caps, and all GPU vendor-specific technologies—like AMD TressFX, Nvidia GameWorks options, and FreeSync/G- Peekaboo! Sync—disabled, and

50 PCWorld AUGUST 2019 temporal anti-aliasing (TAA) enabled to push these high-end cards to their The Division 2 limits. If anything differs from that, we’ll (Frames per second) 83 Nvidia GeForce RTX 55 mention it. We run each benchmark at 2060 (FE) 28 least three times and list the average 97 Nvidia GeForce RTX 64 2060 Super (FE) result for each test. 33 We’ve added a couple of new 100 Nvidia GeForce RTX 67 2070 (FE) games to our testing suite (The 35 119 Division 2, Far Cry: New Dawn) and Nvidia GeForce RTX 79 2070 Super (FE) removed a handful of others 41 109 (Rainbow Six Siege, Far Cry 5, AMD Radeon VII 74 39

Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation, 124 Nvidia GeForce RTX 83 2080 (FE) Middle-earth: Shadow of War). 44 We’re hoping to add Metro Exodus 148 Nvidia GeForce RTX 107 2080 Super (FE) to the mix in future reviews but 58 were unable to do so for this one 1080p 1440p 4K LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE due to severe time constraints.

GAMING BENCHMARKS frames-per-second average. As Nvidia The Division 2 promised, the RTX 2060 Super is effectively Let’s start with the latest games. The Division 2 tied with the original RTX 2070’s is one of the best looter-shooters ever performance, while the RTX 2070 Super lands created, and the luscious visuals generated by within spitting distance of the RTX 2080. And Ubisoft’s Snowdrop engine make it even RIP Radeon VII? The $499 GeForce RTX 2070 easier to get lost in post-apocalyptic Super surpasses AMD’s $699 flagship at Washington D.C. The built-in benchmark every resolution tested. cycles through four “zones” to test an array of environments, and we test with the DirectX 12 Far Cry: New Dawn renderer enabled. It provides better Another Ubisoft title, Far Cry: New Dawn performance across-the-board than the DX11 drags Far Cry 5’s wonderful gameplay into a renderer, but requires Windows 10. post-apocalyptic future of its own, though this This game’s Ultra preset makes graphics vision is a lot more bombastic—and pink— card weep, with not even the vaunted than The Division 2’s bleak setting. The game GeForce RTX 2080 Ti hitting a 60 runs on the latest version of the long-running

AUGUST 2019 PCWorld 51 REVIEWS NVIDIA GEFORCE RTX 2060 SUPER AND RTX 2070 SUPER

Dunia engine, and it’s slightly more strenuous than Far Cry 5’s built-in Far Cry: New Dawn benchmark. (Frames per second) 86 Nvidia GeForce RTX 78 Although we start to see frame 2060 (FE) 42

rates stall as the game becomes 101 Nvidia GeForce RTX 88 2060 Super (FE) increasingly CPU-bound at lower 48 resolutions with the most-ultra 102 Nvidia GeForce RTX 88 2070 (FE) powerful graphics cards, the same 51 105 trends continue as before: The Super Nvidia GeForce RTX 92 2070 Super (FE) duo kicks a lot more butt than their 57 98 predecessors do, and the Radeon VII AMD Radeon VII 91 62

succumbs to the might of a graphics 108 Nvidia GeForce RTX 95 2080 (FE) card that costs $200 less. 61

109 Nvidia GeForce RTX 96 2080 Super (FE) Strange Brigade 76 Strange Brigade ($50 on Humble at 1080p 1440p 4K LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE go.pcworld.com/bysb) is a cooperative third-person shooter where a team of adventurers blasts Strange Brigade through hordes of mythological (Frames per second) 125 Nvidia GeForce RTX 87 enemies. It’s a technological 2060 (FE) 49

showcase, built around the next-gen 143 Nvidia GeForce RTX 103 2060 Super (FE) Vulkan and DirectX 12 technologies 60 and infused with features like HDR 149 Nvidia GeForce RTX 105 2070 (FE) support and the ability to toggle 61 164 asynchronous compute on and off. Nvidia GeForce RTX 121 2070 Super (FE) It uses Rebellion’s custom Azure 71 178 engine. We test the DX12 renderer AMD Radeon VII 130 80

with async compute off. 173 Nvidia GeForce RTX 130 2080 (FE) This game adores Radeon’s 74 architecture, and the Radeon VII 218 Nvidia GeForce RTX 163 2080 Super (FE) manages to stave off the GeForce RTX 92 2070 Super for once—barely. But the 1080p 1440p 4K LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE $399 GeForce RTX 2060 Super

52 PCWorld AUGUST 2019 blows well past its own namesake as Shadow of the Tomb Raider well as the Radeon RX Vega 64. (Frames per second) 88 Nvidia GeForce RTX 58 2060 (FE) Shadow of the Tomb Raider 30

105 Shadow of the Tomb Raider ($60 on Nvidia GeForce RTX 70 2060 Super (FE) 36 Humble at go.pcworld.com/shdw) 108 concludes the reboot trilogy, and it’s Nvidia GeForce RTX 72 2070 (FE) 36 utterly gorgeous. Square Enix 117 Nvidia GeForce RTX 83 optimized this game for DX12, and 2070 Super (FE) 44 recommends DX11 only if you’re using 117 AMD Radeon VII 81 older hardware or Windows 7, so we 44

125 test with that. Shadow of the Tomb Nvidia GeForce RTX 88 2080 (FE) 47 Raider uses an enhanced version of 135 the Foundation engine that also Nvidia GeForce RTX 106 2080 Super (FE) 60 powered Rise of the Tomb Raider. 1080p 1440p 4K No surprises here, aside from how LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE hard the new Supers curb-stomp the competition (including their non- Ghost Recon Wildlands Super cousins). Vega 56 isn’t even in (Frames per second) the same weight class. 58.9 Nvidia GeForce RTX 45.6 2060 (FE) 27.4

64.9 Ghost Recon Wildlands Nvidia GeForce RTX 51.7 2060 Super (FE) 32.3 Move over, Crysis. If you crank all the 65.7 graphics options up to 11, like we do Nvidia GeForce RTX 52.5 2070 (FE) 32.9 for these tests, Ghost Recon Wildlands 74 Nvidia GeForce RTX 58.6 ($50 on Humble at go.pcworld.com/ 2070 Super (FE) 36.6 recn) and its AnvilNext 2.0 engine 65.7 AMD Radeon VII 56 absolutely melt GPUs, even with a 36.7

75.7 sequel due later this year. It’s by far the Nvidia GeForce RTX 61.1 2080 (FE) 38.9 most strenuous game in our suite, 87.8 even with newer stunners like The Nvidia GeForce RTX 73.7 2080 Super (FE) 48.4 Division 2 in the mix. Ghost Recon 1080p 1440p 4K Wildlands prefers Nvidia’s GPU LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE architecture in general.

AUGUST 2019 PCWorld 53 REVIEWS NVIDIA GEFORCE RTX 2060 SUPER AND RTX 2070 SUPER

Again, everything goes as expected—and as Nvidia promised. F1 2018 The GeForce RTX 2060 Super and (Frames per second) 115 Nvidia GeForce RTX 79 RTX 2070 Super effectively shift the 2060 (FE) 49

RTX GPU stack up a performance 129 Nvidia GeForce RTX 86 2060 Super (FE) notch, leaving older RTX options and 56 the Radeon cards looking obsolete at 132 Nvidia GeForce RTX 88 2070 (FE) their current prices. 58 150 Nvidia GeForce RTX 115 2070 Super (FE) F1 2018 68 147 The latest in a long line of successful AMD Radeon VII 112 66

games, F1 2018 ($60 on Humble at 159 Nvidia GeForce RTX 122 2080 (FE) go.pcworld.com/f118) is a gem to 71 test, supplying a wide array of both 190 Nvidia GeForce RTX 157 2080 Super (FE) graphical and benchmarking 95 options—making it a much more 1080p 1440p 4K LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE reliable (and fun) option that the Forza series. It’s built on the fourth version of Codemasters’ buttery-smooth Ego GTA V game engine. We test two laps on the (Frames per second) 98.43 Nvidia GeForce RTX 84.93 Australia course, with clear skies. 2060 (FE) 45.3

There’s a bit more of a gap 104.81 Nvidia GeForce RTX 93.57 2060 Super (FE) between the RTX 2080 and RTX 2070 53.54 Super here by the raw numbers, but 105.06 Nvidia GeForce RTX 95.16 2070 (FE) they’re delivering the same essential 55.21 105.88 performance in the real world. Same Nvidia GeForce RTX 97.51 2070 Super (FE) with the Radeon VII. But again, the 60.3 104.75 RTX 2070 Super is $200 cheaper. AMD Radeon VII 98.33 63.24

108.58 Nvidia GeForce RTX 103.61 2080 (FE) GTA V 60.93 We’re going to wrap things up with a 114.68 Nvidia GeForce RTX 112.12 2080 Super (FE) game that isn’t really a visual barn- 81.06 burner, but still tops the Steam charts 1080p 1440p 4K LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE day in and day out. We test Grand

54 PCWorld AUGUST 2019 Theft Auto V ($30 on Humble at go.pcworld.com/gta5) with all Shadow of the Tomb Raider options turned to Very High, all (Frames per second) 44 Advanced Graphics options except Nvidia GeForce RTX 35 2060 (FE) 60 extended shadows enabled, and 50 FXAA. GTA V runs on the RAGE 53 Nvidia GeForce RTX 41 2060 Super (FE) 70 engine and has received substantial 58 updates since its initial launch. 55 Nvidia GeForce RTX 43 Once again, the Super duo takes 2070 (FE) 73 61 on all comers, and that goes doubly 59 Nvidia GeForce RTX 47 so for similarly priced competition. If 2070 Super (FE) 80 you play at 1080p resolution, 68 66 however, all of these cards deliver a Nvidia GeForce RTX 53 2080 (FE) 88 comparable gaming experience 75 because GTA V stalls out just north of RTX Ultra/DLSS RTX Ultra RTX Med/DLSS RTX Med 100 fps in our current high-end LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE testing setup.

SHADOW OF THE TOMB details, be sure to check out our deep-dive RAIDER RAY-TRACING into the Nvidia Turing GPU architecture (go. PERFORMANCE pcworld.com/trdp). It’s fascinating stuff. Nvidia crammed more dedicated real-time We tested ray-tracing performance with ray-tracing hardware into the Super GPUs, so RTX Shadows set to both Medium and Ultra we wanted to put that to the test, too. settings, and DLSS on and off for each, using Shadow of the Tomb Raider supports the game’s built-in benchmark. Resolution ray-traced shadows, and it doesn’t insta- was set to 2560 x 1440 for all runs. Radeon murder your frame rate, especially when cards lack dedicated ray-tracing hardware paired with Nvidia’s Deep-Learning Super and cannot enable these options, so we Sampling (DLSS) technology. DLSS uses the didn’t benchmark any of AMD’s offerings. dedicated tensor cores in RTX GPUs to use AI If you’re interested in ray tracing, you’ll to perform supersampling with a lower definitely want to invest in the Super versions performance hit, reclaiming some of the of these cards. frame rate lost by enabling real-time ray Of particular note: Though real-time ray tracing. If you want to know more nitty-gritty tracing sometimes gets slammed by

AUGUST 2019 PCWorld 55 REVIEWS NVIDIA GEFORCE RTX 2060 SUPER AND RTX 2070 SUPER

enthusiasts for its performance cost, enabling in overclocking competitions, but can’t be ray-traced shadows at Medium quality with fully relied upon. Fire Strike shows the RTX DLSS in tow results in frame rates identical to 2060 Super and RTX 2070 Super lagging running the game without ray tracing enabled. Not too shabby! Nvidia and 3DMark Fire Strike its partners have been putting a lot of (Graphics subscore) 19,463 Nvidia GeForce RTX 9,050 work into RTX technology 2060 (FE) 4,201

implementations. In Shadow of the 22,282 Nvidia GeForce RTX 10,562 2060 Super (FE) Tomb Raider, you can find some areas 5,135 of fine detail that are slightly blurrier 23,044 Nvidia GeForce RTX 10,904 2070 (FE) with DLSS enabled if you look hard 5,340 25,792 enough, but the visual boost from the Nvidia GeForce RTX 12,308 2070 Super (FE) real-time shadows is well worth it in 5,937 27,776 my opinion. AMD Radeon VII 13,417 6,819

27,775 Nvidia GeForce RTX 13,262 2080 (FE) POWER DRAW, 6,435 THERMALS, AND 35,097 Nvidia GeForce RTX 16,936 2080 Super (FE) NOISE 8,280 We also tested the GeForce RTX 2060 Standard Extreme Ultra LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE Super and RTX 2070 Super using 3DMark’s highly respected Fire Strike synthetic benchmark. Fire Strike runs Whole System Power Draw at 1080p, Fire Strike Extreme runs at (Watts) 1440p, and Fire Strike Ultra runs at 4K Nvidia GeForce RTX 284 2060 (FE) 54.3

resolution. All render the same scene, Nvidia GeForce RTX 300 2060 Super (FE) 55.2 but with more intense graphical Nvidia GeForce RTX 315 effects as you move up the scale, so 2070 (FE) 55.7 Nvidia GeForce RTX 344 that Extreme and Ultra flavors stress 2070 Super (FE) 56 399 GPUs even more. We record the AMD Radeon VII 55.2

graphics score to eliminate variance Nvidia GeForce RTX 366 2080 (FE) 62.6 from the CPU. Nvidia GeForce RTX 482 This is why synthetic benchmarks 2080 Super (FE) 69.2 are good for general comparisons Load Idle 4K SHORTER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE and for providing a level playing field

56 PCWorld AUGUST 2019 more heat than their Maximum GPU temperature namesakes. Instead, they’re XQGHUbORDG(Degrees Celsius) comparable to the pricier GPUs Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 (FE) 67 that the Super cards are replacing in the RTX 20-series Nvidia GeForce RTX 73 2060 Super (FE) product stack. Makes sense! Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 (FE) 73 BOTTOM LINE Nvidia GeForce RTX 76 2070 Super (FE) Yes, especially if you game at

AMD Radeon VII 78 1440p resolution or want ultra- fast refresh rates at 1080p. But Nvidia GeForce RTX 76 2080 (FE) wait a week! Nvidia GeForce RTX The $399 GeForce RTX 2060 2080 Super (FE) 82 Super and $499 RTX 2070 Super SHORTER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE redefine the current GPU landscape, delivering behind the Vega 64 and Radeon VII, substantially more power at or near the same respectively, but that simply isn’t true in price as before. They obliterate the value real-world game benchmarks. proposition of all cousins and competitors in We test power draw by looping the F1 their path, rendering the non-Super versions of 2018 benchmark for about 20 minutes after the RTX 2070 and 2080 as well as all of AMD’s we’ve benchmarked everything else, and high-end Vega-based cards obsolete. There’s noting the highest reading on our Watts Up still an argument to be made for the $699 Pro meter. The initial part of the race, where all competing cars are onscreen simultaneously, tends to be the most demanding portion. We test thermals by leaving HWInfo’s sensor monitoring tool open during the F1 2018 five-lap power draw test, noting the highest maximum temperature at the end. Unsurprisingly, the Super cards consume more power and throw off

AUGUST 2019 PCWorld 57 REVIEWS NVIDIA GEFORCE RTX 2060 SUPER AND RTX 2070 SUPER

Radeon VII’s massive 16GB of HBM2 memory AMD’s published performance being worthwhile for content creation tasks, comparisons for the $450 Radeon RX 5700 but when it comes to gaming, the $499 XT versus the $500 GeForce RTX 2070 GeForce RTX 2070 Super trades blows for a (non-Super) at 1440p resolution. The whole lot less—and it does ray tracing. GeForce RTX 2070 Super is much, much The original GeForce RTX 2060 is still faster than the vanilla 2070. hanging around for $350. It’s a solid card in The stage is set, then, for the hotly its own right (go.pcworld.com/slid), but it’d anticipated launch of AMD’s $380 Radeon RX be more compelling paired with a $25 or 5700 and $450 Radeon RX 5700 XT (go. $50 price cut. As is, it’s well worth saving your pcworld.com/xt57) on July 7. They’ll be the pennies to get the RTX 2060 Super’s vastly first mainstream graphics cards built using the improved performance and more fully 7nm process technology, the first graphics fleshed-out memory system for $50 more. cards equipped with the cutting-edge PCIe Nvidia says the Founders Edition versions of 4.0 interface, and the first graphics cards the Super cards we tested here will be powered by AMD’s new “RDNA” GPU available at MSRP on July 9. architecture. The company’s E3 showcase

AMD’s published performance comparisons for the $450 Radeon RX 5700 XT versus the $500 GeForce RTX 2070 (non-Super) at 1440p resolution. The GeForce RTX 2070 Super is much, much faster than the vanilla 2070.

58 PCWorld AUGUST 2019 demonstrated the Radeon RX 5700 toppling the GeForce RTX 2060 across a spectrum of games at 1440p, and the RX 5700 XT more narrowly beating the RTX 2070. Can AMD’s forward- thinking (but ray-tracing- less) tandem triumph over these much more ferocious RTX Super GPUs though? Anything’s possible with a completely revamped architecture. Given of the GeForce RTX 2060 Super and what AMD showed at E3, it seems unlikely. GeForce RTX 2070 Super shakes up the But we’ve been waiting for Navi for a long status quo for every high-end graphics time. We’ll learn what the Radeon RX 5700 is south of the monstrous GeForce RTX made of soon enough. 2080 Ti. Nvidia may have ruined Radeon’s big Nvidia’s RTX Super graphics cards kick day—or AMD’s major architectural overhaul ass, take names, and come highly could blow our minds. Now, however, recommended. We’ll see if that holds true. It’s there’s no doubt that Nvidia’s surprise reveal an exciting time to be a PC gamer!

Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 Super Founders Edition Super Founders Edition

PROS PROS • Excellent 1440p performance on a par with the RTX • Excellent gaming performance on a par with $700 2070. RTX 2080. • More, faster memory than before. • Superb Founders Edition design. • Superb Founders Edition design. • Same price as RTX 2070 non-Super.

CONS CONS • $50 more expensive than RTX 2060 • Bigger and more power hungry than RTX 2070. • Ray-traced games picking up steam, but still • Ray-traced games picking up steam, but still relatively rare. relatively rare. $399 $499

AUGUST 2019 PCWorld 59 REVIEWS

$0'5DGHRQ5;ƸƺƳƳDQGƸƺƳƳ XT: Blazing new trails AMD’s latest graphics cards contain numerous cutting-edge technologies, and an all-new “RDNA” architecture that fixes previous Radeon drawbacks. BY BRAD CHACOS

The Radeon RX 5700 and their July 7 launch). They’re the first graphics Radeon RX 5700 XT graphics cards packing the ultra-fast PCIe 4.0 interface. cards represent a fresh start They’re the first graphics cards crafted with and a bright future for AMD, AMD’s all-new “RDNA” architecture, which brimming with technologies that have never delivers a massive power efficiency boost that been seen in GPUs before. Radeon’s been needing for years. They’re The Radeon RX 5700 series are the first packing fresh display technologies to enable mainstream GPUs built using the bleeding- 4K, 144Hz monitors without the need for edge 7nm manufacturing process (hence messy chroma subsampling. They’ve

60 PCWorld AUGUST 2019 IMAGE: BRAD CHACOS AMD RADEON RX 5700 XT/ RX 5700/RX VEGA64/RX VEGA56 SPECS*

GPU RADEON RX RADEON RX RADEON RX RADEON RX 5700 XT 5700 VEGA64 VEGA56

Architecture Navi Navi Vega 10 Vega 10

Manufacturing 7nm 7nm 14nm 14nm Process

Transistor Count 10.3 billion 10.3 billion 12.5 billion 12.5 billion

Die Size 251 mm2 251 mm2 495 mm2 486 mm2

Compute Units 40 36 64 56

Stream 2,560 2,304 4,096 3,584 Processors

Base GPU Clock Up to 1,605 MHz Up to 1,465 MHz 1,274 MHz 1,156 MHz

Game GPU Clock Up to 1,755 MHz Up to 1,625 MHz N/A N/A

Boost GPU Clock Up to 1,905 MHz Up to 1,725 MHz 1,546 MHz 1,471 MHz

Peak Engine N/A N/A 1,630 MHz 1,590 MHz Clock

*Continued on next page. upgraded to GDDR6 memory. Heck, AMD SPECS AND FEATURES even managed to tame their blower-style Warning: With so much new technology cooler design, learning from the mistakes of baked into the Radeon RX 5700 series, this is the frankly unpleasant-to-be-around Vega 64. going to be a long review. We’re going to Nvidia tried to spoil their launch with the kick it off by talking about what’s fresh under surprise release of the excellent GeForce the hood. Got it? Good. On to the cool stuff. RTX 2060 Super and RTX 2070 Super (see Let’s examine the hardware, before page 43), but some aggressive pre-launch delving into new software features later. price cuts (go.pcworld.com/cuts) by AMD Here’s an AMD-supplied list of technological foiled that plan. The $350 Radeon RX 5700 specifications for the Radeon RX 5700 and and $400 Radeon RX 5700 XT are great Radeon RX 5700 XT, alongside the same stats graphics cards, full stop. for the Radeon RX Vega GPUs they’re

AUGUST 2019 PCWorld 61 REVIEWS AMD RADEON RX 5700 AND 5700 XT

AMD RADEON RX 5700 XT/RX 5700/ RX VEGA64/RX VEGA56 SPECS CONTINUED

GPU RADEON RX RADEON RX RADEON RX RADEON RX 5700 XT 5700 VEGA64 VEGA56

Peak SP Up to 9.75 Up to 7.95 Up to 12.7 TFLOPS Up to 10.5 Performance TFLOPS TFLOPS TFLOPS

Peak Half Up to 19.5 Up to 15.9 Up to 25.3 TFLOPS Up to 21 TFLOPS Precision TFLOPS TFLOPS Performance

Peak Texture Fill- Up to 304.8 GT/s Up to 248.4 GT/s Up to 395.8 GT/s Up to 330 GT/s Rate

ROPs 64 64 64 64

Peak Pixel Fill- Up to 121.9 GP/s Up to 110.4 GP/s Up to 98.9 GP/s Up to 94 GP/s Rate

Memory 8GB GDDR6 8GB GDDR6 8GB HBM 8GB HBM

Memory 448 GB/s 448 GB/s 483.8 GB/s 410 GB/s Bandwidth

Memory 256-bit 256-bit 2,048-bit 2,048-bit Interface

Board Power 225 Watts 185 Watts 295 Watts 210 Watts

replacing in AMD’s product stack. (Radeon architecture (which Vega is based on), the boss Scott Herkelman confirmed that Vega new RDNA architecture introduces several will be disappearing in The Full Nerd radical changes to the underlying GPU interview at go.pcworld.com/sctt.) design, unleashing significant hardware-level While that table (see page 61 and above) overhauls to everything from the cache to the provides a helpful overview, note that you graphics engine to the compute units cannot simply compare the number of themselves. These new graphics cards compute units and stream processors perform tasks differently from their between the Vega GPUs and the “Navi” predecessors at a fundamental level. GPUs in the Radeon RX 5700 series. We’re not going to get into the weeds of Compared to AMD’s long-lasting GCN redesigned cache hierarchies and SIMD

62 PCWorld AUGUST 2019 impressive numbers for Navi: 25 percent more performance per clock versus Vega, and a whopping 50-percent performance increase overall at the same power levels. Impressive. Those performance-per-clock improvements also make the TFLOPS Wave cycles here. If you want an insightful yet comparisons in the chart misleading, as these understandable explanation of the major Navi GPUs do more with each teraflop. RDNA architecture changes and have 23 Speaking of clocks, the Radeon RX 5700 minutes to spare, I highly recommend and 5700 XT hit much, much higher clock watching the Gamers Nexus interview with speeds than AMD’s previous cards, technology analyst David Kanter at surpassing Vega’s best by hundreds of go.pcworld.com/dav. It’s great. megahertz. No matter how you measure it, AMD says that between the RDNA that’s a good thing. AMD also introduced tweaks and the shift to the 7nm new clock speed terminology to more clearly manufacturing process, its new cards are express estimated performance levels. much more powerful and power-efficient The company’s providing three clock than before—claims that bear fruit in our testing. (Spoiler alert: Navi is even more power-efficient than Nvidia’s Turing architecture, a monumental reversal of the norm with GCN.) The company’s architecture deep-dive for reporters touted some

AUGUST 2019 PCWorld 63 REVIEWS AMD RADEON RX 5700 AND 5700 XT

speeds for Navi GPUs: Base and boost are also change the underlying memory what you’d expect, defining the upper and configuration. The Radeon VII and Vega lower limits. But AMD’s also listing a “game GPUs utilized second-generation high- clock,” that represents “the minimum bandwidth memory stacks, continuing the expected GPU clock when running gaming HBM push that AMD spearheaded with the applications.” It warns that those speeds Fury X (go.pcworld.com/fryx) in 2015. AMD aren’t guaranteed or even set in the VBIOS, switched to traditional GDDR6 memory for but is instead simply “a guide used to set these new cards, matching Nvidia’s current expectations with gamers.” Nvidia handles its GeForce lineup. listed Boost clocks in the same manner, so if For Nvidia, the switch from GDDR5 to you want to compare GeForce cards against GDDR6 provided enormous throughput the Radeon RX 5700’s speeds, look there. benefit thanks to GDDR6’s much faster Note that it says “minimum expected GPU speeds. It’s more of a lateral move clock,” and that they were obtained using performance-wise for AMD, because HBM2’s AMD’s blower-style reference cards. In the 2,048-bit wide memory interface allowed for Full Nerd interview referenced near the top of excellent memory bandwidth speeds. The this article, Radeon boss Scott Herkelman Navi cards we’re reviewing here hit 448GB/ acknowledged that overclocked, custom- second of memory bandwidth thanks to their cooled models by AMD partners could very 8GB capacity and 256-bit bus. well push gaming speeds closer to the Boost “We are not ruling out HBM2 in our clock rating, as you’d expect. roadmap,” Herkelman told me in our Full The Radeon RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT Nerd interview. “We will continue to support that in markets that make sense.” For these Radeon RX 5700 cards in particular, GDDR6 lets AMD “hit better price points [and] still get great performance” while being more widely adopted

64 PCWorld AUGUST 2019 than HBM2, whose pricing he called 4.0 just for potential improvements to multi- “volatile.” The power-hungry Vega cards GPU gaming. needed HBM2’s energy efficiency, but AMD Update: The Radeon RX 5700 series only says GDDR6 offers 60-percent-improved supports DX12 and Vulkan’s explicit multi-GPU, performance per watt versus GDDR5. not CrossFire for DX9, DX10, or DX11, per Faster, more efficient clocks and faster, TechPowerUp (go.pcworld.com/12sp). more efficient memory both provide tangible Virtually no game developers support explicit benefits to PC gamers. One of the flagship multi-GPU in shipping games at this time. features of the Radeon RX 5700 series, PCIe But there are advantages to having the 4.0 support, doesn’t—at least in normal Radeon RX 5700 and 5700XT ride the gaming scenarios. Modern graphics cards bleeding-edge PCIe 4.0 interface. Herkelman simply don’t saturate the PCIe 3.0 x16 says a large percentage of gaming GPU interface typically used in most gaming PCs. buyers also run content creation tasks, which I’d wondered whether the move to PCIe 4.0 makes sense with Twitch and YouTube could benefit performance in CrossFire engulfing the world. “There is much more of a setups, because those need to tap into a benefit in creative workloads today for that narrower x8 connection. Herkelman said any new standard,” Herkelman told PCWorld. benefits would be “corner case, game- I wasn’t able to validate the claim, as I dependent, and situational.” He said he don’t have a PCIe 4.0–compatible system. To wouldn’t recommend people buy into PCIe tap into the Radeon RX 5700 series’ PCIe 4.0

AUGUST 2019 PCWorld 65 REVIEWS AMD RADEON RX 5700 AND 5700 XT

anyone who suffered through a reference Vega 64 roaring hot fire next to them might be cringing right now. It was unpleasant. The new cooler isn’t. Herkelman claims AMD invested a lot of time and effort into improving the Radeon RX 5700 series reference coolers, capabilities, you’ll need to buy a Ryzen 3000 and those tweaks manifest in practice. These series processor and an X570 motherboard, coolers still aren’t quiet, but neither have they both of which are also launching now. AMD’s crossed the line in being noisy or distracting. hardware barrage marks the debut of PCIe While the reference Navi GPUs run at higher 4.0 in PCs, while Nvidia and Intel’s hardware temperatures than Nvidia’s rival Founders still uses PCIe 3.0. If you don’t have a Ryzen Edition models, the heat doesn’t affect 3000 CPU, fear not, as PCIe 4.0 hardware is performance or usability. (More on that in the backward-compatible with PCIe 3.0. The benchmarking sections.) Radeon RX 5700 GPUs will work in any PC. AMD’s new GPUs feature different shroud Both the Radeon RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT designs. The Radeon RX 5700 looks like a return to blower-style cooler designs, even sturdier, cleaner upgrade to the stark red-on- as Nvidia’s Founders Edition cards shift to black design ethos introduced with AMD’s dual-axial fans. Herkelman says it was a Radeon RX 400-series, while the Radeon RX conscious decision: Blower-style coolers 5700 XT changes things up with a series of expel hot air out of the rear of your system, closely spaced lines that run the length of the while dual-axial fans dump it back into your black shroud, and a red band that intersects rig, requiring your PC to have adequate air with the illuminated Radeon logo on the side flow from case fans. Sticking to a blower-style of the card. It also packs an intriguing wave- design eliminates potential user error from the like deformation on the edge of the card. It’ll cooling equation and provides a more probably prove divisive, but I don’t mind it. universal baseline experience. Both cards require 6-pin and 8-pin power The decision makes sense on paper, but connectors, with the Radeon RX 5700

66 PCWorld AUGUST 2019 demanding 185 watts of total board power GPU gets a solid back edge. and the Radeon RX 5700 XT needing 225W. The cards ship with an HDMI 2.0b port and The Radeon RX 5700 XT ships with a a trio of DisplayPort 1.4 connections. The backplate; the Radeon RX 5700 does not. The DisplayPorts support Display Stream RX 5700 XT includes additional venting at the Compression 1.2a, which lets the GPU power rear edge of the card, while the cheaper Navi fearsome monitors over a single cord, maxing out at 4K/240Hz, 4K HDR at 120Hz, and 8K HDR at 60Hz. More significantly, Display Stream Compression lets you run those high-speed 4K HDR monitors without leaning on chroma subsampling, which can affect the readability of fine text in some scenarios. Asus teased the “world’s first Display Stream The Radeon RX 5700 XT. Compression monitor” at AMD’s E3 event. With 4K, 144Hz speeds and HDR 1000 support, it appears poised to challenge Nvidia’s vaunted G-Sync Ultimate (previously G-Sync HDR) monitors, like the superb Acer Predator X27 (go.pcworld.com/pr27). Finally, the Radeon RX 5700 series introduces a new version of the Radeon Media Engine, with better The Radeon RX 5700. hardware accelerated

AUGUST 2019 PCWorld 67 REVIEWS AMD RADEON RX 5700 AND 5700 XT

support for VP9 decoding, and both encoding RADEON SOFTWARE and decoding with H.264 or H.265. IMPROVEMENTS You’ll notice two glaring omissions from AMD gave Radeon Software a huge overhaul this rundown of upgrades: support for ray in December, but it’s adding some new tracing and variable rate pixel shading (go. features for the Radeon RX 5700 series pcworld.com/vrps), both of which were release. Radeon Software Adrenalin 2019 introduced in Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 20-series, Edition version 19.7.1 (phew!) will go live and both of which were embraced alongside the release of the new hardware. (agnostically) by Windows 10’s DirectX 12. While time constraints prevented us from You can hear Herkelman explain why AMD giving these fresh goodies a test drive ahead made the decision to omit dedicated ray- of this review, they’re worth highlighting. tracing hardware from the Radeon RX 5700 series at the 39:20 mark in the video interview Radeon Anti-Lag near the top of this article. Quick tl;dr: AMD Radeon Anti-Lag was created to make esports will enable ray tracing when there are more gamers more competitive by, well, reducing games available that support it, and when the input lag when you click your mouse. In performance hit becomes less drastic. “Don’t GPU-bound scenarios (like esports), AMD get me wrong: It is definitely the future,” he says the CPU registers clicks at least one frame says. “But it needs to be done right.” ahead of the GPU, and the GPU then renders That’s it for the hardware side of things. the response on-screen, resulting in a delay of But AMD’s latest graphics cards pack some at least two frames, or 33.3 milliseconds at new software tricks, too. 60 fps. “Radeon Anti-Lag dynamically improves the pacing of the CPU work, allowing the CPU work to overlap a significant portion of the GPU work, so the CPU doesn’t get too far ahead of the GPU.” That can bring the delay back down to a single frame, or 16.7

68 PCWorld AUGUST 2019 milliseconds at 60 fps, the company says. Not everyone can even feel a single frame’s worth of improvement to input lag. But in the frantic, fast-paced world of competitive esports, every second matters, especially in higher- skilled play. Radeon Anti-Lag click-to-response improvements, measured by AMD. You can try out Radeon Anti-Lag by enabling it for specific Nvidia’s Ansel tool? Yeah, Radeon Image games in the Radeon Settings app’s Gaming Sharpening is nothing like that. While Ansel tab. You can also turn it on in-game using the applies a sharpening filter to the entire Radeon Overlay. It works with all DirectX 11 in-game image, Radeon Image Sharpening games with any Radeon GPU, but the Radeon uses algorithms to intelligently sharpen only RX 5700 and 5700 XT can enable it for DX9 the areas that need it, reducing the blurriness games, too. Don’t enable it universally; that can pop up when you activate various AMD’s reviewers guide warns that due to the anti-aliasing methods or run games at a lower way it works, it has “a minor impact” on resolution than your display’s maximum. gaming frame rates. It’s worth using in esports games where you can feel the difference in responsiveness, but it isn’t recommended for other genres.

Radeon Image Sharpening You know the Sharpening filter in

AUGUST 2019 PCWorld 69 REVIEWS AMD RADEON RX 5700 AND 5700 XT

Sounds nifty! And talking to Scott Herkelman on The Full Nerd, it sounds like Radeon Image Sharpening could be a cornerstone of AMD’s future ray-tracing ambitions. For now, Better yet, it does so with next to no though, it works only with DirectX9, performance impact, AMD says. DirectX12, and Vulkan games on the Radeon Here’s how AMD’s reviewers guide RX 5700 GPUs. Yes, DX11 support appears to describes Radeon Image Sharpening: be missing for now, and RIS can’t process “Because RIS is based on an algorithm HDR visuals, either. To activate it, open the that modulates the degree of sharpening Radeon Settings app and enable Radeon depending on contrast, it clarifies interior Image Sharpening in the Display tab. AMD object details while leaving high-contrast also recommends activating the GPU Scaling edges largely untouched. RIS sidesteps harsh option in the Display tab if you’re using RIS to artifacts like “ringing” or halos that commonly compensate for using a lower resolution than affect other sharpening methods. Meanwhile, your display’s maximum. it avoids damaging smooth gradients on high-contrast edges. As a result, RIS can be Tweaks and tuning combined with virtually any anti-aliasing While Radeon Image Sharpening and Radeon technique used in a game, and the results will Anti-Lag steal the spotlight, AMD also added look great. helpful tweaks to existing tools in Radeon “When paired with Radeon GPU scaling, Software Adrenalin 2019 Edition 19.7.1. We’ll RIS allows gamers to configure their games to quickly recap the most notable. run at lower resolutions to optimize Radeon Chill was already impressive, performance while still enjoying crisp, intelligently ramping down frame rates during detailed full-screen visuals.” static scenes to use less power—sometimes

70 PCWorld AUGUST 2019 receives some extra polish, too, with a Power Savings with Chill new power meter and a summary of b5DGHRQ5;;7(Watts) changes after you run one of its 54 Dota 2 Reborn 77 auto-overclocking or -undervolting 202

96 tools. Now, you’ll be notified of your Fortnite 214 214 new minimum and maximum clock 72 speeds after the auto-tuning finishes. Overwatch 177 218 Finally, if you have a gaming PC in 195 The Division 2 217 your living room, a new Automatic 217 Low Latency Mode feature lets your Chill On 30-60 fps Chill On 70-144 fps Chill Oﬀ Radeon GPU force your TV into gaming mode with no effort on your significantly so—without making it feel like end (assuming your TV offers a lower latency your game’s running slower. And now it’s gaming mode, natch). even better. The latest Radeon Software Now that the stage is set, let’s get to the update alters Chill so that it “automatically games! sets its frame rate targets based on the refresh capability of the connected display.” OUR TEST SYSTEM Previously, Chill targeted 72-fps and 144-fps Our dedicated graphics card test system is thresholds on every display. Now, the display- packed with some of the fastest aware feature will change that to 30 fps and complementary components available to put 60 fps on 60Hz monitors “to better match the any potential performance bottlenecks rate of in-game animation to the display’s squarely on the GPU. Most of the hardware update rate.” was provided by the manufacturers, but we The lower target thresholds can also purchased the cooler and storage ourselves. reduce power demands even further. AMD’s • Intel Core i7-8700K processor ($350 on briefing materials claim that Chill can now Amazon at go.pcworld.com/700k) deliver up to 2.5x more power savings than • EVGA CLC 240 closed-loop liquid before, and like I said, it was already really cooler ($120 on Amazon at go.pcworld.com/ great. I’m looking forward to testing this out c240) with a 60Hz display. • Asus Maximus X Hero motherboard The new software adds a Settings ($395 on Amazon at go.pcworld.com/c240) Snapshot option that lets you create, save, • 64GB HyperX Predator RGB and load custom profiles. Radeon Wattman DDR4/2933 ($420 on Amazon)

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• EVGA 1200W SuperNova P2 power FreeSync/G-Sync—disabled, and temporal supply ($230 on Amazon at go.pcworld. anti-aliasing (TAA) enabled to push these com/mxmc) high-end cards to their limits. If anything • Corsair Crystal 570X RGB case, with differs from that, we’ll mention it. We run each front and top panels removed and an extra benchmark at least three times and list the rear fan installed for improved airflow ($130 average result for each test. on Amazon at go.pcworld.com/crst) We’ve added a couple of new games to • 2x 500GB Samsung 860 EVO SSDs our testing suite (The Division 2, Far Cry: ($78 each on Amazon at go.pcworld. New Dawn) and removed a handful of com/smev) others (Rainbow Six Siege, Far Cry 5, Ashes We’re comparing the $350 Radeon RX of the Singularity: Escalation, Middle-earth: 5700 and $400 Radeon RX 5700 XT against Shadow of War). We’re hoping to add Nvidia’s new $399 GeForce RTX 2060 Super Metro Exodus to the mix in future reviews and $499 RTX 2070 Super Founders Edition but were unable to do so for this one due to cards, of course. We’ve also included results severe time constraints. from the Founders Edition models of Nvidia’s original RTX 20-series lineup: The $350 RTX GAMING PERFORMANCE 2060, $600 RTX 2070, $800 RTX 2080, and BENCHMARKS $1,200 RTX 2080 Ti. Note that aside from the The Division 2 RTX 2060, all other non-Super Founders Let’s start with the latest games. The Edition cards come overclocked and are more Division 2 is one of the best looter-shooters expensive than reference models for each ever created, and the luscious visuals respective GPU. We also tested AMD’s generated by Ubisoft’s Snowdrop engine comparable Radeon options: the $700 make it even easier to get lost in post- Radeon VII (go.pcworld.com/rdv2), $500 apocalyptic Washington D.C. The built-in Vega 64, and $400 Vega 56. benchmark cycles through four “zones” to All prices cited are launch MSRP. You can test an array of environments, and we test often find these cards cheaper on the streets with the DirectX 12 renderer enabled. It these days. provides better performance across the Each game is tested using its in-game board than the DX11 renderer, but requires benchmark at the highest possible graphics Windows 10. presets, with VSync, frame rate caps, and all The Radeon RX 5700 trounces the original GPU vendor-specific technologies—like AMD GeForce RTX 2060, while the Radeon RX TressFX, Nvidia GameWorks options, and 5700 XT surpasses the equally priced RTX

72 PCWorld AUGUST 2019 2060 Super and equals the original The Division 2 RTX 2070 in performance. The (Frames per second) GeForce RTX 2070 Super is the fastest 83 Nvidia GeForce RTX 55 2060 (FE) new card of the lot, but it costs 28

90 significantly more than AMD’s Navi Radeon RX 5700 60 31 duo after their pre-launch price drops.

97 Nvidia GeForce RTX 64 2060 Super (FE) 33 Far Cry: New Dawn 94 AMD Radeon 63 Another Ubisoft title, Far Cry: New Vega 64 33 Dawn drags Far Cry 5’s wonderful 103 Radeon RX 5700 XT 67 gameplay into a post-apocalyptic 35

119 future of its own, though this vision Nvidia GeForce RTX 79 2070 Super (FE) 41 is a lot more bombastic—and 109 pink—than The Division 2’s bleak AMD Radeon VII 74 39 setting. The game runs on the latest 1080p 1440p 4K version of the long-running Dunia LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE engine, and it’s slightly more strenuous than Far Cry 5’s built-in Far Cry: New Dawn benchmark. (Frames per second) The Radeon RX 5700 wallops the 86 Nvidia GeForce RTX 78 2060 (FE) RTX 2060 Founders Edition for the 42

94 same price, while the Radeon RX Radeon RX 5700 84 49 5700 XT delivers performance on a

101 Nvidia GeForce RTX par with its competitor. 88 2060 Super (FE) 48

93 AMD Radeon 84 Strange Brigade Vega 64 48 Strange Brigade ($50 on Humble at 98 Radeon RX 5700 XT 89 go.pcworld.com/bysb) is a 54

105 cooperative third-person shooter Nvidia GeForce RTX 92 2070 Super (FE) 57 where a team of adventurers blasts 98 through hordes of mythological AMD Radeon VII 91 62 enemies. It’s a technological 1080p 1440p 4K showcase, built around the next-gen LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE Vulkan and DirectX 12 technologies

AUGUST 2019 PCWorld 73 REVIEWS AMD RADEON RX 5700 AND 5700 XT

and infused with features like HDR support and the ability to toggle Strange Brigade asynchronous compute on and off. It (Frames per second) 125 Nvidia GeForce RTX 87 uses Rebellion’s custom Azure 2060 (FE) 49

engine. We test the DX12 renderer 131 Radeon RX 5700 96 with async compute off. 61

143 Strange Brigade tends to perform Nvidia GeForce RTX 103 2060 Super (FE) very well on AMD hardware, and 60 129 the Radeon RX 5700 series beats AMD Radeon 94 Vega 64 down the similarly priced RTX 2060 57 155 and 2060 Super. If AMD stuck to Radeon RX 5700 XT 111 67

its original pricing, it wouldn’t have 164 Nvidia GeForce RTX 121 2070 Super (FE) beaten the 2060 and 2070 Super 71 duo. Cutting the price was a smart 178 AMD Radeon VII 130 move. 80

1080p 1440p 4K

LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE Shadow of the Tomb Raider Shadow of the Tomb Raider ($60 on Humble at go.pcworld.com/shdw) Shadow of the Tomb Raider concludes the reboot trilogy, and it’s (Frames per second) 88 Nvidia GeForce RTX 58 utterly gorgeous. Square Enix 2060 (FE) 30

optimized this game for DX12, and 101 Radeon RX 5700 69 recommends DX11 only if you’re using 36

105 older hardware or Windows 7, so we Nvidia GeForce RTX 70 2060 Super (FE) test with that. Shadow of the Tomb 36 89 Raider uses an enhanced version of AMD Radeon 60 Vega 64 the Foundation engine that also 32 114 powered Rise of the Tomb Raider. Radeon RX 5700 XT 77 40

Now here’s an interesting result. 117 Nvidia GeForce RTX 83 2070 Super (FE) Shadow of the Tomb Raider usually 44 favors Nvidia architectures, but AMD’s 117 AMD Radeon VII 81 RDNA has apparently closed the gap. 44 The Radeon RX 5700 is neck-and- 1080p 1440p 4K LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE neck with the RTX 2060 Super here!

74 PCWorld AUGUST 2019 And the Radeon RX 5700 XT is well Ghost Recon Wildlands ahead of it. (Frames per second) 58.9 Nvidia GeForce RTX 45.6 2060 (FE) Ghost Recon Wildlands 27.4

62.4 Move over, Crysis. If you crank all the Radeon RX 5700 50.8 32 graphics options up to 11, like we do

64.9 Nvidia GeForce RTX for these tests, Ghost Recon Wildlands 51.7 2060 Super (FE) 32.3 ($50 on Humble at go.pcworld.com/ 54.3 AMD Radeon 44.4 recn) and its AnvilNext 2.0 engine Vega 64 29 absolutely melt GPUs, even with a 70.1 Radeon RX 5700 XT 57.2 sequel due later this year. It’s by far the 35.6

74 most strenuous game in our suite, Nvidia GeForce RTX 58.6 2070 Super (FE) 36.6 even with newer stunners like The 65.7 Division 2 in the mix. AMD Radeon VII 56 36.7 Ghost Recon Wildlands also prefers 1080p 1440p 4K Nvidia’s GPU architecture in general—or LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE at least it used to. The overhauled RDNA architecture definitely shook F1 2018 something up, leveling the playing field (Frames per second) in games that preferred GeForce GPUs 115 Nvidia GeForce RTX 79 2060 (FE) in prior generations. The Radeon RX 49

120 5700 duo manages to draw effectively Radeon RX 5700 85 55 even with both Super cards here—as

129 Nvidia GeForce RTX well as the far pricier $700 Radeon VII. 86 2060 Super (FE) 56

115 AMD Radeon 96 F1 2018 Vega 64 52 The latest in a long line of successful 139 Radeon RX 5700 XT 105 games, F1 2018 ($60 on Humble at 60

150 go.pcworld.com/f118) is a gem to Nvidia GeForce RTX 115 2070 Super (FE) 68 test, supplying a wide array of both 147 graphical and benchmarking options— AMD Radeon VII 112 66 making it a much more reliable (and 1080p 1440p 4K fun) option than the Forza series. It’s LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE built on the fourth version of

AUGUST 2019 PCWorld 75 REVIEWS AMD RADEON RX 5700 AND 5700 XT

Codemasters’ buttery-smooth Ego game tops the Steam charts day in and day out. We engine. We test two laps on the Australia test Grand Theft Auto V ($30 on Humble at course, with clear skies. go.pcworld.com/gta5) with all options Nvidia’s RTX Super GPUs blow well past turned to Very High, all Advanced Graphics the Radeon RX 5700 family here, especially at options except extended shadows enabled, the more popular 1440p and 1080p and FXAA. GTA V runs on the RAGE engine resolutions. But again, AMD’s price cut and has received substantial updates since its changes the tune, with the $350 Radeon RX initial launch. 5700 surpassing the $350 RTX 2060 in Third time’s a trend. GTA V has performance, and the $400 Radeon RX 5700 performed better on GeForce hardware ever XT blowing well past the $400 RTX 2060 since it launched years and years ago, but Super at 1080p and 1440p resolutions. now, the Radeon RX 5700 and 5700 XT draw even with Nvidia’s pricier RTX Super options. GTA V The vastly more expensive Radeon VII is still We’re going to wrap things up with a game a loser here. that isn’t really a visual barn-burner, but still POWER DRAW, THERMALS, AND GTA V NOISE (Frames per second) We also tested the Radeon RX 5700 98.43 Nvidia GeForce RTX 84.93 2060 (FE) and RX 5700 XT using 3DMark’s 45.3

100.83 highly respected Fire Strike synthetic Radeon RX 5700 90.51 55.27 benchmark. Fire Strike runs at 1080p,

104.81 Nvidia GeForce RTX Fire Strike Extreme runs at 1440p, and 93.57 2060 Super (FE) 53.54 Fire Strike Ultra runs at 4K resolution. 98.67 AMD Radeon 90.26 All render the same scene, but with Vega 64 48.13 more intense graphical effects as you 105.27 Radeon RX 5700 XT 99.16 move up the scale, so that Extreme 61.63

105.88 and Ultra flavors stress GPUs even Nvidia GeForce RTX 97.51 2070 Super (FE) 60.3 more. We record the graphics score 104.75 to eliminate variance from the CPU. AMD Radeon VII 98.33 63.24 The Radeon RX 5700 GPUs 1080p 1440p 4K achieve higher scores than the RTX LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE Super duo, even though Nvidia’s

76 PCWorld AUGUST 2019 cards achieved better results in most real- We test thermals by leaving HWInfo’s world gaming tests. sensor monitoring tool open during the F1 2018 five-lap power draw test, 3DMark Fire Strike noting the highest maximum (Graphics subscore) temperature at the end. AMD’s 19,463 Nvidia GeForce RTX 9,050 new GPUs weren’t recognized by 2060 (FE) 4,201 HWInfo yet, so we used the 23,186 Radeon RX 5700 11,063 company’s Wattman monitoring 5,345

22,282 tool to measure temperatures in the Nvidia GeForce RTX 10,562 2060 Super (FE) 5,135 Radeon RX 5700 series. 22,595 The blower-style cooler can’t AMD Radeon 10,702 Vega 64 5,440 keep temperatures as low as 26,354 Radeon RX 5700 XT 12,503 Nvidia’s dual-axial design, but it still 6,019 gets the job done. Most 25,792 Nvidia GeForce RTX 12,308 2070 Super (FE) importantly, and unlike the Vega 64 5,937

27,776 reference design, the Radeon RX AMD Radeon VII 13,417 6,819 5700 GPUs aren’t unpleasant to be Standard Extreme Ultra around. They’re a big LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE improvement. We test power draw by Maximum GPU temperature looping the F1 2018 benchmark XQGHUbORDG(Degrees Celsius) for about 20 minutes after we’ve

Nvidia GeForce RTX benchmarked everything else, and 2060 (FE) 67 noting the highest reading on our Radeon RX 5700 78 Watts Up Pro meter. The initial part

Nvidia GeForce RTX of the race, where all competing 2060 Super (FE) 73 cars are onscreen simultaneously, AMD Radeon Vega 64 85 tends to be the most demanding portion. Radeon RX 5700 XT 86 Holy. Crap. Now this is Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 Super (FE) 76 unexpected! Ever since Nvidia revealed its Maxwell GPU AMD Radeon VII 78 architecture with the GeForce GTX SHORTER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE 750 and 750 Ti (go.pcworld.com/

AUGUST 2019 PCWorld 77 REVIEWS AMD RADEON RX 5700 AND 5700 XT

mxwl) all the way back in 2014, GeForce 2070. A few days ago, the answer would have cards have absolutely pummeled their been more nuanced, since the Radeon Radeon rivals. With AMD’s new RDNA tandem but can’t quite match the firepower graphics architecture and the leap to the 7nm of the new RTX Super graphics cards (see process, the domination is over. page 43). But in the wake of AMD’s pre- The days of laughing at Radeon power launch price cuts, clarity returns. efficiency (or lack thereof) are over. This is Yes. Yes, you should buy these very encouraging for AMD’s future GPU graphics cards. development...though it remains to be seen The Radeon RX 5700 and 5700 XT are what Nvidia’s architects are capable of when excellent, delivering noticeably better Team Green shifts to 7nm at some point in performance than the GeForce RTX 2060 and the future. RTX 2060 Super they’re price-matched with. The Radeon RX 5700 XT even manages to BOTTOM LINE trade blows with the GeForce RTX 2070 A week ago, the answer would have been a Super in some games despite costing $100 clear yes. The Radeon RX 5700 and RX 5700 less. AMD just served up a delectable 1440p XT deliver more than enough oomph to gaming duo. topple the original GeForce RTX 2060 and These Navi GPUs would also excel at high refresh rate 1080p gaming, and with the Radeon RX 5700 XT you can Whole System Power Draw dabble with 4K gaming in some (Watts) games if you don’t mind dialing some Nvidia GeForce RTX 284 2060 (FE) 54.3 visual settings back from Ultra. If 259 Radeon RX 5700 56.1 you’re into content creation too, poke

Nvidia GeForce RTX 300 around for reviews that reveal how 2060 Super (FE) 55.2 much of a difference the Radeon RX AMD Radeon Vega 416 64 59.6 5700’s PCIe 4.0 connection makes in Nvidia GeForce RTX 315 2070 (FE) 55.7 your workloads of choice. Radeon RX 5700 XT 318 56.5 The Radeon RX 5700 and RX 5700

Nvidia GeForce RTX 344 XT are the first mainstream 7nm GPUs; 2070 Super (FE) 56 the first PCIe 4.0 GPUs; and the first 399 AMD Radeon VII 55.2 GPUs with DisplayPort Display Stream Load Idle 4K Compression for next-gen monitors. SHORTER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE And as the first 7nm GPUs built using

78 PCWorld AUGUST 2019 AMD’s new RDNA graphics architecture, the perform? Real-time ray tracing, which currently Radeon RX 5700 series managed to surpass requires dedicated hardware to achieve Nvidia’s vaunted power efficiency and draw acceptable gaming frame rates. Only Nvidia’s even with GeForce in games that previously RTX GPUs offer that. But while ray tracing is favored Nvidia. That’s a big freakin’ deal. gaining traction, it’s still in its infancy, with the AMD even managed to fix its atrocious cutting-edge lighting features only available in reference cooler! a handful of playable games at the moment. The Radeon team have a lot to be proud Given that; the Radeon RX 5700 offering a far of here. We can’t wait to see what AMD does superior memory configuration to the 6GB RTX with RDNA next. 2060; and both AMD GPUs outpunching their The one trick the new Radeon GPUs don’t RTX 2060 counterparts by significant margins, it’s hard to recommend the GeForce offerings over AMD’s 7nm tandem. The Radeon team have a lot to If you can’t resist the siren song of be proud of here. We can’t wait real-time ray tracing, though, the GeForce to see what AMD does with RTX 2060 Super would be the better RDNA next. option. The $500 GeForce RTX 2070 Super

AUGUST 2019 PCWorld 79 REVIEWS AMD RADEON RX 5700 AND 5700 XT

packs ray-tracing capabilities and sometimes beats the Radeon RX 5700 XT’s performance by a lot—but sometimes they’re neck-and- neck, too. The RTX 2070 Super costs $100 more. The Radeon RX 5700 and Radeon RX 5700 XT are truly great graphics cards that point to a bright future for AMD. The compete directly against. Both cards earn surprise RTX Super reveal almost spoiled high marks, and we’re awarding the Radeon things, but aggressive pre-launch price cuts RX 5700 an Editors’ Choice award. by AMD countered Nvidia’s maneuvering. It’s sure been a whirlwind few weeks for The Radeon RX 5700 and 5700 XT can’t high-end graphics cards, but now that the beat the RTX 2060 Super and 2070 Super, dust has finally settled, gamers are getting respectively, but AMD’s duo trounces the markedly higher frame rates for their dollars. RTX 2060 and 2060 Super they now Yay competition!

AMD Radeon RX 5700 AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT

PROS PROS • Best-in-class power efficiency. • Superb power efficiency. • Excellent gaming performance. • Excellent gaming performance. • New RDNA architecture improves performance in • New RDNA architecture improves performance in several games. several games. • First PCIe 4.0 GPU. • First PCIe 4.0 GPU.

• Ready for 4K, 120Hz HDR monitors without CONS chroma subsampling. • No dedicated ray-tracing hardware. CONS • Blower-style cooler has higher temps than Nvidia’s • No dedicated ray-tracing hardware. FE design. $349 $399

80 PCWorld AUGUST 2019 'HOO/DWLWXGHƺƷƳƳƵLQƴ $QHDUO\SHUIHFWFRPELQDWLRQ RIbSRZHUDQGEDWWHU\OLIH 18 hours of battery life inside a compact, 2-in-1 PC powered by a leading-edge Whiskey Lake CPU? Boom. BY MARK HACHMAN

If you’ve been wondering ExpressSign-in (yes, it’s really spelled about whether a long-life that way). Qualcomm Snapdragon PC As our review shows, Dell has designed a is for you, Dell would like a stylish business notebook optimized for life word. Dell’s new 14-inch Latitude 7400 on the road. It’s also optimized for IT rather 2-in-1 achieves a simply incredible 18 than personal budgets, as our review unit hours of battery life using a powerful Intel clocked in at a whopping $2,800. But if you 8th-gen Whiskey Lake processor. It also want a business laptop with all-day battery life offers a full complement of ports and a and performance, the Dell Latitude 7400 slightly gimmicky feature called 2-in-1 delivers.

AUGUST 2019 PCWorld 81 REVIEWS DELL LATITUDE 7400 2-IN-1

SPECS Battery: 52Wh, 78Wh (78Wh as tested) Other than a surprisingly subpar webcam, Wireless: 802.11ac (2x2); Bluetooth Dell’s Latitude 7400 2-in-1 is optimized for the Operating system: Windows 10 Pro road warrior: A compact form factor, 1080p Dimensions: 12.59 x 7.87 x 0.59 inches display, and a massive battery mean you’ll be Weight: 3.30 pounds, 4.08 pounds with able to work for hours. charger (measured) Display: 14-inch (1080p) touch Color: Aluminum Processor: Intel 1.9GHz Core i7-8665U Options: Fingerprint sensor inside power vPro (Whiskey Lake; go.pcworld.com/whsk) button; contact smartcard reader Graphics: Intel UHD 620 Price: $2,802 (Dell.com, go.pcworld. Memory: 8GB-16GB LPDDR3 (16GB as com/dlcm) as configured; starts at $1,599 tested) Storage: 128GB-2TB NVMe class 40 SSD A ROBUST, YET CHUNKY (512GB as tested) BUILD Ports: Two USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-C The Dell Latitude 7400 2-in-1 invades the (Thunderbolt 3, Power Delivery/ long-battery-life territory defined by Lenovo DisplayPort); Two USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-A; and Qualcomm’s power-sipping Snapdragon HDMI 1.4; microSD; optional microSIM through sheer brute force. Almost the entirety WWAN of our review unit was defined by its massive Camera: 720p HD Camera (user-facing); 78-watt-hour battery, more than twice the Windows Hello capable capacity of some competing laptops. That,

As a 2-in-1, the Latitude 7400 flips easily into tent mode.

82 PCWorld AUGUST 2019 and a power-sipping display, serves as the Intel ecosystem’s answer to what Qualcomm and its partners promise. Dell touts the Latitude 7400 as the world’s most compact 14-inch commercial 2-in-1, and that’s probably accurate. What that means, however, is that the Latitude 7400 is decidedly chunky, with a few more millimeters of Z-height than a thin-and-light design. Dell uses this to its While the display in this shot isn’t fully illuminated, the screen didn’t advantage, however, by give us any issues when working in illuminated spaces. Outdoors, including a full cadre of ports. however, colors quickly washed out. The Latitude 7400’s 3.3-pound heft, while not svelte, weighs less emphasizes battery life, with a conventional than expected. It’s also fair to say that the 1080p display that’s protected by Gorilla 78Wh battery option will allow you to leave Glass 5. Not only does the Latitude’s the charger at home in most cases, which display use extremely low power, the would otherwise bring the total travel weight amount of light it emits is limited: Dell rates to 4.08 pounds. it at 300 nits, though ours emitted a Dell’s Latitude 7400 certainly doesn’t look maximum of 284 nits. While that’s not like the stereotypical function-over-form enough to combat outdoor glare in the business notebook. The silvery aluminum summer sun, we plopped the Latitude 7400 exterior offers a bit more style. More and next to a well-lit window and tapped away more notebook vendors of this generation are without issue. We didn’t measure its color trimming the bezels to streamline their accuracy, but after comparing it to several products, and the 7400 is no exception: The other displays, it matched up well with a side bezels are just 0.4mm thick, with a bit Microsoft Surface Book 2. more space (0.6mm) allocated to the top All told, the combination of slim bezels bezel to accommodate the webcam. and the compact 14-inch display mean that The Latitude 7400’s display also the chassis measures just 12.59 inches wide

AUGUST 2019 PCWorld 83 REVIEWS DELL LATITUDE 7400 2-IN-1

A well-vented laptop usually means a quiet laptop with little, if any, thermal throttling. The Latitude 7400 2-in-1 runs quietly, even without the fans manually throttled down, as part of its “Quiet” mode.

by 7.87 inches deep by up to 0.59 inches that louder PCs would have drowned out. thick. We didn’t try it on an airplane tray table, but it should fit just fine. That additional DELL’S EXPRESSSIGN-IN: A thickness also lends Dell’s Latitude 7400 2-in-1 CONVENIENT GIMMICK absolute stability, with no detectable flex Dell touts the Latitude 7400 2-in-1 as “the only whatsoever. PC that senses your presence,” with a Dell put equal care into the Latitude’s aural technology the company calls ExpressSign-in. ergonomics, too. Dell ships its Power If configured with Windows Hello, Manager utility inside the Latitude 7400, with ExpressSign-in will lock your PC automatically options for the default Optimized setting, when you walk away. But it will also detect plus “Cool,” “Quiet,” and “Ultra you when you approach, then use Windows Performance.” I found the default Optimized Hello to log you in. setting rarely turned on the system fan even The technology uses a sensor package to while running benchmarks. Enabling determine when there’s no one nearby, then Performance Mode increases the clock speed automatically locks your PC. Windows already and runs the fan more frequently, yet fan noise does something somewhat similar (if enabled was exceptionally quiet and unobtrusive to via Windows settings): If you pair a phone via the point that I had to cock an ear to even Bluetooth, Windows can lock you out detect it in the IDG offices. In the quiet of a automatically once your phone goes out of home office the dearth of fan noise allowed range. However, Bluetooth’s range can be me to hear a slight, intermittent staticky buzz long enough that Dynamic Lock doesn’t

84 PCWorld AUGUST 2019 activate until you’re farther away. ExpressSign-in isn’t that much better. It automatically turns off your PC within three minutes if it can’t detect anyone in range. (In testing, it took 1 minute, 3 seconds in an empty office.) If someone wanders by and triggers the sensors before then—poof! your PC is back on, unlocked. Manually locking your PC is more effective, though you can always forget. ExpressSign-in’s complementary There’s a dedicated key (with an LED) to disable the mic. “wake on approach” technology is somewhat gimmicky: As you (or anyone else) Screen, Home, End, Insert, and Delete keys nears, sensors detect your approach and ready left for the function keys in the upper row. Of Windows Hello for immediate login. note is a key to disable the mic—a personal (Otherwise, you’d have to tap the spacebar or concern of mine (go.pcworld.com/dsmc)— power button, like a savage.) I love Windows with a small LED to alert you when that Hello, but ExpressSign-in is the PC’s equivalent particular function is active. Each key is of waving your foot under an SUV’s bumper to backlit, with a two-step gradation: on, raise the back hatch. Do you need it? Probably brighter, and off. not, though it’s fun and convenient. The Latitude 7400’s precision touchpad is a bit small because of the compact chassis. A SOLID TYPING Clickable throughout all but a fingerbreadth EXPERIENCE at the top of the trackpad, it proved both Like many people, my day-to-day work is smooth and comfortable to use. I performed performed upon a laptop keyboard, where I a number of two-, three-, and four-finger prefer comfortably spacious keys and medium gestures easily. key travel. While the Latitude 7400’s keys are As you may have noticed in the spec list, a bit small for my taste, I found the laptop’s the Latitude 7400 2-in-1 ships with a generous keys pleasingly springy. selection of ports. Though our review unit Dell’s keyboard layout is pretty standard, didn’t include either, the Latitude 7400 can using the conventional “cross” of arrow keys be configured with a fingerprint reader in the lower right-hand corner, with the Print embedded in the power button, as well as a

AUGUST 2019 PCWorld 85 REVIEWS DELL LATITUDE 7400 2-IN-1

smartcard contact reader within the chassis. Instead, the webcam doubles as a Windows Hello biometric login, and includes infrared sensing. There’s no privacy shutter, however, though many competing notebooks now include

this feature. Along the right side of the chassis is a headphone jack, USB Type-A, an SD If you buy the Latitude card slot, (optional) WWAN SIM holder, and a lock port. 7400 2-in-1, consider investing in a dedicated webcam for your monitor. Images taken with the webcam (0.9MP still images, 720p video) were fuzzy, and areas of the image were overexposed, even with HDR capabilities turned

on. I’d like to see a bit Another USB Type A slot appears on the left side of the Dell Latitude 7400 more attention paid to 2-in-1, plus a pair of Thunderbolt ports and a dedicated HDMI port. the webcam inside a notebook designed for business users. technology, which serves as both a graphic equalizer and a positional sound feature. CONSUMER-QUALITY Turning on the MaxxAudioPro equalizer, SPEAKERS along with its MaxBass technology, boosts Though Dell designed the Latitude 7400 the low-end audio to a pleasing level that 2-in-1 for business users, its audio is evens out the listening experience from lows comparable to, or better than, what you may to highs. Additional features like Width find on a consumer laptop. That’s thanks to widen the stereo experience using just the the MaxxAudioPro by Waves enhancement laptop’s speakers. Though PCWorld hasn’t

86 PCWorld AUGUST 2019 nx technology generates the illusion that the audio is coming directly from the screen—a nifty trick, though one you can live without. In all, I only found two things I didn’t like about Dell’s Maxx AudioPro experience. By default, the software asks you Waves’ MaxxAudioPro provides both an equalizer as well as sound enhancement. to specify what sort of head- performed a side-by-side comparison to phones you plugged in: true headphones, evaluate one audio-enhancement earbuds, or over-the-ear earbuds. That gets technology compared to another, some form old, though you can opt out. The Waves of audio enhancement goes a long way to MaxxAudioPro nx technology also refuses to improve the typical laptop audio experience, work with UWP apps, which excludes both and MaxxAudioPro offers one of the most the Microsoft Store Netflix app as well as any sophisticated feature sets available. audio played back within Microsoft Edge. With headphones in, MaxxAudioPro also Though nx may be a bit of a gimmick, the provides the option to turn on the nx restrictions are annoying. positional audio, which uses the Latitude 7400’s user-facing webcam to track your ADD-ONS AND head’s position and route the sound ACCESSORIES accordingly. Turn your head to your left, and Dell’s Latitude 7400 2-in-1 ships with the usual Waves routes more audio to your right contingent of Windows bloatware, along with headphone speaker, and vice versa. In all, the three Dell-branded utilities: Dell Command |

AUGUST 2019 PCWorld 87 REVIEWS DELL LATITUDE 7400 2-IN-1

Otherwise, Dell Power Manager stands out as an example of what an OEM app should be. As many PC makers now do, there’s an available ecosystem of Dell Power Manager provides a number of options to monitor and manage the accessories 7400’s power, providing depth without unnecessary complexity. If Dell’s Command | Update app provided this level of sophistication, it could give Lenovo’s Vantage that you can utility a run for its money. also purchase. Dell shipped Update, its utility for updating the BIOS and three to us to review: drivers; Dell Digital Delivery, a digital software The $84.99 Dell PN579X Premium storefront, and Dell Power Manager. Active pen; the $43.99 Dell WM527 The latter utility is a fantastically well- Premier Wireless Mouse; and the $329.99 thought-out app with provisions for managing WD19TB Dell Thunderbolt Dock (go. the laptop’s power consumption, monitoring pcworld.com/wd19). and controlling the charge status, and even maximizing the longevity of the battery. Another provision even allows your laptop to run on battery power during certain predefined periods to minimize the load on the power grid. The only thing I’d like to see is the number of

charge cycles that the battery Dell’s PN579X Premier Active Pen offers more pressure sensitivity has been subjected to. than Dell’s cheaper Active Pen (go.pcworld.com/styl).

88 PCWorld AUGUST 2019 Dell’s PN579X active pen registers 4,096 configurable within Windows, but there’s no levels of pressure sensitivity, with a 240Hz erasure capability. The only way to “erase” report rate. Though the Latitude 7400 2-in-1 e-ink is to slightly depress the top of the doesn’t include a dedicated holster to stash barrel-mounted button. Otherwise, though, the pen, both sides of the 7400 are the e-ink latency was minimal. magnetized to grip the pen when not in use. Dell’S WM527 is essentially a Microsoft There’s also a lanyard in the box, as well as a arc mouse, though with a thumbwheel and SIM removal tool. without the ability to fold flat. A mouse that While the PN579X does offer tilt support, balances fore and aft rather than with a solid it wasn’t functional on the Latitude 7400. It’s base sort of creeps me out, but it’s truly an odd pen, too: The top-mounted shortcut ambidextrous, with a side-mounted button on button serves as an app launcher, either side. You can connect either via Bluetooth or with an included wireless dongle. It runs on a pair of AA batteries. Dell’s WD19TB Thunderbolt dock, meanwhile, demands a sizable portion of your desk for the expansion ports it offers. Weighing 1.29 pounds, the dock requires a footprint of 8.1 x 3.5 inches. Though

Dell’s WM527 mouse is a recommended accessory for the the Latitude 7400 supplies a Dell Latitude 7400 2-in-1. number of ports, the WD19TB provides many more: a pair of DisplayPort connectors, an HDMI connector, two USB-C 3.1 Gen 2 ports, 1 more generic USB-C port, and a Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) connector, too. Unfortunately, you’ll need to figure out which is which, as they’re marked with somewhat cryptic glyphs (an “SS10,” a

Dell’s WD19TB dock is definitely one to leave on your desk, DisplayPort “D” and a lightning bolt) and not in your bag. that don’t quite make clear what

AUGUST 2019 PCWorld 89 REVIEWS DELL LATITUDE 7400 2-IN-1

should be plugged into what. There are also benchmarks. The latter category loads apps like three USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type connectors, Gigabit GIMP and OpenOffice to simulate real-world ethernet, and a 3.5mm mic/headphone jack. workloads. These latter tests are based on PCMark 8, which use a battery of different apps TOP-NOTCH PERFORMANCE grouped into three benchmarks: PCMark 8 AND BATTERY LIFE Work, Home, and Creative. The Dell Latitude 7400 2-in-1 proves you don’t While Work emphasizes office tasks such have to sacrifice performance for long battery as video calls, spreadsheets, and word life. While our review unit topped the heap in processing, the Home test begins steering some tests, it finished no lower than the middle the workloads toward web browsing and of the pack in others. It also delivered the PCMark 8 best graphics (Native resolution)

performance we’ve Dell Latitude 3,722 7400 2-in-1 3,582 seen outside of a (Core i7-8665U) 3,721 dedicated GPU. The HP Spectre 3,541 selling point, x360 13 (2019) 3,443 (Core i7-8565U) 3,632 however, was the Samsung 3,558 battery life, which Notebook 9 Pro 3,298 (Core i7-8565U) 3,612 exactly matched that Huawei 3,662 of a Snapdragon Matebook 13 3,432 850-powered (Core i7-8565U) 3,566 HP Spectre 3,519 tablet, the Samsung x360 13T 3,346 Galaxy Book 2 (go. (Core i7-8550U) 3,510 pcworld.com/ Dell New 0 XPS 13 9370 0 gbk2), while (Core i5-8250U) 3,460 providing the Samsung 1,379 Galaxy Book 2 1,411 performance of (Snapdragon 850) 1,492

notebooks powered PCMark 8 Creative 3.0 (Native Resolution) PCMark 8 Home 3.0 (Native Resolution) PCMark 8 Work 3.0 (Native Resolution)

by Intel Core LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE microprocessors. We test using a We combined all three PCMark tests into one grouping, ranked by performance, with the Dell Latitude 7400 debuting in first place. With a few laptops we mix of synthetic and went no further than the PCMark Work test. Note the Qualcomm Snapdragon- real-world powered Samsung Galaxy Book 2 at the bottom.

90 PCWorld AUGUST 2019 light gaming. The Creative workloads are performance delivered stellar performance typically the most processor-intensive, right out of the gate. leaning harder on GPU-intensive tasks like PCMark 10 reworks all three benchmarks for gaming, as well as photo and video editing. the modern era. Again, typical office tasks like For a business notebook, the Latitude 7400’s video calls play a role, but heavy-duty image manipulation using the PCMark 10 GIMP image-editing tool as well as more (Native resolution) subtle metrics like app HP Spectre x360 15 (late 2018) (Core i7-8550U) 4,691 startup times and Huawei Matebook 13 GPU-stressing physics (Core i7-8565U) 4,299 tests also appear. Dell Latitude 7400 2-in-1 4,082 (Core i7-8565U) PCMark 10 recently Samsung Notebook 9 Pro (Core i7-8565U) 3,882 debuted, so our archive Dell New XPS 13 9370 of benchmarks isn’t as 3,413 (Core i5-9370) comprehensive as it is LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE for PCMark 8. In this

Dell’s Latitude 7400 doesn’t disappoint in the updated PCMark 10 modern benchmark benchmark, though it still lags behind some of its competition. the Latitude 7400 still does well. HandBrake 0.99.0 Encoding (H.246) We also stress the (Seconds) laptop processor in two ways: via Dell New XPS 13 9370 (Core i5-9370) 3,444 Cinebench, a Maxon- Huawei Matebook 13 (Core i7-8565U) 3,507 developed benchmark “sprint” that asks every Dell Latitude 7400 2-in-1 3,677 (Core i7-8565U) CPU core and thread HP Spectre x360 13 (2019) (Core i7-8565U) 4,264 to render a scene as HP Spectre x360 13T quickly as possible, (Core i7-85500) 4,373 Samsung Notebook 9 Pro and HandBrake, an 4,907 (Core i7-8565U) open-source tool used SHORTER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE to convert a

Dell’s Latitude 7400 performed very well in our Handbrake video- Hollywood movie into conversion test. a format that can be

AUGUST 2019 PCWorld 91 REVIEWS DELL LATITUDE 7400 2-IN-1

played back on an Android tablet. First up is the Sky Diver test. You’ll see many desktop HandBrake, where the Latitude 7400 2-in-1 is GPUs use more advanced tests, but the nearly the fastest at completing this real-world laptops and tablets tend to deliver scores on task. the Sky Diver benchmark that are more Cinebench stresses all of the cores over a Cinebench RT15.038 short period, using (All threads) either R15 (a simpler Huawei Matebook 13 scene) or R20 (a more (Core i7-8565U) 692 Dell New XPS 13 9370 complex scene). We (Core i5-9370) 669 test with both, though HP Spectre x360 13 (2019) 623 we have a larger (Core i7-8565U) Dell Latitude 7400 2-in-1 database of scores (Core i7-8565U) 568 from the older test. We HP Spectre x360 13T (Core i7-85500) 553 were a little surprised Samsung Notebook 9 Pro 491 to see the Latitude (Core i7-8565U) 7400 finish midway LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE

down, given its Though the Latitude 7400’s performance in this Cinebench test falls into the performance middle range, it’s not doing poorly. elsewhere. We’ve just shown the R15 results 3DMark 8 Sky Diver 1.0 Overall here. One note: (Demo Mode Oﬀ) turning on the Ultra Huawei Matebook 13 Performance mode (Core i7-8565U) 11,705 Dell Latitude 7400 2-in-1 within Power Manager (Core i7-8565U) 5,042 didn’t make a HP Spectre x360 13 (2019) 4,925 difference in the (Core i7-8565U) Dell New XPS 13 9370 PCMark or 3DMark (Core i5-9370) 4,734 tests, but it did here: Samsung Notebook 9 Pro (Core i7-8565U) 4,698 performance jumped 8 HP Spectre x360 13T 4,370 percent, to 612. (Core i7-85500) Samsung Galaxy Book 2 Finally, we return to (Snapdragon 850) 2,897 3DMark to test the LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE integrated GPU using The Dell Latitude 7400 delivers solid 3D performance.

92 PCWorld AUGUST 2019 dedicated GPU. Battery Life The piece de (Minutes) resistance, of course, is the Latitude 7400’s Dell Latitude 7400 2-in-1 (Core i7-8565U) 1,101 battery life. Because of Samsung Galaxy Book 2 (Snapdragon 850) 1,101 its massive 78Wh battery, we didn’t have HP Spectre x360 13 (2019) 971 (Core i7-8565U) much doubt that it HP Spectre x360 13T (Core i7-85500) 769 could deliver on its Dell New XPS 13 9370 promises of all-day (Core i5-9370) 758 Samsung Notebook 9 Pro battery life. And boy, 592 (Core i7-8565U) does it: With a battery Huawei Matebook 13 (Core i7-8565U) 499 life north of 18 hours,

LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE the Dell Latitude 7400 is a perfect choice for a What can we say? Sure, Dell stuffed the Latitude 7400 with an oversized 78Wh battery, but it paid off, equaling the Qualcomm Snapdragon- transcontinental or powered Samsung Galaxy Book 2 in battery life—down to the minute. transpacific flight, say from San Francisco to indicative of the sort of performance you’ll Taipei, or from London to Los Angeles. It just receive on simpler, older games. While you keeps chugging away, even with display could try playing some of the latest 3D games brightness dialed up to our standardized levels. on a device like the Latitude 7400 2-in-1, the sheer complexity of the scenes they render would likely bring this laptop’s low-end MX150 GPU to its knees, unless the game’s resolution and image quality are dialed down to extremely low levels. Still, the Latitude 7400 outperforms everything that doesn’t use a

AUGUST 2019 PCWorld 93 REVIEWS DELL LATITUDE 7400 2-IN-1

We loop a 4K movie over and over until the interprets instructions. Qualcomm promises that battery expires. It requires a weekend and more its upcoming Snapdragon 8cx (go.pcworld. just for a satisfactory number of repetitions. com/sncx) fixes those flaws. We should note that within Dell’s power- We can wait. The Dell Inspiron 7400 2-in-1 management software lies an option to delivers right here and right now. The marriage of extend the battery life even more, through a top-notch performance and 18-plus hours of process that lowers the display brightness, battery life merits our Editor’s Choice award. It’s a switches off the keyboard backlight, and struggle to find a caveat: the weight? The 1080p clocks down the CPU. We couldn’t discern display? The lack of an integrated GPU? Yes, any effect here, in part because we dialed you’ll pay through the nose for this ultrapremium the display brightness back up to our business PC. But it’s the whole package, and standardized levels. But with an 18-hour worth fitting into your IT budget if you can. “standard” battery life, who’s counting? Dell Latitude 7400 2-in-1 BOTTOM LINE

Though more airlines are including power plugs, PROS the real test of a laptop is running from • Best-in-class performance. • Battery life that equals a Qualcomm Snapdragon appointment to appointment, without any PC. promise of a laptop charger in sight. That’s been • Compact, yet with a 14-inch screen. CONS the case for buying a Qualcomm Snapdragon • Nearly $3,000 as reviewed. PC—more so than performance, which has $2,802 suffered somewhat from how the processor

94 PCWorld AUGUST 2019 $GGOLQN6ƺƳ190H66' .LOOHUSHUIRUPDQFHIRUDVRQJ Would you pay $120 for 1TB? You might, rabbit, you might. BY JON L. JACOBI

I must admit, I wasn’t SPECS AND DESIGN expecting all that much from There’s not a whole lot to say about the design of Addlink’s S70 SSD. I’d never the S70 other than it’s your average M.2 NVMe heard of the company before, SSD, which is in the standard 2280 form factor and a 1TB NVMe SSD for the stunningly low (22 mm wide, 80 mm long). It’s PCIe 3.0 x4 price of $120 raises every red flag I know (using four lanes), and it uses a Phison PS5012 concerning performance. controller and 64-layer TLC (Triple-Level Cell/3- Well, pickle me and call me ridiculous if bit) NAND. That turns out to be very good stuff. the S70 didn’t run rings around the other The S70 is available in four flavors: the 1TB budget drives, and many pricier models in version I tested (currently $120 on Amazon [go. our testing, easily earning an Editor’s Choice. pcworld.com/ads7]), a 256GB model (currently The market just got very interesting. $40 on Amazon [go.pcworld.com/s256]), a

IMAGE: ADDLINK AUGUST 2019 PCWorld 95 REVIEWS ADDLINK S70 NVME SSD

512GB model (currently $67 on Amazon [go.pcworld. CrystalDiskMark 6 com/s512]), and a 2TB model (MBps) (currently $269 on Amazon 3,232 Sequential Write 4K 2,574 [go.pcworld.com/s2tb]). Yes, (Q=32, T=1) 2,717 you pay a bit more per gigabyte for the max capacity, 3,454 Sequential Read 4K 3,485 but it’s still darn inexpensive. (Q=32, T=1) 3,525

PERFORMANCE AddLink S70 WD Black SN750 In the synthetic benchmarks, Samsung 970 Pro the S70 gave the best drives LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE I’ve tested a real run for the Though it’s not the world-beater CrystalDiskMark makes it out to money. The fact that it slows be, the AddLink S70’s numbers aren’t that far off the mark. down after it runs out of cache to just under 1GBps 48GB copies during sustained writes left it (Seconds) slightly behind. But only a 347 Total 333 couple of drives sustain 312 faster than that, and I’d 126 hardly call that rate slothful. 48GB Folder Write 127 The S70 is a very fast 128

drive, and you’d be hard- 143 pressed to tell the difference 48GB Folder Read 142 133 with the naked eye between the WD SN750 Black NVMe 45 48GB Write 32 and the Samsung 970 Pro to 24 which I compare it. 33 AddLink S70 WD Black SN750 The S70’s 48GB Read 32 CrystalDiskMark numbers, 27 Samsung 970 Pro

shown above (gold bars), LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE measure sustained Slowing down to just under 1GBps during long sustained writes and throughput with relatively other realities mean the S70 can’t quite match Samsung’s 970 Pro, or small amounts of data (1MB). even WD’s SN750 Black, but for the price it’s a darn near thing.

96 PCWorld AUGUST 2019 generally see in the low end of AS SSD 2.0 4K Performance the market. The TBW (10GB/MBps) (TeraBytes Written—the total 2,104 4K Write amount of data that a company (64 threads) 1,925 2,114 is willing to guarantee can be

1,861 written to the drive) ratings of 4K Read 1,680 (64 threads) 350/600/ 1200/2000 for the 1,743 256GB/ 512GB/1TB/2TB 123 drives, respectively, are quite 4K Write 138 101 high as well.

35 AddLink S70 WD Black SN750 4K Read 26 BOTTOM LINE 29 Samsung 970 Pro I’m sure other drives will be LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE dropping in price soon, and

AS SSD had nice things to say about the S70 as well, though real-world the vendors are not going to performances isn’t as good. Considering the price, we don’t care. be happy about it given the already thin margins in the The results for the Addlink are stellar. The drive SSD market. But vendor pain is your joy, and isn’t quite on a par with its more expensive as it stands now, you can save $30 or more rivals when it comes to real world copies, as with the AddLink S70 without losing out in shown below, but it’s certainly in the ballpark. performance. Even if it were merely priced AS SSD proved a major coup for the S70, equally with the competition, I’d recommend where it beat even the mighty Samsung 970 it. I consider the S70 a very nice introduction Pro in a couple of tests. to AddLink. Performance simply isn’t an issue with the S70 as it can be with some older bargain AddLink S70 NVMe SSD drives, though thankfully, the days of NVMe drives dropping to below-SATA speeds when PROS the cache runs out seem to be over. • Super affordable. • Excellent everyday performance. My only caveat with the AddLink S70 is that • Five-year warranty. service and support are unknown quantities to CONS me at this point in time. I’ve had no dealings with • Slows to “only” 1GBps during long writes. • No information on quality of support and service. the company so I simply can’t say, though the $119 five-year warranty is two years longer than you

AUGUST 2019 PCWorld 97 REVIEWS

3')HOHPHQW3URƺ$IXOO IHDWXUHG$FUREDW$OWHUQDWLYH With a refreshed interface, this elegant PDF editor makes it even easier to modify, secure, and share documents. BY MICHAEL ANSALDO

ondershare’s PDFelement A USER-FRIENDLY UI 6 Pro has been one of our Version 7’s refreshed user interface puts favorite PDF editors, all the program’s main functions on its combining essential Home screen in large clickable tiles. From Wbusiness features with a simple but here you can jump-start the process of sophisticated interface. Version 7 (go. editing, creating, converting, combining, pcworld.com/pro7) isn’t a major or batch processing PDFs, as well as overhaul, thankfully, introducing only a few access a library of PDF templates. A separate user interface tweaks for even better usability tile on the left lists your most recent while keeping the features that made its documents along with a big, blue Open predecessor so great. File button.

98 PCWorld AUGUST 2019 IMAGE: WONDERSHARE The top of the interface features a Microsoft Office–style toolbar containing master functions such as commenting, security, sharing, and page management. Clicking on any of these drops down a second toolbar with all the options for that particular function. Each of these PDFelement Pro 7 includes a full slate of reviewing tools. toolbars appears to have also been refreshed for a more streamlined manipulate images, insert links, change the look, though they contain the same functions document background, create headers and as in PDFelement Pro 6. footers, and add and remove watermarks. It The goal with streamlined UI was clearly also supports Bates numbering. to get you where you want to go within a The program includes a full slate couple of clicks, and in that it succeeds. of annotation tools, including text Working with a PDF is much the same as it highlighting, sticky notes, stamps, was in version 6. Each document opens in its signatures, shapes, and freehand markup. own tab. Another toolbar down the left side Fonts, color, and other formatting can be allows you to open thumbnails of all the customized for each of these. Sharing document’s pages, add bookmarks, review documents for review is easy, with options comments, manage attached files, and search for emailing and tracking with DocSend, text within the PDF. and sending to Dropbox and Google Drive all available from the open document. EDITING, CREATING, AND The previous version of PDFelement Pro CONVERTING supported a comprehensive range of file Behind the pretty interface is a business-ready formats, so there was little need to improve feature set. Document editing is the meat- on them here. You can convert PDFs to Excel, and-potatoes for PDFelement Pro, and here it Word, PowerPoint, EPUB, Pages, HTML, RTF, allows considerable flexibility. You can edit and text formats, and create them from text in-line or within a text box, drop in and images, HTML, and text file formats.

AUGUST 2019 PCWorld 99 REVIEWS PDFELEMENT PRO 7

You can extract form data directly into a spreadsheet for analysis.

IF IT AIN’T BROKE… restrictions. (Team and Education plans are PDFelement Pro 7’s best move, perhaps, is also available with more information leaving the previous version’s strengths well available on the website.) enough alone. You can still easily create forms and extract their data directly to BOTTOM LINE spreadsheets for analysis, averting the PDFelement Pro 7 continues the program’s introduction of errors that can happen when emphasis on simplicity, functionality, and inputting the information manually. You can affordability. If you’re already a PDFelement secure documents with passwords and user or just starting to shop for an Adobe permissions, batch encryption, and digital Acrobat alternative, you will find plenty to signatures. And you can collaborate on love. documents without having to manage a convoluted chain of emails. PDFelement Pro 7 And Wondershare has thankfully kept it

affordable, too. PDFelement Professional, PROS which includes all the features mentioned • Streamlined, easy-to-use interface. • Advanced business features. here plus others, still costs just $99 for a • Cross-platform compatibility. single license, while a Standard version CONS without some of the advanced business • Windows and Mac interfaces differ. $77 features is $69 per license. And both can be used for free with some feature

100 PCWorld AUGUST 2019 8 kids a day are accidentally killed or injured by FAMILY FIRE.

FAMILY FIRE is a shooting involving an improperly stored gun, often found in the home.

ENDFAMILYFIRE.org FEATURE

102 PCWorld AUGUST 2019 E S K R I L E

S Y L B

E L E E F THE A S E H T C I I R M O

V Y A B

BEST F

N F O O

I T T S A I L R

N PC I S - U K L C L I E

. H T C

S I L

L GAMES

A R U A N E N Y

A E

R H T U OF

F O

, O

9 1 E 0 M 2

H 2019 G

G 9 U 1 0 O 2 R - F H T

- (SO Y D A N W E F

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O FAR) Y L R P N BY HAYDEN DINGMAN A O

AUGUST 2019 PCWorld 103 FEATURE THE BEST PC GAMES OF 2019 (SO FAR)

ow, look at the time! I think arcane-looking phrases like “Flag Is Win” and I say this every year, but I “Water Is Hot” and the titular “Baba Is You.” can’t believe we’re halfway Your task is to push these blocks around, through 2019 already. And redefining the very rules of the puzzle in your it’s been a busy 2019 as well. This list of the favor. Stuck behind a wall? Well, maybe you best games of the year so far is already so should become the wall—or rather, Wall Is You. strong, it feels like a proper end-of-2019 Of course, the difficulty escalates. Game of the Year list. Hell, I had to cut some Immutable rules, either placed outside your perfectly deserving games because we ran reach or tucked into corners where they can’t be out of space. Did I mention this is only the manipulated, force you to get creative with your middle of the year? solutions, creating long chains of cause and And it’s only going to get worse from here, effect where Crab Is You and You Are Melt and with high-profile releases like Doom Eternal and Water Is…nothing? Oh,now I can get across Control still to come in 2019. And then 2020’s that river. And so on and so forth. Baba Is You is spring gauntlet of Cyberpunk 2077 (go.pcworld. smart, it’s addictive, and I’ve derived the utmost com/2077), Dying Light 2 (go.pcworld.com/ satisfaction from its “Eureka!” moments. dl2), Vampire: The Masquerade—Bloodlines 2 (go.pcworld.com/vmb), Watch Dogs Legion (go. RESIDENT EVIL 2 pcworld.com/wdl), and on and on. TRAILER: GO.PCWORLD.COM/RE2 Good years ahead. But before we get there, Resident Evil 2 (go.pcworld.com/rev2) is the let’s take a moment to recount the best games Resident Evil that finally made me a fan—and I of 2019 so far—maybe some you played, and don’t mean the 1998 original, I mean the probably at least a few you haven’t gotten remake this year. After years of trying and around to yet. (Note: This list is in no particular order, except the final entry.)

BABA IS YOU TRAILER: GO.PCWORLD.COM/BABA Baba Is You is a fiendish puzzler with simple rules. So simple, in fact, they’re laid out for you to see. Every puzzle consists of a series of text blocks, Baba Is You

104 PCWorld AUGUST 2019 Resident Evil 2 failing to get into the series, I finally had a proper Resident Evil game with a well-written story and fully modern mechanics (and no more typewriter ribbons) at a time I could appreciate it. Point being, it’s not just a nostalgia piece. Resident Evil 2 is one of 2019’s best horror games, with an entertaining story that sustains Metro Exodus both Claire and Leon’s back-to-back play- throughs, and tweaks that update the source METRO EXODUS material without losing its spirit—like a color- TRAILER: GO.PCWORLD.COM/MEXO coded map that tells you when you’ve col- Metro Exodus (go.pcworld.com/mex) had me lected everything in each room, quality-of-life worried when I first demoed it. This was a series tweaks that demonstrate how games have about claustrophobia, about how nuclear evolved since the ‘90s. survivors rebuilt some semblance of civilization in And for repeat runs? Well, try putting Mr. the ruins of the Moscow subway system. With X in a thong for a truly exciting twist. Exodus, the series was due to go above-ground

AUGUST 2019 PCWorld 105 FEATURE THE BEST PC GAMES OF 2019 (SO FAR)

and open-world, leaving the subways behind. I Cry 5 (go.pcworld.com/dm5) only a month feared the change would scuttle what I loved later. This one, I expected even less. Another about the first two games, especially Metro 2033. series I missed out on in its heyday, until now the But my fears were in vain. While some of only game in the series I held in high esteem the open-world bits do feel superfluous, was Ninja Theory’s controversial DmC. Metro Exodus is still a joy to discover. Each I still think the level design in DmC is more region is dotted with enough ruins to regu- interesting—Devil May Cry 5 gets a little rote larly recreate the old Metro feel, and the story near the end, overusing its H.R. Giger-esque of Artyom, Anna, and their journey out of hellscape for a few too many levels. It’s so damn Moscow is a poignant third act for a series entertaining, though—from its stylish slow-mo- that definitely earned one. tion intro credits to its charmingly cheesy dialogue to its flashy combat. Every single piece DEVIL MAY CRY 5 feels like a series at its peak, which is incredible TRAILER: GO.PCWORLD.COM/DMC5 for a series that hadn’t received a proper sequel Capcom rolled straight from one win to another in over a decade. I’m sure Devil May Cry 5 is a this year. After making me a fan of Resident Evil, I treat for longtime fans, but it’s just as apt to hook then found myself falling in love with Devil May a newcomer. Take it from me.

Devil May Cry 5

106 PCWorld AUGUST 2019 collection of faux-‘90s webpages, laden with ugly gifs and dad-rock jingles and eye-searing colors. It’s a meticulously detailed recreation of what that period felt like, everyone explor- ing this new medium before self-expression consolidated around the handful of universal sites we have today.

Hypnospace Outlaw TOTAL WAR: THREE HYPNOSPACE OUTLAW KINGDOMS TRAILER: GO.PCWORLD.COM/HYP TRAILER: GO.PCWORLD.COM/TWTK There was a magical period in the early days After two excellent and creative Total War: of the Internet where it felt like anyone could Warhammer games, I didn’t know what a Total make a website, and everyone did. Hypno- War based in human history could do to space Outlaw is an homage to that era, to refresh the formula. Turns out the answer was in GeoCities and AOL and all the weirdness that historical fiction, drawing on elements of the came with it. Romance of the Three Kingdoms saga for a Total It’s wrapped in a wild story about HypnOS, War that embellishes history with larger-than- an operating system that only functions while life characters and grandiose battles. Did it all the user is asleep. You’re a “Hypnospace happen this way? Doubtful, but Three King- Enforcer” tasked with stopping illicit activity, be doms is full of personality and lends itself to the it file sharing or harassment or malware distribution. It’s silly fun, in a Hackers sort of way. But the real hook is nostalgia. Your in-fiction job mostly requires trawling through a vast Total War: Three Kingdoms

AUGUST 2019 PCWorld 107 FEATURE THE BEST PC GAMES OF 2019 (SO FAR)

dramatic player-driven storytelling you want from home, with no record of how it happened. from a strategy game, old rivals dueling on the Building on the work it did with Stories Untold, battlefield and trusted advisers stabbing you in No Code’s made another love letter to analog the back at a crucial moment. and early-digital technology, tasking you with And for those who don’t want any of that? unraveling the mystery of the space station’s The “Records” mode gives you the old Total War mysterious journey from the confines of the experience, albeit with a far deeper diplomacy ship’s security cameras and computer systems. system than any in recent memory. It’s a best-of- And while it’s a novel mechanic, Observation’s both-worlds situation, and easily the best New Weird-story (with hints of Annihilation ) is historical Total War since 2011’s Shogun 2. really what keeps you hooked. It goes places.

VOID BASTARDS TRAILER: GO.PCWORLD.COM/VOB Moment-to-moment, Void Bastards is like an infinitely replayable System Shock, as you trawl through a series of abandoned spaceships for food, fuel, and ammo. Each ship incursion takes maybe five minutes, with randomized elements like “No Power” adding additional hurdles—and enemies that get more difficult as you go deeper into the Nebula. Observation But your goals are nonsense like “Find a Line Printer,” with which you’ll create an ID card that OBSERVATION TRAILER: GO.PCWORLD.COM/OBSER “Observation is kind of 2001: A Space Odyssey—but you’re HAL.” I maintain you only need that single-sentence description from No Code’s lead writer Jon McKellan to know whether Observation (go.pcworld. com/obse) might be up your alley. You are Systems Administration & Mainte- nance, or SAM for short—the artificial intelli- gence aboard a space station that ends up far Void Bastards

108 PCWorld AUGUST 2019 Heaven’s Vault doesn’t work. Not without an HR Computer at ing around the Nebula, walking around various least, for which you’ll need a Mouse Ball and planets—are the least interesting facets, and you other space garbage. Every time you die, you’re do them a lot. Less, after the game’s post-release given a new space felon to try again—with patches, but they still comprise a significant randomized traits like “Smoker,” meaning you portion of the experience. cough every few seconds and alert enemies. The writing makes up for it, though. Inkle And did I mention S.T.E.V.? He’s your handy AI already demonstrated its prowess with 80 guide, who chimes in with advice like “Note to Days and Sorcery!, but Heaven’s Vault is its self: Issue more bullets to replacement client.” most ambitious work of interactive fiction yet, It’s one of the most satisfying and reward- a sprawling archaeological sim of sorts, ing run-based games I’ve played in years, and comprised of dozens (maybe hundreds) of hilarious to boot. different story branches that still manage to coalesce into an engaging sci-fi story. And HEAVEN’S VAULT how well you understand that story also TRAILER: GO.PCWORLD.COM/HV depends on how deep you delve into its Heaven’s Vault (go.pcworld.com/hva) has some translation side, with a “lost” language for the rough edges. Its more action-oriented bits—sail- player to slowly decipher as they explore the

AUGUST 2019 PCWorld 109 FEATURE

Outer Wilds

Nebula—for the first, fifth, or tenth time. it in your first-ever playthrough—provided you A linguistics-based puzzle game won’t be to looked up the answer, where to go and what to everyone’s taste, but it’s very much to my taste, do. More likely: You’ll die, either by crashing and I’ve rarely felt smarter than when I finally into a planet at top speed (as I did), or in a blaze deciphered the rules to Heaven’s Vault’s glyphs. of glory as the clock expires. But you could finish it, because nothing BEST OF 2019 (SO FAR): about Outer Wilds changes. Only your OUTER WILDS knowledge changes, as you uncover short- TRAILER: GO.PCWORLD.COM/OWI cuts that make it easier to get to hidden areas, The music swells and I stop. By now, I know or chart when and where certain events occur exactly what those first musical cues mean: so you can be in the right spot next time, or The universe is about to end again. My 22 learn in one area a heretofore-unknown minutes is up. I settle in to watch the sun mechanic that will get you past an obstacle in explode, already planning where I’m going to another area. The story is told in scraps of a explore the next time out. lost language—reminiscent of Heaven’s Vault, Outer Wilds is incredible. It’s a clockwork, a albeit without the translation mechanic. By solar system in miniature that’s trapped in a time the end you’ll have an idea of how and why loop. The same events play out every run, with the time loop occurred, and what to do about 22 minutes to explore any planet you’d like and it, assembling the story like a puzzle. uncover its secrets. You could theoretically finish Outer Wilds is what an adventure game

110 PCWorld AUGUST 2019 should be in the modern era, full of breathtak- not on the actual list, so who cares?” Kiwami is ing vistas and packed with secrets that make it one of the best games I’ve played this year, and a delight to explore, and meticulously the perfect entry-point to the series for some- designed so even without any guidance the one who doesn’t want to spend 50 or 60 player can string its breadcrumbs together, hours on Yakuza 0. I took that route, and I think figure out where to go next and what to do to it’s the better option because some of the story bring the journey one step closer to its end. moments hit harder having played the prequel and spent more time with those characters. BONUS: YAKUZA KIWAMI Kiwami gives you a bite-sized introduction to TRAILER: GO.PCWORLD.COM/YAKI what makes the series special, condensing the In the interest of letting another proper 2019 typical Yakuza experience down into 20 or 25 release get on this list, I’m relegating Yakuza straightforward hours, and putting longtime Kiwami (go.pcworld.com/yk) to the “Honor- protagonist Kazuma Kiryu through some able Mention” section. After all, it came out harrowing events before it’s all over. on consoles three years ago—and is a remake It’s a soap opera, but it’s a great one, and of a game from 2006, no less. I’m glad Sega’s porting these games over to Don’t skip it though. Don’t think “Ah, it’s the PC at last.

Yakuza Kiwami

AUGUST 2019 PCWorld 111 I SERVE LUNCH AT MY CHILD’S SCHOOL, BUT STILL CAN’T AFFORD TO PUT FOOD ON OUR TABLE. Melissa, Michigan

HUNGER IS A STORY WE CAN END.

FEEDINGAMERICA.ORG HOW TO BUILD, MAINTAIN, Here’s How AND FIX YOUR TECH GEAR

How to back up your Google Photos library without auto-sync The useful Google Drive auto-sync feature bites the dust. BY MICHAEL SIMON

ver since Google Photos and its of photos in their original quality. unlimited high-quality cloud On July 10 (go.pcworld.com/chan), that storage arrived, Google has changed. Google said that Drive sync was included a handy backup causing confusion with users, so Photos will Emethod with your Google Drive. As long as no longer include an option (go.pcworld. you had the Google Drive toggle ﬂipped in com/rchn) to sync with Google Drive. You’ll the Google Photos settings (and enough still be able to back up your photos in space in your Drive), everything added to original quality if you choose, but you’ll no Google Photos synced back to Google longer see new photos appear on your Drive, so you could create a personal library Drive. Similarly, anything you add to the

IMAGE: GOOGLE AUGUST 2019 PCWorld 113 HERE’S HOW BACK UP YOUR GOOGLE PHOTOS LIBRARY

Photos folders in Google Drive will no video that resides in both places will take up longer automatically appear in Google twice the space. Photos. So keeping a rolling backup of your Photos folder photos is going to take some work. Here’s If you previously opted to use Google Drive what’s changing and what your options are to back up your Google Photos, you won’t for creating a backup: be able to do that anymore. Any photos that were synced until the minute Google turned GOOGLE DRIVE oﬀ the functionality will remain in your folder. Storage You can do whatever you’d like with them, Like before, Google will store high-quality but photos deleted from Google Drive will photos and videos in Photos for free, so no longer be removed from Photos. they won’t aﬀect the space in your Google Drive. If you opt for Original Quality, UPLOAD FROM DRIVE however, Google Photos will use some of Google has added a new feature to Google the space in your Google Drive to store Photos called Upload From Drive. Similar to your library, even though you won’t be able the Upload button and the drag-and-drop to see or access the photos. Any photo or method, it will let you select photos and videos directly from your Google Drive and import them into Photos. Once something is uploaded to Google Photos, it will live in two places and take up twice the storage. And if you delete a photo from one place, the other will remain.

BACKUP AND SYNC For years, Google has

The photos in your Google Photos folder in Google Drive won’t be oﬀered a Backup And deleted, but new ones won’t be added anymore. Sync app (go.pcworld.

114 PCWorld AUGUST 2019 download a complete copy of your Google Photos archive. It’s not quite as quick or seamless as the Google Drive sync, but it’ll do the trick. To get started, head over to the Data & Personalization tab in your

To back up your full Google Photos library, you’re going to need to download an Google Account, archive first. scroll down and select com/bcup) for Macs and PCs that lets you Download Your Data. There are quite a few easily sync photos and videos from your categories to choose from, but you’ll want desktop to your Google Drive or Google to deselect them all and look for Google Photos. It’s not a two-way street like the Photos. Click the checkbox and then scroll current Google Photos–Google Drive down to Next Step. On the next screen, integration (meaning you’ll need to upload you’ll be able to choose the delivery photos and videos to both places), but you method, ﬁle type, and archive size, as well as can pick individual folders to automatically how often you want to receive a copy of your sync as soon as you ﬁre up your PC. Any new archive. Then select Create Archive to images and videos on your PC will be generate your library. available through Google Drive. It might take a while to deliver depending on the size of your library, and DOWNLOAD A PHOTO then even longer to download once it’s ARCHIVE ready. But your photos will be neatly If you want to make sure you have a arranged in folders by date, so they can then backup of your photos in addition to the be uploaded to Google Drive or stored on one on Google Photos, you can still an external drive, whichever you prefer.

AUGUST 2019 PCWorld 115 HERE’S HOW

ƹZD\VWRILQGWKHSHUIHFW79 VKRZRUPRYLHRQ1HWIOL[ Stop browsing and start watching. BY BEN PATTERSON

etflix offers an embarrassment that instead of having thousands of videos to of video riches considering its choose from, you have just a few dozen. modest monthly price tag, but Once you know what you’re doing, picking just the right TV show though, you can take a deep dive into Net- oNr movie on a given night isn’t the chillaxing flix’s collection of movies and TV episodes, experience it should be. slicing and dicing its categories to pinpoint Indeed, the busy Netflix interface fre- the perfect video for the moment. You can quently pushes the same recommendations also help Netflix make better guesses at what over and over, leaving the false impression you’ll like. Finally, you can easily save your

116 PCWorld AUGUST 2019 picks for later, making it easy to fire up a favorite flick with a minimum of fuss. Note: Because Netflix’s interface varies so much from device to device, we’ve focused our tips on the desktop version of Netflix— and besides, we think you’ll have better success honing in on You can browse Netflix’s (somewhat broad) categories once you filter its selec- great Netflix videos tion by TV shows or movies. on a desktop rather than fiddling with an Apple TV remote or your “Documentaries” for movies and “Anime” and smartphone. We’ll also show you how to add “Stand-Up & Talk Shows” on the TV side. favorite videos to a list that’s easy to access on other versions of the Netflix app. BROWSE MORE REFINED CATEGORIES FILTER BY GENRE Browsing Netflix’s genres is a good first step We all know the feeling of scrolling aimlessly toward finding the perfect video, but the catego- through one Netflix category after another, ries listed in the genres menu are much more from “Reality TV” and “TV Dramas” to “Thrill- broad than the sliced-and-diced collections listed ers” and “Suspenseful Movies.” If you’d rather in the main Netflix interface. What if you’re in the not just passively browse through the catego- mood for, say, a spy movie, a western, a classic ries that Netflix chooses to serve up, there’s musical, or a sports drama? There’s a way to pick an easy way to do it. and choose between dozens of niche Netflix First, click either TV Shows or Movies at categories, but it requires a little legwork. the top of the Netflix homepage. Once you On your desktop, go to Netflix-Codes.com. do, a Genres pull-down menu will appear. No, we’re not talking discount codes here; Click it to reveal a selection of about 20 instead, the site lists scores of codes that you different genres, from “Action” and can paste into a Netflix URL. Just plug in the

AUGUST 2019 PCWorld 117 HERE’S HOW FIND THE PERFECT SHOW ON NETFLIX

In the mood for a western? Netflix-Codes.com makes it easy to browse Netflix’s impressive collection of niche categories.

code (or, even easier, just right-click the code by year from the desktop Netflix interface on the webpage) to jump to any number of (click TV Shows or Movies, click the grid icon laser-focused Netflix categories, from “Comic in the upper-right corner, and then select Year book and superhero movies” and “Film noir” to Released from the drop-down), you’ll need to “Deep sea horror movies” (seriously) and scroll and scroll to get past the 2010s—and “Food & travel shows.” It’s a great way to no, you can’t reverse sort by year. uncover some of Netflix’s hidden gems. Enter InstantWatcher.com, a site that lets you filter Netflix videos by year or rating. FILTER BY YEAR OR RATING Click Search from the InstantWatcher home- The vast majority of shows and movies that page, and then use the sliders to filter TV appear on the Netflix homepage hail from the shows and movies by the year they were past five years or so. If you want to see some- released (a bar chart reveals in dramatic thing from the 1990s or earlier, you’ll need to fashion how heavily Netflix videos are dig. And while you can sort Netflix’s listings weighted toward recent releases), their

118 PCWorld AUGUST 2019

average Netflix rating, their IMDb rating, number of IMDb votes, and run time. Below the sliders, you’ll find a series of checkboxes that give you even more filtering options. You can filter by rating (MPAA or TV), for example, or see a listing of videos that got flagged as New York Times “Critics’ Picks” or “Fresh” according to Rotten Tomatoes. You can review, change, or even wipe the ratings RATE AS MANY VIDEOS that you’ve assigned to Netflix videos. AS YOU CAN can help nudge its algorithms in the right Netflix can have some strange ideas about the direction. videos it thinks you want to watch, but you Whenever you can, be sure to click one of

InstantWatcher.com features a series of sliders that let you filter Netflix’s videos by year, rating, and more.

AUGUST 2019 PCWorld 119 HERE’S HOW FIND THE PERFECT SHOW ON NETFLIX

The “More Like This” section can be essential for finding your next Netflix video, provided you’re on the right platform.

the two thumbs on the title page of a Netflix Account, and then click Ratings under the video, up or down (a much easier ratings My Profile heading. Once there, you can system than the old five-star scale). The more click a thumb to change an old rating, or movies and TV shows you rate, the better click the X to wipe the rating completely. Netflix’s recommendations will become. Don’t be afraid to rate a video you haven’t FIND RELATED MOVIES seen; if, say, torture movies aren’t your bag, One of the easiest ways to find a movie or just click thumbs-down on sight. a TV show you’ll like is by checking the You can also review all your previous related videos of your favorites. Depend- ratings, which is handy if you’ve changed ing on your platform, however, Netflix your mind about a given title. Just hover your does a spotty job of recommending mouse over your profile icon in the top-right movies and shows based on the videos corner of the Netflix homepage, click you’re browsing.

120 PCWorld AUGUST 2019 The Netflix on my Apple TV, for example, Luckily, the queue—er, My List—has doesn’t show related videos at all, while the regained favor, and you can now find it Netflix iOS app has a “More Like This” prominently positioned at the top of the section prominently placed on the title page Netflix interface for desktop and most other of a video. platforms, which is handy for quickly access- If your Netflix app of choice isn’t serving ing the videos you’ve flagged for later. up related video, just visit Netflix on your On a desktop, you can reorder your list, desktop, hover over a title, click the down- just like in the old days. Just click on a title arrow that appears on the bottom, and then and drag it up or down. You can also click click More Like This. Move To Top to jump a selection to the top of your list. REDISCOVER YOUR LIST Another nifty feature of My List for the So, you’ve found some Netflix videos you’re desktop is that it notes which of your saved dying to watch. Now what? Well, those of us videos are about to disappear from Netflix’s who were loyal Netflix-by-mail subscribers ever-rotating selection, so be sure to check will remember the vaunted Netflix queue, a back often before that favorite film heads to a place where we carefully curated the list of Netflix competitor. scores or even hundreds of movies and shows we wanted to watch. As it began its slow shift away from DVDs and toward streaming, Netflix seemingly tired of the queue, eventually renaming it My List and shuffling it into a hard-to-find row in the main Yes, your queue—or rather, My List—is still around, and you can rearrange your interface. list with ease on a desktop.

AUGUST 2019 PCWorld 121 HERE’S HOW

How to get free books for your Amazon Kindle Thousands of free Kindle books are out there. You just have to know where to look. BY SÉAMUS BELLAMY

hen you own an Amazon deal could take forever. Many titles can be had for Kindle, the cost of two bucks or less, but it takes work to find the supporting a voracious gems among the dross. reading habit can get very What you need are some solid options for sWteep, very quickly. A quick glance at Amazon’s finding free, absorbing content to devour on list of the Best Books of the Month shows that a your Kindle. We’re more than happy to point decent read can set you back between $13 and you in the right direction. (And if you need a $15 for a Kindle edition book. Sure, Amazon new e-reader, find one among our reviews of offers deals on great ebooks, but waiting for a the best Kindles [go.pcworld.com/bki].)

122 PCWorld AUGUST 2019 Updated July 2, 2019 with additional resources. just as you would any other connected drive. In your Kindle’s file directory, you’ll see two file PROJECT GUTENBERG folders: Documents and Fonts (if you own a At last count, Project Gutenberg (go.pcworld. Kindle Oasis, there will also be a third folder, com/pgu) offered 57,245 free ebooks that called Audible). Drag and drop the .mobi file can be downloaded in a number of formats, you downloaded from the Project Gutenberg including ones that are readable on a Kindle website into your Kindle’s Document file and E-Reader. You won’t find any new releases disconnect the device once the file transfer is here, with good reason: All of the titles complete. Boom: You’re ready to start reading. available though Project Gutenberg are in the One word of caution: If you live outside of public domain, either because the copyright the United States, downloading the books on the work has expired or because the from Project Gutenberg might not be legal. Be holder of the book’s copyright has given the sure to check your local laws before pulling the project’s organizers permission to provide trigger on any books you find here. access to it at no cost. That said, you’ll find plenty of amazing OVERDRIVE books to read. Some of the greatest tomes in If you’ve got a library card, you’ve got access to the English language are in the public domain: free ebooks. OverDrive (go.pcworld.com/ovd) Moby Dick, Anne of Green Gables, A Study in is an online service that allows library card Scarlett and Beowulf are all there and ready for the taking. (Project Gutenberg provides some content in 49 other languages as well.) To get Project Gutenberg books onto your Kindle, download the book you want to read. Then, attach your e-reader to your PC with a USB cable and With over 57,000 free books to read on your Kindle, Project Gutenberg open it in File Explorer, should keep you busy for a while.

AUGUST 2019 PCWorld 123 HERE’S HOW HOW TO GET FREE BOOKS ON KINDLE

With OverDrive, your local library becomes your Kindle’s best friend.

holders to download free ebooks (and movies Just like a brick-and-mortar library with and audio content, too) from their public library, actual books on its shelves, only one person school or institution’s collection to their Kindles. can take out a book on OverDrive at a time. If The more library cards you have in your name, a book is available, click Borrow and follow the more books you have access to. the prompts. The service also provides a Using OverDrive is dead simple. After well-written help section to walk you through entering your library card number and the PIN the process. Depending on your library’s assigned to you when you were issued your rules, you may be able to choose from a card (if you can’t remember it, ask your number of loan periods. If a book’s unavail- librarian), you’ll have access to all of the able, many libraries will allow you to join a digital content that your library has in its waiting list. When your turn comes around, collection. The more libraries you belong to, OverDrive will let you know. the better chance there is of finding some- That’s the good stuff. Now for the bad: thing you’ll want to read. Not all libraries offer Kindle-ready editions of

124 PCWorld AUGUST 2019 the ebooks that they have in their collection. corner of the Amazon homepage. Choose Many libraries serve up digital content as an Your Content & Devices. You should see a list Adobe Digital Editions file—a format that’s not of all of the Kindle ebooks you’ve ever compatible with Amazon’s E-Ink devices. bought. Next to the title of each book, you’ll note a gray square with three dots on it. Click SWAP KINDLE BOOKS WITH it, and a list of all of the options for this title will A FRIEND appear. If Loan This Title is on the list, you’re in While Amazon keeps it quiet, some ebooks business. Clicking it will take you to a page purchased via the Kindle Store can be loaned that lets you send the book to the friend of out to your friends. Just hope that they’ll your choosing’s email address. Your Kindle return the favor from time to time! ebooks can be lent out for a 14-day period, To loan out a Kindle ebook, sign into during which time you won’t have access to Amazon.com and open the Account & Lists the title, yourself—just as if you’d lent a book drop-down menu, located in the top right to a pal from the shelf in your living room.

Amazon doesn’t advertise the fact that you can loan books to friends, but the option is there and it’s fabulous.

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Amazon allows two adults in the same family to share the books they buy with one another.

SHARE BOOKS WITH YOUR (go.pcworld.com/oli) provides access to well SIGNIFICANT OTHER over one million free ebooks. It bills its offerings Not the only Kindle owner in your family? You’re as “the world’s classic literature at your finger- in luck! Amazon allows a maximum of two adults tips,” but that doesn’t mean it’s a museum of per family to share Kindle eBooks with one moldy oldies. While you’ll find enough literary another. So, if your partner buys an ebook from canon to make an AP English teacher beam with the Kindle Store, you can read it too, for free. Just joy, the virtual shelves are also stocked with log in to Amazon’s website and go to your bestselling authors like Stephen King and Tom Account Settings > Your Content & Devices. Clancy, kid-lit series like Captain Underpants Click Households And Family Library. From here, and Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and a host of aca- choose your Family library sharing settings. demic texts. Given Open Library’s stated goal is “to make all the published works of humankind OPEN LIBRARY available to everyone in the world,” you’re likely A project of the Internet Archive, Open Library to find what you’re looking for here.

126 PCWorld AUGUST 2019 than 20 million currently— as so many books aren’t yet available in digital form. For records that are linked to ebooks, multiple editions are listed (James Joyce’s Ulysses, for example, is offered in 184 editions), each with its own download directory. To search for a book, make sure Show Only eBooks is checked and enter the title or author. Depending on the title, books can be read Open Library offers well over one million free ebooks, but many are subject to your local fair use laws. online or downloaded in a variety of formats includ- Depending on the title, books can be ing PDF, plain text, ePub, and MOBI. You’ll downloaded or borrowed. The first group is need to sideload the downloaded file onto composed mostly of public domain classics. your Kindle. Popular contemporary fiction makes up much of the latter. In all cases, the books are scanned from paper copies, which may raise legal questions depending on your locale. Open Library is aware of this as it states in its licensing disclaimer (go.pcworld.com/ldi) “There may be existing rights issues on some contributions and in some jurisdictions.” Make sure to check your local fair use laws before downloading any of these titles. At its heart, though, Open Library is a Smashwords also provides access to more than to community-driven library catalog. Indeed, it more than 80,000 free ebooks from independent has vastly more records than books—more authors and publishers.

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SMASHWORDS GOODREADS If your reading tastes trend left of the best- Given that Amazon owns Goodreads (go. sellers list, Smashwords (go.pcworld.com/ pcworld.com/gdr), it’s hardly shocking the smh) may be for you. Ostensibly a free retailer provides a direct link to its store for every ebook publishing and distribution platform title on its site. But you may not know it also for indie authors, it also provides readers offers direct downloads of ebooks. There are with storefront access to more than 500,000 about 2,500 of these available, many of which titles, about 80,300 of which are available are free. There aren’t a lot of popular titles here, free of charge. but there are several interesting ones including a Books are organized by category—fiction, few books in the James Potter series, a fan-fiction non-fiction, essay, plays, screenplays, and sequel set in the Harry Potter universe. poetry. To get to the gratis offerings, select Available freebies are identifiable by a button Free from the filter bars at the top of the page, under the Get a Copy section of the book record then select a genre to start discovering new (the verbiage varies, but “Download eBook” and voices. Books can be read online or down- “Kindle $0.00” are dead giveaways). However loaded in a range of Kindle-compatible finding them among the many thousands of titles formats. It’s also noteworthy that Smashwords on Goodreads is a needle-in-a-haystack proposi- publishes books in languages and dialects tion. Fortunately, you can find all available ebooks besides American English, and this info is aggregated here (go.pcworld.com/aea). included in each book’s description. Once you find a book that interests you,

Goodreads offers free direct downloads of some interesting titles.

128 PCWorld AUGUST 2019 also a regularly updated “editor’s choice” selection of books and a section of trending titles. If you’re overwhelmed by the options, start with the editors’ “Ultimate Guide to Our Most Popular Free eBooks,” (go.pcworld. com/ugi) which offers a detailed rundown of classic public domain books by genre, including such favorites as Jane Eyre, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and War of the Worlds. Each book record provides publishing details, a plot summary, and a text excerpt. These are accessible to anyone to read, but Manybooks has free downloads of classic and contemporary titles. you need to register for an account to download the book itself. Once you click the down- click the appropriate link to download it to load link, you just need to choose the appro- your computer. From there, you can side load priate format, which Manybooks will save as it onto your Kindle. your preferred option in your profile if you didn’t already do so when you registered. MANYBOOKS Manybooks (go.pcworld. com/mab) comes by its name honestly. There are more than 50,000 free ebooks here, ranging from public domain titles to offerings from independent and lesser-known contemporary authors. The site has an easy-to-navigate tiled interface that allows you to explore by a dozen DigiLibraries has a simple, if not exciting, site with 30,000 free ebooks in popular genres. There’s Kindle formats.

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DIGILIBRARIES DigiLibraries (go. pcworld.com/dlc) is an online book catalog that boasts around 30,000 ebooks in Kindle formats, all of them free. Books are sorted into dozens of categories and sub-categories, and the selection is predictably heavy on public domain titles. (You’ll find Pride and

Prejudice under Juvenile Book Lending matches Kindle ebook loaners with borrowers. Fiction, not Diary of a Wimpy Kid.) Using the site couldn’t be simpler. If you’re The site won’t win any design awards, but looking for a book, press the big orange button everything is laid out clearly. You can select on the homepage and either search for a title or from a list of genres in a left sidebar—most of browse available loans. If you want to loan a which open to sub-genre choices. Curated book, press the giant green button and look up selections of popular and new ebooks are a specific title or browse recent requests. In prominently displayed in the center of the either case, if the book is available for borrowing homepage with cover photos. or lending it will display a small orange or green Each book record includes a text excerpt button, respectively, in its record. Just press the and three download formats: ePub, PDF, and appropriate one to complete the transaction. Mobi. The site limits you to 50 downloads per Borrowers receive an email notification from day, which should be plenty, I dare say. Amazon that allows them to download the eBook to their Kindle, and they have seven days BOOK LENDING to do it. Amazon’s lending rules apply here just If you don’t have a library card or your library as if you were borrowing directly from the store. doesn’t subscribe to Overdrive, Book Lending Titles can be borrowed for 14 days, during (go.pcworld.com/ble) is a great alternative. which they are unavailable to the lender, and are The site leverages Amazon’s Kindle lending automatically returned at the end of that period. feature to match lenders with borrowers. Also, a title can be loaned only once.

130 PCWorld AUGUST 2019 Jacob Sanchez Diagnosed with autism

Sensory sensitivity is a sign of autism. Learn the others at autismspeaks.org/signs.