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SEPTEMBER 2018

SAMSUNG

GALAXY

NOTE 9 What a $1,250 Android phone feels like

N SO R: IS SU E SP O

PLUS: NVIDIA’S RTX TECHNOLOGY Brings ray tracing to consumer graphics JANUARY 2017 MACWORLD 1

SEPTEMBER 2018

SAMSUNG

GALAXY

NOTE 9 What a $1,250 Android phone feels like

2 MACWORLD MONTH 2017

PLUS: NVIDIA’S RTX TECHNOLOGY Brings ray tracing to consumer graphics

CONTENTS

SEPTEMBER 2018

» DEPARTMENTS

» FEATURES

7 News

35 Reviews & Ratings

90 NVMe SSDs: Everything you need to know

111 Here’s How

134 Tech Spotlight

100 Samsung can fix the Galaxy Note 9’s biggest problem SEPTEMBER 2018 PCWorld 3

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4 PCWorld SEPTEMBER 2018

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News

TECH NEWS AND TRENDS THAT WILL AFFECT YOU TODAY AND BEYOND.

Samsung Galaxy Note 9 hands‑on: This is what a $1,250 Android phone feels like Another first for the Note. BY MICHAEL SIMON

T

he Note 9 doesn’t come in black.

That was the second biggest surprise Samsung had for me during my Note 9 briefing in early August.

IMAGE: MICHAEL SIMON

The first was the price: $1,000 for the 128GB base model and an eye-popping $1,250 for the 512GB version. That’s $100 more than the top-of-the-line iPhone X (which only has 256GB of storage), for those keeping score.

SEPTEMBER 2018 PCWorld 7

NEWS

SAMSUNG GAL A X Y NOTE 9 HANDS - ON

So Samsung’s Note 9 brings another first for the Android world: sticker shock.

Otherwise, Samsung’s newest phablet is pretty much exactly what I expected it to be, what with an endless stream of leaks and rumors spilling nearly every bean there was to be spilled. I already knew about the processor, the new S Pen, the storage increase, and the AI camera. The Note 9 is basically a Note 8 (go.pcworld.com/n8rv) with Galaxy S9+ specs (go.pcworld.com/ s9rv) and a more logical fingerprint sensor placement.

The display is a tenth of an inch bigger than its predecessor, but I might not have noticed when I picked up the Note 9 for the first time, if not for its weight. The Note 8 is already one of the heaviest phones you can buy, but the new Note adds noticeable heft, pushing it over the 200 gram mark.

But the Note has never been designed for use with one hand, so that probably won’t be an issue for anyone who buys one. The new handset doesn’t bring any truly revolutionary features or wild innovations like prior Galaxy phones, but if you’re a Note fan, No. 9 checks off more than enough upgrade boxes. Whether that’s worth four figures is another story.

full specs of the Note 9 at go.pcworld.com/ s9sp, but you can pretty much guess what a phone costing $1,000 in late 2018 has on the inside. Of note, Samsung has doubled the base storage from 64GB to 128GB, but real power users will be more intrigued by the 512GB version. That’s twice the storage Apple offers on the top-of-the-line iPhone X. The 512GB model also comes with 8GB of RAM, the most ever in a Note phone.

It also packs a 4,000mAh battery, another first for a Galaxy phone and a decent 20 percent boost over the Note 8’s 3,300mAh cell. Samsung is well aware that the Note 7 recall is still fresh in our minds, so I was assured that the new phone has gone through the same rigorous testing as every other post-Note 7 phone.

Samsung could have easily put a 3,500mAh battery in the Note 9 and called it a day, so it’s good to see the envelope being pushed again. Buyers of the Note—especially

PACKED WITH POWER The target audience for the Note has always been power users, and the Note 9 is squarely aimed at multi-taskers (or, as Samsung calls them, hyper taskers). You can check out the 8 PCWorld SEPTEMBER 2018

The fingerprint sensor on the Galaxy Note 9 is in a better spot this year.

ones willing to pay over $1,000 for one—are more interested in power than AR Emoji, and Samsung has certainly delivered with the Note.

The only knock on its spec sheet is that it’s still running an OS based on Oreo, which is technically outdated now that Pie has arrived.

ANOTHER CAMERA WITH AI INSIDE The camera inside the Note 9 is the That tiny fork-and-knife icon lets you know the Note 9’s camera most surprising feature, precisely has recognized it’s looking at food. because there are no hardware upgrades. Spec-wise, it’s identical to the S9+, feature geared toward a cheaper phone with right down to the gimmicky Dual Aperture. more mass appeal, like the S9.

What’s different is a dose of artificial intelligence in the form of an optional scene THE S PEN IS MIGHTIER optimizer. We’ve already seen similar systems Specs and smarts aside, the main reason for in phones like the Mate 10 Pro and the LG G7 the Note’s existence has always started and ThinQ with varying results, so it remains to be ended with the S-Pen. The Note is one of the seen if it’s successful on the Note 9. few phones to come with a stylus on board, Here’s how it works: Samsung has and Samsung has done well to integrate the S preloaded some 20 scenes for things like Pen into the Note experience over the years, food, sunsets, and plants. Point the camera at with the Air Command menu and Screen Off an object and the Note 9 will attempt to Memos bringing unique features that you identify what it’s looking at via a small icon won’t find on any other phone. above the shutter. I only got to test it with very The S Pen on the Note 9 doesn’t look or obvious things like plants and fruit, but it feel any differently than the one on the Note 8 switched settings quickly and did a fine job (aside from the new yellow and lavender adjusting color, contrast, and white balance, colors), but there is one major change. at least to my eyes. I’ll be sure to test it Samsung has finally added Bluetooth Low thoroughly in my full review, but at first blush, I Energy to its S Pen, giving it the ability to wasn’t blown away. It seems more like a control the phone remotely without needing SEPTEMBER 2018 PCWorld 9

NEWS

SAMSUNG GAL A X Y NOTE 9 HANDS - ON

to touch the pen’s tip to the screen. It’s a big upgrade with tons of potential, but the applications are pretty limited at launch.

Since the pen does all of its pairing and charging when inserted into the phone, it’s a remarkably simple process, but I’m not sure how often people will take advantage of its remote capabilities or even know they’re available. Samsung showed off its ability to control the camera remotely just by pressing the S Pen’s button, and there are a few other obvious uses while playing music or advancing slides. Music control is probably the most useful—especially with its Dolby Atmos-ready stereo speakers—but even so, I failed to find an immediate killer use.

Maybe that will change over time. Just a handful of apps will work with the new S Pen at launch, and ultimately its usefulness will be dependent on developers’ creativity.

Thankfully, all of the old S Pen functions still

work, even if the stylus isn’t charged. But lack of juice will never be an issue. The S Pen is constantly charging when cradled, and needs just 40 seconds to get enough juice for a half-hour of use.

IS THE NOTE 9 WORTH THE PRICE?

The final piece of the Note’s productivity push is DeX. Like the Note 8, the Note 9 can be expanded to run on an external monitor, but you don’t need to buy a $100 accessory anymore. Just a single USB-C-to-HDMI adapter will do the trick, significantly lowering the bar for adoption. It basically works the same as the docked version—plug it in, add a keyboard, and use your phone as a trackpad—but the new connection is both cheaper and more portable. We already saw this on the Galaxy Tab S4 that launched last week (go.pcworld.com/tbs4), and it’s a great evolution of an underrated feature.

But for all its abilities, the most stunning thing about the Note 9 might be its price. Of course, Apple was the first to sell a four-figure phone, but the iPhone X represents a dramatic change for the iPhone with new tech and a radical design. The Note 9 is a incremental update with an outdated operating system.

And this year you can’t even buy You can still use the S Pen on the Note like before, which is what one in black. most people will probably do.

10 PCWorld SEPTEMBER 2018

Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti are loaded with boundary-pushing graphics tech They boast hardware for real-time ray tracing and enough power to drive 4K G-Sync HDR displays. Those prices, though. BY BRAD CHACOS

T

he wait is over, friends. After a week of rampant rumors and outright teasing by Nvidia itself (go.pcworld.com/nvts), CEO Jensen Huang proudly revealed the longawaited GeForce RTX 2080 and GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, powered by the company’s radical next-gen Turing GPU (go.pcworld.com/nxtr),

IMAGE: NVIDIA

at an event ahead of Gamescom in Cologne, Germany.

These graphics cards look like beasts, infused with dedicated tensor and RT cores to accelerate real-time ray tracing, the Holy Grail of gaming graphics (go.pcworld.com/hlgr), and enough visual firepower to feed 4K G-Sync HDR displays, the Holy Grail of SEPTEMBER 2018 PCWorld 11

NEWS

NVIDIA GEFORCE RT X 2080 & RT X 2080 TI

gaming monitors (go.pcworld.com/hlgm).

They’re equipped with a cutting-edge VirtualLink VR connection, too, and a speedier SLI connection called NVLink.

The $999 GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition blows past the GTX 1080 Ti, and the $699 GeForce RTX 2080 far outpaces the previous-gen flagship in real-time ray-tracing operations. That makes them among the first consumer GPUs capable of keeping up with Nvidia’s beastly new $2,000 4K G-Sync HDR monitors, the Acer Predator X27 (go.pcworld. com/bx27) and Asus ROG Swift PG27UQ (go. pcworld.com/b27u), without begging for mercy—albeit at a hefty price. Previously, only the GTX 1080 Ti and swanky Titan-class hardware could feed the ravenous displays. Nvidia also announced a $499 GeForce RTX 2070.

These boundary-pushing graphics cards are built for the future of gaming, today—but with expensive prices that’ll keep you saving your pennies for a while, too. Let’s dig in!

Memory path: 352 bits Memory bandwidth: 616GBps Ports: VirtualLink/USB-C, DisplayPort 1.4, HDMI 2.0b Power: 2 x 8-pin, 250W TDP stock, 265W TDP OC Founders Edition Release date: September 20, 2018 Price: $999 stock, $1,199 Founders Edition

GEFORCE RTX 2080 TI AND RTX 2080 SPECS, PRICE, AND RELEASE DATE

By comparison, the older GTX 1080 Ti features 3,584 CUDA cores with up to a 1,600MHz boost clock.

The GeForce RTX 2080 Ti and RTX 2080 are built on TSMC’s 12nm manufacturing process, an optimization of the previous generation’s 16nm, and should see some performance benefits as a result. That GeForce RTX 2080 Ti looks like a performance monster—and it should at that price!

Here’s a quick list of specs for the tl;dr crowd: GeForce RTX 2080 Ti: CUDA cores: 4,352 Clock speed: 1350MHz base, 1545MHz boost, 1635MHz boost (OC Founder’s Edition) Memory capacity: 11GB GDDR6 12 PCWorld SEPTEMBER 2018

GeForce RTX 2080: CUDA cores: 2,944 Clock speed: 1515MHz base, 1710MHz boost, 1800MHz OC Founders Edition Memory capacity: 8GB GDDR6 Memory path: 256 bits Memory bandwidth: 448GBps Ports: VirtualLink/USB-C, DisplayPort 1.4, HDMI 2.0b Power: One 6-pin, one 8-pin Release date: September 20, 2018 Price: $699 stock, $799 OC Founders Edition

Screenshot from Battlefield V raytracing trailer.

It’s interesting that the GeForce RTX 2080 bears significantly fewer CUDA cores than the GTX 1080 Ti, and only 400 or so more than the older GTX 1080. Even with the benefits of 12nm and a restructured streaming multiprocessor architecture, the RTX 2080 might not outpunch the GTX 1080 Ti by much in games using the traditional rasterization rendering technology alone.

That covers, er, pretty much all games right now, though Nvidia said Battlefield V, Metro Exodus and Shadow of the Tomb Raider will be among the first games to bake in support for ray tracing. If ray tracing gets popular, the dedicated RT hardware inside newer RTX 2080 cards would give them a big leg up over the GTX 1080 Ti’s performance.

Either way, the Battlefield V ray-tracing trailer looks stunning (go.pcworld.com/bvtr).

The last-gen GTX 1080 Ti also featured 11GB of RAM, but of the older GDDR5X

variety, hitting a total memory bandwidth of 484GBps. The fact that the RTX 2080 Ti hits 616GBps with a similarly-sized memory bus shows the speed advantage of GDDR6 RAM. These are the first consumer graphics cards equipped with it.

Nvidia designed a new cooling system to tame all the cores—the first dual fan, nonblower-style cooler in its history, and one that Nvidia says is engineered for maximum overclocks. Fully cranked, CEO Jensen Huang says the card puts out one-fifth of the audio output of the GTX 1080. To that end, Nvidia is selling its premium Founders Edition cards with overclocks out of the box this time around, rather than stock speeds— another first.

The price surely grew, however, and Nvidia’s own Founders Edition cards sell for a higher premium than ever as a result. While the GTX 1080 cost $600 at launch, or $700 SEPTEMBER 2018 PCWorld 13

NEWS

NVIDIA GEFORCE RT X 2080 & RT X 2080 TI

for a Founders Edition version from Nvidia, the RTX 2080 Founders Edition costs a staggering $699, or $799 for a Founders Edition. And the RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition Nvidia also revealed the GeForce RTX 2070. rockets past the $1,000 barrier all the way to $1,199, with CUDA cores: 2,304 prices for non-Founders cards staring at Clock speed: 1,410MHz base, 1,620MHz $999. The GTX 1080 Ti cost $700 by boost, 1,710MHz OC Founders Edition comparison. Sweet holy moly. Both the Memory capacity: 8GB GDDR6 GeForce RTX 2080 Ti (go.pcworld.

Memory path: 256 bits com/28ti) and GeForce RTX 2080 (go.

Memory bandwidth: 448GBps pcworld.com/rt28) are available to Ports: VirtualLink/USB-C, DisplayPort 1.4, preorder on Nvidia’s website now, with an HDMI 2.0b estimated ship date of September 20.

Power: One 8-pin, 175W stock, 185W OC Nvidia also revealed the GeForce RTX Founders Edition 2070, though at $499 reference price or Release date: Unknown $599 for a Founders Edition (go.pcworld.

Price: $499 stock, $599 Founders Edition com/f599), it costs as much as a last-gen GTX 1080 despite having 256 fewer Now let’s talk about what’s deep inside CUDA cores. Nvidia’s CEO claims it these graphics cards. should be faster than a GTX 1080 Ti, though that claim is tied to games running MEET GEFORCE RTX AND RT ray-tracing operations—it’s likely not CORES Beneath the mere top-level specs lie more nearly as fast as the GTX 1080 Ti in interesting changes. Nvidia tweaked the traditional rasterized games. Here are the design of the Turing GPU’s underlying specs, though Nvidia hasn’t revealed a streaming multiprocessor architecture release date: 14 PCWorld SEPTEMBER 2018

compared to the Pascal GPUs inside the GTX 10-series, working in changes that debuted in the machine learning–centric Volta GPUs. Here’s what Nvidia said when Turing was revealed: “Turing-based GPUs feature a new streaming multiprocessor (SM) architecture that adds an integer execution unit executing in parallel with the floating point datapath, and a new unified cache architecture with double the bandwidth of the previous generation. Combined with new graphics technologies such as variable rate shading, the Turing SM achieves unprecedented levels of performance per core.”

But the real secret sauce is what gives the GeForce RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti their names. The gaming industry’s finally pushing toward the graphics Holy Grail, real-time ray tracing. These Turing GPUs include dedicated RT cores, augmented by AI-boosting tensor cores that can help identify potential errors or missing information during the ray-tracing process. That lets the GeForce RTX 2080 pair process ray tracing far, far faster than their predecessors could.

Nvidia claimed that a single Turing GPU could render the Star Wars demo at the top of this article more than 8 times faster than a GTX 1080 Ti. That’s a substantial and necessary improvement, considering that ray-tracing demos Nvidia showed earlier this year (go.

pcworld.com/rtdm) required multiple highend Titan V cards to run, and not very smoothly at that.

So what’s the big deal with ray tracing?

When Microsoft revealed the DirectX Raytracing API (go.pcworld.com/dxry) for Windows 10 this past spring, we delved into the differences between real-time ray tracing and the rasterization technique currently used in games: “Ray tracing mimics how lighting works in the real world. Objects are illuminated by 3D light sources, with rays bouncing around before reaching your eyes (or the camera, in games).

Light might be reflected by other objects, or look different after passing through water, or be blocked by another object completely and create a shadow. The objects the rays bounce off even affect the final color you see, just like in real life. Ray tracing can deliver very highquality images. Just look at the Avengers movies! But there’s a reason the technique is largely limited to Hollywood films alone: Ray tracing is very computationally expensive…

Rasterization essentially converts a game’s 3D models into pixels on your 2D screen, then applies the color information after. Each of the pixels are then colored in independently, applying textures and shading with techniques like shadow mapping and screen-space reflection. Rasterization is much faster than ray tracing—hence its use in real-time games. But rasterization has its drawbacks.”

SEPTEMBER 2018 PCWorld 15

NEWS

NVIDIA GEFORCE RT X 2080 & RT X 2080 TI

The redesigned Turing GPU lays the foundation for a future when gaming graphics look as gloriously lifelike as movie CGI, and the dedicated RT cores are a big part of it.

Nvidia’s clearly throwing its Nvidia said that many games will include ray tracing. chips behind real-time ray tracing—so much so that these pcworld.com/vrtl), a new USB-C alternatenew flagships ditch the longtime “GTX” mode standard that contains all the video, branding in favor of “RTX.” audio, and data connections necessary to Don’t consider ray tracing alone a reason power a virtual reality headset. It’s backed by to upgrade to a fresh graphics card yet, a consortium of PC heavy-hitters, including though. Getting developers to embrace new Oculus, Valve, AMD, Microsoft, and of graphics technologies can take time (just ask course, Nvidia.

DirectX 12). But again, Nvidia revealed that ”VirtualLink is important because it helps Metro Exodus and Shadow of the Tomb Raider to consolidate three connections for a VR will include ray tracing, as well as Hitman 2, headset into one,” says Anshel Sag, an Asseto Corsa, and many other games. analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy. “You won’t need break-out boxes anymore. It VIRTUALLINK AND NVLINK: simplifies the user experience and also helps CUTTING-EDGE to standardize everyone behind one CONNECTIONS connector for all headsets, and one The GeForce RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti also connector for all graphics cards. Although blaze a path for several connection this does theoretically increase the amount technologies. First up: VirtualLink (go. of power the GPU may consume since it will 16 PCWorld SEPTEMBER 2018

technologies—and the ones you want powering one of those face-melting G-Sync HDR monitors. Previous-gen GTX 10-series cards shipped DisplayPort 1.4-”ready,” but those required a firmware update to activate the capabilities.

Finally, the GeForce RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti bring Nvidia’s high-speed NVLink interface to That tiny USB-C connection on the far end is the VirtualLink port. consumer graphics cards.

NVLink appeared only in highdeliver power to the headset through the performance data center GPUs previously. It VirtualLink (USB Type-C) connector.” delivers far, far more bandwidth than The new graphics cards also include standard SLI, and its inclusion is likely a HDMI 2.0b and DisplayPort 1.4, the latest necessity at this point in GeForce’s versions of the ubiquitous connection evolution. Running multiple GeForce RTX 2080 Ti cards in SLI will require moving a whole lot of information very quickly. Expect SLI support to remain limited to two graphics cards in games (go. pcworld. com/2clm), though, even with the faster NVLink connection. The The new NVLink bridge. adapter costs $79.

SEPTEMBER 2018 PCWorld 17

NEWS

NVIDIA GEFORCE RT X 2080 & RT X 2080 TI

GEFORCE RTX 2080 AND RTX 2080 TI: WHY DOUBLE THE FUN? This is the first time that Nvidia has launched the “Ti” and non-“Ti” versions of xx80-series flagships simultaneously. Previous iterations of the xx80 Ti launched a full two or three quarters after the non-Ti xx80 card. That’s interesting for a few reasons. Last generation, the lower-tier GTX 1070 managed to outperform the previous 980 Ti flagship. On paper, the RTX 2080 barely seems to surpass the GTX 1080 Ti this time around. Is the coordinated launch necessary to get the hulking GeForce RTX 2080 Ti out there ASAP to satisfy deep-pocketed enthusiasts with a need for speed? We’ll know more about the actual capabilities of these cards when we get our hands on review units.

It could also mean we’ll see a refresh of these cards far quicker than we did with the 2.5-year gap between the GTX 10- and 20-series. Nvidia rival AMD is already sampling 7nm Radeon Vega GPUs to customers in data center form, ahead of a launch later this year. We could very well see new consumer graphics cards built on AMD’s next-gen Navi GPU architecture at 7nm next year. Given how 18 PCWorld SEPTEMBER 2018

competitive Nvidia is, I doubt the company would let AMD claim the process lead for long. Maybe we got the 12nm GeForce RTX 2080 Ti early to clear the decks for a response to AMD sometime in 2019.

These are GPUs like you’ve never seen before, and the $1,179 GeForce RTX 2080 Ti looks outright ferocious—the perfect match for the new wave of drop-dead gorgeous G-Sync HDR monitors that push 4K panels roaring past 60Hz all the way to 144Hz. Those prices though! You have to wonder if gamers will balk at paying so much.

The GeForce RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti launch on September 20. Stay tuned for reviews of Nvidia’s new GeForce RTX 2080 graphics cards and the $2000 Acer Predator X27 G-Sync HDR monitor (go.pcworld.com/ x27b) soon. Hey, nobody ever said pushing the bleeding-edge would be cheap.

Intel’s Whiskey Lake notebook chips will offer big turbo boosts to get you to upgrade If the leaked information is correct, there will be just the one key difference between today’s Kaby Lake-R chips and Intel’s Whiskey Lake. BY MARK HACHMAN

W IMAGE: INTEL

hile motherboard companies continue to outdo themselves releasing data on Intel’s

upcoming 9000-series processors, HP has accidentally disclosed details regarding another of Intel’s upcoming chips: its “Whiskey Lake” notebook processors.

SEPTEMBER 2018 PCWorld 19

NEWS

INTEL WHISKEY L AKE NOTEBOOK CHIPS

As disclosed by Anandtech (go.pcworld. com/15ww), the Whiskey Lake-U processors aren’t that different from the existing Kaby Lake-R chips that they’ll replace. In fact, the base clock speeds for the three chips outed

by HP are essentially identical with the existing Kaby Lake-R chips. What Intel has done, however, is offer significantly higher turbo speeds as a way of differentiating the two families.

It’s worth noting that “differentiation” continues to be an issue, as far as product numbers go. The three new Whiskey Lake-U chips—the 2.1GHz Core i3-8145U, the 1.6GHz Core i5-8265U, and the 1.8GHz Core i7-8565U—use similar product numbers to the 2.2GHz Core i3-8130U, the 1.6GHz Core i5-8250U, and the 1.8GHz Core i7-8550U Kaby Lake-R chips they replace.

Cache sizes remain the same, according to the HP listing, Anandtech reports. Both the Core i5 and Core i7 have four cores, while the i3 has two.

Here’s the difference: the turbo speeds, as indicted below.

Core i7-8565U (Whiskey Lake) 1.8GHz base, 4.6GHz turbo Core i7-8550U (Kaby Lake-R) 1.8GHz base, 4GHz turbo Core i5-8265U (Whiskey Lake) 1.6GHz base, 4.1GHz turbo Core i5-8250U (Kaby Lake-R) 1.6GHz 20 PCWorld SEPTEMBER 2018

base, 3.4GHz turbo Core i3-8145U (Whiskey Lake) 2.1GHz, base, 3.9GHz turbo Core i3-8130U (Kaby Lake-R) 2.2GHz base, 3.4GHz turbo Intel doesn’t comment on unannounced products. And naturally, the offending HP spec sheet, governing its Pavilion x360 convertible, has been removed. (Note that HP is listed as a launch partner as part of Intel’s Computex announcement of Whiskey Lake, above.) Intel has confirmed (go.pcworld. com/sphd) that the Whiskey Lake and Amber Lake architectures will ship by the holiday season, however.

Both the current Kaby Lake-R chips and the upcoming Whiskey Lake chips are U-series chips, which typically consume about 15 watts. Amber Lake is a Y-series chip, aimed at ultra-low-power ultrabooks, usually in the 4.5-watt range.

What this means for you: As noted by Anandtech, the addition of turbo boost will certainly help in cases where a chip encounters a short-term, “spiky” load, where turbo boost can kick in and speed up operations for a short time.

But under prolonged loads, you may be better off sticking with a Kaby Lake-R chip, as far as processing power is concerned.

Nvidia’s Turing GPU, Quadro RTX and GeForce RTX: 5 things PC gamers need to know Nvidia’s Quadro RTX GPUs are built on a revolutionary Turing GPU with dedicated hardware for real-time ray tracing. Here’s what they herald for PC gamers and next-gen GeForce graphics cards. BY BRAD CHACOS

I

t looks like the fearsome GPU inside Nvidia’s Titan V (go.pcworld.com/ttnv) will never make it to gamers after all.

Poor Volta. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang revealed at Siggraph 2018 in mid-August (go.

IMAGE: NVIDIA

pcworld.com/rytr) the Quadro RTX 8000, 6000, and 5000 graphics processors, powered by an all-new and long-rumored “Turing” graphics architecture. Friends, Turing looks ferocious—and it’s brimming with SEPTEMBER 2018 PCWorld 21

NEWS

5 THINGS PC GAMERS NEED TO KNOW

portent about Nvidia’s nextgen GeForce graphics cards.

The Quadro RTX GPUs are overflowing with CUDA cores, AI-boosting tensor cores, and an all-new technology dubbed “RT cores” designed Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang holds up a Quadro RTX GPU built on the Turing to make Nvidia’s architecture. new graphics architecture up to 25x more efficient at 1. TURING GPUS GET cutting-edge real-time ray-tracing operations OFFICIAL (go.pcworld.com/dxry). “Turing is Nvidia’s For months, rumors have been swirling most important innovation in computer about potential next-gen GeForce GTX graphics in more than a decade,” Huang said.

1180 or 2080 graphics cards, but each “The arrival of real-time ray tracing is the Holy leak featured a different name for the Grail of our industry.” would-be GPUs. Volta? Ampere? Turing?

We don’t normally cover data center and What would Nvidia’s new architecture workstation graphics here at PCWorld, but be called? with Nvidia teasing a GeForce event with The Quadro RTX announcement “spectacular surprises” (go.pcworld.com/ made Turing GPUs official, and their guts nwgc) at Gamescom in a mere week’s time, will likely make up the inside of new let’s examine what the announcement of GeForce cards, too. There’s still the these Quadro RTX GPUs potentially mean for possibility that Nvidia could strip Turing PC gamers and the consumer GeForce of its AI-boosting tensor cores and call lineup, including the rumored GTX 2080. Or the resulting consumer GPU architecture should I say RTX 2080, as a GeForce tweet “Ampere,” though that doesn’t seem heavily hints? likely.

22 PCWorld SEPTEMBER 2018

2. GEFORCE RTX “This is a significant moment in the history of computer graphics,” Jon Peddie, the wellrespected CEO of analyst firm JPR and a noted graphics expert, said in Nvidia’s press release.

“Nvidia is delivering real-time ray tracing five years before we had thought possible.”

The Quadro RTX GPUs are the first GPUs to include hardware dedicated to real-time ray tracing, a gorgeous visual effect that models how lighting works in the physical universe by sending light rays out from illuminated sources in the 3D scene. Light might be reflected by other objects, or look different after passing through water, or be blocked by another object completely and create a shadow. The objects the rays bounce off even affect the final color you see, just like in real life. (Traditional “rasterization” rendering converts a game’s 3D models into pixels on your 2D screen, then applies the color information after.)

Ray-traced scenes can look much more

The Quadro RTX GPUs are the first GPUs to include hardware dedicated to realtime ray tracing, a gorgeous visual effect that models how lighting works in the physical universe by sending light rays out from illuminated sources in the 3D scene.

realistic than rasterized visuals, but they’re very computationally expensive. That’s why ray tracing is traditionally found in movie CGI, which doesn’t need to be rendered on-the-fly, but not games. The dark era appears to be ending though. Microsoft laid the groundwork software-wise with the DirectX Raytracing API (go.pcworld.com/msry) in Windows earlier this year, and it’s likely that Turing’s RT cores will be coming to at least some GeForce GPUs. Nvidia already said its next-gen graphics card will include dedicated “RTX technology” for enhanced ray-tracing support, and just days before the Quadro announcement, Videocardz (go.pcworld.com/vcdz) unearthed new Nvidia filings at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for “Turing,” “Quadro RTX,” and “GeForce RTX.” The same day, YouTuber AdoredTV (go. pcworld.com/adtv) published a video claiming that Nvidia’s next high-end GeForce GPUs would be called the RTX 2080 and RTX 2070, ditching the long-standing “GTX” moniker.

(Lesser-powered graphics are still branded with GTX, AdoredTV claims.)

The timing of the two leaks, the weekend ahead of this Siggraph unveiling, seems significant. With Turing and Quadro RTX proving accurate, and real-time ray tracing being pushed so hard by the graphics industry, it’s very possible that Nvidia’s more potent GeForce cards could indeed adopt RT cores and the RTX branding, as the GeForce account itself hinted at later in the evening.

More on that later.

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NEWS

5 THINGS PC GAMERS NEED TO KNOW

Nvidia’s Turing GPU.

3. NEW STREAMING MULTIPROCESSOR ARCHITECTURE

shading, the Turing SM achieves unprecedented levels of performance per core.”

Nvidia’s streaming multiprocessors are the building blocks of its architectures, the design of which dictates how its GPUs are created. The Turing GPUs overhaul Nvidia’s current model with some new tricks, including features added to the Volta GPUs for AI and data centers.

To quote the company’s press release:

Nvidia also says Turing works in “new graphics technologies such as variable rate shading.” Deep-level technical details weren’t released, but there’s no question that the GeForce GTX 2080’s Turing GPU will be a step forward from the Pascal architecture in today’s GTX 10-series graphics cards.

“Turing-based GPUs feature a new streaming multiprocessor (SM) architecture that adds an integer execution unit executing in parallel with the floating point datapath, and a new unified cache architecture with double the bandwidth of the previous generation. Combined with new graphics technologies such as variable rate

4. GDDR6 MEMORY

24 PCWorld SEPTEMBER 2018

The Quadro RTX cards feature cutting-edge GDDR6 VRAM, an upgrade that memory suppliers have been hinting at for months.

Depending on which supplier you ask, GDDR6 should be about 40-percent faster than the GDDR5X VRAM inside GTX 10-series

graphics cards, and offer twice the bandwidth of non-X GDDR5 memory. There’s no reason to think that the more powerful cards in Nvidia’s next-gen GeForce lineup, including the rumored RTX 2080 and RTX 2070, would skip GDDR6 memory.

5. VIRTUALLINK AND USB-C Finally, the Quadro RTX GPUs add native support for VirtualLink (go.pcworld.com/vrtl), the new USB-C alternate mode that a consortium of PC giants announced in July. VirtualLink standardizes virtual-reality connections around a single USB-C cable that bakes in four high-speed HBR3 DisplayPort lanes, a USB 3.1 data channel for

sensors and camera information, and up to 27 watts of power.

“Simulating reality requires incredible visual fidelity and processing power,” Jason Paul, Nvidia’s general manager of gaming and VR, said in a statement when the standard was announced. “With a single, high-bandwidth cable, VirtualLink unlocks the full potential of the PC to power amazing VR experiences.”

With VirtualLink already making an appearance in the Quadro RTX 8000, 6000, and 5000, I fully expect to see it supported in the GeForce GTX 2080, GeForce RTX 2080, or whatever Nvidia’s next high-end consumer graphics card will be called.

VirtualLink

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NEWS

Fall preview: 15 games we’re excited for in 2018 From Bard’s Tale IV to the Walking Dead’s final season. BY HAYDEN DINGMAN

T

he bad news: Two of the mosthyped games this fall aren’t coming to PC. Not yet anyway, and maybe not ever: Red Dead Redemption 2 and Insomniac’s Spider-Man. But now for the good news: A staggering number of excellent games are coming to PC this holiday season. Like seriously, too many for any one person to play.

We’ve rounded up 15 of the PC games 26 PCWorld SEPTEMBER 2018

we’re most looking forward to this fall. While a few of the usual heavy hitters make the list (Forza), we’ve also tried to pick out a few surprises, or games you might not have heard of, like The Occupation. Because hey, you definitely know Shadow of the Tomb Raider (go.pcworld.com/shtr) is coming out this fall, but have you heard the good word about Outer Wilds?

Read on for more.

IMAGE: UBISOFT

1.

a long and tough journey, and I hope Telltale can pull out a proper send-off.

The Walking Dead: The Final Season ($20 on Humble, go.pcworld. com/wkdd) started on August 14 and presumably goes through the end of the year, or perhaps early 2019.

1. THE WALKING DEAD: THE FINAL SEASON

2. TWO POINT HOSPITAL

Release Date: August 14

Release Date: August 30

Six years ago when Telltale put out The Walking Dead, it felt like a revelation. Why not take the story parts of an adventure game, present it cinematically, and leave out most of the puzzles and the usual adventure game busywork?

The formula’s been done to death since, not least by Telltale itself, but all these years later I’m excited to see what a “Final Season” of The Walking Dead looks like, and what that means for fan-favorite protagonist 2.

Clementine. It’s been

The late ‘80s and early ‘90s were this weird and wonderful time where it seemed like everything was ripe for a PC simulation.

Cities? Sure, we’ve got SimCity. Ants? SimAnt. Elevators? SimTower.

Then there was Theme Hospital, one of

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NEWS

15 GAMES WE’RE EXCITED ABOUT

Bullfrog’s (RIP) best games, and a cult classic worth revisiting. Or even remaking, as two decades later some of the original Theme Hospital talent is back working on a spiritual successor called Two Point Hospital (go.

3. pcworld.com/ho2p; $35 on Humble, go.pcworld.com/by2p).

And…yup. It’s Theme Hospital. Fully 3D now, and with a much better interface, but you’re still building up armies of nurses, doctors, receptionists, and janitors to cure outlandish diseases like “Cubism” and “Light-Headedness.” And yes, in the latter the patient’s head does turn into a light bulb. It’s good fun, and a great update to a PC classic.

shorter time-to-kill to more flexible load-outs to the creative Gambit mode we tested at E3 (go.pcworld.com/gbmd). The latter is the most fun I’ve had with Destiny 2 in ages.

Assuming Bungie can pull off a halfway decent story, this has all the potential to be the Taken King–style reboot Destiny 2 needs.

And sure, that’s a huge assumption. I’m hopeful though.

3. DESTINY 2: FORSAKEN

4. BARD’S TALE IV

Release Date: September 4

Release Date: September 18

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me however many times Destiny 2 has fooled me and—wait, why is this on the list again?

I honestly am looking forward to Destiny 2’s massive Forsaken expansion ($40 on Battle.net, go.pcworld.com/byfs) though.

Maybe it’s naive, but everything Bungie’s shown so far has been heartening, from a

Inspiration is circular. A few years back, Legend of Grimrock drew upon Bard’s Tale and other long-dormant dungeon crawlers of old to resurrect the genre for a modern audience, complete with graph-paper map.

And now? A few years on, and Bard’s Tale IV (go.pcworld.com/byb4) is clearly drawing from Legend of Grimrock to create its own modernized sequel.

28 PCWorld SEPTEMBER 2018

One more for the “Crowdfunding Revival” success pile, hopefully.

5. PATHFINDER: KINGMAKER Release Date: September 25

4.

Grimrock and...Hearthstone? Yes, this is certainly not a traditional dungeon crawler, opting for mana-based combat and even free-roaming exploration. Strange. And yet the classic dungeon crawler feel pokes through, with labyrinthine halls packed full of secret entrances and fake walls and puzzle after puzzle. And it’s InXile, so hopefully we can count on the writing being pretty damn good.

5.

Every time I’ve seen Pathfinder: Kingmaker ($40 on Humble, go.pcworld.com/path) I’ve come away overwhelmed. On the surface it looks like an Infinity Engine–style isometric CRPG. On the surface.

An effort’s been made to adapt the whole Kingmaker module from Pathfinder though, and I mean the whole thing. Not a streamlined version, not a version that cuts corners for the digital release. It’s an incredibly ambitious project, from the freeform leveling system to a story that spans huge stretches of time and allows you to reshape your kingdom as you see fit—and all from a first-time developer.

If they pull it off, it could be one of the best CRPGs of all time.

That’s a big “if,” though.

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15 GAMES WE’RE EXCITED ABOUT

6.

6. LIFE IS STRANGE 2 Release Date: September 27 “It’s Life is Strange 2!” I thought, when Microsoft ran a Dontnod trailer during E3— and then it wasn’t. It was a free-to-play prologue of sorts, The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit (go.pcworld.com/bycp).

But surprise, Life is Strange 2 ($40 on Humble, go.pcworld.com/lfs2) proper was announced scant weeks after E3, and will apparently include characters from Captain Spirit in some capacity—though not as main characters. What does this all mean? I have no idea, except that in September the sequel to the best Telltale-style adventure of the last few years (go.pcworld.com/lfrv) will roll out its 30 PCWorld SEPTEMBER 2018

first episode. New setting, new characters, new slang.

Believe me, I’m hella excited.

7. FORZA HORIZON 4 Release Date: October 2 On the one hand, four entries in and the Forza Horizon formula’s gotten a bit stale. On the other…well, it’s all we’ve got. The Crew 2 certainly didn’t satisfy (go.pcworld.com/ cwrv) my arcade racing needs, and it’s looking dubious whether OnRush ever gets a much-deserved PC port after its dismal console sales and a round of layoffs.

So Forza Horizon 4 (go.pcworld.com/ f4ho) it is ($60 on Amazon, go.pcworld.

7. combyf4). This year the series returns to Europe, or England to be exact. And that’s about all you need to know, because otherwise it looks like business as usual: Lots of cars, big open world to explore, great music, and iconic set-piece races against jets or hot air balloons or probably Queen Elizabeth II riding a dune buggy or something. Who knows?

Pharaohs expansion (go. pcworld.com/ crph) for Origins.

Blending history and myth, Curse of the Pharaohs took the leash off Assassin’s Creed’s art team and designers and the result was stunning. You might even say otherworldly. (Heh.) Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey (go.pcworld. com/odho; $60 on Humble, go.pcworld. com/byod) looks like it might take a similar tack, and that’s got me excited. Set in Ancient Greece, there will be the usual nods to history—our E3 demo had us chatting up Socrates, for instance. But it also looks like elements of Greek mythology will be present,

8. ASSASSIN’S CREED: ODYSSEY Release Date: October 5 2018’s already played host to my favorite Assassin’s Creed experience in years, the Curse of the

8.

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15 GAMES WE’RE EXCITED ABOUT

9. as evidenced by the minotaur at the end of the E3 trailer. Excited to see how far the series goes in that direction.

9. BATTLEFIELD V Release Date: October 19 Back in 2016 we awarded Battlefield 1 our coveted Game of the Year prize (go. pcworld.com/ bt16). Sure, it wasn’t the strongest year for game releases, and in most other years I don’t think it would take top honors—but it was a fantastic shooter 10. nevertheless, and 32 PCWorld SEPTEMBER 2018

its vignette-style War Stories campaign was a wonderful departure from the usual Battlefield bloat.

Take those ideas and in Battlefield V (go. pcworld.com/ hobv; $60 on Amazon, go.pcworld.com/bybv) transpose them to the iconic underpinnings of World War II? Yeah, that’s an easy sell for me, especially since Call of Duty: WWII barely scratched that itch last year. And remember: There’s no more Battlefield Premium. All post-release maps and modes will be free this year. Fingers crossed whatever monetization scheme EA

replaces it with doesn’t sink Battlefield V the way it sank Battlefront II last year.

10. HITMAN II Release Date: November 13 As I said at E3: I’m not 100 percent sure why IO decided to brand Hitman 2 (go.pcworld. com/hoh2; $60 on Humble, go.pcworld. com/byh2) a full-fledged sequel and not another “season,” even without an episodic release schedule. It just feels like “More Hitman,” full stop.

I mean that in a good way, though.

Hitman was one of 2016’s best games, each level an ultra-detailed and elaborate puzzle box where the solution is always some creative form of murder. When Square

dumped IO I feared the worst, but the breakup appears to have been more amicable than anyone could’ve imagined, and I’m looking forward to Agent 47’s return.

11. DARKSIDERS III Release Date: November 27 Another series I feared was lost to time, when THQ shuttered I assumed we’d never see another Darksiders.

And we didn’t, for a long time. This November, though, we’ll finally get Darksiders III ($60 on Humble, go.pcworld. com/byd3), telling us what Fury was up to when the Apocalypse occurred. I’m not 100 percent sold yet, especially since I didn’t love the loot-grind in Darksiders II as much as

11.

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15 GAMES WE’RE EXCITED ABOUT

the Zelda-like trappings of the original. I want to believe though, because I love the Darksiders world and its strange pulp lore, and I’m hoping against hope the long wait pays off.

Darksiders might always be a cult classic series, but I’d love it to be a cult classic series that eventually gets a proper ending.

12. JUST CAUSE 4 Release Date: December 4 Let me guess: bigger map, even more vehicles and weapons, and a whole lotta stuff to blow up. Sometimes you’re just looking for the simple pleasures, and the Just Cause series is one of the simplest, an entire game predicated on explosives and physics

12.

34 PCWorld SEPTEMBER 2018

tech. Like Goat Simulator, with a hundred times the budget.

The gimmick in Just Cause 4 ($60 on Humble; go.pcworld.com/byj4) is weather.

Blizzards? Check. Tornadoes? Check.

Sandstorms? I guess that counts as weather, so sure. Also the enemy AI is apparently smarter, though it’d be hard not to be—those soldiers in Just Cause 3 are dumb as bricks. Mostly looking forward to the old grappling hook, parachute, C4, explosion loop though. Like always.

13. OUTER WILDS Release Date: 2018 No Man’s Sky has been on a sort-of redemption arc lately, with this summer’s huge NEXT update fixing many of the game’s perceived issues. But

I still find its procedurally generated worlds sort of lifeless and boring.

Outer Wilds (go.pcworld. com/byow) may be the game for me, then. Instead of a sprawling universe of 13. “infinite” possibility, Outer Wilds takes place in a single, ultra-detailed solar system trapped in a time loop. Like Groundhog Day, the solar system resets every 20 minutes when the sun goes supernova.

Time passes during that 20 minutes, with locations changing around you—closed passages opening, or entire cities being buried by sand.

It’s presumably packed full of secrets to uncover, as long as you’re in the right place at the right time.

Fascinating, and after a long wait Outer Wilds is finally due to release sometime 14. this year.

14. MUTANT YEAR ZERO: ROAD TO EDEN Release Date: 2018 Okay, so it’s XCOM set after the nuclear apocalypse (go.pcworld.com/mtyz), and your main characters are a six-foot duck and a

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15 GAMES WE’RE EXCITED ABOUT

boar carrying a shotgun. Good? Good.

In all seriousness, even the Mutant Year Zero (go.pcworld.com/bymt) team throws around XCOM comparisons, so why shouldn’t we? It’s almost identical at times, down to the layout of buttons on the user interface (and their accompanying keyboard shortcuts).

There’s a neat stealth mechanic that lets you pick enemies off one at a time, as well as a more freeform gear system, but at its core this is just more XCOM with a stranger aesthetic.

And who’s going to complain about more XCOM? Certainly not I.

15. THE OCCUPATION Release Date: 2018 Another game with a real-time element and a tight focus, The Occupation (go.pcworld.

15.

36 PCWorld SEPTEMBER 2018

com/ocup) has you playing an investigative journalist in the late ‘80s. An explosion’s killed dozens of people, and nobody’s been brought to justice. It falls to you to pick up the case.

The catch: You have four real-time hours to solve it. The decisions you make during that time, the leads you pursue, the amount of time you spend reading documents and so on—it all determines what information you get, and how far you’ll get in the case.

Expect to play this one at least twice, I think—once to get the basics, another to execute the same plan but twice as fast and with a better handle on the information.

Maybe a third time, or a fourth, I don’t know.

It looks incredible though, with that vague BioShock influence married to a combat-free detective game. An actual detective game, I might add. I’m very excited for this one.

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Microsoft Surface Go: This affordable little Windows 10 S tablet is a PC when you need it Don’t be turned off by Windows 10 S and the Pentium chip inside it. We were pleasantly surprised by how well the Surface Go works, save for the keyboard. BY MARK HACHMAN

M

icrosoft’s 10-inch, $399 Surface Go tablet is a departure from the company’s Surface tradition, which put forth expensive, ambitious designs to break trail for the rest of the PC industry.

Now, the Surface Go’s decidedly mainstream

IMAGE: MARK HACHMAN

price should appeal to businesspeople on the go as well as consumers considering an Apple iPad or Android tablet.

Caveats like its operating system— Windows 10 in S Mode—and its low-end processor may give you pause. And the optional but cramped Type Cover somewhat SEPTEMBER 2018 PCWorld 39

REVIEWS

MICROSOFT SURFACE GO

offsets the Surface Go’s convenience. But our Surface Go review will walk you through the Surface Go hardware, the Type Cover, and the new Mobile Mouse—then tell you how it all works in practice, both as a pure tablet and as a productivity device. Finally, we’ll talk about the Surface Go’s performance, and how it compares to PCs and other tablets both under Windows 10 in S Mode and Windows 10 Home.

BASIC SPECS

commercial model) Dimensions: 9.6x6.9x0.33 inches Weights: 1.14 pounds (tablet), 1.68 pounds (tablet plus keyboard), 1.98 pounds (tablet, keyboard and charger), as measured Optional Accessories: Type Cover keyboard: $99 (black) or $129 (burgundy, cobalt, platinum); Surface Mobile Mouse: $39; Surface Pen: $99 Price: 4GB RAM/64GB storage: $399 (go.pcworld.com/go4g); 8GB RAM/128GB: $549 (go.pcworld.com/nwsg, via the Microsoft Store). Costco offers its own bundle (go.pcworld.com/ccbd) with 4GB of RAM, 128GB SSD, and a Type Cover for $550.

Display: 10-inch (1800x1200) IPS technology, 217 PPI, 3:2 ratio, 10-point touch Processor: Intel 1.6GHz Pentium 4415Y (go.pcworld.com/p445) (Kaby Lake) Graphics: Intel HD 615 (integrated) OUT OF THE BOX Memory: 4GB/8GB (8GB as tested) Out of the box, the Surface Go feels light and Storage: 64GB eMMC/128GB SSD sturdy, if a tiny bit chunky. Microsoft’s (128GB as tested). A commercial model with hardware gurus crafted the Surface Go out of 256GB SSD is planned.

Ports: 1 USB-C, 1 Surface Connector, microSD, headphone jack Wireless: 802.11 a/b/ g/n/ac Wi-Fi, LTE later in 2018 Cameras: 5MP front (Windows Hello-capable), 8MP rear (with autofocus) Battery: 27Wh Operating system: Windows 10 Home in S What normally would be a USB-A slot on the side of a Surface has been Mode (Windows 10 Pro for replaced by a USB-C connector.

40 PCWorld SEPTEMBER 2018

migrated from USB-A to USB-C with the Go. The Surface Connector still works with the Surface Dock, as well as a growing number of USB-C hubs.

You can Microsoft designed the Surface Go to be able to work comfortably on the go. Here’s a thank the Surface Go in action on the Bay Area’s Capitol Corridor commuter train. low-end the same magnesium compound of previous Pentium chip for two other features: The total iterations, with Gorilla Glass 3 protecting the lack of fan vents and the low-power charger.

10-inch PixelSense display. While the Go Unless heat is somehow pushed out of the I/O doesn’t offer the various display color options ports—which, to my finger, it is not—the of the Surface Pro (2017) or Surface Book, the Surface Go is entirely passively cooled. Under 1800x1200 (3:2) display is consistent with load, the upper third of the Go warmed up, other Surface aspect ratios and pumps out a but not unpleasantly. The 1.6-amp charger is surprisingly bright 397 nits of light. modestly endowed compared to the 3-amp to It’s a bit hard to believe that the Surface 4-amp rapid phone chargers you see these Go is actually the ninth Surface tablet, with days, so you can probably charge your Surface three Surface and Surface Pro predecessors, Go using your phone’s USB-C charger. respectively, plus the Surface RT and a We say “probably” because Microsoft “reimagined” Surface Pro (2017; go.pcworld. didn’t provide details on the USB-C port’s com/17ms). The Go retains many familiar capabilities, so we tried it out. While the port elements: the power and volume rocker on clearly doesn’t feature Thunderbolt, it slowthe top, the microSD slot under the kickstand, charged a connected phone. We weren’t and the MagSafe-like Surface Connector on able to charge the tablet with a OnePlus rapid the right side. There, you’ll also find the charger (5V, 4A), but a 5V/2A external battery headphone jack and I/O port—which has charger did the trick.

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MICROSOFT SURFACE GO

THE SURFACE GO TYPING EXPERIENCE

Surface Pro’s. The keys are visibly smaller compared to their counterparts on other Surface keyboards—notably the Enter key, plus the relatively tiny function keys.

While Microsoft generally made smart sizing choices, the Surface Go’s Type Cover is likely to be uncomfortable for users with larger hands. My hands are average in size, and they began to cramp after a period of typing.

As we talk about the Surface Go experience later in our review, you’ll note we make the case for using the Go without its Signature Type Cover. In part, that’s because the Type Cover experience is a step down from generations past.

Aesthetically, these new Signature Type Covers boast the same, slightly plush Alcantara fabric that’s lived on the outside of the last few generations, which give way to a slightly smoother, plasticky feel along the inside. The Type Cover grips the Go tablet using the same double hinge of past Surfaces, plus what appears to be an even Functionally, the keyboard remains identical to generations past… stronger magnetic connection at the edge.

You really have to give the Type Cover a yank to separate it from the tablet, which helps cement its place on your lap.

The Surface Go’s smaller size means its Type Cover is smaller, too.

Microsoft claims the keyboard is about 85 …but you can see, if you overlap the standard Type Cover (right) with percent the size of the the one that ships with the Surface Go (left), that the keys are smaller.

42 PCWorld SEPTEMBER 2018

The Surface Go can be fully reclined, and is also compatible with the Surface Dial.

Typing on the Surface Go is a mixed bag responsive only over the lower three-quarters in other ways. On paper, the most eye-raising or so, not its entirety. It’s not quite up to change is the key travel: 1mm, versus the previous Surface standards.

1.3mm key travel on previous Surface Pro One of the Surface 3’s highlights was its Type Covers and about 1.5mm for the typical unexpectedly strident audio. The Surface Go laptop. Surprisingly, the reduced key travel takes it down a notch or two, but it provides didn’t bother me as much as I though it enough oomph to play a few Spotify tracks would—a firm response cushions your fingers while you’re washing the night’s dishes. I as they land. There’s a surprisingly small found the audio surprisingly balanced, amount of keyboard flex, too. As you strike the keys, however, they produce a noticeably hollow, woodblock sound. The keys include three levels of backlighting (which Apple’s iPad left out of its accompanying Smart Keyboard, incidentally).

I’d rate the trackpad, which is ever so slightly smaller than the Surface Pro (2017)’s, as a Want to use an older, larger Type Cover with the Go? No can slight step down as well. There’s do—note the difference in the width between the small pegs that a plasticky feel to it, and it’s marry the keyboard with the tablet.

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MICROSOFT SURFACE GO

You’ll probably prefer the feel of your desk mouse over the Surface Mobile Mouse, but its low profile makes it conducive to traveling.

though unsurprisingly lacking in low-end bass. Headphones, of course, provide a fuller, richer sound via the headphone jack.

We didn’t test the rear camera, but the front camera logged us in consistently via Microsoft Hello.

The other new piece of hardware that’s available for (but not bundled with) the Surface Go is the Surface Mobile Mouse, a flattish, ambidextrous optical mouse that seems designed to be as compact and portable as the tablet it complements. It boasts right- and left-click buttons, plus an articulated scroll wheel While I’m not a fan of flat mice, the extremely slick way in which this one glides across the surface of a mousepad feels great. There’s even something to love within the battery compartment, which features a magnetic connection and springloaded battery connections. Though the 44 PCWorld SEPTEMBER 2018

The magnetic clasp and spring-loaded battery connectors are a nice engineering touch, though we wonder whether the battery compartment will pop open under repeated storage within a laptop bag or backpack.

batteries popped out easily when I accidentally dropped it, it’s otherwise very satisfying, aesthetically.

THE WINDOWS 10 S, MESS? By now, a certain percentage of the PC-using world—heck, even a certain percentage of PCWorld—sees “Windows 10 S” (go.pcworld. com/wn1s) and stalks off in disgust.

Windows 10 in S Mode restricts you to apps found within the Microsoft Store, which include a mix of games and productivity apps that are usually far less comprehensive than what you’ll find within Apple’s iOS app store or Google Play. You’ll also lack the opportunity to access the Command Line and some other Windows utilities, though Edge plug-ins now work.

But if that’s simply too restrictive, Windows offers a one-time, free “switch” out to Windows 10 Home, giving you unlimited

The Surface Go’s Settings menu provides a way out of Windows 10 with S Mode, if that’s what you prefer.

freedom of choice in apps, as well as a one-time free “upgrade” to Windows 10 Pro in S Mode, which leaves the app restrictions in place but allows you to connect to company networks. Windows doesn’t attach any time restrictions to the switch or upgrade. The Switch simply requires you to go to Settings > Update & Security > Activation and select which one you prefer.

After testing in Windows 10 S, we switched to Windows 10 Home, and the process was quick: By the time we turned back to check on it, it was done.

While there’s some truth in bemoaning the lack of choice in Windows 10 S, the Surface Go also does some positive things with S Mode that are worth noting.

During setup, Windows asked for my Microsoft account. But it also noticed that I already had an Office 365 account attached to it, and offered to set it up. The first time I loaded Microsoft Word, my documents that were backed up within OneDrive loaded automatically, and Windows offered to set up the rest of the Office apps in the background. Very

convenient.

But OneDrive is also integrated within Windows 10 in S Mode, and that makes a great deal of difference. Every file that I had previously stored in the OneDrive cloud over the past few years automatically appeared in the appropriate folder—the documents stored in my OneDrive Documents folder re-appeared in my local Documents folder, as

While there’s some truth in bemoaning the lack of choice in Windows 10 S, the Surface Go also does some positive things with S Mode that are worth noting.

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Most Windows 10 implementations seem to have a dedicated OneDrive folder. The Surface Go and Windows 10 S mixes all of your cloud and local storage in one place.

a OneDrive placeholder (go.pcworld.com/ ondm). That meant that I could see every file that I had backed up as if it were on my machine—but without burdening my storage capacity. Every screenshot I took and stored within my Pictures folder also automatically backed up to the cloud. That is how cloud storage should work.

Well, mostly. Copying a multi-gigabyte file over a USB drive onto the Go also kicked off OneDrive, and it started syncing it in the cloud. Since I couldn’t find any right-click option or OneDrive setting to halt syncing for this particular file, I paused syncing. That’s not what I wanted.

Does that mean you can get by with a 46 PCWorld SEPTEMBER 2018

Surface Go with only 64GB of storage, as opposed to 128GB? Maybe, maybe not.

Smaller, personal files that you’d create on a Go will probably be documents, whose size range in the megabytes. It’s the larger apps that will chew up space quickly. Another reason to consider the 128GB option: It’s a fast SSD, versus the slower (and cheaper) eMMC storage used for the 64GB version.

THE TABLET EXPERIENCE, WITHOUT THE TYPE COVER So far, the Go looks and feels like a smaller, yet conventional Surface device. But with the Go, Microsoft implicitly asks a question: Do you really need a Type Cover? With previous

iterations of the Surface, the question was a bit ridiculous, if not rhetorical: Of course!

They were built for productivity.

Also, once you’ve shelled out, say, $799 or more for the Surface Pro (2017), adding a $160 Signature Type Cover isn’t much more of an investment. With the $399 Surface Go, adding the Go’s $99 Signature Type Cover in black (or $129 for Type Covers in cobalt blue, burgundy, or platinum) adds a proportionally larger chunk to the total cost.

But it’s about more than the money. The Surface Go’s rather wide bezel (about 0.63 inches) gives a thumb and forefinger plenty of room to grasp the tablet—which is good, because Windows doesn’t seem to be smart enough to tune out a thumb that wanders onto the display itself. My average-sized hands were just wide enough to straddle the

Go with my fingers spread out, so I could use it either as a “one-handed” tablet, pecking at the screen, or as a massive phone of sorts, jabbing at it with my thumbs.

While it’s not light enough to be held one-handed for long periods of time, navigating is simple enough with the on-screen keyboard that pops up when you tap a text field. You can also orally order Cortana to bring up a playlist on Spotify, navigate to a webpage, or open Netflix.

Unlike with prior Surface products, a Type Cover–free experience with the Surface Go is plausible.

THE PRODUCTIVITY EXPERIENCE, WITH THE TYPE COVER

The case for the Type Cover is for desk work on the go. While the Surface Go is decidedly the most mobile tablet Microsoft has ever produced, the current model lacks an LTE connection. And I certainly wouldn’t want to make lastminute changes to an Excel spreadsheet via an Android app.

When it came time to The integrated Surface app can reassure you that yes, the Microsoft Surface do “real work,” I Pen can sense different levels of pressure.

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One other note: If you work outside, the 397 nits generated by the Surface Go’s screen is enough to view and edit a Word file in full sunlight. Who says on-the-go can’t mean on the beach?

PERFORMANCE: WINDOWS 10 S As we did with the Surface Laptop (go.pcworld.com/sflp), we considered the Surface Go as a Windows 10 S device first and You’ll want a white background with black type (not the black foremost, comparing it to rivals via background, here) to use the Surface Go in full sun. a suite of cross-platform gravitated toward a Wi-Fi connection, the benchmarks: the most recent 9.7-inch Apple Type Cover, and a flat surface. iPad, for starters, and a preferred Android The Surface Go fills the bill. I wasn’t able tablet, the Samsung Galaxy Tab S2. We also to afford an airline flight to test whether the included the Asus NovaGo (go.pcworld.

Go really fit within the space between a tray com/nvgo), which uses a Qualcomm table and a reclined seat back, but the Go plus its Type Cover made for a comfortable workspace on an Amtrak train tray table and on my lap on the Bay Area subway, BART. It was in this last scenario, though, that I began to wonder whether Microsoft was forcing the tablet concept a bit. All the jouncing and bouncing on planes, trains, and automobiles lends itself more to a small clamshell notebook than a tablet—though, granted, with potential trade-offs in terms of size and weight. I’d be interested to try out a Windows 10 in S Mode stopped us from throwing Surface Go built like a small, convertible our full suite of benchmarks at the Surface Go… Surface Book. until we upgraded to Windows 10 Home.

48 PCWorld SEPTEMBER 2018

Snapdragon chip, and the Asus Chromebook Flip C101PA, powered by an ARM Rockchip processor.

Because of the limitations Windows 10 S places upon apps, we first chose a suite of browser-based tests, which provide some

WebXPRT Apple 15-inch MacBook Pro (2017) (Core i7-7820HQ) Apple 15-inch MacBook Pro (2018) (Core i9-8950HK) Microsoft Surface Pro (2017) (Core i7-7660U) Microsoft Surface Book (2015) (Core i7-6600U) Apple 12-inch MacBook (Mid-2017) (Core m3-7Y32) Microsoft Surface Laptop (Core i75-7200U) Microsoft Surface Pro 3 (Core i5-4300U) Apple 9.7-inch iPad (2018) (Apple A10 Fusion) Asus NovaGo (Snapdragon 835) Microsoft Surface Go (Pentium 4415Y) Asus Chromebook Flip C101PA-DB2 (Rockchip RK3399) Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 (8-core ARM A72/A53)

points of comparison. (All tests used Microsoft Edge, except for the Chromebook Flip, which uses the Chrome OS and Chrome browser.) You’ll see those benchmarks first.

Then we upgraded the Go to Windows 10 Home and evaluated it with our normal suite of benchmarks.

Keep in mind that we’re evaluating it as 597 Microsoft sees it: as a lightweight 549 office machine, 181 nothing more. For 535 a broader context, however, we 453 added some far more powerful 414 Windows and Mac devices, too.

335 In real-world 117 use, the Surface 306 Go’s performance 200 seemed competent.

63 195 Microsoft Edge ran smoothly.

73 187 Spreadsheets 61 with 1,000 rows 186 of data opened The Surface Go finishes 36 near the bottom in the within a second or 125 WebXPRT benchmarks. two, and I even WebXPRT 2015 WebXPRT 3 managed to LO N G E R B A R S I N D I C AT E B E T T E R P E R F O R M A N C E create a chart SEPTEMBER 2018 PCWorld 49

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based on the data. (Manipulating that chart of Windows 10, naturally.) was another story.) We have a lot of numbers One of the more “real-world” Web tests that tell you that the Surface Go is slow—well, available is WebXPRT, by Principled slower than many of its competitors. As a Technologies, which assigns the browser six device for Web browsing, Office work, and HTML5- and JavaScript-based workloads that some music playback, I was surprised at how approximate tasks like organizing photo competent the Go was.

Speedometer But yes, our Apple 15-inch browser-based MacBook Pro (2017) 164.8 (Core i7-7820HQ) benchmarks paint Apple 12-inch a pretty lukewarm MacBook (Mid-2017) 118.3 (Core m3-7Y32) picture. Microsoft Apple 15-inch claimed the MacBook Pro (2018) 107 (Core i9-8950HK) Surface Go would Microsoft Surface 27.5 be slightly faster Pro (2017) 86.3 (Core i7-7660U) than the Surface Microsoft Surface Book (2015) Pro 3 (go.pcworld.

86.6 (Core i7-6600U) com/pro3)—yes, Microsoft Surface Laptop the 2014 device 64.3 (Core i75-7200U) that put the Microsoft Surface 30.2 Pro 3 Surface Pro line on 58.3 (Core i5-4300U) the map. But it’s Apple 9.7-inch iPad (2018) 56.9 not. According to (Apple A10 Fusion) our testing, it’s Asus Chromebook 24.4 Flip C101PA-DB2 42.6 about 60 percent (Rockchip RK3399) Microsoft Surface Go or so of the SP3’s 18.8 Speedometer tests (Pentium 4415Y) 36.5 performance, the browser and PC Asus NovaGo using repetitive calls 18.6 based upon the (Snapdragon 835) to a Document Object 31.9 SP3 Core i5 Model, or DOM. Samsung Galaxy 16 Again, the Surface Go version. (We Tab S2 29.2 (8-core ARM A72/A53) is on the slow side. updated the Speedometer 1.0 Speedometer 2.0 Surface Pro 3 to LO N G E R B A R S I N D I C AT E B E T T E R P E R F O R M A N C E the current version 50 PCWorld SEPTEMBER 2018

albums and tracking stock option pricing. We have a larger database of the older WebXPRT 2015 scores, and a few from the most recent WebXPRT 3 benchmark. The Surface Go finishes near the back, among the optimized tablets, as it does for virtually all of the tests.

Likewise, we use the Speedometer test (version 1 and version 2) to test the responsiveness of the browser (and the PC) to web applications. The Surface Go once again dwells in the cellar.

The JetStream 1.1 benchmark includes both synthetic tests as well as some

According to our testing, it’s about 60 percent or so of the SP3’s performance, based upon the SP3 Core i5 version. (We updated the Surface Pro 3 to the current version of Windows 10.) “real-world applications,” such as the Mozilla open source project’s PDF renderer (pdfjs), and the Box2D JavaScript physics engine (box2d). The Surface Go led the back of the pack.

JetStream 1.1 Apple 15-inch MacBook Pro (2018) (Core i9-8950HK)

323.6

Apple 12-inch MacBook (Mid-2017) (Core m3-7Y32)

274.6

Microsoft Surface Pro (2017) (Core i7-7660U)

258

Microsoft Surface Book (2015) (Core i7-6600U)

210.2

Apple 15-inch MacBook Pro (2017) (Core i7-7820HQ)

200.6

Microsoft Surface Laptop (Core i75-7200U)

198.8

Apple 9.7-inch iPad (2018) (Apple A10 Fusion)

170.9

Microsoft Surface Pro 3 (Core i5-4300U)

143.8

Microsoft Surface Go (Pentium 4415Y)

87.1

Asus NovaGo (Snapdragon 835) Asus Chromebook Flip C101PA-DB2 (Rockchip RK3399) Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 (8-core ARM A72/A53)

67.6 50.3 33.8

The Surface Go still finishes behind the Surface Pro 3 in the JetStream Web benchmark.

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Octane 2.0 Apple 15-inch MacBook Pro (2018) (Core i9-8950HK)

47,603

Apple 15-inch MacBook Pro (2017) (Core i7-7820HQ)

43,662

Microsoft Surface Pro (2017) (Core i7-7660U)

37,580

Apple 12-inch MacBook (Mid-2017) (Core m3-7Y32)

31,380

Microsoft Surface Laptop (Core i75-7200U)

30,402

Microsoft Surface Book (2015) (Core i7-6600U)

29,000

Apple 9.7-inch iPad (2018) (Apple A10 Fusion)

27,915

Microsoft Surface Pro 3 (Core i5-4300U)

18,712

Microsoft Surface Go (Pentium 4415Y)

11,340

Asus NovaGo (Snapdragon 835)

9,885

Asus Chromebook Flip C101PA-DB2 (Rockchip RK3399)

9,860

Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 (8-core ARM A72/A53)

6,324

Again, the Surface Go finishes well down the table.

LO N G E R B A R S I N D I C AT E B E T T E R P E R F O R M A N C E

Octane 2.0 is a deprecated Google benchmark, but we’ve added it for completeness, as well as its large historical database of comparative data. The Surface Go once again wins among the laggers.

Finally, there’s battery life, which we measure by loading a 4K movie into the Windows Movies & TV app and looping it until the battery expires. With Windows 10 in S Mode, we can’t use our normal automated tools to detect when the PC falls out of active mode; instead, we have to sit alongside it and 52 PCWorld SEPTEMBER 2018

keep an eye on it until it does. The Surface Go lasted 6 hours and 49 minutes, which puts it among the shorter-lived competitors.

Remember, this iteration of tests is

With Windows 10 in S Mode, we can’t use our normal automated tools to detect when the PC falls out of active mode; instead, we have to sit alongside it and keep an eye on it until it does.

Battery life (Windows 10 S) (Minutes)

Asus NovaGo (Snapdragon 835)

1,042

Microsoft Surface Laptop (Core i5-7200U)

765

Asus Chromebook Flip C101PA-DB2 (Rockchip RK3399)

625

Microsoft Surface Book (2015) (Core i7-6600U)

605

Microsoft Surface Pro (2017) (Core i7-7660U)

421

Microsoft Surface Go (Pentium 4415Y)

409

Microsoft Surface Pro 3 (Core i5-4300U) Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 (8-core ARM A72/A53)

387 372

The Surface Go’s 27Wh battery pooped out after 6 hours and 49 minutes. Unfortunately, we don’t have Macworld rundown tests to compare the Surface Go to the Apple iPad.

LO N G E R B A R S I N D I C AT E B E T T E R P E R F O R M A N C E

restricted by which apps we can throw at the Surface Go—which is hardly any, because of Windows 10 S.

PERFORMANCE: WINDOWS 10 HOME After we upgraded the Go to Windows 10 Home, we were able to add our standard benchmark suite. In this case, our more sophisticated benchmarks confirmed our earlier results. There’s one advantage to the Pentium chip: Because it doesn’t support turbo mode, Microsoft could simply design for the maximum thermal and power limits and not really worry about spikes. We saw no evidence of throttling at all, using Intel’s XTU

monitoring software.

We used the PCMark Work, Home, and Creative tests to measure general everyday use. The Work and Home tests are probably the most significant, as Microsoft sees the Go as straddling the low end of work and play.

The Work test measures tasks like word processing and spreadsheet data entry and manipulation, while the Home test performs light gaming, web browsing, and related tasks. In these tests, the Surface Go posted lukewarm results.

The Creative test is a slightly more potent test of the Go’s capabilities, with photo editing added to the mix. Again, it’s competent, though nothing special.

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Because the Surface Go’s Pentium is hyperthreaded, it can assign four virtual cores to the task of rendering, as our Cinebench test shows.

Because the Surface Go’s Pentium is hyperthreaded, it can assign four virtual cores to the task of rendering, as our Cinebench test shows. We don’t expect that you’ll be using the Surface Go for intensive graphics work, however. (At the time of our original review, the Asus NovaGo could not run the 64-bit Cinebench executable due to limitations in the architecture.)

Hand Brake, our timeintensive video conversion test, transcodes a major Hollywood movie into a format that we can watch on an Android tablet. It’s here we expected to see some 54 PCWorld SEPTEMBER 2018

PCMark 8 Work 3.0 (Native resolution) HP Spectre x360 13T (Core i7-8550U)

3,510

Samsung Galaxy Book (Core i5-7200U)

2,926

Microsoft Surface Pro (2017) (Core i7-7660U)

2,905

Microsoft Surface Laptop (Core i5-7200U)

2,901

Lenovo X1 Tablet (Core i5-7Y57)

2,819

Huawei MateBook (Core m5-6Y54)

2,644

Microsoft Surface Go (Premium 4415Y) Chuwi Hi13 (Celeron N3450) Asus Nova Go (Snapdragon 835)

2,102 1,505 1,200

The Microsoft Surface Go finishes well down in this business benchmark.

LO N G E R B A R S I N D I C AT E B E T T E R P E R F O R M A N C E

PCMark 8 Home 3.0 (Native resolution) HP Spectre x360 13T (Core i7-8550U)

3,346

Microsoft Surface Pro (2017) (Core i7-7660U)

2,766

Microsoft Surface Laptop (Core i5-7200U

2,714

Samsung Galaxy Book (Core i5-7200U)

2,601

Lenovo X1 Tablet (Core i5-7Y57)

2,459

Huawei MateBook (Core m5-6Y54)

2,311

Microsoft Surface Go (Premium 4415Y) Chuwi Hi13 (Celeron N3450) Asus Nova Go (Snapdragon 835)

1,894 1,233 1,125

The Surface Go falls to a familiar spot in the PCMark Home benchmark, too.

LO N G E R B A R S I N D I C AT E B E T T E R P E R F O R M A N C E

PCMark 8 Creative 3.0 (Native resolution) HP Spectre x360 13T (Core i7-8550U)

3,510

Microsoft Surface Pro (2017) (Core i7-7660U)

3,209

Microsoft Surface Laptop (Core i5-7200U)

2,781

Samsung Galaxy Book (Core i5-7200U)

2,718

Lenovo X1 Tablet (Core i5-7Y57)

2,528

Huawei MateBook (Core m5-6Y54)

2,271

Microsoft Surface Go (Premium 4415Y)

1,805

Chuwi Hi13 (Celeron N3450) Asus Nova Go (Snapdragon 835)

Nothing really changes with the PCMark Creative test, either.

1,290 1,030

LO N G E R B A R S I N D I C AT E B E T T E R P E R F O R M A N C E

Cinebench RT15.038 (All threads)

HP Spectre x360 13T (Core i7-8550U)

553

Microsoft Surface Pro (2017) (Core i7-7660U)

392

Microsoft Surface Laptop (Core i5-7200U)

327

Samsung Galaxy Book (Core i5-7200U)

322

Huawei MateBook (Core m5-6Y54)

251

Lenovo X1 Tablet (Core i5-7Y57) Microsoft Surface Go (Premium 4415Y) Chuwi Hi13 (Celeron N3450)

222 160 121

The Surface Go isn’t a powerful rendering tool either.

LO N G E R B A R S I N D I C AT E B E T T E R P E R F O R M A N C E

slowdown over time. Again, the lack of turbo boost means that the Go’s Pentium processor remained at a fixed temper-ature and utilization over the life of the test… which took, well, forever.

We also used 3D Mark’s Sky Diver benchmark to measure the Go’s performance in light gaming. In the real world, we’d play turn-based games and 2D sprite-based shooters and platformers on it, nothing more. It just doesn’t have the horsepower for anything too complex.

Finally, we rechecked battery life, using our more sophisticated automated approach. Microsoft has indicated that Windows 10 in S mode is more optimized for battery life and security, and we expected battery life to dip a bit in Windows 10 Home.

It actually doesn’t— statistically it’s roughly equal. We’d chalk up any error to the simple fact that it’s difficult to babysit a SEPTEMBER 2018 PCWorld 55

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rundown test over the course of several hours.

VERDICT Microsoft has traditionally pushed the limits with Surface hardware: faster, more powerful, and, yes, more expensive. The Surface Go feels like a repositioning, reaching down into the “niche” of the mainstream commuter, offering a tablet that can be a PC when you need it.

If you’re looking for the best pure tablet, this actually isn’t it. I personally prefer models like the (three-year-old!) $319 Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 (go.pcworld.com/

HandBrake 0.99.0 Encoding H.264 (Seconds)

HP Spectre x360 13T (Core i7-8550U)

HandBrake takes ages to transcode a movie: 206 minutes, or longer than the movie’s run time.

4,373

Microsoft Surface Pro (2017) (Core i7-7660U)

5,855

Microsoft Surface Laptop (Core i5-7200U)

6,353

Samsung Galaxy Book (Core i5-7200U)

7,056

Huawei MateBook (Core m5-6Y54)

8,463

Lenovo X1 Tablet (Core i5-7Y57)

9,762

Chuwi Hi13 (Celeron N3450)

11,348

Microsoft Surface Go (Premium 4415Y)

12,384

Asus Nova Go (Snapdragon 835)

17,623 S H O R T E R B A R S I N D I C AT E B E T T E R P E R F O R M A N C E

3DMark 8 Sky Diver 1.0 Overall (Demo Mode Off) Microsoft Surface Pro (2017) (Core i7-7660U)

6,534

HP Spectre x360 13T (Core i7-8550U)

The Surface Go feels like a repositioning, reaching down into the “niche” of the mainstream commuter, offering a tablet that can be a PC when you need it.

56 PCWorld SEPTEMBER 2018

4,370

Microsoft Surface Laptop (Core i5-7200U)

3,841

Samsung Galaxy Book (Core i5-7200U)

3,469

Microsoft Surface Go (Premium 4415Y)

3,082

Huawei MateBook (Core m5-6Y54)

3,012

Lenovo X1 Tablet (Core i5-7Y57) Asus Nova Go (Snapdragon 835) Chuwi Hi13 (Celeron N3450)

2,921 1,874 1,178

The Surface Go turns in a decent performance in the Sky Diver benchmark, though nothing that makes this a gaming PC.

LO N G E R B A R S I N D I C AT E B E T T E R P E R F O R M A N C E

What the Surface Go is selling is versatility. Plus, Battery life (Windows 10 Home (Minutes) it’s priced low enough that it starts moving into the Asus Nova Go 1,042 (Snapdragon 835) “sure, why not?” range of HP Spectre x360 13T 769 discretionary purchases.

(Core i7-8550U) This is a solid low-cost Microsoft Surface Laptop 765 (Core i5-7200U) tablet, even if all the Samsung Galaxy Book 612 (Core i5-7200U) optional accessories begin Microsoft Surface Pro to add up.

519 (2017) (Core i7-7660U) There’s certainly some Lenovo X1 Tablet A small battery and 482 (Core i5-7Y57) shock associated with high-res display Microsoft Surface Go means that the 435 (Premium 4415Y) using the new Type Cover Surface Go’s battery Huawei MateBook for the first time. But if 333 life isn’t much to (Core m5-6Y54) speak of, at just over you’re headed to Cancun Chuwi Hi13 331 7.5 hours.

(Celeron N3450) for a week, and there’s LO N G E R B A R S I N D I C AT E B E T T E R P E R F O R M A N C E that nagging doubt that you’ll need a real tbs2; Android), a vast (10.5-inch), computer, I think you’re going to grab the lightweight (1.03 lb) sheet of glass.

Surface Go. Likewise, the $329 9.7-inch Apple iPad (2018; go.pcworld.com/pd18) weighs a bit Microsoft Surface Go less than the Surface Go and boasts Apple’s amazing iOS app ecosystem. (But an Apple PROS • Affordable, competitive price Pencil also costs $99 extra, and a decent • Lightweight, fairly compact iPad keyboard [go.pcworld.com/ipkb] can • Real-world performance was satisfactory run you more than $120.) For something CONS • Smaller Type Cover can be uncomfortable smaller, Amazon’s cheap 8-inch Fire HD • Battery life isn’t much to speak of tablets (go.pcworld.com/fhd8) fill the bill.

• Windows 10 in S Mode lacks app flexibility BOTTOM LINE

This is a solid low-cost tablet, even if all the optional accessories begin to add up.

Microsoft’s new, affordable 10-inch tablet runs Windows 10 S for a streamlined Windows experience. It doesn’t have great performance, but it provides a “real” computer when you need it. $549

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2nd Gen Threadripper 2990WX: AMD’s 32-core CPU is insanely fast but not for everyone AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX crushes multi-threaded tasks like we’ve never seen before. BY GORDON MAH UNG

S

top, AMD. You had us at 32-core, 64-thread Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX consumer CPU. You didn’t have to make it better by saying this weapon of thread 58 PCWorld SEPTEMBER 2018

destruction could be ours for $1,799 (available on Newegg [go.pcworld.com/ egrz] or Amazon [go.pcworld.com/amrz] ) —just $76 more than what Intel wanted us to pony up for its 10-core Core i7-6950X two IMAGE: GORDON MAH UNG

years ago. In Millennialese: That. Is. Just. Insane.

But before you invest too much thought or cash into the concept of a 32-core CPU sitting in your PC at home, there’s a lot of caveats you need to know.

Simply put: This CPU may be too much power for most of us.

AMD has four new 2nd-generation Threadrippers on tap, but only two you can order today.

WHAT IS RYZEN THREADRIPPER 2990WX?

Threadripper 2990WX AMD joins four 8-core chips together.

This method comes with its own special penalty, though. Although the sTR4 socket for Threadripper is physically the same as the server socket used for AMD’s Epyc CPUs, sTR4 is wired to support four-channel memory using two of the dies, rather than eightchannel memory using four dies.

On Threadripper, that essentially means that of the four dies in the 2990WX, two are

If you’re wondering just how AMD went from an 8-core Ryzen 7 1800X to a 16-core Ryzen Threadripper 1950X to a 32-core Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX in the space of 16 months, while it took Intel three years just to go from a 6-core Core i7 to a 10-core Core i7, the magic is in the design.

What makes a 32-core Theadripper even possible is the multi-chip design. Rather than the single contiguous or monolithic die approach that Intel takes, AMD CPUs are multiple chips joined together by the company’s high-speed Infinity Fabric.

The original 16-core Ryzen Threadripper 1950X joined two 8-core chips together.

The 16-core Ryzen Threadripper 2950X features two active dies which With the 32-core Ryzen each have their own memory and PCIe access.

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2ND - GEN THREADRIPPER 2990W X

pure compute-only dies, without direct access to memory and to PCIe. Those two compute dies must talk through an I/O die that has PCIe and access to the memory. This design means an I/O die with memory access has 64ns of latency to memory, while a compute-only die has a The new 32-core Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX features four dies latency of 105ns. connected by Infinity Fabric. Two of those dies must access RAM There’s also a reduction in and storage through an adjacent die. bandwidth across the Infinity Fabric. On the new 16-core Ryzen With Intel’s monolithic design, an 18-core Threadripper 2950X, which uses just two CPU would require that every single die be dies, the bi-directional die-to-die bandwidth nearly perfect and all of the cores functional to is 50GBps. On the four chip, 32-core be sold. With Threadripper, to get to 32 2990WX, the bi-directional die-to-die cores, it just needs four functional 8-core dies. bandwidth is halved to 25GBps. This all adds up to the crazy number of cores For what it’s worth, that die-to-die now available to consumers. bandwidth is apparently considerably less (go.

AMD has called this the “Ryzen Effect,” pcworld.com/frls) than a 7000-series server and you can see this on the chart below, Epyc CPU’s 42GBps. What impact that lowered where we mapped out Intel’s major CPU die-to-die bandwidth has on performance isn’t launches over the years and how many cores clear to us, nor is the reason for less bandwidth. they’ve had. So what caused that spike in It’s possibly due to how the CPUs are connected core counts in the last year and a half? It took to the motherboards themselves. The serverIntel from 2008 to 2016 to go from 6 cores to focused Epyc CPUs feature 8-channel memory, 10 cores. It’s taken AMD 18 months to from 8 with each die accessing its own set of RAM, cores to 32 cores. instead of Threadripper’s shared approach.]

THE RYZEN EFFECT

DON’T WORRY, IT’S COMPATIBLE (MOSTLY)

What that multi-chip design does do is enable core-count scaling at a rate unseen before.

With the 2nd gen Threadripper, there was much hand-wringing that the CPUs might not

60 PCWorld SEPTEMBER 2018

AMD and Intel Core Wars

The Ryzen Effect is in full swing. Ever since the introduction of the AMD’s Ryzen CPUs in 2017, core counts of CPUs have taken off like an F-22 Raptor.

work with the existing X399 motherboards.

AMD has said every single X399 board available today will work once you’ve updated the UEFI/BIOS to support the newer chip. All of the X399 motherboards support “BIOS Back” features, which let you update a board’s BIOS via USB without requiring an older CPU. While all of today’s motherboards will work, they might not all overclock the same— but even there the news is mostly good. AMD said the main issue is the massive power draw of the 32-core and 24-core versions of the

chip, so some board vendors have beefed up existing boards by offering cooling kits.

32-CORE THREADRIPPER 2990WX PERFORMANCE For this review, we spooled up the Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX in an MSI MEG X399 Creation motherboard with Windows 10 Fall Creators Update and 32GB of DDR3/2933 RAM. For graphics we run a Founders Edition GeForce GTX 1080 and the latest Nvidia graphics drivers available. Storage is a Kingston HyperX Savage SSD. Both systems SEPTEMBER 2018 PCWorld 61

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The last time we compared Ryzen Threadripper vs.

Core i9 (go. pcworld.com/ rti9), Intel’s 18-core Core i9-7980XE took home the prize for performance (although not for value). This is the one to beat.

For context, Here’s what you get with a new Threadripper: a torque wrench, carrying case, we’ve included big sticker, and CLC adapter that will fit most Asetek-based coolers. scores for some were cooled with closed-loop coolers. The CPUs that were run on a previous build of Core i9 used a Corsair 280mm H110i, and the Windows. The numbers haven’t shifted, so Threadripper 2990WX used an Enermax they’re still valid. We’ll note where you might Liqtech 240 TR4 cooler with cold plate that want to dismiss results for older chips, or we’ll offered full coverage for the giant simply exclude them if we think they don’t apply.

Threadripper. Both coolers were set to maximum fan speed.

CINEBENCH PERFORMANCE For fairness, rather than recycle older Up first is Maxon’s Cinebench R15. This numbers, we updated the original 18-core multi-threaded benchmark is based on the Core i9-7980XE setup that we used in that engine used in the company’s professional CPU’s review (go.pcworld.com/i9rv) with the Cinema4D product. The engine is somewhat same version of Windows, newer Nvidia older, but superbly efficient. It scales well with drivers, and the newest BIOS. The last detail is core and thread count as well as clock speed. key, as it’s been some time since the original The result speaks for itself, as Threadripper Core i9 review, and we were curious as to 2990WX dusts the rest of the pack. The whether its performance had improved with a 32-core Threadripper 2990WX is 52 percent newer BIOS. faster than the previous champ, the Core 62 PCWorld SEPTEMBER 2018

Consumer Reports pulled its recommendation of the Surface Laptop, even though the notebook wasn’t covered in the survey.

Cinebench RT15.038 (Multi-threaded performance) Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX Zen+ (32/64)

5,182

Core i9-7980X Skylake-X (18/36)

3,393

Core i9-7960X Skylake-X (16/32)

3,188

Ryzen Threadripper 1950X Zen (16/32) Core i9-7900X Skylake-X (10/20) Core i7-6950X Broadwell-E (10/20) Ryzen 7 2700X Zen+ (8/12) Ryzen 7 1800X Zen (8/16)

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Cinebench RT15.038 (Single-threaded performance) Core i7-8700K Coffee Lake-S (6/12)

206

Core i9-7980X Skylake-X (18/36)

195

Core i9-7960X Skylake-X (16/32)

189

Core i9-7900X Skylake-X (10/20)

188

Core i7-7700K Kaby Lake (4/8)

188

Core i5-7600K Kaby Lake (4/4) Ryzen 7 2700X Zen+ (8/12) Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX Zen+ (32/64)

184

i9-7980XE. If only it were as easy as running Cinebench and declaring a winner. Reality is a lot more nuanced, though, so we also run Cinebench with it set to use just one thread. This favors CPUs with higher instructions per clock, and also ones that can hit higher clocks.

The winner is the 8th-gen Coffee Lake-S Core i7-8700K, thanks to its high Turbo Boost clock scores. Intel’s 18-core Core i9-7980XE comes in second, with other Skylake-X and Kaby Lake CPUs following. We don’t see AMD show up until we see the Ryzen 7 2700X in 7th place. Granted, the

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Running Cinebench R15 using a single CPU thread, you can see that CPUs with higher clock speeds rule the day, and it’s pretty much all about Intel.

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scores are fairly close, but those higher Turbo Boost scores clearly put Intel in the driver’s seat.

BLENDER PERFORMANCE

Blender 2.78b/c BMW CPU Render (Seconds)

Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX Zen+ (32/64) Core i9-7980X Skylake-X (18/36) Ryzen Threadripper 1950X Zen (16/32)

95 139 159

Our next test is the openCore i9-7960X 161 Skylake-X (16/32) source Blender 3D Core i9-7900X modeling and rendering 203 Skylake-X (10/20) application, which has seen Core i7-6950X 207 Broadwell-E (10/20) some use in indie movies.

Ryzen 7 2700X Zen+ 270 (8/12) It’s so popular, even NASA Ryzen 7 1800X Zen now distributes its 3D 279 (8/16) model for Blender.

S H O R T E R B A R S I N D I C AT E B E T T E R P E R F O R M A N C E The CPU rendering option favors more cores, Blender Performance puts the 32-core Threadripper 2990WX about 37 and the performance of the percent faster than the 18-core Core i9.

Threadripper 2990WX again is a crazy 37 percent faster than the the 32-core Threadripper takes the top spot.

18-core Core i9 chip.

The performance of the 32-core 2990WX, For this test, both the Core i9 and is about double that of the 16-core Threadripper 2990WX were on the latest Threadripper 1950X. The 18-core Core i9 2.78C version, but we also included the does rather well, though, so it’s entirely the performance CPUs runs using 2.78B for upcoming 28-core Intel part will take this one reference on older CPUs. away from AMD when released later this year.

CORONA PHOTOREALISTIC RENDER PERFORMANCE Up next is the Corona Photorealistic Renderer.

Available for 3ds Max and Cinebench, the renderer is seeing popularity in architectural design and visualization. As with other 3D rendering tasks, Corona loves CPU threads, ergo 64 PCWorld SEPTEMBER 2018

V-RAY RENDERER V-Ray is an advanced 3D renderer that’s notched some good wins in its belt, as it was used for some effects scenes in Doctor Strange, Captain America: Civil War, and Deadpool. The benchmark can be used to measure both CPU and GPU performance,

Corona Renderer 1.3 (Rays per second) Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX Zen+ (32/64)

11,944,300

Core i9-7980X Skylake-X (18/36)

8,699,340

Core i9-7960X Skylake-X (16/32)

7,956,400

Ryzen Threadripper 1950X Zen (16/32) Core i9-7900X Skylake-X (10/20) Ryzen 7 2700X Zen+ (8/16)

6,341,910 5,253,400 4,042,280

Ryzen 71800X Zen (8/16)

3,522,570

Core i7-8700K Coffee Lake-S (6/12)

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Corona is a real-world photo-realistic renderer used in popular applications such as 3ds Max. Corona is not optimized for any specific CPU, but it does love more threads, helping the 2990WX take the prize.

V-Ray Render 1.08 (CPU performance) Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX Zen+ (32/64) Core i9-7980XE Skylake-X (18/36) Ryzen 7 2700X Zen+ (8/16)

26 37 73

Ryzen 7 1700X Zen+ (8/16)

87

Core i7-8700K Coffee Lake-S (6/12)

88 S H O R T E R B A R S I N D I C AT E B E T T E R P E R F O R M A N C E

Chaos group’s V-Ray is a realistic ray tracer seeing some success in Hollywood. The standalone benchmark tends to favor thread count over clock speed. The 32-core Threadripper 2900WX takes the prize, but not by the margin we’d expect.

but we’re looking only at the former.

Like most renderers, V-Ray just loves CPU cores, making the new 32-core Threadripper 2990WX the clear winner. That’s just smoking. For comparison, PC maker Puget Systems measured a dual 14-core Xeon E5-2690 V4 system with a score of 31. So yes, that’s a $1,800 consumer CPU eating the lunch of $4,200 worth of Xeons.

POV-RAY PERFORMANCE Our last rendering test is POV-Ray—a ray tracing program that dates back to the Commodore Amiga in the 1980s. It’s obviously been updated along the way, and like everything you’ve seen before, thread count should count the most. No surprise, we see the 32-core 2990WX eat everone’s lunch yet again.

That 18-core Core i9 is in distant second place.

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performance testing. The pattern we see is very similar to what we saw in Cinebench: When it comes to single-threaded performance, Intel still rules. Haters go ahead and hate, but that Core i8-8700K is the clear front-runner, with a batch of other Core chips right behind it. Just like with Cinebench, we don’t see a Ryzen until 7th place.

While these scores are all relatively close, they do illustrate yet again that Intel’s chips can hit those higher clock speeds.

VERACRYPT PERFORMANCE Thus far, we’ve done the easy, feel good tests. The tests where a giant 32-core CPU make you feel warm and fuzzy inside. Not all code and not all tasks are the same.

One of those is VeraCrypt, an open-source encryption application that picked up where the now-defunct TrueCrypt 66 PCWorld SEPTEMBER 2018

POV-Ray 3.7

(Multi-threaded performance) Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX Zen+ (32/64)

10,041

Core i9-7980X Skylake-X (18/36)

6,592

Core i9-7960X Skylake-X (16/32)

6,352

Ryzen Threadripper 1950X Zen (16/32)

6,129

Core i9-7900X Skylake-X (10/20) Core i7-6950X Broadwell-E (10/20) Ryzen 7 2700X Zen+ (8/16) Ryzen 7 1800X Zen (8/16)

4,522 4,166 3,692 3,304

POV-Ray agrees with just about every renderer we’ve tried: More cores are better.

LO N G E R B A R S I N D I C AT E B E T T E R P E R F O R M A N C E

POV-Ray 3.7

(Single-threaded performance) Core i7-8700K Coffee Lake-S (6/12)

487

Core i7-7700K Kaby Lake (4/8)

481

Core i9-7900X Skylake-X (10/20)

466

Core i9-7960X Skylake-X (16/32)

458

Core i9-7980X Skylake-X (18/36)

451

Core i5-7600K Kaby Lake (4/4) Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX Zen+ (32/64) Ryzen 7 2700X Zen+ (8/12)

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POV-Ray’s single-threaded results seem awfully similar to Cinebench R15’s in single-threaded mode.

VeraCrypt 1.21 Encrypt/Decrypt

HANDBRAKE PERFORMANCE

(Mean)

That unease goes beyond VeraCrypt performance.

Core i9-7980X 23.8 Skylake-X (18/36) Our encoding test uses an Ryzen Threadripper 23.8 older version of the 1950X Zen (16/32) excellent, popular and free Core i9-7900X 16.4 Skylake-X (10/20) HandBrake encoder to Ryzen Threadripper 15 2990WX Zen+ (32/64) convert a 30GB 1080p Core i9-7960X MKV file using the Android 13.2 Skylake-X (16/32) Tablet preset. It generally Ryzen 7 2700X Zen+ 12.5 (8/16) increases in performance Ryzen 7 1700X Zen 12.4 (8/16) the more CPU cores you Core i7-8700K throw at it. But oddly, the 10.7 Coffee Lake-S (6/12) 32-core Ryzen LO N G E R B A R S I N D I C AT E B E T T E R P E R F O R M A N C E Threadripper 2990WX is sandwiched between two VeraCrypt seems to scale with core and thread count—but not for the new 32-core Threadripper 2990WX. Intel CPUs with only 10 cores apiece. left off. This particular test, by the way, was Again, it’s a bit of a mystery to us why this a test AMD used as part of it test suite for is happening. Is it an overall lower clock the Ryzen CPU launch. speed? Is it that die-to-die memory latency? Is Performance generally appears to scale it because HandBrake just can’t use all of with core count, as the 16-core Ryzen those threads? We suspect the answer is all of Threadripper 1950X offers almost double the those, but at the end of the day, the 32-core performance of an 8-core Ryzen 7 2700X. So chip is underperforming here. why is the 32-core Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX so far off the mark?

PREMIERE PRO CC 2018 Is it the die-to-die latency? Is it clockPERFORMANCE speed-deficient? We honestly don’t know as Next on our video test is Premiere Pro CC performance here is a puzzler. But again, 2018. We take a two-minute video shot on this is benchmark AMD had recommended, Sony Alpha in 4K and edited for our website so we’re at a loss to explain what’s going on (go.pcworld.com/13rv). For the test, we take right now. that project and export it using in Premiere SEPTEMBER 2018 PCWorld 67

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using the Blu-ray preset with Maximum Render quality HandBrake 0.9.9 checked, which aids when Encode 1080p MKV (Seconds) resizing media. We’ve done Core i9-7980X 796 this same workload on Skylake-X (18/36) Core i9-7960X other CPUs, and it generally 806 Skylake-X (16/32) scales well with core count.

Ryzen Threadripper 875 1950X Zen (16/32) Here are the results from the Core i9-7900X previous Core i9 test (go.

1,027 Skylake-X (10/20) pcworld.com/i9rv).

Ryzen Threadripper 1,039 2990WX Zen+ (32/64) As you can see, the Core i7-6950X 1,130 Broadwell-E (10/20) 18-core Core i9 takes the Ryzen 7 2700X Zen+ gold, with the 16-core 1,200 (8/16) Ryzen Threadripper taking Ryzen 7 1800X Zen 1,355 (8/16) the silver. Because the S H O R T E R B A R S I N D I C AT E B E T T E R P E R F O R M A N C E previous tests were all We don’t know why the Threadripper underperformed in our Handconducted with Premiere Brake test.

Pro CC 2017, we didn’t feel it was fair to compare Premiere CC 2017 4K Video directly. But we did rerun CPU Encode to Blu-ray (Seconds) the same test on the updated Core i9-7980XE Core i9-7980X 144 Skylake-X (18/36) Video snobs and the 32-core say CPU-based Ryzen Threadripper 166 Threadripper 2990WX. The 1950X Zen (16/32) rendering is result? Just as with superior, and if Core i9-7900X 207 Skylake-X (10/20) you do that—you’ll HandBrake and VeraCrypt, Core i7-6950X want more cores.

222 Broadwell-E (10/20) the performance is lower Ryzen 7 1800X Zen than expected. Based on 272 (8/16) the performance of the Core i7-6900K 288 Broadwell-E (8/16) Core i9 between the 2017 Core i7-6800K 394 and 2018 version, it looks Broadwell-E (6/12) Core i7-7700K like the Threadripper 429 Kaby Lake (4/8) 2990WX is just a bit faster S H O R T E R B A R S I N D I C AT E B E T T E R P E R F O R M A N C E than the 10-core Intel CPUs. 68 PCWorld SEPTEMBER 2018

Premiere CC 2018 4K Sony Alpha Encode to Blu-ray (Seconds) Core i9-7980X Skylake-X (18/36)

140

Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX Zen+ (32/64)

179 S H O R T E R B A R S I N D I C AT E B E T T E R P E R F O R M A N C E

NOW HOLD ON, FOLKS...

If you’re ready to slam your mouse on the table and jab the power button, you do need to read on. While we’re not sure whether it’s the die-to-die latency or simple lack of efficient multi-threading in software at fault, we did want to see if the 32-core Threadripper 2990WX can make magic on another important segment of hard work: multi-tasking. More specifically, what happens when your throw heavy loads at the 2990WX all at the same time. You know the Core i9 actually beats up the Threadripper 2990WX when you run Premiere Pro CC by itself, but

what if you also run a Blender rendering test at the same time?

While this may sound unrealistic to you, it’s not that crazy for a indie video editor to encode in Premiere while also rendering out a visual effect in Blender. In fact, if you could to that without dragging everything to a halt, you would.

Once you do that, the performance of the 32-core Threadripper 2990WX comes alive.

In the chart below, the shorter blue bar and the shorter red bar win. In this case, it’s the Threadripper 2990WX by a healthy margin.

Taking the same project, we exported it to

Simultaneous Blender & Premiere Pro 2018 Performance (Seconds) Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX Blender BWW Time Core i9-7980XE Blender BWW Time Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX Premiere Pro 2018 Core i9-7980XE Premiere Pro 2018

Premiere Pro CC 2018 puts Intel’s Core i9 in front of the 32-core Threadripper CPU.

Running Blender and Premiere Pro together gives the advantage to the 32-core Threadripper 2990WX.

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Adobe Media Encoder 4K Sony Alphaa Encode Blu-ray + HEVC + YouTube + Vimeo (Seconds) Encoding four different files simultaneously gave the advantage to the Threadripper CPU.

Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX Zen+ (32/64)

524

Core i9-7980X Skylake-X (18/36)

Adobe Media Encoder and then simultaneously had it encode the same two-minute video to Blu-ray, HEVC, 1080P YouTube, and 4K Vimeo. Maximum Render quality was selected for the Blu-Ray, HEVC and 1080P YouTube video. The 32-core Threadripper again pulled ahead, but not by the margin we expected. We think that’s because of how long the videos took to encode. The Blu-ray, Vimeo, and YouTube videos completed fairly quickly, with the HEVC encode taking the longest. Once they

578 S H O R T E R B A R S I N D I C AT E B E T T E R P E R F O R M A N C E

were finished, this turned back into mostly a single video encode, which can’t use all the cores of the Threadripper.

Our last simultaneous test run involved running Blender and Cinebench at the same time. Because both are heavily multithreaded, we expected the Threadripper to win big, but it didn’t. It won huge. Not only did it finish Blender 40 percent faster than the 18-core Core i9, its performance in Cinebench R15 is about the same as the Core i9—when the Intel CPU isn’t running two

Blender 2.78B BMW + Cinebench R15 Simulataneous Run Core i9-7980X Skylake-X (18/36)

104

Ryzen Threadripper 1950X Zen (16/32)

144

Core i9-7900X Skylake-X (10/20) Core i7-6950X Broadwell-E (10/20)

3,432 278 S H O R T E R B A R S I N D I C AT E B E T T E R P E R F O R M A N C E LO N G E R B A R S I N D I C AT E B E T T E R P E R F O R M A N C E

70 PCWorld SEPTEMBER 2018

One big obstacle facing Threadripper WX is lack of applications that can truly take advantage of 64 compute threads.

Where the Threadripper WX makes up for that is in multi-tasking of multithreaded tasks. Here we ran Blender and Cinebench together. The Theadripper WX’s performance equals the 18-core Core i9’s when the Intel CPU is running Cinebench alone.

things at once. Let me say that again: The 32-core Threadripper is as fast as the top-gun Intel CPU when running two jobs, compared to just a single job on the Core i9.

32-CORE THREADRIPPER 2990WX GAMING PERFORMANCE We actually considered not running any gaming benchmarks on the 32-core Threadripper 2990WX, because if you bought this CPU to play Fortnite, you made a huge mistake. There are far better choices you can make with either Core i7 or Ryzen 7 over

the Threadripper 2990WX. But you don’t care, so we ran them anyway. First up is Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege at a fairly low resolution (for a GTX 1080, anyway) of 1920x1080, and with a visual quality setting of Ultra. We ran the Threadripper 2990WX in both its default Creator mode and in the 1/4, legacy mode which switches off three of the four dies under the lid.

The result? With all of its cores hot the 2990WX is a yawner in performance, as it takes a hefty hit over the Core i9-7980XE CPU. But in legacy mode, it’s actually pretty While you shouldn’t buy an $1,800 32-core CPU to play games, it does rather well in legacy mode.

Rainbow Six Siege 19x10 Ultra (Fps)

Core i9-7980X Skylake-X (18/36)

220

Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX 1/4 Legacy Mode (32/64)

215

Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX Create Mode (8/16)

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Rise of the Tomb Raider 19x10 Very High DX12 (Fps) Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX 1/4 Legacy Mode (32/64)

132

Core i9-7980X Skylake-X (18/36)

131

Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX Create Mode (8/16)

When all 32 cores are hot, the Threadripper 2990WX can’t keep up with the smaller 18-core Core i9 in Rise of the Tomb Raider at 1920x1080. Switching to legacy mode evens the competition.

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AIDA 64 Memory Latency (Ns) Because two of the four CPU dies on Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX lack memory controllers, we expect to see a slight increase in latency in theory, but we had no luck measuring it.

Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX Full (32/64)

68.8

Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX 1/2 Legacy Mode (16/32)

68.8

Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX 1/4 Legacy Mode (8/16)

68.4

close. And at more than 200 fps, it’s close enough not to matter at all.

We also ran Rise of the Tomb Raider at 19x10 in DirectX 12 mode and legacy mode.

The latter makes the Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX pretty dead-even with the Core i9 CPU. The message is, you still shouldn’t buy this class of CPU if you’re going to play games 75 percent of the time. If, however, you push pixels 75 percent of the time, it’s a no-brainer to buy the new Threadripper.

ABOUT THAT MEMORY LATENCY We do honestly wonder how much of the Threadripper 2990WX’s performance is impacted when a die has to take a detour through another die. We tried to coax it out using AIDA 64’s memory latency test. We first ran it on default with all four dies on, then with two dies on, and finally with only one die on.

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and we’d see memory latency increase, but all three results were essentially the same. At this point, we’ll say it’s inconclusive but we’ll keep looking. Maybe it’s not worth worrying about.

THERMALS AND BOOST PERFORMANCE The top-end 32-core Threadripper 2990WX has a rated Thermal Design Power (TDP) of 250 watts, which is the maximum heat it will dissipate before hitting a wall.

The 2990WX also has a total socket power of 250 watts, which it’ll hit a few milliseconds after doing any heavy multithreaded loads. What this means is that you need to keep the CPU well fed with power and generally pretty cool.

Overall, we saw temperatures in the range of about 113 degrees Fahrenheit (45 degrees Celsius) during much of our testing on our Enermax Liqtech TR4 cooler, so it doesn’t require anything too exotic. We actually saw similar performance with the optional $99

The new Ryzen Master utility gives you a glimpse of the cores in the crazy 32-core Ryzen Threadripper.

Stars mean better CPU cores and the circles mean the next best CPU Core. We did run in to an issue where the CPU not boost when running the utility though.

“stock” Wraith Ripper heat sink.

We also want to point out that it was very easy to push the Threadripper 2990WX out of its top boost speeds.

Applications that normally would not bump CPUs out of boost speeds, such as Valve’s Steam, would do it to Threadripper. For example, with Steam installed, minimized and essentially doing nothing, the highest boost clock we saw was 3.4GHz to 3.5GHz. Once we exited Steam, we saw boost clocks of 3.9GHz to 4GHz. Fortunately, Steam was only installed and running for our gaming tests.

In fact, even using the Ryzen Master software to monitor Threadripper was enough to kick the CPU out of its top boost speeds limiting it to 3.5GHz rather than 4.1GHz. AMD officials were able to replicate that experience, but the company said its

own results with Steam weren’t as bad as what we reported.

32-CORE THREADRIPPER PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS Take today’s multi-core CPUs, which all react differently to thermals and power loads, and throw them software that varies in thread parallelization efficiency and you basically get a big question mark on what to expect in performance.

To give you a general idea of what to expect, we take Cinebench R15 and run it repeatedly while increasing the threads from 1 to 64. While Cinebench isn’t going to tell you quite the same thing as a singlethreaded game or Photoshop or an application that may effectively use 8 threads, it can tell us in general what you can expect out of a CPU under certain light or SEPTEMBER 2018 PCWorld 73

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Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX vs. Core i9-7980XE Thread load scaling Cinebench R15 1-64 threads Ryzen 7 1700X (8/16)

Core i9-7980XE (18/36)

We used Cinebench R15 to measure sequential performance from 1 to 64 threads to gauge performance in multi-threaded applications. The 32-core Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX just crushes the 18-core Core i9-7980X at the top end, but it can’t hang with the Intel CPU on lighter loads.

heavy loads.

For comparison, we took the 32-core Threadripper 2990WX and compared it to the 18-core Core i9-7980XE. The result: On the left side of the chart, the higher boost clocks and slightly better efficiency of the cores in the Core i9 give it a significant edge in performance. In fact, the Core i9 actually has a hefty performance advantage all the way up until you get to 28 threads, or the equivalent of a 14-core CPU. 74 PCWorld SEPTEMBER 2018

THREADRIPPER 2990WX WINS THE HEAVY LOADS As expected, once you start to climb above 28 threads, the sheer number of cores and threads in the 2990WX outgun the Core i9.

Because the chart above doesn’t give you a sense of just how much of an advantage each has over the other, we generated a chart based on the percent. As you can see, the Core i9 offers up to 20 percent more performance on those “light” loads of up to

Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX vs. Core i9-7980XE Percent performance

To give you an idea of how the previous Cinebench chart translates, we calculated the difference as a percentage. You can see the Core i9 has a big advantage on lighter loads, but the Threadripper crushes it on heavy loads.

28 threads. Move to the right though, and the Threadripper 2990WX can exceed the performance of the Core i9 by 50 to nearly 60 percent.

WHAT SHOULD YOU BUY? Frankly, if you tend to have workloads that aren’t going to scale and you don’t intend to multi-task heavily, the higher performance of the Core i9-7980XE might actually make more pragmatic sense. But if you do highperformance, heavily multi-threaded loads or multi-task heavily—you can’t look at the performance of the 32-core Threadripper and

walk away.

THE MONEY SHOT The literal money shot is just how much value you’re getting out of the Threadripper platform. It’s crazy to think that an $1,800 CPU can be a good value, but it truly is if you consider how much you’re paying per thread. AMD has amazingly introduced a new CPU with more cores than consumers have ever seen, and it has lowered the price at the same time. If that isn’t a deal, we don’t know what is.

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Bucks per thread (List price US dollars) Ryzen Threadripper 2920X Zen+ (12/24)

$27

Ryzen Threadripper 2970WX Zen+ (24/48)

$27

Ryzen Threadripper 2950X Zen+ (16/32)

$28

Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX Zen+ (32/64)

$28

Ryzen Threadripper 1950X Zen (16/32)

$31

Core i7-7800X Skylake-X (6/12)

$32

Core i7-7820X Skylake-X (8/16)

$37

Core i7-7740X Kaby Lake-X (8/16)

$42

Core i9-7900X Skylake-X (10/20)

$49

Core i9-7940X Skylake-X (14/28)

$50

Core i9-7920X Skylake-X (12/24)

$50

Core i9-7960X Skylake-X (16/32)

$53

Core i9-7980XE Skylake-X (18/36)

$55

Ryzen Threadripper 1920X Zen (12/24)

$58

Core i5-7640X Kaby Lake-X (4/4)

$61 S H O R T E R B A R S I N D I C AT E M O R E M O N E Y I N YO U R P O C K E T

VERDICT First let’s make it crystal-clear: The 32-core Threadripper 2990WX ($1799 on Newegg or Amazon) is not the CPU for most of us. Not by a long shot. For those of us who play games, edit some photos, browse the web, and even do occasional video editing, an 8-core CPU is plenty, while a 16-core CPU is overkill. A 76 PCWorld SEPTEMBER 2018

When you look at how much you’re paying per thread for a CPU, AMD’s the big winner. Perhaps worse, how does Intel sell a consumer 28-core CPU at a competing price, when the server version is almost $9,000?

32-core CPU is double-overkill and a waste. A Ryzen 7 or Core i7 is a more sound investment.

But for those of us who actually do push pixels around for a living, this new 32-core Ryzen Threadripper is Thor’s hammer falling right into your hands with a crackle of lightning and thunder. For these heavy-hitters, it’s well worth the price.

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REVIEWS

Nitro Pro 12: A better document workflow With full Nitro Cloud integration, Nitro Pro makes it easier to prepare PDFs and get them signed. BY MICHAEL ANSALDO

A

s Adobe Acrobat alternatives go, Nitro Pro sits near the top of the heap. It’s used by tens of millions of consumers and over 650,000 businesses—including more than half of the Fortune 500—according to the company’s chief product officer, Jeff Kreutz.

With version 12, Nitro isn’t relaxing its efforts to help people and organizations improve 78 PCWorld SEPTEMBER 2018

their digitized workflows.

The features that make Nitro Pro beloved by individuals and businesses alike are all still here. You get a complete set of content editing tools; review and markup features for efficient collaboration; form fill and signing capability; and multiple security options for sensitive documents including permissions, password IMAGE: GETTY IMAGES

protection, and data redaction. All of these must-have features are intuitively organized in a Microsoft Office–style ribbon interface that groups them into task-based tabs.

Creating and converting PDFs is easily the most popular use for PDF editors, and Nitro Pro has long excelled at both: It can create PDFs from over 300 different file formats, as well as export them to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files.

Where Nitro saw the biggest opportunity for improvement was around signatures—the company found that more than 50 percent of paper usage was tied to users printing a document to sign it. To address this, version 12 of Nitro Pro is now fully integrated with

Nitro Cloud, making it easier than ever to create a document, share it, and get it signed.

With a simple click of the “request signature” button on the home tab, for example, you can send a prepared document with a personal message to a colleague. The recipient can then open and sign the document right in Nitro Cloud, even if they don’t have an account, using a selection of drag-and-drop fields, including the date and their signature or initials and job title.

Other productivity features have also been ported to Nitro Cloud, allowing users to perform tasks in the browser they could previously only do in the desktop program, including common functions like combing

Nitro Pro 12 users can sign documents directly in Nitro Cloud using drag-and-drop fields.

SEPTEMBER 2018 PCWorld 79

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NITRO PRO 12

Nitro Productivity Suite includes analytics to help enterprise businesses optimize digital workflows.

and organizing documents. As a whole, document workflows just feel simpler and more seamless.

Other enhancements—document conversion improvements, more advanced digital signature functionality, better searching—feel less dramatic, but undoubtedly improve productivity.

You can purchase Nitro Productivity Suite—a perpetual license of Nitro Pro 12, plus a one-year subscription to Nitro Cloud— online for $159. You can add Nitro VIP Access, an annual subscription that includes unlimited product updates and premium support, for $49.99 at time of purchase.

Business subscriptions are available for customers purchasing 11 or more licenses but must be purchased through the Nitro sales team.

80 PCWorld SEPTEMBER 2018

BOTTOM LINE With its tighter ties to Nitro Cloud, Nitro Pro 12 feels like more of a legit challenger to Adobe Acrobat DC than any previous version.

If you’re shopping around for an Acrobat replacement, start here.

Nitro Pro 12 PROS

• Microsoft Office ribbon–style interface • Fully integrated with Nitro Cloud for easier collaboration • Improved document conversion CONS

• No dedicated mobile app BOTTOM LINE

Nitro Pro 12 is an excellent PDF editor that will streamline your document workflow.

PRICE

$159

Acer Nitro 5: A Coffee Lake– flavored gaming laptop that won’t empty your wallet Not bad for $750. BY BEN PATTERSON

A

cer’s Nitro 5 gaming laptop says you can have a modest budget of $800 or less and get a decent amount of horsepower for playing AAA games. While most of the Nitro 5’s parts are midrange at best, it takes things up a notch with its new Coffee Lake IMAGE: ADAM PATRICK MURRAY

CPU, offering solid mobile gaming performance in an affordable, if somewhat hefty package. Gamers who insist on maxing out their graphics will have to settle for middling frame rates on the Acer Nitro 5, and battery life is on the short side. But even with those caveats, the Nitro 5 is a good value.

SEPTEMBER 2018 PCWorld 81

REVIEWS

ACER NITRO 5

SPECIFICATIONS AND PRICE

on how to choose a gaming laptop GPU (go.

We tested the $750 version of the Acer Nitro pcworld.com/gmpu) to learn more about 5 (Model AN515-53-52FA), which comes choosing this essential part. with an Intel Core i5-8300H processor and There’s some good news if your budget 8GB of RAM, a 15.6-inch FHD display, Nvidia can stretch a bit more, too. For about $100 GeForce GTX 1050 graphics with 4GB of more, you can step up to a model dedicated GDDR5 VRAM, and a 1TB (specifically, the AN515-51-55WL) with GTX 7,200rpm SATA hard drive.

1050 Ti graphics and a 256GB solid-state The Coffee Lake CPU that powers the drive, plus a 2.5-inch bracket, a SATA cable, Nitro 5 marks the first Core i5 chip to boast and enough screws to install a second drive.

Hyper-Threading, a feature that serves up two Nothing against the budget model we’ve threads per processor core. This allows the tested, but as you’ll see in our performance quad-core i5-8300H to deliver eight threads section, moving up to a GTX 1050 Ti would of processing power. While few current make a noticeable difference in the Nitro 5’s games take advantage of Hyper-Threading (a gaming prowess. feature that was formerly found only in Core i7 CPUs), it’ll still come in handy for multitasking DESIGN gamers who (for example) want to stream There’s nothing small about Acer’s Nitro 5 while they shoot. (Want to learn more? Check budget gaming laptops, and this new Coffee out our story on the best CPUs for laptops [go.pcworld.com/cpus].)

While the Nitro 5’s Coffee Lake Core i5 CPU qualifies as cutting-edge, its GTX 1050 graphics card—while by no means a slouch—sits near the bottom of Nvidia’s GeForce 10 Series line.

As we’ll see in a bit, that means crushing gamers’ dreams of silky-smooth frame rates at Ultra settings. Still, bargain hunters who can live with something closer to 30 fps can crank up their graphics The Acer Nitro 5 is all plastic, but the texture on its lid helps it settings all the way. See our story rise above the ordinary.

82 PCWorld SEPTEMBER 2018

The Nitro 5 has a single drive bay, so you have to lose your old drive to add a new one.

Lake version is no exception. Measuring a fairly bulky 15.4 x 10.5 x 1 inches and tilting the scales at a hefty 5.4 pounds, the Nitro 5 barely squeezes into my 15-inch laptop backpack. It’s as heavy as it looks, too, although, to be fair, that’s more in comparison to a mainstream laptop than to a gaming laptop, where hefty is the norm.

Pack in the charging cord and power brick (and yes, you’ll need them, given the Nitro 5’s relatively meager battery life), and you’ll wind up with a more than 6.5 pounds of hardware to lug around.

Hulking though it is, the Nitro 5 manages to look reasonably sleek thanks to the brushed finish on its lid, its crimson hinge and matching backlit keyboard, complete with highlighted WASD keys. While it’s quite an eye-catcher compared to business-minded

laptops, the Nitro 5 is actually a bit low-key as far as gaming laptops go.

Flip the Nitro 5 on its back and you’ll find a pair of removable panels. One is for the drive bay (there’s room for only one drive, meaning you’ll have to replace the existing drive to upgrade your storage), and a second for upgrading the RAM. You can open each panel by loosening a single screw and pulling on a thumb tab.

DISPLAY The Nitro 5’s 15.6-inch, 1920x1080-pixel display looks relatively sharp and vivid given the laptop’s budget price. Measuring just 251 nits (or calendas), the non-touch display is somewhat dim, just barely exceeding our minimum standard for comfortable indoor viewing. In other words, good luck making out the action if you’re gaming near a bright window or outdoors.

Viewing angles on the Nitro 5’s IPS panel were fine, if not particularly awe-inspiring.

There’s no evidence of inverted colors when viewing the matted display from extreme angles, as we’ve seen on some cheaper laptops. That said, the screen dims noticeably when viewed from the side, starting at about 50 degrees or so. Looking from above or below, the screen is at its SEPTEMBER 2018 PCWorld 83

REVIEWS

ACER NITRO 5

dimmest when viewed from about 45 degrees, before brightening a tad as we edge closer to 90 degrees.

The Nitro 5’s mid-sized trackpad sits a little left of center, directly below the main keyboard. The trackpad requires a fair amount of pressure to click, and I also noticed a few KEYBOARD, TRACKPAD, accidental inputs as my palms grazed the SPEAKERS & EXTRAS trackpad while typing. Given that most The Acer Nitro 5’s keyboard feels solid and gamers will prefer using a mouse, my snappy, with a tactile bump in the middle of trackpad quibbles shouldn’t be much of a each keystroke and a satisfying, springy problem for the Nitro 5’s core audience. rebound. The slightly concave keys boast The Nitro 5’s built-in speakers are decent travel for a laptop and discovery is surprisingly good for a budget gaming relatively easy, but the keyboard would feel laptop, boasting relatively robust, dynamic even roomier had Acer dispensed with the sound—nothing a set of dedicated speakers 10-key numeric keypad. Indeed, the arrow couldn’t do better, mind you, but not bad keys look needlessly squished thanks to the compared to the tinny audio you commonly dedicated keypad, which seems out of place get from laptop speakers. My usual test on a gaming-centric laptop like this one. tracks, including “Live and Let Die” by Paul McCartney and Wings, along with Mozart’s Symphony No. 26, sounded detailed and roomy, with a slight hint of bass. I was also pleased by the delicate crunch of snow and ambient forest sounds in Rise of the Tomb Raider, as well as the glorious cacophony of exploding demons in Diablo 3. You can sweeten the audio with Dolby sound processing as well as crank up the The trackpad centers under the letter section of the keyboard (there’s a volume to impressively numeric keypad to the right). The keys are backlit.

84 PCWorld SEPTEMBER 2018

loud levels, handy for drowning out the Nitro 5’s roaring fans.

The 720p webcam videos look expectedly soft and grainy, but it’s still serviceable for video chat.

Unfortunately, the Nitro 5 lacks a fingerprint sensor for signing in with your fingertip, nor does it include an IR camera for facial recognition.

The Nitro 5’s left side includes USB-C, HDMI, USB-A, and an SD card slot.

PORTS The Nitro 5 comes with a decent selection of ports for a budget gaming laptop, starting on the left side with ethernet, USB 3.1 Type C Gen. 1 (up to 5Gbps), The Nitro 5’s right side includes two more USB-A, an audio jack, and the USB 3.0 Type A (with charger port. power-off USB charging), a full HDMI 2.0 port, and an SD but again, the Nitro 5’s port lineup isn’t bad card reader. Also on the left side: a considering its sub-$800 price tag.

Kensington security lock.

On the right, you’ll find a barrel-shaped GENERAL PERFORMANCE charging port, a pair of USB 2.0 ports, and a When it comes to a $750 gaming laptop like combo audio jack. the Acer Nitro 5, you need to manage your We would have preferred more USB 3.0 expectations. Its performance was competent ports and maybe a Thunderbolt 3 port or two, or better in our gaming-focused tests, but it SEPTEMBER 2018 PCWorld 85

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Acer’s Nitro 5 fares well on the Cinebench singlethreaded CPU test.

Cinebench RT15.038 (Single-threaded performance) Origin PC EON17-X (Core i7-8700K)

202

Dell G7 15 (Core i7-8750H)

179

MSI G S65 (Core i7-8750H)

178

Acer Nitro 5 (Core i5-8300H)

174

Dell G3 15 (Core i5-8300H)

173

MicroCenter PowerSpec 15 (Core i7-7700HQ)

163

Acer Predator Helios 300 (Core i7-7700HQ)

162

Gigabyte Aero 15 (Core i7-7700HQ)

153

Dell Inspiron 15 7000 (Core i5-7300HQ)

146 LO N G E R B A R S I N D I C AT E B E T T E R P E R F O R M A N C E

Cinebench RT15.038 (Multi-threaded performance) Origin PC EON17-X (Core i7-8700K)

1,313

MSI G S65 (Core i7-8750H)

1,144

Dell G7 15 (Core i7-8750H)

1,104

Dell G3 15 (Core i5-8300H)

812

Acer Predator Helios 300 (Core i7-7700HQ)

763

MicroCenter PowerSpec 15 (Core i7-7700HQ)

748

Gigabyte Aero 15 (Core i7-7700HQ)

734

Acer Nitro 5 (Core i5-8300H)

709

Dell Inspiron 15 7000 (Core i5-7300HQ)

515 LO N G E R B A R S I N D I C AT E B E T T E R P E R F O R M A N C E

86 PCWorld SEPTEMBER 2018

hung back noticeably in some situations, most likely because of thermal throttling. You should still enjoy speedy productivity and multitasking, and max-settings gaming, provided you can settle for 30-fps visuals. Oh, and keep that charging cable handy.

CINEBENCH R15 We start with Maxon’s Cinebench, which tests a CPU’s raw power—and the more threads, the better.

Here’s a chance for the Nitro 5’s 4-core, 8-thread i5 Coffee Lake processor to shine. In the singlethreaded test, it jumps right into the mix with Core i7 CPUs and easily bests pre–Coffee Lake Core i5 Consumer Reports pulled its recommendation of the Surface Laptop, even though the notebook wasn’t covered in the survey.

chips. This is a good indication that it’ll perform HandBrake 0.9.9 Encode (Seconds) just fine on most mainstream applications Origin PC EON17-X 1,313 (Core i7-8700K) and games.

MSI G S65 1,985 The story changes (Core i7-8750H) when we run Cinebench in Dell G7 15 2,035 (Core i7-8750H) multi-threaded mode. The Dell G3 15 2,607 (Core i5-8300H) laptops with 6-core, MicroCenter PowerSpec 12-thread CPUs get to strut 2,706 15 (Core i7-7700HQ) their stuff, leaving all the Acer Predator Helios 300 2,706 (Core i7-7700HQ) quad-core chips jostling for Gigabyte Aero 15 2,775 (Core i7-7700HQ) second place. The Acer Acer Nitro 5 Nitro 5 lags behind its 3,119 (Core i5-8300H) peers, with only a 7th-gen Dell Inspiron 15 7000 3,921 (Core i5-7300HQ) Core i5 laptop bringing up S H O R T E R B A R S I N D I C AT E B E T T E R P E R F O R M A N C E the rear. Just remember that there still aren’t many The Acer Nitro 5 labored through the HandBrake test, probably because of thermal throttling. applications that support multi-threaded CPUs, so the score here doesn’t affect how most (about 50 minutes, under an hour). people will experience the Nitro 5.

The Nitro 5’s HandBrake score of 3,119 seconds (a little less than 60 minutes) is HANDBRAKE respectable for a quad-core system. But After Cinebench’s sprint, we send the CPUs we were expecting a bit more from this on a marathon. The free HandBrake utility lets new Coffee Lake–era mobile performance us measure how well the CPU performs over chip. Our guess is that the Nitro 5 taps the time with the intensive task of converting a brakes on performance to keep it cool 40GB video file into Android tablet format. under the hood.

Dual-core laptop processors often need (Incidentally, users who want to tinker more than 6,000 seconds (an hour and 40 with the Nitro 5’s cooling fans can do so with minutes) to complete our HandBrake NitroSense, an Acer utility that comes with a benchmark. The fastest mobile quad-core “CoolBoost” mode that ups the maximum CPUs can finish in fewer than 3,000 seconds fan speeds.)

SEPTEMBER 2018 PCWorld 87

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3DMark FireStrike Overall Origin PC EON17-X (Core i7-8700K)

19,187

MicroCenter PowerSpec 15 (Core i7-7700HQ)

13,577

MSI G S65 (Core i7-8750H)

10,340

Dell G7 15 (Core i7-8750H)

10,012

Acer Predator Helios 300 (Core i7-7700HQ)

9,693

Gigabyte Aero 15 (Core i7-7700HQ)

9,640

Dell Inspiron 15 7000 (Core i5-7300HQ) Dell G3 15 (Core i5-8300H) Acer Nitro 5 (Core i5-8300H)

GAMING PERFORMANCE

8,393 6,811 5,476 LO N G E R B A R S I N D I C AT E B E T T E R P E R F O R M A N C E

Tomb Raider 19x10 Ultimate Preset (Fps) Origin PC EON17-X (Core i7-8700K)

184.3

MicroCenter PowerSpec 15 (Core i7-7700HQ)

144.2

MSI G S65 (Core i7-8750H)

97.3

Acer Predator Helios 300 (Core i7-7700HQ)

96.1

Gigabyte Aero 15 (Core i7-7700HQ))

94.4

Dell G7 15 (Core i7-8750H)

92.7

Dell Inspiron 15 7000 (Core i5-7300HQ) Dell G3 15 (Core i5-8300H) Acer Nitro 5 (Core i5-8300H)

The Acer Nitro 5’s gaming performance is dictated by its lower-end Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 graphics card, and its benchmark results fell right in line with our expectations. In short, while the Nitro 5 delivers frame rates comfortably north of 30 fps at “Ultra” settings for typical AAA games, you’ll need to downshift your graphics settings to boost those frame rates into the 60-fps range.

3DMark’s Fire Strike Extreme is a synthetic benchmark that focuses on pure GPU performance.

The Nitro 5’s score of 5,476

88.3 63 53.7 LO N G E R B A R S I N D I C AT E B E T T E R P E R F O R M A N C E

88 PCWorld SEPTEMBER 2018

3DMark FireStrike shows what a difference a GPU makes. The Acer Nitro 5’s GTX 1050 is competent, but if you want max settings you’ll need to dial back the frame rate.

In Tomb Raider at Ultimate settings, the Acer Nitro 5 logged a very good 53.7 frames per second.

is actually decent. The reason it’s at the bottom of Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor this chart, is because every 19x10 Ultra 4K textures (fps) other laptop shown has a MicroCenter PowerSpec 128.9 15 (Core i7-7700HQ) GTX 1050 Ti or better.

Acer Predator Helios 300 102.4 We’re not trying to make (Core i7-7700HQ) the Nitro 5 look bad.

MSI G S65 91.6 (Core i7-8750H) Compared to other GTX Dell G7 15 88.3 (Core i7-8750H) 1050 laptops, like the Gigabyte Aero 15 i7-7700HQ-powered Dell 86.7 (Core i7-7700HQ) XPS 15, the Nitro 5 ends up Origin PC EON17-X 83.8 (Core i7-8700K) looking pretty good. We’re Dell Inspiron 15 7000 83.8 (Core i5-7300HQ) just showing the trade-off of Dell G3 15 going with a lower-end GPU 57.9 (Core i5-8300H) in a bargain gaming laptop.

Acer Nitro 5 47.2 (Core i5-8300H) Moving on to some LO N G E R B A R S I N D I C AT E B E T T E R P E R F O R M A N C E actual games, we first tested the Acer Nitro 5 with the Acer Nitro 5’s 47 fps in Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor is a decent score. oldie-but-goodie Tomb Raider at its Ultimate graphics preset, with the display set at managing 47 fps and again bringing up the 1920x1080 (and V-Sync off). The Nitro 5’s GPU rear compared to laptops with huskier GPUs. may be at the bottom of this chart, but that’s still We could show you the Nitro 5 on Rise of logging a very good 53.7 frames per second. the Tomb Raider, as we usually would, but the Now for Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor trend is the same. Pushed even harder by this at 1920x1080 and Ultra settings (a little harder). graphically intensive game, the Acer Nitro 5 The Acer Nitro 5 struggles a bit more, tries its best, reaching 39.2 fps and trailing all the better-equipped competition.

That’s still solid gaming performance from Pushed even harder by this a budget gaming laptop, albeit shy of 60-fps graphically intensive game, the nirvana. For those craving buttery visuals on the Nitro 5, a little optimization through the Acer Nitro 5 tries its best, GeForce Experience app managed to do the reaching 39.2 fps and trailing all the better-equipped competition. trick with just a few minimal compromises.

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ACER NITRO 5

4K Video Playback Battery Life (Minutes)

Acer Predator Helios 300 (Core i7-7700HQ)

409

Gigabyte Aero 15 (Core i7-7700HQ)

408

Dell G3 15 (Core i5-8300H)

342

Dell Inspiron 15 7000 (Core i5-7300HQ)

326

MSI G S65 (Core i7-8750H))

323

The Acer Nitro 5’s battery life is about what you’d expect for a gaming laptop.

brick if you’re taking it beyond your family room.

VERDICT

Budget gaming laptops don’t get as much of a break as their mainstream cousins.

Acer Nitro 5 291 (Core i5-8300H) They still face intense Dell G7 15 260 (Core i7-8750H) pressure to deliver. The Acer MicroCenter PowerSpec Nitro 5 is big and heavy, with 225 15 (Core i7-7700HQ) so-so battery life and a fairly Origin PC EON17-X 120 (Core i7-8700K) dim screen. But if you’re LO N G E R B A R S I N D I C AT E B E T T E R P E R F O R M A N C E shopping for a gaming laptop that can handle AAA BATTERY LIFE titles without breaking the bank, the Acer Nitro You can’t expect all-day battery life from a 5 delivers the goods. gaming laptop, and while the Acer Nitro 5 is Acer Nitro 5 AN515-53-52FA no exception, we’ve seen much worse.

We test battery life in a laptop by looping a 4K PROS video with screen brightness between 250–260 • Impressive graphics performance for the price nits—which, for the Nitro 5, meant cranking its • Boasts Coffee Lake Core i5 CPU with Hyper-Threading • Comfy keyboard with above-average speakers brightness setting all the way up—and with the CONS volume set at 50 percent, headphones on.

• Bulky and heavy • Middling battery life The result: about 291 minutes, or just under • Relatively dim, non-touch display five hours. That’s not too shabby given the BOTTOM LINE Nitro 5’s gaming focus and its middling 48Whr It’s big and heavy, with so-so battery life and a fairly dim screen, but if you’re shopping for a gaming battery. Indeed, we’ve seen gaming laptops laptop that handle AAA titles without breaking the with larger batteries that could barely make it bank, the $750 Coffee Lake-powered Acer Nitro 5 delivers the goods. past the 90-minute mark. Nevertheless, you $719 won’t want to forget the Nitro 5’s hefty power 90 PCWorld SEPTEMBER 2018

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FEATURE

THE NEW WAVE OF MEMORYBASED STORAGE BLOWS AWAY THE OLDER GENERATIONS.

NVMe SSDs: EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THIS

INSANELY FAST STORAGE B Y

IMAGE: INTEL

J O N

L .

J A C O B I

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FEATURE

NVME SSDS

N

VMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) is no longer a nice-to-have storage technology. If you’re shopping for a new PC, it’s a feature you should actively seek out. Moreover, if your PC is of fairly recent vintage, you should upgrade to NVMe. Here’s why.

NVMe is a communications standard/ protocol developed specially for SSDs by a consortium of vendors including Intel, Samsung, SanDisk, Dell, and Seagate. It operates across the PCIe bus (hence the Express in the name), which allows the drives to act more like the fast memory that they are, rather than the hard disks they imitate. Bottom line: NVMe is fast. Really fast. Like never-have-towait-again-for-your-computer fast.

the latest top-end PCs seem so much faster is because of the quantum leap in storage performance provided by SSDs. Storage was the last bottleneck for real and perceived performance, but it’s now wide-pour with a vengeance.

If you’ve bought, say, a MacBook Pro in the last two years, you may have noticed that you hardly wait at all anymore for mundane operations. Programs pop open, files load and save in an instant, and the machine boots and shuts down in just a few seconds.

That’s because the NVMe SSD inside the latest MacBook Pro reads and writes data literally four times faster than the SATA SSDs found in previous generations. Not only that, but it locates them 10 times as fast (seek).

That’s on top of the four- to five-fold improvement in throughput and ten-fold improveNVME: IT’S THE ment in seek times already provided by SATA STORAGE, STUPID SSDs (over hard drives).

Not to belittle the efforts of CPU and GPU The approximate performance ceilings for vendors over the last decade, but the reason the three mainstream storage technologies as things now stand are: Hard drives still offer Sustained throughput (MBps) tremendous bang for the SATA hard drive buck in terms of capacity and are wonderful for SATA SSD less-used data. But for your NVMe SSD operating system, proLO N G E R B A R S I N D I C AT E B E T T E R P E R F O R M A N C E grams, and oft-used data, you want an NVMe SSD if Not that you need sustained throughput like this very often, but NVMe your system supports it, or makes short work of transferring files of any size. HDD = 200MBps, a SATA SSD if it can’t.

SATA SSD = 550MBps, NVMe SSD = 3GBps. 94 PCWorld SEPTEMBER 2018

configurations.

For the next step, it was decided to leverage a much SATA hard drive higher-bandwidth bus SATA SSD technology that was also NVMe SSD already in place—PCI Express, or PCIe. PCIe is the underlying data transport The CPU and GPU development curve pales in comparison to that of storage over the last 10 years. HD = 2-5 ms seek, SATA SSD = 0.2 ms layer for graphics and other seek, NVMe SSD = 0.02 ms seek. Shorter bars are better, but this is an add-in cards. As of gen 3.X, overall average. Some drives in each category might do better, some it offers multiple lanes (up to will do worse.

16 in most PCs) that handle SATA SSDs VS. NVME SSDs darn near 1GBps each (985MBps).

There’s a reason why we still have SATA SSDs PCIe is also the foundation for the Thunand NVMe SSDs. Knowing the potential of derbolt interface, which is starting to pay memory-based SSDs, it was clear that a new dividends with external graphics cards for bus and protocol would eventually be gaming, as well as external NVMe storage, needed. But the first SSDs were relatively which is nearly as fast as internal NVMe. Intel’s slow, so it proved far more convenient to use refusal to let Thunderbolt die (go.pcworld. the existing SATA storage infrastructure. com/ltd) was a very good thing, as many Though the SATA bus has evolved to users are starting to discover.

16Gbps as of version 3.3, nearly all commerOf course, PCIe storage predates cial implementations remain 6Gbps (roughly NVMe by quite a few years. But previous 550MBps after overhead). Even version 3.3 is solutions were hamstrung by older data far slower than what today’s SSD technology transfer protocols such as SATA, SCSI, and is capable of, especially in RAID AHCI, which were all developed when the

Seek time (milliseconds)

The SanDisk Extreme Pro offers the exact same performance as the WD Black NVMe. Because, wait for it—it’s the same drive. The drive uses four PCIe lanes for a theoretical maximum throughput of well over 3GBps.

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An M.2 NVMe SSD such as the relatively affordable and very fast (except for extremely large transfers) Samsung 970 EVO can live in an M.2/PCIe slot, or in a regular PCIe slot (x4 or greater) by means of a cheap adapter card.

hard drive was still the apex of storage technology. NVMe removes their constraints by offering low-latency commands, and multiple queues—up to 64K of them.

The latter is particularly effective because data is written to SSDs in shotgun fashion, scattered about the chips and blocks, rather than contiguously in circles as on a hard drive.

The NVMe standard has continued to evolve to the present version 1.31 with the addition of such features as the ability to use part of your computer’s system memory as a cache. We’ve already seen it with the super cheap Toshiba RC100 (go.pcworld.com/trc) we recently reviewed, which forgoes that onboard DRAM cache that most NVMe drives use, but still performs well enough to give your system that NVMe kick (for everyday chores).

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WHAT YOU NEED TO GET NVME It’s possible to add an NVMe drive to any PC with a PCIe slot via a $25 adapter card. All recent versions of the major operating systems provide drivers, and regardless of the age of the system you will have a very fast drive on your hands. But there’s a catch.

To benefit fully from an NVMe SSD, you must be able to boot the operating system from it. That requires BIOS support. Sigh.

Most older mainstream BIOSs do not support booting from NVMe and most likely, never will. There’s simply no benefit to the vendors to add it, and a very real downside: You’re unlikely to upgrade a system that’s been updated with NVMe unless you play PC games or do something truly CPU-intensive, like editing 2160p video.

Most NVMe SSDs being sold in the

consumer space use the M.2 form factor. But simply having an M.2 slot doesn’t guarantee NVMe compatibility. M.2 was designed to support USB 3.0, SATA, and PCIe. Most early M.2 slots supported only SATA. Read your system or motherboard user’s guide, or check online. Note that the MSATA slot, which is the precursor, looks very similar.

There’s no way to tell from looking at a slot whether it supports PCIe and NVMe, but you can tell the difference between a PCIe x2 and PCIe x4 slot. The former, called B-keyed (a key is a rise that marries with a gap in the contacts on the drive), has six contacts separated from the rest, while the

latter, M-keyed, has five contacts separated from the rest on the opposite side. There is no hard-and-fast rule, but many B-key slots were SATA only. If you have a B/M-keyed slot with both sets of contacts separated, the most common today, you’re golden. These are also sometimes referred to as socket 2 and socket 3.

If your socket lets you down, it’s time for the $25 PCIe M.2 adapter card that I mentioned. Plextor’s M9Pe and others are available already mounted on PCIe cards as ready-to-rock products.

What you as an end-user should avoid are 2.5-inch NVMe drives. These require the

While our testbed’s M.2 slot supports PCIe and NVMe, yours may not. Shown here is WD’s Black NVMe SSD—a very worthy drive that sustains transfers better than its Samsung 970 EVO competitor.

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SFF-8639 (Small Form Factor) connector. An SFF-8639 connection features four Gen 3 PCIe lanes, two SATA ports, plus sideband channels and both 3.3-volt and 12-volt power, but it’s found only in enterprise-level storage adapters and systems.

On the off-chance you’re using one of the rare Windows PCs that supports Thunderbolt (many with Asus motherboards do), you may be able to use an external Thunderbolt PCIe enclosure to add NVMe to your system. This works like a charm on a Thunderbolt Mac that’s new enough to run High Sierra.

NOT ALL NVME DRIVES ARE CREATED EQUAL While just about any NVMe should make your system feel quicker, they are not all alike. Not even close. Where Samsung’s 970 Pro (go. pcworld.com/s970) will read at over 3GBps and write at over 2.5GBps, Toshiba’s RC100 (go.pcworld.com/rc1) reads at 1.2GBps and writes at just under 900MBps. The difference can be even greater when the amount of data written exceeds the amount of cache on board.

A number of factors that affect performance, including the controller, the amount of NAND on board, the number or PCIe lanes (see above), and the type of NAND. Here are some rules of thumb: > x4 PCIe NVMe SSDs are faster than x2 PCIe types. > The more NAND chips, the more paths and destinations the controller has to distribute 98 PCWorld SEPTEMBER 2018

and store data at. Smaller capacity drives are quite often slower than the larger capacity drives, even given the same model number. > The type of NAND used matters. SLC (Single-Level Cell/1-bit) is fastest, MLC (MultiLevel Cell/2-bit) is next, TLC (Triple-Level Cell/3bit) is slower, and QLC (Quad-Level Cell/4-bit is slowest. However, the formula is complicated by the fact that you can treat any type of NAND (except SLC) as its faster predecessor by simply writing fewer bits. Vendors do this with portions of the SSD for use as cache, which means that a TLC or QLC drive can be just as fast as an SLC drive, until this cache is used up. > Most controllers these days are very efficient, but some, such as those used by Intel and SanDisk, are smarter about how they use cache and can sustain write performance with larger data sets.

Check out our SSD reviews for the skinny on individual drives (go.pcworld.com/sr).

NVME MEANS NO REGRETS FOR A LONG TIME If all that hasn’t driven home the point, let’s say it again: NVMe is the storage technology you want for your current or next PC. Unless you’re a gamer or high-resolution video editor, it virtually guarantees that you won’t feel the need to replace your current system for quite a while—at least because of performance.

Indeed, I’ve felt zero compulsion to replace my six- to seven-year-old systems since they were upgraded with NVMe SSDs. Zero.

TRASHING ONE EGG WASTES 55 GALLONS OF WATER

FEATURE

SAMSUNG CAN FIX THE GALAXY NOTE 9’S BIGGEST PROBLEM BUT IT WON’T IT REALLY NEEDS A PIECE OF PIE.

BY MICHAEL SIMON

100 PCWorld SEPTEMBER 2018

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amsung passed up a golden opportunity with the Galaxy Note 9 (go. pcworld.com/gn9). Just days before the Note 9 shipped, Google officially launched Android 9 Pie (go.pcworld.com/a9p), bringing a brandnew way to navigate, smarter notifications, and indoor mapping with Wi-Fi RTT. The world’s most dominant mobile platform reinvented itself to stay ahead of the ever-changing smartphone landscape.

But you wouldn’t know it by looking at the Note 9. Samsung launched its new $1,000 phone with Android Oreo 8.1, an OS that’s technically newer but nearly indistinguishable from the one that’s running on the Galaxy S9 (go.pcworld.com/gs9). And instead of making a statement to the Android community that it will not only make the best hardware but pair it with the best software, Samsung continued to treat Android as a necessary burden standing in the way of its vision.

Instead of giving would-be Note 9 buyers the best of both worlds—the highest-end hardware with the freshest

software—Samsung’s latest handset runs the same version of Android that Pixel users downloaded more than eight months ago. Mind you, this is nothing new for anyone who’s used a Samsung phone, but it could have been different with the Note 9. And customers might finally be starting to notice.

SPECS AND PERFORMANCE AREN’T THE SAME I’ve been using the Galaxy Note 9 for a few days now and there’s a lot to like about it, especially if you’re a power user. But while the Snapdragon 845 processor, 4,000mAh battery, and 128GB of storage are all best in class, the OS feels like a step behind. It’s not just that it’s missing smart little features like manual orientation lock and proper volume controls, it’s that the The Galaxy Note 9 has great specs, but its OS falls short.

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The Note 9 is one of the best-looking Android phones, but its software isn’t pretty.

Note 9 feels like a phone that could have released a year ago.

That’s because Pie is the most significant Android update in years. Users might not have noticed or cared if the Note 8 shipped with the Nougat-based Samsung Experience, but Pie’s gesture navigation is something of a game-changer for Android.

Gestures on Pie don’t just change the way we navigate—they’re a fundamentally different way to interact with our phones that’s both fresh and familiar. It’s why Essential worked to push out its own Pie update just hours after Google did, and why several other betas are already in the wild.

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And there’s no excuse for the Galaxy Note 9 to not be among them. If Samsung expects its customers to spend $1,250 to get the top-of-the-line Note, it should at least make a vow to support Android 9 by the end of the year. Based on the fact that Samsung hadn’t released any betas yet, and hasn’t committed to even a vague timeline, Pie likely won’t land on the Note 9 until next spring, at which time its thousand-dollar specs are almost sure to be outdated. So even if you buy one right now (go.pcworld.com/orn), you’re still not guaranteed to get the best possible Android experience.

If Samsung expects its customers to spend $1,250 to get the top-ofthe-line Note, it should at least make a vow to support Android 9 by the end of the year.

HOW LONG WILL PIE TAKE TO BAKE? With Project Treble, the Pixel phones, and a renewed focus on rewarding manufacturers who keep pace with Google’s upgrade schedule, there are signs that Android’s fragmented landscape is beginning to coalesce into something akin to uniformity.

Essential actually beat some Pixel phones with its day-one Pie update, and several phones will likely have the final version of Android 9 before the Pixel 3 ships in the fall.

But Samsung is still playing the same old game. For everything I love about the Note 9, a lot of its greatness—the screen, the speed, the battery—fades away while I’m using it. I can’t help but imagine how incredible Android Pie’s gestures and notification upgrades would have been on a phone this size, giving the upcoming Pixel 3 a real run for its money. Instead, Samsung is being its old stubborn self

and the Note 9 suffers as a result. The virtual home button, flipped navigation bar, and vertical Overview screen are noticeably stale and confounding in a post-Pie world, and it’s hard for Samsung to seriously compare the Note 9 to the iPhone X (go.pcworld.com/px) when it’s still running last year’s OS. The bottom line is Samsung cares far more about its own ecosystem than anything Google is doing, and Android updates are only released when Samsung can properly incorporate them into their own skin. The Samsung Experience (as it’s called now) may use Google’s code as a starting point, but compared to the Pixel The new Overview screen is enhanced by the Essential Phone’s thin-bezel design.

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or the OnePlus 6, the Galaxy Note 9 is basically an Android phone in name only.

And as more and more phone makers start to leverage timely updates as an advantage in a crowded, competitive field, Samsung may need to start reconsidering its philosophy.

A TASTE OF PIE Samsung has made no secret that it sees Apple as its biggest competitor, as it works to build out a similar ecosystem with phones, wearables (go.pcworld.com/wea), apps, and, coming soon, a home speaker (go. pcworld.com/hsp). But while the Note 9’s chips and memory will no doubt hold its own against the rumored 6.5-inch OLED iPhone releasing in the fall, it will fall spectacularly short when it comes to the OS. If Samsung wants to truly compete with Apple, it needs to care more about its software. We already know the new iPhone will ship with iOS 12 and Samsung could have made the same promise with the Note 9. Oreo stands out like a sore thumb on such a high-end phone, and in all likelihood, the Note 9 won’t get Pie until after the Galaxy S10, more than six months from now. Even without a full version of Pie, Samsung could have made gesture navigation one of the Note 9’s premier features, but it showed that it cares more about the homogeneity of its own Experience than its users.

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On specs alone, the Galaxy Note 9 is every bit worthy of its $1,000 price tag, with a combination of power and performance the likes of which you won’t find on another Android phone. But I’m still torn on a buying recommendation. For one, the Pixel 3 is right around the corner, and while rumors suggest it won’t be nearly as good-looking as the Note 9, Google’s new phone will still likely be the best Android phone you can buy. And that’s because of Pie.

With skinny bezels and a notch, it’s a perfect fit for Pie, and the battery, navigation, and notification improvements all make it seem like more modern and cutting-edge than it did running Nougat and Oreo.

When I installed Android 9 on my Essential Phone, the difference was huge.

With skinny bezels and a notch, it’s a perfect fit for Pie, and the battery, navigation, and notification improvements all make it seem like more modern and cutting-edge than it did running Nougat and Oreo. The Essential Phone has always been a stunning handset to look at, but with Pie it’s noticeably better to use now too.

Samsung could have done the same thing with the Note 9. Instead what should have been a great phone is just really good.

Here’s How

HOW TO BUILD, MAINTAIN, AND FIX YOUR TECH GEAR

16 simple, yet powerful, Excel functions you need to know These easy starters will get you on your way to mastering spreadsheets. BY IAN PAUL

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ower users love to talk about how powerful and awesome Excel is (go.pcworld.com/ expw), what with its Pivot Tables, nested formulas, and Boolean logic (go.pcworld.com/blgc). But many of us barely know how to find the Autosum feature, let alone use Excel’s functions to IMAGE: MICROSOFT

create powerful formulas.

If you’re part of the Excel 99 percent, here are 16 handy Excel functions that will get you well on your way to spreadsheet mastery.

1. =SUM() The first function anyone should know tells Excel to carry out basic arithmetic. Let’s say SEPTEMBER 2018 PCWorld 105

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you wanted the numbers in cell A2 and cell B2 to be added together in cell C2. All you’d do is enter =SUM(A2:B2) into C2, then hit Enter. In an instant you’d see the sum of the two cells appear.

You can use this function, and most of the functions listed here, to encompass as many cells as you require. You can also select them with your mouse, but I find it’s far easier to type in a range of cells.

are below. We’ve compared the median to the average in the screenshot to show you the difference.

To get the median for the group in column E, in cell E7 we typed the formula =MEDIAN(E2:C6) and hit Enter. In our example case, the median is 15. Had there been an even number of numerals in the series, the median would have been the midpoint between the two middle numbers.

2. =AVERAGE()

4. =MIN()

Average does exactly what it says, and works similarly to SUM. If you have a worksheet containing your monthly earnings over the past year in columns A2 through A13, type =AVERAGE(A2:A13) into A14 to get the average of all monthly earnings.

Again, you can also use your mouse cursor to click-and-drag to highlight a range of cells, or Ctrl + click to handpick individual cells.

If you need to find the smallest number in a range of cells, MIN can help you do that.

Using =MIN(B3:B39) will give you the smallest number contained in those cells.

5. =MAX() Max is the counterpart to MIN and does the

3. =MEDIAN() The median and the average are often confused, but they are not the same thing. The median takes a group of numbers such as (in our example below) 2, 6, 15, 31, and 56, and figures out the middle point of the group. In other words, half the numbers are above the median, and half 106 PCWorld SEPTEMBER 2018

3.

Average and median are often confused, but this example shows how the average represents a sum of numbers divided by their quantity. The median represents a middle point in the series of numerals, regardless of how they add up.

opposite showing you the largest number contained in a range of cells.

6. =TRIM() If you copy text from another program into Excel you can often end up with excess whitespace that turns your spreadsheet into a visual horror. TRIM can help you 7. clean it up.

Excel’s COUNT function can tell you how many cells in a series TRIM can only deal with contain numbers rather than words, dates or other kinds of entries. text from a single cell. So start This can be helpful when you’re managing a complex spreadsheet. by cleaning up the text in cell B1 by typing =TRIM(B1) into cell C1, for given range that contain characters such as example. The result will be cleaned up text in numbers, text, or symbols, as well as error cell C1. Repeat the function for any other cells values. you need tidied up.

If you’re looking to clean up line breaks, 9. =LEN() try CLEAN instead of TRIM. If you want to count the number of characters in a single cell, including white spaces, check 7. =COUNT() out LEN. Want to know how many characters If you need to know how many cells in a given are in cell A1? Just type =LEN(A1) into a range contain numbers, don’t bother different cell and you’ll find out. counting by hand—just use the COUNT function. If you have a mix of numbers and 10. =CONCATENATE() text in cells A21-A50, for example, type into This takes data from two cells and turns it cell A51 =COUNT(A21:50) and you’ll have into one. Check out our previous look at the answer in no time.

Excel functions to see how this can be useful (go.pcworld.com/15ex).

8. =COUNTA()

Similar to the above example, you can use =COUNTA() to count the number of cells in a

11. =DAYS() Want to know the number of days between SEPTEMBER 2018 PCWorld 107

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12.

=SQRT(1764) into a cell, hit Enter, and you’ll find the answer to life, the universe, and everything—including the example formula.

14. =NOW() Want to see the current date and time whenever you open a particular worksheet?

Type =NOW() into the cell where you want the date and you’re done. If you want to see a future date from right now, you can use something like =NOW()+32. The now function does not take any arguments so don’t put anything in between the brackets.

Calculating the weekdays in 2019.

two dates in a spreadsheet? If you had, for example, September 5, 2018, in cell A4 and December 27, 2018, in A5, then just use =DAYS(A5, A4) to get the answer as a negative number—reversing the order of cells would give you a positive number.

12. =NETWORKDAYS() Knowing the number of days is great, but if you need to know how many weekdays that range encompasses, turn to NETWORKDAYS (that’s ‘net work days’) instead. This function uses the same format as DAYS, but you need to use an ascending cell order to get a nonnegative number. So =NETWORKDAYS(A4, A5) will give you 80 and not –80.

13. =SQRT() Need to know the square root of 1764? Type 108 PCWorld SEPTEMBER 2018

15. =ROUND() As its name suggests, this function lets you round off numbers. ROUND requires two arguments: a number or cell, and the number of digits to round to. If you have the number 231.852645 in A1, for example, =ROUND(A1, 0) gives you 232, =ROUND(A1, 1) gives you 232.9, and =ROUND(A1, -1) returns 230.

16. =ROUNDUP(), =ROUNDDOWN() If you want more direct control over rounding up or down there are functions for that too. ROUNDUP and ROUNDDOWN use exactly the same argument format as ROUND. To learn more about ROUND and its counterparts, check out Microsoft’s support pages (go. pcworld.com/mspt).

How to install Fortnite on Android, and every phone that can play it Not every phone can hop onboard the battle bus. These ones can. BY BRAD CHACOS

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pic Games’ Fortnite is eating the world, and now the battle royale game (and occasional golf simulator) is finally coming to Android. Samsung Galaxy devices held exclusive access to the Fortnite beta for now, but Epic has started rolling out invites to owners of other phones as well.

IMAGE: EPIC GAMES

Can your phone even play Fortnite for Android, though? The game requires some serious graphical horsepower despite its cartoonish looks.

If you’re an Android user and want to gain access to Fortnite, we have you covered here.

Following our instructions, we also have a full list of phones that can play Fortnite on Android.

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HOW TO PLAY FORTNITE ON ANDROID

using default Android settings, you’ll see a warning about downloading and installing APKs from unknown sources. Confirm you’re on the Epic Games website (epicgames. com) before you download any files (an invitation scheme like this is bound to draw phishing schemes galore) and grant Chrome permission to do so. The Fortnite Installer will install; follow the on-screen prompts to finish installing Fortnite. When you’re done, be sure to revoke Chrome’s ability to download apps from unknown sources to stay as safe as possible.

To celebrate the launch of the Galaxy Note 9 (go.pcworld.com/hon9), Samsung Galaxy owners can play the Fortnite beta right now. Anyone who has a Galaxy S7 or later, the Galaxy Note 8, or Galaxy Tab S3 or S4 will find a Fortnite icon in Samsung’s Game Launcher app. (You can find it in your app drawer.) Just tap it to start downloading the game.

If you preorder the Galaxy Note 9 via Samsung.com (go.pcworld.com/prn9), the company will also give you a whopping 15,000 V-Bucks (go.pcworld.com/frvb) to WHAT ANDROID PHONES use in Fortnite along with an exclusive Galaxy CAN PLAY FORTNITE outfit. It’s pretty slick.

You’re going to need a fairly beefy phone to Everyone else must sign up for invitations play Fortnite on Android. Epic says (go. to the beta, which will roll out in waves. Head pcworld.com/epfq) these devices will be able over to the official Fortnite for Android page to hop onboard the battle bus immediately (go.pcworld.com/ftbt) and register with your after receiving an invitation. The good news: email. Epic will eventually send you an invitation email with instructions on how to install the game, which isn’t being distributed through the Google Play Store. Do not download anything claiming to be Fortnite in Google Play—it’s a scam.

You’ll need to download the Fortnite Installer app. If you’re The exclusive Galaxy outfit for Fortnite on Android.

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Screenshot from the Fortnite for Android trailer.

Most of our favorite Android phones (go. pcworld.com/ad18) make the cut.

first, but Epic says it’s “working on fixes in the near term.”

Samsung Galaxy: S7 / S7 Edge , S8 / S8+, S9 / S9+, Note 8, Note 9, Tab S3, Tab S4 Google: Pixel / Pixel XL, Pixel 2 / Pixel 2 XL Asus: ROG Phone, Zenfone 4 Pro, 5Z, V Essential: PH-1 Huawei: Honor 10, Honor Play, Mate 10 / Pro, Mate RS, Nova 3, P20 / Pro, V10 LG: G5, G6, G7 ThinQ, V20, V30 / V30+ Nokia: 8 OnePlus: 5 / 5T, 6 Razer: Phone Xiaomi: Blackshark, Mi 5 / 5S / 5S Plus, 6 / 6 Plus, Mi 8 / 8 Explorer / 8SE, Mi Mix, Mi Mix 2, Mi Mix 2S, Mi Note 2 ZTE: Axon 7 / 7s, Axon M, Nubia / Z17 / Z17s, Nubia Z11

HTC: 10, U Ultra, U11 / U11+, U12+ Lenovo: Moto Z / Z Droid, Moto Z2 Force Sony: Xperia XZ/ XZs, XZ1, XZ2

There’s a second wave of Android phones that won’t be able to play the Fortnite beta at

Finally, if you don’t see your phone listed above, Epic said it may still be able to play Fortnite for Android if it meets or exceeds the following specifications: OS: 64-bit Android, 5.0 or higher RAM: 3GB or higher GPU: Adreno 530 or higher, Mali-G71 MP20, Mali-G72 MP12 or higher But there’s a twist: Your phone can’t be rooted if you want to play Fortnite for Android. Epic says it may drop that condition in the future if it can find “effective anti-cheat solutions” though.

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OnePlus 6: Tips, tweaks, and secrets for the best OnePlus phone ever It’s one of our favorite phones of 2018, and it might be a lot more powerful than you think.

Get started with these 10 power-user tips. BY RYAN WHITWAM

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ome of the most popular phones on the market run heavy custom UIs with more features than any sane person needs (we’re looking at you Samsung and LG). The OnePlus 6 (go.pcworld.com/bop6) doesn’t overload you with things you’ll never use, but there are still subtle and useful features 112 PCWorld SEPTEMBER 2018

hidden inside this phone.

Here are 10 important setting items you should check out on the OnePlus 6.

1. SCREEN-OFF GESTURES You don’t even have to turn on the OnePlus 6 to get things done. After setting up the screen-off gesture system, you can swipe to IMAGE: RYAN WHITWAM

activate features instantly.

You’ll find this under Settings > Gestures > Screen Off Gestures. There’s a straight­ forward Double Tap To Wake option that you should enable. You can also control music (after flipping the switch) by drawing a “pause” icon with two fingers for play/ pause. Draw a left or right­ facing arrow (< or >) to skip tracks. The other gestures are completely up to you—draw an O, V, S, M, or W and apply your desired function. You can launch any app or choose from system features like toggling the flashlight, opening the camera, and more.

1.

2. CUSTOMIZE THE ALERT SLIDER OnePlus has offered a three­position alert slider ever since the OnePlus 2, and the OnePlus 6 makes a much needed change by connecting the slider to the ringer state rather than to Do Not Disturb mode. You can use the slider without any changes to toggle between ring, vibrate, and silent, but there are some useful settings to play with as well.

The alert slider menu is in the main system settings. For ring mode, you can choose whether calls will also vibrate. In silent mode,

you can also have media automatically muted.

This is an especially handy feature when you don’t want your phone making any noise.

2.

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the VoLTE, NFC, and alarm.

4. GAMING MODE

3.

3. DECLUTTER THE STATUS BAR The OnePlus 6 does the screen notch better than most other Android phones, but there’s no getting around the lack of physical space for status-bar icons. You can trim the assortment of icons up there in the system settings under Status Bar. Inside this menu, you can add a battery percentage in place of the icon, but the major space saving is found in the Icon Manager submenu. You can disable icons for almost anything— even things you actually need like the signal bars. But you’re probably safe 4. to ditch icons like 114 PCWorld SEPTEMBER 2018

A lot of people take their mobile gaming more seriously than ever now with high-stakes titles like PUBG hitting Android. OnePlus includes a special gaming mode to boost your phone’s performance or save power while playing games. You’ll find gaming mode rather buried in menus under Settings > Advanced > Gaming Mode.

This feature lets you route calls to speakerphone automatically, disable automatic brightness, and limit network access for non-game apps. Just choose your settings and add apps to your game list. Run any of those titles, and Gaming Mode will activate.

trigger to things like voice search, notifications, or turning off the screen.

6. SWITCH TO THE DARK THEME

5.

5. CUSTOMIZE THE NAVIGATION BUTTONS Many phones let you choose the order of navigation buttons, but OnePlus goes further by letting you pick what the buttons do.

These options are in a top-level Buttons menu in the system settings. You can, of course, reverse the button order if you’re accustomed to Samsung’s default layout. Each of the three standard buttons also have long-press and double-press actions available to configure.

Most button triggers will default to No Action except for the home button, which launches Assistant when you long-press.

You can change that or any other button

All these bright settings screens can be murder on your eyes in a dark room, but the OnePlus 6 has a dark system theme ready to go. Go to Settings > Display and scroll down to the System section. Tap on Theme and choose Dark. There’s also a Light theme that switches to a completely white UI if you want to sear your retinas a little more.

The dark theme applies to all system settings screens and the app drawer.

Remember, you can also change the accent color in this same menu to give your theme a little more charm.

6.

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even less conspicuous. Go to Settings > Display and scroll down to the Notch section.

Here, you can tap on the Notch Display item to get a choice between showing the notch and hiding it.

If you choose to hide the notch, the status bar area on either side of the notch will be black instead of whatever color your status bar is supposed to be at that moment.

The notification and status icons remain up there, but the protrusion into your display is less obvious.

7.

7. SWITCH TO GESTURE NAVIGATION If customizing the navigation buttons isn’t enough for you, there’s an option to get rid of the buttons completely. Go to Settings > Navigation Bar & Gestures and activate Navigation Gestures. In this mode, the nav bar is gone, and you control the phone with swipes from the bottom of the screen. A swipe up in the middle sends you to Home, but swiping up and holding opens multitasking.

Swipe up from the bottom left or right to go back. It takes some adjustment, but you can reclaim that lost screen space.

8. HIDE THE NOTCH The OnePlus 6 screen notch isn’t very big, but you can make it 116 PCWorld SEPTEMBER 2018

8.

9. HIDDEN SPACE APPS Just because you have an app installed doesn’t mean it needs to be visible in your app drawer.

Many third-party launchers let you hide apps, but the OnePlus launcher has a slightly different take on the feature that keeps those apps where you can get to them. It’s called the

list, but you can still launch them normally once you swipe over. If you want to restore an app, long-press and select the Unhide option.

10. CUSTOMIZE (OR DISABLE) THE SHELF 9.

Hidden Space, and it’s just a swipe away.

To access the Hidden Space, just swipe to the left after opening the app drawer. You can add new apps to this list by tapping the plus icon at the top of the screen. Apps in the Hidden Space don’t show up in the main app

10.

The OnePlus launcher includes a Shelf to the left of the first home screen, which is where you’ll find the Google Feed on many devices. The Shelf is an extra home screen panel, vertically scrollable and designed for widgets. It has a selection of built-in widgets that track your data usage, recent contacts, and more. Don’t want all those?

Just long-press and tap the red X to clear any of them.

You can add more widgets to the Shelf as well by tapping the plus button in the lower right corner. Any widget will work, but scrollable ones can get in the way of scrolling through the Shelf. If you don’t like the Shelf, you can shut it off in the Home settings.

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HERE’S HOW

Where to find 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

W

hen you own an Amazon Kindle, the cost of supporting a voracious reading habit can get very steep, very quickly. A quick glance at Amazon’s list of the Best Books of the Month shows that a decent read can set you back between $13 and $15 for a Kindle edition book. Sure, Amazon offers deals on great 118 PCWorld SEPTEMBER 2018

e-books, but waiting for a deal could take forever. Many titles can be had for two bucks or less, but it takes work to find the gems among the dross.

What you need are some solid options for finding free, absorbing content to devour on your Kindle. We’re more than happy to point you in the right direction. (And if you need a new e-reader, find one among our reviews of IMAGE: GETTY IMAGES

the best Kindles [go. pcworld.com/btkn].)

PROJECT GUTENBERG At last count, Project Gutenberg (go.pcworld. com/gtbg) offered 57,245 free ebooks that can be downloaded in a number of formats, including ones that are readable on a Kindle e-reader. You won’t find any With over 57,000 free books to read on your Kindle, Project new releases here, with Gutenberg should keep you busy for a while. good reason: All of the titles available though Project Gutenberg are either Documents and Fonts (if you own a Kindle in the public domain, because the copyright Oasis, there will also be a third folder, called on the work has expired or because the Audible.) Drag and drop the .mobi file you holder of the book’s copyright has given the downloaded from the Project Gutenberg project’s organizers permission to provide website into your Kindle’s Document file and access to it at no cost. disconnect the device once the file transfer is That said, you’ll find plenty of amazing complete. Boom: You’re ready to start reading. books to read. Some of the greatest tomes in One word of caution: If you live outside of the English language are in the public domain: the United States, downloading the books Moby Dick, Anne of Green Gables, A Study in from Project Gutenberg might not be legal. Be Scarlett and Beowulf are all there and ready for sure to check your local laws before pulling the the taking. (Project Gutenberg provides some trigger on any books you find here. content in 49 other languages as well.)

To get Project Gutenberg books onto your OVERDRIVE Kindle, download the book you want to read.

If you’ve got a library card, you’ve got access Then, attached your e-reader to your PC with a to free e-books. OverDrive (go.pcworld.

USB cable and open it in File Explorer, just as com/ovdr) is an online service that allows you would any other connected drive. In your library card holders to download free e-books Kindle’s file directory, you’ll see two file folders: (and movies and audio content, too) from SEPTEMBER 2018 PCWorld 119

HERE’S HOW

FIND FREE BOOKS FOR KINDLE

well-written help section to walk you through the process.

Depending on your library’s rules, you may be able to choose from a number of loan periods.

If a book’s unavailable, With OverDrive, your local library becomes your Kindle’s best friend. many libraries will allow you their public library, school, or institution’s to join a waiting list. When your turn comes collection to their Kindles. The more library around, OverDrive will let you know. cards you have in your name, the more books That’s the good stuff. Now for the bad: you have access to.

Not all libraries offer Kindle-ready editions of Using OverDrive is dead simple. After the e-books that they have in their collection. entering your library card number and the PIN Many libraries serve up digital content as an assigned to you when you were issued your Adobe Digital Editions file—a format that’s not card (if you can’t remember it, ask your librarian,) compatible with Amazon’s E-Ink devices. you’ll have access to all of the digital content that your library has in its collection. The more SWAP KINDLE BOOKS libraries you belong to, the better chance there WITH A FRIEND is of finding something you’ll want to read.

While Amazon keeps it quiet, some e-books Just like a brick-and-mortar library with purchased via the Kindle Store can be loaned actual books on its shelves, only one person out to your friends. Just hope that they’ll can take out a book on OverDrive at a time. If return the favor from time to time! a book is available, click Borrow and follow To loan out a Kindle e-book, sign into the prompts. The service also provides a Amazon.com and open the Account & Lists 120 PCWorld SEPTEMBER 2018

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

drop-down menu, located in the top right corner of the Amazon homepage. Choose Your Content & Devices. You should see a list of all of the Kindle e-books you’ve ever bought. Next to the title of each book, you’ll note a gray square with three dots on it.

Click it, and a list of all of the options for this title will appear.

If Loan This Title is on the list, you’re in business. Clicking it will take you to a page that lets you send the book to the friend-of-your-choosing’s email address. Your Kindle e-books can be lent out for a 14-day period, during which time you won’t have access to the title for yourself—just as if you’d lent a book to a pal from the shelf in your living room.

SHARE BOOKS WITH YOUR SIGNIFICANT OTHER

If you’re not the only Kindle owner in your family, you’re in luck: Amazon will allow a maximum of two adults per family to share Kindle eBooks with one another. So, if your partner buys an ebook from the Kindle Store, you’ll be able to read it too, at no charge.

To get started, log in to Amazon’s website and go to your Account Settings > Your Content & Devices.

Click Households And Family Library. From here, you’ll be able to set up your Family library sharing With over 57,000 free books to read on your Kindle, Project Gutenberg should keep you busy for a while. settings.

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Tech Spotlight

A video showcase of the latest trends

Watch the video at go.pcworld. com/mkey

Mechanical keyboards: What you need to know

â&#x2030;Ľ Mechanical keyboard enthusiast and reviewer Hayden Dingman talks switches (Cherry and its alternatives) and offers tips on why, and how, to pick the right mechanical keyboard for your needs.

122 PCWorld SEPTEMBER MONTH 2017 2018