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INSIDE: THE BIGGEST PC NEWS FROM COMPUTEX

JULY 2021

WINDOWS TIPS: SIX COMMAND PROMPT COMMANDS YOU SHOULD BE USING PLUS: MEET

AMD’S FIDELITYFX SUPER RESOLUTION

REVIEWED

TIGER LAKE H

INTEL’S NEW LAPTOP CHIPS TAKE THE FIGHT TO AMD

Remember the last time your family visited the forest? It’s a place of wonder and imagination for the whole family—where stories come to life. And it’s closer than you think. Sounds like it’s time to plan your next visit. Make the forest part of your story today at a local park near you or nd one at iscover2he orest.org.

CONTENTS

JULY 2021

≥ DEPARTMENTS

≥ FEATURES

7 News

29 Reviews & Ratings

96 Meet AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution

109 Here’s How

132 Tech Spotlight

103 6 Command Prompt commands you should still be using

COVER LAPTOP IMAGE COURTESY OF AORUS; INTEL IMAGE COURTESY OF INTEL

JULY 2021 PCWorld 3

MASTHEAD

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4 PCWorld JULY 2021

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JULY 2021 PCWorld 5

Remember the last time your family visited the forest? It’s a place of wonder and imagination for the whole family—where stories come to life. And it’s closer than you think. Sounds like it’s time to plan your next visit. Make the forest part of your story today at a local park near you or nd one at iscover2he orest.org.

News

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

The biggest PC news from Computex 2021 While you were enjoying a hot dog over the Memorial Day holiday last month, AMD, Intel, Nvidia and more were changing the future. BY MARK HACHMAN ne of the most important trade shows in the PC universe, Computex, unfortunately occurred during the wee hours of the Memorial Day holiday in the United States at the end of May. Fortunately, we kept tabs on the announcements from AMD, Intel, Nvidia and more that you need to know about, and we’ve summed them up below.

O IMAGE: NVIDIA

If we had to pick an overall “winner,” well, AMD stole the show. A number of CPU, GPU, and even architectural announcements made for a jam-packed Computex presentation. But our email and internal chat channels were busy chewing over what Intel and Nvidia had to offer, too. In no particular order, here’s what we consider to be the most important stories that came out of Computex.

JULY 2021 PCWorld 7

NEWS

COMPUTEX 2021

Unit of Computing (NUC), and just how small they were? No longer. Intel has entered the traditional small-form-factor PC market with an 8-liter “Beast Canyon” NUC that can house a full-length graphics card alongside a Compute Element with a gaming-class 11th-gen Tiger Lake-H series AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution looks like a must-have right now. processor. Intel pitched its AMD’S FIDELITYFX SUPER glimpse of Beast Canyon as a sneak peek, RESOLUTION withholding pricing and availability details.

FidelityFX Super Resolution is AMD’s answer But we looked closely at what details were to Nvidia’s DLSS technology (go.pcworld. available, as well as what we think this bad com/dlt2), both of which use some box will be able to accomplish. computational magic to eke out more frames INTEL’S 5GHZ REFRESH OF on your games. AMD’s technology, though, TIGER LAKE can improve not only its own GPUs but the We originally thought the launch of Intel’s competition’s as well—yes, even Nvidia’s Tiger Lake-U parts last September (go.

GTX 10-series GPUs! Even better, there are four levels of graphics performance (in addition to the native performance of the GPU), which, according to this AMD slide, offer frame rates ranging from 49 fps to a whopping 150 fps. That’s simply insane.

INTEL’S BEAST CANYON NUC Remember when Intel introduced the so-called New 8 PCWorld JULY 2021

Intel’s Beast Canyon NUC is, well, a beast.

pcworld.com/tglu) needed a little more oomph. Well, Intel delivered. The company launched a new 5GHz Tiger Lake chip that it claims can top the Ryzen 5800U in both gaming and content creation. By how much, you ask?

If you cherry-pick a HandBrake video transcoding benchmark, the new 2.9GHz Core i7-1195G7 outperforms the comparable Ryzen by a whopping eightfold.

And did we mention Intel now has a 5G module, too?

The Asus ROG Strix G15 Advantage Edition is a pretty notebook.

What’s inside is even prettier.

AMD’S RADEON RX 6000M TAKES ON NVIDIA’S RTX GPUS This is what you were waiting for: a new AMD GPU that can go head-to-head with Nvidia’s RTX GPUs. At Computex the notebook graphics wars just began heating up. AMD launched the Radeon RX 6800M, 6700M, and 6600M, all with differing levels of horsepower. AMD said the RDNA 2 chips offer 1.5X the performance over the original RDNA designs, while also operating at 43 percent less power. And boy, are there benchmarks!

PCWORLD REVIEWS THE AMD RADEON RX 6800M PCWorld reviewed the AMD Radeon RX 6800M, built into the Asus ROG Strix G15

Advantage Edition. We call it a “worthy competitor to Nvidia’s GeForce” right in the headline, and we’ll show you why with our tests.

NVIDIA’S MONSTROUS GEFORCE RTX 3080 TI What Nvidia calls its “new gaming flagship” GPU may have deserved a higher place in our list, given that, well, it’s a new premium GPU. Combine the $1,200 price tag and the fact that graphics cards are still selling out almost immediately, and the result is a graphics card that you’ll probably never get your hands on. However, Nvidia’s RTX 3080 Ti specs are appropriately massive, and we’ve even been able to review the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti (go.pcworld.com/38ti) itself. Prepare to be amazed.

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COMPUTEX 2021

THE NEW AMD ADVANTAGE EDITION NOTEBOOK PROGRAM After reading about Intel Evo’s go-to-market (go.pcworld.com/g2mb) brand for its co-engineered ”Project Athena” (go.pcworld. com/patn) premium notebook designs, you might have thought Intel was the only chip vendor spending time and money to make sure your next gaming notebook was designed properly. Did you notice the AMD Advantage program at the bottom of our Radeon RX 6000M story? Here’s what AMD is doing to guarantee your next Ryzen/Radeon notebook is a compelling product.

WHAT IS ALIENWARE’S ELEMENT 31?

Liquid metal always conjures up images of the T-1000 Terminator rather than a cooling solution inside a premium notebook. We’re not going to spoil (well, in this story, anyway) what Element 31 actually is.

But we can tell you that it’s very important in allowing Alienware to create the crazythin Alienware x15 and x17 laptops.

Thin-and-light gaming laptops? The What’s inside that thing? future is now.

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AMD LAUNCHES NEW APUS FOR LOW-COST PC BUILDS AMD announced that its hotly anticipated Ryzen 5000G APUs (go.pcworld.com/5apu) will launch on August 5. An APU is a Ryzen chip that integrates Radeon graphics, providing DIY builders with a cheap, purposebuilt foundation for building a PC. But things have changed somewhat with the ongoing chip shortage, and we’ll explain why that is.

AMD’S 3D V-CACHE CAN BOOST PERFORMANCE BY 25 PERCENT What is a 3D chiplet? And what is AMD’s 3D V-Cache? That, my friend, is the future. AMD announced a way to stack memory on top of its Ryzen processor, dramatically increasing the cache size and the performance. And it’s coming later this year. We explain what it all means in our report.

Google’s next way of working is ‘Smart Canvas’ Google’s all-in-one workspace appears to be similar to Notion. BY MARK HACHMAN

oogle’s next step in Google Workspace is…a Google workspace: Smart Canvas, an all-in-one digital document that’s designed for collaboration.

“For over a decade, we’ve been pushing documents away from just being pieces of paper, and toward collaborative, linked content inspired by the web,” said Javier Soltero, vice president and general manager

G IMAGE: GOOGLE

of Google Workspace, during a presentation at Google’s Google I/O developer conference in late June.

Soltero didn’t call out Smart Canvas as a separate app, competing with existing Workspace apps like Docs or Sheets.

Instead, he positioned Smart Canvas as more of a conceptual experience, guiding the evolution of working within the Google Workspace apps over time. Some users JULY 2021 PCWorld 11

NEWS

SMART CANVAS

began comparing Smart Canvas to Notion share a Slide, Doc, or Sheet document within (go.pcworld.com/ntin), a subscription a Google Meet call. Beginning this fall, Meet service for the Mac OS platform that uses the will be directly integrated into Docs, Sheets, same sort of inclusive design as Google’s and Slides as well. A related Companion own Smart Canvas.

Mode will also give each member of that Smart Canvas looks like a document, but Meet call their own dedicated video window, includes links to people and other files that if they want it, so they’ll always feel like part of can be linked via the Canvas. (Google calls the conversation, Soltero said. these “smart chips,” and they can be What’s next for Smart Canvas? It looks referenced through an “@” symbol combined like the concept will evolve over time. The with the relevant person or document.) idea is for Smart Canvas to be less of the old Soltero showed a reference that looked way of doing things—a document somewhat similar to Google Keep’s describing a moment in time—and rather an checklists, as well as integrated tables that always-actionable, up-to-date document, could be created within the document—again Soltero said. with references outside the document.

Google included a visual demonstration Soltero’s demonstration included features of what Smart Canvas will look like, which can Google has talked about before, such as be viewed at go.pcworld.com/scdm. inclusive language that would change “chairman” to “chairperson.”

(Microsoft, too, has included this in its own Microsoft Editor tools [go.pcworld. com/medt].)

Google also offered an update on the integration timeline (go.pcworld. com/intm) that it began putting forward Google will soon begin integrating Workspace and Meet so that you’ll be able to launch Meet from, say, Google Docs. last year: You can 12 PCWorld JULY 2021

Android 12, Google Workspace, and five other big reveals at Google I/O Here’s the best of Google I/O 2021: Android 12, new additions to Google workspace, enhancements to Search and Photos, and more. BY MARK HACHMAN

oogle may not be ready to hold an in-person developer conference quite yet, but Google I/O was full of new developments across Google’s products and services. One line of products was missing: hardware. If you were hoping for details on new Pixels, Chromecasts, Stadia consoles, or Nest smart home gear, you’ll have to wait.

But Google did offer new details on the long-awaited Android 12; show off

G IMAGE: GOOGLE

enhancements to its core Search, Photos, and Shopping experiences; and remind us over and over that, yes, it really cares about privacy. There was even a “one more thing” moment in Project Starline. Below is what you need to know about Google I/O 2021.

ANDROID 12 One of the more hotly anticipated announcements of Google I/O 2021 was Android 12, the next iteration of Android for JULY 2021 PCWorld 13

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GOOGLE I/O

smartphones. Google said that it rethought every aspect of Android, from the basic UI to notifications to quick settings. The result?

What Google calls “Material You.” As Google normally does, it will launch Android 12 first in its Pixel phones—but it did not announce any new Pixel hardware, or any hardware at all. Good news, though: Google says it made under-the-hood improvements to speed up Android 12 by up to 22 percent.

This should allow it to run on cheaper, less powerful hardware.

Android 12 will automatically generate personal color palates with a “designer’s eye.” The “Material You” Android UI revamp begins with a phone’s wallpaper: Select an image, and Android will recalibrate the device’s interface color palette to complement it. Google says that Android 12 will “flex” to every device, too, adapting the UI to different devices, with adjustments to

layout, color—even line widths. And that goes for third-party apps, too.

Quick Settings have been reworked, emphasizing Google Pay and your Google smart home ecosystem’s Home controls.

New privacy indicators will tell you when apps are using your camera or mic, and a new Private Compute Core will allow Google’s AI to perform tasks that would normally require help from the Google cloud to execute.

Finally, there’s a big change to Google Assistant: Just give the power button a long press to access the feature.

PRIVACY For the last year, Apple has made “privacy” one of the watchwords of iOS. At I/O, Google responded with a number of privacy-focused features—such as the Android-specific features, above—alongside

Android 12 will automatically generate personal color palates with a “designer’s eye.”

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SEARCH

Don’t be embarrassed by your search history— you’ll be able to quickly delete it.

frequent reminders that Google does care about your privacy. For example, we learned that more than 2 billion Google accounts now use Google’s autodelete capability, which erases your Web and app activity after 18 months. Google also said that it is working to eliminate bad passwords (go. pcworld.com/bdpw) and is a strong proponent of phone-based authentication.

Google also said at I/O that it’s adding controls to delete recent searches (specifically by time, such as the last 15 minutes). Maps will also remind you that Location History is on so that you can turn it off if you’d like.

Finally, Photos is introducing a protected Locked Folder where you can store any images in a de facto lockbox—if stored there, they won’t show up elsewhere in Photos, or anywhere on your device.

Why should you care about a Multitask Unified Model? Because that’s what Google is predicating its next generation of Search upon. MUM is designed to understand the context of a query (“What do I need to hike Mt. Fuji?”) and search out the answer across text and video, and even in foreign languages. Google also says you’ll be able to snap a photo of your hiking boots and ask whether they could be used on the hike, and the new Google Search algorithm will understand enough about the specific model to answer your question.

Visually recognizing the world around you will be part of your Android phone, too.

Google partnered with Simone Biles and

Augmented reality can be used to identify local businesses.

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GOOGLE I/O

SHOPPING Google is tapping the power of Google Lens to help you buy things in the real world, too.

On your phone, you’ll be able to tap the small Lens icon in the Google search bar and take a photo, and then Google will try to identify the object Google Maps is also becoming more aware; here, Maps highlights coffee shops rather than restaurants early in your day. you’ve photographed.

In a future version Megan Rapinoe to put them “inside” AR, so of Chrome, you’ll also be able to quickly see if you’ll be able to watch Biles perform a virtual you have left any items in shopping carts tumbling routine. In Maps, you’ll be able to across various sites. Executives also said that use your smartphone screen and camera to Google will also search out promotional tell what businesses are as you walk by them, how busy they are, and even what dishes they serve. Google is also slowly rolling out Indoor Live View, an AR map of train stations and airports, in An upcoming version of Chrome will show your shopping carts across various sites.

Zurich.

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codes (as in Microsoft Edge), and apply any discounts for loyalty programs it knows you’re a part of, all through Google Pay.

PHOTOS More than 4 trillion photos and videos are stored in Google Photos, and Google knows you’ll probably never look at the majority of them again. That’s why Google Google is making adjustments to Android and its Pixel cameras to invented Google Memories, improve how they take photos of people of color. an existing feature that resurfaces older photos on a given day or topic. Google is now going to tweak this by adding what it calls “Little patterns,” which look for a number of related photos, such as images from birthday parties or hikes, and show them together.

Google also knows that for some, memories can be painful—whether they be of an ex-partner, a deceased loved one, or the time before a transgendered person transitioned. For these examples, you’ll have the option of excluding a specific person, photo, or time period.

Google also said that it worked with people of color to reassess how its cameras take photos of Black people; how its cameras adjust for exposure and white balance; and how portrait mode separates Black hair from the background. This feature will arrive on If you want to, you’ll be able to remove photos from Google’s Moments feature.

Android 12 and Google Pixel phones this fall.

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GOOGLE I/O

GOOGLE’S PRODUCTIVITY AND “SMART CANVAS” It’s taken a long time to evolve the concept of a “document” from an electronic facsimile of a piece of paper to something that embraces the modern digitized workspace, but Google’s Smart Canvas is how Google sees the future of work. Google Canvas takes a Google Doc file, say, and basically makes it a living, always-evolving document by linking to people, tasks, and files via linked “smart chips,” and more.

As a related initiative, Google also said that it’s allowing Docs, Slides, and Sheets documents to be shared and collaborated within Google Meet, and it will add Meet video chat directly to those documents in the fall—no need to switch from one app to another. Want more? Our Smart Canvas story on page 11 explains this further.

PROJECT STARLINE Google’s Google Meet may allow you to see a friend or colleague a few hundred miles away via video, but they’ll still look like they’re sitting in a distant room. Project Starline aims to eliminate that feeling of disconnect with a new combination of super high-definition video and depth cameras, connected by a high-speed interface that’s augmented by digital compression.

Essentially, what Starline is showing you is less of a 2D video representation than a high-res 3D model. Google is only implementing it at its own campus for now, but maybe we’ll see a commercial version later on.

Whew! That’s all from Google I/O for this year. Now we’ll have to wait until we see these features in the real world.

Google’s Project Starline fuses high-resolution video and 3D.

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Qualcomm targets low-cost PCs with the Snapdragon 7c Gen 2 CPU Microsoft and Qualcomm are also launching a new Snapdragon development PC for testing Windows on Arm applications. BY MARK HACHMAN

ualcomm’s lower-end Snapdragon 7c chips carved out a space for Chromebooks and other value devices that aimed for long battery life and consistent connectivity. Now Qualcomm is announcing an upgraded Snapdragon 7c Gen 2 chip aimed at powering the low-end $350 Chromebooks and PCs that flood Amazon’s “most popular” list.

Comparing 2019’s Snapdragon 7c (go. pcworld.com/sn7c) and the new

Q

Snapdragon 7c Gen 2, the main difference is in clock speed: The Snapdragon 7c used a Kryo 468 CPU running at up to 2.4 GHz, while the new chip uses an identical Kryo 468, yet running 6 percent faster at 2.55GHz. It appears that every other feature on the two different chips remains identical. The latest chip also uses the same X15 4G LTE modem as the 7c Gen 1.

What else has changed is the competitive landscape for low-end PCs and Chromebooks, which the original 7c seemed

IMAGE: QUALCOMM

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SNAPDR AGON 7C GEN 2

Lenovo Flex 5G (go.pcworld.com/ lf5g) around Snapdragon processors like the Snapdragon 8cx.

Qualcomm executives said they expect the first Snapdragon 7c devices in the summer, without The Snapdragon 7c Gen 2’s feature set remains largely unchanged. specifically identifying Lenovo. headed for (go.pcworld.com/hdfr). Intel’s “We look forward to launching new Celeron N4020 processor and Pentium Gold Lenovo devices with the Snapdragon 7c Gen N5030 are now viable solutions for low-end 2 compute platform later this year,” Emily PCs and Chromebooks, as is the Mediatek Ketchen, chief marketing officer of Lenovo’s 8183. You probably won’t look for any of Intelligent Devices Group, said in a statement. these on a spec sheet, but you will notice Qualcomm declined to publish actual how peppy the resulting performance is. performance numbers backing the What Qualcomm can’t really quantify is the battery life, since that’s dependent on the hardware manufacturer.

One hardware maker that will use the Snapdragon 7c will be Lenovo, which has often built Qualcomm’s performance estimates are disappointingly vague. laptops like the 20 PCWorld JULY 2021

Snapdragon 7c. Instead, it published relative comparisons against its competition from Intel and Mediatek across a variety of benchmarks. However, we’ve already completed early testing on the HP Elite Folio (go.pcworld.com/elfl), which uses the faster Snapdragon 8cx Gen 2 chip, the premium offering in Qualcomm’s lineup. We also performed hands-on testing with the original Snapdragon 7c (go.pcworld.com/8c7c), and it felt quick enough.

MEET THE SNAPDRAGON NUC

NUC-like box (go.pcworld.com/nucl) that has a Snapdragon processor inside of it. The Snapdragon Developer Kit will be commercially available at The Microsoft Store this summer, the two companies said.

The price and configuration weren’t immediately available.

The development work has also paid off in another area as well. This summer, Zoom will be available in a native version coded for Windows on Arm that can run on Snapdragon. In a demo video, Qualcomm said that the added efficiency would allow a Snapdragon test notebook to run for up to almost eight hours while continually running Zoom. That’s up to 12 percent more than the unoptimized version, the company said.

Two other key things have changed since Qualcomm released the original Snapdragon 7c. First, Microsoft now allows users to run 64-bit apps via emulation (go.pcworld. com/64em) and via the Windows Insider program, allowing the vast ecosystem of Windows apps to finally run unimpressively on top of Snapdragon hardware (go. pcworld.com/tpsn). (The capability has not yet been pushed to the mainstream release build of Windows 10, however.)

Second, more apps now have versions specifically coded for Windows on Arm. To kickstart development even further, Qualcomm and Microsoft said this week Microsoft and Qualcomm have co-developed a that they’ve co-engineered a low-cost Snapdragon Developer Kit, which developers will be able to purchase from the Microsoft Store this summer. development platform consisting of a

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Garmin’s 2021 dash cams add cloud storage and app connectivity Garmin enhances the already impressive capabilities of its super-slim dash cams with phone connectivity and cloud uploads. BY JON L. JACOBI armin recently announced that it has upgraded one of PCWorld’s favorite lines of dash cams (go.pcworld.com/ fvdc) with phone and cloud connectivity.

The new dash cams, which are available via garmin.com, include the 1080p Dash Cam Mini 2, the 1080p Dash Cam 47, the 1440p Dash Cam 57, and the 1440p, wide-field-ofview 67W.

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All except the appropriately named key-fob-size Mini 2 feature GPS and a twoinch color display. The Mini 2 is priced at $130, and the top-end 67W at $260.

Due to the newfound connectivity, there’s now a parking mode (wake on disturbances to capture video), plus a live view on your phone courtesy of the Garmin Drive app. The app may also be used to offload and view captures, as well as configure settings.

IMAGE: GARMIN

Garmin’s new dash cams feature a new parking mode.

Videos are uploaded for safekeeping to Garmin’s Vault storage service, where they’ll reside for at least 24 hours, with an option (via account and subscription, of course) for storage for up to 30 days. All four models store video on removable SD cards for easy swapping and archiving.

Garmin’s dash cams support voice control and offer a variety of bad-driver— ahem, driver safety features, such as forward collision and lane departure alerts, as well as speed camera warnings.

To our mind, Garmin’s new models are as full-featured as any forward-only dash cams on the market. We hope the next iteration will add options for interior and rear view cameras. To learn more, visit Garmin’s website at go.pcworld.com/gmwb.

The Dash Cam Mini 2 is Garmin’s entry-level model.

JULY 2021 PCWorld 23

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RIP Internet Explorer: Microsoft will discontinue support in 2022 Fortunately, IE will live on within Microsoft Edge. BY MARK HACHMAN

elieve it or not, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is still alive and kicking— but not for long. If you’re one of the people who relies on Internet Explorer (hi, Dad!), Microsoft has some bad news: It will officially end support for the Internet Explorer desktop application on June 15, 2022. Before that, however, Microsoft 365 (formerly known as Office 365) will end support for IE on August 17 of this year.

The replacement? Microsoft Edge, which already has an “Internet Explorer mode” built

B

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right in. Microsoft said in 2019 (go.pcworld. com/sd19) that it planned to add an IE Mode within Edge, and the virtualized browser lives on as a configurable mode within Microsoft Edge. That’s important, because the modern Edge browser is simply more secure than Internet Explorer ever was. And you can’t say Microsoft didn’t signal IE’s demise—it basically booted users from accessing hundreds of sites (go.pcworld.com/hnst) via IE in late 2020.

“Not only is Microsoft Edge a faster, more secure and more modern browsing IMAGE: MICROSOFT

experience than Internet Explorer, but it is also able to address a key concern: compatibility for older, legacy websites and applications,” Microsoft explained (go. pcworld.com/mexp) in a recent blog post.

However, there are exceptions. In a technical FAQ (go.pcworld.com/tkfq), Microsoft noted that it will only phase out Internet Explorer on Windows 10 20H2 and later. (Eventually, however, these earlier version releases of Windows 10 will also end support.) If you’re still stuck in Windows 8.1, the end-of-life notice won’t apply, either.

HOW TO ENABLE INTERNET EXPLORER MODE WITHIN EDGE Fortunately, the way to enable Internet Explorer mode within Edge hasn’t changed. First, of course, your PC will need to have Microsoft Edge, which you probably will find residing on the PC’s taskbar. You can then turn on IE Mode via Edge’s settings.

In the address bar for Microsoft Edge, type

to be reloaded in Internet Explorer” toggle to On to enable the compatibility mode.

Here you can also choose when to launch sites in IE Mode, including Always.

Afterward, you’ll need to restart your browser.

If you decide that Edge is for you, go to the Edge Settings menu again, and then go to the Profiles header in the left menu. From there, select “Import browser data,” and then select Microsoft Internet Explorer from the top drop-down menu. Click Import and Edge will configure itself in the same way that Internet Explorer was set up.

Microsoft apparently hopes that you’ll poke around a bit within Edge, decide you’ll like it, and move on. Unfortunately, even if you don’t, it’s going to give you a firm push in that direction.

Microsoft also has a more technical explanation of its decision at (go.pcworld. com/rtre.

edge://settings/ defaultbrowser and click

Enter. Alternatively, you can also go into the Edge Settings menu and down to Default browser. Slide the “Allow sites

Here’s how to find the IE Compatibility Mode options within Microsoft Edge.

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If you hate the Microsoft Store, Windows 10’s package manager can bypass it “Get me Firefox, now.” The new Winget package manager literally tells Windows to do just that, and Windows will obey. BY MARK HACHMAN inally, Microsoft has a way to avoid wading through the Microsoft Store app or hunting down an app download link from the web: Winget, also known as the Windows Package Manager, has finally been released.

Package managers aren’t new to the Windows world. Chocolatey (go.pcworld.

F

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com/choc), for example, has been available as a package manager for years. (Package managers have also been a staple of Linux for years, and one of the operating system’s greatest features.) Version 1.0 of Windows Package Manager (go.pcworld.com/v1pm) is a command-line application that simply tells Windows to seek out a particular app and IMAGE: MICROSOFT

install it—no muss, no fuss. It will soon ship as an automatic update via the Microsoft Store for all devices running Windows 10, version 1809 and later, Microsoft recently said.

Colloquially, the Windows Package Manager is known as “winget,” which is the command you use to launch it. It’s easy to use: Type “winget install firefox” to download and install the Firefox browser automatically.

HOW TO USE WINGET TO DOWNLOAD APPS QUICKLY There are two ways of taking advantage of winget. First, via the App Installer app, you can sideload apps without going through the Microsoft Store. Weirdly, though, the app didn’t work well on our Insider machine.

We’d recommend the second way, using the command line process instead—it’s simpler and more effective.

To do so, open the Windows PowerShell app. By default, the app opens into a DOS shell. Type winget to see a list of commands and launch the package manager itself.

What’s great about the winget command is that it connects to a repository of existing packaged apps, so you can pretty quickly find what you’re looking for if you already know the name of the app. The exception is if there’s more than one version of an app: Typing winget install opera, for instance, returns a notice saying you’ll need to reenter the command, selecting either the Opera GX gaming browser or the Opera

Stable desktop browser. Winget search followed by the name of the package verifies that the package exists, and is the correct terminology to find it.

You’ll want to know two other commands, too: winget uninstall and winget upgrade, where you’ll add the name of the app in question after the commands. The latter upgrade command may be unnecessary, because many apps will simply auto-upgrade themselves or ask you to do it the next time you restart them.

You won’t yet find every app in existence within the Windows Package Manager. But if you’re so inclined, you can ask Microsoft to add packages for others to find. The Windows Package Manager Manifest Creator (also known as “Winget create”) can be downloaded (go.pcworld.com/wcrt) at Microsoft’s Github site. You’ll need to provide the install link to the installer file.

Microsoft will then review the installer for security’s sake, though you’ll be able to track the status of the installer if you provide your Microsoft credentials.

The complexity of the Microsoft Store app has been a sore point with Windows users (go.pcworld.com/sore). Microsoft is expected to overhaul the Store in conjunction with its “Sun Valley” Windows 10 graphical updates this fall, but so far the company has just made incremental improvements (go. pcworld.com/inim). Winget is a terrific alternative while we wait.

JULY 2021 PCWorld 27

Remember the last time your family visited the forest? It’s a place of wonder and imagination for the whole family—where stories come to life. And it’s closer than you think. Sounds like it’s time to plan your next visit. Make the forest part of your story today at a local park near you or nd one at iscover2he orest.org.

Reviews & Ratings

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

11th-gen ‘Tiger Lake H’ performance deep-dive: Intel gets back in the game Intel’s 10nm Tiger Lake H puts it back into the fight with AMD’s best. BY GORDON MAH UNG

hoa, folks—don’t head for the parking lot because this ball game ain’t over yet. Sure, you’ve been watching Intel’s older 10th-gen H-class CPUs get blasted off the mound all afternoon by Team Ryzen, but the coach just gave the

W IMAGE: INTEL

signal and Intel’s new rookie star is warming up in the bullpen: the 11th-gen “Tiger Lake H” processors for gaming and creative laptops.

Unlike the once great but should-haveretired-two-seasons-ago 10th-gen Comet Lake chips, Tiger Lake H features truly new cores and is built on Intel’s most advanced JULY 2021 PCWorld 29

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INTEL TIGER L AKE H

10nm “Super Fin” technology (go.pcworld. com/sprf).

You can read more about Tiger Lake H’s processor lineup here (go.pcworld.com/ tgln), and dig into all the new 11th-gen laptops announced (go.pcworld.com/tglp) so far, but rather than yakety yak, let’s find out just how fast the new 11th-gen chip is.

HOW (AND WHAT) WE TESTED To do that we got our hands on Gigabyte’s new Aorus 17G laptop. On the outside, it’s mostly the same as the previous 10th-gen– based model (go.pcworld.com/p10g), but the Aorus 17G we’re testing today features the 8-core, 11th-gen Core i7-11800H CPU inside. It packs the same GeForce RTX 3080 Laptop GPU (go.pcworld.com/n38r) with a TGP of 105 watts as the previous version, but it’s hooked up to the 11th-gen Tiger Lake via PCIe Gen 4, rather than the slower Gen 3 connection used by Intel’s older CPU. The 11th-gen chip has enough spare PCIe lanes that Gigabyte pairs that GPU with a speedy 1TB Samsung PM9A1 on the Gen 4 bus too. Finally, unlike with the previous Core i7 model, Gigabyte uses 32GB of DDR4/3200 memory instead of DDR4/2933—an odd limitation of the last processor. You can see the plentiful PCIe lanes Intel has put into the Tiger Lake H (page opposite).

30 PCWorld JULY 2021

For comparison laptops, we sought only 8-core CPUs configurations—no 6-core or 4-core laptops allowed.

• Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 (go.pcworld. com/14az) with Ryzen 9 4800HS, GeForce RTX 2060 Max-Q and 16GB of DDR4/3200.

It has a 14-inch screen and weight of 3.6 pounds.

• Asus ROG Flow X13 (go.pcworld. com/13ax) with Ryzen 9 5980HS, GeForce GTX 1650 Max-Q, 32GB of LPDDR4X/4266.

It has a 13-inch screen and weight of 3 pounds.

• Asus ROG Strix G17 with Ryzen 9 5900X, GeForce RTX 3080 Laptop GPU with a TGP of 130 watts and 32GB of DDR4/3200.

It has a 17.3-inch screen and weight of 6 pounds.

The updated Aorus 17G features Intel’s new 10nm 8-core 11th-gen Core i7-11800H CPU and a 105watt Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Laptop GPU.

that’s the laptop’s Turbo setting, while the Dell was tested in its Ultra Performance mode, and the pair of Gigabyte laptops were set to Boost for the 10th-gen and either its Creator Unlike AMD’s chips, the Tiger Lake H offers Gen 4 PCIe support and plenty of it too. or Gaming Mode for the 11th-gen • Gigabyte Aorus 17G (go.pcworld. version. The fan profile for the Gigabyte com/17ag) with Core i7-10870H, GeForce notebooks were set to Gaming for all testing.

RTX 3080 Laptop GPU with a TGP of 105 Before we get too far into the numbers, watts and 32GB of DDR4/2933. It has a we do want to warn you that today’s 17.3-inch screen weight of 6.1 pounds. comparison sticks mostly to CPU • Dell XPS 17 9700 (go.pcworld. performance rather than gaming com/17dx) with Core i7-10875H, GeForce performance. That’s because we ran into a RTX 2060 Max-Q and 32GB of DDR4/3200. driver issue on the 11th-gen–based Aorus It has a 17-inch screen and a weight of 4.6 17G. It became stuck on one of Nvidia’s pounds.

Studio Drivers (which revolve around All of the laptops are running Windows 10 optimizations in content creation apps) 2H02 19042.928 as well as the latest drivers instead of an Nvidia Game Ready driver. and BIOSes available directly from the We’re working to solve the issue with Nvidia manufacturers. While we have tested each and Gigabyte and will run our gaming results laptop’s different power state in their own once we have all three of the 3080 laptops individual reviews, today we’re sticking only running on the same gaming driver. to the laptops highest sane performance plan A WORD ABOUT WEIGHT and fan settings available. By sane, we mean In the charts below, you’ll notice we included the settings most people would run—not 100 the total weight of the laptop along with the percent fan speeds. For the Asus laptops, JULY 2021 PCWorld 31

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CPU model. That’s because size and weight matter a lot in notebooks, and especially gaming notebooks. A larger laptop means you can have more cooling, which means you can have generally better performance.

For example, the older Dell XPS 17 9700 is about 4.6 pounds and ultrathin. Despite wielding a 10th-gen chip with higher model number, it actually tends to trail the 6.1-pound Aorus 17G with its beefier 6.1-pound chassis.

It also goes without saying that you should also be really impressed by the Asus Flow X13 and its Ryzen 9 5980 in these benchmarks because it often trades blows with the new 11th-gen Core i7-11800H in the 6.1-pound new Aorus 17G while weighing as little as a MacBook Pro M1 (go.pcworld.com/13m1).

The final point we want to make is that most of the big laptops here don’t just offer bigger CPU performance—they also offer far more graphics punch with their higher-end GeForce RTX 3080 Laptop GPUs. The cooling in those bulkier builds can handle more GPU firepower too.

3D MODELING PERFORMANCE

We’ll kick this off where we typically do: 3D modeling performance using Maxon’s popular Cinebench R20 benchmark. It’s based on the same engine used in the company’s Cinema4D software that’s sold both standalone and integrated into apps like Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects.

Modeling typically loves more cores and faster cores, and you can see the weakness of Intel’s 10th-gen 14nm CPUs in the bars at right.

Even a year-old Ryzen 4000 CPU in a laptop that’s much, much lighter than the 10th-gen The size and weight of a laptop matters, so you should be very impressed with the Asus Flow X13’s tiny body and big performance thanks to its Ryzen 9 5980HS. laptops is faster.

32 PCWorld JULY 2021

Cinebench R20 nT 3D modeling performance Dell XPS 17 9700 Core i7-10875H

Gigabyte Aorus 17G Core i7-10870H

Gigabyte Aorus 17G Core i7-11800H

Asus Strix G17 Ryzen 9 5900HX

Asus Flow X13 Ryzen 9 5980

Asus Zephyrus G14 Ryzen 9 4900HS

3,758 3,772 5,028 5,275 4,824 4,068

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The good news, though, is that the 11th-gen Core i7-11800H is breathing down the neck of the Ryzen 9 4900HX. No, it’s not faster, but remember that this is a Core i7 versus a Ryzen 9 part.

Next we move on to the open-source Blender 2.92, which is incredibly popular with indie movies as well as hobbyists due to its cost: free. Free doesn’t mean bad, though, and Blender has a huge following. We use the

Barbershop scene for our workload, which is more intensive than the standard BMW scene we’ve used before. The result again puts that monstrous Ryzen 9 5900HX with a decent lead, but that 11th-gen Core i7-11800H isn’t doing too shabbily—especially when you look at the performance of the older 10th-gen CPUs, which finish last.

Next up we use the Chaos Group’s new V-Ray 5 benchmark in CPU rendering mode to get yet one more look at the multicore performance of these 8-core laptops. The new 11th-gen Core i7-11800H is the surprise winner (albeit not by much). It crosses the finish line a hair faster than the Ryzen 9 5900HX chip. That’s good news for Tiger Lake H, and once again, before someone points this out: This is the Core i7 chip, not the higher-clocked Core i9 version.

Our next test is POV-Ray, a ray tracing application that can render scenes based on text-based descriptions. The application

Blender 2.92 Barbershop

V-Ray 5 CPU

Seconds

Vsamples

Dell XPS 17 9700 Core i7-10875H

Gigabyte Aorus 17G Core i7-10870H

Gigabyte Aorus 17G Core i7-11800H

Asus Strix G17 Ryzen 9 5900HX

Asus Flow X13 Ryzen 9 5980

Asus Zephyrus G14 Ryzen 9 4900HS

1,146 1,031 817 707 838 988

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

Dell XPS 17 9700 Core i7-10875H

Gigabyte Aorus 17G Core i7-10870H

Gigabyte Aorus 17G Core i7-11800H

Asus Strix G17 Ryzen 9 5900HX

Asus Flow X13 Ryzen 9 5980

Asus Zephyrus G14 Ryzen 9 4900HS

7,658 7,776 9,734 9,563 8,666 7,344

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Cinebench R20 1T

POV Ray 3.7nT

Single thread performance

Pixels per second Dell XPS 17 9700 Core i7-10875H

Gigabyte Aorus 17G Core i7-10870H

Gigabyte Aorus 17G Core i7-11800H

Asus Strix G17 Ryzen 9 5900HX

Asus Flow X13 Ryzen 9 5980

Asus Zephyrus G14 Ryzen 9 4900HS

3,221 3,411 3,976 4,834 4,424 3,774

Dell XPS 17 9700 Core i7-10875H

Gigabyte Aorus 17G Core i7-10870H

Gigabyte Aorus 17G Core i7-11800H

Asus Strix G17 Ryzen 9 5900HX

Asus Flow X13 Ryzen 9 5980

Asus Zephyrus G14 Ryzen 9 4900HS

470 453 581 572 596 487

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

actually dates back to the Amiga in the 1980s but has dutifully been supported and still sees service. Unlike the previous modeling tests, the Ryzen 9 5900HX opens up a hefty 21 percent advantage over the Core i7-11800H chip. Still, 11th-gen does offer noticeable improvements over 10th-gen.

We’ll close our modeling tests by looking at single-threaded performance. First up is POV-Ray 3.7, which actually puts the Ryzen 9 5900HX behind its sibling, the Ryzen 9 5980HS. That’s a bit of a surprise considering the HX is the unlocked, overclockable part in a 6-pound laptop while the Ryzen 9 5980HS is in a smaller 3-pound laptop. But the power dissipation of the CPUs come down considerably while running single-threaded and the lighter laptops are simply less constrained in these scenarios. The higher boost clocks of the Ryzen 9 5980HS might just be what it takes to come out on top here.

It also aids Intel’s 10th-gen parts, which

largely make too much heat when under all-core loads. This single-thread test lets them finally beat that pesky Ryzen 9 4800HS. Intel’s new 11th-gen chip definitely offers up an improvement, but this is an area where the Core i9 version would definitely get you more performance.

We’ll close out with Cinebench R20 using a single-thread. This really shows you that we have a race here. The Core i7-11800H noses by the mighty Ryzen 9 5900HX and pushes right up against the Ryzen 9 5980HS. O, Core i9-11980HK, where art thou?

34 PCWorld JULY 2021

ENCODING PERFORMANCE We’ll leave the land of 3D modeling for another intense task people typically buy 8-core laptops for: video encoding. First up is Handbrake 1.3.3. We’re converting a 4K open source Tears of Steel video to a 1080p, 30 frames per second file using the HEVC/H.264 CODEC. We measure the time

HandBrake 1.3.3 Encode 4K to 1080p/30 HEVC CPU-based

HandBrake 1.3.3 Encode 4K to 1080p/30 HEVC VCE/Quick Sync

Seconds

Seconds

Dell XPS 17 9700 Core i7-10875H

Gigabyte Aorus 17G Core i7-10870H

Gigabyte Aorus 17G Core i7-11800H

Asus Strix G17 Ryzen 9 5900HX

Asus Flow X13 Ryzen 9 5980

Asus Zephyrus G14 Ryzen 9 4900HS

1,319 1,278 988 897 1,053 1,232

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

it takes to complete the job because that’s what will annoy you the most.

Handbrake, like many advanced encoders, loves fast CPU cores. The winner here is the Ryzen 9 5900HX, taking about 9 percent less time to finish than the 11th-gen Core i7-11800H. Again, that’s fairly decent multicore performance for Intel’s latest processor, especially when compared to the 10th-gen Core i7-10870H in the older Aorus 17G. The 11th-gen chip finishes the encode about 23 percent faster.

Both the Intel and AMD CPUs feature integrated graphics with dedicated hardware encoding support. Intel’s is called QuickSync while AMD’s is VCE. Hardware-accelerated encoding generally provides much faster performance, but can come at the cost of visual quality. To find out which chip rules, we ran the same test using the dedicated encoders.

Dell XPS 17 9700

350 347

Core i7-10875H

Gigabyte Aorus 17G Core i7-10870H

Gigabyte Aorus 17G Core i7-11800H

Asus Strix G17 Ryzen 9 5900HX

Asus Flow X13 Ryzen 9 5980

Asus Zephyrus G14 Ryzen 9 4900HS

279 400 354 310

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

For Intel, it’s a good uptick, with the newer media encoder yielding a very large improvement over the previous encoder in the 10th-gen chips. We’re a little puzzled over AMD’s results. Both of the Ryzen 9 5000 chips should offer very similar performance, but the Ryzen 9 4800HS actually wins. All three of the laptop’s update utilities were showing the latest drivers available so we’re at a bit of a loss. We did try to manually update the Asus Strix 17G using AMD’s updating tool but that nearly corrupted the OS in the process. The short story? Stay tuned.

CONTENT CREATION Next, we’ll move onto practical applications that hordes of people buy expensive 8-core laptops for: Adobe products.

Our first test uses UL’s Procyon, which scripts Adobe Premiere Pro 15.1 to export JULY 2021 PCWorld 35

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UL Procyon Video Test using Adobe Premiere Pro 15.1

UL Procyon Video Test using Photoshop 22.3/ Lightroom Classic 10.2

dGPU disabled

dGPU disabled

Dell XPS 17 9700 Core i7-10875H

Gigabyte Aorus 17G Core i7-10870H

Gigabyte Aorus 17G Core i7-11800H

Asus Strix G17 Ryzen 9 5900HX

Asus Flow X13 Ryzen 9 5980

Asus Zephyrus G14 Ryzen 9 4900HS

1,743 1,785 2,411 2,589 2,521 2,306

Dell XPS 17 9700 Core i7-10875H

Gigabyte Aorus 17G Core i7-10870H

Gigabyte Aorus 17G Core i7-11800H

Asus Strix G17 Ryzen 9 5900HX

Asus Flow X13 Ryzen 9 5980

Asus Zephyrus G14 Ryzen 9 4900HS

5,484 5,553 6,650 6,858 6,449 5,034

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four different 1080p and 4K videos with some effects applied. Because Adobe products can tap the GPU for work, we ran all of our tests with the discrete GPU off, which meant all of the work was done by the CPU cores, the CPU’s integrated graphics cores, or the CPU’s embedded hardware encoder.

The winner (by about 7 percent) is the Ryzen 9 5900HX, with the Ryzen 9 5980HS just behind. Don’t feel too bad about that bronze medal, Intel. The Core i7-11800H is a hefty 35 percent faster than the Core i7-10870H in the older Aorus 17G. And once again: How would the 11th-gen Core i9 fare?

Moving from Adobe Premiere Pro performance to Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom Classic, we tell Procyon to run the laptops through several scripted runs measuring multiple aspects of the programs. Photoshop and Lightroom

Classic are harder to run than browsing or Office, but many of the tasks tap only a few cores, or are optimized for the new instruction sets in the CPUs. As with our previous test, we leave the discrete graphics disabled as both programs can use the GeForce GPUs inside.

The Ryzen 9 5900HX is the technical winner but it’s really a squeaker, as it’s just 3 percent faster than the 11th-gen Core i7.

Intel’s latest chip again posts a very decent performance advantage over the 10th-gen CPUs, to the tune of 19 percent.

36 PCWorld JULY 2021

OFFICE AND BROWSER PERFORMANCE Stepping back a notch, we wanted to look at performance in more mundane work such as Microsoft Office 365 and browsing. For Office, we use UL’s PCMark 10 Applications

test, which runs Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Edge through various scripts to measure common everyday workloads. We hit a snag where the benchmark failed its Microsoft Edge run, so we can’t report an overall score, but it produced results for the stuff that matters: Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Both the 11th-gen chip in the new Aorus 17G and the Ryzen 9 take CPU the technical win, but we think it’s mostly a tie.

We didn’t think there would that much of a difference in such “boring” work—but surprise, surprise: The 11th-gen processor

PCMark 10 Apps Performance Single thread PowerPoint

Excel

Word

Dell XPS 17 9700 Core i7-10875H

10,509 21,677 6,913

Gigabyte Aorus 17G

11,263

Core i7-10870H

22,554 7,235

Gigabyte Aorus 17G

14,106

Core i7-11800H

26,337

WebXPRT 3 Chrome 90

7,568 Asus Strix G17

14,862

Ryzen 9 5900HX

Dell XPS 17 9700

27,459 7,399

Asus Flow X13 Ryzen 9 5980

Core i7-10875H

Gigabyte Aorus 17G Core i7-10870H

9,687

Gigabyte Aorus 17G

23,706

Core i7-11800H

Asus Strix G17

7,297 Asus Zephyrus G14 Ryzen 9 4900HS

aces the 10th-gen by 17 percent in Excel and a whopping 25 percent in PowerPoint, with Word a wash. (Who pushes Microsoft Word that hard anyway?) Still, we’d declare the Core i7-11800H to be a pretty decent winner over the 10th-gen chip it’s replacing, and a Core i7 breathing on the neck of a Ryzen 9 5900HX is something to be proud of.

Since our Edge tests failed, we decided to at least look at browsing performance of the laptops using Google Chrome 90 as the base. First up is Principled Technologies’ WebXPRT 3, which measures performance running HTML5 and JavaScript applications such as photo enhancement, stock option picking, and an online homework task. It can be used to measure browser performance but also yields system-level performance insights if all of the machines are running the same browser.

The overall winner is the Ryzen 9 5900HX but it’s only 4 percent faster than the Core i7-11800H. Compared to the 10th-gen chip,

Ryzen 9 5900HX

Asus Flow X13

9,465

Ryzen 9 5980

19,285 6,110

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Asus Zephyrus G14 Ryzen 9 4900HS

255 254 287 299 293 241

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JetStream 2 Chrome 90 Dell XPS 17 9700 Core i7-10875H

Gigabyte Aorus 17G Core i7-10870H

156 157

Gigabyte Aorus 17G

185 186 186

Core i7-11800H

Asus Strix G17 Ryzen 9 5900HX

Asus Flow X13 Ryzen 9 5980

Asus Zephyrus G14 Ryzen 9 4900HS

149

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the 11th-gen model delivers a decent 13 percent higher score.

Up next is JetStream 2. This benchmark measures JavaScript and WebAssembly performance and is rooted very much in Apple’s WebKit. It’s pretty much a three-way tie between 11th-gen and the two Ryzen 5000 chips, with Intel’s latest outpacing its 10th-gen predecessors by a solid 18 percent.

Last up is another Apple-based, WebKitrooted benchmark called Speedometer 2.0.

Speedometer 2.0 Chrome 90 Dell XPS 17 9700 Core i7-10875H

Gigabyte Aorus 17G Core i7-10870H

154 151

Gigabyte Aorus 17G

185 180 174

Core i7-11800H

Asus Strix G17 Ryzen 9 5900HX

Asus Flow X13 Ryzen 9 5980

Asus Zephyrus G14 Ryzen 9 4900HS

151

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

38 PCWorld JULY 2021

This measures JavaScript and WebAssembly performance again. The 11th-gen Core i7 ekes out about a 3 percent win over the Ryzen 9 5900HX but also a very impressive 22 percent win over the older 10th-gen Core i7 CPUs.

AI PERFORMANCE We’ll close out with the brave new world of PC-based AI work. AI for consumers has been a pretty abstract long-hair book topic, but clearly its most promising practical use for now is helping to accelerate image processing. Our first test is Topaz Lab’s Gigapixel AI. This benchmark uses AI-trained models to make better image enlargements than more conventional (and far dumber) algorithms.

We start with a picture of a US Navy F-18 Hornet taken at an air show with an 8.2MP Canon EOS 1D Mk IIn camera more than a decade ago. Viewed from 2021, 8.2MP sounds pretty pathetic, so we task Gigapixel AI 5.5.1 with increasing the image by 6 times and timing the result. Gigapixel AI can run on a GPU or CPU, so we pick the CPU. Gigapixel AI supports Intel’s OpenVINO technology.

The winner shouldn’t surprise anyone as Intel has pushed AVX-512 support—even to the detriment of its own chips, some would say—for years now. The technology was found in Intel’s Skylake-X products, its 10th-gen Ice Lake CPUs, and its mainstreamfocused 11th-gen Tiger Lake U chips, and now

Topaz Gigapixel 5.5.1 F-18 Hornet AI Time to Upscale 6x CPU Seconds Dell XPS 17 9700

105 102

Core i7-10875H

Gigabyte Aorus 17G Core i7-10870H

Gigabyte Aorus 17G Core i7-11800H

Asus Strix G17 Ryzen 9 5900HX

Asus Flow X13 Ryzen 9 5980

Asus Zephyrus G14 Ryzen 9 4900HS

79 102 137 129

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makes it way into these more powerful 11th-gen Tiger Lake H CPUs. The dividends are pretty sizeable. The Core i7-11800H finishes the job 42 percent faster than the Ryzen 9 5980HS, which oddly ends up losing to the Ryzen 9 4800HS. We’re again at odds to explain the mismatched performance of the Ryzen CPUs. Further investigation needs to be done as to why the results are so scattered, but we can say GigaPixel AI is on a development fast track. It feels like updated versions drop every other week.

We feel more confident in the performance difference between the 10th-gen and 11th-gen chips, though. Tiger Lake churns through the job 22 percent faster.

Our final AI task is the new Nero Score benchmark. We’ve previously used Nero AI Photo Tagger, which was initially a free proof-of-concept that used AI models to sort and analyze photos. If it found what it thought

was a bike, it would classify the image as a bike for you. Sure, your phone might already do that now for new pictures, but if you’re sitting on tens of thousands of images you’ve shot, no one’s going to sort or tag them for you. Until now, anyway.

Rather than using the actual AI Photo Tagger (which is no longer free for newer versions), Nero Score is based on an updated core that quickly measures how fast a CPU can use AI to analyze 50 small pictures three times. This is actually better than trying to use AI Photo Tagger since it likely all fits into memory and would thus be less influenced by the speed of the drive it’s reading from.

Nero Score is based on Intel’s OpenVINO toolkit and—shocker—a CPU with AVX-512 support yields big, big wins here. We’re looking at 50 percent more performance over the Ryzen 9 5900HX from the Core i7-11800H. Intel’s latest chip is also a massive 78 percent faster than the 10th-gen Core i7-10870H.

Nero Score 1.08 Dell XPS 17 9700 Core i7-10875H

Gigabyte Aorus 17G Core i7-10870H

1,278 1,408

Gigabyte Aorus 17G

2,505

Core i7-11800H

Asus Strix G17 Ryzen 9 5900HX

Asus Flow X13 Ryzen 9 5980

Asus Zephyrus G14 Ryzen 9 4900HS

1,669 1,284 1,188

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If you really believe this newfangled consumer AI stuff is going places, this counts as a big (and predictable) win for the Tiger Lake H.

Counter-Strike: Global Operations 19x10 High Frames per second Gigabyte Aorus 17G

GAMING PERFORMANCE As we said earlier, gaming performance is essentially TBD since we could only run the Nvidia Studio Driver on our laptop. Studio Drivers are optimized around content creation updates rather than improving gaming performance like the company’s Game Ready drivers, so testing with a Studio Driver installed could very well depress the results for Intel’s 11th-gen chip. That technical hiccup adds to the difficulty of trying to compare a Ryzen 9 laptop with a 130-watt GeForce RTX 3080 Laptop GPU to a pair of Intel Core i7 laptops with 105-watt GeForce RTX 3080 Laptop GPUs. There are a few tidbits we don’t think will move much, though. The first is 3DMark’s Time Spy CPU test. It measures CPU physics using a real-world engine. You can see the Ryzen and 11th-gen chip are basically tied

3DMark Time Spy CPU performance Gigabyte Aorus 17G Core i7-10870H

Gigabyte Aorus 17G Core i7-11800H

Asus Strix G17 Ryzen 9 5900HX

9,493 10,382 10,141

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

40 PCWorld JULY 2021

Core i7-10870H

324

Gigabyte Aorus 17G

417

Core i7-11800H

Asus Strix G17 Ryzen 9 5900HX

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while the Core i7-11800H outpaces the 10th-gen chip by about 9 percent. The test doesn’t always represent real-world gaming, though, so don’t rely on it too much.

We know you’re hungry for any signs of gaming performance, so this one is probably fine (even though the 11th-gen’s 3080 might be at a disadvantage). The incredibly popular Counter Strike: Global Offensive is such a light load these days that it’s very CPU bound. On the desktop side of things, we’ve seen Ryzen 5000 eat Intel’s lunch here, partly thanks to its giant cache. But the laptop Ryzen 5000 chips don’t have that big fat cache, and in a reversal, the Tiger Lake H chip does. That may contribute to the Tiger Lake’s huge 23 percent advantage over both the Ryzen 9 and 10th-gen CPU. The final result we’ll show you—3Dmark’s PCIe bandwidth test—is a direct result of the design of Tiger Lake H and its newfound PCIe Gen 4 support. Again, the results of this test are unlikely to move even with the Nvidia driver differences, but you can see

rarely flex the PCIe bandwidth needs, so while this massive win for Tiger Lake may be cool to whistle at, the practical upside is far, far less.

3DMark PCIe Bandwidth Test GBps Gigabyte Aorus 17G

12.5

Core i7-10870H

Gigabyte Aorus 17G

18

Core i7-11800H

Asus Strix G17 Ryzen 9 5900HX

6.6

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

the Core i7-11800H indeed has a gargantuan 172 percent PCIe bandwidth advantage over the Ryzen 9 with its limited 8 lanes of Gen 3 PCIe, as well as a 44 percent advantage over the 16 lanes of Gen 3 in the 10th-gen chip.

Does that really matter? Well, we’re not so sure. Most games, even the newest ones,

BOTTOM LINE As you’d expect from the reigning champ and one of the historic greats, AMD’s powerful Ryzen 9 chips don’t ever back down in this slugfest. But after a brutally long rebuilding season, it’s clear that Intel’s new Tiger Lake H is a real contender. Even though the Core i7 doesn’t clearly win many contests here, it’s so damned close that it’d be difficult to bet against the upcoming 11th-gen Core i9 offering.

As we’ve been saying: We got us a ball game, folks.

In this slugfest, AMD’s powerful Ryzen 9 chips didn’t ever back down.

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REVIEWS

Lenovo ThinkPad X12 Detachable Gen 1: A value tablet for business It’s affordable and a solid performer, but the design raises questions. BY MARK HACHMAN he ThinkPad X12 Detachable Gen 1 is Lenovo’s answer to the very good Microsoft Surface Pro 7+.

Both are tablets with detachable keyboards and a business bent. While the Surface Pro 7+ has high-end cachet, the ThinkPad X12, on the other hand, is more about value.

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BASIC FEATURES Of the seven different configuration options of the ThinkPad X12 Detachable Gen 1 on Lenovo’s website (go.pcworld.com/lnwb), our review unit (the 20UW0012US, $2,229 on Lenovo.com [go.pcworld.com/lnwb]) seems to be popular, going in and out of stock as we wrote this review. The tablet IMAGE: MARK HACHMAN

has sold out on Amazon as well. Lenovo offers other basic configurations of the X12 Detachable that start with 8GB of RAM, but we’d consider that setup a bit skimpy if other options are available.

It’s very much worth noting that unlike the rival Microsoft Surface Pro 7+ (go.pcworld. com/7prp), Lenovo bundles a keyboard rather than making you pay extra for it. A pen is extra cost (the keyboard comes with a pen loop). A Lenovo pen with 2,048 levels of ink sensitivity (go.pcworld.com/lacp) is the cheaper option; a separate Lenovo pen with 4,096 levels of ink sensitivity (go.pcworld. com/lap2) is about the double the price.

Here are the rest of the main specifications. Where there are many options (such as with CPU, RAM, and so on), the features on our specific model are indicated by the words “as tested” in parentheses after the item.

Processor: Intel Core i3-1110G4, Core i5-1130G7 (as tested), Core i5-1140G7, Core i7-1160G7, Core i7-1180G7 Display: 12.3-inch (1920x1280 touch, anti-reflective) Memory: 8GB-16GB LPDDR4x 4267MHz (soldered) (16GB as tested) Storage: 256GB/512GB/1TB PCIe SSD Graphics: Intel UHD (Core i3), Iris Xe

Ports: USB-C (Thunderbolt 4/USB4, DisplayPort, Power Delivery, Data Transfer, 40 Gbps), USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10Gbps), 3.5mm jack, optional nanoSIM Security: Windows Hello depth camera/ fingerprint reader Camera: 5MP (user-facing)/8MP (rear facing) Battery: 42.2Wh (design), 41.9Wh (full) Wireless: Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax 2x2), Bluetooth 5.1 Operating system: Windows 10 Pro Dimensions: 11.15x8.01x0.34 inches Weight: 1.67 pounds, 2.4 pounds with keyboard (measured) Colors: Black Prices: Starting at $1,829 (less with discounts, if active) at Lenovo (go.pcworld. com/lnwb) and Amazon (go.pcworld.com/ amx2) ($2,229 as tested) JULY 2021 PCWorld 43

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LENOVO THINKPAD X12 DETACHABLE GEN 1

have to do some fumbling about to find the small tab that folds it out, though. The kickstand supports the ThinkPad X12 Detachable firmly until its point of greatest recline, where it becomes somewhat springy.

If there’s anything I truly hate about the ThinkPad X12 Your fingers will have to find the small lip to pull out the kickstand, a solution Detachable, though, I found somewhat annoying. Unlike the competing Microsoft Surface Pro tablets, the X12 doesn’t have a microSD card slot hiding underneath. it’s the anemic grip that the keyboard has DESIGN on the tablet itself. With the keyboard While Microsoft’s Surface tablets have always unfolded, moving the Detachable around the been aimed at a broad market of creators, house usually means grabbing the tablet consumers, and professionals, Lenovo has itself…and off pops the keyboard, time and aimed its ThinkPad purely at professionals— again. Even worse, the tablet doesn’t always and it shows in the design. electrically reconnect to the keyboard when The ThinkPad X12 Detachable Gen 1 reattached, meaning that I had to fiddle with maintains the boxy, black ThinkPad aesthetic, it—disconnect, reconnect—until it finally using a magnesium alloy for the chassis worked. It’s not a great look when you have material. Though just a smidgen thicker than to pop the keyboard on and off to get a the Surface Pro 7+, the squared lines really product like the ThinkPad X12 Detachable contribute to the idea that this is indeed a Gen 1 to work out of the box. “detachable,” which favors keyboard use, That’s before the ThinkPad X12 rather than a traditional tablet that could take Detachable went overboard. As I was it or leave it. finishing the review, I put the attached tablet A wedge kickstand reclines almost flat, to and keyboard on my lap. The keyboard about 10 degrees off the horizontal. You’ll released its grip, and the tablet tumbled 44 PCWorld JULY 2021

For connectivity Lenovo has gone wholly USB-C, with a pair of ports on the left side. Look closely: A faint glyph next to the upper port indicates the presence of Thunderbolt 4/USB 4 (go. pcworld.com/4usb). You could also use a USB-C dock The right side of the Lenovo ThinkPad X12 Detachable Gen 1 hides a volume rocker and a Kensington lock slot. with the lower port. Though the tiny 65W USB-C power brick could be used in either port, the small backward, landing on my toe. The display plug symbol tells you it should be used on bowed out from the frame. I was able to snap the plain USB-C one. I was worried that the it back in with no apparent loss of Thunderbolt cables that come with some performance, but still—Lenovo needs to fix portable Thunderbolt docks like our Editor’s this. The combination of the weak magnetic Choice-winning pick, the IOgear grip and the thin, narrow edge of the Thunderbolt 3 Travel Dock (go.pcworld. kickstand means that the ThinkPad X12 com/iogr), might be too short to connect to Detachable should be left on a desk, not your the tablet without dangling the dock in the lap. We informed Lenovo of our experiences, air. After trying a few, though, that doesn’t and the company did not comment. seem to be the case.

The ThinkPad X12 Detachable includes venting in the side and top of the tablet, and it emits an occasional faint hiss while under normal use. It’s generally almost quiet during normal use.

However, the tablet seemed particularly sensitive to the ambient temperature of the room.

On the left, the Lenovo ThinkPad X12 Detachable Gen 1 includes a 3.5mm We’ll explore this further jack, a Thunderbolt port, an optional SIM slot, and a second USB-C port for charging. The charging port lacks Thunderbolt capabilities. later on in the review.

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The optional SIM slot on the side of the tablet pops out with a standard SIM tool. Lenovo also splurged for a backplate for the SIM caddy, lessening the chance that your SIM card will slip through and onto the ground.

Though the image is fairly sharp, my navy sweatshirt and kelly green T-shirt fade Lenovo’s display into a uniform blah. Hopefully this is a last hurrah for pandemic hair, though. isn’t anything to to be comfortable. My fingers initially felt write home about, but the matte screen puts cramped, but my typing improved over time. out a comfortable 398 nits max, enough for a The two levels of keyboard backlighting can well-lit room. According to our colorimeter be controlled via the keyboard itself (Fn + tests, the display covers 98 percent of the sRGB Space), and also via an excellent commercial color gamut, but just 73 percent of AdobeRGB version of the Vantage system utility. and 74 percent of the P3 gamut. That might not The iconic red TrackPoint remains in the be color-accurate enough for content creation, center, with a touchpad below. The but it’s fine for everything else.

ThinkPad X12 Detachable’s touchpad is KEYBOARD, AUDIO small and somewhat constrained by the AND WEBCAM discrete buttons at the top—a legacy Lenovo has always had an elite reputation for feature from earlier ThinkPads. They’re its keyboards, and the ThinkPad X12 dependable, though. Lenovo’s touchpad is Detachable’s is pretty good. Naturally, the key otherwise smooth and clickable most of the travel (1.3mm, according to a Lenovo way up and down its length. Gestures representative) isn’t quite as deep as a worked as expected. traditional notebook would allow, but there’s The Lenovo ThinkPad X12 Detachable smooth, consistently firm resistance, and the Gen 1’s audio is subpar. Lenovo includes keys are large enough (about 1.5mm square) Dolby Audio Premium enhancement. When 46 PCWorld JULY 2021

(such as the Windows Camera app) will the Dolby feature is disabled, music sounds simply report that no camera is present. My vaguely underwater, jumbled together only criticism is that you may need a spare unpleasantly. Enabling Dolby’s technology fingernail, nail file, car key or something to couldn’t entirely save it. While the volume is catch the tiny slide and slide it over; a sufficient, make sure to pack headphones or fingertip doesn’t always work. earbuds for a decent aural experience.

The webcam works in conjunction with The tablet’s user-facing webcam offers the in-keyboard fingerprint reader to provide 1080p resolution, rather than the more typical one of the most convenient biometric 720p cameras that accompany most laptops experiences in computing today. (Both are and tablets. This makes for a sharper image.

Windows Hello certified, and both ship On the other hand, I was disappointed by the standard with the tablet.) In fact, I had to do a washed-out color and lighting, which feels lot of ducking just to allow my finger time to like it falls short of what we should expect in be read before the wide-angle depth camera 2021, post-pandemic. A second, front-facing picked up my face.

8MP camera can be used to take photos or videos of things taking place in front of you.

Lenovo also includes a tiny, manual lens shutter for the webcam. Once closed, a small red dot covers the camera lens, and a white LED lights up next to the lens to confirm. The camera lens is completely This may look like a blurry photo, but it’s actually the Mirametrix Glance blocked, and technology blurring and obfuscating the display when it thinks that you’re not paying attention. apps that use it JULY 2021 PCWorld 47

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APPS: GLANCE IS A COOL PRIVACY UTILITY Lenovo kept the ThinkPad X12 Detachable Gen 1 relatively bloatware-free, but there are two apps that stand out. First, there’s a commercial version of the Lenovo Vantage app, Lenovo’s superior system utility, which can be used to control a number of aspects of your PC. It’s well organized and powerful.

Glance by Mirametrix is also intriguing. It’s a bit like the Tobii eye-tracking technology (go.pcworld.com/tob1) that we first wrote about several years ago, but with a privacy bent. The app offers several components, many predicated upon what the depth camera can see of your face. If enabled, presence detection looks to see if you’re at the helm. Look away for too long, and the app blurs your display for privacy’s sake. If it can “see” another person behind you, it will do the same. Leaning too close? A warning will pop up for you to adjust your posture.

The app will even smartly remind you to look away from the screen every twenty minutes or so to relieve your eyesight.

Glance struggles with external displays. The “smart pointer” component also supposedly teleports the cursor to an external display, but it never worked. And the app required a bit of fiddling to blur my external monitor.

PERFORMANCE Lenovo’s ThinkPad X12 Detachable Gen 1’s sober black design communicates that it’s 48 PCWorld JULY 2021

PCMark 10 CPU performance Microsoft Surface Laptop 4 Ryzen 7 4980U SE

Lenovo ThinkPad X12 Detachable Gen 1 Core i5-1135G7 Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 Core i7-1065G7

Microsoft Surface Pro 7+ max Core i5-1135G7

Microsoft Surface Pro 7+ Core i5-1135G7

Microsoft Surface Pro 7 max Core i7-1065G7

Microsoft Surface Pro 7 Core i7-1065G7

Microsoft Surface Laptop 2 Core i5-8250U

Microsoft Surface Pro 6 Core i5-8250U

Microsoft Surface Go 2 Core m3-8100Y

4,774 4,650 4,481 4,294 4,016 3,959 3,838 3,400 3,367 2,685

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

What this test shows is that Lenovo’s ThinkPad X12 Detachable Gen 1 will do just fine in everyday office tasks.

designed for productivity first and foremost.

Our real-world tests showed that it handles the demands of the work-from-home office fairly well, although I had to train myself to move the X12 Detachable with one hand on the keyboard and the other on the table or simply fold it up.

Real-world performance tests were satisfactory. The tablet’s 16GB of memory is more than enough for web browsing and Microsoft 365 office apps, and the tablet dropped only 8 frames out of 10,000 when tested against a 4K/60Hz YouTube video. I actually noticed the YouTube skip a time or two, but it happened so infrequently that it never became irritating in the slightest.

PCMark 8 Creative Native resolution Microsoft Surface Laptop 4 Ryzen 7 4980U SE

Lenovo ThinkPad X12 Detachable Gen 1 Core i5-1135G7 Microsoft Surface Pro 7+ max Core i5-1135G7

Microsoft Surface Pro 7 max Core i7-1065G7

Microsoft Surface Pro 7+ Core i5-1135G7

Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 Core i7-1065G7

Microsoft Surface Pro 7 Core i7-1065G7

Microsoft Surface Pro 6 Core i5-8250U

Microsoft Surface Laptop 2 Core i5-8250U

Microsoft Surface Go 2 Core m3-8100Y

4,343 4,338 4,328 4,273 4,145 4,033 3,904 3,253 3,001 2,506

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While we eventually expect a competing tablet from Dell’s Latitude line, it’s currently a two-horse race between it and the Microsoft Surface Pro 7+ (go.pcworld.com/7prv). (In the graphs following, the Surface Pro 7+ is highlighted in grey.) The race is close, though the differences aren’t profound. We’ve also included the older Surface Pro 7 (go.pcworld. com/s7rv).

Remember that Microsoft dials down the Windows power/performance slider to minimal levels, while Lenovo maxes it out. We show the Surface Pro 7+ results at both that default, and dialed up to prioritize performance, to compare with the Lenovo.

The darker grey is what we recorded with the power/performance slider dialed up to “Best performance.”

Our performance evaluations begin with UL’s PCMark 10 suite, which has replaced the older PCMark 8 suite in our testing.

PCMark 10 measures everything from videoconferencing apps to web browsing to office apps to CAD renders, using real-world apps when it can. Here, the ThinkPad X12 does better than the Surface Pro 7+ in either performance mode.

We’ve also compared the tablet using the older PCMark 8 suite for backward compatibility. Both are still relevant, although PCMark 10’s tests are more taxing.

The Lenovo ThinkPad X12 Detachable again comes out just a little ahead of the Surface Pro 7+.

Cinebench RT15.038 All threads Microsoft Surface Laptop 4

1,531

Ryzen 7 4980U SE

Microsoft Surface Pro 7+ max Core i5-1135G7

Lenovo ThinkPad X12 Detachable Gen 1 Core i5-1135G7 Microsoft Surface Pro 7+ Core i5-1135G7

Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 Core i7-1065G7

Microsoft Surface Pro 7 Core i7-1065G7

Microsoft Surface Pro 7 max Core i7-1065G7

Microsoft Surface Pro 6 Core i5-8250U

Microsoft Surface Laptop 2 Core i5-8250U

Microsoft Surface Go 2 Core m3-8100Y

901 819 776 751 737 723 576 558 245

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Lenovo’s ThinkPad X12 Detachable Gen 1 may not be the best tablet for video transcoding, but it’s near the top.

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HandBrake 0.99.0 Encoding (H.264) Seconds Microsoft Surface Laptop 4 Ryzen 7 4980U SE

Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 Core i7-1065G7

Microsoft Surface Pro 7+ max Core i5-1135G7

Microsoft Surface Pro 7+ Core i5-1135G7

Microsoft Surface Pro 7 max Core i7-1065G7

Microsoft Surface Pro 7 Core i7-1065G7

Microsoft Surface Laptop 2 Core i5-8250U

Lenovo ThinkPad X12 Detachable Gen 1 Core i5-1135G7 Microsoft Surface Pro 6 Core i5-8250U

Microsoft Surface Go 2 Core m3-8100Y

1,493 2,973 2,997 3,245 3,278 3,313 3,874 3,895 4,116 8,682

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

Here, the Lenovo ThinkPad X12 Detachable Gen 1’s performance is disappointing, possibly due to thermal throttling.

Our Cinebench CPU test uses Maxon’s rendering tool to stress-test the CPU in short bursts, as most tasks do. We use the older R15 test for compatibility’s sake. Cinebench measures how powerfully the ThinkPad X12 will run under most loads, not really factoring cooling into the equation. Here, the Surface Pro 7+ in performance mode takes the lead.

We run a similar test using the R23 version of the benchmark, however, which adds a “thermal throttling” element. In that test (not shown in a chart), the ThinkPad X12 Detachable Gen 1 performance dropped about 15 percent.

We normally test thermal stress by running HandBrake, another real-world tool that 50 PCWorld JULY 2021

transcodes movies into a format a tablet can use, taxing the CPU for longer than Cinebench does. Here, where shorter bars are better, the ThinkPad X12 drops further back in the pack.

Finally, we look at UL’s 3DMark benchmark to evaluate 3D performance.

We normally would use the more advanced “Time Spy” benchmark here, but we used the older “Sky Diver” benchmark instead for compatibility with older tablets. The Iris Xe GPU inside Lenovo’s tablet holds up respectably here, fourth out of five leading results.

As noted above, performance does seem to depend upon the ambient temperature.

In a climate-controlled office, we’d expect

3DMark 8 Sky Diver Overall Demo mode off Microsoft Surface Laptop 4 AMD Radeon

Microsoft Surface Pro 7+ max Iris Xe

Microsoft Surface Pro 7+ Iris Xe

Lenovo ThinkPad X12 Detachable Gen 1 Iris Xe Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 Iris Plus

Microsoft Surface Pro 7 Iris Plus

Microsoft Surface Pro 7 max Iris Plus

Microsoft Surface Pro 6 UHD620

Microsoft Surface Laptop 2 UHD620

13,526 13,335 12,672 11,957 10,441 6,999 6,954 4,690 4,658

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

In graphics, the Lenovo ThinkPad X12 Detachable Gen 1 does well.

BOTTOM LINE

Battery life Minutes Microsoft Surface Laptop 2 Core i5-8250U

Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 Core i7-1065G7

Microsoft Surface Pro 7+ Core i5-1135G7

Microsoft Surface Laptop 4 Ryzen 7 4980U SE

Microsoft Surface Pro 6 Core i5-8250U

Lenovo ThinkPad X12 Detachable Gen 1 Core i5-1135G7 Microsoft Surface Pro 7 Core i7-1065G7

Microsoft Surface Go 2 Core m3-8100Y

633 626 605 602 588 563 536 441

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

For a tablet, over nine hours of battery life is certainly satisfactory.

GPU performance to be consistently stable.

But even in an air-conditioned home, the tablet seemed to be sensitive to slight changes in temperature. The tablet passed one 3DMark thermal stability test and failed another.

How well will a thin-and-light tablet last against the demands of all-day computing?

Battery life is our last test, where we set the screen to a fixed brightness level and then loop a movie over and over until the battery expires. The Lenovo’s ThinkPad X12 performed about as well as we’d expect, at about 9 hours and 20 minutes of battery life. Unlike some of its competition, however, it doesn’t offer any quick-charging option, and the tablet required over two hours to charge fully.

Lenovo has a respected history in the tablet market. I recall with fondness the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 tablet, especially the smart kickstand design that the company, sadly, later abandoned.

I’m left thinking that Lenovo’s return to the tablet market after a year or two off feels a little lacking. Of the two Tiger Lake tablets I’ve tried, Microsoft’s Surface Pro 7+ feels like the superior offering, in terms of both physical design as well as performance in several of our benchmarks.

That said, the ThinkPad X12 Detachable Gen 1 would suffice for day-to-day office use, and it’s much more affordable than the Surface Pro 7+. From a value perspective, the Lenovo ThinkPad X12 Detachable Gen 1 is clearly the superior tablet.

Lenovo ThinkPad X12 Detachable Gen 1 PROS

• Good value for the price.

• Competitive performance.

• Intriguing “Glance” app preserves security.

CONS

• Excessively weak connection between the keyboard and tablet.

• Muddy audio.

• Poor color and lighting on 1080p webcam.

BOTTOM LINE

Lenovo’s ThinkPad X12 Detachable Gen 1 competes well against Microsoft’s Surface Pro 7+ in the Windows tablet market, though its strength lies in value more than design or performance. $1,331

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Acer Predator Triton 300 SE: Affordable GeForce RTX performance in a slim package This GeForce RTX 3060-powered laptop makes for great gaming value. BY BEN PATTERSON

n on-the-go gaming rig with ray-tracing chops that won’t break your budget or your back, the Acer Predator Triton 300 SE serves up an enticing mix of value and performance. With a list price of $1,400 but currently on sale at Best Buy for just $1,300, the Predator Triton 300 SE arrives with Intel’s

A

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cutting-edge Tiger Lake H35 “ultraportable gaming” CPU (go.pcworld.com/ti35), along with GeForce RTX 3060 graphics and a slim 3.8-pound design.

The Triton’s understated silver chassis gives the laptop a corporate look, but if you crack open the lid, you’ll find a 14-inch, 144Hz Full HD display, three-zone RGB IMAGE: BEN PATTERSON

keyboard backlighting, and one-touch overclocking. Thunderbolt 4 and solid battery life make a good thing even better.

CONFIGURATION The Acer Predator Triton 300 SE is one of the first laptops to pack Intel’s “Special Edition” 11th-gen Core H-series CPU, a so-called H35 chip (go.pcworld.com/ti35) that’s designed for a new class of (as Intel puts it) “ultraportable gaming” systems. Also inside: a GeForce RTX 3060 GPU, which boasts Nvidia’s Ampere 2nd-gen RTX architecture.

Let’s take a more detailed look under the hood: CPU: Quad-core Intel Core i7-11375H Special Edition Memory: 16GB DDR4 dual-channel SDRAM (upgradable to 24GB using a single soDIMM module) Graphics: GeForce RTX 3060 with 6GB GDDR6 VRAM Storage: 512GB NVMe SSD Display: 14-inch 1920x1080 IPS with 144Hz refresh rate, 300 nits Webcam: 720p SHDR Connectivity: Thunderbolt 4, two USB SuperSpeed 10Gbps Type-A ports (one with power-off USB charging), HDMI 2.1, 3.5mm combo audio jack Networking: Killer Wi-Fi 6 AX 1650, Bluetooth 5.1 Biometrics: Fingerprint reader Battery capacity: 60 watt-hour

Dimensions: 12.7x8.97x0.7 inches Weight: 3.8 pounds (measured), 1.3 pounds (AC adapter) Starting at the top, Intel’s “Special Edition” H35 CPU promises up to 5GHz single-threaded performance (which we’ll be putting to the test later). The RTX 3060 card should serve up 1080p gaming frame rates north of 60 fps and “smooth” 4K gaming, complete with plenty of ray-tracing eye candy.

The roomy 16GB of RAM can be upgraded to an even roomier 24GB, while the 14-inch IPS display can crank out 144Hz visuals (although you’ll have to do without G-Sync support).

Moving along, the 512GB solid-state drive won’t be enough to store your Steam library; thankfully, the Thunderbolt 4 port and the pair of SuperSpeed USB 10Gbps ports should be able to handle your external storage needs.

There’s no ethernet, but you do get a Killer Wi-Fi 6 AX1650 low-latency wireless module with Bluetooth 5.1 and up to 2.4Gbps of throughput. Finally, a beefy 60 Whr battery should help boost your on-battery gaming time—although, realistically, you should keep the 1.3-pound AC adapter within reach.

As with other laptops in the Predator series, the Predator Triton 300 SE comes with Acer’s PredatorSense app, which offers the choice of four performance modes: Quiet, which keeps the laptop’s cooling fans as quiet as possible; Default, for everyday use; Extreme, which overclocks the CPU and GPU while throttling the cooling fans; and Turbo, JULY 2021 PCWorld 53

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which is designed to maximize overclocking while dialing up the cooling fans to a roar. The PredatorSense app lets you assign a performance mode (as well as lighting and sound modes) to specific games, but the laptop itself always boots into Default mode.

DESIGN Intel’s been making a push this year for low-profile, H35-powered ultraportable gaming laptops that won’t raise an eyebrow at work or on campus. The slim, all-silver Predator Triton 300 SE could certainly pass for one of Acer’s productivity-minded Aspire systems if you don’t look too hard.

You won’t find any garish, bright-red highlights here—even the Predator logo on the corner of the lid is relatively tame.

Of course, the jumbo vents on the sides and back of the laptop are a dead

giveaway that this is a gaming rig.

Measuring just 0.7 inches thick and weighing in at 3.8 pounds, the Triton 300 SE could be slipped into a backpack, although with its largish 14-inch display, you’ll certainly know it’s there.

Inside the Triton 300 SE’s chassis is a dual-fan cooling system featuring upgraded AeroBlade fans. According to Acer, its Vortex Flow technology is designed to “create an aerodynamic flow” courtesy of dedicated GPU and CPU heat pipes, while “strategically placed” fans help cool the DDR RAM, power supply, and other “critical” components. Will the Triton 300 SE’s thermal management solution translate into faster performance?

We’ll soon see.

DISPLAY

The Acer Predator Triton 300 SE ships with a 14-inch full-HD (1920x1080) display with a 100 percent Adobe RGB color gamut and a fast but not exceptional 144Hz refresh rate. Given the Triton 300 SE’s moderate price tag and its bleeding-edge H35 CPU, we’re not surprised that Acer opted to dial down the The Acer Predator Triton 300 SE cuts a slim, low-key profile for a gaming rig. refresh rate a tad. If 54 PCWorld JULY 2021

you’re looking for a gaming laptop with refresh rates in the ultrafast 240Hz-300Hz range, you’ll need to either up your budget (substantially) or go for a more affordable system saddled with an older-gen CPU. The IPS display delivers typically solid viewing The Acer Predator Triton 300 SE comes with quiet keys and three-zone RGB keyboard backlighting. angles. Its 300-nit maximum and Zoom, or you can create your own brightness spec is good, provided you keep static patterns. the gaming indoors. The screen is As for the keyboard itself, the Triton 300 surrounded by slim bezels on top and SE’s flat keys offer plenty of travel and are particularly along the sides, although the virtually silent. Gamers who prefer a smooth, chunky bottom bezel is a bit of an eyesore. linear-style action (ideal for those who want to The top bezel, incidentally, houses the flutter their fingers over the keyboard) might Triton’s 720p webcam and a three-mic array. not like the solid, tactile bump at the actuation The display isn’t touch-sensitive, but that’s point, but again, that’s par for the course common for a gaming laptop. given the laptop’s price range.

KEYBOARD, TOUCHPAD, The Triton 300 SE’s keyboard lacks AND SPEAKERS media playback hotkeys, but there is a The Triton 300 SE’s keyboard boasts dedicated key that launches the three-zone RGB backlighting, which you PredatorSense app. A one-touch Turbo can control via the PredatorSense app. You button sits above the left side of the can pick from seven dynamic lighting keyboard. Positioned directly—and profiles, including Breathing, Neon, Wave, worryingly—above the PredatorSense JULY 2021 PCWorld 55

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technology that commonly appears on Lenovo laptops).

While object-based audio can effectively open up a laptop’s soundstage, it won’t necessarily improve overall audio performance, and that’s pretty much the case here. Whether I was Watch out for the Power key, which sits right above the PredatorSense button. running Vanguard strikes on Destiny 2 button is the Power key, which immediately or listening to The Boss on Spotify, the Triton puts the Triton to sleep when struck. Take 300 SE’s speakers sounded disappointingly heed of that juxtaposition. thin, with barely any bass response—in other The Triton’s compact glass touchpad felt words, par for the course as far as laptop smooth and responsive, with the cursor speakers go. If you really want to crank the floating along in unison with a silky motion. sound while listening or playing on the The touchpad is small enough that my palms Triton, you’ll be better off with external rarely brushed against it while I was typing, speakers or a decent set of cans. but even when I tried smashing both my PORTS palms on its surface, the cursors barely The Acer Predator Triton 300 SE comes with budged. There’s a fingerprint reader an impressive array of ports, which will come embedded in the top-left corner of the in handy for putting your Steam library on touchpad for those who want to enable external storage as well as connecting gaming biometric security. mice or controllers.

The Acer Predator Triton 300 SE’s First and foremost is the left-side up-firing stereo speakers are augmented by Thunderbolt 4 port, which can support up to DTS:X Ultra, an object-based sound format two 4K monitors or a single 8K display at that competes with Dolby Atmos (an audio 56 PCWorld JULY 2021

Thunderbolt 4 headlines the Triton 300 SE’s array of ports. Also pictured: the first of two SuperSpeed 10Gbps Type-A ports, plus a barrel-shaped DC input.

On the right: a second SuperSpeed USB 10 Gbps Type-A port, an HDMI 2.1 port, and a combo audio jack.

60Hz. The Thunderbolt 4 spec also allows for connecting up to four Thunderbolt 4 hubs, as well as longer cable runs (including upcoming 50-meter optical cables) compared to Thunderbolt 3.

Next to the Thunderbolt 4 port is the first of two SuperSpeed 10Gbps USB Type-A ports, along with a barrel-shaped power port for the bulky 180-watt AC adapter and a Kensington laptop security slot.

On the right side is the second SuperSpeed 10Gbps USB Type-A port, an HDMI 2.1 port, and a combo audio jack.

Not bad, but there are a couple of omissions, including a media card reader and a wired ethernet port (although you could always just get a USB ethernet adapter).

PERFORMANCE While the Acer Predator Triton 300 SE’s RTX 3060 is—or was, until just recently (go. pcworld.com/rcnt)—the least powerful of Nvidia’s 30-series RTX graphics cards, it still packs impressive bang for the buck.

Coupled with Intel’s H35 ultraportable gaming chip, the GPU should manage solid performance gains compared to its predecessor, the RTX 2060. So how does the Triton 300 SE compare to pricier—and heavier—gaming laptops with beefier graphics cards? Let’s take a look.

HANDBRAKE Our first benchmark measures how well a given laptop handles crushing CPU loads over a JULY 2021 PCWorld 57

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HandBrake Total Encode Time Seconds MSI GE76 Core i7-10870H

Aorus 17G Core i7-10870H

Acer Nitro 5 Ryzen 5 4600H

Gateway GWTN156-3BK Core i5-10300H

Acer Predator Triton 300 SE Core i7-11375H

HP Spectre x360 Core i7-10750H

LG Ultra PC 17 Core i7-10510U

1,344 1,348 1,685 2,152 2,316 2,962 3,584

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 Acer Predator Triton 300 SE’s HandBrake performance isn’t bad considering it’s among the lightest laptops in our chart.

lengthy period—in this case, transcoding a 30GB MKV file to a format suitable for Android tablets using HandBrake, the free video encoding utility. This multicore chore is guaranteed to spin up cooling fans. Because it can take up to an hour or more to complete, it’s a great test of a laptop’s thermal management.

At first glance, the Acer Predator Triton 300 SE’s HandBrake performance might look disappointing (remember, shorter bars are better), but keep in mind that all of the laptops that snagged better HandBrake scores are heavier—in some cases, much heavier—than the Triton 300 SE. The Acer Nitro 5, for example, is nearly a pound heavier than the 3.8-pound Triton, while the two top finishers—the MSI GE76 and the Gigabyte Aorus 17G—tip the scales 58 PCWorld JULY 2021

at 6.6 and 6.1 pounds, respectively. That extra bulk gives the MSI and Gigabyte, and the Acer Nitro 5, much more latitude in terms of thermal management, thus allowing them to turn up the heat with HandBrake.

CINEBENCH More of a sprint than the marathon of our HandBrake benchmark, Cinebench measures how long it takes for a laptop to render a 3D image in real time, a process that generally only takes a few minutes. We run Cinebench in both multithreaded and single-threaded modes, giving us a chance to consider a laptop’s single-core efficiency as well as its sheer multicore speed.

Cinebench R15 0.38 Single thread

All threads

203

Aorus 17G Core i7-10870H

1,750 200

MSI GE76 Core i7-10870H

1,676 178

Acer Nitro 5 Ryzen 5 4600H

HP Spectre x360

1,360 203

Core i7-10750H

Acer Predator Triton 300 SE

1,111 205

Core i7-11375H

Gateway GWTN156-3BK

1,045 189

Core i5-10300H

LG Ultra PC 17 Core i7-10510U

906 189 616

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

The Triton 300 SE’s multithreaded Cinebench performance is middling, but its single-threaded result shoots to the top.

Again, we see the Acer Predator Triton 300 SE’s multicore performance fall behind those of its heavier competitors (with the 6-pound–plus Aorus and MSI laptops again leading the pack), but take a look at the Triton’s single-threaded performance. If we rejiggered the chart to highlight singlethreaded scores, the Triton 300 SE would come out on top, followed by the Gigabyte, the HP Spectre x360, and the MSI. Pretty impressive.

RTX 3060 GPU to fall roughly in the middle of the pack, behind the RTX 3080 laptops in our comparison but ahead of GTX 16 series- and RTX 20 series-powered systems.

No surprises here: The Triton sits somewhat behind a trio of RTX 3080 laptops but slightly ahead of the RTX 2060–powered Gateway, while beating three GTX 1650 systems by wide margins. With these results, we’d expect to see real-world gaming performance well north of 60 fps at max settings in most titles.

3DMARK FIRE STRIKE 1.1 Next up is a synthetic graphics test courtesy of 3DMark’s Fire Strike 1.1 benchmark, which should give us an indication of how the Predator Triton 300 SE’s overall graphics performance lines up with the competition.

We’re expecting the Triton and its GeForce

3DMark Fire Strike 1.1 Graphics performance MSI GE76

23,945 21,755

Core i7-10870H

Aorus 17G Core i7-10870H

Acer Predator Triton 300 SE Core i7-11375H

Gateway GWTN156-3BK Core i5-10300H

Acer Nitro 5 Ryzen 5 4600H

LG Ultra PC 17 Core i7-10510U

HP Spectre x360 Core i7-10750H

14,789 13,653 8,701 7,796 7,613

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

The laptops at the top of our Fire Strike chart all have more powerful GPUs than the Triton 300 SE (and they’re also heavier and more expensive).

RISE OF THE TOMB RAIDER Speaking of real-world gaming, the second entry in the rebooted Tomb Raider series can help give us an idea of how the Triton 300 SE fares during actual gameplay, even

Rise of the Tomb Raider Very High DX11 Frames per second MSI GE76 Core i7-10870H

Aorus 17G Core i7-10870H

Acer Predator Triton 300 SE Core i7-11375H

Gateway GWTN156-3BK Core i5-10300H

Acer Nitro 5 Ryzen 5 4600H

LG Ultra PC 17 Core i7-10510U

HP Spectre x360 Core i7-10750H

149.75 123.85 93.02 67.9 54.91 52.58 43.61

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

The Acer Predator Triton 300 SE can crank out better than 90 fps visuals when running Rise of the Tomb Raider at max setting.

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though the 2015 title is getting just a little bit long in the tooth.

As you can see, the Triton easily clears the vaunted 60-fps mark with Rise of the Tomb Raider, trailing (as expected) only the three RTX 3080-powered laptops in our chart.

More interesting is the sizable margin between the Triton and the RTX 2060– enabled Gateway. Looking down the list, the three GTX 1650–powered laptops can’t quite make it to the 60-fps mark, which goes to show what you’re giving up when you dial back to the GTX 16 series.

3DMARK PORT ROYALE To wring out the Acer Predator Triton 300 SE’s ray-tracing performance, we fired up 3DMark’s Port Royale benchmark, which puts RTX-powered laptops through their paces with ray-traced reflections, shadows, and glass surfaces.

Once more, the Triton falls pretty much where we’d expect, significantly behind three laptops with RTX 3080 GPUs but ahead of the RTX 2060-powered Gateway.

BATTERY LIFE We test battery life by looping a 4K video using the stock Windows Movies & TV app, with screen brightness set to about 260 nits and the volume dialed to 50 percent, with headphones plugged in. The Acer Predator Triton 300 SE and its 60 watt-hour battery acquit themselves well here, lasting a solid nine hours during our battery drain test and outlasting all comers save the LG Ultra PC 17 (which has a larger 72.7 watt-hour battery) and the Acer Nitro 5 (a heavier laptop with a slightly smaller 57.5 watt-hour battery). The Gateway at the bottom

Battery life Minutes LG Ultra PC 17

738 633 547

Core i7-10510U

3DMark Port Royale 1.2

Acer Nitro 5

Graphics performance

Acer Predator Triton 300 SE

Ryzen 5 4600H Core i7-11375H

MSI GE76

7,550 6,294

Core i7-10870H

Aorus 17G Core i7-10870H

Acer Predator Triton 300 SE Core i7-11375H

Gateway GWTN156-3BK Core i5-10300H

3,968 3,463

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

The Acer Predator Triton 300 SE’s ray-tracing performance isn’t bad given its RTX 3060 GPU; those laptops above it have RTX 3080 graphics cards.

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MSI GE76 Core i7-10870H

HP Spectre x360 Core i7-10750H

Aorus 17G Core i7-10870H

Gateway GWTN156-3BK Core i5-10300H

415 387 353 280

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

The Triton 300 SE boats impressive battery life, although your mileage may vary depending on the games you’re playing.

The Predator Triton 300 SE is a fantastic value gaming laptop.

of the chart has the smallest battery (46 watthours), while the system with the beefiest battery, the Aorus 17G (99 watt-hours) limped to the finish with a second-to-last result.

We should note, of course, that the Windows Movies & TV app is a fairly lightweight task as far as CPU loads go. If you’re playing Destiny 2 with Turbo mode engaged, you’re not going to get anywhere near nine hours of battery life.

BOTTOM LINE The Acer Predator Triton 300 SE will be a pleasant surprise for budget-minded gamers who thought RTX-powered laptops were out of reach. Affordably priced, slim, light, and powerful, the Triton 300 SE can hang with the ray-tracing crowd even if it can’t scale the

visual heights of RTX 3080–enabled systems.

Toss in Thunderbolt 4, RGB keyboard backlighting, and solid battery life, and you have a good value in gaming laptops.

Acer Predator Triton 300 SE PROS

• Slim, sub–4-pound design.

• Solid gaming and ray-tracing performance.

• Three-zone RGB keyboard backlighting.

• Impressive battery life.

CONS

• No G-Sync support.

• No wired ethernet.

BOTTOM LINE

An on-the-go gaming laptop with ray-tracing chops that won’t break your budget or your back, the Acer Predator Triton 300 SE serves up an enticing mix of value and performance. $1,299

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Samsung Galaxy Book Pro 360: A beautiful thin-and-light PC Samsung’s new notebook ranks among the best thin-and-light convertible notebooks we’ve ever reviewed. BY MARK HACHMAN Even in an era of progressively lighter notebooks (go. pcworld.com/prlt), larger thin-and-light laptop options like the 15-inch Samsung Galaxy Book Pro 360 are relatively rare. Sure, you might buy it because it simply won’t break your back. But a stunning multimedia experience and 62 PCWorld JULY 2021

shocking all-day battery life demand additional praise.

Samsung’s Galaxy Book Pro 360 lends credence to Intel’s Evo program (go.pcworld. com/iev0), from which this laptop graduated.

Thin-and-light laptop keyboards can be iffy, though, and this laptop suffers accordingly.

Samsung also loads up the Book Pro 360 with IMAGE: MARK HACHMAN

apps for just about everything. Nevertheless, we’ve awarded this laptop our Editor’s Choice award. Read on for why.

BASIC FEATURES Samsung offers the Galaxy Book Pro 360 in either a 13.3-inch or a 15.6-inch configuration. Prices start at $1,199 (the minimal 13-inch spec: Core i7/8GB RAM/256GB SSD) and $1,299 for the cheapest 15-inch configuration with 8GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD. It’s worth highlighting that our review unit and price includes a 1TB SSD, a luxury in an era of 256GB and 512GB notebooks.

Note that all of the Galaxy Book Pro 360 models ship with a Samsung S Pen (go. pcworld.com/amsm) in the box, which would normally cost about $32 on Amazon.

At press time, Samsung.com (go.pcworld. com/smsm) was the only source for the Samsung Galaxy Book Pro 360.

If those prices are still too expensive, consider the similar Samsung Galaxy Book Pro (go.pcworld.com/ sgbp), a traditional clamshell with a few differences: the lack of an included S Pen, for example, as well as a non-touch display. The Book Pro also includes a USB Type A port. Otherwise, the Samsung Galaxy Book Pro 360 we’re reviewing requires purchasing one of our recommended USB-C hubs (go.pcworld. com/hsbu) to connect to devices with a USB-A connector.

Processor: Intel Core i7-1165G7 Display: 13.3-inch or 15.5-inch (as tested): 1920x1080 (AMOLED, touch) Memory: 8GB/16GB LPDDR4x (16GB as tested) Storage: 256GB/512GB/1TB SSD (as tested) Graphics: Intel Iris Xe Ports: 1 USB-C (Thunderbolt 4); 2 USB-C, microSD, 3.5mm jack Security: Fingerprint reader Camera: 720p (user-facing) Battery: 67.0Wh (design), 68.0Wh (reported) Wireless: WiFi 6E Gig+ (802.11ax), Bluetooth 5.1 Operating system: Windows 10 Home Dimensions: 13.97 x 8.98 x 0.47in.

Weight: 3.02lb, 3.38lb with charger (as weighed) Colors: Mystic Bronze, Mystic Navy (as tested) Prices: $1,499 as tested (Samsung.com [go.pcworld.com/14ts]); otherwise $1,199 and up

CONSTRUCTION Samsung’s Galaxy Book Pro 360 proudly proclaims itself a member of Intel’s flagship Evo lineup via a small sticker on its keyboard deck, and it deserves it. The Galaxy Book Pro 360 is a beautiful piece of engineering, very much in the mold of the Surface Laptop (go. pcworld.com/msf4): all cool, glossy metal JULY 2021 PCWorld 63

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The Samsung Galaxy Book Pro 360, in tent mode.

and minimalist ports. We received our review unit in the Mystic Navy color scheme, and the blue hue is virtually indistinguishable from black in most lighting.

It’s also the first laptop in a very long while that’s persuaded me to care about how thin it is, especially when folded back flat.

Remember, this is a 360-degree convertible, which can be reclined all the way back into

tablet mode. The Book Pro 360’s hinge holds the display true even when almost fully reclined, though it oscillates back and forth before settling in.

Less obvious but equally profound is the weight—this is a notebook that you can easily pick up by a corner and set down somewhere else. Samsung used aluminum to construct the Galaxy Book Pro 360, but it felt absolutely stable with no give in the keyboard or to the chassis. While you can theoretically open the laptop with a single finger, its light weight and the slick, stubby feet beneath it nearly caused me to push it off my test stand when I tried.

As many notebooks do, the Samsung Galaxy Pro 360 pulls cool air from the bottom of the notebook and vents it out the back through a grille hidden within the hinge.

Samsung shipped the notebook set to the middle “better performance” tier in the Windows power/performance slider. Under load, the fan noise increases to a moderate

Laid flat, the Samsung Galaxy Book Pro 360 practically disappears. The right side of the chassis includes a standard USB-C port and a microSD card slot.

64 PCWorld JULY 2021

but not annoying hiss, and I was pleasantly surprised to see how quickly the fan turned off, about fifteen seconds after exiting out of a computationally intensive application.

Samsung’s thin, light aesthetic extends to its port That LED to the right is really your best indicator of which USB-C port is Thunderbolt-enabled (the right) and which is a standard USB-C port (the left). choices, which include a pair of USB-C ports and a third USB-C port that don’t want to use one of the installed wireless includes Thunderbolt 4 capabilities. Which apps like Galaxy Share that comes one is which? Good luck trying to tell. There’s preinstalled on the notebook. a virtually indistinguishable “lightning bolt” logo that signals that the front left USB-C port DISPLAY AND AUDIO is Thunderbolt enabled, and a blue LED next Samsung has a well-deserved reputation for to it. Otherwise, you’ll be left trying to figure its dramatic OLED screens on its TVs, tablets out which port is which. and phones, and its Super AMOLED display We’d recommend connecting the 65W (an OLED screen (go.pcworld.com/oled) cellular-style charger to one of the other with an active matrix and touchscreen on top USB-C ports and dedicating the Thunderbolt of it) certainly doesn’t disappoint. If you’re a port to one of our recommended content creator, you can be assured that Thunderbolt docks (go.pcworld.com/rctd) Samsung is nearly perfect in satisfying the instead. Alternatively, you can buy a cheaper, various color gamuts. In part, that’s because slower USB-C hub (go.pcworld.com/hsbu) to Samsung offers several color options. There’s connect to older devices that use a USB Type a general AMOLED color profile, but also A connector. Samsung also includes a separate display profiles within the Windows microSD card slot on the Galaxy Book Pro 10 Settings menu, each tuned to the 360, allowing you to “sneakernet” a microSD AdobeRGB, P3, or sRGB color space. card from a Samsung Galaxy Phone if you JULY 2021 PCWorld 65

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By default, the general AMOLED profile covers 100 percent of sRGB, 98 percent of AdobeRGB, and 99% of P3. Unfortunately, the AdobeRGB profile didn’t really increase the AdobeRGB coverage—it remained unchanged at 98 percent. The P3 profile produced 100 percent of sRGB coverage and 91 percent of AdobeRGB, and covered 99 percent of the P3 color gamut. Enabling the sRGB profile covered the sRGB color space by 100 percent as well, but decreased AdobeRGB coverage to 77 percent and P3 coverage to 78 percent. All of these measurements were recorded by Datacolor’s SpyderX Elite colorimeter, which also measured the display’s luminosity at a maximum of 295 nits—far less than the rated 370 nits that Samsung claims. That’s still fine for working in even a well-lit room, however.

The extreme width of the display (measuring 19.5mm high by 34.5mm long, a roughly 1.77 display ratio) also calls into question Samsung’s choice of 1080p resolution rather than a 4K option. As you might imagine, video played back looks bright and vivid, but there’s a hint of graininess to it that might go away with a higher-resolution option. The screen is quite glossy, too, with reflections often creeping into your peripheral vision.

That’s objective criticism. Subjectively, you might wonder whether the Samsung Galaxy Book Pro 360 might replace your television. You don’t really realize how 66 PCWorld JULY 2021

deeply dark an OLED display can be until the black letterboxes surrounding a video are indistinguishable from the thin (about 5mm) black bezels that wrap around the corners of the screen. It’s truly revelatory, especially when the Book Pro 360’s audio is layered on top.

Samsung shipped the Galaxy Book Pro 360 with a pair of 4-watt AKG-tuned speakers underneath, which sound all right by themselves. Of course, the flat laptop speakers can only do so much—there’s no way to manufacture the bass you’ll receive from a large, physical speaker. But there’s a Dolby Access app hidden within the Start menu, which is off by default. Enable it, flip the Book Pro 360 back into tent mode, and enjoy a superb entertainment experience.

I have more mixed feelings about the Galaxy Book Pro 360’s fingerprint reader, which began as the worst I’ve ever used, by far. Normally, you simply touch the sensor several times to establish an “authorized” fingerprint. However, the notebook’s tiny “strip”-style fingerprint reader nestled in the upper right corner of the keyboard failed to recognize that my finger had actually touched it probably two out of every three times during the setup process.

I gave up in disgust.

But near the tail end of the review, I decided to once again use Samsung’s Samsung Update utility to search out new drivers. Voila! A new fingerprint reader driver

near silence. Nope. That amount of key travel simply feels too shallow to be truly comfortable. But—I say this reluctantly, TYPING EXPERIENCE AND because I don’t want laptop makers to think WEBCAM we’re encouraging this—it wasn’t that bad, If there’s anything that should give you pause offering more cushion than I expected. about the Samsung Galaxy Book Pro 360, it’s Fortunately, keyboards are subjective the keyboard. A thin-and-light PC must experiences, and your fingers may find it inevitably make some sacrifices—and my more welcoming. goodness, the Book Pro 360 is thin, especially Samsung provides keyboard controls for when unfolded flat along a desk or table. three levels of backlighting, though you also Samsung claims that its reengineered have the option of entering the built-in keyboard includes a scissor mechanism that, Samsung Settings app and manually adjusting combined with rubber keypad domes, the backlighting via a slider control. provides a “satisfying” 1mm in key travel in There’s one aspect to the keyboard that partially redeems it: the presence of a narrow but otherwise fullfeatured number pad to the right side of the keyboard, thanks to the extended width of the 15-inch laptop.

Number pads are not only excellent for data entry, but they also provide left-handers an alternative to the You probably won’t love the Samsung Galaxy Book Pro 360’s keyboard, but WASD key layout it does have a spacious touchpad, a dedicated number pad, and a fingerprint reader in the upper right corner, which doubles as a power button. for games, too. downloaded, and the reader worked flawlessly for the last days of our review.

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“beauty” options seemed to knock a few pounds off my pandemic pudge. On the other hand, 720p webcams are the norm for laptops, so the graininess probably won’t be called out.

Samsung doesn’t include a The Samsung Galaxy Book Pro 360’s webcam doesn’t look that great, even with the available beauty options turned on. cubby or holder for the S Pen that The dimensions of the keyboard also it includes in the Galaxy Book Pro 360 box. allow the Galaxy Book Pro 360 to sport a Instead, the pen can be magnetically gargantuan precision touchpad that takes up attached to the top of the notebook, though much of the remaining space on the chassis, that’s not really secure in the slightest. The allowing your wrists to rest on either side. stylus does exhibit a bit of lag while inking. It Gestures worked well, and you’ll find plenty also includes a single button, which when of clickable space. double-clicked triggers a menu that launches Samsung includes a fairly generic 720p a number of pen-enabled apps. user-facing webcam on top of the display, with no privacy shutter. As you might expect from a 720p camera, your image will be somewhat soft, as opposed to a cheap but good standalone 1080p webcam (go.pcworld. com/18pw). I honestly didn’t like the resulting image You’ll find an S Pen in the box. quality, though Samsung’s 68 PCWorld JULY 2021

functions, or tie the Galaxy Book Pro 360 to Samsung’s ecosystem of phones and tablets. Quick Search doesn’t do that much more than Windows’ own search bar. Quick Share is like the Windows Your Phone app. It will find nearby devices and I couldn’t discern any tilt support for the included S Pen, and there was a bit of lag while inking. share files, texts, and photos, provided both SAMSUNG HAS A UTILITY are signed into a Samsung account.

FOR NEARLY EVERYTHING Here’s just some of the apps Samsung Fortunately, Samsung doesn’t particularly reserves for the Start menu: the Galaxy Book overload the Galaxy Book Pro 360 with Smart Switch app, for porting over data numerous third-party “crapware” apps. Still, Samsung adds tons of its own Samsung- or Galaxy-branded apps—some of which, it should be said, are quite good.

Samsung reserves pride of place on the Windows taskbar for Amazon’s Alexa app, and adds a Quick Search and Quick Share app shortcut to the taskbar, too.

The latter apps reflect both of Samsung’s approaches to PC Here’s what someone viewing your Samsung Galaxy Book Pro software: replace or enhance 360’s “secret screen” will see: a mishmash of translucent windows.

Here, the “active” window is Word, with a line of text.

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from an earlier Galaxy PC; the PenUP drawing app; Samsung’s DeX app for connecting your Samsung phone to your PC; the Samsung TV Plus link to a TV-like collection of video streams; the Samsung Update service for updating drivers; and even the ability to control Forza Horizon 4 looked particularly grainy while running, though this your Samsung benchmark proves that you can achieve playable 36fps frame rates SmartThings smart home even at High visual settings. (Driving games aren’t as sensitive to frame rates as first-person action games.) via a dedicated app.

Spotify also comes preloaded, as does Booking.com. from Windows File Explorer and is locked The only three must-open apps are with your PC’s password when discovered.

Samsung Update, Settings, and Security.

It’s like OneDrive’s Personal Vault (go.

Samsung Settings provides granular controls pcworld.com/1dpv), but on your PC. you won’t find elsewhere, such as the ability PERFORMANCE to enable USB charging when your laptop is Samsung’s Galaxy Book Pro 360 straddles the otherwise asleep, or fine-grained control of dividing line between an entertainment and the keyboard backlighting. productivity PC, with a thin-and-light bent. As Samsung Security combines four noted above, it’s absolutely superb for interesting features. One grants the ability to watching movies and streamed video, and “obscure” your screen by making the current the performance is good enough for both. window semitransparent and allowing a One of my checks involves streaming 4K wandering eye to confuse it with other apps.

YouTube video at 60fps and noting any Another provides the option to manually stutters. It dropped an imperceptible three disable your webcam and mic via software; a frames out of a sample size of about 10,000. third creates a “security cam” that snaps a Likewise, Samsung’s Galaxy Book Pro 360 photo of anyone who tries to log into your PC can’t truly be called a gaming PC, but as CPU and fails. The fourth feature, “Privacy Folder,” and GPU capabilities steadily improve, you’ll creates a hidden folder that is kept hidden 70 PCWorld JULY 2021

find a broader range of games that offer playable frame rates. We ran the built-in “battle” benchmark of the strategy game A Total War Saga: Troy and achieved playable frame rates (39.5 fps average) at the laptop’s native 1080p resolution, on Medium graphics settings. We also used the built-in benchmark within the open-world driving game Forza Horizon 4 and achieved playable frame rates at 1080p resolution, too.

Samsung’s notebook will slow itself down under load to prevent overheating, however.

We noted a 6 percent drop in CPU performance using the prolonged Cinebench R23 throttling test. GPU performance was uneven too. 3DMark’s looped Time Spy stress test found that the notebook could maintain a consistent frame rate 90.2 percent of the time. A perfectly thermally managed notebook should be able to maintain a consistent 100 percent frame rate; UL considers above 96 percent acceptable.

Many thin-and-light PCs emphasize the smaller 13-inch or 14-inch size to save on weight, so it’s rarer to find a larger 15-inch thin-and-light laptop. (Many 15-inch notebooks are simply designed for gaming.)

We compared the Galaxy Book Pro 360 to several competing laptops for comparison, but the majority of these are 14-inch offerings.

Still, thin-and-light convertibles are generally slower than their more full-featured cousins, so we were eager to see how the Galaxy Book Pro 360 performed.

In the charts below, it’s worth comparing the 15.6-inch, $1,499 Samsung Galaxy Book Pro 360 to the 15-inch Microsoft Surface Laptop 4 (go.pcworld.com/msf4; $1,469 at press time) as well as our May 2021 choices for best thin-and-light laptop (go.pcworld. com/tnlt): the 14-inch HP Spectre x360 (go. pcworld.com/hspc; $1,269 at press time) and 2020’s 14-inch Acer Swift 5 (go.pcworld. com/asw5; $1,299 at the time of this review).

The 14-inch Acer Swift 3X (go.pcworld.com/ asfx; $1,199) certainly ranks highly, too. At 13.4 inches, Dell’s XPS 13 2-in-1 9310 (go. pcworld.com/del9) is both a little smaller and a little more expensive at $1,449. The 14-inch

PCMark 10 CPU performance Asus ZenBook UM3255 Ryzen 7 5800U

Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 Ryzen 9 4980HS

Samsung Galaxy Book Pro 360 Core i7-1165G7

Acer Swift 3X Core i7-1165G7

Dell XPS 13 2-in-1 9310 Core i7-1165G7

Huawei MateBook X Pro (2021) Core i7-1165G7

Microsoft Surface Laptop 4 Ryzen 7 4980U SE

Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 Core i7-1065G7

HP Spectre x360 14 1Q881AV Core i7-1165G7

Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 Ryzen 7 3780 SE

Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 Ryzen 5 3580U SE

6,188 6,022 5,204 5,103 4,920 4,808 4,774 4,481 4,457 4,077 3,977

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

Samsung’s Galaxy Book Pro 360 proves itself as a capable day-to-day productivity machine.

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SAMSUNG GAL A X Y BOOK PRO 360

Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 (go.pcworld. com/14az; $1,450 at press time) is a little heavier at 3.5 pounds, but it’s a strong performer, too.

UL’s PCMark 10 offers a solid overall benchmark for measuring day-to-day office work (Web browsing, spreadsheets, video calls) as well as light gaming, video transcoding, and even some CAD work.

Once the benchmark has completed its battalion of tests, it generates a score. We consider a score in the 4,000 range pretty good, with anything above 5,000 considered exceptional. The Galaxy Book

Cinebench RT15.038 All threads Asus ROG Zephyrus G14

1,931 1,584 1,531

Ryzen 9 4980HS

Asus ZenBook UM3255 Ryzen 7 5800U

Microsoft Surface Laptop 4 Ryzen 7 4980U SE

Acer Swift 3X Core i7-1165G7

Dell XPS 13 2-in-1 9310 Core i7-1165G7

Samsung Galaxy Book Pro 360 Core i7-1165G7

Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 Core i7-1065G7

Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 Ryzen 7 3780 SE

HP Spectre x360 14 1Q881AV Core i7-1165G7

Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 Ryzen 5 3580U SE

Huawei MateBook X Pro (2021) Core i7-1165G7

970 921 833 751 695 678 662 626

Pro 360 lands in the upper echelon with its 5,204 score.

The Maxon Cinebench score uses a rendering engine to construct a 2D image.

Cinebench R15 is the older test, and most notebooks chew through it fast with their turbo modes enabled. That’s fine—it’s a good test to see how well the Galaxy Book Pro 360 will handle somewhat short, CPU-intensive tasks.

Samsung’s laptop falls in the middle of the pack, an unsurprising result given its extremely slim nature.

Handbrake, meanwhile, is a prolonged test that still taps that majority of CPU cores.

HandBrake 0.99.0 Encoding (H.264) Seconds Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 Ryzen 9 4980HS

Microsoft Surface Laptop 4 Ryzen 7 4980U SE

Asus ZenBook UM3255 Ryzen 7 5800U

Acer Swift 3X Core i7-1165G7

Samsung Galaxy Book Pro 360 Core i7-1165G7

Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 Core i7-1065G7

Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 Ryzen 7 3780 SE

Dell XPS 13 2-in-1 9310 Core i7-1165G7

Huawei MateBook X Pro (2021) Core i7-1165G7

Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 Ryzen 5 3580U SE

HP Spectre x360 14 1Q881AV LO N G ER B A R S I N D I C AT E B E T T ER P E R F O R M A N C E

Core i7-1165G7

1,332 1,493 1,722 2,561 2,740 2,973 3,280 3,287 3,315 3,498 3,622

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

Thin-and-light PCs like the Galaxy Book Pro 360 usually struggle somewhat in performance, and you’re seeing that here.

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Again, the Samsung Galaxy Book Pro 360 lands in the upper middle tier of performance.

3DMark Time Spy 1.2 Graphics performance Acer Swift 3X Core i7-1165G7

Samsung Galaxy Book Pro 360 Core i7-1165G7

Dell XPS 13 2-in-1 9310 Core i7-1165G7

Huawei MateBook X Pro (2021) Core i7-1165G7

HP Spectre x360 14 1Q881AV Core i7-1165G7

Asus ZenBook UM3255 Ryzen 7 5800U

Microsoft Surface Laptop 4 Ryzen 7 4980U SE

Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 Ryzen 7 3780 SE

Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 Ryzen 5 3580U SE

Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 Core i7-1065G7

1,917 1,821 1,714 1,692 1,454 1,388 1,296 1,006 971 968

real-world games we played and our scores in our benchmark argue that you’ll be able to sneak in a bit of fun. Remember, this configuration of this laptop ships with a terabyte of SSD storage, which is an unusually high capacity.

But then we come to battery life, and whoa. Wow. Normally, all-day battery life is reserved for battery-sipping Qualcomm Snapdragon processors or thick, chunky notebooks that pack the chassis full to the brim with a massive lithium-ion battery. Yes, there’s a big battery squished flat within the Pro 360’s chassis—68 watt-hours—but about

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

Here, the Galaxy Book Pro 360 does surprisingly well in 3D performance.

Battery life Minutes

Handbrake is a real-world app that transcodes video (we use a full-length Hollywood movie) into another format. Not only does it ask the laptop to run flat out for a half hour or more, but the Handbrake benchmark helps gauge the laptop’s cooling mechanisms—a poorly cooled laptop won’t be able to run as fast, prolonging the transcoding time. Here, smaller numbers are better. The Galaxy Book Pro 360 delivers good but unspectacular results.

In terms of performance, our final benchmark is UL’s 3DMark, specifically the more advanced “Time Spy” test. Again, we don’t consider the Samsung Galaxy Book Pro 360 to be a gaming machine, but the

Samsung Galaxy Book Pro 360 Core i7-1165G7

HP Spectre x360 14 1Q881AV Core i7-1165G7

Dell XPS 13 2-in-1 9310 Core i7-1165G7

Asus ZenBook UM3255 Ryzen 7 5800U

Acer Swift 3X Core i7-1165G7

Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 Core i7-1065G7

Microsoft Surface Laptop 4 Ryzen 7 4980U SE

Huawei MateBook X Pro (2021) Core i7-1165G7

Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 Ryzen 5 3580U SE

Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 Ryzen 7 3780 SE

Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 Ryzen 9 4980HS

966 881 862 770 753 626 602 541 502 445 383

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

Top of the heap and then some: the Samsung Galaxy Book Pro 360 truly offers all-day battery life (measured in minutes, above) during our video run-down test.

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SAMSUNG GAL A X Y BOOK PRO 360

Book Pro 360 with the ecosystem of Samsung phones, but the company hasn’t yet found an efficient way to do so.

Paying about $1,500 for all this might be a bit too much, though Samsung offers cheaper options that we’ve listed elsewhere in this review.

For the size, weight, and price, plus intangibles like its rich multimedia capabilities, we’d The Galaxy Book Pro 360 is one of the premier thin-and-light notebooks PCs that you can buy. recommend the Samsung Galaxy Book 16 hours of battery life should be a major Pro 360 as one of the premier thin-and-light factor when considering the purchase of the notebooks PCs that you can buy. chart-topping (by far) Samsung Galaxy Book Pro 360.

Samsung Galaxy Book Pro 360

BOTTOM LINE If it’s performance you’re after, Samsung’s Galaxy Book Pro 360 does fairly well in our roundup of comparable laptops. But it isn’t the reason to buy the Samsung’s massive, svelte laptop. The Galaxy Book Pro 360 truly shines as a multimedia machine, with battery life that’s an unexpected delight.

I’m not a fan of the keyboard. Samsung’s app designers also need to be told a stern no when they ask to write and bundle more apps. There’s reason to integrate the Galaxy 74 PCWorld JULY 2021

PROS

• Fantastic 16-hour battery life.

• Ultrathin, light and svelte.

• Excellent 1080p OLED display and Dolby audio.

• Solid value, though a premium price.

CONS

• Shallow keyboard.

• A ton of preloaded apps, many from Samsung.

• No 4K display option.

BOTTOM LINE

Samsung’s Galaxy Book Pro 360 360-degree convertible laptop is an elegantly slim notebook PC that we recommend for its all-day battery life and rich multimedia capabilities. $1,499

Viofo A139 3CH 3-channel dash cam: Discrete design and full car coverage The interior camera of the trio is, unusually, a discrete unit—handy for placement, bad for cable clutter. BY JON L. JACOBI

Viofo’s A139 3CH threechannel, three-camera dash cam system is a first in our experience. We’ve tested three-channel products before, but the interior camera has always been integrated IMAGE: INTEL

into the same body as the front camera.

Viofo’s is separate, as is the rear camera.

The upside to this discrete interior camera approach is versatility in locating each camera.

The downside, though easily surmountable, is that you have more cables to hide.

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VIOFO A139 3CH

Wi-Fi–connected phone app for displaying live views and changing settings. Feedback is provided by status lights, voice, and other audio clues.

On the back of the main camera are power, record on/off, emergency record (save), the microphone on/ off, and Wi-Fi buttons. You must connect to the phone Viofo’s A139 main (forward) camera body. There’s no display. to change the numerous Instead, the camera relies on a Wi-Fi–connected phone app for other settings, and you can’t displaying live views and changing settings. record while doing so. Small DESIGN AND FEATURES matter—you shouldn’t be driving while using The A139’s three cameras are also notable your phone anyway. for their high resolution. The 140-degree There’s quite a bit in the box to support FOV front camera is 1440p, while the three cameras, as you can see here.

170-degree cabin (interior) and rear cameras are both 1080p. All manage 30 fps while recording simultaneously, which means there’s a fair amount of processing power under the hood. High-quality Sony STARVIS IMX335 sensors are used by all three cameras.

The main (forward) camera body uses a sticky mount. The camera attaches and detaches from said mount by sliding to the left or right. There’s no adjustment once mounted (place carefully!), and there’s no display. Instead of The Viofo Phone app for the A139. The front live view and settings pages are shown. the latter, the A139 relies on a 76 PCWorld JULY 2021

The notable feature of the interior camera is the infrared array—six lights surrounding the lens.

Otherwise, as you can see in the two upcoming images, it’s a dead ringer for the rear camera.

The A139’s camera is nothing special, though it does take some of the best video we’ve seen for a unit peering out your back window.

Other features include integrated GPS As you can see, the A139 packs a lot of stuff into the box, and there’s a (embedded in the video lot of cabling to hide. If you have a powered mirror, grab an adapter to and watermarked on the power the main camera. That will cut down on the clutter. video), a parking mode, As I mentioned, the most problematic and a polarizing filter. The latter increased aspect of the A139 is the cabling. The cables reflectivity somewhat, though it did tamp are thin, and they snap into place using mini down glare from the sun.

COAX connectors. How much of an issue they’ll be depends on where you place them.

With most cars, you’ll want to hide the main camera behind the rearview mirror (use an adapter to power the A139 if the mirror is powered), and the interior camera somewhere high up on the windshield so it covers as much of the back seat as possible.

Viofo thoughtfully includes a spudger/ crevasse tool for tucking the cables away The interior camera for the Viofo A139 features six infrared lights to enhance low-light captures. behind molding.

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VIOFO A139 3CH

Front day captures are excellent, though the 170-degree lens captures quite a bit of the dashboard in my small sports car.

The polarizing filter is supposed to cut down on glare, but increased reflectivity from the interior dramatically.

And yes, I hadn’t set the readout to MPH. Divide by 1.6.

PERFORMANCE As you can see, the A139’s daytime captures are excellent, offering a very wide, 140-degree field of view without much fisheye distortion.

Viofo includes a polarizing filter, but during everyday use (as shown below) it increased the intensity of the dashboard 78 PCWorld JULY 2021

reflections quite a bit.

The A139’s low-light captures aren’t half-bad. Keep in mind that it was impossible to keep the windshield completely clean with the San Francisco marine layer hitting the car off and on. Note the exceptional color depth. And that’s without WDR (Wide Dynamic Range)

enabled. It was not nearly as light out as the image would make it seem.

Rear captures are as good as the front captures, albeit with a touch less detail (1080p versus 1440p). Note that the band running horizontally across the image below is a defrosting heater wire, not an issue with the camera. Place yours better.

You can really appreciate the wide angle of the rear camera lens when you see the night shot. Again, moisture is responsible for some of the halos.

In the first daytime interior shot, notice that the view is so wide, you can see the main camera and buildings overhead.

There was no room higher up on my small, Front night captures were excellent.

This capture doesn’t show it, but the camera handles headlight flare very well.

The rear camera during the day. The dark line running horizontally across the middle is a heater wire, not a defect in the camera.

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VIOFO A139 3CH

This rear night capture is also quite good. Most of the halos are caused by moisture on the window.

And yes, I was parked.

steep windshield or I’d have placed the camera there. If I’d used the phone to check the view, I would have aimed the camera lower. It’s one of the foibles that comes from not having a display on the camera itself.

At left in the interior night capture, the sloppy cable run that fell out of the molding in my car presents a teachable moment. (I was in a hurry, okay?)

In summary, there’s nothing to worry about when it comes to video quality with the

This day capture by the interior camera shows lots of detail— and lots of ceiling.

Most users will mount the camera higher and aim it lower.

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Interior night captures show a lot of detail. And the wide field of view will capture just about all of the cabin that’s not hidden.

A139. Thanks to the wide fields of view, the system covers nearly all of your car’s surroundings and interior, and the results are nicely detailed and colorful.

BOTTOM LINE The Viofo A139 3CH is an easy Editor’s Choice. It takes fantastic video. With the exception of the Nextbase modular cameras (go.pcworld.com/nxtb) with their telephoto rear cameras, the A139 is my new favorite. The discrete design lets you mount the cameras at their best possible vantage points, especially helpful for ride-givers who want to keep an eye on what’s going on in the backseat. If you want to track

everything in and around your car, the A139 3CH has you covered.

Viofo A139 3CH PROS

• Separate interior camera allows better cabin coverage.

• Excellent, colorful day and night captures.

• Integrated GPS. CONS

• Lots of cabling to hide.

BOTTOM LINE

The Viofo A139 3CH 3-channel camera is unique for its discrete interior camera (most are integrated with the front camera). It’s versatile for placement, but it adds another cable. It would be a good fit for ride-giving pros. It takes great video from all angles, and it interfaces nicely with your phone. $269

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Best USB microphones for streaming: Upgrade your stream with high-quality audio Our top picks provide great vocal clarity and robust features while still being affordable.

BY ADAM PATRICK MURRAY & ALAINA YEE

hether you’re streaming games to Twitch (go. pcworld.com/sgtw), YouTube, or another streaming platform, your audience needs to hear you clearly over the gameplay. (The same holds true if you’re holding live chat sessions

W

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or talking with your viewers as you work on a project.) And unfortunately, microphones built into laptops, webcams, and even headsets just don’t sound as good as a full-size mic sitting close to your mouth.

The good news is, you don’t have to spend a lot of money to upgrade. While IMAGE: MARK HACHMAN

professional streamers use pro-level audio equipment for the best possible sound, USB microphones are much cheaper.

They’re also much easier to use without sacrificing quality. Plug a USB microphone into your computer, and you can be off and

OUR TOP PICK ELGATO WAVE:3 The Elgato Wave:3 (go. pcworld.com/ewv3) packs in a lot of performance for a $160 USB microphone. Not only does it sound great out of the box, but it can be tuned further, too. You can also easily adjust the mic during streams, thanks to a capacitive mute button and a physical dial that controls mic gain, headphone volume, and crossfade (that means the balance of your mic versus PC volume when using connected headphones).

Powering the excellent audio is a 24-bit/96kHz analog-to-digital converter and a large condenser capsule sensitive to voices of all volumes, plus a lone cardioid polar pattern that keeps the focus on you and not on background noises. Overall, voices sound natural coming through the Wave:3, and transitions from loud to quiet speaking are smooth. Our one nitpick is that this mic would sound even better with a little more sharpness in the midtones.

running immediately. Our picks for the best USB microphones focus on these core basics: They’re easy-to-use models that offer great quality for a fair price, as well as working with a variety of voice types and volume levels.

RATING

PRICE $160 from go.pcworld.com/ewv3 PROS • Fantastic ADC. • Clean and sleek look.

• Great value for the price.

CONS • Mic mute placement.

• Included stand not usable for serious streamers.

The Wave:3 also comes with built-in hardware to reduce unwanted vocal pops (those distracting bursts of air that happen when you’re saying words that start with letters like “p” or “b”), as well as a unique feature that reduces clipping (the distortion that happens when you talk or yell louder than the mic can handle) by JULY 2021 PCWorld 83

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switching to a secondary signal that’s been picking up your voice at a lower volume.

Streamers with a two-PC streaming setup or the use of additional non-Elgato mics may need to look elsewhere, but for

RUNNER UP ELGATO WAVE:1 The Elgato Wave:1 (go.pcworld.com/ ew1) may lack its sibling’s fancier features, but don’t count it out. It still has the same fantastic large condenser capsule and protection against plosives and clipping as the Wave:3, and you get similar sensitivity and tonal clarity, too. This mic plays nice with almost every voice out there—it provides warm, full tones in the low end that mix perfectly with a crisp high range.

Where it falls behind the Wave:3 is with its lower-quality analog-to-digital converter, which offers a 24-bit/48kHz signal. Less data in the digital capture of your voice means a less faithful reproduction of it, though as noted above, it still sounds pretty good.

More disappointing are the strippeddown hardware controls. The control dial on the Wave:1 only toggles muting of the mic and headphone volume. You can still control mic gain and crossfade through Elgato’s Wavelink PC software, but the experience is 84 PCWorld JULY 2021

most people, the Wave:3 is the closest to a one-size-fits-all solution—especially since Elgato’s Wavelink software gives you control over audio routing of other sources beyond your mic, too.

RATING

PRICE $129 from go.pcworld.com/ew1 PROS • Same great sound profile as the Wave:3.

• Same amazing software features.

• Same clean and sleek look.

CONS • Not a great value for its price.

• Lacks dedicated mic gain/ crossover control.

more cumbersome than having dedicated controls on the mic. We think it’s worth the extra $30 to get a Wave:3, but if you’re on a tight budget, this $130 mic is still one of the best on the market.

PREMIUM PICK SHURE MV7 Last fall, Shure released the MV7 (go. pcworld.com/smv7), a USB microphone inspired by the well-known audio company’s legendary SM7B—a professional microphone used for decades by vocalists and countless radio shows. But while still aimed at a more experienced user, the MV7 requires far less time to learn its ins and outs for the best possible experience.

And what an experience it is. This dynamic-capsule mic sounds fantastic in the lower range (think booming radio voice), with smooth, clearly defined reproduction of tones in the midrange and high range, too. To get the best results, you’ll need to tweak the EQ settings using Shure’s easy-to-use MOTIV software, but you largely get similar performance to the unparalleled SM7B’s.

Furthering the MV7’s professional vibe is its solid build quality, though its heavier weight and lack of included stand means you’ll need a strong boom arm to use it effectively. The MV7 is also compatible with XLR connections, so if you upgrade to a more high-end audio system in the future, you can do so without having to buy another mic.

The MV7 isn’t for everyone, however. Its dynamic capsule is better suited for a loud voice, and it also has a highly directional hyper cardioid polar pattern, which limits

RATING

PRICE $249 from go.pcworld.com/smv7 PROS • Rich, bright radio sound.

• USB/XLR connections.

• Easy-to-use software.

CONS • Touch controls.

• Micro-USB connection.

• Steep price.

how you can use it. (Its position relative to your mouth strongly affects performance.)

This mic’s signal also caps out at 24-bit/48kHz. Most disappointing is the touch panel interface on the device for mic gain control, mute button, and monitor levels, which can be awkward to use during streams. But if you’ve got the patience and the right kind of voice, it’ll make you sound like liquid gold.

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MOST AFFORDABLE PICK RAZER SEIREN ELITE Razer’s top offering boasts specs that put it on par with the best mics in this round-up. Like Shure’s MV7, the Razer Seiren Elite (go. pcworld.com/res) sports a dynamic capsule that works well with many vocal types, emphasizes low-end tones, and requires close proximity for smooth output. (That last aspect is a positive when in a noisy environment, as it keeps background noises from being picked up.) And like Elgato’s Wave:3, the Seiren Elite has easy-to-use physical controls, with one knob controlling mic gain, another controlling headphone volume, and a mute switch. It even features an LED ring around the base of the mesh grill that lights up to indicate when the mic’s built-in compressor kicks in to even out high spikes in volume.

While this compact mic generally takes a radio-like approach to mic design and sound signature, its $200 price tag drags down its appeal compared to our top pick, the $160 Wave:3. That’s particularly the case with its analog-to-digital converter limited to a 16-bit/48 kHz signal—the baseline of usable signal by today’s standards. Other mics with

GREAT FOR OTHER USES BLUE YETI X Like Shure, Blue is a well-respected name in professional audio. But unlike Shure, Blue also 86 PCWorld JULY 2021

RATING

PRICE $195 from go.pcworld.com/rse PROS • Low-end heavy, radio-like sound.

• Simple controls.

• Light-up compression warning.

CONS • No software tuning.

• Micro-USB connection.

higher bit rates will have a longer life as future standards (and audience expectations) rise.

You won’t be able to tune its output further, either, as Razer’s Synapse app doesn’t support that—a real bummer, since Seiren Elite lacks the clarity and sharpness of other mics in the middle to higher frequencies necessary for that classic radio sound.

has a history of producing great USB-based microphones for many use cases—and the company’s Yeti X (go.pcworld.com/byx) comes closer to the Wave:3 in terms of audio

performance than the other mics on this list.

Unlike the rest, though, the Yeti X doesn’t focus specifically on streamers. The company’s top microphone features multiple polar patterns (cardioid, omnidirectional, bidirectional, and stereo), which you can easily toggle through using the physical dial on the back. The condenser capsules in the Yeti X pick up voices easily and capture all vocal ranges well, with an output at 24-bit/48kHz that has a neutral, more generic sound and works well for a variety of scenarios. That’s both a plus and a minus for this mic—with no features or distinct identity in its sound, it lacks a personality worth lavish praise. While you can tweak the audio profile in Blue’s Voice software quite a bit, the program can be

AFFORDABLE ALTERNATIVE TO THE BLUE YETI X BLUE YETI Similar to its newer, higher-end sibling, Blue’s original Yeti (go.pcworld.com/by) model is a solid, all-purpose USB

RATING

PRICE $170 from go.pcworld.com/byx PROS • Simple and clean sound profile.

• Sturdy build for mic and included stand.

• Feature-rich software.

CONS • Sound lacks character.

• Micro-USB connection.

buggy, making such adjustments unreliable.

Build quality is solid on this mic, which also comes with a heavy and sturdy included base.

The main drawback of the Yeti X’s design is its imposing size—it takes up a lot of space in your field of view.

At $170, the Yeti X is the best Blue has to offer, but unless you’ll use your microphone for other purposes (in-person interviews, multisinger recordings, and so on), you’ll be better off with a streaming-focused mic like the Wave:3

microphone that offers good sensitivity to a variety of voice types and clear, neutralsounding output. It also has excellent physical controls on the mic, with separate dials for headphone volume, polar pattern (cardioid, omnidirectional, bidirectional, and JULY 2021 PCWorld 87

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stereo), and gain level, as well as a mute button.

As you’d expect, this signal produced by this baseline Yeti is stepped down (16-bit/48kHz versus the X model’s 24-bit/48kHz), but audio reproduction still sounds good. Its primary downside is just how sensitive its condenser capsule is—even in cardioid mode, the mic picks up background noises easily, including the sound of pressing the mute button. The Yeti also still sports the mini-USB connection that it launched with back in 2009, though arguably mini-USB is a sturdier port type than micro-USB. The included base is sturdy and heavy, though this mic benefits from being put on a boom arm. (Remember, it picks up background noise easily, so it’ll capture the sound of your keyboard and how it rattles

OTHER MICROPHONES WE’VE TESTED HYPERX QUADCAST HyperX’s QuadCast (go.pcworld.com/hqc) has a distinctive look, but unfortunately its appearance is the primary thing going for it.

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RATING

PRICE $108 from go.pcworld.com/by PROS • Simple and clean sound profile.

• Sturdy build for mic and included stand.

• Feature-rich software.

CONS • Big and bulky.

• Buggy software.

on the desk with unfortunate clarity.) Positioning it can be a bit of a hassle, though, due to how the Yeti’s large size can block your view.

At a list price of $130, the Yeti is best for budget-minded people who will also use it for other purposes like multisinger recordings and in-person interviews.

However, if you can find it for a sale price of $85 (which the Yeti often dropped to before the pandemic), we’d consider it a solid budget mic.

While the QuadCast’s flashy red coloring, tall rounded shape, and included shock mount show well onscreen, it doesn’t produce audio that sounds good. HyperX uses an electret condenser capsule, which is cheap and small—the opposite of what you want inside a

$140 microphone. Its signal is capped at 16-bit/48kHz, too, which doesn’t do the QuadCast any favors given how light and flimsy it is. Its output sounds hollow and tinny, with a lack of warm, full lower tones. HyperX had a great idea with the built-in shock mount and the inclusion of physical controls on the mic, but the audio performance just isn’t up to snuff, especially at this price

IMPORTANT FEATURES IN A USB MICROPHONE CAPSULE TYPE Capsules are pieces of hardware that convert sound-pressure levels traveling through the air (in this case, your voice) into a directcurrent (DC) signal, aka the audio signal.

How a capsule picks up audio signals is determined by its type. The two most common kinds you’ll encounter—and should seek out—are condenser and dynamic capsules.

Condenser capsule microphones: This variety of mic uses extra voltage (+48V aka phantom power) to charge the capsule, which makes it more sensitive. Generally, condenser mics are better for people who speak at softer volumes or have voices with more dynamic range.

Dynamic capsule microphones: Dynamic mics don’t require that extra voltage and are thus less sensitive. This sort of mic is better for people with loud voices or folks trying to better isolate audio pick-up to only

RATING

PRICE $139 from go.pcworld.com/hqc PROS • Unique, flashy design.

• Built-in shock mount.

• Easy-to-access controls.

CONS • Subpar audio quality.

• Overpriced for its audio performance.

what’s close to the microphone (that is, trying to block out background noises like a mechanical keyboard or loud PC fan). Dynamic mics tend to last longer, as too much sensitivity can harm a capsule over time.

Electret condenser capsules: This capsule type is cheap and small, and more often used in laptops and smartphones.

Unlike a true condenser mic, electret condensers aren’t actively charged—instead, they essentially come precharged, so they’re lower power and produce lower-quality audio.

DIGITAL SIGNAL QUALITY (BIT DEPTH/SAMPLE RATE) After your voice has been transformed into an electrical signal by a microphone’s capsule, it JULY 2021 PCWorld 89

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tuned, also influence what you actually hear as the end result, but because bit-rate and sample-rate numbers reveal the amount of data captured and kept for use, they can serve as a quick way to screen for anything underpowered. A low bit depth and sample rate results in a voice that sounds digital and This cutaway shot from Elgato’s Wave:3 product page shows what a capsule looks like. robotic—the signal lacks enough detail to keep all then passes on to the analog-to-digital the nuance and personality of the original converter (ADC) found in all USB mics. As you speaker—so avoid microphones that are might guess, the ADC converts the incoming stingy in this regard. analog signal (your voice) into a digital signal that your computer can use.

How accurately the ADC does so depends on its defined bit depth and sample rate. These two technical specs indicate how faithfully an audio signal replicates the original sound—in this case, the transmission of your voice through your mic to your PC. As the microphone transcodes your voice, it captures parts of the audio at specific intervals (sample rate) and a specific level of detail (bit The digitization of an analog waveform involves depth) and then reconstructs the original two measurements: bit depth, which refers to based on that data. the amount of amplitude samples available, The higher the number of both bit depth and sample rate, which refers to the amount of samples per second (measured in Hz) available. and sample rate, generally the more faithful More bit-depth samples provide more dynamic the reproduction. Other factors, such as the range, while more sample-rate samples offer more granularity between frequencies. condenser type and how the microphone is 90 PCWorld JULY 2021

Consider a 16-bit/48kHz signal a minimum (it’s roughly the level of a CD in quality), and aim for higher to prolong the use of your microphone.

As with photos and video, standards gradually climb over time, and so too do audience expectations for quality.

SENSITIVITY The sensitivity of a mic indicates how easily it picks up sound. If you have a quieter voice, seek out a more sensitive microphone for more accurate reproduction of your voice— conversely, if you have a booming voice, you’ll need a less sensitive microphone for the same effect. Condenser types (see above) influence how sensitive a mic is, as does the ability to tweak the gain level.

MIC CONTROLS Touch-based controls might be popular for some microphones, but physical controls like buttons, knobs, and dials are superior: No looking is necessary when making on-the-fly adjustments during streams—you can keep your eyes on your screen while fiddling.

Better microphones offer control over mute, gain level, and headphone volume (if you can plug in headphones directly into the mic) at minimum. We like to see crossfade (the

balance between your PC’s audio and hearing your own voice fed in from the mic) as an option, too.

SOFTWARE CONTROLS For a USB microphone, you’ll do all your audio processing—that is, tweaking the audio that comes through the mic—in a desktop PC program. Ideally, this companion software should be easy to use, easy to navigate, and allow you to tune the audio output. The best software also lets you configure the routing of other audio sources (such as the game, chat from programs like Discord, and music from Spotify). You can choose what gets pulled in and how that’s directed out.

BUILD QUALITY The build quality of a microphone affects more than just how the device holds up with use—it also has an impact on audio performance. The better the materials, the JULY 2021 PCWorld 91

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better quality for vocal performance. The capsule type, housing around it, and any shielding placed between you and the capsule (to tamp down unwanted noises) all influence the mic’s output.

TYPE OF USB CONNECTION Micro-USB is still surprisingly common among USB microphones, despite the growing adoption of USB-C and its advantages. We prefer a USB-C connection for its better durability, both for the port itself and for cables—anecdotally, we’ve had more microUSB ports and cables fail or loosen over time.

That said, micro-USB should still serve fine, especially if you don’t plan to move your microphone around (a potential source of stress on the port) or regularly plug and unplug the cable.

POLAR PATTERN A polar pattern (or pick-up pattern) indicates the areas of a mic that are sensitive to sound.

Streamers should focus on microphones with a cardioid pattern, which makes the mic more sensitive right in front of the capsule (typically the top of the mic) and less so on the sides and rear. This type of polar pattern helps physically isolate the audio source being recorded—in this case, you.

Some mics feature other polar patterns as well, making them more versatile for use.

Other common ones are omnidirectional, which makes the mic sensitive to pick up on all sides (useful for conference calls); bidirectional, which picks up from the front and rear (useful for face-to-face conversations between two people); and stereo, aka midside, which makes the mic pick up the right and left channel separately while being sensitive at the front (useful for multiple people conversing or singing while sitting side-by-side and all facing the mic).

WHAT TO LOOK FOR

This screenshot from the Blue Yeti product page illustrates which parts of the mic are active for each polar pattern supported.

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Our picks for best USB microphones work well with a wide variety of voices, but to find a mic

While tone can certainly play a part in this, the biggest influences on clarity are how sensitive the microphone is to the audio it’s receiving and how strong the amplification process is in translating that to a digital signal. A quiet voice will need both a more sensitive microphone and stronger amplification in order to achieve desired volume levels, while a big, Stay close to the mic to get the best-sounding audio from it. booming voice will need the opposite. (In fact, if a highly that fits your voice just that much better, keep sensitive microphone is regularly subjected to these factors in mind. loud sounds, it can actually damage the capsule over time.)

TONAL REPRODUCTION The distance from you to the microphone Tonal reproduction refers to how close the has an impact on this as well, but we don’t microphone’s output matches the sound of a recommend shifting your position to make a person’s actual voice. Some microphones mic work with your voice. Generally, you want cater to lower-end vocal ranges by doing to have a microphone as close as possible to things like boosting midrange frequencies, your mouth, as that’s the position for getting while others cater to those with higher its best performance. pitches by having a less sensitive capsule. To ANALOG-TO-DIGITAL get your desired style of output, find out how CONVERTER QUALITY a microphone is tuned, plus the size of As mentioned above, when you speak into a capsule in the mic and the type of mic. These mic, that analog signal gets captured by the add up to form the microphone’s profile—and microphone’s capsule, then an analog-toonce you know it, it’s pretty easy to narrow digital converter (ADC) transcodes that to a the field of mics that are right for you. digital signal that your computer can use.

VOCAL CLARITY How good an ADC is will impact both the Vocal clarity refers to how loud and clear tone reproduction and clarity of the digital someone can be heard with a microphone. output, as well as how loud it is. Output from JULY 2021 PCWorld 93

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low-quality ADCs sound less natural and can even have more digital artifacts, resulting in a tinny sound with less range. An ADC can also affect the signal transmitted to your PC by not providing enough power to the output of the audio, resulting in less clarity and a quieter volume to work with.

Think of an ADC like the middle person in a three-person game of Telephone—it has the ability to dramatically convolute or distort what the original person passed on.

Generally, the better the converter, the more voices of all types benefit from accurate reproduction, but some folks with specific voice concerns (like quiet volume or a thinner sound) might need to pay more attention to specs like bit depth/sample rate, which influence how strong a signal the ADC sends to your PC. Once you’ve narrowed down your potential microphone picks, find videos of them in use to get a better sense of how their output sounds. As a starting point, we’ve used all of these microphones in this roundup in our live videos on YouTube (youtube.com/ pcworld) and Twitch (twitch.tv/ pcworldus).

headsets that cost about the same may still seem more appealing, since you can use a headset for both listening and talking.

So why choose a USB microphone instead of a headset? While headsets don’t sound bad on a stream, a headset microphone is just too small to really compete with a USB mic. Generally, the larger the capsule, the more sensitive a microphone can be to sound pressure changes, thus producing more accurate results.

That’s the reason headset microphones struggle to produce a well-rounded sound, especially in the low end. Short of attaching a huge capsule to a boom arm on a headset, a standalone USB mic will be better suited for professional-sounding streams. And the more you sound like you could be in the same room as your viewers, the more likely they’ll connect with you and stick around.

USB MICROPHONE VS. A HEADSET While USB microphones are cheaper than a full professional setup, they’re pricier than a good headset. Even 94 PCWorld JULY 2021

Good headsets sound decent on a stream, but a dedicated USB microphone provides the clarity and warmth that really draws in your listeners.

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More than 5 million American kids vape.

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FEATURE

MEET AMD’S FID SUPER RESOLUT

RADEON’S DLSS RIVAL EVEN M YES, YOU READ THAT RIGHT. BY BRAD CHACOS 96 PCWorld JULY 2021

DELITYFX TION

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MEET AMD’S FIDELIT YFX SUPER RESOLUTION

ay hello to Radeon’s long-awaited answer to Nvidia’s DLSS technology. AMD finally took the wraps off its FidelityFX Super Resolution feature (go.pcworld.com/ffxs) during its Computex 2021 keynote. The company promised up to twice your GPU’s native performance when you need extra gaming firepower (like when you activate ray tracing, for example) and the ability to make most recent graphics cards (go.pcworld. com/mrgc) even faster in supported games— even if you’re running a GeForce GPU. And AMD just released it to the public.

The feature’s open nature makes it a huge deal to all PC gamers—not just Radeon owners—during a time when nobody can buy

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graphics cards at sane prices (go.pcworld. com/gcsp). Free extra performance when you’re struggling to make do with an older GPU will certainly prove welcome indeed. It also drives home AMD’s ongoing commitment to more open standards that benefit the wider PC community, following in the footsteps of other AMD initiatives like FreeSync monitors and GPU Open.

In a briefing with PCWorld prior to the keynote, Radeon chief Scott Herkelman drove that point home by showing FidelityFX Super Resolution boosting the performance of Nvidia’s older GTX 1060 by a whopping 41 percent in Godfall, and that wasn’t even with FSR’s fastest form active. In my decade-plus of covering PC technology, I can’t recall a single

AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution being used to speed up Nvidia’s older GTX 1060 in Godfall.

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other time that a major vendor made an effort to show a new feature making its competitor’s hardware faster.

By contrast, Nvidia’s excellent Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) technology works only The cornerstones of AMD’s approach to FSR. on newer GeForce RTX–branded graphics cards that contain proprietary AI tensor cores. tpr) coming to Epic’s Unreal Engine 5 also Even Nvidia’s own GTX GPUs can’t partake. revolves around temporal upsampling (hence FidelityFX Super Resolution, on the other the name). FidelityFX Super Resolution utilizes hand, works on all AMD graphics cards from spatial upsampling instead. Herkelman didn’t the Radeon RX 500 series on up, as well as go into specific technical details about how Nvidia’s GTX 10–series GPUs and newer, FSR works under the hood, but typically, spatial Herkelman told PCWorld. Hallelujah. And a upsampling has a GPU create a frame at a few days after the keynote, AMD said that it is lower resolution, then renders it onscreen at a bringing FSR to the popular Radeon RX 470 higher resolution, using interpolation and 480 graphics cards as well, though the techniques to fill in the blank pixels. company didn’t mention any other 400-series DLSS also starts with a lower-resolution GPUs (go.pcworld.com/400s). image that’s upsampled to fit your screen, but FSR differs from DLSS in other tangible it uses AI comparing against a super-highways as well. Nvidia’s DLSS relies on machine resolution “ground truth” image along with learning and temporal upsampling to drive its temporal feedback to fill in the blanks. The performance-boosting feature. The new first generation of the technology looked a bit Temporal Super Resolution (go.pcworld.com/ blurry and smeared onscreen. The much more popular DLSS 2.0 works like black VIDEO: AMD’S FIDELITYFX magic, especially when you use it with SUPER RESOLUTION, settings enabled that render at a higher base ANNOUNCED resolution, so the technology doesn’t need to Watch now at youtu.be/Drrkm615WOs “fill in the blanks” as much.

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upsampling technology of choice over DLSS, but don’t expect to be able to flip it on in every game right away.

Herkelman said that over 10 game studios and engines will support FSR at some point in 2021 (without noting specifics), but he added that there will be a “tremendous amount more in 2022.”

FidelityFX Super Resolution offers four quality levels with varying levels of performance and visual quality.

We’ll have to see how the technology handles in the AMD’s Fidelity FX will also offer multiple real world now that it’s out, but if FidelityFX quality levels, Herkelman told PCWorld—four, Super Resolution proves successful or even to be exact: Ultra Quality, Quality, Balanced, and just good enough, it could truly bolster Performance. FSR settings toward the left of that Radeon ray-tracing performance—AMD’s list favor fidelity more, while Performance may major weak spot (go.pcworld.com/mws) sacrifice some eye candy for more raw speed. against Nvidia’s RTX 30–series GPUs. And Each quality level deploys spatial upsampling in FSR could make everybody’s graphics cards different ways to achieve its results. Herkelman faster in the games that support it. Exciting said that Ultra Quality FSR is “very similar” and times lie ahead. “pretty close” to native rendering while still providing a very nice performance bump, as you can see in the slide above. On the other end of the spectrum, Herkelman said that Performance mode can offer up to twice the native performance at 4K resolution.

AMD hopes that the more-open FidelityFX Super It’s finally here.

Resolution will become the 100 PCWorld JULY 2021

“My wife knew that I was mixing things up at work.”

— Mario, living with Alzheimer’s

When something feels different, it could be Alzheimer’s.

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BUZZED DRIVING IS DRUNK DRIVING

FEATURE

6 COMMANDPROMPT COMMANDS YOU SHOULD STILL BE USING OLD-SCHOOL DOESN’T MEAN OBSOLETE. BY ALAINA YEE

IMAGE: JAKE WALKER/UNSPLASH

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6 COMMAND PROMPTS YOU SHOULD BE USING

n the beginning, all we had was the command line. Then as Windows matured, the need to access that throwback interface waned.

That doesn’t mean the Command Prompt is completely useless. In fact, recent versions of Windows (go.pcworld.com/rvw) have introduced new commands. And while Windows 10’s graphical interface is generally straightforward to use, several features are still faster to execute through that last tie to MS-DOS. The same goes for accessing a few pieces of useful information, too.

We’ve listed our top Command Prompt commands below, but don’t take this list as the complete lineup of useful commands. If

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you like to kick it old-school, there are still plenty worth your time. For most people, though, these six will add efficiency to your regular routine without requiring excessive time in a command line interface.

To open the Command Prompt, tap the Windows key, then enter cmd.

1. ECHO On its own, the echo command (go.pcworld. com/ech) has little relevance for the overwhelming majority of Windows users.

(The PCWorld staff included.) But we like using one specific application of it: echo off | clip. Entering this string into the Command Prompt clears the last item on your

Clipboard—helpful when you’ve copied sensitive information and are done with it.

(This command won’t clear your full Clipboard history though, so you’ll have to use Windows 10’s Clipboard settings to do that. You can also turn off history while you’re in that menu.)

An alternative way to use this command is to open Windows 10’s Run command window (Win + R) and enter cmd /c “echo off | clip”. If you never use Run for anything else, it’ll remember this command whenever you next call it up, making it slightly faster than opening a fresh Command Prompt window each time.

2. POWERCFG The powercfg command can be of use to both desktop PC and laptop owners, especially if you need to toggle the hibernation feature (powercfg / hibernate) or begin an investigation into what’s disturbing your computer from sleep (powercfg /lastwake).

But laptops benefit the most from the gem among powercfg’s operations: the battery report (powercfg /batteryreport). If you’ve felt like your battery life has taken a sudden dip, this information will share the battery level at certain points in time, along with the time it recently took to drain since last plugged in. By default, the report will save to your Windows 10 user folder under the name “battery-report.html.”

3. IPCONFIG On its own, ipconfig gives a brief readout of the active networking hardware’s local IP address—useful for identifying your PC when looking separately at your router’s list of connected devices.

But the real beauty of ipconfig is when Windows 10’s network troubleshooting isn’t fixing your connection woes and you need to manually release (ipconfig / release) and renew (ipconfig /renew) your IP address. You can also see full detailed information of all of your networking hardware, including the MAC address for when you need to add it to a whitelist, whether or not it’s connected (ipconfig /all).

4. TRACERT Can’t connect to a website and want to figure out whether it’s you or the site? (As much as we wish it knew everything, downdetector. com doesn’t always catch every outage.) Use tracert to both test the connection and see where in the journey the trouble is, if any exists (tracert [website address or ip address]).

The tracert command functions similarly to ping in that it sends out data packets to the site and waits for a response, but it also reports the details of the journey that the data takes. If a communication attempt times out, you’ll see where in the trip it happens, helping you to troubleshoot. For JULY 2021 PCWorld 105

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Downdetector.com doesn’t catch every outage.

example, if you can’t even reach the first hop—your router—then you’ll want to start by looking at your connection to your home network.

Ping is better for answering the question “Is there a connection and how fast is it?” while tracert answers both that and “Where does the connection fail?” It’s more rare that we want only the information that ping reveals, hence tracert’s place of importance on this list.

5. SFC When parts of the Windows interface start acting up—say, disappearing taskbar icons—it may be time to lean on the System File Checker. Running sfc /scannow will check for corrupted files on your system and attempt to repair any files with problems.

To open a Command prompt as an administrator, hit the Windows key or click 106 PCWorld JULY 2021

on Start button, then type cmd. Right-click on the result for the Command Prompt, then choose “Run as administrator.” As a slightly faster alternative, you can also open a PowerShell window as an administrator (Win+X or right-clicking on the Start button). It’ll work the same as the Command Prompt.

6. CHKDSK You may already be familiar with chkdsk.

After an unexpected shutdown, Windows will sometimes halt a reboot to run chkdsk in order to check for bad sectors and repair errors on the disk. If you suspect that one of your drives may have issues, you can initiate this same scan manually as well.

Open a Command Prompt as an administrator, then enter chkdsk to begin a read-only scan. You can also add a drive letter to specify which storage disk to check (for instance, chkdsk D:) and/or a switch to fix errors on disk (such as chkdsk /f), locate bad sectors and recover readable information (say, chkdsk /r), run an online scan on an NTFS volume (for instance, chkdsk D: / scan), and more. (Use chkdsk /? to get the full list of available switches.)

#Dadication

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Here’s How

HOW TO BUILD, MAINTAIN, AND FIX YOUR TECH GEAR

Play games on a Chromebook If you include Android games, a Chromebook arguably can play more games than a PC.

BY MARK HACHMAN

e’ve become used to thinking of Chromebooks as simple productivity machines: a web interface for classwork, online productivity apps, and

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IMAGE: BROOKE CAGLE / UNSPLASH

not much else. But there are many ways to game on a Chromebook, too.

You have three options to play games on most modern Chromebooks: as a web app, in an Android app, or remotely via one of the JULY 2021 PCWorld 109

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prior two ways. Gaming on a Chromebook can mean playing the same games you’d play on a PC, but given all the options you could argue that the diversity of games is richer on a Chromebook than on a PC. As we’ll explain, though, many of the gaming opportunities a Chromebook offers depend on accessing a game on a remote server. The quality of such gaming experiences will depend on the quality of your Internet connection and, to some extent, on what processor the Chromebook contains. Only Android apps, many of which assume the presence of a slower Arm chip, will run natively (and probably very smoothly) on the Chromebook itself.

Below, we’ve included a guide to get you up and running. Feel free to refer to our guide

and recommendations for picking a Chromebook (go.pcworld.com/hro), as well as the differences between a Chromebook and a traditional Windows laptop (go. pcworld.com/twl). For gaming, you’ll probably prefer a Chromebook with a touchscreen. A 360-degree convertible that folds into a tablet mode is quite handy for Android games. We’ve recommended a few good models for gaming above.

HOW TO PLAY WEB GAMES ON A CHROMEBOOK

As you might expect, playing a game inside a web browser on a Chromebook is a lot like playing it on a PC’s web browser—load up the site and you’re ready to go. In 2021 there’s one key difference from years past: Chrome 88, released in January 2021, eliminated support for Adobe Flash (go.pcworld.com/ c88), the foundation for an entire generation’s worth of web games.

However, the well-publicized demise of Flash allowed popular Flash entertainment Fallen London, a conversational browser-based game, is a place to start when considering Chromebook games. It just gets better from here. repositories like 110 PCWorld JULY 2021

from Happy Homes next to a few genuinely interesting games like Pink (go.pcworld. com/pink) or Tiny Fragments (go.pcworld. com/tfr).

Browserbased gaming Flash gaming may be a carryover from a bygone era, but it still houses a few interesting, unique titles. starts to open up a bit more when Newgrounds.com time to convert their you visit the Chrome Web Store, which allows games to HTML5 or provide transitional you to download Chrome game extensions. plug-ins. If you visit a site like Newgrounds, Click with caution here, as Google seems to you’ll be able to play the site’s simple Flash have ditched its dedicated gaming section for games and movies with no trouble at all. A some reason. Chances are that you’ll have to competing site, Kongregate.com, asks you to search out older games like Cut the Rope (go. install an SWF plugin (go.pcworld.com/swf). pcworld.com/ctro) or Tank Riders (go.

Just be warned: Flash games on sites like Newgrounds can be notoriously weird.

Creative coders used to put their own spins on Nintendo games and other licensed IP, which lawyers have now quashed, leaving games like Wife FreeCiv Web isn’t the prettiest of games, but it runs in the Chromebook’s Chrome browser—entirely for free.

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pcworld.com/tri) by name.

A smaller number of “native” browserbased games will take advantage of your Chromebook’s CPU and graphics capabilities. A good example of this is Web Quake (go. pcworld.com/wq), The Asphalt series provides one of the more graphically intensive essentially the demo experiences of any Android app running locally on a phone or Chromebook.

It also runs in landscape mode. of the old iD game Quake, or an openChromeOS-powered Chromebooks to run source version of the PC classic Civilization, Android apps. Virtually every Chromebook known as FreeCiv Web (go.pcworld.com/ shipping since 2019 includes this capability. fcw).

For the purposes of gaming, your The “traditional” browser-based games Chromebook is simply a larger Android are certainly not exclusive to Chromebooks. phone. In fact, your Chromebook will include Games like Fallen London (go.pcworld.com/ the Google Play Store app down in the flon) and Kingdom of Loathing (go.pcworld.

Chrome OS shelf, otherwise known as the com/kol) are more traditional point-and-click taskbar. Select the app you want to install, adventures. We’d recommend PC Gamer’s and Google will download it and install it on collection of browser games (go.pcworld. your Chromebook. com/cbg) for additional options. They should Because many Android apps depend all be playable on a Chromebook. upon touch, you’ll want to own a HOW TO PLAY ANDROID Chromebook equipped with a touchscreen.

GAMES ON A You’ll also quickly realize that you usually hold CHROMEBOOK your phone vertically, while a Chromebook’s In 2016, Google launched Chrome OS 53 screen is oriented horizontally in landscape (go.pcworld.com/53), the version of the mode. Many Android games will carve out a Chromebook operating system that allowed narrow vertical strip on a horizontal screen. A 112 PCWorld JULY 2021

Chromebook that you can fold back into a tablet configuration and then reorient into a vertical portrait mode will allow you to take full advantage of your “tablet’s” screen.

A Chromebook also allows you to mix and match input methods. In some games a touchscreen is best, though a touchpad or a mouse may serve just as well. Games like Asphalt 8 smartly support both keyboard input as well as Chromebooks that include gyroscopes for tilt steering.

As far as gaming recommendations go, the sky’s the limit. We selected the best action games for Android (go.pcworld.com/gfa) a few years ago, and followed that up with the best Android games of the year (go.pcworld. com/gty), period. Many PC games, such as Grand Theft Auto III: San Andreas (go. pcworld.com/snd), have made the transition Many Android games formatted for traditional smartphones will align themselves vertically on a Chromebook.

from the PC and console onto native Android apps. Statista clams (go.pcworld.com/tist) there are over 480,000 Android games available as of the first quarter of 2021, so you’ll have plenty to choose from.

We can’t say for sure how well each game will run on your Chromebook, but the affordable price usually justifies trying them out. Google’s refund policy also usually allows you up to 48 hours to decide whether you want to keep the game or get your money back.

HOW TO PLAY PC GAMES REMOTELY ON A CHROMEBOOK Once you start combining the power of a web or Android app with a Chromebook, your gaming horizons can expand further. It’s at this point, however, that gaming moves off the Chromebook and into the cloud.

Remote or cloud gaming uses a PC or a console situated remotely, and streams the resulting content down to your Chromebook.

You sign up for a service like Google Stadia, and typically download a small web app or Android utility. You can typically connect an Xbox or other third-party controller to the Chromebook, or you can simply use a keyboard and mouse.

During gameplay, the Chromebook and app will take your button or key inputs, send them up via the Internet to the cloud PC, and then show you the results of your actions. It JULY 2021 PCWorld 113

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was predicated upon having a hardwired ethernet connection, which improved performance dramatically. Most Chromebooks don’t have ethernet connections.

Stadia is priced relatively Doom Eternal is a faster-paced game, but it’s still part of the Google Stadia lineup. affordably: $9.99 a month (go. happens so quickly that you’re more or less pcworld.com/stadi), and there are a number “playing” the game right on your of top-tier games (go.pcworld.com/tg).

Chromebook.

In 2021 you have access to a number of There will always be a bit of input lag, different cloud services. In 2020, I used which will make fast, twitchy games less Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass app (go. responsive. You’ll see better results with pcworld.com/xb)—part of a $14.99 per metropolitan broadband connections, for month Game Pass Ultimate subscription (go. example, than with rural DSL. That matters pcworld.com/pus)—to play Xbox cloud less in slower-paced adventure and games on a Chromebook. That story has a exploration games, however, which is why a detailed evaluation of how to set it up, plus game like Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey was a what worked and what didn’t. Unfortunately, launch title for the Google Stadia service.

Sony’s PlayStation Now service (go.pcworld.

Google Stadia began shipping by default com/psns) demands a Windows 10 PC, not a with new Chromebooks (go.pcworld.com/ Chromebook. Google’s rival in the cloud, nch) in February 2021, allowing you to try out Amazon, also plans a service called Amazon cloud gaming on Google’s own service.

Luna (go.pcworld.com/aml) that will But—and this is a big but—our original review eventually run on Android devices—it’s stuck of the Stadia service (go.pcworld.com/sse) in early access for now, however.

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We haven’t even reviewed all the cloud gaming services available. One intriguing option is Shadow (go.pcworld.com/shd), which can stream to a PC or a Chromebook’s Android app. You can subscribe to Shadow (go.pcworld.com/sssh) for $12 per month.

Pony up $25, and Shadow promises that your game can run on the equivalent of an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 in the cloud. Yes—raytraced graphics on a Chromebook!

If you own a PC, there’s another option: Use your PC as the local “cloud” and stream games from it. It’s a viable option if the “gaming” PC is in another room in the house, and a child wants to spend some after-hours time in the privacy of their room. That used to be the domain of Nvidia’s GeForce-powered

GameStream technology and the so-so Shield TV (go.pcworld.com/stvv), but an opensource project called Moonlight (go.pcworld. com/mon) can route the GameStream protocol to Android-powered devices such as Chromebooks, too. (Valve unfortunately killed its similar Steam Link service [go. pcworld.com/sls].)

The abundance of available options provides two great benefits for users.

Competition should keep prices in check, and you’ll have a wealth of services and games from which to choose. Part of the hurdle is simply accepting that you can use inexpensive, portable little Chromebooks as gaming machines—you’ll just need to discover what works for you.

This is Microsoft’s own Forza Horizon 4 running on a Chromebook. In this still image, you can see how Microsoft paints some of the periphery of the game in lower resolution. At full speed, though, it’s not really noticeable.

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HERE’S HOW

Tune Windows 10 for laserfocused productivity These tips make working from home less distracting—and a lot easier. BY BRAD CHACOS

ind yourself suddenly needing to be more productive in the midst of chaos? Good news! Windows 10 comes loaded with all sorts of tools designed to help you Get Things Done, along with deeper tweaks to optimize the operating system for productivity. Each new major upgrade—like the Windows 10 May 2021 Update (go.pcworld.com/2021), the most recent one—adds more. Now for the bad

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news: All those excellent productivity-boosting Windows tools and tweaks aren’t immediately obvious, with many of the most useful settings buried deep inside a maze of options menus.

We can help. Taking five or ten minutes to tinker with Windows 10 can supercharge your setup, regardless of whether you’re trying to keep working while stuck at home temporarily or setting up something more permanent. Let’s dig in.

IMAGE: MAJID RANGRAZ (CC0)

Windows 10’s notifications options

GET RID OF INTERRUPTIONS

item to Off. Boom.

For a more nuanced approach, you can click the tiny “Focus assist settings” link underneath that option, which allows you to set up rules for when and how you’ll receive OS notifications.

If you want to receive some notifications—say, Mail and Calendar events—but not others, head back to the main Notifications & actions screen. At the bottom, you’ll see a big list of all the apps that can potentially send you notifications. Slide the ones that aren’t critical to Off. I like to disable the Razer Synapse and Discord system notifications, for example, because even though I’m a gamer they’re prone to interrupt

If you want to stay focused on a task, reducing your interruptions is key. That can be as simple as checking your email and social media only at designated times, but Windows 10 can still pop up notifications that can kick you out of a productive headspace, be it from apps or the OS itself.

Let’s eradicate those first.

Open the Start menu, click the Settings cog icon, and head to System > Notifications & actions.

You have a few different options here. To nuke all notifications from orbit, eradicating them completely, move the “Get notifications from Windows 10’s focus assist options. apps and other senders”

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me during work hours. I also avoid Mail notifications, preferring to check my inbox on my own schedule.

Notifications aren’t even the worst offender when it comes to interruptions.

Nothing is worse than Windows 10’s forced restarts of your PC to install updates.

Fortunately, Microsoft has worked in lots of tools over the years that make that scenario much less likely—if you know they exist.

Head to Start > Settings> Update & Security > Windows Update to tinker with your options. In particular, check on your Change Active Hours settings. These let you tell Windows when you’re working, and it won’t automatically reset your PC during that time. The ability to pause all updates for a week is handy, too; if you dig into the Advanced options menu, you can push them

Windows Update options.

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out for just over a month.

ORGANIZE YOUR WORKFLOW Instilling some order into your workflow can make a big difference. Sure, Alt-Tab-bing through all your open programs can work, but taking the time to set up some sort of organization can help keep things running as smoothly as possible. Windows 10 includes several tools that can make multitasking even more productive.

First off: Multimonitor setups rock for productivity, and I highly recommend using more than one monitor if possible. Our guides on how to set up two monitors (go.pcworld. com/goh) and Windows 10’s individual display scaling (go.pcworld.com/i) can help you out in that case. In a pinch, you can even use a TV

the left or right of the screen, until your cursor touches the edge of the display.

You’ll see a transparent outline flow out from your cursor to fill half the screen. Let go, and the chosen program will expand, taking up that space. Any When you Snap a window to one half of the screen, Windows pulls back all your other open windows and lets you choose one to fill the other side. other programs open on that monitor will as a computer monitor (go.pcworld.com/ appear on the other half of the screen, and if acm), though they work better as auxiliary you select one, it’ll expand to fill that space. displays. That said, not everyone wants (or Boom! Now you’ve got two programs on the can afford) more than one display, and the screen at the same time, split right down the Windows 10 tools below help even if you’re middle. stuck on a single screen.

If you’ve got a large monitor, or a Don’t underestimate the power of Windows Snap, a native way to easily divvy up your monitor into multiple segments devoted to separate apps. Grab an open window by its title bar—the horizontal bar at the top that says its name—and Four windows Snapped into four quadrants of the screen can put a lot of info at drag it all the way to your fingertips simultaneously.

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Virtual desktops let you separate virtual versions of your desktop, each running its own instances of software, that you can hop between. I work from home, so I sometimes run separate virtual desktops devoted to work time and play time, for instance— You can see your various virtual desktops at the top of Windows 10’s Task View, above your activity Timeline.

Office, Slack, and a browser dedicated pixel-dense 1440p or 4K display, you can use to work tasks in one, and fun apps like Steam, Snap to divide your screen even further.

Discord, and a browser with Reddit or Twitter Dragging open windows to a corner of your open in another. When it’s break time (or beer display will Snap them into that quarter of the o’ clock), I can just hop over to the play time screen, though using this method won’t virtual desktop and pick up where I left off. trigger a prompt asking you what to fill the Alternatively, you could set up multiple rest of the screen with. You’ll need to virtual desktops, each dedicated to its own manually Snap the windows you want to each complicated work task, with all the relevant corner. programs, browser tabs, and documents or It’s worth doing, though. Having, say, a spreadsheets open to that particular project. document, a spreadsheet, your work’s chat Your only limit is your imagination! software, and Outlook open and visible all at To start using virtual desktops, click the the same time can help you get a lot of stuff Task View icon in Windows 10’s taskbar to done faster, especially if you’re transferring summon your Timeline. Select the tiny +New data from one app to another. desktop text at the top left of the screen.

Another potent tool for organization is the Once you’re set up, use the same Task criminally underutilized Virtual Desktops View interface to swap among open virtual feature, which debuted in Windows 10. desktops in the bar that appears at the top of 120 PCWorld JULY 2021

In Windows 10, the Task View icon (a small stack of rectangles with a slider on the right side) can be found to the right of the search bar and the Cortana icon.

the screen.

You can also use these keyboard shortcuts to control your virtual desktops: Windows+Ctrl+D: Create and open a new virtual desktop.

Windows+Ctrl+F4: Close the current

virtual desktop.

Windows+Ctrl+Left or Right: Switch to the virtual desktop on the left or right.

Windows+Tab: Open Task View/Virtual desktop interface.

Finally, while this guide is dedicated to Windows tips, if you tend to juggle multiple programs simultaneously for complicated tasks, consider paying up for Stardock’s excellent Groupy software.

Groupy essentially lets you organize several programs into a single window, letting you hop between them like so many browser tabs. It’s great (go.pcworld.com/ Stardock’s Groupy lets you combine several programs into one window, igr), and it only costs like browser tabs, and jump between them. If you look at the title bar at $10 direct from Stardock the top of the screen, you’ll see that this window includes File Explorer, Chrome, Spotify, and Slack. (go.pcworld.com/100).

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Microsoft was working on a native tabbed interface for Windows 10, dubbed Sets, but alas, it’s dead (go.pcworld.com/sts). Groupy earns our very highest recommendation.

ODDS AND ENDS Getting rid of distractions and organizing your workflow will go a long way toward making you more productive, but a handful of other Windows 10 tweaks can make your life easier, too.

Night light restricts blue light emanating from your display by changing its hue, similar to the popular f.lux app (go.pcworld.com/ lux). “Studies have shown that blue light at night suppresses melatonin production more than other colors and shifts the body’s circadian timing, thereby disrupting the sleep-wake cycle,” we said in our Night Light primer (go.pcworld.com/nlp). Head to Start

Night light’s options are basic, but it’s a handy tool.

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> Settings > System > Display and activate the Night Light slider to turn it on, and then click the “Night light settings” link to adjust how it works.

Windows Timeline shows you a history of your recent activity in Microsoft apps, including individual Office files and Edge browser tabs, making it easy to jump back into something you were working on before.

(If you’re a Chrome user, grab the official Web Activities browser extension by Microsoft [go. pcworld.com/wab] to enable the same functionality.) You summon Timeline by opening the Task View icon on the Windows 10 toolbar, or by pressing Windows+Tab. Your recent activity appears underneath the virtual desktop view.

Cloud clipboard further leverages the connectivity of your Microsoft Account by letting you copy text on one PC, and then paste it on another. It’s wonderful. Head to Settings > System > Clipboard to turn it on and configure its behavior.

If you have external storage connected to your PC, File History is a godsend, taking snapshots of your files as you go and storing the different versions, so you can recover older saves if need be. “Say, for example, you really liked a paragraph from the first draft of an essay, but you deleted it long ago and are now battling regret,” we explained in our primer. “You can dip into File History, retrieve the right version of your document, and copy the paragraph.” Our

Windows 10’s Timeline shows you what you’ve worked on recently, letting you hop back in where you left off with a single click.

File History guide (go.pcworld.com/fhg) can set you up if it sounds interesting, while our roundup of the best external drives (go. pcworld.com/bed) can point you toward the best hardware for the task. (You don’t need a fast external SSD for File History; a slower—and thus more affordable—hard drive performs the job just fine.)

That about does it. If you want to finish your day sooner, be sure to check out 10 time-saving Windows tricks that help you get stuff done faster (go.pcworld.com/gsd).

Those simple tips aren’t glamorous, and most aren’t even new, to be honest, but when you use them together, they can seriously streamline your workflow.

File History makes it easy to manage which folders you’re backing up.

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Enable HDR in Windows 10 You need to manually turn HDR on before Windows 10 will use it. BY MATT SMITH DR, or High Dynamic Range, delivers a dramatic upgrade in brightness, color, and contrast compared to SDR, or Standard Dynamic Range. HDR content looks more brilliant, and more detailed, than SDR. You’ll notice an unmistakable difference when viewing a movie, TV show, or gaming that’s mastered for HDR. Windows 10 offers HDR support, but you must enable it in Windows’ settings to get the

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most out of an HDR-compatible display.

Here’s how to turn it on.

HOW TO ENABLE HDR IN WINDOWS 10 Windows 10 supports HDR by default and has for several years. Microsoft plans to release an Auto HDR update (go.pcworld.com/mp) that, once available, will automatically detect an HDR display and adjust Windows accordingly.

For now, however, you must turn it on manually.

IMAGE: MAJID RANGRAZ (CC0)

Microsoft plans to release an Auto HDR update that will automatically detect an HDR display and adjust Windows accordingly.

• Open the Windows 10 Start Menu.

WHY CAN’T I SEE THE WINDOWS HDR TOGGLE? • Select Settings, which is represented Windows HDR does not automatically turn by a gear icon. on, but it does automatically detect whether • The Settings window will open. Select the display you’re using supports HDR. System.

• You’ll now see Display settings. Scroll down until you see the Windows HD Color section.

• Flip the Use HDR toggle to On. Turning the Use HDR toggle to On will force your monitor to turn off and back on, or flicker, as it changes to its own HDR mode. This should only take The HDR toggle you’re looking for in Windows 10’s system settings. a few seconds.

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The HDR toggle won’t appear if Windows fails to detect an HDR-compatible display. Refer to the monitor’s specifications to see if HDR is supported. You need specific hardware to use HDR, including an HDR-compatible display.

Most HDR displays aggressively market this fact, so you should be able to determine compatibility at the manufacturer’s website.

Your graphics solution also must support HDR. Nvidia added HDR with the GeForce GTX 900 series. AMD embraced HDR with the Radeon R9 300 series. And Intel threw HDR in with the Intel UHD Integrated Graphics found on seventh-generation Intel Core processors. Any GPUs released afterward (go.pcworld.com/gpu) also support HDR monitors.

If your hardware is compatible but you don’t see the HDR toggle, try these solutions.

• If you’re on a laptop, connect the machine to power.

• Turn the monitor off and back on.

• Disconnect and reconnect the monitor’s video cable to your PC. • Swap out the HDMI or DisplayPort cable. If you’re using an adapter to switch from one to the other, try a different adapter, or find a way to connect without an adapter.

• Check that Windows 10, and your PC’s video drivers, are up to date. Install any updates that are available.

• Manually toggle your monitor to its HDR mode using its on-screen menu. The specifics of how to do this vary from one monitor to another, so check the monitor’s manual for details.

Still can’t see the Use HDR toggle? Take a look at Microsoft’s HDR troubleshooting guide (go. pcworld.com/ hdr). It lists over a dozen potential issues and their Nvidia added HDR with the GeForce GTX 900 series. workarounds.

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Add Linux apps to Windows in just one easy step An improved Windows Subsystem for Linux is the key to mixing and matching Linux and Windows apps. BY MARK HACHMAN et’s face it: Not everyone wants to futz with Linux. But within Windows, playing around with Linux is becoming easier and easier—so much so that you can get up and running with little more than a single command. In seconds, you can download and run powerful Linux apps, and even pin them right to your Windows desktop.

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IMAGE: MICROSOFT

Instead of installing Linux within a partition or virtual machine, Windows uses the Windows Subsystem for Linux, added way back in 2016 as part of the Windows 10 Anniversary Update. The recent Microsoft Build conference covered more on this topic as Microsoft encouraged developers to run Windows alongside WSL for development and even general use. It’s not exactly the JULY 2021 PCWorld 127

HERE’S HOW

ADD LINUX APPS TO WINDOWS

same as running Linux in a virtual machine, but it’s getting closer and closer.

When the Windows Subsystem for Linux debuted in Windows 10 in 2016, it had somewhat limited, text-based capabilities.

But in the upgrade to WSL2 in May 2020 (go. pcworld.com/wsl), Microsoft opened the door to more visually friendly GUI apps and even the ability to perform GUI computations (go.pcworld.com/gui). Essentially, Linux within Windows isn’t restricted to text any more.

That means if you have a favorite Linux GUI app that’s written strictly for Linux, you can probably run it as part of Windows— that is, launch the app from the Start menu, pin it to the taskbar, and so on. That allows you to use a greater number of apps than any one OS offers, since you can use apps coded for Linux or for Windows. At the recent event Microsoft hinted that these features would be released in Windows 10 21H1, the latest Windows feature update,

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which has just begun rolling out (go. pcworld.com/bro). But the company clarified that it is not generally releasing the feature in 21H1. It will have more information about availability later.

Unfortunately, that means you’ll need to be part of the Windows 10 Insider program instead, running version preview build 21364 or higher. Configuring your PC for Windows Subsystem for Linux previously required a special GPU driver, too: an Intel GPU driver (go.pcworld.com/gpud), an AMD GPU driver (go.pcworld.com/dgpu), or an Nvidia GPU driver (go.pcworld.com/ngpu). We can’t confirm yet if those drivers ship with the Windows Insider build, so we’ve included them for reference.

HOW TO SET UP THE WINDOWS SUBSYSTEM FOR LINUX IN ONE COMMAND About the only app you’ll need to launch to

Setting up WSL and Ubuntu is a snap. Just remember to add a username and password.

accomplish this task is Windows’ own PowerShell, which you can launch via the Start menu or just by typing PowerShell in the Windows search box. Be sure to click the “run as administrator” option that will appear to the right.

If you’ve never set up WSL before, it’s as easy as typing wsl —install -d Ubuntu into the resulting PowerShell window. That will load the necessary files as well as install the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution. You’ll also need to reboot your machine. Since Ubuntu runs as an OS, you’ll need to then choose a username and password specifically for Ubuntu. That’s it!

There’s also one annoying little trick that you’ll need to do each time you open PowerShell. By default, PowerShell opens into DOS. Type wsl to begin interacting with the Windows Subsystem for Linux. To exit out of WSL, type exit at the prompt.

HOW TO EASILY RUN LINUX APPS ON WINDOWS So what can you do with WSL? First things first: While you still can’t run a Linux graphical environment within WSL, you can run Linux GUI apps—what you might think of as traditional apps that you interact with using a mouse. The only kicker here is that WSL doesn’t support a native GUI, so that means you’ll simply have to download and run them via the PowerShell command line. It’s still pretty simple.

Before you do anything, it’s always good form to make sure everything is up to date by entering the following command—sudo apt update—and waiting for the process to complete. Do the same with sudo apt upgrade. Then you can begin downloading and trying out specific apps.

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didn’t notice any obvious lapses in functionality as a result.

GIMP is the open-source version of Adobe Photoshop, and the app has a reputation for being both powerful and complex. Still, it’s free, and—like Linux—it rewards exploration, discovery, and patience. To download it within WSL, type sudo apt install gimp -y at the prompt. To launch the app, type gimp at

to download apps you can already get on Windows, such as Chrome, Edge, and Microsoft Teams.

We’d suggest you stick with the Windows versions and avoid the complex installation process.

Instead, we’d suggest downloading and trying out three Linux GUI apps to begin with. Don’t be disconcerted if PowerShell reports Even though the PowerShell app fired off several error messages listing problems, the GIMP app seemed to work just fine. a few errors; I 130 PCWorld JULY 2021

the prompt.

Audacity is an open-source audio editor and another favorite of the open-source community. It’s traditionally considered an excellent choice for audio editing, although audio support hasn’t been supported within WSL until Audacity finally allows you to record audio as part of Microsoft’s WSL updates. As you can imagine, this was a severe limitation in previous implementations! now, when Microsoft added of Windows apps, or ways of running Windows it alongside GUI app support. You can install it functions or services within Linux. (Knowing the by typing sudo apt-get install audacity at the PowerShell prompt. To name of the app is often the key to launch the app, type audacity at the prompt. downloading it, even if you don’t have a VLC is an open-source video-playback traditional link: you can download and install app that can handle pretty much any format GNOME-chess via sudo apt-get install gnome-chess, for example.) under the sun. VLC also has a Windows Linux apps appear on your taskbar just version, so your choice to download VLC like any Windows apps, and from there you within Linux may simply be a matter of can treat them just like any other app: Pin preference or to compare the two versions. them to your taskbar or Start menu, create It appears that Windows only allows you to shortcuts to them, and so on. We’re not run one Linux GUI app at a time, so you’ll need saying that you’ll instantly fall in love with the to exit or close the GUI app before launching ecosystem of Linux apps, but they’re free, another. Want even more suggestions on what available, and usually frequently updated.

GUI apps to run under Linux? Here’s a good We’d highly recommend taking five minutes collection of Linux apps (go.pcworld.com/ to check them out. cla)—though many of them are Linux versions JULY 2021 PCWorld 131

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Best $50 smart speaker: Echo Dot vs Nest Mini

≥ Ready to start turning your house into a smart home? There’s no better place to start than with an inexpensive smart speaker. Our two favorites cost $50 or less. Which one is right for you?

Both the Amazon Echo Dot and the Google Nest Mini can control smart home devices, play music, tell the weather, read your schedule, and more, all using voice commands.

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