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(cid:54)(cid:68)(cid:79)(cid:72)(cid:86)(cid:3)(cid:19)(cid:27)(cid:19)(cid:19)(cid:3)(cid:22)(cid:20)(cid:28)(cid:3)(cid:25)(cid:19)(cid:20)(cid:19)(cid:581)(cid:527)(cid:581)(cid:51)(cid:68)(cid:85)(cid:87)(cid:81)(cid:72)(cid:85)(cid:3)(cid:54)(cid:72)(cid:85)(cid:89)(cid:76)(cid:70)(cid:72)(cid:86)(cid:3)(cid:19)(cid:27)(cid:19)(cid:19)(cid:3)(cid:22)(cid:20)(cid:28)(cid:3)(cid:25)(cid:24)(cid:19)(cid:19) Innovative(cid:581)(cid:527)(cid:581)Flexible(cid:581)(cid:527)(cid:581)Reliable(cid:581)(cid:527)(cid:581)Supportive (cid:90)(cid:90)(cid:90)(cid:17)(cid:86)(cid:83)(cid:76)(cid:87)(cid:564)(cid:85)(cid:72)(cid:17)(cid:70)(cid:82)(cid:17)(cid:88)(cid:78) 20 20 0 0 03 20 PrtSohever IntPertrohnvee tCIS tCIS oEl d Best *Subject to terms and conditions WELCOME Editor Jim Martin [email protected] Group Managing Editor Marie Brewis [email protected] Art Director Mandie Johnson [email protected] Production Editor Rob Woodcock [email protected] JIM Multimedia Editor Dominik Tomaszewski [email protected] Consumer Tech Editor Chris Martin [email protected] MARTIN Engagement Editor Ashleigh Allsopp [email protected] Staff Writer Lewis Painter [email protected] Staff Writer Christopher Minasians [email protected] Staff Writer Henry Burrell [email protected] Staff Writer Miriam Harris [email protected] Associate Online Editor David Price [email protected] Associate Editor Karen Haslam [email protected] Associate Editor Neil Bennett [email protected] Boost your Wi-Fi Forum Editor Peter Thomas [email protected] Editorial Director Matt Egan [email protected] Ensure your devices always have a strong connection Contributors Michael Ansaldo, Martyn Casserly, Brad Chacos, Lucian Constantin, Neil Conquest, W Mark Hachman, Matt Hamblen, Benny Har-Even, Bryn Huntpalmer, Sarah Jacobsson elcometotheOctoberissueofPCAdvisor.You’ll no doubt have Purewal, Gregg Keizer, Paul Monckton, Ian Paul, Lincoln Spector, Agam Shah, noticedthe‘BoostyourWi-Fi’headlineonthecover. It’s a frustrating Gordon Mah Ung, Katherine Noyes problemformostpeople:yourhomeWi-Fijust isn’t good enough. Advertising Olderroutersdon’talwayshavethecoveragetoprovide a strong signal Account Director Jonathan Busse [email protected] Senior Account Manager Gemma Rollason [email protected] forafastconnectioninthefarthestroomsinyourhome. Plus, routers are Campaign Support Manager Chris Brown [email protected] increasinglyhavingtohandleanabundanceofwireless devices: multiple phones,tablets,laptops,gamesconsolesandnowIoTgadgets such as your Marketing smartthermostat,securitycamerasandeventhelatest kitchen appliances. 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Accounts Ifyouhaveanextra-largehouseorneedtogetaninternet connection Financial Director Chris Norman [email protected] inaseparategarageorhomeofficewherenoroutercan currently Credit Controller Dawnette Gordon [email protected] Management Accountant Parit Shah [email protected] reach,thenpowerlinenetworkingadaptorscanhelp.We put TP-Link’s newAV1200tothetest(page56)andfoundit’spossible to get superb Publishing speedsusingyourexistingmainswiring. Publishing Director Simon Jary [email protected] Managing Director Kit Gould [email protected] We’vealsotestedacoupleoftheaforementionedsecurity cameras, and botharegoodatwhattheydo.We’rebigfansoftheY-Cam system and the newEvo(page42)cangiveyoupeaceofmindwhenyou’re away from home. Securityisarunningthemethesedays,andyoushould always make sureyoutakeeveryprecautiontokeepyourcomputers, mobile devices andonlineaccountsassecureaspossible.Thatmeansusing two-factor Subscribe online: Subscribe to digital editions: authenticationwhereavailable(seepage96)andnever using the same tinyurl.com/subscribepca pcadvisor.co.uk/magazines passwordformorethanoneaccount. Subscribe by phone: Subscription enquiries: Ofcourse,we’realllazyandtendtoignorethisadvice, but if you use one 08448440232 [email protected] ofthepasswordmanagersonpage79,it’spossibletohave a separate, strong CWO DD passwordforeachemail,bankingservice,forumandany other website you 12 issues £37.99 £35.88 use. As you’ll read on page 90, no-one is immune to being hacked – a bit of Six issues £24.99 £19.99 social engineering can make it fairly easy to figure out someone’s password. Europe (12 issues) £100 £100 And while it’s unlikely you’ll be singled out and targeted like a celebrity or Rest of world (12 issues) £125 £125 politician, every week seems to bring news of another major service being hacked and millions of customer account details being leaked online or sold to the highest bidder. So paying a few pounds per month for a decent WhatdoyouthinkofthisissueofPCAdvisor?Wewelcomefeedback –[email protected] password manager could be a far smaller cost than you think. issuenumberinthesubjectheading PC Advisor is published by IDG UK IDG UK, 101 Euston Road, London NW1 2RA. Tel: 020 7756 2800 Printer: Wyndeham Press Group Ltd 01621 877 777 Distribution: Seymour Distribution Ltd 020 7429 4000 No material may be reproduced in whole or part without written permission. While every care is taken, the publisher cannot be held legally responsible for any ISSUE 256 ON SALE 14 SEPTEMBER 2016 errors in articles, listings or advertisements. All material copyright IDG UK 2016 October 2016 www.pcadvisor.co.uk 3 CONTENTS NEWS & ANALYSIS FEATURES & GROUP TESTS 6 Latesttechnologynews 12 EC charges Google 13 Google’s AI to save lives 14 Human-aware AI 15 US rules cloud infrastucture 16 Tablet sales fall 17 Chromeistopbrowser 64 REGULARS & OFFERS 3 Welcome 64 GROUP TEST: 86 Five Chrome extensions 117 Software downloads zone MU-MIMO routers that help control your inbox 76 Use a Windows 88 S mart homes 118 Subscribe Phone as a PC for the elderly 146 Outbox 79 Password managers 90 Celebrity hacker 82 The future of memory 92 Smarten up your emails TEST REVIEWS CENTRE ROUTERS 18 Dell Latitude 12 7000 20 Dell Chromebook 13 (7310) 66 Asus RT-AC87U 22 Asus ZenPad 10 ZD300C 68 BT Smart Hub 24 Sony Xperia XA 70 Linksys Max-stream EA9500 26 Sony Xperia X 72 TP Link Archer VR2600 28 Motorola Moto G4 Plus GET FREE 30 Samsung Galaxy A7 39 SOFTWARE 32 Obi MV1 PAGE 117 34 Leagoo Shark 1 36 Meizu M3 Note 39 M SI GeForce GTX 1070 41 Xiaomi Mi Band 2 42 Y -Cam HomeMonitor Evo Subscribe to PC Advisor and 44 Netgear Arlo Q SAVE 50% 46 P restigio RoadRunner 545GPS 48 K ehan K300 50 G oPro Hero Session 52 SJCam M20 SEE PAGE 118 54 ViewSonic VX2276-SMHD 55 Samsung 750 Evo 56 TP-Link AV1200 Gigabit Powerline Adaptor Starter Kit 57 Audio-Technica ATH-MSR7 58 R AVPower Ace 22,000mAh External Battery Pack 22 17 59 C HJD UltraCompact Power Bank 60 H omefront: The Revolution 62 Overwatch 4 www.pcadvisor.co.uk October 2016 USEAWINDOWSPHONEASAPC PASSWORD MANAGERS THE FUTURE OF MEMORY 76 79 82 CHROMEEXTENSTIONS CELEBRITY HACKER SMARTENUPYOUREMAIL 86 90 92 ON THE COVER TEST HOW TO CENTRE 117 64 TOP 5 CHARTS: 94Quicklysharelargefiles BUYER’S GUIDE 96Enabletwo-stepverification 121 Laptops 122 Budgetlaptops 98StopGoogle’stargetedads 123 Ultraportablelaptops 124 Chromebooks 100MakeanAndroid 125 Gaminglaptops phoneworklikeaPC 126 GamingPCs 128 All-in-onePCs 102ReuseanoldAndroidphone 129 Smartphones 130Budgetsmartphones 104CreatebasicformulaeinExcel 131 Phablets 132 7-and8intablets 133 9-and10intablets 108UseExcelasacalculator 134Smartwatches 135 Activitytrackers 110ImportCSVfilestoExcel 136 Budgetprinters/Printers 137 Wirelessrouters/ 114Fixakeyboard’sbrokenkey Powerlineadaptors 138 NASdrives/Externalharddrives 116GetPiPinYouTube 139 SSDs/Smartthermostats 140Budgetgraphicscards/ 102 Graphicscards 141 4Kflat-panelTVs/ 4Kflat-paneldisplays 142 e-book readers/Media streamers 143 G ames console/ Budget portable speakers 144 Budget headphones/Headphones 79 41 39 145 Power banks/Desktop chargers October 2016 www.pcadvisor.co.uk 5 NEWS Nvidia’s monstrous new Titan X graphics card stomps onto the scene, powered by Pascal Gordon Mah Ung looks at the new Pascal-based Titan X, which is nothing like the old Titan X A new Titan has entered the next-generation graphics war. But while Nvidia’s new Titan X Pascal is no doubt the most potent gaming hardware ever released – the Titan X page on GeForce.com is plastered with lofty gaming performance claims – you won’t find too many reviews of the graphics card hitting the streets today. Instead, Nvidia’s focusing more on the graphics card’s use for professional deep-learning AI applications. The Titan series has always been designed to bridge the gap between the consumer-centric GeForce line-up and pricier Quadro professional cards. The new Titan X Pascal, which gets its name from Nvidia’s cutting-edge 16nm instruction – shows that the company Titan X specs Pascal graphics architecture, delivers 11 expects the new Titan X to be used to bolster and gaming performance teraflops for single-precision floating- neural networks and machine learning. The new Titan X Pascal packs in a lot more point performance. But Nvidia’s decision Make no mistake: Nvidia is pushing the hardware than the older Maxwell GPU-based to surprise launch this card during an AI Titan as a compute card first and foremost. processor, as you can see in the comparison meetup in San Francisco, combined with But most people reading PC Advisor aren’t chart opposite. It has 3,584 CUDA cores its touted 44 TOPS INT8 performance data scientists. Most people want to know with a 1,417MHz base and 1,531 boost clock. – a new deep learning inferencing how much ass the Pascal kicks in games. That’s a face-melting half a gigahertz faster Far Cry Primal 5K Ultra Overall (fps) Far Cry Primal run at 5K resolution Falcon Northwest FragBox 2 64.0 (Core i7-6950x/New Titan X SU) Digital Storm Aventum 3 50.0 (Core i7-6950x / GTX 1080 SLI) 0.0 10.0 20.0 30.0 40.0 50.0 60.0 70.0 (Longer bars indicate performance) 6 www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news October 2016 NEWS Keep up to date with PC Advisor news: pcadvisor.co.uk/news twitter.com/pcadvisor facebook.com/pcadvisor youtube.com/pcadvisor CHRIS MARTIN the new Titan X will likely offer about 30 percent higher frame rates than the GTX 1080. While we won’t know for sure until we get our grubby paws on the card, there’s a pretty decent chance that the Titan X Pascal will be able to play many of today’s top games at damned near 60fps with high settings at 4K resolution. If that winds up being true, it’ll be a major milestone. While the original Titan X, GTX 980 Ti and Radeon Fury X can all play games at 4K, doing so often requires graphical compromise and a FreeSync or G-Sync monitor to smooth out a sub-60fps frame rate. Now, however, you can run two Titan X Pascal cards in a single system with Nvidia’s new SLI HB bridge – the hard bridge pictured below. Despite pushing far more pixels, the Titan X Pascal still draws the same 250W of power as the original Titan X, sipping the than its predecessor, roughly speaking, and of the Titan X. ROP and texture-unit counts juice through 8- and 6-pin power connectors. more than 1,000 CUDA cores greater than aren’t being disclosed. The two-slot card measures 10.5x4.376in the ferocious new GeForce GTX 1080, which So what does that mean in terms of pure wide, and has the same connections as the also uses Nvidia’s Pascal architecture. performance? Nvidia says the Titan X Pascal GTX 1080: DVI-D, an HDMI 2.0b port, and The new Titan X is no slouch in the will offer 60 percent greater performance three DisplayPort 1.4 connections. The new memory department either, with 12GB than its predecessor. Considering that the Titan comes with the same vapour chamber of next-gen GDDR5X memory clocked at GTX 1080 offered 25- to 30 percent greater cooling with a blower-style fan as the GTX 10Gb/s. It’s connected to the GPU over a performance than the last-gen Titan X, 1080, along with a similarly angular metal 384-bit bus, delivering a blistering 480GB/s memory bandwidth aided by the new delta colour compression system created for Pascal. You read that correctly; it doesn’t have the super-fast high-bandwidth memory first featured in AMD’s Fury cards. Some people expected the new Titan X to come equipped with it after HBM2 made its debut in Nvidia’s powerful P100 supercomputing card. But first-gen HBM is limited to 4GB, and second-gen HBM with higher capacities isn’t expected to be ready until sometime around the end of the year. Fear not, though: 12GB of newer, faster GDDR5X memory definitely won’t be a gaming bottleneck any time soon. Nvidia’s not providing any additional architectural details about the new ‘GP102’ processor beating at the heart Nvidia’s new SLI HB bridge October 2015 www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news 7 News shroud, though the Titan X Pascal’s is all have to buy the Titan X Pascal from GeForce. reliably since its launch, which in turn has black, rather than silver. com, or get it as part of a custom system resulted in inflated street prices. (The GTX The latest Titan X also packs all the via a handful of boutique system builders. 1070 and GTX 1060 have had more stock, various new features rolled out with Pascal, In countries where you can’t buy from but are still in high demand.) including simultaneous multi-projection, Nvidia directly, the card will be offered by its Don’t expect Titan X Pascal prices to asynchronous compute enhancements, partners, but they’ll still be made by Nvidia. go sky-high since they’re being sold only the Ansel super-screenshot tool, Fast There are two points worth noting. by Nvidia, but stocks may very well be Sync, GPU Boost 3.0, and more. First, the price: the Titan X Pascal is £1,099, limited in the near term. The demand for or £200 more than the original Titan X’s a £1,099 card will no doubt be lower than Price and availability MSRP. That continues the GTX 10-series for even a £600-plus card such as the Though it’s pretty safe to say that the Titan trend of being priced higher than their GTX 1080. X Pascal will be a beast of a gaming card, Maxwell GPU-based predecessors. You Regardless, this thing looks like an utter we’d recommend – as always – holding off have to wonder how much the inevitable monster. There’s a new Titan in town, and on buying one until you’re able to read in- GTX 1080 Ti, which will likely be more it’ll be the proverbial 800-pound gorilla for depth reviews of its performance. gamer-focused, will cost at launch. a while – AMD’s enthusiast-class ‘Vega’ cards If you do decide to pick one up, Nvidia Secondly, availability is a question. The with HBM2 aren’t expected until at least the will be the only manufacturer, so you will high-end GTX 1080 hasn’t stayed in stock end of the year, or possibly 2017. Intel ships Kaby Lake chips, pointing to PC availability in a few months PC makers could soon start announcing Kaby Lake laptops and tablets, writes Agam Shah Tablets and laptops with Intel’s seventh- generation Core chips codenamed Kaby Lake should become available in the coming months. Intel is shipping Kaby Lake chips to PC makers now, CEO Brian Krzanich during Intel’srecent earnings call. Systems withnew Asus’ Transformer 3 has processors usually become Intel’s Kaby Lake chip available a few months after Intel delivers the chips. Kaby Lake will succeed current Skylake Core processor. The new chip has the underpinnings of Skylakeand won’t necessarily be smaller in size, but interim product, with some design tweaks Surface PCs and Apple’s MacBooks could it’ll provide speed improvements over its to boost performance. also get Kaby Lake chips. predecessor, Krzanich said. At Computex in June, Asus showed Competition to Kaby Lake will come from That raises a question: should you wait Transformer 3, which resembles Microsoft’s AMD’s chips codenamed Bristol Ridge, which a few months for Kaby Lake instead of Surface Pro tablet and runs on Kaby Lake. reached a handful of PCs earlier this year. upgrading to a Skylake PC now? Experts It has a 12.6in screen, weighs 695g and is AMD’s chips excel at graphics, while Intel generally say you should buy a PC as and 6.9mm thick. It can be configured with a chips are better at preserving laptop battery. when you need it rather than wait for the 512GB SSD and up to 8GB RAM. Asus said Intel in April said it would reshape its next improvement to come along. prices would start at $799 (UK price TBA). business to focus less on PCs and more on Nevertheless, Kaby Lake PCs should No other major PC maker has announced data centre products, Internet of Things come in some interesting shapes and sizes. a Kaby Lake PC. Lenovo and Acer are and connectivity. The PC market has been Intel usually first releases Core M versions holding PC-related press conferences slumping for years and has hurt Intel’s of a new processor first, suggesting some ahead of the IFA trade show in Berlin in profits. Krzanich expects the PC upgrade innovative mobile designs. early September. Kaby Lake PCs could also cycle to pick up in the second half this year, Skylake was originally to be followed be shown at the Intel Developer Forum in mainly in enterprises. Demand for PCs was by Canonlake, a 10nm shrink of Skylake. San Francisco in August. slightly better in the second quarter, but But last year Intel pushed out its 10nm Intel has said 400 devices with Kaby Lake should continue to decline in the high single- plans and introduced Kaby Lake as an will ultimately become available. Microsoft’s digit range for the rest of the year, he said. 8 www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news October 2016 FOR EVERYTHING ANDROID DIGITAL EDITION ON ANDROID & iOS tinyurl.com/nk4osoh Every issue is packed with the latest reviews, features, tutorials & more. News AMD pins its laptop hopes on the low-power Bristol Ridge and Stoney Bridge APUs Budget PCs may not be sexy, but AMD wants this mass market for its own. Mark Hachman reports As the notebook PC becomes ever more on up to premium devices. Bristol Ridge Stoney Ridge APUs pack AMD’s Excavator important to the company’s future, AMD and Stony Ridge represent AMD’s first core, which will be paired with AMD’s Radeon debuted its Bristol Ridge and Stoney Ridge APU refresh in a year, since the company R7 graphics cores on the FX and A12 lines; integrated graphics APUs for laptops at the debuted the Carrizo chips last May. AMD’s R5 graphics on the A10 and A9 lines; Computex show in Taipei. The chipmaker’s traditional argument and R4 and R2 graphics on the low-end A6 Combined, AMD’s new seventh-generation for its APUs has been that they offer more and E2 series, respectively. APUs represent a total of nine new products graphics horsepower for a lower price. This All told, the firm is squarely focused intended for low-end, budget notebooks time around, both the Bristol Ridge and on the PC, according to Kevin Lensing, the corporate vice president and general manager of the client business unit at AMD. “We’re not really interested in drones, we’re not really pushing hard in automobiles; we’re pushing really, really hard in PCs,” Lensing said, in a swipe at Intel’s recent refocusing on the broader device market. All of AMD’s new cores consume either 15- or 35W, about the same power consumption as Intel’s own Skylake parts. Though both 2015’s Carrizo APUs and the AMD’s APUs over the years 10 www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news October 2016