ALL MECHANICAL products require maintenance to keep them running. You get your truck or car serviced at regular intervals to ensure that failing parts are spotted and replaced, while tuning the engine to improve performance and efficiency, so why not your PC too?
In this feature, we’ve developed a simple program to help you ensure that your PC’s hardware is running as well as it possibly can. We’ll start by showing you how to audit your system so you can identify everything that’s in it, from the stuff you should already know about (like your graphics card model or CPU), to more obscure components (what USB controllers is your motherboard using, for instance?).
From there, we’ll put in place tools that can help you monitor your system, providing you with early warnings for the parts that may be on their way out, from ageing hard drives to batteries in a state of decline. You’ll learn how to identify other potential problems through stress-testing, before we switch our attention to examining ways to tune your hardware for better performance, from basic updates to judicious overclocking of selected components.
Ready to put your PC through its paces? Let’s get started.
THE FIRST STEP to maintaining your PC is to perform a complete hardware audit. This provides you with a detailed inventory of the various components that make up your PC— including the chipsets that populate your motherboard, allowing you to monitor key aspects of them.
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Denne historien er fra September 2023-utgaven av Maximum PC.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
Allerede abonnent? Logg på
NZXT C1500 Platinum
Top-tier performance and efficiency
Nvidia DLSS vs AMD FSR
Which AI upscaling technique has the edge?
World of Goo 2
Goo-d enough for two
BenQ X300G 4K Short Throw Projector
Priced high, yet punchy
Hyte Thicc Q60
Almost more mobile phone than CPU cooler
Remove stalkerware from your PC
ACCORDING TO KASPERSKY’S LATEST ‘State of Stalkerware’ report, over 40 percent of those surveyed worldwide said they’d experienced stalking or suspected that they were being stalked.
BUILD AN IT SUPPORT HUB
Discover how to use RustDesk to provide remote assistance and control your own devices remotely with Nick Peers
AMD's turn to drop the ball?
WITH INTEL'S RAPTOR LAKE CPUs falling over, the company firing around 15,000 employees, and cancelling its 2024 innovation event, AMD must have been enjoying the view - until its new Ryzen 9000 desktop CPUs rolled out. So, is AMD's CPU a minor stumble or game-changing fumble?
Intel issues fix for Raptor Lake degradation
EARLIER THIS YEAR, I wrote about difficulties I was having with a Core 19-13900K processor (see MPC230 Tech Talk). Little did we realize that we were only seeing the tip of the iceberg. While most complaints have involved the unlocked Core i9 Raptor Lake CPUs, it appears the instability problems build up and potentially impact many Raptor Lake-13th and 14th Gen Core CPUs, with Intel identifying 22 different desktop parts.
AMD Ryzen 7 9700X
The new Zen 5 CPUs are here—time to benchmark!