MAXIMUM PC’S GEEK QUIZ

SO, YOU THINK YOU KNOW YOUR STUFF? WE’LL BE THE JUDGE OF THAT

So, you think you know your stuff? We’ll be the judge of that.

WE’VE BEEN BRINGING YOU the skinny on all things PC, and now we want to see if you’ve been paying attention. What better way than some friendly questioning to see what stuck inside that noodle. And so we present another in our irregular series of Geek Quizzes, formulated to stretch your head with all things tech-related. We’ve seven magical sections of seven questions, covering all things PC, some more general tech, and Internet stuff. It’s the kind of thing you should know if you’ve been following MaximumPC and have any aspirations of geekdom. There are questions your pet can probably answer, some that are much more fiendish, plus the odd trick one.

We recommend you try this well away from the temptation of the Internet. Yes, you can sit and Google your way through this (other search engines are available), but where is the challenge in that? Why not see how you really score at the Maximum PC University, and go old school? We dare you. There’s no prize, apart from that warm glow if you do well. Statistically, you will score 14 by random guessing, so let’s see how much better you can do than that. Ready?

Silicon City

1

We know that Threadripper 2 is a big chip—how big exactly? A) 213mm2 B) 231mm2 C) 312mm2 D) 321mm2

2

How many High-Speed I/O lanes are there on Intel’s Z390 chipset? A) 24 B) 30 C) 32 D) 36

3

How many usable PCIe lanes are there on a Ryzen 2700X? A) 20 B) 24 C) 36 D) 44

4

Which of these is not an Intel code name? A) Tiger Lake B) Lizard Head Pass C) Sunny Lake D) Willow Cove

5

Who manufactured the first 7nm chips to reach the market? A) Apple B) Huawei C) Intel D) TSMC

6

What is the maximum clock speed on an Intel HD 630? A) Half of the CPU base clock B) One quarter of the CPU base clock C) 950MHz D) 1,150MHz 7

What kind of chip is Dhyana? A) A reverse-engineered AMD EPYC B) An unlicensed clone of AMD’s EPYC C) A licensed version of AMD’s EPYC D) A new design of x86 processor

Graphics Gear

8

How wide is the Turing TU102’s memory bus? A) 256-bit B) 384-bit C) 352-bit D) 320-bit

9

Which isn’t part of the Turing architecture? A) Mesh Shading B) Bidirectional Shadow Paths C) Variable Rate Shading D) Voxel Ambient Occlusion

10

How fast can a GDDR6 memory chip run? A) 14Gb/s B) 16GB/s C) 16Gb/s D) 672GB/s

11

What is the most commonly used ray-tracing acceleration algorithm? A) Volume Intersection Predictions B) Path Intersection Hierarchy C) Ray Casting Intersections D) Bounding Volume Hierarchy

12

The Radeon VII card features which GPU? A) 7nm Vega 20 B) 7nm Vega 2 C) 7nm Vega D) 7nm Navi

13

How many games supported RTX’s ray-tracing features at the card’s launch? A) None B) 7 C) 11 D) 27

14

HDMI 2.1 introduces new cables, what are they called? A) Ultra High Speed HDMI B) 10K HDMI C) Ultra Resolution HDMI D) Super Speed HDMI

Storage Stuff ff

15

How many HDD manufacturers are left? eft? A) Two B) Three C) Four D) Five

16

What is the minimum number of drives in a RAID Level 10 system? A) Two B) Four C) Six D) Eight

17

QuantX is a version of which technology? A) 3D XPoint B) DTS:X C) X-IO D) X-Mine

18

Nimbus Data has built the largest SSD drive ever made. How big is it? A) 16TB B) 48TB C) 64TB D) 100TB

19

Western Digital’s 15TB Ultrastar drive uses what form of recording technology? A) Heat-assisted magnetic recording B) Perpendicular recording C) Shingled magnetic recording D) Triple density longitudinal recording 20

What is M.2, basically? A) A device interface to connect SSDs to the PCIe bus B) A set of physical specifications for an expansion card C) A specification for an expansion card that carries NVMe D) A multi-purpose interface protocol 21

AHCI has one command queue with 32 commands; what does NVMe feature? A) 64K command queue with 64K commands per queue B) 64K command queue with 32K commands per queue C) 32K command queue with 64K commands per queue D) 32K command queue with 32K commands per queue

Other Hardware

22

An acid green USB port means what? A) A style choice B) Charging only C) Unofficial protocol D) Always on 23

Why will Wi-Fi 6 be faster? A) Smaller FFT sizes B) Higher wattage transmitters C) Increased spectrum efficiency D) Lower spectrum bands

24

Where would you want good ripple suppression? A) Ethernet cables B) Main memory bus C) Motherboard VRMs D) PSU

Other Hardware (cont.)

25

The PCIe 3.1 specification defines how many lanes a device can be assigned—which of these are within specifications? A) x12 and x24 B) x24 and x32 C) x12 and x32 D) x12, x24, and x32

26

What is the resolution of the Oculus Go, per eye? A) 960x1,080 B) 1,440x1,600 C) 2,560x1,440 D) 1,280x1,440

27

The Digital Cinema Initiative would like your monitor to be what aspect ratio for 4K digital films? A) 21:9 B) 256:135 C) 64:27 D) 1,024:429

28

PCIe 4.0 is due soon; how much power will we get from a x16 slot? A) Doubled to 150W B) Tripled to 225W C) More than 300W D) The same as PCIe 3.0: 75W

Operating Systems

29

How much did IBM spend buying Red Hat Linux last year? A) $34 million B) $340 million C) $3.4 billion D) $34 billion

30

How many Windows PCs still run Windows 7 worldwide, roughly? A) 24% B) 33% C) 42% D) 49% 31

What is Windows 10’s theoretical maximum resolution? A) 4K x 4K B) 4K x 8K C) 8K x 8K D) 16K x 16K

32

Which of these names isn’t connected to a version of Windows 10? A) Threshold 3 B) Redstone 5 C) 19H1 D) November Update

33

One of these isn’t a Windows acronym, which is it? A) WSH B) WPT C) WSB D) WUA 34

If you grab a window by the top bar and shake it vigorously, what happens? A) It switches to full screen B) All your other applications attempt to close down C) All the other open windows minimize D) All your applications switch to full screen 35

When will support for Windows 10 Mobile end? A) December 2019 B) April 2020 C) There are no plans as yet D) It already has

Internet Activity

36

Which of these currently has most active accounts? A) Facebook B) YouTube C) WhatsApp D) WeChat

37

What is the single biggest source of world Internet traffic? A) YouTube B) General web browsing C) Business to business data D) Netflix

38

In last year’s Great Crypto Crash, how much value did Bitcoin lose in a month? A) 25% B) 45% C) 65% D) 85%

39

Last year’s Marriott data breach was one of the largest in history—how many customer details were lost? A) Up to 170 million B) Up to 327 million C) Up to 500 million D) Up to 670 million

40

Which of these wasn’t an Internet meme last year? A) Chonk cat B) Polite cat C) Bongo Cat D) Sweater Cat

41

Top Twitch streamer Tyler Bevins earns approximately how much a month from playing online? A) $10,000 B) $150,000 C) $275,000 D) $500,000

42

Which cat has the biggest YouTube channel? A) Grumpy cat B) Maru the box cat C) Lil Bub D) Sam Eyebrows

Wider World of Technology

43

During last summer’s tech stock boom, which four were briefly the world’s biggest companies? A) Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon B) Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, and Google C) Alibaba, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook D) Alibaba, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft

44

Which stock then took the biggest oneday drop in history? A) Apple B) Intel C) Google D) Facebook

45

Where were the first true driverless cars tested on public roads? A) San Francisco B) Phoenix C) Pittsburgh D) Tempe

46

Approximately how many Raspberry Pis have been sold worldwide? A) 5 million B) 10 million C) 20 million D) 30 million 47

Which is the most powerful computer in the world? A) Sunway TaihuLight, in Wuxi China B) Tianhe-2A, in Guangzhou, China C) Piz Daint, in Switzerland D) Summit, at Oak Ridge, Tennessee

48

What are the dimensions of the smallest “computer” in the world? A) 0.1 x 0.1mm B) 0.3 x 0.3mm C) 0.5 x0.5mm D) 1 x 1mm

49

Which of these hasn’t been made into a smart device yet, although it has patents filed? A) Toilet B) Salt cellar C) Wig D) Egg tray