Custom PC UK December 2018

With its knowledge of ray tracing, it’s possible we could see a very different GPU emerge from Intel Now would usually be a golden moment to scoop up a graphics card bargain, with the arrival of brand-new GPUs sending the prices of the old guard tumbling down as retailers try to shift their old stock. Not this time. GeForce GTX 1080 Ti cards are a little cheaper than previously, but they’re still demanding at least £650 inc VAT. It’s hardly a bargain. This time, there simply hasn’t been a like-for-like swap. Nvidia’s new RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti cards are demanding huge premiums, meaning the older GPUs can still happily chug along at or near their old prices. There are many factors at play here, and Richard Swinburne has covered…

Nvidia has taken a ‘build it and they will come’ approach For me, the biggest news about Nvidia’s new RTX GPUs isn’t, in fact, the performance, but the astronomical prices. After two and a half years of GTX 1000-series GPUs, the leap in prices for the new RTX cards has left a lot of potential upgraders unhappy. However, let’s be pragmatic about the market situation, as there’s no whiff of high-end competition from AMD, and Nvidia is in business to make money. Also, looking deep into the new Turing architecture, it’s clear the new chips also cost significantly more to make, and the research and development costs will have been considerable as well. The GTX 1080 Ti (GP102) core offered 471mm² of silicon, the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 (GP104)…

My own grandmother operated a massive gun and shot down Nazi planes 'Who wants to play … Aaaarmy,’ we’d chant, linking arms and marching around the school playground at lunchtime. ‘No boys! Just girls!’ We were eight years old and had recently noticed that the boys were playing Army but excluding girls. It was annoying because Army was an extremely fun game in which you ran around making machine gun noises and diving behind imaginary bunkers. We fought back by starting our own, girl-only game of Army. Why did the little boys choose to exclude the girls in their war game? Eight-year-olds aren’t usually sticklers for historical accuracy, but although we had learned about the World Wars in class, we weren’t taught that it was actually illegal for women to…

Oculus unveils standalone Quest headset Oculus has announced a new member of its VR headset line-up, promising to completely do away with the need for a wired connection, or even a PC. The new Quest bundle features two Touch wireless controllers, as well as a headset packed with dedicated hardware, freeing the wearer from constraints. Meanwhile, each eye will get a dedicated 1,600 x 1,440 screen, and 64GB of storage space will be provided. There’s no advanced detail on the specs available at the time of going to press, but Oculus says the Quest will be released in 2019 at a price of $399 US (around £366 inc VAT). Intel readies mainstream 8-core CPUs Despite its current stock shortage woes (see p114), Intel is planning to launch a new range…

Remember old TIM My gaming computer began crashing occasionally during the recent warm spell. My Intel Core i5-4670K rig that I built five years ago was affected by the high ambient temperature, and the fans couldn’t cope. It was getting noisier as well. The CPU was overclocked to 4.3GHz using air cooling, and it was going above 99°C and throttling. I thought that the problem would resolve itself with cooler weather, but it didn’t, so remedial action was required. I removed the heatsink, which seemed looser than I remembered when I built it, and looked at the CPU surface. The TIM was completely dry, patchy and crumbly. A quick clean, reapplication and reassembly was needed, and the temperatures showed that the problem was fixed. So, for all those systems that…

Pc_Shed Nice to have something good to read delivered to your door. But @ CustomPCMag what has happened to the @ foldingathome league tables as they are not in the issue 182/November 2018? Ben: We removed them – sadly not many people do Folding@home any more, and we couldn’t justify giving it a whole page when it had so few results. As always, we’re open to bringing it back if enough of our readers demand it, perhaps not a whole page though. aazzgard Hi, when do you think prices for 1080 Ti cards will drop and where do you think they will drop to? I guess there will need to be a drop otherwise the new 2080 cards will be too expensive and not sell in great numbers. Ben: I’ve…