Innholdsfortegnelse for May 2019 i Custom PC UK

AMD may not have developed real-time ray tracing tech for its latest GPU, but it still had a golden opportunity to hit back hard at Nvidia with the Radeon VII (see p20) this month. With Nvidia’s new GeForce RTX GPUs demanding extremely high prices, but only a tiny fraction of games supporting their new features, AMD could have stormed into the ring with a cut-price, super-fast, rasterisation-only GPU, and gleefully hoovered up a load of cash from disaffected PC gamers. I don’t know how AMD arrived at the £650-£700 price, but it’s utterly bewildering to me There’s a lot to like about the Radeon VII. Its total memory bandwidth of 1TB/sec is huge, and it’s great to see 16GB of HBM2 memory integrated into the same package as the GPU.…

Nvidia releases GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Nvidia has just released a new GPU based on its latest Turing architecture, but it’s quite a different beast from the other Turing chips we’ve seen. The new GeForce GTX 1660 Ti has the company’s old ‘GTX’ moniker, rather than ‘RTX’ for a reason – it contains none of the dedicated RT processors for real-time ray tracing that are found in Nvidia’s RTX GPUs. Instead, the GTX 1660 Ti aims to provide decent rasterisation performance for gamers who can’t afford an RTX card. With prices starting from £260 inc VAT for Palit and MSI cards from www.scan.co.uk, the GTX 1660 Ti is starting a direct fight with AMD’s new Radeon RX 590, as well as the red team’s Radeon RX Vega 56, following recent…

SUPPLIER www.scan.co.uk Corsair’s new Dominator memory marks the first major design tweak for this particular brand for quite a while. The new Dominator Platinum RGB  kits will be hitting shop shelves as you read this review, and thankfully, memory prices are falling too. The usual 16GB 3200MHz dual-channel kit costs £160 inc VAT, but the range goes all the way up to 4800MHz, with various dual-channel and quad-channel kits from which to choose. Corsair sent us the 3600MHz 32GB quad-channel kit with 16-18-18-36 timings as a review sample, which sports matt black heatsinks rather than the silver ones we’re used to on Dominator modules. The new memory’s trump card is its particular implementation of RGB lighting, which differs from other RGB kits by using Capellix LEDs. These LEDs are tiny…

SUPPLIER www.pcspecialist.co.uk The PC Specialist Recoil II RTX features a new GeForce RTX 2070 GPU and a Core i7-8750H processor, yet its price of £1,699 inc VAT undercuts many other portables with this spec level. The lower price means that the Recoil doesn’t look particularly eye-catching. The exterior is made from dark, plain aluminium, and it has no logos. There are no outlandish angles, no bright brushed metal and few RGB LEDs. It’s not particularly slim or light either, with a 2.5kg weight and a 27mm-thick body. Build quality is only middling, and we’ve seen slimmer screen bezels – even if this panel’s surrounds aren’t particularly wide. However, the Recoil has plenty to recommend it when you consider its practical features. The keys have a  comfortable softness to their  action…

PROCESSORS TESTS: We use Custom PC RealBench, Cinebench and Far Cry 5, installed on Windows 10 Home 64-bit, and record the power draw of the test  PC. These tests cover a broad range of performance characteristics, including image editing, gaming,  video encoding and 3D rendering. We run all tests at stock speed and at the CPU’s highest overclocked frequency. CUSTOM PC REALBENCH Our benchmark suite, co-developed with Asus, simulates how people really use PCs – a higher score is better. You can download them from www.asus.com/campaign/Realbench MOTHERBOARDS TESTS: We use Custom PC RealBench and Far Cry 5 installed on Windows 10 Home 64-bit, and also test the board’s SATA and M.2 ports. We try to overclock every motherboard by overclocking our test CPU to its maximum air-cooled level. GRAPHICS CARDS…

SUPPLIER www.aquatuning.co.uk We’re already very familiar with Alphacool’s decent fittings, pumps and radiators, so we had high hopes for its water-cooling kit, especially as it offers all the gear you need to create your own loop for under £170 inc VAT. You even get a filling funnel, a fan splitter cable and an ATX jumper for leak testing in the box. Plus, if that wasn’t enough, there’s also quick-release fitting, allowing you to easily add another component in the future, such as a GPU waterblock, without having to drain the system. It has a well-documented manual as well, and the core components in our sample included a NexXxos 240mm radiator, which is 30mm thick, although there are various versions of the kit available with different sizes of radiators. You also get two…

SUPPLIER www.ebuyer.com Samsung’s Pro line of SSDs has long ruled the roost when it comes to performance and longevity, and it’s all down to their use of MLC NAND, rather than TLC. All the other drives on test rely on TLC NAND to offer great read performance and good value. However, TLC NAND has slow write performance, so all these drives have a portion of the NAND that dynamically switches to SLC mode in order to offer fast write performance. Once the write operations have finished, data in the SLC buffer is written to TLC and the buffer is cleared. By and large, this setup works fine, as the write buffer is generally large enough to accommodate large write operations – in the order of tens of gigabytes. However, if your…

DEVELOPER DontNod Entertainment / PUBLISHER Square Enix / WEBSITE https://lifeisstrange.square-enix-games.com The first episode of Life is Strange 2 made a promising start. Following brothers Sean and Daniel on the run from the law, it suggested a melancholy American road trip that explored themes such as bigotry and discrimination, as the brothers sought a place to call home. Unfortunately, the second episode is tedious, meandering and gets off to a dreadful start. It opens with Sean and Daniel hiding deep in the backwoods of Oregon, taking shelter from the midwinter cold in an abandoned summerhouse. After episode one’s chaos, they’ve enjoyed a peaceful few weeks, but food is running low and Daniel has a nasty-sounding cough, prompting them to head for their maternal grandmother’s home. DontNod clearly believes the brothers’ situation…

In the 2003 book Masters of Doom, which charts the foundation of id Software and the company’s widespread impact upon the video gaming, John Carmack utters a sentence that has become one of the most infamous quotes in the industry.‘A story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It’s expected to be there, but it’s not important.’ Carmack’s words embody a persisting notion that has haunted gaming for decades. It also isn’t true. Storytelling has been a fundamental part of gaming since the days of the text adventure, with games such as Zork and Colossal Cave Adventure establishing the framework for story design in games. In the interceding years, the significance of story in games has only grown. Many of today’s biggest titles are story-centric adventures,…

The CPU was a first-generation Core i5-750 that I bought in 2010, along with an Asus P7P55 LX motherboard. The case was inherited from a previous build, a SilverStone Temjin TJ07 that I bought in 2007. It underwent two power supply upgrades in order to accommodate more demanding graphics cards. It was born a Windows 7 PC running off two hard drives, transitioning to Windows 10, with SSDs gradually replacing first the C drive then the data drive. In 2012, I started naming devices on my home network after players who had joined Manchester United in that year, so the PC was named Shinji, after Shinji Kagawa, a promising young attacking midfielder from Japan, by way of Borussia Dortmund. The less said about him the better. Shinji had the same…

I am sure that a fair number of CPC readers have been through several generations of memory upgrades. Every time we change over from one memory tech to the next one, whether it’s from SDR to DDR, or DDR3 to DDR4, the benchmark results of each new generation never show much benefit. However, I believe that DDR5 will be different because of the recent explosion in CPU core counts. The more memory-hungry cores you have in your CPU, the more memory bandwidth you need to feed them. The DDR5 spec is expected to range from 4266 to 6400MHz Pairing an 8-core CPU with dual-channel DDR4 memory is fine, but when you get to 16 cores, then a total bandwidth of ~40GB/sec (for the popular 3200MHz kits) leaves only 2.5GB/sec per…

Feel the heft The quality, the heft of the damn thing! I felt like a bloody king thumbing through this month’s new and improved edition. I guess you can have your Pi and eat it! TONY NEWTON Ben: Thank you. We’ve had an overwhelming amount of feedback about the quality of the paper we’re using now – almost every letter and tweet to us this month mentioned it somewhere. It feels good to be offering a magazine that feels like you’ve really bought something again. But can it play Crysis? I’m liking the new full-fat edition of Custom PC. Since you’re indulging in new features, how about a ‘readers’ challenge’ where we ask you a question that can then be used as the basis for an article? For example,‘is there…

SUPPLIER www.overclockers.co.uk AMD needs the Radeon VII to hit back hard if it wants to retain its space in the GPU arena. The company’s previous Radeon RX Vega GPUs were  delayed, underwhelming and overpriced, and Nvidia has been cheerfully trundling over the last generation of graphics cards in a big, shiny, ray-traced steamroller over the past few months. As we see it, there are two options for AMD if it really wants to compete. The first is to produce a GPU without the ray-tracing and AI features of Nvidia’s RTX GPUs, but excels at rasterisation performance and significantly undercuts the RTX GPUs on price. After all, even now, only a few games use those new features. The second is to beat the performance of Nvidia’s GPUs and match them on price. Given that the…

SUPPLIER www.overclockers.co.uk If you’ve sided with Intel and have your heart set on a 4-core, 6-core or 8-core K-series CPU, you’d be forgiven for thinking you need to spend well over £200 on a motherboard, given some of the examples we’ve tested recently. However, MSI’s Tomahawk motherboards have often offered excellent value for money, and the company has now added a Z390 board to this budget-conscious range, with the MAG Z390 Tomahawk retailing for just £150 inc VAT. A few features have been cut from the specifications, but MSI has got an awful lot of it right. You get a massive M.2 SSD heatsink that makes the ones the company first used a few years ago look like a piece of tinfoil. It’s also placed on the lower of the…

It’s great to see our favourite pump and reservoir combo SUPPLIER www.scan.co.uk It might seem bizarre that one water-cooling kit can cost under £120 inc VAT, while the EK Water Blocks Performance 240 kit will set you back nearly £300 inc VAT, but it all comes down to the details. Every aspect of this kit oozes quality, and thankfully, that praise extends to the manual too, which is superb and easy to follow. It’s great to see our favourite choice of pump and reservoir combo included too. We’ve used EK Water Blocks’ EK-XRES Revo D5 for a variety of builds in Custom PC, thanks to its powerful D5 pump with PWM speed control, easy-fill reservoir and flexible mounting system. The latter allows you to mount it in a vacant vertical…

SUPPLIER www.cclonline.com With a range of complete kits on offer, Thermaltake was keen to get in on the action this month. However, the firm really wanted to go all-out and focus on the decidedly premium Pacific M240 D5. It’s unique in that it’s equipped with rigid PETG tubing, instead of the flexible tubing included with the rest of the kits this month. This tubing will need to be bent to shape, with Thermaltake including an insert to prevent kinking when you do so. It’s certainly handy to know you have compatible fittings for the job, but you’ll need to invest in the rest of the tools needed for this yourself (see our full guide to it on p104). Alternatively, you can run straight lines, and use angled fittings and joins, although…

SUPPLIER www.scan.co.uk The Intel 760p is the only drive in this test that significantly trails any of the others in terms of reported speed. While all the other drives claim sequential read speeds of over 3,450MB/sec, Intel only claims 3,230MB/sec for the 760p. Its claimed sequential write speed is even further back, at just 1,625MB/sec – the next slowest drive has a claimed write speed of 2,000MB/sec. We’re testing the 1024GB model, rather than the 512GB one, but the claimed performance is identical for both drives. Of course, another upshot of Intel sending us the 1024GB model is that it doesn’t immediately leap out as the best value drive, as its cost per gigabyte isn’t the best. However, there’s a couple of benefits to this series of drives. For one,…

SUPPLIER www.ebuyer.com Western Digital’s range of Black hard drives has long been among the best you can buy when it comes to performance. However, it has taken a while for the company to offer up an SSD that’s worthy of the same name. It’s a situation that the company hopes to resolve with the new WD Black SN750. Across the board, it boasts impressive claimed speeds. Its claimed sequential read speed of 3,470MB/sec is as fast as any competing NVMe drive, in any practical sense, and its claimed sequential write speed of 2,600MB/sec is second only to the Samsung 970 Evo Plus. Its random read performance of 420,000 IOPS is also very high, although its random write performance (380,000 IOPS) is a little more modest. Add in a class-equalling five-year…

Whether you’re refreshing your coolant, adding components, cleaning your loop or changing your coolant colour, you’ll eventually need to drain the coolant from your system. Drain ports allow coolant to flow out of certain sections of the loop, but they rarely drain more than a third of the coolant. A lot of it will be stuck in tubes, waterblocks and radiators. As a result, you nearly always need to disconnect some sections of the loop in order to remove all the old coolant. It’s usually easier to just use a container to collect the coolant and allow it to flow out of the loop by disconnecting fittings that are well away from your hardware, such as those on the pump, reservoir or radiator. You can then disconnect each component, drain…

REVIEW Argon One If you own a Raspberry Pi, you have no shortages of case choices. From the utilitarian bicolour plastic of the official case, to the please-don’t-sue-us-Nintendo familiarity of the NESPi (reviewed in Issue 176), there are choices for almost every wallet and taste. Argon Forty’s Argon One is a crowdfunded entry into this bustling market, and you really notice its weight when you pick it up. The bulk of the case is made from a single block of surprisingly thick aluminium, finished in an Apple-esque ‘space grey’. Only the bottom half is made from plastic, in a 1980s-aesthetic smoked finish, and you get apply-them-yourself rubber feet included in the bundle. The Argon One’s design is primarily about undoing some of the annoyances surrounding the layout of the Raspberry Pi.…

The pros and cons of vertical GPU mounts Last month’s mini-ITX case group test interested me for several reasons. For starters, it was fascinating to see the sheer variation in the design of these small cases, and how different designs impact cooling. As usual, the larger the case, generally, the better the cooling, but there were one or two exceptions. Kolink’s Rocket, for example, managed to achieve a very respectable GPU temperature, so much so that, despite its high price, I’d still definitely consider using one as a home for my own high-end gaming rig. Conversely, while I love the design of the Raijintek Ophion, as well as the fact that you can squeeze a 240mm radiator inside it, this case offered comparatively poor GPU cooling. The Ophion’s GPU delta…

Recent gaming news has been concerned with the right to offend, in light of musician Joel Zimmerman (also known as Deadmau5) being suspended from Twitch for what is being described as ‘a homophobic slur’. If you read what he actually said (which I won’t repeat here; it’s nasty), it’s not hard to sympathise with the argument that grown men with millions of followers shouldn’t be hurling such insults on Twitch, or indeed anywhere. Broadly, it’s my position that when it comes to the law, no one has the right to not be offended But the argument has now gone into the wider issue of consistency, with Zimmerman claiming in a recent Reddit thread that ‘I’m not going to stand for Twitch’s double standard when it comes to censoring me and…

SUPPLIER www.razer.com Razer has made a comfy niche in the gaming laptop world by carving classy-looking laptops out of aluminium, and the latest Blade 15 is no exception. Physically, not much has changed since last year’s model. The chassis is black and minimalist, with a subtle hinge, clean lines and colour only provided by the keyboard backlight and the lid’s logo. It’s a fantastic-looking machine. Its 18mm thickness is a tiny bit chunkier than last year’s model, but it’s not really a noticeable increase. The 2.1kg weight is fine too – it’s certainly light enough to make the Blade easily portable. The build quality is great as well – the aluminium just doesn’t budge. You lose  some features in the move to a slim and light laptop though. On the…

Sega Saturn Smartphone Controller / £29.99 inc VAT The Sega Saturn Smartphone Controller is a tragically misbegotten device. It succeeds quite well in being a modern, Bluetooth-operated facsimile of the classic 1990s Sega console pads, but it also needs to be remembered that those pads were horrible, and that in capturing the spirit of those pads, this new controller is likewise horrible. The heart of this problem is the awful D-pad. Movement in games is extremely cumbersome and it doesn’t feel good to use in any way. That’s a shame, because the phone holder attached to the pad is really good. You can clip the phone into it and play with the screen above the pad, or detach it and use it as a stand to prop up your phone…

How we test We test cooling ability on LGA1151, LGA2011 and AM4 motherboards. Our LGA1151 test system uses an Intel Core i9-9900K overclocked to 4.9GHz with a 1.22V vcore and an MSI MEG  Z390 Ace motherboard. Our LGA2066 system uses an MSI X299M Gaming Pro Carbon AC, with an Intel Core i9-7900X overclocked to 4.2GHz using a 1.15V vcore. Finally, our AM4 rig uses an Asus ROG Strix  B350-F Gaming and an AMD Ryzen 7 1700 overclocked to 3.9GHz using a 1.425V vcore. All test systems use 16GB of 3000MHz Corsair Vengeance LPX memory, along with a Samsung 960 Pro SSD. It’s all housed in a Fractal Design Meshify C case with an 850W Corsair RM850i PSU and a Zotac GeForce GTX 1080 graphics card, using an up-to-date install of…

SUPPLIER www.watercoolinguk.co.uk We couldn’t quite believe our eyes when we opened the Liquid.cool Vortex One AM240’s box, and saw just what’s included with this kit that costs under £120 inc VAT. You get a combined pump and reservoir, using a low-power pump similar to the popular Laing DDC, along with tubing, fittings, coolant and even a  flow meter. You also get an ATX jumper, a trio of coolant dyes and a  waterblock LED. The manual does a decent effort of explaining the basics, as well as showing you how to put the kit together. However, there’s limited information in some areas of the manual, such as mounting the pump and reservoir. Comparatively, the manual with the EK Water Blocks kit is much more specific, leaving no room for guessing. We…

How we test Lightning-quick NVMe SSDs used to be the reserve of moneyed enthusiasts, but as prices have steadily tumbled, there’s now little reason not to opt for these tiny but terrifically quick drives. So ubiquitous and fast have these drives become, in fact, that we’re already finding drives hitting a performance ceiling, which we wouldn’t have expected just a few years ago. A quick scan of your favourite etailer will reveal a vast choice of affordable models that claim maximum read and write speeds of around 3,500MB/sec and 2,500MB/sec respectively. One difference between these drives is that there’s still a divide between the types of NAND that some drives use. While most use NAND cells each store three bits of information – triple-level cells (TLC) or 3-bit multi-level cells…

What was the last game you completed more than once? What was the last game you even finished? How many recent games did you play for a couple of evenings and then never play again? I’ve been thinking about these questions a lot lately, because my Steam library is scattered with countless part-finished games. Not because I got bored with them, but because they’re simply too big to finish. I sank almost 70 hours into Assassin’s Creed Odyssey while reviewing it, and there are still huge swathes of the map I’ve never explored. I’ve made the argument before about how many games are simply too long. But it’s worth reiterating the question: what is the point of making games that are too long for most people to finish? And, more…

DEVELOPER Innerspace VR / PUBLISHER Vertigo Games / WEBSITE http://afishermanstale-game.com On the surface, there’s nothing to indicate that A Fisherman’s Tale is a VR trailblazer. It starts out as a bizarre story about a wooden puppet fisherman who lives in a lighthouse, whiling away his days building a little model version of his home. None of it makes any sense. Alongside the small fact that you’re a literal puppet, fishermen don’t live in lighthouses, because being a lighthouse keeper is an entirely different job that requires you to not be fishing. The story never properly explains any of the above, but the mechanics at least help to clarify why the story is so odd. Early on in the game, you remove the roof from your lighthouse model to discover a tiny…

The benefits of DIY water cooling compared with air cooling are numerous. For starters, custom water-cooling gear obviously looks fantastic, and you get to choose your own coolants to colour-match it with the rest of your PC too. Your PC is going to turn far more heads if it’s water-cooled than if it just has a large air cooler on top of the CPU. On a less superficial level, the extra cooling capacity you gain by using large radiators, and the increased heat capacity of using coolant compared with air, means that fans on radiators can run much more quietly, yet still offer the same or better cooling as a large air cooler. If you have an aversion to noise, water cooling is the ultimate solution if you want to…

Corsair K70 LUX RGB keyboard with your choice of switches TOTAL VALUE £160 inc VAT / MANUFACTURER www.corsair.com The K70 LUX RGB is a part of Corsair’s LUX flagship line of gaming keyboards, featuring Cherry MX key switches backed by a lightweight, durable aluminium frame and dynamic, multicoloured lighting. The USB pass-through port is positioned for uninterrupted gameplay, and ready for your mouse or wireless headset adaptor. You can also harness the power of CUE for sophisticated macro programming and dramatic lighting effects and animations. Meanwhile, 100 per cent anti-ghosting with full key rollover on USB helps to ensure accuracy, so every keystroke translates directly into accurate gameplay. The contoured, textured FPS and MOBA keycap sets keep you in control, while the Cherry MX key switches give you a linear…