Custom PC UK April 2021

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been thoroughly immersed in the epic landscape of Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla. I’ve never been a fan of previous Assassin’s Creed games, but the history nerd in me loves that you can largely ignore the stealthy assassin aspect of this game, for which I don’t have the patience, and go all out on Viking melee combat, while exploring today’s big cities as they were in the old Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. What also really struck me is just how beautiful this game looks. The attention to detail is superb, the textures look amazing and the scenery is just incredible. It does this despite not having a single mention of DLSS or ray tracing in the graphics options, and we’ve decided to add it to our GPU test…

Intel is lighting the figurative rocket to get its 11th-generation Intel Core processors out the door. New motherboards with its 500-series chipsets (Z590, H570, B560) are already in the shops months before its CPUs are available to fill the sockets. Current Intel 10th-gen CPUs can use these new boards, but I wouldn’t bother, as the upcoming 11th-gen CPUs look set to be considerably better. Will it be worth the wait until March? Well, it’s not like you can buy an AMD Ryzen 9 5900X anyway. AMD’s latest CPUs are scoring all the benchmark wins, so you’d think the perpetual underdog would be seeing its best times ever, but what good are all the awards and reputation if there’s nothing on the shelves to buy? For months there have been back…

The pandemic didn’t give me an excuse to practically live inside video games, I was doing that anyway, but games have now become the only way I get to go anywhere. I often talk about how I spent months in Final Fantasy IX during a difficult period of my life, and credit the game with getting me through it. There’s nothing wrong with that, as long as I could control how much and when I played. It was a way of escaping a few things over which I had no control, without real consequences. Control is what the problems with the lockdown and pandemic are all about. It’s not about whether we prefer being at home playing games rather than going out, it’s the fact we no longer have a…

NVIDIA ANNOUNCES GEFORCE RTX 3060 Nvidia has announced plans to expand its line-up of Ampere gaming GPUs further with the introduction of the GeForce RTX 3060. Priced from £299, the RTX 3060 contains 3,584 CUDA cores, which is a big drop from the 4,864 found in the RTX 3060 Ti (see p39). Bizarrely though, it comes with 12GB of GDDR6 memory, compared to 8GB on the 3060 Ti. That’s likely a product of the narrower 192-bit memory interface, compared with the 256-bit interface on the RTX 3060 Ti. If Nvidia had the choice of equipping it with either 6GB or 12GB of memory, it decided to go for the latter. The RTX 3060 also goes a little way towards making up for its lack of CUDA cores with a higher…

GEFORCE RTX 2060 GETTING RERELEASED? In an apparent bid to appease customers dismayed by the lack of Ampere stock, Nvidia has reportedly resurrected the GeForce RTX 2060 and RTX 2060 Super. Tech site overclocking.com claims that it’s talked to several Nvidia board partners, who say they’ve received GPUs from Nvidia with an aim to remake their Turing-generation cards. It’s not necessarily a terrible idea, but the site also claims that the RTX 2060 cards could be priced at €300 (around £262 inc VAT), with the RTX 2060 Super cards going for just above €400 (around £349 inc VAT). If that’s true, it would represent shockingly bad value for money, given that the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti (if there was any stock) costs £369 inc VAT and offers performance comparable with…

SUPPLIER amazon.co.uk Cooling a CPU with over 20 cores can be a challenge, and when it comes to dealing with Threadripper CPUs, having a large enough contact plate to cover the giant heatspreaders on AMD’s high-end desktop CPUs is also important. Generally, coolers with these big heatspreaders perform better than those without them. At the very least, it gives them an advantage, and helped the Cooler Master MasterLiquid ML360 RGB TR4 to pick up an  award in our recent Threadripper cooler Labs test (see Issue 207, p40). It was also one of the more affordable coolers to offer decent cooling and compatibility with AMD’s Socket TR4 and TR4X, so we were keen to see what Cooler Master has done with this new tweaked version. The MasterLiquid ML360 Mirror TR4 isn’t a…