Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2021 i Custom PC UK

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…

SUPPLIER overclockers.co.uk With products in many PC categories, from liquid coolers to PSUs, it probably escaped most people that Phanteks doesn’t have an all-in-one liquid cooler to its name. Cases, air coolers and RGB lighting are just some of the other products it makes, as well as some very fancy water-cooling components, but it has now teamed up with Asetek to create its very own AIO liquid cooler. The Glacier One is available in both black and white colours, and in a range of sizes, including 240mm, 280mm and the biggest 360mm model here - the Glacier One 360 MP. It uses Asetek’s 7th-generation pump, which sports a pure copper base with dense skived fins and is PWM-controlled. In an interesting move, Phanteks’ addition is a large clip-on housing, which…

SUPPLIER razer.com The BlackShark V2 Pro is one of Razer’s most premium headsets, boasting just the sort of high-end feature set you’d expect for its £180 asking price. It has a wireless connection, surround sound and top-of-the-line headphones, so there’s plenty going on. As well as lots of features, this is also a great-looking headset. All black and almost completely devoid of any flashy design extras –even the Razer logos on each earcup are shiny black on matt black – it’s both a stylish yet modest-looking headset, which has more of a feel of form following function than many other gaming designs. The design is in many ways quite simple too. The headband is a single-piece affair, with an adjustment system that just involves the two metal wires of the…

SUPPLIER nvidia.com With similar performance to the GeForce RTX 2080 Super for under half the price, the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti has proved extremely popular. So much so, in fact, that stock has dried up with little hope of replenishment on the near horizon, as James Gorbold outlines on p114. As with all the Nvidia GPUs on test this month, the board-partner cards from retailers cost more than the Founders Editions, with RTX 3060 Ti cards going from £450 inc VAT on overclockers.co.uk The stock situation is a real shame, because £369 is a fantastic price. If you can afford it, the GeForce RTX 3070 is worth the extra cash, as it properly opens up 2,560 x 1,440 gaming with loads of eye candy. However, if you can’t find the…

SUPPLIER overclockers.co.uk AMD’s Radeon RX 6800 XT got o an awesome start when we fir Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla. W looked sceptically at our test rig, and ran tests several times, but there’s no mist – this £680 card can outperform the GeFor RTX 3090 at not just 1,920 x 1,080 but also 2,560 x 1,440 in this game and it’s not far behind it at 4K. That’s an incredible achievement at this price. If Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla is your main time sink, this is a cracking card if you can find one. And therein lies the rub – there aren’t any. Stock of all new GPUs is pretty dire at the moment, but the situation for the Radeon RX 6800 XT is particularly bleak, as James Gorbold outlines on p114.…

SUPPLIER nvidia.com In normal times, the most remarkable aspect of the GeForce RTX 3090 would be its stunning performance, but in these silly times it’s the fact that there’s actually some stock available. Yes, real graphics cards inside real boxes on real shelves! At the time of writing, scan.co.uk even had stock of three models. On the downside, they’re massively pricey. The £1,399 price for the Founders Edition on nvidia.com is expensive enough, but the cards from board partners at retailers (the ones you might actually be able to buy) typically go for at least £200 more. Is it worth it? Not in terms of bang per buck, no, but if you really want the fastest gaming GPU available, then this is the one. The monstrous price is backed up…

DEVELOPER CD Projekt RED/ PUBLISHER CD Projekt RED Cyberpunk 2077 is a game of dizzying highs and disappointing lows. At its best, it’s a glimpse into the future of open world games, with next-generational visuals, phenomenal environment design, and storytelling that combines Hollywood-level production values with CD Projekt Red’s penchant for human, emotive storytelling. At its worst, Cyberpunk struggles to keep up with the past, with underbaked core systems, tedious RPG mechanics, antiquated open-world design and a general sense that the game isn’t quite finished. On PC, it offers a decent experience but it isn’t even close to being the revolution that the game’s marketing would have you believe. Players assume the role of V who, depending on how you create your character, can either be a counterintelligence agent working…

DEVELOPER Respawn Entertainment / PUBLISHER EA Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond seems like a dream come true for VR. A full-length, classic WWII shooter developed by FPS maestro Respawn Entertainment (whose founders, Jason West and Vince Zampella, created both Medal of Honor: Allied Assault and the original Call of Duty), all designed to showcase the potential of VR. Above and Beyond is easily the most exciting VR project since Half-Life: Alyx. What could possibly go wrong? Sadly, the answer is ‘quite a lot’. Although there’s much to admire about Above and Beyond’s ambition, it never approaches the quality of Half-Life: Alyx. From scripting and pacing issues, to a design attitude that favours scope and spectacle over detail and player experience, Above and Beyond never quite satisfies as much as…

OpenGL enjoyed a 22-year run in the graphics application programming interface (API) space as the sole viable alternative to DirectX on PCs, and the only viable option on non-Microsoft platforms. Then came Metal in 2014, and Vulkan just two years later, both of which completely shattered the mould when it comes to driving modern GPUs on modern systems. A few years on and, while the Apple-exclusive Metal remains as such, Vulkan is now absolutely everywhere as the lingua franca for GPU programming, available on all sorts of devices, from your phone to the most powerful gaming PCs. Let’s dive into its initial development, how it works, and what the future holds for the Khronos GPU programming powerhouse. The birth The evolution of real-time 3D graphics acceleration has been driven in…

Carrier board revives old Spectrums Retro computing enthusiast Alistair Carty is looking to bring long-dead Sinclair ZX Spectrums back to life with a case-compatible carrier board, which is designed to replace the motherboard with a Raspberry Pi Zero single-board computer. Designed to fit in original or reproduction ZX Spectrum cases, the board links to the original keyboard and offers an HDMI video output. Software isn’t run natively, however, but on the Raspberry Pi Zero via the open-source FUSE emulator. The boards are being crowdfunded on kickstarter.com, priced at £20 for a bare PCB, £75 for a kit or £125 for a fully assembled board (all inc VAT.) FUZE launches 89p Switch game bundle Educational computing specialist FUZE has launched a low-cost package of games written in its eponymous programming environment…

The 486 went into development at an interesting time for Intel. The Intel 386 line had seen Intel snatch a victory from the jaws of a disaster, making up for the failure of Intel’s new-fangled iAPX432 architecture with a mix of strong compatibility and great performance. Its design team, led by chief architect John Crawford, had dragged the 16-bit x86 architecture into the 32-bit era and kept Intel ahead of the pack. But other manufacturers were moving fast. Arch-rival AMD was already developing its own 386 CPUs and only Intel’s litigation was delaying their release. Cyrix was already producing Intel-compatible maths co-processors and was threatening to move into CPUs. Intel needed an awesome new product. It combined a tighter, more streamlined pipeline with an integrated L1 cache On the other…

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…

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 corsair.com The latest addition to Corsair’s gaming headset line-up includes both analogue wired input and Bluetooth connections, making the HS70 Bluetooth ideal for use with a gaming laptop, a console gamepad’s audio port or a mobile device via Bluetooth. The design of the HS70 Bluetooth is all but identical to the company’s HS60 headsets (such as the HS60 Haptic reviewed in Issue 209), with the main difference being the addition of wireless support. This means it retains the same simple but stylish look and solid build quality. Less welcome is the fact that the HS70 Bluetooth has the same level of comfort as the HS60. The headband has fairly shallow, not overly soft padding, so it doesn’t do a particularly good job of distributing the weight of the headset.…

TILE SLIM / £24.99 inc VAT SUPPLIER thetileapp.com The Tile Slim is the bigger, flatter brother of the Tile series of key ring tracking devices. The Slim is shaped like a slightly chunky credit card, so it can fit in a wallet. The Tile Slim runs off a battery with a three-year lifespan, so in that way it could be seen as disposable, but three years for an inexpensive tracking gizmo is a pretty decent run. The Slim is also rated as waterproof for up to 30 minutes in 1m of water, which ought to be enough for most situations. Setup is easy and the Tile App is highly polished and simple to use on Apple or Android devices. It allows you to activate an alarm on your Tile Slim…

SUPPLIER nvidia.com We’ll admit that it’s hard to rate current crop of GPUs when such an important factor and supply is all over the place. We’ve listed the official nvidia.com price of £469 inc VAT for the RTX 3070 above, but the more realistic board-partner prices start from around £530 inc VAT  at retailers. That still makes it a fair bit cheaper than the Radeon RX 6800 in terms of retail prices, and the GeForce RTX 3070 is at least turning up in limited quantities, unlike the practically nonexistent Radeon RX 6800 (see p114). Assuming that stock does become more widely available, and you can find a GeForce RTX 3070 for £530 inc VAT, it’s definitely worth buying, as this card crosses the threshold into 2,560 x 1,440 gaming at…

SUPPLIER nvidia.com Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3080 landed with a sonic boom last year, boosting ray-tracing performance well beyond its Turing-based predecessors, including the mighty RTX 2080 Ti, and significantly improving raw shading power too. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang confidently assured owners of Pascal GPUs that it was now safe to upgrade, and it’s been sold out since day one. James Gorbold has an update on the stock situation on p114, and while supply still can’t meet demand, cards are still arriving, with pre-orders gradually trickling out to customers. That’s not ideal, but it’s better than the situation with the latest Radeon cards. In terms of specs, the RTX 3080 is based on the same GA102 GPU as in the RTX 3090, but with one Graphics Processing Cluster disabled. This gives…

How we test Gaming chairs have come in for a bit of stick since they first started appearing a few years ago. All style and no substance with overinflated price tags is the general cynic’s refrain, but what’s the reality of the situation? Are they worth buying or are you better off with a premium office chair? We’ve tested six gaming chairs priced between £225 and £429 inc VAT, which may sound like a lot compared with the bargain basement bottom warmers you’ll find in your local office supplies store. However, the step up in features and quality is huge, even for the cheaper chairs on test. Sturdy bases, recline support, headrests, ample padding, adjustable armrests and wheels that actually roll are the sort of features you’d expect to cost…

Core component bundles The fundamental specifications we recommend for various types of PC. Just add your preferred case and power supply, and double-check there’s room in your case for your chosen components, especially the GPU cooler and graphics card. We’ve largely stopped reviewing power supplies, as the 80 Plus certification scheme has now effectively eliminated unstable PSUs. Instead, we’ve recommended the wattage and minimum 80 Plus certification you should consider for each component bundle. You can then choose whether you want a PSU with modular or captive cables. Mini PCs Our favourite components for building a micro-ATX or mini-ITX PC. Always double-check how much room is available in your chosen case before buying your components. Some mini-ITX cases don’t have room for large all-in-one liquid coolers, for example, or tall…

DEVELOPER The Coalition/ PUBLISHER Microsoft Creating a single-player origin story for a multiplayer mode might seem like the height of hubris, but Hivebusters proves to be a thoroughly entertaining addition to Gears (of War) 5. A Gears campaign in miniature, Hivebusters is designed as an introduction to the main game’s Escape mode, which sees players working together to infiltrate and destroy a Locust Hive. It tells the story of that mode’s three main playable characters, Keegan, Lahni and Mac, as they embark on their very first Hivebusting mission across the tropical Galangi islands. Hivebusters packs an impressive amount of variety into its three-hour campaign. The opening mission sees your squad stranded on one of the tropical islands, the vibrant colours and lush vegetation of which are a far cry from…

This project came about because my dad started gaming in recent years. He had an older laptop he had been both gaming and working on, and it was in need of an upgrade. So, I wanted to build him a  desktop computer that would let him play games at above ‘low’ graphic settings. The extra fun part of this build was that I wanted the specs and design to be a complete surprise for him. Solidifying the concept and design of the Spirit of Motion was a multi-month process. I created lists of his favourite things, asked him some leading questions, and landed with a rough plan for an art deco era car’s front grille with Candy Apple Red paint. He has always loved early automotive design and hotrod-era candy…

Why Thunderbolt is my new favourite tech If you’d asked me a year ago whether or not I’d be writing about Thunderbolt 3 in my first column of 2021, I’d have laughed at the remotest possibility. It’s always seemed like Apple-centric, expensive and largely reserved for external storage – areas that don’t really interest me for the most part. Sure, it offers blistering transfer speeds, but USB 3 has been enough for me, especially as the latest portable SSDs can dish out up to 1,000MB/sec over USB 3 now anyway. However, following a few recent experiences, I’m considering it an essential feature for my future PC. This is down to a shedload of reasons, from reducing cable clutter to upgrading mini-ITX PCs and home network speeds. Here’s why. If you’ve…

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…

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…

SUPPLIER roccat.com Costing £50 inc VAT, Roccat’s Burst Pro isn’t quite what you’d call cheap, but in a world of seemingly simple gaming mice going for upwards of £70, this new ultra-lightweight gaming rodent is a relatively affordable option. In accordance with its modest price, you don’t get a lot of extra features, but there’s plenty of the latest technology and trends in mouse design included here. The headline figure for this mouse is its weight. It tips the scales at just 68g, putting it right up against the lightest mice around, such as the Glorious PC Gaming Race Model O and Endgame Gear XM1 (both reviewed in issue 195). It couples this weight with a design that incorporates the new trend for perforating the chassis of the mouse with…

How we test We’ve introduced a couple of new game benchmarks this month. First up is Cyberpunk 2077 (see p65), which is a high-profile and challenging game for even the latest GPUs. We run our own custom benchmark, which incorporates a 60-second drive around Night City recorded with FrameView. We run it at the Ultra preset with no ray tracing, and with the Medium Ray Tracing preset on Nvidia GPUs – the game currently doesn’t support ray tracing on AMD GPUs. You ideally want a 99th percentile result above 45fps with an average above 60fps. Our second new test is the epically awesome Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla. We run the built-in benchmark at the Ultra High preset with resolution scaling at 100 per cent, recording the results with FrameView. A 99th…

SUPPLIER overclockers.co.uk Let’s start with the big shock, which is that AMD’s £600 Radeon RX 6800 actually managed to beat the GeForce RTX 3090 in Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla at 1080p. This game is clearly well optimised for AMD’s GPUs, but that’s still astonishing. There’s clearly a decent amount of shader power on offer here. The Radeon RX 6800 sits at the bottom of AMD’s ‘Big Navi’ stack, using the same Navi 21 GPU as its bigger siblings, but with just 60 of its Compute Units enabled. That gives you 3,840 stream processors and 60 corresponding Ray Accelerators. What’s more, you also get the same memory system as even the flagship Radeon RX 6900 XT, with 16GB of GDDR6 memory running at 16GHz effective, giving you a total memory bandwidth of…

SUPPLIER overclockers.co.uk It’s been the best part of a d since AMD had a GPU that compete with the best Nvid offer, but with some help from AMD’ Ryzen revenue, as well as a new GP architecture, it’s now almost there. We say 'almost' because the current flagship of AMD’s ‘Big Navi’ GPU line-up, the Radeon RX 6900 XT, can’t keep up with the GeForce RTX 3090. All of AMD’s current Radeon RX 6000-series GPUs are based on the same Navi 21 GPU, but with different numbers of compute units enabled. In the case of the Radeon RX 6900 XT, you get 80 of them, and they each come with one of AMD’s Ray Accelerator units for real-time ray tracing in games. The result is a whopping count of 5,120…

What makes a great video game? There are many reasons why a game might turn out mediocre or worse, ranging from bugs and technical issues to imbalanced mechanics or poorly implemented design. Similarly, there are lots of ways a game might stand out, such as having a distinctive art style, such as Limbo, or introducing a new mechanic, such as Watch Dogs Legion. These features don’t necessarily make a game great, however. A game can be bug-free and execute its design well, and still only be a satisfactory experience at best, such as Crysis 2. Limbo and Watch Dogs Legion might be enjoyable, but they wouldn’t occupy the virtual hall of fame. A game can be bug-free and execute its design well, and still only be satisfactory at best If…

DEVELOPER 343 Industries/ PUBLISHER Microsoft Studios The Master Chief Collection’s staggered arrival on PC completes with the release of Halo 4. The first Halo title developed by 343 Industries rather than Bungie, it’s generally considered the series’ weakest entry. However, while it’s flawed in certain areas, Halo 4 offers one of the series’ more interesting storylines. It’s more personal than earlier games, with Master Chief searching for a way back to Earth after being stranded in space at the end of Halo 3. The story mainly concerns Chief’s relationship with Cortana, his AI Companion who is suffering from the virtual equivalent of dementia, which can only be remedied by getting back to Earth. It’s a surprisingly intimate and emotive narrative thread, sadly undermined by a couple of issues. The first…

REVIEW Kobol Helios64 Kobol isn’t a name that’s likely to spring to mind in the network attached storage (NAS) market, but the Helios64 isn’t the company’s first product. Four years ago, Kobol released the Helios4, an open-spec Arm-based NAS in an eye-catching laser-cut acrylic chassis via crowdfunding site Kickstarter. The Helios4 was a modest success, but lacked power and professionalism. That’s where the Helios64 comes in. The acrylic chassis has been dropped in favour of an all-metal, surprisingly compact design with a magnetic front panel and five drive bays, while the board powering it offers a 6-core 64-bit processor, 4GB of RAM and a 16GB eMMC. There are a couple of caveats, however. The first is that while the processor does indeed have six cores, they’re not all equal. The…

The past few months have seen some fantastic new PC products launched, such as GeForce 30-series and Ryzen 5000-series. While both these launches have been plagued with supply issues on specific models, particularly the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, 3080 and Ryzen 9 5900X, the vast majority of our pre-orders for the other models have now been fulfilled. Sadly, with the inevitable lull in manufacturing and logistics over the Christmas and New Year period, there’s still extremely little free stock available for customers to order. However, at least there’s a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel. Supply of the Ryzen 9 5900X is still very bleak, with hundreds of pre-orders still yet to be fulfilled Unfortunately, the supply situation on the aforementioned three models is still pretty bleak.…