Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2021 i Custom PC UK

An AMD-branded Radeon RX 6900 XT graphics card with liquid cooling has been detailed on the website of UK system builder PC Specialist, along with a few other sites. There’s been no official word from AMD about it yet, but PC Specialist’s page says the ‘AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT Liquid Cooled graphics card enables the best of 4K gaming with ultra-high frame rates at max settings, with the noise and temperature benefits of liquid cooling designs’. The card is attached to a single-fan radiator. Hardware enthusiast website videocardz.com has also dug up some details from other retailers and leaks around the world, which suggest the liquid-cooled card will have a 2250MHz game clock, giving it a 185MHz boost over the standard Radeon RX 6900 XT. The maximum boost clock…

SUPPLIER ebay.co.uk Well, would you look at that? Another new graphics card that you can’t actually buy anywhere. Who’d have thought it? Nvidia may have attempted to cut Ethereum miners out of the loop with its Lite Hash Rate system, but the insatiable demand for new graphics cards after a nine-month shortage is clearly so titanic that nothing can stop the scalping bulldozer in its tracks. At a nominal price of £529 inc VAT, the RTX 3070 Ti would already be asking a lot from mid-range gamers. We’re so used to bonkers eBay pricing, we sometimes forget that £500 is more than most people pay for a graphics card even in normal times. At the current eBay price of ~£1,100, it’s just out of the question unless you’re desperate. If…

SUPPLIER overclockers.co.uk Large air coolers have plenty going for them. They’re much less hassle than a full water-cooling system, but can often handle the heat produced by high-end overclocked CPUs while remaining relatively quiet. You don’t have to worry about pumps, coolant or leaks – you can just fit them and then forget about them. Their size can be an issue, though, taking up a huge amount of space around the CPU socket, but that hasn’t prevented IceGiant from creating one of the largest aid coolers we’ve ever seen in the ProSiphon Elite. Thankfully, it’s only 164mm tall, so it’s unlikely to run into too many issues with CPU clearance in the vast majority of ATX and micro-ATX cases. It’s compatible with all current sockets too, including all generations of…

SUPPLIER currys.co.uk The Sabre RGB Pro is Corsair’s new palm grip-focused gaming mouse, which incorporates a large, rounded, curvy design to make for a comfortable, palm-filling shape. It also embraces the modern move towards lighter mice – a significant shift for Corsair, given that its mice have tended to be on the heavy side – and the Sabre RGB Pro weighs just 74g. The most obvious and long-running comparison to the Sabre is Razer’s DeathAdder series, with its similar non-symmetrical design, wide back end, raised left edge and downward-sloping right edge. It’s similar also to the Roccat Kone Pro (see p28) but that mouse is a littler shorter and wider at the back. The upshot of this design is a mouse that fills the underside of your palm, making for…

How we test When testing CPU coolers, it’s important to examine performance across different sockets, as the mounting mechanisms vary between them. We’ve seen differences here in the past and this month’s Labs test is no different. This month we’re using the latest 8-core CPUs from AMD and Intel – the Core i9-11900K and Ryzen 7 5800X – to see how each of our chosen coolers performs on Socket AM4 and LGA1200 CPUs. With the Intel CPU, we’ve left it at stock speed, but enabled Adaptive Boost technology, which can hit 5.1GHz across all cores and also dish out a lot of heat – a great test for any cooler. Meanwhile, our Ryzen 7 5800X was overclocked to 4.6GHz using a vcore of 1.25V. We used an MSI MEG Z590…

SUPPLIER aquatuning.co.uk We liked a number of features found within the be quiet! Silent Loop 2 when we first took a look at it a couple of issues ago. It has powerful Silent Wings 3 fans that boast a speed rating of 2,200rpm, giving it more scope for high-end cooling than slower fans when it’s needed. What’s more, these fans proved to be barely any louder than the far slower-spinning fans on the Antec Neptune 240 in action. The Silent Loop 2’s tri-chamber pump is also exceptionally quiet, and uses an enlarged cold plate in order to improve performance on CPUs with large heatspreaders, such as AMD’s Threadripper chips. There are also two interesting inclusions in the form of a fill port and coolant bottle. This is still an all-in-one…

SUPPLIER overclockers.co.uk The Phanteks Glacier One 240MPH HALOS differs from the Glacier One MP we reviewed a few issues ago in one key area, which is the inclusion of Phanteks’ HALOS fan rings, which are equipped with RGB lighting. These rings are available to buy separately, and can jazz up any 120mm fan, especially those with transparent or semi-transparent blades, or white models. Sensibly, Phanteks has included white 120mm fans here, which look fantastic when they’re illuminated. Our particular sample also sported white HALOS fan rings, and a white pump and radiator too, so it would look amazing in a white-themed PC. The pump top is separate to the actual pump section, and simply sits on top of it using magnets. It’s there purely for aesthetic reasons, but we can’t…

SUPPLIER ebuyer.com While we originally planned to look at what the latest mid-range Wi-Fi 6 routers have to offer, we decided the Netgear Nighthawk Pro Gaming XR1000 was interesting – and just about affordable – enough to cover in this group test. However, its higher price makes it less directly comparable to the other units on test. As well as boasting a speedy AX5400 rating, with peak theoretical 5GHz speeds of up to 4,800Mb/sec, this router’s key claim is its gaming credentials. It runs Netgear’s DumaOS, which includes features for fine-tuning several aspects of how your system connects to online games. Specifically, it allows you to geo-filter which game servers with which to connect, so you can ensure the best ping. So, if you’re in Europe you can block servers…

Resident Evil Village is both a sequel to Resident Evil 7 and a spiritual successor to Resident Evil 4. It’s also a grab bag of various ideas and influences taken from its own series and further afield. These disparate inspirations are carefully knitted together, then sprinkled with impressive-looking snow and some half-decent first-person combat. In story, if not in spirit, Village is a direct continuation of 7. Players once again assume control of Ethan Winters – the gaming world’s most tepid protagonist – who, after surviving the Baker Mansion in the last game, is now living in Europe with his wife Mia and new-born daughter Rose. Their precise location isn’t divulged, but it appears to be towards Europe’s eastern fringes, possibly Romania. Either way, the Winters’ peaceful domestic life is…

DEVELOPER Fast Travel Games/PUBLISHER Fast Travel Games Wraith: The Oblivion: Afterlife is a suitably spooky horror game that struggles to make the most of its VR DNA. It offers a relatively interesting horror story and some tense, evade-the-monster sequences in the vein of Alien: Isolation. However, the experience is undermined by tedious visual design and a paucity of interactive opportunities. You assume the role of a former photographer named Ed Miller. ‘Former’ because you were recently killed during a disastrous séance. Trapped inside the sprawling Los Angeles mansion where the séance took place, you must find a way to escape your spiritual prison, while also investigating what exactly happened to you and the other participants. Like most games in which you play as a ghost, Wraith immediately struggles with this…

We’ve gone to town on our painting guide in our full guide on p102 this month, as painting is one of the more involved ways to mod your case. Here, though, we’re focusing on a slightly more advanced (but still fairly easy) way to make your painted PC even more impressive. We’ll be adding a marble effect to the paint, but there are many more effects you can choose from companies such as Montana and Plastikote. The marble effect spray comes from Montana and is available in a few colours, including black, white and silver. Start by following our guide on p102 until you get to the part where you need to apply the colour coat, which is where you’ll need to make some key decisions if you want to…

Even if you’re not a fan of super-bright rainbow lighting effects, illuminating your PC with coloured lighting can add flair while still looking tasteful. If you’re going for a specific colour scheme, RGB lighting can complement it, and it’s usually easy to combine components into groups so the lighting is easy to manage, even if you’re dealing with lighting tech from multiple manufacturers. Most waterblocks come with RGB lighting, which is often powered using 3-pin digital RGB headers. As such, you’ll need to use your motherboard’s software or another application that can tie your motherboard’s control to its own software, such as Corsair’s iCUE. Manufacturers such as Phanteks offer a huge range of RGB components, and while they use proprietary connectors to hook up to each other and Phanteks’ own…

Can’t buy a GPU? Have a go at modding Every now and then we undertake a Dream PC build of our own (see p74), which means I get to play with some new toys. This time, the highlight for me was a case I’d been itching to get my hands on for a while. Rather than using a case that offers good air cooling out of the box, this time I decided to go for a blank slate and use Lian Li’s O11D Mini. I chose this case for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it is indeed a blank slate, so you can kit out the case with your own fans and other hardware – that’s exactly what you want if you’re splashing some serious cash and want to cherry-pick…

AMD has finally released its equivalent of Nvidia’s DLSS tech, called FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR). Like DLSS, it works on the principle of upscaling gaming graphics to higher resolutions to lessen the workload and improve performance. Unlike DLSS, however, it doesn’t require AMD-specific hardware, and works on Nvidia’s GPUs too. AMD claims that FSR can improve performance by up to 2.4x at 4K on average in the technology’s Performance mode, when compared with running at 4K natively. Four modes are available – Performance, Balanced, Quality and Ultra Quality, with AMD claiming that ‘image quality is almost indistinguishable from the target native resolution’ in the latter mode’. According to AMD, FSR’s ‘spatial upscaling technology utilises an advanced edge reconstruction algorithm to analyse features in the source image and recreate them at…

SUPPLIER ebay.co.uk Read the room, Nvidia. We’ve just endured nine months of catastrophic stock shortages, your GPUs are going for absurd prices on eBay and you messed up your last attempt to limit mining performance with an accidental driver release. Was this the best time to release a new card for over £1,000? Really? We’ll give you a hint – no. Not surprisingly, the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti sold out soon after its launch, and the cards are now going for around £1,700 on eBay. That might be a smaller markup than we saw the last time around, but Nvidia’s Lite Hash Rate feature, which limits Ethereum mining performance, clearly isn’t enough to quell the current swollen demand. That’s not particularly surprising, given the pent-up demand from gamers unable to…

SUPPLIER box.co.uk The Roccat Kone Pro is the newest addition to the company’s line-up of gaming mice, which also includes our current ultra-lightweight mouse of choice, the Burst Pro. The Kone Pro is in fact even lighter than that model, weighing in at just 66g. However, it eschews the modern trend for symmetrical lightweight mouse shapes and instead has a resolutely right-handed design. This lopsided shape, with a high left side that slopes down to the right, makes for a more comfortable wrist angle for right-handed users, in the same way as the raised centre portion of ergonomic keyboards. This design particularly enhances the comfort of this mouse for use with a palm grip, where your whole hand is draped over the mouse. However, the right edge where your left…

SUPPLIER scan.co.uk Asus’ TUF hardware usually tries to balance performance with value, and the Dash F15 is no different – this laptop costs £1,299 inc VAT, but it includes an RTX 3070 and a new Core i7-11370H processor. This 11th-gen Intel CPU has four Hyper-Threaded cores, alongside base and boost speeds of 3.3GHz and 4.8GHz, and a maximum TDP of 35W – that’s 10W lower than the chips usually used in gaming laptops. Intel wants this CPU to find a home inside slimmer, lighter laptops, but Asus has redressed the balance by deploying performance modes that sometimes push the chip back up to 45W with higher clock speeds. There are power considerations with the RTX 3070 8GB too. In this machine, it runs at 1290MHz with a boost peak of…

SUPPLIER overclockers.co.uk While Alpenföhn’s Glacier Water 240 ARGB appears to be fairly basic for a price that’s just shy of £150, when other coolers are more lavishly equipped with software or exquisite aesthetics, it makes up for this by coming equipped with a wireless remote control for its digital RGB lighting. It’s the only cooler on test to do so, making it simple to flick through colours and lighting effects without the need for software. The actual RGB lighting, as you’d expect at this price, extends not just to the pump housing, but to the fans too. That’s good, but bear in mind that this feat is also matched by the far cheaper Antec Neptune 240. However, the Alpenföhn Glacier Water 240 ARGB’s lighting is far superior to that of…

SUPPLIER scan.co.uk The £150 price bracket used to be considered the extreme premium end of AIO liquid coolers, and rightly so seeing as you can build a cheap custom water-cooling loop for just a bit more. However, while other Corsair coolers have offered software control and RGB lighting, the iCUE H100i Elite Capellix goes a few steps further. For starters, the lighting comes from Corsair’s Capellix RGB LEDs, which are super-bright, vivid and accurate in terms of colour reproduction. You also get replacement pump tops and an iCUE Commander Core hub in the box. The latter has six fan channels, as well as Corsair-specific RGB lighting ports, and gives you the ability to use Corsair’s excellent iCUE software to control not just your cooler’s lighting and fans, but those of…

How we test While there’s currently a lot of talk about mesh network systems that use multiple Wi-Fi access points to distribute and extend your network, such systems don’t come cheap and for many homes, they're overkill. If you live in a little flat, a two-up, two-down terrace or a small three-bedroom home, it’s likely that a single, good-quality router will cover the whole house, with a mesh system only needed if you extend into the loft or want to work at the bottom of the garden. As such, we’ve grabbed six conventional standalone routers, although most of them are compatible with each company’s mesh systems if you want to extend them, to see just what features and performance you can get for £100-£200. To test the routers, we set…

SUPPLIER amazon.co.uk The Linksys MR9600 is a mid-sized router in this test. Its footprint of 280 x 170mm is sizeable and it rises to 163mm with its antennae extended, but several other models are quite a bit wider or taller still. It has four antennae, as befits its 4x4 spatial streams for its 5GHz channel (2x2 for the 2.4GHz channel), which rotate to sit flush with the sides or stand proud. Given their slim profile and the low-slung overall design of the unit, the whole router looks and feels like a home theatre device. You could conceivably find this router a home in a cabinet below a TV, rather than hidden away in a corner or plonked on top of the cabinet, as would be the only option for taller…

SUPPLIER ebuyer.com Boasting Wi-Fi speeds of up to AX5400 and festooned with six aerials, the TP-Link Archer AX73 certainly looks like it will offer good value for its £170 price tag. Like the Linksys MR9600, this is a shallow, low-slung rectangular unit measuring just 147mm from front to back. This again makes it more suited to potentially being stowed away, although of course, for the best coverage, you’ll want to have your router out in the open. The aesthetic here isn’t quite as slick as the Linksys. The six aerials sprouting from the back and sides simply outnumber the four of the Linksys and they lack the same sleek profile. The front of the router doesn’t have quite the same home theatre look either, although the diagonal ventilation pattern on…

Originally released in 2010, Nier was an ambitious but compromised Japanese RPG. It boasted an ambitious storyline, inventive quest design and a fascinating party of characters ranging from foul-mouthed sorceresses to talking books. However, it was let down by terrible performance and an overemphasis on repetition, and this remaster attempts to smooth out some of Nier’s kinks. Set in a future so far-flung it has reverted to medieval fantasy, Nier sees you play as a precocious teenage boy seeking a way to cure his juvenile sister of an illness known as the Scrawl. During his travels, he encounters a powerful, sentient book known as Grimoire Weiss, who may hold the key to ending the Scrawl. Unfortunately, Weiss has lost his memory, and you must help him reclaim it by locating…

Rebellion has announced a VR entry into its massively popular Sniper Elite series. Sniper Elite VR sees you play as an Italian anti-fascist resistance fighter attempting to sabotage Nazi U-Boat operations on the island of Sicily. This isn’t a static arcade experience where you shoot waves of Nazis from a belltower or mountaintop. Instead, it’s a fully fledged Sniper Elite campaign, offering 18 missions where you’ll sneak and blast your way through an array of Nazi-occupied towns and facilities. You’ll be able to freely move around environments, and use an array of weapons such as pistols, STEN guns and grenades alongside sniper rifles. Sniper Elite VR will also include all the mechanics you’d expect from a Sniper Elite game, such as stealth, the grisly X-Ray system and shooting Nazis in…

You’ll need to tread carefully when you first enter the world of water cooling, as it can go wrong. Thankfully, in many instances leaks won’t actually harm your hardware, especially if you’re using a low-conductivity coolant. Of course, if you douse your CPU socket or VRMs in any water-based coolant, you’re likely to fry your hardware if it’s powered on. However, modern water-cooling components are designed not to leak, with plenty of fail-safes and elaborate ways to identify leaks before they happen too. There are only a handful of key components in any water-cooling loop, and these include the waterblocks for your CPU and graphics card, as well as the radiators to cool the coolant. You’ll also need tubing to connect all the parts together, and fittings to secure the…

Ever wanted to put a radiator in a place where your case doesn’t have a mount? Do you want to add fan blow holes to boost cooling or expand a water-cooling system? Custom fan mounts are one of the best ways to make an otherwise stock case look unique, and have the benefit of improving cooling and boosting water-cooling potential too. You might want to perform other cutting tasks too, and the same rules apply here for any case-cutting jobs. As always, don’t start cutting with your hardware installed in the case. It needs to be removed first, and your case cleaned before you reinstall it. If possible, remove the panel you intend to cut, but if this involves drilling out rivets, it’s possible to do most cutting with the…

Engraving is a fun and easy way to customise your PC, with its only real drawbacks being its requirement for a steady hand, plenty of time, a rotary tool with appropriate attachments and an appropriate work surface. If your case is covered in fragile glass then you’ll need to consider etching instead, but acrylic or metal panels are ideal surfaces for engraving. You can either engrave freehand using grinding tips for a rotary tool, or trace out your design using carbon copy paper overlaid by an image of your choice. A trick here is to head to an image editing program, such as Paint.net, convert it to black and white and then invert the colours. This will show you how your image might look once it’s engraved, and also highlight…

As Wi-Fi has steadily improved, and especially with the advent of mesh Wi-Fi systems such as the Netgear Orbi or Google Wi-Fi, it’s easy to think that all other forms of home networking are pointless relics of a bygone era. It’s a wireless world now, so why would you go back? However, in reality, the situation isn’t that simple. For a start, mesh Wi-Fi systems can get expensive pretty quickly, with each node generally setting you back at least £100. If you want to stretch your network all the way to a new home office at the bottom of a garden, you need at least three units to get a reliable, speedy connection, even in a modest two or three-bedroom house. All forms of Wi-Fi are also prone to interference…

SUPPLIER overclockers.co.uk With its price of just £80 inc VAT for an RGB-equipped cooler, you really can’t go wrong with the Antec Neptune 240 – it’s been our affordable all-in-one liquid cooler of choice since we first reviewed it. The fact that you get RGB lighting on both the fan and pump, not to mention a fan and lighting hub with a manual RGB controller thrown into the box, is amazing at this price. However, there’s some stiff competition this month, so the key questions for Antec’s venerable 240mm AIO liquid cooler are whether it can hold its value, a well as whether it’s worth spending a bit more money. Interestingly, with the Neptune’s design, the pump isn’t actually located in the usual housing that sits on the CPU, but…

SUPPLIER overclockers.co.uk Better-known for its cases than CPU coolers, the first liquid cooler we’ve seen from Lian Li impressed us from the outset with some solid-feeling fans equipped with anti-vibration mounts, not to mention a brushed aluminium-encased radiator and pump. It looks fantastic, and unlike most of the radiators included with the other coolers on test, you’d actually want to make the 240mm model here the centrepiece of your PC. The lighting is high-quality and accurate too, with vivid colours that looked better than the lighting from cheaper coolers such as the Antec Neptune 240, and the semi-transparent fan blades diffused the colours attractively as well. What’s more, the pump unit has a large ring of densely packed circles, which allow the light to shine through them. Plus, if you…

Over the past couple of years, horror-focused gaming website Dread XP has collaborated with small and solo indie developers to produce eclectic collections of short horror games. Subtitled The Hunt, this latest collection is directed by David Szymanski, developer of the incredible retro-FPS DUSK. Offering seven short games, The Hunt is a great example of the weirder side of indie game development. All seven games are horror experiences that involve hunting in some context, but vary wildly. The two best games are Black Relic and The Fruit. In the former, you play as a medieval monk battling hordes of cultists with a crossbow, as the theft of a dangerous relic turns your peaceful monastery into a fiery hellscape. It’s a tense and gritty survival horror with vivid and crunchy pixel…

Totally Accurate Battle Simulator (TABS) attempts to answer pressing historical hypotheticals, such as ‘who would win in a fight between pirates and Vikings, assuming everyone was drunk?’ It’s a lightweight strategy game where you pitch armies from various eras against each other, then watch them stagger around like a herd of fainting goats trapped on a bouncy castle. There’s a campaign mode and a sandbox mode. Both involve the same simple premise of selecting a bunch of units from a range of different historical armies – represented as googly-eyed mannequins with bodies made of rubber – then pressing Fight, whereupon those armies duke it out through a combination of simple AI and physics-powered attacks. Sandbox mode lets you field both armies how you like; the campaign mode sets you more…

HTC has released its latest commercial headset, the Vive Pro 2. The new headset represents HTC’s push to regain its position as the premium headset manufacturer over Valve, with an incredibly high resolution and an equally lofty price. The Vive Pro 2’s whopping 5K resolution offers 2,448 x 2,448 per eye, compared to just 1,440 x 1,600 per eye for the Valve Index. According to HTC, the Vive Pro 2’s display virtually eliminates the screen door effect that has plagued VR for years, while also minimising blurring in the periphery of the user’s vision. The Vive Pro 2 also increases the headset’s field of view to 120 degrees, and includes several other features, such as a ‘quick adjustable sizing dial’ and ‘3D Spatial sound’. It also has a price tag…

The sheer number of off-the-shelf components available these days means it’s quite easy to build a unique, or at least nearly unique, water-cooled PC. However, not every component will fit in the place you want it in every PC case, and if you case is quite old, it may not have the right mounts for components such as pumps and reservoirs. Also, while distro plates look great, tailor-made examples are only available for a small selection of cases. Mounting pumps and reservoirs in cases used to be a pain, and drilling holes in cases used to be routine for this purpose. These days, fan-mounted combined pump and reservoirs are commonplace, so you can make use of a fan, fan mount or radiator as a universal location to secure a pump…

Arduboy FX The credit-card size Arduboy, reviewed back in Issue 162, wasn’t the first Arduino-compatible handheld console – even discounting the delays surrounding its crowdfunding campaign, it was soundly beaten to market by the bulkier but more capable Gamebuino (see Issue 134). Its extremely compact dimensions – thin enough to slide into most wallets, although at the risk of scratching the plastic covering the single-colour OLED display – ensured its popularity, though, and now it’s back as the improved Arduboy FX. There’s no massive overhaul of the platform here – the Arduboy FX shares the same physical dimensions and the vast majority of the parts found in its predecessor. Both consoles are driven by a Microchip ATmega32U4 microcontroller with 2.5KB of RAM, a 1KB EEPROM and 32KB of flash memory.…

Arduino has officially launched its competitor to Raspberry Pi Pico, the Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect. It’s more expensive, but it packs in a range of impressive features. Designed to be pin-compatible with the Arduino Nano and fully supported in the Arduino IDE and Arduino IoT Cloud, it’s powered by the same RP2040 microcontroller as Raspberry Pi Pico, but boasts 16MB of external flash and support for Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.2 and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). It also has an on-board six-degrees-of-freedom inertial measurement unit (IMU) and a microphone. The board is available from store.arduino.cc for $24.50 US (around £17.35 ex VAT).…

TOTAL PROJECT TIME/7 DAYS Summer is the best time of year to spray-paint your PC, as you’re more likely to get a better finish and the paints will dry much faster than in winter too. It’s also easier to get outside into well-ventilated spaces, and you don’t have to spend hours outside in freezing temperatures either. This month we’re taking you through the process of spraying your PC case, whether it’s screwed or riveted together, and covering all the information you need to make the process as pain-free as possible, while still resulting in a fantastic finish. The products you need are readily available and cost no more than they did two years ago, so unlike some PC components, spray-painting your PC is affordable and a great way to transform…

It’s a classic case of being the right company with the right tech at the right time. 3Dfx launched its revolutionary Voodoo Graphics chipset just as fully polygonal 3D graphics hit the mainstream and PC gamers wanted an easy and accessible way to get them. In late 1996, Quake and Tomb Raider had just been released, the Nintendo 64 was out in Japan and North America, and the Sony PlayStation and Sega Saturn were still in their first year. Reliant purely on CPU horsepower, and with no dedicated 3D hardware to back it up, the PC was beginning to lose its place as the king of gaming platforms. Sure, it had a bunch of 2D/3D accelerator cards, but they were too damn slow to make any difference. With the Voodoo…