Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2021 i Custom PC UK

SUPPLIER scan.co.uk With a price of £310, the Asus ROG Strix Z590-I Gaming WiFi is far from cheap, costing around £40 more than the excellent Gigabyte Z590I Vision D. Both boards sport Thunderbolt 4, but the ROG Strix Z590-I Gaming WiFi is definitely geared towards gamers and lovers of RGB lighting. You get the usual 3-pin and 4-pin RGB connectors, but the M.2 heatsink also sports a snazzy RGB ROG logo. It’s quite restrained, but it does look very attractive. While it’s lacking the clean white theme of the Gigabyte board, the ROG Strix Z590-I Gaming WiFi is still extremely good-looking. It has large heatsinks for the teamed 8+2 phase VRMs, which are linked by a heatpipe and actively cooled by a small fan. This can be fully controlled in…

SUPPLIER amazon.co.uk The Sinjimoru cable clip is a neat and tidy system that keeps USB charging cables and other similar wires under control in such a way that, if necessary, you can detach them and take them away. The clip has two parts – a square magnetic dock that you attach with double-sided tape to your chosen surface, and then a small square block that grips onto the cable and snaps neatly into the magnetic dock. You can pull the magnets apart if the cable is needed elsewhere and you can then snap them back together later. If you’re absolutely certain that you don’t want even the most unobtrusive piece of cabling to start wandering free, the Sinjimoru will handle it, and look pretty smart while it’s doing it. A…

SUPPLIER aquatuning.co.uk As it’s the most expensive cooler on test by a long way, the be quiet! Dark Rock TF 2 has to live up to some serious expectations and the company’s usual build quality is certainly evident. The Dark Rock TF 2 is beautifully made and looks like it means business, although it’s also rather large. Measuring a full 134mm tall, it’s only a little shorter than many full-sized tower heatsinks, but this slightly shorter height still allows it to sit in many cases with limited cooler height restrictions. It makes the most of the extra heatsink volume as well – not only are there two layers of heatsinks in this cooler, but there are two large 135mm fans too. When combined, these fans shift a substantial amount of…

SUPPLIER scan.co.uk The Noctua NH-L12S makes great use of the company’s excellent slim 120mm NF-A12x15 PWM fan in order to create a reasonably large cooler that still has a low profile. Interestingly, Noctua has also pre-installed the fan to exhaust air up through the heatsink, with the fan mounted beneath it. This setup should still draw air over your motherboard, creating extra airflow, but it likely won’t cool your VRMs as much as the be quiet! Dark Rock TF 2, which has both of its fans pointing downwards. The Noctua isn’t as expensive as the be quiet! cooler either, with a price of £50 inc VAT compared to the latter’s lofty £70 price tag, but it still costs a good deal more than the other three low-profile coolers on test.…

DEVELOPER Worldwalker Games LLC/PUBLISHER Worldwalker Games LLC Video games have borrowed liberally from Dungeons & Dragons for decades, but while games have built countless brilliant RPGs on the shoulders of D&D, they’ve always struggled to recreate the main draw of the pen-and-paper system, namely the ability to create a story that feels like your own. No matter how deep a game’s systems or how meticulous its narrative design, it simply can’t beat D&D for creative storytelling. A video game can’t conjure new ideas out of nothing like a human Dungeon Master; neither can they represent character development with the same level of depth and nuance. In this respect, Wildermyth is no exception, but it gets closer than most games and that’s one heck of an achievement. Worldwalker Games’ tactical RPG…

This month we’re taking a look at the growing market for diminutive desktops, so we can provide you with all the knowledge you need to build your own mini PC. If you’ve been put off going small, we’ll be covering common misconceptions around mini-ITX, such as the build process being more difficult and hardware running hot, as well as addressing perceived limitations. The latter is particularly important, because if you own a PC with a single graphics card and no other PCI-E expansion cards, you’ll probably be able to easily build a mini-ITX that suits your needs, save loads of space and avoid compromising on performance too. We’ll be offering our top tips on how to build a small PC, looking at what hardware works best and why, while covering…

My eyes were opened to the world of PC modding, water cooling and custom builds around a decade ago through a specific build by Laine over at sweclockers.com. He modified a Lian Li V1000 and to me it was to die for. This was the moment when I realised that a computer could be so much more than a tool; it could be a sculpture. Fast forward to a year ago and I was about to take the opportunity to ruin my wallet and build a once-in-a-lifetime computer with top-tier components and a custom water-cooling loop. The last component I needed was a case that could house it all but still have a small footprint, and most importantly, it had to look like a sculpture that highlighted the components. At…

Amit Katwala’s Quantum Computing: How It Works, And Why It Could Change The World isn’t designed to be an exhaustive technical treatise on quantum technology. Instead, it’s positioned as a pocket-sized primer for ‘people who don’t have a background in maths or physics’. It’s almost entirely text-based, bar a single simple illustration of the double-slit experiment on p15, but its wide margins and double spacing give it around half the word count you’d expect from the book’s 154 page count. Katwala’s book takes a complex topic and works to boil it down to understandable core concepts. Then it expands on those concepts, pulling down interview content and references to everything from research papers to actual working quantum computers in the labs of Google, IBM and Microsoft, among others. Of course,…

ROCCAT PYRO The Roccat Pyro mechanical gaming keyboard not only offers RGB lighting, but it also comes with mechanical switches that offer an accurate linear-feeling (red) keystroke response with 2mm actuation. The keyboard also features advanced anti-ghosting technology, so you can enjoy reliable gaming without worrying about a keystroke not registering. What’s more, it’s reinforced by a brushed aluminium top plate for robust durability. Switches are also long-lasting, with a lifespan of 50 million keystrokes per switch, so you can enjoy reliable gaming with a solid build quality. The Pyro also features Roccat’s Easy-Shift[+] button duplicator technology and a detachable palm rest for customisable comfort. ROCCAT BURST PRO The Burst Pro is an extremely lightweight optical gaming mouse, which Roccat has engineered from scratch with a symmetrical ergonomic shape. While…

CPC: How did this project start? Jeroen: It all started in early 2019 when I was still happy with the performance of my previous build, but I wanted my PC to have a fresh look. My goal was to create a fresh and new-looking design that hadn’t been seen from a particular case before, while also being able to fit at last two 360mm radiators inside the case for cooling. CPC: Why did you base this build on the Fractal Meshify S2? Jeroen: From my earlier experience of modding a Fractal Define S in 2018, I knew that adding an extra front panel on the back side of the Meshify S2 would be quite easy. Add the full mesh panels on the top, and I was convinced this case would be…

Thank you for beating the scalpers I’m not on Twitter so I hope you’ll be happy with this email response to Issue 217. As a subscriber I usually can’t wait to rip off the wrapper and dive straight into every new issue of Custom PC, mentally bookmarking the items that most interest me and the order in which I’ll read through the mag. Thanks to some unexpected ‘Big Life Stuff’, Issue 217 only got a cursory glance from me and I put it aside. I’ll be honest, I saw the ‘Beat the scalpers’ cover splash and thought it would be another one of those articles about being careful buying from eBay, watching out for ex-cryptocurrency mining boards, not feeding the scalpers and so on. I was fortunate enough to time…

GEFORCE RTX 3090 SUPER INBOUND GPU tech leaker ‘Greymon55’ has tweeted that Nvidia has another high-end graphics card in the works called the 3090 Super, which will feature 10,752 CUDA cores and have a TDP over 400W. The configuration implies that the new cards will feature a fully enabled GA102 GPU, which would mean it has two more Streaming Multiprocessors enabled than the RTX 3090 and two more RT processors, for a total of 84. INTEL ALCHEMIST AS FAST AS RTX 3070 An apparently leaked presentation slide showing the performance of Intel’s GPUs has been published by videocardz.net. The slide shows two Inteldesigns–SOC1 andSOC2. ThelatterislistedwithaTDPof65W and is shown to be as fast as a GeForce GTX 1650 Super at the top end. Meanwhile, SOC1 is listed with a TDP of…

SUPPLIER zerowater.co.uk ZeroWater claims that its water filter will remove 99 per cent of dissolved impurities from water, which is a lot (usual water filters remove about half of them). In this variant, it’s attached to a 2.3-litre jug with a neat little slot on top for an included TDS (total dissolved solids) water quality meter. In testing, the ZeroWater does very much what you’d expect given the name. When filled with tap water with a TDS level of 267, which is for all intents and purposes fine, it filtered out everything, down to a TDS level of zero. This is accomplished by a five-stage filter, which manages to be extremely thorough while not taking all day about it. The website also features a video with Philip Schofield pouring a…

SUPPLIER overclockers.co.uk If you need an extremely low-profile cooler, perhaps for a build in a slimline desktop case, then you’ll likely want a design that ends up looking short even when it’s sat next to your memory modules. If that’s you, then you may well find yourself drawn to the Cryorig C7. This cooler’s diminutive height of just 47mm means it will fit into spaces that simply aren’t accessible to most of the other coolers on test this month. Not only that, but with a price of just £30 inc VAT, it looks like it offers remarkably good value, especially given its chunky, dense design that manages to cram four 6mm heatpipes into the unit. What’s more, it’s also designed to sit within the confines of any small motherboard, sporting…

SUPPLIER overclockers.co.uk While the RGB lighting on the fan of the Jonsbo CR-701 can’t be controlled, leaving it stuck in a cycle of rainbow coours, the Raijintek Pallas 120 RGB’s slim 120mm fan sensibly comes with standard 4-pin RGB connector, enabling you to tweak its colours to your liking. The lighting is fairly vivid when it’s running, but due to the highly angular blades, it doesn’t quite manage to produce the same full illumination effect that we’ve seen other full-sized fans achieve. The angular blades, which can hit a maximum 1,400rpm, also added to a noticeable airflow noise at full speed, but this was thankfully backed up with decent amounts of air flowing through the heatsink for such a slim fan. Combined with a total of six heatpipeswitha6mmdiameter, there’s clearly…

DEVELOPER Consumer Softproducts/PUBLISHER Consumer Softproducts Cruelty Squad is a cross between an immersive-sim, a mid-1990s shooter and a nightmare. It sees you play as a depressed assassin hired to perform ‘extreme liquidations’ for the cruelty squad, the private mercenary arm of a shady corporate conglomerate. Visually, it’s designed to be as repulsive as possible, combining the colour palette of a pre-school children’s cartoon with the fleshy hell-world textures of Doom, all sprinkled with 1990s-era Microsoft clip art and warped, unsightly character models. It looks like nothing else you’ve played, avoiding both modern visual trends and the comfort of nostalgia. Each mission tasks you with assassinating one or several targets within a large, open-ended level. Your job is to kill these targets in whatever way you see fit, then exfiltrate…

Remember the late 2000s when Guitar Hero was in its heyday, and there seemed to be more fake plastic guitars than real ones? Well, Unplugged aims to bring back those late nights pretending to be a rock god, but without embarrassing faux instruments. Instead, Unplugged transforms your air guitar into a real guitar through the magic of VR hand-tracking. The game uses a similar rhythm-action interface as Guitar Hero, but simulates the guitar itself in VR, and tracks the movement of your hands across its virtual strings. You slide your left hand up and down your virtual guitar’s neck in time with the notes, using your right hand to strum. Unplugged started as a small independent project, but has greatly expanded in scope due to a partnership with publisher Vertigo…

REVIEW Airxed IRX Smart Home Hub Interest is growing in smart home technology, which lets you control devices ranging from TVs and stereos to air conditioning units and lighting with voice assistants or your smartphone. Upgrading a home to a smart home, though, can be expensive if you’re looking to rip out standard appliances in favour of their connected equivalents. That’s where the Airxed IRX comes in. Developed using infrared technology licensed from parent company Remotec, the IRX is an unassuming black hockey puck of a gadget. It has only a single micro-USB port at the rear – just next to a reset button that doubles as a trigger for Wireless Protected Setup (WPS) connection mode. Taking off the gloss plastic case reveals a not surprisingly circular circuit board, with…

Hands on with Corsair’s XD7 RGB Despite being a newcomer to the custom water-cooling scene, Corsair hasn’t held back with its product range, offering every single product you need to build a water-cooling loop. However, one missing option was a distro plate – the funky clear panels designed to route coolant to different points in your case, making it a little easier to add hard tubing runs. Corsair has just fixed this omission now, with the new XD7 RGB. It’s a very unusual distro plate too, as it’s designed to mimic a trio of fans, with three clear circular sections instead showing off your coolant. They’re surrounded by RGB LEDs, of course, but the benefit is that, unlike some distro plates, the XD7 will fit in most locations that also…

On 16 September, I heard the sad news that Sir Clive Sinclair had passed away, aged 81. I can’t comment on Sir Clive Sinclair as a person, but I wanted to pay a personal tribute to the invention of his that permanently shaped my life. One evening I came downstairs to find my dad at the dining room table playing a game he called ‘bat and ball’ on our old black and white TV (the ‘new’ colour TV we’d started renting was in the living room), while pushing the buttons on a small black box with grey keys. I was young, probably 5-6 years old, and I’d never seen a computer before. I didn’t know anyone at school with a NES – I wasn’t even aware it existed I don’t…

NEW INTEL SOCKET PICTURED The new LGA1700 socket for Intel’s Alder Lake CPUs has been pictured on Chinese site bilibili.com, and reported by videocardz.net. The socket’s array of pins is clearly longer than that of Intel’s current LGA1200 socket, but Intel appears to have shrunk the latch system surrounding it, so it takes up a similar amount of space. The socket latch sports the codename ‘15R1’ on the top, along with ‘LGA17xx/LGA18xx’, suggesting that CPUs with 100 more pins could arrive in the future. LGA1700 is expected to be used for Intel’s Meteor Lake CPUs after Alder Lake, but Intel usually moves to a new CPU socket after two generations.…

SUPPLIER overclockers.co.uk The Asus ROG Flow X13 is one of the most exciting gaming laptops on the market right now, as it’s not just a laptop. This machine is at its best when you buy it alongside the ROG XG Mobile graphics dock, which turbo-charges its gaming ability. The dock contains an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Laptop GPU with a hefty peak power level of 150W, alongside its conventional 6,144 stream processors and 8GB of memory. The reliance on laptop graphics is a smart move – it means the dock weighs just 1kg and is only 208mm long and 30mm thick. Companies such as Razer have experimented with graphics docks, but those products are larger, weigh more than 5kg and take a desktop graphics card. Asus’ dock doesn’t just provide…

BOOMPODS POWERBOOM X10/£19.99 inc VAT SUPPLIER amazon.co.uk The Boompods Powerboom X10 is a 10,000mAH power bank that feels like it was named to tempt fate. The design is much more sensible than the name, with ports and buttons kept to a minimum, and it also has IPX7-rated water resistance, with a tight cover over the USB Type-C charging port and the USB output. Meanwhile, a button on the side activates the torch on the top after a second of holding it down, or you can just tap it to activate the power level indicator lights. This button is also a part of the case, so there are no gaps for water to get into the device. The Powerboom X10 is roughly the same size as a smartphone, but a little…

How we test USB microphones aimed squarely at the burgeoning game streaming market are the latest must-have accessories for gamers and gaming peripheral makers alike. In just the past year or two we’ve seen all the big players in gaming peripherals introduce quality desktop microphones, while several stalwarts of the microphone industry have embraced the home-recording and streaming trend too. To test these microphones we first assessed the build quality, design and physical features. Given their premium price tags, most are solidly built units but some are better than others, while ease of use of the included stands and pivot mounts varies wildly. All the models on test provide a USB interface, but some use older USB connections while some have embraced the latest USB Type-C standard. Several microphones also…

How we test We’re testing a bunch of low-profile air coolers this month, which retail for between £30 and £70. We’ve tested them on both AMD and Intel CPU sockets, as different mounting mechanisms can affect cooling performance. As low-profile coolers have limited cooling headroom compared with their tower heatsink counterparts, we’ve stepped down to 6-core CPUs in this month’s Labs test, as several of the smaller heatsinks would never stand a hope of dealing with CPUs such as the toasty Core i9-11900K. As a result, we’ve opted for the Core i5-11600K and AMD’s Ryzen 5 5600X, which are far easier to cool than their higher-end counterparts in the kind of small systems in which these coolers would be used. We’ve overclocked the Core i5-11600K to 4.8GHz using a 1.35V…

SUPPLIER overclockers.co.uk We were a bit irritated that you can’t control the RGB lighting on the Jonsbo CR-701 – it’s great to see RGB lighting on a sub-£30 cooler, but you’ll have to make do with a continuous cycling of colours if you install it in your PC. To be fair, the continuous rainbow effect isn’t unpleasant and actually looks quite snazzy. The Jonsbo CR-701 feels well made too. It has five 6mm heatpipes making direct contact with your CPU, which is one more than the Cryorig C7 that retails for £3 more. The Jonsbo also has a 120mm fan compared with the C7’s diminutive 92mm fan, but the latter cooler is much shorter, with its height of just 47mm, compared with 125mm for the CR-701. The Jonsbo is also…

DEVELOPER The Farm 51/PUBLISHER The Farm 51 Superficially, Chernobylite resembles a clone of 2007’s Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl, a nascent open-world shooter which saw players exploring the Exclusion Zone surrounding the ill-fated nuclear plant, collecting anomalies and shooting mutants. Chernobylite uses the same ingredients, but combines them in a way that results in a very different dish. The game puts you behind the gas mask of Igor Khymynyuk, a physicist and former employee of the Chernobyl NPP who was present at the time of the disaster on 26 April, 1986. Thirty years later, Khymynyuk returns to the Zone on a mission to find his wife Tatyana, who disappeared on the night of the disaster, and of whom Igor has heard nothing until he recently began seeing visions of her located…

DEVELOPER Robot Entertainment/PUBLISHER Robot Entertainment Orcs Must Die 3 is a sequel to Orcs Must Die 2. This might sound asinine, but there isn’t much else to say. After Robot Entertainment’s abortive experiment with free-to-play gaming in Orcs Must Die: Unchained, Orcs Must Die 3 goes back to its roots, then clings onto them like an agoraphobic mole. Around 80 per cent of it is familiar fare. Each campaign level plonks you into an arena with several locked doors. At your discretion, orcs pour through those doors, attempting to reach a portal. You must prevent them from vanishing through the portal with tactical placement of ACME-style traps, ranging from floor spikes and poison darts to giant springboards. Unlike traditional tower-defence games, you also actively participate in combat, able to directly…

DEVELOPER Schell Games/PUBLISHER Schell Games You can’t fault I Expect You to Die 2 for style. The sequel to Schell Games’ spy-tacular VR puzzler has wonderfully colourful locations, and superb writing and voice acting. It even kicks off with a James Bond-style credit sequence, complete with psychedelic visuals and a suitably camp song. It’s an extremely likeable VR game, albeit one that doesn’t exactly push boundaries, and sometimes makes you feel less like 007 and more like Wile E. Coyote wearing a tuxedo. The story sees your plucky agent once again on the trail of the villainous organisation Zoraxis, which appears to have gained powerful influence over major world leaders through some unknown means. Your mission is to infiltrate Zoraxis, find out what it’s doing and thwart its dastardly plans.…

Despite being the by far the largest seller of GPUs in the world, thanks to the integrated graphics in its CPUs, Intel has never managed to successfully break into the discrete graphics card market that’s now dominated by AMD and Nvidia. That’s not entirely for lack of trying though. Over the years it has made a number of attempts to enter the fray, such as with the i740 – an AGP-based card built on Real3D technology – that launched in 1998 and was scrapped 18 months later. Then there was the more recent x86-based Larrabee project that launched in 2006 and was again scrapped, this time three years later. With its latest venture, though, Intel is finally promising that this time its new graphics cards will actually launch and stay…

The low-cost open-specification Kobol Helios64 five-bay network attached storage (NAS) box impressed us when we reviewed it back in Issue 211, with a few caveats about design flaws and potential software glitches harming stability. Now, having been in active deployment for a number of months, it’s time to revisit the device – and the news isn’t good. Based on the surprisingly powerful 6-core Rockchip RK3399, a downgrade from the originally promised and faster RK3399K, the Helios64 packs 4GB of RAM, Gigabit and 2.5Gb Ethernet ports and five 3.5in SATA drive bays with hot-swap sleds into a smart, but awkward to use, compact metal chassis with a clever magnetic cover. During initial testing, we noted that the Helios64 port of Armbian, a community-driven respin of Debian Linux designed for Arm-based single-board…