Custom PC UK January 2023

This autumn’s new hardware bonanza is now well underway, and it’s an exciting time to be a PC enthusiast, as long as you have a well-endowed bank account. If you want to play Cyberpunk 2077 at 4K with full ray tracing, you can hand two and a half grand to a scalper on eBay for a GeForce RTX 4090 (see p28). Want a new super-fast CPU? How about a new fully featured X670E motherboard for £600, some new DDR5 memory and an £800 16-core Ryzen 9 7950X? I don’t want to take credit away from Nvidia or AMD here – Zen 4 and Ada Lovelace are stunning technical architectural achievements, but the total platform cost for AM5, and the high price and scarcity of the GeForce RTX 4090, makes for…

AMD’s Ryzen 7000-series CPUs have just hit the shelves, but unless you’re a hardcore AMD fan and early adopter, you’ll want to keep a hold on that itchy buying finger for a little while longer. Without exception – and I say this as someone who used to review motherboards and work for a company that makes them – on every previous AMD platform launch, back to the mid-2000s, there have always been BIOS issues that need a couple of months to iron out. With a new socket and new memory to support, this isn’t likely to change this time either. On the whole, performance of Zen 4-powered CPUs looks great, but the first wave of X670/X670E motherboard prices start at over £300, with many sitting on the wrong side of…

My favourite meta joke is ‘what does the “B” stand for in Benoit B Mandelbrot? Benoit B Mandelbrot’. My least favourite is Mark Zuckerberg’s ongoing folly, the metaverse, about which I have written before. In January 2022 I said, ‘Zuckerberg’s vision of the metaverse relies on a successful marriage of physical tech with digital culture, and that won’t happen if the physical tech is a virtual reality headset’, and nothing I’ve seen since has changed my mind. Still, the Zuck keeps trying, despite his net worth dropping 70 per cent (according to a Bloomberg report) and Meta’s stock dropping 57 per cent. None of this is helped by headlines that are meant to bolster support for the metaverse but instead attract criticism or even derision. For example, the company recently…

Intel has finally launched its Arc A750 and A770 gaming graphics cards, giving the GPU market a third competitor. However, stock appears to be scarce and only one UK etailer (ebuyer.com) is stocking them at the time of going to press. The Arc A750 is currently going for £330 inc VAT, and comes with 8GB of GDDR6 memory and a 2050MHz boost clock, while the A770 has 16GB of GDDR6 memory and a 2100MHz boost clock. The cards support real-time ray tracing and Intel’s Xe Super Sampling technology, which the company says will soon be supported by over 20 titles. Some board partners have also announced cards based on the new GPUs, including ASRock and Acer, marking the latter’s first entry into the gaming card space. We haven’t been able…

Corsair has teamed up with smart lighting firm Nanoleaf to enable its wall-mounted light-up shapes to synchronise with your PC’s lighting, via iCUE. According to Corsair, in addition to giving you the ability to synchronise lighting effects on Nanoleaf devices, iCUE will also be able to ‘display system temperature indicators on them, putting your room on red alert when your PC is running hot, to a calm green when systems are stable’. Nanoleaf Light Panel support will be coming to iCUE later in 2022.…

Thermaltake is one of the first PSU manufacturers to get ATX 3 power supplies available in the UK, with Scan, Overclockers UK and Ebuyer all now listing the company’s new Toughpower GF3 units, although only for pre-order at the moment. Designed for heavy loads, the new PSUs all feature 80 Plus Gold certification and are available with whopping power ratings of up to 1650W. The PSUs have native support for the new 12VHPWR 12-pin+4-pin power cable, which is used on Nvidia’s latest GeForce RTX 4090, plus compatibility with the ATX 3 spec. They’re not cheap, though, with the 1650W version costing £400 inc VAT, and the 1200W unit coming in at £260 inc VAT from overclockers.co.uk. You can read our full feature on ATX 3 on p78.…