Innholdsfortegnelse for January 2023 i Custom PC UK

Nvidia has quickly backtracked on its plan to release two GPUs under the GeForce RTX 4080, by rebranding the 12GB version. ‘The RTX 4080 12GB is a fantastic graphics card, but it’s not named right. Having two GPUs with the 4080 designation is confusing,’ admitted the company on its website, saying it was now ‘pressing the “unlaunch” button’. Two versions of the RTX 4080 were originally announced – a 16GB version for £1,269 and a 12GB model for £949 inc VAT. However, as the prices suggest, the differences went much further than the memory, with the 12GB RTX 4080 only having a 192-bit wide memory interface, compared to the 256-bit wide interface on the 16GB card. The cheaper card also only had 7,680 CUDA cores, compared to 9,728 on the…

SUPPLIER overclockers.co.uk If there was one issue with the Ryzen 5 5600X it was its price compared with its predecessor. At launch, there was no sign of the Ryzen 5 5600 and 5500 either, and it looked as though AMD’s high value 6-core predecessors were potentially gone forever, as the company levelled up to Intel and realised it could demand premium prices. Likewise, the new Ryzen 5 7600X isn’t cheap, but at least it doesn’t retail for significantly more than its predecessor and is roughly the same price as the latter a year ago. At £326 inc VAT, the current cheapest Ryzen 7000-series CPU costs around £60 less the Core i5-13600K, while it’s also £40 more expensive than the 8-core Ryzen 7 5800X, which will remain on sale to bolster…

SUPPLIER scan.co.uk With Intel launching its most core-laden desktop processor ever in the form of the Core i9-13900K, it’s not surprising to see some suitably highend and extreme motherboards lining up as potential suitors. Once a brand that sat at the budget end of the ROG line-up, the new Hero won’t leave you with much change from £700. However, on paper at least, the Asus ROG Maximus Z790 Hero seems to be utterly droolworthy. For starters, it looks fabulous, with a huge RGB display above the enormous heatsink sitting on top of the I/O panel. It’s not too garish either, instead adding a premium feel to the board that looks classy. The rest of the PCB is covered in huge heatsinks, both for the 20+1 teamed power stages and three…

SUPPLIER scan.co.uk Despite its fair share of naysayers, it’s clear that mini-ITX is here to stay now, and Asus has been an avid supporter of the form factor, offering both AMD and Intel platforms since Ryzen first appeared on the scene. Luckily for small form factor fans, there are now mini options for both Socket AM5 and LGA1700 available, although going the Intel route appears to be noticeably cheaper given that the ROG Strix X670E-I Gaming WiFi we’re reviewing here is set to retail for nearly £500 inc VAT. Even if you consider its imposing specifications, that’s still a huge amount of money and it makes the Asus ROG Strix X670E-I Gaming WiFi easily the most expensive mini-ITX motherboard we’ve reviewed. Thankfully, Asus hasn’t been idle when it comes to…

SUPPLIER box.co.uk Cooler Master’s MM711 sneaks into our sub-£40 price bracket thanks to it being several years old, leading to discounted current pricing. Originally priced at £50, it can now widely be found for just £30 inc VAT. It takes the recent trend of weight-reducing holes to the extreme. Almost the entire unit, other than the front two thirds of the sides and the main left and right buttons, are perforated. Add in its short shape and it’s one of the lightest mice around, weighing just 60g. Dust can get into the holes, but the inside has a water-resistant coating to keep the electronics relatively safe. This shorter shape means you don’t get much palm support, making this mouse suited to fingertip grip for most hand sizes, although it could…

SUPPLIER overclockers.co.uk The Glorious Model O has maintained a slot on our Elite List for years, thanks to its great design and impressively low price. Now widely available for just £40 inc VAT, it still impresses. Its long, gently sloped and symmetrical shape is comfortable for most grip styles with a wide variety of hand sizes – and if it is too large for you, there's the smaller Model O-. It’s also impressively light for a mid-size mouse, at just 67g. The sides could be flatter, but largely this mouse’s shape is excellent. Styling is another plus point, assuming you don’t mind the weight-saving perforated look. RGB lighting is neatly integrated around the sides of the scroll wheel and in stripes down the sides, while the simple black or white…

Marissa Marcel starred in three films – a 1968 gothic horror, a detective drama two years later and a glitzy thriller filmed just before the millennium. Then she disappeared. None of the movies was ever released commercially, and between her second and final project, Marissa spent most of her life in seclusion. The details of her life and career were a mystery, until an archive of footage from all three films was unexpectedly discovered. Unedited and disorganised, the footage represents a jigsaw puzzle of a life in forgotten stardom, a jigsaw puzzle that you’re tasked with assembling. This is the premise for Immortality, which is simultaneously the most ambitious full-motion video (FMV) game ever made, and a wild experiment in modern filmmaking. Combining a remarkable eye for period detail with…

It’s been a mighty back-and-forth battle between AMD and Intel for CPU supremacy in recent years. AMD’s first Ryzen processors revolutionised the market in terms of value and core count, but struggled when it came to raw clock speed, while Intel offered high clock speeds but relatively few cores. As the years have gone on, AMD has steadily become more and more competitive on the speed front, while Intel has responded when it comes to core count and value, culminating in AMD comprehensively winning the performance crown with its 5th-generation Ryzen 5000 processors, only for Intel to sneak ahead at the end of last year with its 12th-gen Core processors, codenamed Alder Lake. Just last month we saw the tables turn again with AMD’s Ryzen 7000-series processors offering big clock…

It’s been a pretty frantic 12 months for PC enthusiasts, what with the tail end of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine both impacting economies worldwide. It’s taken a while for the real toll of this situation to be revealed on retail prices, but combined with the pound hitting some devastating lows, it’s going to be expensive to build or upgrade your PC. Older hardware such as AMD Ryzen 5000-series CPUs, and Intel 10th and 11th-gen CPUs, plus their respective motherboards and memory, usually get some tasty retail price cuts just before major launches, but this time around, those discounts have been pretty conservative. Even if you turn to eBay for your hardware, you’re unlikely to see the influx of older gear you would normally expect following new hardware…

Few PC gaming technologies have been quite so maligned as full-motion video (FMV). Originally appearing in the early 1980s and throughout the 1990s, FMV formed the basis of some truly abysmal interactive movies. You may have heard some of the names – Night Trap, Phantasmagoria and The 7th Guest. These are the good ones, which had (relatively) decent production values and a rather coherent idea of their purpose. Beneath these games are dozens of interactive movies so bad they make Phantasmagoria look like The Shining. Interactive movies did so much damage to the reputation of FMV that it more or less disappeared from games the moment real-time graphics became detailed enough to render a half-decent cutscene. But FMV itself is neither good nor bad. It’s merely a tool, and the…

SUPPLIER scan.co.uk We’re not sure we can remember a period of CPU launches landing quite so close together, intermixed with graphics cards too, but as Intel’s Raptor Lake CPUs have finally landed, this is the real comparison everyone wants to see. The Core i9-13900K is retailing for a lot more than we initially expected, with a price of £700 inc VAT at scan.co.uk, but that’s still around £100 less than AMD’s flagship Ryzen 9 7950X. The two CPUs couldn’t be more different though. AMD hasn’t increased core counts and is instead relying on high frequencies, a new architecture and boosted cache amounts in order to compete with Intel’s 13th-gen CPUs. The Core i9-13900K, though, has had a top to bottom refresh compared with its predecessor. The most significant change is…

While several firms in the PC industry would love us to all be upgrading to new DDR5 memory right now, the simple fact is that DDR4 memory is cheaper and, from our experience so far, isn’t noticeably slower either, at least not in games and most typical tasks PC encountered by PC enthusiasts. That’s not particularly helpful if you’re building an AM5 system, where DDR5 is your only option, but Raptor Lake continues what Intel started with Alder Lake, with support for both memory standards. This gives Intel an advantage when it comes to platform cost, and there are plenty of DDR4 LGA1700 motherboards available, including models based on the new Z790 chipset. Whether you want to transplant your existing DDR4 memory, or splash out on a new DDR5 kit,…

SUPPLIER ebay.co.uk Oh scalpers, how we’d missed you. Just when the GPU market had settled back into some sort of normality, you’ve stepped back into our world to make buying a GeForce RTX 4090 as stressful as possible. Yes, there’s no stock of the RTX 4090 already. Yes, there are lots of them now on eBay going for around £2,400. On the other hand, though, the RTX 4090 was already priced very high in the few minutes it was still available at the standard retail price. The Founders Edition we’re reviewing here launched a day before the partner cards for a price of £1,699 inc VAT. Some of this premium is down to the drop in value of the pound, of course, but there’s no getting away from the fact…

SUPPLIER scan.co.uk There’s no getting round the fact that motherboards are going up in price, and if you want the latest chipsets you’re going to have to pay down the nose for them. Even here, with the Asus ROG Strix Z790-A Gaming WiFi D4, we’re looking at a £400 motherboard. Despite being a few hundred pounds cheaper than the admittedly lustworthy ROG Maximus Z790 Hero on p32, that’s still a lot of money. These are the prices we have to pay at the moment, though, and if you can afford it, the Strix has a lot going for it. For starters, it looks fabulous in its white and silver colour scheme, complete with a large ROG logo illuminated with RGB lighting in the I/O shroud. It definitely has more of…

SUPPLIER custompc.co.uk/ChillblastDefiant The Defiant is the first of Chillblast’s brand-new laptop range to break cover, and for £1,879, you get an RTX 3070 Ti GPU and Core i7-12700H processor. This RTX 3070 Ti runs with the GPU’s peak power limit of 150W, and Intel’s CPU is another known quantity with a top turbo speed of 4.7GHz. The inclusion of 32GB of dual-channel DDR5 memory is great for the money too, as is 1TB of NVMe storage. The supplied Samsung 980 drive only uses the PCI-E interface, but it still topped out with a decent read speed of 3,451MB/sec, with a slightly disappointing 2,760MB/sec write speed. These speeds are fine for most people’s needs in everyday use though. Internally, it’s easy to access the SSD, along with a spare M.2 socket…

How we test Not surprisingly, budget mice simply tend to have fewer features than their pricier alternatives, so the addition of any extra buttons, RGB lighting or even just the ability to program the mouse via software are notable at this price range. The shape, build quality and addition of extra physical features, such as the latest highly flexible lightweight braided cables, are all areas where some cheap mouse designs make compromises. At this price, you won’t find any reputable brands offering a wireless option, so a cable that doesn’t push back against your movements is a major plus point. The modern trend for gaming mice to shed a fair bit of weight, using perforated cases or the latest lightweight materials, is also a rarity at the budget end, so…

SUPPLIER overclockers.co.uk The full-fat £55 Corsair Sabre includes RGB lighting, but this non-RGB version costs just £40 inc VAT and its 69g weight is 5g lighter than the RGB version. It’s fairly large, with a tall, bulbous back section that fills the area under your palm. It’s ideal for palm grip use with small and medium-sized hands, but it also works well for other grip styles with medium to large hands. Its plain black styling is simple without looking cheap, and its relatively coarse matt outer surface provides decent grip, even for dry hands – it’s helped here by the tall sides, which provide plenty of surface area for your thumb and outer fingers. You don’t get any extra top-mounted buttons, but there’s a DPI button on the underside with…

SUPPLIER overclockers.co.uk The G203 has been Logitech’s budget wired gaming mouse option for years, and while that longevity could be seen as testament to a good design, Logitech could do with issuing an update now. It’s a petite mouse, measuring around 10mm shorter and 3-4mm narrower than many rivals. Its lozenge-like shape is much less contoured to the curves of your hands too. The left and right buttons have slight dips in their middle to help centre your fingers, but otherwise it’s a largely convex shape. It’s also surprisingly heavy for its size, weighing 85g. Despite this not overly accommodating shape and weight, the G203 is still easy to use and works well for fingertip grip with most hand sizes, and even works for palm and claw grip with small…

SUPPLIER currys.co.uk SteelSeries' Rival 3 is similar to Logitech’s G203 Prodigy in that it’s notably compact and cheap, and also includes RGB lighting, while featuring a relatively modest sensor. However, where the Logitech had notable drawbacks, such as its weight and stiff cable, the Rival 3 has fewer issues. Its shape is quite narrow where you grip the sides, so it isn’t ideal for larger hands, but then it also splays out towards the back, resulting in your fingers sliding forwards. It works if you grip the mouse with only your little finger but feels awkward if you use your ring finger too. With a weight of 77g, the Rival 3 is far from the lightest mouse but it’s trimmer than the Logitech. Plus, although the rubber-coated cable arrives kinked,…

It would be fitting if Cult of the Lamb lured players with false promises of enlightenment before revealing itself to be a tedious, soul-destroying grift, but it’s actually bloody brilliant. A dazzling mix of settlement building, 2D brawling and twisted social simulation, Massive Monster’s magnum-opus is marvellous and malevolent. You play a literal sacrificial lamb who, after being ritually murdered to appease one god, is pulled from the afterlife by a rival deity to serve as their messiah. Returned to the mortal plain, you’re tasked with building a religion dedicated to your mysterious saviour, gathering followers, constructing a settlement, and destroying the heretics who originally sacrificed you in a campaign of righteous vengeance. Play is divided into two roughly equal halves. The first half is the colony simulation, where you…

You might have already seen a couple of ATX 3 power supplies turning up on the virtual shelves of online stores, with Thermaltake in particular pushing hard into the UK market, and including both SFX and ATX options already. The new standard was inked in February this year, and more will arrive as we hit 2023. Let’s state upfront that you don’t need one if you’re upgrading, so don’t worry. However, if you’re building a high-end rig with a next-gen GPU, it’s worth considering making the jump to ATX 3, especially if you want to avoid using ugly connector adaptors. To put ATX 3 in context, let’s step back for a minute and look at its origins. Launched by Intel in 1995, the first ATX standard replaced the archaic AT…

Richard Moss is a man with a love for vintage gaming. His first book, The Secret History of Mac Gaming (see Issue 196), was a walk through the history of games on a machine that’s most associated with serious business. His second book, Shareware Heroes, holds no such ties to a specific platform. Moss’ latest book isn’t quite as lengthy, at 338 pages plus 16 colour plates in the book’s centre, compared to 416 for the first book, but that by no means indicates a lack of content. Shareware Heroes is absolutely packed to the gills, yet by Moss’ own admission, it can’t even attempt to offer a truly comprehensive look at what was for years the most popular way to distribute, buy and sell games, as well as other…

SUPPLIER scan.co.uk Intel is keeping up the Raptor Lake momentum at the cheaper end of the scale, as the new Core i5-13600K isn’t just a boring incremental bump over the excellent Core i5-12600K, which retails for around £300 these days. As with the Core i9-13900K, the Core i5-13600K doesn’t just have higher clock speeds than its predecessor but it has more cores too, even if they are only the lower-power E-Cores, rather than full-fat P-Cores. Its price of £380 inc VAT might not be super-cheap, but it’s competitive at today’s prices, sitting between the price of AMD’s Ryzen 5 7600X at £326 and the Ryzen 7 7700X at £430. Out of the box, it will hit a peak frequency of 5.1GHz, giving it a 200MHz advantage over its predecessor, and…

There haven’t been many CPUs you’d want to manually overclock recently, simply because so many are already pushed close to their limits out of the box that there’s not much overclocking headroom left. In addition, manually overclocking can also mean you lose peak boost frequencies. Intel CPUs do at least allow for per-core overclocking, which is one way around that issue, but with Raptor Lake, Intel offers a degree of overclocking headroom that’s worth exploiting. We’re focusing on the Core i5-13600K here, as it proved to be an excellent overclocker. Even better is that it’s compatible with Z690 and motherboards, as well as DDR4 memory, making it a potential winner from a value point of view too. In this guide, we’ll look at applying a basic manual overclock and how…

SUPPLIER amazon.co.uk The Garmee Cup Warmer brings a new level of complexity to keeping a hot drink warm. It has a pressure-operated glass plate that’s activated by the weight of your cup, or any other object that might happen to be pressing down on it. It also has a simple interface and display and three temperature settings-low, medium and high; as any scientist will tell you, these are the three different heats available. You pick the temperature or switch it off with the on button, which is very simple and easy with the basics indicated by clear white lights. In terms of its effectiveness, your mileage will vary based on the mug or cup that you use, but having abandoned ordinary-sized mugs of tea on it for 15-minute increments, I…

SUPPLIER amazon.co.uk As a relatively new entrant to the mouse market, we’ve only previously looked at one of AOC’s gaming mice, the ultra-budget GM500, which retails for under a tenner. It had decent main switches and a good sensor but a basic shape, comparatively heavy weight and dull design. With a price more than double that of the GM500, the GM530 is understandably a considerably more capable offering. The most obvious advantage of the GM530 over the GM500 is its greatly improved shape. The slightly concave curved rubber sides, with their Y-shaped texture, provide fantastic grip, while the scalloping on the two main buttons similarly helps your fingers to nestle into their centre. It’s similar in shape to the Razer DeathAdder, with a sloped right side and full body for…

SUPPLIER overclockers.co.uk The Endgame Gear XM1r is a simple mouse with just five main buttons and a scroll wheel on its top. However, on its underside, it also has a button and two LEDs that combine to select and indicate the polling rate and DPI. A tap of the bottom button cycles through the four available DPI settings (400, 800, 1,600 and 3,200) with the LEDs changing colour accordingly (blue, green, yellow and red). Meanwhile, a long press switches between 125Hz (left LED), 500Hz (right LED) and 1000Hz (both LEDs) polling rates. It’s a neat system. Also on the underside are the surprisingly thick but wonderfully smooth glide pads. Smaller pads are fitted by default, but larger pads are included in the box. Inside, the XM1r uses the excellent PixArt…

SUPPLIER scan.co.uk The Lift has a seriously slick design. It comes only in matt black or white and uses a clean, symmetrical shape with the NZXT logo subtly picked out in glossy text on the rear. RGB lighting strips run down each side, providing a gentle under glow. For an extra £20, you can also opt for the scroll wheel, buttons, underside and cable to come in one of five accent colours. The shape is very reminiscent of the Glorious Model O, with a long, gently sloped rear, with slightly flared left and right buttons and heavily contoured sides. It’s a very comfortable shape for a variety of grip styles and hand sizes, although the sides could be just a little taller and flatter. The surface also isn’t the grippiest…

SUPPLIER argos.co.uk The GTX 981 Redex is markedly small, being 12mm narrower and 15mm shorter than the NZXT Lift, for instance. It weighs only 74g but considering its size that makes it relatively dense by modern standards. As a result, it’s best suited to those with smaller hands, although its shape is surprisingly accommodating to larger paws. The gentle inward curve of the sides centres the fingers well, while the relatively high, flat sides provide room for your fingers to grip. In terms of styling, the backlit GXTrust writing on the rear isn’t the most alluring, and the overall design lacks the sleekness of some other options, but you do get software-programmable RGB lighting around the scroll wheel and illuminating the rear. For features, the Trust is very similar to…

Arcade Paradise is a nostalgic love letter to coin-ops, 8-bit graphics and chiptune soundtracks. You play a teenage layabout tasked with running a laundrette owned by your wealthy, workaholic father. After discovering a handful of old stand-up gaming machines in a dingy back room, your character decides to convert the laundrette into a thriving arcade. You divide your time between management simulation and retro-gaming. Converting the laundrette into an arcade requires money. A basic income is provided by the laundrette, where you fill and empty washing machines and tumble dryers, pick up litter and occasionally take a plunger to the toilet. Cleaning clothes provides you with a small amount of cash that lets you buy new arcade machines, each of which helps to increase your passive income. Each arcade machine…

Released more than a decade ago, the Arduino Uno rapidly rose to become the go-to development board for a wide range of microcontroller projects. With integrated USB programming capabilities, pulse-width modulation (PWM) support, and both analogue and digital inputs, the Arduino Uno delivered plenty of features at a low cost and absolutely deserves its position in history. In 2022, though, its feature set feels a little lacklustre. Its successors and competitors, from Arduino and beyond, offer more powerful processors, additional connection options and more. It’s a situation that’s ended up with many makers hiding their Unos away in a desk drawer, having followed the siren song of more modern microcontroller boards. That’s where the Jolly module enters the fray. Developed by Gianluca Martino, one of the cofounders of Arduino, the…

CPC: What inspired you to build HYDROPOWER – what were your design inspirations and what look were you trying to achieve? Dante: I’ve always gravitated towards retro/industrial aspects in the design of my mods, and for this mod I wanted to stay with this theme, with a focus on water and electricity. I wanted to build something that didn’t look like a computer, while focusing the design around the liquid-cooling components. CPC: How did you plan out this build? Did you use CAD, good old-fashioned pen and paper, or a mix of approaches? Dante: I initially used hand drawings for the general design. I find it handy to have a sketching notebook in which I can quickly draw up a design with a pencil when I have ideas for mods.…