Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2023 i Custom PC UK

SUPPLIER amazon.co.uk If the Swiss Army was all about cleaning electronic devices instead of sporking everything, the AGPTEK cleaning kit might be sequestered in its backpacks. This kit notably lacks the elegance of a multi-tool; it’s more accurately described as a dusting brush with a compartment that holds the extra tools, namely a foam prodder for digging dust out of hard-to-reach places, a smaller, firmer brush with a scraper on the back, for digging more tenacious grot out of smaller areas, and a keycap remover. These tools in themselves are reasonably well constructed and the main brush is good for lightweight cleaning jobs. You’re not going to be able to shift a carpet of dust with the AGPTEK kit, but it’s fine for basic maintenance. Serious mess Frivolous tidiness…

SUPPLIER overclockers.co.uk The original Asus Claymore was the first keyboard we’d reviewed with a detachable numpad, allowing you to switch between a conventional full-sized layout and a compact TKL arrangement, so you could free up desk space for your mouse when gaming, or even have the numpad on the left of the keyboard. It was an interesting but expensive idea for the time, and it lacked in a few other areas. Now Asus is back with a revised version that includes a wireless connection and uses Asus’ own RX mechanical switches. As well as several feature changes, the design of the Claymore has changed, mostly for the better. The original Claymore had a premium-feeling thick metal top to its case, but its edges were rather sharp and the way the…

SUPPLIER overclockers.co.uk We’ve previously looked at the Razer Huntsman V2 Analog (see Issue 213), but that keyboard is a surprisingly different beast to the rest of the current Huntsman V2 line-up. As well as its inclusion of analogue switches, it has an illuminated wrist rest and lacks the sound deadening material and 8000Hz polling rate of the rest of the line-up. It’s this sound deadening that really sets the Huntsman V2 apart from many other mechanical keyboards, and certainly the others on test. It’s amazingly quiet, registering just 46dB from 20cm above the unit. That compares to typical readings of over 55dB for the other models on test. The exact noise level will depend on your choice of switch but with the linear switches we tested, there was essentially no…

Modern Warfare 2 is the best Call of Duty in years, although given the underwhelming efforts in Call of Duty: Vanguard and Black Ops: Cold War, that isn’t saying a whole lot. Nonetheless, series originator Infinity Ward succeeds in recapturing some of the game’s former glory, with a single-player campaign that’s as creative as it’s chaotic, and a multiplayer mode that brings Call of Duty closer than ever to occupying the same territory as EA’s Battlefield franchise. The campaign is notionally a direct follow-up to 2019’s Modern Warfare reboot, but in practice has little in common with that game’s story. Not only is the plot only tangentially related, but Modern Warfare 2 is also a lighter, more Hollywood-style affair that’s less interested in ‘realism’. Gone are the traumatically detailed terrorist…

After several years of struggling in terms of both performance and power efficiency with its GPU designs, the arrival of AMD’s 1st-generation RDNA architecture saw the company leap forward in both areas. The second generation of that architecture continued this trend, with a hefty 54 per cent improvement in performance per watt and the introduction of support for ray tracing, making the company’s 6000-series graphics cards a compelling mid-range alternative to Nvidia’s 3000 series, especially for non-AAA titles that didn’t take advantage of ray tracing. Now AMD’s back with its third iteration of RDNA, which rather pleasingly brings with it the exact same claimed 54 per cent increase in performance per watt, while ray tracing performance has improved by a nearly identical claimed figure of 50 per cent. We’ve seen…

SB Components has launched a follow-up to its RoundyFi and RoundyPi smart circular displays, reviewed back in Issue 226, and this time the company has decided it’s hip to be square. SquaryFi and SquaryPi are compact 240 x 240 colour displays with either a Wi-Fi-equipped Espressif ESP8266 or Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller and micro-SD storage slot. The square display panels aren’t the only change – the new boards also include support for an optional battery and USB Type-C connection. The boards should be available on sb-components. co.uk when this issue hits shelves, with pre-launch crowdfunding pricing set at £23-£25 inc VAT.…

AMD has usually offered some sort of Eco mode with its processors, which works by limiting power consumption and cutting temperatures. This usually results in reduced performance, but seeing as undervolting has become popular with some Ryzen CPU owners, especially those with small form factor PCs, trimming power consumption and operating temperatures is a relatively common activity among some enthusiasts. As we saw in our Ryzen 9 7950X review, the 65W and 105W Eco modes dramatically cut power consumption, but still give the CPU enough headroom to outperform previous AMD flagships. For example, even at its 65W Eco mode, the 7950X was still faster than the Ryzen 9 5950X and Core i9-12900K in heavily multi-threaded tests, which is testament to its efficiency, especially at lower power levels. In these times…

A Ti’s Rage graphics accelerators saw the firm rise over a four-year period to become one of the key graphics hardware manufacturers. Its products didn’t break new ground like those of 3dfx and Nvidia in the same period, but they consistently delivered the latest 3D features in products that more of us could afford. The first Rage 3D products were typical of early 2D/3D graphics chips. Keen to jump on the 3D bandwagon as buzz grew around the first 3dfx and VideoLogic 3D-only cards, ATi combined the 2D Windows accelerator tech behind its popular Mach64 chips with 3D tech it picked up from acquiring the design team from Kubota Graphics, a small division of an industrial and construction giant, specialising in high-end graphics workstations. The new chip was launched at…

So here we are in the closing days of 2022 (as I write this), and after the multitude of product launches over the past few months, one brand has decided to squeeze another launch into the year. However, unlike the other launches, this one has been frustratingly marred by the stock problems that we’d hoped had been relegated to the past. It feels a perhaps a little harsh to stick the knife into the new AMD Radeon 7900-series GPUs after the editorial team spent so much time and words covering the products in this issue. After all, the GPUs themselves are very competitive, providing similar performance to the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4000 series in rasterised games. AMD still lags behind Nvidia when it comes to ray-tracing performance, which is of…

It’s rare we get a new type of memory, and Samsung recently surprised us with its new GDDR6W tech. The ‘W’ means it’s ‘wide’ and can send twice the data per cycle of standard GDDR6 memory, doubling the bandwidth per chip. Achieving a data bus that is both wide and fast (22Gbps) are two performance factors that are typically mutually exclusive, so this is a significant breakthrough. GDDR6W uses chip-stacking within each package (fan-out wafer-level packaging), in order to put one layer of memory ICs on top of another and connect them with tiny copper pillars. This also doubles the capacity within each chip. It means a high-end GPU with 16GB of memory and a 256-bit interface could need only four GDDR6W chips, rather than the eight normally required, simplifying…

SUPPLIER scan.co.uk AMD’s latest flagship GPU is finally here! Oh, hold on, where’s it gone? As James Gorbold correctly outlines on p98, there’s currently severely insufficient stock of the Radeon RX 7900 XTX. That’s a shame, because AMD’s new top-end GPU is actually pretty good. It’s still overpriced at £999 inc VAT, but it looks like a veritable bargain next to Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4090 and 4080. We’ve taken a full deep dive into the new RDNA 3 architecture in our feature on p68, but we’ll go through the essentials here too. RDNA 3 sees AMD makes its first move to a modular, chiplet-based approach to GPU package design. Instead of having the whole lot in one monolithic die under the heatspreader, AMD has separated the L3 cache and memory…

SUPPLIER box.co.uk As the first motherboard based on AMD’s new B650 chipset to land in our lab, the MSI MPG B650 Carbon WiFi has plenty of expectations riding on it. One of those is doing what the B450 and B550 chipsets did for Socket AM4, which is making owning a Ryzen system more affordable. Sadly, though, at a price of £337 inc VAT, it’s actually more expensive than some X670E motherboards we’ve reviewed, and only around £30 cheaper than the excellent ASRock X670E Steel Legend. Part of the reason is that the differences between the two chipsets are minimal, with few low-end X670E boards offering close to the flagship chipset’s maximum number of USB and SATA ports. For example, the ASRock X670E Steel Legend actually has fewer SATA ports than…

SUPPLIER scan.co.uk Affordable, compact desktop PC speakers that still have decent sound quality are hard to find these days, with the market having essentially divided into cheap rubbish or pricey premium options. The Edifier G2000 bucks that trend, offering solid audio quality and a decent feature set for £70 inc VAT. These speakers are small and dense. They each stand just 128mm tall, 104mm deep and 105mm wide, although their angled stance means they take up a little more desk space overall (roughly 125mm). With the left speaker weighing 622g and the right one weighing 722g, they’re markedly heavier than most similarly sized budget speakers. Their stretched hexagonal shape is fetching enough, as is the simple exposed-driver front and plain black finish, even if it’s a bit plasticky-looking. However, the…

SUPPLIER amazon.co.uk This handy clip-on pair of yellow lenses sits on top of a pair of your own presumably prescription glasses (although kudos to any committed hipsters wearing them just for fun). The idea is that they filter out the amount of blue light from screens and, in theory, reduce eye strain and let you sleep better. The lenses and clip are mechanically very well made, they attach easily and securely, and they’re supplied with a glasses case, a bag and a cleaning cloth. The shape of the lenses is quite narrow, which is fine for a screen, because your point of focus should be directly in front. They definitely take the edge off a screen’s brightness and blue light too, and without reducing the acuity of vision. Everything looks…

How we test This month we’re taking a look at six Intel Z790 LGA1700 motherboards at a range of prices, in order to find which boards offer the best features for your cash, and to gauge how well they handle and overclock Intel’s latest 13th-gen CPUs. As it has plenty of overclocking headroom, we’ll be using a Core i5-13600K to test the boards, which has 14 cores and 20 threads, making it a suitable choice for gamers and content creators alike. We’ll be looking at VRM temperatures, as well as SSD temperatures using any supplied heatsinks, and we’ll also be taking a good look at the layout and feature set of each board. Our chosen boards offer ether DDR5 or DDR4 memory support, and with the former, we’re using a…

SUPPLIER scan.co.uk The K100 RGB is Corsair’s flagship wired desktop keyboard. On top of a full-sized keyboard layout and a handful of media controls, it adds a column of six extra gaming keys down its left edge that can be programmed for convenient gaming or other desktop macro functions. There’s also an iCUE control wheel that can be programmed to control brightness, skip through tracks, switch applications and more. The top plate of the body is made from brushed aluminium, which gives the keyboard a premium feel. However, the metal isn’t as thick as on the older design and its black finish rather hides it construction. The K100 also features 44-zone RGB lighting around the sides, as well as individual lights under all the keys. The rear and side sections…

SUPPLIER uk.roccat.com While much of the PC tech industry is taking its foot off the gas when it comes to RGB lighting, Roccat is forging ahead. The Vulcan II Max boasts not just full RGB-lit keys with shortened keycaps that expose more of the RGB-illuminated switch below, but it also has a lighting array on the front edge that lights up its included rubber wrist rest. Subtlety isn’t this keyboard’s forte, but if you’re into the dazzling look, there’s no denying the Vulcan II Max delivers the goods. The wrist rest lighting works impressively well. The wrist rest is just a piece of translucent rubber that slots into holes in the front of the keyboard (from which the lights shine), but the light disperses through it surprisingly evenly, and the…

While I enjoyed a wider variety of gaming experiences in 2022 than in any previous year, something was missing. Essentially, the AAA gaming industry didn’t turn up. I could count the number of genuine blockbusters that launched on one hand – Elden Ring, Modern Warfare 2, God of War: Ragnarok (which didn’t even launch on PC) and maybe A Plague Tale: Requiem if you’re feeling generous. The pandemic undoubtedly had a chilling effect, with numerous major titles sliding into 2023, including Starfield, Redfall and Forspoken. More generally, AAA games are contending with increasingly protracted development times, requiring ever more money and manpower to squeeze a diminishing amount of visual lustre from the next wave of GPUs. Our expectations of what constitutes a AAA game have also changed. Age of Empires…

In most survival horror games, entering a safe room provides a moment of respite, but in Signalis it offers only further apprehension, because saving means accessing the terminal with the blood-red screen located somewhere in the room, and accessing this terminal triggers the most awful sound you’ll hear in a video game this year. Somewhere between a rusted metal door squealing open and a shriek of mortal agony, it turns saving from a relief into a reluctant necessity, like fishing your wedding ring out of a public toilet. It’s a design flourish that encapsulates Signalis’ approach to survival horror. This love letter to PlayStation 1-era classics such as Resident Evil and Silent Hill wants you to never feel safe or feel certain about anything going on in its strange alien…

PCI-E 5 SSDS TURN UP AMD’s Ryzen 7000-series launch a few months ago brought with it the associated teaser of PCI-E 5 SSDs from a wide range of manufacturers, including Crucial, Corsair and Sabrent. Corsair claimed that its forthcoming MP700, for example, was capable of sequential read speeds of up to 10,000MB/sec. Once the CPUs were available, we expected the drives to follow, but that hasn’t been the case. Instead, Phison, maker of the E26 controller that was supposed to power a lot of these new drives, announced that it’s been delayed. That hasn’t prevented manufacturers from announcing their forthcoming drives though. CFD Gaming, a Japanese manufacturer, announced its drives recently, featuring active cooling with a massive heatsink and fan. Prices have been seen at Japanese retailer Kataku, which lists…

We may have only just got the big CPU and GPU launches out of the way at the end of 2022, but I’ve also got my eye on quite a few bits and pieces lined up for the coming year, particularly when it comes to small form factor systems. Quite a few items have been delayed, or aren’t available in great quantities recently due to the usual issues, and others are promised to be on the way. One product that could revolutionise water cooling, especially in small cases, is EK’s Quantum Velocity² 4.2 DDC PWM D-RGB combined waterblock, pump and reservoir. My sample is inbound, so I’ll hopefully be taking a look at it here soon, with plenty of projects planned for it. The ability to do away with reservoirs…

Sometimes, if it’s relevant or I’m feeling mischievously pretentious, I’ll drop a casual, ‘oh yes I met so-and-so at the BAFTAs’ into a conversation about the aforementioned so-and-so. The other person usually hesitates, trying to decide if I’m a nob for mentioning it (yes) or if they’re actually impressed (sometimes), which is just enough time for me to make a cheeky face and say, ‘the video game BAFTAs.’ There’s always either a palpable relief or slight disappointment that turns into a knowing laugh. The sad truth is, the video game BAFTAs aren’t taken as seriously as the film and TV BAFTAs, even by the game-playing public. They don’t attract international A-list celebrities, they aren’t televised and the clothes winners wear aren’t scrutinised in magazines or social media. Games just aren’t…

SUPPLIER overclockers.co.uk Unlike its bigger sibling, the Radeon RX 7900 XT was still in stock at its MSRP of £899 inc VAT at the time of going to press, and while that’s good to see in these times, there’s also a reason for it. Like the GeForce RTX 4080, the Radeon RX 7900 XT is priced too close to its respective flagship GPU for the spec on offer. There’s only £100 separating the two cards, and the variety of SKUs on offer from board partners means that in many cases, you can pick up a stock-speed Radeon RX 7900 XTX for the same price as an overclocked Radeon RX 7900 XT, and the former is absolutely the better card to buy. That said, it’s still refreshing to see two top-end…

SUPPLIER scan.co.uk We have yet to see many 32GB DDR5 memory kits rated to 6000MHz or faster speeds dip under the £200 mark, but that reality is edging closer and this month, it’s Thermaltake's turn to push the needle a little closer to the line with its latest Toughram modules. Retailing for £213 inc VAT and sitting at 6000MHz, the Toughram XG RGB D5 is one of the cheapest kits of this speed or higher we’ve seen that includes RGB lighting. It’s a far better effort than the Toughram RC DDR5 we reviewed a few months ago. Not only does it retail for £150 less, but it also offers a frequency that’s 1200MHz higher. The modules look stunning too, with grey and black heatsinks, which feature a mirrored section in…

SUPPLIER uk.roccat.com The Roccat Kone Air is, frankly, a peculiar new addition to the company’s gaming mouse lineup. It joins the ranks of travel-orientated gaming mice, such as the Razer Orochi and Corsair Katar Pro, that rely on conventional AA batteries rather than rechargeable units to provide hundreds of hours of use between charges. However, unlike most such mice, this one isn’t small or light and it can house two AA batteries rather than one. It's the size and weight of this mouse that really perplexes. With a whopping 82mm width, and a more conventional (but still sizeable) 132mm length and 43mm height, this mouse is a classic palm-grip-only design that fills the entire space under your hand. This bulk is matched by a considerable 96g weight without any batteries,…

SUPPLIER argos.co.uk The JBL Flip 6 is a Bluetooth speaker approximately the size of a large beer can, which means you can take it almost anywhere. It has a big, simple control interface, tough construction and its IP67 rating indicates protection from dust and short-term immersion in water. There’s a USB Type-C charging port on the back that doesn’t require a cover, which is a plus, as they tend to be a point of weakness over time, and playback time on the battery is good for 12 hours. The sound quality is great for a speaker of this small size too, being crisp and clear while delivering solid bass notes. Meanwhile, using the JBL Portable app allows the use of software called PartyBoost, which enables multiple compatible JBL speakers to…

How we test Outside of the money-no-object world of fully custom keyboards, you’d have been forgiven for thinking the mechanical keyboard market had reached its zenith several years ago. There has long been a multitude of well-built, stylish keyboards with RGB lighting, lots of switch options and plenty of gaming keys available. However, more recently, we’ve seen a surprising number of innovations that have transformed the premium mechanical keyboard landscape. The latest models include features such as hot-swappable switches that can just be pulled straight out and replaced, with no soldering required. Removable cables are also now common, providing extra versatility, while a couple of the keyboards in this test even have removable numpad sections, enabling you to switch between a compact TKL layout or a full-sized keyboard. Keycaps that…

SUPPLIER scan.co.uk Mountain is a relatively new name in the PC peripherals market, but you’d never have guessed it by looking at its Everest Max keyboard. Far from a simple first attempt to ease into the market, this keyboard has an ambitious modular design that includes removable numpad and media control sections, and it can even be bought in stages. The idea is that you can pick up the TKL Everest Core keyboard for just £120 inc VAT, or even the barebones keyboard (not currently available), and then later add the media dock (€40 ~£35 inc VAT), numpad (€60 ~£52 inc VAT) and wrist rest (€10 ~£9 inc VAT), or you can just opt for the whole lot at once with the Everest Max (£220 inc VAT). It’s a great…

The latest grand strategy game from Paradox Interactive, Victoria 3 swaps out the dynastic skulduggery of Crusader Kings for a dizzyingly complex Eurogame of industrial production and political progressivism. It lets you pick virtually any nation on the map and broadly do whatever you like with it. Whether you plan to run an aggressive military dictatorship or a politically emancipated utopia, your country must run at a profit. Victoria 3’s economic simulation combines managing a complex network of production chains, and eking profit out of their respective supply and demand. Your country can produce a wide range of goods through many different industries, but all are interconnected. If you want to manufacture more tools, for example, you’ll need additional wood and iron, increasing the demand and price of those goods.…

Not only does Vampire Survivors cost the price of a London coffee, but it also manages to create some of the most spectacular action you’ll see this year out of four measly controls. Those controls are W, A, S and D. That’s it. All you do in Vampire Survivors is move a laughably basic 2D sprite around a map, while waves of equally simple enemies descend on your position. To defend yourself, you have one basic attack that triggers automatically every second or so. As you guide your character around the map, simultaneously avoiding and eliminating enemies, you’ll pick up gems. Collect enough of these jewels, and you can upgrade your character, adding new attacks, such as a wand that spews homing balls of magic, a dagger that fires consistently…

REVIEW The Ultimate Guide to Informed Wearable Technology Giving a book a title that includes the word ‘ultimate’ is always a risky proposition, given the necessary breadth of such a publication, but Christine Farion’s The Ultimate Guide to Informed Wearable Technology makes a heck of a case for its applicability – with over 500 pages, it’s a weighty tome indeed. Farion’s chosen topic is wearable technology, but the book’s far from a dry review of the state-of-the-art. Instead, Farion, a post-grad lecturer at the Glasgow School of Art, has opted for a hands-on approach – turning the book into a guide to building a range of projects using Arduino-compatible hardware. Putting a few LEDs on a sewable circuit wouldn’t constitute an ‘ultimate guide’, though, which is where Farion’s academic experience…