Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 254 i PC Powerplay

Nvidia have taken the wraps off their midrange GPU offering, the GTX1060. Based on the same Pascal architecture and 16nm FinFET process as its more expensive GTX1080 and GTX1070 stablemates, the GTX1060 is designed to compete in the $400-$500 price point with AMD’s new RX480. The main differences between the GTX1060 and the GTX1070 are a 192-bit vs. 256-bit wide memory bus, 1280 CUDA cores as opposed to 1920, 80 texture units instead of 120, 120W of power consumption versus 150W, and 6GB of VRAM versus 8GB. From early benchmarks, the GTX1060 has a slight edge over the RX480 and performs between the previous generation GTX970 and GTX980. From the same benchmarks, the GTX1060 excels at 1080p gaming and performs admirably at 2560x1440 - but 4K gaming is a bit…

Despite SSDs becoming more and more popular lately, there’s still innovation happening in the old magnetic drive market. Seagate have released 10TB drives for consumer use, leveraging the helium based technology from their enterprise drives. The enclosure of the drive is filled with helium gas to allow the tightly packed spindles inside to be read reliably by the drive heads. There’s three different 10TB drives from Seagate - the BarraCuda Pro, IronWolf and SkyHawk. The BarraCuda Pro is designed for desktop use and performance, the IronWolf for NAS purposes and the SkyHawk for surveillance systems. The IronWolf and SkyHawk models are rated for 180TB/year of workload with a 3 year warranty, whereas the BarraCuda Pro is rated for 300TB/year and has a 5 year warranty. All three models are hitting…

Three days after releasing their Ghostbusters tie-in game, developer Fireforge Games has filed for bankruptcy. According to Kotaku’s Jason Schreier, the company had been liquidating assets in July to repay their over $12 million dollar debt, filling for bankruptcy on the 15th of July. Its tie-in Ghostbusters game was released alongside the movie on the 12th of July, receiving significantly negative reviews with an average rating of 31/100 by critics and a user score of 0.7 out of ten on Metacritic. Fireforge has cancelled at least two MOBAlike projects since they were founded in Irivine, California in 2011 by ex-Blizzard employee Tim Campbell. One of said projects, code-named Zeus, was said to be published by computer hardware company Razer who claim that the studio inappropriately used their funds towards other…

Frontwire Studios has had to remove all Star Wars intellectual property from its fan-made Star Wars Battlefront inspired third person shooter, Galaxy in Turmoil. On the 22nd of June, President of Frontwire Studios, Tony Romanelli, received a cease and desist letter from Lucasfilm responding to the developer’s request to use a variety of Star Wars IP in their multiplayer game with the film studio’s permission. Romanelli organised a meeting between the executives of the film studio in an attempt to negotiate a deal. “Due to their exclusive contract with EA, Lucasfilm was contractually obligated to deny our request for the use of the Star Wars IP for Galaxy in Turmoil based on EA’s decision. We tried to reach out to EA directly for more information, but we have so far…

“TF2 cannot survive, because it lacks one of Overwatch’s most compelling features: waifus.” In the Year of our Lord and Saviour 2016 the western world has now finished migrating from a postindustrial society into a neo-feudal content farm economy. It has not been a smooth transition. While it is now widely understood that high-quality content is the most precious commodity of all, profiting from this reality remains a challenge for even the largest and most deeply entrenched enterprises. Gearbox’s magnum opus Battleborn shipped with a tremendous amount of content, but in a mere two months and 17 days after launch it was demoted to sale via Humble Bundle; possibly a record for a ‘AAA’ release. Evolve, a shooter where four hunters chase a space monster around in circles until it…

DEVELOPER DIRE WOLF DIGITAL PUBLISHER BETHESDA SOFTWORKS DUE 2016 legends.bethesda.net When Elder Scrolls: Legends, a CCG set in the Elder Scrolls universe, was first announced, it’s safe to say that there were more than a few eyes rolled. The announcement seemed to be a bit of a “me too!” situation cashing in on the success of Blizzard’s free-to-play juggernaut, Hearthstone. After getting some hands on time with the game though, any thoughts of a simple cash-in have vanished. At this stage, ESL is shaping up to be a hugely compelling CCG with its own identity and play style. Unlike Hearthstone, Elder Scrolls: Legends doesn’t feature any classes. Instead, cards are separated into seven base categories, five of them being the base statistics from the Elder Scrolls RPGs (Agility, Endurance, Intelligence,…

For over 25 years PLE has been the go to PC store for West Australian consumers, and now they’re located in Melbourne providing fast freight to the entire eastern side of Australia. They sell a huge range of products and have no hidden fees such as parcel protection, credit card or PayPal surcharges. With four stores, over 50 friendly staff members and 25 years experience, this family owned business has definitely earned its reputation as one of Australia’s top IT retailers. CUSTOM BUILT COMPUTERS Undoubtedly one of the most impressive aspects of PLE is their extensive range of Custom Built Computers. On their website you will find one of the most flexible Custom Build configurators around. You can either start with one of their recommended specifications or start from scratch.…

“Having a vast shoal of multicoloured fish following your every move is pretty spectacular” DEVELOPER GIANT SQUID STUDIOS PUBLISHER DOUBLE JUMP PRICE $19.99 AVAILABLE AT STEAM www.abzugame.com It’s hard to describe Abzu in traditional gameplay terms. It’s not quite the underwater version of a walking simulator but it shares many elements in common with the game style. It’s not quite an adventure game but to progress players must find and use the right elements in the environment. It’s not an action game but there is a sense of danger. It is linear in terms of progression but still feels somewhat like a sandbox. It’s a game that’s hard to categorise, but it’s definitely not hard to love. Players take the role of a deep ocean diver of indefinable race and…

“Bank shots off walls to hit traps, enemies or doors from relative safety” DEVELOPER DOUBLE FINE PUBLISHER ADULT SWIM PRICE $19.99 AVAILABLE AT STEAM www.adultswim.com/games/headlander Set in a world half way between Buck Rogers and Logan’s Run, Headlander is a Metroidvania style puzzle platformer that takes a lighthearted approach to a rather horrifying idea. Players take the role of a disembodied head in a rocket-powered helmet who must make their way through a hedonistic robot city to combat the evil AI that is controlling everything. You do this by using your flying head to pull the heads off other robots and then perch on the neck hole, co-opting the body and all the abilities it possesses. The robots are colour coded in relation to their position in robot society, with…

“The game’s like a box of arts’n’crafts gear, allowing builders to design almost whatever they want” DEVELOPER CHUCKLEFISH PUBLISHER CHUCKLEFISH PRICE $14.99 AVAILABLE AT STEAM playstarbound.com Your appreciation of Starbound will depend entirely on whether you were part of the long, long Early Access period this “Terraria in space” sandbox platformer went through. Gamers first got their hands on a public Starbound build back in December 2013. Yes, 2013. That means the core community has lived with the game nonstop for an incredible two and a half years. They’ve watched it slowly evolve, seen features come, go and come back again. That’s why their response to 1.0 – and thus most of the Steam user reviews – has been so negative. Developer Chucklefish provided keen pioneers with access to nightly…

PRICE $520 www.nvidia.com Pity poor AMD. It seems like every time they have a new product up their sleeve, Nvidia comes along with a rival, and usually better, product. In this case it’s the new GeForce GTX 1060, which is designed to go head to head with AMD’s new mainstream product, the RX480. It’s priced slightly higher though, at around 25% increased cost here in Australia. Question is: is the 1060 worth the extra dosh? Like all new Nvidia product lines, the 1060 is based on the same main architecture. In this case it’s known as Pascal, and is actually very similar to the Maxwell design used in the last generation. The big change though is the move to a smaller design process, which refers to the size of the…

“ It only takes a few clicks to set up easy streaming with any DLNA compatibile device” PRICE $699 www.synology.com ANAS isn’t usually something we’d cover in PCPP, but considering how so many companies are trying to take over the loungeroom with devices like the Corsair Bulldog and Lapdog, the Roccat Sova and the like, we thought it high time to look at another solution for bringing the PC to the loungeroom. If you’re unfamiliar with the acronym, a NAS is Network-Attached Storage, a device that attaches to your router and accessed by any compatible device on the network or via the internet. Although definitely suitable for secure file storage, the DS416play is first and foremost a multimedia NAS, built for streaming content to any compatible device. As such it…

PRICE $69 www.gskill.com There’s a hell of a lot to like about G.Skill’s first mouse, but there are also a few drawbacks that make the debut peripheral a little difficult to fully recommend. To start with the good, the build quality and customisation options for the mouse are both excellent. The frame is made of aluminium giving a solid base for the buttons, thumb and palm rests. The side panels can be swapped out so the thumb rest can be positioned on either side, making the mouse ambidextrous. The palm rest can be raised and lowered with a screw for maximum comfort. All in all it feels like a good, premium mouse. Under the hood is an 8200 DPI laser sensor, 512k or memory, 1000Hz polling, and Omron switches. Even…

“Ultima IX killed Origin. Garriott left, all future Ultima projects were cancelled, and that was that.” Ultima IX: Ascension DEVELOPER ORIGIN SYSTEMS PERSONALITY RICHARD GARRIOTT RELEASED 1999 NUTSHELL After seven acclaimed games and Ultima VIII: Pagan, Garriott and his team took five years and four distinctly different approaches to release a buggy mess. Along with its technical failings, the game played fast and loose with its own lore, angering and alienating even those fans who endured the terrible gameplay. Today, a sprawling open-world RPG with multiple locations, dozens of NPCs and intricate quest lines is just, you know, what we expect. Games like Skyrim and the Witcher 3 have normalised vast worlds with weather effects, day-night cycles, logically consistent wildlife and hundreds of hours of gameplay. Back in the late…

THIS MAN’S SKY Hey guys, One of the biggest games this year, No Man’s Sky, is releasing this month. We’ve waited years to explore the endlessly generated neon-lighted galaxies and it’s crazy to think it’s out this month. People can’t bear to wait any longer though and are potentially ruining the experience for others. Reddit user Daymeeuhn told fellow Reddit users in a post on the game’s subreddit that he bought an early copy of the game for $1250 USD to play the game before anyone else in an attempt to avoid spoilers. Fellow Reddit users wanted to know his impressions on the game so he shared gameplay footage on YouTube before they were taken down and then later re-uploaded on Dailymotion by other users. Personally, I can’t understand imagine…

ASUS have a long history of quality gaming laptops and their latest model is no exception. The ROG G701 updates the 17” screen model in the popular Republic of Gamers line, bringing an Intel i7 6820HK overclockable processor, Nvidia GTX 980 graphics, 8GB to 64GB of DDR4 RAM, dual 512GB or 256GB PCIe SSDs that can be configured in a RAID 0 and the option of a 1080p or 4K display with G-SYNC support. The inclusion of an anti-ghosting keyboard with 30-key rollover and an ESS Sabre headphone DAC back up the G701’s gaming credentials. If the stock performance of the G701 doesn’t do it for ya, ASUS’s included ROG Gaming Centre includes 1-click overclocking, allowing you to extract a few more frames per second out of your favourite games…

“The idea is that the player will get to learn to be a complete fighter, and get to learn a variety of different fighting styles.” WHO PIERRE TARNO WHERE SLOCLAP WHY ABSOLVER Striking, stylish, and a little surreal, Absolver was one of the more noteworthy titles showcased at this year’s E3 convention. The debut game from an indie start-up founded by Ubisoft veterans, it will let players tear through an open world and engage in dynamic martial arts biffo. When we had the chance to catch up with Sloclap creative lead Pierre Tarno, the first thing he wanted to stress to us was that Absolver is not a game about mastering a singular martial arts system. “Basically, the player, during his adventures, will get to discover and learn different combat…

“Breach does an admirable job of revealing even more about Deus Ex’s dark cyberpunk world” DEVELOPER EIDOS MONTREAL PUBLISHER SQUARE ENIX DUE AUGUST 24 www.deusex.com It used to be standard fare for a game to come out with a solo campaign, and some form of multiplayer tacked on. These days, the reverse is often true (seriously, does anyone play Battlefield for the campaign?), but one genre that rarely goes that rout is your classic single player RPG. You might wish for multiplayer Skyrim, but really it’s a solo experience. The modern incarnation of Deus Ex – both games, in fact – have a heavier focus on combat, so you could almost imagine a multiplayer mode being tacked on. But you also know it would kinda suck. But someone at Square…

“Your enjoyment of Apex will depend heavily on who you play it with” DEVELOPER BOHEMIA INTERACTIVE PUBLISHER BOHEMIA INTERACTIVE PRICE $34.99 AVAILABLE AT STEAM, BOHEMIA INTERACTIVE STORE arma3.com/apex Let’s get this out of the way: if Apex was on Steam for US$19.99 it would be a no-brainer. But at US$34.99 (about $46 as I write this) it needs you to be really, REALLY into Arma 3. Whats more, the base game, released in 2013, is still asking US$39.99. Which means if you’re new to Arma and want to play online with the full set of mods and enhancements everyone else is using, you’ll have to shell out $99. Damn. But then, Arma 3 is an extremely hardcore, ultra-detailed military simulator. It has an almost overwhelming amount of content, and is…

“The promise was “pay once, play forever” and that is true. From a certain point of view” DEVELOPER FREE REIGN ENTERTAINMENT PUBLISHER FREE REIGN ENTERTAINMENT PRICE $24.99 AVAILABLE AT STEAM playshatteredskies.com This new open-world loot ‘em up has the deck stacked against it from the start, poor thing. That’s because it comes to us from Sergey Titov, the most prominent member of the team behind WarZ. WarZ is/was zombified version of DayZ which was... not well received by its players. The distilled version of the thousands upon thousands of words of vitriol spewed out online about WarZ? That it relies on microtransactions, the developer promised many features, then dumped the project. The devs dumped it for this: Shattered Skies. They called it a loot-em-up. Aliens came to Earth, everything’s bad,…

“ Promises to take what is already the world’s fastest consumer GPU and then give it some water love” PRICE $1309 www.msi.com We knew it was bound to happen, but not this quickly; somebody, sooner or later, was going to get Nvidia’s new GeForce GTX 1080 and strap a water cooler to it. Which is exactly what the Sea Hawk EK X is. This stunner of a card promises to take what is already the world’s fastest consumer GPU and then give it some water love. As you can see from the product shots, this a truly stunning representation of the GeForce GTX 1080. It shouldn’t be confused with the MSI GeForce GTX Sea Hawk X though, which comes with an All-in-One water cooler, and will be sold by both…

PRICE $59 www.cougargaming.com Cougar is definitely looking to shake up the headset market with the release of the Immersa. It’s a good looking, wonderfully comfortable, clear sounding, and well-built headset with a price tag that puts it firmly in the budget range. In fact, the price in Australia is something of a miracle. The Immersa has been released in the US at $49, so with exchange rates being what they are, the Immersa headset is actually cheaper locally than pretty much any other territory in the world. Keeping with the orange and black colours synonymous with Cougar design, the Immersa is a pretty striking headset, with a bright orange sprung headband and orange accents on the rear grill of the ear cups and massive cushions that look like training wheels…

PRICE $199 www.gskill.com Alongside the MX780 mouse, G.Skill has also taken its first foray into the gaming keyboard market with the KM780 RGB mechanical keyboard. Right off the bat it’s obvious that this keyboard is built for durability and features. The faceplate is a vast expanse of black aluminium hosting a full array of keys as well as six dedicated macro keys, profile switch buttons, and multimedia controls. There are both audio and USB passthroughs. The keys are Cherry Brown or Red RGB. There’s a decent wrist rest. Basically, the KM780 features pretty much everything you could expect from a mechanical gaming keyboard. Unfortunately there are a few problematic features, all too common in gaming keyboards, that have made it into the KM780 – most notably pointless design flourishes that…

PRICE $699 www.edifier.com Nearly $700 may seem excessive for a set of 2.0 speakers, and to be sure it is a pretty hefty price tag, but the quality and performance of the Edifier S1000DB is good enough to make the price seem like a bargain. The speakers are large and heavy, each featuring a titanium tweeter for a smoother response than seen with plastic or aluminium, and large, powerful 5.5” forward facing drivers that deliver 120W of oomph and an impressively booming bass. Initially the power of the bass was a little overwhelming and left the mid ranges muted, but after a few days of burn in everything balances out nicely and you end up with a very rich, satisfying soundscape. The speakers have a slanted design that is supposed…

PRICE $699 www.gigabyte.com.au RGB lighting is the flavour of the year and this board has hopped on the bandwagon with no less than four onboard RGB lighting locations. The option that pulses the lighting with your audio output was particularly neat. The board includes two U.2 ports for some great futureproofing, the only board in our roundup to offer as many. On the PCI-E front this was also the only board tested that offered three full 16x lanes for 3-way graphics configurations, however due to the slot layout, 4-way can’t physically be done with double height cards. The reason for this is because Gigabyte have chosen to use the sole PCI-E 1x slot as an extra spacer between the primary and secondary PCI-E 16x slots to aid card cooling, compressing…

01 FujiFilm X-T2 Price: $2400 • Distributor: FujiFilm www.fujifilm.com.au While high end smartphones have been increasing the quality of their cameras, high end cameras have been increasing the quality of their connectivity features. POWERED UP: Smartphone app allows simple photo browsing and transfer, as well as operating shutter settings. The Tether Shooting plugin for Photoshop Lightroom allows for remote shooting and automatic transfer and saving of images. And you can expect 24.3MP images and 4K video recording in a body just over half a kilo in weight. PLAYED OUT: The price tag makes this one for those serious about their photography. 02 Pong Table Price: $TBA • Distributor: Not yet www.tablepongproject.com If you’ve got a whole lot of money, then consider throwing it at these people so they can turn…

FOUR MOST IMPRESSIVE FEATURES: 1. 5760x1080 of gaming bliss 2. A 210cm desk from Ikea to support it all 3. R9 380 4GB Video Card 4. AMD FX 8350 Eight Core Processor LAST UPGRADE: Logitech G502 Gaming Mouse DREAM UPGRADE: 1TB SSD DREAM UPGRADE: Lian Li Case – Simple elegance that has lasted the years WHY SO SPECIAL: I still like to think of this PC as the one I bought all those years ago when I graduated uni. It is still the only complete PC I have ever purchased. Everything since that point has been the purchase of parts to upgrade. And whilst there are none of the original component left (I ditched the original FDDs two years back), with each upgrade I have always retained something of the…

If you’ve ever seen an OLED television in the flesh, you’ll know that they look amazing and you probably wish there was an OLED computer monitor for your eyes to feast on. Dell have you covered with their UltraSharp UP3017Q, 30”, 4K UHD, OLED beast. It offers 100% Adobe RGB coverage, 97.8% DCI-P3 coverage and a 400,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio. For the gamers, there’s a 120Hz refresh rate and a super-fast 0.1ms response time. From the specs, the UP3017Q is the perfect monitor, providing excellent colour reproduction, without sacrificing its gaming credentials. It even has a beautiful thin bezel, like the Dell XPS laptops. Unfortunately, the UP3017Q comes with a US$4999 price tag. Ouch.…

Case fans aren’t the most exciting thing in the world, but when one of them craps out or ramps up, you sure do notice it. Corsair have announced a new range of case fans that use magnetic levitation technology to reduce noise, increase airflow and improve reliability over the traditional bearings used today. The bearings inside Corsair’s ML range of fans create a magnetic field so that the fan’s shaft doesn’t come into contact with the bearing, so there’s practically zero friction. This allows the fans to spin at up to 2,400RPM, yet keep noise to a minimum. The magnetic levitation also reduces wear and tear, with Corsair rating the ML series for 200,000 hours of operation before failure and backs that up with a 5 year warranty. The ML120…

“The T-Rex sequence actually had me stepping back and ducking from the spray of spit when the beast roared into my face” I really don’t know if VR is here to stay, but the technology – now in its second or third coming depending on how many arguments you want to start – is certainly making its best case for itself yet. With a range of hardware, from Google Cardboard up to the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, it’s even catering to all budgets. And with this rush of hardware comes a rush of software designed for it. There are documentaries, simple ‘almost being there’ experiences, and of course a raft of games, both dedicated and with added VT support. But what is it like not just to review the…

“PC gamers are trying to combine their favourite hobby with more physical activity.” Just in case this wasn’t abundantly clear already, videogames permeate many aspects of my life: work, recreation, family time, wardrobe. I even went through a phase of learning how to cook meals from The Sims, like Key Lime Pie. (I may have given myself the Soggy Crust debuff moodlet.) One thing, however, that has previously been entirely separate over the last ten years is exercise. But this month I put a plank over the top of my treadmill and played The Sims 4 on laptop while walking at 6km per hour until the battery ran out, 8km later. Part of what prompted this experiment was buying a Garmin Vivofit. I noticed that, on the three or four…

SID MEIER’S CIVILIZATION VI DEVELOPER FIRAXIS PUBLISHER 2K DUE OCT 21 http://civilization.com Civilization is one of those games that’s been around for such a long time and is so well-regarded that you start to wonder if maybe it’s approaching perfection. It’s the chess of videogames, the Tetris of turn-based strategy: where do you even go with it? How do you begin to improve on something so delicate and complex, a game you can play for thousands (!) of hours without becoming bored? “Yeah, it’s definitely a delicate balance!” laughs Sarah Darney, associate producer of Civilization VI. “You have to make sure you have enough familiar for the fans that’ve been around and enough new stuff because it’s the next generation. So, the way we approach it is, we take one…

ROG STRIX X99 Strix is the newest recruit into the Republic of Gamers (ROG) — and ROG Strix X99 Gaming is the first ROG Strix motherboard. The ROG Strix X99 Gaming delivers premier performance, innovation, and visual dynamics to release your gaming instincts. The bold design and bright colours channel your spirit of fierce individualism, charging every gaming experience with thrilling energy. Want to dominate with epic speed and agility? Join the Republic with ROG Strix X99 Gaming! ROG SHEATH The stage for the ultimate battle The extra-large Asus ROG Sheath mouse pad is optimized for all gaming mouse types, with a smooth surface that perfectly ensures pixel-precise tracking for unmatched command and control. ROG Sheath is designed for your comfort and features a non-slip ROG-red rubber base that keeps…

“Mired in a mix of contradictory mechanics, sloppy controls, and meandering level design” DEVELOPER HAREBRAINED SCHEMES PUBLISHER BANDAI NAMCO ENTERTAINMENT PRICE $29.99 AVAILABLE AT STEAM, HUMBLE, GOG necropolisgame.com Necropolis is basically the videogame version of nuts and gum. Individually they are great but when mixed together it becomes an unappetizing mess. The elevator pitch for Necropolis would be something along the lines of “Procedurally generated Dark Souls”. It’s definitely intriguing and a concept we were behind until we got hands on with it. Rather than being strengthened by this merging of ideas, Necropolis is instead mired in a mix of contradictory mechanics, sloppy controls, and level design that is little more than a meandering maze. The objective of the game is simple – make your way, either solo or with…

“Inside is more coherent, compelling, and horrifying than its predecessor.” DEVELOPER PLAYDEAD PUBLISHER PLAYDEAD PRICE $19.99 AVAILABLE AT STEAM www.playdead.com Early in Inside, the young, red-shirted protagonist runs from a huge, crazed pig. Time a jump right and it stuns itself running into a wall. It’s only then you see the fat worm that has burrowed into the pig’s rectum. Pulling out the worm is both uncomfortable and unnerving but it’s only a taste of the stunning body-horror to come. A spiritual successor to Playdead’s own hit game, Limbo, Inside is far more than a retread of the previous game. True, it utilizes the same simple controls to solve setpiece puzzles, but the new adventure is more coherent, compelling, and horrifying than its predecessor. Limbo subscribed to a dream logic…

An hilarious, chaotic mess of undead and screaming 8-bit people DEVELOPER NOCLIP PUBLISHER GAMBITIOUS DIGITAL ENTERTAINMENT PRICE $12.99 AVAILABLE AT STEAM www.zombienightterror.com What would happen in the adorable blue and green suicide machines that populate the Lemmings franchise were soulless monsters with an insatiable hunger? That seems to be the basic premise of Zombie Night Terror, a fun, challenging and funny zombie apocalypse puzzle game in which players infect people in the hopes of creating a zombie army large enough to kill sufficient humans to progress to the next red pixel soaked level. Instead of directly controlling the zombies, players instead are tasked with wrangling the shambling chaos. At the beginning of each stage, players have a limited number of doses of the unfortunately tainted party drug known on the…

“What is the point of building an SLI GTX 1070 rig and only ever asking it to render at 1920x1080?” PRICE LG 27UD88-W: $1299 • LG 34UM88-P: $1499 www.lg.com Most gamers buy cheap gamer-branded 1080p 24-or 27-inch monitors. But you’re not most gamers. You don’t like the limited viewing angle of a TN display. You demand better colours, whiter whites, blacker blacks and most of all pixels. You need so many pixels. What is the point of building an SLI GTX 1070 rig and only ever asking it to render at 1920x1080? Spend $1500+ on a new PC these days, and even 2560x1440 won’t stress your marvellous machine. You need more pixels! The logical thing to do is buy a 4K monitor. And LG’s 27UD88-W is such a monitor. But…

“With the price of the Stealth starting at $450 cheaper than the Macbook, it’s really a no brainer decision” PRICE $1549 FOR QHD- 128GB • $1849.95 FOR QHD – 256GB • $2149.95 FOR UHD – 256GB • $2449.95 FOR UHD – 512GB http://www.razerzone.com Razer laptops are generally assumed to do one thing, and one thing well – game on the go. But to buy the new Stealth for this task would be a mistake. It’s the company’s first shot at a purebred Ultrabook, and it’s a beauty. Until now my favourite Ultrabook has been Apple’s latest Macbook, but I think the Stealth has finally knocked Apple’s amazing machine from its perch. The Stealth is built around an absolute stunner of a screen – this 12.5 inch comes in two variants,…

PRICE $80 www.coolermaster.com The Masterkeys Lite utilises a technology with one of the most awkward portmanteaus we’ve heard in recent years. It’s built around “mem-chanical” keys – mechanical style plungers used to hit membrane activators. The idea of combining the feel of mechanical switches with the low price point of membrane keyboards is a good idea on paper, but this first mem-chanical keyboard is not the most pleasant thing to use. It also doesn’t have an apostrophe. The key is still there but unlike every other key there’s no indicator. Hunt and peckers beware. The problem is that the switches, although designed to work like mechanical keys (they’re even compatible with Cherry keycaps), don’t actually feel like mechanical keys. No matter what type of mechanical switch you prefer, each of…

PRICE $199 www.thermaltake.com Thermaltake’s new Core P3 is not a case for everyone. It’s not going to be your next LAN build, and it probably isn’t even ideal as your main, desktop system. But, if you’re a dedicated tweaker of your PC hardware, or an overclocker, this DIY open design is probably just what you’re after. You do have to build the chassis yourself, but the process is pretty straightforward, and everything is well-engineered enough to go together quiet well. It’s a little fiddly in parts, but quite simple – and with the added bonus that you can choose from a few different configurations while putting it all together. For instance, you can mount your video card traditionally, or have it standing beside the motherboard thanks to an included mounting…