Table of contents for December 2016 in Custom PC UK

Our spreadsheet tells us which cards offer the best value in raw, unpretentious numbers There’s nothing quite like maths for turning our human comprehension into cold, hard numbers. There’s nothing romantic about our graphics card scoring Excel spreadsheet, but it does a grand job of removing our preconceptions and prejudices,just telling us which cards offer the best bang per buck in raw, unpretentious numbers. We started using this scoring system a few years ago, to shift the focus onto useful, real gaming performance. For example, we wanted to avoid rewarding cards for getting 15fps in a game, over a card that gets 10fps, when both results were ultimately unplayable. You can find out more information about the scoring system in our graphics card Labs test on p41, but I wanted…

Libratone’s Too is deliberately modelled to be a similar shape and size to that of a drinks bottle, so the speaker fits neatly into the side mesh pockets on backpacks, bike bottle holders and other slots designed for drinks. Of course, not many bottles of water cost £109; we’d certainly think twice before wandering around with it hanging off the side of a bag rather than zipped safely within. In use, the Too was competent rather than classy, though, which is a letdown given the price. Low tones lacked the presence of the similarly sized and priced UE Boom 2 and volume wasn’t as plentiful either. Libratone suggests pairing a couple of Toos together using the Libratone app if you need more volume, but for that £220 price, you’d be…

Nvidia’s flagship Titan X and GTX 1080 cards might be good for grabbing headlines and showing off, but only a handful of gamers can afford the large sums of money demanded by these top-end cards. Most graphics cards are sold in the sub-£250 portion, and the battleground in this sector is really hotting up. Not only has AMD released several brand-new GPUs in this price league, but Nvidia has also now brought its Pascal architecture into play with its GeForce GTX 1060 6GB and 3GB cards. There’s a lot of very new competition, and we’ve only been able to look at a couple of the options so far, so this month we’ve decided to take a look at all the new sub-£250 options, including various memory configurations, to see what…

SUPPLIER www.overclockers.co.uk / CARD TESTED MSI GeForce GTX 1060 Gaming X 3GB (£228 inc VAT from www.overclockers.co.uk) Showing that you can’t necessarily judge a graphics card on how much memory is soldered to its PCB, Nvidia’s cheaper GeForce GTX 1060 cards include just 3GB of memory, yet cost more money than AMD’s 4GB Radeon RX470 cards. We’ve taken a proper look at the impact of graphics memory on p50, and there are some instances where our tests go over the 3GB mark, but the underlying GPU here is so powerful that the limited amount of memory rarely has a significant impact on performance. The memory isn’t the only difference between the GeForce GTX 1060 3GB and its 6GB bigger sibling either; the 3GB cards also have a slightly cut-down…

SUPPLIER www.ebuyer.com / CARD TESTED AMD reference card The 8GB flavour of AMD’s Radeon RX480, provided our first glimpse of AMD’s new 14nm FinFET line-up back in Issue 156. It impressed us by nearly matching the performance of Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 970 while still only costing £219 inc VAT and massively improving on AMD’s previously woeful power efficiency. But a lot has changed in just three months, with fluctuating prices after the referendum, and Nvidia’s new GeForce GTX 1060 cards shaking up the market. If you look around, you can find 8GB RX480 cards with prices that now aren’t far off the launch price, but is that enough to fend off Nvidia’s aggression? Unlike Nvidia’s two GTX 1060 versions, there’s little difference between the 4GB RX480 and the 8GB…

How we test Like joysticks, racing wheels can bridge the huge gap in realism between a game pad and actually driving a car. A good wheel will make you feel like you’re really driving a vehicle, especially with the addition of force feedback, which has come a long way in the past few years. Thankfully, PC gamers no longer have to tolerate dodgy software and drivers when using racing wheels on a PC either. The latest games and hardware usually pair up perfectly for some excellent PC racing sessions, offering the next best experience to driving on a track with hundreds of horsepower. However, profiles, calibration and force feedback still differ a fair bit between racing wheels and, more importantly, the wheels themselves use all manner of ways to mount…

SUPPLIER www.argos.co.uk Despite gear shifters being popular on real cars, especially in the UK where manual gearboxes are common on road cars, they’re often optional on racing wheels. Logitech’s add-on shifter for the G920 costs only a little less than the Trust 20293 GXT 288 as a whole, but as well as paddle shifters, the Trust also includes a gear shift lever. Sadly, though, it only behaves like a shifter you might find in a sporty automatic; you can only shift up or down, rather than to a specific gear. However, it adds an interesting dynamic if you’re not keen on paddle shifters and don’t want to use the fully automatic option. Alternatively, you can also use it as a makeshift handbrake, although it uses the same assignments as…

SUPPLIER www.morecomputers.com /MODEL NUMBER 4468008 Thrustmaster’s TMX Force Feedback wheel and pedals set comes in at £118 inc VAT, making it significantly cheaper than the Logitech G920 Driving Force (see p55), but also nearly twice the price of Trust’s surprisingly good 20293 GXT 288. This middle ground gets you a solid example of a steering wheel, though, with a very solid mount that includes padding to protect the surface on which you mount it, and it has clearance for up to 4cm-thick desks, plus the all-important mains-powered force feedback system. Full-sized paddle shifters are included, and while they don’t feel quite as realistic as the paddles on the Logitech, they’re plenty good enough for taking a virtual Nissan GTR for a spin. The wheel doesn’t have a complete coating…

After the enormous success of Human Revolution, the golden-hued prequel that proved it was possible to make Deus Ex great again, a sequel to the prequel was inevitable. The mainstream games industry can’t let a sleeping Aug lie when there’s money to be made. Yet sequels are treacherous ground in the Deus Ex world, as demonstrated by the disappointing follow-up to the Ion Storm original. Deus Ex: Invisible War shot for the moon, missed, and flew right into the roiling surface of the sun instead. Mankind Divided mercifully avoids the fate of Invisible War, but it does so in a manner that isn’t characteristic of Deus Ex – playing it safe. The sequel to Human Revolution is the least adventurous entry in the series. It’s both smaller and messier than…

War has been a staple topic of gaming for almost as long as gaming has existed. Whether it’s blasting lines of aliens in Space Invaders, shooting Nazis in Call of Duty or battling a Dark Lord in Dragon Age, gaming has represented large-scale, armed conflict in just about every way imaginable. Yet for all the time and money developers spend on depicting war, until recently, games gave little thought to exploring war.Whether it’s a spectacular FPS or a grand strategy game,most games that depict war are only concerned with the machine itself–the soldiers,the technology and the spectacle.Mainstream developers such as Infinity Ward and DICE spend large sums of money on rendering gun barrels in exquisite detail,oranimating pixel-perfect explosions, while thousands of man hours are consumed with calculating bullet collisions with…

Will M.2 revolutionise modding and case design? Cast your mind back to the early days of usable SSDs and you might remember just how this awesome technology stomped all over the performance of mechanical hard disks. These early SSDs only had small capacities of 64GB and 128GB, if you were lucky, but some of us, including myself, willingly tolerated pitiful amounts of OS drive space just for that speed boost. Of course, SSDs have moved on since then, and decent 512GB SSDs can now be bought for just over £100, and the next big step is moving away from 2.5in SATA SSDs to M.2 drives. M.2 doesn’t just support smaller SATA drives, but can also support PCI-E drives, using four PCI-E 3 lanes, depending on your motherboard and your drive.…

I also want literal silence, not the marketing box claims of ‘silence’ Silent PCs often use low-power chips, forgo graphics cards and are housed in exotic cases with heatpipes everywhere. Meh! These approaches are unsatisfactory for my needs. I want performance, I want to game and I want my PC to be as normal as possible, but I also want literal silence, not the marketing box claims of ‘silence’ that so often fail to live up to expectations. So,over the past several months,I’ve been attempting to build a fanless PC with off-the-shelf hardware,while maintaining as much performance as possible. Ultimately, I’ve had to compromise by going semi-fanless,but I’ve still tamed a Core i7-5960X CPU, along with an Nvidia GeForce GTX graphics card,in a machine that makes zero noise when it…

Samsung created a splash last year with its 950 Pro SSDs. Using the latest NVMe protocol over PCI-E 3, they brought unprecedented performance for the money. Thanks to the tiny M.2 form factor, they could also bring that performance to desktops and laptops alike. A year later, the 950 Pro range still reigns supreme, but Samsung hasn’t rested on its laurels – it’s just announced a new line of high-performance NVMe M.2 SSDs – the 960 Pro and 960 Evo, boasting sequential read speeds that are up to 1,000MB/sec faster than those of the 950 Pro drives. Samsung 960 Pro The flagship Pro model now comes in capacities up to 2TB, marking a four-fold increase over the maximum capacity of the 950 Pro range. There will also be 512GB and…

If you only gave Coloretto a passing glance you might assume it was just a simple kids’ game. There are very few rules; the game simply involves collecting coloured cards from three central piles and it’s all dressed up with slightly childish chameleon artwork. You’d realise you were wrong about mid-way through your first play-through, however. A game of Coloretto, which takes around 20 minutes, plays like a cross between Poker and Rummy, although you can see your opponents’ cards. Each turn requires a careful balancing calculation between building a pile for yourself and blocking off colours your opponents want, while remembering which cards have been claimed and which cards are left in the deck. With its cheap price, portability and simplicity, it’s an easy recommendation. SUPPLIER www.amazon.co.uk…

Samsung claims that the Powerbot VR9300’s motor is the most powerful one the company has ever put in a robot, and its performance bears out this claim. Carpets were left clean and brushed, and route finding is good too, thanks to the bot’s myriad sensors. For a laugh, you can control the unit manually with the bundled remote, terrorising pets and guests in the process. These features all add to the eye-watering price, but they work. The VR9300 only got stuck once in the week we had it, and its coverage was reliably good. If you’re simply in love with the idea of a robot trundling around your home doing your bidding, and you have the money, the Powerbot VR9300 is the best robot vacuum cleaner we’ve seen. SUPPLIER…

SUPPLIER www.ebuyer.com / CARD TESTED AMD reference card The 4GB AMD Radeon RX480 cards enable you to get a piece of Polaris action for just under £200, which still gets you access to a full fat 14nm Polaris GPU. Unlike the 3GB GeForce GTX 1060, the 4GB AMD Radeon RX480 doesn’t have a cut-down GPU – every part of its Polaris chip is enabled and fully functional, giving you nine compute units, each of which contains 64 stream processors for a total of 2,304. By default, the GPU has a 1120MHz base clock, boosting to 1266MHz, and this spec is the same between both the 4GB and 8GB cards. However, there’s one small difference between the 4GB and 8GB cards, aside from the amount of memory, which is the…

When it comes to VRAM, more is better, right? After all, if your graphics card has more video memory (VRAM), then it has more room to store all your games’ graphical goodness in high-speed chips, resulting in faster performance. But will your card actually use that extra memory? We decided to find out by monitoring VRAM usage on our standard graphics test rig (see p41) with an AMD Radeon RX480 8GB card, using used GPU-Z (www.techpowerup.com/gpuz) to monitor peak VRAM use over three runs of each of our benchmarks. Two surprises were that both The Witcher 3 at High settings and Crysis 3 at Very High settings didn’t even break the 2GB mark at 1080p, and only used slightly more than 2GB at 2,560 x 1,440. Fallout 4 sat below…

The wheel is completely covered in leather, so it feels very realistic SUPPLIER www.currys.co.uk / MODEL NUMBER 941-000124 When it comes to competing for the best racing wheel title, Logitech has a particularly tough challenge because of the simple fact that its legendary G27 wheel set, while discontinued and very hard to find, is still considered the benchmark for premium racing wheels costing under £300. In the past year, Logitech has launched several new wheels, including the G920 Driving Force – a combined force feedback wheel and pedal set with flappy paddles – and initially it wasn’t received particularly well. The original price of £300 inc VAT saw it cost considerably more than the G27, and the G920 lacked a gearstick too – a feature that was included with…

Build a home theatre PC The parts you’ll need to build an affordable, home theatre PC that’s ideal for putting in the lounge and playing back all manner of video formats. This machine will handle general computing and media tasks with no trouble, and its dual-core Skylake CPU can even handle 4K video playback. Meanwhile, its super-quiet Noctua CPU cooler prevents it from making a racket. Build a budget gaming PC The parts you’ll need to build a budget machine capable of playing the latest games at maximum settings on a 1080p monitor, and even some games at 2,560 x 1,440. The machine has a discrete graphics card, a Skylake dual-core CPU and DDR4 memory. The ASRock Extreme4 motherboard is also capable of base clock overclocking via a BIOS update.…

Back in 2011, Eidos Montreal released Deus Ex: Human Revolution to both critical and commercial success. Human Revolution was the culmination of four years of hard work, pushing technology to the very edge of its limits. The CDC engine, developed by Crystal Dynamics for 2007’s Tomb Raider: Anniversary, proved not entirely suited to a game as large and complex as Deus Ex. ‘In the last year of the production of Human Revolution, iterating over that content was proving difficult,’ says Julien Bouvrais, chief technology officer of Eidos Montreal ‘We were overall quite happy with the runtime of the engine and how we could shape it to bring the art direction to life, as well as create the gameplay elements that make up the game. The CDC engine was a great…

REVIEW Sugru Rebel Tech Kit Sugru is, it has to be said, a remarkable product. Developed by a team of scientists working under Jane Ní Dhulchaointigh in the materials department of Queen Mary, University of London, Sugru (derived from the Irish word súgradh, for play, and more technically known as Formerol) is cheap, easy to use, safe and has loads of uses. The only problem is easily communicating all those many uses. For those of you who have never seen Sugru, the new Rebel Tech Kit is designed to act as an introduction. Now sold under the tagline ‘mouldable glue,’ giving at least a hint as to its purpose, Sugru is a soft, pliable putty that hardens into silicone rubber overnight. It has found uses in all sorts of areas,…

How many times in the past 15 years have you only installed a graphics card in your ATX board? Two of my many responsibilities at Scan are deciding on the spec of our 3XS PCs for our website and designing systems for customers with a specific set of requirements.Again and again,I’m struck with the fact that, for all the PC has changed in the past few decades, ATX is still by far the most popular form factor. First launched more than 20 years ago by Intel, ATX is only the second form factor in the entire history of the PC to be popular enough to become the de facto standard. There have been attempts to replace ATX, such as BTX over ten years ago, but it was soon scrapped when…

Gaming is a hobby and ultimately trivial; it’s nothing like Nazism Sticks and stones may break my bones,but words will never hurt me … hang on, someone called us, what? Racists?! Michael Pachter, well-known gaming industry analyst and pundit, has inflamed and enraged the Internet by telling the Daily Star, ‘I think PC gamers are like racists; they only like their own kind and they have no interest in venturing out and mixing with other races. PC gamers are arrogant twits who are convinced what they do is better than what anybody else can possibly do.’ Yikes. It’s an inflammatory thing to say, although perhaps not for the reasons that are most common in angry responses. It’s inflammatory because it trivialises actual racism, an issue which everyone may have noticed…

Asus has sensibly ditched SATA Express SUPPLIER www.scan.co.uk SPECIFICATIONS Chipset Intel X99 CPU socket Intel LGA2011-v3 Memory support 8 slots: max 128GB DDR3 (up to 3333MHz) Expansion slots Four 16x PCI-E 3, one 1x PCI-E 2, one 4x PCI-E Sound ROG SupremeFX Networking Intel I218-V Gigabit LAN, Intel I211-AT Gigabit LAN, 802.11ac Wi-Fi Overclocking Base clock 80–300MHz, CPU multiplier 12-80x; max voltages, CPU 2V, RAM 2.155V Ports 10 x SATA 6Gbps (Z170), 1 x M.2, 1 x U.2, 8 x USB 3, 2 x USB 3.1 Type-A, 2 x USB 3.1 Type-C, 6 x USB 2, 2 x LAN, 3 x surround audio out, line in, mic, (extra 3.5mm and 6.3mm audio out and mic via SupremeFX HiFi) Dimensions (mm) 305 x 272 Asus’ Rampage V Edition 10 is…

Nvidia’s flagship mobile chip has 2,560 stream processors SUPPLIER www.scan.co.uk SPECIFICATIONS CPU 4GHz Intel Core i7-6700K Memory 16GB 2133MHz DDR4 Graphics Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 8GB Screen 17.3in 3,840 x 2,160 Nvidia G-Sync IPS Storage 256GB Samsung 950 Pro M.2 SSD, 2TB hard disk Networking Gigabit Ethernet, dual-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi Weight 4.3kg Ports 4 x USB 3, 2 x USB 3.1 Type-C, Gigabit Ethernet, 4 x audio, SD card slot, HDMI, 2 x mini-DisplayPort Dimensions (mm) 418 x 282 x 39(WxDxH) Operating system Windows 10 Pro 64-bit Warranty Two years parts and labour, with first year collect and return and second year return to base Scan’s new LG17 Carbon Extreme is one of the most monstrous mobiles we’ve seen. It sports Nvidia’s latest mobile GPU alongside a desktop CPU,…

GoPro is dominant in the world of action cameras, but if anyone has the know-how and money to compete, it’s Sony. Priced at £179 inc VAT, the AS50 currently costs £20 more than a GoPro Session – the latter’s price has dropped dramatically from its £330 RRP a year ago. In some areas, the more modern Sony has the edge too – it has longer battery life, built-in digital image stabilisation and a much better UI. However, in the ways that matter most, it loses out. It’s heavier than the Session, it needs a separate waterproof case, it’s bulkier and, crucially, the image quality isn’t as good. The dynamic range of the AS50 shots was narrower than that of the GoPro, making video look dull in comparison. We recommend opting…

Given its whopping 20,000mAh capacity, £28 inc VAT is a relatively small sum for the Aukey PB-N36. It’s not as if you’re getting a bargain basement unit either, as the PB-N36 is attractively finished and has some clever touches. At the top of this list is the inclusion of both micro-USB and Lightning power input ports, meaning iOS users don’t have to carry an extra cable to recharge the battery. Meanwhile, the two 2.4A USB output ports can pump out juice to connected devices simultaneously, while a coloured light behind the power button indicates the remaining charge. On our test bench, the Aukey recharged our test Nexus 5X phone four times without even dropping down to 30 per cent charge, making it an ideal accessory for a festival weekend or…

SUPPLIER www.scan.co.uk / CARD TESTED Asus Strix Gaming Radeon RX470 (£189 inc i VAT from www.scan.co.uk) Asus’ Strix Gaming Radeon RX470 wowed us last month, offering decent 1080p and 2,560 x 1,440 performance for under £200, all in a quiet, overclocked and good-looking package. At its stock speed, AMD’s RX470 has a 926MHz base clock and a 1206MHz boost clock, but it’s possible to get an overclocked card for not much more money than the reference spec. The GPU itself is based on the same Polaris architecture found in AMD’s pricier Radeon RX480 cards (see opposite), but with a slightly cut-down specification. The RX470 has 32 compute units, compared to the 36 compute units in the RX480, giving it a total of 2,048 stream processors and 128 texture units,…

Although this Labs test is focused on cards costing under £250, the cards on test sit at the upper end of that scale. We’ve previously found that GPU performance falls off a cliff once you get below a certain price, where graphics cards become bottlenecked by narrow memory interfaces, slower clock speeds and fewer stream processors. But is this still the case? AMD’s new Polaris-based Radeon RX460 is available in both 2GB and 4GB versions, with prices circulating the £100 mark. Can you really get respectable performance for this money? To help us find out, AMD sent us a Gigabyte WindForce 2 RX460 2GB card (£113 from www.scan.co.uk). The RX460 is built with the same 14nm FinFET transistors found in its bigger siblings, and its low power requirements mean it…

SUPPLIER www.scan.co.uk / CARD TESTED Zotac GeForce GTX 1060 AMP! Edition 6GB (£264 inc VAT from www.scan.co.uk) Sitting just shy of the £250 price limit of this month’s Labs test is Nvidia’s full-fat GeForce GTX 1060 6GB, which not only features twice as much GDDR5 memory as its 3GB little siblings, but also has a slightly beefier GPU. The 6GB flavour of the GTX 1060 has 1,280 stream processors, compared to 1,152 in the cheaper model. The 6GB cards also demanding £54 more than the 3GB versions. The two flavours otherwise share the same spec, though, with a stock GPU clocked at 1506MHz and boosting to 1708MHz, although the latter figure is a little conservative. Our Zotac sample happily boosted to 1898MHz during our benchmarks, even with the base…

SUPPLIER www.amazon.co.uk / MODEL NUMBER SL-650300-BK Speedlink’s Black Bolt offers a way into the world of force feedback for just £45, forgoing mains-powered force feedback in favour of a subtler, USBpowered vibration effect. The wheel compensates for the lack of power with a fair degree of spring-back resistance as standard – it doesn’t feel quite right at first, but you get used to it. Our experience with the Black Bolt reminded us of using an arcade steering wheel, and it has quite a large dead zone as standard too, requiring some calibration, whereas the other wheels on test were great from the outset. The wheel is small, but solid and pleasant to use, making it potentially useful if you’re limited for space. The paddle shifters work well and are…

SUPPLIER www.box.co.uk / MODEL NUMBER 4168049 If you want some serious power from a very realistic steering wheel set, then the Thrustmaster T300 RS should definitely be on your shortlist. This premium set features an industrial-class brushless motor and even requires a fan to kick in after lengthy gaming sessions. However, the result is some monstrous force feedback that’s both powerful and detailed from this mains-powered unit. At a price of £214 inc VAT, the Thrustmaster T300 RS is the most expensive wheel on test, yet it lacks the clutch pedal present on the Logitech G920 Driving Force (see p55) and isn’t equipped with a manual gear shifter either. Thankfully, paddle shifters are present, although we were a tad disappointed with them – they feel rather flat and tinny…

It’s easy to create a sense of mystery when you offer the player little information Storytelling is one of the trickiest parts of game design. What makes gaming an interesting art form – interactivity, dynamism and unpredictability – is at odds with modern storytelling conventions, where plot, pace andcharacterareguidedwithexpertdetailbyanauthorialhand. It’s like putting on a play where the audience is on stage with you – a drunken audience that’s more interested in kicking over the props and poking the actors than listening to them warble about existence or relationships. Games have previously grappled with this problem by adopting one of three approaches. Games such as Half-Life embrace linear storytelling,funnelling you along a scripted path and using momentum to keep you interested. Others, such as Mass Effect, lend you agencythroughabranchingnarrative,whereyour choices affect…

In theory, buying a graphics card is simple. A quick glance at some reviews reveals the level of performance any given card provides – cross-reference that information with your budget and you should be able to narrow down your choices to one or two cards. However, the reality is that GPUs can quickly get confusing, with many complicated terms, and a review may leave you with more questions than answers. So, to help out, over the next few pages we’re going give you a complete overview of a graphics card’s workings. Throughout this article, we’ll use the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 and AMD Radeon RX 480 as comparative examples, as they represent the most current offerings from both companies that are price and performance comparable. THE GRAPHICS PIPELINE The key…

MILESTONES THIS MONTH TOP 20 OVERALL TOP 20 PRODUCERS WHAT IS FOLDING? Folding@home uses the spare processing cycles from your PC’s CPU and graphics cards for medical research. You can download the client from http://folding.stanford.edu and our team’s ID is 35947. Once you pass a significant milestone, you’ll get your name in the mag. You can also discuss folding with us and other readers online at the www.bit-tech.net forums.…