Table of contents for July 2018 in Custom PC UK

We haven’t spent several nights, tearing our hair out, trying to get RAM kits to work Only a few things in life excite me. Knowing that I’m going to see Iron Maiden later this year is one of them. My forthcoming honeymoon, and my first proper holiday in several years, is another one. In all my time on this planet, I don’t think I’ve ever been sincerely excited about a die shrink, but that’s all changed this month. Honestly, hear me out. On the face of it, not much has changed with AMD’s 2nd Gen Ryzen CPUs (see p21). They have the same underlying architecture as the original Ryzen CPUs from last year, with the same number of cores and the same amount of cache. It’s really just an optical…

Corsair unveils ‘Contrast’ memory Corsair has unleashed a brand-new special-edition range of its Dominator Platinum memory, called Contrast. Finished in what Corsair calls ‘an elegant high-contrast design of pearlescent white and high-gloss black’, the memory certainly looks good and it has a white LED bar at the top, although there’s no RGB lighting. The Platinum Special Edition Contrast will come in 32GB dual-channel and quad-channel kits, based on Samsung modules, and will be rated to run at 3466MHz. The dual-channel kit is currently available to buy from www.corsair.com/uk for £380 inc VAT, while the quad-channel kit costs £415 inc VAT. Nvidia halts 32-bit Windows and Fermi support GPU maker Nvidia has officially confirmed that it will no longer update its 32-bit GPU drivers for performance improvements or bug fixes in…

You can now overclock single cores in Ryzen Master SUPPLIER www.scan.co.uk Only four new CPUs are being released by AMD for now, with the fastest 2nd Gen Ryzen model being the Ryzen 7 2700X, meaning there’s no direct replacement for the Ryzen 7 1800X. The new CPU has a 100MHz advantage in base frequency, but while the Ryzen 7 1800X could reach a maximum frequency of 4.1GHz using XFR, the new CPU can reach a lofty 4.3GHz, and across more than just one core too. As such, it’s potentially not just quicker than the 1800X in lightly threaded tasks, but it could be significantly faster in multi-threaded tasks too. There isn’t much new in terms of basic hardware. The new chip’s Zen core has had a fairly paltry die…

When it comes to overclocking, a lot has changed with 2nd Gen Ryzen chips compared with the original Ryzen CPUs, although all-core overclocks are still achieved in the same way, by increasing the multiplier and vcore. You don’t really need to touch much else, and you can perform these tweaks either in your motherboard’s EFI, or in AMD’s Ryzen Master Windows-based overclocking software. One major change is that AMD’s new Ryzen CPUs and Ryzen Master software allow for per-core overclocking. Not only that, but like Intel’s Turbo Boost Max 3, you’re also able to identify the best-performing and most overclockable cores on each Core Complex (CCX). There are four cores per CCX and Ryzen Master will identify a single core on each one as the core you should attempt to…

PROCESSORS TESTS: We use Custom PC RealBench 2015, Cinebench and Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation, installed on Windows 10 Home 64-bit, and record the power draw of the test PC. These tests cover a broad range of performance characteristics, including image editing, gaming, video encoding and 3D rendering. We run all tests at stock speed and at the CPU’s highest overclocked frequency. GRAPHICS CARDS Graphics cards are mainly evaluated on how fast they are for their price. However, we also consider the efficacy and quietness of the cooler. Every graphics card is tested in the same PC, so all results are directly comparable. TESTS : By using the fast PC detailed on the left, we can be sure that any limitations are due to the graphics card on test, rather…

What the Venom R10 lacks in airflow, though, it counters with quietness SUPPLIER www.overclockers.co.uk A relative newcomer to the all-in-one liquid cooler scene, Akasa has opted for an unusual approach to the Venom R10 – it doesn’t come equipped with a fan, resulting in a relatively low price of just £55 inc VAT. That price is especially low when you consider that the Akasa has RGB lighting and full mounting mechanisms for all three of our test systems, while some coolers this month have opted to use the standard AMD AM4 plastic mount. Sadly, there aren’t enough screws in the box to mount two fans to the R10, but these screws are available for a couple of quid should you wish to push the R10’s cooling to its limits.…

Cooler Master has even included a basic lighting controller SUPPLIER www.box.co.uk The last 120mm all-in-one liquid cooler we saw from Cooler Master was its MasterLiquid 120, which put in a decent effort. However, not only has the company since revised the design and included a plethora of RGB lighting, but the new cooler also costs just £45 inc VAT, which undercuts the original cooler by £20 and comes close to making the ML120L the cheapest cooler on test. Both the powerful MF120R RGB 2,000rpm fan, which retails separately for around £10 inc VAT, and pump sport RGB LEDs. They can also both be controlled separately or together using an included three-way RGB LED splitter cable, allowing you to power an LED strip in addition to the fan and pump…

How we test Of all the peripherals in your gaming arsenal, the headset is the one that benefits most from being wireless while having the fewest drawbacks. They allow you to get up and stretch your legs in between rounds without missing out on team chat, you can sit back in comfort to watch a film without disturbing your neighbours and, of course, you don’t have a cable dangling across your desk. What’s more, because our hearing isn’t sensitive enough for millisecond delays to be noticeable, the usual problems with wireless mice and keyboards are a non-issue for headsets. Given that they’re such a great idea, it’s surprising how few options are available. Hugely popular headset brands such as HyperX, Roccat and Sennheiser don’t even make wireless headsets at all,…

Engines often outgrow the games they were originally designed to support. Unreal Engine, for example, has long since moved beyond the series of 3D shooters that it originally powered. Indeed, this situation is more or less the reason why the idea of engine licensing came about, as developers realised that their technology could be given to other developers (for a price, naturally) to create new games. It’s much rarer for a game to outgrow its engine, mainly because most games are fixed creations, whereas engines constantly evolve. But it does happen, especially with games that have long lives, such as Counter-Strike and RuneScape. Such is the case with Dagor, the engine created by Russian developer Gaijin Entertainment. A proprietary engine that has powered all manner of different games, in the…

VOICE ASSISTANT The key to any modern smart home is your choice of voice assistant. If you’re shooting for the low-budget end of the market, there are really only two options: Amazon or Google. The cheapest dedicated voice assistant in Amazon’s range is the Echo Dot, which normally sells for £50 inc VAT but is regularly discounted to £35, and can be bought cheaper if you opt for a refurbished model. The speaker on the Dot is puny, and certainly isn’t ideal for listening to music. There’s a 3.5mm audio out to connect the Dot to an external speaker system, however, or you can use Bluetooth. What’s great about the Dot is that it’s so cheap you can put one in every room if you have the budget, giving you…

R EVI EW Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ Let’s start with a clarification: the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ isn’t a Raspberry Pi 4, which is now unlikely to appear before 2019. The core of the Pi 3 B+ is the same Broadcom BCM2837 processor that powers the Pi 3, although you’d be forgiven for not recognising it, thanks to a design overhaul, which sees the plastic chip package ditched in favour of a more desktop-like, silicon-die-underheatspreader approach. That shift in design, which gives the BCM2837 its B0 suffix, is responsible for two key advantages. The first is that, along with a new custom-designed power management integrated circuit (PMIC), which provides more accurate and stable voltage regulation while considerably simplifying the circuitry, the Pi 3 B+ runs at 1.4GHz to…

PETG vs acrylic tubing I’ve been dabbling with rigid tubing for a few years now, and while installation does take a lot more effort compared with flexible tubing, both clear and metal rigid tubing look fantastic. The straight lines create a super clean-looking loop, while clear rigid tubing really allows your coolant to shine. It can be trickier to work with metal tubing, and it’s more expensive too, but it can also look even better. Plastic-based tubing offers another perk, of course, which is that it can be bent to shape to create a completely custom loop. This tubing can be useful for creating a loop that works specifically with your hardware or case, or for simply creating a great-looking loop design. There’s a couple of downsides to acrylic tubing,…

It will still be years before many of us gamers can experience this tech for ourselves If you were a first-generation CPC reader, and were into PC gaming around 2004-2005, let me reach in and pull a few memory strings. Do you remember the release of Far Cry 1.3 and Half-Life 2 Lost Coast? Six months after Far Cry launched, and with Nvidia’s help, Crytek dropped the 1.3 patch in late 2004, which introduced DirectX 9c support, complete with Shader Model 3 and gorgeously bright HDR lighting. Meanwhile Valve, which was continuing to co-work with ATI since the launch of Half-life 2, introduced the Lost Coast demo, with an alternative effect that approximated HDR using Shader Model 2b. Later, in 2005, Valve updated the Source engine with full support for…

Wot, no DVD drive? I jumped at the chance to try to build my own PC, as suggested by the cover of Issue 176, but I was disappointed by the price difference on the Scan website to that which you gave. I’ve gone ahead anyhow, but I’d like to draw your attention to the absence of a DVD drive, which would be imperative if I wanted to load games. The prices on Ebuyer were better, and I await delivery of the parts I ordered from there to mix with parts I also bought from Aria PCs, and my own power supply. I’m excited to see the result and look forward to future articles in your excellent magazine. ALEXANDER O’ REILLY Ben: Thanks, Alexander. In terms of pricing, we can only…

The lighting stretches to every corner of the PCB SUPPLIER www.awd-it.co.uk It’s clear from our testing that AMD’s new CPUs offer great performance and value for money, but you’ll need an X470 motherboard to take full advantage of them. We’ve managed to get hold of Gigabyte’s X470 Aorus Gaming 7 WiFi just before we went to press, and it’s a stunning-looking motherboard. Gigabyte has tweaked its colour scheme a little, but it’s still obviously an Aorus-branded board, with splashes of orange, which is also the default colour for the board’s extensive RGB lighting. As usual, the lighting stretches to every corner of the PCB, including the PCI-E and DIMM slots, PCH heatsink and I/O shroud. Gigabyte is also now following in Asus’ footsteps with a multi-LED lighting strip above…

It has a Ryzen 7 1700 CPU, along with a Radeon RX 580 GPU SUPPLIER www.ebuyer.com Bucking the usual trend for gaming laptops to be based on Intel CPUs and Nvidia GPUs, Asus’ ROG Strix GL702ZC has an all-AMD core spec. It doesn’t use the latest 2nd Gen Ryzen silicon (see p21), but it does have an 8-core Ryzen 7 1700 at its disposal, along with a Radeon RX 580 GPU. Asus intends this system to be used for multimedia and creative tools as well as gaming. To that end, this 3GHz CPU has eight cores and 16 threads via SMT, and it can hit a turbo peak of 3.7GHz. The 1700 supports twice as many threads as Intel’s Core i7-7700HQ, which is used in most gaming laptops, although…

SUPPLIER www.ebuyer.com We were amazed to see that Antec’s latest 120mm all-in-one liquid cooler – the Kühler H2O K120 – costs just £40 inc VAT. This super-low price makes the Antec cheaper than many current mid-range air coolers, and it even undercuts ARCTIC’s bargain-tastic effort with the Liquid Freezer 120 (see p49). In fact, the Antec Kühler H2O K120 retails for less than half the price of NZXT’s Kraken M22 (see p52). Despite the low price, the Kühler feels well made, and even the package even includes a blue glowing fan equipped with anti-vibration mounts to add some pizazz. In addition, Antec has also managed to route the pump’s power cable underneath the tubing’s braided cover, so there are no cables protruding from the pump at all, with the…

Corsair includes a premium SP120 fan with the H60 SUPPLIER www.scan.co.uk As one of the first companies to enter the all-in-one liquid cooler market, Corsair has had a stab at nearly every radiator size and has also been adding to its line-up this year, with monsters such as the Hydro H150i. However, the H60 probably sounds familiar, as the company has simply used the same name for multiple generations of coolers of this size. This version, which is new for 2018, has an updated mounting mechanism that differs from the usual Asetek design, although it works in a similar way. There’s a backplate for Intel LGA115x motherboards, with all Intel socket mounts requiring the usual mounting pins and thumbscrews. You also now get two pairs of separate slide-on plates…

The sound quality from the headphone portion of the headset largely impressed SUPPLIER www.overclockers.co.uk The HS70 is Corsair’s brand-new entry-level wireless headset. Like its wired cousin the HS50, it offers a cheaper, simpler alternative to the company’s more expensive Void range of headsets. As well as being the cheapest headset in Corsair’s wireless range, it’s also the cheapest headset in this test, and some of that cost saving is immediately clear. While all the other headsets have earcup mounts that rotate left and right to a greater or lesser extent, the HS70 is fixed on this axis. The earcups still tilt up and down (or in and out, really), though, so there’s still some allowance for different-shaped heads. Nonetheless, the HS70 isn’t the most comfortable headset we’ve ever used.…

CCL has turned to a serious case to house this RyzenX PC SUPPLIER www.cclonline.com CCL’s RyzenX GT is the first system we’ve seen with AMD’s 2nd Gen Ryzen 7 2700X chip. This new CPU has eight cores and 16 threads just like last year’s Ryzen 7 parts, but AMD has turbo-charged the chip in other departments. The new Zen CPU uses a 12nm manufacturing process rather than a 14nm process, and latencies have been improved across all caches. AMD has also increased clock frequencies, and refined the boost process, so you get more aggressive boosting across more cores. The 2700X runs at 3.7GHz with a boost peak of 4.3GHz, improving on the older 1800X. Meanwhile, the CCL’s Asus ROG Strix X470-F Gaming motherboard has the new X470 chipset and…

It’s hard to believe that it’s been nearly four years since the launch of the Gamebuino (reviewed in Issue 134), Aurélien Rodot’s open-design Arduinocompatible handheld games console. In that time, Rodot has been quiet but not resting on his laurels, and now he’s back with a follow-up, the Gamebuino Meta. Designed to sit alongside the existing Gamebuino design rather than replace it, the Meta is a considerable upgrade. Where the original Gamebuino used an 8-bit ATmega microcontroller equivalent to the one you’d find on an Arduino Uno development board, the Meta switches it out for a 32-bit ARM Cortex-M0+. The recycled Nokia single-colour, edge-lit LCD display has also been replaced with a 1.8in backlit colour panel capable of either an 80 x 64 resolution in 16-bit RGB colour or a…

/MEET THY MAKERS Name Nik Taylor and Jansen Benoit Age Both 37 Location London Occupation Modders at ExtremePCUK.co.uk Main uses for PC Media centre and gaming Likes Gaming, movies and car modding Dislikes Consoles and slow Internet What inspired you to use the HP Omen X case? Nik and Jansen: It all started with an idea from one of our customers, Arif Kara. He had a bold new case that wasn’t yet out in the media or being discussed in the computer world. On first arrival, we saw this cube, which we could only think was some sort of server case – when we got it out of the box, it was on the floor in multiple pieces. After further inspection, we realised that this bizarre-looking thing was actually HP’s…

Corsair K70 LUX RGB keyboard with your choice of switches TOTAL VALUE £160 inc VAT / MANUFACTURER www.corsair.com The K70 LUX RGB is a part of Corsair’s LUX flagship line of gaming keyboards, featuring Cherry MX key switches backed by a lightweight, durable aluminium frame and dynamic, multicoloured lighting. The USB pass-through port is positioned for uninterrupted gameplay, and ready for your mouse or wireless headset adaptor. You can also harness the power of CUE for sophisticated macro programming and dramatic lighting effects and animations. Meanwhile, 100 per cent anti-ghosting with full key rollover on USB helps to ensure accuracy, so every keystroke translates directly into accurate gameplay. The contoured, textured FPS and MOBA keycap sets keep you in control, while the Cherry MX key switches give you a linear…

The Dutch gaming authority has decided that loot crates are gambling Say a fond farewell to loot crates, they’re on their way out. Although the British government hasn’t yet declared loot boxes to be gambling, I’ve long been predicting they will (sadly without putting any money on it), and the latest news from The Netherlands is the biggest sign yet that Brits will soon have some types of micro transactions regulated by the government. The Dutch gaming authority has decided that loot crates are gambling, and given publishers and developers until June to comply with the Betting and Gaming Act. That’s a big deal, because it means that loot crates are officially games of chance rather than skill, and that they have a value outside of the game itself, also…

When AMD launched its first Ryzen CPUs a little over a year ago, the company was quite clear about the product it was launching in terms of expectations and its future development. AMD basically said that the first iteration of the Zen core and its implementation in Ryzen was a worst-case scenario, given that the company was dealing with an entirely new architecture and feature set in its SenseMI technologies. It was also true that Ryzen presented some challenges in the early days, with poor memory support above frequencies of 2666MHz, as well as a plethora of other issues. AMD has aimed to resolve all these issues with 2nd Gen Ryzen. Indeed, even some X370 motherboards with the latest BIOS updates will now enable you to hit memory speeds over…

Fast memory yields limited gains on Intel systems, especially as you move above a 2666MHz, with 3000MHz or 3200MHz memory usually sitting in the sweet spot. Conversely, AMD’s high-speed data link, also known as Infinity Fabric, is linked to memory speed. In theory, the faster your memory, the faster your Ryzen CPU will perform in many tasks. The trouble has been that achieving any memory frequency much over 3000MHz has been previously tricky with AMD Ryzen systems, due to a lack of optimisation and memory support. However, this situation has changed in recent months, with new motherboard EFI updates sporting code that better supports memory speeds above 3000MHz. In fact, clock speeds above 3200MHz are now widely supported on AMD systems, and not just with Samsung B-die modules. All of…

Thumbs Up Retro Gaming Console/ £17.99 inc VAT The Thumbs Up Retro Gaming Console crams a huge amount of old-style games into a tiny handheld device. It would have been amazing if you’d had one in the 1980s – it’s much smaller than an old LCD Game and Watch, and it not only offers better games, but you get 150 of them. There’s an eclectic mix of games, from shooting galleries and Space Invaders knockoffs to assorted puzzle games and primitive platformers, all played with the classic D-Pad and two-button interface. There are no standout classics, and it’s all fairly rudimentary, but the nature of the system means the games are accessible, making for some cheap occasional fun. SUPPLIER www.asos.com Mionix Sargas 400/ £19.99 inc VAT The Mionix Sargas…

How we test When testing CPU coolers, it’s important to examine performance across a range of sockets, as mounting mechanisms vary between them. Some coolers perform well on some CPU sockets, but not on others. For this reason, we now test cooling on LGA115x, LGA2011 and AM4 motherboards. As this is Custom PC, all our CPUs are overclocked too, so we can weed out the wheat from the chaff. Our LGA115x test system uses a Core i7-4770K overclocked to 4.3GHz with a 1.15V vcore, a Gigabyte Z97X-UD5H motherboard, 4GB of 1600MHz Crucial Ballistix DDR3 RAM and a 240GB Intel SSD 730. Meanwhile, our LGA2011 rig has a Core i7-3960X overclocked to 4.2GHz with a 1.275V vcore, an MSI X79A-GD45 motherboard, 16GB of G.Skill Ripjaws 1600MHz RAM and a Samsung 830…

Both the fans and the pump can be daisy-chained together SUPPLIER www.novatech.co.uk ARCTIC’s Liquid Freezer 120 was featured in our last 120mm all-in-one liquid cooler group test, but ARCTIC hasn’t updated it since, and we’re largely glad about that. Despite its low price, the package manages to include two 120mm fans, along with a large, 50mm-thick radiator that makes for the most potent cooling system on test. There’s no RGB lighting here, though, and build quality feels a little light in places, but we’ve been using this cooler ourselves for several months and it’s held up well. The Liquid Freezer 120 uses the standard Asetek mount, which comprises a bunch of pins and thumbscrews for all CPU sockets. You get a backplate for LGA115x systems, while for AM4 systems…

NZXT has ditched nearly every cable attached to the pump SUPPLIER www.ebuyer.com With so many solid offerings from NZXT’s other cooler models, featuring great RGB lighting and software control, we had high hopes for the Kraken M22. However, while this 120mm cooler also sports the hologram-like lighting of its more expensive siblings, that’s the only part of the cooler that can be controlled using NZXT’s CAM software. The pump and fan sport 3-pin and 4-pin headers respectively, so you’ll be relying on your motherboard to control them. Thankfully, though, that still means the Kraken M22 has an advantage over the likes of Corsair’s H60, where the pump is powered by a SATA connector and its speed is fixed. NZXT has clearly been listening to user feedback as well, and…

SUPPLIER www.chillblast.com Chillblast’s Fusion Huntsman packs an Nvidia Pascal GPU and Intel Coffee Lake CPU into a tiny Fractal Design Node 202 mini-ITX case. It measures 377mm wide and 88mm tall, so it’s easy to slip inside a rucksack – and, at 7.1kg, it won’t weigh you down too much. Those dimensions mean the Chillblast undercuts the Zotac MEK1, which was 118mm wide, 418mm tall and weighed 8.6kg – and the Chillblast’s square shape makes it easier to manoeuvre too. With its console-like shape and dimensions, the Fusion Huntsman can also sit comfortably beneath a TV. It can also stand vertically. What’s more, Chillblast can wrap the Huntsman with your own design – so a whole eSports team can have rigs with the team logo, or you can show…

If a game purports to be profound, it needs to do the right work to reach that objective Far Cry is one of my favourite game series. I love first-person shooters and games that produce interesting scenarios from their own systems. Since Far Cry 3, however, the themes each game purports to explore have had little to do with the player’s actual actions. At a systems level, the Far Cry games prioritise letting a bunch of different mechanics crash together to create unique, entertaining and often silly events, such as unleashing a tiger into a compound of mercenaries, or blowing up a convoy of enemy vehicles with a rocket launcher while flying a gyrocopter. However, this over-the-top and fantastically entertaining fun is often set within a far more serious theme.…

Fully automated homes, where you can switch on the lights with a click of your fingers were – until recently – the preserve of the rich. Now, however, a barrage of off-the-shelf smart home devices are on the market. In fact, it’s possible to smarten up your home for less than a couple of hundred quid, although you may have to ask Alexa to turn on the lights, rather than snap your fingers. In this feature, we’ve equipped a smart home for three different budgets. There’s a budget smart home for under £200, a set of mid-range options for under £1,000 and a premium smart home where we’ve let rip with the budget, but still got all we need for less than £4,000. Obviously, our model smart homes aren’t entirely…

For years, the Arduino IDE (Integrated Development Environment) was the gold standard for ease of use when it came to programming embedded platforms, which wasn’t saying much. Cross platform by dint of being written in Java, the IDE grew over the years, adding support for multiple boards in the Arduino family – and, later, other microcontroller-based development board families, via third-party board support packages (BSPs). Create is the Arduino project’s attempt to replicate the success of the Arduino IDE as an in-browser package, and now it has a feature that makes it hard to ignore: the ability to take almost any Arduino sketch and port it to a range of powerful single-board computers, including the Aaeon UP², BeagleBone and – naturally – the Raspberry Pi. There are obviously trade-offs. The…

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.…

The past few weeks have seen the beginning of a slowdown in demand for new GPUs from miners What can I tell you about the inner workings of the PC industry in April 2018? I’d imagine that most PC enthusiasts would consider the launch of AMD’s 2nd Gen Ryzen processors to be the biggest story this month. After all, it’s that very story that adorns the cover of this mag, and receives many pages of reviews and much analysis. The 2nd Gen Ryzen CPUs are a big improvement over the original chips. So much so, in fact, that if my current system died, I’d be quite tempted to build a Ryzen system myself. However, for the wider PC market, the launch of Intel’s cheaper H310, H370, B360 chipsets for Coffee…