Table of contents for August 2018 in Custom PC UK

It’s a bit of an anticlimax for the CPU to be clever enough to do that job itself I’ve just committed a cardinal journalism sin by putting a question mark at the end of this column’s title. As Betteridge’s law states, any headline with a question mark at the end can be answered with a ‘no’. Incidentally, Ian Betteridge, who coined this law, has regularly written for Custom PC, so I’m hoping he doesn’t see this one while flicking through the mag in WH Smith. Anyway, let’s get that obvious answer out of the way – no, technically there’s still a point to overclocking your CPU for some tasks. For most people, though, I think we’ve now reached the end of that road. I’m going to upgrade my water-cooled X370…

Nvidia GPU prices approach normality After a few months of ludicrous graphics card prices, it looks as though the demand for GPUs for cryptocurrency mining is starting to abate, and supplies are starting to fill the shelves again. We’re not quite at pre-boom prices yet, and AMD GPUs are still demanding a hefty premium, but the prices of Nvidia GPUs are now approaching sensible levels again. GeForce GTX 1060 3GB cards have dropped from a minimum of £290 inc VAT in January to £195 inc VAT on www.scan.co.uk, while 6GB GTX 1069 cards have dropped from £360 to £245 inc VAT over the same period at the same retailer. Even the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti is starting to look reasonably priced again, with Zotac Mini’s version (pictured) now going for…

SUPPLIER www.overclockers.co.uk While AMD’s original non-X-edition Ryzen CPUs, such as the Ryzen 7 1700, weren’t officially speed-binned for better overclocking performance, in many cases, they overclocked similarly to the Ryzen 7 1800X, making bargains for anyone willing to overclock them. There was also a huge £170 price gap between the Ryzen 7 1800X and the Ryzen 7 1700, but these gaps are much smaller between AMD’s new, cheaper 2nd Gen Ryzen CPUs. The Ryzen 7 2700 costs just £250 inc VAT, but the fantastic Ryzen 7 2700X costs only £30 more, potentially making the Ryzen 7 2700 not quite as big a bargain as its predecessor. It has an extremely low TDP for an 8-core CPU Its specifications reveal a much faster CPU than the Ryzen 7 1700, though,…

The individually addressable LEDs offer great effects SUPPLIER www.cclonline.com Last month saw Cooler Master’s ML120L RGB pick up our Approved award, thanks to a low price, good cooling and low noise. The MasterLiquid ML240R RGB is quite a different beast though. It’s not only twice as large, with a 240mm radiator that’s 27mm thick, but it also costs more than twice as much at £102 inc VAT. There’s more RGB lighting here, with a large controller powered by either a USB header or SATA connector. It can control RGB LEDs in the fans and pump, all of which sport several individually controllable LEDs, allowing rainbow and other multi-LED lighting effects. The lighting is bright and punchy, although the pump section appeared to be much brighter than the fans. You…

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. CUSTOM PC REALBENCH 2015 Our benchmark suite, co-developed with Asus, simulates how people really use PCs – a higher score is better. You can download them from www.asus.com/campaign/Realbench MOTHERBOARDS TESTS: We use Custom PC RealBench 2015 and Ashes of the Singularity installed on Windows 10 Home 64-bit, and also test the board’s SATA and M.2 ports. We try to overclock every motherboard by overclocking our test CPU to…

You get the full complement of overclocking and testing tools SUPPLIER www.box.co.uk A little over a year ago, we were battling with some gremlins with various X370 boards, one of which was the Asus Crosshair VI Hero, until Asus released a spate of EFIs (as did other manufacturers) to improve memory support and stability. Fast forward to 2018, though, and its successor, the ROG Crosshair VII Hero WiFi, is solid as a rock and bristling with features too. You’d expect nothing less, though, as it costs a whopping £250 inc VAT. Providing plenty of power to AMD’s new Ryzen CPUs is a key focus, with a lot of boards on test this month and the ROG Crosshair VII Hero WiFi has two huge heatpipe-linked VRM heatsinks, a 10+2 power…

There’s an impressive count of eight 4-pin fan headers SUPPLIER www.box.co.uk As the cheapest X470-chipset motherboard on test, and costing nearly half the price of the Asus ROG Crosshair VII Hero (see p45), you might expect the Gigabyte X470 Aorus Ultra Gaming to come with a bare PCB and a drastically trimmed feature set. However, it’s a refreshingly solid board that covers all the essentials, despite its low price tag. You get an 11-phase power design, some reasonable-sized heatsinks and even an M.2 heatsink, although the latter can only be fitted to the top M.2 slot. The audio circuitry and PCH heatsink also sport RGB lighting, plus you get 3-pin digital, 4-pin standard and 5-pin RGBW LED headers on the board. There’s an impressive count of eight 4-pin fan…

It overclocked further than all the pricier boards on test SUPPLIER www.box.co.uk The MSI X470 Gaming Pro Carbon AC has a fairly sizeable price league to itself this month, sitting between the two budget boards on test and the trio of £200+ premium offerings. However, it includes the best elements of many boards this month, and in the unlikely event that six SATA ports aren’t enough for you then the X470 Gaming Pro Carbon AC includes eight of them, trumping all the other boards on test. The board includes an 8+4 power phase design, which is one phase more than its predecessor. There’s a pair of 8-pin CPU power connectors too, so the X470 Gaming Pro Carbon AC clearly means business when it comes to overclocking. Like the X470…

The vast majority of ‘couch-coop’ PC games are short, throwaway experiences I love cooperative gaming. Playing games with a friend nearly always makes the experience more enjoyable, and playing a great game designed specifically for co-op is one of life’s greatest joys. However, as a 30-year-old man with a young child, setting aside time for gaming isn’t always easy, and pinning down a time with two or three friends with their own commitments requires military levels of organisation. Fortunately, I’m blessed with a partner who likes games as much as I do, and I recently bought a Steam Link, as there are plenty of PC cooperative games that I figured would be fun to play together. What I discovered, however, is that the vast majority of ‘couch-coop’ PC games are…

DEVELOPER Fast Travel Games / PUBLISHER Fast Travel Games / WEBSITE www.apexconstructgame.com Apex Construct is a VR game that aims to be more than an hour-long experiment. Its post-apocalyptic story sees you awaking in a wrecked world, missing your memory and your left hand. Fortunately, you’re greeted by a benevolent-seeming AI called Father, who gives you a robotic replacement arm. Father explains that civilisation was destroyed by another AI called Mother and you’re the last human left alive – you then need to track down and deactivate Mother before she deactivates you. The game comprises a sequence of semi-open levels surrounding a central hub, with many paths gradually unlocking as the game progresses. Apex Construct’s ruined world is presented in an eerily pleasant painterly aesthetic, with an architectural style somewhere…

Bullfrog Productions is one of the most cherished PC game developers. Founded by Peter Molyneux in 1987, the studio produced at least half a dozen classic PC games. From Populous to Syndicate, through Theme Park to Dungeon Keeper, Bullfrog developed a reputation for its systemically rich and distinctly British management games. The company’s last unique game was Theme Hospital, a project headed by programmer Mark Webley and artist Gary Carr. It was enormously successful, selling four million copies and remaining in the charts for a decade. Bullfrog was closed by owner Electronic Arts in 2001, but the spirit of the studio lived on as Webley and Carr joined Molyneux’s new firm Lionhead, where they worked on Black & White and The Movies. Yet as they moved up the Lionhead ladder,…

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.…

Leaks suggest Intel is preparing an 8-core chip to replace the Core i7-8700K Way back in Issue 145 (mid-2015), I discussed how Intel’s ‘tick-tock’ strategy had become ‘tick-flop’, as the company moved away from ten years of its ‘process then architecture’ CPU upgrade cycle, onto a new ‘process, architecture then improvement’ cycle. At the time, Intel was having trouble with its 14nm process, and it needed an extra year to get 14nm manufacturing back on track before 10nm transistors arrived. Unfortunately, 10nm has become an even more troublesome child, with Intel now claiming that big volume production has been pushed back to ‘2019’. Given that we’re already halfway through 2018, Intel’s ambiguity over the date is leading some analysts to read that as ‘not the early part of 2019,’ because…

Yes to massive monitors I was amazed at the response from Ben this month. Is it really true that Ben can’t imagine a home user would want a big screen? Has he ever used one?! I’ve got two 37in screens on my twin-SLI GTX1080 rig. Why would I not? Surely your readership is made up of exactly the kind of people who love tech. What would be the point in having all that graphics power if I didn’t use it to run some screens?! I hope you’re learning that we’re interested, and I hope to see a ‘massive screens’ megatest in the near future. There must be a lot to consider, because some of the truly massive screens actually have very low resolutions. Other slightly smaller screens have a very…

SUPPLIER www.cclonline.com SUPPLIER www.cclonline.com Samsung has dominated the SSD market recently, thanks to a slew of high-performance and cost-effective drives, both in the lower-end SATA segment and the high-end M.2 NVMe space. It’s in the latter space that the Samsung 960 Evo and Pro made a huge splash in 2016. Although they weren’t cheap, they weren’t extortionate either, and they blitzed the competition. Nearly two years on, Samsung is back with a replacement for the 960 drives – the aptly named 970 range. As you’d expect, performance has again improved, but not by nearly as much as before, and moreover, the rest of the market has changed too. Now the latest drives from Western Digital, in particular, offer meaningful competition. Let’s first take a look at what the…

The Gigabyte is one of just two boards on test with heatsinks for both M.2 ports SUPPLIER www.novatech.co.uk Of the three boards topping £200 this month, the X470 Aorus Gaming 7 WiFi is easily the best-looking. A lot of this aesthetic prowess comes down to the elaborate heatsinks for its extensive 12-phase power circuitry, ten of which are for the CPU vcore. Instead of being solid, the heatsinks comprise over 100 aluminium fins, which Gigabyte claims drops temperatures by up to 40 per cent compared with a solid heatsink. These fins are backed up by a heatpipe that makes direct contact with the hot spots on the PCB too. The lighting, as we’ve come to expect from Gigabyte, is also the most extensive of any board on test. Practically…

The M.2 heatsink made a massive difference to temperatures SUPPLIER www.ebuyer.com If you’re worried about your M.2 SSD overheating, then you’ll like the huge, weapon-like dual heatsink that occupies half the PCB of the MSI X470 Gaming M7 AC. This monstrous lump of metal flips out on a sprung hinge that’s separate to the PCH heatsink, and is the largest M.2 heatsink on test. Unfortunately, you can’t run both M.2 slots at 4x PCI-E 3 speed, though, with the lower slot’s PCI-E 2 interface limiting it to around 1,600MB/sec instead of the speeds of over 3,000MB/sec you can see from many modern M.2 SSDs. Thankfully, it’s also compatible with SATA M.2 SSDs, so you could use one large SATA M.2 SSD for storage and a smaller PCI-E SSD in…

SUPPLIER www.amazon.co.uk The Echo Show’s special feature is a 7in LCD touch-screen, which means Alexa can play videos as well as music. That might not sound very useful for a living-room device, but it’s ideal for the kitchen, where you can stick on a sitcom while you’re slaving over your Bolognese. It’s not exactly a cinematic experience, but it’s as sharp and colourful as you could reasonably demand. However, browsing and selecting videos involves a lot of scrolling around with the touch-screen, so you lose some of that sense of effortlessness that comes with direct voice control. The range of content is disappointingly narrow too: Amazon Prime members have the Prime Video library, but there’s no Netflix, YouTube or iPlayer. When not streaming video, the screen provides information. For…

DEVELOPER The Creative Assembly / PUBLISHER Sega / WEBSITE www.totalwar.com After pitting dragons against giants, and elves against rat-men, in Total War: Warhammer, a game set in the perpetually damp and overcast British Isles is inevitably a bit anticlimactic. Granted, Thrones of Britannia is specifically about Anglo-Saxon Britain, where the followers of Alfred the Great clash against the Vikings of the North in arguably the most turbulent period of British history, but it’s still not quite the same as fielding an army of dinosaurs or mechanical Steam Tanks. Britain doesn’t even have War elephants. With colourful flights of fancy replaced by grey skies and greyer beaches, this standalone Total War needs an ace up its sleeve. That ace, apparently, is innovation. As suggested by the extended title, Total War Saga…

In a small corner of one of the Tobacco Dock London venue’s many alcoves, a developer quietly worked on its games amid the pleasant hubbub of this year’s EGX Rezzed convention. Two computers sat side by side. One monitor displayed a simple questionnaire where players could fill in their answers, while a simple grid-based puzzle game could be played on the other screen. Depending on the time of day, that game could involve anything from mice avoiding cats while trying to eat cheese, to cows chasing bananas while avoiding UFOs. The same creator lay between those two computers. Its name is ANGELINA, and it’s an artificial intelligence (AI) system that makes its own games. ANGELINA is the brainchild of Mike Cook, who began creating the AI system in 2011 as…

REVIEW Quimat Pocket Oscilloscope An oscilloscope is one of the handiest tools you can have on your workbench when it comes to diagnosing electronics issues. Unfortunately, they’re also traditionally bulky, expensive and complicated to use. The march of technology has done much for the former issue, thanks in no small part to the replacement of cathode ray tube (CRT) displays with much smaller LCD panels. It has begun to help out with the latter two issues as well, as proven by the existence of the DSO138. Designed by JYE Tech and released under an open-source licence and then, predictably, immediately cloned by a wide variety of Far Eastern electronics concerns, the DSO138 is two devices in one. The first, naturally, is a digital storage oscilloscope; the second is an ARM…

At first glance, Push Start: The Art of Video Games should be easy to love. A hefty, mostly full-colour hardback coffee-table tome, Stefan Gunzel’s creation takes the usual formula: full-page, or occasionally two-page, reproductions of screenshots or screenshot extracts from games spanning the 8-bit era onwards, with a small smattering of text. We’ve also seen this format in the In Pixels or Visual Commpendium books, but it sadly misses its mark in Push Start. The problem begins at the start, where images from early low-resolution systems are presented blown up to full-page size with no consideration for how they would appear on the CRT displays for which they were designed. A few pages on, into the arcade section, there’s a far bigger concern: games that used vector displays, rather than…

Cooling 2nd Gen Ryzen CPUs Many of the benefits of water-cooling your PC are purely aesthetic these days, although water cooling still offers the coolest and quietest way to deal with the heat produced by your PC’s components. You may want to kit out your PC with an oversized radiator and slow-spinning fans, for example, to make it inaudible when it isn’t handling very high workloads, and much quieter than your average, non-water-cooled system under load to boot. However, with AMD’s 2nd Gen Ryzen CPUs sporting new frequency boosting algorithms, I was interested to see whether water-cooling them could make a difference to stock speed performance and possibly increase overclocking headroom too. I also wanted to see if the fairly hefty Wraith Prism RGB cooler in the Ryzen 7 2700X…

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 report is clear from the beginning that the Internet is, in fact, either good or neutral here In last month’s column I talked about government regulation of in-game purchases such as loot crates, which falls under the general umbrella of‘protecting vulnerable people’. Gambling addiction can ruin adult lives, and kids are particularly ill-equipped when it comes to recognising the risks and repercussions of behaviour. Regulating these transactions would bring loot crates in line with existing regulation – simply a case of deciding whether they’re gambling or not – rather than introducing new laws. Whether the British government decides to regulate microtransactions remains to be seen, but in the meantime, a different and more troubling spectre looms over the online and gaming population. Various politicians (and therefore various newspapers) have…

Again, AMD’s cheapest 6-core CPU is a bargain SUPPLIER www.overclockers.co.uk ot on the heels of the X-series Ryzen chips we saw last month, the new Ryzen 5 2600 looks like a veritable bargain. While the Ryzen 7 2700 only shaves 12 per cent off the price of the Ryzen 7 2700X (see Issue 178, p22), the Ryzen 5 2600 costs a more substantial 22 per cent less than the Ryzen 5 2600X (see Issue 178, p23). While this difference only equates to a £30-40 saving in both cases, it’s a much bigger deal at this end of the budget spectrum, and amazingly, it retails for £40 less than its predecessor’s launch price too. That’s particularly exciting, as the Ryzen 5 1600 was our favourite CPU in AMD’s previous line-up. It…

SUPPLIER www.overclockers.co.uk Due to the colossal size of AMD’s TR4 CPU socket, we never imagined Threadripper motherboards would dip below the ATX form factor, but ASRock has worked its mini magic once again, as we also saw with its epic X299E-ITX/ac mini-ITX X299 motherboard. The X399M Taichi doesn’t quite shrink to mini-ITX, but fitting the massive TR4 socket onto a micro-ATX PCB is still quite a feat. Thankfully, ASRock has done a superb job with the X399M Taichi too. It looks absolutely stunning, with huge, gunmetal grey heatsinks for the CPU power circuitry linked by a heatpipe. These heatsinks are flanked by an I/O panel shroud that hides the unsightly ports underneath. Despite its size, it can comfortably house two dual-slot graphics cards Despite its small size, the X399M…

The new Coffee Lake Core i7-8750H CPU offers six cores SUPPLIER www.scan.co.uk Scan’s latest 3XS LG15 Vengeance Pro laptop makes an impact in numerous ways. It’s one of few gaming laptops we’ve seen with a mechanical keyboard, and Scan reckons it’s slimmer and lighter than any rival too. It’s also the first Coffee Lake laptop we’ve seen, with the Core i7-8750H offering six Hyper-Threaded cores, and its base speed of 2.2GHz can boost to 3.9GHz on all six cores and to 4.1GHz across one or two cores. Previously, the quad-core Core i7-7700HQ was the usual gaming mobile CPU of choice, as found in the £1,349 Dell Inspiron 15 7000 Gaming (see Issue 177, p32), which has a maximum turbo speed of 3.8GHz. The Scan doesn’t have any new components…

ISelector 6 Way Outlet/ £25.99 inc VAT The ISelector attempts to cater for various tech power needs, with six plug sockets in two inwardly facing rows, and five USB charging ports out of the other end. It also offers surge protection and a maximum of 2.4A for each USB port, although the total current for all five USB ports used together is only 8A. The net result, however, is a bit of a cable explosion, as all the wires attached to it are invariably sent off in one of three directions. Having the sockets so close together keeps the size of the ISelector down, but it also means bulkier transformer plugs will take the corresponding socket on the opposite side out of play. It’s hard to recommend the ISelector for…

How we test To make the most of AMD’s 2nd Gen Ryzen CPUs you’ll need a motherboard with AMD’s new X470 chipset. While ATX boards make up most of the X470 line-up at launch, smaller models will soon be available. Of course, the rest of AMD’s 2nd Gen Ryzen CPUs and low-end chipsets will also be released soon, but in the meantime we’ve tested six ATX X470 boards, with prices ranging from £130 and £250 inc VAT, to see which ones are worth your cash. Our test kit includes 16GB of 3000MHz Corsair Vengeance LED DDR4 RAM, a 512GB Crucial MX100 SSD with Windows 10 installed, a Cooler Master ML120L RGB all-in-one liquid cooler and a Zotac GeForce GTX 1080 AMP! Edition graphics card. We also use a Samsung 960…

The TUF is t he o nly board on test to drop the audio codec to the less capable ALC 88 SUPPLIER www.cclonline.com There are plenty of premium X470 boards around already but, as Asus and Gigabyte have shown this month, you can already pick up one for under £140 inc VAT too. The TUF X470-Plus Gaming is part of Asus’ aim to reinvent the TUF brand, which used to include the likes of the Sabertooth and Gryphon series, but now focuses on the lower end of the market, albeit still with its own aesthetic flare. The TUF X470-Plus Gaming feels noticeably lighter than the ROG Crosshair VII Hero, which might partly be down to the small cut-out in its PCB. This notch takes a leaf out of the…

How we test We consider a range of factors when reviewing smart speakers, including the general capabilities of the voice assistant, the specific design features, and the convenience and ergonomics of any physical controls. Sound quality is also an important factor. We assess it by listening carefully to a variety of standard tracks on each unit – in both mono and stereo where supported –paying attention to the depth, balance and overall tone of the sound, at both moderate listening volume and maximum volume. Multiple listeners were involved in this subjective test, with us accounting for personal impressions of each speaker’s handling of classical and modern music at a typical indoor listening volume. We also measure the maximum sound output of each speaker while playing a standard piece of music,…

DEVELOPER Rare / PUBLISHER Microsoft / WEBSITE www.seaofthieves.com A sailing ship is the ideal mode of transport for an open-world game; it’s essentially a giant wooden fort that goes wherever you go. It’s simultaneously a vehicle, a weapon and a storage space, which are generally the essentials in a virtual world. A sailing ship is also a puzzle game itself, where one wrong move will end in the world’s worst case of rising damp. Sails must be spliced, helms manned, anchors weighed, all in time with the movements of the wind and the waves. Care and maintenance are also crucial. A hole in the hull must be plugged with a plank, while seawater pouring into your cargo hold must be bailed out posthaste. A ship embodies many of gaming’s key…

CHECK EFI When your system boots up, press the Del key to enter your motherboard’s EFI system. You can then apply the Extreme Memory Profile (XMP) in the M.I.T section 22. This setting should set the RAM to the correct speed, timings and voltage, but it’s worth double-checking the voltage in the advanced voltage settings section of the M.I.T tab 23. If the motherboard fails to boot at the standard 1.35V then try 1.4V, as this setting is known to fix some memory speed issues. You can also tweak the fan control settings in the EFI. Head to the Smart Fan 5 section and identify the system fans. We set the front fans in the case to only operate when the CPU is above 45°C, so when you’re typing or…

SSH – the Secure Shell protocol – is one of the most useful tools around, allowing you to connect to a remote system over an encrypted tunnel and launch a shell, transfer data or even forward X applications. It just has one, teeny tiny limitation: you have to be able to find the system to which you’re connecting. Following CrashPlan’s decision to cease offering consumer-orientated remote backup facilities, I set up a Raspberry Pi with Syncthing to serve as my offsite backup store (see Issue 171). That was the easy part; the hard part is ensuring I can maintain access to the device, for maintenance and troubleshooting, once it’s in its new home. Traditionally, remote access requires a hole to be punched in the firewall – for home users, this…

TOTAL PROJECT TIME /30 HOURS PSU shrouds are a great new feature in PC cases. They help to cover your PSU’s unsightly mass of cables, and they also provide a handy place to stow cables if there’s limited space behind the motherboard tray. What’s more, cooling can also be improved by cutting cable clutter, and directing airflow over the PSU from the front of the case towards the graphics card. If your case doesn’t have a PSU shroud, it’s thankfully easy to create your own one custom one using coloured acrylic and simple spray paints. You can even add lighting for some added pizzazz. All you need is a sheet of acrylic and the means to bend it to shape. 1 / CUT CARDBOARD BOX TO SIZE An easy way…

There are five Kaby Lake ‘G’ processors, but you’ll be hard-pressed to find any PCs or laptops using them Five years ago, one of the most overhyped tech launches was Intel’s new Haswell CPU line-up; with their new integrated GPUs, they were supposed to usher in an era of new affordable gaming PCs. Instead, despite a 25 per cent increase in execution units, the sort of increase AMD and Nvidia GPU designers can only daydream about, the Intel HD Graphics 4600 GPU was yet another massive disappointment. It wasn’t merely that performance was still woeful, but the drivers were wonky too, creating all sorts of visual artefacts in many games. Returning to the present day, Intel has finally managed to start shipping CPUs with game-ready GPUs. However, rather than producing…