Table of contents for June 2021 in Custom PC UK

Form a circle, folks, because we’re going to witness a clash of arms between two grizzled veterans. I’m not sure we’ve ever seen such a tight fight between Intel and AMD. When AMD64 ruled the CPU kingdom, Intel was flailing around with NetBurst. When Core later reclaimed Intel’s honour, AMD was floundering with Bulldozer. Even the first Ryzen vs Core battles were fought on different terms, with Intel winning on gaming performance and AMD leading on multi-threaded performance. This time it’s different. Technically, AMD still wins on core counts, but that’s largely irrelevant when there aren’t any Zen 3 CPUs with more than eight cores available to actually buy. It mainly comes down to choosing a Rocket Lake-S or Zen 3 CPU with six or eight cores, both with decent…

CORSAIR LAUNCHES MINI MECH KEYBOARD Corsair is the latest tech firm to get into the mini gaming keyboard trend, launching its first ever 60 per cent mechanical keyboard. The K65 RGB Mini eschews the dedicated numberpad, F keys, cursor keys and so on in favour of a  design that just keeps the core keys. There’s a choice of Cherry MX Red, Silent Red and Speed Silver key switches, and they’re topped by a set of PBT double-shot keycaps. What’s more, the keycaps can be swapped out for custom designs, and Corsair is offering kits with several colour options, including Onyx Black, Arctic White, Elgato Blue, Rogue Pink, Origin Red and Mint Green. Other features include dynamic per-key RGB backlighting, which can be customised with Corsair’s iCUE software, as well as…

SUPPLIER ebay.co.uk We followed the recent launch of the GeForce RTX 3060 with interest. Nvidia said the card’s driver would limit its cryptocurrency mining performance, and we were keen to see whether that would help the stock problems. The answer is, sadly, no. Mining is just one piece of the nightmarish stock supply puzzle, which we’ve investigated in more depth on p88. As with all recent GPU launches, the retail stock was wiped out within a few minutes of the launch, and the cards soon appeared on eBay at inflated prices. These are depressing times if you want to buy a new GPU, and as such, we’re not going to give new GPUs review scores until these problems are sorted. There’s no point in reviewing this Zotac GeForce RTX 3060…

SUPPLIER currys.co.uk We’ve been impressed with recent iterations of Razer’s Viper mouse, with the newest ambidextrous shape (see Issue 195, p61) proving very comfortable to use. However, that iteration was hampered by a couple of issues with its buttons, which held it back from greatness. With this latest iteration, though, Razer has fixed the button problems and added a new 20,000DPI optical sensor and the ability to poll at 8kHz, up from the typical maximum of 1kHz. The idea is that a faster polling rate reduces the potential for a split-second delay in a mouse report, which could end up being the difference between hitting a shot and not. That said, in reality the 8K polling doesn’t amount to much. For a start, many games simply don’t support it, resulting in…

SUPPLIER box.co.uk Despite being launched nearly two years ago, the Ryzen 5 3600 is still for sale, and for good reason – it offers decent performance against Intel’s cheaper 4-core and 6-core CPUs for under £180 inc VAT. The question is whether a Zen 2 processor can cut it in 2021. Under the hood, you get six cores and 12 threads thanks to Simultaneous Multithreading. What’s more, this chip was among the first of AMD’s CPUs to use a 7nm manufacturing process, so it’s very power-frugal too, with our system drawing just 179W under load with this CPU installed. You get 32MB of L3 cache and 3MB of L2 cache, which is a sizeable boost over its predecessor, the Ryzen 5 2600, but under the hood it lacks the refinements…

SUPPLIER cclonline.com This 8-core 16-thread CPU sports AMD’s Zen 3 architecture and 7nm manufacturing process, and can boost one of its cores up to 4.7GHz. The biggest boon of the Ryzen 7 5800X, though, is that it’s actually available to buy. It has the same TDP as the 12-core Ryzen 9 5900X for a very good reason too. It can boost all eight of its cores up to 4.5GHz in multi-threaded applications. In our initial review last year, it picked up an award with its ability to keep up with Intel’s 10-core CPUs in a range of tasks, while offering decent bang per buck. At this time, the Ryzen 9 5900X cost only £100 more, making it a slightly better buy if you could stretch your wallet. However, with the…

SUPPLIER scan.co.uk Intel has only geared up to offering more affordable 6-core CPUs over the past couple of CPU generations, with the likes of the Core i5-9400 offering decent gaming performance for a low price. The Core i5-10400F is particularly tempting with its price of just £130 inc VAT. However, being a 65W 14nm CPU means very constrained clock speeds, with a peak frequency of just 4.3GHz that falls to just 4GHz with all cores under load. This puts it at a distinct disadvantage compared with the rest of Intel’s 10th-gen CPU line-up this month, with the Core i5-10600K able to hit a 4.7GHz peak boost and 4.5GHz with all cores loaded. However, the Core i5-10400F fights back with its very low price, which significantly undercuts AMD’s Ryzen 5 3600.…

SUPPLIER scan.co.uk Intel’s line-up of 14nm Comet Lake desktop CPUs differs from Rocket Lake-S due to the addition of a 10-core model sitting above the 8-core CPU here. The Core i7-10700K has always been piggy in the middle, though, lacking the multi-threaded prowess of the Core i9-10900K and more recently, the excellent Core i9-10850K, but not offering much more gaming grunt than the Core i5-10600K. Still, seeing as you can actually buy it, unlike many of AMD’s latest CPUs, and it undercuts AMD’s Ryzen 7 5800X by £100, it’s a CPU we’re keen to put through its paces. Compared with the Core i9-10850K with its ten cores, you get a slightly lower peak boost frequency of 5.1GHz vs 5.2GHz, while its all-core boost frequency of 4.7GHz is 100MHz lower than…

SUPPLIER scan.co.uk With poor stock levels at the start, and the introduction of a similar, cheaper option in the form of the Core i9-10850K, it’s little wonder the 14nm Comet Lake-based Core i9-10900K isn’t on the tip of anyone’s tongue right now. AMD stole a lot of its limelight with its Zen 3 CPUs too, but thanks to a price cut and better availability, it’s now more of a contender if you have around £450 inc VAT to spend on a powerful CPU. Like the Core i9-10850K, you get 12MB of L3 cache, plus 4MB (256KB per core) of L2 cache. You also get support for Intel’s Thermal Velocity Boost tech, which increases the CPU frequency according to thermals and motherboard capabilities. What’s more, the Core i9-10900K can hit 5.3GHz…

DEVELOPER Youthcat Studio / PUBLISHER Gamera Game Full disclosure, Dyson Sphere Program isn’t a ‘finished’ game. It launched on Steam Early Access earlier this year, with approximately 12 months of further development planned before it officially hits version 1.0. That said, the experience it currently offers is already so rich and enjoyable that it feels complete, and as such, we simply couldn’t wait to tell you about it. It’s a wildly ambitious, utterly captivating game that’s fantastic to play right now. Dyson Sphere Program (DSP) is a factory-management sim that bears many similarities to the equally brilliant Factorio. Indeed, DSP copies large chunks of Factorio’s core experience to serve as its own basic structure. Landing on a verdant planet in a faraway solar system, your initial goal is to establish…

ANALYSIS DOSBox GL Shaders Anyone who has even a passing interest in vintage gaming will likely have found themselves firing up a classic title, either in emulation or on real hardware, and discovered the game isn’t quite as remembered. The immersive graphics of memory seem to have been snatched away, replaced by harsh, blocky squares of simple colours. The player’s memory is partially to blame, of course: an old game with 320 x 200 graphics and a 16-colour palette is never going to be described as photorealistic, however generously. A lot of blame, though, should be placed on technology. The interpretation of vintage games through the lens of what has now become known as ‘pixel art’ reinforces a stereotype of large, highly visible pixels – but games were never meant…

Is it worth water-cooling your SSD? I love my M.2 SSD, for a whole bunch of reasons. Firstly, I use a mini-ITX case, so having a 3.5in hard disk or 2.5in SSD means adding two more cables for every drive install. Having all your data on one or two M.2 SSDs strapped directly to your motherboard means you can shed the power and data spaghetti, and make your cable-tidying task much easier too – that’s especially important in small cases. M.2 SSDs are also fast if you opt for the PCI-E NVMe variety, and you can customise them with all manner of heatsinks, from third-party models in different colours, such as the ones from the likes of EK, to the ones included with your motherboard. I haven’t been this excited…

With huge PCBs, external power bricks, up to 128MB of memory and a new chip codenamed ‘Napalm’, 3dfx’s Voodoo 4 and Voodoo 5 cards looked set to race past the competition in a fiery blaze, trample on Nvidia’s GeForce 256 and reinstate 3dfx at the top of the 3D graphics scene. It was 2000, and until recently, 3dfx had been the brand of the moment in 3D acceleration, but Nvidia’s TNT2 and later GeForce 256 were making a bit of a mockery of 3dfx’s Voodoo 3, which could only display games in 16-bit colour, rather than 32-bit. 3dfx had some new ideas to retake its throne, but it was beset by delays. The one idea that made it to production, several months after the GeForce 256, was the VSA-100 chip,…

This question has been on everyone’s minds for months, and I’m attempting to answer it. However, in the process of digging into as many internet rabbit holes as I could find on the subject, there’s a lot of opinion and little on specifics of what’s happening this year. We’re already a third of the way through the year and forecasts are still vague. Rick Lane has taken in-depth look at this situation on p88, but I also wanted to share my own findings while speaking with people in Taiwan. The whole semiconductor industry is anticipated to grow by anywhere from 11-20 per cent in 2021, depending on which analysts you read, but what does that mean for us? When can we get affordable graphics cards? Well, spoiler alert, put the…

GEFORCE RTX 3080 Ti INBOUND Tech Twitter is currently buzzing with rumours about a new high-end Ampere GPU from Nvidia being launched in mid-April. The GeForce RTX 3080 Ti is rumoured to sit in between the current RTX 3080 and 3090 in the current line-up, and feature 10,240 CUDA cores, compared to 10,496 in the RTX 3090 and 8,704 in the RTX 3080, meaning the 3080 Ti is likely to be much closer in performance to the 3090 than the 3080. Chinese tech site news.mydrivers.com also says the new GPU will feature a 384-bit memory interface, as with the RTX 3090, but will come with 12GB of GDDR6X memory rather than 24GB. The site also says the card will have a driver that limits cryptocurrency mining performance, as with the…

SUPPLIER ebay.co.uk With the ‘Big Navi’ launch now out of the way, AMD is busy fleshing out its line-up of ray tracing-capable GPUs with the launch of a new chip based on its RDNA2 architecture. The Navi 22 die measures just 336mm², compared to the 519mm² Radeon RX 6800-series GPUs. This little die contains 17.2 billion transistors and 40 of AMD’s RDNA2 compute units, and the whole chip is fully enabled on the Radeon RX 6700 XT. As with Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3060, the Radeon RX 6700 XT also has 12GB of GDDR6 memory attached to a 192-bit memory interface. On paper, this gives the card a total memory bandwidth 384GB/sec in conjunction with the 2GHz (16GHz effective) memory. However, AMD claims that the chip’s 96MB of on-die Infinity Cache…

SUPPLIER overclockers.co.uk Gigabyte’s Aorus machines have carved a sizeable niche in the gaming laptop space, and this new machine is its first model with an RTX 3070 GPU. This Ampere-based chip has 5,120 CUDA cores  and 8GB of memory, and here, the  RTX 3070 has a peak TDP of 105W,  which means a moderate boost speed of 1290MHz. The rest of the Gigabyte’s specification is decent – there’s a Core i7-10870H CPU with six cores that runs at 2.2GHz with a potential turbo peak of 5GHz, 16GB of dual-channel DDR4 memory, and both 2.5Gbps Ethernet and dual-band Wi-Fi 6. Meanwhile, the 512GB Phison SSD provides decent read and write speeds of 3,346MB/sec and 2,514MB/sec, but it could do with a larger capacity given the size of modern game  installs. The…

KONTROLFREEK PERFORMANCE GRIPS STRIPS/ £14.99 inc VAT SUPPLIER amazon.co.uk The KontrolFreek Performance Grips Strips pack contains a set of 28 grippy pads to attach to keyboards, mice and gamepads. The pads stick onto their devices easily enough, and they’re easy to remove as well. Cleaning the back of the pad allows them to stick again and they don’t leave behind any residue. The grip surface is also comfy, like a sort of squashy tyre tread; plus, as you’d expect, they’re also grippier than the smooth plastic surface on most peripherals. The strips make gamepads and mice a little comfier to use, but using the pads on a keyboard didn’t feel like it made an improvement. That said, using the grips as markers on specific keys could be helpful for…

SUPPLIER currys.co.uk In a rare case at the moment of a component being available for less than its original launch price, AMD’s 12-core Ryzen 9 3900X will set you back around £410 inc VAT. What’s more, unlike the Ryzen 9 5900X it’s readily available shops. Considering that this price buys you a 12-core CPU with 24 threads, that’s an awful lot of CPU for your cash. The Zen 2 microarchitecture that’s under the hood isn’t as advanced as the latest Zen 3 CPUs, but it still made some sizable gains over AMD’s 2nd-gen Ryzen CPUs. Zen 2 marked the point when AMD made the move to Core Chiplet dies (CCDs), with two quad-core CCXs in each CCD. Cache sizes were increased from 8MB per quad-core CCX to 16MB, and AMD…

SUPPLIER overclockers.co.uk The Ryzen 9 5900X is certainly right up there as a highly desirable bit of silicon, but it has a couple of drawbacks in the current climate. The first is that the price that rarely dips below £600, which is £100 higher than at launch. The second is the fact that it’s rarely in stock. As much as we love the Ryzen 9 5900X, not being able to buy it at the recommended price (if you can buy it at all) takes the wind out of its sails. We hope this 12-core, 24-thread CPU will return to the shops soon, but in the meantime, we can also see how it compares with Intel’s new 11th-gen CPUs as well as others, so you can make an informed choice. It…

SUPPLIER scan.co.uk Intel’s Core i5-10600K got off to a good start when it first launched last year. It outpaced AMD’s Zen 2 Ryzen CPUs in games and was competitive with them in content creation, but sadly for Intel, AMD’s Zen 3 CPUs were just around the corner, with the Ryzen 5 5600X offering even better gaming grunt and massively outstripping the Core i5-10600K in multi-threaded tasks too. Fast forward to 2021 and the Core i5-10600K is often discussed as a viable CPU for several reasons. For starters, the Ryzen 5 5600X has seen its price jacked up and stock dwindle, while the Core i5-10600K has enjoyed mostly constant supply and a sizeable price drop, now costing a little over £200. This is over £100 cheaper than the Ryzen 5 5600X and…

SUPPLIER scan.co.uk It’s thanks to the back port from 10nm Sunny Cove to 14nm Cypress Cove that means 10-core CPUs aren’t practical with Intel’s LGA1200 package for Rocket Lake-S. As a result, we now have two 8-core CPUs at the top of the range, with the Core i7-11700K likely to be siphoned off the lower rungs of the binning scale, and available more cheaply and in higher quantities than the Core i9-11900K, as a result of it not needing to hit such high frequencies. It can still hit a 5GHz peak boost on up to two cores, thanks to the inclusion of Turbo Boost Max Technology 3, but it lacks the support for Thermal Velocity Boost that allows the flagship Core i9-11900K to reach 5.3GHz. The all-core boost of the…

How we test This month we’re taking a look at some shiny new LGA1200 motherboards based on Intel’s new Z590 chipset. We’ve picked six boards that cost between £200 and £440, to see what sort of features and performance is available across a range of prices and determine which is worth your cash if you’re planning on buying one of Intel’s new Rocket Lake-S CPUs. Our test kit includes 16GB of 3466MHz Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro RAM and an Nvidia RTX 3070 Founders Edition graphics card. Windows 10 is installed on a 2TB Samsung 970 Pro SSD along with a Corsair MP600 PCI-E 4 SSD, and these are also used to test the speed of any M.2 ports as well as heatsink performance. The SSDs’ internal temperature sensor is used…

Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor’s Nemesis System is one of the best game mechanics devised in the past ten years. It turns Shadow of Mordor’s Uruks into recognisable, ever-changing personalities by giving them unique arrangements of character traits, then placing them within an ever-shifting political hierarchy that can be manipulated by the player. The result is a system whereby the player can create and complete their own missions, which in turn can have dynamic story consequences down the line. For example, the player might decide to assassinate a particular Uruk, but that Uruk may return from the dead later in the game, now immune to the method you used to kill it last time. No other developer can create a similar system without risking legal ramifications The Nemesis System is…

DEVELOPER Nepos Games/ PUBLISHER Nepos Games Nebuchadnezzar harks back to the golden age of city builders, heralded by games such as Caesar III and Pharaoh. Tasking you with building the world’s oldest cities, from primordial Ur to wondrous Babylon (complete with hanging gardens), Nebuchadnezzar’s play revolves almost entirely around establishing production chains to sustain and entertain your ever growing populace. Every house you place in your city will attract settlers along its dusty roads, but maximising habitable space requires you to supply each house with specific goods. There are three tiers of citizen in Nebuchadnezzar, each of which has differing demands. The middle tier, for example, requires fish and dates as a basic level of sustenance. Fish is obtained from piers built along coastlines, while dates must be grown on…

Intel’s new Rocket Lake-S launch marks one of Intel’s more interesting CPU development cycles in recent years. With well-documented delays in developing its 10nm manufacturing process, Intel has been forced to eke out ever more performance from its 14nm process and its aging Skylake microarchitecture. With Rocket Lake-S, though, it’s taken a different route. Instead of using a variation on the Skylake architecture, Rocket Lake-S uses a variant of the newer Sunny Cove core design found in Intel’s 10nm Ice Lake mobile CPUs. In this case, however, the newer design has been converted so that it can be manufactured on the company’s 14nm process, in a process called backporting. This process isn’t straightforward and means Intel has had to make several compromises, most notably maxing out the core count of…

Raspberry Pi Pico gets CircuitPython support The Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller (reviewed in Issue 212) now has a fresh option for programming it: CircuitPython. Developed by Scott Shawcroft as a fork of MicroPython rebuilt with education in mind, CircuitPython is now available for the Raspberry Pi Pico and Adafruit, one of its biggest supporters, has published a detailed ‘getting started’ guide to assist users with installing and programming CircuitPython on the Pico. All major features are supported, including USB operation – currently unavailable in MicroPython. The guide is available from custompc.co.uk/ PicoCircuitPython, while CircuitPython can be downloaded from circuitpython.org…

Growing up, we weren’t a console family. My cousin had an Atari and then a NES, which were fun when I visited, but because my dad was a computer salesman at a time when home computing was brand-new, our house always had computers. We didn’t own them, but that was a benefit as we got regular upgrades. My popularity on our council estate may have been related. My dad worked for Apple in the early 1980s, then Apricot, Tandy and Amstrad. I loved the Tandy TRS-80, with its bafflingly obscure games (Cuthbert in Space or Pettigrew’s diary, anyone?) and the Amstrad CPC series, which could run more famous games, such as The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy or The Hobbit. Time had filtered out bad memories and left me with…

Multi-room wireless? Firstly, top marks on the magazine. Secondly, I’m thinking of creating a downstairs VR system, but I still want to be able to game on my desk upstairs. Instead of having two completely separate systems with a NAS box, I’m thinking of building one monster system and then having wireless accessories on the desk upstairs. I already have a wireless screen, but I’m struggling with wireless peripherals and speakers. Do you have any recommendations for getting gear to work through the floor, and are there any problems you think I might stumble across? Keep up the great work, and please tell Tracy that I completely agree regarding the positive impact of gaming on mental health. I have a regular session with friends that really boosts my mood and…

SUPPLIER logitech.com Logitech’s original G Pro Wireless (see Issue 187, p19) was an absolute game changer for the gaming mouse world. It had a great overall design that was truly ambidextrous, thanks to removable side buttons. Combine this with an incredibly low weight of just 80g, plus the latest fast-as-wired wireless technology and a top-notch optical sensor, and you ended up with a device that could truly be recommended to just about any buyer seeking a competitive gaming mouse. It was pricey but highly versatile. The G Pro X Superlight is a new version of this mouse that drops its weight even further to just 63g, while also adding Logitech’s latest 25,600DPI Hero sensor. Does this make it the best gaming mouse yet? Yes and no. Starting with the good…

SUPPLIER currys.co.uk The Huntsman V2 Analog is Razer’s new flagship keyboard, which not only sports high-end features such as optical switches, an RGB-adorned wrist rest and USB 3 pass-through, but also includes analogue switches. Like those on the Cooler Master MK850 (see Issue 193, p55), these switches can track the depth that you’ve pressed a key, allowing you to provide analogue input – like the analogue triggers on a gamepad – direct from the keyboard. It’s an intriguing technology and, unlike the MK850, Razer includes it in every key on this keyboard, so you can program the lot to act just how you like. The keys can also be set up to trigger two different actions depending on how far down the key is pressed. The problem is that it’s…

How we test Competition in the CPU market is fierce, and while AMD has the upper hand, Intel has the advantage of better availability and price cuts across its Comet Lake CPUs. This month, Intel also launched its 11th-gen Core line-up, codenamed Rocket Lake-S, and for the first time in over five years, we have a new Intel microarchitecture, rather than just another speed bump or increase in the number of cores, even if it’s still produced on a 14nm node. AMD’s Zen 2 and Zen 3 CPUs are also still in the running, so we’ve got a mix of the lot in this Labs test, from 6-core budget CPUs to 16-core monsters. We’ve also included all three of Intel’s new K-series Rocket Lake-S CPUs. Our CPU test systems include…

SUPPLIER cclonline.com Looking back at AMD’s previous 6-core X-edition models, it’s clear that the Ryzen 5 5600X demands considerably more from your wallet. With a price of over £320 inc VAT, it’s already out of reach for anyone with a budget of £250 or less, which includes many people that will have settled for an Intel Core i5 in the past. The situation also isn’t helped by the current climate, where stock has been intermittent and prices generally higher than they should be. That said, the Ryzen 5 5600X is still a stunning CPU that really showcases the prowess of AMD’s Zen 3 architecture, so let’s take another look at how it stacks up in 2021. This chip gives you an additional 200MHz over the Ryzen 5 3600X, with a…

SUPPLIER currys.co.uk We managed to spot the Ryzen 9 5900X in stock once or twice over the last few weeks so were able to get a handle on its current inflated price. However, one CPU that has been practically non-existent in the shops is AMD’s Ryzen 9 5950X. Its launch price of £750 inc VAT was already high, but ultimately worth paying for this blisteringly fast and powerful behemoth of a CPU that was great in games and stellar for content creation too. However, prices now range from its launch cost to up to £900 inc VAT, so it’s tricky to make any firm judgements right now, especially as we couldn’t even find it in stock anywhere at the time of writing. Assuming the supply situation eventually gets better, and…

SUPPLIER scan.co.uk We’ve recommended Intel’s Core i5 K-series CPUs plenty of times over the years, as they usually offer a good step up from the cheaper runs of Intel’s lineup, with decent multi-threaded support and stellar gaming performance. The former has recently been lacking, though, with AMD becoming the king of multi-threaded bang per buck since Ryzen’s introduction. With Rocket Lake-S, though, we’re looking at a new microarchitecture from Intel for the first time in  five years. Cypress Cove hasn’t had an easy birth, being backported from Intel’s 10nm Sunny Cove to a 14nm process, thanks to 10nm production issues. The maximum core count in this generation has also dropped from ten in Comet Lake to eight in Rocket Late, as a result of Cypress Cove’s limitations. The Core i5-11600K…

SUPPLIER scan.co.uk We quite liked Intel’s belated 10-core 14nm Comet Lake CPU due to the fact that it had better availability than the Core i9-10900K and cost quite a bit less too. What’s more, this month its price has been cut to just £350 inc VAT, making the Core  i9-10850K a bit of a steal if you want a  10-core multi-purpose system with plenty of grunt for gaming and content creation. However, the key question is how it performs against Intel’s new Rocket Lake-S CPUs. You get the same ten cores and 20 threads as the Core i9-10900K, a 5.2GHz peak boost frequency, which is only 100MHz short of the Core i9-10900K, with the same deficit on the base frequency, as well as the Turbo Boost Max 3 and 2…

SUPPLIER scan.co.uk When rumours surfaced that Intel was reducing the core count of its Rocket Lake-S flagship to eight cores from ten with Comet Lake, it seemed a questionable decision, especially given the gaping chasm between Intel and AMD in mainstream desktop multi-threaded performance. However, due to issues backporting the 10nm Sunny Cove architecture to 14nm on the desktop, Intel apparently had no choice. As such, it decided to concentrate on making the fastest 8-core CPU possible, most likely with an emphasis on wrestling the single-threaded and gaming performance crowns back from AMD. In addition to a hefty boost in instructions per clock (IPC) compared with Comet Lake, the Core i9-11900K can also hit a 5.3GHz peak boost thanks to Thermal Velocity Boost and up to 4.8GHz across all cores.…

SUPPLIER scan.co.uk We’ve been impressed by ASRock’s Extreme motherboards over the years, thanks to their balance of premium features and affordability, and the Z590 Extreme is no different. For a start, the price is right - it’s the only board on test this month to come in at under £200, even if it is only by £5. Aesthetically, it’s a winner too, with a snazzy cut-out on one side that also plays host to a GPU support bracket. You get power and reset buttons too, which is very rare on sub-£200 boards, and even the VRM heatsinks, which sit on top of a 14-phase power delivery, include a heatpipe to spread the load. There are splashes of RGB lighting on the PCH heatsink and VRMs plus a USB 3.1 Type-C…

DEVELOPER Tarsier Studio/ PUBLISHER Namco Bandai Little Nightmares 2 is a rare example of a prequel that’s better than the original. Not much better, mind. You play as Mono, a skinny child who enjoys hobbies such as skulking around, wearing a paper bag on his head and (if you play like us), getting killed in horrible ways. Beginning the game lost in a forest filled with dangerous traps, Mono soon arrives at a seemingly abandoned woodland lodge, where he encounters a little girl trapped in the basement. Releasing her, the pair escapes pursuit through the forest and make their way to a nearby city, where even more dangerous challenges await. Little Nightmares 2 plays almost identically to the first game, using a handful of simple mechanics (primarily jumping and grabbing)…

DEVELOPER Fireproof Games / PUBLISHER Fireproof Games Originally designed as mobile games, the extremely popular Room series has been quietly creeping onto PC over the last few years. After last year’s The Room VR impressed with its immersive take on object-based puzzling, The Room 4 is a more conventional affair. Set in 1899, the Room 4 sees you searching a house for clues to the disappearance of a renowned engineer and his wife. The game begins at the culmination of this search, with your character investigating the final room in the house – the attic. Here, they discover a large, elaborate dollhouse that serves as the focus of puzzling, as well as a neat way for Fireproof Games to get around being limited to a single room. The dollhouse is…

If you tried to buy a GPU in the past 12 months, chances are you struggled. If you tried to buy a GPU in the past six months, chances are you found it next to impossible. The launch of Nvidia’s Ampere GPUs and AMD’s Radeon 6000 series have both been met with unprecedented demand – demand that both companies have failed to meet. The likes of the RTX 3080, the 3060 and the Radeon 6800 all sold out within minutes of launch, and beyond a few brief windows of new stock, have been largely unavailable since. But it isn’t only these latest graphics cards that have become remarkably scarce. Head over to a retailer such as Scan or Overclockers, and you’ll find that nearly all GPUs are either only available…

QuickLogic launches Tiny Qomu FPGA board QuickLogic has announced its own entry into the *omu family of ultra-compact development boards with the Qomu, combining a microcontroller and small field-programmable gate array (FPGA) in a device that fits almost entirely inside a USB Type-A port. ‘The Qomu dev kit is a milestone for the industry in many ways,’ claims QuickLogic’s Mao Wang of the open-source design. ‘It packs an incredible amount of functionality in the size of a USB port.’ The Qomu is available to order now via crowdsupply.com at $40 US plus $16 global shipping (around £29 and £12 respectively, ex VAT).…

I remember getting genuinely excited when Nvidia brought back the SLI brand in 2004, as I had fond memories of linking together a pair of Voodoo 2 cards in the late 1990s and marvelling at the outlandish frame rates. Unfortunately, neither SLI nor ATI/AMD’s CrossFire equivalent tech really fulfilled on their promise of boosting frame rates. If you were lucky enough to play one of the few games that worked properly, you could expect a 60 per cent performance boost, but many games would micro stutter so badly that the whole experience was ruined, and you were better off disabling multi-GPU ‘acceleration’. Finally, in 2021, it’s fair to say that the final nail has been hammered into the multi-GPU gaming coffin. I for one am pleased – apart from the…