Table of contents for November 2021 in Custom PC UK

Days Gone divides opinion I just read Rick Lane’s review of Days Gone and I think the 60 per cent score is a little wrong. For me it’s more of a 75 per cent, and it’s probably one of my best games of the year so far. Gamers on one of the forums I frequent also agree it’s a pretty entertaining game. The review in your magazine basically covers what I call Act 1, which is a slow burner. However, there are three parts to Days Gone and once you get to what I call Act 2 – with the biker cult – it steps up another level. The final act involves infiltrating the Mad Colonel’s military organisation to find and rescue the main character’s wife. This culminates in a…

SUPPLIER scan.co.uk Ever since AMD introduced its first APUs, we’ve keenly awaited each release as their integrated GPUs usually offer acceptable frame rates at 1080p and below, saving a lot of cash compared with buying a separate graphics card. They’ve also previously left you with plenty of change from £200, but at £329, the new Ryzen 7 5700G is significantly more expensive. One reason is that it has eight cores (16 threads) instead of four, although it’s not quite a performance match for the Ryzen 7 5800X. While both chips have eight cores, the latter has double the L3 cache at 32MB, and adds 100MHz to the peak boost speed. We observed an all-core boost clock between 4.2GHz and 4.35GHz on the 5700G, which is also behind the 4.5GHz on…

SUPPLIER amazon.co.uk The last 360mm all-in-one liquid cooler from Asus that we reviewed was the original Ryujin 360, which offered interesting features and excellent cooling, but for a slightly eye-watering price tag. Unfortunately, Asus clearly thought that was a positive selling point, as the new Ryujin II 360’s only listing when we went to press was for over £400 at amazon.co.uk. So, let’s see what you get for the price of a high-end custom water-cooling system. The cooler uses a 7th-gen Asetek pump, which proved to be extremely quiet in our testing with no noticeable whine even at full speed. This sits below a VRM fan and the cooler’s centrepiece – a large 3.5in customisable LCD. This display can dish out a custom logo, show temperature and fan speeds, or…

SUPPLIER razer.com The Hammerhead True Wireless X is much what you would expect if you engineered a gaming headset down into a pair of wireless earbuds. They’re not visually subtle – they’ve got lights for a start – and they’re also quite big by earphone standards in order to accommodate the hardware. This comprises a Bluetooth 5.2 connection, 13mm headphone drivers and batteries that can provide six hours of playback, with 18 hours of standby off a single charge, plus slightly more if you use the audio control app to turn off the lights. The payoff for the size is found mostly in the sound quality, which is sharp, well defined and potent. Expect to turn the volume down to maybe half what you’d use with regular earphones, because the…

How we test A gaming laptop is an expensive investment, even if you want a model that doesn’t cost the earth, and it makes sense to evaluate these machines from every angle before you decide which one to buy. It’s important to have a robust set of test procedures to find out which laptops are the fastest, strongest and quietest, and which ones have the best screens, so we’ve locked and loaded our full range of benchmarks to discover which laptops are worth your money. Our gaming tests see which laptops can handle a range of titles at playable frame rates, and we’ve run our application benchmarks so we can see which laptops are suitable for tougher content-creation tasks too. We’ve run SSD benchmarks to fine the fastest storage systems,…

SUPPLIER scan.co.uk A sus’ TUF Dash F15 has one of the most interesting specifications on test. It uses one of Intel’s new Core i7-11370H processors, which is a quad-core chip with base and turbo speeds of 3.3GHz and 4.8GHz. It’s designed for slim and light laptops, so it has a low TDP of 35W, but Asus has created performance modes that overclock the chip back up to 45W. Asus has fiddled with the power levels on the graphics side too. The F15 features an RTX 3070, but it has a peak power draw of 85W – the lowest of this group’s trio of RTX 3070 machines. The rest of the spec is fine, if unremarkable. There’s 16GB of memory, a 512GB SSD with mediocre read and write speeds of 1,413MB/sec…

SUPPLIER laptopsdirect.co.uk Lenovo’s Legion 5 is one of the most intriguing machines in the Labs, because it serves up an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 and AMD Ryzen 7 5800H for a relatively low price of just £1,299 inc VAT. That figure undercuts the Alienware, which uses an RTX 3060, and it also ducks below the PC Specialist, which pairs the RTX 3070 with a beefier AMD processor. The RTX 3070 in this laptop has a solid peak power limit of 130W, and the 8-core CPU runs at base and turbo speeds of 3.2GHz and 4.4GHz. There’s 16GB of memory and a 512GB SSD with impressive read and write speeds of 3,594MB/sec and 1,681MB/sec. In Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, the Lenovo returned a 99th percentile minimum of 52fps, which is the best…

How we test If you’re looking for pin-sharp image quality, opting for a 4K monitor is still the ultimate upgrade for most people, whether you go for an enormous 30in+ panel or a display size that’s a little more modest. In recent years we’ve also seen 4K gaming screens finally offer higher refresh rates than 60Hz, greatly enhancing their gaming potential. We’ve grabbed four of the latest 4K screens over a range of prices and feature sets, to demonstrate what 4K options are available. Whether you’re looking for the ultimate do-it-all screen, or just a high-res panel for productivity, one of these displays will likely fit the bill. We start our testing by assessing the fit, finish and features of the monitors, looking at the quality of materials, the adjustability…

SUPPLIER scan.co.uk Monitors with both a 4K resolution and a fast refresh rate aren’t entirely new, but choices have largely been limited so far and there have been restrictions such as the maximum refresh rate you can achieve while maintaining full colour depth. With the TUF Gaming VG28UQL1A, though, there are very few such compromises. This 28in, 4K IPS screen boasts a 144Hz maximum refresh rate, which it can maintain even when driven with a high colour depth HDR signal. It also includes a degree of backlight zoning for better HDR reproduction. Add in a fully adjustable stand and a USB hub and you have quite the feature list. However, the TUF branding is one that Asus applies to its more budget-focused monitors, and sure enough, there isn’t the level…

Griftlands is the latest creation from Klei Entertainment, developer of several excellent games, such as Don’t Starve and Invisible, Inc. The studio has an uncanny knack for turning its hand to any genre and producing something interesting. Griftlands is no different, although the result isn’t as successful as the studio’s earlier titles. The game is essentially a deck-building RPG where conversations are treated with the same level of mechanical depth as physical battles. You play as a Grifter, and by that, we don’t mean a professional YouTube contrarian trying to sell you brain enhancement pills. No, a Grifter is a mercenary gifted both in martial arts and debating techniques. You start off the game playing as Sal, a freed slave who returns to the Griftlands seeking vengeance on the woman…

Overboard! is a fascinating experiment in interactive fiction and detective gaming, where you play not as the sleuth trying to solve the crime, but the criminal trying to evade capture. What results is a fantastic little game that packs wit, charm and ingenuity into every pixel. Set in the 1930s, Overboard! sees you play as Veronica Villensey, a former starlet on a transatlantic voyage between London and New York. The night before the SS Hook arrives at its destination, Veronica pushes her husband Malcolm over the port-side railing into the ocean. After taking sleeping tablets, Veronica awakes the following morning with eight hours until they reach port. In that time, she must avoid being accused of the crime by the ship’s crew and passengers, which includes nosy aristocrats, distraught witnesses…

This PC-in-a draw desktop carpentry project started in the autumn of 2019 during my training to become a carpenter. I thought it would be awesome to use wood to build a computer case, or in some way combine the woodworking skills I was learning with the art of computer modding. For my final exam project, I came up with the concept of a computer built into a desk. However, rather than taking the traditional approach with desk PCs, where the PC is just built into the desktop itself and topped by a large sheet of glass – making for a very thick desk – I decided to build the PC into a drawer. What’s more, I decided to do it in such a way that the drawer looks like it’s…

SUPPLIER amazon.co.uk The Xinxuan Mini Spy Camera is a surprisingly endearing device considering its ostensibly nefarious purpose. What makes it so endearing is how the designers have wrestled with cramming a 1080p night-vision-capable video camera, microphone, motion sensor, battery, tiny USB port and SD card slot into a very small cube. What’s more, the control interface has also been boiled right down, being based on two buttons and one light that can be red, blue or off. There’s no computer interface here – once the necessary (but not supplied) SD card is installed, a PC just sees the data folders for the footage and images when the SQ11 is plugged into it. The controls have a curious system of pressing one or the other button for different amounts of time.…

SUPPLIER laptopsdirect.co.uk Acer’s Nitro 5 looks like a traditional gaming laptop. The rear has bold red air vents, and a slash design adorns the metal lid. Ease back the lid, and you’ll find more angles and a sunken keyboard. Some people will love it; others will find it dated. Build quality is decent, though, and it competes well here with its key budget rivals: it offers similar strength to the Gigabyte and Dell machines and it’s more robust than the MSI. It’s not all good news though. The Acer weighs 2.3kg, which makes it heavier than some rivals, and its 25mm body is thicker than most too. Connection options are also a little frustrating – the Acer does have a fast USB 3.2 Gen 2 port, but its USB Type-C…

SUPPLIER dell.com Gaming laptops are often black or littered with RGB LEDs, but Dell’s G15 Ryzen Edition uses a matt finish called Phantom Grey, which is covered with a speckled pattern, and it really stands out. Dell has paired the bold looks with impressive build quality. This sturdy laptop will easily cope with frequent travel. The downside is size: at 2.44kg in weight and with a body that’s 26.9mm thick and 273mm deep, it’s also one of the largest laptops on test. The Dell pairs a 125W RTX 3060 with an AMD Ryzen 7 5800H and performance is impressive. It achieved playable 99th percentile frame rates in every game and proved marginally quicker than the Alienware in most tests. It outpaced the low-power RTX 3070 inside the Asus too. The…

SUPPLIER currys.co.uk As its name suggests, MSI’s Stealth 15M is designed for discretion. Its sleek black chassis measures just 16.15mm thick and weighs 1.7kg, making the MSI is the slimmest and lightest laptop in the Labs. Build quality is reasonable – there’s some movement in the chassis’ base and around the display, but a sleeve will protect the laptop. The added bounce doesn’t prevent the keyboard from being pleasingly crisp in action either, but bear in mind that there’s no numberpad and the trackpad has too much movement. The slimline design makes the MSI more portable than most gaming laptops, but it does mean there are restrictions under the hood. This machine may have an RTX 3060, but it’s restricted to 65W – the lowest power envelope in the Labs.…

SUPPLIER laptopsdirect.co.uk The AOC U28G2AE is a super-low-budget 4K gaming screen that lacks many of the high-end features that adorn pricier models. However, it still boasts some key features that make it well worth considering if image quality is your main priority. The key upgrade it offers over some cheap 4K monitors of the past is the use of an IPS LCD panel. This ensures you get good viewing angles and better colour reproduction than TN LCD panels. Another key addition is adaptive sync support, gaining you tear and stutter-free gaming with both AMD and Nvidia GPUs. The big downside when it comes to gaming performance is the 60Hz refresh rate. While adaptive sync will keep your games looking relatively smooth, the slow rate of update means this monitor isn’t…

SUPPLIER ebuyer.com BenQ markets the EW2780U as an entertainment monitor, rather than a gaming model, and for good reason. Along with its comparatively limited 60Hz refresh rate, you don’t even get support for adaptive sync, so there are no meaningful gaming features. Instead, the focus here is on HDR and overall image quality, along with a few extras such as an ambient light sensor, uprated speakers and USB Type-C support. The latter lets you deliver 60W of power to connected devices, as well provide a data connection and video connection using DisplayPort Alt mode. Essentially, you can plug in a laptop and this one port provides everything you need through one cable, although the lack of a USB hub means you can’t connect a keyboard and mouse through the screen.…

On the bloody battlefields of Chivalry 2, the rival armies of skill and stupidity crash into each other like metal waves. The results are simultaneously spectacular and hilarious. This is a game where you can successfully fight off two knights at the same time in an epic duel, only to be slain by a man wielding his own severed arm, where a mighty charge into the fray can be abruptly ended by someone throwing a barrel at you. This blend of deeply nuanced melee combat and taking foolish chances makes Chivalry 2 one of the finest multiplayer games we’ve played in years. A sequel to 2012’s Chivalry: Medieval Warfare, Chivalry 2 is broadly similar to its predecessor. It sees two teams of armour-clad warriors – the noble Knights of Agatha…

REVIEW Mooltipass Mini BLE It’s been a long road for the Mooltipass Mini BLE, a Bluetooth-equipped successor to the Mooltipass Mini password safe (reviewed in Issue 168), not helped by a global components shortage that continues to bite the electronics industry. When previewed in Issue 201, it was hoped the gadget would reach backers of its crowdfunding campaign by January 2021, but it would be nearly six months later when backers finally started receiving their devices. The delay has been put to good use. At its heart, the Mooltipass Mini BLE is unchanged from when we previewed it a year ago. It’s an open-source pocket-sized gadget that stores all your passwords in a secure element, protected by a physical smart card and four-digit hexadecimal PIN. Stored passwords can be retrieved…

Readers of a certain age may remember social piracy: meeting up in playgrounds, coffee shops and office break rooms to swap cassettes holding the latest 8-bit entertainment. While there are arguments to be made for and against the idea that every pirated copy of a game represents a lost sale, there’s no denying it triggered a cat-and-mouse game between those looking to protect software and those looking to break that protection. Crackers are in the latter group. Microzeit’s Crackers I: The Gold Rush – the first in a planned duology of books – looks to document the growth of the cracking scene in Europe. And what a scene. When increasingly sophisticated copy protection systems attracted technically capable crackers with a new puzzle to solve, the groups banded together under brands:…

Back in the late 1990s, I worked at a computer shop in Derby, where we sold components over the counter, while pointing to a sign that said ‘components are sold on the basis that the customer is competent to fit it themselves’. There were often compatibility issues between components, but there were two cards I’d always try to steer customers away from, as they nearly always came back to the shop, accompanied by a tired, angry face and colourful vocabulary. One was a PCI soft modem that required an MMX CPU and refused to cooperate with Freeserve, Dixons’ free ISP that was taking the UK by storm. The other was Express 3D graphics card, based on Intel’s 740 gaming chip. This was before Nvidia had coined the term ‘GPU’ for…

GRAPHICS CARD AMD RADEON RX 6600 XT /£400 inc VAT SUPPLIER novatech.co.uk Hats off to AMD for achieving the seemingly impossible task of actually making enough GPUs to sate demand in 2021. Weeks after the launch of the Radeon RX 6600 XT, the cards are still for sale at retailers for under £500. It’s a low bar, but it’s one that’s rarely passed these days. Part of the reason is undoubtedly that the GPU is already overpriced by previous standards. It was only last year that the Radeon RX 5600 XT provided award-winning 1080p gaming performance for £255 inc VAT, with a 192-bit-wide memory interface and 2,304 stream processors. Fast forward to 2021 and AMD’s latest 1080p-focused GPU, the Radeon RX 6600 XT, has 2,048 stream processors and a 128-bit…

SUPPLIER dell.com With its hexagonal grilles, rearmounted RGB LEDs and singlehinged design, the Alienware is arguably the best-looking laptop on test. What’s more, the m15 has super-fast 2.5Gbps Ethernet and it’s one of the only laptops on test with a Windows Hello webcam. The keyboard has a generous 1.8mm of travel and the keys are bouncy, consistent and satisfying – this is the best keyboard in the Labs. It’s also possible to spend an extra £100 and upgrade to a low-profile Cherry MX mechanical keyboard that’s faster and crisper. The display impresses too. The 1080p resolution and 165Hz refresh rate are ideal at this size, and the contrast level of 1,454:1 is tremendous – the best in the Labs and high enough to deliver huge depth and vibrancy. It’s the…

SUPPLIER scan.co.uk Gigabyte’s G5 is the cheapest laptop in the Labs. It’s natural to be sceptical of a gaming machine with such a low price, but it gets off to a good start with an RTX 3060 that runs at 105W. That mid-range power envelope translates into decent performance. The Gigabyte’s finest result came in Valhalla, where its 99th percentile minimum of 39fps matched the group’s best RTX 3060 machines. It was a couple of frames per second behind the 125W competition in other games, but the gaps weren’t huge and there’s still ample power for mainstream gaming. The Gigabyte’s nearest rival at the checkout is the Acer, and the G5 was almost always quicker. The G5 is also the only laptop in the Labs with a Core i5 processor.…

SUPPLIER pcspecialist.co.uk The PC Specialist is the only laptop in this Labs from a British system builder, and it stands out with highend hardware. It’s the only machine on test with an AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX processor, with eight cores alongside base and turbo speeds of 3.3GHz and 4.6GHz. The rest of the specification is similarly muscular. The 140W RTX 3070 is the most powerful GPU in the Labs on paper, and you get 2.5Gbps Ethernet alongside dual-band Wi-Fi 6. That CPU made the Ionico the fastest laptop on test in our image editing benchmark, and it was the second fastest chip in the Handbrake test, so it clearly has the pace to scythe through creative workloads. The SSD helps too – its read and write speeds of 3,108MB/sec and…

SUPPLIER scan.co.uk Cast your mind back a couple of years to the time when we got our first glimpse of true HDR gaming monitors with the Asus PG27UQ. This 27in 4K display came equipped with 512 individual backlighting zones, which properly allowed for the dazzling contrast that’s the defining feature of HDR content. The problem was, with a diagonal of just 27in, it lacked the bigscreen impact that you’d hope to get from such a colossally expensive display. The ROG Swift PG32UQX, then, ups the ante on all fronts, more than doubling the number of backlight zones to 1,152 and increasing the screen size to 32in. Now you get a vision-filling image and a screen size that’s large enough to allow you to take advantage of all those pixels in…

Necromunda: Hired Gun is about six months away from being a decent first-person shooter. Set in the largest Hive City in the Warhammer 40,000 Universe, Hired Gun puts you in the role of a mercenary who becomes embroiled in a turf war after being hired to assassinate a group of thugs, who in turn murdered a local guilder. It’s a likeable game with considerable potential, but it’s undone by being, well, unfinished. Necromunda’s standout achievement is its stunning recreation of 40K’s infamous Hive City, simultaneously a gigantic armaments factory, a sprawling slum, a spaceship graveyard and Space Hell. Each of the story’s loosely connected missions takes you to a new location in Necromunda, each brilliantly conceived and designed. Mission highlights include the Koloss-44, where you battle your way along a…

How many ways can you slice an apple? Clearly the answer is more than one, as 2016’s juicy hack ‘n’ slash Fruit Ninja VR is getting a sequel later this year. Shockingly titled Fruit Ninja VR 2, the sequel will bring ‘gorgeous areas to explore, never before seen fruit-slicing techniques, and juicy new ways to interact with the environment and other ninjas around the globe’, according to its developer Halfbrick Games. But how exactly do you expand on such an extremely simple premise? Well, Fruit Ninja VR 2 introduces a semi-open world that you can explore on foot, moving between 25 levels, each containing various challenges. More significant is the addition of a bow and arrow, opening up a new suite of archery challenges where you’ll be able to shoot…

Back in 2015 when Microsoft launched Windows 10, the company claimed it would be the last ever version of Windows, with subsequent updates coming in dribs and drabs to that OS in perpetuity. Well, let’s be generous and say that Microsoft has clearly changed its mind. Windows 11 is expected to launch at the tail end of this year, bringing a host of feature updates with it, including a new central Start menu, integrated Android app support and a new rounded-corner look. It’s set to be a free upgrade for Windows 10 users, although not all Windows 10 machines will be compatible, at least officially. Otherwise, licences for fresh copies of Windows 11 are likely to cost similar amounts of money to current Windows 10 licences, at least from what…

The death of the Pebble smartwatch brand, which had launched to great acclaim via crowdfunding, but fell at the final hurdle when trying to release an updated model with heart-rate tracking, left behind a cadre of enthusiasts. Many turned to commercial offerings to fill the hole; others tried to eke extra life out of their Pebbles and Pebble Times with third-party firmware. A small group, though, opted to make their own watch. Enter the Watchy, from SQFMI. At its heart, the Watchy is a smartwatch driven by an e-paper display, meaning it draws very little power and is fully readable in direct sunlight. It’s available commercially, but that’s not its focus – it’s an open-source project to prove there’s a market for devices more flexible than those offered by big…

Are giant PC cases redundant? When I first got into water cooling, the case features I wanted changed dramatically. I was no longer interested in funky-looking cases. Instead, I wanted plenty of fan mounts, ideally 120mm or larger, and clearance for radiators. Back then, this was difficult to find, as case manufacturers were only just beginning to gear their PCs towards good air cooling, and migrating from 80mm fans to 120mm models. All-in-one liquid coolers didn’t exist then as we know them today, so case manufacturers admittedly had little reason to factor radiators into their chassis design choices. As a result, very few cases made decent homes for water-cooled hardware. Cases that did tick all the water-cooling boxes were either extremely expensive due to their size and niche appeal, or…

CPC:How did this project start, and what was your inspiration to build an open-air PC based on ASRock’s Taichi design scheme? Jason: It all started when I won the motherboard back in 2019 at the Tweaktown party in Taipei. I love the layout and the look of the cogs on the Z390 Taichi board. However, due to a shortage of parts as a result of the pandemic, I decided to redesign my old gaming case and utilise the water-cooling parts. CPC:We’ve not seen an open-air chassis like this before, but parts of it look a little like one of Thermaltake’s Core P-series case designs. Was this the starting point for the chassis, or is it a full custom scratch build? Jason: The chassis began as a single Thermaltake Core P5…