Table of contents for May 2022 in Custom PC UK

Do you know when we last did a build feature for a sub-£1,000 PC with a discrete GPU? It was in Issue 204, 20 months ago. Zen 3 was still months away, as were Ampere and RDNA2. Our last budget gaming PC build had a quad-core Ryzen 3 CPU and a Radeon RX 5600 XT – we haven’t done a sub-£1,000 gaming build for nearly two years. But that changes this month, as the graphics card market has slowly started correcting. It’s not party time yet. GPU prices are still a long way from normal, and the £400+ eBay prices for the GeForce RTX 3050 (see p16) show that there’s still plenty of silliness around. However, there has been a definite drop. Since last issue, the cheapest price for the…

Fractal Design has miniaturised the design of its Torrent chassis with two new models. First up is the Torrent Compact; like Fractal’s Define and Meshify Compact models, it reduces the space next to the motherboard tray to make an ATX case with a small footprint. It also comes with a pair of 180mm Fractal Prisma ARGB PWM fans to push air over the internals. Meanwhile, the Torrent Nano shrinks down to a mini-ITX form factor, with just one of Fractal’s big spinners in the front, but maintaining the distinctive grille pattern. Despite its smaller dimensions, the Nano can still house a three-slot graphics card up to 335mm long, with room for a CPU cooler up to 165mm tall. When’s the next issue out? Issue 225 on sale Thursday, 31 March…

The enthusiast memory market is about to become less diverse, as Crucial’s high-end Ballistix brand has been binned by Crucial’s parent company, Micron. The move applies to all products under the Ballistix brand, including the Ballistix Max and Max RGB lines. The move marks a withdrawal from the enthusiast memory market, although Micron says Crucial will ‘continue to support the performance compute and gaming communities with its award-winning SSD products,’ which include NVMe PCI-E 4 SSDs. It now describes Ballistix as ‘end of life’. Teresa Kelley, vice president and general manager, Micron Commercial Products Group, said, ‘We remain focused on growing our NVMe and Portable SSD product categories, which both offer storage solutions for PC and console gamers.’ Ballistix RAM first appeared in 2004.…

SUPPLIER overclockers.co.uk It’s not raining, but pouring at the moment as far as mini-ITX cases go, with the Phanteks Evolv Shift XT joining NZXT’s new H1 in this issue, and more to come next issue. This is Phanteks’ fifth mini-ITX case, but rather than being a tweak of the aging vertical tower Shift design, the new Shift XT is Phanteks’ first traditional sandwich style case. With the GPU and motherboard sitting back to back, and connected using a PCI-E 4 riser cable, it’s shorter than the Shift and NZXT’s H1, but takes up more desk space thanks to its horizontal orientation. At £160 inc VAT, it’s certainly pricey given that it lacks any bundled extra hardware, although Phanteks did tell us it will be including its new Revolt SFX PSUs…

SUPPLIER custompc.co.uk/FusionSentinel Chillblast’s Fusion Sentinel is the first PC we’ve seen with the RTX 3050 – Nvidia’s newest and most affordable Ampere GPU (see p18). It’s designed for 1080p gaming with an extra side of ray tracing and DLSS. The Palit card in this PC has the usual 2,560 stream processors and 8GB of memory, along with no overclock, so its boost speed remains at 1777MHz. The Fusion Sentinel combines its entry-level graphics card with an Intel Core i5-12400F (see p16). It’s an Alder Lake chip with six Hyper-Threaded cores, but this chip has modest base and boost speeds of 2.5GHz and 4.4GHz. The rest of the components are similarly fine, but unremarkable. The 16GB of dual-channel DDR4 memory runs at 3200MHz, and the Seagate SSD delivered decent read and…

SUPPLIER amazon.co.uk The Coolon USB hub doesn’t try to do anything beyond giving you as many USB 3 ports in as little space as possible. It plugs directly into a port and then provides an additional two ports at the back and a third port in the raised hump on the top. The design clearly favours laptops and other horizontally orientated ports, but it can work pretty much anywhere due to the small size. For a laptop or a PC with relatively few USB ports in play, this is a great idea and the tiny doodad is a great way to turn one USB 3 slot into three. The consideration with any USB hub such as this one, of course, is that it isn’t bringing its own power input to…

SUPPLIER razer.com The Razer Sphex V3 almost defies definition as a mousepad or mouse mat, because both of these suggest a level of chunkiness. Conversely, there’s no padding here and nothing that suggests a mat – it’s more like a surface, or almost even a coating. The Sphex measurers just 0.4mm thick, with the top couple of fractions of a millimetre consisting of a lightly textured polycarbonate surface on which the mouse runs, and the bottom layer, which is a reusable sticky pad. In effect, the Sphex operates like a sticker – you slap it down, it stays in place and it keeps such a low profile that you would be forgiven for forgetting it was installed in the first place. Installed is a key word here – you don’t…

SUPPLIER box.co.uk A quick scan of popular etailers reveals quite a few Z690 motherboards available for under £200, so spending £220 on a B660 board that lacks multiplier overclocking for Intel’s K-series CPUs might seem like a strange decision. Put simply, the Gigabyte B660 Aorus Master DDR4, which is also available in a DDR5 flavour, is for people who want all the extra features you get with a premium board, but have no intention of overclocking their hardware. This makes sense, especially as the Z690 version of this board costs twice as much. You get an impressive count of eight fan headers, 802.11ax Wi-Fi, 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet and three M.2 ports covered by heatsinks. The latter helped the Aorus Master to get the second lowest M.2 temperature when stress-testing our…

SUPPLIER amazon.co.uk Creative has consistently made some of the most well-regarded PC speakers for decades now, with its T20 speakers (£65 inc VAT) being a favourite of ours for many years. At the top end of its current range of stereo speakers, though, is the T100, which add Bluetooth and USB audio playback, as well as an infrared remote control, making for a far more convenient all-round package than the T20 set. Another key improvement over the T20 is the design of the T100 speakers. Each speaker’s oblong shape and curved front is covered completely by a painted black metal grille, giving them a much smarter overall look than the sparkly paint and yellow highlights of the T20 speakers. That said, there’s still a noticeable lightweight plasticky quality here when…

Maybe, just maybe, hardware prices are starting to edge towards normal this month, as we’ve finally been able to build a decent PC for under a grand that didn’t require twisting a retailer’s arms or hitting well-known auction sites. Instead, we’ve been scouring websites for the latest hardware you can actually buy, and we’ve come up with a great PC for under £1,000 that will offer smooth frame rates at 1080p and even at 2,560 x 1,440 in many games. It’s all about making your money go as far as possible and hunting for the best graphics card you can afford, which is why we’ve cherrypicked some of the best-value components we’ve used over the last few months to avoid skimping in some areas. As such, there are few compromises…

TOTAL PROJECT TIME / 2 HOURS If you want to give your case a makeover with a new colour scheme, and maybe some fancy effects and patterns, using vinyl is often cheaper, quicker, less messy and easier to work with than spray painting. What’s more, it’s also simpler to remove than paint, whether you mess up or if you just want to change colours. We’ve also looked at vinyl-wrapping your graphics card this month on p104, but vinyl-wrapping your case needs a slightly different method. That’s because you need to deal with large surface areas, a greater risk of air bubbles and you also need to make sure your case can still breathe, with its panels still fitting correctly. Dealing with large sheets can be tricky, and you’ll need to…

While I’ve never really identified myself as an overclocker, or a modder or gamer for that matter, preferring the term PC enthusiast, I’m in some ways sad that’s it’s come to this – overclocking is dead. Overclocking used to be one of the driving forces for many early PC enthusiasts, such as myself and Custom PC’s editor, Ben, getting into PCs in the first place, as it provided a way for us to get faster PCs without buying premium-priced hardware. By spending time fiddling with DIP switches and jumpers on the motherboard, or if you were feeling particularly brave, using tiny pieces of wire to short pins in the CPU socket, you didn’t have to spend as much on a new CPU as everybody else. It was smart, it was…

Like a slowly deflating balloon, Nvidia’s Arm deal finally ran out of air after multiple governments took aim at it, and Nvidia was forced to let it go. It was a predictable outcome, given that the deal had opposition from practically everyone that makes chips using Arm’s technology. It’s not the first time Nvidia has tried to get its own CPU IP. In the mid-2000s, it approached VIA with the intent to buy its x86 licence, but this was when VIA was facing legal hurdles with Intel. Based on agreements made with Cyrix in the 1990s, VIA argued it had the right to keep making x86 CPUs and use Intel’s front side bus protocols in its designs, but Intel argued otherwise. This was around the time that AMD and ATi…

Corsair’s acclaimed K70 series of keyboards now has a new Pro-branded flagship, featuring a soft-touch wrist rest, double-shot PBT keycaps, reduced latency and a new dedicated ‘tournament’ switch. The latter immediately changes the backlight to a ‘distraction-free’ static colour, so your eyes don’t get drawn to any breathing, pulsing or rainbow chasing effects, and disables accidentally activated macros. The keyboard also comes with a detachable USB Type-C cable and a choice of five Cherry MX mechanical switches, including the Red, Brown, Blue and Speed varieties. Meanwhile, Corsair says the double-shot PBT keycaps are ‘precision-moulded to resist wear and fading so your keys still look and feel fresh even for years to come, while allowing stunning perkey RGB lighting to shine brilliantly through’. The new soft-touch wrist rest also marks a…

SUPPLIER scan.co.uk Cooler Master has reached into its archive of retired trademarks and brought the HAF (high airflow) series back to life, with the company making a few tweaks to its H500 design to improve the airflow of the HAF 500 here. It retains the bevelled front edges, an ever present feature going back to at least the original HAF cases, but this time with a more traditional flat roof. The front I/O panel sits atop the front on a sloped platform, which is well equipped, with two USB 3 ports, a USB Type-C port, a combined audio jack and a power button in the shape of the Cooler Master logo. Meanwhile, what would usually be the reset button is set up to control the RGB lighting on the fans…

SUPPLIER ebuyer.com We loved the original H1 from NZXT for a number of reasons, and were pleased to see the company release a new version, the H2 V2, to boost cooling and solve a number of other issues that plagued the original case. Graphics card support wasn’t ideal in the original case, for example. Its cooling wasn’t particularly potent either, and not only did its PCI-E riser cable lack PCI-E 4 support, but it also had a fault that could short-circuit in rare cases. NZXT offered a replacement part, but the damage to one of the most distinctive mini-ITX cases of the last couple of years was done. Thankfully, NZXT claims to have fixed all these issues with the new H1 V2. For starters, there’s an entirely new riser cable…

SUPPLIER custompc.co.uk/Phoenix Wired2Fire’s new Phoenix system costs just £1,099 inc VAT, but the Surrey-based builder has found room for an overclocked RTX 3060 in its budget, which is impressive considering the state of the graphics market. The MSI-made graphics card in this rig pairs its usual 12GB of GDDR6 memory and 3,584 stream processors, and raises the boost clock from 1777MHz to 1807MHz. The rest of the specification is reasonable. The 16GB of DDR4 memory rattles along at a decent 3600MHz, and the 1TB Lexar NM610 SSD offers a solid amount of storage space for games, even if its read and write speeds of 2,174MB/sec and 1,725MB/sec are decidedly mid-range. Meanwhile, the Core i5-12400F is a new budget-friendly CPU from Intel’s Alder Lake range, which means unimpressive base and boost…

SUPPLIER amazon.co.uk Slapping extra layers of comfy squashiness onto a chair doesn’t feel like an especially pro-gamer upgrade, but if you’re going to be stuck in a chair working from home, playing games, or both if nobody is checking in, you might as well make the best of it. The Everlasting Comfort arm rests have two straps and Velcro pads, which attach over the existing arms of an office chair, or any chair that has an arm rest with a gap underneath it. They’re not difficult to install or remove, and the straps are supplemented by a grippy textured layer underneath. The latter helps to prevent the cushion from sliding over to the sides, which sometimes happens with cushions. The pad itself is the main event and it’s extremely comfy.…

MOTHERBOARDS TEST PROCESSORS > Intel LGA1700 Intel Core i5-12600K> Intel LGA1200 Intel Core i9-11900K> AMD AM4 AMD Ryzen 9 5900X Common test hardware between our CPU test rigs includes a WD Red SN750 SSD, along with a WD Black SN850 SSD to test the speed of M.2 ports, and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070. We use 16GB (2 x 8GB) of Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro 3466MHz DDR4 RAM, or 32GB (2 x 16GB) of Kingston Fury 5200MHz DDR5 RAM. All CPUs are cooled by a Corsair Hydro-X water-cooling loop with two XR5 240mm radiators, an XD3 RGB reservoir and an XC7 RGB waterblock. We test with our RealBench suite and Far Cry 6 on Windows 11. We also test each board’s M.2 ports, and record the noise level and dynamic…

SUPPLIER box.co.uk We felt sure that spending under £150 on a B660 motherboard wouldn’t always have to land you with a bland and uninspiring board, so we hoped that Gigabyte might have the answer with the B660 Gaming X DDR4. First up, it looks great and costs just £133 inc VAT, which means two very important boxes are ticked in our search for the ideal affordable LGA1700 board. Unlike the Asus B660M-A D4 Prime, it has full VRM heatsink coverage and doesn’t look half-bare as a result, and it has a much more substantial M.2 heatsink as well. However, this didn’t prove to be as effective as that on the Gigabyte B660 Aorus Master DDR4, with a peak temperature of 65°C when cooling our PCI-E 4 SSD. This will only…

Core component bundles The fundamental specifications we recommend for various types of PC. Just add your preferred case and power supply, and double-check there’s room in your case for your chosen components, especially the GPU cooler and graphics card. We’ve largely stopped reviewing power supplies, as the 80 Plus certification scheme has now effectively eliminated unstable PSUs. Instead, we’ve recommended the wattage and minimum 80 Plus certification you should consider for each component bundle. You can then choose whether you want a PSU with modular or captive cables. 8-core system with integrated graphics 8-core CPU, basic gaming Needs a micro-ATX or ATX case. We recommend a 450W 80 Plus Bronze power supply. See Issue 218, p76 for an example build guide. *This motherboard may require a BIOS update in order to…

TOTAL PROJECT TIME / 2 HOURS Your graphics card probably looks reasonably attractive with its large cooler and maybe even some RGB lighting, but if you want to add a personal touch that (unlike spray painting) is completely reversible, you should definitely give vinyl wrapping a go. Easy to apply and available in a huge range of colours and patterns, vinyl can add some colour to your graphics card to make it stand out or colour-match the rest of your PC. Of course, you also need to avoid hindering cooling and damaging your card when you trim the vinyl sheet to fit, but we’ll be covering all of this in the guide. TOOLS YOU’ LL NEED 1 / CHECK FOR SUITABLE SURFACES It’s best to stick to flat surfaces with…

CPC: So how did this build start? Simon: My plan was for this to be my first hard line tubing build, having previously worked on soft tubing builds. I wanted to create a PC that looked a bit different from the norm, and I was inspired by reviews of water-cooling components online. I’ve been interested in the orange, black and white colour scheme for a while, as I think it’s unique and I’ve used it for my last couple of builds – it’s becoming a signature for me. CPC: What made you choose the Raijintek Paean case as the foundation? Simon: I chose this case as it looked quite different from most of the other cases I’ve seen in online PC building groups. I looked though multiple options online before…

I was a PC kid rather than a console kid, but I remember the early handheld wars well. I was 16, doing a BTEC in computer programming, poor as can be and intrigued by the Sega Game Gear. That was until a fellow student with rich parents brought one in, and I realised it was comically large for the tiny screen and kind of unwieldy. I went back home to my ancient creaking Amstrad 464 gratefully, while he burned through countless batteries and only two games. But these days I spend a lot of time on handheld games, because schlepping a PC or gaming laptop around on the bus requires more strength, security and chutzpah than I possess. While Nintendo has allowed more variety on the Switch store, including some…

Some of ASRock’s 1st-gen Ryzen boards have been given new beta BIOS updates to support AMD’s Zen 3 CPUs, meaning you could use a five-year-old motherboard to accommodate a brandnew Ryzen 5000-series chip. Given the limited space on the motherboards’ EEPROM flash memory, updating to these latest BIOS versions will result in losing support for some older CPUs. The BIOS notes state that there’s no support for Bristol Ridge chips (AMD’s cheaper A-series and Athlon X4 CPUs) with the new updates. The X370 boards getting the Zen 3 treatment include the X370 Killer SLI, Fatal1ty X370 Gaming K4 and Fatal1ty X370 Professional Gaming. If you have an ASRock X370 motherboard, you can find the BIOS updates available for your board at asrock.com, and scroll down to the bottom to find…

SUPPLIER scan.co.uk The release of the 4000D Airflow nearly 18 months ago marked a triumphant comeback to the performance case market for Corsair, and subsequent releases of the 5000D and 7000D have cemented its standing in the raft of airflow cases now available. The attention to detail and finish of these cases made them easy on the eye too, so when Corsair told us about a new variant of the 5000 series with a focus on looks and RGB lighting, we were a little apprehensive. This new Corsair 5000T isn’t here to be just desk candy, though, it’s here to kick ass, chew bubble gum and, well, you know the rest. While the 5000T is in essence a reskin of the 5000D, every aspect outside the core chassis has been…

SUPPLIER amazon.co.uk Anker’s magnetic cable management system is geared towards situations where you want wires and cables to be tidy, but are also able to pop them in and out of their tidied positions at will. You get ten gripping pieces that slot onto cables, and then two magnetic plates that you can attach to an agreeable metal surface. The gripping pieces then hold the cable onto the plate. You can fit five cables to each plate in this way, and the result is a neat system that makes it easy to pop cables off the line and put them back again as needed. As long as your intention is only to tidy cables on a magnetic surface, such as a metal desk or case panel, the Anker system is…

SUPPLIER amazon.co.uk The Attenuo wallet takes the concept of a minimalist design and runs with it. In fact, the Attenuo runs so far with the concept of a minimalist wallet that it’s only a hair’s breadth and around £20 away from just stuffing your credit cards in your pocket. Physically, it’s a single piece of machined aluminium that acts as a sort of cage for up to eight credit cards, or other similarly shaped objects, such as tracking cards or RFID blockers. This design makes the Attenuo light, strong and resistant to the elements (short of maybe a lightning strike) – there’s not much that can go wrong with a single piece of metal. As a card wallet, the Attenuo works fine. It can be a bit of a fiddle…

SUPPLIER box.co.uk With a significantly higher price tag than its micro-ATX sibling, the Asus Prime B660-Plus D4 needs to offer noticeably more to justify its extra outlay, but at first glance, the boards appear to be very similar. There are the same eight power stages, along with a slightly bland design and no Wi-Fi included. The latter feels particularly tight on a board that costs nearly £200 inc VAT. It doesn’t even include an integrated I/O shield. Thankfully, on closer inspection, you do get a few extra bits and pieces. Both banks of VRMs are now heatsink-equipped, unlike the micro-ATX board, although temperatures were similar to its sister board this month at 58°C. There’s an extra fan header as well, although the total here still stands at a paltry five.…

SUPPLIER ebuyer.com Another pricey option for Intel’s B660 chipset is MSI’s MAG B660 Tomahawk WiFi, which is available in several guises, including versions with either DDR4 or DDR5 memory support. MSI sent us the latter, which is around £30 more expensive than the DDR4 version. That’s worth bearing in mind, as any conclusions we draw here would likely be bolstered by a lower price tag, given that DDR5 offers little benefits for most people. In fact, including it on a B660 board at all is a questionable decision. The board itself offers 14 power phases cooled by two large heatsinks. With a super-low VRM load temperature of just 48°C, the MAG B660 Tomahawk WiFi is a perfect home for one of Intel’s high-end 12th-gen CPUs. All three of the M.2…

Over the past decade, the game industry’s attitude towards game preservation has improved. Services such as Steam and GoG now have extensive libraries of old PC games, while various studios such as Nightdive and Beamdog have optimised and remastered aging classics. The motivations here are primarily profit-driven, of course, but making old game libraries available online is nonetheless good for us. However, not everything about this trend is so positive. In 2021, we saw several major games removed from Steam in favour of newer models. When Nightdive’s remaster of Quake was launched on Steam, it outright replaced the original, unoptimised version. A more egregious example came when Take Two Interactive removed GTA III, Vice City and San Andreas from Steam, replacing all three with GTA Trilogy: Definitive Edition. This purported…

To enter your rig for possible inclusion in Readers’ Drives, your build needs to be fully working and, ideally, based in the UK. Simply send us a couple of photos on Twitter (@CustomPCMag) or Facebook (CPCMagazine), or email low-res ones to ben.hardwidge@raspberrypi.com. Fame isn’t the only prize; you’ll also get your hands on some fabulous prizes, courtesy of Corsair. Corsair Hydro X Series XD3 RGB Pump/Reservoir C The Corsair Hydro X Series XD3 RGB Pump/Reservoir Combo features a high-performance DDC PWM pump, integrated RGB lighting and in-loop temperature sensor to drive even the most compact custom cooling systems. It has a high-performance Xylem DDC PWM pump controlled via PWM to deliver the perfect flow balance for your loop. There are also 16 individually addressable RGB LEDs, which light up the…