Inhaltsverzeichnis für November 2020 in Custom PC UK

In our last issue, we had great fun knocking together a retro gaming PC using 1990s hardware. Our archaic yellow ATX motherboard sported a stack of seven PCI and ISA expansion slots, and back then you really needed them. Once you’d added a sound card, graphics card, 3D accelerator, modem and network card, there wouldn’t be much room to swing a ribbon cable in your cramped beige case’s dusty innards. Compare that with today, when all the basics are already integrated onto your motherboard. I have one PCI-E card in my ATX PC – my graphics card, and I know I’m not alone. I could easily downsize the whole caboodle into a tiny box, and I wouldn’t lose features or performance. I could have a 16-core CPU, super-fast PCI-E 4…

Fight! Specifically, a battle royale between the giant armies of tech and gaming. It’s Epic, maker of Fortnite, vs Apple. However, it’s also Epic vs Google, Epic vs Valve and, if you believe the rhetoric, in some ways Epic vs the entire concept of monopolies and profit. It’s tempting to pick a side, and many gamers jumped on board the #FreeFortnite hashtag on social media, referring to a Fortnite tournament where you could win prizes that mock Apple. Epic has access to lawyers just as expensive and effective as those of Apple and Google If you don’t already know, Apple removed Fortnite from the iOS app store, because Epic was selling add-ons directly to players, thereby depriving Apple of its 30 per cent cut. Google did the same with the…

The original Raijintek Metis and Metis Plus were supremely small, thanks to good use of interior space that allowed for reasonably long graphics cards and ATX PSUs, as well as 120mm all-in-one liquid coolers. It was a little limited on airflow, though, but that’s true of many small cases. Raijintek has decided do something about that, though, and the Metis Evo is the result. Available in a range of colours, it’s available with vented or tempered glass side panels, with our sample sporting the latter. The roof is also perforated, allowing the roof-mounted graphics card to breathe. That said, the graphics card mount is off-centre, and the cooler of our model didn’t line up, with half its fan obscured, so you’ll want to check the design of your GPU cooler…

If you have your heart set on a powerful dual-fan all-in-one liquid cooler, then you currently have quite a few excellent models from which to choose. However, when Antec’s sub-£100 gets you decent cooling and RGB lighting, there’s no need to spend much more unless you’re looking for more advanced lighting or more cooling power. Stepping up to a 280mm radiator will offer more cooling capacity and allow fans to spin at lower speeds for similar heat dissipation, though, and this is where Fractal Design’s Celsius+ S28 Prisma comes in. It offers some familiar features to the original Celsius series, such as a handy hub based on the radiator for connecting your fans, meaning there’s no need for cables to trail from them to your motherboard or pump. The tubes…

Asus’ ROG Zephyrus Duo 15 is one of the most outrageous gaming portables around – a dual-screen machine packed with top-tier components. It comes with what Asus calls a ‘ScreenPad’– a 14.1in screen that sits above the keyboard designed to hold chat tools, browsers and other secondary software during gameplay. Its own launcher can group frequently used apps together, and snap windows around, which is useful. However, game support is thin on the ground; the ScreenPad adds features in Dying Light II, League of Legends, Dota 2, Fortnite and CS:GO, but no other game support is currently available. The ScreenPad has a resolution of 3,840 x 1,100, which means a density level of 283ppi, matching the pixel density of the main 15.6in 4K panel. The latter has a 60Hz refresh…

SCREEN MOM SCREEN CLEANER KIT / £15.99 inc VAT SUPPLIER amazon.co.uk Cleaning a screen can sometimes feel like you’re just swapping dust, fingerprint powder and blood spatters for a bunch of streaks. The Screen Mom Screen Cleaner Kit thankfully doesn’t go that way with it. Consisting of a 40 x 40cm microfibre cloth and an impressively hefty bottle of cleaner, the Screen Mom manages to avoid causing streaks and does a great job of cleaning ordinary household mess off a monitor. The bottle contains 16 fluid ounces because of American exceptionalism, or 473ml to everybody else. This is just about enough screen cleaner to keep a large monitor in reasonably good nick for a long time. The cleaner works very well, the cloth is fine for the job and…

Rather than drop its Z490 offering into one of its middling product ranges, MSI has launched the Z490I Unify into its prestigious MEG range of motherboards. This means you get beefed-up power circuitry and active cooling, although the price sits close to £300 inc VAT as a result. The 8-phase power delivery with 90A stages is cooled by two massive heatsinks linked with a heatpipe, and cooled by a small fan embedded within the I/O shroud. The VRMs did top 60°C under load, but this was accurately measured using software, which most other boards on test lacked, plus it’s tens of degrees lower than the danger zone, so nothing serious to worry about. Meanwhile, the large M.2 heatsink saw our SSD sit at 62°C under load, which was over 10°C…

As the only B550 mini-ITX motherboard we’d reviewed up until this month’s Labs test, we didn’t have much with which to compare the Gigabyte B550I Aorus Pro AX. However, now we have a pretty good idea about where it sits among the other baby boards sporting AMD’s new chipset. It’s good-looking, if chunky, and it sports a large heatpipe-linked pair of heatsinks that cool an 8-phase power delivery and the top M.2 slot. There are essentially two heatsinks – a small one that sits on the SSD and then a massive, thick one that only makes slight contact with it. The big one blocks airflow to the SSD heatsink, though, so if you remove the big one, the SSD temperature drops by a few degrees, which isn’t a great piece…

We’re looking at a couple of brand-new iiyama ultrawide gaming monitors in this test, each of which represents the IPS/VA divide. Given the fairly fundamental differences in such displays, it’s intriguing to see that iiyama has opted for such similar and impenetrable model names for these two displays. While over the page we have the VA-equipped G-Master GB3466WQSU, here we’re looking at the IPSsporting GB3461WQSU. This IPS model has a couple of key advantages going for it. The first is that, along with height, rotation and tilt adjustment, the stand includes a pivoting motion. There’s a prominent sticker on the base of the stand telling you not to pivot the display – the display is so wide, it would hit the desk in portrait mode. However, there’s enough movement room…

Enemy design is one of the most complicated areas of game development. It requires the involvement of almost every studio discipline, the combined effort of artists, modellers, animators, sound designers, writers and AI programmers. Even environment designers don’t get away from enemy design scot-free, because enemies need a place in which to fight and the ability to traverse that environment effectively. This complexity, combined with the variety of enemies most games feel obliged to include, means games often get enemy design wrong. It doesn’t help that the difference between good and bad enemies is often subtle. Enemies need to challenge the player without annoying them, a distinction many games often fail to make. Enemies also need to be satisfying to defeat, because there’s no point in putting the player to…

DEVELOPER Phobia Game Studio/ PUBLISHER Devolver Digital Heavily inspired by films such as The Blob and John Carpenter’s The Thing, Carrion is a ‘reverse-horror-experience’ that puts you in control of a monster and challenges you with escaping from a secretive, subterranean research complex. Short, sharp, and stupendously violent, it’s an entertaining premise delivered with grisly style, although it doesn’t dig into its concept as much as we would like. By far the biggest draw of Carrion is the monster itself, a nameless, formless mound of meat and teeth that terrifies despite the fact you control it. While not a true shapeshifter like Carpenter’s Thing, Carrion’s creature is constantly in a state of physical flux. You start out as little more than mouth with a bit of muscle attached, but after…

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT CORSAIR The clever folks at Corsair have been answering the needs of PC hardware enthusiasts for decades, making memory with amazing heatsinks, and even incorporating LEDs into them, well before the current trend. Corsair still makes superb memory today, and it’s since diversified into DIY water cooling, cases, SSDs, fans, system monitors, all-in-one liquid coolers and even air coolers. Offering a huge range of quality enthusiast products, and constantly investing in research and development, Corsair has been a mainstay of Custom PC since the very beginning. Other nominees AMD / Asus / Nvidia BEST VALUE COMPONENT AMD: RYZEN 5 3600 AMD’s 3rd-gen Ryzen line-up hasn’t just changed expectations at the top end of the scale, but at the sub-£200 level too. With six cores, 12 threads and the…

Cooler Master launches Raspberry Pi case crowdfunder Enthusiast PC brand Cooler Master has launched a crowdfunding campaign for the Pi Case 40, an aluminium chassis for the Raspberry Pi 4. ‘Pi Case 40 is the result of an intense co-working between our engineers and key community ambassadors, from computer scientists, to musicians, to gamers,’ claims Cooler Master’s Matteo Stracciari. ‘Pi Case 40 sports a unique features set and a cooling solution worthy of Cooler Master’s name.’ The aluminium case includes a TPU rubber bumper, VESA-compatible mounting brackets, and a 90-degree GPIO header with silkscreened labelling. The case is scheduled for delivery in September from kickstarter.com, priced at €23 (around £21 ex VAT).…

HYPERX LAUNCHES LIGHTWEIGHT WIRELESS HEADSET HyperX has expanded its line-up of Cloud headsets with a lightweight wireless model for PC and PS4 owners. The Cloud Stinger Core weighs 275g and has 40mm drivers. HyperX says its 2.4GHz wireless connection has a range of 12m, and claims it has a 17-hour battery life. Hyper X also claims that its soft, breathable earcup cushions will remain comfortable during long gaming sessions. Other features include volume controls on the earcup, and a swivel-to-mute noise-cancelling microphone. The Cloud Stinger Core Wireless is available in an all-white design from argos.co.uk for £75 inc VAT. NEW NVIDIA GPUS INCOMING By the time you read this magazine, Nvidia will have officially announced some details of its forthcoming Ampere-based GeForce GPUs, presumably with RTX 3000-series model numbers. However, in…

Externally, Cooler Master’s new £90 mini-ITX case looks similar to a number of others on the market, but the MasterBox NR200P is hiding a treasure trove of features and customisation inside it, and we’re sure other companies will soon be scrambling to try to match it. The NR200 range comes in two guises, with the NR200P flagship we’re reviewing offering two 120mm fans, the option of a perforated or glass side panel and a PCI-E riser cable. The NR200 lacks those features, and has 120mm and 90mm fans instead. Despite costing under £100, the MasterBox NR200P feels very solid and weighs over 5kg. It’s reasonably compact, with a width of under 20cm, and it only stands 27cm tall. However, its footprint is certainly a lot larger than cases such as…

While a PWM fan hub can allow your case’s fans to tap into your motherboard’s cooling software, it can be tricky to control an entire case and water-cooling system’s worth of fans. Similarly, adding all your lighting into the equation – both inside your PC and from any external sources you have in your gaming den –often means you run out of ports on your motherboard. Many motherboards also lack the ability to control your radiator fans based on coolant temperature and thermal probes, never mind having all of the above work together via a single piece of software. Enter the Corsair iCUE Commander Pro, which does all this and more. It can be installed anywhere in your case using adhesive pads, so there’s no need for a drive bay.…

While there’s currently no Asus Impact board available for Intel’s LGA1200 socket, the Asus ROG Strix Z490-I Gaming is close to being worthy of the Impact name. It has a deliciously complicated PCB, with a triple stack of heatsinks and PCBs hiding both M.2 ports, and unlike every other board on test this month, both these ports are equipped with heatsinks. Our Samsung 960 Evo SSD peaked at 60°C under load, which was the second coolest result. That ROG logo has full RGB backlighting too, with the only downside of this contraption being that it makes installing your SSDs very fiddly indeed. The PCB is otherwise suitably equipped. You get a Type-C USB 3.1 Gen 2 header, four SATA 6Gbps ports and Asus has even shoehorned a thermal probe header…

Asus has a trio of small motherboards for AMD’s X570 and B550 chipsets, with both the X570 version of the ROG Strix B550-I Gaming we’re looking at here, as well as the mighty Crosshair VIII Impact. At £200, it’s significantly cheaper than the X570 version, which costs closer to £300. At first glance, the two boards seem very similar. Both have fan-assisted VRM heatsinks, which in this case kept the VRMs below 60°C according to our IR probe (the VRM phase design is 8+2). They both also share the same aesthetics, with an all-black theme and stacked components rising off the 170 x 170mm PCB. However, there are some subtle differences. The ROG Strix B550-I Gaming lacks the snazzy RGB lighting on the M.2 heatsink. It also has just one…

MSI decided to leave X570 to other manufacturers when it came to mini-ITX, but with the arrival of B550, the company has finally dished out some PCI-E 4, small form factor love to 3rd-gen Ryzen owners. The MSI MPG B550I Gaming Edge WiFi is one of the cheapest boards on test, leaving you with change from £200, but it doesn’t skimp on features. There’s a USB Type-C header, which is absent on the Gigabyte B550I Aorus Pro AX, and you even get a fan-assisted M.2 SSD and chipset cooler too. You can control the fan in the EFI or software, but it only powers up under high chipset temperatures. If you want to boost M.2 cooling, it’s best to set it to a fixed speed, so it’s on all the…

The Nitro XV340CKP doesn’t sport Acer’s top-of-the-line Predator gaming branding, but it’s still a very capable gaming display, as you’d hope given its relatively premium price. While most of the screens on test cost under £500, the Acer costs well over £600. The price is matched with a premium design, with the Nitro sporting a very elegant, narrow, cylindrical stand with a matching circular base. Combined with an all-black colour scheme, it’s a clear cut above all the other displays on test for sheer desk appeal. You don’t get any fancy extras such as RGB lighting or a headphone stand though. You do get a largely typical selection of connections, with two DisplayPort 1.2 inputs, two HDMI 1.4 ports, a 4-port USB 3 hub, a headphone jack and an internal…

If high contrast is the calling card of VA-type LCD panels, then the iiyama G-Master GB3466WQSU certainly fits the bill. It’s rated to the same 3,000:1 contrast level as the AOC CU34G2X, but while the AOC came up well short of that figure during testing, the GB3466WQSU hits a lofty 3,542:1. That’s more than triple the contrast ratio that any of the IPS displays on test can deliver. This high contrast lends itself well to both games and watching video, with the deeper black levels providing a real depth that adds extra atmosphere and makes colours stand out even more. While we’re fans of the generally natural-looking colour, high response time and image stability of IPS screens – and their readability for desktop use, precisely because of their lower contrast…

DEVELOPER Superhot Team / PUBLISHER Superhot Team Officially Superhot: Mind Control Delete is an expansion pack. But in practice this superb follow-up to Superhot walks, talks, and shoots like a sequel. MCD radically expands upon the Superhot’s time-manipulating action, adding new weapons, new enemies, and a whole new, randomly generated structure. The result is a relentless tirade of action that will eat up your evenings more efficiently than a toddler full of sugar. Importantly, the basic premise remains the same – time only moves when you do. The world exists in a base state of Max Payne-like slow motion, and it’s only when you move that the game speeds up to normal timeflow. This gives you the ability to choreograph your own action-movie sequences on the fly, letting you pull…

If you’ve ever been interested in dabbling in overclocking, one of the terms you’ll see discussed a great deal is ‘VRM’. The term stands for voltage regulator module, and it describes an electronic circuit that regulates and converts the main output voltages of a  PC’s power supply to the voltages required for integrated circuits (ICs), such as your CPU, memory and GPU. On current systems, that means taking the 12V output of a power supply and converting it to typically around 1V for a GPU or 1.4V for a CPU. It’s a simple task, but an essential one, as ICs of this complexity require very stable input voltages to operate reliably, and to ensure stable overclocking. If they don’t get quite enough voltage at just the right time, it might…

We wanted to give our readers a voice when it came to assessing system builders and retailers, as well as service and support – an area that can be tough for us to gauge as journalists. You voted in your hundreds, and some brands were consistently ahead, with Chillblast, Overclockers UK and PC Specialist getting regular nominations. However, Scan was the overall winner of every award – an amazing feat for the Bolton firm. Well done, Scan. BEST ONLINE RETAILER SCAN Runners-up Amazon / Overclockers UK / Ebuyer BEST INDEPENDENT SYSTEM BUILDER SCAN Runners-up Chillblast / Overclockers UK / PC Specialist BEST SERVICE AND SUPPORT SCAN Runners-up Chillblast / Overclockers UK / PC Specialist…

ANALYSIS Nine Tiles Prototype ZX Spectrum ROM Blue’s ZX Spectrum Next (reviewed in board-only form in Issue 176 and in  retail-release guise in Issue 202) isn’t your average microcomputer. It’s designed to take on different ‘personalities’, ranging from ZX Spectrum variants with custom read-only memory (ROM) contents, to entirely different machines loaded onto the field-programmable gate array (FPGA) as a soft core. The ability to load custom ROMs offers a key opportunity in the field of electronic archaeology too – restoring the Nine Times prototype ROM to fully functional status. Nine Tiles is a Cambridge-based software development house, chosen by Sinclair to develop the BASIC ROM needed for its ZX80, ZX81 and ZX Spectrum microcomputers in the  1980s. Last year, Nine Tiles emptied out a storage space and donated a…

My case wish list If you’re an old-timer like myself, and you’ve seen the transition from beige boxes devoid of decent features, to fantastic models such as the Fractal Design Define 7 and Phanteks Eclipse P600, you’ll know just how far PC cases have come. There have been lulls to be sure. It wasn’t that long ago that I was complaining that all PC cases had started to look the same, with front mesh panels, black exteriors and a modicum of cable-tidying features. Then it was all change with the move to tempered glass panels, closed front panels and RGB lighting. I’m not really complaining about these features either. RGB lighting can look great when it’s used tastefully, and tempered glass panels also add to the aesthetic prowess of your…

Inside Intel’s latest Linux patch notes is a specific line that says ‘Hybrid Core/Atom Processors’. It looks as though next year’s Alder Lake (12th-gen) CPUs are set to introduce the first heterogeneous x86 CPU design, a combination of ‘big’ Golden Cove (Core) and ‘little’ Gracemont (Atom) cores. I expect Alder Lake to adopt a chiplet design, where its Atom cores are put on a 10nm die ARM introduced heterogeneous CPUs to the consumer market with its own ‘big.LITTLE’ design in 2012, mixing two types of its Cortex-A cores together in a single chip – high-performance ‘big’ cores and power efficiency-focused ‘little’ cores. The design switched between either cluster of four cores depending on performance demands. This original ‘clustered switching’ wasn’t that elegant and has evolved to become much more fine-grained,…

Keyboards with displays ha long time, even predating mechanical gaming keyb Logitech’s old G-series membrane k ed fancy customisable LCDs. Fast forward to 2020 and Corsair clearly feels these screens need to be introduced again, and the company’s iCUE Nexus is designed to integrate onto the company’s own keyboards, although it can also sit on your desk as a standalone unit. You’ll need to check compatibility with your existing Corsair keyboard, though, as not all models are supported. However, the box includes several adaptors, so you can clip it to most models, making use of the USB pass-through to connect both your keyboard and the iCUE Nexus to your PC. For those without a Corsair keyboard, a neat and surprisingly large stand holds the iCUE Nexus so that it sits…

ASRock’s Z490 Phantom Gaming-ITX/TB3 is a beast that looks like it means business. While it will just about leave you with change from £300, the company has certainly gone to town to justify the comparatively high asking price. It offers full Thunderbolt 3 support for starters, and it has two VRM fans. One of these fans is exposed and cools the tall heatsink at the top of the board. Another fan sits on a second heatsink under the I/O shroud, cooling the total of nine power phases beneath. The fans only spin up under certain conditions according to ASRock, but the top fan was spinning as soon as we turned on the system. We couldn’t control its speed either, but thankfully it was inaudible from a few feet away. The…

With some excellent mini-ITX boards to its name over the years, Gigabyte’s Z490I Aorus Ultra has a reputation to manage, and from looks alone it appears to mean business. Its trio of heatpipelinked heatsinks are chunky and help cool the 8-phase power delivery feeding the CPU, with  no fans in sight. Thankfully, with a VRM temperature measured with our IR probe of 58°C, it’s more than able to cope with Intel’s mighty Core i9-10900K. The M.2 and PCH heatsink, on the other hand, sports the same confused design as Gigabyte’s AMD-based counterparts, with a large slab of metal enclosing the actual M.2 heatsink underneath. While our M.2 SSD was still cooler with this than with no heatsink, it was cooler still if that top heatsink was removed, allowing the one…

The ASRock B550 Phantom Gaming-ITX/ax isn’t quite as lavish as its Z490 counterpart, and at £215 inc VAT, it’s also the most expensive B550 board on test. Its silver cladding does look very smart, though, even if the PCB is a little bare compared with other boards on test. You get an easily accessible M.2 port on the top side, which offers PCI-E 4 compatibility and is equipped with a large, flat heatsink that kept our SSD at a peak of 62°C in our back-to-back CrystalDiskMark runs. The second port is located on the rear of the PCB as usual, but is limited to PCI-E 3 SSDs as well as SATA M.2 SSDs. You get the typical four SATA 6Gbps ports, and they’re handily angled too for easier cable routing.…

If the Acer Nitro XV340CKP typifies one type of ultrawide gaming monitor configuration, the AOC CU34G2X represents the main other type of ultrawide gaming monitor you can buy at the moment. Instead of a flat IPS-type LCD panel, it sports a curved VA-type LCD panel. It’s an interesting divide that’s common throughout different sizes of monitor, and it’s one that primarily seems to come from the need to address one of the downsides of VA-type panels. While they have much better viewing angles than TN-type LCD panels, they’re not as good as IPS. As such, on flat screens, you can notice the slight shift in colour that happens from the changing angle of view from the centre to the edge of the screen. By curving the display, this effect is…

Costing more than double the other displays on test (apart from the Acer), you’d be forgiven for thinking the LG UltraGear 34GN850 can claim some significantly greater performance abilities than the other displays on test. However, while it does have several advantages, they’re subtler than you might expect. The most obvious win for this monitor is its maximum refresh rate of 160Hz. It’s a small jump over 144Hz, but every little helps for fast-paced competitive gaming, especially if you’re considering upgrading from a 100-120Hz ultrawide display. However, this is an overclocked figure, so you’ll have to jump into the display’s OSD to stretch its maximum from 144Hz. Another small advantage here is official G-Sync support. In many instances, official support isn’t necessary, but sometimes there can be some performance issues…

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. Mini PCs Our favourite components for building a micro-ATX or mini-ITX PC. Always double-check how much room is available in your chosen case before buying your components. Some mini-ITX cases don’t have room for large all-in-one liquid coolers, for example, or tall…

DEVELOPER Kojima Productions / PUBLISHER 505 Games Death Stranding is possibly the most indulgent game ever made, a pompous, meandering, and ridiculous experience with an overlong story, boring characters, and no ability whatsoever to retrain its own  excesses. At the same time, it’s one of the most interesting open-world games we’ve played in ages, one that thinks differently about how open worlds can be interacted with and used as a foundation for producing unique, player-driven stories. The game takes place in the United States in the near future, after an event known as the Death Stranding has rendered it unrecognisable. Only a handful of cities remain habitable, and the infrastructure that once connected them has been utterly destroyed. You play as Sam Porter Bridges, a professional courier who traverses this new and…

NEWS STAR WARS: TALES FROM THE GALAXY’S EDGE Between Vader Immortal and Star Wars: Squadrons, Disney and LucasFilm have been pumping out the VR Star Wars experiences lately. Now there’s another name to add to the growing pile – Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge. Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge is a slightly unusual premise. Developed by ILMxLAB (the creators of Vader Immortal), it’s a new story experience that’s based on Galaxy’s Edge – the theme park worlds at Disney’s resorts in California and Florida. Specifically, the game takes place on the planet of Batuu, centring around a location known as the Black Spire Outpost, between the events of The Last Jedi and the Rise of Skywalker. While the specifics of the experience remain largely under wraps (the game…

Ot was an innocent enough request: ‘I want an iMac’. My wife uttered these words to me just after I returned from Dreamhack Jönköping where I’d hoped to exhibit my first attempt at a proper mod. However, a blown motherboard the day before the competition scuppered my chances, so instead I was looking for a new  project. As you can imagine, I panicked a bit upon hearing these words but soon realised that maybe this iMac thing wasn’t such a bad idea. Of course, no actual Mac would ever cross my doorstep, but the idea of building a  computer in or on a screen? That I could get behind. After all, there’s plenty of space on ultrawide monitors. From idea to concept Once the thought had taken hold, I started…

The Oldschool PC Font Pack 2 released The Oldschool PC Font Pack, a collected recreation of classic computer typefaces, has hit release 2, and now includes bitmap-format, web-format, TrueType and aspect-corrected versions of the font files. Based on text-mode and system fonts, the downloadable Creative Commons-licensed font pack includes modern pixel-accurate recreations of the typefaces used on systems ranging from the Apricot Xen family to IBMs, Amstrads, Wyse terminals, and even AmiBIOS and Phoenix BIOS interfaces. The new release offers over 130 additional fonts, aspect-ratio-corrected versions of existing fonts and remains free to download from int10h.org/ oldschool-pc-fonts…

Just like one my other hobbies, target shooting, speccing a PC is a complex and ongoing process of refinement. For target shooting, you start with deciding the distance(s) at which you’re going to shoot, which leads onto calibre, the type of gun, ammunition load, optic and gun rest. As with many hobbies, you repeat that cycle, tweaking and upgrading your loadout, and adding aftermarket parts. The process for building and upgrading PCs is equally complex, with a multitude of interlinked decisions that have an impact on one another. Just like target shooting, you first need to decide what types of games and software you’re going to run the most. This is critical, because despite the PC being a decent jack-of-all-trades, you’ll have a far better experience if your PC is…