Indice dei contenuti per January 2018 in Custom PC UK

It’s up there with getting my jeans’ belt holes stuck on door handles While it’s always tempting to upgrade to the very latest tech gear, I have a general policy on upgrades in an attempt to temper any irrational impulses that might leave my bank account barren. The policy is simple: upgrade when a product’s shortcomings start to really annoy me, not because I just want the latest stuff for the sake of it. It’s a policy that’s pushed me to prioritise faster and more capacious SSDs over new CPUs, for example. My quad-core Core i7’s shortcomings annoy me sometimes, but not nearly as much as running out of fast solid-state storage. At the top of my current annoyance list is my home network. Wherever I sit in my house,…

First Ryzen APUs appear AMD has just unveiled its very first ‘Raven Ridge’ APUs to be based on its new Zen CPU architecture and Radeon RX Vega GPU tech. The Ryzen 7 2700U and Ryzen 5 2500U are quad-core CPUs, but they also support AMD’s Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT) tech, so they can execute eight threads simultaneously. The Ryzen 7 2700U has a 2.2GHz base clock (up to 3.8GHz turbo), and also has a 1300MHz GPU with ten compute units, equating to 640 stream processors. Meanwhile, the Ryzen 5 2500U has a 2GHz base clock (up to 3.6GHz turbo), and features an 1100MHz GPU with eight compute units. According to AMD, both chips have a nominal TDP of around 15W, and the integrated GPU has enough power to play games such…

Despite the huge changes in the number of cores in Intel’s latest mainstream CPU line-up this time around, with core boosts for every Core i3, Core i5 and Core i7 desktop CPU, Coffee Lake offers comparatively little in the way of architecture changes or chipset improvements. The biggest talking point is that Coffee Lake CPUs aren’t backwards compatible with previous LGA1151 sockets. In other words, if you own a Z170 or Z270 motherboard, you’re out of luck if you want to drop a Core i7-8700K into your motherboard. No backwards compatibility Similarly, older CPUs aren’t compatible with the new Z370 motherboards either, and this situation has caused a fair bit of commotion among enthusiasts due to the fact that the sockets are practically identical. Both sockets have 1,151 pins, the…

 SUPPLIER www.scan.co.uk Its body weighs just 1.8kg, and it only measures 23mm thick The MSI GS43VR is one of the smallest gaming laptops we’ve seen recently, and it’s also not ridiculously overpriced, with a respectable midrange price tag of £1,499 inc VAT. The dinky machine uses a 14in screen, and flaunts the design tropes that we’ve seen on numerous other MSI laptops. The lid has the familiar MSI Dragon Gaming logo, and the interior has a red keyboard backlight and red metal around the trackpad. Fitting in with the red theme, the status lights and power buttons are also coloured red, and the chassis panels are made from glossy brushed aluminium. Meanwhile, the back of the GS43VR features a couple of vents that eject air through red slats. The MSI…

PROCESSORS TESTS: We use Custom PC RealBench 2015, Cinebench and Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation, installed on Windows 10 Home 64-bit, and record the power draw of the test PC. These tests cover a broad range of performance characteristics, including image editing, gaming, video encoding and 3D rendering. We run all tests at stock speed and at the CPU’s highest overclocked frequency. GRAPHICS CARDS Graphics cards are mainly evaluated on how fast they are for their price. However, we also consider the efficacy and quietness of the cooler. Every graphics card is tested in the same PC, so all results are directly comparable. T E STS : By using the fast PC detailed on the left, we can be sure that any limitations are due to the graphics card on…

The Hero includes a 3A header to power water-cooling pumps SUPPLIER www.box.co.uk While some Z370 boards are pricier than their Z270 equivalent predecessors at launch, Asus’ ROG Maximus X Hero actually costs around the same amount of money. What’s more, the new board appears to offer more features, rather than taking a machete to the specification list. The Maximus IX and X Hero look quite similar, but there are two clear aesthetic differences. The first is the inclusion of a nifty integrated I/O shield, and the other is a large heatsink for one of the two M.2 ports. It’s one of the better-featured boards on test this month, yet it doesn’t cost that much more than some of the cheaper models on test. It has an enviable set of…

Despite the low price, Gigabyte has still managed to include a nifty lighting display SUPPLIER www.novatech.co.uk Thankfully, if you don’t want to spend upwards of £200 inc VAT on a Z370 motherboard, there are plenty of cheaper examples available. Gigabyte’s Z370 Aorus Ultra Gaming is a fine example, costing just £170 inc VAT. Like its more expensive sibling, the Z370 Aorus Gaming 7, it costs noticeably more than its Z270-based predecessor at launch. It’s still the cheapest board on test by quite a margin, though, and Gigabyte hasn’t cut too many corners to get the price down. You get six fan headers on the Z370 Aorus Ultra Gaming, along with six SATA 6Gbps ports and even two M.2 ports. Neither of the latter sports a heatsink, so your M.2…

How we test A few years ago, the Wi-Fi router market reached a plateau. With the latest 802.11ac standard, Wi-Fi speeds up-close didn’t really need to get any faster for most practical uses. Instead, what matters most for many people now is range and consistency, which is where mesh routers, or whole-home Wi-Fi systems, come in. They use several access points, or nodes, that work together to spread out the Wi-Fi load. In essence, they’re like a network of Wi-Fi extenders but they differ in a couple of crucial ways. For a start, they’re generally faster. Each node tends to be at least dual-band and uses multiple spatial streams to provide speeds that would rival a dedicated router. The second benefit is that, despite using several bits of hardware working…

Underneath you’ll find a Type-C power socket and a couple of Gigabit Ethernet ports SUPPLIER www.johnlewis.co.uk The Google Wifi is arguably the most well-known whole home Wi-Fi kit. The sheer clout of Google has put it front and centre of this new wave of products. However, fame doesn’t necessarily equate to quality. Unlike most of the other mesh routers on test this month, Google is actively pushing the Google Wifi as a possible standalone router if you buy just a single unit. While all but the BT Whole Home can also function in this way, most of those companies are pushing their products as kits containing several units. However, we advise you to dismiss this idea straightaway. While it’s perfectly competent and powerful enough on its own to work…

If you don’t like it, tough luck; you either need to get good or accept that you’re not a proper gamer Playing games in easy mode has long been viewed with derision by gaming culture. What began as a joke in games such as Wolfenstein 3D, with its tongue-in-cheek difficulty settings such as‘Can I play,daddy?’ and ‘Don’t hurt me’, has now become an embedded social hierarchy within the hobby. People who play games in easy mode are viewed as babies and pretenders, while only the truest, most elite gamers play games on hard. Such thinking has always been lingering in the shadows, like rats in a restaurant that doesn’t clean up properly, but the issue has become more pertinent in recent years due to the growing trend of games that…

The Total War series made its name with its representation of historical conflict. Its explored warfare in arenas ranging from the Roman Empire to Feudal Japan, from Medieval Europe to the Napoleonic Wars. Wherever the series has roamed, however, one factor has remained consistent – the nations, factions and armies it depicts all really existed. Then, recently, the series took a dramatic shift into the realms of the fantastical. Total War: Warhammer merged the colourful armies and races of Games Workshop’s Warhammer world with the vast and detailed real-time battles of Total War. It seems like a marriage made in heaven, bringing Warhammer miniatures to life on the battlefield, and letting Total War swap out its samurai and legionnaires for orcs and dragons. But how exactly did this marriage come…

Water-cooling AMD’s Radeon RX Vega While AMD’s Vega GPUs are a tad disappointing given the wait, we were interested to see if there was much scope for improvement. After all, the Vega 56 might not have blown us away, but it’s at least competitive with Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1070. There’s nothing you can do about stock levels, of course, or the fact that prices are a little higher than the initial RRP too. What you can fix, though, is the awful stock cooler that seems to be fitted to nearly all the Vega cards. When I was writing this column, some shots of Asus and Gigabyte Vega cards sporting triple fan coolers had appeared in the press, but two months on from the launch, we’re still waiting for separate third-party…

Overclockers and enthusiasts are calling Intel’s TIM ‘toothpaste’ and ‘pigeon poop’ When Intel first started adding heatspreaders to its processors with the Pentium 4, it sensibly soldered the aluminium plate to the CPU silicon underneath, which always provided an excellent bond and thermal transfer. However, when Ivy Bridge arrived five years ago, Intel did a low-key switch-out and decided to swap its solder for bog-standard thermal paste (TIM). It was irritating on its usual desktop processors, but at least the high-end desktop (HEDT) CPUs still used solder, until now. As you may have read, Intel’s latest premium Skylake-X CPUs on its X299 HEDT platform also now feature thermal paste rather than solder. It’s a decision that’s caused nothing but problems. Temperatures – especially when over-clocking – are going through the…

Very little has changed with Coffee Lake compared with its predecessor. We’re sticking with DDR4 memory, and the CPUs haven’t changed much apart from core counts and cache levels. However, memory prices have risen considerably in the past few months, with your average premium 16GB kit costing around £170 inc VAT for 3200MHz modules, compared to just over £110 when we first looked at Kaby Lake at the beginning of the year. This begs the question of whether the sweet spot has shifted. Is 3200MHz still worth buying at this price, or is the performance gain so little between that and a 2400MHz kit that you can potentially save some cash? Also, how much could you save by dropping down to 8GB from 16GB, and would the performance sacrifice be…

The silver heatsinks make a pleasant change from the usual grey or black colour SUPPLIER www.cclonline.com As with the ROG Maximus X Hero, Asus’ ROG Strix boards are available in a variety of models, with the main differentiating features between the Z370-E Gaming here and the cheaper Z370-F Gaming being Wi-Fi support and different-coloured heatsinks. It might seem strange to include two very similar boards in your line-up, but Asus claims that many system builders prefer boards with no Wi-Fi, instead allowing the customer to choose a high-performance Wi-Fi card instead, or indeed use a wired network. The silver heatsinks of the ROG Strix Z370-E make a pleasant change from the usual grey or black colour schemes though; plus, at £200, it’s one of the cheaper boards to offer…

The EFI’s excellent fan control section allows you to switch off fans under low heat loads SUPPLIER www.ebuyer.com Two boards sit on the £200 mark this month – Asus’ ROG Strix Z370-E Gaming and MSI’s Z370 Gaming Pro Carbon AC, and these two models’ predecessors have been doing battle for a couple of generations too. Choosing between them is going to be trickier than ever now, though, as they’re both extremely similar in terms of features. Both boards support Wi-Fi, but while Asus uses its own integrated Wi-Fi card, MSI has opted for an entirely discrete 1x PCI-E card with an Intel 8265NGW 802.11ac network adaptor installed on it. This decision could be due to the fact that the rear I/O panel is a little busier than that of…

In theory, it should also be possible for Asus to add a wired backhaul feature SUPPLIER www.overclockers.co.uk The Asus Lyra is a powerful and versatile mesh Wi-Fi system that demands a suitably premium price. However, compared with similarly capable systems, it’s a bit of a bargain for what you get in the box. It consists of three nodes, each of which has a powerful, tri-band 2x2 Wi-Fi system that can deliver a total of 2,200Mb/sec (400+867+867). Each node also includes two Ethernet ports that can be used to connect wired devices to the extended network. Whichever node you choose to be the primary one that plugs into your modem or existing router, one of its Ethernet ports will have to be given over to this task and the system…

SUPPLIER: www.currys.co.uk The Linksys Velop is the most versatile Wi-Fi system on test. Each node can function as a router or an access point, and the system supports wired backhaul as well. So with this three-node system, you could, for instance, set up one node as the router, one node as a Wi-Fi extension in the house and one node as a wired extension out in the garage. As well as being versatile, the Ve lop is also powerful, with each node packing a tri-band AC2533 Wi-Fi System into its chassis. This raw power puts it on a par with the Asus Lyra – in fact the two systems are all but identical in terms of features – and only behind the Netgear Orbi in terms of sheer Wi-Fi oomph.…

A good colony sim is essentially a story engine, a complex algorithmic mechanism that churns out characters and situations that smash together to form thousands of little plots, intrigues and dramas. ‘There’s a high-level result that occurs in many games, including Dwarf Fortress, which is emergent, character-driven stories where players become invested in a generated character,’ says Tynan Sylvester, designer of space colony sim RimWorld.‘I used to have this experience as far back as the original X-Com, where I’d get really attached to some randomly generated character and be devastated when they ended up mind-controlled and killing their buddies.’ RimWorld is one of a spate of colony sims that emerged in the wake of Dwarf Fortress, which also includes the likes of Prison Architect. The game tasks players with building…

low downloads; blank web pages; endless staring at the spinning loading circle in the middle of your screen. In an era when we expect information immediately, having a dodgy Wi-Fi connection can be one of the most irritating experiences of the modern world. One solution, of course, is to buy a new mesh router system (see p52), but that may not solve all your problems, depending on your setup, and there are lots of other ways to tweak your Wi-Fi network that may well give you a speed boost. Your first job, however, is to make sure that the bottleneck is definitely your Wi-Fi connection, and not your broadband provider. Point your browser at www.speedtest.net from a regular, Wi-Fi-connected laptop, and run the test to see what sort of connection…

MILESTONES THIS MONTH TOP 20 OVERALL TOP 20 PRODUCERS WHAT IS FOLDING? Folding@home uses the spare processing cycles from your PC’s CPU and graphics cards for medical research. You can download the client from http://folding.stanford.edu and our team’s ID is 35947. Once you pass a significant milestone, you’ll get your name in the mag. You can also discuss folding with us and other readers online at the www.bit-tech.net forums.…

It’s funded by Mars, because it’s costing the firm a fortune in lost peanuts Remember‘frankenfoods’? That weird period of time in the late 1990s when some people were trying to scaremonger everyone into avoiding genetically modified crops? The name never made sense to me, because as everyone on the Internet will leap to tell anyone who doesn’t know, Frankenstein is the name of the doctor. GMOs should have been called Frankenstein’s Monster Munch, or something. Anyway, the name was as ridiculous as the concept, which is that science shouldn’t use science to improve crops, despite people having tinkered with breeding out undesirable traits in food since forever. Fortunately,the public has broadly accepted that genetically modifying crops is good, and can improve yields, lower prices and even prevent entire nations from…

In terms of how you go about overclocking Intel’s latest Coffee Lake CPUs, the method hasn’t really changed compared with overclocking a Kaby Lake CPU. You still have a 100MHz base clock, a CPU multiplier and you need to deal with similar voltage ranges. The difference, of course, is that with more cores, you’ll have to contend with more heat. Core i3 CPUs have brought the biggest change in this respect, where the TDP has risen from 60W for the Core i3-7350K to 90W for the Core i3-8350K, thanks to a doubling in the number of cores. At stock speed, these CPUs are easily tameable, but we’ve found the 6-core Core i7-8700K draws quite a bit more power than the Core i7-7700K, and generates more heat too, which is to…

Mousebean Ergonomic Hand Rest / £9.48 inc VAT Having a wrist rest built into a mouse pad can sometimes cause a few problems, usually to do with the moving position of the mouse relative to the fixed position of the pad. The Mousebean aims to bypass these problems by attaching the wrist rest directly to the mouse itself. It solves the positioning problems of a fixed wrist rest, but it introduces some new problems too. The biggest is that there’s no satisfactory way to attach it. No adhesive is supplied, and glue is recommended – applied to a flexible rubber pad. However, it’s still not ideal, especially if you have a high-end and/or oddly shaped mouse and you don’t want anything stuck to it. If you’re willing to glue the…

How we test As Coffee Lake CPUs aren’t backwards compatible with Z270 motherboards, if you want to build a system using one of Intel’s stunning new CPUs, you’ll need to invest in a new Z370 motherboard. Thankfully, there’s plenty of boards from which to choose, with all sizes and price ranges landing at launch, even if some of the CPUs and low-end chipsets are still on their way. We’ve chosen six boards, priced from £170 to £530 inc VAT, from three of the big manufacturers to see which ones are worth your cash. As the Z370 chipset is for the most part identical to Z270, our test kit mostly uses the same kit as our Kaby Lake test gear. This setup includes 16GB of 3000MHz Corsair Vengeance RAM, a 512GB…

It offers the most amazing light show we’ve ever seen on a motherboard SUPPLIER www.scan.co.uk While some other boards on test haven’t seen a price hike over their equivalent predecessors, the Gigabyte Z370 Aorus Gaming 7 does sadly cost around £20 more than the Z270 Aorus Gaming 7 cost at launch – a board that picked up our Premium Grade award back in January 2017’s Z270 motherboard group test. The higher price also means that it’s noticeably more expensive than Asus’ ROG Maximus X Hero, which costs £240. It does sport a few extra features, though, such as more fan headers, an extra M.2 port and the most amazing light show we’ve ever seen on a motherboard. There are also four headers for standard RGB LED strips, as well…

A 16x PCI-E card with two additional M.2 ports is included too SUPPLIER www.scan.co.uk Unlike MSI’s sub-£200 Z370 Gaming Pro Carbon AC this month, the company’s other entrant is hoping your wallet hasn’t been on a diet. The Z370 Godlike Gaming costs over £500, but while that’s a rather obscene amount of money to spend on a motherboard, there’s an awful lot to get excited about. This beastly E-ATX motherboard has every feature you could want from an enthusiast motherboard, outdoing the rest of the field this month in practically every department. While the MSI Z370 Gaming Pro Carbon AC only has one M.2 heatsink and two M.2 ports, for example, the Z370 Godlike Gaming has three ports, each of which sports a heatsink. The lowest slot is out…

SUPPLIER www.currys.co.uk BT’s Whole Home Wi-Fi kit is the cheapest system on test, but don’t for a minute think that the low price is an indicator of low capabilities. While it isn’t the fastest or most feature-rich kit on test, it provides solid performance for a great price. Just how low is its price? Well, at £200 inc VAT, the next cheapest system on test is the Google Wifi, which costs £230. However, the latter is a two-node system compared with the BT Whole Home Wi-Fi’s three nodes. Nearly all the other three-node systems cost well over £300. That cost-cutting has some limitations though. The Whole Home Wi-Fi kit is an extension system only, which must be used with an existing router, so you can’t replace your whole router…

One of the most common criticisms of virtual reality is that, as a platform, it lacks a real killer app from a major developer. Sure, there are some great games available, such as Arizona Sunshine and Vanishing Realms, but they’re from small, relatively unknown studios. Even indie darling Superhot doesn’t have the same sort of clout as a triple-A title, and Valve’s The Lab is little more than an adorable half effort. It’s a complaint with which I have some sympathy. Before the current generation of VR headsets landed, I was a staunch VR sceptic, and it wasn’t until I saw a video of a Half-Life 2 VR mod using the Razer Hydra controllers that I really changed my mind. I’d seen other VR games and tech demos before then,…

REVIEW DFRobotLattePanda It’s fair to say I see a lot of single-board computers (SBC) pass through the office for testing, and they’re almost always based around the ARM instruction set architecture (ISA). That’s no surprise. ARM, now owned by Japanese technology giant SoftBank, provides the intellectual property that goes into the overwhelming majority of chip designs for mobile, embedded and other low-power markets – it’s exactly what you want for an SBC. The LattePanda, though, ditches convention and hitches its wagon to the x86 ISA with a key focus on a very particular market: Windows developers who fancy a go at low-power embedded work, but who don’t want to have to learn an entirely new platform on which to do so. Based around the 64-bit Intel Atom x5-Z8300 quad-core processor…

The once popular sound card and network card have almost disappeared in gaming PCs Despite the increasing miniaturisation of electronics and integration of more functions into motherboards, the mid-tower case is still the number one choice for most PC buyers. It’s evolved considerably since its humble beginnings in the 1990s. Long gone are the beige steel boxes of yesteryear – we now have a massive variety of shapes and styles, plus lighting effects and multiple materials,including tempered glass. The internal design has changed a fair bit too, casting out the 1980s era AT form factor in favour of ATX. However, as somebody who has designed and reviewed thousands of PCs in my career, it fascinates me that ATX mid-tower PCs are still the most popular choice in the market. Like…