Indice dei contenuti per March 2019 in Custom PC UK

Initially landing with more of a farty squelch than a bang, Nvidia’s new RTX GPUs can finally sink their silicon teeth into a real game. Battlefield V’s implementation of real-time ray tracing has now been unleashed in the wild, prompting a flurry of driver updates and patches to make it work properly. Thankfully, it’s all settled down a bit now, and it works, as long as you have all the right updates installed. We’ve taken a look at it on p92, and it’s an amazing experience that makes a very real difference to the game world around you. As you would expect, you get working mirrors and decent reflections, but real-time ray tracing also just makes the whole game world look more lifelike – properly modelled lighting just adds a…

Intel 10nm CPUs coming this year All talk of Intel’s troubled Cannon Lake products has seemingly ceased, with Intel announcing a new line-up of 10nm chips codenamed ‘Sunny Cove’ at its recent Intel Architecture Day. The company revealed little detail about specifications, but said that the new architecture would ‘increase performance per clock and power efficiency for general purpose computing tasks’. According to Intel, the new microarchitecture is designed to ‘execute more operations in parallel’ than its predecessors, and will feature new ‘algorithms to reduce latency’. At the same event, Intel also lifted the lid on a new way of laying out the internal components (such as the memory controller, integrated graphics processor, CPU cores and so on) of a CPU package, which the company calls ‘Foveros’. Rather than laying…

SUPPLIER www.amazon.co.uk AOC’s £399 AGON AG322QC4 justifies its price with a large 32in diagonal and a massive feature set. The eye-catching addition is HDR support, aiming to make games and movies look more vivid thanks to deeper contrast and higher brightness. However, the AOC only uses the low-end VESA DisplayHDR 400 standard, so it only requires a 400cd/m² brightness to achieve certification. More demanding HDR standards require 1,000cd/m² backlight strength. As such, HDR content will look a little better, but it won’t be transformative. That brings us to another issue, which is that HDR is still only supported by a handful of games, including Hitman, Battlefield 1 and Forza Motorsport 7 – it’s still relatively rare. Elsewhere, the AOC has 144Hz AMD FreeSync support, synchronising the refresh rate with…

SUPPLIER www.scan.co.uk Intel may have just launched a new range of CPUs for its high-end LGA2066 CPU socket, but it hasn’t introduced a new chipset to accompany them, as it did with its mainstream 9th-generation CPUs. However, that hasn’t prevented MSI from going all-out and adding another ludicrously premium MEGrange motherboard to its X299 motherboard line-up. It’s very similar to MSI’s MEG X399 Creation motherboard for Threadripper CPUs, in that it boasts a huge price tag that tops £500 inc VAT, but also just about justifies the price with its sheer range of features and accessories. The box nearly requires a forklift truck to move, due to several reasons. You get all the overclocking and testing tools you’ll need We’re dealing with a monstrous E-ATX PCB for starters, which…

How we test AMD’s Threadripper CPUs are tough customers for coolers. For starters, their heatspreaders are huge, which is why many coolers have enlarged contact plates, meaning they’re only compatible with Socket TR4. Others continue to use contact plates designed for smaller CPUs, but have wide-ranging compatibility. The heat produced is also a challenge, especially the Threadripper 2990WX, which pushed all our coolers to their limits when overclocked this month. However, we also pitched each cooler against the more affordable Threadripper 2950X, which we overclocked to 4.1GHz using a vcore of 1.425V, while we overclocked the Threadripper 2990WX to 4GHz using a vcore of 1.3375V. The rest of the system uses an ASRock X399M Tachi motherboard in a Fractal Design Meshify C case, with 32GB of 3000MHz Corsair Vengeance RGB…

SUPPLIER www.scan.co.uk The second most expensive cooler on test this month is Thermaltake’s Floe Riing RGB 240 TT Premium Edition, and if you like your RGB lighting then you’ll like its colourful looks. The pair of 120mm Riing Plus RGB fans sport addressable lighting with 12 individually controllable LEDs, while the pump has six LEDs of its own too, offering a similar lighting array to the Corsair H100i RGB Platinum (see p42). What’s clever here, though, is that both fan speed and RGB lighting control information are transmitted via a single proprietary cable, cutting the cable clutter in half compared with the Corsair cooler. The lighting and fan speeds are tweakable in a refreshingly snazzy software suite, although we did have a few snags getting it to run, which…

What was the last bad game you played? I don’t mean buggy or boring. I mean wheels-falling-off-a-clown-car bad, the kind of fascinating disaster that leaves you wondering how this game got made in the first place. For me, it’s Underworld Ascendant (see p78), a catastrophic fantasy RPG that makes just about every mistake imaginable. It feels awful to play, it’s riddled with glitches and many of its systems are so broken there are times when it becomes literally unplayable. Nonetheless, I’m glad I played it. Not because I enjoyed it, but because it reminded me of just how good we normally have it. Atrocious games are rarer than great ones, as long as you exclude all the dreck on Steam The game industry receives a lot of flak from its…

DEVELOPER ProjectSoul/ PUBLISHER NamcoBandai/ WEBSITE www.bandainamcoent.com/games/soulcalibur-vi It’s possible the first SoulCalibur PC game might also be the last. There are rumours that Namco Bandai has little interest in SoulCalibur, and if the sixth entry doesn’t perform well, there won’t be another. That would be a shame, as SoulCalibur has always been one of the most accessible fighting games around, and the sixth entry showcases the combat at its finest, even if some of its broader features are a little undercooked. SoulCalibur is defined by its universal fighting system, where buttons and combinations are often the same for every character. You only need to learn one set of moves to perform adeptly with all the characters, although the moves themselves will be different, and there are some unique advanced combinations. Combined…

This month, we’re catering for smaller budgets. However, we’ve still managed to cherry-pick some of our favourite hardware, resulting in a rig that not only looks fantastic, but offers superb bang for your buck too. It’s important to build a balanced system at any price range, but at this end of the scale, it makes sense to maximise the amount of money you spend on your graphics card – it should definitely be the most expensive component. That said, you shouldn’t dip too low on other components or you risk creating bottlenecks, not ending up with enough storage or owning a case that’s not up to the task of cooling your hardware. It can be a tricky exercise, but we’ve pieced together a PC using some of the best hardware…

The PC Classic retro PC gaming box started as a joke, Unit-e Technologies founder Eric Yockey explains, prompted by the ever-growing number of nostalgia-driven ‘Classics’ – NES Classic, SNES Classic, PlayStation Classic and so on – hitting the market. ‘Our principal engineer saw that people were joking about things like “the VCR Classic” and “the PC Classic”, and he pitched it to me because he felt we could actually make a PC Classic, and moreover, make it really cool. ‘I discussed the project with a bunch of people from various backgrounds and varying amounts of technical ability, and most people took an immediate liking to it and would say something like “yeah, if I could play Jill of the Jungle on my couch, I’d totally buy one!” We named it…

TOTAL PROJECT TIME / 4 HOURS If you’re anything like us, the area around your PC will be surrounded by various computing accessories, from screws and tools to adaptors, USB thumb drives and memory cards. While you can put them in drawers or on shelves, you really want easy access to them on your desk, but without the risk of littering your workspace or losing any of them. What you need is a specifically tailored desk tidy. There are various desk tidies available for pens and stationery, but precious few of them cater for our exact needs. Thanks to 3D printing, however, it’s possible to create your own and tailor it to your needs. We’ve used the free Tinkercad online modelling tool to create a small desk tidy that can…

This year is going to be a good one for us, I’m sure of it. For starters, we’re finally leaving the 16/14/12nm transistor era after what feels like forever and jumping to 7nm chips. AMD has already shown its hand with 7nm CPU chiplets in its next-gen EPYC data centre processors, so that’s likely how next-gen Ryzen CPUs will appear too. AMD is going to use TSMC to make these processors, which is already shipping 7nm products such as the latest iPhone chip. AMD has only ever used TSMC before to make lower-performance (sub-2GHz) CPUs in the Xbox One and PS4 – a far cry from the 4GHz+ CPUs needed to be competitive today, so it remains to be seen how next-gen Ryzen CPUs will hold up. Intel, meanwhile, really…

SUPPLIER www.overclockers.co.uk Part of the wow factor from last year’s Skylake-X CPUs was the massive upshift in core counts, with the top CPU moving from ten to 18 cores between the Core i7-6950X and Core i9-7980XE. Despite moving the model names into the 9000-series, though, Intel’s new line-up of HEDT CPUs doesn’t increase the number of cores. Instead, the Core i9-9980XE offers higher frequencies, with the biggest leap being the all-core boost of 3.8GHz, which is 400MHz higher than the Core i9-7980XE, while the maximum Turbo Boost Max 3.speed, which now applies to two cores, can reach 4.5GHz. As with all of Intel’s HEDT 9000-series CPUs, solder makes a return between the die and the heatspreader, rather than thermal paste. This move will likely put an end to delidding,…

SUPPLIER www.scan.com / MODEL NUMBER GL504GS-ES082T Despite being a relatively slim laptop, Asus’ ROG Strix GL504 Scar II has been beefed up with several neat features that are borrowed from desktop hardware. Take the screen, for instance, which has a slim bezel, a 144Hz refresh rate and a 3ms response time. That 144Hz refresh rate means games can run at 144fps, and the screen can pump out the frames at the same rate, with much smoother motion than on a conventional 60Hz panel. Sadly, there’s no active sync tech though. Comparatively, the Omen by HP 15 (see Issue 184, p34) paired its 144Hz refresh rate with Nvidia G-Sync, synchronising the GPU’s output with refresh rate to eliminate tearing and stuttering. The screen is slotted inside a great-looking chassis. The…

PROCESSORS TESTS: We use Custom PC RealBench, Cinebench and Far Cry 5, 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. TESTS : By using the fast PC detailed on the left, we can be sure that any limitations are due to the graphics card on test, rather than the CPU.…

SUPPLIER www.aquatuning.co.uk With no RGB lighting, software or even a tweaked cold plate, the Alphacool Eisbaer LT 240’s bland appearance does at least come with a very low price tag compared with the rest of the coolers on test this month, retailing for little more than half the price of the likes of the EK Water Blocks EK-MLC Phoenix (see p43). Out of the box, you get a pair of 120mm fans and all the fittings you need for CPU sockets other than TR4. For the latter, however, you’ll need to invest in Alphacool’s TR4 adaptor, which costs £7incVAT. The Eisbaer LT 240 uses a two-piece mounting plate, with the two sections clipping together from either side of the pump. These sections proved to be extremely stiff when we…

SUPPLIER www.overclockers.co.uk The original Enermax Liqtech TR4 was shipped with AMD press packs, as it was a Threadripper-specific cooler with an enormous contact plate. The new RGB lighting-equipped Liqtech TR4 II continues this tradition, and is available with 240mm, 280mm and 360mm radiators. The 240mm example we’ve tested here sports a 39mm-thick radiator, which is noticeably deeper than many others on test, yet has a slightly wider fin spacing to offer lower air restriction. This design shouldn’t pose too much of an issue, though, as the Enermax’s pair of 120mm fans can reach 2,300rpm at full speed, and they also both use 4-pin connectors to fully tap into your motherboard’s fan control system. You get a fan-splitter cable in the box as well, which allows you to use a…

How we test If you’re into MMOs, MOBAs and other games that require quick access to a mass of macros, the more buttons the better. That’s the pitch for MMO mice, which are designed with just such gamers in mind. They come with upwards of 15 buttons, often with a whole stack of them arranged on one side, under the area where your thumb rests. Some of these models look positively ridiculous but in practice they work surprisingly well, and manufacturers have come up with some rather clever ways of making all those buttons easier to use than you might imagine. Some of them offer modular sections, others have innovative button arrangements, and some allow the buttons to be moved around. It’s the ease of access to extra buttons that…

DEVELOPER IO Interactive / PUBLISHER Warner Bros / WEBSITE www.hitman.com Despite its official labelling as a sequel, it’s better to think of Hitman 2 as Hitman: Season Two. The game follows directly on from 2016’s episodically structured murder sim, although all the content is playable from the start. In both structure and mechanics, however, it’s very similar to the game IO made two years ago. That’s not to say it’s a disappointment. After years fumbling around with the Hitman formula, which included the high of Blood Money and the low of Absolution, 2016’s episodic Hitman saw the studio finally crack the nut, offering six meticulously crafted assassination sandboxes in which it was enormous fun to play around. Hitman 2 simply provides more of this formula, only with the added confidence…

DEVELOPER OtherSide Entertainment / PUBLISHER 505 Games / WEBSITE https://otherside-e.com/wp/games/underworld-ascendant Created by former Looking Glass developers, Underworld Ascendant was one of 2018’s most exciting prospects, being a new, systems-driven fantasy RPG from the brains behind Thief, System Shock and, of course, Ultima Underworld. While Ascendant claims Underworld heritage, though, in practice it plays more like Arkane Studios’ Dark Messiah of Might and Magic. Your goal is to destroy a malevolent God named Typhon, which you achieve not through a grand and compellingly written quest, but by finding seven keys to unlock a big door. An entire castle glitched in and out of existence as I approached it Ascendant seems sketchy from the start. Unlike its namesake, the game world isn’t seamless, but split into seven large levels, which are ‘connected’…

Whether you’re working on new-build hardware or vintage gear, you’ll be aware that dust can be a massive pain. For actively cooled devices, it means clogged heatsinks, gummed-up fans and furry radiators; for passively cooled devices, it still somehow worms its way into every nook and cranny. Anyone who has tried to solve the problem with a vacuum cleaner will probably have found out why that’s not the best idea, with static charges building up on the tip of the brush only to discharge into your precious components. There are also air dusters, of course – cans of compressed gas that can be squirted like the world’s least offensive flavour of Lynx at whatever you’re trying to clean. Air dusters have a few problems though. They’re not exactly environmentally friendly,…

With 2018 drawing to a close, there’s no new hardware to consider now, so over the past few weeks I started the process of speccing up a new PC. It’s not for me, or even for my work; this time, I was building a new PC for my father. While most people his age would probably be content with a tablet or NUC, my father still likes proper PCs. Not because he’s stuck in the past,but because he needs the full performance only a desktop PC can provide for video post-production. Video encoding has always been a part of the CPC review process, since the very first issue, so the first place I turned was CPC’s own RealBench suite. Armed with a tonne of computing gear, I started testing. What…

Esports aren’t going to be included in the Olympics anytime soon. The President of the International Olympics Committee, Thomas Bach, has ruled out having video game tournaments in the athletics competition because, I kid you not, esports games are too violent. ‘If you have egames where it’s about killing somebody, this cannot be brought into line with our Olympic values,’ he said, seemingly forgetting that shooting actual guns has been a part of the Olympics since 1896. Actually, he didn’t forget. How could he, when he has a gold medal for fencing? He said, ‘Of course every combat sport has its origins in a real fight among people. But sport is the civilised expression about this.’ What if Blizzard goes bankrupt? Is that the end of Olympic StarCraft? This is…

SUPPLIER www.overclockers.co.uk Clad in an ice blue shroud with matching LEDs shining through the fans, Sapphire’s spin on AMD’s Radeon RX 590 stands proud from the usual silver and black mid-range graphics cards we review. Like a bottle of mouthwash of the same colour, it gives an impression of being cool and refreshing, which is apt for a new graphics card that costs under £250 inc VAT. As we saw with XFX’s AMD Radeon RX 590 Fatboy (see Issue 185, p22), AMD’s Radeon RX 590 is a formidable force for 1080p gaming, but Sapphire’s card is more elegant. It takes up just two expansion slots, rather than two and a half, for a start, and its length measures 10mm shorter than the XFX card too. It’s all contained in…

SUPPLIER https://play.google.com/store The Google Home Hub – Google’s answer to the Amazon Echo Show (see Issue 185, p32) – is something of a revelation. The surprise isn’t that adding a 7in display makes the smart screen more powerful than its speaker-only counterparts, but that, until you’ve used the Home Hub, you don’t realise what you’re missing with Google’s plain Home and Home Mini. In the simplest terms, having a screen helps you to make decisions You’re still encouraged to control the Home Hub using your voice, but the power of the display quickly becomes obvious. Ask if it’s cold outside, for example, and the Home Hub not only gives a verbal response, but also details the weather forecast for the next six hours in a friendly graphic. Ask how…

SUPPLIER www.scan.co.uk The Corsair H100i RGB Platinum includes mounting plates for Socket TR4 in the box, making it one of the few coolers available that includes fittings for every current desktop CPU socket. Unlike its AM4 mounting pieces, though, which use the two-point mounting clips on AM4 motherboards, the TR4 mount involves four pins and thumbscrews to apply a firm, even amount of pressure. Corsair has redesigned its cold plate too. It’s larger than the ones we’ve seen from Corsair recently, which is possibly because the company wants to improve heatspreader coverage on Threadripper CPUs. However, it still leaves large areas uncovered, whereas both the EK Water Blocks EK-MLC Phoenix 240 (see p43) and Enermax Liqtech TR4 II (see p44) both offer wider coverage. Installation is easy, though, as…

SUPPLIER www.scan.co.uk The Kraken X52 was made for NZXT by Asetek, which is why it can fit with the TR4 adaptor provided by AMD with every retail Threadripper CPU. This adaptor mounts on the pump, and four screws embedded in the adaptor secure it to the socket. What’s more, NZXT’s Kraken series, and the X52 in particular, generally offer plenty of bang for your buck, as well as software control. Even though there’s no need to fork out for a separate TR4 adaptor, as required with the Alphacool Eisbaer 240 LT, the latter is still considerably cheaper than the Kraken X52, which trades blows with the Enermax Liqtech TR4 II (see p44) and Corsair H100i RGB Platinum (see p42) in terms of price, retailing for £130 inc VAT. Like…

SUPPLIER www.scan.co.uk The Corsair Scimitar’s approach to adding more buttons is to have one large grid of them that sits under your thumb. However, it has a trick up its sleeve in order to make these buttons more accessible: the buttons can slide back and forwards, so that they can be positioned in just the right spot to suit your hand size and grip style. Loosen an Allen bolt on the underside of the mouse and the whole array of 12 buttons can move across a range of 8mm. That measurement may not sound like much, but when you’re talking about the difference in what’s essentially thumb length, quite a large proportion of the population can be accommodated by that variability. In our case, we opted to have the…

SUPPLIER www.amazon.co.uk The SteelSeries Rival 500 packs a total of 15 buttons into its small chassis, but instead of presenting a mass of them sitting under your thumb, they’re distributed all around the mouse. There’s one over to the right of the right mouse button, and another pair to the left of the left mouse button. Three more buttons sit just above where the thumb rests then two more are located below it, leaving just one button directly underneath your thumb. This arrangement has the advantage of meaning you can still grip the mouse by the sides, opening it up to be used with a wider variety of grip styles. It’s easy to use all three of the standard claw, fingertip and palm grips with this mouse. That said,…

SUPPLIER www.overclockers.co.uk The Rapier is one of the smallest gaming systems we’ve seen for months. It’s barely bigger than a shoebox. The tiny dimensions come from the Raijintek Ophion Evo mini-ITX case, which has a brushed metal front and tempered glass sides that stand proud of the steel skeleton. The glass does a great job of showing off the components that occupy both sides of this machine, as the case divides the system into two sections. The glass shows off the components on both sides A steel plate runs through the middle, with the motherboard on one side and the graphics card on the other, linked to the motherboard by an extension. The motherboard is installed vertically at the back, with the 1TB hard disk below it and the…

Daybreak Games is currently working on two separate PlanetSide projects, the existing massively multiplayer shooter PlanetSide 2, and a new game titled PlanetSide: Arena. These projects exist in a cyclical relationship with each other. PlanetSide 2 is acting as a foundation for Arena, while the technological changes made in Arena feed back into the ongoing development of PlanetSide 2. There are many different strands to this setup, but it primarily centres around the implementation of DirectX 11. This move was particularly important for PlanetSide 2, as the game’s renderer was so old that it was beginning to encounter problems on modern hardware.‘We’re one of the last remaining DirectX 9 games being supported,’ says Nick Silva, producer on PlanetSide 2.‘We were starting to see issues that were going all the  way…

Explosions mirrored in the eyes of soldiers, super-shiny metal surfaces and amazing reflective water effects. The first demos of Nvidia’s real-time ray-tracing hardware were stunning, but the actuality on the launch of the new GeForce RTX GPUs was an anticlimax. Aside from a nonbenchmarkable demo from 3DMark, and a very limited DLSS anti-aliasing version of the Final Fantasy XV benchmark, there was nothing to show off the new GPUs’ features, until now. Battlefield V is finally out (see p76), and it’s brought real-time ray-tracing support along for the ride too. It’s not been an easy journey though. The first update for the game that supported DirectX ray tracing (DXR) had a lot of trouble with the contemporary Nvidia driver. Nvidia admitted that there were stuttering problems with DXR at high…

Cooling Intel’s Core i9-9900K The reintroduction of solder as the thermal interface material between the die and heatspreader for Intel’s 9th-generation CPUs has been largely seen as a positive move, given just how much of a difference delidding made to the older CPUS with thermal paste. We’ve seen the impact of soldered heatspreaders in our own CPU cooler testing too. Our old LGA2011 cooler test rig would often yield much lower temperatures than our LGA1150 system, despite being overclocked and having 50 per cent more cores too. The difference there was that the LGA2011 HEDT CPU had solder while our trusty Devil’s Canyon Core i7-4790K CPU used thermal paste between the CPU die and heatspreader. I looked at the impact of solder last month too, where I pitched the Core…

Corsair K70 LUX RGB keyboard with your choice of switches TOTAL VALUE £160 inc VAT / MANUFACTURER www.corsair.com The K70 LUX RGB is a part of Corsair’s LUX flagship line of gaming keyboards, featuring Cherry MX key switches backed by a lightweight, durable aluminium frame and dynamic, multicoloured lighting. The USB pass-through port is positioned for uninterrupted gameplay, and ready for your mouse or wireless headset adaptor. You can also harness the power of CUE for sophisticated macro programming and dramatic lighting effects and animations. Meanwhile, 100 per cent anti-ghosting with full key rollover on USB helps to ensure accuracy, so every keystroke translates directly into accurate gameplay. The contoured, textured FPS and MOBA keycap sets keep you in control, while the Cherry MX key switches give you a linear…