Indice dei contenuti per special issue 2018 #2 in PC Powerplay

“Intel also deserves credit for its impressive SSD Toolbox software and data migration tool.” PRICE $275 www.intel.com.au Here we have the outlier of our NVMe roundup - the Intel 760p we tested is the only 512GB drive in our roundup, and is clearly targeted at upgrading SATA users. SATA drives remain very popular, but NVMe drives are the future thanks to their far superior performance. Their weakness is still pricing, though - something Intel is attempting to rectify, firstly with the 600p series, and now the updated 760p series. The competition never sits still though, and 760p series drives need to offer both value and performance at their respective price points to compete in an increasingly cut-throat marketplace. The 760p brings Intel right up to date with the latest SSD…

“... there’s a five year warranty, but with an endurance rating of 1200TBW, the drive should last a lot longer...” PRICE $779 www.samsung.com/au Samsung’s Pro series drives have long sat atop the throne at the top end of the consumer SSD market, a position that has come under some threat. Samsung aren’t going to cop that, which brings us to the latest and greatest, the 970 Pro. When you have a device with a performance pedigree like the Pro models have always had, our expectations are high. NOT YOUR TYPICAL NAND M.2 DRIVE The Samsung 970 Pro 1TB is a physically atypical NVMe M.2 2280-sized drive connected via a PCIe 3.0 x4 interface but… That’s about where the similarities end. While there are many high performance drives shipping with 64-Layer…

“AMD has rebranded FreeSync 2 to FreeSync 2 HDR, which mandates HDR600 support - think of this as the real FreeSync 2.” As we move into the second half of 2018, it’s time to take a look at the current PC monitor landscape, and… It’s a veritable visual feast. We’re seeing all sorts of new technologies come on line, as well as improvements to older ones. There’s the rise of ultra-widescreen, bigger screens, HDR, new FreeSync and G-Sync features, higher refresh rates, updated connection standards, and a whole lot more. The rest of 2018 looks very promising if you’re on the hunt for a new display (or three). One of the best things about monitors is their longevity. You can buy a good quality screen right now knowing that it…

“The ASRock H370M-ITX/ ac is a fantastic choice of motherboard for a budget-oriented ITX system.” PRICE $179 www.asrock.com ASRock is well known for its budget-oriented motherboards that offer value without sacrificing on key features. If you’re looking into a budget minded ITX system, ASRock is a very logical choice. We selected its H370M-ITX/ac as the foundation of a value-driven system. When paired with an Intel i3 or i5 processor, with their increased core counts, you’ll get a great balance of gaming performance while still having the multi-threaded grunt to take on more demanding tasks, all without breaking the bank. ONE OF THE BEST VALUE MOTHERBOARDS ON THE MARKET ASRock is one of the biggest supporters of the ITX form factor. At Computex this year, the company proudly displayed an entire…

“If you’re thinking of going all in with a kit of DDR4-4000+ memory, there are few better boards...” PRICE $275 au.msi.com If you’re a gamer and want the best platform you can get with an ITX footprint, then Intel’s Z370 platform and and i7-8700K will unquestionably deliver the best gaming performance. For this system, we chose MSI’s Z370 Gaming Pro Carbon AC. It’s got all the features you’ll need to maximise your gaming performance and still have some headroom for overclocking up to that magical 5GHz number. It will maximise the output of your GPU and deliver the highest possible frame rates to get the best out today’s high refresh rate gaming monitors. SMALL FORM FACTOR GAMING WITHOUT COMPROMISE It’s a well established fact that Intel CPUs give you that…

“As with the other Clubsports, the front panel features bolt holes for accessory attachment...” PRICE $829 www.fanatec.com Fanatec is mid-way through splitting its products into three lines – CSL for the lower end (still far superior to Logitech and most TM gear), Clubsport for the midrange, and later this year the Podium series for high-end racing, starting with a new Direct Drive wheel. For now, the evolved Clubsport 2.5 base is the best the company offers, and it’s the best base on the market until you move into multi-thousand dollar DD wheel bases like the Accuforce range. Having owned a v1 and raced with a v2, the 2.5 is a huge improvement, especially over the v1. Using a pair of multi-v-ribbed belts and a powerful motor it’s silky smooth and…

Computex is one of those events that we always look forward to. Yes, there’s the tired feet and lack of sleep, but it’s one of the very best events in the entire tech world, and we wouldn’t miss it for all the tea in China Taiwan. There’s always so much to see, hear, touch, taste and smell. Well, less emphasis on the taste and smell unless you count the fantastic food that many of the vendors offer after hours. Computex this year was as vibrant, colourful and busy as ever. Taiwan is arguably the center of the PC world and there’s no doubt that Computex remains as relevant as it ever was. The organisers proudly claim there were no less than 1,602 exhibitors across a total of 5,015 booths. If…

Gigabyte invited us to its suite in the Taipei 101 to check out its latest products, something we always look forward to given Gigabyte’s always excellent hospitality, backed by stunning views of the Taipei skyline. With it being a quiet year for motherboard and graphics card releases, we were able to pay more attention to some of the other things Gigabyte was working on, with a particular focus on Aorus branded products. RGB RAM FOR EVERYONE Gigabyte is entering the RAM market and showed us a very attractive kit of Aorus DDR4-3200 RGB memory. It looks quite lovely, as you’d expect, but the key take away is an additional set of dummy modules that look the same from the outside, but are there purely for aesthetics. So, if you have…

In years past Adata was a bit boring, with things like unsexy USB drives or SD cards featuring prominently. This year was very different, and Adata is quickly establishing itself as a competitive, top-tier gaming brand. ADATA IS PLAYING WITH THE BEST NOW One of the areas Adata has really lifted its game is in the area of performance NVMe SSDs. Brands like Samsung or Western Digital might get the lion’s share of NVMe attention, but Adata is right there too. We actually have a review of the Adata Gammix S11 elsewhere in this issue, and it’s one of very few drives that comes with a proper integrated heat spreader. Adata also showed off an RGB M.2 drive cooler. Yes, you read that right. Everything else has RGB lighting on…

A few weeks prior to our trip to Taipei the Synology PR team visited us in Sydney and hinted that there would be action on the router front. We already hold the current RT2600 in very high regard (it’s the router some of us use at home), so with the blitz of high-performance routers from the likes of Asus, D-Link and Netgear we were expecting an RT5400, or something like it. But, no. Instead what we got was the somewhat surprising announcement of a new mesh system. Being Synology, the Mesh Router MR2200ac is far more than a simple plug-and-play mesh Wi-Fi solution. For starters each MR2200ac unit can also function as a stand-alone router. Other mesh systems don’t offer this flexibility and need to hang off an already-installed router.…

“Broadwell did see a very limited release, topped by the i7-5775C, but theywere quickly replaced by sixth generation Skylake CPUs.” If we had to write a state of the CPU industry article in 2016, we could probably just have reprinted what we wrote in 2015… “AMD is a non-factor. We’re waiting for Zen, and Intel made a quad-core CPU that’s a 10 per cent faster than the one the year before”. That would have summarised most of the consumer CPU industry. Here in 2018 though, things are very different. There’s a lot that’s happened and a lot of exciting things to come. A competitive AMD deserves a lot of thanks for this change in pace. Without the threat from AMD, Intel may well have been content to push out just…

Welcome to our roundup of the latest and greatest consumer SSDs on the market. NVMe drives are the future of PC storage, well and truly in another performance league. While SATA drives still command the lion’s share of the SSD market, the times, they are a changing. As time goes on, NVMe drives will continue to filter into the mainstream, leaving the SATA interface solely to mechanical hard drives. NVMe - or to use its tongue-twisting full name, Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface Specification (NVMHCIS) - was designed from the outset with support for flash-based drives. These days, most drives come in the M.2 form factor, though NVMe is also supported by PCIe add in cards and the increasingly rare, but not yet dead U.2 connector. The industry is gravitating…

“This family of controllers has seen widespread use amongst many third party SSD makers.” PRICE $735 www.kingston.com Straight up, Kingston’s KC1000 NVMe SSD is an older generation unit that cannot match the performance of the latest 64-Layer NAND designs. The KC1000 was Kingston’s first NVMe drive - it’s been on the market for just over a year, but a year is a long time in the tech world and every other drive in this roundup was released in 2018. That shouldn’t automatically mean the KC1000 is out of date, but it does leave it in a tricky position. SOME STRONG POINTS Like the other drives in the test, the KC1000 960GB is a standard form factor NVMe M.2 2280 drive that makes use of a PCIe 3.0 x4 interface. Kingston…

“WD joins a small club including Samsung & Intel that has the capabilities to design its own drives in house.” PRICE $609 www.wdc.com It took Western Digital a long time to enter the SSD marketplace, but thanks to its acquisition of Sandisk just over two years ago, WD finally had the resources and expertise to really attack the SSD market. While the WD Black 3D NVMe SSD is not the first from the company, it is the first to use its own in-house designed and built controller. This means WD joins a small club including Samsung and Intel that has the capabilities to design its own drives completely in house. So the WD black is a serious SSD, but can it go head to head with the likes of the…

“This board is a perfect choice to maximise the strengths of the AMD Ryzen series of processors.” PRICE $329 www.asus.com/au Our pick of motherboards for a power user is the Asus ROG Strix X470-I Gaming. This board is a perfect choice to maximise the strengths of the AMD Ryzen series of processors. Pair it up with a highly recommended 8-core Ryzen 2700 processor and you’ll be all set with a mini powerhouse of a system capable of performing any reasonable task you’re likely to throw at a desktop PC. PINT SIZED POWERHOUSE It’s not easy to pack the X470 feature set, plus all the premium high end additions you’d expect, into an ITX motherboard. However, Asus did exactly that, and did it with style. AMD’s Ryzen series brings unprecedented computing…

We’ve talked a lot about small motherboards, but what about small graphics cards? Luckily many cases support full-sized graphics cards, but mini GPUs are being introduced by many manufacturers and they are the only choice for truly tiny gaming PCs. GIGABYTE GETS SERIOUS Gigabyte deserves particular praise for the genuinely small GPUs it produces. Take a look at the Gigabyte GTX 1080 Mini. It’s a little taller than a typical card but its length is similar to a bottom end GPU. At $900+ it’s pricey though. If a 1080 is priced out of your range, Gigabyte offers GTX 1060 and GTX 1070 options that are the same size. How about low profile? Gigabyte offers a GTX 1050 low profile card at around $199. It will game competently at 1080p but…

x264 FHD Video Encoding FPS 46.12 Cinebench 15 MULTI-THREAD SCORE 1411 Cinebench 15 SINGLE THREAD SCORE 200 7Zip MILLION INSTRUCTION PER SEC 40314 PCMark 10 SCORE 6273 3DMark Firestrike SCORE 22930 (19304 Physics) 3DMark Firestrike Extreme SCORE 13035 (19420 Physics) Rise of the Tomb Raider 1080P, VERY HIGH, DX12, AVG FPS 175.48 Ghost Recon: Wildlands 1080P, ULTRA, AVG FPS 71.51 Total War: Warhammer II 1080P, ULTRA, DX11 AVG FPS 102.4 Far Cry 5 1080P, ULTRA, DX11 AVG FPS 126 CPU: Intel i7-8700K Motherboard: MSI Z370I Gaming Pro Carbon Graphics Card: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti RAM: 2x8GB Corsair Dominator Platinum DDR4-3200 Case: Corsair Obsidian 250D Power Supply: Corsair RM850i Cooling: Corsair H60i AIO liquid cooler…

Almost every genre within PC gaming can be played using a stock keyboard and mouse, and that’s part of the beauty of our hobby. Sim racing though, well... that’s something else. You need gear, and that ranges from a simple and affordable wheel-and-pedal set all the way through to a full rig kitted out with some serious – and expensive – equipment. At the top of the scale it’s very easy to spend thousands of dollars, and that can include a dedicated PC just for your sim rig, perhaps triple screens, or a VR HMD. But hardly anyone that’s getting into sim racing dives in deep with an all-out investment in the best from the outset. We gradually upgrade over the years, spending as our enthusiasm grows, as our mad…

Unlike Logitech or Thrustmaster, the Fanatec ecosystem is built around its bases, to which you then buy and attach separate wheels. This is more expensive, but much better for the enthusiast that may want a couple of - or a few! - wheels in their collection. There are currently 13 wheels in the range and we’ll take a close look at the most popular here. As before, we won’t dwell on worries like cost because this sim racing. That said, by far the most popular wheel is the Formula and it’s absolutely good enough to use that and that alone. All Fanatec wheels come with a beautifully engineered quick-release mechanism and you can hotswap a wheel in a few seconds. That’s changing with the introduction of the new McLaren GT3…

Our older – cough, hello - more mature readers might remember some of the legendary cases Lian-Li released ten or 15 years ago. While Lian Li doesn’t have the profile of the likes of Thermaltake or Corsair these days, it never went away, and the company was proudly displaying some lovely cases at this year’s show. LIAN LI GOES BACK TO ITS ROOTS A real contender for the most impressive case at this year’s Computex was the Lian Li Lancool One. This lovely case hearkens back to classic Lian Li designs from the past with its brushed aluminium finish combined with a hint of RGB lighting and a spectacular darkened tempered glass side-panel. This last point is particularly impressive as the dark panel hides almost all ambient light and allows…

As one of the biggest names in the industry, we always expect a good showing from Corsair and this year was no exception. Corsair didn’t have a booth on the usual show floors, instead renting out a penthouse suite on the top floor for the Taipei Grand Hyatt. In rooms normally occupied by celebrities and foreign leaders, we were shown a dazzling array of products with RGB everywhere, beautifully modded systems, and lots of goodies we’d be proud to show off in our own personal systems. POWER SUPPLIES FOR EVERYONE Every year Corsair has new power supplies on show and this year we were shown a new budget friendly range of PSUs - the Vengeance series. These are aimed at the mainstream market and come in 650w and 750w capacities…

It’s always nice to watch the battle for NAS supremacy as it’s fought from ground zero in Taipei, between QNAP and Synology. Yes, there are others - lest we forget WD and Seagate - but it’s these two that offer the most advanced products for power users, and they are always racing neck and neck. There was much activity on the surveillance and enterprise front, which doesn’t interest us at all, though we did see a very nice demonstration of an AI system that’s being worked on. Using a powerful 24-bay enterprise NAS, QNAP had it analysing thousands of images of human retinas to detect differences that indicate eye disease. It of course consumed all available on-board CPU horsepower to do so, and the idea that a NAS can do…

“The highest capacity drives top out at 14Tb right now, though as time goes on we will see even larger drives.” Storage is never boring. There are always a ton of products from all different segments. Hard drives, SSD, NVMe, NAS, Optane. It’s all happening! MECHANICAL HARD DRIVES ARE HERE TO STAY The world is producing ever larger amounts of data. The likes of IoT, analytics, deep learning, and all those cat memes means there’s a constantly increasing need to store it all. SSDs are too expensive for mass storage and probably always will be, so there is still plenty of life in the humble mechanical hard drive. The highest capacity drives top out at 14Tb right now, though as time goes on we will see even larger drives. Western…

“Adata claims the heat spreader lowers average drive temperatures by 10c and we see no reason to dispute this.” PRICE $509 www.adata.com Here we have something from a relatively new entrant into the high performance NVMe SSD marketplace. Adata’s XPG Gammix S11 is an example of how Adata is elevating its product portfolio. Once, it was known for its rather bland memory products. That’s changing, and Adata is gradually transforming itself into a competitive gaming brand. On paper the S11’s specs look quite respectable. It’s not designed to be the fastest solution on the market, but it does aim to hit a very good price/performance ratio. We have the striking looking 960GB Gammix S11 on hand and we’re excited to see how this drive competes with the behemoths of the…

“The 1TB 970 Evo is rated for 600 terabytes written, half that of the 970 Pro, though this is still a healthy number...” PRICE $569 www.samsung.com/au The Samsung EVO series of drives, whether the SATA or NVMe versions, has always been competitive by every measure - whether it be value, performance, reliability, or even the number of units sold. As the Evo drives have such a strong legacy, anything less than hitting it out of the park would be a disappointment. Can the 970 Evo fill the shoes of its illustrious predecessors? RIGHT IN THE SWEET SPOT The Samsung 970 Evo is a typical NVMe M.2 2280 drive that makes use of a PCIe 3.0 x4 interface. The drive contains Samsung’s 64-Layer 3-bit MLC V-NAND (or Triple Level Cell). Samsung…

“Straight up, The Asus G703 is perhaps the most beastly laptop we’ve ever seen.” PRICE TBC (YOU CAN’T AFFORD IT) www.asus.com.au As tech geeks, we’re fortunate to get our hands on some pretty cool gear, and there’s not much out there cooler than the Asus ROG G703 gaming laptop. Calling this a laptop is actually something of a misnomer. It’s more like a technical statement – “Look at what we can make.” Straight up, The Asus G703 is perhaps the most beastly laptop we’ve ever seen. THE BEST OF EVERYTHING Let’s rattle off a few specs, starting with an Intel i9-8950HK and overclocked GTX 1080. Not a bad start. Throw in 64GB of DDR4 memory, 3x 512Gb NVMe RAID SSDs and a 2TB SSHD. Then there’s the gorgeous 144Hz Gsync…

“Here, we’re showing off a capable Mini-ITX gaming build that cranks out frames...” Here we are in 2018, where people are using all manner of small, lightweight and portable devices. Almost everyone has a smartphone or a tablet or a laptop, and sometimes all three. Why is it then, that the stereotype of the desktop PC is still one of the chunky box mostly full of empty space, about 50cm high and 20cm wide? This view has been prevalent for decades! THE MORE THINGS CHANGE, THE MORE THEY STAY THE SAME Firstly, a bit of background on why the PC typically looks like it does. The ATX (Advanced Technology eXtended) standard goes back to 1995. It was introduced by Intel and was designed to bring a level of standardisation and…

It’s not the kind of board you’ll use to overclock to any meaningful extent, though you can if you choose. PRICE $155 www.gigabyte.com/au ITX systems are just what the doctor ordered for a compact home theatre or living room PC. For this purpose, AMD’s Ryzen APUs are an excellent choice thanks to their powerful integrated graphics, low cost, and excellent multimedia capabilities. You’ll need a quality board that supports the key features needed for media centre use, though. Our choice of motherboard for this purpose is Gigabyte’s AB350N Gaming Wi-Fi. VIDEO CAPABILITES: THE DEFINITIVE FEATURE Let’s get to the really important stuff first. If you’re building a compact media centre PC, a key consideration is the HDMI port. Gigabyte officially claims the port only supports HDMI 1.4, but users across…

“The new SF series has almost every feature you’d want in a mini PSU, including 80 Plus Platinum efficiency...” The venerable ATX power supply is a big chunky device that’s remained largely unchanged physically over the last 25 years. It would be nice if the chubby PSU lost a pound or two from around the midriff. The industry has the turning circle of the Titanic though, so it’s pretty unlikely the ATX PSU standard dimensions will change any time soon. Luckily, small form factor power supplies have been around for quite some time. There are more than enough options on the market that are suitable for very small builds. As is the case with graphics cards, many small cases support full size PSUs, but they can be a tight squeeze…

PRICE $699; $199 (MONITOR STAND) www.pagnianimports.com.au After looking at every reasonably priced option, this fairly new product stands alone. It’s unique in some exciting ways, as well looking sexy as heck. For me, space is a factor and this has a relatively narrow width. The seat isn’t the huge oversized sort that is so common - it doesn’t have the wide shoulder supports that look like a real race car seat but you never need sitting still. It doesn’t waste space, either, on big holes for seatbelts because seatbelts on a sim rig is ridiculous and we all know that to be true. THE SEATING OF THINGS The seat is miraculously comfortable. I could seriously fall asleep in it. But the big prize is that you can position things so…

ASRock always has some interesting things on display at Computex. ASRock isn’t as hyper-focused on gaming like the other brands, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t some cool stuff that caught our interest. ASROCK SHOWS NEW OLD GRAPHICS CARDS Just about the only ‘new’ graphics cards we saw at the entire show were the Phantom Gaming range of cards. ASRock told us that we can expect to see these cards in Australia at some point and that they would be relatively affordable. Though they weren’t on display here, ASRock also revealed it plans to release higher-end, custom Vega 56 and 64 models, which means we should be seeing ASRock offer a complete top-to-bottom range of custom AMD cards. We hope they perform well and look forward to seeing the extra…

You can always count on Cooler Master to unveil a bunch of cool gear and at this year’s Computex there was a lot to feast our eyes upon. IT’S NOT ALL ABOUT RGB, JUST MOST OF IT Computex is full of amazing cases of every shape and size, but one of our three personal favourites from this year was Cooler Master’s MasterCase SL600M. The focus of this case is silent operation, and it adopts a novel design that eschews front and rear case fans in favour of a bottom-to-top thermal design, like a chimney, and has a funky motion detection system that turns some reactive lighting on when it senses movement. It also has a gorgeous aluminium finish with a tempered glass side-panel. This is the kind of case that…

These are evolutions, are they not, of the original Air 240 case? Yes! It’s a micro ATX case and there’s the regular version, which is a dual-chamber design and comes with two standard 120mm fans, and there’s the RGB version, which is also the dual-chamber design with two RGB fans, as well as a lighting controller. With that you can control all of the lighting in your case - light strips and fans - and sync it all together with the other Corsair iCUE compatible products. What are some of the advantages of the dual-chamber design? There’s three tempered glass panels on the front chamber of the case so you can highlight all your products – your cooler, graphics card and all the fans and light strips and in the…

Memory technology hasn’t really progressed in recent years. DDR4 is still essentially the same DDR4 we saw last year, and will see again next year. That didn’t stop the memory vendors from releasing a ton of new models though, with RGB-flavoured modules being all the rage in every booth and in almost every modded system across the entire show floor. The GeIl Super Luce RGB Sync 1 looked amazing with its white RGB theme. Geil also showed a prototype unnamed module with a mirror like chrome finish. Lovely! G.Skill always has a full range of memory on display, including this year the Trident-X RGB Royal 2 . It looks very similar to other G.Skill RGB RAM but features a crystalline covering that has a shimmering effect. It’s fast, too, with…