Table of contents for June 2020 in Custom PC UK

It feels very strange to be finishing off an issue of Custom PC in the midst of the chaos surrounding COVID-19, and it hasn’t always been easy, but we’re still immensely pleased with this issue. In particular, the PC in our cover feature (see p76) has an amazing specification for the budget – we’ve never managed to assemble a sub-£1,000 PC with such an uncompromising spec before. It’s not just that there’s a 6-core 3rd-gen Ryzen CPU beating at its heart, but it also has a GeForce RTX 2060 Super GPU, a cracking case, 16GB of very fancy Corsair RGB memory and a 500GB NVMe PCI-E SSD. It even looks good. There isn’t a single part of this PC that made us rub our chins and think, ‘Hmm, well, that’s…

AMD CONFIRMS ‘ENTHUSIAST-CLASS’ RAY-TRACING GPUS FOR 2020 AMD has revealed that its next-gen gaming GPUs are scheduled to be released in late 2020. Unlike the company’s first RDNA Navi products, such as the Radeon RX 5700 XT, the new RDNA 2-based GPUs will also support hardware-accelerated ray tracing. AMD unveiled these details about its new GPUs at its Financial Analyst Day on 5 March, while also revealing that RDNA 3 is in development, with products expected before  the end of 2022. The company describes its forthcoming RDNA 2 GPUs as ‘enthusiast-class’, with ‘uncompromising 4K gaming’, meaning they could potentially take on Nvidia’s top-end GPUs, rather than competing in the midrange like AMD’s current Navi chips. In addition to hardware-accelerated ray tracing, AMD also promises up to a 50 per cent…

We’re very familiar with NZXT’s Asetek-based AIO liquid coolers these days, as there have been several generations of successful products, which have often picked up CPC awards in spite of stiff competition from the likes of ARCTIC and Corsair. The company’s Kraken coolers haven’t received an update for a number of years, but it’s now released several new coolers, including the X53 we’re looking at here. The Kraken X53 is the successor to the X52, and it uses a 240mm half-height radiator, so it sits at the bottom of the new stack, with 280mm and 360mm models above it. NZXT has apparently introduced its 7th-generation pump with it, although it has very similar credentials to the one used on the older cooler, with a speed of up to 2,800rpm. However,…

Fierce PC’s Ardent Core immediately impresses with its striking design and custom water-cooling system. The CPU is topped with an Eisblock XPX Aurora with attractive cooling channels, and another Eisblock chills the RTX 2080 Super GPU. They’re connected with Alphacool’s hard tubing, and the front of the chassis is dominated by an Alphacool NexXxos ST30 240 mm radiator with four 120mm fans. Despite all this cooling hardware, the Ardent also uses a mini-ITX Corsair Crystal 280X case, which means Fierce PC has been clever with other cooling components. The sizeable cavity behind the motherboard tray houses the Alphacool Eisstation VPP reservoir, as well as the pump and a plug for draining the loop. Meanwhile, the CPU and GPU waterblocks are illuminated with an attractive orange shade, along with the DIMMs…

The K5 is one of the more expensive membrane keyboards in this Labs – the only pricier model, the SteelSeries Apex 3, is just one pound more. The Asus is also one of the loudest-looking units in this group. At the top is a patterned section with the TUF logo, and in the top-right corner, there are five large status lights. There are more TUF gaming logos elsewhere, and the large wrist rest is part of the main body of the keyboard, so can’t be detached. The bold physical design is paired with large dimensions, thanks in large part to that wrist rest. At 460 mm wide and 218 mm deep, this is one of the biggest units in the Labs. It’s 40mm tall without its feet extended, too, making…

The Alloy FPS Pro is a unique product in this Labs, on two accounts. First, it’s the only tenkeyless model, but perhaps more importantly, it’s also the only mechanical keyboard here that uses the most popular Cherry MX switches. The tenkeyless design means this keyboard has no numberpad. That cuts down on versatility, but it means this unit is smaller and lighter – so it’s ideal for frequent transport – plus the fewer keys keeps the cost below our £70 cut off for this test. HyperX goes a step further on the portability front by including a removable power cable, which makes it far easier to pack away safely. Again, this is a feature unique to this keyboard in this Labs. The compact Alloy FPS Pro is bolstered with a…

Razer is usually associated with its more expensive and outrageous gaming products, but the Cynosa Lite is a simple membrane keyboard with modest looks and a £45 price. The plastic Cynosa has an illuminated Razer logo on its slanted front edge, but that’s it when it comes to ornamentation. Elsewhere, this device is smart and subtle. Build quality is decent, too. This unit can’t match the strength exhibited by more expensive keyboards that are bolstered with metal plates, but it’s just as sturdy as the £40 Corsair K55 RGB and noticeably more robust than the MSI Vigor GK30. The Razer is one of the most compact keyboards in the Labs. Its minimal design means there’s not much plastic to be found beyond the keys, and the buttons themselves are recessed…

AOC’s 27G2U might not have the 2,560 x 1,440 resolution of the other displays on test, but it offers amazingly good value for money. You get a 27in IPS panel, 144Hz+ refresh rate, fully adjustable stand, and even FreeSync and G-Sync support, all for under £200. Of course, there are other areas where costs have been cut, such as build quality. While the stand offers height, tilt, rotation and pivot adjustment, it feels noticeably less sturdy than the other displays on test, although all the adjustments are easy to perform. The back of the display is also a bit thinner and less robust than the others, and you miss out on some extra features, with no flip-down headphone stands or RGB lights (oh the humanity!) However, you miss out on…

It was the LG 27GL850 that kicked off this latest wave of improved 27in, IPS gaming screens. This monitor introduced us to LG’s new 1ms IPS panels, which also power some of the other screens on test this month, so we were interested to see if LG’s implementation could better the competition. What you first notice about this display, upon placing it on a desk, is the strange lack of rotation in the stand. That oddity aside, first impressions are good. The stand doesn’t have a particularly premium feel, and the red plastic highlights aren’t to our taste, but it’s still reasonably smart. The display itself also has the requisite tiny bezel and general slimness that we expect from this latest generation of displays. Connection options are good too, with…

Conan the Barbarian has a surprisingly large gaming footprint, being the face of online survival games and tower-defence strategy experiences, all of which miss the razor-sharp point of Robert E. Howard’s fast and furious short stories. Elderborn doesn’t feature Conan, but this taut and breathless first-person slasher is nonetheless the best Conan game we’ve played. The plot is classic sword and sorcery fare. You play a barbarian who ventures into an ancient city, which was once the terror of its fantasy realm, but fell silent after it was besieged by a massive rebel army. Dispatched by your tribe to investigate rumours of a great treasure hidden at its heart, you discover that the soldiers who attacked the city centuries ago are now defending it as cursed husks. Elderborn’s combat is…

The Pedestrian is a puzzle-platformer where the platforms are also the puzzles. You control a human silhouette that you’d typically see on road signs and pedestrian crossings, guiding it through the signs and notices of a bustling city. There are two key layers to puzzling. The first is inside the signs themselves. Here, The Pedestrian is a standard jumping game. You must navigate between platforms, push around boxes, collect keys and avoid hazards typically found on city signs, such as, er, lasers and circular saws. There’s nothing wrong with this side of the game, although there’s little remarkable about it either. The second layer is outside the signs, and that’s where The Pedestrian works its magic. Your pedestrian can move seamlessly between different signs using the doors and ladders painted…

Scalable Link Interface The very first iteration of SLI actually dates back to 1998 when 3dfx implanted a technology that used two GPUs to render a 3D scene. Here, while the acronym was the same, the technology was called Scan Line Interleave. You linked up two matching 3dfx Voodoo 2 cards with a ribbon cable, and they would split each frame into lines, with each card handling alternate lines. In some games you could even see the split between the lines as the two cards worked on them. This didn’t just get you higher frame rates – it also enabled you to hit higher resolutions. Voodoo2 cards were generally limited to 800 x 600 in games, but you could push your system to 1,024 x 768 with an SLI setup.…

The crowdfunded ZX Spectrum Next project (reviewed in board-only format in Issue 176) has finally reached a successful conclusion, with fully-finished units shipping two years after the original target. Recreating a souped-up Sinclair ZX Spectrum on an FPGA, the Spectrum Next includes impressive compatibility along with upgraded memory, Wi-Fi and even a Raspberry Pi coprocessor, housed in a keyboard casing that proved to be late industrial designer Rick Dickinson’s last project. A review of the top-end ZX Spectrum Next Accelerated will follow in Hobby Tech next issue.…

The Corsair K70 RGB MK.2 SE is a premium mechanical gaming keyboard that’s built to last. It has a silver anodised brushed aluminium frame, as well as stunning white precision-moulded, double-shot keycaps. It’s built to turn heads and withstand a lifetime of gaming. There’s a detachable, soft-touch wrist rest too. Meanwhile, its Cherry MX  Speed mechanical keyswitches provide the reliability and accuracy you demand, with blisteringly fast 1.2mm actuation. There’s also stunning per-key RGB dynamic backlighting, 100 per cent anti-ghosting with full-key rollover, 8MB of on-board memory, plus dedicated media controls.…

You can tell a lot about individuals, groups of people and organisations by how they deal with the unexpected. From irrational panic buying to more measured responses, the whole spectrum of human behaviour has been on display over the past few months. All companies have to deal with issues such as supply shortages, peaks and troughs in demand. This is particularly true of the computer industry, which requires successful companies to successfully navigate around complex supply chains and short product life cycles. As part of my role at Scan involves liaising with our partners to find the best products to use in our systems, it has been particularly interesting to see how different organisations deal with the impacts of COVID19. Several product launches have been pushed back to later in…

The folks at the IEEE and Wi-Fi Alliance aren’t sitting still. After just launching Wi-Fi 6E, which is Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) extended into the ‘6GHz band’ (5.71–7.13GHz actual), engineers are already knee-deep in 802.11be development, which is likely to adopt the Wi-Fi 7 name. Called‘Extremely High Throughput’ (EHT), it features impressive headline speeds of 30Gbps. However, the better features, in my opinion, are some of the improvements elsewhere. Firstly, though, don’t worry if you’ve just upgraded your home router, as this new standard isn’t expected to launch for a few years yet. Working together, these three technologies will make large mesh networks feel seamless Just as Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac) and Wi-Fi 6 borrowed heavily from 4G LTE mobile tech, such as MU-MIMO and OFDMA respectively, Wi-Fi 7 is borrowing from…

Refreshing! Any chance you could run a feature test on monitor refresh rates, to find a sweet spot between resolution and refresh rate? 4K is still (to my knowledge) locked to 60Hz, so I’m looking at changing my monitor for a lower resolution but higher refresh rate, and this feature test would be invaluable to me STEWART AYERS Ben: Most 4K monitors are indeed locked at 60Hz – you can get 144Hz from a monitor such as Asus’ brilliant ROG Swift PG27UQ, but it costs the best part of two grand, and even the cheapest models come in at around £800. We’ll look into doing a test on refresh rates in the future, but in the meantime, check out our monitor Labs on p52, which features 2,560 x 1,440 and…

The Era ITX is the product of Fractal Design collaborating with Intel to create a new mini-ITX case, and it demands a serious premium at £139 inc VAT. This does make it noticeably more affordable than NZXT’s H1 (see p24), but that case also includes an SFX PSU and a 140mm liquid-cooling system as standard. So what’s so special about the Era ITX? For starters, it’s available in some very stylish colours, including options for top panels with wood finishes. Our black sample looks quite plain by comparison. Externally, there are very few vents, and there are also no tempered glass side panels or RGB lighting. This is a very minimalist case, at least from the outside. The roof sports a large vent where you can interchange a mesh panel…

The Netgear Orbi (RBK50) has been our favourite router/Wi-Fi system since it arrived back in 2016. Its range, performance and easy setup made it the ultimate router for larger homes. Now Netgear is back with a new flagship Orbi, the RBK852, which packs the latest Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) technology, with an astronomical price to boot. Open the heavy box and you’re greeted by two large, dense devices. Disappointingly, the silver trim around the outside isn’t aluminium, as you might hope for the price. Instead, all the weight comes from an enormous aluminium heatsink inside each unit, enabling Netgear to omit fans. This two-device system consists of a master router and a slave satellite. It’s a different configuration to many other full-mesh Wi-Fi systems, where all units are treated equally. While…

6AMLIFESTYLE ADJUSTABLE DUAL HEADPHONE HANGER / £14.99 inc VAT SUPPLIER amazon.co.uk There seem to be two approaches to attaching under-desk headphone hangers – double-sided tape and clamps. The 6amLifestyle Dual Headphone Hanger uses the latter. The clamp itself is small but strong, with padded grips, so you won’t mark your furniture if you attach it tightly. The arm screws onto the clamp using a hex key, which is a little fiddly but doable. The clamp is expected to hold up to 5kg, which is plenty for even massive headsets. Still, that surplus strength is appreciated if you knock into it. Using a clamp means you have to place the hanger near the edge of your desk, and there’s a small surface profile, which you don’t get with a taped stand.…

The Cooler Master MS110 arguably offers the best value in this Labs. While other keyboards are cheaper, this device includes a gaming mouse too. The MS110 also features a bold design. The keyboard itself isn’t too wild, physically – its body has neat, flared sides that barely extend past the buttons – but Cooler Master has added loads of lighting. There’s a ring of RGB LEDs around three sides of the unit with an illuminated Cooler Master logo at the front, and the keys themselves float above the membrane material, which is lit in six zones. At first glance, it looks superb, with the matte plastic keycaps hovering above a sea of light, but closer inspection reveals superficial problems. The lighting underneath the buttons is a little inconsistent, and it’s…

The G413 Carbon is one of the priciest peripherals in this group test, but there’s good reason for it. Along with the HyperX Alloy FPS Pro, it’s one of only two keyboards to have long-lasting, more precisely engineered mechanical keyswitches, rather than cheaper rubber membrane switches. What’s more, unlike the HyperX model, you don’t miss out on a numberpad here, instead getting a full-sized keyboard with the usual 105 keys. Such is the advantage of using the company’s own Romer-G keyswitches. It’s a great-looking keyboard too, with a far more mature feel than many of its rivals, thanks to a brushed aluminium plate on its top surface. Underneath, it’s all plastic, but build quality is superb, with the whole thing having a solid feel. That said, the relatively thin aluminium…

The SteelSeries Apex 3 is the most expensive membrane keyboard in the Labs, with its £60 price tag sitting just one pound above that of the Asus TUF Gaming K5 and one pound less than the tenkeyless, mechanical HyperX Alloy FPS Pro. SteelSeries has tried to justify the price by loading the Apex up with features. It has ten-zone RGB LED lighting, which means you get more versatility than on virtually any other keyboard in the Labs. The lighting is bright and bold, and the translucent membrane beneath the floating keys gives the whole unit a nice even glow. The font on the keys is also big and bold, and the lighting here is a little more consistent than on most of the other membrane keyboards in the Labs. The…

Asus’ TUF Gaming VG27AQ packs most of the same core essentials as the other monitors on test – aside from the lower-resolution AOC model. That means the VG27AQ has a 2,560 x 1,440 resolution, a maximum refresh rate of 144Hz (that’s overclockable to 165Hz) and adaptive-sync support with G-Sync compatibility. That’s a tempting list of features by any measure, and the VG27AQ has an ace up its sleeve, though elsewhere it's a little more mundane. You do get a fully adjustable stand, with height, rotation, pivot and tilt movements (plus of course, 100 x 100mm VESA mount support), but otherwise the design is smart but decidedly drabber than all the others on test, bar the AOC. The plastic has a slightly cheaper-looking finish to it, the stand is just plain…

Like the Gigabyte Aorus FI27Q, the ViewSonic XG270QG sets itself apart with a host of extra features. You get RGB lighting, a USB hub, a headphone stand, mouse cable bungies and even sight shields for the sides. It’s also one of the smarter-looking displays on test, with a very stark, plain black look accented by subtle RGB lighting zones. There’s a fetching hexagonal ring of light on the back, and the outer two quarters of the underside emit a glow too. Both lights combine to provide a gentle background glow  that can genuinely help to reduce eyestrain if you’re in an otherwise dark room. All this elegance is rather nullified if you attach the side sight shields though. They supposedly help you concentrate by blocking out distractions, while preventing others…

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…

Let’s get straight to it. The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners is one of the best VR games currently available. This might come as a surprise, given that it belongs to one of the most exhausted sub-genres in gaming – zombie survival. However, Skydance Interactive uses VR to breathe new life into this weary premise, producing a thrilling VR survival experience. Saints and Sinners puts you in the role of a survivor seeking sanctuary in zombie-infested New Orleans. Making your way through the flooded city, you establish contact with another survivor hiding in the Reserve, a nuclear bunker filled to bursting with food, medicine and weapons – everything you need to wait out the apocalypse. Unfortunately, the Reserve is slowly flooding, while the only key to get into it is…

NEWS ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT? Fireproof games’ The Room series has brought the studio enormous success, first on mobile and then on PC. Now Fireproof is bringing its escape room-style puzzling to VR, with The Room: A Dark Matter. Set in 1908, A Dark Matter puts you on the trail of a missing Egyptologist who disappeared at the British Institute of Archaeology. It’s a typical Room scenario, set in a single location filled with clever puzzles and lots of objects with which you can tinker. You’ll be gazing into crystal balls, following footprints and fiddling with strange mechanisms, all with VR-enabled touch controls. First-person puzzling can be tricky to pull off in VR. Being stuck on a puzzle is frustrating in a normal game, and being stuck with a box strapped…

YOU CAN APPLY YOUR OVERCLOCKS IN A MORE PERMANENT FASHION IN THE EFI ONCE YOU KNOW THEY’RE STABLE Download MSI Afterburner from guru3d.com and GPU-Z from techpowerup.com. Fire up both programs and, in MSI Afterburner, set the temperature limit to maximum, the core clock to +170MHz and memory clock to +600MHz. We found these frequencies to be perfectly stable, and resulted in a peak GPU boost frequency of 1820MHz compared to 1650MHz at stock speed, while the effective memory frequency rose from 7000MHz to 7600MHz. We also found that 4.2GHz was an easy target for our Ryzen 5 3600 with the ARCTIC liquid cooler, although you may fare better, as it’s a silicon lottery out there. We first tried out our settings in Ryzen Master, and then applied them in…

With dwindling game support and expensive hardware requirements, is it still worth setting up an SLI system? To find out, we enlisted Scan (scan.co.uk), which kindly loaned us a top-end SLI rig for testing. Carefully built inside a smart and subtle NZXT H710 case, the Scan test rig features a Ryzen 9 3950X CPU cooled by a Corsair all-in-one liquid cooler with a 360mm radiator in the front. It also comes with a 2TB PCI-E 4 SSD and a pair of EVGA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti graphics cards with a light-up EVGA NVLink connector. In addition, Scan sent us a pair of EVGA GeForce RTX 2080 Super cards, so we could test two SLI configurations. It all plugs into an Asus ROG Strix X570 motherboard, which has an SLI-friendly design,…

It’s September 2003, and AMD is about to swing a 64-bit wrecking ball straight into Intel’s desktop CPU stronghold. The company’s Athlon XP chips have already been giving Intel’s Pentium 4 CPUs a run for their money, but AMD’s new K8 chips are about to change everything. Not only will they bring 64-bit instructions to the mainstream desktop for the first time, but they’ll also bring an integrated memory controller with them. The first consumer 64-bit processor, the AMD Athlon 64 3200+, was unleashed on the world on 23 September, 2003, with two 130nm product lines launching at once. The mainstream Athlon 64 design, codenamed Clawhammer had an integrated single-channel memory controller and used the Socket 754 motherboard socket, with the very first 3200+ model being clocked at 2GHz. Then,…

Our time is now. All of the hours we’ve spent indoors, in isolation, online and entertaining ourselves, have turned out to be ideal practice for a pandemic quarantine. Of course, by the time this column goes to print things may have changed completely, but at the time of writing, the year ahead in gaming looks like one of physical solitude. So, gaming as usual for us, but goodbye to showcase events. Most people who have been to a games event, or a convention of any sort, will be familiar with ‘con crud’, the cold or mild flu everyone seems to get from being in close proximity to others indoors. The spread of viruses is exacerbated by everyone touching the same stuff – from controllers to VR headsets to door handles…

Let’s be honest, AMD’s 64-core Threadripper 3990X is so far outside the envelope for most of us that it’s a desktop CPU in name only. The high motherboard cost, eye-watering CPU price and sheer number of cores mean this monster CPU is not only out of reach for most of people, but completely unneeded too. We already began to see the limits of standard Windows-based desktop PCs with AMD’s Threadripper 3970X, with diminishing returns in many benchmarks that simply can’t scale to use so many cores. Throwing a 64-core beast at them isn’t likely to improve the situation, so while the Threadripper 3990X is undoubtedly a monster CPU, it’s still a niche product that needs the right conditions to show its true potential. Its specs certainly pack a punch, though, with…

The K55 RGB is one of the cheapest keyboards in this test, which makes its feature set all the more impressive. Despite its price of just £40, this is the only keyboard here with dedicated macro keys, and it also has buttons for macro recording – to change the lighting brightness and disable the Windows keys – alongside separate media buttons. The six macro keys are installed in a column on the left-hand side, with the other buttons in the top-right corner. The macro keys and media buttons bolster the Corsair’s main buttons, which are excellent. They’re membrane units that offer more weight and a more reliable typing action than most of the other keyboards in this group, and they pair their solid action with a noticeable tactile bump and…

The Vigor GK30 only costs £40, which makes it one of the cheapest units in the group test, along with the excellent Corsair K55 RGB. The MSI punches above its weight when it comes to its RGB LED lighting, though. It has six lighting zones, which is twice as many as the Corsair, and the use of a translucent membrane layer lends the whole unit a smart, attractive glow. There are none of the issues surrounding inconsistent or weak lighting here – unlike on the £45 Razer device – and MSI’s Dragon Center app has a reasonable range of effects available. Crucially, though, only seven colours are available, so you can’t pick any RGB LED shade. The biggest lighting issue is the band of RGB LEDs installed on the right-hand…

How we test We’ve long considered 27in IPS 144Hz+ monitors to be the ideal all-round spec for gaming, thanks to their balance of size, resolution, image quality and gaming performance, and some of these latest models have another ace up their sleeve. Previous 144Hz+ IPS screens have been limited to a response time of around 4ms, whereas these new panels can all achieve a 1ms response time, putting them in line with TN LCDs for responsiveness. At least in theory. They all also include G-Sync-compatible adaptive sync, so they can provide tear and stutter-free gaming on both AMD and Nvidia cards. Less welcome is the fact that all these displays also include extended colour gamuts in a nod towards HDR. However, none of them really produces proper HDR, so the…

The Gigabyte Aorus FI27Q packs in a huge number of features for its price, hitting the same £450 price as several other displays on test this month, yet including markedly more extras. For a start, you get RGB lighting (we know you’d been missing it so far!), with a couple of multi-coloured backlit wings on the back of the display, and an illuminated Aorus logo on the rear of the stand. The stand itself is also a hefty premium metal contraption that gives this display a far firmer footing than the likes of the Asus VG27AQ. The full complement of adjustment movements are reassuringly smooth, yet firm, although the tilt mechanism is slightly too stiff for making quick and easy adjustments. Around the back of the display you’ll find the…

Since the days of Syndicate and Fallout, games have loved to have a dig at capitalism. Our corporate society is one of the five possible triggers for a virtual apocalypse, along with zombies, aliens, Nazis and viruses. Communism might occasionally threaten to destroy the world, but it never succeeds. Lately, capitalism has been in for a right kicking. The past few months have seen the release of The Outer Worlds and Journey to the Savage Planet. Both are first-person sci-fi games about exploring distant planets, and both have got it in for large, oppressive corporations. It’s all definitely the fault of capitalism, but nobody is able to say why In The Outer Worlds, one planet is run by a company called Spacer’s Choice, and its policies includes forcing employees to…

Kentucky Route Zero is a point and click adventure game inspired by American literary fiction. It began life in 2013, when developer Cardboard Computer launched the first of five planned episodes. Seven years on, it’s finally complete. The story initially centres around a delivery driver named Conroy, who pulls up his rusty old truck at a gas station named Equus Oils to ask for directions to 5 Dogwood Drive. He discovers that getting to Dogwood Drive requires him to travel along the Zero, a mysterious highway that runs through a cave system beneath Kentucky’s Interstate 65. So begins a surrealist adventure through the forgotten corners of American society. The game is heavily inspired by famous American prose stylists, such as John Steinbeck or William Faulkner, and the game’s own writing…

1 REMOVE CPU COOLER MOUNT The cooler we’ve chosen needs to be screwed directly to the backplate behind your motherboard, which means you need to detach the standard mounting clips on the top side. This is an easy job, as they’re simply held in place using four large screws. 2 INSTALL CPU Lift the handle next to the CPU socket. AMD Ryzen CPUs have a small gold triangle in one corner that matches up to a triangle symbol in the CPU socket, allowing you align them. Failing that, the CPU model text on the heatspreader sits next to the socket hinge into which the socket lever sits, and you can align it that way too. When your CPU is the right way around, gently push it into place,…

Ever since Nvidia reintroduced the SLI brand in 2004, adding two or more graphics cards to a system has been seen as the ultimate way to get the best graphics performance possible. However, particularly in the last handful of years, there has been less and less emphasis on the technology, and fewer and fewer systems implementing it. In fact, with its latest Navi-based graphics cards, AMD dropped support for its rival CrossFire technology, killing stone-dead any chance of tying multiple AMD GPUs together with full support from AMD. Technically, you can still get two AMD GPUs to work together in some games using the API’s own multi-GPU system, but you won’t get any official driver support from AMD. So, is multi-GPU gaming still a going concern, and if it is,…

PREVIEW Mooltipass BLE Security in the early days of computing was physical: a locked control panel on a machine housed in a guarded building at the centre of a military base. The birth of multi-user computing, then the Internet, saw that change. Now, electronic security is the watchword, and it’s ever-difficult to guarantee, owing to the sheer volume of sites and services with which modern computer users are obliged to register. There are innumerable software packages that take aim at the central problem. Password managers, from open-source tools such as KeePassX, to subscription services such as LastPass, generate highly-complex passwords unique to each site and service and remember them for you in encrypted databases. There are attempts at doing away with passwords using hardware too, with Microsoft’s Windows Hello offering…

Why I still love mini-ITX Like many people working from home in the UK, I’ve had to contend with a fairly limited amount of space until recently, resulting in me reducing the size of my PC. However, this hasn’t resulted in slower frame rates or lack of power in other departments. Thanks to the small form factor scene really taking off over the last decade, the choice of PC cases, motherboards and other compact hardware has grown, and I honestly haven’t missed the giant PCs I used to own at all. Mini-ITX has meant that, despite owning a PC with a smaller footprint than a shoebox, it’s been easy to find ways of using high-end desktop processors and graphics cards, along with the latest storage technology. My current PC is more…

Water-cooling hardware manufacturer Alphacool is offering a choice of £150 worth of gear to every featured Readers’ Drives winner. For your prize, you can select from DIY water-cooling kits, the Eiswolf and Eisbaer all-in-one CPU and GPU liquid coolers, as well as a vast range of individual components, including waterblocks (pictured), fittings, reservoirs, pumps, and radiators. Alphacool also makes coolant, tubing, and fans, as well as modding and water cooling-related tools.…