Table of contents for January 2019 in Custom PC UK

Back in the early days of Custom PC, when the Athlon 64 was cutting-edge, people still used IDE cables and my appearance wasn’t regularly being compared with the Wampa from The Empire Strikes Back, I ran a feature called ‘rip off Britain’ in Issue 17. The idea was to compare the prices of equivalent components in the UK and the USA, and find out why there was such a discrepancy. There were all sorts of reasons, from the higher cost of warehousing and business rates in the UK, to staffing costs and fluctuating exchange rates. The marketing director of Dabs claimed that many manufacturers saw the UK as ‘treasure island’ However, there was also a greed factor.The marketing director of Dabs.com (now www.shop.bt.com) at the time, Jonathan Wall, claimed that…

What’s new? It was only a matter of time until Intel returned to the mainstream CPU market to respond to AMD’s Ryzen 7 2700X ; thanks to better boosting algorithms and higher frequencies, as well as a 12nm manufacturing process, this closed the gap on Intel in areas where the first Ryzen fell short. However, Intel hasn’t made too many changes in terms of lithography or architecture, which means that not only do the new CPUs still use the LGA1151 socket, but also that the new 9th-generation CPUs are backwards compatible with Z370 boards, as well as other chipsets, such as H370 and B360. It’s the same situation the other way around too – if a Z390 motherboard takes your fancy, and you’ve found a bargain 8th-generation Intel CPU, such…

SUPPLIER www.overclockers.co.uk The fight between Intel’s Core i7-8700K and AMD’s Ryzen 7 2700X was pretty full-on, thanks to both CPUs having certain strengths and weaknesses but retailing for similar amounts of cash. However, the Core i9-9900K is in a league of its own in terms of both specifications and price. With a £600 inc VAT pre-order price tag and few signs of the price falling post-launch, we’re looking at a CPU that’s twice the price of AMD’s Ryzen 7 2700X. Its 4.7GHz all-core turbo frequency is the highest of any Intel CPU The specifications are mouthwatering, though, as the Core i9-9900K’s 5GHz maximum turbo boost frequency can be achieved across not one, but two cores, giving it a significant advantage over the Core i7-8700K. Perhaps more significantly, its all-core…

SUPPLIER www.scan.co.uk The fact that the cheapest GPU in Nvidia’s RTX lineup costs at least £460 inc VAT (or £550 inc VAT for the Founders Edition or the overclocked EVGA card here) says a lot about the sorry state of the GPU industry at the moment. Nvidia has poured a load of money into R&D for its Turing architecture and needs to recoup the costs, while the lack of competition from AMD means there’s no incentive for the company to cut prices. If you want a fast graphics card, Nvidia is really the only choice at the moment, and that means stumping up serious cash. The best you can say about the RTX 2070’s price is that at least it isn’t as silly as the RTX 2080 Ti prices.…

SUPPLIER www.hp.com / MODEL NUMBER dc0029na The Omen by HP 15 has an awkward name, but it’s one of few gaming laptops at this price to support 144Hz Nvidia G-Sync. It means that the HP’s 1080p IPS panel will synchronise its refresh rate with the GPU’s output at a peak frame rate of 144fps, eliminating tearing artefacts. That’s great on paper, but the HP’s GeForce GTX 1060 6GB GPU will have trouble playing demanding games at top settings with very high frame rates, although it has at least overclocked the core from 1404MHz to 1455MHz. The Pascal GPU is paired with a powerful CPU too – an Intel Core i7-8750H. It has the Coffee Lake architecture and six Hyper-Threaded cores. Its stock speed of 2.2GHz is solid, and it…

How we test Following on the heels of Intel’s 9th-gen CPU launch (see p20) is the company’s new supporting Z390 chipset, which has ushered in a range of new motherboards. Asus is supporting it with ROG boards, ASRock has its Taichi and Extreme4 models, Gigabyte has the latest Aorus designs and finally MSI has its new MEG series. All these motherboards sport premium features such as automatic overclocking, M.2 heatsinks, RGB lighting and EFI systems that give you complete control over your PC. As well as looking into these features, we test each motherboard’s prowess in raw performance. Our test kit includes 16GB of 3000MHz Corsair Vengeance RAM, a 512GB Samsung 960 Pro SSD with Windows 10 installed, plus an NZXT Kraken X42 all-in-one liquid cooler. We also use a…

SUPPLIER www.ebuyer.com Asus’ Maximus brand continues with the introduction of the Z390 chipset, and Asus has made more than a few tweaks this time too – the Maximus XI Hero is most definitely a leap forward from its predecessor. Gone are the gunmetal grey heatsinks, and in their place are thick, black chunks of metal with a heatpipe sandwiched between them. Asus has also added M.2 heatsinks to both M.2 slots this time, although only one slot supports SATA M.2 SSDs, with both offering homes to 4x PCI-E 3 SSDs. The snazzy design lights up, courtesy of some RGB illumination, but Asus has gone for an etched effect with the lights glowing through a line pattern that spreads across the I/O shroud and chipset heatsink. Combined with the black…

How we test There are three main areas, other than lighting, where gaming mice have improved recently. The first is wireless technology, which is finally reaching truly wired-rivalling levels of responsiveness, especially Logitech’s Lightspeed technology. However, there’s still a level of risk involved with dropped connections, and it also adds to the price. As such, we’re focusing our efforts on traditional wired mice for this test. Next up is sensor technology. Not long ago, laser was still the sensor tech of choice, but it’s now well established that optical sensors – in combination with a good mousemat – provide more accurate, stable and reliable tracking performance. What’s more, the latest optical sensors are better than ever, being able to track at ridiculous resolutions and speeds. The final area of change…

In a recent interview with the website Vulture, Rockstar Studios’ co-founder Dan Houser stated that the developers of Red Dead Redemption 2 had been working ‘100-hour weeks’ to get the game finished. The comment, intended by Houser to show the studio’s dedication to creating a great game, instead caused a furore about the ridiculous expectations studios place on their developers. There are countless stories of developers working 16-hour days for weeks on end The game industry has a notorious reputation for working its employees into the ground. As the industry has grown, games have become ever larger, more ambitious and increasingly difficult projects to manage. Consequently,  towards the end of a project, many studios either require or expect their employees to work dozens of hours of overtime per month to…

One of the signs of an aging computer is the ugly yellow colour that many formerly white boxes turn over time. That’s because old ABS plastics contain the brown fire-retardant chemical bromine, but when it’s exposed to ultraviolet light, the bonds are broken and the molecules go in search of oxygen. In 2008, the CBM Museum in Wuppertal, Germany, discovered that dipping case parts in hydrogen peroxide for a few days reversed the process. This process was refined over the subsequent months with the addition of an oxy launder booster and a UV lamp. The substance became known as Retr0bright, and the effects are almost miraculous. Steve Over, of RetroByte Computers, uses a similar chemical process to reverse the yellowing on mainly Amstrad 464 Plus and Amstrad 6128 Plus computers.…

The end of messy thermal paste? Thermal paste can be a pain. It’s messy and I’ve lost count of the number of times stray spots have found their way onto my hands, clothing, peripherals and door handles before I realise I’ve been TIM-tagged. You might be lucky and be able to use a cleaning solution to remove it from desks and keyboard keys, but clothes are another matter. Having dealt with countless CPU cooler tests over the years, I’m well versed in the irritating side of thermal paste. Thermal paste can be tricky to use correctly too. Some pastes spread well, with a cross-shape application being all that’s required, but others can be too thick, requiring a degree of manual spreading. Some also seem to go off the boil and,…

If there was ever a perfect case study in the need for competition, AMD’s recent resurgence is it. After 11 years of quad-core products (Kentsfield 2006 to Kaby Lake 2017), Intel has suddenly pushed its desktop platform from four to eight cores within 18 months. It’s not all good though. Competition from AMD may have spurred Intel to improve its products, but it hasn’t prevented the company from charging a silly price for its top-end Core i9-9900K . If you’re considering upgrading to an 8-core CPU, your key decision will be down to being pragmatic about what you do with your PC. Do you do regular thread-heavy work such as rendering, encoding or simulations, or is it a mix of office, gaming and web work that benefits from single-threaded performance?…

Plastic not fantastic As we hurtle towards Armageddon in my son’s lifetime, can you stop shrink-wrapping magazines in single-use plastic. Okay, I know it’s not that simple, but I’m seriously trying to cut down use of single-use plastic and just about everything uses it. It’s impossible! And I love Custom PC, so if I’m still around in 30 years I’ll be clutching my shrink-wrapped Custom PC as we choke in plastic and frazzle in runaway blistering heat. Always good to have something to look forward to! DAVID COLE Ben: I hate the fact that our subs copies are all wrapped in single-use plastic too, but it’s sadly not an issue on which the editorial team has a say. I’ve brought it up with the appropriate folks at Dennis, and been…

SUPPLIER www.overclockers.co.uk As the only 9th-generation Intel CPU with a direct successor in terms of cores and threads, the Core i5-9600K’s spec looks familiar. It has the same six cores and six threads as the Core i5-8600K, thanks to its lack of Hyper-Threading, but it does have slightly higher frequencies. It has a 100MHz base frequency advantage, at 3.7GHz compared to 3.6GHz, and a 300MHz higher maximum turbo boost at 4.6GHz compared to 4.3GHz. Likewise, under load across all six cores, the Core i5-8600K has an all-core boost of 4.1GHz and this figure is also trumped by the Core i5-9600K’s all-core boost to 4.3GHz. It has the same six cores and six threads as the Core i5-8600K However, all these frequencies pale in comparison to the Core i9-9900K and…

One advantage of Intel’s mainstream chips over its HEDT CPUs is that they have a more modern CPU architecture. The latter are still based on Intel’s older Skylake architecture, while the former is essentially a refresh of the newer Coffee Lake. With fewer cores, Intel’s mainstream CPUs can also reach higher frequencies when overclocking, so it’s definitely worth having a go if you have a Z370 or Z390 chipset. As we explained on p20, Intel’s 9th-gen CPUs also revert to using solder as the thermal interface material between the CPU core, which will hopefully result in much cooler temperatures when overclocking. However, with the Core i9-9700K and Core i9-9900K, we’re still dealing with 8-core CPUs, so you’ll need a minimum of a 140mm all-in-one liquid cooler if you want to…

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. 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 test, rather than…

SUPPLIER www.overclockers.co.uk The ASRock Z390 Extreme4’s predecessors have picked up awards on numerous occasions, offering decent motherboards for surprisingly low prices. We’ll be looking at cheaper motherboards from other manufacturers soon as well, but the Extreme4 was the first sub-£200 Z390 motherboard to arrive at our lab. At face value it appears very similar to ASRock’s Z390 Taichi board (see p48). Both boards have a trio of M.2 ports, along with a heatsink in the lowest slot. Despite the low price tag, the Z390 Extreme4 also matches the Taichi’s number of SATA ports, with an impressive total of eight ports, two of which come from an ASMedia controller. The Extreme4 also has a USB 3.1 Type-C header and rear port, twin USB 3 headers and apparently identical 12-phase power…

SUPPLIER www.cclonline.com Gigabyte’s Z390 Aorus Master looks like it’s worth close to £300 more than any other board on test this month – it’s an imposing beast in the flesh. It’s the only example this month to have every M.2 port covered by heatsinks, and they’re easier to fit than everyone else’s too, although MSI’s heatsink is able to cool both upper and lower surfaces of the SSD. Like several other boards on test, Gigabyte has opted for 12-phase power delivery, with the VRMs covered with hefty, heatpipeequipped heatsinks that use fins, rather than chunks of metal, to increase the surface area. Gigabyte has recently been at the forefront of RGB lighting, with many of its boards giving Christmas trees a run for their money. However, the Z390 Aorus…

DEVELOPER EidosMontreal/CrystalDynamics/ PUBLISHER SquareEnix/ WEBSITE https://tombraider.square-enix-games.com Shadow of the Tomb Raider is the third and final entry in Crystal Dynamics’ rebooted series. Supposedly, it’s the game in which we finally see Lara transform into the ‘Tomb Raider’. It’s an idea that would make more sense if it was like Bruce Banner turning into the Hulk, rather than a sociopathic British lady who steals valuable objects from other cultures. Indeed, what Shadow of the Tomb Raider mainly achieves is showing that Tomb Raider was a misguided concept in the first place. After three dark and humourless games dedicated to making Lara Croft suffer, we end up with a version of Lara who somehow manages to be less interesting than the original well-endowed assemblage of polygons holding a pair of guns. Shadow…

For many computing veterans, the computers of yesteryear are an important part of the past. We coded on them, played on them, worked on them and loved them to bits (and bytes). However, once they were obsolete, they usually ended up abandoned and discarded in lofts, basements, garages and cupboards, or very often the local tip. Today, prices for old computers can be high. You’d be hard-pressed to find an Amstrad 464 Plus computer for under £150, while a Commodore 64GS console can fetch as much as £650. With working examples of such computers being rare finds, and commanding high prices, there’s an inherent danger of us losing knowledge about them. ‘There is a worry that some computers and consoles are becoming so rare and expensive that they need to…

Turn on an old Amstrad CPC or PCW, or an MSX2 computer, and you’re unlikely to be blown away by the primitive text-based interface that appears on the screen. Switch to the alternative multitasking operating system SymbOS, however, and you’ll give the machines a new lease of life. Initially created for Zilog Z80-based computers by Rob Buckley in 2004, SymbOS has succeeded in bringing a graphical user interface to these 8-bit computers. For Buckley, it’s about keeping old computers relevant. ‘Why was SymbOS not around in 1986?’ he asks. ‘Clearly not because it wasn’t possible. But coding design and ideas have grown over the past 30 years, and new life can be breathed into new hardware, not by hardware improvement but by increments in the coding design process.’…

Isn’t it amazing what a bit of healthy competition can do for the market? Until just over a year ago, Intel was still complacently plodding along, offering its umpteenth generation of quad-core processor, having first started shipping CPUs with four cores way back in 2006. The situation couldn’t be more different now; in the course of just 12 months, Intel has added to the core-count of its mainstream desktop CPUs not once, but twice. A move it didn’t make even once in the years between 2006 and 2017. The first increase in October 2017 came with the introduction of Coffee Lake CPUs, which had a 50 per cent increase in the core count over the previous-generation Kaby Lake processors. And this month Intel has done it again, this time with…

I’m finally going to do it. I’m going to be the person who answers the controversial and fight-inducing question,‘Are video games art?’ But first, let’s see how we even got to the place where it’s debatable in the first place. The Victoria and Albert museum has launched a video games exhibition called Design/Play/Disrupt, to ‘provide a unique insight into the design process behind a selection of groundbreaking contemporary videogames. Design work, including concept art and prototypes, feature alongside large-scale immersive installations and interactives’. It’s on for six months and tickets cost an eye-watering £18 each.The Guardian called the exhibition ‘superb’, while Londonist trashed it, describing it as being ‘as messy as a Mortal Kombat fatality’. I haven’t been, because I can get much the same effect from wandering around my…

SUPPLIER www.overclockers.co.uk When we first saw rumours of an 8-core, Coffee Lake-based K-series Core i7 CPU without Hyper-Threading, we viewed them with a degree of scepticism. The company’s desktop Core i7 CPUs, especially the models in the K-series, have featured Hyper-Threading all the way back to the first K-series processors. With all of its eight cores loaded, the Core i7-9700K can reach 4.6GHz It still seems an odd choice of branding, but there’s logical reasoning behind the Core i7-9700K only spawning eight threads from its eight cores, which is that the Core i9 is the new Core i7. Intel’s usual mix of K-series CPUs with identical core counts now straddles these two naming schemes, instead of the Core i5 and Core i7 brands. It also means Intel now has…

We’ve now established that Intel’s new Core i9-9900K is the fastest mainstream CPU available, and that performance is evident in a range of games, content creation applications and other multi-threaded software too. Memory is still pretty expensive compared with a year or two ago, though, and your typical 16GB 3000MHz dual-channel DDR4 kit won’t leave you with much change from £150. It’s important, then, to see whether Intel’s new CPUs are happy playing with 2666MHz memory or whether you’ll see big gains from spending more money on faster kits. For example, Corsair’s gorgeous Vengeance RGB Pro memory costs £215 inc VAT for a 16GB dual-channel kit of 3466MHz DIMMs, but you only need to spend £153 to get the 2666MHz version. That difference in price could enable you to buy…

SUPPLIER https://store.google.com Bigger sibling to the Google Home (see Issue 179, p57) and Home Mini, the Google Home Max has taken almost a year to reach UK shops, so has it been worth the wait? It’s certainly bigger, louder and much more expensive than its smaller siblings. Google hopes the Max will hit the spot for customers who want a smart speaker, but don’t want to compromise on sound quality. The company’s ambitions arguably go further too: it wants the Max to be the smart speaker people use as their main home hi-fi speaker. It’s not designed as a portable speaker – there’s no battery inside and it’s not waterproof – but it’s flexible in terms of how you connect to it, with voice control, Wi-Fi support, Bluetooth and…

SUPPLIER www.morecomputers.com As one of the cheaper boards on test, ASRock’s Z390 Taichi will likely be favoured by many wallets. It still costs £230 inc VAT, but you’ll be saving £50 or more compared with other boards on test this month. ASRock has managed to include plenty of features too, and even trumps some of the pricier boards in one or two areas. For starters, you get an additional two SATA 6Gbps ports compared with Asus, Gigabyte and MSI’s boards on test, courtesy of an ASMedia controller, bringing the total to eight ports, with the rest controlled by the Intel Z390 chipset. You also get three M.2 ports, which is more than the Asus Maximus XI Hero, and all three of them support full 4x PCI-E 3 bandwidth, with…

SUPPLIER www.scan.co.uk MSI has finally joined Asus and Gigabyte in offering integrated I/O shields, so there’s no more fiddling around with those hideous finger-slicing plates at the back of your PC case, at least if you use the pricier boards in its range. The rear panel offers clear-CMOS and USB BIOS Flashback buttons too, which are complemented by power and reset buttons, plus an LED POST code display. MSI was also one of the first companies to include M.2 heatsinks, and this case it’s gone a step further – answering early criticisms of only cooling one side of the SSD – potentially an issue with some SSDs that have components on both sides. The MEG Z390 Ace’s heatsinks cool both sides, thanks to a static heatsink beneath and a…

DEVELOPERS Ubisoft (Quebec, Montreal, Bucharest, Singapore, Montpellier, Kiev and Shanghai) / PUBLISHER Ubisoft WEBSITE https://assassinscreed.ubisoft.com Despite its name, the Assassin’s Creed series has never been particularly great at simulating clandestine murder, but it does offer fantastic historical adventures. From Assassin’s Creed II’s Renaissance conspiracy to Black Flag’s piratical plundering, the series has always been strongest when prioritising the setting over its daft sci-fi plot and questionable system design. As a fine example, Odyssey abandons the original premise almost entirely, yet turns out to be the best game in the series. Taking place 400 years before the Assassin order is formed, Odyssey is almost a pure role-playing game. This superbly crafted adventure sees you travel across Ancient Greece, assuming the roles of naval captain, wandering mercenary, tomb raider and even mythological…

DEVELOPER Twice Circled / PUBLISHER Twice Circled / WEBSITE www.twicecircled.com/2c/megaquarium Megaquarium might not have the slapstick appeal of Two Point Hospital, but it still has charm. It challenges you to build a series of increasingly elaborate aquariums. What makes Megaquarium interesting is its requirement to balance the experience of your guests with the needs of your fishy attractions. Maintaining a simple tropical fish tank requires a network of supporting machinery, such as a heater to maintain the water temperature and a filter to keep the water clean. What’s more, each species of fish you house has differing needs and quirks. At a basic level, some fish require different foods, and take up different levels of space in a tank. As the game becomes more involved, however, you’ll acquire fish that…

One of the major driving forces for preserving old machines is gaming, with the appetite for classic titles from the 1980s and 1990s currently proving stronger than a ravenous Pac-Man. To that end, there have been numerous efforts to revive iconic consoles by making them smaller and bundling them with a host of built-in games. These mini consoles effectively keep the machines alive by making them more convenient for a modern-day audience. So far, we’ve seen the release of Nintendo’s Classic Mini and SNES Classic Mini. There has also been a tinier version of the Commodore 64 ‘breadbin’; despite not having usable keys, this can be programmed by plugging in a USB keyboard. Sega is also looking to get in on the act with a shrunken Mega Drive to celebrate…

REVIEW Clockwork GameShell The Clockwork GameShell is an ambitious project: an effort to create an open-source handheld games console capable of playing both original and emulated retro games. What’s more, it comes in a modular form factor that opens it up, in theory at least, to expansion and modification. Externally, there are no prizes for guessing where Clockwork got its inspiration; the GameShell looks for all the world like a hacked-about Nintendo Game Boy, right down to the slot in the rear casing for a cartridge. In this slot, though, it provides access to the power switch, headphone socket and USB port of the mainboard module. It’s internally that it becomes interesting. The GameShell is made up of multiple parts that get sandwiched together between the front and rear plastic…

Some tools are jacks of all trades – the Dremel, for example, can handle most modding tasks well and even deal with tough materials such as steel. However, as you push these tools’ limits, such as using them to cut long lengths of materials accurately, you’ll achieve generally poorer finishes and the jobs will take longer too. That’s when you need to invest in tools designed for specific jobs, and the table saw is a classic example. Table saws can look a lot like workbenches, but they have a circular cutting blade protruding above the middle of the table surface. They can’t cut curves, they’re not mobile and they lack the Dremel’s range of accessories. However, they can cut long lengths of sheet materials so well that you rarely need…

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…