Table of contents for June 2019 in Custom PC UK

Crytek has recently thrown a very shiny, reflective spanner into the works, by showing off a CryEngine 5.5 ray-tracing demo. A video of the Neon Noir demo shows us a futuristic cityscape, full of reflective glass and a very shiny flying craft. Then, after the demo has finished dazzling you, it gives you the twist – it was all done on an AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 GPU. Crytek goes on to claim that the ray-tracing feature in its engine is ‘agnostic’ towards GPUs and APIs, and that it can run on most mainstream graphics cards. As you’d expect, the fanboy conspiracy theorists have been out in force in the comments sections, claiming that Nvidia has been scamming us, and you don’t need GeForce RTX hardware for ray tracing at…

Google announces cloud gaming plan Undeterred by the failure of OnLive to capitalise on the idea of cloud gaming, Google has announced a new cloud gaming system called Stadia. According to Google, the system can handle 60fps gaming at 4K with HDR and surround sound, as long as you have the bandwidth for it. ‘The future of gaming is not a box,’ says the company, claiming that users will be able to go from watching a YouTube video to playing a game in seconds, without having to wait for updates or downloads. There’s little detail on the system yet, but Google has revealed the spec of the gaming system you’ll get on the server side.  The CPU is described as a 2.7GHz ‘hyperthreaded’ chip with ‘AVX2 SIMD’, while  the GPU is…

SUPPLIER www.overclockers.co.uk When we reviewed Asus’ previous flagship Threadripper X399 motherboard, it dealt with the mighty Threadripper 1950X well.  However, Asus has admitted that the original Zenith fell  short in terms of cooling and power delivery when handling AMD’s 32-core WX-series CPUs. It seeks to rectify those problems with a rather late addition to the X399 line-up, the ROG Zenith Extreme Alpha. A fan expansion card adds another six fan headers to make a total of 12 It looks to compete with the likes of MSI’s MEG X399 Creation, which has 19 power phases and huge heatsinks, to deal with AMD’s 2nd-generation Threadripper CPUs. Accordingly, the ROG Zenith Extreme Alpha has 16 power phases in eight paired teams – with each stage you get a pair of phases ready to deal…

SUPPLIER www.scan.co.uk Scan’s 3XS LG15 Vengeance Max-Q RTX aims to give you all the gaming essentials in a small package for well under £2,000 inc VAT, including a 144Hz screen, a mechanical keyboard and a Max-Q RTX 2070 GPU. While the latter retains the 2,304 stream processors and 8GB of GDDR6 memory of the standard RTX 2070, its clock speeds have been cut to improve efficiency. Additionally, Scan has chosen the slower but more efficient of the two Max-Q cards. It has an 80W TDP, with an 885MHz base clock and 1185MHz boost clock. The beefier 90W Max-Q model has a 1,080MHz base clock and 1,215MHz boost clock. Enabling High DXR  and DLSS resulted in a solid minimum of 54fps Scan has paired the GPU with a Core i7-8750H CPU…

SUPPLIER www.cclonline.com The AMD Ryzen 7 1700 was one of our favourite 1st-generation Ryzen CPUs. It was so much cheaper than the flagship Ryzen 7 1800X, yet it could overclock to similar levels, making it an 8-core bargain at the time particularly when Intel’s mainstream competition couldn’t compete with its core count. The price difference isn’t quite so great between the cheapest and most expensive 2nd-generation Ryzen Zen+ CPUs, but the argument about whether to opt for the Ryzen 7 2700 over its near-identical X-series sibling is an interesting one. Like many other CPUs this month, the Ryzen 7 2700 has had a small reduction in price, dropping to £245 inc VAT from its £270 launch price. However, the fact that the Ryzen 7 2700X has only ever retailed for around…

SUPPLIER www.cclonline.com The Core i7-9700K was a bit of a damp squib when it arrived last year, with its price of nearly £450 making the Ryzen 7 2700X and Core i9-9900K superior choices for a variety of reasons. However, the CPU now costs just £379 inc VAT, having received a huge price drop since we last looked at it. As a result, it’s barely £80 more expensive than the AMD CPU and still £120 cheaper than Intel’s LGA1151 flagship, the Core i9-9900K. Once again, we’re dealing with a 14nm CPU here that’s based on Intel’s recent Coffee Lake refresh architecture and, like the Core i9-9900K, the Core i7-9700K also has a rated thermal design power (TDP) of 95W. In terms of clock speed, you don’t lose out too much compared…

DEVELOPER Respawn Entertainment/ PUBLISHER EA/ WEBSITE www.ea.com/games/apex-legends Another day, another doomed battle royale game trying to take on the almighty Fortnite. Normally we wouldn’t give a game that makes such cynical moves the time of day, but this one happens to be developed by Respawn Entertainment, creator of the splendid Titanfall and the even better Titanfall 2. In fact, Apex Legends is brilliant; a stellar turn on the battle royale formula that also makes significant strides in fixing one of multiplayer gaming’s biggest problems. Apex Legends notionally takes place in the Titanfall universe, but you probably wouldn’t notice. Structurally, it’s a dyed-in-the-wool battle royale game, with 60 players being dropped onto an island, forced to scavenge for weapons and equipment while a shrinking force field gradually squeezes them together until…

DEVELOPER Eastshade Games / PUBLISHER Eastshade Games Eastshade is a delightful, Skyrim-esque RPG that trades swords and sorcery for an easel and paintbrushes. You play a travelling artist visiting the idyllic island of Eastshade, aiming to paint four scenes of  key locations in your mother’s childhood. Although art is important in Eastshade, it’s not a painting simulator. When you find a scene you want to paint, you press a button to bring up the ‘painting’ overlay, which lets you crop your canvas to fit whatever you’re currently viewing. Then you simply press E, and your painting materialises on an easel in front of you. It’s hardly an authentic representation of artistry, but it’s fun to line up the best possible scene, and Eastshade’s world is an inspiring location. The gorgeous…

A Raspberry Pi computer offers a cheap, compact way of gathering a wide range of information, but it’s pretty useless if it can’t display said information. Regular readers may remember the Raspberry Pi Zero Energy Monitor build from Issue 153. This project uses the same hardware, but replaces the software in order to pull down live weather data and display it on a Pimoroni Unicorn HAT, using a range of colourful icons. 1 Set up your Pi If you’ve just bought your first Raspberry Pi, or if you’ve picked up a brand-new one for this project, you’ll need to set it up. If you bought the Pi Zero W, you’ll need to solder the 40-pin GPIO header onto it; if you bought the Pi Zero WH, or any Model…

TOTAL PROJECT TIME / 3 HOURS If you need two very different PC systems, but don’t have space for them, then a dual-system rig could be just the ticket. It allows you to use two PCs’ worth of hardware in one case, saving both space and component costs, as you can share the power supply, cooling and case between the two systems. You might want to pair a great-value Threadripper system for content creation with an overclocked Intel 6-core CPU system for maximum gaming performance, so you can play games and render or stream at the same time. Alternatively, if you spend most of your time doing low-load tasks with the odd blip of full-throttle rendering or multi-GPU 4K gaming, you could use a low-power system with an integrated GPU…

If I were writing a school-style report, I’d have to sum up 2019 as mediocre and disappointing. It’s not that there haven’t been many new product launches or announcements – after all, we’ve already had Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 2060 and more recently, the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti and 1660, with the latter two getting the reviews treatment in this issue. While none of these three GPUs is inherently bad, though, none of them is particularly exciting either, resulting in lacklustre sales so far at Scan. That’s a dangerous predicament for the industry when it’s already struggling to shift excessive stock of the previous-generation GTX 1060 and GTX 1070 cards. The industry is already struggling to shift excessive stock of the GTX 1060 and 1070 And don’t get me started on…

USB-IF, the organisation behind the universal serial bus standard, has recently acted true to the last part of its name, because nothing happened for ages and then three announcements arrived at once. The first is a bump in the maximum speed, from the current 10Gbps to a new 20Gbps standard, which was immediately followed by a new naming scheme. Remember when it tried to rename all the USB 3 devices to USB 3.1 Gen 1 and Gen 2? Well it’s at it again. Are you paying attention? Good. USB 3, which became USB 3.1 Gen 1, is now known as USB 3.2 Gen 1: SuperSpeed USB. Meanwhile, the original USB 3.1, which became USB 3.1 Gen 2, is now known as USB 3.2 Gen 2: SuperSpeed USB 10Gbps. Then there’s…

SUPPLIER www.amazon.co.uk The Philips Brilliance 499P9H is a vast monitor designed for gamers and professionals with deep wallets and wide desks. It’s a monster, costing £1,130 inc VAT, and sporting a 49in diagonal alongside a 32:9 aspect ratio. It’s the widest monitor we’ve ever tested, and it has a correspondingly mighty resolution of 5,120 x 1,440 –it’s like having two 2,560 x 1,440 monitors side by side. It also has an 1800R curve. Its huge resolution and size give it several advantages in gaming. You get better situational awareness in racing games, flight sims and FPS titles, and there’s more to see when you’re hacking through RPGs and strategy games. However, bear in mind that the 499P9H’s 7.3 million pixels isn’t far short of the 8.3 million required by 4K…

Elegiant SR200 Mini Soundbar/ £25.99 inc VAT The SR200 is a curious stereo speaker, with the kind of size and shape you’d normally associate with a Bluetooth device. However, the SR200 is wired, and connects to a phone, laptop or any other gizmo with a headphone jack output. Power comes from a USB connector, but not data, so you still need to use analogue audio wires to get any sound out of it. The control options are limited; there’s a volume control that hits maximum volume at one end, and clicks off at the other. The sound quality is surprisingly good, though, with the caveat that the SR200 isn’t really capable of being loud. It’s a considerable boost to a laptop or phone speaker, but way below the volume level…

How we test Our test rig include an MSI MEG Z390 Ace motherboard for Intel LGA1151 CPUs and an MSI X470 Gaming Pro Carbon motherboard for AMD AM4 CPUs. The rest of the components in our test setup include 16GB of Corsair Vengeance LPX 3000MHz DDR4 memory, a 512GB Samsung 960 Pro SSD, a Zotac GeForce GTX 1080 AMP! Edition graphics card and a Corsair RM850i PSU. We also used an EK Water Blocks Phoenix liquid cooler on both test systems, along with up-to-date versions of Windows 10, including the latest hardware drivers. We record results at both stock and overclocked frequencies. Our benchmarks include the CPC RealBench suite, which tests single-threaded performance in image editing with Gimp, and multi-threading performance in video encoding with Handbrake. We also test content…

SUPPLIER www.overclockers.co.uk Intel has been rather slow to release 9th-gen successors to its 8th-gen quad-core CPUs, namely the core i3-8100 and Core i3-8350K. There are signs that a Core i3-9350KF is on the horizon, with faster frequencies, support for turbo boost, but a lack of an on-board GPU. The latter can be useful for GPU troubleshooting, or if you never play games, but it’s otherwise not a great option. If you’re prepared to overclock your CPU, though, then the Core i3-9350KF is unlikely to offer anything new to tempt you its way, as it still sports the same four cores and four threads as the multiplier-unlocked Core i3-8350K we’re reviewing here. Another Intel CPU that hasn’t seen much of a reduction in price since its launch in 2017, the Core…

SUPPLIER www.overclockers.co.uk The Core i7-9700K had it easy compared with the complaints made against the Core i5-9600K at launch, and for good reason. Intel’s latest unlocked Core i5 CPU cost a huge amount more than AMD’s 6-core CPUs, such as the Ryzen 5 2600X, and it didn’t really offer any new benefits compared with its predecessor, the already outdated Core i5-8600K. Both the Core i5-8600K and 9600K have six cores, and would have taken the CPU world by storm three years ago. However, they just arrived a little too late. While the 8600K’s predecessor, the quad-core Core i5-7600K was a great all-round CPU in its day, the same can’t be said for the Core i5-9600K. Unlike its pricier siblings, the 9600K hasn’t had much of a price cut either. Meanwhile, its…

SUPPLIER www.overclockers.co.uk At launch, Intel’s 8-core flagship proved very divisive, largely thanks to its high price. At £600 inc VAT, it cost twice as much money as AMD’s Ryzen 7 2700X, yet it certainly wasn’t twice as quick. However, it remains a CPU powerhouse that gives many high-end desktop (HEDT) CPUs a  run for their money, plus it has solder between the CPU core and the heatspreader, rather than the thermal paste used on its predecessor. Best of all, though, its price is now £100 lower than the launch price. The specifications are dizzying, with a 5GHz maximum boost frequency that can be reached using two cores at the same time, helping it to blast through those lightly threaded tasks, yet it still manages to hit 4.7GHz across all eight…

DEVELOPER BioWare / PUBLISHER EA / WEBSITE www.ea.com/games/anthem Anthem marks the biggest departure in BioWare’s game design since the original Mass Effect. Largely ditching the compelling role playing on which BioWare established its reputation, Anthem is an online shared-world shooter in the vein of Bungie’s Destiny. Typically, storytelling is where BioWare fares best, and Anthem is aiming to be a Destiny-style shooter with BioWare’s narrative heft. The game takes place on an alien world ravaged by perpetual cataclysms, which are triggered by a strange force known as the Anthem. Players assume the role of a Freelancer, a member of a once legendary group of heroes. A group that has fallen into disrepute, after failing to hold back the Anthem’s recent geological onslaughts at a place called the Heart of Rage.…

Over the past year we’ve witnessed a sudden influx of first-person shooters that seek to rekindle the glory days of the genre – the mid-1990s. Duke Nukem 3D creator 3D Realms is developing two new first-person shooters – Ion Maiden and Wrath (built on the Build and Quake engines respectively). Meanwhile, indie projects such as Amid Evil and Prodeus will bring their own spin on classic FPS gunplay later this year. For now, there’s DUSK. The game officially launched in December 2018, featuring lightning pace, intense action and some of the best 3D level design this side of the millennium. Yet despite resembling a shooter from 1996, technologically, DUSK is thoroughly modern, built with that perennial foundation of  indie games, Unity 5. So how exactly does DUSK use modern technology…

There’s been a lot of talk about thermal paste in the PC enthusiast scene lately, with more companies bringing out their own tubes of thermal goo. A layer of thermal material between your CPU and its cooler remains an essential part of any PC build, and that situation isn’t going to change any time soon. It’s used on almost every hot-running component in your PC, from chipset heatsinks to graphics cards, and it’s used in both air and water-cooled PCs too. With a huge amount of thermal pastes on the market, using all manner of materials, it can be tough to work out the right one to use and the differences between them. In addition, there are now four different sizes of CPU heatspreaders with which to contend, each demanding…

Dual-system cases? I’m a convert I suspect it doesn’t occur to most people to own more than one desktop PC these days, for a number of reasons. I personally don’t have the space to house two PCs in my tiny office, and even a single ATX rig takes up far too much space, which could otherwise be used for storing tools, testing equipment or hardware. For this reason, I’ve owned a mini-ITX rig for quite a while – I don’t need to house two graphics cards or multiple PCI-E devices, never mind two entire PCs. There’s also the expense; owning one PC for gaming and one for general use or content creation is seen as a waste of money. Those of us who own  a second rig usually have it…

While not a tool per se, wet and dry sandpaper is an essential component of many PC moddingrelated tasks. Primarily used in painting preparation, wet and dry sandpaper has a few  interesting characteristics that make it an  essential addition to your toolbox. Standard sandpaper is basically designed to  shape, strip or coarsely sand objects in a  dry environment. That’s fine, but when it comes down to dealing with more delicate tasks, particles can clog up between the sand particles, rendering the paper ineffective. Wet and dry sandpaper gets around this by using a water-resistant backing, so you can use the paper ‘wet’ with water acting as a lubricant. Comparatively, the backing on standard sandpaper isn’t waterproof and would fall apart if it got wet. The benefits of using water are twofold.…

There’s always a gaming controversy of some sort, but quite often it’s trivial, or at least doesn’t have major real-world consequences for gamers or wider society. And then there are the controversies that are very serious, but really difficult to talk about. This month’s column concerns one of them. It’s not easy to write, but we have to discuss it because it’s one of those controversies where politicians have waded in, and that can escalate into changes in the law. I’m talking about Rape Day, the interactive narrative fiction game recently pulled by Steam after several petitions and considerable media and political backlash. The game, which hasn’t yet been published, was created by a chap called Desk Plant, who is now saying he’ll seek an alternative publisher. Valve is in…

Zotac Gaming GeForce GTX 1660 6GB / £200 inc VAT SUPPLIER www.ebuyer.com MSI GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Gaming X 6G / £250 inc VAT SUPPLIER www.novatech.co.uk You’d be forgiven for thinking that gaming graphics cards are now considered luxury goods for the landed gentry. Over the past year, Only AMD’s Radeon RX 590 provided a welcome glimmer of affordability in what was otherwise a smog of ostentatious willy waving and flamboyant pricing. Thankfully, though, Nvidia has now brought its Turing architecture to the masses, with the GeForce GTX 1660 and 1660 Ti picking up where the GTX 1060 3GB and 6GB left off nearly three years ago. Inside TU116 There are other benefits to Turing beyond RTX hardware Let’s start by taking a look at the new TU116 GPU used…

SUPPLIER www.overclockers.co.uk Asus’ ROG line-up of motherboards has been rather diluted lately, being replaced by various Strix models that offered most, but not all, of the features and extravagance you’d expect from this premium brand. Sadly, while there were still pure ROG boards such as the Formula and Rampage, only the ATX and E-ATX form factors got the proper ROG treatment, with the mini-ITX Impact and micro-ATX Gene and boards slipping down to Strix status. However, Asus has finally seen sense and the beloved Gene is back with a bang. It’s the most unusual enthusiast micro-ATX board we’ve seen All those extreme overclocking tools, such as LN2 mode and the Probelt voltage readout points, are back. Plus, you also get more mainstream tools, such as power, reset and clear-CMOS buttons,…

SUPPLIER www.cclonline.com You don’t technically need a Z390 chipset motherboard for Intel’s new 9th-generation CPUs, which is just as well, as some Z390 boards are substantially pricier than their Z270 and Z370 predecessors. However, Intel’s latest mainstream premium chipset is now being used on quite a few sub-£200 boards, and Gigabyte’s £167 Z390 Aorus Pro ticks more than a few spec boxes. Gigabyte’s fan control section in the EFI is the best available One key competitor is MSI’s £150 MAG Z390 Tomahawk (see Issue 188, p26), a generally decent board with a couple of key drawbacks, which are rectified by the Gigabyte. To start, the MSI only includes the less capable Realtek ALC892 audio codec, but the Gigabyte has the top-sounding ALC1220 codec, along with the full array of audio…

SUPPLIER www.overclockers.co.uk The Aorus 15 X9 comes from Gigabyte’s boutique gaming brand, and it’s equipped with a full-fat RTX 2070 GPU, rather than the Max-Q version that’s proved popular elsewhere. It has a base clock of 1215MHz and a boost speed of 1440MHz with a TDP of 115W. It’s also possible to use the Aorus Control Center application to overclock the base and boost speeds by around 100MHz, although you’ll need to monitor thermals carefully. Processing power comes from the familiar Core i7-8750H, which serves up six Hyper-Threaded cores alongside base and turbo clocks of 2.2GHz and 4.1GHz. It has enough power to handle gaming and even multi-threaded software. It’s also good to see 16GB of  dual-channel memory and Intel 802.11ac Wi-Fi. The full-power RTX 2070 is noticeably faster than…

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.scan.co.uk The arrival of AMD’s Ryzen accelerated processing units (APUs) with Radeon Vega RX graphics around a year ago put AMD in a unique market position. Not only did these APUs give people who didn’t want to pay for a discrete GPU a cheaper way to own a decent CPU, but their on-board GPUs had some decent poke too. AMD’s previous APUs, based on its pre-Zen CPU architecture, were held back by poor CPU performance outside of games, but the Zen architecture drastically improved that situation, with the Ryzen 5 2400G sitting at the top of the new APU stack. The Ryzen 5 2400G has a slightly different composition to other Ryzen CPUs though. For example, the Ryzen 5 1500X uses a pair of Core Complexes (CCX) and disables…

Video games and Star Wars have long enjoyed a fruitful relationship. Dozens of Star Wars games have been developed since the early 1980s, and a fair number of them are among the best games ever made. In the 1990s, the best new Star Wars adventures could be found in games, with X-Wing, TIE-Fighter, Dark Forces, Jedi Knight and Rebel Assault. Even the largely derided prequels resulted in a handful of decent titles, such as Pod Racer, Republic Commando and, arguably the greatest Star Wars game, Knights of the Old Republic. Given that Star Wars is back in cinemas and more popular than ever, you might expect us to be inundated with a second wave of licensed games capitalising on that hungry fanbase, but it hasn’t happened. Since Disney acquired the…

‘RISC architecture is going to change everything,’ Kate ‘Acid Burn’ Libby, played by Angelina Jolie, opines in one of the buzzword-laden scenes from 1995 thriller, Hackers. ‘Yeah,’ answers Dade ‘Zero Cool/ Crash Override’ Murphy (Jonny Lee Miller), ‘RISC is good.’ Hackers is not a film that strove for technical accuracy, but of all the scenes in the film, this one rings most true. Reduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC) did indeed change everything about computing, and it’s now on track to do it again. For years, mainstream computing was dominated by Complex Instruction Set Computing (CISC) architectures. Proponents of RISC claimed it was more efficient, and turned out to have a point. Although today’s x86 and x86-64 processors expose the same CISC instruction set architectures (ISAs) externally as before, Intel and…

Commodore: The Inside Story is an autobiographical account of one man’s time at Commodore: David John Pleasance, who joined as a salesman after a very brave attempt at becoming a professional flamenco guitarist. Pleasance’s story begins somewhere in the middle: by the time he joined Commodore, the company had already shifted into computers, and it was his job to flog the Personal Electronic Transactor (PET) family. Twelve years later, Pleasa the company go down in fl claims, to a planned and management buyout that him and colleague Colin control being scuppered by an ex and his contacts at ESCOM. Between these times, Pleasance enjoyed a rollercoaster of a time at the company, which is made abundantly clear in the book’s opening half – a collection of stories, rather than a…

TOTAL PROJECT TIME / 1 HOUR Many cases come with dust filters these days, but they often only cater for obvious areas, such as the PSU and front intake fans. There may be additional fan mounts in your case that lack filters, or you might be modifying you case or building one from scratch, meaning that new air vents need to be protected. There are, of course, plenty of third-party options already, allowing you to fit various sizes of filters to your case. However, it’s also possible to make your own filters that are tailor-made to your dimensions, and can even be attached magnetically. In this guide, we’re looking at super-cheap ways to add dust filters to your case if it lacks them out of the box. FILTER TYPES READY-MADE DUST…

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…