Table of contents for July 2019 in Custom PC UK

New budget Nvidia GPU Nvidia has unveiled the GTX 1650, a new budget option for both its desktop and laptop GPU ranges, with prices for desktop cards starting from £138 inc VAT at scan.co.uk It’s based on Nvidia’s new TU117 GPU, and includes 14 Turing streaming multiprocessors, giving it a total of 896 stream processors. Memory support tops out at 4GB of GDDR5, connected to a 128-bit bus, resulting in total memory bandwidth of 128GB/sec. Meanwhile, the stock GPU base clock sits at 1485MHz, with a 1665MHz  boost clock. In comparison, Nvidia’s GTX 1050 includes 640 stream processors, and has a 1354MHz base clock and 1455MHz boost frequency, along with the same 128-bit memory interface. Meanwhile, the laptop GTX 1650 actually includes more stream processors (1,024) and texture units (64)…

SUPPLIER scan.co.uk Even though Intel’s X299 chipset launched two years ago, Asus has seen fit to revamp its flagship offering, as with the ROG Zenith Extreme Alpha (see Issue 189, p30). In fact, the two boards share a few similarities, but the latter sports AMD’s Socket TR4 for Threadripper CPUs, whereas the former is designed to handle the worst that Intel’s 18-core CPUs can throw at it. Intel’s decision to increase its core count from ten to 18 in a single generation did, according to Asus, cause problems for motherboard manufacturers that had already nailed down their designs for X299. Then Intel rebranded a bunch of Xeon CPUs to combat AMD’s WX-series Threadripper CPUs and, all of a sudden, X299 boards were having to deal with nearly double the core…

SUPPLIER overclockers.co.uk Up to this point, M.2 SSDs have tended to be in one of two categories: expensive NVMe models or cheaper SATA ones. The WD Blue SN500, though, is a genuine halfway house. It offers a meaningful upgrade over SATA drives but is only a little more expensive. This 500GB version offers sequential read speeds of up to 1,700MB/sec, which certainly isn’t breaking any records, but is still over three times faster than a SATA drive. Meanwhile, its sequential write speed is rated at a far more impressive 1,450MB/sec – plenty of more expensive drives don’t offer much more – and its random performance is equally good, rated at 275K IOPs for reads and 300K IOPs for writes. The big downside is that the SN500 range tops out at…

SUPPLIER scan.co.uk The Corsair K83 Wireless is designed to handle gaming, media and living-room duties without any wires cluttering up the couch. The main keyboard is a tenkeyless unit, with a circular touchpad on its right, along with mouse buttons, a volume roller and buttons to alter the backlight brightness and lock the function keys. It’s a setup that can handle full OS navigation on the sofa, which is great for controlling media, web browsing and basic work tasks. Then, above the touchpad, there’s a joystick and two shoulder buttons that enable the K83 to be used for living-room gaming. It’s a hefty slate of features inside a pleasingly svelte frame. The K83 only weighs 0.48kg – half the weight of many gaming keyboards – and it’s just 380mm wide…

How we test We tested all these graphics cards at 1,920 x 1,080 and 2,560 x 1,440, using four test games – Battlefield V, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Total War: Warhammer II and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. You can see more details about our game tests on p60. We haven’t performed ray-tracing tests in this group test, as only one GPU has the ability to do it properly. For this specific Labs test, we’ve also built a spreadsheet to work out the scores mathematically. We feed all the frame rates for each GPU into the spreadsheet and it allocates points when the minimum frame rate hits certain milestones. We work on the basis that 30fps is the bare minimum you should expect from a graphics card, so a GPU…

SUPPLIER scan.co.uk The grizzled veteran of this Labs test is Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1070. First launched in the middle of 2016 for around £400, this aging GPU is still managing to duel competitively thanks to a massive price cut. It’s uncertain how long stock of the GTX 1070 will be available, but there were still plenty of them on the shelves as this issue went to press, with prices as low as £230 inc VAT. Like the AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 (see p47), its price cut has created a fair bit of confusion. The first reviews of these aging GPUs were based on old games, leaving people uncertain whether they should buy a new GTX 1660, or an older GPU with a price cut now. It’s a question we…

SUPPLIER scan.co.uk The Titanium flavour of Nvidia’s new GTX-branded Turing GPUs impressed us last month, with an MSI Gaming X card coming in at just £250 inc VAT. A month later, the price has gone up everywhere, with even the cheapest cards costing £260 inc VAT. That’s a problem when there’s competition from so many other GPUs, old and new, in the same price league and it puts the GTX 1660 Ti in a difficult position. It’s still a great GPU, hence the total score of 86 per cent, but the cheaper Radeon RX Vega 56 is faster, and just another £39 would net you an RTX 2060. Meanwhile, cheaper GTX 1660 cards, such as the Zotac on p44, might not offer as much bang for your buck, but are…

SUPPLIER overclockers.co.uk The AOC G2590FX typifies the benefits of buying a FreeSync monitor with G-Sync support. It costs just £200 yet  still delivers a 144Hz refresh rate and 1ms response time, while also providing the benefits of adaptive sync on both AMD and Nvidia graphics cards. In comparison, you can’t buy a true G-Sync display for under £400 inc VAT. As such, the AOC G2590FX hardly has to do more than deliver a usable level of image quality and gaming performance to be worth considering. Thankfully, though, it delivers a lot more than that. For a start, it’s very stylish. The screen is surrounded on three sides by a slim, low-profile bezel that gives the whole display a light, modern feel. A simple round base with a concentric circle pattern and…

SUPPLIER overclockers.co.uk Sitting under Asus’ Republic of Gamers umbrella, the XG248Q sits at the premium end of the FreeSync monitor market, with a price that’s nearly double that of some 1080p, 144Hz gaming monitors. Its headline feature is a 240Hz refresh rate. While some 240Hz screens have dropped to as low as £350 inc VAT, most still demand a similar outlay to this display. In other areas, it delivers the sort of premium touches you’d expect for the money as well. As with other Asus Strix products, there’s a strong focus on RGB lighting. Around the back of the display you’ll find a ring of multi-coloured light that you can set to all manner of colours and lighting patterns. It’s about as pointless as RGB lighting gets for most people,…

DEVELOPER Massive Entertainment / PUBLISHER Ubisoft Tom Clancy’s The Division was like a digestive biscuit, a derivative multiplayer cover shooter that provided a certain level of sustenance but wasn’t remotely exciting. By comparison, The Division 2 is more like a chocolate digestive. It’s still the largely the same derivative experience, but improved by a layer of fat and sugar. Set six months after the first game, The Division 2 takes place in Washington DC. The US capital is an overgrown ruin controlled by three different gangs, and your job is to wrest back control of the city from them. The original game was criticised for refusing to engage with its own story about a group of heavily armed militia suppressing a civilian uprising with extreme violence. The Division 2 responds…

DEVELOPER White Paper Games / PUBLISHER Sold Out The Occupation is a bite-sized stealth adventure that stands on the precipice between broken and brilliant. It takes place in the fictional British town of Turing in an alternate 1980s timeline, and places you in the role of Harvey Miller, a renowned journalist. Miller is investigating the recent bombing of the Bowman-Carson facility, a private corporation that’s working on behalf of the government on the creation and implementation of the Union Act, a highly controversial anti-immigration bill. It’s a fixed-time game lasting four and a half hours across four acts. The first two chapters culminate in interviews with key Bowman-Carson employees, where you can ask questions about bombing and the Union Act. Your starter questions aren’t particularly incisive, however. To get to…

The trouble with guides to robotics is that, typically, they fall into one of two categories. One is a hands-on publication that only walks you through the basics of setting up an off-the-shelf kit before running out of pages. The other is a high-level overview that fails to teach anything practical. Learn Robotics with Raspberry Pi, by Matt Timmons-Brown, lifts itself out of the first box by including hands-on examples of relatively advanced topics. While the core is still about building a relatively simple two-wheel robot, the later chapters go into a little more depth than most robot guides. It includes a chapter on using the Raspberry Pi Camera Module to perform Python-powered object recognition, with you programming the robot to recognise and follow a yellow ball around the room.…

SUPPLIER amazon.co.uk Asus’ Zephyrus laptops have hugely powerful components and a keen sense of style, and the GX701GX doesn’t disappoint. It looks superb. It’s made from black magnesium alloy with bronze edges, and the Republic of Gamers logos have a stylish chrome effect. It’s eye-catching without being garish. It’s not too hefty either. Its 2.7kg weight is normal for a 17.3in laptop, and it’s only 19mm thick. It’s too big for regular moving, but it’s easier to sling the Zephyrus in a backpack than many other laptops with this level of power. You get three full-sized USB 3.1 ports and two Type-C connectors, with Gen 2 supported on three of those ports. However, there’s a notable lack of a wired Ethernet port, or a card reader for that matter. Plus,…

SUPPLIER overclockers.co.uk The fact that AMD’s Radeon RX 590 is now the lowest-scoring card on test shows just how much chaos has recently been created in this pocket of the GPU market. When we first reviewed it five months ago, it was an obvious victor over the GTX 1060 in an otherwise uncrowded arena. Now it’s up against several other contenders and finding it hard to counter-attack. That’s not to say the RX 590 is a bad GPU. In fact, it’s testament to the current competition in this price bracket that not a single card on test dropped below 30fps in any of our game tests. There are no terrible cards here, it’s just that some of them offer more performance for your buck than others. Unlike Nvidia’s new GeForce…

SUPPLIER scan.co.uk MSI’s GeForce GTX 1660 Gaming X goes all out on features, surrounding this budget GPU with a full metal backplate on the rear of the PCB, as well as the company’s Twin Frozr 7 cooler, complete with RGB lighting around the fans, and illuminating the MSI logo on the top edge. It looks great in your case, but the extra features push up the price to £240 inc VAT. That’s a good £34 more than Zotac’s Gaming GeForce GTX 1660, which is based on the same GPU, and it pushes the price into the same territory as GeForce GTX 1070 and AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 cards. MSI has also applied a decent overclock to the GPU, with the boost clock sitting at 1860MHz, compared to just 1785MHz…

SUPPLIER scan.co.uk Graphics cards featuring Nvidia’s latest RTX tech have now dropped below the £300 mark, with Palit RTX 2060 cards now going for £299 inc VAT. That means you get access to Nvidia’s dedicated RT cores for real-time ray tracing, as well as the Tensor cores, which can improve anti-aliased performance using Nvidia’s custom DLSS (deep learning super-sampling). These features aren’t featured in many games yet, but real-time ray tracing (see Issue 186, p92 ) does look fantastic in the games that support it. In our initial review (see Issue 187, p20 ), the RTX 2060 coped with real-time ray tracing in Battlefield V with a solid minimum of 60fps at 1080p in Low DXR mode. This figure then increased to dropped to 41fps in High DXR mode. Since…

SUPPLIER overclockers.co.uk The Asus VG258QR is on the pricier side of the scale for a 1080p G-Sync 24in/25in monitor without the official hardware. However, it delivers the premium touches you expect from a slightly more expensive monitor. It gets off to a good start with the build quality and styling. Surrounding the display is a narrow, low-profile bezel, providing a compact, modern look, while the rest of the monitor has a simple, understated feel with its muted, dark grey plastic finish. There’s none of the RGB lights of the Asus XG248Q, but that’s precisely why this display is much more affordable. The stand also offers a full set of ergonomic adjustments, and provides a solid platform for the display. Connection options aren’t this display’s strongest suit though. There’s no USB…

SUPPLIER overclockers.co.uk BenQ’s Zowie XL2740 has a comparatively utilitarian design, despite its premium price tag and high-end specification, which includes a 240Hz refresh rate. You won’t find slim, low-profile bezels or RGB lighting here, just a solid mass of hefty matt black plastic with the merest hints of red paint or plastic here and there. We’re all for keeping design simple, but it’s all a bit stark. On the plus side, there’s plenty of handy little extras, although quite frankly, you’d expect them given the price of this display. The stand, for instance, offers a full complement of ergonomic adjustments, including the ability to pivot the display into a portrait mode. The top of the stand also includes a carry handle. On the screen’s left-hand side there’s also a pop-out headphone…

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…

DEVELOPER From Software / PUBLISHER Activision How could From Software follow up Dark Souls, a game that radically changed notions about how games can present storytelling, environment design and challenge? Its mysterious world, punishing combat and gargantuan monsters made it hugely influential. From Software has grudgingly developed two sequels, but in many ways, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is Dark Souls’ true spiritual successor, as it tears up the rulebook again. Sekiro is set in a mythologised feudal Japan, placing you in the role of Wolf, who is a Shinobi – a blend of ninja and warrior who is honour-bound to protect the juvenile Lord Kuro. The game begins with Wolf failing in this duty, bested in battle by another warlord, resulting in the kidnapping of Kuro and the loss of…

Creating dystopian themed PC mods has long been a passion of mine, so receiving an invitation from Deep Silver to create a Metro Exodus themed PC was a dream come true. The Metro game (and book) series is set in a post-apocalyptic Russia, where the fallout from nuclear war has left the world ruined and humanity has to survive on the scraps left over from its previously peaceful age. The main character, Artyom, must eke out a  living, scavenging what he can find, while taking on hazards both human and mutant with his cobbled-together arsenal of handmade weapons. Rendered in gorgeous detail by the 4A Game development team in Ukraine and Malta, there could hardly be a more inspiring world on which to base a PC mod. Raising steam A…

Hypnospace Outlaw is a game that took an abrupt shift partway through its development process, but in an unusual twist to the norm, feels so much better for it. Its origins trace back to Hypnospace Enforcer, a 2014 release from Jay Tholen, who also developed the point-and-click adventure Dropsy. Tholen describes Hypnospace Enforcer as ‘a side project I took on while developing Dropsy to prevent burnout’. In it, the player drives an angular vehicle across a colourful track in order to chase down criminals in Hypnospace – a persistent online world inhabited by people wearing electronic headbands to enter a collaborative electronic dream state in 2114. It’s not a big game, it’s not a complex game, and it’s not even a particularly clever game, but the core concept – a…

If you’ve ever wondered how screw threads are made, the answer usually involves some form of tapping tool, even if it’s fitted to a machine in a  factory, rather than the hand tool we’re analysing here. Tapping tools cut into an object, creating a specific size of thread, and they’re useful for all manner of different tasks. You can use one to create threaded holes for mounting water-cooling hardware, fan controllers and internal components, such as hard disk trays. One great aspect of tapping tools is that you only need to buy the taps you need. The actual tap wrench is compatible with most of them, as long as the sizes aren’t extreme, so you don’t need to invest in a large tap set. For PCs, you’ll be dealing with…

SUPPLIER aquatuning.co.uk Alphacool’s new all-in-one liquid cooler, the Eisbaer Extreme 280, seeks to build on previous models with a larger, more attractive radiator, a more powerful pump and the use of a proper DIY water-cooling CPU waterblock, complete with snazzy lighting. The Eisbaer Extreme 28’s price reflects the fact that it comprises a bunch of water-cooling components plucked from Alphacool’s high-end DIY parts range. Thankfully, though, unlike many of its previous efforts at making combined pumps and radiators, this time Alphacool has gone with its own version of the Laing D5 pump, instead of the whiny DC-LT pump used in the Alphacool Eissturm Gaming Copper (see Issue 188, p41 ). Normally, the D5 is rated at over 1,000 litres an hour, but it’s also quite noisy at this speed, so…

SUPPLIER scan.co.uk With a price of £155, Thermaltake’s Level 20 RGB competes with the best names in gaming keyboards and, like its competitors, it offers extensive media controls, RGB  lighting, control software and premium construction. The latter is evident across most of the  unit too, with a huge piece of aluminium sitting under the keys, which plants the Level 20 RGB firmly on your desk, and results in a weight of over 1.4kg. You get a standard full key set, plus a generous helping of media controls, including dedicated playback and audio mute buttons, plus a volume wheel for fine adjustment – the latter is much more useful than having this feature as the second function of other keys. However, the quality isn’t quite on a par with Corsair’s K70…

Tablecoaster/ £11.99 inc VAT SUPPLIER amazon.co.uk The Tablecoaster is a cup holder crossed with a coaster, which apparently shares some of its DNA with limpet mines. You affix it to your desk or table, put your drinking vessel on it, and in theory it’s then almost impossible to spill your drink. In practice, the success of the device varies with the receptacle. A pint glass will fit but has some wobble because of the height, and a wine glass is a dead loss. However, a mug or can works perfectly. A removable inner layer allows cans to fit snugly, and there’s a slot to accommodate handles for mugs. The adhesion is extremely strong, to the point where you sometimes need to pry the Tablecoaster off its surface once it’s attached. If…

SUPPLIER cclonline.com At the cheaper end of the GTX 1660 price scale is Zotac’s Gaming card, while MSI’s Gaming X model (see p48) provides a more premium package. With a price of £206 inc VAT, the Zotac gives AMD’s Radeon RX 590 a serious run for its money. Unlike the RX 590, the GTX 1660 is also a new GPU, based on the Turing architecture also used in Nvidia’s top-line RTX chips. With these cheaper GTX-branded GPUs, however, Nvidia has removed the advanced features such as RT cores and Tensor cores, and instead focused on maximising rasterisation performance for the lowest price possible. The result is the streamlined TU116 GPU, which is used in both the GTX 1660 and 1660 Ti, but with one texture processor cluster (TPC) disabled on…

SUPPLIER scan.co.uk AMD’s Radeon RX Vega chips might have originally landed with an uninspiring fart noise, but a huge price cut to just under £250 has made the Vega 56 seriously competitive in this Labs test. In Deus Ex: Mankind Divided at 1080p, it even beat Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 2060. Rather than using GDDR5 or GDDR6 memory, with chips spread over the front and  back of the PCB, AMD’s Vega 56 and 64 use HBM2 (high-bandwidth memory), which is integrated into the same package as the GPU. The close proximity of the memory to the GPU reduces latency, and there’s a super-wide 2,048-bit memory interface connecting the GPU to the 8GB of memory, along with 64 ROPS. The memory is only clocked at 1.6GHz (effective), but the massive memory interface…

How we test The arrival of Nvidia’s G-Sync technology was one of the most exciting PC gaming developments in years. In one fell stroke, it improved your gaming experience in two clear and profound ways. Like V-Sync, it eliminated image-tearing, but by syncing the refresh rate of the monitor to the frame rate of your graphics card, it also removed the stutter associated with V-Sync. The result was a smoother, better-looking gaming experience regardless of the frame rate your PC could muster. The problems with G-Sync, though, have been just as numerous. Support is exclusive to use with Nvidia graphics cards – it uses a functionally limited custom processor inside the monitor and it’s also expensive. At least, that was the situation until recently. Nvidia has now opened up G-Sync…

SUPPLIER box.co.uk Measuring 31.5in from corner to corner, Acer’s ZX321Q has a huge screen yet it still only sports a resolution of 1,920 x 1,080 pixels, meaning you get a bit of a chunky image when you’re up close to it. The Acer also uses a VA-type panel, which generally provides a better image than the TN panels on test. In particular, it has far wider viewing angles; along with its low pixel density, this mean it’s better suited as a hybrid TV/monitor than a straight desktop monitor – it’s ideal if several people are viewing the screen while playing games, or while sitting to the side on a bed or sofa. Where the XZ321Q regains its PC gaming credentials is with its 144Hz refresh rate and, of course, FreeSync…

DEVELOPER Gabe Cuzillo / PUBLISHER Devolver Digital The basic premise of Ape Out is ‘Hotline Miami, but with a killer gorilla’. Viewed from a top-down perspective, you assume the role of the titular simian, and are tasked with escaping a series of increasingly complex and challenging urban environments, basically by smashing everything in sight. Mechanically, Ape Out is simple and elegant. Your Ape can perform two actions; shoving and grabbing, but these actions can be combined in imaginative ways. You can shove an enemy into a wall, for example, but you can also shove them into other enemies, knocking them down like skittles. Grabbing, meanwhile, gives you de facto access to a range of power-ups, all of which are related to whatever you’ve grabbed. Grabbing any enemy will cause them to…

Back in 2014, Nvidia surprised the tech industry by seeming to jump on the Raspberry Pi bandwagon – and missing by a mile. The Jetson TK1 (reviewed in Issue 133) was a monstrously powerful single-board computer, but the £200 inc VAT price tag jarred badly with the decision to make Maplin the sole UK stockist. Not surprisingly, the Jetson TK1 wasn’t a commercial success. It did, however, give rise  to an entire family of more sensibly targeted embedded devices, which retain their predecessor’s name: the Jetson TX1 and TX2, and now the Jetson AGX Xavier. There’s an even newer member of the family too, unveiled at the company’s 2019 Graphics Technology Conference (GTC) – the Jetson Nano, an attempt to correct the mistakes of the past and bring Jetson back…

Modding is all about breaking rules This month I’ve written about building your own dream PC (see p76 ), and how I created my own one over the past year or so. Sadly, I didn’t fund the necessary components with a lottery win. Instead, I used long-term loan parts I had lying around, or I managed to organise sponsored hardware – that’s one of the perks of the job, although believe me there are plenty of downsides too! The PC is fantastic, but I’ll admit the build was stressful and hugely time-consuming. It’s also received a lot of online criticism. You get the odd vocal voice incorrectly assuming I was loaded and bought all the hardware myself, and also that I could have made better hardware choices. Plenty of people…