Table of contents for December 2019 in Custom PC UK

It regularly baffles me that so many people still house their PCs in colossal tower cases with at least four unused expansion slots. There are legitimate reasons for not going down the mini PC route, of course. You might genuinely need more than one PCI-E expansion slot, you might want to install an elaborate cooling system, or you might just want the greater airflow and easier building that usually comes with a larger case. On a personal level, I still use a discrete sound card, and like to have room for my water-cooling gear, so I’m still quite happy with my Fractal Design Define R6. For anyone else, though, you really have nothing to lose by building a mini PC these days. As our motherboard reviews this month show, the…

Cooler Master launches massive air cooler Cooler Master has launched a new premium air cooler, with a chunky design and RGB lighting. The Master Air MA620M features a dual tower design using blacked-out aluminium for the heatsinks, with six heatpipes routing heat away from the CPU. A variable-speed 120mm SF120R fan sits between the two towers, and speeds up as required. The MA620M is also very versatile, being compatible with a huge number of CPU sockets, including Intel LGA115x, LGA2011/v3, LGA2066, AM4, AM3+, FM2+ and AM2+. Measuring 165 x 135 x 125mm, the MA620M will make up a significant part of your motherboard topography, and Cooler Master has jazzed up its classy appearance further by equipping it with an addressable RGB LED array. The MA620M is available to pre-order now  from…

There are thankfully now several ways to avoid AMD’s noisy blower cooler on the firm’s new 7nm Navi GPUs. You could add your own waterblock to a reference card (see p102) or, if you want an easier life, you could buy a card with a third-party cooler. Sapphire’s Radeon RX 5700 XT Pulse is one such card, pairing AMD’s top-end Navi chip with a custom cooler. It features two 95mm dual-ball-bearing fans on top of a heatpipeequipped stack of heatsink fins, with a chunky aluminium backplate on the back. Sapphire claims that it’s improved the design of its fan blades to make them up to 10 per cent quieter than the company’s previous fans. The fans are also digitally controlled by a PWM chip, which the company claims makes the…

My favourite gaming genre is the immersive sim. Games such as Thief, Deus Ex, System Shock and Dishonored all rank highly in my personal greatest hits. I like games that let me solve problems in creative ways, where systems can interact and produce unexpected results. Since the days of Ultima Underworld, the immersive sim has been the ultimate expression of this interaction, and the genre commands a lot of respect within the industry. In terms of the wider gaming audience, however, immersive sims have never seen the popularity of, say, Minecraft or Fortnite. I’ve often wondered why, and I think it comes down to a question of tone. Generally speaking, immersive sims take themselves very seriously. They’re often dark, violent and cynical, as high-minded and unapologetically cerebral as the developers…

Remnant: From the Ashes is a surprisingly entertaining mashup of The Division’s cooperative gunplay and Dark Souls’ punishing boss fights. You play a nameless hero tasked with eliminating the Root, a race of evil, Ent-like creatures who have taken over the earth. From your base in an underground research facility known as Ward 13, you venture into the ruins of the game world either solo or with two other players. Remnant’s initial couple of hours are deeply uninspired. Visually, it’s an assault of brown rubble and browner enemies, while the third-person shooting – albeit solid – seems devoid of personality. After defeating the first major boss, however, Remnant suddenly becomes much more exciting. Suddenly you’re jumping between planets via an interstellar gateway known as the Labyrinth, battling radioactive cavemen in…

Engineers Tomasz Mloduchowski and Colin Riley have been working at gaining access to the Raspberry PI 4’s PCI-E bus directly, desoldering the VL805 chip and soldering a proper PCI-E slot in its place. They’ve enjoyed surprising success. Riley’s work is particularly impressive: as well as connecting a bunch of USB 3 cards to the PCI-E bus, he also connected a SATA controller and even a pair of high-performance GPUs. While drivers for the latter aren’t yet available, his experiments continue. More information is available from mloduchowski.com and labs.domipheus.com…

Is it worth water-cooling Navi? Over on p102 you’ll find a guide to installing a waterblock on AMD’s latest Navi cards, which is likely going to be a popular decision for Navi cards, despite their sub-£400 prices. I certainly wouldn’t want to sit next to the blower cooler of the RX 5700 XT for long periods of time, but as there are plenty of reference models around, buying one and water-cooling it is easy. However, there are other benefits to water-cooling your hardware other than noise reduction. Processors are becoming more intelligent in the way they boost frequencies and respond to your cooling system’s capabilities, adding extra megahertz to their clock speed if temperatures are kept below certain levels, or maintaining a higher boost frequency for longer. This is true…

/MEET THY MAKER Name Liam Alex Betts Age 19 Occupation IT co-ordinator at PC Howard Ltd Location Stamford Main uses for PC Gaming, video editing and general everyday use Likes I absolutely love IT – I’m currently studying for my CompTIA A+ and N+ exams Dislikes I hate mushrooms! CPC: Let’s start with the initial inspiration. What made you want to build Apex MKIV, and where does the name come from? Liam: To be honest, the initial inspiration for this build was a combination of the YouTube channels LinusTechTips and JayzTwoCents. I’ve watched both of them for years and I always loved the amazing overkill builds Jay built, and the detailed build logs Linus did at the time. They were fascinating, I was determined to build my own! This build…

When it comes to processors, be it CPUs, GPUs or coprocessors, you can never have too much performance. After all, nobody would willingly choose to play a game at 15fps or wait longer than necessary for a render or encode to complete. But not all parts of the PC’s architecture are created equal, so improvements to some areas can have a greater or lesser impact on performance than others. Take RAM, for example. For many years, successive generations of premium Intel and AMD processors have had high bandwidth, quad-channel memory controllers as opposed to the lower-bandwidth dual-channel memory controllers of mainstream CPUs. However, multiple studies have demonstrated that, in games at least, quad-channel memory is not appreciably faster than dual-channel – the only quantifiable benefit is seen in complex content…

Chip engineers have been yapping on about ‘the end of Moore’s Law’ for what seems like forever, but now that the end of scaling is in sight, as transistor gates reach a dozen atoms of silicon (at 0.11nm each), it looks like the cost, not physics, will prevent us from getting the tiniest, fastest chips. A recent article in Semiconductor Engineering claims that the cost of designing a single 3nm chip will be over a billion US dollars. It specifically cites ‘a complex GPU at Nvidia’ as costing $1.5 billion US to develop. Yowzers. In contrast, a typical 12/14/16nm-generation chip costs just ~$100 million US to develop, while the latest 7nm designs, such as AMD’s Ryzen 3000-series CPUs or its Radeon RX 5700-series GPUs, triples the cost to ~$300 million…

The Virtuoso RGB Wireless SE is a completely different animal to any o Corsair headset we’ve reviewed, and numerous ways. Its price is in a different leag Its £180 inc VAT tag makes it the most expensive he Corsair has produced by far. If you’re still reading, that price is arguably justified, though, as the Virtuoso RGB Wireless SE is a superb headset. Its all-aluminium construction means the headset feels extremely solid without being heavy, and the headband offers a reasonable amount of padding and flex too. We did get a hint of pressure on our heads after prolonged use, though, and a little more padding on the headband would help. However, there’s a good amount of pressure from the earcups to both seal in sound and prevent leakage. Battery…

Joining the newly revamped MX Master 3 mouse (see opposite) is a new addition to Logitech’s keyboard line-up. The MX Keys is a slim, wireless keyboard with a premium look and feel and several useful extra features that, like the Master 3, potentially make it an ideal desktop work tool. If you’re familiar with Logitech’s other keyboards, you might recognise that the MX Keys is essentially a cut-down version of the Logitech Craft. That keyboard incorporates a dial in its top left corner, that can be used to control all sorts of features, in the same way that a scroll wheel can be used to zoom in and out or move around. With the MX Keys, you miss out on this dial. What you don’t miss out on, though, is…

No, that’s not a typo in the price section, the Metallic Gear Neo Mini really does cost just £60. But even in the flesh, we can’t quite see how the company isn’t losing cash on every sale, given it looks and feels like a case worth twice the price and even includes a good chunk of aluminium too. The internal design is rather basic, with a miniaturised tower design and a standard ATX PSU mount in the roof. The motherboard sits below this in a slightly recessed area of the motherboard tray, which allows the CPU clearance to stand at a healthy 160mm – far more than the Phanteks, Lian Li and Raijintek cases this month. There’s also space for a 345mm-long graphics card, so if you have hardware to…

Gears of War has made its name as a series where big dumb men shoot big dumb guns into big dumb enemies, resulting in an experience that’s as satisfying as it is stupid. Gears 5 is bigger and bloodier than any of its predecessors, but in a shocking twist, it’s no longer brainless. It manages to be the most interesting and complex entry yet, without sacrificing the straightforward joys of its grisly combat. Gears 5 places you in the role of Kait, the series’ first female protagonist who originally appeared as a sidekick in Gears 4. The story revolves around her personal quest to discover why she’s started having visions of the Locust Swarm – the Gears’ perennial adversaries – while she and her companions search for a way to…

Hunt: Showdown is all about choosing your moment. In the swamps of 19th-century Louisiana, multiple teams of gun-toting hunters attempt to track down and kill a powerful, otherworldly monster, but you choose now to engage with the hunt. You could approach the concept directly. Taking place in a large chunk of sweltering Louisiana Bayou, you must navigate the marshland in search of ‘clues’, supernatural anomalies that help you identify the location of the monster. On your journey, you’ll contend with various lesser creatures, such as zombies and squid-like horrors lurking in the water. Once you’ve pinned down the monster’s location, you can descend into its lair to fight it. The monster is randomly selected in each match, and includes beasts such as the Butcher, who is basically Leatherface on steroids,…

CPU AMD Ryzen 9 3900X £531 inc VAT scan.co.uk We’re basing our mini-ITX PC on the mighty AMD Ryzen 9 3900X. It has 12 cores that can process up to 24 threads at a time, so it can rip through multi-threaded tasks. Its boost clock of 4.6GHz also makes it AMD’s quickest new CPU in games and other lightly threaded tasks. It can also reach an all-core boost of a little over 4GHz. Its TDP is 105W, though, so you’ll need a decent cooler. Alternatives The Ryzen 9 3950X lands in November and could be worth the wait, depending on your needs. It has 16 cores, allowing it to process 32 threads, and has a peak boost frequency of 4.7GHz. Early results show it performing similarly to Intel’s Core i9-9980XE,…

Solid state drives (SSDs) have well and truly established themselves as the first choice for PC storage, with hard drives all but relegated to bulk, long-term storage only. Their much faster access times have brought about a revolution in the way we expect our PCs to respond, with boot times, game load times, file access and much more now measured in seconds rather than minutes. But what lies at the heart of this change in our computing lives? How exactly do SSDs work, and exactly what difference do they make? Read on to find out. WHAT ARE SSDS? The data storage capabilities of SSDs are derived from the same silicon wizardry behind CPUs and GPUs. By manipulating the surface of a wafer of silicon, etching it and adding various layers…

When Saar Drimer announced the Boldport Club was shutting its doors, it was disappointing. Now, though, it has opened up new avenues thanks to licensing agreements for the company’s iconic circuit designs. Drimer has confirmed licensing agreements with Velleman and Pimoroni, giving the two companies the rights to manufacture and sell Boldport-designed soldering kits, including the Ligemdio LED tester, new Cordwood Puzzle variants and the bare bones Cuttle Arduino-compatible.…

Now celebrating its 30th birthday, the Sound Blaster made a massive impact when it was launched back in 1989. It seems bizarre now, but at that time, gaming was still considered to be a frivolous novelty for the PC, which was primarily a business machine. While the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga had half-decent sound capabilities, most PCs came equipped with only a mono PC speaker, which simply blurted our chirps and beeps like an excitable 1970s telephone. PC audio was terrible. If you wanted proper music in your games then you needed a MIDI card. Rather than playing back a music recording like current games, MIDI music is a bit like a Word document. In a Word document, the fonts are stored somewhere else, and the Word file just…

The news that a French court has ruled in favour of the consumer right to resell games is likely to change the way we buy and play games forever. Because I have, like all of us, historically enjoyed the legal right to resell things I own, I’ve always only grudgingly accepted the new normal of downloadable media. When I buy a digital game (I mean non-physical, for anyone about to remind me that game discs are digital), I’ll never recoup any money from it, but if I buy the same game boxed, I can resell it for whatever the market is willing to pay, or pass it on to a friend. I can’t do that with my Steam games. It’s this inconsistency that led to a French consumer rights group,…

You really have to pay attention to the clock frequencies when picking an AMD 3rd-gen Ryzen CPU, as the company’s pairs of 6-core and 8-core models are mostly identical in other areas. It’s a very different situation from Intel’s line-up, where the Core i5-9600K, Core i7-9700K and Core i9-9900K couldn’t be more different, with  a mix of Hyper-Threading support, number of cores and the amount of cache making each chip a unique choice. As a case in point, AMD’s 6-core Ryzen 5 3600 and 3600X both sport six cores and 12 threads, thanks to Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT) support. Also, because these CPUs have two cores disabled over their two Core Complexes, which sport four cores apiece, both these 7nm CPUs have 1MB less L2 cache than their 8-core counterparts, as…

Gigabyte’s X570-I Aorus Pro WiFi is the more affordable of the two mini-ITX boards we’re looking at this month. At less £227 inc VAT, it’s noticeably cheaper than the ASRock X570 Phantom Gaming-ITX/TB3 and considerably more so than the Asus ROG Crosshair VIII Impact. It also has a very different feature set and design. There are downsides with Gigabyte’s effort, though, the most concerning of which is a lack of fan headers. There are just two available, one of which is for the CPU, giving you just one for your case fans. You could solve this problem with a fan hub or splitter cable, but we expect a minimum of two system fan headers on a modern mini-ITX motherboard. Gigabyte has also left a large portion of the rear I/O…

How we test Our case testing method is simple – use real, overclocked hardware in a standard system to see how cases perform in terms of cooling. Our trusty test gear includes an Intel Core i5-2500K overclocked to 4.4GHz using a vcore of 1.3V and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 570 1.3GB with a blower-style cooler. This is installed into an Asus P8Z77-I Deluxe mini-ITX motherboard with 4GB of Kingston DDR3 memory, a Crucial MX500 SDD and a SilverStone SST-ST45-SF SFX PSU. The CPU cooler is a low-profile Zalman CNPS 8900, which can fit into nearly all mini-ITX cases to obtain comparable numbers. We lock the GPU fan speed at 70 per cent to prevent automatic fan control from interfering with the results. We leave each case for 15 minutes, using…

The original Enthoo Evolv Shift had sub-par airflow, which was a shame because in many ways, Phanteks’ mini tower is one of the most interesting mini-ITX cases of the past few years. However, even though it can fit AIO coolers inside and has space for additional fans to the single 140mm model that’s included in the box, airflow still isn’t great. Thankfully, the company has listened to criticism and taken drastic measures to drop temperatures, but without altering the attractive design of the Shift too much. From the front, it looks the same, but viewed from the side, there’s no longer a tinted glass view of the interior, as the side panels are now covered in a fine mesh. The dense weave allows a reduced view of the interior and…

The Model O is the only one of the three most notable perforated lightweight mice that we were able to properly review in this group test, as samples of the recently announced Cooler Master MM710 aren’t available yet, and the various Finalmouse Ultralight models (see p60) are sold out and discontinued. It’s good, then, that the Model O does an excellent job of showcasing the design approach. The big benefit here is, of course, the low weight, and sure enough, the Model O weighs just 67g, while the smaller Model O- weighs a mere 58g. Those are astonishingly low numbers for a mouse that still includes frills such as RGB lighting. The downside is that you get dust and other crud inside the mouse, which was evident after using our…

The Viper is Razer’s direct response to the new trend for ultra-light mice. Considering the style hasn’t been around all that long, we’re impressed to see a peripheral juggernaut such as Razer respond so quickly to it. Weighing in at just 69g, the Viper ticks the first box for being classed as truly ultra-light. What’s more, Razer has achieved this weight while still managing to add a thin layer of rubber to the sides to aid grip. Most alternatives have done away with rubber as it adds to the weight of the mouse. Another key feature that’s present and correct is an ultra-flexible cable. The one here looks just like a conventional braided cable, but the inner core of the cable is very thin-walled and flexible, so it provides very…

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…

It feels like Remedy Entertainment has been working towards Control over its entire existence. It takes the best elements from the studio’s previous games – the action of Max Payne, the horror and storytelling ambitions of Alan Wake, the stylish weirdness of Quantum Break – and brings them together in one of the most distinctive settings we’ve seen in a game yet. It’s thrilling, gorgeous, incredibly weird and, just occasionally, extremely frustrating. Nonetheless, it will stick in your mind for a long time. Control sees you play Jesse Faden, a young drifter who walks into the Federal Bureau of Control (FBC) to apply for the job of Janitor’s Assistant. Within minutes of arriving, she discovers that the Director of the Bureau is dead, and that she has been selected as…

OPINION CROSS AT CROSS›BUY When the Oculus Quest launched earlier this year, one of the big questions was whether it would support cross-play for users’ existing Oculus Rift libraries. Oculus responded, saying cross-buy support was up to the discretion of the developer. As a result, some games on Oculus devices support cross-play, while others, such as Superhot and Job Simulator, need to be bought anew if you want to play them on a separate Oculus device. However, when it actually comes to purchasing games, Oculus doesn’t make it at all clear which games support cross-buy and which ones don’t. The answer is hidden in a sub-category of games named ‘Quest and Rift apps’ that’s very difficult to find on the storefront. This situation is frustrating, as players obviously want to…

1 Install CPU With AMD CPUs, use the small arrow marks on the socket and CPU substrate to align the CPU pins with the socket. The pins are very fragile, so take care not to drop the CPU, and keep it in its protective housing until you’re near your PC. Pull up the lever, lower the CPU carefully into the socket, then push down the lever to lock it in place. 2 Install memory As there are only two memory slots on our motherboard, there’s no need to worry about using the correct ones to enable dual-channel mode. Push down the clips on either side of the memory slots, and push the memory down (the notches ensure it can only be inserted the right way around) until the…

INTERVIEW Ryan Brown from Quarter Arcades The nostalgia-fuelled ‘mini’ console trend is in full swing, despite a few missteps along the way – such as Sony’s ill-received and rapidly discounted PlayStation Mini, which failed to include any of the platform’s most well-remembered games. However, consoles were already pretty compact; what happens if you apply the same concept to some larger items of yesteryear, such as arcade cabinets? That’s where Quarter Arcades, from Numskull Designs, come in. ‘Well, the pun certainly helps,’ says Ryan Brown of the company’s naming, and the related decision to scale its products down to one quarter of their original sizes. ‘It’s mostly down to their manageable size; we think they’re still fairly large, but small enough to be reasonably stored or displayed in UK homes, and…

When building a self-contained Raspberry Pi project, there’s always the question of how to display its data. A traditional LCD panel is a colourful option, but draws a lot of power and glows brightly at times you might not want to be disturbed. An OLED display is compact and eye-catching, but a little cramped. Meanwhile, devices such as the Pimoroni Unicorn HAT and its HD upgrade are neat and colourful, but lack the resolution for any display beyond simple icons. The Inky wHAT, meanwhile, comes rather out of left field. Based on an E-Ink display, and building on the earlier Inky pHAT displays for the Raspberry Pi Zero range, the oversized add-on board – the ‘w’ stands for ‘wide’ – adds a 4.2in display panel via a solderless connection to…