Table of contents for March 2020 in Custom PC UK

The RX 5500 XT is alive Finally out in the wild is AMD’s Radeon RX 5500 XT, its new graphics board that – through board partners – is already available with sufficient stock out there. That’s not something that can be said for every launch we got from AMD over the past year or so. The RX 5500 XT is a Navi 14 GPU with 1,408 stream processors and a base clock of 1670MHz to a boost of 1845MHz. There are 4GB and 8GB versions and both use GDDR6 on a 128-bit bus. Custom variants are expected to play around with clock speeds, as always. Price-wise, AMD is positioning this one in the slot where the Radeon RX 590 used to sit. As such, expect to spend around $169 US…

We were quite fond of Cooler Master’s previous mini-ITX cases. The Elite 120 and Elite 130 were compact, low-riding, but still had room enough for long GPUs and ATX PSUs. However, with the Elite 210, things got a little trickier, with a smaller chassis cutting the GPU length to a paltry 210mm, although it did still offer room for an AIO liquid cooler. The MasterCase H100 is another very small mini-ITX case from Cooler Master, which is different again. It’s more of a small tower compared with its predecessors, although it barely tops 300mm in any dimension. However, the added height hasn’t been put to particularly good use. There are three or four inches above the motherboard that seems to be largely wasted space, with a mesh vent in the…

There’s no gaming arena more competitive than esports, so it’s no surprise that the SteelSeries Sensei Ten takes aim at its key rival by one-upping it when it comes to sensor sensitivity. The Sensei Ten uses an updated version of the TrueMove 3 sensor used in the SteelSeries Rival 600 – a mouse that’s already on our Elite list. This new version, called TrueMove Pro, has a vast sensitivity level of 18,000DPI. It also doesn’t have any artificial acceleration or smoothing. Crucially – at least, if such specs are anything to go by – it’s  more sensitive than the 16,000DPI unit inside the Razer Lancehead Tournament Edition, which is our current Elite ambidextrous gaming mouse. That £80 rodent is designed for esports too. The 18,000DPI sensor will be overkill for…

The latest Asus gaming laptop is a bruiser. It’s an old-school, 17.3in machine that weighs nearly 3kg and arrives with more coloured lights than the average Christmas tree. This machine has per-key RGB lighting and a prominent ring of LEDs around the base, but it doesn’t just rely on lighting for bold design. The lid and wrist rest are covered in brushed aluminium, and the right-hand side is decorated with prominent ridges. There’s more patterned material at the rear, and a large, chrome-effect logo on the lid. It looks eye-catching, but there are compromises elsewhere such as in build quality. There’s movement in the area around the trackpad, and the underside is a little creaky. The screen is stronger, but we’d recommend using a sleeve at minimum to protect this…

DISWOE WIRELESS CONTROLLER FOR NINTENDO SWITCH / £27.99 inc VAT SUPPLIER amazon.co.uk The Diswoe is a strange fish: a Bluetooth Nintendo Switch gamepad that also doubles as a PC controller. On a PC, you can connect it via USB as well as Bluetooth. The USB connection also charges the device with its on-board battery pack, giving it six hours of use. The pad is lightweight but doesn’t feel flimsy with enough weight to give its rumble motors something to work with, and the control sticks and buttons are comfy and precise. That being said, this is a Switch pad first and foremost, so although it shares a lot of visual similarities with an Xbox pad, it doesn’t have analogue shoulder triggers. If you’re expecting the pad to handle your PC…

With two very attractive boards to its name this month, Gigabyte must be proud of its designers at the moment. The TRX40 Aorus Master employs a huge heatpipe-equipped heatsink array that stretches right around the top and left side of the motherboard. The heatsinks are by far the most intricate examples on test too, with dozens of small fins, which look more like CPU cooler fins than the lumps of aluminium you can see on the other TRX40 boards this month. A small fan is included, but it only cools a very small section of the heatsink. As a result, the heatsink gets toastier under sustained loads than some of the other boards on test. Gigabyte’s software reported that the VRMs, which sit above a 16+3-phase power delivery system, were…

The Asus PG27UQ was the first gaming monitor to deliver a truly spectacular HDR experience thanks to its 384-zone FALD backlight. However, a high price and limited HDR content restricted its appeal at the time of launch. A year and a half on, though, how does it hold up? Well, the first thing to report is that, sadly, the price hasn’t dropped all that much. When first released, it went for around £2,200 inc VAT whereas now it’s widely available for closer to £1,900 inc VAT. Saving £300 isn’t to be sniffed at, but this is still a hugely expensive display. What’s more, the other key limiting factor of this display, which is its size, also hasn’t changed. We said at launch, and still feel, that for such a colossal…

We looked at the MSI MAG321CURV a few months ago and found it to be a perfectly capable 4K monitor for those who want a fun, colourful picture. However, we didn’t focus too heavily on its HDR capabilities, so we thought it worth a revisit, as its performance is representative of many a DisplayHDR 400 rated monitor. Like the AOC AG273QX, the MAG321CURV is a monitor that’s based on a VA-type LCD panel that has an inherently high contrast ratio, in this case, 2,500:1. The monitor relies on this to create its HDR-like image, along with its extended colour gamut. Also like the AOC, the MAG321CURV’s wide colour gamut can’t be turned down for use in normal sRGB mode. However, the monitor only extends very slightly, hitting 78 per cent…

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…

Rockstar Games is a master of world design, but as game designers the studio has relied on old tricks for a long time. Grand Theft Auto V brought players an incredibly detailed city to explore, but struggled to give them a reason to explore it. The main story led players by the nose through its tightly scripted missions, while the game’s wide range of side activities were ultimately arbitrary. The crucial difference with Red Dead Redemption 2 (RDR2) is that Rockstar makes that attention to detail the point. The studio’s latest game isn’t just a visual triumph, but a tactile and narrative one as well. Every action, side mission and tiny cabin in the woods legitimises its place in the game world through Rockstar’s sheer commitment to craft, and a…

REVIEW STAR WARS: VADER IMMORTAL EPISODE III / £7.99 inc VAT DEVELOPER ILMxLAB / PUBLISHER Oculus Finally, we have the conclusion to ILMxLAB’s VR Star Wars experience, which would have fared better as a single product, if we’re honest. Nonetheless, Episode III offers the most comprehensive Star Wars experience of the trilogy, giving you the widest range of equipment yet and letting you battle the Dark Lord of the Sith himself, as well as offering the definitive version of its Jedi Dojo. If only the Story Mode gave players a little more freedom to experiment. Having been left for dead by Vader at the end of Episode II, Episode III sees players gradually working their way back up into Vader’s Imperial Fortress for a climactic showdown. On the way, you’ll…

1 INSTALL CPU Remove the Threadripper CPU from its packaging, open the socket mechanism and slide the CPU into the second metal tray from the top. Then use the included tool to tighten the three locking screws in the correct order, which is listed on top of the tray. 2 INSTALL WATERBLOCK The waterblock comes with thermal paste pre-applied, so you don’t need to apply it. The ports should sit one above the other, not side by side, as the former will ensure best performance using a Threadripper CPU. 3 INSTALL THE MEMORY With the memory, start by using the real memory modules and install them into slots one, three, six and eight. This will ensure they run in quad-channel mode. The Light Enhancement dummy modules can…

INTERVIEW Bitmap Books Sam Dyer’s Bitmap Books launched onto the scene in 2014, with a crowdfunding campaign for Commodore 64: A Visual Commpendium – the spelling of the last word was a deliberate pun, as Dyer explained in an interview published in Issue 136. It launched amid a collection of similar nostalgia-fuelled publications, many of which fell by the wayside, but half a decade later, the business has only grown. ‘We now have 15 published books, which include visual compendiums on the ZX Spectrum, Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) and Super Nintendo (SNES), as well as a fully licensed Sega Master System visual compendium, two official SNK books on the Neo Geo and Metal Slug, a Point-and-Click art book and a book all about Computer Role Playing Games (CRPGs) [reviewed in…

After waiting 15 years since Half-Life 2 was launched, and over 12 years since Episode 2 came out, Valve recently announced its long-awaited follow-up, Half-Life: Alyx. Valve states the new game is not Half-Life 3, and that the game is also a VR exclusive. The trailer turns the hype meter past 11, with some revolutionary first-person shooter mechanics that make it look immensely awesome. However, Valve is pitching it as being ‘made for Index’ – the company’s premium, extremely expensive £919 headset. Unless you’re already into VR, this makes the game exclusionary for most of us. This is a business decision to push Valve’s own expensive hardware Valve has stated it’s committed to the Half-Life VR universe, but we’ve heard its commitments before, many years ago. I remember when Valve…

CPUs for gaming Now that Half Life Alyx has been announced, I have finally convinced myself that a VR set is necessary. This will require a full PC upgrade in order to support the minimum system requirements. One aspect that’s causing me some confusion is which route to take for the CPU. Previous system builds have been relatively straightforward, as I just purchased the fastest Intel CPU I could afford, but now that Ryzen has stormed into the market, the decision is more difficult. When comparing a top end Core i7 and Ryzen 7, the Intel product is approximately 15fps better in Far Cry 5. However, all the recent Custom PC recommendations seem to point towards the purchase of the AMD product line, which is clearly superior in other tests.…

The Turtle Beach Elite Atlas Aero packs plent impressive-sounding words into its name does its performance match up to its prizewinning, world-carrying, lightweight moniker? Yes and This is a premium, wireless headset that includes feat such as ProSpecs glasses relief, Nanoclear speakers and TruSpeak microphone technology, but the thing you’ll notic before any of those buzzwords is the design of this headset. It’s sleek, with its nearly all-black look, and there are some nice touches of good build quality, such as the exposed steel band and chunky earcup arm joints. The cushioning on the earcups is also very deep and inside you’ll see the speakers are covered by a near-transparent mesh that allows you to gaze lovingly at the 50mm drivers below. There’s a chance this mesh lets a little…

CyberPower’s Infinity X99 Super tries to fight back against AMD’s multi-core dominance with a serious piece of Intel hardware. The Core i9-9900KS has eight Hyper-Threaded cores, matching the core and thread count of AMD’s Ryzen 7 3800X, and it has a peak turbo frequency of 5GHz, along with a 4GHz base clock. This will give it an edge in some games and lightly threaded software, but it can’t match AMD’s latest Ryzen 9 chips in terms of heavily multi-threaded performance. CyberPower has paired it with an MSI GeForce RTX 2080 Super card. The GPU is fully enabled, giving it 3,072 stream processors, and it also has 8GB of GDDR6 memory running at Nvidia’s improved speed of 15.5GHz (effective). The MSI Ventus XS OC card used here has fans with steep blades…

With Asus already showing us its flagship TRX40 board in the form of the ROG Zenith II Extreme (see Issue 197, p22) last month, we were keen to see if it could reproduce a similar level of awesomeness for a more affordable price tag. Costing close to £500, the ROG Strix TRX40-E Gaming isn’t exactly cheap, but it’s one of the less expensive TRX40 boards out there. It certainly looks the part too, with a far more refined and compact look than the ASRock TRX40 Taichi, and a neutral, minimalist design when it comes to colours and heatsinks. Rather than opt for a lavish two-part, actively ooled heatsink for the 16-stage VRMs, though, gl unit with a pair of small el packed array of fins. This cooling system isn’t as…

We’re hoping be looking at a more affordable TRX40 motherboard from MSI next month, but this issue we’re putting the company’s flagship TRX40 through its paces and, at a whopping price of £675 inc VAT, the Creator TRX40 is a  monster. The cooling system is the most elaborate example on test, with one of the longest heatpipes we’ve ever seen connecting both the massive VRM heatsinks with the large 5cm chipset fan. This means the whole contraption is actively cooled, as heat is transferred around the motherboard using the heatpipe. The fan, which only spun up under medium to high loads and was quiet when it did so, also has a small cut-out sections, which allow airflow to reach all three M.2 ports too. These M.2 ports also have thermal…

The Acer CG437K is a perfect example of the rather baffling array of HDR monitors that are available. Putting aside for a moment the fact that its size makes it more of a TV replacement than a conventional monitor, this thing has an intriguing take on HDR. Rated for DisplayHDR 1000 certification, it boasts a 1,000cd/m2 maximum brightness and a native contrast ratio of a whopping 4,000:1. However, there’s no FALD backlight here to achieve that DisplayHDR 1000 rating; instead it uses just 16 backlighting zones that are controlled via LEDs along the top and bottom edges of the screen. These zones split the display in half top to bottom and into eight columns across its length, so that even the tiny cluster of pixels required to illuminate a cursor…

When we originally reviewed the PG27UQ, we lamented its relatively modest screen size for the price and felt its 4K resolution unnecessary. Enter the PG35VQ, which corrects both those problems, although it adds a couple of its own. Most obviously, there’s the even higher price. You can buy a 55in OLED TV for watching all that HDR video and a 34in ultrawide monitor for your PC and still have change left over for a few games, peripherals or whatever else you might spend £500 on. FALD backlights are expensive to produce, and the likes of this display make that abundantly clear. You get a total of 512 (32 x 16) backlights behind this LCD display that combine to create a truly dazzling HDR display. If you’ve never experienced a display that’s…

On a technical and mechanical level, the new Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (see opposite) is a decent game, both looking fantastic and feeling great to play. But it’s also a game at war with itself, wanting to be simultaneously an important work of art, while also being a big daft lark. This is nothing new for Call of Duty or gaming as a whole, but in Modern Warfare this conflict is so extreme that it completely undermines the game’s artistic intentions. The single-player campaign focuses on a supposedly gritty, realistic depiction of contemporary war, going beyond the themes of soldierly honour and sacrifice that were the key hallmarks of the series in its early years. In Modern Warfare, the sacrifice made by its leading characters is not one of…

Need for Speed: Heat sees Ghost Games (formed from the ashes of Criterion Games) being inspired by its legacy. The result is a racer that combines the summery open-world fun of Burnout Paradise with the muscular car chases of Need for Speed: Rivals. The story places you playing an up-and-coming street racer looking to make his name on the roads of Palm City. By  day, you participate in organised races to earn ‘Bank’ (or ‘money’ as it’s known by most humans). When darkness falls, the game switches to illegal street racing, which increases the ‘Rep’ points required to partake in more advanced races and unlock new cars and parts. This switching between day and night is Heat’s key mechanic, and it’s smartly designed. Changing between the two is performed manually, accompanied by…

Once you’re in Windows, download and install ASRock’s Motherboard Utility software and Quad M.2 Card Software. The former will let you control the motherboard fan headers and the latter the fan speed on the M.2 expansion card. We’ve set the fans and pump to sit at low speeds up to certain temperatures, but we’ve kept the pump at low speeds for most of the curve, as you’ll see very little benefit above 30 per cent power. We’ve opted not to apply a manual overclock, but instead make use of AMD’s Precision Boost Overdrive (PBO) settings in the EFI. This increases the all-core boost frequency and can help to maintain boost frequencies for longer, boosting single and multi-threaded performance. Start by heading into the EFI and setting the XMP profile. This…

A series of firmware updates, made available since launch, have dramatically improved the power draw and heat output of the Raspberry Pi 4. The updates dropped its operating temperature after 60 seconds of a heavy synthetic CPU and GPU workload from 72.1°C at launch with a 7.28W power draw, to just 64.8°C now with a 6.41W power draw. To update Raspbian, simply open a Terminal and type: sudo update && sudo full-upgrade sudo shutdown -r now…

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

Recovering from various family Christmas traumas, I’m reminded of the old adage ‘never discuss politics or religion in polite company’. I would like to add a third topic: video games. If your polite company is anything like mine, you’ve probably had some frustrating conversations about the merits of your hobby. At best, we’re wasting our time when we could be watching TV. At worst, gamers are turning themselves into either zombies or crazed mass killers, depending on which scare story your relative read in the Daily Mail this week. I suspect I Am Jesus Christ isn’t particularly controversial at all Politics, religion and video games can cause arguments, but at least we’re past the Mary Whitehouse era of religiously conservative censorship, right? Whatever daft opinions various folk might have about…

The XMG Fusion 15 is a highly configurable laptop from German brand Schenker. This particular unit has a couple of familiar components: an RTX 2070 Max-Q GPU and a Core i7-9750H processor. The RTX 2070 Max-Q is a cutback, more efficient version of one of Nvidia’s key GPUs. It has the 2,304 stream processors and 8GB memory of the standard mobile RTX 2070, but its clock speeds have been reduced to 885MHz and 1185MHz. As for the Core i7-9750H, it’s a 6-core CPU with base and boost speeds of 2.6GHz and 4.5GHz. It’s used in virtually every high-end gaming laptop now. It has enough single-threaded power to avoid bottlenecks, and its cores mean there’s ample bandwidth for photo editing and multi-tasking. Elsewhere, there’s 16GB of 2666MHz memory and a 1TB…

As efficient as AMD’s 7nm Zen 2 architecture is, packing 24 cores under a Threadripper heatspreader is still going to demand some hefty cooling. If you’re spending upwards of £1,350 on a CPU, you’re not likely to be short of a bob or two of course. In which case, while AMD’s Threadripper 3960X and 3970X dish out plenty of heat, you’ll likely have the funds to find a powerful and exotic liquid-cooling solution to deal with it. However, not all of us are keen on opting for liquid cooling. AIO liquid coolers can have pumps that are whiny, and their longevity is often brought into question too, even if leaks are extremely unlikely. Meanwhile, custom water cooling is even more niche and expensive. So just what are your options if…

The Roccat Kone has been around for a number of years now and has come in all manner of variations in that time. The Pure Ultra version, though, is the first one that has really piqued our interest. It jumps on the ultralight mouse bandwagon, boasting a weight of 66g thanks to it using a perforated honeycomb-like structure. What makes this mouse decidedly different from any of the other ultralight mice that use this sort of structure, though, is that it’s purely internal. The outer surface just looks like a regular old mouse, with a matt black plastic finish. Roccat considers this a significant plus point for comfort, but we’ve actually come to quite like the extra grip some holey mice can provide. Nonetheless, the Pure Ultra does have an…

The CCL RaiderX is a rare beast at the moment – a gaming PC where both the CPU and GPU come from AMD. The Gigabyte-made Radeon RX 5700 XT has the usual 8GB of memory and 2,560 stream processors, and this model also ups the game clock (the frequency at which AMD says the GPU is likely to run in games) from 1755MHz to 1795MHz. That said, the maximum boost clock remains unchanged at 1905MHz. The GPU is paired with an AMD Ryzen 7 3800X. It’s an 8-core chip with SMT (giving it 16 threads), and it’s left at its stock base and boost speeds of 3.9GHz and 4.5GHz. Those core components are paired with 16GB of 3200MHz DDR4 memory, and there’s a 1TB M.2 Corsair PCI-E 3 SSD as…

The AOC AG273QX represents perhaps the most common type of HDR display available at the moment. This 27in monitor uses a VA-type LCD panel that provides it with a natively high contrast ratio of 3,000:1. Combine this with a slightly extended colour gamut and you have an instant HDR-like monitor. However, the telling detail of this display is its basic DisplayHDR 400 rating. If you recall from our HDR monitor guide, this means the AG273QX only achieves the same level of HDR as many existing non-HDR monitors can provide: that is, a contrast ratio of at least 1,000:1 and at least 95 per cent of the sRGB colour space. In the case of this monitor, it fails to make the grade for higher classes of DisplayHDR on three counts. Firstly,…

Infinity’s Ward’s latest Modern Warfare reboot is the strongest game in the series for years, with a no-holds-barred campaign and a fully fledged multiplayer offering. The campaign aims to provide a gritty and authentic portrayal of today’s war zones, aiming for a tone that’s less like an action movie and more like the war documentary Restrepo. Set primarily in the fictional country of Urzikstan – a thinly veiled analogue for Syria – it sees Captain Price team up with soldiers from the UK, USA and Urzikstan as they hunt for a stolen brace of chemical weapons. In some ways, this new direction works well. Early in the game, you play an SAS soldier in London when terrorists attack Piccadilly Circus. The resulting scene is one of genuine horror and confusion as…

The Outer Worlds’ premise is basically Fallout 4 in space. It mimics Bethesda’s massively popular RPG in every meaningful way, be it combat, dialogue, environment design or questing. That isn’t necessarily bad, but sadly it sticks far too closely to the Fallout 4 template with only a fraction of the budget. The result is an inferior imitator of a four-year-old game. It’s set in the Halcyon Colony, a star system in the far reaches of space controlled by a conglomerate of corporations known as the Board. You play a wannabe colonist whose transport ship ran out of power en route, leaving you frozen in cryostasis for the best part of a century. You’re eventually defrosted by an eccentric scientist called Phineas Wells, who wants your help thawing out the other colonists…

CPU AMD Ryzen 9 3900X £1,350 inc VAT scan.co.uk Nothing else in terms of desktop CPUs comes close to the performance 3rd-gen Threadripper offers, both in terms of multi-threaded tasks and bandwidth, with a total of 72 PCI-E lanes. So, the choice comes down to either the 24-core Threadripper 3960X or the 32-core Threadripper 3970X. Both sport Simultaneous Multi-Threading, so they support twice as many threads as they have cores and both have the same amount of L3 cache at 128MB. Crucially, they both boost to the same single-core frequency of 4.5GHz. Meanwhile, the price difference between them is significant – more than £500 – and while professionals may need all the grunt they can get, for a high-end multi-purpose system, the benefits of the extra eight cores and 16…

Super-slim radiators There’s a plethora of different radiator sizes out there, and if you know your fins-per-inch from your bleed ports, then you’ll know there’s more to your choice of radiator than just its length or the fan size it supports. The thickness of a radiator is important for a number of reasons. You may not have room for a 45mm or 60mm-thick model in your case, as drive mounts, cable-routing paraphernalia or existing fan mounts might get in the way. For this reason, people with small to medium-sized cases need to make do with thinner radiators. However, while a thinner radiator’s cooling capacity is ultimately lower than that of a thicker one, there’s a few good reasons to use them. Firstly, pushing or pulling air through a thick radiator…

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

Unfortunately, because two of the words in my job title are ‘Technical Marketing’, I sometimes get dragged into projects aspects of which drive me around the bend. One such recent project required us to propose a new range of systems and submit benchmark results at specific settings. The purpose of the project itself is not important; what is was the frankly ridiculous settings at which we had to run the benchmarks. Part of me was relieved to see that the benchmarks were all real games, and not synthetic tests such as 3DMark. However, two of the games were from 2016, with only one from 2018 and none from this year, so none of them was really going to push the boundaries of modern hardware, let alone get gamers excited about…