Table of contents for January 2022 in Custom PC UK

Truth to power In response to James Gorbold’s column about the importance of power efficiency, there are some things I want to check in case I’m gravely mistaken about the power consumption of my own PC. I think this is a deeply important aspect of our usage of these systems that needs to be properly understood. Perhaps it would be worth spending time on a longer feature? My understanding is that, at any given time, an ATX power supply will draw the power equivalent to the power required by components, plus power lost due to PSU inefficiency. This is important, because power is basically heat and drawing the maximum capacity of your PSU at all times means you need to shed a lot of heat. I believe I can demonstrate…

After the Core i7-11700K proved almost as potent as the Core i9-11900K, but for much less cash, Alder Lake sees Intel’s mainstream Core i7 chip go back to basics. It has a lower core count than the 12900K, but also a much lower price, retailing for £150 less than the Core i9-12900K. It actually has the same number of P-cores as the Core i9-12900K, which should give it serious clout across the board. These can hit a peak of 5GHz at stock speed, which is 200MHz lower than the Core i9-12900K, but it did hit this frequency regularly. In fact, we saw an all-core boost of 5GHz regularly in multi-threaded workloads too. The E-cores usually sat at 3.6GHz in our tests, but according to Intel they can reach 3.8GHz, which…

Asus’ mini-ITX motherboards usually get released a few weeks after a major chipset launch, but this time around Asus has seen fit to get its new Z690 dinky offering out the door on day one. The ROG Strix Z690-I Gaming WiFi looks absolutely stunning, and Asus has also thrown in some funky engineering to make the most of the smaller form factor. Sadly, we couldn’t persuade Asus to let us in on the expected launch price at the time of going to press, so we can’t come to a firm conclusion nor offer scores or awards, but our usual testing and keen eyes will hopefully still give you some insight, especially given the fantastic performance of Intel’s Alder Lake CPUs in our reviews (see p16). We expect this board to…

While there are some very reasonably priced all-inone liquid coolers available that offer decent cooling for your cash, there’s definitely a trend towards pushing performance and features, and of course the price tag, much higher than we’ve seen in the past. In fact, the cost of numerous liquid coolers has topped the £200 mark in the past year, and the latest to do so is Thermaltake’s Toughliquid Ultra 360. It will set you back £240 inc VAT, and at face value, it doesn’t seem to justify its price tag. Combining a 27mm-thick 360mm radiator and powerful pump, there’s clearly some scope for serious cooling as with most cooling systems based on 360mm radiators, although you can certainly buy similar coolers in terms of what’s in the box for a lot…

Our recent M.2 group test in Issue 215 saw some of the cheaper PCI-E 4 offerings such as ADATA’s own S50 Lite offer decent bang for your buck, although in real-world use you’re unlikely to see noticeable benefits by jumping from PCI-E 3 to PCI-E 4 unless you regularly shift multiple terabytes of data around your storage system. As a result, cheaper PCI-E 3 SSDs can still provide excellent performance while saving you some cash or, in the case of the ADATA XPG Spectrix S40G, you can spend a little bit more money and get an RGB-equipped SSD instead. Yes, you heard us right – this PCI-E 3 SSD has its own RGB lighting array – a feature that’s usually only found in slower 2.5in SATA SSDs. What’s more, the…

REUSAPAD / £19.99 inc VAT SUPPLIER amazon.co.uk The smartness of smart notepads can often be tethered to the software that comes with them. The Reusapad bypasses this problem by not using its own software, instead relying on Microsoft Lens to handle the smart part of the equation. This allows you to scan, store and organise photographed pages easily into compatible formats. The notepad itself is a spiral-bound A5 affair with 56 pages, half of which are lined and half of which are plain. The paper quality is high, and the pages are durable enough to be used plenty of times, as long as you don’t press too hard with the pen – they’re even waterproof, so you won’t ruin them by overcleaning. Meanwhile, the pen is a Pilot FriXion, which…

Wait, what, sorry, why is this Labs test kicking off with a GeForce RTX 2060 at the end of 2021? The answer is because it’s made a reappearance in the shops, with new cards being made. As a response to the huge stock shortages of Nvidia Ampere GPUs, the RTX 2060 was rushed back out to fill in the gaps and get some cards back on the shelves. There are even rumours of a 12GB version coming out in the near future. In the meantime, though, it’s the 6GB RTX 2060 that’s appearing in affordable PCs from a number of system builders at the moment, and also retailing in the shops for more than its original launch cost of £329 inc VAT – remarkable for a GPU that’s nearly three…

There was a brief moment where Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3060 was a half-decent buy. It was regularly available in stock for a few months, and we even managed to squeeze one into our £1,099 ‘beat the scalpers’ build in Issue 217. Recently, however, it’s been increasingly hard to find and steadily going up in price, while AMD has returned fire with the Radeon RX 6600 XT. Despite having very similar nomenclature to the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, the standard RTX 3060 is quite a different GPU. It’s based on Nvidia’s 276mm² GA106 die, rather than the GA104 die used in the 3060 Ti. At full strength, this chip has 3,840 stream processors cores and 30 RT cores. However, the GeForce RTX 3060 has two of its Streaming Multiprocessor blocks disabled,…

At the end of last year, Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3070 gave us our first glimpse of the company’s GA104 chip, along with a nostalgically low launch price of £469 inc VAT. Like other Nvidia Ampere GPUs, it’s since fallen victim to stock shortages, speculation and insatiable demand, and the cheapest price we could find now was £800. That’s not far off double the original price, and only £65 less than the Ti version. Unlike the RTX 3070 Ti, the original RTX 3070 has two streaming multiprocessors disabled, giving it a total of 5,888 stream processors, plus 46 RT cores for ray tracing, and it also has a slightly lower clock speed than the Ti. In addition, it lacks the Ti card’s GDDR6X memory, with its 8GB of standard GDDR6 memory…

To celebrate Quake’s 25th anniversary, Bethesda Softworks has released a remastered version of the classic FPS. This shiny new version optimises the game for modern machines and even adds a new expansion from Wolfenstein: The New Order developer Machine Games. In terms of basic quality-of-life features, the remaster adds proper support for full-screen and windowed play, plus widescreen resolutions and FOV scaling. The new graphical features, meanwhile, include anti-aliasing, ambient occlusion, and dynamic lighting and shadows. Quake couples these broader bells and whistles with sharper textures and a complete overhaul of the game’s models, making them slightly less lumpy without compromising their distinctive designs. The Quake that emerges from this makeover is slightly brighter and more vivid, while retaining its moody atmosphere. It’s still brown and murky, but its brown…

Like it or not, every few years technology advances and our once improve performance of your PC, but levelling favourable way to upgrade your PC. It motherboard, or is another added cost when upgrading those features. Upgrading from one type of memory to noticeable performance improvements either. There’s often increased latencies with newer, faster standards, in addition to higher prices for the same capacity and far fewer kits from higher bandwidth and higher frequencies. The first desktop CPU platform to offer DDR5 support will be Intel’s Z690 chipset with its new LGA1700 socket and Alder Lake CPUs, although the shift to DDR5 won’t be complete, at least not at first. While high-end more affordable ones, will support DDR4. In fact, you’ll even see two versions samemodelinsomecases, suchasMSI’s MAG Z690 Tomahawk,…

ANALYSIS The MNT Reform project For most laptop manufacturers, the computer is the product, but for MNT, the laptop is merely part of the story. The MNT Reform (see over) is designed to be open – aggressively so, in fact. From the 3D-printed trackball to the motherboard, the system-on-module, and even the system management controller – both hardware and software – every part that goes into the Reform is published under an open-source licence. If you’re unhappy with the performance, you can – skills allowing – design a replacement system-on-module using the design files published for the original as a basis. MNT itself is already doing so, in fact, promising both a more powerful Arm variant and investigating the possibility of an even more open design built on a RISC-V…

Hands-on with EK’s FLT 80 If you’re building a watercooled PC, your choice of pump and reservoir is often very important. Your decision will dictate the ease with which you can fill the loop, the visibility of your coolant and how you route your tubing around the case, since many combined pumpand-reservoir units have multiple inlets and outlets. They’re also a critical choice when it comes to building a small water-cooled PC and can often make or break a plan for a watercooling system. It’s usually a case of smaller is better when it comes to combo units here, but it can be tricky to integrate a powerful DDC or D5 pump into a small unit while not make gurgling noises and still enabling you to bleed air from the…

Thanks to supply shortages, AMD’s Ryzen 5 5600X has often been a tad too expensive to offer a viable alternative to Intel’s Core i5 chips, and it now has its work cut out even further, with Intel’s latest Core i5-12600K coming in at just £289 inc VAT. Like its pricier siblings, the Core i5-12600K has a mixture of high-performance P-cores and power-efficient E-cores with six of the former, compared to eight for the other two CPUs on test this month. Meanwhile, the count of E-cores stands at four, which is the same as the Core i7-12700K, giving it 16 threads in total. It’s equipped with 20MB of L3 cache and 9.5MB of L2 cache while the frequencies are a tad slower than those of the Core i7. The lack of…

At the complete opposite end of the spectrum to the Kingston Fury Beast DDR5 opposite is Corsair’s Dominator Platinum RGB DDR5 kit; as its name suggests, it certainly does have RGB lighting and a whole lot of aesthetic prowess besides. The modules themselves have a matt finish, which looks fantastic, and the heatsinks themselves are enormous. This should mean they’re more than up to the task of dealing with any extra heat load from the DDR5 memory’s additional circuitry for voltage regulation, as well as overclocking. The downside to the heatsinks is their size. At a height of 55mm, the Dominator Platinum RGB modules are extremely tall, so you’ll need to factor this height into your PC build, especially if you’re using an air cooler that overhangs the DIMM slots…

The range of NZXT’s all-in-one liquid coolers can be a little confusing, but there are some clear differences between the latest models as well as their predecessors if you delve into the specs. The company now uses the latest 7th-generation Asetek pump design, but it’s the lighting, software control and fan speed that differentiates them, with the NZXT Kraken X73 RGB sitting in the middle of the pack. It has a 360mm radiator and three 120mm fans, but unlike the current Z-series models, it lacks software control for fan speed, so you’ll need to hook them up to your motherboard. That’s easily done, as the Kraken X73 RGB includes a splitter cable, so you just need one spare fan header. Unlike the fans, the pump can be software controlled, although…

Available for under £400, the LG UltraGear 32GP850 provides a large 32in screen size and a rapid 165Hz (overclockable to 180Hz) refresh rate. What’s more, it uses LG’s Nano IPS panel technology for class-leading response time and what should be solid image quality. It’s an attractive-looking bit of kit, if a little on the plain and plastic side. There’s no RGB or extra gaming hardware, such as a headset hook, but it’s a simple, classy-looking unit. The stand is reasonably elegant, although the long pointy leg design is a little less practical than a flat square base. It offers height and tilt adjustment, as well as rotation, although there’s no swivel option. Around the back, the ports face directly outwards rather than downwards. It’s easier to plug cables into the…

AMD’s latest RDNA2 desktop GPU is the Radeon RX 6600, which takes the same Navi 23 die used in the Radeon RX 6600 XT and cuts down the spec. It has 28 compute units enabled, compared to 32 on the XT model, giving it 1,792 stream processors and 28 Ray Accelerators. Meanwhile, the 8GB of GDDR6 memory runs at 1750MHz (14GHz effective), compared to 2GHz (16GHz effective) on the XT model. It’s connected to a 128-bit wide memory interface, giving it a total memory bandwidth of 224GB/sec, although AMD has also equipped the GPU with 32MB of Infinity Cache. The standard Radeon RX 6600 also has much lower clock speeds than the XT model, with a quoted game clock of 2044MHz, compared to 2359MHz for the XT – a deficit…

Despite being based on the same GA104 Ampere GPU as the RTX 3070, the RTX 3060 Ti currently undercuts the RTX 3070 by £170, offering substantially better value, even if it still costs way more than the original £369 launch price. In terms of stock, the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti was practically non-existent after it launched, but it’s recently started reappearing on the shelves, providing some fierce rivalry for the Radeon RX 6700 XT. The 3060 Ti only has 38 of the GA104 GPU’s potential maximum of 48 streaming multiprocessors (SMs) enabled, compared to 46 on the RTX 3070. That still gives you 4,864 stream processors, though, along with 38 2nd-gen RT cores for ray tracing and 152 3rd-gen Tensor cores. Like the RTX 3070, it also comes equipped with…

Like the Radeon RX 6800, Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3070 Ti started life with an almost-sensible price of around £530, but has since found itself rocketing around the land of ridiculous money. RTX 3070 Ti cards were recently going for over a grand on eBay, but they now seem to have settled at £865 at retailers. That might be well over £300 higher than the launch price, but it’s also well below the price of the Radeon RX 6800. There isn’t much to separate the RTX 3070 Ti from its non-Ti sibling in terms of core GPU spec. They’re both based on the GA104 Ampere chip, but the RTX 3070 Ti has all 48 streaming multiprocessors enabled, compared to 46 on the standard RTX 3070. This gives the RTX 3070 Ti…

Double Fine Productions is a studio that has hovered outside the exclusive club of ‘best game developers’ for years but has never quite got past the bouncer. From Brutal Legend to Broken Age, its games are always brimming with charm, but tend to suffer from unfortunate design decisions or other problems in development. Even the original Psychonauts offers as much frustration as entertainment. Hence, it’s a delight to say that Psychonauts 2 is Double Fine’s masterpiece, a spellbinding adventure that not only brings all the humour and imagination you’d expect from a Tim Schafer game, but fixes all the sticky design problems of the original. It also features some of the best level design you’ll see all year, and a story that will tickle your tear ducts as much as…

There are two kinds of remasters. There are those that seek to update the game, giving it a visual overhaul while keeping the core experience intact, and there are those that seek to modernise it, overhauling both the visuals and the core experience to rectify mistakes in the original design and make the game more accessible to modern audiences. Myst belongs to the former group, but it should probably belong to the latter. That’s not to say it’s terrible. Myst is a classic for a reason. Much like the Witness, which was based upon Myst, it’s about exploring a mysterious, puzzle-filled island while slowly unveiling a fragmented and ambiguous story. To get off the island, you need to retrieve the scattered pages of the book, which means solving puzzles that…

Taken on its own, in complete ignorance of the ethos behind the project, the MNT Reform is a confusing device. The 12.5in 1080p IPS display and backlit mechanical keyboard – ignoring the unusual layout with its split spacebar, Hyper key and so on – suggest a modern device perhaps aimed at gamers. The trackball mouse, though, leaves you wondering if this laptop is old stock from the 1980s. It’s the thickness that really strikes you. At 42.5mm, if you include the rubber feet, the MNT Reform is beefy, tipping the scales at just over 2kg. Flip over the laptop and all is revealed – literally, thanks to a transparent acrylic base. The bulk of the space is taken up by a battery made up of eight individual 18650-size cells (1,800mAh…

TOTAL PROJECT TIME / 1 HOUR While modern water-cooling pumps and extremely powerful, you rarely need to run them at full speed in order to get the best cooling. In fact, tuning them down by 25 or even 50 per cent will often see little to no increase in load temperatures of your water-cooled hardware. However, at full speed, most pumps can be noisy and some make a racket that makes you want to be in a different room from them. This completely ruins one of the best reasons to water-cool your PC, which is noise reduction. In this guide, we’ll show you how to identify your pump and any built-in ways to control its speed, in addition to using software if you can hook it up to your motherboard,…

MAD CATZ S.T.R.I.K.E. 2 Equipped with RGB lighting and best-inclass durability, the membrane-based S.T.R.I.K.E.2 provides the feel of a genuine mechanical keyboard. The full-sized 104-button key set allows for smooth and reliable gameplay, even during sustained gaming sessions, while the 26-key antighosting feature is ideal for competitive gamers in intensive gaming action. It features nine variations of RGB lighting effects, all equipped with adjustable speed/brightness, allowing gamers to illuminate their gaming environment the way they wish. The convenient on-thefly controls allow gamers to change the lighting settings by shortcut, without downloading additional software or exiting their game. Meanwhile, the 26-key anti-ghosting design makes sure that simultaneous key presses are always registered in-game. The S.T.R.I.K.E. 2 enables gamers to execute complex commands with full precision, accepting multiple key presses at once.…

It’s been a long time coming, but Intel has finally taken a giant leap forwards in terms of architecture, CPU design and manufacturing – Alder Lake is here at last. We’re finally dealing with a desktop 10nm CPU from Intel now and, rather than just using it to add more cores, Intel has made some interesting changes to its CPU design. There are now two different types of cores in this hybrid CPU design, with Intel attempting to provide more performance at lower power levels and have different cores designed to different tasks. There are P-cores and E-cores – the former deal with high-performance tasks, and the latter aid lower-power and background tasks, while providing a general boost to multi-threaded workloads. If you think this sounds a nightmare in terms…

While Alder Lake uses a vcore and multiplier to overclock your K-series CPU just like other CPUs, the process is now complicated by having the ability to overclock both the performance-orientated P-cores and more power-efficient E-cores. They’re clocked differently and won’t hit the same speeds when tweaking their multipliers, so you’ll need to adjust each type separately to find their limits. At the time of writing, it looks as though it’s just the frequency that differs, as there’s just a single vcore input. Due to print time constraints, we had to write this guide prior to receiving the lowdown from Intel and motherboard manufacturers, but if necessary we’ll do a more comprehensive guide in future with more details. 1 To start, check your stock speed temperatures using Prime95 (mersenne.org) and…

There has been a flurry of DDR5-related press announcements over the past few months, and Kingston has been quite forthcoming about its approach, as well as contributing to our DDR5 memory feature this month, discussing the pros and cons of DDR5 (see p86). This Kingston Fury Beast kit was also the first DDR5 memory to pass through our doors, and while we don’t have pricing information yet, we’ve put the 32GB Kingston Fury Beast 5200MHz kit through its paces on our new Alder Lake test system. On the surface, this Fury DDR5 set looks like a standard DDR4 memory kit, and for anyone needing some low-profile memory to sit under a large air cooler, or in a cramped small form factor build, the Fury modules stand just 35mm tall. This…

We’re used to WD’s SSDs either offering great value for money, such as the Blue SN550, or extreme speeds, as we saw with the Black SN850, which topped 7,000MB/sec when we reviewed it. However, not only is the company’s new SN700 the first Red-branded NVMe SSD from WD, but it’s also not actually aiming to appeal in terms of either value or performance. Instead, the Red SN700 is all about reliability. Its key asset is its TBW rating – the number of terabytes you can write to the SSD and still have it covered under the warranty. The endurance of SSDs has been an issue in the past, but with most SSDs now offering many hundreds of terabytes on their TBW ratings, endurance is unlikely to be an issue for…

The Corsair M65 is a stalwart of the gaming mouse market, but its shape and weight make it an outlier when the current trend is to make gaming mice lighter. There are two variants of the new M65 – a wired and a wireless version. They share the same overall shape and dimensions, but the wired version is slightly lighter at 97g, while the wireless version starts at 110g and can go up to 128g once its weights are added. When the latest lightweight FPS-targeted mice weigh in the region of 70g or lower, you can see why the M65 is such a different beast. The weights system consists of three 4g weights and three 2g screws to affix them. They’re arranged in a triangle on the underside of the…

How we test Wobbly stock levels and sky high prices have made the graphics card market harder to understand than Season 2 of Twin Peaks. The boom in cryptocurrency mining saw Nvidia RTX rocketing on price on eBay, but Nvidia has responded with low hash-rate cards. Low stock of all GPUs, coupled with low demand, has also seen speculative scalpers making a mint out of the latest GPUs. Cards have gradually started to appear back on retailers’ shelves over the past few months, but only in dribs and drabs, and usually at high prices. Where does that leave us now? If you can afford to buy a new graphics card, which one should you buy for gaming at current prices? In order to make sense of the situation, we’ve rounded…

While pricier GPUs have doubled in price since their launch, AMD’s Radeon RX 6600 XT is still contentedly sitting below the £500 mark. The current going rate of £480 is still utterly silly for a 1,920 x 1,080 gaming GPU, of course, but it’s only climbed by £80 since we first reviewed it in Issue 218, which gives it an edge over its nearest competitor, the GeForce RTX 3060. Like the GeForce RTX 3060, the Radeon RX 6600 XT is based on a new, small GPU die, rather than a cut-down version of an existing die used by pricier cards. In this case, it’s AMD’s 237mm² Navi 23 die, with the Radeon RX 6600 XT giving you 32 RDNA2 compute units that divide into 2,048 stream processors with 32 Ray…

We’ve been fans of the Radeon RX 6700 XT over the past few months, not necessarily because it’s the best-performing GPU in its ostensible price range, but simply because it’s been in stock. The cheapest card we could find cost £690 at overclockers.co.uk, which is much higher than it should be, but it’s a good £110 cheaper than the RTX 3070. Despite the ‘7’ in its name, though, the Radeon RX 6700 XT is more like a competitor to the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti. The latter has previously been impossible to find in stock, but is now readily available for £630. Where does this leave our venerable mid-range favourite of the past few months? In terms of specs, the Radeon RX 6700 XT is competitive. It has 12GB of GDDR6…

AMD’s Navi 21 GPU just squeezes into this sub-£1,000 Labs test, courtesy of the Radeon RX 6800, which currently goes for £999 inc VAT. It comes equipped with a massive 16GB of memory – more than any other card on test this month. The memory is clocked at 16GHz (effective) and it’s GDDR6, so it’s not as quick as the 19GHz GDDR6X memory on the RTX 3070 Ti. It’s attached to a 256-bit wide memory interface, giving you a total memory bandwidth of 512GB/sec, compared to 608GB/sec on the RTX 3070 Ti. Meanwhile, the GPU itself has 60 of the Navi 21 GPU’s 80 compute units enabled, each of which contains 64 stream processors, adding up to a total of 3,840. Each compute unit also contains a dedicated Ray Accelerator,…

Aragami 2 is simultaneously better and worse than its predecessor. It radically changes the mechanics and structure of the original game, emphasising faster-paced, acrobatic stealth and more open-ended missions designed around cooperative play. While the former is by and large an improvement, the latter burdens Aragami 2 with repetition and grind. The story is where the game most clearly departs from the original, seeing your ghostly ninja whisked away to the home of the Kurotsuba clan in the remote valley of Rashomon. The Kurotsuba are cursed spirits like yourself, and promise to help you find a way to break the spell if you help them to defeat the evil Akatsuchi clan. Frankly, the story is a confused mess that doesn’t really capitalise on its ideas, a phrase that could also…

The Thing is my second 3D-printed case, following the creation of AV3D, a machine I built for the Cooler Master Case Mod World Series (CMWS) 2018 modding competition. That was a bigger ATX case but this time I wanted to try something a little smaller. The inspiration for this build came one night following a conversation with my wife. I’d said I wanted to make my own mini-ITX case design but didn’t know what it should look like, and she assured me I’d figure it out in my sleep. Sure enough, the next day I woke up and the design had come to me, so I hopped on to my computer and started to draw. It took three long weeks of drawing and 3D modelling but eventually I came up…

Released in 1987 as a musician’s tool, the MT-32 would revolutionise PC gaming audio Aglossy black box with a green LCD invites you to ‘Insert Buckazoid’ on its screen. A stirring 1980s sci-fi theme blasts glossy-textured synth tones through the speakers connected to it, as you’re brought up to speed on the continuing exploits of space janitor Roger Wilco. In 1989, Space Quest III leaned into the highest-quality music available on home computer platforms, an external MIDI audio device that was as prohibitively expensive as it was revolutionary. When it was released in 1987, the original Roland MT-32 MIDI synthesiser cost £450 in the UK – equivalent to over £1,200 in today’s money, and it didn’t even come with the MIDI interface card you’d need to connect it to your…