Table of contents for August 2016 in PC & Tech Authority

Dyson Csys www.dyson.com.au There are many ways in which an optimistic human mind can justify the $850 cost for this desk lamp. Let’s start with the ‘every PC user needs a good desk lamp’ rationalisation. That one is undeniable, and the best comparison here is choosing to spend a grand and a half on a Herman Miller Aeron chair, as opposed to an Office-works $200 back-killer that will need replacing in a few years. Yes, they both do the same job, but one is so much nicer than the other and makes you feel good. Like an Aeron, the Csys should have long legs. The LED bulbs are claimed to keep on keeping on for 37 years, and without fading, too. Quickmaths shows that buying a regular $20 Philips Dimmable…

This year’s Computex was both exciting and disappointing in equal measures. While there was one new major technology release in the form of Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 cards, there was little else that wasn’t simply a rehash of older technology. Intel showed off its Broadwell-E CPU, but to be frank this two year old architecture doesn’t really excite us – just because it’s got a stack of extra cores doesn’t mean most users will notice any performance improvements. And yet the focus on VR was exciting, as it appears the industry is really getting behind this in a big way. If you weren’t a believer before the show, you certainly were afterwards. PC&TA attended the show for four days, and over the course of approximately 40 meetings…

At a launch event in Macau, which PC&TA attended, AMD unveiled its newest GPU products - which included a mighty surprise for anyone ready to write the company off in the face of Nvidia’s startlingly fast GTX 1080. AMD’s three new GPUs are pitched very much at the low- and mid-range, but one particular demo demonstrated the potential of the new Polaris GPU when the high-end product - Vega - ships later this year. AMD announced three new GPUs at the event: The RX 460, which is optimised for DX9/DX11 games at 1080p resolution, with a TDP of 75 watts. The RX 470, which has better DX 12 performance than the 460 and a TDP of 110w. Lastly the RX 480, the top of the new mid-range cards. It replaces…

This is the kind of product I simply love to review. My office is usually filled with a bunch of me-too components that are very similar, be it motherboards, graphics cards or monitors. But the TBS-453A is something entirely new, and entirely cool. It’s a NAS designed to house M.2 SSDs instead of the usual mechanical drives used in NAS units. Yes, this means it’s going to be incredibly expensive to fill to any decent size of capacity (you’re looking at $800 for two 1TB M.2 SSDs as a minimum), but man is it fast. But is it too fast for the average user? Because it uses such tiny drives, this is a very small NAS unit, at around the size of a small novel. It can host up to…

BENCHMARKS BATTERY LIFE When it was released in 2015, the Apple MacBook was so thin and light as to be a revelation. At a shade over 900g and 13.1mm thick when closed, this 12in laptop was slimmer, lighter and had a smaller footprint than the 11in MacBook Air. However, any portable design brings inevitable compromise, and the firstgeneration MacBook wore those on its sleek metallic sleeve. Battery life was nothing more than average; performance worse still. The keyboard, with its super-shallow travel, also divided opinion. The 2015 MacBook, then, was great if you valued portability above all else. As it happens, it fitted my needs perfectly – the closest I come to being a “power user” is modest audio and video editing – and I bought one. The question is,…

Somewhere deep inside Dell’s R&D labs, white-coated workers have toiled day and night to splice the DNA of Dell’s Latitude and XPS families. The fruit of their labours is one of the finest ultraportables to ever see the light of day: the Dell Latitude 13 7370. As a starting point, you couldn’t ask for any better: the XPS 13 is an Ultrabook to aspire to, all carbon fibre, metal and understated design. It’s fast, light, beautiful and well-equipped in every category. The Latitude 13 7370 takes those strengths and moulds them into a more business-friendly form. BAG-FRIENDLY BUILD QUALITY It gets off to a great start. The base is cast from perfectly smooth, gently rounded plates of carbon fibre, while the silver metal lid of the XPS 13 has been…

As the most expensive card in the roundup, we expected grand things from this product. It’s also wearing Asus’ prestigious Strix brand, which means it’s one of their top products. Therefore we expected top overclocks, the best features and overall a beautiful product. We weren’t disappointed, but it turns out that overclocking the GeForce GTX 1080 doesn’t make a huge difference to performance in our tests. Before we begin, we have to point out just how many RGB lights Asus has endowed this card with. There are RGB strips around each fan, making this light up more than your average rave. The default mode is set to pulse through a variety of colours, though you can use the RGB customisation software to make it shine like a lighthouse if you…

Sitting slightly higher than the Gigabyte G1 Gaming GeForce GTX 1080 on the price spectrum, MSI’s variant of the Nvidia’s new top-end chip is only $30 more expensive. This makes it one of the more affordable GeForce GTX 1080s on the market. Have they had so to shave any features off the card to hit this price point? In terms of features, it’s nigh on identical to its lower powered sibling, the MSI GeForce GTX 1070 Gaming X 8G. Once again we see the new Torx 2.0 fans used within the Twin Frozr VI cooler design. It seems to be identical, once again claiming a 22% increase in air pressure for more efficient, yet quieter cooling. It hit 47dB under load during our audio test, exactly the same as the…

We know it’s tempting to buy a printer based on the initial price, on the dazzling list of features on display, on simply how it looks. But there’s almost no other technology purchase that needs more proper analysis: a moment of weakness in PC World could see you stuck with a printer that looked amazing on the shop floor but will demand new cartridges every other week. We examine the true cost of running each of these printers, but if that was the only concern then the buying decision would be almost too easy. Take a rough guess at how many pages you print, see which printer comes top for value at that point, and hand over your credit card details. Job done. But you’ll have your own needs, and…

We tested every printer this month under typical home-office printing conditions. Each one was connected to a desktop PC via a domestic router, using 802.11n wireless where possible. We put each printer through a batch of speed-related tests. First up was a 20-page text-only document, using the printer’s standard print-quality setting. We then printed the ISO 19798 test document – five pages of coloured text, charts and graphs – again in standard mode. In each case we measured the time taken from hitting the print button to the last page exiting the printer, then calculated a pages-per-minute score. We also tested the speed of each printer’s built-in scanner, where applicable. We scanned first a greyscale text document at 200ppi, then a full-colour A4 page at 300ppi. To determine the overall…

Sit the HP Envy 5540 next to the similarly priced Epson WF-2630 and it’s no contest: the latter looks cheap and boxy, while the HP is undeniably stylish. It’s much friendlier too: by contrast with the Epson’s clunky 25-button interface, the Envy is controlled from a 5.6cm mono touchscreen. The Envy is, to be sure, a less businesslike proposition. Paper-handling options for printing are fairly limited, with one 125-sheet cassette, a 15-sheet photo tray and a 25-sheet output tray. There’s no Ethernet interface – it’s USB or wireless only – and no fax capability, either. Although rated for up to 1,000 pages per month, the Envy 5540 is clearly aimed at the personal end of the scale. Print quality is immediately pleasing. Text looks sharp and bold, and pages are…

Back in 1997, Dilbert creator Scott Adams coined the term “confusopoly” – a market in which would-be shoppers are bamboozled with a huge range of similar options, leaving them overwhelmed and unable to make a smart purchasing decision. At the time, Adams was principally talking about the mobile-phone market, which even now remains bogged down by a bewildering range of deals and tariffs. But the idea of a confusopoly will be equally familiar to anyone trying to choose a new printer. The ten models we’ve tested this month represent a diverse cross section of the market, and as our double-page feature table makes clear, each one comes with a whole database of variables to weigh up. We’re talking different features, different speeds, different print quality and, of course, different running…

This month has been one of extremes, first involving plenty of rushing around, including a week-long trip to Las Vegas to attend the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) show, and second being laid up in bed before the trip with sinus flu, and then post-trip with the usual long-haul/Las Vegas flu that I always seem to attract. So there’s much to cover over the next few pages, and I’m going to begin with the truly bizarre. Someone has managed to get Windows 95 to boot on an Apple iWatch, by using a CPU emulation library. This appears to be genuine – and it really works, according to the YouTube videos. I have to admire the mindset of someone even having the desire to get a 20-year-old version of Windows to…

Angus Renton believes in console communism The console wars have been underway for generations. Nintendo dominated the market for years, then Playstation and Xbox came in and flipped the idea of ‘one console, one format’ on its head. The amount of games that have split between the three competitors have been game-changers’, but the beautiful PC remained impartial, letting everyone play everything (as long as your computer was powerful enough). But that beautiful neutrality may be coming to an end due to virtual reality. When the Oculus Rift was first announced, everyone garnered it with love and affection. When Sony’s Morpheus announced, the same thing happened. The HTC Vive followed the trend. Then Oculus got bought by Facebook, and alarm bells started ringing for enthusiasts. Facebook, as a large multinational…

Bigger and faster is always better, isn’t it? At least that’s what PC hardware marketing would always have you believe. However for memory, the old adage ‘it’s how you use it that counts’ rings especially true. With DDR4 now being mainstream there is a large swath of speeds available from 2133MHz up to 4266MHz and under extreme overclocking even 4800MHz, well over double that of DDR4’s launch speeds. The question is how much does that translate into real world a performance gains? The reality is, for the average user or gamer, it’s basically not much, but in some circumstances it can help quite a bit. Under light loads like office work or browsing the web nothing is going to be gained as these aren’t memory intensive tasks. Even gaming on…

The dream of an autonomous artificial human being has been in our psyche for a very long time. There’s something about it being a milestone of evolution – that we can become like gods ourselves, and create something in our own image. When we have that first fully independent, intelligent, artificial human we can sit back and say ‘There, we did it – we made ourselves, in another form’. And you know it’s just a matter of time. Though, it may be quite a bit longer than some pundits are expecting. Recently, researchers at Google announced that they were working on an AI ‘kill switch’, just in case. The inherent implication being: ‘oh, technology is fantastic! Here’s our latest super-helpful artificial person, the X-5 Kitchen Helper! Wait... no... X-5 put…

If you’re familiar with Lenovo’s Yoga devices, you’ll recognise the trick on show here. The Transformer Book Flip looks like a normal laptop, but, thanks to a lid that can flip 360 degrees, it doubles as a tablet when you need it. Say, if you want to take a few handwritten notes on-screen. While the design concept isn’t new, its price certainly is. Lenovo’s cheapest Yoga, the 700, costs around $1,000. Asus manages to cut that price in half without obvious compromises: it’s still light and slim, weighing 1.2kg and measuring 18.4mm with the lid closed. Only when you touch the surface does it become clear that it’s made from brushed-metaleffect plastic. Much like the Yoga 700, the Flip’s screen had a tendency to bounce back and forth when used…

This is a 15in laptop with serious poke. Just take a look at the specs and try not to whimper with excitement: a 2.8GHz quad-core mobile Xeon processor with Hyper-Threading, 32GB of RAM, a 512GB PCI Express-based NVMe SSD, and Nvidia Quadro M1000M graphics driving a 15.6in, 3,840 x 2,160 HP DreamColor display. Given such a specification, you might forgive HP for neglecting design. Thankfully, the ZBook is as tempting in the flesh as its specs are in black and white. From its dimpled, aluminium-clad lid to its glass-topped touchpad and gleaming chamfered edges, this laptop is a joy to behold. It’s comfortable to use, too. The keyboard is flanked by Bang & Olufsen stereo speakers, and has a key action that’s light to the touch and has just the…

It can be easy to underestimate the impact of Microsoft’s newest hardware project, the augmented reality Hololens headset. In a world going crazy for virtual reality, AR almost seems like it should fall short of the wholly immersive VR worlds being peddled by the likes of the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and even Google Cardboard-related devices. However, just an hour with the Hololens is enough to convince even the most hardened sceptic that Microsoft has created something very special indeed. Unlike early developer units from Oculus, this developer-only iteration of the Hololens device already feels like it’s ready for full release. The headset is very well-made, featuring an inner head-band that uses a screw mechanism to tighten onto your head, while the actual display unit and glasses hangs and swivels…

N vidia’s new GeForce GTX 1080 and 1070 cards have started to arrive in force, so we’ve sourced a diverse collection to see just how each variant differs from the rest. From expensive premium models to the cheapest of the 1070s, as you’ll see, whatever you pay, you’re going to get some incredible performance boosts even over the last generation, especially at higher resolution. Please note that we changed our testing methodology for this roundup. These cards are not designed for 1080p gaming, which is why we included only one 1080p test, 3DMark’s Fire Strike. Our other tests were run at 2560 x 1440 and 2880 x 1620. Note that we didn’t test at 4K. Despite Nvidia’s claims that these are 4K-ready cards, we believe in running games at ultra…

Welcome to the first GeForce GTX 1070 in our review. This is basically a cut-down version of the GeForce GTX 1080, with several key differences. Yet the performance difference isn’t all that big, while the price drop is. Let’s see what makes this card tick. The number of CUDA cores has dropped by a large amount, from 2816 in the GeForce GTX 1080 to 1920 in the 1070, a 31% drop. Which explains most of the performance difference between a 1070 and 1080 considering they do most of the work in the card. The Texture Units have also taken a snip, down from 160 to 120, a cut of 25%. However the ROPs, the bits that handle the end of the pixel pipeline, remain identical. There are 64 in the…

We all know how the “starter” cartridges bundled with inkjet printers tend to run out in a matter of weeks, pushing you onto costly replacements. Not so the Epson EcoTank ET-4500: it comes with enough black ink in the box to print 4,000 mono pages, and 6,500 pages’ worth of cyan, magenta and yellow. Even better, it doesn’t use cartridges at all: when you do run out, you can simply buy a cheap bottle of Epsonbranded ink, tip it into the tank and keep on printing. It’s an approach that yields phenomenally low running costs: 0.004c per black-and-white page, 0.01c for colour. Several of this month’s rivals work out at ten times the price, so, even though the EcoTank ET-4500 is this month’s most expensive printer, it could pay for…

The Xerox Phaser 6022V proudly keeps it simple: those seeking scanning and fax capabilities should look elsewhere. Xerox does offer a range of multifunction alternatives, but there’s something to be said for the compact footprint of a classic desktop laser. The price may seem steep considering the stripped-down feature set, but the Phaser 6022V’s excellent print quality could justify it: we found it turned out both sharp, precise black text and beautifully balanced business graphics. As is common with laser printers, a slight banding effect was visible on colour gradients, but illustrations and our photomontage looked strikingly vibrant, with bags of fine detail visible even in darker areas. Print speeds are unexceptional: our 20-page text document emerged at an average of 11.9ppm, with the addition of colour graphics slowing things…

Civilization VI civilization.com Developer: Firaxis • Publisher: 2K Games Available: October 21st 2016 Civilization VI is a continuation of the Civilization series, where you command a civilisation and lead them to conquer the world in any way you deem fit. There has been a revamp in city structuring, with cities no longer containing wonders or monuments, with those taking up separate tiles, and builders having a maximum number of uses before you have to train more. Our only worry? Will Firaxis bring back the pacifistturned-war fiend, Nuclear Ghandi? Prey prey.bethesda.net Developer: Arkane Studios • Publisher: Bethesda Softworks Available: 2017 Prey is a sequel-but-not to the original 2006 game, where you fought aliens on a spaceship. This time, it is rumoured to be more like ‘Groundhog Day’, we’re not sure how,…

I ’m always fascinated by how the lines between business and domestic technology are becoming ever more blurred. Areas such as colour printing and network-attached storage (NAS) were once very much confined to the office domain. As were wireless networks – outside of “people like us”, that is. I had one of the first Xircom wireless networks at home; it was pre-Wi-Fi, pre-802.11, and I shudder to think how much it cost! And things don’t only trickle down. Many technologies originally designed for home use are now finding their way into offices, factories and other workplaces too. I think the greatest example of this is the firing mechanism in the Challenger tank, which has been deliberately modelled on the PlayStation controller. The theory being that new recruits to the Tank…

“If you’re agile, you don’t need a strategy” This wasn’t a slogan. Nor was it a PowerPoint slide. It was one of those throwaway ad-libs at the end of a response to a question about “elephants” – a bit of shorthand used by the gathered IT business leaders to refer to issues that aren’t included in the formal description of a project, but that pop up the instant the actual work begins. Training staff during a platform change or an upgrade is a classic “elephant”. The aside came from Karl-Heinz Streibich, CEO of long-standing middleware guru Software AG. Packed with shorthand too, the nine-word sentence was an allusion to the sunlit, carefree life that’s waiting for those businesses that are ready to make their business “digital” – preferably by buying…

The latest trends and products in the world of technology I ntel may have an unassailable lead in the PC chip market, but it’s never been more than an alsoran when it comes to mobile. Despite investing billions of dollars, Intel has never threatened to dislodge ARM’s dominance in smartphones and tablets. Now, as the company prepares to shed 12,000 staff and change tactics in many areas of its business, Intel appears to have admitted defeat in its battle to get its processors and system on a chip (SoC) technology into phones. The company has confirmed it will cease development of at least some of its Atom processors, including the nextgeneration “Broxton” and SoFIA mobile SoCs. According to analysts, the move effectively ends Intel’s attempts to crack the mobile processor…

CPU XBOX ONE TWO With Sony’s PlayStation 4 redux, codename project Neo, grabbing headlines a couple of months ago when leaks surfaced of its existence, it seems Microsoft has been busy with refinements to their own two consoles. Yes, plural. Two. So worried are Microsoft about Sony’s PlayStation 4 Neo that they brought forward the announcements of the two consoles its working on. The just announced Xbox One S does, much like the Xbox 360 Slim did, shrink down the size of its predecessor while retaining basically the same performance characteristics. It seems AMD might simply be re-spinning the Xbox One APU straight down to their latest 14nm design. The benefits of which mean it’ll draw less power resulting in the normally external power brick now becoming internal to the…

Mfaced, surrounded by tiny, gleaming instruments and an iFixit step-by-step guide, the life of my venerable iPhone 5 hangs in the balance. Ten nerve-shredding minutes later, I secure the final pentalobe screw, hold my breath and press the power button. The phone blinks into life. Over the next few days, a phone that often expired by lunchtime powers through until the late evening. The total cost: $45 for a replacement battery – which included a small ziplock bag of tools to do the job. The price pales in comparison to the $119 Apple charges for such out-of-warranty replacements, and disappears completely compared to the $450 of a replacement handset. The picture of economic conservatism, the following month I drop my Optus contract and buy a PlayStation 4 with the savings.…

This is the first ever laptop released by Razer that isn’t intended for gamers. There’s no discrete GPU, instead relying upon Intel’s integrated HD Graphics 520, which is basically only good enough for Candy Crush. No, Razer is intending this ultrabook to go head-tohead with the likes of Apple’s Macbook and Dells XPS 13… and it’s done a bloody good job in the process. This thing is absolutely tiny. For a 12.5-inch form factor ultrabook, the thickness of just 13.1mm is miniscule. In fact, it’s identical to the Macbook, which is 13.1mm at its thinnest point. It’s also incredibly light, at just 1.25kg. This isn’t quite as lightweight as the Macbook, which is a mere 900 grams, but the Stealth definitely feels like a sturdier build. Besides, 1.25 kilograms is…

BENCHMARKS BATTERY LIFE High-powered laptops tend to fall into two distinct camps. You have your big, brash gaming laptops, which go for all-out power and don’t give a fig for portability. And then there’s a breed of more elegant, more practical machines. The Asus VivoBook Pro N552VW falls into this latter category. The outside is decorated by Asus’ trademark brushed metal concentriccircle finish, resembling the grooves of a vinyl record, while inside is a classy silver keyboard tray. Its build quality falls a little behind the high standards set by Dell’s XPS 15 – there’s a little flex in the keyboard base, for instance – but it’s a high-quality machine nevertheless. It’s also hefty, measuring 30mm thick and weighing 2.5kg. That’s partly due to its built-in DVD-RW drive, reminiscent of…

We view a NAS, now, as more or less essential for most people and homes. The need for vast local storage via hard drives is diminishing as we move to budget SSDs, and network and cloud access to files whether for work or entertainment is a luxury hard to pass on. Synology’s new 916+ is probably more powerful than what most home users need, but for power users and SOHO operators it’s a dream. A meaty quad-core Intel Pentium N3710 @ 2.56GHz burst is coupled with either 2 or 8GB of RAM. That’s plenty enough to handle multiple simultaneous users hitting it, with the 8GB easily accommodating several of the excellent suite of Synology apps running concurrently. For media, it transcodes common formats (H.264/5, HVEC and VC-1 at up to…

Gone are the days when you or your friends would see a Huawei phone and ask ‘Hua-who?’. The Chinese company has established a decent track record over the years of well-specced, well made and generally well priced handsets. The brand is still lacking the cool cachet of Apple or Samsung, but not for lack of trying Like most Huawei phones the Mate 8 is a bit bling, a bit show-offey and oozes prestige. The machined aluminium case looks classy and my review unit was, to my tastes, perfectly pleasing thanks to the elegant space gray colour. As a tool, the thin case with slabby edges is eminently holdable, despite its size. The fingerprint scanner is in the top-centre of the back and it takes no practice at all to have…

Streacom’s FC10 Alpha fanless case impressed us recently with its impeccable build-quality and innovative heat pipe cooling system. This is its bigger brother, a full-size ATX case called the F12C. At first blush it’s a much more basic enclosure. Just a big open space inside sand-blasted aluminium. It follows the FC10’s design language, but doesn’t have a fancy cooling system, or an internal drive shelf. What it does have is impressive flexibility. Rather than the hard drive “cage” found in most ATX towers, the F12C just has lots of holes in the case walls. Drives can be mounted in a range of different directions, angles, whatever you need to cram in the build. A pair of rails stretch across the case for mounting extra fans or a water-cooling reservoir. Apart…

As the cheapest GeForce GTX 1080 in our roundup, Gigabyte has once again undercut the other suppliers when it comes to price. It’s a tactic they use regularly, and it seems to work rather well for them – I’ve been using their cards for several years now due to the $100 or more saving over other competing cards. The question is whether you actually lose anything due to these cost savings. Judging by this card, you do compromise on a few features when compared to the premium models like the Asus Strix. This card uses a single 8-pin power supply, which suggests it’s not designed for serious overclocking. Yet out of the box it supports a factory overclocked mode of 1860Mhz in OC mode. It’s simple to use – fire…

Let’s get this out of the way first of all – MSI’s top-end version of the GeForce GTX 1070 is basically identical in performance and price to the Asus ROG Strix GeForce GTX 1070. Therefore, the deciding factor in choosing one of these two cards is all going to come down to feature set. So let’s cut to the chase, and see where the two differ. The first difference you’ll notice during installation is the use of twin power plugs on the MSI card; one 8 pin and one 6 pin. This suggests it has a more rigorous power supply system, and MSI advertises this card as a ten phase power supply, likely in an 8+2 configuration. Yet its factory overclocks are less aggressive than the Asus card. There’s a…

Printers must be among the most unloved computer accessories. We’ve all had experience of printers jamming at crucial moments, ruining prints with streaks and smears, and ripping us off with sky-high cartridge prices. The truth is, you get what you pay for. A great many printers these days are sold for less than $1,000, so it’s hardly surprising if they’re not perfectly reliable. And because the manufacturers make little or no profit on selling their hardware so cheap, we can’t be too shocked when they hike up the price of ink. Whether you’re a heavy print user or just want to make a hard copy of the occasional email, we’d recommend you steer clear of such bargain-basement printers. They’re just not worth the frustration. The printers on test this month…

The black and somewhat boxy MFCJ5620DW is a low-key inkjet printer. It’s not exactly small – with the paper tray fully extended its footprint is as large as that of a bulky laser. Impressively, though, Brother has managed to cram a full A3 paper feed into that space – something no other printer this month can claim. Connecting to a wireless network and accessing the MFC-J5720DW’s main functions is a breeze. Everything’s done through a generously sized colour touchscreen interface, which we found perfectly intuitive to use. As well as regular scanning and faxing capabilities, there’s integration with a wide range of cloud services, so you can – for example – print files directly from Dropbox or Evernote. If the printer is accessible to multiple users, each one can register…

Epson’s WF-2630 is substantially the same printer as the ET-4500, the difference being that it takes traditional ink cartridges rather than using the bottle-based EcoTank system. That makes it slightly more compact, as there are no ink reservoirs sticking out the side. Aside from that, the rap sheets are identical. You get a 100-page paper tray and a 30-sheet ADF, but print speeds are every bit as mediocre as on the EcoTank model – 7.6ppm for mono pages and 2.8ppm for colour. Ditto scanning: 22 seconds for a single greyscale page isn’t too bad, and scan quality is very good – but the ADF is painfully slow, taking more than five minutes to process our ten-page document. Slightly to our surprise, a subtle variation in print quality was visible between…

Like the old Simpsons gag about two great flavours together at last, Total War: Warhammer seems like a great idea. At first. In fact, for our first few weeks with the game it was quite the epic adventure. But like the punch-line to that same old gag – nuts and gum, together at last! – long-term play has seen Total Warhammer (easily the easiest way to refer to the game), fall steadily down our daily games rotation. In fact, at time of writing, I’ve not touched it for… a couple of weeks. The game does get a lot right. There’s a slavish devotion to accuracy and recreating the Warhammer miniatures game to the Total War milieu. From the smallest Night Goblin firing its poison arrows, hidden away in a gloomy…