Table of contents for November 2017 in Custom PC UK

It’s like gutripper or skullsmasher. It’s not just a higher number in front of the Ryzen brand Threadripper! It’s like the name of a weapon from a Fighting Fantasy book, or a highly destructive needlework tool, depending on your perspective. I prefer the former, though, and not just because we interviewed Games Workshop founders and Fighting Fantasy authors Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone this month (see p86). Threadripper. It’s like gutripper or skullsmasher. It’s not just a higher number in front of the Ryzen or Core brand. It’s a power tool that gives you huge multi-threaded computing power,ripping through threads like an SDS drill through Play-Doh. Like a dual-GPU card, it’s essentially two Ryzen dies in a single package, linked by AMD’s Infinity Fabric, and it instantly solves the problem…

In some ways, there’s not a lot that’s new with Threadripper, as its building blocks are exactly the same as those of the AMD’s mainstream Ryzen CPUs. The 14nm Zen core was designed to be scalable, so the technology and features of the quad-core Ryzen 3 1200 basically match those of AMD’s 32-core EPYC server CPUs. You also get the same AMD SenseMI technology as Ryzen CPUs, such as Precision Boost, Extended Frequency Range (XFR), and all Threadripper CPUs feature Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT). There are four core complexes (CCXs) in a Threadripper CPU, each made up of four individual cores. With the Threadripper 1950X, each pair of CCXs is tied together using AMD’s high-speed Infinity Fabric to create a single die with up to eight cores. There are two dies…

When we first tested AMD’s Ryzen 7 CPUs in March, memory support was poor, and only a select few memory kits that used Samsung B-die chips could get over 3000MHz. AMD and motherboard manufacturers have pretty much solved these issues now, though, and memory support for Threadripper at launch is also much better. That said, while 3000MHz memory is widely supported by Threadripper, 3200MHz support is currently a little hit or miss. We managed to get our quad-channel G.Skill Trident Z RGB memory kit running at 3200MHz on our Asus ROG Zenith Extreme test board using the latest 9980 BIOS. However, we had some trouble getting some memory and board combinations to POST with the memory running at 3200MHz. We suggest buying 3000MHz memory at the moment, or running 3200MHz…

Two ports can be ganged together to provide a single 2Gb/sec link Asus ROG Rapture GT-AC5300 / £400 inc VAT SUPPLIER www.overclockers.co.uk The Asus ROG Rapture GT-AC5300 is incredibly expensive, but it brings together just about every feature you could want. As well as the latest AC5300 Wi-Fi support, it includes eight Gigabit Ethernet ports, two USB ports, built-in lifetime protection against online threats and unique gaming features. It’s huge, measuring 245 x 245 x 65mm and weighing in at 1.8kg, and that’s not even accounting for its eight aerials. The pace of change in the Wi-Fi arena has slowed recently, so this router shares the same AC5300 Wi-Fi support as the older RT-AC5300. Instead, much of the recent progress has been in mesh router systems that use multiple…

Its fastest speed was a sequential read rate of 2,775MB/sec Apacer PT920 Commando / £155 inc VAT SUPPLIER www.cclonline.com Novelty and data storage aren’t generally words you associate with each other in the PC world. Performance, capacity and efficiency, perhaps, but not novelty. However, novelty is the precise direction Apacer has taken with its PT920 Commando. This 4x PCI-E NVMe drive is designed to look like the main body of an M16-type rifle. It’s as clichéd a gamer-orientated design as you can imagine, but you know what? It sort of works. After all, so many of us buy ATX motherboards and cases with big windows on the side, only to populate them with one graphics card and a measly SATA SSD – or even worse, a near-invisible M.2 SSD.…

For me, this service is about as useful as a keyboard made of butter Twitter is my social media platform of choice. I regularly use Facebook to keep up with what my friends and family are doing, but I rarely post there myself, while Twitter is the tool my peers use to communicate – it’s where other journalists, developers and PR reps come together to share ideas and information about the latest games. I also enjoy the challenge of condensing information into a handful of words – a useful skill for a journalist. Increasingly, however, I’m finding Twitter borderline unusable. It’s not because of the dreadful new replies system or,mercifully,Twitter’s abysmal record on curtailing abuse and harassment (although these factors don’t help). It’s for one reason alone, called ‘In case…

At a basic level, it’s a simple, stripped-back platformer DEVELOPER Edmund McMillen, Tyler Glaiel / PUBLISHER Edmund McMillen, Tyler Glaiel / WEBSITE http://yourendisnigh.com The End is Nigh is a spiritual sequel to Super Meat Boy, the 2010 platformer that dispensed with the cutesy aesthetic of most platformers in favour of a macabre style and fiercely challenging level design. On the surface, The End is Nigh looks like Meat Boy with a different story, but there are subtle differences that make it a smarter, more accessible counterpart. It centres around the story of Ash, a surprisingly chipper little flake of blackened skin who lives in a quiet corner of the apocalypse, playing video games. When his favourite (and only) game stops working, however, Ash resolves to head out into the world…

How do you spend your weekends and evenings? At the moment, I mainly spend mine killing people. Sometimes I tear their hearts out on spears; sometimes I crush their skulls with hammers. Sometimes, in moments of murderous prowess, I kill two with a single well-aimed sword swing, and my friends cheer as cleaved skulls fly through the air. I often get so swept up in the thrill of it I don’t even notice the sweat building up inside my headset. But, that’s Gorn for you. It may be a simple gladiatorial combat game, but it’s still so much fun I can easily lose whole evenings to the joys of murder. Hang on, what? Ban this sick filth Debates over games and violence aren’t new. It’s only ever a matter of…

REVIEW Creoqode2048 When a product is supplied in kit form, you generally expect it to be a little bigger than a device pre-assembled by robots and nimble fingers in factory conditions. Even so, the 2048 from London-based coding startup Creoqode surprises in this respect. Measuring nearly 300mm wide, 108mm tall and weighing a whopping half a kilo, it stretches the very limit of the definition of ‘handheld’. The key to the 2048’s size is its display: the 64 x 32 RGB panel features 2,048 individually addressable LEDs, and dominates the front of the device. Thankfully, while the 2048 is positioned as a build-it-yourself kit, there’s (theoretically) no soldering involved, and the panel is provided with its surface-mount LEDs already very firmly attached. A closer look at the panel also reveals…

MEET THY MAKER Name Andreas Fredholm Age 28 Location Sweden Occupation Student Main uses for PC Gaming, CAD, photo editing, video editing Likes Cooking, figuring out how things work, playing games Dislikes Getting up early in the morning! CPC: What originally inspired you to build Wing X99? Andreas: I’ve always been interested in design and how devices work mechanically – problem solving is one of my great passions in life. When I look at other PC builds and mods, I can’t help looking for parts I’d do differently. No matter how you look at it, no design is 100 per cent perfect. There’s always a flaw somewhere, including in my own designs. That’s life, but Wing X99 is my attempt to create a PC with the attention to detail that…

GDDR6 increases the bandwidth per pin from 12Gb/sec to 16Gb/sec If you’re not buying one of AMD’s new Vega GPUs (see p30), you may be better off saving your pennies for 2018, rather than buying a new GPU now, because Nvidia is very unlikely to launch its next-generation ‘Volta’ consumer GPUs this year. That’s despite the fact that Nvidia is already shipping a Volta-based product, the Tesla V100, for GPU compute work. ‘We shipped a lot of Voltas, and Volta is fully ramped,’ Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said during a recent conference call discussing his company’s financial results. However, the Tesla V100 is a highly specialist component that’s exclusively aimed at servers and artificial intelligence applications. In fact, every generation of Tesla card has brought fewer graphics capabilities and more…

Creeping obsolescence PC components are continually evolving in order to keep up with all the latest games, such as Battlefield 1 and so on. Not so long ago, I was reading about how great the GeForce GTX 680 was, and now I find myself wishing I could afford a GeForce GTX 1080 Ti card. Anyway, here’s my question: My current setup has an Intel Core i7-4790K running at stock speed (I’m not a seasoned overclocker) with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 Ti, and 16GB of DDR3 RAM. Are these components now completely obsolete, or can I still look forward to the upcoming Call of Duty WW2 game, for example? ANNECK CRANKE Ben: I wouldn’t say those components are completely obsolete, at least not if you mainly use your PC for…

AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X / £998 inc VAT SUPPLIER www.ebuyer.com AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1920X / £780 inc VAT SUPPLIER www.cclonline.com After shaking up the mainstream CPU industry with the first Ryzen CPUs, AMD is now aiming its Ryzen rocket launcher squarely at Intel’s high-end desktop chips with Threadripper. At the top is the 16-core Ryzen Threadripper 1950X, followed by the 12-core 1920X. Threadripper CPUs use the new AMD TR4 Socket, which is absolutely enormous due to the fact that there’s room for not just two, but four dies in the package. AMD claims two of these dies act as dummies to provide physical support to the heatspreader, and to space out the active dies to provide better cooling. The whole package is the same size as AMD’s EPYC…

Before you start As with mainstream Ryzen CPUs, Threadripper can’t reach the sky-high frequencies regularly achieved by Intel’s K-series CPUs, so start with a safe target of 3.8GHz across all cores. Our Threadripper 1950X found its limit at 3.85GHz, where sadly just one test proved not to be stable, but our 1920X sample managed to get to 4GHz. In this guide, we’ll look at manually overclocking a Threadripper CPU, and also investigate the new memory access modes in the Ryzen Master software. Again, like mainstream Ryzen CPUs, at launch, most software programs report the X-series Threadripper CPUs as having a higher temperature than is actually the case. For now, you’ll need to subtract not just 20°C as with Ryzen X-edition CPUs, but 27°C from the reported temperature to get the…

There are on-board RGB lights down the right side of the rear of the PCB Gigabyte AB350N-Gaming WiFi / £108 inc VAT SUPPLIER www.cclonline.com Despite the promise of Socket AM4 mini-ITX motherboards back in March, and even a dedicated chipset for them in the form of X300, there are precious few mini-ITX boards in the shops six months down the line. Only ASRock, Biostar and more recently Gigabyte have come up trumps. Interestingly, the cut-back X300 chipset has failed to be taken up so far, and the Gigabyte AB350N-Gaming WiFi we’re reviewing here uses the B350 chipset. The B350 chipset does fit the modern enthusiast mini-ITX motherboard better than X300, though, offering up to four SATA ports compared to just two, as well as USB 3.1 Gen 2 support.…

Sugru Mouldable Glue / £12.62 inc VAT This stuff is weird. Sugru bills itself as mouldable glue, which in practice behaves like putty or clay that sticks to objects and later sets hard into rubbery plastic. This behaviour makes it suitable for repairs or as a construction element in its own right, as Gareth Halfacree found in Issue 159. It also works well enough for repairs, being able to act like a sort of super-powered version of an engineer’s chewing gum to plug holes and cracks, and it’s shaped by hand. It works well for impromptu low-stress construction projects too; if you’ve ever needed to stick a fan somewhere in a PC case with no mount, or if your keyboard is missing a leg, you can get out the Sugru.…

How we test There are even fewer AMD X399 motherboards at launch than there were AM4 or Intel X299 samples, but we’ve managed to get our hands on four examples from the four main manufacturers, retailing between £330 and £520 inc VAT, which include all the latest features. While overclocking isn’t as fruitful as you’d expect from an Intel CPU, it’s still very much worth doing, so we’ve also discussed the maximum overclocked frequencies and how to do it, as well as recording the difference it made in our benchmarks. AMD’s new high-end desktop platform also seems to be more stable than the first AM4 boards at launch too, particularly when it comes to memory support. All the kits we tried worked at 3000MHz on all these boards, albeit with…

The slots, PCH heatsink and I/O shroud are illuminated in full RGB lighting SUPPLIER www.cclonline.com Gigabyte is seemingly only offering one Socket TR4 motherboard at the moment – the X399 Aorus Gaming 7. Retailing for £340 inc VAT, it’s in the same price league as the other sub-£400 boards on test, so competition will be fierce. Gigabyte hasn’t skimped on many features, though, which is immediately apparent when you power it on. Very few areas have missed out on some sort of RGB lighting, with all five of the 16x PCI-E slots sporting nifty glowing inserts that diffuse the light, as do all the DIMM slots. The PCH heatsink and I/O shroud are also illuminated in full RGB lighting, and you get a pair of RGB LED headers too.…

DEVELOPER SizeFiveGames / PUBLISHER SizeFiveGames / WEBSITE www.sizefivegames.com/category/behold-the-kickmen Behold the Kickmen comes from Swindle creator Dan Marshall, who freely confesses not to know or especially like much about football. It’s heavily inspired by Sensible Soccer, playing from a top-down perspective with cute bobble-headed players. However, Kickmen deliberately misreads the rules and lexicon of football. There are no corners or throw-ins, while the game employs a baseball-style ‘three-strikes’ rule to fouls. Perhaps most ludicrous is the ‘offside’ rule, wherein half the pitch glows red, and any player in possession of the ball within the red zone is immediately sent off. You can also ‘charge’ tackles and goal shots by holding down the appropriate button, and you can ‘dodge’ tackles from side to side. Meanwhile, ‘aftertouch’ lets you alter the ball’s direction…

It’s not all doom and gloom. Since the early 2000s, there’s been a steady stream of research showing the potential benefits and therapeutic uses of VR, including a 2005 study that used VR to treat PTSD (http://tinyurl.com/VRPTSD), and others focused on using VR to treat phobias. Most impressive, though, is an ongoing study that uses VR to help paralysed people to regain feeling and control in their limbs. The full research will take time, and the current sample size is very small, but of the eight people included in a study at Duke University, four regained enough feeling to be reclassified from full to partial paralysis within a year. After two years, all showed an improvement. It was achieved using a VR unit combined with head-mounted electrodes to reintroduce the…

rand Theft Auto is one of the game industry’s most recognised titles. The 11 games released under the name amount to the fourth biggest-selling video game franchise on the planet, succeeded only by Mario, Pokémon and Tetris. The series prides itself on being at the technological cutting edge, with Grand Theft Auto V offering astonishing environment design and virtual life simulation. This has been the case right back to the original Grand Theft Auto, released almost 20 years ago in October 1997. To the untrained eye, this statement might come as a surprise. At the time of its launch, Grand Theft Auto seemed at odds with the rest of the industry, presenting players with a 2.5D, top-down perspective when everyone else was trying to rob the 3D bank. But as…

You remember Clippy, that bastard paperclip who was supposed to personify help It’s been an interesting month to be a woman in tech. An anti-diversity memo penned by a Google employee has loomed large over the heads of women who have battled workplace discrimination, casual sexism, online abuse, or just the general headache that comes with being female in male-dominated spaces. The memo itself and the bad science therein has been debunked thoroughly already. However, the general thrust – that women are, naturally, simply less good than men at certain tasks, which just happen to be the tasks at which the author is good – is so pervasive in tech and science industries that it’s going to take a lot of work to undo the additional damage the memo caused.…

The X399 chipset The most interesting aspect of the X399 chipset is the huge number of PCI-E lanes on offer - 64 in total for the system, and they’re available on all Threadripper CPUs, including the 8-core 1900X. Conversely, Intel requires you to splash out for a 10-core Core i9-7900X to get the full 44 lanes. Entering the world of massive I/O and multiple GPUs is certainly much more affordable with AMD. The chipset itself offers 60 PCI-E lanes, which is why many X399 motherboards offer up to three M.2 slots, along with claiming 4-way GPU support. Compared with the mainstream X370 chipset, X399 also gives you an additional four USB ports of either USB 2 or USB 3 flavours, two extra potential SATA ports, the ability to run up…

AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 8GB / £380 inc VAT SUPPLIER www.overclockers.co.uk AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 8GB / £470 inc VAT SUPPLIER www.overclockers.co.uk It’s tempting to describe AMD’s new Vega GPUs with the old cliché ‘too little, too late’, but in truth they would still be too little if they’d been released a year ago. Following several delays, Vega finally turned up in August this year, with most models fitted with AMD’s horrible reference blower coolers – a design that AMD won’t be able to market in the same way as Nvidia’s Founders Edition cards. AMD is also pitching the products at Nvidia’s GTX 1070 and 1080, rather than the flagship 1080 Ti, which already feels like a defeat for a supposedly high-end GPU architecture. It’s tough…

PROCESSORS TESTS: We use Custom PC RealBench 2015, Cinebench and Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation, installed on Windows 10 Home 64-bit, and record the power draw of the test PC. These tests cover a broad range of performance characteristics, including image editing, gaming, video encoding and 3D rendering. We run all tests at stock speed and at the CPU’s highest overclocked frequency. GRAPHICS CARDS Graphics cards are mainly evaluated on how fast they are for their price. However, we also consider the efficacy and quietness of the cooler. Every graphics card is tested in the same PC, so all results are directly comparable. T E STS : By using the fast PC detailed on the left, we can be sure that any limitations are due to the graphics card on…

A discrete Intel Wireless-AC 8265 PCI-E card is included in the box SUPPLIER www.ebuyer.com For now, MSI only offers one AMD X399 motherboard, in the form of the X399 Gaming Pro Carbon, meaning that only ASRock and Asus currently make more than one board for Threadripper CPUs. MSI has gone down a similar route to Gigabyte, aiming for around the £330 mark, and offering enough features to stand out from MSI’s flagship AM4 offerings. The X399 Gaming Pro Carbon AC sports a slightly tweaked design compared with its Intel X299 sibling, with larger CPU power circuitry heatsinks and, of course, a third M.2 port. All the M.2 ports feature heatsinks and support at least 80mm SSDs, which is the size of Samsung’s 960 Evo and Western Digital’s Blue M.2…

DEVELOPER Hinterland Studio Inc / PUBLISHER Hinterland Studio Inc / WEBSITE http://hinterlandgames.com The Long Dark should be the best survival game around. It’s visually stunning, deeply atmospheric and it simulates every survival hazard from fire to frostbite. In the story mode, you play bush pilot Will Mackenzie, who is flying Dr Astrid Greenwood to a remote habitat in Northern Canada when an electrical storm causes the plane to crash. Alone and injured, Mackenzie must recuperate, before searching for Greenwood. The story is well written, and the more linear approach to exploration provides enjoyable structure in a genre that can devolve into mindless repetition. After spending years in Early Access, the story mode is also now going to be drip-fed in episodic format, with the first two episodes available at launch.…

Kodi has become one of the sleeper hits of the past few years. The media player software, formerly known as XBMC (it started out as an Xbox Media Centre) is now one of the most downloaded pieces of software on the planet. One reason for its popularity is its sheer versatility: it can be installed on devices ranging from a £30 media streaming stick, to smartphones and tablets, through to full-blown desktops. There are even workarounds for platforms that do their best to keep Kodi at bay, such as iOS. However, another undeniable reason for Kodi’s success has been the way third-party operators have used the Kodi software to distribute copyrighted movies, TV shows and live channels for which you would otherwise have to pay. Kodi’s not happy about it,…

Insomnia is Britain’s biggest gaming festival, and its growth since it began in 1999 has been stratospheric. Starting as a tiny gathering in Swindon, it moved to Newbury Racecourse, and then upwards to the Ricoh Arena in Coventry. These days, Insomnia festivals are so large that they’re held at the Birmingham NEC – Britain’s latest exhibition centre. PC GAMER CENTRAL The numbers involved are sensational. There’s a Bring Your Own Computer (BYOC) gaming hall that holds 3,500 gamers and their PCs, and around 40,000 visitors stream through the doors across four days to see hundreds of exhibitors and try thousands of games. The result was an incredible experience at August’s Insomnia61 festival. Walking through the densely populated LAN halls, we saw some PC gamers arrive with their desktop rigs on…

Threadripper compatibility isn’t enough – CPU coolers need much larger contact plates I’ve been playing with AMD’s Threadripper CPUs for most of August and I was also lucky enough to head over to LA to the launch as well. It’s great to see such interest in the PC, and the new X399 platform even looks more exciting than Intel’s X299 equivalent, with more I/O options and, of course, those huge CPUs and TR4 sockets. With 16-core CPUs costing just £999 inc VAT – the same price as Intel’s 10-core Core i9-7900X, there’s plenty of scope for building a massively multi-threaded rig to blitz through video encoding and rendering tasks for a much lower price than an equivalent Intel system. Having focused on Threadripper CPUs this month, standard AM4 and LGA1151…

MILESTONES THIS MONTH TOP 20 OVERALL TOP 20 PRODUCERS WHAT IS FOLDING? Folding@home uses the spare processing cycles from your PC’s CPU and graphics cards for medical research. You can download the client from http://folding.stanford.edu and our team’s ID is 35947. Once you pass a significant milestone, you’ll get your name in the mag. You can also discuss folding with us and other readers online at the www.bit-tech.net forums.…

I’m sorely tempted to liken Vega to AMD’s disastrous Bulldozer CPUs a few years ago This year has been a really interesting one for PCs, most notably because it’s seen the long overdue return of some competition in the mainstream and high-end CPU markets. AMD sure took its time developing a completely new microprocessor architecture, Zen, from the ground up, but it seems to have paid off. Ryzen now has a solid footing in the market, offering competitive performance against Intel’s Core i-series chips, all the way from £100 to £450 inc VAT. It’s too early to make a call on Threadripper, as while it offers great performance in some workloads, there are questions over latency between cores, and the workstation market often prioritises platform stability over outright performance, which…