Table of contents for December 2018 in Custom PC UK

With its knowledge of ray tracing, it’s possible we could see a very different GPU emerge from Intel Now would usually be a golden moment to scoop up a graphics card bargain, with the arrival of brand-new GPUs sending the prices of the old guard tumbling down as retailers try to shift their old stock. Not this time. GeForce GTX 1080 Ti cards are a little cheaper than previously, but they’re still demanding at least £650 inc VAT. It’s hardly a bargain. This time, there simply hasn’t been a like-for-like swap. Nvidia’s new RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti cards are demanding huge premiums, meaning the older GPUs can still happily chug along at or near their old prices. There are many factors at play here, and Richard Swinburne has covered…

Oculus unveils standalone Quest headset Oculus has announced a new member of its VR headset line-up, promising to completely do away with the need for a wired connection, or even a PC. The new Quest bundle features two Touch wireless controllers, as well as a headset packed with dedicated hardware, freeing the wearer from constraints. Meanwhile, each eye will get a dedicated 1,600 x 1,440 screen, and 64GB of storage space will be provided. There’s no advanced detail on the specs available at the time of going to press, but Oculus says the Quest will be released in 2019 at a price of $399 US (around £366 inc VAT). Intel readies mainstream 8-core CPUs Despite its current stock shortage woes (see p114), Intel is planning to launch a new range…

SUPPLIER www.morecomputers.com It’s rare that a motherboard maker gets into the memory market, and even rarer that it manages to offer a unique product compared with the rest of the field, which is already teeming with RGB LEDs and fancy heatsinks. However, Gigabyte’s Aorus RGB Memory not only hits the nail on the head in terms of pricing, but also has a great solution to one of the biggest aesthetic issues with dual-channel RGB memory. You might think we’ve used the wrong photo, and that this dual-channel kit should have just two modules. However, despite there being four modules in the Aorus RGB Memory box, it’s only a dual-channel kit for the simple reason that two of the modules are dummies. These dummy modules contain only a sparsely populated…

SUPPLIER www.scan.co.uk Cooler Master’s MasterLiquid ML240R RGB won an Approved award earlier this year, but it now needs to try its hand against the other new kids on the block. It goes big on RGB lighting. There’s a SATA-powered RGB controller in the box, with buttons to control the lighting colours and effects, and if you use an included USB cable, you can also use Cooler Master’s own RGB LED controller software. Cooler Master claims the lighting is compatible with the major motherboard manufacturers’ RGB software too. The pump section is particularly bright and vivid, with individually controllable RGB LEDs that make for great rainbow effects, although Deepcool’s Gamer Storm Castle 240 (see p51) looks even better in this respect. The downside to the lighting is that you have…

SUPPLIER www.overclockers.co.uk The EK Water Blocks EK-MLC Phoenix 240 is really two different products that can be bought together to create a CPU-only water-cooling loop. There’s the EL-MLC Phoenix CPU module, which has two versions available – one catering for AM4 and Intel sockets, while the other one caters for AMD’s socket TR4. The other part is the EK-MLC Phoenix 240 radiator module, and both parts are pre-filled with coolant, connecting together with quick-release fittings. It’s proper, expandable water-cooling gear, but there’s no bleeding, filling or leaks involved, and connecting and detaching components takes seconds. The radiator section has seen a price cut too, coming down to just over £110, meaning you can now get both parts for £160 inc VAT, which is just £40 more than the NZXT…

SUPPLIER www.overclockers.co.uk Topping the features chart, thanks to RGB lighting, software control and the inclusion of additional fan screws for extra fans, the NZXT Kraken X52 also demands a hefty premium. At £120 inc VAT, only the EK Water Blocks EK-MLC 240 (see p52) is more expensive and Corsair’s similar H100i Pro RGB (see p50) costs noticeably less money too. However, the Kraken X52 ticks a lot of boxes. Its lighting show still looks great, despite the cooler now being two years old. You can choose from anywhere in the full RGB colour pallet, and it sports a funky reflecting light show, with the centre display on the pump looking as though it goes on for infinity. The fans aren’t illuminated, but you do get extra screws to mount…

DEVELOPER CreativeForgeGames/ PUBLISHER GoodShepherdEntertainment/ WEBSITE www.goodshepherd.games/games/phantom-doctrine Phantom Doctrine basically aims to give you XCOM with spies. It puts you in charge of an independent spy network working to bring down a terrorist organisation known as Beholder. You need to build a base, gather intelligence, recruit agents and deploy them on tactical operations across the globe, from small-scale kill/ capture ops to more elaborate, story-centric missions. On the surface, the structure is similar to XCOM. Your time is split evenly between managing your base and controlling your agents on deployment. Base building is very similar to that of Firaxis’ strategy classic, while the missions mimic both XCOM’s movement and combat systems, right down to the colour of movement pools and camera angles for gunshots. Lurking underneath these similarities, however, are some…

Frozen Synapse is one of the most inventive strategy games of recent years. Released in 2011, it’s a top-down tactical shooter in which players (or the player and AI) control a squad of special forces units. During a turn, each player makes separate plans about how they will move their agents, but the resolution happens simultaneously. This setup results in an intense psychological duel of planning, bluffing and second-guessing, as players attempt to counter as many of their opponent’s potential moves as possible. In many ways, it’s a perfectly distilled strategy game, and therefore a hard act to follow. Nonetheless, its developer had a pretty ambitious notion of where it could take a sequel.‘The very first thing that I thought about was simply:“How are we going to make a city?…

Cloud gaming was once heralded as the future of the industry. Why spend hundreds or even thousands of pounds on a new gaming PC every few years, when you could just stream any game regardless of its system requirements straight to your monitor, TV or laptop? It’s more convenient, more mobile and, if you’re a regular player of all the latest games, much more cost-effective. Even now, a ‘Netflix-for-games’ style service seems like an appealing business venture. Then came OnLive, the first ever cloud-gaming service. It’s still the most famous, or perhaps we should say infamous. Instead of proving the viability of cloud gaming, OnLive demonstrated that streaming games was significantly more difficult than streaming video. Whereas a small delay between pressing play on a video and the video actually…

Water-cooling AMD’s Threadripper 2990WX Whether you view AMD’s 32-core Threadripper as a triumph over Intel, or a disappointment due to the fact that it’s not as good an all-rounder as the 16-core Threadripper chips (or Intel’s Core i9-7980XE for that matter), it can be a monster record-breaker. This mighty CPU can tear through multi-threaded benchmarks, and it will make short work of workstation 3D modelling workloads too. However, with 32 cores packed under that heatspreader, you end up with a massive 250W TDP, requiring some serious cooling. AMD has mentioned to me on several occasions that it expects most Threadripper 2990WX users will need to opt for some form of liquid cooling. On the plus side, the CPU has a soldered heatspreader, rather than using thermal paste between the dies…

THE DRILL It’s easy to think of the drill as a rather clunky, single-purpose device, when in fact it can be useful for a variety of tasks. Attachments allow it to act as a polisher, a cutter of fan or radiator blowholes, and it’s also useful for drilling out rivets in PC cases. It can do a lot more than just drill small holes, and in my mind it’s the most essential tool in any PC modder’s toolkit. Corded vs cordless I have to admit that I think cordless tools are overrated. They usually lack torque compared with their mains-powered counterparts and this limitation, combined with the fact that even expensive batteries don’t last long under heavy loads, means a corded mains-powered drill is usually the best option when dealing…

Nvidia has taken a ‘build it and they will come’ approach For me, the biggest news about Nvidia’s new RTX GPUs isn’t, in fact, the performance, but the astronomical prices. After two and a half years of GTX 1000-series GPUs, the leap in prices for the new RTX cards has left a lot of potential upgraders unhappy. However, let’s be pragmatic about the market situation, as there’s no whiff of high-end competition from AMD, and Nvidia is in business to make money. Also, looking deep into the new Turing architecture, it’s clear the new chips also cost significantly more to make, and the research and development costs will have been considerable as well. The GTX 1080 Ti (GP102) core offered 471mm² of silicon, the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 (GP104)…

The Samsung X5 managed read speeds of 2,352MB/sec SUPPLIER www.scan.co.uk USB Type-C is a great connector, but it’s a bit confusing as an interface standard, coming in USB 3.1 and Thunderbolt 3 flavours. Of the two, the latter can reach 40Mb/sec while USB 3.1 is capped at 10Mb/sec. And such speeds, as the Samsung Portable SSD X5 amply demonstrates, are particularly useful for external SSD drives, enabling you to take full advantage of a PCI-E NVMe SSD. Samsung has history here, with its SSD T5 reigning supreme as the USB 3.1 speed king. With the SSD X5, it adds a Thunderbolt 3 to the mix, in your choice of 500GB, 1TB or 2TB capacities. Samsung quotes sequential read and write speeds of up to 2,800MB/sec and 2,300MB/sec respectively, which…

Pocket Spinner Multi-tool/ £19.99 inc VAT On some level it’s possible to think that attaching an array of tools to a heavy-duty fidget spinner is such a bizarre idea that it just has to work. On every other level, and we’re talking about many levels, the situation is less optimistic. As a tool, the Pocket Spinner includes an array of screwdrivers, which is fine, except there are many reasons why screwdrivers are their standard shape – a prime one being that you don’t want lots of spiky bits digging into your hand. As a spinner, the Pocket Spinner is also undermined by the fact that it has tools poking out of it. It’s not especially unsafe; you’d have to be walking around in the first ten minutes of an episode…

How we test When testing CPU coolers, we want to examine performance across a range of sockets, as the mounting mechanisms vary between them; some coolers perform well on some CPU sockets, but not on others. For this reason, we test across three sockets and we’ve updated our Intel test rigs this month, using CPUs without soldered heatspreaders. Our LGA1151 test rig comprises an MSI Z370 PC Pro and Intel Core i5-8600K overclocked to 4.6GHz with a 1.2V vcore. Next is LGA2066 using an MSI X299M Gaming Pro Carbon AC and Intel Core i9-7900X overclocked to 4.2GHz with a 1.15V vcore. Finally, our Socket AM4 rig uses an Asus ROG Strix B350-F Gaming and AMD Ryzen 7 1700 overclocked to 3.9GHz with a 1.425V vcore. We also use 16GB of…

SUPPLIER www.ebuyer.com Corsair’s revamped RGB coolers, namely the H115i Pro RGB and H150i Pro RGB, might be expensive, but they offer excellent cooling at low noise levels, as well as an exceptionally simple and easy-to-use mounting mechanism for both AMD and Intel sockets. The downside is that they require a large case with space for a 360mm or 280mm radiator. The H100i Pro RGB, though, has a more commonly sized 240mm radiator, which should fit in the majority of cases, along with its two ML-series fans. These fans differ significantly to the spinners on the larger coolers, though, as they can spin at a super-fast speed of 2,400rpm. The 140mm fans on the H115i Pro RGB are limited to just 1,200rpm while the H115i Pro RGB’s 120mm fans are…

SUPPLIER www.overclockers.co.uk As the reigning 240mm liquid cooler on our Elite list, the Fractal Design Celsius 24 takes its place against the rest of the field this month having not been toppled for over a year. However, it’s already looking dicey, since it still costs around £100 yet lacks software control, RGB lighting and the expansion possibilities offered by competitors this month in various forms. However, it still has plenty going for it. It has a radiator-mounted PWM fan hub, and the cable is cleverly routed up to this hub from the pump inside the tube braid. As the fans can also be plugged into the hub, the result is that you only need to deal with a single power cable, making the Celsius 24 the cleanest cooler on…

The citizens swear like a sailor who has dropped an anchor on his foot One of the most hotly discussed games coming out of E3 this year was CD Projekt’s Cyberpunk 2077. While the creator of The Witcher 3 showed a two-minute CG trailer of the new game to the public, it also gave the press the opportunity to watch a 48-minute gameplay demonstration behind closed doors. Most of the journalists who saw it came out breathlessly excited, with many proclaiming it the future of gaming. As a huge fan of CD Projekt’s work, I was naturally thrilled to hear the feedback from Los Angeles. Yet when the developer showed off that same footage online last month, I found myself more concerned than excited. As a raw technical achievement, it…

Nvidia has never been one to undersell its own achievements, and in many cases, deservedly so; the company has arguably led PC gaming graphics pretty consistently for more than a decade. However, for the GeForce RTX-series announcement (see p20), the hyperbole went into overload as Nvidia threw around phrases such as ‘a historic moment in computer graphics’. and ‘Computer graphics will never be the same again’. Nvidia even described real-time ray tracing as ‘The Holy Grail’. But what is ray tracing, and is the hype really justified? Before discussing ray tracing, it’s helpful to cover how computer graphics are generated now, which is through a process called rasterisation. This process involves generating 3D objects from a mesh of triangles, otherwise known as polygons. These triangles, along with their associated colour,…

TOTAL PROJECT TIME / 1 HOUR Motherboard fan control systems have evolved in leaps and bounds in recent years. In fact, there’s now little point opting for a separate fan controller, as your motherboard can not only control 3-pin and 4-pin fans, but also water-cooling pumps. All the main four motherboard manufacturers now provide both EFI and Windows-based suites that allow you to set up permanent profiles. You can control each individual fan, switching them off at lower temperatures to cut noise, and the more advanced suites also allow you to choose from a range of temperature inputs, such as the VRMs or M.2 slots, to dictate fan speed. In this guide, we’ll look at how to connect your fans and pumps to your motherboard and the various ways to…

Corsair K70 LUX RGB keyboard with your choice of switches TOTAL VALUE £160 inc VAT / MANUFACTURER www.corsair.com The K70 LUX RGB is a part of Corsair’s LUX flagship line of gaming keyboards, featuring Cherry MX key switches backed by a lightweight, durable aluminium frame and dynamic, multicoloured lighting. The USB pass-through port is positioned for uninterrupted gameplay, and ready for your mouse or wireless headset adaptor. You can also harness the power of CUE for sophisticated macro programming and dramatic lighting effects and animations. Meanwhile, 100 per cent anti-ghosting with full key rollover on USB helps to ensure accuracy, so every keystroke translates directly into accurate gameplay. The contoured, textured FPS and MOBA keycap sets keep you in control, while the Cherry MX key switches give you a linear…

My own grandmother operated a massive gun and shot down Nazi planes 'Who wants to play … Aaaarmy,’ we’d chant, linking arms and marching around the school playground at lunchtime. ‘No boys! Just girls!’ We were eight years old and had recently noticed that the boys were playing Army but excluding girls. It was annoying because Army was an extremely fun game in which you ran around making machine gun noises and diving behind imaginary bunkers. We fought back by starting our own, girl-only game of Army. Why did the little boys choose to exclude the girls in their war game? Eight-year-olds aren’t usually sticklers for historical accuracy, but although we had learned about the World Wars in class, we weren’t taught that it was actually illegal for women to…

The fan control section of the EFI is also excellent SUPPLIER www.overclockers.co.uk Gigabyte’s B450 I Aorus Pro WiFi is aiming high with its RRP of £130 inc VAT, especially considering it uses AMD’s B450 chipset as opposed to X470. Thankfully, on mini-ITX boards at least, there’s next to no difference between the two chipsets, as there’s no space to make use of the additional features that the more expensive X470 chipset offers anyway. However, Gigabyte has some stiff competition, as the B450 version of the Asus ROG Strix mini-ITX board retails for only £20 more. Gigabyte has certainly upped its game since its last AM4 mini-ITX effort though – the B450 I Aorus Pro WiFi looks and feels decidedly more premium than the last-generation B350N Gaming AC WiFi. There’s…

Its gamma tracking and uniformity proved terrific SUPPLIER www.cclonline.com When you can buy a 32in, 4K monitor for under £500, you might wonder how ViewSonic has the audacity to charge £883 inc VAT for the VP3268-4K. The answer is accuracy. It offers a pre-calibrated IPS display that – ViewSonic claims – can reproduce 100 per cent of the sRGB spectrum. When switching from the default mode to sRGB mode, the most obvious change isn’t a sudden improvement in colour accuracy but that the VP3268-4K’s display becomes dimmer. That’s because the panel’s sRGB calibration was performed at 120cd/m², and if you vary from this figure then your results will change. Once you select sRGB mode, you’re locked to 120cd/m². Fortunately, it performed magnificently in this mode. We measured an average…

PROCESSORS TESTS: We use Custom PC RealBench, 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. CUSTOM PC REALBENCH  Our benchmark suite, co-developed with Asus, simulates how people really use PCs – a higher score is better. You can download them from www.asus.com/campaign/Realbench MOTHERBOARDS…

SUPPLIER www.aquatuning.co.uk As the bigger sibling of the recently Premium Grade-awarded Eisbaer LT 120, we really wanted to see how the Eisbaer LT 240 fared against the other 240mm all-in-one liquid coolers available. Like its smaller sibling, it’s an expandable cooler, with a quick-release fitting plumbed into the middle of one of the coolant tubes. This fitting enables you to add other parts, such as reservoirs or GPU waterblocks, without draining the system. The company’s range of Eiswolf GPX Pro GPU waterblocks come pre-filled too, so you can connect them straight to the Eisbaer LT 240. Meanwhile, the radiator is made from copper, so it should perform better than aluminium radiators, as well as eliminating the risks involved with mixing metals. You can add any other copper-based components to…

SUPPLIER www.scan.co.uk Like many coolers on test this month, Deepcool’s Gamer Storm Castle 240 RGB will set you back around £100 thanks to its extensive RGB lighting, although it can certainly lay claim to being the best-illuminated cooler this month. Both its fans and pump have individually controllable LEDs, which are punchy and vibrant, and have similar brightness levels, which can’t be said of the Cooler Master MasterLiquid ML240R RGB (see p48). If RGB lighting is key to your build, the Gamer Storm Castle 240 RGB gets top marks. The lighting can be controlled by Asus’ Aura software, or an included SATA-powered remote control if your motherboard is made by a different company, and there are cables to attach additional devices too. Also included in the box is a…

SUPPLIER www.scan.co.uk Despite costing less money than many 120mm all-in-one liquid coolers, the Game Max Iceberg 240mm has a fully-fledged 240mm radiator, and it even offers lighting too. However, while the pump is illuminated and colours change on rings that surround the fans, you can’t control the lighting – that’s fine if you don’t mind the full colour spectrum spilling out all the time, but it’s not great if you want to use specific effects or colour-match the lighting to the rest of the PC. Thankfully, the display looks quite pleasant, and it will help to brighten up your PC’s interior if the rest of the gear is budget-focused. The fans are rated at 1,800rpm, so they have a reasonable amount of grunt, and there’s a PWM splitter cable…

DEVELOPER Two Point Studios / PUBLISHER SEGA / WEBSITE www.twopointhospital.com The third most amazing point about Two Point Hospital is that it has taken 20 years for someone to make a genuine successor to Theme Hospital. Bullfrog’s last original management sim sold over four million copies and remained in the video game charts for ten years. Despite these figures, though, there hasn’t been another hospital management game in the past two decades, and it’s taken the original creators of Theme Hospital – Mark Webley and Gary Carr – to found an entirely new studio to make it. The second most amazing point about Two Point Hospital is that its creators have repeatedly claimed it’s not just a spiritual sequel to Theme Hospital. That’s complete nonsense. Two Point Hospital is a…

It’s up to you to bury the bodies that are brought to you by a talking donkey DEVELOPER Lazy Bear Games / PUBLISHER Tinybuild / WEBSITE www.graveyardkeeper.com Graveyard Keeper makes a wonderful pitch. Less Stardew Valley and more Death Valley, it’s a management sim in which you bury corpses rather than grow crops. Starting as a lowly gravedigger, you repair and tend your graveyard, gradually working your way up the church ranks until you can perform memorial services and other duties, while making a side earner by selling corpse flesh to the local innkeeper to bake in his pies. The story seems a little off from the start though. See, you’re not just any old graveyard keeper. You’re a regular fellow who was tragically killed in a car accident, and…

Ray tracing has been used extensively in the movie industry for decades, not only in animated movies, but also to add CGI (computer-generated imagery) effects to live-action movies. Ice Age was a groundbreaking example in 2006, where ray tracing was employed to accurately simulate how light scatters off the animals’ fur, with each piece of hair casting accurate shadows. In most respects, ray tracing in movies is used to create the same global illumination, or indirect lighting effects as the RTX simulates in games, such as enabling more realistic reflections and shadows, including accurate shadows from ambient lighting in the scene. The key difference between movies and games is fidelity – put simply, the quality and accuracy of the output for movies is vastly higher than in games. Of course,…

TUTORIAL Daily schedule printer As a freelancer it can be challenging remember to put on pants in the morning, much less remember what you’re supposed to be doing all day. Previously, solutions have centred around pen and paper, but when you have a Linux machine, every problem looks like a potential shell script, and when you have a label printer, this potential shell script gets really exciting. For a given value of ‘exciting’ that includes small scraps of paper, anyway. This project involves a Linux machine with an Internet connection, some freely available software, a Dymo LabelWriter 450 printer, and the bizarre desire to have a teeny-tiny card with your day’s schedule printed on it. The printer The Dymo LabelWriter 450 is, as the name implies, designed for printing labels.…

Silent Base 801 Introducing the next PC case in the be quiet! Silent Base series, the Silent Base 801 offers excellent usability and silent operation. The relocatable motherboard tray and PSU shroud satisfy the highest requirements for a neat and individual interior. Meanwhile, smart cable management and various new features, such as a detachable top bracket for radiator installation, underline this case’s usability. The Silent Base 801 is available in two versions, with or without a tinted and tempered glass window, with each version available in a choice of three colour accents: black, orange and silver. The competition winner will be able to choose their preferred colour, subject to availability. HIGHLIGHTS OF THE SILENT BASE 801 Noise dampening vents provide excellent air permeability with maximum noise reduction Extra-thick 10mm insulation…

It’s not just processors either. There’s also a shortage of Z370 chipsets The long-awaited launch of Nvidia’s next-gen Turing-based GeForce RTX GPUs is undoubtedly the most exciting story in tech at the moment, but the biggest story of 2018 has to be the massive supply shortages of specific components. It’s only been a few months since GPU, PSU and budget CPU supply has returned to normal after the extreme demand and the associated stock shortage and price rises caused by cryptocurrency miners. Yet now, just in time for the start of the peak season in the run-up to Christmas, there’s a massive shortage of many Intel CPUs and chipsets. The problem has been building up for a while and is likely tied into Intel’s troubled transition away from its current…