Table of contents for issue 270 in PC Powerplay

$4,000. That’s about the price of a top of the line gaming PC these days. Crazy right? It wasn’t all that long ago (less than a year actually) that a little over $3,000 would get you the best of the best. It seems we’re in something of a perfect storm in the PC market with multiple pressures influencing the price of various components all at once. The biggest and most obvious culprit is the crypto mining craze that is creating a high degree of demand for all high-performance graphics cards for use in multi-GPU mining rigs. To the point where retailers are limiting sales to one or two per customer, if they even have stock in the first place. The demand is so high that a graphics card I bought…

WHO JOSH SAWYER WHERE OBSIDIAN ENTERTAINMENT WHY PILLARS OF ETERNITY II: DEADFIRE With Pillars of Eternity, a niche, crowdfunded title, Obsidian Entertainment sought to recapture the glory days of the Infinity Engine games. If you’re not familiar with the term, the Infinity Engine was the core of a number of isometric PC RPGs, including Baldur’s Gate II, Icewind Dale and Planescape: Torment, lauded as some of the best RPGs of all time. Initially asking for $1.1 million, the Kickstarter for Pillars of Eternity wound up raking in around $3.9 million. The resultant game was critically lauded and commercially successful, blending the style of the Infinity Engine games with modern storytelling and a campaign that was at once intimate and epic. A sequel was all but inevitable. “We had made enough…

DEVELOPER ARC SYSTEM WORKS • PUBLISHER BANDAI NAMCO ENTERTAINMENT • PRIcE $59.99 • AvAILABLE At STEAM, RETAIL bandainamcoent.com.au Arc System Works aren’t known for doing licensed games, but Dragon Ball definitely fits in their wheelhouse. The developer behind the beloved Guilty Gear and BlazBlue fighting games has a history of creating spectacular, beautiful games with deep fighting mechanics and over the top spectacle. Dragon Ball FighterZ is definitely beautiful and over the top, with more crazy bullshit per second than pretty much any other fighting game on the market, and whilst the fighting engine is simplified when compared to the developer’s flagship titles it still manages to deliver a satisfying and deep experience good for beginners and pros alike. The story of the long running Dragon Ball comics and animated…

DEVELOPER JOAKIM SANDBERG • PUBLISHER BITFROST ENTERTAINMENT • PRIcE $19.99 • AvAILABLE At STEAM, GOG www.playiconoclasts.com It took Joakim Sandberg, someone we can only assume is a mad genius living in a lab with a Tesla coil and Jacob’s ladder, seven years to make Iconoclasts, and amazingly, the time he took was definitely worth it. Iconoclasts is the rarest of modern retro games – a loving tribute to the look and mechanics of 16-bit platformers that still feels modern and fun. It’s also remarkably dark for such a brightly coloured game. Players take the role of Robin, a young unlicensed mechanic with a social conscience, much like her late father from whom she inherited her wrench. In the world of Iconoclasts, a conservative religion controls everything, including power and maintenance.…

“as big and bright as the screen is, the 60Hz refresh rate leads to some serious screen tearing” PRICE $3299 www.resistance.com.au It’s rare to find an all-in-one computer designed for gaming that is actually up to the task thanks to the size, power and cooling requirements of desktop graphics cards forcing manufacturers to compromise on performance in order to keep the machine cool and not unreasonably bulky. Well, Resistance, the gaming arm of Leader Computers hasn’t compromised on power to deliver a sleeper all-in-one computer. The Beast AiO is very aptly named. It’s huge and bulky, allowing for both a massive screen as well as some powerful innards. Built around a Samsung 21:9, 34” curved 3440x1440, 60Hz panel, the Beast measures 863.6mm wide, 127mm deep and 431.8 mm high and…

PRICE $729 www.gigabyte.com.au Gigabyte’s GTX 1070 Ti Gaming 8G strikes a good balance of performance and affordability. It is positioned in the budget segment of the 1070 Ti market. Its overclock mode sets the card at 1632MHz base clock with a 1721MHz boost clock. It uses the well regarded Windforce 3X cooler which does an acceptable job, but it does feel a touch lightweight compared to the cooler found on the high end Gigabyte & Aorus Xtreme cards. The cooler is certainly capable enough, but does give up some surface area when compared to the Asus and MSI cards, which means a maximum boost clocks are a touch lower and noise levels are higher, though not as high as the Zotac Mini. The Gigabyte Gaming 8G comes with a good…

“at the typical distance you sit from a computer monitor things look blocky and web-browsing is unpleasant” PRICE $2,499 samsung.com.au Monitors don’t get any bigger than Samsung’s behemoth 49in CHG90 QLED curved gaming monitor. It’s so big that it didn’t even fit on my desk when I unboxed its gigantic frame from the surfboard sized box it arrived in. As a result, Samsung’s LC49HG90DMEXXY (aka CHG90 for short) ended up on the kitchen table for this review, much to my partner’s chagrin. If you have any interest at all in this big boy, you really need to get the measuring tape out before splashing the cash, otherwise you’ll end up in my embarrassing situation. The dimensions of the CHG90 and its stand, if you’re wondering, are 1203mm wide, 525mm high…

“games like Overwatch run well at 1080p, making AMD APUs a compelling choice for users on a budget” PRICE $139 & $235 www.amd.com AMD had a very successful 2017 beginning with the release its Ryzen series of CPUs, firmly bringing the company back to a welcome competitive position not seen for the last decade. Not stopping there, AMD continued to execute its plans with Threadripper, Epyc, Ryzen Pro and finally Ryzen Mobile all being well received. As we moved well into 2018 there was always the glaring omission of the company’s shining light: its APU range. For many years AMDs processor division saw most of its success come from the sales of its range of so called APUs (Accelerated Processing Units) which merge the functionality of a CPU and GPU…

“shows just how effective the Strix cooler is. If it can handle this hungry GPU, it can handle anything” PRICE $1299 TBC www.asus.com.au Reviewing a card like the Asus ROG Strix RX Vega 56 is somewhat difficult at this time. Graphics cards might as well be called mining cards. Currently, gamers are being forced to pay crazy money for decent high resolution gaming performance in AAA games. Do you delay your upgrade or sell a kidney? Mining aside, Vega is actually a competent gaming GPU and Asus have produced a stellar design in the ROG Strix Vega 56. It’s an absolute beast of a card that offers an excellent feature set. Just look at this thing! It’s effectively a triple slot design, which is something to keep in mind. The…

 PRICE $4199 www.acer.com/ac/en/AU/content/predator-series/predatortriton700 “more than capable of running games at max settings with playable framerates” Not too long ago, only Razer was mass producing thin and light gaming laptops, but thanks, at least in part, to the Nvidia Max-Q design philosophy, every month we’re seeing more and more machines that combine portability and power into a very appealing package. The design philosophy throttles down the GPU reducing the heat output so the laptop doesn’t require bulkier and heavier cooling to offset the extra heat. It’s a clever philosophy but one of compromise – it’s unlikely a Max-Q laptop will ever be as fast or powerful as a desktop replacement style gaming laptop, but the more powerful machines will never be as portable. The 15.6” Triton 700 comes in two versions;…

PRICE $2999 www.msi.com The MSI Infinite X is a high end PC by any measure. Several different configurations are available and you can go all the way to a GTX 1080 Ti and 64Gb of RAM if you like. Our test system came equipped with a GTX 1080 Gaming X 8Gb graphics card, i7-8700K processor, 32Gb of DDR4-2400 RAM, and a 256Gb NVMe SSD plus a 2Tb hard drive. We’d like to see faster RAM to be honest, but the way RAM prices are at the moment, faster RAM would really increase the price. Our test system also came with a MSI DS4200 LED backlit gaming keyboard (not mechanical) and a DS B1 mouse. One of the weaker points is the inclusion of a weak 550W bronze rated PSU. A…

PRICE $169 www.alienware.com.au The Alienware Advanced Gaming Keyboard is quite an attractive bit of kit. Given Alienware’s general aesthetic it’s a little understated; a black, angular slab of plastic with lighting around the edges and the blue alien head situated in the top right, but that understatement is what we like about it. We’re less pleased about the barebones packaging – there is a padded wrist rest that slides up against the oddly angled front of the keyboard, but you have to buy it separately – and the lack of any backlighting, which is very disappointing at the price point. So do we like the Alienware Advanced Gaming Keyboard, or not? The answer is a little of both. First the good stuff. The keyboard is well-built and features Kailh Brown…

PRICE $189 www.coolermaster.com/peripheral/keyboards/masterkeys-mk750 It takes a little while to get used to the keyboard commands for changing the lighting on the MK 750. F1-F8 all have different functions for the lighting when combined with the Fn key, from changing the intensity of a hue to changing an actual effect, making it all too easy to turn your keyboard into a strobe light. With that out of the way, however, we can definitely say that Cooler Master has delivered a great looking, feeling and performing keyboard with the MK 750. Our review model came with Cherry Brown switches but the MK750 also comes with Cherry Red and Blue skus. Construction of the keyboard is nice and solid, using a combination of an aluminium top plate and plastic for the base. The…

“I had a little bird, its name was Enza. I opened the window, and in-flu-enza.” This was a children’s rhyme in 1918. It was a big year for the world. Armistice Day saw an end to the hostilities of WW1, legendary pioneering comedian Spike Milligan was born, great strides were made in women’s suffrage and the Spanish Flu pandemic spread worldwide, eventually killing around 5% of the global population. London, 1918 isn’t the happiest of places. Due to the war, news is censored heavily in an effort to keep up the spirits of those at home, the financial drain of the war and the lack of any kind of safety net leaves the poor of the city not only destitute but malnourished as well. In Dontnod Entertainment’s latest game, vampires…

DEVELOPER WARHORSE STUDIOS • PUBLISHER FIVE STAR GAMES • PRIcE US$60 • AvAILABLE At STEAM, GOG, RETAIL www.kingdomcomerpg.com When you nominate “realism”, “authenticity” and “historical accuracy” as core pillars of the design philosophy upon which your open world RPG is built, you inevitably invite scrutiny. The real world can be a cruel yardstick against which digital simulations almost always fail to measure up. Yet at the same time, as players, we tend to be easy to impress. When it comes to realism, close enough can be good enough. Kingdom Come: Deliverance cuts it fine a lot of the time, and misses the mark by a wide margin in some areas, but when it really hits it’s a unique experience. Developer Warhorse Studios is based in the Czech Republic and they’ve…

DEVELOPER LIENZO • PUBLISHER LIENZO • PRIcE $19.99 • AvAILABLE At STEAM www.lienzo.mx/mulaka/ A few years back we reviewed an interesting but ultimately flawed game called Never Alone. Whilst the mechanics in the game were lacking, the fact that Never Alone told stories from Native Alaskans still made it a fascinating and important game, giving an ancient culture a new way to pass on their stories. Mulaka has a similar pedigree, telling the stories and myths of the Tarahumara people of Northwest Mexico, but unlike Never Alone, it’s also a fun and rewarding game that could stand on its own even without the fascinating culture behind it. Players take the role of Sukuruame, a warrior and shaman who must travel the land to fight against an evil force of corruption.…

DEVELOPER UNKNOWN WORLDS ENTERTAINMENT • PUBLISHER UNKNOWN WORLDS ENTERTAINMENT • PRIcE $US24.99 • AvAILABLE At STEAM unknownworlds.com/subnautica I’ve played plenty of games that have been all about ‘flow’. Games with simple, abstract settings, easy to master controls, and often backed by gentle, ambient music; games that drop you out of the everyday, switch your mind to a different gear, and kind of force a meditative state upon you as adapt to the game’s soothing rhythm. Subnautica is neither simple, nor abstract. It features a rich narrative, complex, interlocking survival mechanisms, and one of the most calming and yet also alarming aquatic settings I’ve swum around in since Super Mario 64 (don’t @ me – that water level was legitimately terrifying). But for all of that the game still manages to…

In early November Nvidia introduced what is likely to be the final GTX 10 series graphics card. The GTX 1070 Ti filled a gap in the Nvidia lineup that became acutely apparent with AMD’s release of the RX Vega 56. While the 1070 Ti doesn’t bring anything revolutionary to the table, it is still a fine GPU that sits between the well-known GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 stalwarts. The 1070 Ti offers low power consumption, excellent performance and in the case of the Founders Edition, adequate cooling. This last point is addressed with the subsequent release of custom models from all the major manufacturers. In our labs we have models from Asus, Gigabyte, MSI and Zotac, each of which are unique in their own ways as we’ll see. Nvidia is…

“built like a battleship with a solid back plate and additional metal heatsinks” PRICE $749 www.msi.com The MSI GTX 1070 Ti Gaming 8G is another 1070 Ti that impresses with its cooler and build quality, along with its competitive pricing. Its overclock mode is set at an impressive 1683MHz base clock and 1759 MHz boost clock. The MSI 1070 Ti uses the stalwart Twin Frozr V cooler that is used across almost all of MSI’s high end graphics cards, so it’s no surprise to see it used here. The card is built like a battleship with a solid back plate and additional metal heatsinks for cooling the components. There’s also RGB functionality for the MSI logo on the side, though its usefulness is limited with a clashing set of red…

“Black Stabilizer highlights dark areas, so you can see enemies hiding in shadows” PRICE $1299 lg.com/au Gamers have never had it better, with a plethora of devices and accessories currently on the market to help them indulge in their passion. LG’s latest monitor is a gamer’s delight, fitted out with all the specs any demanding gamer will love. The 32GK850G-B is a 31.5-inch, 2560x1440 display with a VA-type panel. A VA-type panel is the best choice for most gamers, as it retains a level of colour rendition superior to that of the cheaper TN type panels, but allows for faster refresh rates than IPS panels, which are normally used for colour accurate applications. LG’s use of a VA panel allows for a whopping 144Hz refresh rate, perfect for competitive FPS…

“ground breaking in terms of reliability and will likely survive many years of heavy duty operation” PRICE $469 (EVO), $659 (PRO) www.samsung.com/au It seems like it’s been forever since the legendary Samsung 850 Pro and Evo SSDs launched. Almost unbelievably, we have to go all the way back to 2014 since we saw the first iterations of the 850 series. The competition never really managed to catch up and when you’re the top dog in the market, there’s little commercial reason to shake things up. The 850 Evo in particular is probably the best consumer SATA SSD ever made due to its unrivalled combination of value, performance, reliability and brand recognition. The 850 Pro has been the long time performance leader which makes it equally important. Now we’re well into…

“Achieve speeds of 5GHz+ across all cores, your cooling will give out well before the motherboard breaks a sweat” PRICE $699 www.asus.com Asus Republic of Gamers motherboards frequently find their way onto PC enthusiast’s shortlists. Take just one glance at it and you know you’re looking at a seriously high end motherboard. It looks rather like a blend of the full cover Sabretooth series combined with the functionality of the Apex models. Looks are only a part of it of course. Its chock full of features and it should be capable of getting the most from your Intel Coffee Lake processor. The feature list is comprehensive as you’d expect. An EK water block is a significant inclusion which gives you an idea of its target audience. As you can see,…

“the real strength is the gorgeous screen... it’s as good as it gets for a laptop” PRICE $2999 www.asus.com.au We’ve seen our fair share of gaming laptops over the years. Some are better than others, but with a few exceptions one of the traditional weaknesses of gaming laptops are the screens. If you’re dropping a few grand on a laptop, a generic 1080p screen just makes the whole experience poorer. Asus knows this and has introduced something every serious laptop gamer must have: a genuine IPS 1080p 120Hz screen with G-Sync, powered by a GTX 1070. Hurrah! The Asus GL503 Scar is a serious laptop. Its design is somewhat understated in an era where RGB lighting and brash styling is the norm. The lid is metallic, but the shell is…

PRICE $179 www.alienware.com.au After years of being known for high-end gaming PCs and laptops, Alienware has now broken into the peripherals market with two mice and two keyboards (both of which are reviewed this issue). The Elite gaming mouse, as the name suggests, is a premium gaming mouse designed and priced to compete with the big boys already in the market, and from our extensive testing we can safely say that it’s… okay? As far as features go, the Elite mouse ticks all the requisite boxes with an up to 12,000 DPI optical sensor, 1000Hz polling rate, on-the-fly DPI switching, programmable buttons, interchangeable side modules, an adjustable palm rest and weights, on board memory and the like, but despite all these features it’s just not a very good mouse. The…

PRICE $249 www.alienware.com.au The naming of the Advanced and Pro keyboards from Alienware sounds a little topsy-turvy to us, but the pro is a more appealing prospect, even though it costs $80 more. One of the problems we had with the Advanced keyboard remains with the Pro – the wrist rest is an optional extra that costs more – but it does feature backlighting. It also features the same Kailh Brown switches. Rather disappointingly, although the top plate of the keyboard has a metallic sheen, it’s just different coloured plastic. The build quality is still good, but for the price of a premium keyboard some aluminium for added rigidity isn’t much to ask. The only real change to the overall design of the Pro is that the three volume buttons…

PRICE $189 www.thermaltake.com.au If it weren’t for the existence of a Tt Esports mousepad, the X1 RGB would be more aptly titled the XL RGB. It’s a big keyboard – full-sized with a large bezel on each side, a fairly large magnetic wrist rest and dedicated AV keys and controls for game mode, a Windows lock and lighting. The thing has a footprint that takes up a large part of a desk – 465 x 170 x 40mm (approximately). Despite the fact that the keyboard is much bigger than we usually prefer our keyboards to be, we can’t but help sing the praises of this well-built board, Rather than offering the full range of Cherry MX switches (or Kailh switches that have appeared in previous Thermaltake keyboards), the X1 RGB…

PRICE $229 www.razerzone.com The moment you pick up Razer’s latest attempt to beat Microsoft at its own controller game, it’s hard not to be impressed. The new Wolverine Ultimate may not have adamantium-coated bones and a healing factor, but its solid case, incredible build quality, and remarkable versatility certainly make you feel as though it might grow back a lost limb – or trigger – eventually. The Wolverine Ultimate sits intimately in your hands, and with textured grips on the underside, and a choice of magnetic thumb buttons to customise the controller to how you play, along with a choice of two different magnetic D-pads. Particularly welcome is the double height thumbstick, though it’s annoying that there’s only one – it’s be nice to have the option to have the…

The first game I ever reviewed for money was Myth: The Fallen Lords. David Hollingworth (who is about to become the editor of PCPP), who was working on PC Authority at the time (the magazine that would go on to become PCPP’s sister publication, PC & Tech Authority) was the person who commissioned me. Small world, huh? I was an employment agent at the time because, after a failed stint as a playwright in residence for a theatre company, I didn’t think that I would be able to make a living writing, at least not outside of advertising or copywriting, two career paths most of my family followed. Two years later I was the tech editor for this magazine, and for nearly two decades I have made my living with…

CPU THE PINNACLE OF SOLDERING Intel has copped some flak recently for using less effective thermal paste under the integrated heater spreaders (IHS) on its high-end processors. Removing the IHS (“de-lidding”) to put better performing paste under the IHS has come into fashion of late with super-enthusiasts, due to this, resulting in temperatures some 20°C cooler. Using solder to directly connect the IHS to the CPU die is the much-preferred attachment method when it’s done at the factory, and it turns out that Pinnacle Ridge, aka Ryzen 2, processors will get this treatment. Being produced on a newer 12nm node (compared to the current 14nm) AMD should be looking to push Ryzen 2 clock speeds as hard as possible to close the gap to Intel’s superior single thread performance numbers.…

DEVELOPER DIM BULB GAMES • PUBLISHER GOOD SHEPHERD ENTERTAINMENT • PRIcE US$20 • AvAILABLE At STEAM, GOG www.wherethewatertasteslikewine.com Stories grow with the telling. What may start out as 100% true warps over time, becoming mythologised and far grander than it once was. A story can, through retelling, become a legend, and that myth can then go on to influence other stories in turn, creating a new mythology. At its core, this is what Where the Water Tastes like Wine is all about. Sometime in the early 1930s, a hobo loses a card game to a wolf and becomes its servant, travelling America collecting and telling stories in the hopes of finding a true, important story that can affect the myth that is America. It’s a somewhat bizarre premise for a…

DEVELOPER FIRAXIS • PUBLISHER 2K GAMES • PRIcE US$30 • AvAILABLE At STEAM, RETAIL www.civilization.com Rise & Fall isn’t an overhaul of Civ VI. Instead its core new features are additions to the mix that are not intended to fundamentally reconfigure your strategies, but rather encourage players into considering different approaches. Overall, I think, the design goal is to introduce a little more push and pull between the competing systems, a little more flexibility and even unpredictability to the arc of a single play session. The new feature that best reflects the expansion’s title is the Golden Age, in which players rack up points for their empire’s achievements - e.g. eliminating a barbarian camp, circumnavigating the world, building a unique unit, and so on. Qualify for a Golden Age and…

PRICE $799 www.asus.com.au The Asus 1070 Ti Strix Gaming is the most feature packed variant in our test. It’s no surprise that it comes with the highest price, too. It has the joint highest overclock of the bunch, along with the MSI card, with a 1683MHz base clock and 1759MHz boost clock. The Strix cooler is very effective with a huge surface area. When you pick it up you know it’s a serious piece of kit with its excellent build quality and rigidity. It’s a 2.5 slot card, which you may need to take into consideration if space is limited. It delivered the coolest temperatures of the roundup and was second only to the MSI in fan noise, though the difference is minimal in reality. The Asus comes with unique…

“the surprise was just how competitive the Zotac was in the benchmarks despite its lack of an auto-overclock” PRICE $699 www.zotac.com Zotac doesn’t have a huge market presence in Australia compared to other parts of the world, but that’s changing. The Zotac GTX 1070 Ti we have on hand is the sole mini card of the 1070 Ti launch, and also the only one not to offer an overclock profile - though of course you can manually overclock it if you wish. The little Zotac is obviously ideally suited to a small form factor build. It’s also the cheapest card in the test by quite a margin. The Zotac Mini comes in at just 211mm in length, meaning it should fit in the vast majority of cases. It comes with…

“it may look small, but there’s room for every kind of mobo including EATX, as well as ample cooling” PRICE $209 fractal-design.com It’s no secret that a number of PCPP writers are fans of Fractal cases and have them for their personal machines. In many ways, Fractal cases occupy the same space that Lian-Li cases did in the early noughties, offering beautifully built enclosures with plenty of space to build in and a clean, minimalist aesthetic that looks great in an understated way. The Define R6 is the latest in the Define line, and we can safely say that it’s quite possibly their best so far. Standing at just over 50cm high, the Define R6 comes in a few different flavours – black, white and gunmetal, each with the option…

“the MX500 is fantastic value, but also comes with an impressive list of features and specifications” PRICE $389 www.crucial.com The SATA SSD market has been pretty stagnant of late. The performance advantage of PCI Express based NVMe drives means that older SATA drives no longer grab the headlines. SATA drives still make up the largest part of the SSD market though, and competition remains fierce. Crucial has fired the first shot of 2018 with the aggressively priced MX500. Even at launch it’s one of the cheapest 1TB drives on the market. That alone makes it a solid recommendation, though the MX500 is far from being a one trick pony. Crucial parent company Micron is one of the leading flash producers in the world. It manufactures the 64-Layer TLC NAND flash…

“support for OpenVPN means that you don’t have to install the provider’s app on your machine” PRICE $528 asus.com/au Asus routers are some of the best in the industry for home users wanting a little extra than simply getting online. Known for their performance and wide feature set, the DSL-AC3100 is the latest in that tradition and does not disappoint. Denoted by the DSL in its product name, the DSL-AC3100 is a Wi-Fi router with a built-in ADSL, ADSL 2/2+ and VDSL2 modem. Perfect for NBN FTTN users. Interestingly, Asus has added support for G.Fast, which doesn’t exist in Australia yet, but could one day be used on the copper portions of the NBN. Wi-Fi on the DSL-AC3100 is one of its unique selling points thanks to the inclusion of…

PRICE $1899 www.acer.com/ac/en/AU/content/predator-helios300-series The Predator brand usually seems to denote high end gear, but the Acer Predator Helios 300 is a distinctly mid-range gaming laptop. That’s not a slight on the machine – far from it. It’s a very solid machine aiming for a balance between power and affordability and hitting admirably close to the target. The machine comes in two different form factors, either 15.6” or 17.3”. We opted to review the 15.6” version as we think it offers the best price to performance ratio of all the models, and given the fact that both sizes feature a 1080p screen, the higher pixel density makes the images really pop. Like many other Acer laptops, the chassis is made of a combination of aluminium and plastic, but the red details…

PRICE $69 www.cougargaming.com Cougar really seems to have hit its stride of late. Instead of focussing all over the market, it appears that the company has decided to focus more on the high end budget market when it comes to peripherals. The Surpassion may have a bit of a dumb name, but don’t let that put you off – it’s an extremely impressive FPS oriented gaming mouse with some very nifty features. The key feature of the Surpassion is a built in LCD screen flanked by two buttons on the base of the mouse. The screen shows a readout of the current DPI and polling rate, the former which can be adjusted by increments of 50 by holding in one of the base buttons and using the thumb buttons to…

PRICE $199 www.razerzone.com To keep things simple I’ll start by saying that I love this keyboard. It is the best we’ve seen from Razer to date, combining the excellent performance and feel if the standard Chroma V2 but fitting it into a tenkeyless package. The model we reviewed featured Razer Yellow switches, the silent, linear switches with a shorter throw and actuation distance than the more common Orange and Green switches. They feel similar to the excellent Cherry Speed switches if slightly firmer – an odd fact given that both switches feature a 45g actuation force. At any rate, the Yellow switches feel great and fast, for both gaming and typing. Making the keyboard feel even faster is a technology Razer calls I.T.T. Instant Trigger Technology sends the key activation…

PRICE $129 www.gamdias.com We’ve been really keen to check out our first dedicated optical switch keyboard for quite a while now, and our first experience has turned out to be quite the surprise. We don’t know about you, but when we think optical, we think quiet. Light isn’t known for making too much noise. Imagine our surprise then when we discover that the Hermes P2 RGB is just about the loudest, clickiest keyboard we’ve ever heard. The keyboard features optical switches, yes, but they are Blue optical switches. Noise aside, the Hermes P2 RGB is an excellent keyboard. The keys have a nice resistance and tactile feedback and feel extremely quick under the fingers thanks to the relatively short actuation distance. The build quality of the keyboard is excellent, with…

PRICE $229 www.hyperxgaming.com Another month and another excellent headset from HyperX arrives in the office. This time around HyperX has delivered their first wireless headset, and it’s a stunner. The basic design of the headset sits somewhere between the Cloud Alpha and Cloud Stinger, with a simple padded headstrap and plastic hinges attaching the well-cushioned earcups. The most noticeable difference between this headset and any of those that came before is the lack of wires. You can also plug the headset in using a regular 3.5mm cable if you want some wires in your life. It’s not the most striking looking headset in the world, but it sits very comfortably on your head and sounds a treat. The earcups each house a nice 50mm driver and deliver the stereo performance…

01 Beerjet $TBA • Beerjet www.beerjet.com Sometimes technology takes us to a place we didn’t expect to be, and sometimes that place is a place where there’s a machine that can pour 1000 half-litre beers an hour. POWERED UP: A pneumatic glass tilting system angles six glasses for the perfect pour, while a touch screen controls how much and what level of foam should be poured. Temperature and flow can easily be monitored, and should the power go out, you can still do a manual pour. PLAYED OUT: You’d need to regularly host pretty big parties to justify owning one of these. 02 Honda 3E-D18 $TBA • Honda www.honda.com An autonomous ATV that’s designed as a tool to help people in various industries in a variety of ways, from personal…