Table of contents for July 2017 in Custom PC UK

You’ll need to understand Ryzen’s various quirks, but that’s where we can help I honestly don’t think I’ve worked on an issue of Custom PC like this one for over ten years. Over the next few pages you’ll see awards handed out to various AMD-related products, including a CPU, GPU, AM4 motherboard and several CPU coolers. Not only that, but we’ve dedicated a whole feature to building a PC based on a top-end AMD CPU and put it on the cover. It’s a combination we haven’t seen in this magazine since the Athlon 64 days, probably before AMD bought out ATI. After a bit of a shaky launch last month, we’ve now had some time to get used to Ryzen. EFI updates have started trickling down, and although performance still…

Corsair unveils customisable mouse Whatever style of mouse grip you prefer, Corsair reckons it may well have your needs covered by its new customisable gaming mouse. The Glaive gives you a choice of three swappable magnetic grips, with options for a rubberised finish, a smooth curve or a wide thumb rest. The Glaive also sports six programmable buttons, three zones of programmable RGB lighting and a  custom 16,000dpi PixArt optical sensor, which was developed specifically for Corsair. The Corsair Glaive is available now from www.scan.co.uk for £70 inc VAT. Nvidia releases new Titan After predictably irritating buyers of its last Titan X (Pascal) card with the release of the cheaper and faster GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, Nvidia has now unleashed another Titan card with an equally baffling moniker – the…

SUPPLIER www.scan.co.uk SPECIFICATIONS Frequency 3000MHz Timings 15-17-17-35 Voltage 1.35V Height (from base) 49mm Lighting Yes (RGB) The first RGB memory kit we reviewed – GeiL’s Evo X – wowed us with the ability to configure the colours in your RAM’s lighting array. However, while it was first out of the starting blocks, the Evo X suffered from a serious issue – it required cables to power and control the lighting. This situation meant you had to deal with a  mess of string trailing across your motherboard, but thankfully Corsair has found a way around this problem with its new Vengeance RGB DDR4 memory. It’s available in both dual-channel and quad-channel kits, in 16GB and 32GB capacities, although due to recent DDR4 RAM price hikes, the added premium of RGB…

GAMEPAD SteelSeries Stratus XL / £49.99 inc VAT The SteelSeries Stratus XL is a hefty Bluetooth gamepad based on the PlayStation 4 controller’s layout – with the analogue thumbsticks sitting front and centre – while the D-pad is positioned in the upper left. This layout means that the pad handles slightly differently to pads with the Xbox layout pattern, but the buttons are bound identically. The Stratus XL owes a significant amount of its heft to being a Bluetooth pad and thus having to contain batteries, but the pad has a  reassuring weight and solidity even without the batteries. The action on the buttons and sticks feels precise, and it feels like a well-made and robust pad in your hand – it will likely withstand more than a couple of…

How we test This month we’re looking at the latest 120mm all-in-one liquid coolers, covering a range of budgets, and for the first time we’re including results for AMD Ryzen CPUs on Socket AM4 too, as well as our usual LGA115x and LGA2011 results. Our AMD system sports a Ryzen 7 1700 overclocked to 3.8GHz using a 1.3V vcore on a Gigabyte AB350-Gaming 3 motherboard, 16GB of 3000MHz Corsair Vengeance LPX memory and an XFX R9 390 graphics card,  along with a Crucial MX100 SSD. Our LGA115x test rig uses an Intel Core i7-4790K overclocked to 4.4GHz with a 1.275V vcore, a Gigabyte Z97X-UD5H motherboard and 4GB of 1600MHz Crucial Ballistix DDR3 memory. Alongside these components sit a 240GB Intel SSD 730 and an AMD Radeon HD 5770 1GB graphics card.…

SUPPLIER www.dinopc.com SPECIFICATIONS Compatibility Intel: LGA2011, LGA2011-v3, LGA115x, LGA1366; AMD: Socket AM4, AM3/+,AM2/+, FM2/+, FM1 Radiator size with fans (mm) 120 x 157 x 77 (W x D x H) Fans 2 x 120mm Stated noise Up to 30dBA We first looked at Cooler Master’s MasterLiquid 120 last month, but now it’s time to pitch it against the latest competition, and also see how well it deals with cooling an overclocked AMD Ryzen 7 1700. Out of the box, the cooler is compatible with AM4 too, thanks to the fact that it uses  the existing plastic clips on AM4 motherboards. These clips are compatible with older coolers, as they’re identically placed to the ones on previous AMD motherboards. As a result, the MasterLiquid 120 is by far the easiest cooler…

How we test The ever-decreasing price of SSDs has resulted in hard drives playing a less significant role in PCs. Just a few years ago, it was still standard practice to buy a 128GB SSD boot drive and a larger hard drive for bulk data, but a 500GB SSD now costs under £150, so you can store more of your data on the faster drive. Still, while some people have the budget (and limited data needs) to fully do away with hard drives, most of us still can’t afford to replace them all just yet, as media libraries grow larger and the likes of 4K video become commonplace. The question, then, is which hard drive should you buy? Is there still a place for performance hard drives, or should you…

Build a budget gaming PC The parts you’ll need to build a budget machine capable of playing the latest games at decent settings on a 1080p monitor. The machine has a discrete graphics card, a Kaby Lake dual-core CPU and DDR4 memory. The Core i3-7350K also has an unlocked multiplier, so it can be overclocked to 4.8GHz and beyond. See Issue 163, p86 for a guide on how to build this PC. Build an 8-core AMD Ryzen PC The parts you’ll need to build a cut-price, 8-core PC for dealing with heavily multi-threaded software, such as 3D rendering and video encoding packages. The PC includes an overclockable AMD Ryzen 7 1700 CPU, 16GB of RAM, a basic SSD and a GPU that can handle games at 1,920 x 1,080. For…

Rhythm games are rarely noted for their technological prowess – they’re usually fairly simple, with a well-established structure. Rhythm games only require the player to hit certain buttons in time to music, and frame a scoring system around that concept. They don’t need to render vast worlds, or feature realistic, cutting-edge graphics. Most of the innovation happens on the hardware side, such as the false musical instruments used to control the game. Thumper isn’t your standard rhythm game, however. Rather than playing along to your favourite songs, Thumper sees players attempting to survive an audio/visual assault, navigating a gleaming insectoid creature through a black, hellish dimension at blistering speeds. What’s more, Thumper’s soundscape is created by the player as they blast along the track and scythe around its corners. Conceptually,…

Our good pals at Fractal Design are offering two great prizes to a lucky Custom PC reader, with both an all-in-one liquid cooler and a 750W power supply up for grabs. Fractal Design Celsius S24 The Celsius series builds upon proven technology, using premium sound-dampening materials to deliver extreme cooling ability with minimum noise output. Its smart dual-mode speed controls are simple and robust, with no need for additional software. Both fan and pump speeds can also be managed by an intelligent auto mode or switched to PWM mode for precise user control. For true enthusiasts, the satisfaction of a clean and efficient build can never be overstated, and the Celsius makes this easier than ever to achieve, with an integrated fan hub and concealed cable routing. The Celsius S24…

Gimp We use Gimp to open and edit large images. Unlike our previous Gimp test, this one uses more than one CPU core, although it’s still more sensitive to clock speed increases than more CPU cores. Handbrake H.264 video encoding Our heavily multi-threaded Handbrake H.264 video encoding test takes full advantage of many CPU cores, pushing them to 100 per cent load. LuxMark OpenCL This GPU compute test is the only synthetic part of our suite, although the renderer is based on the real LuxRender software. As 3D rendering is a specific workload that not everyone uses, and because most software doesn’t support OpenCL, this section has just a quarter of the weighting of the other tests in the final score. Heavy multi-tasking Our new multi-tasking test plays a full-screen…

We could expect to see 7nm GPUs next year! By most accounts, AMD’s Ryzen launch appears to have been successful. Software support is lagging at the moment, but it takes time for the ripples of a totally new platform to reach the wide parts of the PC ecosystem, so this delay is inevitable. Let’s also remember that AMD is a tenth of the size of Intel, so it has much more limited resources when it comes to working with partners and software vendors to optimise their products. From past experience, I can say that motherboard makers need a good six months to tweak their EFI systems for reliability and performance. In particular, optimising the new DDR4 memory controller is important, as it’s now directly tied to the performance of AMD’s…

Micro-ATX audio I’ve always enjoyed good PC sound. I remember configuring my new Gateway PC (remember Gateway?) with top-of-the-range Boston Acoustics 2.1 speakers. Just as Ben said about enjoying the amazing scenery in modern games, I feel that good sound falls into that category, except that you can continue playing while enjoying the sound! I’ve been thinking about what I could usefully lose from my machine when downsizing to micro-ATX, and decided the Asus DX sound card could be spared; I could instead use and enjoy the motherboard’s on-board HD Audio chip. I thought that the six years between upgrades would have resulted in major advances with on-board audio from the Realtek 889 chip on my old board. Wrong! Of all the micro-ATX boards I’ve seen, from Gigabyte to ASRock,…

The board was easily the fastest-posting AM4 sample we’ve seen SUPPLIER www.scan.co.uk SPECIFICATIONS Chipset AMD X370 CPU socket AMD Socket AM4 Memory support 4 slots: max 64GB DDR4 (up to 2667MHz) Expansion slots Three 16x PCI-E 3, three 1x PCI-E 2 Sound Realtek ALC1220 Networking Intel Gigabit LAN Overclocking Max CPU multiplier 63x; no base clock overclocking; max voltages CPU 1.7V, RAM 2V Ports 6 x SATA 6Gbps (X370), 2 x M.2, 8 x USB 3, 1 x USB 3.1 Type-A, 2 x USB 3.1 Type-C, 7 x USB 2, 1 x LAN, 6 x surround audio out, line in, mic, DisplayPort, HDMI Dimensions (mm) 305 x 244 We’re finally seeing some stock of AM4 motherboards filling etailers’ shelves, and while there’s no official explanation for why it’s taken…

SUPPLIER www.aquatuning.co.uk SPECIFICATIONS Compatibility Intel: LGA2011, LGA2011-v3, LGA115x, LGA1366; AMD: Socket AM4, AM3/+,AM2/+, FM2/+, FM1 Radiator size with fans (mm) 120 x 155 x 99 (W x D x H) Fans 2 x 120mm Stated noise Up to 0.3 sones Despite working with a sub-£60 price tag, ARCTIC has managed to include not just two 120mm PWMcontrolled fans with the Liquid Freezer 120, but also a 49mm-thick radiator. This radiator is much thicker than the half-height efforts from Deepcool, Cooler Master and NZXT, and should mean that, all other factors being equal, the ARCTIC can offer the same cooling as its competitors but at lower noise levels. The downside is that the total depth sits at 155mm, so you’ll need plenty of clearance in the rear or roof of…

SUPPLIER www.amazon.co.uk SPECIFICATIONS Compatibility Intel: LGA2011, LGA2011-v3, LGA115x, LGA1366; AMD: Socket AM4, AM3/+,AM2/+, FM2/+, FM1 Radiator size with fans (mm) 120 x 154 x 57 (W x D x H) Fans 1 x 120mm Stated noise Up to 31.3dBA If we have one complaint about many all-in-one liquid coolers, it’s that they look similarly bland. However, Deepcool has made a valiant effort to jazz up its Captain 120 EX, which features a little piece of bent rigid acrylic tubing that runs around the outside of the pump. Combine this feature with some illumination, courtesy of a glowing red backlight in the centre of the pump section, and the Captain 120 EX is easily the snazziest-looking cooler on test. Deepcool only includes one fan with the radiator, though, and screws…

It amounts to distracting the player with cut-and-paste activities I always feel bad when an open-world game turns out to be mediocre. When a game such as Ghost Recon: Wildlands or Mass Effect: Andromeda offers sprawling landscapes to explore, each rendered in exquisite detail, I almost feel like a spoiled brat for dismissing it. These games require vast amounts of resources, and so much time and effort from their development team to create. I don’t relish turning around and saying ‘sorry, but it’s a bit rubbish’. Unfortunately, this obsession with environment size and visual fidelity is partly the reason why an increasing number of open-world games are failing to excite players. As each release competes to be larger and/ or more detailed than before, the question of how the player…

It’s tempting to give Snake Pass full marks simply because it’s a 3D platform game that involves no jumping. Its central character is entirely legless, in a good way – Noodle the Snake is a bright-eyed, charmingly lackadaisical serpent who must find navigate the rocky platforms and bamboo ladders of his jungle home. The central concept is learning how to overcome your lack of appendages and turn it into an advantage, which makes for a truly fantastic game for at least the first couple of hours. Controlling Noodle involves holding down the left mouse button to move forwards, and using WASD to change direction. However, Noodle moves extremely slowly in a straight line, so you speed up by slithering from left to right, using your coiled muscles to build up…

Maybe it’s just my Internet cookies, but it seems I can’t go for five minutes lately without seeing a video about a VR arcade. My social networks, particularly LinkedIn, are awash with featurettes about VR theme parks where you run on omni-directional treadmills, don haptic vests to suffer simulated gunshots and run through mixed-reality mazes. Such theme parks undoubtedly offer a more immersive version of VR than most people can replicate at home. The issue is that there aren’t very many of them. The world’s most ambitious VR theme park, The Void ( www.thevoid.com ), currently only has two locations – one based at Madame Tussauds in New York, the other in Dubai. Tickets cost approximately £25 per person, per hour and there’s only one game available to play. It’s…

Back in March, AMD provided what many enthusiasts have  been desiring since the introduction of Intel’s Core architecture a decade ago – a competitive range of CPUs. Ryzen might not match Intel’s equivalents in all areas, but it offers superb value, usually outperforming much more expensive Intel CPUs for less cash, particularly in heavily multi-threaded tasks. However, launching an entire CPU ecosystem was never going to be easy, and there were certainly some early teething troubles. Intel’s latest motherboards are able to handle memory speeds well in excess of 3000MHz, but getting above this frequency with a Ryzen system is tricky. Only a few DIMM kits are supported at higher frequencies, which does limit Ryzen’s performance, as it scales well with increased memory speeds. There were also stability issues, problems…

Say what you will about the Raspberry Pi Foundation, it’s not an organisation that likes to keep still. Not long after the highly successful launch of the £4 (inc VAT) Raspberry Pi Zero single-board computer (SBC) at the tail end of 2015, it followed up with a revised model adding in a  miniature camera serial interface (CSI) connector for compatibility with the Pi Camera Module and Pi NoIR Camera Module. Now it’s at it again, but the shift is rather more fundamental: it’s added wireless support to the Raspberry Pi range for the first time. The Pi Zero W, then, isn’t simply a revision of the Pi Zero, unlike the model with the added CSI connector. It’s an entirely new model in the family, and one that’s being sold alongside the…

Mini-ITX needs more than scaled-down towers I’m a strong advocate of mini-ITX. In a world packed with large towers with just a single graphics card and a rack of  empty expansion slots, I’m still surprised more people don’t opt for smaller systems instead of buying a PC case that wastes a huge amount of space. Mini-ITX is perfect if you’ll be using a single graphics card, overclocked CPU, SSD and a hard disk – you lose nothing in terms of performance, and with AMD’s AM4-based X300 chipset focusing exclusively on mini-ITX, the form factor could see a further boost in popularity this year too. However, while mini-ITX cases have generally improved in terms of cooling, a lot of mini-ITX cases, such as the Fractal Design Define Nano S and Phanteks Evolv…

No one ever calls eggs a gateway food to custard You probably know the phrase ‘gateway behaviour’ from various clichés about marijuana being a gateway drug. No one ever calls eggs a gateway food to custard, or Baileys a gateway drink to absinthe, or at least not until now. Enter the National Crime Agency, the UK’s law enforcement body for various crimes including hacking, which just published a report suggesting that game modding is a gateway to serious cybercrime. The report, available on the NCA website, has problems, not least that subjects were criminals and may have biases or reasons for being dishonest. Two types of interviews were carried out, the first being a ‘debrief’ of people who had received a caution, community sentence or imprisonment for cyber-related crimes. The…

SUPPLIER www.ebuyer.com SPECIFICATIONS Compatibility Intel: LGA2011, LGA2011-v3, LGA115x, LGA1366; AMD: Socket AM4, AM3/+,AM2/+, FM2/+, FM1 Radiator size with fans (mm) 128 x 153 x 95 (W x D x H) Fans 2 x 120mm Stated noise Up to 36.9dBA We looked at Be Quiet’s Silent Loop 280 in our 280mm cooler Labs (see Issue 160, p50), and concluded that it was a superb liquid cooler, but a tad on the pricey side. Sadly, the latter also seems to be true for the 120mm model – at £90 inc VAT, it’s the most expensive cooler on test by far, costing nearly twice the price of the NZXT Kraken X31, which features software control. That said, Be Quiet! hasn’t simply set a lofty price tag because it’s greedy. The Silent Loop…

SUPPLIER www.ebuyer.com SPECIFICATIONS Compatibility Intel: LGA2011, LGA2011-v3, LGA115x, LGA1366; AMD: Socket AM4, AM3/+,AM2/+, FM2/+, FM1 Radiator size with fans (mm) 120 x 155 x 55 (W x D x H) Fans 1 x 120mm Stated noise Up to 34dBA We were amazed to find that NZXT’s Kraken X31 costs just £48 inc VAT, undercutting every other cooler on test by a sizeable margin. The price is even more impressive when you consider that it’s also the only cooler on test to offer software control via its USB 2 header connector and free CAM software, which enables you to tweak the profile curve of up to two fans. These fans can be hooked up to the pump, which dishes out the power, although only one 120mm fan is included in…

SETTING UP THE EFI As Ryzen is a new platform, configuring a  system currently takes a little more fiddling than on your average Intel system. We recommend installing Windows first, when the system is running at stock, default settings, and then tweaking. For starters, setting the correct memory speed and timings is usually best done manually. MSI and Asus’ implementation of XMP are very hit and miss, with a miss resulting in failed boots, while Gigabyte’s implantation of XMP can result in EFI errors that result in failed boots. Thankfully, you can circumvent these issues by avoiding XMP profiles entirely and manually inputting your memory settings instead. On the Gigabyte board used in our build, you’ll need to head to the M.I.T section and then go to Advanced Frequency Settings. This…

I’ve been working heavily on a book for the BBC micro:bit microcontroller – The Micro:bit User Guide, published by Wiley and due out later this year, hint, hint! – and while I was experimenting with the device’s serial port, I found a rather handy use for its 5x5 single-colour LED matrix display: a scrolling bar graph for system statistics. Whenever I see an LED matrix, my immediate thoughts are to make it display bar or line graphs – back in Issue 153, I turned a Raspberry Pi Zero and Pimoroni Unicorn HAT into a home energy monitor. This project is a lot simpler, though, and relies upon the very useful psutil Python library and the MicroPython REPL (Read-Eval-Print-Loop) interpreter. It was created with a Raspberry Pi in mind, although it…

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, multi-colour 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…

The gains when Optane Memory is caching a SATA SSD, let alone a PCI-E SSD, are minimal 3D XPoint, the new memory technology developed by Intel and Micron, created a big stir when it was revealed in July 2015. It promises to solve many of the limitations of both DRAM and NAND by delivering much higher density and performance than NAND without the cost and volatility of DRAM. However, actually bringing a 3D XPoint product to market has taken considerably longer than either company originally estimated. Anyway, at long last the first 3D XPoint products are now here, although they’ve arrived with more of a whimper than a bang. Branded as Optane Memory, these Intel-made M.2 drives look like PCI-E SSDs and, indeed, you can format them in Windows and…