Table of contents for May 2018 in Custom PC UK

I ended up doing a comedy photo shoot of me mindlessly chomping on a PCB Many years ago, I boldly announced that I’d eat my own graphics card if AMD bought ATI. Hey, I also predicted the iPhone would flop. We can’t be right al l the time. My reasoning was that the cost of buying ATI would be so huge, and the task of integrating a Radeon GPU into a CPU so great, that it just wouldn’t be worth the colossal risk. AMD was taking a massive gamble on GPU compute going mainstream, and being able to treat an integrated GPU as a kind of built-in coprocessor. Of course, I was wrong about the buyout – AMD did indeed buy ATI, and I ended up doing a comedy photo…

EK apologises for Threadripper blocks Water-cooling kit manufacturer EK has issued an official apology for the performance of its first-generation of waterblocks for AMD’s TR4 Threadripper platform. EK’s original Supremacy Evo TR4 block had a standard-sized CPU waterblock in the middle of a TR4-sized plate, meaning the waterblock wasn’t directly positioned over either of the dies under a Threadripper heatspreader. According to EK’s statement, the decision was ‘a result of an oversight from our side almost a year ago’, and the company will be discounting its first-generation TR4 waterblocks as a result. However, the company also claims to have now solved the problem by engineering a new cold plate with a much larger fin area, specifically designed to cool the two dies in a large TR4 package. If you purchased…

Memory speed has always had a big impact on AMD’s APUs, but with the introduction of Infinity Fabric, it’s now doubly important, as the performance of the CPU and GPU performance are directly related to it. As a result, while both the Ryzen 3 2200G and Ryzen 5 2400G are aimed at PCs at the extreme low end of the price scale, requiring paltry amounts of power and no discrete graphics card, you should consider opting for the fastest memory you can afford. To see what memory you should buy, we’ve put three of the faster, but affordable, speeds to the test on a Ryzen 5 2400G system, using a 16GB dual-channel kit of G.Skill’s Flare X memory to pitch 2800MHz, 3000MHz and 3200MHz frequencies against each other, all using…

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. TESTS : By using the fast PC detailed on the left, we can be sure that any limitations are due to the graphics card on test, rather…

SUPPLIER www.ebuyer.com Just as the Samsung 850 Evo has dominated the upper end of the mainstream SATA SSD market, so the Samsung 850 Pro has dominated the professional end. Thanks to its use of MLC 3D NAND (rather than TLC), it provided long-lasting, consistently fast performance. If you didn’t necessarily want the fastest drive, but required rock-solid performance right up to the last gigabyte, all while having a reassuringly long warranty and endurance, it was the drive to get. The formula remains the same with the Samsung 860 Pro, though, as with the 860 Evo (see p45), the hardware under the hood is completely new. The cornerstone is Samsung’s new 64-layer 3D NAND flash memory; due to its use of MLC rather than TLC, this comes in 256Gb dies.…

SUPPLIER www.scan.co.uk Cooler Master’s MasterSet MS120 is the most expensive product in this Labs, and with good reason – it’s the only keyboard that’s packaged alongside a gaming mouse. The keyboard is by far the most interesting product in the box though. Cooler Master has built this unit with the aim of mimicking mechanical switches. The hardware beneath the MS120’s plastic keycaps still uses a membrane base, but it’s otherwise designed like a mechanical switch, so there’s a spring and plunger. Hands-on time reveals that Cooler Master’s hybrid switches are the closest option on test to a true mechanical unit. The keys have the loudest typing sound of any in this group, and they certainly feel tactile like a mechanical keyboard. They don’t have a bump in the middle…

SUPPLIER www.overclockers.co.uk The mid-priced SteelSeries Apex 150 is a curious beast – it’s larger and stands taller than every other keyboard in this test, but its buttons are more reminiscent of a laptop keyboard than the other keyboards here. The Apex’s 105 keys use SteelSeries’ thermoplastic design, which is built for low friction and impressive stability. It has an iron base, and SteelSeries boasts about its custom-tuned rubber domes and custom-moulded housing for each button. Get hands on, though, and the Apex’s buttons border on the unusual. The keys have plenty of travel, and they feel heavy enough, but the action is softer than the Corsair and Razer buttons when they eventually bottom out. The soft, comfortable action is paired with the quietest typing action here too – ideal…

With your PC all built, you now need to install Windows, ideally from a USB thumb drive (it will cost £99 inc VAT from www.scan.co.uk if you don’t have it already). Press F2 when your PC starts to enter the EFI, go to the Boot tab and set the first boot drive to your thumb drive. Restart your PC and go through the Windows setup process. Once Windows is installed, go to www.amd.com and download the latest B350 chipset and APU graphics drivers from the Drivers & Support section. If your system is all happily working, you can then try overclocking it. Restart your system, press F2 to enter the EFI and go to the OC Tweaker section. If you haven’t done so already, make sure your memory is running…

REVIEW Retroflag NESPi ‘How much? £23.99 (inc VAT) for a Raspberry Pi case,’ you may think to yourself when you see the Retroflag NESPi for the first time – although probably without the bit in brackets. ‘Made out of plastic? You’re having a laugh, right?’ Regular readers who caught the Pi-powered retro gaming special last month (Issue 175) will likely already recognise the NESPi. However, while the primary reason for its existence is to give you a convincingly Nintendo Entertainment System-themed case for your retro build, with just enough of the trade dress filed off to keep Nintendo’s lawyers at bay, the case actually hides a considerably clever design, which sets it head and shoulders above the 3D-printed competition. The NESPi is, for starters, properly injection moulded from quality coloured…

The price of high-speed enthusiast kits is expected to increase further In last month’s mag, Ben and I advised about upgrading CPUs and GPUs. On the CPU side, between now and what’s available soon, the situation looks great! However, if you need a new graphics card you might end up in tears. Since then, I’ve been researching another crucial area for upgraders: memory and storage. If you’re angling for a new AMD Ryzen 2 CPU, an 8th-gen Intel chip or even a future 9th-gen upgrade this year,then you’ll want to keep hold of any DDR4 memory you own, because prices look set to keep increasing until 2019. According to market research firm TrendForce, memory price increases resulted in a global revenue surge of 76 per cent in 2017 among memory…

Building a hi-fi PC I read your magazine most months with interest. In fact, I was a subscriber for many years, but decided not to continue with my subscription and instead buy the magazine when I felt so inclined. The reason is that, as I’m not out-and-out gamer, much of the content was of little interest to me. However, I’m always interested in building a custom PC for myself, and for that reason your magazine is extremely useful. I mainly use my desktop PC for music streaming. My current interest is building a PC specifically for playing music and digitising my vinyl collection. As I read very little in your magazine about sound cards and speaker systems, could you recommend a sound card(s) and speaker system that would enable me…

We managed to overclock the base clock to 3.9GHz SUPPLIER www.scan.co.uk At just £89m inc VAT, the Ryzen 3 2200G is a sizeable £60 cheaper than its Ryzen 5 sibling – a huge amount of money at this end of the budget spectrum. Even after recent price cuts of AMD’s first-generation Ryzen CPUs, it still appears to offer good value for money, costing the same price as the Ryzen 3 1200. In fact, its base frequency and boost frequency of 3.5GHz and 3.7GHz match those of the Ryzen 3 1300X, which retails for £20 more and also lacks on-board graphics. However, the latter also sports XFR, giving it a 200MHz advantage in single-threaded workloads at stock speed, where it’s able to reach a maximum of 3.9GHz. Like its pricier…

SUPPLIER www.ebuyer.com The Kingston SSDNow UV400 is a couple of years old now, but it remains the company’s latest mainstream SSD option – Kingston’s performance drive is the HyperX Savage. Unlike all the other drives in this test, it’s based on planar TLC NAND rather than a form of 3D NAND, which you might think would suggest it’s at a disadvantage, given that 3D NAND is the newer technology. However, if it’s used in the right way, planar NAND can still produce good performance, so there’s certainly no reason to dismiss it immediately. That said, the UV400 is a value-orientated drive and its performance figures support that description. Available in capacities from 120GB up to 960GB, it’s one of the few drives in this test where performance does vary…

SUPPLIER www.ebuyer.com For a long while, SanDisk was the only company to have a credible alternative to the supreme Samsung 850 Pro, in the shape of the very quick SanDisk Extreme Pro. However, with the company’s takeover by Western Digital, its line-up of high-performance drives has fallen by the wayside. After a fashion, the SanDisk name still lives on with the Ultra 3D, but it really is only in name, as the drive is technically identical to the drive we’re looking at here, the WD Blue 3D. Both drives, then, are aimed at the lower end of the SATA SSD market, with prices and performance figures to match. Intriguingly, Western Digital also makes the WD Green, which is an even more budget-focused range that’s only available in capacities of…

This issue’s lead game review is of Subnautica,a splendid underwater survival game that everybody should play. While reviewing it, however, I was surprised to learn that its gorgeous seascape, which I had assumed to be procedurally generated, is in fact 100 per cent handcrafted, and remains the same (at least in terms of topography and biomes) no matter how many times you play. At first, I was surprised, as survival gaming and procedural generation go together like partisan opinions and the Internet. But I then realised that most of my favourite survival games – DayZ, Miasmata, the Forest – all take place in hand-designed worlds, whereas games that leave me nonplussed, such as Stranded Deep and No Man’s Sky, are driven by algorithmically generated content. I looked over my whole…

Scan back through yellowing copies of any computer magazine – including this one – and you’ll find repeated references to quantum computers being ‘the next big thing’ for the past decade. So why are there no quantum computers on the shelves at PC World yet? Quantum computers do exist, but you’d hav0e to visit the labs of corporations such as Google or IBM – not your local high street – to see them. If you did, what you’d encounter would be very different from the rectangular box beneath your desk. ‘Quantum computers are an entirely new technology which has really very little to do with conventional computers,’ says Winfried Hensinger, professor of quantum technologies at the University of Sussex. ‘Quantum computers are going to be used for things where you…

The vintage computing field is rife with fraud and vapourware, as anyone who backed and is still waiting on a certain crowdfunded handheld Sinclair ZX Spectrum emulator will attest. Even when products really do exist, they’re often cheap cash-ins: ARM-based emulators in poor-quality housing, running off-the-shelf software that’s compatible with only a handful of titles at best. Henrique Olifiers’ ZX Spectrum Next is different. Following the closure of a successful crowdfunding campaign last year, which saw more than £720,000 raised from fans of Sir Clive’s original low-cost colour computer, Olifiers and his colleagues have been working hard to bring the machine to life, though not without some hiccoughs along the way. Sent to backers after a short and entirely predictable delay, the ZX Spectrum Next Issue 2A is the first…

We need a reservoir revolution When it comes to water-cooling your PC, the reservoir is an often overlooked, but incredibly useful component. You need it to bleed air from your loop and, of course, to fill it. In the past, when pump and reservoir combo units didn’t exist, it could be tricky to find a home for a reservoir, and many PC enthusiasts resorted to T-lines, which were tubing run-offs designed to act like a reservoir. These days, reservoirs are important aesthetic components too, and we’re finally seeing them become the centrepieces of top-end systems, rather than being hidden away in a plastic box. However, we haven’t really moved on that far in terms of making reservoirs easier to install, especially in smaller cases. Sure, we have combined pump and…

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.…

As this month’s SATA SSD Labs test has proved (see p42), SATA SSDs now run at such similar speeds that they’re all basically the same. This hasn’t always been the case, of course, with massive differences in performance and price in the first few generations of SATA SSD. However, this market has now reached maturity, with speed effectively limited by the SATA 6Gbps bus rather than any parts inside the drives. Beyond the usual factors, such as brand perception, reliability and warranty, the only factor that really differentiates one SATA SSD from another now is cost per gigabyte,which effectively means they’re now commodity items. While I can remember the make and model of the boot drive in my PC, as I bought it a while ago, I honestly can’t remember…

Sometimes PEGI double checks, but broadly it’s a self-report system The school shooting in Florida, which left 17 dead, has been blamed on violent video games by at least one politician, Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin. He said, ‘there are video games that, yes, are listed for mature audiences, but kids play them and everybody knows it, and there’s nothing to prevent the child from playing them.’ I’ve often covered the evidence for games causing violence, so I’d like to focus instead on the other part of Bevin’s complaint, that kids are playing games ‘listed for mature audiences’. The shooter is 19, but presumably Bevin thinks he was playing mature games his whole life,creating a monster. That theory isn’t backed by evidence, but it’s worth looking at whether age ratings for…

It has eight threads, courtesy of Simultaneous MultiThreading SUPPLIER www.scan.co.uk The Ryzen 5 2400G is the most expensive of AMD’s new APUs at £150 inc VAT, and it comprises a single Core Complex of four cores. Plus, unlike its cheaper sibling, it has eight threads courtesy of Simultaneous MultiThreading (SMT). Its quad-core Ryzen 5 siblings, the Ryzen 5 1500X and Ryzen 5 1400, comprise two Core Complexes, with two cores disabled on each one. The latter two CPUs benefit from significantly more L3 cache as a result, at 8MB and 16MB respectively, compared to just 4MB for the Ryzen 5 2400G. This reduction in cache makes room for the Vega IGP, which simply wouldn’t fit inside an AM4 CPU with two Core Complexes. That’s also the reason why all…

Magni-viewer/ £21.99 inc VAT The Magni-Viewer is a portable magnifier for smartphones, effectively doubling the size of a very small screen. When folded up, the Magni-viewer is around the size of a book and has plenty of room to fit whichever model of phone you might use, even with a third-party case on it. Portability is the big advantage of the Magni-Viewer, and it’s ideal if you often happen to find yourself in places where your phone is your only device for watching video. There’s also a panel in the side that allows you to access the phone to plug in headphones, but the main downside is that there’s no way to access video controls once your phone is in the Magni-view, unless you remove the phone again. SUPPLIER…

How we test SATA drives might not represent the glamorous end of the SSD market, but they’re fast enough to cope with large file transfers, while offering quick Windows boots and fast game loading times. Some games still take a while to load, but the bottleneck is seldom storage, unlike in the days of hard drives. What’s more, there are a couple of exciting new additions to the world of SATA SSDs. Both Samsung and Micron have released brand-new models, and while performance is still limited by the SATA interface, capacities are up and prices are set to trickle downwards. While NVMe M.2 drives can be much quicker in some tests, they also tend to be around 40 per cent more expensive. Unless you have a specific need for that…

SUPPLIER www.ebuyer.com For four years now, Samsung’s 850 Evo has reigned supreme as the go-to SSD for anyone seeking the ideal balance between performance and price. Thanks to Samsung being the first company to market with its cost-effective 3D NAND, it was able to keep the cost of its drives low. Meanwhile, the company’s nippy MGX and MEX controllers kept the drives ticking along quickly too. Not even when Crucial and Toshiba had started producing their own 3D NAND could any commercially available drive really challenge the 850 Evo. In fact, it’s only with the brand-new Crucial MX500 (see p43) that Samsung has really faced a true fight. It’s just as well, then, that Samsung also has a brand-new drive of its own. The Samsung 860 Evo is Samsung’s…

How we test It’s important to get it right when you’re choosing a gaming keyboard. After all, the keyboard and mouse are the devices with which you’ll have most contact when you’re playing games, as well as typing. Not everyone has more than £100 to spend on the latest mechanical units, though, and not everyone likes the feel and sound of mechanical switches anyway. That’s where Membrane keyboards come in. Instead of having individual keys constructed using physical switches, membrane keyboard keys press down into a layer of plastic that stretches across the whole keyboard. Pressing down the membrane forces that plastic to connect an electronic circuit, registering key presses. That’s the basic principle, but manufacturers vary their designs to enhance certain attributes. Some will replace the rubber domes used…

SUPPLIER www.box.co.uk Razer’s Cynosa Chroma is one of the pricier keyboards on test this month, and Razer is making some big claims about this keyboard’s performance levels and design. For starters, the Cynosa Chroma serves up individually backlit keys that can be customised in the latest version of Razer’s Synapse software. It will also work with custom profiles in different games, so you can have game-specific lighting in Overwatch, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided or Call of Duty: WWII, for example. You’re immediately thrust into the latest version of Synapse as soon as you start – simply plugging the keyboard into your USB port results in you being invited to download the beta of the latest software, so you don’t have to go and find it yourself. We were up…

With a fluctuating pound and rocketing GPU prices, the cost of building a high-end PC in the UK has soared like a Tesla rocket over the last year, leaving many folks with limited budgets in the dust behind it. But, thanks to AMD’s latest accelerated processing units (APUs), which feature half-decent Radeon RX Vega GPUs and four Ryzen CPU cores, you can now build a respectable, all-purpose PC for under £400 inc VAT. In fact, you can even get a 250GB SSD, a Cooler Master case with a clear side panel, 8GB of dual-channel memory and a decent PSU while you’re at it. As long as you’re not expecting to play the latest first person shooters at top detail settings, you can build a surprisingly capable PC for not much…

Beagle Point is a nondescript star system suspended in the misty void beyond the Milky Way’s spiral arms, over 62,000 light years away from our local star, Sol. It became famous within the Elite Dangerous community as one of the most remote charted systems in the game’s simulated galaxy, discovered by a player known as Commander Erimus One during his 2015 ‘Distant Suns’ expedition to map the most remote system possible. Last year, Erimus One headed up another expedition – Distant Worlds – which aimed to chart as many systems as possible between Sol and Beagle Point. Unlike Distant Suns, this expedition was open for other players to join. One of them was Commander Felix Macedonica, a fellow explorer keen to venture into the darkest reaches of space. Little did…