Table of contents for April 2020 in Custom PC UK

Making sense of the current sub-£350 graphics card market is a bit like trying to unravel an intricate logic puzzle. It’s only been nine months since we last took a snapshot of this part of the market, and since then we’ve seen seven new GPUs introduced, as well as several older models disappearing from the shelves. Add in a veritable Alphabetti Spaghetti of different suffixes and model numbers, and it becomes hard to make a buying a decision. What’s the difference between a GeForce GTX 1660 and a 1660 Super or 1660 Ti? Can you really run ray tracing on a £250 graphics card? Does a last-gen Radeon RX 590 with a price drop offer better value than a current-gen GPU at the same price? In order to make sense…

While AMD’s 3rd-gen Threadripper CPUs are fantastically fast and powerful, they’re also hugely expensive, and the same generally goes for their accompanying TRX40 motherboards. However, at £430 inc  VAT, MSI’s TRX40 Pro WiFi is the cheapest TRX40 motherboard we’ve tested, even undercutting the ASRock TRX40 Taichi (see Issue 198, p44). Of course, MSI has had to trim some features to get to this price, but the TRX40 Pro WiFi still has enough clout to build a monster system. For starters, while there are only two PCI-E 4 M.2 ports on the PCB, MSI has managed to include a PCI-E 4 expansion card to add two more ports, both of which are cooled with a massive heatsink and fan. While using the on-board M.2 ports saw our PCI-E 4 SSD’s temperature…

At a glance, the GTX 1660 seems to be a sensible next step up over the GTX 1650 Super, with more stream processors and ROPs for just £30 more. However, its use of GDDR5 RAM holds it back. This older RAM standard uses more power and, despite this card having a wider 192-bit memory interface than the 128-bit interface of the GTX 1650 Super, its slower speed means you only get the same overall memory bandwidth as the cheaper card. All that said, its performance is still decent, thanks to the sheer horsepower of the TU116 GPU at its heart, despite it having had two streaming multiprocessors disabled. In our tests, it managed to stay above 60fps in Battlefield V at 1080p, which is decent for this price of card.…

On paper, Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1660 Ti looks as though it would provide a comfortable upgrade in performance over the GeForce GTX 1660 and its Super variant, thanks to it using a fully enabled TU116 GPU. Both the GeForce GTX 1660 and GTX 1660 Super have two of their streaming multiprocessors disabled, resulting in them having 128 fewer stream processors than the Ti model. However, with the GTX 1660 Super clocked slightly higher and being otherwise identical to the GTX 1660 Ti, the performance gap between the two cards is much narrower than you might expect, particularly when the GTX 1660 Ti costs so much more money. Physically, there’s very little to tell the difference between a GTX 1660 Super and GTX 1660 Ti, partner card tweaks aside. Most variants are…

The Radeon RX 5700 uses the same configuration of the Navi 10 GPU as the 5600 XT, with its four disabled compute units. However, it ups the clock speeds and uses a much wider 256-bit memory interface for a whopping 448GB/ sec memory bandwidth. The result is an impressively powerful card. One of only two cards in this group test to sport a blower-style cooler, the reference RX 5700 is a very smart-looking card. The smooth, clean lines of its cooler shroud and illuminated Radeon logo is a vast improvement over any of the other cards we’ve seen in this group test – other than the near identical RX 5700 XT. You do miss out on a backplate, so it looks far less appealing from that angle, which seems like…

Available in a huge range of speeds and in dual-channel and quad-channel kits, Corsair’s Dominator Platinum RGB uses the familiar oversized Dominator heatsink design that’s been a popular sight in PC hardware circles for over a decade. This time, though, you get full RGB lighting. Rather than opt for a diffusing strip to spread out the colours of the lighting and allow them to intermix, the LEDs are instead left as bright pinpoints of light, like a single strip of LED pixels. They’re not any old LEDs either, but Corsair’s new Capellix LEDs, which are tiny but brighter and more power-efficient than usual RGB LEDs. As a result, they’re supremely vivid, making for an impressive display. However, we’re undecided if they ultimately look better than the more diffuse lighting style…

As one of the more affordable kits on test, the Patriot Viper RGB has stiff competition from the superb ADATA XPG Spextrix D60G and G.Skill Trident Z RGB, which give you change from £100 for dual-channel 3200MHz kits. The Patriot’s heatsinks are aggressive-looking, with viper-like logos on the side. They’re available in black or white, although the former has more speed options, ranging from 2666MHz to 4133MHz, while the white kits only reach 3200MHz. However, there don’t appear to be any quad-channel kit options. A diffusing strip covers the LEDs running the length of each module, with raised sections at each end that unfortunately see the height rise to 46mm. This does add some pizzazz to the lighting, although the light isn’t as well diffused as the Corsair Vengeance RGB…

As the most expensive memory on test, you’d hope that G.Skill’s Trident Z Royal memory was pretty special, and it’s undeniably the most lavishly bestowed memory we’ve ever seen. Living up to its name, the modules are essentially the DIMM equivalents of crowns, with a large sparkling ‘jewel’ sitting atop a golden or silver rim. In this case, the jewel is a clear piece of angular, clear plastic that’s shaped like an elongated diamond, with flat edges that catch the light. It looks fit for royalty (albeit ostentatious) before you turn on the RGB lighting, but when you switch on the lighting, the appearance goes from eyebrow-raising to questionable. The lighting reflects to such a degree that the rest of your case will undoubtedly look like it arrived at a…

Core component bundles The fundamental specifications we recommend for various types of PC. Just add your preferred case and power supply, and double-check there’s room in your case for your chosen components, especially the GPU cooler and graphics card. We’ve largely stopped reviewing power supplies, as the 80 Plus certification scheme has now effectively eliminated unstable PSUs. Instead, we’ve recommended the wattage and minimum 80 Plus certification you should consider for each component bundle. You can then choose whether you want a PSU with modular or captive cables. Mini PCs Our favourite components for building a micro-ATX or mini-ITX PC. Always double-check how much room is available in your chosen case before buying your components. Some mini-ITX cases don’t have room for large all-in-one liquid coolers, for example, or tall…

The past few years have left the distinct impression that Disney isn’t entirely sure what to do with the world’s biggest sci-fi franchise when it comes to games. Disney’s publishing partnership with Electronic Arts has resulted in two mediocre games over a period of six years. We wish we could say that Jedi: Fallen Order bucks this trend. A single-player, Jedi-focused action game sounds like just the ticket after two multiplayer-focused fiascos. Unfortunately, Fallen Order only epitomises the problems the franchise has been facing. It’s a bizarre accumulation of ideas from the past ten years of big-budget game development, strung together in a way that just about works but leaves cracks the size of Beggar’s Canyon running right through the experience. Fallen Order puts players in the role of Cal Kestis,…

REVIEW ESPIRE 1: VR OPERATIVE / £22.99 inc VAT DEVELOPER Digital Lode / PUBLISHER Tripwire Interactive Espire 1 is essentially a James Bond simulator, if James Bond were an asexual robot who frequently threw his gun at people by mistake. It’s a first-person stealth game that’s as intriguing as it is frustrating. It contains every feature you could want from virtual stealth, but it lacks the refinement needed to make its sneaking satisfying. The game puts you in the role of a drone operator working for an Australian counterintelligence organisation. You’re tasked with investigating an incursion into one of the organisation’s black sites developing remote-controlled robots. Taking control of one such android, you need to infiltrate the facility and slip past the enemy patrols to figure out their dastardly plan…

REVIEW Pimoroni Heatsink Case for Raspberry Pi 4 The launch of the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B (reviewed in Issue 193) brought a range of welcome improvements over its predecessors, not least of which were a significantly more powerful processor, increased maximum memory up to 4GB, and USB 3 ports for high-speed peripherals. It also drew criticism, as it was power-hungry and capable of hitting its 80°C thermal throttle point with ease, especially when cased. Since then, the Raspberry Pi Foundation has been working to improve the situation through a series of firmware updates. These updates have added tweaks such as more dynamic clock control, a new virtual machine for handling the HDMI ports, and enabling some of the USB 3’s power-saving features that were previously ignored. As a result,…

Don’t set your pump and radiator fans to respond to CPU temperature If you own a water-cooling system or an all-in-one liquid cooler, then you’ll want to fine-tune it to get the best balance of noise and cooling performance possible. However, if you have your radiator fans and pump responding to your CPU temperature, then you may be surprised to know that you’re doing it wrong. In fact, setting them up this way will make your PC much louder than necessary, and could even mean your hardware runs hotter. Here’s why. Let’s start with the example of an air-cooled PC that uses heatsinks where the transfer of heat from the CPU core to the contact plate on the heatsink occurs over a fairly short distance. From there, the heat is…

I’ve made some calls and I can exclusively confirm for Custom PC that the biggest change to PC power supply design since 1995 – Intel’s new ‘ATX12VO’ platform –will launch this year. However, it will only be exclusive to commercial system builders at the beginning. The new ATX12VO (the ‘O’ stands for ‘only’) platform completely redesigns PC power as we know it. Intel has removed the 3.3V and 5V rails, so the PSU will only provide 12V power to the motherboard, graphics cards, storage or other internal peripherals. Intel has removed the 3.3V and 5V rails, so the PSU will only provide 12V power Meanwhile, the 24-pin ATX socket is being replaced by a new 10-pin connector, and the EPS connector that goes near the CPU socket will only be optional. Even…

Intel has taken a good battering from AMD recently. The latter’s Zen 2 architecture has seen the company draw level in areas where it previously lagged behind, exceed Intel in other areas and close gaps where Zen+ was noticeably slower. Meanwhile, AMD’s 3rd-gen Threadripper CPUs have given AMD a commanding lead at the top of the stack too. It’s forced Intel into the highly unusual move of slashing prices of its HEDT CPUs, so its latest 10-core,12-core and 14-core Cascade Lake-X CPUs are much more affordable than their predecessors. Stock seems to be thin at the moment, and some retailers appear to be charging exorbitant prices, but we’re going with Novatech’s pricing for this review, which was the cheapest we could find for bona fide, checkout-capable pre-orders. For instance, the…

The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 Super provides a notable upgrade over the original GTX 1650 thanks largely to a big increase in its stream processor count. Where the older card had just 896, the new version packs in 1,280. Elsewhere, though, this card is as modest as its price suggests. The card itself is tiny, measuring just 159mm in length, which is barely longer than the PCI-E slot. Despite this modest size, Zotac has equipped the card with two fans, but they produce quite an irritating high-pitched whirr when the card is under load. A 6-pin PCI-E power cable is also required. The TU117 chip that powers this card ticks over at 1530MHz with a 1725MHz boost clock. There are variants with slightly quicker boost clock speeds but only up…

We’ve alluded to it several times on previous pages and here it finally is: the current sub-£200 champion graphics card, the GTX 1660 Super. Built on the same Nvidia TU116 GPU as the GTX 1660, the Super version houses the same number of stream processors and runs at the same base and boost clock speeds as its cheaper sibling, but crucially, it uses GDDR6 memory. This one change makes all the difference, as memory bandwidth leaps from 192GB/sec to 336GB/sec, unlocking a huge amount of extra performance. Our sample Zotac GTX 1660 Super card has two fans that, intriguingly, are different sizes. This card isn’t an exotic delight for the sight, and there are no fancy frills such as RGB lighting, but the Zotac GeForce GTX 1660 Super still has…

The Radeon RX 5600 XT is the latest addition to AMD’s GPU range. Sitting between the pricier Radeon RX 5700 and cheaper 5500 XT, it’s based on the same Navi 10 GPU as the Radeon RX 5700 and even has the same number of compute units and stream processors. However, it runs at lower clock speeds, has a narrower memory interface and less memory. With a highly competitive price of £255 inc VAT for the Sapphire Pulse card we tested, it’s in direct competition with the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti, and that means the RX 5600XT stacks up well. With 2,304 stream processors, it has buckets of parallel processing power. Both the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti and the Radeon RX 5600 XT also use a 192-bit memory interface, talking…

The Radeon RX 5700 XT represents the current pinnacle of AMD’s graphics card line-up, so it seems a natural place to wrap up our comparison of the more affordable end of the graphics card spectrum. If you want greater performance than this you’ll have to splash out considerably more and your choices are limited to just three Nvidia cards. Step up to an RTX 2070 Super and it will set you back an extra £100 or so, while the rest of Nvidia’s top-tier cards add several hundred pounds on top of that. The one caveat to that opening statement is the remaining stock of the vanilla RTX 2070. You  can pick those cards up for as little as £350 while stocks last, at least at the time of writing, and…

A DATA has had a rather mixed run of reviews in the past, with its XPG Spectrix D40 kit performing reasonably well, but its M.2 heatsink being one of the worst products we’ve reviewed. However, its new RGB memory – the Spectrix D60G – caught our eye with its full-height RGB lighting, which stretches from top to bottom on the sides of each module. It looks fantastic when the lights are on, and it easily matches Corsair’s legendary Vengeance RGB Pro memory in terms of wow factor. The LEDs sit under a diffusing plastic plate, but the lights still remain vivid, offering vibrant colours without tell-tale pinpoints of light showing through. The modules’ dark details and angular light strips make the Spectrix D60G one of the best-looking kits on test…

Memory pricing got so ridiculous not so long ago that Corsair and other manufacturers such as Aorus, who is sadly absent this month thanks to it changing memory dies, went as far as offering dummy modules to allow you to fill all the DIMM slots on your motherboard even when only using a small number of real memory sticks. This allowed you to provide a full, unbroken stretch of RGB lighting atop your memory, without breaking the bank. It sounded bonkers at first, but Corsair’s Vengeance RGB Pro modules really do look best stacked side by side without the gaps between them that are caused by correctly spacing the memory modules for proper dual or quad-channel configurations. If, in particular, you’re running a quad-channel motherboard with eight DIMM slots then…

If you’re looking for RGB memory for as little money as possible, then Team Group’s Night Hawk RGB will leave you with change from £80, making it one of the cheapest 16GB dual-channel 3200MHz kits currently available. However, these kits are only available at 3200MHz in the UK, even though Team Group’s website lists faster versions. With a height of 53mm, these modules aren’t short either. The clearance on any large CPU air cooler is likely to be lower than 53mm, so if you’re using a large cooler, make sure it doesn’t overhang the DIMM slots before purchasing. The heatsinks themselves certainly look good, with a towering wing design and plenty of intricate details. Large diffusing strips allow the RGB LEDs beneath them to splash their light along the heatsinks,…

Cyberpunk 2077 is probably the most anticipated game on the planet. As such, CD Projekt’s massive RPG has been the subject of a lot of speculation. Almost every aspect of it, from its representation of race to gender, sexuality and violence are all being examined under the microscope before the game has even launched. Much of this speculation is bound up in assumptions of what is, or what should be, the definition of Cyberpunk, and whether or not CD Projekt’s work is in line with that. Like all science fiction, Cyberpunk originated as speculative fiction. When Blade Runner and particularly Neuromancer were released in the early 1980s, they were created as visions of the future intended to inform the now. However, Cyberpunk was also hotly counter-cultural – an angry and…

Phoenix Point has a bizarre knot of influences. It’s a spiritual successor to X-COM (Or UFO: Enemy Unknown in the UK) created by X-COM’s original designer, Julian Gollop. However, it’s equally inspired by the recent reboot of X-COM spearheaded by Firaxis. It’s like Shakespeare writing a play based on a film of Macbeth. It sees players attempting to save the world from an alien virus that turns people into terrifying, hostile monsters. On the Geoscape – a holographic representation of Earth – you need to explore the virus-ravaged world to scavenge resources, locate and upgrade underground bases, and acquire alien technology. You can then research the latter to produce advanced weapons and equipment. Those nasty mutants won’t give away their tech without a fight, however, so you regularly need to…

The ZX Spectrum Next, previewed back in Issue 176, is finally approaching completion – some two years after Kickstarter backers were originally scheduled to receive their models. The board-only form has already shipped (and been reviewed here), but the completed and cased ZX Spectrum Next has been hit by a series of delays, many revolving around the keyboard, which is to be paired with housing from since-departed Sinclair designer Rick Dickinson (interviewed in Issue 137). The keyboards and housing are now complete, the project’s creators claim, with the first assembled units expected to ship in early 2020.…

The Corsair K70 RGB MK.2 SE is a premium mechanical gaming keyboard that’s built to last. It has a silver anodised brushed aluminium frame, as well as stunning white precision-moulded, double-shot keycaps. It’s built to turn heads and withstand a lifetime of gaming. There’s a detachable, soft-touch wrist rest too. Meanwhile, its Cherry MX  Speed mechanical keyswitches provide the reliability and accuracy you demand, with blisteringly fast 1.2mm actuation. There’s also stunning per-key RGB dynamic backlighting, 100 per cent anti-ghosting with full-key rollover, 8MB of on-board memory, plus dedicated media controls.…

Once upon a time, the big trade shows such as Computex and CES were the places to watch what was going to be happening within the PC industry. Manufacturers used to stack up an exciting range of technology announcements and product launches for these shows, but they now seem to be much more spread out over the year, including manufacturers’ own events, such as Intel’s Extreme Masters game tournament and Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference. This year’s CES is a case in point. While there were apparently over 4,500 exhibitors and dozens of press releases issued, I struggled to spot a single truly innovative product or interesting announcement from the PC industry. I appreciate that, to some extent, this is down to my age – the older I get, the more…

Apples feature in several fairy tales, from Greek myths to Snow White. They’re even called ‘forbidden fruit’ following the Garden of Eden story and a Latin translation error (the word ‘malum’ means both apple and evil). The most modern apple-based fairy tale, though, doesn’t involve any princesses or dwarves. There’s a rumour, allegedly a leak from Apple’s China manufacturers, that the computing behemoth is about to launch a $5,000 US gaming machine. The industry press has responded with scepticism, not least because this rumour crops up fairly frequently but never bears fruit. But this time, I’m not entirely sure it’s seedless. Jobs and Wozniak first collaborated on the Atari classic Breakout, after meeting as hobbyists at the Homebrew Computer Club Apple’s origins are via custom PCs and gaming. The two…

If you think Corsair’s high-end K95 keyboards are mostly identical, we wouldn’t argue with you for the most part, although the brand-new K95 RGB Platinum XT has just enough new features to warrant the extra letters after its name. The detachable wrist rest, for instance, no longer offers a harsh, solid, rubber-coated plastic surface – its plush, padded faux leather feels so much more comfortable. The wrist rest stretches the entire length of the keyboard and will make any  third-party soft wrist wrest redundant. There’s a slightly different selection of switches from which to choose too, including CherryMX Speed Silver RGB Silver and the super-clicky CherryMX RGB Blue, as well as the usual linear-feeling CherryMX RGB Brown. The Speed Silver switch is much like a Red switch, with the same…

ADATA SE800 / £149.99 inc VAT SUPPLIER amazon.co.uk If the ADATA SE800 represents what we can expect from USB drives in the future, then PC storage could be changing radically. It’s a 1TB SSD with a USB 3.2 Gen 2 interface and a USB Type-C connector. What first strikes you is that there’s so little to it – the SE800 is tiny, lightweight and also certified for IP-68-grade dust and water resistance, thanks to the rubbery cover for the connectors. Secondly, it’s reasonably inexpensive, particularly when you consider its speed. We didn’t have a USB 3.2 controller with which to test the drive, but it’s still fast when it’s plugged into a standard USB 3 port – when tested with CrystalDiskMark, we clocked a read speed of 463MB/sec and a…

The Radeon RX 590 was something of a last gasp for the company’s Graphics Core Next architecture. Designed as a drop-in upgrade for OEMs, the GPU could be used on existing RX 580 board designs. Indeed, the GPU is basically just an RX 580 with a die shrink and clock speed boost. Over a year since launch – and many years since the GCN architecture debuted – and this card is seriously showing its age, but hefty price drops mean it still has some merit. The major downside to this older architecture, though, is woefully bad power efficiency. This card tops the power usage charts in this group test by some margin, despite it being far from the fastest. That’s why our sample XFX card also required two large fans…

The Radeon RX 5500 XT is built on AMD’s latest RDNA architecture, which not only brings improved performance but also vastly improved power efficiency over the company’s previous GCN architecture. As such, despite delivering performance that’s in the same ballpark as the  Radeon RX 590, the 5500 XT has a substantially lower TDP. This improvement comes both from the architecture itself but also the move from a 12nm manufacturing process to a 7nm process. In our tests, our system drew 135W less power under load with this card, compared with the RX 590. It’s based on AMD’s Navi 14 GPU, and houses 1,408 stream processors and 32 ROPs. Our Asus test sample also runs at similar clock speeds to those competitors around it, with a base clock of 1737MHz and…

The GeForce RTX 2060 is the cheapest entry point to the world of proper hardware-accelerated ray tracing. As the switch from GTX to RTX naming implies, this card provides you with dedicated RT cores for completely offsetting those calculations from the CUDA cores, providing a massive leap in ray-tracing performance. Originally launching at £329 inc VAT, recent price drops have brought it under £275, making it appear a very tempting option, if your budget allows. Based on the TU106 GPU that also powers the RTX 2060 Super and RTX 2070, the RTX 2060 uses a considerably stripped-down version, with six SMs disabled, resulting in noticeable drops in capability across the board. The total number of CUDA cores drops from 2,304 to 1,920, the number of ROPs from 64 to 48,…

Super by name and super by nature, the RTX 2060 Super expands upon the RTX 2060 in just about every way, offering more processing power and a much improved memory interface for a substantial uptick in performance that really allows those ray-tracing cores to breathe. Delving a little deeper into those upgrades, the RTX 2060 Super uses the same TU106 GPU as the RTX 2060 but here, the whole chip is enabled. This means the stream processor count moves from 1,920 to 2,176, the RT core count increases from 30 to 36 and the ROPs jump from 48 to 64. Along with this, the memory interface has broadened from 192-bit to 256-bit, removing this potential bandwidth bottleneck. The result of all these extras is an average of 10 per cent…

Like many PC part manufacturers, Antec has recently branched out from cases and power supplies and gotten into the memory game, although it has a fairly limited range of modules compared with the likes of Corsair. Its 5 Series modules don’t really appear to stand out from the crowd either, with a fairly unremarkable design. To make matters worse, these kits are only available in speeds up to 3000MHz, which might be okay for a typical Intel PC, but they won’t enable you to get the most out of the latest AMD 3rd-gen Ryzen systems, which benefit from faster memory. Despite these shortcomings, though, the 3000MHz kit still costs the same amount of money as most other kits with higher speeds. Under the hood you’ll find Micron B-die chips, which…

It was lucky that G.Skill was using Samsung B-die memory in its Trident Z modules when Ryzen hit the shelves back in 2017. That first generation of Ryzen CPUs and AM4 motherboards were a bit finickity when it came to memory, and they worked best with  those Samsung chips. As such, G.Skill became one of the go-to choices. It was also one of the first to offer cableless RGB lighting and at decent speeds too. The memory compatibility issues of 2017 and 2018 have long since died away, but Trident Z remains highly popular and continues to be one of our favourite kits. What’s perhaps surprising, though, is that the original Trident Z RGB kits are still readily available, so we felt it necessary to fully reassess their capabilities. The question…

Another supremely affordable RGB memory kit this month is Thermaltake’s ToughRAM RGB, which not only costs just £80, but also runs at 3600MHz out of the box. Thermaltake is certainly aggressive on pricing, but less so with its module design; while distinctive, it doesn’t leap out from the crowd like kits such as the ADATA XPG Spectrix D60G. At this price  and this speed, though, we can forgive middling aesthetics. A large block of diffusing, opaque plastic sits on top of RGB LEDs, giving the ToughRAM a large illuminated surface area compared with other kits on test. However, it doesn’t do as good a job at hiding the LEDs beneath, which are slightly visible in some sections, meaning the light isn’t as even and linear as on Corsair’s Vengeance RGB Pro modules,…

At the time of its release, Halo: Reach was arguably the best Halo game since Combat Evolved. A decade on, however, Reach is showing its age, and on PC, it’s eclipsed by a large number of superior shooters. What mainly separated Reach from other Halo games was its storytelling, which put players in a battle they were destined to lose from the start. As the conglomerate alien force known as the Covenant invaded the planet Reach, the six Spartans of Noble Team traversed the planet from battle to battle, gradually being whittled down until only one remained. It was stirring in its day, and some of the game’s key moments remain thrilling and dramatic, such as the space assault on a Covenant Supercarrier, the evacuation of Reach’s capital New Alexandria…

Portal with perspectives. That’s the simplest way to describe Superliminal, a first-person puzzle game with a mind-bending central mechanic, a brain full of kooky jokes and a female AI character who may or may not want to kill you. It’s difficult to avoid comparing Pillow Castle’s puzzler with Valve’s mini-masterpiece, and equally difficult for Superliminal to come off as anything other than inferior. That said, it still has a lot going for it. You play a patient at a cutting-edge research centre specialising in sleeping problems. You’re undergoing some new-fangled dream therapy to help you overcome your difficulties with insomnia. The dream theme is primarily a way to contextualise Superliminal’s core mechanic, in which you can adjust the size of objects simply by picking them up and moving them around…

VR technology is evolving fast. It was only four years ago that the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive opened up a new way of interacting with virtual worlds. Since then, we’ve seen a flurry of new headsets that have added many new features to those original designs. Touch-controllers, internal headtracking, wireless VR, even prototypical hand-tracking have all become realities in the space of half a decade. But how exactly does all this work, what do these changes mean for the VR experience, and if you want to experience VR for yourself, which headset should you buy? In this article, we dive deep into the technology behind VR headsets, and how that technology is changing with every passing day. The basics Virtual Reality headsets, also known as head-mounted-displays or ‘HMDs’, are…

Dangerous Prototypes’ Ian Lesnet has published details of an upcoming board design dubbed the Bus Pirate Ultra, taking the original Bus Pirate universal communications tool and placing a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) at its heart to considerably increase its power and flexibility. ‘Previous Bus Pirates relied on the hardware peripherals available in a microcontroller, which vary in features and have the occasional bug. With an FPGA, we can implement practically any peripheral with all the fixes and hacks we want,’ Lesnet explains. More information is available on dangerousprototypes.com/blog; no release date is yet available.…

Water-cooling hardware manufacturer Alphacool is offering a choice of £150 worth of gear to every featured Readers’ Drives winner. For your prize, you can select from DIY water-cooling kits, the Eiswolf and Eisbaer all-in-one CPU and GPU liquid coolers, as well as a vast range of individual components, including waterblocks (pictured), fittings, reservoirs, pumps and radiators. Alphacool also makes coolant, tubing and fans, as well as modding and water cooling-related tools.…