Table of contents for March 2021 in Custom PC UK

Happy New Year, fellow devotees of PC hardware! And let’s hope there is indeed some quality happiness to be found in this year. It seems crass to complain about the supply of PC components when people are losing their loved ones to the pandemic, as well as their jobs, but while it’s nowhere near as important, fixing the stock issues would bring a welcome dose of happiness to us in a time when it’s in short supply. As we put the finishing touches to this issue in mid-December, we’re hoping that January will bring us a slightly less dire supply of components in some areas, although we’re not expecting the whole situation to settle down for a while yet. As such, we’ve devoted a large chunk of this issue to…

CORSAIR RELEASES AMPERE WATERBLOCKS The options for water-cooling a GeForce RTX 3000-series card have just widened, as Corsair has announced a new line-up of waterblocks for GeForce RTX 3080 and 3090 cards from a number of board makers, including Nvidia’s Founders Editions. The blocks feature a full-length aluminium backplate, 50 high-density cooling fins and 16 individually addressable RGB LEDs. Corsairs says that the Hydro X Series XG7 RGB blocks will cool all of your card’s components, including the memory and VRMs, as well as the GPU. Meanwhile, the lighting can be controlled by Corsair’s iCUE software, as can the limited integrated lighting on the Founders Edition cards. The blocks are available to buy now from corsair.com starting at £145 inc VAT for a GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition block. VULKAN…

SUPPLIER nvidia.com Roll up, roll up. Get your imaginary graphics cards here! Come gaze at the barren warehouse shelves. See the overpriced cards on eBay. GeForces, Radeons – you name it, it’s gone! Yes, Nvidia’s new budget-friendly Ampere GPU was yet another product that had all its stock hoovered up within an hour of going on sale, joining nearly every other recently launched PC enthusiast component in a miraculous disappearing act. In a world that makes sense, this £369 card would be a no-brainer, but sadly that’s definitely not the world in which we currently reside. Indeed, this card should be vaguely affordable, but the only way you’ll currently pick one up is by handing over £550 to an eBay seller, if you’re lucky. That’s a damn shame, because Nvidia…

SUPPLIER amazon.co.uk Few companies aim as high as Razer when it comes to laptops, with the company nearly always trying to provide huge computing power inside slick chassis designs. The Blade 15 looks the part, with familiar black aluminium used throughout the build, and the glowing green Razer logo on the lid. The classy design is paired with superb build quality and dimensions too – this sturdy machine weighs just 2.1kg and is 20mm thick. Connection options are reasonable, with three full-sized USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports and two USB-C ports, one of which supports Thunderbolt 3. There’s Gigabit Ethernet, dual-band Wi-Fi 6, a sole headphone jack and an HDMI output, plus a 720p IR webcam. On the inside, the Razer has an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 Max-Q GPU, which…

SUPPLIER chillblast.com The Chillblast Fusion Commando is one of two systems in this issue that pair an AMD Ryzen 7 5800X with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti. Impressively, this machine also adds a PCI-E 4 SSD, and it’s  nearly £100 cheaper than its key rival. The Fusion Commando deploys a Gigabyte-made RTX 3060 Ti card with a modest overclock, adding an extra 30MHz to the 1665MHz stock boost speed. That’s not a huge boost, but the RTX 3060 Ti already has a storming specification for the price, including 4,864 CUDA cores and 8GB of memory. Elsewhere, the Ryzen 7 5800X serves up eight cores and 16 threads via SMT, and it runs at its stock base and boost speeds of 3.8GHz and 4.7GHz. Chillblast has also geared this modestly…

How we test When testing CPU coolers, it’s important to examine performance across a range of sockets due to the fact that mounting mechanisms vary between them. We’ve seen differences here in the past and this Labs test is no different, so be very wary of any tests you see that don’t test on the specific socket for which you're looking to buy a cooler. This month, we’re focusing on the new kids on the block: Intel’s LGA1200, which of course features great gaming CPUs such as the Core i9-10900K, and AMD’s Socket AM4, using its Zen 3 Ryzen CPUs. We’re focusing on affordable air-powered cooling this month, using eight of the latest sub-£35 heatsinks. However, we haven’t skimped on the hardware they’ll need to cool. Our LGA1200 test system…

SUPPLIER cclonline.com Few coolers are as instantly recognisable as be quiet!’s and, despite leaving you with change from £30, the Pure Rock 2 is no different. You get the smart capped heatpipes, brushed metal top and of course the signature all-black finish. A quality Pure Wings 2 fan is also on hand and yet, despite all these premium touches, it’s far from being the most expensive cooler on test. The fan isn’t particularly powerful, topping out at 1,500rpm, but the heatsink fins are quite densely packed and sport angled edges to direct airflow through the entire length. The direct contact plate is perfectly finished, with no gaps, though it’s not polished to a shine like with more premium coolers. It’s a much larger plate than some of the other coolers…

DEVELOPER Ubisoft / PUBLISHER Ubisoft You’d be forgiven for thinking that little has changed about Assassin’s Creed in Valhalla. The game has broadly the same structure as Ubisoft’s previous open-world monsters, Origins and Odyssey, and actually removes some features seen in those games, most notably Odyssey’s ship combat. It also has the worst introduction of the three, a multi-hour prologue set in Norway that, while breathtakingly pretty, keeps you at arm’s length from the game’s most interesting features and gives a false impression that Valhalla is a snowier retread of Ubisoft’s prior work. It isn’t. Valhalla is comfortably the best game in the series to date, combining the earlier games’ massive worlds with a story and characters you’ll actually care about, along with a sense of progression that’s far more…

REVIEW STAR WARS: TALES FROM THE GALAXY’S EDGE / £19.89 inc VAT DEVELOPER ILMxLAB / PUBLISHER Oculus Having previously brought us the Vader Immortal trilogy, Disney’s ILMxLAB has encased another slice of VR Star Wars action in carbonite and shipped it our way. Assuming the role of a droid technician, Galaxy’s Edge starts with the player’s ship being attacked by space pirates in orbit above the planet Batuu. Forced to flee the ship as the pirates raid your cargo hold, you end up stranded in Batuu’s Black Spire Outpost, a virtual recreation of the Disney World theme park experience of the same name. Despite its origins, Galaxy’s Edge isn’t a glorified theme park ride. In fact, it’s a full-on first-person shooter. The main campaign sees you exploring the Black Spire…

It’s now more than 35 years since Windows launched in November 1985, 18 months behind schedule and almost three years after Apple’s Lisa had introduced the first commercial GUI. It wasn’t exactly a hit; it flopped commercially, while reviewers criticised its performance and wondered whether some of its most powerful features were really that useful. Yet less than five years later Windows dominated the operating system market, running on over 70 per cent of all personal computers sold. You can see Windows 1 as the ugly duckling that was to transform into the, well, still gruesome but enormously successful swan. It wouldn’t require a hard drive and it would run with just 192KB of RAM MAKING WINDOWS Windows began its journey in the autumn of 1982. Microsoft’s CEO Bill Gates…

As I’ve stated in this column previously, the gaming market has been booming for the past few months, with unprecedented sales of gaming PCs and components. The recent Nvidia GeForce RTX 3000-series GPU launches, the AMD Ryzen 5000-series CPU launch and the Sony PlayStation 5 launch have all been extremely challenging, with demand far outstripping supply. That said, at least there has been some supply of all three of the above. We haven’t received the thousands of units that have been required, but hundreds of units were available at launch, with hundreds more arriving every week afterwards. This gave us the confidence to enable customers to pre-order these products for a limited time. I say limited, because we closed sales as soon as we had taken more pre-orders than could…

Memory maker TeamGroup is currently getting ahead of the competition. A year ahead, in fact. In a recent press release the firm said it was taking a global lead on DDR5, which is surprising since there’s no supporting platform announced from either AMD or Intel yet. However, TeamGroup’s statement says the firm ‘will coordinate its releases with the DDR5 platforms of the top two CPU manufacturers, Intel and AMD. The company’s DDR5 memory is expected to be available as early as Q3 2021’. This clearly reveals that DDR5 platforms are coming from both AMD and Intel during this year, with at least one potentially dropping as early as this July. So, what is it? Intel has already announced that it’s releasing its 12th-gen Core (Rocket Lake) CPUs in April. These…

Just as we were going to press this month, we managed to get hold of a sample of AMD’s new top-end ‘Big Navi’ graphics card, the Radeon RX 6900 XT. We didn’t have time to run the full suite of tests on it, but we’ve managed to quickly get some numbers to see how it fares. We’ll do a full review of it in a future issue. As you’ll read in James Gorbold’s column on p114, supply of these cards is basically non-existent. In fact, one (large) anonymous etailer told us they received only 20 Radeon RX 6900 XT cards on its launch day, compared to several hundred GeForce RTX 3060 Ti cards the previous week. Both Nvidia and AMD are having stock problems, but it looks as though the…

SUPPLIER overclockers.co.uk According to the marketing spiel on Zotac’s website, its GeForce RTX 3080 AMP HoloBlack has ‘inspiring electroplated workmanship on a translucent flourish’, along with ‘a unique design embracing an iridescent holographic finish.’ It’s a needlessly wordy statement worthy of a Dan Brown novel, particularly as the HoloBlack’s finish is neither iridescent nor holographic. That’s not to say it doesn’t look good though. The HoloBlack is packed with RGB lighting and it still looks classy. The chunky metal die-cast backplate has several strips of RGB lighting flowing through it, while the lighting strips on the top edge are topped with a plastic diffuser that fades from green to purple, apparently inspired by the Aurora Borealis. That’s presumably the ‘iridescent’ bit, but while purple and green are the right colours, they…

SUPPLIER ebuyer.com The LG 27QN880 is one of a new trend of business and productivity-focused monitors that have a compact desk-clamp stand rather than a desktop stand. The idea is that it offers more ergonomic adjustment than typical desktop stands, freeing up desk space in the process. The counterpoint is that you could just buy any other monitor and attach it to an aftermarket desk-clamp stand, but the 27QN880 has a few advantages. First, there’s the fact that you don’t have to spend extra money on a good-quality third-party stand. These stands start at around £30, with the better-quality options usually going for £50-£100. As such, if you know you’re never going to use a desktop stand, you’ll save some money. The second advantage is that you get a stand…

SUPPLIER overclockers.co.uk With an asking price of £30, the Alpenföhn Ben Nevis is one of the pricier options this month, and correspondingly early impressions were very good. It has a jet black heatsink as well as heatpipes, rather than the plain aluminium and copper of cheaper units, and the heatpipes are angled to offset the heatsink away from your memory modules, giving them full clearance. However, the heatsink isn’t quite full size and has several sections cut out of the fins to the rear, although it does sport five rather than the usual four heatpipes. The fifth of these is a straight vertical pipe running from the centre of the direct contact plate all the way up through the centre of the heatsink, which isn’t something we’ve seen before. For…

SUPPLIER amazon.co.uk You’ll need to pay careful attention to Deepcool’s line-up of 120mm air coolers, if you intend to buy the Gammaxx GTE V2, as it has a staggering number of options available, which can make finding the right one a bit tricky. We initially thought we’d made a mistake when we saw the price, as £26 for a full-sized 120mm heatsink and RGB-enabled fan seemed too good to be true, but sure enough this cooler really is this modestly priced. The Gammaxx GTE V2 has a standard 4-pin RGB connector, so there’s no rainbow effects on show like that on the Jonsbo CR-1000 GT, nor an illuminated heatsink top like the latter offers as well. However, the lighting is bright and vivid, and there’s also a cable splitter included…

SUPPLIER overclockers.co.uk As an old-timer when it comes to coolers, Scythe is usually a safe bet when it comes to decent, affordable cooling performance. The Scythe Kotetsu II isn’t the cheapest cooler on test, though, and actually sits at the top of the price list at £33. You also don’t get any RGB lighting for your money either, which is something other coolers such as the Deepcool Gammaxx GTEV2 have in abundance and for less cash too. However, what you do get is rather good. This is a full-fat 120mm cooler with a large heatsink and quality fluid dynamic bearing Kaze Flex 120mm PWM fan. The fan tops out at just 1,200rpm and as a result, it was the second quietest on test, recording just 41dBA using our sound meter.…

2020 was a challenging year, and it looks unlikely that 2021 is going to be much easier, at least for a while. As such, there’s no reason to make your gaming life any more difficult than necessary. This might sound daft, but it’s surprising how many arbitrary obstacles we put in front of ourselves in the name of entertainment. So for the start of a new year, I’ve put together a few tips to make your virtual life easier. Firstly, play games on Easy mode. Unless the game is specifically about the challenge, such as Sekiro or Spelunky, there’s no reason to make it any harder than necessary. What’s the point in getting stuck on a boss in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla when the game is mostly about exploration? With half…

DEVELOPER Romero Games/ PUBLISHER Paradox Interactive Empire of Sin has a tantalising premise. Set in 1930s Chicago, it sees you select one of 14 different crime bosses and attempt to dominate the city’s illegal alcohol trade through a combination of economy management, diplomacy and bloody combat. The core of Empire of Sin revolves around acquiring and managing property in Chicago. Whether through funds or by force, you take control of buildings in the city’s various districts, converting them into illicit speakeasies, brothels and casinos. By supplying these places with alcohol from your breweries, you generate income. The better you cater to clientele’s changing tastes, the more profits you receive. Empire of Sin may present as a strategy game, but its surprisingly involved role-playing element is more successful. Unlike most management…

Get a 3D printer I’ve touched on 3D printing numerous times in Custom PC and reviewed a few 3D printers as well. They’re fantastic nerd toys, but also highly useful tools that can create replacement parts for all manner of objects, as well as creating new parts to make devices look or work better. The ease with which you can design and print your own objects is amazing these days, and it’s not hard to transition from downloading prerendered files to creating your own ones. I can thoroughly recommend Tinkercad (tinkercad.com) as a free online tool that’s surprisingly detailed and flexible. There’s plenty of 3D printers that are up to the task of dishing out high-quality prints in a variety of materials too, and you certainly don’t need to spend…

The Queen once referred to a bad year as ‘annus horribilis’, which gave everyone exactly the laugh we needed to counter the horrible year, even if just for a moment. 2020 has been the most horribilis of all the annuses, but it’s also had some amazing gaming science, and that cheers me immensely. Science is how we’ll beat the ’rona, but it’s also still ticking along nicely elsewhere. While some of the headlines have been a little overblown (as is often the case with tech headlines), late 2020 heralded the news that Google’s Deep Mind has made major progress towards solving a decades-old protein-folding puzzle with potentially huge implications for medicine – it’s worth seeking out Professor Mohammed AlQuraishi’s blog on the implications and limitations. Science is how we’ll beat…

Cheap memory alert Earlier on today I was putting together a PC Part Picker list for my friend, and I saw you could get 32GB of Corsair Vengeance Pro RGB RAM for under £150! I also want to add that I always look forward to the delivery of your magazine. Keep up the good work. MARCUS WHITE Ben: Indeed, while it’s a truly rubbish time if you want to upgrade your graphics card right now, it’s an awesome time to upgrade your memory – the prices are amazing. There’s 16GB of Corsair Vengeance Pro RGB RAM in our build guide this month, and at current prices, it costs just £81 inc VAT for a dual-channel 3600MHz kit. Heat of battle I just had a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti card crash…

SUPPLIER razer.com The Razer DeathAdder, in its various guises, has been one of the most popular gaming mice ever made, with Razer boasting about sales of over ten million units. Now it’s back in yet another tweaked format, this time including the company's latest low-latency 2.4GHz wireless connection, as well as Bluetooth and conventional wired connection options too. The heart of the mouse is, of course, its iconic design. With its large, flared left and right buttons, wide, offset back end and left-to-right tilted profile, it has the ultimate ergonomic shape for right-handed users. Whether you use a claw, fingertip or palm grip, it provides a comfortable shape on which your hand can relax, as long as your hands are reasonably large – this is a fairly chunky mouse with…

MOFT MULTI-FUNCTION PHONE STAND / £19.99 inc VAT SUPPLIER amazon.co.uk The MOFT Multi-Function Phone Stand is a combination of a wallet and a smartphone stand in one foldable piece. You attach it to the back of your phone using a reusable sticky pad, which is pretty strong and can also adhere to a case, so you don’t have to forgo armouring your phone. As a wallet, the MOFT is a minimalist affair, and not entirely in a good way. You can stash three cards inside it, but there’s nothing else wallet-like about it, and the cards aren’t particularly accessible either. Meanwhile, the phone stand option works in portrait or landscape configurations – you simply fold the back into a foot that attaches to the rest of the stand with a…

SUPPLIER overclockers.co.uk If you have less than £20 to spend, ARCTIC’s Freezer 7 X has been our go-to cooler for years now. It offers affordable cooling that beats the pants off stock coolers and produces low noise levels too. If something isn’t broken, then it’s generally better not to try to fix it (that’s the pithy version of the old saying – Ed.), but ARCTIC has taken the bold move of tweaking the design a little and creating a more potent cooler. The result is the 13X, which still costs a very wallet-friendly £22 but has a slightly beefed-up specification. To start with, though, there are two versions of the cooler – one for Intel and the other for AMD systems, designated i13X and A13X respectively. We’ve reviewed both here,…

SUPPLIER overclockers.co.uk As the second cheapest cooler on test, the SilverStone AR12 RGB might appear to need to cut corners somewhere, but when you open the box there’s little to suggest that’s the case. It’s one of the few coolers on test to include an actual tube of thermal paste, meaning you should be good for a couple of applications. It also has 4-pin RGB lighting, albeit the actual LEDs aren’t as vivid as some other coolers on test. However, you get a splitter cable too, allowing you to add another fan or LED strip to the mix. The fan also includes anti-vibration mounts and the direct contact plate is not only polished smooth, but is large enough to encompass the larger heatspreaders on Ryzen CPUs too. You also get…

DEVELOPER Treyarch/Raven Software/Beenox/ PUBLISHER Activision The awkwardly titled Black Ops – Cold War flings Call of Duty players back to the 1980s, where the Cold War is at its hottest time since the Cuban Missile Crisis. The single-player campaign opts for spy games as its dominant theme, revolving around a group of disavowed espionage agents working on the orders of Ronald Reagan to track down a mysterious terrorist known as Perseus. The story is filled with twists and turns, double-crosses and fragile alliances. It has potential to be great, but there are too many characters, none of whom has much personality beyond ‘Gung-ho American’ and ‘Posh Brit’. That said, the individual missions are surprisingly good. One sees you sneaking between checkpoints in East Berlin as you track a potential ally…

DEVELOPER Ubisoft Toronto/ PUBLISHER Ubisoft Watch Dogs: Legion’s is set in a post-Brexit London controlled by a private company named Albion, and this third game in Ubisoft’s open-world hacking series lets players recruit and then assume control of virtually any non-player character (NPC) in the entire game. Every NPC in London has a simulated life, with a job, routine and set of character traits semi-randomly assigned from a larger pool. You can walk up to any NPC and press ‘E’ to start a recruiting mission, where they’ll ask you for help with a problem that usually involves infiltrating an area and hacking a device of some sort. Once completed, the NPC will join your hacking team DecSec, whereupon you can play as them. You can recruit any NPC in the…

From the lows of COVID-19 and lockdown to the highs of some stellar PC hardware launches (supply issues aside), 2020 is certainly the year that’s kept us guessing. So, fully aware of the potential pitfalls of predicting what might happen in the year to come, we’ve nonetheless put out the feelers and tapped up our sources to see just what 2021 might hold for PC enthusiasts. DDR5 due MAXIMUM MEMORY SPEEDS WILL JUMP FROM THE 4600MHZ AT THE CURRENT BLEEDING EDGE OF DDR4 TO UPWARDS OF 6400MHZ Perhaps the most obvious place to start is an area that Richard Swinburne has covered in depth in his column this month on p8, which is the arrival of DDR5. The new standard, which will see maximum memory speeds jump from the 4600MHz…

REVIEW Raspberry Pi 400 Ever since the launch of the original Raspberry Pi Model B, the Raspberry Pi range has been known as the ‘credit-card-size computer’. Its dimensions have shifted a little in the years since launch, but overall, the design goal has always been a device with a footprint roughly equal to that of a credit card. The Raspberry Pi 400 doesn’t have a footprint roughly equal to that of a credit card. Even shucked from its housing, it’s by far the largest device the Raspberry Pi Foundation has ever created. That’s because it’s not a single-board computer at all, but an all-in-one device inspired by the classic keyboard-based computers of the 1980s. Developed under the initial codename Project C64, until its designer Simon Martin pointed out that naming…