Table of contents for February 2022 in Custom PC UK

This is the first time we’ve seen one of Huawei’s gaming displays, and this 27in unit arrives with a 2,560 x 1,440 resolution, a 165Hz refresh rate and slick design. It’s not cheap though – its £449 price makes it more expensive than any comparatively specified rival we’ve recently reviewed. The solid resolution is paired with a 1500R curve, which increases immersion without hampering viewing angles. On the inside the MateView uses a VA panel and Huawei says it can display the sRGB and DCIP3 gamuts. It supports AMD FreeSync Premium and works with Nvidia G-Sync too, but its refresh rate of 165Hz and listed response time of 1–4ms are middling attributes at this price that are outpaced by its immediate competitors. The MateView’s sleek metal base and stand look…

The full-sized version of Logitech’s MX Keys keyboard impressed us when we reviewed it a few months ago, and now Logitech has added a mini model to the range that drops the numpad cluster, and squeezes the cursor keys under the right Shift and Enter keys. It makes for a much more compact keyboard but it also results in a few compromises. What isn’t compromised here is the design and build quality. The simple metallic dark grey (graphite) top and otherwise black plastic colouring is simple, subtle and smart, as is the overall shape with its gentle rounded edges. Fetching light pink and silver/white versions are also available. The tenkeyless design also helps with the smart appearance, as the lack of gaps between the alphanumeric keys, cursors and numpad makes…

ICELAND MINCE PIES/£1 for six Iceland’s effort is a happy little-star patterned pie with a sparkly sprinkling of sugar on top that mitigates the less than perfect construction. The sizeable quantity of the sugary sprinkles on top offsets fairly ordinary pastry and filling, with a noticeable but pleasant aftertaste. The whole thing lands squarely in the respectable bracket for quite nice pies to which you wouldn’t say no, which is good enough, but there’s nothing going on that really impressed the judges. 7/10 CO-OP IRRESISTIBLE ALL BUTTER/£2 for six The vented star design on this pie seems superfluous as there are already vents around the edge. There’s nothing wrong with the pastry itself – there just seems to be less of it than usual for a pie of this size.…

Currently topping the ‘hardest GPU to find in stock’ charts is Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3080. We eventually found one at cclonline.com going for £1,184, but that demonstrates an extreme hike in price. The Founders Edition originally cost £649 when it launched – that’s a price increase of £535. When we last compared this GPU with the Radeon RX 6800 XT, back in Issue 211, it was a clear winner, offering a better balance of performance for a similar price. Now that it’s so expensive, the gap has closed a little, but the RTX 3080 is still (just) the better allround option. It’s based on the same GA102 Ampere GPU as the top-end RTX 3090, but it only has 68 Streaming Multiprocessors enabled, giving it 8,704 stream processors, 272 3rd-gen Tensor…

Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3090 was already hugely overpriced when it launched for £1,399, but the prices for RTX 3090 cards are now so over the top that it’s perfectly acceptable to point and laugh at them. The cheapest card we could find was going for £2,150 – that’s £660 more than the RTX 3080 Ti, and it really doesn’t get you £660 worth of extra performance. In fact, that £660 (which could buy you an Alder Lake Core i7 CPU and a Z690 motherboard), only buys you two extra streaming multiprocessors over the RTX 3080 Ti. That translates to 256 more stream processors and two more RT cores for ray tracing. It really isn’t worth it. There are other factors bumping up the cost, of course. The RTX 3090 comes…

The Cooler Master MS110 is a distinctly different offering to the other keyboards on test this month, for several reasons. The first and most fundamental one is that it’s not just a keyboard, but a keyboard and mouse combo. There's a similar MK110 keyboard and CM110 mouse available separately, but the former isn’t readily sold in the UK while the latter is slightly different to the mouse included in this set. The second big difference is that this keyboard uses a so-called ‘mem-chanical’ key switch that emulates a mechanical switch’s form but uses a rubber dome mechanism. The primary benefit of this, other than the impressive 50 million keystroke rating, is that you can actually pull off the keycaps and replace them with Cherry MX-style keycaps. The downside to this…

The Razer Cynosa Chroma is the slightly older variant of the two Cynosa rubber-dome keyboards you can currently buy, with the newer V2 model adding dedicated multimedia keys to the mix. The Cynosa Chroma has a comparatively basic feature set, but it includes per-key backlighting and it also benefits from Razer’s ever-reliable eye for attractive design. The styling here is quite simple, with just a single piece of unadorned black plastic wrapping over the top, back and front of the keyboard, which is punctuated only by the sunken translucent sections for the keys and the little cutout for the shiny piece of plastic with the Razer logo at the front. This simple, clean approach, along with a sharp choice of key legend font and Razer’s neat-looking logo, makes for an…

DEVELOPER Milestone/PUBLISHER Milestone Hot Wheels Unleashed is a devilishly enticing mix of Micro Machines, Burnout and Trackmania, all wrapped in the orange and blue branding of the coolest die-cast vehicles in toytown. It’s the most enjoyable arcade racer we’ve played since Forza Horizon 4, although it’s dragged down by an unseemly emphasis on loot boxes. Unleashed’s racing is simple and spectacular. In singleplayer mode, you square off against 11 other cars on a wide range of twisting and looping Hot Wheels tracks, all represented to scale, with tracks snaking under pool tables and twisting around bookshelves. Racing relies heavily on drifting and a Burnout-style boost, and performing the former helps you to charge up the latter. The racing is given complexity by the tracks themselves, which are brimming with bonuses,…

DEVELOPER ACE Team / PUBLISHER Good Shepherd Entertainment The Eternal Cylinder sees you play as a group of cute creatures called Trebhum, on a planet that’s slowly being crushed into dust by a giant rotating cylinder. Your goal is to evade this unstoppable rolling pin of death, finding ways to evolve your Trebhum while deciphering the mystery behind the curvilinear phenomenon that’s destroying your home world. You control one Trebhum directly, but recruit others to follow you – you can then switch between which Trebhum you control directly. As you explore the game’s strange planet, you’ll come across various plants and animals that can be consumed, which will change your Trebhum in different ways. Some adaptations give you better legs for jumping, or a fur coat to keep you warm…

From the creator of popular VR game Arizona Sunshine, After the Fall is a cooperative zombie-blasting action game in which four players team up in an alternate 1980s LA, where the apocalypse happened 20 years before. Not only is the City of Angels frozen over like a giant, celebrity-filled ice rink, but the streets are also prowled by the undead. After the Fall is essentially a cooler, VR version of Left 4 Dead. Players assume the role of ‘Runners’ working together to complete missions, while battling hordes of zombies known as ‘Snowbreed’, alongside ‘Special’ undead enemies that have unique powers, plus a handful of towering boss enemies. Although the game aligns itself closely with Valve’s classic, there’s a handful of minor differences, such as zombies being able to crawl across…

If you read our Alder Lake coverage last issue, you’ll know that Intel’s new chipset and 12th-gen CPUs don’t just bring a new CPU socket, but also new memory in the form of DDR5. It offers higher frequencies and greater bandwidth than DDR4, as well as on-board voltage control and more besides. However, as with any new technology, there are teething issues and early DDR5 kits have quite high timings for starters, plus they’re only available in very small quantities at the moment. There’s also the fact that faster kits will be launched in the near future, as we learned last month in our Q&A with memory manufacturer Kingston. If you’re looking to buy a premium motherboard, then you may well have to opt for DDR5 memory regardless, as DDR4…

Once you have all the components you need, you can follow this guide to make sure you get it right. We’ve picked a few choice components for our Core i9-12900K example system, such as WD’s 1TB SN850 Black M.2 SSD, an NZXT 510 Flow case and NZXT Kraken Z53 cooler, along with a Corsair RM850X PSU and Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Ti Founders Edition graphics card. For this guide, we’re mainly focusing on aspects that make an Alder Lake build with one of our bundles different from builds you might have done previously. If you’ve never built a PC before, we recommend reading our ‘Build a better PC guide’ in Issue 215, which you can pick up from custompc.co.uk/215 1 Alder Lake CPUs are larger and heavier than previous mainstream…

WEBCAMS AND STREAMING GEAR For budding game streamers, or even those who just like to play online with friends, a proper webcam is a great present. The venerable and excellent Logitech C920 can be had for just £60 from johnlewis.com If you’re looking for a more directly streaming-focused cam, then the Elgato Facecam (£190 from currys.co.uk) offers superb image quality and endless tweakability. Or you can use Elgato’s Cam Link (£90 from amazon.co.uk) to use a standard camera as a webcam. Another great tool for budding streamers is a dedicated control surface for managing your stream. Whether its switching camera angles, turning your comment feed on or off, switching audio feeds and much more, there’s a surprising amount involved in trying to both play a game and manage a stream…

It would be easy to look at the Nezha and see just another Raspberry Pi clone. It has all the hallmarks – near-identical footprint, 40-pin generalpurpose input/output (GPIO) header, Ethernet and USB to the left, HDMI, 3.5mm audio jack socket and power to the bottom, a radio module to the top left, and a system-on-chip – the Allwinner D1 – towards the rough centre. It’s the Allwinner D1 that makes the Nezha different though. It’s not an Arm-based part at all, but one built around the free and open-source RISC-V instruction set architecture. The D1 implements a Xuantie C906 RV64IMAFDCVU core, recently open-sourced by Alibaba’s T-Head division, meaning it’s a 64-bit part with the performance-boosting vector extensions included. While that’s true, it’s only part of the story. To get the…

The AOC U28G2XU is the cheapest 144Hz 4K display we’ve yet seen. As you’d expect for this price, the U28G2XU isn’t a particularly flashy monitor. Its build is simple and minimalistic, but not to the point we’d be concerned about any build quality failings. The stand offers height, pivot, rotation and tilt adjustment, as well as a 100 x 100mm VESA mount for using alternative stands. Connection options are decent too, with one DisplayPort 1.4 input and two HDMI connectors. However, only the DisplayPort 1.4 input can handle 4K at 144Hz – the HDMI inputs are only HDMI 2, so they’re limited to 60Hz at this resolution. You also get a 4-port USB 3.2 hub, and the power supply is internal and uses an IEC C14 (kettle lead) connection, so…

How we test After giving our verdict on the sub-£1,000 GPU market last month, this month’s first Labs test is dedicated to the cream of the crop – the top-end, 4K-capable GPUs that already cost a veritable arm and a leg when they were released, but now threaten to leave you with just your head and torso intact. If you’re willing to spend the cash necessary to get a top-end GPU, though, which one should you buy? Nvidia’s low hash rate cards have lowered demand (a bit) over the past few months, while the price of AMD’s RDNA2 cards has steadily increased. Where does that leave us now? In order to make sense of the situation, we’ve tested five £1,000+ GPUs listed at the cheapest prices we could find them…

As we climb into next tier of graphics performance, you start to get slightly better value. That might sound like a bit of a laugh when we’re discussing a £1,350 graphics card, but the Radeon RX 6900 XT launched with a £999 price anyway, and was already going for £1,200 in our Issue 211 Labs test. Proportionally, its price hasn’t increased as far as the GPUs immediately below it. There isn’t an enormous difference between the Radeon RX 6900 XT and the 6800 XT. Both cards have 16GB of 2GHz (16GHz effective) GDDR6 memory attached to a 256-bit wide memory interface, giving you a total memory bandwidth of 512GB/sec, along with 128MB of AMD’s Infinity Cache. Both cards also use the same GA102 GPU clocked at the same frequency, it’s…

How we test Most of the keyboards in this Labs test can be bought for under £50, which inherently means the features you get aren’t quite at the same level as on more premium mechanical boards. None includes a USB pass-through, for instance, while per-key backlighting is a rarity, with lighting instead split into zones on most of these models. Premium touches, such as the aluminium top plates that Corsair favours for its expensive keyboards, are also out the window. What you do still get with nearly all these keyboards, though, is some form of multimedia control, so you can adjust volume, and play and pause your media at the touch of a button. RGB lighting abounds too, while easy key remapping and macro recording is provided by software for…

Corsair’s K55 RGB Pro XT is the most feature-rich of all the keyboards on test this month, and it comes with a correspondingly higher price. However, the price of £75 still puts this keyboard well below the price of most mechanical keyboards, and it really does come packed to the gills with features. First off, this is an extended-range keyboard, with six extra dedicated gaming keys running down the left side. All the board’s keys are fully programmable, but having dedicated ones means you don’t have to worry about using awkward key combinations or losing any other functions. Just beware that there’s a potentially frustrating learning curve involved with avoiding hitting the G keys when you’re aiming for the column of Esc-to-Ctrl keys. On the opposite end of the keyboard…

The big selling point of the Roccat Magma is its lighting setup. It makes use of a translucent top plate in order to provide lighting for not just the keys, but also for the entire top of the keyboard. On paper, it might sound a bit gimmicky, and the look of the keyboard doesn’t initially inspire confidence when you get it out of the box unplugged either. You’re greeted by a big slab of white plastic that we suspect doesn’t quite fit in with the aesthetic of most desk setups. However, plug this keyboard into your PC and its party piece makes a more convincing case for itself, assuming that you love RGB lighting. The show put on here is quite striking and there’s a certain practicality to it too.…

DEVELOPER Arkane Studios / PUBLISHER Bethesda Deathloop seeks to solve a specific problem with immersive sim design, namely the player’s tendency to become entrenched in a certain way of playing. It’s a game designed to pull stealth fanatics out of the shadows, to teach gunslinging door-kickers that sometimes a quieter approach is more fruitful. It even seeks to show multiplayer haters that sometimes life can be better with other people around. It’s bold, imaginative and more fun than a box of kittens. Players initially assume the role of Colt Vahn, who awakes on the bracing shoreline of Blackreef island to find himself stuck in a time loop caused by a spacetime anomaly at the centre of the isle. If Colt dies or reaches the end of the day, the loop…

DEVELOPER 7-bit / PUBLISHER 7-bit Song in the Smoke is a spooky prehistoric survival sim revolving around a wonderfully physical crafting system. You play a strapping hunter-gatherer exploring a linear sequence of otherworldly open-ended levels. The broad goal of each level is to find three ‘Song Stones’ that summon a supernatural beast you need to battle in order to progress. As with most survival games, you need to gather resources such as wood, stones and herbs and combine them to create useful items. However, where Song in the Smoke stands out is in the way it uses VR to bring physicality into the system. To make a health potion, for example, you don’t simply select the relevant herb and press a button. Instead, you place the herb into a mortar…

TOOLS OF THE TRADE Having exactly the right tool for the job is essential, and there’s no better place to start PC tinkering than with a good screwdriver in your hand. Most of the screws used in PCs – the ones used for motherboard mounts, expansion card slots, PSU mounts, fan mounts, cooler mounts and so on – use the Philips No.2 head. A long-necked screwdriver is essential for reaching into your case’s crevices. Our pick remains the Stanley FatMax 250mm PH2 model (£6.90 from amazon.co.uk), thanks to its good build quality and comfortable handle. For the various smaller screws in your PC, such as the ones used to attach the arms to cooler mounts or hold down M.2 SSDs, you’ll want a set of micro screwdrivers. For very little…

What do you get if you cross a Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ with a Raspberry Pi Zero W? The punchline isn’t very funny, but it’s sure to raise a smile from anyone looking for a bit more grunt from their ultra-compact embedded projects: Raspberry Pi Zero 2. The original Raspberry Pi Zero (see Issue 150) launched for just £4 (inc VAT), a price so low it ended up cover-mounted on The MagPi magazine – a world first. The Raspberry Pi Zero W added a Bluetooth and wireless LAN radio chip, and now the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 offers a true successor. Externally, the Zero 2 W is near-identical to the Zero or Zero W. It’s even possible to use it in existing Zero cases. The biggest change is the…

Order your LGA1700 adaptor now to avoid disappointment Believe it or not, cooling Intel’s new Alder Lake CPUs is quite tricky at the moment. As you’ll likely be aware now, the motherboards require an LGA1700-specific cooler or adaptor kit to be used. Firstly, the gaps between the CPU socket mounting holes are slightly wider on Z690 motherboards than their predecessors. It does seem like a bit of a silly move, given the difference is just a few millimetres, but we have to deal with it all the same. Interestingly, Asus is including both LGA1700 and LGA115x/LGA1200 mounting holes on its boards, but you should be very wary of mounting older coolers on new Z690 boards, even if you have a mounting kit and backplate that fits. There’s another reason for…

If you like your frame rates fast and your screen immersive then make sure you submit an entry to this month’s competition. We have a 27in AOC C27G2ZU gaming monitor up for grabs, with a 1500R curved screen and a super-fast 240Hz refresh rate. The latter completely unleashes topend GPUs, bringing unprecedented fluidity to the picture on your screen. With every detail brought sharply into focus and every movement shown with crystal clarity, you can feel your reactions become one with the action and elevate your game. Meanwhile, the screen’s pixel response time of 0.5ms means smear-free gaming, with fast-moving action and dramatic transitions rendered smoothly without ghosting. What’s more, the 1500R curve wraps around you, putting you at the centre of the action and providing an immersive gaming experience.…

WING COMMANDER By 1990, VGA was well established, the 386 had become the mainstream PC CPU and the 486 had just appeared. All three technologies found their perfect showcase in Wing Commander. Chris Roberts’ dazzling space combat game offered stunning scaling and rotating sprite spaceships, Star Wars-inspired cinematic cutscenes and thrilling mission design. It paved the way for LucasArts’s X-Wing games and the Elite revival, while showing the way forward for a new breed of Hollywood-influenced, story-driven games. THE SECRET OF MONKEY ISLAND It’s a toss-up which was more influential – the first of Ron Gilbert’s beloved pirate series or the awesome Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. Either way, these two titles used VGA’s capabilities to full effect, with impressive sprite characters and glorious backdrops that made the…

With a whopping price of £250 inc VAT, Corsair’s fancy new H150i Elite LCD is one of the most expensive all-in-one (AIO) liquid coolers we’ve tested. Not only does it have a customisable screen on the pump/waterblock unit, but the cost is also bumped up by the inclusion of a Corsair iCUE Commander Core in the box, which is a combined fan and lighting controller. Tweakable using Corsair’s iCUE software and a USB 2 header, the controller can power up to six RGB components with Corsair’s own connectors, as well as six PWM fans. It also connects to the new pump, which is no longer made by Asetek, with the software allowing to you select from various profiles or, in the case of the fans, create your ownprofile. There are…

There’s no avoiding the fact that £149 is a considerable amount to spend on a gamepad, but you notice the difference between the Razer Wolverine V2 Chroma and a normal gamepad as soon as you hammer the face buttons. Razer describes them as ‘mecha-tactile action buttons', and they move with an underlying mechanical switch rather than a conventional membrane. Razer claims that this design delivers quicker actuation times than traditional pads, and the buttons do feel fantastic – they’re crisp, comfortable and fast. The raised D-pad uses the same design, and it has the same impressive feel. The pad’s other buttons don’t have the same hardware, but they’re enhanced elsewhere. Meanwhile, glossy casings house the analogue sticks to ensure friction-free movement. Razer includes interchangeable caps in the box as well…

The Marshall Motif ANC is a pair of earbuds from a company whose name more traditionally appears on big hefty guitar amps. It’s fair to say that the journey from amps to noise-cancelling earbuds was very much worth it though. They’re small, even for earbuds, with only a tiny metal protrusion visible when they’re worn. However, in spite of their small size, they provide a rock-solid connection thanks to their Bluetooth 5.2 support with up to a 10m reach. The battery is good for 4.5 hours of play time with active noise cancelling, and six hours without it. This isn’t a huge amount of time, but the case acts as a recharging port and can get you another 20 hours. The case can be recharged wirelessly on a charging plate…

It seems weird the Radeon RX 6800 XT cost £680 inc VAT when it launched this time last year. At the time, even that price seemed too expensive when it couldn’t outperform the similarly priced GeForce RTX 3080, but the price has now climbed stratospherically to well over a grand. It’s based on AMD’s top-end Navi 21 GPU, with 72 compute units enabled, giving it 72 Ray Accelerators for ray tracing and a total of 4,608 stream processors. Like the Radeon RX 6900 XT, it also has 16GB of GDDR6 memory attached to a 256-bit wide memory interface. With a 2GHz (16GHz effective) memory clock, that gives it a total memory bandwidth of 512GB/sec. That’s a long way behind the 760GB/sec of the RTX 3080 with its GDDR6X memory and…

While the RTX 3080 is often harder to find than rocking horse teeth, and other mixed metaphors, the RTX 3080 Ti regularly turns up in stock. When it launched the 3080 Ti got off to a bad start with a £1,099 launch price, but thanks to Nvidia’s low hash rate technology, and a steady stream of stock, its price has ‘only’ gone up by around 50 per cent rather than nearly doubling. At the time of writing we found an EVGA on scan.co.uk for £1,490, but this retailer occasionally has the Founders Editions in stock at the launch price, so it’s worth keeping an eye on the website. The RTX 3080 Ti’s core spec isn’t far off that of the RTX 3090 either, which looks like a good deal when…

While most of the keyboards on test this month include some sort of multimedia controls, either via secondary functions of the standard keys or via dedicated buttons, the Asus TUF Gaming K1 is the only model to offer a proper big chunky volume wheel, and it makes for a surprisingly meaningful upgrade over those fiddlier alternatives. It’s large enough to easily make small adjustments, helped by the detents that let you know each time you’ve moved the dial up or down a notch. Unfortunately, adjusting volume is this dial’s only purpose – you can’t tap it to mute or play/pause media, or control any other aspect of your system. Given there are no other dedicated media controls, this feels like an oversight. That said, most of the time, it’s easy…

While most of the other keyboards on test hover around the £50 mark, the Logitech G213 stands apart with its exceptionally low price of just £35, yet it gives up very little in terms features. As well as its five-zone RGB backlighting, you get nine dedicated extra buttons and a built-in wrist rest, which is more than several other more expensive keyboards on test provide. Take a closer look at this board and the first feature that strikes you is the integrated wrist rest. Presumably it reduces machining costs to just build the whole keyboard longer, rather than providing the clips and holes for attaching a wrist rest. Regardless, if you already have a preferred separate wrist rest, or prefer not to use one at all, this keyboard is immediately…

If we had to pick our favourite keyboard on test based on design alone, the SteelSeries Apex 3 TKL would easily take the win. It certainly helps that the compact tenkeyless (TKL) form factor looks a little less bulky than the full-sized keyboards on test, but the full-sized version of this keyboard looks great too. Instead, it’s the subtler details that really elevate this keyboard. For a start, the backlighting is neatly contained in translucent, sunken sections that provide an attractive way for the lighting to fill out below the keys without spilling everywhere. The lighting is also split up into eight equal-size columns – more than some keyboards – allowing for a particularly attractive flowing, colour-shift effect. You can change the speed and colours of this effect, choose a…

DEVELOPER Shedworks / PUBLISHER Raw Fury Sable is a peaceful open-world game about exploring an alien desert world. Placing you in the role of a young woman (Sable) on a rite of passage, it sees you travelling through a world of dunes, canyons and mesas, delving into ancient ruins, performing jobs for various settlements, and slowly peeling back the many mysteries developer Shedworks has woven into its game. Two factors separate Sable from other open-world experiences. The first is that it’s entirely non-violent, instead focusing on exploration, dialogue and puzzle solving. The second is that, after completing a slightly overlong tutorial, you’re free to go wherever you want. There’s no level gating or predetermined quest structure. If you want to travel to the farthest reaches of the map the moment…

HTC has announced the Vive Flow, a new standalone headset that’s a little different from the company’s usual fare. Unlike bulkier, gaming-focused headsets, the Flow is a compact and lightweight device apparently designed for wellbeing and social interaction. Instead of being a large box that hangs off your face, the Flow is essentially an extrathick pair of glasses, sitting over your ears with arms that can fold away. Weighing just 189g, it’s lighter than any other major VR headset. The Flow’s twin lenses have a 3.2K resolution, which likely translates to 1,600 x 1,600 pixels per eye (HTC has yet to confirm the ppi resolution), combined with a 75Hz refresh rate and a field-of-view of 100 degrees. The headset doesn’t require a connection to a PC but relies on an…

COOLING ALDER LAKE There are two issues when it comes to transplanting your existing cooler or buying a new one, when it comes to Alder Lake. The first is that the LGA1700 socket’s mounting holes sit wider apart than on previous Intel mainstream sockets, meaning some kits simply won’t fit, especially if they rely on fixed backplates. Even if you can tweak your cooler to fit the new mounting holes, or in the case of some Asus Z690 motherboards, use LGA1200 mounting holes, the CPU height has also changed. Many mounts might not apply the right pressure, even if your cooler is otherwise compatible The latter means that many mounts might not apply the right pressure, even if your cooler is otherwise compatible. We confirmed this with one of our…

With choices to be made about your memory, motherboards and cooler, and different people coming from various positions in terms of hardware they already own, we’d forgive you for being a tad confused when it comes to upgrading to Alder Lake. Thankfully, our testing this month and experience with Alder Lake so far has enabled us to create a flowchart, which you can follow to help guide you on your path to building your deal Alder Lake PC. The chart takes into account whether you’re looking to buy a specific motherboard, as well as whether you want to keep the budget as small as possible. You can also use it to decide whether to go with DDR4 or DDR5, how to avoid cooler compatibility issues and also make sure you…

Despite the cover of Not All Fairy Tales Have Happy Endings promising ‘the rise and fall of Sierra On-Line, as told by the ultimate insider,’ this book by Sierra On-Line cofounder Ken Williams is purely a memoir. Some small contact was made with former colleagues, and there’s evidence of research to get the core facts right, but you’re primarily reading the personal recollections of Williams himself, and his wife. ‘Roberta is the true founder of Sierra and was always Sierra’s bestselling author,’ Williams explains, long after covering how he pushed his wife into programming – and how her interest wasn’t piqued until he introduced her to Will Crowther’s seminal Colossal Cave Adventure, at which point she kicked him off the computer to play it herself. ‘Roberta should be the one…

The technology that put PC graphics firmly on the map arrived in April 1987 as part of IBM’s PS/2 line of PCs. IBM saw the PS/2 as the answer to its biggest problems, putting Big Blue (as we all used to call it) back in control of the PC architecture and one step ahead of the clone manufacturers. To do so, it had Intel’s latest processors, cutting-edge connection options and the fastest floppy disk storage, not to mention a revolutionary new high-bandwidth system bus. But what turned out to be the PS/2’s most important feature was its new graphics hardware – the Video Graphics Array, or VGA. In 1987 the PC wasn’t exactly considered a graphics powerhouse In 1987 the PC wasn’t exactly considered a graphics powerhouse. Apple’s Mac II,…