Innehållsförteckning för February 2019 från Custom PC UK

I think I’ve just seen the tackiest computer component ever. It looks as though someone smashed up some boiled sweets, stuck them to a piece of gold-coloured metal with some lights and wrote ‘Royal’ on it, thinking they could sneak it into the crown jewels at the Tower of London without anyone noticing. You can see it on p14. I know taste is subjective to a degree, but if the G.Skill Trident Z Royal memory is to your taste then I’m going to judge you hard, and probably raise one of my eyebrows while I’m doing it. You can even get an RGB LED top for your 24-pin ATX power cable. Where can you go from there? The problem isn’t that it’s form over function. The Trident Z Royal kits…

G.Skill blings up memory G.Skill is going for all-out bling with its latest RAM heatsink, which looks more like something from a luxury watch catalogue than a computer component. The TridentZ Royal features a polished aluminium heatspreader, with either a gold or silver finish, along with a ‘crystalline light bar’, which G.Skill describes as a ‘crown jewel’ design. According to G.Skill, the new light bar is designed to refract the lighting from the module’s RGB LEDs, resulting in a ‘magnificent display’. A range of kits will be available, including both dual and quad-channel sets, going from 3000MHz to 4400MHz, with a dual-channel 16GB kit also available at 4600MHz. Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 results spotted It looks as though a cheaper GPU based on Nvidia’s new Turing architecture could soon be…

SUPPLIER www.scan.co.uk Because of the way AMD’s Threadripper WX-series CPUs are designed, with two of their four dies lacking direct memory access, their performance doesn’t scale as well as that of the 16-core and 12-core models in multi-threaded tests. As a result, you need to consider both the Threadripper 2970WX and its 32-core bigger sibling, the 2990WX, very carefully before purchasing. AMD is sticking to a £50 per extra core philosophy with these chips However, there have been two big performance-boosting breakthroughs for the WX-series since we looked at the Threadripper 2990WX. Firstly, Nvidia found a bug in its drivers that drastically hindered performance on CPUs with more than 18 cores in games, cutting performance by up to 50 per cent. Secondly, AMD has introduced a dynamic local memory…

SUPPLIER www.amazon.co.uk Amazon’s new Echo Show introduces a slick new design, a sharper 10in screen, better speakers and a fistful of extra smart features over the original Show. The screen dominates, with Amazon sensibly moving the speaker from below the screen to the rear. The new Echo Show has a slightly bigger footprint than its predecessor, but it’s a little shorter than the original. It hasn’t lost its gawkiness though. The thick bezel above the screen gives it a lopsided look, but it’s there for a reason, housing not only a five-megapixel camera but also part of the Show’s far-field microphone array. This feature is supplemented by a further four microphones on top of the speaker, plus physical mute and volume buttons. Meanwhile, the DC power input sits in…

SUPPLIER www.scan.co.uk ASRock has produced premium offerings for several generations of Intel mini-ITX motherboards, but hasn’t previously hit the sweet spot for a variety of reasons. Chief among them has been price, with the Z390 Phantom Gaming-ITX/ac’s predecessors usually retailing for around £200 inc VAT or more. Thankfully, the situation is very different for this Z390 board. Costing just £177 inc VAT, it undercuts Asus’ ROG Strix Z390-I Gaming (see p51) by over £30, and it’s not hugely more expensive than ASRock’s own Z390M-ITX/ac (see p49) budget board either. The ASRock Phantom also has a top-notch set of features that shouldn’t leave many users wanting. Its packed rear I/O panel offers the only clear-CMOS button on test, along with Wi-Fi aerial connectors, a pair of display outputs, six Type-A…

DEVELOPER Cyanide Studio/ PUBLISHER Focus Home Interactive/ WEBSITE www.callofcthulhu-game.com/en Considered on its own, Call of Cthulhu was clearly made with the developers’ hearts in the right place, but the magnificence of Return of the Obra Dinn (see below) really highlights its shortcomings. Like Obra Dinn, Cthulhu is a detective game. At least, it starts that way. You play Edward Pierce, a dyed-in-the-wool 1920s PI, whose specific choice of dye is whatever hard alcohol is closest to his oesophagus. Desperate for work, Pierce takes on a case on the thoroughly dismal island of Darkwater, where a local artist died in a house fire that the artist’s father believes was suspicious. From there, Call of Cthulhu spins a predictable tale of mysterious cults, eldritch gods and mad scientists. Call of Cthulhu’s take…

In the mid-to-late 1990s, the best way to create a detailed virtual world was to use pre-rendering. Real-time 3D graphics must be generated in every frame, which requires vast amounts of processing power if you want to do it with decent detail. That’s why most 3D games up until the mid-2000s represented their worlds using simplistic geometric shapes. It’s also the reason why so many early 3D games took place in caverns, caves and corridors. This method worked fine for games such as Quake and Descent, where the emphasis was on movement and action. For a game about exploring a believable and detailed world, however, a more appropriate solution was to render the game’s environments during the process of development, dedicating the entirety of a computer’s processing power to producing…

01 Install CPU We’ve seen plenty of bent CPU socket pins in our time, so heed our advice and be careful as you install the processor in the socket – the socket’s pins are extremely easy to damage and you run the risk of killing your motherboard if you bend a pin. Lift up the lever, take your time and gently lower the CPU into the socket squarely – it will only fit one way around, then lock it in place with the lever. 02 Install cooler backplate and pins The Corsair H100i RGB Platinum uses Asetek’s mounting mechanism, with a backplate and top side pins. Go ahead and install this backplate and pins next, following Corsair’s instructions and making sure to use the correct pins for LGA1151. 03 Install…

Solder vs TIM The reintroduction of solder thermal interface material (STIM) between the CPU core and heatspreader is a welcome move by Intel. Having ditched it in favour of thermal paste back with its Ivy Bridge mainstream chips in 2012, and in its high-end desktop (HEDT) Skylake-X CPUs year, it faced a backlash from enthusiasts. Following reports of higher temperatures, we saw scathing demonstrations of just how much cooler the CPUs ran after delidding them and applying high-performance thermal paste. As we saw in last month’s delidding guide (see Issue 184, p104), the difference can be significant, especially if you overclock your CPU. Intel’s reasoning for these moves isn’t quite clear in either direction. Rumours about the original move suggest cost saving, with thermal paste being cheaper per CPU than…

The desktop PC industry is undoubtedly mainly driven by demand for gaming hardware these days, as seen with the recent explosion in products named after games. However, with the increase in the number of people gaming on mobile devices, several companies have announced plans for game streaming services, which run the games remotely on a cloud server, streaming the gameplay to the player via a video stream. Previous efforts to create game streaming services, such as Gaikai and OnLive failed, but more recently Nvidia and Sony’s GeForce Now and PlayStation Now services have been launched to limited success.However, new commitments from Microsoft (xCloud), Sony,EA (Project Atlas) and even Google (Project Stream) should be taken more seriously. Game streaming services are no longer a case of‘if’but ‘when’ they will arrive. There’s…

SUPPLIER www.scan.co.uk / MODEL NUMBER RX-590P8DFD6 XFX’s new Radeon RX 590 Fatboy arrives with a refreshing no-nonsense attitude. There are no RGB LEDs studded around the cooler, there’s no superfluous bling and the £250 price tag is surprisingly sensible. In a time when new graphics card launches are demanding silly prices, and coming soon after the cryptocurrency mining trend pushed the prices of AMD’s previous GPUs out of the reach of many gamers, AMD has picked an ideal moment to launch a new GPU that hits the 1080p sweet spot without breaking the bank. Well, we say ‘new’, but the Radeon RX 590 is still a variation on the same Polaris GPU used for the Radeon RX 480 back in 2016, and the RX 580 the year after that.…

How we test If you want to take advantage of Intel’s 9th-generation CPUs, but in a tiny PC, then we have just the Labs test for you this month, as we’ve put five Z390 mini-ITX motherboards through their paces. We’ve got all sorts of boards, from budget models to high-end monsters that even give their ATX siblings a run for their money in terms of features. As well as looking into these features, we test each motherboard’s prowess in raw performance. Our test kit includes 16GB of 3000MHZ Corsair Vengeance DDR4 RAM, a 512GB Samsung 960 Pro SSD with Windows 10 installed plus an NZXT Kraken X42 all-in-one liquid cooler. We also use a Zotac GeForce GTX 1080 AMP! Edition graphics card and a Samsung 960 Evo M.2 SSD for…

Half-Life is one of the most important PC games ever made, possibly second only to Doom. At the very least, without Half-Life there would be no Steam, and as such, the landscape of PC gaming would be unrecognisable. That’s not to mention the impact of its game design. Half-Life’s story-driven single-player game has influenced games from Dishonored to Call of Duty, while without Half-Life’s netcode, two of the most successful multiplayer games ever – Counter-Strike and Team Fortress – would not exist. Like Doom before it, Half-Life reshaped the face of PC gaming, but there’s more to Valve’s classic shooter than its legacy. The reason Half-Life was so influential is because it was a fantastic game, and it remains a fantastic game today. That’s not true of every classic. Try…

This month is all about the marvellous world of mini-ITX gear, including a roundup of motherboards from the usual suspects in this month’s Labs test (see p48). We’ve picked the winner of that test to take part in this month’s cover feature too, packing some seriously powerful hardware into a case that’s not much bigger than a shoebox. We’ve also chosen Intel’s ridiculously fast and powerful Core i9-9900X, cooled by Corsair’s latest all-in-one liquid cooler kitted out with some awesome RGB lighting. There’s a generous helping of RGB memory and a super-fast PCI-E NVMe M.2 SSD too, and it’s all housed in Raijintek’s shiny new aluminium Ophion mini-ITX case with dual glass side windows. We didn’t want to compromise anywhere, so we also chose the most powerful gaming GPU available…

Head into the EFI by pressing the Del key after firing up the PC, and find the OC Tweaker section. Set the CPU Core Voltage to Fixed mode and then enter 1.3V. Applying any more voltage at this point can lead to high temperatures as you reach 5GHz, and we’ve found that most boards don’t need such a high voltage to hit 5GHz across all the cores on a Core i9-9900K anyway. The Core i9-9900K has a default all-core boost of 4.7GHz, so we’ll start at 4.8GHz and work up. In the Voltage Configuration section, enter an all-core CPU ratio of 48, which will give you a frequency of 4.8GHz. Finally, make sure your memory is running at the right frequency and timings. Head to the DRAM Tweaker section. Under…

Sword fighting is hard to represent accurately in video games. Using a mouse and keyboard bears little resemblance to swinging a real sword, and it’s hard to condense an activity that uses your entire body into a few button presses. VR makes a realistic sword fighting game slightly more viable, but there are still aspects to sword fighting that are tough to replicate, such as the point at which two weapons clash and the ensuing struggle. The gaming industry still has some odd notions about how melee combat works too. Typically, games divide weapon strikes between ‘light’ and ‘heavy’ attacks. Strength may bear some significance when fighting with a blunt weapon such as a club or mace, but with a sharp weapon such as a sword, strength is far less…

TOTAL PROJECT TIME / 2 HOURS Whether or not you’ve chosen to jump onto Nvidia’s RTX bandwagon, there are always gains from water-cooling your graphics card. It will be quieter and significantly cooler, and in most cases, it will look better too. What’s more, your water-cooling system will be taking all the heat from your card to the radiators, exhausting the hot air out of your case, rather then dumping it back into the case. Nvidia’s GeForce RTX cards are quite tricky customers when it comes to water cooling, though, and the process is harder than with previous generations. In this guide, we used the latest waterblock from EK Water Blocks, along with its corresponding backplate, to show you how to water-cool your new GPU without any problems. 1 /…

November saw Intel launch another group of new CPUs in addition to the Core i9-9900K and its brethren, the 9th-generation Core X series. While the CPUs themselves were quite underwhelming,only having a marginal clock speed bump over their predecessors, what struck me most was the confusing and pointless nature of the launch. It’s confusing because, despite the 9th-generation branding, the new processors failed to provide any significant advances over the previous 7th-generation X-series CPUs. In fact, about all I can find to commend them is that all the CPUs, even the Core i7-9800X, now have a 44-lane PCI-E controller, whereas some 7th-generation models only had a 28-lane PCI-E controller. While that’s largely irrelevant to gamers, especially with the near death of SLI and CrossFire, it’s great news for deep learning…

I grew up a PC gamer, missing out on the NES and SNES entirely, so I don’t have any nostalgia for ye olde Nintendo. Instead, my nostalgia is for 1980s Amstrad games, many of which haunt my memories. I recently grabbed an emulator ROM of a favourite from my childhood – Fantasy World Dizzy, a 1989 game by the Oliver twins. Young Tracy would spend days trying to solve the puzzles and platforms, most of which involved patiently carrying one object across various screens only to find it’s not the object you need and that you’ve wasted the last hour. I loved this game, and the intervening 30 years had removed all the bad bits (most of it), and left me only with memories of fun and joy. Replaying was…

SUPPLIER www.ebuyer.com Despite the Threadripper range trebling in size this year, the new additions from 2018 still slot neatly into the stack. The Threadripper 2920X costs around the same amount of money as Intel’s Core i7-7820X, but has four more cores and eight more threads and, while it’s more expensive than the Threadripper 1920X, it offers much higher clock speeds, as well as AMD’s enhanced boosting algorithms. However, the Threadripper 1920X didn’t offer particularly great value for money, with the Threadripper 1950X offering better bang for your buck. Can AMD’s new 12-core CPU step out from its bigger sibling’s shadow? The 2920X offers an extra 300MHz of boost frequency, reaching 4.3GHz Compared with its predecessor, the Threadripper 2920X offers an extra 300MHz of boost frequency, reaching 4.3GHz, which should…

SUPPLIER www.overclockers.co.uk Every now and then a motherboard manufacturer goes all-out and leaves the rational worlds of value and price points far behind to create an ultimate flagship. We’ve already seen MSI’s MEG X399 Creation, with its air-cooled M.2 PCI-E card and mega power circuitry, and less recently, ASRock’s X99 Extreme 11, with its twin PLX PCI-E switches and 18 SATA 6Gbps ports. This month, though, it’s Gigabyte’s turn and unlike the wallet-destroying hulks of ports and PCI-E lanes we just mentioned, the Z390 Aorus Extreme isn’t a high-end desktop (HEDT) board. Instead, it’s based on Intel’s lowly mainstream Z390 chipset. The 8-core, 16-thread Core i9-9900K is the most potent CPU it can accommodate, yet this board costs over £600 inc VAT, making it one of the most expensive…

PROCESSORS TESTS: We use Custom PC RealBench, Cinebench and Far Cry 5, 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 than being CPU…

Super Mario Chess Set / £49.99 inc VAT Some ideas are a much better fit for a chess set than others and, when it comes to the Super Mario Chess Set, it can be said that one side definitely fits better than the other one. The side that it fits best is that of team Bowser. You’ve got Bowser himself as the red king, and he’s an absolute beast, easily the highlight of the set. His queen is Bowser Junior, which seems odd, until you notice that the king and queen of the opposing team are Mario and Luigi and then it looks relatively normal. Meanwhile, Peach and Daisy are the bishops, opposed by Magikoopa. The pawns are coins versus green shells, while the rooks are Toad and Goomba and…

DEVELOPER Treyarch / PUBLISHER Activision / WEBSITE www.callofduty.com/blackops4 There was once a time when Call of Duty sneezed and the whole industry caught a cold. The original game spawned a legion of Nazi-blasting imitators, while Modern Warfare shifted the entire FPS paradigm into contemporary conflict for half a decade. That same game also revolutionised multiplayer shooting, with its perks and upgrades system still forming the basis of many online FPS games today. That was a long time ago. Now, Call of Duty is like a chameleon, hopping between different styles and shamelessly copying trends as it attempts to remain relevant while maintaining its brutal annual release schedule. In 2016, Call of Duty went to space, before returning to its WW II roots in 2017’s (decent) offering. This year, it’s become…

‘You don’t get many views like that. And, of course, people bring us out tea and cakes and everything else.’ Brin Richards isn’t wrong about the view. Gesturing towards the horizon, he points out landmarks that include most of Newport, the impressive hulk of the Severn Estuary and, stretching for a mile across the water, the Severn Bridge. The view might be impressive, but Richards has his eyes fixed on the 700mm trench that contractor Chris Walford is digging to bring fibre broadband to this otherwise idyllic corner of the world. It has to stay level, he says. ‘Otherwise, when you come to blow you have difficulty, because of course you’re suspending fibre in air.’ His point: if the trench undulates, the strand of fibre blown through the channel will…

REVIEW Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ The Raspberry Pi Model A moniker is back, but before we get into the nitty-gritty, let’s look at the context of this launch. The original Raspberry Pi Model A, launched nearly a year after the full-fat Model B, existed solely to bring down the price. The board design was literally the Model B with fewer parts on it: a gap where the Ethernet port would otherwise sit, the two USB ports were replaced by a single port and the memory was halved, although plans to release it with just 128MB were, thankfully, shelved in favour of a more usable 256MB. When the Raspberry Pi Foundation ‘plussed’ the range, upping the specifications, redesigning the board and switching to the now standard 40-pin general-purpose input/ output…

Alphacool Eissturm Hurricane Copper 45 3x120mm If you’ve ever fancied building a full custom water-cooling loop, but can’t afford all the necessary gear, our pals at water-cooling etailer Aquatuning (www.aquatuning.co.uk) are offering an amazing prize for one lucky Custom PC reader – a full Alphacool water-cooling kit, complete with 360mm radiator, flashy tube reservoir, CPU waterblock and all the kit you need to create a working loop. The full kit list includes the following: Alphacool NexXxoS XT45 Full Copper 360mm radiator Alphacool Eisblock XPX CPU waterblock Alphacool Eisbecher tube reservoir Alphacool VPP755 pump 3 x Alphacool Eiswind Pure Edition fans All the tubing and fittings you need to get started The Alphacool Eissturm sets include all the gear you need to step into the world of water cooling. With this…

Corsair K70 LUX RGB keyboard with your choice of switches TOTAL VALUE £160 inc VAT / MANUFACTURER www.corsair.com The K70 LUX RGB is a part of Corsair’s LUX flagship line of gaming keyboards, featuring Cherry MX key switches backed by a lightweight, durable aluminium frame and dynamic, multicoloured lighting. The USB pass-through port is positioned for uninterrupted gameplay, and ready for your mouse or wireless headset adaptor. You can also harness the power of CUE for sophisticated macro programming and dramatic lighting effects and animations. Meanwhile, 100 per cent anti-ghosting with full key rollover on USB helps to ensure accuracy, so every keystroke translates directly into accurate gameplay. The contoured, textured FPS and MOBA keycap sets keep you in control, while the Cherry MX key switches give you a linear…