Table of contents for May 2017 in Custom PC UK

We were sometimes presented with a black screen, rather than the Windows desktop AMD has finally unlocked the big door with ‘Ryzen’ sprayed on it (see p14), allowing the first few Zen chips to start feeling their way around in the wild,and while we’ve yet to give them a proper test, the early signs look good. Our columnist James Gorbold has run our benchmarks on a chip (see p114), and the performance in Handbrake and Cinebench looks fantastic for the money, undercutting and outperforming the 8-core Intel equivalent. However, there’s one niggle worrying me about Ryzen, and that’s reliability. You only need to peruse a few tech forums to discover that AMD has a poor reputation for compatibility, although it’s largely undeserved. There was a time, well over ten years…

AMD unleashes Ryzen After several years of tediously predictable quad-core launches from Intel, AMD reckons it’s now set to offer some serious competition, courtesy of its new Ryzen CPUs. The company has just unveiled three new Ryzen 7 chips, which will be on sale by the time you read this. At the top of the pile is the Ryzen 7 1800X, which AMD describes as ‘the new 8-core performance champ for half the price’, when compared with Intel’s Core i7-6900K. The company has shown the 1800X outperforming the Intel chip in heavily multi-threaded benchmarks, including Cinebench and Handbrake. Our columnist James Gorbold at Scan has confirmed the findings by running some benchmarks just before we went to press (see p114), although he also states that some workstation software is also…

Asus as sensibly dropped the U.2 port of the board’s predecessor SUPPLIER www.ebuyer.com /SPECIFICATIONS Chipset Intel Z270 CPU socket Intel LGA1151 Memory support 4 slots: max 64GB DDR3 (up to 4000MHz) Expansion slots Three 16x PCI-E 3, three 1x PCI-E 3 Sound Asus ROG SupremeFX S1220 Networking Intel Gigabit Ethernet, 802.11ac Wi-Fi Overclocking Base clock 40-650MHz, CPU multiplier 8-83x; max voltages, CPU 2.155V, RAM 2.4V Ports 6 x SATA 6Gbps (Z270), 2 x M.2, 4 x USB 3, 1 x USB 3.1 Type-A, 1 x USB 3.1 Type-C, 4 x USB 2, Gigabit Ethernet, 6 x surround audio out, line in, mic, DisplayPort, HDMI Dimensions (mm) 305 x 244 Asus’ Formula series stretches back to the X38 chipset and LGA775 socket, and has retained its essence over this time.…

19 RGB LEDs are embedded along a light strip on the top edge SUPPLIER www.scan.co.uk /SPECIFICATIONS Connection Wired, USB Cable 2m, braided Material Plastic, aluminium Switch type Cherry MX RGB Brown, Cherry MX RGB Speed Backlighting RGB Extras USB pass-through, wrist rest, additional textured keys, volume wheel, macro keys, key puller Corsair’s current grip on the gaming keyboard market is enviable, and while much of the firm’s success can be put down to its exclusive deals with Cherry, it definitely makes some fantastic keyboards in its own right. A fine example is the flagship K95, which has just been revamped in a new premium guise as the Gaming K95 RGB Platinum, with a matching premium price tag of £179 inc VAT. The most obvious change is the reduction in…

There’s a bit of the Frankenstein’s Monster about the Plain Lazy mug – a sense that the creators have opted for a grand scale to make construction easier. As such, the mug boasts a cavernous 450ml capacity, with a motor powered by two AAA batteries, a spinning stirrer and a control button in the handle. The size of the mug provides two practical benefits. Firstly, that 450ml is a lot of coffee or tea. Secondly, if the stirrer spins itself off (as it did for me after a few uses), it can be shoved back into place. In practice, the Plain Lazy is gimmicky and not as well made as it should be, but creating tea and coffee vortexes is both fun and surprisingly effective for mixing a beverage. It’s…

As a general rule of thumb, products that try to do one job, while looking like another product tend to be a bad idea, so you’d think that a screwdriver set trying to look like a bear, vaulting the vast gulf between large mammals and small tools, would be doomed. However, the Papa Bear Screwdriver Set manages to both look like a bear, albeit a plastic one around the ideal size for a screwdriver, and works well. What makes the Papa Bear surprisingly good is that it’s robust, hefty and feels more like a screwdriver first and a bear second. There are six different-sized bits that lock into the handle magnetically, and the magnetism also means screws stick to the head. Ideal for basic computer tinkering, but still small and…

PROCESSORS We judge CPUs on whether they offer sufficient speed for the price. Part of a CPU’s speed score comes from how overclockable it is. Every type of CPU is tested in the same PC, so all results are directly comparable. TESTS: We use Custom PC RealBench 2015, Cinebench and a variety of games. We also test the power draw of the test PC with the CPU installed. These tests reveal a broad range of performance characteristics, from image editing to gaming and video encoding to 3D rendering. We run all tests at stock speed and again when overclocked to its highest 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…

The tiny satellites produce a crisp, articulate high end that sparkles with detail SUPPLIER www.audioaffair.co.uk The Acoustic Energy Aego M has been one of our top speaker sets for years, but they’ve now been discontinued and replaced by the Aego³. The formula remains the same though. A premium option, the set comprises a pair of petite aluminium satellite speakers with a huge subwoofer. There are few extras – you’re paying for sound quality and good looks rather than frills here. We weren’t exaggerating about those sizes either. The satellites measure just 105 x 75 x 85mm, so they’re dwarfed by those of the Creative Kratos S3 and Logitech Z533. Meanwhile, the sub has dimensions of 350 x 195 x 307mm, again making it significantly bigger than the Creative and…

The slope helps direct the sound towards your ears rather than your elbows SUPPLIER www.overclockers.co.uk Edifier makes a whole range of premium stereo PC speakers, with the R2000DB sitting roughly in the middle when it comes to price. These speakers offer great design and build quality, along with beefy but detailed sound and Bluetooth support. You’d hope for a big sound as well, considering the prize and size of these speakers. Measuring 174 x 289 x 252mm, and with sides resplendent in piano black, they’re every bit the full-fledged desktop hi-fi speaker. They look fantastic, with their slight backwards-sloping angle making them look more interesting than straight-edged alternatives. Plus, of course, the slope helps to direct the sound towards your ears rather than your elbows. Build quality is also…

The forces that shape our civilisation naturally influence the art that creative people produce By and large, video games are designed as entertainment spaces in which we can escape work or other responsibilities, giving us a way to alleviate stress, tiredness or boredom. However, games are also an art form; each game is a created work that was designed by individuals expressing their ideas and beliefs either about our world, or the game world they’ve created. In recent years, the collected social and moral viewpoints of individuals have come to be known online as a person’s ‘politics’ (which aren’t necessarily related to the politics of government, although they can be), and it seems natural that these personal politics form a part of the games we play. After all, the forces…

Leaving Lyndow is a pretty, pleasant and very short fantasy game about growing up and leaving home. You play Clara, an inhabitant of the island of Lyndow who has been accepted to join an expedition with the island’s Guild of Maritime explorers – a three-year journey from which she may not return. The game comprises five playable vignettes, which document Clara’s preparations for her journey. Each chapter is framed around a particular task, such as packing bags at home, taking one last walk in Lyndow’s woods and visiting the local teahouse to say goodbye to friends and acquaintances. Interactively, Leaving Lyndow is very simple. You walk around Lyndow’s lush woodland and attractively rendered environments, picking up the occasional object and chatting with a few of the island’s residents. There’s also…

It doesn’t matter whether you favour the HTC Vive, the Oculus Rift or the Google Daydream (aww, how cute!) –virtual reality currently has a problem. Worse, it’s the sort of insidious little issue that could stifle the platform and slow or prohibit the success of VR as a whole. It’s not cost. It’s not ergonomics. It’s not the hassle of having to put sensors in your house, or even the fact that VR is an early investors’ market right now. It’s much simpler than that. It’s the simple act of moving around. It’s walking. Walk on the unintentionally wild side As a seasoned gamer, I’ve only experienced motion sickness during the handful of occasions that I’ve tried to play games while I’m hungover. So, when I bought my first VR…

After a pair of GTX 1070 cards smashed the Titan X’s 4K gaming results last month (see Issue 163, p93), we started to wonder if there was scope further down the scale. If two GTX 1070 cards were more than powerful enough for 4K gaming then, in theory, you should be able to build an even cheaper dual-GPU machine with lower-spec cards and gain entry to the 4K gaming world at the bottom too. Sadly, Nvidia has other ideas, and its GeForce GTX 1060 cards don’t support SLI, but AMD’s Radeon RX480 cards are CrossFire-capable. Could the latter do it? To help us find out, XFX sent us two of its RX 480 RS 8GB cards to plug into our graphics test rig. This XFX card currently costs £255 inc…

If you glanced at the HiFive1 review and thought you were seeing an Arduino clone, then you’d be forgiven for skimming here and assuming this board is yet another Raspberry Pi clone. This time, you’d be right – the Tinker Board is designed to exactly mimic the Pi in every way, but distinguishes itself from similar Far Eastern lookalikes by dint of the name attached to its creation: Asus. The Tinker Board is Asus’ attempt to capture a slice of the maker market. To do so, the company has adopted the ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ mantra. The Tinker Board features four USB 2 ports, an Ethernet port, on-board Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. There’s also an HDMI port for audio and video output, a 3.5mm analogue audio jack, CSI…

With Ryzen inbound, AMD is on the upswing Late last year, a rumour emerged that Intel had switched its graphics licensing agreement from Nvidia to AMD. It’s an essential requirement for Intel to license GPU patents from one of the two leading PC graphics companies, as it was late to realise the importance of GPUs, so it didn’t secure enough patents. What’s significant,though,is that this rumour suggests Intel would go to the trouble of switching to AMD from Nvidia. With Ryzen inbound, AMD is on the upswing to retake some CPU market share this year but,competitively speaking,this‘old’ market is declining in terms of volume,and hasn’t been Intel’s main focus for years.However,Nvidia does pose a threat to Intel’s future.Nvidia is widely regarded as hot property in fashionable growth areas, such as…

The 4K 60Hz IPS panel nails every single criteria you can imagine SUPPLIER www.razerzone.com /SPECIFICATIONS CPU 2.6GHz Intel Core i7-6700HQ Memory 32GB 2133MHz DDR4 Graphics Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 8GB Screen 17.3in 3,840 x 2,160 Nvidia G-Sync IPS Storage 512GB Samsung 960 Evo Weight 3.05kg Networking Killer Gigabit Ethernet, Killer 802.11ac 1535 Wi-Fi Ports 3 x USB 3, 1 x Thunderbolt, 1 x headphone, SD card slot, HDMI 2, Gigabit Ethernet Dimensions (mm) 427 x 277 x 22.4 (WxDxH) Operating system Windows 10 Pro 64-bit Warranty One year Razer’s previous Blade Pro got a lot right, including its fantastic design, but it was let down by unconvincing performance, middling quality screen options and an odd touch-screen trackpad. For its latest iteration, though, Razer has fixed all these issues and…

The Tecknet Hard Drive Docking Station has a certain no-nonsense charm about it. You plug it into your PC via USB, power it via the mains and then plug a 2.5in or 3.5in SATA disk into the top of it in a way that feels vaguely reminiscent of loading a cartridge into an old games console, albeit with more care. If you have several old hard drives knocking about on the shelf then this is a great way to pull the data off them without faffing around inside your PC, and it also makes for an easy backup system. The only potential worry compared with a more traditional hard drive case is that, if you’re a proper klutz predisposed to tripping over wires and knocking stuff over, then you might…

There’s a clear step up in detail and clarity over cheaper sets of 2.1 speakers SUPPLIER www.currys.co.uk The Logitech Z533 makes for a good stereo vs 2.1 comparison when lined up against the Creative T20 (see p50). Priced at roughly the same level, the Z533 also represents a step or two up from entry-level speaker systems, offering good design, build quality, features and performance, but with a slightly different audio style. It’s a great-looking speaker set. Available in white or black, the satellites are finished in glossy plastic and each has a single, exposed 2.6in gold-coloured driver. It would be good to have the option of a cloth cover for the fronts, but at least this way you don’t end up with unsightly mounting points when the cover is…

The Sniper Elite series has grown considerably in stature since its resurrection in 2012. Sniper Elite V2 was little more than an anatomically precise shooting gallery, offering not much more than grisly X-ray shots of exploding Nazi organs. Sniper Elite 3, meanwhile, evolved into more of a long-distance stealth game, featuring large, open-ended maps that offered players a greater choice of approach. With Sniper Elite 4, Rebellion has graduated to developing full-on sniping sandboxes. Its missions are huge, and lots of thought has gone into letting the player pick their own path through them. Sniper Elite 4 is set during the Allied invasion of Italy in 1943, and sees the stony-faced American deadeye Karl Fairburne on the trail of a new Nazi ‘wonderweapon’. Fairburne is tasked with tracking down this…

Teleport What is it? Teleport-based movement, similar to movement in Dishonored. You aim where you want to go with the controllers or your headset and move there in an instant. Is it good? It’s simple and reliable, but it slows the pace with extra button presses. Some people think it breaks immersion too. Trackpad What is it? The way you move in most non-VR games. Some use gamepads, such as Elite: Dangerous, while others use the inputs of a VR controller. Is it good? You can get used to it, but there’s often confusion about how head-tracking correlates to movement. For example, if you turn my head while pressing forwards, should you turn a corner? Ninja What is it? Essentially positional-based movement – you bend forwards and put your arms…

If you’re unfamiliar with White Wolf, then let us introduce it through one word – Bloodlines. The 2004 Vampire RPG, still regarded as one of the most ambitious role-playing games of all time, was based on the Vampire: The Masquerade setting created by the pen-and-paper RPG publisher. In many ways, Bloodlines and White Wolf’s stories closely mirror each other. Bloodlines was an almost superb game forced out the door early by its publisher Activision. The game let you play as seven different types of vampire, took place in a large, semi-open world with dozens of ways to explore it, and sported an incredible dialogue system that made Deus Ex look primordial. But it was left buggy and unfinished by its developer Troika, after it was forced to wrap up the…

Dealing with the British weather I do a fair bit of spraying when it comes to PC modding, and I’m regularly asked about how to achieve a good paint finish. I’ve been spraying using aerosol cans for over 20 years, and while my technique has obviously improved, as has the quality of the paints (I can highly recommend Montana Gold), and I’ve also started to use air brushes, there’s one massive issue we have to consider here in the UK, which is the weather. It’s little wonder we see many modders in warmer climes achieving great paint finishes at home. They often have more space, for starters, but it’s also down to the weather. For most of the year, we’re lucky to see temperatures much over 18°C and it can…

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, multi-colour 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…

Developers who put code at the centre of the user experience will dominate this market Adobe Creative Cloud has been controversial since its 2013 launch. The move from boxed software licences to a subscription model annoyed an awful lot of people, although I wasn’t one of them. I welcomed the move as progress – rather than spending thousands of pounds every time Adobe’s Creative Suite was upgraded, I could spend less than £50 a month and have access to constant upgrades. However, the reason Adobe CC suited me so well is because I use almost every single piece of software – Photoshop, After Effects, InDesign, Audition and so on, because my work and collaborations span a huge number of disciplines. My usage isn’t particularly typical, though, so I have sympathy…

The PMW3367 optical sensor goes all the way up to 16,000dpi SUPPLIER www.scan.co.uk /SPECIFICATIONS Sensor 16,000dpi optical Connection Wired, USB Cable 1.8m, braided Materials Plastic Extras RGB lighting, software The first iteration of the Scimitar RGB graced these pages 14 issues ago and wowed us with its surprisingly flexible and attractive design, bridging the gap between an extreme multi-button mouse designed for MMO and MOBA-style games, and a mouse you could also use every day. Now the Scimitar is back in the form of the Scimitar Pro RGB, and at first glance not a lot seems to have changed. It was already a winning formula, with its wide chassis being comfortable for people with small or large hands, although its short length meant large-handed palm-grip users would have fingers…

The Adata SV620H is a USB 3 external SSD, so it’s much faster than an external hard drive, or even an internal hard drive, and also more robust thanks to the lack of moving parts. The drive itself is lightweight and small, making it easily portable and ideal if you need to move large amounts of data from one place to the other without waiting at your destination for hours for the files to transfer. The SV620H casing is fairly plain, which is fine, as it’s an SSD not a parade float, although it does have a disk activity light. That’s handy, as the drive is nearly silent so you otherwise can’t tell if anything has gone wrong with it. The compromise, of course, is the price – you’re paying…

How we test We test each motherboard with a Core i7-7700K CPU, 16GB of Corsair Vengeance LED 3200MHz DDR4 RAM and an XFX Radeon R9 390X graphics card. We use a 512GB 960 Evo M.2 SSD and a Samsung 850 Pro SSD, along with CrystalDiskMark’s 32-queue-depth storage test to record sequential speeds. To measure on-board audio performance, we run RightMark’s Audio Analyzer software using 24-bit/192KHz settings, with the line-out connected to the line-in jack to obtain noise and dynamic range levels. We load optimised default settings and set the XMP profile in the EFI for stock-speed tests, but touch no other settings, which sets the correct memory speed and timings, and ensures the board is set up for the best stock-speed performance. When overclocking, we find the maximum stable CPU…

How we test Although surround sound in games and movies still offers a great experience, the gear can be cumbersome and expensive, particularly in a small room where a simple stereo set of speakers will do the job fine. However, that still leaves the choice of whether to get a standard stereo pair, or a 2.1 set with a subwoofer. Stereo sets tend to give a slightly more even sound than 2.1 sets, with less of an over-egged bass thump and less of a gap in the mid-range frequencies, making them ideal for a wide variety of music genres. However, a 2.1 set will give you a satisfying rumble that’s ideal for bass-driven electronic music, while bringing a little more weight to explosions and other moments of impact in films…

The satellites deliver a good stereo image and the sub fills in the lows nicely SUPPLIER http://uk.creative.com The Kratos S3 is Creative’s very latest set of 2.1 speakers specifically targeted at gamers. What makes them gaming speakers? Apart from being able to get quite loud and having red Xs on them, not much. However, on paper, it’s still a capable set with plenty of power, and a step up in quality from entry-level 2.1 speaker systems. At a glance, this set has an almost identical spec to the Logitech Z533 (see p54), with each of the satellites sporting a 2.75in driver, and the subwoofer being a ported unit with a 5.25in driver, making for a claimed 46W RMS of overall power. Comparatively, the Logitech system claims to have 60W…

Build a quiet performance PC The parts you’ll need to build a very quiet PC that doesn’t compromise on performance. Not only does this PC feature an Intel Kaby Lake CPU and an Nvidia Pascal GPU, but it also uses a massive CPU heatsink and a fanless PSU to eliminate fan noise, while the graphics card fans only spin up under heavy loads. You can see our full guide to building this PC in Issue 160, p84. Build a budget gaming PC The parts you’ll need to build a budget machine capable of playing the latest games at decent settings on a 1080p monitor. The machine has a discrete graphics card, a Kaby Lake dual-core CPU and DDR4 memory. The Core i3-7350K also has an unlocked multiplier, so it can…

Most game developers license third-party engines such as Unity or Unreal, tweaking them to suit their projects’ needs. Alternatively, a developer will design an engine specifically for its game or series, as with Total War or Ubisoft’s new Snowdrop technology. Occasionally, you see the latter grow into the former – CryENGINE gradually evolved from a project-focused technology to a licensed development toolset. Rarely do you see the former become the latter, but that’s what happened with BigWorld, an all-purpose MMO engine that became the exclusive tech behind one of the biggest multiplayer games – World of Tanks. Originally created by an Australian tech company, BigWorld was first licensed by Wargaming.net  in the late 2000s. Wargaming chose BigWorld because its complete set of online features allowed it to build…

OVERCLOCKING Our Core i7-7700K can be easily overclocked to 5GHz, although we suggest staying below a 1.3V vcore for everyday overclocks unless you have custom liquid cooling. Start by heading to the EFI system (press Del or F2 when you first turn on your machine) and enabling the XMP profile, then set the core ratio limit (multiplier) to 48 19 . This setting will give you a CPU clock speed of 4.8GHz. Next, scroll down to the voltage section and set the CPU core voltage to manual mode and enter 1.28V 20 . This voltage should be enough for a Core i7-7700K to get to 4.8GHz – some may not go higher. If you run into stability issues, increase the vcore to 1.3V and try again. You’ll now need to…

REVIEW SiFive HiFive1 If you’re about to skip over these pages, thinking ‘oh, look, it’s another Arduino clone’, I’d advise taking a second look: the HiFive1 is no mere Arduino. The HiFive1’s key feature is its microcontroller. Where other Arduino-like boards on the market use off-the-shelf parts, such as Atmel ATmega328 or SAMD chips, SiFive’s Freedom E310 is a microcontroller based on the open RISC-V (pronounced ‘risk five’) instruction set architecture. A reduced instruction set computing (RISC) architecture, RISC-V began life as a research project in the Computer Science Division of the University of California at Berkeley but has since broken free from the lab. Its proponents point out various benefits to RISC-V over competing ISAs such as ARM, MIPS or x86 – in particular, its scalability – but what…

Gimp We use Gimp to open and edit large images. Unlike our previous Gimp test, this one uses more than one CPU core, although it’s still more sensitive to clock speed increases than more CPU cores. Handbrake H.264 video encoding Our heavily multi-threaded Handbrake H.264 video encoding test takes full advantage of many CPU cores, pushing them to 100 per cent load. LuxMark OpenCL This GPU compute test is the only synthetic part of our suite, although the renderer is based on the real LuxRender physically based rendering software. As 3D rendering is a specific workload that not everyone will use, and because OpenCL support isn’t standard in most software, this section is given just a quarter of the weighting of the other tests in the final score. Heavy multi-tasking…

In Cinebench, the Ryzen 7 1700X is 32 per cent faster than the Core i7-6800K Some of the very first articles I wrote for Custom PC were about AMD’s amazing K8 architecture, which formed the basis of its extremely successful Athlon 64 and Opteron CPUs. However, the early life of the K8 architecture was the high watermark for AMD, with it steadily losing market share to Intel after the launch of Core 2 Duo in 2006. AMD tried to make a comeback in 2007 with the K10 architecture, and again in 2011 with the Bulldozer architecture, but those attempts were unsuccessful. This time, AMD is back again with a new architecture – Zen. Designed from the ground up, Zen has just made its first appearance in three new CPUs: the…