Table of contents for January 2016 in Custom PC UK

I’d decided which mountain bike I wanted – it was entry-level, but it had a lovely blue and black colour scheme. I talked to the manager of the shop who then kindly offered me 15 per cent off the price of any of the bikes. ‘You could effectively get the next model up for the same price as the entry-level one,’ she said, thinking that would be a great deal. But I was then left in a quandary, because the next model up was red and black, and to me, it didn’t look as attractive. I felt ashamed for caring so much about something so shallow. It was a mountain bike – it was only going to get scratched and covered in mud. Why did the colours matter? But they…

SUPPLIER www.scan.co.uk /SPECIFICATIONS Chipset Intel Z170 CPU socket Intel LGA1151 Memory support 2 slots: max 32GB DDR3 (up to 4133MHz) Expansion slots One 16x PCI-E 3 Sound Asus SupremeFX Impact III Networking Intel Gigabit Ethernet, dual-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi Overclocking Base clock 40–650MHz, CPU multiplier 8-83x; max voltages, CPU 1.7V, RAM 2V Ports 4 x SATA 6Gbps (Z170), 1 x SATA Express, 1 x U.2, 4 x USB 3, 1 x USB 3.1 Type-A, 1 x USB 3.1 Type-C, 1 x LAN, 2 x Wi-Fi antenna outputs, 3 x surround audio out, line in, mic, 1 x HDMI Dimensions (mm) 170 x 170 Asus revolutionised the high-end small form factor PC when it launched its first Maximus Impact board. It sported a VRM daughterboard, loads of tweaking and overclocking tools, a…

We’ve previously praised Booq’s blend of premium materials and idiosyncratic design, but only the former is present with the Cobra Brief – visually, it’s as plain as a concrete wall. That doesn’t prevent it from being spacious, of course – a laptop (up to 15.6in), tablet, book, smartphone and all the associated cabling can all be slotted easily into its padded interior, which is sensibly laid out and easily accessible thanks to its large, three-side opening. It’s comfortable to wear and the built-in Terralinq lost-luggage retrieval system is as useful as ever. However, with a price of £220, we expect some design thrills too. SUPPLIER www.amazon.co.uk…

SUPPLIER www.novatech.co.uk The AMD R7 370 has the honour of being the most affordable card on test, saving you £10 over its close rival, Nvidia’s GTX 950. As with a few of AMD’s GPUs from its current generation, it’s a refresh and rebrand of a previous model, the R7 270, a card that borrowed the same GPU from the HD 7850 before it. As such, the R7 370 is based on the aging Graphics Core Next 1.0 core, unlike AMD’s more powerful GPUs, which go up to Graphics Core Next version 1.2. As you’d expect at this relatively low price, the R7 370 offers a modest hardware specification, with 2GB of GDDR5 memory, just 1,024 stream processors, 64 texture mapping units (TMUs) and 32 ROPs, a configuration that’s dwarfed…

SUPPLIER www.ebuyer.com Despite only costing £38 more than AMD’s Radeon R7 370, the Radeon R9 380 has a considerably more powerful specification. It’s based on the GCN 1.2 Antigua Pro core (a new name for AMD’s Tonga design), with 5 billion transistors, a sharp increase over the R7 370’s 2.8 billion, and it has a larger 359mm2 die as well. Similarly, its stream processor count of 1,792 with 112 TMUs is a big increase over the specs of the R7 370, although some aspects remain – it still has a 256-bit wide memory interface, and there’s only 2GB of GDDR5 memory, although that’s still enough for the resolutions and settings that most gamers use. The specs might sound familiar too because, like many current AMD GPUs, the R9 380…

SUPPLIER www.overclockers.co.uk Although AMD has squeezed three GPU generations out of its Graphics Core Next architecture, it isn’t strictly accurate to say the cards are simply rebadges. Despite the basic technology being the same as the R9 290X before it, thanks to a few tricks and tweaks from AMD, the Grenada XT core (the new name for Hawaii XT) in the Radeon R9 390X can be clocked at higher frequencies than its predecessor, and it’s capable of churning out great frame rates. The core specifications are indeed unchanged from the 290X, though, with 2,816 stream processors, 176 TMUs and 64 ROPs making up the same rendering engine. However, AMD has made a small change to the core clock speed, which has increased by 50MHz to 1050MHz. It’s the memory…

SUPPLIER www.overclockers.co.uk /SPECIFICATIONS CPU 3.3GHz Intel Core i7-5820K overclocked to 4GHz Motherboard Gigabyte GA-X99M Gaming 5 Memory 16GB Team Group Elite Plus 2400MHz DDR4 Graphics KFA² GeForce GTX 970 4GB Storage 250GB Samsung 850 Evo SSD, 2TB Seagate Barracuda hard disk Case Corsair Carbide Air 240 Cooling CPU: OCUK Tech Labs Liquid Cooler with 4 x 120mm fans; GPU: 2 x 90mm fans; top: 2 x 120mm fans PSU SuperFlower HX 650W Ports Front: 2 x USB 3, 2 x audio; rear: 4 x USB 3, 6 x USB 2, 2 x PS/2, 1 x Gigabit Ethernet, 1 x optical S/PDIF, 5 x audio Operating system Windows 10 64-bit Warranty Three years collect and return with parts and labour covered, plus one year return to base labour only Overclockers’…

Build a mini APU PC The parts you’ll need to build an affordable, general-purpose mini PC that’s ideal for putting in the lounge, based on an AMD APU. This machine will handle general computing and media tasks with no trouble, as well as basic gaming, although you’ll have to lower the detail settings. Build a budget gaming PC The parts you’ll need to build a budget machine capable of playing the latest games at maximum settings on a 1080p monitor, and even some games at 2,560 x 1,440. The machine has a discrete graphics card, a highly overclockable dual-core CPU and high-speed memory. Meanwhile, the Z97 motherboard gives you headroom to upgrade to a faster CPU later. Build a mid-range PC Work PC The parts you’ll need to build a…

When we last braved the dark and spooky code of Frictional Games’ HPL Engine in 2012, the Swedish developer was in the middle of upgrading its homebrew tech, in anticipation of its next project, SOMA (see p 82). Fast forward another 2.5 years, and SOMA has finally been released, supported by HPL version 3 in all its gloomy glory. But what terrifying surprises await beneath the surface of Frictional’s latest tech, and why has it taken five years for the game to finally emerge? ‘Basically, it’s been very hard to figure out how to approach the game, and there has also been a bit of a tech build-up,’ says Thomas Grip, co-founder of Frictional games and lead developer on SOMA. ‘We’ve added terrain and HDR lighting, which I think…

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 video encoding 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 Our new…

For months now, the industry has been gearing up for the launch of Intel’s Skylake platform. Without exception, all the reviews in the press were positive, and the new chipset Z170 was well received too, as it added four extra dedicated PCI-E 3 lanes for high-speed SSDs. Commercially, however, Skylake hasn’t been smooth sailing. As with any launch of a new component, availability at launch is always expected to be tight, with the most influential resellers and PC manufacturers getting the lion’s share of allocation. However, for Skylake, supply wasn’t just tight, but incredibly , many resellers not getting any stock at all. I know this, because at Scan we could see many of our smaller competitors trying to buy Skylake kit from us. Since then, the situation has gone…

As the CPC Labs team squeeze every last frame per second out the current crop of GPUs (see p40), I’ve dug around to discover what Nvidia’s next-generation Pascal GPUs might offer next year. For starters, after three long years of 28nm GPUs, Pascal will be Nvidia’s first die-shrink to 16nm, courtesy of Taiwanese chip maker TSMC. There was briefly talk of using Samsung’s 14nm facilities, but reports of yield issues forced Nvidia back to long-time partner TSMC. Nvidia GP100 and GP104 test chips have already been seen on shipping manifests from TSMC to Nvidia, and people are speculating about a launch in the second quarter of 2016. Analysts expect to see around 4,000 stream processors in the biggest GP100 chip – up from the current 2,816 in GM100 (GTX 980…

SUPPLIER www.overclockers.co.uk /SPECIFICATIONS Compatibility Intel: LGA775, LGA1366, LGA115x, LGA2011(-v3) AMD: Socket AM3(+), AM2(+), FM2(+), FM1 Weight 650g Materials Copper, aluminium Size (mm) 105 x 140 x 125 (W x D x H) Fans 2 x 92mm Stated noise 8-24.3 dB(A) (per fan) The Alpenföhn Atlas targets micro-ATX and mini-ITX users, with its low 125mm height giving it compatibility with many small form factor cases. It also claims to have no RAM or compatibility issues. It has a dual tower design, with the aluminium fins fed by five copper heatpipes that pass through the copper baseplate. The entire cooler is nickel-plated for a consistent look and the build quality is high. For your £43, you also get two seven-blade 92mm PWM fans with 80mm mounting holes. Each fan has a…

SUPPLIER www.scan.co.uk / MODEL NUMBER 3831109863343 /SPECIFICATIONS Compatibility Intel: LGA2011, LGA2011-v3, LGA115x, LGA1366, LGA775 Radiator size with fans (mm) 133 x 68 x 295 (W x D x H) Fans 2 x 120mm Noise Not stated The line between all-in-one liquid coolers and custom kits has suddenly become more blurred recently, thanks to the release of EKWB’s Predator coolers. The company is well known for producing some of the best water-cooling components for custom loops, but its new Predator coolers now cram some of this high-performance gear into maintenance-free, pre-filled units. The Predator 240 is large, thanks to a full-height double 120mm-fan radiator with a 6W Laing DDC pump and reservoir mounted on the end. The radiator section is nearly 300mm long and 68mm deep, so your case will…

Despite weighing just 29g, the Jawbone UP3 claims to be able to track your daily activity, sleep patterns and heart rate. When it works, the data is fascinating. It’s great seeing your heart rate plotted throughout the day, with the peaks (taking the stairs, rather than the lift) and troughs (that two-hour meeting) clearly visible. Consistency was an issue though. It wasn’t great at noticing when we we’d started exercising and it seemed too eager to interpret sitting on the sofa as being asleep. The band needs to be fitted tightly to get a good heart rate reading too. On the plus side, the Jawbone activity tracking app is one of the best we’ve seen. Data is clear, and the Smart Coach (which gives advice based on your data) is…

The graphics card is the epicentre of performance in a gaming PC, much more so than the CPU or memory. Get the right graphics card for your needs, and you’ll be able to play all of the latest games at the resolution of your choice. In the eight months since we last conducted a Labs test, AMD has replaced its Radeon 200-series with the 300-series, and introduced its Fury cards with high bandwidth memory (HBM). Meanwhile, Nvidia has filled out its Maxwell range at both the top and bottom of the pack, releasing both the GeForce GTX 950 and the GTX 980 Ti. The result is a complete reshuffling of the whole GPU pack, with new technology sitting among rebranded older technology. Both Nvidia and AMD have had to cope…

SUPPLIER www.scan.co.uk The GeForce GTX 950 bridges the gap between the GTX 750 Ti and the slightly more expensive GTX 960. The GTX 950 uses the same second-generation Maxwell design, codenamed GM206, which first appeared in the GTX 960. It fully supports DirectX 12.1, along with H.265 encoding via Nvidia’s upgraded video engine, plus HDMI 2 and G-Sync. The physical die area measures just 227mm² and it’s backed up by 2GB of GDDR5 memory. As with the GTX 960, this memory is addressed via a comparatively narrow 128-bit memory interface, and there are only two graphics processing clusters (GPCs), as opposed to the four found in the GTX 970. With the GTX 950, Nvidia has gone further in its drive for austerity, though, disabling two of the GTX 960s…

SUPPLIER www.overclockers.co.uk The AMD Radeon R9 390 is a cheaper and slightly less powerful version of the R9 390X in the same way that the GeForce GTX 970 is related to the GTX 980. As such, it sits at the same important price point, below £300 but well above the £150 of the mainstream GPUs below it, offering great frame rates, but without the significant premium attached to premium beasts such as the Fury X. Both the R9 390 and 390X use the same Hawaii GPU core, which is a 6.2 billion-transistor chip with a 438mm² die. In the case of the R9 390, it’s a Hawaii Pro, which is the same core found in the Radeon R9 290. It has 2,560 stream processors, 160 TMUs and 64 ROPs.…

SUPPLIER www.novatech.co.uk The Radeon R9 Fury X, based on AMD’s Fiji core, is currently the firm’s most powerful GPU on the market, with liquid cooling as standard and high-bandwidth memory (HBM) attached to a super-wide 4,096-bit memory interface. So how much of this interesting technology remains in the slimmed-down, non-X variant. What stays, what gets cut and how much difference does it make? The liquid cooling has gone in the vanilla Fury, coming with a traditional air cooler as standard, as with the Sapphire card we’ve reviewed. HBM is here to stay, though, and the Fury still has 4GB of it running at 500MHz (1GHz) effective like the Fury X. Don’t be fooled by those low numbers, though, as the wide memory interface negates the need for high clock…

SUPPLIER www.novatech.co.uk The Fuji GPU used in AMD’s top-of-the-line Fury X takes the company’s aging Hawaii core, and soups it up with more of everything. A lot more. It’s a very large GPU, based on the Graphics Core Next 1.2 architecture, measuring 596mm² and containing a massive count of 8.9 billion transistors, a huge increase from the 6.2 billion in the 438mm² Hawaii core. It has eight Asynchronous Compute Engines (ACE) with four shader engines, each of which has a rasteriser, a geometry processor and 16 compute units, an increase from the 11 in Hawaii. With each compute unit subdividing into 16 stream processors, you get a grand total to 4,096 stream processors – that’s more than any other graphics card on test, and a massive increase from the…

The game industry is currently in rude health, with more titles being released than ever before. In 2013, 561 games were released on Steam alone, and that number skyrocketed to 1,814 last year. And that’s just Steam, never mind the dozens, perhaps hundreds of games exclusive to console platforms, alongside the thousands of mobile games that populate the Apple and Android online stores. This growth is viewed as a cause for concern in some corners of the industry, particularly with regard to Steam’s proliferation. Indie developers such as Jeff Vogel have claimed that the so-called ‘indie bubble’ is about to burst in a similar way to the 1983 video game market crash. Such worries aren’t entirely unjustified. Valve doesn’t regulate the quality of games launched on Steam, which means many…

THE SURPRISING WORLD OF PROCEDURAL GENERATION Dan Marshall’s game wasn’t working. In late 2013, two years into development, the head of indie studio Size Five Games officially put The Swindle on hold. This side-scrolling crime caper, in which you break into buildings ranging from rundown squats to high-security banks, simply wasn’t proving to be the thrilling burglary simulator Marshall had intended. ‘Originally, you’d keep going back to the same buildings, but the AI would add security to your previous route, so if you went through the sewers beforehand, the AI would block it off and add cameras or more guard patrols,’ Marshall says. ‘It was one of those ideas that looked great on paper, but just didn’t work in practice. You’d never retry that route; you’d always be looking for…

/MEET THY MAKER Name Peter Brands Age 35 Location The Netherlands Occupation Ship electrician Main uses for PC Surfing the Web, gaming, editing photos and video, rendering, and watching movies and TV series Likes Spending time with my family and friends, watching movies and TV series, listening to music Dislikes Nagging people CPC: What was the original inspiration behind L3pipe? Peter: Ever since I started using hardline water-cooling loops back in 2010, I had the feeling I could do much more with them – it felt like playing with Lego. Back then, I’d already started thinking about an extreme system with a lot of pipes and a very complicated loop. However, since I’ve been mainly  on making desk PCs recently, I never really had the time to play with that…

MILESTONES THIS MONTH WHAT IS FOLDING? Folding@home uses the spare processing cycles from your PC’s CPU and graphics cards for medical research. You can download the client from http://folding.stanford.edu and our team’s ID is 35947. Once you pass a significant milestone, you’ll get your name in the mag. You can also discuss folding with us and other readers on the www.bit-tech.net forums. TOP 20 OVERALL TOP 20 PRODUCERS…

Antistatic wrist slap After reading issue 147 of CPC, I just had to reply on the subject of antistatic wrist straps. They normally incorporate a high-value resistor in the circuit of around one mega-ohm. They can’t be checked for continuity with a torch or similar, but would require an ohm-meter. PAUL JONES In Issue 147, Bob Stimpson was concerned about the fact that some of the antistatic wrist straps he purchased weren’t connected between the crocodile clip and the earth/ground plate on the wrist strap, when tested for continuity. Having worked in electronics for over 40 years I can assure him that there’s almost certainly nothing wrong with his wrist straps – if he has a multimeter he should check them using the high ohms range. In fact, for electrical…

Your country needs you! The UK government and some private companies, including defence contractors, have identified a skills gap for ‘cyber security’ and have launched some online games to test your elite skills, and possibly give you a job being Simon Pegg in the Mission Impossible films. The project is called Cyber Security Challenge UK and its logo looks like it was made in WordArt in 2003, which is mildly discomfiting for a national security recruitment project, but let’s not judge the website too harshly. Oh, it has ‘page under development’ if you click on ‘Meet The Team’. Well, elsewhere there’s some information, including a ‘Women In Cyber’ page, which has testimonials from two – count ‘em, two – women who have used the scheme. One of them, Ese Oduyoye,…

SUPPLIER www.scan.co.uk /SPECIFICATIONS Interface M.2 4x PCI-E 3 (32Gb/sec) Nominal capacity 256GB, 512GB Formatted capacity 238.47GB, 476.94GB Controller Samsung UBX Cache Samsung 512MB LPDDR3 Memory Samsung 128Gb 32-layer V-NAND MLC Warranty Five years (maximum 110GB/day or 220GB/day host writes) Samsung has been at the forefront of SSD technology for some time now. The 840 Evo was the first SSD to feature triple-level cell (TLC) NAND, while the SSD 850 Pro introduced us to 3D NAND. The new SSD 950 Pro, while not introducing any new technologies of its own, does merge a whole host of emerging standards into one tiny but incredibly powerful stick of solid state storage. NVMe is a protocol that specifies a new means of communication between the system host and the SSD. Unlike AHCI, which…

SUPPLIER www.ebuyer.com Transcoding has been a spotlight feature on the last few Synology DiskStations, offering the ability to convert video to different resolutions and formats on the fly to ensure compatibility with various devices. However, the DS216play goes out guns blazing in the transcoding texts, with Synology claiming it can transcode 4K video on the fly – quite a feat when you consider that many NAS enclosures struggle to cope with 1080p. This headline feature comes courtesy of a dedicated transcoding engine, although the circumstances in which it can tap into this engine’s power are relatively limited. Not all third-party media servers support hardware-based transcoding – for example, Plex can’t support it, and Plex is unlikely to be supported on the DS216play either, thanks to the use of an…

The best compliment we can give the Sengled Pulse (a set of two Bluetooth-equipped LED speaker bulbs) is that they give a sense of the future. Once installed in a room, a connected phone or tablet can control the room’s lighting and audio – an idea that’s really cool. Extra bulbs can be added and different zones of control created via the slick app. However, the audio from the speakers is muddled, with little definition between different instruments, making music sound messy and flabby. The treble response is disappointing too, with high notes crackling if you push up the volume much past 50 per cent. Also, the size of the units means they won’t be accommodated by every lampshade – two of the four lampshades we tried wouldn’t fit with…

As anyone who is unlucky enough to have been in our office over the last few weeks will confirm, the NERF Modulus has seen a lot of ‘testing’ in the time we’ve had it. Designed to be highly customisable, the system is based around a semi-automatic blaster that fires darts using a battery-powered flywheel. This system is great, as there’s no need to cock the blaster between shots. The system is powerful too – flinging the darts a good 15m, although they did tend to arc randomly during flight. The flywheel is noisy too, so sneak attacks are nearly impossible. There are also 14 accessories that enable you mod the blaster, the first five of which are included in the starter pack 1 . The other nine are available as…

All our graphics tests are performed on a high-end Ivy Bridge system, which features an Asus Maximus V Extreme LGA1155 motherboard and an Intel Core i5-3570K running at 4.2GHz. Alongside these components is 8GB (2 x 4GB) of Corsair Dominator 2400MHz DDR3 RAM and a 480GB SanDisk Extreme Pro SSD. Meanwhile, power comes from a LEPA G1600 1,600W PSU. We’ve tested each card in five separate games. We record the most demanding parts of the built-in benchmarks for three games: Alien: Isolation, GTA V and Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor. Crysis 3 is tested using a custom, 60-second macro-recorded play-through from the single-player mission Red Star Rising and, finally, for The Witcher III: Wild Hunt, we record a 45-second manual play-through of Geralt entering and passing through a village on…

SUPPLIER www.awd-it.co.uk Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 970 uses the same GM204 core as its bigger sibling, the GTX 980. It’s a powerful 5.2 billion-transistor chip with four graphics processing clusters (GPCs), each of which is split into 16 streaming multiprocessors (SMs) giving you a total of 2,048 stream processors. However, in the case of the GTX 970, three of those SMs have been disabled. As a result, its tally of stream processors drops to 1,664, while it has 13 tessellation units rather than the GTX 980’s 16, and 104 texture units rather than the GTX 980’s 128. The base clock has been lowered very slightly as well, from 1126MHz (1216MHz boost) on the GTX 980 to 1050MHz (1178MHz boost) on the GTX 970. However, it’s the similarities that matter more…

SUPPLIER www.ebuyer.com Last year, the GeForce GTX 980 was the most powerful Maxwell card in Nvidia’s arsenal, well deserving of the Extreme Ultra award it received in the last Labs test. Fast forward to late 2015 and there are now several cards sitting above it. While it’s no longer Nvidia’s flagship card, though, the GTX 980 is still equipped with plenty of grunt to cope with high-resolution gaming. It uses the full-fat 398mm² GM204 core, and unlike the GTX 970, none of its parts is disabled. As such, you get eight GPCs, 16 SMs and a total of 2,048 stream processors, along with 64 ROPs, 128 TMUs and 16 tessellation units. It’s a beefy hardware specification, and one that ensures the GTX 980 remains a top performer. There’s 4GB…

SUPPLIER www.cclonline.com Until fairly recently, each generation of Nvidia’s top-end GPUs followed a fairly predictable pattern. The launch would start with a single high-end model, followed by a card that squeezed two high-end GPUs into a single power-hungry, wallet-busting package. However, the firm recently ditched the idea of making its flagship graphics card a miniature SLI setup, instead launching a superfast single-GPU card. The Titan X is the latest such card, following on from the GTX 980, but coming out a couple of months before the very similarly specified GTX 980 Ti. The Titan X is based on Nvidia’s GM200 core, with a 601mm2 die and 8 billion transistors. There are also six graphics processing clusters, each with four streaming multiprocessors, bringing the total to 24, making for a…

SUPPLIER www.aria.co.uk /SPECIFICATIONS CPU Intel Core i7-5960X overclocked to 4.5GHz Motherboard Asus Rampage V Extreme Memory 32GB 3000MHz Corsair Dominator Platinum DDR4 Graphics 3 x EVGA Hydro Copper Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan X Storage 400GB Intel SSD 750 Case DimasTech Easy V3 Cooling Thermaltake W1 CPU waterblock, EKWB/EVGA Hydro Copper water-cooled graphics cards, Thermaltake T33 reservoir, Thermaltake P1 pumps, Thermaltake Tubler 4T tubing, Thermaltake RL360 radiators, Thermaltake 1000 Blue coolant, Thermaltake blue Ring 120mm fans PSU Corsair AX 1200i Ports Front: none; rear: 10 x USB 3, 2 x USB 2, 1 x Gigabit Ethernet, 1 x optical S/PDIF, 6 x audio, PS/2 Operating system Windows 10 64-bit Warranty One year parts and labour (including two months collect and return), followed by three years labour only return to base…

DEVELOPER Wargaming St Petersburg / PUBLISHER Wargaming.net World of Warships is the third and final entry in Wargaming’s series of multiplayer vehicular shooters, after the brilliant World of Tanks and the mediocre World of Warplanes. In terms of quality, Warships falls between the two. It’s more enjoyable than Warplanes, but lacks some of the spark that made Tanks a stratospheric hit. Like its brothers, Warships’ setup is simple. When the game launches, you select a ship and click the big orange Battle button and you’re then dropped into a form of teamdeathmatch with 13 other players. There are several game modes that revolve around capturing aquatic territory in a series of island archipelagos, but most of the time, the experience is one of straightforward naval combat; the team that wins…

REVIEW Compulab Fitlet Do you remember when you first saw the Intel Next Unit of Computing, and thought, ‘Blimey, that’s small?’ When the Fitlet arrived from Israel-based Compulab, I had a similar reaction made more impressive by the fact that the box I thought would be dominated by the machine itself was in fact mostly full of cables, accessories and a wall-wart PSU. If you need a small yet powerful computer, the Fitlet measures 108 x 83 x 24mm (W x D x H), with a volume of 0.215 litres. The smallest NUC model, by contrast, measures 115 x 111 x 32.7mm with a 0.417-litre volume. Before you get too excited, though, there’s a disparity in performance to consider. The Intel NUC5i5RYK packs an Intel Core i5-5250U 1.6GHz dual-core processor;…

Easier and cheaper water cooling Last month I mentioned an interesting new GPU liquid cooler from Alphacool – the GPX-Pro. I managed to get some hands-on time with it briefly at the recent Multiplay event in Coventry, and there are several reasons why it’s potentially a very interesting bit of kit. Firstly, it’s incredibly quiet – much more so than any all-in-one liquid cooler I’ve tested. Secondly, it’s a far more elaborate and refined GPU cooler than NZXT and Corsair’s efforts to mount their all-in-one liquid coolers on graphics cards. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there’s scope for doing away with a mountain of hardware compared with a traditional water-cooling loop. You don’t need a GPU waterblock, reservoir or pump and, as the loop is expandable, there’s even the potential…