Table of contents for April 2022 in Custom PC UK

SUPPLIER currys.co.uk This affordable HP Omen machine is a rare beast – a laptop that relies on AMD for its processor and graphics. The Radeon RX 6600M laptop GPU boasts the same RDNA 2 architecture used in AMD’s mid-range desktop cards. The 6600M deploys 1,792 stream processors alongside a 2416MHz boost clock, and it has 8GB of memory. Meanwhile, AMD’s now familiar Ryzen 7 5800H processor has eight SMT-enabled Zen 3 cores (16 threads), alongside base and boost speeds of 3.2GHz and 4.4GHz. The rest of the machine’s specification is respectable for the money too, comprising 16GB of dual-channel DDR4 memory, and a 512GB WD SN730 NVMe SSD, along with support for dual-band Wi-Fi 6, Gigabit Ethernet and Bluetooth 5.2. On the outside, there’s one USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C…

TILE MATE 2022 /£14.99 inc VAT SUPPLIER uk.tile.com The 2022 iteration of the Tile Mate tracking device is a dead ringer for its older siblings, at least from the outside. However, the past few years have been good for the technology at the heart of the Tile Mate, even if they’ve been pretty rough for everybody else. The new Tile Mate now boasts a solid three-year lifespan, which mitigates the fact that the battery can’t be replaced. Also new to this version is a QR code on the back, which can be scanned by a phone to identify the owner of the item to which it’s attached, which might help to get a lost item home if it’s found by a helpful individual. An IP67 survivability rating also means it…

How we test Not everyone wants or even needs an all-in-one (AIO) liquid cooler with a large radiator for their system. Some micro-ATX and mini-ITX cases simply don’t have room for them, and you can save yourself some money by going for a 120mm cooler as well. Not only that, but 120mm AIO coolers can also keep some of the most powerful CPUs out there in check. We’ve been pleasantly surprised at how well some 120mm AIO liquid coolers have coped with the likes of Intel’s Core i9-12900K, for example, which has a total of 16 cores (eight P-Cores and eight E-Cores). This CPU makes for a tough test, though, so every cooler on test this month will need to deal with this CPU to make the cut. We’ll also…

SUPPLIER overclockers.co.uk Adding a second row of fans isn’t always worth it with some radiators, but any extra airflow is welcome with the high heatloads our bunch of AIO liquid coolers have to handle this month. Thankfully, the extra fan here doesn’t mean the only dualfan cooler on test costs the earth, with the be quiet! Silent Loop 2 120mm retailing for £80 inc VAT. According to be quiet!, the Silent Loop 2’s all-new pump design, with a six-pole motor, three chambers and high-density cold plate fin stack, all combine to offer better cooling, lower noise and less turbulence. We can confirm that the Silent Loop 2’s pump was indeed inaudible unless we put it to our ears, so it gets top marks for low-noise operation, even at full speed.…

SUPPLIER scan.co.uk Better known for its huge range of custom water-cooling components, EK has produced numerous to pend all-in-one liquid cooler designs over the years, but it’s now turning its focus to surprisingly affordable mainstream cooler designs. The AIO 120 D-RGB we’re reviewing here retails for £73 inc VAT, which is cheaper than both the Corsair iCUE H60i RGB PRO XT and the be quiet! Silent Loop 2 120mm. Both those coolers have advantages though. The be quiet! model has two fans compared to the EK’s single fan, and the Corsair cooler has software control, which the AIO 120 D-RGB lacks. The EK cooler has the best-looking RGB lighting on test this month, though, and it has the most premium-feeling build quality in this Labs test as well. The RGB…

SUPPLIER overclockers.co.uk The web page for the SilverStone PF120 ARGB is packed with impressive details about the cooler, and with its top-end price of £70 inc VAT, we were hoping for a cooler that matched the likes of the EK AIO 120 D-RGB and the quiet! Silent Loop 2 120mm, but for slightly less cash. It gets off to a good start with the inclusion of addressable RGB lighting on the pump block and fan, and a lighting controller is included as well, if you want to have physical control over the lighting colour and modes rather than using your motherboard’s software. The lighting itself is vibrant and accurate, and the semi-translucent fan blades did a good job of diffusing the light as well, so the lighting appears as a…

SUPPLIER overclockers.co.uk The Samsung is the most basic of the monitors on test this month in several ways. Its stand offers no adjustment, it has no extended colour range and there’s next to nothing in the way of extra features, which is why it’s also the cheapest 2,560 x 1,440 display on test. Open up the notably small box and the lightness of the entirely plastic stand is also striking, as is the complete lack of adjustability – not even tilt is on offer, so you can’t angle the display up or down for taller or shorter users. The feet of the stand also stretch nearly the entire width of the monitor, which seems unnecessarily space-hogging considering the lack of adjustability. While it’s basic, though, this is a smart-looking display.…

DEVELOPER Sledgehammer Games / PUBLISHER Activision Vanguard sees the Call of Duty series returning to the well-trodden battlefields of WWII, with the campaign promising a different kind of WWII adventure. Framed around a fictional special forces team on a clandestine mission in the dying days of the war, the opening mission sees you hijack a train on its way to bombed-out Berlin, before infiltrating a hidden submarine base to retrieve intel on a secret Nazi operation known as Project Phoenix. It’s an exciting and unusual introduction, with shades of Wolfenstein’s weirdness. Unfortunately, your team is then immediately captured by the Germans, and spend the whole campaign imprisoned beneath some Berlin administrative building. The remaining missions are all flashbacks to the individual team members’ experiences during the war, conveniently covering nearly…

Arguably more baffling than a VR version of Among Us, superb city builder Cities: Skylines is getting a VR version courtesy of Fast Travel Games, previously responsible for titles such as Apex Construct and Wraith: The Oblivion: Afterlife. Cities: VR is a straightforward adaptation, maintaining the perspective and general play of its flatscreen equivalent, while adapting the control scheme to work with touch controls. You’ll be able to drag out roads and place buildings with your own virtual hands, and watch your cities apartments and skyscrapers slowly rise up in stereoscopic 3D. Again, it’s an odd choice of game to convert to VR. There can be an appeal to VR strategy games, especially when they’re designed to replicate the tactile joys of tabletop gaming. However, Skylines is a laid-back game…

Vintage computing enthusiasts invariably end up with collections of disks cluttering up their shelves, but what do you do when the computer system that made them is no longer around, but you’re curious about what’s on them? Creating an emulator-compatible disk image from a physical Dragon 32 disk is fairly straightforward, if you have the right gear. You can capture a raw image using a KryoFlux (see Issue 131) and turn it into a VDK image using the HcX Floppy Disk Emulator software (see Issue 222). That’s enough to get you some of the way there, but not all. Take, as an example, a disk labelled ‘PIC-DISC’ and full of files with the extension ‘.LR’. An emulator will let you list the files, but go no further, unless you happen…

It’s testament to Nvidia’s late 1990s marketing team that one of its buzzwords has now slipped into common parlance. Not only did Nvidia’s 1st-gen GeForce 256 introduce us to its now famous ‘GeForce’ gaming graphics brand, but it also brought the term ‘GPU’ with it. An initialism that we now use as shorthand for any graphics chip, or even a whole graphics card, started life as an Nvidia marketing slogan. To give you an idea of how long ago this was, I was introduced to the term ‘GPU’ by a paper press release the same week I started my first tech journalism job in September 1999. We didn’t get press releases via email then – they were physically posted to us, and the editorial assistant sorted them all into a…

AMD has just released a new cut-price GPU based on its RDNA2 architecture. That cutdown price also accompanies a seriously cut-down spec though. Based on AMD’s 107mm² Navi 24 GPU, the Radeon RX 6500 XT has just 16 compute units, giving it 1,024 stream processors and 16 accompanying Ray Accelerators. Its memory system is also limited, with just 4GB of 2250MHz (18GHz effective) GDDR6 memory attached to a tight 64-bit memory interface, resulting in a total memory bandwidth of just 144GB/sec. There’s 16MB of AMD’s Infinity Cache to potentially help performance here, but that’s still a limited spec. Potentially compounding the GPU’s performance further, Radeon RX 6500 XT cards also only have a 4x PCI-E 4 interface, which shouldn’t be an issue if you have a PCI-E 4 CPU and…

SUPPLIER currys.co.uk The PC speaker market has been rather neglected in recent years, so we were quite excited when we saw LG has decided to enter the market with a high-end gaming soundbar. Originally priced at a whopping £500, it’s currently discounted in several shops to a more palatable £250. Featuring a quad-driver design with two passive woofers on its rear, the GP9 includes a USB Type-C input for your PC and Bluetooth for your phone, laptop or tablet. It also boasts DTS virtual surround sound support, a headset output and a microphone, allowing you to use the speaker for calls and in-game chat. The big news, though, is that it’s a portable Bluetooth speaker as well. Its 2600mAh (7.2V) internal battery will provide up to five hours of music…

SUPPLIER amazon.co.uk Sticking lights to literally any object that can have lights on it is a noble goal, and the Luminoodle Click represents an advance in this field. The device itself is a string of white LEDs (no colour changing here), but instead of relying on an external power source the LEDs are powered by a battery pack at one end. This pack doubles as a switch, or a chunk of the casing does at any rate, and both this pack and the LEDs can be fixed to clean, flat surfaces with double-sided tape. The net result is that the Click can be installed in places where lights usually can’t go - inside cupboards, underneath shelves and (quite handily) under desks, so you can see when you have to go…

SUPPLIER overclockers.co.uk With its pump located in the radiator, the Aerocool Pulse L120F’s radiator unit is a fair bit longer than those of most other AIO liquid coolers, stretching to 176mm. As a result, you’ll need to make sure your case has space for it before you consider purchasing it. On the flip side, the waterblock that would normally hold the pump section is comparatively quite small, so you shouldn’t have any trouble trying to fit it in your motherboard’s CPU socket area. The whole setup is also very thin, with the radiator and fan together only measuring 52mm thick, which is about as slim as you can get. A single 120mm fan is included in the box, with both the fan and waterblock unit sporting 3-pin digital RGB lighting,…

SUPPLIER box.co.uk As you’d expect given Corsair’s propensity for light-up products, Corsair’s iCUE H60i RGB Pro XT includes RGB lighting, but only on the pump housing, which is a bit of a shame given it costs £80 inc VAT. On the plus side, however, this cooler does feature full software control of the pump and lighting, allowing you to customise the cooling and lighting to your own needs. Only one 120mm fan is included in the box, but the cables have a spare port available to power a second fan, and Corsair includes the necessary screws for another fan in the bundle too, which is handy. Seeing as the be quiet! Silent Loop 2 was the best-performing cooler on test with its two fans, an extra fan could be a…

SUPPLIER cclonline.com Despite costing just £50 inc VAT, the GameMax Ice Chill 120 ARGB manages to cram RGB lighting for both its fan and pump block into its package. It looks great too, with an infinity mirror effect on the pump and individual points of light on the single 120mm fan. The cables for the fan and pump can be linked together as well, allowing you to use a single 3-pin RGB header to power both of them. There’s no mention of official LGA1700 compatibility on GameMax’s website, but the GameMax Ice Chill 120 ARGB installed fine on our Asus ROG Maximus Z690 Apex motherboard, with its lengthy sprung mounting screws seemingly offering enough pressure to make solid thermal contact with our CPU. The GameMax’s mounting plate and backplate can…

How we test VA displays tend to have at least double the contrast ratio of IPS or TN panels, making them particularly desirable for watching video. This extra visual depth can also add atmosphere to games and is preferred by some people to the slightly more washed-out look of other LCD panel types. The downside is that their response time is much slower than IPS or TN panels, making for sluggish gaming performance characterised by detail-destroying, ghostly trails behind fast moving objects. For this reason, we generally don’t recommend them for competitive, fastpaced gameplay, although they can still hold their own in esports titles if you’re just playing casually, and they’re fine for single-player gaming. We start our testing by assessing the fit, finish and features of the monitors, looking…

DEVELOPER Relic Entertainment / World’s Edge/ PUBLISHER Microsoft Age of Empires 4 is a classy update of a classic strategy game. Embracing the series’ age, Relic’s strategy revamp offers a familiar blend of historical city building and frenetic RTS combat in a lavish and substantial package. The game is centred around four single-player campaigns that each see you play through the Norman Conquest of England, the Hundred Years’ War, the Mongol conquest of Asia and the founding of the Russian nation. Aside from the Norman campaign, which is essentially an extended tutorial, each campaign focuses on the strengths of that civilisation. The Mongol Campaign, for example, emphasises the Mongols’ aggressive cavalry tactics, while the Russian campaign is more orientated around defensive strategies and using post-gunpowder siege equipment. These campaigns are…

DEVELOPER Exbleative/ PUBLISHER Future Friends Games / Exbleative Exo One straddles the line between game and interactive screensaver, being an incredibly pretty but functionally simplistic sci-fi adventure in which you propel a highly unusual spacecraft across dramatic alien worlds. Its core systems are based almost entirely around flying your spacecraft, which doesn’t move like a conventional earth-built aircraft. Instead, it’s a cross between a glider and a gravity-propelled marble. Pressing the left mouse button plummets your spacecraft towards the ground, picking up momentum through the air and on downward terrestrial slopes. Releasing the button will then see it gradually ascend, while holding down the left Shift key transforms the spacecraft from a ball to a disc, helping it to maintain altitude. The challenge centres around keeping that momentum going, using…

There’s a running theme to this month’s VR news, which is ‘games that don’t seem especially well-fitted to VR, are coming to VR’. First up is Innersloth’s hidden-role megahit Among Us, which is getting a VR version in 2022. For those unaware, Among Us sees up to ten players assume the role of lozenge-shaped spacemen working together to repair their perpetually beleaguered spaceship. However, at least one player assumes the role of an impostor, whose goal isn’t to repair the ship, but to murder all their crewmates. The impostor must eliminate all the crew without them figuring out who they are, while the crew must attempt to deduce the impostor’s identity, intermittently taking votes to cast suspected impostors out into space. Developed by veteran VR developer Schell games, Among Us…

Modders have long explored ways of repainting and visually modifying their mice, but for most people, the only time they’ll ever take apart their mouse is if a cable breaks or if the mouse has become so dirty that a full dismantling and deep clean is warranted. However, in recent years a whole community has built up around the idea of not just fixing and changing the look of mice, but also improving them. Whether you’re looking to trim your mouse’s weight, change the feel of its switches, make it glide better or replace its tired, overly stiff or kinked cable, it’s now easy to get hold of all manner of replacement parts. We grabbed a handful of the most popular options, along with an old mouse – a much-used…

Crackers II: The Data Storm continues from where Crackers I: The Gold Rush (see Issue 218) ended. Where the first book focused on the explosive rise of software piracy in the days of high-speed tape dubbing and ‘don’t copy that floppy’, the second moves into an era of digital networking. However, it’s firmly positioned in the early 1990s, when ‘digital networking’ meant bulletin board systems (BBSes) rather than the Internet. The second book begins, after a Commodore 64-focused introduction by David Almer, at chapter eight of the combined work. ‘The scene started to operate faster and faster,’ it reads – a direct follow-on from where the first volume’s chapter seven ended. In other words, you’re not going to want to read this book as a standalone. A mixture of prose…

Nvidia has lifted the lid on two new GPUs based on its Ampere architecture, sitting at opposite ends of the price scale. At the cheaper end is the new GeForce RTX 3050 that, like the Radeon RX 6500 XT, only comes with 4GB of GDDR6 memory and only runs at 1750MHz (14GHz effective). However, it’s also attached to a 128-bit memory interface, giving it a total memory bandwidth of 224GB/sec. Unlike the budget Radeon, the GeForce RTX 3050 also uses a full 16x PCI-E 4 interface, so its performance won’t be significantly reduced if you use it on a PCI-E 3 setup. Meanwhile, the GPU itself features 18 Streaming Multiprocessors, giving it 2,304 Nvidia CUDA cores and 18 RT cores for ray tracing, along with 72 Tensor cores. The reference…

SUPPLIER technextday.co.uk Giving you change from £60, the Deepcool Gammaxx L120 V2 is one of the cheaper AIO liquid coolers in this month’s Labs test, yet it still manages to include RGB lighting on its pump and a single 120mm fan. The lighting is fairly simple, though, with no fancy diffusing effect or flow indicators. There are also no extra fan screws included for mounting an additional fan, although you do get a sachet of thermal paste instead of it being pre-applied on the contact plate – handy if you ever need to remove and reinstall it. Despite having a slightly longer radiator than some other coolers on test, the Gammaxx L120 V2 has its pump located above the contact plate as normal, rather than housing it in the radiator…

SUPPLIER cclonline.com While NZXT’s more expensive coolers are lavishly endowed with RGB lighting and software control, the Kraken 120 is only equipped with an RGB pump, sporting NZXT’s familiar infinity mirror hologram effect. The waterblock section is significantly smaller than the one on NZXT’s larger coolers too, which have had compatibility issues with some mini-ITX motherboards, including the Asus ROG Strix Z690-I Gaming WiFi we reviewed recently. The reason the waterblock section is smaller is because this cooler’s pump is actually located within the radiator fins rather than the waterblock, with a separate 3-pin power cable protruding from it, making it the only AIO liquid cooler on test this month to incorporate this type of design. This does mean there’s a matchbox-sized area of the radiator that doesn’t cool anything,…

SUPPLIER scan.co.uk Considering the MSI offers you a panel with a diagonal that’s fully 5in wider (corner to corner) than the 27in monitors on test, the reasonably low £330 asking price of this 32in display immediately heightens its appeal. What’s more, there’s plenty else to like about this display. Despite its large screen size, the MAG322CQR cuts a fine figure thanks to its slim housing. The entire upper half is only 8mm thick, and although the bottom half is much thicker towards its middle, it still has reasonably thin-looking sides. The overall clean, matt black plastic aesthetic is also smart and unobtrusive. Meanwhile, the rather elegant, pointy-footed stand offers height and tilt adjustment but not rotation or pivot. There aren't many extra features – there aren't even speakers, but there's…

DEVELOPER Playground Games/ PUBLISHER Microsoft Few games guarantee a good time like Forza Horizon. Playground Games’ open-world drive ’em ups currently offer the first and last word in arcade racing, with an alluring combination of amazing locations, a huge range of vehicles to drive, an accessible and flexible driving model, plus a relentlessly upbeat tone. Not only does Forza Horizon 5 continue this proud tradition, but it’s probably the best entry in the series yet. While it’s not as innovative as Forza Horizon 4, it does a better job of balancing the features that its predecessor introduced, and the result is a superior experience both in single-player and multiplayer modes. For its fifth outing, the Forza Horizon Festival sets its sights on Mexico, with Playground Games producing a rugged and…

REVIEW WARHAMMER: AGE OF SIGMAR - TEMPESTFALL / £24.20 inc VAT DEVELOPER Carbon Studio / PUBLISHER Carbon Studio Warhammer: Age of Sigmar - Tempestfall is the latest game from Carbon Studio, developer of acclaimed VR spellcasting game The Wizards and its sequel. The studio’s experience with spectacular fantasy nonsense would seemingly make it an ideal fit for an Age of Sigmar game. However, in Tempestfall, the spellcasting shenanigans of its previous titles takes a back seat to underwhelming melee combat. Tempestfall puts you in the role of a Lord-Arcanum leading a group of Stormcast Eternals into the dark lands of Shyish to cleanse it of its undead denizens. You fight these creatures with various melee weapons, each of which can also be used to cast spells. Your sword, for instance,…

Over our many years of experience with building PCs, we’ve accumulated dozens of tips and discoveries that we don’t always get the space to mention in our usual build guides. There are all sorts of ways to make your PC run cooler, faster, quieter, as well as eliminate dust and build your PC faster and more efficiently. In this month’s feature, we’ll be covering pitfalls to avoid and many ways to improve your PC building skills, as well as explaining how to pick the right hardware for you in terms of monitors, storage, graphics cards and CPUs. We’re sure everyone will find tips here they hadn’t considered before, and there are 50 of them, so there’s plenty to consider for all sorts of machines, from water-cooled ATX rigs to air-cooler…

REVIEW Bangle.js 2 Engineer Gordon Williams rose to fame in 2013 with a crowdfunding campaign for the Espruino, an effort to meld the worlds of JavaScript and the Internet of Things (IoT). In 2019 he unveiled the JavaScript-powered Bangle.js smartwatch – and now its successor. The positioning of the Bangle.js range as an open-source, hacker-friendly gadget echoes that of the Arduino-compatible Sqfmi Watchy (see Issue 218). Unlike the Watchy, the Bangle.js 2 isn’t open hardware. In fact, the hardware is a commercial off-the-shelf product – the SMA Q3, a low-cost smartwatch available in bulk from China for $28 US (around £21 ex VAT) per unit. The Bangle.js ecosystem is definitely open though. The firmware allows the watch to load any one of a number of compact applications, from watch faces…

EK announces Asus ROG Strix X570-I Gaming block A week before I wrote this column, I was planning to make a YouTube video discussing the lack of monoblocks for mini-ITX motherboards. It’s just great being able to dump as much heat as possible from your motherboard into your water-cooling system’s coolant, so your radiator can deal with it. This ability is especially important in toasty, space-limited mini-ITX systems. I’ve always used monoblocks where possible. As well as cooling your CPU, they help to keep your motherboard’s VRMs in check, save on fittings and nightmare plumbing scenarios by having single inlets and outlets, and in some cases, they allow you to ditch chipset fans too. There’s been a distinct lack of monoblocks for mini-ITX motherboards recently, though, and I’d created a…