Table of contents for February 2016 in Custom PC UK

Efficiency just isn’t sexy. I’ve watched marketing managers try to talk enthusiastically about performance per watt, and it must be like trying to get excited about loft insulation. Better graphics are cool. Faster computers are cool. Even bragging rights are cool. But lower power consumption? It’s tough, because there’s no immediately visible benefit. But while efficiency might not be the stuff of hardware geek fantasies, it’s a major factor when it comes to my buying decisions. While we were sorting out the scoring system for last month’s GPU Labs test, we settled on a 10 per cent score for efficiency again, but I wonder if that’s enough now. There’s a gulf between Nvidia and AMD’s GPUs when it comes to power efficiency, where our test system drew 266W from the…

AMD releases Radeon R9 380X In the ever-expanding numbers battle to make sure every possible niche segment of the graphics card market is covered, AMD has just released another member of its Radeon R9 300-series, the 380X. As with all of AMD’s current GPUs, the 380X’s Antigua XT core is based on the aging Graphics Core Next architecture – in this case, the 1.2 variant that was first seen with the Radeon R9 285 last year. The 970MHz GPU has 2,048 stream processors, 128 texture units and 32 ROPs, and sits between the Radeon R9 380 and 390 chips in terms of specs. As standard, Radeon R9 380X cards will have 4GB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 5.7GHz (effective). Radeon R9 380X cards start at £189 inc VAT on www.overclockers.co.uk.…

SUPPLIER www.box.co.uk /SPECIFICATIONS Chipset Intel Z170 CPU socket Intel LGA1151 Memory support 2 slots: max 32GB DDR3 (up to 4200MHz) Expansion slots One 16x PCI-E 3 Sound Realtek ALC1150 Networking Intel Gigabit LAN Overclocking Base clock 98–341MHz, CPU multiplier 8-83x; max voltages, CPU 2.155V, RAM 2.2V Ports 4 x SATA 6Gbps (Z170 ), 1 x SATA Express, 1 x M.2, 4 x USB 3, 3 x USB 2, 1 x LAN, 3 x surround audio out, line in, mic, 1 x HDMI, 1 x DisplayPort, 1 x PS/2 Dimensions (mm) 170 x 170 Mini-ITX is becoming a big hit in enthusiast circles, with every major motherboard manufacturer looking set to offer at least one dinky motherboard that can take advantage of Intel’s K-series Skylake CPUs. Last time, MSI was…

SUPPLIER www.scan.co.uk/ MODEL NUMBER AC-HUEPS-M1 /SPECIFICATIONS Channels 2 Lighting RGB Power Molex LED strips Four 11cm strips, magnetic and self-adhesive If you’re keen on lighting up your PC, you probably have a few sets of LED strips or cold cathodes in a drawer somewhere. The trouble is that as soon as you change PC cases or hardware, these lights invariably end up clashing with your new parts’ colours. Similarly, standalone kits usually have limited lighting functions. However, NZXT reckons it has the answer with an update to its HUE programmable lighting system, called the HUE+. The system consists of a 2-channel hub that can connect via a motherboard USB 2 header using an included cable, or externally using a standard micro–USB cable, and it’s powered by a single Molex…

There are many facets of SSD performance that can be assessed. Our own battery of tests comprises synthetic benchmarks, trace-based storage workloads in PCMark 7 and PCMark 8, boot time measurements and Iometer’s I/O workload generator. Prior to testing, we issue an ATA Secure Erase command to each drive using the SSD’s software package if available, or with the Parted Magic (www.partedmagic.com) Linux build if not. This procedure erases all data and resets the SSD to factory performance. We first run the synthetic benchmark CrystalDiskMark 5.0.2 to give us a quick overview of a drive’s peak sequential and random performance, at queue depths of one and 32 - the former is the most relevant to regular users, but the latter pushes most drives to their true peak performance. You can…

Kingston HyperX Predator M.2 240GB / £158 inc VAT (£200 inc VAT with add-in card) SUPPLIER www.ebuyer.com Kingston HyperX Predator 480GB add-in card/ £340 inc VAT SUPPLIER www.ebuyer.com Until the launch of the Samsung 950 Pro, Kingston’s HyperX Predator M.2 was the fastest consumer-focused PCI-E M.2 SSD you could buy, excluding OEM models or add-in cards. With four PCE-E 2 lanes, it doesn’t offer the headroom you get with newer PCI-E 3 devices, though, so it’s going to be significantly slower than Samsung’s 950 Pro on Intel’s X99 and Z170 chipsets. On the plus side, the Kingston HyperX Predator’s performance is clearly quicker than SATA M.2 SSDs. However, the significant speed boost offered by Samsung’s 950 makes the HyperX Predator look overpriced and slightly outdated. While the Predator…

SUPPLIER www.amazon.co.uk Whenever a new disruptive product is launched that seriously outclasses its competition, it instantly alters the landscape of that market. It doesn’t mean alternative products cease to become a worthwhile purchase, but it often forces them to compete in terms of pricing and value for money rather than performance. Anything that costs more money than the new killer product, or even costs the same amount, without any inherent advantage, instantly becomes uncompetitive. With SSDs, that new product is Samsung’s 950 Pro, so Plextor’s M6e Black Edition, with its price of £220 inc VAT, is now up against some serious competition. The 950 Pro has set a standard against which all other drives will undoubtedly be compared, thanks to the raw performance it offers, courtesy of four PCI-E…

Transcend MTS800 M.2 512GB / £187 inc VAT SUPPLIER www.amazon.co.uk Transcend MTS800 M.2 256GB/ £90 inc VAT SUPPLIER www.lambda-tek.com Although most storage firms are moving towards higher SSD capacities, chopping even 128GB flavours from their line-ups, Transcend is clearly still keen to cater for those users who absolutely don’t care about huge amounts of flash memory storage. Accordingly, the SATA-based MTS800 M.2 series is available in five capacities, including just 32GB, a capacity that could only be useful in extremely cheap laptops. It’s the 256GB and 512GB models that most interest us, though, as you then have enough room to install Windows, plenty of software and some games, with the latter occupying increasingly large capacities as games become ever more complex. Transcends MTS800 drives use a Silicon Motion…

Build a home theatre PC The parts you’ll need to build an affordable, home theatre PC that’s ideal for putting in the lounge and playing back all manner of video formats. This machine will handle general computing and media tasks with no trouble, and its dual-core Skylake CPU can even handle 4K video playback. Meanwhile, its super-quiet Noctua CPU cooler prevents it from making a racket. 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.…

DEVELOPER Ubisoft Blue Byte/ PUBLISHER Ubisoft/ WEBSITE http://tinyurl.com/UbisoftAnno In what’s possibly the perfect game premise, Anno 2205 is about building a city on the moon. Taking place in the 23rd century, where cities are built and governed by benevolent, carbon-neutral corporations, Anno places you in the penthouse office of one such unlikely capitalist venture. You’re then tasked with becoming the world’s number one business, by constructing and supporting a lunar colony, and plundering its abundant mineral wealth. Not surprisingly, building a city on the Moon is expensive, so you must first establish yourself on Earth by founding at least two other metropolises – the first in an idyllic, resource-rich temperate zone; the other in the Arctic, where settlements must be constructed close to heat sources and your business activities must…

When it was released back in 2010, Just Cause 2’s virtual island archipelago of Panau was one of the largest true-3D open worlds ever created. Its landscapes ranged from rugged mountain ranges to thick tropical jungles and even a sprawling metropolis. It was a tremendous achievement in terms of environment design, and the game was fun to boot, so you might be surprised to learn that the developer wasn’t entirely satisfied with its work on Just Cause 2. ‘We felt limited by the way the landscapes were represented,’ says Linus Blomberg, co-founder and CTO of Avalanche Studios, developer of the Just Cause series. ‘In Just Cause 2, we used traditional height maps for terrain, like most other open-world games, but their two-dimensional nature negatively affects what kinds of landscapes you…

In this feature we’ve concentrated on systems from Scan and Syber. The PCs we’ve covered are high-end configurations, but they aren’t the only options available. Scan, for instance, has four models that range in price from £494 to £905 inc VAT, with our sample costing £899. They’re all in different cases and, given those price differences, the components change too: at the low end, you’re looking at a Core i3 processor, GTX 750 Ti graphics and a 1TB hard disk, while pricier machines have Core i5 chips, GTX 960 and GTX 970 GPUs and SSDs. These Scan 3XS machines are completely customisable too. Syber’s machines are similarly versatile. The firm offers four devices with prices from £499 to £1,205 inc VAT. Interestingly, Syber’s £695 and £1,205 machines both rely on…

the home theatre PC (HTPC) was dealt a bit of a blow with the launch of Windows 10 – it no longer included Windows Media Center (WMC). In some ways, it’s a relief – Microsoft had never given Media Center the support it needed to thrive and the application was mainly reliant on third parties for features. Even at the end of its life, it wasn’t able to offer a complete experience, but it came pretty close. So what now for the HTPC? Well, many people have already ditched WMC in favour of more streamlined, modern programs such as XMBC – now called Kodi, and Plex too. The HTPC can also claim to support every streaming service and content formats – that’s the benefit of using Windows. However, the HTPC…

My job at Scan involves, among other tasks, R&D, so I spend a considerable amount of time testing early samples of upcoming components and software. However, until this weekend, I hadn’t built a PC for almost four years. I do, of course, upgrade my main system at home on a regular basis, but the last time I took a complete set of factory-fresh components and assembled them together was way back in November 2011. Doing so reminded me of one of the many reasons why I’m a PC – I ’justget pleasure using PCs but I also enjoying tinkering inside the case too. Like riding a bike, how to put all the parts together in the most efficient way quickly came back, and it amused me to see that, despite…

N Base-T is a new specification designed to bridge the gap between Gigabit Ethernet and enterprise-centric 10 Gigabit (10GbE) standard, which typically uses optical fibre and costs big wads of cash. The NBase-T spec calls for bandwidths of 2.5Gb/sec and 5Gb/sec – a significant upgrade – while retaining the use of the CAT5e/6 spec cabling that’s ubiquitous in homes and small to medium businesses. The specification states that these speeds should be possible at up to 100m over copper wire, making it an ideal upgrade. At the moment, though, Wi-Fi is getting all the investment, with routers sporting extreme speeds, such as AC3200+, although admittedly, those speeds are technically not true peruser. There have also been big advancements in beam-forming, with Wi-Fi kit featuring six, eight and even 13(!) antennae,…

SUPPLIER www.scan.co.uk / MODEL NUMBER CH-9000121-UK /SPECIFICATIONS Connection Wired, USB Cable 2m, non-braided Material Plastic Switch type CherryMX Silent Backlighting RGB Extras USB pass-through, wrist rest, additional textured keys As its name suggests, The Strafe RGB offers full RGB per-key backlighting, whereas the original Strafe only offered red lighting. This feature ties in to Corsair’s Utility Engine software, which gives comprehensive control over the lighting effects of every key, in addition to other parts of the keyboard. The Strafe RGB also sports a reasonably large detachable wrist rest for extra comfort and a USB 2 pass-through port – both missing features on the cheaper non-RGB model. The USB pass-through is useful for connecting other desktop peripherals such as mice and headphones to your PC. Sadly, though, Corsair’s excellent dedicated…

Asus has one of the widest ranges of adaptive-sync displays on the market, catering for both G-Sync and FreeSync, for users of Nvidia and AMD GPUs respectively. Their general high quality has impressed us in previous reviews, and they’ve also come packed with features, including flexible stands that pivot, rotate and tilt, as well as great on-screen display software, controlled by a small joystick at the rear of the display. The ROG Swift PG27AQ breaks new ground, though, being a 27in G-Sync display with an IPS panel and a low 4ms response time. As such, you can expect superior image quality and viewing angles compared with your average TN panel, but without the severe ghosting problems of some older IPS monitors. What’s more, it has a native 4K resolution and…

Crucial MX200 M.2 250GB / £76 inc VAT SUPPLIER www.ebuyer.com Crucial MX200 M.2 500GB / £128 inc VAT SUPPLIER www.scan.co.uk The 500GB version offers the best cost per gigabyte we’ve seen from an M.2 drive The 2.5in versions of Crucial’s MX and BX SSDs have proved popular, with the BX100 occupying a well-deserved slot in our Elite list for its excellent value and bang per buck. There are some small differences between the MX and BX lines, of course. While both series are good choices for a price-conscious PC builder, the BX is the value option, with a relatively bare bones set of features, while the MX offers extras such as hardware encryption and a form of power-loss protection. With the M.2 variant, Crucial has taken the simple…

When SATA ports first appeared on motherboards over a decade ago, it was a welcome solution to a longstanding storage nightmare with PCs. The long 40-pin IDE connector occupied a lot of space on motherboards, limited the number of storage devices to four, and relied on a master/slave configuration, with a jumper that had to be set correctly for a device to be recognised. The pins bent all too easily and were a constant cause of headaches for PC builders. Younger readers might be grateful to have never experienced these problems, but computers and storage technology have once again moved on since the introduction of SATA. The SATA standard has gone through three revisions, each raising the performance headroom it provides, with modern SATA III devices offering 6Gb/sec of bandwidth.…

Samsung SSD 850 Evo 250GB/ £80 inc VAT SUPPLIER www.box.com Samsung SSD 850 Evo 500GB/ £139 inc VAT SUPPLIER www.amazon.co.uk The M.2 versions of Samsung’s SSD 850 Evo drives lift most of the technology and features from the 2.5in 850 Evo drives and place them into a much smaller, 2280-format M.2 cards. However, these M.2 drives use the SATA bus rather than PCI-E, and use the AHCI bus protocol rather than NVMe. It’s the same approach used by a few manufacturers, notably Crucial with the M.2 version of the MX200. The M.2 850 Evo drives also share the interesting NAND flash configuration of their 2.5in counterparts. They use the same second-generation Samsung 32-layer V-NAND as the company’s 850 Pro and 950 Pro drives, with all the advantages of…

SUPPLIER www.pcspecialist.co.uk /SPECIFICATIONS CPU 3.5GHz Intel Core i5-6600K Motherboard Asus Maximus VIII Impact Memory 16GB 2133MHz Kingston HyperX Fury DDR4 Graphics Zotac GeForce GTX 980 4GB Storage 960GB Kingston HyperX Savage SSD Case Parvum Veer 1.0 Cooling CPU: Corsair Hydro H100i GTX with 2 x 120mm fans; GPU: 1 x 90mm fan PSU Corsair CS650 Ports Front: 2 x USB 3; rear: 4 x USB 3, 1 x USB 3.1 type-A, 1 x USB 3.1 type-C, 1 x optical S/PDIF, start and reset buttons, Gigabit Ethernet, 3 x audio Operating system Windows 10 Home 64-bit Warranty One year parts and labour, plus two years labour only, one month collect and return, then return to base PC Specialist’s Ignis stands out with its use of a Parvum case, made from…

For every game review I write for Custom PC, I take somewhere between 250 and 1,000 screenshots to use as accompanying images. The reason I take so many is because the vast majority end up being unusable. Characters or enemies aren’t fully in shot, or the action is obscured by objective markers or a dazzling explosion effect. Or, as is most often the case, the image is simply horribly blurred. This latter problem comes courtesy of the wonderful graphical effect that is motion-blur, one of the silliest aesthetic conventions in modern gaming. For those of you unfamiliar with the technique, motion-blur is a post-process effect used to blur the image on screen when the player turns or tilts the game camera, most often to simulate the effect of your eyes…

DEVELOPER EA DICE/ PUBLISHER EA/ WEBSITE www.ea.com/starwarsbattlefront Star Wars: Battlefront is the closest you’ll currently get to the gaming equivalent of a popcorn movie. It’s a simple and immediately accessible multiplayer shooter that dispenses with depth or tactical nuance in favour of dazzling spectacle. Battlefront allows you to play as a Rebel Alliance soldier or an Imperial Stormtrooper in a wide variety of game modes, battling in classic locales from the Star Wars universe. The two headlines acts are Supremacy, where players vie for control over key tactical locations on the map, and Walker Assault, in which the Rebels must destroy two hulking AT-AT Walkers encroaching on their base, while the Imperials must defend the walkers until they reach their target. These 40-player Star Wars battles are astonishing experiences. DICE’s…

This month, in our continuing effort to create a video game with all the programming knowledge of a medieval peasant, we did a little more tweaking of collisions before adding a proper start menu to our game. We then made several more fundamental changes to how the combat functions, primarily the addition of an overarching ammo system for several of our weapons. We left off last month having successfully implemented both player and AI collisions, which also enabled the construction of some basic level layouts. However, there was one problem; although the player could no longer ‘move’ through solid objects, shooting both the Web Trap and the Shotgun caused kickback, which could push the player through solid objects. Fortunately, the fix just involved a simple script that resets the kickback’s…

We’ve locked and loaded two Steam Machines for Valve’s big launch. The Syber Steam Machine K comes from CyberPower (www.sybergaming.com), and the 3XS ST10 is built by Scan (www.scan.co.uk/3xs/custom/steammachines). Scan’s machine arrives in a new Fractal Design case. It looks at home beneath a TV: its brushed aluminium exterior, single white LED and short, wide design make it look like a console or a Blu-ray player rather than a gaming PC. The Scan’s top cover pulls away to reveal sensible innards. The Asus mini-ITX motherboard sits on one side with the small PSU, and the other half is dominated by the EVGA graphics card that uses a riser to lie horizontally. Meanwhile, the SSD sits in a small cage with another drive bay free. Syber’s system is more conventional. It’s…

Our conclusion, then, is that if you want the best flexibility when it comes to viewing and streaming content, and handling your data, the HTPC is still better than any combination of smart TVs, NAS enclosures or HDMI dongles, although this situation may well change a few years down the line. So what do you need to assemble a capable media rig? Firstly, if you already own a laptop, you can easily combine it with Chromecast and get a fair amount of features while saving money. Likewise, if you have a PC, you can use it to tap into the various excellent media servers, such as Plex and Kodi. If you’re still looking for a dedicated PC, though, there are other options to consider, such as an Intel NUC or…

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…

There’s an experiment in which you play two videos simultaneously, each showing one person talking. You ask your subject to listen to one of the people speaking, and they will automatically tune out the other video until the person in that video says one of several words that grab attention. The study demonstrates that we can hear things even when we aren’t explicitly listening, or when we’re concentrating on other speech entirely. It’s solid science because you can prove the shift of attention using eye-tracking. Not surprisingly, one of the words that grabs our subconscious attention is ‘sex’. The old cliché that men think about sex every seven seconds isn’t true, of course. Men don’t think about sex as much as claimed, and women think about sex more than men…

SUPPLIER www.ebuyer.com /SPECIFICATIONS Chipset Intel Z170 CPU socket Intel LGA1151 Memory support 4 slots: max 64GB DDR3 (up to 3733MHz) Expansion slots Three 16x PCI-E 3, three 1x PCI-E 3 Sound Realtek ALC1150 Networking Two Intel Gigabit LAN Overclocking Base clock 40–650MHz, CPU multiplier 8-83x; max voltages, CPU 1.7V, RAM 2V Ports 6 x SATA 6Gbps (Z170), 2 x SATA 6Gbps (ASMedia), 2 x SATA Express, 2 x M.2, 6 x USB 3, 5 x USB 3.1 Type-A, 1 x USB 3.1 Type-C, 5 x USB 2, 2 x LAN, 3 x surround audio out, line in, mic, 1 x HDMI 1.4, 1 x DisplayPort 1.2 Dimensions (mm) 305 x 244 With a price that’s close to £200 inc VAT, there are certainly cheaper options than Asus’ Sabertooth Z170…

Measuring barely larger than a pair of AA batteries and tipping the scales at a mere 20g, the PulsePak is one of the tiniest external batteries we’ve seen. Cosseted away inside the tough plastic shell is a 500mAh cell – that’s enough, PulsePak claims, to provide a two-hour charge to a modern smartphone. That charge is hardly going to make a dent in a weekend at a festival, but in an emergency, an extra two hours of talk or screen time could be a lifesaver. In testing, the PulsePak delivered too, adding an extra hour and 45 minutes of browsing time to a Nexus 6, albeit with the screen brightness turned down. The fragile connector can also be retracted back into the case, preventing it from getting bashed. At £13,…

When Intel launched the Z97 chipset, motherboards started to feature a new type of connector called M.2. Its main use so far has been for SSDs, with one of the main advantages being its ability to carry data across either the SATA or PCI-E bus, with the latter offering the potential for much faster transfer speeds than you get from a standard 2.5in SATA SSD. M.2 storage devices are much smaller, squeezing the NAND flash, controller and memory cache onto a stick that measures 22mm wide and (usually) 80mm long. The connector delivers both power and data, and needs no extra cabling, enabling you to fit a whole PC into even smaller cases, or entirely remove the drive caging from your chassis, giving you extra room for water-cooling kit, or…

SUPPLIER www.scan.co.uk Intel beat Samsung to market with a PCI-E 3 NVMe SSD in the form of the 750 Series. It comes in either a half-height, half-length add-in card format, or in a 2.5in case with an SFF 8639 (U.2) connector, rather than as an M.2 drive. Like Samsung’s 950 Pro drives, it accesses four 1GB/sec PCI-E 3 lanes, so it offers far more bandwidth than PCI-E 2 devices such as the Plextor M6e M.2 and Kingston Hyper X Predator M.2. Three capacities are offered, ranging from 400GB to 1.2TB. Unfortunately, Intel could only send us a 1.2TB sample for testing, which makes direct comparison between the drives on test slightly more complicated. We don’t know exactly how the lower-capacity 750 drives will perform in our test suite, but…

SUPPLIER www.cclonline.com The 2.5in versions of Kingston’s SSDNow drives have been around for quite some time, aimed squarely at the entry-level end of the market. The drives originally launched back in 2009, when the SSD market was in a nascent stage and the majority of people’s computers still relied on a mechanical hard disk for their operating system files, and an SSD was an expensive extravagance. It comes as no surprise, then, that the SSDNow M.2 bears little similarity to the older 2.5in drives, aside from its branding and the continued focus on the entry-level end of the market. Also known as the SM2280S3, the Kingston SSDNow M.2 240GB is a double-sided 2280 M.2 SATA drive, and it uses the AHCI bus protocol rather than NVMe. Being a SATA…

Samsung SSD 950 Pro 256GB / £147 inc VAT SUPPLIER www.ebuyer.com Samsung SSD 950 Pro 512GB/ £261 inc VAT SUPPLIER www.dabs.com Samsung’s SSD 950 Pro breaks new ground in a few areas, being the company’s first consumer M.2 drive to use four PCI-E 3 lanes for the fastest possible performance. It joins the Intel SSD 750 in being one of only two drives on test to take advantage of the 1GB/sec per channel offered by PCI-E 3 lanes. It also uses the NVMe protocol, a first for Samsung in the consumer M.2 arena, although an updated version of the enterprise-grade SM951 also supports NVMe. The 950 Pro sports a triple-core MBX controller running at 500 MHz, with 512MB of LPDDR3 cache memory across both of the capacities on…

DEVELOPER Fatshark / PUBLISHER Games Workshop / WEBSITE www.vermintide.com Imitation is allegedly the sincerest form of flattery, but if someone copied almost everything we did while dressed in a giant rat costume, it probably wouldn’t be particularly endearing. Such is the case with Warhammer: The End Times: Vermintide, a game that doesn’t so much borrow the structure and systems of Left 4 Dead as claim squatters’ rights to them. Set in the classic Warhammer universe – specifically the gothic city of Ubersreik – it teams you up with three other players, tasking you with fending off hordes of rodent-like Skaven as you navigate the city’s twisting streets, completing various objectives to hold back the eponymous Vermintide. To survive, you must work together, watching each other’s backs as you hack and…

The rise of efficient components and mini-ITX motherboards means it’s easier than ever to install a tiny gaming PC in your living room, so Valve has competition from Windows-based machines as well as consoles. For starters, Syber sells a range of systems it’s dubbed Vapor, which come in the same chassis as its Steam Machine, and there are even more specifications available: prices range from £485 to £1,905 inc VAT, across seven models, some of which will be able to handle gaming on a 4K TV. Scan will sell its Steam Machines as Windows models too, although you’ll have to ask the company directly and add the price of an OS. Alienware, too, sells its Alpha as a Windows machine, with similar configurations and prices. Look outside of these Steam-style…

REVIEW Tenma Digital Soldering Station When I write a review it’s usually based on relatively short-term usage of the product: I may have had access to the item in question for a day or two and used a battery of synthetic tests to make up for the short timescale, or I may have had it for a week or more and been able to get some real-life usage data. This time, though, I’ve been using the Tenma Digital Soldering Station since March last year. For years I’d been using bargain-basement, fixed-temperature soldering irons, and when I finally upgraded to a variable-output model, it was Maplin’s cheapest rebranded Chinese import. It served me well, despite its limitations, but after seeing an offer on a proper temperature-controlled soldering station, I was convinced…

Mini-ITX cases need a rethink There are some fantastic mini-ITX cases that cater for all manner of systems, but the performance gaming area of the market is currently coming up short. My grumbles began when Nvidia’s GTX 660 and 670 graphics cards began sporting deliberately shortened PCBs. These cards meant you no longer needed a large case to accommodate them, or one that offered enough room to house a decent mid-range GPU. The situation has progressed even further since then, and currently, the GTX 960 and awesome GTX 970 are available in decidedly dinky variations, plus AMD has its new R9 Nano. The issue, however, is that very few (if any) cases take advantage of them. It’s an issue that reared its head again when our columnist Richard Swinburne mentioned…

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 online at the www.bit-tech.net forums. TOP 20 OVERALL TOP 20 PRODUCERS…