Table of contents for April 2018 in Custom PC UK

It’s a remarkably good impression of the south-east England housing market  I’ve marked the first weekend in February as‘busy’ in my calendar. It’s not because I have family coming to visit, or because I have an exciting city break. Nope, I’m planning to rebuild my PC. For some people, that would just mean swapping over a few components, but for me (and I suspect many other CPC readers), it means several hours of scrubbing the insides of waterblocks with a toothbrush, fighting with compression fittings, flushing various fluids through tubes and then leaving the finished machine to leak-test for 24 hours. I love having a water-cooled PC, but the process of assembling it isn’t half a faff, especially if you’re planning to reuse some of the parts from your last…

NZXT enters motherboard arena After making a big impact in the PC enthusiast scene with its cases and coolers, NZXT has now taken an unusual step and announced its very first motherboard. The N7 Z370 is specifically designed to help you colour-coordinate your PC without having to look at the solder points and traces on your motherboard. An all-metal cover conceals the PCB beneath it, and is available in black and white to match your case. Meanwhile, heatsink covers are available in glossy blue, red and purple, as well as matt black and white, to coordinate colours, especially with NZXT’s cases, which often have solid blocks of colour against black or white. The motherboard also features a built-in digital GRID+ V3 fan controller and integrated HUE+ RGB lighting, all of…

The fan kicked back to barely audible levels at idle and low loads SUPPLIER www.amazon.co.uk The ARCTIC Freezer 33 has been on our Elite list for ten months, thanks to its low noise, good cooling and wallet-friendly price, but the Freezer 33 eSports One aims to improve it further. At £30 inc VAT, it retails for the same price as the original cooler at launch, and it nets you some far superior aesthetic credentials. The whole heatsink and even the heatpipes have been coated in matt black thermal coating, which ARCTIC claims optimises heat dissipation, but improves its visual appeal too. Even better is that the finish appears to be scratch-resistant. The heatsink is identical to that of the original Freezer 33, with four 6mm heatpipes and a direct…

Both coolers offer full control in Corsair’s Link software Corsair H115i Pro / £135 inc VAT SUPPLIER www.overclockers.co.uk Corsair H150i Pro / £165 inc VAT SUPPLIER www.scan.co.uk It’s been a while since Corsair released a new high-end all-in-one (AIO) liquid cooler, and its presence has been missed at the high end, with the likes of NZXT’s Kraken X62 clearing up in our last AIO cooler Labs test. Thankfully, January saw the release of not one, but two premium AIO liquid coolers from Corsair – the H115i Pro, which retails for £135 inc VAT and the larger H150i Pro, which will set you back a whopping £164 inc VAT. Both are more expensive than the powerful Kraken X62. Starting with the H115i Pro, this beast sports two 140mm fans…

Pisen Power Pack/ £22.99 inc VAT The Pisen is a weighty power brick containing 20,000mAh of power when fully charged. That’s enough for around seven full charges for most phones, although the exact amount will vary. The Pisen boasts two USB outputs and a micro-USB input. The design is simple, but well done. The shape of the pack avoids squared corners, making it more comfortable for transport, and the sides are textured for grip. The use of an LCD showing the remaining capacity as a percentage is a handy touch too, as the use of three or four LED indicators would mean the margin between one light and the next one could be an entire extra phone’s worth of charge. The Pisen isn’t pretty, but it offers a lot of…

How we test The CPU landscape was fizzing throughout 2017, and even though we’re a few months away from AMD’s second-generation Ryzen CPUs, now is a great time to build a new PC. Both Intel and AMD have cut prices of their mainstream desktop processors, with AMD making some particularly savage, consumer-pleasing temporary discounts before Christmas, followed by some permanent cuts in early January. With the likes of the Ryzen 5 1600, with its six cores and 12 threads, now costing just £165 inc VAT, are Intel’s Coffee Lake CPUs now completely redundant, or can their overclocking prowess and efficiency give them an edge? To find out, we’ve pitched every Intel Coffee Lake CPU from the Core i3-8100 to the Core i7-8700K against its closest AMD rival in terms of…

We could run this chip at a super-high 5.1GHz frequency using a 1.34V vcore SUPPLIER www.overclockers.co.uk We gave the Core i3-8350K a rave review in our initial Coffee Lake coverage, as this CPU is essentially a Core i5 K-series CPU with a cheaper price tag. At £170 inc VAT, it costs £50 less than the Core i5-7600K’s price earlier in 2017, yet it sports a very similar specification, thanks to Intel bumping up the core counts of its Coffee Lake CPUs compared with their Kaby Lake predecessors. The Core i3-8350K actually trumps the 7600K in some areas too. It has 8MB of L3 cache compared to the 7600K’s 6MB and it has a 200MHz higher base frequency too, at 4GHz as opposed to 3.8GHz. This frequency also makes it…

It enjoys a 400MHz advantage in base and Precision Boost clocks over the Ryzen 5 1600 SUPPLIER www.morecomputers.com While AMD originally promised that the X-edition CPUs in its range of Ryzen products would be the best options for overclockers, it turned out the opposite was often true, with CPUs such as the Ryzen 5 1600X only really being the better choice if you planned to run your CPU at stock speed. The reasons for this situation are that many non-X-editions CPUs, such as the Ryzen 5 1600, actually overclock to similar speeds as their X-edition counterparts, despite the fact that X-edition CPUs are supposedly speed-binned. Secondly, the X-edition CPUs have higher base and boost frequencies, so they’re quicker than the standard CPUs at stock speed. For example, the Ryzen…

It had a massive lead over every other CPU once we’d hit 5GHz using a vcore of 1.28V SUPPLIER www.scan.co.uk While Intel’s Core i7-7800X offers an overclockable and affordable way to get six cores and 12 threads, all eyes have been on the mainstream Core i7-8700K instead, and for several reasons. Firstly, the 7800X’s quad-channel memory support isn’t a feature that will benefit gaming-focused enthusiasts, or even most content creators, and X299 chipset motherboards are also much more expensive than their Z370 counterparts. The Core i7-7800X itself might be a little cheaper than its Coffee Lake sibling, but the total system cost will end up being much higher. Also, while the Skylake-X Core i7-7800X was a much better overclocker than its Broadwell-E predecessor, managing to hit 4.8GHz relatively easily,…

While you can get started in emulation with just a simple software download, additional accessories can really enhance the experience. Not only can you interface classic hardware with your PC or Raspberry Pi, but there are also tiny replicas of some classic machine cases now readily available. Cases An unadorned Raspberry Pi is typically robust enough for use as an emulator, but there are reasons above protection to invest in a case – such as offering a shout-out to your favourite classic hardware. In addition to the Retroflag NESPi Case pictured (£24.99 inc VAT, www.amazon.co.uk), you can find 3D-printed scale models of all sorts of computers and consoles including the Commodore VIC-20, 64, and Amiga computers (£14.99-£26.99 inc VAT, www.ebay.co.uk) through to the first PlayStation. However, many of them are…

While a tour of your favourite search engine will likely turn up a wealth of packages for an emulated system, the legal concerns make your search for software a little more challenging, but not impossibly so. One rich source of software is The Internet Archive (https://archive.org), a non-profit US organisation founded in 1996, aiming to collect and preserve the entire Internet – a goal that’s expanded over the years to cover audiovisual printed and software-based content. ‘The Archive has been sent thousands of pieces of software throughout the years, starting with the early 2000s when it allowed outside contributors to add data,’ explains Jason Scott, the Internet Archive’s software curator.‘They’d uploaded texts, movies and music, but also software and games. The problem was there was no easy way to try…

During the original disclosure, researchers detailed three vulnerabilities. Firstly, Variant 1 and Variant 2, dubbed Spectre and applicable to processors from Intel, AMD and ARM. Meanwhile, Variant 3, dubbed Meltdown, is only applicable to Intel processors. Further investigation uncovered Variant 3a, a new approach to exploitation of the Meltdown flaw, which allowed it to be extended to selected ARM processors as well. Each variant, bar the ARM-specific Variant 3a, has its own entry in the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) database ( https://cve.mitre.org ), which can be searched for more information. Variant 1: Bounds Check Bypass, CVE-2017-5753 Variant 2: Branch Target Injection, CVE-2017-5715 Variant 3: Rogue Cache Data Load, CVE-2017-5754 Variant 3: Rogue Cache Data Load (ARM variant), no CVE yet assigned…

This delay could damage Intel after five years of shipping 14nm products The recent CES trade show in Las Vegas showcased polar differences between Intel and AMD. Intel’s event showed off research-grade or attention-grabbing topics, such as quantum computing, autonomous drones and AI, but lacked any news of actual products it intends to sell. When its CEO was asked about its delayed 10nm products, he claimed it was already shipping some. That’s technically true – it shipped a single 10nm product on 31 December 2017: a dual-core CPU with no graphics that runs at 2GHz. It’s not a product that anyone will actually buy. When asked for the latest CPU roadmaps, which Intel has proactively shared in the past, Intel declined to give any away. That’s extremely unusual behaviour for…

MSI hasn’t skimped on the audio either, as you get Realtek’s latest ALC1220 codec SUPPLIER www.cclonline.com We’re still waiting for Intel to release Coffee Lake chipsets other than the expensive Z370 model, not least so that its non-K-series CPUs can offer better value once you factor in the motherboard price. It seems we’ll have to wait a bit longer in order to pick up boards that aren’t geared towards overclocking and cost under £100, but MSI has managed to squeeze quite a few features into its Z370 SLI Plus, which costs just £125 inc VAT. Compared with the likes of Asus’ Z370 Strix ATX boards, which cost close to £200, it’s a comparative bargain, and it looks great, with a black PCB and heatsinks mixed with splashes of silver.…

The software gives you full control over fan curve profiles SUPPLIER www.overclockers.co.uk NZXT has offered some great micro-ATX cases in the past, but has recently been absent from any chassis below the ATX form factor until the divisive Manta came along. However, the new H-series brings not only a new mini-ITX case – the H200i – but also a micro-ATX case in the form of the H400i. At £150 inc VAT, it’s one of the most expensive micro-ATX cases we’ve ever reviewed. Amazingly, there’s no aluminium in sight nor an integrated cooling system, which make the price tag seem very optimistic. However, the build quality and specifications shed some light on why it costs as much as an average premium ATX tower. With its 210 x 421 x 417mm…

PROCESSORS TESTS: We use Custom PC RealBench 2015, Cinebench and Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation, installed on Windows 10 Home 64-bit, and record the power draw of the test PC. These tests cover a broad range of performance characteristics, including image editing, gaming, video encoding and 3D rendering. We run all tests at stock speed and at the CPU’s highest overclocked frequency. GRAPHICS CARDS Graphics cards are mainly evaluated on how fast they are for their price. However, we also consider the efficacy and quietness of the cooler. Every graphics card is tested in the same PC, so all results are directly comparable. T E STS : By using the fast PC detailed on the left, we can be sure that any limitations are due to the graphics card on…

The 3.6GHz clock speed is significant because that’s as high as she goes SUPPLIER www.overclockers.co.uk It’s amazing to think that Intel’s Kaby Lake-based Core i3-7100 still retails for around £100 inc VAT, yet only has two cores and four threads. It might just have passed as a budget gaming CPU, but the low core count could often lead to high frame times, not to mention poor multi-threaded performance. In the wake of AMD’s Ryzen launches in 2017, in particular the Ryzen 3 and Ryzen 5 ranges of quad-core CPUs, Intel was left with little option but to increase its core counts across the board. As a result, the Coffee Lake-based Core i3-8100 sports four cores and is more akin to a Kaby Lake Core i5 as a result, except…

In this price league, the Ryzen 5 1600 is the clear king in terms of all-round performance SUPPLIER www.overclockers.co.uk When we first reviewed the Ryzen 5 1600 last summer, it gained our Premium Grade award thanks to the fact it offered six cores and 12 threads for under £200 inc VAT. Amazingly, the same CPU can now be bought for £30 less, so while Intel’s Core i3-8350K might seem like great value for money at first, the fact you can get AMD’s cheapest 6-core CPU, with three times the number of threads for the same price, puts it into perspective. It was a great CPU at launch, as it bettered every Intel CPU below £300 in any multi-threaded task, ending the Core i5-7600K’s reign as our recommended circa-£200 CPU.…

It has 3MB more L3 cache than its predecessor, and 50 per cent more L2 cache SUPPLIER www.overclockers.co.uk After getting its quad-core Kaby Lake CPUs well and truly kicked by AMD’s 6-core Ryzen 5 chips last year, Intel’s new K-series Core i5 chip has enabled the firm to stomp back, being a great all-rounder and fairly future-proof. Having received a small price cut from its original £300 inc VAT price tag a few months ago, Intel’s 6-core, non-Hyper-Threaded Core i5-8600K now retails for a much more reasonable price of £249 inc VAT. That price is only a few tenners more than you’ll pay for a Core i5-7600K, yet you get two more cores and nearly as much overclocking headroom. In addition, the Core i5-8600K also has 3MB more L3…

The flagship CPU’s price is now just a stone’s throw away from the Ryzen 7 1700 SUPPLIER www.memoryc.com In percentage terms, the Ryzen 7 1800X has received the biggest discount of any CPU in the past six months, with its price falling from £500 to just £292 inc VAT when we wrapped up this issue. As a result, Intel has had to follow suit, with the Core i7-8700K falling from £400 back in November to £350 inc VAT now, but that’s still a solid £50 more than AMD’s Ryzen 7 1800X. The Ryzen mainstream flagship CPU’s price is now just a stone’s throw away from that of the Ryzen 7 1700, but while the latter offers similar overclocking potential and a lower price tag, the Ryzen 7 1800X makes…

In the second half of the 1990s, game development technology was improving at an exponential rate. The industry was in the latter stages of moving from 2D to 3D-focused games, while new innovations such as graphics hardware acceleration and scripting languages were just coming onto the scene. Many software that’s taken for granted now, such as out-of-the-box gamedev toolkits and industry-standard middleware, still didn’t exist. Hence, almost every game programmer in the world was figuring out how to put their technology forward in their own way. It was a time of furious change and dynamism, and few games demonstrate this technological upheaval as well as Grim Fandango. Tim Schafer’s comic crime caper in the land of the dead was LucasArts’ first 3D adventure game, and the studio’s most ambitious project…

The idea of being able to play every game ever made for your favourite vintage console is an undeniably tempting one, but it’s an area rife with legal difficulties.‘An emulator created using new code or open source code is unlikely to be illegal on its own,’ explains Chris Taylor, a partner at law firm Eaton Smith LLP and legal counsel to a range of UK-based and international game development and publishing clients, ‘but if any code is used from a third party’s software – for example, a platform holder – then there’s more than likely to be breaches of copyright laws. ‘Beyond the emulator, there are the ROM [read only memory] images of the games themselves. If an emulator is legal, is playing a game through one legal as well?…

The processor market has recently been rocked by the disclosure of two of the biggest security vulnerabilities in history: Meltdown and Spectre. Stemming from hardware design choices made to boost performance, the flaws affect almost every processor on the market going back to the mid-1990s, and potentially allow thieves to grab the contents of arbitrary, supposedly-protected memory locations, using nothing more than a malicious webpage. The flaws The root of both Spectre and Meltdown lies in speculative execution, a performance-boosting technique that forms part of the out-of-order execution (OOOE) employed by the majority of modern processors. Under speculative execution, the processor is free to go ahead and start pulling data and instructions before they’re required; when the program actually requires them, they appear instantaneously. If they turn out to not…

REVIEW Coinkite Opendime They say that the best time to plant a tree was 30 years ago, and that the second-best time is today. Bitcoin, and other cryptocurrencies, are similar. The best time to get involved in Bitcoin was in 2009, when pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto released the first implementation. Back then, you could have filled your boots with coins by doing nothing but running a simple program on your CPU; the second-best time is now. Cryptocurrencies are basically ‘coins’ that are given value and security through cryptographic work, and they can be transferred via peer-to-peer, while still offering the benefits of digital cash. They make for a fascinating subject, and interest in them has exploded over the past year. A single Bitcoin is, at the time of writing, worth…

Pushing mini-ITX to the extreme Around 18 months ago I decided to upgrade from my Intel Haswell PC, not only because I was increasingly finding the need for more than four cores, but also because my aging AMD Radeon RX 480 was struggling in games on my 34in ultra-wide monitor. My main rig has been mini-ITX-sized for a few incarnations now, and I saw no need to size up when support for high-end mini systems is now better than ever. Having built the cover PC for Custom PC in Issue 153, I knew how the PC would look. I’d be using Raijintek’s Metis case, along with ASRock’s X99E-ITX/AC motherboard – the predecessor to ASRock’s X299E-ITX/ AC (see Issue 174, p26). I planned to use a GeForce GTX 1070 graphics card…

It sounds stupid, given there are billions of gamers across the world who just have a hobby with no ill effects It finally happened. Gaming addiction is a real thing. Or at least that’s the impression you’d get if you just scanned the headlines. The facts are a little different, but not necessarily better. The World Health Organisation, the body responsible for declaring what is or isn’t a disease as new research crops up (and sometimes recommending the treatment), has proposed ‘Gaming Disorder’ for the June 2018 edition of the International Classification of Diseases. Gaming disorder. It sounds stupid, given there are billions of gamers across the world who just have a hobby with no ill effects. That enough of them are ruining their lives because of video games to…

The two 5-pin LED headers are compatible with RGBW strips SUPPLIER www.box.co.uk It’s not just MSI (see p24) that’s in a battle against price with its Z370 motherboards. Gigabyte’s Z370 Aorus Gaming 3 will also set you back a very reasonable £131 inc VAT. It’s a tad more expensive than the MSI Z370 SLI Plus, but it’s also quite a different board. In terms of expansion possibilities, the Gigabyte has four 1x PCI-E slots compared to the MSI’s three, although its lower slot is actually a 16x slot, so it’s more flexible in terms of what you can install. However, the Gigabyte has one 1x slot above the primary 16x slot, so however many graphics cards you use, you’ll always be able to access at least one 1x slot.…

The 200MHz XFR boost allows a single core to hit 3.9GHz at stock speed SUPPLIER www.ebuyer.com As the second cheapest AMD Ryzen CPU available, the Ryzen 3 1300X is potentially a great budget processor and, like many of its siblings, it’s received a price cut and now retails for just £110 inc VAT, which makes it £15 cheaper than its launch price. At this end of the price spectrum, two features stand out with the Ryzen 3 1300X – unlike the similarly priced Intel Core i3-8100, it has an unlocked multiplier, and it also has the biggest XFR boost in AMD’s mainstream Ryzen range, at 200MHz. The latter allows a single core to hit 3.9GHz at stock speed, while the Precision Boost frequency is 3.7GHz and the base frequency…

If you’re not intending to overclock, the Core i5-8400 offers plenty of bang for your buck SUPPLIER www.cclonline.com Marking the cheapest way to get a 6-core Intel CPU, the Core i5-8400 is the only Intel option for around £200 if you want some serious multi-threaded grunt without a discrete GPU. It’s a potentially attractive option if you want to build a tiny mini-ITX PC and have no interest in gaming, but as we’ve said elsewhere this month, Intel’s multiplier locked, K-series Coffee Lake CPUs suffer from one significant issue at the moment – the lack of cheap supporting motherboards. At the moment, your only option is to invest in an overclocking-orientated motherboard based on Intel’s top-end Z370 chipset, as Intel has only released one Coffee Lake-compatible chipset so far.…

What the AMD CPU lacks in clock speed, it makes up for in cores and threads SUPPLIER www.cclonline.com Alongside AMD’s Ryzen 5 1600, the Ryzen 7 1700 was one of the best CPUs for enthusiasts that AMD released in 2017. It was considerably cheaper than the flagship Ryzen 7 1800X, but apart from lower stock speed frequencies, the two chips were identical. As a result, that if you were game for a bit of overclocking, a Ryzen 7 1700 could match an overclocked Ryzen 7 1800X in terms of performance, but for much less money. Both CPUs have enjoyed price cuts, though, and the Ryzen 7 1700 is now available for just £254 inc VAT, which is a bargain considering it has eight cores and 16 threads, and it…

The undead hordes fill the screen, washing over your base’s defences like a fleshy tsunami A few months back, I wrote a column looking over the dramatic decline in the development of real-time strategy games. Where it was once t h e defining strategy sub-genre, in the past five or six years, the number of real-time strategy (RTS) games being released has dwindled to a couple of major series – namely Total War and Dawn of War. I theorised various, before declaring it ‘unlikely’ the RTS would make a comeback. I felt confident in this assertion until right at the end of last year, when a game arrived that blew this declaration out of the water. They Are Billions is an RTS that involves building a…

Old is gold, and retro gaming is sweeping the world in a major way.Beyond the off-the-shelf devices such as the NES Classic Mini and Spectrum Next, though, it’s possible to make your own classic games console. You’ll need little more than a low-cost Raspberry Pi single-board computer, some clever software and your favourite games from yesteryear – or today, courtesy of some very smart developers who refuse to let their platforms of choice rust in the corner of a storage shed. There are pitfalls, though, from finding software sources that won’t infect your browser with nasties, to picking your way through the often incomprehensible maze of UK copyright law. Read on to see how you can get started with a legal and ethical clean slate.…

The Raspberry Pi makes a great base for an emulation system for a variety of reasons. First, it’s cheap; with even the most powerful model costing around £30 inc VAT, you can start your journey into emulation for less than the cost of a new-release game. Second, it runs GNU/Linux, an operating system for which plenty of emulators have been written. Lastly, it’s surprisingly powerful – with four processor cores and 1GB of RAM, a Raspberry Pi 3 is more than up to the challenge of emulating any machine from the 8-bit and 16-bit eras without breaking sweat. The easiest way to turn a Raspberry Pi into an emulation station is with RetroPie, which – confusingly – is neither an emulator nor a host operating system. RetroPie is, simply, a…

MILESTONES THIS MONTH TOP 20 OVERALL TOP 20 PRODUCERS 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.…

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…

It could be argued that 2018 hasn’t got off to a particularly auspicious start in the tech industry. For instance, there’s been precious little else in the tech news headlines for the last few weeks than the public unveiling of the Meltdown and Spectre security exploits that are potentially executable on millions of computing devices worldwide. You can read more about the details of the exploits in this month’s feature on p93. The other big issue is graphics card pricing; as I discussed last month, this continues to rise at an alarming rate due to the hyper-demand of individual and corporate cryptocurrency miners. While on one hand, this surge in sales is great news for business, I also can’t help but feel sorry for any gamers who were planning on…