Table of contents for February 2020 in Custom PC UK

The Threadripper 2970WX was probably the most niche Threadripper CPU AMD has ever released. The only reason you’d consider a WX-series CPU was for the multi-threaded grunt, and even then it only worked properly in a select few applications. This time, the 24-core, 48-thread model is the Threadripper 3960X, which is a good £600 cheaper than its 32-core sibling, yet it offers an identical boost frequency of 4.5GHz and a higher base frequency of 3.8GHz. With AMD’s 7nm Zen 2 architecture under the hood, the Threadripper 3960X is potentially a much better all-rounder than its predecessor. However, it stands alone in terms of price, with Intel’s Core i9-10980XE retailing for around £400 less and having six fewer cores, while its bigger sibling will set you back two grand. The only people…

If a motherboard is scored on the weight of its box, the ROG Zenith II Extreme would rack up the points. It’s one of the most extreme motherboards to pass through our lab. For starters, while pricing was still very approximate when we went to press, it’s  set to retail for around £700, which makes this E-ATX monster the most expensive desktop motherboard we’ve ever reviewed. Secondly, it looks absolutely stunning in a heavy metal, imposing kind of way. However, Asus hasn’t just slapped copious amounts of aluminium to the PCB in the form of heatsinks and backplates. The RGB lighting is incredible, with an infinity mirror-like array on the I/O shroud, a huge illuminated ROG logo on the chipset heatsink and a vivid, top-to-bottom row of RGB LEDs in…

If there was one range of PC components that really didn’t need another contender, it was the £200-£250 graphics card segment. We already have the GeForce GTX 1660 and Ti in there, along with AMD’s aging Radeon RX Vega56 and Nvidia’s last-gen GTX 1070 muddying the waters further. Nevertheless, Nvidia has decided that we need one more slightly different GPU in the mix, introducing a new Super-branded flavour of its GeForce GTX 1660. Unlike the Super RTX line-up, there’s no change to the GPU here. You still get the same 1,408 stream processors and 48 ROPS, attached to a 192-bit memory interface. Where the Super variant differs from its predecessor is the memory. It has 6GB of 1750MHz (14GHz effective) GDDR6 memory, compared to the original GTX 1660’s 6GB of…

The Razer Tartarus Pro is an intriguing update to the company’s gamepad product line. In case you’re unfamiliar with the Tartarus line-up, these devices are basically standalone gaming keypads that you would use primarily in place of a normal keyboard. It provides a more ergonomic shape for resting your hand, and it’s more compact than a normal keyboard, so it’s easier to position in a way that feels comfortable. Meanwhile, its key layout puts more keys into closer reach than with a normal keyboard. You get a total of 19 keys that sit under your fingers, with another button under your thumb. In between them is a D-pad that you can control with your thumb and a scroll wheel that sits next to your index finger. It’s a smartly designed…

AlphaBeta is a new name in the PC builders market, and its i5 RTX gets off to a solid start by offering a GeForce RTX 2070 Super GPU in a machine that costs just £999 inc VAT. A large chunk of AlphaBeta’s budget has clearly gone on the GPU, but it’s still paired with a Core i5-9600KF CPU. This chip has no integrated graphics, so it’s cheaper than the Core i5-9600K, but it’s otherwise identical, with six cores, no Hyper-Threading, and respective base and boost frequencies of 3.7GHz and 4.6GHz. The rest of the specification is middling. There’s 16GB of memory, but it only runs at 2400MHz – a  little slower than most rivals. There’s a 500GB Crucial MX500 SSD, but no secondary hard disk. The PSU is modest too…

How we test Gaming laptops are complex devices with many areas where a machine can excel or disappoint, so a robust set of test procedures is required to discover which systems are worth buying. They’re gaming laptops, of course, so we’ve deployed our gaming tests to find out which machines can handle top titles at solid speeds, and to discover whether laptops can handle ray tracing and deliver the frame rates required to handle screens with high refresh rates. We’ve tested those panels with an X-Rite i1 Display Pro colorimeter in order to see which screens have the best contrast, colour accuracy and gamut coverage levels. Many gaming laptops are also used for work, which is no surprise given their powerful components. In order to evaluate their suitability, we’ve run…

lienware laptops are well-known for their gregarious design, and the m17 is no exception, with its bold RGB LEDs and honeycomb-styled air vent and speaker grilles. It looks more eye-catching than  the modest Chillblast and outdated MSI. Build quality is good too, with sturdy matt magnesium alloy used throughout, and the m17 has great software, eye-tracking and loads of RGB LEDs. It’s a good start, but the £2,599 price is high and, at 2.6kg, the m17 is the heaviest system on test. Ergonomics are solid. The trackpad has snappy buttons, and the chiclet keyboard has 1.7mm of travel, a rock-solid base, RGB LED backlighting and anti-ghosting alongside four macro keys. The Chillblast’s mechanical keyboard is better, but the Alienware has the best chiclet unit in the Labs. Graphics power comes…

MSI’s GS75 Stealth 8SG-046UK is the most expensive machine on test this month, with a price that’s more than £200 beyond even the Alienware. It’s the only machine here with 32GB of memory as well, and it has 1TB of solid state storage. It also comes kitted with a GeForce RTX 2080 Max-Q GPU, which is one of the most powerful GPUs in the Labs – just like the Alienware. The other 17.3in machine on test, the Chillblast, uses the full-power RTX 2070, which has fewer stream processors but faster clock speeds. However, the MSI uses the older Core i7-8750H, which still has six cores, but has reduced speeds when compared with the Core i7-9750H used in rivals. That means reduced application performance. The MSI beat the Alienware in the…

Scan’s 3XS Vengeance GL 2070 looks pretty underwhelming compared with most of the competition this month. The exterior is built from plain, brushed metal and there are few  eye-catching design touches. Build quality is fine, and the Scan is neither too heavy or thick. The spec is solid though. Scan makes good use of the Core i7-9750H, and the Vengeance GL 2070 is the fastest Core i7 laptop on test in terms of application performance, easily beating the HP Omen 15 and Chillblast machines and only coming second to the PC Specialist and its Core i9 CPU. The rest of the specification is decent, with 16GB of 2666MHz memory, and the inclusion of a 1TB SSD and a 2TB hard disk gives the Scan the best storage setup on test this…

After a dodgy sequel and a decent but largely overlooked spin-off, GRID is Codemasters’ attempt to take its arcade series back to the roots that made Race Driver: GRID a success in 2008. It’s strips away unnecessary frippery and focuses entirely on track action. After a brief introduction that sees you complete three rapid-fire events, GRID catapults players straight at its career mode’s wall of races. Its four primary categories – Touring Cars, Stock Cars, Experimental Cars and a Fernando Alonso-branded Supercar category – each offers 14 events and dozens of races. There are also 28 more invitational events, with cars ranging from Mini Coopers to classic Ferraris. These events take place within what seems like a wide variety of locations, ranging from British classics, such as Brands Hatch and…

Trine 4 could be more accurately described as ‘Trine 3 done right’. The third game’s attempt to blend 2D platforming with full 3D movement and combat didn’t go down well with fans. What’s more, the experiment was so costly for developer Frozenbyte that it had to cut the planned game short, with a sudden and unsatisfying cliffhanger ending. Rather than continuing from here, Trine 4 essentially pretends Trine 3 never happened, returning to its pure 2D roots with a new story. It’s a delightful return to form that sees the series’ three heroes (Amadeus the Wizard, Zora the Thief and Ser Pontius the Knight) reunite as they attempt to track down a missing prince whose nightmares can take physical form. The quest seems straightforward at first, but the Prince proves…

Dangerous Prototypes has confirmed that it’s working on an upgraded version of its Bus Pirate universal bus interface device, dubbed the Bus Pirate Ultra and replacing the original device’s microcontroller with a Lattice iCE40 field-programmable gate array (FPGA). The Bus Pirate Ultra aims to achieve the original device’s accomplishments, allowing users to communicate with hardware on a range of bus types, while adding considerably more features, including the ability to drive an on-board colour LCD. No release date or pricing has yet been announced for the Bus Pirate Ultra, but interested parties can visit dangerousprototypes.com/blog to read about the device’s development process.…

In last month’s column I lamented that AMD needed a Zen 2 chip for around £125 in order to compete with the Intel Core i5-9400F. The Ryzen 5 3500X is that chip, except you can’t buy it in the UK. Out here in East Asia, however, I just picked one up in a retail box with a three-year warranty for the equivalent of around £125, which I’ve paired with a bargain-end Gigabyte Aurous B450 M (micro-ATX) motherboard. I dug into my box of bits and threw in a pair of old 4GB DDR4 DIMMs, along with an early Samsung PM941 256GB M.2 SSD, and the result is a very responsive system that will handle web browsing, office work and 1080p gaming. If you’ve been clinging onto an older Sandy Bridge,…

Bite the dust I’ve been reading Custom PC since the very first issue and I’m over the moon at the improvements since the Raspberry Pi buyout! There is one feature I would absolutely love to see in the magazine, though, which has plagued me for decades – how to build a dust-free PC. It doesn’t seem to matter what components or case I use, dust finds its way into my rig, and always has done (even in a tidy and smoke-free environment). I recently upgraded my son’s PC, and it took us longer to clean it than it did to install the new GPU. Is there any way to prevent this, and if not, how about an article full of your top cleaning tips? Keep up the excellent work with…

AMD’s Threadripper 2990WX and 2970WX were, thankfully for Intel, rather niche, thanks to several issues at launch hindering performance. Various tweaks led to improvements over the months, but they still lack grunt in many tasks outside of workstation-class applications, in part due to the way they’re configured. With 3rd-gen Threadripper, though, AMD has connected all the Core Chiplet Dies, which amount to 32 cores and 64 threads, to an I/O die, giving each die access to the memory controllers and PCI-E bus. This setup should massively improve performance, especially in games and lightly-threaded tasks that benefit from lower latencies, plus you have the improvements of the 7nm Zen 2 architecture as well. The peak boost frequency has risen from 4.2GHz to 4.5GHz for the Threadripper 3970X compared to the Threadripper…

It’s taken AMD a while to get its final retail Zen 2 AM4 processor out the door, and the resulting delay means that it lands in the same month as Intel’s Core i9-10980XE, as well as AMD’s own 24 and 32-core 3rd-gen Threadripper CPUs. It’s a fascinating combination, but you might argue that the Ryzen 9 3950X is carving out a niche for itself, rather than competing with any new CPUs that have launched this year. For starters, even though AMD’s latest chipset supports PCI-E 4, the X570 platform still lacks quad-channel memory support and has far fewer PCI-E lanes than Intel’s X299 equivalent. It has so many more cores than any other mainstream CPU that there’s no suitable comparison there either. However, with NVMe SSDs readily available in 2TB…

Sapphire’s Radeon RX 5700 XT Nitro+ is what happens when you tell your component designers that they really can’t have too much bling on a graphics card. Not only has Sapphire removed the horrible reference blower cooler from this card, but it’s also fitted a custom cooler that looks like it came from a cyberpunk future. Our favourite part is the ARGB lighting diffuser along the top edge. Assuming you’re not using a vertical PCI-E riser, this part will be on display through your case window. It has several RGB LEDs behind it, and creates a smooth effect where the colours run into one another. You can set the lighting software to run a chaser effect across the diffuser on the edge, through the Sapphire logo just below it and…

MORRISONS MINCE PIES /£1 for six Opening the test this year is a really ordinary-looking pie with a star on the top. It shares this appearance almost exactly with some of its rivals (leading to questions over just how many varieties of industrial pie pastry cutters there are in the UK mince pie industry). Despite looking nonplussed, however, the Morrisons pie tasted pretty good. There’s no unpleasant aftertaste, and the filling is surprisingly tasty for the money There’s nothing extravagant here, but if you’re short of cash, this is the best sub-£1 box of pies we’ve tasted this year. TESCO FINEST /£1.85 for six The Tesco Finest pies are big boozy beasts with a strong, sweet flavour and a slightly sharp aftertaste, which divided some of the panel’s judges, but…

HP’s affordable Omen 15 balances eye-catching looks with a refined sense of design. Older Omen models had red accents and outlandish angles, but those have been replaced with modest textured metal and matt aluminium. It’s one of  the best-looking machines in the Labs. It measures 20mm thick and build quality is solid, but it’s a bit heavier than rivals. Still, it’s a good start – it’s just as sturdy as the Razer and better than the Acer and Scan machines in this respect. The HP has three full-sized USB 3.1 ports and a Type-C socket that supports Thunderbolt 3 – alongside a card reader, Gigabit Ethernet and Wi-Fi 6 – those are great connection options. Meanwhile, the chiclet keyboard has customisable RGB LEDs and 26-key anti-ghosting support. The buttons have…

Razer’s Blade 15 is arguably the best-looking laptop in the Labs, with its aluminium frame, clean lines and smart logos. It’s slim and light, with a weight of 2.1kg and a 20mm body, and build quality is exceptional. Acer’s rival offers similar dimensions alongside more basic looks and build quality, while the HP and Scan machines are much larger. Connection options are solid too, with Thunderbolt 3 support included. It’s a good start, but the Razer falters in practical areas. It uses an RTX 2060, just like the Acer, and its Tomb Raider, Warhammer and Battlefield minimums of 60fps, 55fps and 50fps are virtually identical to those of the Acer. However, the Razer’s bigger competition comes from the Scan and HP, both of which have RTX 2070 Max-Q GPUs. Both…

Core component bundles The fundamental specifications we recommend for various types of PC. Just add your preferred case and power supply, and double-check there’s room in your case for your chosen components, especially the GPU cooler and graphics card. We’ve largely stopped reviewing power supplies, as the 80 Plus certification scheme has now effectively eliminated unstable PSUs. Instead, we’ve recommended the wattage and minimum 80 Plus certification you should consider for each component bundle. You can then choose whether you want a PSU with modular or captive cables. Mini PCs Our favourite components for building a micro-ATX or mini-ITX PC. Always double-check how much room is available in your chosen case before buying your components. Some mini-ITX cases don’t have room for large all-in-one liquid coolers, for example, or tall…

Whereas most role-playing games treat character creation as a separate entity that occurs before the game starts, Disco Elysium dedicates its entire length to figuring out who you are, spiritually and literally. It also happens to be one of the most imaginative, touching and laugh-out-loud funny RPGs in ages. You play an alcoholic, drug-addled police detective who, after one too many all-night benders, awakes in a hotel room having sluiced his entire memory right out of his head. You can’t remember your name, what you look like, or what you’re doing in the dilapidated port-town of Martinaise. Through the intervention of your newly assigned partner, Kim Kitsuragi, you learn that you’re investigating the death of a man hanging from a tree behind the hotel. You chase these two cases –…

REVIEW PISTOL WHIP / £19.49 inc VAT DEVELOPER Cloudhead Games / PUBLISHER Cloudhead Games Pistol Whip is a rhythm game and first-person shooter hybrid. The developer claims it was inspired by ‘action movies like John Wick and Equilibrium’, although we reckon it’s more likely inspired by two of the best, most successful VR games currently available – the rhythmic block-slicing of Beat Saber and slow-mo shooter SUPERHOT VR. That’s not to besmirch the work by Cloudhead Games. Pistol whip is a decent blend of two of our favourite VR experiences. Each stage sees you automatically moving forwards through a loosely sketched 3D environment, while silhouetted enemies appear from both sides and attempt to add a large dose of lead into your diet. Wielding a pistol in each hand, your goal…

REVIEW Argon 1 Pi 4 Argon 40’s original Argon One case for the Raspberry Pi (reviewed in Issue 188) was clever, but flawed. Using an aluminium upper part and a plastic lower part, the case served as both housing and heatsink, while a GPIO extension board provided a smart power button and software-controlled cooling fan. There was even a daughterboard that brought all the Pi’s connectors around to one side, finally solving the problem of messy cabling. The Argon One was a great design, but far from perfect. The cooling fan was largely pointless, while the smart power board – which allows the Pi to be safely powered off or reset if it becomes unresponsive – drew enough power on its own to cause the ‘lightning-bolt’ under-voltage symbol to be…

Three new CPUs, but no new socket mounts If you own an expensive CPU cooler, the thought of upgrading to one of the new CPUs this month might have prompted you to think about purchasing a new CPU cooler too. Some cooler manufacturers have previously been delighted by the fact that PC enthusiasts had to fork out for new mounting gear, or even entire new coolers, to cater for their shiny new hardware. The last time this happened was with AMD’s AMD 4 and TR4 sockets. The former had slightly wider mounting holes than previous mainstream AMD sockets. It forced manufacturers to reassess their coolers and come up with different mounting mechanisms, while also accounting for the very different CPU lurking under the heatspreader. The same was doubly true for…

To enter your machine for possible inclusion in Readers’ Drives, your build needs to be fully working and, ideally, based in the UK. Simply send us a couple of photos on Twitter CustomPCMag) or Facebook (CPCMagazine), or email low-res ones to editor@custompcmag.org.uk. Fame isn’t the only prize; you’ll also get your hands on some fabulous prizes. Corsair K70 RGB MK.2 SE – Cherry MX Speed The Corsair K70 RGB MK.2 SE is a premium mechanical gaming keyboard that’s built to last. It has a silver anodised brushed aluminium frame, as well as stunning white precision-moulded, double-shot keycaps. It’s built to turn heads and withstand a lifetime of gaming. There’s a detachable, soft-touch wrist rest too. Meanwhile, its Cherry MX  Speed mechanical keyswitches provide the reliability and accuracy you demand, with…

I’ve always been interested in the relationship between gaming and mental health, but historically that’s been very much from a ‘games are brilliant escapism when you can’t cope’ perspective (I’ve frequently credited Final Fantasy IX with saving me following a very serious mental health breakdown many years ago). Increasingly, though, it’s obvious that – a few corporate gamified apps aside – games can be used as a social good far beyond escapism and fun. The evidence for any causal relationship between gaming and mental health problems has been thoroughly explored in this column many times, and I feel safe in saying I’ve been vindicated for my warnings and criticism around ‘gaming disorder’ and the medicalisation of gaming behaviours. Games designed specifically to study psychology or neuroscience are often made cheaply…

Despite being the surprise member of AMD’s 2017 Zen party, and not even a part of AMD’s original plans for its desktop CPU onslaught, Threadripper has undergone the most dramatic changes of any Zen-based CPU. We first had a model with eight, 12 and 16 cores. Then the 2nd-gen chips maintained compatibility with Socket TR4 and the X399 chipset, while adding 24 and 32-core models. This time, AMD has ditched any chips with fewer than 24 cores, with just two models sitting in the current lineup – one with 24 cores and one with 32 cores. However, just before we went to press, AMD told us that a 64-core Threadripper is waiting in the wings too. The decision to keep Threadripper at 24 cores and above is likely down to…

The story of AMD’s Zen CPUs and memory speed has been a complicated and often frustrating one, with early CPUs and motherboards being highly unoptimised when it came to memory support. Running your memory faster than 3000MHz on 1st-gen Ryzen systems originally required very specific memory dies, or you’d be stuck at 2933MHz. It took several months and a few BIOS updates before we could run most memory at high frequencies on the first Zen chips. That was unfortunate, because memory speed is very important with Zen CPUs, whether it’s an AM4 Ryzen chip or a Threadripper processor. All these chips have a high-speed interconnect, otherwise known as Infinity Fabric, which is directly  related to memory speed. This in turn impacts on the performance of the CPU, so using fast…

As we were writing this review, Intel’s new 18-core, 36-thread CPU was still over a week away from launching, so we only had a rough idea how much the Core i9-10980XE will cost, which is expected to be around £1,000 inc VAT in the UK. That’s expensive compared with usual mainstream CPUs, but it’s significantly cheaper than its predecessor, the Core i9-9980XE. Intel has basically made some monumental price cuts in order to counter the AMD Ryzen 3950X (see p24). The latter was rumoured to offer similar performance to the Core i9-9980XE, but for just £750 ,so the blue team had to come up with a plan. Lacking a 10nm desktop CPU die, its only option was to use yet another refinement of its 14nm manufacturing process, first introduced on…

The Cooler Master MM710 is the latest addition to the new wave of ultralight gaming mice. Weighing in at just 53g, it is indeed one of the lightest mice available, and with an asking price of just £45 inc VAT, it’s one of the cheapest ultralight models too. The MM710 keeps down its weight by having much of the outer casing perforated. The entire back two-thirds of the mouse are punctured by hexagonal holes that help shed tens of grams (the similarly-shaped CM110 weighs 92g). The downside to all those holes is that they open the internals up to invasion by dust and spilled drinks, although Cooler Master has thought of this and given the interior a dust-and-waterresistant coating. You’ll want to avoid dunking it in your tea, but it…

Scan’s 3XS Vengeance RTX Ti Fluid is one of the most powerful consumer PCs the Bolton-based firm has ever produced – it serves up a PCI-E 4 SSD, an RTX 2080 Ti GPU and one of AMD’s monster new Ryzen 9 3950X CPUs. You’ll have to shell out a whopping £4,499 inc VAT for this machine, though, so it’s good that AMD’s new chip is a beast. It has 16 cores (and 32 threads via SMT) and a base speed of 3.5GHz. What’s more, Scan has made good use of an extensive water-cooling loop to overclock every one of those 16 cores to 4.3GHz. Of course, those 16 cores are unlikely to be used in most games and office tasks, but they’re great for heavily multi-threaded video and CAD work. The…

COZOO HEADPHONE STAND / £22.99 inc VAT SUPPLIER amazon.co.uk The Cozoo Headphone Stand is a combination of a couple of useful desktop gizmos smushed together. Ostensibly, it’s a headphone stand that attaches to the underside of your desk with a strip of double-sided tape. However, it also has a three-port USB hub and an audio port. This combination of features enables you to not only use the Cozoo as a headset stand, but also as a charging port or, most helpfully, as the point of connection for a USB headset back to your PC. The Cozoo is also supplied with a trio of cable holders, equipped with double-sided tape, in order to mitigate the possible headache of wiring. As such, you can neatly hook the wires to the underside of…

The Chillblast Phantom 17 is the only 17.3in machine in the Labs with a mechanical keyboard. It’s an excellent addition; the buttons have more travel, snap and speed than any chiclet unit, and there’s a strong base. The Chillblast has a numberpad too, and no buttons are reduced in size. The keyboard has RGB LED backlighting too, and it offers a robust gaming and typing experience. We can’t say the same for the trackpad though – it’s large, but the buttons are soft. The design is decent elsewhere too, even if it doesn’t have the pizzazz of the Alienware. Its 2.4kg weight and 27mm frame mean its dimensions slot between the larger Alienware and the slimmer MSI, and its design is smart and subtle – it’s all matt metal and…

he PC Specialist Vortex IX isn’t the most attractive laptop we’ve seen. The lid and base are made from plain metal, the wrist rest is littered with stickers and the sides have strange orange accents. It weighs 2.5kg, and it’s the thickest laptop on test too. On the plus side, it’s kitted out with a Core i9-9980HK CPU with eight Hyper-Threaded cores – the rest of the machines on test have 6-core chips. The CPU has base and boost speeds of 2.4GHz and 5GHz, with that latter figure also the best on test. It’s joined by a full-power RTX 2070 GPU – the same GPU as the Chillblast, while the boot drive is a 500GB Samsung SSD that returned excellent read and write speeds, plus there’s 16GB of 2666MHz memory.…

I’ve never particularly enjoyed reading in games. I enjoy reading in general, of course – I wouldn’t be much of a writer otherwise, but I’ve always found reading in games challenging. I didn’t get into RPGs until the early 2000s, when games such as Morrowind and Knights of the Old Republic made reading less central to the experience. As I’ve become older, I’ve built up more of a tolerance to it, but I still frequently find grappling with text-heavy games difficult. Or at least, that’s what I thought. I’ve always assumed that my dislike of reading in games was more specifically a dislike of reading from a screen.I still buy paper books,for example, because I prefer them to reading on a Kindle or a phone. However, having recently rattled through…

Ubisoft’s practice of reusing ideas and mechanics across multiple games is well known and, when done carefully, that strategy can have its place. However, it comes crashing apart in Ghost: Recon Breakpoint, a horrendously stitched-together ragdoll with which no child would ever want to play. Like its predecessor Ghost Recon: Wildlands, Breakpoint is an open-world tactical shooter. It sees players join forces with up to three friends to infiltrate the island of Auroa. Here, tech-entrepreneur Jace Skell’s drone-manufacturing facility has been hijacked by a rogue private military company known as the Wolves. Wildlands wasn’t great game, but its loop of infiltrating enemy compounds, and its blend of stealth and gunplay to complete objectives had potential. Instead of adding depth to those existing concepts, Breakpoint lumbers its experience with two inexplicable…

It’s easy to get carried away when putting together your new PC; you want to get the best of every component you can afford. However, not all components are created equally when it comes to maximising your gaming experience. Do you really need a 16-core processor or 32GB of RAM? Well, that’s what we’re here to find out. We tested a wide range of components and peripherals across five different games, to see what difference they made. Some upgrades didn’t make a difference to performance, but unlocked better visuals, improved ergonomics or just generally made our gaming life easier. The basis of our test rig was an AMD Ryzen 7 3700X – we then underclocked, overclocked and disabled some of its cores in order to test how a CPU can…

The Arduino IDE is dead, long live the Arduino Pro IDE – with a long-awaited dark mode. Announced during Maker Faire Rome 2019, the Arduino Pro IDE is a new integrated development environment that ditches the legacy IDE in favour of a much more accessible design, although there’s also a Classic Mode for purists. Based on Eclipse Theia, and thus Electron, the IDE is as cross-platform as the original. The Arduino Pro IDE isn’t quite ready for prime time yet. An alpha build is available from github.com/arduino, with no word on when it will replace the original Arduino IDE.…

I’ve been saying for a while now that Intel’s HEDT (high-end desktop) strategy isn’t fit for purpose any more. The products are out of date and out of touch, especially the aging X299 chipset, and they fail to satisfy both the enthusiast and workstation markets at which they’re aimed. Couple that with ongoing supply issues, both with the outgoing 9000-series Skylake-X models and the new 10000-series Cascade Lake-X models, and you have to wonder what’s going on at Intel now. Only offering a one-year warranty on such a high-end premium CPU does seem outstandingly arrogant With demand for HEDT processors at an all-time low, Intel’s big hope for a resurgence in Q4 was the special-edition Core i9-9900KS. This 8-core/16-thread processor ups the base clock from 3.6GHz to 4GHz, and with…