Custom PC UK

Sadly, I’m going to start this column with a piece of rubbish news, which is that you’re holding the last print issue of Custom PC magazine. We’re all upset about it, but with the cost of printing and paper spiralling out of control, it’s no longer sustainable to keep the magazine going. I’ve worked on Custom PC in some form or another since the very first issue back in 2003, as has James Gorbold (see p98) and our production editor Julie Birrell, and even then, there were many naysayers who thought we were delusional to launch a new PC print mag in the Internet era. Nearly 20 years later, we’re one of the last PC magazines still standing, with a loyal base of readers who love what we do and a publication…

In the latest desktop road map to leak, Intel appears to have killed any chance of us seeing its previously scheduled 14th-generation ‘Meteor Lake’ CPUs for desktop PCs this year, and is instead committing to a refresh of the current 13th-generation Raptor Lake line-up, using the same Z790/B760 chipsets. Just six months ago, Intel presented a slide saying that Meteor Lake would scale from 5W to 125W, and then its Management Engine Interface drivers featured a listing for ‘MTL-S’. The ‘-S’ suffix has historically been assigned to PC SKUs of processor ranges, and ‘MTL’ is clearly short for ‘Meteor Lake’. Intel is, however, apparently still committing to the chip design in laptops, so I think this is an indicator that the industry has now formalised the extreme high-end laptop segment. In this…

When I was a kid there was a cartoon punchline I didn’t understand: ‘people don’t want nice…people want consistency’. I puzzled over it until I became an adult and saw it play out often, particularly in the commercial sphere. Companies can be jerks as long as they’re jerks from the start and are consistent about it. Any attempt to change behaviour or customer treatment is met with suspicion. Nintendo, for example, has always been extremely heavy-handed with intellectual property, shutting down all sorts of projects it’s seen as infringing, even if it isn’t for commercial gain. People generally accept this and go along with it. Of course, it goes double if it’s the other way around. Companies that start off nice but then take something away, perhaps in response to changing…

AMD has finally lifted the lid on its forthcoming Zen 4 chips that make use of the company’s 3D V-Cache tech. The new CPUs will feature a massive stack of L3 cache on top of one of the chiplet dies in each chip and, unlike the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, it looks as though the new CPUs will have decent boost clocks as well. Three chips have been announced, starting with the 8-core Ryzen 7 7800X3D, which has a total of 104MB (L2+L3) of cache and can boost up to 5GHz. In the middle is the 12-core Ryzen 9 7900X3D, which has a total of 140MB of cache and can boost up to 5.6GHz. Finally, there’s the Ryzen 9 7950X3D, which boosts up to 5.7GHz and has a 144MB total of cache.…

Intel has released a new desktop CPU that it says can boost to up to 6GHz. The Core i9-13900KS has the same core spec as the Core i9-13900K, with eight P-Cores and 16 E-Cores, but it’s based on speed-binned silicon that can hit higher clock speeds. The new flagship raises the Thermal Velocity Boost and Max turbo clock speeds of the P-Cores to 6GHz, up from 5.8GHz on the standard Core i9-13900K. It also raises the Turbo Boost Max 3 speed from 5.7GHz to 5.8GHz. The E-Cores remain clocked at the same frequency of 4.3GHz, however. Samples of the Core i9-13900KS came out just too late to be featured in this month’s Labs test, but it’s available to buy now from scan.co.uk for £690 inc VAT.…

SPEC Graphics processor Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti, 2310MHz base clock, 2700MHz boost clock Pipeline 7,680 CUDA cores, 80 ROPS RT cores 60 (3rd-gen) Tensor cores 240 (4th-gen) Memory 12GB GDDR6X, 1313MHz (21GHz effective) Memory interface 192-bit Card interface 16x PCI-E 4 Bandwidth 504.2GB/sec Power connectors 1 x 16-pin / 3 x 8-pin The latest slice of Ada silicon to escape from Nvidia’s big green barn of overpriced wares is the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti. Originally called the GeForce RTX 4080 12GB and priced at £899, Nvidia quickly ‘unlaunched’ it after negative feedback. It’s now dropped the price by £100 for the base spec and renamed it the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti. This was definitely a move in the right direction, as this GPU is nothing like a GeForce RTX 4080 with just 12GB of memory. For starters, it’s based on a completely different chip, the AD104, which has a…