Custom PC UK April 2022

When you’ve been mucking about for PCs as long as we have (and in my case that’s longer than I really want to think about), you accumulate a veritable bank of tips and tricks that prepare you for the future. You learn from your mistakes, other people pass on their wisdom to you and you get better at PC building as you go. Sometimes you make a mistake and think ‘I really wish I’d known that before I started’, or ‘why did no one tell me that?!’ Here’s a confession from a PC veteran who’s been fiddling with the insides of computers for years – after being accustomed to Intel’s LGA sockets for many years, I made a big slip-up when I moved over to AMD’s AM4 socket a few years…

I got in a real grump at AMD’s CES announcements last month. It released 20 new Ryzen 6000-series APUs for laptops, but for desktop users, the promise of new ‘3D V-Cache’ CPUs has been whittled down to a single chip: the Ryzen 7 5800X3D. Arriving sometime in the spring, this 8-core chip is probably the last AM4 CPU we’ll see before AMD brings in its new AM5 socket. AMD even admitted that the claimed 15 per cent performance gains were pretty much exclusive to gaming, and that most other workloads, such as productivity, won’t see similar benefits. It also didn’t announce the price, and it looks like there’s a reason for that. Over the following days, AMD’s chief architect of gaming solutions & marketing, Frank Azor, stated in an interview that ‘V-Cache…

The metaverse is coming, or is already here, or was here and was called Second Life but isn’t here anymore, depending on how you define ‘metaverse’. I wish I could be excited, because I’m not afraid of new things and most technology – including Facebook – has improved my life. However, I haven’t yet seen anything meta-verserelated that gives me hope. It’s all a bit Black Mirror adjacent. The main concern is that the biggest player in whatever the metaverse turns out to be (online connected 3D virtual world, or just a buzzword intended to reassure shareholders) is Facebook. While the other internet behemoth Google at least started out with the motto ‘don’t be evil’, Facebook’s origins were a tad more unwholesome, with Zuckerberg’s website for rating the ‘hotness’ (or notness)…

Microsoft has announced its intention to buy games firm Activision Blizzard in a deal worth $68.7 billion US (around £50.4 billion). The move follows Microsoft snapping up a number of other high-profile game publishers and developers, from titans such as Bethesda to quirky indie developers such as Double Fine. It’s a strategy that’s enabled the firm to add many high-profile titles to its Game Pass services, which are available to Windows and Xbox gamers for a subscription fee. Activision Blizzard publishes a number of high-profile game franchises, including Call of Duty, Overwatch, Warcraft and Diablo, as well as the highly popular Candy Crush. ‘We want to make it easier for people to connect and play great games wherever, whenever and however they want,’ said Microsoft chairman and CEO Satya Nadella in…

AMD kicked off 2022 by demonstrating one of its Zen 4 CPUs in action at an online briefing for the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), claiming that all the CPU’s cores were running at 5GHz. AMD says the first Zen 4 chips (pictured) will be launched in the second half of this year, and will be fabricated on a 5nm process. The company also confirmed that its Zen 4 platform will support the PCI-E 5 interface and DDR5 memory, bringing it into line with Intel’s Alder Lake chips. In addition, Zen 4 sees AMD finally moving its consumer desktop CPUs to a land grid array (LGA) socket, rather than having pins on the CPU. Socket AM5 will feature 1,718 pins and will also be compatible with Socket AM4 coolers. There’s also going to be…

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 boost…