Custom PC UK May 2019

AMD may not have developed real-time ray tracing tech for its latest GPU, but it still had a golden opportunity to hit back hard at Nvidia with the Radeon VII (see p20) this month. With Nvidia’s new GeForce RTX GPUs demanding extremely high prices, but only a tiny fraction of games supporting their new features, AMD could have stormed into the ring with a cut-price, super-fast, rasterisation-only GPU, and gleefully hoovered up a load of cash from disaffected PC gamers. I don’t know how AMD arrived at the £650-£700 price, but it’s utterly bewildering to me There’s a lot to like about the Radeon VII. Its total memory bandwidth of 1TB/sec is huge, and it’s great to see 16GB of HBM2 memory integrated into the same package as the GPU. Thanks to…

I am sure that a fair number of CPC readers have been through several generations of memory upgrades. Every time we change over from one memory tech to the next one, whether it’s from SDR to DDR, or DDR3 to DDR4, the benchmark results of each new generation never show much benefit. However, I believe that DDR5 will be different because of the recent explosion in CPU core counts. The more memory-hungry cores you have in your CPU, the more memory bandwidth you need to feed them. The DDR5 spec is expected to range from 4266 to 6400MHz Pairing an 8-core CPU with dual-channel DDR4 memory is fine, but when you get to 16 cores, then a total bandwidth of ~40GB/sec (for the popular 3200MHz kits) leaves only 2.5GB/sec per core; this,…

Recent gaming news has been concerned with the right to offend, in light of musician Joel Zimmerman (also known as Deadmau5) being suspended from Twitch for what is being described as ‘a homophobic slur’. If you read what he actually said (which I won’t repeat here; it’s nasty), it’s not hard to sympathise with the argument that grown men with millions of followers shouldn’t be hurling such insults on Twitch, or indeed anywhere. Broadly, it’s my position that when it comes to the law, no one has the right to not be offended But the argument has now gone into the wider issue of consistency, with Zimmerman claiming in a recent Reddit thread that ‘I’m not going to stand for Twitch’s double standard when it comes to censoring me and suspending me…

Nvidia releases GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Nvidia has just released a new GPU based on its latest Turing architecture, but it’s quite a different beast from the other Turing chips we’ve seen. The new GeForce GTX 1660 Ti has the company’s old ‘GTX’ moniker, rather than ‘RTX’ for a reason – it contains none of the dedicated RT processors for real-time ray tracing that are found in Nvidia’s RTX GPUs. Instead, the GTX 1660 Ti aims to provide decent rasterisation performance for gamers who can’t afford an RTX card. With prices starting from £260 inc VAT for Palit and MSI cards from www.scan.co.uk, the GTX 1660 Ti is starting a direct fight with AMD’s new Radeon RX 590, as well as the red team’s Radeon RX Vega 56, following recent price cuts…

Feel the heft The quality, the heft of the damn thing! I felt like a bloody king thumbing through this month’s new and improved edition. I guess you can have your Pi and eat it! TONY NEWTON Ben: Thank you. We’ve had an overwhelming amount of feedback about the quality of the paper we’re using now – almost every letter and tweet to us this month mentioned it somewhere. It feels good to be offering a magazine that feels like you’ve really bought something again. But can it play Crysis? I’m liking the new full-fat edition of Custom PC. Since you’re indulging in new features, how about a ‘readers’ challenge’ where we ask you a question that can then be used as the basis for an article? For example,‘is there a sub-£500 new graphics card…

Archariess I know I’m a bit behind, but I was reading your Call of Duty BO4 review just now. You say that Call of Duty spawned Nazi Blasting imitators. Wasn’t Call of Duty itself an imitator of Medal of Honor? Good review otherwise. Rick: Hi! It’s difficult to say because Call of Duty and MOH: Allied Assault were both projects headed by the same people (Jason West and Vince Zampella). So really they’re more like sister games, rather than COD being an imitator of MOH. citlee I had to take this photo at 3am when it popped into my brain – not sure if this is a real anecdote in the @tkingdot interview, a reference to British bedroom-coder classic Jet Set Willy being impossible to complete, an undiscovered Easter egg, or all…