Custom PC UK November 2019

Not everyone can afford to fork out for a whole new PC, or even a new motherboard and CPU for that matter, but you can still make great improvements to your PC without spending over the odds. Your PC was designed to be expanded and improved in myriad ways – it’s a fundamental part of the PC’s design, and one of the main benefits of buying a PC over a console or Mac. There are universal mounts, slots and ports for hooking up new gear, enabling you to make a substantial difference to the way you use your computer, often for not much cash. This issue’s primary feature (see p74) is an epic, ten-page guide to those upgrades – the extra bits and pieces that can make a real difference to your…

If you were building PCs in the early 2000s, you might remember Intel’s separate strategy for desktop and laptop architectures. While its Pentium 4 (Netburst) CPUs were being crushed by AMD’s Athlon 64 (K8) chips on the desktop, its laptop architecture was continuing an evolution of the Pentium III core, and being much more successful. The latter was developed by its Israeli team in Haifa, which added novel functions such as micro-op fusion, smart caching, and dynamic frequency and voltage adjustment (branded SpeedStep), which are still being used in some form today. Intel later unceremoniously dumped Netburst, instead opting to use its laptop platform to develop its ‘Core’ architecture, giving it the historic Conroe moment in 2006 that flipped the tide of desktop performance back to Intel in a single tick. In…

The Beatles complained about it. Jimmy Carr was humiliated by it. David Bowie moved to Switzerland for it. Wesley Snipes went to prison for it. Taxes. They seem grossly unfair or life-changingly essential, depending on which end of the system you sit. The entertainment industry is particularly notorious for tax-shyness, from ‘Hollywood accounting’ in movies to rock stars moving to tax havens. Video games have their own rock stars too – Notch is loaded and PewDiePie is a household name (in certain houses). Then there’s actual Rockstar, maker of Grand Theft Auto, which has just found itself the subject of a deeply unflattering report. The argument, by ethical thinktank Taxwatch, is reasonable and serious: Rockstar North has claimed tens of millions of pounds in tax credits, while paying zero corporation tax. Rockstar’s…

Third-party AMD Navi cards appear The first third-party graphics cards based on AMD’s latest Radeon RX 5700 and 5700 XT GPUs have started appearing this month. Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, PowerColor, Sapphire and XFX have all entered the fray, with their cards offering two or three large fans, rather than the blower cooler used by AMD’s reference design. That’s a relief, as the AMD blower cooler makes a horrible racket when it gets going. However, the new cards aren’t cheap. The cheapest one at the time of going to press was MSI’s MECH OC variant of the RX 5700 (pictured), which costs £369 inc VAT from overclockers.co.uk, while Asus’ ROG Strix RX 5700 is currently up for pre-order for £448 inc VAT from scan.co.uk – comparatively, an RX 5700 card with a blower…

3RD-GEN THREADRIPPER SPOTTED A link from Twitter user Momomo_us led us to an entry in the Geekbench 4.4 database for what looks like a 3rd-gen Ryzen Threadripper chip, codenamed Sharkstooth, which is apparently some kind of monster. The CPU in the test is running 32 cores with 64 threads. The base clock speed sits at 2.2GHz but the boost clock is up at 4.17GHz. There’s 16MB of L2 and 128MB of L3 cache. This means the cache size is up considerably, although the clock speed appears to be down on the 2nd-gen Threadripper 2990WX, which runs at base and boost clocks of 3GHz and 4.2GHz respectively. Running the test under Windows 64-bit, the Sharkstooth chip manages a single-core score of 5,523 and a massive 68,576 multi-core score. Comparatively, the fastest 2990WX Windows…

Is micro-ATX dying? After a few years of not feeling the need to upgrade anything except my GPUs, I’m finally ready to upgrade my aging Core i7-2600K. To tell the truth, I’ve never built an AMD-based system (my first build was based on a Core 2 Duo E6600) and I’ve been waiting a long time for AMD to give me an excuse to switch sides. The Ryzen 7 3700X has given me that push. I decided a few years ago that ATX was more than I need. I’ve always preferred one single fast GPU, rather than CrossFire or SLI, and with so much on-board, I don’t see the need for multiple PCI-E slots. So why have board manufacturers stopped producing micro-ATX boards? The X570 boards you reviewed in the latest issue have…