Custom PC UK February 2020

AMD has sent a large, Ryzen-branded demolition squad into the CPU market this year. While its AM4 Ryzen chips are comprehensively taking a wrecking ball to Intel’s LGA1151 chips, its latest Threadripper CPUs are now bulldozing Intel out of the high-end desktop (HEDT) space. Intel is fighting back, of course, with its latest 18-core Core i9 CPU (see p26) set to cost under a grand – that’s a huge price reduction compared with last year, but it’s still not enough. Not when a 16-core Ryzen chip undercuts it by £250 (see p24), and the latest Threadripper CPUs are available in 24-core and 32-core flavours (see p16), with the 64-core 3990X waiting in the wings as well. Now, we’ve had 24-core and 32-core Threadripper CPUs before, but internal latency problems meant they were…

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, Ivy…

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 But that’s not…

InWin unveils $500 case InWin has announced a new full tower case with a huge price tag. The 925 has a recommended retail price of $500 US (around £466 inc VAT), making it ideal for when you’re building a PC that deserves a home nicer than yours. It looks spacious, gorgeous, robust and well-ventilated. Made from 4mm-thick brushed aluminium, the 925 has a chunky, unthreatening and almost cartoonish aesthetic, with some distinctive visible nuts and bolts and a big tempered glass window to show off the cavernous interior. There’s also an addressable RGB logo on the front panel, which helps break up the otherwise stern frontage. Cooling options are substantial, with room for three 120mm or two 140mm fans in the front panel, three 120mm fans in the top, three 120mm fans in…

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 the revived…

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…