Custom PC UK March 2020

The past year has been one to remember for the way it has shaken up the PC world. While AMD’s Ryzen debuted back in 2017, the arrival of Zen 2 in August last year has finally put to bed any nagging doubts about just how fast AMD’s new CPUs could be. Even 3rd-gen Threadripper has made a strong case for itself, as Antony Leather explores in our mammoth 24-core PC build this issue, thanks to it taking a huge leap in single-threaded and gaming performance over past iterations. Meanwhile, we’ve seen DDR4 and flash memory prices drop to sensible levels, making RAM and SSDs ever more affordable. We’ve also had the arrival of a swathe of ultra-lightweight gaming mice, putting to an end the strange trend for big, heavy mice that…

After waiting 15 years since Half-Life 2 was launched, and over 12 years since Episode 2 came out, Valve recently announced its long-awaited follow-up, Half-Life: Alyx. Valve states the new game is not Half-Life 3, and that the game is also a VR exclusive. The trailer turns the hype meter past 11, with some revolutionary first-person shooter mechanics that make it look immensely awesome. However, Valve is pitching it as being ‘made for Index’ – the company’s premium, extremely expensive £919 headset. Unless you’re already into VR, this makes the game exclusionary for most of us. This is a business decision to push Valve’s own expensive hardware Valve has stated it’s committed to the Half-Life VR universe, but we’ve heard its commitments before, many years ago. I remember when Valve promised yearly…

Recovering from various family Christmas traumas, I’m reminded of the old adage ‘never discuss politics or religion in polite company’. I would like to add a third topic: video games. If your polite company is anything like mine, you’ve probably had some frustrating conversations about the merits of your hobby. At best, we’re wasting our time when we could be watching TV. At worst, gamers are turning themselves into either zombies or crazed mass killers, depending on which scare story your relative read in the Daily Mail this week. I suspect I Am Jesus Christ isn’t particularly controversial at all Politics, religion and video games can cause arguments, but at least we’re past the Mary Whitehouse era of religiously conservative censorship, right? Whatever daft opinions various folk might have about the negative…

The RX 5500 XT is alive Finally out in the wild is AMD’s Radeon RX 5500 XT, its new graphics board that – through board partners – is already available with sufficient stock out there. That’s not something that can be said for every launch we got from AMD over the past year or so. The RX 5500 XT is a Navi 14 GPU with 1,408 stream processors and a base clock of 1670MHz to a boost of 1845MHz. There are 4GB and 8GB versions and both use GDDR6 on a 128-bit bus. Custom variants are expected to play around with clock speeds, as always. Price-wise, AMD is positioning this one in the slot where the Radeon RX 590 used to sit. As such, expect to spend around $169 US for the 4GB…

CPUs for gaming Now that Half Life Alyx has been announced, I have finally convinced myself that a VR set is necessary. This will require a full PC upgrade in order to support the minimum system requirements. One aspect that’s causing me some confusion is which route to take for the CPU. Previous system builds have been relatively straightforward, as I just purchased the fastest Intel CPU I could afford, but now that Ryzen has stormed into the market, the decision is more difficult. When comparing a top end Core i7 and Ryzen 7, the Intel product is approximately 15fps better in Far Cry 5. However, all the recent Custom PC recommendations seem to point towards the purchase of the AMD product line, which is clearly superior in other tests. Can…

The XMG Fusion 15 is a highly configurable laptop from German brand Schenker. This particular unit has a couple of familiar components: an RTX 2070 Max-Q GPU and a Core i7-9750H processor. The RTX 2070 Max-Q is a cutback, more efficient version of one of Nvidia’s key GPUs. It has the 2,304 stream processors and 8GB memory of the standard mobile RTX 2070, but its clock speeds have been reduced to 885MHz and 1185MHz. As for the Core i7-9750H, it’s a 6-core CPU with base and boost speeds of 2.6GHz and 4.5GHz. It’s used in virtually every high-end gaming laptop now. It has enough single-threaded power to avoid bottlenecks, and its cores mean there’s ample bandwidth for photo editing and multi-tasking. Elsewhere, there’s 16GB of 2666MHz memory and a 1TB SSD alongside…