Custom PC UK January 2021

Well that just about wraps it up for Intel, doesn’t it? At least when it comes to desktop PCs. With its move beyond 14nm fabrication beset by delay after delay, and following years of churning out the same quad-core LGA115x CPUs with minor tweaks year after year, Intel has been snared in AMD’s circular brushstroke of doom, and seemingly can’t escape. Until now, despite its problems, Intel had a final stronghold in its defence against AMD’s Ryzen army. Its CPUs’ mighty single-threaded performance made them faster in most games than AMD chips, and they were faster in single-threaded desktop tasks such as image editing too. Of course, the CPU makes a miniscule difference to gaming performance compared with the GPU, but if you really wanted the fastest gaming performance possible, you…

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In a shift from its usual summer cadence of CPU launches, AMD announced its latest Zen 3 CPUs in October, with in-store availability right now. AMD claimed – and let’s not understate this – a massive 19 per cent gain in IPC, and therefore single-core performance leadership. AMD hasn’t been able to make this claim since it introduced the Athlon 64 17 years ago. It’s a true milestone. Make no mistake, AMD is ahead, so it’s no longer the ‘value’ brand you knew beforehand AMD originally piled as many cores as possible into the first Ryzen chips to outmanoeuvre Intel, but we’re not getting more cores with Zen 3 – the Ryzen 9 5950X maxes out at the same 16 cores as the 3950X. If you’re a long-term CPC reader, back in…

At last, some action about a subject that’s simultaneously trivial and also very important. The Advertising Standards Authority has banned a series of misleading adverts for the games Homescapes and Gardenscapes. These ads first came to my attention when they started featuring bizarre gruesome artwork and comedic horror gameplay footage, in which you had to stop a dismemberment or other impending terrible death of a cute sheep, sometimes via ‘pull the pin’ gameplay. No Man’s Sky overpromised in its marketing to a degree that broke the Internet The ads were attention-grabbing, and they worked. Lots of people downloaded the games, and lots of people got rightly annoyed when they turned out to be bog-standard ‘match three’ games, not comedy horror pin-pulling puzzle games. It seems trivial, because these are free, casual games, but…

INTEL LAUNCHES 10-CORE CPU FOR £440 In a bid to nab some of AMD’s limelight with the Zen 3 launch, Intel has released a new 10-core LGA1200 CPU at a cheaper price than the Core i9-10900K. The new Core i7-10850K offers ten Hyper-Threaded cores, and has a turbo boost frequency of up to 5.2GHz, with Turbo Max 3 peaking at 5.1GHz and a base clock of 3.6GHz. In terms of specs, that means the base clock and turbo clock sit only 100MHz below that of the flagship Core i9-10900K, with a 200MHz on the Turbo Max 3 frequency, which currently costs £550 inc VAT from scan.co.uk, but the new Core i9-10850K only costs £440 inc VAT from the same retailer. As its ‘K’ suffix suggests, the new CPU also has an unlocked…

NVIDIA CANS 20GB RTX 3080 AND 16GB RTX 3070 While Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3080 currently comes with 10GB of memory, the tech rumour mill has been buzzing with rumours about a 20GB version that was planned to counteract AMD’s forthcoming Big Navi GPUs at the end of the year, as well as a 16GB version of the RTX 3070 (which has 8GB as standard). However, tech site videocardz.com claims to have spoken to two independent sources, who say these plans have been cancelled. The site also says a planned card called the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti, which upped the number of CUDA cores in the RTX 3070 from 5,888 to 6,144, has also been cancelled. According to one of the site’s sources, a reason for the 20GB RTX 3080’s cancellation could be…