Custom PC UK August 2021

Pack away your binoculars and shut your CPU spotter’s guide – AMD’s Zen 3 CPUs are no longer rarer than penguins in the Sahara. You can even spot one here in the UK at the retailer of your choice without the need for an overactive imagination. It’s as if someone has poured a bottle of bleach down the CPU supply pipe, and whatever gunk was lodged in there has finally been flushed out. Not only are AMD Ryzen 9 CPUs readily available in the shops, but they’re also back to normal pricing. Right now, scan.co.uk is selling the 12-core Ryzen 9 5900X for £499 inc VAT – its original retail price. There’s plenty of stock of the 16-core Ryzen 9 5950X as well. Meanwhile, the prices of the Ryzen 7 5800X…

The fan that cools the X570 chip on my Asus motherboard is failing. It’s only two years old but even after cleaning, reapplying thermal grease and remounting it, the chipset temperature is still blipping into the 70s. I’ve looked around for alternatives, but there’s nothing out there. Years ago, we used to be able to buy a chonk of anodised metal fins with little wings that jutted out from underneath, so you could align it to the nonstandardised heatsink-mounting holes in your motherboard. I’m surprised at the lack of options – virtually every X570 motherboard needs a chip fan, so there should be a small army of people in the same boat as me, all looking for alternatives. This got me thinking about all the other little bits of kit we…

I love a one-stop-shop. Those of us old enough to remember bricks-and-mortar Blockbuster stores think as fondly of the bags of Revels and weekly rentable console games as we do the films (Nintendo actually sued Blockbuster to try to stop this, but lost). Likewise, when HMV started selling video games, those £10 vouchers from my nan suddenly got more exciting. Games belong with other multimedia. I watch films and TV on my computers, and play games on my TV. Blockbuster died off in part because it was bricks-and-mortar, to be replaced by internet services, including Netflix, which started with physical media but has always excelled at seeing what’s coming. That’s why Netflix’s expansion into video games is the surest move I can bet on right now. We know this in part because…

Gigabyte has declared war on thermal throttling by launching a PCI-4 SSD with a behemoth of a heatsink attached to it. The new Aorus Gen4 7000s Prem. measures 44.7mm tall, with the SSD PCB sandwiched between an aluminium base plate and a dual heatsink arrangement on top of it, with the two sections linked by a pair of heatpipes. The SSD itself is based on the same Phison PS5018-E18 as the standard Aorus Gen4 7000s (see p46), which has a small, low-profile heatsink. This SSD became warmer than the Corsair MP600 Pro with its larger heatsink in our tests, but it still didn’t throttle under stress testing. As such, it’s unlikely the Prem. version of the SSD will be any quicker in most cases, but it will almost certainly be cooler.…

Nvidia has confirmed that it’s releasing new versions of its GeForce RTX 3080, 3070 and 3060 Ti cards that will deliberately restrict cryptocurrency mining performance. The new ‘lite hash rate’ cards will have an ‘LHR’ identifier on the box, and will reduce the hash rate when mining Ethereum cryptocurrency. ‘GeForce products are made for gamers,’ says the company’s VP of Global GeForce Marketing, Matt Wuebbling, on Nvidia’s blog site (custompc.co.uk/LHR). ‘We believe this additional step will get more GeForce cards at better prices into the hands of gamers everywhere.’ This isn’t the first time Nvidia has dabbled with this strategy to deter people from using its gaming cards for cryptocurrency mining. The GeForce RTX 3060 also launched with a driver that reduced its hash rate, but a later driver removed it, which Nvidia…

Corsair says that its DDR5 memory modules will be coming ‘soon’, and has unveiled some of its thoughts in an online primer (custompc.co.uk/CorsairDDR5). The company also says it’s ‘excited to share more about DDR5 in the coming months’, inviting customers to ‘keep an eye out for more details from our social channels’. The new technology offers a number of improvements over DDR4, including a much higher maximum die density of 64Gb per chip, compared to 16Gb on DDR4 modules. This means we could see 128GB on a single DDR5 module (DDR4 modules max out at 32GB). In its primer, Corsair points out that this could mean standard four-module desktop systems could be kitted out with a massive 512GB of memory. DDR5 will also offer much more bandwidth than DDR4, with the JEDEC…