Custom PC UK December 2021

The last time I stayed in a hotel, I asked the staff if they had any toothpaste and I was presented with a charmingly tiny tube about one third the size of my finger. I felt myself gawping like a dog being shown a biscuit as I prodded it a round my palm. There was some thing almost cute about this miracle of miniaturisation. Similarly, a friend once cooked me a miniature breakfast, with fried quail’s eggs, cocktail sausages and so on – again it almost looked endearing when it arrived on a saucer. There’s just something really appealing about big things being made tiny. Of course, miniaturising a PC is massively more complicated than making a tiny tube of toothpaste, but the PC industry is having a good go at it,…

This magazine is printed on paper sourced from sustainable forests. The printer operates an environmental management system which has been assessed as conforming to ISO 14001. Custom PC magazine is published by Raspberry Pi (Trading) Ltd., Maurice Wilkes Building, St. John’s Innovation Park, Cowley Road, Cambridge, CB4 0DS. The publisher, editor, and contributors accept no responsibility in respect of any omissions or errors relating to goods, products or services referred to or advertised. ISSN: 1740-7443.…

At its recent architecture day, Intel disclosed more details about its 12th-gen Core ‘Alder Lake’ CPUs. Firstly, it confirmed there are two types of processors inside – Performance Cores and Efficiency Cores, with different types of devices (mobile and desktop, for example) varying the number of Performance Cores inside. The idea is that the Performance Cores are focused on single-threaded performance and do the most immediate tasks as fast as possible, while the Efficiency Cores work on the jobs the OS and programs conduct in the background to keep your PC ticking over. This is very similar to how Arm’s Cortex-based CPUs are made for smartphones and tablets, so this ‘heterogeneous design’ isn’t new, but it is a first on PC. At the time Arm launched its groundbreaking 2-core-type CPU design in…

Years ago, I debunked the then-common myth that girls are naturally inferior at games. That belief is still around in a few dank corners, but I’ve definitely observed a shift away from it, perhaps because female gamers are so visible now that it’s an accusation easily dismissed. Most adults under 40 grew up with some gaming experience, and many of them will have kids of their own with whom gaming is important family time. I know mums who play Minecraft and dads who spend hours in Animal Crossing, and one family of four who play Battlefield together. But while progress has been made in the perception of female gamers, there’s still a slew of people who think male gamers are somehow … not real men. It’s an accusation as old as games,…

Thank you for beating the scalpers I’m not on Twitter so I hope you’ll be happy with this email response to Issue 217. As a subscriber I usually can’t wait to rip off the wrapper and dive straight into every new issue of Custom PC, mentally bookmarking the items that most interest me and the order in which I’ll read through the mag. Thanks to some unexpected ‘Big Life Stuff’, Issue 217 only got a cursory glance from me and I put it aside. I’ll be honest, I saw the ‘Beat the scalpers’ cover splash and thought it would be another one of those articles about being careful buying from eBay, watching out for ex-cryptocurrency mining boards, not feeding the scalpers and so on. I was fortunate enough to time my new…

NEW INTEL SOCKET PICTURED The new LGA1700 socket for Intel’s Alder Lake CPUs has been pictured on Chinese site bilibili.com, and reported by videocardz.net. The socket’s array of pins is clearly longer than that of Intel’s current LGA1200 socket, but Intel appears to have shrunk the latch system surrounding it, so it takes up a similar amount of space. The socket latch sports the codename ‘15R1’ on the top, along with ‘LGA17xx/LGA18xx’, suggesting that CPUs with 100 more pins could arrive in the future. LGA1700 is expected to be used for Intel’s Meteor Lake CPUs after Alder Lake, but Intel usually moves to a new CPU socket after two generations.…