Custom PC UK

mini magic

It regularly baffles me that so many people still house their PCs in colossal tower cases with at least four unused expansion slots. There are legitimate reasons for not going down the mini PC route, of course. You might genuinely need more than one PCI-E expansion slot, you might want to install an elaborate cooling system, or you might just want the greater airflow and easier building that usually comes with a larger case. On a personal level, I still use a discrete sound card, and like to have room for my water-cooling gear, so I’m still quite happy with my Fractal Design Define R6. For anyone else, though, you really have nothing to lose by building a mini PC these days. As our motherboard reviews this month show, the latest mini…

custom pc uk

EDITORIAL EDITOR Ben Hardwidge ben.hardwidge@raspberrypi.org FEATURES EDITOR Edward Chester edward.chester@raspberrypi.org MODDING EDITOR Antony Leather GAMES EDITOR Rick Lane CONTRIBUTORS Gareth Halfacree, James Gorbold, Mike Jennings, Phil Hartup, Richard Swinburne, Tracy King PRODUCTION EDITOR Julie Birrell PHOTOGRAPHY Antony Leather, Brian O’Halloran, Fiacre Muller, Gareth Halfacree PUBLISHING PUBLISHING DIRECTOR Russell Barnes russell@raspberrypi.org DESIGN criticalmedia.co.uk HEAD OF DESIGN Lee Allen DESIGNERS Ty Logan COMMERCIAL & ADVERTISING ADVERTISING Charlotte Milligan charlotte.milligan@raspberrypi.org +44 (0)7725 368887…

very expensive chips

Chip engineers have been yapping on about ‘the end of Moore’s Law’ for what seems like forever, but now that the end of scaling is in sight, as transistor gates reach a dozen atoms of silicon (at 0.11nm each), it looks like the cost, not physics, will prevent us from getting the tiniest, fastest chips. A recent article in Semiconductor Engineering claims that the cost of designing a single 3nm chip will be over a billion US dollars. It specifically cites ‘a complex GPU at Nvidia’ as costing $1.5 billion US to develop. Yowzers. In contrast, a typical 12/14/16nm-generation chip costs just ~$100 million US to develop, while the latest 7nm designs, such as AMD’s Ryzen 3000-series CPUs or its Radeon RX 5700-series GPUs, triples the cost to ~$300 million US.…

resale value

The news that a French court has ruled in favour of the consumer right to resell games is likely to change the way we buy and play games forever. Because I have, like all of us, historically enjoyed the legal right to resell things I own, I’ve always only grudgingly accepted the new normal of downloadable media. When I buy a digital game (I mean non-physical, for anyone about to remind me that game discs are digital), I’ll never recoup any money from it, but if I buy the same game boxed, I can resell it for whatever the market is willing to pay, or pass it on to a friend. I can’t do that with my Steam games. It’s this inconsistency that led to a French consumer rights group, UFC Quo…

incoming

Cooler Master launches massive air cooler Cooler Master has launched a new premium air cooler, with a chunky design and RGB lighting. The Master Air MA620M features a dual tower design using blacked-out aluminium for the heatsinks, with six heatpipes routing heat away from the CPU. A variable-speed 120mm SF120R fan sits between the two towers, and speeds up as required. The MA620M is also very versatile, being compatible with a huge number of CPU sockets, including Intel LGA115x, LGA2011/v3, LGA2066, AM4, AM3+, FM2+ and AM2+. Measuring 165 x 135 x 125mm, the MA620M will make up a significant part of your motherboard topography, and Cooler Master has jazzed up its classy appearance further by equipping it with an addressable RGB LED array. The MA620M is available to pre-order now from overclockers.co.uk…

rumour control

AMD RADEON RX 5300 XT SPOTTED A listing for AMD Radeon RX 5300 XT graphics cards has appeared in the specs list for HP desktop PCs at German retailer alternate.de. Spotted by the folks at computerbase.de, the listing doesn’t provide any details about the GPU, but says that the cards come with 4GB of GDDR4 memory. However, the nomenclature suggests that these GPUs will sit in the entry-level slot in AMD’s GPU line-up. The PCs listed with RX 5300 XTs in the specification had been slated for pre-order and due to arrive on 8 October, suggesting that the next wave of AMD GPUs is imminent. NEW GIGABYTE MOTHERBOARD DETAILS LEAKED Twitter user @momomo_us has spotted a number of Gigabyte motherboards based on forthcoming chipsets listed in the Eurasian Economic Commission’s (EEC) database. The…