Custom PC UK

We’ve been relentlessly refreshing the Nvidia GeForce Shop webpage over the course of writing this issue, just to make sure this semblance of normality wasn’t a temporary blip in the machine. Sure enough, though, the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Founders Edition has remained in stock, at its MSRP of £1,049 inc VAT, for several weeks. In fact, the brand-new RTX 3090 Ti Founders Edition is also still in stock at its MSRP at the time of going to press. At the high end, at least, the graphics card crisis that’s blighted PC gamers for the past two years appears to have been corrected. Not only that, but even if the Founders Edition is out of stock by the time you pick up this mag, there are other RTX 3080 Ti cards going…

Since 2019, Intel has talked about its new Xe era of graphics. After hiring a large chunk of the AMD Radeon team, including its then senior vice president and chief architect, Raja Kadori, several ex-technology journalists and a boatload more, we’ve been drip-fed a steady stream of news about these magical graphics chips. Last year Intel introduced the DG1 – the very first Xe GPU fitted onto an actual PCI-E card. Except you couldn’t buy it. It was only issued to very select system builders in very limited volumes, and its performance proved little better than what you get inside its CPUs. It wasn’t even a sliver of the gaming credibility we were expecting. Later in the year, it announced that future Xe graphics architectures were now named Arc and would be…

There’s an old internet meme, a quote from the late American children’s TV host Mister Rogers that does the rounds whenever anything bad happens. ‘When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.”’ It’s a nice enough quote for children, but I notice lots of adults share it among themselves online and find solace in it. There’s nothing wrong with that, but being the original internet curmudgeon that I am, of course I must point out the flaw in doing so. Looking for the people who are helping makes us feel better about the tragedy, but it also consoles those who are doing nothing. I would prefer a…

Corsair has announced the two complete kits for creating hardline water cooling loops using its Hydro X custom cooling products. The XH305i and XH303i both include a CPU block, 360mm radiator, three fans, a reservoir/pump combo, an iCUE commander and lighting hub, plenty of hardline tubing, coolant, and all the tools you need to cut and bend your piping. The £560 XH305i includes a larger XD5 pump/reservoir and has QL120 fans, while the £460 XH303i, which is designed for more compact setups, uses a smaller XD3 pump/reservoir combo and SP120 fans.…

Peripherals specialist Glorious has announced the latest addition to its award-winning gaming mouse line-up, the Model I. Sporting a more sculpted, ergonomic (and right-hand only) shape than its previous mice, the Model I includes nine programmable buttons with four thumb buttons. Two of the latter are modular, so you can customise their shape with magnetically attached alternative top sections, or you can just blank them off. Despite the extra features, the Model I still weighs just 69g thanks in part to the hexagonal holes that cover the top. Inside is the excellent Glorious BAMF sensor with a maximum DPI of 19K, a top speed of 400 IPS and 50G acceleration. The Model I can be pre-ordered from overclockers.co.uk now for £70 inc VAT.…

SUPPLIER scan.co.uk How do you offer PC enthusiasts a faster CPU when you don’t have any major architectural changes, and you’re planning to introduce a new range of CPUs in the near future? Well, we have two very different approaches this month, and Intel has taken the speed-binning approach, creating a CPU that can hit even higher frequencies than the previous Alder Lake flagship, the Core i9-12900K. The resulting Core i9-12900KS has a peak boost frequency of 5.5GHz, which is a sizeable 300MHz higher than the Core i9-12900K’s peak boost clock, and 600MHz higher than the Core i5-12600K’s top boost frequency. During testing, we saw the Core i9-12900KS hit 5.4GHz on its P-Cores regularly on a single core, although Intel’s specifications reveal that 5.5GHz will only be achieved via its Thermal Velocity…