Table of contents for January 2020 in Custom PC UK

Despite being 42 years old and having enough white body hair to start worrying that I’m turning into the Wampa from The Empire Strikes Back, managing excitement is still a problem for me when it comes to PC building. I’m a bit like a five-year-old ripping open a chocolate wrapper – I want my new gear up and running now – I don’t want to have to spend days setting it up properly first. However, taking your time makes the difference between having a neat and tidy build, and a box full of messy wires, as we show you in our masterclass on p76. It means you don’t block your case’s airflow, and that you can easily add upgrades in the future. I’ve written before about how much I love…

Razer launches first gaming monitor Razer is known for making all sorts of gaming peripherals and accessories, but the Raptor 27 represents its first foray into monitors. It has a 27in IPS panel with a 2,560 x 1,440 resolution, along with a 144Hz refresh rate. According to Razer, the Raptor 27 boasts a DCI-P3 colour range and a 1,000:1 contrast ratio. Meanwhile, its wide standing foot is equipped with RGB LEDs, and there’s hardly any visible bezel around the edges of the screen. There’s also a built-in cable management system in the back of the foot for HDMI, DisplayPort, USB 3.2 Gen 2 and headphone cables, and the foot flips up a whole 90 degrees. There’s no word on final pricing yet, but the price at the original time of…

Back in early summer this year during the Computex trade show, Intel announced, much to our surprise, the Core i9-9900KS. The CPU, which was completely unexpected, came just as AMD was launching its 3rd-gen Ryzen products, which have done rather well since launching in July. The Core i9-9900KS, though, only landed in our lab hours before we went to press near the end of October, so it’s rather late to the 2019 CPU war. While we’ve grabbed a full suite of benchmark results before these pages flew out the door, there is one aspect of the new CPU we’re not sure about and that’s the price. The review embargo sat a week in the future of when we were writing this review, so there were no concrete retail prices available.…

We were big fans of ARCTIC’s last foray into liquid cooling, with the Liquid Freezer 120 grabbing the top spot in several group tests with its low price, quiet operation and good cooling. With the original Freezer line of liquid coolers now end-of-life, ARCTIC has finally ushered in a new range of liquid coolers, rather unimaginably called the Liquid Freezer II series. There are more models this time, with 120mm, 240mm and 360mm radiator models covering 120mm fan sizes, but the Liquid Freezer II 280 also covers 140mm fan sizes. We’re looking at the Liquid Freezer II 240, which costs £65 inc VAT – a very reasonable price for a 240mm all-in-one (AIO) liquid cooler. The 120mm version costs under £50 inc VAT too, so it seems ARCTIC is maintaining…

Our pals at Corsair are kindly offering our favourite wireless gaming headset to one lucky Custom PC reader this month. The Corsair Virtuoso RGB Wireless SE delivers a high-fidelity audio experience, all-day comfort from its premium memory foam earpads, and hyper-fast connectivity with Slipstream wireless technology. Uncompromising sound quality From the lightest footstep to the deepest bass tone, you’ll hear more of everything with the Virtuoso RGB Wireless. A matched pair of precisely tuned 50mm high-density neodymium drivers boast a frequency range of 20-40,000Hz – double what you’d get from most gaming headsets. Comfort is king The Virtuoso Wireless SE comes with premium memory foam earpads that conform to the shape of your head, along with a lightweight headband. It delivers pillow-soft, long-lasting comfort, enabling you to play for hours…

HAMSWAN VR HEADSET / £21.99 inc VAT SUPPLIER amazon.co.uk The Hamswan is a relatively uncomplicated phone-based VR headset, but has the unusual bonus of coming with built-in headphones. This seems like a relatively minor inclusion, but the reduction in messing about is substantial. The headphones are attached to adjustable arms at the side of the unit, reaching backwards from the viewer, rather than over the top as you might expect for earphones. This keeps them out of the way of the separate strap that holds the unit in place. Keeping these parts separate also reduces faffing with audio outputs. The viewer itself is remarkably good for the price. The phone is held with a secure folding door, and the headphone cable tucks away when it’s not in use but is…

Rather than go all-out with clear panels and RGB lighting, the Corsair Carbide Series 678C goes down the same path as the Cooler Master MasterCase SL600M, with an understated design, unassuming closed front end and no RGB LEDs in sight. It also has noise-dampened roof, front and side panels, with the former being removable to boost airflow and the latter sitting in a swing-open door. It’s the first case that we’ve seen in a while to sport a 5.25in bay, which can be reached behind the front door. These bays can detract from the overall look of a case and limit its other storage options, but this case hides it well and you still have plenty of other storage options. Up to six hard disks or SSDs can be mounted…

Hats off to Netgear for trying to make its router design a little different with the AX8. If you’ve ever wanted your router to invoke the stylistic spirit of a Star Wars imperial spacecraft, this is the router for you. The rather splendid-looking Nighthawk AX8 isn’t all style over substance though. This is a highly powerful router. However, it does trail the other models on test this month in one very obvious way: it has only five Ethernet LAN ports compared to the eight ports you’ll find on all the other routers on test. For a high-end router priced at £300 inc VAT, that’s quite the slip-up, even if more of people’s internet-connected devices use Wi-Fi instead of wired connections these days. Ethernet connections aside, though, the AX8 includes the…

This year has truly been an Epic one. After launching its storefront at the end of 2018, Epic Games has spent most of 2019 setting itself up as a direct rival to Steam. Its approach to this endeavour hasn’t been without controversy. The studio’s policy of offering large sums of money (£8 million in the case of Remedy’s Control) to developers for exclusive rights to publish their games has come under criticism from many PC users. Personally, I don’t have an issue with developers signing up to the Epic Store. At a time when the gaming space is more competitive than ever, I can’t imagine anyone turning away the stability that comes with such an offer, especially in the case of smaller indie developers. That said, although it’s great that…

From a stylistic perspective, Blasphemous is more interesting than most games inspired by Dark Souls. This challenging 2D platformer takes Dark Souls’ theme of punishment, and broadens it out to become the focus of an entire game. If that makes Blasphemous sound horrible, well, it is, but not in the way you might expect. Blasphemous takes place in the fantasy realm of Cvstodia, whose environment design and general aesthetic is heavily inspired by Catholicism (or at least a specific reading of Catholicism). You play the Penitent One, a conically helmeted paladin who is the sole survivor of a terrible massacre. Making your way down from the charnel pile, you come across a being who tasks you with taking down the Miracle, a seemingly benevolent deity which has corrupted Cvstodia’s populace…

Imagine that you’re looking round a prospective new home, and instead of all the electrical wires being neatly hidden under floorboards and inside walls, they’re snaking across the floors ready for you to trip over them. The pipes for the central heating are also climbing all over the walls and sticking out of the floorboards, and the extractor fan in the bathroom is the wrong way round, so it doesn’t do its job. The house might technically have everything you need, but you wouldn’t want to live there. It sounds ridiculous, but we’ve seen plenty of home-built PCs with cables blocking upgrade paths and airflow, and with fans positioned in a way that will make your components run hotter. Building a PC properly isn’t just a case of ordering the…

TUTORIAL Inky wHAT secondary display Pimoroni’s Inky wHAT add-on for the Raspberry Pi (see Issue 195, p96) is an undeniably clever piece of kit, but out of the box it lacks one key feature: the ability to display arbitrary text. Thankfully, adding that feature is straightforward and, when combined with a cheap box frame, colour printer and a sharp knife, the result is a handy network-attached secondary display. 1. Install the Inky wHAT Assembling the Inky wHAT and Pi Zero WH is straightforward, but to minimise the project’s depth – and thus the likelihood of it fitting into your box frame when you’re done – isn’t quite the same as installing it on a full-sized Raspberry Pi. First, discard the bundled mounting hardware and Booster Header. Instead, slide the Inky…

The Corsair K70 RGB MK.2 SE is a premium mechanical gaming keyboard that’s built to last. It has a silver anodised brushed aluminium frame, as well as stunning white precision-moulded, double-shot keycaps. It’s built to turn heads and withstand a lifetime of gaming. There’s a detachable, soft-touch wrist rest too. Meanwhile, its Cherry MX  Speed mechanical keyswitches provide the reliability and accuracy you demand, with blisteringly fast 1.2mm actuation. There’s also stunning per-key RGB dynamic backlighting, 100 per cent anti-ghosting with full-key rollover, 8MB of on-board memory, plus dedicated media controls.…

I know this column will get me some angry tweets, but seriously, hear me out. I understand that creating Threadripper is like grabbing low-hanging fruit when AMD is already making EPYC chips that are practically the same. However, it’s missing out on bigger opportunities by focusing its scant resources on a new Threadripper platform, which the forthcoming 16-core/32-thread Ryzen 9 3950X will already sufficiently serve. That’s because, at the other end of the market, Intel’s recent price drops mean AMD has no products to effectively compete with the Intel Core i3-9100F and Core i5-9400F. While a lot of enthusiasts will indulge in a Core i9-9900K or Ryzen 9 3900X, more CPUs at the other end of the scale are sold to DIY folks building capable rigs on a budget. AMD…

Readers’ drives pics I would like to congratulate you and your team for the very impressive turnaround in Custom PC’s fortunes. I know from other feedback that I was not alone in being close to cancelling my subscription in the months leading up to the sale to Raspberry Pi, as the magazine had felt a little stale. As a PC Pro subscriber, I also found the duplication of content infuriating. The quality of the magazine – physically as well as content – has been steadily improving ever since, and I have happily renewed my subscription recently. However, I have one request. I really enjoy reading about (and being inspired by) the hugely impressive machines featured in ‘Reader’ drives’ but I am equally frustrated because it’s so often difficult or even…

Kingston’s new M.2 SSD is the latest drive to push the cost of entry into ultra-fast NVMe SSDs ever lower. The 1TB drive we’re reviewing here costs just £108 inc VAT, making it just about the cheapest 1TB NVMe drive you can buy, costing nearly £100 less than the priciest options. So, what do you give up in terms of speed and features for that low price? Well, surprisingly little. Sure, the peak rated speed of this drive tops out at 2,200MB/sec, compared to over 4,000MB/sec for the very latest PCI-E 4 drives. However, the Kingston’s performance is still in the same ballpark as many other cheaper NVMe drives. For instance, the WD Blue tops out at just 1700MB/sec, although the WD Blue’s capacity is limited to 500GB, so you…

Razer’s latest Blade 15 doesn’t initially look hugely different from its stunning predecessor, but there are significant internal changes. The 1080p IPS display has undergone a huge upgrade – it’s now available with a 240Hz refresh rate. That makes it one of the fastest laptop panels in the world, and it makes the Blade a  great option for esports. While a 240Hz screen is impressive, though, it’s also overkill for lots of players. This screen also doesn’t have Nvidia G-Sync, so you still get occasional tearing artefacts. The upgraded screen is partnered with a new GPU too though. The RTX 2070 Max-Q includes 2,304 stream processors and 8GB of GDDR6 memory – the same hardware as the full-fat version. However, it has a boost clock of 1185MHz, compared to the…

How we test Our case testing method is simple – use real, overclocked hardware in a standard system to see how cases perform in terms of cooling. Our trusty test gear includes an Intel Core i7-870 overclocked to 3.4GHz using a vcore of 1.305V and CPU PLL of 1.9V, plus an AMD Radeon HD 5870 1GB. This is installed in a Biostar TPower I55 motherboard with 4GB of PNY DDR3 memory, a Corsair Force GT SSD and Antec Signature SG-650. It may be old hardware, but it tells us what matters when it comes to a case’s cooling performance. The CPU cooler is a Gelid Tranqullo, which is fairly modest – especially so, given that we’ve replaced the fan with a slow-spinning Noctua NF-S12B ULN, to really highlight the poorest…

If your primary concern when it comes to home Wi-Fi performance is getting enough range, then the best option isn’t to spend big on a single fast router, but to get a mesh system. These systems use multiple routers that work together to extend and distribute the Wi-Fi signal, like a glorified Wi-Fi extender that’s faster and more versatile. Asus’ AiMesh AX6100 is the first Wi-Fi 6 router we’ve seen to offer this feature, with this £384 kit including two fully fledged Wi-Fi 6 routers. You place one of them next to your internet connection, and the second one in an adjacent room or on the floor above. For instance, in our test scenario, the second router was placed on the first floor, in the centre of the house. Ideally,…

As the cheapest router in this Labs test, you might expect the TP-Link AX6000 to be lacking in a few areas. However, right across the board this router is about as good as it gets. For a start, it doesn’t make the mistake of the Netgear AX8 of omitting any Ethernet ports – you get a full complement of eight of them. However, instead of having various link aggregation options, all of the TP-Link’s LAN connectors are standard Gigabit ports, while the WAN port offers a single 2.5Gbps connection. This is useful in the one specific instance where you have an extremely fast internet connection, but it’s less versatile than the competition overall. For instance, you can’t provide a single fast connection to a NAS with it, which would require…

Greedfall takes place in a fantasy world inspired by Europe’s colonial age. You play De Sade, a male or female cousin to the freshly appointed governor of New Serene. This is one of several recently established cities on the island of Teer Fradee. Acting as a diplomat for the Confederation of Merchants, you entreat with rival factions as all three of them search for a cure to a disease ravaging the mainland, while also trying to navigate the delicate political situation with the island’s native people. Structurally, Greedfall borrows heavily from Dragon Age: Inquisition. Cutscenes and dialogue are both directed in a similarly cinematic fashion, while combat is a hybrid of real-time action and pausable tactics. The game world, meanwhile, is broken up into around a dozen large regions that…

Untitled Goose Game looks like a gimmicky joke, another Goat Simulator with feathers instead of fur. While there’s some gimmickry about it, though, it’s well made and genuinely amusing. The premise is straightforward. You’re a horrible goose in a lovely British village, and your job is to waddle around said village ruining everyone’s day. Although the village is an open sandbox, you’ll progress through its four or five locations along a specific route. At each location, there’s a list of objectives to achieve. These include stealing the gardener’s hat, chasing a local boy into a phone box and making an old man at the pub fall on his backside. The game plays out like a smaller, more light-hearted version of Hitman. Each villager you encounter, from the gardener to the…

Sphero acquires LittleBits Toy robot company Sphero, still recovering from a licensing deal with Disney being cancelled last year, has announced the acquisition of educational electronics concern LittleBits for an undisclosed sum. ‘Sphero and LittleBits are on a mission to make hands-on learning fun and memorable,’ says Sphero chief executive Paul Berberian. ‘Together, we’re able to make an even greater impact by delivering the best possible solution – whether it is programming a robot to solve a maze or building an electronic music synthesiser.’ BeagleBoard.org launches BeagleBone AI The BeagleBoard.org Foundation, creator of single-board computers (such as the BeagleBone Black, reviewed in Issue 120), has launched a model aimed at artificial intelligence projects. ‘This board is the answer to our community’s request to see the next major advancement in the…

Water-cooling hardware manufacturer Alphacool is offering a choice of £150 worth of gear to every featured Readers’ Drives winner. For your prize, you can select from DIY water-cooling kits, the Eiswolf and Eisbaer all-in-one CPU and GPU liquid coolers, as well as a vast range of individual components, including waterblocks (pictured), fittings, reservoirs, pumps and radiators. Alphacool also makes coolant, tubing and fans, as well as modding and water cooling-related tools.…

Before sound cards brought us polyphonic music and CD-quality PCM (pulse-code modulation) audio recordings, PCs could make exactly one noise: a square wave, output through a dynamic speaker driven by the computer’s timer chip. Launched in 1981, IBM’s first model 5150 Personal Computer had an internal 2.25in (5.7cm) speaker, designed to produce BIOS error codes to help diagnose problems at boot. It was driven by the Intel 8253 Programmable Interrupt Timer, the same piece of hardware that handled system timing. While Timer Channel 0 was used for system synchronisation, Timer Channel 2 was used to send square waves to the internal speaker, making it beep. By the 1990s, the 8252 had been superseded by the Intel 8259 Programmable Interrupt Controller (PIC), and these days, you’ll find a modern hardware equivalent…

Unless you look for them, politics aren’t usually obvious in mainstream video games. Developers and publishers want to reach the largest possible audience so, as with any other business and product, games developers like to avoid controversy. But what happens when ‘avoiding’ politics involves actively taking the side of an authoritarian regime? Enter Blizzard. You’ve probably heard by now that professional Hearthstone player Ng Wai Chung, aka Blitzchung, was punished by Blizzard for undertaking a protest during a tournament. His words explain his politics, ‘liberate Hong Kong’. In response, Blizzard banned him for a year (later reduced to six months) and confiscated his 2019 winnings (which were then reinstated after a backlash). Blizzard cited some of the tournament rules, which say that ‘engaging in any act that, in Blizzard’s sole…

Asus’ ROG Strix XG438Q is a 43in monster with a broad feature set. It has a 4K VA panel with a 120Hz refresh rate and AMD FreeSync 2 support. It deploys DisplayHDR 600, and it claims support for 90 per cent of the DCI-P3 gamut. The panel delivers a 102ppi pixel density, which is still great for gaming, despite not matching smaller 4K screens. Meanwhile, the response time is rated at a reasonable 4ms, which is fine for anyone except competitive esports players. Its size is overwhelming up close, but it’s comfortably immersive if you’re laying back on a sofa. The Asus has three HDMI inputs and one DisplayPort connection. The latter is required to run the 4K panel at 120Hz or with HDR, and in these modes, you’re restricted…

The Asus RT-AX88U is the most traditional-looking of all the routers in this group test, but it doesn’t give up anything in terms of features to its more exotic-looking rivals. In fact, it’s just about the most feature-rich router of the lot (other than the pricier Asus AX6100 mesh system). It offers more USB functions than any other router this month, including the ability to plug in a USB modem so that you can even use your phone as your internet source. Plus it offers Alexa and IFTT support for easier home automation. Style-wise, the RT-AX88U is traditional both  in terms of its flat, wide shape and four detachable antennae, as well as its fairly aggressive, angular lines. To an extent, all the routers in this Labs test share the…

Wi-Fi 6, otherwise known as 802.11ax, is the new Wi-Fi standard in town, but while Wi-Fi 6 routers are slowly starting to appear, client devices that can connect to them are few and far between. Enter the first PC Wi-Fi 6 adaptor that we’ve encountered, the TP-Link Archer TX3000E. It’s a 4x PCI-E card, so sadly, it can’t serve double duty as an adaptor for a laptop, unlike a USB adaptor. Otherwise, though, it’s an easy enough device to install thanks to the card itself being very small. You also get a low-profile expansion bracket in the box, so you can mount the card in low-profile cases. Its two gold-plated aerial sockets sprout from the back of the card, and they attach to the 1m cable that runs to the…

Core component bundles The fundamental specifications we recommend for various types of PC. Just add your preferred case and power supply, and double-check there’s room in your case for your chosen components, especially the GPU cooler and graphics card. We’ve largely stopped reviewing power supplies, as the 80 Plus certification scheme has now effectively eliminated unstable PSUs. Instead, we’ve recommended the wattage and minimum 80 Plus certification you should consider for each component bundle. You can then choose whether you want a PSU with modular or captive cables. Mini PCs Our favourite components for building a micro-ATX or mini-ITX PC. Always double-check how much room is available in your chosen case before buying your components. Some mini-ITX cases don’t have room for large all-in-one liquid coolers, for example, or tall…

Borderlands 3 is a celebration of excess. From its bajillion guns to its enormous cooperative campaign, to a script that seems to have been written on a toilet roll (both in length and in tone), it’s an incredibly indulgent experience. If it was a Roman Emperor, Borderlands 3 would be Caligula – decadent, unhinged and prone to frequent massacres. Unlike Rome’s most infamous emperor, however, Borderlands 3 is annoyingly good at what it does. Beneath the glossy and often grimy extravagance, Borderlands 3 is a thoroughly entertaining shooter with a gimmick that, after three games, still hasn’t stopped delivering. Just don’t expect much to have changed. Once again, Borderlands 3 kicks off on the desert planet Pandora, with you and up to three friends assuming the role of four new…

OPINION BEYOND HAND TRACKING Oculus’ announcement that the Quest will  support hand tracking raises some interesting notions about how far such technology could be taken; namely, how much of the body can inside-out cameras reasonably track? Touch controllers already simulate the functions of the hand well enough; tracking technology simply makes games that don’t require buttons more convenient to play. But what if VR headsets could expand that technology to also track your feet? Imagine a martial arts game where it’s possible not only to punch your virtual opponents, but kick them as well? Such technology would also make certain sports games such as football much more viable. It even has ramifications for more fundamental elements in all VR games. Instead of scrolling forwards using thumbsticks or teleporting between locations,…

Since 1998, Nvidia has taken a steady march through the pantheon of science when naming the architecture behind each of its GPUs. Those of the company’s first (NV1 in 1995 ) and second (NV3 in 1997) publicly released GPUs didn’t get that treatment, but each one since has carried the name of someone who legitimately changed the world with their scientific contribution. Alan Turing, the British mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst and computer scientist lends his name to the architecture that underpins the company’s current chip lineup, and his achievements in science and their impact on our world today undoubtedly put some extra pressure on them to deliver something great with it. Indeed, the initial Turing-based GPUs were the first in over a decade to use something other than the famous GTX…

Is mini-ITX too small for X570? Last month I reviewed two new mini-ITX motherboards – the first models to use AMD’s X570 chipset. However, neither of them blew me away, with Gigabyte’s X570 Aorus Pro WiFi only just scraping an award. This situation has left me disappointed for a number of reasons. Firstly, mini-ITX is usually where the innovation happens. You only have to look at previous models to see some interesting ways of cramming high-end audio, M.2 ports and heatsinks into a 170 x 170mm PCB. Mini-ITX motherboards were the first ones to have M.2 ports on the rear of the PCB – an idea that’s since been adopted on some micro-ATX boards to save space. With X570, though, while the ASRock X570 Phantom Gaming-ITX/TB3 does have an innovative…

If you follow the retro PC gaming world online, you may well have seen Matilda’s work shared in various forms. Her Lego models of the Sound Blaster Pro and 3dfx Voodoo cards have proved popular with those of us who remember the early days of PC gaming, particularly when Photoshopped onto a real Lego box to look like proper kits. There’s plenty of other nods towards DOS gaming in Matilda’s portfolio as well, from her regular stream of Doom-inspired artwork, to pieces based on Monkey Island, System Shock and Dungeon Keeper. We caught up with Matilda to talk about early PC hardware, DOS gaming and what it is about the PC’s early days that still excites so many people. CPC: Why do you think there’s so much nostalgic enthusiasm for…

Throughout the varied history of the PC, its evolution has been driven by many different factors. One of the most notable, of course, was the development of the gaming market in the late 1980s from a cottage industry into the billion-dollar industry of today. As we saw in last month’s interview with the founder of Creative, a significant cause of this change was the emergence of sound cards, finally giving the PC sound capabilities in line with other home computers of the day, such as the Atari ST and Amiga. I still have very fond memories of my first Sound Blaster, not just because it was the first piece of hardware I bought, but because in conjunction with games such as Wing Commander, my 286 felt like a true gaming…