Table of contents for May 2020 in Custom PC UK

As you’ve no doubt already deduced from the glossy decorative parts of the front cover, this is the 200th issue of Custom PC, and while we don’t want to entirely disappear up our own posteriors in our rose-tinted specs, we’ve marked the occasion with a special feature on p84. While I only worked on Issue 1 as a freelancer, and didn’t join the full-time team until a few months later, I remember the build-up to the launch well, and it was an exciting time in PC journalism. Looking back on Issue 1 shows just how far we’ve come since those early days, when the PC was finally starting to break free from its bland business machine moorings. We no longer have to tolerate the whiny racket of 80mm fans, liquid…

Despite a relentless upgrade schedule a few years ago, we haven’t seen a new entry-level two-bay NAS from Synology for a while. The DS218j was the last NAS from the company we reviewed, which was released in early 2018. Currently retailing for around £150 inc VAT, it’s still a fantastic NAS and noticeably quicker than the DS216j in a couple of tests, although they shared a very similar specification. The DS218j also has a fair bit in common with its new successor, the DS220j, which we’re reviewing here. The new model still has 512MB of RAM, which is perhaps a bit on the small side for heavy users wishing to simultaneously dish out 4K video while dealing with multiple surveillance streams. This is the reason why most four-bay models have…

Despite various Chinese companies offering some compelling and very affordable 3D printers at the moment, there’s still clearly a market for an easy-to-use, yet feature-packed, 3D printer. Dremel has capitalised on this situation with its range of Digilab 3D printers and the current flagship, the 3D45, offers the biggest print area of its current range. However, tipping the scales at over £1,000 inc VAT, does it justify the price when many of its cheaper rivals offer bigger print areas? Its huge footprint of 65cm x 41cm is partly due to the enclosed print chamber, which helps to seal and filter printing fumes, while also providing a warmer environment to print objects, which can improve print quality. The filament is also stored internally and, to reduce its bulk, Dremel has taken…

Intel’s quad-core dominance ended when Ryzen hit the scene in 2017 but before that, when CPUs such as the Core i5-6600K were the kings of mainstream overclockable enthusiast systems, these CPUs were highly desirable and supremely quick in games. The Core i5-6600K was a £250 chip, though, so those on a budget had to look lower down the ladder. Sadly, below the Core i5 range, Intel only offered limited overclockable options, with the likes of the Core i3-7350K being limited to just two cores. As such, the Core i3-8350K was a breath of fresh air. It not only offered double the core count of the constrained Core i3-7350K, but it cost under £160 at launch. It was one of Intel’s success stories in the face of Ryzen and was a…

While Intel might fairly be accused of being caught napping a couple of years ago, releasing the first round of Coffee Lake CPUs several months after Ryzen Landed, the fact is that the Core i7-8700K, and later the Core i5-8400, both went on to be popular CPUs. However, the Core i5-8600K felt a little lacking from the start, with AMD already offering more grunt in  multi-threaded applications for the same cash, meaning the venerable Core i5 was no longer the best affordable all-rounder. The Core i5-9600K, sadly, offers little on top of this already struggling CPU, but excellent gaming performance and the reintroduction of a soldered heatspreader meant it was still a popular option for the frame rate obsessed. When you read this, Intel’s 10th-generation mainstream desktop CPUs will still…

AMD’s mainstream product stack has been squished at the top end, thanks to the addition of the new 12-core and 16-core models at the summit. These chips haven’t just made life difficult for the Ryzen 7 3800X, but for the entire CPU market in general. This is the first time we’ve looked at AMD’s fastest 8-core Ryzen CPU, but it already looks quite different to when it launched, due to a hefty £70 price cut from its launch price of £380. It’s now priced at around £310, but is that enough for it to be worth buying over the cheaper Ryzen 7 3700X? Its main plus point is the peak boost frequency of 4.5GHz, which is the second highest of any mainstream Ryzen CPU, so it will be no slouch…

As much as AMD fans might have liked to preach the virtues of the Ryzen 7 2700X over the Core i9-9900K, Intel’s ability to hit super-high frequencies, as well as its low inter-core latencies, meant that the latter Core i9-9900K was supremely quick in games. If you wanted to hit extremely high fame rates, perhaps on high refresh rate monitors, it was the go-to CPU, and any game with a modicum of CPU-limited frame rates saw AMD lag behind. AMD has since clawed back an awful lot of ground with Zen 2, though, so is Intel’s Hyper-Threaded 8-core CPU still a monster for gaming? The latest price cuts to both AMD’s Ryzen chips and Intel’s Cascade Lake-X CPUs mean that Intel’s former mainstream flagship now costs under £480, but there’s…

As if AMD’s monster 16-core mainstream CPU wasn’t disruptive enough, it’s fallen £50 since launch and now sits at under £700. It’s certainly not affordable for everyone, but considering it keeps up with Intel CPUs that cost close to £2,000 a year ago, its value, even at this price, is hard to dismiss. So much so that it resulted in Intel slashing prices of its Cascade Lake-X CPUs and even then, they still only offer niche appeal. As well as 16 cores and 32 threads courtesy of Simultaneous Multithreading, the Ryzen 9 3950X uses AMD’s 7nm Zen 2 architecture to great effect. It’s far easier to tame in terms of cooling than Intel’s Core i9-10980XE or Core i9-10940X, which sport 18 and 14 cores respectively. It has a massive 64MB…

Is Black Mesa (see p70) a game or a mod? This conundrum has been bouncing around my head ever since I finished Crowbar Collective’s incredible remake of Half-Life. What started out as an absurd pipe dream in 2004 is now a complete redesign of Valve’s masterpiece in the latest version of the Source engine. It includes an entirely rebuilt Black Mesa Facility, and a new version of Xen that’s massively expanded and reimagined. Given the extent of the work involved,alongside the fact that it’s available on Steam for £14.99, it’s reasonable to ask, is Black Mesa really a mod any more? On the other hand, is calling it a game unfair to the legion of modders who have worked so hard across the years to bring this remake into fruition?…

Transport Fever 2 sees you assume the role of a budding city logistics tycoon. Your goal is to transform isolated rural backwaters into hives of industry by connecting them to the resources and goods they need. Whether you’re playing through the campaign or creating your own transport empire in the sandbox mode, the game’s basic function is the same. You’ll be presented with a detailed 3D map covered in settlements, each of which needs one or two different resources that can be created by establishing a production chain. If a city needs bread, for example, you need to connect a farm to a food production factory, then connect the factory to the city. The fundamentals are identical for all modes of transport. You need to create stops, stations or ports…

There are few elements of computing that are more misunderstood than random access memory, or RAM. It’s both incredibly important for maximising performance of other components, yet it can’t boost performance in and of itself. Moreover, with different CPUs benefiting in different ways from different RAM speeds, and other processing units such as GPUs often using their own dedicated RAM, there’s a lot of confusion over the exact role of system memory. So, to help clear up the situation, we’re going to get right back to basics and explore the inner workings of the memory that sits at the heart of modern-day PCs. THE BASICS At its most basic, main system memory is simply a temporary storage place for the data that your PC’s CPU and other processing components, such…

Open-source laptop specialist MNT Research has finalised the Version 2 design of Reform system, boosting the specifications considerably ahead of a Crowd Supply campaign launch scheduled for February 2020. The new model includes an NXP i.MX8M system-on-chip, 4GB of RAM and fanless cooling, plus a 1080p embedded DisplayPort panel. An improved keyboard also houses a secondary OLED display, tied into the system management processor. Pricing for the models – which will range from board-only to fully assembled versions – had not been confirmed at the time of writing. More information is available on mntre.com…

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.…

As it’s 2020, and this is the 200th issue of Custom PC, I’ve been thinking back over my past two decades of building PCs, so crack out your rose-tinted glasses with me as I look back at how the industry has changed. Firstly, back in 2002 the ATI Radeon 8500 wasn’t necessarily faster than the equivalent GeForce 3, but it provided better image quality (an important factor when you had analogue monitor inputs) and helped to cement Radeon as a top-tier graphics brand. I bought the cheaper Radeon 8500 LE instead. This version could be ‘pencil-modded’ to bump up the voltage on the core and memory, enabling overclocking further than the full 8500 card. Sadly, a carefully placed bit of graphite can no longer upgrade you to a premium graphics…

Broken Bluetooth I’ve just finished building my new PC, and I’ve had difficulties with Bluetooth. It’s mentioned in the motherboard manual as being part of the ‘Wireless Communication Module’ together with Wi-Fi, but nothing else is said about it. My old PC had no Bluetooth, so I bought an inexpensive USB 2 dongle, which worked fine. However, I was surprised and disappointed to find that my £2,400 new PC provided a poor Bluetooth signal, making the keyboard occasionally erratic and the mouse unusable. I spent hours installing the latest drivers, as well as trying (and failing) to get the old dongle working, but nothing helped. Then a friend suggested that the PC’s metal case might be interfering with the signal from the motherboard’s Bluetooth signal. Sure enough, removing the case’s…

For all the exciting developments we’ve seen in gaming mice over the years, one section of the market is all too often neglected: left-handed mice. Almost no popular gaming mice are produced in left-handed variations, leaving the only option to go with an ambidextrous mouse. Even then, while many mice have symmetrical shapes, all too often they lack thumb buttons on both sides, so they lack a truly ambidextrous design. The Corsair M55 RGB Pro, then, isn’t just a symmetrically shaped mouse but a proper ambidextrous one. What’s more, with a price of just £25, it’s a bargain too. Another feather in the cap of the M55 RGB Pro is that it’s relatively light, weighing in at just 86g. That’s hardly record-breaking, but Corsair in particular has tended to produce quite…

The MSI GT76 Titan lives up to its name, weighing 4kg, costing four grand and being packed with desktop-level hardware. There’s the desktop RTX 2080 GPU, for starters, which has 2,944 stream processors and 8GB of memory, and the boost frequency is overclocked from 1710MHz to 1755MHz. Likewise, the Core i9-9900K is one of Intel’s beefiest consumer chips, with eight Hyper-Threaded cores alongside a peak boost clock of 5GHz. The rest of the specification is monstrous too. There’s 64GB of DDR4 memory, and a 1TB RAID 0 array made from two Samsung PM981 NVMe SSDs. You get a 1TB hard drive as well, and networking is handled by dual-band 802.11ax Wi-Fi and Killer 2.5Gbps Ethernet. This isn’t the first laptop we’ve seen with components at this level. The £3,799 Alienware…

TABLET PILLOW STAND / £19.99 inc VAT SUPPLIER amazon.co.uk The Tablet Pillow Stand is comfy and foamy, with three little plastic ridges amid the comfy foaminess, which enable you to balance a phone or tablet computer while you operate it. While it lacks the precision and fortitude of a metal or rigid plastic stand, the pillow stand can do its job fine – it doesn’t take a suspension bridge level of heavy engineering to keep a tablet at a visible angle, after all. The sides of the stand are soft, and you can rest your arms on them while you’re using the screen, so there’s no risk of encountering even mild discomfort or inconvenience either. It’s ideal for sofa or bed use. T-CORE PORTABLE CHARGER / £23.99 inc VAT SUPPLIER…

When the Core i5-8400 was first released, the lack of cheap Coffee Lake-compatible motherboards meant that it didn’t provide particularly good value, as its lack of overclocking made it a poor choice to couple with an expensive Z-series board. Eventually, though, once cheaper motherboards arrived, it proved its worth, bettering equivalent 1st and 2nd-generation Ryzen CPUs in games, and costing significantly less than the K-series models. A few years later and the lack of overclocking remains with the Core i5-9400F but cheap motherboards are plentiful now, so there’s no need to wait to make the most of this chip. To the uninitiated, the addition of an F signifies that this particular iteration of Intel’s 6-core 9000-series CPU lacks integrated graphics. Thankfully, it’s cheaper than the Core i5-9400 as a result,…

Under the hood, the Ryzen 5 3600X and its cheaper sibling on p43 are identical. Both of these processors have two core chiplet dies (CCDs) with four cores apiece, as well as an I/O die that sports an improved dual-channel memory controller and PCI-E 4 root complex. On both CPUs, two cores are disabled, bringing the total to six cores rather than eight. This also accounts for the fact that the Ryzen 5 CPU has 1MB less L2 cache than the 8-core Ryzen 7 3700X, as each core has its own 512KB allocation of L2 cache, which is therefore lacking on both of AMD’s 3rd-gen Ryzen 6-core CPUs. However, it has the same 32MB L3 cache and actually a higher base frequency than the Ryzen 7 3700X. Plus, when running…

The Core i7-9700K has been through some serious mood swings during its lifetime, largely thanks to price. It’s a solid CPU for gaming, but its initial price of nearly £500 was a tad steep. In order to combat the threat from AMD, though, this price has steadily fallen, and it’s now settled at just £369. This price doesn’t sit near any other AMD CPU, with the Ryzen 9 3900X costing £70 more and the Ryzen 7 3800X costing £70 less. With this new price in mind, we were interested to see how it now stacks up compared with the last time we looked at it. As Intel has enabled Hyper-Threading on its other 8-core K-series CPUs, it was left with no option but to remove the feature on the Core…

Intel’s had a tough time reacting to the competitive thread of AMD’s Ryzen and Threadripper CPUs. It has combatted the latter by massively increasing the number of cores in its CPUs, from the 10-core Core i7-6950X to the 18-core Core i9-7980XE, and it’s combatted the former with massive price cuts. Add in the supply shortages, and it’s clear that Cascade Lake-X hasn’t had an easy ride. Both Intel and AMD also have increasingly powerful mainstream offerings, which makes it hard to see a solid place for a CPU such as the and the Core i9-10900X. It has only two more cores than Intel’s Core i9-9900K, and six fewer cores than AMD’s slightly more expensive 16-core Ryzen 9 3950X. Under the hood you’ll also find a slightly different CPU die to…

Intel’s Core i9-10920X costs only a little bit more money than AMD’s Ryzen 9 3950X, at least from some retailers (supply of Cascade Lake-X chips is still short, see p114). However, it has four fewer cores than the Ryzen 9 3950X– that’s not quite as big a deficit as with the Core i9-10900X, but it immediately puts this Cascade Lake-X chip at a disadvantage against the 3950X in many multi-threaded tasks, which isn’t great from a value point of view. Unlike the Core i9-10900X, the 109020X is also based on Intel’s High Core Count (HCC) die, which is also used in the top-end Core i9-10980XE, except several of its cores are disabled in the 109020X. Like its Cascade Lake-X counterparts, it uses a 14nm++ manufacturing process, has 19.25MB of L3…

Darksiders Genesis is essentially a buddy-cop movie set in Hell. It sees two of the four horsemen of the apocalypse – War and Strife – dispatched by the arbiters of reality, known as the Charred Council, to check up on Lucifer. Shockingly, the Council believes that the lord of Hell might have been misbehaving, and wants to the horsemen to set Satan straight. As with every Darksiders game, the story is hot nonsense and all the better for it. The script gleefully revels in the absurd machinations of Hell’s various demonic overlords, while the rapport between the two protagonists is never less than delightful. Strife is the axe to War’s grindstone, constantly chatting, jibing and joking while War grunts and harrumphs his vaguely irritated replies. It’s a classic straight man/jester…

Journey to the Savage Planet is a gaudy sci-fi adventure that excels at assimilating ideas from other games, but struggles to bring much that’s original to the table. You play an interstellar explorer whose  ship has crash-landed on a mysterious world. Your  job is to evaluate the planet for potential colonisation on behalf of your employer, the totally not oppressive Kindred Technologies. Savage Planet offers a blend of platform-based exploration, light puzzling and lighter combat. The planet is an eye-catching collection of floating islands dominated by a vast alien megastructure at the centre. You start at the frozen fringes of the planet, and to explore further, you need to collect resources to unlock new equipment, such as a jetpack and a grappling hook. You then traverse new paths, unlocking more equipment.…

Nvidia has launched a modestly upgraded version of the Jetson Nano Developer Kit (reviewed in its original form in Issue 191), bundling a new B0 revision of the carrier board. The biggest change is the addition of a second DSI camera connector, making the kit ready for stereo-vision applications. However, it comes at the cost of the remote power button and serial console connector. The updated carrier board is also compatible with the Jetson Nano Module, which includes on-board eMMC storage. The retail price of the Developer Kit remains unchanged at £95 (inc VAT, excluding shipping).…

Packaging your CPU inside a big box before slotting it into your motherboard seems like a recipe for a thermal catastrophe now, but for a brief period around the turn of the Millennium, Intel (and later AMD) mounted their CPUs on circuitboards inside sleek black packages. They looked great too. There was now room for proper logos and a flashy physical design. Instead of dropping a nondescript-looking ceramic square into your motherboard, you had a fancy black box with a hologram on the front. With their slick packaging, the first Pentium II CPUs looked great in the TV adverts and promo shots. I remember wanting one just because they looked so good – a small hologram sticker clearly goes a long way towards manipulating people like me! To the uninformed,…

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.…

Supply shortages aren’t new in the PC industry – just look at the highly volatile supply and price of memory over the years. However, what’s new is a company such as Intel having such serious supply problems for so long. The first signs of trouble appeared back in the summer of 2018, with Core i5 chips becoming scarce as Intel prioritised production of high-end CPUs. The situation became so bad that in September 2018, Intel issued an open letter citing massively higher-than-forecast growth in the server market as the primary cause of the shortage, and committing to extra investments in manufacturing. Since then the situation has only deteriorated, with more product lines going short and, in some cases, disappearing. Intel’s flagship 10-series Core X chips first launched in November, but…

Game localisation is an entire industry of its own. Knowing what American or British audiences want compared with Japanese or Korean gamers is a specialist skill. Not only do different markets have different cultures and politics, but also different laws. Australia, for example, is fairly censorious of violence and gore in games. But what happens when two very different cultures clash, and a Western publisher wants to change the content of, say, a Japanese game? On one hand, the creative vision of the game designers and writers should be respected. On the other hand, game publishers have a responsibility to not promote content that isn’t acceptable to the market in which it’s sold. This leads to some difficulties and occasional controversies. The most recent is Persona 5 Royal, which has…

Game streaming is an increasingly hot prospect, as various tech companies scramble to become the Netflix for games. It’s a prize that’s both elusive and tantalising. The lofty demands for both sharp image quality and low latency make game streaming much harder to realise than streaming video. Game-streaming services do exist, in the form of platforms such as Shadow and Google Stadia, but both are far from perfect. Enter GeForce NOW, Nvidia’s attempt to seize the game streaming crown. In Beta since 2015, it saw its public launch in January this year. Structurally, it’s more closely aligned to Shadow than Google Stadia. Rather than being a platform with its own storefront, it offers an alternative way to play games you already own (or are free to play). When launched, it…

It may seem strange that Corsair hasn’t had extensive repertoire of air coolers to match its liquid cooler range, but the company did actually try a while ago, with mixed results. This month, though, it’s most definitely back in the air-cooling game with the A500. It’s a monstrous £80 dual-fan cooler, which aims to offer premium air cooling and a hefty amount of overclocking headroom. This massive cooler’s measurements stretch to 169mm long and 171mm tall, with the latter measurement meaning you’ll need to pay careful attention to your case’s CPU cooler height limit, as many cases won’t be able to accommodate it. It also weighs close to 1.5kg, so you won’t want to drop it on your foot either. The box is enormous too, but inside there’s no mass…

It’s not often we deem a mouse mat worthy of a full-page review, but the Corsair MM500 piqued our interest. With a colossal area of 1220 x 610mm, this ‘3XL’ mat is large enough to cover an entire desk with plush, squishy loveliness. Having such an enormous mouse mat may sound like a gimmick, but having recently been won over by extra-wide mouse mats that run all the way under your keyboard, we were intrigued to know if there was any merit to stretching a mat even further. In theory, there are several benefits to these extended mats. The first is that you have the ability to truly go to town on your mouse placement and movements, flinging your mouse all over your desk without the risk of it falling…

AMD’s 6-core Ryzen CPUs have long been among our favourites thanks to the their excellent all-round multi-threaded performance and affordability. This has been borne out in sales too, with them outselling every other desktop CPU in recent times. In fact, the Ryzen 5 3600’s predecessor was the most popular CPU bought via etailers during the end of 2018 and into 2019. The Ryzen 5 3600 has a lot to live up to, then, but the 7nm Zen 2 architecture has helped it to offer a lot more across the board, especially in games. Even better, its launch price of nearly £200 has been cut to under £160, meaning it massively undercuts the Core i5-9600K and now competes with the Core i5-9400 and Core i5-9500. As with all of AMD’s Zen…

AMD made some interesting tweaks to its product stack with the introduction of Zen 2, and one of them was the positioning of the Ryzen 7 3700X compared with the 2nd-gen Ryzen line-up. Like the Ryzen 7 2700X, this chip has eight cores and 16 threads, but it also has a low TDP of just 65W. However, the frequencies aren’t in any way lowly. The peak single-core boost of 4.4GHz is only 100MHz lower than that of the Ryzen 7 3800X and just 200MHz lower than that of the Ryzen 9 3900X. The all-core boost we’ve observed was a fair bit lower than its 8-core sibling, though, with the Ryzen 7 3800X hitting 4.2GHz as opposed to 4GHz for the 3700X in multi-threaded tasks. Thanks to the Zen 2 architecture,…

If you’d said that 12-core CPUs would be available for under £450 on mainstream desktop platforms two years ago, we’d probably have laughed in your face. However, the Ryzen 9 3900X landed last summer, took the PC industry by storm and caused some serious problems for Intel. While the X570 platform lacks quad-channel memory support and enough PCI-E lanes to properly deal with several GPUs or many M.2 SSDs being accessed at the same time, the fact that this mainstream chipset can still handle several speedy PCI-E 4 M.2 SSDs, and accommodate 12-core and 16-core powerhouses, is a great benefit. It means AMD is offering serious content creation-crunching performance for very reasonable prices, and with comparatively cheap and varied motherboard options too. With 12 cores (and 24 threads via SMT),…

It’s always great to see manufacturers releasing halo products that tip their hats to PC enthusiasts, with the goal of creating a special product rather than a disruptive influence. While we love the thinking behind the Core i9-9900KS, though, it has suffered stock problems, and a delayed launch have meant that it never became a worthwhile consideration. The cheapest example we could find cost nearly £700 and, given that most Core i9-9900K CPUs can reach a 5GHz all-core overclock and cost £200 less, it’s already hard to recommend the Core i9-9900KS, in spite of its extremely rapid out-of-the-box credentials. It has a base frequency of 4GHz and, when boosting, all of its cores can reach 5GHz. Comparatively, only two cores were able to stretch that far with the Core i9-9900K…

With the Core i9-10980XE out of reach in this sub-£1,000 Labs test, the Core i9-10940X is Intel’s most potent weapon on test this month, and at £828, also the most expensive CPU in this roundup. This means it’s the target for AMD’s Ryzen 9 3950X, which undercuts it by £100 and offers an additional two cores over and above the Intel CPU’s 14. However, aside from multi-threaded performance, there’s a number of reasons why you might consider the Core i9-10940X over the Ryzen 9 3950X. Firstly, the accompanying X299 platform is mature and motherboards can now be bought for under £150. That’s less than the price of any AMD X570 motherboards we could find – you’d need to lose PCI-E 4 support and dip down to boards based on AMD’s…

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…

After 16 years in development, Crowbar Collective’s remake of the original Half-Life is (basically) complete. While Black Mesa: Earthbound was released eight years ago, that version only took players from Gordon Freeman’s arrival at the facility through to his teleportation to Xen. However, Half-Life’s famously underwhelming finale was left out, as Crowbar Collective opted  to spend more time fashioning it into something special. That second half of the game is finally out, and calling it a second half isn’t an overstatement. Crowbar Collective’s interpretation of Xen is nothing short of remarkable, comfortably transcending Valve’s original work, and making Black Mesa not just a remake but a game in its own right. Before we discuss this more recent update, though, it’s worth briefly going over Crowbar Collective’s work on updating the…

OPINION SHARE TACTICS Sharing images and video is now a common part of modern gaming. It’s always fun to share a daft screenshot or a cool video from your games with friends, but the ability to create and share media varies wildly between different virtual reality devices. For example, if you want to take a screenshot on the Valve Index, you simply press the trigger and system-menu button at the same time. Compare this simplicity with the equivalent system on the Oculus Quest. On this device, you need to open the Oculus menu, go to the Sharing section, select ‘Take photo’ and then wait in-game for the Quest to actually take the shot. It’s an unwieldy process, which makes it near impossible to get decent in-game shots to share. The…

So what’s inside the very first issue of Custom PC? Once you get past the contents page, you’re presented with Gareth’s introductory column, where he promises a new PC magazine that doesn’t either assume you’ve never seen a PC before, or that you’re an IT manager. ‘We won’t exclude people by using jargon unnecessarily,’ he says. ‘We’ll drill down to the roots and discover the truth behind the jargon, and what it actually means to you.’ It’s a philosophy that we still apply to Custom PC today, as you’ll find in our memory feature on p76. Next follows a lengthy news section, which includes a column by Hexus founder David Ross, a whole page of game news and an interview with Crucial about the next new exciting standard in memory,…

ANALYSIS tilde.club The modern Internet is dominated by  the World Wide Web, and the modern World Wide Web is dominated by social networks. According to InternetLiveStats.com, around half the users of the Web are also Facebook users. Add in Twitter, Instagram and so on, and it would be fair to claim that the majority of web use comes down to social networking. The modern web, though, is very different from the early days of the Internet. ‘Back in ye olden Inter-Net tymes of the 1990s, if you were a (then youngish) nerd like me, you’d get an account on some server called CyberFox.net and your web address would be http://CyberFox.net/~vixen. (You were “vixen”),’ wrote Paul Ford, founder of tilde. club, in October 2014. ‘And you could put some web pages…

The water-cooling and modding boom It’s strange to think that I’ve been a part of the Custom PC team for more than half its life now. I was the team’s modding and water-cooling expert when I first arrived, and those segments of the PC enthusiast scene were very small niches back then. When the financial crisis hit over a decade ago, I wondered if they would survive, given the sorry state of the PC market. With general PC sales declining, we’ve had years of grim reading, but it’s actually really looking up for enthusiasts. The PC modding and water-cooling scene has become huge over the past few years. Modding competitions with budgets of tens of thousands of dollars are commonplace. Meanwhile, professional modders number in their thousands and the water-cooling…

CPC: How did this project start, and what inspired you to build an open-air design? Michael: The whole project hatched from a fellow modder who kindly donated two 360mm EKWB SE radiators to me, after I helped him with the custom cables for his own build. I had also just built myself a DIY metal bender brake, so obviously I wanted to use that too. This was my first mod that I’ve ever done from scratch, and I wanted to use an open-air design because I wanted to display the cables, as that’s where my passion lies. However, I also didn’t want the restrictions of working within a case and enclosing everything in such a tight space. CPC: How did you go about designing the custom chassis? Michael: I always…