Содержание выпуска: June 2016 — Custom PC UK

I could print out an A3 game screenshot and wrap it around your head, but I doubt it would help Earlier this year, stories started circulating about Nintendo ceasing production of the Wii U. Few people were surprised. At the end of last year, the console had sold just 12.6 million units three years after its launch. Comparatively, the Wii sold over 50 million units after its first three years. Anecdotally, my (few) Wii U-owning friends put some of the blame on people not really understanding the Wii U, saying you really need to have a go on one yourself to understand the fun of the controller, and it’s difficult to get that across in a TV or online advert. That’s often a problem when a tech company invests in…

The units are produced by Asetek and use FEP flexible tubing SUPPLIER www.scan.co.uk SPECIFICATIONS / H1200 PRO Compatibility Intel: LGA2011, LGA2011-v3, LGA115x, LGA1366; AMD: AM3/3+,AM2/2+, FM2/2+, FM1 Radiator size with fans (mm) 271 x 120 x 25 (W x D x H) Fans 2 x 120mm Stated noise 16-35dB(A) H600 PRO Compatibility Intel: LGA2011, LGA2011-v3, LGA115x, LGA1366; AMD: AM3/3+,AM2/2+, FM2/2+, FM1 Radiator size with fans (mm) 155 x 120 x 27 (W x D x H) Fans 1 x 120mm Stated noise 16- 35dB(A) Antec hasn’t been afraid to try new ideas in the world of liquid cooling, consistently offering products showing out-of-the-box thinking, such as combined pumps and fans, as well as other new ideas, some of which were good, and some of which were not so good.…

The build quality and finish of the Addon T3 simply shout quality, letting you know it’s the real deal as soon as you get your hands on it. The brushed metal buttons and leather carry strap are particularly pleasant touches. At £159 inc VAT, you’d rightly expect audio excellence, and again, the T3 has it where it counts. Music sounded unexpectedly rich and full for a unit that’s only around the size of a handbag, and while the treble tended to dominate at the very top end of the volume settings, the mix is balance and behaved at normal listening levels. A claimed battery life of 30 hours (at 50 per cent volume) and a rear USB port for charging mobile devices mean the T3 can act as a travel…

In Win’s bizarrely named iEar is designed to fix the common conundrum of where to put your headphones when they’re not on your head. It’s little more than an elaborate hook, but it works very well – the sucker in the unit’s base stuck fast to every smooth, nonporous surface we tested, and it held firm in one spot for the few weeks we used it. You’ll need a suitable nearby surface on which to stick the iEar for it to interest you (and be able to stomach the grumble-worthy £15 price tag), but if you keep your PC on your desk, most side panels will do the trick fine. SUPPLIER www.box.co.uk…

Measuring less than 23mm thick, it’s truly a lean, mean gaming machine SUPPLIER www.overclockers.co.uk With a price that’s just shy of £1,900 inc VAT, the Aorus is the most expensive laptop on test, but it’s easy to see why. The black, all-aluminium chassis is simply lovely both in look and feel, with the subtle angles and aggressive vent design adding to its charm. It also just pips the MSI to being the lightest model, it’s the least wide and its thickness measures less than 23mm – it’s truly a lean, mean gaming machine. The Ethernet port and power input are the only rear-mounted connections, with all the others, including the power button, easily accessible at the sides. These connections include both USB 3.1 Type-C and HDMI 2, with a…

Gigabyte has even managed to fit an optical drive inside SUPPLIER www.overclockers.co.uk Measuring less than 21mm thick, Gigabyte’s P35X v5 is the thinnest laptop in this group test, and it only weights around 2.5kg as well. The smooth metal chassis is prone to picking up marks from grubby hands, but it’s at least comfortable to rest on, in part because of the smooth edges. The bezel around the 15.6in screen is rather large, but aesthetically, the P35X v5 is fine, if a little plain. It feels strong, has a sturdy screen adjustment mechanism and grips surfaces well. Meanwhile, the single-body touchpad has touch-sensitive buttons, which are a little stiff. The keyboard, however, has a quiet key action and doesn’t feel too sticky or spongy either. Via the FN key,…

Removing the bottom cover reveals a spare M.2 slot SUPPLIER www.mysn.co.uk The chassis used by XMG is almost identical to that of the Scan, with Clevo being the OEM of both. This laptop is a fraction lighter, however, and also a few millimetres thinner, since it uses the GTX 970M version of the chassis. Aside from the use of a GTX 970M GPU, though, this XMG configuration is basically the same price as Scan’s laptop. You do get a 2TB hard drive and 2400MHz DDR4 memory instead of the usual 2133MHz RAM though. Also, the M.2 SSD is a Samsung SSD 950 Pro, which is technically a little better than the SM951 used by most others, although the real-world difference will be slight. However, it’s the Scan’s 980M that…

On 18 June 2015, Wembley Arena was packed out. Originally built for the 1934 Olympics, and host of the 1948 and 2012 Olympic swimming competitions, the Arena was now centre stage for an entirely new kind of sporting event. Tens of thousands of fans gathered to watch the quarter final of the League of Legends (LoL) World Championships, while millions more watched the showdown online via Twitch. Even the BBC streamed the event for UK audiences, the first time a mainstream broadcaster has done so for an eSports competition. In total, 36 million people watched 16 teams compete for a combined prize purse of over $2 million US. Alongside Wembley, the championship packed out arenas in France, Belgium and Germany. The winners of the tournament, the South Korean team SK…

My new favourite case for modding: Raijintek’s Metis Raijintek’s tiny mini-ITX case, the Metis, has been largely overlooked by the modding community. One or two projects have made use of its aluminium construction, cutting some attractive sweeping windows into the panels, and plenty of people have fitted fan grilles and AIO liquid coolers too. However, very few people have cottoned onto the fact that the case can be easily dismantled, thanks to its screw-together construction, which is devoid of pesky rivets. This consistent use of screws opens up the case to many modifications. Firstly, spraying and cutting the case is much quicker and easier than with a standard case, as it’s so simple to deal with the individual panels. Secondly, it’s actually possible to invert the motherboard, as the motherboard…

MILESTONES THIS MONTH TOP 20 OVERALL TOP 20 PRODUCERS WHAT IS FOLDING? Folding@home uses the spare processing cycles from your PC’s CPU and graphics cards for medical research. You can download the client from http://folding.stanford.edu and our team’s ID is 35947. Once you pass a significant milestone, you’ll get your name in the mag. You can also discuss folding with us and other readers online at the www.bit-tech.net forums.…

Hard disks make a noise akin to someone shaking a half-empty biscuit tin when the heads are moving I’ve always hated extraneous mechanical and electrical noise, be it the whirl of noisy fans, the whine of a washing machine or the irregular rumble of a fridge compressor. Fortunately, there are now many ways to make your PC quieter – from your choice of cooling system to using low-power components that don’t emit much waste heat. However, there’s one component in many PCs that still makes a hell of a racket – the hard disk. With the platters typically spinning at 7,200rpm, a hard disk makes a very irritating, high-frequency whine, plus a noise akin to someone shaking a half-empty biscuit tin when the heads are moving about, seeking data. As…

UWP has no support for CrossFire, SLI, G-Sync or FreeSync Universal Windows Platform (UWP) allows developers to code one app and roll it out onto all Windows 10 devices, whether it’s a phone, tablet, laptop, PC or Xbox. However, the apps generally end up looking like those childish, colour-filled ‘Metro-apps’ that so many people hated in Windows 8. Microsoft may have good intentions, but it behaves as if it hasn’t learned from its past mistakes. PC users generally aren’t interested in apps or games designed for touch-screen-centric devices. The ecosystem for apps is far more fine-grained than just one size fits all; PCs are many times more powerful, and play completely different titles; I’m never going to play a typical PC title on my phone, regardless of the fact that…

The rest of the abuse is just from regular players who sometimes lose their temper Nature magazine, one of the most respected science journals, isn’t known for hyperbole, so when it published: ‘Can a video game company tame toxic behaviour? Scientists are helping to stop antisocial behaviour in the world’s most popular online game. The next stop could be a kinder Internet’, it’s reasonable to assume there’s substance behind the headline. The game in question is League of Legends, and anyone who plays it (or any other online game) will be no stranger to abusive behaviour. The Nature article rightly describes this behaviour as ‘griefing’, and Riot Games is so concerned about it that it hired some scientists. The lead researcher is Jeffrey Lin, who has a PhD in cognitive…

SUPPLIER www.overclockers.co.uk And I’m back in the room. That’s good, as it means I haven’t been mobbed by zombies because I couldn’t work out how to reload my gun after all, but taking the Vive off my head and returning to real life is a truly odd sensation. I’ve apparently paced around the entirety of Overclockers’ new VR room while wearing the Vive headset and trying out the Brookhaven Experiment zombie shooting demo. It isn’t a photo-real demo; I clearly wasn’t actually there, but the Vive really makes you feel as if you’re right there in the middle of the action, and it’s bizarre to be returned to the bare walls and empty floor of the demo room. This year sees a whole load of VR gear being released,…

SUPPLIER www.overclockers.co.uk Large, curved gaming monitors have been arriving in greater numbers, but most of them involve compromise, with comparatively low resolutions, missing features or underwhelming panels. That isn’t the case with the Asus ROG Swift PG348Q. This monitor costs a cool grand, but every feature is crammed into it. The PG348Q not only has a curved 3,440 x 1,440 ultra-wide IPS panel, but it also supports Nvidia G-Sync, while sporting flashing LEDs and game-specific screen modes. The screen’s 110ppi pixel density is high enough to keep games looking pin-sharp, but not so high that you’ll need to deploy Windows’ own scaling settings, which can be a blessing – even today, some software doesn’t scale properly. It’s a good balance, being sharper than most 1080p and 2,560 x 1,440…

The BrydgeMini is a clamshell-style iPad mini keyboard case made from brushed aluminium, styled to make your tablet look and feel like a dinky MacBook. The result is undeniably cute, and the quality of the case is top-notch; the keyboard is backlit, with solid key action, and the hinge clasps gripped our test iPad perfectly. Of course, reducing a keyboard down to this size introduces a number of annoyances, such as the tiny Shift keys, but Brydge has done well to at least keep the main letter keys well proportioned. Even so, the typing experience still feels cramped, making tapping out much more than a long email a chore. Elegant engineering can only do so much to mitigate a basic lack of space. SUPPLIER www.amazon.co.uk…

When we saw the Sargas 900 back in Issue 133, it was the biggest mouse mat we’d seen, but now Mionix has updated the line and introduced a new, even bigger model. In truth, the updates aren’t major. The fabric upper now has a Mionix logo and is treated to make it easier to clean. The mats’ thickness has also increased by 25 per cent to 2.5mm. In use, the Sargas XL is basically indistinguishable from the 900 model it replaces. It’s the same size (90 x 40cm), and the surface tracks equally well. The new XXL model tracks well too, but with its 120 x 50cm dimensions, it actually hung off the edges of our desk, which was faintly ridiculous. Both mats roll up, but even then, they’re still…

It’s the lightest laptop in this class on test, weighing under 2.3kg SUPPLIER www.scan.co.uk Like the Aorus (opposite), Asus’ UX501VW is very well crafted. The sleek and stylish all-metal exterior has at least a whiff of Apple about it, which is no bad thing when it comes to laptop design. The width and depth are mainly dictated by its 15.6in screen; it’s very slim at 21.3mm and it’s also the lightest laptop in this class on test, weighing in at under 2.3kg. A consequence of the size is a very large area for supporting your wrists when typing, and it’s comfortable to rest against the slightly textured metal. Meanwhile, the large touchpad is a single body model with a glass-coating and touch-sensitive buttons, which all works fine, although the…

The MSI’s brushed-metal chassis looks and feels pleasant SUPPLIER www.overclockers.co.uk The GS40’s 14in screen definitely helps with its portability. It has a very similar weight and thickness to the Aorus, but the latter isn’t as wide and the MSI is less deep. The MSI’s brushed-metal chassis looks and feels pleasant, although it smudges easily. The build quality isn’t quite as good as that of the Aorus’ but it’s very good nonetheless – there are no issues with the screen movement mechanics either, and the laptop has plenty of grip. The core specification, including the CPU, GPU and RAM, is also the same as that of the Aorus machine. The main difference between the two systems is storage. The MSI has a 256GB NVMe SSD with a 1TB 2.5in hard…

Build a home theatre PC The parts you’ll need to build an affordable, home theatre PC that’s ideal for putting in the lounge and playing back all manner of video formats. This machine will handle general computing and media tasks with no trouble, and its dual-core Skylake CPU can even handle 4K video playback. Meanwhile, its super-quiet Noctua CPU cooler prevents it from making a racket. Build a budget gaming PC The parts you’ll need to build a budget machine capable of playing the latest games at maximum settings on a 1080p monitor, and even some games at 2,560 x 1,440. The machine has a discrete graphics card, a Skylake dual-core CPU and DDR4 memory. The ASRock Extreme4 motherboard is also capable of base clock overclocking via a BIOS update.…

DEVELOPER Thekla, Inc/ PUBLISHER Thekla, Inc/ WEBSITE www.the-witness.net Eight years since the highly praised platformer Braid, Jonathan Blow has finally released his second game, The Witness. It’s an open-world puzzler set on a gloriously colourful abandoned island. The premise is simply that you wake up on this island and begin solving mazes. These mazes are displayed on flat grey screens that stand in stark contrast to the picturesque landscape, and they’re completed simply by tracing a line from a circular starting node to a pulsing end point. There are so many mazes that, by the time you’ve finished The Witness, you’ll be qualified to join Leonardo DiCaprio on a mission to plant ideas in somebody’s brain. It’s a bold idea to frame an entire game around one type of puzzle,…

Particles are a key component of modern game engines. From motes of dust glinting in simulated sunlight, to sparks floating from fires and spraying from explosions, particles offer an easy way to add a large amount of detail to a scene. They can be used to create weather systems such as snow and rain; plus, when combined with animation and a little ingenuity, they can represent distant flocks of birds, or leaves being blown off trees to simulate wind. But can particles form the basis of an entire game? This idea was the starting point for Bezier, a furious twin-stick shooter that combines spectacular visuals and action with an introspective story that explores religion and evolution. It also crams more particles into a single scene than an explosion at a…

With a first glance at the Raspberry Pi 3, the silkscreen layer aside, you could convince yourself that you’re holding a Raspberry Pi 2, or even a Raspberry Pi Model B+. It’s all there: the 40-pin general-purpose input-output (GPIO) header, the four USB ports, the system-on-chip processor slap bang in the centre, even the rounded corners and mounting holes. Physically, the Raspberry Pi 3 is definitely underwhelming. That is, until you realise what this consistency means: the Pi 3 is a complete drop-in replacement for the Pi 2 or Model B+ in any existing project. If you own any add-on hardware, it should work just fine with the new device, bar a few hiccoughs regarding the decision to switch over a couple of UARTs, which could cause temporary problems for…

Overclockers launches mini 8Pack rig Overclockers’ resident tweaking guru, Ian ‘8Pack’ Parry has brought his distinctive brand of overclocked, water-cooled PCs to the mini-ITX world, with a dinky powerhouse called the Asteroid. The new system is built into a custom Parvum 8Pack Edition case, which features a built-in water-cooling reservoir, unlike the standard Parvum X1.0, which is mainly designed for all-in-one liquid coolers. The Asteroid features a Core i7-6700K overclocked to 4.7GHz, 3866MHz Team Group Xtreem memory and a GeForce GTX 980 Ti card overclocked to at least 1450MHz. Meanwhile, a 1kW 80Plus Titanium PSU comes from Superflower, and you get two SSDs in the system. Overclockers has also focused hard on the looks of the machine, which features a full custom water-cooling loop with rigid tubing. Prices for the…

 SUPPLIER www.scan.co.uk / MODEL NUMBER FD-CA-DEF-NANO-S-BK The case has been modified to include reservoir and pump mounts /SPECIFICATIONS Dimensions (mm) 203 x 412 x 344 (W x D x H) Material Steel, plastic Available colours Black Weight 4.6kg Front panel Power, reset 2 x USB 3, stereo, mic Drive bays 2 x 35in/2.5in, 2 x 2.5in Form factor(s) Mini-ITX Cooling 2 x 120mm/140mm roof fan mounts (fans not included), 2 x 120/140mm front fan mounts (1 x 140mm fans included), 1 x 120mm rear fan mount (fan included), 1 x 120mm bottom fan mount (fan not included) CPU cooler clearance 160mm Maximum graphics card length 315mm We’ve already seen one new mini-ITX case from Fractal Design recently, in the form of its excellent Core 500, which offered reasonable water-cooling support and,…

We first assess a gaming laptop physically, looking at its size and weight, the chassis’ build quality, the usability of the touchpad, keyboard and ports, and the ease with which you can get into the laptop to upgrade or service it. After letting the OS fully update and installing the latest graphics drivers, we assess overall system performance with our own RealBench software, which performs image editing, video encoding, OpenCL and heavy multi-tasking workloads, giving a score for each test based on time taken, as well as a weighted overall score. The test is looped three times and we report the average results. This test is run using the Balanced power setting in Windows while plugged into the mains. To test gaming performance, we switch to the High Performance power…

It has a mostly metal exterior, which is preferable to plastic SUPPLIER www.cyberpowersystem.co.uk The Fangbook 4 SX6-200 is presented in a fairly bulky, 27mm thick chassis, and it isn’t as strong as some of its competitors either, showing too much flex in a few places. Still, it has a mostly metal exterior, which is preferable to plastic, but the finish is slightly glossy and shows marks too easily. There’s also quite a thick bezel around the screen, but the mechanism for moving this screen is solid. The touchpad is generally fine to use and has clicker buttons that are totally separate from it, although they’re made from plastic and sound quite loud when depressed. On the plus side, the full-sized keyboard doesn’t present any issues, and it has a…

It got a great result in Total War: Attila, where others fell down SUPPLIER www.pcspecialist.co.uk The Defiance II is the joint least expensive laptop on test, but in this case you get a GTX 970M, whereas the Cyberpower only has a GTX 960M. While the Cyberpower has a fast NVMe SSD, though, PC Specialist’s SSD only supports SATA 6Gbps. However, you get almost double the capacity (240GB vs 128GB), with both laptops also having a 1TB hard drive. At this price, PC Specialist’s approach makes more sense – it will be hard to tell the two machines’ speed apart in most 2D tasks, but the 128GB of storage in the Cyberpower will quickly limit you once a few games are installed. The PC Specialist’s Clevo-made chassis is also lovely,…

G-Sync isn’t a feature to be underestimated or understated SUPPLIER www.scan.co.uk Scan’s LG15 Vengeance is presented in a big, Clevomanufactured chassis. The main external surfaces (excluding the plastic underside) are metal, and resting on this material is comfortable, although it also smudges easily and the edges are a little sharp. This laptop is also both the heaviest and thickest machine on test, although it’s still a far cry away from standard, beefier gaming laptops. It’s the screen that really makes this laptop shine though. It’s another 1080p panel, but with one big difference – Nvidia’s G-Sync tech, which is fantastic, eliminating tearing and stuttering artefacts from games. Frame rates between 30-60fps are pretty much standard for a gaming laptop at this price, which our results show very clearly, and…

The best horror makes us question how we act and behave Horror games are stuck in a rut. Ever since 2010’s Amnesia: The Dark Descent wowed critics and players with its terrifying twist on the traditional haunted castle, developers across the globe have been chasing the same pot of severed heads at the end of the same black rainbow. A pioneering concept six years ago has become an increasingly worn template, followed slavishly by an entire sub-genre of games, and it’s time the mould was broken and forged anew. Amnesia, if you haven’t played it, was developed by the Swedish team Frictional Games, and was a culmination of work Frictional had begun several years previously in its Penumbra series. Amnesia was revolutionary in several ways. First and foremost, it removed…

DEVELOPER Bloober Team SA/ PUBLISHER Aspyr/ WEBSITE www.layersoffear.com Layers of Fear’s developers are quick to reference their artistic inspirations from the gothic artworks of Francisco Goya and Henry Fuseli but, in terms of execution, Bloober Team’s debut is less a horror masterwork and more a funfair ghost train. It’s a decent ghost train, however, being moody, unpredictable and offering up genuinely effective scares. It casts you as an artist whose creative aspirations are restricted by his lack of success and the need to support his family. The resulting stress eats away at his sanity, and we’re introduced to him as he returns home to finish his latest and greatest work, at which point his mind begins to unravel faster than a Damon Lindelof plot. Layers of Fear’s key gimmick is…

We usually stick to simple build guides in Custom PC, but this month we’re going all out with a proper customised PC. We’ll show you how to build one of the smallest, most powerful water-cooled systems on the planet. By making a few simple modifications to one of the smallest cases on the market – Raijintek’s Metis, we’ve made room for a capable, custom water-cooling system to build a monstrous PC in a case the size of a shoebox. We haven’t settled for low-spec hardware here. If you’re building the most powerful PC possible, you need to take advantage of Intel’s X99 platform and we’ve managed to squeeze an X99 motherboard, along with a Core i7-5960X CPU, into a mini-ITX case. We’ve also selected a high-end graphics card – Nvidia’s…

Before we started overclocking, it was important to see how our radiator coped with cooling the Core i7-5960X and GTX 980 Ti. Running Prime95’s smallfft test and Unigine Valley at the same time for 15 minutes, we saw the CPU top out at 74°C, with a delta T of 51°C using the motherboard’s standard CPU fan profile. This temperature indicates reasonable headroom for an overclock. The GPU, meanwhile, sat at 57°C, with a delta T of 34°C – again, a long way from the GTX 980 Ti’s thermal throttling limit of around 80°C. Our maximum Core i7-5960X frequency is around 4.45GHz with a 1.35V vcore. However, this overclock requires elaborate cooling and we need to cool a GTX 980 Ti too. As such, we decided to hit 4GHz with a…

Having signed up for a Loop energy monitor, which promised to give me insight into my gas and electricity usage over time, I was disappointed to find there was no publicly accessible application programming interface (API) for polling the data. A kindly customer service person pointed me to a third-party hack that was capable of pulling down the raw data, although with the warning that it was entirely unsupported and could go away at any given moment without warning. And at that point the idea was born. I wanted to make a pretty real-time graph of electricity usage, in an effort to remind others in the household to turn off devices when they’re done with them. Using a Raspberry Pi Zero for this job is admittedly overkill, but I’ve also…

Our kind pals at acclaimed peripheral maker Roccat have left us with a top-notch Ryos MK FX mechanical keyboard, complete with RGB lighting and Cherry MX Brown switches, to offer up to a lucky winner of this competition, along with a Roccat Nyth – the company’s amazingly flexible modular MMO gaming mouse. Not only that, but there are also two mice going for runners-up prizes – a Roccat Kiro and a Roccat Kova, the latter of which is our current Elite-listed ambidextrous mouse. Purpose-built for hardcore gamers, the Ryos MK FX is one of the most advanced mechanical gaming keyboards on the market. Using all of Roccat’s industry expertise and gaming experience, the Ryos MK FX boasts a feature set so comprehensive and a design so eye-watering you’ll be leading…

Gimp We use Gimp to open and edit large images. Unlike our previous Gimp test, this one uses more than one CPU core, although it’s still more sensitive to clock speed increases than more CPU cores. Handbrake H.264 video encoding Our heavily multi-threaded Handbrake video encoding takes full advantage of many CPU cores, pushing them to 100 per cent load. LuxMark OpenCL This GPU compute test is the only synthetic part of our suite, although the renderer is based on the real LuxRender physically based rendering software. As 3D rendering is a specific workload that not everyone will use, and because OpenCL support isn’t standard in most software, this section is given just a quarter of the weighting of the other tests in the final score. Heavy multi-tasking Our new…