Pc Gamer Presents ; Pc Hardware Handbook - 2018.pdf

P R E S E N T S

HANDBOOK 58 PAGES OF GUIDES

PC GAMING STARTS HERE FROM OVERCLOCKING TO CASE MODDING: THE ADVICE YOU NEED

FIRST EDITION

Digital Edition

84

PAGES OF HARDWARE REVIEWS INSIDE!

AMD vs INTEL INTEL CORE OR AMD RYZEN — WHICH CPU SUITS YOU?

REVIEWED CPUs I CASES I GRAPHICS CARDS I MOTHERBOARDS I SSDs I MONITORS I MICE I HEADSETS

WELCOME TO P R E S E N T S

HANDBOOK It’s been a fun old year for PC enthusiasts, and by ‘fun’ we mean “Thanks, crypto miners, for driving up the prices of RAM and GPUs to literally insane levels. Good job.” Snarky comments about being made of imaginary money aside though, the last 12 months have seen some interesting developments, aside from the squeeze on our pockets. AMD dropped the bombshell that is Ryzen; everybody waited for Intel’s counter-move. And waited. And waited. When it finally dropped, our first move was – obviously – to pit them against each other in a battle royale of builds. That’s what we’re all about here, which is why, on these pages, you’ll find all the essential info you need to build and/or upgrade your own PC. Whether you’re looking to switch out components to give yourself a performance boost ahead of the next slew of AAA games or whether you’re going to simply bite the bullet and put together a whole new rig, we’ve got the lowdown on the latest high-end kit as well as budget and mid-range offerings that won’t break the bank. From processors, motherboards and graphics cards (and solutions to keep them cool) to keyboards, mice, speakers and monitors, we’ve got everything you need to put together your dream machine.

P R E S E N T S

HANDBOOK Future PLC Richmond House, 33 Richmond Hill, Bournemouth, Dorset, BH2 6EZ

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Contents 80

Build section 10 How to build a PC Your essential guide to putting your own rig together

18 Today’s best upgrades Bring your system bang up to date with these hardware picks

28 Memory matters Discover the complex state of DDR4 in 2018

38 Protect your tech

132

Protect your kit from theft and make your own alarm system.

46 Build it special: AMD versus Intel Two CPU titans go head-to-head, but which build is the best?

56 Build it: Ryzen to the challenge

128 HARDWARE REVIEWS All the hardware you need to supercharge your PC

Our AMD build in depth

60 Build it: The Intel rig of damnation Our Intel rig in depth

64 The CPU scandal What do Spectre and Meltdown mean for your gaming PC?

Head to head

68

74

80

86

BUDGET CASES PROCESSORS Z270 GRAPHICS MOTHERBOARDS CARDS If you’re building a new PC you’re going to need something to put it in. House your hardware in our pick of the best cases for under £100

6

We pit AMD and Intel’s chips head-to-head in a CPU brawl to find out which one truly delivers the ultimate in processing power

Lay the foundation of your new PC with our selection of the best Z270 mobos on the market

There’s no need to raid your savings for these great-value GPUs

92 SOLID STATE DRIVES Give your level load times a lift with these high-end solid state drives

104

98

110

134

145

136

98

104

110

ALL-IN-ONE COOLERS

4K MONITORS

KEYBOARDS WIRELESS MICE

Serve your CPU performance ice-cold with these frosty cooling solutions

Show off your graphics card’s capabilities on a high definition screen and get a graphical boost from our selection of seven of the best Ultra HD displays

We cherry (switch) pick our favourite from the best mechanical keyboard setups out there

116 Set your mouse free from cables with one of these wireless mice

122 SPEAKERS Turn your PC into a highquality media centre and make some noise with a set of high-end desktop speakers

7

Contents

BUILD 28

HERE’S WHAT YOU NEED TO BUILD YOUR OWN PC FROM SCRATCH

38 60

10

8

BUILD Intro

10 HOW TO BUILD A PC Your essential guide to putting a rig together

46

18 TODAY’S BEST UPGRADES Bring your system bang up to date with these hardware picks

28 MEMORY MATTERS Discover the complex state of DDR4 in 2018

38 PROTECT YOUR TECH Protect your kit from theft and make your own alarm system

46 BUILD IT SPECIAL: AMD VERSUS INTEL Two CPU titans go head-to-head, but which build is the best?

56 BUILD IT: RYZEN TO THE CHALLENGE Our AMD build in depth

60 BUILD IT: THE INTEL RIG OF DAMNATION Our Intel rig in depth

64 THE CPU SCANDAL What do Spectre and Meltdown mean for your gaming PC?

BUDGET

MID RANGE

ADVANCED

9

F E AT U R E How to build a PC

10

HOW TO BUILD A PC Feature

GUIDE

HOW TO BUILD A PC Building a PC is a huge part of the joy of PC gaming. No-one starts off as an expert PC builder, though, and here we’ll take you through the entire process step-by-step

11

F E AT U R E How to build a PC

1

PREPARE THE CHASSIS

Let’s build. First, take off both side panels on the case. You’ll need access to both sides for inserting hardware, cable management, and general ease of access. It can get crowded, quick. Move any cables inside of the case out of the way. We’ll get to moving those around in a while.

2

MOTHERBOARD PREP

Your chassis should include motherboard standoff screws, as pictured (sometimes they’re gold instead of black). These prevent your motherboard from making direct contact with the back of the chassis, which could short out the board. Reference the holes on your motherboard to see where the standoffs need to be, since this can vary. Screw them in tightly. Take the I/O (input/output) shield and line it up with the frame from inside the case. Make sure you have it facing in the right direction before you pop it in. Again, make sure that you check your motherboard for reference. Push it in, making sure not to press too hard on the centre (but you might have to really press hard on those edges in order to make sure that it’s in the right place). There should be a satisfying click from each side once it’s aligned correctly and as it snaps into place. With this done, we can move onto the motherboard itself. 12

3

INSERT THE MOTHERBOARD Once the chassis is prepped, it’s time for you to insert the motherboard. This chassis has a convenient built-in standoff that centres the motherboard for you. However, not all cases will have one, so when you place it down – make sure that you do so gently – there may be some resistance up against the I/O shield. This is completely normal and nothing to worry about. Just make sure that no metal prongs accidentally get lodged into a USB port, otherwise it’s game over! Once the motherboard is aligned with the standoffs, screw down the centre – don’t tighten it yet – and then do the opposite corners. Screwing in opposite corners is a good rule of thumb for installing anything in a PC, as it lowers the risk of misaligning and potentially damaging your hardware. Tighten the screws bit by bit until the motherboard is firmly in place. Don’t overdo it. If it isn’t jostling around, it should be secure. Once it’s secure, tighten up the screws slowly and gently, working from opposite corners, to make sure that the motherboard stays seated correctly.

HOW TO BUILD A PC Feature

4

SEAT THE PROCESSOR Good job. If you’re reading this and not cursing or crying, you’ve successfully got a motherboard in a PC case. Next up we deal with the most important part of any PC: the CPU. Treat the CPU like an inexplicably living brain in a glass jar. Hold it at the edges and avoid touching the underside. Finger grease can mess with the heat diffusion, which is not good on one of the most expensive, vital, volatile PC components. To install it, lift the lever on the CPU socket on the motherboard, remove the plastic placeholder, and locate the golden arrow on your CPU. This, and the notches on your CPU, will let you know how to align the CPU above the slot. Make sure everything is matched up, then carefully lower the CPU straight down onto the socket. It should fit in effortlessly, so don’t put extra pressure on it. CPUs are easily damaged. Once the CPU is in place, lower the socket shield and secure it by pulling and locking the metal lever down. You’ll feel resistance, and likely a few heart palpitations, but try not to worry too much, everything is (probably) okay. 13

F E AT U R E How to build a PC

5

PUT IN THE POWER SUPPLY

Now, for something much simpler… A PC isn’t powered by magic, so a power supply (PSU) is necessary. Ours is a modular unit, meaning we can plug and pull cables as needed. Some PSUs have cables built into the unit, making cable management a hassle, so if you can, go modular. Installing is simple. Just make sure the PSU fan is either facing the chassis vent (or upwards if it works in with your airflow scheme) and then screw it in from outside the case.

6

READY THE RAM

With the PSU in, its time for another simple step: the memory. First, you’ll need to locate the DIMM slots. Any DIMM-wit could do it! Sorry, that wasn’t helpful. They’re the four, thin, RAM-length slots next to the CPU. In order to take advantage of any dual-channel functionality, you’ll need to install the RAM in alternating slots. Refer to your motherboard documents for details, but for us, the slots were labelled. Placing the RAM is simple. Make sure the locks at the end of each slot are open, find the notch in your RAM, line it up with the notch in the slot, insert it, and push until the lock clicks and the RAM is securely in place. Don’t be afraid to push down hard.

SOME PSUS HAVE CABLES BUILT INTO THE UNIT, MAKING CABLE MANAGEMENT A HASSLE, SO IF YOU CAN, GO MODULAR

14

7

INSTALL THE COOLER This step will vary depending on what type of cooler is being installed, so be sure to refer to the manufacturer’s instructions. If you’re using a stock Intel cooler, installation is as simple as lining up the small fan and pressing down each corner until the legs snap into the motherboard. Most coolers require some kind of backplate installation, which means you’ll be coming from the underside of your motherboard. With an air cooler, you’ll probably thread mounting screws through the top of the motherboard and attach them to the backplate with nuts. On the top side, directly over the CPU, goes the cooler itself. Make sure you align each corner around the CPU. Plug the cooler’s power cable into the motherboard. The manual should illustrate where the pins are in case they’re not labelled on the motherboard itself. We plugged into CPU_FAN and W_PUMP.

HOW TO BUILD A PC Feature

8

INSTALL THE SSD Of course, every PC needs non-volatile memory for storage, but nowadays, there’s an allowance for plenty of variation. What you see on these pages is a simple build, so in this case we’re just sticking with a single SSD. Installing an SSD is easy in this Fractal Design Define R5 case. You’ll find that most cases are built with SSDs in mind these days: just screw the drive into one of the provided SSD trays, and then screw the SSD plus tray into wherever the chassis allows. Now is a good time to start thinking about cable management, too. The drive will need power and a way to interface with the other PC components. First, you’ll need to plug the SATA data and power cables into the drive. Be sure to arrange your cables with some kind of logic in mind that prevents them from trailing across the motherboard, if possible. Most cases let you snake cables through the base behind the mobo by using conveniently placed routing holes, but not all chassis are quite so lucky. Next, the SATA data cable plugs into the motherboard. Some plugs have different speeds or interfaces, so check your motherboard manual for specifics about which to use. Lastly, the power cable goes to the PSU, as indicated either on the PSU itself or in the manual.

9

INSTALL THE GPU It’s time to seriously pump this PC up with the graphics card. Fortunately, installing this in your PC is extremely simple. First, remove the PCI-E slot shields near the rear of the case where your video card will lay. You’ll find that most of today’s graphics cards take up two slots. Grab your graphics card, align it with the PCI-E slot, and press it down gently until you feel the card lock into place. Secure the graphics card by screwing it in with thumbscrews where the slot shields used to be. Graphics cards need extra power to function, so find the power cables your GPU requires and plug them in (they’re typically labelled PCI-E or VGA). Don’t worry since PSU cables only fit where they’re meant to, thanks to an elaborate set of square and hexagonal plug components. Of course, if your PSU is modular, make sure the cables are plugged into the unit as well. 15

F E AT U R E How to build a PC

10

PANEL CONNECTORS In order to get the lights and switches on the front of your chassis to work, these tiny cables need to plug into your motherboard in very specific places. Refer to the motherboard manual and on-board labelling if necessary. There may be some front panel USB cables too, but those are much easier to deal with. Plug them in as indicated here. A motherboard needs power too. Find the 24-pin power connector, orient it correctly, and push it into the motherboard until it’s firmly connected. Standard ATX motherboards also require an additional power connection close to the CPU, usually four to six pins. Check for one, plug it in, and then make sure all power cables plug back into the PSU if it’s modular. There should be fan connectors in various locations on the motherboard. Find the ones that best suit your cable management and plug them in. Wrap things up by doing any last minute cable management. It’s not a bad idea to double check your connections and make sure all of your components are firmly seated, too. 16

HOW TO BUILD A PC Feature

TROUBLESHOOTING

11

AND THEN, A PC! Be sure to take a step back and drink it all in. You’ve (probably) successfully expressed yourself via expensive hardware, sweat, tears and a healthy dose of love. This is the beginning of a new era for you, but it doesn’t have to end here. Feel free to add components we didn’t

cover. If you’re a fan of antiquated tech, then throw in a disc drive. Want to open up your PC to more peripherals? Add a bluetooth receiver. Not enough red LEDs in your life? Well, then light that sucker up. It’s your PC, make it your way. The platform is open for a reason, after all.

No power? Try reseating connections between PSU and the motherboard. Still nothing? Recheck the mobo’s front panel cables. If you’re getting power, but no bootup, check the RAM. Maybe try the other set of DIMM slots. Check your video cable – it should be connected to the graphics card, not to the motherboard. If nothing else works, most manufacturers offer solid support.

17

F E AT U R E Today’s best upgrades

KEY Budget build

Mid-range build

Advanced build

Pick the parts you want to build a new, well-rounded PC for a good price.

Run every new game at 1080p 60fps? This recommended build will see you through.

You’re looking for the best PC on the market, but you still want to spend smart.

BUDGET

18

MID RANGE

ADVANCED

T O D AY ’ S B E S T U P G R A D E S Feature

TODAY’S BEST UPGRADES U

Bring your system bang up to date with some choice HARDWARE PICKS

pgrading is fundamental to the PC. It’s one of the cornerstones of our platform of choice, and it’s why the PC has survived while other systems have failed. It’s also the reason why you can focus on the hardware that matters the most, and spend your money appropriately. You can upgrade in stages—if you want to focus on a performance CPU first, with a mind to upgrading your graphics card or storage later, you can. As long as you know what’s happening in the tech world, you’re in good shape. On that note, we’ve just had an incredible year for processors. AMD has come out swinging with its Ryzen line, with increased core counts and strong raw performance. And Intel has just responded with its eighth-generation CPU line—we’ve managed to squeeze the first chips to arrive into our recommendations, too. Which means we’re now looking at two completely new mainstream platforms that didn’t exist a year ago. Plenty of opportunities for

upgrades, in other words, and we’ve rounded up some of the best on the market, whatever budget you’re planning on. Bear in mind that any new piece of gear should have a legitimate upgrade path. Getting the best processor for your motherboard is fine, but it takes the shine off it a bit if you know there’s a whole new platform doing the rounds. That’s why our recommendations all relate to some of the most recent hardware lines. This shouldn’t stop you upgrading older hardware as far as it can go, though, because that can often be a cost-effective route – especially if you’re happy to take the risk of buying used hardware (great for older processor deals, and making the move to SLI). Over the page, we look at the best hardware upgrades you can buy right now, with performance benchmarks where they matter. We cover all the major components, and highlight things to watch out for when upgrading. It’s a great time to give your machine a new lease of life, as you’re about to find out. 19

F E AT U R E Today’s best upgrades

PROCESSORS ADVANCED

AMD RYZEN THREADRIPPER 1950X www.amd.com There is an argument for going with Intel’s Core i9-7980XE: It’s a beast, with 18 cores and 36 threads. It costs £1,668, though. For the vast majority of us, such a move makes no sense. If you want high-end performance that will leave your bank balance less sore, then a Threadripper is the way to go. And at £999, the 16-core 1950X is the best that AMD has on offer. The AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X is incredible, effectively squeezing a pair of Ryzen 1800Xs into one package. There are big wins in addition to the phenomenal core count, including 64 PCIe lanes, support for quad-channel DDR4, and 40MB of L3 cache. It happily turbos up to 4GHz, and stays cool while doing so; 60 C puts Intel’s latest to shame.

T O TA L £999

The resultant chip is huge, so AMD has introduced a new package and mounting mechanism – an interesting system that helps ensure you don’t damage your new motherboard or expensive CPU. Speaking of which, you will, of course, need a new motherboard to go along with your top-end chip, and we cover our recommendation for X399 later.

INTEL CORE I5-8400 www.intel.com At last, we’ve seen it come to fruition. Intel has finally thrown off the shackles of those four-core limitations, and added an additional two cores to the vast majority of chips in its arsenal of mainstream processors. It is, in essence, an effective way of combatting AMD’s Ryzen eight-core parts, without having to redevelop an entire processor

raft of additional processing prowess, capable of demolishing the older Core i7-7700K. It is, by far, the best value processor you can buy to date, coming in at a faintly ridiculous £183. That’s not to say there aren’t any limitations with Coffee Lake, the big one being power

INTEL HAS FINALLY THROWN OFF THE SHACKLES OF THOSE FOURCORE LIMITATIONS architecture to do so. The Core i5-8400 is the absolute sweet spot in the lineup, and for those looking for a mid-range, no fuss chip, that gets the job done, it’s the new king of the hill. Although it still lacks the Hyper-Threading of its Core i7 superior, the inclusion of those two Coffee Lake cores on top of the usual four provides a 20

MID_RANGE

T O TA L £183

FOR HIGH-END PERFORMANCE A THREADRIPPER IS DEFINITELY THE WAY TO GO

T O D AY ’ S B E S T U P G R A D E S Feature

BUDGET

T O TA L £130

AMD RYZEN 3 1300X www.amd.com As an upgrade, a budget chip is a tricky concept. We’ve been recommending the Intel Pentium G4600 for our budget build for the best part of a year, but when it comes to an upgrade, we can’t really recommend a last-gen CPU that slots into a last-gen motherboard. So instead of tying ourselves in knots trying to predict which platform you’re upgrading from, we’ve picked a chip that offers strong performance at a great price point. The Ryzen 3 1300X may not have the headline-grabbing thread count of the top-of-the-range 1800X, but this is still an unlocked quad-core chip for not much cash. Talking of cost, you’ll need to buy an AM4 motherboard to use it, and possibly some DDR4 memory to go with it, if your current system is a little

long in the tooth. So that £130 price tag isn’t the whole story, but this is still a good value proposition, with a decent upgrade path of its own, which is always worth considering at the budget end of the scale. The retail chip comes with the Wraith cooler as well, which does a fine job of keeping it cool while hitting the 3.7GHz turbo, so no immediate need to grab a separate all-in-one to get the most from this chip. This is an upgrade path that represents significantly less outlay than the others we’ve mentioned, but won’t struggle too hard to run the latest games.

A CHIP THAT OFFERS STRONG PERFORMANCE AT A GREAT PRICE POINT

PROCESSOR BENCHMARKS Cores/ Threads

Cinebench R15 Single

Cinebench R15 Multi

Fry Render

X265

Power Draw Idle

Power Draw Load

Price

Intel Core i9-7980XE

18/36

41.12

184

3,331

64

66

258

£1,668

MD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X

16/32

38.29

167

3,012

84

91

271

£999

Intel Core i9-7900X

10/20

38.15

180

2,218

94

86

223

£827

AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1920X

12/24

35.39

152

2,308

127

67

243

£799

Intel Core i7-7820X

8/16

30.45

194

1,741

122

83

197

£496

AMD Ryzen 7 1800X

8/16

27.89

159

1,612

161

56

182

£450

Intel Core i7-8700K

6/12

30.65

205

1,553

133

65

198

£336

AMD Ryzen 7 1700X

8/16

26.81

154

1,542

172

57

143

£329

Intel Core i7-7700K

4/8

20.68

194

970

225

44

110

£296

AMD Ryzen 7 1700

8/16

24.12

147

1,406

178

47

115

£290

AMD Ryzen 5 1600X

6/12

22.18

159

1,223

226

45

115

£250

Intel Core i5-7600K

4/4

15.86

179

663

346

44

103

£206

Intel Core i5-8400

6/6

22.24

172

956

231

44

123

£183

AMD Ryzen 5 1500X

4/8

15.85

154

807

329

42

101

£189

AMD Ryzen 5 1400

4/8

13.61

131

693

380

55

93

£169

AMD Ryzen 3 1300X

4/4

12.64

139

550

462

56

95

£130

Chip

21

F E AT U R E Today’s best upgrades

GRAPHICS CARDS NVIDIA GTX 1080 TI www.nvidia.com Graphics cards are in a bit of an odd state right now. Nvidia has been left unchallenged, with AMD only providing any hint of competition in the mid-range. The RX 500 refresh was little more than a badge swap, and Vega a dud – a disappointing high-end solution, overhyped to its own detriment (although it struts its stuff nicely when it comes to cryptocurrency mining, annoyingly). So, how does the land lie if you’re looking to invest in a high-end GPU? How do you power a 4K gaming rig in today’s market? Well, fortunately, Nvidia hasn’t been resting on its laurels, and is still focused on trying to capture as much of that market share as it can. Recently it dropped the bombshell that is the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti. Think of it as a cut-down Titan Xp, a warhorse of a GPU focused solely on gaming, but coming in at a far more attractive price point. The differences are slim, with its 1GB of GDDR5X being

ADVANCED

one of the few things cut. The Titan Xp is slightly more powerful – about 15 per cent or so – but it also costs £500 more, making it a superfluous product aimed solely at the affluent, or those who need the Titan’s very specific developer skill set, as limited as it is.

T O TA L £679 GRAPHICS CARD BENCHMARKS High-End 4K GPUs (Over £550)

Nvidia Titan Xp

MSI GTX 1070 GAMING X 8G www.msi.com

Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti Reference AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 PNY GTX 1080 XLR8 OC

Once upon a time, the card to have was the GTX 660 Ti. It was cost-effective, powerful for its day, and clocked like a champ. However, as the battle lines widen, and GPU prices extend ever upward, our idea of what a mid-range card actually includes has inevitably increased, too. The GTX 1070 is a prime example. With performance matching the height of Maxwell’s frame-rendering capabilities, it’s a card that makes the once-premium 9 series Titan X affordable, cutting the price by 66 per cent. MSI’s Gaming X variant provides a fine balance between noise reduction and thermal management. There’s no superfluous RGB lighting here apart from a hint of background colour. Couple that with a powerful stack of 8GB GDDR5X and its bunker-busting Pascal GPU, and the GTX 1070 dominates 1440p with ease, providing average frame rates well into the 60fps range that every enthusiast with a gaming habit covets. 22

Asus ROG Strix GTX 1080

Mid-Range 1440p GPUs (£300–£550)

AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 Nvidia GTX 1080 Reference MSI GTX 1070 Gaming X 8G

MID_RANGE

T O TA L £549

Nvidia GTX 1070 Reference Sapphire Radeon RX 580 8GB

Budget 1080p GPUs (£120–£300)

Gigabyte Aorus RX 570 4GB

AS THE BATTLE LINES WIDEN, OUR IDEA OF WHAT A MIDRANGE CARD INCLUDES HAS INEVITABLY INCREASED

Zotac GTX 1060 AMP Edition EVGA GTX 1060 3GB SC Gaming Asus ROG Strix GTX 1050 Ti 4GB EVGA GTX 1050 Ti SC Gaming 4GB

T O D AY ’ S B E S T U P G R A D E S Feature

EVGA GTX 1060 3GB SC GAMING www.evga.com So, where is AMD in all of this? The sad reality is that AMD isn’t providing any competitive solutions at any of the right price points. Vega’s lack of availability and sub-par performance has left the upper echelons empty, while the mid-range and budget solutions suffer from cryptocurrency fever. Unless you absolutely cannot live without FreeSync, there is no justifiable reason to run with an AMD card, either as an upgrade or in a fresh build. At the budget end, there’s only one choice: the GTX 1060 3GB. We’ve recommended it all year, and for good reason: It’s at the price and performance sweet spot, even up against Nvidia’s own GTX 1050 Ti. Look at the figures—for £89 more, you get a card that’s 50 per cent faster than the next step down, gives the GTX 980 a run for its money, and masticates 1080p. Because Nvidia’s GTX 1050 Ti is

BUDGET

T O TA L £289 so unattractive, seemingly nothing more than a die shrink, and spec for spec almost identical to the 950, the 1060 3GB is incredibly appealing. And it won’t set you back as much as some others that offer less functionality.

IT’S AT THE PRICE AND PERFORMANCE SWEET SPOT, EVEN UP AGAINST NVIDIA’S GTX 1050 TI

VRAM

Total War: Attila

Far Cry Primal

The Division

Rise of the Tomb Raider

Power Draw Idle

Power Draw Load

3DMark: Fire Strike Ultra (DX11)

3DMark: Time Spy (DX12)

Price

12GB GDDR5X

16/29

54/62

35/61

12/32

49

365

7,166

9,097

£1,149

11GB GDDR5X

14/27

51/56

39/55

11/29

47

354

6,587

8,307

£679

8GB HBM 2.0

9/16

36/43

22/43

13/20

66

403

5,241

6,758

£570

8GB GDDR5X

9/19

39/43

26/41

8/20

53

334

5,077

6,597

£700

8GB GDDR5X

9/20

40/44

21/43

8/22

49

325

5,339

6,892

£999

Our test bed consists of an Intel Core i7-7700K, 16GB of Corsair DDR4, an Asus Maximus IX Hero, and a 500GB Samsung 850 Evo. All games tested on the highest graphical profile, with AA at 4K

VRAM

Total War: Attila

Far Cry Primal

The Division

Rise of the Tomb Raider

Power Draw Idle

Power Draw Load

3DMark: Fire Strike Ultra (DX11)

3DMark: Time Spy (DX12)

Price

8GB HBM 2.0

21/31

58/69

42/67

22/36

64

331

8,656

6,263

£450

8GB GDDR5X

23/40

65/77

39/73

16/42

48

252

9,371

6,537

£529

8GB GDDR5

23/36

55/65

47/63

14/35

53

306

8,221

5,753

£549

8GB GDDR5

21/34

53/62

34/59

13/33

47

288

7,805

5,542

£419

8GB GDDR5

19/25

40/48

25/49

11/26

59

297

6,033

4,515

£420

Our test bed consists of an Intel Core i7-7700K, 16GB of Corsair DDR4, an Asus Maximus IX Hero, and a 500GB Samsung 850 Evo. All games tested on the highest graphical profile, with AA at 1440p

VRAM

Total War: Attila

Far Cry Primal

The Division

Rise of the Tomb Raider

Power Draw Idle

Power Draw Load

3DMark: Fire Strike Ultra (DX11)

3DMark: Time Spy (DX12)

Price

4GB GDDR5

24/31

45/56

32/56

7/33

66

268

10,243

3,833

£360

6GB GDDR5

26/38

53/66

31/60

15/38

53

225

10,959

4,158

£289

3GB GDDR5

24/36

49/61

31/55

9/35

47

251

20,251

3,905

£289

4GB GDDR5

14/23

34/43

19/36

9/23

52

216

7,042

3,209

£145

4GB GDDR5

13/22

32/40

17/36

9/23

43

201

7,012

3,188

£200

Our test bed consists of an Intel Core i7-7700K, 16GB of Corsair DDR4, an Asus Maximus IX Hero, and a 500GB Samsung 850 Evo. All games tested on the highest graphical profile, with AA at 1080p

23

F E AT U R E Today’s best upgrades

MOTHERBOARDS ASUS PRIME X399 www.asus.com If you’re going with the mighty powerhouse of Threadripper, you need a suitable motherboard. We admit, there’s not a huge selection of X399 boards out there right now (seven in total), so pickings are slim, but that’s not to say there’s no choice to be had. In our opinion, Asus’s Prime X399 is ideal. For this number of cores, unless you have very specific needs (overclocking, more PCIe SSDs, specific storage solutions, and so on), there’s very little to justify investing in a pricier mobo. Asus’s Prime X399 was the board we chose for our recent workstation rendering machine, because of these very reasons. We wanted to keep an eye on the price, yet still have access to a fantastically smooth BIOS for additional tweaking, overclocking, and more if we needed it. Throw in the gorgeously understated colour scheme and design of the board, plus cooling and storage support, and it’s an all-around no-

CPU COOLERS www.nzxt.com

T O TA L £290

brainer. That said, one of the biggest reasons we chose this board is due to market share. Why? Simply put, Asus has loads of money and resources to invest in BIOS development, pushing the boundaries of memory support in the process—and good memory support is still key to unlocking the real potential of AMD’s potent processor. Stability is also an important factor, and you can max both of those factors out using this powerful motherboard. Throw in the strong feature set and raw power on offer, and this is an easy recommendation to make.

ASUS HAS LOADS OF MONEY AND RESOURCES TO INVEST IN BIOS DEVELOPMENT

GIGABYTE AB350 GAMING 3 www.gigabyte.com £130

NZXT KRAKEN X62 If cash is tight, there’s nothing wrong with using the cooler that comes with your CPU (as long as it’s the retail version – OEMs don’t have coolers). However, if you want to overclock, or keep temperatures down so your machine runs more quietly, water cooling gets the nod from us. Obviously, piecing together your own loop is the pro choice here, although for an easier life, an all-in-one cooler has a lot going for it. We’ve seen quite a few of these recently as new manufacturers enter the market, but the likes of the Corsair H110 (£110) and NZXT Kraken X62 (£130) still stand out as the ones to buy.

24

ADVANCED

Now we turn to our budget-specced motherboard of choice: the Gigabyte AB350 Gaming 3. Ryzen is an absolutely revolutionary product, chipset and all. Just how far it’s shifted the processor industry is something we may never know, but the fact that you can now invest in a quad-core i5 equivalent for less than $100 certainly makes it a force to be reckoned with. Couple Ryzen with Gigabyte’s fantastically well-designed AB350 Gaming 3, and you’re quickly on your way to speccing out one hell of a budget rig. Gigabyte has long impressed us with just how much it can cram onto a motherboard, while still hitting aggressive price points, and the plucky underdog often wins our motherboard group tests, purely because of its crazy design ethos. There’s a whole heap of mobos available for Ryzen, however if you’re after a no-fuss, plug-and-play build, the AB350 is great. This board isn’t for tweakers – you can’t overclock it – but

it does provide everything you’ll need to support multi GPUs, PCIe storage, USB 3.1, and more. It even supports memory up to 3,200MT/s, so you can net yourself a 10–15 per cent increase in performance in some cases.

T O D AY ’ S B E S T U P G R A D E S Feature

RAM

www.corsair.com

£420

CORSAIR 32GB DOMINATOR PLATINUM 2,400MHZ It isn’t a great time to upgrade memory right now. Memory pricing has almost doubled in the last 12 months, so while we’d love to recommend that everyone aims for at least 16GB in their systems, it’s a tough call to make when even a budget kit will set you back nearly £200. Aim for 8GB as an absolute minimum, although 32GB is nice for serious work. If you’ve got room to double up on what you’ve already got, do so, because hopefully pricing will calm down by the time you upgrade again. When it comes to what to buy, aim for capacity first and frequency after. Low latency kits are the way to go if you can afford them, although given the current inflated pricing, being picky will cost you. As an example, you can pick up DDR4 kits rated at up to 4,600MT/s (PC4 36800 with 19-23-2343 timings), although you will pay a lot for the privilege (£390-plus for 16GB). It’s worth noting that Ryzen benefits from faster

MID_RANGE

memory, but be mindful of compatibility—check your

T O TA L £240

motherboard’s supported memory list for capacity and speed first.

BUDGET

T O TA L £289

ASUS ROG MAXIMUS X HERO www.asus.com At the time of going to press, we haven’t had chance to play with a lot of Z370 motherboards yet. That said, it’s hard to argue with the Asus ROG Maximus Hero’s heritage. We’ve been using this lineup of motherboards in our test

with one manufacturer’s BIOS will almost always know how best to take advantage of that compared to another, and it’s often personal preference that dictates the issue; however, the placement of menus, along with the

THE OPTIONS AND ITEMS YOU CAN TWEAK IN ASUS’S BIOS MAKE IT ONE OF THE MORE INTUITIVE AND EASY-TO-USE

GIGABYTE HAS IMPRESSED US WITH JUST HOW MUCH IT CAN CRAM ONTO A MOTHERBOARD

benches since Devil’s Canyon and Z97. The Asus ROG Maximus X Hero is a fantastic update to the series, featuring an integrated rear I/O cover, oodles of USB ports, BIOS reset switches, Ethernet ports, integrated Wi-Fi, dependable audio, a ton of onboard storage support, M.2 heatsinks, and more. One of the things we’ve already touched upon with our love for Asus is just how easy it is to use the UEFI BIOS. It may be difficult to quantifiably review a BIOS, because those familiar

options and items you can tweak in Asus’s BIOS make it one of the more intuitive and easy-to-use that we’ve seen in the last few years. This board is a touch on the pricey side, but if you’re looking to shell out on a high-end Coffee Lake processor, it’s well worth the investment. After all, there’s little point spending your hard-earned cash on a top-of-the-range processor and not letting it shine. This is a good compromise on price without sacrificing performance. 25

F E AT U R E Today’s best upgrades

SOLID-STATE DRIVES SAMSUNG 960 PRO www.samsung.com

HARD DRIVES www.hgst.com

£340

ADVANCED

T O TA L £260–£1,020

No-brainer time: If you want the fastest storage around, you’ll want an SSD. Not just any SSD either—you’ll want a PCIe M.2 drive that is capable of producing the kind of transfer rates that make grown system admins weep. And at the top of that pile of drives at the moment is Samsung, with its 960 Pro range of M.2 drives, where you’ll see sustained transfer reads and writes of 3,400MB/s and 2,100MB/s respectively. The random 4K performance is no slouch either, hitting 57MB/s and 194MB/s

SAMSUNG 960 EVO www.samsung.com

when throwing around smaller files. You’ll notice that we haven’t specified a capacity with our recommendation, and that’s because we suggest getting the biggest drive you can afford, without getting silly; £260 will net you a fairly sizeable 512GB model, which is more than enough for your OS and your main applications. Jumping up to a 1TB drive means you can hold a good chunk of your data on the drive as well, with the pricey 2TB model allowing for serious data usage.

BUDGET

T O TA L £125

HGST HE10 How much storage do you really need? We’re assuming you have some form of network attached storage, a good sized SSD, plenty of backup options, and a healthy chunk of online storage, like any good setup. So what’s left? Some extra space is nice, sure, but unless you have

The 960 Evo mixes a lot of the same magic as the 960 Pro, but at a lower price. The big difference is the type of NAND used: The 960 Pro uses MLC (Multi-Level Cell) flash, while the Evo uses TLC (Triple-Level Cell). They’re both 3D NAND architectures, but the Pro manages to squeeze more into the same space, which is why it’s available in larger capacities—512GB–2TB, while the Evo ships at 250GB–1TB. Performance-wise, there is a difference between the Pro and Evo, but it isn’t huge – sustained reads and writes of 3,200MB/s and 1,800MB/s aren’t too far off the Pro. It’s worth noting that the 960 Pro does have a five-year warranty (or 800TB written), while the 960 Evo MID_RANGE only has three years.

T O TA L £110-£432

26

specific requirements, a 1TB, 2TB, or 4TB hard drive is probably all you need, and will set you back £40–£145. You can now pick up hard drives up to 12TB, although they cost over £560. This 10TB model is a little more reasonable.

CRUCIAL BX300 480GB www.crucial.com Once you’ve used an M.2, you can’t go back. To be fair, that’s not strictly true, but it’s a good sound bite, and there are some transfers where you can notice the difference. Not every system has access to M.2, though, and even those that do tend to be limited to one or maybe two slots. M.2 drives also demand a slight premium over 2.5-inch SSDs. That means there is still a market for the more traditional SSD, and such drives are still the go-to upgrade for anyone

who is still running an old-fashioned spinning hard drive. The Crucial BX300 is our new favorite budget SSD, packing half a terabyte for a wallet-friendly £125. As with any modern SSD, performance is decent enough, although you’ll find that the straight throughput of any SSD that uses SATA is ultimately limited by the interface. Still, it is significantly faster and will be longer lived than the spinning platters of yore.

T O D AY ’ S B E S T U P G R A D E S Feature

CASES

FRACTAL DESIGN MESHIFY www.fractal-design.com

PHANTEKS ENTHOO EVOLV TG www.phanteks.com Cases are inevitably a very personal thing for many people. After all, a big factor is aesthetics. Whether you care can dictate how much you’re willing to spend. Looking for a super-slick, clean build? Then it’s likely you’re hunting for a svelte, aluminum, tempered glass solution. Couldn’t give a damn? A square tin can sans window will do the job just fine. That said, if you’re building a premium system, you can’t go wrong with a premium chassis. Ease of building, materials, paint finish, and internal cable routing options all contribute to a happier enthusiast. For us, all this is epitomised by Phanteks—the Dutch company has a knack for making the premium affordable, and nowhere is this more apparent than the Phanteks Enthoo Elite TG. Featuring 4mm thick

ADVANCED

T O TA L £175

aluminum, tempered glass, and a sandblasted finish, combined with extensive cooling and storage support, it’s definitely one of the best chassis out there for any custom system.

Fractal provides a plethora of more exotic styled, cooling-heavy cases. The Meshify is a perfect example: a small, stylish, mid-tower design, developed with maximum airflow in mind. The polygon-esque 3D diamond mesh front panel lends itself to up to 360mm radiators, and although liquid cooling isn’t the best solution, it’s perfect for AIOs and smaller form factor builds. Despite its low price, it supports up to three 2.5-inch SSDs on the rear of the motherboard tray, two 3.5-inch hard drives below the PSU cover, and a full-sized ATX PSU. Couple that with the inclusion of fan filters, solid cable management, and a smoked glass side panel, and you start to wonder where the corners were cut when designing this beauty. We’ll let you know—if we find them.

DISPLAYS

CORSAIR CARBIDE 270R www.corsair.com £60 is a fair amount of cash when building a budget rig. We usually recommend you try to save as much money as you can on parts – apart from your PSU, CPU, GPU, and RAM. After all, you won’t gain much from a case upgrade compared to amping up those four essential components. But if you’re looking for a cheeky cheap upgrade, nothing’s more satisfying than upgrading that old hunk of metal in which you house your precious hardware. Corsair’s Carbide 270R hits that mark perfectly. With a simple, elegant design, the 270R would look as at home in a bedroom as in a game developer’s studio. With support for up to three 120mm fans in the front, two 140mm ones in the roof, and four hard drives, it’s not that different from the more expensive Fractal Design Meshify design and provides plenty of room for cooling and further expansion. It’s not perfect, but for the cash, you’d be hard pushed to find better than Corsair’s aggressively priced, budgetbusting box.

BUDGET

T O TA L £60

www.asus.com

MID_RANGE

T O TA L £90

£1,410

ASUS PA329Q Recommending a display is tricky because there are so many subjective variables. What may be perfect for one may not work for you. Gamers, for instance, want to prioritise the high refresh rates and low latency of a TN panel over IPS’s colour accuracy and viewing angles, while video editors may prefer the higher contrast ratios of VA panels. Most of us want the best of all worlds—which tends to mean IPS panels, although newer tech is blurring these lines. Add in screen sizes, native resolutions, FreeSync/ G-Sync, high dynamic ranges (HDR), and more, and it’s clear that recommending a screen is difficult. We’re still searching for the “perfect” panel at a price we’re comfortable with – the Asus PA329Q is great, but at £1,410, it’s not for everyone.

27

F E AT U R E Memory Matters

MEMORY MATTERS 28

M E M O R Y M AT T E R S Feature

A fresh look at the state of DDR4 in 2018

W

e often describe the PC as having its own ecosystem, almost as though it’s some form of living entity, and the symbiotic relationship between each component is almost a perfect example of Aristotle’s (oft misparaphrased) saying: “The whole is more than the sum of its parts.” Admittedly, the Greek philosophical genius was likely referring to metaphysics and ideologies, rather than the modern-day abacus, yet in our eyes the saying is more apt here than anywhere else. After all, you only have to take one core component out of the typical system’s arsenal, and you render the machine incapable of function. Whether that’s processor, motherboard, or memory, the crux of the matter is that this holy trinity of hardware combines to create a perfect amalgamation of machine-based interfacing – yet, isolated, the components themselves

hold far less value. And not only does this metaphor suit the PC itself, but it also extends to the PC marketplace. With the prices of both memory and GPUs skyrocketing, inevitably those generational spikes in performance we’ve been seeing across the computing industry over the last 10 years are going to evaporate – because the price of memory has nearly tripled, new platform adopters are forced to go for lower-spec parts. This has a knock-on effect across game development, video production, CGI... Hell, even us tech journos are going to feel the bite. Whether it’s mining, supply issues, or a bit of both, the ecosystem is suffering, and there’s not a lot we can do to change that, but understanding how memory works, and what you should be spending your cash on, as far as memory is concerned, is now more pivotal than ever. So, it’s time for us to bust out the magnifying glass, and shine a light on the volatile world of memory. 29

F E AT U R E Memory Matters

THE OBSESSION WITH SPEED Memory speed is one of the most convoluted specifications around, and is often misrepresented. Way back when, in the early days of SDRAM development, the megahertz measurement was the correct way of advertising the associated speeds of memory. In short, every single solid-state component in your machine operates at a specific frequency, or Hz – whether it’s your processor, GPU, memory, or even SSD, each one operates on a cycle. Like the ticking of a clock, each tick represents a single hertz or cycle (the opening and closing of a

transistor gate, in this case). A speed of 1Hz, for example, is one cycle per second; 2Hz is two per second; a MHz is 1,000,000 cycles per second; you get the picture. Once we got our heads round it, it made perfect sense, and continued to do so for years. The problem is, when DDR (or double data rate) RAM came on the scene, it changed how data transfers were registered. Instead of only actuating once on the rising of each clock cycle, it could now also process an additional operation on the fall of that same clock cycle, effectively doubling

the rate at which the DIMM could process data. The figure for accurate measurement of data transfer requests then shifted from MHz to MT/s to adjust for this change, despite the fact that memory still operated at the same frequency. However, marketing apparently didn’t get that memo, because many companies, in a bid to tout it as the next big thing, ignored the MT/s figure, instead referring to it as MHz, while modern-day memory quoted at 2,400MHz, for instance, actually only operates at half that frequency.

TIMINGS AND LATENCY The next part of the holy trinity of memory specifications revolves around timings and latency. There’s a ton of them, but the most important one you need to keep in mind is the CAS latency. Referring to the Column Address Strobe, this figure indicates just how many clock cycles it’s going to take for the memory module to access a particular memory location, either to store or retrieve a bit of data held there, ready for processing by the CPU. That said, this figure on its own doesn’t give you all the information you need. It’s only when you combine it with the memory

transfer rate we mentioned above that you get a better picture of just how fast your memory modules are. So, how do we get a figure that makes any sort of logical sense to us consumers? Well, there’s a handy formula that converts CAS latency and MT/s into a real-world latency: Latency = (2,000/Y) x Z, where Y is your RAM’s speed in MT/s, and Z is your CAS latency. So, as an example, if we take a 2,666MT/s memory kit, operating with a CAS latency of 15, we get a real-world result of 11.25ns. This tells us exactly the total time it takes for that memory module to access, store, or

request a bit of data from its particular location on the module. This is where the concept of overclocking your memory typically comes unstuck. As a general rule of thumb, the higher the frequency, the higher the CAS latency, and as such, real-world performance gains are often slim, unless the rise of that CAS latency is slowed as well. When it comes to the “best” performing memory, what you’re looking for is a kit that has a high frequency, a low CAS latency, and the necessary capacity (see opposite) to do what you want to do.

RAM LATENCIES

30

Technology

Memory Chip Capacity

Transfer Rate (MT/s)

CAS Latency (ns)

Real Latency (ns)

DDR2

500MB

400

5

25.00

DDR2

500MB

800

5

12.50

DDR3

1GB

800

9

22.50

DDR3

1GB

2,400

11

9.17

DDR4

2GB

2,133

15

14.06

DDR4

2GB

4,500

19

8.44

DDR5*

4GB

4,266

23

10.78

DDR5*

4GB

6,400

27

8.44

M E M O R Y M AT T E R S Feature

CAPACITY FOR CAPACITY To understand how memory capacity is calculated, we have to look at how the chips themselves are designed. This starts with JEDEC, an association of over 300 different companies that focus on solid-state technology. Its task is to ensure that universal standards are used across the registered companies when it comes to solid-state tech, with a particular emphasis on DRAM, solid-state drives, and interfaces (NVMe and AHCI, for instance). What this does is ensure that the consumer won’t have to pick between four different connection standards for DDR4, for example, and everything is consistent across multiple

manufacturers – aka no proprietary BS. As far as memory is concerned, JEDEC lists the criteria that, say, DDR4 needs to adhere to – for instance, the number of pin outs, the dimensions of the chips, and more. That spec is then handed over to the manufacturers to produce memory chips to their own specifications that fit into JEDEC’s criteria. Typically, the differences lie within the size of the manufacturing process used (which additionally affects power draw). These chips are then bought by aftermarket partners, such as Corsair, HyperX, G.Skill, and so on, to be assembled with their own PCBs, heatsinks, and

aftermarket features (RGB LEDs, anyone?), while, of course, still adhering to JEDEC’s original outline. Due to limitations in transistor size, DDR4 chips are limited to just 1GB each, although a theoretical 2GB per chip is well within the specification. In the consumer market, most DIMMs can only support up to a maximum of 16 memory chips per stick, meaning a maximum capacity of 16GB per DIMM is possible. You can find larger sticks in the enterprise market, typically featuring up to 32GB per stick, but these are designed for server use rather than the consumer market, and are priced into the thousands.

HOW MUCH MEMORY? So, in this world of hyperinflated memory prices, just how much DDR4 is enough for what you want to do? It’s tricky. A year or so ago, we would have happily sat here and recommended 64GB of DDR4 for any video editor or content creator out there. But, to be honest, given

the ludicrous price increases (more on that later), that’s just not a practical or good use of your money in this day and age.

4GB

If all you’re building is a home theatre PC or a machine for low-end office work, then arguably a single 4GB stick of low-spec DDR4 should be perfect for the job. Couple that with a low-end Pentium part, and you’re all set. For those keen miners out there, this is also the ideal spec for a cryptocurrency mining rig, because mining is typically not as memory-intensive as other more mainstream applications (but you should pass on the Pentium if you’re planning to mine CPUintensive currencies).

8GB

If entry-level gaming is your jam, 8GB (2x 4GB) is the absolute minimum we’d recommend. Ironically, the lower the amount of VRAM on your GPU, the more likely the system is to cache overly large texture files onto the actual RAM itself.

16GB

For mid-range to high-end gaming, you absolutely need that 16GB of DDR4. Annoyingly, more and more games are starting to use more and more memory. Yearly releases and poorly optimised titles are putting more strain on system memory, with even Star Citizen recently announcing a minimum spec of 16GB of RAM purely to run the Alpha.

16GB is also a nice middleweight RAM capacity for any task you want to throw at your rig. Whether that’s extensive office work, Photoshop, entry-level videography, you name it, it’s the right spec for you.

32GB

For anyone who makes a living from 3D modelling and content creation, 32GB is the way to go for the time being. Although this will more than likely still set you back £300 or more,

it’s the absolutely perfect amount for applications such as After Effects, 4K Premiere Pro, and more.

32GB PLUS For now, unless you can somehow get it aggressively subsidised, anything beyond 32GB just isn’t worth it, at least not until RAM prices drop below that key £500 mark once more. You’ll kick yourself for spending that much when prices drop again.

31

F E AT U R E Memory Matters

PRICE HIKES If you haven’t built or upgraded a machine recently, you might not realise that memory pricing has gone crazy over the last 12–16 months. While, a year or two ago, the amount of memory you put in a system could be decided on a whim, it now has to be a carefully thought-out plan if you want to keep any machine up to date and capable of the workloads intended. But why have prices increased so much? And what are the chances of them coming back down to more reasonable levels? The biggest problem for DRAM is that producing flash is far more lucrative. The

reason for this is primarily down to one thing: smartphones. The specifications for these tiny powerhouses are constantly on the rise, so the amount of storage and RAM they ship with has risen sharply recently. As they are premium products, the amount of money being charged for them has gone through the roof. You might be thinking that high-speed desktop DDR4 RAM has nothing to do with NAND flash, and in a sense you’d be right, but the plants that manufacture NAND are also the ones responsible for our beloved DDR4. So, because it’s financially more

IT COULD BE WORTH HANGING TIGHT FOR A LITTLE LONGER, BECAUSE THE MEMORY MARKET HAS A HISTORY OF RIGHTING ITSELF

advantageous to switch over to NAND, that’s exactly what has happened. It might be important to us, but desktop RAM is relatively low in the pecking order as far as manufacturers are concerned. There is another reason for the current high prices, though, and that’s down to market demand. We had some decent platform releases last year, which meant there has been a slew of people in the market looking to buy more RAM. Yes, it’s Ryzen’s fault. Well, not really, but the new platform has certainly not helped the situation. If you’re looking to upgrade a system with more RAM, it could be worth hanging tight for a little longer, because the memory market has a history of righting itself. If you’re looking to build a new system, your options aren’t as obvious. Buy wisely. And be ready to pounce when pricing does return to more reasonable levels.

MEMORY PRICING GONE HAYWIRE We’ve collated the average memory prices over the last two years. This is an average of memory pricing on our test machines on a per gigabyte basis (which helps mitigate the fact that the turbo build tends to use 4x 8GB DIMMs, while the budget build uses a pair of 4GB sticks). How we pick memory for these builds is also affected by pricing –if RAM prices are high, we pick lower-frequency DIMMs. So, there is some margin of error, but the general trend shown in this graph is hard to ignore.

$13.00

$12.00

$11.00

$10.00

$9.00

$8.00

$7.00

$6.00

$5.00

$4.00

$3.00

2016

32

2017

2018

Memory Matters Feature

CHANNEL BANDWIDTH What is channel bandwidth and how does it affect memory? Think of it as the maximum amount of data that can be transferred at any one time between your system and the memory installed. It’s calculated by using MT/s, the width of the memory bus, and the number of memory channels your system supports. So, for a typical Ryzen 7 1800X system, featuring 16GB (2x 8GB) of 3,200MT/s DDR4, it’s something like this: 3,200,000,000 (3,200MT/s) x 64 (64-bit bus) x 2 (dual-channel) = 409.6 billion bits per second, or 51,200MB/s ,or 51.2GB/s. That’s the absolute maximum amount of data the system could transfer between the memory and the processor at any given time, before bottlenecking. If you were to use a 4x 4GB kit on your dual-channel board, bandwidth wouldn’t increase, because the processor can still only read and write from two memory channels at a time (thus the

THE FUTURE

dual-channel spec), despite the fact that you have four DIMMs installed. On the flip side, installing just one DIMM will cut that figure in half. It’s worth noting that for most applications, dual-channel memory kits provide you with more than enough bandwidth for everything you want to do on your desktop. However, for applications that manipulate massive data sets, textures, and more, an increase in channel support can eliminate potential bottlenecks, because more powerful processors become more capable at manipulating larger data sets. 4K, 5K, and 8K video editing in After Effects, for instance, benefits greatly from having access to both a larger memory capacity and increased memory bandwidth, thanks to quad-channel support. Ultimately, you need to work out exactly how much strain you’ll be placing on your machine and where bottlenecks could potentially occur.

STANDARDISATION

What exactly are JEDEC’s standards? And why are they necessary? Well, the biggest reason they exist is to ensure consumers have a non-convoluted platform. They also ensure that motherboard manufacturers don’t have to design four different types of motherboard, just because Corsair has its own connection standard, HyperX another,

and G.Skill a slightly different variant. You get the picture. Think of it like USB, but for memory. The biggy is that all 300 members can pool their resources to accelerate technological development, without any one of them getting a competitive edge, and saving them time and money in the process. It’s worth noting that JEDEC’s standards

JEDEC is poised to announce the next-gen memory standard (DDR5) later this year, and has confirmed a few details for us: “DDR5 will offer improved performance, with greater power efficiency compared to previous generation DRAM technologies. As planned, DDR5 will provide double the bandwidth, and density over DDR4, along with delivering improved channel efficiency.” That’s exciting, if only for the fact that power consumption should drop – DDR3 sat at 1.5V and DDR4 at 1.2V, so it’s likely we’ll see DDR5 at 1.0V or lower. The doubling of density means we’ll likely see mobos double in max capacity, too, with mainstream platforms maxing out at 128GB, and high-end desktops hitting a 256GB limit. Expect initial MT/s figures to hit around 4,133MT/s, with latencies at 27ns if not more. However, it’s unlikely to come into production until late 2019.

are on the fairly conservative side of things when it comes to memory frequency (after all, they’re designed to work with everything from desktops to servers and supercomputers), and DDR5 has yet to be clarified in its entirety just yet, but you can see from the table below the standards that each manufacturer has to adhere to.

JEDEC STANDARD DDR4 MODULE Standard Name

Data Rate (MT/s)

Module Name

CAS Latency (ns)

Real Latency (ns)

DDR4-1600J

1,600

PC4-1600

10

12.50

DDR4-1600K

1,600

PC4-1600

11

13.75

DDR4-1600L

1,600

PC4-1600

12

15.00

DDR4-1866L

1,866

PC4-1866

12

12.86

DDR4-1866M

1,866

PC4-1866

13

13.93

DDR4-1866N

1,866

PC4-1866

14

15.01

DDR4-2133N

2,133

PC4-2133

14

13.13

DDR4-2133P

2,133

PC4-2133

15

14.06

DDR4-2133R

2,133

PC4-2133

16

15.00

DDR4-2400P

2,400

PC4-2400

15

12.50

DDR4-2400R

2,400

PC4-2400

16

13.33

DDR4-2400U

2, 400

PC4-2400

18

15.00

33

F E AT U R E Memory Matters

INTEL HOW MEMORY SPEEDS AFFECT INTEL CHIPS When it comes to memory, over the years Intel’s architecture has benefitted very little from increased frequencies. Certainly, the current mainstream platform sees little to no performance increases when fixed up with higher frequency memory with lower latencies. When it comes to mainstream applications, gaming, and even video editing to some degree, if you’re sitting pretty on Z77 and above, you’ll likely have enough bandwidth to do anything you want, without having to shell out for higher frequency kits for the additional bandwidth. There is one area where Intel does benefit from higher frequency memory, though, and that’s file compression. If you’re exporting and sending compressed files on a

day-to-day basis, memory speed does help significantly. That said, it’s a fairly niche scenario. All we can suggest, then, is that the best thing to do when speccing out a new system is to find a reasonable frequency (2,400 or 2,666MT/s) memory kit at a capacity that suits your needs. We’ve recommended a few kits as examples (see opposite), so pick a kit with similar specs for as little money as you can find. The good thing here is that unless you desperately need the higher frequencies you can shop around the different manufacturers and you’re likely to find better deals, because you’re mainly focusing on capacity rather than worrying about whether a particular brand works better with Intel CPUs.

BENCHMARKS 8GB DDR4

Cinebench R15 Single/Multi (Index)

AIDA 64 Memory Read (MB/s)

AIDA 64 Latency (ns)

Total War Warhammer II (Low and Avg fps)

Middle Earth Shadow of War (Low and Avg fps)

10GB WINRar Archive Time (Seconds)

Core i7-8700K @ 2,400MT/s

204/1,521

35,933

65

38/43

22/51

245

Core i7-8700K @ 2,666MT/s

205/1,522

39,418

53.1

39/43

28/53

232

Core i7-8700K @ 3,000MT/s

205/1,527

44,130

51.2

39/43

25/53

223

Core i7-8700K @ 3,200MT/s

204/1,526

46,802

47.3

31/43

34/51

215

16GB DDR4

Cinebench R15 Single/Multi (Index)

AIDA 64 Memory Read (MB/s)

AIDA 64 Latency (ns)

Total War Warhammer II (Low and Avg fps)

Middle Earth Shadow of War (Low and Avg fps)

10GB WINRar Archive Time (Seconds)

Core i7-8700K @ 2,400MT/s

204/1,515

35,282

57.5

38/43

34/51

245

Core i7-8700K @ 2,666MT/s

205/1,532

38,936

53.4

33/43

24/51

231

Core i7-8700K @ 3,000MT/s

205/1,544

43,662

49.3

33/43

35/52

225

Core i7-8700K @ 3,200MT/s

204/1,541

46,153

47.1

38/43

24/52

216

32GB DDR4

Cinebench R15 Single/Multi (Index)

AIDA 64 Memory Read (MB/s)

AIDA 64 Latency (ns)

Total War Warhammer II (Low and Avg fps)

Middle Earth Shadow of War (Low and Avg fps)

10GB WINRar Archive Time (Seconds)

Core i9-7900X @ 2,400MT/s

195/2,175

62,432

84.4

33/43

29/52

197

Core i9-7900X @ 2,666MT/s

194/2,167

70,065

77.3

36/42

32/51

192

Core i9-7900X @ 3,000MT/s

191/2,197

77,599

73.8

31/43

24/51

185

Core i9-7900X @ 3,200MT/s

194/2,177

83,063

70.3

34/43

26/52

182

Our test bed consists of an Asus Z370 Maximus X Hero for the Core i7, and an Asus X299 Prime Deluxe motherboard for the Core i9. All memory tests were performed with either 8GB or 16GB Corsair Dominator Platinum DIMMs, with a CAS latency of 16.

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M E M O R Y M AT T E R S Feature

THE RECOMMENDED SPECS Right then, what do we recommend, memory-wise, for your latest immersion into the Intel platform? Well, given the vast swathe of different setups and use cases out there, we’ve categorised our selections into three rather generic specs: one for run-of-

the-mill office work, one specifically for gaming, and one for creating grade-A quality image or video content. It’s worth noting that you don’t have to stick with the brands we’ve highlighted – because memory prices are fluctuating about rather

haphazardly at this point, you’ll probably find brands jumping in and out of being the best value kit you can get depending on when they refresh their lines. Stick with trusted brands, such as Corsair, Crucial, G. Skill, and HyperX, and you’ll be good.

OFFICE & HOME THEATRE As we mentioned earlier, if all you’re wanting to do is run office software and browse the web, a single stick of DDR4 4GB will do you just fine. Unfortunately, that means you’ll be forking out about 50 whole smackeroonies for this 2,400MT/s kit (sadly, that’s the state of affairs we’re now faced with). Real-world latency is pretty attractive, though, coming in at 12.5ns at CAS 15 – not that it’ll matter for these kind of applications.

HYPERX FURY 4GB (1X 4GB) @ 2,400MT/S, CAS 15 £35–£45

GAMING 16GB is ideal for future-proofing yourself against the inevitable rise of HD texture packs and unoptimised AAA titles. Yes, devs should be working harder on coding, rather than the “can it run Crysis?” crapfest of a mindset, but there’s not a lot we can do to influence that. 2,400MT/s at 16GB is perfect under Intel’s platform. Combine that with a CAS latency of 16, for around $170, and you’ve got a fast (13.34ns) future-proof kit.

CRUCIAL BALLISTIX SPORT LT 16GB (2X 8GB) @ 2,400MT/S, CAS 16 £164–£170

WORKSTATION Until memory prices change, 32GB is the go-to spec we recommend for anyone looking at the more expensive workstation-oriented stuff. There’s some good value kits out there – Corsair’s Vengeance LPX series, in particular, has long been a staple of our high-end test benches. Again, as Intel doesn’t benefit much from the frequency side of things, 2,666MT/s is a sweet deal for any would-be video editor out there.

CORSAIR VENGEANCE LPX 32GB (4X 8GB) @ 2,666MT/S, CAS 16 £350–£410 35

F E AT U R E Memory Matters

AMD MEMORY MASTERY FOR TEAM RED Ryzen is an oddity when it comes to memory. For the first time in eons, memory speed impacts processor performance. Simply going from 2,666MT/s to 3,200MT/s can equate to a performance increase of around 10 per cent in rendering tasks. Combine that with an overclock on your Ryzen CPU, and you can net yourself almost 25 per cent more grunt. Why is this? It’s all down to how AMD has crafted its Infinity Fabric. This is the interface that connects all the core complexes in the processor together, enabling them to communicate with one another. The Infinity Fabric is directly controlled by the IMC (integrated memory controller), so the higher the speed of the memory, the faster the IMC operates, and the quicker the processor can

transfer bits of data across each core complex. It’s a smart solution, but it does mean that Ryzen is somewhat bound by its dependency on faster memory – not so good when the memory market is priced as high as it is today. So, best bet? If you’re heading toward Team Red’s Ryzen platform, get the highest frequency memory you can, at a capacity that best suits you. While this may make things more expensive in the memory stakes thanks to the current overinflation of RAM prices (thanks, crypto miners), there is a trade off in that AMD chips are typically a bit cheaper than Intel’s offerings. Gamers especially may find that they’ll be laying out more cash going for AMD over Intel though, because of the minimum RAM requirements for AAA games.

BENCHMARKS 8GB DDR4

Cinebench R15 Single/Multi (Index)

AIDA 64 Memory Read (MB/s)

AIDA 64 Latency (ns)

Total War Warhammer II (Low and Avg fps)

Middle Earth Shadow of War (Low and Avg fps)

10GB WINRar Archive Time (Seconds)

Ryzen 7 1800X @ 2,400MT/s

156/1,607

37,299

91.4

32/42

18/51

344

Ryzen 7 1800X @ 2,666MT/s

153/1,615

41,307

87.3

33/42

22/50

340

Ryzen 7 1800X @ 3,000MT/s

154/1,632

46,202

79.9

37/43

28/51

316

Ryzen 7 1800X @ 3,200MT/s

155/1,638

48,473

76.5

35/43

31/51

308

16GB DDR4

Cinebench R15 Single/Multi (Index)

AIDA 64 Memory Read (MB/s)

AIDA 64 Latency (ns)

Total War Warhammer II (Low and Avg fps)

Middle Earth Shadow of War (Low and Avg fps)

10GB WINRar Archive Time (Seconds)

Ryzen 7 1800X @ 2,400MT/s

153/1,607

36,523

93.7

30/41

17/51

345

Ryzen 7 1800X @ 2,666MT/s

149/1,612

40,436

88.9

30/41

18/50

336

Ryzen 7 1800X @ 3,000MT/s

150/1,620

45,717

80.6

37/43

29/52

319

Ryzen 7 1800X @ 3,200MT/s

154/1,632

47,850

75.1

35/43

27/52

311

Cinebench R15 Single/Multi (Index)

AIDA 64 Memory Read (MB/s)

AIDA 64 Latency (ns)

Total War Warhammer II (Low and Avg fps)

Middle Earth Shadow of War (Low and Avg fps)

10GB WINRar Archive Time (Seconds)

Threadripper 1950X @ 2,400MT/s

141/2,891

56,524

113.7

38/43

24/55

532

Threadripper 1950X @ 2,666MT/s

138/2,902

62,712

106.2

31/43

25/54

505

Threadripper 1950X @ 3,000MT/s

140/2,939

71,961

97.0

39/43

24/53

472

Threadripper 1950X @ 3,200MT/s

139/2,945

74,992

94.3

39/44

23/53

464

32GB DDR4

Our test bed consists of an Asus X370 Crosshair VI Hero for Ryzen, and an Asus X399 ROG Zenith Extreme motherboard for Threadripper. All memory tests were performed with either 8GB or 16GB Corsair Dominator Platinum DIMMs, with a CAS latency of 16.

36

M E M O R Y M AT T E R S Feature

THE RECOMMENDED SPECS Now we’ve wrapped up exactly how AMD benefits from memory speed in particular (thanks, Infinity Fabric), it’s time we got down to the nitty-gritty of recommending some kits and specs. As with the Intel recommendations, it’s worth noting that

you don’t need to stick with the brands we’ve picked out below, because prices are fluctuating about rather haphazardly at this point. We’ve just tried to balance, price, spec, and performance to come up with the perfect pairings for your AMD-based build.

As noted previously, gamers in particular need to shop around for the best deals, because today’s high-end games won’t compromise on their minimum RAM, and ideally you want to be running slightly over the lowest recommended specs.

OFFICE & HOME THEATRE Let’s assume you have an old GPU from an out-of-date system that you’re going to be plugging into this build, because until the Zen APUs come out, you’ll need a dedicated GPU to run a Ryzen HTPC or office system. A single stick of 4GB DDR4 at 2,666MT/s fits the bill perfectly. Ryzen has always been a bit fussy with memory, so make sure you go for a good mainstream brand here, and stick with 2,666MT/s and above where you can.

HYPERX FURY 4GB (1X 4GB) @ 2,666MT/S, CAS 16 £41–£69

GAMING That price jump is painful, but we reckon it’s worth it for this kit. For gaming, frame rates matter, and near-instantaneous communication between Ryzen’s intricate core complexes certainly helps batter those low frame rates into submission, at the very least. With a super-low latency of 10ns, a 3,200MT/s kit with a CAS latency of 16 will set you back a good £200, but it’s definitely the best way to game on Ryzen. Period.

CORSAIR VENGEANCE LED 16GB (2X 8GB) @ 3,200MT/S, CAS 16 £180–£220

WORKSTATION We’ve opted for more capacity here, but a slight drop in frequency in contrast with the gaming recommendation above. This is mostly centred around the notion that the gains from Threadripper’s memory speed increase (from 3,000 to 3,200) weren’t that impressive. That said, it’s still a kick-ass kit, and the latency combo is perfect, if you can get a kit at a good price. G.Skill’s Ripjaws V series is the best value we’ve seen so far.

CORSAIR VENGEANCE LPX 32GB (4X 8GB) @ 3,000MT/S, CAS 15 £330–£370 37

F E AT U R E Protect your tech

PROTECT YOUR

TECH Having your laptop, tablet or phone stolen is depressingly common. As we explain here, there’s a lot you can do to keep your IT equipment safe

38

PROTECT YOUR TECH Feature

AT A GLANCE

How to find what you’re looking for • Anti-theft products, p40

• Behavioural changes, p41

• DIY solutions, p42

Anti-theft products range from devices to

Even if you don’t want to buy any anti-theft

Creating your own anti-theft products could

provide physical security, through alarms that

products – although we certainly suggest you do

provide you with extra functionality while being

will let you know if your equipment is tampered

– you could probably make your kit

an interesting exercise and perhaps providing

with, to products to mark your gear uniquely

a lot more secure just by altering the way you

a cost saving. We recommend a couple of DIY

and indelibly. We look at the pros and cons of

behave. It’s all too easy to let your guard down,

solutions: a software-only laptop alarm, and a

each, and identify some suitable products.

so here are some common-sense precautions.

proximity tag with app.

W

e have good news and bad news. The good news is that the crime rate has been falling in the UK, from a peak in 1995. Similar trends apply in many other countries. The bad news is that, despite a reduction in household burglary, property theft overall – and theft from the person in particular – has remained high or even risen over the same period, with computer-related equipment being especially targeted. Needless to say, mobile phones are particularly sought after, but we’re guessing most would-be thieves wouldn’t turn their nose up at a top-of-the-range laptop or tablet either. It’s a depressing irony, then, that although convenience while you’re out and about is the whole reason for using portable electronic devices, once your equipment is taken out of the home or office it becomes much more likely to attract the attention of criminals. What’s more, the consequences could be serious. Certainly, the cost of replacement of the hardware has to be considered – and even if it’s insured, you won’t necessarily be fully reimbursed for the loss – but this is just a start. The possibility of theft makes data backup even more important on a laptop or tablet than it is on a desktop but, unless you use a cloud backup or an external disk kept separately from the laptop, your data will only be secured once you get back home. Potentially, therefore, you stand to lose a day or more of work and information which – in the case of notes made at a meeting, for example – might be difficult to replace. We also have to consider the fact that sensitive data could fall into the wrong hands. Finally, getting a replacement for a stolen item, setting it up, re-installing all your software and restoring your data will take some time. Unless you have a spare,

therefore, you could be without a laptop or tablet for quite a few days and this could have a serious impact on your productivity. It’s common to believe that these problems always happen to someone else and are probably due to carelessness. However, one in 10 laptops is stolen during its lifetime and half a million people in the UK had a phone stolen in 2016. If these statistics have convinced you that this is a subject that can affect us all, do read on because, as you’ll see, a small change in your behaviour and a modest investment in anti-theft products could make your equipment a whole lot more secure. We’re going to be looking mainly about prevention of laptop theft here but some of the products, and most of our advice, applies equally to tablets, smartphones, cameras or just about any other electronic equipment you might want to use on the move.

GET THE RIGHT PRODUCT Just as there are several ways of protecting your home or car from theft, the same applies to your laptop. The choice is even more diverse, however, so a bit of guidance is called for. Anti-theft products that are suitable for high-tech gear fall into three main categories. First are products that make it physically difficult for a thief to get away with your gear – we can think of these as the equivalent of the lock on a door. Second are those devices which will draw attention to a thief should they attempt to steal your equipment; this is the equivalent of a household burglar alarm. And third are products for marking your kit to improve the likelihood of it being returned if it is stolen while, at the same time, making it less attractive to a would-be thief. Again, very similar products are available for household items. Here we’ll look at each category in turn, examining their pros and cons and

highlighting some actual products. First we need to make an important point, though: no single type of product is better than the others and each offers benefits in certain circumstances. So, just as it’s common to have locks on your house doors and a burglar alarm, it would be wise to consider protecting your portable gear with at least two, if not all three, types of products.

PHYSICAL ANTI-THEFT KIT Most laptops have a so-called Kensington lock slot which is used to secure it using a security cable from Kensington (www. kensington.com) or other manufacturers. The cable is wrapped around some immovable object such as the legs of a desk, then the end is threaded through a loop in the cable before being inserted into the Kensington slot. The laptop is now secured against casual theft, although it won’t deter a thief equipped with a pair of bolt cutters or who is prepared to damage the laptop to release the security cable. The laptop can be removed by its rightful owner using either a key or a combination lock, depending on the specific product. Prices vary significantly, from as little as £3 to over £35. Tablets rarely, if ever, have Kensington lock slots and smartphones are never equipped in this way. Realistically, it’s probably easier to just make sure that phones are always kept in a secure place, and any adaptor would be quite intrusive on such small devices. Nevertheless, if you’re willing to accept a bulge on the back cover, cable anchors that glue onto the back of smartphones are available from various sources and these can also be used on tablets. However, a better solution for tablets is the Blade Universal Lock Slot Adaptor provided by Maclocks (www. maclocks.co.uk). This is a low-profile hinged bracket that can be attached to the base of tablets using high-strength adhesive,

39

F E AT U R E Protect your tech

which allows a security cable to be attached, and that folds away when not in use. It costs from £38.

ALARMS The first type of alarm we’ll look at, the Lock Alarm Mini (www.lockalarm. com) at £25, serves a dual purpose in also providing physical protection. Like security cables, this product also incorporates a steel wire that is fitted to any type of product that has some sort of loop through which it could be threaded. For a laptop, you also need an adaptor which allows it to be fitted into a Kensington lock slot. The wire is much thinner than Kensington-type security cables but it probably won’t succumb to small wire-cutters and, in addition, its small diameter allows it to be retracted into the body of the unit when not in use. Where it differs from a plain security cable is that a 100dB alarm will sound if the cable is cut. A movement sensor can also be activated. The next type of alarm, and one that is becoming increasingly popular, is the proximity alarm. These generally take the form of a Bluetooth-enabled tag that is attached to the equipment being protected and is paired with a smartphone. There are lots on the market, each with slightly different features, and although this isn’t a comparative review, we will indicate what to look for and approximately how much you can expect to pay. First, it’s important to recognise that the tags tend to be in the region of 35mm across and cannot easily be attached to a

laptop. They’re frequently shown hanging from keyrings but they could readily be attached to a laptop case or hidden in one of its pockets. To truly be called a proximity alarm, an audible alarm should sound if the phone and the tag are separated by more than some preset distance. Not all tags offer this useful feature, perhaps because it’s tricky to gauge distance from Bluetooth signal strength. What they do all offer, however, is a means of manually triggering an alarm on the tag from the paired phone if the tag is still within Bluetooth range – up to several tens of metres, depending on the device and whether there are walls between the tag and the phone. This helps you to track down the tag and might cause a thief to abandon it if it truly has been stolen. Many also have a crowd-finding facility which, even without people’s active participation, employs the user community to help find a device if it’s out of Bluetooth range. In reality, this isn’t going to be much use unless you’re in a densely populated area and you’ve chosen one of the most popular brands. These products are equally effective against accidental loss as against theft, and to help you here, most associated apps will allow you to see, on a map, where your tag was last detected. Tags cost from about £20, but some have batteries that cannot be recharged or replaced so you have to buy a new tag – often at a reduced price, fortunately – after the year or so it takes for the battery to run down. The product

MOST LAPTOPS HAVE A SO-CALLED KENSINGTON LOCK SLOT THAT IS USED TO SECURE THEM WITH A CABLE

QUICK GUIDE

PREY: TRACKING SOFTWARE Prey doesn’t stop your mobile device being stolen, but it does make it more likely you’ll be able to get it back if it is taken from you. It takes the form of software that you install that runs in the background. If your device is stolen, you report it as stolen on the Prey website and, from then on, whenever it’s switched on you’ll receive reports containing an IP address and a location based on nearby Wi-Fi signals. If the device has a camera you’ll get photos of whoever’s using it, and you’ll also receive screenshots – which might be useful as they could show, for example, the culprit’s Facebook page. Armed with this, you could approach the police, who might be able to recover your device. The Pro version also allows you to remotely delete files. Prey is open source and the standard version is free. It is available for most operating systems from www.preyproject.com.

Below: Prey provides you with reports, including information about the location of missing devices

family that is probably the market leader is Tile (www.thetileapp.com) although, as yet, it doesn’t feature a true proximity alarm. The PebbleBee Honey (www.pebblebee.com) is one that does offer a proximity alarm, also known as geofence, functionality. The other main type of alarm that’s relevant to laptops is the purely software version. These are really only effective against opportunistic theft and will sound if, for example, the mains power supply or a mouse is unplugged from an unattended laptop. Unfortunately, pretty much all of these alarms only work on Windows and, while a few free packages are still available for download, most commercial products have been discontinued. However, for those proficient in coding, a DIY solution could be a possibility.

MARKING PRODUCTS Products for marking equipment serve two quite distinct purposes. First, they improve the likelihood of your equipment being returned to you if it’s stolen and subsequently recovered by the police. Second, because possession of marked equipment could be discriminating, it makes your laptop or other equipment a much less attractive target to a potential thief. Two categories of product achieve these two important functions. The first category allows you to mark a product in a way that is highly visible and difficult to remove. One type comprises stencils, prepared with either

40

Protect your tech Feature

Top: SmartWater is almost impossible to remove and uniquely identifies the owner Above: Tags from Tile use Bluetooth to help you track down missing devices

your address or a unique serial number, that are supplied with an applicator and special ink. The ink etches into the surface of your laptop or other equipment, thereby making its removal almost impossible. The other main type involves specially prepared tamperresistant labels, again showing your address or an ID, which are supplied with an adhesive for attaching them to your equipment. Again, removal is difficult and, at best, will leave tell-tale signs. When a serial number is used as opposed to an address, this product is sold with registration to a database – accessible by the police – that associates the owner with the equipment. The advantage this offers is that equipment can be re-registered if you sell it. Retainagroup (www.retainagroup. com) offers this type of product in the UK, and STOP (www.stoptheft.com) offers it in the US. At first sight, the second category of products – those that mark your

potentially removable with a solvent if the thief discovers the marking. Where things get more interesting is when we consider those products such as SmartWater, which is an invisible ink, prepared with a formulation unique to each customer, that you apply to the equipment and is almost impossible to remove completely. It can be detected with an ultraviolet light, leading the police to forward recovered equipment to SmartWater for analysis to reveal the registered owner. It’s provided with warning labels that you can attach to marked equipment, thereby providing that all-important deterrent value. SmartWater is sold in the UK; prices range from £25-35 for products in the Home Security range and these can be purchased from https://shop.smartwater.com. In the US, up to ten items can be protected for as little as $5 per month – see https:// shop.smartwatercsi.com.

BEHAVIOURAL CHANGES Physical protection, alarms and marking products are important anti-theft measures and should be seriously considered by anyone who regularly takes valuable equipment outside the home or office. However, your behaviour is also important and changes here could prove to be equally as effective in preventing loss. Our first piece of advice is to not advertise the fact that you’re carrying valuable equipment when you’re not using it. When you’re walking down the street, keep small items such as phones in your pocket or handbag rather than in your hand, where they can be easily seen and could readily be snatched from your grasp. Needless to say, this isn’t feasible with larger items such as tablets and laptops. However, it’s not necessary to carry them in a conventional laptop case, which does little to disguise the expensive equipment it contains. A police Crime

PRODUCTS Anti-theft device types to consider

1

LOCTOTE FLAKSACK SPORT

It’s difficult to provide physical protection for individual small items, as you can easily do with a laptop. However, the LocTote FlakSack Sport (http://loctote.com, £75) keeps several small pieces of equipment secure. It takes the form of a slash-resistant bag with a nylon and steel locking strap and combination lock with which you can attach it to an immovable object.

2

LOCK ALARM MINI

The Lock Alarm Mini (www.lockalarm. com, £25) offers both physical protection and an alarm. The physical protection is provided by a strong steel cable to secure your laptop or other kit. This is difficult to cut with hand tools and, if a thief does try to cut through it, an alarm will sound.

STENCILS, PREPARED WITH EITHER YOUR ADDRESS OR A UNIQUE SERIAL NUMBER, ARE SUPPLIED WITH AN APPLICATOR AND SPECIAL INK products invisibly – seems a strange concept. Some companies sell invisible ink pens that you’d use to write your postcode or ZIP code on your equipment, which becomes visible if you shine an ultraviolet light on it. We don’t recommend this solution since it offers no deterrent value and is also

Prevention Officer we spoke to said that he always carries his laptop in a scruffy supermarket bag because nobody would guess it contained anything more valuable than a few cans of beans. If you want something a bit smarter, or that provides more protection from knocks, you could consider a backpack.

3

SMARTWATER

SmartWater provides the benefits of both visible and invisible marking. Warning labels act as a deterrent, while the invisible paint is very difficult to remove and the smallest trace is enough to identify you as the owner. You can mark up to 50 items for £35 from https://shop. smartwater.com.

41

F E AT U R E Protect your tech

You could use an ordinary backpack of the sort you might take on a hike, but a special laptop backpack might be more appropriate, because they’re designed to hold a laptop of a particular size and have plenty of compartments for accessories and documents. You can easily pay over £100 for such a backpack, but we recommend opting for a much cheaper one so it’s not as

perhaps to buy a coffee. It’s important to recognise that your insurance company might not reimburse you if leave your laptop unattended – and if it belongs to your employer, you might find yourself having to answer some very difficult questions from your boss. Of course, the safest piece of advice that we can give is to never leave your laptop unattended, even if you only

IT’S IMPORTANT TO RECOGNISE THAT YOUR INSURANCE COMPANY MIGHT NOT REIMBURSE YOU IF YOU LEAVE YOUR LAPTOP UNATTENDED conspicuous. These are widely available from several suppliers. With laptop backpacks now fairly common, their stealth value is not as great as it once was, but a thief will still find it more difficult to take a backpack from your back than a case from your hand. Next, think about the situation when you’re using your equipment, most notably your laptop, in a public place such as an airport lounge, railway station, coffee shop or university library. It would be rare for a laptop to be stolen while you’re actually using it, although you should be careful about leaving a phone in view. After all, it only takes a momentary lapse in your attention for someone to walk off with any such small items. The main risk to your laptop, however, is if you need to take a break,

42

intend to be away for a very short time. That’s not always possible though, even if you just need a short trip to the loo, and in any case you might not want to appear neurotic (Looking neurotic is better than losing your laptop, but we have to be realistic). This being the case, how about carrying out a risk assessment to come up with your own set of rules? You might decide, for example, that you will never leave your laptop unattended in an airport, on a train, or in a coffee shop or bar (and that really is the only sensible option in these places). If you’re in the university library, you might decide that you’d be prepared to ask someone to watch it for you, as long as you’re not going to be away for more than two minutes. This is also an instance in which you might decide to use a software alarm,

QUICK GUIDE

ENCRYPT SENSITIVE DATA Losing a laptop could deny you access to important data, at least until you can access a backup, but if sensitive data falls into the wrong hands it could be even more costly. An obvious precaution is not to store sensitive information on your portable devices unless you really need to access it when you’re away from home. If it is necessary to store that data when you are on the move, though, it would be wise to encrypt it. Choosing an ideal solution is a major topic in its own right.

bearing in mind that it’ll only provide a minimal degree of protection. Below Security cables, like this one from Kensington, are ideal for deterring casual laptop theft

DIY SOLUTIONS If you’re a developer as opposed to a user, you might want to consider creating your own anti-theft utilities and devices. We’ve already seen that software-only laptop alarms are few and far between and most of those that do exist only operate under Windows. Still, there’s some benefit in having an extra layer of protection, even if it’s not 100 per cent effective. So how about writing your own alarm? Since this will cost you nothing at all except your time, it’s worth considering. The advantage in writing your own alarm is that you can decide exactly how you’d like it to operate. Be prepared to be innovative. Some features, such as sounding if the power supply is unplugged, are surely essential, but there are other useful things you might choose to add. For example, you might find that certain patterns of Wi-Fi signal strength are indicative of the laptop being moved, as opposed to someone just walking between it and the access point. If so, this might provide a means of detecting theft of your laptop, even if it wasn’t connected to mains power. An alternative is to detect motion directly. While nearly all smartphones contain the accelerometers that would permit this, they are not nearly as ubiquitous in laptops. Some products,

Protect your tech Feature

Visibly marking your gear provides a deterrent to potential thieves

QUICK GUIDE

INSURANCE

THE ADVANTAGE IN WRITING YOUR OWN ALARM IS THAT YOU CAN DECIDE EXACTLY HOW YOU’D LIKE IT TO OPERATE most notably Lenovo ThinkPads, have accelerometers as part of the Hard Drive Active Protection System (HDAPS) which parks the disk drive heads to prevent damage to platter if the laptop is dropped. Another example are convertible laptop/tablets that often include an accelerometer so that screen rotation can be detected. Finally, don’t forget that an alarm could be disabled just by turning off the laptop or closing its lid, so do be sure to disable both the power and the lid switch whenever the alarm is active. Another DIY project you might want to attempt is a proximity alarm based on a small single board computer with an associated Android or iOS app. The Particle Photon (www.particle.io) would be a contender due to its small size and, while it isn’t much cheaper than an off-the-shelf Bluetooth tag, it does offer some benefits. First and foremost is the fact that you can add whatever features you want, rather than being constrained by what’s on offer in commercial products. In fact this additional functionality needn’t be

restricted to theft prevention. These tiny SBCs are often targeted at Internet of Things applications, so you could use it to experiment with real-world monitoring too. On the downside, many of the smaller SBCs – the Particle Photon included – have Wi-Fi rather than Bluetooth. For a tag that has to operate on internal batteries for perhaps a year or more, this would be a serious disadvantage as Wi-Fi is much more power-hungry than Bluetooth. If you’re going to run your tag from an external battery and are prepared to recharge it periodically, however, this is no longer a disadvantage, and has the extra benefit of a greater range. Another platform that’s designed specifically as a tag, is the open source RuuviTag (https://tag.ruuvi.com). This takes the form of a compact circular board powered from an onboard button cell, housed in a round waterproof case, fitted with various sensors including an accelerometer, and including Bluetooth. It costs Ð69 excluding VAT for three units (that works out to roughly £76

Insurance is important for valuable equipment but do make sure your equipment is adequately covered. Details differ between countries, insurance companies and policies, but there are two things you should check: Does your household policy provide adequate cover for equipment that you take out of the house? And is equipment covered if you use it for business? If the cover provided by your general policy doesn’t meet your needs, look for dedicated insurance for your tech gear.

including 24% EU VAT at the time of going to press). You’ll never find a solution that allows you to keep your laptop completely secure all of the time – accidents can happen – but you can do your best to minimise the risk of theft.

Right: It’s much harder to steal a laptop if you carry it in a backpack

43

F E AT U R E Protect your tech

HOW TO

MAKE A DIY BACKPACK TRACKER WITH RUUVITAG

1

BACKPACK BEACON

This project is a simple way to make your own tracking device that you can tuck away in your backpack. Essentially, what you are doing is turning the RuuviTag into a proximity beacon and for this we’re using Eddystone, the open beacon format from Google. Make sure you’re running the latest version of Eddystone by flashing the firmware. The RuuviTag is set up for Over the Air (OTA) updating, so it’s easy to flash. You’ll need a phone: we used the Moto G4 Android smartphone for the job, so we needed to download nRF Connect (http://bit.ly/nRFConnect) from the Play Store.

2

ENTER THE BOOTLOADER

Now you need to head on over to https://lab.ruuvi.com/ dfu on your phone, scroll to the ‘Ruuvi Firmware’ link and download it. To flash RuuviTag, we first need to enter its bootloader, so prise it open and pop it out of its enclosure using the attached metal clip. On the RuuviTag, you’ll notice two tiny buttons. Press the one marked R while keeping B pressed to enter the bootloader. If you’re successful you’ll get a red light. Next, open nRF Connect and swipe down to refresh. ‘Ruuviboot’ should pop up as a found device so press ‘Connect’. At this point the light on the board will turn green.

3

PREPARE TO FLASH

4

GET EDDY READY

In the top right-hand corner of the app’s GUI there’s a tiny DFU icon which you now need to tap. This enables you to select the file type you want to use. The default ‘Distribution package (ZIP)’ is correct, so Click ‘OK’ and select the Ruuvi Firmware. This will start the upload to your RuvviTag. (Note: It’s confusing but the firmware file is actually called weather_station_1.0.1.zip.) Once complete, it will display ‘Application has been sent’ and disconnect from Ruuviboot. Now you’ve got to configure your tag as a beacon.

Head back to https:// lab.ruuvi.com/dfu/ and download the second link called ‘Eddystone’. Go back to Step 3 and follow the same process, but choose eddystone_dfu_1.0.0.zip to upload.

5

CONFIGURE YOUR BEACON

Now to the configuration proper. First, download nRF Beacon for Eddystone (http://bit. ly/nRFBeaconforEddy), but this time press B to get a red light and enter config mode. Launch the

44

nRF Beacon for Eddystone, click the ‘Update’ tab, click the RuvviTag Device from available devices and you’ll connect. This will bring up an ‘Unlock Beacon’ box that needs a 16 byte default unlock code. This will be: 0x00112233445566778899aabbccdd eeff. Configure the beacon by typing a dummy address into ‘Slot 0’, such as https://my-backpack. The transmission interval needs to be set to 300 milliseconds, so edit ‘Adv. interval’. The recommended transmission power is -4 decibelmilliwatts (dBm), so alter that in the ‘Radio Tx Power’ option. Now click ‘Disconnect’. You’re all set!

6

TEST YOUR BACKPACK BEACON

We stuck the tag inside a backpack, at the top. This shouldn’t affect the signal too much, but you could put it on the outside – the RuuviTag is waterproof. To track your tag, you can use any beacon scanner. We’ve just used Beacon Toy (http:// bit.ly/BeaconToy). Open the side menu and click on ‘Beacons around me’ and your Ruuvitag will pop up. The tag has a range of 50 metres (150 feet), but you’ll get a distance from your backpack in metres to track it.

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F E AT U R E AMD vs. INTEL

BUILD IT SPECIAL AMD VS. AMD

BUILD IT! Step-by-step guide

Pg. 56

Two very different systems and two very different builds go head to head in this workstation showdown

W

e’ve spent a while bigging up how important Ryzen is in the grand scheme of processor development. Without it, Intel’s price gouging would likely have continued for the foreseeable future, with the red prodigy being relegated to a footnote in computing history. Ryzen, for better or worse, has changed everything, giving Intel’s R&D labs the gusto to push forward with core count and chip design, and reintroducing choice into an otherwise stagnant decision-making process. No longer is system spec purely tied to how much money you want to spend on an Intel chip, but which CPU you believe is right for you. With most multithreading professionals looking toward Ryzen for its cheap and affordable multicore applicational use, the question is, does it warrant the fanfare it’s received

AMD INGREDIENTS Street PRICE

PART Case

Corsair Carbide Air 740

£125

Motherboard

MSI X370 Gaming Pro Carbon

£190

CPU

AMD Ryzen 7 1800X

£310

Memory

32GB (4x 8GB) Corsair Dominator Platinum 2666

£465

GPU

AMD Radeon Pro WX 7100

£625

PSU

Corsair HX1200i Platinum

£260

Storage 1

Samsung 960 Pro 512GB PCIe NVMe SSD

£276

Storage 2

Western Digital - Black 2TB 7,200rpm HDD

£102

Cooling

Arctic Freezer 33

£33

OS

Windows 10 Home 64-bit OEM

£80

Total

46

£2,466

AMD vs.INTEL Feature

INTEL so far in the workstation environment? We know what the situation is with our synthetic benchmarks, and for gaming, but what about the real-world tests? What about situations that really matter? Gaming is great and all, but it’s in the 3D workshops, the VR laboratories, the photomanipulation bunkers and the video-editing powerhouses that these processors are truly designed to shine. This all caused something of an argument in the office. So, to stop the squabble, we got a hold of ourselves and decided to settle the debate. A build-off, to the death. One side Intel, one side AMD. No budget constraints, no fluff, just a pure, fair, and balanced battle between processor, chipset, and GPU type, to decide, once and for all, which platform is the better workstation standard. So, then, the rules: Storage would be the same for each system, but we’d have free rein over the choice of processor, memory, motherboard, GPU, and cooling – and, of course, we’d have full access to any system and OS tinkering we wanted, including overclocking and memory frequency. With both builds completed, it was time to benchmark the mighty beasts to settle the quarrel, and put an end to the bickering.

INTEL INGREDIENTS Street PRICE

PART Case

Raijintek Asterion Plus

£140

Motherboard

Asus X99-E-10G WS

£500

CPU

Intel Core i7-6950X

£1,630

Memory

G.Skill Trident Z 64GB (4x 16GB) DDR4-3200

£900

GPU

Zotac GeForce GTX 1080 Ti 11GB Founder’s Edition

£750

PSU

EVGA SuperNova T2 1,600W 80+ Titanium

£440

Storage 1

Samsung 960 Pro 512GB PCIe NVMe SSD

£276

Storage 2

Western Digital Black 2TB 7,200rpm HDD

£102

BUILD IT! Step-by-step guide

Cooling

Noctua NH-D15 CPU heatsink

£83

OS

Windows 10 Home 64-bit OEM

£80

Total

INTEL Pg. 60

£2,466

47

F E AT U R E AMD vs. INTEL

AMD BUILD

AMD CPU

AMD RYZEN 7 1800X £310 There are plenty of good processors in the Ryzen stack, but for a workstation-class machine, you really do want to make sure you have the top dog. Eight cores, 16 threads, running at a slight overclock of 3.9GHz makes for a beefy heart for any number-crunching activity. It’s only a fraction of the cost of Intel’s top chip as well.

AMD MOTHERBOARD

PROFESSIONAL GRAPHICS CARDS MAY COST A LOT MORE, BUT THE PAY-OFF CAN BE CONSIDERABLE AMD GPU

MSI X370 GAMING PRO CARBON £190 The Gaming Pro Carbon is our current favorite offering for any AM4 build. Solid, stable performance, backed up by a rich feature set, and a reasonable price make this a tough one to beat. Dual M.2 ports and six SATA connectors make for great storage options, while a total of 16 USB ports give you plenty of connectivity, too.

AMD RADEON PRO WX 7100 £625 Professional graphics cards may cost a lot more than their gaming-focused brethren, but the pay-off can be considerable in the right applications. It’s all about drivers. The Radeon Pro

WX 7100 is a single-slot card in delightful YInMn blue (Google it; the colour does more than look good), with 2,304 stream processors, capable of hitting an impressive 5.7Tflops.

AMD MEMORY

32GB (4X 8GB) CORSAIR DOMINATOR PLATINUM 2666 £465 Memory can make a considerable difference in a lot of workstation applications, so spending more on a quality kit makes sense. We’ve gone for a set of the Corsair Dominator Platinum 2666 sticks here, as it’s a good compromise between capacity, speed, and price. If you handle a lot of large data sets, a 64GB kit may be a better idea. 48

AMD vs.INTEL Feature

INTEL BUILD

INTEL MEMORY

INTEL CPU

64GB (4X 16GB) G.SKILL TRIDENT Z DDR4 £900 When it came to memory, we didn’t want to absolutely demolish the competition, but we did want to lean on X99’s hypothetical memory maximum and oomph up performance to the max. G.Skill’s 64GB (4x 16GB) kit has served us well in the past. Its grand capacity and 3,200MT/s speed really dents our benchmark suite. Did it work? Best read on to find out.

INTEL CORE I76950X £1,630 It’s a lot of money for those 10 cores, but it’s hard to deny how impressive this chip is. Capable of reaching 4.4GHz, we overclocked this monster to 4.2GHz, to keep it strong and stable, and more than capable of kicking the crap out of our rendering benchmarks.

INTEL GPU

NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 1080 TI £750 We could have opted for a Titan Xp, or a Quadro, but decided to use something a little different from the AMD competition. The 1080 Ti packs a stunning amount of performance in a card that costs just as much as the Radeon alternative, but with enough wallop to hammer games as much as any CAD task you can throw at it.

THIS IS TRULY A STUNNING AMOUNT OF PERFORMANCE IN A CARD THAT COSTS JUST AS MUCH AS THE RADEON ALTERNATIVE

INTEL MOTHERBOARD

ASUS X99-E-10G WS £500 Workstation heaven, thy name is X99-E-10G WS. All right, that might be a little more long-winded than we’d like, but you get the point. 10 SATA 6Gb/s ports, dual 10GbE ports, seven PCIe 3.0 slots capable of running seven workstation GPUs (in x16/x8/ x8/x8/x8/x8/x8), plus it overclocks like a champ, and has incredible memory support, too. 49

F E AT U R E AMD vs. INTEL

AMD BUILD AMD COOLING

ARCTIC FREEZER 33 £33 There is a growing number of options for AM4 coolers, but most focus on all-in-one solutions. Here we wanted to use an air cooler that can keep the

Ryzen 7 1800X in check, and the Arctic Freezer 33 steps up to the task brilliantly. Easy to install and quiet running, it’s a great option.

THERE IS A GROWING NUMBER OF OPTIONS FOR AM4 COOLERS, BUT MOST FOCUS ON ALL-IN-ONE SOLUTIONS

AMD CASE

CORSAIR CARBIDE AIR 740 £125 Having plenty of space in your case is great when it comes to airflow. The Carbide Air 740 takes that to a wonderful level with its compartmented design, which has the power supply and hard drives

hidden out of the way, leaving plenty of room around the motherboard for any further upgrades we might have planned. It’s a joy to build in, and looks great, too, which keeps us happy.

AMD PSU

CORSAIR HX1200I £260 Two hundred and sixty quid. That’s a lot of money for a power supply, but it’s arguably worth it. For a system that’s going to spend a huge proportion of its life turned on, efficiency and expandability are key. Not only will the

AMD

Corsair HX1200i provide you with enough options for multiple add-in cards, but it’ll also waste little energy on heat, thanks to its 80 Plus Platinum certification, meaning your rig runs just that little bit cooler.

INTEL

STORAGE

SAMSUNG 960 PRO 512GB £276 Keeping our storage fairly well balanced between these systems was key. Although memory is a big part of what makes both X99 and X370 so different, the storage situation is relatively similar between the two. The 50

950 Pro 512GB was the perfect choice; its exceptional file transfer speed and performance are second to none, making it perfect for pitting our benchmark machines against each other head to head.

AMD vs.INTEL Feature

INTEL BUILD

INTEL COOLING

NOCTUA NH-D15 £83 We needed something reliable and powerful to alleviate all that heat, and the challenge fell to Noctua’s NH-D15. Astoundingly, it held out fantastically well, even with the 6950X clocked at 4.2GHz. In fact, if it weren’t for the fact that it’s so easy to install an AIO, this may very well have been replacing our Kraken X62 that’s on the dedicated test bench. It’s that good.

INTEL CASE

RAIJINTEK ASTERION PLUS £140 The Asterion Plus is a full tower, acryliccovered, aluminum box. It looks stylish, and comes with support for plenty of hard drives, and a slim 5.25-inch bay. Is it the best solution

for this system? In hindsight, we perhaps should have used a Define R5 instead, but this case was more than adequate for the job that we wanted it to do.

IN AN IDEAL WORLD, WE WOULD HAVE POPULATED BOTH SYSTEMS WITH A WD BLACK 6TB HDD FOR ONBOARD STORAGE

INTEL PSU AMD

INTEL

STORAGE

WD BLACK 6TB £236 Unfortunately, Western Digital didn’t get these drives to us in time for our Build It photo shoot, but in an ideal world, we would have populated both systems with a WD Black 6TB HDD for onboard storage. Back these up daily on to an external NAS, and you’re guaranteed to have plenty of onsite storage.

EVGA SUPERNOVA 1600 T2 £440 This SuperNova is a 1,600W beast of a PSU, fully modular, and comes with a Titanium rating, for a power efficiency of 96 per cent. Couple that with the inclusion of two eight-pins, nine eight-pin PCIe, five six-pin PCIe, and 16x SATA power, and it’s one of the best equipped PSUs out there. It even supports floppy! Floppy!

51

F E AT U R E AMD vs. INTEL

AMD BUILD

CHOOSING BENCHMARKS FORGET YOUR STANDARD TESTING SUITE, IT’S TIME TO GET SERIOUS CAD PERFORMANCE

Above: SPECviewperf is a harsh test of a system’s CAD capabilities

52

Assessing the performance of a workstation for CAD applications isn’t easy, mainly because real workloads vary so wildly. Even when handling the same models and data, what you’re doing can be just as important as what you’re working with. While you may be CPU-bottlenecked on some tasks, you can be held back by RAM, hard

drive, or graphics card in others. There’s a lot of factors when it comes to CAD work, and that’s a problem when you want to know how one workstation compares to another. There is a solution: industry stalwart SPECviewperf. This pushes any would-be workstation through a series of gruelling tests to

ascertain how they’ll perform in the real world of 3D CAD modeling. Because the tests used vary in complexity and rendering techniques used, there isn’t an overall score or index; instead, we have results for different testing scenarios (which, in fact, are made up of multiple test runs themselves). You can download and run SPECviewperf 12.1 for free on your own machine to see how it compares: www.spec.org. Note that it’s a chunky 4GB download, and not a fast one either. In theory, the big takeaway is that professional graphics cards make a big difference in CAD. This is muddied by the fact that plenty of the tests benefit from the raw grunt offered up by the GTX 1080 Ti, so it isn’t the whitewash for the AMD Radeon Pro WX 7100 that you might expect. The GTX 1080 Ti does incredibly well in the DirectX Maya benchmark, while the WX 7100 is almost 10 times faster in the penultimate SNX test. If you’re serious about CAD, then upgrading to a Quadro P6000 might make sense, although you need to be prepared to drop up to £5,200 on such a card. Note that these tests are largely processoragnostic, running on a single core, so the focus is very much on the graphics card. Even so, as with gaming scenarios, a faster core clock on your CPU can make a difference here.

AMD vs.INTEL Feature

INTEL BUILD

On to the nitty-gritty. You can build all the fancy workstations you want, but if you don’t have some way of measuring real-world performance across them (which is, let’s face it, the entire point of this feature), it amounts to very little outside of hypothetical potential throughput. Synthetic benchmarks are good at giving you a rough idea of how a system responds, but they’re also fallible. Just take a step into Asus’s Crosshair VI BIOS, and you’ll quickly spot the option to enable performance boosts for both Cinebench and GeekBench, if you should so desire. Which brings us to the question of what benchmarks we should use. For both our Intel and AMD builds on the following pages, we stuck with our traditional suite, which we use across most of the systems we build for those pages – more game-heavy, with a peek at processor performance and storage output. However, for this feature, we really wanted to focus on a more accurate depiction of how each platform operates in a working environment. Which meant delving into real-world programs. From the get-go, we knew we wanted to include something that utilised CAD clients. Because most software associated with CAD reaches the tens of thousands of pounds mark, we opted for SPECviewperf, a free-to-download benchmark, which

runs a number of CAD applications to truly test your GPU’s design capability. Next on the list was video editing – for this, we took a copy of the latest version of Adobe’s Premiere Pro CC, and coupled it with a fairly gargantuan project file we borrowed from our parent company’s corporate advertising division. For photomanipulation, we went with Gigapan Stitch. Designed to test memory capacity, bandwidth, and CPU prowess, this takes hundreds, if not thousands, of images, and stitches them all together to create a massive panorama, with PSB files reaching upward of 96GB in some places, depending on DPI settings. Finally, we ran a few more synthetics for our own understanding of how the systems performed across memory, and our traditional rendering benchmarks, including SiSoft Sandra and X265, which are available for free or on trial.

SPECVIEWPERF 12.1 BENCHMARKS ZERO POINT

RYZEN WORKSTATION

VIEWSET

INTEL WORKSTATION

3ds Max (Index)

95.72 (-39%)

157.54

124.3 (-21%)

Catia (Index)

103.42 (20%)

85.93

105.69 (23%)

Creo (Index)

81.41 (31%)

62.32

62.6 (0%)

Energy (Index)

4.06 (-53%)

8.57

11.73 (37%)

Maya (Index)

75.2 (-45%)

136.04

Medical (Index)

34.32 (-31%)

49.72

52.64 (6%)

Showcase (Index)

65.43 (-36%)

101.71

141.35 (39%)

SNX (Index)

96.79 (1,011%)

8.71

10.52 (21%)

SW (Index)

111.97 (84%)

60.98

67.80 (11%)

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

80%

90%

100%

0%

175.43 (29%)

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

80%

90%

100%

Our desktop zero-point has a Core i7-7700K running at a stock frequency of 4.5GHz, an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 8GB, 16GB of Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4-2400, and a 250GB Samsung 850 Evo, mounted on an Asus Maximus IX Hero mobo.

53

F E AT U R E AMD vs. INTEL

AMD BUILD

VIDEO RENDERING

The video editing community is divided on which editing software is best. Apple’s Final Cut Pro and Adobe’s Premiere Pro are the two most commonly used applications. Although Premiere offers a far greater set of tools than its

Premiere Pro in all of its processoreating glory

barely supported Apple counterpart, Final Cut Pro’s render times are far superior, especially when it comes to exporting 4K video. That said, Final Cut Pro isn’t available on Windows, therefore anyone lacking the investment into

Apple’s Mac OS ecosystem has little choice when it comes to video editing software. We used Adobe Premiere Pro CC for our real-world benchmarks, taking 180GB-worth of files, a preconstructed Adobe project file, rendering out in 4K in H.264 at maximum bit depth and render quality, and timing how long it took each machine to complete the task. As far as performance goes, Premiere is always a mixed bag, because it relies heavily on both the CPU and the GPU, leveraging workloads to whichever core makes the most sense. Its Media Rendering engine supports both OpenCL and CUDA, with the latter taking centre stage when it comes to eking out that extra performance. The number of cores and clock speed also matter, because although not every processor is fully utilised during rendering, the more you have and the faster those individual cores run, the better. On top of that, we also ran our X265 benchmark. This is an interesting one because it doesn’t rely on any particular GPU, but purely transcodes video from one file format into another, so it acts as a fairly heavy synthetic CPU test, producing average fps figures for four consecutive runs, which are then averaged out.

VIDEO RENDERING RYZEN WORKSTATION

VIEWSET Premiere Pro (Seconds)

901 (-9%)

X265 Benchmark (fps)

29.56 (41%)

0%

10%

20%

INTEL WORKSTATION

ZERO POINT

733 (11%)

824

35.92 (72%)

20.93 30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

80%

90% 100%

0%

10%

20%

30%

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90% 100%

Our desktop zero-point has a Core i7-7700K running at a stock frequency of 4.5GHz, an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 8GB, 16GB of Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4-2400, and a 250GB Samsung 850 Evo, mounted on an Asus Maximus IX Hero mobo.

AMD CONCLUSION The value proposition Both of the machines we built are incredible. But in terms of raw performance, there’s no getting away from the fact that Intel’s Core i7-6950X is an absolute beast. It is expensive, though, and getting the best from that chip will set you back a serious amount of cash. Our Ryzen machine, meanwhile, is much more thrifty, which means that while we do lose out in the drag race of straight performance, Ryzen has the Intel system easily beat in terms of value for money – 20 per cent performance improvements in most of the tests doesn’t balance well with the 80 per cent price difference. In light of that, you could emphasise the win on this front by focusing even more on the value 54

of the individual components. We wouldn’t step away from the core of the RAM, motherboard, and CPU (although an argument could certainly be made for stepping down to the Ryzen 7 1700), but everything else is potentially up for grabs. You could pick a more affordable power supply, and while we’re personally huge fans of the case, it’s an obvious place to save a bit of cash – especially as it won’t affect the bottom-line performance at all. The one component that would be easy to replace is the graphics card, as you could hit pretty much the same performance in many tasks by swapping to a Radeon RX 580 (saving £200). Of course, if you use applications that

benefit from a pro-level card, that doesn’t make sense, but for everyone else, it’s an easy win. Overall we’re happy with how the Ryzen build came together, and how it has performed. It’s a strong system that proves that AMD is back on a par with Intel. We still have a few reservations in some areas – RAM support is still not quite where we would like it to be, and as the platform is new, we ran into problems during testing that we couldn’t be certain weren’t down to the particular test, so that’s worth factoring in. Even so, if you’re looking to build a power workstation machine, AMD is definitely an option once again, and it’s been a while since we’ve been able to say that with confidence.

AMD vs.INTEL Feature

INTEL BUILD

IMAGE STITCHING

It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise when we say that assessing how these machines handle image editing varies depending on what you’re doing. When you’re packing loads of memory, fast storage, the fastest processors

The world’s most frustrating 2-12 hour benchmark

money can buy, and great graphics cards, many tasks that take a while on a standard desktop are too easy for our monster rigs. We searched for workloads that actually made sense, but kept coming up with operations that finished

within seconds, or were too specific to be of much use. In other words, if you’re looking for a workstation for image editing, both machines fulfill the role competently. Not all image-based tasks are created equal, though, and if you’re looking for serious system draining, image stitching is a good option. The concept is to take a series of photographs that cover a wide panorama, and stitch them together to create a massive final image. In order to get consistent coverage for these images, a “robot” is often used, and that’s exactly what was done to get the live data set for our testing. The shots in question were bracketed for improved contrast, and the final image count came in at a cool 690 images, with each measuring 5184x3456 pixels. There’s some necessary overlap between images, but the final panorama is 136,758x50,502 pixels, and weighs in at 22GB. The software we used for this test, Autopano Giga 4.4, uses as many CPU cores as you can throw at it, loads of RAM, and requires fast storage, too. No real surprises on the result front – the added core count of the Intel build, along with the larger capacity memory, makes a real difference.

GIGAPAN IMAGE STITCHING RYZEN WORKSTATION

VIEWSET Kolor Autopano Giga 4.4 (Time)

1h 57m 34s (4%) 0%

10%

20%

30%

INTEL WORKSTATION

ZERO POINT

1h 29m 6s (27%)

2h 1m 55s 40%

50%

60%

70%

80%

90% 100%

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

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90% 100%

Our desktop zero-point has a Core i7-7700K running at a stock frequency of 4.5GHz, an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 8GB, 16GB of Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4-2400, and a 250GB Samsung 850 Evo, mounted on an Asus Maximus IX Hero mobo.

INTEL CONCLUSION Pricey build, pricey prize When considering CPU cores, how do you best explain the proposition behind a workstation, like the two builds we have here? Going from a four-core, eight-thread processor to an eight-core, 16-thread one can cut render times in half. If you shave 15 minutes off a 30-minute render, and do that twice a day, five times a week, that’s 2.5 working hours saved in a week. Multiply that out by a year, and it’s around 125 man hours saved. Take the average wage of an experienced video editor (£20 an hour), and that’s a total of £2,500 saved, purely in time, in a single year. What we’re getting at is that, for the self-employed, or the corporate busybody

looking to improve their company’s efficiency, investing in good systems, much like infrastructure, will always pay for itself in the long run. And that’s something you partially see with the two systems we have here. Ryzen’s value proposition in contrast to our Intel build is huge. We knew from the start that Intel could never win a fight based on trying to spec a similarly priced machine, so performance was the goal – smashing the opposition through sheer brute force, graphically, computationally, and in I/O support and memory was key. We’ve gotta give credit to Ryzen – it’s exceptionally well equipped at an outstanding price in comparison to Intel, but it wasn’t

without its limits. Initial setup and getting memory to operate above 2,133 was still challenging, even with the latest BIOS updates, and Gigapan, in particular, proved troublesome (although that’s also true of the Intel rig). Ultimately, recommending one rig over the other is difficult. If you’ve got the cash to spare, the Intel one is easier to set up, more powerful, and far more stable than its Ryzen counterpart. But, in all honesty, with AMD’s 16-core Threadripper HEDT platform and Intel’s Skylake-X right around the corner, it would be better to see what both of those new platforms muster up first, before committing to either processor ecosystem. 55

F E AT U R E BUILD IT: Ryzen to the challenge

BUILD IT Ryzen to the challenge LENGTH OF TIME: 2-3 HOURS

LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY: EASY

Just because AMD’s new chips offer great value for money, it doesn’t mean we have to scrimp and save

THE CONCEPT

W

e’re always comparing hardware here. Every review, build, and feature sees us comparing components, or whole systems, against what has gone before; either explicitly when picking components, or more subtly when alluding to performance metrics. Even so, it’s rare that we actually go head to head against another machine, yet that’s exactly what we’re doing here: two machines aimed at solving the same problems, but only one can be considered the winner. That’s the ethos, and it forms what has gone into these two builds. However, when it comes to piecing together this Ryzen build and the Intel one that follows, they can be considered in isolation. If you want to build either machine, you’ll find the full component lists and build processes over the next few pages. Having said that, there are a few things worth bearing in mind at this point: These machines are designed to handle workstation loads, and, as such, the component choice isn’t the standard desktop fare – the Radeon Pro WX 7100 that can be found inside this machine is aimed at serious CAD work, for instance, not playing the latest games at 4K. You’ll probably want to factor in your own requirements. With that said, it’s time to get building….

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B U I L D I T: R Y Z E N T O T H E C H A L L E N G E Feature

STARTING ON THE RIGHT FOOT Obviously, the starting point for this build was the Ryzen 7 1800X, the high end of AMD’s current Ryzen lineup. We did briefly toy with the idea of trying to build a machine on a much tighter budget, to see what sort of value for money we could squeeze out of AMD’s new architecture, but looking at the Intel rig that follows on afterwards, cost is clearly the last thing on the young reviewer’s mind. Time is money, after all. Once we’d decided on the chip to use and the general ethos of building something that needs to at least give Intel’s finest a run for its money, a lot of the other components came together quite easily. On the motherboard front, we went for, the MSI X370 Gaming Pro Carbon. Into that we slid four 8GB sticks of Corsair’s sleek Dominator Platinum

RAM, alongside a serious graphics card in the form of the AMD Radeon Pro WX 7100. There are plenty of all-in-one solutions for keeping a Ryzen cool, but here we wanted to go with an air cooler, and so reached out to Arctic, who provided us with a Freezer 33 for our build. We’ve used the same hard drive and M.2 system drive as the Intel machine, which give us a good base for a fast boot drive, coupled with plenty of space for data at the same time. We eased all of this gorgeous gear into the spacious Corsair Carbide Air 740 case, and powered it all with the frankly over-the-top HX1200i Platinum from Corsair as well. Read on to discover how this build came together and whether the Ryzen managed to give the Intel machine a suitable run for its (not insignificant) money.

INGREDIENTS STREET PRICE

PART Case

Corsair Carbide Air 740

£125

Motherboard

MSI X370 Gaming Pro Carbon

£190

CPU

AMD Ryzen 7 1800X

£310

Memory

32GB (4x 8GB) Corsair Dominator Platinum 2666

£465

GPU

AMD Radeon Pro WX 7100

£625

PSU

Corsair HX1200i Platinum

£260

Storage 1

Samsung 960 Pro 512GB PCIe NVMe SSD

£276

Storage 2

Western Digital Black 2TB 7,200rpm HDD

£102

Cooling

Arctic Freezer 33

£33

OS

Windows 10 Home 64-bit OEM

£80

Total

£2,466

1 INSIDE OUT There are two schools of thought when it comes to building PCs: one, check the core components outside of the case first, and two, the more optimistic route of throwing it all together in the chassis, and only finding out if you’ve got problems once you flick the switch (Which, let’s face it, is not the recommended course of action). For this build, we were of the more pessimistic persuasion, partly because our chip had some bent pins that needed straightening. It also means you have lots of room when piecing together the cooler. The Arctic Freezer 33 was fairly straightforward, as it uses the backplate that comes with the mobo. Even so, we ran into a few problems while screwing in the heatsink, which resulted in a screw shearing. We had a spare backplate, but if you’re not so lucky, don’t force it. Like we did.

2 ROOM FOR POWER We love compartmentalised cases, because they promote good airflow and clean builds, and the Carbide Air 740 gives you plenty of space in both sections for your components (Also, if you’re less familiar with building PCs, the LEGO-like shapes and sectioning make it much easier to see what you’re doing and where things are going). The rear area is for the power supply and your hard drives, with removable drive cages for 3.5-inch and 2.5-inch drives. There is ample space for the slightly oversized power supply we used in this build, and the fact that it is completely modular made for a particularly easy installation. A thumbscrew helps position the PSU in place with a tiny retaining bracket, as you get it lined up with the rear grille, which is a neat addition. 57

F E AT U R E BUILD IT: Ryzen to the challenge

3 CAPACIOUS INTERIORS

SMALL SCREWS

Sliding the motherboard into place was every bit as easy as installing the power supply. In fact, because the PSU is in its own compartment, it frees up plenty of space around the motherboard, making this one of the easiest installs we’ve ever done. After clipping the rear IO shield into place, the board slotted in neatly. One thing to note here is that we had to spin the rear case fan around, so that it was working in tandem with the Arctic Freezer 33, as opposed to fighting against it. We could have avoided this by installing the cooler fan the other way around, but we didn’t want to obstruct the RAM slots, despite there being plenty of clearance.

Once the motherboard was in place, it was a straightforward task of installing the memory and the M.2 drive. The only awkward bit here was getting the heat spreader, which MSI includes to keep those M.2 temperatures in check, screwed into place. This uses a very small screw, which escaped our grasp a few times when trying to anchor it in place. In hindsight we should have installed the M.2 drive before placing the motherboard in the case. It’s also worth noting that we’re using the top M.2 slot, as there are two slots on this motherboard.

5 CABLE GUY The next step was to spin the case around so we could work on the cabling after installing the hard drive. The Carbide Air 740 uses a tool-free design for holding your hard drives, which means that popping the data drive into the system was really easy – clip the drive into the caddy, then slide it into the cage. There’s only room for three 3.5-inch drives in this cage, although there’s space for four 2.5-inch drives as well. Cabling was also straightforward, thanks to the copious number of rubber-edged cutouts on the motherboard tray.

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6 SINGLE SLOTTER The Radeon Pro WX 7100 is something of an oddity in these days of oversized coolers, because it’s just a single-slot card. There’s an air of no-frills seriousness about its design, and it’s refreshing to not have to worry about making room for a two- or three-slot behemoth. The card only requires a single six-pin power connector, too, which was easy to route around the back of the motherboard. We connected the rest of the cabling at this point as well, pulling it as tight as possible around the back to keep airflow clear on the business side of things – this is particularly important when using an air cooler on the CPU.

B U I L D I T: R Y Z E N T O T H E C H A L L E N G E Feature

Having the hard drives and power supply in the back compartment makes for a clean build, with plenty of room around the motherboard for good airflow, while providing easy access to the various ports. All the cutouts make for some neat cabling options, too.

1

2

The Arctic Freezer 33 was straightforward to install, and kept the Ryzen 7 1800X at comfortable temperatures in use. You may get a little more overclocking headroom with an all-in-one water cooler, but the simplicity of this solution is a good counter to that.

3

A professional card, such as the AMD Radeon Pro WX 7100, isn’t essential for many builds, and if you fancy spending your spare time gaming, an enthusiast-level card may well be a better option. For instance, an RX 580 is half the price, and outperforms it when it comes to gaming.

THE EVERYMAN WORKHORSE The big selling point of Ryzen is the multi-threaded performance at a great price. This machine promotes that ethos in a succinct way without compromising in order to get its point across – you could definitely build a cheaper workstation with the same core, but it wouldn’t be as rounded a machine. This is a PC that has an eye on its price tag, while knocking out solid performance at the same time. The build itself was surprisingly straightforward, with the Corsair Carbide Air 740 making for a great basis for a clean build. After constructing so many ITX systems, it’s refreshing to have so much room around the motherboard. If you’re going to augment your own workstation with plenty of SSDs and hard drives, this comes heartily recommended – although if you want to install lots of 3.5-inch hard drives, you’re going to need to come up with your own mounting system, because the included cage only holds three drives. The other component that impressed us was the Arctic Freezer 33. Even allowing for the fact we overtightened one of the mounting screws, and needed to grab another backplate, we’d still class it as an easy install. (Besides, that was our fault, not Arctic’s.) The Arctic Freezer 7 Pro was an incredibly popular option back when the Core i7-920 was king, and while it’s doubtful that the Freezer 33 will regain the throne in these days of all-in-one coolers, it’s worth considering for your own builds.

It’s worth bearing in mind that this is our standard benchmarking suite for Build It, and as such it leans toward gaming more than the hardware in this machine is happy with. The Radeon Pro WX 7100 is essentially an RX 480 with slightly slower clocks, which equates to a rather sound thrashing from our zero-point machine (which employs a Fury X for the gaming heavy lifting). You can hit smooth frame rates in most games with some tweaking, but if you’re serious about relaxing with your workstation, you would be better off going with either a more powerful card, or conversely a cheaper one. To find out more about the workloads that these machines are really built for, we suggest checking out the result of their head to head on p55.

When it came to testing, we could have left the Ryzen 7 1800X running at stock speeds, but that would have felt like we were wasting the chip’s potential. We couldn’t get this particular chip running at 4GHz stably (it would boot fine, but then fall over during a benchmarking session), so settled for a solid 3.9GHz. There is an argument to be had for not overclocking at all when dealing with a workstation, but it’s in our DNA to push CPUs as hard as possible, and we weren’t about to change that stance. Even so, for reference, we did initially run the chip at stock settings, and saw Cinebench R15 post scores of 149 in single-threaded loads, and 1,600 with the multi-threaded test.

BENCHMARKS ZEROPOINT Cinebench R15 Multi-Thread

987

1,710 (73%)

Cinebench R15 Single-Thread

196

158 (-19%)

CrystalDisk QD32 Sequential Read (MB/s)

1,895

3,509 (85%)

CrystalDisk QD32 Sequential Write (MB/s)

949

2,093 (121%)

Rise of the Tomb Raider (fps)

76

32 (-58%)

Far Cry Primal (fps)

72

56 (-22%)

Attila: Total War (fps)

42

28 (-33%)

The Division (fps)

73

56 (-23%) 0%

10%

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50%

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70%

80%

90%

100%

Our desktop zero-point PC uses a Core i7-6700K CPU @ 4.6GHz, an AMD R9 Fury X, and 32GB of RAM. All games are tested at 1080p on max settings, with HD texture packages installed.

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F E AT U R E BUILD IT: The Intel rig of damnation

BUILD IT The Intel rig of damnation LENGTH OF TIME: 2-3 HOURS

LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY: EASY

Proof, once and for all, that X99 is the platform-pulverising workstation of choice

THE CONCEPT

T

his is it: the head-to-head. The build-off. To hell with gaming, it’s Ryzen versus Intel. X370 versus X99. Chipset versus chipset. A superstar competition to determine the definitive champion of the workstation marketplace. Whether it’s high-end photomanipulation, 4K video editing, or the most advanced calculative tasks, we’re pitting two of the gnarliest top-end Ryzen and Intel systems against each other in an epic battle to the FPU death. After gushing over Ryzen’s positive performance prowess, it was this hardware reviewer’s duty to take on team blue. And, boy, did we call in the big guns: 10 cores, 20 threads, 64GB of high-spec DDR4 memory (we did consider 128GB but, well, we can’t absolutely demolish the competition), an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, and Asus’s now legendary X99-E-10G WS motherboard to hold the whole thing together. From a price to performance perspective, this is a system and platform that makes little to no sense. With Intel’s chips still priced so high, the per-core cost of this machine really is unjustifiable. That said, with support for twice as much memory, at frequencies as high as 3,333MT/s, and with the vast majority of rendering programs benefitting from larger quantities of the volatile stuff, it should make this platform the overall performance king.

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B U I L D I T: T H E I N T E L R I G O F D A M N A T I O N Feature

THE KING OF CRAZINESS Okay, that price: ouch! Why the big bucks? Where are the compromises? And what makes this system so much better than the competition? That X99 platform. Knowing the Intel build was never going to win as far as affordability was concerned, we decided our best bet was to ignore the price differentials and leverage those two extra cores and the greater support for DDR4 over the X370 opposition. By default, our Ryzen system consisted of an eight-core, 16-thread processor, and 32GB of DDR4, likely operating at 2,133MT/s, depending on motherboard revision. That’s nice for it. In contrast, we doubled the memory capacity to 64GB of 3,200MT/s DDR4, and added an extra two cores and four threads. Boom! Couple all that higher-spec quadchannel memory with the more

powerful cores, and our real-world benchmarks should be substantially different from the Ryzen cousin. Enough to shatter those real-world benchmarks in half? Well, maybe. Apart from memory and chip differences, the two rigs feature identical storage setups. To retain some tenuous notion of parity, we decided to run each system off a single Samsung 960 Pro 512GB PCIe M.2 NVMe SSD, and a 2TB WD Black hard drive – we didn’t want the storage to have a huge impact on the real-world figures, preferring instead to set the chips against each other and see what happened. Couple that with the fact that the X99 smokes X370 on the number of SATA ports and potential PCIe drives, and you can see what we’re getting at.

INGREDIENTS STREET PRICE

PART Case

Raijintek Asterion Plus

£140

Motherboard

Asus X99-E-10G WS

£500

CPU

Intel Core i7-6950X

£1,630

Memory

G.Skill Trident Z 64GB (4x 16GB) DDR4-3200

£900

Zotac GeForce GTX 1080 Ti 11GB Founder’s Edition

£750

PSU

EVGA SuperNova T2 1,600W 80+ Titanium

£440

Storage 1

Samsung 960 Pro 512GB PCIe NVMe SSD

£276

Storage 2

Western Digital Black 2TB 7,200rpm HDD

£102

Cooling

Noctua NH-D15 CPU heatsink

£83

OS

Windows 10 Home 64-bit OEM

£80

GPU

Total

£4,901

1 MOTHERBOARD MOUNTING Ahh, that beautiful X99-E-10G WS. To be quite honest, we could have gotten away with a cheaper motherboard, but why would we? The connectivity, combined with its strong overclocking prowess and workstation pedigree, made it the perfect choice. Also, the beauty of X99 is its lack of need for a backplate. We simply installed the motherboard into the system, popped the memory and chip in, and could leave the massive CPU heatsink until last, thanks to that reinforced socket, making life a dream in comparison to our Ryzen competition. With a fairly easy plug-and-play build process, slotting together the first three key components was ease itself. Getting the fans on would be another matter (see below), but hey, sometimes if you want to achieve great things, you’ve got to put the work in. Which we did.

2 FANS WITH MOLEX? Raijintek’s Asterion Plus comes with an assortment of cooling from the get-go – pretty impressive for this kind of chassis. And those fans? Well, they’re not bad either. You get two 120mms in the front, and a single 120mm in the rear – the only nuisance is those Molex adaptors. Traditionally (well, back in the late noughties), if you didn’t have enough fan headers on your board, you could plug them in via Molex, to get them to run at a constant speed. However, because we didn’t need them, we simply cut the Molex part off as close to the three-pin header as possible, and plugged the fan header into the board instead. Okay, yes, hacking bits off of things will definitely invalidate any warranty, but you’re building your own PC, you were going to be doing that anyway. 61

F E AT U R E BUILD IT: The Intel rig of damnation

3 PSU PROBLEMS

HARD DRIVE SOLUTIONS

It’s been a struggle to find a system in which we can use EVGA’s 1,600W T2 – without occupying those PCIe slots with another three GTX 1080 Tis, there’s very little need for a PSU of this calibre. However, the biggest problem by far isn’t the fact that it remains heavily under-utilised, but more that the thing is so darn long. So long, in fact, that it ends up touching the hard drive cages located under the PSU cover, even in this rig. It’s a frustrating fix, but for the sake of the build, as we’re only running one hard drive here, we opted to pull the hard drive cage out entirely, and run off the single one on top of the PSU cover. In a real-world scenario, you could get away with running a 1,200W PSU or smaller, then keep the additional HDD cage, to allow for a total of three 3.5-inch HDDs.

And here’s our solution to the conundrum we mentioned: You can mount an additional two SSDs here, on top of the PSU cover – or, using the included rubber locking grommets, a single 3.5-inch HDD. You need to use a straight SATA data cable, and the end of a SATA power, but it’s more than suited to chilling out here. Let’s just take a moment to appreciate that Samsung 960 Pro 512GB – we do enjoy some of that sweet M.2 love. What a standard!

5 NOCTUA COOLING SUPERCOLLIDER Noctua’s NH-D15 is a monster of air cooling capability. With two NF-A15 140mm fans, it cools the same surface area as a Kraken X62 or Corsair Hydro H115i AIO. But with two major differences: it works by convection, not a pump, and is half the cost of the Kraken. And with Noctua’s legendary fan lifetime (150,000 hours), and six-year warranty, there’s no fear of it dying on you. But it wasn’t all roses: we had to raise up the closest fan to avoid making contact with the memory, and drop down the GTX 1080 Ti by one PCIe slot, so it didn’t make contact with the GPU’s backplate.

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6 LIMITED I/O Look at that Rear I/O, or perhaps we should say lack of. There’s not a lot of it on this board. Four USB 3.0 slots, one USB 3.1 Type A, and another Type C, and, of course, the standard 5.1 + optical-out audio solution. But the real kingpin of this device is the dual 10Gb/s Ethernet ports, and a fairly good excuse for skimping on the internal storage. Couple this system with a QNAP TS-431X-2G NAS, with built-in 10GbE, for a $350 starting price, sans hard drives, and a nice chunky 10GbE Internet connection, and it would be a workstation force to be reckoned with.

B U I L D I T: T H E I N T E L R I G O F D A M N A T I O N Feature

1 The biggest fault with this case is probably the rear panel, consisting of a hinged acrylic door – if your cable tidying isn’t good enough, it’ll jut out above the hinges.

2 Although appearances shouldn’t really be a major factor when it comes to a decent workstation, we’ve got to admit that the beige and poop-brown fans have really grown on us.

3 4

If a windowed chassis like this isn’t quite your jam, you could save yourself some cash, and opt for a silenced Fractal Design Define R5 midi tower instead.

We could have gone with a Titan XP, or perhaps even a Quadro, but for most jobs, the GTX 1080 Ti holds its own against the two graphics giants, and comes in far cheaper.

PRICE VS. PERFORMANCE This build was a relative cake walk to produce. There were conundrums and problems that needed solving, mostly to do with that insane NH-D15 cooler being a little too chunky in various places, but otherwise nothing really stood out in terms of difficulty. Ideally, we would have loved to have gone with a case with a touch more storage potential, but you should be running your backups away from your main system in this working environment anyway. Replace that meagre 2TB with a 6TB or higher WD Black, and it should be plenty for any onsite storage. The biggest advantage of using the X99-E-10G WS, however, comes in the form of those dual 10GbE connections in the back. What they do is make offsite storage a potential reality for heavily accessed programs and media. That QNAP NAS we spoke of earlier, coupled with a few HDDs, would make this system truly killer. On top of that, if you really do crave the internal capacity, there’s support for a total of six 2.5-inch drives with this system, all of which can be plugged in via the X99-E-10G’s 10 SATA 6Gb/s connection. And, of course, you have Intel’s U.2 connector, and that M.2 x4 for a plethora of PCIe alternatives. On to performance. Because we’ve already covered our extensive real-world tests in the main feature, we’ll focus on the usual plethora of system benchmarks to provide some clarity for the regulars about how our two systems perform.

The biggest shocker, however, was the cooler, and its absolutely staggering performance. Staying at a steady 72 C, with 1.29V in the V Core, the plucky tower just goes to show that not only can you overclock easily enough on air, but it’s just as powerful as any AIO, and packs the extra reliability that a pump simply cannot muster. There’s no escaping the fact that this system is expensive – exceedingly so – but if you’re after the very best in performance, whether that’s for 3D rendering, video content creation, photomanipulation, or more, in this humble reviewer’s opinion, X99 is still the king of the hill.Well, until we build another system with an even newer chip and some more toys to play with, that is.

In short, and unsurprisingly, our Intel system absolutely demolishes our zero-point in almost every benchmark, the big one being Cinebench R15. Our 6700K, at 4.6GHz, is certainly no slouch, but can it compete with the mastery of a 4.2GHz Core i7-6950X? Sadly not. With the 20-threaded beast bringing in an impressive 2,188 points in multi and 175 points in single-core performance, it makes the 6700K look like small change. Storage performance was equally as impressive, with the 512GB Samsung 960 Pro booting those figures up against the wall. Our 1080p gaming test suite also fell prey to the 1080 Ti, with nothing scoring below 60fps.

BENCHMARKS ZERO-POINT Cinebench R15 Multi-Thread

987

2,188 (121%)

Cinebench R15 Single-Thread

196

175 (-11%)

CrystalDisk QD32 Sequential Read (MB/s)

1,895

3,450 (82%)

CrystalDisk QD32 Sequential Write (MB/s)

949

1,951 (106%)

Rise of the Tomb Raider (fps)

76

92 (21%)

Far Cry Primal (fps)

72

121 (68%)

Attila: Total War (fps)

42

65 (55%)

The Division (fps)

73

131 (79%) 0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

80%

90%

100%

Our desktop zero-point PC uses a Core i7-6700K CPU @ 4.6GHz, an AMD R9 Fury X, and 32GB of RAM. All games are tested at 1080p on max settings, with HD texture packages installed.

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F E AT U R E The CPU scandal

Within that architecture, a dangerous security exploit lurks. So is there a performancefriendly fix?

T EC H REP O RT

GHOST IN THE MACHINE

THE CPU SCANDAL

Caption goes in here x xx xx xx x xx x

Spectre and Meltdown affect PC gaming, and there’s no easy fix

I

ntel has had a bad time lately. A pair of far-reaching CPU security issues dubbed ‘Spectre’ and ‘Meltdown’ (presumably action movie producers were in charge of naming them) have been all over the headlines recently, and their impact is far-reaching: if you have an Intel CPU produced in the last 20 years sitting at the heart of your PC, you’re affected. The question is: how much? In theory, the Meltdown exploit allows access to all the bits of your CPU that were long considered impossible to access, and thus allocated as secure memory storage. That means any and all sensitive data is fair game for potential cyber snoopers. Passwords, photos, documents, off-colour Skyrim mods: the lot. Spectre is a similar story, but it doesn’t end with Intel PCs. AMD desktops, smartphones and tablets of all denominations can be pilfered of their most secure information by the latter exploit. It’s a bit of a worry. Security exploits do crop up, of course, and a company as big as Intel shouldn’t be dragged across the coals simply for an exploit being discovered across its decades-wide raft of hardware. It might seem a flimsy platitude, considering the scale of the problem, but these things happen. Frequently. That’s why your PC wants to restart itself every five minutes – the 64

goalposts of cyber security are forever changing, and both manufacturers and platform holders need to be agile in their responses.

FEELING THE HEAT The difference with Meltdown and Spectre is that they were brought to the world’s attention long before Intel, Microsoft, Apple, AMD et al were ready to roll out any fixes. That’s dangerous. It was discovered by four separate research teams, all working independently, over the span of just a few months. They informed Intel, and Intel started work on a fix for its two-decades-old security flaw. Yet word about Meltdown and Spectre got out before it was ready. After the security flaws were made public, news sites reported that Intel’s CEO Brian Krzanich had sold off a huge number of stocks in the company in November 2017 – months after Intel had been made aware of the problem. An Intel spokesperson told press that Krzanich’s sale was “unrelated” to the security issues. And as of writing, Intel’s stock is trading at roughly the same price Krzanich sold it for, meaning there was no significant monetary gain from that timing. Some good news, though: Meltdown hasn’t been as bad as the gloomier industry voices feared, and we’ve

Melting point The headlines were full of worry in early Jan: two security exploits were found that affected all Intel CPUs for the past 20 years, and a raft of smartphones and tablets too. What really matters, though, is how it impacts your framerate. Obviously.

THE CPU SCANDAL Feature

LEFT: The huge spike on the Fortnite servers’ CPU utilisation graph shows the impact of Intel’s Meltdown fix

S TAY F R O S T Y

1 MOBILE

Here’s what you can do to protect yourself

Protect your Android device by letting the OS update run its course while you’re charging.

2 WINDOWS

It should install its own update, but you can force it by clicking ‘check for updates’ in the Windows Update menu.

3 UPDATE E VERY THING

Have a Chromebook or a phone around that you hardly use? Turn it on and make sure it automatically updates.

yet to see an attack as a result of these flaws. In fact, despite panicked reports about just how bad these exploits could be, Intel and other affected manufacturers were able to roll out their updates before Meltdown lived up to its ominous moniker. We haven’t yet seen anything on the scale of the 2017 NHS cyber attack, for example, in which over 300,000 computers were affected. Unfortunately, the updates come with an admittedly less-cataclysmic side effect: CPU performance. CPUs, like pre-election governments, need to demonstrate strength and stability. Strength, in this field, is measured in raw data-crunching ability, and stability from the absence of blue screens, system hangs, and alarming pops coming from within your case. It’s been a frenetic 20 years for CPU performance and until recently the industry kept pace with Moore’s Law, which is to say the focus has long been on faster performance; iterating on architecture so that it’s optimised to perfection, then doing it all over again. Fixing a problem that applies to every Intel CPU architecture since the mid-’90s, then, threatens to shake loose a lot of those incremental performance gains. It requires a fundamental change in operation, because the exploit works by accessing the OS kernel, a secret area of virtual memory kept several layers deep in an OS which blocks untrusted programs from accessing it. Kernels have been fundamental to Windows OS design since Bill Gates had acne, and Intel has made CPUs in accordance with that constant for a long time.

4 O R YO U C O U L D T R Y…

If you want to go tinfoil hat, buy an AMD CPU. They’re not vulnerable to Meltdown (but are to Spectre).

Early reports about the Meltdown fixes suggest they can impact performance by as much as 49%. Your gaming PC is probably fine. Large-scale server arrays and big data virtual machine-type stuff has been hit hardest. Your data probably isnt that interesting, but snoop on a virtual machine that’s connected to many others, and suddenly you’ve got access to the type and volume of data that lets you hold big companies to ransom. That was an example, by the way, not an instruction. Please don’t do either, there’s a good reader. As the Windows patch has been ignominiously rolled out the world over, benchmarkers haven’t noticed much of a drop-off in gaming performance on a single machine. Synthetic benchmarks seem more likely to report lower performance, but games themselves? Most benchmarks show a 1fps drop, roughly. That’s frustrating, certainly, if you’ve fine-tuned your CPU and overclocked that extra 1fps through hard graft. But considering the potential ramifications of a security vulnerability this big, it’s a comparatively small price to pay. So if your first instinct upon reading this is to start googling ‘how to roll back meltdown fix’... don’t. Seriously. The real question is whether major companies can implement a fix without their whole infrastructure falling over. Ultimately, yes, these security breaches are a big deal. Yes, they affect PC gaming, but no, not by any meaningful measure. Let Windows or Linux do their thing, and enjoy that private data of yours.

LARGE SERVER ARRAYS AND BIG DATA VIRTUAL MACHINE-TYPE STUFF HAS BEEN HIT HARDEST

65

Contents

HEAD TO HEAD

98 CPU COOLERS The best cooling solutions to keep your CPU chilled

68

66

86

HEAD TO HEAD Intro

DISCOVER THE BEST KIT ON THE MARKET IN OUR HEAD-TO-HEAD GROUP TESTS

68 BUDGET CASES House your hardware in the best cases for under £100

74 PROCESSORS We pit AMD and Intel’s chips head-to-head in a CPU brawl

80 Z270 MOTHERBOARDS Lay the foundation of your new PC with these motherboards

86 GRAPHICS CARDS No need to raid your savings for these GPUs

92 SOLID STATE DRIVES Give your level load times a lift with these SSDs

98 ALL-IN-ONE COOLERS Serve your CPU performance ice-cold with these solutions

104 4K MONITORS Get a graphical boost from seven of the best Ultra HD displays

110 KEYBOARDS The best mechanical keyboard setups out there

116 WIRELESS MICE Set your mouse free from cables with one of these wireless mice

122 SPEAKERS Turn your PC into a high-quality media centre and make some noise

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116 67

GROUP TEST Budget cases

BUDGET CASES Seven of the best cases for under £100 68

BUDGET CASES Group Test

Q&A How much should I spend? A quality, modestly sized case can be had for between £50-£100. Large, premium cases can hit £200 or more, while small, low quality ones are under £30. How big do I need? Most modern gaming PCs only need one hard drive and an SSD. As such, even small

C

ase design is getting smarter and with hard drives and optical disc drives being ditched, the latest models are smaller and more affordable than ever. We’ve grabbed seven of the most popular cases you can buy for under

£100 to test. From the hefty, sound deadened might of the Fractal Design Define R4 to the sub-£30 BitFenix Nova, there’s a case here to suit most kinds of gamer. Each case was assessed for build quality and design then loaded up with a powerful gaming system –

cases can still pack in all the features and cooling you need. Only water cooling needs larger cases. What layout? Modern cases tend to have no optical drive bays and just a couple of hard drive bays at the bottom, next to the PSU, leaving plenty of room at the front for cooling. Older cases, meanwhile, have drive bays at the front, limiting cooling options.

Dictionary Radiator – removes the unwanted heat from a water-cooling system. 2.5in, 3.5in, 5.25in – the size of SSDs, hard drives and optical drives respectively. Form factor – all the cases here are ATX form factor so fit full size motherboards, but will also fit smaller sizes.

Intel Core i5-6600K, Nvidia GTX 1070 – and tested for ease of build, upgrade options and cooling performance. It’s a testament to how efficient modern CPUs and GPUs are that none of our cases really struggled, but if you’re still rocking something like an AMD Radeon R9 290 then you’ll need a case with plenty of ventilation. 69

GROUP TEST Budget cases

1

2

3

NZXT SOURCE S340 ELITE

PHANTEKS ENTHOO PRO M

www.nzxt.com £75

www.phanteks.com £90

The S340 is one of the most popular cases you can buy right now. Entirely modern in its design, it does away with any optical disc drive bays and has just two 3.5in hard drive bays that are hidden in the bottom alongside the power supply.

As the most expensive case on test, you’d expect big things of the Enthoo Pro M, and big things it delivers. Like the S340 Elite, it features a tempered glass side panel, while the rest of the case is built from quality materials and is well put together.

1

This makes the case impressively compact yet still leaves plenty of room for large CPU coolers and graphics cards thanks to the whole top section being one big open space. This also means you can fit a 2 x 140mm or 2 x 120mm radiator in the front section as well as one at the rear. As well as being petite, this case looks great. Matt black paint gives it a really classy look while the full tempered glass side panel adds a premium touch. The downside is the paint is very delicate and easy to scratch, so build it and leave well alone. Up top you get the power button and connectivity, which consists of no less than four USB ports and an HDMI. Meanwhile, the default cooling configuration has two 120mm exhaust fans at the top and rear of the case. These combine to good effect, providing good overall cooling performance without getting too loud. Overall, this is by far the best looking case on test, it has good cooling and is competitively priced. Not a bad combo.

90%

70

2

It’s a big case too. Big enough, in fact, for eight 3.5in hard drives, three 2.5in drives and a removable optical drive bay. Cooling options are also extensive. You can fit in five 140mm fans, six 120mm fans or two 3x120mm radiators and there are mounts for reservoirs and slots for fitting pumps. However, by default you only get one 140mm fan that’s positioned as an exhaust behind the CPU. But this case still delivered the best CPU cooling on test and was mid-table for GPU temperatures. Something I’m less keen on is the bottom section that covers the power supply and a couple of the 3.5in drive bays. For some reason Phanteks has perforated the entire top of it and put a large hole in the side, so you can see much of the ugly mess of cables and you don’t get airflow isolation. The power button is on the front edge. The IO is on the left side and consists of two USBs and audio. Overall, this is well thought out, good value case for a high-end PC that requires serious cooling power.

80%

BUDGET CASES Group Test

4

AEROCOOL 300

CORSAIR CARBIDE 270R

www.aerocool.com.tw £30

www.corsair.com £57

The Aerocool 300 was a real surprise. Just a few pounds behind the BitFenix Nova as the cheapest case on test, we weren’t expecting anything too clever. However, this case is actually really well thought out and ideal for budget builds.

The Corsair 270R is a case that looks like it means business when it comes to cooling. The whole top panel is perforated with big hexagonal holes, and you can fit a 2x120mm radiator in the top, as well as a 3x120mm radiator in the front.

3

For a start, it doesn’t look too bad. It’s a bit boxy and utilitarian but it’s far from ugly and the whole interior is painted, which isn’t always a given. Constructed from thin steel, the build quality isn’t great, though. This is also an impressively small case with a useful modern layout. That is, while you do get an optical drive bay, it’s very compact, and elsewhere there are just two 3.5in hard drives that are hidden in the closed off bottom section, along with the PSU. This leaves plenty of space in the top section for long graphics card coolers, hefty CPU heatsinks and up to five 120mm fans. You can also squeeze in three 3.5in drives. But the default cooling is modest. There’s just one small fan at the rear. Despite this, the Aerocool performed well, with mid-table results for both CPU and GPU temperatures. We believe this was largely due to the ventilation grill in the side panel that allowed hot air from the graphics card to vent straight out the case. Overall, for the price, this is a great case.

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4

As the latter gives away, this is a case with a modern layout with no drive bays in the front section. Instead, this area is dedicated solely to cooling options, although unlike the top section, this is covered by a plastic panel that’s solid at the front and perforated at the sides. That means you can’t fit any optical drives in here and you’ve only got room for two 3.5in hard drives and two 2.5in drives, all of which are mounted on the back of the motherboard tray. Like most such modern layout cases, the PSU is installed from the back of the case. Combined with the generally simple and tidy design, this makes for a great looking case overall. As for cooling performance, despite featuring two fans and having all that ventilation, this case didn’t do all that well in our tests, with it coming second last for CPU temps and joint second last for GPU temps. We’re only talking about a couple of degrees, though, so this is still a case that’s well worth considering.

75%

71

GROUP TEST Budget cases

5

COOLERMASTER MASTERBOX 5

FRACTAL DESIGN DEFINE R4

eu.coolermaster.com £55

www.fractal-design.com £80

This case has great side panels. No really. So many cases, even the premium ones, have side panels that are a pig to get on and off. Here, though, the screws line up properly and the panels slide effortlessly into and out of position.

The Define R4 is still a popular and widely available case but it’s one of Fractal’s slightly older designs now. As such it has an older-style layout that puts more emphasis on drive bays than compactness and cooling. But it does have an ace up its sleeve.

Elsewhere, this case has plenty else going for it too. The simple angular design with the full ventilated front panel works well, and it’s an impressively compact case. Despite this you still have room at the front for a 2x120mm radiator and a rear 120mm radiator/fan, though you do miss out on an optical drive and have only two 3.5in/2.5in combi drive bays and one 2.5in bay. Also, despite the generally modern layout with the PSU and drives at the bottom and the nice looking stuff at the top, CoolerMaster hasn’t fully covered up the bottom. You get a plastic shroud that screws into place over the PSU but the drives are left exposed. Otherwise you get good cable routing options and two preinstalled fans. As for cooling, it performed very well. The front fan being directed straight towards the graphics card meant it had the lowest GPU temperature on test while the CPU temp was mid-table. Overall, the MasterBox 5 is a solid option for a good price.

Starting with that layout, though, you can squeeze in a whopping eight 3.5in drives as well as two 5.25in drives, which is fairly ludicrous by modern standards, particularly as the huge stack of 3.5in bays gets in the way of longer graphics cards. It takes removing just a couple of screws to slide out the whole middle section of bays, opening up a nice gap for your graphics card to extend into. Elsewhere, this is clearly a premium case with quality touches everywhere. You also get masses of cooling options, with seven 120/140mm fan mounts. Two of these are occupied and combine to provide good overall cooling, with the lowest CPU temp on test and a mid-table result for the GPU. And as for that trick up its sleeve? The case is plastered in sound deadening material, meaning that only the strong whoosh of fans comes through. Still, there are plenty of other cases with more modern layouts that would probably suit most users better, including Fractal’s own Define S.

5

75%

72

6

70%

BUDGET CASES Group Test

STACKED UP CPU TEMPERATURE (Celsius)

1

PRICE (£)

GPU TEMPERATURE (Celsius)

NZXT Source 340 Elite 75 56 62

2

6

Phanteks Enthoo Pro M 90 50

7 3

62

Aerocool 300 30 52

4

64

Corsair Carbide 270R 57 58

5

64

CoolerMaster MasterBox 5 55 53

6

58

Fractal Define R4 80 51 61

7

BITFENIX NOVA

BitFenix Nova 26

www.bitfenix.com £26

63 67

5.25in bays

2.5in drive bays type

120mm fan points

1

3

0

4

4

Tempered glass

2

8

0

3

3

Tempered glass

3

2

1

3

6

No

4

2

0

2

6

Plastic

5

65%

3,5in drive bays

2

0

3

5

Plastic

6

7

The main culprit is the very old-school layout with a full-height drive bay column at the front that doesn’t even have 3.5in bays that face the side panel. As such, you have to remove or work around the PSU to install hard drives. Thankfully, for those with long graphics cards, so long as they aren’t too tall, you can manoeuvre them under the drive cage to install them. Plus, if you want a small case but still use optical drives then the Nova can accommodate you. Cooling options are basic but sufficient if you’re not interested in water or all-in-one coolers. You get two 120mm fan mounts at the front and one at the rear, which is already occupied. Nonetheless, this modest configuration and the lack of top or side penal ventilation meant that this was the only case on test to noticeably fall behind in our cooling tests. It came last in both CPU and GPU cooling and by a clear distance. All told, this stalwart of budget cases is starting to look a bit long in the tooth as more modern designs outclass it.

ESSENTIALS

8

2

2

6

Plastic

7

The BitFenix Nova is a very popular option for an entry level case, as it’s cheap but has a nice, tidy, simple design with a window. However, particularly when compared to the more modern layout of the Aerocool 300, it feels dated.

4

1

2

3

Plastic

Window?

73

GROUP TEST Processors

PROCESSORS Intel and AMD trade blows in this CPU brawl

T

he arrival of Ryzen gave the CPU market the kick it had long been waiting for. By offering multicore performance at unprecedented low prices, it forced Intel to battle back. As a result, we now have one of the most competitive CPU markets in ages, and there’s never been a better time

74

to invest in a new and improved multi-core processor. The tricky part, of course, is deciding which chip to get, which is where this handy guide comes in. We’ve tested a handful each of AMD and Intel’s main contenders to see which of them is the best option for a variety of budgets. Benchmarks at the ready...

PROCESSORS Group Test

Dictionary Core/thread: Modern CPUs are made up of several processors called cores. Each core can run a piece of code, or thread, independently.

Q&A AMD or Intel? AMD still offers the best value, especially as the company has suggested its imminent second-gen Ryzen chips will still work on its X370 motherboards and will be noticeably faster. Right now, though, Intel still has a lead in single-threaded workloads, which is best for gaming, though you pay a little more for the privilege. Cores or clock speed? Clock speed is still king for most games – even a dual-core chip is sufficient for the majority of games.

Times are changing, though, and devs are getting better at utilising multiple cores. What about overclocking? Intel still has a lead in clock speed. AMD’s fastest chips struggle to pass 4GHz, even when overclocked, while Intel’s chips can push 5Ghz. What about Threadripper/ Core i9? Something you won’t find in this roundup are any AMD Threadripper or Intel Core i9 processors. These high-end processors are beyond what we consider necessary for any gaming PC, unless you intend to run multiple top-end graphics cards.

Simultaneous multithreading: The generic term for Intel Hyperthreading and AMD SMT, this is where a CPU core is able to handle two threads at the same time. This makes each core appear as though it’s dual-core to your software and can give a performance boost in multithreaded workloads. Socket: CPUs are designed to be used only with certain motherboards. The socket is the physical thing the CPU plugs into, and the components have to match. Chipset: The chip that controls how the CPU interacts with the motherboard. The two main ones are X370 for AMD and Z370 for Intel. Base clock/boost clock: The base clock is the normal top speed for all cores while the boost clock is the maximum potential speed of one or more cores.

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GROUP TEST Processors

1

2

3

AMD RYZEN 3 1300X

AMD RYZEN 5 1500X

www.amd.com £105

www.amd.com £155

The cheapest of the AMD CPUs in this test, the Ryzen 3 1300X offers four cores but, unlike the Ryzen 5 processors, it doesn’t include SMT. As such, it can only handle four threads at once.

The Ryzen 5 1500X is another great value chip. With four cores and SMT, it can handle up to eight threads at a time, plus it’s multiplier-unlocked and runs at a decent clock speed. For £155, that’s seriously good.

1

Otherwise it has all the other key features that make the Ryzen line so tempting. It’s unlocked for easy overclocking, it auto-overclocks from a base clock speed of 3.5GHz to 3.7GHz, and it’s very cheap. Intel does have a similarly priced quad-core chip but it’s multiplier-locked and lacks turbo boost, so its clock speed is stuck at 3.6GHz. Not that the 1300X is all that great for overclocking, but like most Ryzens, it can be pushed to around 3.9GHz-4GHz. What’s more, the relatively modest core/thread count of this chip doesn’t hold it back, with it holding its own in all of our game tests other than the fiendish Ashes of the Singularity. Here, it’s the only AMD chip to not deliver around 65fps at 1080p. It’s worth noting that the performance deficit of the AMD processors in Ashes of the Singularity is an anomaly. We’ve still included it, as an indicator that there are games simply better optimised for Intel’s Core architecture. That aside, the 1300X is a great starting point for a budget gaming PC.

90%

76

2

All the usual caveats apply in regards to its relatively modest clock speed compared to its Intel rivals, but Intel can’t offer anything with this multithread performance for the same price. Plus, we see that the 1500X comes out on top of all the AMD chips for several tests, hinting that its core count allows AMD’s automatic overclocking to squeeze out that last little bit of speed. Incidentally, the reason we’ve chosen the X variants for the AMD chips is that clock speed is the biggest thing AMD’s chips struggle with. So even though all Ryzens are overclockable, results aren’t guaranteed. Opting for the X variants gives you the best chance of getting the fastest clock speed. In contrast, we’ve gone for the K variants of the Intel chips because they’re easy to overclock, and though they don’t need the extra speed, they’re so easy to boost that you might as well. Intel doesn’t have a direct equivalent to the 1500X now and, as such, it stands out as an ideal option for £155.

85%

PROCESSORS Group Test

4

AMD RYZEN 5 1600X

AMD RYZEN 7 1800X

www.amd.com £180

www.amd.com £330

At launch, the 1600X stood out in AMD’s Ryzen line. Six cores, SMT, a decent clock speed and multiplierunlocked. Back then, Intel’s closest equivalent was a quad-core chip that didn’t even have hyperthreading.

The Ryzen 7 1800X is AMD’s flagship mainstream CPU and brings with it more cores than anything Intel can offer for the same price. You can get an 1800X and motherboard for well under £400.

3

Nearly a year on, however, and the story’s different. Now Intel has a much more direct equivalent in the shape of the 8600K, which has six cores and can run at a considerably faster clock speed (although it still lacks hyperthreading). However, AMD has kept the fight going through the 1600X’s price. It’s available for £180, making it an excellent choice for those seeking a powerful multicore machine, but who are still on something of a budget. Combine it with a basic B350 motherboard and you can have a strong six-core CPU-and-motherboard combo for under £300, which is, frankly, ludicrous. There are some caveats to consider, though. Despite being multiplier-unlocked, there’s not all that much headroom for overclocking, so around 4GHz is all you’ll likely get. Even without overclocking, the 8600K maintains a strong lead in single-thread performance, and so in terms of gaming power, it’s the better of the two. That said, the 1600X’s value can’t be ignored, making it a great option.

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4

As well as packing in a huge number of cores, the 1800X also includes SMT technology so it can handle 16 threads at a time. Plus, like all Ryzen processors, it’s multiplier-unlocked for easy overclocking and runs at a decent clock speed, with a base clock of 3.6GHz and boost speed of 4GHz. However, while the 1800X may be the fastest Ryzen chip, it’s still some way off comparable chips from Intel. Notably, the Core i7-8700K may have a base speed of 3.7GHz but it can boost to 4.7GHz. What’s more, the 1800X can’t be overclocked that well. Our Asus Crosshair VI Hero motherboard couldn’t push it far beyond a 4GHz base clock. That provides a nice boost to multithreaded workloads, but because overclocking disables the automatic single-core overclocking, many will find singlethread performance doesn’t improve or even drops. While the 1800X is still a fairly decent option for most gamers, it’s not the best. The 8700K would be the better way to spend around £330 on a CPU.

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77

GROUP TEST Processors

5

INTEL CORE i3-8350K

INTEL CORE i5-8600K

www.intel.com £155

www.intel.com £240

Intel’s multiplier-unlocked Core i3 processor from last generation, the Core i3-7350K, always felt a bit too underpowered, despite its impressive clock speed.

If the 7700K was always the go-to choice for gamers with money to burn, the 7600K was the aspirational next best thing. With its four cores, high clock speed and overclockability, it was a great all-rounder.

5

This was because it had two cores, and while hyperthreading helped, the advantage from jumping to quad-core processors was plain to see. This update to the Core i3 part bumps it up to true quad-core, making it much more of an all-rounder. However, it doesn’t come without compromises. While you gain two physical cores, you lose hyperthreading, so as far as your apps can tell it has no more cores than the 7350K. Also, it lacks Turbo Boost so it can’t bump up the frequency of one of the cores to eke out even more performance – all four can run at up to 4GHz and that’s your lot. It holds its own in multithreaded workloads, doing well with Ashes of the Singularity, which favours having many cores. It trounces the 7350K, with the older chip managing 39fps in the 1440p/ Ultra test, compared to 46fps for the 8350K. You’ll have to stretch your budget further than for an equivalent AMD chip, but for sheer gaming performance, the 8350K is a great option.

85%

78

6

Now Intel’s back with the 8600K that, like the 8700K, ups the core count by two while retaining the high clock speed and overclockability that made its predecessor so tempting. The one thing you still miss out on is hyperthreading, and it’s surprising just how much of a difference it makes. While the 8700K does have a clock speed advantage, it’s nonetheless notable that it’s 50% faster than the 8600K in the multithread Cinebench test. As ever, the major caveat here is price, with AMD’s direct rival, the 1600X, being around £50 cheaper while still having a lead in multithread performance thanks to its inclusion of SMT. Take advantage of the 8600K’s overclockability, though, and it’s able to close most of that gap, and further extend its lead in other areas. As such, if your budget can stretch a little further, the 8600K may be the better bet, particularly if gaming is your highest performance priority.

85%

PROCESSORS Group Test

STACKED UP CINEBENCH R15 (POINTS) Single Multi

ASHES OF SINGULARITY (FPS) 1440p/high 1080p/low

(Higher is better)

(Higher is better)

1

PRICE (£)

AMD Ryzen 3 1300X 105 152

545

6 2

45.2 52

AMD Ryzen 5 1500X 155

7 155

812

3

45.8

67

AMD Ryzen 5 1600X 180 161

1240

4

45.2

64.6

AMD Ryzen 7 1800X 330 159

1619

5

42.9

68.1

Intel Core i3-8350K 155 174

670

6

46.3

70.2

Intel Core i5-8600K 240 188

INTEL CORE i7-8700K

1072

7

43.7

84.2

Intel Core i7-8700K

www.intel.com £355

355 207

The i7-7700K was the ideal for gamers who weren’t on a budget. Its four hyperthreaded cores, 4.2GHz base speed and 4.5Ghz turbo boost offered a perfect balance of single and multithreaded performance.

93.5

Base clock speed (GHz)

Turbo clock speed (GHz)

Cores

Threads

1

3.5

3.7

4

4

2

3.5

3.7

4

8

3

3.6

4.0

6

12

4

3.6

4.0

8

16

5

ESSENTIALS

4.0

4.0

4

4

6

75%

45.6

3.6

4.3

6

6

7

7

However, as soon as Ryzen came along it instantly looked like poor value, despite the high clock speed meaning it held its own when gaming. Intel’s response? The Core i7-8700K. With 50% more cores it brings the fight to AMD’s finest in multithreaded workloads while its 3.7GHz-4.7GHz clock speed means it still has a big advantage. What’s more, it overclocks well. With an Maximus X Hero I managed to push all six cores to 5GHz. This is all reflected in its benchmarks where it tops the Cinebench single-thread test and almost beats the 1800X in the multithread test. In games, it dominates, topping all but one of the tests. The only downside is that it’s still pricey compared to AMD’s range. Even the eight-core 1800X is cheaper, and though the 8700K holds its own in multithread workloads, it’s not that good. However, with a strong lead in clock speed, the 8700K is still the clear choice for those seeking pure gaming performance, without too much regard for price.

1543

3.7

4.7

6

12

79

GROUP TEST Z27O Motherboards

Z270 MOTHERBOARDS Lay the foundation of your next gaming PC with one of the latest Z270 motherboards 80

Z27O MOTHERBOARDS Z27O Motherboards

Dictionary

Q&A How much should I spend? If you’re not fussed about overclocking don’t spend much more than £200. Already have a great soundcard and lots of USB hubs? Drop that to under £175. Don’t care much about looks? Head below £150. Is onboard audio worth it? The pricier options are

A

lthough existing Z170 motherboards will support Intel’s Kaby Lake CPUs, the Z270 chipset brings a couple of new features that make it the better option if you’re looking to buy a new mobo right now. The first is support for 24 PCI-E lanes, up from 20 on the Z170. This

better, but if you’re really concerned about audio quality you should get a separate soundcard. What about overclocking? All these motherboards support overclocking of your processor and memory. The flagship Intel Core i7-7700K processor we’ve tested them with is relatively easy to

overclock from 4.5GHz to 5GHz, resulting in close to a 10% performance boost for around a 20% increase in power consumption.

Chipset Controls communication between the CPU and other features of a motherboard. PCI-E lanes The main communication interface for graphics and other expansion cards.

enables multiple 4-lane PCI-E M.2 SSDs, without impacting graphics bandwidth at all. There’s also better support for new Optane storage technology, enabling it to act as a cross between system memory and long term storage, which is handy. We’ve reviewed seven new Z270 boards on the following pages. 81

GROUP TEST Z27O Motherboards

1

2

3

GIGABYTE Z270X-GAMING 7

ASROCK Z270 EXTREME4

www.gigabyte.com £215

www.asrock.com £160

This is a fully featured, powerful motherboard that comes with a few quirks but largely delivers. There’s certainly little missing in terms of design. A matt PCB? Check. RGB lighting? Check. IO shrouding? Check. Full colour coordination? Check.

This is one of the cheaper boards in this test but packs plenty of features and performance. Styling isn’t its strong suit, but it’s a step up from the Pro4 thanks to a matt finish to its PCB, more extensive plastic shrouding and RGB lighting.

1

Not that the result is quite to our liking. It’s smart and premium-looking but we prefer the darker shades of the Asus Code. It is packed with features, though. Two M.2 slots, buttons for power, overclocking, eco mode, turbo mode and XMP mode, a POST readout display, excellent hybrid fan headers, strip lighting headers and much more. Connectivity is also excellent. There are six USB Type-A ports of various sorts, USB Type-C, two gigabit Ethernet ports and quality surround sound. It’s a different story when it comes to the UEFI. It was the only board on test that had a problem with mouse movement. We also struggled with manual overclocking, instead resorting to the quick “upgrade” options, which managed to push the CPU to 4.8GHz but not 5GHz. We’re sure this board could do better, but it shouldn’t be such a struggle. Also, it had by far the most aggressive nonoverclocked settings, bumping the CPU to 1.32V at stock speed, when every other board hovered around 1.2V.

83%

82

2

Something we’re less keen on is the backplate IO, which has just four USB 3.0 ports, no USB type-C and too many legacy video connections – who needs DVI, HDMI and VGA on a board like this? Otherwise the Extreme4 has a good all round selection of features with a layout that’s easy to work with. The two M.2 slots are easy to reach while all the fan headers and other connections are conveniently arranged around the edges. Some of the on-PCB labelling of those features is a bit hard to read but you can get by. What’s more, the UEFI of this motherboard is great. It’s nothing too fancy but it’s logically laid out and easy to get overclocking. Not that we quite reached our target of 5GHz for overclocking. The CPU wouldn’t go beyond 4.9GHz through basic multiplier and Vcore adjustment. It was also quite power-hungry once overclocked. Overall, though, this board offers plenty and is well worth considering, if rear IO isn’t your biggest priority.

80%

Z27O MOTHERBOARDS Z27O Motherboards

4

ASROCK Z270 PRO 4

ASUS MAXIMUS IX CODE

www.asrock.com £120

www.asus.com £290

This is the cheapest board on test, and in many ways it shows: a shiny finish, lack of cover for the IO, plain silver CPU mount and a lack of lighting. It all adds up to a board that immediately looks less premium than the others.

This is just a couple of steps down from Asus’s most expensive Z270 motherboards and as such it’s packed with features and performance. The most striking thing about it, however, is that it’s covered head to toe in plastic armour.

3

That’s not to say it looks bad. The black and white design has its charm and most of the components are colour coordinated. More importantly, this board provides solid performance and overclocking, plus low power consumption. You also get all the features you should need. Two M.2 SSD slots, an M.2 W-Fi card slot, plenty of connectivity and some basic onboard sound. The only real stumbling block is the IO panel, which has too many legacy connections and too few USB ports, plus there are no USB 3.1 ports despite the presence of one Type-C connector. If you’re happy with the basic feature set, then the Z270 Pro4 delivers. It demanded the lowest power draw on test while having no problem running our fast RAM. Its UEFI is also a doddle to navigate, though try as we might we couldn’t get the 7700K up to 5GHz. We stuck with 4.8GHz instead, which still delivered performance within 2% of that of the fastest on test.

85%

4

This protects the board and makes it look better too. On the flipside, it can be quite an inconvenience if you drop a screw and get it stuck under that lot. There are also several RGB-lit zones, including a Republic of Gamers logo in the middle of the board. RGB lighting is getting a little out of hand at the moment but the balance here is about right and it can all be controlled from the desktop software. It’s a top-tier board, so you get masses of features including 2x USB 3.1 and 6x USB 3.0 ports on the backplate, with support for several more via headers. There are also two M.2 SSD slots, though their positioning is far from ideal. You also get top notch audio and inbuilt ac-Wi-Fi. All this, and extensive overclocking options from a UEFI that’s simple and quick to navigate. We couldn’t get the memory to hit its XMP-defined 3200MHz top speed but the board overclocked the 7700K CPU to 5GHz with no problems. Its resultant performance took second place in our charts.

87%

83

GROUP TEST Z27O Motherboards

5

ASUS STRIX Z270G GAMING

MSI Z270 GAMING PRO CARBON

www.asus.com £180

www.msi.com £160

This is only a micro-ATX motherboard but it wants for little compared to the big boys. RGB lighting, two M.2 SSD slots (one is on the back), quality audio, plenty of connectivity, it’s all here. This is a great-looking board, too.

Amusingly, the eponymous carbon fibre flourishes are the least appealing thing about this board’s design. Otherwise it’s a decent mid-range option with great performance. As the price indicates, some of the more premium touches are missing.

The single RGB Republic of Gamers light on the chipset adds just the right touch of customisation, while there are two headers for further lighting strips so you can fully illuminate your case without the need for any extra wiring. Talking of headers, there are masses of these for further USB connections, fans and more, and they’re all conveniently arranged around the edges of the board and clearly labelled. It’s more good news when it comes to connectivity. You get seven USB Type-A ports as well as a Type-C, plus gigabit Ethernet, ac-Wi-Fi, DisplayPort and HDMI, PS/2 and decent quality audio. The Strix Z270G Gaming doesn’t let up when it comes to performance either. It easily keeps up with the larger boards, and you’ve even got space for a couple of graphics cards. Overclocking worked well too. We had no problem reaching 5GHz, though had to run the memory at a slightly slower 3000MHz to get the system to boot.

You get plastic IO shrouding, chunky colour coordinated heatsinks, a matt black PCB and some RGB lighting. The CPU mount is plain metal, there are no heatpipes to assist cooling, no cover for the audio section and you miss out on a power button. But back to that carbon. MSI has managed to take the edge off what would’ve been quite a nice simple, sedate design by plastering all the plastic sections with faux carbon fibre. It’s not our thing. Otherwise there’s a lot to like. You’ve got plenty of connectivity on the backplate, a neat metal cover for your M.2 drives and quality audio. All told, it’s a well balanced selection. What’s more, this board had no issues with installation or configuration. Nearly every other one had a moment where a reset was needed or a setting-change failed. Here, it just worked. The same was true when it came to overclocking. We dialed in 5GHz and 1.34V and off it went, and the resulting performance was class-leading.

5

90%

84

6

88%

Z27O MOTHERBOARDS Z27O Motherboards

STACKED UP CINEBENCH R15 (points) Not overclocked Overclocked

OVERCLOCK (GHz)

1

PRICE (£)

Gigabyte Z270X-Gaming 7 215 4.8 988 1053

2

6 ASRock Z270 Extreme 4 160 4.9

7 3

988

1066

ASRock Z270 Pro 4 120 4.8

4

983

1058

Asus Maximus IX Code 290

5

5.0 996

1081

988

1067

Asus Strix Z270G Gaming 210

6

5.0

MSI Z270 Gaming Pro Carbon 160 5.0 986

7

MSI Z270 GAMING M5

1090

MSI Z270 Gaming M5

www.msi.com £185

185 4.9

Form Factor

USB Type A

USB Type C

Wi-Fi

Surround Sound

1

ATX

6

1

No

Yes

2

ATX

5

1

No

Yes

3

ATX

5

1

No

No

4

ESSENTIALS

ATX

9

1

Yes

Yes

5

80%

1072

mATX

7

1

Yes

Yes

6

7

Dig a little deeper, and you don’t find much extra for the price difference. A U.2 slot adds extra SSD support but it’s a very niche feature. You also get a POST readout. You miss out on the raft of extras on more expensive models, such as power and overclocking buttons. You don’t even get labelling for the front panel headers, leaving you to read the manual to know which cable to plug in where. Otherwise there are few slip ups. The layout is tidy and intuitive and the M.2 shield a nice extra. When it comes to performance the Gaming M5 just pipped the Carbon in its default config, though it consumed slightly more power in the process. As for overclocking, for some reason we couldn’t push past 4.9GHz, even with quite a bit of extra voltage. It remained rock solid at 4.9GHz at 1.34V, though, and the resulting performance was within one per cent of the Carbon. This is a good board, but it doesn’t excite as much as more expensive ones, nor is it a bargain.

994

ATX

7

1

No

Yes

7

The MSI Z270 Gaming M5 is, on paper, very similar to the Gaming Pro Carbon, but what a difference a little bit of design makes. It gets just the right balance of muted colours, little extras and that obligatory RGB lighting.

ATX

5

1

No

Yes

85

GROUP TEST Graphics cards

GRAPHICS CARDS No need to raid your savings for these

86

GRAPHICS CARDS Group test

Q&A

Dictionary

AMD or Nvidia? Nvidia has consistently held the top-end performance crown for years. Its cards also remain slightly more power efficient. However, AMD competes well for mid-range cards, and if crypto-currency mining is of interest to you, they are a better choice.

GPU – The graphics processing unit is the heart of your graphics card, just as the CPU is for the rest of your PC. Its hundreds (or thousands) of tiny stream processors power through the highly parallel workloads that are required to render each frame of your game.

AMD Freesync or Nvidia G-Sync? An extension of the AMD/ Nvidia battle is which stutter-eliminating adaptive sync technology to plump for. Both work as well as each other, for the most part, but the more expensive G-Sync tends to be used on the best displays. How much video memory? The basic rule is that the higher the resolution and graphical fidelity, the more memory you’ll need. So if you’ve a high resolution screen and want your games to look their absolute best, then go for more memory.

Stream processors (SPs) – Tiny processing cores, like the cores of a CPU but far simpler. The more of them and the faster their clock speed, the faster your framerate. Architectural differences mean you can’t directly compare AMD SPs to Nvidia SPs, though. Video memory – Otherwise known as VRAM, this is the high-speed memory on a graphics card that allows the GPU quick access to all the data it needs, such as textures, polygons, etc. Not having enough means having to access your much slower system memory. AIB – Add-in-board partners are the likes of EVGA and Sapphire which take the chips designed by AMD and Nvidia and build them into the graphics cards you can actually buy. Overclocking, custom coolers and other extras allow each AIB to differentiate its product. Bang for Buck (BfB) – The number of frames per second you get for each pound spent. Calculated here by taking the average fps in our tests divided by the cost of the card. A raw indication of value.

T

he sweet spot for the graphics card market right now is somewhere around the £400-£500 mark, with both the Nvidia GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 offering amazing performance for a not-ludicrous price. However, spending that sort of money on a graphics card just isn’t an option for

many of us. That’s why we’ve grabbed the next seven cards down from the GTX 1070. That means they cover a range of prices from £300 down to £115, which is a much more palatable amount to consider when looking at upgrades. So if you are looking for a compromise between power and price, you should find the right card for you here. 87

GROUP TEST Graphics cards

1

2

3

EVGA GEFORCE GTX 1050 GAMING 2GB www.evga.com £120

GEFORCE GTX 1050 TI EXPEDITION 4GB www.asus.com £160

The EVGA GeForce GTX 1050 Gaming is one of the smallest and cheapest cards featured here, but it still packs a surprising punch.

Expedition? What’s that all about? It’s Asus’s graphics card equivalent of its TUF motherboard brand. This means they’re designed to cope with being used in always-on PCs.

1

It’s only a few frames-per-second behind the more expensive GTX 1050 Ti but is available for a much lower price. As a result, this card has the second best bang for buck score in this test. If you’re mainly concerned with 1080p gaming then it’s ideal. Its appeal stretches further than just raw performance and value, too. This is a compact card that’s no taller than a PCI bracket. It is two expansion slots thick, but is still a card ideally suited to small form factor PCs. Moreover, it doesn’t need any extra power, other than what’s supplied by its PCIe slot, so it makes for a great drop-in upgrade even on PCs that aren’t equipped with fancy power supplies. This is also reflected in its power consumption, which peaks at just 104W under load. Meanwhile, its single fan and small heat sink do an ample job of keeping things cool and quiet, with the fan not spinning up when idle and remaining quiet when under load. For just over £100, this is the card to get.

85%

88

2

While plenty of other GTX 1050 Ti cards use just one fan and have short PCBs, the Expedition offers two high-quality fans and a spacious circuit board layout, making for a much lower chance of the card overheating and meaning a longer overall life. Crucial to the appeal of the GTX 1050 range, though, is that you don’t need any extra power inputs. It can draw all its power from your motherboard, which is demonstrated in its power consumption figures, with the whole system consuming just 103W when gaming. With this power consumption comes relatively modest performance, though. This card will hit 63fps average at 1080p but drops to 41fps at 1440p. You wouldn’t want to be playing anything competitive at the latter resolution. Moreover, in terms of bang for buck, the GTX 1050 Ti loses out to the vanilla GTX 1050 and the GTX 1060 3GB. It sits nicely between the two when it comes to price, but is closer to the GTX 1050 in performance.

80%

GRAPHICS CARDS Group test

4

ASUS RADEON RX 580 DUAL 4GB www.asus.com £270

GIGABYTE GTX 1060 WINDFORCE OC 3GB www.gigabyte.com £200

Available in either 4GB or 8GB VRAM versions, the RX 580 is AMD’s top-tier offering for below £300. We tested a 4GB version in the shape of the Asus RX 580 Dual, which is available for around the £270 price point.

Many people believe that graphics cards with large amounts of VRAM are the ones to get, and for certain situations that can be true. However, this 3GB GTX 1060 goes to show that this is far from always the case.

3

Unlike most of the other cards in this test, having two fans isn’t an upgrade over a single-fan version. Instead, it’s a downgrade from more expensive three-fan options. Not that this was evident in our testing. The fans remained still when the card was idling and were impressively quiet when under load. There’s good reason for needing at least this many fans, though, as the RX 580 is a toasty chip. It is far and away the most power-hungry card we’ve featured here, consuming 222W when under load. It also requires one eight-pin power connection. This card takes up two slots and is taller than a standard PCI bracket. It isn’t particularly suited to low-profile cases, but it’s not longer than standard ATX motherboards. As for performance, the RX 580 is quite powerful, delivering 88fps average in our games at 1080p and dead-on 60fps at 1440p. However, its bang for buck score is the lowest in this test, suggesting its price needs to drop £20-£30 to be competitive.

70%

4

At £200, this card is almost as cheap as some top-end GTX 1050 cards, but hidden under its hood is a far more powerful GPU. Its GTX 1060 processor absolutely rips through our benchmarks, with an average of 101fps at 1080p and 65fps at 1440p. That’s a big step up. You might see the benefit of the GTX 1060’s 6GB version at even higher resolutions, but then the raw power of the card isn’t necessarily enough to make the most of them anyway. The long and short of it is that the 3GB card is the standout bargain of the test. There’s nothing too fancy about it, though. A plastic covering on the back of the PCB keeps it protected, but largely this serves to cover over the heat sink. More powerful cards use heat pipes and have coolers made from sheets of folded metal. But even without, this card wasn’t overly hot or loud. It requires a six-pin power input and uses 165W when under load, so performance doesn’t come without some penalty. Still, this the card to get for £200.

90%

89

GROUP TEST Graphics cards

5

MSI GEFORCE GTX 1060 GAMING X 6GB www.msi.com £300

SAPPHIRE RX 560 PULSE 4GB

As the most expensive graphics card featured in this test, you’d expect big things from the MSI GeForce GTX 1060 Gaming X 6GB, and it sure delivers on that front with strong performance and build quality.

This Sapphire RX 560 is the minnow of this group test, with the lowest price and lowest performance. However, you shouldn’t judge it on performance alone: it still has a few things going for it.

5

It comfortably came out on top in our benchmarks with average framerates of 107fps at 1080p and 69fps at 1440p. In comparison, AMD’s fastest competitor at around this price, the RX 580, couldn’t break 90fps for 1080p gaming. This is also a premium-looking card. The back is covered in a protective, cooling metal plate, while the front has various illuminated sections. Underneath its two fans is a fancy fine-finned heat sink with several heat pipes for efficient cooling. The extra power of this card over the 3GB version of the GTX 1060 means it requires an eight-pin power input rather than a six-pin one. Perhaps more of a concern is the size of the card. It sits some 35mm above its expansion bracket, so might not fit in some compact cases. Also, we’re not actually sold on the design. It may have flashing lights, but it’s gaudy. Nonetheless, overall this is a good option, it’s just that the 3GB version provides much of the same performance for a lower price.

70%

90

www.sapphiretech.com £115

6

For a start, if you shop around, there are other RX 560 cards available for under £100, which bumps its bang for buck score up. The usual caveats about G-Sync and Freesync monitors also apply. For instance, you could buy this card and the LG 23MP68VQ-P monitor and have a 75Hz, IPS, 1080p, Freesync-enabled monitor and graphics card setup for £330, which is the same price as the cheapest G-Sync monitor on its own. That said, the card isn’t small form factorfriendly. While it’s relatively short and is no taller than an expansion bracket, it’s not that compact. It’s also worth saying that the 4GB version of this card is unlikely to be necessary for most buyers. The amount of processing power this card has means that it will seldom be able to take full advantage of the extra memory. So just how fast is it? It’ll hit 47fps at 1080p and 30fps at 1440p. Tweak detail levels right down and 1440p will be playable, but largely this is a 1080p and below card.

70%

GRAPHICS CARDS Group test

STACKED UP BANG FOR BUCK FPS divided by price (higher is better)

FRAMES PER SECOND Minimum (higher is better) Average (higher is better)

1

PRICE (£)

GeForce GTX 1050 Gaming 2GB 120 39

46 0.38

2

6 GeForce GTX 1050 Ti Expedition 4GB 160

7

45

52

3

0.33

Radeon RX 580 Dual 4GB 270 60

74

4

0.28

GeForce GTX 1060 Windforce OC 3GB 200 69

83

5

0.41

GeForce GTX 1060 Gaming X 6GB 300 75

89

6

0.30

RX 560 Pulse 4GB 115 32

0.33

7

SAPPHIRE RX 570 PULSE ITX 4GB www.sapphiretech.com £195

38

RX 570 Pulse ITX 4GB 195 51

GPU

SPs

Clock speed

Memory

Memory bus

TDP (W)

1

GP107

640

1455

2GB GDDR5

128-bit

75

2

GP107

768

1392

4GB GDDR5

128-bit

75

3

Polaris 20

2304

1380

4GB GDDR5

256-bit

185

4

GP106

1152

1708

3GB GDDR5

192-bit

120

5

65%

ESSENTIALS

GP106

1152

1708

6GB GDDR5

192-bit

120

6

7

This version is also compact and comes with a premium heat pipe-equipped cooler. And despite only having one fan, it’s surprisingly cool and quiet. However, when it comes to performance, the GTX 1060 3GB has it beat. The GTX 1060 3GB can hit over 100fps at 1080p and 60fps at 1440p, but the RX 570 can only manage 77fps at 1080p and 51fps at 1440p. They’re still decent figures but for just £5 more it’s a clear choice – the GTX 1060 3GB has a comfortable lead in bang for buck. It doesn’t help that the RX 570 is more power hungry, consuming 172W under load, although it still only requires a single six-pin power connector. Of course, where AMD does have an advantage is in cryptocurrency mining, so if you are interested in that then the RX 570 may represent better value. Similarly, it’s always worth considering the extra cost of monitors that feature Nvidia’s G-Sync technology. Go with AMD and you can buy a Freesync monitor instead for, on average, £100 less.

64 0.33

Polaris 11

1024

1216

4GB GDDR5

128-bit

80

7

The RX 570 is AMD’s almost-direct rival to the GTX 1060 3GB. It can boast a slightly larger 4GB VRAM quota – 8GB versions are also available – and it costs just £195, making for a whopping £5 saving.

Polaris 20

2048

1244

4GB GDDR5

256-bit

120

91

GROUP TEST Solid State Drives

SOLID STATE DRIVES Give your level loads a lift with a new SSD

92

In Association With

T

Q&A

Dictionary

Do I need a really fast SSD? As a gamer you won’t see much benefit – levels will only load fractions of seconds faster. They’re more useful if you work with very large files, such as when video editing.

NVMe/AHCI – The protocol a drive uses to talk to the PC. AHCI is an old standard designed for hard drives and used with SATA drives. NVMe is designed specifically for SSDs and can be much faster.

Should I worry about drive life? Early SSDs suffered from performance degradation and they weren’t rated to last all that long. These days most SSDs will last the better part of ten years with average usage.

M.2/SATA/PCIe – The physical connection between drive and PC. SATA is the classic hard drive connection, PCIe the same slot that your graphics card plugs into, M.2 is a new storage-specific slot for tiny SSDs.

he speed advantage of SSDs has been known for a long time, but low capacities and high prices have previously meant we had to make compromises. Usually, pairing it with a bigger conventional drive and having not quite the best of both worlds. But now capacities have risen and prices

dropped, so much so that there’s little reason to buy another conventional hard drive at all. Stick to the traditional 2.5-inch SATA SSD route, and while you won’t find a much faster device than those of a few years ago, you will get far greater capacity: 500GB is now available for under £100. Meanwhile, new connection standards have

SLC/MLC/TLC – Single- multi- or triplelevel cell. SSD memory cells can store one bit of information or several. The fewer, the faster information can be written to them and the greater the longevity of the drive. Sequential/random – Sequential tests measure how fast a drive can continually read/write a big block of data, in MB/s. Random tests are where the drive has to constantly look all over the place for separate bits of data and so is measured in Input/ Output Operations per second (IOPs).

opened up the maximum speed of the most expensive drives to astonishing levels. The latest M.2 NVMe drives are seven times faster than the fastest SATAs. With that in mind, on these pages we round up some of the best Solid State Drives out there at the moment to consider which one gives you the best storage and performance for your money. 93

GROUP TEST Solid State Drives

1

2

3

INTEL SSD 750 SERIES 400GB

SAMSUNG 960 EVO 500GB

www.intel.com £350

www.samsung.com £230

Intel’s 750 Series was the first drive to arrive with the new NVMe connection standard. But rather than an M.2 slot, the 750 Series uses the classic PCIe slot, and there’s a version that looks like a 2.5in SATA drive but uses an SFF 8639 connector.

The little brother to the 960 Pro, the 960 Evo is essentially the same drive but rather than using MLC (two-level) NAND it uses TLC. This means you get much of the same performance when it comes to read speed but write speed is slower.

1

This makes it decidedly bulkier and less convenient than most other SSD options, but top-line performance still makes it a tempting proposition. This 400GB version is quite a bit slower than the largest capacities but it can still hit 2200MB/s sequential read and 900MB/s sequential write, and that’s a sustained write speed too. What’s more, if random read and write performance is what you’re after then Intel is still the fastest you can get. This 400GB drive can manage 430,000 read IOPs and 230,000 write IOPs, which is 100,000 IOPs faster than the 512GB 960 Pro for read, though 100,000 IOPs slower for write. One advantage of the 750 Series over M.2 drives is heat management. The larger drive enables Intel to add metal heat sinks that keep it cool. However, nearly two years have passed since its launch, and the 750 Series is let down by Intel’s uncompetitive pricing. With the arrival of the 960 Pro it doesn’t look like great value for money anymore.

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Where the 512GB 960 Pro can maintain up to 2100MB/s sequential write, the 500GB 960 Evo can only hit 1800MB/s, and only for a short period. This is because the Evo uses the same trick as many other TLC drives where it converts a small portion of the drive to work in an SLC mode to enable fast writes. Once it’s full, write speed drops until the SLC memory can be cleared. Here the speed drops to 600MB/s after 22GB have been written. The Evo also has a lower rating – 200TB vs 400TB – for the total amount of data that can be written to it. All that, though, is in comparison to the fastest drive you can buy. Compared to everything else the Evo is lightning fast for both sequential and random workloads. In many ways it’s still overkill, but the Evo is priced more competitively than the Pro. All told, the 960 Evo is the performance SSD to buy right now. It does demand a premium but it’s super fast yet far cheaper than any drive of comparable speed, and has all the performance you’ll ever need.

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In Association With

4

SAMSUNG 960 PRO 512GB

SAMSUNG 850 EVO 500GB

www.samsung.com £320

www.samsung.com £145

Samsung’s new 960 Pro SSDs are the fastest you can buy. They can hit sequential speeds up to 3500MB/s read and 2100MB/s write. That’s 1000MB/s and 600MB/s faster than last year’s 950 Pro drives and way beyond any other SSDs.

The Samsung 850 Evo line has been the champion of mid-range SSDs ever since it first arrived last year. That’s because it strikes a near perfect balance of performance and value, making it ideal for gaming PCs.

3

Several factors enable such high speeds. First is that these drives use the M.2 interface and NVMe protocol. This removes the inherent speed limit of SATA, which maxes out at around 550MB/s. Samsung also packs in its latest V-NAND memory technology for even higher data densities. V-NAND is a form of 3D NAND and this latest version moves from 32 layers to 48 layers. This has allowed Samsung to offer the 960 Pro in a maximum capacity of 2TB, which has never before been possible on an M.2 drive. The result is it monsters every test you could imagine and, unlike some far more expensive, specialist SSDs, it isn’t only fast according to a few criteria – it’s a complete all-rounder. It also has a healthy five-year warranty. But all that performance is totally overkill for most users. Load times for games, Windows and other applications are hardly improved over far cheaper SSDs. So a slower drive with more capacity for the same money is likely to be a better option.

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Based on Samsung’s older 32-layer V-NAND technology, the 850 Evo is a SATA drive so can claim maximum read and write speeds of 540MB/s and 520MB/s respectively. Even then it’s not the fastest SATA SSD around, but with random performance figures of 98,000IOPs read and 90,000IOPs write, it comfortably outpaces most other SATA drives. Being a TLC drive, it uses a form of SLC caching, but the sustained write speed on the 500GB and larger drives is still fast enough to nearly max out the SATA interface. The 120GB version does drop to as low as 150MB/s, though. As with other Samsung Evo drives, the 850 Evo has a three-year warranty while the 500GB is rated to last for up to 150TB total written data. To put that into perspective, our three-year-old 750GB 840 Evo still only has 17TB total data written to it. All told, the Samsung 850 Evo is still the single best option for those on a budget but who don’t want to compromise too much on performance.

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GROUP TEST Solid State Drives

5

SANDISK EXTREME PRO 480GB

CRUCIAL MX300 525GB

www.sandisk.com £190

www.crucial.com £110

The SanDisk Extreme Pro and Samsung 850 Pro are the two top dogs of the SATA SSD market. Both have near identical performance and are priced very similarly, so whichever you pick you’ll be happy, but for this test we opted for the SanDisk.

Crucial’s MX300 line is the first commercially available SSD not made by Samsung to use a form of 3D NAND. It should bring the same speed and capacity advantages, but, unlike Samsung, Crucial is debuting it in a mid-range TLC model.

5

That performance doesn’t come in the form of maximum sequential read and write speed, which is as limited as any other SATA SSD – 550MB/s read and 515MB/s write. Instead, what sets these drives apart is that they use MLC NAND, so can maintain that write performance right until the drive is full. Random performance is also fantastic, with 100,000IOPs read and 90,000IOPs write, making these an excellent choice for demanding workloads. What’s more, you get a whopping ten-year warranty, though only an 80TBW total data rating – great for gaming PCs but less so for applications where masses of data is regularly written to the drive. You also miss out on drive encryption, which is something most other SSDs now offer. But if data security isn’t a massive concern, then the Extreme Pro – while markedly cheaper than the ludicrous M.2 NVMe drives – still offers the sort of sustained load performance that means your work won’t grind to a halt because of your SSD.

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The MX300 is available in both 2.5in and M.2 versions, but unlike the other M.2 drives featured here it still uses the SATA interface, so can’t hit the speeds of NVMe drives. This 525GB model, which is notably larger than other ~500GB TLC drives, can reach 530MB/s sequential read and write as well as hit 92,000 IOPs read and 83,000IOPs write in random operations. Like other TLC drives, the MX300 uses a form of SLC write-caching but here it’s a completely dynamic system where any portion of the drive can temporarily act in an SLC fashion when needed. As a result, while you do get a drop in performance, it’s not until half the drive has been filled with data (in one go) that you’ll see performance drop. Overall, however, in benchmarks it can’t compete with other MLC drives and even trails the Samsung 850 Evo for raw speed, making it a drive you’d buy for similar reasons to the 850 Evo but with even more of a focus on capacity over speed.

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STACKED UP PRICE (£)

SEQUENTIAL READ SEQUENTIAL WRITE (MB/s)

RANDOM READ RANDOM WRITE (IOPs)

1

Intel SSD 750 Series 350 1652

1063

250k

332k

2

6 Samsung 960 Evo 230 3406

1766

7

342k

272k

3

Samsung 960 Pro 320 3566

2007

4

336k 358k

Samsung 850 Evo 145 530 551

5

69k 98k

SanDisk Extreme Pro 190 526 562

6

77k 98k

Crucial MX300 110 514 535 81k 90k

7

KINGSTON SSDNOW UV400 480GB www.kingston.com £120

Kingston SSDNow UV400 120 515 528

Form factor

NAND mode

Warranty

TBW

1

PCIe

MLC

5

127TBW

2

M.2

TLC

3

200TBW

3

M.2

MLC

55

400TBW

4

ESSENTIALS

2.5in SATA

TLC

3

150TBW

5

70%

76k

2.5in SATA

MLC

10

>80TBW

6

7

That’s not a great starting point and it’s only made worse by the fact the UV400 has a markedly lower capacity than the MX300 – 480GB vs 525GB. As for that feature set, it’s an entry-level 2.5in SATA model that uses TLC planar NAND. As such, it has modest performance figures, particularly for the lower capacity models. This 480GB version has decent sequential speeds of 550MB/s read and 500MB/s write, as well as a reputable 90,000IOPs random read. However, its random write speed shows why it’s considered such an entry level model – it hits just 35,000 IOPs. That’s still far faster than any hard drive, mind, which measure in the hundreds of IOPs. If you can find it for £100 or below, this drive is a decent buy for an entry-level SSD, and you’ll still get fast boot, app load and game load times. But if you regularly move big files or work on IO-intensive apps it’s not the best choice – by spending only a little more you can get much better performance for the money.

35k

2.5in SATA

TLC

3

160TBW

7

Kingston’s UV400 should be the cheapest drive on test both based on past pricing and its feature set, but at the time of writing price fluctuations mean it’s more expensive than the Crucial MX300 in the UK – in the US it’s still a little cheaper.

2.5in SATA

TLC

3

200TBW

97

GROUP TEST All-in-one CPU coolers

ALL-IN-ONE CPU COOLERS CPU performance is best served cold

C

PUs are a hot topic this year. Starting with the launch of Ryzen and followed by Intel’s Socket 2066 chips and AMD’s monster Threadripper CPUs, there’s never been a greater choice of chips to have with everything. Whichever you are using, you need to keep it cool. Water cooling is ideal, and an all-in-one liquid cooler eliminates any faff. We’ve grabbed seven popular all-in-one coolers and tested them using an AMD Ryzen 1800X running the Prime95 torture test. We measured temperatures with the cooler set to a silent mode, where the fans spin slowly, and a more uniform standard mode.

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A L L- I N - O N E C P U C O O L E R S Group test

Q&A What is an all-in-one liquid cooler? These coolers offer the basic properties of liquid cooling but in a self-contained unit. A CPU/water block mounts to the CPU while a pair of pipes feed water to and from a radiator where the heat is drawn out from the liquid. Which CPUs do liquid coolers support? All of the coolers on test support all AMD Ryzen and

How much better are they? For reference, we also tested our 1800X with AMD’s Wraith Max cooler and it hit 75°C in silent mode and 70°C in standard mode.

Intel socket 1151 CPUs. They’re also compatible with all Intel 2066/2011 CPUs, but some wouldn’t be recommended for use with the most powerful processors in those lineups as they simply don’t have the cooling power.

Dictionary

Do they need filling? These coolers ship prefilled and most are never meant to be refilled. However, some do include a means of emptying and refilling the coolers.

120mm, 240mm etc - These coolers are generally categorised by how large their radiators are. The smallest use a radiator that’s the size of a single 120mm case fan – it’s these

ones that generally don’t have the cooling power for Threadripper and Socket 2066/2011 processors. Then there are double-length 240mm radiators and even larger 280mm radiators that use 140mm fans. The bigger the cooler, the greater the overall cooling ability and the slower the fans can spin to keep things quiet. TDP - Thermal Design Power (TDP) is the maximum amount of heat generated by a chip. It’s a good rough way

of telling how powerful a cooler you’ll need for any given processor. Decibels - We’ve measured the noise created by each of these coolers, and this is measured in decibels (dB). This is a logarithmic unit so if something is 10dB louder it’s actually 10 times as loud. Therefore just a couple of dB difference in our coolers is significant. Ambient noise in our test labs was 30dB and noise levels were measured 30cm from the cooler.

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GROUP TEST All-in-one CPU coolers

1

2

3

BE QUIET! SILENT LOOP 240

BE QUIET! SILENT LOOP 120

www.bequiet.com £120

www.bequiet.com £95

While the inclusion of a second fan in the 120mm version of be quiet!’s cooler means it is priced a little high, the 240mm Silent Loop is more competitively positioned. This is still a premium option, though.

The be quiet! Silent Loop 120mm is, by some distance, the most expensive 120mm liquid cooler that’s featured in our group test, but it immediately justifies much of this cost in several ways.

1

This means you still get the nickel-plated base to the water block, a solid metal block itself and the coil-wrapped flexible tubing. You miss out on having software control of the whole system. The Silent Loop 240mm relies on your motherboard having three fan headers – one for the pump, and one each for the fans. One of the nicest things about this cooler is the flexibility of the water hoses. It’s a cinch to slot it all into place and the metal coils surrounding the tubes help to ensure they don’t get bent. As for performance, this cooler delivers some of the best temperatures both in silent and standard modes, and it’s among the quietest, too. In silent mode it claims top spot, outputting just 31.5dB, while in standard mode it sits a little more mid-table, but with a still decent 41dB. As such, the be quiet! Silent Loop 240 is a great option if you’re after a premium 240mm cooler and aren’t particularly fussed about software control.

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This one has a CPU block with a polished base. The theory goes that the flatter and more polished the surface of your cooler and the top of your CPU, the greater the contact and the less reliance on less thermally-efficient thermal paste to fill the gap. This is also the only 120mm model to come with two fans. This is great for performance, though it does make the radiator section rather bulky. This cooler is also refillable, something that be quiet! recommends you do every two years. With the fans set to the motherboard’s silent mode, this cooler was one of the hottest. However, with the fans cranked up, it improved considerably, coming in comfortably mid-table and ahead of the other two 120mm models. However, this generated a fair amount of noise. All told, there’s a lot about this cooler that justifies its high price but its performance means it sits in an awkward position between single-fan 120mm options and two-fan 240mm options.

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4

CORSAIR H60i V2

CORSAIR H100i V2

www.corsair.com £70

www.corsair.com £105

While the Corsair H100i is all about its software control and RGB lighting, the H60i keeps things simple. This 120mm cooler runs straight off your motherboard’s fan headers and lacks lighting of any kind.

The H100i V2 has a mid-range feel in terms of features and build. You get a copper base plate and an RGB logo set into the top piece of the CPU block, but you don’t get the fancier quality of some of the other coolers.

3

Compatible with everything but Threadripper CPUs, the mounting system used here is simple. It uses a choice of two top mounting pieces that are magnetically attached to the block. The AMD one, then, just uses the AMD mount on the motherboard so there’s no need to fit a base plate on the back. Meanwhile, the Intel one does require fitting a back plate but it’s simple enough to do and doesn’t require any brute force or an extra hand. The H60 V2 is pretty much middle of the pack for 120mm coolers. It’s ahead of the CoolerMaster MasterLiquid Lite 120 but a couple of Celsius behind the be quiet! Silent Loop 120, which is to be expected given this is a single-fan design. That’s true of noise levels too, with it being a little louder than the CoolerMaster but quieter than the Silent Loop, at least in standard mode. In silent mode it’s a touch louder, but still stays below 34dB. As such, the H60i doesn’t quite stand out as a bargain, but it is a fairly good option for the reasonable price.

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One of the crucial selling points of this cooler, though, is its software control. Using the Mini-USB port on the side of the CPU block and the supplied cable that can fit directly to a motherboard USB header, the cooler can talk to Corsair’s Link software. This enables you to control fan and pump speed, either via presets or by customising how the cooler responds to different CPU temperatures. Oddly, despite this control, the H100i defaults to being surprisingly loud. The H100i silent option had the fans spinning at 1200rpm and at 1800rpm in standard mode. As such, this was the loudest cooler on test in silent mode. The upside to this is better cooling, and sure enough the H100i ran away with it. It’s likely there’s an ideal compromise between noise and performance to be found by customising profiles. The H100i can’t claim to be the cheapest or the fanciest cooler here, but it sits in a nice middle ground, making it a good option, especially for software control.

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GROUP TEST All-in-one CPU coolers

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COOLERMASTER MASTERLIQUID 240 www.coolermaster.com £65

COOLERMASTER MASTERLIQUID LITE 120 www.coolermaster.com £40

The MasterLiquid 240 is astonishingly good value. It’s nearly half the price of most other 240mm coolers, and while similar cost-cutting measures have been applied here as to the Lite 120, the end result is more impressive.

The CoolerMaster MasterLiquid Lite 120 is by far the cheapest cooler in this group test, and in some ways it shows, but fundamentally this cooler still delivers in the areas where it counts.

5

It’s got an illuminated logo and the hose mounts rotate, which is useful, but there’s none of the fancy materials or clever infinity mirror lighting of the more premium models on test. However, you get a chunky radiator, quieter rubber-tipped fans and the convenient thumbscrews for mounting them. CoolerMaster has also upgraded the tubing from the Lite 120. Here, it’s much thicker and braided. This makes it more difficult to move around, but it’s a lot tougher. When it comes to performance, the MasterLiquid 240 is surprisingly good. At no point does it take the crown in either silent or standard modes, however it holds its own and is relatively quiet in standard mode when under load – hitting just 40dB compared the Silent Loop 120’s 44dB. Just as with its 120mm sibling, the MasterLiquid 240 can’t help but impress. For raw performance you can’t really go wrong for the price, especially if this is your first time buying an all-in-one cooler.

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You do get a few nice extras, too. While plastic, the pump/block is topped by an illuminated CoolerMaster logo. The radiator is also well made, though it is a touch bigger than others. The fan also comes with integrated rubber pads on its corners to help reduce transfer of vibrations and reduce noise. Plus, the screws for mounting the fan are thumbscrews, which means there’s one less reason to grab a screwdriver when installing it. The mounting system of this cooler is also good, particularly for AM4 motherboards. It uses the standard AM4 motherboard bracket, so there’s no need to fit a base plate. In terms of performance, it came dead last for overall cooling, both in silent and standard mode. It was also the joint loudest in silent mode – due to the pump making noticeable burbling noises – though it was the quietest in standard mode. The end result is that this is a perfectly decent budget cooler. It’s not perfect, but for the price it more than delivers.

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STACKED UP

1

PRICE (£)

TEMPERATURE (°C) Standard Silent

NOISE LEVEL (DB) Standard Silent

BeQuiet! Silent Loop 240 120 31.5

41 52

2

6

55

BeQuiet! Silent Loop 120 95

7

3

32.5

44 56

61

56

62

Corsair H60i V2 70

4

33.5

40.5

Corsair H100i V2 105 36 37.5

5

51

55

Coolermaster MasterLiquid 240 65 32,7

40

6

55 57

Coolermaster MasterLiquid Lite 120 40 33.5 38 58

7

NZXT KRAKEN X52

65

NZXT Kraken X52

www.nzxt.com £135

135 32.5

Radiator + fan dimensions (mm)

Radiator material

Fans

1

277 x 124 x 55

Copper

2 x 120mm

2

153 x 128 x 95

Copper

2 x 120mm

3

120 x 152 x 52

Aluminium

1 x 120mm

4

120 x 275 x 52

Aluminium

2 x 120mm

5

80%

61

ESSENTIALS

277 x 119.6 x 52

Aluminium

2 x 120mm

6

7

The top of the CPU block uses a piece of mirrored plastic and clever lighting to create an illusion of depth as the ring of light around the outside appears to continue deeper into the block. Less impressive is the mass of cables that is needed to get this thing fully hooked up. It requires a proprietary connection from the block to the USB header, plus a SATA power connection. But the end result is a cooler that can be controlled by NZXT’s excellent software that offers various default fan presets and the ability to customise the profiles. The default silent and standard modes had the fans spinning very slowly, which meant the cooler didn’t excel when it came to cooling, but also meant it was among the quietest – although not by much. As such, in terms of performance it’s basically on par – spin the fans up more and it would be in line with the other 240mm coolers on our test. Instead, the appeal of this cooler comes down to that snazzy but ultimately superfluous infinity mirror effect.

55

157 x 119.6 x 52

Aluminium

1 x 120mm

7

As the most expensive cooler on our test the NZXT Kraken X52 has a burden of expectation resting heavily on its shoulders, and thankfully it largely justifies its asking price.

38

275 x 123 x 55

Aluminium

2 x 120mm

103

GROUP TEST 4K monitors

4K MONITORS Seven of the best Ultra HD displays around

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4K MONITORS Group test

Q&A Which LCD panel type should I get? It’s always the same question when buying a monitor: IPS, TN or VA? And the usual rules apply: IPS is best for overall image quality, VA is great for video and TN is cheap and suitable for gaming. However, with 4K refresh rates at a current maximum of 60Hz, TN is less appealing as there’s little gaming advantage. Large screen or small? You’d need a 40-inch monitor at 4K resolution to get the same pixel density as a 27-inch 1440p display. If you do a lot of reading or writing on your PC, you’ll need as big a screen as possible. However, if you only need your monitor for video, pictures and gaming, a smaller screen will get you an incredibly sharp image. Why only 60Hz? The main limitation with 4K screens right now isn’t the panel itself but the interconnect. Older DisplayPort and HDMI standards don’t support the 1.2 trillion pixels per second that are required to run such a massive resolution at 144Hz. The latest DisplayPort will support this, and the latest HDMI supports up to 10K at 120Hz.

Dictionary Colour temperature: A measure of colour as related to the temperature of a very hot object. The cooler the object, the redder the light. The hotter it is, the bluer the light. Our sun’s daylight is 6500K so this is the standard for monitors. Hz: The refresh rate, as measured in hertz (Hz), is how many times a monitor changes image in a second. 100Hz+ feels best for gaming, but 60Hz is the max for current 4K monitors.

T

he arrival of 4K was greeted with much fanfare, but it has taken a few years to become affordable. Now, however, prices have dropped and graphics cards have become powerful enough to run at 4K resolutions, making it a great time to invest.

There are caveats, of course. Upcoming screens will be able to run at 144Hz, making for a much smoother experience. They’ll also be monstrously expensive. If you’re on a budget, the current 60Hz screens are the way to go. For this test, we’ve picked a broad spectrum of models to give an idea of what’s available now.

DisplayPort and HDMI: The two current PC and multimedia video connection standards. Both support audio and video and come in a variety of versions. Windows scaling: In order to make most programs on your desktop readable when using high-res displays, Windows has a setting that lets you ‘zoom in’. This makes things appear larger and allows apps to bypass it if needed, letting you view pictures, videos and games at full resolution.

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GROUP TEST 4K monitors

1

2

3

SAMSUNG U28H750

ACER S277HK

www.samsung.com £400

www.acer.com £430

The prolific Korean manufacturer has something of a knack for making surprisingly stylish-looking budget displays, and the U28H750 is no exception. In fact, this display even gives the Acer S277HK a run for its money.

The S277HK is a designer screen. With its all-metal stand, white rear and hidden bezel, it ticks every style box. It may not sit well next to your RGB-filled black box of a PC, but it’s ideal for minimalists.

1

It can’t match the Acer’s build quality but it’s commendable for the price. The only thing to keep in mind is that the stand is a bit wobbly. On a sturdy desk it’s fine, but if you have a lightweight desk then the U28H750 can start to wobble as you type. Its connectivity is basic, too. You get two HDMI to go with the one DisplayPort, and there’s a headphone jack but no USB hub nor speakers. The biggest cost-cutting measure here, though, is that this is a TN display, and in fact it’s worse than the Asus MG28UQ. Both have poor viewing angles, mediocre colour accuracy and slightly low contrast, but the Samsung suffers that much more from one of the most distracting qualities of many TN monitors: they struggle to reproduce the light grey colours that are used as window dressing in apps and websites. Not that this display is bad, by any stretch. It’s mostly fine, and one of the cheaper screens in our test. But a video or picture editor’s dream this isn’t.

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The only caveat being that there’s a mass of connectivity on the back, and it’s not as elegantly integrated as, for instance, the rear of an iMac. Still, you do get plenty of connectivity. DisplayPort, mini DisplayPort, HDMI and DVI video ports are all on offer, along with an audio input and headphone jack. Its image quality is largely impressive. It uses an IPS panel, so viewing angles are excellent. As a 27-inch display, you don’t get a huge desktop boost from the resolution, as you’ll want to have Windows scaling set to 150% most of the time to make things readable. Nonetheless, for video and gaming, it’s superb. The only problem is that contrast is a bit low. It’s okay for desktop work, but it takes a bit of the punchiness out of video. Otherwise, the only major downside is the stand, which offers only tilt adjustment with no option to swap it for an alternate stand. If you’re happy to height-adjust via stacking books, though, then the S277HK is a really nice 4K monitor option.

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4K MONITORS

4

AOC AG271UG

PHILIPS 328P6VJEB

eu.aoc.com £600

www.phillips.com £550

AOC’s AG271UG is a direct competitor to the Acer XB271HK and Asus ROG PB279Q. All are 27-inch 4K IPS displays that include G-Sync to reduce screen tear. But AOC’s model is the cheapest of the three.

Philips offers a couple of large 4K displays, including the massive 40-inch BDM4037UW. The 32-inch 328P6VJEB is likely a more practical size for most people’s needs.

3

Available for around £600, it’s by no means cheap, but with its competitors asking for closer to £700, it still offers a good saving. What’s more, it doesn’t slip up elsewhere, making this an excellent display. It all starts with the elegant design. The frame is slim and simple, and the stand is similarly understated in solid metal. That stand also offers a full range of adjustments and VESA compatibility. It even has a dial on the side that makes it easy to reset the height back to exactly where you like it. You get a couple of rare extras, too. On the right edge, for instance, there’s a flip-down headphone stand that sits above two USB 3.0 ports and the headphone jack, making for a convenient little zone of connectivity. One of the USB ports also supports fast-charging. The display offers very good image quality, too, even if the colour balance needs a bit of tweaking to get the best from it. All told, this the best 27-inch 4K G-sync display on the market for the price.

90%

4

This display uses a VA panel, the chief advantage of which is great contrast. This makes it fantastic for watching video. However, it’s not just a one-trick pony and also works well for work duties. One thing it can’t claim, though, is to be stylish – there’s an obvious cheapness to the overall look. What it lacks in pizzazz, though, it makes for up for in practicality. The stand offers height, rotation and tilt adjustment and can be swapped for a VESAcompatible alternative. You also get plenty of connectivity, with DisplayPort, HDMI, DVI and even VGA connections on the back, as well as four USB 3.0 ports on the side. Overall image quality is good, with the massive 2,317:1 contrast really bringing movies and games to life. Being a VA panel, gaming isn’t its strongest suit thanks to the technology’s slow response time, but it’s still okay for non-competitive games. Overall, it offers a good set of features and will appeal to those that like to sit back and watch movies on their PC.

75%

107

GROUP TEST 4K monitors

5

ACER PREDATOR XB321HK

ASUS MG28UQ

www.acer.com £800

www.asus.com £375

Acer offers two premium 4K monitors that, for the most part, only differ in size. Both offer 4K resolution, an IPS panel, a 60Hz refresh rate and G-Sync, so it just comes down to how big of a screen you want.

There’s an argument for saying that 4K and TN just shouldn’t mix. With 4K refresh rates limited to 60Hz, the gaming advantage of TN is null, while the lower quality of TN negates the point of having a large resolution.

Pay more and you do get more, though. That’s because a larger screen means you can reduce Windows scaling, resulting in more desktop real estate. A 27-inch screen with Windows scaling set to 150% reduces the effective resolution to 2560x1440, whereas this screen lets you use 125%, for a resolution of 3072x1728. Fire up a game or movie and you also get a bigger picture overall. Resolution and size considerations aside, the XB321HK has loads going for it. The design is not too offensive and is likely to sit comfortably alongside most PCs. The stand also offers height and tilt adjustment, though not rotation or pivot. It does support VESA monitor mounts, though. As for image quality, it’s fantastic. The IPS panel produces accurate colours and great contrast right out of the box, and when combined with G-Sync it makes for some truly fantastic gaming. It’s no competitive monster but it’s a superb all-rounder that’s great for all other forms of work and play.

However, there are a couple of reasons why a display such as the Asus MG28UQ might suit you. First, there’s the price. You’re getting a large 28-inch display, all those pixels, a fully adjustable stand and Freesync all for well under £400. Nonetheless, the MG28UQ does struggle to convince. This one has a grey finish to its stand and frame that just cheapens the overall look. It also feels like a noticeable step down in build quality from Asus’ more premium models. Some of the image quality issues of TN panels are also obvious. Contrast is low and the viewing angles aren’t a patch on other display types. Still, the stand is great in terms of practicality and is removable, plus you get loads of connectivity with three HDMI ports alongside the DisplayPort. Plus there’s a couple of USB 3.0 ports. Nonetheless, there’s not quite enough here to convince. You can get 4K for less and, without a fast refresh rate, gaming performance is compromised.

5

85%

108

6

70%

4K MONITORS Group test

STACKED UP COLOUR TEMPERATURE (K) Deviation from 6500K (the lower the value the better)

CONTRAST (The higher the value the better)

1

PRICE (£)

Samsung U28H750 400 874 376

2

6 Acer S277HK 430

7

560

3

100

AOC AG271UG 600 1,060

4

558

Philips 328P6VJEB 550 2,317

5

118

Acer Predator XB321HK 800 1,238

6

95

Asus MG28UQ 375 869 170

7

LG 27UD68P

LG 27UD68P

www.lg.com £400

400 1,144

Screen size

Panel tech

Resolution

Response time

1

28 inch

TN

3840 x 2160

1ms

2

27 inch

IPS

3840 x 2160

4ms

3

27 inch

IPS

3840 x 2160

4ms

4

32 inch

VA

3840 x 2160

4ms

5

80%

ESSENTIALS

32 inch

IPS

3840 x 2160

4ms

6

7

Take this 27-inch display from its box and you can feel the cost saving as its plastic stand and lightweight construction shows that it’s no professional-grade display. However, once set up, its simple, curved stand, plain black rear and low-profile bezel makes for a stylish display. And so long as you treat it right, it should continue to look good for a long time. This is even something of a step up model in LG’s range as it offers height adjustment and pivot so you can use it in portrait mode. The stand can also be removed to reveal a 100x100mm VESA mount. Otherwise you get no extras here. Connectivity is one DisplayPort and two HDMI, but there’s no USB hub or speakers. The image quality is great, though. IPS glow and backlight evenness might be a touch worse than premium models, but that’s just nitpicking. Overall, it’s superb right out of the box. If you’re looking for a cheap 4K screen this is the one to get.

26

28 inch

TN

3840 x 2160

1ms

7

LG has hit a winning formula with some of its displays. They’re great value, combining elegant design and a minimum of features with IPS panels that deliver reliably good image quality. The 27UD68P is such a model.

27 inch

IPS

3840 x 2160

5ms

109

GROUP TEST Keyboards

110

KEYBOARDS Group test

Q&A Why mechanical keyswitches? Some users still aren’t convinced by mechanical keyswitches, however the benefits are clear. They last longer than membrane-type keys, and they feel responsive throughout their life. They also have a far more consistent resistance, making for a more even-feeling typing experience. Blue/Brown/Red? The leading mechanical keyswitch brand, Cherry MX, has three main keyswitch types. Tactile (Blue and Brown) have a slight bump as you press the key, giving you physical feedback when the button has been pressed – Blue adds an audible click to this. Meanwhile Red provides a linear motion with no physical feedback of when the switch has been activated – you just see the results on your screen.

Which switch is best for playing games? Blue and Brown switches are preferred by typists due to the feedback they provide, making it easier to touch type. However, for gaming, many prefer the linear type switches as they allow for rapid key presses.

Dictionary Mechanical keyswitch This is any form of properly engineered individual switch used to register a keypress. Older incarnations include the buckling spring switch of old IBM keyboards, while the modern explosion of mechanical keyboards has been driven by the switches made by Cherry MX. Keycap - The thing you actually press. You can easily replace the keycaps – there are hundreds of colours and fonts you can use, making it possible to customise your keyboard.

KEYBOARDS The best mechanical setups out there

I

f the reports are to be believed, there has been something of a downturn in the mechanical keyboard market. With every man and his dog having already bought into the revolution, it seems that the scene has already reached its saturation point.

However, that doesn’t mean there isn’t still plenty of choice out there if you want to upgrade or join in fashionably late. So, we’ve grabbed seven of the top keyboards you can currently buy, all of which feature mechanical keyswitches and RGB backlighting, and, in some cases, several more features, too. 111

GROUP TEST Keyboards

1

2

3

ASUS ROG CLAYMORE www.asus.com £200

COOLER MASTER MASTERKEYS PRO L RGB www.coolermaster.com £90

The ROG Claymore from Asus is the most expensive keyboard that’s featured in this group test, and just about the most expensive keyboard you can actually go out and buy, full stop.

Cooler Master describes the MasterKeys Pro L as “no gimmicks, just quality”, and despite it being the second cheapest keyboard on our test, this is a tagline it well and truly lives up to.

1

There’s good reason for this: you get the mechanical switches and RGB lighting, a hefty metal build and its signature feature – a detachable numpad that can be affixed to either side of the device. It makes it more appealing to leftys and, for right-handed users, it can also be used for macro keys or simply to allow for more mouse room. The latter is welcome as it means your arms end up at a more natural angle when using the classic WASD-and-mouse gaming combo. You can also just buy the keyboard without the numpad for £150. This is also a great-looking piece of kit. The ‘Mayan’ pattern on the top plate and the backlit ROG logo add just the right amount of flair. Performance is also excellent. It’s available with a range of Cherry MX switches, with us testing the Cherry MX Red version, and they’re as good as ever. We also like that you can remove the Micro USB cable, though we’re less keen on there being no USB hub and no extra gaming keys. All told, though, this is fantastic.

85%

112

2

What Cooler Master has got so right here is the simple design. The base and keys are unadorned with logos, light-up sections or anything extraneous. What’s more, there are some nice practical touches here, too. The base rises slightly above the sides of the keys, providing them with some protection from getting snagged and broken – a common problem with open designs. The Micro USB cable for this keyboard is also removable, making it easy to replace if it gets damaged. All this and you get proper Cherry MX keyswitches, with all three types available. The lighting is fully programmable via Cooler Master’s software, with downloadable layouts also available, and there are four extra profile-switching buttons above the numpad. On-the-fly macro recording is also offered, however the software has no macro editing function. It’s on-the-fly or nothing. Nonetheless, the price, great design and combination of features make this keyboard a real winner.

90%

KEYBOARDS

4

RAZER BLACKWIDOW CHROMA V2 www.razer.com £165

CORSAIR K95 PLATINUM

Razer can sometimes be accused of manufacturing products that are a little style over substance, but with the Blackwidow Chroma V2, it has proved that statement is far from the truth.

The Corsair K95 Platinum is the second most expensive keyboard on this test but it certainly has all the bell and whistles to show for it, especially when it comes to extra functions and key customisation.

3

Not that it isn’t stylish. It’s minimalistic with nothing more than a backlit logo adorning the matte-black plastic body. The only thing letting it down is a cheap-looking glossy plastic section in the top-right. We also like that Razer provides a sample key that’s accessible from outside the box so you can try out which switch you prefer before you buy. Also included is a proper cushioned wrist rest that magnetically attaches to the front of the keyboard. This provides the proper comfort and support required of a wrist rest, unlike the token hard plastic efforts you get on most keyboards. You also get a USB pass-through. It’s only USB 2.0, and it’s on the side, but it’s still nice to have. There’s a headphone pass-through there, too. As for Razer’s keyswitches, the Yellow ones work well and are rated to last ages. What’s more, they are compatible with Cherry MX keycaps so you can customise them to your heart’s content. The Blackwidow Chroma V2 is pricey, but it largely delivers the goods.

85%

www.corsair.com £195

4

You get six extra programmable keys on the left side, multimedia buttons and a volume wheel on the top-right, and the top-left houses buttons for switching profiles, adjusting backlight brightness and locking the Windows keys. There’s more, too. A detachable wrist rest is included and there’s a USB pass-through on the back as well. The wrist rest also offers a rubber top that’s bumpy on one side and dimpled on the other. Also present is Corsair’s signature brushed aluminium top section. This is joined by an RGB strip that runs along the back edge, as well as a full complement of RGB keys. The design looks busy, but it still feels nice and premium. Otherwise, this keyboard delivers on all fronts. The Cherry MX Brown switches are fantastic and Corsair’s software makes programming the lighting and key functions easy. Super-fast Cherry MX Speed switches are also available. This keyboard is mighty expensive, but has the functionality to justify that.

85%

113

GROUP TEST Keyboards

5

LOGITECH ORION SPARK G910

ROCCAT SUORA FX

www.logitech.com £120

www.roccat.org £120

The G910 doesn’t make the best first impression, thanks to a design that’s a bit ‘plastic fantastic’. While several of the other keyboards on our test are externally all plastic, with this you can really feel it.

The Roccat Suora FX is as straightforward as a mechanical gaming keyboard can get, and therein lies its appeal. Its barebones design is completely devoid of any unnecessary additions.

5

The addition of strange 3D-looking symbols on the gaming keys and the lit-up G logo in the top-left and G910 logo on the wrist rest don’t help matters. Then there’s the ARX dock. This wobbly piece of blue plastic slides out the back to provide a place to rest your phone, which you can link up to the keyboard via an app. This lets you control aspects of your PC and keyboard from your phone – like lighting, music and seeing PC temperatures and other stats. It’s nice, but the appeal is pretty niche. You get plenty of extra keys, though. You’ve got four gaming keys above the F1-F4 keys and five more on the left. There are also buttons for profiles, a host of media keys and a volume wheel. As for performance, it holds up well. Logitech’s Romer-G keyswitches feel great and they’re rated to last for ages. However, you can’t replace the keycaps with third-party ones, which is a shame. Add in the non-removable wrist rest and lack of a USB hub and you have a keyboard that doesn’t wholly convince.

75%

114

6

This not only results in a keyboard that looks appealingly simple, but also means that you have more space to move your mouse around. The downside is that you miss out on a few of the niceties of other keyboards. There’s no volume wheel, no USB pass-through and no gaming keys. You just get four extra keys above the numpad for mute, volume down, volume up and ‘Game Mode’, which disables the Windows key. Otherwise, you get programmable RGB backlighting and plenty of default secondary functions that can be activated by hitting the Fn key. You don’t, however, get Cherry MX keyswitches, but rather ones made by TTC. They still offer good performance and withstand 50 million keystrokes, plus Cherry MX keycaps fit on them. Only the Brown TTC switches are available, though, which have the same action as Cherry MX Red switches. This is a great, simple keyboard. It’s just that the Cooler Master MasterKeys Pro L does the same for less.

70%

KEYBOARDS Group test

STACKED UP KEY TYPES Gaming keys Multimedia keys

1

PRICE (£)

TOTAL KEYS

Asus ROG Claymore 200 1 106

2

6 Cooler Master MasterKeys Pro L 90

7 3

109

Razer Blackwidow Chroma V2 165 5

4

110

Corsair K95 Platinum 195 6

6

5

120

Logitech Orion Spark G910 120 9

1

6

126

Roccat Suora FX 120 3 109

7

STEELSERIES APEX M800

SteelSeries Apex M800

www.steelseries.com £80

80 6

Keyswitches

Volume wheel

USB pass-through

Programmable macros

1

Cherry MX

Yes

No

Yes

2

Cherry MX

No

No

No

3

Razer

No

Yes

Yes

4

Cherry MX

Yes

Yes

Yes

5

70%

ESSENTIALS

Logitech Romer-G

No

No

Yes

6

7

Things get off to a good start. Although all-plastic, there’s a simplicity to the design of this keyboard, with the illuminated sides being a nice little flourish. You also get five extra keys down the left side, there’s a two-port USB hub on the back and the massive spacebar is surprisingly useful. Unfortunately, this keyboard has a couple of issues. The first is forgivable given the low price, which is that the keyswitches are SteelSeries’ own QS1. Like the Logitech they’re incompatible with replacements, though you do get replacement keys for the Alt and SteelSeries keys in the box. The switches otherwise feel nice and are rated for 60 million keystrokes. They have a linear action, like Cherry MX Red, but with a short throw of just 3mm. The other problem, though, is that the backlighting on the keys flickers. This is an issue we’ve encountered before and we find it troublesome. It’s distracting, and can make it difficult to focus on the keys when looking directly at the keyboard.

111

TTC

No

No

Yes

7

The SteelSeries Apex M800 is the cheapest keyboard on test, at least here in the UK. Available for just £80, it’s incredibly cheap for a fully programmable RGB keyboard. However, that doesn’t mean it’s an instant bargain.

SteelSeries QS1

Yes

Yes

Yes

115

GROUP TEST Wireless mice

WIRELESS MICE Set your mouse free

w

O

ver the years, wireless mice have got a lot better, so much so that the latest models offer exceptional performance. Many prefer the reliability of wired mice, but for most users wireless models are now good enough for everyday use. What’s more, many wireless mice now offer the best of both worlds, with you able to plug in a cable when needed. It’s therefore intriguing to

116

note that several of the big names in peripherals don’t currently offer a wireless mouse solution. Still, Logitech and Razer are doing their best to hold up the wireless end, with both companies offering several models ¬ in fact they make five of the seven models on test here. We’ve put all seven mice on this test through their paces, looking at performance and features as well as that all-important convenience that is the hallmark of a wireless mouse.

WIRELESS MICE Group test

Q&A Wired or wireless? Wireless is more convenient and performance is good enough now for most gamers. However, wired mice still have a slight advantage – they are endlessly reliable, and they’re cheaper, too. But what about batteries? Every now and then you have to charge wireless mice or swap batteries over. However, several wireless mice now allow you to plug in a cable when needed, which also has the advantage of switching to a wired connection. Moreover, the latest mice from Logitech can also charge wirelessly using the Logitech PowerPlay mousemat.

Dictionary DPI – Dots per inch is the standard method by which the sensitivity of a mouse is measured. The higher the DPI, the further the cursor will move on your screen. Reporting/polling rate – This is how frequently a mouse will report its position to the computer, measured in hertz (Hz). The faster it is, the more accurate. Latency – The potential delay in a signal being received and sent on to the computer, as compared to a direct wired connection. The best wireless mice have a latency of just a millisecond.

117

GROUP TEST Wireless mice

1

2

3

ROCCAT LEADR www.roccat.com £130

LOGITECH G403 PRODIGY WIRELESS www.logitech.com £80

Wireless mice with their own charging docks may be uncommon, but they’re certainly not unique to the Razer Mamba series. The Roccat Leadr also has such a feature and more besides. A lot more, in fact.

Logitech’s G403 mouse is the company’s attempt at making a mouse that has all the performance but none of the extras, making it affordable but free from compromise. And largely it has succeeded.

1

This mouse is packed with goodies, including no less than eight extra buttons. These include a tilt switch behind the scroll wheel, a button below where the thumb rests and an analogue paddle. The only problem is that, despite Roccat’s best efforts to position them so that they don’t get in the way, it is easy to knock all these extra buttons. In particular, the analogue switch frequently changed weapons in the heat of battle. You can just disable the offending buttons, but there’s no point having all these extras if you can’t ever use them all. That said, this mouse’s dock is quite something. It’s very large and prominently presents your mouse as though it were a work of art. The dock also includes a charging indicator and illuminated Roccat logo, so it certainly isn’t subtle. All told, this is an excellent, feature-packed mouse for a very competitive price. Its ergonomics aren’t the best but its optical sensor is excellent and overall performance is top-notch.

80%

118

2

At Logitech’s list price of £99.99, it’s a bit close to other mice that have far more features, but with it currently available for around £80, it’s great value. The mouse can be used in a wired mode. You’ll need to unplug the receiver to use a cable, but at least the option’s there. There are also a couple of RGB lighting zones, and its onboard memory means you can take presets with you on the go. The best thing, though, is that its ergonomics and performance are excellent. The simple, right-handed design with its thick rubberised sides sits effortlessly in the hand, suits a variety of grips and the mouse is light at just 107 grams. The six extra buttons are also perfectly placed. The mouse’s PMW3366 optical sensor is fantastic, delivering near flawless performance. If you’re just after a high-performance wireless mouse for the least outlay, the G403 is the one to get – or opt for the G703 which is identical, but includes PowerPlay and so is a touch more expensive.

90%

WIRELESS MICE Group test

4

LOGITECH G903

ASUS ROG SPATHA

www.logitech.com £130

www.asus.com £130

This is Logitech’s new first-class gaming mouse. It includes a bunch of features, including an ambidextrous design and a freewheeling scroll. However, its headline feature is the inclusion of Logitech’s PowerPlay tech.

The Asus ROG Spatha is bursting with features. In the box you also get a dock and stand, cables, interchangeable button switches, a mini torx screwdriver for dismantling the mouse and a case to store it all in.

3

This integrates wireless charging right into a mousemat, meaning the mouse is always charging. This works really well, though the impact on long-term battery remains to be seen. Also, the PowerPlay mat costs an extra £125 which is quite an investment. Otherwise, the G903 has lots going for it, though you wouldn’t know just from looking: its ambidextrous design doesn’t look comfortable. In use, however, the G903 works well, and the secret is its interchangeable buttons. You get back and forward buttons on both sides of the mouse, but whereas this usually makes such mice awkward to hold, here you can take out the buttons from whichever side you’re not using and insert a cover. Its other features work well, too, such as the two DPI buttons behind the scroll wheel. We’re less keen on the tiltable scroll wheel, but the fantastic optical sensor pulls things back. There isn’t a feature that makes the G903 shine – other than PowerPlay – but it’s still a versatile option.

80%

4

The default switches are rated for 20 million clicks and require a 60 gf (gram force) to activate, while the alternate pair require a 75 gf. They’re only rated to a million clicks, though, which suggests Asus knows most people won’t swap them. The mouse itself has six extra buttons, as well as your usual left, right, back, forward and middle. Four of these are positioned where your thumb rests, which brings us to a major frustration. That positioning means there’s basically no room to rest your thumb, making it awkward to lift and move the mouse without accidentally hitting a button. This is made worse by the device’s large size and its heavy build, measuring 135x90x43mm and weighing 179 grams. These ergonomic issues rather kill the Spatha’s chances, and the choice of a laser sensor further reduces its appeal for some gamers. If, for some reason, the ergonomics do work for you and you do prefer a laser sensor, it offers good performance and value.

70%

119

GROUP TEST Wireless mice

5

RAZER MAMBA

RAZER ATHERIS

www.razer.com £150

www.razer.com £55

The Mamba has been one of the most desirable mice on the market ever since the first version arrived nearly ten years ago. And after all these years, it remains one of the best you can get.

The Atheris is a real surprise package from Razer. This tiny wireless device packs in all the core technology that you’d hope for but at a fraction of the price of most wireless mice. It’s the cheapest one on this test.

5

Its key appeal is in the charging dock. While several mice offer wired and wireless functionality, few also have a dock on which to rest and charge it. This makes using the Mamba that much more convenient as it quickly becomes a habit that you just dock the mouse after every use. Its wired option only comes into play for very long gaming sessions, or if you just prefer to game in a wired mode. It also helps that the Mamba looks great, although it isn’t quite as nice as some of Razer’s wired mice when it comes to ergonomics. It’s just a touch more compact and the top surface isn’t quite as grippy as some. The biggest problem with this mouse, though, is its laser sensor. It’s good for tracking on a variety of surfaces but isn’t as good as optical for providing smooth and stable tracking on fabric mousemats. The tiltable scroll wheel is also unnecessary for a gaming mouse. If you can get past this, though, then the Mamba remains an excellent wireless mouse.

80%

120

6

Part of the reason it manages to be so cheap is that it uses disposable AA batteries rather than rechargeables, but nonetheless it’s impressive stuff. What’s also worth noting is how well put together it is. Pry open the top and you can access the battery compartment wherein you’ll also find the stowage location for the tiny USB wireless adapter. This clever system means you can toss the mouse into a bag without fear of losing the adapter. And if the need does arise, the Atheris can also be used in Bluetooth mode. Running off disposable batteries also allows this mouse to last a whopping 12-and-a-half days of use before it runs dry. Of course, there are compromises, the most obvious of which is the small size. Such a cramped design means it isn’t as comfortable as large mice for long sessions. Also, although ambidextrous in design, you only get back/forward buttons on the left side of the device. Overall, though, this is one of the finest travel gaming mice you can buy.

90%

WIRELESS MICE Group test

STACKED UP DPI (dots per inch)

1

PRICE (£)

WEIGHT (grams)

Roccat Leadr 130 12,000 134

2

6 Logitech G403 80 12,000

7 3

107

Logitech G903 130 12,000

4

110

Asus ROG Spatha 130 8,200

5

179

Razer Mamba 150 16,000

6

133

Razer Atheris 55 7,200 66

7

RAZER LANCEHEAD

Razer Lancehead

www.razer.com £125

125 16,000

Sensor Type

Buttons

Weight system

Wired/Wireless

1

Optical

14

No

Wired/Wireless

2

Optical

6

Yes

Wired/Wireless

3

Optical

11

Yes

Wired/Wireless

4

Laser

12

No

Wired/Wireless

5

75%

ESSENTIALS

Laser

9

No

Wired/Wireless

6

7

While it has many similarities, there are several key differences. For a start, unlike the G903, this mouse looks great. The silver version isn’t as nice as black, but it’s still much classier than Logitech’s offering. The ergonomics and button layout are a bit more familiar and approachable, too. You get a normal lightweight scroll wheel and DPI buttons that are in line, rather than next to each other. However, you don’t get the removable buttons of the G903 so you’ll just have to disable, via software, the buttons on the side you don’t use. Perhaps the biggest surprise is that it uses a laser sensor, where optical is still the gamers choice. This alone would put many off getting this over the G903, though some users do still prefer laser, particularly if you use a hard mousemat or if you use your mouse on a tabletop. There’s not enough here to push the Lancehead to the top. It’s good for left-handed Razer fans but the G903 or the Mamba are better for right-handed users.

111

Optical

6

No

Wireless

7

The Lancehead is Razer’s newest wireless mouse and it’s a competitor to the Logitech G903. Like that mouse, it has an ambidextrous design, and crucially it lacks the charging dock that makes the Razer Mamba more pricey.

Laser

9

No

Wired/Wireless

121

GROUP TEST Speakers

SPEAKERS Turn your PC into a high-quality multimedia centre 122

SPEAKERS Group test

W

ith gaming headsets and high-end headphones all the rage, PC speakers are the forgotten child of the enthusiast PC market. Not today. Spending just £30 or so will get you a huge upgrade in quality and volume. Not that £30 is as much as you can or should spend. We’ve compiled a selection of speakers that runs from under £20 all the way up to £400. Whether you’re after something basic for occasional use or you really want to make an impact, you’ll find a speaker set here to suit you.

Q&A How much bass do I need? As much as you want. It’s that simple. If you like how certain speakers sound, get the biggest sub you can and enjoy. However, as general rule, spending the same amount on speakers without a separate sub-woofer will get you better overall sound quality, so it comes down to what sort of music you like. Do watts matter? The wattage rating you’ll see on speaker systems is only a very crude indication of how loud they can get. That’s

because there are several other factors in play, such as speaker/driver efficiency. As a rough indicator, wattage can be useful, but pay attention to the RMS (root mean square) level and not the peak level. Quantity or quality? One of the biggest considerations is whether to go for less powerful but better quality speakers or all out power. Generally I’d opt for the former when it comes to games, but if you’re looking for something that you can really crank up for parties – or just when you’re doing a bit of housework – then you may want that extra oomph.

Dictionary 2.0, 2.1, 5.1…? The number of speakers in a set. The first number tells you how many satellite speakers there are, the second how many sub-woofers. Soundbar speakers have several satellites in one bar and often have virtual surround sound. Frequency response The range of audio frequencies – measured in hertz (Hz) – the speaker set can reproduce. Somewhere around 50Hz to 20kHz is typical, but numbers outside that range deliver more.

123

GROUP TEST Speakers

1

2

3

BOWERS & WILKINS MM-1

CREATIVE T3250

www.bowers-wilkins.com £399

www.creative.com £45

By far the most expensive speakers in this round-up, the Bowers & Wilkins MM-1 are proper high-end hi-fi audio squeezed into desktop form. The question is, can they possibly justify the price? Short answer: yes.

The Creative T3250 is a perfect 2.1-vs-2.0 counter to the company’s own T20 speakers. Although a little cheaper, they’re in the same ball park, and while the latter offers clarity and mid-range, the T3250 is all about that bass.

1

Clearly you’ll need deep pockets to even consider them, but if you’re after a PC speaker set that delivers truly exceptional audio quality and looks fantastic too, there simply isn’t anything better. What’s perhaps most striking is just how small they are considering their audiophile aspirations and high asking price: they’re just under 17cm tall and 10cm square. Yet what perfectly formed speakers they are. Covered all round in speaker fabric broken only by an aluminium strip running round the middle and down the back, and an aluminium plate on top, they simply ooze class. They sound classy too. Astonishingly deep and powerful bass is joined by a rich and detailed mid-range and a top-end that simply sparkles, plus they sound great at both high and low volumes, without the need to tweak any EQ. Add the lovely little wireless remote, headphone jack, 3.5mm jack input and a USB input that uses the MM-1’s own high-quality DAC, and you have the perfect PC audio package.

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2

The impressively petite sub delivers just the sort of rumble that can bring explosions in games and films to life while also delivering the thud that certain genres of music require. You also get Bluetooth connectivity that’s easily set up via the wired remote, which also houses the power and volume control and power indicator. It’s a useful addition but so lightweight you’ll need to stick it down to stop it being dragged around by its own cable. This is clearly a fairly cheap 2.1 speaker set – in fact, it’s more of a sub-£40 set in terms of pure speaker quality. It’s the Bluetooth that raises the price. As such the build quality is basic. It all feels a little flimsy and none of the cables are removable. The overall sound quality is let down by a lack of clarity from the satellite speakers, there’s a noticeable mid-range gap between the relatively weedy satellites and the sub-woofer, and you can’t adjust bass level. All told, a perfectly adequate entry level 2.1 option, but one with definite limitations.

70%

SPEAKERS Group test

4

CREATIVE GIGAWORKS T20 SERIES II www.creative.com £60

RAZER LEVIATHAN

The Creative T20 was something of a revelation when it arrived ten years ago. In a market dominated by big subs and satellite speakers galore, the T20 delivered quality over quantity without breaking the bank.

“One soundbar to rule them all”, declares Razer on the box of this review sample supplied by Overclockers. Razer does have a point – as you’d hope given the price. One area where the Leviathan doesn’t immediately impress, though, is design.

All these years later there’s only been one revision of the T20, in the shape of the T20 Series II, and the set’s impact hasn’t lessened one bit. The T20s just sound so damn good. It’s the combination of detail and power with a sound that stretches from surprisingly low bass right the way through the mid-range and to the top-end. In contrast, many 2.1 speaker sets are missing that vital mid-range that brings guitar, piano and vocal-driven music to life. The lack of a sub does mean you miss that bass thud, and compared to the more expensive 2.0 sets reviewed here the T20 does lack top-end detail. But for the price, it’s fantastic. It’s stylish and well made too. Although all-plastic there’s a heft and solidity to this speaker set. For features you get bass and treble dials and frontmounted headphone and aux inputs on the right speaker, along with the main input on its rear. So while the T20 is basic, it delivers where it counts.

The plain old plastic used throughout isn’t particularly premium and the glossy plastic around the controls in the centre of the soundbar actually looks a little cheap. Those controls could also do with some backlighting to tell the seven identically shaped buttons apart. Otherwise this soundbar delivers. Its bass presence is huge – it’s by far the most bombastic on test – and yet there’s high-end detail and good mid-range warmth too. It can’t match the MM-1 for overall finesse but it’s not bad. The bass control is too fiddly, however. You get plenty of features: Bluetooth with easy NFC setup, Dolby virtual surround, three sound modes (Gaming, Movie and Music), digital optical input and an analogue 3.5mm jack. The virtual surround sound adds immersion to games and movies, although it doesn’t quite bring the competitive advantage of true surround. There’s a lot to like. If Razer could tweak the design it would be perfect.

3

www.razerone.com £180

88%

4

82%

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GROUP TEST Speakers

5

LOGITECH Z533

LOGITECH Z150

www.logitech.com £80

www.logitech.com £17

You would expect this to be a decent step up from the Logitech T3250, but actually it’s surprising how much of a leap it is, for just a £30 or so price difference. It’s available in either black or white, and both versions look great.

For the money – a very small amount of money – these speakers boast a whopping 3W RMS output, one 3.5cm driver per speaker, a headphone jack, a secondary aux input jack and a combined volume/power control.

5

The option of covers for the satellite speakers would have been nice, it’s true. As for build quality, perhaps the two most notable improvements compared to the T3250 are that all the cables, bar the wired remote, are removable, making setup, adjustment and cable-replacement far more convenient. The remote itself is heftier too, so it stays firmly planted on your desk, and it has a lovely big knob – sorry – for turning the speakers on and adjusting volume. Plus it houses 3.5mm jacks for headphone and auxiliary input as well as a bass adjustment dial. The sizeable sub also has a 3.5mm jack input and a pair of RCA inputs. As for sound quality, that sub doesn’t disappoint – it can hit hard and loud. The satellites also offer a huge step up in high-end detail compared to the T3250, though there is still something of a mid-range gap. The Z533 is ideal for gaming, movies and EDM/hip-hop, but the Leviathan and premium 2.0 speakers are better for other types of music.

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6

The latter three are all situated on the front of the right speaker while round the back is the main input – which sadly is a tethered cable rather than a proper jack socket – and the socket for the included mains power adapter. Some speakers at this price range are either passive or USB powered. The latter can be useful as it saves a mains plug socket, but then it uses up a USB socket. Which is more convenient will be down to you. These small, all-plastic, speakers are reasonably well made, all things considered, and they look more stylish than you might expect. What’s more, they sound okay. They’re reasonably clear and have far more power than any monitor or laptop speakers. They can’t really stretch to kitchen-party duties but are plenty loud enough for daily desktop listening. Doubling your outlay will gain you a big leap in volume and bass, but for a cheap-aspossible upgrade to monitor or laptop speakers the Z150s deliver.

80%

SPEAKERS Group test

STACKED UP FREQUENCY RESPONSE (Hz) Minimum Maximum

Power (watts RMS)

1

PRICE (£)

Bowers & Wilkins MM-1 399 72 38

22

6 2

Creative T3250 45 30

7 3

20

35

Creative T20 60 28

4

20

50

Razer Leviathan 180 60

5

20

Logitech Z533 80 60 55

6

20

Logitech Z150 17 3 150

20

7

EDIFIER R1600T III

Edifier R1600T III

www.edifier.com £90

90 60

Speaker configuration

Satellite speaker dimensions (cm)

1

2.0

17 x 10 x 10

2

2.1

15 x 7 x 9

3

2.0

23 x 9 x 13.5

4

4.1 (soundbar + sub)

9.5 x 50 x 7

5

88%

ESSENTIALS

2.1

17 x 10 x 8.5

6

7

On every level the R1600T is a noticeable upgrade form the T20, including size. Standing 26cm tall and with a 16 x 18cm footprint, these are proper bookshelf hi-fi speaker-sized units – they’re easily double the size of the more expensive B&W MM-1. They also use some premium build materials, the real wood sides contrasting nicely with the silver/grey of the rest of the chassis and removable speaker covers. For features you get two pairs of RCA sockets for inputs, joined by a mains power switch on the back. On the right side of the right speaker are the well-engineered bass, treble and volume knobs, plus there’s a little IR remote with volume and mute. With that extra size comes power and quality. For sheer bass oomph these kept up with all the sub-woofer equipped units other than the Leviathan. You also get a much more pronounced yet smooth and balanced mid-range and high-end. Hi-fi in look and price, these are fantastic if you have the space.

20 30

2.0

15 x 8.5 x 7.5

7

If Creative’s T20 and T3250 bring the 2.0 vs 2.1 fight to the sub £60 mark, it’s the Edifier R1600T and Logitech Z533 that bring it to the sub £90 level. And what a step up in quality that £30 or so gets you.

2.0

25.5 x 15 x 21

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Contents

KIT REVIEWS 135 ALL THE HARDWARE YOU NEED TO SUPERCHARGE YOUR PC

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143

133

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153

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BUYERS GUIDE Don’t want to put your own rig together? We round up the best prebuilt PCs on the market today.

Turn to page 156

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30 PAGES full of must have kit!

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137 129

REVIEWS Hardware

DIGITAL STORM BOLT X www.digitalstorm.com From £1282 (approx) depending on chipset PC

What makes a small form factor system? Surely massive, hulking machines don’t qualify, but is shaving only an inch or two off a standard mid-tower desktop enough? That’s the question asked by the Bolt X, the latest iteration of Digital Storm’s “slim and powerful” small form factor design. Measuring 15.5 x 6 x 20 inches, and weighing up to 30lb, the Bolt X is only an inch or two smaller than many mid-tower cases, and massive compared to super-compact systems, such as the Corsair One. We wouldn’t call it small judging solely from the exterior, but things are different once you look inside. The most impressive achievement of the Bolt X’s size is its slimness – at only six inches wide, some finesse is required to fit all the components soundly. That includes a vertical alignment of the graphics card, connected to the mobo by a long ribbon cable. Speaking of that GPU, it sure is a doozy. The Bolt X is one helluva gaming machine, rocking a single GTX 1080 Ti for pixel-pushing power. It doesn’t pack the same punch as crazy high-end dual-GPU builds, but there’s also no SLI to worry about. The single GTX 1080 Ti is a powerhouse on its own, pairing nicely with Intel’s i7-8700K Coffee Lake CPU. Both are slotted (the GPU remotely, as we mentioned) into an Asus ROG Strix Z370-I motherboard that also sports 32 gigs of DDR4-3000 RAM. The first thing we noticed when firing up the Bolt X: Wow, this thing is loud. The CPU fan, a Corsair H115i 280mm Liquid CPU Cooler, was whirring loudly at idle, kicking up to a roar at even the slightest hint of load. The problem was quickly sorted, though, with a tweak to the fan control profile in Corsair Link. Without much ado, the Bolt X was purring along quietly. So, what kind of power does this compact system pack? Quite a bit. The GTX 1080 Ti crushed our 1080p gaming benchmarks, averaging 167fps in Rise of the Tomb Raider, 104fps in Total War: Warhammer II, and 74fps in the super-demanding Ghost Recon: Wildlands.

Those are largely overkill numbers, though, and we wager most users won’t be saddling a £2k system (yep, the Bolt X is pricey) with a 1080p screen. 1440p is a much more logical companion, and the 1080 Ti performs admirably in that slot. Rise of the Tomb Raider’s three-part benchmark served no issue, with the Bolt X scoring 145fps in the Mountain Pass, 110fps in Syria, and 106fps in the Geothermal Valley—an average of 121fps; perfect for a high refresh rate 1440p monitor such as the Asus ROG Swift PG279Q or the Acer Predator XB271HU. Total War: Warhammer II’s Battle benchmark proved a bit more demanding, but with a score of 74fps, the Bolt X still survived unscathed. The only benchmark to dip below the coveted 60fps line was Ghost Recon: Wildlands – but just barely. A score of 59fps there is nothing to scoff at, as that game’s Ultra graphics preset brings even the most impressive systems to their knees. Small or not, the Bolt X brings the might of a full-size gaming powerhouse. And while pricey, it’s not nearly as extravagant as some of the pre-builts that we could mention. Throw in Digital Storm’s top-notch build quality, metallic paint finish, custom cable-sleeving, and did we mention the built-in software-controlled RGB lightshow? It’s clear to see that X marks the spot. PROCESSOR: INTEL CORE I7-8700K @ 3.7GHZ / GRAPHICS: NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 1080 TI 11GB / RAM: 32GB DIGITAL STORM PERFORMANCE SERIES DDR4-3000 / MOTHERBOARD: ASUS ROG STRIX Z370-I GAMING / PRIMARY STORAGE: 500GB WD BLUE M.2 / ADDITIONAL STORAGE: 3TB SEAGATE/TOSHIBA / COOLING: CORSAIR H115I 280MM LIQUID CPU COOLER / PSU: 750W LIAN-LI PE-750 / CASE: CDIGITAL STORM BOLT X WITH STORM BLUE EXOTIC PAINT / WARRANTY:

90%

LIFETIME EXPERT CARE WITH THREE-YEAR LIMITED WARRANTY (THREE-YEAR LABOUR AND ONE-YEAR PART REPLACEMENT)

BENCHMARKS ZEROPOINT Cinebench R15 (Index)

959

1,644 (71%)

CrystalDisk QD32 Sequential Read (MB/s)

1,721

559 (-68%)

CrystalDisk QD32 Sequential Write (MB/s)

1,473

529 (-64%)

Rise of the Tomb Raider (Avg fps)

93

121 (30%)

Total War: Warhammer II (Avg fps)

55

74 (35%)

Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands (Avg fps)

48

59 (23%)

3DMark Fire Strike (Index)

9,128

12,863 (41%) 0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

Our desktop zero-point consists of an Intel Core i5-8400, 16GB of DDR4 at 2,666MT/s, an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080, and a 500GB Samsung 960 Evo PCIe SSD. All games tested at 1440p using highest available preset.

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HARDWARE Reviews

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REVIEWS Hardware

1

POWER DRAW

2

WOT NO OVERCLOCK?

Combine the i3-8100 with a GTX 1080, and 16GB of DDR4, and you’ll be fine with a 550W PSU running it.

Some mobos may let you overclock this, but Intel doesn’t let you bump up its budget parts.

INTEL CORE i3-8100 www.intel.com £105

CPU

3

4K STREAMING

4

AMD COMPETITION

Thanks to support for HDCP 2.2 you’ll finally be able to have access to those 4K streams without worry.

The closest red rival for single core performance is AMD’s Ryzen 5 1500X, coming in at £143.

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With Intel’s first foray into its Coffee Lake architecture, we saw one major difference from its seventh series processors: core count. Each part received two extra cores. The Core i3-8100 is the cream of the crop from that redesign. It goes up from last gen’s two-core, four-thread design to a flat four cores and no hyperthreading. It’s a £105 Core i5 from last gen, with a 3.6GHz clock count and integrated graphics, making it versatile both for gaming and for those looking to build a cheap and cheerful HTPC too. In CineBench, we saw scores of 156 on the single core, and just shy of 600 on the multithreaded scenario. To put that into context, a Sky Lake Core i5-6600K, scores

166 and 598. In games, we saw similar performance, with 76fps in Far Cry Primal at 1440p with a GTX 1080 versus the Core i7-8700K’s 77fps, and 42fps in Total War: Attila against the 8700K’s 43fps. If gaming is your focus, the Core i3-8100 is a great option. The only downside compared to those older Core i5s? No overclocking capability, and no turbo. Honestly, that’s a small price to pay.

90%

BASE CLOCK: 3.6GHZ / CORES/THREADS: 4/4 / LITHOGRAPHY: 14NM / CACHE: 6MB / MEMORY SUPPORT: 64GB DDR4 @ 2666 MHZ / MAX PCIE LANES: 16

HARDWARE Reviews

ROUND-UP

STEELSERIES ARCTIS 3 www.steelseries.com £135 HEADSET

The tried-and-true Steelseries Arctis brand is one we trust for providing solidly built, comfortable headsets. The Arctis 3 Bluetooth edition is a bit of an odd one, though, as it lacks the USB connectivity and RGB lighting of the Arctis 5, yet costs more than it too. The headset is designed for a very specific scenario, and that is for the mobile gamer. You can, of course, plug it directly into your rig via the analogue cables, but the battery is reserved for Bluetooth use only. The soundscape is good, great even – well balanced with no emphasis on either end. But paying an additional £55 for Bluetooth seems a bit steep.

COOLER MASTER COSMOS C700P www.coolermaster.com £260 A premium case with a legendary heritage. The C700P is a fantastic combination of aluminium, RGB and design merged into a XL Tower. With an array of great features, it’s perhaps one of the best chassis out there at this % price point.

85

DRIVER TECHNOLOGY: DYNAMIC / FREQUENCY RESPONSE: 20 HZ - 22 KHZ / IMPEDANCE: 32 OHMS /

78%

CONNECTIVITY: ANALOGUE, FOUR & THREE POLE SPLIT / BATTERY LIFE: 28 HOURS

PHANTEKS ENTHOO EVOLV FLOW www.phanteks.com £200

SENNHEISER GSP 600 www.bit.ly/sennheisergsp600 £220 HEADSET

This headset is damn good. Whether it’s the build quality, the fit and feel of the cups, the sound stage or the materials used, it’s just awesome. Admittedly, the price is steep, but you get a lot for your money. The fit and feel is tight – not too constricting, but secure. Noise isolation has been paramount in the design of the GSP 600, and you can tell. The likelihood of hearing much outside of your game is slim. On top of that, the soundscape is incredible. It’s not a reference soundstage, that’s for sure – the bass is intense, enveloping, but unlike most headsets, the treble doesn’t suffer from it. It’s clear and an absolute joy to listen to. DRIVER: DYNAMIC / FREQUENCY RESPONSE: 10 HZ - 30

92%

KHZ / IMPEDANCE: 28 OHMS /

This is an upgrade to the ATX variant, and thanks to its honeycomb cutouts, enables superior internal airflow to its predecessor, making it ideal for anyone looking to craft a % liquid-cooled system.

88

FRACTAL DESIGN MESHIFY C www.fractal-design.com £80 The Meshify may be at the more budget end of the spectrum, but it still touts an arsenal of features. Whether that’s the support for up to a 360mm radiator, tempered glass side panel, or great cable management support, it’s % a case that can do it all.

91

CONNECTIVITY: ANALOGUE, FOUR & THREE POLE SPLIT

133

REVIEWS Hardware

3

2

1

1

D-PAD SWAP

2

USB+WIRELESS

Although on the cheaper side of life, MSI also includes a more circular d-pad cover, giving the GC30 a bit more versatility.

You can connect it to your rig via a tiny 2.4 GHz USB Wireless dongle. There’s a 2m-long USB cable, too.

3

BAT TERY LIFE ?

By default, the GC30 offers up eight hours of use, and this is our only criticism. We’d have happily taken a bit of extra weight for double that.

4

NO BLUETOOTH?

There’s no Bluetooth, but we wouldn’t say no to a premium £50 version with it. Hint hint, nudge, nudge, MSI.

134

MSI FORCE GC30 GAMING CONTROLLER www.msi.com £37 CONTROL PAD

This is the first time that we’ve placed a controller in the main spot. That alone should tell you just how impressed we are with MSI’s Force GC30. In a world where PC gaming is becoming ever more well-stocked with console-style titles, is now the time to pick up a pad? We say the answer is yes. After all, for the games that need them (here’s looking at you Dragon Ball FighterZ), using a controller over a mouse and keyboard makes life so more enjoyable. If the high price of wireless pads has previously put you off, the MSI GC30 is the pad for you. It’s a fantastically well-bundled bit of kit, with an awesome finish, a typical Xbox controller layout, vibration and, more importantly, wireless (or wired) connectivity, all for £37. Everything feels solid, which is a rarity for cheaper

controllers. The materials are good, and although not weighty, it’s not light enough to feel tacky. Not to overstate it, but the value factor here is superb. To find such build quality in a wireless controller at this price point is ridiculous. This isn’t the route we expected MSI to go down, but if this is any sign of how its peripherals are going to develop going forward, consider us excited.

95%

COMPATIBLE OS: WINDOWS 10/8.1/7, ANDROID 4.1 AND ABOVE / BATTERY: 600 MAH BATTERY (8 HOURS USE) / ACCESSORIES: ADDITIONAL D-PAD COVER / CABLES: 2M USB CABLE + 30CM CABLE FOR ANDROID / WEIGHT: 280G

HARDWARE Reviews

ROUND-UP

VERTAGEAR S300 – INFERNO RED

ASUS ROG STRIX X370-I GAMING

www.vertagear.com £230

www.asus.com £185 MOBO

This is a really tidy piece of motherboard design, but it’s not entirely without its downsides. We can tell you just how impressive a motherboard this thing is, and that’s no word of a lie. The raised M.2 PCB integrated into the audio hardware makes it a really exceptional piece of mobo design. However, the VRM solution has its flaws. At idle it draws 30W more than its own ATX

Vertagear’s S300 fabric chair is a fantastic entry point into the gaming chair ecosystem. Available in a load of different colours, it’s easy to set up, and it gets a thumbs-up for comfort as % well. Pricing is just right.

87

siblings, and it doesn’t overclock as high (coming in at 3.9GHz, versus the 4.0GHz we usually achieve). Whilst this isn’t damning, it’s worth noting if you’re looking at an ITX Ryzen build. CHIPSET/SOCKET: X370 / AM4 / FORM FACTOR: ITX / MEMORY SUPPORT: 32GB DDR4 @ 3600 MT/S /

84%

M.2 / U.2 SUPPORT: 2X M.2 / SATA SUPPORT: 4X SATA 6GB/S

NOBLECHAIRS EPIC SERIES BLACK/RED www.noblechairs.com £300 Next up is Noblechairs’ Epic Series. Still following that bucket seat fashion, its faux leather composition is a delight to sit in. Not so great in warm weather, but the range of adjustability on it % is staggering.

83

ASUS ROG STRIX Z370-G www.asus.com £191 MOBO

We’ve seen the price of a 16GB kit of memory increase exponentially, so a Micro-ATX system is now much more appetising. The Z370-G is a fantastic Micro-ATX offering, packing a small form factor, and plenty of connectivity into its tiny, yet affordable, confines. The aesthetic is absolutely stunning, and, although we do wish it had some form of rear I/O cover internally for prettier builds, it’s something we’re willing to let slide.

Performance is a blast, too. We coupled this with an Intel Core i3-8350K, and a GTX 1060, and found it made a fantastic little mid-range 1080p machine for little over £1,200. CHIPSET/SOCKET: Z370/LGA 1151 /

93%

FORM FACTOR: MICRO-ATX / MEMORY SUPPORT: 64GB DDR4 @ 4000 MT/S / M.2 / U.2 SUPPORT: 2X M.2 /

NOBLECHAIRS ICON TOP GRAIN LEATHER www.noblechairs.com £520 £520 is a good GTX 1080’s worth of cash to splash. Happily, the Icon is a premium product. Its leather fabric finish makes it right at home in any office, and is perfect for anyone with more refined taste than the typical % bucket seat style.

84

SATA SUPPORT: 6X SATA 6GB/S

135

REVIEWS Hardware

1

1440P VALUE?

2

ASUS DESIGN

Expect average framerates of around 70 in most titles, with 40 fps in some of the more demanding games.

Asus’s DCIII cooling design is a fantastically quiet solution for the GTX 1070 Ti, and it looks classy as hell.

3

OVERCLOCKING HEADROOM

With a bit of a push you can easily get a 220 MHz overclock on the core, boosting it further.

4

4K?

Although it’s possible to achieve 4K resolutions with some AA tweaking, itdoesn’t quite hit the mark yet.

136

ASUS ROG STRIX GTX 1070 TI A8G www.asus.com £500 GRAPHICS CARD

This is the world’s most confusing graphics card. A seemingly nonsensical reaction to the Vega 56, AMD’s only competitive gaming GPU right now (unless you’re into mining), the GTX 1070 Ti doesn’t make much sense. It’s a card that’s simultaneously amazing, yet annoying. The difference between a GTX 1060 6GB and 3GB is 128 CUDA cores. The difference between a GTX 1080 and a GTX 1070 Ti is 128 CUDA cores and a drop down from GDDR5X to GDDR5. So why does the 1070 Ti warrant a new designation when the 3GB 1060 doesn’t? Good question. You can’t beat the GTX 1060 3GB for price to performance. The fps difference between the two is, on average, a meagre 5%. The 1070 Ti follows the same trend. At 1440p, the difference between the cards ranges from

0-4 fps across our four test titles. That’s ridiculous given the £80 difference in price. What you’re getting with the GTX 1070 Ti is a discounted 1080 under a new badge, with slightly cheaper memory. On top of that Nvidia gets to pitch it as a new product, and at the same time, it nibbles at that last smidge of market share that AMD’s Vega 56 currently holds.

90%

LITHOGRAPHY: 16NM FINFET / TRANSISTOR COUNT: 12 BILLION / CUDA CORES: 2432 / CORE/BOOST CLOCK: 1607/1683 MHZ / MEMORY CAPACITY: 8GB GDDR5 / DISPLAY CONNECTORS: DISPLAYPORT 1.4, HDMI 2.0(B)

HARDWARE Reviews

ROUND-UP

MEDION ERAZER X7851 www.medion.com £1,150 It’s great to see Medion really push into the gaming sector. The Erazer brand promises fantastic value for your money, but does it actually hit the mark? To be short, yes, it does. Our sample unit here is the slightly aged X7851, packing a Core i7-7700HQ, 16GB of DDR4, a 256GB SSD, 1TB HDD and a GTX 1060 6GB graphics card at its heart. It’s actually a fairly accurate representation of a mid-range rig at the moment. Combine those innards with the 17-inch IPS screen and a £1,150 price tag, and well, it speaks for itself. The build quality of the Erazer X7851 is good. It’s not exemplary, but the soft-touch finish is a nice addition to its design. The one thing we wish it had was a more slimline design, however, especially when it comes to its distracting bezel.

ASUS RT-AC86U

GAMING LAPTOP

www.asus.com £220 There’s nothing quite like having a decent home router. Asus’s RTAC86U is perfect for anyone looking for that additional customisation. From smart bandwidth management to VPN setup, your own personal AI Cloud, 5 GHz dual bands and more, the RT-AC86U makes the whole affair as easy and % painless as possible.

84

SCREEN SIZE: 17-INCH / NATIVE RESOLUTION: 1920X1080 / GPU: NVIDIA GTX 1060 6GB /

86%

RAZER BLACKWIDOW TE CHROMA V2 YELLOW SWITCH

MEMORY: 16GB DDR4 / STORAGE: 256GB SSD, 1TB HDD

www.razerzone.com £160 Man, this keyboard is good. Razer’s yellow switch lacks the clack of its standard switch in favour of a more subtle Cherry Red-like linear click instead. Combine that with the stunning RGB lighting and a fantastically comfortable wrist rest and there’s little to fault here.

93%

VIEWSONIC XG GAMING XG2530 www.viewsonic.com £420

ASUS ROG STRIX X370-I GAMING www.asus.com £185

MONITOR

First-person shooters are fast-paced dens of destruction. Splitsecond reactions can mean the difference between life and death. We tend to advocate higher refresh rate screens for the enjoyment factor. However, once you get above 165Hz it becomes less about enjoyment, and more about response. The XG2530 is an FPS-targeted monitor, packed with tech and designed to reduce latency and offer perfect smoothness.

Does it work? Well, there’s no delay, and the colour reproduction is impressive, even for a TN panel. If you live and breathe shooters, the XG2530 is perfect for you. SCREEN SIZE: 25” / PANEL TECH: TN /

91%

NATIVE RES: 1920X1080 / REFRESH RATE: 240HZ / RESPONSE RATE: 1MS GTG /

The X370-I gaming may be pricey, but it’s one hell of a well-built Ryzen board. Packing some intuitive engineering into a raised M.2 PCIe SSD/audio hub, the design aspect is impeccable. Ryzen demands strong VRM solutions, and this doesn’t miss the mark, providing solid overclocks in the tiny form % factor.

91

CONNECTIONS: 1X DISPLAYPORT, 2X HDMI (2.0 & 1.4)

137

REVIEWS Hardware

1

HOT HOT HOT

2

GAMING

More cores and a poor TIM between the IHS and the CPU die means that to get the most out of it, you need to delid the device.

Thanks to that single-core prowess, the i7-8700K is the best CPU we’ve tested when it comes to gaming.

3

OVERCLOCKING

We managed 5 GHz at 1.3V with ease, seeing load temps increase to 80°C, and performance matching Ryzen’s best equivalent component.

4

DELIDDING

Intel still refuses to solder its processors. Temperatures can drop by up to 20 degrees with delidding and better thermal paste.

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INTEL CORE I7-8700K www.intel.com £400 CPU

Ladies and gentlemen, we give you Coffee Lake, Intel’s mainstream retaliatory blow to the might of Ryzen. A second optimisation of Intel’s 14nm process, but is it enough to beat back the big red beast? With Coffee Lake, we think it’s fair to say that tick-tock is dead. Coffee Lake’s main focus is to bring the fight back to multi-core mainstream dominance by the inclusion of two additional cores across the vast majority of its range. And for the most part it succeeds. The Core i7-8700K now features a hefty six cores and 12 threads, the Core i5 has six cores and six threads, and the Core i3 comes with four cores and four threads. And that’s about it, there’s little else new so far as architecture is concerned. Just

higher stock clocks and more cores. And to be frank, it’s an effective mix. The Core i7-8700K is a potent computational part, still dominating in single-core performance, yet its true potential lies in multi-threaded applications, with it seeing a 50% performance increase in both CineBench and our X265 benchmark tests.

85%

BASE/TURBO CLOCK: 3.7 GHZ/4.7 GHZ / CORES/THREADS: 6/12 / LITHOGRAPHY: 14NM / CACHE: 12 MB / MEMORY SUPPORT: 64GB DDR4 @ 2666 MHZ / MAX PCIE LANES: 16

HARDWARE Reviews

ROUND-UP

LOGITECH BRIO www.logitech.com £180

MSI GEFORCE GTX 1080 TI GAMING X TRIO www.msi.com £770 GPU

We already know the GTX 1080 Ti, is the king of all GPUs. If you’re looking for a high-end, 4K-capable GPU, there truly is no other option. But it’s been a while since we looked at an aftermarket variant. MSI’s latest Gaming X Trio is the first in its new line of triple-fan-cooled cards. Although we’ve seen these designs from MSI before, they were typically only available in the expensive Lightning line.

4K and HDR in a webcam? Yep, it’s finally happened. No more messing around with overly pricey DSLRs and the like. Logitech has done the seemingly impossible and finally integrated all those high-end features into a camera worth its salt. Yeah, it’s a little pricey, but for a plug-and-play USB webcam at this calibre, it’s % hard to argue with.

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The elegant black aesthetic coupled with intuitive RGB lighting and exceptional fan curves keep it quiet, whilst still hammering the framerates at 4K. GPU: PASCAL / LITHOGRAPHY: 16NM FINFET /

91%

CORES: 3584 / MEMORY: 11GB GDDR5X / MEMORY BUS: 352-BIT

XPG EMIX H30 GAMING HEADSET www.adata.com £190 Adata is doing headsets, and damn are they good. We were fairly apprehensive, but this headset-andDAC combo is exceptionally impressive. And it wants to be for £190. There’s a bit of sound leakage, but the comfort and quality is exactly % where you want it to be.

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ASUS MX34VQ www.asus.com £717 MONITOR

RAZER BLACKWIDOW CHROMA TE V2

If you’re after the most premium experience you can get, 21:9, 1440p and 100Hz is definitely the place to be. It’s not cheap, not by any measure. The MX34VQ is the perfect combination of super wide aspect ratio, high refresh and pixel density, perfect for those looking to have it all. The 21:9 aspect ratio makes it perfect for enjoying media, maintaining productivity and enjoying any and all games out

there. It’s not got super low response times or crazy refresh rates, and it does take up a fair chunk of desk space, but experiences in story-driven games are unparalleled. SCREEN SIZE: 34 INCH / PANEL TECH: VA /

88%

NATIVE RESOLUTION: 3440X1440 / REFRESH RATE: 100 HZ / RESPONSE RATE: 4MS GTG /

www.razerzone.com £140 This wrist pad is so comfortable. Razer’s keyboards are exceptional, and this TE variant of the Blackwidow is lush. Fully RGB, with a silent mechanical switch, it’s perfect for any FPS gamer, or anyone who values a smaller footprint for their peripherals. It’s % pretty pricey, though.

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CONNECTIONS: 1X DISPLAYPORT, 3X HDMI

139

REVIEWS Hardware

1

PRICE

2

GAMING PROWESS

£1,800 is a huge amount of money. Even given its extensive performance, the price point has contributed to the 71% verdict.

The i9-798OXE is one of the highest scoring processors we’ve ever reviewed for gaming.

3

POWER DRAW

At stock, power draw is concrete at 258W under load. However if you start cranking it higher, you can easily see 500W under load.

4

OVERCLOCK SUPERIORITY

We saw scores of 4,289 points in CineBench R15 at 4.4 GHz, only limited by the integrity of the board’s VRM.

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INTEL CORE I9-7980XE www.intel.com £1,800 CPU

The highest echelon of AMD’s Ryzen architecture, the Threadripper 1950X, is a beast, although certainly not designed for gaming. What it did do, however, is demand a response from Intel, and, oh boy, a response is what we got. This is not a cheap processor; you could build two competitive 1080p systems for the price of this CPU. However, it’s a part designed for those who profit from more cores in a working environment. That said, it’s impressive at gaming. It’s hard to deny just how good Intel’s core Skylake-X architecture is. Its single-core prowess is second only to the latest Coffee Lake parts. Yes, really. In-game it dominates all. There’s no gaming mode, just pure brute force powering all of those cores.

As far as rendering goes, it’s only 300 points off of AMD’s Threadripper part in CineBench, despite the excessive price difference. However, unlike TR, it’s only after you overclock it that the 7980XE becomes unhinged. Power draw may sail through the roof, but we saw a 15% boost in CineBench going from 3.4 GHz to 4.4 GHz. That’s the equivalent of adding six cores to the part.

71%

BASE/TURBO CLOCK: 2.7 GHZ/3.4 GHZ / CORES/THREADS: 18/36 / LITHOGRAPHY: 14NM / CACHE: 24.75MB / MEMORY SUPPORT: 128GB DDR4 @ 2666 MHZ / MAX PCIE LANES: 44

HARDWARE Reviews

ROUND-UP

STEELSERIES RIVAL 310 www.steelseries.com £60

MSI Z370 GODLIKE GAMING www.msi.com £530 MOBO

Intel has broken away from its ‘four cores’ ideology with Coffee Lake, and implanted an extra two into its mainstream offerings. And a new chip means new mobos, which may sound sucky, but if you’re buying a new system, it does mean you get the latest gear. The Godlike Gaming is the pinnacle of MSI’s mobo arsenal. It may be pricey, but its features sell it: triple Ethernet, wireless A/C, support for three M.2 PCIe

We’ve long been fans of the Rival series from SteelSeries, and the 310 doesn’t disappoint. It’s a lightweight, FPS-oriented, intuitive gaming mouse, with pixel-perfect 1:1 tracking, thanks to its Pixart TrueMove3 optical sensor. It’s comfortable, sleek, effective and highly recommended. %

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SSDs, and four GPUs. Incredible. The real joy lies in the audio, though: if you’re not willing to invest in a DAC, but still want the best sound you can get, this is the board for you. CHIPSET/SOCKET: Z370 / LGA 1151 / FORM FACTOR: E-ATX / MEMORY SUPPORT: 64GB DDR4 @ 4133 MT/S /

91%

M.2 / U.2 SUPPORT: 3X M.2, 1X U.2 /

LOGITECH G613 WIRELESS

ATA SUPPORT: 6X SATA 6GB/S

www.gaming.logitech.com £130 Why, oh why, has it taken this long for us to get a wireless mechanical keyboard? Logitech’s G613 has finally arrived to fill that gap. Offering an impressive 18 months of battery life, it’s powered by only two AA batteries. Sure, It may not feature any of the fancy LEDs that we’re used to, but the inclusion of that wireless switch is enough % for us.

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AMD RADEON RX VEGA 56 RAZER TIAMAT 2.2 V2

www.msi.com £500

www.razerzone.com £125 GPU

AMD’s GPU offerings have been a little lacklustre, to say the least. Even with all the hype in the world, they fell far flat of what we hoped. Priced out of the stratosphere due to cryptocurrency mining, and coupled with nasty power draw and little room for extra performance, Vega 64 was nothing more than a disappointment. The 56, on the other hand, somewhat redeems the series. Priced at a reasonable £450, it fortunately provides some very

competitive performance with the GTX 1070. However, right now, you’re still forking out an extra £80 for it, and with no aftermarket cards scheduled for team red, it’s not looking good at all for Radeon going forward.

64%

GPU: VEGA / LITHOGRAPHY: 14NM FINFET /

Razer’s Tiamat 2.2 V2, is an impressively designed, dual-driverper-earcup headset. The latter is what drew our attention to them. The headset sounds crisp, with no muddiness in the treble or upper end, making it actually fairly well balanced. Still a touch pricy, but not bad. %

84

CORES: 3584 / MEMORY: 8GB HBM 2.0 / MEMORY BUS: 2048-BIT

141

REVIEWS Hardware

1

I/O CONNECTIVITY

This houses 64 PCIe lanes, meaning you can run up to four GPUs at x16 without degradation or throttling.

2

SINGLE-CORE PERFORMANCE

This behemoth is still a Ryzen part, and you can expect performance similar to an i5-6600K.

3

GAMING?

By default, AMD includes a gaming mode to ensure single-core performance doesn’t hold back titles that tend to favour higher clocks.

4

OVERCLOCKING HEADROOM

You can clock this up to around 4 GHz across all the cores, adding an extra 160 points in Cinebench tests.

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AMD THREADRIPPER 1950X www.amd.com £990 CPU

Let’s get this out of the way right now: this is not a gaming part, but that doesn’t stop it from being an incredible piece of engineering. AMD’s Threadripper series is aimed solely at the professionals, the folk who make money out of rendering content on a day-to-day basis. And, my God, is it awesome? Packing a total of 16 cores and 32 threads, this kills the competition, when it comes to price and performance in more computational-oriented tasks. We saw scores of over 3,000 points in CineBench at stock, a benchmark of software traditionally used in the industry for CGI and rendering cinematic content. To put that into perspective, a Core i5-7600K scores around 663 points, a Core i7-7700K 970 points, a Ryzen 7 1800X 1,612, and even Intel’s top dog right now, the Core i9-7900X,

coming in at the same price of this part, only manages 2,184 points at stock. That’s just an astronomical performance increase. The biggy is overclocking. By default, it performs identically to its Ryzen cousins, making it easy to overclock it to 4 GHz on all cores; increasing single and multi-core performance by 15%. If you profit from computational work, this part is a no-brainer.

90%

BASE/TURBO CLOCK: 3.4 GHZ / 4.0 GHZ / CORES/THREADS: 16/32 / LITHOGRAPHY: 14NM / CACHE: 40MB / MEMORY SUPPORT: 128GB DDR4 @ 2666 MHZ / MAX PCIE LANES: 64

HARDWARE Reviews

ROUND-UP

GIGABYTE AX370 GAMING K7 www.gigabyte.com £200

PNY GEFORCE GTX 1080 TI XLR8 GAMING OC www.pny.com £760 GPU

What, no Vega? That rant is coming soon enough, but here we decided to take a look at PNY’s latest GTX 1080 Ti rework instead. After all, if Vega has shown us anything, it’s that it’s just not quite up to GTX 1080 levels of performance. The GTX 1080 Ti is still king of the hill. PNY’s aftermarket XLR8 GPU capitalises on that 1080 Ti GPU by pushing up the boost clock by a solid 70 MHz at stock, taking advantage of a tri-cooler fan

design, and packing a hell of a wallop to overclock potential. We managed to push the clock up to 2025 MHz, and the memory clock up to 12 Gbps, pushing both minimum framerates and averages up by 15%, making this an ideal 4K card.

92%

LITHOGRAPHY: 16NM FINFET / CORES: 3540 / MEMORY: 11GB GDDR5X / MEMORY BUS: 352-BIT

This is, by far, Gigabyte’s best offering when it comes to Ryzen mobos, featuring a sleek satin black design, classy RGB LED lighting, and impressive memory support (We’ve got it running 64GB of 3200 MT/s right now), it’s a solid contender for any high-end Ryzen system. If only the BIOS % were a little stronger.

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EKWB A240G LIQUID COOLING KIT www.ekwb.com €240 Ever fancied your own custom loop? EK’s latest aluminium liquid cooling kits are super cheap, easy to setup, and can cool your GPU and CPU off a single dual radiator unit. Performance is incredible, and after testing these extensively we can’t recommend them enough to anyone % dabbling in liquid cooling.

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RAZER LANCEHEAD

ASUS ROG STRIX X370-F GAMING

www.razerzone.com £140

www.asus.com £120 MOUSE

£140 for a mouse? You’ve got to be kidding right? Well maybe not, Razer’s newest mouse more than makes up for the hefty tag. Mice are one of, if not the, most subjective peripheral you’ll ever find – we all hold mice in different ways. That said, the Lancehead is nothing if not spectacular. Its svelte design, combining a gunmetal matte finish, smooth curves, rubber grips and subtle RGB lighting, makes it a standout product.

Combine that with an easy plug-and-play setup and a 24-hour battery life and we’re well on to a winner. We hope Razer makes one of those continually charging pads that Logitech has for this bad boy.

95%

SENSOR: 5G LASER SENSOR / MAX DPI: 16,000 / CABLE LENGTH: 2M / LIGHTING: 16.8 MILLION

Here’s another contender for your Ryzen build. This has incredible memory support, solid performance and comes in at an affordable price. So what’s the downside? Well, the RGB strip isn’t the prettiest, backed into the Rear I/O cover, and it could do with a bit of extra spice in overclocking % performance.

88

COLOURS / BUTTONS: 9 / WEIGHT: 111 GRAMS

143

REVIEWS Hardware

1

X370 CHIPSET

Combine the 1300X with a solid X370 board, such as the Asus Prime X370-A, and you’d be well on the way to a well-equipped machine.

2

SINGLE-CORE PERFORMANCE

Unfortunately, this is still a little bit lax – at least, until AMD refines that core architecture.

RYZEN 3 1300X www.amd.com £125 CPU

3

INTEGR ATED GRAPHICS?

We’re still missing this, and it could be a while until we see Vega GPUs baked into these as well.

4

OVERCLOCKING HEADROOM

Like most Ryzens, you can clock this up to around 4 GHz across all the cores, adding an extra 160 points in Cinebench.

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This CPU U has got one of the more price-conscientious processor parts. Don’t be fooled by the naming scheme, this is a fully-fledged four-core, four-thread part, more akin to a Core i5 than anything else, but at half the price. We’re seeing a war occur between the two major processing powerhouses. With AMD and Intel gearing up to pit ever-more powerful models of their ranges head-to-head, it’s looking like a exciting time to be a CPU enthusiast. It’s the low end that interests us, though, and the 1300X hits the nail right on the head. It’s a four-core processor, with 8MB of cache, and 3.7 GHz turbo. It doesn’t have the multithreading of the 5 series, but it comes with a decent cooler and uses 65W of power.

In CineBench R15 the 1300X managed 562, with 154 points for single-core performance, putting it in line with a Core i5-4670K. In-game, the 1300X performed well, scoring 70 fps in Far Cry Primal. Ultimately, the Ryzen 3 1300X, is a sound quad-core part. We would’ve liked to have seen higher clock speeds for better single-core performance, but aside from that, it’s a solid chip.

94%

BASE/TURBO CLOCK: 3.5 GHZ / 3.7 GHZ / CORES/THREADS: 4/4 / LITHOGRAPHY: 14NM / CACHE: 8MB / MEMORY SUPPORT: 64GB DDR4 @ 2666 MHZ / MAX PCIE LANES: 16

HARDWARE Reviews

ROUND-UP

ASUS RADEON RX 580 4GB www.asus.com £380

ASUS TUF X299 MARK 1 www.asus.com £285 MOBO

It’s weird to think that this is one of the most affordable X299 motherboards out there right now. TUF hasn’t ever let us down in the past, and, as a brand, it’s one of the few we go to without question. If the brash styling of Asus’s ROG Strix line doesn’t cut it for you, perhaps TUF’s armour-based X299 boards can sway you instead. The integrated PCB/M.2 cooling, memory support and clean RGB lighting makes this a solid choice for anyone looking to build a crisp-looking setup.

The RX 580 might not be anything other than an overclocked RX 480, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a good card. Although the price of these is through the roof, once they come back down to that £220 sweet spot (goddammit, cryptocurrency), it’ll definitely be the card to get, especially if you game % at 1080p.

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We managed to reach an impressive 4.4 GHz on my Core i9-7900X with relative ease. Asus’s BIOS is also one of the easier to work with if you’re new to overclocking. CHIPSET/SOCKET: X299 / LGA 2066 / FORM FACTOR: ATX / MEMORY SUPPORT: 128GB DDR4 @ 4133 MT/S /

91%

M.2 / U.2 SUPPORT: 2X M.2 / SATA SUPPORT: 8X SATA 6GB/S

BITFENIX PORTAL www.bitfenix.com £120

CORSAIR VOID PRO WIRELESS www.corsair.com £100

HEADSET

It’s been a while since we first took a look at Corsair’s Void series of headsets. We’ve always had a penchant for wireless headsets, and so when Corsair announced a V2 of its Voids, we had to get a pair. So what’s new for the headset? Well, the audio drivers have been tweaked to provide a more resonant sound, the microphone has been redeveloped from the ground up for greater sensitivity, and, more importantly, the ear cups have been changed out for memory foam additions. That last bit is a big deal. Previously, the ear cups on the Voids always felt like they were leaking sound out of the bottom of the circumaural cups, but with the memory foam in place, this seems there’s a tighter fit – isolating more noise, whilst also being far more comfortable than its counterparts. DRIVER TECHNOLOGY: 50MM DYNAMIC / FREQUENCY

90%

RESPONSE: 20 HZ - 20 KHZ / IMPEDANCE: 32 OHMS /

Bitfenix has always designed some bonkers cases, whether it’s the Prodigy or the Shinobi, it has always been at the forefront of pushing those case design boundaries further. The Portal is no exception. Its crazy cylindrical ITX design is impressive, the materials used exceptional and the % cooling acceptable.

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ASUS ROG STRIX B250I www.asus.com £125 And what’s better to go with the ITX Portal than a solid Asus motherboard. This B250i Strix is packed with features, including an M.2 PCIe SSD heatsink, eight-pin CPU power, a ton of USB and SATA ports, RGB lighting and even Wi-Fi. Couple that with a stunning price and solid performance. % It’s a winner.

92

CONNECTIVITY: USB / WIRELESS

145

REVIEWS Hardware

1

PCIE LANES

2

SINGLE-CORE PERFORMANCE

Although X299 supports 44 PCIe lanes, these are only available on the Core i9-7900X and higher. That’s a £900 processor.

That Kaby Lake architecture doesn’t disappoint, delivering 190 points in Cinebench R15.

INTEL CORE I7-7740X www.intel.com £320 CPU

3

D U A L- C H A N N E L WOES

You can only use DDR4 in the left slots, others are disabled until you upgrade to a six-core.

4

INTEGR ATED GPU?

The HEDT platform doesn’t support any integrated graphics, meaning you’ll need a dedicated GPU.

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It’s a good job these are near £30 cheaper than their Skylake and Kaby Lake cousins, as that’s about the only saving you’re going to achieve on Intel’s X299 platform. Designed as an all-encompassing, one-size-fits-all chipset, but not without fault. The release of Ryzen has unsettled the blue beast and there’s competition back in the market. X299, Intel’s latest chipset, is an oddity. Comprising everything from four-core, four-thread parts, to 18-core, 36-thread parts, it makes little sense. With both the Core i5-7640X and the, pictured, Core i7-7740X being nothing more than a transplanting of its Kaby Lake quad-core equivalents onto a larger CPU PCB, with the integrated graphics soldered off, 100 MHz added on to the core clock speeds, and a 21W increase to TDP.

The idea is simple. Invest now, with a pricier motherboard, and a quad-channel memory kit, a ‘cheaper’ dual-channel 2066 processor, and then invest in one of the meatier eight-core parts later on. As far as performance goes, it’s identical to our Kaby Lake Core i7-7700K sample. In short, if you’re on Haswell or above, we’d say to hold off, unless you desperately need more processing power.

68%

BASE/TURBO CLOCK: 4.3 GHZ / 4.5 GHZ / CORES/THREADS: 4/8 / LITHOGRAPHY: 14NM / CACHE: 8MB / MEMORY SUPPORT: 64GB DDR4 @ 2666 MHZ / MAX PCIE LANES: 16

HARDWARE Reviews

ROUND-UP

ROG STRIX EVOLVE www.asus.com £55

ASUS ROG STRIX GEFORCE GTX 1080 TI www.asus.com £800 GRAPHICS CARD

That’s one hell of a price tag for a GPU. No matter how you look at it, it’s no small amount of cash. But does it warrant the splurge? At 1440p I managed to hit over 100 frames per second in Far Cry Primal and The Division, and even kept Rise of the Tomb Raider and Total War: Attila comfortably above 60fps, with all of the graphical settings ramped right up. Move up to 4K and Far Cry Primal hits that 60fps sweet spot easily.

The Evolve is one of the more interesting gaming mice out there. Featuring swappable top plates, you can turn this from a right-handed mouse to a left-handed ergonomic dream with ease. It comes with Asus’s RGB lighting and is comfortable to grip. If only the material was a touch more % premium.

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The biggest bonus to this AIB card, however, is the cooling solution. The triple-fan DC III Strix cooler is one of the best in the business, if you’re looking for a super-quiet card, the Strix is the one to get. GPU: PASCAL / LITHOGRAPHY: 16NM FINFET /

84%

CORES: 3,540 / MEMORY: 11GB GDDR5X / MEMORY BUS: 352-BIT

PULSEFIRE FPS www.hyperxgaming.com £50 Another £50 mouse, this time from HyperX. Being its first venture into the mouse ecosystem, the Pulsefire is inspired by other competing brands, with an overall look not too dissimilar from Razer’s DeathAdder. Don’t let that put you off, however, it’s a crisp palm-gripping tool, locked and loaded ready % for any FPS gamer.

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MSI GEFORCE GTX 1050 TI 4GT LP QCK PRISM MOUSEPAD

www.msi.com £150

www.steelseries.com £65 GRAPHICS CARD

MSI’s GTX 1050 Ti might not make a lot of sense at first glance, but it’s one of the more interesting cards we’ve reviewed this year. Why is that, you ask? Low profile, no PCIe power, and fairly impressive performance. For those looking to upgrade, it’s a viable budget option. For high-to-ultra 1080p gaming you can easily hit around 40-50fps in most AAA titles, as long as the game doesn’t bottleneck the CPU.

And if that isn’t your jam, put up £120 for the 1050 2GB version and you’ve got yourself a gnarly HTPC as well. It is louder than we’d like to admit, but for the money, it’s not a bad investment.

83%

GPU: PASCAL / LITHOGRAPHY: 16NM FINFET / M.2 / CORES: 768 / MEMORY: 4GB GDDR /

It’s hard to stomach paying £65 for a mousemat. That said, the Prism expands on the likes of Corsair’s Polaris MM800 and Razer’s Firefly by smoothing out the USB hub and making sure the RGB LEDs are visible. Swapping out from a smooth to a more textured surface is also a pretty neat and % intriguing feature.

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MEMORY BUS: 128 BIT

147

REVIEWS Hardware

1

GPU POWER

2

IPS PERFECTION?

Boy, do you need some serious GPU grunt to power this screen. At a minimum, you’ll need a single GTX 1080, or a 1080 Ti, to enjoy it fully.

IPS (in-plane switching) is, by far, the most accurate when it comes to colour reproduction.

3

NO 120HZ?

Is this the end of 4K 60Hz being the best? Asus, Acer and AOC have announced 120Hz 4K panels but they’ll be priced at £2,000-plus.

4

PRICE TAG?

AOC’s AG271UG isn’t the first to market, but it does come at an attractive price – almost £70 cheaper than the Asus equivalent.

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AOC AGON AG271UG www.aoc.com £650 MONITOR

Choosing a monitor is possibly the most difficult decision you’ll ever have to make when it comes to your gaming rig. Which resolution do you go for? What graphics card do you have? Do you prefer higher refresh rates, or more clarity in your gaming? What about adaptive sync? There’s never a perfect answer. A screen great for shooters will be less than stellar for RPGs, and vice versa. Arguably AOC’s AGON AG271UG is the best of what PC gaming has to offer. Got a GTX 1080 Ti, and a penchant mindblowing visuals? Then this screen is the one for you. Featuring 4K, an IPS panel for stunning colour reproduction, a four-millisecond response time and G-Sync, it more than makes up for its price. It’s one of the nicest screens we’ve used. There’s a lot to be said for that IPS 4K

combo, although we’re surprised it isn’t available in a 32-inch form factor. It’s quite hard to discern the difference between 1440p and 4K at 27 inches. Boost that up to 32 inches, however, and the difference is huge. Those extra five inches are joyous. G-Sync is also a fairly nice feature, although adaptive sync (found in the Nvidia control panel) does negate a lot of its benefits if you fancy saving the cash.

86%

SCREEN SIZE: 27 INCHES / PANEL TECH: IPS / NATIVE RES: 3840X2160 / REFRESH RATE: 60 HZ / RESPONSE RATE: 4MS GTG

HARDWARE Reviews

ROUND-UP

MASTERPULSE www.coolermaster.com £60

AMD RYZEN 5 1500X www.amd.com £170 CPU

When this was written, Intel was yet to reveal a decent competitor to AMD’s Ryzen processors – a response that’s best described as confusing. For all the constant criticism of Ryzen for gaming and early BIOS teething issues, the plucky underdog really does seem to have the market pinned right now. Think of the 1500X as the top-end Core i7 equivalent, just at half the price and coming with a stock cooler as well. In-game, it’s a solid performer, akin to

any Devil’s Canyon part – it still has a few niggles, but we’re talking about less than a 5% difference in framerate between that and its closest Intel competition.

The MasterPulse headphones are an intriguing new design from CM, featuring both an open and closed back design, depending on how bassy a sound you want. The overall rigid design, and strong comfortable headband ensures they’ll last the test of time, and the sound quality is solid, too. % Highly commended.

84

BASE/TURBO CLOCK: 3.6GHZ / 3.7GHZ / CORES/THREADS: 4/8 / LITHOGRAPHY: 14NM /

89%

CACHE: 16MB / MEMORY SUPPORT: 64GB DDR4 @ 2666MHZ / MAX PCIE LANES: 20

GLAIVE BLACK www.corsair.com £70 We had our reservations when we first saw the Glaive, being big fans of the M65. The design is lacklustre, and the professional flair Corsair once touted seems to have dried up in favour of a gaming-centric style. That said, it’s a comfortable, precise, solid palm grip mouse that is well worth % your consideration.

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ASUS RAMPAGE V EDITION 10 OPTANE MEMORY 16GB

www.asus.com £545

www.intel.com £50 MOBO

Skylake-X doesn’t offer anything particularly new or interesting, with performance likely to be no more than 10% over last generation.

Furnishing your rig with a better motherboard makes a lot of sense. The Rampage V Edition 10 is aesthetically stunning, and exceptionally well equipped. It’s one of the only boards capable of pushing our Core i7-6950X to 4.4GHz and beyond, and its vast arsenal of connectivity

options makes this the perfect X99 motherboard. If you can stomach the eyewatering price, there’s no doubt this thing is the perfect showpiece for your desktop. CHIPSET/SOCKET: X99 / LGA 2011-3 / FORM FACTOR: E-ATX

88%

/ MEMORY SUPPORT: 128GB DDR4 @ 3333 MT/S / M.2 / U.2 SUPPORT: 1X M.2, 1X U.2 /

It’ll cost you a mere £50 to speed up an old hard drive to SSD speeds, but only if you’re running a Z270 and the latest Kaby Lake platform. It’s a new form of caching technology, similar to RST, but lacks substance. Save the cash you’d spend on this and go out there and buy yourself a 120GB SSD for % your OS instead.

58

SATA SUPPORT: 10X SATA 6GB/S

149

REVIEWS Hardware

1

CORE COUNT

More cores and more threads make Ryzen the king when it comes to Twitch streaming and video content creation.

2

OVERCLOCKING

The overclocking situation is still a little lacklustre on this one. You can crank all four cores up to 4GHz.

3

PRICE

At £240, the Intel equivalent to Ryzen is the Core i5-7600K, a four-core, four-thread processor. For a total of a third of the processing power.

4

FUTURE PROOFING

The six cores, solid single-core performance, and hefty chipset should sort you out for the next four to five years.

150

AMD RYZEN 5 1600X www.amd.com £240 CPU

Six cores and 12 threads make this a heavy hitter. Well, sort of. It’s hard to ignore just how much of an incredible proposition Ryzen is to any looking at joining the ranks of streamers and people who make videos across the globe. But what about gaming? That’s Ryzen’s Achilles heel, right? The answer isn’t as easy as the majority of fanboys would believe. Ryzen has problems. Specifically at higher framerates (120+), stuttering in older titles that no longer have developer support. Ultimately, each Ryzen processor will operate from multiple core complexes (two, in fact). Each complex is capable of housing four individual cores that can communicate with one another. The latencies within each complex are low, but as soon as Windows starts scheduling processes across both complexes, latency increases, in turn creating irregularities.

That said, Ryzen is fine in developer-supported titles, at high-res and lower framerates. If you’re looking to game at 1440p or 4K, Ryzen is only few frames behind its competition. The 1600X is a jack of all trades; it presents 12 threads of power at a phenomenal price. It feels like we’d be doing you a disservice suggesting you buy anything other than Ryzen today.

90%

BASE/TURBO CLOCK: 3.6GHZ / 4.0GHZ / CORES/THREADS: 6/12 / LITHOGRAPHY: 14NM / CACHE: 20MB / MEMORY SUPPORT: 64GB DDR4 @ 2666MHZ / MAX PCIE LANES: 20

HARDWARE Reviews

ROUND-UP

ARCTIS 7 www.steelseries.com £158

ASUS MAXIMUS IX APEX www.asus.com £285 MOBO

It’s nice to see AIB manufacturers do something crazy for once, and the Apex is a marvel of mechanical engineering and an overclocking masterpiece. Two memory slots allow for dualchannel DDR4 for a total of 32GB of up to 4133 MT/s memory. The others are replaced by a DIMM.2 slot, usable with Asus’ add-in card, allowing you to run two M.2 PCIe x4 NVMe SSDs via the DRAM bus, enabling zero bottlenecks outside of thermal throttling.

It’s expensive, but it’s still more affordable than a Formula or Code.

Wireless headsets with a ski band for a headrest; what’s not to love about the Arctis 7? It’s comfortable, clean-looking and generally a well-rounded headset. The headphone drivers could use some love, widening that soundscape and whacking up the bass, but otherwise they’re a solid pair of cans for the price. % Worth a listen.

78

CHIPSET/SOCKET: Z270 / LGA1151 / FORM FACTOR: ATX / MEMORY SUPPORT: 64GB DDR4 @ 4133 MT/S / M.2 / U.2 SUPPORT: 2X M.2 / SATA SUPPORT: 4X SATA

87%

6GB/S / REAR I/O: 6X USB 3.0, 1X USB 3.1 TYPE A, 1X USB 3.1 TYPE C, INTEL GIGABIT ETHERNET, 5.1 AUDIO, OPTICAL OUT, HDMI, DISPLAY PORT, 2X PS/2 PORTS.

G413 CARBON www.msi.com £100 We’ve been using this keyboard for a while, and it’s safe to say we’re in love. The crisp aluminium finish is lush, the no-fuss red backlight is enjoyable, the clean design outstanding and the USB passthrough just what we need. Couple that with Logitech’s own Romer G switches, and a relatively tidy price tag, % and you have us sold.

94

MSI X370 GAMING PRO CARBON www.msi.com £175 MOBO

ROG GLADIUS II

We spent ages combing over AMD’s motherboards, trying to find out just which one offers the best value. This was the clear winner.

MSI’s X370 aesthetic may not be for everyone, but it’s hard to argue with just how well equipped it is. With two M.2 PCIe x4 slots, one featuring MSI’s heat shield, and reinforced PCIe and DDR slots, the list is vast as to what this motherboard can support. Although integrated graphics hasn’t been featured

on the lineup yet, we suspect that the Ryzen 3 series may be APUs. CHIPSET/SOCKET: X370 / AM4 / FORM FACTOR: ATX / MEMORY SUPPORT: 64GB DDR4 @ 3200 MT/S / M.2 / U.2 SUPPORT: 2X M.2 / SATA SUPPORT: 6X SATA 6GB/S /

95%

REAR I/O: 2X USB 2.0, 4X USB 3.0, 1X USB 3.1 TYPE A, 1X USB 3.1 TYPE C, INTEL GIGABIT ETHERNET, 5.1 AUDIO,

www.asus.com £80 RGB for everyone. The Gladius is its own entity now, and a far cry from the Deathadder clone we saw with the first iteration of this model. The design is comfortable and well built, the cable dependable and the palm grip feels just right. The only hiccup? The fairly % hefty price.

84

OPTICAL OUT.

151

REVIEWS Hardware

1

DIAMOND COOLER

3

GOOD VALUE?

Nvidia’s 10 series cards look good and are a fantastic cooling solution. The blower design excels in small form factor cases, and those lacking suitable internal airflow.

Although Nvidia has been charging us near £700 for the past year for the GTX 1080, and £1,200 for the Titan, it still doesn’t feel like we’re being short changed with this card.

2

OVERCLOCKING PROWESS

4

1440P & 4K KING

We took a retail sample all the way up to 2.0GHz core clock and 12Gbps memory bandwidth with ease, boosting performance by near 15%.

Whether you game at high refresh rates at 1440p, or just 4K, this card is the king. We’re curious to see what’ll happen when we put two of these beauties together…

NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 1080 TI www.nvidia.com £700 GPU

It feels like only yesterday we were sat here declaring the GTX 1080 as the true king of 4K gaming. But honestly, the Ti was not something we expected. The 1080 was priced resolutely at £700 on average, and the Titan X was sitting pretty at a huge £1,200 for a meagre 10-15% improvement in frame rates. Now there’s this Frankenstein’s monster of a graphics card solution. What do we mean by that? Let’s compare the 1080 Ti and the Titan X. By default the 1080 Ti has the same, fully loaded GP102 core featuring 12 billion transistors, the same 3,584 CUDA cores, and the same 224 of texture units as found in the £500 more expensive Titan XP. However, that’s where the similarities end. The VRAM in particular is the most intriguing. The Ti loses 1GB of GDDR5X, dropping it down to 11GB total, on a 352-bit bus against the Titan’s 384. Yet rather intriguingly, it has an

11Gbps memory clock as opposed to the rest of the 10 series. All this on top of having higher, and tighter base and boost clocks. This card, if ever there was one, is the Titan killer we all expected from AMD, not Nvidia. Not only does it perform outstandingly at 4K (56fps in Far Cry Primal, and 55 in The Division), but it’s also shunted the rest of Nvidia’s 10 series down in price.

95%

152

LITHOGRAPHY: 16NM FINFET / TRANSISTOR COUNT: 12 BILLION / CUDA CORES: 3,584 / CORE/BOOST CLOCK: 1481 MHZ / 1582 MHZ / MEMORY: 11GB GDDR5X / DISPLAY CONNECTORS: DISPLAY PORT 1.4, HDMI 2.0(B)

HARDWARE Reviews

ROUND-UP

PRIME X370-PRO www.asus.com £155

CORSAIR K95 PLATINUM www.corsair.com £200 KEYBOARD

£200 for a keyboard. But this isn’t a keyboard designed for those on a budget. The K95 Platinum takes all of the best from Corsair’s vast lineup of K series keyboards and packs it into a svelte aluminium chassis. With your choice of either Cherry MX Brown or Speed switches, the K95 also comes with dedicated macro and media keys, an exceptionally premium-looking wrist rest, and, of course, that plethora of RGB lighting. That’s not to say it isn’t flawed. The coloured grey keycaps, and the garish overly gamer font face are a step away from

Corsair’s traditional clean crisp black design, while the silver platinum of the media scroll wheel is stark against the black aluminium backdrop.

Asus’s Prime X370-Pro is the only direct step down from the prestigious ROG Crosshair, and we’ve not been impressed with it so far. Although the connectivity and overall looks are solid, memory performance has been somewhat flaky. It seems Asus’s ROG development team pumps out BIOS far faster and to a far better degree than its % Prime compatriots.

64

SWITCH TYPE: CHERRY MX SPEED / BROWN / KEY DURABILITY: 50 MILLION KEY OPERATIONS / FULLY PROGRAMMABLE KEYS: YES / DEDICATED MACRO KEYS: 6 PT /

81%

RGB LIGHTING: 6 PT / N-KEY ROLLOVER: FULL / PASSTHROUGH: USB

AORUS GA-AX370-GAMING 5 www.gigabyte.us £205 This was the first Gigabyte offering on the table, and what a beauty it is. The satin white finish really helps this board look the part in any colour matched system. Couple that with its solid BIOS and its plug-and-play attitude, and Gigabyte has nailed it on this one. Memory support is still a little flaky this early on, but that’s to be expected % at this stage.

85

ASUS ROG CLAYMORE www.asus.com £200 KEYBOARD

Asus is another brand yearning for £200 of your hard earned cash for its latest keyboard. Well into its development cycle it’s a keyboard designed to be as versatile as it is crazy to look at, but do we like the cut of its jib?

The Claymore’s biggest feature is a detachable numpad. Leave it on for your daily Excel spreadsheet tasks, but once you start gaming, pull it off and place it to one side, enabling you some nice wide arcs for your low DPI skill shot settings, and the better ergonomics that come with it. Don’t care for our numpad friend and want to save yourself

£60? Then get yourself a Core version instead. The Claymore is a well rounded bit of kit, but for £200, you decide whether it’s worth it. SWITCH TYPE: CHERRY MX BLACK / BROWN / BLUE / RED / KEY DURABILITY: 50 MILLION KEY OPERATIONS / FULLY

83%

PROGRAMMABLE KEYS: YES / DEDICATED MACRO KEYS: YES / RGB LIGHTING: YES / N-KEY ROLLOVER:

X370 XPOWER GAMING TITANIUM www.msi.com £300 Don’t let the silver put you off – this board’s aesthetic works a treat. Couple that with M.2 support, a retweaked heat shield, and solid (2666MHz) memory support, and it will look the part in any high end system. The added HDMI and DisplayPort rear I/O hint at APUs launching soon. % That’s exciting.

91

FULL / PASSTHROUGH: NO

153

REVIEWS Hardware

1

RYZEN 5

2

SUPPORT

Expect to see Ryzen 5 drop later this year, with better single core, a stunning price, and hopefully solid 1080p performance.

Ryzen has support for up to 20 PCIe lanes – 16 dedicated to the GPUs, and four isolated for PCIe SSDs.

3

TEMPER ATURE

Temperatures are a mixed bag, with the top end chip and a decent AIO cooler idling at 50-60 degrees, yet only reaching 70-75 degrees under heavy load.

4

OVERCLOCKING

Overclocking also seems nonexistent, but we’ve seen overclocks up at 4.1GHz, which gives Intel’s Core i7-6950X a run for its money.

154

RYZEN 7 1800X www.amd.com £500 CPU

With Ryzen it looks like AMD is finally back with its A game. The plucky processor manufacturing underdog has brought to the table a 14nm eight-core, 16-thread rendering powerhouse at an astonishing price, but is it the right fit for you? The 1800X is nothing short of incredible value. If your main hobby is video editing, or game streaming from a single system, this thing is a dream. The Intel equivalent, the Core i7-6900K, would set you back almost £950 in comparison. Generally speaking, it’s a high-end-desktop part, priced at an almost mainstream level. Its single core performance, although lacking in contrast to Intel’s Core i7-7700K, is still at the same level as Haswell’s Core i7-4790K, and at an almost identical level to Intel’s current generation of Broadwell-E parts too.

The big doozy, however, is game performance. At 1440p or higher Ryzen’s 7 series shines with most titles, matching Intel within 1-2fps on average, (39 vs 41fps in Total War: Attila, and 75 vs 77 in Far Cry Primal). But at 1080p things do get a bit ropey, with reports of frame rates dropping by 10-15fps. That said, if you want to get into video editing/game streaming the R7 1800X is the perfect choice.

93%

BASE/TURBO CLOCK: 3.7GHZ / 4.0GHZ / CORES/THREADS: 8/16 / LITHOGRAPHY: 14NM / CACHE: 20MB / MEMORY SUPPORT: 64GB DDR4 @ 2666MHZ / MAX PCIE LANES: 20

HARDWARE Reviews

ROUND-UP

SILENT WINGS 3 120MM HIGH SPEED FAN

ASUS CROSSHAIR VI HERO

www.bequiet.com £20

www.asus.com £250 MOBO

In forcing new motherboards on us with every two processor gens, most of Intel’s powered systems are packed with the latest connection standards. AMD, meanwhile, has predominantly been aimed at utilising the same socket.

Another £20 fan hits our testing block. Stylish, black, quiet, and as impressive as Noctua, Be Quiet!’s Silent Wings 3 impressed us with its noise cancelling, swappable mounts, low operating speeds and high static pressure at 28 dB(A). We very much like how % quietly it runs.

85

Welcome then to the first in a new iteration of chipsets from Team Red, X370. Featuring support for all of the latest Ryzen processors, M.2 PCIe SSDs, dual slot graphics cards, native USB 3.1 support, and a plethora of SATA support, Asus was first with a new motherboard. With a crisp design, solid performance and only minor memory niggles, it’s

well equipped, performs solidly and has even managed some world record overclocks under LN2. CHIPSET/SOCKET: X370 / AM4 / FORM FACTOR: ATX / MEMORY SUPPORT: 64GB DDR4 @ 3200 MT/S / M.2 / U.2 SUPPORT: 1X M.2 / SATA SUPPORT: 8X SATA 6GB/S / REAR I/O: 4X USB 2.0, 8X USB 3.0, 1X USB 3.1 TYPE A,

92%

1X USB 3.1 TYPE C, INTEL GIGABIT ETHERNET, 5.1 AUDIO,

KRAKEN X52

OPTICAL OUT

www.nzxt.com £140 With an infinity mirror, 240mm AIO, braided cable, and solid performance, it’s hard to imagine that there’s a nicer looking liquid cooler out there. The LED ring, fully customisable through NZXT’s CAM software, provides those perfect finishing touches to any aesthetically minded system builder. A clear-panelled case is a must with this bad boy. %

92

ASUS GEFORCE ROG STRIX GTX 1080 A8G SOUND BLASTERX SIEGE M04

www.asus.com £550 GPU

We gave the original Asus GTX 1080 OC a bad rap for being a poor overclocker and coming in at an astonishing £900, or so we thought. At the time you could buy it for £720 from Scan, and so we have to stand corrected.

All that aside, the recent launch of the GTX 1080 Ti has made GPU prices across Nvidia’s range plummet, making it a perfect time to pick up this 1440p, 4K dominating GPU. Asus’s A8G comes with a super quiet tri fan design, with integrated RGB lighting, and impressive performance. It’s hard to argue just how much of an upgrade

the GTX 1080 is over the GTX 980. In both Far Cry Primal and The Division we saw frame rates up into the 70s, maxed out, and a more than comfortable 52 and 54fps at 4K too, with just one drop in the AA settings.

91%

GPU: PASCAL / LITHOGRAPHY: 16NM FINFET / CORES: 2560 / MEMORY: 8GB GDDR5X /

www.us.creative.com £70 Creative’s first foray into the world of pointer peripherals, this mouse features PixArt’s tried and true PMW3360 optical sensor, on top of the usual barrage of extra buttons, RGB lighting and multiple polling ratings. It has a comfortable grip too, although the finish could use a little work, along with the quite frankly eye-watering % price. Ouch.

77

MEMORY BUS: 320BIT

155

HARDWARE Buyer’s Guide

BUYER’S GUIDE Build the best PC for your budget

ADVANCED

MID-RANGE

BUDGET

KEY

156

Budget build

Mid-range build

Advanced build

PC gaming is for everyone. Pick the parts you want to build a new, well-rounded PC for a good price.

You want to run every new game at 1080p 60fps. This recommended build will see you through.

You’re looking for the best PC on the market and superior components. But you still want to spend smart.

BUYER’S GUIDE

MOTHERBOARD

Z370-A Pro

PROCESSOR

Core i3-8100

GRAPHICS CARD

Hardware

GeForce GTX 1060 3GB

MSI £110 What better place to start than with MSI’s Z370-A Pro? With plenty of expandability, it’s perfect for any entry rig.

Intel £105 Intel’s new Coffee Lake processors add an additional two cores to the lineup. Think of this as a Core i5 processor, but cheaper.

MEMORY

Ripjaws V Series 8GB (2x4GB) – 2400

POWER SUPPLY

500BQ

SSD

EVGA £270 Its prices are haywire due to cryptocurrency mining, but this is still the best deal you can get right now.

A400 120GB

G.Skill £96 Memory prices are horrendous right now, however this 8GB 2400 MHz kit is perfect.

EVGA £56 It may be cheap, but this 500W PSU is more than enough to handle any budget build. This rig only draws 269W at maximum load, too.

HDD

Kingston £38 A 120GB SSD will help with some zippy boot times without breaking the bank. Just don’t go installing too many games on here.

WD Blue 1TB 7200rpm

T O TA L £984

CASE

EN NEW TR Y

KEYBOARD

Asus £100 1080p and 24 inches is a perfect match for that GTX 1060 GPU. Expect an easy 60fps in all of your titles, in crisp clear HD perfection.

MOUSE CONTROLLER

HEADSET

Enjoy 1080p gaming without breaking the bank

VP247HA

Bitfenix £34 The Neos provides decent airflow, good support for 3.5-inch hard drives, and a fairly painless build experience.

450K Cougar £40 Smart design, hybrid mechanical switches, splashproof exterior and three backlighting colour options make this a good pick.

Rival 100 SteelSeries £30 SteelSeries’ Rival lineup is ideal for those looking to get a quality gaming mouse at a respectable price. EN NEW TR Y

BUDGET BUILD

Neos

DISPLAY

Western Digital £40 One terabyte of old-fashioned hard storage is the perfect home for all of your media, backups and storage-hungry games.

Cloud Stinger HyperX £40 We love the HyperX Cloud, but at £70 it’s too much for an entry-level system. The Cloud Stinger is the next best thing.

F310 Gamepad Logitech £25 It’s no Xbox 360 controller, but this cheap, cheerful pad will help you power through all the controller-friendly games in your library.

157

HARDWARE

MOTHERBOARD PROCESSOR

Core i5-8400

GTX 1070 SC Gaming ACX

MSI £140 This is a nice-looking bit of kit at a good price. Couple that with two M.2 slots, and it’s the perfect place to house that Core i5.

Intel £180 Intel’s latest boasts six of its Coffee Lake cores, with great single-core performance. It even gives last-gen’s i7 a run for its money.

MasterLiquid Lite 240

MEMORY

CoolerMaster £45 This 240mm, dual-fan, all-in-one liquid CPU cooler is ludicrously cheap, but performs well and stays quiet, too.

Ballistix Sport LT 16GB (2x8GB) – 2666

POWER SUPPLY

EN NEW TR Y

EVGA £530 Trying to balance prices, we’ve opted to drop down to an SC Gaming card. Don’t worry, you only lose out on a very minor overclock.

RMx 650W

SSD

COOLER

Z370 Tomahawk

GRAPHICS CARD

Buyer’s Guide

850 EVO 250GB

Crucial £167 This is the cheapest 2666 16GB kit out there, and perfect for any midrange build.

Corsair £81 There’s nothing like having a quality power supply. Get a decent cable kit for this one and you can easily spice up your rig.

HDD

Samsung £83 Samsung retains its top spot on the SSD pile with the fantastically priced, very speedy 850 EVO. Still the best price/performance.

WD Blue 1TB 7200RPM

158

EN NEW TR Y

AGON AG251FZ AOC £300 Not only does this 1080p monitor have a lightning-fast 240Hz refresh rate but it produces decent image quality, too.

KEYBOARD

T O TA L £1,854

Phanteks £78 The clean lines, intuitive build features and fantastic price cements the Eclipse as our mid-range case of choice.

Alloy FPS Cherry MX Blue

MOUSE

Our recommended build for playing the latest games

Eclipse P400S TG

Castor

HEADSET

MID-RANGE BUILD

DISPLAY

CASE

Western Digital £40 SSDs are great, but they’re still far from cheap. This 1TB HDD will hold as many games as you will need.

HyperX Cloud

HyperX £93 This crisp keyboard from HyperX ticks all the right boxes. It may lack RGB, but those clicky keys will keep you happy for years.

Mionix £47 The Castor is a dream to use and supportive like a glove. With clutter-free software and an optical sensor, it’s hard to go wrong.

Kingston £70 Despite the budget price, we recommend this headset. There’s simply nothing better for the money.

BUYER’S GUIDE

MOTHERBOARD

Crosshair VI Hero

PROCESSOR

Ryzen 7 1800X

GRAPHICS CARD

GTX 1080 Ti Strix

COOLER

Kraken X62

MEMORY

Vengeance LED RGB 32GB - 3200

POWER SUPPLY

HX750i 80 Plus Platinum

SSD

Hardware

960 Evo 250GB M2 PCIe SSD

Asus £220 The best Ryzen board out now. It provides a stable backbone for any early adopter looking to join the red core revolution.

AMD £290 The 1800X, combined with 32GB of 3200 MT/s, dominates both single and multi-core tasks with ease.

Asus £950 This is the height of efficiency. Silent and well equipped to dissipate heat, the 1080 Ti GPU will power any title you throw at it.

NZXT £ 130 The Kraken is the culmination of three of our favourite things: an infinity mirror, a 280mm radiator and slick braided cooling.

Corsair £400 Ryzen is the one processor that does benefit hugely from higher frequency memory. This kit is perfect for any would-be video expert.

Corsair £135 Modular, custom cable kits, and a platinum efficiency rating. What’s not to love about this Corsair PSU? Nothing, that’s what.

HDD

Samsung £110 A cost-effective OS drive delivering sequential read and write speeds of 3200MB/s and 1500MB/s respectively.

MX300 1.1TB SSD

CASE DISPLAY

T O TA L £3,708

KEYBOARD

Go above and beyond with a PC powerful enough to end worlds

AGON AG271QG

K70 LUX RGB

MOUSE

ADVANCED BUILD

Enthoo Evolv ATX TG

Rival 700

HEADSET

Crucial £248 At 1TB, this SSD from Crucial is fantastic value, and more than big enough for all of your AAA gaming titles.

ATH-AG1X

Phanteks £175 The 5mm thick aluminium panels resonate with svelte professionalism, and the interior makes building inside this a dream.

AOC £550 It’s £200 cheaper than Asus’s PG279QG, and we can’t tell why. 165Hz, IPS, G-Sync, 4ms response... this is the perfect screen.

Corsair £160 Even when money is no object it’s hard to argue against Corsair’s latest K70. A no-fuss, solid piece of aluminium craftsmanship.

SteelSeries £60 Swappable sensors, back plates, 3D printed rear guards and an OLED display. The most comfortable, adaptive mouse we’ve used.

Audio-technica £280 What’s life without a nice set of cans? The ATH-AG1X set is the pinnacle of headphones, and it’s super comfy to boot.

159

 





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9001

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