[PDF] THE BEST SELLING MAG FOR PC HARDWARE, OVERCLOCKING, GAMING & MODDING

1 THE BEST SELLING MAG FOR PC HARDWARE, OVERCLOCKING, GAMING & MODDING / ISSUE 147 DECEMBER 2015/ 5.99 PLUS SKYLAKE ...

THE BESTSELLING MAG FOR PC HARDWARE, OVERCLOCKING, GAMING & MODDING / ISSUE 147

24.5cm

DECEMBER 2015/£5.99

PLUS SKYLAKE MOTHERBOARD SUPERTEST 13 Z170 BOARDS REVIEWED ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE WHAT MAKES GAME CHARACTERS TICK?

25cm

C@ntrol MSS

Welcome Custom PC Issue 147

Editorial

EDITOR Ben Hardwidge [emailprotected]

Dennis Publishing Limited

LABS Matthew Lambert Orestis Bastounis

Tel: 020 7907 6000 fax 020 7907 6193

MODDING EDITOR Antony Leather

MANAGING DIRECTOR DENNIS TECHNOLOGY John Garewal

GAMES EDITOR Rick Lane ART EDITOR Bill Bagnall www.billbagnalldesign.com PRODUCTION EDITOR Julie Birrell CONTRIBUTORS Gareth Halfacree, James Gorbold, Mike Jennings, Paul Goodhead, Richard Swinburne, Simon Treadaway, Tracy King PHOTOGRAPHY Antony Leather, Gareth Halfacree, Mike Jennings

Publishing & Marketing GROUP PUBLISHER Paul Rayner [emailprotected]

LICENSING MANAGER Carlotta Serantoni [emailprotected] +44 (0)20 7907 6550 LICENSING & SYNDICATION ASSISTANT Nicole Adams [emailprotected] +44 (0)20 7907 6134 SYNDICATION SENIOR MANAGER Anjum Dosaj +44 (0)20 7907 6132

Commercial & Advertising Paul Rayner [emailprotected]

DIRECTOR OF ADVERTISING Julian Lloyd Evans

CEO Ian Westwood NEWSTRADE DIRECTOR David Barker FINANCE DIRECTOR Brett Reynolds GROUP FINANCE DIRECTOR Ian Leggett CHIEF EXECUTIVE James Tye COMPANY FOUNDER Felix Dennis

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The paper used in this magazine is produced from sustainable fibre, manufactured by mills with a valid chain of custody. DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME The information in this magazine is given in good faith. Dennis Publishing Limited cannot accept any responsibility for loss, disruption or damage to your data or your computer that may occur as a result of following or attempting to follow advice given in the magazine. If things do go wrong, take a break. Custom PC is produced by Mr Freelance Limited, and published monthly by Dennis Publishing Ltd, 30 Cleveland Street, London W1T 4JD, a company registered in England number 1138891. Entire contents © Dennis Publishing Ltd licensed by Felden. © Copyright Dennis Publishing Limited. Custom PC is a trademark of Felix Dennis.

C U STO M P C / ISSUE 147

Contents Welcome to Issue 147

84 Build a tiny gaming powerhouse AMD’s new Nano graphics card is an incredible achievement, packing a supremely powerful GPU onto a PCB that measures just 6in across. Its use of high-bandwidth memory cuts out the need to accommodate big GDDR5 chips, and it doesn’t need a liquidcooling system. The result is an engineering triumph – a miniature graphics card that can even play some games at 4K resolutions. It has its pros and cons, as you’ll find out in the review on p18, but it also offers a great opportunity to build a tidy and incredibly powerful mini PC. As such, we enlisted the help of Parvum to build us a custom version of its X1.0 mini-ITX chassis, and brought in Asus’ latest mini-ITX Z170 motherboard to build a Skylake Nano system. There’s no reason why you can’t do the same either.

Highlights

COVER STORY P84

10 The startup renaissance Niche enthusiast startups such as Parvum are making big established tech firms look like embarrassing dads, argues Richard Swinburne.

Green gaming Tracy King analyses a study claiming that high-end gaming PCs consume the same power as ten consoles.

AMD Radeon R9 Nano AMD says its new miniature graphics card can play games at 4K while also remaining cool and quiet. Is there a catch? Find out in our full review.

24 EVGA nails 4K gaming EVGA clocks up a GeForce GTX 980 Ti to ridiculous levels on this storming graphics card, enabling proper 4K gaming with just a single card.

38 Z170 motherboard Labs We put 12 motherboards through our test suite to find the best enthusiast boards for a variety of budgets.

80 The RED Engine We talk to the developers of The Witcher III engine.

90 AI puppet masters It’s commonly believed that game AI has barely improved since the 1990s, but is this true? Rick Lane investigates.

94 Hobby tech Gareth Halfacree checks out two e-textile kits, while also reporting from Manchester MakeFest.

102 Make drive bays disappear Use filler to give your PC’s front panel a smooth finish.

106 Remove acrylic scratches Accidentally scuffed your case? Never fear. Using a bit of Xerapol can clear up scratches on plastic.

Reviewed this month

106

PRODUCTS REVIEWED

Reviews NAS BOX 17 Thecus W2000

108

GRAPHICS CARDS 18 AMD Radeon R9 Nano 20 Asus GeForce GTX 950 Strix 24 EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti Classified ACX 2.0+

100

MOTHERBOARD 26 Asus Z170i Pro Gaming GAMING KEYBOARD 30 CM Storm Quick Fire XTi

Custom kit

36 36 36 37 36 37

Goggle Cardboard Orbitsound A70 AirSOUND Bar Startech S252BU33R Exploding Kittens: Original Edition Exploding Kittens: NSFW Edition Sandberg USB Master Charger Pro

Z170 Motherboard Labs

Regulars 8 10 12 14 15 29 32 36 56 62 73 80 94 100 102 108 112 113 114

Cover guide

From the editor

Richard Swinburne Letters Tracy King Incoming How we test

56 Chillblast Fusion Nano 58 Box Cube Predator 60 Oblivion Gladiator

Custom kit PC system reviews

Games

Elite products Inverse look

74 Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain 76 Mad Max 78 Zombi

The engine room Hobby tech Customised PC How to guides

Hobby tech

Readers’ drives RealBench leaderboard Your folding milestones

ASRock Fatal1ty Z170 Gaming K4 ASRock Z170 Extreme4 Asus Maximum VIII Gene Asus Maximus VIII Ranger Asus Z170 Pro Gaming EVGA Z170 Classified Gigabyte Z170X-Gaming 3 Gigabyte Z170X-Gaming 5 Gigabyte Z170XP-SLI MSI Z170A Gaming M7 MSI Z170A Gaming Pro MSI Z170A Xpower Gaming TE

PC system reviews

For the win

James Gorbold

40 41 42 44 45 46 48 50 51 52 53 54

26 90

94 Adafruit Gemma Starter Kit 94 Kitronik Electro Fashion Deluxe E-Textiles Pack

OPINION

B E N H A R DW I D G E / FROM THE EDITOR

M.2 IS A SHAMBLES Multiple sizes of cards and interface standards have made M.2 practically incomprehensible, argues Ben Hardwidge here’s a part of me that misses IDE cables. They might have taken up loads of space, and routing them neatly meant taking a masterclass in origami, but if you bought an IDE hard drive, you knew it would work with your system. There might have been several UDMA speed variations, but they were all backwards compatible if you were prepared to sacrifice speed. Of course, there were obvious reasons why we needed new storage interfaces, but IDE looks so remarkably simple compared to the current shambles of storage‘standards’. The Z170 motherboards we’ve reviewed in this month’s Labs test (see p38) have to support a variety of different ports, sockets and standards to tick all the necessary feature boxes. There are regular SATA 6Gpbs ports and SATA Express ports, which are basically a couple of SATA ports strung together with a third new connector. It’s a bit like the storage equivalent of VESA local bus – for those of you without grey beards, VESA local bus was a clunky 32-bit expansion system that bolted a new PCI-esque slot onto a 16-bit ISA slot, resulting in needlessly massive cards – it was soon rightly replaced by PCI. SATA Express is the same – an interim mishmash of technology that hardly anyone supports, and which is going to be rendered obsolete by M.2 anyway. That’s if M.2 can get its act together. I’ve been into tech a long time, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a shambolic approach to creating a tech standard. Firstly, there are different sizes of M.2 devices, so you need to make sure your M.2 slot can physically accommodate your chosen device. This is a nuisance itself, but then you have to wrestle with the interface standard. Some M.2 devices only support SATA, which means they offer no speed advantage over a standard SATA drive. Some devices support PCI-E with AHCI, and others support PCI-E with the

new NVMe standard. It’s not just the device though. You also need to look at what your slot supports. Not every PCI-E M.2 slot is equal; some only offer two lanes, while others offer four, and some only support PCI-E 2, rather than the quicker PCI-E 3 standard. To make matters worse, makers of M.2 devices don’t even seem to understand their market. For example, Samsung has refused to send us review samples of its SM951 M.2 SSDs, as it says the product is only for professional users, yet system builders regularly put these drives into enthusiast gaming systems. We’re now left with a fiasco where many people don’t know if the M.2 device they want will work with their board, meaning they just avoid the whole situation entirely. It’s also further complicated by other factors – not every motherboard will boot from an NVMe drive, for example – if you own such a board, you may be able to use your NVMe drive for data storage, but you’ll need another SSD for Windows. This muddled approach to standards might be acceptable in the world of laptop building, where a manufacturer decides which size and standard its device will support and makes it accordingly. However, it’s not acceptable on the desktop, where people like to mix and match components, and standards need to be clear. Will Z170’s support for 4x PCI-E 3 M.2 devices help to push towards a simpler system? We now have two chipsets (X99 and Z170) that support this standard. However, the size of M.2 device you can install still depends on the motherboard you choose. Either way, makers of M.2 devices and need to stop faffing around, communicate properly with each other and nail down a comprehensible standard.

We have a fiasco where people don’t know if the M.2 device they want will work with their board

Ben Hardwidge is the editor of Custom PC. He likes PCs, heavy metal, real ale and Warhammer 40,000.

[emailprotected]

@custompcmag

OPINION

R I C H A R D SW I N B U R N E / VIEW FROM TAIWAN

STARTUP RENAISSANCE Niche startups, such as Parvum, that are in touch with PC enthusiasts, are making big firms look like embarrassing dads, argues Richard Swinburne hile we’re seeing a slowdown of PC sales, the oftentouted death of the PC has been largely overstated, especially in the innovative land of startup firms. Of course, the PCs and laptops that were found in family homes and student digs a decade ago were mostly used as internet machines and word processors rather than powerful computers, and they’re often being sensibly replaced with tablets and smartphones. Meanwhile, businesses may still be using PCs, but they’re spending longer between upgrade cycles. However, PC gaming, workstations and the enthusiast segment remains very strong. So, while bigvolume PC businesses such Acer, HP and Lenovo are struggling, PC component manufacturers have pivoted towards gaming branding. Sadly, though, the gaming branding also seems to come with a strategy of shying away from genuine innovations and risky ideas, and is instead playing it safe with similar designs to the competition. I truly hope we’ve now reached the peak of gaming branding, lest we suffocate further with the embarrassingly dad-like embrace of big companies’ attempts at marketing to gamers. But the upside of big companies behaving in this way is that it’s left a sizeable gap in the pure enthusiast ecosystem, which has yielded a great opportunity for niche startups to fill the gaps with cool ideas and real innovations. Recently we’ve seen BitFenix, Raijintek, and more recently Parvum and Hex Gear, enter the chassis and cooler fray, sporting innovative and attractive designs that cater for enthusiast needs without resorting to embarrassing gaming branding. Of course, making a case requires much less in the way of precision engineering and machinery than a motherboard, so it’s unlikely you’re going to see the next ROG competitor pop

up overnight. Having said that, though, the explosive growth of mini PCs, maker events and the multi-million-selling Raspberry Pi means it’s not impossible in the future. What’s more, with Windows 10 now having an IoT edition, the crossover between the PC and startup designs is ever closer. Social media is key to generating a core fan base and sustaining noise for these new startups’ brands and products – it’s exactly how firms such as Case Labs, Parvum and Hex Gear all primarily interact with their customers and the modding community. Meanwhile, sponsorship of modders from companies such as EK and BitsPower also make big waves, as the overwhelming majority of modding articles and project logs that go viral on the Internet feature water-cooled builds. With EK just launching its all-in-one cooler, called the Predator, we’re seeing a fresh attack on incumbents such as Corsair or Cooler Master, with their heavily patented all-in-one liquid coolers. Likewise, Alphacool’s GPX-Pro (see p100) combines a radiator, pump and GPU waterblock, while enabling you to use standard water-cooling fittings. We’re even seeing startups making PSU gear. Of course, PSUs can’t easily be made by outsiders from scratch, but third-party manufacturers of PSU accessories, such as Shakmods (another UK startup) are providing enthusiast gear such as cabling accessories, which you rarely see from the big companies – notable exceptions being Corsair’s individually sleeved and coloured cable kits, and SilverStone’s replacement cables. Otherwise, though, the standard big PC companies need to realise the great opportunities provided by working with these more in-touch startups. They could then start to generate new trends, propelling the industry forwards, rather than simply waiting for Intel or Nvidia to lead it in slow steps.

The majority of modding articles that go viral feature water-cooled builds

Richard has worked in tech for over a decade, as a UK journalist, on Asus’ ROG team and now as an industry analyst based in Taiwan

@Bindibadgi

F E E D B AC K

Letters Please send us your feedback and correspondence to [emailprotected] Real-life mods

I’ve just got back from Insomnia 55, where I met my favourite YouTuber DanTDM, and had a good look around the Expo hall, where I saw the Asus ROG Sica (and left £25 lighter as a result). However, the most interesting part of the day was seeing Pandora’s Purple Box, and Team Magoo’s Lumo on the OCUK and In-Win stands respectively. I’m sure you know how you can never really appreciate a mod until you’ve seen it in real life, and this was certainly true for these two. Seeing the water-cooling systems bubbling away is really something, especially when you see people coming to look at the mods who probably don’t even read any PC mags, and seeing them ‘oohing’ and ‘ahhing’ at these machines. Modders must be really proud to hear the nice comments from these strangers. I advise any others readers to take these opportunities to see the machines featured in Readers’ drives. MATT VAUGHAN

Ben: Yes, even the best photography doesn’t get across the experience of seeing these machines in action – there really is some amazing PC modding talent out there, and it’s often on display at these types of events. I’m glad you had the pleasure of seeing these machines in the flesh, as it were.

Worthless wrist straps

I just read the letters page in Issue 145 and, as a modding newby, I would really appreciate guidance on tools and methods appearing in the magazine. From recent personal experience, I’ve found that many antistatic wrist straps aren’t worth a penny because the 12

usually just ground myself by touching the metal on my case when it’s earthed via the mains. That’s an interesting find though – the crocodile clip would indeed need to make a connection with the grounding plate to be worth using; I wonder how many PCs have been built using wrist straps that don’t work.

M.2 confusion

The photos of Pandora’s Purple Box already look good, but you can’t beat seeing the real thing in the flesh

crocodile clip isn’t electrically connected to the earth/ground plate on the wrist strap. I checked out a strap with a multimeter because the ‘free with other hardware’ offer I’d taken up seemed too good to be true, and it certainly was. After trying two different types, I’ve still not found a really good one. What’s more, online retailers don’t understand them – I returned one for being faulty to be told: ‘no postage refund – it is not faulty – we cannot see anything wrong with it’ – their returns staff clearly don’t get issued with multi-meters. If you’re going to use an antistatic wrist strap, I strongly recommend checking it first for electrical continuity – you can do it by just using a battery and torch bulb – if there’s no connection, then there’s no ESD discharge path. I’m now prepared to pay for a functional wrist strap, rather than using free ones, to protect my expensive memory hardware.

Thanks for a great mag. I wanted to ask you if you could consider something. As more M.2 drives are appearing and with Skylake, can you specifically state if the M.2 device or interface to which you’re referring is SATA or NVMe? I think you would agree that a SATA-onlycapable M.2 slot is disappointing and almost pointless, whereas the only M.2 slots we really want are NVMe-capable ones? Or have I totally misunderstood the tech? I thought you needed motherboard support as well as an NVMe drive to make the magic happen, or are all M.2 slots capable of supporting NVMe, maybe via a BIOS update? It would be horrible to buy a great reviewed motherboard with M.2 support to find it didn’t support NVMe, no? DR ASIF ANWAR

Ben: Indeed, not every M.2 slot or device is the same. Some use SATA, some use PCI-E with AHCI and some use PCI-E with NVMe. To make matters

BOB STIMPSON (MANXBOB ON FOLDING@HOME)

Ben: I’ll put my hand up here, and say that I don’t think I’ve actually used an anti-static wrist strap since the 1990s – I

M.2 devices can be exceptionally fast, but you need to make sure your device and slot both support the same standards

I’m sure you know how you can never really appreciate a mod until you’ve seen it in real life

Twitter highlights Follow us on Twitter at @CustomPCmag ArcticMartyn Look who decided to stop by! Now waiting for Mr Tool-kit to show up.

kieraanv Couldn’t agree more with this article about WMC! Best thing I ever made with an HD quad tuner!

more confusing, some chipsets allocate different numbers of PCI-E lanes to M.2 devices, and support different PCI-E generations. What’s more, you also have size compatibility issues, with some slots not being able to accommodate larger cards. It’s all a bit of a confusing mess at the moment, but your best bet at the moment is to go with an X99 or Z170 motherboard if you want to install a PCI-E NVMe M.2 device, as they can allocate four PCI-E 3 lanes to it and support NVMe too. We’ll try to make our M.2 coverage clearer from next issue onwards.

OEM flip-flop

First let me say I immensely enjoy the mag and subscribed a year or so ago. My letter to you today concerns Windows licences. With Windows 10 recently being released, I was looking to buy the new OS. Of course, this situation has sent me spiralling into the depths of Microsoft legal purgatory. I know that Microsoft’s policy on OEM licenses has flip-flopped on the issue of system builder licences for personal use between the pre-7 licences to 7, back again for 8, only to disallow the practice again in 8.1. With no information coming out of Redmond at the moment, I turned to your mag for guidance only to find that the Windows versions you list under the Elite list are the very OEM versions that (I believe) don’t allow personal use. I know that Windows licensing has always appeared to be a dark art, and OEM licensing for personal is a grey area, but are you recommending that your readers breach their licence agreements? I

may, of course, have the wrong end of the stick, and would happily be corrected if I’m wrong. If you could offer any clarity on the use of OEM licences for personal builds (particularly for Windows 10) I’d be forever grateful.

Only Windows 10 retail editions are licensed for personal use

RICHARD SMITH

Ben: Well, researching this situation has been a bit of an eye-opener, and it looks like you’re right – OEM licences aren’t always licensed for personal use. It used to be the case that you had to buy the OEM software at the same time as a piece of hardware, but it was on the understanding that you would have to replace it if you bought a new motherboard. So, yes, Windows 7 OEM licences aren’t condoned for personal use, Windows 8 OEM licences are fine, and with Windows 10 (and Windows 8.1), we’re now back to OEM licences not being for personal use.

Send your feedback and correspondence to

JayBlanch flower Celebrating my org*smatron PC in Custom PC mag 10 years ago next week. Ben: I remember org*smatron being featured in Readers’ drives very well, that was a really great mod – can’t believe it was ten years ago.

We were also in a difficult situation with Windows 7, because we didn’t want to recommend Windows 8 when it was released. We used to recommend the retail version of Windows 7, as it’s important for enthusiasts to know they can upgrade their motherboard, but towards the end, Microsoft pulled the plug on the retail version and you could only buy the OEM version. So yes, it looks like we were indeed recommending Windows 7 OEM versions that weren’t strictly licensed for personal use, for which I apologise – it was a genuine error made with the assumption that, as with Windows 8 OEM licences, the licences would be fine – thank you for bringing it to our attention. However, given that Windows 7 OEM licences were so easily available to buy from retailers, I’d wager that Microsoft isn’t particularly bothered about it. Either way, we’re recommending the retail version of Windows 10 on the Elite list now, so you can be sure the version of Windows we recommend is licensed for personal use.

WHEN’S THE NEXT MAG COMING OUT?

Issue 148 of Custom PC will be on sale on Thursday, 12 November, with subscribers receiving it a few days beforehand.

[emailprotected]

OPINION

T R ACY K I N G / SCEPTICAL ANALYSIS

GREEN GAMING Tracy King analyses a study that suggests high-performance gaming PCs consume the equivalent power of ten games consoles ideo games are now apparently responsible for ruining the planet, and a whole generation of PC gamers has single-handedly doomed the human race to extinction through global warming. What have we done this time? Our gaming machines aren’t energy-efficient, according to a new study, and we’re in trouble. Before you don your tinfoil hat, though, I’m not debunking climate change or humankind’s contribution to it – that’s a matter of scientific fact. The question here is whether high-performance gaming PCs are a significant contributor and, if so, what can or should we do about it? The answer to the first part is yes, and no. High-performance gaming PCs as a group do use a lot of energy compared with, say, fridges but very little compared with the Las Vegas strip. The difference is that we need fridges, but we don’t need high-performance gaming PCs or Las Vegas. It’s only fair to compare energy consumption of luxury items with other luxury items, and in that regard, gamers do well in the green stakes compared with VW owners or people with heated pools, but badly compared to console owners. The study is called ‘Taming the energy use of gaming computers’ and is by Evan Mills of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, who was part of the team that won the 2007 Nobel peace prize with Al Gore, and his son, Nathaniel Mills of website Greening The Beast (http://tinyurl.com/ GreeningTheBeast). Both are gamers and environmentalists who, according to the site, were ‘in the process of building our own gaming machine [when] we discovered two important things: 1. It can cost a bundle to run a gaming computer – think hundreds of dollars a year, depending on hardware, use, and energy prices.

2. There was almost no info out there on the energy use of Gaming Machines, especially measured data.’ Saving a few quid per year in the grand scheme of building and running a rig doesn’t make me care. But unlike off-theshelf electronics such as fridges, which have handy energyefficiency rating stickers, custom PCs are a wild west of power consumption, and there’s no reason we should consider ourselves exempt from social responsibility, although I don’t think we’re more irresponsible than anyone else or Vegas. The authors offer some potentially useful tips at http:// tinyurl.com/GreenPCTips too. As Evan Mills said to me,‘We’re actually not advocating that people stop gaming or even reduce it, only to look at ways of specifying more efficient rigs. Even if the environment isn’t considered important, inefficient gaming PCs also release tonnes of heat and are noisier than efficient ones, so, it’s a win-win proposition.’ The Mills’ study is, by their own admission, limited. They estimate that ‘the typical gaming PC (including display) uses about 1,400 kWh of electricity per year. The energy use of a single typical gaming PC is equivalent to the energy use of ten game consoles, six conventional desktop computers or three refrigerators’. They base this figure on an average daily gaming time of 4.4 hours, which seems about right, but it’s US-orientated so any financial estimates aren’t relevant elsewhere, and the power consumption estimates are based on nameplates; as you probably know, these don’t always bear much relation to the actual power used. However, the study is a useful contribution to an area that, as environmental concerns become more the responsibility of individuals, is bound to get the attention of the gaming PC community eventually.

Fridges have energyefficiency stickers, but PCs are a wild west of power consumption

Gamer and science enthusiast Tracy King dissects the evidence and statistics behind popular media stories surrounding tech and gaming

@tkingdoll

CO M I N G S O O N / NEWS

Incoming We take a look at the latest newly announced products

Samsung announces super-fast M.2 SSDs Samsung has just announced two new M.2 SSDs that promise to smash speed records. The new SSD 950 Pro range supports NVMe over four PCI-E 3 lanes, and Samsung says the new drives can perform sequential reads at up to 2,500MB/sec, a speed the company says is 4.5 times the speed of its current SSD 850 Pro 512GB SATA drives. Meanwhile, the claimed sequential write speed of 1,500MB/sec isn’t quite as jaw-dropping but is still massively quicker than a SATA drive. The new drives use Samsung’s UBX controller and are equipped with 512MB of DDR3 cache. The company says the new drives also consume very little power, drawing just 5.7W at full load. The drives come in both 256GB and 512GB flavours, and we’ll be reviewing the drives in our next issue.

Corsair unveils new RMx PSUs

Arctic goes semi-passive

Corsair has added a new line-up of PSUs to its already expansive range. The RMx power supplies are fully modular for easy cable tidying, and feature 80 Plus Gold certification. Meanwhile, the 140mm cooling fan only spins up when it’s needed, ensuring there’s no fan noise when it’s under low loads. The RMx comes in 550W, 650W, 750W, 850W and 1,000W flavours, with prices at www.scan. co.uk starting at £70 inc VAT for the 550W model, and going up to £130 inc VAT for the 1,000W unit.

Cooling manufacturer Arctic has launched a new CPU cooler with semi-passive operation, without needing to spin up the fan during what Arctic calls ‘typical Windows operation’. The cooler comes in two versions – the I32 for Intel CPUs and the A32 for AMD chips. Arctic says its new fan controller doesn’t start up the PWM-controlled fan until it hits a certain temperature, starting at 40 per cent speed. The I32 is available from www. amazon.co.uk for £30.60.

Nvidia launches Shield TV box Nvidia has just announced that it’s bringing its Shield Android set-top box to the UK, with claims that’s ‘up to 34 times faster and has significantly more features than other popular media streamers’. The device is based on the company’s Tegra X1 SoC, which features an 8-core 64-bit ARM CPU and an integrated GPU that’s bolstered by 256 stream processors. The big feature touted by Nvidia is the ability to stream 4K video content from services such as Netflix, with a 60Hz refresh rate possible from its HDMI 2.0 interface. Other hardware features include 7.1 and 5.1 pass-through via HDMI, plus 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Ethernet network connections. In addition, the Shield box will be able to play a number of Android games, and will also hook up to Nvidia’s newly announced GeForce Now service. Like the now defunct OnLive service, GeForce Now promises to stream a number of top-end PC games to the device, saving on the need for dedicated PC hardware. The launch titles include The Witcher III: Wild Hunt, various Batman and Lego titles, and Saints Row: Gat out of Hell. Prices for the Shield box start at £149.99, including a controller, while a subscription to GeForce Now will cost £7.49 per month. See http://shield.nvidia.co.uk for more information.

Reviews

Our in-depth analysis of the latest PC hardware

Reviewed this month Thecus W2000 p17 / AMD Radeon R9 Nano p18/ Asus GeForce GTX 950 Strix p20 / EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti Classified ACX 2.0+ p24/ Asus Z170i Pro Gaming p26/ CM Storm Quick Fire XTi p30/ Custom kit p36 16

HOW WE TEST PAGE 32

N A S B OX

Thecus W2000/£310

inc VAT

SUPPLIER www.amazon.co.uk

hecus’ W2000 distinguishes itself from much of the usual dual-bay competition by using Windows Server 2012 – essentially a massively cut-down copy of Windows 8, instead of an in-house OS. In fact, the OS is so cut down that you have to install many services to even be able to create shared network folders. As you’re using a Windows OS, though, many programs your average PC enthusiast needs from a NAS are easy to install, plus you can install your own backup or cloud services such as Dropbox too. It makes the W2000 hugely flexible, but there’s no getting away from the fact that, for the most part, delving any deeper, or carrying out relatively mundane tasks such as creating shared folders, can be a challenge that’s not for networking novices. In order to access the W2000, you need to download and install Windows Server Essentials Connector, which adds your PC to the list of connected computers, enabling it to talk to the NAS. Incidentally, this process didn’t seem to work on Windows 10, even if it was run as Administrator and in Windows 7 compatibility mode. It’s all a little clunky compared with a Synology NAS, to which you can connect a computer in a matter of seconds, and from a variety of operating systems. Comparatively, it took us nearly an hour to set up the W2000 ready for testing. Hardware-wise, it sports a dual core, Hyper-Threaded Intel Atom D2701, 2GB of DDR3 memory and includes a 2.5in SSD to act as the OS drive, rather than using integrated flash storage. Meanwhile, its two drive bays support either 2.5in or 3.5in drives and have lockable doors. The front sports a USB 3 port and SD card reader, while at the rear, there’s a further two USB 2 ports, an eSATA port, two Ethernet ports that support link aggregation, as well as HDMI and VGA outputs. To control the W2000, you can also hook up a keyboard, mouse and monitor, or connect to it remotely via a browser. Being Windows-based, there’s plenty of scope for creating a very flexible media centre too, and the Windows version of Plex installed without a hitch. Even more impressive was the fact that the Atom CPU managed to transcode 1080p video on the fly to

The Windows version of Plex installed without a hitch

an iPhone using Plex, although the CPU was above 90 per cent load the whole time. Transfer rates peaked at a little over 100MB/sec when reading large video files, with our usual large file test seeing average read and write speeds of 85MB/sec and 71MB/sec respectively. Meanwhile, our torturous small file test saw these rates drop to 22MB/sec and 19MB/sec, which are still good results for this test. Sadly, though, while the W2000 only consumed 23W when idle, it’s quite noisy compared with the latest Synology and QNAP NAS boxes.

Conclusion The W2000’s use of Windows gives it huge potential, but it’s comparatively pricey, the complex setup procedure is a problem, especially when compared with Synology’s offerings, and it has a noisy cooling fan. Its diminutive size and power draw mean it’s still an attractive media server compared with a cheap PC, but if you must have a small Windows-based NAS, you could also consider an Intel NUC with Windows 10 or FreeNAS installed, which would be much easier to set up. ANTONY LEATHER

SPEED

30/35

FEATURES

VALUE

26/35

21/30 VERDICT

OVERALL SCORE

77%

The use of Windows makes the W2000 very flexible, but setting it up is challenging and it isn’t as easy to use as many Linux-based competitors.

R E V I E WS / NEW KIT

GRAPHICS CARD

AMD Radeon R9 Nano/£500

inc VAT

SUPPLIER www.overclockers.co.uk

MD has taken the Fury X’s Fiji GPU, put it in a dualslot card that’s just 6in long, and is claiming it’s cool, quiet and capable of high-detail 4K gaming. All of the R9 Fury X’s 4,096 cores, 256 texture units and 64 ROPs are enabled in the R9 Nano. It also has the same 4096-bit wide memory bus, which is connected to 4GB of HBM. HBM has a far smaller physical footprint than GDDR5, as it’s integrated onto the same ASIC as the GPU, which is the key enabler of the Nano’s size. Furthermore, while Fury X is clocked at up to 1,050MHz, the Nano is rounded off at up to 1GHz, although the memory is left at 500MHz (1GHz effective). The key, of course, is the phrase ‘up to’. With Fury X, the card’s closed-loop cooler ensures it comes nowhere near its thermal limit. AMD also gives it a very high power limit, quoting 275W as its typical board power (the true limit is higher but not shared). This limit drops to 175W for the Nano, and that’s the second key part of the size equation. Power consumption is positively correlated to heat output, so slashing the power limit is needed to keep it effectively cooled with such small dimensions. However, this setup also means the card will throttle, unlike the Fury X. Its temperature-based throttling kicks in at 85°C but the real limit is going to be power. That said, the card uses a single 8-pin PCI-E power connector and is thus technically capable of drawing up to around 225W. Another part of the engineering is a binning process – AMD selects only its most efficient GPUs for the Nano. It also cuts the GPU VRMs from six in Fury X to four here, further reducing heat and saving space. The final element, of course, is the cooler. It uses a single fan that’s as large as possible given the dimensions. The shroud is open and the horizontal, full-length fins will guide out hot air both through the rear I/O panel, where there’s plenty of ventilation, and back into your case. The GPU and HBM are cooled by a copper vapour chamber, but a heatpipe and metal plate /SPECIFICATIONS are also used to help draw heat away from the Graphics processor AMD VRMs and the rest of the PCB. It’s a wellRadeon R9 Nano (up to 1000MHz) considered design that makes maximum use Pipeline 4,096 stream of the card’s limited volume. processors, 64 ROPs Display outputs include three DisplayPort 1.2 Memory 4GB HBM, connectors and an HDMI 1.4 plug. The lack of DVI 1GHz effective is forgivable but missing HDMI 2.0 is silly – it’s the Bandwidth 512GB/sec primary way of driving 60Hz 4K televisions. The Compatibility DirectX 12, Mantle, Vulcan Nano also supports CrossFire over XDMA, so no Outputs 3 x DisplayPort, physical connector is needed, and it’s been HDMI shown to work in CrossFire with a Fury X too. Power connections 1 x There’s no true competitor against the Nano. 8-pin, side-mounted It’s clearly a premium card, and based on pricing Size 152mm long, dual-slot alone it’s up against the mighty GTX 980 Ti.

The performance is awesome considering its total volume

However, that would ignore the point of this card – its size. There are third-party GTX 970s that compete in this sense, but of course, they’re less powerful and cheaper.

Performance Across our tests, the GTX 980 Ti and R9 Fury X are faster than the R9 Nano by, on average, 20 per cent and 12 per cent respectively. The Nano is closer to the GTX 980 in terms of pure performance, which it beats by 10 per cent on average. As such, considering the size, there’s nothing remotely close to the Nano. It’s truly a mini monster, easily capable of handling games at 2,560 x 1,440 and making a surprisingly strong showing at 4K as well. At this resolution, it never drops below 30fps in three of our five games. In The Witcher III, it only passes the technically playable test with a minimum of 27fps, and it takes a game as demanding as Crysis 3 to slow it down to unplayable levels. In our well-ventilated chassis, the card was always at least 10°C below its thermal cap, but still hovered between 850MHz and 950MHz in games (typically the lower half of this range), indicating a clear power limit. System power consumption barely rose above 300W and the fan only span up to around 35 per cent under sustained load, which was very quiet indeed. Sadly, though, there was clearly audible coil whine with an irritating pitch in every game. Considering the quality of engineering elsewhere, that’s a disappointing slip-up. AMD Overdrive lets you increase the power limit by up to 50 per cent. Doing so saw frequencies hover much closer to

costs the same money – the Nano really just buys you a little more cable-routing space. We would say it’s a prime candidate for a discreet, 4K lounge gaming PC, but the irritating coil whine and absence of HDMI 2.0 scuppers it here too. The Nano is a cool bit of kit that’s sure to find its way into some sweet builds and mods (waterblocks have already been announced), and it’s great if you have the money, and want to build the fastest and tidiest mini system possible, such as our feature PC this month (see p84). For most people, though, a short-PCB GTX 970 will offer much better value for money, and even a full-sized GeForce GTX 980 Ti card will fit in most mini-ITX chassis too.

1GHz and we managed to add a further 80MHz to the maximum clock. Along with the lifted power limit, these tweaks saw performance increase by anywhere between 7 and 15 per cent. However, the fan was much more audible and the power consumption went up by almost 100W – the Nano isn’t really designed for overclocking.

Conclusion As a feat of engineering, the R9 Nano is amazing. The performance is awesome considering its total volume, and it’s cool and quiet too. However, it undoubtedly has niche appeal. Even very compact cases are usually able to house full-length cards such as a GTX 980 Ti, which is faster and

MATTHEW LAMBERT

CR YS IS 3

ALI EN: I S OLAT I ON

2,560 x 1,440, Very High detail, 0x AA

2,560 x 1,440, Ultra detail, SMAA T2x

AMD R9 Nano

81 fps 100 fps

AMD R9 Fury X Nvidia GTX 980 Ti

93 fps

AMD R9 Nano

42 fps

52 fps

48 fps

Nvidia GTX 980 Ti 32

28 fps

25 fps 30 fps

AMD R9 Fury X

26 fps

32 fps

Nvidia GTX 980 Ti

26 fps

32 fps

62 fps

B AT T LEFI ELD 4

2,560 x 1,440, Ultra detail, 4x MSAA

M ID D L E EA R T H : S H A D O W O F M O R D O R

AMD R9 Nano

50 fps

AMD R9 Fury X

2,560 x 1,440, Ultra detail

60 fps

54 fps 64 fps

AMD R9 Nano

64 fps

AMD R9 Fury X

Nvidia GTX 980 Ti 40

77 fps

57 fps

AMD R9 Nano

44 fps

39 fps

AMD R9 Fury X

38 fps

Nvidia GTX 980 Ti

85 fps

3,840 x 2,160, Very High detail

AMD R9 Nano

50 fps

56 fps

38 fps

47 fps

AMD R9 Fury X

44 fps

Nvidia GTX 980 Ti

44 fps

49 fps

39 fps

81 fps

66 fps

0 34 fps

74 fps

62 fps

Nvidia GTX 980 Ti

3,840 x 2,160, Ultra detail, 0x MSAA

65 fps

51 22 fps

AMD R9 Nano

59 fps

48 fps

3,840 x 2,160, Very High detail, 0x AA

AMD R9 Fury X

63 fps

53 fps

132

3,840 x 2,160, Ultra detail, SMAA T2x

55 fps 51 fps

Nvidia GTX 980 Ti

122 fps

43 fps

AMD R9 Fury X

92 fps 111 fps

53 fps 54 fps

T H E WI T C H ER III: W IL D H U N T 2,560 x 1,440, High detail, HairWorks off

AMD R9 Nano

3,840 x 2,160, High detail, HairWorks off

46 fps

AMD R9 Fury X

AMD R9 Nano

58 fps

Nvidia GTX 980 Ti

62 fps 72 fps

33 fps 38 fps

Nvidia GTX 980 Ti

32 fps 38 fps

Stock speed min

27 fps 33 fps

AMD R9 Fury X

56 fps 67 fps

Stock speed avg

Overclocked min

Overclocked avg

T OT A L S Y S T E M POW ER D R A W AMD R9 Nano

108W

AMD R9 Fury X Nvidia GTX 980 Ti

105 Idle

FEATURES

35/40

8/10

VALUE

EFFICIENCY

25/40

7/10

415W

109W

SPEED

311W

121W

OVERALL SCORE

75%

Load

381W

210

315

420

Lower is better

VERDICT A seriously cool piece of engineering, with great gaming performance, but it’s hampered by some irritating coil whine, and it has a niche target market.

R E V I E WS / NEW KIT

GRAPHICS CARD

Asus GeForce GTX 950 Strix/£139

inc VAT

SUPPLIER www.ebuyer.com

he GeForce GTX 950 slots into Nvidia’s stack between the GTX 750 Ti and GTX 960, filling the important sub-£150 price point. Prices start at just under £130 and go up to around £150, meaning the Asus card on test here sits in the middle of the pack, hoping to impress with above average cooling, components and overclocking. Like all the GTX 900-series cards, the GTX 950 uses a secondgeneration Maxwell GPU – the 28nm GM206. This gives it full DirectX 12 support up to feature level DX12_1. It uses the same GM206 GPU as the GTX 960, but two of the eight SMMs have been disabled, resulting in a 25 per cent reduction in cores and texture units – 768 and 48 respectively. ROPs aren’t tied to the SMMs, so they remain fixed at 32. Likewise, the memory system is the same. The GPU has an internal L2 cache of 1MB, which is divided into two 512KB partitions, each of which is tied to a 64-bit memory controller. This 128-bit interface is then connected with 2GB of GDDR5 memory. It’s a comparatively narrow interface by today’s standards, though, which may hurt the GTX 950 in situations that demand high memory bandwidth, such as cranking up the resolution and detail. Nvidia claims it offsets this limit through faster and larger internal caches (1MB is indeed large for L2) to reduce reliance on GDDR5, and through its third-generation delta colour compression engine, a lossless algorithm said to reduce the bytes needed per frame by 25 per cent on average. Reference clock speeds are set at 1024MHz base (1188MHz boost) and 6.6GHz effective for the memory. Asus also applies a pleasing 14 per cent overclock to the core – 1165MHz base (1355MHz boost) – but the memory runs at the same speed. The GTX 950 also adopts the GTX 960’s new video engine, which brings full hardware support for H.265 encode and decode. Up to four 5K monitors can be run at once and HDMI 2 is supported for 4K 60 content. Naturally, G-Sync is available via the /SPECIFICATIONS DisplayPort output, while a pair of dual-link DVI Graphics processor Nvidia ports and a single SLI connector round off the GeForce GTX 950, 1165MHz (boost 1355MHz) collection of connectors. Pipeline 768 stream Nvidia is also debuting its MOBA input latency processors, 32 ROPs reduction feature with the GTX 950, although it Memory 2GB GDDR5, will come to other existing cards in the future 6.6GHz effective too. It works by cutting the number of preBandwidth 105.6GB/sec rendered frames in the DirectX pipeline from Compatibility DirectX 12, OpenGL 4.5 two to one, and is available as an option in Outputs/inputs DisplayPort, GeForce experience for DOTA 2, Heroes of the Dual-link DVI-D, Dual-link Storm and League of Legends. Nvidia claims to DVI-I, HDMI have reduced latency in DOTA 2 by nearly 50 per Power connections 1 x cent compared with a GTX 650. 6-pin, top-mounted With a 90W reference TDP, power Size 220mm long, dual-slot requirements are low enough for a single 6-pin

PCI-E power connector, which Asus uses, along with a 4+1 phase power configuration with Super Alloy Power components; Asus claims this will bolster efficiency and overclocking potential. The cooler utilises two direct-contact heatpipes connected to a single fin stack, and it’s cooled by two temperature-controlled fans that switch off entirely when the GPU temperature is below about 60°C. It’s a basic design that doesn’t offer direct cooling to the memory or VRMs, but that’s not an issue at this level of performance.

Performance A brief look at average frame rates puts a stock-speed GTX 960 at 8 per cent quicker than the GTX 950 Strix overall, while an Asus R9 380 Strix is roughly 20 per cent ahead. Examine the all important minimums, though, and the GTX 950 Strix is clearly a very capable 1080p GPU, able to churn out playable frame rates in modern games with practically all the settings turned up. With a few sacrifices here and there, you could achieve very smooth gameplay – in the less demanding Alien: Isolation, for example, it managed a super-smooth 60fps minimum, and that’s at full detail. The one exception is Shadow of Mordor, but even then it managed 28fps, passing our technically playable test. However, 2,560 x 1,440 gaming proved too much for the GTX 950 – it only offered a playable frame rate in Alien: Isolation at this resolution. Meanwhile, efficiency is excellent, as always with Maxwell GPUs. Our system power consumption peaked at a little over 200W, so the already quiet cooler has an easy job – even when the fans did spin up, they were inaudible. Overclocking proved fruitful too. We added 100MHz to the base clock, taking it to 1265MHz, whereby the actual

ELITE NEW ENTRY P 62

its modernised video engine, the GTX 950 Strix would be great for use in a discreet HTPC or a mini 1080p gaming rig. Its only problem is that there are faster GeForce GTX 960 cards available for not much more money, but these cards still won’t get you much more in terms of playable frame rates, and the extra premium gets you very quiet operation and great overclocking headroom too. The Asus GeForce GTX 950 Strix might be a little overpriced for the performance on offer, but it’s still a highly efficient, quiet and overclockable card for 1080p gaming.

in-game frequency was around 1.5GHz. We also kept the memory stable at 8.2GHz (effective), a whopping 24 per cent increase over stock speeds. In this state, the card remained quiet and it was able to surpass GTX 960 and R9 380 performance, but only just.

Conclusion There’s no doubt that this Asus Strix model is an outstanding GTX 950 card. It has a big overclock out of the box, it’s capable of significantly higher clocks still and it will be inaudible in almost any setup. With these credentials, and

MATTHEW LAMBERT

CR YS IS 3

A LI EN: I S OLATI O N

1,920 x 1,080, Very High detail, 0x AA

1,920 x 1,080, Ultra detail, SMAA T2x

Asus GTX 950 Strix

60 fps

Nvidia GTX 960

Asus GTX 950 Strix

76 fps

66 fps

Asus R9 380 Strix

71 fps

38 fps

Asus GTX 950 Strix

48 fps

42 fps

Asus R9 380 Strix

52 fps

23 fps

Asus R9 380 Strix

60 fps

1,920 x 1,080, Ultra detail

Asus GTX 950 Strix

43 fps

Nvidia GTX 960

40 fps

Asus R9 380 Strix

52 fps 49 fps

Asus GTX 950 Strix

29 fps

25 fps

Asus R9 380 Strix 8

47 fps

22 fps 28 fps

Asus R9 380 Strix

31 fps

26 fps

21 fps 27 fps

Nvidia GTX 960

2,560 x 1,440, Ultra detail

24 fps

38 fps

33 fps

2,560 x 1,440, Ultra detail, 4x MSAA

Asus GTX 950 Strix

37 fps

29 fps

Asus R9 380 Strix

40 fps 48 fps

28 fps

Nvidia GTX 960

31 fps

M ID D L E EA R T H : S H A D O W O F M O R D O R 38 fps 46 fps

28 fps

24 fps

BAT T LEFI ELD 4

21 fps 25 fps

1,920 x 1,080, Ultra detail, 4x MSAA

49 fps

Nvidia GTX 960

48 fps

36 fps

2,560 x 1,440, Very High detail, 0x AA

Nvidia GTX 960

37 fps 45 fps

Asus R9 380 Strix

88 fps

2,560 x 1,440, Ultra detail, SMAA T2x

Asus GTX 950 Strix

35 fps 42 fps

Nvidia GTX 960

82 fps

24 fps

34 fps

31 fps

T H E W I T C H ER III: W IL D H U N T 1,920 x 1,080, High detail, HairWorks off

2,560 x 1,440, High detail, HairWorks off

Asus GTX 950 Strix

32 fps 39 fps

Asus GTX 950 Strix

38 fps

Nvidia GTX 960

38 fps

27 fps

49 fps

26 fps

24 fps 29 fps

Asus R9 380 Strix

36 fps 44 fps

Asus R9 380 Strix

22 fps

Nvidia GTX 960

44 fps

34 fps

Stock speed min

Stock speed avg

Overclocked min

Overclocked avg

T OT A L S Y S T E M POW ER D R A W Asus GTX 950 Strix

101W

Nvidia GTX 960

104W

Asus R9 380 Strix

107W

75 Idle

SPEED

FEATURES

28/40

8/10

VALUE

EFFICIENCY

34/40

9/10

OVERALL SCORE

79%

Load

209W 228W 299W

150

225

300

Lower is better

VERDICT Very quiet, overclockable and highly efficient. The Asus GeForce GTX 950 Strix is a great sub-£150 card for 1080p gaming.

R E V I E WS / NEW KIT

GRAPHICS CARD

EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti Classified ACX 2.0+/£619

inc VAT

SUPPLIER www.scan.co.uk

VGA has ten GTX 980 Ti cards in its roster, and the Classified sits at the top, at least until the K|NGP|N edition is released. With a price of £620 inc VAT, however, it needs to prove itself. It’s based on Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 980 Ti GPU, which sports 2,816 cores, 176 texture units and 96 ROPs, and it’s paired with 6GB of GDDR5 via a 384-bit memory bus, which equips it with enough horsepower for 4K gaming. However, EVGA has overclocked the core by a massive 19 per cent, taking it to a base co*ck of 1190MHz (1291MHz boost), with actual speeds of over 1400MHz observed in games. It’s one of the highest factory overclocks around for this GPU, but the memory has been left at 7GHz (effective). We’ve had great success overclocking the memory used with the GTX 900 series, so this is a little disappointing. The Classified sports the standard set of display outputs, and it’s also fitted with dual SLI fingers, with 4-way setups supported. It maintains a dual-slot form factor and its length measures just under 280mm, making it an easy fit in most cases. That said, the cooler does extend past the expansion slot bracket edge by almost 30mm, which could affect some small form factor chassis. Meanwhile, EVGA’s ACX 2.0+ cooler is very well built and uses six heatpipes and a GPU contact plate, all of which are nickel plated. A cooling plate also ensures all the memory chips and VRMs are directly cooled by the two fans, which each feature optimised swept fan blades, double ball bearings and an extreme low power motor. EVGA claims this combination improves airflow while reducing noise, but also decreases fan/SPECIFICATIONS power consumption, leaving more power Graphics processor Nvidia available for the core components when GeForce GTX 980 Ti, 1190MHz (boost 1291MHz) overclocking. The fans are semi-passive too, Pipeline 2,816 stream switching off completely when the GPU processors, 96 ROPs temperature is below 60~65°C. Lastly, while Memory 6GB GDDR5, there’s plenty of ventilation in the rear I/O panel, 7GHz effective the cooler shroud is open at the sides, so bear in Bandwidth 336GB/sec mind that lots of heat will end up in your chassis. Compatibility DirectX 12, OpenGL 4.5 The card is also supported against its own Outputs/inputs 3 x weight by a brushed metal backplate, which DisplayPort, Dual-link has the added benefit of looking rather swish DVI-I, HDMI through a case window, and it will help a little Power connections 2 x with heat dissipation too. 8-pin, top-mounted Power is drawn through a pair of 8-pin PCI-E Size 279mm long, dual-slot connections (an upgrade from the reference

The fans switch off when the GPU temperature is below 60-65°C

8-pin/6-pin combo) and two dual 6-pin to single 8-pin adaptors are provided as well, each neatly braided in black. Power delivery, meanwhile, is handled by a massive 14+3 power phase setup – the main reason for the extended PCB height. In theory, this setup will help to deliver higher levels of clean power to both the core and memory than the standard 6+2 design, which can be useful when overclocking. Other features include support for EVBot, EVGA’s dedicated hardware controller for overclocking on the fly, via a dedicated connection next to the power inputs. You’ll also find a BIOS switch here – the card has one marked normal and another marked for liquid nitrogen cooling. Lastly, you get easily accessible voltage monitoring points next to the BIOS switch (although no cables to connect to them) and a non-conductive thermal strip to place over the VRMs and prevent shorting when using aftermarket cooling – EVGA has clearly kept extreme overclockers in mind when designing the Classified.

Performance Average frame rates tell us that this card is approximately 14 per cent quicker than a stock GTX 980 Ti. Compared with AMD’s flagship, the R9 Fury X, it’s 23 per cent quicker at 2,560 x 1,440 and ‘only’ 19 per cent ahead at 4K. The all-important minimum frame rates tell us that this card makes light work of 2,560 x 1,440, staying above 60fps in every test – an achievement that neither the Fury X nor a stock-speed GTX 980 Ti can match. Even at 4K, frame rates are consistently smooth - the lowest result is 31fps in Crysis 3. The 30-60fps margin is where G-Sync really shows its capabilities, so this card would be great with 4K G-Sync screen. In short, the GTX 980 Ti Classified effectively represents the pinnacle of current single GPU performance. Power consumption is higher than a GTX 980 Ti by around 50W under load, but the total system peak draw is still comfortably below 430W. The ACX 2.0+ cooler does an admirable job too. It kept the GPU at a delta T of under 60°C in a well-ventilated chassis, with the fans peaking at around 1,400rpm, which proved to be only just audible. There was also zero coil whine; indicative of high-quality components.

ELITE NEW ENTRY P 62

Conclusion

We used EVGA Precision X to max out the power and thermal limits and increased the GPU voltage by 50mV too. We managed to add 75MHz for a 1265MHz base clock (1366MHz boost). In reality, though, the card was staying at over 1.5GHz under load – a truly outstanding result for this GPU. The memory reached a staggering 8.4GHz (effective) as well. These impressive overclocks yielded performance increases of between 7 and 13 per cent, with a trade-off of slightly elevated power consumption, temperature and noise, although nothing alarming in any case.

Pairing a GTX 980 Ti with a 19 per cent overclock results in performance that’s simply through the roof, and the EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti Classified ACX 2.0+ even has a fair bit of overclocking headroom left in the bank. All the bells and whistles are there too; even those who like to dabble with liquid nitrogen are covered. Yes, the price tag is around £100 more than a standard GTX 980 Ti, but if you truly want to play games smoothly at 4K with a single GPU, this sort of investment is needed. MATTHEW LAMBERT

CR YS IS 3

A LI EN: I S OLAT I O N

2,560 x 1,440 , Very High detail, 0x AA

2,560 x 1,440, Ultra detail, SMAA T2x

Nvidia GTX 980 Ti

93 fps

AMD R9 Fury X

Nvidia GTX 980 Ti

122 fps

92 fps 111 fps

EVGA 980 Ti Classified

115 fps

120

160

62 fps

58 fps

AMD R9 Fury X

48 fps 59 fps

EVGA 980 Ti Classified 0

63 fps 74 fps

26 fps

32 fps

33 fps

27 fps 26 fps

72 fps

32 fps

Nvidia GTX 980 Ti

33 fps

39 fps

31 fps

BATTLEFI ELD 4

EVGA 980 Ti Classified

2,560 x 1,440, Ultra detail, 4x MSAA

Nvidia GTX 980 Ti

64 fps 77 fps

AMD R9 Fury X

54 fps

71 fps

Nvidia GTX 980 Ti

38 fps

97 fps

100

3,840 x 2,160, Very High detail

64 fps

81 fps 76 fps

49 fps

85 fps

62 fps

EVGA 980 Ti Classified

56 fps

44 fps

66 fps

AMD R9 Fury X

EVGA 980 Ti Classified

2,560 x 1,440 , Ultra detail

85 fps

39 fps

AMD R9 Fury X

M ID D L E EA R T H : S H A D O W O F M O R D O R

3,840 x 2,160, Ultra detail, 0x MSAA

Nvidia GTX 980 Ti

37 fps

34 fps 41 fps 0

64 fps

EVGA 980 Ti Classified 0

3,840 x 2,160, Very High detail, 0x AA

48 fps

AMD R9 Fury X

51 fps 63 fps

EVGA 980 Ti Classified

142 fps

3,840 x 2,160, Ultra detail, SMAA T2x

Nvidia GTX 980 Ti

53 fps 65 fps

AMD R9 Fury X

Nvidia GTX 980 Ti

44 fps

AMD R9 Fury X

54 fps

44 fps 53 fps

EVGA 980 Ti Classified

50 fps

61 fps

T H E WI T C H ER III: W IL D H U N T 2,560 x 1,440, High detail, HairWorks off

3,840 x 2,160, High detail, HairWorks off

Nvidia GTX 980 Ti

62 fps 72 fps

AMD R9 Fury X

56 fps 67 fps

EVGA 980 Ti Classified

65 fps

33 fps

Nvidia GTX 980 Ti 80 fps

Stock speed avg

43 fps

43 fps 48 fps

0 Stock speed min

38 fps 38 fps

EVGA 980 Ti Classified

38 fps

32 fps

Overclocked min

Overclocked avg

T OT A L S Y S T E M POW ER D R A W Nvidia GTX 980 Ti

109W

AMD R9 Fury X

121W

EVGA 980 Ti Classified

122W

115 Idle

SPEED

FEATURES

40/40

9/10

VALUE

EFFICIENCY

26/40

7/10

OVERALL SCORE

82%

Load

381W 415W 430W

230

345

460

Lower is better

VERDICT An outstanding and very desirable graphics card that’s capable of smooth, high-detail 4K gaming on a single card.

R E V I E WS / NEW KIT

M I N I - I T X M OT H E R B OA R D

Asus Z170i Pro Gaming/£130

inc VAT

SUPPLIER www.cclonline.com

ur Z170 motherboard Labs this month (see p38 ) looks at full-sized motherboards for Intel’s Skylake CPUs, but there are still limited numbers of mini-ITX Z170 boards. All is not lost, though, as Asus’ Z170i Pro Gaming has just landed in our lab. We’re expecting a bunch of new mini-ITX offerings to land in the next few weeks as well, from Gigabyte, MSI and ASRock, as well as the highly anticipated Maximus VIII Impact from Asus. For now, though, the Z170i Pro Gaming is one of few options available if you’re looking to build a mini-ITX Skylake system. Asus has also changed its mini-ITX line-up with the launch of Z170, and rather than including a mainstream board along with a pricier ROG Impact board, which has been its strategy since the original Impact launched on the Z87 chipset, the company’s cheaper offering now comes under the Pro Gaming banner, with a distinctly snazzy look and feel. That’s a bit of a shame, as the P8Z77-I Deluxe and Z97I-Plus looked both smart and distinctive, while the Z170i Pro Gaming looks very like the early shots of similar boards we’ve seen from MSI and Gigabyte. Thankfully, the Z170i makes up for its lack of unique aesthetics with features. The PCB is crammed full of ports and headers, although the first obvious omissions are on-board overclocking and testing tools, such as power and reset buttons or an LED POST code display. That said, few (if any) of Asus’ mainstream mini-ITX boards had these features. Otherwise, there’s plenty to talk about. There are three fan headers – two for the CPU and one for a system fan, although there’s no dedicated all-in-one liquid cooler pump header as we’ve seen on several of Asus’ full-sized boards. There’s a single SATA Express connector at the edge of the PCB, including two SATA 6Gbps ports, but the other two SATA /SPECIFICATIONS 6Gbps ports are located on the other side Chipset Intel Z170 of the DIMM slots, which could make tidy CPU socket Intel LGA1151 cable routing tricky. The fan headers, Memory support 2 slots: max 32GB DDR3 (up to 3400MHz OC) USB 3 header and front panel connectors Expansion slots One 16x PCI-E 3 are all well-placed though. Meanwhile, an M.2 port is located the Sound Asus SupremeFX port on the underside of the PCB to save Networking Intel Gigabit LAN Overclocking Base clock space – a trick Asus implemented with the 40–500MHz, CPU multiplier 8-83x; Z170i Pro Gaming’s predecessor – and the max voltages CPU 1.7V RAM 1.8V port is compatible with SSDs up to 80mm Ports 4 x SATA 6Gbps (Z170), 1 x SATA in length. The downside, of course, is that Express, 1 x M.2 (2280), 2 x USB 2, 4 x USB 3, 2 x USB 3.1 Type-A, 1 x LAN, 6 x you need to remove the motherboard to surround audio out, line in, mic, optical access it. S/PDIF out, 1 x HDMI, 1 x DisplayPort On the top of the board are three Dimensions (mm) 170 x 170 heatsinks, all of which are fairly small,

The M.2 port is on the underside to save space

including the ones surrounding the CPU socket, so large air coolers should have no compatibility issues. Asus has even squeezed in a small section of isolated audio circuitry for the Realtek-based SupremeFX audio codec, which sports a headphone amplifier. There’s also an integrated 802.11ac Wi-Fi module, which has rear connectors for use with the included desktop magnetic antenna. Finally, the rear panel sports more USB ports than we’ve seen on some full-sized Z170 boards, although there’s no Type-C USB 3.1 port – only two Type-A USB 3.1 (Gen 2 ) ports are included, which are backwards compatible with previous USB standards. There’s a bank of four USB 3 ports plus two USB 2 ports too, so if your setup is USB-heavy, the Z170i Pro Gaming is certainly up to the task.

Performance We’ve come to expect exactly the same performance from mini-ITX motherboards as their larger counterparts, and Z170i Pro Gaming generally doesn’t disappoint. The M.2 port managed read and write speeds of 1,556MB/sec and 669MB/sec respectively using our HyperX Predator SSD – easily as fast as any other board we’ve tested, and the same was true for the SATA 6Gbps ports’ 563MB/sec read and 531MB/sec write speeds. In our game benchmark, Total War, it also matched the result of its bigger sibling, the Hero, with a minimum frame rate of 58fps, while its total system score of 132,454 is roughly in the middle of the pack, thanks to a slightly lacklustre image editing result. The audio performance was practically identical to that we’ve seen on Asus’ ROG boards too, with dynamic range and noise levels around the 104dBA and -104dBA respectively – results that are very good for on-board audio. The Z170i proved to be a capable overclocker as well, and the EFI is surprisingly ROG-like in layout and feel, although several ROG EFI features, such as SSD secure erase, are absent. It managed to overclock our Core i7-6700K to 4.8GHz with ease, needing just 1.32V to get there. Sadly,

ELITE NEW ENTRY P 62

1 The 802.11ac Wi-Fi module has rear connectors for use with the included desktop magnetic antenna

2 The heatsinks are all fairly small, so you shouldn’t have any compatibility issues with large CPU coolers

2 4.9GHz was a little too far, with neither a 1.48V vcore nor maximum loadline calibration getting a stable result. Even so, the 4.8GHz frequency saw the system score rise from 132,454 to a healthy 147,915. Power consumption rose thanks to the overclock, but the idle total system power draw only increased from 49W to 60W, with load power consumption rising to 166W from 135W.

3 There are three fan headers – two for the CPU and one for a system fan

Conclusion

featured, so we have no hesitation in recommending it for small form factor builds. The only motherboard likely to beat it in terms of enthusiast features is Asus’ own Maximus VIII Impact, but it will also cost considerably more. In the meantime, the Asus Z170i Pro Gaming provides a great foundation for a mini mainstream Skylake build.

The Z170i Pro Gaming continues Asus’ excellent run of pedigree enthusiast mini-ITX motherboards that nearly match their larger siblings in terms of performance and overclocking. It also has excellent on-board audio, and can handle the latest high speed interface standards. We’ve yet to compare it with the competition directly, but early indications are that it’s favourably priced and well

ANTONY LEATHER

C P C MEDI A R EALB E N C H 2 0 15 GI MP I MAGE EDI T I N G Asus Z170i Pro Gaming

T O T A L W A R : A T T IL A 1,920 x 1,080 0x AA Quality setting

53,492 60,991

Asus Maximus VIII Gene

62,147 72,096

MSI Z170A Gaming Pro

58 fps 69 fps

Asus Z170i Pro Gaming

60 fps 70 fps

58,675 677,47

20,000

40,000

60,000

80,000

60 fps 70 fps

Asus Maximus VIII Gene

60 fps 70 fps

HANDBR AKE H. 26 4 V I D E O E N C O D I N G Asus Z170i Pro Gaming

293,528 333,704

Asus Maximus VIII Gene

60 fps 70 fps 0

297,137 324,816

100,000

200,000

167,385 181,554

Asus Maximus VIII Gene

171,158 186,516

MSI Z170A Gaming Pro

167,168 176,962

50,000

100,000

Asus Z170i Pro Gaming

1324,54 147,915

Asus Maximus VIII Gene

136,794 154,927

MSI Z170A Gaming Pro

134,598 146,398

43,000

FEATURES

36/40 22/30 26/30

Overclocked min

86,000

129,000

Overclocked avg

84%

60W 70W

Asus Maximus VIII Gene

72W

MSI Z170A Gaming Pro 0

Asus Z170i Pro Gaming

128W

172,000

50 Stock speed

VERDICT A competent overclocker with loads of features for a reasonable price – a great foundation for a mini Skylake build.

84W

88 166W 190W

155W

MSI Z170A Gaming Pro

81W

135W

Asus Maximus VIII Gene

Overclocked

OVERALL SCORE

49W

Asus Z170i Pro Gaming

Load

Stock speed

Stock speed avg

Idle

150,000 200,000

S YS TEM S C OR E

T O T A L S YS T EM P O W ER CO N S U M P T IO N

Asus Z170i Pro Gaming

Stock speed min

300,000 400,000

HEAVY MULTI - T A S K I N G

VALUE

MSI Z170A Gaming Pro

298,461 345,028

MSI Z170A Gaming Pro

SPEED

59 fps 68 fps

100 Overclocked

161W

150 200 Lower is better

/TEST KIT 4GHz Intel Core i7-6700K, 16GB Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 2666MHz DDR3 memory, 256GB OCZ Arc 100 SSD, Corsair HX860i PSU, Windows 10 Home 64-bit

FO R T H E W I N / COMPETITION

WIN! A be quiet! Silent Base 600 case IN THE COLOUR OF YOUR CHOICE

erman manufacturer be quiet! is famous for making some of the most technologically advanced and quietest PC equipment available. The company’s latest PC case, the Silent Base 600, offers the perfect symbiosis of noise prevention and cooling ability, as well as good usability and an extensive capacity for high-end hardware. The combination of innovative construction and two pre-installed Pure Wings 2 fans assures that cooling ability and air circulation are excellent, and you can control the airflow too. Meanwhile, numerous sound-insulation features, such as the double-glazed window, contribute to the case’s whisperquiet operation. In addition, the case’s use of tool-free mounts, as well as its generous space for hardware and cable management, means it offers first-class usability. The end result is a case that’s ideal not only for high-end gaming gear, but also for quiet systems. The new case is available in six versions, with a choice of three accent colours – orange, black and silver – and the option for a window. What’s more, be quiet! is offering the winner of this competition a Silent Base 600 in their own choice of colour, with or without a window. To be in with a chance of winning a Silent Base 600 case, answer the question below. QUESTION: Which accent colour is not available for the Silent Base 800? A. Orange B. Silver C. Green

Email your answer to [emailprotected], with ‘be quiet! Competition 147’ in the Subject line. Closing date 19 November, 2015. See www.dennis.co.uk/comp/terms for the full competition rules.

R E V I E WS / NEW KIT

G A M I N G K E Y B OA R D

CM Storm Quick Fire XTi/£140

inc VAT (MSRP)

SUPPLIER TBC

ost keyboards with complicated macro and lighting customisation options manage these features through software. There are a few exceptions, however, and adding itself to that list is CM Storm’s Quick Fire XTi. This new keyboard offers multi-colour per-key backlighting, five on-board profiles and programmable macros for almost every key, yet it’s also fully plug-and-play with no need for software. The Quick Fire XTi has an extremely minimalist design; it’s about as small as possible for a full 105key keyboard. The small space above the numeric keypad is home to four dedicated profile keys, allowing for easy switching at any time. You can also hit FN-Esc to go to the keyboard’s default profile, which returns every key to its default function. All five profiles, including the default one, can have a wide array of backlighting effects applied. Using FN-F3, you can flick between pre-programmed effects that are applied to the entire key set, or, with FN-Pause, record your own perkey patterns. Each key is backed by a dual-colour LED. FN-F2 controls the red lighting while F1 controls blue lighting, and you can also achieve a purple effect. There are five levels of brightness per colour, /SPECIFICATIONS which equates to 35 possible combinations Connection Wired, USB overall. In record mode, the FN key indicates the Cable 1.8m, braided, detachable current selected colour, and you then simply hit Material Plastic which keys you want to be that colour. It may Switch Type Cherry MX sound confusing, but you quickly get used to it, Brown (Blue and Red and Cooler Master has made a handy YouTube available) manual to guide you through the process. Backlighting Red/blue dual LED, per-key The quality of the lighting is superb. The USB ports None brightness is consistent, the colours are solid and Wrist rest No there’s a lovely glow between the keys courtesy of Extras 105-key rollover, the white plate on which the keys rest. This plate Windows lock, media keys, also helps to spread the light effectively through key puller, replacement function key, on-the-fly dual-symbol keys. lighting control, on-the-fly Meanwhile, macros can be recorded and stored macro recording in all but the default profile using FN-F9 (F10 for

There’s a lovely glow between the keys

macro deletion). Most keys are available for programming, with the available (empty) ones lighting up blue. Once a key is selected, you simply enter your keystrokes – the keyboard can handle at least 100 key presses per macro and there’s no obvious time limit either. You can even set specific playback modes for the macro – one-time, toggle or loop. Of course, without software, there are limitations as to what can be achieved. For example, the backlighting isn’t RGB, although red, blue and purple are popular colours among many enthusiasts. You also can’t program keys with functions, such as Windows or program shortcuts, nor can you set macros to be replayed without delays – these settings are stored and played in real time. All this customisation would be meaningless if the keyboard itself wasn’t up to scratch, but thankfully, the Quick Fire XTi is fantastic. It’s extremely well built, and feels as solid and robust as the best keyboards we’ve used. The rubber pads equip it with a strong grip on smooth surfaces, while its rear legs provide a sharper typing angle if desired. The USB cable is detachable too, which typically increases longevity, and it can be threaded through one of the underside’s three cable channels to keep your desk tidy. Our sample was furnished with a full set of Cherry MX Brown switches, although Red and Blue Cherry MX options are also available. In use, the switches are as excellent and consistent as ever. We find the light, tactile Brown switches to be pleasant both in typing and when gaming, making them ideal for people who do lots of both on the same machine. Full 105-key rollover is supported over USB and the keycaps are a joy to use, as they’re not only smooth, but they also have the right level of grip – they also have a UV

coating. Honestly, we can’t fault the experience of using the Quick Fire XTi. While build quality is high, though, extra features are thin on the ground. There’s no wrist rest, for example, just a key puller and a replacement keycap sporting the Cooler Master logo. There are also no USB ports or dedicated media controls. The FN key brings a few more functions though. Coupled with F4, it provides a Windows key lock, while F5-F8 control the hardware accelerated repeat rate. Lastly, with the six keys above the arrow keys, you have all the usual media and volume controls at your fingertips.

Conclusion A price of £140 is serious cash for a keyboard. For those who use their machines solidly, such an investment can make sense, but Cooler Master could still have sweetened the deal with some extra features. If you don’t mind using software, Corsair’s K70 RGB offers even more lighting and key options, dedicated media keys and a wrist rest, and for £20 less too. That said, there are very few keyboards that offer multicoloured lighting control and heaps of macro possibilities without any software – as far as we know, the XTi is the pinnacle of plug-and-play keyboards. These features are very appealing for certain gamers, though, as is the exceptionally high level of quality that Cooler Master has poured into the XTi. If you’re looking for a superb mechanical gaming keyboard that’s brimming with macro options and doesn’t require you to faff around with software, the Quick Fire XTi is currently as good as it gets.

DESIGN

FEATURES

38/40 28/35 VALUE

15/25 VERDICT

OVERALL SCORE

81%

The Quick Fire XTi offers superb quality and excellent plug-and-play features, which don’t require any software. It’s expensive, but worth the cost if that’s what you’re looking for.

MATTHEW LAMBERT nanopoint_dennis_190x130mm_20150225.pdf 1 27.02.2015 15:02:25

CMY

R E V I E WS / NEW KIT

How we test Thorough testing and research is the key to evaluating whether a product is worth buying, and deciding whether or not there’s a better alternative PROCESSORS We judge CPUs on whether they offer sufficient speed for the price. Part of a CPU’s speed score comes from how overclockable it is. Every type of CPU is tested in the same PC, so all results are directly comparable.

INTEL LGA2011V3

INTEL LGA1151

+ Intel LGA1151 CPU

Asus Z170 Deluxe

16GB Corsair Vengeance LPX 2666MHz DDR4

256GB Samsung 850 Pro

Intel LGA2011 -v3 CPU

+ Asus Rampage V Extreme

16GB Corsair Vengeance LPX 2133MHz DDR4

512GB Crucial MX100

COMMON COMPONENTS

AMD FM2+

+ AMD FM2+ APU

+ MSI A88XG45Gaming

+ 16GB Corsair Vengeance Pro 2133MHz DDR3 (GPU testing)

+ 8GB Corsair Vengeance Pro 1600MHz DDR3 (CPU testing)

+ 240GB Crucial M500

Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 3GB

Windows 10 64-bit

TESTS: We use Custom PC RealBench 2015, Cinebench R11.5 and a variety of games. We also test the power draw of the test PC with the CPU installed. These tests reveal a broad range of performance characteristics, from image editing to gaming and video encoding to 3D rendering. We run all tests at stock speed and again when overclocked to its highest frequency. *Please note: We test AMD FM2+ APUs using the on-board graphics, not the Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 3GB

GRAPHICS CARDS Graphics cards are mainly evaluated on how fast they are for their price. However, we also consider the efficacy and quietness of the cooler. Every graphics card is tested in the same PC, so all results are directly comparable.

4.2GHz Intel Core i5-3570K

8GB Corsair Dominator 2400MHz DDR3

Asus Maximus V Extreme

Windows 10 64-bit

= SCORES

The graphics card we’re reviewing

CUSTOM PC REALBENCH 2015 INTEL REFERENCE

Intel Core 16GB of Corsair i7-4790K 2400MHz DDR3

AMD REFERENCE

+ 240GB OCZ 150

+ Asus Maximus Gene VII

=100%

Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 3GB

AMD 8GB of Corsair A10-7850K 2133MHz DDR3

+ 256GB Plextor M5 Pro

MOTHERBOARDS Motherboards are evaluated on everything from layout and features to overclockability and value for money. Every motherboard is tested with the same components, so all results are directly comparable.

INTEL LGA1151

AMD FM2+

Motherboard 16GB Corsair Intel 240GB on test Vengeance LPX OCZ Arc Core 2666MHz DDR4 i7-6700K 100

INTEL LGA2011V3

Motherboard on test

16GB Corsair Vengeance Pro 2133MHz DDR3

COMMON COMPONENTS

Intel Core Motherboard Plextor M6 32GB Crucial i7-5960X on test 256GB 2133MHz DDR4

The Awards EXTREME ULTRA

+ AMD A10-7870K

Our benchmark suite, co-developed with Asus, simulates how people really use PCs – a higher score is =100% better. You can download them from Asus www.asus.com/ A88X-Pro campaign/Realbench

AMD Radeon R9 390X*

Windows 10 64-bit

TESTS: We use Custom PC RealBench 2015 andTotal War: Attila, and also test the speeds of the board’s SATA and M.2 ports. We try to overclock every motherboard we review by testing for a maximum QPI, base clock or HTT as well as overclocking the CPU to its maximum air-cooled level. We run our tests at stock speed and with the CPU overclocked. *Please note: We test AMD FM2+ motherboards using the on-board graphics, not the AMD Radeon R9 390X

Some products are gloriously over the top. These items of excellent overkill earn our Extreme Ultra award.

PREMIUM GRADE Premium Grade products are utterly desirable – we’d eat nothing but beans until we could afford them.

PROFESSIONAL Products worthy of the Professional award make you and your business appear even more awesome.

APPROVED Approved products are those that do a great job for the money; they’re the canny purchase for a great PC.

CUSTOM KIT TESTS: By using the fast PC detailed on the left, we can be sure that any limitations are due to the graphics card on test, rather than being CPU limited. We test Battlefield 4, Shadow of Mordor, Crysis 3, Alien: Isolation and The Witcher III: Wild Hunt at their maximum detail settings, in their highest DirectX mode, at several resolutions. High-end cards should be able to sustain playable frame rates at 2,560 x 1,440, while 1,920 x 1,080 is more important for mid-range cards; we also test at 3,840 x 2,160 for 4K monitors, and try to overclock every graphics card we test to assess the performance impact.

For those gadgets and gizmos that really impress us, or that we can’t live without, there’s the Custom Kit award.

R E V I E WS / NEW KIT

Custom Kit Paul Goodhead checks out the latest gadgets, gizmos and geek toys P H O N E ACC E S S O RY

Goggle Cardboard/£15

inc VAT

We’re quite taken with Google Cardboard. Its low-fi, homebrew feel appeals to our modding tendencies and it’s great being able to assemble a passable VR headset from cardboard. The end experience relies heavily on the smartphone you use to provide the display, however. It needs some grunt to run the games, and the higher the pixel density (ppi) of the screen, the better – a Nexus 6 worked fine in our tests, but an HTC One Mini (M8) struggled, for example. Gaming on the Cardboard was fun, as was flying around Google Earth, although the effectiveness of the magnetic button on our test model was patchy. The latter has been improved on the newly announced V2, however, so opt for the newer model if you can find it. SUPPLIER www.amazon.co.uk

E X T E R N A L D I S K C A D DY

Startech S252BU33R/ £57 inc VAT

Generally, sound bars blast audio straight forwards, and Orbitsound says this state of affairs results in a below-par experience for everyone not lucky enough to be in the central audio sweet spot. Its solution to this problem is the A70, with clever audio processing and an additional pair of end-mounted speakers. It really works too – audio felt much fuller and richer from every angle than with a standard soundbar, with very little variation no matter where we stood. A wireless subwoofer adds bass punch, and with 300W of output, you’ll need to wait until the neighbours are out before you push the volume up to full whack. At £500 inc VAT, it clearly isn’t for everyone, but with on-board Bluetooth for streaming music and the ability to pair it with your TV remote, it’s a greatquality, feature-rich soundbar if you have the money.

The S252BU33R might not have a catchy name, but it’s a cut above your usual external hard drive box, being designed to take two 2.5in disks and run them in RAID 0, RAID 1, JBOD or BIG configurations. It’s attractive too, thanks to its anodised aluminium shell, and it’s small enough to be portable. The power options can help with portability as well – depending on the power requirements of your drive setup, you can power the box via one or two 5V USB ports for host power, and there’s an optional mains adaptor for setups that need more juice, although you’ll then be tied to the mains. A USB 3 port handles data transfer, along with the two SATA 6Gbps ports, but with a JBOD-mode SSD installed, we only measured leisurely read and write speeds of 47.7MB/sec and 34.9MB/sec respectively. While it isn’t particularly quick, the S252BU33R still offers an affordable and attractive dual-drive USB box that’s ideal if you already have a couple of suitable drives knocking about.

SUPPLIER www.orbitsound.com

SUPPLIER www.cclonline.com

SOUNDBAR

Orbitsound A70 AirSOUND Bar/£500

inc VAT incVAT

CARD GAME

Exploding Kittens: Original Edition/£28

inc VAT

With over 219,000 Kickstarter backers pledging $8.7m for it, card game Exploding Kittens created a hubbub when it first broke cover in January. It’s now on general sale with two decks available – Original and NSFW. The game plays like a cross between Uno and Russian roulette, thanks to a central draw deck that’s laced with instant death via the exploding kitten cards. It’s simple to pick up and takes just over 15 minutes to play – the aim is to be the last player left unexploded. Play revolves around using your hand cards to minimise your explosion risk, whether by skipping your turn to draw, or by reshuffling the central deck. It’s a fine balance though; while drawing from the deck can be perilous, it’s also the only way to replenish your hand.

Exploding Kittens: NSFW Edition/£28

inc VAT

The card and box artwork is by Matt Inman of The Oatmeal fame and is typically offbeat, lending the game a sense of personality, and the two decks function identically, so it’s possible to combine them for bigger games. Unfortunately, though, some of the adult card images in the NSFW deck are bizarre and their humour often falls flat. It feels half-baked, as if the makers of the game had half a deck of funny card ideas, and then made all the rest up in an alcohol-induced haze. The core game itself is still fun, though, and its shallow learning curve and quick game time makes it a great party or pub game that we heartily recommend. SUPPLIER www.amazon.co.uk

USB CHARGER

Sandberg USB Master Charger Pro/£78

inc VAT

With ten USB ports, Sandberg claims that the grandly titled Master Charger Pro can meet the charging needs of an entire family. At first glance, ten ports may feel like overkill for the job, but they’re soon filled once you factor in two or three devices for each family member. Thankfully, the ports also keep up their high 2.4A output regardless of the number of devices connected, so charging is consistently quick. On the negative side, it has looks that only a mother could love. The logistical challenge posed by tethering so many devices to one small box also shouldn’t be underestimated – we were forced to resort to building precarious stacks, which isn’t ideal when you’re dealing with expensive gadgets. SUPPLIER www.morecomputers.com

Seen something worthy of appearing in Custom Kit? Send your suggestions to

[emailprotected]

L A B T E ST

Mothers of invention We give 12 motherboards a hammering through our test suite, covering a variety of prices and feature sets, to find the best foundations for new Skylake builds

he performance improvements from Intel’s new Skylake CPUs may be more evolutionary than revolutionary, but the new motherboards that accompany them bring interesting changes to the table for high-end gaming PCs. Dual-channel DDR4 memory and optional USB 3.1 are part of the offering, along with 4x PCI-E 3 SSD storage in the slim M.2 form factor, massively improving the bandwidth for M.2 storage over the previous Z97 chipset. However, there’s a huge number of Z170 motherboards from which to choose, with a variety of prices and feature sets. We’ve

already covered some of them, both in our initial Skylake coverage and in a roundup last month, but that’s still only scratched the surface of the staggering range on the market. As such, this month we’re looking at a far wider range of Z170 ATX motherboards (and a microATX board), putting them through their paces in all our usual tests, looking at the key differences in their design and feature sets, and most importantly, establishing whether they’re worth purchasing over the competition. MATTHEW LAMBERT AND ORESTIS BASTOUNIS

Featured this issue How we test /p39 Results graphs /p55 ASRock Fatal1ty Z170 Gaming K4 /p40 ASRock Z170 Extreme4 /p41

Asus Maximum VIII Gene /p42 Asus Maximus VIII Ranger /p44 Asus Z170 Pro Gaming /p45 EVGA Z170 Classified /p46 Gigabyte Z170X-Gaming 3 /p48

Gigabyte Z170X-Gaming 5 /p50 Gigabyte Z170XP-SLI /p51 MSI Z170A Gaming M7 /p52 MSI Z170A Gaming Pro /p53 MSI Z170A Xpower Gaming TE /p54

How we test

On-board audio performance is tested using Rightmark Audio Analyzer

e test each of the motherboards in this Labs test using an Intel Core i7-6700K, the highestspecification LGA1151 CPU currently available. Alongside this CPU is 16GB (2 x 8GB) of Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 memory. We also use an OCZ Arc 100 240GB SSD and an XFX Radeon R9 390X Double Dissipation 8GB graphics card. The CPU is cooled using a Corsair H110i GT liquid cooler and the system is powered by an Antec High Current Pro 850W PSU. All tests are performed with Windows 10 Home 64-bit. We first test each motherboard at its stock settings, resetting the EFI system to its defaults and setting the memory speed to 2666MHz using the built-in XMP profile before booting into Windows. We then attempt to overclock the board to its highest possible CPU frequency. The maximum clock frequency we’ve achieved with our sample is 4.9GHz. Beyond this clock speed, the voltage needed for stability would necessitate venturing into extreme cooling, so this speed is the realistic limit of the chip. For simplicity’s sake, we leave the base clock at 100MHz and tweak the multiplier and vcore until we reach the maximum possible frequency with the lowest possible voltage to achieve it. We also disable CPU power-saving features and set loadline calibration (or the equivalent setting) to its maximum, as this tweak has proved useful when overclocking Skylake CPUs. Once a stable overclock is found, we repeat the CPU-based tests. We’ve tested using the latest version of Custom PC RealBench 2015 (see p112). This benchmark runs four separate tests, taxing a PC’s single-threaded performance using the Gimp image manipulation suite, heavily multi-threaded performance using the Handbrake open source video transcoder, OpenCL performance using LuxMark and heavy multi-tasking performance by playing back full-screen HD video at the same time as conducting a video transcode. We’ve excluded the OpenCL results from this test, as it only really tests graphics card performance. Each test produces an individual point score based on completion time, and also outputs a weighted system score. The

Gaming performance is assessed using the built-in Londinium benchmark in Total War: Attila

We use CrystalDiskMark test the chipset’s SATA 6Gbps speed, and the speed of any M.2 ports

entire suite is free to download so you can easily run it on your home system and see how your hardware compares to the kit on test. To test in-game performance, we use the built-in Londinium benchmark in Total War: Attila, capturing the minimum and average frame rate over the first 50 seconds using Fraps. The test is performed at 1,920 x 1,080 with Quality settings and antialiasing disabled. While the test is partially GPU-limited, this game also heavily taxes the CPU, so the onus is still on the motherboard to perform. Next, we use CrystalDiskMark to test the chipset’s SATA 6Gbps speeds as well as the speeds of any M.2 ports using a Samsung SSD 850 PRO 256GB and a Kingston HyperX Predator 240GB M.2 PCI-E SSD respectively. We then test on-board audio using Rightmark Audio Analyzer. With a 3.5mm audio cable, we connect the line-out jack to the line-in jack, and then set both devices to 24-bit/96kHz in the Windows Properties

menu. We then run the Playback/ Recording test at these settings, adjusting the levels to as close to -2dB as possible. The results we report are noise level, dynamic range and total harmonic distortion. Last but not least, we record idle power consumption as well as load consumption using Prime95’s smallfft test, both at stock settings and when overclocked.

USB STANDARDS The USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF) has recently caused confusion by making the new USB 3.1 spec essentially absorb the older USB 3.0 one. The ports we all know as USB 3.0 (5Gb/sec maximum transfer speed) are now officially called USB 3.1 Gen 1, while new ‘real’ USB 3.1 ports (10Gb/sec) are USB 3.1 Gen 2. We’ll be sticking to USB 3.0 and USB 3.1 for simplicity, but if you see either of the new names listed in motherboard spec sheets, that’s why!

L A B S T E ST / Z170 MOTHERBOARDS

ASRock Fatal1ty Z170 Gaming K4/£108

inc VAT

SUPPLIER www.kikatek.com

he two ASRock motherboards in this test join Gigabyte’s Z170XP-SLI in the sub-£110 family, making them among the cheapest boards on test. The first noticeable aspect of the Z170 Gaming K4 is its two PCI-E 16x slots, rather than the three slots found on many other boards this month. Although most people won’t install more than two graphics cards, if you do have a CrossFire configuration, there won’t be any room for a 4x card such as a PCI-E SSD. However, the leftover space from only having two 16x slots isn’t wasted. There are three PCI-E 1x slots, but as long as you stick to dual-height graphics cards, there’s extra room for airflow underneath each of them and still space to fit a shorter card in each PCI-E 1x slot, which is good to see. The Gaming K4’s layout is generally good in other respects too. There’s plenty of space around the power connectors, and although the SATA ports aren’t right-angled, they’ve been positioned so they can’t get in the way of long graphics cards in the lower slot. It’s not all good news though. The sizeable heatsinks on the VRMs have no heatpipe, and the fan headers are tightly packed together as well. Meanwhile, the separate PCI-E Molex power connector is in the middle of the board, where it’s pretty difficult to access and, as on some other boards, the M.2 slot will also be obscured by the top graphics card. Meanwhile, ASRock’s EFI generally matches the efforts of other manufacturers in terms of layout and features. The initial splash screen shows the usual information, such as temperatures and boot priority, and there’s a link to ASRock’s EZ OC feature for quick and easy overclocking, plus firmware updating via either USB or online sources. Switch to the EFI’s advanced mode and you get a tab system that’s easy to navigate, with the usual way to add frequently accessed settings to a Favorites bar, while voltages are in separate submenus, although Gigabyte’s EFI offers more voltage options. As with MSI’s EFI, you get a handy system browser, which is useful if you suspect one of your components

isn’t working properly. It looks good too, with a high contrast colour scheme and font. Notably, despite the entry-level purchase price, the Z170 Gaming K4 supports an impressive maximum memory frequency of 3866MHz, more than some of the more expensive boards, although this is a niche feature. The Gaming K4 was also capable of an overclocked and stable 4.8GHz clock frequency without thermal throttling, though it required 1.48V to be passed through it. However, while the Fatal1ty Z170 Gaming K4 is clearly a well-built, good-value board, its performance, while still quick enough, was still slower comparatively slow, with the lowest result in our image editing test. Perhaps more importantly, though, ASRock’s own Extreme4 costs a similar amount of money, yet offers a third 16x PCI-E slot, along with on-board power and reset buttons, a POST code display, a clear-CMOS switch and SLI support, all of which are strangely absent on the Fatal1ty Z170 Gaming K4.

Conclusion The ASRock Fatal1ty Z170 Gaming K4 is a decent Z170 motherboard for the money, but

ASRock has missed a few tricks with its feature set, such as on-board power and reset buttons. What’s more, ASRock’s own Extreme4 motherboard offers more features, including a third PCI-E slot, as well as quicker performance, for a similar price, making it a superior budget buy.

PERFORMANCE

26/30

FEATURES

VALUE

24/35 30/35 VERDICT

OVERALL SCORE

80%

A decent Z170 motherboard, but ASRock’s Extreme4 offers a wider feature set and quicker performance for a similar price. /SPECIFICATIONS Chipset Intel Z170 CPU socket Intel LGA1151 Memory support 4 slots, max 64GB DDR4 (3866MHz - OC) Expansion slots Two 16x PCI-E, three 1x PCI-E Sound Realtek ALC1150 Networking Killer E2400 Gigabit LAN Overclocking Base clock 100–340MHz, CPU multiplier 8–120x; max voltages, CPU 1.520V, RAM 1.8V Ports 1 x PS/2, 2 x SATA Express, 6 x SATA 6Gbps 1 x M.2, 2 x USB 2, 5 x USB 3, 1 x USB 3 Type C, 1 x Gigabit LAN, 8-channel surround audio out, line in, mic, optical, S/PDIF out IGP display outputs 1 x DVI, 1 x HDMI Dimensions (mm) 305 x 244

ASRock Z170 Extreme4/£109

inc VAT

SUPPLIER www.scan.co.uk

SRock’s two motherboards on test are very close in price and, if you ignore the branding and red colour scheme of the Fatal1ty Z170 Gaming K4, the components look very similar to those on the Z170 Extreme K4. The cover for the I/O shield and audio hardware is identical, just painted a different colour, and the heatsink design for the VRMs is pretty much the same too. The Extreme 4 improves on the Fatal1ty in a few ways though. There are still six 6Gbps SATA ports and three SATA Express ports, but the larger block of them to the right of the board are right-angled, solving the potential problem of long video cards being obstructed. There’s another 16x PCI-E slot too, raising the total from two to three, and the Extreme4 also supports SLI as well as CrossFire. There’s an extra gap for airflow underneath the top 16x slot too, although the M.2 connector is positioned right underneath it, guaranteeing that it will be obscured by a dual-slot graphics card cooler. There’s sensible spacing for dual-slot coolers in the other 16x slots too, although you’ll then end up blocking two of the three 1x PCI-E slots. Space around the connectors is generally ample, with plenty of space for the 8-pin CPU connector and fan headers at the top. The board is quite crowded in the bottom right, though, with SATA ports, power and reset buttons and an error code display. The display and buttons are welcome inclusions that are absent on the Fatal1ty board, but they could be better positioned – there will be cables all over the place in this area in an assembled PC. We’re surprised that, even with the modern Z170 chipset, USB 3 hasn’t completely replaced USB 2 as the standard used throughout motherboard designs, but the Extreme4 is one of the few boards on test that thankfully banishes the older standard from the rear I/O panel, so you won’t need to fumble around the back, wondering if your hard disk is plugged into the right port. USB 3.1 is present too, in type-A and type-C forms, bringing the total number of rear USB ports to eight. Rounding off the rear I/O panel is a range of video outputs for the IGP, should

you need it, including DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort connectors. As expected, ASRock has used a similar EFI on both the Extreme 4 and Fatal1ty Z170 Gaming K4, albeit with slightly different colours. The Fatal1ty EFI is red, while the Extreme4 EFI has a blue scheme. The menus and settings are otherwise the same, although you get a few more overclocking options with the Extreme4. ASRock’s EFI design is generally very good, with a concise menu system, clear labelling and a good range of features that matches other board makers. We were pleased to see the Extreme4 perform well with overclocking too, managing a stable 4.8GHz frequency at 1.48V, matching the results from the Gaming K4. Higher speeds weren’t possible, and the voltage is pretty high, but it’s a good achievement from one of the cheapest boards on test. The Extreme4 was no slouch in performance either, achieving the fourth best RealBench 2015 overall system score on test.

designed EFI and good potential for overclocking. Best of all, it only costs £109 inc VAT, making it a great foundation for a budget Skylake build.

PERFORMANCE

27/30

FEATURES

VALUE

27/35 32/35 VERDICT

OVERALL SCORE

86%

Solid performance, loads of enthusiast features and surprisingly good overclocking abilities make the Extreme4 a great motherboard if you’re on a tight budget. /SPECIFICATIONS Chipset Intel Z170 CPU socket Intel LGA1151 Memory support 4 slots, max 64GB DDR4 (3866MHz - OC) Expansion slots Three 16x PCI-E, four 1x PCI-E Sound Realtek ALC1150

Conclusion

Networking Intel Gigabit LAN

The ASRock Extreme4 has a strong board layout, a wide range of features, a well-

Overclocking Base clock 90–600MHz, CPU Multiplier 8–120x; max voltages, CPU 1,520V, RAM 1.8V Ports 3 x SATA Express, 6 x SATA 6Gbps 1 x M.2, 8 x USB 3, 2 x USB 3.1 Type-A, 1 x USB 3.1 Type C, 1 x Gigabit LAN, 8-channel surround audio out, line in, mic, optical S/PDIF out IGP display outputs 1 x DVI, 1 x HDMI, 1 x DisplayPort Dimensions (mm) 305 x 244

ELITE NEW ENTRY P 62

L A B S T E ST / Z170 MOTHERBOARDS

Asus Maximus VIII Gene/£142

inc VAT

SUPPLIER www.scan.co.uk

he differences between micro-ATX and ATX boards have now shrunk to the point where you don’t lose much by opting for a smaller board, especially if you buy the Asus Maximus VIII Gene. Aside from having fewer PCI-E slots, it offers all you get from an ATX board and, in some cases, more. All the goodies of the Z170 chipset are here: an M.2 slot, on-board USB 3.1 ports (in addition to six USB 3 ports), four DDR4 DIMM slots, six SATA 6Gbps connectors, and the same EFI overclocking tools you would expect from ATX boards, with a similarly wide range of supported CPU multipliers, base clock frequencies and voltages. Notably, the rear panel is also completely free of USB 2 ports. Similarly, there’s been no skimping on the chunky chipset and VRM heatsinks, the latter of which are connected via a small heatpipe, and Asus has still managed to leave plenty of room around the power connectors. There should be few problems with longer video cards as well, as the SATA ports are all rightangled, and even the M.2 slot has space to spare – you’ll even be able to squeeze a 22110 M.2 device in there, albeit obscured by the graphics card – a feature that not every ATX boards offers. The board also happily accommodates dual-GPU setups, with space underneath both 16x PCI-E slots, although the limited room on micro-ATX boards means you sacrifice upgrade room elsewhere by doing so. There’s a single 1x PCI-E slot underneath the second 16x slot, but it will be obscured if you install a second card. If you’re using two dual-slot air-cooled cards then they will also be positioned right next to each other using this board, which isn’t ideal. Meanwhile, the I/O panel is quite crowded, with HDMI and DisplayPort outputs, BIOSflashback and clear-CMOS buttons, and USB 3.1 type-A and type-C ports positioned at the top. Asus has even found room for seven fan headers on the board, along with power and reset buttons and a POST code display. Then we have they comprehensive EFI system, which lacks none of the features of the larger Asus ATX motherboards. BIOS

updates can be performed via USB or a direct Internet download, there’s a separate Q-Fan control with customisable fan curves and the highly useful Asus SSD secure erase feature is present. It’s full of features and it also has clear menus and a logical layout, making it a pleasure to use. We managed to squeeze 4.9GHz out of our Core i7-6700k Skylake processor with the other Asus ROG board on test, the Maximus VIII Ranger (see p44), and had similarly good results from the Gene. Again, it hit 4.9GHz, which is a faster frequency than we achieved from most other Z170 boards, and again this result was stable at a fairly low voltage of just 1.38V. In fact, when overclocked, the Maximus VIII Gene was the overall fastest motherboard on test in RealBench 2015, showing you now lose nothing in terms of performance and overclocking by going for a micro-ATX board. The Gene was very quick at stock speed too, and its small size also helped with power efficiency, with our test system drawing just 128W at load at stock speed – the best result on test.

Conclusion The Gene betters several ATX boards on test, with great performance, amazing overclocking abilities and a strong feature set.

PERFORMANCE

28/30

FEATURES

VALUE

30/35 29/35 VERDICT

OVERALL SCORE

87%

A feature set that belies its size, and its performance and overclocking abilities are superb too. /SPECIFICATIONS Chipset Intel Z170 CPU socket Intel LGA1151 Memory support 4 slots, max 64GB DDR4 (3800MHz - OC) Expansion slots Two 16x PCI-E, one 1x PCI-E Sound Realtek ALG1500 Networking Intel Gigabit LAN Overclocking Base clock 40–650MHz, CPU multiplier 8–83x; max voltages, CPU 1.7V, RAM 2.0064V Ports 1 x PS/2, 2 x SATA Express, 6 x SATA 6Gbps, 1 x M.2 , 6 x USB 3, 1 x USB 3.1 type-A, 1 x USB 3.1 type-C, 1 x LAN, 8-channel surround audio out, line in, mic, optical S/PDIF out IGP display outputs 1 x HDMI, 1 x DisplayPort Dimensions (mm) 244 x 244

The answer is

Is Silent Base 600 a true all-rounder? Absolutely! The new be quiet! Silent Base 600 case has all you need to build any PC you want. It offers the perfect symbiosis of noise prevention and cooling performance, good usability and generous capacity for high-end hardware. Outstanding airﬂow control Renowned whisper-quiet operation ■ Generous space and tool-free mounting ■ Available with or without double-glazed window side panel

■

Product conception, design and quality control in Germany. For more information visit bequiet.com. Available at: scan.co.uk · overclockers.co.uk · novatech.co.uk · aria.co.uk · ebuyer.com · amazon.co.uk

*According to the GfK market research 2007-2015.

‘Yes!’

L A B S T E ST / Z170 MOTHERBOARDS

Asus Maximus VIII Ranger/£154

inc VAT

SUPPLIER www.ebuyer.com

lthough the Maximus VIII Ranger is far from the cheapest board on test, it’s still notably less expensive than other Asus Republic of Gamers boards, giving enthusiasts a chance to get their hands on Asus’ ROG goodness without breaking the bank. It’s good to see solid, large heatsinks on the VRMs and chipset, although there’s no connecting heatpipe, as found on the other ROG boards. Free space around the power connectors isn’t that generous either, but that’s not a major problem. On the plus side, the main fan headers are positioned along the easily accessible top area of the board, including a connector for a pump, and the front and rear chassis fan headers are in the right places as well. Meanwhile, there are six SATA ports and two SATA Express ports with right-angled connectors, and a single M.2 connector is located to the lower right of the motherboard, positioned below the middle 16x PCI-E slot. Placing the M.2 connector in this area of the board is better than placing it in a fiddly spot right under the top 16x slot, and there’s also enough space for 22110 device compatibility. Of course, your M.2 device will be obscured if a graphics card is installed in that slot, but that’s only likely to be an issue if you’re building a dual-GPU setup. There’s also a single 1x PCI-E slot above the main 16x PCI-E slot, so it’s always accessible even with two graphics cards installed. There’s extra space between the top two 16x PCI-E slots too, giving room for plenty of airflow, and there’s still a third slot you could use for a PCI-E SSD, rounding off a generally strong layout. We were also pleased to see that the EFI is almost identical to the one included with the Maximus VIII Gene, with a great layout that’s rich with tools for overclocking and system control. It carries over the same features too. Firmware updating via USB or over the Internet is possible, with a dedicated BIOS Flashback button at the rear. The useful SSD Secure Erase feature is there too, plus fan control software, profile saving to USB and a port renaming tool.

There are a few small differences between the Gene and Ranger though. You still get two USB 3.1 ports (type-A and type-C) but there are four USB 2 ports on the back, and only two USB 3 ports, which seems a bit mean – the Gene has no USB 2 ports on the back. As you would expect, the board also features on-board power and reset buttons, and a POST code display for easy testing. As usual for a ROG board, though, the Ranger was great at overclocking. It managed to overclock our CPU to 4.9GHz while only needing a 1.36V vcore – well below the amount some boards needed to reach a lower 4.8GHz or 4.7GHz frequency. As with the Gene, the Ranger was also a fantastic performer in our tests, with both ROG boards occupying the top spots in our RealBench 2015 test, and in our Total War benchmarks.

Conclusion Despite a couple of very minor niggles with the board layout, the Maximus VIII Ranger is otherwise very well designed and fast, and it offers a great EFI and some genuinely useful extra features. Throw its superb overclocking

abilities into the mix, and the Ranger is the best-balanced enthusiast ATX motherboard on test, and it’s priced reasonably too.

PERFORMANCE

28/30

FEATURES

VALUE

31/35 28/35 VERDICT

OVERALL SCORE

87%

Well designed, fast, great at overclocking and rich with genuinely useful features. The Ranger is a great enthusiast motherboard for a surprisingly reasonable price. /SPECIFICATIONS Chipset Intel Z170 CPU socket Intel LGA1151 Memory support 4 slots, max 64GB DDR4 (3400MHz - OC) Expansion slots Three 16x PCI-E, three 1x PCI-E Sound Realtek ALC1500 Networking Intel i219v Gigabit Ethernet Overclocking Base clock 40–650MHz, CPU multiplier 8–83x; max voltages, CPU 1.7V, RAM 2V Ports 1 x PS/2, 2 x SATA Express, 6 x SATA 6Gbps 1 x M.2, 4 x USB 2, 2 x USB 3, 1 x USB 3.1 (type-A), 1 x USB 3.1 (type-C), 1 x Gigabit LAN, 8-channel surround audio out, line in, mic, optical S/PDIF out IGP display outputs 1 x HDMI, 1 x DisplayPort Dimensions 305 x 244

Asus Z170 Pro Gaming/£119

inc VAT

SUPPLIER www.scan.co.uk

musingly, the competition between Asus and Gigabyte seems to now extend to brand tie-ins with Wargaming.net. Gigabyte’s Z170X-Gaming 3 has a World of Tanks logo, while Asus’ Z170 Pro Gaming goes for World of Warships. You don’t get much – it’s just a code for a new cruiser and 15 days of premium access, but the close rivalry between motherboard firms now extends to the virtual battlefield as well as the marketplace. The Z170 Pro Gaming has three 16x PCI-E slots, three PCI-E slots and a single M.2 slot. The positioning of these components is very good – the main graphics card won’t block anything, there’s a single unobscured 1x PCI-E slot above it and a free slot for airflow underneath, with another unobstructed 1x PCI-E slot below that. The M.2 slot also supports 22110 devices. The rest of the layout is great too – there’s room around the power connectors, and the fan headers are well placed to the right of the VRM heatsinks. Six right-angled SATA 6Gpbs ports are also sensibly placed in the lower right of the board, joined by a single SATA Express port The aforementioned heatsinks are a bit small, though, and there’s no heatpipe to connect them. You do get an aesthetic lighting kit, however, with red LEDs below the model name and a strip by the SupremeFX sound system. You can toggle these lights on or off in the EFI, or set them to a ‘breathing’ mode. Unlike ASRock’s cheaper Extreme4, though, there are no on-board power and reset buttons, or a clear-CMOS switch. At the back, there’s a stack of four USB 3 ports, with USB 3.1 type-A and type-C connectors, and another pair of USB 2 ports at the top. Interestingly, the IGP has four display outputs too – VGA, DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort – providing plenty of options. Meanwhile, the EFI is up to the same high standard as the other Asus motherboards, and is an aspect of Asus products that stands out. Arguably, all manufacturers now offer an EFI that’s good enough, but Asus goes further, with a great main screen, favourite settings, Q-Fan control with custom fan curves and OC

profiles. Useful features such as USB BIOS Flashback and SSD Secure Erase are included too – the latter used to only be found on Asus’ ROG boards. The two Asus ROG boards on test and EVGA’s Classified enabled us to overclock our Core i7-6700k processor to 4.9GHz, and unfortunately, the Z170 Pro Gaming couldn’t quite hit this same level, topping out at 4.8GHz, but with a relatively comfortable voltage of 1.34V. That’s still a good result, though, particularly from a £119 board. However, while the Z170 Pro Gaming was fast enough, it was noticeably behind most of the other boards on test in our performance benchmarks, but only by a small margin.

Conclusion The Asus Z170 Pro Gaming can’t quite compete with the ASRock Extreme4 in terms of value, and it isn’t quite as quick as much of the competition, although the margin is small. However, it does offer a great EFI and a decent layout and, while it misses a few feature marks, it’s great to see features such as SSD Secure Erase making it to a sub-£120 board.

The Extreme4 might offer better value for money, but if the Z170 Pro Gaming’s feature set is more appropriate for your needs, it’s still a decent board for a reasonable price.

PERFORMANCE

26/30

FEATURES

VALUE

27/35 31/35 VERDICT

OVERALL SCORE

84%

A decent layout, EFI and a feature set for the money, although other boards are a little quicker and offer slightly better value. /SPECIFICATIONS Chipset Intel Z170 CPU socket Intel LGA1151 Memory support 4 slots, max 64GB DDR4 (3400MHz - OC) Expansion slots Three 16x PCI-E, three 1x PCI-E Sound Realtek ALC1150 Networking Intel Gigabit Ethernet Overclocking Base clock 40–650MHz, CPU multiplier 8–83x; max voltages, CPU 1.7V, RAM 1.8V Ports 1 x PS/2, 1 x SATA Express, 6 x SATA 6Gbps 1 x M.2, 2 x USB 2, 4 x USB 3, 1 x USB 3.1 type-A, 1x USB 3.1 type-C, 1 x Gigabit LAN, surround audio out, line in, mic, optical S/PDIF out IGP display outputs 1 x VGA, 1 x DVI, 1 x HDMI, 1 x DisplayPort Dimensions (mm) 305 x 244

L A B S T E ST / Z170 MOTHERBOARDS

EVGA Z170 Classified 4-Way/£345

inc VAT

SUPPLIER www.scan.co.uk

VGA’s Z170 Classified 4-Way is the only motherboard on test with 4-way SLI support. Normally, there aren’t enough PCI-E lanes on a Z170 system for four graphics cards, but with the addition of a PLX chip, which artificially increases the number of lanes via multiplexing, it’s possible to effectively squeeze more lanes from the Z170 chipset and run four Nvidia cards together. The Z170 Classified is also notable for its price. At £345, it’s significantly more expensive than any other board on test. On the plus side, it’s great to see the use of particularly massive heatsinks that cover the VRMs and chipset, with large heatpipes running along the board. However, otherwise this board struggles to justify its price tag. It has a fairly standard array of ports. USB 3.1 is included, but only via a header on the board, while there are six standard USB 3 ports and two USB 2 ports at the back. There are eight SATA 6Gbps ports, though, which is fairly generous, with two SATA Express ports next to them. You also get two Intel Gigabit LAN ports, which could have some benefits in certain networked environments, or with NAS boxes that have dual NICs. The Classified is also an E-ATX board, so it has extra space for a comfortable component layout. The top 16x PCI-E slot has plenty of space around it, but the single 4x PCI-E slot is guaranteed to be obscured by a card in the fourth 16x PCI-E slot. The M.2 slot sits right next to it too, meaning M.2 access will be tricky. What’s more, EVGA recommends using the top and fourth slots for 2-way SLI, which will obscure these parts. Also, the twin 8-pin CPU power connectors are really close to the VRM heatsink, so fitting them will be a tight squeeze. However, a major plus point is the universal use of rightangled connectors, including the ATX connector. Likewise, the audio and USB headers, as well as the SATA ports, are all angled, which will improve cable management and result in a tidier PC. EVGA’s EFI isn’t bad either, with sensible decisions made for the layout of the splash screen. It shows the overclock settings on the front page with memory settings in a separate tab, which is chock full of timing controls. USB firmware updating is standard and the menu design is fairly simple, so you shouldn’t get

lost easily. However, there are none of the fancy features such as fan curve profiles or favourites sections you get with Asus’ EFI, and there’s no list of changes made as you exit either. However, one area where the Classified excelled was in overclocking, being the only non-ROG board on test to get our CPU to 4.9GHz, although it required 1.4V to make it stable, which is more than the ROG boards and accounts for the highest overclocked power consumption on test. In terms of performance, the Classified was generally competitive in our benchmarks, but it faltered in our audio tests, where the on-board Creative Core 3D Audio system recorded a signal to noise ratio of -98.5dB(A) and dynamic range of 98.4dB(A), when every other board on test achieved results below -100dB(A) or above 100dB(A) respectively. The sound quality is respectable, but it’s disappointing that it lacks the fidelity of much cheaper boards.

Conclusion The EVGA Z170 Classified 4-Way’s extensive SLI support, use of right-angled connectors and build quality all help it to stand out. However, a couple of shortcomings and some questionable layout choices make it hard to

justify the price, making this board only worth considering for 4-way SLI Skylake builds. For everyone else, you can get much better value for money elsewhere.

PERFORMANCE

27/30

FEATURES

VALUE

33/35 16/35 VERDICT

OVERALL SCORE

76%

The only board on test with 4-way SLI support, and it’s great to see so many angled connectors, but otherwise it struggles to justify its very high price. /SPECIFICATIONS Chipset Intel Z170 CPU socket Intel LGA1151 Memory support 4 slots, max 64GB DDR4 (3200MHz) Expansion slots Five 16x PCI-E, one 4x PCI-E Sound Creative Core 3D Audio Networking Intel i219 Gigabit Ethernet, Intel i210 Gigabit Ethernet Overclocking Base clock 100–340MHz, CPU multiplier 8–83x; max voltages, CPU 2V, RAM 2V Ports 2 x SATA Express, 8 x SATA 6Gbps 1 x M.2, 2 x USB 2, 6 x USB 3, 2 x Gigabit LAN, 6-channel surround audio out, line in, mic, optical S/PDIF out IGP display outputs 1 x HDMI, 1 x DisplayPort Dimensions (mm) 304.8 x 263.5

L A B S T E ST / Z170 MOTHERBOARDS

Gigabyte Z170X-Gaming 3/£120

inc VAT

SUPPLIER www.ebuyer.com

s with the Z170X-Gaming 5 (see p48), the Gaming 3 doesn’t sacrifice many features compared with its pricier brethren. It looks almost identical to the Gaming 5, with three steel-reinforced red and white 16x PCI-E slots complementing the red and black colour scheme. There are three 1x PCI-E slots, one of which sits above the top 16x slot for unobscured access, and there’s a sizeable gap under the top 16x slot for graphics card airflow too. As with the Gaming 5, the top M.2 slot is also well positioned, sitting above the top 1x slot, so nothing can obscure it, except maybe a chunky CPU cooler. There’s another M.2 slot further down too, and it’s great to see support for two M.2 cards on a £120 product, although they’re limited to holding 2280 cards. The layout is good in most other areas. There’s no heatpipe connecting the VRM heatsinks, although the heatsinks themselves are still pretty chunky. As with the Gaming 5, though, the top heatsink might get in the way of the 8-pin CPU power connector, and the fan headers are all over the place. There are also six right-angled SATA 6Gbps and three SATA Express ports in the lower section of the board, which is good to see. However, the status LED and buttons in the top right of the Gaming 5 are no longer found on the Gaming 3 and, unlike ASRock’s Extreme4, there are no on-board power and reset buttons either. Meanwhile, the only lighting on the board is found around the audio circuits, although lighting is hardly an essential motherboard feature. Meanwhile, at the rear is the standard USB port array – two USB 2 ports at the top, three USB 3 ports and both USB 3.1 type-A and type-C sockets. You also get VGA, DVI and HDMI connectors, but lose the DisplayPort output found on Gigabyte’s pricier boards. As with the other Gigabyte motherboards on test, the EFI system is generally fine, but lacking in a few notable areas. It looks just like the system on the Gaming 5, with the same strange layout in some places, such as menus containing only two items, and there are no

options for fan curves. Of course, the layout of an EFI system isn’t a major reason to avoid any motherboard, but it’s an area where the competition has an upper hand. The Gaming 3 is also let down ever so slightly by thermal throttling when overclocking our CPU to 4.8GHz, so we had to clock it down to 4.7GHz, which was perfectly stable at 1.28V. That’s still a good result, and it’s not as if most people are going to run their CPU at 4.8GHz 24/7 anyway, but again the competition can do better. Like the Gaming 5, the Gaming 3 also lacked in the performance stakes at stock speed – it isn’t slow, but it’s definitely behind the other boards on test. However, its audio performance was superb, achieving the best audio fidelity results on test – a great result for a £120 board.

Conclusion The Z170X-Gaming 3 has plenty going for it, including dual M.2 ports, an attractive price and superb audio quality. However, the cheaper ASRock Z170 Extreme4 offers more enthusiast features and overclocking headroom, and Gigabyte’s EFI needs some

work too. If your top priority is audio performance, though, and you’re on a tight budget, the Z170X-Gaming 3 is still a decent board for a good price.

PERFORMANCE

26/30

FEATURES

VALUE

25/35 29/35 VERDICT

OVERALL SCORE

80%

Great audio quality and dual M.2 ports for a tempting price, but it falls behind the competition in terms of enthusiast features and overclocking headroom. /SPECIFICATIONS Chipset Intel Z170 CPU socket Intel LGA1151 Memory support 4 slots, max 64GB DDR4 (3466 MHz - OC) Expansion slots Three 16x PCI-E, three 1x PCI-E Sound Realtek ALC1150 Networking Killer Gigabit Ethernet Overclocking Base clock 80–500MHz, CPU multiplier 8–27x; max voltages, CPU 1.8V, RAM 2V Ports 1 x PS/2, 3 x SATA Express, 6 x SATA 6Gbps, 2 x M.2, 2 x USB 2, 3 x USB 3, 1 x USB 3.1 (type-A), 1 x USB 3.1 (type-C), 1 x Gigabit LAN, 8 channel surround audio out, line in, mic, optical S/PDIF out IGP display outputs 1 x VGA, 1 x DVI, 1 x HDMI Dimensions (mm) 305 x 235

MAKE OF IT WHAT YOU WILL

MasterCase5

WITH FREEFORMTM MODULAR SYSTEM

Breaking new ground in case technology, the MasterCase 5 by Cooler Master provides you the tools to make something special. Achieve absolute control over how your case looks and functions through our patented FreeForm™ Modular System. The exterior structure and internal layout can be customized, adjusted, and upgraded to meet your needs in pursuit of the maker spirit. Go ahead, dive in, and explore. What will you make of it? Learn more: Coolermaster.com/MasterCase5

L A B S T E ST / Z170 MOTHERBOARDS

Gigabyte Z170X-Gaming 5/£142

inc VAT

SUPPLIER www.box.co.uk

igabyte’s Z170X-Gaming 5 is a little cheaper than the Gaming 7 (see Issue 146, p21), but retains many of its features. It has a similar black, white and red colour scheme, with three steelreinforced red and white 16x PCI-E slots complementing the racy visual design. There are four 1x PCI-E slots, up from three on the Gaming 7, dual M.2 ports remain and there are still two Ethernet ports – one from Intel, the other from Killer. There are a few small differences between the two boards, though. The heatpipe connecting the VRM coolers has gone, and there are no covers on the I/O panel or audio circuitry either. In terms of layout, the area around the 8-pin CPU power connector is fairly crowded, with a fan header and the edge of the VRM heatsink right next to it, but the rest of the connectors are easier to access, including the fan headers. The six SATA ports and three SATA Express ports are all right-angled too, and there are clear labels on the USB headers. Meanwhile, an error code display, and OC and Eco buttons sit at the top right of the board, with the OC button automatically loading a Gigabyte-optimised overclocking preset, and the ECO button enabling power-saving features. However, a simple set of power, reset and clear-CMOS buttons would arguably be more useful here. On the rear I/O panel, you get four USB 2 ports, USB 3.1 in type-A and type-C forms, and three USB 3 ports. HDMI and DisplayPort video outputs are provided for the IGP as well. As on a few other boards, the top M.2 slot is sensibly positioned so that it’s unobstructed by any graphics card, but it’s good to see the lower slot positioned away from the second PCI-E graphics slot – so you’ll be able to access both M.2 ports, even with a dual-GPU setup – a smart move from Gigabyte that other firms should follow. Meanwhile, Gigabyte’s EFI is practically identical to the one on the Gaming 7. It’s pretty solid, with a straightforward splash screen and extras such as USB updating. However, a few features are notably missing, such as a

favourites system and fan control curves. The layout could do with an overhaul as well. When overclocking our Core i7-6700K, the Gaming 5 hit the same 4.8GHz clock speed as the Gaming-7, with a vcore of 1.42V. That isn’t a bad result, but Asus’ Maximus VIII Ranger costs a little over a tenner more and managed to hit 4.9GHz with just a 1.36V vcore. Interestingly, the Gaming 5 also scored the lowest system score in our RealBench 2015 suite. Likewise, all the Gigabyte boards on test could only manage a 56fps minimum in Total War: Attila at stock speed, while other boards hit 60fps. The performance difference between all the boards on test isn’t huge, but we expect a board costing £142 to perform better. On the plus side, the on-board audio quality was superb, with both the Gaming 5 and Gaming 3 achieving the best signal-to-noise ratio and dynamic range results on test, and you can even upgrade the OP-AMP too.

Conclusion The Gaming 5 offers great looks and fantastic audio quality, but it’s slightly let down by its

EFI system, and the similarly priced competition offers faster performance and superior overclocking.

PERFORMANCE

26/30

FEATURES

VALUE

27/35 27/35 VERDICT

OVERALL SCORE

80%

Great looks and superb audio quality, but the EFI needs work, while its performance and overclocking abilities are bettered by the competition. /SPECIFICATIONS Chipset Intel Z170 CPU socket Intel LGA1151 Memory support 4 slots, max 64GB DDR4 (3466MHz - OC) Expansion slots Three 16x PCI-E, four 1x PCI-E Sound Realtek ALC1150 Networking Killer E2201 Gigabit Ethernet, Intel Gigabit Ethernet Overclocking Base clock 80–500MHz, CPU multiplier 8–127x; max voltages, CPU 1.8V, RAM 2V Ports 3 x SATA Express, 6 x SATA 6Gbps, 2 x M.2, 4 x USB 2, 3 x USB 3, 1 x USB 3.1 (type-A), 1 x USB 3.1 (type-C), 2 x Gigabit LAN, 8-channel surround audio out, line in, mic, optical, S/PDIF out IGP display outputs 1 x HDMI, 1 x DisplayPort Dimensions (mm) 305 x 244

Gigabyte Z170XP-SLI/£106

inc VAT

SUPPLIER www.box.co.uk

s the cheapest board on test this month, the Z170XP-SLI’s feature list deserves particular scrutiny. Cheaper boards usually sell in greater volume than the deluxe offerings, but what do you lose by plumping for a £106 motherboard? In the case of the Gigabyte Z170XP-SLI, not an awful lot in terms of essentials. There’s a single M.2 slot, three 16x PCI-E slots, which support 2-way SLI or 3-way CrossFire. It also supports up to 64GB of dual-channel DDR4 memory, with the same maximum overclocked frequency of 3466MHz as the Z170X-Gaming 3 and Z170X-Gaming 5. There are two 1x PCI-E slots and, unusually, two PCI slots, which can be handy for moving older expansion cards over to a new PC, but they’re obsolete in terms of new hardware now. There’s no sign of austerity with storage either, with three SATA Express ports and six SATA 6Gbps connectors. Like most Z170 motherboards, there’s only one M.2 slot, although the other two more expensive Gigabyte boards in this Labs notably offer two. The board is a little bare – it’s just a simple black PCB with no on-board power and reset buttons, no POST error code readout and no easy-access clear-CMOS switch – features that are all found on the ASRock Extreme4, which costs just a few quid more. It’s good to see USB 3.1 is included on the rear I/O panel as well, with both type-A and type-C connectors, a feature that hasn’t been cut from the specification to create an artificial difference between the Z170XP-SLI and pricier offerings. Also on the back you’ll find a pair of USB 2 ports and three USB 3 ports. PS/2 and analogue VGA display outputs are included too, continuing the theme of support for legacy standards, although there are DVI and HDMI connectors too. The board layout is generally okay, and includes right-angled SATA ports to help with neat cabling and to avoid interfering with graphics card placement. The area around the 8-pin CPU connector is a little crowded, though, and the connector has been rotated 90 degrees from its usual horizontal positioning. Also, with two graphics cards installed, the lower 1x PCI-E slot will be inaccessible, leaving just one at the top. Above this slot sits the M.2 port, which will

only support up to 2280 devices, but is very sensibly positioned so that nothing can obscure access to it. As with MSI and Asus, Gigabyte has chosen to include the same EFI system across its product range, which means it’s well laid out, and supports firmware updating via USB, but it also carries the same problems as the other Gigabyte boards on test. The menus in this EFI system seem to defy convention, with frequency, memory and voltage settings all in separate menus. To overclock your chip, you’ll need to go back and forth between them, which will get frustrating. Some of the menus have only two settings in them as well, and although you can save OC profiles, there’s no favourites menu or a list of changes on exit. After we worked around these problems, though, we overclocked our Core i7-6700K. Despite its low price, the Z170XP-SLI is still a decent overclocker, managing to get our chip to 4.8 GHz, with a relatively reasonable 1.38V vcore. This result places it above some of the other Z170 boards on test, which only made it to 4.6GHz or 4.7GHz, including Gigabyte’s own Z170X-Gaming 3.

Conclusion The Gigabyte Z170XP-SLI may only cost £106, but it has some surprisingly powerful overclocking

abilities, SLI support and a decent layout. However, it suffers from an unintuitive EFI layout, and its feature set is lacking compared with the similarly priced ASRock Extreme4.

PERFORMANCE

27/30

FEATURES

VALUE

24/35 30/35 VERDICT

OVERALL SCORE

81%

A well laid-out SLI board with decent overclocking abilities for a low price. However, the EFI needs work and ASRock’s Extreme4 offers more features. /SPECIFICATIONS Chipset Intel Z170 CPU socket Intel LGA1151 Memory support 4 slots, max 64GB DDR4 (3466MHz - OC) Expansion slots Three 16x PCI-E, two 1x PCI-E, two PCI Sound Realtek ALC1150 Networking Intel Gigabit Ethernet Overclocking Base clock 80–500MHz, CPU multiplier 8–127x; max voltages, CPU 1.8V, RAM 2V Ports 3 x SATA Express, 6 x SATA 6Gbps, 1 x M.2, 2 x USB 2, 3 x USB 3, 1 x USB 3.1 (type-A), 1 x USB 3.1 (type-C), 1 x Gigabit LAN, 8-channel surround audio out, line in, mic IGP display outputs 1 x VGA, 1 x DVI, 1 x DisplayPort Dimensions (mm) 305 x 225

L A B S T E ST / Z170 MOTHERBOARDS

MSI Z170A Gaming M7/£175

inc VAT

SUPPLIER www.ebuyer.com

here’s a strange assumption among motherboard makers that red and black is the colour scheme of choice for PC gamers. Not only is it used on the majority of Z170 motherboards, but it’s also seen on many cases and even gamingfocused displays. Assuming you like this colour combo, of all the boards on test, MSI has made the best use of these two colours with the Gaming M7. The VRM and chipset heatsinks are decorated with deep red go-faster stripes, and the same even goes for some of the connections directly on the PCB. There are some LEDs on the board too – a red strip outlines the audio isolation circuit, while a bright red light enables you to diagnose any network problems with the LAN port. In general, the build quality is excellent. A heatpipe connects the chunky VRM heatsinks, the GPU slots are reinforced, there’s plenty of space around the power connectors, and the fan headers and on-board buttons are all easily accessible. Along with the usual power and reset buttons, there’s also a Game Boost button, which provides a quick voltage and multiplier boost, and there’s a POST code error readout too. There are the usual three 16x PCI-E slots and four 1x PCI-E slots. The top 1x PCI-E slot is also sensibly positioned above the main graphics slot, parallel with one of the two M.2 ports. Although the second and third 1x PCI-E slots will be obscured by dual-slot graphics cards used in the nearby 16x slots, it’s unlikely that any component will block the first and fourth 1x slots. The lower M.2 slot is directly beneath the second 16x graphics slot, so it’s easily accessible in most cases, although it will be obstructed by a second graphics card. Meanwhile, the rear I/O panel sports two USB 2 ports and two USB 3 ports at the rear, along with two USB 3.1 ports with type-A and type-C connectors. An additional USB 2 port is also provided for USB firmware updating, with a button placed next to it. The SATA ports are a similarly standard offering, with six SATA 6Gbps ports and two SATA Express ports, all of which are right angled.

The Click Bios 5 EFI is pretty much identical to the one used on the MSI Z170 Titanium Edition, with a splash screen that allows easy access to the main system functions and settings, as well as the boot order. The Advanced menu is easy to navigate, with a neat layout that has six main icons to guide you around. The overclocking settings are also thorough and kept in one place, including voltage and DRAM frequency controls. A favourites system is included too, which is very simple to use. Overall MSI’s interface design is hard to fault, and certainly deserves the ‘EZ’ name for its ease of use. Like most of the boards on test, the Z170 Gaming M7 overclocked our Core i7-6700K to 4.8GHz. However, it required a 1.44V vcore, resulting in the second highest overclocked power consumption on test at load. The Z170A Gaming M7 is a solid performer, though, pushing out decent benchmark results in all our tests.

Conclusion The Z170A Gaming M7 has a solid EFI, strong performance, plenty of features, easy

overclocking and a good layout. It isn’t cheap, though, and at this price, it’s up against some serious competition from Asus’ cheaper Maximus VIII Ranger, which is similarly rich in features and also a better overclocker.

PERFORMANCE

27/30

FEATURES

VALUE

31/35 26/35 VERDICT

OVERALL SCORE

84%

A solid board with a decent EFI, strong performance and a good layout, but it’s up against serious competition from Asus’ ROG boards. /SPECIFICATIONS Chipset Intel Z170 CPU socket Intel LGA1151 Memory support 4 slots, max 64GB DDR4 (3600MHz - OC) Expansion slots Three 16x PCI-E, four 1x PCI-E Sound Realtek ALC1150 Networking Killer E2400 Ethernet Overclocking Base clock 70– 655.25MHz, CPU multiplier 8–83x; max voltages, CPU 2.155V, RAM 2.2V Ports 2 x SATA Express, 6 x SATA 6Gbps, 2 x M.2, 3 x USB 2, 2 x USB 3, 2 x USB 3.1, 1 x Gigabit LAN, 8-channel surround audio out, line-in, mic, optical S/PDIF out IGP display outputs 2 x HDMI, 1 x DisplayPort Dimensions (mm) 305 x 244

MSI Z170A Gaming Pro/£120

inc VAT

SUPPLIER www.scan.co.uk

uch like the other less expensive Z170 motherboards on test, the MSI Z170A Gaming Pro only omits a few of the main features found on its bigger siblings. What’s more, the Z170A Gaming Pro looks better than your average budget board. The black and red theme so loved by many PC component manufacturers is used to full effect here. The chunky VRM and chipset heatsinks are red on the top, while the rest of the board is a mix of black and grey. There’s a red lighting kit too, with a section at the side lighting up to show the MSI logo and a few more LEDs dotted around the board. When powered down, this side section doesn’t look half as good though – it’s basically a yellow strip along the side of the board. Meanwhile, three 16x PCI-E slots and three 1x PCI-E slots provide a good set of expansion options, with the two main 16x slots reinforced with steel. One of the 1x PCI-E slots is sensibly placed right at the top to ensure it won’t be obstructed by other components, while there’s an extra slot’s worth of space for extra airflow between the two main graphics slots. It looks fine, and there’s even a PCI slot, which could be handy if you have any aging PCI gear you still want to use. The SATA Express ports are cut down to just one for this board, although that isn’t a big deal considering the lack of SATA Express devices. There are also six standard SATA 6Gbps ports to the right and bottom of the board. Unfortunately, they aren’t right-angled, making for messier cabling and the potential for SATA cables to obstruct a second graphics card. The M.2 slot is sensibly placed above the top 16x PCI-E slot though. At the back, you get the standard pair of USB 2 ports at the top, next to a PS/2 port and two USB 3.1 type-A ports and four more USB 3 ports. Aside from the lack of right-angled SATA ports, the layout is pretty good – ample space is provided around the fan headers and power connectors. Nothing is missing in the EFI either. In fact, the EFI looks almost identical to the system on the pricier MSI motherboards.

That’s good, since the excellent MSI Click BIOS 5 system is easy to navigate and has all the extras too, with the ever-useful Board Explorer (which highlights each part on a photo of the board), fan monitor and USB BIOS update features included, and it lists any changes on exit. Unfortunately we didn’t get too far when we tried overclocking our Skylake CPU. With the load line calibration set as high as it could go (level 4), we only managed to squeeze 4.6GHz from the Z170A Gaming Pro, with a 1.32V vcore. Higher speeds and voltages either failed or resulted in thermal throttling, putting the Z170A Gaming Pro at the bottom of the pack for overclocking, although its overall stock performance is still generally very good. One exception, though, is M.2 read performance, which was still fast, but significantly slower than every other board on test. The audio quality, while still reasonable, was also beaten by most of the competition.

Conclusion The MSI Z170A Gaming Pro has a lot to offer, with plenty of expansion options and a great

EFI at a decent price. However, it’s up against stiff competition in this price bracket, and both the ASRock Extreme4 and Asus Z170 Pro Gaming offer superior overclocking abilities and better value for similar money.

PERFORMANCE

27/30

FEATURES

VALUE

25/35 28/35 VERDICT

OVERALL SCORE

80%

A good EFI and decent expansion options, but there’s serious competition at this price, and the Z170A Gaming Pro falls short on overclocking abilities. /SPECIFICATIONS Chipset Intel Z170 CPU socket Intel LGA1151 Memory support 4 slots, max 64GB DDR4 (3600MHz - OC) Expansion slots Three 16x PCI-E, three 1x PCI-E, one PCI Sound Realtek ALC1150 Networking Intel Gigabit Ethernet Overclocking Base clock 98–341MHz, CPU multiplier 8–83x; Max voltages, CPU 2.155V, RAM 2.2V Ports 1 x PS/2, 1 x SATA Express, 6 x SATA 6Gbps, 1 x M.2, 2 x USB 2, 4 x USB 3, 2 x USB 3.1 (type-A), 1 x LAN, 8-channel surround audio out, line in, mic, optical S/PDIF out IGP display outputs 1 x DVI, 1 x DisplayPort

L A B S T E ST / Z170 MOTHERBOARDS

MSI Z170A Xpower Gaming Titanium Edition/£227 inc VAT

SUPPLIER www.scan.co.uk

SI’s Xpower Gaming Titanium Edition is possibly the best-looking motherboard we’ve ever seen, sporting a striking light grey colour scheme across the PCB. The layout is superb too. There are four 16x PCI-E slots and three 1x PCI-E slots, with ample space underneath slots 1 -3 for a 3-way graphics setup using decent-sized coolers, and slots 1 and 3 are reinforced with steel. Meanwhile, the use of right-angled SATA connectors means your SATA cables won’t get in the way of longer graphics cards. There are also two M.2 slots, although they’re positioned between the 16x PCI-E slots, so access will be blocked when cards are installed. You’re restricted to 2280 cards too, but the good news is that you can create an M.2 RAID array for super-fast storage transfer rates. There’s plenty of space around the 24-pin and 8+4 pin power connectors too. The on-board 6-pin PCI-E power connector for the top graphics card slot won’t be obscured by a card either, although there’s a fan header next to it which might get in the way. Then there’s the OC dashboard, which uses a special header to give you on-board overclocking tools, enabling you to take the base clock and multiplier up and down. It may not be used by everyone, but it’s a handy extra if you want to overclock your board and don’t want to faff around in the EFI. However, the voltage readouts aren’t essential unless you’re really into competitive overclocking. You also get a generous count of eight SATA 6Gbps ports, with two SATA Express ports next to them. Meanwhile, power and reset buttons sit in the lower right, along with a clear-CMOS button, and there’s a multi-BIOS switch and POST readout towards the lower left. Also of interest is the complete discharge button, which erases every single setting, including ones left intact by a clear -CMOS operation. MSI also has its own system for easy BIOS updating without needing a CPU installed. It’s called FlashB1, and it works using a

dedicated USB port on the I/O panel and a button at the top. The EFI follows most usual conventions, with a splash screen clearly displaying the main system information and quick access to the most useful functions such as the boot order. The hardware monitor tab gives you custom curves to control the speed of each fan, and it has a physical board diagram too, displaying the components connected at any time. Rounding it off is a set of five favourites menus, used for frequently accessed settings, and the overclocking features are held together in one menu. As one of the pricier boards on test, we were hoping for great overclocking performance, and the MSI managed to overclock our CPU to 4.8GHz at 1.32V. That’s a good result in terms of voltage, but we couldn’t get a stable 4.9GHz frequency, with the board failing even when using vcores well above 1.4V. All of this places it just below the Asus ROG boards in terms of overclocking performance. The Xpower Gaming TE also performed solidly, sitting only just below the two ROG boards in lots of our tests.

Conclusion The Z170A Xpower Gaming Titanium Edition might be comparatively expensive, but it offers a fantastic layout, loads of enthusiast features, solid performance and great looks.

PERFORMANCE

27/30

FEATURES

VALUE

33/35 22/35 VERDICT

OVERALL SCORE

82%

Dashing good looks, a great layout and loads of features make the Xpower Gaming TE a cracking premium motherboard. /SPECIFICATIONS Chipset Intel Z170 CPU socket Intel LGA1151 Memory support 4 slots, max 64GB DDR4 (3600 MHz - OC) Expansion slots Four 16x PCI-E 3, three 1x PCI-E Sound Realtek ALC1500 Networking Intel Gigabit LAN Overclocking Base clock 75–655.25MHz, CPU multiplier 8–83x; max voltages: CPU 2.155V, RAM 2.2V Ports 6 x SATA 6Gbps, 2 x SATA Express, 2 x M.2, 3 x USB 2, 4 x USB 3, 2 x USB 3.1, 1 x Gigabit LAN, 8-channel ‘Nahimic’ surround audio out, line in, mic, optical, S/PDIF out IGP display outputs 2 x HDMI, 1 x DisplayPort Dimensions (mm) 305 x 244

CPC REA L BENCH 201 5 GIMP IMAGE EDITING Asus Maximus VIII Ranger

HANDBRAKE H.264 VIDEO ENCODING

71,021

59,058 70,425

MSI Z170A Gaming M7

298,691 334,234

70,838

Asus Maximus VIII Gene

298,461 345,028

MSI Z170A Gaming M7

167,971 181,174

297,137 324,816

MSI Z170A Gaming Pro

167,168 176,962

62,147 72,096

Asus Maximus VIII Gene MSI Z170A Xpower Gaming TE

59,248

MSI Z170A Gaming M7 EVGA Z170 Classified

58,879

MSI Z170A Gaming Pro

58,675 67,747

MSI Z170A Gaming Pro

ASRock Z170 Extreme4 Gigabyte Z170XGaming 5

171,158 186,516

301,259 336,240

Asus Maximus VIII Ranger

168,614 184,954

301,251 336,288

168,133 182,224

ASRock Z170 Extreme4 MSI Z170A Xpower Gaming TE

168,049 181,215

Gigabyte Z170XP-SLI

287,337 336,127

Gigabyte Z170XP-SLI

163,206 183,255

70,535

EVGA Z170 Classified

287,165 339,228

162,644 182,058

55,901

70,107

ASRock Fatal1ty Z170 Gaming K4 EVGA Z170 Classified Asus Z170 Pro Gaming Gigabyte Z170XGaming 3 Gigabyte Z170XGaming 5

160,446 181,369

Asus Z170 Pro Gaming ASRock Fatal1ty Z170 Gaming K4

ASRock Fatal1ty Z170 Gaming K4 Gigabyte Z170XGaming 3 Asus Z170 Pro Gaming Gigabyte Z170XGaming 5

55,177

70,751

54,187

69,542

40,000

60,000

80,000

285,550 333,834 285,530 325,265 285,360 336,127 280,604 330,093 0

100,000

200,000 300,000 400,000

Gigabyte Z170XGaming 3 Gigabyte Z170XGaming 5

136,794 154,927

Asus Maximus VIII Gene MSI Z170A Xpower Gaming TE

135,992 151,136

Gigabyte Z170XP-SLI

ASRock Z170 Extreme4

672.1

1564

667.1

1564

666.1

1563

160,207 176,683 160,172 178,881 50,000

100,000

150,000

200,000

Z170 SATA 6GBPS SPEED (MB/SEC)

CrystalDiskMark 32-queue-depth sequential 137,452 154,472

161,939 183,889

STORA GE

M.2 SPEED (MB/SEC)

SYSTEM SCORE Asus Maximus VIII Ranger

Asus Maximus VIII Gene

57,981 70,161

55,737 69,249

20,000

302,987 344,492

55,956

Gigabyte Z170XP-SLI Gigabyte Z170XGaming 3

HEAVY MULTI-TASKING

Asus Maximus VIII Ranger MSI Z170A Xpower Gaming TE ASRock Z170 Extreme4

72,374

62,795

CrystalDiskMark 32-queue-depth sequential

Asus Maximus VIII Ranger ASRock Fatal1ty Z170 Gaming K4

563.6

531.7 531.2

563.5

Asus Maximus VIII Gene

532.9

563.5

135,694 151,185

MSI Z170A Gaming M7

669.1

1562

563.4

135,283 150,475

ASRock Fatal1ty Z170 Gaming K4

670.2

1561

Gigabyte Z170XP-SLI Gigabyte Z170XGaming 5

529.3

MSI Z170A Gaming M7

530.7

563.4

MSI Z170A Gaming Pro

134,598 146,398

EVGA Z170 Classified

130,874 152,506

Gigabyte Z170XP-SLI ASRock Fatal1ty Z170 Gaming K4 Gigabyte Z170XGaming 3 Asus Z170 Pro Gaming Gigabyte Z170XGaming 5 0

50,000

Stock

ASRock Z170 Extreme4 MSI Z170A Xpower Gaming TE

670.9

1560

ASRock Z170 Extreme4

529.1

563.4

669.8

1556

Gigabyte Z170XGaming 3

531.8

563.3

130,464 151,389

EVGA Z170 Classified

663

1556

MSI Z170A Gaming M7

531.9

563.3

129,448 150,375

Asus Z170 Pro Gaming

671.2

1555

532.2

563.2

129,221 146,697

671

1555

530.4

563.1

129,099 151,079

Asus Maximus VIII Ranger Asus Maximus VIII Gene

MSI Z170A Xpower Gaming TE Asus Z170 Pro Gaming

668.7

1552

EVGA Z170 Classified

529.3

563.1

128,036 148,730

MSI Z170A Gaming Pro

669

MSI Z170A Gaming Pro

531.1

562.9

100,000

150,000

200,000

1229

450

900

1350

Overclocked

AUD IO PERFO RMANCE DYNAMIC RANGE (DBA)

Rightmark Audio Analyzer 96kHz

-105.1

Gigabyte Z170XGaming 5

-104.5

MSI Z170A Gaming M7 Asus Maximus VIII Ranger MSI Z170A Xpower Gaming TE ASRock Fatal1ty Z170 Gaming K4 ASRock Z170 Extreme4

-104.5

-104.1 -103.8

104.2

ASRock Z170 Extreme4

59fps 69fps

104.1 103.9

MSI Z170A Gaming Pro MSI Z170A Xpower Gaming TE

103.8

EVGA Z170 Classified

Asus Z170 Pro Gaming

103.3

Asus Maximus VIII Gene

103.3

Gigabyte Z170XP-SLI

-102.7

Gigabyte Z170XP-SLI

101.2

MSI Z170A Gaming Pro

-100.9

MSI Z170A Gaming Pro

101

59fps 68fps 58fps

Gigabyte Z170XGaming 3 Gigabyte Z170XGaming 5 Gigabyte Z170XP-SLI ASRock Fatal1ty Z170 Gaming K4

120

1,920 x 1,080, Quality, 0x AA

Windows desktop / Prime95 smallfft

Asus Maximus VIII Gene

ASRock Z170 Extreme4

60fps

70fps

Asus Maximus VIII Gene Asus Maximus VIII Ranger Gigabyte Z170XP-SLI

60fps

70fps

60fps

70fps

60fps

70fps

MSI Z170A Gaming M7

60fps

70fps

MSI Z170A Gaming Pro

60fps

70fps

EVGA Z170 Classified ASRock Fatal1ty Z170 Gaming K4 Gigabyte Z170XGaming 5 Gigabyte Z170XGaming 3 Asus Z170 Pro Gaming

MSI Z170A Xpower Gaming TE

60fps

70fps

Gigabyte Z170XP-SLI

Asus Z170 Pro Gaming

59fps

70fps

ASRock Fatal1ty Z170 Gaming K4

59fps

69fps

MSI Z170A Gaming M7 MSI Z170A Xpower Gaming TE

59fps

69fps

59fps

69fps

ASRock Z170 Extreme4 Asus Maximus VIII Ranger

59fps

69fps

MSI Z170A Gaming Pro

Minimum

Average

68fps 67fps

56fps

67fps

56fps

67fps

55fps

66fps 60

Average

TOTA L SYSTEM P OWER CONSUMP TION STOCK POWER CONSUMPTION (WATTS) OVERCLOCKED POWER CONSUMPTION (WATTS)

OVERCLOCKED TOTAL WAR: ATTILA

57fps 56fps

Minimum

EVGA Z170 Classified Gigabyte Z170XGaming 3 Gigabyte Z170XGaming 5

69fps

58fps 68fps

Asus Z170 Pro Gaming

98.4 0

120

70fps

60fps 69fps

-103.4

70fps

60fps

MSI Z170A Gaming M7

-103.3

EVGA Z170 Classified

60fps

104.4

Asus Z170 Pro Gaming

700

Write

104.4

Asus Maximus VIII Gene

-98.5

525

Asus Maximus VIII Gene Asus Maximus VIII Ranger

104.9

MSI Z170A Gaming M7 MSI Z170A Xpower Gaming TE Asus Maximus VIII Ranger ASRock Fatal1ty Z170 Gaming K4 ASRock Z170 Extreme4

-104.2

350

1,920 x 1,080, Quality, 0x AA

Gigabyte Z170XGaming 3 Gigabyte Z170XGaming 5

-104.3

175

GA MING STOCK SPEED TOTAL WAR: ATTILA

Rightmark Audio Analyzer 96kHz

Gigabyte Z170XGaming 3

EVGA Z170 Classified

Read

NOISE LEVEL (DBA)

1800

Windows desktop / Prime95 smallfft

129

130

131

134

141 75

142

69 69 72 0

135

192

180

Lower is better

Load

194 194

199

208 91

211

94 0

Idle

193

EVGA Z170 Classified

161 90

190

Gigabyte Z170XGaming 5 MSI Z170A Gaming M7

155

167

MSI Z170A Xpower Gaming TE Gigabyte Z170XP-SLI

147

155

Asus Maximus VIII Ranger ASRock Fatal1ty Z170 Gaming K4 Asus Z170 Pro Gaming

137

MSI Z170A Gaming Pro Gigabyte Z170XGaming 3 Asus Maximus VIII Gene ASRock Z170 Extreme4

128

223 120

180

240

Lower is better

R E V I E WS / NEW KIT

PC system reviews GAMING PC

Chillblast Fusion Fury Nano/£1,619

inc VAT

SUPPLIER www.chillblast.com

hillblast’s Fusion Nano might be small, but it uses the stupendous AMD Radeon R9 Nano (see p18) to cram an unprecedented amount of power inside its tiny case. The R9 Nano uses the Fiji GPU core that underpins its Fury X cards, and the use of 4GB of highbandwidth memory on the GPU package, rather than big GDDR5 chips, has enabled AMD to use a pint-sized PCB too. However, the Fury X requires liquid cooling, so AMD has turned down the Nano’s GPU clock, so it can be chilled with a hybrid air and vapour-chamber cooler. The new GPU is backed up by a Core i7-6700K Skylake CPU, which features Hyper-Threading support to boost multi-threading performance, and Chillblast has overclocked it to 4.4GHz – a comparatively modest overclock, but one that makes sense in a small chassis where airflow is limited. Of course, the tiny size of this PC limits what Chillblast can do in terms of storage, but the Fusion still includes an SSD and hard disk. The boot drive is a Samsung SM951 M.2 SSD that uses four PCI-E 3 lanes and is attached to the rear of the motherboard, while the hard disk is a 2.5in 1TB hybrid drive. The Asus Z170I Pro Gaming motherboard (see p26) also sports some decent features, such as Asus’ SupremeFX audio circuitry and dual-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi. The rear panel is good too – four USB 3 ports, two USB 3.1 (type-A) ports, an optical S/PDIF /SPECIFICATIONS and five audio jacks are included, plus HDMI and CPU 4GHz Intel Core DisplayPort outputs. i7-6700K overclocked to 4.4GHz It even has some LEDs and spare SATA ports, Motherboard Asus Z170I but neither are really practical in this machine – Pro Gaming the lights are hidden, and the single spare 2.5in Memory 16GB Crucial 2133MHz DDR4 bay is blocked by cables. Of course, the form Graphics Asus Radeon R9 factor naturally restricts it to a single 16x PCI-E Fury Nano 4GB slot and two memory slots. The latter can Storage 250GB Samsung handle 32GB of DDR4 memory, with Chillblast SM951 M.2 SSD, 1TB Seagate hybrid hard disk installing 16GB of modest 2133MHz DDR4 RAM. Case Raijintek Metis The high-end silicon is packed inside a red Cooling CPU: Corsair Hydro Raijintek’s Metis chassis, which looks great; the H75 with 2 x 120mm fans; GPU: 1 x 90mm fan brushed metal is immaculate and the edges are PSU Corsair CS650M 650W bevelled to a shine. The panels aren’t too thick, Ports Front: 2 x USB 3, 2 x as it’s still a budget case, but build quality is audio; rear: 4 x USB 3, 2 x good, and the Raijintek is both sturdy and light USB 3.1 Type-A , 2 x USB 2, 1 x PS/2, 1 x Gigabit Ethernet, 1 x enough to lug to LAN events. optical S/PDIF, 5 x audio The two side panels are held on by small Operating system Windows screws and lift away easily. The interior is 10 Home 64-bit cramped, but the layout has been sensibly Warranty Two years collect and return parts and labour, arranged to eke the most from a small space. followed by three years Meanwhile, the PSU is installed vertically at return to base labour only the front of the case with a cable that runs to

the rear of the chassis, and the motherboard is installed upside down. There’s no room to hide cables, but Chillblast has kept the interior as neat as possible. PSU cables run around the unit, bundled above it, which leaves the central area of the case free for the Corsair Hydro H75. The Corsair liquid-cooling unit has two 120mm fans, and Chillblast has sensibly cut a hole directly above the Nano’s 90mm fan to aid air intake. The Fusion sports Chillblast’s standard five-year warranty, which has two years of collect and return parts and labour cover, plus a further three years return to base, labour only.

Performance The Chillblast had no problem playing games at 2,560 x 1,440. Even Crysis 3 proved no problem, with the Chillblast never dropping below 38fps. AMD says the Nano can manage 4K gaming, but its performance at this extreme resolution isn’t as clear-cut in this machine. Its Shadow of Mordor minimum of 37fps is fine but its Battlefield 4 minimum of 25fps is only borderline playable, and in Crysis 3, the minimum slipped to an unplayable 20fps. The Battlefield 4 result is possibly a result of the card throttling inside the small chassis, as the card did much better in this test in our review using our standard graphics test rig. Nevertheless, a playable frame rate at 4K is still a good result. The overclocked Core i7 processor puts up a good fight too, achieving great results in our benchmarks, with an overall system score of 144,701. The Samsung SM951 M.2 SSD doesn’t mess around either. Its sequential read and write speeds of 1,764MB/sec and 1,196MB/sec respectively are several times the speed of your average SATA SSD. Thermal issues and fan noise are always a concern with small form factor machines, but the Chillblast didn’t falter when running low-intensity tasks. Its CPU and GPU

ELITE NEW ENTRY P 62

The Radeon R9 Nano card measures just 6in across

A Corsair H75 liquid cooler chills the overclocked CPU

The Metis’ brushedmetal finish is immaculate

3 1

remained cool and the fans were almost silent. The Fusion was barely any louder when we ran game tests, and heat wasn’t an issue either – the CPU and GPU delta Ts of 42°C and 51°C are impressive for such a small machine. The fans were a little noisier when running games, though, and close inspection revealed a bit of the high-pitched capacitor whine common with Fury Nano cards. It was never irritatingly noisy though; even quiet gaming audio will drown it out. The hottest thermal results were recorded when its GPU and CPU were both running at full load. The CPU delta T of 73°C was particularly high, and the fans then ramped up and churned out more noise. Even so, you’re very unlikely to run both the CPU and GPU at full pelt for long periods, and the temperatures are still within thermal limits. However, we advise leaving plenty of airflow space around the Fusion so that its fans get a decent supply of air.

Conclusion Small form factor PCs always involve compromise, but Chillblast’s Fusion Nano comes close to replicating a fullsized system in benchmarks. The stupendous Nano card provides more graphics power than we’ve ever seen from such a small graphics card, and the Core i7 CPU is quick too. Meanwhile, the chassis looks good and is organised as tidily as possible, although it comes with the usual mini-ITX caveats: a lack of upgrade room and hot running at full load.

It’s also a little more expensive than full-sized machines that offer similar power, and you can save money by building your own machine with a similar spec too (see p84). However, building a custom rig from scratch isn’t for everyone, and if you’re looking for an attractive, well-built miniature PC that still offers storming performance, the Fusion Nano is a great example. MIKE JENNINGS

CP C REALB ENC H 2 0 15 GI MP I MAGE EDI TI N G

B A T T L EF IEL D 4

Chillblast Fusion Fury Nano

2,560 x 1,440, Ultra Detail, 4x AA

68,223 0

18,000

36,000

54,000

Chillblast Fusion Fury Nano

72,000

50fps 0

H ANDB R AKE H. 26 4 V I D E O E N C O D I N G Chillblast Fusion Fury Nano 180,000

270,000

360,000

Chillblast Fusion Fury Nano

77,065 20,000

40,000

60,000

80,000

Chillblast Fusion Fury Nano 45,000

90,000

55fps 0

72fps 60

135,000

180,000

37fps 0

45fps

CR YS IS 3 2,560 x 1,440, Very High Detail, 0x AA

Chillblast Fusion Fury Nano

144,701 37,000

74,000

111,000

148,000

INT EL R EFERENCE : 12 6 . 4 3%

38fps 0

Chillblast Fusion Fury Nano

23/25

HARDWARE

VALUE

20/25

OVERALL SCORE

88%

60fps 45

20fps 7 Minimum

DESIGN

3,840 x 2,160, Very High Detail, 0x AA

22/25

32fps

Chillblast Fusion Fury Nano

175,124

SYS TEM S C OR E

SPEED

25fps 0

3,840 x 2,160, Very High Detail, FXAA

H EAVY MULT I T AS KI N G

2,560 x 1,440, Ultra Detail, FXAA

Chillblast Fusion Fury Nano

60fps

SHADOW OF MORDOR

L UXMAR K OP ENC L 0

3,840 x 2,160, Ultra Detail, 4x AA

320,046 90,000

27fps 21

Average

VERDICT An amazing amount of power inside a surprisingly small package, thanks to AMD’s Fury Nano card.

R E V I E WS / NEW KIT

GAMING PC

Box Cube Predator/£1,999

inc VAT

SUPPLIER www.box.co.uk

his system from Birmingham-based builder Box is one of the largest PCs we’ve ever seen. The Corsair Graphite 780T weighs 11kg on its own and stretches 637mm from its base to its roof – and those dimensions, and the black and white colour scheme ensures it will stand out like a monolith in any room. The Predator takes up more space than your average desktop rig, but the case is also practical. The front and top panels are made of mesh and pop off for easy fan access, and the chassis sits on large feet that allow plenty of airflow into the base. Both side panels ease off with handles rather than fiddly screws, and the front panel has four USB ports and a fan-speed switch. The Graphite is no less impressive on the inside. The front half of the chassis has five free hard disk bays with tool-free caddies that are divided into two removable cages. Further back, there’s a huge motherboard tray with rubber-lined routing holes and ample room for cables. Around the back you’ll find three vacant 2.5in bays, while cooling is handled by two 140mm fans at the front and a 140mm exhaust unit. The Predator is a full-sized ATX build, but the components are dwarfed by the sheer size of the case. There’s plenty of clearance between the bottom of the motherboard and the large, modular PSU, and the Corsair Hydro H110i GT cooler installed in the roof isn’t even visible. /SPECIFICATIONS It’s a good-looking rig too. The black and CPU 4GHz Intel Core i7-6700K overclocked to 4.5GHz white theme is carried over to the interior, Motherboard MSI Z170A where the MSI motherboard uses both Krait Gaming colours liberally. Every other component Memory 16GB Kingston HyperX matches the scheme – even the M.2 SSD 3000MHz DDR4 and memory are black and white. Graphics MSI GeForce GTX 980 Ti 6GB The Predator is tidy, well made and has Storage 240GB Kingston HyperX loads of room for working inside, but we still Predator M.2 SSD; 4TB Seagate hybrid hard disk can’t help but think of what could have been. Case Corsair Graphite 780T The off-the-shelf water-cooling unit, lack Graphite Series of sleeved cables and an absence of Cooling CPU: Corsair Hydro H110i illumination are all obvious, especially given GT with 2 x 120mm fans; GPU: 2 x 100mm fans; front: 2 x 140mm the side panel’s huge window. There’s a fans; rear: 1 x 140mm fan huge amount of room to grow here, but the PSU Seasonic SnowSilent 80 Plus end result seems underwhelming because Platinum 750W Ports Front: 2 x USB 3, 2 x USB 2, of this case’s size and the machine’s price. 2 x audio; rear: 6 x USB 3.1, 2 x USB Meanwhile, gaming power comes from 2, 1 x Gigabit Ethernet, 1 x PS/2, 1 x an MSI GeForce GTX 980 Ti card, which optical S/PDIF, 5 x audio Operating system Windows 10 overclocks the GPU base clock from 1GHz to Home 64-bit 1102MHz, boosting to 1190MHz. It’s chilled Warranty Two years collect and by two smart, industrial-looking fans, and its return, covering parts and labour 6GB of GDDR5 memory runs at 7010MHz. If

you’d like more gaming power, Box also produces an SLI version of this machine, which will set you back £2,800 inc VAT. The Predator is also equipped with Intel’s Core i7. It’s the most powerful Skylake part, with four Hyper-Threaded cores and plenty of cache, and Box has overclocked it from 4GHz to 4.5GHz with a 1.3V vcore. The rest of the specification is similarly impressive. There’s 16GB of Kingston DDR4 memory that whizzes along at 3000MHz, and there’s a Kingston M.2 SSD alongside a 4TB hybrid hard disk. There’s also a Blu-ray writer. The MSI Z170A Krait Gaming motherboard is generally decent too. It looks great, and has spare PCI-E slots – you could easily add another graphics card later. That said, it’s missing some high-end options; there are no on-board buttons or an error readout, for example, and it doesn’t have on-board lighting like other MSI Krait boards. Finally, the standard Box two-year warranty includes collect and return coverage, of both parts and labour, which covers the essentials – the most important part of any warranty is the parts coverage, after all.

Performance The overclocked GTX 980 Ti swept through our games tests. Its Battlefield 4 and Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor minimums of 68fps and 70fps indicate that games at 2,560 x 1,440 aren’t any problem for this GPU, and the Predator returned a swift minimum of 47fps in Crysis 3 as well. The GTX 980 Ti proved adept in most of our 4K tests too, although it struggled in Crysis 3 with a minimum of 22fps. Meanwhile, the overclocked Core i7 has enough power to handle virtually all computing tasks, with the Box delivering an overall RealBench result of 145,525. That’s 27 per cent quicker than our reference machine, and is in the usual league for an overclocked Core i7-6700K PC. The Box continued to perform speedily in storage tests, but its Kingston M.2 SSD couldn’t quite keep up with the Samsung hardware inside the Scan 3XS Z170 Vengeance (see Issue 145, p66). The HyperX drive’s sequential read and write results of 1,411MB/sec and 653MB/sec are great, but

The 750W Seasonic SnowSilent PSU is 80 Plus Platinum rated and very quiet

The empty space in the chassis gives the hardware room to breathe

The MSI GeForce GTX 980 Ti card has a 1102MHz GPU base clock

the Scan machine topped out at 1,928MB/sec and 1,120MB/ sec – either way, you’re unlikely to notice the difference in general use. The Box machine outpaced most of its rivals in thermal tests, though. The CPU and GPU delta Ts of 40°C and 54°C respectively are both excellent, showing the advantage of giving hardware room to breathe in a large case. The same goes for the noise levels. The Box makes almost no noise when idle on the lowest fan setting. What’s more, at this setting, you can still run games and the temperatures only increase by a couple of degrees. The 750W Seasonic SnowSilent PSU also helps here – it’s very efficient (80 Plus Platinum, no less) and very quiet – its fan doesn’t even spin up until it hits a 45 per cent load.

2 3

Conclusion The Box Cube Predator has ample room to grow inside, and its overclocked components deliver performance levels that swipe aside most games and applications. Also, while the components and cooling system arguably don’t make full use of the luxurious, versatile case, it’s very cool and quiet. The main problem for the Cube Predator is its price compared with the competition. You can specify the aforementioned Scan 3XS Z170 Vengeance with an EVGA GTX 980 Ti card for £1,741 inc VAT, for example, and while it

C P C R EALB ENC H 2 0 15 GI MP I MAGE EDI TI N G 65,279 17,000

MIKE JENNINGS

B A T T L EF IEL D 4

Box Cube Predator 0

might not have the Box’s fancy PSU, swanky case and larger Corsair cooler, it’s significantly cheaper and offers similar performance. If a cool and quiet system is your priority, though, the Predator is still well worth considering if you have the money.

34,000

51,000

68,000

2,560 x 1,440, Ultra Detail, 4x AA

Box Cube Predator

68fps 82fps 0

H ANDB R AKE H. 2 6 4 V I D E O E N C O D I N G 80,000

160,000

25,000

50,000

75,000

42fps 33

181,912 50,000

70fps

Box Cube Predator 0

90fps 75

100

3,840 x 2,160, Ultra Detail, 4x AA

Box Cube Predator 100,000

150,000 200,000

Box Cube Predator

CR YS IS 3

48fps 0

58fps 60

2,560 x 1,440, Very High Detail, 0x AA

SYS TEM S C OR E 145,525

Box Cube Predator 37,000

74,000

111,000

148,000

INTEL REFERENCE : 12 7 . 15 %

Box Cube Predator

47fps 16

DESIGN

23/25

22/25

HARDWARE

VALUE

19/25

Box Cube Predator

22fps 8 Minimum

OVERALL SCORE

87%

64fps 48

3,840 x 2,160, Very High Detail, 0x AA

23/25

31fps 0

100,000

H EAVY MULT I T AS K I N G

SPEED

2,560 x 1,440, Ultra Detail

90,189

SHADOW OF MORDOR

Box Cube Predator

240,000 320,000

L UXMAR K OP ENC L 0

3,840 x 2,160, Ultra Detail, 4x AA

316,874

Box Cube Predator

31fps 24

Average

VERDICT Fast, well built, cool and quiet, although it’s comparatively expensive.

R E V I E WS / NEW KIT

GAMING PC

Oblivion Gladiator/£1,200

inc VAT

SUPPLIER www.oblivionsystems.co.uk

ewcomer Oblivion has opted for an eye-catching black and orange colour scheme for the Gladiator, and it looks attractive with its large swathes of colour and little details. The pipes that flow down from the Raijintek Triton’s 240mm reservoir are filled with orange coolant. Meanwhile, the Gigabyte motherboard mixes its black PCB with orange heatsinks, and the trio of intake fans and single exhaust spinner have all been replaced with orange-bordered Alpenföhn models. It’s a great effort at colour coordination. Likewise, the motherboard and graphics power cables are individually sleeved in orange, and the memory has been chosen for its heatsinks. Oblivion has fitted a smart nameplate to the shroud that covers the PSU at the base of the chassis as well, and a strip of orange LEDs illuminates the interior through the side panel’s sizeable window. It’s all built into an NZXT H440 case, which is a great chassis in terms of both looks and features. It has four drive bays free behind the metal plate on the right, which does a great job of hiding cable clutter, but also means you have to remove the right side panel to access the bays. There are also two free 2.5in bays on the top of the PSU shroud, which also does a great job of hiding cable clutter. The end result is a tidy-looking machine. The Gigabyte motherboard is a decent model too. The top-right corner sports a POST code display, and buttons that handle power, reset and overclocking, with buttons to /SPECIFICATIONS toggle the CPU ratio and base clock level CPU 3.5GHz Intel Core i5-4690K overclocked to 4.3GHz on the board itself. It also has toggles for Motherboard Gigabyte GA-Z97Xactivating or switching off memory slots SOC and PCI-E slots. Memory 16GB Team Vulcan 1600MHz DDR3 Elsewhere, the board has three spare Graphics Asus GeForce GTX 16x PCI-E slots, a free PCI slot and one 970 4GB vacant 1x PCI-E slot, along with plenty of Storage 250GB Samsung 850 Evo empty SATA and USB connectors. There’s SSD; 1TB Western Digital hard disk Case NZXT H440 a PCI-E power plug above the graphics card Cooling CPU: Raijintek Triton with 2 for giving multi-GPU setups added current x 120mm fans; GPU: 2 x 92mm too. There’s no M.2 port on-board, but the fans; front: 3 x 120mm fans; rear: 1 x 120mm fan Z97 chipset won’t get the most out of an PSU 650W SuperFlower Golden NVMe M.2 SSD anyway. Green HX The quad-core Core i5-4690K CPU is Ports Front: 2 x USB 3, 2 x USB 2, 2 x audio; Rear: 4 x USB 3, 4 x USB 2, overclocked to 4.3GHz. It’s a last-gen chip, 1 x Gigabit Ethernet, 1 x PS/2, 1 x with Skylake silicon taking over, but it’s still optical S/PDIF, 6 x audio powerful enough for most people’s needs. Operating system Windows 10 Home 64-bit The overclock isn’t that ambitious, though, Warranty Two year parts and considering that other system builders labour return to base have extracted 4.5GHz or 4.6GHz from the

same silicon. It’s paired with an Asus GeForce GTX 970 Strix graphics card, with two large fans, and a factory overclock, taking the GPU core from 1050MHz to 1114MHz. There’s also a solid allocation of 16GB of DDR3 memory, which is plenty for most people. It’s only clocked at 1600MHz, though, when much faster memory is available for not much more money. That said, memory speed doesn’t make a massive difference to overall performance. The 250GB Samsung 850 Evo SSD is a good SATA model too, but it seems pretty ordinary when compared with the quicker M.2 drives arriving with Skylake systems. The specification doesn’t look as strong when lined up against rivals though. The Overclockers Titan Riptide (see Issue 146, p68), for example, costs a similar price to this machine but includes a 6-core Intel processor and 16GB of memory clocked to 2400MHz, although it lacks the fancy liquid-cooling system. Scan’s 3XS Z170 Vengeance system is a little more expensive than Oblivion’s machine, but it justifies the extra pennies with a lightningquick SSD and GTX 980 graphics. Oblivion packages this PC with a two year return-to-base warranty that also includes parts and labour coverage for the same amount of time.

Performance The Oblivion’s key competitor is the Overclockers Titan Riptide, and the two machines make for an interesting comparison in our application benchmarks. The overclocked Core i5 part inside the Gladiator has a big clock speed advantage over the Haswell-E chip inside the Riptide, giving it the edge in our mostly single-threaded image editing test. However, the six cores inside the Overclockers machine and the lack of Hyper-Threading inside the Gladiator saw the Riptide pull ahead in our heavily multi-threaded H.264 video encoding test. The Gladiator’s end system score of 102,419 shows that it will be fine for most tasks and gaming, but it’s a little underwhelming from a system that costs £1,200 inc VAT. The Gladiator was great in gaming at both 1080p and 2,560 x, 1,440 too, never dropping below 30fps in any of our game tests. However, the machine arrived as pictured with the card installed in the second 16x PCI-E slot down, which only allocates eight lanes to it – an odd move, but Oblivion says it allows more room for tubing, pointing out that the GTX 970 won’t saturate the bandwidth of eight lanes anyway. It isn’t an optimal situation, but it does indeed have little effect on the GTX 970’s performance. The 240GB Samsung SSD returned sequential read and write speeds of 497MB/sec

The Raijintek Triton all-in-one liquid cooler is filled with orange coolant

A smart Oblivion nameplate adorns the shroud covering the PSU area

The MSI GeForce GTX 970 graphics card plays all games at 2,560 x 1,440

and 478MB/sec, which are fine for a SATA SSD, but there’s an obvious speed benefit from the M.2 NVMe drives we’re seeing with Skylake and X99 machines now. We didn’t encounter any thermal issues with the Oblivion either. Its CPU and GPU delta Ts of 54°C and 52°C are fine, and noise levels were consistent – when idle, the machine churned out a low hum, and that noise only increased a little when we played games – you won’t notice the rumble if you use speakers or a headset. There’s a also fan controller on the back, but it just ramped up the fan noise to uncomfortable levels, and our tests indicated that the CPU didn’t overheat with the fans running at a more modest pace anyway.

Conclusion The Gladiator system has clearly been built carefully. The orange and black colour scheme has been cleverly applied throughout virtually every component, and the little touches show that Oblivion has really thought about the looks and build of its first review machine. The Core i5 CPU and overclocked GPU offer decent enough gaming and application performance, and the motherboard is packed with features as well. It’s a shame, then, that this PC is let down in some other departments. The reliance on a last-generation motherboard and CPU, comparatively slow memory and SATA storage all make it

CP C REALB ENC H 2 0 15 GI MP I MAGE EDI T I N G 58,971 15,000

look uncompetitive next to similarly priced X99 and Skylake machines. Nevertheless, Oblivion is clearly a company to watch in the enthusiast system arena, and we look forward to seeing what else it can do. MIKE JENNINGS

B A T T L EF IEL D 4

Oblivion Gladiator 0

30,000

45,000

60,000

1,920 x 1,080, Ultra Detail, 4x AA

Oblivion Gladiator

66fps 0

HANDBR AKE H. 26 4 V I D E O E N C O D I N G 55,000

110,000

20,000

40,000

60,000

59fps 45

118,969 30,000

Oblivion Gladiator

58fps 0

77fps 60

2,560 x 1,440, Ultra Detail, FXAA

Oblivion Gladiator 60,000

90,000

120,000

Oblivion Gladiator

CR YS IS 3

44fps 0

56fps 45

1,920 x 1,080, Very High Detail, 0x AA

S YS TEM S C OR E

Oblivion Gladiator

102,419

Oblivion Gladiator 30,000

60,000

90,000

120,000

I NTEL REFERENCE : 8 9 . 4 9 %

47fps 0

DESIGN

20/25

23/25

Oblivion Gladiator

HARDWARE

VALUE

21/25

84%

31fps 11 Minimum

OVERALL SCORE

75fps

2,560 x 1,440, Very High Detail, 0x AA

20/25

42fps 0

80,000

HEAVY MULTI TA S K I N G

SPEED

1,920 x 1,080, Ultra Detail, FXAA

73,784

80fps

SHADOW OF MORDOR

Oblivion Gladiator

165,000 220,000

LUXMARK OP ENC L 0

2,560 x 1,440, Ultra Detail, 4x AA

216,981

Oblivion Gladiator

41fps 33

Average

VERDICT Great looks and reasonable power, but the specification is a little too inconsistent to earn a wholehearted recommendation.

E L I T E / THE BEST KIT

Elite

Our choice of the best hardware available

Build a mini APU PC The parts you’ll need to build an affordable, general-purpose mini PC that’s ideal for putting in the lounge, based on an AMD APU. This machine will handle general computing and media tasks with no trouble, as well as basic gaming, although you’ll have to lower the detail settings. SUPPLIER

FEATURED

SilverStone Fortress FTZ01

www.scan.co.uk

Issue 144, p84

£110

Gigabyte F2A88XN-WiFi

www.cclonline.com

Issue 144, p84

£81

AMD A10-7870K

www.scan.co.uk

Issue 144, p22

£104

8GB Corsair Vengeance Pro 2400MHz (CMY8GX3M2A2400C11R)

www.scan.co.uk

Issue 144, p84

£44

Cooler Master Seidon 120V

www.scan.co.uk

Issue 144, p84

£39

250GB Crucial BX100

www.scan.co.uk

Issue 144, p84

£69

SilverStone SST-ST30SF

www.scan.co.uk

Issue 144, p84

£41

Microsoft Windows 10 Home Retail USB drive

www.scan.co.uk

Issue 146, p17

£88

TOTAL

PRICE

NAME

(inc VAT)

£576

Build a budget gaming PC The parts you’ll need to build a budget machine capable of playing the latest games at maximum settings on a 1080p monitor. The machine has a discrete graphics card, a highly overclockable dual-core CPU and high-speed memory. Meanwhile, the Z97 motherboard gives you headroom to upgrade to a faster CPU later. PRICE

NAME

SUPPLIER

FEATURED

NZXT S340

www.overclockers.co.uk

Issue 137, p54

£60

ASRock Z97 Pro3

www.scan.co.uk

Issue 130, p50

£73

Intel Pentium G3258

www.scan.co.uk

Issue 132, p17

£52

8GB Corsair Vengeance Pro 2400MHz DDR3 (CMY8GX3M2A2400C11R)

www.scan.co.uk

Issue 132, p22

£44

www.ebuyer.co.uk

Issue 147, p20

£139

250GB Crucial BX100

www.scan.co.uk

Issue 144, p84

£69

SilverStone Argon AR01

www.scan.co.uk

Issue 132, p57

£26

EVGA SuperNova GS 550W

www.dabs.com

Issue 146, p50

£57

Seagate Barracuda 2TB ST2000DM001

www.scan.co.uk

Issue 104, p75

£55

Microsoft Windows 10 Home Retail USB drive

www.scan.co.uk

Issue 146, p17

£88

Asus GeForce GTX 950 Strix

D U PDATE

TOTAL

(inc VAT)

£663

E L I T E / THE BEST KIT

Build a mid-range PC Work PC The parts you’ll need to build a solid quad-core PC with plenty of upgrade potential. This kit list gives you an all-in-one liquid cooler and a K-series Core i5 Skylake CPU, meaning you can overclock it and get some serious processing power. We’ve managed to get the Core i5-6600K Skylake CPU up to 4.6GHz, so it has some great performance potential. Also included is a solid EVGA PSU, a 500GB SSD and 8GB of high-speed DDR4 memory. The core configuration assumes you won’t be doing any serious gaming, however, and it relies on Intel’s integrated graphics. PRICE

NAME

SUPPLIER

FEATURED

NZXT Phantom 530

www.overclockers.co.uk

Issue 127, p44

£98

www.ebuyer.com

Issue 147, p44

£154

Intel Core i5-6600K

www.scan.co.uk

Issue 145, p17

£198

8GB Corsair Vengeance LLPX 2666MHz DDR4 (CMK8GX4M2A2666C16 )

www.scan.co.uk

Issue 145, p24

£51

NZXT Kraken X41

www.overclockers.co.uk

Issue 138, p57

£73

EVGA SuperNova GS 550W

www.dabs.com

Issue 146, p50

£57

Seagate Barracuda 2TB ST2000DM001

www.scan.co.uk

Issue 104, p75

£55

Lite-On IHAS124-14

www.dabs.com

Issue 99, p108

£11

Crucial BX100 500GB

www.ebuyer.com

Issue 141, p43

£135

www.scan.co.uk

Issue 146, p17

£88

Asus Maximus VIII Ranger

U PDATE

Microsoft Windows 10 Home Retail USB drive

TOTAL

(inc VAT)

£920

Gaming PC The graphics card you’ll need to play current games at their maximum settings at 1080p and 2,560 x 1,440. NAME 1,920 x 1,080 Asus GeForce GTX 950 Strix

D U PDATE

2,560 x 1,440 Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 4GB

FEATURED

www.ebuyer.co.uk

Issue 147, p20

£139

www.scan.co.uk

Issue 140, p48

£252

Z170 PRO GAMING MOTHERBOARD

PLAY TO YOUR STRENGTHS 64

PRICE

SUPPLIER

OVERCLOCK YOUR WAY | GAMING-OPTIMISED FEATURES BUILT FOR DURABILITY

(inc VAT)

Build a performance PC Work PC The parts you’ll need to build a high-quality, fast PC that’s ideal for multi-threaded workloads. This kit list features a highquality, well-built case, a feature-rich motherboard and an Intel Skylake Core i7-6700K CPU. This processor’s support for Hyper-Threading splits the resources of the CPU’s four physical cores into a further four virtual cores, meaning it can effectively handle eight threads at once. There’s also a solid Corsair 750W PSU, giving you plenty of headroom for overclocking and adding another GPU, 16GB of DDR4 memory and an all-in-one liquid cooler. PRICE

NAME

SUPPLIER

FEATURED

Cooler Master Cosmos SE

www.cclonline.com

Issue 144, p41

£120

Asus Maximus VIII Hero

www.novatech.co.uk

Issue 146, p20

£170

Intel Core i7-6700K

www.scan.co.uk

Issue 145, p17

£319

16GB Corsair Vengeance LLPX 2666MHz DDR4 (CMK16GX4M2A2666C16 )

www.scan.co.uk

Issue 145, p24

£90

NZXT Kraken X41

www.overclockers.co.uk

Issue 138, p57

£73

Corsair RM750i

www.scan.co.uk

Issue 146, p55

£104

Seagate Barracuda 2TB ST2000DM001

www.scan.co.uk

Issue 104, p75

£55

Samsung 850 Evo 500GB

www.scan.co.uk

Issue 141, p51

£138

Microsoft Windows 10 Home Retail USB drive

www.scan.co.uk

Issue 146, p17

TOTAL

(inc VAT)

£88

£1,157

Gaming PC The graphics card you’ll need to play current games at their maximum settings at 2,560 x 1,440 and beyond. PRICE

NAME

SUPPLIER

FEATURED

2,560 x 1,440 Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 4GB

www.scan.co.uk

Issue 140, p48

£252

4K 2 x Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 4GB

www.scan.co.uk

Issue 140, p50

£504

(inc VAT)

Z170 SERIES MOTHERBOARDS

UPGRADE TO INTEL 6TH GEN

E L I T E / THE BEST KIT

Build a 6-core workstation Multi-threaded workstation The parts you’ll need to build a PC with serious power in multi-threaded workstation software, such as 3D rendering apps and optimised distributed computing software. The kit list features a 6-core LGA2011-v3 CPU, which is overclockable using the motherboard and cooler listed. Also supplied is 16GB of RAM, 1TB of solid state storage and a 1.2kW PSU, providing loads of headroom for adding multiple GPUs. PRICE

NAME

SUPPLIER

FEATURED

Phanteks Enthoo Luxe

www.eclipsecomputers.com

Issue 144, p53

£117

Asus X99 Deluxe

www.overclockers.co.uk

Issue 136, p20

£315

Intel Core i7-5820K

www.scan.co.uk

Issue 134, p43

£309

Issue 147, p20

£139

Asus GeForce GTX 950 Strix

www.ebuyer.co.uk

(inc VAT)

16GB Corsair Vengeance LPX 2666MHz DDR4 (CMK16GX4M4A2666C16 )

www.scan.co.uk

Issue 136, p14

£108

Corsair Hydro H110i GT

www.eclipsecomputers.com

Issue 140, p17

£93

Corsair Professional Series AX1200i

www.scan.co.uk

Issue 111, p40

£253

Samsung 850 Evo 1TB

www.cclonline.com

Issue 141, p51

£280

Seagate Barracuda 2TB ST2000DM0001

www.scan.co.uk

Issue 104, p75

£55

Lite-On IHAS124-14

www.dabs.com

Issue 99, p108

£11

Issue 146, p17

£88

Microsoft Windows 10 Home Retail USB drive

www.scan.co.uk

TOTAL

£1,768

4K gaming PC This LGA2011-v3 system can support multiple graphics cards over 28 PCI-E 3 lanes, making it an ideal foundation for highresolution PC gaming, replacing the graphics card listed above with two high-spec cards. NAME

SUPPLIER

FEATURED

4K 2 x Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 4GB

www.scan.co.uk

Issue 140, p50

TOTAL

STRIX GTX 980 TI

GAMING GRAPHICS CARDS 66

PRICE

(inc VAT)

£504

£2,133

Build a mini PC Core components The parts you’ll need to build either PC. This kit list gives you a solid PSU, 16GB of RAM, an overclockable Skylake CPU, an all-in-one liquid cooler and Windows 10 Home 64-bit. Also included is a short-PCB graphics card that can play current games at their maximum settings at 2,560 x 1,440, and a 500GB SSD. PRICE

NAME

SUPPLIER

FEATURED

Intel Core i7-6700K U PDATE D

www.scan.co.uk

Issue 147, p84

£319

16GB (2 x 8GB) Corsair Vengeance LPX 2666MHz U PDATE D www.scan.co.uk

Issue 147, p84

£90

Corsair H80i GT U PDATE D

www.scan.co.uk

Issue 147, p84

£80

Asus GeForce GTX 970 DirectCU Mini

www.overclockers.co.uk

Issue 139, p20

£300

Crucial BX100 500GB

www.ebuyer.com

Issue 141, p43

£135

Seagate Barracuda 2TB ST2000DM001

www.scan.co.uk

Issue 104, p75

£55

Lite-On IHAS124-14

www.dabs.com

Issue 99, p108

£11

EVGA SuperNova GS 550W

www.dabs.com

Issue 146, p50

£57

Issue 146, p17

£88

Microsoft Windows 10 Home Retail USB drive

www.scan.co.uk

(inc VAT)

Mini-ITX PC The parts you’ll need to build a pint-sized powerhouse. PRICE

NAME

SUPPLIER

FEATURED

Corsair Obsidian 250D

www.scan.co.uk

Issue 136, p41

£75

www.cclonline.com

Issue 147, p26

£130

Asus Z170i Pro Gaming

U PDATE

TOTAL

Micro-ATX PC

(inc VAT)

£1,340

The parts you’ll need to build a mini PC that doesn’t take up as much room as a full-sized desktop. PRICE

NAME

SUPPLIER

FEATURED

Fractal Design Arc Mini R2

www.scan.co.uk

Issue 127, p46

£67

Asus Maximus VIII Gene U PDATE D

www.scan.co.uk

Issue 147, p42

£142

TOTAL

(inc VAT)

£1,344

E L I T E / THE BEST KIT

Cases PRICE

TYPE

NAME

SUPPLIER

FEATURED

Budget ATX

NZXT S340

www.overclockers.co.uk

Issue 137, p54

£60

Sub-£100 ATX quiet

Fractal Design Define R5

www.scan.co.uk

Issue 137, p20

£79

Sub-£100 ATX performance

NZXT Phantom 530

www.overclockers.co.uk

Issue 127, p44

£98

Sub-£150 fullsized ATX quiet

Nanoxia Deep Silence 5

www.quietpc.com

Issue 144, p50

£113

Sub-£150 fullsized ATX

Phanteks Enthoo Luxe

www.eclipsecomputers.com

Issue 144, p53

£117

Sub-£150 mid-size ATX

Cooler Master Cosmos SE

www.cclonline.com

Issue 144, p41

£120

Mini-ITX tower

Corsair Obsidian 250D

www.scan.co.uk

Issue 136, p41

£75

Mini-ITX cube

Antec ISK600

www.overclockers.co.uk

Issue 126, p28

£45

Micro-ATX

Fractal Design Arc Mini R2

www.scan.co.uk

Issue 127, p46

£67

Water-cooling micro-ATX

Parvum Systems S2.0

www.overclockers.co.uk

Issue 129, p22

£140

(inc VAT)

Graphics cards NAME

SUPPLIER

FEATURED

1,920 x 1,080 gaming

Asus GeForce PDATE D GTX 950 Strix U

www.ebuyer.co.uk

Issue 147, p20

£139

2,560 x 1,440 gaming

Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 4GB

www.scan.co.uk

Issue 140, p48

£252

High-end singleGPU gaming

EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti D U PDATE Classified ACX 2.0+

www.scan.co.uk

Issue 147, p24

£619

4K gaming

2 x Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 4GB

www.scan.co.uk

Issue 140, p49

£504

Mini-ITX

Asus GeForce GTX 970 DirectCU Mini

www.overclockers.co.uk

Issue 139, p20

£300

BLAZING- FAST. ARMOR- PROTECTED. SUPER- COOL. 68

PRICE

TYPE

(inc VAT)

Power supplies PRICE

TYPE

NAME

SUPPLIER

FEATURED

Mid-range 550W

EVGA SuperNova GS 550W

www.dabs.com

Issue 146, p50

£57

High-end 550W

Super Flower Leadex Platinum 550W

www.overclockers.co.uk

Issue 146, p52

£83

Mid-range 750W

Corsair RM750i

www.scan.co.uk

Issue 146, p55

£104

High-end 1.2kW

Corsair Professional Series AX1200i

www.scan.co.uk

Issue 111, p40

£253

(inc VAT)

Networking PRICE

TYPE

NAME

SUPPLIER

FEATURED

Router

Asus RT-AC68U

www.scan.co.uk

Issue 128, p88

£139

Wi-Fi adaptor

Asus PCE-AC68

www.scan.co.uk

Issue 128, p88

£67

TYPE

NAME

SUPPLIER

FEATURED

Hard disk

Seagate Barracuda 2TB ST2000DM001

www.scan.co.uk

Issue 104, p75

£55

250GB SSD

Crucial BX100 250GB

www.scan.co.uk

Issue 141, p43

£69

500GB SSD

Crucial BX100 500GB

www.ebuyer.com

Issue 141, p43

£135

1TB SSD

Samsung 850 Evo 1TB

www.cclonline.com

Issue 141, p51

£280

High-performance SSD

Intel SSD 750 1.2TB

www.scan.co.uk

Issue 143, p24

£809

NAS box

Synology DS215J

www.cclonline.com

Issue 138, p17

£134

(inc VAT)

Storage PRICE

(inc VAT)

E L I T E / THE BEST KIT

Monitors PRICE

TYPE

NAME

SUPPLIER

FEATURED

24in monitor

Dell U2414H

www.overclockers.co.uk

Issue 129, p43

£186

29in monitor

Asus PB298Q

www.scan.co.uk

Issue 129, p52

£293

28in 4K monitor

Asus PB287Q

www.scan.co.uk

Issue 133, p44

£383

G-Sync monitor

Asus ROG Swift PG278Q

www.eclipsecomputers.com

Issue 143, p44

£552

FreeSync monitor

BenQ XL2730Z

www.overclockers.co.uk

Issue 143, p46

£390

(inc VAT)

Peripherals

No.1

NAME

SUPPLIER

FEATURED

Budget mechanical keyboard

Gigabyte Aivia Osmium

www.awd-it.co.uk

Issue 139, p40

£65

Mechanical gaming keyboard

CM Storm Trigger-Z

www.ebuyer.com

Issue 139, p44

£70

Mechanical MMO keyboard

Corsair Vengeance K95

www.awd-it.co.uk

Issue 123, p64

£125

Gaming mouse

Logitech G402 Hyperion Fury

www.currys.co.uk

Issue 139, p53

£40

Wireless gaming mouse

SteelSeries Sensei Wireless

www.box.co.uk

Issue 139, p61

£90

Flight stick

Saitek X-55 Rhino H.O.T.A.S.

www.overclockers.co.uk

Issue 131, p29

£170

Steering wheel and pedals

Thrustmaster TX Ferrari 458 Italia Edition

www.overclockers.co.uk

Issue 137, p32

£300

Gaming Monitor Brand 70

PRICE

TYPE

(inc VAT)

Audio PRICE

TYPE

NAME

SUPPLIER

FEATURED

PCI-E sound card

Creative Sound Blaster Z

www.eclipsecomputers. com

Issue 116, p42

£66

USB DAC

Asus Xonar Essence One

www.overclockers.co.uk

Issue 118, p44

£363

2.1 speakers

Acoustic Energy Aego M

www.amazon.co.uk

Issue 142, p52

£165

Soundbar

Razer Leviathan

www.overclockers.co.uk

Issue 142, p57

£165

Headset

HyperX Cloud II

www.ebuyer.com

Issue 142, p46

£70

Surround-sound headset

Asus Strix 7.1

www.cclonline.com

Issue 142, p43

£150

(inc VAT)

Systems PRICE

TYPE

NAME

SUPPLIER

FEATURED

(inc VAT)

Sub-£1,000 gaming PC

PC Specialist Hailstorm GT

www.pcspecialist.co.uk

Issue 146, p66

c. £899

Quiet gaming PC

Chillblast Fusion Serenity

www.chillblast.co.uk

Issue 138, p66

c. £1,499

Dream PC

Scan 3XS Barracuda

www.scan.co.uk

Issue 145, p58

c.£9,499

Sub-£2,000 gaming PC

Scan 3XS X99 Carbon Ti

www.scan.co.uk

Issue 143, p58

c.£1,999

Skylake PC

Scan 3XS Z170 Vengeance

www.scan.co.uk

Issue 145, p66

c. £1,449

Mini-ITX gaming PC

Chillblast Fusion D U PDATE Fury Nano

www.chillblast.co.uk

Issue 147, p56

£1,619

Gaming laptop

MSI GT70 2PC Dominator

www.overclockers.co.uk

Issue 129, p26

c. £1,320

Premium PC

Overclockers UK Infin8 Emperor

www.overclockers.co.uk

Issue 145, p44

c.£5,399

Games

Featured this month Inverse look p73 / Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain p74 / Mad Max p76 / Zombi p78 / The engine room – RED Engine (The Witcher III: Wild Hunt) p80 / Indie corner p82 72

OPINION

B E N H A R DW I D G E / FROM THE EDITOR R I C K L A N E / INVERSE LOOK

HEADING HERE THE SECRET WORLD PLEASE

The game industry’s obsession with secrecy is pathetic, self-defeating and needs to stop, argues Rick Standfirst here please Standfirst here please Standfirst hereLane please Standfirst here please Standfirst here please

he game industry is obsessed with secrecy. Publishers guard information about their games with the vigilance of amake spy agency protecting ancard informant. ow, I’d better sure I have an Nvidia in 2014, I Every detail revealed a game development is controlled thought, asabout I watched theinWitcher 3 PhysX demo last by a marketing schedule stricter than a Victorian schoolmaster, proprietary GPU feature would actually persuade me and are keptGPU silent by punitive non-disclosure to godevelopers with one company’s over another’s since the 3dfx days. agreements (NDAs) that canhave result in lawsuits they letthese slip Graphics card companies been comingifup with an inconsequential fact aboutcall, a game at the wrong unique selour own judgment according to yourtime. priorities. Standard critical journalism What are your priorities when.practice, such as playing games prior to release in order to write a timely review, is becoming increasingly difficult to perform, as PR companies drip-feed review copies for maximum exposure over the longest time possible. Even specifying precisely when a game will become available for review is often too much to ask, which makes keeping a schedule almost impossible. Talking to developers has to be done in accordance to the grand marketing plan. Some publishers even refuse to talk about a game after it' s been released, believing that it distracts from their focus on new projects. Of course, if the problems were restricted to making my life more difficult than necessary, I' d leave my griping for the pub. Yet the game industry' s cloak-and-dagger approach to discussing games isn' t just irritating for journalists, it' s also harmful to developers. While NDAs might seem sensible safeguards during game development, they often end up gagging developers for far longer. I commonly encounter designers who are reluctant to discuss projects they worked on ten or 20 years ago, for fear that an NDA they signed, or even might have signed, years back will come back to bite them in the bank account.

T W

The culture of silence can make it hard for new devs to get into the industry too. Last year, music agent Darrell Alexander complained that the game industry' s opacity regarding current projects made it very difficult to find jobs for freelance audio designers. Publishers could be missing out on amazing talent simply because nobody knows what they' re making. The silence also has more serious ramifications for developers, as it conceals the more insidious parts of the industry, such as poor management, abusive employment practices, or crunch, which I discussed last month. If developers are reluctant to talk about the positive aspects of their work for fear of legal reprisals, how can they address the negative aspects? The reason the industry is so secretive isn' t entirely clear, but it could be because it' s grown up with a very vocal audience. The music, film and publishing industries all matured prior to the Internet, so criticism came mainly from newspapers and angry fans sending letters. But the game industry grew up attuned to an online audience, and gaming fans can be ferocious critics. Yet rather than responding in the two most sensible ways, either sticking to its guns or making changes when criticism appears, the industry has instead decided to bury its head in the sand, only popping up to spit out a new game here and there. The silly thing is that transparency and criticism rarely affect sales. In 2012, almost every fact about Modern Warfare 3 was leaked onto the Internet prior to release, and yet the game still sold tens of millions of copies. So open up, game industry. Let us talk to your developers, review your games on time and discuss your problems openly. We' ll all feel better for it and you' ll still be richer for it.

The silly thing is that transparency and Cicriticism debis velrarely iliquam sam affect samsales serovides doloris of games utaque volectas

Ben Hardwidge is the editor of Custom PC. He likesRick PCs,Lane heavy metal, real ale and Warhammer 40,000. [emailprotected] is Custom PC’s games editor. @Rick_Lane

@custompcmag

G A M E S / REVIEW

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain/£45

inc VAT

DEVELOPER Kojima Productions / PUBLISHER Konami / WEBSITE www.konami.jp/mgs5

OVERALL SCORE

95% / VERDICT With astonishing attention to detail and flexibility in its systems, Metal Gear Solid V is the new pinnacle of stealth gaming.

he Metal Gear Solid series has always been a great innovator in terms of stealth mechanics and creative play. Until now, though, the games have also come with a hefty side order of cinematic storytelling; depending on the particular game, this was either a welcome accompaniment to those delightful stealth systems, or an infuriating distraction from them. With the Phantom Pain, however, the lengthy cut-scenes and ponderous philosophising of its characters, previously hallmarks of the series, have been stripped back. Instead, the emphasis is on the player and their actions, which has two consequences. First, Metal Gear Solid V has one of the weakest stories in the series. Second, Metal Gear Solid V is the greatest stealth game ever. Players reprise the role of Big Boss, the hero of Metal Gear Solid 3 and Peace Walker, and the antagonist of the original Metal Gear who was ultimately defeated by Solid Snake. Phantom Pain is about that transition from hero to villain. It’s 1984, and Big Boss awakens from a coma after a disastrous covert operation nine years previously, which saw the obliteration of the private army he established in Peace Walker. After a dramatic and cinematic escape from the hospital where he’s being treated, Big Boss takes it upon himself to rebuild his forces – the Diamond Dogs – and exact vengeance on those who attacked him nine years ago. The game then lets you off its cinematic leash, parachuting you into two fantastic open worlds designed entirely around stealth gaming. To fund his

army, Big Boss takes on private contracts, infiltrating dangerous conflict zones in Afghanistan and Zaire. These contracts include assassination missions, prisoner extractions, intelligence operations and all kinds of wetwork for various clients. Each of the game’s 40-odd missions uses a chunk of these large environments, inserting you a fair distance from the objective by helicopter, and letting you work your way through guard posts and enemy patrols, approaching the objective however you please. The standard top-down presentation has been jettisoned in favour of a more modern third-person perspective, while stealth is much more about choice and preparation than simply threading the needle in the correct manner. The military encampments, occupied villages and dozens of other target locations can be tackled from almost any angle, so you need to consider your approach carefully, marking guard patrols using your binoculars, and thoughtfully using weapons and equipment with care. A vast array of factors affect the perception of your enemies, such as whether you’re standing or crouching, the time of day, the type of camouflage you’re wearing and whether you’re positioned in light or shadow. Enemies have keen hearing too. Knock over an object and a nearby guard might investigate, while environmental sounds such as rainfall or passing vehicles can help mask your footsteps. In many ways, the game becomes even more interesting when your plans go wrong. Being discovered by a guard triggers ‘reflex’ mode – a few seconds of slow motion in which Big Boss can dispatch his opponent before the

alarms sound. It’s an ingenious way to both increase the tension and give the player one last chance to rectify their mistake. If you fail, the base is alerted to your presence, and you need to either evade the gunfire or fight back. As an action game, MGS V is less forgiving but equally compelling. You can use standard cover/fire tactics, and explosives such as grenades and rocket launchers, and even call in helicopter support. Meanwhile, all your achievements are tied together by Mother Base, the Diamond Dogs headquarters that you expand as the game progresses. This sprawling oil rig in the Seychelles serves many functions, each represented by a different platform. R&D, for example, develops new weapons and gadgets, while the Intel and Support platforms give you greater tactical options in the field, such as more advanced helicopters and even the ability to call in artillery fire. Expanding Mother Base requires money and people. The former you receive through completing missions, smaller side-ops and eventually sending troops on combat deployment. The latter are acquired through volunteers and capturing enemy soldiers by knocking them out and extracting them using ‘Fulton balloons’. These brilliant balloons are attached to in-game objects, which send them shooting into the sky to be collected by a helicopter. Later, you can upgrade your Fulton balloons to extract machine gun placements, cargo containers and even tanks. As you delve deeper into the game, your infiltration capabilities increase exponentially. Mission buddies such as D-Dog let you sense enemy locations without having to mark them manually, while gadgets such as smoke grenades and ‘decoys’ – inflatable dummy versions of yourself – enable more creative ways to distract or incapacitate guards and patrols. Brilliantly, however, your enemies will eventually adapt to your tactics. Use too many smoke grenades, and base guards will begin to wear gas

masks. The game doesn’t allow you to rely on one particular approach for too long. It constantly encourages you to adapt and experiment. There are a few problems. It takes a while to get used to the keyboard controls, although it’s worth it for the massive boon of mouse-aiming. The story, as previously mentioned, is also rather thin and scattered, with much of it squirreled away in audio logs that you can play while roaming the world. Big Boss is curiously mute for many of the more dramatic scenes, while antagonists such as Skull Face and the Man on Fire simply aren’t as compelling as those encountered in previous games. In addition, the multiplayer aspect of Forward Operating Bases, where players can invade other players’ games and attempt to steal resources from them, is interesting but has an infuriating tendency to interrupt your single-player missions. Lastly, there are some unsavoury aspects, most notably in the form of Quiet, your handy Sniper companion whose hypersexualised portrayal is puerile and astonishingly tawdry. But the good massively outweighs the bad here. Metal Gear Solid V is a tremendous achievement in game design. Its open world is capable of surprising you after dozens of hours of play, and its stealth systems are endless in their creative potential. Alongside The Witcher 3, it’s easily a contender for the best game of this year. RICK LANE

G A M E S / REVIEW

Mad Max/£34.99

inc VAT

DEVELOPER Avalanche Studios / PUBLISHER Warner Bros / WEBSITE www.madmaxgame.com

ad Max is an interesting case study for how radically the open-world game has changed in recent months. If it had been released a couple of years ago, it would have been one of the best open worlds we’d experienced. However, it’s had the misfortune to launch in the same year as two exceptional open-world games – The Witcher 3 and Metal Gear Solid V. Both games have elevated the genre through their meticulous design around specific characters, with every aspect of the games carefully constructed to make sense within those worlds. By comparison, Mad Max takes a specific theme and drapes it over a standard open-world framework, giving tried and tested mechanics and missions a lick of rustcoloured paint. The result is still a competent and occasionally spectacular open-world experience, but one that’s visibly greying at the temples. Avalanche’s game begins with a fittingly simple premise. After having his Interceptor car stolen and destroyed by local warlord Scabrous Scrotus, Max teams up with a highly eccentric yet brilliant mechanic named Chumbucket to create the greatest car the Wasteland has ever seen – the Magnum Opus. To achieve this goal, Max must help Chumbucket source the best parts the Wasteland has to offer, which means travelling to its farthest reaches and making a bunch of fragile alliances with dangerous people. The story is distinctly no-frills, but the script is surprisingly well written. Chumbucket in particular is a fantastic character, a quirky hunchback who loves cars so much he’s built his own religion around them. He talks about vehicles with the flowery oration of a priest, and refers to people with the cold technical jargon of a mechanic. The various warlords you encounter on your travels have equally colourful personalities. In fact, the only letdown is Max himself who, despite having a better Australian accent, lacks that barely contained mixture of rage and grief that Tom Hardy depicts so well in the recent film, Fury Road. As with most open-world games, the best character is the Wasteland itself, which is as beautiful as it is eerie. It’s also surprisingly varied. Avalanche has painstakingly ensured that each of its regions feels unique, ranging from sweeping sand dunes and parched salt flats to a vast, blackened rubbish dump that forms the outskirts of Gastown, the player’s ultimate destination. But even OVERALL SCORE in the most desolate parts of the waste, there’s always something on screen to draw your eye. It might be a unique rock formation, a towering ‘scarecrow’ totem pole, or a curiously repurposed fragment of civilisation, such as a concrete cooling tower that’s been converted / VERDICT into a warlord’s fortress. Exhilarating car It’s a strange, harsh world that’s evidently dying combat and a around you, yet it still manages to lash out angrily during beautiful open world are wasted these death throes. Punishing dust storms thunder into on a game that isn’t the game with the force of a tidal wave, flinging debris worth the time at you like a child throwing a tantrum. Meanwhile, you’re and investment constantly harassed by War parties that roam the that’s required. sands, preying on the weak and vulnerable.

64% 76

It’s during encounters with these roving vehicular bandits where Mad Max shines brightest. Car combat is a truly fearsome whirlwind of fire and twisted metal. You can approach it straightforwardly, ramming and side-slamming into other vehicles until they explode in viscous flames. Or you can be more surgical, using your harpoon gun to yank wheels, doors and even drivers from their vehicles. It’s thrilling and inventive, making good use of the Wasteland’s meandering roads and rugged landscapes. The only problem with the car combat is that, bizarrely, the game doesn’t place much emphasis on it. Far more time is spent fighting your enemies on foot, which simply isn’t as entertaining. The melee combat is functional and works thematically, taking the free-flow combat system seen in Batman: Arkham Asylum and giving it a scrappier edge, but it isn’t interesting enough to justify the amount of time the game dedicates to it. In fact, Mad Max generally doesn’t have its priorities straight. The open-world activities in which you partake feel like template distractions with a post-apocalypse theme, rather than activities tailored specifically to what makes Mad Max interesting. For example, a big chunk of your time is spent raiding fortified oil transfer camps that belong to Scrotus – a spin on the ‘base liberation’ side quest that’s a staple in open-world games such as Far Cry. Yet rather than encouraging creative play with the game’s systems, as in Far Cry, raiding these camps in Mad Max means performing the same sequence of actions over and over again. The game attempts to tie these disparate activities together through the process of upgrading the Magnum Opus. Many story missions require you to have obtained particular parts for your car, and often those parts are only unlocked by completing a certain number of side activities. However, it’s presented in a confusing and off-putting manner. It’s possible to race ahead with the story, only to have to backtrack for several hours mopping up occupational detritus in order to unlock a better exhaust or a more powerful engine. Every task in the game takes longer than necessary. Raiding transfer camps is unnecessarily drawn out by cutand-paste obstacles, collecting scrap (the game’s currency for buying upgrades) is a painfully slow process. Every fistfight is two or three minutes longer than necessary, and there are times when you need a flowchart to figure out what you need in order to unlock the next story mission. Consequently, the game’s pacing is extremely uneven. There are times when you feel like you’re racing towards completion, and other times where you’re overwhelmed by the sheer amount of work required to make any progress whatsoever. In the end, Mad Max the game has a lot in common with Mad Max the character. When it comes to surviving in a brutal, desolate wasteland and fighting off War Parties through bone-crunching vehicular combat, Mad Max excels. But when it comes to doing anything else, the game simply struggles to cope. RICK LANE

G A M E S / REVIEW

Zombi/£15

inc VAT

DEVELOPER Ubisoft Montpellier / PUBLISHER Ubisoft Montpellier / WEBSITE www.ubisoft.com/en-GB/game/zombi

OVERALL SCORE

80% / VERDICT Smart, inventive and exceedingly creepy, Zombi is a survival thriller with teeth.

riginally a Wii U launch title called ZombiU, Zombi sees you playing a survivor of an undead outbreak in London. After an introductory sequence that sees you chased into the London Underground, your character awakes in a safehouse created by an ex-soldier who calls himself the Prepper. The Prepper takes it upon himself to be your mentor, teaching you how to scavenge for supplies, battle the undead and stay alive, although he’s completely fixated on survival. If you want any semblance of hope, you’ll have to step out from under his protective yet controlling wing. What makes Zombi immediately stand out from other games of its ilk is its eerie atmosphere. The game does an awful lot with very little; environments are flat and boxy, and you’ll rarely see more than half a dozen zombies at once. However, each walking corpse you encounter can kill you with a single bite, while London’s smoggy streets and shadow-stained underground prove adept at concealing them in unexpected places. This haunted atmosphere also blends superbly with Zombi’s most novel mechanic. When you die, that particular character is gone forever, and you respawn back at the safehouse as a different individual. What’s more, your first task is to return to the previous survivor’s corpse and scavenge what you can find from their backpack. If they became infected upon death, you’ll have to fight them for it first.

This uncompromising approach to death makes Zombi’s scares effective. Combined with limited resources that need to be carefully managed, and a gradually unfolding city map that must be carefully navigated, Zombi is a captivating example of virtual horror. Even the fairly basic combat is brilliantly balanced; guns are plentiful but ammo is scarce, while melee combat consists of a simple, desperate bludgeoning technique, which is handy when faced with one or two zombies but useless against more. Sadly, not all of Zombi’s ideas made it to the PC. On the Wii U, the inventory and map are on the controller’s second screen, increasing the tension by forcing you to look away from the action when you needed to get your bearings or sort your equipment. On the PC, these features have been reworked into a more basic map/inventory system. There are also no configurable graphics settings aside from resolution, and unorthodox default keyboard controls. The game bears a few bite marks too. The resource collection system, where you keep track of different city districts via CCTV to replenish supplies, isn’t properly explored, and the game arbitrarily breaks some of its own rules toward the end, deactivating shortcuts through the city for no logical reason. But while Zombi may have lost a little vigour in its second life on the PC, overall it’s still a triumph of its genre, with a thrilling sense of danger. RICK LANE

G A M E S / ANALYSIS

The RED Engine’s animation system enables incredible character expressiveness, especially with subtle facial movements

R I C K L A N E / THE ENGINE ROOM

RED Engine 3 Rick Lane hunts down the technical secrets behind one of the best games of this year, The Witcher III: Wild Hunt espite being a mightily impressive RPG in its own right, The Witcher II was also a rescue project for its Polish developer CD Projekt. Prior to its creation, the company had burned through a huge amount of money attempting to create an Xbox 360 remake of the original Witcher game, named The Witcher: White Wolf. This failure forced the team to curtail ambitions for a sequel, creating it in half the time it took to develop the original. Major cuts were made to the game’s content, particularly to the final act, and the game’s RED Engine, while undoubtedly beautiful, was poorly optimised at the time, resulting in fairly small environments. For The Witcher III, CD Projekt wanted to avoid these compromises. It wanted a seamless open world, blending sprawling countryside with huge urban environments.

It wanted realistic and consistent lighting, including a day and night cycle with beautiful sunrises and sunsets. It wanted emotive character animations to convey its morally ambiguous and deeply human stories. The first priority was to better enable the RED Engine’s formidable rendering power to represent the vast world CD Projekt wanted, which meant overhauling the engine’s approach to level streaming. Marcin Gollent, principal engineer programmer on the game, explains that the RED Engine originally streamed content through ‘streaming areas’, which were defined manually by artists. ‘This is a simple and reliable solution, but requires some hand tuning, and when you’re moving towards a 50km² map “some” hand tuning turns into “unbearable amounts” of hand tuning,’ he says.

CD Projekt needed a more automated process that could determine when streaming was required without direct input from the developers. ‘We ended up developing a very robust and complex system that automatically splits content both spatially, thus virtually implementing the concept of streaming areas, and logically,’ Gollent says. ‘The logical part happens during data baking, and some of the system’s tasks are to organise the data into bundles and chunks, so that it best reflects the physical limitations of hard drives and Blu-ray discs.’ With an effective streaming system in place for large environments, the next challenge was filling those rolling hills and dense woodland with detail. The Witcher II set a remarkable standard when it came to rich fantasy environments. Matching that

standard manually over such a large area was an impossible task for CD Projekt’s relatively small team, so automated solutions were once again required. One of these automated systems ‘is populating terrain surfaces with predefined sets of grass, rocks, stems or small bushes’, Gollent says. ‘It happens in runtime so we don’t need to store spatial data, and it’s easy to modify. This, coupled with doublelayer terrain texturing and some offline vegetation generation, allows us to have decent-looking results without investing a lot of the artists’ time.’ With procedural generation acting as a sort of base clay, the artists then move in to sculpt and mould. ‘They polish everything they see,’ Gollent adds. But The Witcher III’s world isn’t entirely rural. Its swamps and woodlands are pockmarked by small peasant communities, and parts of the landscape are dominated by large cities such as Novigrad and Oxenfurt. ‘When thinking about the streaming system, we basically had two games to create: one game is Novigrad and the other is, well, all the rest,’ Gollent says. ‘Novigrad itself forced us to implement a set of features that are supposed to hide data-streaming delays.’ The Witcher III’s world also possesses a very specific character, and conveying that mood in the environments was extremely important for the developers. To that end, RED Engine 3 employs fully dynamic lighting that adapts accordingly to time and weather conditions. ‘It was also a must for us to seamlessly handle interiors without visible transitions or light bleeding,’ Gollent emphasises, ‘so we developed a solution based on localised environment probes and artist-controlled interior volumes, which allowed that.’ Alongside lighting, the aforementioned weather effects are vital to making The Witcher III feel alive. In particular, its simulation of wind is unique and remarkable effective. According to Gollent, the wind simulation is controlled by an overarching weather system that also determines other factors such as rainfall and cloud cover.

The game’s dynamic lighting system has a 24-hour cycle, simulating moonlight as well as sunlight

‘This consistent wind information is passed to multiple systems that control physical assets, hair simulation, ‘dangle’ simulation, foliage movement and so on. Each of those systems is left with a simple task: animate its subjects in the most convincing way possible,’ Gollent says. For smaller objects such as foliage, this work can be handled by a vertex shader, which animates the individual vertices. But Gollent states that some objects need to be simulated physically, handing off the processing work to the CPU. Of course, The Witcher games’ focus has always been as much on characters as the game world, and much of the work involved in bringing the earthily charismatic population to life is done by the writing team. However, the RED Engine plays its part too, most notably in character animation. ‘We improved the system in a few areas,’ Gollent says. ‘For example, we made it easier to move facial animation from one model to another, which improved iteration times. By investing more work in animation constraints, we improved eyelid behaviour and blinking. Also,

‘Implementation of the golden hour effects (sunrise and sunset) was a long process, and proved that close collaboration between lighting artists and programmers is essential,’ says Gollent

a new animation-based ‘look-at’ system allowed us to make the characters behave more naturally when moving their attention from one interlocutor to another. For example, by tilting their head down and blinking.’ As well as their central role in the game’s story, The Witcher III’s inhabitants are also used as details in the world itself, thanks to a unique AI system within the RED Engine. In terms of individual AI, the game uses a fairly standard behaviour tree model, but the game also possesses a higher level of AI that acts almost like a hivemind to continuously populate the environments. ‘We ended up developing a system that we called “Spawn Tree”,’ says Michał Słapa, principal AI programmer on The Witcher III. ‘From the design point of view, it’s quite similar to the way hierarchical AI systems are built. You can think of it as a kind of community AI that’s meant to spawn and conduct high-level control over NPC groups.’ The end result of CD Projekt’s work is plainly visible in the screenshots. Even more fascinating is the fact that the engine in the final game is scaled back from the initial concept demos shown in 2013. The rendering and lighting engines had to be altered because the team couldn’t get the desired scale and draw distances using DirectX 11. However, with DirectX 12 bringing improved speed, we wouldn’t be surprised to see another leap forwards when CD Projekt’s next game, Cyberpunk 2077, arrives in two years. 81

G A M E S / ANALYSIS

Rick Lane takes a look at some of the forthcoming treats from independent game studios

Empyrion: Galactic Survival

Crest

DEVELOPER Eleon Game Studios / RELEASE Out now (Early Access)

DEVELOPER Eat, Create, Sleep / RELEASE Out now (Early Access)

here hasn’t been a decent god sim since Black & White, and whenever one arrives that looks like it might be worth worshipping (From Dust, Godus), it turns out to be less divine intervention, and more smoke and mirrors. It’s too early to say whether it will be worth constructing an idol to Crest, but it does arrive with more than a booming voice and a promise of paradise. Crest has ideas. As with most god sims, Crest has you assume the role of an almighty sky-eye watching over an island populated by several tribes. You give these villagers commandments, but unlike other god sims, these commandments are deliberately ambiguous. Crest’s commandments comprise a verb and object that you select separately. For example, you might tell villagers to ‘prioritise’ ‘young people’. However, it’s up to your villagers to interpret this message. It could result in them having more children, or giving children more food, but your villagers will often get the wrong end of the stick, leading to mishaps and occasionally outright disasters. It’s an intriguing way of exploring the human phenomenon of searching for meaning in occurrences that are difficult to explain. Currently, though, Crest’s AI needs considerable work, as many commandments seem to have no effect whatsoever. The final version is due for December.

ith the recent resurgence of space games and the unceasing popularity of survival games, it was only a matter of time before someone combined the two and created Empyrion: Galactic Survival. The player begins Galactic Survival stranded on a hostile alien planet. Your ship is broken and your supplies limited. With only a handful of tools at your disposal, you must gather resources to repair your ship, and then head out in search of a friendlier planet for survival. Galactic Survival has all you’d expect from both a space sim and a survival game: resource gathering, crafting, base building, ship flying, space combat – the works. However, it’s how Galactic Survival blends these survival systems with its sci-fi theme that makes it interesting. Resources aren’t merely limited to food, water and building materials – oxygen too has to be produced manually. Meanwhile, familiar survival staples such as campfires and hammers are replaced with generators and universal constructors. Galactic Survival is enormously ambitious in scope, especially from a first-time developer, but these aspirations evidently have a cost. Visually, it looks pretty rough, and we don’t know how the game will engender a sense of progression once you’ve safely escaped that initial planet. Even in its current Early Access state, though, there’s already a huge amount to see and do.

Forest of Sleep

Outpost 13

DEVELOPER Twisted Tree Games / RELEASE TBA

DEVELOPER Cantina Games and Entertainment, Inc RELEASE 27 October, 2015

orest of Sleep comes from the creator of cheerful walking simulator Proteus, which had dynamic music that changed according to environmental factors, and Forest of Sleep applies the dynamism of Proteus’ soundtrack to storytelling. Inspired by Russian fairytales, you guide a group of three boys along a path through a vast forest, helping out all manner of people along the way with various tasks. According to the developer, these events will happen procedurally. The game’s unique story system ties together different elements on the fly, bringing characters in and out of the tale as it deems necessary, and leaving just enough of a gap in meaning for your imagination to fill, Dark Souls style. One of the most intriguing aspects is the lack of dialogue. All character interactions are achieved through animation, with stances and expressions conveying tones and situations for you to interpret. You’ll also need to keep an eye on the resource management system, although the developer says it exists to create interesting situations for the player, rather than being a necessary component for winning or losing the game. Any attempt to blend the nuanced demands of storytelling with the random, unpredictable nature of games is worthy of admiration, and we’ll be keeping a close eye on Forest of Sleep’s development.

utpost 13 is an adventure game in which you basically play the ‘Thing’ from The Thing. It casts you as an alien life form named Tantalus who infiltrates a research outpost on the remote icy planet of Achelous. Your goal is simple – terrifying the crew members until they abandon their mission and evacuate the planet – taking you back to Earth with them. You achieve this goal by strategically killing off crew members while disguised as their lovable pet dog, Fen. While Outpost 13 has the look of a traditional adventure game, there are dynamic elements at work. You need to distract and isolate crew members so you can kill them and remain undetected, using objects in the environment and the outpost’s ventilation system to gain the upper hand. Raise the alarm, and the crew will come after you with flamethrowers – Outpost 13 isn’t shy about its inspirations. It’s a delightfully twisted idea. The only question is whether the game’s systems will let you be creative, or whether it will adopt a more conventional, puzzle-based approach. The fact that you can upgrade abilities for both Tantalus and Fen suggest the latter, so hopefully the game will possess the important dynamic core that the concept deserves.

Perception DEVELOPER The Deep End Games / RELEASE 2016

t first glance, Perception looks like another Amnesiainspired first-person horror game. You play a blind young woman named Cassie who has persistent nightmares about an abandoned mansion. After some research, she discovers her dream vision is a real place, and travels there to investigate. Cassie can sense her surroundings with echolocation, so anything that makes a noise, such as a ticking clock or wind blowing through an open window, is revealed on screen in blue-tinted silhouette. Cassie can also reveal the environment around her by stamping on the ground. If she makes too much noise, though, she will attract the attention of The Presence, a supernatural inhabitant of the mansion. Hence Perception becomes a terrifying balancing act as you try to navigate through the mansion undetected. The game also explores its notion of a blind protagonist in other interesting ways. Objects that you pick up are only revealed after rolling them around in your hand

for a while, and they could end up being useful, disgusting or disturbing. In addition, Cassie has a smartphone app with a video linkto friends with sight, helping her decipher clues and puzzles. Perception’s success will rely on how the developer expands on this wonderful concept, and the strength of the connection between the game’s audio and visual design. The early footage looks extremely promising though.

F E AT U R E / CUSTOMISATION

Build a Radeon R9 Nano PC Want to cram a whole Skylake system and a super-fast graphics card into a tiny case? Antony Leather enlists some help from Parvum Systems and AMD’s new Radeon R9 Nano card to show you how it’s done

ith the release of AMD’s Radeon R9 Nano (see p18), mini-ITX fans have never had it so good. The Nano currently represents the ultimate in terms of short-PCB gaming power, and while it can’t quite handle every game at 4K, it comes tantalisingly close. You can, of course, spend more money and use a GTX 980 Ti, but it’s a much larger graphics card, and you’ll be left with less room for a tidy build. This month, we’ve decided to take full advantage of the Nano by building a tiny PC that also sports an Intel Core i7-6700K, 16GB of RAM and a 512MB SSD – an awesome rig for gaming and much else besides. As if that wasn’t enough, we’ve also worked with Parvum Systems to create a custom version of its X1.0 mini-ITX case, which can house an all-in-one liquid cooler, as well as providing great airflow to the graphics card.

ELITE NEW ENTRY P 62

The components THE CASE AND PSU

Parvum Systems X 1.0 and SilverStone SSTSX600-G / £190 incVAT SUPPLIER www.overclockers.co.uk

While the Parvum Systems X1.0 mini-ITX chassis can house larger graphics cards than the Nano, the interior starts to get very cramped with a large card installed. However, the R9 Nano fits perfectly in this case, allowing plenty of space for routing cables, and it doesn’t look oversized for the case either. The X1.0 also has space for a 120mm allin-one liquid cooler, or a 120mm fan, at the front, while the roof section plays host to a large vent that allows the graphics card to breathe. There’s a further 80mm fan mount at the rear of the case, but with such large vents elsewhere, a small 80mm fan isn’t going to achieve much, so we’ve omitted it. A slightly different version of the X1.0 – the Veer – is available too, which has been altered to be more water cooling-friendly. There’s also space for two 2.5in SSDs, although there’s no room for a 3.5in hard disk nor is there a way to mount a 5.25in device. The other potential imitation of the X1.0 is that it uses an SFX PSU, which limits your power options, but this decision has also enabled Parvum to drastically reduce the size

of the case so that it measures just 250mm across and 310mm deep – it’s truly tiny. Besides, SilverStone makes excellent SFX PSUs. There’s a wide range of wattages from which to choose, but given the power requirements of the R9 Nano, we opted for the 600W SST-SX600-G. It has more than enough connectors for our system, plus its 80mm fan is very quiet and shuts off entirely when the internal temperature is below 45°C – great if you’re just web browsing or typing up an essay. What’s more, www. overclockers.co.uk has a bundle deal at the moment for the X1.0 and SST-SX600-G for £190 inc VAT, saving you around £15.

THE GRAPHICS CARD

AMD Radeon R9 Nano / £500 incVAT

SUPPLIER www.overclockers.co.uk

unless you have room for the Fury X’s separate liquid-cooler. In fact, the Nano is so small that it even appears lost in our tiny X1.0 case. Performance-wise, the Nano is close can play some games at 4K, but it’s borderline. Crysis 3 saw the minimum frame rate drop to 24fps, which would only require a little tweaking to make it playable. Meanwhile, its 28fps minimum in The Witcher III: Wild Hunt is playable, but it’s also close to the line. You’ll have to drop a few of the settings in some games to get smooth frame rates at 4K, but the good news is that games at lower resolutions, such as 3,440 x 1,440 or 2,560 x 1,440, will be perfectly playable.

T H E CO O L E R

Corsair H80i GT / £80 incVAT

SUPPLIER www.scan.co.uk

If you want the smallest graphics card possible, but don’t want to sacrifice performance then AMD’s R9 Nano is currently your best option. At barely 152mm long, its PCB is a whole 20mm shorter than Asus’ already tiny GTX 970 DirectCU Mini, or any other short-PCB GTX 970 for that matter, which is your only other short-PCB option,

The X1.0 only has space for a 120mm radiator so, to maximise the cooling on offer, we’ve opted for the Corsair’s H80i GT. It has a thicker radiator than the smaller, cheaper H75which enabled it to knock a few more degrees off the CPU load temperature in our testing. As it’s more important to get the heat out of a case than

Going custom with Parvum systems It isn’t often that a case manufacturer is able to completely customise your case, but we’re lucky enough to have Parvum Systems in the UK, and if you’ve seen some of the Parvumbased PCs on the Internet, you’ll know how many colours and designs are available already. During our visit to the factory last year, Parvum Systems highlighted its ability to offer customisation services for its cases.

As well as adding logos, the team can also cut out additional or repositioned fan mounts, giving your case a unique design, or one that’s better suited to your cooling hardware than the default design. The team can even create highly accurate renders so you can see how your case will look before you go ahead. For example, we went through a few colour changes before settling on our red and silver theme.

F E AT U R E / CUSTOMISATION

to push cool air into it, we’ll be installing it as an exhaust. It also has an excellent software suite, and there’s enough space in the X1.0 to mount both its fans too.

What’s more, it also sports an M.2 slot long enough to support some of Samsung’s super-fast SSDs, such as the SM951 or newly released 950 Pro.

THE CPU

Intel Core i7-6700K / £319 incVAT

SUPPLIER www.scan.co.uk

If you’re aiming to pack some serious grunt in the CPU department, then your best option for a mini-ITX system is the Core i7-6700K. ASRock does have a miniITX X99 board, but your cooling options are limited and the system cost will be substantially higher. However, the Core i7-6700K is very overclockable and can also process eight threads simultaneously, thanks to its four CPU with Hyper-Threading support.

T H E M E M O RY

16GB (2 x 8GB) Corsair Vengeance LPX 2666MHz / £90 incVAT SUPPLIER www.scan.co.uk

S TO R AG E

As you’ll need to buy new DDR4 memory for this system, rather than using older DDR3 RAM you may have spare, we’ve decided to add 16GB of Corsair’s low-profile Vengeance LPX RAM to give our system a bit of future proofing. Remember that mini-ITX motherboards only have two DIMM slots, so you won’t be able to add another couple of sticks in the future, which is another reason to opt for 16GB rather than 8GB now.

T H E M OT H E R B OA R D

Asus Z170i Pro Gaming / £130 incVAT

SUPPLIER www.cclonline.com

There are very few Z170 miniITX motherboards around at the moment, but Asus’ Z170i Pro Gaming turned out to be a fantastic board when we reviewed it this month (see p26), so it’s currently our firm choice for a mini-ITX Z170 motherboard.

Crucial BX100 500GB / £135 incVAT

SUPPLIER www.ebuyer.com

If you’re going small, then the first sacrifice is usually space for hard disks. However, the vast majority of us only need a single hard disk and SSD anyway, and you don’t even need the former if you have a NAS box at home. As such, the X1.0 has ditched the 3.5in form factor entirely and opted for two 2.5in mounts instead. We’ll just be using a single 500GB Crucial BX100 SSD in this build, which still offers plenty of space for Windows, numerous games and applications, while still leaving hundreds of gigabytes of solid state storage for data.

Total hardware cost:

£1,444

INC VAT

The build O

ne of the joys of a Parvum case is that you get the pleasure of building it yourself. Don’t worry if you have a phobia of flat-pack furniture though – the X1.0 is simple to build and just requires you to build it around the hardware, rather than installing it all in one go. Start by laying out all the parts to familiarise yourself with the panels and components. The X1.0 doesn’t include any instructions – instead, you’ll need to take a look at the Parvum Systems X1.0 assembly video on YouTube. 01 The case is held together using corner supports and screws, so your first step is to mount these supports to the base of the case, following the video. The side panels, motherboard tray and both end sections affix to this area. 02 You can now attach the motherboard tray. Remember to use the correct length of screws as well – 6mm and 10mm screws are supplied, with a small selection of large-threaded 10mm screws for the PSU. The video also

clearly shows the correct orientation for the base – pay close attention to this part, as it’s easy to install the base and other components the wrong way around. 03 The Corsair H80i GT has two 120mm fans, but the X1.0 also sports a fancy-looking 120mm fan. We decided to use the latter as the radiator’s intake so that it’s on show through the side window. Don’t install the second rear fan just yet though. 04 You’ll need to mount the radiator or front fan before you install the front panel. 05 The screws pass through the second panel – in this case, silver – and the red section then sits on top. As a result, the fan screws are hidden. Pass the screws through the panel and rear fan, then secure the radiator to the case. 06 You can now secure the front panel, adding the three corner supports at the top, followed by their opposite numbers at the other end of the case. 07 The two supports closest to each other can then provide a mount for the SSD storage tray,

which sits at the top of the case, behind the motherboard and above the PSU. 08 There are no USB ports to mount, but you need to wire up the power button. There are four cables – two apiece for the power button and power LED, which connect to the corresponding headers on your motherboard’s front panel connectors. You can connect the coloured wires as shown – the inner two wires are for the power button and the outer two wires are for the power LED. 09 Thread the cable through the case power button hole, then use the locking ring to secure it to the case. It’s an anti-vandal switch so you can replace it with quite a few different types and colours. 10 Your next job is to fit the Corsair H80i GT’s backplate to the back of the motherboard. On LGA1151 sockets, this backplate is a singlepiece affair, with four pins required on the top side. 11 You can now test-fit the motherboard with the RAM installed, to make sure it all fits in place. 12

There’s plenty of room for Corsair’s relatively low-profile LPX DDR4 modules with our setup, so install them and the CPU into the motherboard. 13 You can then insert the motherboard’s I/O blanking plate at the rear and install the motherboard. We found that mounting the cooler’s pump section with the logo the right way up allowed the tubing to bend round in the least forceful way, while also leaving some clearance from the side panel. 14 With a single SSD and one power cable going to the GPU, there aren’t many power cables, but it’s still important to tidy all the wires together to improve airflow. We’ve used Cable Modders Cradle Mount cable

anchors, which you can pick up from www. watercoolinguk.co.uk for £2.75 inc for a pack of 20, and they work perfectly within the X1.0’s tight confines. 15 SSDs are mounted using the smaller 6mm screws, which simply pass through the mounting panel and screw it in place. From here, the SSD is within easy reach of the motherboard through routing holes in the motherboard tray. 16 The PSU sits on its side, and the X1.0 has a side vent for its fan, so make sure you point the PSU fan at the side. Parvum includes screws for the PSU, which have a thicker thread than the fine ones used with the corner supports. 17

The graphics card is the last piece of hardware to be installed, and again the case is built around it, as the outer rear panel locks it in place. With this panel removed, install the graphics card then connect the 8-pin power cable. 18 19 Now install the outer rear panel over the inside one. As you move it into position, it will hold the graphics card in place, so there’s no need for any further screws. You might need to use a little force to get the screwholes to line up, though, and make sure the graphics card is still properly slotted into the motherboard too. 20 The SST-SX600-G PSU is fully modular, which makes installing it easy, but more

F E AT U R E / CUSTOMISATION

importantly, means you can remove any cables you don’t need. For example, we have no need for the 4-pin Molex connector cable, so remove any cables you don’t need to reduce the number of cables you have to tidy. 21 With all the cables attached and routed, use a couple more anchors to tie up the rest of the cables. As they’re all located in the rear section with the PSU and SSD, there’s no airflow to worry about, but it still looks much neater if you at least gather them all together. 22

The side panel and window are made from two separate sections and are held together once you’ve mounted them to the rest of the case. 23 Pass the screws through the four corners, then give the interior a once-over to make sure you haven’t missed anything – removing the side panel isn’t as easy as with a traditional PC case. You can then secure the panel and window to the case’s exposed corner supports. 24

The roof will be the final part of the case to be installed, and it just needs to be screwed into the corner supports. Make sure you align the vent in the roof so it that sits over the graphics card’s fan. 25 With the system complete, make sure there are no screws missing, and then tighten them up. Not doing so can lead to vibration or a lack of rigidity, which you definitely don’t want if you’ll be transporting your machine to LAN parties. 26

Performance and overclocking To give our system a free boost, we overclocked the CPU to 4.5GHz, using a vcore of 1.25V and simply raising the multiplier to 45x. You can stress- test your overclock to make sure it’s stable by using the smallfft test in Prime95 (use version 27.7 or lower, as later versions can cook Haswell and Skylake CPUs), and if you’re feeling adventurous, you may be able to push your CPU further. You can’t overclock the R9 Nano’s memory, but we increased the GPU core frequency from 1000MHz to C U STO M P C RE AL BEpower NC H 20 15 by 50 per cent. 1070MHz using MSI Afterburner, while also increasing the limit These tweaks saw the minimum GI M P I M AGE E DI TI NG frame rate in Battlefield 4, go from CPC Nano PC 56,223 50fps to 55fps, at 2,560 x 1,440 15,000 30,000 45,000 60,000 0 with 4x AA and Ultra detail. HANDBRAK E H.26 4 VI DE O E NC O DI NG Meanwhile, the extra CPU grunt CPC Nano PC 313,469 saw the overall RealBench 2015 80,000 160,000 240,000 32,0000 0 L U X M ARK O P E NC L system score rise from 132,454 to CPC Nano PC 176,744 139,477. The peak power draw was 45,000 90,000 135,000 180,000 0 also just 332W with both overclocks SYSTE M SC O RE applied, which is easily within the CPC Nano PC 139,477 0 limits of our PSU. In terms of 35,000 70,000 105,000 140,000 I NTE L RE FE RE NC E : 121.86 % temperatures, the GPU sat at a BATTL E FI E L D 4 modest 70°C and the CPU peaked at 2,560 x 1,440, 4x AA Ultra detail 76°C - with an ambient temperature Custom PC 4K PC 55fps 66fps of 23°C, the delta Ts were 47°C and 17 34 51 68 0 Minimum Average 53°C respectively.

25 We overclocked our CPU to 4.5GHz, using a 1.25V vcore and a 45x multiplier

F E AT U R E / ANALYSIS

PUPPET MASTERS THE INVISIBLE WORLD OF VIDEO GAME AI IT’S COMMONLY BELIEVED THAT VIDEO GAME AI HAS BARELY IMPROVED SINCE THE 1990s, BUT IS THIS TRUE? RICK LANE INVESTIGATES

he years between 1997 and 2001 are often considered a golden age of video game AI, encompassing a spate of fascinating games that appeared to make giant leaps forwards in how players could interact with non-player agents and vice versa. The touchstones are all fondly remembered. Stealth games such as Thief introduced behaviour states that went beyond the straightforward, binary choice of passive or aggressive, which was previously the norm. Social simulations such as Dungeon Keeper and The Sims brought us NPCs with simulated emotions who interacted with each other and affected one another’s behaviour. Most famously of all, Lionhead’s Black & White AI could apparently learn new skills and employ them in ways that reflected a particular personality. This cluster of games so rapidly expanded our understanding of the capabilities of game AI that it seemed as though the future games would be AI-driven, but that wasn’t the case. Aside from a couple of games, such as Monolith’s F.E.A.R, and Paradox’s Crusader Kings series, game AI has appears to still be relying on the basic principles established in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Is this really what’s happened? ‘No,’ says Hugo Desmeules, lead AI designer on Ubisoft’s Far Cry series. ‘I remember the games we were making in 1999, when we 90

were programming enemies with simple brains and patterns. The technology at that time didn’t allow us the freedom we have now, which translates into sampling the environment with heavy physics simulation, tonnes of math processing and a great deal of objects in memory.

AI IN AN OPEN WORLD

‘Today you can have a gigantic navigable world in a game such as Far Cry 3, with a full day/night cycle, a whole bunch of enemies and vehicles at the same time, fire simulation, real physics and a lot of persistency. Those ingredients, when gathered together, have pushed the process of building AI brains to a whole new level.’ The Far Cry series provides an interesting case study in terms of how computer game AI has and hasn’t evolved. From Far Cry 2 onwards, the player explores vast open worlds pockmarked by enemy encampments. A major part of the game involves liberating those encampments from the AI’s grasp through a combination of stealth and gunplay. On a fundamental level, the AI techniques that Ubisoft employs are little different from those seen in Thief. ‘The AI brain has three main states – idle, alert and combat,’ says Desmeules. These behaviour states,known in AI development as finite state machines, are essentially identical to those first explored in Thief. Enemies

stick to set patrols while idle, switch to The Sims brought us NPCs with simulated searching for the player when alerted and emotions who attack the player when in combat. interacted with each At the same time, the number of other and affected one eventualities the AI needs to accommodate another’s behaviour has expanded enormously. To start, the game world is now open, with both players and AI characters able to wander in almost any direction. While Thief’s AI characters had to navigate through fairly restricted environments of rooms and corridors, Far Cry’s AI pathfinding must account for hills, rocks, trees, rivers, vehicles, buildings, interiors – the list goes on. And it isn’t simply navigation that’s more complicated.‘There are so many emergent situations that the NPC brain needs to be a lot more complex,’ Desmeules says. ‘Simply take the example of an AI [character] completely surrounded by fire near a river. A simple evolution towards smarter AI would be to teach them how to swim. In a more linear game, you would probably be able to prevent this situation by not allowing the player to have a flamethrower, but in an open-world game such as Far Cry 3, the player can do pretty much anything they want.’ Indeed, the demands of both the player and the environment on the AI are so great that it’s tremendously difficult to take all the different potential scenarios into account. ‘The way we structure the AI code is crucial and can’t be a sum of special cases everywhere, so the hardest part is to keep a simple code/data model where it’s easy to scale the AI brain.’ says Desmeules. ‘To know we’ve done it right, we can test it by adding a feature such as swimming with the desired complexity, then creating a new animation, recording new dialogues, new particle effects and so on. ‘The brain part [of the AI] should already be generic enough to support navigation from A to B, and react to Far Cry 4’s AI is based on bullet hits and state transitions. tried and tested Only the data used during this methods, but action should be different. with far more complexity Maintaining this philosophy isn’t

THE NUMBER OF EVENTUALITIESTHAT THE AI NOW NEEDS TO ACCOMMODATE HAS EXPANDED ENORMOUSLY easy and it’s a daily battle.’ Yet despite the fact that Far Cry 3’s AI characters can swim, drive vehicles and call in support from other bases, alongside many other abilities, from the player’s perspective, they don’t seem much more intelligent than the guards in Thief. The reason is that AI development in video games is a knotty subject that depends upon a huge variety of factors. To start, the significance of AI development in a game depends on the type of game you want to make and whether there are AI techniques that cater towards that type of game. There are many well-established

F E AT U R E / ANALYSIS

game genres now, and most have tried and tested ways of implementing AI that suits them. For example, when Thief launched, the ‘alert’ state crucial to making a stealth game work didn’t exist. This innovation was part of what led to Thief being viewed as such a groundbreaking game. Far Cry requires this state to function too, but it doesn’t need to invent it. Plus, although it adds dozens of smaller details on top of this framework, we don’t notice the improvement because they’re subtler iterations on an existing idea. For players, perceiving these subtle improvements is far harder than in other areas of game development such as graphics or animation, where every change is directly visible on the screen. As such, we only pay attention to a game’s AI when it deliberately draws our attention to it.

INSIDE THE XENOMORPH BRAIN

A recent example is the Creative Assembly’s sci-fi horror game Alien: Isolation, which places great emphasis on the intelligence of the game’s eponymous Xenomorph. The technology that lends the alien its apparent intelligence is certainly impressive.The Alien appears in the game dynamically, and its behaviour is dependent on various parameters that tell it which areas of the environment to search, for how long and whether or not it ‘knows’ the player is in a particular area. ‘If you follow someone into a small room, you have a good idea where they are and that you should search the room thoroughly,’ says Clive Gratton, technical director on Alien Isolation.‘On top of this AI, we also have a meta-layer that makes more strategic decisions – when and The apparent where to appear. This layer also makes intelligence of the decisions about how to handle the player if Alien: Isolation Xenomorph alien they have a flamethrower and so on.’ is as much about In other words, the Alien receives a huge artistry and level amount of support from the game itself in design as it is about AI programming making it appear intelligent. The game’s excellent modelling, animation and sound design lend the Alien a terrifying presence when it’s in the same room as you, and the levels are constructed from small rooms and corridors to minimise glitches or pathfinding problems. Finally, Sevastopol Station’s ventilation system enables the Alien to seamlessly traverse environments, popping in and out of the game world without breaking the immersion. Whereas Far Cry uses its AI to facilitate a specific idea, Alien: Isolation builds its game entirely around its AI, and that’s what makes its Xenomorph such a powerful portrayal of predatory cunning. The alien appears intelligent because the developers work hard to convince you of this fact through every aspect of the game, while minimising the number of factors that the Alien itself needs to think about. This is why it’s difficult for gamers to gauge the extent of AI’s progression.

From the developer’s perspective, there’s no point reinventing the wheel, and what’s important is that the AI feels convincing and makes for entertaining play, rather than its actual ‘intelligence’. From the player’s perspective, the desire for more‘intelligent’AI is conflated with the desire for innovative AI – different behaviour that we haven’t experienced before.

SIMULATING SOCIAL AWKWARDNESS

Although it’s difficult to state clearly that game AI is becoming more ‘intelligent’, it’s certainly becoming more detailed. A fine example is Simon Roth’s Maia, a space colony simulator in which you oversee a team of researchers on a verdant but hostile alien planet. Maia is inspired by previous social simulations such as The Sims and Dungeon Keeper, with the aim of making its colonists and their interactions as detailed and granular as possible. ‘To start, every colonist has over 50 base desires, ranging from those attached to bodily functions, hunger, thirst, fatigue and so on, to higher-level emotional wants such as social contact and a wish to express themselves,’ says Roth.‘They also build their own model of the base’s requirements, safety, security, food production and so on, so they can plan workloads in an efficient manner.’ According to Roth, objects in the game world then‘advertise’their ability to satisfy specific needs. Any colonist or creature that interacts with an object will retain some knowledge of its effectiveness, which influences their likelihood of using it in the future. ‘This system also lets objects misleadingly advertise their usefulness, allowing for items such as animal traps, which offer food but don’t provide it,’ he adds. Alongside needs, colonists also have emotions and moods that affect (and are affected by) the satisfaction of needs and interactions with other colonists. ‘Currently, the colonists have basic social interactions where they can

THE ALIEN APPEARS INTELLIGENT BECAUSE THE DEVELOPERS WORK HARD TO CONVINCE YOU OF THIS FACT

In Maia, colonists’ behaviour changes according to their mental state

our understanding of what makes a good game AI system is as much about our perception of it as players,as it is about the algorithms developers write in their code.

MACHINE LEARNING

A nav mesh of a wave to, talk to, hug, threaten or assault each machine-learning other. This fulfils their desire for social bot in Unreal interaction (attention), but also feeds back Tournament 2004 directly into their emotional simulation. Their moods rub off on each other, so an irritated colonist may end up making your whole base annoyed or upset as the interchanges go sour.’ One of the most important aspects of Maia is that every AI agent is individually simulated. There is no ‘higher-level’ AI that connects or oversees them. As Roth puts it, the colonists can’t read each other’s minds. Roth gives the example of two colonists who need to use a specific item, but don’t know about the other colonist’s need to use it. ‘If they arrive at an item already in use, they can choose to wait in the room if they can withstand the social awkwardness, but they may instead decide to use a different object to save themselves the embarrassment.’ This level of detail in individual, autonomous agents simply wouldn’t have been possible 15 years ago – the demand on the CPU would have been intolerable.However,Roth says the bigger problem is conveying the thoughts and emotions of colonists effectively to the player.‘In recent builds, we’ve been adding a lot of hammed-up animations, expressing a wide range of mixed emotions, but often the cause of a mood isn’t as clear as it needs to be,’ he says. Again,

The notion that AI ceased to progress around the year 2000 is a myth. That said, there’s one area of AI where games have stagnated – machine learning, where AI is capable of learning new skills and then applying them autonomously in a given environment. In the entirety of gaming history, only a handful of games have dipped their toes into machine learning – the most famous being Black & White. Not surprisingly, Black & White is frequently touted as the best AI-driven game of all time. Since Black & White, the game industry has barely touched machine learning. Most of its applications are consigned to academic circles. The most notable time the two have crossed over recently was in 2012, when a team from the University of Texas won that year’s Unreal Tournament ‘Botprize’, with a bot so lifelike that testers were unable to tell whether it was human or not. The team was put together by AI researcher Risto Miikkulainen. The team tracked data on how human players navigated UT’s maps, and the bots were taught to apply those navigation techniques independently via a technique called ‘evolutionary computation’. ‘The idea was that first we would try to evolve the best possible combat behaviour,’ says Miikkulainen, ‘We’ll have a bunch of bots in the level, play with and against them, and the best versions of the bots, the best neural networks, will survive and be passed on.’Unfortunately, this method resulted in bots with superhuman skills, so the team had to find a way to rein them in. ‘We added a bunch of constraints that we thought were human-like constraints, and then optimisation under those constraints resulted in behaviour that actually looked very human-like,’ Miikkulainen explains. What’s interesting about this project isn’t so much the result of the team’s work – bots which passed the Turing test within the context of the game – but the process through which they got there. It hints at how machine learning could be adopted into mainstream gaming. Imagine a Pokémon game where you trained the creatures yourself, or a football management game where you coached AI players in tactics. Miikkulainen even explored this idea in 2005 by developing a game called NERO, wherein players train special-ops soldiers for combat deployments. ‘The behaviour that comes out of these techniques is much more complex,and it can be more interesting – just the fact that you would have agents that adapt and change their behaviour is hugely interesting, and it can create entirely new games.’ Ultimately, the game industry is driven by ideas, rather than any specific technology or presiding artistic theory, and within gaming at least, AI is a technology – a tool rather than a goal. But that doesn’t mean the industry has given up on AI at all. Indeed, as hardware becomes increasingly powerful, it opens up new opportunities that AI programmers are already keen to explore. ‘We would love to see hardware that allows database storing of facts to help the AI make more complex decisions,’ says Desmeules. ‘This would require more memory space and processing power, so yes, hardware could definitely improve AI complexity.’ 93

C U STO M I SAT I O N / HOBBY TECH

G A R E T H H A L FAC R E E ’ S

Hobby tech The latest tips, tricks and news in the world of computer hobbyism, from Raspberry Pi, Arduino and Android to retro computing REVIEW

E-textile kits

Hands on with Adafruit’s Gemma Starter Kit and Kitronik’s Electro-Fashion Deluxe E-Textiles Pack

he world of wearables can, at first glance, seem unwelcoming to the hobbyist. While making device similar to an Apple or Pebble smartwatch is perhaps a little overenthusiastic for a first project, there’s an easy way to get started with a simpler project: conductive thread. In a traditional circuit, electricity is carried via copper wires or traces on a circuitboard. Conductive thread is designed to replace this material: it carries electricity just like wiring, although less efficiently, but can be used almost exactly like cotton thread – it can even be placed into a sewing machine. A spool of conductive thread on its own isn’t enough, though, and that’s where a pair of starter kits from noted maker-suppliers Adafruit and Kitronik come in. The two kits share plenty of similarities. They’re both designed for people with little to no experience of what’s becoming known as e-textile or soft-circuit creation, and they both focus heavily on the simplest of projects: making LEDs light up. The Kitronik kit forms an introduction to what the company calls its Electro-Fashion range. The surprisingly small packet, enclosed in a blister pack, contains almost everything

There’s plenty to get you started in Adafruit’s kit, including needles

you need; there’s 6m of Kitronik’s own conductive thread, created by plating traditional thread with silver, three battery holders with matching batteries, three colours of sewable surface-mount LEDs (two LEDs for each colour) cleverly placed on tiny circuitboards, three more colours of full-sized LEDs (two LEDs for each colour)

with built-in flasher circuits, a slide switch, and a momentary push switch. I say ‘almost’ everything you need, because there’s definitely a missing component: a pack of needles with which to sew. The Adafruit kit, by contrast, includes a pack of needles of varying sizes, 25m of two-ply conductive thread made purely from stainless

You need to make sure you don’t short the circuit by crossing over your previous seams steel and handily loaded onto a machinecompatible bobbin, four ‘Flora’ RGB LEDs, a battery pack with a JST connector and two batteries, a set of very useful coloured crocodile leads for testing circuits before sewing components down, and the star of the show – the Arduino-compatible Gemma wearable microcontroller, complete with micro-USB cable for programming. Regardless of which pack you choose, the process for building a circuit is the same – handily detailed in a colour guidebook included with Kitronik’s kit, while the paperwork-free Adafruit version requires you to go online to learn how to use it. You then just need to thread the needle, although neither kit saw fit to include a needle threader, which would have been particularly welcome when using Kitronik’s soft but thick conductive thread, and start sewing components onto your chosen material. To practise, I began sewing LEDs into the fingertips of an old glove. If you’ve ever done any sewing before, using conductive thread is no different from normal thread, except you need to make sure you don’t short the circuit by crossing over your previous seams. The large, through-hole LEDs in the Kitronik kit require their legs to be bent into eyelets, a procedure detailed in the manual, while all the other components from both kits sew directly onto your material. When you’ve finished adding blinking or plain LEDs to material, you’ll have outgrown the Kitronik kit and will need to pick up some more components from the Electro-Fashion range – or any e-textiles range, really – but the Adafruit kit keeps going. The Gemma is a

The clips included in the Gemma kit make it easy to test your circuits before sewing

Kitronik’s ElectroFashion kit isn’t as feature-packed as Adafruit’s kit, and there isn’t a needle in sight

If you’re hoping to use these kits with children, be aware that some of the included components are extremely small

Thickness aside, there’s little difference between the process of sewing normal cotton thread and conductive thread

fully functional, sewable microcontroller, programmed directly from the Arduino IDE, and giving the kit plenty of room to grow. There are, naturally, caveats. A move to the compact ATtiny reduces the capabilities of the Gemma considerably compared with ATmega Arduino compatibles; there are only three GPIO pins, although two of them offer PWM control for LED dimming and the third can be switched to act as an analogue input for sensors. The serial port is also tied up dealing with the USB connection, which means there’s no

option to add Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. The Gemma also uses 3.3V logic, as opposed to the 5V logic of most Arduino models. That’s all being picky though. If you’re an Arduino enthusiast, the Gemma – built in collaboration with Arduino.cc – is a great way to begin experimenting with wearable projects, and requires no esoteric knowledge. It’s also far more flexible than the basic components supplied with the Kitronik kit, although it’s naturally a little more expensive as a result. Comparing the two, though, the Adafruit kit has the edge for me, although neither kit is perfect. The bundled instruction pamphlet of the Kitronik kit means it’s a quick starter, but only if you already have sewing needles to hand. Meanwhile, the Gemma is extremely flexible, but would it really have broken the bank for Adafruit to include some printed documentation with the bundle? Both kits are available now from http://cpc. farnell.com, priced at £23.33 inc VAT for the Gemma Starter Kit (code MK00260) and £14.92 inc VAT for the Electro-Fashion Deluxe E-Textiles Pack (code MK00100).

It’s easier to work with the thinner, all-metal Adafruit thread than Kitronik’s thread

C U STO M I SAT I O N / HOBBY TECH

EVENT

Manchester MakeFest B

efore talking about Manchester’s first MakeFest, held at the wonderful Museum of Science and Industry (MOSI), there’s a clarification that must be made: the Manchester MakeFest is in no way, bar perhaps thematically, related to the Liverpool MakeFest from Issue 145. ‘It was a bit of a happy coincidence really. We just both come up with MakeFest as a name,’ explains Susannah Williams, MOSI’s contemporary science event manager and one of the event’s organisers, although it was operating under the similar banner of Manchester MakerFest until surprisingly late in the event’s promotion. ‘We have a lot of makers who have been to Liverpool MakeFest as well, you know; they all go around the same sort of circuit. It’s been quite nice to have that, especially as we’re on the site of the original Liverpool-to-Manchester railway, so we used to send people to Liverpool and we’ve got that little connection now with the two MakeFests!’ There’s certainly overlap between the two events. As I walk around, I see familiar faces from York and Leeds Hackspaces, as well as DoES Liverpool’s Nerf shooting gallery. Even for those who attended Liverpool MakeFest, though, there’s plenty new to see, including

Rachael Moat’s musical bowls, driven by a Bare Conductive board, were a smash with kids

a great show from the Manchester Vintage and Retro Computing Enthusiasts group, which is demonstrating how to program the Manchester Baby, the first stored-program computer and an exhibit at the museum, while a clattering teletype machine prints ASCII art samples from paper-tape input. MakeFest isn’t the Museum’s first makerthemed event, but it’s the first in which it’s had a direct hand organising under an

Matthew Shotton, left, attracted a crowd with the B0rkestra

independent banner. It’s not hard to see why the maker culture aspect may appeal: inside the main hall of the museum, I’m surrounded by exhibits that demonstrate the inventive past of the region, from the output of cotton mills through to a full-sized Avro aircraft suspended from the ceiling. ‘We do a lot of making events, but this is the very first MakeFest we’ve had,’ says Williams, speaking up over the noise of an impressive crowd of visitors. ‘It’s been a really exciting weekend, because we’ve been able to bring our galleries to life, looking at connections with historical machines and the inventing and making that’s gone on in Manchester in the past.’ There were far too many amazing exhibitors to detail in just two pages, from the usual soldering workshops to knitting

The B0rkestra – where digital music software on a laptop drives real-world instruments

A day-two failure of the Archimedes Screw required some careful repairs from Ian Norton

Amazeballs participants were given box dimensions but otherwise left to their own devices

classes, 3D printing and of course plenty of Arduino and Raspberry Pi-powered creations. As such, what follows is a rough selection of personal highlights, starting with an entirely unexpected exhibit: bowls of food. ‘These are musical bowls, so when you dunk your hands in either the spaghetti, water or custard, it will play a tune, which is quite fun and it’s going down well today,’ Rachael Moat, of Manchester Arduino, explains. ‘I volunteer at a place called Seashell Trust, which is a school for children with very complex needs, and I use this sort of thing to encourage them to explore new textures and potentially open up their diets, because they’ll lick their hands and actually experience new foods.’ Leaving behind the bowls – powered by a Bare Conductive Touch Board, a review of which will appear in a future column – my next highlight is the B0rkestra, a wonderfully named fusion of digital and analogue audio and an easy exhibit to find: just follow the noise. ‘The idea is that electronic music has always been sort of made in computers and you always hear it out of speakers,’ explains Matthew Shotton, BBC research and development engineer and one-half of Team B0rkestra. ‘We wanted to see if we could turn

For vintage computing enthusiasts, the site of a teletype interacting with paper tape was a real treat

it on its head a bit and make electronic music using acoustic instruments. Each of our instruments is wired up to a central computer, and then you can use any kind of MIDI sequencing software to make music on it.’ Amazeballs, meanwhile, is a larger collaboration involving several hackspaces and maker organisations in the area. ‘Each of these boxes has been built by a different hackspace or a different person within that hackspace,’ Lancaster and Morecambe Makers’ Ian Norton tells me, taking a break

from a day-two running repair on the clever Archimedes screw, which returns ball bearings to the start of the multi-box run, ‘and then there’s a ball lift at the end to shift it back to the beginning.’ This write-up, sadly, leaves out many other folks I spoke to on the day: the educational chaos of Noisy Toys, the excellent Kids in Space and even the clever Build-a-Bug Workshop which so delighted children. There’s only one thing for it, of course: next year, you’ll all have to come along with me.

NEWS IN BRIEF

Supplyframe acquires Tindie Tindie, originally a place to sell crowd-funded gadgets to sell once their campaigns had finished, has been acquired by Supplyframe for an undisclosed sum. Supplyframe, which acquired maker blog Hackaday in 2013, claims it will continue running Tindie as normal following the deal. ‘The only changes we’re interested in are the ones that make the community stronger,’ said Aleksandar Bradic, chief technology officer at Supplyframe, of his company’s newest subsidiary. ‘We are fascinated with the challenges surrounding the supply chain and will be looking into tools to help sellers improve margins and ship better products.’

C U STO M I SAT I O N / HOBBY TECH

I N T E RV I E W

Ben Gray and the MeArm v1.0 R

egular readers will remember my review of the Phenoptix MeArm robotic arm kit, cleverly constructed from a single A4 sheet of laser-cut acrylic, in Issue 133. Since then, inventor Ben Gray has been hard at work on the project, which has just hit a major milestone: the release of design files for the MeArm Version 1.0. ‘I spotted a product online and had the tools – or so I thought – to make it. As it turned out, the manufacturer hadn’t released any files, just calling its product “open source”,’ Gray explains of the inspiration behind the project. ‘So rather than vent my anger into a website comments section, I set out to build what I thought the product should have been.’ The lack of files for a project claiming to be open source isn’t uncommon. Gray even has a name for it – ‘open washing’. He defines this as ‘using the popularity of open source hardware in the media to market your product without actually releasing any useful information. I have a test you can apply to products claiming to be open source – give yourself ten minutes to find the source files: if you can’t find them in that time then it’s not open source.’ The MeArm, by contrast, has been open from the start. In fact, he actively encourages the production of derivative designs, even if they’re commercial products. ‘It’s a massive buzz,’ he laughs. ‘You get a feeling like a hole

Regular readers will recognise this early-design MeArm kit from Issue 133

Ben Gray, the MeArm’s inventor, has a bee in his bonnet about ‘open-washing’

in your stomach, as if someone has taken your thing, especially if theirs is really good! Once your brain kicks back in, though, you can take a look at what they’ve done and borrow the clever bits for your design, and getting in touch with them is always a pleasure. Also, as there’s no financial penalty for copying the design, they’re always happy to tell people where they got the original idea. ‘Personally, I’ve learned a great deal from the open hardware scene, so I really wanted to give something back. Also, I believe that if something is good people will copy it anyway; the open hardware movement allows people to copy and improve your designs.’ One major change since my review is that Phenoptix is no more: Gray has fully plunged

NEWS IN BRIEF

Punch Through Design funds LightBlue Bean+ Punch Through Design, creator of the Arduinocompatible LightBlue Bean, has successfully funded manufacturing of its successor, the Bean+. Like its predecessor, the LightBlue Bean+ combines Arduino features with an on-board Bluetooth radio. Improvements in the new model include Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) compatibility, solderless pin headers, a rechargeable battery, 16 GPIO pins accessible to end users, plus connections for Seeed Studio’s Grove family of add-ons. With nearly $160,000 raised, the company easily exceeded its $30,000 goal on crowd-funding site Kickstarter, and aims to have the first boards sent out to backers by the end of the year.

into the MeArm project, shutting his popular component shop in order to concentrate on his new company: MeArm Robotics. ‘The product seemed to be taking off almost without me,’ he recalls. ‘I felt that if I didn’t leave the rat race I’d be left wondering what could have been. Having run a company before, it didn’t feel like too massive a leap, but it’s been far tougher than I’d thought.’ With the design of the arm itself now at a release-ready Version 1.0, Gray is working on other aspects of the project that many makers all too often ignore, distracted by the next idea that swims up from their subconscious. ‘It’s been clear that more time needs to be spent on the documentation, so that’s where we’re concentrating right now,’ he tells me, as I recall relying on a third-party write-up when building my early-model MeArm. ‘Before now, we’ve dealt with a technical audience who are happy to fill in the gaps themselves. What we’re selling now is a kit for beginners, and there’s a lot of information to cover!’ Gray has already enjoyed success for a crowd-funded follow-on product, a MeArm controller board dubbed the MeBrain, but he’s uncharacteristically coy when asked what’s coming next. ‘Well, there’s a lot in the pipeline,’ he teases. ‘Watch this space!’ More information on the MeArm project can be found at http://mearm.io

Gareth Halfacree is the news reporter at www.bit-tech.net, and a keen computer hobbyist who likes to tinker with technology.

@ghalfacree

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MODDING

A N TO N Y L E AT H E R ’ S

Customised PC Case mods, tools, techniques, water-cooling gear and everything to do with PC modding Mayhems revamps glass tubing Last month I looked at Mayhems’ glass tubing – a new take on hard tubing that follows on from acrylic and metal. It looked fantastic, but at that point it was still practically at the concept level. However, at the recent Multiplay i-55 event at the NEC in Birmingham, I caught up with Mayhems and the project has already made a lot of progress. For starters, Mayhems has now increased the wall thickness from around 1.5mm to 2.5mm – a considerable amount – so it’s now even stronger. I couldn’t even crack the tubing with the previous thickness with a hammer and a fair degree of force, so I’d have no qualms about using this type of tubing now instead of acrylic or metal in strength terms. The interior is a little smaller as a result, but that will have a negligible impact on flow rates.

Hex Gear created this great PC for MSI using its R40 case, with some help from UK modder John Laveric

In addition, Mayhems says it’s looked into offering pre-bent glass tube sections, despite saying last month that bending it was too tricky compared with metal or acrylic tubing. Sizes are also now more varied; tubing with outside diameters of 12mm, 13mm and 16mm available, with 12mm and 16mm tubing being supported by the likes of EK’s hard tube fittings, while other companies such as Alphacool offer fittings for 13mm tubing too. Best of all, the tubing is now available on the Mayhems website, starting at £6.50 inc VAT for a 500mm tube, so head over to http://mayhems.co.uk/store if you fancy having a go at glass tubing instead of acrylic or metal.

PC modding thrives at i-55

Mayhems’ revised glass tubing (left) sees the wall thickness increasing from around 1.5mm to 2.5mm

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As I mentioned above, I visited the Multiplay i-55 event last month and I was blown away by the amount of modded PCs and hardware on show. Many of the Dream PCs we reviewed a few issues ago were there, including Overclockers’ 8Pack Supernova and Emperor as well as Scan’s Barracuda.

A lot of the companies had built modded PCs for the event too, with UK modders Daniel Harper and Dave Alco*ck getting in on the action, along with several systems based on Parvum and Hex Gear chassis. The place was packed – tens of thousands of people attended over the event’s few days. It was great to see so many people interested in PC hardware, and it was clear that the likes of Minecraft and eSports are creating a new generation of PC gamers and enthusiasts; lots of parents with young children attended too – it’s great to see a console and smartphone-free event drawing crowds so big and varied. Many manufacturers and etailers were there as well, including Scan, Overclockers UK, Ebuyer and CCL. Manufacturers such as Asus, MSI,

UK modder Dave Alco*ck has been busy working on his white modded Phobya Owl case

Gigabyte and Thermaltake had their latest gear on show too, all of which had a modded PC on display to help draw the crowds. For example, Hex Gear created a great PC for MSI using its R40 case, with some help from UK modder John Laveric, while Overclockers UK had several Parvum Systems cases on show, including one made by the folks at OCUK themselves. The star of the show, though, as far as modding and water cooling were concerned, was the Aquatuning stand. It had several great-looking PC mods, including a yellow machine based on a Corsair 750D, made by the folks at Aquatuning. Meanwhile, UK modder Dave Alco*ck displayed his work on a white modded Phobya Owl case. There are some very interesting products in the works too, including a combined GPU waterblock, pump and radiator cooler from Alphacool called the GPX-Pro. It features Alphacool’s

Aquatuning’s stand was the star of the show, with several great-looking PC mods, including the company’s own yellow Corsair 750D rig

GPX waterblock, which can be made to accommodate practically any PCB design when you order it. More interestingly, the kit uses standard fittings so it’s expandable too. Such a setup could eliminate the need for a separate pump and reservoir and, when combined with a larger radiator and CPU waterblock, it could enable you to water-cool your entire system very easily. Excitingly, the pump was practically inaudible – even with my ear against it, there was no discernible noise. The same can’t be said for most all-in-one liquid coolers, so the GPX-Pro could be a very interesting addition to the liquidcooling scene – there was a triple 120mm-fan radiator version on display too. Also on show was the company’s vast array of radiators, as well as selections of its CPU and GPU waterblocks, along with complete water-cooling kits.

or on the Internet, but Brands has just completed quite possibly his best project since his famous L3p d3sk PC. Called L3pipe, its foundation is basically made up of some sheets of acrylic and metal sandwiched together, custom-made by Parvum Systems. Brands then put in a huge amount of work creating the chassis and installing the hardware into the open-air case, with two large triple 120mm-fan radiators at either end and another two smaller radiators in the centre. We don’t think we’ve seen quite so many tube fittings all in one PC before, but if you’re dealing with four radiators, four pumps, four reservoirs, two GPU waterblocks, a CPU waterblock and a motherboard waterblock, with acrylic tubing as well, you’re going to need an awful lot of fittings. The end result, as is usually the way with Brands’ work, looks spectacular and drew quite a crowd online. What’s more, Brands will be talking to Custom PC about the mod in our Readers’ drives section in next issue.

We don’t think we’ve seen quite this many tube fittings all in one PC before

Peter Brands will be talking to us about L3pipe in our Readers’ drives section next issue

L3pipe by Peter Brands Alphacool’s GPX-Pro cooler combines a GPU waterblock, pump and radiator in one unit

You’ve probably seen at least one of Peter Brands’ many fantastic builds already, either in these pages

Antony Leather is Custom PC’s modding editor

@antonyleather

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M O D D I N G / HOW TO GUIDES

How to Make drive bays disappear Antony Leather shows you how to magic away any unsightly drive bays in your case, using filler TOTA L P R OJ E C T T I M E / 2 H O U R S

1 / INSPECT THE AREA TO BE FILLED You need to make sure the area to be filled is free from objects that can wobble around. Ideally, the area should be flat so that it can be sanded to a smooth finish. You don’t need to use any back supports for the filler, as long as the holes are small.

ainting your case can make it look fantastic, but before you get the spray can ready, you can also take this opportunity to completely customise your case’s aesthetics, get rid of drive bays and heal any battle wounds. You can sand areas flat, get rid of any scratches and dents and, once the paint has been applied, it will look as good as new. The magic ingredient is filler. Using this filler, you can fill large dents and scratches but, more importantly, you can also fill in entire sections of your case. For example, in our recent Dream PC Labs test, Scan filled in the front 5.25in bays of its SilverStone TJ07 before spraying the case. The end result is so smooth that you’d never know they were there. We’ll be taking a look at how to use filler on your PC case, focusing on filling in some drive bays and then spraying over them to make them disappear.

2 / ADJUST FRONT PANEL BLANKING PLATES

TO O L S YO U ’ L L N E E D

If you’re filling in 5.25in blanking plates, they need to be tightly secured with screws. If your plates are tool-free and move around, glue them in place so they can’t move when you apply the filler.

P38 Easy Sand filler / Most hardware stores

240 and 600-grit sandpaper / Most hardware stores

3 / SAND AREA The filler adheres best when applied to roughened surfaces, so rub around and over the filling area with 240-grit sandpaper, using no water, until you’ve scored into the metal or plastic a little.

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4 / CLEAN AREA

5 / APPLY FILLER AND HARDENER

After the area has been sanded, clean it thoroughly. Use isopropyl alcohol for this job if you have some, or just some warm soapy water. Allow the area to dry naturally of, if you’re in a hurry, use a hairdryer on a low heat setting.

Apply the filler and hardener to a piece of paper or cardboard. You’ll only need a tiny amount of hardener – the more you use, the quicker the filler will set, but even this small amount saw it go rock hard in under ten minutes.

6 / MIX COMPONENTS TOGETHER

7 / WORK INTO CORNERS

Once you’re sure the area is ready, and that you’ve used the right amount of hardener, use the included spatula or an old credit card to mix the two components together. Mix them thoroughly but for no more than a minute, or it will start to set.

First, work the filler into any large holes or corners. Here we’ve pressed it into the corners and holes surrounding our 5.25in bay. Afterwards, allow it to dry, so it will form a supporting layer for a second application that will enable you smooth it off.

8 / APPLY A SECOND LAYER

9 / SMOOTH OVER FINISH

Mix up some more filler and, once the previous layer has dried, apply the second layer liberally, forming a large area that you can sand down. Don’t be afraid to use plenty of filler, but avoid making big peaks and troughs.

Finally, before the second layer sets, use the spatula to smooth over the surface, removing excess filler, but being careful not to dig so far into the filler that you catch the edges of the drive bay.

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M O D D I N G / HOW TO GUIDES

10 / USE 240-GRIT SANDPAPER

11 / USE 600-GRIT SANDPAPER

The filler will likely be ready to sand in less than 20 minutes, after which you can start sanding with coarse sandpaper. Don’t press too hard until you can gauge how quickly you’re eating into the filler. You need to sand the filler so it’s level with the case surroundings.

The filler is level with the case, use 600-grit sandpaper to smooth off the finish, ready for primer. Sand it for five to ten minutes, until all the smaller pits and holes are gone.

12 / CLEAN AREA

13 / FEEL FOR IMPERFECTIONS

Once you’ve finished sanding, wipe the area with a damp cloth to remove all the filler dust. Any leftover dust can allow the paint to lift once it’s dried, so it’s essential to get rid of it.

It’s usually easier to feel imperfections than to see them, so use your fingers to check the area. If you feel any big pits, you can fill them again or sand the surrounding area.

14 / APPLY PRIMER

15 / ALLOW TO DRY

Apply primer ready for your choice of paint. Typically, primer is grey and can be bought in most hardware stores. Apply a few layers, then sand it down using 600-grit sandpaper. If you spot any pits and troughs in the primer, fill them or sand them appropriately.

Once you’ve sanded down the primer and applied several more coats, take a look at the finish. Once dry, you can proceed and apply your paint or go back and touch up some areas with filler or sandpaper.

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M O D D I N G / HOW TO GUIDES

How to Remove acrylic scratches Accidentally scraped your side panel window? Antony Leather shows you how to remove scratches from acrylic panels

1 / INSPECT THE SCRATCH All scratches are different – some are just swirly surface marks, while others cut quite deep into the plastic. For serious scratches, you’ll need to use 2,000-grit sandpaper initially, while lighter scratches will only need 3,000-grit paper or maybe no sandpaper at all.

TOTA L P R OJ E C T T I M E / 2 H O U R S

he use of acrylic has enabled PC cases to become lighter, cheaper and more colourful, and it’s a very handy material when building your own case too, as it’s easy to cut and bend. However, as acrylic is fairly soft, it’s also very prone to picking up scratches. Unlike painted metal, you can’t just respray your case to get rid of scratches on acrylic, or just sand them out. They can look particularly unsightly on side windows or front fascias too. Thankfully, you don’t have to be stuck with a ruined case exterior, as it’s possible to polish out even fairly deep scratches, bringing the surface back to new again. There are plenty of plastic polishes available, which can revive scratched acrylic and buff up the surface if it’s lost its shine too. Couple this polish with some fine-grit sandpaper and a bit of elbow grease, and your case will be scratch free in no time.

2 / CHECK THE MATERIAL This method only works with glossy, uncoated side panel windows and acrylic – polishing a coated material using our method will remove any matt coating, and probably make it look worse. If your acrylic is coated, don’t try to remove the scratches using this guide.

TO O L S YO U ’ L L N E E D

2,000 and 3000-grit sandpaper / Most hardware stores

3 / REMOVE PANEL Xeropol plastic polish / www.amazon.co.uk

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If possible, remove the scratched panel from your case to make this work easier and avoid accidentally sanding into paintwork. Most case fascias can be easily removed, and even side panel windows often just use clips to hold them in place.

4 / CLEAN AREA

5 / WET AREA

To make sure the polish can reach the acrylic, give the area a thorough clean with warm soapy water. Then wipe off any scuff marks and residue from whatever scratched the case with a sponge – the scratches should be the only marks left.

The sandpaper works best when wet, as it can then create a grinding paste for a super-smooth finish and help to lubricate the paper. Apply a small amount of water to the area with which you’re working and continue to do so every few minutes while you work.

6 / USE SANDPAPER

7 / APPLY XERAPOL POLISH

Start with 3,000-grit sandpaper, rubbing the area in circular motions for two minutes. If the scratches are still clearly visible, switch to 2,000-grit paper until they can’t be detected with your fingernail. Then switch back to the 3,000-grit paper to smooth over the area.

The polish can remove fine scratches itself, but can also be used after 3,000-grit sandpaper has been used. Apply a small amount to the scratched area and buff with heavy pressure for five minutes then inspect the area.

8 / BUFF TO A SHINE

9 / INSPECT FOR SCRATCHES

Clean the Xerapol off the area and buff up the surface. You might need to use standard household polish to completely remove the Xerapol. If you spot other scuffs and marks, reapply some Xerapol and continue the process until you’re happy with the finish.

Only after you’ve buffed the surface to a shine will you know if you’ve removed all the scuffs and scratches. Don’t be afraid to use the polish again and, if necessary, repeat the sanding process until the scratches have been removed.

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M O D D I N G / READERS’ DRIVES

Readers’ Drives

FLUX Inspired by modern architecture and gemmology, goldsmith Femke Agnes Toele created this aluminium and Plexiglas NUC PC with custom water cooling CPC: What originally inspired you to build FLUX? Femke: If you look at modern architecture, sometimes you see very refreshing new ideas and beautiful structures. There' s an architect who makes very special buildings called Zaha Hadid, and she' s been a great inspiration for my first ideas about FLUX. /MEET THY MAKER Also, if you look at the Name Femke Agnes Toele Beijing Olympics (aka F.A.T.) Aquatics Pool (not Age 27 years young designed by Zaha Location Schoonhoven, Hadid), you can see the The Netherlands’ ‘silver city’ similarities with FLUX. Occupation Goldsmith I noted this particular and silversmith building years ago Main uses for PC Photo and video editing when I had to do research for an art Likes Being a goldsmith. Case modding, which feels class at school. The like ‘modern’ silversmithing image stayed with me – in the old days throughout the years. silversmiths made items The cell structure is such as cutlery because there was no IKEA. Now complex, but it still everyone uses computers, looks clean and well but there are limited design organised. The colour options if you want a goodscheme of the build looking computer. I also was very easy love motorbikes (although I had to sell mine), and my because I always tend blue parrotlet friend, Pixel to go for blue and Dislikes Running out of white/silver/steel dental floss, having to sell colour combinations. my motorbike, crappy Wi-Fi, plugging in my USB CPC: Where does the drive the wrong way name come from? 108

Femke: As I' m a goldsmith, gemmology was a part of the course at my school in Schoonhoven. In gemmology, you learn chemical aspects of gemstones and minerals ± it' s like chemistry, but very specialised. You have to determine the properties of a lot of gems, such as diamonds, sapphires and rubies to know if they' re synthetic or real gemstones. Nowadays, there are a lot of synthetic gemstones and sometimes it' s hard to tell the real ones from the synthetic ones. The process of making synthetic gemstones is very interesting. When you want to make a synthetic gemstone, you start off with a ` flux' , which is a substance that will transform under heat and pressure into a gemstone. I thought of my FLUX build similarly ± I had to create it using a lot of heat (work) and pressure (time). The Plexiglas in the build also looks like it' s starting to move and settle into its final shape. CPC: What specs did you choose and why? Femke: In the bit-tech Intel NUC competition, all the contestants had to work with Intel' s new NUC the 5i5RYK motherboard. It' s a complete system, apart from the RAM and SSD, which you still have to install yourself. It' s basically the perfect HTPC foundation! CPC: What other mods have you built? Femke: I' ve built a few systems now. The first one was called LittleScratch and was made for the ECS Modmencompetition two years ago. It was designed to be compact and different from usual case mods ± a computer you' d like to place on your desk as a sculpture. It ended up in the top five in the

contest, and I took it to Computex in Taiwan ± that was the moment when my passion for case modding started. Afterwards, I worked on my Polar (http://tinyurl.com/FATPolar) build, which was also inspired by FLUX. Then, for Gamescom 2015, I made Aegis (http://tinyurl.com/ FATAegis), which was based on the BitFenix chassis, and started on the Prototype Atlas build for BitFenix too. I' m also working on some top-secret builds that are still in progress, but they will soon be revealed! CPC: What difficulties did you come across? Femke: All the techniques I used to build FLUX were experimental. I knew the principles, but didn' t know whether they would work. In the end, it thankfully all worked out very well! However, of course there are always a few parts that could have gone more smoothly, such as the water-cooling loop. Custom water cooling was new to me when I started FLUX, and it was quite a struggle to fit all the parts into that tiny case. Filling the loop was also a tedious process, but thankfully there were no leaks. CPC: What materials did you use? Femke: FLUX is made from aluminium, laser-cut Plexiglas and PLA printed parts. The base and top frame are made of aluminium ± it' s easy to work with aluminium, and it looks really attractive with the sandblasted finish. The eye-catching part of the build, though, is the Plexiglas top cover. I first made the aluminium frame and then melted the Plexiglas in the oven. When it was flexible and hot enough, I pressed the Plexiglas into the frame by sitting on it. That was the only way

SEE THE FULL PROJECT LOG:

http://tinyurl.com/ FATFLux

I could put enough weight on the frame so that the Plexiglas would bulge out like bubbles ± proper butt power! I could have used a different technique, but sitting on it was a good way to show how you can achieve spectacular results without using fancy expensive machinery. CPC: What tools and machinery did you use?

Femke: The aluminium was formed on a lathe by metal spinning, using a handmade wooden mould ± aluminium is the perfect metal for this technique. Meanwhile, some of the Plexiglas parts were cut with a laser to get a quick start, and then endlessly adjusted by hand, which involved lots of filing, cutting and sanding. I also used a 3D printer to print the

FULL SYSTEM SPECS CPU Intel Core i3-5010U Graphics card Integrated Intel HD Graphics Memory 4GB Corsair Value Select DDR3 SODIMM Case Scratch build Motherboard Intel NUC5i3RYK Storage 80GB Intel M.2 SSD Cooling Custom water-cooling loop

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M O D D I N G / READERS’ DRIVES

PLA mounting plate ± 3D printing takes a lot of time, though, and the result of the printed material isn' t always perfect either. CPC: What media interest has FLUX attracted? Femke: The project has been featured in bit-tech' s Intel NUC

BE A WINNER To enter your machine for possible inclusion in Readers’ Drives, your mod needs to be fully working and, ideally, finished based in the UK. Simply log on to www.bit-tech.net and head over to the forums. Once you’re there, post a write-up of your mod, along with some pics, in the Project Logs forum. Make sure you read the relevant rules and advice sticky threads before you post. The best entrant each month will be featured here, where we’ll print your photos of your project and also interview you about the build process. Fame isn’t the only prize; you’ll also get your hands on a fabulous selection of prizes – see the opposite page for details.

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Competition 2015, together with four other awesome projects. What' s more, in the final public voting round on bit-tech' s modding forum, FLUX ended up in first place! After the final pictures were finally published, a lot of tech sites posted the pictures on their websites or social media pages too. The Dutch tech websitehttp://tweakers. netwrote a really cool article about FLUX, and Intel Netherlands posted about FLUX on Twitter as well. CPC: How long did the build process take? Femke: In total, we all had two months to finish the project, which sounds like plenty of time, but you need to have a tight schedule. Of course, the stress kicks in at the last minute as well. CPC: What did you learn from the build process? Femke: The process of building

FLUX was an eye-opener for me. A lot of the techniques planned for the build went very smoothly, but putting it all together was the trickiest part ± the biggest lesson learned was not to underestimate the work involved with the final assembly. CPC: Are you happy with the end result, and is there anything you’d do differently if you built it again? Femke: I' m absolutely very happy with this project. The shape and colour scheme had been on my modding wish list for a long time, and FLUX was the perfect project to show it off! I wanted to show lots of different techniques in the build log too. If I built FLUX again, though, I` d use a different mounting plate ± I' d probably use a milled aluminium plate, which would look much better than the 3D printed PLA plate.

Win all these prizes! We’ve teamed up with some of the world’s leading PC manufacturers and retailers to offer this great range of prizes to each lucky Readers’ Drives winner. If your creation is featured in the magazine then you’ll walk away with all of the prizes listed on this page, so get in your entries!

Corsair graphite Series 230T case and RM 550w Modular power supply TOTAL VALUE £150 inc VAT / MANUFACTURER www.corsair.com

Corsair believes that a great PC starts with a great case. The Corsair Graphite Series 230T is a compact expression of this core philosophy. With stylish looks and a choice of three different colours, it packs in a remarkable number of features to provide builders with tonnes of room for expansion and amazing cooling potential. Like all Corsair cases, it’s built using the finest materials and finished to the highest standards, so it will withstand several years of upgrades. Plus, to make sure it stand outs from the crowd, the 230T features Corsair’s new Air Series LED high-airflow fans, providing distinctive lighting with low-noise, high-airflow cooling. Just as a quality case is essential to building a quality PC, a high-performance, a high-quality power supply is also a vital ingredient. The all new RM series has been built from the ground-up to deliver unmatched reliability alongside 80Plus Gold efficiency, and all with the absolute minimum of noise. It uses specially optimised quality parts to reduce sound at the component level, and it’s completely silent below 40 per cent load, thanks to its Zero RPM fan mode. It’s also fully modular, allowing for the maximum amount of flexibility during installation. With a Corsair Graphite 230T case and an RM 550W Modular power supply at the heart of your build, you’ll have the foundations for a truly awesome gaming machine.

Mayhems coolant and dyes VALUE £50 inc VAT / MANUFACTURER www.mayhems.co.uk

Cooling performance is only one part of the equation when it comes to kitting out your rig with custom water-cooling gear. The other major bonus is that all those tubes and gleaming fittings just make your PC look damn sexy, and they look even better when they're pumped full of fancy coloured coolant. As such, we're particularly pleased to have the folks at Mayhems now on board with Readers' Drives; they're currently offering two 1-litre bottles of Mayhems' Pastel Ice White coolant, along with a selection of five dyes, so you can choose the colour that best complements your PC. Check out the blue coolant in our own mini PC mod on the cover of Issue 109 for an example of what's possible with some Mayhems coloured coolant.

Phobya Modding Kit VALUE £50 inc VAT MANUFACTURER www.phobya.com, www.aqua-tuning.co.uk

The Phobya modding kit is designed with the modder in mind, offering great value for money and quality products. The kit includes Nano-G 12 Silent Waterproof 1,500rpm multi-option fans, which use an innovative fan-blade design. As standard, the fans include braided black cables to keep your case looking as neat as possible. The fans are also supplied with a special cable that lets you run the fan at 5V rather than 12V, reducing the noise emitted in order to help you to build a silent system. The kit also includes the 60cm Phobya 3-pin Molex to 4x 3-pin Molex Y-cable. This pre-

braided extension cable gives you extra routing options in your case, and it also enables you to run up to four fans from one compatible motherboard header. Meanwhile, the Phobya SATA 3 cables included in the kit offer the same great quality braiding as the rest of the Phobya range, while also securing your connection with latched connectors. As well as this, the kit includes the Phobya SlimGuide Controller, which gives you the option to vary the speed of other fans in your case, while the Phobya TwinLEDs let you shine a light on your mods.

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DOWNLOAD FROM WWW.ASUS.COM/ CAMPAIGN/ REALBENCH

CO M M U N I T Y / TESTING

Custom PC

BENCHMARK YOUR PC

Download the benchmarks from www.asus.com/campaign/Realbench and, before you run them, disable any power-saving technologies in your BIOS that change your CPU clock speed, or the leaderboard won’t reco rd your overclock frequency properly. To post a score on the leaderboard, go to Save Upload File in the RealBench 2015 app’s Results menu, and save your results in an RBR file. You need to sele ct Offline Uploads on the leaderboard site, sign up for an Asus account and upload your file.

in association with Give your PC a workout with our new benchmark suite, and see how your rig compares to other readers’ machines Gimp

We use Gimp to open and edit large images. Unlike our previous Gimp test, this one uses more than one CPU core, although it’s still more sensitive to clock speed increases than to more CPU cores.

Handbrake H.264 video encoding Our heavily multi-threaded Handbrake video encoding takes full advantage of

SHOUT OUTS! Wow, 8Pack has done it again! This time, OCUK’s veteran overclocker has hit the top spot with a Core i7-5960X running at an incredible speed of 5.5GHz (125MHz x 44), producing an amazing system score of 275,683. Also, kudos to our new entries in the top 20 this month – mark.gee93 and olthepol.

many CPU cores, pushing them to 100 per cent load.

LuxMark OpenCL

This GPU compute test is the only synthetic part of our suite, although the renderer is based on the real LuxRender physically based rendering software. As 3D rendering is a specific workload that not everyone will use, and because OpenCL support isn’t standard in most software, this section is given just a quarter of the weighting of the other tests in the final score.

Heavy multi-tasking

On an Intel system, the 100 per cent reference score comes from a stock-speed Core i7-4790K, with 16GB of Corsair 2,400MHz DDR3 memory, a 240GB OCZ 150 SSD, an Asus Maximus Gene VII motherboard and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 3GB graphics card. On an AMD system, the 100 per cent reference score comes from a stockspeed A10-7850K APU, with 8GB of Corsair 2,133MHz DDR3 memory, a 256GB Plextor M5 Pro SSD and an Asus A88X-Pro motherboard, using the APU’s integrated graphics.

Our new multi-tasking test plays a fullscreen 1080p video, while running a Handbrake H.264 video encode.

CHROME WARNING At the moment, Google’s Chrome browser flags up the RealBench 2015 download as potentially harmful, and we’re aware of this issue. The file is perfectly safe, however – please ignore this warning.

Scores

RealBench 2015 breaks down the scores for each test, then gives you a total system score and a percentage reference score.

CUSTOM PC REALBENCH 2015 LEADERBOARD RANK

SYSTEM SCORE

REFERENCE

MOTHERBOARD

CPU

275,683

240.9%

USERNAME 8pack

Asus Rampage V Extreme

Intel Core i7-5960X

CPU CLOCK 5.5GHz

16GB Kingston 3000MHz

MEMORY

PRIMARY GPU Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan X

233,375

203.9%

ian.parry3

Asus Rampage V Extreme

Intel Core i7-5960X

4.6GHz

32GB G.Skill 3200MHz

Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan X

219,415

191.7%

Luke@DinoPC

Asus Rampage V Extreme

Intel Core i7-5960X

4.6GHz

16GB Corsair 3276MHz

Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan X

206,273

180.6%

stuart

Asus Rampage V Extreme

Intel Core i7-5960X

4.41GHz

16GB Corsair 3000MHz

Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 Ti

201,446

176.0%

CustomPC

Asus Rampage V Extreme

Intel Core i7-5960X

4.3GHz

16GB Corsair 2666MHz

Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan X

197,964

173%

Carbonleg

Asus X99-E WS

Intel Core i7-5960X

Not reported

32GB Corsair 2400MHz

AMD Radeon R9 200 Series

189,230

165.3%

shadowsrayne

Asus Rampage V Extreme

Intel Core i7-5960X

4.2GHz

32GB Corsair 2133MHz

Nvidia GeForce GTX 980

172,828

151%

mdottwo

Asus Rampage V Extreme

Intel Core i7-5820K

4.4GHz

16GB G.Skill 2766MHz

AMD Radeon R9 200 Series

ASRock X99M Killer

Intel Core i7-5930K

4.48GHz

32GB Kingston 3071MHz

AMD Radeon R9 200 Series

MSI X99S SLI Plus

Intel Core i7-5820K

4.49GHz

16GB Corsair 3000MHz

Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 Ti

Asus Rampage IV Black Edition

Intel Core i7-4930K

4.72GHz

16GB Corsair 2464MHz

Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan X

Asus X99-Deluxe

Intel Core i7-5820K

4.5GHz

32GB Corsair 2333MHz

AMD Radeon R9 200 Series

167,332

146.2%

grozzie

167,002

145.9%

maliepaard.chris

166,078

145.1%

Chris_Waddle

165,512

144.6%

Penfold

165,151

144.3%

mark.gee93

Asus Rampage V Extreme

Intel Core i7-5930K

Not reported

16GB Corsair 3200MHz

Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 Ti

163,650

143%

shaunhanson

MSI X99S SLI Plus

Intel Core i7-5820K

Not reported

16GB Corsair 2133MHz

Nvidia GeForce GTX 980

163,400

142.7%

andy

MSI X99S Gaming 7

Intel Core i7-5820K

4.4GHz

16GB Corsair 2666MHz

Nvidia GeForce GTX 980

163,065

142.5%

viperz

Asus X99-Deluxe

Intel Core i7-5820K

4.48GHz

16GB Corsair 2400MHz

Nvidia GeForce GTX 970

ASRock X99M Killer

Intel Core i7-5930K

4.19GHz

32GB Kingston 2666MHz

AMD Radeon R9 200 Series

Asus X99-Deluxe

Intel Core i7-5930K

Not reported

16GB Crucial 2400MHz

Nvidia GeForce GTX 970

Asus Rampage IV Black Edition

Intel Core i7-4930K

4.49GHz

16GB Corsair 2400MHz

AMD Radeon R9 200 Series

Asus X99-Deluxe

Intel Core i7-5820K

4.08GHz

32GB Corsair 2448MHz

Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 Ti

160,855

140.5%

imre_grozner

158,072

138.1%

olthepol

157,611

137.7%

andrew_mcse

156,212

136.5%

bennunn

112

CO M M U N I T Y / FOLDING

Folding@Home Join our folding team and help medical research MILESTONES THIS MONTH USERNAME

POINTS MILESTONE

USERNAME

POINTS MILESTONE

USERNAME

POINTS MILESTONE

USERNAME

grozzie

20000

Mike1419

400000

tastyradiskull

1000000

Tommye123

8000000

dbmitch84

30000

TimmyH

400000

anadir2

2000000

toothytech

10000000

Capt-Camm-Nett

40000

TheTomBoy

500000

Bobthetoolnut

2000000

Trunkey

10000000

Pickles96

50000

Sonic67

600000

RaistlinRTCW

2000000

slowpurple

20000000

tallandgentle33uk

60000

The_FFrey

600000

varnis

2000000

Little_Willie

30000000

Arcem

70000

Just_G

700000

bigrew

3000000

Andy_J

40000000

LEACHIE007

70000

scoobyzilla

800000

Damien_Tanner

3000000

BeezaBob

50000000

wir3d123

70000

Bob_D

900000

robertmather

3000000

Maglor

50000000

pig_farmer_uk

80000

b1ll55t34m

1000000

ittoms

4000000

Cmaxx

60000000

nbowling

100000

Catflaps

1000000

SirBenjaminNunn

4000000

Dickie

90000000

smiler

100000

jamiesp17

1000000

techknowledgey

5000000

Roveel

100000000

Ayeska

200000

ManxBob

1000000

andboo1

6000000

Laguna2012

200000000

Grimm808

200000

MrDevious

1000000

Liam266

7000000

TheFlipside

200000000

Mr_Blue_Jam

200000

Pickles

1000000

Werewolf_Legs

7000000

HHComputers

400000000

roosauce

200000

PURE

1000000

ZeDestructor

7000000

piers_newbold

600000000

Kentara

300000

QuasarGreg

1000000

Allan_Smith

8000000

mort6dav3

300000

siddallj

1000000

GreenDemon360

8000000

FurstyFerret

400000

Simbouncer

1000000

Ken_Swain

8000000

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

TOP 20 OVERALL RANK

USERNAME

Nelio

DocJonz

POINTS

WORK UNITS

POINTS MILESTONE

TOP 20 PRODUCERS RANK USERNAME

DAILY POINTS AVERAGE

OVERALL SCORE 1,353,147,963

2,400,024,645

136,674

DocJonz

2,463,048

1,353,147,963

178,928

piers_newbold

1,273,358

611,306,242

coolamasta

773,196,219

171,515

PC_Rich

1,034,002

442,769,248

Scorpuk

649,179,278

22,469

Laguna2012

1,015,670

220,107,408

piers_newbold

611,306,242

44,247

Scorpuk

857,103

649,179,278

StreetSam

570,985,851

90,228

apeman556

678,037

158,324,586

Dave_Goodchild

465,448,860

119,598

coolamasta

660,808

773,196,219

PC_Rich

442,769,248

77,625

Desertbaker

654,091

199,943,744

HHComputers

427,247,906

20,687

Dickie

647,137

96,877,203

johnim

422,773,360

81,215

HHComputers

610,632

427,247,906

Slavcho

345,598,392

34,220

Lordsoth

552,148

307,710,808

Lordsoth

307,710,808

94,812

johnim

511,477

422,773,360

The_M2B

296,613,895

58,339

The_M2B

486,725

296,613,895

phoenicis

250,044,587

95,660

Roveel

479,214

113,604,596

Laguna2012

220,107,408

20,722

daxchaos

397,526

18,944,039

Wallace

212,477,027

6,204

Andy_J

363,905

41,179,521

zz9pzza

211,014,628

15,794

Nelio

294,105

2,400,024,645

TheFlipside

200,239,649

21,942

Cmaxx

256,134

60,918,049

Desertbaker

199,943,744

17,206

Maglor

252,455

53,530,416

KevinWright

171,557,437

29,688

slowpurple

229,933

22,439,075

113

OPINION

JA M E S G O R B O L D / HARDWARE ACCELERATED

THE MAGIC OF ILLUSION VR is nearly here and it’s finally come of age, argues James Gorbold ’ve waited almost a year for the 3K ultra-widescreen IPS monitors with G-Sync that were announced at CES. The wait was so long, in fact, that I’m now considering skipping this upgrade altogether and going for a VR headset when they first go on sale early next year. After all, a display upgrade is such a big expense that it’s only worth it when there’s a huge change in quality or experience. A VR headset is just that – a change in experience unlike anything before. Well, not quite anything. I’ve been a VR enthusiast for years, but early VR headsets were too bulky, the resolution wasn’t high enough and they were far too laggy. I remember as a young journalist in the 1990s being very excited to have a sneak peek at a (unreleased) Sony headset with Unreal Tournament and marvelling at the view, before finding that after two minutes, I had almost strangled myself with the mass of cables, not to mention having a sore neck from the ridiculously heavy contraption. I daresay I probably looked a little weird too, as I found it necessary to a lay a dark jumper over my head to prevent light bleeding in from the real world and distracting me from the virtual world. In contrast, the two most prominent models of the new wave of VR headsets, the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, are all about drawing you into a virtual world. I challenge anybody who has been lucky enough to try the Portal demo with the Vive not to be engaged as GLaDOS taunts you. A part of this demo also successfully tricked the ‘flight’ routine hardcoded into my DNA into taking an uncertain step backwards, as the floor tiles started collapsing underneath me.

There are still problems and limitations, of course – most notably, the cables connecting the headset to your PC. This isn’t too much of a problem in co*ckpit-based games, such as racing games, and flight and space simulators, as your in-game avatar is sitting down just like you, so you can easily swivel around in a chair without too much discomfort. However, playing a first-person game is more problematic – as soon as you step onto the cable or bump into a real-world object, the illusion of being in the virtual world is obliterated by the intrusion of the real-world sensation. I’m sure this situation will get better once we have wirelessly connected headsets. Resolution and responsiveness could be better too, but with each prototype, both the Rift and Vive have edged closer to greatness. For me, the Vive edges ahead of the Rift at the moment, mostly because it includes a pair of wireless batons for interacting with the virtual world, instead of a gamepad or joystick. What would really elevate the Vive to greatness is a swords and sorcery game where you can use the batons to swing melee weapons around – an action that’s hard to simulate with a keyboard and mouse. However, I suspect it will be a while before the Vive is responsive enough to let you perform fast and accurate sword moves with the batons. Either way, early 2016 when the Rift and Vive are expected to go on sale will be a very exciting time to be a PC gamer, especially as both devices are designed to be ‘PC first’ and haven’t been compromised to make them compatible with current consoles.

I challenge anybody to try the Portal demo with the Vive and not be engaged as GLaDOS taunts you

James Gorbold has been building, tweaking and overclocking PCs ever since the 1980s. He now helps Scan Computers to develop new systems.

114

[PDF] THE BEST SELLING MAG FOR PC HARDWARE, OVERCLOCKING, GAMING & MODDING - Free Download PDF (2024)

References