PC Powerplay

Computex officially kicked off on Tuesday the 28th of May, but that doesn’t stop many companies from holding pre show press briefings and keynotes. So it was with AMD. Anticipation around Ryzen 3 CPUs and Navi GPUs has been building for some time, an

Let’s start off with Ryzen 3, the first true overhaul of the Ryzen processor since its launch in Q1 of 2017. It’s known by several codenames, with Zen 2 being the best descriptor. The desktop Zen 2-based CPU family is known as ‘Matisse’, while the re

Let’s not forget that AMD is also a graphics manufacturer. As a company, both from a market and Wall Street perspective, AMD has received a huge amount of attention for its resurgence since the release of first generation Ryzen, and its stock price r

At the heart of your processor is the section that takes the data and runs the x86-64 instruction set over it — this defines the PC. This is the microarchitecture. Around this sits a host of other transistors, the caches, memory controller, I/O contr

There’s a total of 68 ray-tracing cores buried inside here—22 more than the RTX 2080, and only four fewer than a Titan RTX. To give you some numbers, if this processor didn’t have ray-tracing cores, it should house around 15 billion transistors. It a

There is a practical limit on how much heat a chip can handle before going pop, and keeping cool is a fundamental part of processor design. The goal is more performance per watt. Thankfully, chips don’t go pop anymore, either; there are sensors and s

In the summer of 2017, two security vulnerabilities were discovered, which went public in January 2018, and caused something of a panic. Meltdown and Spectre, as they were dubbed, did something really nasty. The loopholes were in the very fabric of t

Once upon a time, every PC needed a graphics card; now, many processors come with a decent one ready to roll. If you haven’t used a processor’s on-board graphics for a while, you may be pleasantly surprised — they are actually perfectly usable. Not t

Gaming PCs emerged in the 1980s (their specifications would make you laugh now); by the 2000s, custom-built gaming machines were everywhere; and now you can buy just about everything you need off the shelf, from colored cables to whole systems swathe

If you like to keep abreast of tech news, you’ve probably heard of Shadow. A service operated by French company Blade, it allows users to access their own personal “Shadow,” a virtual hosted environment on a server running Windows 10, which acts as a

It’s a funny thing, streaming. For movies and TV, it’s no surprise that it’s taken off; services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video offer unlimited on-screen entertainment at subscription premiums, demanding only 5Mb/s to deliver HD-quality movie

Console gaming numbers have always fluctuated up and down, but home consoles do seem to be steadily trending downward as the costs associated with them increase. The peak of console gaming occurred around the turn of the millennium, with Sony’s PlayS

A quick Google search for “failed game streaming services” rather damningly places OnLive at the top of the results list. It wasn’t the only one to fall in the face of traditional downloads and physical copies, though. Gaikai’s tech might have gone o

Playing games over a stream is a tricky business, not least because some games stream better than others. One of the key benefits of cloud gaming is the fact that it enables games to be played at a high level of graphical quality (thanks to powerful

Much like PlayStation’s Remote Play, there are other ways to stream games yourself, without the aid of a hulking data center. Kids hogging the TV? Xbox One enables you to stream games to any Window 10 PC connected on the same network, using the compu

A good monitor is just as important as the parts inside your tower – the graphics of your favourite games are only ever going to be as good as the display they’re on allows them to be. ASUS has unveiled its next generation of monitors, and there’s so

If your Internet connection is even vaguely important to you, a quality router is the way to go. How far you go depends largely on what sort of user you are. If, say, you fancy yourself as something of a serious gamer, you should at least consider Ne

Bigger is better. Eight is twice as big as four. Therefore 8K video must be twice as good as 4K. Not convinced? Well… you may have a point. 8K is, of course, four times as big as 4K when it comes to the number of pixels on offer. But that isn’t the p

Shining a big backlight — or a huge number of individual backlights — through a grid of millions of tiny, imperfect shutters is a silly way to go about engineering large-format, full-color displays. But that’s LCD monitors for you. With that approach

At last, the beast of bedlam rises again from the mist. Its elegant form glinting in the sunlight, as those charged rays sheen across its metallic surface. Dream Machine 2019 hath cometh, with back-breaking labor, a price list that only the divine co

Over the years, we’ve worked our way through giant cases, separate loops, hard tubing, soft tubing, air cooling — you name it, we’ve done it. This year, though, we decided to try something a little different, something we hadn’t attempted in some tim

LENGTH OF TIME: 20–30 HOURS LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY: EXTREME Our Dream Machine is extra special, because we’re fitting two full systems in one super-tower chassis, under one cooling loop. It’s a complex affair, but the first thing we knew we needed to do

Oh boy, when it came to testing this behemoth, it didn’t exactly play ball. The main system’s motherboard decided to have a dead memory slot on arrival, along with a couple of bent pins in the socket, requiring a complete mobo swap out, and the ITX r

Never heard of emulation? It’s when a piece of software mimics another machine in order to run its programs. For instance, you may have seen someone playing old Nintendo games on an Android phone. Emulation is best known for its use in playing old vi

Thermaltake cares about PCs looking and performing their best. Its goal, with every one of their products, is to give you the best experience possible – you want a PC with some serious power, but that also runs smoothly, looks stylish, and lets you p

Other than the emulator, you usually need two things: some ROMs and a BIOS. “ROM” is a blanket term for programs you want to emulate. Although it should refer to an image of a system’s Read Only Memory chip, it is often used in the context of normal

One of the earliest machines to be accepted as an analog computer is the Antikythera Mechanism. Dated to around 100 BC, it was used in astronomy to determine the positions of celestial bodies decades in advance. Only fragments of it remain, but detai

Babbage’s machines were analog, but for digital computers, history usually looks to Alan Turing. You probably know the story well — how Alan Turing cracked the Germans’ Enigma code so that Benedict Cumberbatch could save England (according to the fil

Although there are plenty of contenders, generally the entry that gets awarded without controversy is 1958’s Tennis for Two. An astonishing technical achievement, the title suggests something like Pong, but the reality is far grander. Designed by Ame

SPECIFICATION CPU: Zilog Z80 @ 3.5MHz RAM: 16/48/128K Graphics: 256x192 resolution, eight colors Sound: CPU-driven single-channel onboard speaker Storage: Cassette and ZX Microdrive OS: Sinclair BASIC Released: December 1981 Launch Price: US$220 16K,

SPECIFICATION CPU: MOS Technology 6510 @ 1MHz RAM: 64K Graphics: 320x200 resolution, 16 colors Sound: SID 6581 chip Storage: Cassette, 5.25-inch floppy, and ROM cartridge OS: Commodore KERNAL/Basic 2.0 Released: August 1982 Launch Price: US$595 Produ

SPECIFICATION CPU: Motorola 68000 @ 8MHz RAM: 512K (up to 4MB) Graphics: 320x200 with 16 out of 512 colors, 640x200 with 4 out of 512 colors, 640x400 monochrome Sound: Yamaha YM2149F three-voice squarewave plus one-voice white noise OS: GEM, via Atar

SPECIFICATION CPU: Motorola 68000 @ 7.16MHz RAM: 512K (up to 8.5MB) Graphics: 4,096 colors at 320x256, 16 colors 640x512 Sound: Custom MOS Paula chip, 28KHz OS: AmigaOS 1.2 Storage: 3.5-inch floppy, optional hard disk Released: July 1985 Launch Price

Unlike the PlayStation, the Saturn is a deeply complex machine, with a dual-CPU setup, and eight processors overall. Initial sales were good in Japan, but Sega ruined its launch in the West, and never really recovered from it. Unfortunately, the Satu

The 16-bit computers would be dominated by one man and one CPU. The CPU was the Motorola 68000, known in the business as the 68K — a multimedia powerhouse whose potential had not yet been tapped. The man was head of Commodore, Jack Tramiel. Tramiel w

Out of all the consoles we could have covered, we chose the PlayStation because of its influence on emulator history. Initially, emulators for the PlayStation were buggy, unprofessional, and just too niche to worry Sony. However, two polished commerc

Computex gets bigger every year and it’s something we always look forward to. It’s as vibrant, colourful and busy as ever. This year saw the debut of a second packed Nangang exhibition hall, which, combined with numerous hotel suites, the packed out