Sunday 23 November 2014

AOC U3477Pqu

AOC U3477Pqu

Super wide, seriously dramatic, sadly pricey.

We’re so over 4K. That first rush of super high-res 4K screens were pretty exciting, but only because they were offering a new resolution we hadn’t seen before. Now those 4K screens are securely packed away in the kit cupboard because there’s a new wide-boy in town: AOC’s U3477Pqu.

Our big problem with 4K screens is that there isn’t the content yet to justify the step up in resolution and resulting step down in performance. Realistically, moving from a 1440p screen to a 2160p one doesn’t currently offer anything other than a drop in frame rates. Your in-game textures are still generally the same scale and won’t deliver the visual fidelity promised by the 8MP 4K resolution.

Intel Core i7-5820K

Intel Core i7-5820K

The missing link between Haswell and Haswell-E has been found...

The top end of Intel’s Haswell-E platform is where all the finest new technology from this generation of performance computing lies. When you’ve got the fastest PCIe-based storage connections, a brand new generation of system memory and a full eight-core consumer processor pulling it all together, that’s the pinnacle of today’s PC tech right there.

Quite rightly then, the Core i7-5960X, with its 16 threads of processing power, got all the initial headlines. But for us, this bargain-priced six-core Core i7-5820K is the most interesting CPU of this latest chip generation.