Water Cooling 101

How and why to become a water-cooling master?

For much of recent history, water cooling has been shunned. Only a select few could afford to merrily dance with computing death, taking their chances with water-cooling hardware and components that weren’t even designed to work in the silicon environment. They’d ghetto-graft G1/4-inch plumbing fittings onto hardware and hand-mill various water blocks, all in the hope of creating a leak-proof, watertight system. A system that could efficiently and effectively transfer heat away from their component parts, to a far greater degree than traditional air coolers ever could.

Samsung U32E850R

A flawed masterpiece for lots of money

Call it Ultra HD. Call it 4K. Either way, it’s a metric tonne of pixels and simultaneously seductive and very silly. It’s seductive in a way that only really big numbers and cutting-edge tech can be. Eight millions pixels on a PC display? Extraordinary.

OCZ Trion 100

Getting a little TLC from Toshiba

In this brave new world of PCI Express storage, of M.2 drives, U.2 drives and fancy NVMe protocols, is there any space for ye olde 2.5-inch SATA drives and their piffling 6Gb/s of bandwidth and crusty AHCI interfaces?

Asus GeForce GTX 950 STRIX OC

All the grunt you need for everyday 1080p gaming

Let’s face facts. No matter what k ind of gamer you are, you can guarantee that 99 per cent of the time, you won’t be buried in the latest AAA title from [enter evil megalomaniac game publisher name here]. After all, the latest games from Ubisoft and EA, while featuring incredible levels of graphical fidelity, often have as much depth as any of Michael Bay’s recent Hollywood blockbusters.

My worthless year working for Google

Barry Collins becomes Google’s lowest paid employee, earning a pittance for his expertise

Forget the stories about Amazon warehouse workers labouring 68-hour shifts for minimum wage; I’ve just spent the past year working for Google for £10.28. Not £10.28 per hour, but £10.28 in total.