MSI GS60-2PE-060UK

The GS60 is the thinnest and lightest full-on gaming laptop we’ve ever seen, tipping the scales at under 2kg (1.96kg), with a chassis that’s 20mm thick at its broadest point. This slim, light laptop is made from a magnesium-lithium alloy – a material that MSI says was first used on NASA’s Saturn V rocket. The metal is black and brushed, and there’s subtle backlighting across the keyboard, power button and logos. It’s a greatlooking machine, even if it won’t attract attention in the same way as larger laptops with larger designs, such as the Alienware 17.

Importantly, though, MSI hasn’t skimped on the internals despite the slim dimensions. The key component is an Nvidia GeForce GTX 870M – a GPU with 1,344 stream processors, 3GB of GDDR5 memory at its disposal and a core base clock of 941MHz. It isn’t as powerful as the Alienware 17’s GTX 880M, but it should still be able to handle today’s games at great settings.

Intel Core i7-5960X

The Core i7-5960X is Intel’s gleaming desktop flagship, with no compromises. It has the full-fat Haswell-E silicon, so it has a fearsome specification, including eight cores, 20MB of shared L3 cache and Hyper-Threading. However, the eight cores have resulted in a slight reduction in clock speed. The 5960X runs at 3GHz, which is less than the 3.6GHz from last year’s 4960X, and it’s also less than the frequencies of both the 5930K and even the 5820K.

As such, benchmark results aren’t always clear-cut. While this new chip is an undeniable beast in most of our tests, its lower clock speed and higher core count mean it isn’t always the best option in applications that aren’t heavily multi-threaded.

Making the most of Minecraft

Rick Lane takes you through the various mods available for Minecraft on the PC, from different shaders and texture packs, through to new game features.

Minecraft is less of a game and more of a cultural phenomenon. With 54 million copies sold on all platforms to date, it’s become one of the most widely played games on the planet. Almost everything you can imagine has been recreated in its blocky world, from the Starship Enterprise to Westeros to the entirety of Denmark. It’s even become a teaching aid in many schools across the world, in subjects including science and English.

Its near-universal appeal also means there’s an abundance of user-created content for the game that expands its potential in nearly every way possible. Graphical updates, new items, new environments, new adventures. In fact, there’s so much content available that attempting to sort the wheat from the chaff is liable to make your eyes go square. As such, we’ve put together a detailed guide to making the most of Minecraft, including which mods to install, how to install them and how to generally make Minecraft a fuller, more enjoyable experience.