Building A Console Killer

Mark Pickavance tries to build a console-beating PC while celebrating the Pentium's 20th anniversary

Almost exactly a year ago, I built a SteamOS PC from an AMD APU processor and a H75 chipset motherboard. I recall thinking at the time that with the addition of a decent video card, the system might be comparable with the latest-generation games console, at least on paper. Indeed, if you ask most people why they bought a games console over a PC, it certainly wasn't because the games were cheaper!

STEAM: Can It Reinvent PC Hardware?

As Valve gears up for the launch of multiple Steam Machines in time for Christmas, David Crookes looks at the likely impact on the PC market

Up until now, modern day gamers have had a simple choice to make when deciding how they want to play: do they go for an inexpensive console or do they invest in a potentially wallet-sapping gaming PC? The arguments over what path to take have raged for many years, spanning the relative merits of the hardware and the quality and quantity of the games. The truth is, that a consensus has never really been reached.

Sharkoon Skiller Gaming Keyboard

An inexpensive keyboard with a ton of impressive features

The Sharkoon Skiller Gaming Keyboard has been around for a good couple of years now, but hasn't shown any signs of fading into the background despite the wealth of mechanical gaming keyboards that are currently available.

There's a kind of snobbishness attached to gaming keyboards, in that a non-mechanical can't ever be as good as its mechanical counterpart. We've seen it a number of times, and it's utter nonsense. Yes, a mechanical keyboard is an excellent choice, but let's not discount the huge price differences and the fact that a modern membrane (or other such non-mechanical) keyboard can offer just as many features.

MSI GE72 2QD-037UK

MSI's GE72 costs just £999, which makes it the cheapest gaming laptop we’ve seen for some time. However, despite its price, it still has a beefy specs list, including a GPU from Nvidia's latest mobile range.

The GeForce GTX 960M sits right in the middle of the mobile 900-series, and it’s well placed to deliver decent performance on the MSI's 1080p screen: it has 640 stream processors, 2GB of 5GHz (effective) GDDR5 memory and a core clock speed of 1,096MHz. It's based on the GM107 architecture, which first appeared in the desktop GTX 750 Ti GPU.

Backing Up To The Cloud

Prevent a rainy day disaster by using Cloud services for backup

These days it seems that all the online services are offering online storage space. Recently, prices have been dropping across the board with Google Drive, Dropbox, Microsoft and others slashing prices to encourage users to move services to them.

Intel SSD 750 1.2TB

SSDs have been pushing the bandwidth limits of SATA 6Cbps for some time, and even recent PCI-E based M.2 and expansion card SSDs are still held back by the Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI), the protocol that specifies how a storage device communicates with the system host controller. It was designed for older mechanical drives, but it's inefficient for SSDs and wastes CPU cycles. That's where the Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface Specification (NVM Express or NVMe for short), used by Intel's new SSD 750 card, comes in.

Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 Ti

After GTX Titan left a massive gap between itself and the GTX 980 in terms of both price and speed, we all suspected a card such as the GTX 980 Ti was coming. Still, we weren't expecting the GTX 980 Ti to be so close to the GTX 980’s price, while nearly matching the GTX Titan X's speed, making the latter almost redundant.

The GTX 980 Ti uses the same 28nm GM200 GPU as the Titan X, but with two of its 24 streaming multiprocessor (SMM) units disabled, leading to an 8 per cent reduction in stream processors and texture units, now 2,816 and 176 respectively. Otherwise, it's business as usual; the 1GHz clock speed (1,075MHz boost), 250W TDP and memory subsystem are unchanged.

The Useful Family Hub

Keir Thomas explains how to turn a Raspberry Pi or old PC into a useful storage and sharing device for the entire family's computers and handhelds

Most households feature a corner of the living room in which electronics are stashed. Alongside the TV you might see a Sky or Virgin box, and a games console or two, an internet router, and perhaps more complex add-ons such as a Chromecast.

In this feature we discuss adding another device that acts as a go-to helper for all the computers in your household. For example, it can act as an ad blocker for every computer, a DNS cache to speed up net access, and a network-attached server to store and share files. You can add in a personal cloud or AirPlay capabilities so you can beam your music live from your iPad, iPod Touch or iPad.

Noctua NH-D9L

Noctua’s CPU coolers consistently offer great build quality, and while the company is perhaps better known for monstrous yet quiet coolers such as the NH-D15, it makes much smaller offerings such as the NH-D9L too.

The tiny NH-D9L measures just 110mm high, and costs £39 inc VAT, which might seem expensive for such a small CPU cooler, but it manages to justify its price tag. For starters, the packaging is superb. All the parts are neatly packed into their own small boxes, all of which fit precisely into the main box with no wasted space. You can quickly and easily pick out the parts you need for your particular setup, making installation easier.