CyberPower Fangbook 4 SK-X17

CyberPower’s Fangbook 4 SK-X17 brings the joys of active sync tech to the mobile world, featuring Nvidia’s G-Sync tech in order to eliminate stuttering and tearing artefacts in games. It’s a monster of a machine too, with a 17.3in screen and a huge chassis, although its matt black exterior is aesthetically inconspicuous. The lid is only decorated by a subtle, metal-effect CyberPower logo, and the keyboard is simply surrounded by a row of discreet buttons. There’s a classy touch from the keyboard backlight, though, as well as some subtle lighting beneath the front edge.

Gigabyte Z170-Gaming K3

If you’re on a tight budget, opting for a Skylake Z170 system is thankfully becoming more affordable all the time. There are now plenty of motherboards below the £100 mark, such as this Z170-Gaming K3 from Gigabyte, which can push most CPUs to their air-cooled limits, so any extra cash will only net you some more features and sometimes a little extra performance.

MSI Z170A Gaming Pro Carbon

If you fancy having RGB lighting on your motherboard, but Asus’ lighting-equipped offerings, such as the Maximus VIII Formula or Hero, aren’t quite in your price range, then MSI’s new Z170A Gaming Pro Carbon might be just the ticket, retailing at a tempting price of £120 inc VAT.

Like MSI’s Z170A XPower Gaming Titanium, the Z170A Gaming Pro Carbon has chrome-plated PCI-E slots, but it also sports a black PCB, black heatsinks and carbon fibre detailing. There’s essentially no colour on the PCB, which makes it easier to colour-match it with the rest of your hardware, something you can’t achieve with the likes of Gigabyte’s otherwise excellent Z170MX-Gaming 5, with its obvious red details.

SilverStone SST-TD02-Slim

SilverStone’s new TD02-Slim sports a similar waterblock and design to the company’s other all-in-one (AIO) liquid coolers but, as its name suggests, its fans are halfheight 120mm models that are just 15mm thick, instead of the usual 25mm. The radiator is only 22mm thick too – a good 8mm thinner than many other half-height radiators. The total thickness of just 37mm is around 20mm slimmer than most double 120mm AIO liquid coolers.

Turn your Raspberry Pi into an internet radio

Coupled with an onboard display, the Raspberry Pi makes a great choice for an internet radio receiver. Follow our guide to start streaming stations

The radio, a remarkable invention, was all but supplanted as the centre of home entertainment by the television, and as a source of up-to-the-minute news by the internet. Its biggest drawback, aside from sometimes questionable audio quality, is its limited range. Even today, with the rise of digital radio, channels are typically national rather than international in their reach.

Eclipse Sky-Cube i5

We’ve seen quite a few compact PCs over the past couple of issues, and the race for a spot in your living room is hotting up with every release. The latest, Eclipse’s Sky-Cube i5, is among the smallest PCs we’ve seen, with an Antec ISK600 case that’s just 195mm tall and has a footprint of 260x369mm.

It’s one of the cheapest mini-ITX cases you can buy, retailing for around £30. It’s no design icon, with square edges and a boxy shape, but at least it won’t draw attention to itself if you’re after a more subtle kind of PC.

The Souls Still Burn

Years on, Dark Souls continues to resonate throughout videogames. Here, players, designers and famous fans unpick its influence

It’s understandable that games such as Super Mario 64 and The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time would prove enormously influential, because they set the standard for different types of 3D worlds back when 3D worlds were new. It’s understandable that games such as Doom and Wolfenstein would be cited so often as foundational works in the videogame form, because they wrote so many of the early rules of the firstperson shooter. When it comes to Dark Souls’ influence on game design, though, it didn’t invent new rules, or set new technological standards, or change the conception of what a videogame could be. What it did was make people think differently about how a game could be, and what players would appreciate.

Old Souls

Hidetaka Miyazaki rekindles the flame in a return to the series that made his name

Even from a distance, he is unmistakable. We turn into a corridor and hear his repetitive, metallic clank. We see his sprawling grey mane and, below that, a burly, hairless torso. This near-final build of Dark Souls III has just arrived in Bandai Namco’s UK office, and we are the first to play it. The PR rep looking over our shoulder gasps. We just about keep our cool. We approach Andre the blacksmith and his west country lilt is every bit as calming, yet motivating, as it was in 2011’s Dark Souls. “Prithee, be careful,” he ooh-arrs when our business is done. “Wouldn’t want to see m’work squandered.” For you, Andre, anything.

Way of the Street Fighter

A Dutch professor has spent five years and 1.25m euro seeking to answer a simple question: should Street Fighter be considered a martial art?

A few years ago, during a drink-fuelled graduation ceremony at Leiden University, Chris Goto-Jones, a lecturer in comparative philosophy and political thought, asked a group of outgoing honours students to identify the single most important thing they had learned during their education. “I was somewhat hopeful that their answers might include references to great works of literature, exalted philosophical principles, or perhaps rigorous scientific methodologies,” he says. It wasn’t to be. Some students joked that they could barely remember what had happened during all those indistinguishable semesters, with their hedonistic nights and drowsy, morning-after lectures. One student drolly turned the question around, asking: “Professor, what do you think was the most important thing I learned?”