Yamaha YSP-1600: Single bar sounds sweet enough

Anyone drawing up a mid-range/premium soundbar shortlist will no doubt be intrigued by Yamaha's YSP-1600. Selling for £500, it shares some of the DNA of the brand's higher-end models (the YSP-2500 and YSP-5600) but leaves more cash in the bank for Blu-rays. There are plenty of other prospect at this price, however, so can the soundbar do enough to make it an essential audition?

Philips 55PUS8601: 4K TV better by design?

When it comes to TV design, Philips has an almost unfair advantage. After all, no other brand offers Ambilight, where the screen’s rear edges are fitted with LED lights able to cast colourful auras that can accurately match the tones and variations of the pictures you’re watching. It's a longrunning USP, and one that we're routinely impressed by.

Denon AVR-X6200W: X marks the spot

If 3D audio’s your thing, then this Denon AVR is where you want to be.

It's a tempting time to upgrade your AVR. With a rising tide of 4K content requiring HDCP 2.2 copy protection, UHD 2,160p displays and object-based audio formats, the stars are aligning for those eager for a movie theatre makeover. And if you’re prepared to shop at a higher level, there’re precious few compromises that need be made.

Consider Denon’s AVR-X6200W, one of the most advanced nine-channel receivers in town. Not only does this £1,800 receiver handle 4K HDR sources and Dolby Atmos/DTS:X bitstreams, you can even upgrade it to Auro-3D, should you be a completist.

Dangerous Golf: Stroke of Madness

In Dangerous Golf, without the albatross of technical limitations around their neck, the makers of Burnout take a swing at creating the Crash mode they always dreamed of. Fore!

When it comes to whetting your appetite, Dangerous Golf knows just how to lay the table. With candlesticks and champagne bottles to start, followed by teetering piles of china plates and fragile wine glasses for the main course. And for dessert? How about a tray of annoyingly fussy vol-au-vent pastries, each one costing more than your mortgage, and each one filled with a jam that would look fantastic smeared across the floor?

Chillblast Fusion Brimstone

The Fusion Brimstone from Bournemouth-based Chillblast sports the type of graphics hardware we’re not used to seeing inside a mid-range £1,500 gaming PC. Instead of the usual single-card setup, the Fusion Brimstone is packed with a pair of GTX 980 GPUs – and they’re hefty, overclocked Windforce models made by Gigabyte. These triple-fan cards have had their 1126MHz base clocks boosted to 1203MHz, and between the two of them, they deploy 8GB of GDDR5 memory, 4,096 stream processors and more than ten million transistors.

Overclockers Titan Finesse Phoenix

The Titan Finesse Phoenix has a consistent red and black theme. The NZXT Noctis 450 case is black throughout, and Overclockers has cleverly made it glow with crimson There are strip lights in the roof, fans that illuminate meshed areas and more lights under the chassis to provide a warming red glow from beneath. The colouring continues to the components. The Asus motherboard and MSI graphics card both have black heatsinks tinged with red, and the visible power cables are braided in both colours.

PC Specialist Nova

PC Specialist has named its Nova after an intergalactic explosion, so we’re expecting a lot from this sturdy, squat system. It starts well with a Zotac GeForce GTX Titan X. It’s Nvidia’s beefiest graphics card, with the same Maxwell architecture used elsewhere but with almost three billion more transistors than the GTX 980. That translates to 3,072 stream processors, a 1GHz core, and 12GB of GDDR5 memory clocked to 1753MHz.