OMG they killed mini!

For friends and family of the most affordable Mac, this new version offers a terrible shock. It’s one of those Doctor Who moments when a friend turns around and… they’re a Cyberman.

Previously in the four-year history of the unibody Mac mini, its base was a black plastic disc with indents for your thumbs. Twisting this off revealed the inner workings. The RAM was right there, with a diagram to help you swap modules, so you could upgrade the memory at any time, rather than pay Apple’s extortionate prices for extra RAM when buying your Mac. If you were more ambitious, after removing a few more components the main logic board slid right out, revealing the power supply and drives.

14 million 745 thousand 600 pixels

Apple’s brand new Retina 5K display shows seven times more detail than 1080p HD, and nearly three times more than a 15in Retina MacBook Pro. And it comes with a free iMac.

It’s true: when you look at the prices emerging for other makers’ 5K monitors, they’re similar to what Apple is charging for the new 5K iMac. That’s not to say it’s cheap; but its apparent £550 premium over the basic 27in model is only £240 once you adjust all the specifications to match (even then, the 5K has a slightly faster CPU).

And when you see this screen, £240 is suddenly not going to seem like a lot of money. The obvious question about the Retina display, with its fourfold increase in pixel count, is: can you tell the difference? We saw it for the first time, at Apple’s invitation, in the new conferencing annexe to the Apple Store on Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm, which is as good a place as any to see a thing but offered no previous Macs to compare with. Even so: yes, we could see the difference. Such a huge display with such a complete absence of pixellation is quite something to behold.

Dirty Bomb

DAVE KOZICKI discovers that Dirty Bomb is about to blow the roof off this mother…

ow would we sum up Dirty Bomb in a word? Fast. OK, maybe one word isn’t enough. How about ve words? Unrelentingly fast, old school shooter. How unrelenting? Liam Neeson on your arse because you kidnapped his daughter unrelenting. How damned fast? It’s quicker than a newly single Ryan Gosling pulling at a bar. How Old School is it? About as Old School as Will Ferrell drunk streaking his way to KFC. Yep, it doesn’t get more Old School than that.

Dirty Bomb is setting itself up to be the game Splash Damage was destined to make. It takes the developer’s well known pedigree for creating hardcore multiplayer first-person shooters, such as Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, tosses in the loud character designs and personalities of Brink and dumps it all in a Free-to-Play model to maximise exposure and get it out to the masses. It’s a classic shooter designed for the modern gamer and is an amalgamation of everything Splash Damage has done successfully over the decades.

AS Rock Z97E-ITX/ac

The Z97E-ITX/ac is one of the cheapest boards on test, so it’s no surprise that its heatsinks are small and plain without a connecting heatpipe. There are no on-board buttons either, and the area around the CPU socket is sparse, although that also makes it easier to attach coolers to the board.

However, the 8-pin CPU power connector is awkwardly located next to a heatsink, while the four SATA 6Gbps connectors and SATA Express port are crammed between the memory slots and Wi-Fi chip. Meanwhile, the CPU fan connector is in the top-right corner, which is fairly sensible, but the other fan connector is in the bottom-left corner, beyond the memory slots, and there's no third fan header.

Gigabyte F2A88XN-WIFI

Gigabyte's F2A88XN-WIFI is one of a few FM2+ mini-ITX boards available, matching the low cost of AMD's APUs with a highly affordable price of £75, making it over £25 cheaper than the cheapest Intel-based boards on test.

That saving immediately makes this board a contender for cheaper builds based on AMD's integrated CPU for modest work and play, rather than small, powerful gaming machines. In some areas, though, the F2A88XN-WIFI's specification matches - or beats - its Intel-based rivals. Its 64GB maximum memory is four times the capacity offered by most mini-ITX boards (although you'll need 32CB DIMMs), and it also sports Gigabit Ethernet and dual-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi, like most affordable Intel boards.