PC Powerplay #241 July 2015

Almost immediately after writing this I have to start packing my bags for Computex. I’m usually a little jaded when it comes to work trips. I’ve done a lot of them and the majority feel more like taking a long sleepless commute to work rather than travelling to a different country. I feel differently about Computex. I’ve never been to one before. That’s exciting in itself, but what’s more exciting is that it will be an intensive crash course getting me back up to speed on the PC tech world, and the cutting edge PC tech world at that. I know the general rules of modern tech and have the contacts, but my in depth knowledge is a little lacking. The last time I was heavily invested professionally in PC…

DANIEL WILKS woz ‘ere. @drwilkenstein MALCOLM CAMPBELL is staring at his own name. BENNETT RING is in tech heaven. @bennettring JAMES COTTEE endlessly ponders. @j_cottee MEGHANN O’NEILL may have kissed Blackwall. @firkraags JAMES O’CONNOR has a fine beard. @jickle BEN MANSILL Agonised over War Thunder. NATHAN LAWRENCE needs to trim his beard. ANGUS BAILLIE Whokka whokka? ALESSANDRO GUARRERA can’t stop thinking with magnets. @ALguarrera DAVID HOLLINGWORTH has had a haircut. ALEX MANN is the bacon & egg king. CAMERON FERRIS broke the stapler. @pcpowerplay SEAN FLETCHER joins the team!…

LETTER OF THE MONTH WINS! Write in to PCPP with your rants, considered opinions, and endless run-on sentences of pure awesome. The address is letters@pcpowerplay.com . au. Each letter read by hand! This Letter of the Month winner scores himself a sweet Turtle Beach Grip 300 Gaming Mouse Kit! LETTER OF THE MONTH WHO WATCHES THE WATCHDOGS I recently purchased a copy of watch dogs and found that the key had been used, this is the response I got. I thought you might like to let your readers know how willing Ubisoft is to hand out their personal details. Apologies for the late response, We have checked the CD key code that you have sent to us and we found that your CD key is registered to…

Gareth Barthorpe: twas a thoroughly decent edition, though there were a few spelling mistakes, a couple of garbled sentences and one doubled up opinion statement (intel’s opinion) in the gaming in 20 years time piece. Matthew Schmidt: I like the shiny. Mitchell Hall: Good cover, excellent preview of Star Wars: Battlefront, would have liked it to feel more like a birthday issue. Justin Murtagh: Cover was amazing. Although temper , it’s pretty hard to stuff up Star Wars. Unless you’re George Lucas. MAKE YOURSELF HEARD! facebook.com/pcpoweplay www. .com.au…

Hey guys I figured I’d show my setup, which is primarily setup for Flight Simulator. I took this new setup from under the desk with the idea to basically piss the wife off, given that she spends so much more on her clothes. The cases are Antec skeletons which have been given a custom paint job to look the part. They are mounted on aluminium racks which I made to keep these units out of the wife’s reach. The second PC is networked to support the main one with background programs like weather and navigation. The main computer is run by an i7 2600k @4.5ghz on water, alongside with a HD6970, also water cooled. Flight Simulator runs pretty happily on this hardware. The radiator, fans and reservoir are on a…

Now here’s good news for people who like watching their hand-picked, elite squads of infantry die in horrible ways - 2K has announced that XCOM 2 is in development. And, interestingly, it’s only being announced for PC at this stage. The new game posits what happened to most people in XCOM - we’ve lost, and the aliens have won. Now XCOM is an even more clandestine operation, fighting against the alien-backed ‘new world order. The future cities and locations look more like something out of Deus Ex, and gear and models have an all new, far grittier feel. “Firaxis proved they could reimagine a beloved franchise with XCOM: Enemy Unknown, a Game of the Year award-winning title” said Christoph Hartmann, president of 2K, in today’s release. “With XCOM 2, the…