Innehållsförteckning för Issue 256 från PC Powerplay

The successor to Samsung’s very fast and very popular M.2 PCIe SSD is here. The new 960 Pro and 960 Evo SSDs both use Samsung’s new Polaris controller and feature 48-layer V-NAND, with the Pro using the MLC based chips and the Evo using TLC technology. The Pro is available in 512GB, 1TB and 2TB capacities, with the Evo coming in 250GB, 500GB and 1TB sizes. The main difference between the Pro and the Evo is performance, with the Pro just getting a bit more speed thanks to the MLC NAND. The Pro can hit speeds of up to 3500 MB/s, which is blistering, but the Evo is no slouch either, hitting up to 3200 MB/s in sequential read speeds. The 960 series also has a new heat spreader on…

Acer has shown off some very fancy gaming monitors that’re sure to wow even the most hardcore gaming enthusiast. The Predator displays feature Tobii EyeX tracking technology: an alternative input method to the traditional mouse and keyboard. These monitors have embedded sensors that allow a camera to track eye positions and gaze points that can be fed into games to control camera orientation or other game features. 40 games already have support for Tobii EyeX, such as Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and The Division. Tobii EyeX is also compatible with Windows Hello, as a quick way of authentication. The three Predator displays come in 24.5” and 27” sizes and feature NVIDIA G-Sync support. They’re not exactly cheap, starting at approximately $1200 for the curved 27”, but if you’re after a…

The PAX Arena is coming back! Catch the Australian & New Zealand finals of the Counter Strike: Global Offensive finals at PAX Australia. At this year’s PAX Australia event in Melbourne, the PAX Arena is coming back, packed with competitive gaming events featuring some of the best eSports teams in the ANZ region. The event runs over the whole of PAX AUS, from the 4th to the 6th of November. The ESL Counter-Strike: Global Offensive AU & NZ Championship Finals is a round-robin event that will lead up to the two best teams fighting it out live via Twitch on the the 6th of November at 12pm. And there’s $20,000 in prize money up for grabs! Here’s the full schedule: Round Robin - Tues. 4 Oct. 7pm - 11pm AEDT…

“Initially inscrutable, the people you’re fighting soon make a worrying kind of sense” When PC Powerplay #254 arrived in my mailbox and I screamed, “Civilization VI,” loudly enough for a passing neighbour to turn her head captiously, I realised that game hype has largely lost its feeling of pressing concern in my life. And this is coming from the gal who once got out of bed at 2am to download The Sims 2 Pets expansion pack. (And again at 4am to play it before work.) I still love games devoutly, as I hope is obvious when you read the indie pages. It’s just that the anticipation for any particular thing has been crowded out by one of every other thing, not to mention endless Kickstarter updates for the addition of…

Each year, there seem to be more options for potential games students in Australia. AIE is expanding out (they’re currently establishing their Perth campus), developers, programmers, and artists of all kinds are moving into teaching roles, and many of the independent developers working around Australia are made up of people who met in class. We’ve reached out to educators, students, and alumni around the country to talk about getting an education in games.…

“The main missions are comprised of fetch quests, key hunts, and tedious jumping puzzles” DEVELOPER COMCEPT/ ARMATURE STUDIO PUBLISHER MICROSOFT STUDIOS PRICE $39.99 USD AVAILABLE AT WIN 10 STORE recoregame.com Far Eden, the distant planet on which ReCore is set, was once a place of so much promise. An escape for mankind after Earth is ravaged by plague, thousands of machines known as corebots were sent to terraform the surface as most of humanity slumbered in orbiting ships. Joule, the game’s protagonist, wakes from cryosleep down on the planet to find that (predictably) very little has gone to plan. It’s not far from how I felt when playing ReCore. Joule navigates the desert landscape on foot, leaping about with the help of rocket boosters. She is accompanied by three corebots…

“Mother Russia Bleeds is a game that equates difficulty with more enemies on-screen” DEVELOPER LE CARTEL STUDIO PUBLISHER DEVOLVER DIGITAL PRICE $14.99 USD AVAILABLE AT STEAM motherrussiableeds.com The side scrolling beat ‘em up had been a mainstay of gaming for years, but outside of the true kings of the genre – Final Fight, Double Dragon, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and the like – most entries into the style have been one-off affairs. Mother Russia Bleeds is something of a love letter to the genre, aping both the style and substance of many of these classic side scrolling games, whilst amping up the pixelated violence and gore to ludicrous levels. While this approach is commendable on a nostalgic level, it also highlights many of the problems inherent in these old school…

“Redout is Wipeout for the PC master race with a taste of Nintendo’s F-Zero mixed in” DEVELOPER 34BIGTHINGS SRL PUBLISHER 34BIGTHINGS SRL PRICE $34.99 USD AVAILABLE AT STEAM 34bigthings.com Wipeout has a very special place in gaming culture. The futuristic hovercar racer may have had, in Psygnosis, a fairly typical developer, but it was the LOOK of the game that made the 1995 original and its many sequels and reboots so iconic. The Designer’s Republic took every late 90s Cyberpunk-Akihabara visual trope, mashed them together and the result was awesome. It even featured briefly in Hackers, for the ultimate in 90s cred. Since the “cars” in Wipeout have no wheels, the game is all about fluid speed. Extreme speed. Mad, stupid speed. Supersonic? Forget about it. These things are capable…

If you want the absolute maximum in SSD performance, then the Samsung 950 Pro is at the top of the performance ladder. While a SATA SSD is a great all-round choice for quick access and write times, the Samsung 950 Pro takes it to a new level of extreme performance. Most SATA drives will deliver around 500MB/s of read and write speeds, but the 950 Pro smashes through that barrier, offering write speeds of up to 1500MB/s and an astounding 2500MB/s read speeds. It achieves these incredible numbers thanks to being based on the very newest NVMe SSD interface. The drive itself comes in a tiny M.2 form-factor, which most new motherboards support. It installs flush on the motherboard, needs no cables and is so small and low profile that…

 PRICE STARTS AT $1499 “Alienware claims that this second revision of the Alpha is up to 60% faster than the original version” alienware.com The original Alienware Alpha was born in a time when Valve’s steam machines seemed like they were going to revolutionise PC gaming. We all know how well that turned out – we’re as likely to see Steam machines take over PC gaming as we are a plebiscite on gay marriage. It was tiny, relatively quiet, and fairly cheap, but it lacked the gaming guts to play any of the games of the day at high settings. This was thanks to the proprietary GTX 750 level card inside, which was slow by any stretch of the imagination. Alienware has taken a second crack at the Alpha, delivering the…

“If you’ve got a low profile cooler, you can forget about using these badboys – they simply won’t fit” PRICE $285 corsair.com Even though our extensive testing has shown that increasing memory speeds usually doesn’t lead to noticeably improved game performance – except in texture-hogging pigs like Fallout 4 – memory companies nevertheless continue the race to increase the speeds of DDR4. This is good news for budget conscious gamers. As speeds get faster and faster, high-end, ultra-fast memory that was once beyond the means of frugal gamers is now actually quite affordable. Not cheap, mind: but not enough to break the bank either. That’s the case with this kit from Corsair. At $285 for 32GB it’s only a little more expensive than DDR4 2400MHz, but you get the added…

“Built around Sennheiser’s proprietary technology, the audio delivered is crystal clear no matter the volume” PRICE $399 www.sennheiser.com If you’re looking for a cheap set of gaming headphones to whip through a quick round of Call of Duty, these are not the headphones for you. At $400 they’re some of the most expensive on the market, not surprising considering they come from the premium Sennheiser brand. But can you really tell the difference between a $400 set of headphones and a pair of $150 cheapies from another generic brand? The answer is most definitely yes. The first thing you’ll notice about these headphones is how darn light they are. Instead of the neck-straining whoppers from other brands, Sennheiser has made this set about as light as possible without making them…

01 Artifox Desk 02 $1400+ • Artifox artifox.com Artifox enjoys minimalism, which is good because so do we. POWERED UP: Made of hardwood and steel. There’s a hook on each of the front legs for hanging things like bags or headphones, and there’s a cable grid to keep your cables untangled and fed neatly up through the built-in dock slot where all your smartphones and tablets can be kept. PLAYED OUT: Great for a laptop and dock combo, probably not so great for a full tower, three monitors, router, gamepad, and joystick. But maybe that’s just our problem. 02 Mophie Power Capsule $60 • Mophie mophie.com Every day is new opportunity to see people wearing wireless earbuds. And yes, they were a thing before Apple released a pair. POWERED UP:…

“Smart has singled-out Star Citizen as some kind of elaborate, multimillion-dollar scam” BATTLECRUISER 3000AD DEVELOPER 3000AD PERSONALITY DEREK SMART RELEASED 1996 (KIND OF) NUTSHELL Absurdly ambitious military space sim designed to stick it to those pricks at Origin who thought they were so great, well NO ONE has made a game this awesome with so much detail built on technology that hasn’t been recreated to this DAY certainly not with $100 million of other people’s money SHUT UP. Separating Battlecruiser 3000AD the game from Battlecruiser 3000AD the late-90s / early-00s cultural phenomenon is difficult, and made more difficult by the way its creator Derek Smart continues to evangelise it, in more or less proportion with the increasing success of Star Citizen. As most vaguely-aware PC gamers know, Smart has singled-out…

UNBIASED AND UNBALANCED Another great article by Daniel Wilks in PCPP #254, bringing to light a global misunderstanding of media roles, leading to communal divisiveness, and concocted outrage, not just in the gaming industry. It might help if primary schools taught the meaning of each media role and the critical differences between them, at the same time as children learn to read and understand language.Mass Media is the primary interface through which we all build our worldview, and are variously entertained and/or informed in the process. Unfortunately a disproportionate number of us take editorial or opinion (‘entertainment’) as ‘factual information’. Mr Wilks uses varying terms of gaming writer roles throughout his excellent piece, but it is vital that readers distinguish between them to appreciate why there is division and outrage…

AMD has officially launched their 7th-generation Bristol Ridge processors as well as the new AM4 socket and related chipsets. There’s a total of eight new CPUs, targeted at OEMs, rather than DIY system builders. The new chips are in the 35W and 65W TDP range. The flagship 65W model is the A12-9800, which uses the new Excavator v2 microarchitecture, supports DDR4-2400 RAM, has a base 3.8GHz and turbo 4.2GHz frequency and an integrated Radeon R7 GPU clocked at 800MHz base, 1108MHz turbo. The B350 chipset was also announced to go with the new CPUs and brings USB 3.1 support natively to the AMD platform. AMD will reveal their enthusiast and DIY system builder range of 7th-generation Bristol Ridge chips later this year.…

Dell’s gaming brand, Alienware, has announced updates to their range of gaming notebooks. The popular Alienware 15 and 17 now have a thinner chassis and updated internals. Both are labelled as “VR-Ready”, packing a GTX 1080 in the 17 and a GTX 1070 in the 15. The CPUs are still 6th Generation Intel chips and are available up to a quad core i7. The design has changed, with the laptop now 25% thinner than the previous models and cases made out of anodized aluminium with magnesium alloy and steel reinforcements. The keyboard is all new, with switches that allow 2.2mm of key travel, as well as the ability to simultaneously press up to 10 keys. The new Tobii eye-tracking feature is built in, allowing the cameras to track your eye…

Coincidentally, I just finished reading a book called Revenger, and if you like steampunk sci-fi, it’s pretty great. Cougar’s new mouse, also called the Revenger, also looks pretty great, but is lacking in the steampunk department. What it does have, however, is a PMW 3360 sensor capable of an impressive 12,000 dpi, tinned with OMRON micro-switches. Cougar promises ‘consistency and accuracy’ across a range of resolutions, up to multi-screen and 4K builds. The mouse also boasts six buttons capable of up to 21 different functions, thanks to macros that can be assigned via Cougar’s UIX software. 512kb of onboard memory also lets you store three complete profiles on board, and of course there’s the obligatory RGB backlight, offering two distinct lighting zones. The Revenger features rubber grip pads on either…

“We may be past the point of market saturation ... Maybe GameMaker itself is diving headfirst into the tar pits” While there have been some fantastic bargains on the Humble Store over the years, the recent Battleborn fire sale demonstrated two salient points. Firstly, some programs aren’t worth buying at any price – like an online game without a player base. And secondly, sometimes the Humble Store will sell software that simply isn’t worth owning. They recently offered a trio of Humble Bundles encompassing software from the GameMaker family of programs. On paper even the most expensive of these represented phenomenal value – around $1,800 USD worth of warez for a mere $15 USD. For the price of an indie game, any punter could purchase GameMaker: Studio Pro, the plugins…

PREY DEVELOPER ARKANE STUDIOS PUBLISHER BETHESDA SOFTWORKS DUE 2017 prey.bethesda.net/ “I quite liked the premise of Prey 2,” Arkane Studio’s co-founder, and the creative director on Prey, Raphaël Colantonio, reveals as we sit backstage in Austin, Texas. Moments earlier the first gameplay demonstration of Prey had been received to rapturous applause in a large theatre just down the hall, and it was clear nothing of the failed sequel – and its Deus Ex meets Blade Runner in space setting – remained. In fact, Colantonio dismisses the old Prey with a casual wave of his hand; “this is a very different game altogether.” “We never became involved in a discussion about taking over the Prey IP,” Colantonio continues as we dive deeper into the surprise resurrection of this seemingly dead franchise.…

“Demon hunters are a spectacle to behold as they leap, dash, and backflip across the battlefield” DEVELOPER BLIZZARD ENTERTAINMENT PUBLISHER BLIZZARD ENTERTAINMENT PRICE $69.95 AVAILABLE AT BATTLE.NET us.battle.net World of Warcraft has supposedly died and come back to life that many times even my cat is starting to get jealous. Now it’s back with some new tricks and a fresh lick of paint (that’s WoW, not my cat), but most importantly the world of Azeroth feels alive again. Here’s the need-to-know, story-wise: the demonic Burning Legion has returned, and the heroes of Azeroth must travel to the Broken Isles to stop them. Along the way you’ll wield powerful artefact weapons from Warcraft’s lore, establish an order hall for your class, and uncover the story behind Illidan Stormrage and his demon…

“Combat is an exercise in active listening as well as pattern recognition” DEVELOPER TINIMATION PUBLISHER SNOW CANNON GAMES PRICE $14.99 USD AVAILABLE AT STEAM tinimations.net Two things you really need to know before installing Klang: one, it’s best to install the game on a SSD rather than a standard HDD as the game loads most assets before starting, so boot up can take quite a while from a conventional drive; and two, even though the game is playable with a keyboard, you really want a controller if you don’t want to be pulling your hair out after the first one or two levels. The reason for the controller becomes apparent pretty early on – whilst it’s easy (or at least relatively easy) to hit left, right, up, and down in…

DEMO-LITIOUS So for the last couple of months we’ve tried to fill the disk with as many free games as possible, with VR titles, Battlefield mods, and the like, but this month we’re switching it up with demos of some great games you might not have heard of (and a few you probably have but are quite timely in their own ways). We also have some free games, so fear not. Mandagon is amazing. Think pixel 2D Tibetan Tomb Raider and you’re part way there. Just play it already. Enjoy. The PCPP Team. 31 FREE GAMES AND DEMOS! • A Midsummer Night’s Choice Demo• A Week of Circus Terror Demo• Ara Fell Demo• atorb Demo• Blacksea Odyssey Demo• Choice of the Pirate Demo• Corona Blossom Vol 1. Gift from the Galaxy Demo• Demetrios - The BIG Cynical Adventure…

Upgrade Australia has grown, and now with four mighty events Aussies have heard the call, and come to see, learn and play. The top tech companies are behind Upgrade Australia all the way, and this is the place to catch the newest gear before anyone else. PC & TECH AUTHORITY Helping Australian’s learn about, and get the most from PC tech, since 1997. PC POWERPLAY The finest damn PC gaming magazine on this planet, and probably many others. HYPER Gaming and culture and the whole cool tech life that we love…

Having a NAS (Network Attached Storage) connected to your home network is now something we believe you can’t get by without. The convenience and accessibility of NAS backup files can’t be beat and for digital media there’s no better solution. Qnap has been developing outstanding NAS devices since 2004, and its TS-251A and TS-451A are great examples of what a NAS can do for you. Whether you choose the two-bay TS-251A or four-bay TS-451A, you have the power of a 14nm Celeron dual-core CPU with burst speeds up to 2.48GHz, plus 2GB or 4GB of fast DDR3L memory (upgradeable to 8GB) to keep things smooth and speedy. With dual-Ethernet ports and SATA 6Gb/s onboard, these NAS devices can deliver transfer speeds up to 213MB/s. Setup is easier than ever. Both…

“The GT73VR is an absolute behemoth of a gaming laptop packed to the brim with the latest in quality components” PRICE $4,999 www.msi.com.au On p.76 in this very issue, we’ve reviewed the stupendously fast Metabox Prime-X, which comes packing twin mobile GeForce GTX 1080s. As expected, it blew away every laptop we’ve ever tested, but what happens when you take one of those GeForce GTX 1080s out? MSI’s new GT73VR is just the machine to let us know, as it uses one of these cards instead of two. Like the Prime-X, MSI has adopted the old school approach of building a huge gaming laptop, forgoing the recent trend of shrinking them to sizes approaching Ultrabooks. Tipping the scales at a hefty 4.14kg it’s not exactly mobile, though MSI does point…

“With M.2 and NVMe hitting desktops, it’s brave of Corsair to release a SATA 3 drive... some might say foolish” PRICE $299 corsair.com These days it’s almost impossible to find a laptop that ships with a standard SATA 3 SSD – all of the major manufacturers have moved to the M.2 format. However, that’s as much for size reasons (M.2 drives are much smaller than standard SATA 3 drives) as it is for speed. Still, we’re rapidly seeing M.2 and now NVMe hitting the desktop market, so for Corsair to release a SATA 3 drive is a brave move. Some might even say foolish. The biggest change here is a doubling in onboard DRAM to improve performance, yet it’s not a massive increase. Corsair claims 560MB/ sec of sequential read…

“You don’t get a native 4K image – it’s simply 1080p with extra pixels added, making for a slight increase in clarity” PRICE $4,800 epson.com.au My good friends know how obsessed I am with projectors – my first model was around the time of the original Xbox release, where it’s 720p resolution looked absolutely incredible blown up to the size of a theatre screen on my wall. It’s also why I do most of my gaming on an Epson TW9200, a 1080p projector that delivers a truly big-screen gaming experience. So when I heard that Epson was releasing a 4K projector for less than five grand, I was amazed. Until now, only Sony had offered remotely affordable home 4K projectors, and they were in the twenty grand range, just a…

PRICE $299 roccat.org There is obviously a market for couch based peripherals for lounge-room PC gaming. Corsair has already released their Lapdog keyboard enclosure and now Roccat has released theirs. Rather than being a stable table with space for a keyboard and some cables, the Sova is an all in one unit with a built-in membrane keyboard (there is a mechanical version available in other territories but it hasn’t reached Australia as yet), and ample room for a mouse. The lapboard connects to a PC via two 4m breakaway USB cables. The cables are joined near the lapboard with PS/2 style connectors ensuring that anyone who trips over the them is far more likely to break themselves than anything valuable. These two USB cables power the keyboard and an additional…

Recently my old, but beloved gaming rig met an untimely demise. So while I went about raising the funds for a new one I decided to try my hand at some case modding and build a Mandalorian Mercenary themed PC. This was my first attempt at modding a case but I’m happy with the results. The donor case was an Antec Three Hundred Two. I cut out the HDD cages to allow the front case fans some unobstructed air flow. Added an additional fan to the side to help cool the graphics card. Cut the top out and built a custom cradle to hold the liquid cooling radiator to keep overclocking temperatures down. Gave the inside a cherry red paint job and the exterior a battle hardened Mando merc paint…

A company familiar to any flight simulation enthusiast would be Saitek. They make all sorts of controllers like yokes and throttles and joysticks for those who love to play Elite: Dangerous and the popular Microsoft Flight Simulator series of games. Saitek even make hardware for farming simulators! Saitek is now a Logitech brand, after MadCatz agreed to sell it to Logitech for US$13m. This acquisition adds to Logitech’s already impressive range of highly rated driving related paraphernalia such as steering wheels, pedals and shifters. Saitek’s products will be progressively integrated into the Logitech G brand and Logitech plan to invest heavily in making a wide range of immersive hardware devices that’ll ensure Saitek’s legacy lives on.…

“Xbox One and Windows 10 racers can compete with and against each other” A lot of things are great on paper. Communism. Square-based tacos. Microsoft’s rekindled love for PC gamers when spruiking pre-release Windows 10. I was one of those people that immediately upgraded to Windows 10 as soon as it was available. For the most part, I love it. But, like other gamers, I’m sure, a big part of that motivation to upgrade to Windows 10 (outside of the free price tag) was this idea that it was an operating system built with gamers in mind. DirectX 12 was at the forefront of the Windows 10 gaming dream, and even though I wasn’t particularly fond of the idea of having to use yet another digital platform outside of Steam,…

I recently tried to play some of the new space shooter Everspace. I say tried, because I wanted to experience the game in virtual reality – while technically possible, however, it shows some serious pitfalls to presenting anything in VR in a less than polished form. Early Access is an interesting idea. For a lot of developers, it hits two birds with one stone – it gives them an early revenue stream as people buy into a game before it’s completed, and it offers a willing audience with which to test and balance a game. From that side of the fence, it’d a deal that’s almost too good to refuse, but a lot of gamers – all you have to do is read some Steam reviews of Early Access games…

RAIN WORLD DEVELOPER VIDEOCULT PUBLISHER ADULT SWIM GAMES DUE 2017 rainworldgame.com Rain World is a rogue-like adventure following a nomadic, weirdly adorable part slug part cat creature on its quest to hunt for food. Players explore an industrial wasteland, hunting and gathering food to survive while in danger of being the prey of larger and more terrifying creatures. A distinct pixelated art style with an emphasis on grey visuals illustrates your polluted surroundings. Creature designs look disturbing as well, as elongated worms and radioactive lizards found in drenched sewer channels cross your path. ASTRONEER DEVELOPER SYSTEM ERA SOFTWORKS PUBLISHER SYSTEM ERA SOFTWORKS DUE 2016 astroneer.space Currently in Steam’s early access, Astroneer is an expansive interplanetary exploration game with a cutesy aesthetic that belies the depth of its underyling systems. Players…

“The problem with Obduction is one of MOOD. There’s just not much that feels worth exploring” DEVELOPER CYAN INC PUBLISHER CYAN INC PRICE $29.99 USD AVAILABLE AT STEAM obduction.com When I started on PCPP back in 2000, the best-selling PC game of all time was Myst. During 2000, Myst lost the best-selling crown to The Sims. Neither of these are what you might call “core” PCPP games. Myst was a flip-book Hypercard project built on Mac, and the Sims was... well, you know what the Sims was. Of course, developer Cyan’s real masterpiece (and by extension the masterpiece of subsequently-estranged brothers Rand and Robyn Miller) was Myst’s sequel, Riven. A five-CD epic, it still had no real-time animation, but what it did have was a world that felt organically real.…

“You could cause a massive sinkhole to drag everything down into the void” DEVELOPER MASCHINEN-MENSCH PUBLISHER MASCHINEN-MENSCH PRICE $14.99 USD AVAILABLE AT STEAM curious-expedition.com The intrepid team of explorers, desperate in their search for fame and fortune, finally made it to the golden pyramid at the centre of this strange, foreboding land. Their numbers were diminished – one of the porters took his own life and the cook ironically wound up as dinner for a cannibal tribe – but the drive to succeed where others had failed was still strong. Well, strong until fire started to rain from the sky… The Curious Expedition is a game almost purpose made for anecdotes. Each playthrough is quick but packed with great moments and exposition, making each individual trek memorable and serving to…

“Text descriptions, still images, Skill, Stamina, and Luck… it all feels a bit quaint, honestly” DEVELOPER TIN MAN GAMES PUBLISHER TIN MAN GAMES PRICE $19.95 USD AVAILABLE AT STEAM tinmangames.com.au Fighting Fantasy (FF) is a series of once-popular “gamebooks” invented by gaming luminaries Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone. The basic idea with FF books is that they combine the branching narrative of a Choose Your Own Adventure with light, D&Dish roleplaying. The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, published in 1982, was the very first FF novel and is generally regarded as one of the best. Simplicity is its chief virtue, the narrative being a flimsy excuse for a straight-up dungeon crawl through Firetop Mountain to find and kill its warlock master, Zagor. Built with Tim Man’s gamebook adventure engine, the digital…

FPS gamers demand the best gear tailored to their specific needs, so when HyperX set about designing its first ever PC gaming keyboard they went straight to the professionals. Consulting with pro gamers such as Legacy eSports, who boast one of Australia’s top CS: GO teams, enabled HyperX to deliver the ALLOY FPS Mechanical Gaming Keyboard, a full-sized mechanical gaming keyboard that has a space-saving layout to maximise desktop real estate for FPS mouse movement. With an RRP of $169, the HyperX ALLOY FPS Mechanical Gaming Keyboard is built with a solid steel frame, features Cherry MX Mechanical switches with HyperX red backlit keys and six preset LED modes including a custom mode. The keyboard also offers Game Mode to easily disable the Windows key to prevent accidental game interruptions,…

“Backing up the extraordinary graphics hardware are some of the most serious components in the biz” PRICE $6,899 www.metabox.com.au Nvidia’s new Pascal architecture is taking the world by storm, and the moment we’ve been waiting for has finally arrived – a mobile version of the current king of the stack, the GeForce GTX 1080. Except Aussie company Metabox has gone one better – instead of just putting one 1080 inside the Prime-X, they’ve stuffed two of these monsters inside. Considering we were expecting this GPU to already be the world’s fastest on its own, putting two inside should deliver some remarkable performance, and it’s taken a bunch of crazy Aussies to pull it off first. We should point out that the Prime-X series encompasses a wide range different laptops –…

“4x4 devices, such as this PCIe card from Asus, are designed to turn your desktop PC into a Wi-Fi powered beast” PRICE $169 asus.com.au There are a lot of router manufacturers out there making some rather bold claims about performance. In reality the vast majority don’t perform anywhere close to those speeds, but it’s not their fault. They use a 4x4 transmit/receive antennae system, whereas most devices are limited to 2x2, so you’ll theoretically only get half the speed. Thankfully we’re slowly starting to see more 4x4 devices arrive on the market, such as this PCIe card from Asus, designed to turn your desktop PC into a Wi-Fi powered beast. This is a rather intimidating card to look at, with a huge red heatsink residing atop the network chip, and…

“It seems the days of the having a powerful PC the size of a small refrigerator are coming to an end” PRICE $3,999 asus.com.au With almost 20 years of PC product reviewing under my belt, I like to think I know a thing or two about computers. The G20 proved how wrong I can be. When the first sample of this mini-tower arrived, I plugged in the two separate power cords (yep, it comes with not one, but two, of slightly different sizes, which then plug into a separate power brick, display, keyboard, the lot). I hit the power button… and nothing. I then replugged everything in, tried different power points, different power boards, had a look inside to ensure there were no rogue cables, the whole shebang. And it…

PRICE $79 hyperxgaming.com We’ve been impressed with every headset from HyperX so far, from the breakout Cloud to the brilliant Revolver, and the Stinger is no exception. The budget entry into the HyperX headset range, the Stinger is quite unlike the other headsets in design. It’s a lot simpler, with a padded plastic headband instead of a fully padded headband or supportive strap, and earcups attached with a plastic swivel. The headset still features the memory foam and leatherette covering of the other models, making the Stinger very comfortable to wear, and the headband gives enough clamp to provide some decent passive noise occlusion. The headset weighs in at around 275g so you don’t have to worry about them becoming uncomfortable over longer gaming sessions. We tested the headset with…