Innehållsförteckning för Issue 261 från PC Powerplay

PC & Tech Authority, PC PowerPlay, Atomic and Hyper are joining forces once again to bring you another spectacular night of cutting edge PC technology, the latest advances in gaming and the coolest new gear around. The last Upgrade Australia event was hosted in Sydney, so now we’re heading back to Melbourne with an all new show with new partners and gear. Get ready to experience the latest PC hardware, talk to experts in the field, witness live demonstrations, feast on free food and drink, and stand a pretty good chance of walking away with freebies. We know you can’t wait to get your hands on the latest and greatest PC gear so jump on the website and register right away! Register at: www.pcauthority.com.au/upgradeaustralia WHERE: Melbourne ‘s Monash University, Caulfield…

The PC & Tech Authority and PC PowerPlay crew have long been fans of HyperX’s brilliant Cloud series of headphones. PCTA editor Ben has them on his head for much of the working day, and they appear in both PC & Tech Authority’s A-List and PC PowerPlay’s Beast PC. Very few cans match the comfort (especially the comfort!) and sound quality of the $279 Revolver S. So with interest we hope you are looking forward to trying the new Cloud Revolver S at the next Upgrade Australia. The upgraded model features several tweaks to the already excellent design. They feature the same 50mm drivers used in the other Cloud models, so they sound great. Clouds are fantastic for gaming as music, equally, with a clean yet punchy sound that’s unadulterated…

“ultimately I think Andromeda is a victim of the developer’s ambition” DEVELOPER BIOWARE PUBLISHER EA PRICE $89.99 AVAILABLE AT ORIGIN, RETAIL masseffect.com/Andromeda WILKS: I was a massive fan of the first Mass Effect arc. I loved them all, including the deeply divisive third game (the whole game was the ending, not just the space kid), so the idea of a new arc starting had great appeal for me. I love the premise - concurrent to the Reaper threat in the Milky Way, a number of arc ships carrying tens of thousands of colonists, scientists and explorers pulled from the ranks of all the Council races sets off on a 600+ year journey to the Andromeda galaxy with the aim of colonising the “golden planets” discovered in the Heleus sector. It’s…

“extreme cold means you can t be away from a fire for too long before taking damage from frostbite” DEVELOPER GAMES FARM PUBLISHER KALYPSO MEDIA PRICE $39.99 USD AVAILABLE AT STEAM www.kalypsomedia.com Although Vikings: Wolves of Midgard has all the hallmarks of fitting in nicely with the established style of action RPGs - there is a levelling mechanic, skill trees, dropped loot and the like - in play the game feels like a modern version of something much older. Rather than being an RPG, action or otherwise, Vikings instead feels like something older, less nuanced and more concerned with instant gratification. It feels a little something like Gauntlet mixed with an isometric brawler a-la Victor Vran. That’s not at all a bad thing. What Viking lacks in narrative depth it…

As mentioned earlier, just as we’d finished our testing and writing of the Ryzen 7 coverage, we received an invite from AMD to head to Beijing for the official Ryzen 5 launch. This would allow us to test and write about the mid-range chips in just three days before the beloved binding of paper you’re now holding would be churned out at the printers. It’s a shame we couldn’t have had the Ryzen 5, prior to the Ryzen 7, as it’s arguably a better chip for PC gamers. As you well know, the vast majority of games still only make use of four cores, so the larger number of cores found in the Ryzen 7 don’t tend to offer up noticeable gaming performance improvements unless you’re also streaming, recording or…

 PRICE $239 www.asus.com.au “ We loved the BIOS of this board, as it’s clean and responsive ” We have to hand it to Asus – they’ve designed a very aesthetically attractive board considering the price of just $239. Even better, they’ve managed to squeeze in the most expensive X370 chipset into a board at this price, which is simply astonishing value. Let’s dig deeper to see how they’ve managed to do so. Like many of Asus’ recent boards, it features the 5-way optimisation technique, allowing a single click that will optimise fan speeds according to various temperature sensors on the board, while also optimising the speed and voltages of the CPU. Basically it’s an automatic overclocker, with additional features. There’s also support for Asus’ Aura lighting system, allowing you to…

“ an absolute ripsnorter, delivering the biggest jump in performace over a standard GPU Nvidia has achieved ” PRICE $XXX www.nvidia.com It’s been almost a year since Nvidia’s Pascal GPU was launched, and in that time there have been several iterations, from the top-end discrete GTX 1080 and GTX 1070, mid and budget range GTX 1050 and 1060 – along with a tweaked 1050 TI. In the mobile space Pascal has been a raging success as it offers the same performance in a mobile GPU as you get in the desktop card, and that’s been used by gaming laptop manufacturers to produce truly exciting products that leverage its power, mostly in the form of very high resolution (up to and including 4k) screens, and/or very high refresh rate screens. The…

PRICE $3299 www.resistance.com.au The Resistance Striker Elite is the first laptop we’ve looked at from the Australian gaming brand, but if the Striker Elite is indicative of the price and performance of the range, we’re keen to see more. When it comes to specs, the Elite is no slouch, boasting a 17.3” full HD G-Sync panel, 16Gb of DDR4, an i7-7700HQ CPU and an 8Gb GTX 1070. It’s not short on connectivity either, with a Display Port, two USB type C and two USB 3 ports on the left side of the chassis, a second Display Port and an HDMI port on the back and another USB 3 on the right. The chassis is made of both plastic and brushed aluminium,, with the metal used primarily as the screen backing…

PRICE $99 www.roccat.org Roccat is using some pretty sweet marketing hype with the new range of mice, touting the performance of the new Owl-Eye sensors. These brand new sensors aren’t actually new technology – they are custom Pixart 3360 optical sensor (Roccat calls the sensor a 3361) modified for precision. Basically what this means is that while the Kone EMP is capable of scanning at 1200DPI, it is optimised for use around the 2000DPI mark. The big numbers may look impressive on the back of a box, but few, if any gamers like their sensitivity so crazily high. The result is a nice, fast, accurate mouse that puts the cursor where you want. The build quality of the Kone EMP is as good as the sensor. It’s a big mouse…

As you can see from the photos, I use multiple computers at the same time, including a personally built PC, mac mini, Linux server (Centos OS 7) and a few Raspberry PI’s. I spent around 9 months saving and deciding on the computer hardware, before purchasing the parts for the main PC, which I built myself in August 2016. MOST IMPRESSIVE ELEMENTS: • ASUS ROG GeForce GTX 1080 Strix Gaming video card • 4K display • Lots of storage, including using the Samsung 950 Pro 512GB M.2 SSD as the boot drive • Hauppauge Win TV QUAD HD TV Tuner – as I enjoy watching TV, especially sport whilst working or playing games on the computer. WHAT MAKES MY PC SO SPECIAL? It’s not just the one computer, but a…

“climate change has made basic resources scarce and placed irreversible strain on the Earth” DEVELOPER DECK 13 INTERACTIVE PUBLISHER FOCUS HOME INTERACTIVE DUE MAY thesurge-game.com “We were wondering if Donald Trump had been reading our design documents,” laughs Jan Klose, managing director at Deck 13 Interactive and creative lead on the German studio’s upcoming action-RPG The Surge. I’m chatting with Klose via Skype having just played through a preview build of The Surge consisting of an early game area that introduces players to a dystopian Earth on the brink of environmental collapse. The level is an intricately designed industrial ruin full of half-destroyed machinery, crazed workers wearing mech suits, hostile drones, dust storms and toxic waste, and culminates in a boss fight against a giant robot that bears more than…

“can you please auto-design some missions that use the skidoo and the helicopter, kthxbai” DEVELOPER UBISOFT PUBLISHER UBISOFT PRICE $59.99 USD AVAILABLE AT STEAM, UPLAY, RETAIL ghost-recon.ubisoft.com One of the central philosophical debates in videogame criticism is whether or not a game should be “allowed” to only get good after ten hours. Should we, as critics, mark a game down, if it only rewards people who invest serious time in it? Wildlands seems like an ideal candidate for further exploration of this problem. Most reviews were written soon after release, by critics who binged on the thing over a foetid weekend of 40, 50 hours of grinding through Bolivia and headshotting poverty-stricken and religiously deluded coke gangsters. And as with so many Ubisoft games, you see the two contrasting opinions:…

 PRICE $179 www.gigabyte.com.au “ the affordable B350 chipset means Gigabyte has been able to keep the price down ” Ok, ok, we get it – RGB lighting is important to a certain sector of the market. But when Gigabyte’s boldest claim about this product is that it has the most advanced lighting controls in the world, we have to wonder where else we’re going to see something a little more innovative than shiny lights. Over 30% of the information about this product focused on the ability to attach RGB light strips (most boards support this), change their flashing/pulsing mode (most boards support this) and software support to fully customise each lighting zone. Snooze much? Thankfully the rest of the board is a little more exciting. Based on the more affordable…

“ the shape of the One allows natural convection to do a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to cooling ” PRICE $3149 www.corsair.com Corsair’s no stranger to PC building. Apart from having a wide range of components under its belt, from cases to power supplies, it’s also had a go with the Bulldog kit PC. It was an odd first choice for the company, and a product that seemed to be a solution in search of a problem. The same cannot be said for the Corsair One (of which the Pro is the top model), a complete PC solution that is not only powerful, but extremely well-engineered. There are two things you first notice about the One (which is impossible to type without thinking of The Matrix).…

PRICE $159.95 www.roccat.org The Isku+ Force FX, aside from having a rather clunky name, is an interesting and altogether decent keyboard thanks to a mixture of cost and features. The keyboard features a row of programmable macro keys along the left hand side and another three keys situated under the space bar, as well as multiple profile slots, media controls and RGB lighting, but that is all frills on top of what makes the keyboard so interesting. Although the Isku+ uses decent if somewhat squishy feeling membrane keys, the QWEASD keys can be set to analogue, enabling the force of a keystroke to be measured for finer control in gaming. While this may sound a bit like a solution to a problem that doesn’t really exist, after a brief learning…

PRICE TBC AROUND $100 Cougargaming.com The Cougar Revenger gaming mouse uses an unmodified version of the powerful and accurate Pixart 3360 optical sensor, and even without tweaks it’s a cracker. The sensor is accurate and fast and a joy to use when not pumped up to maximum sensitivity. Thanks to the built-in memory, players can have up to three configuration profiles with programmed buttons and DPI settings saved to the mouse at all times. The design of the Revenger, much like the name, is quite aggressive, with a split between the left and right buttons, and those buttons tapering into points. The Revenger features six programmable buttons; left, right, two thumb buttons, wheel click and the DPI switch. It’s the last of these that is really interesting. The DPI switch…

01 Book One $3500 • Porsche Design www.porsche-design.com If the relative success of Microsoft’s Surface has taught us anything, it’s that there’s a market for 2-in-1 style laptop-tablet thingies. So Porsche Design has decided to throw its name out into the market as a contender in this area. POWERED UP: The usual Core i7-7500, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD arrangement. Approximately 14 hours battery life. 10-finger multi-touch 3200x1800 IPS display. Anodised aluminium casing. And USB type C connections. PLAYED OUT: Is listed on the Porsche Design site under the “Men” category. Sorry ladies, you may not use this laptop, it seems. 02 The Frame $TBA • Samsung www.samsung.com We don’t know art, but we know what we like, and we like this attempt from Samsung to make a television look like…

THE GEFORCE GTX 1080 TI IS NVIDIA’S NEW FLAGSHIP GRAPHICS CARD That top of the line Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 you got last year is no longer top of the line. Nvidia has announced the GTX 1080 Ti, a souped up version of the GTX 1080, based on the Nvidia Titan X monster GPU. Core clock speed is down on the 1080 Ti (1481 MHz vs. 1607 MHz), and it “only” has 11GB of RAM versus the Titan X’s 12GB, but every other spec you care to name is bigger and better on the 1080 Ti. The 1080 Ti also has an 11Gbps memory clock - a 10% increase over the 10Gbps clock found on the Titan and the GTX 1080. The downside to all this grunt is power consumption.…

DESTINY 2 - WHAT WEKNOWSOFAR Bungie’s big sequel is no longer a console exclusive Bungie has always said it has a 10-year-plan for Destiny, and now in year three, we have a better sense of where the shooter sensation is headed next. Officially announced last month, Destiny 2 will release this spring and expand the experience with plenty of new worlds, fresh gameplay elements, and more customisation options than ever. And you’ll get a first taste of it this winter with an early access beta test. We’re still fairly light on details, but this is everything you need to know for now. THERE’S A NEW THREAT Destiny 2 surfaces a new threat for your Guardians to take down: the Red Legion, led by the surely-horribly-evil Ghaul. Here’s the official synopsis…

“the most unique VR setup I’ve ever seen: a sailboard mounted on a gimble” ESL and Intel spend the year touring the world with Intel Extreme Masters events, but they culminate in three days of epic gaming and PC hardware in the city of Katowice, in southern Poland. Nestled amongst grim, leafless winter forests and the remains of abandoned coal mines, it’s an odd place to find such an event, but there’s no denying that this is one of THE biggest dates in the eSports calendar. Imagine a location like the old Entertainment Centre, or the more modern venues around Sydney’s Olympic Park, and now fill it with massive screens to replay all the action, and a truly adoring public. Get dozens of the best teams and players from around…

“The problem lies in the fact that most people assume all M.2 drives come with NVMe, but they don’t.” If there’s one area of PC hardware that has blown through speed barriers exponentially, it’s today’s Solid State Drives, or SSDs for short. With the latest drives delivering much faster performance than drives released just a few years ago, they’ve experienced explosive growth when it comes to throwing data around your system. And there’s one company that has consistently scored highly in product reviews, which is why you’ll find its drives in most pre-built gaming systems. Samsung has been the leading SSD-maker for several years now, and there are several good reasons why its drives are outstanding. WHAT’S AN M.2 DRIVE? First, a quick refresher if you’re not familiar with M.2…

“it was clearly all utter gibberish so I forgot it immediately” DEVELOPER HOLLOW PONDS PUBLISHER HOLLOW PONDS PRICE US$15 AVAILABLE AT STEAM, HUMBLE, ITCH.IO lootrascals.com Loot Rascals combines the strategy of deck building, the blind luck of random drops, and the constant tension of a Roguelike. On paper it looks like a really solid set of gameplay mechanics, and in practice it mostly delivers, but it never quite managed to hook me in the way I initially thought it might. There’s a silly premise about travelling to an alien planet that is possibly also a theme park to rescue someone called Barry who is possibly a robot with your friends who include another robot and a giant pink baby man. A British man narrated all this at me during the…

Thank you AMD. It might have taken four years to go from the drawing board to churning chips out on the factory line, but your new Ryzen CPU is hopefully going to do wonders for PC gaming. You see, we’ve been bored out of our skull with the monopoly that Intel has had for the last five years when it came to CPU performance, especially when it came to games. But in one fell swoop you’ve managed to deliver a brand-new CPU that promises to reignite the CPU wars, finally challenging Intel’s dominance and spurring them into action to lift performance by more than a few digits each year. Well, that’s the plan with Ryzen. Unfortunately the story about this chip’s performance isn’t such a straight tale – while it…

 PRICE $159 www.asrock.com “ AMD has always been known for outstanding value, but this is an entirely new realm of price versus performance ” This board is the perfect example of what an incredible value proposition Ryzen can be. Chuck this together with a $469 R7 1700, overclock it to R7 1800X levels, and you’ve got a $628 platform that will outperform an Intel-based system that will set you back at least $1800. AMD has always been known for outstanding value, but this is an entirely new realm of price versus performance. ASRock has used the mid-range B350 chipset in this board, so there are obviously fewer features than the higher end X370 models, yet not dramatically so. In terms of basic PCIe physical lanes, we have the main full-length…

 PRICE $469 www.msi.com “ this board doesn’t offer a lot that gamers will find to be must-have features ” At the time we sent out our invite to this roundup, we also sent out a similar invite from our sister magazine, PC and Tech Authority. MSI was unfortunately only able to send one board to cover both magazines, and it just happened to be the most expensive of the lot. This fact alone is going to make it hard to recommend. There’s also the fact that this board really doesn’t offer a lot that gamers will find to be must-have features; instead it has a very specific audience in mind. There’s no denying what a damn sexy piece of work this thing is, with its shiny silver finish helping it…

PRICE $99 antlionaudio.com The Modmic 5, as the name suggests, is the fifth and latest model of the Modmic, a boom mic attachment designed to turn any set of headphones into a gaming headset. The mic exists in a niche environment but fills the role extremely well, namely those people that have a good set of audio headphones and don’t want to have to shell out for an all-in-one gaming headset so they can chat with their friends online. The mic attached to the headphones by way of a small adhesive magnetic clip. Once that is placed on the headphones, the mic itself can be easily attached and detached, so you can still use your headphones for non-gaming purposes. Attaching and detaching the boom is easy, but cable management is…