Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Week In Tech: Haswell Mobile, AMD Goes GHz Gaga

By Jeremy Laird on June 17th, 2013.

Some of you were a teensy bit miffed by my unceremonious defenestration of Intel’s new Haswell CPUs as desktop chips. In fairness, when you’ve only played with the desktop iterations, that’s going to influence your outlook. And Intel really was asking for it. Anyway, while I mentioned Haswell has some serious mobile chops, it’s worth having a closer look at what it all means for mobile gaming and what you should be looking out for when bagging a laptop. In other news, AMD has annouced a 5GHz processor. Surely this can’t be the beginning of a new GHz war…? Read the rest of this entry »

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Build A Better-Than-Xbox-One/PS4 PC For £500

By Alec Meer on June 14th, 2013.

Well, don’t take that entirely literally. I’m just writing that to get your attention and/or I can’t think of a more accurate way to do it within the character limit. Obviously you can’t build your own Xbox One or PlayStation 4 – they use some custom hardware not available to PC-builders to do their next-generation thing, they’re running bespoke operating systems (and all the horror-DRM that goes with it) and contain it all with in a comparatively small black monolith that sits underneath your TV. Additionally, console games can be made to specific hardware requirements, which can entail a far great degree of optimisation than trying to target a hundred thousand million different PC configs. No matter what the console generation, the PC comparison can never be an exact one. What you can do, though, is build yourself a PC that has a little more grunt under the hood than these apparent future-machines, for pretty much the same amount of money.

To be honest, while hitting the £420 price of an Xbone is eminently possible, I’d recommend you spend just a little more on a games PC than that – it’ll last you longer, there’s more scope for upgrading later, games will look fancier and you won’t have to spend a week trawling price comparison sites. Either way, the idea that a beefy games PC costs thousands of dollars/pounds is an outdated and wildly inaccurate one.
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AMD Aiming To Smooth Ports Between PC And Console

By John Walker on June 5th, 2013.

Both the Xbox One and the PS4 are going to contain AMD graphics chips. Which must be lovely for them, and deeply annoying for NVidia. Of the current gen, the Xbox 360 has an AMD GPU, but the PS3 sports Nvidia’s idiotically named RSX ‘Reality Synthesizer’. The next gen consoles are both basically PCs in a box, and as such both are going to feature a version of AMD’s Radeon – the card that fills so many desktop PCs. And indeed both contain AMD CPUs too. According to a report on PC Advisor, that means Advanced Micro Devices (as I’ve just learned their name stands for) are hoping this means they can make ports far less of a faff.

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Hard Choices: Intel’s ‘Orrible New Haswell Chips

By Jeremy Laird on June 3rd, 2013.


Move along. There’s absolutely nothing to see.

Still here? Fine. Intel’s new Haswell CPUs are a non-event for the desktop PC. In fact, with Haswell Intel’s indifference to the desktop might just have been upgraded to spite. If you really must have an explanation, here it is. Read the rest of this entry »

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Week In Tech: Hands On With Those New Games Consoles

By Jeremy Laird on May 27th, 2013.

Ha, sorry. Not really. But it got your attention. And there’s a thin tendril of truth in it. It’s been a busy week in hardware and in my mortal hands I hold a laptop containing AMD’s Jaguar cores. The very same cores as found in the freshly minted games consoles from Microsoft and Sony. So what are they like and what does it mean for PC gaming?

Meanwhile, Nvidia drops a price bomb of the bad kind and Intel has some new chips on the way. Read on for the gruesome details. Read the rest of this entry »

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Week In Tech: Nvidia’s ‘New’ Graphics Cards

By Jeremy Laird on May 13th, 2013.

Back in Feb we had a little chin wag about the mad dash of annual graphics hardware launches slowing to a saunter. We can add a little more flesh to the bones of that story this week, with some pretty plausible looking details of Nvidia’s upcoming plans – and further confirmation of nothing new from AMD. It’s worth a quick dip into the mucky waters of rumour for anyone pondering a GPU upgrade or a generally a new rig as some new kit – of sorts – is imminent. Read the rest of this entry »

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Update: Awesome RPS Gaming Rig Winners

By Jeremy Laird on May 12th, 2013.

What do points mean?

Remember our gaming rig give away in January? It took a little while to pull all the pieces together and get the kits out to our winners. But it was quite a haul – a package including our favourite CPU, motherboard and graphics card combo – and well worth the wait. The lucky so and soes who won have had their booty for a few months now, so we thought we’d drop in and find out what life is like in the pixel-pumping fast lane… Read the rest of this entry »

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Week in Tech: Why PC Monitors Aren’t Going to Get Better

By Jeremy Laird on April 25th, 2013.

Equitable though Her Majesty’s United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland may largely be, a few isolated injustices still stalk the land. That I have to work for a living hardly seems fair, for instance. But even more odious is the fact that consumerist tat like smartphones, ultrabooks and tablets now have better screens by many metrics than our hallowed PC monitors. What gives? A recent interview I did with monitor maker Iiyama for ye olde PC Format mag dug up some answers. I also discovered why things aren’t likely to dramatically improve any time soon. Meanwhile, the roller coaster ride for AMD’s fortunes continues. This week, I predict survival! Read the rest of this entry »

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Starting Over: Windows 8 To DeScrewUpify Itself?

By Alec Meer on April 24th, 2013.

Gimme transparency, not an explosion of garish colour

Now that everyone who isn’t mad has roundly agreed that Windows 8 is a whole bucketful of stupid, even Microsoft are acknowledging that trying to bruteforce people into using their computers completely differently was a silly move. Yes, Windows 8 basically has cheerful old Windows 7 lurking underneath its disruptive, tablet-orientated Metro skin, but the wasted seconds spent getting it to it every time, or inefficiently trying to get to your program or option of choice, really stack up as the months wear on, and the frustration that the OS keeps insisting on doing its own thing doesn’t go away. Now multiple reports are coming in that the forthcoming 8.1 update will allow booting to the traditional desktop, and might even reinstate the Start button.
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Week in Tech: Intel Overclocking, Bonkers-Wide Screens

By Jeremy Laird on April 18th, 2013.

Don’t sling your old CPU on eBay just yet. Too many Rumsfeldian known unknowns remain, never mind the unknown unknowns. But the known knowns suggest Intel is bringing back at least a slither of overclocking action to its budget CPUs. It’s arrives with the incoming and highly imminent Haswell generation of Intel chips and it might help restore a little fun to the budget CPU market, not to mention a little faith in Intel. Next up, local game streaming. Seems like a super idea to me. So, I’d like to know, well, what you’d like to know about streaming. Then I’ll get some answers for you. Meanwhile, game bundles or bagging free games when you buy PC components. Do you care? I’ve also had a play with the latest bonkers-wide 21:9-aspect PC monitors… Read the rest of this entry »

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Hard Choices: Ask AMD Part 2, The Answers

By Jeremy Laird on April 8th, 2013.

Here it is, folks. The answers to all your AMD questions. Well, not all of them. Dropped some, reworded others, added a few twists of my own. The usual. The senior AMD suit in question is Roy Taylor. His official title is Corporate Vice President, Global Channel Sales. That’s right, Corporate Vice President, Global Channel Sales. Soak up the seniority. He’s been at AMD for 12 weeks having spent the previous 12 years at arch enemy Nvidia. So let’s just say he’s got plenty of insight into graphics, CPUs and gaming. Did I mention he is indeed quite senior? Read the rest of this entry »

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