Hello, good evening and give it up for an all-new Intel CPU. By chip industry standards, it’s been a long time coming. But with a nonchalant shrug of its 14nm FinFETs, Intel’s new Skylake chip has crashed the desktop PC party. Dare we hope for genuine progress? Or is the new Core i7-6700K yet another samey CPU from Intel? I also have an early take on the new Z170 platform that pairs with Skylake, in the form of MSI’s Z170 Gaming M5 motherboard. Without giving much away, Skylake is something we desktop gaming dinosaurs can definitely get excited about. But not necessarily for the reasons you might expect.

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Catharsis comes in many forms. But there’s none so satisfying as a good old fashioned sweary rant. Hell, I’m not even talking about a pseudo-Charlie-Brooker-but-not-nearly-as-witty polemic. More shouting obscenities into the wind. The time has come for me to unload on my top ten most cursed ruses in PC gaming hardware. In truth, the following is not entirely devoid of practical insight. But you have been warned. It ain’t pretty. Read the rest of this entry »

With CPUs, GPUs and screens (x2) in the bag, it’s time to put the RPS spotlight onto that most mysterious of PC components, the motherboard. By some metrics, mobos are pretty easy to pick these days. For starters, there aren’t many chipset vendors to worry about. Only AMD and Intel are really left in the game. But Intel, in particular, has plenty of marketing tricks up its sleeve. It’s always worth knowing your Z77s from your H67s. So, let’s begin.

Now, I’ve never been a card-carrying motherboard aficionado. It’s a lot easier to get excited about crazy clocks speeds, lots of cores or a shit-load of shaders than it is all-solid super caps and 8+2 power phasing. It’s also true that chipsets and in turn motherboards have become less critical as ever more features have migrated onto the CPU itself.
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