As 27in 2560×1440 monitors go, the MSI Optix MPG27CQ is one that really likes to get up in your face. It’s only 27in across the diagonal, but its curved VA panel and ginormous base gives it quite a sizable footprint. Indeed, you’ll need 379mm clearance to fit this beast on your desk, which is just about enough room to stick your keyboard in front of it, but not a lot else.
In a way, having its screen shoved so close to your eyeballs helps show off its 1800mm curvature radius much more effectively than if it was sat further away from you, as the sense of those curved edges wrapping themselves snuggly round my peripheral vision feels much more pronounced than any of the ultrawide 21:9 monitors I tested earlier in the year. The other reason why it feels so up in your grill all the time, though, is that it’s also got five pulsing LED strips along the bottom, which is sure to make RGB fanatics squeal with delight.
You have to hand it to MSI for cramming so many keys onto its new Vigor GK80 mechanical keyboard. Glance down at its streamlined aluminium base and you’ll see at least sixteen keys with extra function symbols peeking out of the tiny crevasses between each row.
That’s in addition to four dedicated media keys in the top right corner and a further eight function buttons along the usual string of Fn keys. For a keyboard measuring just 445x141x42mm, that’s pretty impressive. Whether you’ll end up using all of those is another matter of course, but (lack of volume slider aside) the main thing here is that you’re not having to compromise on style over substance. Read the rest of this entry »
It’s been a pretty bleak couple of months for anyone hoping to buy a new graphics card, but there’s still a bit of good news to be found for those whose ambitions stop firmly at getting a great gaming experience at 1920×1080, as entry-level cards like the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050Ti on test here have been largely unaffected by recent price hikes.
Indeed, the GTX 1050Ti currently occupies the top spot in our Best graphics card 2018 article for 1080p gaming, and more importantly can still be found for as little as £150-odd in the UK and a fraction over $200 in the US. That’s almost half the cost of Nvidia’s next card up, the GTX 1060, which you can read more about in our Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 review. It won’t be much good for anything beyond 1080p, but if Full HD gaming is your bag, then the GTX 1050 Ti is an excellent choice.
We’ve looked at our fair share of gaming laptops at RPS over the last year, but nothing has been quite so preposterous as MSI’s new GT75VR 7RF Titan Pro. This three grand mega laptop has the complete works: an Nvidia GTX 1080 chip paired with a quad-core 2.9GHz Intel Core i7-7820HK processor and 32GB of RAM, a 17.3in, 120Hz Full HD display (which I can only assume to be IPS because MSI neglected to specify), a mechanical Steelseries RGB keyboard, a super fast 512GB NVMe SSD and a 1TB HDD.
It’s a ridiculous piece of machinery, made even sillier by its enormous size. Measuring a colossal 428 x 314 x 58mm and weighing a back-breaking 4.56kg, this is going nowhere except the middle of a very large, sturdy desk. Even if you did manage to lug it somewhere, you wouldn’t be able to get much out of it away from a plug socket anyway, as I barely managed an hour of gaming on it with the screen set to half brightness. Read the rest of this entry »
It’s time to catch up with the latest graphics kit and developments as fully unified shader architectures wait for no man. Nvidia has just released a new value-orientated 3D card in the GeForce GTX 950. We’re talking roughly £120 / $160 and so entry-level for serious gaming. But could you actually live with it?
Meanwhile, AMD’s flagship Radeon R9 Fury graphics has landed at Laird towers. Apart from being geek-out worthy simply as the latest and greatest from one of the two big noises in gaming graphics, the Fury’s weird, wonderful and maybe just a little wonky 4GB ‘HBM’ memory subsystem begs a potentially critical conundrum. Just how much memory do you actually need for gaming graphics? Read the rest of this entry »
RPS Feature
Eight million pixels may not be as a good as it sounds
With Laird Towers currently undergoing major renovations, RPS’s hardware coverage has been forced to retreat to the vaults. But that hasn’t stopped me. No, I’ve battled through the dust, the rubble, the builders lumbering about the place at ungodly hours of the morning (I regard consciousness before 9:30am as rather uncivilised) and the relentless tea-making to bring you some reflections on 4K gaming. We’ve covered several interesting alternatives to 4K of late including curved super-wide monitors, high refresh rates, IPS panels and frame synced screens. So does that experience put a new spin on plain old 4K, aka gaming at a resolution of 3,840×2160? Read the rest of this entry »
The kickoff match put the home side, North America’s Team SoloMid, on the back foot as Europe’s Fnatic pulled the rug from under them with a surprise Cassiopeia pick on top lane. But it was the Korean scene’s SK Telecom T1 who asserted steady dominance as the day wore on – it’s their event to lose at this point.
Midway through the day’s schedule I sat down with shoutcaster Rivington “RivingtonThe3rd” Bisland III to get his take on the lay of the meta-land and what the teams had brought to the Rift so far.
Greetings from the Sunshine State! Which is apparently what Florida is called even at nighttime. I’ll be out here covering the League of Legends Mid-Season Invitational for the next few days so it’s probably a good idea to explain a) what the Mid-Season Invitational is and b) when the various bits of it are happening in case you want to follow along.
