Things you could type on one key of a mechanical keyboard before it breaks
For some reason, the last couple of months have seen a glut of mechanical keyboards pass through the PC Gamer labs. From Razer’s Battlefield 3 branded Black Widows, through Corsair’s elegant Vengeance K60, to Qpad’s MK-85 which arrived on my desk today – if I was any good at planning ahead I’d have organised a group test.
All of the keyboards that have come through lately have had one thing in common – Cherry’s MX switches, which have a light action and that familiar clackety clack sound that evokes an old fashioned typewriter. They come in different flavours – my favourite are the smooth action Cherry MX Reds of the K60 and MK-85 – but they all make standard plastic dome keyboards feel like typing in treacle. If only there was a relatively good value ergonomic keyboard that uses them – I’d struggle to write without the layout of my Microsoft 7000 typist’s friend these days.
Is water cooling making a comeback?
Have you considered water for cooling your PC? The received wisdom suggests you probably haven’t. Computer components have been getting gradually more efficient and cooler running, while at the same time traditional fan and metal heatsinks have improved in design to the point that they’re often more efficient than water coolers and cost a lot less.
According to some industry insiders, however, water cooling is undergoing something of a renaissance. Baroque designs and piping are back in fashion, so they say, and demand for water cooling has never been higher.
Actual figures are hard to come by, mind. Gartner and other analysts don’t really track the types of cooler PC owners are custom fitting to their machines, and any evidence one way or the other is entirely anecdotal. What’s almost certain, though, is that reports of the demise of the water cooler have been greatly exaggerated.
Set up your own Steam Cloud equivalent for Skyrim
Steam Cloud is great. Spending a lunch hour playing Deus Ex: Human Revolution, able to pick straight up at the point that you left off last night at home, is the way all games should be. Unfortunately, not all Steam published games make use of this feature. If you want to spend an hour tidying your bookshelves in Skyrim, for example, you’ll need to wait until you get back to your real home or faff around with memory sticks.
Unless you create your own private and near universal version of Steam Cloud, that is.
Passive cooling for Core i7s
Bit of Friday fun for you – I’m testing a group of heatsinks for the next issue of the mag and was persuaded to try this out by the chaps at QuietPC.com. It’s the Nofan CR-95C, a completely passive cooler that claims to be able to chill a 95W quad core Core i7 processor.
Naturally, I was a little bit skeptical.
The most frustrating Windows 7 audio problem solved
What’s the sound of one hand clapping? There’s nothing Zen-like about that question for those of us who’ve come up against a strange and surprisingly common audio bug in Windows 7. Nothing makes any noise at all, no matter how many hands you have.
Here’s the issue: you have a fully functioning sound card, probably built into your motherboard. Up until now, it’s been working fine. Your drivers are up to date, it’s listed in Device Manager and shows up just fine as the default device when you right click the volume icon in the task tray.
If you’ve had this problem – and a few of you will – you’ll share my frustration with it. And I’m about to make you very happy indeed.
The PC Gamer Battlefield 3 benchtest experiment: send us your stats
I’m still waiting for my copy of Battlefield 3 to finish installing and updating and all that, but as soon as it does I’ll be putting to the test the many claims of hardware vendors that you need to spend a fortune on new kit to get it playing perfectly.
While I’m waiting, however, here’s a little experiment I’d like you all to try at home.
Get your PC ready for Battlefield 3
There aren’t many game launches which get people looking at their PC and wondering if it’s powerful enough. But the seemingly high system specs of Battlefield 3 have got a lot of us suddenly concerned about the state of our hardware.
With just one weekend to go until it’s released, it’s time to face the question: do you need to upgrade for Battlefield 3?
NVIDIA experiments with 3D storytelling
What do 3D effects add in terms of storytelling? That’s a discussion which comes up a lot no matter what visual medium you’re working in at the moment, be it games, films or photography.
While not at all game related, it is has been interesting to look at techniques involved in one experiment for 3D storytelling that’s taken place in Spitalfields Market, London, this week. Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF), an NGO which sponsors doctors and hospital workers in crisis regions and the developing world, teamed up with NVIDIA and one of the best photojournalism outfits around to create a short piece of 3D photojournalism about one of their midwives in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Hands on with Sony’s external graphics card: it’s superb
Over the last week or so I’ve been playing around with Sony’s new Vaio Z laptop. It’s not really relevant for a PC games blog – I was looking at it for Stuff magazine – except for one thing. This ultralight notebook comes with an optional dock which adds an optical drive and USB hub along with extra monitor ports for when you’re sat at your desk rather than staring at an Excel sheet on the train. Inside that dock, there’s an auxiliary graphics card which adds an AMD Radeon HD6650 GPU to the on-board Sandy Bridge processor. And it’s stunningly good.
What are your favourite PC gaming peripherals?
The one thing we don’t review enough of in the PC Gamer hardware pages is game controllers. A fair number of wheels and joysticks with nasty plastic cases and pseudo rumble reactions pass through The Labs, but very few of the old fashioned, real-world simulation kits which used to be a stalwart of PC gaming get strapped to the test bench these days.
Partly, this is because gaming tastes have changed and the sims that require this gear aren’t as popular as they were – it’s been five years since the last Flight Sim, for example. Partly it’s because there just aren’t as many industrial strength peripherals around any more, and what there is can be very niche and usable only by the kind of sim fans who already have a real helicopter pilot’s licence.
Is your router killing the planet?
The European Commission is meeting with industry groups tomorrow to try and agree new regulations for power use in network adaptors. On the table are amendments to the European Ecodesign Directive which covers energy use for white goods around the home.
The changes being discussed involve the introduction of a compulsory standby mode for network adaptors, with maximum power consumption phased in over several years. Adaptors that need to wake within under one second will be allowed draw slightly more power in standby than those which are less essential. The actual limits are what will be on the table tomorrow.
Are ultrabooks the future of PC gaming?
How powerful does a laptop need to be? It’s a pertinent question. Last week Razer unveiled a laptop it proclaimed the “saviour of PC gaming”. But the big laptop news is that we’re about to be deluged by ‘ultrabooks’ – thin and light MacBook Air clones which weigh just over a kilo, but pack powerful Core i5/i7 processors.
PC sales down, but high end graphics holds steady
With summer already approaching its end, it’s Q2 reporting season already and time for naysayers of the world to unite around statistics. We’ve seen a few quarterly snapshots which have made glum reading for PC fans already.
Gartner’s analysis, for example, that PC shipments in Western Europe were down by nearly 19% was bleak indeed. Acer was especially badly hit, losing over a third of its sales compared to last year.
How to save space on your SSD: Part 2
Struggling to stay on top of the tiny amount of space you have on your SSD drive? Fear not, as promised in our first guide on how to save save space on your SSD we have a few more tips on creating room for games on your new flash drive.
How to save space on your SSD
SSDs are great. Not make the world a better place and sort out your work/life balance great, but having one in your PC will almost certainly make it a slightly better machine. The problem is, of course, that they’re quite small.
The standard advice for making the most of SSD space is to install Windows and a few key games onto your SSD and put everything else, like videos and music, onto a larger, slower hard drive. If only it were that easy.
Lots of programs, from iTunes to Google’s Picasa to most games, save large files like thumbnail caches or save data in the Users folder on the C:\ drive. That’s regardless of where you install the application itself to. They offer you no control at all, and in the case of iTunes and Picasa especially can quickly use up many gigs of precious space.
