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.
Rid yourself of troublesome Catalyst drivers
If you’ve recently bought yourself a new AMD Radeon graphics card, or updated the drivers for an existing one, you might be familiar with this problem: when you try to install a new version of the Catalyst driver suite, the progress bar hangs about a quarter of the way through for anything up to 15 minutes or so and then presents you with an error stating that the installation has failed.
I’ve had this problem present itself itself on several different systems in recent months – I thought it was as a result of doing lots of driver upgrades/card swaps for various features, but it turns out to be pretty common. Especially with any of the drivers from the 11 series.
Make your PC run quieter with one simple trick
Are your case fans giving you nightmares about ‘nam? Are they just a few RPM away from sending you into a Ridley Scott style reverie? Want to know a quick, cost free way to make your PC run more quietly than it is right now? Everything you need to stop that incessant din might be right there in your BIOS.
How to identify a motherboard when you want to upgrade
I often get emails asking for advice on upgrades, most of which I try to answer as quickly as I can, but one that came through the other day struck me with a problem that I imagine is more common than you’d think.
The writer wanted to know what the best graphics card would be for his motherboard, and proceeded to list all the bits and bobs inside his PC. Some of them were nearly ten years old. Two things were immediately obvious from his mail. Firstly, that a graphics upgrade alone wasn’t going to get Crysis 2 running at full speed. Secondly, that he’d obviously made a mistake identifying his components. According to the email he was running an Athlon FX chip from the middle of the last decade with a Pentium 4 motherboard circa 2001.
Since he also reckoned he was using two GeForce graphics cards in SLI configuration, I surmise that the writer is probably right about the chip, wrong about the mobo (since that predates SLI technology). Or that it was someone deliberately being silly and trying to catch me out.
The serious question the story raises, though, is how do you know what motherboard is inside your machine, and what its compatible with when you come to upgrade?
Intel Series 6 recall: What you need to know
Launched at the CES trade show last month, the latest Core i5 and i7 processors from Intel have been winning plaudits from PC Gamer chums like TechRadar. Codenamed Sandy Bridge, performance of these new chips is notably up against the already respected older Core processors, while the price has been kept the same or, depending on where you shop, even lowered.
It’s not surprising, then, that most online pundits have marked the new range as ‘the one to get’ if you’re after a new CPU.
So yesterday’s news that Intel was performing a massive product recall for PCs designed around Sandy Bridge CPUs put a bit of a dampener on things. Something which none of the early reviewers spotted has gone wrong, and it’s going to cost Intel an estimated $1bn to fix.
Make Modern Warfare 2 run faster on your PC
In anticipation of the forthcoming Call of Duty: Black Ops, a few of us in the office have been sharpening our mad skillz with CoD: Modern Warfare 2.
Ignoring the editorially dubious airport sequence, it’s still one of the most popular online shooters going, with difficult to conquer maps that rely on both strategy and skill.
We can’t do much to speed up your reactions, but we can help to speed up your PC. If you fancy indulging this weekend, here’s a quick guide to getting the fastest frames per second possible.
Ask the expert: messing with your mouse
What do you do if your mouse goes wrong? That innocuous looking piece of plastic that sits beside your keyboard has proven to be somewhat problematic for a few followers this week. Which is a strange co-incidence because I’ve just written a column about troubleshooting mice for next month’s mag.
Ask the expert: How to revive an old PC
Sunday is a day for tackling those odd jobs you just haven’t had time to do over the last week. Like fixing annoying PC problems or figuring out what the internet is made of. Fortunately, our resident technical expert Adam Oxford doesn’t believe in weekends, so he’s on hand to help out whatever day of the week it is.
Ask the Expert: what 3D card should I buy?
Another week, another set of tech troubles to be solved by PC Gamer’s resident hardware guru, Adam Oxford. He drops by every seven days to offer advice on persistent problems and fix foibles, and he’ll even have a shot at answering the great questions in life. Like “what does anti-ghosting mean”? Got a problem? You can raise an issue or ask a question by commenting on this thread, posting in our tech forum or emailing the magazine.
Ask the Expert: Fixing a broken internet
It’s Wednesday here on the PC Gamer blog which means that we’re late in posting our PC Gaming helpdesk. Our resident tech doctor, Adam Oxford, is in and ready to dispense diagnostic advice. He’ll also answer all your hardware related questions. Except, “where do chips come from, Mummy”? You’re far too young to know.
Ask the expert: should I turn off UAC?
If cross platform gaming were a horse race, the PC would be a thoroughbred. Faster, more powerful and with a penchant for expensive oats. Like any infinitely rarified animal or highly tuned machine, though, it doesn’t take much to cause it damage. Our resident tech vet Adam Oxford is here to put it out of your misery.
Ask the expert: cooling your PC
The hot weather has provided a theme for this week’s PC gaming helpdesk. Cooling concerns have cropped up over and over again, so how much do you need to worry about what your CPU’s temperature?
Every Tuesday, our hardware expert Adam Oxford is on hand to answer your hardware and software gripes. If you’ve got a question, ask below in the comments, or in the tech folder in our forum.
