CUSTOMPC/ ISSUE 197
08 The best budget chip
you can’t buy
Richard Swinburne picks up a Ryzen
5 3500X in Taiwan, complete
with a retail box and warranty.
10 Game therapy
Can games help to treat mental
health? Tracy King takes a
look at The Insight Project.
16 3rd-gen Threadripper
We investigate the changes to
AMD’s Threadripper CPU design, try
out the new 24-core and 32-core
CPUs and find out which memory
works best on the new platform.
22 Asus ROG Zenith II Extreme
We try out one of the first new
TRX40 motherboards off the block
for AMD’s new Threadripper CPUs.
24 16-core Ryzen
AMD’s new Ryzen 9 3950X packs
16 cores into an AM4 package
for mainstream motherboards.
We try it out in both gaming and
multi-threaded workloads.
30 GeForce GTX 1660 Super
We try out Nvidia’s latest tweak to
the Turing formula, which pairs the
GTX 1660 with GDDR6 memory.
Highlights
Contents
Welcome to Issue 197
88 All about anti-aliasing
Don’t know your TAA from
your FXAA? Edward Chester
looks at the various ways that
your GPU can smooth out the
jagged edges in games.98 Hobby tech
Gareth Halfacree looks at the Argon
1 Pi 4 and Sipeed Longan Nano,
while having a good read of a tome
about typography in arcade games.106 Make a radiator blowhole
Our modder in chief, Antony Leather,
shows you how to boost your case’s
water-cooling potential by creating
your own blowholes for fans.44 Mince pie megatest
The test of the year is here! Find
out which festive pastry treat
won over our panel of judges.50 GeForce RTX on the go
We put eight laptops with Nvidia
GeForce RTX GPUs through their
paces, in order to find the best
portable gaming machines.70 Reading woes
Rick Lane thought he didn’t like
having to read text in games,
until he played Disco Elysium.78 What you need for gaming
Do you need more CPU cores
for gaming, and how much
difference does RAM make? We
investigate which components
111 make a difference to gaming.100
COVER
STORY
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