FEATURE / RETROSPECTIVE
IN HONOUR OF OUR 200TH ISSUE, CPC VETERAN BEN HARDWIDGE TRAVELS
BACK TO THE SUMMER OF 2003, WHEN CUSTOM PC FIRST STARTED
E
xtreme ultra! It’s now the name of one
of our awards, but back in 2003 it was
a phrase that members of the PC Pro
office (including me) shouted at Gareth Ogden
to taunt him. It’s all a bit embarrassing now.
Gareth had taken over PC Pro’s Leisure section –
a small part at the back of the magazine to
where we relegated our game reviews, and
he’d introduced a new ‘Extreme’ page to cover
modding and overclocking, where many of the
products had ‘Ultra’ in their name.
Games weren’t considered important to
most PC hardware magazines at this time. If
you were interested in games, you bought PC
Zone or PC Gamer. If you were interested in
hardware, most PC magazines for tech-literate
folks assumed you were an IT manager or a
businessperson. A review of a graphics card
was deemed to be a bit of fun that took up less
than a page, while most of the space went on
the serious PC kit – laser printers, scanners,
everyday PCs. If you were lucky, you might see
a 3DMark score on a PC review.
This was all about to change though. By
the early 2000s, it was rapidly becoming
clear that an awful lot of people were
massively interested in PC hardware, and
not because they wanted to run Excel
faster. The introduction of the first 3D
accelerator cards had elevated PCs well
above consoles for gaming horsepower,
and more and more people were realising
that you didn’t have to pay the inflated
prices for top-end processors if you knew
how to overclock a budget CPU.200 issues of
The full cover for Issue 1 of Custom PC, with its
arty design and mustard-coloured backgroundFEATURE / RETROSPECTIVE
IN HONOUR OF OUR 200TH ISSUE, CPC VETERAN BEN HARDWIDGE TRAVELS
BACK TO THE SUMMER OF 2003, WHEN CUSTOM PC FIRST STARTED
E
xtreme ultra! It’s now the name of one
of our awards, but back in 2003 it was
a phrase that members of the PC Pro
office (including me) shouted at Gareth Ogden
to taunt him. It’s all a bit embarrassing now.
Gareth had taken over PC Pro’s Leisure section –
a small part at the back of the magazine to
wherewerelegatedourgamereviews,and
he’dintroduced a new ‘Extreme’ page to cover
modding and overclocking, where many of the
products had ‘Ultra’ in their name.
Games weren’t considered important to
most PC hardware magazines at this time. If
you were interested in games, you bought PC
Zone or PC Gamer. If you were interested in
hardware, most PC magazines for tech-literate
folks assumed you were an IT manager or a
businessperson. A review of a graphics card
was deemed to be a bit of fun that took up less
than a page, while most of the space went on
the serious PC kit – laser printers, scanners,
everyday PCs. If you were lucky, you might see
a 3DMark score on a PC review.
This was all about to change though. By
the early 2000s, it was rapidly becoming
clear that an awful lot of people were
massively interested in PC hardware, and
not because they wanted to run Excel
faster. The introduction of the first 3D
accelerator cards had elevated PCs well
above consoles for gaming horsepower,
and more and more people were realising
that you didn’t have to pay the inflated
prices for top-end processors if you knew
how to overclock a budget CPU.200 issues of
The full cover for Issue 1 of Custom PC, with its
arty design and mustard-coloured background