Custom PC - UK (2021-05)

Welcome

Custom PC Issue 212

EDITORIAL

EDITOR

Ben Hardwidge

[email protected]

FEATURES EDITOR

Edward Chester

[email protected]

MODDING EDITOR

Antony Leather

GAMES EDITOR

Rick Lane

CONTRIBUTORS

Gareth Halfacree, James Gorbold,

Mike Jennings, Phil Hartup,

Richard Swinburne, Tracy King

PRODUCTION EDITOR

Julie Birrell

PHOTOGRAPHY

Antony Leather, Brian O’Halloran,

Fiacre Muller, Gareth Halfacree

PUBLISHING

PUBLISHING DIRECTOR

Russell Barnes

[email protected]

This magazine is printed on paper sourced from

sustainable forests. The printer operates an

environmental management system which has been

assessed as conforming to ISO 14001.

Custom PC magazine is published by Raspberry Pi

(Trading) Ltd., Maurice Wilkes Building, St. John’s

Innovation Park, Cowley Road, Cambridge, CB4 0DS.

The publisher, editor, and contributors accept no

responsibility in respect of any omissions or errors

relating to goods, products or services referred to or

advertised. ISSN: 1740-7443.

DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME The information in

this magazine is given in good faith. Raspberry Pi

(Trading) Ltd cannot accept any responsibility for

loss, disruption or damage to your data or your

computer that may occur as a result of following or

attempting to follow advice given in the magazine.

If things do go wrong, take a break.

I

f you’ve ever gazed at the photos of gorgeous water-
cooled PCs on the Internet, with coloured coolant and
lights, and thought ‘wow, I wish my PC looked like
that’, then this issue’s main cover feature (see p76) is for you.
Building a water-cooled PC certainly has its challenges, and
you’ll want to set aside a decent chunk of time to do it, but the
end result will be a cool, quiet and lush-looking system that you
can proudly put on Instagram and say ‘I built this!’
We’re looking at this as your first step into a larger world (it’s
best to imagine that line in Alec Guinness’ voice, obviously).
We haven’t gone all-out on custom case modding and hard line
water cooling for this PC – we’ve based it on a readily available
case, standard components and soft tubing. It won’t be easy,
but if you’ve already built PCs with all-in-one liquid coolers,
this is a great next step in the land of custom rigs.
It’s not all about custom water cooling, of course. We’ve also
taken you through the best component choices for building a
high-end gaming PC, and detailed the options for overclocking
them, so you can eke out as much performance as possible from
your new system.
The big furry mammoth in the room, of course, is the
depressingly low stock of many new components, but we’re
starting to see some hope on the horizon here. AMD’s Ryzen
5 5600X and Ryzen 7 5800X CPUs are now easy to find in
stock, and Nvidia has also revealed plans to limit the mining
performance of its GeForce RTX 3060 cards in cryptocurrency
mining (see p12), while introducing a new line of dedicated
mining cards with no display outputs.
If AMD follows suit, and future gaming graphics cards are
steered away from miners, then the stock problems will start
to ease. Likewise, if the world can get to grips with vaccinating
its population against Covid, and stay on top of new variants,
we can also start to plug other holes in the supply chain. In the
meantime, though, now is a great time to have a think about
what you might put in a new PC and how you’ll build it.

First step into

water cooling
DESIGN
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ISSUE 212
SUBSCRIBERS
EDITION
ISSUE 212
EDITOR
Ben Hardwidge
[email protected]^
@custompcmag
/ FROM THE EDITOR