PC Powerplay

For all intents and purposes, this is Samsung’s new flagship SSD series. Samsung today responded with its new 970 Evo Plus line of SSDs, which on paper is its fastest consumer NVMe offering to date. It’s somewhat of a surprise release, and an interes

Take your mind back a moment. It’s November 1996, Bill Clinton has just beaten Bob Dole to the presidency, “Macarena” is topping the charts, and Star Trek: First Contact is about to make waves at the box office. In the world of tech, however, somethi

With all of this coming from the mainstream manufacturers, you might be forgiven for thinking that’s it for the world of the humble processor. Well, there’s one outlier you might not expect to be making waves, but there are more than just ripples com

We’re in an odd place with pricing, and that old adage, “It’s always cheaper to build your own rig,” doesn’t hold true right now, at least, not until Samsung and co. get their extra memory plants up and running. The memory shortage and cryptocurrency

For the experienced, building a PC is an easy, often therapeutic experience. Each part fits into its designated slot, each cable is carefully woven around the frame, and each power-on is successful. However, for a vast swath of folk, it’s nothing of

Back to basics—how on earth did we come up with this one? Well, as graphics card prices have fallen, and the cost of memory is more reasonable than it has been of late, we thought it was time to see what you could do with an absolutely minimal budget

A sus is a world leader when it comes to PC parts, designing some of the best, most powerful components in the business. Whether you’re looking to put together a new PC, upgrade an existing one, or even invest in a new mouse and keyboard, Asus’ unbea

You’ve made it. You’ve got a brand new rig, and you’re ready to kick some serious ass in those 1080p games. But how do you get there? How do you install an operating system on your new machine? You haven’t installed an optical disc drive in your chas

Computers are funny things: a complicated collection of components, each working in conjunction with the rest to produce on-demand output. But as with any team effort, there is always a weak link in the chain. As more and more people join the PC enth

Having read the above, you should now have some understanding of just how important it is to buy the right GPU for the resolution you want to take advantage of, and the games you want to play. Memory and GPU cores are typically well paired. A GTX 106

Game developers are increasingly taking advantage of the growing market in Linux gaming, but that’s not always been the case, and even now some games aren’t released outside of Windows. Thanks to a clever tool called Wine, though, you can run many Wi

PlayOnLinux’s scripts aren’t always capable of getting the job done, sadly. There’s a particular issue with Steam-powered games, where the installer falls over attempting to insert Steam into the virtual drive you’ve created. The solution here is to

Free software drives the PC industry. Paid-for packages might seem to be the better option in general (and if you’re in industry, you’ll need the professional support options that come from paying up), but it’s the no-bucks-down applications that mak

Ever wanted to revisit classic games from the ’90s? DOSBox enables you to play games written for MS-DOS, and while it’s possible to tie it into PlayOnLinux, it’s far simpler to just install it natively: $ sudo apt-get install dosbox$ mkdir-p ~/dos/c

PlayOnLinux isn’t the only way to (try to) run Windows software in Linux. As we’ve seen, POL is basically a user-friendly wrapper for Wine, and while it makes things easier—particularly in the way it supports multiple Wine versions for compatibility

When it comes to outright speed, your PC never seems to have enough. Or to put it another way, it doesn’t matter how smoothly it’s running, your PC could always do with being that bit faster. Armed with the right know-how, you can fine-tune your PC t

BootRacer (www.greatis.com/bootracer) has become our go-to app for managing startup. Not only does it enable you to see which programs are launching with Windows, but it times everything, too, enabling you to keep an eye on the boot process, and givi

One way you can speed things up is by overclocking your processor, so both it and your RAM run faster than they were designed to. There are dangers with this approach—overheating can shorten your components’ lives—but official tools help to minimise

Reinstalling Windows from scratch is a one-way process. Once you’ve formatted the drive and reinstalled Windows, everything you once had is gone. What happens if you forget a key file or setting, or the reinstall process goes wrong, and you want to r

Once Windows has been reinstalled, open Windows Update to bring your fresh operating system fully up to date—don’t be surprised if there are hundreds of updates still to apply in the case of Windows 7 and 8.1. Once it’s completely updated, consider r

If you lived through the ’90s, you probably have fond memories of gaming classics such as Red Alert, Doom, and Starcraft. Despite the clunky graphics and witless AI, it’s hard to recapture the sense of excitement that came from giving Stalin a bad da

As the Australian summer winds down, it can be easy to forget that your PC is still generating plenty of heat, especially if you’re running all the latest games on it. When you’ve got all the best parts and you’ve maxed out the graphics settings on B

Sequels and remakes, sequels and remakes. It’s been a criticism of the games industry for some time that it’s averse to taking a risk on something new, more content to rake over the past, and present the familiar and “safe.” This has been particularl