Given that Microsoft has made a fairly big deal about Windows Vista’s gaming credentials with talk of DirectX 10, Games for Windows and Games for Windows – LIVE (an extension of the Xbox Live! network to the PC), it’s more than a little disappointing that Vista has so far done fairly little for PC gaming. (more…)

There’s been a lot of talk on the web recently about Intel’s efforts in the field of real-time ray-tracing (RTRT) and Custom PC is no exception, as you can see here. The debate has centred on whether ray-tracing is set to replace traditional raster-based graphics in games in the not too distant future, and this is certainly an exciting prospect given the potential benefits in terms of visual quality that ray-tracing allows. The question is, is it likely? (more…)

This year’s awards are different to those of previous years, in that the majority of the awards (11 of the 14) were decided by your votes in our Reader Satisfaction Survey, rather than by the Custom PC team debating the relative merits of the products we’ve reviewed. Some of you will probably remember filling in that survey a month or so ago (nearly 4,000 of you did, so thanks for that!). (more…)

Many of you probably spat out a mouthful of tea in disgust when you read the title of this blog, but before you and your CS: S clanmates descend on the CPC office en masse shouting ‘Go, go, go!’ as you burst through the Labs door and lob in a flashbang, I should add that this isn’t my opinion, but that of users of game browser/monitor X-Fire.

According to games news site Gamesindustry.biz, the X-Fire servers recorded that Call of Duty 2 was played, on average, for a cumulative total of 173,355 hours per day, compared to 158,714 hours per day for Counter-Strike: Source.

This I find quite strange, since, in my experience, CS: S is massively more popular than CoD 2. Of course, these results are obviously skewed in favour of what X-Fire users play, although considering that there are now 8 million registered X-Fire users, you’d expect the sample size to be fairly representative of the ‘typical’ online gamer (especially since 60% of these users are based in Europe).

Nevertheless, these numbers fly in the face of what Valve (the developer of Counter-Strike) says about how popular CS: Source is on www.steampowered.com, which states that Source is played an average of 1,055,737 hours per day – nearly 7 times higher than the X-Fire statistic.

So, who is right? Is Source the Alpha and the Omega of online shooters, or is Steampowered hopelessly biased and X-Fire is right than CoD 2 is the mutt’s? Bet CT all…

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The reason for this is down to the fact that Windows has to reserve an area of memory address space for input/output devices that need to access the processor. Crucially, this includes graphics cards. (more…)

You may have read my previous post about water-cooling my PC, in which I described how I improvised a mounting system for a water block (since the original mounting kit had gone missing). At the end of this post I effectively warned against doing this, and it seems that this was good advice since my improvised mounting system broke over the weekend (cue sorrowful violins).

This meant having to completely strip-down the PC to almost a bare case (in order to remove the retention bracket from the rear of the board) and rebuild it again from scratch. However, rather than attempt to mod another mounting system (I was tempted, I have to admit, and even went to B&Q to eye up some screws) I resigned myself to defeat on this occasion and used an air-cooler instead.

However, I’ve only lost the battle and not the war, because I’m still planning to water-cool the rig in the future. This time, I’m definitely using a proper mounting kit though!

Image: ‘Screws’ by mfshadow

There’s a lot of rubbish talked about Windows Vista, and how it’s no better than XP, is noticeably slower, has poor driver support and so on ad infinitum. Sure, Vista has had its share of teething troubles, but I’ve been using it on my home PC since it was released and there’s simply no way I’d go back to XP.

I won’t go in to all the reasons why I love Vista, but I’ll mention one quickly because I had cause to call upon it recently (see here). That reason is Vista’s Repair function. (more…)

There are many things you can do to a PC in order to mark it out as a custom rig, but few are as obvious or as effective as water cooling. A well-implemented, water-cooled PC is more that just utterly cool, it’s a work of art, as the PCs from Vadim and Voodoo PC regularly illustrate.

I don’t contend to be able to build a water cooled PC to the same standard as these two mighty system builders, but I have dabbled with water cooling on more than a few occasions, both for my home rigs and also for features in the magazine (the last one being the system in the ‘Build your Dream PC’ feature. (more…)

I’ve played many, many games over the years, but relatively few have really hooked me to the point where I can’t play anything else, and find it difficult to stop playing and go to bed.

Counter-Strike, X-COM: UFO Defence and the first two Monkey Island games (to name a few) all managed to make this illustrious list, to which I have now also added Medieval II: Total War. (more…)