Rated: 100% (4 votes)
Loading ...Custom PC (.co.uk) is go!
garethogden
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It seems odd to have a blog post about our new website sitting above a bunch of other blog posts (which, in case you’re wondering, I added while the site was still invisible to the outside world) but I thought I ought to mark the occasion anyway!
As you can see, the new www.custompc.co.uk is up and running, and blogging is a major part of it. You can even have your own blog, including a modding project blog (or Plog) for describing your latest and greatest project. We no longer call this ‘Readers’ Drives’, but the best mods posted on the site will still get hand-picked to appear in the Readers’ Drives section in Custom PC the magazine, and you’ll still get your PC professionally photographed and win a bundle of great prizes too.
However, if the new site is still a little daunting then check out this short Hands On Guide, which walks you through the new features and should help you get up to speed.
I hope you enjoy the new Custom PC website and I encourage you to take advantage of the Plogs, commenting and User Review features!
Rated: 100% (4 votes)
Loading ...Do us brits ‘get’ Fatal1ty?
garethogden
During the CPC team’s visit to Taipei for the Computex trade show in June, we ventured out one evening with Abit and a couple of pro overclockers (you can see the video of them doing their stuff here). In addition to hosting a pro-overclocking show, Abit also hosted a Fatal1ty challenge, which was the usual ‘Fatal1ty pwns anyone and everyone daft enough to take him on’ sort of affair.
Now, there’s no doubting that Fatal1ty is an amazing gamer, but I’ve never really understood the appeal of Fatal1ty-branded products. Read more
Rated: 100% (2 votes)
Loading ...Are remakes of old games a good idea?
garethogden
The release of Tomb Raider: Anniversary, which is basically just a remake of the first Tomb Raider from 1996, has sparked an interesting debate on the issue of whether game developers should remake old games or concentrate on new ideas. There’s a good article on Gamesindustry.biz called History Repeating that discuss the issue, and� I recommend giving it a read.
Personally, I like the idea because there are many excellent games from yesteryear that we simply can’t play (or play easily) anymore because hardware and operating systems have changed so much. Read more
Rated: 100% (2 votes)
Loading ...New modder on the scene
garethogden
Bill Owen from Mnpctech.com gave me a heads up on a new modder from South Africa, whom he is now sponsoring. His name is Ettienne Venter and his first mod is called ‘Project Epiphany’. As you can see, it’s pretty stunning.
According to the forum thread on www.wizdforums.co.uk, Ettienne was inspired to build the PC after seeing the feature on Orac 3 in Custom PC. As he says in the thread in Wizdforums, ‘A few years ago I read a CustomPC magazine and saw the ORAC machine in it. It was really the most amazing mod I had ever seen. To this day, I still believe ORAC to be the most amazing mod. So I decided to do a mod of my own. This was the first real mod that I was to do, and I had absolutely no modding skills whatsoever.’
Bill supplied us with Ettienne’s email so we’ll get in touch and, hopefully, he’ll be able to follow in the footsteps of Peter Dickison (builder of Orac 3 and WMD) and have his mod featured in the pages of Custom PC too.
Rated: 100% (3 votes)
Loading ...Budget DirectX 10 cards - you can’t polish a turd
garethogden
Image from Guffsturdpolish
Now that ATi has finally released a competitor to Nvidia’s GeForce 8600-series in the form of the Radeon HD 2600XT we have a clearer picture of how the mainstream DX10 market has shaped up. And the shape resembles a brown swirly thing that is usually left behind on the pavement by a member of the species Canis lupus familiaris. Basically, mainstream DX10 cards are all a bit cack.
Rated: 75% (4 votes)
Loading ...Q. When is a Core 2 Duo not a Core 2 Duo?
garethogden
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A. When it’s a Pentium Dual-Core!
Okay, so it’s not very funny, at least not in a funny ha-ha kind of way, although Intel’s decision to release another Pentium-branded CPU is certainly a little strange, especially when it ditched the Pentium name in the first place because it had become synonymous with poor-performing, inefficient Netburst-architecture chips. Read more
Rated: 93.33% (3 votes)
Loading ...The Manhunt 2 debate
garethogden
The banning of Manhunt 2 by the BBFC has understandably provoked a lot of media coverage, and rightly so, because it’s a big deal. The only other game to be banned by the BBFC was Carmageddon in 1997, although tweaks to the game (adding Zombies, instead of humans, for example) meant that it did later get released. Read more
Rated: 90% (4 votes)
Loading ...Crazy ideas for games
garethogden
When the pile of Custom PC mail is slammed down on my desk the first thing we all do (although I usually beat the others to it) is to grab the jiffy bags. This isn’t because we all have a strange fetish for padded envelopes, but simply because the jiffy bags usually contain new games that have been mailed to us by publishers for the purposes of reviews. Read more
Rated: 85.71% (7 votes)
Loading ...Upgradeable laptop draws closer
garethogden
There’s been quite a lot of interest on the web surrounding the Asus C90 laptop, which will be the real first ‘DIY’ laptop, in that a large majority of the components will be user upgradeable. It was recently shown off at the Computex show in Taipei (which Alex, Clive and I attended a few weeks ago), but now Asus is hinting that sample may arrive in the UK fairly soon, along with a variety of MXM graphics card modules. Read more
Rated: 67.5% (8 votes)
Loading ...A new X-Fi, but it’s not from Creative
garethogden
It’s no secret that Custom PC is a big fan of Creative’s X-Fi sound chip, and I’m also personally a big fan of the technology too. So it was with great interest that I opened an email today from Auzentech, a Californian company that is to become the first manufacturer (other than Creative, of course) to release a sound card based on the X-Fi chip. Read more