PC Powerplay

Welcome to a whole new year, and a whole new decade! As usual, we’re kicking off this trip around the sun with an in-depth technical handbook, packed with PC building advice, our favourite gear of 2019, and a few hints and tips to get you firmly grou

After all these years, we are still not at the point where our PCs turn on instantaneously, or restore an active session in Windows. Waking from sleep or hibernation can take anywhere from a short while to what feels like an eternity, depending on th

In case you missed it, Nvidia officially slashed the price of its GeForce RTX 2060 Founders Edition to US$299 last month in an obvious attempt to steal some thunder from AMD’s upcoming Radeon RX 5600 XT launch. Now, rumor has it AMD is pushing out a

Over the next six pages, you’ll find the best gear to have been released this year. The hardware, systems, and components that stand out as the best options around. If you’re looking to treat yourself, this makes for a great wishlist of where to drop

Chris: No matter what kind of pirate you are, Rare added something to Sea of Thieves for you this year. Fishing is the perfect activity for solo players with a nice array of fish that can only be caught in certain parts of the world and sometimes onl

Wes: This is just primo grade-A videogame, right here. Capcom updated a classic, tightly designed game with smooth modern action and managed to retain the low-level anxiety and occasional bursts of terror that early Resident Evil excelled at. As the

Chris: There’s a weird pleasure to playing a bad guy in games, but it’s often coupled with a bit of guilt over the terrible things you do, and punishment in the form of a ‘bad ending’. Not so in Untitled Goose Game, because you’re not really evil, yo

Harry: Like many, I suspect, I considered giving up on Sekiro. I wasn’t even very far, either, but my stumbling block came in the shape of a nondescript general: Tenzen Yamauchi. To jog your memory, this is the foe with a smattering of soldiers aroun

Tyler: Control’s brand of weirdness is familiar – Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, and George Saunders come to mind – and that’s Remedy’s thing: it never hides the influences of its metaphysical playgrounds. But it’d be unfair to call Control a pastiche ju

Steven: I’m just going to go ahead and say it: Final Fantasy XIV is the best Final Fantasy game ever made. Though it’s an MMO, Square Enix has stuffed it full of the endearing characters and exciting fantasy worlds you’d find in any of the single-pla

Chris: Laughter is often the result of surprise, and there are few games quite as surprising as What the Golf? Each of its holes has three stages, and each stage gives developer Triband another chance to catch you out. That structure itself is a surp

Wes: I’m 30 hours into a Three Kingdoms co-op campaign where I’m conquering all of southern China as Sun Jian. Meanwhile, my friend and neighbour Yuan Shu has had to become a vassal, then join an alliance, just to stop Cao Cao from trampling him. I k

Evan: Walking in the footsteps of other PCPP GOTYs of yore (Into the Breach, FTL, Spelunky) Slay the Spire is a series of difficult, pleasant epiphanies that you acquire through failure. Oh, relics might be more important than cards. And huh, maybe r

Chris: It’s not just the breadth and beauty of the world Rockstar built but the amount of things to do in that world and the lack of real pressure to do any of them until you’re ready. RDR2 doesn’t have the desperate insecurity of a Ubisoft world whe

Evan: A year in, it’s the athleticism of Apex Legends that elevates it above its FPS and battle royale peers. Apex contains a decathlon worth of verbs: crouch-slides, dropship nosedives, trampoline leaps, zipline ambushes. These moves aren’t gimmicks

Rachel: I’ve put my janky little wooden spaceship through hell in Outer Wilds. Crashing into planets, plummeting into black holes, botching up landings, and spinning wildly through the void is all part of the joyful experience of exploration. I’ve lo

Jody: The Drama skill would like to explain that what makes Disco Elysium great is how it coherently draws together influences from outside of videogames, that it combines 1970s cop dramas with David Fincher deconstructions of detective stories and C

Liquid-cooling is a fickle thing. It’s complex, intricate, and filled with far deeper considerations than any standard PC build. There’s a finesse and beauty to it, and a risk involved. The very best systems out there incorporate it into their wonder

LENGTH OF TIME: 20-30 HOURS LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY: HARD It’s always scary taking a graphics card apart, because you’re messing around with something that’s insanely expensive. On the flip side, liquid-cooling anything below an RTX 2080 or equivalen

It’s been five long years since Intel’s very first 14nm CPUs came to market. That’s worth repeating. It’s taken fully five years for Intel to roll out the 10nm successor to its 14nm production node. This from the company that has led the industry in

Intel’s 10th-gen CPUs are here. But wait – what about the desktop? For now, there are three different families of 10th-gen chips and none are mainstream desktop processors. So, what gives? According to the narrative that has emerged over the last yea

Over one teraflop of pure compute performance, support for ultra-high resolution HEVC encode and decode, improved display pipelines, an enhanced rasterizer, variable rate shading, over double the performance in 3D rendering, and support for adaptive

So, you use Windows. You’re in a slowly shrinking but still three-quarters majority, so it’s not a surprise: Windows users are ubiquitous. Almost as ubiquitous as people complaining about Windows, because that group extends to macOS and Linux users,

Our preparation time is going to be a little more detailed this time around. All the usual rules apply: Make sure you’ve got a nice open surface to build on, a small bowl or other container to keep loose screws in, and all the tools you’re going to r

One of the factors that contributes to our pessimism surrounding reinstalling Windows is that we desperately don’t want you to lose anything. We’re kind like that. But there is another, slightly frivolous way to do a reinstallation if you’ve got work

We’re back with another featured build, and this time our focus is customisability. We wanted to make a straightforward, versatile system to act as a launchpad for future expansions. As such, we had a budget to work with: $1,000. And we stuck to it (

Reinstalling is, or should be, a last resort – and if you ever come to the point where you absolutely have to reinstall Windows and don’t have copies of your files, it might be too late. A hardware failure, a cryptographic malware attack, whatever th

LENGTH OF TIME: 2-3 HOURS LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY: EASY Nvidia’s “Super” variants of the GeForce RTX range have proved divisive, with some loving the improved performance sans price increase, while others disparage the modest performance gains. For our

A few months before the start of this decade, a game called League of Legends entered open beta. Back then, it was impossible to know the extent of the phenomenon it would become – ten years on, Riot’s debut game is played by 8 million players every

RELEASED JULY 25, 2017 | DEVELOPER EPIC | PUBLISHER IN-HOUSE James: Who said it? Who at Epic Games – during whatever meeting about the questionable outlook of its cooperative base building game finally entering early access after nearly seven years

The first game I ever bought from Steam Early Access was a survival sandbox called Under the Ocean. I played it, enjoyed it and tried out new alphas as they were released over the next few months. As time passed, the game’s scope grew, devblogs and r

Mark Essen has a simple justification for initially leaving out an online multiplayer mode in Nidhogg: the tech was difficult to build and expensive to deploy. He did not have an army of netcode experts ready to squash bugs, reduce latency and seamle

There have been few moments over the last ten years where I’ve been far from a grid full of little soldiers duking it out turn by turn. There was a lull, certainly in attention, after the ’90s, but then XCOM: Enemy Unknown came along and lit a fire u

Robin: Though some of their stealthier forms might survive I think your run-of-the-mill loot boxes aren’t long for this world. There’s just too much scrutiny on them these days. If government regulation doesn’t kill them, publisher skittishness will,

ISSUE 280 ON SALE MARCH 2019 ■

We’re at the point in the PC’s evolution where the overheads of virtualisation are proportionately so small, and the technology enabling it so plentiful, that running an everyday OS in a virtual machine is entirely reasonable. You obviously won’t get