Enter Recimg, a tool also built into Windows 8 that enables you to create a custom refresh point. Get your Windows installation to an ideal state, with all necessary updates in place, and Steam installed along with all your favourite games and mods, then take a snapshot. Now when you use Refresh, only the programs installed in the intervening time will be lost: your savegames will be kept and your games and other installs will merely be returned to the state they were in when you took the snapshot.

Here's how.

Pascal was announced almost a year ago, but it's taken until recently for details of just how powerful Nvidia's next-gen GPU will be. In short: powerful. I mean, just look at the infographic above.

In fact, the company is touting Pascal as having roughly 10 times the power of its current flagship card, the Titan X. EDIT: That's in terms of CUDA compute performance—definitely impressive, but don't expect the first Pascal card to actually deliver 10 times the gaming performance levels of the Titan X.

Allowing for 8-way SLI through its NVLink tech and the ability to utilise up to 32GB of RAM - up from the 12GB of a Maxwell card—it's... beastly. Though admittedly I'd just use it to play Football Manager.

With research and development coming in at around three years—and presumably a fair bit of cash, too—it's unsurprising that Pascal looks like it could be such a leap over our current tech.

The Pascal range is expected to hit next year, so for now you'll just have to get by with your $999 Titan X.

Nvidia's next-next GPU chip, Volta, is slated for 2018. Reports it will be able to "power a small moon" are said to be "slightly overstating things".

Thanks, PCGamesN

Space Hulk: Ascension will be the last game developed by Full Control, the studio's CEO has announced.

Thomas Hentschel Lund, the CEO in question, spoke to NordicGame, saying:

"After releasing ten games with considerable critical and commercial success, we ve made the difficult decision that the release of Space Hulk: Ascension will be our last one. We simply wanted to stop when we were at the top of our game."

The decision comes about off the back of the underperforming Jagged Alliance: Flashback and a long-winded exit agreement negotiation with investor CAPNOVA, leaving Full Control unable to sort out new publishing/development deals in a timely fashion.

Additionally, the time-consuming and risky production of games - needing 6-12 months of funding and without any guarantees things will do well - means a medium-sized studio like Full Control faces difficulties Lund wasn't sure the company could contend with.

As such, the studio is ceasing production of games and reducing its staff numbers - but avoiding bankruptcy or closure means sales and community support will continue for existing titles.

"At least I have enough control of my budgets to be able to land the entire company and avoid bankruptcy," Lund said, "Even though we will not be producing any more content after May, I want Full Control to continue selling the Space Hulk and Jagged Alliance games and providing community support for several years to come."

DLC and ports of Ascension are still being worked on and will release in due course, but there will be no more gaming projects from the studio.

I've been tragically deafened by the EVE Fanfest crowd's reaction to the above Valkyrie footage. At home—on a monitor that isn't the size of a house—it might look slightly less like something worth bursting someone's eardrum over. Nevertheless, it's an impressive and action-packed look at how the VR dogfighter has progressed.

The footage is from an early offline mission in which the player, as a Gallente cadet, is on escort duty. It's a training mission for online play, which remains EVE Valkyrie's main focus. CCP says their goal is to make Valkyrie the best competitive multiplayer game available in VR. No pressure, then.

Also revealed in CCP's Valkyrie keynote was a new heavy fighter with an EMP-based stun attack, and a new game mode that requires teams to deploy drones in order to capture control points. Also there's the voice: that's Battlestar Galactica's Katee Sackhoff.

Source 2 will be free to developers, but it isn't stopping there. Valve bossman Gabe Newell has spoken of how he wants a more open world for developers.

Talking with MCV during this year's GDC, Newell spoke of how Valve is allowing other companies to use its tech for free—something that might not have come to pass if other companies had their way:

"We started to get pretty worried a while ago when we saw this sort of closing off. It was like Microsoft saw the iPhone and said: We should make the PC more like that; people should have to go through us to have new ideas . And we thought that sounded like a terrible idea. The iPhone should be more like the PC and the internet. Not the other way around. "We were happy doing what we were doing but we felt that, for our own sake, we needed to make sure that the PC and PC gaming continue to exist and thrive. Developers need the freedom to try out stuff; that s how we ve been successful."

Sure, it doesn't mean we're all getting free Steam machines and Vive headsets with our copies of Half-Life 3 that we're all given gratis, but that's because we're not all developers. If you are, Newell and Valve want to help:

"If there s something useful, we ll give it away. Somebody else will figure out another way to use it, as long as we treat it as a tool and not a straightjacket."

The new engine is the big reason to follow Blood Bowl 2, the underlying rules developed by Games Workshop in 1995 are still perfectly capable of producing farce on the football field. Developer Cyanide says its striving for a "fresher" look that improves "clarity and comprehension of the action on the field". They've also put a lot of work into animating Blood Bowl's bumbling players, as you can see in the latest trailer, starring the humans, who aren't especially good at anything, but pass basic IQ requirements that Orks sometimes struggle with.

The game's due out in Spring, and a shiny new website has launched with extra details, including news of a story-driven campaign following the resurgence of the Reikland Reavers. If it's anything like the last game, the real fun will be in creating leagues with friends, which tend to create ridiculous but surprisingly intense rivalries.

A free update for Endless Legend landed yesterday adding a new victory condition that lets you build a spaceship and flee the planet in a culture-wide mic-drop exit that will make your enemies sad. This victory is available to all factions, but only after they've completed "Faction specific Quests".

The update also adds three new map generation presets including New World, which puts everyone on the same island so they can eat each other, Hunger Games style. The Scattered preset gives each faction their own island and Symmetrical does what you'd expect.

A new minor faction called the Dorgeshi have also been included at the community's request and diplomacy has been expanded to let you ask other factions to declare wars on targets of your choice. There's good news for modders, too. They'll now "have access to the game Simulation" which should hopefully enable folks to make deeper rule changes and create more varied scenarios.

Endless Legend was the best strategy game of 2014, earning a commendation for design in our game of the year awards, thanks largely to the way it tries to innovate on staid turn-based strategy principles. It also has amazing, varied factions, like science vikings from space, and people made from soul dust. For more info, check out our Endless Legend review, and the Endless Legend site.

While few of us will have the horsepower to run The Witcher 3 at 4K resolution when it releases this May, it's nice to know the option is there. The image above depicts the RPG running at said resolution (click here to see it properly) and it definitely looks better than The Witcher 2 at 4K. 

CD Projekt RED released system specs for The Witcher 3 in January, and even the minimum requirements are pretty demanding. Still, you've got more than a month before the game's May 19 release date to upgrade, and... well, this is Build Week. If you've got the money there's no excuse. 

You can build yourself a gaming rig out of a bargain-priced, dual core processor and a budget motherboard. I ve had Far Cry 4 running at max settings on a 1080p machine that cost less than either of the latest consoles. Or, you can spend thousands creating a PC that nails the absolute highest framerates.

If you want the top of the current tech tree it s got to be the latest Intel Haswell-E platform: X99.

Want to jump straight to the tests? Click here to head to page two.

But why would I want to spend so much on building my PC?

The easy answer is future-proofing. Spend big now and you ll be set for years. But that should still be tempered with a little restraint there s little point in spending over the-odds on every part of your system. You don t need 32GB of DDR4 memory, for example, and probably won t for another decade.

Do I need a $1050 ( 800) processor?

Heavens, no. I d argue almost no one does. The top Core i7-5960X is a modern marvel of Intel s technical expertise, packing in eight of the latest 22nm Haswell cores, all running at breakneck speeds and eminently overclockable to boot. But unless you re into serious, computationally heavy number crunching work you re never going to see a return on your investment.

Where the Haswell-E platform gets interesting is at the bottom of the range. There are only three processors in this line-up, with the ultra-expensive 5960X at the top and another pricey beast in the middle. But at the bottom is one of my favourite chips of the last year and the missing link between Haswell and Haswell-E: the Core i7 5820K.

It s priced only a little higher than the top i7 of the Z97 platform, but packs in another two cores to become the cheapest six-core CPU Intel has ever produced. It s better than the 800 Extreme edition chip from the last generation.

Do I have to spend a fortune on an X99 motherboard?

Again, you can if you want to. But the most pleasing thing about this platform is that you don t have to. You can spend less on your X99 board than you might on a high-end Z97 equivalent and it will still deliver the very best PC technology currently available.

What does an X99 board offer beyond Haswell-E support?

The big thing for gamers is that this platform has the highest bandwidth for a multi-GPU setup. The standard i7/Z97 combo offers only16 native PCIe 3.0 lanes for the whole machine, while an 5820K paired with an X99 board can offer 28. While that still won t provide x16/x16 bandwidth on two graphics cards, it gives you more than a dual-GPU Z97 would.The X99 also has a full x4 bandwidth M.2 socket. That s twice the bandwidth the standard Z97 M.2 interface offers, and won t hobble future PCIe-based SSDs the way the lower platform will.

How we tested

CPU performance: An i7-5960X CPU was used with Cinebench and X264 v4 to find the relative performance differences between boards.

Gaming performance: Battlefield 4 was used at max settings at 1080p, with a GTX780Ti graphics card, to look for performance differences between the motherboards.

Overclocking performance: As long as single-threaded performance remains crucial for gaming, a decent overclock will boost framerates. Ease and stability of overclocking was thus factored into the overall score for each board.

Page 1: Introduction to X99 motherboardsPage 2: MSI X99 SLI Plus, Asrock X99M Extreme4, Asus X99-Deluxe, Gigabyte X99-SOCForcePage 3: Asus X99-A, Asrock Fatality X99 Killer, EVGA X99 Micro, benchmark scores

MSI X99S SLI Plus

MSI s well-priced $180 ( 160) X99S SLI Plus is the among the cheapest X99 boards I ve seen since they all launched. It s been a firm favourite of mine ever since, and one of the best motherboard partners for the Core i7-5820K processor that I can think of.

Yet the battle for first place was still a very close-run thing, and that s because ASRock are offering a very tempting alternative with their X99M Extreme4. Additionally, the SLI Plus doesn t top the tables in any benchmarks—and in my Battlefield 4 benchmark was languishing around the bottom in terms of average framerates. All this might lead you to wonder why it s getting the topscore, but the other key metric in gaming performance is the minimum framerate.

At 66fps this budget hero runs over 10fps higher than the minimum framerate of every other board I ve tested, and that is going to give you a smoother experience playing games. But then, even to refer to this board as budget is to do MSI a disservice. They re asking for no compromise on your behalf here.

You still get all the important Haswell-E features you could want. There s a full eight DIMM slots for your quad-channel DDR4 memory,there s a SATA Express port and an x4 M.2 connection to cater for all your PCIe storage demands now and in the future.

You also get full SLI support and CrossFireX too. You can t run your graphics cards across all four of the PCIe slots available, but it will comfortably run up to three graphics cards working together, all running directly from the CPU s available PCIe 3.0 lanes. For such a well-priced board that s a big fat tick for serious gamers.

In general CPU performance terms it s no great shakes. The SLI Plus was never far from the top boards I ve tested, but isn t going to win any performance awards. The weakest showing was in the overclocking stakes—it came joint bottom in that test with a maximum frequency of 4.3GHz.

The SLI Plus isn t going to win any GQ style awards, either. The plain black PCB has no fancy shielding covering the rear interface connections, and no LEDs blazing away behind the MSI logos. It s aboard for building a performance PC, not for gazing adoringly at through a perspex window.

ASRock s micro ATX board is similarly priced, but isn t quite as powerful at stock clock speeds and doesn t have the benefit of the full eight DIMM slots for future memory upgrades, or the extra PCIe3.0 sockets. MSI s X99S SLI Plus is thus my pick of the current crop of X99 boards for pairing with the six core 5820K.

Score: 93

Verdict: An excellent and excellently priced X99 motherboard, perfect for your multi-GPU i7 5820K gaming build.

ASRock X99M Extreme4

ASRock is no longer a motherboard manufacturer associated with the absolute bottom of the market. It now stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the likes of Asus, Gigabyte and MSI. Which is why the $220 ( 170) ASRock X99M Extreme4 board got so close to taking the gold this month: it s great value, but also able to keep up with the big boys and offer all the extras.

It s also great to see the super high-end X99 platform getting the small form factor treatment. The mATX scale might not be as minute as mini-ITX boards, but there s no way to shrink down the huge 2011-v3 socket and you wouldn t want to lose the quad-channel capabilities of DDR4 either and for that you need at least four DIMM slots.The only compromises you re making between ATX and mATX is that you get four slots instead of eight, and there s only a pair of PCIe 3.0 slots. On a more budget-oriented X99 build you re unlikely to be buying more than two graphics cards for your multi-GPU array anyway.

The Extreme4 doesn t stand out in the benchmarking stakes—in fact it s the slowest out of the blocks for straight CPU performance. Its single core performance is also relatively low, but it still manages to post competitive gaming performance numbers. It makes up for all that when you overclock, easily hitting 4.4GHz.

Were it not for the MSI, the Extreme4 would have taken the top spot, but unless you re building a smaller machine the SLI Plus is a better bet.

Score: 89

Verdict: Not the fastest, but this is a quality small form factor board that doesn't demand much compromise at all.

Asus X99-Deluxe

The top two boards in this supertest win their place with an eye to pairing them up with the CPU on the bottom rung of the Haswell-E ladder, the Core i7-5820K. If you re going all out for the i7-5960X, the pricey $375 ( 280) Asus X99-Deluxe would have to be the board you buy to go with it—it s simply the outright best board in this test.

You have the full X99 complement of eight memory slots for your quadchannel DDR4, and both M.2 x4 and a pair of SATA Express ports as well. But you also get a further eight SATA 6Gbps ports, ten USB 3.0ports on the rear, with headers on the board for a further four, and five PCIe 3.0 x16 slots.

That means you can get a proper four-way SLI or CrossFireX setup running on this board with all slots running at x8 speeds. There are also physical switches on the PCB so you can select how many graphics cards you re plugging in and it will light up which sockets to use for dual, triple or quadruple GPU arrays. There are also switches for overclocking, XMP and things most of us will probably never need.

You may also notice that the Asus X99 Deluxe is using a different socket to the other boards. The extra pins deliver more stable power and enable better overclocking. It didn t let me push the CPU any further than the rest, but enabled it to deliver a better Cinebench score even with a slightly lower clockspeed. It let the Corsair DDR4 hit its 3000MHz clockspeed, something only the other Asus board could manage.

Score: 89

Verdict: Arguably the best motherboard in this test, but only for the very rich looking to partner it with their 5960X.

Gigabyte X99-SOCForce

Right away you know the $350 ( 300) Gigabyte X99-SOCForce is a board designed to be free from the confines of a PC case, sitting in an open test bench being tortured with super-high frequencies and voltages by dedicated overclockers.

Inside the packaging is a GPU bracket specifically designed to hold your graphics cards in place while the board sits out in the open. There are also a vast array of physical buttons on the board itself to allow you to adjust overclocking frequencies and voltages on the fly.

Yet in general the CPU performance is uninspiring and so are the memory and storage numbers. Gigabyte has upped its gaming performance, offering the highest average framerate on test, but also the lowest minimum fps too.

I did manage the joint highest CPU overclock of all these boards hitting 4.41GHz without trouble but the Asus X99-Deluxe was still able to post a higher actual benchmark score.These, however, are not the places the SOC Force wants to fight. This is a board for getting your name (sorry, handle) in the serious overclocking tables of HWBot, not for some light overclocking with a closed-loop water cooler at home.

Gigabyte s X99-SOC Force is a board for the OC professional, and priced like one too, but the performance you ll get at the liquid nitrogen end of the spectrum doesn t translate into more mundane, real-world usage.

Score: 83

Verdict: A thoroughly impressive pro-overclocking board, but not necessarily one for gamers. Spend the extra money elsewhere.

Page 1: Introduction to X99 motherboardsPage 2: MSI X99 SLI Plus, Asrock X99M Extreme4, Asus X99-Deluxe, Gigabyte X99-SOCForcePage 3: Asus X99-A, Asrock Fatality X99 Killer, EVGA X99 Micro, benchmark scores

Asus X99-A

The $275 ( 203) Asus X99-A is the little brother of the X99-Deluxe and shares much of the same design aesthetic and feature set. Sadly the performance is something that hasn t been shared. Given the big difference in price that s not a surprise, but does leave me wondering where the X99-A sits. It s too expensive compared to the MSI or ASRock bargain-boards but doesn t offer the full feature-set and performance of either the Deluxe or Gigabyte s board seen above.

The PCIe storage performance is pretty much the slowest of all these X99 boards, which is a little odd given how speedy the Deluxe is. The stock CPU performance is also relatively low, though that is at least saved by posting the second highest overclocking benchmark. But crucially the framerates are poor on both fronts: the minimums aren t very good and the average is the absolute lowest of all these boards. (Although that s still only 7fps off the top performing Gigabyte board.)

It does still offer Asus s bespoke OC Socket, so it s the only other board to run Corsair s 3000MHz XMP setting on its memory modules. But if you are desperate for high-performance memory on a more affordable board, it s worth mentioning that there will be some X99 revisions happening next year which ought to address the current memory failings. So you don t have to make do with the X99-A.

Score: 78

Verdict: A capable board with a decent feature set, but doesn t quite match the gaming performance of the other boards here.

ASRock Fatal1ty X99 Killer

ASRock has tried to make the $230 ( 208) Fatal1ty X99 Killer as high-spec as possible,creating a board that s able to post performance figures that are actually only a touch behind the Asus Deluxe. What it can t do is match even the lower-end Asus board s overclocking or memory performance. Without that OCSocket to help deliver higher benchmark numbers and improved DDR4 support, it s difficult to recommend anybody else s board as a high-end alternative.

The CPU performance is relatively high compared to the others, and the PCIe storage speeds are also impressive, but the X99X Killer is still not going to be the board I d choose at any level. Compared with the MSI SLI Plus,or even its own X99M Extreme4 stablemate, the Killer can t deliver much more than either of those two bargain-priced boards.

That s a shame, as it still gets many things right. The BIOS screen is clear and informative and makes tweaking your system as simple as you could wish. There s also a Multicore Enhancement option which allows you to eschew Intel s limitations on running all CPU cores at maximum turbo.

Score: 77

Verdict: This ASRock motherboard puts up good numbers, but it's more expensive than some other options that perform just as well.

EVGA X99 Micro

The obvious competition for this micro board is ASRock s Extreme4, but that s a comparison that doesn t work out too favourably for EVGA.

The $245 ( 200) EVGA X99 Micro keeps up in terms of the featureset, dropping four memory slots but retaining quad-channel compatibility, and it s also got multiple PCie 3.0 lanes for up to three-way SLI or CrossFireX. Where it s missing out is in modern storage options.

The biggest omission is the lack of an M.2 slot for PCIe SSDs—the Key E socket is for mini PCIe WiFi cards only. There are also fewer SATA 6Gbps ports. That said, given that PCIe storage is in its infancy you can understand why it wasn t included.

The issue is that when you re spending this sort of money you want all the key features to be in evidence. If you re buying the X99 as a future-proof platform the X99 Micro falls a little short.

It does perform admirably in the benchmarks, aside from DDR4 performance. In gaming it s right up there with the big guns in terms of average framerate and is the most power efficient of the lot. But when the price is so close to the mATX Extreme4 there s no good reason to go for this EVGA.

Score: 74

Verdict: A few missing ports and features make this a tough recommendation over similarly priced options.

Benchmarks

Intel Core i7-5960X Cinebench R10 Index score (higher is better)

Intel Core i7-5960X, Battlefield 4 (1080p), Nvidia GTX 780 Ti (higher is better)

Intel Core i7-5960X maximum overclock (higher is better)

Page 1: Introduction to X99 motherboardsPage 2: MSI X99 SLI Plus, Asrock X99M Extreme4, Asus X99-Deluxe, Gigabyte X99-SOCForcePage 3: Asus X99-A, Asrock Fatality X99 Killer, EVGA X99 Micro, benchmark scores

If you weren't able to make it to our PAX East party, we're sorry we missed you! In addition to being an awesome time, we gave away an ASUS ROG G751 laptop to one of our attendees who used the hashtag #rogpcgparty during the event. Congratulations to winner Philip P. for nabbing that, but to everyone who wasn't able to attend, good news: you still have a chance to win a brand new laptop. 

While we were at PAX East, we got eleven of the best and brightest game developers we could find to sign another ASUS ROG G751, and we're going to give it to one of you. 

Here are the names you'll find on it:

• Alan Dabiri
• Brent Sodman
• Calvin Goble
• Chris Chung
• Chris Roberts
• Cliff Bleszinski
• Dustin Browder
• Eric Dodds
• Guillaume Provost
• Kepa Auwae
• Peter Holzapfel

To enter for a chance to win, head over to this link and fill out the form at the bottom of the page. This giveaway is for US residents ages 18 and older only, so apologies to our young readers from across the border—we'd offer this contest to as many people as possible if pesky laws didn't prohibit us from doing so. The giveaway is open now and will end on March 30th at 11:59 PDT. Good luck!