Hullo chaps! Yes, it's another US processor deal, as there have been quite a few good ones recently. The 12700K is my personal pick of the new Intel 12th-gen family, as it offers the same number of performance cores and therefore much the same performance as the flagship 12900K - all while producing far less heat and costing much less too. It normally retails for around $385, but today a $45 discount code on Newegg brings it to just $340.
The Ryzen 9 5950X is a magnificent CPU that manages to deliver top-tier gaming performance while having enough cores (16) and threads (32) to be an incredibly strong workstation too - and now it's on sale.
CCL in the UK are offering it for £516 for the CPU alone, but you can also combine a discount code and CCL's bundling mechanism to get an even better deal on the 5950X and a Corsair 850W power supply - the ultimate starting point for a content creation workstation that also doubles as a high-end gaming PC.
Lots of people (Katharine) said how much they liked Tunic. An isometric action game about a fox dressed as Zelda who goes an ickle wickle adventure. How good could it really be? Good> apparently. Fine, sorry Tunic fans (mainly Katharine) I was very wrong.
Brendy's Tunic review (oh, and sorry Brendy) goes into why the game is an isometric treat. But there's another thing I'd like to highlight: the music. It's a magnificent work companion or study aid or meditative ascent to nirvana enabler.
As I mention on the episode, we've now organised our podcast recordings with a big spreadsheet, which means that (in theory) repeat topics on The Electronic Wireless Show podcast should be at a minimum. But for now we may have doubled up again, as we talk about games that have other, smaller games in them, like a Kinder Egg or a novelty casino.
Before that we have a big more egg chat to get out of the way, and a decent discussion on some of Henry Cavill's recent activities. Also I complain about how there are too many Marvel heroes now and they need to kill a load of them off. Plus, in exciting news Nate manages to do his first ever accurate impression, by accident. Stick around for another near miss for Matthew in this week's Cavern Of Lies.
The Intel Core i9 10850K is the defacto 10th-gen flagship CPU for Intel, and it's going cheap at Newegg today. It's been reduced to $290 when you use code 4FSBR2Z26 at the checkout, compared to a launch price of $450. Not bad for a CPU that launched less than two years ago - and a damn sight cheaper than upgrading to a 12th-gen system that requires a new CPU, motherboard and potentially expensive new DDR5 RAM as well.
Right now on Amazon UK, you can pick up a high performance WD Black SN750 SE 500GB SSD for £44.64 - and get a free game in the shape of Battlefield 2042 for your troubles. That's a great price for a PCIe 4.0 drive that also works well in PCIe 3.0 systems, with a maximum read speed of 3600MB/s and maximum write speed of 2900MB/s. The drive normally costs £58, making this a nice 22% discount from RRP.
This weekend I managed to watch, after recommendations from every corner of the internet, Our Flag Means Death, a TV show that is perhaps the most literal expression of the 'be gay, do crime' meme yet committed to celluloid. This got me thinking about pirate games again, as I do every 12-18 months or so. Everyone likes the pirate concept, and there is, I think, a collective urge to make piratey games. There are a bunch of them, after all. But there hasn't yet been one that I think provides exactly what I want from a pirate game.
2K and Gearbox Software have announced the first of four DLC additions to their obligatorily zany shooter Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, Coiled Captors, and it’s out on April 21st. That’s just two days before Shakespeare’s birthday – surely a sign of a quality narrative?
This Lenovo Legion laptop with an RTX 3060 graphics card was selling for £950 at the start of the year, but now you can pick up for £800 after a sizeable discount at Amazon. That's a fair price for a laptop with good mid-level specs, including an 11th-gen Core i5 11400H processor (6C/12T), 8GB of DDR4 RAM, a 512GB NVMe SSD and a 15-in 1080p 144Hz screen.
Lenovo make some of the best gaming laptops in the business, where their clean design, solid build quality and reliability have set them apart from other brands that tend to be a little plasticky at the sub-£1000 price points where most laptops are sold.
Looking for some external storage? You normally pay through the nose to get a super-high capacity drive, but right now GameStop are offering a capacious 8TB model for just $100. That's half the price of the same drive on Amazon, and works out to just 12.5 cents per gigabyte - a level of value you'd normally only expect to find on drives that are far smaller. The drive is called the 'Seagate Game Drive Hub for Xbox', but of course it works happily on PC too.