NZXT's H1 v2 is one of my favourite small form factor PC cases, but a high price point (and a manufacturing defect in the V1 model) kept it from seeing widespread adoption. It's now possible to pick up this Mini ITX case from Best Buy for $200, half its usual price and a good deal for a case that includes a 750W SFX power supply, 140mm AiO and top fan.
One of the lantern fish lures dangled in the face of anybody losing momentum in Starfield is "mate, you would not believe> the weird stuff that happens in New Game Plus". I won't say too much - not in this opening paragraph, anyway - but there's a playfulness to the post-completion options that you don't really find in the rest of Bethesda's much-ballyhooed RPG. It's the kind of thing you expect from modders, not the developers themselves.
I like small things - models, and what not - but I'm not patient enough to build them from scratch myself. Lego sets represent an ideal, if monstrously expensive, solution. I can build the thing without having to make all the constituent parts of it. I've recently gotten well into the modular city sets, to the extent that I look up discontinued sets on eBay and other such secondhand vendors. I don't actually get sets very often, but last week I built a police station, which can slot next to the bookshop I got for my last birthday. And while the bookshop has cute details - like a book called Moby Brick with a white block leaping from the sea on the cover, and an attic flat with a pet iguana in a glass tank - the copshop has some secret secrets that are the Lego equivalent of leaving a skeleton in a toilet stall. But better.
A friend recently found her old floppy disks from the 1997, uncovering a treasure trove of poetry, MS Paint art, homework, screensavers, and fanfic. Delightful finds which I feel privileged to have seen. I very much do not have my old floppies. They're all long-gone, chucked along with all my old websites and blogs and CDs and everythings in strict sentimentality purges. I don't know if I now regret that. So with vintage Internet simulator Hypnospace Outlaw being our game of the month in the RPS Game Club, I'm wondering: do you have your old sites and stuff? Dare you share it with us?
We've already covered a few RX 6800 XT deals that have come across as a result of the recent release of the 7700 XT and 7800 XT, and now it's time to look at the slightly smaller RDNA 2 card: the RX 6700 XT.
This model is a good option for 1440p gaming and examples are now significantly cheaper than they were a few months ago, including the ever-reliable Sapphire's Pulse RX 6700 XT 12GB model. This used to go for $340, but is now available for $309 when you use code SSCW2574 at the cart at Newegg.
While DDR5 RAM is the future now, there are still millions of DDR4 systems out there used for gaming, content creation and much more. Happily, the advent of DDR5 means that DDR4 prices have nose-dived, bringing extremely high capacity kits into much more reasonable price points. For example, this 2x 32GB kit of DDR4-3600 RAM from Viper, is down to £98 on Amazon - after retailing for over £130 as recently as July.
This is an awesome kit for RAM-intensive applications, like video editing, 3D rendering or scientific computing, and comes at the fraction of the price of even the cheapest 64GB kit of DDR5 (~£150).
On the latest-but-one revision of their About page, Metacritic describe the process of calculating a videogame's aggregate "Metascore" as a kind of "magic". The FAQ cheekily invites you to "peek behind the curtain", evoking the figure of the theatre conjurer beckoning the audience on-stage to inspect the props, before performing the trick. You're only shown so much, however. There are tables for conversions between different review scoring systems, demonstrating how a B- becomes 67/100, but the "weighting" Metacritic gives to each source publication when producing the combined Metascore is a closely-guarded mystery.
You could argue that the secrecy is necessary to avoid heavily weighted publications being targeted and pestered by fans to deliver positive reviews of forthcoming games, so as to swing the average (though in practice, Metascore soothsayers have long since sussed out which outlets have the most votes). But I think it's better understood as a mixture of basic trademark protection and a mechanism of enchantment, a means of both deterring imitators and keeping avid readers guessing about the output. After all, no professional magician seriously wants to give away how the trick is performed, much as no meat magnate wants to show you the inside of a sausage factory.
Normally you'd expect to pay the better part of $100 for a new mechanical keyboard, if not more, but today you can find a full-size model for just $30. The Pulsar Gaming Gears PK020 Lunar Alloy is down to that price on Amazon USA following a 50% reduction from the keyboard's MSRP, making for a great deal on a keyboard that ticks all the boxes and actually looks cool too.
Prefer a larger monitor? Right now you can pick up a Viewsonic 32-incher with a 1440p resolution and 75Hz refresh rate for just £150.74 using a 20% off voucher at Ebay. That's a good deal for a monitor of this size and spec, especially from a brand like ViewSonic, and well worth considering for gaming and content creation. Let's take a closer look.
Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty is, according to our reviewer Graham, "perhaps the best expansion pack ever made." Feh, small potatoes – Phantom Liberty’s most prestigious achievement is surely> how it heralds a new ray tracing feature that makes Cyberpunk 2077 look and run a tiny bit better. On specific settings. And only on GeForce RTX graphics cards. The more expensive ones.
Hello, then, to DLSS 3.5 and its Ray Reconstruction component. Like how DLSS improves visuals and performance with AI-aided upscaling and ant-aliasing, Ray Reconstruction injects some machine learning cleverness into the rendering of ray tracing. Nvidia say Ray Reconstruction cleans up artefacts and reduces the performance impact of RT effects, and judging by how it works in Cyberpunk 2077, I’d say they’re correct – with the caveat that all its enhancements are, ultimately, modest.