A 2,500-year-old stash of whole marijuana plants have been unearthed from an ancient tomb in northwest China. This discovery adds to a growing body of evidence that ancient people used marijuana for its psychoactive properties, and incorporated it into their rituals.
THE PLANTS WERE FOUND LYING LIKE A BURIAL SHROUD
A team of archaeologists, led by Hongen Jiang with the University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, discovered 13 marijuana plants that were still largely intact, if yellowed and desiccated after millennia underground. In a first for funerary marijuana, the plants were found lying like a burial shroud atop the body of a man who had died in his mid-30s. Their roots lay below the man’s hips and the tips — which had been trimmed to remove the flowers — extended up around his face, according to the publication of the find in the journal Economic Botany.
This stash was found in one of 240 tombs that archaeologists had excavated in a desert region of the Turpan Basin in northwest China. The area had probably once been a stop along the Silk Road, and pastoral people called the Subeixi had lived and traded here, Kristin Romey forNational Geographic reports. Three other tombs in this cemetery also contained marijuana fruits, leaves, stem fragments, and seeds. Scientists have wondered whether the marijuana plants came in via trade, or whether they had been farmed or grew wild in the region. Since the burial shroud marijuana plants were whole, uprooted plants, that suggests local growth.
ANCIENT PEOPLE USED MARIJUANA FOR ITS PSYCHOACTIVE PROPERTIES
Ancient people in Siberia and northwestern China have been putting pot in tombs since at least the first millennia BCE. An open question has been whether these plants were used for fruit, for their hemp fibers to make rope and clothing, or for what we use them for today: to get high, or to cut pain. So far, archaeologists have found 6,000 to 7,000-year-old hemp fabrics in Northern China, but haven’t unearthed any evidence of hemp clothing near the Turpan Basin before 2,000 years ago. While it’s possible that the clothes may simply have rotted over time, it’s also possible that the main purpose of marijuana wasn’t fiber.
In 2006, archaeologists found a large cache of marijuana fragments in a grave from around the same time period, at a nearby settlement. When scientists later analyzed the plants, they detected compounds that form when the main source of marijuana’s high — tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC — breaks down. That means these plants were probably prized for their psychoactive properties. This latest discovery of marijuana plants used as a burial shroud as well as the many previous findings of marijuana in the region’s tombs suggests that marijuana was used either medicinally or ritually, the authors write.
VIA: National Geographic
SOURCE: Economic Botany, Journal of Ethnopharmacology, Journal of Experimental Botany
Design & Image Quality Features Ideal for Multiple Monitor Configurations
NEC Display Solutions of America, a leading provider of commercial LCD display and projector solutions, today announced the MultiSync® EX241UN display, a 24-inch display with four of the slimmest bezels on the market.
The EX241UN display includes a bezel of just 0.8mm on all four sides, making it an ideal model for applications in command & control, corporate, financial services and digital signage. In multiple monitor configurations, the EX241UN features only 5.38mm inactive areas between matching sides and can rotate the image by 180 degrees, allowing two monitors to be tiled vertically. In addition, the display can support a tile matrix of up to 5×5 using DisplayPort SST (single stream transport) mode and 2×2 using DisplayPort MST (multi-stream transport) mode, ideal for small-scale video wall applications.
The new 24-inch widescreen model also features AH-IPS panel technology and LED backlighting with wide viewing angles (178° horizontal/vertical), providing excellent monitor performance. In addition, the EX241UN includes other features to further improve image quality, including factory-calibrated uniformity correction, and the ability to calibrate and match displays using NEC’s SpectraViewII software solution.
“The new EX241UN slim design demonstrates NEC’s commitment to push the boundaries of desktop display technologies,” said Kevin Christopherson, Director of Product Marketing for Desktop Displays at NEC Display Solutions. “Its image quality and features offer new configurations for users across multiple industries.”
The EX241UN display includes ControlSyncTM technology, exclusive to NEC, which controls the settings for up to six displays in a multi-monitor configuration simultaneously. The optional human and luminance sensor (KT-SS1) adds NEC-exclusive sensing functionality consistent with other displays in the enterprise portfolio.
The display also includes the following features:
1920×1080 resolution at 60Hz
20,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio (1000:1 typical)
16:9 native aspect ratio and 6ms response time
250 cd/m2 brightness and 8-bit color
5 direction menu control on the back of the display
Quick release stand and carrying handle
VGA, DVI-D, DisplayPort 1.2 and HDMI 2.0 inputs, and DisplayPort out
3-port USB Hub 3.0
Uniformity control
Hardware calibration via SpectraViewII
Integrated speakers (1W x 2) and headphone jack
The MultiSync EX241UN display ships with a 3-year limited parts and labor warranty, and will be available in October 2016 at a minimum advertised price of $379.
The SpectraViewII EA Kit, which includes NEC’s SpectraViewII Software and a Datacolor Spyder5 calibration sensor, is available as a separate option (minimum advertised price of $199) or bundled with the 24-inch monitor as the EX241UN-BK-SV display at a minimum advertised price of $529.
Check out NEC’s EX241UN display during the upcoming NEC Display Solutions New York Partner Showcase, taking place October 26 at SIR Stage 37, 508 W. 27th St. in New York City.
About NEC Display Solutions of America, Inc.
NEC Display Solutions of America, Inc., a leading designer and provider of innovative displays, offers the widest range of products on the market, such as commercial- and professional-grade large-screen LCD displays, desktop LCD monitors, direct view LED displays, a diverse line of multimedia and digital cinema projectors, and integrated display solutions. Benefitting from the technologies of NEC Corporation and its own Research and Development, NEC produces leading-edge visual technology and customer-focused solutions for a wide variety of markets, including education, retail, transportation, broadcast, enterprise, healthcare, houses of worship, and many more. NEC is orchestrating a brighter world with the quality and reliability of its products and outstanding customer service. For additional information about NEC Display Solutions of America products, call (866) NEC-MORE, or visit the website at www.necdisplay.com. Follow us on our social media channels: Facebook, YouTube, Google+, Twitter and LinkedIn.
About NEC Corporation
NEC Corporation is a leader in the integration of IT and network technologies that benefit businesses and people around the world. By providing a combination of products and solutions that cross utilize the company’s experience and global resources, NEC’s advanced technologies meet the complex and ever-changing needs of its customers. NEC brings more than 100 years of expertise in technological innovation to empower people, businesses and society. For more information, visit NEC at www.nec.com.
The NEC Group globally provides “Solutions for Society” that promote the safety, security, efficiency and equality of society. Under the company’s corporate message of “Orchestrating a brighter world,” NEC aims to help solve a wide range of challenging issues and to create new social value for the changing world of tomorrow.
Supervivid OLED display; Great graphics performance for price; Excellent audio quality; Superb keyboard
Cons
CPU performance could be better; Bottom runs hot
Verdict
The Alienware 13 puts the most dazzling laptop screen ever in a portable design with powerful graphics performance and excellent audio.
I have seen the future of laptops, and it is OLED. Alienware is the first gaming laptop manufacturer to embrace this truth, updating the company's small, but powerful 13-inch laptop with a jaw-dropping 2560 x 1440 panel. It truly has to be seen to be believed. But the Alienware 13 (priced and reviewed at $1,299) is about more than its tear-inducing display; it also offers impressively loud audio, lightning-fast transfer speeds and serious graphics performance. This is the laptop to beat in the woefully underserved $1,000-$1,500 gaming laptop market.
Editors' Note: The version of the Alienware 13 review had a bug that prevented screen dimming, which didn't allow us to properly run our battery test. We will update this review once that issue is resolved.
World-Beating Display
The OLED panel Alienware promised in January has finally arrived, and it was worth the wait, because it is simply sublime. Colors on the 2560 x 1440 panel are so vivid I could almost see them with my eyes closed. OK, maybe not that vibrant, but you get where I'm going with this.
Watching the 4K version of the film Tears of Steel on the Alienware 13, I saw almost every joint, divot, gear and wire in the woman's robot hand. Her auburn hair popped thanks to the emerald-green trees in the background. The sapphire blue on her jacket and neon pink accents on the pants seemed to glow.
As I played Rise of the Tomb Raider, I took a long time just walking around the hidden village. Individual blades of yellow-green grass shifted realistically as Lara waded through to the top of a cliff. Crystal-clear water flowed over the zenith, sending out a fine spray of mist and culminating as a tempest of white froth at the bottom.
The display's color reproduction is just ridiculous, covering an insane 206 percent of the sRGB gamut (100 percent is excellent). This performance far surpassed the 87 percent category average as well as the Nitro Black (97 percent) and GL552 (93 percent).
As incredibly vivid as the Alienware 13's screen is, the color accuracy is a bit off. The panel measured 2.2 on the Delta-E benchmark, with zero being ideal. The Nitro Black had a much better score of 1, and the GL552 registered 0.7.
The panel is seriously bright, averaging 292 nits, which outshines the 243-nit mainstream average. The Nitro Black was a close second, with 289, nits while the GL552 emitted 273 nits.
Clad in silver anodized aluminum with a sturdy carbon-fiber frame, the Alienware 13 looks like a small scout ship from an intergalactic armada. Like its larger brethren, this laptop features two customizable LED strips on the lid intersecting with the midline that draws the eye with the company's trademark glowing alien head.
The notebook's interior is awash in black, soft-touch finish that surrounds a glowing keyboard. Positioned right above the keyboard is the power button, disguised as another alien head.
Along the laptop's right side, you'll find a USB 3.0 port, Gigabit Ethernet and a USB-C port, which is a new addition to the lineup. Another USB 3.0 port resides on the left with a security lock slot and jacks for a microphone, a pair of headphones and the power adapter. HDMI and Alienware's proprietary port for the Graphics Amp sit in the rear, waiting to kick things up a notch.
Measuring 12.9 x 9.3 x 1.04~1.1 inches and weighing 4.5 pounds, the Alienware 13 is currently the lightest system in the company's lineup. However, this laptop is massive and thick compared to the slim proportions of the Razer Blade (4.25 pounds, 13.6 x 9.3 x 0.7 inches) or Aorus X3 Plus v3 (4 pounds, 12.9 x 10.3 x 0.9 inches).
Audio: Big bark
Man, this little laptop can pump out some big sound. The side-mounted speakers filled my medium-size testing space, with crisp, loud audio. Jazmine Sullivan's powerful vocals washed over me during "Masterpiece (Mona Lisa)", accompanied by the gentle, yet insistent strum of a guitar, buoyed by the rhythmic clapping of the audience.
Man, this little laptop can pump out some big sound.
As I fought through a squad of religious zealots in Tomb Raider, I could hear the tightening of my bowstring before I released my poison-gas arrow. Once the arrow hit its intended target, I was rewarded with the gentle hiss of the vapor being released and the heavy thud of my targets hitting the ground.
Graphics and Gaming: Bigger bite
When you're going to battle against marauding demons or hostile militiamen with the Alienware 13, you'll be doing it with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 965M GPU with 4GB of RAM. The laptop churned out a steady 38 frames per second as I made my way through the opening level of Rise of the Tomb Raider on high. The rising snowstorm whipped Lara's hair into a frenzy as she searched for shelter, her jagged breaths rising in small white wisps that barely had time to form before they were scattered to the winds.
The laptop hit an impressive 96 fps on low at 1080 during the Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege benchmark, coasting past the 85-fps mainstream average. Powered by Nvidia GeForce GTX 960M GPUs, the Asus GL552 and Acer Nitro Black scored 84 and 82 fps, respectively. Cranking the settings to high dropped the Alienware 13's showing to 68 fps, which is well above the 49-fps average. The Nitro Black and GL552 missed that mark, at 45 and 42 fps. Switching the Alienware 13 to its native resolution (2560 x 1440) netted 61 fps on low and 43 fps on high.
The OLED display's color reproduction is just ridiculous, covering an insane 206 percent of the sRGB gamut.
The Alienware 13 continued to dominate on Metro: Last Light, our most grueling graphics test, scoring 69 fps on low at 1080p, matching the category average. The Nitro Black was a couple of frames short, at 67 fps, while the GL552 was a full 10 frames short, at 59 fps. The Alienware 13 kept dishing out the win on high with 52 fps, easily clearing the 18-fps average as well as the 19 fps and 16 fps posted by the GL552 and Nitro Black.
When you decide to take a break from banishing Hell's denizens or snagging the Play of the Game, the Alienware 13 switches over to its integrated Intel HD Graphics 520 GPU.
Keyboard and Touchpad: Seriously comfy
Bouncy, comfortable typing awaits on the Alienware 13's full-size traditional TactX keyboard. Buoyed by the keyboard's 2.2 millimeters of key travel and 60 grams of actuation, I easily hit 65 words per minute on the 10FastFingers typing test, which is well above my typical 60-words-per-minute average.
My fingers glided across the 4.2 x 2.6-inch touchpad as I navigated web pages and highlighted passages without ever encountering an edge. Performing multitouch gestures like two-finger scroll and four-finger tap was a breeze with speedy response. The bottom corners of the touchpad perform their function as right and left buttons with a healthy amount of feedback and an audible click.
Alienware Command Center
What's a mini battle station without its war paint? Alienware's Command Center suite allows gamers to configure the backlighting and power settings, and set unique software profiles. AlienFX continues to be one of my favorite color configurators, since it offers a wide variety of colors and effects to create a mean, lean, glowing machine. When this is paired with AlienAdrenaline, you can create a unique profile for each of your games while monitoring system performance.
Overall Performance
I was surprised to see that Alienware equipped the 13 with a 2.5-GHz Intel Core i7-6500U processor with 8GB of RAM, instead of the speedier 2.6-GHz Intel Core i7-6700HQ CPU I've grown accustomed to seeing on competing laptops. However, the Alienware 13 can juggle multiple tasks with ease, streaming an episode Gunslinger Girl while running a system scan with 10 additional tabs open in Google Chrome.
The Alienware 13 stumbled a bit when we ran our synthetic benchmarks. For example, it notched only 6,816 on Geekbench 3, missing the 7,531 mainstream average. Both the Nitro Black and GL552 outdid that, with 12,577 and 13,554, respectively.
The Alienware 13 continued to dominate on Metro: Last Light, our most grueling graphics test.
When we tested the Alienware 13's 256GB PCIe SSD, it transferred 4.97GB of multimedia files in 28 seconds. That's a transfer rate of 179.6 megabytes per second, which tops the 129.8MBps category average. The GL552's 1TB and 7,200-rpm hard drive was a distant second, at 98.5 MBps, while the Nitro Black (1TB 5,400-rpm hard drive) mustered only 33.9MBps.
During the OpenOffice Spreadsheet Macro Test, the Alienware 13 paired 20,000 names and addresses in 2 minutes and 12 seconds, decimating the 5:38 category average. The GL552 and Nitro Black were way ahead, with times of 3:44 and 3:46.
Battery Life
As pretty as that display is, if you're planning on using the Alienware 13 without keeping it plugged in, you might want to turn down the brightness. The laptop lasted about 3 hours and 35 minutes on our battery test (continuous web surfing over Wi-Fi) at full brightness.
Heat
After I spent 15 minutes fighting my way through a nest of hostile enemies in Tomb Raider, the Alienware 13's undercarriage measured a crotch-roasting 139 degrees Fahrenheit. (We consider anything above 95 uncomfortable.) The space between the G and H keys reached 104 degrees, while the touchpad stayed cool, at 89 degrees.
After letting the laptop cool down, I switched to watching a video. Another 15 minutes later, the bottom of the laptop registered a hot 114 degrees, while the keyboard and touchpad hit 95 and 82.
Webcam
The integrated 1080p webcam serves up sumptuous color with a solid amount of detail. My midnight-blue blanket and shamrock-green shirt helped accent the reddish tones in my brown complexion. The camera even caught my purple-dyed locks. Details were sharp enough to capture the lines in my top, but there was a lot of visual noise, so much so the lights looked like misshapen blobs.
Software and Warranty
The Alienware 13 is nearly bloatware-free aside from Candy Crush Soda Saga, Twitter and Flipboard. You also have your typical Windows 10 fare, including Microsoft Edge, OneNote, Skype and Cortana.
Configurations
In addition to the OLED screen, the $1,299 configuration of the Alienware 13 has a 2.5-GHz Intel Core i7-6500U processor with 8GB of RAM, a 256GB PCI SSD, an Nvidia GeForce GTX 965M with 4GB of RAM and an Intel HD Graphics 520 GPU.
Bottom Line
If you've been using a regular display for your laptop gaming and entertainment, I'm here to tell you that you're doing it wrong. The $1,299 Alienware 13's OLED screen is a vibrant revelation of where gaming notebooks are going. But once I stopped peering into the panel trying to see my future, there was the rest of the notebook to consider.
While I would love for Alienware to outfit this baby with beefier Nvidia GeForce GTX 970M graphics, the 965M is a powerhouse in its own right. The speakers and colorful keyboard also impress. I just wish the bottom of this rig ran cooler.
The only other thing I would change about the system is the processor. I want a beast whether I'm gaming or writing a review. Overall, though, the Alienware 13 is a great choice for gamers who want an unparalleled viewing experience for a midlevel price.
The Oculus Rift and HTC Vive are here. But your PC has to be pretty powerful to use these cutting-edge VR headsets. If your PC is lacking performance, don't worry. We're going to show you how to build a VR-ready PC.
Update, July 1 2016: We've added information about the new AMD Radeon RX 480 and Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 and 1070 graphics cards, which change the VR landscape in a big way. We've also rechecked all our prices.
Getting started
Building a PC is simpler than you might think. You simply:
Pick out the right components
Plug them into the correct slots
Install your operating system
We're not going to rehash that entire process here, because CNET's Dan Graziano wrote acomprehensive three-part guide that covers all the PC-building bases.
But when it comes to building a VR-ready PC, not any old component will do. We've spent hours piecing together parts, quizzing hardware manufacturers and speaking to VR developers to figure out the best parts for you -- both today and into the future.
Then, we sat down to build a VR gaming rig.
(We got a little help from PC component vendor Newegg, which provided the CPU, GPUs, motherboard, memory and liquid cooling system for our computer after we finished our research.)
Don't want to build a VR-ready PC? Here's my colleague Dan Ackerman's guide to buying one instead.
Here's what you need to play games in VR
As you read through this guide, you'll see up to three options for each major component of a VR-ready PC. If you just want to comfortably play every VR title today, you'll be just fine with the bare minimum.
If you pick what we used, you should be well-equipped for next year's titles and beyond. We wanted CNET's Future-Proof VR Gaming PC to be ready for anything.
Future-proof PCs tend to be pretty large, but if you want a small, cool and quiet computer that'll easily fit your office or home, be sure to look for our mini PC options.
You can also simply skip down to the bottom of this story for our full parts list.
A graphics card
The bare minimum:
AMD Radeon RX 480 ($200, £180, AU$320 and up)
For a mini PC:
Asus Mini GTX 970 ($355, roughly £270 or AU$475 converted) or AMD Radeon R9 Nano ($500, £450, roughly AU$670)
What we used:
Two Nvidia GTX 980 Ti graphics cards ($1,000, roughly £750 or AU$1,350)
The graphics card is the heart and soul of any VR-ready gaming PC, and unless you've picked up new hardware recently, yours might not be up to snuff. The right graphics card will keep you from feeling sick, so it's important to go with a powerful one.
To hit smooth, satisfying gameplay on a PC, you'll generally want your games at a frame rate of 60 frames per second. That means your PC is capable of pumping out 60 images every second; dip too far below that, and you'll encounter staggered, choppy visuals.
For virtual reality, 90 frames per second is the holy grail. With high-resolution displays this close to your face, any lag or choppiness in movement is going to be magnified. Worse still, if the action doesn't react in time with your motions, you could end up feeling nauseous. And keep in mind, virtual reality needs to render the action twice -- once for each eye.
When the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive first came out, that meant starting with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 or AMD Radeon R9 290, each of which cost around $320 back then, and the best you could get was a $700 GeForce GTX 980 Ti.
As of June 2016 there's a new sheriff in town: the $200 AMD Radeon RX 480. We put it through a battery of VR tests, and it seems just as capable as the GTX 970 for a good bit less money. (In fact, it's a bit smoother in some games.)
Yes, that's a $200 graphics card.AMD
But Nvidia hasn't stood still. The GTX 970 can now be found for as low as $270 -- and more importantly, the new (but hard to find) $380 GTX 1070 and $600 GTX 1080 are mopping the floor with every other graphics card. If you're going to pay more than the bare minimum to get a futureproof VR system, you'll want one of those two new Nvidia cards -- though you may want to wait until they come down in price before you buy one.
It's worth noting that current VR titles don't support more than one GPU at a time, although a dual-GPU system will still work fine with VR, and even a single high-end GPU like a GTX 980 can be overkill for the initial crop of VR games.
That said, popular development platforms such as Unreal Engine 4 will incorporate Nvidia's tech to link two graphics cards together, and there's also no guarantee that game developers will stick to the system specs that Oculus and Valve recommend. We found we could already turn up the graphical settings in a few games (Eve: Valkyrie, Project Cars and The Gallery) to higher levels than a $200 AMD Radeon RX 480 can handle.
Intel Core i5-4590 ($190, roughly £145 or AU$255 converted)
For a mini PC:
Intel Core i5-4690K ($235, roughly £180 or AU$315)
What we used:
Intel Core i7-6700K ($350, roughly £265 or AU$470)
The CPU or central processing unit is your gaming rig's brain, and while the graphics card will be doing most of the heavy lifting in virtual reality, you'll still need a CPU that's up to the task. Recommendations for both the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive start at Intel's Core i5-4590, a solid mid-range part that's a little long in the tooth, but still plenty capable.
But capable isn't good enough for our future-proofed rig, so we're heading right to the top of Intel's stack with the Core i7-6700K. This processor throws a few wrenches in the works. It's using a new socket type, which means we'll need a new motherboard to support it. It also supports DDR4 RAM. No self-respecting future-proofed PC should be without the latest in speedy memory, but that'll inflate the price of our build further still.
The Gigabyte Z170X Gaming 7 motherboard.Josh Miller/CNET
We've also picked an unlocked processor. That's what the "K" at the end of the processor's name means. An unlocked processor means we can overclock (manually speeding up the card's internal processor beyond that intended by the manufacturer) if we want even more power. You might actually be able to get away with an even less powerful CPU if your graphics card is up to snuff, but if your goal is future-proofing, you'll want to aim higher.
For a mini PC build, you'll notice we still recommend an older i5-4690K chip. There are two reasons for that. First, we weren't able to find a small motherboard for Intel's newer Skylake processors with enough user reviews for us to trust it. Second, we figured if you're going to build a mini PC, you'll probably pick liquid cooling to keep it quiet, and if you're going with liquid cooling you might as well take advantage of the ability to easily overclock that CPU, too. If you're ever a few frames short of the 90 fps you need to feel comfortable in VR, it could come in handy.
Why no AMD CPUs? VR experts told us that right now, they're not up to snuff when it comes to something called single-threaded performance, which is how fast the processor can work on any single tiny task put in front of it.
Memory (RAM)
RAM is fairly cheap, and more RAM generally means your PC can do more things at once before it bogs down. You'll want a bare minimum of 8GB of DDR3 ($40, £30, roughly AU$55). VR game developers tell us that more than 8GB is probably overkill for now.
Our future-proofed rig is going a different route: we used a single 16GB stick of DDR4 RAM ($90, £70, roughly AU$120). DDR4 RAM is fairly new, and pricier than DDR3, but it's required for newer processors. 16GB will give us plenty of oomph for now, and we can easily double it to 32GB as prices come down.
For a mini PC, you might as well go for 16GB of DDR3 ($60, £60, roughly AU$80) since it's likely to go up in price as DDR4 takes over, and it may be harder to reach inside a tiny mini PC case to swap out memory sticks when the time comes to upgrade.
Power supply
Power supplies are the unsung heroes of most PC builds, and getting a great one will save you a lot of headaches down the road. Power supplies are available in a wide range of wattages: you're going to have to pick the one that will provide ample power for the components you've settled on. We recommend using PCPartPicker to keep track of the components you pick and estimate how much power you'll use, but if you need a specific pick we'd suggest Corsair's 500-watt CX550M power supply ($60, roughly £40 or AU$75 converted) as the bare minimum.
Our future-proofed rig takes things quite a bit further: We used a massive 1,200 watt power supply from SeaSonic that gets stellar reviews. This amount of power will be overkill for most people, but it gives us the opportunity to use three giant graphics cards if future VR games wind up using them, and it provides an incredibly stable source of power if we decide to do any overclocking in the future.
Besides, power supplies tend to outlive every other PC component. A good power supply is an investment.
And the rest
I've left out a number of key components here, but they're not exactly specific to virtual reality. You'll want a motherboard that will support your processor and your upgrade goals -- our Gigabyte GA-Z170X Gaming 7 has room for three graphics cards, supports DDR4 RAM and has a Thunderbolt 3 port forexternal graphics if you ever need them.
You'll need enough hard drive space to store your games and operating system. A $50 magnetic hard drive will be fine as a bare minimum, but we stick to speedy solid state drives (SSDs) on all of our PC builds. You'll get much more storage space out of a traditional hard drive, but an SSD will make your entire system feel faster. We used a speedy 500GB SSD, paired with a reliable 2TB 7,200 rpm standard hard drive for storage. That's more than enough space for now.
Pick a case that works for you. Maybe it makes allowances for airflow, or quiet performance, or one that just looks cool. Our Corsair 760T has loads of space to work inside, and a full actual window to look through -- what's the point of getting sweet hardware if you can't look at it from time to time? Here are some popular cheaper options.
We just used monitors, mice and keyboards that were lying around because they're no good to us in VR. And of course, you'll also need an operating system -- we're rolling with Windows 10.
Building a PC isn't hard, but it isn't a cakewalk, either. (There are some easy ways to trip up.) Here's wishing you the best of luck in your PC building adventure!
Want to see all these parts in a more digestible, browsable format? Take a look at ourbasic, mini and future-proof builds at PCPartPicker. Please note we've included US pricing and approximate conversions for Australia and the UK.
Your Canon dSLR has a useful tool on its strap that has likely gone unnoticed. PetaPixelpoints out that the small rubber thingy, (for lack of a better term) on the strap that came with your Canon camera is an eyepiece cover that prevents light from leaking into the viewfinder.
Whenever you don't use the viewfinder to shoot a photo -- when using the self-timer or remote switch, for example -- light can enter the viewfinder and throw off the exposure. To prevent that from happening, just mask the viewfinder with the rubber eyepiece cover.
I use an old Nikon D50 and have no such rubber thingy on the strap. According to my D50 user manual, an eyepiece cover was included in the box. Since it wasn't cleverly integrated onto the strap, I lost it years ago.
I shoot with a Nikon, so I went to my local Best Buy and asked a patient store associate to open a Canon dSLR box. The included strap had the eyepiece cover that my Nikon lacks. To use the eyepiece cover, I had to remove the rubber eyepiece cup from the back of the camera and then slipped the cover over the viewfinder.
If you need to cover the viewfinder and don't have a rubber eyepiece cover handy -- Lori Grunin, one of CNET's resident photography experts, suggests you simply drape a black microfiber cloth over the viewfinder.
The AMD Radeon RX 470 sits slightly awkwardly in AMD's range. As you'll see from our benchmarks, it's a great Full HD GPU, but pricing oddities mean it sits in a price bracket that's just 5% lower than the more powerful 4GB RX 480.
Aside from the economics – these might change in the coming months – AMD has produced a very competent card for Full HD gaming with the latest AAA titles with a very low power draw of just 120W. Compact versions of this card will be great for microATX and mini-ITX PC builds, producing very little heat and noise and playing nicely with tight power budgets.
AMD isn’t producing its own version of the RX 470, so reviewers have been sent a variety of third-party cards from AMD’s partners. Ours is a PowerColor Red Devil model that's currently priced at £200.
AMD RADEON RX 470 – SPECS AND TECHNOLOGY
The Radeon RX 470 uses the exact same chip as the RX 480, called Polaris 10. The RX 470 uses ‘binned’ Polaris 10 chips – a common practice in the world of microelectronics. These binned chips didn’t make the grade as RX 480 units, but they're still good enough to match the specification of the less powerful RX 470. It’s sensible business logic: you get a much higher yield of usable Polaris 10 chips and get to sell them in two different products.
The difference between the two isn’t huge. The RX 480 has 36 compute units, while the 470 gets 32. Clock speeds have been reduced slightly, too, with the base clock speed sitting at 926MHz, lower than the RX 480’s 1,120MHz. Our PowerColor model comes pre-overclocked with a boost clock speed of 1270MHz.
The RX 470 gets the same memory as the 4GB RX 480, shipping with GDDR5 with a 256-bit bus and a memory bandwidth of 211GB/s, which is slightly less than the 224GB/s on the RX 480.
Polaris itself is full of little technical treats, with perhaps the most important coming in the form of massively improved power efficiency. There are also hardware-level improvements to colour compression for more efficient rendering, and granular overclocking control with AMD’s WattMan software.
Our PowerColor model came pre-overclocked to 1,270MHz with 1,750MHz memory. It’s a double-height card, as is typical with all RX 470s. It has a dual-fan design with nine blades on each. The shroud is made of black plastic, and the backplate is a simple matte-black affair with a hexagram affirming the satanic themes of PowerColor’s Red Devil.
The PowerColour RX 470 comes with a small switch on its near side that toggles between the overclocked mode and a quieter, more power-efficient mode. All of our testing was conducted in the OC mode, which is the default setting. Turn to page two to see how it performed.
The number of video outputs on the RX 470 varies across the different third-party manufacturers. Our model included three DisplayPort 1.2 sockets, an HDMI 2.0 connector and a DVI connector, but some are available with a second HDMI port in place of one of the DisplayPorts.
AMD RADEON RX 470 – PERFORMANCE AND BENCHMARKS
How we test: I tested the Radeon RX 470 in our in-house test rig. It represents a fairly typical gaming PC and consists of the following components:
Motherboard: Asus Z170-Deluxe
Processor: Intel Core i5-6600K (not overclocked)
RAM: Corsair Vengeance 2,666MHz, 16GB DDR4
Cooler: Corsair H60 liquid cooler
PSU: Corsair CX750M
SSD: Samsung 850 EVO
OS: Windows 10 Pro 64-bit
For this review, I’ll be comparing the RX 470 with other cards Trusted has reviewed recently. TrustedReviews hasn’t tested older AMD cards in our current test rig setup, so I’ve not included those here. My results should give you a good idea of how the RX 470 stacks up against its nearest competitor – which happens to be the RX 480 – and also how much performance you can get by paying more for an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060.
This only takes into account Full HD gameplay. The RX 470 is capable of 1440p as well, but since Trusted's tests focus on games running on maximum graphics settings, I'm focusing on Full HD only.
Note: One of the key points of comparison is the RX 480. My benchmark figures for that card are based on the 8GB model. Third-party tests point to the cheaper 4GB card performing a couple of percentage points slower, at most, than the 8GB version.
One final point to remember: The GTX 1060 benchmarks here are from the Founders Edition card, which is effectively a reference design with slightly lower clock speeds than the GTX 1060s on sale now from third-party card manufacturers.
Now let’s get to those numbers...
Dirt Rally
Dirt Rally is the least challenging title Trusted runs benchmarks on. The biggest challenges here are fast-moving textures and some particle effects.
Dirt Rally is the RX 470’s bread and butter, and unsurprisingly it performed extremely well here, scoring an average frame rate of 82.9fps. This is a great GPU for racing games and other less challenging titles.
For comparison, the RX 480 was just 7% faster.
Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor
Warner Bros’ third-person adventure title is a tough one on graphics cards, with the short benchmark including lots of particle effects, explosions and lighting challenges.
The RX 470 was once again extremely capable here, managing a fantastic 79.5fps, making it very playable. Here it was just 5% slower than the RX 470.
Because it performed so well, we also tested it at 1440p resolution at the same Ultra settings and achieved another very playable result of 57.2fps.
GTA V
GTA V is one of our more challenging benchmarks, with high-speed textures, loads of objects and plenty of physics calculations as well. The benchmark is run at a combination of High and Very High settings and 4x anti-aliasing.
The RX 470 managed 59.4fps, just off the hallowed 60fps I always look for. It’s an excellent result in a challenging game. That result puts it around 13% slower than the RX 480. The extra horsepower of the RX 480 is in evidence here.
Hitman
Episodic stealth game Hitman is tough, but it was built with AMD in mind, so performance here is an indicator of the best the RX 470 is capable of. At Ultra settings the RX 470 managed 67.1fps, just 4% slower than the RX 480.
Rise of the Tomb Raider
Rise of the Tomb Raider presents GPUs with a series of fairly challenging tasks, including lighting and particle effects.
The RX 470 managed 57.7fps, its second-slowest result behind GTA V, but still very fast and stable in what can be a difficult title. I also had a go at 1440p, and at Ultra settings it managed an average of 39.1fps. With a bit of tweaking you could easily get this up to beyond 45fps for some fairly smooth 1440p gameplay.
Fire Strike Ultra
3DMark’s Fire Strike Ultra is an incredibly difficult and unforgiving benchmark that forces a graphics card to render some challenging visuals at a 4K resolution. It doesn’t represent any game in particular, but the overall score it creates is fairly representative of overall performance.
Here, the RX 470 is 299 points off the RX 480, equating to 11%. This is a slightly greater performance delta than in all of the games I benchmarked, and points to the incredible strain Fire Strike Ultra puts on both memory and GPU. It was here I also recorded a peak temperature reading of 66ºC, making the RX 470 the coolest card we’ve tested this year. This isn’t a great surprise, though, since it has that dual-fan cooling system on board, whereas the rest had single-fan solutions.
Power draw
The RX 470 isn’t hugely different to the RX 480 in terms of power consumption, either. Taken during the Hitman benchmark, our test system reached a peak power draw of 236W, compared to the 249W of the RX 480 under the same circumstances. This is likely due to the overclocking settings applied by PowerColour; the base thermal design power (TDP) of the RX 470 should be 120W, 30W less than the RX 480.
SHOULD I BUY THE AMD RADEON RX 470?
At the time of writing, buying an RX 470 for £189 or £199 isn't a bad idea, but its price is just slightly lower than a 4GB RX 480. While the performance delta is small, if your budget will stretch a tiny amount more, the RX 480 is a better buy for the longer term. Whether that continues to be the case in the next few months is unknown, but as this is a review written in the here and now, I currently can’t see any compelling reason why you should buy an RX 470 over a 4GB RX 480.
The big caveat here is whether AMD actually continues to sell the 4GB RX 480. There are far fewer 4GB RX 480s on the market at the moment, and considering it's been two months since its launch, this makes things tricky. If the situation changes, I will update the review.
VERDICT
An excellent card for Full HD gaming, but wacky pricing at the time of review makes it a hard sell.
The Raspberry Pi 3 is the latest version of the circuit-board computer that caused such a fuss in 2012. This is the most powerful version of the Pi, making the £4.25 Pi Zero look like, well, it’s worth about four quid.
To some this may seem the sort of annual refresh from your favourite phone makers. However, in adding greater power and both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to the Pi without increasing the price, it's now a more versatile "all-in-one" board. For almost everyone, it’s clearly the best Pi yet.
For those not solely interested in learning the basics of Python, C or Java, the added power and features make it far more powerful as a retro games machine, and more convenient as a media streamer too. There’s very little to dislike at £30.
RASPBERRY PI 3 – DESIGN AND FEATURES
The Raspberry Pi 3 looks almost identical to the Rasberry Pi 2. This means owners of Raspberry Pi 2s who have bought, made or 3D-printed their own cases will be able to slot this new model into them. For those who haven’t come across one of these computers before, it’s roughly the same size as the palm of your hand.
For £30 you get only the circuit-board computer: no power supply, no case, no cables. However, any owners of Android or Windows phones will be able to use their 5V phone charger and cable to power the Raspberry Pi 3. It uses microUSB, although you'll need a fairly high-amp plug (up to 2.5A if you have lots of peripherals) rather than the 1A ones that tend to come with cheaper phones.
The Pi 3 has identical ports to the old Raspberry Pi 2. Four USBs, an Ethernet port and a full-sized HDMI make up your main connectors. None of the USBs are 3.0-speed, just 2.0, but anything much faster would needlessly push up the budget when these boards are designed to run off a microSD card.
There’s no built-in storage to the Raspberry Pi, only a microSD slot on its underside. This port supports the higher-capacity microSDXC standard, so you could grab a 128GB microSD card for £40 and have a formidable portable mini-media player on your hands.
The one other conventional port on the Raspberry Pi 3 is a 3.5mm audio jack.
Where the Raspberry Pi 3 strays from the Raspberry Pi 2 blueprint is in including Wi-Fi (b/g/n) and Bluetooth on the board itself. In previous boards you had to use USB adapters for these features. While they can be bought for a few pounds, they add bulk to the board. You may still wish to use these if your current case interferes with wireless signals.
When the Pi 3 was released, the default Raspbian OS didn’t support these new connections, but support has since been patched in, and as the de facto OS many users will start with, this is great news.
The Raspberry Pi 3 still features 40 GPIO pins. These are used to connect items such as LEDs, motors and anything else you can think of for proper home-brew projects. Sitting between the HDMI and 3.5mm ports is the camera connection port, also inherited from the Raspberry Pi 2. The Raspberry Pi Foundation sells a 5-megapixel camera for around £20.
Depending on your use case for the Pi 3, you'll either use these connectors all the time or leave them for the more simple USB connectors. For those attracted to the board for tweaking and coding, the Raspberry Pi 3 is ready to hook up with the new BBC micro:bit too.
RASPBERRY PI 3 – SOFTWARE AND OS SUPPORT
If you buy the £30 Raspberry Pi package, no software is included. Fresh downloads of the various supported operating systems are all free, but there’s a slight premium to pay if you want to get a pre-loaded microSD card that will let you get up and running immediately.
For example, Pi Hut sells a starter kit that includes a charger, HDMI cable, Ethernet cable, case and 8GB memory card for £50. That’s not a bad deal, but it means that buyers who are simply after something to turn your old TV into a smart-ish TV may be better off with an Amazon Fire TV Stick, a Roku Stick or a Chromecast. Of course, these are far less fun to play with.
One downside that still isn't fully solved is that you can’t run Android on Raspberry Pi. There’s an in-progress community project to port it over, but if all you want is an Android interface for your TV then there are easier ways to get one.
The Raspberry Pi 3 is designed primarily to run the Debian-based Raspbian, now recognised as the computer’s "official" OS. While the Pi ships as a barebones skeleton unless you buy a package, Raspbian is full-fat, powerful and, most importantly, free.
Since its arrival in 2012, numerous bits have gradually been bolted on. to Raspbian. At this point in its development, it may have all the features you could wish for without having to download extra bits and pieces.
Raspbian includes Office-like apps, Minecraft, a web browser and tools to let you get started with the main programming languages the Raspberry Pi is designed to help you learn. Scratch is perhaps the most interesting of these for younger and less-experienced buyers. It’s a visual programming language, far less terrifying than C, which is perfect for creating simple programs and games without needing masses of experience.
You're not limited to Scratch, though, you can program whatever you want in the likes of C and Python, too.
The Raspberry Pi 3, and all other Pis, give you a low-cost and portable way to try out this stuff. But the real triumph is how this raw ability is made into something more thanks to the giant catalogue of well-presented tutorials available over at the Raspberry Pi website. There are more than 100 available, covering Python, Scratch and digging into the extra bits that plug into a Raspberry Pi.
These include Sense HATs, Breadboards, the Pi camera and more. If you or your child are going to really get into Raspberry Pi be aware that you'll be spending more than £30 over the life of a project, but it will be far cheaper than a Lego obsession in the long run.
Let me be honest: I come from the other end of the Raspberry Pi spectrum. While I find the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s resources inspiring, my time with the various Pis of the past has been much more about setting up a media player, or installing some game emulators and reliving SNES-flavoured memories from the 1990s.
There are several media players available, including a couple of different branches of XBMC. You can install a couple of them through NOOBs, which is a one-download installer that lets you choose between all the main Pi operating systems without hunting down separate installers. These include Raspbian, media centre OpenELEC and several others.
All of this isn't specific to the Raspberry Pi 3, of course, but it's good to know if you haven’t used a Raspberry Pi before. And if you feel like you’re drowning in acronyms, the Raspberry Pi downloads section lays out all your options clearly.
Unless you’re planning on only surface-level use, you'll have to embrace some basic Linux commands. You can see a few of them in action in our feature on turning the Raspberry Pi into a gaming centre.
RASPBERRY PI 3 – PERFORMANCE
There are three main benefits to the Raspberry Pi 3 over the Pi 2. It has Bluetooth; it has Wi-Fi; and it has a more powerful CPU/GPU pair.
Let’s deal with the CPU first. The Raspberry Pi 3 has a Broadcom BCM2837 CPU. This is a 1.2GHz quad-core CPU with the Cortex-A53 processor, as used in Qualcomm’s entry-level Snapdragon phone chipsets.
The Broadcom BCM2837 is a 64-bit CPU but the main benefit of the upgrade is that this chip is more efficient and far more powerful than the one in the Raspberry Pi 2 – a quad-core Cortex-A7 Broadcom BCM2836.
The difference in power is much greater than the move from a 900MHz quad-core processor to a 1.2GHz quad-core one might suggest.
To test this I dug out an old version of Geekbench, the only one that supported both the Linux software and ARM CPUs used here. For those interested, it’s version 2.4.2. This is so old it isn't really directly comparable with the results we get today from Geekbench 3, but I had an old Raspberry Pi 2 on hand to test. The Raspberry Pi 3 scores 2,086 points; the Pi 2 1,302.
The claim was that the Pi 3 is 50% more powerful than the Pi 2, and that’s what these results suggest; in fact it's actually closer to 60% when measured purely on Geekbench 2.4.2 results.
This isn't just down to the CPU. The GPU is more powerful, too, even though they're of the same VideoCore IV family. Why? Clock speed. The Raspberry Pi 3 has a 400MHz GPU, the Pi 2 a 250MHz one. RAM remains at 1GB of DDR2.
For basic video-streaming use, there isn't a great deal of difference to be seen between the two generations – but only because the Raspberry Pi 2 already had enough power to get by unless you were using the the latest H.265 codec in your videos. If you want to see the difference between the two, game emulation is the easiest way to do so.
While the Raspberry Pi 2 can run 16-bit games – such as those of the SNES – at full-speed, it struggles with many N64 games. The same is true of the Pi 3, to an extent. However, several games that were barely playable on a Pi 2 now run pretty comfortably on Pi 3, including The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. There remains a bit of slow-down, though, which slightly spoils the experience.
There isn’t a massive shift in what the Pi 3 can do, but it offers an improvement that's easy to appreciate.
USING THE RASPBERRY PI AS A PC
The extra power of the Pi 3 also makes it much less frustrating to use as a PC for web browsing, work and so on. There’s now much less obvious lag when using the basic Raspbian interface.
I still find the rendering of web pages in the default browser a little slow, so it still feels like a compromise. However, it's one that’s much easier to live with than the Raspberry Pi 2. The last-generation model lags far more frequently when you’re doing anything but the most basic of tasks.
I spent a few days using the Raspberry Pi 3 as my main work computer for a couple of three-hour stretches. While I’m not ready to retire my MacBook just yet, it did the trick for writing and researching online.
It's a serviceable alternative to the more expensive stick PCs that have failed to take off so far.
SHOULD YOU BUY THE RASPBERRY PI 3?
The Raspberry Pi 3 is certainly worth the upgrade from the £4 Pi Zero. It's also much more powerful than the Raspberry Pi 2, but for a lot of people the most noticeable benefit won't be the extra power, but that you don't need any annoying dongles to make the computer wireless.
Those connections and 'free' extra power (it costs roughly the same as the Pi 2 did at launch) make this the only Pi to buy if there’s a chance you might use it as anything other than a way to play with Scratch/Python, or to play some MP4 files you downloaded from the internet.
While there are a number of alternatives, none of them have managed to offer quite as compelling a package for this kind of money. Rather than getting all excited about the hardware, though, it’s actually a good idea to take a look through some of the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s tutorials to see if the mini-projects on offer appeal.
They may be intended for a young audience, but their matter-of-fact presentation makes them suitable for all ages. If there’s nothing there to get you excited about learning programming, or that’s not your aim at all, you may want to consider one of the several very good media stick alternatives instead.
VERDICT
The best Pi yet continues to offer unbeatable value for money and an appeal for tech fiddlers and would-be coders alike.
