Water Cooling For Gaming Computers

We like water cooling in gaming rigs for a whole host of reasons:
Cooling efficiency
Whisper quiet
Over clocking
Loads more

You can have all the water cooling possible in your gaming computer but if the cooling radiator looks like this

It's not going to work!

For a full range of water cooling gear for all modding & gaming builds, check the cooling section on our web store.

The Birth Of A Hand Crafted Gaming PC

As part of our custom design and build service, Alex our resident Engineer has been building this gaming rig for a long standing client of ours and we thought it would be of interest to other Gamers to follow the steps.

We start with the naked gaming case

Antec Gaming Case

This Antec 100 case is one of our firm favourites because of the qualityand the thoughtful design with respect to ventilation.

Ventilation and cooling is absolutely vital for a stable gaming system. A lot of people do not appreciate just how much heat is generated by a quality gaming system when playing a demanding game like Skyrim.

We have used an OCZ 700w which allows for upgrades as more components means more power.

Next up is the mother board:

In this case we are using the Asus P8 Z77-VLE with the Intel Z77 chipset. we like this board because of the extra cooling around the VRM and the Chipset. These features enhance the overclocking potential of this board.

The motherboard is now fully mounted into the gaming case. We pay particular attention to the cable management as it helps a huge amount for the cooling. It also makes the inside of the case look great. 

The graphics card has now been plumbed in.

The card that is fitted is a Asus HD Radeon 7870 what is one of the new cards from ATI. It has great potential for stunning graphics in games such as Skyrim and Battlefield.

The rig is fitted with a Intel i5 2500k which is the very overclock-able chip as it has the unlocked multiplier , it also has a good amount of memory (8GB) to help with the overall performance of the machine.

Once the system has been fully tested for stability, speed and cooling, the gaming rig will be delivered to a very happy gamer!

Details of the Next Generation of Processors from Intel

Details of the new processor range (Ivy Bridge) from Intel were released to Intel Partners of which we are one :)

Particularly looking forward to using the new gen processors in our custom gaming PC build service.

More information on the new Intel Processor Generation can be found on our main site

How to Choose The Right Computer Processor

We are often asked by our customers about what is the best processor in the market. Our reply is '"It depends on what your needs are"

By this we mean what are you going to use your computer for.

Intel, Microsoft, AMD et al are great at marketing the next greatest piece of technology but not everybody needs the latest and greatest.

Our main site has a nice video from Intel which will give you some pointers when choosing the processor for your computer.

This will also be of interest is you are thinking of buying a gaming PC or using our custom PC design and build service

The Latest Creation to Emerge from the PC Solutions Gaming Lab

We have just finished off the physical build of a brand new gaming system for a customer of ours. Its a fantastic system with the new AMD FX-8120 which is a eight core processor.

This build is done in a slightly different case than what we would usually use, yet it is still a great case for gaming , it is called the Fractal Design Core 300. 


The next major component that is essential to a gaming computer is the graphics card. In this build we used a Nvidia GeForce GTX560Ti (MSI Twin Frozr II) which is a great card, not only is it powerful but the style of it is really cool. It has the dual fans on it also which help with the cooling of the card.

Gaming Computer for Microsoft FS X

Just finished a very interesting computer gaming build as part of our custom gaming computer design and build service.

The requirement was for a high spec PC to be able to play the very very demanding Microsoft Flight Sim X at as high a frame rate with as good resolution as possible.


It also had to look good, run quiet and not be monster foot print AND with expansion for the future.

Not an off the shelf solution.

So after a bit of research and some pretty extensive testing and tweaking we decided on an Antec 300 case, 750 watt power supply and a 120 GB SSD

Windows 7 64 Bit stripped down to absolute minimum with 8 GB DDR3 booting from an SSD is so fast that if you are a serious Gamer, you really should consider it.

The graphics is provided by an Nvidia GeForce 560ti. Despite having 8 GB RAM, there are still 2 spare RAM slots and a secondary PCI Expres slot for a second graphics card.

Internals BEFORE Cable Management

Donald, had the pleasure of 'demonstrating' the finished product to the client:

All in all a VERY nice gaming system

The finished product can be purchased via our website and of course we would be happy to discuss any additional features or mods that you would like added to personalise your gaming PC

A quick video of the finished product in action:

Skint after Christmas? Try Indie games!

Well, I hope everyone has had a very merry Christmas, and thoroughly enjoyed their New Years celebrations!

I hope Santa brought you plenty of gadget-gifts to keep you suitably informed and entertained over the coming year; however if you're anything like me and dreading to check how many digits are missing from the bank balance, but still can't resist the urge to get some new games to play on your new toys, then you should take a look into Indie games.

Indie games are games which are created by small groups of people, or even single-handedly by an individual! This means that they have usually created the game as a hobby, and without any financial support of a large publisher, such as EA Games, Bethesta, Blizzard etc. Because indie games don't have the overheads of these large businesses, such as marketing, staffing, blah and blah, they normally only charge a few quid for them!

Now, you must be thinking "a game, made by some guy in his mothers basement charging me £2... sounds rubbish.". This may have been true a few years ago, and maybe even now, but the indie gaming market has developed massively in the last year. This is primarily due to more and more people having access, and faster access, to the internet. Ultimately the indie market success has come down to two words: "Digital Distribution", which has allowed easy and quick market access for the indie developers.

I personally love indie games, the nature of them being developed by a team or individual with an idea, without a publisher ball and chain around their ankles demanding they make billions of dollars from it. I find that this allows indie games to be more creative and I'll tell you now there are a lot of abstract indie games out there which are a lot of fun!

I think that's about enough of me waffling about the games and show you some!

One of the major indie game developers which have seen leaps and bounds of success over the year are Mojang. Mojang are the creators of the hugely popular Minecraft, which when started by a single developer, Markus Persson, is Sweden has grown into one of the largest indie development teams. You can find their website here: http://mojang.com/

Another great source of indie games is on the popular gaming platform Steam; a list of indie games on Steam can be found at: http://store.steampowered.com/genre/Indie/

And finally one of my personal favourites, http://www.humblebundle.com/ . The humble bundles are 'packs' of games which you are free to choose how much you pay for them, and a percentage of what you spend goes to charity! Isn't that great? You get a bunch of games, for whatever price you want, and you're helping a charity!

These are just a few places to get indie games, but there are hundreds, if not thousands, out there which are a lot of fun to play for very reasonable prices.

I hope you go forth into the indie gaming world and enjoy all the games as much as I have, and in doing so you are helping grow the developers and community, which will only lead to expanding it more!

Over Clocking Mother Board in the Extreme

Just been told that we are going to get our hand on the latest mother board for Gamers from MSi to build a totally awesome gaming PC

http://www.pcsolutions.co.uk/news/msi-releases-over-clocking-dream-mother-board.html

Please let me be the Engineer who gets this 'task'!

New Small Form Factor PC Range

Been working on some of the new Shuttle Mini PCs today and I think I'm in love with them :)

http://www.pcsolutions.co.uk/news/PC-solutions-gains-shuttle-mini-pc-reseller-status.html

UPDATE:

We have just finished specifying and building this little beauty which will place most modern games at medium resolution but with a small foot print AND the ability to stream media.

http://www.pcsolutions.co.uk/products/mini-pc-gaming-system.html

Very Sweet :)