The latest issue of PC Format is in the shops and on the digital shelves right now. Here’s what you’ll find inside:

Now, it may seem quite obvious to us all that a rig with the main components totting up to around £3,000 would be able to slap a £300 machine silly, but what if we told you it wasn’t so cut and dried? In PC Format issue 263 we’ve side-stepped our usual benchmark obsession in favour of a more experiential test, and the results are surprising to say the least. We’ve taken two rigs, one three grand and one three ton, and sat four industry guinea pigs in front of them. It’s a blind test and then some, could you tell the difference?

Sitting in the expens-o-rig is AMD’s latest graphical behemoth, the £430 Radeon HD 7970 and we’ve got a full, in-depth review of it this issue. The standalone review is backed up by its CrossFire credentials thanks to  Overclocker’s Ultima 9450i Mosasaur MKII rig, which just so happens to be packing two of the blighters. Yup that’s right, a machine with £960-worth of polygon-pushing promise.

We’ve also got a pair of £200 monitors, of the non-TN variety, one MVA Phillips and one IPS Viewsonic. And both of them rather desirable – the screen market is moving at an incredible pace at the moment, and prices appear to be heading south on a daily basis. We’ve also got Corsair’s latest line-up of peripherals, including new headset and its first ever mouse and keyboard for gamers.

Our special report in PC Format 263 sees us putting our overclocking hats on again to give you the lowdown on getting the most out of your components. We’ve checked out the best OC processor and GPU as well as the best software to make things super simple. Inside we show you how to hit 4.8GHz with a Core i5 2500K, and even manage to get it booting running at 4GHz (although it wouldn’t benchmark at this speed reliably).

There’s also a host of gaming goodness in there too, as well as all the fun of home networking, including the best NAS devices and setting up your own torrent server.

So there’s a lot to read, hurry up and get your issue!

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Current rig: Intel Core i7 930, Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R, AMD Radeon HD 6970, 6GB RAM, Kingston 128GB SSD, Antec Twelve Hundred, Corsair 650W PSU

Currently playing: Skyrim, Rift & Diablo III

Contact: alan.dexter@futurenet.com