What’s on the ho-Ryzen?

Why these are exciting times for desktop PCs

Welcome to the May issue of PC Advisor. It feels like it’s been a long while since anything exciting happened in the world of desktop PCs, aside from the new Nvidia graphics cards. But even the GTX 1080 – as good as it is – isn’t a must-have upgrade if you already had a 980 Ti.

Part of the issue is that it’s expensive, and it’s hard to justify spending £550+ unless you’re also running a triplet of 4K monitors, in which case such a sum isn’t so significant.

This is why I for one can’t wait to benchmark AMD’s brand new Ryzen 7 processors. Unfortunately, you’ll have to wait until next month to see how they compare with Intel’s latest Kaby Lake chip (our full review is on page 74) as the chips haven’t yet arrived at PCA Towers. But AMD’s claims show that it is confident it has a winner on its hands, and early indications are that the range-topping Ryzen 7 1800X beats the equivalent eight-core Intel chip (the i7-6900K) while undercutting by over 50 percent: £499 versus £1,049.

There is no eight-core Kaby Lake processor yet, which means that any comparison to Kaby Lake right now has to be against the i7-7700K. That costs £330, which is the same as the Ryzen 7 1700, but it’s certainly worth waiting until those benchmark results are in before buying a new PC.

Ryzen isn’t the only new product from AMD this year. The next-generation of graphics cards – code-named Vega – is due to launch later in the summer, and you can read more about these on page 82. Plus, on page 58 we’ve rounded up the best tech we saw at CES that should arrive on shelves over the next 12 months.

You’ll find plenty of phone reviews starting on page 30, but the Lenovo P2 stands out this month for its exceptional battery life. Most phones will last a day, or possibly 48 hours with very light use, but the P2 just keeps on going.

Acer’s latest laptop is the thinnest in the world, and you can read our verdict on the Swift 7 on page 23. Not everyone needs a millimetre shaved off here and there, and you may not even need to buy a new PC or laptop to get better performance. An SSD is still the best-value route to restoring and improving speed in both PCs and laptops. On page 92 you can see the sort of speed boost you can expect, and we also explain how to install an SSD.

If your current hard drive is full up, we offer some tips on freeing up space on page 102, and it’s well worth checking its health using the guide on page 100 to ensure you don’t lose any precious files. For those that were accidentally deleted, you can try to recover them using the methods on pages 96 and 110.