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After a short absence from our catalog Thermaltake is back with 5 new cases available in our online custom PC builder, Level 10 gaming Headsets and Poseidon Z RGB mechanical keyboards and Level 10 mouse.

Joining the line up is also Thermaltake RGB power supplies, 80+ Gold rating with gorgeous Riing fans providing cooling and RGB illumination within. Why? Well why not, if RGB is your thing, too much is never enough.

Established in 1999, Thermaltake has long been a well respected world wide brand of cases, fans and coolers. Their latest line of products are not only great looking but offer some really hard to beat value for the money. Solid construction, plenty of features, great designs and very competitive pricing makes the Thermaltake line up not only unique in many ways but a great choice for a lot of gamers and PC builders alike.

To checkout the full range of Thermaltake products click (here) of better yet, start building your next gaming PC in one of these spectacular Thermaltake cases in our online custom gaming PC builder store page here.

As always, don’t hesitate to contact us with any questions and explore our website for great guides, how to’s, build logs with plenty of photos of our previous builds and keep up to date with our news blog for all the latest gaming PC and hardware news!

For a few weeks now, the phasing out of the previous generation Skylake series motherboards and CPUs has been taking place as the Kaby lake equivalents have taken over.

The full range of 7000 series model i3, i5 and i7 series Kaby Lake CPUs are now exclusively available and to pair, the latest generation Z270, H270 and B250 series motherboards.

The full Intel 7th Gen Kaby Lake CPU Line Up

• i7 7700K Quad Core 4.5GHz  – 8 Threads (Overclockable on Z270 Boards)
• i7 7700 Quad Core 4.2GHz  – 8 Threads
• i5 7600K Quad Core 4.2GHz – 4 Threads (Overclockable on Z270 Boards)
• i5 7600 Quad Core 4.1GHz – 4 Threads
• i5 7500 Quad Core 3.8GHz – 4 Threads
• i5 7400 Quad Core 3.5GHz – 4 Threads
• i3 7100 Dual Core 3.9GHz – 4 Threads
• Pentium G4560 Dual Core 3.5GHz – 4 Threads

The new chipsets offer increased number of PCI-E lanes and m.2 SSD support along with native Kaby Lake CPU support, bold new aesthetic designs and a load of overall small improvements  behind the scenes for an even more rock solid user experience.

While the impacts on gaming performance are non extreme over the previous generation, it is measurable and most importantly, pricing has stabilized making the equivalent Kaby lake models on par with their discontinued predecessors which are almost completely sold out across all retailers.

So what Kaby Lake CPU should I use in my gaming PC build?

Of course it depends on your budget and the types of games you play, but for this particular recommendation lets make a couple of assumptions.

1. You want to play any and all new release games for the foreseeable future on high settings at a smooth frame rate.
2. You want the best value for money option, not to pay a dis-proportionally higher amount for a relatively small performance difference.

If this sounds like what you’ve been thinking, then our recommendation would be the i5 7600K. Significantly cheaper than it’s i7 bigger brothers, it still delivers all the CPU throughput you need for any gaming title. While it only has half the cores of the the i7, it’s a sad fact that very few if any game engines actually utilize these additional codes in any meaningful way that improves overall gaming performance.

We have recommended the K model and not the vanilla i5 7600 as it comes with a slightly higher boost clock speed (nothing major) but most importantly, it’s overclockable. We don’t recommend overclocking unless you get to a stage where your unhappy with your gaming performance and the CPU is the bottleneck because it can introduce system instability and heat issues if not done properly, but leaving the the option open gives you some wriggle room in the future should you choose to crank up the clock speeds and squeeze a little more life out of your machine.

If you have a particular budget or a different use case and need more personalized recommendations don’t hesitate to contact us via email, our contact page, Facebook or by phone during business hours and our dedicated team will gladly assist!

Also worth remembering, and something we remind customers almost on a daily basis here at the Evatech offices, be sure to balance your CPU selection with your choice of graphics card (especially for gaming PCs)! Matching the wrong CPU and GPU will cause a bottleneck and the last thing you want is to lose potential performance you’ve already paid for.

To avoid bottle-necking in gaming we typically recommend;

• SLI GTX 1070 or 1080 with an i7.
• GTX 1070 or 1080 with to be paired with a high end i5 or any i7.
• GTX 1060 with a mid to low end i5.
• GTX 1050TI or lower with at least an i3.

So what’s next?

Get in touch if you have any questions or jump on our store page at www.evatech.com.au and start customizing your next Intel Kaby lake custom gaming PC today. With just a few clicks of a button, instant quotes, built in automatic compatibility checking, expert assembly and thorough burn in testing, it’s never been easier to yourself a custom built to order PC delivered anywhere in Australia.

 

 

 February

For Honor

There’s a lot of hype around this game at the moment as it goes in to beta a couple of weeks away from it’s official release. Plenty of videos online showing off it’s close range melee combat and game mechanics in which the online play consists of  small 1v1, 2v2 or 4v4 game played in waves and a single player campaign mode follows Vikings, Knights and Samurai.  Knock downs, revives and Mortal Kombat style finishing moves with different character archetypes diversify the game-play and hopefully are enough to keep the game interesting and fresh beyond the first couple of hours.

Sniper Elite 4

Need another world war II third person sandbox shooter with slow motion x-ray disturbingly graphic shots of bullets tearing up your enemies? Rebellion studios have you covered. The 4th in the series is due to be released in just a couple of weeks (14th of Feb) and if it’s anything like the previous Sniper Elite titles, will offer a decent single player story campaign,plenty of nazis to murder and of course, the ability to shoot said nazis right in the nuts.

 

March

Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands.

Thin Far Cry’s open world meets the Tom Clancy universe with a co-op tactical third person shooter layered on top and 100’s of outpost missions scattered across a the Bolivian setting amidst cartels and warring government factions.

Mass Effect: Andromeda

Only a couple of months away and very little is known about this next installment of this massive franchise. A couple of trailers is all we have to work with but Bioware has promised this is the biggest game they have made to date and they have done away with their much criticized ‘loading elevators’ from the earliest installments.

April

Sniper Ghost Warrior 3

The first of 2 sniper games coming out in quick succession, this one is modern take on the genre with plenty of Tom Clancy’esc gadgets, and a little close range stealth shooter action to mix up up the long range marksmanship and keep it interesting.

Unannounced Release Dates

Prey

Nothing to do with the now cancelled Prey 2 or it’s predecessor, instead this space survival horror game is set in an alternative sci-fi cold war history with aliens, space stations and soviets.

Red Dead Redemption 2

While the first never made it to PC, the sequel has been strongly rumored to be almost a sure thing, especially after the success of the PC port of GTA V. For those of you not familiar with the original, think GTA in the wild west.

Metal Gear Survive

A four player co-op zombie survival Metal Gear game on PC? Yep, during TGS (Tokyo Game Show) 2016 Konami showed off a teaser game play demo video blending the stealth shooter mechanics of MGS 5 with hordes of zombies.

South Park : Fractured But Whole

If your a fan of Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s work, this should have you at least a little excited.  Trey and Matt are apparently the driving force behind the dialog and story line so we expect fans of the South Park series to enjoy it, even if the game-play elements are fairy basic.

Warhammer 40k : Dawn of War 3

8 years after Dawn of War 2 and the sequel has Warhammer fans chomping at the bit to get their hands on it. It’s been shown off at trade shows and online for A LONG dam time already and we can only expect that when if does finally drop, it should be well polished.

Note that this is only a small handful of the deluge of games coming this year and with a bit of luck we’ll get some more surprise releases, late announcements and some indi gems along the way.

Honorable Mentions,

Call of Cathulu
Halo Wars 2
Project Cars 2
Tekken 7
Star Wars Battlefront 2 (2017)
Crackdown 3
Mount & Blade 2
Outlast 2
State of Decay 2
Quake Champions
The Walking Dead ( FPS from Overkill, the PayDay developers! )

Time you upgraded your gaming PC?

Has your current rig already served a few years and starting to show signs of age? Are you getting less FPS that you really want to still gaming on a little 1080P display? It might be time in investing in a brand new custom built to order gaming PC to get the most out of your upcoming favorite titles and experience them the way the developers intended, in beautiful high resolution and frame rates, with all the settings cranked up to high.

Visit evatech.com.au today and start customizing your next custom gaming PC today. 100% customisable, built in error detection, easy to use one click component selectors and even performance indicators for all the latest release AAA titles!

Fans of the franchise have been waiting almost 5 years since Resident Evil 6, but the wait is finally over with Resident Evil 7 : Biohazard launching today worldwide and unlike last time, the PC release is day and date with Xbox and PlayStation.

Despite the concerns that come with traditionally console franchises getting PC releases as to the quality of the ‘port’, optimization for mouse and keyboard input and general performance and visuals, Capcom has risen to the occasion and by all reports pulled together what is arguably the best version of the game for PC.

With very high reviews across the board for all versions of the game, PCGamer was particularly impressed, scoring it 90/100 siting it’s return to the original games slow burning horror game-play and extremely well realized dark gritty atmosphere as the games true highlights.

With the game being equally well optimized for each platform by all reports, the PC version shines through as it should with higher resolutions, texture quality, lighting effects and filtering possible on mid-range to high end systems.

Now we know it’s a quality release, it’s a great game and your a fan of the previous games? The question now becomes, can your rig handle it.

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

MINIMUM :

• OS: WINDOWS 7,8,10 64-BIT
• Processor: Intel Core i5-7400 or equivalent.
• Memory: 8 GB RAM DDR4
• Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 or equivalent.

RECOMMENDED :

• OS: WINDOWS 10 64-BIT
• Processor: Intel Core i5 7600 or equivalent.
• Memory: 8 GB RAM DDR4
• Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 or equivalent.

ULTRA :

• OS: WINDOWS 10 64-BIT
• Processor: Intel Core i7 7700 or equivalent.
• Memory: 16 GB RAM DDR4
• Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 or equivalent.

Well if your system doesn’t quiet make the cut, maybe it’s time you checked out our online custom PC builder and get an instant quote, built in error detection and free shipping + $50 instant discount with voucher code ‘evil7’ at checkout.

Quality top tier brand components, assembled and tested thoroughly by hand right here in Australia by trained professionals and delivered to your door nation wide, now with up to 6 months interest free available online^.

^subject to approval, setup fee applies, see https://evatech.com.au/zipmoney/ for details.