Section 03
Guides
Advice written from the same phones, the same connections and the same budgets you're working with. If a fix needs hardware you don't have, we'll say so in the first line instead of the last.
Holding 90fps on a mid-range phone
Thermal throttling is why your ninth minute feels worse than your first. The order you change settings in, how to test with the case off, and the three toggles that buy you the most headroom for the least visual cost.
Read the guide →Playing ranked without burning your GB
What a match actually costs you in data — measured, not guessed. Which downloads you can defer safely, and how to stop a background update from eating an entire package while you sleep.
Read the guide →Second-hand GPUs: the six-point check
What to run before you pay, what a hard-worked mining card looks like up close, and the one question that ends most bad deals in ten seconds. Bring a USB stick and twenty minutes.
Read the guide →Your first punish, properly explained
Frame data without the spreadsheet. Learn to block one specific move and punish it, and you'll win more matches this week than any combo route will get you. Ten minutes in training mode.
Read the guide →Fixing ping you thought was your ISP's fault
Router placement, the 5GHz question, and how to tell an actual routing problem from a congested evening in your neighbourhood. With a test you can run in five minutes before you call anyone.
Read the guide →Building a squad on a starter budget
Chemistry that survives a patch, the positions worth overspending on, and where to find value in the twenty-four hours after ratings change and everyone else is still asleep.
Read the guide →How we write guides
Every guide here is written by someone who did the thing, on hardware they own, in the conditions you're in. Nobody on this site has a review unit of a phone that costs more than a motorbike, and we think that's an advantage: the advice has to survive contact with a real device.
We test on mid-range Android hardware first and flagships second, because that's the split among people who read this. We test on home broadband and on mobile data, because plenty of you play on a phone connection at 11pm. When a guide's advice depends on something specific — a chipset, a package, a shop — we name it.
Guides get updated when the game changes. The update note goes at the bottom of the piece with the date and what moved, so you can tell whether the advice you followed last month is still the advice.
If a guide doesn't work for you, that's useful information and we'd like it: [email protected].
The Friday email
Ten stories. One email. Friday, 8pm.
The week's news, one review, one guide, and the local tournament calendar. Written by the same three people who write everything else here. If it's a slow week, we send you a short email — not a padded one.
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