Better Than an iPod? 12 Smartphones Reviewed! Get DirectX 10 Cheap!

Download music direct from Don’t get locked into a bad The GeForce 8600 GTS brings
the net to the new Sansa! contract—you need our guide! high-end features to a $200 card

MINIMUM BS • JULY 2007

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HOTSPOTS!
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ACTUAL
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Maximum PC vs. the
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Intel’s next-gen
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Can we beat the puddin’
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HOW TO Create Ultra-Vivid High Dynamic

Range Photos: THEY LOOK LIKE PAINTINGS!
 Contents

Ed Word
E very once in a while, I see something that is
eminently cool that I don’t know exactly how I’d
use at first glance. Twitter (www.twitter.com) is just
But Twitter’s actually good for a lot more than
that. Say you’re at a convention in a strange city.
You join the Twitter group set up for the conference,
that sort of application. I liked it immediately, but it and you’re instantly tapped in to a hardcore feed
took a little pondering to figure out why it’s awesome. of frequently useful info from the Twitterati. There’s
You see, this service gives me a simple way to no need to search for a good breakfast joint or
keep track of my friends. I subscribe to their lists, and an interesting panel—all the other attendees are
they subscribe to mine. When I send a text message broadcasting their discoveries, in real time, using
to a special number (40404), Twitter automatically their cell phones. That’s useful and cool.
broadcasts my message to everyone who’s So, what are you waiting for? Go sign up for
subscribed to my Twitter feed. That sounds a little Twitter (and get your friends to sign up too—it’s
lame and annoying, I know. But let me give you a pair better with friends).
of real-world examples that show why it’s addictive. Got your Twitter account set up? Good! I think
I’m ready to head out for a night on the town, there’s a better use for Twitter than telling my pals

I’m all but none of my pals knows exactly where we

should go. So, we all head to our local watering
holes. It’s dead-quiet in my neighborhood bar,
I’m getting a haircut. I’m going to use Twitter as a
kind of anywhere worklog, posting my day-to-day
work activities for all to see. I’d like to use Twitter to

a-Twitter but my pal (we’ll call him Barney) discovers pay

dirt. Not only is there a great band playing in his
favorite nighttime establishment, but he’s also
managed to score a booth in an impossibly full bar.
keep you guys tuned in to the Maximum PC beat 24
hours a day, seven days a week. If you’re interested,
feel free to subscribe to my Twitter feed—it’s http://
www.twitter.com/willsmith/.
With one quick text message he lets all of us know And, if you think up exciting new ways to use
where he is and that he can hold down the booth Twitter (or any other nifty web app), let me know
for only another 15 or 20 minutes before the black- about them!
leather-jacket crowd moves in on his patch of
Please send feedback and
ice cream sandwiches to Naugahyde paradise. This is undoubtedly a good,
will@maximumpc.com. if somewhat frivolous, use of technology.

MAXIMUMPC 07/07

Features

34 Smartphones
We give you the 411 on
what to look for in a smartphone
and review 12 top models.

28 Parental-Control
Software Our editors battle
Net Nanny and other apps in order to obtain
the forbidden fruits of the Internet.

49 Penryn We get an early look

at Intel’s latest CPU and find

18 Thermal Cooling
out what else the chipmaker
has in store for power users.

It’s getting hot in here! We show you how to cool

your rig’s hot spots with pinpoint accuracy.

JULY 2007 MAXIMUMPC

MPC
P 05
PC
MAXIMUMPC Contents
EDITORIAL
EDITOR IN CHIEF Will Smith

Departments
MANAGING EDITOR Tom Edwards
EXECUTIVE EDITOR Michael Brown
SENIOR EDITOR Gordon Mah Ung
SENIOR EDITOR Katherine Stevenson
ASSOCIATE EDITOR David Murphy
CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Norman Chan, Kris Fong,
Tom Halfhill, Steve Klett, Tom McDonald, Zack Stern Quick Start AMD gives up on R&D The full story on Vista audio .....62
EDITOR EMERITUS Andrew Sanchez
high-end parts, hopes to compete
ART in the midrange.................................... 08 In the Lab Is Ageia’s PhysX
ART DIRECTOR Natalie Jeday
ASSOCIATE ART DIRECTOR Boni Uzilevsky technology ready for prime time? ........64
PHOTO EDITOR Mark Madeo
ASSOCIATE PHOTOGRAPHER Samantha Berg
Head2Head CPU vs. GPU—the
battle for upgrade supremacy! ............ 14 In/Out You write, we respond.........102
BUSINESS
GROUP PUBLISHER Stacey Levy
650-238-2319, slevy@futureus.com WatchDog Maximum PC takes Rig of the Month Joe and Jesse
WESTERN AD DIRECTOR Dave Lynn
949-360-4443, dlynn@futureus.com a bite out of bad gear .......................... 16 Nuzzo’s Vader ITX ..............................104
WESTERN AD MANAGER Derek Johnson
650-238-2327, djohnson@futureus.com
EASTERN AD MANAGER Larry Presser How To Create HDR images ........... 56
646-723-5459, lpresser@futureus.com
EASTERN AD MANAGER GAMES Kristin Kelleher
646-723-5491, kkelleher@futureus.com
ADVERTISING COORDINATOR Jose Urrutia
Ask the Doctor Diagnosing
650-238-2498, jurrutia@futureus.com and curing your PC problems ............. 60 76
SENIOR MARKETING MANAGER Alison McCreery
MARKETING COORDINATOR Michael Basilio

PRODUCTION
PRODUCTION DIRECTOR Richie Lesovoy
PRODUCTION COORDINATOR Dan Mallory

CIRCULATION
CIRCULATION DIRECTOR Peter Kelly
NEWSSTAND MANAGER Elliott Kiger
Reviews
NEWSSTAND COORDINATOR Alex Guzman
INTERNET SUBSCRIPTION MARKETING MANAGER Betsy Wong
PRINT ORDER COORDINATOR Mila Villaflor Gaming rig Digital Storm
Twister Ultra 4 ...........................................66

Speakers M-Audio Studiophile

FUTURE US, INC AV 40 Speaker System .........................68
4000 Shoreline Court, Suite 400, South San Francisco, CA 94080
www.futureus-inc.com
iPod integration kit Dice 80
PRESIDENT Jonathan Simpson-Bint
Electronics iPod Integration Kit ............. 68 66
VICE PRESIDENT/COO Tom Valentino
CFO John Sutton
GENERAL COUNSEL Charles Schug
PUBLISHING DIRECTOR/GAMES Simon Whitcombe
Motherboards Abit IN9 Speaker dock Jabra S5010
PUBLISHING DIRECTOR/BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT Dave Barrow 32X-MAX; MSI P6N SLI Platinum............70 Speaker Dock ..........................................80
EDITORIAL DIRECTOR/TECHNOLOGY Jon Phillips
EDITORIAL DIRECTOR/MUSIC Brad Tolinski
DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL SERVICES Nancy Durlester Blu-ray drives Lite-On BD Earphones Razer ProTone
PRODUCTION DIRECTOR Richie Lesovoy Triple Writer LH-2B1S; LaCie m100 Earphones ..................................80
Future US, Inc. is part of Future plc. d2 Blu-ray Drive ................................72
Future produces carefully tar-
geted special-interest magazines, Gaming headsets TheBoom
websites and events for people Flash memory key Corsair Quiet; Tritton Audio Xtreme 360;
who share a passion. We aim to
satisfy that passion by creating titles
16GB Flash Voyager ...............................74 Genius HS-04U........................................82
offering value for money, reliable
information, smart buying advice
and which are a pleasure to read or Supplementary monitor Projector Toshiba TDP-FF1 AU
visit. Today we publish more than
150 magazines, 65 websites and a
Thermaltake 7-Inch Touch Screen LCD Video Projector .........................................84
growing number of events in the US, Monitor .....................................................74
UK, France and Italy. Over 100 inter-
national editions of our magazines are also published in 30 other Projection screen Epson
countries across the world. Videocard BFG 8600 GTS OC ........76 Accolade Duet Projection Screen .........84
Future plc is a public company quoted on the London Stock Exchange
(symbol: FUTR). Terabyte hard drive Hitachi Video editing CyberLink
FUTURE plc
Deskstar 7K1000 ....................................76 PowerDirector 6 .......................................86
30 Monmouth St., Bath, Avon, BA1 2BW, England
www.futureplc.com
Tel +44 1225 442244
Media players SanDisk Music software Finale 2007;
Sansa Connect 4GB; Cowon D2 ...........78 Ableton Live 6.......................................88
NON-EXECUTIVE CHAIRMAN: Roger Parry
CHIEF EXECUTIVE: Stevie Spring
GROUP FINANCE DIRECTOR: John Bowman
Tel +44 1225 442244
www.futureplc.com Gaming
REPRINTS: For reprints, contact Ryan Derfler, Reprint Operations
Specialist, 717.399.1900 ext. 167
or email: futurenetworkusa@reprintbuyer.com Oblivion: Shivering Isles.................90
SUBSCRIPTION QUERIES: Please email customerservice@
maximumpc.com or call customer service toll-free at 800.274.3421 Infernal ................................................90
Maximum PC ISSN: 1522-4279

JULY 2007 MAXIMUMPC 07

 quickstart THE BEGINNING OF THE MAGAZINE, WHERE ARTICLES ARE SMALL

AMD
Surrenders!
Can AMD win the GPU
war by ceding the battle
for best high-end
videocard to Nvidia?

A MD has decided it will compete with

Nvidia in the first-generation DirectX 10
GPU market only at the mainstream level:
The best videocard AMD will offer this season is designed to compete only with
Nvidia’s midrange part, the GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB.
Depending on how you look at it, and whom
you ask, it’s either a brilliant strategy or an
admission of utter failure. sweet spot. Pessimists will declare that AMD CPU than Nvidia’s best because Nvidia’s
The top videocard AMD will bring to is admitting defeat—that its engineers just second-generation PureVideo HD engine
market this quarter is the ATI Radeon HD can’t compete with Nvidia at the high end. is available only on its otherwise lower-end
2900 XT, a $400 card that will be positioned The truth lies somewhere in between. GeForce 8500- and 8600-series parts.
against Nvidia’s similarly priced GeForce There’s no question Nvidia now rules AMD’s best part will have a full 512-
8800 GTS. ATI will not only leave the high the roost when judged solely on videogame bit ring-bus memory interface to 512MB
end of the market to Nvidia’s GeForce 8800 frame rates, but AMD’s entire line of new of GDDR3 memory. Compare this to the
GTX but also have no answer for Nvidia’s GPUs offers several compelling features that GeForce 8800 GTS, which has just a 320-
even faster 8800 Ultra. Nvidia’s midrange—and even its best—can- bit interface to either 320MB or 640MB of
Optimists will say that $400 is the max not match. First and foremost: support for GDDR3, and the GeForce 8800 GTX and
that most people will spend for a videocard HDCP on dual-link DVI in order to support 8800 Ultra, which have 384-bit interfaces
anyway, so AMD is smart for pursuing that the native resolution of 30-inch displays. to 768MB of memory. AMD is betting that
ATI’s new cards should also offload developers will target a maximum memory
more HD video-decoding work from the footprint of 512MB, and it claims the reason
AMD ATI RADEON HD 200 SERIES
Nvidia uses larger frame buffers on its cards
ATI RADEON ATI RADEON ATI RADEON
is merely to compensate for the relatively
HD 2400 HD 2600 HD 2900 odd sizes of its memory buses: In order to
PRICE RANGE Sub $100 $100 to $200 $400
achieve the desired memory bandwidth,
AMD says, Nvidia has to put more memory
PROCESS 65nm 65nm 80nm
on the card.
TECHNOLOGY
AMD will clock the 2900 XT’s core at
STREAM 40 128 320
740MHz and its memory at 825MHz, but
PROCESSING
UNITS the company says it will encourage third-
party vendors and end users to overclock
CORE CLOCK 525 to 700MHz 600 to 800MHz 740MHz
SPEED * both components. AMD will also bundle
a coupon with the high-end SKU for free
MEMORY * 128MB DDR2 256MB GDDR2 512MB GDDR3
256MB DDR2 256MB GDDR3 copies of Half-Life 2: Episode 2, Team
256MB GDDR3 256MB GDDR4 Fortress 2, and Portal. AMD is launching a
MEMORY CLOCK 400 to 800MHz 400MHz to 1.1GHz 825MHz complete line of other desktop and mobile
SPEED * parts almost simultaneously, with desktop
RING BUS 64-bit 128-bit 512-bit products covering price ranges from well
MEMORY below $100 to $400 for its best part. Check
INTERFACE out the table for the specs on the desktop
OUTPUTS SVGA, DVI, VO Dual DVI, VO Dual DVI, VIVO products and see MaximumPC.com for
benchmark numbers.
* Varies according to SKU

08 MAXIMUMPC JULY 2007

 FAST FORWARD

Velocity Micro Buys

TOM
Up, Up, and HALFHILL

Overdrive PC Online
“If you can’t beat ’em, join
Why shouldn’t a modest-size company benefit
from a boutique shop, just like the big boys?
’em” is the resounding mes-
sage coming from the TV
Being Smart
networks these days as they about Vista
I n a move that echoes Dell’s acquisition of Alienware
and HP’s purchase of Voodoo, semi-boutique PC
shift their online efforts from
maker Velocity Micro is looking to up its street cred by
buying Overdrive PC.
their own websites to portals
that have more resonance
with webizens. In the case of
H ow can you turn a big, fast computer into a
small, slow computer? Upgrade Windows!
Unfortunately, there’s always a dark side to
Velocity Micro has always catered to the top end of
the NBC/News Corp. venture upgrading. Code bloat in each new version of
the mainstream market, but its acquisition of boutique
announced in April, that Windows erodes our precious RAM and hard-
seller Overdrive should give both brands a better shot
means featuring broadcast disk space. I still have my Windows 1.0 install
at high-end enthusiasts. Overdrive PC will continue to
content on MSN, Yahoo, disks: two 5.25-inch floppies. Each disk holds
function as a separate unit, but its staff will relocate to
MySpace, and other sites. 360KB, so the whole installer is less than one
Velocity Micro’s headquarters.
For CBS, which just megabyte. Nowadays, one megabyte isn’t
Overdrive PC is less well known than ultra-high-
recently announced its enough for the splash screen.
end vendors Falcon Northwest and Voodoo, but its
own web strategy, it means But never mind that I’m a pack rat. My
reputation has been
partnering with forward- point is to assure you that it’s OK not to
skyrocketing. Velocity
looking upstarts such as upgrade to Windows Vista—not immediately,
Micro no doubt hopes to
Joost, Sling, and Brightcove at least. Although long-term resistance to
capitalize on Overdrive’s
and emphasizing interac- Vista is futile, there are good reasons to wait a
“Hyperclocking” tech-
tivity. The P2P Internet TV while. Your status as a power user need not be
nology, a method for
site Joost (still in beta), threatened. Real power users aren’t reckless
producing fast yet reli-
for instance, incorporates lemmings. Only insecure users succumb to
able overclocked PCs.
search, chat, and IM features peer pressure and marketing hype by roboti-
While it might seem
into its video player; Sling’s cally upgrading their systems with the latest
to be a growing trend,
Clip + Sling site (also in of everything. Real power users know when
there are few boutiques
beta) works with a Slingbox to upgrade.
out there left to be pur-
streaming device to allow Corporations know, too. They usually wait
chased—we just wonder
you to record and share at least a year after a new version of Windows
who’s next.
content with others, and is released before updating, by which time
Overdrive’s Core2.GX2 won our $2,500 gaming Brightcove lets users edit Microsoft has released Service Hack 1. That’s
rig roundup in December 2006. and comment on video clips. the collection of patches that fixes the worst
bugs, security holes, and shortcomings. Plus,
delaying adoption gives the IT folks enough

Let Your Web Browser Do the Walking

time to test the new OS with all their apps and
upgrade the creakiest PCs in the company.
My day job is at a 38,000-employee inter-
Opera 9.2’s Speed Dial feature offers users a novel way to access their favorite sites national corporation that only last year began
broadly upgrading from Windows 2000 to
Windows XP. No joke. When I sent my company-
loaner laptop to the IT department for repair,
it came back with XP Pro—but still with only
128MB of RAM. Now it takes 10 minutes to
boot, and it runs like a drunken slug.
Maybe you crave Vista for its allegedly
tighter security, airhead user interface, or
DirectSeX-10 graphics. Whatever. That’s fine
for your primary power machine. But most
people these days have one or more older
machines, too. Maybe your previous PC is now
a media server, backup system, or hand-me-
down to someone. You have my permission to
keep running XP, Windows 2000, or even (in
extreme cases) Windows 98. I promise that
Maximum PC won’t cancel your subscription.

Tom Halfhill was formerly a senior editor for Byte magazine

and is now an analyst for Microprocessor Report.
In the latest version of Opera’s free browser, a new tab launches a
thumbnail grid of nine websites that you’ve either chosen from your
existing favorites or entered manually.
JULY 2007 MAXIMUMPC 09
 quickstart THE BEGINNING OF THE MAGAZINE, WHERE ARTICLES ARE SMALL

GAME THEORY
Blu-ray Puts the
Heat on HD DVD
THOMAS
MCDONALD

According to Home Media Magazine,

first-quarter sales of high-definition movie
HD DVD
Bad discs favored the Blu-ray format by a
30%

Dad? wide margin. Of the 1.2 million discs sold

between January 1 and March 31, 832,530 Blu-ray
have been Blu-ray units. It’s too early, 70%
E very once in a while, when my kids spend
a couple hours parked in front of the com-
puter, I get the guilts. This is often assuaged by
however, to say the figures reflect a defini-
tive preference; the numbers could stem
from the relative strength of the titles in
hearing about a parent who lets their kid spend
each camp’s release slates for that period.
four hours a day plugged into Gears of War. Q1 sales of HD movies.
Hey, I may suck as a father, but at least I’m not
as bad as that guy.
But the little bit o’ guilt still tickles the back
of my conscience, and I want to squash that
sucker flat. Because you know what? It isn’t so
Vista Not a
bad for children to be plugged in a few hours
a week. Parents are conditioned to think that
Shoo-In
this time is some yawning vortex of sucking The OS meets resistance in its bid
evil that is slowly leeching our children of their for dominance
very souls! Rather, we should all gather round
and play state capitol bingo or work on our Back in January, all the major computer
compost heaps or compose haiku in honor of makers jumped aboard the Vista band-
Basho’s birthday. wagon and began offering the OS exclu-
Bull. My kids have only been enriched by sively on their consumer PCs. And why
the time they spend on the computer. That’s not? Microsoft’s long-awaited follow-up
because we manage time (it’s limited and my to XP was touted as the best OS ever—it
kids rarely use the computer on school nights) was assumed everyone would want it. actually asking that their new machines
and content (largely benign or at least non- Apparently, that hasn’t been the case. be outfitted with XP.
graphic) and because computers open a rich PC sales following Vista’s launch have Responding to a flood of requests on
and amazingly diverse interactive environment. fallen short of expectations. According to its IdeaStorm website, Dell has resumed
Sure, a lot of what my kids play is educa- an analyst at research firm Gartner, “While bundling Windows XP with four of its
tional, and that comes with its own benefits. Vista includes a number of interesting Inspiron laptops and two Dimension
SpongeBob is a far better (and surprisingly features, these features just don’t have desktop models. Of course, it’s only a
more patient) typing instructor than I would be, enough ‘must have’ appeal… to spark a matter of time before consumers have no
and Ms. Frizzle knows infinitely more about significant rush of new PC sales.” But the choice. Microsoft has said it will cease
bugs than I ever, ever want to know. news for Vista is actually worse than a selling XP to large computer makers
But even titles like Battle for Middle-earth slow adoption rate. Some consumers are come January 2008.
II or Stronghold: Legends or Medieval II deliver
endless riches. My son has become quite the
expert on tactics, fortifications, and balanced
force deployments, not to mention well mari-
nated in the beloved world of Tolkien and the
intricacies of Crusader politics. We can have
A TRIP-py Trillion
intelligent discussions about the proper use of A new computer processor design looks to take systems by storm
light and heavy infantry and the relative merits
of trebuchets, ballista, catapults, and other A trillion calculations per second. That’s what researchers at the University of Texas in
arcane items of medieval warfare. Austin are promising will happen by 2012, thanks to their new TRIPS computer pro-
And dammit, that’s the kind of thing that cessor. Short for Tera-op, Reliable, Intelligently adaptive Processing System, TRIPS
makes a boy a boy and a man a man. My stands out from traditional CPU design in its ability to simultaneously issue 16 opera-
boy will almost certainly never need to know tions per cycle and 1,024 instructions in flight. By contrast, a “modern” processor
the capitol of Oregon, but knowing how to caps out at around four operations per cycle.
properly deploy a trebuchet just might come The TRIPS processor operates under the EDGE (Explicit Data Graph Execution)
in handy some day. architecture. Researchers hope the new architecture will become a successful alter-
native to multicore parallelism, as the former focuses on increasing the efficiency of
Tom McDonald has been covering games for countless single processors rather than simply expanding the number of cores on a single chip.
magazines and newspapers for 11 years. He lives in the
New Jersey Pine Barrens.

10 MAXIMUMPC JULY 2007

 quickstart The beginning of The magazine, where arTicles are

Vonage funsizeNeWs

Scrambles A KiNder, GeNTler MPAA?

under Apparently, the Motion Picture Association of

the Legal America (MPAA) is ready to explore an alterna-

tive to the strong-arm
Guillotine tactics it’s tradition-
ally used to prevent
The ongoing litigation between content piracy. At a recent
Verizon and Vonage is a lot LexisNexis conference
like that scene in Return of the on DRM, MPAA leader
Jedi when Yoda dies—it just Dan Glickman said the
despite being new silicon, the GeForce Ultra keeps going and going, and organization is committed
lacks the second-gen PureVideo Hd engine right when you think it’s done, to developing interoper-
Nvidia packs into the far-cheaper 8600 GTs. blammo, another twist. able DRM schemes that will allow consumers
A federal appeals court to play their legitimately purchased content on

Nvidia Ups the Ante, Again is currently keeping the VoIP

provider alive, which should
any device, even if it means ripping said con-
tent from a DVD.
come as a brief sigh of relief The organization called on other industry

N
vidia’s new GeForce 8800 Ultra sounds pretty players to join its efforts in devising an actual
for the embattled Vonage.
underwhelming: While it is faster than a stock The company was facing plan—meanwhile the MPAA continues its fight
slow death—an injunction against existing ripping programs, such as
8800 GTX—core clock speed of 612MHz, shader
preventing it from signing RipIt4Me and the recent HD DVD crack.
clocks of 1.5GHz, and 1.08GHz memory—it has the
on new customers—after it
same number of stream processors (128) and the same was found guilty of violating
dell’s solid sTATe oF AFFAirs
In what’s sure to become a
384-bit memory interface. The 768MB frame buffer is three of Verizon’s VoIP-themed
trend, Dell is offering a solid-
patents earlier this year. While
the same, too. And they expect $830 for this? state drive (SSD) upgrade to
Verizon requested $197 million
buyers of its ultra-portable
in damages, a federal court Latitude D420 and semi-rugged
ordered Vonage to pay $58 D620. For $550, a consumer
DisplayPort to Pack a Punch! million and a 5.5 percent roy-
alty per customer.
can opt to swap a notebook’s
mechanical drive for a 32GB
The outcome of the case SanDisk SSD. An SSD is more
A revolutionary new feature could help the up-and- will have a lasting effect on stable (as it lacks moving
coming digital interface make up for lost time more than just Vonage. If parts), requires less power, and generates less
Verizon ultimately proves noise and heat than a platter-based drive, mak-

N ow that DisplayPort 1.1 has been ratified for use in con- successful in its patent chal- ing it ideal for portable computing.
sumer electronics products, you’re probably wondering lenge, the company could very
how the next-gen interface will coexist with HDMI. After all, well cast its legal net over a ForBiddeN FrUiT No More
HDMI, which can already be found in many CE devices, larger array of VoIP providers. If you crave a BlackBerry’s unique functionality
has been positioning itself to replace DVI in PC products In essence, Verizon could use (or require it for your work) but resent being
by offering the bandwidth (and HDCP support, of course) the court system to give itself tied to a BlackBerry handset, a solution is on
necessary to carry high-def audio and video signals across a a monopoly in the VoIP sector the horizon. RIM (the maker of the BlackBerry)
single petite connector—the very thing DisplayPort offers. until a company is successful plans to release a “virtual BlackBerry” cli-
in creating a work-around to ent later this year for select devices running
But DisplayPort’s trump card could be fiber optics; at
Windows Mobile 6. The BlackBerry Application
least that’s the goal of a company called Luxtera, which Verizon’s holdings.
Suite will be accessible via an icon in
is working to Vonage is currently
Windows Mobile and will load with the famil-
incorporate appealing the decision in
iar BlackBerry interface—a user can toggle
its CMOS the United States District
between the two environments.
Photonics Court for the Eastern District
technology into of Virginia, and the process
DisplayPort, is expected to proceed
thereby unnaturally quickly for a pat-
establishing a ent case. That doesn’t give
replacement Vonage much time to develop
for today’s a technological work-around
copper cables. for Verizon’s patent claims,
provided it can even do
Fiber optics are better able to carry high-speed, so—according to earlier court
high-bandwidth data than copper cables because the documents, Vonage is in for
latter’s impedance can lead to signal loss. quite an uphill climb.

12 MAXIMUMPC july 2007

 head2head TWO TECHNOLOGIES ENTER, ONE TECHNOLOGY LEAVES

DirectX 10 GPU vs. Quad-Core CPU

M aximum PC recommends that you have both a DirectX 10
graphics card and a quad-core CPU for PC nirvana, but that
goal isn’t realistic for everyone—that much kit costs a ton of cash.
check to keep your rig on the bleeding edge of technology? You’ve got
to decide which part comes first. To help you weigh the pros and cons,
we’ve pitted the two technologies against each other.
So what do you do when you can’t afford to blow an entire pay- BY GORDON MAH UNG

GAMING
round 1 Gamers have plenty of reasons to buy a DirectX 10 card. Even though
developers tell us DirectX 9 has some life left, we’ve seen enough DX10 content to
know we’d cry crocodile tears if we didn’t have a DX10 part on the day Crytek’s Crysis
launches. However, this battle really isn’t as cut-and-dried as you might think. Besides
shooting for DX10 support, developers are also coding for quad-core processors,
using different threads for physics and artificial intelligence. In fact, Valve has said that
it expects a quad-core CPU to give you quite a different—and we presume better—
VIDEO PLAYBACK
gaming experience than a single- or even dual-core proc. Still, even the CPU fanboys
here think that if you have a serviceable CPU—a good midrange dual-core proces-
round 2 AND ENCODING
sor—you should opt for a DX10 upgrade before buying a quad core if your primary The PC has risen to the challenge as people increas-
interest is gaming. WINNER: DX10 CARD ingly turn to it for video playback. GPU-enabled video
playback using either Nvidia’s PureVideo or AMD’s
Avivo can actually be better than what you get with
pricey professional DVD players, and it’s all thanks
to the GPU. While you can view HD content with a
low-end dual-core CPU, you’ll still need an HDCP-
enabled videocard, which all but the cheapest DX10
cards support. However, when it comes to video
encoding and transcoding, it’s all about the CPU.
Hell, a quad core isn’t enough when you’re using an
encoder that’s truly multithreaded. WINNER: TIE

CPU
INTEL CORE 2 QUAD Q6600
$530, www.intel.com

APPLICATIONS
round 3 The general-purpose CPU will never be replaced when it comes to
pushing Microsoft Office’s fat ass up and over that hill. As applications are updated for
multithreading, the quad-core processor will actually get faster but also run multiple
non-multithreaded applications without taking a performance hit.
This category is all about the quad-core CPU, but there are still a couple of scenari-
os in which the GPU is important. Almost every major video-editing application uses the
GPU for acceleration, and that isn’t going to change. We’re at the point now that crappy
onboard graphics isn’t enough for these apps. ATI’s and Nvidia’s stream processing
technologies also represent future challenges for the CPU. But that technology won’t
have any measurable impact for a while, and truth be told, the quad core is more impor-
tant for your video renders anyway. WINNER: QUAD-CORE CPU

14 MAXIMUMPC JULY 2007

 Developer Support
round 5 Does it make sense to make
DX10 capability your number one upgrade
choice when DX10 games are still six
months away? Even scarier, how will today’s
round 4 Compatibility
This is an easy category to judge. You can
GPUs perform when DX10 games finally
come out? It’s enough to make you want to
take an ancient Socket 939 system or even the very first pass up that graphics upgrade in favor of a
925X PCI-E motherboard and couple that old-ass Prescott new CPU. However, CPUs provide a similar
Pentium 4 with a current-generation DirectX 10 card. You story. How many desktop applications use
can’t say the same for a quad core. For Intel, you need a the power of a quad core? About a half-
very modern motherboard. And although AMD will likely dozen. That’s more apps than DX10 has but
offer an upgrade for its AM2 platform, quad-core procs in not exactly a compelling case to spend $500
AM2 trim aren’t even on this year’s schedule. If you already right now. Winner: QuaD-Core Cpu
have a Quad FX, you probably aren’t itching for a CPU
upgrade just yet. Winner: DX10 CarD

GPU
NvIDIA GEForCE 8800 GTX
$560, www.nvidia.com

And the Winner Is...

N o one—especially us—likes ties, but after sorting out the pluses
and minuses of each technology, neither part has a compel-
ling edge. If you are all about crunching applications—photo editing,
core should be your first upgrade choice. However, if you are a gamer
with a respectable CPU (say any Core 2 Duo or Athlon X2 proc), the
DirectX 10 card is the way to go.
video editing and encoding, or other CPU-heavy chores—the quad

July 2007 MAXIMUMPC 15

 watchdog
dog MAXIMUM PC TAKES A BITE OUT OF BAD GEAR

Our consumer advocate investigates...

P Web of WinFixer PLast.fm Keeps
PThe
Launching PPriorityElectronics.com
Lincoln, watchdog of the month

THE WINFIX IS IN WinFixer popups have plagued

Have you ever heard of www.virussw.com? I had a not only PC users. Reports
charge from them pop up on my bank account today. on the Internet indicate the
I have never heard of the company and don’t know popups that goad people into
how they were able to charge my account. The web- visiting WinFixer’s site have
site screams scam. I called the number on the site also impacted Mac and Linux
and waited to talk to someone. After being told the Firefox users.
whole time that I would speak to a person, I could only So, who the hell is behind
leave a message. I am working with my bank on this these terrible programs?
but was hoping you had some info about them. Menlo Park, CA, attorney
— Michael Joseph M. Bochner thinks
he may have the answer.
Michael, you did the right thing by following your Bochner filed a class-action
instincts and contacting your bank about the suit on behalf of Beatrice
questionable charges. Many people wait until it’s Ochoa, who claims WinFixer
too late to dispute fraudulent charges. did a number on her PC after
The Dog started his investigation by simply she paid the company $30
calling the company. After two minutes on hold, for the program. The suit,
the Dog was transferred to a customer service filed in Santa Clara Superior
rep who would not tell the Dog her name or Court, alleges that WinFixer,
Search the web for Virussw.com’s phone number and
even the name of the company she was work- ErrorSafe, WinAntivirus, and
you’ll find that many other questionable companies also
ing for. When the Dog asked her if she thought WinAntispyware are “fraud-
use it.
that was suspicious, she would not respond ware” and use messages to
and instead transferred the Dog to “Jennifer’s” trick users into installing the
voice mail. No surprise, “Jennifer” did not packages on their PCs. The suit says: “These 2,300 a day. If the average cost were just $30 per
return the Dog’s call. representations are fraudulent (and very often customer, the company’s yearly take would be
A check of the domains registered to flatly false) in that Defendants have designed greater than $25 million.
Virussw.com’s IP address (66.244.254.64) and intended the Fraudware to report that the Bochner, however, is dismayed by the lack
turned up several other websites the Dog has host computer is infected regardless of the of interest shown by law enforcement and large
written about, including WinAntivirus.com and truth. The Fraudware then misrepresents that companies. Symantec, Bochner said, sued Reno
WinFixer.com. The Dog was also able to con- the victim may repair the purported problem and ByteHosting, and the deposition in the case
nect Virussw.com to WinFixer by searching by paying money to Defendants. Victims who made it clear that the antivirus company had
for Virussw.com’s toll-free support number. comply are instructed to enter their credit card been pursuing WinAntivirus, which was appar-
WinAntivirusPro.com, DriverCleaner.com, information and to transmit it over the Internet, ently using the familiar yellow colors of Norton.
ErrorSafe.com, and WinFixer, amazingly, have whereupon Defendants charge the victims from Bochner said Symantec had ByteHosting in its
also used that number. $29.95 to $59.95, depending on the particular sights, but oddly, never followed up on it.
In the January 2006 issue of Maximum PC, Fraudware title involved.” “Symantec clearly had a chance to shut
the Dog warned readers away from these appli- Bochner has taken his suit one step beyond [these WinFixer] guys down,” Bochner said,
cations, which clearly have a checkered his- what others have been able to achieve by actu- “but didn’t for some unfathomable reason.”
tory and have been rated as malware. Google’s ally naming two of the defendants, Marc J. Cohen Bochner said he has also had very little luck
Stopbadware.org. has since banned people of Florida and James Reno, the president of convincing any law enforcement agencies
from visiting the WinFixer 2005 and 2006 site Ohio-based ByteHosting. During his investiga- to take a hard look at the folks, despite the
if they find the URL via Google’s search engine. tion of WinFixer, Bochner said he ran across an complaints. Regardless, he said the suit will
unsecured database that continue. More information about the suit is
contained information on available at http://fixwinfixer.wordpress.com.
Got a bone to pick with a vendor? Been spiked by a fly-by-night people who purchased the For what it’s worth, the Dog was unable to get
operation? Sic the Dog on them by writing watchdog@maxi- program around the world. a comment from Cohen’s attorney or any of
mumpc.com. The Dog promises to answer as many letters as
possible, but only has four paws to work with. Bochner estimates sales of the other parties named in the suit. The Dog
WinFixer to be in excess of will keep a close eye on this one and report

16 MAXIMUMPC JULY 2007

 dog

Firing up
Windows Media
Player will
launch Last.fm.

updates as they arrive. In the meantime, you snarky with me as well. All I wanted was my hard
should obviously avoid these applications like drive on time.
the plague. — Charles T. La Grande III

My Last.fM Won’t stop the Dog spoke with a priority Electronics rep
After reading about www.last.fm in Maximum PC I who confirmed that the company had refunded
decided to try it. It’s not bad. I figured I would run it Charles’s shipping costs. the rep wasn’t sure
when I wanted to hear some streaming music. When why the drive took so long to arrive, but he said
I finished listening, I clicked the icon in the task bar that a delay at the warehouse was the probable
to exit the application. Ten minutes later it was run- reason. although priority did ultimately sup-
ning again. I clicked Exit and went to work. It started ply the drive, Charles’s frustration isn’t unique.
again. I looked at the Options menu and unchecked priority Electronics of fountain Valley, Ca,
“Scrobbling” and made sure it wasn’t set to run received an f rating from the Better Business
automatically when Windows starts up. Bureau. on its website, the BBB describes its
After clicking Apply and exiting the applica- f rating as follows: “We strongly question the
tion, it started up again. I could tell when it would company’s reliability for reasons such as that
start up because my floppy drive would make a they have failed to respond to complaints, their
noise. I decided to uninstall it since I have no idea advertising is grossly misleading, they are not
what it’s doing. in compliance with the law’s licensing or regis-
— Brian tration requirements, their complaints contain
especially serious allegations, or the company’s
to see if he could reproduce the problem, the industry is known for its fraudulent business
Dog installed the latest version of Last.fm on a practices.” ouch.
clean copy of Windows Xp pro running in a virtu- the Dog must point out, however, that
al machine. Like Brian, the Dog also unchecked the BBB’s rating is apparently based on 18
“scrobbling” and “start with Windows.” complaints, with eight of those ending in a full
after 18 hours, the application had not refund. to see what other people had to say, the
spawned. so why was Brian’s version starting? Dog headed over to www.resellerratings.com,
Windows Media player is the likely culprit. When which compiles consumers’ reviews of stores.
installed, Last.fm hooks into Windows Media the company has a lifetime rating of 4.38 out
player. If you launch WMp, Last.fm launches with of 10 with fewer than 20 reviews, and the last
it, which gives the impression that it is starting positive review came back in December 2005.
by itself. as far as the Dog knows, the app is the tenor of the complaints was pretty hot. one
clean, and the Dog has received no other com- consumer wrote, “I ordered a new laptop drive
plaints about it being too aggressive in starting that they spec’d as DVD+rW, DVD-rW, DVD+DL,
up on its own. and CD-rW. the first drive I got appeared used
or refurbished, didn’t open when the button was
LoW prIorIty pushed, and did not support DVD-rW or DVD+DL.
I purchased a notebook PC hard drive from the second drive looked new but did not support
PriorityElectronics.com in February and ordered it DVD+DL. rMaed a second time (and I paid for
second-day FedEx. Two days later, the drive didn’t shipping), then they decided they could not pro-
show up. A week later, I called Priority Electronics vide me with a drive that met their own specs.
and spoke to a salesperson named Jessica who said they credited back to my credit card $20 short!
an email with the package’s tracking number would I’m now working with the credit card company
be sent to me at the end of the day. I didn’t receive to get my $20 back.”
the tracking information. To make a long story short, I although the number of complaints against
had to call the company several times to get a refund the company is relatively small, we cer-
for my shipping costs, and I had to badger them tainly don’t have much confidence in priority
just to get the product I paid for. I felt the reps were Electronics. Woof.
 M Guide aster’s

Cooling
to

We’re busting out the thermal camera to

show you what’s hot or not in your PC—and what you
should do to fix your rig’s trouble spots BY DAVID MURPHY

Unless you’re running your rig in a not about to suggest mounting an air clumsy author of this article would be
refrigerator, the first law of geek life conditioner to the side of your rig. But carefully supervised, our friends at
reads as follows: Computers are we’ve done one better. After much Fluke set us up with a super-duper-
warm. And onto that, Maximum PC pleading and promises that the oft- fancy thermal-imaging camera.
extends the corollary that as a PC’s In short, we pointed the camera at
guts get faster, temperatures will only THAT’S HOT! just about everything we could get our
get hotter. And hotter. And then you hands on to take full advantage of its
upgrade your rig again, and you find We used Fluke’s Predator-style heat vision, but you’ll
yourself just three degrees shy of IR FlexCam be most interested in our views of
slathering your CPU with butter and Thermal Imager three common types of rigs—an aver-
using its four cores to make a morn- to capture the age gaming rig, an uber-enthusiast
ing omelet rather than animate your heat-related images in this fea- PC, and a media center machine. The
Supreme Commander armies. thermal imager let us precisely mea-
ture. The Ti55 records its tem-
But while conventional wisdom sure the temperature of every area in
perature shots at a 320x240 reso-
might tell us that more case fans these PCs. For as fun as it would be
equals more cooling, that handy lution, which we then pulled into to say that fans make the red areas
mantra hardly reveals the real truth Fluke’s SmartView image-editing turn blue, we didn’t want to use mere
about what goes on inside your application. This allowed us to set ballpark estimates to optimize the
case. You don’t need a hurricane to all the pictures to a default tem- cooling on these rigs.
chill your machine, nor do all setups perature scale for each system, That means we’re not only taking
benefit equally from an abundance a look at the problematic hotspots,
ensuring that the dark purple, for
of fans. Efficiency is every bit as but also assessing the actual perfor-
instance, in one image represent-
important as eagerness when it mance of cooling solutions across
comes to cooling, unless you’re ed an identical temperature specific areas of each machine. We’d
planning to turn your basement into in all other shots. much rather reassign a fan to a place
a wind tunnel and restock the ice where it’s needed than overcool a
buckets every 15 minutes. location that doesn’t need the air. But
So what, then, is one to do? don’t let us spoil the ending. We shot
Far be it from us to simply toss up before and after thermal photos of our
the standard cooling clichés. Much tweaks, so you can see the differ-
as it pains us to say it, water cooling ences for yourself. We also highlight-
isn’t a solution for most folks. And ed key areas that either need more
electricity costs what they are, we’re work or can simply be ignored.

18 MAXIMUMPC JULY 2007

MAINTAIN THE CPU STATUS QUO MEMORIES OF SUMMER OPTICAL DRIVES ARE COOL
Unless you’re overclocking, your stock CPU Ahh, the ol’ memory sticks. Nearly every other Here’s one area of your computer that
cooler should do an adequate (read: non- component in your computer has some kind of af- doesn’t need much cooling: the 5.25-inch
destructive) job of keeping your processor’s termarket cooling product, so why not the RAM? drive bays. Unless you have some hard
temperature at stable levels. That said, it In short, you’re gullible if you buy into the non- drives stuffed up in here, you aren’t going
would be in your best interest to keep your sense that stock-clocked RAM needs air blasting to find your optical drives or front-panel
chip on the blue side of the thermometer at it or additional heatsinks stuck to it. Leave the connectors outputting any heat. Point those
instead of the red, for longevity’s sake. memory alone, and who the hell is Summer? fans elsewhere, son.

YOUR POWER SUPPLY SUCKS STORAGE IS HOT

Don’t forget that your power supply works This one’s a no-brainer. Hard drives get
as a quasi-efficient air-sucking mecha- warm. And while you’ll see variations in
nism. We don’t recommend using your temperature across the billions of different
PSU as the only means of air movement in models, the usual rule is that the faster
your case, but it does help a little bit—just they spin and the more they’re working, the
a little. warmer they get.

JULY 2007 MAXIMUMPC 19

Master’s
Guide to COOLING
TEST
CASE 1 THE EVERYMAN GAMING RIG
It’s not the fastest box on the market, but this rig’s GeForce 8800 GTX can handle anything you throw at it

VOLCANIC VOLTAGE REGULATORS A FROSTY PROCESS HOT AND HARD… DRIVE

To the left of your CPU lie the voltage regulators, a little If you didn’t know your CPU needed cooling, Even with a limited amount of air mov-
hotbed of activity that allows the processor itself to run please put this magazine down and grab the near- ing around its exterior, our 75GB Rap-
at varying voltages, depending on what’s set in the est fire extinguisher. Even a stock cooler can work tor drive isn’t exactly smoking. But it’s
BIOS. In our rig, these guys are running at nearly 60 C; wonders. We were pleasantly surprised to see no still not cool. While we can’t prove that
for those of you playing at home, that’s literally “hella heat issues whatsoever stemming from our stock high temps will shorten a drive’s life,
hot.” If your motherboard came with a clip-on fan for Intel CPU cooler. While fancier models can help the combination of heat and delicate
this area, you should use it. you better direct the airflow in your case, you’d spinning parts is never ideal. That said,
see a lot of red if you were just rocking a passive drives don’t require a massive amount
cooler, assuming it even worked. of cooling, just enough to stir the air.

A DEAD ZONE?
In this case study, we removed all the built-in
front and rear fans to best simulate the effect
of installing a modern gaming rig into a bare-
bones chassis. Without some fans to help
with airflow, the warm air created by our hot
components has nowhere to go, save for the
power supply’s conduit. There’s no reason to
cut new fan holes, as the case has plenty of
mounts—we just need to figure out the most
efficient way to use them.

8800 DEGREES
Graphics cards are guaranteed to generate a
lot of heat. Our rig’s 8800 GTX card is running
at a steaming 60 C up top. While the card’s
built-in cooling system helps move heat from
the GPU to the butt of your case, it doesn’t
dramatically affect the underside—or top—of
the card. Make sure your case’s back-fan is
spinning; it’ll help.

UNDER THE HOOD

CPU 3.2GHz Pentium

Extreme Edition 840
MEMORY 2GB DDR2 Corsair
Dominator RAM,
800MHz
VIDEOCARD Asus EN8800 GTX
HARD DRIVE Western Digital 75GB
Raptor
COOLING Stock CPU cooling fan
CASE Zalman Fatal1ty
FC-ZE1

SCALE
65.0
The 60.0
Most cases include plenty of options to accommo- should give us the best possible way to cool the temperature 56.0
date sufficient cooling—having to actually cut a hole monstrosity that is this rig’s 8800 GTX card. But we’re scales in 52.0
all photos
in your case is unusual. We’re casting our gaze on the also going to dovetail this watery solution with a few of this rig
48.0
44.0
easiest and most efficient fixes for this Fatal1ty case: fans. Right now, the system is running at its absolute have been 40.0
normalized
adding a water-cooling rig to help draw heat from the worst, coolingwise; there are no fans pulling cold air to match
36.0
32.0
entire PC and lowering the general ambient tempera- into the case and only the power supply is pushing the scale on
28.0
ture of the case itself. out air. Water cooling is a great solution, but it’s not a the right.
24.0
Water cooling allows us to directly address the one-shot fix. 20.0
˚C
temperatures across a wide range of areas and

20 MAXIMUMPC JULY 2007

TOSSING WATER ON THE PROBLEM

Since our 8800 GTX card’s cooler is pretty efficient, we figured that
slapping another aftermarket air cooler onto the card would provide
little benefit, so we cracked our knuckles and installed a CoolKit
SLI Elite water-cooling kit ($380, www.petrastechshop.com), which
includes a pump, radiator, CPU block, reservoir, and tubing. We
added a Danger Den GPU block ($135, www.dangerden.com) to
our 8800 GTX and then said a prayer to the patron saint of no leaks
before we fired up the rig.
We were ever so happy to see a dramatic drop in tempera-
tures during our highly scientific “Oblivion at full power” test.
Temps on top of the card dropped from 55–60 C to a pleasant
43–50 C. Less heat off the GPU helped lower the overall tem-
perature of all the components around the 8800.
In our before shot, the entire GeForce 8800 GTX board was
painfully hot.

A VERITABLE TWISTER OF COOLING

Originally, the airflow in this rig was a complete disaster—shoot,

there was no airflow. Sure, there was a little action around the
CPU and the power supply, but as a whole, we’d hardly call that
a cooling scheme. We fixed the problem by adding a stock 12cm
fan to the rear of the case to suck warm air out and two 8cm
fans to the front of the case to pull frosty air in. We were actually
surprised to find that running the second 8cm fan up front didn’t
have an impact on the case’s ambient temperature.
Around the cooler parts of our rig we saw drops of between
5 and 10 degrees. But because we switched to a water-cooling
setup, we did see an increase in temperatures near the CPU. Our
next step with this rig would be to add a dedicated fan blowing
directly on the CPU area.
This case’s poorly conceived cooling scheme was easily remedied.

THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS

Nothing beats water when it comes to cooling, save for a healthy hybrid of air and
liquids. While it would be great to rely on just pumps and tubing to turn your rig into
an icebox, even the most hardcore of water-cooling enthusiasts needs a few supple-
mental fans to cool hard-to-reach areas. It’s sad but true—try as you might, you
can’t water-block every single warm spot in your system.
Still, you needn’t go fan-crazy with a water-cooled rig. Just use enough fans to
get some air moving around the hard drives and add an exhaust fan to the rear to
complete the airflow circuit. Better yet, double up; make that exhaust fan the intake
fan for your radiator. And it’s always a good idea to tune your airflow using a software
utility such as SpeedFan or a fanbus to get the best airflow-to-noise ratio.

We not only improved temperatures but also

made the rig look totally sweet with a UV-
reactive water-cooling setup.

JULY 2007 MAXIMUMPC 21

Master’s
Guide to COOLING
TEST
CASE 2 THE UBER-ENTHUSIAST RIG
Our Quad FX machine is one hot mother… shut your mouth! Just talking about Quad FX!

SPLIT THE TWINS KEEP YOUR ARMS AND LEGS AWAY FROM IF IT AIN’T BROKE…
Yes, we’re looking at the hard drives again. THE VOLTAGE REGULATORS See this part of the case? Near our two
It’s bad enough there’s no air to flow across As it’s running a pair of dual-core procs in nestled optical drives? Yeah, it’s plenty
their spicy exteriors. But in this case, there’s tandem, our Quad FX platform requires two volt- cool. There’s no need to buy a crazy
an additional issue: The Raptors are nestled age regulators. And without any kind of cooling bay fan or start drilling holes all over
together like two bugs in a rug. Two very support, these puppies get hot. How hot? 100 C the place. Your case doesn’t need to
warm bugs in a heated, bearskin rug. With is a conservative average, although certain areas become an F3 vortex to achieve cooling
temperatures pushing 65 C, these 10,000rpm of the regulators got hotter than 110 C—the top nirvana. The Quad FX already sounds
Raptors surely won’t last as long as they range of our thermal imager. It’s a small wonder like a jet engine; there’s no need to turn
could were they a wee bit chillier. nobody was killed testing this rig. it into a rocket launcher.

RAM A-OK
The RAM in our Quad FX machine
reached an average of 53 C or so.
That’s pretty warm, and it’s due to
a lack of additional cooling around
the motherboard area. We’d prefer
that area to be just a little cooler,
but the temps aren’t cause for
alarm. We want to run just a little air
across the modules—believe it or
not, one of those aftermarket RAM
coolers will do the trick.

UNDER THE HOOD

CPU 3GHz Quad FX-74

MEMORY 2GB DDR2 Corsair
Dominator RAM, 800MHz
VIDEOCARD Two Nvidia GeForce
7900 GTX in SLI
HARD DRIVE Two Western Digital
150GB Raptors
COOLING Two AMD stock CPU
coolers
CASE Thermaltake Armor

SCALE
110.0
The 104.0
temperature
96.0
scales in
all photos 88.0
of this rig 80.0
Listen, Raptor drives cost a ton of money, so we’d like to keep them as pristine as possible for as long as pos- have been 72.0
sible. Our first plan of attack is to somehow get our hard drives to a reasonable average temperature. We’re not normalized
64.0
to match
looking to freeze up any platters but reducing the heat by 10 degrees or so would be a worthy accomplishment. the scale on 56.0

Our obvious next targets are the small supernovas—otherwise known as the voltage regulators—nestled the right. 48.0
40.0
above the Quad FX. We’re concerned that a lack of air on them for very long will lead to critical issues, the least 32.0
of which being a giant, roaring fire in the Maximum PC Lab. These things need to get cooled, stat; 110-plus 24.0
20.0
degrees does not a happy computer make. ˚C

22 MAXIMUMPC JULY 2007

 Master’s
Guide to COOLING
BEGONE, FOUL HEAT!

Our Quad FX machine is interestingly designed in that a 12cm fan

pulls hot air from the CPU area and pushes it out of the case some-
what close to the power supply’s fan. This gives us the effect of two
hot-air channels emitting from the back of the case, while at the
same time, a third fan covering the hard drive area sucks that warm
air right back in. Strange.
To cool the drives, we start by reversing this odd airflow to let
our underpowered fan also suck warm air out of the case; no sense
in redistributing 30–50 C air over already warm drives. We also gave
the Raptors a bit of breathing room by providing them a drive’s worth
of space between their toasty exteriors. And the result of our efforts
was fabulous; we cooled the drives by approximately 15–20 C each,
Warm Raptors are angry Raptors—and as we learned from
and we didn’t even have to use any aftermarket parts.
Jurassic Park, angry raptors are bad news.

ANYONE NEED TO MELT STEEL?

Alas, the only real solution we have for our Quad FX’s insanely hot
voltage regulators is to strap on the generic, tiny fans that come
with the motherboard. While one would think that a more powerful
CPU fan would be a better choice, our tests showed there was no
difference between the devices. Besides, the stock fans covering
our Quad FX’s processors are insanely loud and, thus, insanely fast;
an aftermarket CPU cooler would offer little improvement, if any.
That said, we did see quite a benefit from using the tiny fans.
Not a single temperature reading near the voltage regulator area
pushed past 100 C, and we shaved off nearly 20 degrees in some
areas. While the voltage regulators are still stupid-hot for our tastes,
even baby steps are better than fried electronics. When someone
designs a water-cooling setup that nicely covers this area, we’ll be
If you hear a loud booming noise, that’s just the voltage regula- the first ones in line to get it.
tors on our machine exploding in a horrific fury. Pay it no mind.

FANS ARE YOUR FRIENDS

Even the fastest machines with the loudest of fans can fall short
in the cooling department if said fans are improperly placed. How
air flows through your rig is just as important as the amount of air
you push through your rig. Remember that the next time you put an
intake fan near the exhaust of something extraordinarily hot.
But as we’ve seen, even the tiniest modification can offer mas-
sive improvements. Simply creating some additional space between
hot components can make a world of difference. Similarly, any
airflow you can direct on a hot spot is going to offer some improve-
ment. Even the tiny wussy fans that you think are worthless can
become awesome, if used in the right context. And we’d much
rather fuss with those than try to find a louder, messier solution, like
adding a ton of fans to the exterior of the case. And as fun as it can
be to watch a rig’s internals go nuclear, we’ll pass this time around.
Considering this is a heat-generating machine, it’s a wonder we
were able to affect the temperatures in any capacity.

24 MAXIMUMPC JULY 2007

Master’s
Guide to COOLING
TEST
CASE 3 THE MEDIA CENTER MACHINE
You’re kidding, right? You mean we can’t just attach a 22cm fan to the side of our media PC?

WHERE’S THE VIDEOCARD?

It’s nice that our media PC sports integrated graph-
ics—that frees up space in the case and generates
WHO NEEDS SPEED? less heat than a discrete card. But the bare graphics
Our media center PC can’t double as a high-end gaming system, and therefore, it comes as no chip is still one of the warmer components in the rig.
surprise that our silent heatsink is more than able to cool the rig’s 2GHz Sempron proc. Even the And remember, using a big-ass aftermarket heatsink
electronic bits around the CPU are running at just 40 C or so. We can only imagine what might just won’t work here; the low-profile case won’t
happen were we to, say, strap a Zalman CNPS9700 to the processor. accommodate one, and anyway, most people don’t
want their media PCs to sound like a jet engine.

NORTH BRIDGE BAKE SALE

The area around our north bridge runs
superhot in our media center case. Not only
does the chipset itself hit 55 C, but it’s sur-
rounded by two smaller superhot chips that
run around 70 C. With no fans to direct air
around these critical parts, this area is too
warm. We need to get some air across this
little part, and the case’s two side fans just
aren’t getting the job done.

POWERED AND PROBLEM FREE

It’s interesting that our rig’s power supply is
one of the cooler areas in the case. That helps
in part because we used a low-powered
CPU that doesn’t require a ton of juice from
the PSU. Less work equals less heat, which
directly affects the ambient heat levels of the
lower half of the case. Our case is a mere
10 C or so above the Lab’s room tempera-
ture—not bad at all!

UNDER THE HOOD

CPU 2GHz AMD Sempron

3500+
MEMORY 2GB DDR2 Corsair
RAM, 800MHz
VIDEOCARD Integrated graphics,
ATI Radeon X1250 GPU
HARD DRIVE Seagate Barracuda
7200.10 750GB
COOLING One stock CPU cooling
fan, two 1.2cm fans
CASE Antec Fusion

SCALE
74.9
The
70.0
temperature
scales in 65.0
all photos 60.0
As much as we’d love to just strap a few fans into our case and call it a day, we can’t—a media center PC of this rig 55.0
have been
should be as quiet as possible. Instead of digging through a ton of fans to find one that performs well and normalized
50.0
45.0
runs silently, we’ve come up with some clever ways to keep this rig’s components chilly. to match
the scale on 40.0
At least we’re only looking at chips on the motherboard, which simplifies our situation somewhat. With the right. 35.0
the rest of the rig’s parts operating at nominal temperatures, we won’t have to take into account the noise 30.0
created by cooling, say, a hard drive. That leaves us with a little bit of acoustic wiggle-room for the rig. 25.0
20.0
˚C

26 MAXIMUMPC JULY 2007

TOSSING WATER ON THE PROBLEM

For some reason, our motherboard didn’t come with a heatsink for
the integrated graphics chip, so we start our journey down cooling
lane by salvaging a similar heatsink from a dead board and strap-
ping it into our media PC. It ends up smoothing out the temperature
of the area to a crisp 50 C, down from about 60 C.
We decided to cool the other hot chips in the case by attaching
passively cooled RAMsinks commonly used for GPU memory. It’s a
little hoopty, but it drops the temperatures of the affected areas by
10–20 C degrees on average.
Finally, we stuff a trispeed cooler over our unused PCI slots.
Since this cooler pumps air pretty much directly over the top of the
north bridge, the temperature in the area dropped 11–13 C. And
since we’re using the fan’s medium setting, we’re able to strike a
They might look a little funny, but our cooling solutions aren’t
balance between annoying fan noise and cooling potential.
meant to win a beauty pageant—just suck up the heat.

CHILLIN’ YOUR CHIPS

Like making a computer case out of cardboard boxes or a coffee

table out of beer bottle caps, sometimes the most efficient solu-
tion isn’t the most elegant. With a drab exterior and bare-bones
interior, our media PC certainly wasn’t built for looks. But even
the slimmest of setups generates heat, and while this rig didn’t
reach absurdly critical levels like our Quad FX setup, any heat
reduction is a good thing.
While sticking heatsinks to chips isn’t the prettiest of solutions
and our PCI-style cooler leaves us with no room for add-on cards,
such are the trade-offs you have to consider when building a media
PC. If you want something that’s quiet and cool, you’ll have to make
some concessions concerning what goes in your machine. But that
should be the easy part; you don’t need a GeForce 8800 just to
Having cooled our media PC to the brink, we can now go back
watch DVDs. You don’t need 30 fans either.
to watching DVDs in the Lab instead of wor…. [redacted]

Sam Fisher Fact or Fiction

We use our thermal imager to determine whether Splinter Cell–style investigative methods work in the real world

KEYPAD TEST FOLLOW THE FOOTPRINTS ASSPRINT CHALLENGE

While it’s
possible
to detect
footprints
left behind
by bare
feet, you’ll
be hard- Just as every individual has a unique
pressed fingerprint, the heat signature left
A keycode left behind by a
to follow behind by an, er, behind—be it bare or
recent visitor clearly tells us
the trail of clothed—can be very telling. The size
who has been in our Lab—and
shoe-wear- and shape of this imprint will lead us to
provides an outsider with
ing folk. this chair’s former occupant.
easy entry.

JULY 2007 MAXIMUMPC 27

 ANOTHER

MAXIMUMPC
CHALLENGE
THIS MONTH SOFTWARE

Do Parental-Control Apps
Really Keep Kids Safe?

28 MAXIMUMPC JULY 2007

BY THE MAXIMUM PC STAFF

P
arents these days have a savvy than their parental units. THE TESTING METHODS
lot to worry about, par- Formative years spent in front We set up the software on a fairly
ticularly when it comes to of a keyboard and screen have typical notebook running a fully
their children’s Internet activi- rendered these young’uns all too updated install of Windows XP. We
ties. Just a little time online or at ease with a PC’s inner work- installed one parental-control app at
even a casual glance at the news ings. Can a little ol’ app, no mat- a time and used the recommended
makes it woefully clear that the ter how lofty its promises, keep settings, assuming most parents
web is crawling with all kinds of today’s children from getting would do likewise. To ensure a level
unsavory content and charac- where they want to online? playing field, we created a Norton
ters. To counter these potentially To answer this question, we Ghost image of the machine with
harmful forces, many parents pitted the wits of three Maximum software installed to duplicate the
turn to software for custodial PC editors against three popu- exact same settings and conditions
help. Scores of applications are lar parental-control apps—Net for each editor. Editors were allowed
now available that employ vari- Nanny, PC Tattletale, and Safe to take as much time as needed to
ous methods to keep kids safe Eyes. Not because these edi- breach each app’s boundaries. To
online, so keeping them away tors are inherently childlike, but prove success at the most basic
from inappropriate sites should because it isn’t far-fetched to level, an editor had to provide screen
be a cinch, right? believe a kid today would pos- captures of restricted content. If said
Before you return to your sess similar skills—or, to use content was accessed without leav-
work worries, endless errands, the common vernacular, skillz. ing any signs of tampering, the appli-
or Body-for-Life support group, Turn the page to find out how cation was considered unequivocally
assured that your kids are taken our editors fared against their cracked, and thus untrustworthy as a
care of, consider this: Most of “parents.” monitoring method.
today’s youth are far more tech

MEET THE EDITORS

THE OLD-TIMER THE CRUSADER THE UPSTART
The most senior staffer in terms of Though he has no children himself, this He’s young, and that just might be his
computer experience, this geezer of a editor has outspoken opinions about secret weapon. A whippersnapper him-
geek has been around the block once child rearing and firmly believes that self, he knows how kids think and what
or twice, learned a trick or two along parental-control software has no busi- they’re capable of. Shoot, it wasn’t so
the way, and cultivated an enduring ness in the mix. He’s on a mission to long ago that he was hacking into his
passion to stick it to the Man. No stink- prove that this is the wrong way to go. high school’s student database and hav-
ing software is gonna tell him what he Will he be so adamant when he has ing his way with every locker combo.
can or can’t look at. Or will it? kids? That’s a topic for another story. What’s a silly application going to do,
suspend him?

JULY 2007 MAXIMUMPC 29

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CHALLENGE

NET NANNY to load, so he may have been too trigger-

Will she stand firm against the happy, since he nuked the entire OS in the
process. Parents, take this as a warning to
ruthless attacks of an unruly brood?
back up your data!
The Old-Timer was at the machine for
Net Nanny ($40/yr, www.netnanny.com) no more than six minutes before he handed
blocks all the obvious unwholesome it back to the administrator with several
website content by default: pornography, naughty screen captures and an innocent-
gambling, violence, drugs, etc. looking web report. His trick was a cunning
First up against the app was the one that would pay off big in the remaining
Crusader, who was so sure of Net Nanny’s tests: The Old-Timer explained, “As an avid
ineffectiveness that he predicted a two- reader of the many books written about
minute turnaround time. By the 15-min- Kevin Mitnick, I’ve learned that the social
ute mark he had succeeded in filling the The first hour or so with Net Nanny hack is far, far more powerful than any
administrator’s inbox with alerts of his taught one editor everything he could technical hack. Since our rules of engage-
attempts to enter My-sexylingerie.com, possibly want to know about a certain ment didn’t specify that we couldn’t use a
Moviepoopshoot.com, and other sites Pacific seabird. USB key, I simply went to another machine
unspeakable. Undaunted by the ridicule of (any 14-year-old on the planet has access
the administrator and his peers, he turned to the Internet outside his or her domicile),
to Torpark. By downloading the browser, him in the porn, with nary a mention of the visited several restricted sites, and saved
he was able to completely bypass the soft- violation in the app’s web report. my proof files to the key as well as a copy
ware’s blocks. For many a kid, this would be The Upstart thought like a 14-year- of Ardamax Keylogger Lite—a free keylog-
enough, but should Torpark’s slow surfing old and channeled his destructive inner ger available on the Internet…. Once the
speed prove unsatisfactory, there’s recourse: child. He opened the Net Nanny folder in administrator checked the web report,
The Crusader stayed on just long enough to Program Files, then fired up the Windows which was, of course, clean, I waited for
search for tips on disabling the software. As Registry Editor and expunged all men- her to step away from the test machine,
instructed, he killed the cwsvc.exe service tion of Net Nanny’s executables from the pulled up the keylogger, and jotted
and disabled cwtray.exe from running at registry. Following that, he deleted the Net down her password. From there
startup; he then used an app he found on Nanny folder itself and restarted the com- I had free rein to do what I
Google (LSPFix) to disable the cwalsp.dll puter. The downside is that Windows failed wanted. It was that simple.” UNLOCKED!

embedded in Winsock. A quick reboot had

PC TATTLETALE
Can our editors stick a sock in the
mouth of this software snitch?

PC Tattletale ($50/yr for two PCs, www.

pctattletale.com) takes an entirely different
approach to online monitoring. It dispens-
es with keywords and filters and simply It’s one thing to create a phony log to mask naughty net surfing, but c’mon!
records every single thing a user does
on the computer—every website visited,
every email sent, every keystroke entered. prior to giving me the laptop, which was shots taken every few seconds—a simple
In other words, it’s a keylogger. PC Tattletale’s website [the source of Windows search for files created that day
Determined to redeem himself, the the download], and which happened to revealed the litany of logs. And from there,
Upstart went first and took just 20 minutes include info about what the program does, the location of the program itself was
to acquire proof of his untoward online and even the Ctrl + Alt + F5 key combina- revealed!
activities yet left no evidence whatsoever tion one needs to access the administra- “Having learned my lesson with Net
in the software’s log. True, the complete tive options. Nanny, I let PC Tattletale do its thing.
absence of any logged online activity “The executables were hidden in I surfed for all the porn I could get my
was itself suspicious but certainly not the Windows Directory in a folder called hands on, then disabled the PC Tattletale
proof of anything illicit. His method? The ‘Explorer32.’ Crafty. Since PC Tattletale process (to stop those damn screen-
Upstart explains: “I used Internet Explorer keeps detailed logs of all the sites you visit shots), deleted said screenshots, nuked all
to see where the administrator had been and keys you press—including screen- the logs, and prepared to tell ‘mom’ I had

30 MAXIMUMPC JULY 2007 XXXXXXX 2007 MAXIMUMPC

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 ANOTHER

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spent the whole day outdoors.” (A highly the program and typing in the password, “I found a list of offending processes using
implausible excuse, but OK.) but I found myself trapped. If I switched the the Interweb, then killed the two renamed
Relying on his social-engineering hack, program on, it would record the screenshot processes using Task Manager. Also, I built
the Old-Timer guessed correctly that the of the control panel—a very suspicious clue a convincing trail of sites, so the adminis-
administrator would use the same pass- indeed, and one that would certainly have trator wouldn’t suspect I’d done anything
word. (For shame!) Having learned the Ctrl the administrator changing her password wrong.” He was unaware of the videolog,
+ Alt + F5 sequence from his comrade—fair, (can’t have that!). I decided to leave the pro- which showed his Google searches and
since kids do talk—he found the control gram in the off mode and believed that on Task Manager activity, but there was
panel, entered the password, and was the reboot, it would restart. Unfortunately, it no hard evidence that he had actually
in. In his words: “I deleted all of the logs, didn’t restart after a reboot. If it did, I could tampered with the program, and
cruised for porn, cleared my trail in IE, and have then restarted in safe mode and delet- the innocuous web log provided
UNLOCKED!
decided to lay a smoke screen by brows- ed the last few screen grabs manually.” a convincing enough cover.
ing goody-two-shoes content—Harvard So, yes, the Old-Timer defeated
Admissions, Habitat for Humanity, etc. the app, but not without a trace.
I manually searched for and deleted the The Crusader took about 30
screenshots that showed me starting up minutes with this one. He explains,

SAFE EYES records, making it look like the

program was screwing up and
If the guys break through this app’s listing identical logs for two days.
restraints will they go blind? Unfortunately for him, the adminis-
trator was not fooled by the bogus
With Safe Eyes ($50/yr for three PCs, www. log and recognized it as proof of
safeeyes.com) you create different accounts his tampering.
for different users. The account the edi- The Crusader’s breach was
tors had access to restricted all the typical flawless: First, he browsed
Porn by proxy, literally. A simple Google
off-limits categories—adult, drugs, nudity, some innocuous sites to gener-
search revealed a web site from which to surf
etc.—with a popup warning. An icon in the ate a browsing history. Then he
out of Safe Eyes’s sight.
Windows taskbar opens a log of all activ- opened the app’s Logs directo-
ity, which can be viewed by anyone but ry—which was cleverly hidden
changed only by the administrator. (not!) at C:\Program Files\Internet Content abled momentarily. By disabling the auto-
Naturally, this application was a cakewalk Filter\logs—and write-protected it, so it start for SafeEyes, the Crusader was able
for the Old-Timer, who used the administra- wouldn’t record his shenanigans. At the to reboot and surf unrestrained by filters.
tor’s password to surf to his heart’s content same time, he configured the firewall to But what happened when the admin
and collect proof of his exploits. block outbound packets from the Safe returned? All that needed to be done was
The Upstart utilized the power of Google, Eyes app, which would prevent it from restart the Safe Eyes executable, which
searching for “safeeyes proxy.” That pointed sending emails to the administrator, which kindly repaired all the damage done by the
him in the direction of a helpful web proxy might encourage closer scrutiny. Crusader’s escapades, without a hint that
that allowed him to access illicit sites without After testing Safe Eyes’s boundaries the app had been disabled for hours.
being stopped by Safe Eyes. And since Safe and discovering that it relied on a Winsock In all fairness to Safe Eyes, you
Eyes leaves the Logs folder in its directory, plugin, the Crusader tried to download can opt for the log to be kept online,
the Upstart easily eliminated his tracks. To the LSPfix utility but was foiled by Safe as opposed to in the Program
confuse the admin, he copied the log from Eyes. It took another two minutes to find Files, but the latter was the
the previous day over the current day’s an unblocked mirror, and the app was dis- default option. UNLOCKED!

WHAT WE LEARNED
In the end, our experiment taught us several lessons. The Old- parents to create limited user accounts for their children. All it takes
Timer certainly knows how to stick it to the Man, who in this case is a little ingenuity and a steadfast spirit to outsmart a piece of soft-
was the test administrator. The Crusader proved his point that ware (and the person who installed it). So while our tests might have
parental-control software is no substitute for personally partici- exposed ways to make the applications either more effective or bet-
pating in your child’s Internet activity. And the Upstart proved he ter at detecting tampering, there are likely to be ways around even
hasn’t lost much of his edge since joining the workforce. those measures, so you really shouldn’t rely on a piece of software
We also learned that there are multiple ways around these to keep your kids safe online. To see how Vista’s OS-based parental
so-called safeguards, especially when the apps don’t encourage controls change the equation, see page 64.

00 MAXIMUMPC
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T
Calling mom and playing Q*Bert just doesn’t cut it
anymore. Here’s everything you need to know to
get the brightest phone on the block

BY TOM EDWARDS

T
he state of the smartphone union is strong—so strong, in fact, that the dizzying
array of service plans, operating systems, and phone features available can make
choosing a device more challenging than building out a full-blown rig. Sure, you
could get by with the freebie phone your service provider gives you when you sign a
two-year contract—and be ridiculed and eventually shunned by your power-user friends
so your minutes sit, piling up, unneeded. Lucky for you, it’s easy to avoid this cruel fate!
Today, even low-end phones sport cameras and email functionality—features that
were unheard of just a few years ago. What, then, makes something a smartphone?
For our purposes, a smartphone is a device that can sync to your PC and download
and install a rich variety of third-party apps. Some of the phones in our roundup stretch
this definition, but we wanted to show you an array of options.
We contacted service providers and handset makers to collect 12 phones that
represent the major carriers—plus one upstart—and the major OSes. We tested
sound quality from different locations (calling people from areas of both good and poor
signal strength), tried out email and messaging capabilities, and considered ease of
use and ergonomics. In the end, we found some phones that we really liked, but the
features we went ga-ga for might not be the same ones that will float your boat. The
best phone really depends on your individual usage habits.

34 MAXIMUMPC JULY 2007

E

JULY 2007 MAXIMUMPC 35

 M A R T
S N EUNION
H
P OF TO HE
STATE

BUYERS times called a world phone) for international

calls. Dual GSM/CDMA phones are also

GUIDE available but are a more expensive option.

Alas, the choice is not that simple, as you
must also consider data transmission, which
for you to give up your other devices. Do
you really want a bunch of YouTube-quality
A smartphone can cost as much as a
turns everything upside-down. Sprint and videos? Will you ditch your MP3 player to
decent gaming rig; before you drop that Verizon have the strongest high-speed data listen to music on your phone? If not, you
kind of cash, consider these key factors networks, using EV-DO; Cingular is catching might eschew these features entirely—or at
up and T-Mobile is just getting started build- least not let them drive your decision-mak-
SCREEN SIZE ing a high-speed data network. ing. While integration is nice, many times the
We’ve always been proponents of expansive quality you get is limited—and remember,
screen real estate on our desktops—and INTERFACE these features also drain battery life.
we feel the same way about our phones. You basically have two choices: touch
Of course, a bigger screen makes for a big- screen or keypad/scroll wheel. Most PROVIDER
ger package, so you’ll need to weigh size Windows Mobile phones come with a touch- When choosing a provider, you need to
against portability concerns. If you’ll be edit- screen interface, but Windows Mobile for consider how you’ll be using your phone.
ing documents on your phone, you’ll want to Smartphone–powered devices lack this Do you need international roaming? A low-
get the biggest screen you can find. If you’ll capability. BlackBerry’s offerings use a key- cost, unlimited data plan? The provider you
primarily be messaging, you can forgo the pad and scroll wheel or trackball interface. choose will have the greatest effect on what
larger screen and get a device that’s more Additionally, you’ll want to consider whether phones are available to you; we recommend
pocket friendly. you need a full QWERTY keyboard. If you’ll first choosing a provider and then selecting
be editing docs or writing long emails, a full a phone. If your home or office is in a provid-
OPERATING SYSTEM keyboard—the larger the keys the better—is er’s dead zone, it doesn’t matter how awe-
The OS you choose will determine the a must. We prefer devices that can be used some your phone is. To get detailed informa-
quantity and quality of apps available for with one hand. If you’ll mainly be banging tion about cell reception in your area, go to
your phone. While there are dozens of out short IMs, a smaller keyboard with a pre- CellReception.com and search for coverage
competing operating systems, we’ve nar- dictive text system such as T9 or SureType is by city or zip code, and then turn the page to
rowed our selections to the four major ones. good enough to get the job done. learn more about the big four providers’ ser-
Windows Mobile offers an interface you vice plans. Note that while we list standard
already know—for better or worse—as well AUDIO + VIDEO activation fees and service rates, providers
as Outlook (and tight Exchange integra- If you’re using your smartphone mostly for typically offer rebates and
tion), MS Office apps, and Media Player. work, you can probably do without a camera other specials, and phones
The newly released version 6 includes VoIP and video playback. While these features are usually available at less
support. Symbian, the most popular mobile attract a lot of attention, you should also than list price.
OS worldwide, is co-owned by leading consider whether they are good enough
handset-makers, Nokia, Samsung, Ericsson,
Sony Ericsson, and Siemens; however, the
actual interface differs from phone to phone.
If ease of use is your main criteria, Palm’s
OS provides the best out-of-the-box experi-
ence. Palm is switching to a Linux-based
OS later this year, so expect to see some
changes soon. BlackBerry leads the way
in terms of email and messaging, but often
at the expense of other features. And if you
prefer a touch-screen interface, BlackBerry
can’t help you.

NETWORK TECHNOLOGY
You have two items to consider in this cat-
egory: voice and data. The provider you
choose will determine the network technol-
ogy available to you. Sprint and Verizon use
CDMA, which is the dominant system in the
United States. Cingular and T-Mobile use
GSM, which is widely used in the United
States, but the de facto standard in much
of the rest of the world. However, because
American networks operate on different
frequencies from the rest of the world, you’ll
Go to CellReception.com to determine if you live in a cell-tower dead zone.
need to have a quad-band phone (some-

36 MAXIMUMPC JULY 2007

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BUYERS GUIDE (CONTINUED)
VERIZON SPRINT
Our least favorite part of cell-phone contracts is the early ter- Sprint is far and away your best bet if your main need
mination fee, and while Verizon doesn’t do away with it entirely, is a widespread high-speed data network. Although
the company does make it easier to swallow. Verizon’s contract Sprint operates on the internationally unfriendly CDMA
termination fee starts at $175 but drops $5 per month for each full network, it is rolling out its EV-DO data network
month you hold the contract. Verizon’s activation fee is $35. quickly and has the best overall coverage nationwide.
Verizon operates on a CDMA network, so unless you purchase Individual plans begin at $40/month for 450 minutes;
a combined GSM/CDMA phone, you’ll be limited primarily to use a 2,000-minute plan costs $100/month. Sprint’s nights
in North America. Individual plans range from $40/month for 450 begin at 6:00, 7:00, or 9:00 p.m., depending on the
minutes to $200/month for 6,000 minutes, with unlimited usage plan selected; roaming rates begin at 65 cents a min-
from 9:01 p.m. to 5:59 a.m. Monday through Friday, and weekends ute. The activation fee is $36, and the early termination
from 12:00 a.m. Saturday until 11:59 p.m. Sunday. International fee is $200. For data, a 40MB plan costs $40/month,
roaming rates start at 69 cents a minute. Two data plans are avail- while an unlimited plan is available for $60/month.
able: $30/month for 10MB and a $50/month unlimited plan.

SPRINT
POWER VISION
COVERAGE

SPRINT PCS
NETWORK

ADDITIONAL
DIGITAL
SERVICE

ROAMING
COVERAGE
NO COVERAGE
NO COVERAGE

T-MOBILE CINGULAR
T-Mobile operates on a GSM network, which makes it a Cingular is increasing its 3G data network, but if you’re
good choice if you travel to Europe often; however, the not in a major metropolitan area, you’ll have to wait to
company’s domestic coverage lags behind the other pro- see the benefits of this rollout. Cingular’s voice plans are
viders’. T-Mobile is also just beginning to construct a high- similar to the other providers’, but the company bests
speed data network, so for the time being, expect slow its competitors in terms of data plans. Smartphone data
downloads and web surfing. Voice plans range from $30/ plans begin at $10 for 5MB of data, and the unlimited
month for 300 minutes to $130/month for 5,000 minutes. data plan is $20. For voice, plans range from $40/month
The myFaves plan, which includes unlimited calls to five for 450 minutes to $200 for 6,000 minutes. Unused min-
people on any network, starts at $40/month for 300 min- utes can be used in following months. Cingular’s activa-
utes. T-Mobile’s unlimited data plan is $50/month. Night tion fee is $36 and there is an early termination fee of
rates are from 9 p.m. to 6:59 a.m.; weekends are from mid- $175. Night rates run from 9:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m, and
night Friday to midnight Sunday. T-Mobile’s activation fee weekends are from 9:00 p.m. Friday to 6:00 a.m. Monday.
is $35, and the early termination fee is $200.

COVERAGE
COVERAGE
NO COVERAGE
NO COVERAGE

38 MAXIMUMPC JULY 2007

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shop smart
Don’t get stuck with a dunce. Our reviews of 12 popular
handsets will help you choose a phone that fits your needs 5.2"

VERIZON XV6700 wrong, however, with the phone’s option

2.3"
of switching from portrait to landscape
One of the first phones we received for this view, which makes reading web pages
story, the XV6700 initially won our hearts, and documents much easier.
but as more fully featured devices came If you’re often on the road and
our way, our love proved a bit fickle. For tend to forget your charger, this is
a phone this size, we’d prefer a camera the phone for you; this handset is a
that’s better than 1.3MP. And frankly, the workhorse, easily surpassing its advertised
external antenna makes toting the phone standby time of eight days. At $200 less
in your pocket uncomfortable. And while than Cingular’s 8525, it’s a good option for
the XV6700 has a large, bright screen and a those who don’t want to break the bank on
responsive keyboard, it suffers from a lay- a phone.

8
out that makes it easy to engage the caps VERDICT The object of our first, albeit
lock (like Cingular’s 8525). There’s nothing $400, www.verizonwireless.com fleeting, love.
PROVIDER: VERIZON

BLACKBERRY PEARL even like the condensed keyboard, which places two letters
on each key and utilizes the SureType predictive text system,
This tiny phone does what BlackBerrys typically instead of the more common T9 setup. Still, without a key-
do well—messaging and email—but it also kicks board, the Pearl is suited for quick text messages rather than
in some new multimedia features. Messaging extensive emails, and while the 2.5-inch screen is bright, at
is available via BlackBerry’s proprietary system that size, it’s really best just for browsing headlines. What’s
or third-party services, and the device supports more, the Pearl’s unique glowing trackball, which replaces the
4.2"

BlackBerry email services as well as POP3 and typical click-wheel, was a bit too jittery for our liking.
IMAP accounts.
Audio and video playback are now available
(though on the tiny screen, video isn’t much of a
feature), and while you won’t be getting rid of your
The Pearl is
BlackBerry’s
VERDICT
$400, www.blackberrypearl.com
PROVIDERS: T-MOBILE, CINGULAR
7
digital camera, the addition of a 1.3MP camera—a first attempt to
first for a BlackBerry device—is a nice touch. We include multi-
media functions
in its handsets.
2"

BLACKBERRY 8700g time—not a huge amount, but when you’re down

to the dregs of your battery, every minute counts.
Like the 8703e reviewed on the next page, This device serves a particular niche; while
4.3"

the BlackBerry 8700g lacks many of the you can link up to 10 POP3 email accounts
features people have come to expect from to the device, unless your company utilizes
a smartphone—multimedia playback and a BlackBerry Enterprise Server as a means of
camera, to name a few. But this device focuses synching your work-based email to the device,
on the BlackBerry’s core strength—email—and there are better options for you. As a device to
in that area it shines. This handset offers a few keep you connected to work, it’s a solid choice,
bonuses that place it a notch above its Sprint- if not particularly exciting.
branded brother. Being designed for T-Mobile’s
network means international roaming is a pos-
2.7"

7
sibility. Additionally, the 8700g sports just a bit VERDICT
The phone for folks who can’t
more battery life—about a half hour more talk $400, www.blackberry.com be trusted with a camera.
PROVIDER: T-MOBILE

40 MAXIMUMPC JULY 2007

 M A R T
S N E
P H O
OF THE UNION
STATE

SAMSUNG HELIO HEAT CINGULAR PALM 750

Perhaps we’re slowly turning into Grandpa Simpson, but the The quad-band 750 improves upon its predecessor
Heat initially left us feeling alone and confused. Simply making the Palm 700 with a sleeker design that’s free of an
a call was unintuitive and working through the unclear menu external antenna, but like that earlier model, the 750
with the unresponsive electrostatic touchpad had us on the features the Windows Mobile Pocket PC OS. And in
verge of dropping the device from our roundup entirely. But our opinion, if you want a Windows Mobile phone,
we slowly warmed up to what had at one time irritated us. We there are better choices.
became addicted to the H.O.T. feature, If you’ve got to have a Palm with the
which streamed headlines from SI.com Windows OS, the 750 does
and other websites to our handset. We’re have a few things going for it:
also intrigued by the Buddy Beacon fea- The Palm formfactor makes
ture, which allows friends to see where the device easy to use with
you are (and vice versa) via the phone’s one hand, and the 1.3MP
GPS. Still, this handset lacks a solid feel camera takes acceptable
3.6"

and has an almost disposable quality to images. Since the device

it. And while we enjoyed some of its fea- runs Windows Mobile 5, you
tures, the Heat seems like more of a toy can also view and edit Office

4.4"
than a smartphone. docs; however, you’ll be
Helio doesn’t own its own towers but doing so on a dull, 240x240
instead leases network space from Sprint. screen, which was a deal-
Its All-In memberships include unlimited breaker for us.
data and run from $65 for 500 minutes of
talk time to $135 for 2,500 minutes.

6 6
1.8" VERDICT 2.3" VERDICT
The Heat is, most Not the best choice for a $400, www.palm.com
$285, www.helio.com
certainly, not on. PROVIDER: HELIO Windows Mobile device. PROVIDER: CINGULAR

CINGULAR 3125 BLACKBERRY 8703e

We love this dual-screen flip-phone’s design and rugged Lacking a camera and multimedia playback, the 8703e is
build, in particular the metallic keypad and the ridged pretty bare-bones for a smartphone—if you want a device
exterior, which makes it easy to hold. When that will keep you focused on work, this phone is for you.
closed, a screen on the front can display And although it lacks any frills, this handset does excel at
a variety of information, such as the messaging, via either BlackBerry’s proprietary app or third-
time and battery power, or track infor- party clients.
mation for audio files. We also like that It’s a bit chunky and the
forward, back, play, and pause func- all-plastic body won’t win any
tions are available without opening the design awards, but its size does
phone. The interior screen is bright allow for a spacious, responsive
and its 240x320 resolution is higher keyboard—the best of all we
than the Palm 750’s. As with other tested. And for scrolling though
phones that run the Windows Mobile emails and messages, we find
4.3"

Smartphone OS, you can view, but the trackwheel preferable to

not edit, docs. The 1.3MP camera a touch screen and stylus. If
and video recorder also took rea- multimedia playback is important,
3.8 "

sonably good images in our tests. the newly released BlackBerry

With so much going for it, we found 8800—which is essentially a
the lack of 3G to be a disappoint- full-keyboard Pearl—might be a
ment, though. better bet, though, strangely, it
also lacks a camera.
2" 2.7"

7
This tiny but rugged VERDICT If all you want is
flip-phone won our

7
$350, www.cingular.com email and text mes- VERDICT
durability award. PROVIDER: CINGULAR saging, the 8703e $450, www.blackberry.com
will get the job done. PROVIDERS: SPRINT, VERIZON

42 MAXIMUMPC JULY 2007

 M A R T
S N E
P H O
OF THE UNION
STATE

T-MOBILE DASH QWERTY keyboard (though the keys are a bit

While it doesn’t have the biggest screen of all small for our taste). These are mostly niggling
our entrants, the quad-band, Wi-Fi-enabled irritations; the only misstep that really both-
Windows Mobile Dash was a favorite for its ered us was the volume strip placed to the
slim design, solid feature set, and ease of right of the screen. It was a challenge to use

4.4"
use. The 1.3MP camera took decent pics for while speaking to someone and it was often
a smartphone, and the predictive text feature less than responsive.
on the phone was actually useful, making typ- And though it may seem our complaints
ing simple. are piling up, the Dash was one of our favorite
However, the Dash has a number of limita- handsets—if you can live with its constraints,
tions that will make it a poor choice for some it’s a solid choice.
users. You’ll be able to open MS Office docu-
ments but not edit them, and data transfers
will be hamstrung by T-Mobile’s lack of a 3G

9
VERDICT 2.5"
network. We love that the device has a full
$350, www.tmobile.com The Dash proves that slim is in.
PROVIDER: T-MOBILE

CINGULAR making it a great choice for someone who often

works outside the office.
PALM 680 Palm was late to the handset multimedia
Running the Palm OS, the Cingular game, but the 680 includes photo, video, and
Palm 680 is by far the most intuitive and MP3 capabilities, though the image quality from
user friendly of the handsets we tested. the VGA camera leaves much to be desired and
Setting up email accounts and calendars lens placement means you will likely end up with
was a snap and the icons on the Home a number of shots of your index finger. With its
screen made finding and launching apps media weaknesses, the Treo is best-suited for
as simple as could be. Also a plus is a folks who plan to focus on email and texting.
4.4"

bright, responsive touch screen. The 680

improves on its predecessor, the Palm

9
The 680 sports VERDICT
650, via subtraction—gone on this model an OS simple $400, www.palm.com
is the external antenna, making the enough for peo- PROVIDER: CINGULAR
device more pocket friendly. Although it ple who aren’t
doesn’t run Windows, you can still edit as smart as their
MS Office documents on this handset, phones.

2.3"

push e-mail; Xpress Mail provides wireless

SAMSUNG BLACKJACK access to email, your calendar, and contacts;
The quad-band BlackJack is comparable and Microsoft’s Direct Push is an option for
to the Dash in a number of ways—it has a corporate customers who use Exchange.
4.4"

similar feature set and slim size and runs the Messaging is available through AOL, MSN,
Windows Mobile OS. The phone also has and Yahoo. Multimedia playback and record-
similar limitations regarding MS Office docs— ing are strong—the BlackJack’s camera has a
you’ll be able to view, but not edit, them. number of shooting modes for video and still
We prefer the Dash’s slightly larger screen images. On the downside, the BlackJack took
and metal trim to the all-plastic BlackJack, longer than the other handsets to boot; how-
but if you are tied to Cingular’s service and ever, since it operates on Cingular’s 3G data
interested in a small formfactor handset, the network, data transfers are speedy.
BlackJack is a good choice.
Email is available via three different sys- 2.3"

8
tems: Good Technology allows for real-time, VERDICT While not as rugged as the 3125, we
$400, www.samsungblackjack.com liked the BlackJack’s small formfactor
PROVIDER: CINGULAR and 3G data speeds.

44 MAXIMUMPC JULY 2007

 M A R T
S N EUNION
PAH O THE
STTE OF
CINGULAR 8525 NOKIA N95
Sporting a strong array of features, the quad-band Cingular Any discussion of Nokia’s
8525 is great for both work and personal use, putting it at N95 has to start with its $750
the top of the smartphone heap. Running Windows Mobile price—for that kind of cash, you
5, the device has a bright, responsive touch screen and a could get a 33-year subscription
full QWERTY keyboard with large, easy-to-use keys (though to Maximum PC! The N95 comes
it does suffer from the same caps-lock problem as Verizon’s unlocked, so if you don’t have

3.9"
XV6700 and requires two hands to use). You’ll have full one already, you’ll also have
access to reading and editing MS Office documents. to buy a SIM card from either
Additionally, the device supports the HSDPA 3G protocol, Cingular or T-Mobile. But if you
so data transfers are speedy (if you live in an area with a 3G want a phone packed with multi-
network); Wi-Fi is also supported. media features, the N95 is it.
The 8525 also excels as an entertainment device. With N95’s 5MP camera
Whereas most of the devices in this roundup sport 1.3MP you can leave your point-and-
cameras, the 8525 has a 2MP camera with a load of shoot at home. It includes a 2.1"
shooting options—more than we’re ever likely to use, in flash, video, and multiple scene The king of all
fact—as well as video. As with other Cingular devices, modes. The device is pretty slug- media.
setting up email accounts with Xpress Mail was simple. gish between frames, but the
The inclusion of both a scroll wheel and nav button makes multiple-shot function performed
working through menus a snap when it is inconvenient to adequately. Media playback was
use the stylus. strong, but since there’s no 3G support, videos from
At a little more YouTube were sluggish, particularly in full-screen mode;
than six ounces, music playback—even on the tiny speakers—was solid.
the device is a The GPS took a while to set up, but it plotted our
bit bulky, but still location down to the correct side of the street, and the
pocket-size, and directions it provided were spot on. Nokia charges an
a fair trade for additional 92 bucks a year for voice directions.
the full keyboard Setting up a POP3 account was simple, but with-
and selection of out a full keyboard, the N95 has limitations as a work
features. device. If you want to stay connected to the office and
edit Word docs and spreadsheets, Cingular’s 8525 is
2.28"

a better choice, but as a multimedia device, no other

handset comes close.

9 9
4.43" VERDICT
Your best bet for VERDICT
a Windows-based $750, www.nseries.com
$600, www.cingular.com PROVIDERS: ANY GSM PROVIDER
smartphone. PROVIDER: CINGULAR MAXIMUMPC
KICKASS

LEGEND #2: SPONTANEOUS

Tales of the Loch COMBUSTION
than keep consumers from reenacting the
opening scene of Lethal Weapon 3. FALSE!

Ness Motorola We’ve heard several stories of cell phones

exploding while recharging. While some of LEGEND #4: HIDDEN POWER
Are the stories you hear about portable these stories are apocryphal, many are indeed Rumor is, if your Nokia phone is running out
phones for real? true. The culprit, generally, is aftermarket bat- of juice, enter *3370# to tap into “hidden
teries. The number of incidents remains rela- battery power.” This code actually affects
LEGEND #1: NO KEYS, NO PROBLEM tively small, but as with other devices, watch audio quality but does not open any hid-
Lost your keys? No problem! Just call home for product recalls to stay safe. TRUE! den power. If you want to conserve power,
and have someone press the button on your reducing screen brightness and limiting the
spare keyless entry device, thereby trans- LEGEND #3: BURN BABY BURN! number of apps running will do the trick—
mitting the signal through your phone to Rumors have swirled about cell phones caus- and not make it sound like you’re talking
your car door. Then use your phone to call ing gas station fires, but in truth there are no into a tin can. Anyway, everybody knows the
AAA, because unless you use your handset actual incidents to back this up. Granted, many actual code for tapping into reserve power
to smash through your window, the device handset-makers warn against using mobile is Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left,
won’t open your car. Keyless entry operates devices near a gas station, but we suspect that Right, B, A, Start. FALSE!
on an RF signal different from those used is more an effort to prevent litigation rather
by phones. FALSE!

46 MAXIMUMPC JULY 2007

Intel
expands
its
INTEL’S
NEXT-GEN
ATHLON
KILLER
ead
L !
IS JUST THE
BEGINNING
OF AN
ALL-OUT
OFFENSIVE
AGAINST
AMD. WE
PREVIEW
PENRYN
AND
EXAMINE
INTEL’S
LONG-TERM
STRATEGY

JULY 2007 MAXIMU

MAXIM
XIMUM
UM PC
P 49
 INTELSTRIKESBACK

T his ain’t your father’s Intel. The old Intel Well, as they say, failure breeds victory, and
would introduce a new microarchitecture Intel has indeed emerged from its trouncing as a
and milk it for almost a decade with the leaner, meaner company. No longer building CPUs
most minute of tweaks every few years. When the just for the sake of maximizing profits, the com-
competition would start to breathe down its neck, Intel pany is pushing a new strategy that seems fixed on
fixed the problem with marketing and, umm, higher maximizing performance and pain to its competition.
frequencies, more cache, and some new instructions. This month we went to Intel’s headquarters for a
This strategy ended with Intel crumpled on the floor hands-on preview of the company’s follow-up to the
while AMD’s Athlon 64 pranced about like a happy, current prize-winning Core 2 chips, as well as a look at
happy pony. what may very well be the Core 3.

I
ntel is a proud company, and would hustle to release a brand-new used by SSE instructions. The super shuffle
from what we can tell, it’s determined graphics core every 18 months. engine will let Penryn perform 128-bit
to never have its ass handed to it again shuffles in a single cycle, which will increase
by AMD, as happened when AMD released performance on any SSE2 or SSE3 instruc-
its Athlon, Athlon XP, and Athlon 64 CPUs. PENRYN: UP CLOSE tions without requiring any software rewrites
Following the Athlon 64 ass-whooping, Intel AND PERSONAL or even recompiles. Media encoding will
adopted what it calls a “tick-tock” philoso- It may be designated as a tick, but Intel’s get a further boost when developers adopt
phy—a tick amounts to a die shrink with Penryn is more than a mere die shrink. a new instruction set called SSE4. To the
some feature enhancements, while a tock is Intel has made numerous improvements folks who don’t take instruction sets seri-
an entirely new microarchitecture. to keep this CPU in the game. Many of ously, Intel says that SSE4 will dedicate cir-
For example, the first tick was the Penryn’s enhancements are aimed at cuits on the CPU to typical encoding tasks,
Presler Pentium D, which was mostly a core increasing performance in today’s applica- which should result in a huge performance
shrink from the previous NetBurst chip. The tions, not those apps that won’t be out for boost in apps that use the instructions.
tock was the new Core microarchitecture another three years—further proof that Intel One other feature Intel is building into
behind the champion Core 2 chips. Intel has no intention of standing still. Penryn (and the upcoming mobile Centrino
plans to tick again late this year with the The Penryn’s design is similar to the Pro CPUs) is Dynamic Acceleration
Penryn CPU, which moves from a 65nm current Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad. Technology. Typically, in applications that
to a 45nm process. Following that will be a Natively, Penryn is a dual-core CPU; Intel use only one core, the second core will
tock in 2008 with the new 45nm microarchi- will create quad-core versions by joining go into a low-power mode. With Penryn,
tecture code-named Nehalem. two CPUs via the front-side bus inside the Intel plans to leverage the second core’s
The next tick will be a shrink to 32nm CPU heat spreader. To keep communication decreased heat output by dynamically
in 2009 with an improved core called between the two chips from bogging down, cranking up the clocks on the first core.
Westmere. The tock will strike in 2010 with Intel will up the FSB in all Penryns from Intel plans to manufacture its next-gen
the Gesher core, which will feature yet anoth- 1,066MHz to 1,333MHz. Xeon versions chips in volume later this year at clock
er new microarchitecture. Get the picture? of the chip will also get a 1,600MHz FSB. speeds greater than 3GHz and sell them by
This is a radical departure from the Penryn will feature 6MB of L2 in dual-core early 2008, but there are indications that the
Pentium 4/NetBurst microarchitecture, chips and 12MB in quad cores, a 50 per- CPU behemoth could ship faster processors
which went from 180nm to 130nm, cent increase over the current Core 2 chips. earlier to pee on AMD’s quad-core parade,
and from 90nm to 65nm over almost Intel expects performance increases which is scheduled for this summer.
six years with very few changes. Why with existing apps thanks to a new Fast
such a brutal schedule? We believe Intel Radix-16 divider, which will, theoretically,
is leveraging its ability to run multiple double division-math performance. DOC OCTOCORE: NEHALEM
design teams in parallel in the hopes Media encoding, already something the REVEALED
of wearing down AMD. It’s reminiscent current Core 2 kicks butt at, will get a boost Nehalem, the CPU coming after Penryn,
of the great graphics wars between ATI through a “super shuffle engine,” which will isn’t expected until next year, but the
and Nvidia, in which both companies optimize data housekeeping operations “New Intel” is being a Chatty Cathy about

50 MAXIMUMPC JULY 2007

INTELSTRIKESBACK

reviews TESTED. REVIEWED. VERDICTIZED

it to anyone who will pull its string. an additional eight virtual cores available
Nehalem will be based on the same via an improved simultaneous-multithread-

Xxxxxxx Xxxxxx X
45nm process as Penryn, but it will be ing design reminiscent of Hyper-Threading.
significantly different from its predeces- Not every Nehalem CPU will sport eight
sors, even going against Intel’s long-held cores; Intel says the CPU will be scal-
opinions about front-side-bus topology. able, so it will be possible to construct a
xXxxxx
Intelxxxxx xx x xxxxx-xxx
has maintained that itxxxxxxx
doesn’t xxxx need xxxxxxxx XXX Xxxxxxx,
Nehalem-based PC with anywhere from
XXXanxxxxxxxx,
on-die memory xxx x xxx controller
XXXX xxxx. like AMD’s one to eight cores.
because its shared front-side bus works Besides the use of an on-die memory
just fine. Indeed, the Core 2 seems to controller, Nehalem will also feature a

X
backxxxx upxxxxxx xxx xxxxxx-xxxxxxxxxx
Intel’s claims. If the Core 2 is xxxxx xxx xxxx
chip-to-chip xxxxxxx not unlike AMD’s
interconnect
so xXxxxx
much faster xxxxxxxxxxx
than all the xx xxxxxx,
Athlon 64s, xx xxxxx, xxx xxxxxlinks.
HyperTransport xx xxNehalem will also A quad-core CPU in the Penryn family
xxxx xxxxxxxxx
doesn’t that prove xxxxxxxxx
that on-die xx xXxxxx
memory xxseexxxIntel
xxxxxxxxxxx.
adopt yet another AMD initiative: will pack two dual-core chips and fea-
xxxxxxxxxx
isn’t needed? xx xxxMaybe
xxxxxxxxxxso, butxxxxxy
Intel is Xxxx xxx xXxxxxx
graphics integrated xxxXX,
into the CPU. Intel’s ture 820 million transistors, 12MB of
xxxxxxxxx
changing xxxitsxxxxxxy
tune with xx Nehalem.
Xxxx Xxxx Xxxxxxx Xxxxxxxx
plans, however, xxxx
don’t involve a GPU inhab- L2 cache, and a 107mm2 die—which is
xxxxxx: Intel
Xxxysays xxx an“xxxx”
on-die xxxxxxx
memory xxx xxxxx
controller xxiting
xxxxxxxxxx
the CPU die; xxxxrather, a graphics chip about 25 percent smaller than today’s
x xxxx.
makes sense with Nehalem, which won’t xxxwillxxxxxxx,
be integratedxxx xxx intoxthe “CPU socket”— 65nm Intel chips.
Xxxx xxxxxxxx—xXxxxx
be sharing a mere four cores xxxxxon axxfront-side
xx xxxxxx-xx
sort of thexxxxxxxx,
way two Core x 2 Duos are joined
xxxxxx
bus xx likexxxxxxxxx
the currentxx Core
yxx2xxxx Quad xxxx—
CPUs—it xxxxxxxxxx
in today’s Core XXX,2xxx Quad. It’s not known what could be substantial enough to warrant a
xxx will
xXxxxxx
expose xxxxxxx
up to eight
xxxxcoresxx xxx to xxxy
the OS, with xxxx Nehalem
xxxxxxxx will be xxxxxx
called, but the Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
leap forward “Core 3” brand.
xxxxxxxx xxxxxxx xx xxxxxxx xXxxxx’x xxxxxxxxxx xxx xxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxxxy XXX xxxxxxxxxy, xxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxxxxy xxxx xxxx
xxxxxxxx xxx xxxxxxxxxx xx x xyxxxx xx xxxxxxxx. xxxxxx xxxx xxxx xx xxxxxxxx xx xxx
xxx xxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxx-xxxxxxxxxx Xxx xxxx xxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxx—xxx xxxxxxxxxxx. Xxxx xx Xxxxx xxxxxx xxx
xxxxxx. (Xxx xxxxxxx xx XXX, xxxx xx xxx xxxx xxx xx xxxxxxxx xxxx xxx Xxxxxxx xxxxxx-xxxxxxxxxx xXxxxx xxxxxxxxxxx
xxxx xx.) Xx xxxxx xxx xXxxxxx XXX xxxxx XX xxxx—xx xxxxxxxxxx XXX xxxxxxx. xx xxxxxx, xx xxxx xxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxx
xxxy xx xxxx xxxx Xxxxx’x Xxxxx Xxxx- xXxxxx’x xxxx xx XXX xxxx xxxxxxx xxx xx xXxxxx xxxxxxxxxx xx xxx xxxxxxxxxx
PUTTING PENRYN TO THE TEST xxx xxxxx xx xxx xxxxxxxxxxx. Xxxxxxx
xxxxx xxxxxxx, xxxxx xxxxxxy xxxxx xxx xxxxxy xxxxxxxxx xxx xxxxxxy xx Xxxx Xxxx
xxxxxxxxxxx
We knew thisxxxx was axx xxxxxx
new Intel whenxx $xxx.
we wereXxx invited xxx xxxxx
similar Intel xxxxxx
demo lastxxxxxxxx
year of Corexxxy xx XXX
2 proved honest xxxxxx:
Penryn looksXxxy
reallyxxx
good.“xxxx”
Althoughxxxxxxx xxxjust
Yorkfield had xxxxx
xXxxxxx
to companyxxxxxxx, xxxxx toxxxxxx
headquarters benchmark xxxxxxtwo Penryn Xxxxxxx
when we xxxxx,
had our own xXxxxx xxxx
way with thexxxxxxxxx
chips. ax13.6
xxxx.
percent clock advantage over the QX6800,
xx xxxxx
CPUs and xxno xxx
one$xxx xxxxx,
confiscated ourxxxx
camera,xx searched xxx xxxxxxx xxx xxx
The tests pitted xxxxx. Xxx
a Penryn-family xxxxxquad-
3.33GHz xx PenrynXxxx
was 22xxxxxxxx—xXxxxx
to 40 percent faster inxxxxxmost ofxxthexx
xxxxxxxxxx
our cavities,xxxx Xxxxxx
or irradiated usxx/XX/Xxxxxxx
to kill any spy equipment. xxx corexxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxx
CPU (code-named xxxxx
Yorkfield) against xxx xx
its 3.33GHz xxxxxx xxAnd
benchmarks. xxxxxxxxx
SSE4 truly xx yxx
looks xxxx
to be morexxxx—
than
xxxy, xxx Still,xxxx xxxxxxx
we weren’t givenxxxx Xxxxxx
free rein. xxx xxxall xxx
Intel selected xxx XXX
dual-core Xxxxxxx
sibling (code-namedxxxxx xxxxxxxx
Wolfdale) and the xx xxx xXxxxxx
merely xxxxxxx
a new instruction set.xxxx
Designedxx just
xxxfor
xxxy
encod-
xxxxxxx
the tests,Xxxxxx xxx xxxxxxxxxxxx.
which were run in Intel labs with Intel-built xxx xxxx.
current Xxxx
speed yxx the
champ, xxxxxx
2.93GHzxxquad-core
xxx x xxxxxx Core 2 xxxxxxxx
ing, SSE4 helped xxxxxxx
the DivXxx xxxxxxx
encodes xXxxxx’x
run 111 percent
Xxxand
PCs xXxxxxx xxx’xOSes.
Intel-installed xxxxWexxxxxxxx XXX
weren’t allowed xxxxxxxxx,
Extreme QX6800. yxx’xx xxxxx
All the x xxxxxxxx
machines featured the xxxxxx
same xxxxxxxxxxxxy
faster XXXdesktop
than on the fastest xxxxxxxxxy, xxxxx
CPU available today.
xx xxx
to runxxxxxx
any of our xxxxx; xx xxxx
own tests, but wexxxx
werexx xxx to
allowed xxhardware,
xxx xxxxx xxxx
drivers, andxxxx xxxxxxxxxxx
RAM timings, xxx
running 32-bit xxxxxxxx xxx xxxxxxxxxx
These benchmarks indeed show xx Penryn
x xyxxxx
to be
xxxxx
pokexxxxxxx
around the xxxx xxxxxx
machines xxxxxxx
all we wanted. xxx xxxxx
Windows xx Vista
xxxxxxx xxxx xxx xxxxx xx xx.
Ultimate. axxx xxxxxxxxxxxxx
formidable chip. With monthsxxxxxxxx-xxxxxxxxxx
left for fine-tuning,
xxxx-xxxxxxxxxx
Normally, we xxxXX/x
pass on thisXXXXkind ofxxxxxx
arrangement, Xxy xxx xxxxxxx
Several xxxx
of the tests arexxxxx xx xxxx
well-known publicxxx xxxxxx.
possibly (Xxx
even xxxxxxx
higher xx XXX,
clock speeds xxxxand
at launch, xx who
xxxx
xxxxasxxxxxxx
it can foster xxxxxx
cheatingxxxxxxx xxxxxxx
or allegations xxx
of cheating. xxxxx?
benchmarksxXxxxx xxyxthat
and apps xxxxx
need xxx xxx xxxxxxx. knows
no explanation: xx.) Xxwhatxxxxx xxx xXxxxxx,
other added XXX xxxxx
tricks, the upcoming battle
xxx-xxxxxxxxx
This time, however, xxxxxxxxxxxx.
we decided to Xxx run withxXxxxxx
it since we Xxx xxxxx MainConcept’s
3DMark06, xx xxxx xxxxx xx encoder,
H.264 xx xxxxCinebench
xxx xxxy xx
between thexxxx xxxx2 Xxxxx’x
new Core Xxxxxis Xxxx-
Quad and Athlon sure to
xxxxxxx
also plan xxxto xxxx xxxxtheyxx
allow AMD same xxopportunity
x XXXX when xxxxy’x—xxx
9.5, and Half-Lifexxxxxxxy xxxx
2: Lost Coast. Intelxxxxxxxx’x—
threw in a beta bexxxxx xxxxxxx,
epic. When xxxxx
you factor xxxxxxyappearance
in a Nehalem xxxxx xxx
its quad-core Barcelona/Agena FX is available for a xxxxxxxx
Cinebench xx xxxxxxx
10 test and an xxxx xxxxofxxxxxxxxx.
alpha build DivX 6.6 with xxxxxxxxxxx
next year, you can xxxx
see how xxrough
xxxxxx xx $xxx.busi-
this tick-tock Xxx
hands-on UNDER evaluation.THE
So, yes,HOOD
take these benchmarks Xxx SSE4 xxxxxx
supportxxxxxx xx xxx1.7.1,
using VirtualDub xxxxxxxxxx
as well. xXxxxxx
ness is goingxxxxxxx,
to be. xxxxx xxxxxx xxxxxx
with a grain of salt, but it’s worth mentioning that a xxxxxxxxx xx xxxxxxxx
The verdict? x xxxxxxx
On the Intel-confi xxxx
gured test rigs,xx xx xxxxx xx xxx $xxx xxxxx, xxxx xx
BRAINS
xx xxxx XXX Xxxxxxx xxxxx; xxxxx xxxxx xxxxxxxxxx xxxx Xxxxxx xx/XX/Xxxxxxx
XXX Xxxxx x.xxXXx Xxxxxxx x
Xxxxxxx Xxxxxxx xxxxxxx
2.93GHZ CORE 2 EXTREME xxx xxxxxxx
QX6800 xx CORE
3.33GHZ xxxx2 QUAD
xxxxxxxxxx xxxy, xxx
(MODEL UNDISCLOSED) xxxxCORE
3.33GHZ xxxxxxx xxxxUNDISCLOSED)
2 DUO (MODEL Xxxxxx xxx xxx
CODE NAME xxxxxxx
Kentsfield xxxx—xxx xxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxx
Yorkfield xxxxxxx Xxxxxx xxx xxxxxxxxxxxx.
Wolfdale
XXXX Xxxxx XxxxXXXXx xxxxx Xxxxx
xxxXX xxxxxxx Xxx xXxxxxx xxx’x xxxx xxxxxxxx XXX
L2 CACHE 8MB 12MB 6MB
XXX xXX Xxxxxxxxxx XxXx xxx xx xxx xxxxxx xxxxx; xx xxxx xxxx xx xxx
EXECUTION CORES 4 4 2
Xxxxxxx Xxxxxxxxxxx xxxXX) BENCHMARKS
3DMARK06 CPU 4,047 4,944 3,068
XXX Xxxxxxxxxx Xxxxxxxxx) ZERO POINT SCORES
3DMARK06 OVERALL 11,252 11,969 11,020
XXXX XXXXX xXX Xxxxxxxxxx XxXx xxx XXXxxxxXXXX XX XXX XXX
MAINCONCEPT H.264 ENCODER
Xxxxxxx (SEC)
Xxxxxxxxxx (xxx xxxXX) 89.0 72.7 119.2
Xxxxxxxx Xxx XXXX xxx XXXX xxx
CINEBENCH 9.5 xXX Xxxxxxxxxx XxXx xxx
XXXXXXX 10,551 12,900 7,061
Xxxxxxx Xxxxxxxxxx xxxXX) Xxxxxxxxx Xxx XXX xxx XXX xxx
CINEBENCH 10 BETA 1,541 1,917 1,125
BEAUTY Xxxxxx x.x XXXX xxx XXX xxx (+xxx.xx%)
HALF-LIFE 2 LOST COAST (FPS) 153.14 213.03 206.06
XXXXXXXXX XXX Xxxxxx
DIVX 6.6 WITH VIRTUALDUB Xxxx (SEC)
1.7.1 ALPHA Xxx 38 XXXX XX xxx 18 XXX xxx 22
xxxXX (xxxXXx xxxx,
xxxXXx XxX) Xxxxx x XXX.X xxx XXX.X xxx
Best scores are bolded. All tests were performed on Intel BadAxe2 975X motherboards with a modification to allow them to run Penryn CPUs, with GeForce 8800 GTX cards, 2GB of DDR2/800, a Seagate Barracuda 320GB hard drive, and onboard audio.
XXXXXXXXX Xxxxxxx XX Xxxxx
XXXX Xxxxxx Xxxxxx Xxxxxxxx 0 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
BOOT: XX sec. DOWN: XX sec. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

00 MAXIMUMPC
52 JULY
XXXXXXX
2007 2007
 how2 IMPROVING YOUR PC EXPERIENCE, ONE STEP AT A TIME

Expose the Details with

HDR Photography
T
he tabloids do an unbelievable job of exposing every detail of their target
If you hate playing the subject’s image—too bad digital cameras can’t do the same. Under various
lighting conditions, digital cameras tend to expose their limitations when
ping-pong exposure
it comes to dynamic range—the scope of an image’s shadow to highlight detail.
game with your digital Therefore, that sunny blue sky in your photo may look nice, but your intended Elvis-
inhaling-a-Krispy-Kreme masterpiece is nothing but a silhouette—try exposing him
camera, learn to create
in Photoshop and your sky turns into a white, overblown mess. Thankfully, you can
images with a high do something to attain maximum exposure without turning to B-list celebrity antics.
It’s called high dynamic range (HDR) photography.
dynamic range BY KRIS FONG

WHAT YOU NEED

DIGITAL SLR OR POINT-AND- Tired of getting

SHOOT CAMERA WITH pics like this from
MANUAL CONTROLS
your digital camera
TRIPOD (left)? Employ HDR
ADOBE PHOTOSHOP CS2 photography prin-
(or later version) ciples and expose
$650, www.adobe.com every precious
or
HDRSOFT PHOTOMATIX PRO detail (right).
$100, www.hdrsoft.com
(Download a trial if you don’t have
either app)

1 Define Your Composition

Take your camera, tripod, and butt to looks like this: [ • ]), set the camera
a favorite location that offers a good to capture RAW or TIFF images,
amount of shadows and bright areas, set the ISO to the lowest setting (to
so you can truly see the merits of this avoid noise), and set your preferred
technique. We recommend a dimly lit white balance—don’t use auto
room with sunlight streaming through modes or flash. Then determine how
a window or a favorite spot to watch you want to compose your frame,
the sunset. Mount your camera on switch your camera to Aperture
the tripod, set your camera’s meter- Priority mode, and set an aperture to
ing mode to spot metering (the icon complement your subject.

Our composition features high contrast, and

this is how our camera captured it to prop-
erly expose the dragon and then optimally
expose the lamp.

56 MAXIMUMPC JULY 2007

2 Gauge the Brightness
To ensure that you capture your each is set equally apart for a total
composition’s entire brightness of five shutter speeds. In our exam-
range, you need to shoot a series ple, we calculated our five shutter
of images that properly exposes speeds to be 1/2, 1/189, 1/376,
its darkest and brightest elements. 1/563, and 1/750. Round to the
To gauge the darkest parts of your nearest shutter speed if values fall
composition, use your camera to between your camera’s set speeds.
spot meter the darkest element—
something with detail—not an area
that’s solid black. Focus on the area
and press the shutter
down halfway; your cam-
era should display the
shutter speed required
for proper exposure—jot
this down. For example,
our camera indicated a
1/2-second shutter speed
to properly expose the
area behind the dragon’s
ear. Do the same for the
brightest detailed ele-
ment—not an area of
total white—and jot down
the displayed shutter
speed; in our example,
the lamp’s surface
requires a 1/750-second
shutter speed.
Now calculate three To determine the proper shutter speed to
additional shutter speeds expose our darkest details, we spot-metered
between the two so that the area behind the dragon’s ear.

3 Go Snap Happy
OK, let’s shoot. Make sure that your camera and tripod are steady, set your camera
to its Manual mode, check that your aperture setting is still the same, and set the
shutter speed to the slowest speed you jotted down. Then frame your composition
and snap your first shot. Without moving the camera, reset the shutter speed with
the second-slowest speed and shoot again. Repeat this process with the remaining
three shutter speeds, taking care not to move the camera. When you’re finished,
review the five images in your camera—you should see a gradual progression of
exposures without any frame movement. If you detect movement, shoot again.

Our five-shot series shows a range of detail at opposing ends—from some

dust on the dragon’s fins down to the dirty details on the surface of the lamp.

XXXXXXX 2007 MAXIMUMPC 00

 how2 ImprovIng your pc experIence, one step at a tIme

4 Create an HDR Image 5 Bring out the Details

Download your images to your computer and then follow the All right, you’re probably wondering, “What the f***? Why does my
instructions below for the app you have at hand to create an photo look so crappy? High dynamic resolution my ass!” Don’t worry,
HDR image. all of the exposure information is there—your computer screen just
can’t display all the info due to its low dynamic range of brightness. To
Photoshop Users—Choose File > Automate > Merge to HDR. In make your photo fit for public consumption, you need to down-convert
the resulting dialog, choose Files from the Use drop-down menu your 32-bit HDR image into an 8- or 16-bit image for proper display and
and then click Browse. Navigate to and select your five images editing. In the HDR world, this is called tone mapping.
in the resulting dialog, click Open, click OK to have Photoshop
work its magic, and then click OK to confirm. To save your new Photoshop Users—Choose Image > Mode > 16 Bits/Channel to open
32-bit image, choose File > Save and then choose an HDR the HDR Conversion dialog. From the Method drop-down, choose
format from the Format drop-down menu, such as the stan- Local Adaptation. You should see your image’s brightness change
dard Radiance HDR (.hdr) format or Industrial Light & Magic’s dramatically. Click the “Toning Curve and Histogram” reveal button and
OpenEXR (.exr) format, which is widely used in the CG and ani- then use the Toning Curve (along with the Radius and Threshold sliders)
mation industry. Then click Save. to fine-tune the exposure. Just click on the diagonal line (Toning Curve)
to plot a point and then drag it around to see how your changes affect
your image. Plot several points and shape the curve initially so that it
complements the shape of the histogram (the mountain-looking graph-
ic). Then fine-tune the curve so that your image displays an optimal
amount of contrast while retaining a high degree of detail throughout.
Be careful that you don’t inadvertently wash out your image (low con-
trast) as you bring out its details. Play around until you’re satisfied with
the image’s appearance and then click OK. Save your result as a TIFF
image and then tweak it to perfection.

Photoshop’s easy-to-use HDR merge feature quickly turned

our five shots into a detail-enriched HDR image. You just
can’t see all of the details—yet.

Photomatix Users—Choose HDR > Generate. In the resulting

dialog, select the “Load differently exposed images” option and
then click Browse. Navigate to and select your five images in the
resulting dialog, click Open, and then click OK. In the resulting
dialog, Photomatix provides options to help improve your image;
select the ones you want, then click OK to have the app blend
everything together. To save your new 32-bit image, choose File
> Save As and then choose an HDR format from the “Save as
type” drop-down menu, such as the standard Radiance HDR Photoshop’s Toning Curve tool works like the Curves tool to
(.hdr) format or Industrial Light & Magic’s OpenEXR (.exr) format. fine-tune different levels of exposure in your image.
Then click Save.

Photomatix Users—Choose HDR > Tone Mapping to open the

Tone Mapping window, which offers a variety of contrast, color, bril-
Photomatix Pro liance, level, and other controls. The idea is to balance your image
features options to so that it displays an optimal amount of contrast while retaining
improve your HDR a high degree of detail throughout. If your image needs a good
image, including a amount of exposure tweaking, choose Tone Compressor from the
function that can Method drop-down menu and use the controls to tweak the bright-
align your images ness, contrast, and levels in your image. For fine-tuning, choose
to help eliminate Details Enhancer from the Method drop-down menu and use the
camera shake. sliders to enhance the contrast, color saturation, luminosity, levels,
and more. When satisfied, select either 8-bit or 16-bit under Output

58 MAXIMUMPC july 2007

 how2 IMPROVING YOUR PC EXPERIENCE, ONE STEP AT A TIME

Depth and click OK. Save your result as a TIFF image, which
you can then tweak to perfection using an image editor.
SHOOTING SHORTCUTS
If you don’t have manual controls on your camera or are feeling
lazy, here are a few shortcuts to get the requisite photo exposures.

Instead of measuring and calculating exposures, set your cam-

era to Auto Bracket mode with a 1 EV difference between expo-
sures (such as -2, -1, 0, +1, +2) and snap a five-frame burst. This
is also a good way to capture multiple exposures of a composition
that contains potential movement (such as the ocean or people).

Don’t have manual controls? Shoot your composition in pro-

gram mode at 0 EV; next, alter the exposure compensation up and
then down the EV scale to get the other shots.

Photomatix’s Instead of five shots, aim for the middle shutter speed between
Tone Mapping your two measured speeds and shoot just three images.
window fea-
tures a few Forgo measurements and calculations altogether and shoot in
controls to Aperture Priority mode with matrix metering, using exposure com-
fine-tune your pensation in 1 EV increments instead of shutter speeds.
image.

Ask the Doctor

Diagnosing and curing your PC problems

D-V-IVERS in SLI, but it’s not because of the difference in but in the end I have to turn the monitor off for
I have a Dell 19-inch LCD monitor. Will an Nvidia memory. The GTX and the GTS are within the a few minutes and then turn it back on hoping it
GeForce 6600 OC graphics card support this same family, but they’re architecturally differ- will stay on.
monitor’s DVI input with the drivers on the instal- ent. The 8800 GTX has 128 stream processors —Woody Hearn
lation CD or will I have to download another driver and 24 rasterizers, while the 8800 GTS has 96
from the Nvidia website? stream processors and 20 rasterizers. Since you’re describing an intermittent prob-
—Gene Macavey The Doctor thinks you could run an 8800 lem, the Doctor assumes you know that when
GTS with a 640MB frame buffer with an 8800 you run both 7800 GTs in SLI, one of the two
You won’t have any problems running the GTS with a 320MB frame buffer in SLI, but displays will go dark. This is the standard MO
monitor with your bundled graphics card in that situation, you’d be wasting half the for SLI. Intermittent problems like this are
driver, but as a general rule, you should run memory on the higher-end card because the always a bear to solve, but you might first
the latest graphics driver available. Check combination will seek the lowest common try swapping cables. It’s possible that the
Nvidia’s website for the most recent version. denominator in terms of memory. monitor isn’t sensing that it’s connected to
your videocard and is therefore going into an
MIX-N-MATCH 8800S THESE TWO MONITORS ARE GR… energy-saving sleep state.
In your May 2007 issue, you answered a question <BZOOP>
(Congrats, It’s Twins) in regard to matching SLI I have two 7800 GTs running two NEC MultiSync VISTA ACTIVATION ODDITIES
cards. You said that as long as the GPUs match LCD1760NX monitors and a Cintiq 21UX. I bought a copy of Vista, ran home, and installed
there’s no problem. Does that mean I can run an Whenever I’m forced to restart my computer, the it. For a number of reasons—an inability to find
8800 GTX with my 8800 GTS? Or does the dif- second NEC monitor will come on and then go the right drivers, system slowdowns, fear of losing
ference in video memory (768 versus 640) make black, as if in Sleep mode. If I turn the monitor my key because of over-activation, and plain lazi-
this not possible? back on immediately, it will stay on for a varying ness—I never activated it. When I finally felt I could
—Sel Baskurt amount of time before going black again. I’ve live without my copy of XP, I attempted a clean
dug through every Display Property setting and install. When I tried to activate Vista, I got an error
You couldn’t run an 8800 GTX and an 8800 GTS built-in monitor setting trying to correct the issue, message that said my key was for an upgrade

60 MAXIMUMPC JULY 2007

only, not a clean install. Was I death” while others call it a
supposed to reformat, install XP, “snap, crackle, pop.” The majority
then install Vista? of problems have occurred with
—Patrick Ignaczak nForce chipsets, but the issue
is not limited to that part. Back
The Doctor would like to wel- in the Voodoo2 SLI days, many
come you to the ever-confus- soundcards were blamed for
ing world of product activation screeching and popping sounds
and OS versions. In this case, as well. The problem, called bus
you have clearly purchased an hogging, happened because the
upgrade copy of Vista. In the- graphics card would hog the PCI
ory, you’re supposed to install bus and not release it (remember,
that overtop your XP installa- it’s a shared roadway) within
tion, as the disc will prevent industry-standard specs.
you from installing Vista on a The Doctor suspects a simi-
wiped—or “clean”—drive. lar problem is happening in this
That said, there is an ingenious case, but as he said, he has
workaround to the issue. never experienced it using X-Fi
Install Vista, but don’t enter a cards and nForce or Intel chip-
product key when prompted. sets. That doesn’t mean you’re
This will get you a 30-day trial totally hosed. Some people
version of the OS. Once it is If you’re using alternate drivers for your optical drive, don’t. have reported that updating
up and running, fire up your Windows XP should automatically be able to configure any disc the board’s BIOS corrects the
upgrade disc and install Vista reader you have. problem, while others say that
once again, entering your prod- the latest drivers from Creative
uct key when asked. You’ll get will do the trick. The Doc recom-
a fresh, clean installation of the OS without ever wreaking havoc on optical drives. mends that you grab the latest BIOS for your
having to touch XP. Finally, your problem could be as simple as a Asus board and run the auto-update program
bad cable or a bent pin on the drive. You should from the support section of Soundblaster.com.
also double-check the jumpers on both drives on
A DUSTY DVD COLLECTION the chain and try both cable select and slave and EXTERNALLY CURIOUS
I recently removed my DVD drive from my PC to master to see if that solves your problem. I am buying an external hard drive and will install
reinstall Windows on my son’s PC, as his CD-ROM Windows XP on it. I plan on using it as a portable
drive was too slow. When I put the drive back in my SPLINTER CELL: PAINFUL SCREECH OS when I use other PCs. Will the external drive
PC, the BIOS was able to see the drive, but I could I am running two 8800 GTX cards in SLI on an Asus have conflicts with other PCs when I use it?
not get it to work (it doesn’t show up in Windows P5N32-SLI Premium mobo with two gigs of RAM —Alfred Braxton
Explorer, and bootable CDs won’t boot on my and an Intel Core 2 E6700 overclocked to 2.93GHZ. I
computer). I bought a new DVD drive, but it doesn’t have a Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Music soundcard. Well, provided you don’t mind a bit of a speed
work on this computer. And, yes, I reinstalled the After I load Splinter Cell: Double Agent the sound choke, you’ll be perfectly fine installing XP on
drivers from both manufacturers. dies after a few minutes and is replaced by a loud, an external drive. The Doctor is assuming, of
I had another hard drive and was able to rein- high-pitched squeal. I have to reboot to get rid of course, that you’re using a standard USB con-
stall Windows (using the same DVD drive on the the noise. Interestingly, if I disable SLI, the game will nection to hook the drive to a computer. If your
same computer), and everything is working fine run without this sound occurring, but the frame rate external device uses an eSATA connection, you’ll
now. I would like to put the old hard drive back and drops dramatically. I have tried reinstalling both the see no performance difference whatsoever—it
put the whole system back the way it was, but I still game and the soundcard drivers many times, but would be as if you were using a drive nestled in
do not understand why Windows refuses to recog- that has not fixed the problem. I have only one avail- your machine to boot XP.
nize the DVD drive. able PCI slot, so installing the card in a different slot That said, you won’t be able to use said
—Roy Bellon is not an option. I do not have this problem with any external drive as a “local” copy of XP for
other games. machines you connect it to. Remember, XP
It’s a little tough to diagnose your problem with- —Daniel Guerand installs a ton of files based on the detected hard-
out knowing which motherboard and OS you’re ware of the machine it’s attached to. Unless you
running and the make and model of the optical Daniel, you’re running into a problem that’s plan on using your OS on machines that are all
drives. Still, the Doc will take a stab at it. The fact often reported to the Doctor but that he has identical, you’re going to run into a nightmare of
that you were able to reinstall Windows on your never been able to reproduce. According to compatibility issues that will prevent XP from
PC using a different hard drive indicates that your Creative, the problem occurs because certain running in the first place.
problem is with Windows and not a hardware motherboard
problem. If you are running Windows XP, you do BIOSes incorrectly The Doctor jokes around a lot, he realizes. But there’s one thing he’s 100
not need drivers for the optical device. You should enumerate add- percent serious about: bears. If you’re sitting there gaming away and you
uninstall any drivers that you installed, as they in cards. Some see a bear looking into your basement window, just stop. Stop what you’re
doing. Don’t email the Doctor via doctor@maximumpc.com; definitely
are for older operating systems. If you recently people describe don’t send him anything about the computer-related issues you’re having.
installed a game that uses StarForce protection, the sound as Grab your can of bear spray and prepare for the inevitable. It’s coming.
that may also be an issue, as it is notorious for a “screech of

july 2007 MAXIMUMPC 61

 r&d BREAKING DOWN TECH —PRESENT AND FUTURE

White Paper: Audio in Vista

Cha- cha- cha- changes: HOW IT WORKS Windows Vista Audio Stack

Microsoft re-architects AUDIO ENGINE

User mode Kernel mode

Windows’s sound system IAudioRenderClient Audio Stream

MIX Wave RT DMA

WASAPI IAudioClient Audio Stream BUFFER
BY ZACK STERN Mini Port Memory

IAudioCaptureClient Audio Stream Vendor

Miniport

W indows Vista plays David Bowie Driver

songs—and all other types of audio— Speaker

differently than Windows XP does. You won’t Soundcard
see the differences, because the changes are
deep beneath the surface of the new OS, but
Microsoft had two key objectives for Vista’s audio system: Move as much of the process out of Kernel mode as possible and reduce
you’ll probably hear them. And that can be a latency by significantly streamlining the entire audio stack.
good thing—or a very bad thing.
Microsoft, you see, fired most of the band
while designing Vista’s audio subsystem: The such as Creative’s EAX, will revert to stereo (i.e., poorly) or the way the OS itself is writ-
company’s engineers rewrote and reorga- when running in Vista. ten (ditto). Evaluating claims of audio fidelity
nized the entire audio stack, moving nearly Microsoft worked with Creative Labs and should be an easier task.
all kernel functions to the user level. The ben- Nvidia for more than a year to develop a new
efits of this move are twofold: First, any bug driver model that would enable hardware WILL IT GO AROUND
that might creep into the audio system affects acceleration in Vista but pulled out of the initia- IN CIRCLES?
only the audio system; it doesn’t bring down tive when Nvidia exited the audio-hardware Vista’s audio architecture is based on three
the entire OS. Second, the change increases market. Creative then turned all its attention major APIs: the Multimedia Device API (used
the number of programmers who are qualified to the development of the free OpenAL API. to catalog and manage audio endpoints,
to develop new audio applications because Applications that use OpenAL behave the such as microphones and speakers), the
programming at the user level is much easier same way in Vista as they do in XP: Calls to Device Topology API (a tool programmers
than programming at the kernel level. OpenAL fall back to software mode (the code use to interrogate audio hardware, such
When you consider that the Windows is executed on the host CPU if no dedicated as soundcards, so they can create a soft-
audio system has changed very little since soundcard is available). Creative is also devel- ware control panel that can access all that
Windows 98, an overhaul was long over- oping a solution—called ALchemy—that will device’s features), and the core of Vista’s
due. In the midst of this transition, however, translate DirectSound3D and EAX calls to audio system, the Windows Audio Session
Microsoft dumped support for the custom OpenAL in real time so that they can also be API (WASAPI), which actually renders and
property set that enabled DirectSound and executed in hardware. captures audio streams.
DirectSound3D processing to be offloaded Microsoft maintains that its changes Three smaller APIs take their place
to a soundcard or even an integrated audio render Vista more stable than XP; what’s beneath WASAPI in the Vista audio
system. The host CPU must now perform more, it claims Vista’s audio system should stack: IAudioClient acts as a gateway
these calls. (Microsoft says its research indi- deliver higher fidelity than previous versions so that audio can stream between an
cates that only four percent of PC users have of Windows. This latter claim stems from the audio application and the Vista Audio
soundcards, but we know that number is fact that the new audio system uses a 32-bit Engine. IAudioRenderClient is an interface
much higher among Maximum PC readers.) floating-point pipeline, compared to XP’s that audio-rendering applications use
16-bit integer pipeline. If a DSP (digital signal to stream their output to an audio end-
THE LONG AND WINDING ROAD processing) algorithm causes a buffer over- point device. The last of these four APIs,
Over time, less and less software will rely flow, the result is typically distortion and other IAudioCaptureClient, is used by audio-
on the legacy Windows audio architec- undesirable audible artifacts. This shouldn’t capture applications to record audio from
ture, and Microsoft claims that applications happen with a 32-bit FP pipeline. capture endpoints.
properly designed to use DirectSound and This doesn’t change the fact that Vista has In what Microsoft describes as Shared
DirectSound3D should work fine in the new developed a bad reputation among gamers, mode, each of these IAudio clients builds
environment. But without access to hardware but it’s difficult to determine whether the oper- a stream in the audio engine, and then
acceleration, many applications that utilize ating system’s stability issues—not all of which all these streams are mixed in the mix
widely adopted but proprietary advanced are associated with soundcards—are related buffer. The mixed audio is then passed
audio APIs (application program interfaces), to the way games are coded for Windows to the kernel-streaming endpoint. This is

62 MAXIMUMPC JULY 2007

 Hardware Autopsy
the final stage that occurs in User mode.

Cell Phone
From here, audio moves to the audio driver
in Kernel mode, where it encounters the
kernel-mode driver known as Port Class
(portcls.sys).
Port Class works on what Microsoft calls Yesterday’s $500 phone is today’s giveaway. We crack open the case on the best
a mini-port model: By providing the generic
cell-phone technology 2005 had to offer—Motorola’s RAZR V3.
functionality that an audio device needs in
order to function within Vista, the hardware
vendor needs only to provide a set of mini-
port drivers to handle the hardware-specific
SUPPLEMENTAL SCREEN
functions that their product is capable of The RAZR sports a 96x80
performing. In order to discourage hardware external screen.
vendors from creating complex drivers in
Kernel mode, Microsoft has built a technolo-
gy called System Effects into the Vista audio
pipeline. System Effects allows the hardware
vendor to create custom DSP effects pro-
grammed to operate in User mode.

PUT THE LIME IN THE

COCONUT
Microsoft created a new class of mini-port
driver for Vista called WaveRT (RT being
short for real time). Using the vendor-supplied CAMERA LENS
This RAZR features only
WaveRT mini-port driver, Vista can capture a VGA-quality (0.3MP)
the audio data and store it in a region of DMA sensor, but newer mod-
memory so that it doesn’t require intervention els have 2MP sensors.
from the host CPU. The audio playback device
(here again, either a soundcard or an integrat-
ed audio chip) can then access this memory
directly, pass the data contained within it to its
digital-to-analog converter (DAC), and output
the result to your speakers.
Musicians using PC-based pro-audio MEMORY
gear—such as Digidesign’s Pro Tools or Later models of the
Cakewalk’s Sonar—want even less latency, CPU RAZR include a slot for
This phone microSD cards. This
and Microsoft is accommodating them with model has 5.5MB of
features
a feature known as WASAPI Exclusive mode. a U800 usable onboard SRAM.
In this mode, Vista maps the DMA memory Neptune
all the way up into application space, so the chipset,
which han-
audio is rendered to the hardware even faster. dles all of the
Software using Exclusive mode bypasses the RAZR’s cell
entire Vista audio engine, and the OS doesn’t and multime-
dia functions.
perform any mixing or digital signal process-
ing at all. Over time, Vista’s WASAPI Exclusive
mode will likely displace ASIO (Audio Stream
Input/Output), a low-latency protocol devel-
oped and freely licensed by software-devel-
oper Steinberg.
These new processes significantly reduce
the latency of the audio subsystem, which MOTOR
should reduce or eliminate common problems When you set your phone
such as audio that’s out of sync with video and to vibration mode, this small
motor turns a shaft that is
audio glitches. It should also enable vendors weighted on one side, caus-
to create entirely new types of audio hardware ing the phone to shake.
and audio applications without the need to
create complex drivers down in Kernel mode.
And Microsoft hopes that keeping developers Any requests? What hardware—new or old—would you like to see go under
out of the kernel will render Vista more stable Maximum PC’s autopsy knife? Email your suggestions to input@maximumpc.com.
overall—leaving only Microsoft to blame if the
OS doesn’t deliver on that promise.

JULY 2007 MAXIMUMPC

MA
MAXIM
XIMUM
XIMU
UM PC
P 63
 in the lab Real-WoRld testing: Results. analysis. Recommendations

mICHAel brown

Suffers Through
Another Ageia
PhysX Experience
If CellFactor: Revolution is the best physics-based
gameplay we can expect, Ageia is doomed Thanks to my awesome “psi power,” I was able to crush this
bot by throwing a massive concrete pipe that was conveniently
lying around.

I
’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Hardware-accelerated
physics is a good idea. And if it’s going to be done in hard-
ware, it should be done with dedicated silicon. But jeez, Ageia is too hard to use, or simply because the developers don’t know
can’t seem to market a product to save its life. how to make a compelling game.
CellFactor: Revolution started out as a tech demo for Ageia’s There are a few aspects of CellFactor that hold promise for
PhysX hardware. It looked quasi interesting, but it wasn’t even Ageia’s technology: As the player, you have the ability to manipu-
a game when we first saw it. It’s much more complete now, and late flowing lava, for instance; you can push the material so that
Ageia has made it available to the public for free. it pours over and immolates your enemy. It would be much cooler
Here’s a very old lesson that Ageia can’t seem to grasp: The if the lava looked better, but it’s a start. You can also pick up and
only thing that’s going to sell a completely new concept like hard- throw just about any object in the environment, and you can set
ware physics acceleration is an unbelievably kick-ass game that’s gravity mines that suck in everything around them before explod-
virtually unplayable without the hardware. Quake did it for the ing, spewing shrapnel in all directions. As exciting as all that
original Voodoo cards. CellFactor: Revolution couldn’t sell steel- sounds, everything seems to have the same mass. There’s no
toe boots to barefoot workers in an anvil factory. Based on the difference between using your “psi power” to pick up a truck and
very late beta we played, this game is crap. toss it off a catwalk than there is in rolling a barrel down a hallway.
This is a big problem for Ageia since it’s hard to tell if the If the folks at Ageia don’t figure out how to sell PhysX soon,
game is crap because the PhysX card isn’t as powerful as it their investors are going to roll them down the hall—right into the
needs to be, because the PhysX software development kit (SDK) trash bin.

ed account: many games won’t launch, burning optical discs is ver-

Will Smith boten, and you can’t install or uninstall many apps. Hell, you can’t
even peruse the complete list of running processes when you’re on
Explains the Pros and Cons a limited account.
of Vista’s Parental Controls One thing Vista actually does well is make the limited account
usable. With a Vista limited account, many more applications and
functions work, but users don’t have access to any of the potentially
We had a good reason for excluding Vista from troublesome areas and info that we were able to exploit in order to
this month’s Maximum PC Challenge, honest! disable all three parental-control schemes in a matter of hours.
most of our attacks were simple. First, we rebooted into Safe
mode, in which the parental-control apps won’t load. Then we

T he problem with most parental-control apps—including the ones

we tested this month (see page 28)—is that they ignore the giant
pink elephant in the room, administrator access. You see, trying to
looked at recently modified apps to see where the new applica-
tion was installed. We hit Google, figured out how to disable the
apps, then rebooted and browsed as we normally would. Disabling
prevent someone with admin privs from disabling, uninstalling, or apps inevitably requires admin access in order to modify stuff in
otherwise bypassing an app is a losing proposition. C:\Program Files\, the Windows folder, or the registry. With a limited
These apps could encourage parents to create limited-user Vista account, access to these areas is disabled.
accounts for their kids; however, that’s not a good option with XP The only real problem with Vista’s parental controls is that you
because a number of common tasks simply don’t work with a limit- have to use Vista.

64 MAXIMUMPC july 2007

 best of the best

How
HowWe
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Our monthly
monthly category-by-category
category-by-category
list
list of
of our
our favorite
favorite products.
products. New
New
products
products are in
are in red.
red.

Real-world
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benchmarks. Real-worldresults
results Xxxx-xxx xxxxxxxxx:
Xxxxxxx xxxx Xxx
High-end videocard

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reflect
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Xxxx Xxxxx xxxXx
such
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as Microsoft
Word, Quake 4: based on the Doom 3 engine, DVD burner
Word,
excel, Excel, PowerPoint,
PowerPoint, Macromedia Dreamweaver,
Macromedia Quake 4 is a popular OpenGL game. We run Plextor PX-755SA
Xxx xxxxxx:
Dreamweaver,
Flash, and WinzipFlash,
to test and Winzip
general performance.
to test gener- It our test at 1600x1200 with 4x antialiasing and Xxxxxxx Xx-xxxX
isn’t
al performance.
heavy in multithreading,
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does feature 4x anisotropic filtering. Generally, more robust High-end LCD monitor
multitasking
but it doestests.
feature multitasking tests. OpenGL drivers yield better performance. We Xxxxxxxxxx
Dell 2707WFPXxx xxxxxxx:
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Adobe premiere
premiere propro2.0:
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finally
ditched use a custom timedemo recorded using the 1.2 X xxxxxx xxxxxxxx
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old standard-def
our old standard-def
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for onetest
that
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xx-xxxxxx xxx xxxx xxxx $xX!
Samsung SyncMaster 206BW
uses
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that usessource
high-def
material.
sourcethe material.
test is the
mul- dual-core processors.
tithreaded,
test is multithreaded,
uses the GPU uses
for the
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mark
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tion enabled,usingusing
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the 1.07
patch. patch. Asus Striker Extreme
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Maximum PC’s
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test beds
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double asas zero-point
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systems, against
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Our current desktop test bed is a Windows XP SP2 machine, using a dual-core 2.6GHz Athlon 64 Isles, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of
Xxxx-xxxx xxxx:
FX-60, 2GB of Corsair DDR400 RAM on an Asus A8N32-SLI motherboard, two GeForce 7900 GTX Thebar
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components.
Xxxxxxx, Xxxxx xx Xxxxxxxx

july 2007 MAXIMUMPC 65

 reviews TesTed. Reviewed. veRdicTized

Digital Storm
Twister Ultra 4
Back with a vengeance, the latest Twister Ultra 4
is fast and pretty darn stable

M
aximum PC’s mandate has always Falcon in a few
been that performance rules all runs. Surprisingly, in
else. But recently we’ve been harp- Adobe Photoshop
ing about nothing but stability. It’s not that CS2, the Twister
we previously ignored this area, but lately just squeezes by
we’ve been inundated with rigs that have the Mach V with a
been overclocked so aggressively they make score of 142 sec-
our standard benchmarks blow up within onds versus 149.
minutes. Because of this, our new message The difference is
has been stability, stability, stability. negligible due to the
Apparently, Digital Storm got our margin of error, but
The Twister 4 Ultra carries the same name as the previous
memo. The company shipped us its cur- the Falcon Mach V
Athlon-based box, but its performance is all Core 2.
rent speed king: Intel’s 2.93GHz Core 2 has a 267MHz clock
Extreme Quad-Core QX6800 clocked up advantage, so count
to a mere 3.46GHz running a pair of 8800 this as a win for
GTX cards and 2GB of Corsair Dominator the Twister. We’re also marking the Nero bone-headed errors. We do have to point
RAM cranked up to 1,066MHz, all on an H.264 encode test as a win for the Twister. out, however, that connecting two DVD
EVGA 680i SLI board. From a hardware Although its score in this test is about burners to the same PATA port will kill your
perspective, this is nothing new; this a minute slower than the Mach V’s, the performance if you try to burn to multiple
setup is similar to what we’ve been seeing Twister is running a slower CPU and is 100 drives at once.
since January. percent stable. But is the Twister stable? Yes. We flew
Normally, this would make for one big The Twister is top gun in our FEAR through all of our normal benchmarks with
yawner of a story, but the Twister hits the test, with a score that’s just a tad faster no issues—well, except for SYSmark2004
right notes for us. First up: performance. than that of the similarly equipped ABS SE, which refused to run. We can’t
Although it doesn’t rip the speed crown PC that we reviewed in February. So, in blame the Twister for this though, since
from the wickedly fast Falcon Northwest performance the Twister holds three Lab
Mach V that we reviewed in June, it records and really doesn’t have to apolo- digital storm twister ultra 4
does manage to top the higher-clocked gize for performance elsewhere.

9
In build quality, we were interested to CAsio
see if the company paid attention to items Fast, stable, and nicely
under the hood configured.
the techs missed last time, such as whether
brAins all the front USB ports were connected and
ArmiTron
cpU Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6800 operating. Fortunately, there were no such
(2.93GHz overclocked to 3.46GHz) Two DVD burners on one
port. Is no Vista a plus or
MAXIMUM PC
KICKASS
MoBo EVGA 680i SLI a minus?
rAM 2GB Corsair DDR2/800 (Two benchmArks $6,600, www.digitalstormonline.com
1GB sticks@1,066MHz)
zero point scores
LAn Dual Gigabit LAN (Nvidia)
sysmark2004 sE 275 n/A
HArD DriVes Two 150GB Raptors (10,000rpm 3,000 sec
Premiere Pro 2.0 1,510 sec
SATA) in RAID 0, and one
750GB Seagate Photoshop Cs2 295 sec 142 sec (107.7%) +
opticAL Lite-On LH-18AIP x2 recode H.264 2,648 sec 1,249 sec (112%) +
bEAUTy fEAr 1.07 80 fps 151 fps
ViDeocArD Two EVGA GeForce 8800GTXs
Quake 4 110.5 fps 196.2 fps
in SLI mode
soUnDcArD Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeGamer
cAse Modified Cooler Master 0 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%
CMStacker 830 Our current desktop test bed is a Windows XP SP2 machine, using a dual-core 2.6GHz Athlon 64 FX-60, 2GB of Corsair DDR400 RAM on an Asus
A8N32-SLI motherboard, two GeForce 7900 GTX videocards in SLI mode, a Western Digital 4000KD hard drive, a Sound Blaster X-Fi soundcard, and
Boot: 34 sec. DoWn: 9 sec.
a PC Power and Cooling Turbo Cool 850 PSU.

66 MAXIMUMPC july 2007

 SYSmark2004 SE hasn’t worked in months. other multithreading tests also went without
We did run the new SYSmark2007 Preview a hitch. So we have more faith in this rig’s
with no problems, and the Twister achieved long-term stability than in the stability of any
an overall score of 219. We also subjected machine we’ve tested since the Polywell Poly
the Twister to our new quad-core torture I680SLI-QX (March 2007), which sported a
test, Prime 95, with only one issue. On one stock-clocked quad core.
of several overnight runs, the app reported That leaves the Twister in a great spot.
a data anomaly, but it didn’t crash or lock It holds three Lab records and is much
digital Storm even managed to pretty up. On the Mach V, the Prime 95 test caused cheaper than the Mach V—and it’s stable.
up the unruly hard-drive area. a spontaneous reboot within minutes. Our —Gordon Mah UnG

july 2007 MAXIMUMPC 67

 reviews TesTed. Reviewed. veRdicTized

Dice Electronics iPod

Integration Kit
Keep your eyes on the road and your hands upon the wheel

F inding an aftermarket stereo that blends seamlessly with your car’s interior
can be an impossible dream; it’s certainly not a task you’d want to endure
just so you could plug in your iPod. For that, you should consider buying a third-
party integration kit that allows you to retrofit your factory unit.
We examined Peripheral Electronics’s iSimple iPod Adapter in our June
2007 upgrade feature story, and we’re following up that coverage with a review
of Dice Electronics’s iPod Integration Kit. Dice’s product has one cool feature
that its competitor’s doesn’t: an AUX input (in the form of a 1/8-inch stereo jack) Dice electronics’s iPod integration Kit was not compatible with
that allows you to plug an existing CD player, satellite radio tuner, or non-iPod any domestic cars or trucks at press time, but the company
MP3 player into the iPod integration module. plans to add such support “soon.”
The trunk-mounted 10-disc CD changer in our test vehicle—a 2002 VW
Cabrio—doesn’t work that way, so this feature wasn’t useful in our situation.
But we were even more disappointed to discover that we couldn’t use the but- that the more advanced your factory stereo is, the more features both prod-
tons on our factory stereo to control the iPod either. That’s one of the big selling ucts should be capable of. For example, if your factory stereo can display text
points of these integration kits, and we were able to use our stereo controls (i.e., CD and song titles, not just “TRACK 01”), flip a few DIP switches on the
with the iSimple adapter we tested last month. We also preferred the iSimple’s back of the adapter and your iPod will pass this data to your head unit for
extra-long docking cable (being 12 feet, you could pass the iPod to a passenger display. But given the fact that the Dice unit didn’t deliver the interoperability
in the backseat; Dice’s three-foot cable was just long enough to reach the cup we expected with our VW, readers should be sure any retailer they

7
holder in our Cabrio). purchase a unit from has a sat-
Both integration kits require vehicle-specific wiring harnesses, so we isfaction-guaranteed policy. dice ipod kit
weren’t able to test either adapter in a variety of vehicles, but we do know —Michael Brown $160, www.diceelectronics.com

M-Audio Studiophile AV 40 Speaker System

Funk good. Funky bad

C onsidering their $200 price tag, it’s amazing to see how many professional
features M-Audio’s Studiophile AV 40 reference monitors are packed with,
including 1/4-inch balanced inputs that can accommodate long cable runs. But
you know the company had to make some compromises—and we found out
where the moment we turned the speakers on.
At first, we attributed the low-level hum we heard from the amplifier to a
ground loop, which can occur when components with different ground poten-
tials are connected. But after connecting two other systems to the same out-
lets, we concluded the problem was with the amp. We returned the speakers to
M-Audio, and the replacement set we received was a little quieter, but we still
detected a funky buzz when we pressed our ear to the driver. If you’re using
these speakers for recording, mix-down, or other critical listening tasks, the
noise will haunt you because you won’t know if it’s coming from your instru-
ments, your mic, or some piece of outboard gear.
The AV 40s do exhibit a characteristic that is essential for any speaker
laying claim to the “studio monitor” moniker: pancake-flat frequency response
that doesn’t add to, subtract from, or otherwise color recorded music. The 20- M-audio’s Studiophile aV 40 speakers have both 1/4-inch bal-
watt-per-channel class A/B amplifier is well suited for near-field listening, but anced and rca inputs in back; there’s a 1/8-inch stereo input
if you also want to use the system for recreational listening or even gaming, and headphone jack in front.
simply flip the bass-boost switch on the back and be rewarded with just a little
more thump in the low end. Even in this mode, bass response is far short of trum, from the belch of Stephen “Doc” Kupka’s baritone sax to the crackle
what M-Audio’s subwoofer-equipped Studiophile LX4 system dishes out, but it’s and snap of Dave Garibaldi’s drum work. But we’d score these

7
impressive for monitors in this price range. speakers much higher if the
Listening to the power funk of Tower of Power’s “Oakland Stroke,” we amp were quieter. studiophile av 40
were impressed by the AV 40s’s ability to deliver the band’s full sonic spec- —Michael Brown $200, www.m-audio.com

68 MAXIMUMPC july 2007

 reviews TesTed. Reviewed. veRdicTized

SLI Madness
CrossFire? Feh! For those looking to double their GPU action,
SLI is the only game in town

G
amers who have faith that AMD/ATI FSB pushed up
can get back in the game with its to 1,333MHz and
dual-card strategy may want to wait even did a few runs
a month or three, but if you have to build at over 1,400MHz
today, SLI is the sure bet. This month we with no issues.
finally get a look at a 680i board that isn’t With perfor-
a cookie-cutter copy of earlier models and mance a nonissue,
compare it to a budget SLI board. we think the choice the MSi P6n SLi Platinum: SLi without the frills.
—Gordon Mah UnG comes down to fea-
tures. The enthusiast-
oriented features of the IN9 push it beyond the FSB CPUs, but MSI told us it’s just an advi-
abit in9 32X-MaX budget MSI board. Still this isn’t the best 680i sory. Although we had an easier time over-
If you’ve seen one Nvidia 680i reference board we’ve seen. That honor goes to Asus’s clocking to higher front-side freqs with the
board, you’ve seen them all. Not so with awesome Striker Extreme. Abit, we suspect the same can be done with
Abit’s IN9 32X-MAX board, which thumbs its the P6N SLI Platinum if you have the time to
nose at the me-too crowd. The IN9 32X- finesse it.
MAX features Nvidia’s top 680i chipset, abit in9 32x-max What’s interesting are the performance
which gets you two x16 PCI-E slots for numbers. With the RAM manually set and

9
SLI, a third full-length x8 PCI-E slot for drivE-by trUckErS the same drivers and hardware, we didn’t
graphics, and support for unannounced, Easy-to-use BIOS is still our see any major gaps. In a way, it’s like when
favorite.
unofficial 1,333MHz FSB processors. Toyota takes a Camry, slaps on some tech
We’ve nagged Abit about funky slot trUckEr hatS
and paint and relabels it a Lexus. If you’re
configurations before, but the IN9 makes Mediocre documentation;
willing to forgo power seats, power win-
no such mistakes. With dual 8800s Realtek audio doesn’t support EAX. dows, and AC, the P6N SLI Platinum is a
installed, you have access to one PCI, one fine ride.
x8 PCI-E, and one x1 PCI-E slot. The lay- $400, www.abit-usa.com
out of the IN9 is nearly flawless; our only
complaint is that our unit didn’t come with msi p6n sli platinum
an auxiliary fan to cool the voltage regula- MSi P6n SLi PLatinUM

8
Edith froSt
tors. It’s supposed to be included, but ours Make no bones about it, the MSI P6N SLI
Auto-update for drivers
was apparently lost. Platinum is a budget Core 2 board that gets should be adopted by
To make the board worthy of the “MAX” you SLI for a song and a dance. It features others.
moniker, Abit bundles in Wi-Fi, surface-mount- the cheapest chipset available with SLI: the froStEd fLakES
ed buttons, an HDMI header for audio, and a Nforce 650i SLI. Realtek audio doesn’t
support EAX.
rear-mounted CMOS reset switch, should your To make a 650i chipset, take a 680i
overclocking project go sideways. SLI and cut two SATA ports, lose support
Overclocking is one area in which the for SLI memory, cut a Gigabit Ethernet $180, www.msicomputer.com
IN9 has a big advantage over the MSI port, and lose a pair of USB
board (reviewed next). We ran the IN9 with ports. Oh, you also have to benchMarkS
a 1.86GHz Core 2 Duo E6300 with the chop one of the x16 PCI-E
slots, as well as LinkBoost, MSI P6N SLI PLatINuM abIt IN9 32X-MaX
Nforce 650I SLI Nforce 680I SLI
and settle for one of those old-
CPU SPeed/FSB (MHz) 2333/1333* 2333/1333
school manual SLI switches.
If it feels like the P6N SLI 3dMARK2001Se 38,508 38,283

Platinum is akin to a budget car 3dMARK05 14,242 14,277

with manual steering and win- 3dMARK06 9,422 9,574
dows, it is. However, step on the FeAR 1.07 (FPS) 204 209
gas and this card is plenty fast. PC MARK 2005 OVeRALL 7,089 7,215
We ran both boards reviewed PCMARK 2005 RAM 5,424 5,698
here using a 1.86GHz Core 2 PCMARK 2005 GPU 8,338 8,958
Duo E6300 mildly overclocked
PCMARK 2005 Hdd 6,845 6,563
to 2.33GHz on a 1,333MHz FSB
VALVe PARtiCLe teSt 40 37
with no problems at all. We did
Best scores are bolded. Test used two 7900 GTX cards, 1.86GHz Core 2 Duo E6300 overclocked
get a message that this board to 2.33GHz, 1KW PCPC power supply, 2GB DDR2/800 RAM.
*Limited by BIOS but can be overridden in Windows Utility
abit’s in9 is no boring reference board. doesn’t support OC’d 1,066MHz

70 MAXIMUMPC july 2007

 reviews TesTed. Reviewed. veRdicTized

Blasé about Blu-ray Burners

We review two new choices in a market that holds little interest for us

W
e’re not saying a high-definition
optical burner is a useless pur-
chase these days, but only a select
few folks can justify owning one. If data
backup is your bag, you can’t argue with
the convenience of Blu-ray’s large-capacity
discs—25GB for single layer and twice that
for double layer—but you can pitch a fit about
media costs: $20 and $40 apiece, respectively.
An external backup drive is a bargain by com-
parison. The most compelling reason we can
think of for owning a Blu-ray burner today is if
you have a high-def video camera and want
to author your own HD discs—for yourself or LaCie’s d2 is actually a rebadged panasonic drive, like the plextor and io Data burners
other folks who own a Blu-ray player, natch. we reviewed in December 2006.
Whatever your motivation, here’s what
lite-on bd triple writer lh-2b1s
we’ve learned about two of the latest models. The Triple Writer also stands out with an
—Katherine StevenSonilluminated indicator strip across its front bezel

8
BLue veLvet
that informs you of drive activity and whether SATA interface, better-than-
it involves BD, DVD, or CD media. Maximum average CD/DVD specs,
Lite-on BD tripLe theoretical write speeds for the three formats lowest price.
Writer Lh-2B1S are 2x, 12x, and 32x, respectively. A 2x BD BLue LaGoon

As far as Blu-ray burners go, Lite-On’s Triple burn speed is standard in today’s Blu-ray Still expensive, limited usefulness,
BD burns take a long time.
Writer comes across as the most forward- drives; DVD and CD speeds are typically
looking, with the simple inclusion of a serial capped at 8x and 24x, respectively. $600, www.liteon.com
ATA interface—a feature that’s been sorely In our DVD burn test, the Triple Writer
lacking in all the other Blu-ray drives we’ve wrote 4.38GB of data to a single-layer burner. The drive is encased in a LaCie-
tested. Really, it should be standard issue with DVD+R in 7:09 (min:sec), besting all previ- branded brushed-metal shell that offers both
any so-called next-gen device, as parallel sup- ously tested Blu-ray drives by a good two USB 2.0 and FireWire connectors. Roxio’s
port will only get more scarce over time. minutes. As expected, the TW was with the Easy Media Creator 8.2 comes bundled with
pack in BD-R burns, taking a leisurely 46:41 the package.
to fill a 25GB write-once disc, but its perfor- As with all the Blu-ray drives we’ve tested,
mance with rewriteable media surprised us. other than the Lite-On above, the d2 is spec’d
All the other drives we tested took approxi- to write CD, DVD, and BD at maximum
mately twice as long to write to BD-RE as speeds of 24x, 8x, and 2x, respectively. And
to BD-R—the result of a data verification not surprisingly, the d2 turned in benchmark
process. But Lite-On feels confident enough scores that were right in line with its similarly
with its Triple Writer to have disabled verifi- spec’d brethren: 9:08 (min:sec) to write to
Lite-on’s triple Writer is the only Blu-ray cation in the drive in order to increase BD- DVD+R, 45:31 to fill a 25GB single-layer BD
drive we’ve tested that sports a Sata RE write speeds. In our admittedly limited disc, and 99:38 to fill a rewriteable (BD-RE)
interface. tests, we had no problems reading the TW’s disc of the same capacity. Indeed, there is
BD-RE discs. nothing especially noteworthy about the d2,
benchmarKS In fact, taking into account the TW’s besides the fact that it costs $400 more than
relatively low price, its SATA inter- Lite-On’s Triple Writer.
Lite-On LaCie face, and its superior CD and DVD
DVD Write SpeeD AVerAge 8.95x 6.78x write speeds, the Triple Writer is
lacie d2 blu-ray drive
DVD reAD SpeeD AVerAge 9.36x 6.16x the closest thing to something we
might buy—not that we’re even

6
AcceSS time (rAnDom/Full) 138ms/216ms 159ms/305ms Barney ruBBLe
considering it.
cpu utilizAtion (8x) 31% 44% USB and FireWire interfaces
are convenient.
time to burn 22.5gb to bD-r (min:Sec) 46:41 45:31
LaCie D2 BLu-ray Drive
time to burn 22.5gb to bD-re (min:Sec) 46:36 99:39
Like the Plextor PX-B900A and the IO BurninG ruBBLe
Best scores are bolded. All tests were conducted using the latest version of Nero CD-DVD Speed.
Data BRD-UM2/U that we reviewed We should pay this much money
Our test bed is a Windows XP SP2 machine, using a dual-core 2.6GHz Athlon 64 FX-60, 2GB of
Corsair DDR400 RAM on an Asus A8N-SLI motherboard, an ATI X1950 Pro videocard, a Western to watch the paint dry during Blu-ray burns?!
Digital 4000KD hard drive, and a PC Power and Cooling Turbo Cool 850 PSU. in December 2006, the d2 is actually
a Panasonic-manufactured Blu-ray $1,000, www.lacie.com

72 MAXIMUMPC july 2007

 reviews TesTed. Reviewed. veRdicTized

Corsair 16GB
Flash Voyager
This little key can swallow more data than a
dual-layer DVD disc

A in’t technology wonderful? Just a few years ago our mouths were agape at
1GB USB thumb drives that cost $500. Yet here we have Corsair pushing the
16GB mark for $140—a mere $8.75 per GB.
The Flash Voyager looks the same as previous models, except for its color. Corsair pushes the 16GB boundary with its affordable Flash
The standard-speed device is blue, while the faster GT model is red. Although Voyager key.
the rubberized case gives the unit a fairly rugged feel, we have torn through the
rubber key-ring loop on older units. Oddly, no driver or encryption software was
included with our device. Corsair normally bundles the open-source TrueCrypt JPG files. Not pretty. Payback came in read speeds, as the Flash Voyager aced
software with its products, which is passable though inconvenient. the small-, medium-, and large-file reads, achieving speeds equal to those of
In performance, the fat Flash Voyager is an interesting story. Of the seven the fastest keys we’ve benchmarked.
keys we’ve tested recently, the 16GB Flash Voyager is the second fastest in So what you have is a key that reads files very quickly and is pretty good
small-file writes, taking about eight minutes to write 10,315 files. The stupen- at writing small files but could take a minute longer than a hard-disk unit and
dously fast Kingston 4GB Secure Traveler took three minutes, while the rest of almost four times longer than the Flash Voyager GT to write large files, which
the pack clocked in with scores of 20 minutes or more. is odd because a 16GB key seems as though it were made to write huge ISO
The Flash Voyager’s biggest weakness is in writing medium and large and image files, not read gigabytes of text files. We don’t think the medium-
files. The key took 4:10 (min:sec) to write about 2GB of large files, which was and large-file write performance is terminal, but it certainly doesn’t
almost a minute slower than even the hard-disk-based Verbatim Store ’n’ Go reach the yee-haw speeds of its
we reviewed last month.
The 16GB Flash Voyager also trailed the Verbatim in writing medium-size
red-cased brethren.
—Gordon Mah UnG
corsair 16GB flash
$180, www.corsairmicro.com
8

Thermaltake 7-Inch
Touch Screen
LCD Monitor
A secondary LCD can sometimes be better than
a real monitor

Y ou’re still using one monitor? That is so old school we’re not even going to
offer a snarky comment about it. Nope. Not a word. But if you don’t have the
desk space for a second display, Thermaltake has you covered. The company’s
seven-inch LCD monitor is an awesome addition to your rig—with the caveat
You will squeal with delight the first time this seven-inch
that unless you have a matching Thermaltake case, you’re likely SOL.
display pops out of its enclosure, eagerly awaiting your
As a supplemental display, Thermaltake’s seven-incher is almost a full-
greasy fingers.
fledged monitor, although the unit’s small size and meager 1280x1024 resolu-
tion somewhat distance it from what we would typically use. The display itself
is a retractable touch screen—something you rarely see on car displays, let And controlling your computer by tapping your finger is simply too fun. Cooler
alone computer displays. still, you can plug standard RCA cables into the back of the unit. Control a DVD
Installing the display is as easy as stuffing the device into a seven-inch playing on your main monitor using the touch screen; then switch to a game of
drive bay, wherein we find its biggest fault. Do you have a seven-inch drive Wii Tennis during the boring parts. Life just doesn’t get much better than that.
bay in your case? We sure don’t—not in any of the chassis in our Lab, save for We’ll be waiting with bated breath for Thermaltake to release a version of
Thermaltake-branded designs. Unless you’re skilled with a hacksaw, purchas- this monitor that isn’t tied to its cases. (Though we highly doubt that day will ever
ing this monitor will require you to pick up a new case as well, which is a total arrive.) You’re certainly getting more than you bargained for with the
letdown since it’s such a sweet device. seven-inch display, just prepare
Simply put, although it’s pricey, the Thermaltake display is light-years
beyond anything else out there, save for actual touch-screen-based computers.
for some additional purchases.
—daVId MUrPhY
thermaltake monitor
$350, www.thermaltakeusa.com
8
74 MAXIMUMPC july 2007
 reviews TesTed. Reviewed. veRdicTized

Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000

Hard Drive cheese and
Whoever said size isn’t everything was lying to you, trust us crackers! This
drive will hold a

H oly hell, man. We have been waiting for this day for a long time, and Hitachi load of music,
is the first hard-drive manufacturer out of the gate to meet our terabyte- video, and...
size storage needs. Yes, that’s right. A terabyte. One thousand gigabytes stuffed umm... anything
into a hard drive, or in this case, a Deskstar. else.
For those keeping score at home, that’s 250GB more than the current
storage leader, Seagate’s 750GB Barracuda drive. And while the differences
aren’t quite as dramatic in terms of speed, Hitachi’s 7K1000 storage monster
still beats out the Seagate in our HD Tach benchmarks. 77.9MB/s, it’s also less than one-sixth the capacity of the 7K1000.
The Deskstar 7K1000 drive sports five platters with 200GB of storage Looking at random access times—a measure of a hard drive’s ability to
apiece, which doesn’t give the device an amazing areal density, especially pull information from a variety of different spots on the disks—Hitachi’s tera-
compared to its smaller peers. In theory, drives with a higher areal density per- byte drive again tops the Barracuda, by only 0.3 of a millisecond, but a differ-
form better, but not so when it comes to the 7K1000. We recorded a whopping ence nonetheless. As one might expect, the Raptor drive retains its speed-king
72.7MB/s for the drive’s average read position. You’d merely need to RAID seven of them together to get the capacity
BenChMarks test, which curb-stomps the Seagate’s of the 7K1000.
now-paltry In a comparison of apples and oranges—the Raptor’s speed versus the
HitacHi Deskstar seagate BarracuDa
66MB/s. Barracuda’s size—Hitachi’s terabyte drive is nothing short of a watermelon. It’s
Size 1,000GB 750GB
While Western the fastest of all the drives in its class, of which there is one, and even tops the
Random acceSS (mS) 13.1 13.4 Digital’s Raptor drives that hover around the meager 500GB mark. Toss in the tera-
aveRage Read (mB/S) 72.7 66 drive tops that byte of storage, and you get an
BuRSt Speed (mB/S)

Best scores are bolded.

206.9 236.9 score with a
random access
speed of
absolute winner.
—DaviD Murphy
DeSkSTar 7k1000
$400, www.hitachi.com
9
MAXIMUM PC
KICKASS

BFG 8600 GTS OC cards based

on the 8600
We’re stifling a yawn over this cheaper DX10 card GTs offer hDcp
decryption on
both links, so you

W e thought DirectX 10 was going to be a crucial factor by now, but Vista is

so screwed up from a gaming perspective we can’t recommend installing
it. And then there’s the issue of high-def video playback to consider. Oy vey!
can watch copy-
protected Blu-ray
and hD DvD mov-
If you have just $200 to spend on your next videocard, don’t see a Vista
ies on 30-inch
upgrade in your near future, and don’t think Microsoft will relent and release
monitors.
DX10 for XP, you’ll want to compare Nvidia’s GeForce 8600 GTS to ATI’s Radeon
X1950 Pro. In many cases, cards based on the latter are cheaper than those
based on the former, leaving you with enough money to buy a new game.
Prices aside, which card is the better value? The answer depends on what GTS’s 32) and a 256-bit memory interface (compared to the 8800 GTS’s 128-
you need from your videocard. In terms of gaming performance, the Radeon bit memory path). These specs help ATI’s part beat Nvidia’s to a bloody pulp in
X1950 Pro is the hands-down winner. Although it has lower clock rates on both FEAR (outrunning it by a 39-percent margin at 1920x1200 resolution) and ren-
its GPU and memory, the chip has dering Supreme Commander at least tolerable at that same high resolution.
more shader units (48 to the 8600 We didn’t see much of a difference in DVD-decoding performance
BenChMarks
between the two cards, but the new PureVideo HD engine in Nvidia’s GPU
ATI RADEON X1950 PRO BFG 8600 GTS OC
makes it the clear favorite if you’re looking to play Blu-ray or HD DVD movies on
3dmaRk06 game 1 (FpS) 9.7 7.1
your machine. The 8600 GTS will relieve the CPU of more of the high-definition
decoding chores, which is an important consideration if your machine is outfit-
3dmaRk06 game 2 (FpS) 8.6 7.9
Quake 4 (FpS) 42.4 36.7
ted with a less-powerful processor.
FeaR (FpS) 32 23.0 Considering our low opinion of the next-gen optical-drive formats and the
SupReme commandeR (FpS) 20.7 14.7 utter insignificance of Vista (and, by unfortunate extension, DirectX
10), we just can’t get very excit-

7
Best scores are bolded. All benchmarks run at 1920x1200 with 4x AA and 8x aniso. FEAR tested with soft
shadows on; Quake 4 tested in High Quality. Cards were installed in an EVGA nForce 680i SLI motherboard
with a 2.93GHz Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 CPU and 2GB of Corsair DDR2 RAM. ed about the 8600 GTS. BFG 8600 GTS OC
—Michael Brown $220, www.bfgtech.com

76 MAXIMUMPC july 2007

 reviews TesTed. Reviewed. veRdicTized

Media Player Playoff

2"
Craving innovation? Look beyond the iPod

M
edia players—other than Apple’s Unlike the Zune’s silly wire-
largely overrated iPods, that is—are less-sharing capability, the Sansa 3.75"
rapidly approaching commodity Connect’s networking feature
status. Cowon and SanDisk have taken very is useful, even if you’re not
we dig the cowon’s D2’s comprehensive file-format
different approaches by adding features that interested in sharing or renting
support, and the display is gorgeous; it’s just not big
set their products apart from the hundreds music. The device can join any
enough to be a touch screen.
of others crowding store shelves. Wi-Fi network (with support for
—Michael Brown WEP, WPA, or WPA2 security,
but not Enterprise authentica- We dig the wireless networking feature
SanDiSk SanSa tion) and it uses two free Yahoo services: and it sounds fabulous at the bitrates and file
connect 4GB Launchcast Internet radio and the Flickr formats it does support. SanDisk tells us they
Microsoft’s idea of letting people share their photo-sharing service. could support lossless formats with a firmware
favorite songs using a wireless connection The Internet radio service is particu- update, so we’re hoping to see that in the next
was as botched in execution as it was bril- larly cool because it uses the Zing Mobile go-round.
liant in conception. SanDisk’s Sansa Connect Entertainment Engine to automatically create
makes much more sense, although it requires playlists based on the songs you’ve listened cowon D2
users who want to share to cough up the $12- to. This works much like the Internet services Cowon provides a wealth of choice where
to $15-per-month subscription fee for Yahoo’s Pandora and Last.fm do on the PC, and it’s a SanDisk sets severe limits: The D2 supports
Music Unlimited to Go service. terrific way to discover new artists. not only MP3, WMA, and secure WMA, but
Although the Sansa Connect sounds also OGG, FLAC, and even WAV.
very good, we do wish SanDisk hadn’t limit- But if you’re planning to fill your player
ed the player to just MP3, WMA, and secure with losslessly encoded tracks, drop the
WMA audio formats at maximum bitrates of extra $30 for the model with 4GB of flash
320Kb/s VBR. We find ourselves increas- memory. Both players include an SD slot,
ingly enamored with the pristine quality of which renders their storage capacity virtually
losslessly encoded music (FLAC, WMA loss- unlimited, but 2GB is just not enough for a
less, etc.), which it doesn’t support at all. We large library of tracks encoded with even a
do understand the file-size drawbacks: The lossy codec.
Tower of Power tune “What Is Hip?” requires The D2 doesn’t have anything as unique
3”

about 8MB of storage when encoded (using as wireless networking, but it does offer
EAC and LAME) in MP3 format at 320Kb/s several features the Sansa Connect does
VBR, compared to nearly 36MB when not, including video support (320x240 reso-
encoded using EAC and FLAC. lution), voice recording, a text reader, and an
FM radio tuner. The D2 also features a slick
sandisk sansa connect touch screen, but navigating a GUI in three
square inches is awkward with the included

9
Down to the niGhtcluB stylus and nearly impossible with your fin-
Wireless networking, gertips. (The stylus can also serve as a kick-
2.25"
Internet radio, great user stand while you’re watching videos.)
interface.
the control wheel and buttons on the The D2 is supremely versatile, it sounds
Sansa connect have been improved in copacaBana fabulous, and it’s certainly priced right. Oh,
AXIMUM PC
every way over previous Sansa models. Limited codec support, no what we wouldn’t give to trade its highfalutin
support for lossless formats. M
KICKASS
touch screen for a simple control wheel and
a couple of buttons.
specs $250, www.sandisk.com

SanSa connect cowon D2 cowon d2

CapaCity 4GB Flash plus MicroSD slot 2GB Flash plus SD slot

8
audio File Formats MP3, WMA, Secure WMA MP3, OGG, FLAC, WAV, WMA, Secure WMA
lookinG for SoMe tuSh
max audio Bit rate MP3: 320Kb/s VBR 320Kb/s VBR
Support for all types of
Fm radio tuner No Yes media, including lossless
Video File Formats N/A WMV 9, MPEG 4 audio formats.
image File Formats JPEG, PNG JPEG
puSh your tuSh
sCreen size (inChes) 2.2 2.5
Not enough built-in memory.
touCh sCreen No Yes
Wi-Fi 802.11b/g N/A
$190, www.cowonamerica.com

78 MAXIMUMPC july 2007

 reviews TESTED. REVIEWED. VERDICTIZED

Jabra S5010 Speaker Dock

It’s two, two, two brands in one!

Y ou might know the Jabra brand name from the company’s comprehen-
sive lineup of telephone headsets, but designing a tabletop speaker
system is vastly different than building the tiny drivers in a headset. Jabra
realized this and forged a partnership with Klipsch, one of the best speaker
designers around.
The result of this collaboration is the cobranded Jabra S5010, a
powered speaker dock that works with just about any music device, from
an iPod to a mobile phone to a PC. The speakers are the most important
factor in this equation, and Klipsch’s deliver plenty of bass and far better Jabra’s S5010 speaker dock takes an agnostic approach to
highs than Cambridge SoundWorks’s portable PlayDock Zen ($200). But for audio-player support.
the money, we think Creative’s surprisingly good GigaWorks T20 speakers
($100) are a better sonic value. cable inside it. Jabra provides one cable with a 2.5mm stereo plug on one
The dock is equipped with a mini USB port that’s supposed to charge end and a 3.5mm stereo plug on the other, one cable with stereo 3.5mm plugs
any device plugged into it, but it didn’t work with our Creative Zen Vision: M, on both ends, and a cable with mini USB plugs on both ends. But when you
and we couldn’t find mini USB cables that were compatible with our video plug in the USB cable, its L-shaped head blocks the 2.5mm stereo jack. Doh!
iPod or BlackJack smartphone. We couldn’t play music from the BlackJack Fortunately, there’s a 3.5mm stereo jack on the back of the cabinet.
either because the phone has a nonstandard headphone jack and we didn’t The S5010 doesn’t sound bad enough for us to slam it, but it doesn’t
have an adapter. sound good enough to warrant a recommendation, especially with the connec-
Removable neoprene panels in the cradle and on the back of the dock tor annoyances.

7
hide a bay containing a 2.5mm audio jack and the aforementioned mini USB —MICHAEL BROWN
port. The panel has notches on three sides and a hole in the middle to allow S5010 SPEAKER DOCK
cables to emerge, and the bay is large enough that you can coil unused $150, www.jabra.com

Razer ProTone m100

Earphones
Better than your average buds

M P3-player manufacturers bundle such crappy earbuds with their products

that we sometimes wish they’d put nothing in the box and credit the sav-
ings to the price of the player. But then we come back to Earth and realize that
At the risk of damning
Razer’s ProTone m100
those buds are so utterly cheap that omitting them would likely save us only a earbuds with faint
buck or two. praise, these $40
If you’re still suffering with factory earbuds because you can’t swing earphones are many
the lofty price tag of M-Audio’s IE-20 XB reference earphones, Shure’s E4gs, times better than
or another high-end product, give Razer’s ProTone m100s a listen. They don’t whatever came with
approach the sonic heights of our favorites, but they’ll set you back only 40 your MP3 player.
bucks—and the package includes an attractive nylon carry pouch and an air-
line adapter.
The m100s have plenty of bottom end, but it’s not the tight, punchy bass
that makes you boogie to the beat. While auditioning these buds to the sound
of Tower of Power’s power-funk classic “What Is Hip?” we noticed how the
unrelenting series of sixteenth notes from Rocco Prestia’s electric bass blurred three high-hat accents came through with enough energy to shred our ear-
together because the earphones just couldn’t keep up. But we’d rather have a drums. This will be less of a problem if you’re listening to compressed MP3s as
bit of boom and bloom to our bass than no low-frequency response at all, as is opposed to losslessly encoded tracks because those high frequencies will roll
too common with cheap earphones. off much sooner.
The m100s proved more adept at delivering high frequencies, especially Since the m100s fit in your ear canal (you can choose from three plug
with instruments in the upper registers (we’re thinking of the trumpets and alto sizes), they do a good job of isolating outside noise. All things consid-
sax in Tower of Power’s almighty horn section). You will want to monitor your ered, these earphones deliver
volume levels, however, because certain frequencies cut through the mix like
a knife. While we were listening to “Down to the Nightclub,” Dave Garibaldi’s
plenty of bang for the buck.
—MICHAEL BROWN
RAZER PROTONE M100
$40, www.razerzone.com
8
80 MAXIMUMPC JULY 2007
 reviews TesTed. Reviewed. veRdicTized

Headset Hullabaloo
Three headsets enter the ring, one barely crawls out

A
great headset must not only deliver is dull as dishwater,
great-sounding music, dialogue, and musically speaking:
sound effects, but also be capable of These headphones
capturing the human voice with a mic that exhibit very limited
can distinguish between a subtle whisper and dynamic range. The Tritton aX360’s machined-aluminum earcups are attractive, but
undesirable breathing noise while also reject- The mic, on the the earmuffs on the other side have an annoying tendency to fall off.
ing extraneous environmental sounds and other hand, is eas-
remain comfortable over long stretches of ily the best of the three we tested. It made Genius hs-04u
time. Few headsets do all these tasks well. the best recording of our voice, and it did an The Genius HS-04U plugs into your PC’s
—Michael Brown extraordinary job of rejecting extraneous noise USB port, instead of your soundcard’s
from nearby case fans and our own boisterous analog speaker output and mic input, so it
TheBooM QuieT keyboard taps. This headset is extremely light, bypasses any EAX or OpenAL audio effects
We generally don’t like headphones that in spite of its rugged construction, and proved that game developers might have painstak-
use active-noise cancellation because these to be very comfortable during several hours of ingly programmed into the software. What you
devices mask external noise by producing gaming. But for this kind of money, you should get instead—after installing a driver—is what
noise of their own. But we decided to make be able to get it all. Genius calls “Virtual Dolby.”
an exception for theBoom Quiet because of We’re assuming Genius meant to say
the lofty promises the company makes for its TriTTon audio XTreMe 360 “Dolby Headphone” because the packaging
noise-canceling mic. Tritton’s headset delivers true surround bears Dolby’s trademark Double-D-and-head-
The headphones do a superb job of sound, just like the Turtle Beach Ear Force phone symbol (accompanied by the phrase
screening out fan noise, but that telltale noise- HPA2 we recommended in June. It also offers “Dolby headphone certificate,” no less). To our
canceling hiss is there when you aren’t listen- a feature that the HPA2 doesn’t: a powered
ing to any other audio. Worse, theBoom Quiet Dolby Digital decoder module with optical
and coaxial digital inputs, plus a port for
plugging in a second set of Tritton head-
phones. Cool!
This feature renders the AX360 useful
for watching movies on a DVD player or
gaming on a console system, but it doesn’t
do much for PC use. Tritton provides an
analog adapter cable, so you can plug
the headset directly into your soundcard,
but the AX360’s mic isn’t as good as the
HPA2’s, and it’s leagues behind theBoom
Quiet in terms of rejecting background The Genius hs-04u is made of plastic,
noise. The Tritton also can’t match the but it sounds like tin.
HPA2 in terms of audio fidelity in music,
movies, and games, but it sounds far better knowledge, there is no such thing as Virtual
than the BQ and the utter waste of plastic Dolby, but it doesn’t matter because this head-
that is the Genius. set sounds like crap. As for Genius’s claim that
Surround-sound support is a welcome its noise-canceling mic is “military grade,” well,
TheBoom Quiet has a handy volume con- feature, but the Turtle Beach product bundles our voice did sound as though we were serv-
trol and inline mute button on its cable. it in a better package. ing a tour of duty onboard a submarine.

theboom quiet tritton ax360 headset genius hs-04u

6 7 4
BooMin’ Bass Thin lizzy Genius
Fantastic noise-rejecting Comes with a Dolby Digital In-line volume control and a
mic, extremely comfortable, decoder that supports two mute button.
solid construction. sets of headphones.
BooMin’ BaGhdad lizzy Borden iMBecile
Limited range, especially at the So-so sound, sloppy Lousy sound, even for cheap
high end; overly expensive for the construction. headphones; the mic is worse.
musicality it provides.

$275, www.boomquiet.com $120, www.trittontechnologies.com $50, www.geniusnet.com

82 MAXIMUMPC july 2007

 reviews TESTED. REVIEWED. VERDICTIZED

Accolade Duet Projection

Screen
Epson lets you have it both ways

Y our current video projector has a 4:3 aspect ratio, but you’re planning to
move up to a high-def model with a 16:9 aspect ratio next year. In the
meantime, you need to replace your projection screen, which your two-year-
The absence
of support in
the center of
old recently mistook for an artist’s canvas. Quite the pickle, eh? the screen
Epson has an easy solution for your dilemma: Its unique Accolade Duet could cause
projection screen can deliver either aspect ratio from the same package. it to sag over
Instead of unrolling up or down from a horizontal position, the Duet is verti- time.
cally oriented and opens to the left and right. Open it (one-handed) to the
first position and it becomes a 65-inch screen with a standard-definition 4:3
aspect ratio; open it to the second position and it’s an 80-inch screen with
an HD aspect ratio of 16:9.
The screen fabric is a typical matte white and can be washed with a
rag moistened with water. In our test environment, the Duet was slightly
less reflective than our Draper Piper portable screen, but it exhibited excel-
lent off-axis viewing, which is important if you’re entertaining a large audi-
ence that can’t all be seated directly in front of the screen. the wall and again pair it with the tripod to take your show on the road.
The Duet’s screen clips onto its tripod stand, so you can carry both items The fact that the Duet is $100 cheaper than the Piper makes up
as a single unit, but you won’t want to lug it far: It weighs 27 pounds (more than for the fact that it’s not quite as bright; in fact, we think we’ve

9
twice as much as the Piper). The tripod contributes to a rather large footprint: found our new favorite projec-
33 inches deep by 37 inches wide. If you need to keep the screen closer to your tion screen. ACCOLADE DUET
wall, you can mount it there—Epson provides the necessary hardware in the —MICHAEL BROWN $250, www.epson.com
box. You can still close the screen when it’s mounted, and you can take it off MAXIMUM PC
KICKASS

Toshiba TDP-FF1AU
Video Projector
Now we understand how it can run on batteries!

W ith apologies to the Beach Boys, wouldn’t it be nice if there were an inex-
pensive video projector that was small enough to fit in the palm of your
hand yet capable of throwing a 68-inch image? And while we’re dreaming, how 5.5” wide by 2.4”
about giving it the option of operating on a Li-Ion battery. Oh, wouldn’t it be nice? deep x 4.9” high

Toshiba’s go-anywhere TDP-FF1AU delivers on much of that dream.

There’s just one crushing problem: This projector is about as bright as a black
hole. OK, maybe that’s too harsh, but with a brightness rating of just 400 ANSI
lux, you’ll need a room that can be darkened to pitch black in order to be satis-
fied with this tiny device’s output.
If you can’t do that, you’ll want a projection screen with both high con-
trast (in order to enhance the display of black and other dark colors) and high
gain (in order to achieve maximum brightness). High-contrast screens, however, A tiny footprint and an ultra-quiet cooling fan are among the few
typically have negative gain ratings. This is because they use gray or silver upsides to this DLP projector’s dim image.
fabric, which renders dark areas of the image closer to black while keeping
bright areas of the picture about the same as they would be when displayed on included carry bag, but a vertical seam right down the middle of it remains
a matte-white screen. visible when in use.
Toshiba bundles a rigid 23-inch tabletop screen with the projector, As a business tool, we think Toshiba’s projector is a better value than the more
which is manufactured with a high-gain silver coating on its display side. than twice-as-expensive Casio XJ-S35 we reviewed in May (which is also powered
It proved capable of reflecting an image in a room darkened only by mini- by DLP technology), but we can’t recommend it for home-theater or gaming
blinds, which is something neither our usual Draper Piper test screen nor applications unless you can abso-
Epson’s Accolade Duet (reviewed above) could do. Toshiba’s screen, how-
ever, is really useful only for business presentations: It folds up to fit in the
lutely darken your media room.
—MICHAEL BROWN
TDP-FF1AU PROJECTOR
$700, www.toshiba.com
7
84 MAXIMUMPC JULY 2007
 reviews TesTed. Reviewed. veRdicTized

CyberLink
PowerDirector 6
Powerful yet constrained

P
owerDirector 6’s powerful features
are handcuffed by a mildly frustrating
interface. Unfortunately, the app just
won’t let you easily tweak things, which is
strange because the product seems aimed
at pleasing the button-mashers.
CyberLink embedded a simple process
that allows users to upload rendered videos
straight to YouTube, so you can tell who the
company is marketing this product to. We
easily uploaded a slide show we created
using a wizard, though we did encounter
some problems with this featurette.
In addition to one-click (well, three)
uploads of your YouTube feature,
We found Powerdirector 6 better than its competitors at handling commercial
PowerDirector 6 includes a host of pleas-
VoB files.
ing video effects, but again, the clumsy
interface forces you to hunt around for
the proper controls. If you apply an effect and that’s a multistep process. It’s almost as to tape, but that’s it. There’s no Blu-ray or
directly to a video in the timeline, you can’t though CyberLink gets paid by the click. HD DVD disc support nor a way to master
simply right-click on the track to remove it. But enough about the bad stuff. The the disc so that it will play on an HD DVD
You have to select the track, hit the Effect software does include some pretty neat fea- deck using a standard single- or dual-layer
button, and uncheck all of the effects you tures, such as the PiP effect, which lets you DVD encoded at a higher resolution.
don’t want to see. easily move a still image or video across the PowerDirector 6 does excel in VOB
It’s a minor quibble, but we struggled screen. There’s no key-frame ability, but the editing of commercial discs. While
with the interface more than we expected to method CyberLink uses to move, rotate, and Adobe Premiere Elements 3.0 is unreli-
resize objects in a video is probably easier able in its handling of commercial VOB
for newbies to understand. And honestly, files and Pinnacle Studio 10.7 has issues,
do you really need to key-frame the thought PowerDirector 6 easily imported a VOB
bubble over someone’s head in your Blind file ripped from a commercial disc. That’s
Date spoof video? It’s also worth noting that of great value if you want to recut The
the subtitle engine can import .SRT subtitle Godfather: Part III to remove all of Sophia
files. Unfortunately, subtitles can’t simply be Coppola’s scenes.
turned on or off; they’re rendered directly Whether PowerDirector 6 is for you
into the video. depends on how far you want to go. If you
HDV editing is now included as well. want a quick-hit editor, it has more than
We captured video from a Canon HV10 enough to keep you happy. If you expect
HDV camcorder in PowerDirector 6 with to get a little more medieval with your
no hitches. Although one of the primary edits, you’d be better served by Pinnacle
The auto slide show tends to cut off scene-detection methods did not work for Studio 10.6.
people’s heads but offers no easy way to us, post-capture scene detection effec- —Gordon Mah UnG
correct this problem. tively diced up our video for us. That’s
certainly better than Adobe Premiere
Elements 3.0, which doesn’t preview HDV powerdirector 6
with a product that should be user-friendly. video capture or have any post-capture

7
Michael corleone
The updated slide-show wizard, in particular, scene detection. Likewise, Pinnacle’s
annoyed us. If you autocreate a slide show Studio 10.7 requires that you activate Best program for VOB han-
dling and subtitle support.
but don’t like the result (for example, every- scene detection. It doesn’t cost anything,
one’s head is cropped off), you can’t easily but we shouldn’t be subjected to the has- Mary corleone
modify the slide show to fix the problem. sle. One of PowerDirector 6’s weaknesses Awkward button placement.
The only thing you can do is keep applying is how it exports HDV video. You can cre-
different templates to see how they look— ate an AVI file at high res or output it back $90, www.cyberlink.com

86 MAXIMUMPC july 2007

 reviews TesTed. Reviewed. veRdicTized

Expensive Music-Making
Making your own jams is an awesome, and awesomely expensive, hobby

H
ey there, you fancy musically inclined face, same ol’ note
person, you. We’ve reviewed a few input. Only now, you
bare-bones, low-priced music apps, get to contend with
and now it’s time to tackle the big guns. slowdown and finicky
Yes, that’s right. These programs will set you stability as a result of
back a pretty penny—60,000 pretty pennies, the extras.
in fact. They have everything the budding As a stand-alone
composer or aspiring DJ needs, but are they product, you really
worth the cash for the average Janes and can’t get much bet-
Joes of the computing world? ter than Finale 2007,
—Dave Murphy but only if you’re a
first-timer to the expe-
Finale 2007 rience. Composition
Staff paper be damned, we say. This noobs and people who
Beethoven-in-a-box is one of the most just want to transcribe
editing a track in ableton live 6 can be as simple as mixing
popular music-creation utilities available “Brick” might best
and matching blocks of loops.
for the Windows platform, and it’s easy benefit from Finale’s
to see why. A nigh-limitless level of help- less feature-soaked
fulness and customizability has existed (and one-third cheaper) cousin, Allegro. start at the top. With just a few clicks of an
throughout Finale’s many incarnations, in-application help system, we were up and
and the 2007 edition of the score-creator running with the program’s Operator add-
ups the ante even further. The program not finale 2007 on, creating notes and beats that sound
only blends elements of sound-board mix- as though they were pulled straight from a

8
ing directly into its notation interface but rocking the suburbs Keith Schofield music video. Awesome.
also comes with a large collection of help- It couldn’t be easier to cre- While the program references a number
ate music in any shape or
ful videos—gone are the days of having to form you want. of functions that are a lot to swallow for a
scour through PDF help files just to figure rocking the FarM beginner—filter frequencies, resonances,
out the basics. Taking out a second mortgage waveshapes—the simple interface encour-
Our biggest criticism of Finale, aside just to make piano jams isn’t very fun. ages the ol’ “try it” approach to learning the
Go find a cheap copy of Finale 2006.
from its outrageous price, is that the program. That said, audio enthusiasts will
program hardly seems like much of an $600, www.finalemusic.com find plenty of opportunity for experimenta-
upgrade from Finale 2006. Granted, Finale tion under Live 6’s hood: You can create
2007 includes the awesome Garritan your music using a MIDI-attached keyboard,
Personal Orchestra, which gives you way ableton live 6 directly edit the MIDI notes within your
more realistic MIDI sound than your stan- You can do so much with Live 6, it’s hard loops, and then change up your beats with a
dard MIDI samples. Still, Finale 2007 is to know exactly where to begin describing ton of plugin-style effects.
what Finale’s always been—same ol’ inter- this masterful software sequencer. So we’ll Live 6 would benefit from a better
navigation system to simplify accessing its
many functions, and the drab gray program
needs some Apple interface treatment. But
these are paltry concerns for such a sweet,
learner-friendly music application.

ableton live 6

9
light-switch rave
Fun to tinker around with, even
if you have no audio-creation
experience whatsoever.
paciFiers
Could stand an interface
overhaul; a few more tutorials
MAXIMUM PC
KICKASS
would be nice.

$600 box, $500 download

if only history’s greatest composers had had access to Finale 2007’s music tools. www.ableton.com

88 MAXIMUMPC july 2007

 reviews TesTed. Reviewed. veRdicTized

The Elder Scrolls IV:

Shivering Isles
Oblivion with a healthy dose of laughing gas

M ost of us at Maximum PC really dug Oblivion—some of us could do little

else until we’d “finished” it, including sleep, eat, shower, or hit our dead-
lines…. When it was finally over, we went through a little withdrawal depres-
sion—there just wasn’t another game out or even on the horizon that appealed
to us as much.
We dabbled with fan-created add-ons and some of the game’s pay-to-
play content, but they barely scratched our exploration itch. Finally, the first
official expansion is here, and it was worth the wait.
In Shivering Isles you gain entrance to the Realm of Sheogorath—the Sheogorath is resplendent with detail and chock-full of impressive-
stomping grounds of the particularly nutty Daedric Prince of Madness—and looking (but not so tough) baddies to keep your sword-arm swinging.
defend the land from “certain destruction.” OK, so the role of champion isn’t
exactly new, but the landscape certainly is. Sheogorath is unlike
anything we saw in Cyrodiil, and even at one-quarter its size, there’s Well, almost. Aside from one nasty fight, the new content’s a bit too easy.
a lot to see. (If you’re looking for a challenge, it’s probably best to create a new character.)
Not only are the flora and fauna of Sheogorath unique, but so too are its The add-on is really more about dialogue and politics than unbridled brawling,
denizens. Sheogorath is generously populated with new NPCs, quests, sub- which might not be for everyone. And there’s not enough high-level kit to be
quests, and baddies looking to split open your skull with their axes, swords, found, either.
arrows, and other implements of destruction. The main quest took us about 20 However, the writing for this expansion kept us entertained throughout the
hours to beat, and there’s about another 10 hours of “smell the roses” content adventure. The scads of laugh-out-loud moments in this add-on again

8
tossed in for those that like to take the scenic route. You can play the game made personal hygiene optional
shivering isles
with a new character or tackle it with your existing hero—either way, the game until we finished our quest.
will adapt to match your skill level. —Steve Klett $40, www.theelderscrolls.com
ESRB: M

Infernal
The gaming equivalent of a David Goyer action movie

Y ou never want to get on the bad side of God, especially when you’re one
of his elite angels. That’s what happened to Ryan Lennox (who bears
more than a striking resemblance to Ryan Reynolds), the rugged protagonist
of Infernal. You step into his forsaken boots as a fallen angel who is look-
ing for redemption—but still isn’t afraid to kick ass and take names. After
signing a contract with the devil, you’ll do dirty work for both good and
evil, smiting rogue monks, heretics, and other supernatural menaces in this
single-player-only fragfest.
The game takes you through monasteries, ironworks, and even an
aircraft carrier—varied locations that ensure you won’t notice the repetitive
action. The fast-paced gunfights take a cue from other established third-per-
son shooters: We jumped, dived, and circle-strafed while blasting away at an
endless supply of gimpy minions. Infernal even has a unique gameplay gim-
though not as effective as the no-look punch, the no-look shot is
mick—using built-up mana power, you can unleash a hellfire attack that dra-
still pretty flashy.
matically augments your current weapon. We also dug the ability to harvest
souls, which gives you upgrades and lets you reclaim health.
The game’s pace is hindered only by its mazelike levels. We felt very Mercenaries and mini-bosses were no pushovers—we needed to score head
restricted within the confined space of the maps and got bored with the shots and use cover to avoid losing our own noggin. The game includes plenty
countless puzzles requiring us to find keys and alternate routes through of exciting weapons, ranging from RPGs to plasma rifles, and everything gets
passageways. Even worse, we found ourselves occasionally stuck between kicked up a notch when you enable hellfire. Soft bloom and subtle lighting
objects while using the game’s cover system. There’s no harsher punish- effects had us convinced that the developers went all out with the
ment than being trapped in a dark hallway, stuck to a barrel while goons visuals. Too bad we can’t say
spew vulgarities at you from afar.
When it comes to shooting and killing, Infernal doesn’t disappoint.
the same about the gameplay.
—NormaN ChaN
infernal
$40, www.infernalgame.com
7
ESRB: M
90 MAXIMUMPC july 2007
 WIN Rig of the Month
If chosen, your rig will be featured before all the world in Maximum PC—
and you’ll win a $500 gift certificate for Buy.com

To EnTEr: Your submission packet must contain your name, street address, and daytime phone number; no fewer than
three high-res JPEGs (minimum size 1024x768) of your modified PC; and a 300-word description of what your PC represents
and how it was modified. Emailed submissions should be sent to rig@maximumpc.com. Snail mail submissions should be sent
to Rig of the Month, c/o Maximum PC, 4000 Shoreline Court, Suite 400, South San Francisco, CA 94080.
The judges will be Maximum PC editors, and they will base their decision on the following criteria: creativity and craftsmanship.

onE EnTry pEr housEhold. Your contest entry will be valid until (1) six months after its submission or (2) October
15, 2007, whichever date is earlier. Each month a winner will be chosen from the existing pool of valid entries, and featured
in the Rig of the Month department of the magazine. The final winner in this contest will be announced in the December 2007
issue. Each of the judging criteria (creativity and craftsmanship) will be weighed equally at 50 percent. By entering this contest
you agree that Future US, Inc. may use your name and your mod’s likeness for promotional purposes without further payment.
All prizes will be awarded and no minimum number of entries is required. Prizes won by minors will be awarded to their parents
or legal guardians. Future US, Inc. is not responsible for damages or expenses that the winners might incur as a result of the
Contest or the receipt of a prize, and winners are responsible for income taxes based on the value of the prize received. A list
of winners may also be obtained by sending a stamped, self-addressed envelope to Future US, Inc. c/o Maximum PC Rig of the
Month, 4000 Shoreline Ct, Suite 400, South San Francisco, CA 94080. This contest is limited to residents of the United States.
No purchase necessary; void in Arizona, Maryland, Vermont, Puerto Rico, and where prohibited by law.
 inout YOU WRITE, WE RESPOND

We tackle tough reader questions on...

PCs in the Lab PGaming on Linux PF-22
Software PGeek Quiz Error? PTurntables
BY THE POWER OF GRAYSKULL! games like Half-Life 2, Supreme Commander, end of development for both of those apps. The
How many PCs are running in your Lab at any given and World of Warcraft. I wasn’t thinking about source code wasn’t available when they were
moment? Inquiring minds want to know. the Game of Life or Minesweeper clones. shut down, and the involved parties are almost
—Tony certainly prohibited from even discussing the
SHHH, THEY’LL GET TO US TOO! apps, much less releasing source code.
Dave “To Hell with the Environment” Murphy I just read your guide to copying and converting However, it’s not all bad news. To para-
responds: Since Gordon is busy having a kid right media in the May 2007 issue and thought I would phrase Jeff Goldblum’s goofy character from
now, we’re wasting a little less electricity than share two observations regarding some of the soft- Jurassic Park, hackers find a way. They always
normal. To counteract the carbon reduction, I’m ware mentioned. find a way.
currently setting forest fires and clubbing baby As of March 31, the RipIt4Me website has been
seals with three active rigs. Katherine is but a closed and development of the program has been THE ONLY GEEK QUIZ COMPLAINT LETTER
mere litterbug with one computer, though she discontinued, and as of April 19 the same goes WE RECEIVED THIS YEAR
rolls with two or more monitors all the time. We’ll for FixVTS. No clear reasons or explanations were I have a quick comment about your Geek Quiz article
upgrade her to “dumping toxic waste.” Michael given for the shutdowns. (May 2007). You state that tip-ring-sleeve audio con-
sends batteries to the landfill with just one com- —Julian Betances nectors are mono and stereo. This is not true—tip/
puter, and Will is doing his best to fight global ring/sleeve (TRS) connectors are stereo and tip/sleeve
warming by keeping all of his machines in a EDITOR IN CHIEF WILL SMITH RESPONDS: Here’s (TS) connectors are mono only. The ring is what
pristine, unplugged conditioned. Quoth him, “The the scoop: The folks who built those two apps allows for the second audio channel to be transmitted.
Power is Yours!” All told, the Lab PC count is five. were cease-and-desisted by persons unknown —Tim Henderson
mere days after we went to press. The good
LINUX IS FOR GAMERS news is that the apps are still available; you’ll EXECUTIVE EDITOR MICHAEL BROWN
I have to take issue with your article “Get Started just have to use Google to find them. The bad RESPONDS: I agree that most TRS connectors
with Linux” (June 2007) even though it did show a news is that this almost certainly means the are stereo: The tip is used for one channel, the
lot of what Linux can do. In particular, I disagree with
what you term a “limited amount of games.” I will
admit that I have OpenSuse and not Ubuntu and the
number of games available might seem limited in
terms of what’s available in the Windows world, but
110 free games came loaded with my system. There The Real
are solitaire games, Tetris-like games, and more, so
I would dispute that the term “limited” really applies Problem
with F-22s
in this case.
—John Meyer

EDITOR IN CHIEF WILL SMITH RESPONDS: Well,

I guess Linux’s gaming viability depends on I read Mr. Halfhill’s May 2007
what you consider a game. Not to knock any column (“Multithreaded Booby
of our more casually oriented gamer brethren, Traps”) with interest. I have sad
but when I knocked Linux for its lack of games, news for him regarding the head-
I was specifically thinking of high-end AAA ings 180 East and 180 West. 180
is the only heading which is purely south and no other cardinal direction—always, no exceptions.
The F-22 error took place when the aircraft crossed the International Date Line, which is 180 degrees
CUTCOPYPASTE longitude. The aircraft went from 180W longitude to 180E longitude. The software engineers should
be embarrassed.
In the June 2007 issue, we inadvertently listed the Trust me.
Ubuntu Linux distro’s homepage as www.ubuntu.org.
In fact, it’s www.ubuntu.com; sorry for the
—David McDonald
inconvenience. Lt Col, USAF Reserve (R) (that means very retired)

102 MAXIMUMPC JULY 2007

 IN G
COMT
used for a second channel, and the sleeve platform, except the PC! Stalker was a welcome
is used for ground. But there are also mono- breath, but I’m seriously starting to wonder

NEXNTH
aural TRS connectors that are used for bal- where this is leading! I know it’s difficult (if not
anced lines. In this case, the tip is used for impossible) to pick and choose your advertisers,
an in-phase signal, the ring is used for an but you seem to be ignoring your own philoso-
inverted copy of the same signal (i.e., out-of- phy! The PC hardware manufacturers who are

MO
phase), and the sleeve is used for ground. catering to the “horsepower for gaming” crowd
When the signal carried on a balanced are simply going to die off if the games don’t

C’s
connection reaches its destination, the materialize. We have no reason to upgrade
out-of-phase signal is flipped and added to unless there are games and apps that make the

XIMUM P
MA
the in-phase signal. Any noise that made newer equipment necessary or desirable, and
its way into the signal is also inverted and that would render your magazine irrelevant! IN
therefore cancelled. Balanced lines are —Steve Bachman

UBLE-
DO FED
much less susceptible to hum, so they’re
typically used to carry audio signals over EDITOR IN CHIEF WILL SMITH RESPONDS:

STUF T
long distances. There are actually two things for me to talk
about here, Steve. The first is that the edito-

CRUS
TURNTABLE TURNABOUT rial staff of the magazine has absolutely no

ST
The information in your turntable reviews control over the products that are adver-

AUGUE
(May 2007) was good as far as it went, but you tised within these pages. We assiduously
should have consulted with someone who has guard the boundary between editorial and

ISSU
actually used an original turntable on some advertising so that we can deliver an edito-
original records. It is important to know what rial product that’s completely untainted by
speeds those turntables support because unlike advertising. We don’t know what products
CDs, records come in several different speeds: are being advertised until we get the issue,
16, 33 1/3, 45, and 78 revolutions per minute.
Leaving this information out makes the rest of
just like you. This is as it should be, and it’s
what allows us to continue delivering a top-
MEDIA CENTER
the report meaningless. If one of the turntables notch editorial product to you every month. ROUNDUP
supports all those speeds and the other does The other part of your letter is about Is the time right for a living-room
not, then all other specifications quickly lose the larger (and almost completely use- PC? We’ll look at several new pre-
their relevance. less) battle between console and PC gam- built media center machines to see
—Bill Stadelman ing. PC gaming is bigger now than it ever how the category has evolved and
has been before. There are housewives whether your TiVo will soon be out
EXECUTIVE EDITOR MICHAEL BROWN in the Midwest playing World of Warcraft, of work.
RESPONDS: Thanks for your feedback on the Microsoft’s spending a ton of money pro-
turntable reviews. Due to space constraints, moting the PC as the fourth main gaming
we have to prioritize the facts we include platform, and most of the really interesting
in our reviews. As I said in the opening, innovations right now are happening in PC PUT YOUR PC
anyone who’s truly serious about vinyl
records will dismiss these products as toys.
gaming. As always, there are games that
play well on the PC and games that play TO SLEEP
But you’re right, I should have been more well on consoles. And increasingly there are No, we’re not suggesting that you
explicit in stating that both these tables games that play well on both. Shadowrun euthanize your computer. We will show
are limited to 33 1/3 and 45rpm instead of is one such game—and it will launch with you how your PC’s S3 Standby mode
mentioning LPs, EPs, and 45s and assum- cross-platform multiplay between Xbox 360 can cut your energy costs without
ing that the reader would then deduce that and PC players. hampering performance.
neither product is capable of running at 16 What’s the practical upshot? When
or 78rpm. Shadowrun comes out, you’ll finally have a

CONSOLE AGNOSTICISM
healthy outlet for all your anti-console rage.
All you’ll have to do is fire up the game and VISTA GRIPES
I was dismayed (to put it mildly) when I pulled
back the cover of June’s issue to find an ad for
frag the console weenies (you can recog-
nize them by the sloooow way they turn and
FIXED
By now, everyone can agree that
an Xbox 360 game on page one! I am STILL their pathetic aiming skillz).
Vista has some issues. We’ll look
disgusted that COD3 is available for every
at some of the common complaints
about the OS and tell you how you
can fix your problems with Vista.
LETTERS POLICY: MAXIMUM PC invites your thoughts and comments. Send them to
input@maximumpc.com. Please include your full name, town, and telephone number, and limit
your letter to 300 words. Letters may be edited for space and clarity. Due to the vast amount of
e-mail we receive, we cannot personally respond to each letter.

JULY 2007 MAXIMUMPC 103

 rig of the month ADVENTURES IN PC MODIFICATION
Sponsored by

JOE AND JESSE NUZZO’S

Vader ITX Why is this rig called the

Vader ITX? Old-school
gamers know that the
all-black Atari 2600 was

W e’re not much for console gaming,

but we do have fond memories of
running home after school to play Atlantis,
commonly referred to as
the Darth Vader model.

so we were excited to see the Nuzzo

brothers’ rig—and even more excited to
hear that they didn’t have to sacrifice an
Atari 2600 to create it.
A friend of Joe and Jesse bought out
a pawn shop’s entire video game supply—
thousands of games and a few dozen sys-
tems—and part of the haul was an empty
2600 shell, so the brothers didn’t have to
destroy a working system to create this rig.
After a few missteps (PSU issues and
a fried hard drive—hey, things happen!)
the guys got on track and built up this rig
based on a mini ITX board. A 2.4GHz P4
is the brains behind this beast that also Like our car, the entire
includes 512MB of DDR RAM. back of this case was
And just what do the Nuzzos reshaped and rebuilt
use this rig for? Playing old arcade with Bondo and pieces
games like Golden Axe and Final of plastic taken from
Fight, of course! old monitors.

The multicolor glow

emanating from inside
the rig was created
with UV-reactive spi-
ral-wrap and UV lights.

To get this just-off-

the-shelf look, Joe For their winning entry, Joe and Jesse
and Jesse repainted Nuzzo win a $500 gift certificate for Buy.
the case with both com to fund their modding madness! See
high-gloss and tex- all the hardware deals at www.buy.com,
tured paint. and turn to page 101 for contest rules.

If you have a contender for Rig of the Month, e-mail rig@maximumpc.com with high-res digital pics and a 300-word write-up.

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