Maximum PC July 2007 RSS Feed

July 2007 - Target Your Hotspots!

The Maximum PC Staff — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 14:38:00 -0500

In the PDF archive of the July 2007 issue, you can find:

Target Your Hotspots - Supercool your PC
Hands on with Penryn
Beating the Parent Trap
12 Smartphone Reviews!
And 24 More Awesome Product Reviews!
Ask the Doctor
Rig of the Month
The Watchdog
And a whole lot more!

Click the big giant cover image to the right to download the PDF archive today!

Digital Storm Twister Ultra 4

Gordon Mah Ung — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 17:38:33 -0500

Maximum PC’s mandate has always been that performance rules all else. But recently we’ve been harping about nothing but stability. It’s not that we previously ignored this area, but lately we’ve been inundated with rigs that have been overclocked so aggressively they make our standard benchmarks blow up within minutes. Because of this, our new message has been stability, stability, stability.

Apparently, Digital Storm got our memo. The company shipped us its current speed king: Intel’s 2.93GHz Core 2 Extreme Quad-Core QX6800 clocked up to a mere 3.46GHz running a pair of 8800 GTX cards and 2GB of Corsair Dominator RAM cranked up to 1,066MHz, all on an EVGA 680i SLI board. From a hardware perspective, this is nothing new; this setup is similar to what we’ve been seeing since January.

Normally, this would make for one big yawner of a story, but the Twister hits the right notes for us. First up: performance. Although it doesn’t rip the speed crown from the wickedly fast Falcon Northwest Mach V that we reviewed in June, it does manage to top the higher-clocked Falcon in a few runs. Surprisingly, in Adobe Photoshop CS2, the Twister just squeezes by the Mach V with a score of 142 seconds versus 149. The difference is negligible due to the margin of error, but the Falcon Mach V has a 267MHz clock advantage, so count this as a win for the Twister. We’re also marking the Nero H.264 encode test as a win for the Twister. Although its score in this test is about a minute slower than the Mach V’s, the Twister is running a slower CPU and is 100 percent stable.

The Twister is top gun in our FEAR test, with a score that’s just a tad faster than that of the similarly equipped ABS PC that we reviewed in February. So, in performance the Twister holds three Lab records and really doesn’t have to apologize for performance elsewhere.

In build quality, we were interested to see if the company paid attention to items the techs missed last time, such as whether all the front USB ports were connected and operating. Fortunately, there were no such bone-headed errors. We do have to point out, however, that connecting two DVD burners to the same PATA port will kill your performance if you try to burn to multiple drives at once.

But is the Twister stable? Yes. We flew through all of our normal benchmarks with no issues—well, except for SYSmark2004 SE, which refused to run. We can’t blame the Twister for this though, since SYSmark2004 SE hasn’t worked in months. We did run the new SYSmark2007 Preview with no problems, and the Twister achieved an overall score of 219. We also subjected the Twister to our new quad-core torture test, Prime 95, with only one issue. On one of several overnight runs, the app reported a data anomaly, but it didn’t crash or lock up. On the Mach V, the Prime 95 test caused a spontaneous reboot within minutes. Our other multithreading tests also went without a hitch. So we have more faith in this rig’s long-term stability than in the stability of any machine we’ve tested since the Polywell Poly I680SLI-QX (March 2007), which sported a stock-clocked quad core.

That leaves the Twister in a great spot. It holds three Lab records and is much cheaper than the Mach V—and it’s stable.

Accolade Duet Projection Screen

Michael Brown — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 15:42:54 -0500

Your 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-old recently mistook for an artist’s canvas. Quite the pickle, eh?

Epson has an easy solution for your dilemma: Its unique Accolade Duet projection screen can deliver either aspect ratio from the same package. Instead of unrolling up or down from a horizontal position, the Duet is vertically 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 excellent off-axis viewing, which is important if you’re entertaining a large audience that can’t all be seated directly in front of the screen.

The Duet’s screen clips onto its tripod stand, so you can carry both items as a single unit, but you won’t want to lug it far: It weighs 27 pounds (more than twice as much as the Piper). The tripod contributes to a rather large footprint: 33 inches deep by 37 inches wide. If you need to keep the screen closer to your wall, you can mount it there—Epson provides the necessary hardware in the box. You can still close the screen when it’s mounted, and you can take it off the wall and again pair it with the tripod to take your show on the road.

The fact that the Duet is $100 cheaper than the Piper makes up
for the fact that it’s not quite as bright; in fact, we think we’ve found our new favorite projection screen.

Toshiba TDP-FF1AU Video Projector

Michael Brown — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 13:33:39 -0500

With apologies to the Beach Boys, wouldn’t it be nice if there were an inexpensive 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 about giving it the option of operating on a Li-Ion battery. Oh, wouldn’t it be nice?

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 satisfied with this tiny device’s output.

If you can’t do that, you’ll want a projection screen with both high contrast (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, typically have negative gain ratings. This is because they use gray or silver 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 a matte-white screen.

Toshiba bundles a rigid 23-inch tabletop screen with the projector, which is manufactured with a high-gain silver coating on its display side. It proved capable of reflecting an image in a room darkened only by miniblinds, which is something neither our usual Draper Piper test screen nor Epson’s Accolade Duet (reviewed above) could do. Toshiba’s screen, however, is really useful only for business presentations: It folds up to fit in the included carry bag, but a vertical seam right down the middle of it remains visible when in use.

As a business tool, we think Toshiba’s projector is a better value than the more than twice-as-expensive Casio XJ-S35 we reviewed in May (which is also powered by DLP technology), but we can’t recommend it for home-theater or gaming applications unless you can absolutely darken your media room.

CyberLink PowerDirector 6

Gordon Mah Ung — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 19:31:38 -0500

PowerDirector 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, PowerDirector 6 includes a host of pleasing video effects, but again, the clumsy interface forces you to hunt around for the proper controls. If you apply an effect directly to a video in the timeline, you can’t simply right-click on the track to remove it. You have to select the track, hit the Effect button, and uncheck all of the effects you don’t want to see.
It’s a minor quibble, but we struggled with the interface more than we expected to with a product that should be user-friendly. The updated slide-show wizard, in particular, annoyed us. If you autocreate a slide show but don’t like the result (for example, everyone’s head is cropped off), you can’t easily modify the slide show to fix the problem. The only thing you can do is keep applying different templates to see how they look—and that’s a multistep process. It’s almost as though CyberLink gets paid by the click.

But enough about the bad stuff. The software does include some pretty neat features, such as the PiP effect, which lets you easily move a still image or video across the screen. There’s no key-frame ability, but the method CyberLink uses to move, rotate, and resize objects in a video is probably easier for newbies to understand. And honestly, do you really need to key-frame the thought bubble over someone’s head in your Blind Date spoof video? It’s also worth noting that the subtitle engine can import .SRT subtitle files.

Unfortunately, subtitles can’t simply be turned on or off; they’re rendered directly into the video.
HDV editing is now included as well. We captured video from a Canon HV10 HDV camcorder in PowerDirector 6 with no hitches. Although one of the primary scene-detection methods did not work for us, post-capture scene detection effectively diced up our video for us. That’s certainly better than Adobe Premiere Elements 3.0, which doesn’t preview HDV video capture or have any post-capture scene detection. Likewise, Pinnacle’s Studio 10.7 requires that you activate scene detection. It doesn’t cost anything, but we shouldn’t be subjected to the hassle. One of PowerDirector 6’s weaknesses is how it exports HDV video. You can create an AVI file at high res or output it back to tape, but that’s it. There’s no Blu-ray or HD DVD disc support nor a way to master the disc so that it will play on an HD DVD deck using a standard single- or dual-layer DVD encoded at a higher resolution.

PowerDirector 6 does excel in VOB editing of commercial discs. While Adobe Premiere Elements 3.0 is unreliable in its handling of commercial VOB files and Pinnacle Studio 10.7 has issues, PowerDirector 6 easily imported a VOB file ripped from a commercial disc. That’s of great value if you want to recut The Godfather: Part III to remove all of Sophia Coppola’s scenes.

Whether PowerDirector 6 is for you depends on how far you want to go. If you want a quick-hit editor, it has more than enough to keep you happy. If you expect to get a little more medieval with your edits, you’d be better served by Pinnacle Studio 10.6.

Genius HS-04U

Michael Brown — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 18:04:17 -0500

The Genius HS-04U plugs into your PC’s USB port, instead of your soundcard’s analog speaker output and mic input, so it bypasses any EAX or OpenAL audio effects that game developers might have painstakingly programmed into the software. What you get instead—after installing a driver—is what Genius calls “Virtual Dolby.”

We’re assuming Genius meant to say “Dolby Headphone” because the packaging bears Dolby’s trademark Double-D-and-headphone symbol (accompanied by the phrase “Dolby headphone certificate,” no less). To our knowledge, there is no such thing as Virtual Dolby, but it doesn’t matter because this headset sounds like crap. As for Genius’s claim that its noise-canceling mic is “military grade,” well, our voice did sound as though we were serving a tour of duty onboard a submarine

Tritton Audio Xtreme 360

Michael Brown — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 15:28:23 -0500

Tritton’s headset delivers true surround sound, just like the Turtle Beach Ear Force HPA2 we recommended in June. It also offers a feature that the HPA2 doesn’t: a powered Dolby Digital decoder module with optical and coaxial digital inputs, plus a port for plugging in a second set of Tritton headphones. 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 noise. The Tritton also can’t match the HPA2 in terms of audio fidelity in music, movies, and games, but it sounds far better than the BQ and the utter waste of plastic that is the Genius.

Surround-sound support is a welcome feature, but the Turtle Beach product bundles it in a better package.

Ableton Live 6

David Murphy — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 17:20:44 -0500

You can do so much with Live 6, it’s hard to know exactly where to begin describing this masterful software sequencer. So we’ll start at the top. With just a few clicks of an in-application help system, we were up and running with the program’s Operator add-on, creating notes and beats that sound as though they were pulled straight from a Keith Schofield music video. Awesome.

While the program references a number of functions that are a lot to swallow for a beginner—filter frequencies, resonances, waveshapes—the simple interface encourages the ol’ “try it” approach to learning the program. That said, audio enthusiasts will find plenty of opportunity for experimentation under Live 6’s hood: You can create your music using a MIDI-attached keyboard, directly edit the MIDI notes within your loops, and then change up your beats with a ton of plugin-style effects.

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