Maximum PC August 2007 RSS Feed

Intermatic Home Settings Lighting Control Starter Kit

Michael Brown — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 15:13:18 -0500

If you’re considering automating your home, lighting is the best place to start. But if you’re afraid that handling bare electrical wires will leave you with an Einsteinian hairdo, pick up Intermatic’s Home Settings Starter Kit.

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Shure SE530PTH Earphones

Michael Brown — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 15:02:51 -0500

For the price of one set of Shure’s SE530PTH earphones, you could buy two 30GB iPods, 17 sets of Apple earbuds, or 500 encrypted songs from iTunes. A worthy investment or Marie Antoinette–style consumption?

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Flip Video 1GB

Gordon Mah Ung — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 19:32:36 -0500

It seems that most people would want to use a high-def video recorder to document their growing families or Star Wars action-figure collections, but can a case be made for purchasing a low-res camera? At 640x480, the Flip Video’s resolution isn’t VideoCD low, but you won’t stun your family when you proudly display your movies on a 60-inch, 1080p set.

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OWC Mercury On-the-Go External Drive

David Murphy — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 19:05:26 -0500

There are three schools of thought concerning external storage solutions: build an oversized bookend that rocks out with huge amounts of storage, sculpt a supremely portable device that you’d actually want to carry around, or just make a plain-vanilla enclosure. OWC’s Mercury On-the-Go drive is a surprise contender in the second category, as it’s a delightful combination of portability and speed.

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AeroCool PowerWatch

David Murphy — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 17:47:24 -0500

At first glance, AeroCool’s PowerWatch front-panel display looks like every computer enthusiast’s worst nightmare. Admittedly, the display itself is pleasing to the eye, but the back of the device looks like two octopi trying to leg wrestle. It’s a tangled mess of cords, cables, connectors, and prongs that’s sure to bring ruination to anyone’s wire-hidden case.

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Hammer Storage Myshare

Dave Murphy — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 16:14:06 -0500

When we first got the Myshare into the Lab, we were a bit taken aback by its simplicity. There’s no fancy software to accompany the 500GB device; it’s actually two 250GB drives striped using RAID 0. If you want to access the Myshare, you have to go through Windows Explorer, just as you would with any other network drive.

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Western Digital My Book World Edition II

David Murphy — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 19:44:57 -0500

We fondly recall reviewing this unit’s connected brother in arms, the My Book Pro Edition II (March 2007). The products are virtually identical, featuring two 500GB hard drives locked in a RAID 0 configuration that gives you one honkin’ terabyte of space. The difference, of course, is that you access the World Edition II through an Ethernet cable instead of a FireWire or USB connection.

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Overdrive PC Core2.SLI

Gordon Mah Ung — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 18:44:05 -0500

One thing we respect about Overdrive PC is that it’s never predictable.
These guys seem to always take the path of most resistance.

In this case, Overdrive PC has constructed a rig whose sole purpose
seems to be smashing our benchmarks. The company’s theory: Why go with
a quad-core setup when you can push a dual core to higher speeds and
guarantee stability? Since the overwhelming majority of applications
aren’t multithreaded for quad core, why not push the hell out of a dual
core?

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