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In the Lab: Will Smith Gets Burned by the Apple TV

Will Smith — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 15:38:06 -0500

As part of my testing for this month’s cover feature, I spent a few quality days watching movies from the iTunes Store on my PC and in my living room. By necessity, I had to integrate a newly updated Apple TV into my entertainment center, which is a fairly common closed cabinet with a few air vents in the back. All of my other electronics devices—my receiver, my TiVo, my Xbox 360—live happily in this environment (although I do open the cabinet door when I fire up the 360).

After leaving the Apple TV connected overnight, I detected the faint smell of burning plastic in my living room. After investigating, I found that the Apple TV was actually too hot to touch—around 140 F. I don’t know about you, but none of the other consumer electronics devices I own (save a towel-wrapped Xbox 360) gets this hot.

After digging into the documentation and Apple’s support site, I was assured that the passively cooled Apple TV “may feel warm when touched.” But that it was “designed to operate quietly in an environment warmer than room temperature, including within media cabinets.” Eventually, I discovered a standby mode, which leaves the Apple TV running but disables the graphics hardware to minimize heating. You can access standby by holding down the Play/Pause button for a few seconds. That’s great, but if I forget to manually put the Apple TV into standby, it won’t automatically do it for me. That’s just irresponsible and dumb. There’s absolutely no reason for a modern CE device that gets this hot not to automatically shut down when it’s not being used.

In the Lab: Gordon Mah Ung Cross-Examines CrossFire

Gordon Mah Ung — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 15:35:28 -0500

AMD's Radeon HD 3870 X in quad mode scales well for having four GPUs.

I’ve been skeptical of multi multi-GPU support since the days of Nvidia’s original Quad SLI. Back then, bad drivers, a lack of game support, and 30-inch panels that cost a month’s pay made the prospect unpalatable.

So when AMD sent us an Alienware ALX system decked out with four GPUs, I didn’t expect much. But the dual Radeon HD 3870 X2s in this rig performed pretty damn well. In a system sporting a 3GHz Core 2 Extreme QX6850 overclocked to 4GHz, an Asus X38 board, DDR3/1800 RAM, and Windows Vista, the double double-barreled 3870 X2s’ performance at ultra-high resolutions shocked the hell out of me. In 3DMark06, Call of Duty 4, and Unreal 3, I saw a roughly 40 percent increase in frame rates going from one Radeon HD 3870 X2 to two.

At lower resolutions, closer to reality, the four Radeon GPUs didn’t up the ante quite as much at 1900x1200, but there was still a healthy 20 percent boost in COD4 and UT3. That’s probably not worth filling that second slot, but at least the setup offers decent scaling. The Radeon HD 3870 X2 ain’t perfect, though. Driver problems initially plagued our preview of the cards, so our assessment is that this quad-GPU solution isn’t quite ready for prime time.

It’s not much of a secret that Nvidia has its own second-gen Quad SLI coming out. It will use two new dual-GPU cards dubbed GeForce 9800 X2. It’s obviously too early to say which will be faster, but the quad Radeon HD 3870 X2 at least presents a respectable dual-card solution for folks who want to build a high-res gaming box using an Intel X38 or even X48 chipset.

CrossfireX Performance
	CrossFireX	Single Card	% Difference
3DMarkOverall 2560x1600, DX9	21,050.0	12,889.0	38.8%
3DMark06 HDR1 Canyon Flight 2560x1600, DX9 (fps)	52.7	30.0	43.1%
3DMark06 HDR2 Deep Freeze 2560x1600, DX9 (fps)	51.3	26.0	49.3%
Call of Duty 4 2560x1600, DX9 (fps)	93.0	73.0	21.5%
Unreal 3 CTF-OmicronDawn_Bot 2560x1600, DX10 (fps)	118.0	65.6	44.4%
Unreal 3 CTF-OmicronDawn_Bot 2560x1600, DX9 (fps)	120.3	68.5	43.1%

In the Lab: David Murphy Doesn't Like Microsoft Mucking with Standards

David Murphy — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 16:33:27 -0500

What do you do with a media-streaming device that doesn’t connect to anything? That’s the question posed by the HP Media Vault NAS, which I reviewed this month (page 79). I found that I was unable to stream a movie on the device’s hard drive to any connected platform in my house, including Windows Media Player 11 and the Xbox 360.

But determining the culprit in this media mess wasn’t as cut-and-dried as I expected. I was ready to hoist the sails and speed away from the sinking HP device, but a little bit of research brought a new target to bear: Microsoft. The company has allegedly modified the open UPnP protocol the Xbox uses to connect to devices. Company reps won’t admit to any outright fudging, but something seems suspicious in their response: “The Xbox 360 console is optimized to communicate with Microsoft UPnP streaming devices… to provide the best possible consumer experience with the Xbox 360 dashboard.”

The blog Mediaholic interviewed the CTO of TwonkyVision at the 2006 Consumer Electronics Show—TwonkyVision being the creator of TwonkyMedia, the streaming service the QNAP TS-109 Pro NAS box uses to connect to the Xbox. This works, according to the CTO, because Twonky reverse engineered the protocol to end-run Microsoft’s Windows Media Connect-only restriction.

If that’s correct—and I suspect it is—that’s why I’m hacked off. An open standard is dubbed “open” for an explicit reason: A product that follows the standard should be able to interoperate with other standard-friendly devices. You’re not following the standard if you’re tweaking it to work with only your branded platforms.

HP might share some blame for not figuring out a way to make streaming work, but why should a company have to reinvent a wheel that Microsoft’s broken?

In the Lab: Gordon Mah Ung Re-Examines RealTek Audo

Gordon Mah Ung — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 16:32:24 -0500

In December 2006, I took RealTek to the woodshed for its cheating drivers, which made many EAX-enabled games sound simply awful.

For months, we’ve been rattling motherboard makers, including Nvidia (which uses RealTek parts on many of its reference motherboards), about the issue, but RealTek seemed not to get the message, as nothing changed—until recently, that is. Indeed, I was pretty surprised when testing XFX’s nForce 780i-based motherboard to find that RealTek had finally fixed the problem with EAX support.

The problem was that RealTek HD Audio drivers would tell games that EAX support was enabled, which would cause games to pass off the audio mixing to the soundcard drivers. In RealTek’s case, that often (though not always) produced terrible sound. A tank that was supposed to sound as though it was 200 meters away sounded like it was 10 meters away. And instead of a grenade sounding muffled by the presence of a wall, it sounded like it was next to you.

With older RealTek drivers, a simple position test would show that EAX filtering wasn’t working correctly.

Why would RealTek do this? Falsely claiming to have EAX support is akin to a videocard driver claiming to run16x AA filtering when, in reality, no filtering is occurring.

But RealTek’s R 1.86 drivers dated February 1, 2008 seem to finally enable EAX. Using RightMark’s 3D Sound positioning utility, I found that the occlusion effect finally worked as it does on all other EAX-enabled cards. The obstruction effect almost works but is a bit heavy-handed, blocking all sound when you should still hear some audio.

In real-world gaming tests, however, EAX support seemed sporadic. Battlefield 2 audio was as poor as it was previously when EAX was enabled and the game let the RealTek part do the mixing. But when we fired up the EAX-enabled BioShock and ran the new drivers through their paces, with EAX and reverb enabled, the experience wasn’t bad. Compared to an X-Fi XtremeGamer soundcard, the onboard RealTek component’s audio was still clearly inferior but at least not intolerable, as it was with Battlefield 2.

I’ll continue to follow this issue, but at least it appears that RealTek is finally addressing the problem.

In the lab: Will Smith Experiments with 64-bit Vista

Will Smith — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 18:06:54 -0600

Listeners of the No BS podcast know that I’ve spent the last two months experimenting with 64-bit Vista on a system with more than 2GB of memory. That’s right, I took my trusty XP/Vista x86 dual boot and borked the entire thing by adding a couple gigs of memory and installing an OS that’s still facing some serious growing pains.

The first problem was stability—the machine crashed at the drop of a hat and Windows rapidly became corrupted. After reinstalling Windows for the nth time, I finally installed components one at a time and was able to determine that my Creative X-Fi card was the culprit. With the X-Fi removed, and onboard sound enabled, everything was much better, or so I thought.

Next up was suspend. While the suspend functionality in 32-bit Vista works flawlessly, I experienced crashes when suspending and resuming in 64-bit mode. I first theorized that the problem was due to my memory configuration. I’d populated all four banks on my motherboard to reach 4GB of RAM, which can cause stability problems. To counter that, I popped two 2GB Patriot DIMMs from the Lab into the test machine—to no avail. The machine still frequently crashes on suspend and resume operations.

What’s the upshot? After at least 10 complete reinstalls of Vista, a switch to onboard sound, a new motherboard or two, and the sacrifice of several chickens, I still can’t suspend or sync my iPod (one of the many incompatible operations I’ve tried). I’m giving up, at least for now. While performance felt moderately better than with 32-bit Vista, especially on apps that can use more than 2GB of memory, the benchmarks didn’t show it, and frankly 64-bit isn’t worth the hassle.

In the Lab: Gordon Mah Ung Wants to Kill ATX

Gordon Mah Ung — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 14:44:01 -0600

Would you use a ball mouse? A VL-Bus graphics card? A Socket 7 board? Then why the hell are enthusiasts still embracing the 13-year-old ATX formfactor? It’s time we started thinking about moving beyond ATX.

Today, we’re running quad-core boxes with two or more GPUs in a formfactor created when people used serial and parallel ports and the Pentium was the hot chip in town. In the near future, USB 3 will appear on motherboards in the south-bridge chips. To route the ports, motherboard vendors must run traces all the way from the south bridge to the rear I/O shield. You might be able to do this with USB 3 data rates on a four-layer board, but can it be done with USB 5? If it requires more layers, it’ll add to the cost of the board.

The failed BTX formfactor included many forward-thinking features.

Of course, Intel tried to fix these problems with its BTX formfactor, which cratered because of resistance from case-makers, a new emphasis on cooler CPUs, and complete resistance from AMD. But if I were hardware dictator for a day, I’d propose a new formfactor called GTX (Gordon TX) that mandates:

A minimum motherboard stand-off height, so wires can be routed safely and easily under the motherboard
RAM and expansion slots that are parallel to air flow in the case
A larger board area and I/O section to accommodate the dizzy- ing array of connectors a modern power user needs
Standardized front-panel connectors for reset, power, and LEDs
Two more expansion slots. The seven in ATX aren't enough with the multi-GPU machines we’re building
Less distance between the south-bridge and north-bridge chips
A CPU cooling scheme that accounts for liquid cooling or venting from an area other than the front of the machine. While we’re at it, let’s build in more cooling for the GPU.

This probably sounds crazy because the push is for smaller, rather than larger, PCs, but I say it’s time. Average people are moving toward smaller machines or notebook PCs. Full-tower ATX boxes are increasingly focused on the workstation market; we really shouldn’t be handcuffed by formfactors designed to appeal to the masses.

In the Lab: Gordon Mah Ung Thinks ESA Is Long Overdue

Gordon Mah Ung — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 14:42:36 -0600

PC geeks like dials and gauges and greater hands-on involvement, so Nvidia’s Enthusiast System Architecture (ESA) should come as a welcome gift to us all. In a nutshell, ESA is an open standard for adding communication capabilities to normally “dumb” components. Using USB as the basic protocol, ESA adds intelligence to devices such as water coolers, power supplies, and cases, so you’ll have more insight into how your PC is running and be able to effect changes.

I finally kicked the tires on ESA’s basic functionality with this month’s Hypersonic Sonic Boom OCX (reviewed here). The PC came with an ESA-enabled PC Power and Cooling 1,200 watt PSU and CoolIT Systems Freezone Elite. At this stage, the software, drivers, and hardware are pretty rudimentary, but I like what I saw.

Of course, your own appreciation of ESA depends on how geeky you are, but I like knowing that my PSU is eating about 34 amps on the 12-volt rail at idle. And just how hot is it inside my power supply? Well, it’s 31 C, and the fan is spinning at 100 percent. Likewise, just what is the temperature of the coolant? You’ll know if you have an ESA-enabled water-cooling system. Sure, some water-cooling rigs already give you basic readouts and manual control over flow, but ESA will eventually let you control functionality from the OS or monitor a device remotely across the Internet.

ESA will finally let you know the actual load on your PSU!

Ultimately, if ESA takes hold, we could use it to troubleshoot problems—we’d know if the power supply is overloaded or if the coolant is low. Cases with ESA will let you toggle lights and control fans from within the OS, functionality which has been limited to large OEMs until now, and I’m sure some crafty geek will figure out a way to let you remotely control a USB device via ESA, so your Peltier cup-cooler has your beer nice and cold by the time you get home from the cubicle.

ESA actually stands a better chance of widespread adoption than Nvidia’s EPP profiles for RAM. While EPP couldn’t make it past the August JEDEC memory council, ESA will be submitted to the USB-IF—the folks who approve USB standards. Nvidia is even willing to forgo branding the spec with its name to ensure its competitors feel more comfortable adopting it.

Overall, ESA is cool and will give power users yet another reason to upgrade.

In the Lab: Nathan Edwards Flies the Friendly Skies

Nathan Edwards — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 14:42:17 -0600

In my review of the Hypersonic Sonic Boom OCX on page 68, I focused on the PC’s performance and stability—crucial qualities in any gaming rig. But I’d be doing this machine a disservice if I didn’t talk a bit about its flight-simulator setup.

Hypersonic shipped the Sonic Boom with three 19-inch monitors controlled by a Matrox TripleHead2Go Digital Edition—enabling a resolution of 3840x1024 across a single desktop—as well as Saitek’s Pro Flight yoke and rudder pedals. The good news: Flight Simulator X looks fantastic with this panoramic view. But is it worth it? Are three relatively small monitors better than one huge one? For comparison, I also tested the Hypersonic with one 30-inch Gateway XHD3000 at 2560x1600.

The verdict? Although I and others here thought we’d prefer a large single-panel display, when it came to the flight sim, I actually preferred the smaller panels’ wraparound effect, which felt more lifelike. Once I returned to the desktop for real work, however, the happy feelings vanished. The triple monitors are especially irksome when you have to go into the BIOS. Instead of being confined to one panel, the BIOS screen is stretched across all three, which makes changing settings rather difficult. It was hard to tell if I was adjusting the CPU core voltage or RAM voltage with the TripleHead2Go enabled.

Given the choice, I’d go for the triple-panel display for racing, flying, or any other immersive sim—maybe even an MMO. But for most other purposes, I’ll take a single large panel any day.