Maximum PC August 2008 RSS Feed

This Mod Goes HawgWild

Tom Edwards — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 17:55:21 -0500

V ic McGuire found a diamond in the rough when he set out to build his latest mod. While browsing through a computer store, he found a custom case with chrome-plated front air grills in the junk pile and an idea came to mind. After arduously sanding the rust off the grills, Vic had the basis for the HawgWild U.S.A.

The side of the case originally held an 8cm fan. After a little work with a scroll saw and a dremel, Vic created a window to show off the rig’s parts.

After simulating several paint designs in Photoshop, Vic decided on this black and orange motif with a hammered metal finish as a texture coat. (click for full)

Vic purchased a model Harley, stripped it, painted it to match the case, and planted it in the window.
(click for full)

The difference is in the details. These official emblems complete the rig’s look.

Vic and his rig.

For submitting this month’s winning entry, Vic has won a $250 gift certificate.

To enter the Rig of the Month contest, 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.

August 2008: PC Notebooks vs. the MacBook

The Maximum PC Staff — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 19:04:16 -0500

In the PDF archive of the August 2008 issue, you can find:

PC vs. MacBook Notebook Battle!
Ultimate Guide to Firefox 3
Nvidia's Next-Gen GTX 280 GPU Unveiled!
How To: Create your own Internet TV Show!
Awesome Product Reviews, including MSI's new P35 Combo Platinum mobo!
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!

How-To: Create Your Own Internet Video Show

David Murphy — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 16:02:16 -0500

Setting up a streaming TV show on the Internet is a pretty easy task. You grab a webcam, plug it into a PC, and use an Internet streaming site to host your amateur show. We’re stressing the amateur part because let’s face it, we’ve all seen enough YouTube stars to know the score.

But since this is Maximum PC, we’re kicking it up a notch and showing you how to become an online video producer. First off, we’re upping the number of cameras to two. Second, we’re going to show you how to stream your video live. By using Ustream’s (www.ustream.tv) online interface, you’ll be able to switch back and forth between your two cameras. Give your audience two different views of your head! Or more likely, use the second camera to feature a special guest or sidekick.

However, switching the cameras and the input audio is a Herculean task for one Flash-based interface—plus, we scoff at built-in webcam microphones—so we’re also using a condenser microphone, lavalier microphone, and mixing board. With them, you’ll have better sound quality and you’ll be able to adjust the microphones’ levels on the fly, independent of your camera-switching efforts on your PC. It’s the perfect way to up the production values of your show, and it will help you stand out without resorting to super-expensive, high-definition camcorders. Let’s roll!

Time Required = 35 Mins.

What You Need

Mixing board
$30-$100, www.behringer.com
MXL 990 Condenser Microphone
$60, www.mxlmics.com
ATR35s Lavalier Microphone
$40, www.audio-technica.com
Two webcams
$100-$200, www.logitech.com
One XLR Cable
$10-$20, www.musiciansfriend.com
1/8-inch male to two 1/4-inch male Y cable
$10, www.musiciansfriend.com

1. Connecting the Sound

We’re using Behringer’s MXB1002 mixing board for our setup, but feel free to select any mixing board that comes with the number of inputs you intend to use. For our setup, we need one XLR input (fat connector, three prongs) and a single 1/4-inch input. The condenser microphone provides the show’s host with far better sound quality than what a typical USB headset or 1/8-inch microphone offers. The lavalier microphone is a perfect, less-expensive alternative for guests, and it gives you more mobility if you need to stray from your desk for a segment.

As for the mixing board, you can opt for a fancier model to give yourself the option of more guests, or you can just go for a cheaper model with the bare essentials. You won’t see a difference in quality at this price level, just connection options.

Connecting the microphones to the board is simple. For the XLR microphone (top image), plug one end of the male connector into the mic and the other end into the first position on the mixing board. The lavalier mic we’ve chosen, Audio-Technica’s ATR35s, comes with a converter that allows us to plug its 1/8-inch connector into the second channel’s 1/4-inch line-in on our mixing board (bottom image). Finally, to get the audio to our PC, we’re attaching our Y cable’s 1/4-inch connectors to the left and right outputs on the board and the cable’s 1/8-inch end to the microphone input on our motherboard.

2. Connecting the Cameras

Physically installing the webcams is pretty straightforward. We recommend you do it systematically, to prevent your OS from freaking out, especially if you’re using webcams from different manufacturers.

Start by connecting the first webcam to your rig and then installing the accompanying drivers from either the provided CD or a packaged download. Depending on your camera, you might be given the option to enable a face-tracking feature. We recommend you resist the urge to enable this or any special effects. They’ll make your show look lame at best, and at worst, the jittering of the automatic lens seeking out your mug will annoy viewers to the point of turning off your show.

Once you have your first webcam up and running, attach the second one. If it’s the same make and model, the software interface should allow you to toggle between the two as-is. If not, install the drivers for your second webcam. They should be compatible, but if you want to experiment with live-feeding the images from both cameras at the same time, the two apps will have to run simultaneously.

All that matters at this point is that you can operate two cameras. Check both to see that they produce images, place the cameras where you want them to broadcast from, and proceed to Step 3!

Next: Step Three!

3. Setting up the Show

We’re using Ustream.tv to host our streaming show because of its smorgasbord of options, both behind the scenes and embedded into the broadcasting interface. Setting up an account is easy. Just go to www.ustream.tv and click the Log In/Sign Up button in the upper-right corner. Once you’ve entered your personal information, you’ll be taken to a show configuration screen.

This menu allows you to configure the basics of your show—such as its name and logo—as well as tags and an HTML-based description. If you want to tackle some of the advanced configuration options available, cycle through the tabs on the top of the screen. In the Design tab, you can edit the color scheme and fonts of your show’s main page. And if you already have favorite shows on Ustream, you can add links to them below your show.

The Sharing tab is the hub for propagating your show across the Internet. You can use this portion of the options menu to post information about your show to your favorite web 2.0 websites, Twitter your friends, or import your email contacts and send them notes about your production.

Finally, the Advanced tab allows you to configure your show’s accompanying chat room. You can turn commenting on or off, but more importantly, you can assign other Ustream users to serve as chat moderators. This is also where you set permissions for co-hosting, in case you ever want to share the spotlight with other Internet buddies.

4. Broadcasting

Once you’re ready to go live, click the big Broadcast Now button in the upper-right corner of Ustream’s website. A window will pop up, showing you the feed from one of your cams. Make sure that both Audio and Video Broadcast are checked and that the audio source is the microphone input on your motherboard or soundcard. Don’t forget to adjust the video and audio quality if you have to, depending on the speed of your connection.

Click the Advanced Settings tab in the lower-left corner. We recommend you leave the frame-rate option as it is and instead use the slider bars on the main broadcasting screen to adjust your show’s quality levels. Click the option that asks if you’re using a mixing board. And while you’re here, check out the other options: The Create Poll feature is a handy way to interact with your chat room audience, and the Cohost tab allows you to bring live guests into your show’s mix.

When you’re done mucking around, click the Close button to head back to the main broadcasting screen. You can switch your camera input by selecting a new video source—it’s right above the audio source option you set earlier. There will be a bit of a delay as the image switches over, and the corresponding software for each webcam (if they’re different models) might load when you switch. Keep the webcam software windows open, and use this switch to shift back and forth between your cameras.

5. Rockin’ the Boards

Each channel on a mixer comes with a number of inputs—in our case, an XLR and a line-in for left and right channels. Below the channel are the various knobs that control the sound itself. The ones you need to concern yourself with are the equalizer settings—the Low, Mid, and Hi knobs—and the Gain knob, which controls the signal’s amplification. The fader slides up and down to control the level of sound that routes to the mixer’s main output.

Start by turning all of the knobs in the channel to their zero settings—the notches should be facing up. Only the Gain knob is different: Its zero requires you to turn the knob all the way to the left. Now move the channel fader and the board’s main fader from their lowest levels up. Your mixer should have LED lights that indicate the level of sound that’s passing out of the board: You’re aiming to have the loudest parts of your broadcast just barely blip past 0, usually signified by the briefest of flickers on one of the board’s yellow lights.

We recommend you pick a point for your main fader—the number varies depending on your mixer, but the fader should be about 75 percent of the way up from the bottom—and play with the channel fader until you’re comfortable with the volume. You can also adjust the Gain to increase volume, but pushing it too far will add artificial noises and clipping to your stream. When you’re ready to go, click Start Broadcast in Ustream and start talking!

Ustream's Not the Only Game in Town

You can use Justin.tv (www.justin.tv) and Y! Live (live.yahoo.com) as alternate streaming options, but they’re less feature-packed than Ustream. The former lets you edit image quality, record episodes, and send Twitter messages to friends in its GUI, but that’s it. Yahoo Live offers a bit more. It provides your web show with its own chat channel that allows you to see the video streams of up to four other users on your show’s main page. It’s a great way to keep the conversation alive among your listeners. Ustream supports only text chat, not video.

To Affinity and Beyond!

The Maximum PC Staff — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 13:35:58 -0500

I just completed a minor upgrade to my system, including the addition of a brand-spankin’-new Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 CPU. My question: When you right-click a process in task manager it gives you the option to set affinity. If I’m right, this gives you the ability to set a process or task to a particular core of your CPU.

It seems like this would help distribute the load of everything running and keep things flowing smoothly, but it looks like every process is set to use all four cores.

Is there a right or wrong way to go about changing these settings? Is it advisable to change them? I would think that if you divided them up, you could gain a performance advantage.

—Michael Seymour

The Doctor has not manually set the affinity for an application, but he doubts that it would yield any performance benefit that would be worth the time spent setting the affinity of each program on your machine. You’d also have to reset the affinity each time you started the application. While this can be done automatically with Innes.org’s ROPE utility, it’s a moot point. The Doctor thinks it’s best to let the OS handle thread-scheduling.

White Paper: Raster vs. Rays

Zack Stern — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 18:42:14 -0500

The shiny, new hatchback you nudge in a street race dents slightly on the driver’s side door. Although you’re playing a PC game, created with beaucoup equations, the bend looks almost real. The 3D renderer sculpts all those numbers into images, with help from the video API (application program interface). However, several completely different rendering techniques can be the source of those images. Currently, the hardware and software industries are debating how to best utilize two graphics-rendering techniques: ray tracing and rasterization.

Rasterizing is widely used to render current 3D games because it strikes a compromise between real-time processing demands and pretty pictures. Its regular, predictable patterns are also suited to specialized massively parallel processors, such as GPUs. Essentially, the raster engine looks at the thousands of 2D triangles that build a 3D scene and determines which are visible in the current perspective. With that information, the engine analyzes the light sources and other environment details to light and color pixels onto each triangle.

Ray tracing takes the opposite approach, borrowing from the way photons move in the real world. In nature, a light source creates countless photons (or rays) that bounce off objects, take on their color and properties, and eventually reach your eye.

Ray tracing reverses the process, firing its gaze away from the camera perspective, assessing which objects are in view. When a ray hits something, the engine knows to draw a pixel.

The Grey Area

These two techniques further diverge when adding shadows and other details to a scene. Rasterized graphics can use a few techniques to create light and dark, frequently relying on shadow maps. These guides are created by rasterizing from the perspective of a light source, seeing which objects are visible, and shading the camera perspective based on this blueprint. A ray tracer calculates shadows just by tracing more beams and seeing how they bounce. If a beam’s path leads back to a light source, its pixel is drawn brighter. If the beam ends without hitting a light, the engine knows to draw that pixel in shadow.

Ray tracing’s realism—and system burden—comes from the arbitrary point at which the engine stops calculating these bounces. Every time the beam ricochets off another object, more color, shadow, and reflection details can be added back to the first collision pixel. Fog effects can be especially taxing, requiring the beams to refract through a mist. The best-looking images can take billions of rays; that’s just too much number crunching for today’s CPUs and GPUs to handle in real time.
And even if those chips could keep up, other bottlenecks couldn’t keep pace with a fully ray-traced real-time scene. “It’s just too hard in terms of memory bandwidth; it’s too hard in terms of silicon speed,” says David Kirk, chief scientist at Nvidia. “It’s just too hard. And I don’t think that’s the goal.”

“Graphics in general is the grand art of cheating,” Kirk notes, regardless of technique. “We’re trying to approximate what nature does—tracing gazillions of photons around—by doing less work than that, because even the most sophisticated and powerful ray tracers don’t trace billions of rays per second.”

Tools For The Job

“This whole CPU versus GPU distinction is a little bit artificial,” says Bill Mark, senior researcher at Intel’s Corporate Technology Group. “Certainly you can build GPUs that have some CPU-like characteristics. Similarly, you can build CPUs that have GPU-like characteristics.” That said, ray tracing slightly favors current CPUs because those chips were designed for similar computations as the physics-based ray engines.

Jerry Bautista, co-director of Intel’s Tera-scale computing research program, says, “There’s no computational difference between tracing the path of a bullet and tracing the path of a light ray.” That similarity could even lead to ray-tracing engines being recycled as a game’s physics engine, saving programming and processing power. Bautista also notes, “General compute engines like a CPU are pretty well suited to physics kinds of problems, whereas a GPU is more of a stream compute engine and probably a little better suited to… processing triangles at a high speed.”

Ultimately, hardware companies want software developers to have access to the fastest parts, regardless of renderer. Intel is developing its massively scalable, multicore Larrabee architecture. Nvidia is offering ways for game developers to run their own rendering code directly on the video hardware, allowing even those GPU devices to accelerate ray tracing.

Bright Future

According to Intel, hardware one to two generations away could render a complete, real-time scene with ray tracing. But nobody sees that as the goal. Nvidia’s David Kirk says, “If you could do all ray tracing, would you? I don’t think you would. There are many effects that you can do that involve diffuse kinds of lighting—that means softer, more inter-reflected kinds of lighting—that are horrendously [taxing]… to do with ray tracing.”

The hardware companies want to give software developers more opportunities to write their own renderers, mixing and matching methods even within a single scene. Like the current process in many animated movies, a rasterizer could sketch in a game scene, while a ray tracer could add sharp reflections and details.

This mix-and-match approach seems to contradict an API standard, but Microsoft has already been heading toward this solution. DirectX even allows game developers to send programmable shaders directly to the graphics card, allowing open-ended acceleration regardless of the 3D engine. Chas Boyd, principal program manager for Windows Display and Graphics Technology notes, “In future releases, we will continue to increase the generality of [Direct3D], and thus offer developers even more flexibility in their choice of rendering methods.”

Almost Everything In Wonder

The Maximum PC Staff — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 17:29:45 -0500

This one is a little complicated, but here’s what happened: My girlfriend bought an AMD All-in-Wonder 7500 AGP card from Provantage.com for her father, but it arrived without a remote. He thought the description on the website indicated a remote would come with it, so he asked me to take a look at the website. I thought the product description was ambiguous, so I pinged Provantage about the remote and whether it was OEM or retail packaged.

To make a long story short, a customer service rep told me it did come with a remote and that it was retail boxed. The package my girlfriend’s father received was OEM and came with a driver disc and card—no remote. My girlfriend’s father didn’t want to bother with trying to fight for a return or the remote, so I left it at that. But I think it’s wrong for a company to tell you a product comes with something and then not include it. Provantage.com is definitely not a company I would recommend to anyone who works hard for his or her money.

—Zachary Cothran

The Dog spoke with a Provantage spokesperson who said, “We did accidentally provide erroneous information to the customer, which happens on occasion. We process thousands of orders per day, and we cannot hit a home run every time, although we give our best effort to do so. Had the customer been dissatisfied with what was received and we were notified that they were shipped the wrong product, we would have gladly made it right. Unfortunately, we were not contacted, but Maximum PC’s Watchdog was. Provantage has been around since 1984 and one thing will never change: Customer mistakes happen. We do our best to correct any errors, but if we do not know they happen, there is nothing we can do to make it right.”

The spokesperson said a contributing factor to the confusion may have come from the fact that Zach’s girlfriend ordered the part under her name and Zachary made the inquiry separately, so customer service would never have connected the two.

He also said that the customer service reps aren’t near the products, so they can’t check what’s in the box. The spokesperson said that if Zach’s girlfriend wanted the version with the remote, she could return the card and purchase a retail-packaged one, which includes a remote.

How Can You Measure, Measure a Year?

The Maximum PC Staff — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 16:29:49 -0500

I was a victim of the Symantec triple-license AV software whose timer started ticking with the first installation (March 2008). I called Symantec’s customer service number and complained, and the company fixed it for me by resetting the timer to start with the third installation. This rectified the situation to my satisfaction, and I learned a lesson.

Fast forward a year to a similar three-pack from Computer Associates. Being careful, I installed all three licenses on the same day to make sure there wouldn’t be any issues with the expiration date. As soon as the software ran an update cycle with the home server, it took three weeks off my license! I called CA and the company fixed the problem. The culprit? It seems the clock started ticking when I bought the package (or so I was told). But how did they know when I bought it?

Customer service didn’t say, but I bet it’s from the rebate form I sent in after buying the software. I had purchased the software locally prior to the expiration date of the current antivirus software on the systems I was using and waited a few weeks until the current licenses expired before installing the new copy—a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

This strikes me as an extremely deceptive practice. I wonder if anyone else has been bitten by this?

—Louis Lung

The Dog spoke with a rep from Computer Associates who explained, “With the purchase of a boxed product from a store, the installation process starts when you install the product (not when you purchase it). As the customer states, there is no way for us to know when he purchased it if he bought it in a store.” The spokesperson said this doesn’t apply to all versions though—for software downloaded directly from the website, the clock starts on the purchase date. Louis said he purchased the three-pack locally, so that’s not what occurred. “The update process should not take away any time from his subscription. And submitting a rebate would definitely not alter his subscription date either,” the rep explained.

The spokesperson said the company has not received reports of this happening to other customers. “We try to be as transparent as possible in all of our practices and by no means would we intentionally do anything that was duplicitous.

Fortunately, our customer service resolved this issue directly with the customer, but we do want to make sure it doesn’t happen to anyone else.”

Since some details of what exactly happened in Louis’s case aren’t clear, the rep offered to contact him to try to discover what could have happened.

The lesson to be learned from this is that you need to track your subscriptions— don’t assume companies will do it for you.

Hard Drives and Taxes

The Maximum PC Staff — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 14:34:29 -0500

In your May 2008 issue, you made warm comments about HD Inspector from AltrixSoft. However, the trial version is not really fully featured, as you said, since you can check only the primary drive. All other drives are blocked. Also, these guys charge sales tax on downloaded software. No physical product is delivered, and there’s no way to complain about this. The real issue is the sales tax. This amounts to a 5 to 8 percent surcharge on the price of the product. I live in Boulder, CO. I highly doubt that the company is licensed to collect sales tax in Boulder, or in any other small town in America. This is fraud, and you should look a bit deeper before recommending some of these software vendors.

—Tom Wade

The Dog pinged AltrixSoft, who pinged SWREG, the vendor that processes its software purchases. A SWREG spokesperson said, “The tax we charge is based on our company location and tax requirements. By law, in the U.S., we are required to collect sales tax. We do collect this and pay it to the state. We have offices in Colorado, Georgia, Iowa, Illinois, Nebraska, Minneapolis, and Utah and are required to add sales tax to orders from residents in those states.”

Residents of some states will have to pay sales tax
when they purchase Hard Drive Inspector Professional online.

So, while Boulder is a lovely place to live, apparently residents will always have to pay sales tax on orders from SWREG. If you’re wondering why you didn’t pay sales tax on, say, a copy of Adobe Photoshop CS3 or Symantec Norton Antivirus that you downloaded—not all states require companies to charge sales tax on software downloads.

Among those that don’t are California, Nevada, Oregon, Florida, Ohio, New York, and Virginia. Colorado and several others require sales tax on downloaded software. As far as the “fully featured” comment, the Dog was not aware that HD Inspector works with only the primary drive, as the machine he tested it on did show the secondary drive. The primary drive, a SAS drive, did not show up when he used HD Inspector though.