Maximum PC Reviews RSS Feed

Optoma Pico PK101

Michael Brown — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 19:30:19 -0500

Honey, I shrunk the video projector!

Optoma picked an appropriate moniker for its Lilliputian-size video projector. The Pico PK101 isn’t just small, it’s almost inconceivably tiny. It measures just 1.97 inches wide by 4.06 inches long by 0.59 inches thick, and it weighs only four ounces.

Texas Instruments’ DLP (Digital Light Processor) technology deserves much of the credit for making such a product possible. DLP projectors create an image by bouncing light off microscopic mirrors arranged in a matrix on a semiconductor. Each mirror represents a pixel in the image and swivels to either reflect light through the lens or to an internal heatsink. Toggling these two states on and off creates a grayscale. Color pixels are created by using either a color wheel or a colored light source. Optoma uses a non-replaceable LED for its light source, which it claims should last for 20,000 hours. There’s a tiny speaker and a 0.5-watt amp onboard, too.

In addition to its Li-Ion battery, the Pico PK101 can operate on AC or USB power (we used the USB port on a Metadot Das Keyboard). Optoma claims a fully charged battery should last 90 minutes, but ours delivered only 67 minutes while playing a silent, looping slide show at the brighter of the projector’s two settings. Good thing it comes with a spare.

This projector is designed to be paired with a handheld media player and is outfitted with only an analog A/V input. You connect the projector to a source using either a special cable or an iPod docking-port adapter (both are included). If you want to connect the projector to a PC, the PC must be equipped with either a composite video output or a VGA output (connected to a VGA-to-composite adapter). That limitation pretty much rules out the device as a PowerPoint tool for the traveling businessperson, because a VGA signal converted to composite does a very poor job of displaying text.

We weren’t surprised to discover that the Pico PK101 lacks adjustments for settings such as zoom, tilt, and keystone, but we found its focus wheel thumbwheel to be annoyingly stiff. And while it can throw an impressively large image (it produced a 60-inch diagonal picture from its maximum distance of 102 inches), the image was unsatisfactorily faded in daylight hours, even with heavy curtains covering the window. The Pico performs best in a very dark room or at distances much closer to the screen, where its light is concentrated on a smaller area.

Premiere Elements 7.0

Gordon Mah Ung — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 11:59:25 -0500

Our love affair with Premiere Elements is just about over

Get Robert Stack on the phone! In what could be the greatest tech unsolved mystery since the disappearance of Intel’s Tejas, someone has kidnapped Premiere Elements 5.0 and 6.0!

Just kidding. There’s no crime here unless you believe that it’s flat-out wrong for Adobe to jump from version 4.0 to version 7.0 just to ensure that Premiere Elements matches version numbers with Photoshop Elements 7.0.

One thing we hoped for that’s definitely not present: three full upgrades’ worth of new features and improvements. Adobe continues to use its dumbed-down interface, which we initially viewed with disgust. Oddly enough, the more we’ve used it, the more forgiving we’ve become; we’ve grown quite fond of the newb-friendly front end, despite the fact that it’s basically unchanged. The menus and titling in the consumer video editor continue to be top-notch, as well.

Changes to the program include AVCHD editing support, which we welcome, and the addition of wizard-like features, some good, some so-so. InstantMovie, for example, allows you to easily turn a bunch of clips into a movie, parsing the best clips and adding transitions and effects for you automatically. Similar features have been a big disappointment to us in the past and InstantMovie isn’t a noticeable improvement. The pain of being forced to watch someone else’s home video isn’t lessened just because it’s automatically dressed up with transitions, filters, and a soundtrack. On the other hand, SmartSound makes creating soundtracks a snap. It includes some free music, or you can add your own MP3s to create copyright-violating home movies. Our favorite wizard is the SmartTags feature, which mitigates the tedium of organizing your clips. After you import clips, it scans them for close-ups, crowds, small groups, blurry images, shaky shots, and even focus problems. It’s not perfect and it lacks actual facial recognition, but it does help if you have a lot of footage to wade through.

Our biggest problem with Premiere Elements is that it suffers a host of problems (both minor and major). The first glitch occurred when we were trying to capture HDV footage via FireWire from a Canon HV10. The app’s preview screen would simply stop showing the preview footage. The content would capture, but we could not watch it as it was captured. OK, not a show stopper. More serious was our inability to burn more than one hour of HD footage to a Blu-ray disc. The app would either hang or reboot Windows Vista 64-bit. And it’s not like we didn’t bring enough firepower. We tested using this month’s Gateway FX6800 (page 76), which was equipped with a 2.93GHz Core i7-940, Radeon HD 4870 X2, and 6GB of RAM. We checked online and others have reported problems getting lengthy high-def video to Blu-ray disc, as well. Only by tweaking OS settings were others able to complete their projects. For the record, we had no problems burning the same project at DVD resolution.

When we contacted Adobe, our rep initially said the app is limited to burning roughly an hour of high-def resolution video. Adobe then later claimed to successfully burn two hours of high-def with no problems. So what’s the truth? All we know is that our project burned when we edited it to 17 minutes but choked at 59 minutes. As Madden says, “Boom!”

As a sanity check, we loaded Cyberlink’s PowerDirector 7 on the same box, took the MPEG-2 HDV files and encoded and wrote a one hour, 15 minute Blu-ray disc without a hitch.

Our other issues with Premiere Elements go back to the roots of the program. Since it’s based on the DNA of Premiere Pro, its main purpose is to make videos from traditional DV, HDV, or AVCHD cams. Try to feed it weird exotic video codecs and it chokes. The program, for example, can’t do something as basic as handling MS-DVR files, which can be created by almost any Vista PC with a TV tuner. Given people’s growing interest in consuming, editing, and “mashing up” video from dozens of sources, developers with stronger codec portfolios, such as Corel and Ulead, will likely win out.

With sub-par codec support and problems burning to Blu-ray discs, it’s pretty hard to recommend Premiere Elements 7.0. Maybe version 11.0 will be better.

HP TouchSmart tx2

Michael Brown — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 20:00:00 -0500

Don't touch me there

We’re unabashed fans of HP’s Touch-Smart desktop machines, so we were really looking forward to getting our digits on the new technology in a convertible touch-screen notebook PC. But our eager anticipation only made the reality of the TouchSmart tx2 all that more disappointing.

This is the first convertible touch-screen PC designed for the consumer market, and its underlying hardware—which in our review unit included AMD’s best mobile CPU—delivered enough horsepower for this machine’s touch-screen elements. Benchmark performance, on the other hand, was dismal (more on that later).

You can use the TouchSmart tx2 as a conventional notebook PC or rotate its 12.1-inch screen 180 degrees, lay it flat, and use the machine’s tablet functionality. The 1280x800 touch screen uses active digitizing technology and supports the use of either a fingertip or a digital pen (as opposed to the simple stylus that HP shipped with its first-generation TouchSmart desktops). The digital pen delivers hover feedback (it doesn’t have to touch the screen to activate user-interface elements, such as tooltips) and considerably more precision than a fingertip.

The pen is particularly useful for drawing diagrams and jotting notes, and HP’s handwriting-recognition software is nothing short of excellent. It had no problem recognizing even our sloppiest handwriting as fast as we could scribble. The vaunted multitouch feature—which lets you manipulate objects and certain aspects of the user interface—is really only useful with HP’s very basic MediaSmart applications.

That could change once Windows 7 hits the market, since the new OS is slated to offer native support for multitouch screens. (This machine came with the 64-bit version of Windows Vista Home Premium).

If you don’t have a work surface and don’t need to type, you can put the machine in tablet mode and cradle it in one arm. But we found that our elbow and shoulder could tolerate this position for only about 20 minutes because the TouchSmart tx2 is so heavy for its size: five pounds, one ounce (with the optional eight-cell battery). Adding the power supply brings the weight up to five pounds, 13 ounces. Replacing the optical drive with the plastic “weightsaver” shell sheds five ounces, but renders the machine much less useful.

As you can see in the chart below, the TouchSmart tx2 is abysmally slow with hardcore applications. And while the machine was nearly silent when idle or playing a movie, it sounded like a hair dryer when given a heavy load. The battery delivered two hours and 51 seconds—long enough to watch both Boogie Nights and its supplemental disc—using HP’s recommended settings (which balance battery life with performance).

We made many allowances for the performance of HP’s touch-screen desktops, with the caveat that they shouldn’t be a Maximum PC reader’s only computer. We can’t do the same for a notebook. And while we can ignore the TouchSmart tx2’s crappy gaming performance—no one buys an ultra portable to play games—we can’t ignore this machine’s other shortcomings and high price tag.

DFI LAN Party UT X58

Gordon Mah Ung — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 10:39:52 -0500

There's a party on this motherboard and you're invited!

Motherboards can’t just sit quietly in your case and service your parts anymore. Today, motherboards also must advertise to the entire world that you have one badass system. Hoping to outdo all others, DFI’s LAN Party UT X58 Core i7 motherboard features a massive heat pipe appendage, called the “Flame Chiller,” that juts out the back of your case.

The idea is to transport heat from the heatsinks attached to the board’s power regulators and chipset to outside the case, where it can be cooled by the exhaust from the case. Does it work? The concept makes sense, but we’re a bit skeptical of the small contact patch the heat pipe makes with the board. The external heatsink never got hot in our tests, but we typically don’t overclock test boards far enough to overheat voltage regulators. The Flame Chiller looks cool, though!

This board’s not all about flash and panache, however. The board’s tri-SLI implementation is certainly better than on other X58 boards we’ve tested. While other boards’ x16 PCI-E slot arrangements force you to either buy a specific case enclosure or hack-saw off a portion of your videocard to get a tri-SLI configuration up and running, the LAN Party UT X58’s tri-SLI will work in most cases.

With tri-SLI as one possible config, DFI also properly laid out the SATA ports. All eight of the SATA ports on the board are accessible even with three huge GPUs in place. Another two eSATA ports are available on the backplane, too.

DFI’s audio implementation is also pretty interesting. Instead of an audio card riser that stabs into an x1 slot or some custom slot alternative, the riser board (with Realtek codecs on it to lower board electrical noise) connects to the mobo via a ribbon cable. This lets you place the board wherever it’s convenient. Alas, while other enthusiast boards give you X-Fi compatibility through drivers or licensed hardware, the LAN Party UT X58 sticks to basic Realtek codecs and drivers, which aren’t quite as good.

After spending some time overclocking Intel’s threadbare DX58SO board (see page 40), we really appreciate how the LAN Party UT X58 offers far more switches and knobs to turn. One thing DFI needs to add, though, is a status page, so you can tell what your tweaks have changed. For example, you should be able to see what DRAM frequency you have selected instead of calculating it manually.

In our overclocking tests with the LAN Party UT X58, we didn’t get our engineering sample Core i7-965 to the speeds that we did with the DX58SO (just shy of 4GHz), but we spent considerably more time with the Intel board than we can with any review board. Spending more time learning the intricacies of this board’s BIOS could very well improve the overclocking performance.

Unfortunately, DFI’s board doesn’t distinguish itself on the benchmark performance beat, either—it clocks scores that are very similar to all the other X58 boards we’ve tested. DFI does set its Turbo Mode much higher than other boards, but that didn’t seem to impact performance at all.

So what’s the practical upshot? We still prefer the features and onboard X-Fi of the MSI Eclipse SLI that we reviewed in February, but the DFI LAN Party UT X58 comes in a close second.

Gateway FX6800

Gordon Mah Ung — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 22:00:00 -0500

Who says a gaming PC has to break the bank?

Gateway’s trademark cow is long dead, but that doesn’t mean the company can’t be its quirky old self—something the FX6800 gaming rig illustrates perfectly. With its itsy-bitsy, microATX board, “I don’t care about appearances” wiring, and moderate price, you’d think the box would be easily outclassed by the custom, hand-built PCs we see every month. Well, think again.

The FX6800’s secret is under the hood. While the majority of the machines we’ve tested lately are still running overclocked Core 2 Extreme CPUs, Gateway reached for the midrange Core i7-940. The top-end CPU may be the speed king, but we seriously wondered if a stock-clocked, 2.93GHz Core i7-940 could even hang with those 4GHz Core 2 Extreme rigs.

The results were surprisin. While the FX6800 didn’t clean anyone’s clock, the Core 2 Quad boxes didn’t exactly blow the lowly $3,000 Gateway out of the water, either. For example, the radical, oil-cooled, nearly $11,000, Hardcore Reactor that we reviewed in March was only six percent faster in our Premiere Pro CS3 test and 10 percent faster in Photoshop CS3. Perhaps even more embarrassing is the Reactor’s score in our ProShow Producer and MainConcept tests. Both benchmarks are multithreaded and thus we saw the eight-core (four real, four Hyper-Threaded) FX6800 acing the Reactor by 31 percent in ProShow Producer and achieving near dead-even scores in Main Concept. The performance gap was shocking considering the 1GHz clock gap and massive price difference between the two machines.

In gaming, the FX6800’s single ATI HD Radeon 4870 X2 card couldn’t compete with the competition’s CrossFire and SLI configurations, though. In Crysis, the 4870 X2 saw frame rates in the 34fps range. The tri-SLI Reactor ran in the 53fps range.

Just because the FX6800 comes with only one videocard doesn’t mean the machine can’t run CrossFire. It’s true that you lose two slots going from ATX to microATX, but the board in the FX6800 features two x16 physical slots, so a second X2 card could be mounted. The Delta PSU in the rig even features a harness to support a second graphics card, but we don’t know if it can deliver the needed juice.

There are some other nice touches in the FX6800. The top-mounted media reader features a copy button that automatically copies files to the PC. We like the FX6800’s storage config, which features Intel’s speedy 64GB X-25M SSD drive and a 1TB Seagate Barracuda. Not great, but not bad. We particularly like the two additional, easy-to-access drive bays in front. Slide open a door, and you can insert two 3.5-inch SATA drives to act as backup. Further adding to the convenience, Gateway has a backup button that activates Vista’s built-in backup application.

There’s a lot to like about the FX6800. It’s not Kick Ass–worthy, but it’s pretty affordable, and it won’t leave you embarrassed, even if you compare it to last month’s fire-breather. The FX6800 is a little like driving your dad’s AMC AMX against an exotic car in a street race. The other car may be louder and flashier, but it still can’t pull away from your funky ’70s ride.

BFG GeForce GTX 295

Will Smith — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 10:00:00 -0500

With speed to burn, this dual-GPU videocard delivers SLI in a single PCI-E slot

Just in case you missed our review of the new GTX 295 reference board last month, we’ll revisit the high points. To make a GeForce GTX 295, Nvidia sandwiched a fairly large heatsink between a pair of boards—that’s one kick-ass sandwich!

The GTX 295’s GPUs are basically modified GTX 280 GPUs. They’ve got the same shader core configuration as the GTX 280, but Nvidia shrunk the chip’s die from 65nm to 55nm, and lowered the core clock speed to 576MHz (the same as the GTX 260). These two adjustments help keep power requirements and heat generation under control, while the full complement of 240 shader cores keeps the frame rate up in shader-limited benchmarks, such as Crysis and Far Cry 2.

The GTX 295’s memory configuration is also similar to the GTX 260’s. Each GPU is paired with 896MB of GDDR3 clocked at 999MHz, connected to the GPU by a 448-bit bus. Where ATI increases memory bandwidth on the 4870 family of cards by using quad-pumped GDDR5 memory, Nvidia is still using double-pumped RAM with a wider bus. The upshot is that the 4870 X2 has a tiny memory-bandwidth edge. In reality, it’s probably not something you’d ever notice.

The performance story hasn’t changed much from our last review, despite new driver revisions from both ATI and Nvidia. Even in shader-limited tests that typically favor ATI’s massive array of 800 shader processors (Crysis and 3DMark Vantage), the GTX 295 managed to outpace ATI’s fastest. Indeed, the BFG card laid down the smack in every single benchmark we test, a rare feat.

This card fits into a single PCI Express slot, but it will cover the adjoining slot, as well. It requires both 6-pin and 8-pin PCI-E power connectors and a decent 680W power supply to run. BFG equipped its board with a pair of dual-link DVI connectors and a single HDMI output.

It’s fast, it’s beautiful. ‘Nuff said.

LG GH22LS30

Katherine Stevenson — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 13:30:21 -0500

Another 22x DVD burner enters the fray

The GH22LS30 comes with Nero Express for recording discs and Cyberlink's Power-Producer and PowerDVD for disc authoring and playback chores.

If you read our disc-ripping challenge on page 62, then you already know that LG’s GH22LS30 22x SATA drive is a slowpoke at copying video discs. But if that’s not an activity that interests you, this drive offsets the shortcoming with other talents. For example, the GH22LS30 turned in the fastest time we’ve ever clocked at writing data to a single-layer DVD+R disc. Like Samsung’s SH-S223 (reviewed February), LG’s 22x burner isn’t daunted by 16x media; the drive peaked at a 20.1x speed when filling the disc and achieved an impressive write-speed average of 16.31x. Thus the GH22LS30 was able to write 4.38GB of data in 4:29 (min:sec) compared with the SH-S223’s time of 4:46. The GH22LS30 read the single-layer data disc in 4:58 to the SH-S223’s 4:55.

The two drives were close performers when reading and writing dual-layer discs, as well—when the content was data, that is. The GH22LS30 wrote 7.96GB of data to disc in 13:54 versus the SH-S223’s 13:13. And LG’s drive took 11:46 to read the data disc we created, while Samsung’s drive took 11:29. But as we mentioned earlier, the speed of the GH22LS30 ratchets way down when the drive is reading video files. Our new disc-ripping test involves copying the contents of a dual-layer movie disc to a hard drive (a read operation, as far as the optical drive is concerned). LG’s GH22LS30 took 20:24 to rip our test DVD, while Samsung’s SH-S223 finished in 15:26 in stock trim (and just 8:26 with a third-party firmware hack), and a host of other DVD drives took just a little over 10:00. (See page 62 for details). That kind of time can add up when you’re archiving a movie collection.

The two drives evened out again in our DVD+RW tests, with the GH22LS30 writing 4.38GB of data to a rewriteable disc in 14:55, a second faster than Samsung’s drive mustered.

Yes, the GH22LS30 is nearly equal to Samsung’s SH-S223 in many respects, but we’ll opt for the total package over a partial any day.

Cooler Master V10

Nathan Edwards — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 13:02:56 -0500

Huge, mediocre, and difficult to install is no way to go through life, son

The Cooler Master V10 is a monster. It weighs two pounds, 10 ounces, stands 6.3x9.3x5.1 inches, and contains one thermoelectric cooler, two fans, and two heatsinks: one on the CPU and one on the TEC. The TEC, which needs to be powered by a 4-pin Molex on a dedicated power lead, activates only when needed.

The Cooler Master V10 is two and a half pounds of frustration.

The V10’s installation is the worst we’ve ever experienced. Two retention clips attach to the cooler, which you then attach to a bracket you mount on the back side of the motherboard. This means removing your motherboard and balancing the cooler on your lap while you screw it in. Unfortunately, the V10 is so huge that it blocks the motherboard’s top three ATX screws, making it difficult to mount the motherboard in even the roomiest cases. And the V10’s bulk made it difficult to connect both the 8-pin and the 24-pin motherboard power cables on our test system’s motherboard—impressive, since they’re on opposite sides of the motherboard.

The V10’s RAM fan means you have to remove the cooler to remount your memory, and DIMMs with cooling vanes, like Corsair’s Dominators, are likely to be bumped by the V10’s overhanging radiator. Indeed, the first few times we tried to install the V10, our machine wouldn’t POST due to RAM seating issues. It wasn’t until we replaced our tall DIMMs with shorter sticks, and removed the optional backplane bracket to mount the cooler (which can warp the motherboard), that we could even get our system to start.

Ultimately, the V10 offers nothing to recommend itself. It’s a nightmare to install in most machines—the only exceptions are cases with motherboard tray cutouts behind the CPU. Plus, its performance is merely mediocre: Our favorite air cooler, the Zalman CNPS9900, outcools it easily in both idle and full burn (by three and five degrees, respectively). The Zalman cooler is also smaller, $60 cheaper, easier to install, and requires less power.