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Microsoft Optical Desktop Elite for Bluetooth

Maximum PC — Mon, 06 Dec 2004 19:36:45 -0600

Second-gen keyboard/mouse makes steady advances

Month Reviewed: December 2004
Verdict: 8
URL: www.microsoft.com

This latest Bluetooth wireless keyboard and mouse combo corrects many of the problems we had with Microsoft’s initial Bluetooth desktop. For starters, the Bluetooth adapter that comes with this set is a fully functional Bluetooth receiver. That means it’s able to communicate with cell phones, printers, and PDAs. Hey, we wouldn’t accept anything less.

The keyboard uses a standard layout, plus 19 extra programmable keys. Like other Microsoft keyboards, these extra keys can be programmed to do almost anything you want, such as starting apps, opening folders, and controlling media applications. We have two minor gripes with the Microsoft keyboard. It still uses the unforgivable F-lock feature mentioned in the review above, and the delete and insert keys are in unconventional locations.

The mouse is a mixed bag as well. It shares the same basic design as the Wireless Intellimouse Explorer, and even includes the new tilting, smooth-scrolling wheel. Unfortunately, although the smooth scrolling of this mouse model feels awesome for desktop apps, it’s too sensitive in games. We didn’t experience this problem with the Intellimouse Explorer 4.0, which uses the same type of scrolling, so we hope a software fix will correct this problem down the road. Another concern: Battery life was significantly shorter than we like; and for a mouse that uses standard AA batteries rather than rechargeables, it’s a serious problem. --Will Smith

+ Bluetooth: Comes with a Bluetooth adapter that works the way Bluetooth adapters should.

- Bluebeard: The mouse wheel sensitivity problem is a killer, and we are concerned about mouse battery life.

HP F2304

Maximum PC — Mon, 06 Dec 2004 18:53:51 -0600

The best LCD we've seen

Now imagine the glory of SDM-P234 times two! While we were evaluating Sony’s monitor, the f2304 was by its side running the exact same DisplayMate scripts and real-world content via a DVI splitter box. (It’s the preferred method of comparison, but not always possible if the monitors in question have varying resolutions and/or interfaces, in which case we review them individually using the same PC.)

Believe us when we say, it was a vision of spectacular excess—a testament to the fine quality of both models.

Still, DisplayMate performance wasn’t identical. The f2304 had no problems at all with the 256 level gray-scale ramp, but it wasn’t as good as the SM-P234 at white-level saturation. In other words, super-light grays were difficult to resolve against a white background. Otherwise, aspect ratio, screen uniformity, color tracking, and the various other nuances DisplayMate reveals were up to the standards we expect from a high-end LCD monitor. Similarly, Need for Speed: Underground proved the f2304 to be an able gaming ally.

Indeed, the f2304 and SDM-P234 are mighty close competitors. In the end, it came down to inputs. In addition to the VGA, DVI, and audio inputs that the SDM-P234 offers, the f2304 includes S-video and Component inputs, as well as built-in speakers.

The latter is admittedly of lesser importance, but all told, the f2304 is the more versatile of the two—and our new favorite LCD monitor. --Katherine Stevenson

+ Liquid crystal: 23-inches of solid LCD splendor! Variety of inputs.

- Crystal meth: Super light grays indistinct from white in DisplayMate tests.

Month Reviewed: December 2004
Verdict: 9
kickass=yes
URL: www.hp.com

Rio Carbon 5GB MP3 Player

Maximum PC — Mon, 06 Dec 2004 18:43:25 -0600

Wherein the iPod Mini suffers a mortal wound

Month Reviewed: January 2005
Verdict: 9 Kick Ass
URL: www.digitalnetworksna.com

You’ve got to hand it to Apple—the iPod family of MP3 players is so iconic that every new MP3 player is immediately challenged with the same review clichÃ©: “Is it an iPod killer?” The Rio Carbon is not, but paradoxically, it’s a superior device.

The Rio Carbon uses Seagate’s miniature 5GB drive, putting it a gigabyte over the capacity of the iPod Mini. Even better, the openness of the Carbon makes the iPod Mini look positively uptight. You don’t need proprietary management software to load tracks onto it (although software is included for creating playlists). Instead, it shows up as a removable hard drive in Windows Explorer, and from there you’re free to transfer music and data files onto the player. Tracks within folders—even folders several levels deep—are also recognized. The sound is delectably vivid, and can be further shaped with the five-band graphic equalizer the iPod Mini lacks.

The display is as crisp and titillating as the dark-red backlit buttons and the curvaceous shape (which is more comfortable to hold and to pocket than the iPod Mini). We can even forgive the lack of a Hold button because not once during our abusive go-round was a button accidentally pressed. Best of all, the battery life absolutely crushes the iPod Mini at more than 19 hours on a single charge at 75 percent volume!

True to Maximum PC’s perfection-seeking character, we have quibbles. The carrying case is awful; it prevents us from operating the player, and removing it from the case is an awkward chore. Audio is disabled during fast-forward, and there’s no fast-advance equivalent to the iPod Mini that allows you to quickly jump to any point in the track. Furthermore, we’re flummoxed by the absence of OGG or FLAC support, both of which are present in the 20GB Rio Karma. (The player does support the Audible audiobook format, and can bookmark your place in these tracks.) We also would have liked to see an on-the-fly playlist function comparable to the one in the iPod Mini.

The Rio Carbon isn’t an “iPod killer” because it won’t seduce those who prefer the Apple convention of restricting choice in favor of “ease of use.” Instead, it delivers the do-it-your-way music management system and broader format compatibility that PC users expect. It’s got the right attitude, and the right hardware. Apple could learn a thing or two from this media player. --Logan Decker

+ Santa’s reindeer: Convenient, intelligent music and data file management. Looks sweet.

- Courtney Love’s career: No OGG or FLAC support. Ridiculous carrying case.

Averatec 6200

Maximum PC — Mon, 06 Dec 2004 02:30:28 -0600

We think of it as a big-ass DVD player

Month Reviewed: December 2004
Verdict: 7
URL: www.averatec.com

We’ve never been impressed by low-cost notebooks, which tend to sacrifice so many features they feel like a car without a spare tire or rear window defroster. Thankfully, the 6200 isn’t one of these, sporting an interesting blend of features that make it a noteworthy portable.

The most compelling feature is that you can play up to 4.5 hours of DVD movies on a single battery charge. Averatec accomplishes this—without using two batteries, we’ll add—by taking advantage of what has become a plethora of low-cost MPEG2 decoding chips made for single-purpose portable DVD players and DVD decks. Because the 6200 uses one of these chips—which handles all DVD, MP3, and audio functions, it can boot into a power-saving pre-OS environment where it can be used to play CDs, DVDs, and MP3 discs instead of forcing you to wait the minute or so it takes for Windows XP to boot.

How much power does it save? Consider this: The zero-point notebook we compared it with needs two batteries to reach the same playback time as the 6200. To aid in DVD viewing, a nifty PC Card-size remote lets you flip through chapters as well as choose subtitles and audio formats. Elegantly, the remote slips into the notebook’s single PC Card slot when not in use.

Unfortunately, this impressive battery life comes at the expense of visual quality. The movies we watched using the built-in decoder chip looked dull and soft when compared with playback in CyberLink’s PowerDVD running in Windows XP on the same laptop. Because the DVD playback mode lacks the ability to tweak image quality, there was little we could do to sharpen the image.

The 6200 is powered by AMD’s Athlon XP-M 2400+, a 1.8GHz Athlon XP using the Barton core with AMD’s PowerNow! technology, which steps the processor speeds down as usage levels drop. While this mobile XP chip can outgun the two-year old 1.7GHz Pentium 4M we use as a zero-point, it gets smoked by modern Pentium M/Centrino-class CPUs. If your mobile work is limited to DVD viewing, light-duty Photoshop work, web browsing, and e-mail, the Athlon XP-M has more than enough pep. For gaming, however, it’s a dud. With its integrated graphics, it was incapable of running our five-year-old Quake III test. Because we couldn’t get the game to run at 1280x1024 resolution—the minimum resolution required for the benchmark—we were unable to obtain any results. Suffice to say, don’t expect to use this laptop to play much beyond Solitaire on this laptop.

Storage is a 4,200rpm, 60GB Hitachi Travelstar 80GN with an 8MB buffer and a Lite-On 24x CD-R combo drive. The model we reviewed didn’t feature a DVD burner but Averatec has since added it as standard equipment. There’s no Bluetooth, but you do get 802.11g, which is backward compatible with 802.11b access points.

We’ll admit, we didn’t expect a whole lot from the Averatec 6200, but overall, it’s a pretty serviceable notebook for the money. If you’re looking for a notebook that will give you long-haul movie viewing and basic computing capabilities, the 6200 is surprisingly satisfying and won’t break your back—or the bank. --Gordon Mah Ung

+Anchor Steam: Incredible DVD playback times and a wide screen for $1,200.

- Lucky Lager: Integrated graphics core and no DVD burner.

Philips Ultimate Edge PSC724

Maximum PC — Mon, 06 Dec 2004 02:13:13 -0600

A complete alternative to Sound Blaster arrives, but with a cost in performance

Month Reviewed: January 2005
Verdict: 7
URL: www.philips.com

Once a solid purveyor of hardware audio acceleration, Philips/VLSI has made an abrupt reversal with its new Ultimate Edge PSC724 soundcard. The 24-bit Ultimate Edge dumps the Thunderbird Avenger DSP that Philips used in its older Acoustic Edge soundcard for the ubiquitous VIA Envy24GT chip. A similar VIA chip is used to power the M-Audio Revolution 7.1, AudioTrak Prodigy 7.1, and a host of other competing cards.

Note that the word “powers” does not mean the aforementioned chip does any actual audio processing. No. The Envy24GT is essentially a PCI bus-mastering chip that handles the flow of data between the audio converters and the PCI bus. Any crunching of data for positional audio, reverb, or other such effects are performed by the CPU.

When we test soundcards (an increasingly dying breed) in the Maximum PC Lab, we’ve found that the software, drivers, and algorithms often make a huge impact on the way a card performs and sounds. It’s clear from our tests that Philips spent a considerable amount of time polishing its drivers and supporting applications. Of the Envy24 cards we’ve reviewed to date, the Ultimate Edge has the most advanced audio applets and controls we’ve seen. The controls are centralized, easy to understand and much better than its competitors’ offerings.

Audio quality is a slightly different story. The card uses a pair of Wolfson Microelectronics WM8766 24-bit/192kHz codec chips to convert digital to analog. The same codecs are used in AudioTrak’s Prodigy 7.1, which explains the sound similarities between the two. In subjective listening tests using high sample-rate audio, we found the Ultimate Edge to sound a little dull when compared with an Audigy 2 ZS (and we felt similarly about the Prodigy 7.1). We were able to EQ the Ultimate Edge to compensate for the flatness, but even so, we still give the Audigy 2 ZS a slight edge.

In gaming, the Ultimate Edge holds its own in sound quality, even though it doesn’t support Creative’s proprietary EAX3 and EAX4. But you pay a steep price in performance. We’ve wondered for a long time now whether accelerated soundcards would go the way of the MPEG2 decoders. With gigahertz to burn, we’ve reasoned, do you really need a DSP?

It sure looks like it. We used our standard Athlon 64 FX-51 test bed and ran 3DMark03, UT2003, Quake III Arena, and Comanche in 5.1 mode (the highest the Ultimate Edge supports) and saw 10 percent frame rate penalties. That’s pretty painful, especially when you consider the performance hit in another way: If you spent $500 on your videocard, a 10 percent hit in frame rates is going to reduce your $500 videocard’s performance to the equivalent of a $400 videocard. The same reduction is also going to affect your CPU, robbing it of a bin or two of CPU clock cycles.

This may make gamers reel in horror, but there’s a massive counter-trend rearing its head that may ultimately render DSPs worthless, regardless: Games may stop supporting them. Id’s Doom 3, for example, does all audio on the CPU. Valve’s Half Life 2 and GSC’s S.T.A.L.K.E.R. are expected to do the same. If this practice continues, a hardware accelerated card won’t make any difference whatsoever in your gaming. --Gordon Mah Ung

+Strawberry Jam: Good value, integrated control panel.

-Toe Jam: Eats CPU cycles.

December 2004 - Gear of the Year

The Maximum PC Staff — Wed, 01 Dec 2004 00:00:00 -0600

In the PDF archive of the December 2004 issue, you can find:

Maximum PC Names 2004's Best PC Parts
CPU Shootout
25 Must-Have Upgrades
How To: Take Better Digital Pictures
32 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!

November 2004: Build Your Own PC

The Maximum PC Staff — Mon, 01 Nov 2004 00:00:00 -0600

In the PDF archive of the November 2004 issue, you can find:

Build Your very own PC
The Birth of a CPU
PC Trauma Kit
Awesome Product Reviews, including the Logitech Z-5500 5.1 Speaker System!
Ask the Doctor
Rig of the Month
The Watchdog
And a whole lot more!

Click the frickin' huge cover image to the right to download the PDF archive today!

Epson PictureMate

Maximum PC — Tue, 19 Oct 2004 20:30:23 -0500

A decent ink jet, but it can't compete with the dye subs

Month Reviewed: November 2004
Verdict: 7
URL: www.epson.com

Of the four printers here, Epson’s PictureMate is the only ink jet. Unlike a dye sub, which uses a ribbon to lay down continuous layers of color, an ink jet creates an image by spraying closely arrayed dots onto paper. We expected the PictureMate to face an uphill battle against the dye subs, and we were right. Even with a resolution of 5760x1440, the PictureMate couldn’t match the output of the Canon, Sony, and Olympus printers. While we did get surprisingly good results from the PictureMate, close inspection of the test photos revealed signs of banding from the ink-head passes as well as the dotted stippling that’s characteristic of ink jets. One thing’s for sure—after experiencing the benefits of the dye subs, we’re not inclined to ever opt for ink jet.

Not all is bad for the PictureMate, though. The printer kicks ass when it comes to media costs. All three dye-sub printers cost more than 50 cents a picture, while the PictureMate’s consumables are in the 26 cent range. This makes the PictureMate a more affordable proposition. And even though the PictureMate is about $30 more than the others, it comes with enough ink and paper to print 20 prints.

The PictureMate also features slots for xD, Smart Media, Memory Stick, Memory Stick Pro, Compact Flash, and SD. Even better, you can use the printer as a media reader (something Sony should have done with the EX-50), although data transfer rates are slowed by the USB 1.1 speeds.

But, unless you’re really concerned about consumables, the PictureMate just doesn’t make sense next to the faster and sharper mini dye subs. --Gordon Mah Ung

+ Dye sub: Cheaper consumables and still very good output.

- Ink jet: Slight banding, and resolution doesn’t match dye subs.