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December 2005 - Gear of the Year

The Maximum PC Staff — Sun, 06 Aug 2006 08:02:01 -0500

In the PDF archive of the December 2005 issue, you can find:

Gear of the Year 2005
Making the Mac Switch?
Media Player Roundup
Radeon X1800 Torture Test
16 More Awesome Product 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!

Don't Get Mysty

Maximum PC — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 12:20:10 -0600

By Thomas McDonald
The first words of this column, written almost 10 years ago, were the undeniably childish (albeit accurate) “I hate Myst.” Myst was an anti-game, a desiccated husk of an imaginary world peppered with puzzles that only grew in tedium the further you traveled. Levers and buttons and switches, oh my!

Well, a decade or so later, Myst finally comes to an end with Myst V: End of Ages, and I needed to see if maturity had done anything to mellow my feelings about this spawn of the brothers Miller. The answer is a definitive “sorta.”

Despite the mighty efforts of team Cyan, reams of text, and oceans of dialog (all well-voiced), I still feel no connection to these humorless, mopey, unappealing characters and their problems. End of Ages is loaded with the sort of overripe text that defines the series: “What is a stranger? Someone who is not me? Yet sometimes I feel like a stranger to myself.”

This is simple sub-Robert Jordan wankery: low-level freshman English comp with pretensions of profundity. As a passing bit of narrative/character backfilling, it would be merely something to dismiss on the way to the next bit of lever/button/switch twiddling. The problem is, the entire game—indeed the entire series—is permeated with this grim portentousness. It’s a particular style of fantasy narrative that many readers (and gamers) adore, but which leaves me utterly cold, and it partly explains why this series has never clicked with me.

And yet… there is a real sense of imagination at work here. While the narrative and gameplay sensibilities of the Millers hold little appeal for me, the visual style and grand sense of the fantastic is mightily impressive. Myst’s worlds—dark and empty as they always are—display a tremendous amount of invention. World-building is no easy matter, and an entire landscape with such wondrous places and clever touches is a tremendous achievement. Cyan always delivers the eye-candy, and a wholly 3D Myst world is an amazing place to explore. Too bad I’ve never felt there was a good reason to explore it.

Sizing Up Multicore Processors

Maximum PC — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 12:06:36 -0600

By Tom R. Halfhill
If two processor cores are better than one, can we evaluate multicore chips simply by counting cores? Unfortunately, we can’t. That would be as misleading as judging single-core processors solely by their clock speeds, and everybody knows how that turned out.

All multicore processors are not created equal. They have profound differences that greatly affect their performance. Before the marketing schemers at AMD and Intel corrupt your mind with propaganda, consider some important aspects of multicore designs.

One factor is the microarchitecture of the cores replicated on the chip. For now, AMD and Intel are using processor cores originally designed for single-core chips, because that’s all they’ve got. Multicore PC processors are so new that neither company has had time to create entirely new cores. I think Intel has a slight edge, because its latest multicore processor (Yonah, expected in January) has two cores derived from the low-power Pentium M (Banias) microarchitecture. AMD’s cores aren’t quite as power-optimized.

Another factor is whether the multiple cores are homogenous or heterogeneous. Homogenous means all the cores are the same, and so far, that describes all the multicore chips announced by AMD and Intel. Someday we may see heterogeneous designs with different cores optimized for different software workloads.

Another very important factor is how the cores communicate with each other. There are numerous options. AMD’s first dual-core processor, the Opteron 800, has a sophisticated on-chip link called a crossbar switch. In comparison, Intel’s first dual-core processor, the Pentium EE 840, looks like a duct-tape job. Under pressure to match AMD’s multicore introduction, Intel crammed two Prescott Pentium 4 cores on the chip and routed their communications through the external chipset. Intel’s Yonah is a much better multicore design.

Cache matters, too. Because AMD and Intel derived their first multicore processors from single-core chips, each core has its own L2 cache. Like jealous siblings, they don’t share. Yonah takes a step forward by using a shared cache, which is more efficient when one program needs more cache than another does.

There are many more differences among multicore processors, and they always reflect engineering trade-offs—there’s no absolute best design. Weighing those trade-offs will require better benchmarks and knowledgeable reviewers.

Selecting the Best

Maximum PC — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 11:44:25 -0600

By Will Smith
This year, Maximum PC reviewed 420 products. That’s a lot of reviews. And each and every product that was reviewed is eligible for our annual “Gear of the Year” story.

Although it’s easy to outright eliminate the hardware we savaged with bad reviews and low verdicts, there’s still a boatload of quality contenders, making the selection process a grueling task.

The whittling goes something like this: First, every editor makes a list of the contenders in his or her category. Some of these lists are short—those in the know will agree that there’s only one possible core-logic chipset choice this year—but some of the lists are long. Really, really long. The list of candidates for our Wild Card category—outstanding hardware that doesn’t fit into one of our traditional categories—was positively epic!

Next, we lock all the editors in a tiny, poorly lit, spider-infested conference room deep in the bowels of the Maximum PC Complex. Sure, we could use one of our well equipped, modern conference rooms, but squalid conditions motivate us to get the job done faster.
Once we’re sealed in the room, the first editor presents the contenders for the first category, and the debate begins. No topic is off-limits—be it fan noise or future upgradeability or even a product’s color—and while raw performance is the primary concern, everything about every product is considered before we make our final proclamations. Believe me, the debates are lively—not lively like a political debate, but lively like a soccer riot.

No one leaves until the list is done. There are no bathroom breaks, no food orders, no interruptions whatsoever. There are occasional startling developments: This year we were so torn between two strong contenders for the Wild Card category that we created a new category (Cooling) so as to accommodate both. Drama abounds. This bears repeating: No one leaves the room until the list is done.

If it sounds like a lot of hassle, it is. But it’s worth every tear and every drop of blood shed. Sure, we could just pick the products that got the best scores and call it a day, but then I never would have heard one editor call the 10,000rpm Raptor “the hard drive that changed my life,” or been privy to the full inventory of another editor’s RAIDed 500GB Deskstars.

So I hope you guys enjoy “Gear of the Year.” It’s on page 24. As you’re reading it, remember that six editors went through hell to get it to you.

The Maximum PC Auction

Maximum PC — Mon, 26 Dec 2005 01:00:14 -0600

We’re selling two kick-ass Maximum PC-built and -blessed PCs on eBay to raise money for the Red Cross and the Salvation Army. You could be one of the lucky bidders!

The Baby Blue auction is OVER! Check it out here!

The Roadrunner auction is online NOW! Take a look!

The staff at Maximum PC watched in horror as first Hurricane Katrina, and then Hurricane Rita pummeled the Gulf coast, killing more than 1,000 people and destroying the homes, towns, and even cities of thousands more. Yet our hearts were warmed by the stories of the heroes who came to the aid of the hurricanes’ victims. And more than ever, we recognized the invaluable contribution of charitable organizations, such as the Red Cross and Salvation Army.

We wanted to do something to help. So we embarked on a mission to raise money for these charities that save the day in disaster zones, by doing what we do best—building kick-ass PCs.

These are two of the fastest PCs money can buy. The gaming PC we assembled is lightning-fast, and the hand-crafted small formfactor rig combines the raw speed of an all-around performer with the silent running you can only achieve with a mobile processor.

We’re going to auction these PCs on eBay, then donate 100 percent of the proceeds from the gaming rig to the Salvation Army and all the proceeds from the silent machine to the Red Cross.

Of course, we couldn’t have built these rigs without the good will of vendors throughout the PC industry, who donated parts and time to help make these machines a reality—their contributions are much appreciated!

Mind you, this is the first time ever that hand-built machines by Maximum PC editors have been available for sale. Each one was built with care, is completely unique, and bears the signature of every editor. This is your once-in-a-lifetime chance to own a piece of Maximum PC, and best of all, it’s for a great cause! If you’re not in the market for a new rig right now, consider these machines a roadmap to your next hardware upgrade.

Check back here on December 4, when we'll release information about how you can bid on one of these two machines:

Check out "Baby Blue."

Check out "The Road Runner."

How To: Compress a DVD Using Divx 6

Maximum PC — Wed, 21 Dec 2005 17:33:51 -0600

By Logan Decker
It’s not just a codec anymore. Maximum PC shows you how to make the most of new features in the new Divx Media file format!

Back when the entertainment industry was still trying to figure out what this em-pee-three business was all about, the Divx video compression codec was already becoming a de facto standard for “sharing” video on the Internet, and it remains popular today, despite challenges from freeware codecs like Xvid and OGG Video, as well as Microsoft’s Windows Media 9.

But Divx 6 is more than just a more efficient and higher-quality iteration of the Divx codec—it’s now a container format, like AVI, which can wrap compressed video, menus, subtitles, and multiple audio streams into a single file. We’ll show you how to take advantage of the codec’s fancy new features and create a trimmed-down and compressed version of your DVD-Video that’s almost identical to the original.

Here's what you'll need:

DivX Create Bundle ($20)
DivX Create Bundle MPEG-2 Plug-in ($10 upgrade within the above app)
www.divx.com

AC3 Codec (Free)
www.sourceforge.net

A DVD Burner

Optional

Slysoft AnyDVD ($40)
www.slysoft.com

InterVideo DVD Copy 4 Platinum ($80)
www.intervideo.com

STEP 1: INSTALL THE NECESSARY APPS AND CODECS
Download and install the Divx 6 Create Bundle from the Divx website. This package installs the Divx Pro codec, the Divx Media Player application, and Divx Converter, which lets you create Divx Media files by simply dragging and dropping files onto the Converter application. If you intend to convert VOB files from commercial DVDs, you’ll also need the MPEG-2 plugin, which will be automatically activated on a trial basis when you drag a VOB file onto the converter.

The Divx 6 Create Bundle is a slick, stupid-simple application that lets you drag and drop video files for automatic batch conversion, including AVI files compressed with different codecs (as long as these codecs are already present on your system) and VOB files from DVDs. But it won’t allow you to specify individual chapters or videos to compress or to cut out audio streams you don’t need. In order to take advantage of Divx Media’s secret candy stash, you’ll need to download and install InterVideo’s DVD Copy 4, the first application to officially support the Divx Media container format.

Finally, you’ll need the appropriate codecs. If you can already view and hear your media in Windows, you’ve got them, but you might also need to download the AC3 audio codec used in many DVD-Videos. Keep in mind that the Divx 6 Create Bundle, DVD Copy 4, and even the MPEG-2 plugin are all available in fully functional 15-day trial versions, so don’t hesitate to give the next-generation Divx a chance!

STEP 2: RIP YOUR DVD
If you want to convert your DVD-Video to Divx Media—in order to stream movies from your Media Center PC, for example—you’ll need to rip the contents to your hard drive with a DVD-ripping application, which is technically illegal. That’s why freeware rippers such as DVDDecryptor and SmartRipper are being clubbed on the Internet like baby seals. You can still find them with some Googling effort, but make sure your antivirus auto-protection is activated, and check for spyware after installation.

Slysoft’s AnyDVD takes a different approach than most rippers: It decrypts DVD-Video on the fly so the copy protection is rendered essentially invisible to you, and you can copy the VIDEO_TS folder, where the DVD content resides, by simply dragging it to your hard drive.

Don’t bother with the AUDIO_TS folder or anything else you find on the disc—all the contents of the DVD-Video, including menus, video, and audio, are contained within the VIDEO_TS folder.

CAUTION!
One more time: Circumventing the encryption on commercial DVDs is illegal! If you don't like that, let your Senator, Representative, or legal guardian know.

STEP 3: USING THE DIVX CONVERTER APPLICATION
The easiest way to convert your media to Divx Media is to simply drop the files onto Divx Converter and select an encoding profile. Because not many portable devices support Divx 6 yet, we recommend the Home Theater profile, which encodes standard DVD resolution video (720x480) at a bit rate of 1250KB/s. If you drop a handful of media files onto Converter, it will allow you to encode them as individual files or create a single Divx Media file with an automatically generated menu.

It won’t do this with VOB files; instead, it will simply create one file from all the consecutive VOBs. In order to take advantage of some of the more advanced features of Divx Media—including compression of an entire DVD with menus and all—we’ll need to use InterVideo’s DVD Copy 4.

STEP 4: SELECT YOUR SOURCE FILES
DVD Copy 4 will not copy CSS-encrypted commercial DVDs, so we’re going to assume you’ve already copied and decrypted the VIDEO_TS folder to your hard drive using AnyDVD or a similar app. Launch DVD Copy 4 and begin the three-step conversion process with the Source menu. Click the file-browser button, navigate to the VIDEO_TS folder on your hard drive (or to your optical drive with an unencrypted DVD), and click OK to select it.

STEP 5: SELECT YOUR TARGET DIRECTORY
Next, we’ll tell DVD Copy 4 where to output the results of our work. The application can write to a folder on your hard drive or burn directly to CD or DVD when it’s done with compression. We intend to store our compressed video on an external hard drive, so we’re going to select that drive using the file-browser button in the Target menu.

STEP 6: SELECT A TARGET FORMAT
DVD Copy 4 offers a number of swell exporting options, including automatic encoding for the Sony PSP and the option to directly convert the audio track from your DVD into an iPod-friendly MP3 file. Exporting to Divx Avi will create a single AVI file of just the movie, playable with any hardware or software player that has the Divx 6 codec, but we prefer the new Divx format instead, which will give us a Divx Media file with all the menus, audio options, and subtitle choices.

Note that some codecs give you the option here to split a single, large video file into many smaller ones based on either file size or the DVD chapters. And if you chose to output directly to disc, this is where you can specify the maximum capacity of your disc, and indicate whether or not you want DVD Copy 4 to compress the contents to fit on one disc, be it a CD or DVD.

STEP 7: SELECT A COPY MODE
If you want to compress the entire contents of your DVD, leave the Entire Disc radio button checked under Mode and skip ahead to Step 9, but remember that you’ll be including a lot of content you’ll probably never watch (such as movie trailers and dreary “featurettes”), which defeats the purpose of compression, dude.

You can also check Main Movie, which will tell DVD Copy 4 to take a stab at guessing which title is the main movie and select it, and all its chapters, automatically. Usually, this is blindingly obvious; it’s almost always the title of the longest duration, and almost always the first title in the list.

Your third option is Customize, which allows you to select specific titles and chapters within those titles for compression. Whether you choose Entire Disc, Main Movie, or Customize, you’ll still be able to tweeze out content—including subtitles and alternate audio tracks—you don’t want (we’ll cover that next).

STEP 8: SELECT YOUR CONTENT
Our DVD of The Year Without A Santa Claus includes two additional movies, which we don’t want to compress. The scene index from the box indicates that The Year Without A Santa Claus is the first movie on the disc, and by looking at the content list reported by DVD Copy 4, this is obviously Title 01. After checking Title 01 as the movie we want to compress, we now have the option to click the plus sign next to the title and get a chapter listing. We want all the chapters from Title 01, so we’re not going to uncheck anything here.

STEP 9: EXAMINE PROPERTY SHEETS FOR CONTENTIn this step, we’re going to strip out any content within our movie that we don’t need. This might include subtitles, alternate audio tracks, and even alternate video tracks. Luckily, The Year Without A Santa Claus doesn’t have a lot of this kind of thing. By clicking Title 01 and then clicking the Property sheet button on the same line, we see that there’s only one Dolby Digital audio track (which we want to keep), and no subtitles or funny business.
If you’re not sure what a video title or chapter contains, just click that title or chapter to highlight it and then click the Preview button at the bottom left of the screen.

STEP 10: EXPLORE YOUR OPTIONS
There’s one more item to check off before you begin transcoding and burning your content. Click the tiny hammer icon next to the Fit to One Disc checkbox to access the Optional Settings tab. Under Output Video System, select NTSC (unless you have a good reason to believe you’ll be fleeing to Europe anytime soon). You can give your disc a descriptive label under Disc Label/File Name. And finally, check the “Preview while transcoding” box if you want to monitor the process, which is unlikely considering it will take several hours.

Click OK to close this tab, and then click the burn icon at the bottom right. DVD Copy 4 does the rest for you!

Nero 7 Ultra Edition

Maximum PC — Wed, 21 Dec 2005 15:34:44 -0600

Don’t let the “bloatware” boogeyman scare you away. Even though the Nero 7 Ultra Edition suite now comes with no fewer than 18 applications, you’ll never even see the ones you don’t want or need. But adventurous types will discover that Nero 7 has reinvented itself as a suite that’s as useful for enjoying your media as it is for committing it to disc.

At the fore of this new angle is Nero Home, a sleek media-center interface with large, comfy icons that are as easy to see and control from the couch (via a third-party remote control) as they are to access on your PC. Launching Nero Home automatically fires up Nero Scout, which indexes the media files on all of your drives, or just the drives and folders you specify (in case you want to exclude video of a personal nature).

Nero Home also includes integrated TV time-shifting that trots you gracefully through the setup process. You can then search through your media files and your TV recordings from the Nero Home screen, and even create playlists without losing your proximity to the potato chips. Nero Scout also shows up in My Computer, giving you a directory-like alternative structure to access your media.

It’s a testament to the maturity of Nero’s core CD- and DVD-burning application that little has changed—or needed to—other than a nominally cleaner and more configurable interface. With so many applications in the suite, however, Nero SmartStart earns its keep as a task-based usher that sends you where you want to go, to do what you want to do, whether it’s compressing an (unencrypted) double-layer DVD to fit on a single-layer disc, editing WAV files with Nero Wave Editor 3, or importing photographs from an SD card using Nero Photosnap.

Other applications, however, got the extra lovin’ they needed to be useful as stand-alone utilities. Nero BackItUp, for example, is now capable of performing scheduled backups to an FTP address, and the new “Shadow Copy” feature can save stumblebums from disaster by making backup copies at intervals throughout the day, so that a carelessly deleted file can be retrieved from a stored copy.

Another component that got a huge upgrade is audio recording, with Nero WAV Editor 3 supporting tracks with up to 7.1 channels and automatic track splitting (so your vinyl rip will automatically be imported as individual tracks based on the silence between songs). For heaven’s sake, you even get Nero SoundBox, a clever and intuitive sonic playground that includes a drum machine and sequencer to create your own “beats,” which could bag you a DJ gig in Miami a few months down the road. Or more likely not.

Naturally, we can come up with a couple complaints. We would have liked the media player Nero ShowTime 2 to support external subtitles in the SUB or SRT formats, and though we’re well aware of the capabilities of the homegrown Nero Digital MPEG-4 codec, we’d have preferred to see Nero support encoding to other MPEG-4 formats, such as Divx, in addition to Nero Digital.

This is an application suite polished so brightly you can see your reflection in it, and history tells us that Nero 7 Ultimate Edition is a whopping value. Two years elapsed between versions 5 and 6, and another two years between 6 and 7, during which time registered users were entitled to download updates and even whole applications added to the suite at no additional charge. We’ll go beyond endorsing Nero 7—we’ll ask, can you afford not to have it?
—Logan Decker

Month Reviewed: December 2005

+ DISC DRIVES: Nero 7 makes 18 applications as easy to use and enjoy as a single one.

- BEEHIVES: No external subtitle support in Nero ShowTime 2; no support for DivX.

Verdict: 9
kickass=yes

www.nero.com

CMS ABSmini 40GB

Maximum PC — Wed, 21 Dec 2005 15:28:19 -0600

When a USB key just won’t cut it, it’s time to bust out a handheld 40-gigger like the ABSmini. This rakish drive packs a 1.8-inch 40GB hard drive (also available in 20GB and 60GB) inside its chrome shell, and uses a USB 2.0 bus-powered interface.

It achieves its “backup system” status by including both file backup and media-management utilities—handy apps that are often missing from portable drive bundles. Though it’s rather pricey, the ABSmini works surprisingly well as a notebook backup system.

Operation is straightforward. Because it’s bus-powered, you just plug it into a USB port and—bada-boom, bada-bing—it works. The USB cable includes a second USB head to use in case a single port doesn’t draw enough power, but we never had any issues with it during testing. The only weird thing is that the included USB cable is incredibly thick—so much so that it’s difficult to wrap the cable around the drive when you’re not using it, so it just dangles awkwardly from the drive.

You’ll backup your data with the included BounceBack Express utility, which is a very streamlined but powerful backup utility. A media-copying utility called copy2go is included as well for copying audio and video, but the arcane file structures it copies to the ABSmini are difficult to organize. We love the backup software, but copy2go is just silly.

Our only other issue is with the unit’s paltry 4,200rpm 1.8-inch hard drive. Its performance is on the slow side, but still on par compared with similar drives. It’s expensive, but the ABSmini delivers on all its promises.
—Josh Norem0

Month Reviewed: December 2005

Verdict: 8