To celebrate the launch of the new Lynnfield Core i5 and Core i7 CPUs, we've partnered with Intel to give away a CyberPower gaming PC. Between 12:01AM PST on Friday, September 11th and 11:59PM on Friday, September 25th, you can enter the raffle for the prize by joining our Facebook group (http://www.facebook.com/maximumpc). It's really that simple -- no essays, photos, or craft projects required. We'll draw a random entry after the contest deadline and one lucky winner will walk away with a new Lynnfield-powered PC!

Prize system specficiations and official rules after the jump! [Rules updated to include Canadians]

My 6-year-old computer is extremely slow and sometimes takes 20 minutes just to start up. The other day it caught a virus, which masqueraded as a firewall and installed itself onto my computer, changing the background to a picture that said I have spyware on my computer. I tried to open my virus-scan program (AOL) but it would not open. I have tried everything I can think of. I took out my hard drive so that it could not get to my files. Now, I have to use my son’s computer for emails. He is a big gamer so it’s really hard to get in the time to use it. Should I wait for Windows 7 to come out before getting a new computer?

Read the answer to Jim's question after the jump.

AMD’s graphics division, the former ATI Technologies, loves a good surprise. The company has been a perennial also-ran in the graphics performance arena, but every now and then, it one-ups the competition in a big way. That happened back in 2002, with the launch of the original Radeon 9700, which stole the performance lead from archrival Nvidia. It happened again last year, with the Radeon HD 4800 series. The 4850, 4870, and 4890 weren’t always faster than the competition, but they were small, efficient chips that forced Nvidia into a price war that was good for users but bad for Nvidia’s bottom line.

Now AMD’s doing it again, putting some serious hurt on the competition with the first GPU to support Microsoft’s upcoming DirectX 11 API. AMD’s also been paying close attention to the emerging market for non-gaming apps accelerated by GPUs, such as video transcoding and digital photography, fully supporting DirectCompute 11 and OpenCL standards for general purpose computing on graphics cards.

This new chip is no shrinking violet in the numbers department. Every number associated with the new Radeon 5800 series is staggering: 2.15 billion transistors, 2.7 trillion floating-point operations a second, more than 20 gigapixels per second throughput, 1,600 shader units. Other numbers impress because of their smallness. One example: The idle power is a scant 27W— lower than many entry level GPUs.

Given the sheer scale and ambition of this GPU, does it deliver in the performance realm? And will it deliver at a price normal humans can afford? Let’s find out.

I tried to install a Philips webcam made for XP on my Dell Inspiron 640m running Vista Home Premium. It corrupted one of my boot files. I had to get a replacement Vista disc sent from Microsoft after I discovered that using a friend’s Vista disc gave me only 30 days of use (Microsoft customer service was awesome—no joke!). Anyway, I thought all my programs and files had been wiped, but a month or so later I noticed that the hard drive was almost full. I checked the C: drive and, low and behold, all my old files and programs were in a folder called “Old Windows.” How do I get those reinstalled to their rightful place?

So AMD’s ATI graphics division has got something in the works that supports up to six monitors.

If you’ve ever navigated even two displays with a mouse, you may realize something: multiple, high resolution displays may be outstripping the mouse’s capability as a primary user interface tool. Now toss in six 30-inch monitors – 24 whopping megapixels in all – and you’ve got a real problem. Even if you drop that to six more affordable 1920x1080 displays, that’s still over 12 megapixels you need to navigate. Just visually tracking the mouse cursor becomes problematic.

Still, it's a setup I’d love to have.

What’s needed for huge pixel count displays is multi-touch. Windows 7 now incorporates an actually useful multi-touch display capability, but it’s currently relegated to all-in-one PCs with multi-touch, a handful of laptops and the expensive (at $12,500 a pop) Microsoft Surface. Still, multi-touch isn’t perfect.

Techies are too often tempted by the lure of new technology, leaving perfectly good hardware drifting in the wake of compulsive upgrading. And while we love getting new gadgets as much as the next geek, we also like how a new purchase gives us the opportunity to take apart and tinker with our older gear in the Lab. Whether it’s by soldering circuit boards or loading open-source firmware, we pride ourselves on being able to stretch the lifespan of older electronics by performing undocumented (and sometimes warranty-breaking) hardware hacks.

The projects we’ve included here range from relatively safe software tweaks to more challenging technical exercises. You’ll learn how to bend USB connections to your will and imbue home routers and digital cameras with robust new features. We’ve also taken some inspiration from projects we’ve seen online, including building a blue laser gun and making a digital picture frame you can mount on the wall of your office. These hacks will help you showcase your craftiness and give you a better understanding of how your electronics work. And the best part is that your old hardware will be faster, cooler, and more awesome afterward.

So, let’s get hacking!

I’m building a new rig using Windows Vista. I thought I’d try the 64-bit version since all the bugs and such should be gone by now. Everything went fine until I attempted to install a wireless adapter in the PCI slot. Much to my surprise, I can’t find an adapter that’s compatible with the 64-bit version. I’ve found many sites that claim to sell 64-bit wireless adapters, but when I check the details of the specs they all say 32-bit compatible. Am I missing something or do they not exist? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

We're finishing up an issue of the magazine this week, but still found some time to talk about tech news on the podcast. Topics of discussion include the new Windows 7 commercials featuring Maximum PC, Microsoft's anticipated Zune HD debut, and AMD's $99 Athlon II X4 CPU. Will gives the scoop on the ATI's new Eyefinity videocard technology, which he saw running on an aircraft carrier. This week also features a fruitful listener question and answer segment, which includes one of the episode's many Nixon references. Gordon goes off on Bay Area traffic, and talks about his new phone purchase (no, not an iPhone). 

Do you have a tech question? A comment? A tale of technological triumph? Just need to get something off your chest? A secret to share? Email us at maximumpcpodcast@gmail.com or call our 24-hour No BS Podcast hotline at 877.404.1337 x1337--operators are standing by.

Subscribe: http://feeds.feedburner.com/maximumpc/1337

Try as it might, Microsoft has never been able to put a dent in Apple's marketshare for portable media players. The previous Zune players were pretty good, and the Zune desktop software finally got there after a few revisions, but neither one had the "wow factor" necessary to pull the masses away from the iPod juggernaut. With the Zune HD (and accompanying Zune 4.0 software), Microsoft has finally delivered the kind of truly exciting device that should make even the most ardent iPod fan take notice. It's sleek, small, thin, and surprisingly light with the rare quality of looking as good as Apple's products without looking just like Apple's products.

Read on for the full review!

What determines whether the RAM on an i7 mother-board runs as dual- or tri-channel memory? Is there a difference between RAM sticks, or is the only difference in how they are placed in the motherboard slots?

The Dell XPS desktops that have Core i7 can run as dual-channel when they have DIMMs in four slots, with 4GB or 8GB RAM. The same machine can run as tri-channel with DIMMs in three slots for a total of 3GB, or in six slots for a total of 6GB or 12GB (though I don’t know who needs 12GB of RAM.)

Could the same 2GB sticks be used in dual- or tri-channel machines depending only on how they are placed in the slots?

I feel silly asking such a simple question—I can build a computer blindfolded, but from time to time I shock myself at the little things I haven’t learned: If I buy a USB-powered headset and install a Sound Blaster card on my motherboard, will my headset take advantage of the soundcard even though it’s plugged into a USB port (and not directly into the card)?

Over the last four months, I have noticed a drastic drop in my computer’s ability to run games. I have Call of Duty 4 and Call of Duty: World at War, both of which ran perfectly at 1400x900 with all settings at max or medium. But when I go to play them now, I experience momentary freezes, which I can “fix” with Ctrl-Alt-Del and then hitting Cancel (32-bit Vista Ultimate). But eventually, while playing the game, there will come a point where it just freezes the entire computer and blue screens. There are also many artifacts within the game, as well as other rendering problems. Now I have to play the games on the absolute lowest settings to delay the inevitable crash, which helps a little. Once rebooted, Vista will report either a fault from my graphics card—an Nvidia 7900 GT—or an unknown error. I have updated all my drivers, defragmented my hard drives, and re-installed the game. What’s going on here?

I am planning on building a new video-editing system and have never configured SATA devices before.

Does the SATA architecture work in a similar fashion as IDE (i.e., master and slave devices per channel) or are the ports single-homed? I was planning on building a system with RAID 1 OS drives, a separate swap file drive, and RAID 1 data drives. That would use up five ports if they are single-homed. Which brings me to my second question: Is there a benefit to having SATA optical drives or should I put them on the IDE channels?

If you ask a gun enthusiast why he needs that M4 SOPMOD to hunt squirrel, you’re asking the wrong question. It’s not that the average squirrel in the Adirondacks is on PCP and likely to require two magazines to put down; it’s that the M4 SOPMOD is a fine and uniquely crafted weapon regardless of whether it ever sees action worthy of its true potential. So, please, don’t ask us why you’d want to spend $200 on a keyboard with up to 36 macros available across 12 programmable macro keys (recordable on the fly from the keyboard itself), customizable keyboard backlighting, and even a 320x240 color display. If you’re a gamer, understand that you’re buying more power than you may ever need, but absolutely should have.

The key action is cush and quiet (preferred by most gamers and characteristic of Logitech’s boards), and the plastic is smooth yet never slippery beneath sweaty digits. The keyboard itself includes a hardware switch to disable the Windows key, and both macro and function keys are slightly elevated for easier nailing. We appreciate the slightly larger than usual Mute button below the media control keys to the upper right, and love the barrel-style volume control (if only it were reprogrammable for use as a scrubber or dial).

Continue reading this review after the jump.

After four years of running a very fine system that I built, I would like to upgrade it. I’m not sold on Vista yet, so I would like to know how far you can upgrade a machine and still be able to install/activate the computer’s original Windows XP operating system. I want to upgrade the mobo, CPU, RAM, GPU, etc. I would also like to upgrade the hard drive. I have Googled this question but can’t get a straight answer. What concerns me is that Microsoft will see my upgrade as a whole new computer and not allow me to activate.

Read on to see the answer to James' question.

By now, when people think of The Sims franchise, they think of a virtual dollhouse in which you guide little idiot people through the mundane details of their lives rather than living your own.

That reputation is both well-deserved and unjust. Now in its third iteration, you still have to worry about getting your Sims to a bathroom before they wet themselves. On the other hand, it can be so addictive that it often feels like there’s someone watching you on his PC monitor, selecting you, then clicking on your computer and choosing “Keep playing The Sims 3” from your radial menu. If you’re lucky, he’ll let you go to the bathroom.

Fundamentally, The Sims 3 is a very similar game to its predecessors: You juggle the needs and wants of a family of Sims to make them healthy, wealthy, and wise. What has changed is the revolutionary increase in scale. Previous Sims games locked you into a single lot, and if you wanted to take your Sims elsewhere you’d have to sit through an epic-length loading screen. The Sims 3 loads an entire town, which both frees your Sims to stroll down the street or drive across town, and expands the number of characters living in the world at once from a handful to dozens, simulating an entire community. The ability to quickly zoom out and view the whole area alone puts this version head and shoulders above The Sims 1 and 2.

Continue reading this review after the jump.

This week, the gang gives the scoop on Intel's Lynnfield processor, sorting out the differences between the new Core i5 and Core i7 CPUs. To go along with that discussion, we announce a gaming PC giveaway (details here). We also preview Microsoft's new Windows 7 avertising campaign, and give our reactions to Apple's Fall keynote. Gordon dishes out a rant about the next generation of Star Wars fans, and we answer a bunch of listener questions (including one reader's happy ending). 

Do you have a tech question? A comment? A tale of technological triumph? Just need to get something off your chest? A secret to share? Email us at maximumpcpodcast@gmail.com or call our 24-hour No BS Podcast hotline at 877.404.1337 x1337--operators are standing by.

Subscribe: http://feeds.feedburner.com/maximumpc/1337

Francois Piednoel is worried.

For those of you who have never met Francois, he’s a member of the performance marketing team at Intel. It’s always entertaining to carry on a conversation with Francois. He was the guy at Intel who first steered me to the idea of building small systems around an X58 micro ATX motherboard and undervolting the CPU while maintaining the reference clock speed. This is sort of the inverse of overclocking, and results in pretty high performance systems that run cooler and quieter than the norm. What worries Piednoel, though, is this: what are desktop users ever going to do with six cores?

Moore’s Law means we get more CPUs with more and more transistors. Or we get smaller CPUs with the same number of transistors as past products. But what are the practical benefits for users?

I have 32-bit Vista installed on my system and have had it since it was released back in ’07. Each day when I start up, I sit and watch the cursor spin and watch the task bar fill. Every time I think it’s ready to go, it loads more programs. Is there some sort of graphical bar or gauge that can be loaded onto the desktop at logon that will show all of my background services loading, so I can tell at a glance whether my computer is actually ready to go? Windows 7 beta still offers NO progress bar/gauge to indicate when all background services are finished loading. I have used Sabayon Linux in the past and it did have a progress bar before the desktop had even appeared. This has really been a pain in my “mouse click,” so if you can help with this I would really appreciate it.

Read on to see the answer to Ray's question.

It's no secret that the music industry has been in a bit of a bind over the past decade or so: they claim illegal downloading has lost them millions in sales while distribution deals with companies like Apple have left the labels feeling as though they've lost control over pricing.

Meanwhile, consumers have seemingly endless ways to download, stream and discover music. Streaming sites like Pandora, Blip.fm, Hype Machine and Last.fm are all great ways to listen to music from your browser while you're online, but picking specific artists to stream can be a haphazard process. Buying music presents a whole new set of problems, with companies (iTunes, Rhapsody, eMusic, Amazon, Zune Marketplace) that all offer different pricing models and collections of artists. 

Spotify (Windows, Mac, Linux, Free BSD), which has had a popular debut in Europe and the UK, is a new music service that hopes to streamline the way we both stream and purchase new music. The company was launched with the blessing of several major labels, in a refreshingly forward-thinking move on the part of the music industry. Because of this, Spotify is able to stream full, high-quality tracks from these labels without fear of retribution. Though not yet available in the US, we got our hands on a beta-code to test out the service.

Our impressions after the jump!