The 55nm RV770 is one of the best arrows in AMD’s GPU quiver, so it’s a good thing the part has proven to be both versatile and powerful. As deployed in the Radeon HD 4870, the RV770 has a full complement of 800 stream processors—just like the Radeon HD 4850—but in this design, the GPU is paired with GDDR5 memory.

GDDR5 memory boasts a very high data rate (ranging from 3.6Gb/s to 6.0Gb/s, compared to GDDR3’s 1.0Gb/s to 2GB/s). This enables AMD to deliver nearly the same memory bandwidth through a relatively narrow and inexpensive 256-bit bus as it would with a much wider and costlier 512-bit bus.

Continue reading this review after the jump.

Nvidia pretty much owns the top end of the GPU market, thanks to the mighty, dual-GPU GeForce GTX 295. But no manufacturer can survive by selling low-volume parts, no matter how pricey they may be. Selling oodles of moderately priced products is where the real money is made. And that’s where the GeForce GTX 275 comes in.

Nvidia would never have concocted the GTX 275 had AMD not launched the Radeon HD 4890. Competition is the consumer’s friend.

Jeff Koons is getting mixed signals from the American legal system. He’s an artist known for “appropriating” pop culture in his art—that’s infringing copyright to some, fair use to others.

In 1992 a photographer sued Koons for creating a statue of his photograph of two people with a line of puppies crossing their laps. Koons exaggerated the dogs’ features, turned them blue, added flowers, and called it “Banality.” The judge didn’t buy that this was different enough, or parody, and Koons lost the case along with some of the $300,000 he’d sold three statues for. It was a mixed verdict for the photographer—he won the case, but legally speaking, it seems his work really was banal.

Continue reading after the jump.

With the recent hullaballoo over the dangers of talking on the the phone while driving, we couldn't help but be reminded of a real-world experiment our sister publication Mobile ran way back  in February 2005 about the very same issue. Using noted drinker Roger Hibbert as a guinea pig, they headed for the hallowed grounds of our local Malibu Grand Prix, carrying a phone, a stopwatch, a Breathalyzer, and bottle of 100-proof Absolut. Our goal: To find out if our subject could stay on the road while besotted or blathering. Our results will shock you to your very soul. Naturally, the tests are completely un-scientific, but it's a funny read, and the results are sobering (a-ha!) so we thought we'd repost it here for your consideration. Enjoy!

HDMI (the acronym stands for High-Definition Multimedia Interface) is one of the consumer electronics industry’s more remarkable innovations. This de facto HDTV interface enables the transmission of high-definition digital video, up to eight channels of digital audio, HDCP encryption, the Consumer Electronics Control (CEC) protocol, and five volts of electrical power over a single cable.

HDMI 1.0, introduced in December 2002, had all of these features. The latest version, HDMI 1.3c, boasts several more, including support for Deep Color, auto lip sync, and the two high-definition multichannel audio formats used in Blu-ray discs. Let’s take a look at how HDMI accomplishes all this while remaining backward-compatible with the earlier DVI standard.

Continue reading after the jump!

Empire: Total War and Stormrise are two radically different games with a common core. Developed by Creative Assembly, they give us a rare opportunity to see the stark contrast between what PC and console strategy games can and cannot do.

Empire is a refinement of a revered brand, featuring new elements set within a familiar context. Despite the bugs, it’s still a deep, detailed, and beautiful strategy game with a different texture from any other Total War game.

Stormrise severs the 3D tactical element from the Total War series and reconfigures it as a third-person real-time strategy game. The ground-level FPS/RTS hybrid is not the huge innovation trumpeted by Sega. Pandemic’s Battlezone II: Combat Commander attempted a similar RTS/FPS mélange 10 years ago, with pretty solid results. But memories are short and hype is powerful in the game world, allowing Stormrise to position itself as “The First Truly 3D RTS Game.”

Continue reading after the jump.

I recently reformatted my main OS drive. I had copied all of my essential documents to a 1TB Samsung drive. Now that my main OS drive is back in business, I find that the second drive appears to be unformatted. Any time I attempt to access the D: drive, I am prompted to format it. When I boot to my Windows CD, the D: drive appears as a 138GB unformatted partition, with the rest unallocated.

Please, please tell me I have not lost the ability to retrieve all my photos, music, spreadsheets, etc. If I reformat the drive, will I be able to recover the files, using a file recovery app such as Recuva?

Don’t tell Newton: Ramming your hot rod full-speed into a concrete block, idling minivan, or in-game ad billboard in Burnout Paradise doesn’t really slow you down. The game is a steady, fuel-injected dose of momentum from spark plug to finish line. Pushing over Paradise City’s 20 square miles of pavement for just an hour means accumulating new cars, completing events, knocking over barriers to find shortcuts or spontaneous jumps, earning license upgrades, setting street-specific high scores, or just streaking a newfound scenic route with rubber.

The game combines the feel of impulsive, mission-based sandbox titles like Grand Theft Auto and Tony Hawk with loose, forgiving, driving mechanics—making for disposable, whimsical racing with a persistent career and surprisingly good online mode. Every major intersection in the city is a gateway to a racing event. Spin your wheels at a stoplight and you’ll activate a point-to-point race or one of four other variations on the standard sprint: Road-rage events have you side-swiping a set number of opponents within a time limit, stunt runs are all about racking up points with long drifts and high jumps, and in our favorite, “marked man,” you’ll try to escape a set of ominous black sedans before they can smear you into the median. There are vehicle-specific challenges, too, and as you spend more time in Paradise City, you can earn the keys to rival cars roaming the streets by pushing them off the road.

Continue reading this review after the jump.

I bought an Intel Mini-ITX D201GLY2 mobo some months ago and finally got around to putting it all together. 1GB of Patriot DDR2 RAM (automatically underclocked to 533MHz), a 250W PSU, an LG SATA DVD/CD burner, and a 160GB SATA Seagate hard drive. Windows installed without any problems. But when I found the onboard graphics wouldn’t display widescreen video, I picked up an ATI Radeon 9250 videocard, thinking this would solve my problems, but it only created more. Before installing it, I went into the BIOS under Video settings and turned off the integrated graphics and switched over to PCI graphics, hit F10, and saved it. When the machine was powered down and unplugged, I hit the power button again to discharge any juice still left in the system before installing the videocard. Once it was installed, I plugged the VGA cable into the card, plugged the AC cable back into the PSU, and powered on the system. Nothing. Just a blank screen with the card installed. I know the card works fine because I have already installed it in another system to test it and had no issues with it. It’s only when the card’s installed in the mini machine that I get a blank screen. Have you run into this sort of problem before?

—Marcus Jorgensen

Click to read Marcus' answer, after the jump!

Fans of Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War might feel burned by the barely recognizable sequel to their old favorite, but going in without expecting it to be yet another typical real-time strategy game is extremely rewarding. That’s because DoW II is actually two excellent games in one. Both have outstanding graphics and animation, a complete lack of traditional RTS base-building, and strong tactical gameplay, but the single-player/co-op campaign mode and multiplayer experiences are very different.

In single-player, you command a group of four marine squads (or two each in two-player co-op) in a campaign to defend sub-sector Aurelia from invasion by Orks, Eldar, and Tyranid forces. Without the typical emphasis on base-building, the game feels more like an action RPG. For example, squad leaders level up and never die (they can be revived after their life is depleted). The squads can also be equipped with Wargear to make them more powerful.

Read the rest of this review after the jump.

This episode of the No BS Podcast features special guest Gary Whitta (former editor-in-chief of PC Gamer), who made minor ripples in the gaming community this past week by declaring that he was giving up on PC gaming. After we trot this traitor out for a verbal lashing, the gang talks about Microsoft's retail store announcement, their newest Laptop Hunters ads, and more Windows 7 upgrade controversy. News is analyzed, listener questions get answered, and a good time is had by all. Except for the console-loving scum. Enjoy!

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.

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In the movie Braveheart, there's a pivotal scene involving Mel Gibson and a Scottish battalion where, as William Wallace, he tries to muster some courage from his ragtag company. Face painted blue and half-hysterical, he rallies them with a memorable speech about freedom and love of country. Then, the army proceeds to completely destroy the foreign oppressor in a fight to the bitter end.

In some ways, the current war on smartphone devices could be just as pivotal...and bloody. Companies such as Palm and Nokia have everything to lose if their platforms do not thoroughly crush the competition. Meanwhile, Apple has taken a strong lead with the iPhone, and BlackBerry devices do not appear to be losing any momentum, at least in the business sector. Google has entered the fight with their Android OS, attracting legions of developers to the platform in record time.

All of these operating systems support touch control, rudimentary multi-tasking, rich media, desktop-like Web browsing, and advanced messaging. Yet, only one OS is superior and will ultimately emerge as the victor. It might seem like Apple has already had their Braveheart moment, and maybe there is room for several companies at the top of the pile, but if Windows has taught us anything, it's that a single operating system can become so dominant that every other desktop OS becomes inconsequential. Developers lock into a platform, users get accustomed to it, and that OS wins the war.

We set out to put the major contenders to the test and find out which could become the most dominant. Really, it's too early to call Apple the victor, even though it would be easy to do so with 50,000 apps available and over a million iPhone users. As any technology analyst can tell you, there are actually significantly more Nokia and BlackBerry phones in use today than the iPhone, especially in Europe. The surprise is that the OS that seems to be winning the battle (the iPhone) may not eventually win the OS war in the long run.

One of the caveats that many people have with using Linux is the current state of media support. While media playback on Linux is presently much better than it has ever been before, it still requires a little bit of know-how and tweaking to get everything working properly. This guide will go over each step of optimizing your media capabilities.

Why doesn't media just work? The reason why some types of media do not work out of the box on Linux is due to legal and technological reasons. Many of the popular media formats (like DVD, MP3, Adobe Flash, etc.) require a codec, DRM workaround, or other sort of player before content in any of those formats can be viewed. Because of patent and copyright law, Linux distro maintainers are not able to include these extra packages in their distros, so media performance is somewhat crippled as a result. Some distros actually license these codecs (e.g. Mandriva's Codina tool) and have working media support out of the box. However, such features are not free and many people balk at the notion of paying for Linux. If it provides any reassurance, it helps to know that this problem is not specifically limited to Linux. Windows XP and some of the low-end editions of Vista are unable to play DVDs out of the box as well, and no version of Windows offers out of the box Blu-Ray support.

Intel, the world’s largest semiconductor company, suffers from a Freudian case of appendage envy. The appendage is an ARM.

Simply put, smartphones (and other mobile consumer-electronics gizmos) are the next PCs, and Intel wants them to run on Intel x86 processors. Right now, your mobile phone, MP3 player, or digicam probably has a custom chip with a microprocessor core licensed from ARM. Although most people have never heard of ARM, it makes the most popular 32-bit microprocessor architecture in the world.

Yet ARM doesn’t make a single chip. It licenses its 23 different processor cores to other companies that design and make chips. These chips are very different from most of Intel’s. They are system-on-chip (SoC) devices—highly integrated chips that surround the processor core with built-in peripherals, memory, I/O interfaces, and application-specific logic.

Continue reading after the jump.

I am using the Windows 7 Beta and I really like it. However, I am trying to delete my windows.old folder, and it keeps saying I don’t have permission from the system to perform that function.

I’ve turned off UAC completely, restarting in the safe mode, and nothing works. I would appreciate any suggestions, as it takes up a ton of room.

—Kenneth Pletz

I recently started playing COD4, and at my favorite server, I get a ping of 50–60ms on a 5Mb/s connection. I wanted to get my ping down a bit more, so I upped the connection first to 10Mb/s and then to 16Mb/s, but alas, still no difference. My modem is an older Linksys BEFCMU10, but the router is a newer D-Link 4100 GamerLounge. I’m considering a purchase of a Bigfoot Networks Killer NIC M1 but hate to throw more money at the problem, only to have little or no results. Is there anything I can do to lower my ping? Please help me, Doctor!

Well, well, well. Look who decided to join the OS war. This week, the gang discusses Google's surprise announcement of their netbook-targeted Chrome OS, whether it'll be a threat to Microsoft or Apple, and how consumers will be confused by its naming scheme. Other topics of discussion include Google's services leaving beta, the hot new release of VLC, and our experience with Firefox 3.5. We also reveal details about the 2009 Dream Machines and answer a bunch of listener questions. All that plus Gordon's rant of the week on this episode of the No BS Podcast. 

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.

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BitTorrent is a tremendously popular peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol designed to simplify and speed up the process of transferring large files over the Internet while drastically limiting the bandwidth consumption of any one server.

In a conventional file-transfer process, a file is stored on a server on a network such as the Internet. Other computers on the network send messages to the server, informing it that they would like to copy that file. When the two sides establish a connection, the other computers become clients to the server. As the number of clients increases, so do the demands on the server. And while each client might consume only a little bandwidth, the server can consume tremendous amounts. To reduce costs and prevent the server from crashing, the server’s owner will typically constrain the speed at which each client is allowed to download data or even limit the number of clients that can be served at one time.

Continue reading after the jump.