After 15 years of building and upgrading PCs, I’ve made some awesome upgrades to my own PCs. These hardware updates either opened the doors to exciting new functionality, or served as force multipliers, greatly increasing my rig’s performance in one fell swoop. Best of all, a killer upgrade can even revitalize a tired old rig.

Now, there’s a subtle difference between upgrades and a complete system overhaul, but for my purposes, an upgrade is anything you can do without reinstalling Windows. Here’s my definitive list of My All-Time Top Five Greatest PC Upgrades:

See the list after the jump!

It’s no secret that ATI’s RV770 GPU, which first appeared in the Radeon 4870 and 4850 last year, is a performance beast. The spring refresh of the GPU, which offers increased core and memory clocks, along with a slight redesign of the GPU, tells an interesting story to anyone who isn’t yet running a second-gen DirectX 10 card (GeForce 2xx series or Radeon 48xx series). However, if you’ve already upgraded, there’s not much to get excited about here.

The Radeon 4890 is built on a 55nm process, just like the 4870 and 4850, but the company made significant tweaks to the architecture to accommodate higher clock speeds, which is evidenced by the fact that Diamond overclocks this board from 850MHz to 925MHz out of the box. Diamond also overclocks the card’s 1GB of memory 100MHz faster than the default, to 1,050MHz. The Radeon 4890 sports quad-pumped GDDR5 memory running on a 256-bit bus. The real stars of the Radeon 4890’s show are its pixel shaders, though, with 800 shader units running at the GPU’s core clock speed. The massive number of shader units gives the 4890 a significant advantage over comparable Nvidia cards in shader-limited benchmarks like Crysis.

Continue reading after the jump.

Battery-life claims never seems to line up with reality. You’d think testing battery life would be straightforward, but benchmark results rarely jibe with real-world results—in part, because there are an infinite number of potential workloads (each tapping power differently), and battery life decays over time. Both Intel and AMD make mobile CPU platforms designed for low power consumption, but due to the massive number of variables involved, I’ve found it nearly impossible to determine which architecture sucks the least juice.

Think about it. There’s a lot of hardware in a laptop that can affect battery life besides the CPU and the battery itself: the LCD screen and backlight, the optical and hard drives, the GPU, chipset, and memory config—to name just a few. The upshot is that if you want to fairly compare Intel and AMD hardware, you really need to test what we’ll call core power draw, isolating all the other variables. There are just a handful of ways to do this fairly, and each comes with its own problems.

I'm, Will Smith, the editor of Maximum PC and the guy in the video below. We shot this video demonstration to show people how to build a killer PC, one step at a time. It's a great reference for beginners and experts alike. This video was created for viewing by attendees of Comic-Con 2009.

When we first reviewed the original Logitech G9 (November 2007), we didn’t like it. Specifically, we thought it was uncomfortable to hold, using either of the removable shells. In fact, we described it as “not particularly comfortable for day-to-day mousing” before complaining that it was unsuitable for people who use a traditional palming grip.

We were wrong. After we made a few small adjustments to our grip, we fell in love with the G9—at least when using the grippy palm-friendly Precision body. We still don’t like the smooth grip—dubbed Wide Load—and we’re generally not fans of having to adjust our grip to suit a mouse, but the smooth response and power-gamer-friendly features that the G9x delivers make this mouse the best we’ve ever tested.

Continue reading this review after the jump.

In times of hardship, it’s important that we, the people, step up and do our civic duty. That’s why, in light of the harsh economic conditions we all face today, I implore everyone to spend more money on computers. LOTS more money. With hardware vendors reporting the worst holiday season of all time, they desperately need you to buy more components and build new PCs. And so-called “budget” machines won’t cut the mustard. You need to buy $1,000 CPUs and multiple $500 videocards. Think 6GB of RAM is enough? Think again. Now, all this PC construction will undoubtedly require tough sacrifices in other areas: Your kids may not get to go to “college.” You may need to cut back on your “food” budget. You may need to turn off non-essential services like “water” and “garbage collection.” Just remember that baloney and ramen taste better when you have a rig that can run Crysis at 2560x1600 with everything turned all the way up. Yes, power user, some things are worth tough sacrifices.

Wait. That’s terrible advice.

Continue reading after the jump!

The videocard industry typically works on an 18-month cycle for each GPU design. Last year, Nvidia released the GT200 and ATI launched the RV770. Both are speedy, DirectX 10-capable parts, packed with shader processing power and capable of running the most demanding games at top speed. We tested Nvidia’s first refresh of the GT200 last month (the GeForce GTX 285); now it’s time to put ATI’s first re-spin of RV770 under the microscope, with Asus’s Radeon EAH4890 TOP.

The 4890’s RV790 GPU is built on a 55nm process, just like its predecessors; however, ATI made fairly significant tweaks to the GPU’s structure in order to accommodate higher clock speeds. Asus’s stock overclock is a testament to that revamp. The Asus board’s stock clock is 900MHz (the default stock clock for 4890 boards is 850MHz). Likewise, the board’s quad-pumped GDDR5 memory sits on the same 256-bit bus but runs at 1,000MHz (the stock speed for 4890 boards is 950MHz). The star of the Radeon 4890’s show remains the GPU’s 800 shader units, which handle the heavy lifting in shader-heavy modern games, such as Crysis.

By now, if your browser's cache has refreshed, you've already noticed that we've put a fresh coat of paint on MaximumPC.com today. If you're still seeing a lot of orange, press Shift+F5 or clear your cache and reload the page.

Back? Good. We haven't added a ton of new functionality with today's release--we've given our current design a little more breathing room, worked to improve page load times, and laid the groundwork that will let us add new features and functionality in the coming months. That doesn't mean that today's release will be bug-free, if you find problems with the site, things don't look right, or you just want to let us know how we did, please let us know in this post's comment thread. 

 As always, this new look is all thanks to hard behind-the-scenes work of the MaximumPC.com team--Bart, Chris, Drew, Kitt, Mark, and Michael. Thanks guys, the site looks great!

Last month, we reviewed Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 295, a dual-GPU GT200-based board that benefited from a die-shrink from 65 nanometers to 55 nanometers. This month, we’re testing the GTX 285, which uses the same silicon as the GTX 295, in a clocked-up single-GPU design. Unfortunately, the paltry clock-speed improvements that the die shrink allowed don’t deliver enough of a performance boost to make this board worth recommending, especially for folks who already own a GTX 280 board.

When you compare the GTX 285 to the GTX 280, you can see what the problem is. The GTX 285’s GT200 core is clocked at 648MHz, up from 602MHz for a stock GTX 280. The 1GB of GDDR3 memory runs at just 621MHz on a 512-bit bus—the GTX 280’s memory runs at 550MHz. The upshot is that this new card delivers less than a 10 percent performance increase over the GTX 280 parts in most benchmarks. The only big gains over the 280 are at lower resolutions with very high antialiasing and anisotropic filtering levels. The big gain is in power consumption. The 285 features a TDP of about 183W, while the 280 drew a massive 236W. That means that the 285 will actually run in a system that’s equipped with just a pair of 6-pin PCI-E video connectors—you don’t need the 6-pin and 8-pin combo that’s been de rigueur for the last few months.

Continue reading this review after the jump.

As I write this, I’m sitting in seat 17F. My air speed is about 517mph, and I’m 35,146 feet above Limon, Colorado. Last year, this would have been a boring five-hour plane ride. This year, my hours in the air feel no different than kicking back at home on a rainy Sunday afternoon. I’m on a computer, farting around on the Internet. And while that’s undoubtedly nice, I really want—no, that’s not right—I need more.

You know the question everyone always asks: “If you could choose one superpower, what would it be?” The unimaginative types say they want an adamantium skeleton or X-ray vision, but I’m not interested in “classic” superpowers. I want instant brain-level access to the Internet. I want to know everything there is to know about everything—or at least have that information available at the speed of Google*. And I want all the relevant info at any given time displayed in a context-rich overlay on top of whatever I’m actually looking at. That’s not too much, is it?

Continue reading after the jump!

Here’s the thing about Mirror’s Edge: It’s 85 percent awesome, and we’re as surprised as anyone that the part that’s awesome is the first-person parkour. The running, jumping, and climbing bits are utterly engaging and even transcendent. There’s something liberating about leaping fearlessly from rooftop to rooftop while fleeing from a nebulous anti-freedom force. Unfortunately, for every high you get while soaring through the sky, there’s a painful low in the form of a combat sequence.

And therein lies the rub. The rooftop chases, where the designers were free to build many-pathed courses through the map, are sublime. By confronting the player with a constant stream of risk-vs.-reward decisions—do I take the risky jump to shave some seconds off my time, or the safe jump to avoid death?—and increasing your players speed as she successfully strings together long combos, the game is elevated from the run-along-a-path-on-the-rooftops experience it could have been into something emergent and amazing and wonderful.

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.

Stop surfing the internet for a minute (we know, a tall order) and go get your last cable or satellite TV bill. Back? Good. Now skim to the bottom and look at the total amount of money you paid for TV last month. Do you feel like you got a reasonable amount of entertainment for that $60, $80, or even $100-plus? Are you happy about the money you spend for the privilege of watching TV? We’re not. The vast majority of TV we watch is available for free, over the air. Sure, we’ll occasionally watch an episode of Flight of the Conchords on HBO or a documentary on Discovery, but most of the TV we watch is on one of the big over-the-air networks—ABC, CBS, Fox, the CW, and NBC. So we started looking for alternatives.

It turns out that the vast majority of new TV shows are available online, either as part of an ad-driven website like Hulu or TV.com, or available for sale on iTunes or Amazon’s Unbox service. However, having a PC in the living room has traditionally sucked. After all, you don’t want to hear a big, noisy PC when you’re enjoying a movie or a TV show, and using a mouse and keyboard as the primary interface just doesn’t cut it when you’re kicking back on the couch. But times have changed. These days, it’s easy to build a PC that’s quiet enough to be virtually unheard, yet powerful enough to play all the high-definition video that’s currently available.

And making the proposition even more appealing, there are software frontends like Boxee and the new Hulu Desktop that let you harness all that hardware power in an easy-to-use, remote-friendly interface that combines the massive library of streaming video on the web with the DRM-free content you rip from discs or purchase legally on the web. We’ll introduce you to a couple of the options, then help you configure our favorite. By combining a few hundred bucks’ worth of hardware with a free software app and your broadband connection, you can reduce the money you spend on entertainment from $100 a month to $100 a year.

Read on to get started!

SSDs are all the rage for performance-oriented builders these days, but they aren’t without problems. Even the largest solid state drive is too small to hold all the stuff we need to store on the C: drive—games, photos, music, videos, etc.—and the inexpensive models max out at around 64GB of capacity. And there’s the performance problem, to boot. All but the most expensive SSDs suffer from very slow write speeds, which can have a significant impact on your real-world performance.

So what’s the solution? We’re going to show you how to set up your Windows install like a Linux setup—with the OS and primary apps on the SSD, and your user profile and space-hogging games on a traditional hard disk. This gives us the best of both worlds—the folders we write to most frequently are on a traditional disk, while our boot and app load times can benefit greatly from the fast read speed and low random-access time of an SSD. Best of all, you can use even a tiny 64GB SSD without having to constantly manage disk space—picking and choosing which apps and media will be stored on the small drive.

In the spirit of trying new and exciting things in the year ahead, this month I decided to upend my column-writing strategy: Instead of writing about whatever’s stuck in my craw, I asked the folks following my Twitter stream to tell me what I should write about—a contest of sorts. The responses of my fellow Twitterinos ranged from mildly kooky to wildly off-topic, and while there’s absolutely no way to write about everything suggested, I’m going to give it the ol’ Maximum PC try. Here we go.

• The first respondent, @terryrobinson, wanted to know, “What’s next after we win the battle against DRM and GNU becomes the standard software license?” Well, while I love your optimism, Terry, I think it’s much too early to dream of a post-DRM world. We’ve made good progress against DRM in music, but there’s a long road in front of us with respect to movie and game content. And no one’s even talking about electronic books, like the Kindle and its proprietary locked format. So while I’m sure we’ll one day live in a magical Internet wonderland filled with open content, free software, and unicorns, for now at least, it remains a long way off.
• Fellow Rock Band aficionado @strngwys wanted a column about how excited I am to unleash my inner Eddie Vedder when Ten is released this spring. No column required, stranger, just three words: REALLY, REALLY EXCITED.

Normally, we lead off reviews with the relevant speeds and feeds, but in the case of an eBook reader, like the Kindle, that’s not necessary. The Kindle 2 is about the same thickness as this magazine and the size of a trade paperback, but packs enough internal memory to hold an incredible number of books—between 1,000 and 2,000, depending on the length of the books. But that doesn’t really matter. What matters is that the Kindle 2 is a great way to read and purchase books.

We’ve become so accustomed to the ease and convenience of iTunes and blink-and-you-miss-’em CD rips that we forget how in the mid-1990s, ripping a CD was a time-consuming process fraught with peril. Shoot, ripping a single disc to a 128Kbps MP3 could take eight hours on a 200MHz Pentium! Fast forward a decade and faster hardware and better software have made CD ripping so mainstream your mom does it.

Now, ripping DVDs is our great challenge. Copying and transcoding the disc’s video into more efficient formats involves math an order of magnitude scarier than what’s required to rip audio CDs. A machine that will rip the latest Miley Cyrus CD in mere moments could take hours to extract and convert your copy of Alien vs. Predator to an iPod-friendly format. But with the right software, a quad-core-equipped PC, and a little know-how, you can cut your disc-rip time from hours to 30 minutes. Plenty of tricks and traps still await first-time rippers, but we’ll show you the basics and then walk you through some of the most valuable power-user ripping secrets.

Your first decision is simple: What player are you ripping your discs for? Are you ripping for a portable player, like the PSP or iPhone? Would you rather stream to a device in your living room, like the Xbox 360, PS3, or Popcorn Hour? Or are you simply interested in making archival-quality DVD rips in case you lose your collection? More likely, you’re looking for a combination of all three of these things. We’ll show you how to rip your DVD to a file suitable for streaming that consumes a fraction of the disk space of a DVD but maintains full video and audio quality. Then you can take that file and convert it for whatever other devices you might have, like a PSP or an iPod.

With the preliminaries out of the way, let’s get started.

Just one week after Facebook deployed its latest design update, the social network is quietly rolling out a pair of beta services -- Facebook Premium and Facebook Classic -- to select users. Facebook Classic lets each user opt in to the Facebook design of his or her choice. From the pre-news feed design (circa 2006) to the single-page design used through much of 2008, beta users will be able to select the Facebook interface that they’re most comfortable with. In an official status update, Christopher Cox, Facebook’s Director of Product, cited the reasons behind this move, which he feels are "in line with the Facebook's intent to both respond to user feedback and adapt the product for different usage models and forward-looking feature opportunities".

Also in beta, and available to select users is the new Facebook Premium service.

There’s a lot to be excited about when you consider the features Windows Home Server offers out of the box—primarily, automated backup of all your desktop and mobile machines and media streaming to every room in your house. HP builds on this goodness with a second-generation WHS product that boasts both improved hardware and a supercharged features list.

When we reviewed HP’s first foray into the world of Windows Home Server last year, we were optimistic about the future of the platform but a bit underwhelmed by the performance of the little box. Since then, the Home Server software has gone through some teething pains, including a horrific bug that corrupted users’ files (since corrected with the first Service Pack for the Home Server software).

Read on for the rest of the review!

As a general rule, our belief is that pairing two slow-performing cards using SLI or CrossFire is a bad idea—you’re usually better off running a single faster card. However, the Radeon 4850 X2 delivers astounding performance compared to the single-GPU boards in its price range, spanking the Radeon 4870 and the GeForce GTX 280, with none of the pitfalls that have plagued dual-GPU boards in the past.

At the heart of the board is a pair of ATI’s RV770 GPUs running at 625MHz, just like the single-GPU in the 4850 boards. Each GPU features a full complement of 800 stream processors, which are connected to identical 1GB GDDR3 frame buffers running at 993MHz on a 256-bit bus. Although X2 boards are labeled as featuring 2GB of memory, because the contents of each GPU’s frame buffer must be mirrored, applications can utilize only 1GB of video memory.

Read on for the rest of the review!