Maximum PC march 2007 RSS Feed

March 2007 - Windows Vista Survival Guide

Maximum PC Staff — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 09:19:16 -0500

In the PDF archive of the March 2007 issue, you can find:

Windows Vista Survival Guide
PC Fix-It Kit
Firefox Tweaks
26 Awesome Product Reviews!
Core2 Mobos Revealed
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!

The Maximum PC Staff

Asus Striker Extreme

Gordon Mah Ung — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 18:41:46 -0500

How much of a badass mother is Asus’s new motherboard? It’s so bad that it doesn’t even use numbers in its name. Yeah, there’s no R2-D2-like naming convention here. Just call it Striker Extreme, or El Extremerino if you’re not into the whole brevity thing.

The Extreme isn’t just about marketing shtick though. Asus has integrated some pretty compelling features into this nForce 680i–based Intel Core 2 motherboard that we hadn’t seen before. The best example of this is the LCD poster. Instead of providing a cryptic POST message, the Extreme features a small LCD display that gives you info in plain English.

The I/O shield features electroluminescent lighting, so you can see where your USB or PS/2 ports are. And there are even LEDs that can be safely activated when you work around your PC with it turned off. It’s scary to muck with parts while the LEDs are lit, but if you push a switch on the back of the board, it cuts power to USB, RAM, and the add-in slots, so you can remove or add components without damaging anything.

More important though, the Extreme gives you more usable slots. With two double-width GPUs installed, there are still enough slots to add a PCI soundcard and a PCI-E card. The onboard sound, which features SoundMax codecs, is even passable. There’s no EAX support, but SoundMax still sounds better than the Realtek parts.

On the performance front, the Extreme edges the two Intel-based boards by a small margin and comes up short only in FEAR, which tells us something is screwy with the nForce 680i chipset and FEAR. All three nForce-based boards we’ve looked at recently trailed their Intel counterparts in FEAR when run at low resolutions. Everywhere else, this mobo came up smelling of roses.

So what’s wrong? The price. The board lists at about $330 and was going for $100 more than list as we went to press. That’s not Asus’s fault though. You can’t blame the company for what others are willing to charge for such a damned sexy beast.

Samsung Syncmaster 206BW

Katherine Stevenson — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 19:08:19 -0500

In keeping with the prevailing aesthetic of this category, Samsung’s 206BW is fancily clad in black plastic and brushed aluminum, much like ViewSonic’s VX2035wm. And as with that model, you can tilt the screen only forward and back. The height stays put. A circular base serves as a lazy Susan of sorts for swivel functions.

In the past, we’ve taken issue with Samsung’s “hands free” displays, which relegate all screen adjustments to software; fortunately, this model strikes a compromise, offering OSD buttons (in addition to the software) that are discreetly placed beneath the bezel’s bottom edge. Luckily, labels on the bezel help guide your fingers. In Samsung fashion, the adjustment options are plentiful and include a handful of presets for various types of content—movies, games, text, etc. We’ve actually come to appreciate these presets. They make overall changes to the brightness, contrast, and gamma that would take many more steps to achieve through standard OSD operations. HD videophiles will appreciate the 206BW’s HDCP support.

The 206BW’s performance in DisplayMate was strong. Evidence of backlight seepage around the extreme perimeter of the screen was its most notable failing. That was sufficiently offset by stellar grayscale reproduction and marked distinctions between shades at even the extreme dark and light ends. Text looked crisp and clear, and content of all stripes, including games, was reproduced without flaws. While this was also the case with HP’s L2045w, Samsung’s 206BW bested that model with a more vibrant, lively picture. In the end, we’re prepared to declare this our new favorite budget desktop LCD.