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The Biggest Technology Flops Of 2008

Justin Kerr — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 12:33:16 -0600

Every year around late December or early January the internet is bombarded with the top “whatever and such and such” of 2008. Here at Maximum PC we stopped to reflect on our favorite gaming moments, and even cracked the lid on the best of open source; but we never took the time to focus on the hilarious technological flops of the year now past. Luckily however, Tom’s Hardware has put together a fairly comprehensive list. Some of which we can agree with, others perhaps worthy of debate. The list includes:

1.) HD DVD
2.) Nvidia’s Mobile GeForce 8400M and 8600M
3.) iPhone Killers
4.) Windows Vista
5.) Mobile Television
6.) OLED Displays
7.) Phenom X3
8.) The Microsoft Yahoo Proposed Merger
9.) GPGPU
10.) Sony Ericsson XPeria X1
11.) HybridPower: Pseudo-Green
12.) Sony Batteries
13.) Fiber Optics
14.) Non-HD DTT
15.) GTA IV For PC

I’m sure we have more then a few readers that will jump to the defense of some of these items such as Windows Vista and perhaps OLED or Fiber, but it’s hard to argue with the bulk of it.

What do you think should be added or subtracted from the list?

The 250 Most Important Tech Products, Events, and People of 2008

The Maximum PC Staff and Paul Lily — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 12:00:00 -0600

Years from now, when future geeks muse over the history of PC tech, what will they remember about 2008? That’s the question we sought to answer when we compiled this comprehensive technology retrospective of the last year. Make no mistake, identifying and sorting the year’s most significant tech events was no easy task. We locked ourselves in a room where we mentally relived the last 12 months, pondering hundreds of items of note and debating the importance of each to find its appropriate rank on our list. Behold the result: our countdown of the 250 items representing the most noteworthy events and product releases that shaped the PC computing landscape in 2008.

250. Newegg Opens in Canada

It’s hard to imagine a life without Newegg, the second largest online-only retailer in the U.S. But for Canadian computer builders, they had no choice but to find their PC parts elsewhere. That is until Newegg opened its doors north of the border. And no, delivery by Mooseback isn’t a shipping option.

249. Sony is First with 8x Blu-ray

While we were waiting for other Blu-ray manufactures to catch up to LG’s 6x BD-R write speeds, Sony pulls a fast one—literally—and releases the first 8x burner to be sold in the U.S. What does the BWU 300S mean to Blu-ray fans? 22GB BD-R writes in less than 14 minutes! That is, if you’re using the manufacturer recommended Panasonic 6x media.

248. Army Warns of Twitter Terrorism

An Army intelligence report makes the rounds warning that Twitter could be used by terrorist organizations to coordinate militant attacks. The report, which first surfaced on the Federation of the America Scientists website, laid out three separate scenarios in which evil doers might use modern mobile phone applications in conjunction with Twitter to do their evil deeds.

Image Credit: The Inquisitr

247. Cuil Search Engine Sucks

What happens when a band of ex-Google employees set out to make a better search than their former employer? The end result is Cuil, which is pronounced ‘cool’ but is anything but. Not only did the startup stumble out of the gates to heavy criticism over its search results, but Cuil’s Product VP Louis Monier bailed on the company just a month after its launch amid “philosophical differences.”

246. Yahoo Asks Surfers to Start Wearing Purple

Yahoo launches a quirky marketing campaign encouraging surfers to ‘Start Wearing Purple.’ Why purple? Apparently that’s Yahoo’s official color, never mind that the logo has long been colored red. As part of the grassroots effort, the company creates a website centered on all things purple, including a purple-themed gift shop.

245. NZXT Tempest Case

Our favorite budget case is a virtual carbon copy of the Antec Nine Hundred, only $50 cheaper. Some might deride NZXT for a lack of imagination, but we say, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. We loved the Nine Hundred and we well appreciate a similar model at a lower price point.

244. Zune 3.0 Makes Zune Zunier

Microsoft had hoped its Zune player would usurp Apple’s iPod from the media player throne, and while things didn’t work out that way, Microsoft did manage to make its Zune a more compelling alternative with its 3.0 software update. The biggest change came in adding WiFi support so that users could wirelessly download and stream songs from any hotspot. Several other enhancements added to Zune’s appeal, but in the end, Apple still ruled the roost in 2008.

243. GPS Hires Voice of KITT from Knight Rider for Driving Directions

Sure, the old Knight Rider show is cornier than Iowa, and we won’t even talk about what David Hasselhoff has done with his career since then, but who among us hasn’t dreamed of driving around in a 1982 Trans Am with KITT? Mio made that dream semi-possible when it released its Knight Rider GPS, complete with flashing ride lights and actor William Daniels, the original voice of KITT, giving personalized driving directions. Vintage Trans Am not included.

Image Credit: Radio Shack

242. Windows 3.11 Finally Retired, Doesn’t Collect a Pension

You may not have even known Windows 3.11 was still alive and kicking, but the ancient OS found renewed life as an embedded platform in low-power platforms, such as cash registers, train schedule displays, ticketing systems, and other simple devices. But after 18 years, Microsoft officially stops issuing licenses for the OS that originally debuted n May 1990.

241. Blizzard Sues World of Warcraft Bot Creator

Michael Donnelly found himself in shark infested waters after a Vivendi attorney and private investigator visited his home. The visit served as a final warning for Donnelly to stop selling his Glider program, claiming it infringes on the company’s EULA. The Glider application enabls users to automate certain functions, and in the FAQ section, Donnelly freely owns up to the fact that “Glider is against theTerms of Service provided by Blizzard for World of Warcraft.”

240. Nvidia Dons Cape, Launches Supercomputer

Nvidia brought supercomputing to the desktop when it launched its GPU-based Tesla personal supercomputer, a beast of a machine the company claimed could offer up to 250 times the performance of a standard workstation. Three to four Nvidia Tesla C1060 computing processors, each one made up of 240 streaming processor cores and 4GB of 800MHz GDDR3 memory, came configured in every Tesla supercomputer. That kind of power didn’t come cheap and potential buyers could expect to drop 10 large on a rig.

239. Verizon Buys Its Way to the Top

If money talks, then the world can certainly hear Verizon now. Verizon spent roughly $28.1 billion acquiring rival Alltel, which turned Verizon into the nation’s largest cellular telephone provider. The deal knocked AT&T down to No.2, with Sprint sliding into the No. 3 spot. The deal also culminated rumors dating back to 2005 speculating the two companies were considering a merger.

238. Microsoft VP Dyes Hair Orange after Developers Meet Deadline

Microsoft VP Ted Kummert, perhaps now better known as pumpkinhead, promised to dye his hair orange if his engineering team could wrap up SQL Server 2008 by the company’s deadline. The release was delayed from its initial target, but the developers ultimately came through, and Kummert made good on his promise.

237. Assassin’s Creed First to Support DX 10.1, Stirs Controversy

Assassin’s Creed was the first title to support the new DX 10.1 API, and some benchmarks showed up to a 20 percent performance improvement when using a current generation ATI-based videocard, the only ones to support DX 10.1. A patch later removed DX 10.1 from the game, leading some to wonder if politics were at play. Conspiracy theorists were quick to point out that the game was part of Nvidia’s The Way It’s Meant To Be Played program. Coincidence?

236. Professional Gamer Accused of Doping

Whether or not you consider professional gaming to be a real sport, the practice shares some similarities with those that are. Not all of those similarities are anything to be proud of. Australian site GamePlayer wrote an article identifying commonly abused substances gamers have been using to get an edge, including marijuana, amphetamines, Ritalin, and more. Kind of makes you wonder what someone means when they say they achieved a ‘high score.’

235. HTC Phones Lead the Rebellion Against iPhones

Most would agree that Apple’s iPhone is still the best touch-screen phone on the market, but it’s no longer the only viable option. With the release of T-Mobile’s G1 Android phone, handset maker HTC poses a legitimate threat to the Apple Empire in the mobile phone sector. In addition to the G1, HTC in 2008 sported an impressive lineup of touch-screen phones, including the Windows Mobile-based Touch HD.

234. CoolerMaster HAF

The High Air Flow case is Cooler Master’s magnum opus. It takes everything that was great about previous CM cases like the Cosmos and mixes them into a glorious best-of. Big fans on the top, front, and side keep air moving, there’s plenty of room for a second PSU or water-cooling reservoir, and the toolless design is always appreciated.

233. WarGames Returns to Theaters for 25th Anniversary

Whether you were in diapers the first time WarGames played in movie theaters or are old enough to remember going to see it back in 1983, everyone got a chance to see Matthew Broderick play the part of a hacker on the big screen in 2008. To celebrate the War Games’ 25th anniversary and to build hype for a straight-to-DVD sequel, MGM brought the memorable flick back for a single encore showing in select theaters.

232. San Francisco IT Guy Holds City Hostage

Turns out you don’t need a gun to hold an entire city hostage, you just need access to the city government’s fiber optic network. Terry Childs, a city tech employee, was accused of modifying the city’s municipal network and then refusing to hand over the passwords after being arrested. Even the mayor’s email was affected from Childs’ alleged shenanigans.

231. Team China Wins Annual Advanced Overclocking Championship

After two days of competition in Hong Kong, two contestants from China emerged as Champions of AOCC 2008. The Chinese duo – Xu Gang and Susie – beat out 38 other contestants representing 19 countries by taking the top spot in all 3 categories of the competition. Runners up, in order from 1st to 4th, included Sweden, Portugul, Singapore, and Finland.

230. Record Sentence Handed Out for Computer Sabotage

Yung-Hsun Lin might have a hard time getting his former employer to write him a letter of recommendation. That’s because Lin, a systems administrator fearful he was about to be laid off, dropped a logic bomb on company computers designed to take them out. His unsuccessful attempt translated into a 30-month prison sentence, the longest that has ever been handed out for computer sabotage.

229. Congressman Pushes for Opt-In Rule for Web Tracking

Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) fights back against deep-packet technologies, which have been used on the web to track what sites users visit so that companies can deliver targeted ads. The practice raises privacy concerns, for which Markey says an opt-in rule should be mandatory. On the flip-side, Robert Kykes, CEO of NebuAd, countered that a web-wide opt-in program would harm the internet, which receives half of its funding through advertising.

Image Credit: Boston Globe, Dina Rudick

228. WirelessHD Standard Ratified, Living Room Still Cluttered with Cables

Maybe the next generation of game consoles and other living room equipment will allow us to beam high definition content to our HDTVs without all the cable clutter. That type of future became very possible when the WirelessHD 1.0 specification was ratified. WirelessHD 1.0 taps into the unlicensed 60GHz frequencies to transmit HD signals, while also providing a standard for manufacturers to follow.

Image Credit: TomsHardware

227. States Push to Tax Digital Downloads, Time for a Boston.com Tea Party?

In 2008 alone, nine states put laws in the books taxing digital downloads, bringing the running total to 17 states in all, plus the District of Columbia. At stake is a $130 billion untaxed digital market pushed by popular services like Steam and iTunes. Several other states begin examining their own laws, signaling that the free ride may soon be over.

226. Jerry Yang Steps Down as Yahoo CEO, Leaves Mess Behind

Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang stayed busy during his year and a half tenure as the search company’s CEO, and during that time he staved off a $44.6 billion acquisition offer from Microsoft and watched as Yahoo’s stock price tumbled down. Despite the financial failures, the decision to step down was said to be mutual.

Image Credit: Flickr jdlasica

225. GoDaddy Sells Domains All About .Me

Those in need of a clever sounding URL got a whole new selection of top-level domains to choose from when GoDaddy started selling .Me domains. GoDaddy wasn’t fully prepared to deal with the demand during the initial open registration, and as a result, several people who registered for Aweso.me at the same time had their orders go through, but only one got to keep it. The rest got an Aweso.me refund.

224. Intel’s Dunnington-based Xeon Chips Dance with Six Cores

The best part about Intel’s Dunnington-based server CPUs isn’t that they contain six cores, but that the chips are monolithic so that all cores are on a single die. No previous Xeon chip can make that same claim, nor can they touch the Dunnington in performance, which Intel claims is improved by 50 percent.

223. Thomson and Leadtek Flirt with Cell Processor Add-In Card for the PC

The promise of Cell processing on the PC takes a step forward when both Thomson and Leadtek announce plans to release a SpursEngine add-in card. Toshiba’s SpursEngine technology, which is based on the Cell processor technology found in the PS3, allows users to encode or decode HD video using hardware-based MPEG2 and H.264 codecs, as well as upscale standard-definition video HD on the fly.

222. Nvidia Launches GeForce 9-Series, Not Much Better than 8-Series

The best thing about Nvidia releasing its 9xxx GeForce videocards is that it drove the price down on the company’s 8-series parts. The update might have been more dramatic if Nvidia didn’t already refresh part of its 8-series lineup with the G92 core, which ultimately resulted in the 9800GTX being little more than a glorified G92-based 8800GTS.

221. Linksys WRT600N WiFi Router

The Linksys WRT600N is the first 802.11n draft 2.0 router we’ve tested that can operate on both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz frequency bands simultaneously. It's also the most expensive router we've tested, but it's impressive performance and feature set justifies its cost.

220. Broadcom Billionaire Pleads Innocence in Two Federal Cases

Reading like a tabloid rag, the federal indictment brought against Broadcom co-founder Henry T. Nicholas III contained accusations of sex, drugs, but no rock and roll. Nicholas III pled not guilty to all charges, which in total have the potential to carry a 370-year prison sentence. The 18-page indictment accuses Nicholas III of everything from stock-option backdating to slipping ecstasy into drinks he served to business associates.

219. Max Payne Sucks on Big Screen

No, not like that, not in a literal sense anyway. Whereas 3DRealms weaved together an intriguing storyline, awesome action sequences complete with Bullet Time, and a deeply disturbed character, the Max Payne movie failed to capture any of the elements that made the game such a hit. Despite the negative reviews, Max Payne topped the box office chart and pulled in $18 million during its opening weekend.

218. Radeon 4850

Why do we like the Radeon 4850? It’s easy. This family of boards uses the same GPU that powers the Radeon 4870 HD and 4870 X2 boards. By pairing lower-clocked versions of that speed demon with slower (and less expensive) GDDR3 memory, ATI built a $150 performance champ that is perfectly paired with a 22-inch panel. The icing on the cake is the chips impressive overclockabilty. We like what we see!

217. Micron Shows off Supercharged SSD

Despite the hype surrounding solid-state drives, with few exceptions the technology remains overpriced, undersized, and surprisingly slow. Intel’s X-25M thrashes the competition, but it’s Micron’s demo of a supercharged SSD that gets everyone excited about flash-based drives again. The company posts a low-quality YouTube video showing a prototype model hitting 800 MB/s, which wipes the floor with any consumer storage device yet available.

216. Pirate Bay Pitches Plan to Encrypt Internet

Everybody knows what goes on at Pirate Bay, and that can pose a problem for the P2P site when certain prying eyes start poking around. So in response to the European Union heading toward a DMCA-like copyright enforcement, the Pirate Bay responds by outlining a plan to encrypt the entire internet. The “Transparent end-to-end encryption for the internets” (IPETEE) would, in theory, prevent ISPs from identifying and throttling P2P traffic.

215. Google Gives Birth to Lively

It seems that everything Google touches turns to gold, so maybe the search giant has a shot at stealing the virtual show from Second Life when it entices users to use its Lively service instead. Google’s grand plan was for users to create a massive distributed virtual world, which all starts with creating an avatar.

214. Google Puts Lively on Death Row

Not everything Google touches turns to gold, especially when those things are bug ridden clients trying to compete with the online social world known as Second Life. Such is the case with Google’s Lively experiment, a project Google ultimately gave up on just 6 months after it was introduced. When we asked readers what they thought of Lively’s impending demise, poster AndyYankee17 summed it up best by responding “never heard of it.”

213. Microsoft Makes XP Available to OLPC

The OLPC missed its mark at offering a laptop for $100 or less, but it also didn’t come with XP, preventing some would-be buyers from making a purchase order. That changes when OLPC partners with Microsoft to include a modified version of XP, and it only adds $10 to the cost.

212. Cyberathlete Professional Leagues Hangs its Hat

Mother always said you can’t grow up to be a professional gamer, and it gets harder to prove her wrong when the Cyberathlete Professional League closes down. The Dallas, Texas-based organization stayed busy during its 10.5-year tenure, hosting over 60 international tournaments and handing out over $3 million in prizes.

211. Whoops! Charter Accidentally Nukes 14,000 Email Accounts

What was supposed to be just routine maintenance to purge unused email accounts turned into anything but routine for thousands of Charter subscribers who found that their active email addy had been decimated. To make matters worse, Charter said it couldn’t retrieve any messages or attachments that may have been sitting in the in-box when the glitch occurred. Affected customers were offered a $50 credit for the mistake.

210. Best Buy Nabs Napster, No One Notices

The book on Napster adds yet another chapter as Best Buy acquires the subscription music service for $121 million. The move is meant to compete with Apple’s iTunes service, something Napster was never able to do on its own. Best Buy’s ambitious plans to expand the service have yet to materialize.

209. AMD's Puma Pounces

If Intel can build massive branding around a “platform” that is really just a CPU, chipset and Wi-Fi chip chip, AMD can too. Well sorta. While Intel forces PC builders to take all three in order to qualify for “Centrino 2,” AMD is only requiring the CPU and chipset and is letting vendors pick from a qualified list of third-party wireless vendors for the last component.

208. Researchers Fear Cell Phones Stifle Sperm Quality

Most research involving cell phone use centers around whether or not we’re putting ourselves at risk for brain cancer. But if you’re a male, researchers at the Cleveland Clinic warned that cell phones might also cause harmful effects to your gonads. The study found more free radicals in semen that had been placed 2.5cm away from an 850 MHz cell phone in talk mode for 1 hour, giving a whole new meaning to the term phone sex.

207. IBM Commits to Help Companies Become Microsoft-Free

IBM has always had a soft spot for Linux, and in 2008, the company lays out plans to help companies move away from Microsoft and into open-source software. The plan includes partnering with several Linux vendors to bundle its middleware on more Linux systems, and to help them do that, IBM reconfigured its Lotus Foundations software to make it both easier and cheaper to install on Linux-based computers.

206. Second Life Holds Party to Celebrate 5th Birthday

Most 5-year-olds ask to go to Chuck E. Cheese for their birthday, but such a simple celebration wouldn’t do for Second Life. To commemorate the occasion, developer Linden Labs held a two-week long Virtual World Fair, which took place from June 23 to July 7, 2008. Linden closed off the event to its mature-themed sub-communities, who went on to plan celebrations of their own, birthday suit and all.

Image Credit: Flickr Miyaoka Hitchcock

205. Largest Prime Number Yet Discovered, Also the World’s Hardest Password to Remember

If your favorite online portals are saying your passwords are too weak, consider changing them to the nearly 13-million digit long prime number discovered by a UCLA computer running the GIMPS distributed computing software. The prime number, 243,112,609-1, marks only the 45th Mersenne prime ever discovered, which is a prime that can take the form of 2n-1.

204. Netscape Suffers Same Fate as Old Yeller (SPOILER!)

Netscape didn’t develop rabies like Old Yeller did, but like the lovable dog, it had to be put down by the hands of its owner. After almost 14 years of service, the browser died an honorable death, receiving one final update before AOL recommended its users switch to Firefox. At its height in 1995, Netscape claimed over 80 percent of the browser market share.

203. SDHC Sets New Speed and Capacity Records

SanDisk soared to the top of the SDHC capacity chart by releasing a 32GB model, while also claiming the speed crown with maximum read and write rates of 15 MB/s and 10 MB/s respectively. Days later, Panasonic came out with a 32GB SDHC of its own and upped the speed ante with maximum data transfer rates up to 20 MB/s.

202. 5 Billion Songs Served on iTunes, DRM Ruins Meal

Making a pitch for quantity over quality, Apple’s iTunes Store boasts over 5 billion songs sold by June of 2008, most of which came saddled with DRM. Other digital download stores pick up the slack by offering a smorgasbord of DRM-free music, but Apple never appears to be in a rush to follow suit. Such is the luxury the company can afford to make when it claims over 70 percent of online digital music sales.

201. Low-Life Hackers Target Epilepsy Patients

We know we shouldn’t be surprised by anything hackers do – after all, they have no qualms about stealing your personal data and selling it to the highest bidder. But targeting epilepsy patients with a flashing computer animation designed to cause seizures marked a new low for cybercriminals. Kudos to the Epilepsy Forum staff, who responded quickly to the attacks.

Image Credit: Coolest-gadgets.com

200. CompactFlash Flies to 100GB

Chances are, if you own a DSLR camera, you use CompactFlash to store your photos. And if you shoot a lot of pictures in RAW, you might be running out of space. Pretec made the practice of filling up a CF card no easy task when it released a 100GB CF card, the largest capacity to date.

199. HP DreamColor 30-bit Panel

While most of us would have a hard time justifying the purchase of a $3,500 panel—particularly in these trying economic times—that does little to alleviate our desire for this 24-inch LCD monitor that’s capable of displaying one billion colors. And though marketed to people in graphic design and photography, who’s to say blasting zombies isn’t a color critical task.

198. Spam Turns 30, Avoids Mid-Life Crisis

Spam has become such a ubiquitous part of computing that it’s easy to assume the practice has been around forever. And it nearly has been. The first spam message was sent back in 1978 by a marketer at DEC (Digital Equipment Company) to about 400 people before the practice even had a name. Thanks for opening that can of worms, asshat.

197. Windows Home Server w/ SP1

We liked Microsoft’s Windows Home Server software from the git-go, right up until the point that users began suffering data corruption and file loss. More than just teething pains, the problems were rooted at a very low level. Fortunately, Microsoft fixed these core problems—and added needed features like support for 64-bit clients and integrated server backup software—with the first service pack for the nascent OS, dubbed Power Pack 1.

196. Death of the Internet, as Written by Mark Cuban

Dallas Mavericks owner and one-time avid blogger Mark Cuban made his fortune on the internet, so it came as a bit of surprise when the outspoken billionaire declared the internet dead. And he didn’t stop there. Cuban said “the internet’s for old people,” though 5 minutes on Runescape would have anyone signing a different tune. Maybe Cuban was just having a bad day, like the ones he suffers each year when the Mavericks exit the playoffs empty-handed.

195. Ebay Neuters Sellers Ability to Leave Negative Feedback

It’s one thing to raise fees, but many felt Ebay crossed the line when it revamped its feedback system. In order to encourage buyers to leave accurate feedback without fear of retaliation, the online auction side made it so that sellers can only leave positive feedback, even if the buyer ends up being a rotten non-paying bidder. Sellers staged a weeklong boycott in response, which did nothing to change Ebay’s mind.

194. OLED Keyboard Materializes, Pigs Still Don’t Fly

As far as we know, hell never froze over (perhaps Justin Long will send us a postcard when he gets there), so we can’t explain what cosmic forces brought Art Lebedev’s Optimus Maximus OLED keyboard out of vaporware status and transformed it into a shipping a product. At almost $1,600, it’s expensive, but it exists. We still can’t say the same for Duke Nukem Forever.

193. Memory Goes Multi-Core

A PC is a sum of all parts, and the trick to wringing out better performance is to reduce or eliminate bottlenecks. With dual- and quad-core chips now the norm, memory chips struggle to keep pace. Cryptographer Joseph Ashwood set out to tackle the problem by developing multi-core memory. According to Ashwood, his architecture, which “borrows extensively from today’s modern multi-core CPUs,” can muster 16GB/s.

192. PC Gaming Hardware Market Valued at $20 Billion

According to the bean counters at Jon Peddie Research, not only is PC gaming not dead, but it isn’t even on life support. On the contrary, the research firm declared the PC gaming hardware market to be worth $20 billion. Furthermore, JPR estimates the market will nearly double to $34 billion by 2012. Take that, you cocky console gamers.

191. Google Gets in the Game with AdSense

Quite frankly, we’re surprised it took Google as long as it did to target with Flash games. The company’s foray into Flash can be viewed as confirmation that the potential for heavy ad dollars are at stake, and its AdSense for Games program isn’t without competition. But Google’s solution offers a fair bit of flexibility, allowing beta users to implement video, image, and text ads within an online game.

190. Silverlight Stands Over Adobe in Olympics

Michael Phelps may have earned himself a spot in the record books, but it was Microsoft who also scored a major victory in Beijing. Despite Adobe Flash’s wide userbase, Microsoft managed to sweet talk NBC into using its competing Silverlight technology to stream Olympic coverage, and with it all the gold that comes from the deal.

189. Fatal1ty Whores Himself Out to New Levels

We’re waiting for the moment when Johnathan Wendel joins forces with Microsoft to create Vista: Fatal1ty Edition or Windows 7 Fatal1ty. In the meantime, you can find the gamer tag on just about every component available, including OCZ RAM. Before the year was through, OCZ also added a line of Fatal1ty-branded power supplies.

188. Funky Looking Webcam Does 3D

One part E.T. and two parts weird, Novo’s Minoru makes its debut as the world’s first 3D webcam. The two-eyed gadget creates a stereoscopic image so that viewers can see you in three dimensions, provided you can convince them to don a pair or red and blue 3D glasses. If not, 2D still works, but where’s the fun in that?

187. Biostar Claims Overclocking Frontside Bus Record

We typically associate Biostar with the bargain bin, but it might be time to take another look. Using a Biostar TPower I45 motherboard, renowned overclocker ‘Youngpro’ set a new frontside bus record by reaching 725MHz. That same board has been spotted in other overclocking competitions, including a stint in Belgian when another enthusiast became the first to pump the FSB to 645MHz on air-cooling.

186. Nvidia Breaks Promise to Simplify Product Line

It can be full-time job keeping up with changing technology (and for us, it is!), and it doesn’t help matters that Nvidia’s popular GeForce line is plagued with a confusing naming scheme. Model numbers are only part of the battle, and consumers must also grasp the differences between a GS, GSO, GT, GTS, GTX, and so on. And that doesn’t take into account core modifications, like the one that exists between the 320MB and 640MB versions of the 8800GTS. Nvidia promised to simplify its lineup, only to add yet another tag, the GTX+.

185. GeForce GTX 260 Core 216

Quite frankly, the first-generation GeForce GTX 260 was over-gimped. Figuring out how much functionality can safely be cut from a higher-end GPU to make a mid-range product is a tricky balance. Cut too much, and you suffer anemic performance. Don’t cut enough, and there’s no reason to buy a spendy high-end card. While the initial run of GeForce GTX 260s (with a mere 192 shader cores) couldn’t hack it, the versions with just 24 more shader processors (that’s where the board gets its name) are just right.

184. Hitachi Thinks Big, Pledges 5TB Hard Drive by 2010

Hitachi was the first hard drive manufacturer to reach the 1TB milestone, and the company is already off to the races towards 5TB. A year earlier, Hitachi said that 4TB could be attainable by 2011, but later revised its prediction and said it would release a 5TB 3.5-inch hard drive in 2010. And according to Hitachi, if you run two of them in tandem, you’ll have the equivalent storage capacity of half a human brain.

183. AMD Refocuses on Stream Processing, Offers Free Avivo Video Converter

AMD’s stream processing technology isn’t new, but it’s always been more of an afterthought. The same can’t be said in 2008, and AMD showed renewed focus with its new ATI Stream brand, which is a compilation of several previous technologies. Updated drivers unlock the new ATI Stream acceleration capabilities built into several ATI videocards, and to add icing on the cake, AMD offers its ATI Avivo Video Converter as a free download.

182. Polaroid Puts Instant Film in the Grave

Before digital cameras marched into the mainstream market, you could either wait for your film to be developed by some nosy 1-hr photo lab employee who would keep a copy for himself, or placate your desire for instant gratification with Polaroid’s instant film. Closing yet another chapter on our younger days, Polaroid put the kibosh on instant film and closed down the last of its instant film factories.

Image Credit: Flickr Patrick Haney

181. Polaroid Camera Makes a Comeback with Underwhelming PoGo Support

Polaroid may be discontinuing production of their iconic instant film, but they’re not leaving the market totally vacant. This June saw the release of PoGo, a pocket-sized printer which promised instant, adhesive-backed photos straight from our cameras and phones. The device was marred by lousy battery life and Bluetooth connectivity issues, but was still fun enough that we’re looking forward to future versions.

180. Eye-Fi Explore

Remember you used to have to manually upload your photos to your web site? Feh. With Eye-Fi’s lineup of Wi-Fi integrated SD cards, just snap the shot, leave the camera on and it’ll upload those adorable pictures of your kids, pets. Or for the more geeky, your World of Warcraft figurines or other “man dolls.”

179. Nvidia Gets Serious About Physics, Acquires Ageia

Ageia’s standalone PhysX card never did quite catch on, but physics processing did. Just months after Intel spent $110 million to acquire Havok, Nvidia answered back by picking up Ageia, a deal rumored to have been worth $150 million. The asking price drove AMD out of the running, who also showed interest before Nvidia stepped in.

178. Debian Enters Adolescence, Celebrates 15th Birthday

On August 16th, 1993, Elvis fans mourned the 16th anniversary of his passing. It was also on this day that Debian was born, and by the age of 15, the GNU/Linux distribution has gone on to influence some of the most popular distros, including Ubuntu. And here’s an interesting tidbit – Debian got its name by combining founder Ian Murdock’s first name with his then girlfriend (now wife) Deborah (Deb+ian).

177. Nvidia Enforces Manufacturer Advertised Pricing

Hopping over to Newegg and sorting videocards by price is supposed to simplify the process of picking out a bang/buck videocard, but Nvidia ruins the experience when it decides to enforce Manufacturer Advertised Pricing. With MAP, vendors aren’t allowed to display prices below a set minimum, forcing shoppers to add the item to their cart to see the true selling price. Why is this akin to sitting on nails? Because it’s a pain in the ass.

176. Memory Makers Push GDDR5 into Development

Higher bandwidth and lower power consumption sounds like a win-win proposition, and it’s these two characteristics that GDDR5 brings to the table. Memory maker Qimonda gets busy churning out the new chips, most of which end up in AMD’s hands for use in the company’s HD 4870 and HD 4870X2 videocards. Later in the year, Hynix introduces an even more power efficient GDDR5 memory, requiring just 1.35V compared to 1.5V.

175. OCZ Taps into Human Brain

While we’ve often threatened to obliterate enemies with just our mind, it was never before possible until OCZ unveiled its Neural Impulse Actuator. Once strapped to the noggin, the futuristic looking device can then translate electrical biosignals allowing you to control the on-screen action through the power of thought and various reactionary movements, such as clenching your jaw and different facial expressions. Don’t use while constipated.

174. Obama Texts Registered Users His VP Candidate

Before Barack Obama went on the defeat John McCain in the 2008 Presidential election, he first reached out to connected voters by announcing he would text message his choice for VP running mate before making a formal announcement. According to Nielsen Mobile, 2.9 million subscribers signed up to receive the text.

173. Convicted BitTorrent Seed Farmer Sentenced to 18 Months

EliteTorrents, at one time a popular portal for finding pre-release movies, drew the ire of the MPAA, who took the admins to court. Of the three administrators, only Daniel Dove pleaded ‘not guilty,’ and as one might imagine the Department of Justice had little trouble winning a jury conviction for copyright infringement. Dove, no longer a free bird, was sentenced to 18 months in prison, which is more than either of his cohorts but less than the 10 years he could have received.

172. Apple MacBook Pro

It takes a big man to admit that he’s wrong, but that’s just what notorious Apple-hater Gordon Mah Ung did this year, when he served our first review of an Apple laptop right beside a tasty serving of crow. Said Gordon, “the MacBook Pro is a surprisingly satisfying machine”.

171. Microsoft Makes Development Tools Available for Students at No Cost

Between tuition, books, and kegs, college students don’t often have loads of extra cash lying around to buy things like, oh, developer and design tools to write software applications. And nor do they have to, as Microsoft launched its DreamSpark initiative, offering college and high school kids all around the world free access to technology tools. With them, budding developers can build web pages, create Xbox 360 videogames, and engage in other geeky time killers for those dateless Friday nights.

170. E3 Sucks

There, that’s it. We said it. The new, trimmed-down E3, while glorious and wonderful for anyone actually working the show, sucks for everyone else. Along with the thronging crowds, clamoring for a glimpse of Wil Wright’s latest and the breathy news coverage of the latest family-friendly musical rhythm game, the games industry also left behind a lot of the fun and excitement around games. Put another way: more people waited in line to play the Wii in 2006 than attended E3 in 2008. We’re glad “old” E3 is coming back, even if our voices and feet aren’t.

169. Some Progress Made in Internet Radio Legislation

The online music industry has always been a touchy one, but the RIAA and internet radio came a step closer to ending online royalty disputes. An agreement called a “breakthrough that will facilitate new ways to offer music to consumers online,” between songwriters, music publishers, record labels and digital music websites concluded a seven year dispute over mechanical royalties and limited music downloads. Unfortunately, sites such as Pandora and Live365 remain in a high-stakes standoff with SoundExchange, the company in charge of collecting the fees for artists and record companies.

168. AMD Launches AMD GAME! Marketing Initiative

AMD set out to prove it has game by launching a new marketing program called AMD GAME! In a similar vein to Microsoft’s Vista Capable campaign, AMD’s strategy is to certify and label affordable PCs that meet set criteria the company determines can play the latest games. AMD compares the concept to the simplicity of buying a console.

167. Epic Fail: Asus Includes Software Cracks and Confidential Docs on Recovery DVD

We’ve heard of viruses and other malware being inadvertently included on media coming from trusted sources, but imagine the surprise that would come from firing up a recovery DVD and finding software cracks and confidential documents. The SNAFU belongs to Asus, who shipped the dirty recovery DVDs to several notebook customers. Makes you wonder just what’s going on behind over there.

166. VIA Vacates the Motherboard Chipset Business

Enthusiasts have mixed feelings when it comes to VIA chipsets. On one hand, the company regularly churned out high performance chipsets well before overclocking became a mainstream hobby. But many remember VIA most for its buggy platforms that often led to an inevitable revision (KT266 to KT266A, for example). Memories are all enthusiasts have left after 2008, as VIA bowed out of the motherboard chipset business to focus on x86 processors. Farewell or good riddance?

165. High Volume of Stolen Bank Data Drives Online Prices Down

There’s an entire underground economy that thrives on stolen data, such as bank account information, credit card details, and other personal information. And at one point, a stolen credit card might have sold for $100 or more on the web, but in 2008, that same card would only fetch $10. The reason? Hackers have gotten too good at what they do resulting in an oversupply of stolen data.

164. LG 6x Makes Blu-ray Fast, Affordable

Blu-ray adoption got off to a very slow start—in part because of the competing HD DVD standard, but also because of the format’s initially sloooooow burn times and the exorbitant cost of both hardware and media. But with LG’s GBW-H20L burner, Blu-ray’s prospects begin to improve. Not only does the drive distinguish itself with 6x BD-R burn times, making it possible to write 22GB of data to a disc in around 20 minutes, but its $280 price is nearly half that of the competition.

163. Microsoft Manages to Patent Page Up and Page Down Keystrokes

Originally applied for in 2005, in 2008 Microsoft was a granted U.S. patent number 7,415,666 which, among the rhetoric, gives an example whereby “a user is viewing a page starting in a viewing area from the middle of that page and ending at the bottom, a Page Down command will cause the next page to be show.” All tallied, Microsoft owns some 10,000 patents, including the scrollable mouse wheel and double clicking.

162. NPD Starts Tracking Subscription Sales for PC Games

PC game sales have gotten a bad rap and it’s no wonder so many are quick to read PC gaming’s eulogy. But what those numbers don’t’ tell you is what amount is being made off of digital sales and how much subscription based gaming brings in. With the long overdue introduction of subscription based tracking, the NPD takes a step in the right direction into providing an accurate snapshot of the PC gaming industry.

161. Nvidia CEO Promises to “Open a Can of Whoop Ass”

Want to boost investor confidence? Tell them your company’s going to open a can of whoop ass on the competition. We don’t know if it will work, but that didn’t stop Nvida CEO Jen-Hsun Huang from using those exact words during one of the company’s financial analyst meetings. In fact, the outspoken CEO is rarely without candid comments, including dismissing Intel’s integrated graphics as “a joke.”

160. GTA Hot Coffee Mod Settlement Pays $35 to Offended Gamers

It wasn’t the ability to bludgeon prostitutes to death and take back money for services rendered that caused the biggest uproar. No, it was the not-so-graphic digitized sex scenes only unlockable by downloading a ‘Hot Coffee’ mod that got Take Two in deep doo-doo. But when the dust settled, the class action lawsuit only netted up to $35 per offended gamer, or $5 for those with no disc or receipt. Less than 2,700 gamers participated in the settlement.

159. Voodoo PCs Mingle with HP/Compaq Computers

Not many standalone boutique OEMs are left standing, as many have either shuttered their doors or been gobbled up by mainstay OEMs. And such is the case with Voodoo PC, now an HP acquisition. For awhile, HP kept the Voodoo line separate, but later decided it made more sense to merge its specialty PC division with its consumer Compaq and HP lines.

158. Pioneer Punches Out First 16-Layer Optical Disc

Sure, a 16-layer 400GB Blu-ray disc sounds groovy on paper, but how far in the future would we have to travel to find a Blu-ray player capable or recognizing the thing? Apparently, not very far. Just five months after Pioneer announced it had developed the disc, the company showed one off at the IT Month Fair in Taipei, and the word is it will work with current BD decks. Bitchin’!

157. Nikon Releases First SLR to Shoot Video

In October, Nikon released the D90, the latest in its line of solid, entry-level DSLRs. What most distinguished the D90 from its predecessor the D80—and indeed from every other DSLR in the field—was its ability to capture 24 fps, 720p video. While video capture may seem gimmicky in a DSLR, the D9 posted some fairly impressive results, and we’ll be surprised if we don’t start seeing this feature in more DSLRs soon.

156. Independent Artists Start Collecting Royalties on Last.fm

Last.fm had been talking about bringing together a business model that would compensate independent artists who aren’t signed with a music label, and the social music service made good on that promise in July. Last.fm’s Artist Royalty Program made it possible for artists and labels to start accruing royalties provided their music was played enough (i.e., didn’t suck).

155. At Long Last, Nvidia Implements Multi-Monitor SLI Support

Life is series of tradeoffs, but one that always seemed unnecessary was forgoing that second display when in SLI mode. Thankfully, Nvidia finally got its act together and in November released new Forceware 180.48 drivers, the first non-beta driver to enable SLI multi-monitor support. The drivers also marked the first time that end users could bring SLI and Intel together without any funky hacks.

154. Blizzard Sells Authenticator Dongle to World of Warcraft Players

It didn’t matter how many times WoW players casted a level 40 spell of Hacker Protection on their accounts, they still ran the risk of logging in only to find that their loot is gone. To help ensure that such an unpleasant scenario can never take place, Blizzard started selling an authenticator dongle, which generates a unique one-time password every time gamers log in.

153. Mac First to Fall in Pwn2Own Contest

You know how Mac users like to talk about how secure their platform is compared to your crash-prone Windows rig? Next time it happens, simply remind them that during CanSecWest’s annual Pwn2Own challenge, not only wax Mac OS X the first to fall, but it only took hacker Charlie Miller two minutes to make the MacBook Air his ____ (insert naughty word). It took two days to the same to Vista, and only Linux walked away unscathed.

152. Acer Aspire One

Like virtually every other netbook we’ve seen, it’s about 3 pounds, 8.9” screen, and runs Windows XP on a 1.6GHz Atom processor with 1GB of RAM. Its specs are nearly identical to the MSI Wind and Lenovo S10, but it’s slightly smaller and much cheaper. With a roomy 160GB hard drive, it’s the best first-gen netbook value around.

151. TinyURL Levels Up with Vanity URLs

We’ll never know why some links have to be so long as to take up multiple lines, but nor have we cared much thanks to TinyURL. The only problem is that remembering the random characters at the end of the shortened link never made any sense. TinyURL addressed that problem by giving users the ability to customize the shortened URLs, so that www.tinyurl.com/58dr8q can be more easily remembered as www.tinyurl.com/ForSpiderMonkey.

150. Google Helps You Change the World with 10 to the 100 Project

If Google were a guy, the chicks would totally dig him. Not only is he famous, filthy rich, and good at what he does, but he also wants to help you change the world. The idea behind the 10 to the 100 project was to get ordinary people to submit extraordinary ideas that would change the world. The best ideas will eventually be whittled down to five, among which Google will divvy up a $10 million contribution. What a guy!

149. Skype on Everything but the iPhone

Are you using Skype to keep in touch with friends, family, and maybe even a few random strangers? Of course you are, because Skype is available on just about every gadget out there, including Sony’s PSP. Long after Vonage’s ‘woo-hoo’ commercials fade from memory, users will be making phone calls and sending IMs through Skype whether at home or on the go, and maybe even one day will you be able to officially do so on your iPhone.

148. Californians Can’t Text and Drive at the Same Time

It’s not because they’re incapable, but because California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger helped pass a bill banning the practice. Get caught texting while driving in the sunshine state and you’ll be hit with a $20 fine. Do it again and that number more than doubles to $50, the same for each subsequent infraction. Curiously enough, the state had already passed a ban making it illegal to hold a cell phone and drive at the same time, but you could still text, assuming you could levitate objects with your mind.

147. The Gamer’s Bill of Rights is Born

Is it truly necessary for game publishers to require that their games can only be played while the CD/DVD remains in the drive? According Stardock and Gas Powered Games, not only is it unnecessary, but it’s a violation of No. 10 in The Gamer’s Bill of Rights. The two devised the list in hopes of garnering enough industry support to eventually create a consortium, which would actually uphold the standards instead of just talk about them.

146. EA Tries to Buy Take 2

Electronic Arts' infatuation with rival video game maker Take-Two Interactive have been anything but secret, nor has Take-Two's rejection. In late February, Take-Two publicly rejected EA's unsolicited takeover bid worth roughly $2 billion, a move Take-Two accused of being "opportunistic" with Grand Theft Auto IV nearing release. Not taking the rejection well, EA threatened with a hostile takeover in the following months, but has since backed down.

145. OpenID Finds Big Backers among the Tech Elite

The best ideas in the world can go down in flames without support from key backers – just ask Toshiba about its HD-DVD platform. And so OpenID had to be thrilled to find out Microsoft, Google, Verisign, and IBM were all hopping on board as partners. Board nominations and other housekeeping duties are still taking place, but at this point, it’s hard to imagine a future without OpenID in it.

144. AT&T Bans Wireless P2P Outright

Forget any talks of overage fees or other measures intended to curb the use of file-sharing applications. In a chat with the FCC, the telco disclosed its stance against allowing its wireless broadband customers from doing anything that “may cause extreme network capacity issues,” while also making sure to specifically point out P2P. Use it and lose it.

143. OCZ Dives into DIY Notebook Sector

OCZ’s Do-It-Yourself Gaming Notebook Program serves as another reminder of how far the company has come. What started off as an enthusiast memory company has grown into a multi-faced operation with products running the gamut from peripherals, power supplies, cooling solutions, and so much more. It seems only logical that DIY notebooks would end up in OCZ’s radar – there’s not much left for the company to conquer.

142. Universal Abit Bids Adieu to Motherboard Market

Before you kids got your overclocking groove on with your shiny DFI and Gigabyte motherboards that became all the rage, Abit stood out as a premier producer of enthusiast level motherboards catering to both AMD and Intel. Sadly, the company who brought us such gems as the NF7-S2 and IC7-Max3 let it be known that it would not produce any more motherboards after 2008. Drat.

141. VIA Answer’s Intel Atom with Nano Processor

The year of the netbook can also be described as the year of the Atom processor. Nearly every mini-notebook on the market sports Intel’s Atom CPU inside, but the release of VIA’s Nano chip threatens to shake things up. Benchmarks show lots of promise for the new chip, as does the company’s plan to release a dual-core variant in 2010.

140. Wikipedia Compiles Book with 90,000 Authors

While on the topic of records, Wikipedia made history by publishing a book with about 90,000 authors, qualifying as the most credited individual authors ever. Credits alone account for 27 pages in “The One-Volume Wikipedia Encyclopedia,” which is a compilation of 25,000 of the most popular articles on German Wikipedia.

139. Firefox Sets Record for Most Downloads in 24 Hours

Look at Microsoft’s Internet Explorer over there, thinking it’s so cool with its 70 percent market share. But can it boast a Guinness World Record? Mozilla’s Firefox can, following a pre-launch campaign implorering surfers to download Firefox 3 on the day of its release. Firefox fans responded, helping the open source browser break the record for most downloads in a 24 hour period by registering over 8 million downloads.

138. Psystar and Apple Spar over Cloned Macs

Geek fight! Only this one had nothing to do with stolen pocket protectors. Instead, Apple took exception to the Miami-based OEM selling Mac clones running OS X and hit the company with a lawsuit. Psystar fired back with a lawsuit of its own claiming Apple’s Max OS X EULA runs afoul of U.S. monopoly laws. Ultimately the two parties agreed to have the cased move to “Alternate Dispute Resolution” and avoid setting a legal precedent.

137. Microsoft Hands Pink Slip to Game Test Contractor for Talking to VentureBeat

Don’t bite the hand that feeds you, even if that hand is knowingly churning out faulty Xbox 360 consoles. That’s the lesson Robert Delaware learned, who was terminated by Microsoft from his position as a contract game tester after speaking to VentureBeat without permission. Delaware, who has no regrets about his decision, was the only named Microsoft worker who contributed to the piece detailing the Xbox 360’s well publicized failure rate.

136. Merriam-Webster Defines 'Fanboy' and Other Geek Terms

We can think of better ways to describe a fanboy than “a boy who is an enthusiastic devotee (as of comics or movies),” which was just one of a handful of geek terms Merriam-Webster added to its collegiate dictionary. Other notable entries include ‘Malware,’ ‘Netroots,’ and ‘Webinar.’ Sadly, Merriam-Webster still hasn’t updated its definition for ‘tea bag.’

135. iPhone 3G

We're not the biggest Apple fans, but we can't deny that the iPhone 3G was one of 2008's most significant product releases. Hell, even our Online Editor waited in line for one.

134. FCC Chairman Pitches Free, Porn Free Internet

Taking porn away from the internet would be like, well, taking porn away from the internet. The concept might have trouble registering in the mind, but not for Kevin Martin, FCC Chairman and advocate of a free internet devoid of any lewd content. Martin’s plan? Auction off the AWS-3 spectrum to any company willing to provide nationwide wireless broadband free of charge and free of two of anythings doing anything with a single cup.

133. SoundBlaster X-Fi Titanium

The PCI served us well but we can finally let go with the arrival of Creative Lab’s PCI-Express-based X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Edition card. It doesn’t hurt the Titanium that it finally brings Dolby Digital Live support too.

132. Wine Ferments for 15 Years before Popping the 1.0 Cork

Linux and Mac users have long used Wine (formerly WINE, or Wine Is Not an Emulator) to run Windows applications on non-Windows environments, but always in beta form. That all changed when, 15 years later, the application finally went gold and reached 1.0 status. The gold release brought about several bug fixes, including improved Skype support, but it didn’t taste any different.

131. Judge Sides with RIAA Because Defendant Used a File Shredder

Without evidence, there’s no case, right? Wrong! In Atlantic v Howell, defendant Jeffrey Howell found out the hard way that you can’t make your legal woes go away by simply disposing of the evidence. Not only did Howell delete his shared folder, but he used a file shredder to make the data virtually unrecoverable, ultimately earning himself a $40,000 guilty verdict.

130. Intel Delivers Dual-Core Atom Processors

Not only are reports of an Atom shortage a thing of the past, but Intel takes it ultra low-processor technology to the next level and starts shipping a dual-core variant. Essentially two Atom 230 processors on a single board, Intel’s two-core Atom 330 stays clocked at 1.6GHz per core. But unlike its single-core brethren, Intel relegates the Atom 330 only to nettops, leaving netbooks stuck in a single-core world.

129. HP Laptop Lasts for 24 Hours on a Single Charge

Even the Energizer bunny hopped up on Viagra would have a tough time lasting as long as HP’s EliteBook 6930p, the first notebook ever to claim a 24-hour battery life. To make the milestone possible, certain configuration options are mandatory, such as an optional Intel 80GB SSD drive and an LED display. Configured properly, the notebook could outlast a trip from Newark Liberty International Airport to Singapore Changi Airport, the world’s longest scheduled commercial airline flight.

128. Refreshed MacBook Line Sports Nvidia Graphics Inside, Not Intel

With all the problems Nvidia faced with failing GPUs and falling stock, the graphics chip maker was badly in need of a major win, and it got exactly that with its 9400M GPU. Apple, fully aware of Nvidia’s past problems, chose Nvidia to supply graphics chores for its refreshed MacBooks rather than continue a longstanding relationship with Intel.

127. PCs Surpass the 1 Billion Mark

At last count, there were approximately 6.7 billion people puttering around the planet. Shift the roll call to the number of computers in use around the world and for the first time, that number passes the 1 billion mark, according to research firm Gartner. And while that number is good for emerging markets, it’s not as rosy for the environment as an estimated 180 million PCs are replaced by year’s end, 35 million of which ultimately end up in landfills.

126. Asus Literally Thinks Outside the Box with External Graphics

Most notebooks have no way of letting the end-user upgrade its graphics solution, leaving mobile gamers in a tough predicament – dial down the settings, or start over with a new notebook? At least, that’s how it used to be. Asus’ ROG XG Station proved a game changer as being the world’s first external graphics dock with an Express Card connector. Not only does the device allow for easy PCI-E VGA upgrades, but it also comes with four USB 2.0 ports and Dolby Technology through its headphone-out port. That’s rad!

125. Musicians Give Away Albums, Free is the New $15

Radiohead might have garnered the most media attention over its pay-what-you-want experiment, but they’re not the only band to give away digital downloads. Rock group Marillion made its new album available as a free download with a pop-up box imploring listeners to share their email address. Coldplay Nine Inch Nails, and several others have also experimented with various forms of free music, so that pirates are no longer the only ones sticking it to the record labels.

124. HyperTransport Consortium Announces HTX3 Specification, Triples Performance to 5.2 GT/s

The HTX3 specification triples the performance of the original HTX 1.0 spec by pushing 5.2 GT/s (20.8 GT/s on a 16-bit link) while also remaining backward compatible, but there’s more to salivate over than just a speed bump. The new connector offers a direct, low-latency route to the CPU that, in theory at least, could replace the PCI-E bus and link GPUs directly to the CPU.

123. AMD Releases Triple Core Phenom Processors

With AMD’s recent failure to compete in the high-end enthusiast sector, the company needed a strong competitor for the midrange market. The X3 was designed to look good against Intel’s dual core chips, while undercutting the pricier 4-core processors. The tri-core processor did pretty well for itself in the lab, but competitive price cuts from Intel kept it from blockbuster status.

122. LED Backlighting Lights up Notebooks

The use of LED backlighting in notebooks sees a significant surge in 2008, and that’s only the beginning. Dell announces plans to transition its entire notebook lineup to LED backlighting by 2010, which it says will add up to a combined customer savings of $20 million, and Apple believes it can make the transition even sooner. On your mark, get set, go!

121. Tera Era Promotional Video Brings Joy to Our Hearts

As a follow up to their internet classic "Get Perpendicular" video, Hitachi releases the "Tera Era" cartoon to celebrate their first three-platter terrabyte drives. The catchy tune, adorable animation, and Schoolhouse Rock throwback makes this a win in our book. Say goodbye to the Gigabyte/Terabyte is outta sight!

120. T-Mobile G1

We love the G1 for its intuitive interface, bright screen, and myriad apps—that there’s finally a mobile phone that can go toe-to-toe with what’s in the pockets of our Apple-lovin’ coworkers only sweetens the deal. And though were impressed with the G1, we’re particularly excited about what the device represents, the promise of a host of Android-powered devices available on all the major carriers.

119. Playboy Jerks DVDs off Assembly Line, Moves to Online Distribution

Yeah, we know what we did there. But what Playboy did was save itself an estimated $12 million a year by ditching its DVD business in favor of digital distribution. The decision was made in an attempt to return the company to profitably, which also entailed job cuts and identifying other money saving endeavors, such as using lighter magazine paper. Tissue would work well, don’t you think?

118. Mobile Quad-Core

If you don’t think you don’t need a quad core in your notebook, go encode that movie on a single-core Atom CPU and then come back and tell us processing power in a notebook doesn’t matter. It does and only those who want to pad out their billable hours by using slower computers would choose a single-core or dual-core over a quad-core notebook today.

117. The Web’s Awash in Over 1 Trillion Unique URLs

We can’t help but imagine some poor sap sitting at his desk counting every unique URL in existence. Unfortunately, such a task is just not feasible, but we do trust Google’s computers to give us a reasonable estimate, which tells us that by July, 2008, the web was home to over 1 trillion unique web addresses. Put into perspective, that’s 149 URLs for every man, woman, and child on the entire planet.

116. Creative Calls Shenanigans on Asus, Says Company Misleading Customers on EAX Drivers

Customers have long complained over Creative’s crummy soundcard drivers, leading many to cozy up to the competition, such as Asus’ Xonar line. But according to Creative, the only problem with that (well, one of the problems) is customers are being cheated out of advertised EAX support. Creative communications VP Phil O’Shaughnessy accused Asus of essentially misleading its customers, claiming “the new Asus drivers are falsely reporting EAX 5 capabilities.” Oh schnapp!

115. Ubuntu Linux Leaps onto Brick and Mortar Store Shelves

Prior to Vista, most people viewed Linux as a complicated niche OS ill-suited for mainstream use. But that all changed in 2008 and it doesn’t even matter if Vista’s underwhelming reception is to blame, or if strides in streamlining the interface in Linux played a bigger role. The end result is that for the first time, consumers could walk into Best Buy and pick up a boxed copy of Ubuntu (a free download) for $20.

114. College Student Faces Charges for Allegedly Hacking Sarah Palin’s Email Account

David Kernell, a 20-year-old student at the University of Tennessee and the son of state Rep. Mike Kernell, D-Memphis, makes headlines for allegedly gaining unauthorized access into Sarah Palin’s Yahoo-based email account. The stunt, which included posting screenshots of the account, changing the password, and posting the password so that others could access her email, could ultimately result in a maximum 5-year prison sentence and $250,000 fine.

113. DRAM Market Faces Toughest Time in 15 Years

System builders rejoice at paying a fraction of what 2GB and 4GB kits used to cost, but the mood is decidedly less celebratory among DRAM manufacturers. Memory makers exhaust all the usual tricks, such as cutting production and scaling back the workforce, and even make a plea for a government bailout. None of it worked and A-DATA chairman Simon Chen declared 2008 the worst year for DRAM in the past 15 years.

112. Overclocker Tends to 51 GPUs in his Folding@Home Farm

The well intentioned competition fostered by Stanford’s quest to find cures to common diseases kicked into high gear when the Folding@Home distributed computing project tapped into GPUs to fold proteins. But nobody took bigger advantage of the new capability than Overclock.net forum member nitteo, who promptly built a F@H farm consisting of 16 motherboards and 51 8800-series GPUs. Failed hardware and a hurricane are temporary roadblocks, but at full tilt, it’s estimated nitteo’s farm pulls in between 225K-250K points per day.

111. Dirk Meyer Replaces Hector Ruiz as AMD’s CEO

Following AMD’s forfeiture of the performance crown to Intel, high level execs seemed to be jumping ship left and right. The mass exodus culminated with Hector Ruiz stepping down as CEO after holding onto the title for 6 years. Looking to right the ship, Dirk Meyer jumped into the role and eventually ended up breaking AMD into separate design and manufacturing firms in an attempt to right what’s become a rickety ship.

110. Spam King Evolves into a Cowardly Cold Blooded Killer

The fact that Edward Davidson sent out so many spam messages that he became known as the spam king is enough to indict him into the scumbag hall of fame, but it’s his later antics that perhaps makes him the worst spammer of all time. While serving a 21-month sentence in a minimum security prison for tax evasion and falsifying computer records, Davidson, with the help of his wife, escaped jail only to kill his wife and three-year-old daughter before taking his own life.

109. Frickin’ Lasers Achieve 20 Gigabit Per Second Transfer Rate

Apparently lasers aren’t just good for driving your cat bonkers as it tries to catch the uncatchable varmint, but they’re also capable of transferring data through the air much faster than any commercial wireless systems. Even more impressive, engineers at Battelle, a research and development firm in Columbus, OH, demonstrated a 20 gigabit capability using off-the-shelf telecommunication components. Here’s your wet blanket - a shipping product small enough to make the technology feasible remains out of grasp for years to come. Sorry!

108. Nvidia Cooks Up 9400M, Integrated Graphics Still Weaksauce

Despite all the hoopla surrounding Nvidia’s well publicized problems with its previous mobile GPUs, the graphics chip maker found a suitor in Apple for its new GeForce 9400M. And compared to the integrated GMA X3100 graphics the 9400M was chosen to replace, Apple’s refreshed MacBook line is, according to Steve Jobs, up to five times as fast in the graphics department. Meanwhile, advances in discrete GPUs make it hard to get too excited over any integrated solution.

107. ThinkPad W700

It’s hard not to channel Paul Hogan and say “that’s not a mobile workstation” when some Mac head pulls out his Mac Book Pro. “Now, that’s a mobile workstation,” you say as you drop your Lenovo W700 ThinkPad on the table. With its Core 2 Quad, 1GB frame buffer graphics card, built-in color calibrator, high color gamut screen and integrated Wacom tablet, the W700 makes all other mobile workstations kneel before it.

106. Samsung Skirts Mobile Drives Halfway to the Terabyte

For a long time, notebooks have been the red-headed stepchild of the storage industry. How else do you explain desktop drives exploding to 1TB and beyond while laptop drives shipped at only a fraction of that capacity? Props go out to Samsung, who brought mobile storage halfway up to par with the first ever 2.5-inch 500GB hard drive, putting 1TB within reach for anyone willing to run a dual-drive array.

105. FCC Censures Comcastfor P2P Throttling

In a 3-2 vote, the Federal Communication Commission concluded that Comcast violated the rules of net neutrality by monitoring and selectively blocking P2P traffic. Comcast was mandated to immediately cease any packet shaping initiatives and to publically disclose the full extent of its traffic blocking policies.

104. Suing Spree Catches Up with RIAA, Ordered to Pay Legal Fees

Call it the modern day David versus Goliath if you will, but Tanya Andersen, a mere mortal, found herself staring face to face with the RIAA, who had already sued 20,000 people before her for copyright infringement. But in this instance, the RIAA dropped its case when it realized it Andersen wasn’t pirating music. A federal judge ordered the RIAA to pay Andersen $108,000 in legal fees for its gaffe.

103. Former Intel Engineer Indicted in $1 Billion Trade Secrets Case

Dr. Evil would be proud of Biswamohan Pani, the low-level ex-Intel employee who managed to make off with $1 billion worth of information before his final official day with the chip maker on June 11. But wait, it gets even better. As it turns out, Pani had obtained employment with rival AMD, for which he was to start on June 2. The case has yet to go to trial, and of course Pani maintains he’s innocent.

102. Intel Thinks Small with First 45nm CPUs

The saying ‘size matters’ takes on a whole different meaning in the chip industry, as manufacturers race to see who can produce the smallest unit. This becomes even more important in the mobile market where smaller chips translate into lower power consumption and often times less heat. Intel, having already re-asserted its dominance on the desktop, also becomes the first to unveil mobile chips built on a 45nm manufacturing process. Wave it proudly, Intel!

101. Google and Mozilla BFFs for 3 More Years

The money for developing open-source software has to come from somewhere, and in the case of Mozilla, that somewhere is Google. By 2006, Mozilla had milked Google for roughly $57 million in exchange for making Google the default search engine. Set to expire in 2008, the two agreed to extend their relationship another three years.

100. Free Full-Featured Games

Paying for games is so passé. Quake Live and Battlefield Heroes (both still in beta) prove that free games are worth your time. Now we wait to see if revenue from in-game advertising and micro-transactions will be enough for publishers to keep these freebies alive.

99. Asus Striker II Extreme

In a horrible, low-power, all-in-one computing future not too unlike Mad Max, someone will come across an Asus Striker II Extreme and proclaim it as the last of the nForce interceptors. Fast and boldly different than the 790i reference design pursuit specials, the Striker II Extreme will likely mark the zenith of Nvidia’s chipsets.

98. Kindle Makes a Killing, Encore to Follow

An estimated 240,000+ Kindle sales can’t be ignored, and so Amazon doesn’t and makes plans to release a follow-up version. While Amazon remains tight-lipped on sales figures, at least one analyst values the Kindle as a $1 billion business for Amazon. And while on the topic of speculation, supposedly leaked photos of the second generation Kindle shows it to be slightly larger than the original.

97. Wal-Mart Waves Goodbye to Linux PCs

Lackluster demand forces Wal-Mart to end its four month, 600-store trial run of selling $199 Linux-based Evermax computers on store shelves (online sales remain). A spokesperson for the chain concludes “This really wasn’t what our customers were looking for,” but that could more of a reflection of the Evermax system than Linux itself. Nevertheless, the decision is a blow to open-source advocates in a time when frustrated Vista users are more willing than ever to consider a Linux alternative.

96. Oil Immersion PC

Immersion computing went mainstream with the release of Hardcore Reactor PC. Perhaps the coolest custom PC we’ve ever seen (and we’ve seen a lot) the Reactor relies on 4.5 gallons of oil to keep all of its components cool. Of course, we guess that mainstream depends on your checking account but with its base configuration weighing in at $4,500, the Reactor PC is still truly an amazing work of art.

95. OpenOffice 3.0 Launches with Improved Document Standards Support

The open-source productivity suite steps up its game by implementing filters for Microsoft’s XML format, allowing for easy importing of Office 2007’s .docx files. In addition, OpenOffice 3.0 boasts native compatibility with the Mac OS X platform eliminating the need for X11. The update proved so popular that eager users crashed OpenOffice.org’s website on the day of its release. Later in the year, an independent study found OpenOffice to be five times more popular than Google Docs.

94. Skulltrail

DP isn’t just for the professionals anymore. Intel’s insane, over the top Skulltrail platform gave consumers (well those with the initials BG or WB) the ability to have their very own dual-proc, eight-core monster. Even better, Intel even swallowed its pride and integrated two Nvidia nForce 100 chips so the board could run quad SLI or quad Crossfire.

93. ICANN Votes Unanimously to Allow Custom Top Level Domains

Following a week-long meeting in Paris, ICANN, the internet’s nonprofit overseer, loosens its grip on generic top level domain names. At the time of the vote, only 21 gTLDs existed to serve 1.5 billion internet users. The real winners are big corporations, who are not only capable of funding the roughly $185,000 per applicant fee, but also might have a legitimate need for a custom TLD.

92. John Carmack Deems DirectX 11 Unnecessary

In a sit-down with us at E3, Carmack admitted he doesn’t see a need for either DirectX 10 or 11 given the maturity of the DirectX 9 API and prominence of compatible hardware. Steam survey numbers appear to back his claim, as do the lack of must-have DX 10 titles. In Carmack’s mind, after DX 9, Microsoft’s focus turned to churning out new DX APIs to keep the department alive as opposed to implementing clearly needed features.

91. Hybrid Graphics Hop onto Desktops

Rivals ATI and Nvidia both release Hybrid graphics solutions enabling users to combine integrated graphics with discrete graphics cards. The odd coupling of low and high end GPU solutions turns in mixed performance results, but the real upshot is in power savings, particularly in mobile PCs. By only tapping into the more powerful graphics solution as the need arises, the net result is extended battery life for notebooks, and a feel-good conscious on the desktop knowing you’re not wasting electricity.

90. Kodak Develops 50MP Sensor

Kodak comes up with a new flagship CCD sensor capable of 51.6 million square pixels, promptly giving every other digital camera on the market megapixel envy. According to Kodak, the 50.1MP sensor would allow you to crop objects no bigger than a notebook in an image that covers a width of 1.5 miles. That is, if you can afford the $40,000 price tag.

89. AT&T First to Shove Microsoft’s Surface into Retail Stores as a Shopping Tool

Microsoft’s scintillating Surface technology makes its retail debut in select AT&T stores and steals the show from the mobile devices they’re intended to help sell. The 30-inch tabletop invites interaction not only with human hands, but also with devices. Raising the bar in cellular shopping, consumers can drag ringtones onto a mobile phone resting on the Surface, view interactive coverage maps, compare features of multiple devices placed side by side, and more.

88. Nvidia Activates Physx and CUDA

Starting with the GeForce 8 series, Nvidia puts its CUDA compiler to work by enabling PhysX support and bundling a bevy of CUDA-based programs in a pair of Power Packs. Not many games punch into the PhysX API, which largely limits its appeal to ‘gee-whiz’ tech demos, but CUDA carves a path for developers to tap into Nvidia’s GPUs for non-gaming tasks such as Folding@Home and video encoding.

87. Jury Helps Rambus Ramrod Memory Industry

Giving Rambus a much needed legal win, a jury rules that Rambus did not commit fraud or engage in anti-competitive means when obtaining its patents for memory technology. The ruling comes as bad news to Hynix, Micron, and Nanya, all targets of Rambus’ suing spree. Rambus, whose RDRAM standard has all but died out, contends that it patented the SDRAM technology long before it became a standardized technology.

86. Airlines Take WiFi Above the Clouds

Gogo provides passengers with the ability to take their forum disputes to the skies by incorporating wireless internet access on select flights. The new service uses the Aircell Network and supports any laptop with 801.11 a/b/g wireless capability, as well as a handful of handheld devices, such as Apple’s iPhone. Airlines that join or plan to join the WiFi mile high club include Delta, American Airlines, United, Air Canada, and Virgin American.

85. Microsoft Spends $300 Million on Grassroots “I’m a PC” Campaign

Attacking the stereotype perpetuated in Apple ads head on, Microsoft fires back with a series of “I’m a PC” ads depicting real-life users from all walks of life. Celebrities not named Justin Long get in on the action too, such as basketball star Tony Parker and TV actress Eva Longoria, but most of the ‘actors’ are regular people armed with a webcam and look nothing like John Hodgeman.

84. Adobe AIR vs Microsoft Silverlight: FIGHT!

With Rich Internet Applications gaining ground, Adobe’s AIR sets the stage for a long-term showdown with Microsoft’s Silverlight despite each one’s different approach. Both technologies seek to redefine desktop applications and vie for supremacy, but unlike Silverlight, which is more comparable to Adobe’s Flash, AIR is a runtime and not a browser plugin. AIR takes flight by being able to run web applications as desktop apps across operating systems, something Silverlight can’t do.

83. Lord British Launches into Outer Space

Most know Richard Garriott as the creator of Ultima, but on October 13, 2008, Garriott, aka Lord British, leaves behind videogames for new adventures in outer space. The $30 million 10-day flight ticket allows Garriott to follow in his father’s footsteps, who in 1973 spent two months aboard Skylab. Space becomes the new playground for wealthy tech gurus, and Google co-founder Sergey Brin books a flight to space scheduled for 2011.

82. AMD Releases Phenom, Right into the Bargain Bin

Following the Phenom debut, which failed to take back the performance crown from Intel, AMD found itself in the familiar position of battling for the bang/buck crowd. Part of the problem had to do with releasing Phenom at relatively low clockspeeds rather than burst out of the gates with a 3+GHz chip, but even still, clock for clock Intel’s superior Core 2 architecture notched another victory in its belt at AMD’s expense.

81. Crytek CEO Estimates Piracy Rate as High as 20:1

Piracy continues to plague PC sales, but during an interview, Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli puts a number on the problem claiming there are 15 to 20 PC games pirated for every 1 that is sold. Even more disturbing, Yerli suggests that the days of PC-exclusive titles may be numbered if the perceived situation doesn’t improve, starting with Crytek.

80. Spore Finally Goes Gold

Will Wright’s magnum opus arrives in stores, making demi-gods of gamers everywhere. Most critics deem the game worth the wait, but its gameplay merits are overshadowed by EA's unintelligently designed DRM.

79. Amazon Enables Cell Phone Shopping with TextBuyIt

In what can only be construed as a sign of the times, Amazon unveils its TextBuyIt service enabling shoppers to make purchases via text messaging. Suddenly, brick-and-mortar bargain hunters have the means to quickly compare in-store prices with Amazon’s online sales simply by texting the item’s name, description, or UPC or ISNB number, and then place an order if Amazon’s price is cheaper.

78. Google Dresses Up Gmail with Goggles, Emoticons, and Canned Responses

Gmail, while still and perhaps forever in beta form, receives several new features to its web mail service. Implementing emoticons ranks as one of the more obvious additions, but thinking outside the box, Google also adds a Mail Goggles feature, which tasks angry writers with answering a series of math questions before sending off that emotionally charged email. And who doesn’t delight in the ability to construct canned responses?

77. Computing Takes Cover in the Cloud

The concept of cloud computing draws increased interest from heavy hitters in the tech industry, including IBM, who invests $300 million upgrading its infrastructure to offer cloud-based services. The sky-high investment covers 13 data centers worldwide aimed at serving customers in the event a disaster disrupts IBM’s networks. But IBM isn’t the only one with its head in the clouds; Dell goes so far as to try (unsuccessfully) to trademark the term Cloud Computing.

76. Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB Hard Drive

A decently-fast, stupid-huge 7,200rpm hard drive for under $200? Sign us up! The 1.5TB Barracuda, though not quite as fast as terabyte drives from Western Digital and Samsung, still performs decently, and crams 375GB each onto four platters. We’ve had scattered reports of performance issues with these drives, but we haven’t experienced any, and Seagate pledges a fix via firmware update. Wait for the update, then pick one up—for $180 on the street, you get a lot of storage with decent speeds. And we call that a win.

75. RealNetworks Releases, then Sued Over DVD Copying Software

The answer to the question of what happens if you release DVD copying software capable of copying DVDs without circumventing the CSS encryption is you go to court anyway. Not only does the RealDVD software rip exact copies, but it even adds an additional DRM layer. But the problem, in the MPAA’s eyes, is that users still have the ability to rip rented movies, prompting MPAA executive VP to nickname the program “StealDVD.”

74. TorrentSpy Says Goodbye, Then Ordered to Pay $110 in Damages

If there can be a tech equivalent of a self-procliamed martyr, TorrentSpy would be it as the powers that be shut down the site rather than comply with a court order to log user data. At the time of its demise, TorrentSpy was engaged in a legal battle with the MPAA, who accused the site of facilitating copyright infringement. The MPAA was ultimately awarded a $110 million default judgment, a fine that will likely never be paid.

73. The Pirate Bay Grows 10 Million Users Strong

Much to the dismay of the RIAA and MPAA, The Pirate Bay’s explosive growth leads to over ten million peers managing one million torrents. But those numbers only served as a precursor of things to come. By the end of the year, the number of peers more than doubles to 22 million, prompting the torrent site to seek recognition in the Guinness Book of World Records.

72. Thermaltake Duo Orb

Our favorite CPU air cooler eschew the high-rise trend and still outperforms the competition. Modern performance CPU coolers have been getting wider and taller—6” by 5” cooling arrays are, sadly, not uncommon. The ThermalTake DuOrb spreads its fans and fins horizontally, making for a more restrained-looking rig without compromising performance. However, its horizontal sprawl does potentially block RAM and PCI-E expansion slots, so install those first to prevent conflicts.

71. Apple Bundles Crapware with iTunes

This year Apple got into the bundled crapware racket by foisting first Safari and then MobileMe on unsuspecting Windows users using their Apple Software Update utility, which is included with iTunes. Bundled crapware remains lame, whether it’s Apple, Google, or Ask doing it.

70. Centrino 2 Cruises onto Laptops

Intel’s long awaited Centrino 2 platform lands on laptops bringing with it several improvements in both performance and power management. Chief among the hardware upgrades is Intel’s Mobile 45 Express chipset, which beefs up the frontside bus to 1066MHz and accommodates both DDR2 and DDR3 RAM, the first mobile platform ever to do so.

69. Windows XP SP3 Arrives After Rocky Start

XP owners are able to download the OS’s third Service Pack, but not before a compatibility issue forces Microsoft to temporarily pull SP3 from the web. More trouble follows as some HP laptops with AMD processors enter into an endless reboot loop. Still others complain of no longer being able to remotely access their XP boxes following the update. The initial glitches are eventually worked out, putting staunch Vista holdouts once again at ease.

68. PC Gaming Alliance Formed, Whoopty Doo

The death of PC gaming continues to be exaggerated, but should the threat become imminent, the PC Gaming Alliance will be there to do nothing about it. Several big names encompass the non-profit organization designed to promote PC gaming and stave off the console invasion, but its powers are limited. Following the release of LucasArts console-only Force Unleashed, PCGA’s president Randy Stud tees off on LucasArts, and afterwards Force Unleashed remains a console-only title.

67. Creative Crows at X-Fi/Audigy Driver Modder Daniel_K

Daniel Kawakami’s modified X-Fi and Audigy drivers, which fixed several issues in Vista, are heralded by all except Creative who publicly chastises the programmer in a letter on the company’s forum. The letter, which accuses Daniel_K of essentially “stealing” from Creative, never specifically states what part of Daniel’s drivers cross the line, saying only that no one besides Creative has the right to decide what features can and cannot be developed for each specific soundcard.

66. Canon Launches Awesome EOS 5D Mark II DSLR

Even without the ability to shoot HD video, Canon’s new DSLR kicks all kinds of ass, starting with a full-frame 21.1 megapixel 14-bit CMOS sensor. But with the video capability, Canon sends a message to Nikon’s D90 that ‘yea, we can do that too.’ The 5D MKII can also do continuous shooting at 3.9 frames per second and touts a 3-inch LCD screen with quadruple the pixels found on the EOS 5D’s 2.5-inch screen.

65. Western Digital Releases Velociraptor Hard Drive

With no 10K RPM challengers in sight, Western Digital pummels its own flagship Raptor line by launching the Velociraptor, a speed successor surrounded by a black heatsink. Not only does the 2.5-inch design shrink make room for the sleek looking heatsink, but it also allows Western Digital to pack 300GB on just two 150GB platters. The end result is a new benchmark king.

64. CoolIT Freezone Elite

The Freezone Elite thermo-electric CPU cooler strikes a mostly-elegant balance between cooling power and size. The Elite rocks six thermoelectric coolers to keep your CPU crispy, and delivers the best cooling you’ll see short of its (much) bigger brother, the CoolIt Boreas. Plus, it’s fully controllable from within your OS, and at its quietest setting still outperforms stock air coolers. Best of all, it’ll actually fit in your case. We can overlook a somewhat tricky installation for a size/performance ratio this good.

63. Intel Quad-Core Processors Drop Below $200

With an aggressive round of price cuts, price no longer becomes a prohibiting factor when shopping for a four-core chip based on Intel’s Core 2 architecture. The newfound bang-for-buck lineup also puts a stamp on Intel’s change in philosophy, who in years past (think Netburst) demanded a premium for slower silicon than what AMD had to offer. Equally important, sub-$200 quad-core chips put the onus on developers to catch up with the hardware.

62. Creative Creates Working X-Fi Drivers for Vista Users

Late to the party, sure, but after waiting nearly two years, Creative throws Vista owners a bone with X-Fi drivers re-establishing Dolby Digital and DTS decoding. DVD Audio playback, which also worked under XP but found itself neutered in Vista, is also restored, but it’s the decoding features that had Vista owners feeling most miffed. Even worse, Creative orders now infamous modder Daniel_K to stop producing and distributing his homebrew drivers, which, among other things, ‘fixed’ Vista support.

61. Supreme Court Upholds First Felony Spam Conviction

Not surprisingly, free speech doesn’t apply to using fake email addresses to sell scam products, but what is surprising is the close 4-3 vote in denying spammer Jeremy Jaynes’ appeal. Jaynes, who was convicted in 2005 on three Virginia Computer Crimes Ace code violations, is currently serving a combined 9 year sentence and goes down in history as the first to receive a US felony conviction for spamming.

60. Severed Undersea Cables Give Rise to Conspiracy Theories

A rash of ruptured telecommunications cables in the Mediterranean Sea turn out to be caused by abandoned anchors dragged by inclement weather. Prior to solving the mystery, the cuts had scaremongers screaming sabotage in what some thought could be a terrorist plot to cut off communication from the Middle East. Two ships – one belonging to a Korean company and one to an Iraqi company – are ultimately detained and fined for the damages.

59. Intel X25-M SSD

How big a deal was Intel’s X25-M? At the company’s big developer conference, the buzz was not about the Core i7, but about the X25-M. And why not? This notebook-sized 80GB drive essentially gives you RAID 0 performance in one drive.

58. Microsoft Masks Vista as New OS in Mojave Experiment

Apparently Vista’s problem really is one of perception, or so Microsoft tried to prove by disguising it as a new OS called Mojave and then demoing it to 140 people with no prior Vista experience. On average, the unsuspecting test subjects scored Mojave an 8.5 out of 10 versus a pre-demo score of 4.4 for Vista. Many have likened Microsoft’s experiment to the tech equivalent of a blind taste test.

57. Intel Penryn

Intel’s biggest competitor for the Core i7 doesn’t come from AMD, it’s the wildly successful 45nm-based Penryn family of CPUs. These dual and quad parts have been powering the world’s fastest CPUs at 4GHz for months and months. With prices of the 45nm Core 2 chips and rich infrastructure, even the might Core i7 will have a hard time convincing people to break down what they have when it’s already so damned fast and efficient.

56. Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron

There aren’t that many game-changers in the operating system world, but this year while both Apple and Microsoft were struggling with their operating systems, the open-source wunderkinds at Ubuntu released the best version of Ubuntu yet, Hardy Heron. Well done guys!

55. Growing Trend in Green Computing

Energy efficiency moves to the forefront of the IT industry igniting a mass movement among manufactures on everything from green hard drives to green wireless routers. Helping to set the tone, Dell declares it achieved its goal of going carbon neutral. Even LCD panel makers transition towards more eco-friendly displays as mercury-free LED backlighting start to supplant cold cathode fluorescent bulbs (CCFLs) en masse.

54. Adobe CS4 Adds GPU Support

In the “why the frak didn’t someone do this earlier” department, Adobe’s Photoshop CS4 now supports using the GPU to enable smooth as butter zooms and rotates for photo editing. Previously, rotating or zooming apps in the preeminent photo editor was like a throwback to choppy 1995. That’s not all, Premiere Pro CS4 and After Effects CS4 are also increasing their use of the GPU engines for display effects too.

53. Large Hadron Collider (LHC) Goes Live and World Survives

Having already dodged a bullet in the Y2K scare, the human race once again cheats death when physicists switch on the LHC without destroying the universe. The $10 billion particle accelerator proved doomsayers wrong on September 10, 2008 as proton beams traversed the collider’s 17-mile circular underground tunnel. Or did it? Because of a mechanical failure, tests with the LHC will not resume until 2009 when physicists plan to have proton beams collide.

52. Opening Ceremonies Kick Off with Giant BSOD at Beijing Olympics

As Li Ning, one of China’s sporting greats, dangled in mid-air preparing to light the torch, behind him onlookers caught a glimpse of an Olympic-sized blue screen of death. The SNAFU occurred inside the Bird’s Nest as computer-controlled theatrical equipment apparently suffered a fatal error and displayed the familiar looking blue screen much to the amusement of both tech bloggers and Linux fans.

51. European Union Slaps Microsoft for Record $1.3 Billion Fine

Skirting the line between healthy competition and unfair business practices finally catches up to Microsoft when EU regulators levy the largest fine ever imposed on an individual company. Combined with existing fines, Microsoft’s tally comes to about $2.5 billion in the EU. While it didn’t come right away, it didn’t take long for Microsoft to file an appeal in a “constructive effort to seek clarity from the court.”

50. Radeon 4870 X2

The ultimate fruit of ATI’s R700 GPU is the Radeon 4870 X2, which packs two R700s on a single board with a whopping 2GB of GDDR5 memory. The feeds mean nothing if the speeds don’t stack up though, and this is the fastest videocard we’ve ever tested.

49. Google Jumps into the Browser Battle with Chrome

Looking to shake things up in what has traditionally been a stale two-man fight between Microsoft and Mozilla, Google bursts into the browser scene with Chrome. Built from the ground up, Chrome boasts several intriguing features, including its ability to run each tab as a separate process. The lack of extension support remains the biggest criticism, an area Google says it will address in a later release.

48. Lenovo Thinkpad X300

Lenovo’s X300 weighs in at just over three pounds, but that doesn’t mean it’s a compromised design. With a 1.2GHz Core 2 Duo, this is the ultimate road warrior rig for anyone who values substance over style.

47. Everyone Discovers Twitter

According to the latest Nielsen Online statistics, Twitter’s year-on-year growth reaches 343 percent making it the fastest growing social-networking site. And it’s not just teeny-boppers using Twitter in place of SMS text-messaging who make up the majority either. As published on Time.com, 35-to-44-year-olds account for Twitter’s largest microblogging demographic at over 25 percent. It also didn’t hurt Twitter’s growth that 2008 was a hotly contested election year, giving users lots to talk Twitter about.

46. AMD and Nvidia Sue for Allegedly Price Fixing

A class action lawsuit accuses rival graphics chip makers AMD and Nvidia of conspiring to fix prices of each company’s GPUs and videocards. At the heart of the case sits potentially damning evidence in the form of several email exchanges between AMD’s and Nvidia’s top brass. Rather than face a long, drawn out court battle, a settlement agreement is reached for $1.7 million, and a month later, the Department of Justice officially closes its investigation into the charges.

45. Microsoft Takes Office Online with Office Live Workspace

Microsoft’s Office Live Workspace boasts hundreds of thousands of registered users by the time the software giant opens the beta up to the public. That number hits the one million milestone later in the year, solidifying the service as a legitimate contender to Google Docs and Zoho, all three of which compete in the cloud.

44. Gizmodo Staffer Banned from CES Following TV Remote Prank

Using an infrared TV-B-Gone remote, a Gizmodo cameraman plays a practical joke on CES exhibitors by turning off several flat-screen displays. Reactions to the stunt range from those who find it funny, to misguided fear that CES will no longer welcome bloggers from any site. But instead of a widespread ban, the Consumer Electronics Association identifies Richard Blakeley as the culprit and bans him from any future CES events for his shenanigans.

43. iPhone Software 2.0

Apple caves to software developers and lets users purchase third-party apps with this major update. Since the firmware's release, over 10,000 applications have been created for the App Store, including these 101 essential programs.

42. Gov’t Discloses Policy Giving U.S. Agents Right to Seize and Retain Laptops

The tech community is shocked to learn that U.S. border agents have been granted the power to detain documents and electronic devices for an unspecified time frame. Suddenly, crossing the border with a laptop becomes a risky affair as complaints surface of devices never being returned, or returned months after the fact. Equally frightening, U.S. Senator Russ Feingold voices concern that customs agents could use its power for racial profiling in targeting specific groups.

41. Protestor Throw Eggs at Steve Ballmer

During a speech at a Hungarian University, the animated CEO was forced to take cover behind a desk to avoid being hit by a barrage of eggs. The lone protestor, wearing a shirt with “Microsoft = Corruption” written on it, is escorted out amid confused laughter. Ballmer takes the incident in stride calling it a “friendly disruption,” which it was compared to the time a prankster beamed Bill Gates in the face with a cream pie at point blank range.

40. Instant-On Technology Gains Traction

DeviceVM’s Splashtop instant-on software finds its way onto several notebooks, allowing users to hop online within seconds instead of waiting for Windows to load. The embedded Linux-based pre-boot environment gets its biggest push from Asus, who rebrands the technology as Express Gate and is found on both desktop motherboards and notebook solutions. In addition to online activities, Splashtop also comes with a music player and photo manager.

39. Jack Thompson Permanently Disbarred

The Florida Supreme Court says ‘game over’ to former lawyer Jack Thompson following a recommendation by Judge Dava Tunis. Earlier in the year, Tunis found Thompson guilty of 27 out of 31 disciplinary issues brought against him, some of which allegedly occurred during his controversial vendettas against violent videogames, including the Grand Theft Auto Series. So while the debate on whether or not violent videogames leads to real-life violence wages on, the world learns that violent games can lead to disbarment.

38. Intel Launches Atom Processor, It Doesn’t Bomb

Essentially a dumbed-down version of Intel’s more powerful desktop chips, the company’s Atom processor is every bit as significant and helps low-power PCs explode in popularity. Intel correctly surmises a growing market for netbooks and nettops, and demand is so high that manufacturers begin to worry about an Atom chip shortage. Those concerns are quickly put to rest as Intel ramps up production before later releasing a dual-core Atom.

37. Netflix Expands Streaming Service in a Big Way

In an aggressive campaign to attract new customers, Netflix makes its streaming service compatible with several devices, including Microsoft’s Xbox 360 console. But gamers aren’t the only beneficiaries of Netflix’s newfound determination to invade living rooms. The streaming service finds its way onto select Blu-ray players from LG and Samsung, as well as being made available through TiVo. Along with Roku’s set-top box, Netflix subscribers suddenly have a wealth of streaming options to choose from.

36. Microsoft Program Manager Admits Vista’s UAC Intentionally Annoying

Speaking at an RSA Conference in San Francisco, Microsoft’s David Cross tells listeners that Vista’s UAC was designed to annoy users. Cross went on to explain that the decision was made in order to encourage developers to write more secure code that would trigger less prompts. Nevertheless, the confession comes as little consolation to power users who have made it a habit to automatically disable UAC on newly installed systems.

35. X58 Chipset: One Chipset to Run Them All…

We’ve been sick of the hard partition between CrossFire and SLI motherboards for some time but X58 finally fixes that. Without its own Core i7 chipset, Nvidia will “certify” motherboards to run multi-GPU SLI configurations. The upshot is that we’re no longer forced to have our multi-GPU setup dictate our motherboard choice.

34. Yahoo Dodges Microsoft’s Take-Over Attempt

In an open letter, Steve Ballmer threatens Yahoo with a hostile takeover if it doesn’t accept Microsoft’s unsolicited bid, but Microsoft’s interest fades over time. The initial proposal would have netted Yahoo shareholders $31 a share, valuing the deal at $44.6 billion. Instead, Yahoo CEO Jerry Wang deftly dodges all attempts at a takeover, including an eventual joint-bid between Microsoft and billionaire investor Carl Icahn that would have sent Yahoo’s search business to Microsoft.

33. Microsoft Answers Apple with Tongue-in-Cheek Ad Campaign

Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates star in Microsoft’s first round of long overdue ads aimed at debunking boring PC stereotypes (and promoting delicious churros). But rather than take potshots at Apple or touting Vista over Mac OS X, Microsoft instead attempts to “engage consumers” through an ongoing campaign that has Gates doing the Robot and Seinfeld showering in his shoes.

32. Activision and Vivendi Merge to Create Activision Blizzard

Originally announced in late 2007, the transaction that would create Activision Blizzard finalizes in July, 2008 for just shy of $19 billion. Separately, the two entities were responsible for a number of high profile gaming hits, including World of Warcraft, StarCraft, Call of Duty, Guitar Hero, Tony Hawk, and several others. Together, the high-profile merger propels the new company commonly referred to as ActiBlizzard past Electronic Arts as the largest game publisher.

31. Intel Releases USB 3.0 Spec

SuperSpeed will deliver 5Gb/s data transfers when it goes live next year. Intel released the Extensible Host Controller Interface to hardware partners in August, and finally announced completion of the spec in November. Expect to see the first USB 3.0 devices to arrive in late 2009.

30. DDR3 is Here, Get Used to It

As sure we predicted last year, suddenly everyone’s bitching and moaning about DDR3 seems pretty silly don’t it? The heir to the RAM throne should also to benefit from a perfect storm of Core i7’s tri-channel config, reasonable prices and AMD’s DDR3 Phenoms this year. In other words, stow your whining and just let those DDR2 modules will ya already?

29. Microsoft Extends XP Sales Until 2010

Despite repeated attempts to kill off Windows XP, strong customer feedback convinces Microsoft to issue a stay of execution until 2010. Officially, the decision was made to accommodate low-cost PCs with “limited hardware capabilities,” but that doesn’t stop some pre-built system buyers from taking advantage of a Vista downgrade option in order to have XP installed on more capable machines.

28. Gateway Stuns Gamers with Affordable High End Gaming Notebook

Gamers get their geek on with Gateway’s P-7811FX notebook, a sub-$1500 powerhouse that pummels the competition. Usually corners have to be cut at that price range, but Gateway somehow manages to cram a 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo Mobile P8400 CPU on a 1066MHz frontside bus, 4GB of DDR3 RAM, and a GeForce 9800M GTS with a 512MB GDDR frame buffer into a 17-inch notebook for considerably less than what most mobile gaming PCs run at the time.

27. Nvidia Releases GT 200 Series

For raw, single-GPU performance, you just can’t beat Nvidia’s GT200 GPU, which powers the GeForce GTX 260 and 280 cards. The GT200 is among the largest silicon chips we’ve ever seen using a 65nm process. The only problem with the GPU is that it’s a touch power-hungry. Put two GTX 280 boards in a system, and you need a beefy power supply.

26. Left 4 Dead Redefines Co-Op Gaming

Valve’s vision of the zombie apocalypse redefines the cooperative multiplayer experience. Never before has teamwork and communication been so important in a multiplayer shooter, not has success in a campaign ever been so rewarding. The zombies are fast, fearless, and frightening -- and it's even more fun to join their ranks. This game haunts our dreams in a good way.

25. Gaming Community Fights Back Against Spore’s DRM

Electronic Arts saddles Will Wright’s Spore with a modified version of SecuROM, sparking a backlash from angry gamers. Thousands of Amazon user “reviews” slam the game with a 1-star rating, but the attack gets even more aggressive as some gamers encourage pirating the game via BitTorrent. EA ultimately loosens the allowable installs from 3 to 5 machines, but by then, lawsuits have already been filed.

24. Google’s Open-Source Android OS Debuts

T-Mobile and handset-maker HTC partner up to release the first mobile phone built around Google’s Android platform. Though not without its shortcomings, T-Mobile’s G1 signifies a legitimate alternative to Apple’s iPhone complete with a slide-out QWERTY keyboard. Following the release, Google quickly makes good on its promise and releases Android’s source code.

23. Intel Motherboards Finally Ship with SLI Support

Ending a long-held licensing embargo in which consumers were the ultimate losers, Nvidia finally lets its SLI technology be used on Intel boards. Nvidia also backs down on its insistence that mobo makers provide SLI by way of a chip, paving the way for native SLI support. Following the announcement, Asus, Evga, MSI, Gigabyte, and DFI prepare SLI-compatible X58 motherboards for Intel’s Core i7 launch.

22. Nvidia Sued Over Bad Batch of Notebook GPUs

A shareholder hits Nvidia with a class action lawsuit over faulty notebook GPUs the graphics chip maker admits suffer from an “abnormal failure rate.” It’s never made clear exactly how widespread the problem really is, only that Nvidia took a one-time charge of $200 million to cover associated warranty and repair costs. Nvidia later scores a big win with Apple, who decides to use the company’s 9400M GPU in its refreshed MacBook line.

21. Seagate Launches World’s First 1.5TB Desktop Drive

Seagate’s 1.5TB hard drive not only offers the most storage space of any desktop drive on the planet, but also qualifies as the largest capacity increase ever. And with an areal density of 375GB per each of its four platters, Seagate’s monster-sized drive offers monster-sized performance to boot, making a strong case for both power users and HTPC buffs alike.

20. AMD Splits into Separate Design and Manufacturing Companies

Tough times call for drastic measures, and for AMD, that means splitting into two companies so that one can focus entirely on chip design while the other takes on the more expensive role of manufacturing. Two Abu Dhabi investment firms promise to invest at least $6 billion in the new companies to build a new chip factory and upgrade existing ones. AMD’s chief executive Dirk Meyer summed it up best when he referred to the split as “the biggest announcement in our history.”

19. Fantasy Buffs Mourn the Passing of D&D Co-Creator Gary Gygax

After suffering from an abdominal aneurysm and other health problems for several years, Dungeons & Dragons co-creator Gary Gygax leaves the real world behind on March 4, 2008. Gygax, who was 69 years old at the time of his passing, is survived by his wife, Gail Gygax, six children, and a legion of fans who spent many late nights acquiring XP and loot among the company of friends.

18. Microsoft Names, Dates, and Demos Windows 7

Details regarding Microsoft’s next OS, Windows 7, pour out of Redmond revealing everything from what changes Vista owners should expect to how MS came up with the name. According to Microsoft’s fuzzy math, the newest OS will represent the 7th iteration of Windows, hence the name. During a public demo in late October, Microsoft handed out pre-beta builds of Windows 7 to PDC attendees while announcing plans to release a full beta in early 2009.

17. Everyone Gets Rickrolled

Historians still debate how the art of Rickrolling came to be, but in 2008, the goofy prank managed to annoy millions of Americans, including New York Mets fans forced to listen to “Never Gonna Give You Up” after various web communities voted to have the 1987 hit single played at Shea Stadium. The online contest was intended to let fans vote for the team’s traditional eighth-inning song, but instead served as the high point the hoax. NBC effectively ruined the phenonenom when the rickrolled all of America during the Thanksgiving Macy's Day Parade.

16. Microsoft Points Finger at Nvidia for Poor Perception of Vista

Despite Microsoft’s public ballyhooing over Vista’s inflated sales numbers, consumers viewed the OS as crash prone, a perception the software giant blamed on buggy Nvidia drivers. The blame-game came to light when a judge ordered unsealed a 158-page collection of confidential Microsoft emails. According to Microsoft’s data, almost 29 percent of Vista’s early crashes were attributable to Nvidia, suggesting that initial complaints of wonky Nvidia Vista drivers weren’t without merit.

15. RIAA Wins $222,000 Judgment before Being Declared a Mistrial

A jury finds Jammie Thomas guilty of copyright infringement and orders her to pay $222,000 in associated penalties before the case is later declared a mistrial. On September 24, 2008, U.S. District Judge Michael Davis overturns the original judgment, saying he misguided jurors by indicating that making copyrighted songs available for sharing constitutes infringement. As expected, the RIAA fired back with an appeal, and the tech world continues to watch how the first file sharing case ever to go to trial plays out.

14. Radiohead Releases Album for Pay What You Want

After Radiohead’s recording contract with EMI came to an end, the band released its next album, In Rainbows, as a digital download giving customers the ability to set their own price. The move ranked #59 in Fortune Magazine’s list of 101 Dumbest Moments in Business, but that was before Radiohead went public with its sales figures. The band still managed to sell 1.75 million physical albums and surpassed 17 million plays on last.fm. Take that, naysayers!

13. Verizon Wireless Wins Lion’s Share of 700MHz Spectrum

Verizon Wireless posts the winning bid for the coveted 22MHz band of spectrum known as the ‘C-block’ in the FCC’s 700MHz auction. Verizon’s $4.7 billion bid was enough to beat out Google, who both showed interest in the spectrum and pushed for open-access provisions. All tallied, Verizon spent $9.36 billion for the C-block plus 102 licenses, which it plans to use to deploy a high-speed 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE) network by 2010.

12. Hulu’s Launch Deemed a Success

Met with skepticism before its public launch, Hulu’s joint founders – NBC Universal and News Corp – get the last laugh as the online video service becomes an instant hit. It’s tough to ignore a site serving up more than 140 million streams ranging from popular TV shows and full length movies to news and sports games, and innovate features like giving a thumbs up or thumbs down rating for commercials continues to draw several million unique visitors each month.

11. Bill Gates Retires. Well, Sort of.

At just 52 years old, Bill Gates completes his transition into semi-retirement trading in his daily responsibilities for a cozy position as company chairman. Former Microsoft CTO Ray Ozzie takes over as Chief Software Architect, while Gates commits to spending more time focusing on philanthropy work through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and learning how to live on just $50+ billion.

10. Comcast and AT&T Put a Cap on Bandwidth

Comcast made internet waves by imposing a 250GB bandwidth cap on its broadband customers, followed suit by AT&T experimenting with various limits based on the service level. AT&T’s lowest service plan caps bandwidth at just 20GB with a $1 per GB penalty for going over, but regardless of the size, the majority of outspoken consumers vehemently oppose bandwidth caps of any kind despite being designed to stem the minority of bandwidth hogs.

9. Blu-Ray Beats HD DVD, Nobody Cares

No one anticipated that the high definition format war would end as abruptly as it did, but as more and more studios jumped aboard the Blu-ray bandwagon, Toshiba was left with no choice but to abandon the HD-DVD format. Even with the format dispute settled, consumers continue to cling to standard DVDs and upconverting DVD players. High Blu-ray player pricing, an increased focus on digital downloads, and less disposable income to invest in HDTVs have all contributed to Blu-ray’s lukewarm response.

8. Mozilla Releases Firefox 3 and Grabs More Market Share

Mere months before celebrating Firefox’s fourth birthday, Mozilla launches version 3.0 of its open-source browser and celebrates a record number of downloads instead. Just over 8 million downloads in a 24-hour period was enough to set a new Guinness World Record, but that’s not all the new browser accomplished. In the ongoing war with Microsoft and its Internet Explorer browser, Firefox increased its market share to 20 percent, representing a 329 percent growth rate since its inception.

7. Eee PC’s Small Footprint a Big Step for Portable Computing

Technically, Asus didn’t create the term netbook, but it might as well have, as the company’s Eee PC has become the face of the fad. The surprising success of these subnotebooks spurned widespread competition from nearly every OEM imaginable, including Aspire and MSI, who have turned what was once a one man show into a three-way cage match. Still, no other company’s netbook enjoys the same brand recognition as Asus’ Eee PC.

6. Storage Becomes Stupid Cheap

The price per gigabyte takes a nose dive to the point where the world’s first 1.5TB hard drive debuts at just $190, and we’re not talking about gimped drives with lethargic spindle speeds and neutered cache. A 1TB 7200RPM with 32MB of cache routinely streets for just $109, and sometimes dips just below the $100 mark. At roughly a dime per gigabyte, the Tera Era enters full swing, making the recycle bin nearly obsolete.

5. Vista SP1 Arrives and Fixes a Broken OS

Vista users fed up with slow file transfers and lackluster performance celebrate the OS’s first Service Pack and its many fixes. Much more than just a series of security plugs, SP1 offers speed gains in everything from browsing network file shares to manipulating zipped files, and so much more. Even the Photo screensaver is snappier. For the first time since its release, Vista isn’t all that bad.

4. Death Knell Rings for DRM

After suffering through years of music tethered to annoying DRM schemes, consumers (and the voice of reason) finally win out as DRM-free downloads become the norm and not the exception. DRM hasn’t been completely obliterated, but it has become clear that the days of restricted music are at an end when Sony BMG, the last major holdout, embraces MP3s free of shackles, just as God intended them to be.

3. Solid State Drives Storm the Mainstream Market

As prices for NAND memory continue to fall, storage manufacturers seize the situation by moving solid state drives from a high-priced niche category to an affordable storage alternative. Surprisingly, it’s OCZ and Super Talent that led the initial charge with low-price offerings. The price-to-performance ratio still keeps SSDs from supplanting hard drives by and large, but SSDs have found a home in low-power netbooks and notebooks.

2. ATI R700 GPU

It’s rare that we heap hearty praise on a chip that’s actually slower than the competition, but ATI’s R700, which powers the Radeon 4000 series, deserves accolades for focusing on efficiency first, then performance. By stepping back from the power-consumption brink, ATI delivers a lust-worthy GPU that kicks ass in single- and multi-GPU configurations, without requiring a crazy 1400W PSU.

1. Core i7 Crushes All Others

Core i7. Born from a weekend fling between a Core 2 Quad and an Athlon 64, Intel’s Core i7 inherits the best attributes of its parents to become the most badass CPU on the planet. With an on-die memory controller, chip-to-chip interconnect, tri-channel DDR3, individual core Turbo mode, instructions to aid super computing tasks, and Hyper-Threading, the Core i7 instantly makes all previous desktop CPUs obsolete and girlie-men all at once.

Behind-the-Scenes: How We Built the 2008 Dream Machine!

David Murphy — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 12:00:00 -0500

Dream Machine 2008 Revealed: Part One, Part Two, and Part Three

We've given you the gear. Now take a trip into the Maximum PC Lab with an exclusive Web-only look at how we constructed this year's Dream Machine 2008--the fastest PC you can buy, hands-down. Be there for all the heart-wrenching fluid leaks! The painstaking storage decisions! The bits and pieces we had to break just to achieve our Dream Machine...dreams!

If you have yet to check out what we packed into this rig, be sure to catch up on our first, second, and third looks at the actual parts of this over-customized rig. Speaking of, we know that we promised to reveal the fancy secret hard drives we used, shown below:

Unfortunately, the non-disclosure date for these drives has been bumped back by two weeks as the request of the manufacturer. Feel free to speculate in the comments as much as you'd like: we've seen plenty of back-and-forth about whether these Photoshop-blurry drives are standard magnetic drives, SSDs, nuclear-powered, et cetera. Are they Western Digital's rumored 20,000 RPM Velociraptor drives? Have we added some Photoshop trickery to make them look like a number of drives we could be using? Find out in two weeks!

Behind-the-Scenes

Left: Gordon looks happy as a clam as he prepares to open the box containing the custom-chromed chassis of the Dream Machine 2008. You'll note the box is on the floor. That's because the HP Blackbird 002 case weighs close to a metric ton as-is, and chroming it seemed to pack on the poundage to absurd levels. Rather than risk a broken back, Gordon wisely decided to chop the box from a safer height.

Right: We had to snap off the case's optical-drive rail locking tabs just to be able to fit our water cooling reservoir into the chassis. In doing so, we broke the entire mechanism. But all the optical drive needed was some way to wedge into the five and one-fourth-inch bay. It didn't matter that the rails didn't exactly lock into the chassis as they used to just as long as the entire contraption of optical drive, drive rails, and mounting guides created enough of a wedge to lock the optical drive in place--which it did. We were happy.

Left: Nothing fancy to report on this one. It's just a beautiful shot of our glimmering chassis. Had we shot it horizontally, you could have turned it into a jaw-dropping desktop wallpaper. But we didn't. Sorry.

Right: Dave and Gordon carefully move the preassembled water-cooling loop to the Lab bench. We opted to test the entire plumbed system prior to attaching it to actual electronics. This was a lesson learned from last year's Dream Machine, when we killed an entire motherboard the first time we fired up the rig. Word to the wise: no matter how tightly you have those fixtures screwed into place, it's well worth your time to test the entire system when it's not near thousands of dollars of expensive equipment.

Left: This backplane of SATA connections would prove to be our undoing at first. If you recall, the positioning of Western Digital's Velociraptor hard drive doesn't fit with any standard hot-swap configuration. Unfortunately, this meant that we were unable to use these speedy drives for the Dream Machine 2008. And believe us, we tried every possible situation--even contemplating the removal of this backplane entirely--just to get the drives the work. But at the end of the day, we opted for ease-of-use over speed. The backplane stayed and we went looking for a new pair of speedy hard drives...

Right: As noted earlier, Dave is attaching the HP Blackbird's drive rails to a new optical drive. It took both him and Gordon approximately 20 minutes to figure out the exact orientation of the rails that would match case's internal mounting. As it turns out, they were right with their first configuration--the drive just needed a bit of wedging to get inside the case. We don't often recommend elbow grease treatment when building a machine, but it was just what The Doctor ordered this time around.

Left: Gordon takes a look at the Skultrail motherboard we used on this year's machine. That's not an apprehensive look on his face. He's just contemplating the raw power that two Intel QX9775 processors will bring to this year's mega-rig. You'd also be correct in suggesting that he's considering just how the EATX motherboard will fit inside of this chassis.

Right: Gordon struggles to wedge this oversized motherboard into the Dream Machine's chromed case. It was a tight fit, but we were barely able to make this motherboard work. We didn't end up blocking any critical ports, although we did make for some tough cable management situations later when we attempted to route the case backplane's SATA cables to the side-facing inputs on the EATX motherboard.

Left: The Corsair FB-DIMM memory we chose didn't come with much passive cooling, so this ended up being one of the few times we ever saw the top of the memory without a huge fan accessory on top of it. Take our word (and burnt fingers) for it: these little guys get H-O-T hot. That's twice as hot as normal hot, for those keeping score at home.

Right: We're unsure of what calculations Gordon was writing at the time of this picture. Are they the secrets to his 4 GHz overclocking success? Something having to do with cable management? A mental layout of the case's front-panel connections? A quick game of Lab Soduku? We might never know.

Left: With the motherboard in-place, Dave slaps the water-cooling configuration back into the dream machine and attaches the D-TEK FuZion v2 blocks to the CPUs. Even given the smaller room to work with in the HP Blackbird 002 case, the water cooling was a lot easier to configure than last year's monstrosity. You might recall that we ended up cooling both the videocards and the CPU on the Dream Machine 2007. Next year, Dave suggests we just dunk the entire thing in oil and call it a day.

Right: Gordon rests his hand on the heart of the beast, a custom power supply from PC Power and Cooling. Before we built the Dream Machine for-reals, we measured out the exact cable lengths we'd need to be able to connect all of our devices without having too much extra. The company then shortened or lengthened the leads depending on our specifications--just one way we killed extra case clutter without having to resort to twist ties.

Check out 12 more pictures on Page Two!

Behind-the-Scenes (Page Two)

Left: A perfect example of the "too many chefs in the kitchen" problem that plagues geeks and their friends. Gordon and Dave were just super-excited to get their respective sections of the Dream Machine up and running. When time's an issue, sometimes you just have to work like a pit crew on a rig.

Right: This is an artsy picture of the hard drive holders. There's no back story behind this one--just simple, easy-to-use hard drive holders We packed the Dream Machine full of five drives, and while we don't anticipate removing them anytime soon, it's nice to know that we could do so in mere seconds.

Left: If you look super-closely, you'll note the secret hard drives we promised we wouldn't reveal until two weeks from today. Just kidding. You can't see squat. Dave is holding over three terabytes of raw storage power in his oversized hands, however. Jealous?

Right: Gordon slides the first of the Dream Machine 2008's many PCI-based devices into place. We would end up swapping the configuration multiple times before we achieved the best aesthetic combination of two videocards and one soundcard. Luckily for us, the case fit our two giant ATI 4870x2 cards while still leaving a little bit of room for cable management.

Left: Gordon carefully slides the power supply into place. Given the tight fit between it and the location of the Dream Machine's coolant pump, we actually decided to use the mess of cables themselves to secure the pump into place. Once we slid the power supply all the way in, there was absolutely no way that pump was going to move, period. We'd normally recommend using some kind of adhesive or screws to attach the pump to the case.

Right: Speaking of cables, here's the rat's nest on the dream machine's right side. Gordon would eventually use a lot of tape and twist-ties to get this secured, but the formidable task only grew worse and worse as we continued to add, tweak, and connect various new electronics to the rig.

Left: We fired up the machine and, curse our luck, found a leak in the water cooling setup. Or rather, a leak found us. We immediately powered down the machine once we noticed the drip-drip-drip of coolant onto the rig's sensitive internal electronics. As is typical with custom PC building, Dave is starting to disassemble his hard work to troubleshoot the leaky problem.

Right: We were pretty sure we had the leak nailed down, but we wanted to triple-check that we had fixed the culprit. We came prepared with various paper towels and napkins to prevent any stray fluid from hitting the case's expensive internals this time around. "Be prepared" -- sage advice for the Boy Scouts, Scar the Lion, and water-cooling enthusiasts.

Left: As luck would have it, we fixed the first leak only to create a second. Gordon busted out the flashlight so Dave could get a closer look at the source of the dripping. A CPU waterblock was to blame this time. And given the closeness of the tube clamps to the base of the block, we had no choice but to remove that portion of the loop if we were to have any chance of sealing the leak.

Right: Gordon gives Dave a helping hand. While we don't recommend clamping your tubes too tightly to the nozzles of your water block, we know that it's difficult to tell exactly when your hose is properly fitted. We decided to push, and push, and push some more until we were confident that a tighter seal would be absolutely impossible. But our macho arm strength paid off. This was the last leak we would ever see on the Dream Machine 2008.

Left: With the rig up and running, the scope of what we had built finally began to come together. The blue LED fans attached to the radiator give the rig's internals a lovely blue glow. We still decided to install three blacklight cold-cathode tubes to accentuate the effect towards the rig's lower half. The difference of the lights is subtle, but we love having the clear fluid transitioning in and out of a glowing blue state. It looks neat even though you'll never see these differences unless you actually pop open the case's side door. We're sticklers for detail.

Right: Gordon seals the right side of the Dream Machine 2008 with a loving embrace. Unlike typical cases, the HP Blackbird 002 chassis comes with a number of screws for keeping the right side panel attached and in-place. This makes sense, as HP does a fantastic job with its own cable management. Unless something breaks--or unless you're chroming and customizing a case of your very own--you'd likely have no reason to pop open the cable-hiding side of your rig.

Maximum PC's Sixth Annual Softy Awards

The Maximum PC Staff — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 14:40:43 -0500

Yes, it’s that time of year again when we pay tribute to software. For without it, our badass rigs would have nothing to do to but look pretty. Indeed, it’s the programs we run that show us what our machines are truly capable of. The challenge, of course, is in deciding which applications and utilities are most deserving of special honor, not to mention a coveted silver-esque statue.

There’s no secret ballot, there’s no peer-review process, and the public doesn’t get to call in with their votes. The deciders in this contest are the Maximum PC editors. As always, the award candidates are culled from our own personal software libraries—we nominate only the programs we actually use on a regular basis because of their proven performance and reliability. As a group, we whittle down the entrants to the very best of the bunch—the nine exceptional apps and utilities featured here. What makes the whole process even more wonderful is that many of them are free!

Let’s hand out some Softy Awards!

KeePass Password Safe

Why stress your noggin trying to remember your login?

The Password Generator’s multitude of options will satisfy even the most paranoid users.

These days, you can’t get very far on a computer without amassing a bunch of user names and passwords (surely, you’re not using the same password for every account you register!). KeePass Password Safe helps you keep all that information straight.

This free open-source program lets you manage all your passwords using an encrypted database that is kept safe from prying eyes by a single master password (the only one you need to remember!) and the one-two of AES and Twofish encryption. From the straightforward interface, to the random password generator, to the ability to easily create login scripts for the sites you visit, this app takes all the annoyance out of registered accounts. For ultra convenience keep the lightweight program on a USB key that you take with you anywhere.
Free, http://keepass.info/index.html

Fraps

The gamer’s ultimate benchmarking and multimedia companion!

The movie-creation feature comes with plenty of options to address hard drive space and sound-quality concerns.

It’s hard not to love Fraps. We’re just not sure which part of the popular program we love most. The fact is, this all-in-one application should be a mainstay of any gamer’s desktop rig. For the frame-rate-oriented gamer, the program lets you overlay frame rate, so you can monitor performance in-game. Amateur directors love the program’s movie-capturing feature, which lets you record what you’re doing in a game—you can achieve better-than-HD quality! And rounding out the list of fine features is the program’s screenshot function. We love being able to capture stills of our favorite game moments—frame rate included—with just the touch of a button!
$40, www.fraps.com

Adobe Photoshop Elements

Make your pictures better without the brain strain

Common editing chores, such as color-cast correction, are effortless with Elements 6.0.

Sometimes the ends do justify the means. Take Adobe’s Photoshop Elements 6.0, for instance.

Normally, after we complete a software review, the app is uninstalled and the disc filed away. Not so with Photoshop Elements 6.0. We often find ourselves reaching for this program even over a full-fledged photo editor such as Photoshop CS3. It simply gets us the results we need with less time and hassle. That’s a big win in our book because less time editing means more time shooting. And frankly, unless you’re a Photoshop CS3 whiz, Elements may actually yield better results. And the app isn’t lacking advanced functionality, either. You still get access to Adobe Camera RAW updates, for example—a major leg up over other newb-centric photo editors.
$100, www.adobe.com

AutoGK

Ripping DVDs can be fast, easy, and free!

Quick DVD-to-DivX rips are great, but the power-user features are what really get us excited.

Ripping DVDs used to be a major hassle. It took ages and required pricey software—and at the end of three hours of work you may or may not have created a file that played properly. AutoGK (along with cheap multicore systems) has changed that.

AutoGK works its mojo by corralling a motley collection of utilities into a cohesive package. One app extracts the video from the VOB file, one syncs the audio with the video, and yet another recompresses the video down to a fraction of its original size. While this might seem complex, AutoGK makes it simple enough that any user can rip a disc. Still, hidden away in a secret menu (press Ctrl+F9 to access it) there’s a whole host of power-user-friendly options just waiting to be tweaked. That’s what the Softys are all about!
Free, www.autogk.me.uk

Auslogics Disk Defrag

Kiss Vista’s crappy defragger goodbye!

We don’t actually know how long Vista’s defrag takes because we always lose patience with it. With Disk Defrag it takes a mere 15 minutes.

What’s worse than Apple not giving its users defragmentation support in OSX? The support in Windows Vista—clearly the slowest defragmentation application ever. We’re talking since the Winchester hard drive was invented in 1956. It’s as though the sectors are first squeezed through a quantum singularity and then beamed back and reassembled into a contiguous file by an angry shop of sector elves two steps away from a strike. For those of you who are mad as hell and unwilling to take it anymore, there’s Auslogics Disk Defrag. Install this free defragger on your Vista OS and your blood pressure will drop instead of rise every time you defrag. XP users can benefit too—the app is also much faster than Window XP’s freebie tool.
Free, www.auslogics.com

DoubleTwist

An iTunes DRM stripper—and more!

Facebook fiends will love the way DoubleTwist enables simple file sharing, but its DRM-stripping and sync features are pretty cool, too.

So you got suckered into buying a bunch of DRM-shackled songs from iTunes—just so you could easily manage them on your iPod. But now you’re ready to cut that leash so you can move to a more flexible player. Download DoubleTwist, give it access to your iTunes folder, and you won’t lose that costly investment. The process occurs in real time, but it works.

But this ingenious—and free—program does a lot more than that. It can also automatically grab photos from your friends’ Facebook profiles and synchronize them to your PC and your smartphone or MP3 player. What’s more, you can also share those tunes (and pictures and videos, too) with all your Facebook friends. Cool!
Free, www.doubletwist.com

VMware Workstation 6

Host every OS you can think of on a single machine!

Store profiles for any number of virtual machines, then switch among your collection of operating systems.

VMware workstation rocks due to its ability to let you run multiple operating systems on one PC. Install Linux, Solaris, and other desktop environments right alongside any Windows version—including those as far back as Windows 3.1 (provided you have the licenses, of course).

VMware’s features trump those of a typical virtual machine environment. You can use the program to take snapshots and roll back your computer to a previous state, and you can take screenshots and videos of your system’s activities, which comes in handy if you’re trying to help someone with a troubleshooting issue.

While this app comes with a hefty price tag, we’d rather have a program that does everything than a lesser, cheaper alternative.
$190, www.vmware.com

Radiotracker

Build a massive MP3 library on the cheap

Someone, somewhere on the Internet is playing your favorite song right now. Radiotracker can not only find it but also automatically rip it to your hard drive.

If you don’t mind compromising a smidgen on audio quality, Radiotracker offers an incredibly easy way to build a huge library of free—and legally acquired—digital music. The program works by monitoring Internet radio streams for the types of music you like. You can configure it to target specific genres (Americana, world, jazz, acid rock, etc.), particular artists, or even specific songs, and it will scan thousands of stations looking for just that.

When Radiotracker encounters songs that fit the profile you’ve created, it automatically records them to your hard drive in MP3 format—it even grabs ID3 tags and album artwork. The audio quality is limited to whatever bitrate the station is streaming at, but the tunes are free and legal!
$40, www.radiotracker.com

ThreatFire

Why waste time scanning for bad apps when you can simply block suspicious behavior instead?

Threatfire watches over your system to make sure malicious apps don’t infect your PC.

Old-school antivirus and anti-spyware applications work in a very simple and predictable way. They scan every file you download and every app you install on your PC for malicious behavior. This worked really well back in the days when there were just four or five new threats every week. Today, hundreds of new threats surface regularly, and the old “scan for known baddies” approach simply doesn’t cut it. That’s where ThreatFire comes in.

Instead of scanning against a known database of viruses and malware, ThreatFire monitors applications for naughty behavior. When an app does something suspicious, ThreatFire locks it down and prompts the user to take action. Yes, we’ve been promised this type of protection before, but ThreatFire actually works, and it’s less of a system hog than more traditional scanners. That’s what we like to see!
Free, www.threatfire.com

Favorites of the Future?

Will these three apps be top dogs when final versions are released?

uTorrent

It’s not that we’re unhappy with the current version of uTorrent. The program has proven itself to be one of the top-notch apps in our downloading arsenal. Its scheduling and automated features make pulling files across the Internet a breeze, and the app makes nary a dent in our system resources.

Still, uTorrent can only get better with the coming upgrade to the BitTorrent protocol that runs underneath this amazing bit of software. BitTorrent developers are currently at work on a new encryption method to thwart the bandwidth throttling methods of a number of popular Internet service providers—Comcast included!
www.utorrent.com

Trillian Astra

Long ago, Trillian was our favorite instant messaging client, until Pidgin displaced it. Now we think it might be time to revisit our earlier flame, given what we know of Trillian Astra and its IM-anywhere design. In addition to serving as a traditional desktop client for both Mac and PC platforms, Astra comes in a browser-friendly version that works anywhere. All your relevant info syncs across platforms and machines, so all you need to do is log in to Astra, and everything from your AIM, MSN, and Google Talk settings to your buddy icon will be there at the ready.
www.trillianastra.com

Firefox 3

We’re anxiously awaiting the release of Firefox 3—currently in beta—for a number of reasons. The nascent browser includes some truly revolutionary features. For one, it supercharges the traditional bookmark paradigm, storing your bookmarks in an easily searchable database that’s integrated with the rest of the browser’s search features. Firefox 3’s renderer seems to be speedier than it was in Firefox 2, too. Of course, all the improvements will be for naught if the development team can’t squash the memory leaks that presently plague the Deuce. For now, we’re hopeful.
www.firefox.com

The 2008 Lifetime Achievement Award

AnyDVD!

Don’t confuse our Lifetime Achievement Award with those of other awards shows, where the recipient is nearing the end of his or her career and being tossed a sappy sympathy tribute. Far from it. SlySoft’s AnyDVD is in the prime of its life and getting better all the time. In fact, it’s precisely because of this application’s steadfast commitment to service that we honor it here.

For many years now, AnyDVD has given law-abiding consumers an easy way to circumvent the copy protection on their movie discs in order to create backup copies or play the content on other devices. And just as soon as new DRM is implemented, AnyDVD is right there with an update. Case in point: the AnyDVD HD upgrade, which offers Blu-ray and HD DVD support. Bravo!

AnyDVD will be accepting its award from an undisclosed overseas location.
49 euros, www.slysoft.com

RAID Controllers Compared!

David Murphy — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 12:17:20 -0500

In the November 2007 issue, we took an in-depth look at RAID—short for Redundant Array of Inexpensive (or Independent) Disks—and broke down the pros, cons, and most importantly, speeds of the various RAID permutations you would find on a typical multidrive setup. Here we’ll examine the medium itself: the RAID controller, which tells the drives in a RAID setup how to interact. As you’ll see, there are RAID controllers of differing types, technologies, and price points, and we want to learn whether these variations translate into performance differences. After all, even the fastest RAID configuration ultimately depends on the performance capabilities of its physical host.

A RAID array can be set up in one of two ways: You can use the controller that’s built into your motherboard’s chipset (if it includes one), which requires you to hook up your drives as normal and then edit a few BIOS settings, or purchase an external controller card, which boots its configuration menu before your operating system even loads.

Our mission is to test the performance of RAID setups using both low- and high-end RAID cards from five different manufacturers and compare those results against the performance of two common motherboard solutions. Once the dust settles, you’ll know which RAID controller will give you top performance and exactly what features you get for your buck!

Our Testing Methods

Every aspect of our experiment had to be considered in order to ensure meaningful results.

The Controllers

To test the performance of motherboard-based RAID controllers we turned to Nvidia’s nForce 680i chipset and Intel’s P35 chipset. The former represents the typical testing environment we use for all our storage benchmarking and is a solid example of what you’d find on a high-end motherboard. The Intel-based board provides a fair representation of RAID performance on a midrange machine. Given Intel’s dominance in the performance-computing market right now, we didn’t bother testing an AMD-compatible motherboard. What’s the point?

For our controller cards, we picked a combination of host-based and discrete models: With the former, the controller uses the rig’s processor to handle RAID functionality (just as a motherboard chipset does), while discrete controllers remove your computer from the equation by supporting a low-powered processor right on the card. As you might expect, host-based controllers are cheaper than their discrete counterparts. Besides selecting controllers for both card types, we also sought to vary the price points in each category.

The Test Bed

All the testing, save that done on the MSI P35 Neo2-FR motherboard, was conducted using our standard storage benchmarking system: an Intel Q6700 on an EVGA nForce 680i motherboard, a single EVGA GeForce 8800 GTX videocard, and a single 500GB Western Digital Caviar SE16 hosting the Windows XP operating system. Each RAID test uses four Western Digital 150GB Raptor drives.

We elected to use two RAID configurations for benchmarking: RAID 0 (aka striped) and RAID 5. This allowed us to study the price/performance equation from two different mindsets: speed and redundancy. As we noted in our previous RAID feature, you won’t find a faster storage configuration than RAID 0, in which the drives serve as one volume and your data is written and read across them concurrently. A RAID 5 setup balances the performance gains of striped arrays yet still offers a degree of data redundancy.

The Benchmarks

We’re using the same standard suite of benchmarks we normally use for storage testing, with a few changes. We’ve downgraded our HD Tach program to version 3.0.1.0 to ensure we can run both read and write tests on the arrays. This synthetic benchmark bypasses any software on a machine to get right to the drives themselves, measuring the subject’s

For a more real-world test, we’re using PCMark05. We’ll compare the scores from the program’s subset tests—XP Startup, Application Loading, General Usage, Virus Scanning, and File Writing—as well as the overall score given to each test subject.

Finally, we’ve created our own real-world benchmark to further test these arrays under a typical usage scenario. We time how long it takes to write a 1080p multimedia slideshow to the array using Photodex’s ProShow, based on files read from the array, while simultaneously using Adobe Premiere to convert a DVD rip on the array into an uncompressed AVI file. As these tasks also maximize our processor’s usage, it allows us to discern the potential performance pitfalls of a card that uses said processor for its RAID calculations.

Meet the Test Subjects

Our sample population of controllers covers every price point and feature set

Host-Based/Motherboard

EVGA nForce 680i

This motherboard, chosen for the 2007 Maximum PC Dream Machine, comes with support for up to six SATA devices. But it’s not just the potential size of the RAID that gets us going. The motherboard also provides a decent list of configurations to choose from: RAID 0, 1, 0+1, 5, and JBOD (just a bunch of disks). It’s a surprisingly generous offering, given the fact that some of the add-in cards we’re testing lack such variety.

Setting up the RAID itself is a breeze—you switch the SATA ports to RAID in the BIOS and then use a handy utility to select the drives, array type, and configuration options you want.
$300, www.evga.com

Host-based/Motherboard

MSI P35 Neo2-FR

MSI’s P35 Neo2-FR is a respectable midrange motherboard that sports the flashin’ new Intel P35 chipset with an ICH9R south bridge. We expect RAID performance with this chipset to rival that of EVGA’s nForce platform, which is an older chipset stuffed onto a more high-end motherboard.

You get only five SATA ports on the P35 Neo2-FR: Four operate under the ICH9R chipset, with one running on an integrated Marvell 88SE6111 controller. This could have some bearing on performance when compared to the EVGA nForce 680i, which uses the south bridge for all six SATA ports.
$120, www.msicomputer.com

Host-based

HighPoint RocketRAID 2300

HighPoint’s entry-level RAID controller card is but a mere PCI Express x1 model—though in many ways, this makes it ideal for a typical motherboard setup. If you have the available connector on your motherboard, you won’t have to burn one of your x8 or x16 slots for the card.

The host-based controller supports five different RAID levels: 0, 1, 5, 1+0, and JBOD. The controller features four ports, allowing you to connect up to four SATA drives using standard SATA cables.

We’re mildly concerned that the controller’s lack of any onboard memory might hurt the card’s performance. But that’s more an issue of the card’s price point—you aren’t going to see memory packed onto entry-level products.
$150, www.highpoint-tech.com

Specs
Connection	PCI Express x1
RAID Support	0, 1, 5, 1+0, JBOD
Processor	None
Memory	None
Connection	Four SATA ports

Host-based

HighPoint RocketRAID 3510

One of the most expensive cards in HighPoint’s line of RAID controllers, the RocketRAID 3510 trumps its lesser cousin, the RocketRAID 2300, with a few key features. You’ll also find a multilane connector on the 3510 rather than a four-port SATA connector, although you get the same effect: The included breakaway cable supports the same number of drives—four.

More importantly, the 3510 controller comes with a built-in Intel IOP 81341 processor. The 800MHz proc pulls RAID actions off your rig’s CPU. We expect this critical difference to shine in our more taxing RAID benchmarks, as we’ll want every bit of our CPU’s power going to the rendering test, not the RAID functionality.

The card also comes with 256MB of onboard DDR2 memory and is fashioned for a PCI Express x8 connection.
$370, www.highpoint-tech.com

Specs
Connection	PCI Express x8
RAID Support	0, 1, 5, 6, 1+0, JBOD
Processor	800MHz
Memory	256MB DDR2
Connection	One multilane connector

Host-based

Adaptec 1430SA

Adaptec’s entry-level 1430SA card supports only four RAID levels: 0, 1, 1+0, and JBOD. Critically missing is any support for a RAID 5 configuration—something all the other entry-level cards we’re testing support. While this automatically disqualifies Adaptec’s card from the RAID 5 portion of our comparative benchmarks, it doesn’t necessarily bump the card to last place. The 1430SA might very well offer the best performance for its price in a RAID 0 configuration—which could be fine for folks interested in only RAID 0, or one of this card’s other configs.

The PCI Express x4-based card comes with no extra frills. There’s no onboard memory, nor is there a dedicated processor on the card to handle RAID requests. You can connect up to four SATA drives to the array via four standard SATA ports.
$125, www.adaptec.com

Specs
Connection	PCI Express x4
RAID Support	0, 1, 1+0, JBOD
Processor	None
Memory	None
Connection	Four SATA ports

Discrete

Adaptec 5405

If RAID controllers were cars, you’d find Adaptec’s 5405 on a luxury lot. This little device comes packed with every feature, accessory, and upgrade an enthusiast could ask for.

The 5405 sports an onboard 1.2GHz dual-core processor to handle RAID functionality—that’s more CPU than this article’s author has on his laptop. We’re expecting this, as well as the card’s 256MB DDR2 cache, to spit out massive performance. But we’re also curious to see how a card this stacked will benchmark

The 5405 supports an obscene number of RAID levels (0, 1, 1E, 5, 5EE, 6, 1+0, 50, and 60), making it the clear winner in the options category. The card uses a PCI Express x8 interface for the connection mechanism and a multilane port for SATA connections via a breakaway cable.
$425, www.adaptec.com

Specs
Connection	PCI Express x8
RAID Support	0, 1, 1E, 5, 5EE, 6, 1+0, 50, 60
Processor	1.2GHz dual core
Memory	256MB DDR2
Connection	One multilane connector

Discrete

AMCC 3ware 9650SE-4LPML

The 9650SE-4LPML represents AMCC’s entry-level RAID controller. It runs off a PCI Express x4 interface and supports a decent array of RAID configuration options: 0, 1, 5, 1+0, and JBOD.

The card boasts an onboard 266MHz PowerPC CPU, which does its part to keep your general computer operations separate from the RAID equation. However, we ask ourselves: Is 266MHz enough? In the grand scheme of things, especially given that our test machine runs a quad-core Q6700 processor, will such a relatively underpowered onboard chip have much of an impact on our benchmarks?

The controller also comes with 256MB of onboard DDR2 memory. SATA drives are connected via a single multilane port using an included breakaway cable.
$400, www.3ware.com

Specs
Connection	PCI Express x4
RAID Support	0, 1, 5, 1+0, JBOD
Processor	266MHz
Memory	256MB DDR2
Connection	One multilane connector

Discrete

AMCC 3ware 9650SE-24M8

The high-end version of AMCC’s 9650SE RAID controller is a bit bulkier than the 4LPML card—and that’s due to its extra connection ports. You get three multilane connectors on the large 24M8 card—for a maximum of 24 drives, with the appropriate breakaway cables, of course. The controller attaches to your motherboard using a PCI Express x8 connection.

This card expands upon the 4LPML’s RAID options in a rather dramatic fashion by supporting 0, 1, 5, 6, 1+0, 50, and JBOD. That puts it nearly on par with Adaptec’s 5405 controller.

We’re mildly taken aback by this pricey card’s paltry power potential, as the 24M8 runs a 266MHz processor, just like its far less expensive cousin. While this controller has double the RAM (512MB) of the 4LPML, we’re skeptical that this will provide a huge performance boost.
$1,600, www.3ware.com

Specs
Connection	PCI Express x8
RAID Support	0, 1, 5, 6, 1+0, 50, JBOD
Processor	226MHz
Memory	512MB DDR2
Connection	Three multilane connectors

Host-Based

LSI Logic MegaRAID SAS 8208ELP

On paper, LSI Logic’s MegaRAID SAS 8208ELP controller looks like a respectable contender at the entry-level end of the RAID marketplace. The controller doesn’t use an onboard processor to shuffle RAID duties from your CPU to the card, but it remains to be seen if this will have a demonstrable effect on next-generation computing systems.

The card does come with two separate multilane connectors for adding up to eight SATA devices with the breakaway cables that come included. You can then slap these drives into one of four RAID configurations: 0, 1, 5, or 1+0.

In practice, we found this PCI Express x4-based card to be quite frustrating, primarily because the drivers LSI shipped with the card flat-out didn’t work. A quick run to LSI’s website for updated drivers fixed the problem, but the fact remains: Out of the box, the 8208ELP does not function.
$315, www.lsi.com

Specs
Connection	PCI Express x4
RAID Support	0, 1, 5, 1+0
Processor	None
Memory	None
Connection	Two multilane connectors

Discrete

LSI Logic MegaRAID SAS 8888ELP

Thankfully, the 8888ELP works straight out of the box with the drivers LSI provides. As well it should—this is the company’s high-end RAID product, designed as a discrete-performing controller for handling RAID 1, 5, 6, 1+0, 50, and 60 arrays. The controller itself comes with the same two internal multilane connectors as the 8208ELP, with an additional two external connectors located on the rear of the card.

The 8888ELP attaches to your machine using a PCI Express x8 connector. The CPU itself chugs along at 500MHz. This, plus the controller’s 256MB of DDR2 memory, should help the card hold its own in our RAID benchmark showdown. It will also give us an interesting comparison point: What’s more important, a faster processor or more memory?
$945, www.lsi.com

Specs
Connection	PCI Express x8
RAID Support	0, 1, 5, 6, 1+0, 50, 60
Processor	500 MHz
Memory	256MB
Connection	Four multilane connectors

Performance Results

Yes, there's something to be said for add-in cards, but a costlier controller doesn't necessarily pay off.

Host-Based Performance

It’s only fair that we start our comparisons by looking at the host-based cards and motherboards. The relatively low cost of entry in these two categories makes this the natural starting point for a discussion about how controllers can impact the performance of a RAID. We had high hopes for our motherboards going into the slugfest. After all, these two products each represent pinnacles of performance: EVGA’s nForce-based motherboard is a tried-and-true favorite in our Lab, whereas the MSI board sports one of Intel’s newest chipsets. But even with all that respective might behind them, the two contenders were no match for Adaptec’s 1430SA host-based add-in card. In two of the three official RAID 0 benchmarks, the 1430SA overtook the speediest of our motherboards, MSI’s P35 Neo2-FR.

The only anomaly was a stunning upset by MSI’s P35 Neo2-FR in our real-world encoding benchmark. We were surprised to see the board perform so dramatically better than any other contender in the host-based category. We have two possible explanations: Just considering the two motherboards, the EVGA model uses a single south bridge to control the functions of six SATA ports. The MSI board shuffles a five-port load across two separate onboard controllers. Then there’s the simple possibility that this benchmark performs better on an Intel platform—we’ve seen it happen before and are apt to believe it to be the case this time, given the close performance of the two boards in the two other benchmarks.

Concerning RAID 5 performance, we must first note that the Adaptec 1430SA card was excluded due to its lack of support for RAID 5. It’s a shame, too; HighPoint’s RocketRAID 2300 squeaks out the performance win, but it’s not an outright domination. Given how well the Adaptec card performed on our RAID 0 testing, we believe it would have stood a good chance of taking the crown in the RAID 5 benchmarks as well.

We found that both motherboards had a great deal of trouble with write performance in RAID 5. This killed their scores for all tests across the board, as both of our real-world benchmarks depend on a storage device’s read and write capabilities. This leaves the RocketRAID 2300 as the default winner. In no way would we want to suffer through the abysmal write times of the two motherboards for any length of time.

It was interesting to see virtually no variance whatsoever in CPU usage, regardless of whether our array was being fielded by the motherboard or the host-based controller card. We remain unconvinced that a host-based controller’s performance is hurt in a RAID setup merely because it relies on the CPU—at least, if you’re running a multicore processor. The particulars of the card and the RAID configuration are what ultimately matter—as became apparent during the discrete portion of our testing.

Discrete Performance

If you’re willing to spend the extra dough, the best discrete RAID controllers punish the competition to satisfyingly bloody results—but there are still duds to be found in this category. Both cards that used high-powered processors (800MHz or higher) destroyed the RAID 0 benchmark numbers of their host-based counterparts. While the ultimate winner was Adaptec’s 5405 controller, HighPoint’s RocketRAID 3510 achieved excellent results in our RAID 0 HD Tach and PCMark05 benchmarks. The real-world significance of the card’s power was less apparent in our conversion benchmark, where the RocketRAID 3510 card trumped only the next-best contender by 11 seconds.

By contrast, Adaptec’s 5405 card shined brightly on every individual test we put it to. The card topped all others in our HD Tach read test and utterly blew away the second-place controller by nearly 100MB/s on the write test. The 5405 pulled in awesome numbers in PCMark05 and also did well in our real-world benchmark. This ultimately amounted to a savings of about 50 seconds compared to the RocketRAID 2300, but compared to the nForce chipset, we’re talking about a difference of six minutes.

We were most surprised to see the relatively lukewarm performance of the absurdly expensive 3ware 9650SE-24M8 controller in all of our benchmarks. If anything, this proves that you can’t just toss money at a RAID controller and expect dynamite performance. For a $1,600 (MSRP) contribution to AMCC, you get RAID 0 performance that’s no better than what AMCC’s $400 model is capable of, or even than the $150 entry-level HighPoint RocketRAID 2300 controller. Yikes!
Adaptec’s 5405 controller and HighPoint’s RocketRAID 3510 traded shots during our RAID 5 testing. The former gave us the highest write speeds of any RAID card we tested in this showdown, leading to a squeaks-by-at-the-finish-line victory in our overall PCMark05 benchmark. However, the RocketRAID 3510 had consistently excellent performance across all read-related tests, overtaking Adaptec’s 5405 controller by 14 seconds in our encoding benchmark.

The other cards we tested paled in comparison: 3ware’s high-priced offerings gave us decent RAID 5 performance as compared to, say, a motherboard. They nevertheless showed little variation among the two price points. Adding insult to injury, both cards were topped by the host-based (and far cheaper) HighPoint RocketRAID 2300.

As for LSI’s cards, well, we were amazed to see such an absolute nosedive from both the 8208ELP and 8888ELP controllers. Just to make sure we weren’t flubbing something, we tested these cards in both RAID 0 and RAID 5 arrays on both of the motherboards mentioned in this feature. No dice. Both LSI cards turned in abysmal performances in RAID 5—in fact, their complete inability to perform to reasonable expectations constitutes a failure in our book. And while the 8888ELP functioned in RAID 0, its scores were average at best. We suspect this might be a driver issue of some sort, given the problems we had installing drivers to begin with on the 8208ELP card. However, we can’t argue with the numbers.

Next: The Numbers!

The Benchmarks!

(click the chart to embiggen)

Final Analysis

You have all the data, but we're taking it one step further: Here's what you should buy!

At the end of the day, the RAID equation is pretty simple. You’ve seen the numbers and the analysis, so let’s take a big-picture approach before you rush out and plunk down money at your retailer of choice. The two motherboard-based RAID controllers we tested are perfectly acceptable solutions if you want a little speed boost in a RAID 0 environment, especially since it costs you nothing extra. In fact, depending on the motherboard you have, you may very well see a measurable difference between that and an entry-level host-based card.

If you’re planning to run RAID 5, ignore everything we just said. You will want to have an add-in controller because if the two products we tested are any indication, motherboards just up and die when it comes to RAID 5 performance. You can pick up a host-based controller on the cheap and see a performance boost—provided the card supports RAID 5. In this respect, we have only the RocketRAID 2300 to go by, and based on our results, we think this relatively inexpensive host-based controller card earns its keep. But don’t assume that you’ll get comparable performance from a similarly spec’d/priced alternative. As this roundup has shown, RAID-controller performance varies wildly. You might luck out and score a decently performing product, but you might also select a card that just falls to pieces on your configuration of choice.

The surest way to avoid any pitfalls, especially if you’re planning on testing out multiple RAID configurations, is to pick up a good discrete card. Don’t go after the most expensive one you can find. As we’ve learned here, performance does not necessarily scale with price.

That said, we found great success using Adaptec’s 5405 card in a RAID 0 environment. It was the fastest card in all of the benchmarks, and it offers substantial performance benefits over a similarly configured motherboard RAID environment. You can connect a bevy of hard drives to the card, and it comes with the most bountiful RAID options of any device here. If you don’t mind an excruciatingly long initialization period, this card is perfect for those who want to dabble.

If you’re just looking at RAID 5 performance, however, we have to tip our hat to HighPoint’s RocketRAID 3510. It’s less expensive than Adaptec’s 5405, albeit also less feature-packed. But when it comes time to throw down, the card squeaks out the performance win over Adaptec’s 5405. The 5405 beats the RocketRAID 3510 in RAID 5 write speeds. But it’s still not enough to overtake the Rocket Raid’s speedy reads.

The numbers say it all: We saw only a 14-second difference between the two cards in our real-world encoding test. If you can stomach that loss and want a card with a ton of RAID options, get Adaptec’s 5405. If you just want RAID 5 performance and a card that can also hold its own in RAID 0, opt for the cheaper RocketRAID 3510.

But whatever you do, avoid LSI cards. Two out of two failures across two separate motherboards and a flurry of different hard drives does not a happy storage enthusiast make. Don’t say we didn’t warn you!

Overclock Your PC

Gordon Mah Ung and David Murphy — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 14:49:33 -0600

If you’re running your CPU at stock speeds, you’re missing out on your PC’s true potential, because processors often harbor power beyond their official specs. Your proc, for example, might be rated to run at 3GHz but is actually capable of operating reliably at 3.3GHz. There are myriad reasons for the hidden headroom, ranging from natural variance among parts (even those made from the same batch), to the manufacturers’ practice of underclocking parts to meet market needs, to the improved capabilities of a part over the lifetime of its production.

The point is, you’re not a true power user if you leave a CPU’s hidden performance potential untapped. And the only way to release your proc’s inner speed demon is to overclock it. This story will tell you how. Even if you’ve dabbled in the practice in the past, you’ll want to read on. Because just as CPUs have changed over the years, so has the art of pushing them to their limits. Over the following pages we’ll tell you everything you need to know about overclocking today’s CPUs, be they AMD- or Intel-branded. We’ll explain what’s involved, how to determine what your hardware is capable of, and how to achieve optimal results. Most importantly, we’ll tell you how to overclock safely. Indeed, overclocking is serious business and should never be taken lightly.

When you tamper with the internal workings of your computer’s parts, you do so at your own risk. Overclocking can damage, or even destroy, your CPU, motherboard, RAM, or other system components, and it can void the warranty on those parts. So consider yourself warned about the potential hazards! That said, you’re unlikely to harm your hardware if you overclock with extreme caution and care. And following the advice and instructions we lay out here will help you. So let’s get started!

The Basics of CPU Overclocking

Pushing your processor to new heights can be extremely rewarding—if all goes right. Take the time to understand the concepts of overclocking and the factors that can affect success.

Determining a CPU’s Speed

There’s simple math that determines the clock speed of any CPU. Each CPU has a fixed internal number called the clock multiplier. That number multiplied by the reference clock of the front-side bus determines the stated clock speed of the processor. For example, an Intel 2.66GHz Core 2 Quad Q6700 has a clock multiplier of 10. The stock system bus speed for this processor is 1,066MHz. But wait, 1,066MHz multiplied by 10 equals 10GHz. What gives? Intel’s front-side bus is quad-pumped, so its actual reference clock is 266MHz (1,066MHz divided by four). That makes the clock speed of a Core 2 Quad Q6700 10 times 266MHz for 2,660MHz, or 2.66GHz.

This same math applies to AMD’s Athlon 64 CPUs, although, technically, they have no front-side bus; instead, a HyperTransport link connects the CPU to the chipset. A 2.6GHz Athlon 64 X2 5000+, for example, operates on a 13x multiplier using a 200MHz link—the actual HyperTransport link connection runs at 1GHz, as it operates on a 5x multiplier.
You can overclock both Intel and AMD CPUs by increasing the multiplier setting, increasing the “front-side bus,” or both. By using a combination of a multiplier and FSB overclock, you may achieve higher speeds with more stability. Depending on your situation, a combination of both may give you the best overclock, as your motherboard may simply not be up to running at excessively high speeds.

Multiplier Locking

CPU manufacturers will take measures to ensure that a processor runs at its intended speed by locking the multiplier. This fixes the multiplier setting, so it cannot be changed in the BIOS. This is done primarily to keep CPU “re-markers” from selling cheaper parts as more expensive ones, but it also serves to thwart overclockers.

But not every chip is locked. Intel’s Extreme series of CPUs does not feature multiplier locking nor does AMD’s FX series or some of its new Black Edition CPUs. This gives overclockers who pay the extra price of admission more flexibility in their adventures. A 2.66GHz Core 2 Extreme QX6600 CPU, for example, can be overclocked to 2.93GHz simply by increasing the multiplier from 10 to 11 without having to resort to front-side bus overclocking.

The Role of Core Voltage

When you overclock, you essentially run the CPU out of spec. Upping a CPU’s core voltage allows you to run a CPU way out of spec by further increasing your overclocking headroom. For example, a stock Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 running at 2.4GHz eats about 1.2 volts. To get the same CPU up past 5.6GHz, one overclocker increased the core voltage to 1.9 volts. As you can imagine, if AMD and Intel designed a CPU to operate at a certain voltage, running it higher will greatly decrease the life expectancy of the CPU. This is the most dangerous element of overclocking. The worst we’ve personally seen from overclocking a CPU via its multiplier or front-side bus is instability or a corrupted OS. But by adding a ton of voltage to a processor, you risk nuking it. Proceed with caution!

How Do I Know if My CPU is Overclockable?

As a rule of thumb, a very mature CPU production line will yield parts that are capable of running at much higher than rated speeds. So, while it’s not a guarantee, overclockers are generally better off with later-stepped CPUs.

An even better way to determine your processor’s overclocking credentials is to download CPU-Z (www.cpuid.com). This freeware utility will identify your Intel or AMD CPU and tell you such nitty-gritty details as the stepping and revision of the proc. Steppings and revisions are internal labels that Intel and AMD use to denote versions. A step denotes larger changes while a revision indicates fairly minor tweaks.

Once you find out that your retail 2.4GHz Core 2 Quad Q6600 is a revision G0 you can rejoice in knowing that it runs cooler and can withstand more heat than the previous B3 step version. You learn those particular CPU qualities only by doing research, and the best resources are online overclocking databases. Almost every enthusiast PC site has a section devoted to overclocking, where users post details of their own experiences with various CPUs. MaximumPC.com, ExtremeSystems.org, and FiringSquad.com all include areas for users to discuss overclocking exploits.

Next: Have the Right Hardware!

Have the Right Hardware

Your CPU isn’t the only part that matters in your quest for more speed. Here are the other components to care about.

Motherboard

You get what you pay for and, generally, a cheap-ass motherboard will yield marginal overclocking results. The more expensive the motherboard, the more likely it is to have better components and better overclocking capabilities. That doesn’t mean all sub-$100 mobos are overclocking duds, but you’ll have to troll the forums and customer reviews on enthusiast sites to determine if a cheapo mobo can OC.

One additional tip: If you’re buying a motherboard for overclocking, you’ll likely have the best success with the latest “spin.” Mobo vendors update their boards with fixes and more recently built boards will usually overclock better.

Power Supply

We’ve long said that the PSU doesn’t get the attention it’s due, and that’s especially true when it comes to overclocking. The fact is, the need for clean, reliable power is of utmost importance if you’re pushing a CPU, RAM, and motherboard to the edge.

You don’t need a 1,200-watt PSU like this PC Power & Cooling Turbo-Cool, but you do need a quality, name-brand unit.

If you have a high-compression engine in your street racer, are you going to fill it with 85 octane fuel? A cheap power supply is the equivalent of questionable Kwik-E-Mart gasoline. For overclocking, you don’t need a 1,200-watt PSU, but you do need a name-brand unit. Generally, it’s safer to have a PSU that delivers a bit more power than you need. While it may not be the most power-efficient scenario, a 750-watt PSU running at 450 watts will probably live longer than a 500-watt PSU running at 450 watts.

Cooling

Excessive heat can cause system instability, so it’s essential to keep your overclocked CPU cool. To achieve extremely high overclocks, some hobbyists bathe their CPUs in liquid nitrogen. Others use phase-change units (essentially tiny freezers) to push 3GHz chips past the 5GHz mark. The point is, you can’t expect to push your 1.86GHz proc to a reliable 4GHz using a $12 heatsink. Know your overclocking goals and then choose your cooling accordingly. Air cooling is the most modest solution, followed by water cooling, peltier/liquid combinations, phase change, and exotic liquids, such as liquid nitrogen. Also remember that the extra heat produced by overclocking will warm up the rest of your machine, so you may have to upgrade your case’s cooling or the case itself if you experience overheating issues. For our CPU cooling recommendations, see page 34.

Memory

In the old days the front-side bus’s speed was tied to the speed of the system RAM, so you had to overclock both. That’s no longer the case, but some folks still prefer to give their RAM some extra juice. This is the purpose of pricey, high-performance RAM. It’s been certified by the RAM manufacturer to operate at a given “overclocked” speed. We say overclocked because RAM speeds and timings are actually spec’d by an organization called JEDEC. The top standard speed of DDR2 today is 800MHz. Overclockable DDR2 RAM generally runs in the 1,066MHz range, with some pricier modules pushing 1,250MHz. While it’s not necessary to overclock your RAM to overclock your CPU, there are some instances when you will get improved performance if the FSB and RAM run at similar speeds that are closely synced. Some applications will also favor the increased bandwidth of overclocked RAM. Your research will help you determine if this applies to your parts.

Overclocking an OEM Machine

So, you’re ready to crack open your business-class Dell, HP, or Gateway and give it some gusto, eh? Fugetabout it. The overwhelming majority of OEM machines and notebook PCs prevent overclocking to reduce complaints from the chumps who OC recklessly and ruin their machines. Even motherboard brands known for overclocking may be neutered in an OEM machine. Got it? OK, now we’re going to contradict ourselves. Some OEM boxes do overclock. Dell’s XPS and Hewlett-Packard’s Blackbird PCs are designed to overclock. Still, for the most part, overclocking and OEM machines don’t mix.

Next: Overclocking Intel!
Or, skip to Overclocking AMD!

Overclocking Intel

The steps we take to push our Core 2 Extreme QX6700 beyond its 2.66GHz stock speed can be applied to any
modern Intel processor.

Step 1: Back Up Your Data

While the risk of hardware loss is generally very low, there’s always the possibility of OS corruption or data loss.

Step 2: Enter Your BIOS

Get into your BIOS by hitting the Del, F1, or F2 key during boot. The key will vary by motherboard, so check your documentation if you’re not sure what to press. Once in the BIOS, you will need to find the appropriate configuration screens for overclocking. The screens we refer to in our examples are specific to the EVGA 680i SLI motherboard—they will differ from BIOS to BIOS. Your mobo manual or an online search can provide guidance, but often you just need to dig around.

Step 3: Goose Your CPU's Multiplier

One way to overclock your Intel CPU is to increase its multiplier—if it’s unlocked, which is true for any Extreme-class Intel processor. The downside to doing a multiplier-only overclock is that there is very little granularity. Taking a 2.66GHz Core 2 Extreme QX6700 from its stock 10x multiplier to 12x jumps you all the way to 3.2GHz. If you want to hit 3.1GHz, a multiplier overclock won’t let you do it. Try increasing your CPU’s multiplier just a notch or two (in our BIOS, the multiplier setting is in Advanced Chipset Features, System Clocks). Then reboot your system and see how it runs. If your system crashes or won’t start, see Step 7.

Step 4: Increase your Front-Side Bus Speed

The other, more likely, way to overclock your Intel CPU is through the front-side bus. By bumping the FSB beyond its stock 800MHz or 1,066MHz, you increase your CPU’s clock speed. On the majority of CPUs, this will be the sole overclocking option, as only the most expensive Intel chips are unlocked. On our EVGA 680i board, we went into Advanced Chipset Features, FSB & Memory Config.

Here, we set the FSB Memory Clock Mode to Unlinked. This effectively separates the RAM clocks from the front-side bus. (If your chipset doesn’t allow you to unlink the RAM, you will need to choose an FSB-to-RAM speed ratio; make sure your choice keeps you within your RAM’s spec. See Step 6 for more info.) Increase your FSB by just 20MHz increments. Reboot with each increase to see if your machine will boot (if your system crashes or fails to reboot, see Step 7). With the multiplier set at its stock 10x, we pushed our 2.66GHz Core 2 to 3GHz by increasing the FSB speed from its stock 1,066MHz to 1,200MHz.

Step 5: Add Some Voltage

We wanted to go beyond the 3GHz we achieved, but our attempts at pushing the FSB further made our system unstable. There’s still hope for more speed if we increase our CPU’s voltage. In our BIOS’s Advanced Chipset Features, System Voltages screen, we can increase the CPU voltage, the chipset voltage, and the memory voltage, in addition to the voltage of a few other parts. By pushing the CPU voltage of our early-rev 2.66GHz Core 2 Extreme QX6700 from 1.11 volts to 1.39 volts, we’re able to push the FSB up to 1,333MHz and achieve a stable 3.2GHz CPU speed. How much voltage is safe? It’s difficult to say, as the number differs among CPUs and motherboards. We recommend that you troll forums and overclocking databases to see how far people are going with individual chips. We can’t give general recommendations on voltage as each CPU has different specs and anything over stock could nuke your chip.

Step 6: To Overclock RAM or Not?

So you’re satisfied that the CPU is running far above its rated speed, but now you want to overclock the RAM. As we noted above, our nForce 680i board offers the option to run the RAM linked or unlinked. Linking the RAM sets the RAM speed as a ratio of the front-side bus’s clocked speed. The ratios are determined by the chipset, and in our case, we could choose between FSB: memclock ratios of 1:1, 5:4, 3:2 or Sync mode, which is fractionally equivalent to running at a 2:1 ratio.

Picking any of the settings will change the RAM speed. For example, if you push your FSB to 1,066MHz and choose a 1:1 ratio, your RAM speed will hit 1,066MHz—if you’re using overclockable memory (see RAM section on page 24). If you’re not using overclockable RAM, your box will probably just hard lock. A 5:4 ratio would give you 853MHz, 3:2 generates 711MHz, and Sync gives you 533MHz. Which is better? Some overclockers report that linked RAM gives better performance than unlinked. But you’ll have to test your system by running apps you typically use to determine which setting is the most stable and provides the best performance for your needs.

Step 7: Beep! Beep!

No, your system isn’t asking you where the Dagobah system is. That constant beeping means your overclock failed. With some motherboards, simply powering down by unplugging the system from the wall or switching off the PSU for a few seconds will get you back into the BIOS. In some cases, you’ll need to reset the system’s CMOS by cutting power and then throwing the CMOS-clear jumper or removing and then reinserting the coin-cell battery.

Step 8: Test It!

Just because you booted into the OS doesn’t put you in the clear. You should now stress-test the system using Prime95 or another application that really stresses the CPU. You might be tempted to use 3DMark06, but it’s primarily a GPU test, and many overclocked systems that pass 3DMark06 burn-ins will actually fail under heavy CPU loads.

Overclocking Results For Other Intel CPUs
CPU/Core	Stock Speed	Overclocked Speed	Voltage / FSB X Multiplier	Rev / Step
Core 2 Quad Q6700 / Kentsfield	2.66GHz	3.44GHz	1.40 / 343 x 10	B / G0
Core 2 Duo E6300 / Conroe	1.86GHz	2.88GHz	1.50 / 412 x 7	F / B1
Core 2 Duo E4500 / Allendale	2.20GHz	3.30GHz	1.40 / 300 x 11	D / M0
Pentium E2160 / Allendale	1.80GHz	3.37GHz	1.56 / 375 x 9	2 / L2

Performed on an EVGA 680i SLI mobo, 2GB Corsair Dominator 8500 RAM, a PC Power and Cooling 1KW PSU, and standard air cooling.

Next: Overclocking an AMD Chip!
Or, skip to Cooling Your CPU!

Overclocking AMD

While we wait for AMD to launch its new high-end part, we can push its low- and midrange procs, such as the
Athlon 64 X2 6000+ we use here, to new heights.

Step 1: Back Up Your Data

Overclocking is inherently risky, so back up your data. We mean it.

Step 2: Enter your BIOS

Get into your BIOS by hitting the Del, F1, or F2 key during boot. The key will vary by motherboard, so check your documentation if you’re not sure what to press. Once in the BIOS, you will need to find the appropriate configuration screens for overclocking. The screens we refer to in our examples are specific to the Asus M2N32-SLI motherboard, but they will differ from BIOS to BIOS. Your mobo manual or an online search can provide guidance, but often you just need to dig around.

Step 3: Increase your CPU's Multiplier

Your choices for overclocking are determined by your proc. AMD’s FX-grade CPUs, like Intel’s Extreme chips, are unlocked and let you alter their multiplier settings. AMD recently began unlocking its Black Edition procs as a concession to overclockers who have stuck with the platform. Increasing the multiplier makes for a no muss, no fuss overclock. On our Asus M2N32-SLI board, we go into Advanced JumperFree Configuration and find CPU Multiplier. Our Athlon 64 X2 6000+ is locked, and thus can’t exceed its stock setting of 15x. If your chip is unlocked, you can select a higher multiplier. To get an Athlon 64 FX-60 from 2.6GHz to 2.8GHz, you would need to increase the multiplier from 13x to 14x. Next, test your system for stability. If it crashes or won’t boot, see Step 8.

Step 4: Meet the HyperTransport Link

There’s an overclocking alternative to altering a chip’s multiplier setting. If this were an Intel platform, we’d turn our efforts to the front-side bus and be instantly overclocking, but AMD’s design is a little more complicated. You’ll need to futz with the HyperTransport (HT) speed before you overclock. This interface between the CPU and chipset buzzes along at about 1GHz and doesn’t like to get too far out of spec. Often, people who overclock without reducing the HT speed confuse HT instability with CPU instability. To lower the HT link on our M2N32-SLI board, we go into the BIOS and drill down through the Advanced and Chipset menus. There we see a setting for CPU<->NB HT Speed. Our choices are 1 through 5 and Auto. The default is 5x 200, or 1,000MHz. Since this value will increase during the overclock, knocking it back to 4x (800MHz) or even 3x (600MHz) shouldn’t hurt performance. Keep in mind that when you overclock the CPU frequency, you overclock the HT as well. If, for example, you overclock your CPU frequency to 220MHz and are running a 4x multiplier on your HyperTransport link, you’ll actually be running an 880MHz HT. Set it at a lower speed and prepare to overclock.

Step 5: Boost your Frequencies

Now it’s time to overclock that sucker. On our M2N32-SLI board, we go to Advanced, JumperFree Configuration, and open CPU Frequency. There, we’re greeted by settings of 200MHz and up. We can bump the frequency up to 210MHz, which when multiplied by 15x (the CPU’s multiplier setting), gives us an overall speed of 3.1GHz. Another bump up to 220MHz gives us 3.3GHz. We recommend you increase speeds by 10MHz increments, testing for stability after each jump. If your machine crashes or fails to reboot, see Step 8.

Step 6: Add Voltage

In some cases, boosting the voltage to your CPU can help stabilize an overclock that’s crashing. Unfortunately, this is one of the more dangerous aspects of CPU overclocking as overvolting a chip could kill it. On our M2N32-SLI board, we went into Advanced, JumperFree Configuration and changed the CPU voltage from Auto to 1.5 volts. That’s about a tenth of a volt out of spec, but unfortunately for us, it didn’t help us sustain a 3.3GHz clock speed, so we’re stuck at 3.28GHz.

Step 7: RAM Divisors

With AMD CPUs, the RAM is linked to the clock setting, and the Athlon 64’s on-die memory controller supports only whole numbers for memory divisors. So a 3GHz Athlon 64 X2 6000+ can use either a 7 or 8 divisor to generate a signal for the RAM. Unfortunately, 3,000 divided by 7 works out to DDR2/857 and 3,000 divided by 8 works out to DDR2/750. AMD errs on the side of caution, so this processor actually runs the DDR2/800 at 750MHz. But when you overclock, you may inadvertently overclock the RAM further than you suspect. The 3.28GHz we achieved on our M2N32-SLI board, for example, runs the DDR2/800 slightly out of spec at 825MHz. That’s not something to worry about, but if you’re running your chip at much higher speeds than us, you’ll need to make sure the RAM isn’t running beyond what its maker guarantees. To do that, go into Advanced, CPU Configuration, DRAM configuration, and then Memory Clock Frequency. You should select a conservative low speed for now and clock it up after you’ve reached the CPU’s highest speed.

Step 8: It Won't Boot

Don’t be bummed if your machine hard-locks—it’s the only way you’ll learn your CPU’s limits. To get out of the hole, shut off the PSU or pull the plug from the wall for five seconds. Plug it back in and power up the box. Some boards will automatically recover from a bad overclock and let you go back into the BIOS to aim a little lower. If this doesn’t work, you’ll have to power down again, unplug the PSU, and reset the CMOS via a jumper or button, or by pulling and reinserting the coin-cell battery. After five seconds, try booting it again—you should be able to access the BIOS.

Step 9: Test It!

Getting into the OS is about 65 percent of the challenge. You’ll now need to test the machine by pushing the CPU with an intensive workload. We don’t recommend gaming as a test since games are typically GPU-bound. Try a video encode or run Prime95. And if you have a multi- or dual-core processor, run a multithreaded app.

Overclocking Results For Other AMD CPUs
CPU/Core	Stock Speed	Overclocked Speed	Voltage / FSB X Multiplier	Rev / Step
Athlon 64 X2 6400+ / Windsor	3.2GHz	3.43GHz	1.50 / 214 x 16	3 / JH-F3
Athlon 64 X2 6000+ / Windsor	3.0GHz	3.29GHz	1.525 / 218 x 15	3 / JH-F3
Athlon 64 X2 4200+ / Brisbane	2.2GHz	2.73GHz	1.524 / 249 x 11	1 / BH-G1
Athlon 64 X2 BE-2350+ / Brisbane	2.1GHz	2.61GHz	1.55 / 249 x 10.5	1 / BH-G1

Performed on an EVGA 680i SLI mobo, 2GB Corsair Dominator 8500 RAM, a PC Power and Cooling 1KW PSU, and standard air cooling.

Next: Keeping Your CPU Cool!

Keeping your CPU Cool!

Without adequate cooling, your overclocked rig is as good as toast.

Air

It’s hard to get much worse than a stock air cooler for your CPU. That’s not to say there’s anything outright wrong with the fan/heatsink combo that comes with a new CPU—the little guy will likely keep your stock-clocked processor running well within safe operating temperatures.

The minute you start overclocking your processor, however, you’ll be jacking up your thermals to levels a stock cooler can’t handle. Granted, when overclocking, temps will go up with even premium air coolers, but a solid aftermarket device will give you more room to work with. Your initial temperatures will be lower, and they won’t rise as quickly as they would with a stock solution.

While other air coolers have matched the CNPS9700’s effectiveness, none has done so in this small a package.

Our current Lab champion, Zalman’s CNPS9700 ($80, www.zalmanusa.com), has maintained the throne for nearly a year. It uses a copper and aluminum framework to absorb the warmth produced by both Intel and AMD CPUs. The cooler’s 2,800rpm fan emits a tornado-like whoosh when it’s cranked to the max, but it also allows the device to reach epic levels of heat reduction. In fact, we now use the Zalman as a benchmark for other coolers. On the last test we ran, the device took our processor down to 37.5 C during our CPU burn-in test and 22.5 C when idle—a savings of 16.5 C and 9.5 C, respectively, over stock.

Liquid

aftermarket air cooling is a fine way to manage CPU temperatures, but only to a point. Eventually, practicality and performance concerns render air coolers insufficient for OC’d machines. That’s why there’s liquid cooling. Not only can you reach lower temperatures when using a liquid-based setup as opposed to air, but you’ll also benefit from a lower sound profile.

Of course, there’s an obvious caveat: Liquids plus electronics can equal a serious monetary hit if you have to replace hardware that inadvertently gets wet. Installing a water-cooling kit in your rig is a delicate process, and the drama only increases if you’ve never done it before. Sure, you can go with a preassembled liquid-cooling kit, but in our experience, a majority of these units perform on par with—if not worse than—stock air coolers.

Hardcore cooling devices, like this CoolIt Boreas, come with a price—they require you to stuff more and more gear into your case.

The best liquid cooler we’ve found is CoolIT’s Boreas unit ($450, www.coolitsystems.com). A fancier, fatter version of the company’s Eliminator, the Boreas uses 12 thermoelectric modules to rip the heat from your molten tubing into a giant heatsink. Two 12cm fans take care of the rest, allowing the Boreas to beat our FX-60 test bed’s stock cooler by 20 C in idle and 32 C during our burn-in test.

November 2004: Build Your Own PC

The Maximum PC Staff — Mon, 01 Nov 2004 00:00:00 -0600

In the PDF archive of the November 2004 issue, you can find:

Build Your very own PC
The Birth of a CPU
PC Trauma Kit
Awesome Product Reviews, including the Logitech Z-5500 5.1 Speaker System!
Ask the Doctor
Rig of the Month
The Watchdog
And a whole lot more!

Click the frickin' huge cover image to the right to download the PDF archive today!

March 2004: The Perfect Wireless Network

The Maximum PC Staff — Mon, 01 Mar 2004 00:00:00 -0600

In the PDF archive of the March 2004 issue, you can find:

Join the wireless revolution!
P4 Prescott, all you need to know
Your one all end all Guide to RAM
Awesome Product Reviews, including AVG Anti-Virus and Adobe Photoshop CS!
Ask the Doctor
Rig of the Month
The Watchdog
And a whole lot more!

Click the enormous cover image to the right to download the PDF archive today!