Maximum PC kick ass RSS Feed

Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 X2

Will Smith — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 14:00:00 -0500

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

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

Like its 4870-powered predecessor, the 4850 X2 sports ATI’s advanced video decode acceleration, allowing you to view fully accelerated picture-in-picture Blu-ray discs. It’s fully compatible with multiple-monitor displays, and we love that this board features four DVI ports for multi-mon madness.

In our performance testing, the 4850 X2 unseated the fastest single-GPU videocards, the GeForce GTX 280 and Radeon HD 4870, in almost every benchmark. The exception to the rule was Crysis at high visual-quality settings and high resolution. When running at 1920x1200 with 4x antialiasing and the visual-quality settings cranked to Very High, we hit the 4850 X2’s memory bandwidth wall. Despite running at a higher clock speed than the 4870-family boards, the GDDR3 on the 4850 transfers half as much data per clock cycle.

With a street price that’s less than $300, the 4850 X2 is a great deal for owners of lower-resolution 22-inch monitors. However, if you use a 24-inch or 30-inch panel, it’s probably worth ponying up for a card with a peppier memory pipeline.

Razer DeathAdder

Will Smith — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 17:24:38 -0500

We love the shape of this mouse—it’s comfortable for even the longest session—and the DeathAdder just gets better from there. The sensor delivers pixel-perfect accuracy, and we love that the driver lets us adjust everything from X and Y sensitivity to the lights on the mouse. We’re still not sold on the idea of constantly updating firmware for a mere mouse, but Razer’s built a highly compelling rodent with the DeathAdder.

The DeathAdder’s matte finish and uber-comfortable design let even the sweatiest gamers maintain pixel-perfect control during heated deathmatches.

Razer eschewed the standard laser sensor for an old-school 1800dpi 3G optical sensor. Our testing showed that this third-gen optical sensor offers virtually indistinguishable performance compared to laser sensors. Now, even mouse sensors have their own fanboys—some hardcore gamers swear by old-style optical sensors; others prefer their mice with lasers.

But regardless of your personal preference, we think you’ll find that the DeathAdder’s sensor kicks ass. The mouse itself is extremely comfortable, even for extended gaming sessions, and the buttons are perfectly placed for palm-grip gamers. Gamers who use a claw grip may find this particular mouse a touch narrow. Combined with the uber-comfortable matte finish, the DeathAdder rivals the Logitech G5 for comfort.

Our only complaint is that the DeathAdder offers too much granular control for quick in-game sensitivity adjustment. Instead of dedicated sensitivity switching buttons that toggle between two or three settings, you must bind one of the mouse’s five buttons to on-the-fly sensitivity adjustment in the Razer control panel, and then use the scroll wheel to hone in on the desired sensitivity. If you don’t adjust sensitivity on-the-fly, this shouldn’t pose a problem for you. But if you do, it could be a deal-breaker.

Dream Machine '08

The Maximum PC Staff — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 12:30:00 -0500

A Dream Machine graced the inaugural issue of Maximum PC back in 1998, and the tradition of building an annual no-holds-barred PC beast has continued unabated since then. True to form, this year’s rig is the most audacious, most powerful dream rig to date. Equipped with no fewer than eight processing cores, four graphics cores, and five hard drives, DM2008 is probably also our most controversial build. But as Lando said, it’s not our fault.

In the old days, we would just pick the very best hardware available. But those were simpler times, when parts vendors all got along and their sole mission was to provide you with badass gear. Sadly, the stakes are so high today that politics has an undue influence on hardware configurations.

The most obvious evidence of this is the ongoing war between Intel and Nvidia. Both companies try to downplay the tension, but this war of words, drivers, and marketing puts hardware enthusiasts in a pickle. We originally had our sights set on Nvidia’s hot new GPU for this year’s Dream Machine and even prepared ourselves with an “SLI-ready” motherboard. But the two GeForce GTX 280 cards wouldn’t pair up in SLI on our Intel board, despite its Nvidia nForce chips.

That doesn’t mean Maximum PC’s 10th anniversary Dream Machine is compromised. Far from it. If anything, sidestepping the political and technological land mines has made this machine even better. Even more powerful. And, well, even more intriguing, as our graphics cards are so new that you haven’t even heard of them.

Interested? Read on to find out what’s inside the world’s best PC.

Next: The Guts and the Glory! >

No Guts, No Glory

Click to see how we built a better monster

Processors: Two Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9775 CPU

One is the bomb, two are bombastic

Quad core? Nerd, puhlease—that’s so 2008. Next year will be all about CPUs with eight threads. Fortunately, we’re already there with a pair of Intel 3.2GHz Core 2 Extreme QX9775s. Between these most insane of Intel’s Core 2 chips, we get eight cores available to the operating system at a nice round 4GHz. Is that overkill? Perhaps, as you probably won’t find more than a couple dozen apps that will use all of these cores today. But let’s not forget multitasking—you know, like encoding an H.264 video in the background while playing a game and also compiling some code and running a few Folding@Home sessions. You can have all that and your cake, too, with the QX9775s. It’s even possible—dare we say it—that applications optimized for more than quad cores would benefit more from a pair of QX9775s than they would from Intel’s upcoming Nehalem. Time will tell.

Memory: 8GB Corsair FB-DIMM

So much RAM your applications won’t know what to do with it

Most consumers have never been exposed to “fully buffered” DIMMs, as the memory is strictly intended for workstations. To sum it up, it’s a hybrid of serial and parallel interfaces that uses an advanced memory buffer in the module to let machines run in excess of 128GB of RAM. The penalty is latency and tremendous heat from the AMB, so we had to use a Corsair Dominator fan to keep the modules from spontaneously igniting.

PSU: PC Power and Cooling Turbo Cool 1200

A true 1,200W PSU that makes a mockery of many ‘1,000-watt’ units

Most 1,000-watt PSUs would crumple under the strain of our Dream Machine’s loadout, so we turned to our old standby: PC Power and Cooling. Its custom-wired Turbo Cool 1200 gives us more than enough power to run all of our hardware, and with the PC Power and Cooling name behind it, we know the unit won’t quit on us.

Motherboard: Intel D5400XS

The mother of all, um, motherboards

Intel’s original V8 S5000XVN motherboard was essentially a relabeled dual-Xeon board pitched as an enthusiast board, which it wasn’t. Intel took the lessons it learned from the V8 and created the much improved Skulltrail D5400XS board. Gone are the eight FB-DIMM slots and SAS features. In are CrossFire support, overclocking features, and a more traditional, more capable (for most folks) Intel ICH9R south bridge. The cherry on top is the D5400XS’s added support for SLI via the board’s two nForce 100 chips. That makes it the only platform that will run either CrossFire or SLI out of the box with public drivers. Awesome, right? It was until Nvidia decided to not support its latest generation of cards on Skulltrail. Why? It’s this damned war between Nvidia and Intel. And frankly, the situation sucks. If the parties involved ever get their heads out of their butts, the D5400XS will rightly take its place as the holy grail of platforms.

Cooling: A Custom Water-Cooling Extravaganza!

Our home-brewed cooling kit offers maximum performance and minimum noise

The dimensions of the Blackbird chassis limited our options for water cooling this year’s Dream Machine. We opted for a Black Ice Pro2 Xflow radiator, as it’s one of the slimmer two-fan radiators we’ve tested. The reservoir is the same model from last year’s Dream Machine, Danger Den’s single-bay tank.

The entire assembly is outfitted with half-inch tubing and fittings. A super-powerful DD12V-D5 pump ensures a speedy flow rate for our fluid, Feser One clear UV-reactive coolant. This, in addition to our two D-TEK FuZion v2 CPU blocks, ensures that the processors will stay well within a healthy thermal range as we push this machine to its outer limits. Two silent Enermax Everest 12cm fans maintain low coolant temperatures.

Next: GPUs, Sound, Optical, and Storage! >

Videocards: Two ATI Radeon 4870 X2s

Double the performance you’d get from a GeForce GTX 280 on Skulltrail

Nvidia’s decision to not support Skulltrail with its brand-new GeForce GTX 280 left us with the option of using a single GeForce GTX 280 or switching to a single-proc system that would let us use SLI. Instead, we chose option three. And that was to talk to ATI. The timing couldn’t have been better because ATI was willing to share a card so secret it didn’t even have a name yet. We kid you not. These dual-GPU cards were so fresh off the fab that ATI was still deciding whether to dub them Radeon HD 4870 X2 or 4970 X2. (The company settled on 4870 X2.) We only cared that we got ’em. And they’re fast. In fact, on Skulltrail, they’re more than twice as fast in 3DMark Vantage as a single GeForce GTX 280.

Soundcard: Creative Labs Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium

Discrete audio is making a comeback, but as far as we’re concerned, it never left

Onboard audio has grown by leaps and bounds, but we’re still suckers for clean, pristine-sounding discrete audio. It doesn’t hurt if you get hardware acceleration as well, but even we’ll admit that we have plenty of CPU cycles to spare. Creative’s brand-spanking-new Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty features a redesigned DSP to natively support PCI Express. Also new is Dolby Digital encoding (finally) and a pair of optical SPDIFs.

Optical Drive: LG Super Multi Blue GBW-H20L

A jack of all optical trades

With LG’s GBW-H20L Blu-ray burner, we don’t need a separate drive to get decent DVD write speeds—as we did in last year’s Dream Machine. Back then, the top Blu-ray burner was rated at a pathetic 8x for DVD+R. The GBW-H20L not only boasts the fastest BD-R speeds currently available (6x), but it’s 16x DVD+R rating is also quite respectable. To get the full rundown on this drive’s abilities, see the review on page 89.

Speakers: Axiom Audio Audiobyte

Because audio is every bit as important as video

Speaker manufacturers have all but abandoned the PC market when it comes to surround sound, but that’s not why we chose to pair Axiom Audio’s Audiobyte self-powered speakers and EPZero passive subwoofer with this year’s Dream Machine.

This 2.1-channel system sounds absolutely divine with games, movies, and music, delivering the sonic clarity and high resolution our ears crave. High-end audio products are never cheap, but the Audiobyte’s $530 price tag is fully justified. Reviewed July 2008.

Storage: Two Western Digital Velociraptors + Three Samsung D103UJs

This is the ultimate combination of performance and capacity, period

High-performance storage has split along two distinct lines: speed and size. On the one hand, there’s Western Digital’s Velociraptor (reviewed on page 86). It’s the fastest drive we’ve ever tested, but it offers just 300GB of storage space. And then there’s Samsung’s HD103UJ (reviewed May 2008), which combines a terabyte of storage with top-of-the-line performance for its size.

It breaks our hearts to have to choose between the two… so we picked both. We’re running two Revision B Velociraptors in a RAID 0 array. There’s our speed. For our capacity needs, we’re going with three HD103UJ drives in a RAID 5 setup. This gives us two terabytes of combined storage while offering some level of data protection should one drive fail.

Next: Operating Systems, Case, Monitor, and Peripherals! >

Operating Systems: Windows Vista Ultimate x64 Edition + Windows XP Professional

Between the two OSes, we're covering all our bases

We’ve come down pretty hard on Windows Vista over the last 18 months, but the OS has shown major improvements in stability, reliability, and performance, especially since the launch of SP1. While we’re infinitely more confident in Vista now than we were in 2007, we’re still not quite ready to roll solo with the OS. That said, XP isn’t perfect. Since 32-bit XP caps out at 4GB of usable memory, fully half of our Dream Machine’s RAM is useless. We’ll take the best of both worlds, thank you.

Case: HP Blackbird 002

Why throw the baby out with the bathwater?

We were lukewarm on the HP Blackbird PC we reviewed in our Holiday 2007 issue, but we’re big fans of its one-of-a-kind chassis. The heavy aluminum case is well constructed and much of the electrical wiring for its features—such as front-panel USB and FireWire connections, a pop-up 15-in-1 card reader, and external LED lighting—is kept hidden from sight.

The hot-swap drive bays on the case’s interior are a treat to work with. A 9.2cm fan runs air across all five hard drive slots. This nod to thermal management is replicated on the case’s ceiling, where two 12cm fans churn the air overtop your heated motherboard components.

HP will sell 25 of its Blackbird cases on a first come, first serve basis beginning September 1. The cost is $1,000 (plus tax and shipping). To order, call 877-776-4752.

Chroming the Blackbird

The Dream Machine is all about going the extra mile—in parts and aesthetics. To give HP’s Blackbird case our own unique stamp, we had the whole thing nickel plated. Computer Choppers does all the hard work and offers a selection of more than 70 plating and finish options, from chrome to copper to platinum. We chose smoked nickel for our rig, which looks a lot like chrome, only smokier and more awesome.

Before the plating is applied, the case is disassembled. Then the parts to be plated are stripped with nitric acid and immersed in a zincate solution so the metal sticks. It’s a complex process that can be made more difficult depending on the quality and/or porosity of the material being plated. Waiting on the finished case was the most nail-biting aspect of building this year’s Dream Machine— we didn’t receive it until the day the feature was scheduled to be photographed! Luckily, HP had sent us another case, which we used to work out all the building issues in the interim.

The cost of having an entire rig plated runs from $5,000 to $10,000, depending on the plating metal.

Mouse and Keyboard: Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 + Logitech G5 Rev. 2

This input duo adorns the desktop of many a PC power user.

When you spend as much time at a keyboard as we do, you need a plank that’s as comfy as it is durable. That’s why we chose the Natural Ergonomic 4000 from Microsoft for this year’s Dream Machine. Likewise, your mouse needs to deliver pixel-accurate gaming performance and comfort to last through those marathon WoW sessions. The G5 does that and then some.

Keyboard reviewed March 2006. G5 mouse reviewed Holiday 2005.

Monitor: Gateway XHD3000

You won't find a better-looking, better-performing or better-connecting 30-inch LCD

We’ve seen a number of 30-inch monitors suffer from splotchy backlighting, color-tracking issues, and poor presets that introduce problems to the picture. But not the Gateway XHD3000, our big monitor of choice for nearly a year. This 2560x1600 display does it all. Its picture is vibrant, its grayscale range is impressive, and its bevy of connection options coupled with touch-sensitive interface buttons make swapping between your inputs quick and easy. Trust us, you’ll want to hook up every device you have to this rock-star display. Reviewed December 2007.

Next: The Numbers Don't Lie! >

The Numbers Don't Lie

In the end, all this hardware amounts to one hell of a fast machine. And not just in theory—as in, next year when such and such comes out, this rig’s power will be evident (although we do admit that some software optimizations will be needed).
In the here and now, we routinely saw performance benefits with many of today’s applications.

For comparison, we put Dream Machine against our standard zero-point 2.67GHz Core 2 Quad Q6700, GeForce 8800 GTX box—and DM pretty much flattened it with double- and triple-digit spreads. While a sub-3GHz quad-core box might sound quaint today, we’ll remind you that our zero-point PC actually gave a new 3.5GHz Core 2 Duo gaming PC that we reviewed in August a pretty good drubbing. So it’s not exactly a slouch.

Still, perhaps that machine’s not the most telling measure of the Dream Machine’s fury. For a more worthy contender, we turned to the CyberPower Gamer Ultimate SLI Quad PC that we reviewed in July. With its 4GHz Core 2 Extreme QX9770 CPU, 4GB of DDR3, and a pair of GeForce 9800 GX2 cards, the system rocked all those that came before it and we knew this mean machine would be difficult to overcome.

But DM did it. At least in some tests. We saw Dream Machine rip past the CyberPower box in both Premiere Pro CS3 and ProShow Producer by 23 and 36 percent, respectively. That’s nothing to turn your nose up at. In other tests, Dream Machine did well, but not spectacularly. In Photoshop CS3— not exactly the most threaded application in the world—Dream Machine scored a near tie with CyberPower, taking just two more seconds to complete our test. Since Photoshop doesn’t exploit our second proc, and honestly, barely pushes a single quad-core CPU to the edge, this is about what we’d expect from PCs that operate at the same clock speed.

In our MainConcept benchmark, DreamMachine was about 10 percent slower. Why? The encoder that’s used in MainConcept Reference is license-limited to single-processor support. Multi-processor support is available only with the professional version, which on the Dream Machine cut the encode time in half, by the way.

In our Unreal Tournament 3 Direct X 10 benchmark, DM’s pair of Radeons didn’t disappoint, cranking out 145 fps. Mind you, our normal benchmarks are designed to measure system-level performance. They’re not meant for pure GPU analysis—thus, we don’t run with antialiasing or massive amounts of filtering enabled. Still, we saw almost double the numbers that a pair of GeForce 8800 GTX cards could produce and 12 percent more than quad SLI cards mustered. With AA and aniso cranked up, the Radeons really start to strut their stuff. When we were still deciding what cards to use in DM, we also ran a GeForce GTX 280 in 3DMark Vantage. A single GTX 280 belts out 9,668 in the GPU tests—very impressive. But not as impressive as the 19,014 that our two Radeons put out. For all you 3D Vantage fans, Dream Machine’s overall score was 20,539. Not bad.

Of course, this leads us to our most heartbreaking test: Crytek’s Crysis. We expected the Radeons to crush everything in this one benchmark, but they just didn’t perform. Why? First, as we mentioned earlier, our system benchmarks are designed to reflect normal system use, not act as GPU tests—AA is not enabled nor is tons of filtering. However, we do run at an all-out 1920x1200 resolution. That’s enough to make most systems whimper. While CyberPower’s Quad SLI rig spit out 55 fps, DM was chugging along at 26 fps—about the same performance we got from two GeForce 8800 GTX cards. What the frak? We got ATI on the horn and learned that the likely culprits were driver and OS optimizations—or rather, lack thereof. ATI didn’t expect to make the cards public for several more months. The company has done some optimization for the X48 chipset, but Skulltrail’s 5400 chipset wasn’t on the top of the list. The company is still sorting out some issues with how Windows Vista handles ATI’s AFR rendering. So this is what we’re talking about when we say future performance will come through improved drivers.

But what choice did we have? We sure as hell weren’t going to participate in this silly battle between the CPU and GPU camps. As true believers in pure PC power, we weren’t going to betray that mission statement in our 10th anniversary issue—thus, this machine marks our commitment to having it all.

Vista 64-Bit Benchmarks

	Zero Point	Dream Machine 2008
Premiere Pro CS3	1,260 sec	547 sec
Photoshop CS3	150 sec	80 sec
ProShow	1,415 sec	577 sec
MainConcept	1,872 sec	1,353 sec
Crysis	26 fps	26 fps
Unreal Tournament 3	83 fps	145 fps

Best scores bolded. Our current desktop test bed consists of a quad-core 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Quad Q6700, 2GB of Corsair DDR2/800 RAM on an EVGA 680 SLI motherboard, two EVGA GeForce 8800 GTX cards in SLI mode, a Western Digital 150GB Raptor and 500GB Caviar hard drives, an LG GGC-H20L optical drive, a Sound Blaster X-Fi soundcard, a PC Power and Cooling Silencer 750 Quad PSU, and Windows Vista Home Premium 64 bit.

Samsung 245T

David Murphy — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 14:00:00 -0500

It’s no secret that the expensive Samsung 245T hosts an S-PVA panel beneath its slim black exterior. But this display’s performance is certainly worth the price. The 245T offers a stunning picture for its class, trumping our longtime favorite 24-inch panel, Dell’s 2407WFP, and even its latest rev, the 2408WFP.

This isn't a perfect display, but it wins the fight.

This 1920x1200 display boasts a 97-percent color gamut and the effect is clear. The 245T dishes out notably vibrant blues, reds, and greens, and its color saturation remains strong at even very light levels. To us, the display’s colors feel just right: crisp and bold without any hint of oversaturation. But even if you disagree, the monitor comes with a number of preset options for tweaking the coloration to your exact preferences. We found success using the Mild preset, as Normal made images appear drab and Brilliant made our images look like a supernova.

We were equally impressed by the 245T’s range of grayscales. The display is able to reproduce more details as its darker grayscales turn to black than any other monitor we’ve ever tested. Its light grayscales are similarly expansive. The 245T’s healthy grayscale range translates into superior detail on high-definition images and movies.

Our criticisms of this monitor are few, but strong: We dislike the 245T’s optional dynamic contrast feature, as it treated us to a healthy dose of image fades whenever our movie of choice, V for Vendetta, switched between scenes of varying brightness. Nor did we like the 245T’s lack of single-button contrast adjustments. You can adjust the monitor’s brightness, but not the contrast, without having to traverse a number of OCD screens.

The 245T supports just about any input connection you might use, including VGA, DVI, component, and HDMI. You can swivel, tilt, and raise the monitor at your leisure, and even flip the whole panel to portrait mode. Five included USB ports sweeten the deal, but we don’t need any more convincing. With features as strong as its picture, the Samsung 245T is the monitor to beat in its size class.

A Decade of Kick Ass

Katherine Stevenson — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 14:00:00 -0500

From Deschutes to Penryn, from Voodoo2 to GX2, from floppy drives to SSDs, the definition of pure PC power has changed radically over the last decade, and Maximum PC has been there—hands-on and no holding back—helping computer enthusiasts make sense of it.

In honor of those 10 eventful years, we take a look back at some of the key moments in the magazine’s history, hear from some of the editors who have been there along the way, and take a wild guess at how another 10 years might shape the computing landscape. Strap on your sneaks, folks, we’re taking a walk down memory lane.

10 Things We Got Right

It's nice to look back and see that we sometimes know what we're talking about

Athlon 64: You can call it jumping on the bandwagon, but we call it knowing a winner when we see one. We lauded the Athlon 64 with award after award and high praise for good reason: This chip kicked ass and took names for years.
Core 2: The AMD fanboys tried to blame it on bias, but we knew—and history has proved us out—that the Core 2 marked the return of Intel.
Dual-Core Processing: It’s hard to believe now, but there was resistance to the dual-core movement from folks who thought it was silly, given that applications and games weren’t multithreaded. Ahem, sounds a little like the people who promote dual cores over quad cores now, doesn’t it?
DirectX 9: DirectX has changed the face of PC gaming, and DirectX 9 is the most successful version Microsoft has ever released. With powerful support for programmable hardware, DirectX 9 delivered killer graphics at a reasonable frame rate, using hardware that was readily available at launch.
Windows XP: When it was released back in 2001, we bestowed XP with our highest honor—a perfect 10 verdict. Our appreciation of the OS has only grown now that we’re faced with its flawed follow-up.
Water Cooling: Back in the day, people said cooling hot hardware with liquids was crazy—now it’s a craze.
Ripping CDs and DVDs: People scoffed at the time it initially took to rip music and movies, but we didn’t let that stop us. We saw back then how important it was to take control of our media, whether it’s to stream our library around the home (and across the Internet) or just to load our favorite movies and music onto a pocket-size media player.
DRM: It was obvious to us that music shackled with copy protection would alienate consumers. Finally, that’s become obvious to the record companies. Keep fighting the good fight!
Hardware Physics: Ageia talked a big game about its PhysX PPU (physics processing unit), but we couldn’t get behind a card that cost $300, ate up a PCI slot, and had only novelty games supporting it. Nor could anyone else, apparently.
Firefox: In our January 2004 Softy Awards, we called Firebird (later to become Firefox) “nothing short of revelatory,” and boy has that held true. Indeed, at its release, Firefox 3 had the most downloads of any software in a 24-hour period (8 million!).

Next: Brian Lam was once our lowly intern,
and we were wrong about some things! >

Humble Beginnings

Brian Lam, former intern and current editor in chief of Gizmodo

Long before I had my job at Gizmodo, I was a Maximum PC intern who couldn’t write a review or run a benchmark. I learned those things from Will Smith, but I also learned how important the right voice is when writing about tech. Before there were snarky blogs, there was Maximum PC.

The point, though, wasn’t to be an ass. I think. The point was to turn the trade mags on their heads and cut through the BS and jargon, to inform without being boring. You know, actually write to people as if they were your friends. That irreverent tone complements how technophiles feel about tech: Because it’s fun thinking about how to squeeze a few more frames out of your hardware, reading and writing about such things should be fun as well.

I also learned how to order lunch, lift heavy boxes, and pack and ship a PC back to a manufacturer—and make it look like it broke during transit.

10 Things We Got Wrong

Yes, over the years we’ve made a few bad calls

Vista: We hardly gave Vista a glowing review, but given the magnitude of the botched launch—from crashing Nvidia drivers to certifying Intel’s 915 chipset as Vista-capable—Microsoft got off too easy.
GeForce 5800: On paper, this was Nvidia’s first DirectX 9 GPU. In reality, the company didn’t ship a DirectX 9-capable GPU for almost a full year after ATI. To anyone who bought a GeForce 5800, we’re sorry. You not only missed the full glory of Half-Life 2 but also got stuck with a bum card.
IBM 75GXP ‘Deathstar': It debuted as the largest, fastest IDE hard drive of its time, and we were smitten. But high failure rates for both the original models and their replacements left us feeling foolish.
TrueX Optical Drives: Kenwood’s CD burners were fast—when they worked. We looked past the original 40x drive’s myriad problems and gave subsequent models the nod, only to learn the whole lot of them were lemons.
BTX: In 2004, we believed the ATX formfactor was on its way out and that by now our motherboards would look very different. Instead, BTX has languished in obscurity.
Linux: Little did we know that the quirky OS favored by a fringe element would take off as it has, to become the trusty port in the storm of Microsoft’s dominance.
Pentium 4: Put that coffee down, P4. Coffee’s for closers. Unfortunately, who knew that the Pentium 4 would never seal the deal? Even worse, who could have seen that Intel, the king of the processor, would hit a brick wall at 1,000 mph and turn the Pentium 4 into one big dud.
Direct RDRAM: Kicking RDRAM under the bus seemed like the thing to do years ago, but if we could take it all back, we would. We’re now convinced that RDRAM’s serial interface was the right way to go, not DDR.
Tablet PC: The prospect of pen-based computing seemed awesome, and Bill Gates himself was backing the project. Unfortunately, five years later, we’re still waiting on the cheap, powerful Tablet PCs we were promised.
DirectX 10/Games for Windows: We feel like suckers for buying into Microsoft’s hype. DirectX 10 hasn’t delivered any significant innovation, and Games for Windows has turned out to be a joke.

Next: The old guard strolls down memory lane!

12—Not 10—Years of Kickassedness

Jon Phillips, current editorial director, former editor in chief (Oct 1999 to Dec 2003)

September 1998 marks the 10th anniversary of Maximum PC, but actually the 12th anniversary of our vaunted Kick Ass award. As our most devoted readers already know, the Kick Ass award first appeared in the premier issue of boot magazine, which we published for two years before renaming it Maximum PC.

In boot, we established much of the content and attitude that perseveres in Maximum PC today: our no-BS product ratings, our exacting attention to technical detail, our humor and spontaneity—and, of course, our overarching credo that if you’re going to build a PC, you should always build the absolute best rig possible. In many ways, the very name of the Kick Ass award embodies much of what Maximum PC stands for: exuberance, enthusiasm, excess, and just plain-old best-of-class awesomeness. That’s what we like in our PC hardware, and that’s what we’ve done our best to provide in the last 120-plus issues.

10 Things Maximum PC is Older Than

White LEDs
Wi-Fi
The Segway
Bad Star Wars movies
Reality television
64-bit desktop operating systems
Napster
Department of Homeland Security
The Nahasapeemapetilon Octuplets
Splenda

Cue Blooper Reel and Laugh Track

Gordon Mah Ung, most senior editor and staff curmudgeon

My days with Maximum PC go all the way back to the beginning with “Big Daddy” Dosland and the legendary “Handy Andy” Sanchez, who set the bar for editorial excellence. In those days, hazing new staffers was the norm, and my first experience was upgrading the POS desktop business-class PC that our company provided us.

Would I get access to those oh-so-sweet Voodoo2 cards in SLI? Hell no! As the low man on the totem pole, I got a Voodoo Rush. Try to get a Rush to work with a machine that has integrated graphics that you can’t disable in Windows 95!

In those days, just as today, the Maximum PC Lab was no clean room where some disconnected technician tested hardware and handed you a report. Everything was hands, eyes, and ears on. Certainly one of the most embarrassing incidents was when we ran airflow tests using a fog machine. The good news is that the test worked well, and we were able to visually record the stagnant areas in a case. The bad news is that smoke alarms can’t tell the difference between smoke particles and fog particles. You can imagine the chewing out we got from the facilities manager after the entire building was evacuated and a fire truck rolled up.

Speaker testing is always a challenge—especially when the Lab was located directly next to an office full of lawyers and accountants. If you think editors are cranky, imagine a pissed-off lawyer/CPA hybrid after you’ve fired up Megadeth on eight Klipsch subs in parallel!

In another memorable speaker incident, former editor Josh Norem literally blew up a 5.1 speaker set doing frequency sweeps. Certain it was a fluke, we had a second set delivered and this time videotaped the test. Sure enough, we were able to capture the tweeter exploding with a puff of smoke.

Breaking hardware has always been a specialty of the Maximum PC staff. We could fill a freight car with all the carnage. Of course, in the old days you actually had to work at doing damage. Today, with liquid cooling, hardware gets waterboarded on a regular basis.

Next: An interactive timeline! Fancy!

A Brief History of Time

Western Digital Velociraptor

David Murphy — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 11:00:00 -0500

We’ve seen this day coming for a long time. There was no way that Western Digital was going to sit back and let other manufacturers usurp the Raptor’s place at the top of the storage speed charts. Consider the rule of the speedy terabyte drives a hiccup on the timeline. The Raptor is back: upgraded, renamed, and… physically smaller.

Don't try to pull the drive off its IcePack and install it in your notebook. The Velociraptor's power requirements will prevent it from running.

To maximize the Velociraptor’s speeds, Western Digital has shrunk the size of the hard drive to 2.5 inches. This seems counterintuitive, given that Samsung has been able to achieve a tremendous combination of speed and storage with its 3.5-inch drives. Western Digital’s smaller form allows the Velociraptor to consume less power than its 3.5-inch counterparts, and the drive heads don’t have to travel as far to reach the data. The downside is that these smaller platters will always trail in data/platter.

But consumers and OEM manufacturers buy Raptor drives for a single reason—and it isn’t storage capacity. Given the Velociraptor’s read and write speeds, its 300GB capacity is actually a bonus. The Velociraptor is twice as spacious as its Raptor predecessor and significantly faster.

We can safely crown the Velociraptor the fastest consumer-grade hard drive on the market. Its two 150GB platters spin at 10,000rpm, creating an 18 percent improvement in our PCMark test over Samsung’s HD103UJ terabyte drive. In our synthetic HD Tach benchmark, the Velociraptor beat out the HD103UJ’s read times by 11.6MB/s. The difference shot up to 15.6MB/s when comparing the drives’ write speeds.

This Velociraptor is Western Digital’s second iteration in the line, coming a scant few months after the initial launch of the product. Why the refresh? The first version of the hard drive centered the drive atop the device’s IcePack mounting frame, rendering the drive impossible to use in a hotswap interface. Reps at Western Digital have told us that this first line of Velociraptor drives is scheduled for extinction. The company will phase out these drives in favor of the revision B units unless consumers clamor for the original build—an unlikely scenario.

If you want the fastest consumer-grade hard drive on the market, the Velociraptor is it, with twice the capacity of its Raptor predecessor and a 59 percent speed advantage. If we could ding Western Digital for shafting early adopters with the hotswap issue, we would. But the company’s speedy fix has ensured our praise. You might be able to find a drive with a better price-per-gigabyte ratio, but certainly not one that’s faster.

Mass Effect

Norman Chan — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 19:23:06 -0500

Fans of Star Wars and Star Trek finally have a role-playing game that’s worthy of their love. Mass Effect takes the most compelling themes and ideas of both franchises and mind-melds them into one of the best science fiction games we’ve ever played.

Character feats like Lift and Warp let you throw enemies off-guard. Just don't call them Force powers

After fleshing out our digital avatar with the robust character customization engine (we created a bad-ass female war hero), we dived into an engaging story that put the fate of the galaxy in our hands.

The primary quest charged us with investigating the reemergence of a long-lost race of machines that wiped out an entire species of advanced aliens 50,000 years ago. Through the 20-hour campaign, we explored numerous planets, resolved alien conspiracies, and forged relationships with a believable cast of NPC allies.

Mass Effect’s rich selection of side quests helps flesh out the main story, and we loved the innovative conversation system. Dialogue trees are presented in an intuitive radial selection circle that lets us steer conversations in a plethora of directions depending on the tone of our language—all the characters are amazingly voice-acted as well.

When talking couldn’t get the job done, we turned to the fast-paced combat system, which actually requires some skill. Aiming with a mouse helped us survive firefights, and the newly designed PC combat interface is much better than the Xbox 360 version’s. It’s too bad the inventory system hasn’t been improved—rifling through hundreds of weapon upgrades in the equipment menu is a drag.

But we forgot about the game’s little annoyances after being immersed in the gorgeous high-resolution graphics—Mass Effect runs smoothly at 2560x1600 resolution (though turning off the “film grain” option is recommended).
Mass Effect’s epic story is both moving and fulfilling; the game’s universe is rich with details and feels infused with life. We can’t wait for the inevitable sequel. –norman chan

NZXT Tempest

David Murphy — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 14:30:39 -0500

The Tempest supports two front-panel connection options with its two USB slots and included eSATA input.

Look familiar? That’s the first thing we said when pulling NZXT’s Tempest out of the box. Save for a few minor modifications to the chassis, this case is a carbon copy of Antec’s Nine Hundred chassis. It’s built like the Nine Hundred, performs like the Nine Hundred, and even glows like the Nine Hundred, thanks to its front- and side-panel blue LED fans.

Rather than scorn it for its uncanny similarities, we see a certain wisdom in knocking off a popular design, shaving $50 off the price, and relaunching it as your very own. For what it’s worth, we experienced no difficulties whatsoever installing a modern-day system into this no-nonsense chassis. There was plenty of room to manage cables around our huge 8800 GTX card, and the case’s eight hard drive bays come with screwless rails preinstalled—you pop them off, attach them to a drive, and slide the whole deal into place. The two 12cm front-panel fans take care of the cooling efforts.

Unlike Antec’s Nine Hundred case, the two 14cm top fans and one 12cm rear fan around the Tempest’s motherboard area run at a constant speed. They chug along at a low rpm to preserve your hearing, but we’ve grown quite fond of the Nine Hundred’s customizable fan speeds. It’s a simple solution that this clone sorely lacks. But honestly, it’s one of the very few ways this sweet case falters.