Maximum PC studio RSS Feed

Dell's Website Reveals High-End XPS 435 Desktop

Andy Salisbury — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 14:11:30 -0600

It looks like Dell, keeping with their latest trend of sneaking machines onto their website, has added a graceful new addition to their line of Studio XPS desktops; the Studio XPS 435.

Under the hood of the 435 you’ll find a 3.2GHz Core i7 running on an X58 chipset, room for up to 24GB of DDR3 RAM, and 4.5TB of storage across three hard drive bays. To make it all show up on your monitor, they’ll include a Radeon HD4870. And, of course, to help sweeten the deal they’re tossing in a Blu-ray drive, a 15-in-1 card reader, and a whopping eight USB ports.

Currently there’s no word on pricing or availability, but we’re guessing that a machine packing stats like those will give one’s checking account plenty to worry about.

Image Credit: Dell

Dell Quietly Launches Two New Studio XPS Laptops

Andy Salisbury — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 14:58:42 -0600

Dell, playing to the beat of their own drummer, has oh-so-secretly snuck some new Studio XPS laptops onto their online store.

The new machines, the Studio XPS 1340 and Studio XPS 1640 are upgraded versions of the previous Studio XPS 13. Both of the machines bear the exact same $1,199 price tag (seriously), pack Intel Core 2 Duo processors, and Vista Home Premium. The main discernable difference is that the smaller, 13-inch version is packing Nvidia GeForce 9400M G graphic while the slightly bigger, 16-inch version is rocking an ATI Mobility Radeon M86XT chip.

While both of these notebooks look like pretty solid additions to Dell’s lineup, the lack of a price difference is a bit confusing.

Image Credit: Dell

Dell Cooks Up Colorful Collection with Studio 15, Studio 17 Notebooks

Paul Lilly — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 13:27:39 -0500

Perhaps sensing an increasing divide between the latest fad in ultra-portable laptops (like the Eee PC) and costly desktop replacements, Dell is setting its sights squarely on the middle ground while also appealing to the fashion conscious. Consumers can customize the Studio 15 and Studio 17 notebooks by choosing between 7 seven different color configurations along with a handful of trim color options. Underneath the colorful exterior sparkles an Intel Core 2 Duo T9300 processor (2.5GHz), a Radeon HD 3450 or HD 3650 videocard, an optional Blu-ray combo drive, and several amenities, such as a backlit keyboard option, HDMI port, Dell's Wi-Fi catcher, and more. Look for pricing to hover around $799 and $999 respectively.

Image Credit: Dell

Pinnacle Systems Studio Plus 10

Gordon Mah Ung — Sat, 18 Mar 2006 15:58:15 -0600

When it was released, Pinnacle Systems Studio 9 gained a reputation as a roach motel: Bugs went in and they didn’t come out. The bad word spread so fast and so furiously that the company wadded up the product, tossed it in a dumpster and started over again.

The result is Studio Plus 10. In a nutshell, the program features Studio 9’s familiar and super-friendly interface bolted to an engine based on Pinnacle’s professional Liquid Edition editor.

Unfortunately, somewhere along the way, things didn’t gel. Despite putting reliability and bugs at the top of the priority list, Pinnacle’s new Studio is less than optimal. OK, it was a buggy, horrible mess on not one, but two different machines. That’s really unfortunate, because Studio sports some truly compelling features that make it a far friendlier video editor than its direct competitor: Adobe’s Premiere Elements 2.0, which we reviewed in March.

Our first problem surfaced during the install on a dual-Opteron machine. The app took an inordinate amount of time to install, giving us an error message during the process, yet somehow the install completed anyway. We successfully captured 10 minutes of video from a DV cam, but after a few minutes of editing, the program crashed to the desktop. Mind you, that’s with the latest update for the program installed. Indeed, the program crashed on us enough times that we gave up and moved to a second machine.

Our second PC was an Athlon 64 FX-60 with 2GB of RAM, an nForce4 X16 chipset, and SLI. The program successfully installed the first two discs, but the third gave us an error. Nice. We finally gave up on the third bonus disc completely.

Pinnacle said the installation problem is a “known issue” that will soon be fixed with a new patch. The company also said it’s working on a patch to specifically address “issues” with AMD machines.

If you can successfully install Studio, you’ll find that it’s quite welcoming to users of all stripes. If Premiere Elements 2.0 is like an old college buddy, Studio is the little poodle that humps your leg when you come to visit—it’s in your face and friendly from the start.

Newbies will feel right at home with the storyboard mode, which lets you perform a quick edit rather than tangling with the traditional timeline, although the program does support a timeline, if you prefer. And for users who don’t want to actually edit their own videos, the SmartMovie mode will automatically turn your footage into a music video. It works in a pinch, but hardly counts as an actual project. It’s analogous to a “write my sentence for me” button in Word, or an auto-crop mode for your images. Not everything about Studio is intuitive, however. We found DVD creation to be more straightforward with Elements 2.0.

We appreciate Studio’s comparatively large assortment of transitions, but we find the program’s pay-as-you-go scheme to be quite annoying. The program dangles page upon page of transitions in your face that you can’t use unless you pay for them. Fortunately, you can disable the “premium” content ads, but it’s a drag to be reminded that you need to pay more money for a product you already purchased. The program also includes more robust audio tools than Premiere Elements 2.0.

Studio boasts the ability to edit high-definition video, but we were unable to capture any video with our pro-level cam—a Sony HVR-Z1. It was probably an issue of how we configured the camera; after all, it’s pretty unlikely someone will use an $80 program to edit video from a $5,000 camera.

Pinnacle says the latest version of Studio might be labeled 10, but it’s really a totally new product. We believe it—this definitely feels like a 1.0 app! While we think Pinnacle is laying the foundation for a potentially great new editing application, it’s pretty freaking far from that right now. That coupled with its Athlon stability issues make it impossible for us to recommend this program.

Month Reviewed: April 2006

+ STUDIO 54: New engine and friendly interface.

- STUDIO APARTMENT: Crashes and has installation issues on Athlon 64 machines.

VERDICT: 3

URL: www.pinnaclesys.com