Posted 02/03/09 at 10:00:00 AM by Nathan Edwards

We have to give Antec points for bucking the mainstream: The Skeleton is a seriously cool-looking case. The motherboard rests horizontally, so the case’s footprint is much wider than that of a standard tower chassis, but it’s also shorter. The open design and sliding component tray make it easy to swap parts in and out, and installation is quick and relatively painless. The Super Big Boy LED fan, which truly is both super and big, dominates the top of the case, keeping air moving over all your components, and the open design ensures that there’s plenty of airflow. A smaller fan mounts in front of the hard drive bay for additional cooling.

Removing two spring-loaded thumbscrews lets you slide out the component tray about three quarters of the way, providing easy access to the motherboard as well as the optical and hard drives. The side panels remove easily, and there’s a sliding bay for the power supply. But screwless this case ain’t. Your Phillips head screwdriver will be a constant companion.

Read on for the rest of the review!

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Posted 01/23/09 at 06:24:46 PM by Mark Edward Soper

As noted by Gizmodo, Windows 7 has made quite a few tweaks to the Windows Experience Index (WEI) first introduced by Windows Vista. For those of you tuning in late, the WEI tests hardware performance of five subsystems (processor, memory, desktop graphics, 3D gaming graphics, and hard disk), calculates a score for each one, and uses the lowest subsystem score as your WEI base score.

Since just after Windows Vista shipped, users of high-performance components, especially graphics cards, have been complaining loudly about Vista's WEI top score being capped at 5.9. While the Minpaso database of Vista WEI scores calculates a "presumption score" to try to make allowances for today's faster hardware, there hasn't been an official move from Microsoft until now. The code jockeys in Redmond heard you, and the top WEI subsystem and base score in Windows 7 is 7.9.

Wondering why the top score changed, and what else is different? Join us after the jump for details.

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Posted 01/23/09 at 11:09:45 AM by Paul Lilly

Last year it was Biostar -- and not Asus, DFI, or Gigabyte -- who set a frontside bus world record with its Biostar TPower I45 motherboard, and further blurring the lines between traditional enthusiast branding and companies better known for taking the budget end of the spectrum, A-Data -- not OCZ, Corsair, or Kingston -- has just broken a benchmarking record of its own.

"A-DATA® Technology Co., Ltd., a worldwide leading manufacturer in high performance memory products, announced today that its XPG™ DDR3 memory modules have broke a new world record on SuperPi 32m," A-Data stated in a press release. "The record was set by utilizing the DFI Lanparty UT X58 motherboard and XPG X Series v2.0 memory, the DDR3-2133X v2.0 2GBx3 triple-channel kit."

The new record now sits at 6min 40sec 360ms, which required overclocking A-Data's triple-channel DDR3-2133X v2.0 kit to 2237MHz with 8-7-7-21 latencies. A-Data didn't say how much voltage it took to reach that frequency, but if we had to guess, we'd say it ran high. The same kit comes rated at 2.05V-2.15V with 10-10-10-30 latencies at its stock frequency.

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Posted 08/26/08 at 12:54:21 PM by David Murphy

Testing a display is two parts science, one part art. It's difficult to measure the performance of a display the same way Maximum PC evaluates other products. There is no benchmark that we can just fire up and then report a score from. Nor can we even test displays in their out-of-box condition. A fair amount of tweaking and visual analysis is necessary to ensure fair display benchmarking.  And at the end of the day, determining which monitor reigns supreme is a mix of qualitative testing and the editor's expertise.

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Posted 02/08/08 at 06:12:56 PM by David Murphy

We run benchmarks at Maximum PC because we have to; there’s no other way to determine the minute differences between systems without a repeatable standard of comparison. But you don’t have to be a reviewer to run a benchmark; in fact, regular benchmarking can give you valuable insight into the status of your system. For example, benchmarks are the best way to decipher whether the various performance-enhancing applications you’re running on your PC actually do anything or whether that latest batch of drivers hurt your gaming performance more than it helped.

Click Read More for more. 

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