Features

Google I/O 2013: Everything You Need to Know

Paul Lilly — Fri, 17 May 2013 18:57:46 +0000

Google music streaming service, Gmail improvements, and Galaxy S4 to come with stock Android Jelly Bean 4.2

If you weren't one of the 6 million people who tuned in to YouTube to watch the Google I/O 2013 keynote on Wednesday, don't sweat it, you've come to the right place for an extensive recap of all the big announcements. Some of it you may have already read about here on Maximum PC, such as Google partnering with Samsung to offer a totally clean version of the Galaxy S4 complete with an unlocked bootloader or the introduction of an All Access music service, but we also have some new stuff to share.

Technically the event is still going on -- it's a three-day event -- and while the news keeps pouring in, a lot of what's now being revealed are product statistics and minor software updates, like Heat Maps and Symbols being added to the Google Maps API -- not exactly 'knock-your-socks-off' news. There's plenty of interesting tidbits to share, however, so let's get started!

Android's Ascension

From humble beginnings as an operating system that was originally developed for digital cameras, Android over the past decade has grown into the most popular mobile OS in the world. Just how popular is the open source platform? Google revealed rather early in its opening keynote that Android is now installed on 900 million devices.

"There are over 7 billion people on this planet, so we have a long way to go and we think the journey is just getting started," Google's Sundar Pichai quipped on stage.

What's interesting about Android's dominance in mobile is that it's only scratched the surface of available users. While Pichai may have been semi-joking about getting Android devices into the hands of 7 billion people, Android's penetration in most territories around the world is less than 10 percent, albeit "growing very, very fast."

Underscoring Android's popularity is the number of app downloads to date, which Google pegs at 48 billion. To put that number into perspective, consider that it's just 2 billion shy of Apple, which recently announced 50 billion iOS app downloads.

In just the last month alone, Android users have installed 2.5 billion apps. Beyond bragging rights, all these numbers translate into revenue for developers, who have been paid more money in the last four months than in all of last year. The revenue per user is up 2.5x what it was a year ago. Not too shabby.

Google announced a bunch of new APIs for Android developers as part of a robust update to its Google Play services, including three new Android location-based tools. They are:

A low-power location mode that uses less than 1 percent of battery life per hour.
Geofenching: Lets you define virtual fences around geographic areas, which are triggered when a user enters or exits any of them. Developers can have 100 simultaneous geofences active per app.
Activity Recognition: Uses accelerometer data to determine whether a user is walking, cycling, or riding without tapping into the battery-sucking GPS.

Another new API is one that allows for cross-platform single sign-ons with Google+. The benefit for users is that they don't have to sign into apps separately on different devices, so if you open an app using your Google+ account, you're logged in whether you fire it up on the web, on your smartphone, or with your Android tablet.

Leveling Up Google Play

You'll notice some changes to Google Play over the course of the next few weeks. Google's putting a much bigger focus on movie, music, and book recommendations based on the content you consume and what items prompt your friends to mash the +1 button.

Google Play will also do a better job adapting to whichever device you're using. The same content will be available whether you're viewing Google Play on your notebook's browser or your tablet, but it will be presented differently on each to take advantage of the different form factors.

Google Gets Into Streaming Music

Okay, enough with the APIs, backend infrastructure, and UI enhancements, let's get to the fun stuff. One of the big announcements Google made was its new All Access streaming music service. This is the next logical step in the evolution of Google's foray into music, which began with it offering an online locker for users to upload 20,000 songs of their own that could then be streamed to multiple devices. After that, Google launched a music store, and now this.

For a monthly fee (normally $9.99, though if you sign up by June 30, it's $7.99), you can tap into Google's catalog of millions of songs, but it's more than just that. There are curated playlists by Google's expert music editors and 22 top level genres to sift through, with more to drill into. Best of all, you can immediately start playing anything you see in All Access, as nothing is grayed out.

There's quite a bit of fine grain control, too. Anything you listen to can be turned into a radio station. If you're curious about what the unseen DJ has picked out, you can take a look at the playlist and swipe away any songs you don't want to hear, You can also rearrange the order of songs in your queue.

All Access offers the same features across multiple devices. It's available now with a 30-day free trial.

Samsung Galaxy S4 as You've Always Wanted It (Unlocked)

The other big reveal is the one we talked about at the beginning. Coming soon to Google Play is a special version of Samsung's Galaxy S4 device. Unlike the one that's currently available, this one will ship with an unlocked bootloader. it will also feature a squeaky clean version of Android 4.2 Jelly Bean, delivering the same software experience that Google ships on its Nexus devices.

Like the Nexus line, this version of the Galaxy S4 will receive Android upgrades "promptly" with every system platform update, which means no more waiting around for weeks and months for your device maker and wireless carrier to get on the ball with the latest version of Android. Speaking of which, it will work on both AT&T and T-Mobile.

That's the good news. And the bad? Well, it's going to cost a whopping $649 when it becomes available starting June 26.

Chrome Dominates the Web

As far as Google is concerned, the various versions of Chrome collectively add up to the most used browser on the planet. It's added 300 million active users in the past 12 months, giving it a userbase that's now over 750 million strong, and climbing. Many of those new users are accessing Chrome on mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets.

If those numbers are even remotely accurate, it's easy to see why Google is sticking with its Chromebook platform, which runs the company's Chrome OS. Providing further incentive to push Chromebooks onto the masses is data from Amazon that shows the $249 Samsung Chromebook as being the No. 1 selling laptop for 199 consecutive days.

"It's an ecosystem play and we have many more partners joining our journey," Google Senior Vice President Sundar Pinchai added.

Click the next page to see why you might want to start using Google+

Redesigning Google+

Get ready for a different Google+ experience than the one you're currently used to, assuming you're using the service. To take advantage of widescreen displays and to address the flatness of feeds, Google+ will be switching to a multi-column card design. This will make your feed more visually appealing, and on the backend, Google+ will optionally have the ability to automatically add hashtags. What for? If you spy the Eiffel Tower above, you'll notice there's no mention of what it is. However, Google knows, and if you click the card, it will present related information. Here's a short demo:

Related to Google+, Google introduced Google+ Hangouts for mobile devices during its event. It's a standalone app with a heavy focus on conversations, and it's available on Android, Chrome, Gmail, and iOS. It will keep a history of long-running conversations, though you can turn off the history and/or delete entries you're rather keep private.

Like everything else, there's an emphasis on making Hangouts visually appealing. There might be pictures and videos scattered throughout your long-running conversation, and according to Google, it just "feels alive." Subtle animations show when people join and where they're reading, so that it feels like you're all in the same room together. And of course it's all synced, so if you swipe something away on iOS, it's also gone on your other devices.

Finally, Google is making an effort to make photos less labor and time-intensive by making its data center your darkroom. In other words, the cloud will handle some of the time sucking tasks that are related to cleaning up photos.

It starts with backups, something Google already offers, only now it's giving you 15GB of free unified cloud storage, which you can allocate however you want between Gmail, Drive, and Google+ Photos.

Much more interesting, however, is Google's Highlight feature. If you think about the number of photos you're likely to take on vacation, it quickly becomes a daunting task when you get back home and discover there are hundreds, if not thousands of snapshots to sift through and edit. What ends up happening is you tuck them into a folder telling yourself you'll come back and power through them when you have more time, but that time never comes.

Google proposes it can pick out the best pictures of the bunch for you. Sounds too good to be true, right? Time will tell, but it sounds promising. It's not just a crapshoot wherein Google hopes to get lucky, there's some intelligent sifting going on. For example, Google won't highlight blurry photos, and if it detects duplicate images, it will pick no more than one of them. It also looks for poorly exposed photos and narrows down photos based on other factors, such as whether or not there are people in the picture and if they're smiling. It will even attempt to detect family members, giving those photos a social boost.

A little less interesting is Google's auto-enhance feature, as we've found similar tools to be of limited value. However, Google promises dramatic results using tonal distribution, skin softening, noise reduction, white balancing, red eye removal, and a whole bunch more.

Better Looking Google Maps

Google Maps rocks, that's something most of us can agree on. If you liked it before, you're going to love the new version, which Google rebuilt from "the ground up." Upon logging into Google Maps, restaurants and other places you frequently visit will be highlighted. You can also see more of the map by shoving aside and hiding the sidebar menus. There are Info Cards that provide details about different businesses and locales, some of which even show photos of the establishment you're looking up.

Send Money Through Gmail

Lastly, Google announced that it's folding Google Wallet into Gmail. Now you can send money to family and friends through Gmail, even if the recipients don't have a Gmail address. It's free to send money if you link your bank account to Google Wallet, or if you're using your Google Wallet balance.

In Gmail, just click the dollar sign icon to attach money to your message, and then send away. Some of you will see this feature now, others will see it over the coming months.

If you wanted to check out the entire Google I/O 2013 Keynote, check out the video below.

That wraps up the more interesting highlights of Google I/O 2013. Were you impressed or disappointed by Google's event? Let us know in the comments below!

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How to Download Without Installing Malware

Paul Lilly — Wed, 15 May 2013 22:57:43 +0000

A how to download PSA

When the **** did it become so damn difficult to download a program from the Internet? If you've recently tried to grab a screensaver or software utility from the web, you know exactly what we're talking about. Somewhere along the way, the simple act of downloading a program has become anything but easy, even for Internet veterans who aren't easily duped. Many download sites are now designed to test the wits of savvy users and prey on the impatient with link landmines that will blow up your browser with toolbars and other unwanted add-ons. Even worse, you could end up with a malware infection. Should you give up?...

Hell no! Downloading might not be as simple as it once was, but it's far from an impossible mission, convoluted download portals be damned. We'll show you how to wade through the sea of shady links and track down the program you're looking, but it doesn't end there. You also have to be careful when installing an application, as installers sometimes carry adware, especially ones for free programs.

Free download links are often plastered with malicious links and adware

To Click or Not to Click the Big Green Download Button?

When we posted our "20 Awesome Screensavers" article with download links to each screensaver, some readers thought we screwed the pooch and served up malware infected URLs. Rest assured we verified that every screensaver we posted was clean, but actually downloading each one can be an exercise in frustration. Let's walk through the process of downloading "The Matrix" screensaver.

The link we provided jettisons readers to where the screensaver is hosted on CNET's website. Here's what you should see when you navigate there:

CNET's download.com is a popular website so you might not think twice about clicking the Download Now button, but take a closer look.

The fine print indirectly admits to installing adware.

If you hover your mouse over the button, you'll discover CNET is using an ad-supported wrapper. Not all downloads on CNET's website use the ad-supported stub installer, but the ones that do are indentified as such (so long as you're paying attention), both on the green Download button ("CNET Installer Enabled") and via the above pop-up box.

Downloading and installing looks so simple and easy but it's often anything but.

If you choose to proceed, you'll be presented with several attempts like the one shown above to install third-party software in addition to The Matrix screensaver. Simply click the Decline button to skip these offers one-by-one rather than mashing the oh-so-inviting Accept button. If you learned anything at all from mythology, it's that you should avoid being tempted by Sirens, and download sites serve up plenty of them.

Do you really want to install random third party apps?

Some screens are a little trickier than others and offer only two options:

Full Installation (Recommended)
Custom Installation (Advanced User)

When you encounter one of these screens, check the Custom Installation radio button and then deselect any checkboxes asking if you want to install toolbars or other cruft.

The legitimate download button is often the hardest one to find.

If this seems like an unnecessarily long path to the end, that's because it is. Instead of jumping through CNET's third-party hoops, an easier way to grab The Matrix (and similar downloads) is to click on the direct download situated just below the download button. Easy cheesy, right?

This particular link has SEVEN download buttons. Which one is the legitimate one?

Lest anyone think we're picking on CNET, it's actually not that bad compared to plenty of other download sites that make things much harder than they need to be. It's certainly not uncommon to see adware/malware masquerading as legitimate download links. Some are worse than others. In the screenshot above, there are no less than seven links with the words "download" or "driver," but only one of them actually links to the file we're looking for. How can you tell? Once again, hover your mouse over each button/link and see where it points to. If it's a DoubleClick ad or anything similar, then move on to the next one. In this case, the second download button with a right-facing arrow directs us to a URL with the words "ARCHOS-101-XS-Tablet-Firmware-412-Download" contained within. That's the one we're looking for.

Scan for Malware

Virustotal.com is a great tool for sussing out malware

Once you've finally found and downloaded the file you're looking for, be sure to scan it for malware, especially if you grabbed it from a site you've never heard of. Use any on-demand scanners you have installed (such as a daily AV program and/or Malewarebytes), and also upload the file to VirusTotal, a free cloud-based service that analyzes suspicious files and URLs for dirty code.

Using Virustotal is extremely easy, especially with a browser extension

If you're a Firefox user, we highly recommend installing VTzilla, an official VirusTotal browser extension. The extension adds a toolbar to Firefox, which you can disable if you prefer, as well as a right-click context menu entry to scan hyperlinks with VirusTotal before visiting the site in question.

For further virus protection measures, check out our in-depth virus protection guide. Do you know of any safe downloading tips? Have a downloading horror story to tell? Share them with us and other Maximum PC readers by posting in the comments section below!

Computer Cases Roundup

David Murphy — Mon, 13 May 2013 22:39:27 +0000

7 computer cases reviewed: Cooler Master HAF XB,Thermaltake Soprano, Corsair Carbide 200R, and more!

If you thought that the only innovation in modern chassis design was the (long-awaited) switch from USB 2.0 ports to USB 3.0 ports at all price levels, you haven’t seen anything yet. The cases in our roundup this time around really run the gamut of features: From inexpensive cases that attempt to deliver a lot of functionality without fattening up the price tag, to simple-looking chassis that hide a wealth of must-haves, to some of the most eye-opening cases we’ve seen – that don’t quite stack up once you look beyond their crazy offerings. In other words, it’s a typical computer cases roundup.

Just to lay out our criteria a bit, here are some of the elements we’re typically looking for when we run the magnifying glass over a computer case: Features that take time and effort out of the installation or upgrade process, like screwless drive bays. Minimal annoyances – like having to snap off a case’s entire front panel just to remove its drive bay covers. Adequate cooling, ideally positioned such that one’s hard drives, video cards, and general motherboard area all receive a steady stream of air. And, of course, strong cable management: Nobody likes to open up a case and find a Medusa.

Beyond that, the great computer case race is anyone’s to win. As for how each manufacturer balances “cool” with “functional,” you’ll have to read on for all the gory details!

Cooler Master HAF XB

Don’t call this case “stumpy.” It bites.

Cooler Master’s HAF XB computer case is a hybrid design that attempts to kill two PC birds with one stone: An open-air design for system builders who want to be able to swap out their components like a pit stop, and a standard, covered chassis for those who like having four walls and a roof around their system’s precious parts from time to time. For the most part, it works—but we would have love to have seen a few tweaks to make the system even easier to use for the frequent parts-swapper.

The cube-like case leaves little room for error. Its 17.5x13x16.5-inch size split into a top and bottom half on the inside: Your ATX, Micro-ATX, or Mini-ITX motherboard rests up-top—pray you don’t have a huge cooler overtop your CPU, as you get just under six and a half inches of vertical space (from the silicon on your motherboard) to play with if you have any intention of attaching a 20-centimeter fan to the case’s top. The bottom portion of the HAF XB is where you’ll precariously thread your 7-inch-or-shorter power supply; connect up the case’s two front hot-swap bays; stuff your optical drive in one of the case’s two, tool-free 5.25-inch bays; or slap some SSDs in the four additional 2.5-inch bays provided.

It’s not very often you see a manufacturer going for the fabled, “cube design,” but this is not your standard case by any stretch of the imagination.

As for the hybrid bit we previously mentioned, Cooler Master has designed the open-air case to work just like that, with the case’s sides and top bare to the world. However, when you want to transform the chassis into a normal, box-like enclosure, you just need to reattach the case’s sides and top with the provided thumbscrews.

While the process is certainly easy for those who have ever screwed in a side panel before (that’s most of you reading this), we wish that Cooler Master could have used the kind of thumbscrews that remain attached to the case (or panel) after you’ve loosened them. Losing those at a LAN party would be a real nightmare. That, or Cooler Master could have used quick-snap latches instead – an even stronger match for this Transformer of a computer case.

The beauty of Cooler Master’s split-insides concept is that you only have the annoyance of stringing cables around the lower half once. Most of the parts you’ll likely manipulate sit up top.

The case gives you a lot of expandability for its size— including room for seven PCIe devices in all and videocards up to 13.1 inches in length—as well as two USB 3.0 ports on the front and two beefy, 1,800-RPM, 12-centimeter fans directly behind that for air intake. If you’re crazy enough to try water-cooling given the tight confines of this chassis, it does support a single 24-centimeter radiator on the front if you first remove these fans in addition to a single 12-centimeter radiator on the case’s rear. While indentations on the rear of the chassis indicated a place where tubing could have been threaded, Cooler Master oddly omits any rubberized holes for doing so.

The Cooler Master HAF XB isn’t for beginners. You’re going to get to pretend you’re a surgeon when you try to thread wires around the inside of this tight chassis, even given the HAF XB’s system-builder focus. It’s still a compelling case for tinkerers that comes with plenty of useful features, and one that’s worth looking into for those afraid to (or uninterested in) making the switch to a fully open-air design. Just don’t try to water-cool it.

Cooler Master HAF XB

Hot-swap drive bays, easy-to-access motherboard maintenance, excellent cooling

Removable panels need more than thumbscrews, tight chassis for huge CPU coolers and basic PSU installation

$99, www.coolermaster.com

CoolerMaster Scout 2

Cooler Master makes it easy to carry this case around.

There’s no doubt in our minds that the design of Cooler Master’s Storm Scout 2 chassis is going to draw eyeballs. On the outside, it’s a beautiful case – punctuated ever-so-slightly by red LED fan viewable through the case’s windowed side panel and ever-so-dramatically by the case’s unique, rubber-coated steel handle up top.

Looks can be deceiving. From the outside, this case is a winner. But from the inside, we’re a bit skeptical.

The case’s inside is less eye-catching. We love the three screwless 5.25-inch drive bays that merely require you to flick a switch from “open” to “lock” to secure your components in place. However, we’re a little turned off by the flimsier rails that Cooler Master delivers to secure up to seven, 3.5-inch hard drives in place; drive trays would have been better. Additionally, four of the drive bays have to go if you’re using a video card that’s larger than 28.7 centimeters in length – and there’s no easy way to just pull them out sans screwdriver.

Thumbscrews are your new friends for the case’s seven PCIe expansion slots, and you’ll have to install both standoffs and screws for your motherboard. That said, the Storm Scout 2 makes cable management easier with the five holes (three rubberized) Cooler Master cuts right into the motherboard tray–though they could have been a little bigger.

Our biggest problem with the Storm Scout 2 is its cooling—not due to its potential, as the case supports up to nine fans in total (a mix of 12- and 14-centimeter fans, but mostly 12-centimeter). Rather the case ships with just one fan preinstalled: The aforementioned 12-centimeter LED fan on the case’s rear. You can toggle the light on and off, as the flames shooting out from your hot components will be all the dramatic lighting you really need.

Two USB 3.0 and two USB 2.0 ports adorn the case’s front, which you can hide with a little pull-down cover if you so desire. It’s another one of the many tricks Cooler Master stuffs into the Storm Scout 2’s hat; we just wish we could have some more fans, too.

CoolerMaster Scout 2

Super-mobile case, easy cable management and good connectivity

Poor prebuilt cooling (one fan!), requires sacrifice of drive bays for larger videocards, flimsier rails for hard drive installation

$99, www.coolermaster.com

MSI Stealth

You’ll love this case’s color scheme, we promise

Were there an award for “best case color scheme,” MSI’s Stealth computer case wins by a mile from its lovely black and light-blue-accented aesthetic. As for the case’s design, however, MSI packs in a few problems to balance out the good bits.

Just wait until you pop off the side of this chassis: a pretty world of black and blue awaits you.

We never thought we’d have to struggle so much with this case just to get a simple optical drive secured into one of its three free bays. That involves popping off the front panel just so you can remove the 5.25-inch bay covers–annoyance number one–and then somehow use the case’s big, blue locking mechanisms of fail to roughly secure your drive in place. Spoiler: They not very secure.

MSI does provide full trays for the four hard drives the case supports, which alleviates our frustration somewhat. It also packs two graphics card stabilizers right above that–a fun and quasi-useful addition that allows the case to support video cards up to 31 centimeters in length, but some extra 2.5-inch bays might have been more useful in general.

What the case lacks in big, fat cable routing holes (you get four small, thin ones), it makes up for in the ludicrous amount of space between the rear of the motherboard tray and the case’s right side panel. You could hide a garden hose in this case, not just your power supply cables.

A single 12-centimeter fan in the front balances out a similarly sized blue LED fan in the front, positioned directly next to the hard drive bays. On the top of the case’s front are two USB 3.0 ports, two USB 2.0 ports, and a special USB port that dovetails with your MSI motherboard’s “SuperCharger” functionality for speedy device charging. If you haven’t drunk MSI’s Flavor Aid, however, it’s just a standard USB 2.0 connection. Great looks, polarizing design: The MSI Stealth chassis leaves us feeling a little blue.

MSI Stealth

Lovely aesthetic, plenty of room for huge videocards, front-panel connectivity with an MSI-themed bonus

Videocard stabilizers seem silly, horrible 5.25-inch bay locking mechanism (and installation process)

$99, us.msi.com

Click the next page to check out our new kick-ass best-of-the-best case!

ThermalTake New Soprano

A soprano could sing inside of this case and you’d never hear it.

Find a chassis that successfully combines practical noise dampening, useful features, and cooling can be a bit of a needle in the haystack sometimes—but in this case (pardon the pun), that’s Thermaltake’s New Soprano. The solid construction of this chassis creates an upgrading or installation experience that’s free of frustration. Our only complaint with the case, if you could really call it that, is that it lacks pizazz.

This case might look fairly simple on the outside, but it has just about everything you’d ever want or need. Trust us.

That said, give us function over pretty lights any day.

The jet-black exterior of the case uses a front-panel door to create a sleek, uncluttered aesthetic by allowing you to hide your components when you aren’t specifically using them. The door doubles as an excellent noise-dampener and, we argue, a heavier-than-you-might-expect blunt object for use when squaring off against midnight intruders or zombie hordes.

Two USB 3.0 ports sit alongside two USB 2.0 ports on the top-front of the case; we’re even more enthusiastic about the built-in hot-swap hard drive docking station for 2.5-inch or 3.5-inch drives that Thermaltake’s constructed on the top of the chassis itself. It’s a delightful and unexpected addition to the case that brings a lot of additional connectivity without harming the case’s overall look or feel.

On the inside, Thermaltake uses four simple locking mechanisms to keep your 5.25-inch device held tightly. Installing an optical drive requires you to remove the drive bay’s front panels— easily done without having to rip off any part of the case’s front. Four screwless hard drive trays rest behind the case’s secret weapon: A huge, blue-LED, 20-centimeter fan that delivers plenty of air over your drives without blowing out your eardrums to do so. Above the primary 3.5-inch bays rests a single additional 3.5-inch drive bay and a single 2.5-inch bay for your solid-state needs (both not screwless). Thermaltake positions the thumbscrews for the case’s seven expansion slots on the exterior of the case. While that saves you a little room on the inside—giving the case space for a video card up to 12.2-inches in length—it also means that it’s really hard to actually use your fingers to tighten or loosen the screws.

Thermaltake pulls out all the stops to make it as easy as possible for you to install or upgrade parts—minus the expansion slots, which will require a screwdriver.

Motherboard standoffs are built directly into the case–an excellent touch that saves would-be system builders a bit of time and hassle. A huge hole on the upper half of the motherboard tray exposes your CPU area for easier installation of aftermarket coolers, and that’s joined by five other holes on the tray itself (four rubberized) for cable management. There’s plenty of room between the rear of the tray and the case’s right side panel, even including the acoustical foam that Thermaltake’s attached to the panel to give your ears a respite.

The only other fan in the case is a single, 12-centimeter exhaust fan attached to its rear, and the only other fan you can install beyond that would be an optional 12-centimeter intake fan on the case’s bottom. That’s the trade-off of having a “sound-proof” rig: more potential for heat. However, Thermaltake’s done a masterful job of addressing this issue while building out a case that’s packed with just about everything you’d want to have—assuming you care more about function than flash.

Thermaltake New Soprano VO900M1N2N

Good cooling, great soundproofing, mostly easy installation, slick aesthetics

Expansion slots a little fussy with thumbscrews, case isn’t extraordinarily “flashy”

$119, www.thermaltakeusa.com

Xclio Touch 787

Meet the future, and the past, of cases.

This kills us—it absolutely kills us. The Xclio Touch 787 has one of the most innovative, fun-to-use, Star-Trekian features we’ve ever seen on a case. And the substantial air-cooling on this case feels just a few miles per hour short of a category four. It looks good; it’s one of the few cases that we actually really enjoy interacting with on a daily basis.

Words fail us. The touchscreen controls on this case must be seen to be believed.

But why, oh why, does Xclio have no idea how to build hard drive mounts?

Allow us to explain. The single most noteworthy and compelling feature of the Touch 787 is—as the name alludes—the giant touch-sensitive panel on front of the case’s top. It looks as if it was ripped out of a standard Star Trek: TNG episode, and it functions about as well. After wiring up the panel with a standard Molex connection, you can tap its huge, circular buttons to turn the case’s fans on and off; adjust their speeds to low, medium, or high; turn the fans’ lights on and off; or lock and unlock the panel itself (to prevent accidental bumping).

Call it gimmicky if you want, but the responsiveness of the controls – and pretty blue lighting when you’ve activated an option – is just downright cool. Unfortunately, Xclio seems to have spent most of its R&D on this case on just that— the panel. Or perhaps the fans, as this system comes with no fewer than ten 12-centimeter fans in total: One on the case’s rear, two on the top, one in the front, and six (!) on the case’s side panel. Cooling overkill? Yes. We appreciate the enthusiasm, but one large fan on the side panel (for example) could have pushed plenty of air at a lower RPM and noise level.

All the standard features on this case are the same as what you’d expect to find in this price range: Cable mounting holes, motherboard tray cutouts behind the CPU, locking mechanisms for the case’s three free 5.25-inch bays, et cetera. We’re not going to waste words going over these, simply because the design of the case’s 3.5-inch bays—or lack thereof— presents a critical flaw in any user’s enjoyment of this wind tunnel of a chassis.

It’s too bad that Xclio didn't put some more thought into this case’s internals. As is, they’re not very good.

To access the case’s two actual hard drive bays, you have to unscrew and take apart a stupid bar of-sorts that runs vertically from the case’s bottom to just under its 5.25-inch bays. Upon further inspection, however, Xclio actually wants you to mount your drives to this bar as well, just floating out there in mid-air. Presumably, Xclio wants to put nothing between the intake fan and your system’s motherboard, but it’s a bad design concept that’s ugly for cable management, annoying to work with, and makes absolutely no sense whatsoever: It’s the very definition of, “If it ain’t broke…”

If it wasn’t for Xclio’s choices in designing its mounting “system” for hard drives, we’d consider this case–loud and over-the-top as it might be–to actually be something worth considering if for nothing else than its uniqueness. The more we think about it, however, the more Xclio’s design decisions tease the idea that they don’t actually know how to build a functional case, just a really cool-looking one.

Xclio Touch 787

Amazing touch-panel controls, good cable management, more cooling than you’ll ever need.

Very loud, horrible design for hard drive mounting, plenty of wiring to manage even before you put any parts into the case.

$149, www.xclio.com

Click the next page to read reviews on the budget computer cases.

The Battle of the Inexpensive Cases

Want a case on the cheap? Be sure you don’t get what you’re paying for…

Here we go—a descent into the budget barrel. It’s understandable that you might be a little concerned about the quality of offerings you’re going to see in the sub-$100 case market. You have every right to be: Just go to your local geeky retailer of choice and check out some of the horrible cases on the shelves that get offered up at rock-bottom prices. We wouldn’t want to put our worst enemy’s motherboard into those; why should you install yours?

Of course, you can find some real diamonds in the rough, but you’re definitely going to have to do a little digging to uncover quality, inexpensive cases – especially given the sacrifices manufacturers typically have to make in order to hit these low price targets. We’ve dragged up two of these budget cases to show you just what we mean by the differences you’ll find at this end of the spectrum: Take a look!

Antec One

This case might be inexpensive, but there’s so much more Antec could have done

One… singular sensation is not this chassis. The mid-tower Antec One feels a little flimsy in a few areas, which otherwise detracts from some of the better elements in this ultra-inexpensive case.

The Antec One comes with three 5.25-inch bays that use pre-attached locking mechanisms to keep your devices all snug and attached. However, this is the kind of case that requires you to pop off the entire front panel in order to remove the grilled covers over the empty bays— be careful with that, as we definitely broke off some of the tabs on these covers when trying to remove them ourselves.

The Antec is light enough that you could probably balance it on your fingers and spin it like a basketball. (You-Tube that, if you try).

Antec positions the entrance for the case’s five 3.5-inch bays on the opposite side of the chassis–the right of the case, if you’re looking at it from the front, rather than the left. This decision boggled us at first, but the more we thought about it, it makes sense: You would have to pop off both sides of the case anyway were you to install the drives from the left side of the chassis (using the provided rails) and this method allows Antec manages to build in some additional space for much-needed cable management. It’s just a little weird at first.

The case’s seven expansion card brackets don’t come with screws pre-installed into the case; a bit of an annoyance for those looking to ensure that the flimsy tabs stay on at all times. We do, however, like the recessed side pane that sits behind a huge hold cut out for the top half of one’s motherboard: Cable-management and CPU cooler installations are a breeze.

Antec slaps two 12-centimeter fans in the top-rear corner of the case; none over the hard drives. You get two USB 3.0 ports on the case’s front; that’s it. That’s the Antec One: A price-conscious chassis that’s good in a pinch, but could be a lot better.

Antec One

Hard drive bay design is odd at first, but functional; screwless 5.25-inch bays; good cable management

Lacks screws on PCI brackets, no cooling on hard drives, frustrating 5.25-inch device installation

$49, www.antec.com

Corsair Carbide 200R

It’s not “super” inexpensive, but it’s worth saving pennies for

Delightful. Truly delightful. That’s the best way to sum up Corsair’s sub-$100 Carbide 200R mid-tower chassis. It’s roomy, it’s well-designed, and—most importantly— it doesn’t invite any annoying features or ill-designed elements along for its inexpensive ride.

The Carbide 200R doesn't win huge points for its looks, but there's a lot going on inside this chassis for its low price.

All of the Carbide 200R’s drive bays are completely screwless, a wonderful touch for those looking to make modifications to their system without busting out the tool kit. Popping off the flat, solid panels covering the case’s three 5.25-inch bays is easy and destruction-free— almost as easy as it is to slide and lock up to four 3.5-inch hard drives into the case’s left-facing bays. You can use screws to attach up to four 2.5-inch drives into a provided internal enclosure if you really don’t want your solid-state-drives to jiggle.

Motherboard standoffs are built directly into the Carbide 200R: Just slap down your board, grab a few screws, and you’re set. Five different cable routing holes cut directly into the tray make it easy for you to hide your ugly wires, and a large area cut out behind the top of the motherboard tray speeds along the (often agonizing) process of aftermarket CPU cooler installation.

The case comes with a single 12-centimeter fan in the rear and the front. While we would have preferred that the front fan was placed to push some air over your hard drives, at least it’s able to direct much-need cooling on your video card (up to 11.8-inches long). You can also stick up to five additional 12- or 14-centimeter fans around the case’s top, side, and bottom, as well as one more 12-centimeter fan in the front (covering your hard drives).

The case comes with two USB 3.0 ports on the front—more importantly, popping off the front panel to do any modifications to the Carbide 200R doesn’t result in a tangle of wires coming with it. It’s these little touches, and more, that make this case such an inexpensive delight.

Corsair Carbide 200R

Plenty of drive bays, lots of options for additional cooling, a great emphasis on reducing the amount of screwdriver time needed

Front preinstalled fan could have pushed more air over the hard drives directly, 2.5-inch bays still require screws

$60, www.corsair.com

Build a PC: Recommended Builds (May 2013)

The Maximum PC Staff — Fri, 10 May 2013 21:35:56 +0000

Baseline, performance, and ultra PC builds!

What time is it? It's time to build a PC with our Blueprints! This month, we've built three rigs at three approximate price points: Baseline, Performance, and Ultra. Baseline gets you a powerful, no-compromises rig, suitable for gaming and content creation at 1080p. Performance gets you more, and the Ultra is for those who want a killer PC.

These rigs are lab-tested and editor-approved. Feedback is, of course, welcome. Tell us what you think!

Our baseline build represents the minimum level of performance we’d accept on a semi-strict budget (by our gearhead measurement, at least). This month, we wanted to upgrade to an AMD Radeon HD 7870 XT for a graphics boost, but we haven't gotten hands-on yet. The Samsung 840 Pro is our favorite SSD, hands down, and the 128GB version is surprisingly affordable at just over $1/GB, so we’re sticking with it for the time being. RAM prices continue to creep up, so we switched our PSU to the Seasonic M12II 650-watt to help bring the system price back down. That’s less wattage than we were getting from the Cooler Master Silent Pro M2 720W we used previously, but 650W is plenty, even if we eventually add a second video card for CrossFire.

For the Performance build, we upgraded from Intel's Ivy Bridge to its Sandy Bridge-E platform, where we have more PCIe lanes for multiple video cards, and a socket that should see Ivy Bridge-E CPUs through 2014. The Core i7-3820 can overclock using gear or strap ratios, despite not having the "K" that indicates an unlocked clock multiplier. We thought about upgrading the CPU cooler to something with a 240mm radiator, but we wanted to keep the budget under control. The Cooler Master Silent Pro M2 850W is a good buy at $120. It's a 100W boost over the Corsair HX750 we used previously, and it costs about the same. It's a lot of power, but we’ll need the extra juice if we decide to add another AMD Radeon HD 7970 down the line.

At the Ultra tier, money is of no concern, so we upgraded our case to the Corsair 900D. We love the Cooler Master Cosmos II that has been part of this build since we started this column, but it can't mount a 420mm radiator, and we want that option for the future. The Cooler Master Silent Pro Gold 1,200W is a 150-watt upgrade from the Thermaltake ToughPower Grand we were using, and it's about the same price while offering comparable quality and features. We also updated the CPU cooler from the Corsair H100 to the H100i since it produces less noise and lower temperatures, and offers software control over pump and fans speeds. On the GPU front, we considered swapping the GTX 690 with the slightly faster Radeon HD 7990, AMD’s new fl agship dual-GPU card. But at press time, the card was still experiencing frame latency issues, and the company only had a “prototype” fix for it that wasn’t final. We’re confident AMD'll lick the problem eventually, but it's hard to say when, so for now we’ll stick with the GeForce GTX 690.

Mother's Day Gadget Gift Guide

Paul Lilly — Wed, 08 May 2013 23:45:40 +0000

15 tech gadgets that even mom would like

It's not easy being a mother, that's something every human on the planet can agree with, regardless of gender. She's the one who put Band-Aids on boo-boos as opposed to dad who would just tell you to man up (again, regardless of gender) and rub some dirt in it. She's the one who sewed up your tattered Star Wars blanket long after it had seen better days, and she's the one who couldn't sit and relax for an evening to watch a recorded movie because you broke the VCR by shoving toys and peanut butter sandwiches inside.

Now that we're adults (legally speaking), Mother's Day is a time to atone for all our shenanigans as kids. Taking mom out to dinner is a good start, but what do you get her as a gift? That's where we come in. We've put together a list of 15 gadget gift ideas to show dear old mum that you appreciate her and that it's not so hard to be hip with the latest tech gear.

10 Things You Need To Know About Intel’s New Atom

Gordon Mah Ung — Mon, 06 May 2013 19:57:42 +0000

How Intel's new Atom CPUs may be a game changer

10. It won’t suck.

Atom parts have long been the butt of our jokes for being the anti-performance parts that inspired the Netbook but anyone who ever tried to drive a Netbook for anything beyond browsing knows how much Atom’s sucked in performance. A dual-core, Hyper-Threaded 1.6Ghz Atom N2600 gives up a Cinebench 11.5 score of 0.47. That’s just barely faster than a single-core Athlon 64 3200’s score of 0.42. For reference, a Core i7-2600K gives up about 8.1 and a 3.2GHz Core 2 Duo E8200 gives you about 1.91. The actual performance isn’t known, but the new “Silvermont” version of Atom should offer far more performance than we've ever seen before.

Meet the new Intel Atom family

9. No more process sloppy seconds

Atom has long been the bottom bin of Intel CPUs. It didn’t get access to the latest process technologies and while Core 2 and Core i7 have been on a “tick tock” strategy where two new designs are produced on each process, Atom has plowed along with a one “new” design for each process. With Silvermont, the chip gets moved to the latest 22nm process 3D transistors. Even better for Atom will be the next-generation. With the introduction of the 14nm process, Intel will introduce a “tick” Airmont and then a “tock” chip that doesn’t even have a codename yet. This is just another sign of just how important Intel sees Atom to its future.

Intel Atom core block diagram

8. Silvermont probably won’t bring back Netbooks.

The Netbook was the hottest piece of tech that was introduced at the right time. Who didn’t want a $300 mini-notebook when the entire financial world was collapsing? Unfortunately most users who bought them quickly became disenfranchised with the performance of the Netbook. In fact, Netbook sales numbers look like a failed rocket launch. Netbook sales peaked in 2010 with 32 million Netbooks sold, according to IHS. This year, 3.97 million Netbooks will sell with IHS predicting just 264,000 Netbooks will sell next year before Netbooks go extinct by 2015. Many blame the death of the Netbook on the iPad and other ARM-based tablets but we like to blame Atom. If Netbooks had had decent performance from day one, they might not have cratered so badly. Even with Silvermont and say, Core i7-lite performance, will OEMs try Netbooks again or have they had enough? We think OEMs have moved beyond the Netbook which is a bit of a shame because if they had decent performance years ago, maybe they wouldn’t be the Dodo bird of PCs.

Silvermont's wide range of operation

7. Think of it as Atom i7 or Atom 2 Quad

Silvermont will be built around a modular design. Each module will feature two cores and Intel can stitch together up to eight cores on a die. Unlike AMD’s modular design that shares chip resources, Silvermont’s cores are separate cores that only share a common L2 cache. All previous Atom chips have continued to use the ancient front side bus to connect the chips but Silvermont will feature a point-to-point interface connecting to a system agent which will hook into the memory controller. Also important in Silvermont is the move from the in-order design of all previous Atoms to an out-of-order design. Out-of-order designs allow instructions to be executed out of order to greatly increase performance over in-order designs. For perspective, out-of-order CPU designs have been used by Intel since the Pentium Pro chip. Most ARM-based CPUs have also been in order up until the Cortex A9 chips.

The main penalty to out-of-order designs has been an increase in power consumption and die space which is why Intel turned to an in-order design for the original Bonnell-based Atoms in 2008. Intel says with its advanced 22nm process, it can now do an out-of-order design while keeping power consumption and die space to a minimum. Intel has also completely redesign Silvermont with larger branch predictors, improved decoders, redesigned execution units, larger L2 and reduced L2 cache latency. In a nutshell, performance of Silvermont will be a factor of 3x over the current fastest Atom’s with 5x lower power consumption.

Oh yeah, Silvertmont also gets SSE3.1, SSE4.2, hardware AES-NI encyprtion, hardware random number generation and several other instructions from the Westmere generation of CPUs.

6. Atom now gets Turbo too.

Intel’s popular and effective Turbo Boost makes an appearance in Silvermont which can now “burst” different cores up depending on the load. Intel says Atom also has the ability to run cores at different speeds as well. The company has previously pooh-poohed such an approach and still says it's more efficient to run all cores at the same speed when needed, but certain server, notebook, tablet and phone makers may want to intentionally run cores at asymmetric speeds to reduce power consumption sometimes.

Intel Atom Power Sharing

Click the next page to read about how it's faster and more efficient than ARM

5. Yup. From servers to phones

Silvertmont will go into micro-servers and scale down to phone iterations after introduced. And no, you aren’t likely to get a tablet or phone with an 8-core Silverton variant. Those are likely aimed at micro-servers which aren’t as power sensitive as a phone or tablet.

Intel Atom in tablets

4. No damnit, it’s not ARM

Analysts and self-appointed Internet experts have long speculated that Intel needs an ARM chip to compete with ARM because x86 can’t "get er done." For what it’s worth, Intel had an entire ARM division when DEC sold it the StrongARM family which turned into XScale. Intel sold XScale to Marvell in 2006 and apparently still has no regrets about it. Silvermont is pure x86.

Intel Atom workflow

3. Faster and more efficient—than ARM

The battle of the last three years has clearly not been Intel vs. AMD, but x86 vs ARM. ARMchair commandos have long said x86 can’t compete because it’s just too power hungry. But remember, ARM is no brainiac chip. Even the super weak sauce old iterations of Atom have been performance and on power parity with ARM chips (non-believers see here). Intel says Silvermont will easily stomp all ARM chips into the dirt. While, Intel didn’t actually directly say the ARM word during press briefings but you don’t have to be Steven Hawking to guess what CPU architecture Intel is comparing Silverton to. Even with the power consumption of ARM chips far exceeding Silvermont, those CPUs still can’t match Silvermont’s performance. Up against four competing ARM chips, Intel says at the same power use, Silvermont will be from 1.6 times to 2.3 times faster and consume from 3 to 5.8 times less power.

2. But the competition has eight cores.

Intel’s arrogance is pretty well known. But the truth is you can’t be arrogant if your products suck. That gloat has been fading of late but during our media briefings with Intel engineers, we could see the spring in their PowerPoint decks. We know, the proof is in the pudding, but Intel says Silvermont’s better cores out-perform competing ARM CPUs that use inefficient quad-cores. And yeah, that thing where they have eight cores? Remember four of the cores are low power cores that take over when the high performance cores aren’t needed. Intel says it's long explored such little core, big core approach and it’s never been optimal.

Intel Atom's cores

1. Intel’s war begins with Silvermont

When did the x86 vs. ARM war begin? That’s hard to say. Some say 2010, others say 2011 or even 2012. We’d say that when the war began didn’t really matter. What matters is how each side reacts. Intel has long been a dangerous dragon tends to slumber when not challenged. Need proof? Go and Bing Pentium 4 or Intel’s lack of interest at the high-end desktop game today. So does anyone want to piss that dragon off? ARM does. Over the last few years it and a merry band of dwarves have walked into the slumbering dragon’s cave, stuck a short sword in its side and threatened the dragon’s hoard of gold. Silvermont—if Intel’s claims are true—could very well indicate that someone’s going to get roasted.

7 Unsung Heroes of the PC Universe

The Maximum PC Staff — Fri, 03 May 2013 20:13:39 +0000

Honoring the PC components that don't get the credit they deserve

If you built your first PC more than a decade ago, you know that PC building has come a long way. Modern conveniences like cases with holes for cable routing, motherboards with labels, and right-angle SATA cables certainly help with the cumbersome bits. This article aims to pay respect to these unsung heroes of the PC universe. You can check out our picks in the gallery below.

Did we forget an unsung hero? Let us know in the comments!

Getting Loco with Video Cards

Tom McNamara — Fri, 03 May 2013 18:28:11 +0000

Maximum PC's Best of the Best Updated

We're closing in on Cinco de Mayo, which celebrates Mexico's Battle of Puebla fought on May 5, 1862, a victory against overwhelming odds and an important step towards Mexican independence from European rulers. These days, it's a popular holiday for getting drunk, dancing and making loud noises, but maybe that's just me. I think I'm gonna play it low-key this year instead, and take the opportunity to update our Best of the Best with a couple new entries: the EVGA GeForce GTX Titan and AMD's Radeon HD 7850.

This time around, we're changing the "high-end video card" category to the best "Single-GPU video card." Every GPU category will be getting a refresh. Because at Maximum PC, we care about your wallet.

Below, there is more text and words that you may find informative and entertaining.

And as always, let us know in the comments what you think about our picks!

Zombie Games Roundup

Evan Lahti — Thu, 02 May 2013 22:05:47 +0000

In the zombie apocalypse, your worst enemies might actually be humans.

The rules used to be simple: Don’t get bitten; destroy the brain. Zombie games like Left 4 Dead, Killing Floor, and Resident Evil shared a vaguely similar approach, even as they offered terrific takes on one of horror’s most ubiquitous subgenres.

But zombie games have matured. They've mutated beyond simply being zombie-themed shooters, and redefined what we know as the zombie FPS into more of a genuine survival game. You still have to get headshots and avoid getting gnawed, but there are new threats to manage. Thirst. Hunger. Darkness. Scarce resources. Untrustworthy strangers.

Who knew trying to survive the zombie apocalypse could be so fun?

A gun can’t solve every problem you have in DayZ, The War Z, and No More Room In Hell, in other words. These zombie games demand different skills: communication, leadership, a knack for navigation over open terrain, nerves of steel, and even a little deception will help you survive. In short, they’re the zombie games we’ve dreamed of: demanding and realistic survival simulations that ask a lot of you, but reward players with unforgettable, self-authored stories of sacrifice, horror, and survival. If you're unfamiliar with any of these games, make sure to read on to prepare yourself for the horro that's in store.

DAYZ

Everything you learned about surviving the zombiepocalypse was wrong
In April 2012, an unfinished mod developed by a former New Zealand military officer quietly released. The add-on was designed for Arma 2, a niche military simulation game from Czech studio Bohemia Interactive, known most as the creators of Operation Flashpoint.

Initially, DayZ arrived with little fanfare. “I developed it, essentially, in secret and that removes a lot of ego, it removes a lot of promises,” creator Dean Hall told PC Gamer last year. But DayZ would catch PC gaming by complete surprise. In just four months, it had drawn 1 million unique players. Hundreds of 50-player custom servers hosting the still-incomplete, alpha version of the mod sprung up in a matter of weeks. Almost 200,000 people were playing every day at the peak of the mod’s popularity in August 2012. The zombie game that gamers had openly fantasized about on message boards - an open-world, do-anything, go-anywhere survival game—had appeared out of thin air, albeit in a rough and half-realized form.

Even with placeholder animations, annoying bugs, and incomplete features, DayZ had a death-grip on gamers’ attention. Relative to the zombie games that preceded it, it offered unprecedented freedom and made other facets of the apocalypse—including fellow survivors—as much of a threat as the undead. Its style of realistic zombie arose partly from the inspiration of its creator. Hall had originally pitched the mod as a zombie-less training simulator, having endured survival training himself during an exchange program with the Singaporean military.

A lot of DayZ’s appeal is owed to Arma 2, whose Real Virtuality engine forms a foundation for its authenticity. Arma 2’s creators went to great lengths to create high-fidelity game technology, and DayZ benefits from sharing systems that model for vehicle fuel consumption and modular vehicle damage, a real-time night/day cycle, a working compass and detailed topographical map, voice chat that’s affected by proximity, and an engine that can render objects over long distances.

Loot is everything in DayZ. Your carrying capacity depends on the size of your backpack—a rare ruck can become a literal target on your back. DayZ’s rigid and unintuitive inventory interface, unfortunately, is a well-documented shortcoming.

A particular asset is Arma 2’s ballistics modeling, which distinguishes it from every shooter in gaming. Bullets travel parabolically in Arma 2 and DayZ based on their caliber, so the behavior of a hunting rifle, revolver, and M4A1 assault rifle, for example, is all significantly different. Getting a knack for your weapon is as important as just finding one—someone that knows the nuances of a low-end gun like a Lee Enfield (a bolt-action WWI rifle) is arguably more dangerous than someone holding an AS50 anti-material sniper rifle but doesn’t know how to dial-in its scope. Guns emit different amounts of noise, too—snipers usually find it safest to operate in teams for protection, as a single shot can ring a dinner bell for zombies two or three hundred meters away. For this reason, silenced sidearms and rifles are some of the most prized items in the game.

Chernogorsk (aka “Cherno”) is DayZ’s largest death trap. Erm, city.

To get your hands on high-end equipment, you need to scour the game world. You don’t complete quests or levels or experience points in DayZ, so typically you’re just worried about gathering useful gear—tools, food, and weapons—within the game’s enormous sandbox. One of DayZ’s masterstrokes is that the drive for gear always feels self-motivated; your needs and emotions naturally drive your goals. When you enter DayZ for the first time, you’re unarmed. You instinctively want to find a gun, but to do it you need to put yourself in danger: weapons and items only spawn inside structures, and zombies lurk where structures dwell. Other survival mechanics operate as motivators too. You need to eat. You need to drink, but true to Arma’s fidelity, you can’t fill your canteen in the ocean. I’ve been in situations where I would’ve traded grenades for a can of pasta, or nightvision goggles for a soda. If you’re injured, depending on your ailment, you’ll need to find morphine, painkillers, or antibiotics.

Surveillance is one of the pleasures of DayZ. It’s a game that makes looking and listening a genuine skill. Scouting an area for dangerous players (which you’ll need binoculars or a rangefinder for) is a good habit.

This isn’t a game where your health regenerates automatically, in other words. Actually, the quickest way to restoring your life in DayZ isn’t even something that can be done by yourself. Eating food slowly restores any blood you’ve lost from injury, but in order to use a blood transfusion bag, you need another player—meaning friendship (or temporarily trusting another player, at least) is roadblock to healing yourself. And interacting with strangers in DayZ—other players that, like you, want to find better gear—is inherently dangerous.

These intricate mechanics play out in one of gaming’s most detailed worlds. DayZ borrows Arma 2’s map, Chernarus, a 225km² country that’s actually a satellite-modeled slice of the Czech Republic (see comparison photos and maps here). Basing Chernarus on real topographic data grants it a feeling of authenticity that isn’t present in other virtual environments. Hills roll into unexpected ponds and forest valleys. Road signs are printed in Cyrillic. Powerlines run perpendicular to ruined castles. Villages and dense cities cling to the coast. The only downside is that Chernarus’ realistic scale? To get where you want to go, you might have to run three or four kilometers in real time.

DayZ’s Chernarus map is actually one of several playable worlds available for DayZ. Modders have ported other player-made Arma 2 maps into the mod, including the tundra of Namalsk, the jungle of Lingor Island, and a dense urban desert called Fallujah.

It’s worth noting that modders—the ever-busy carpenter gnomes of PC gaming—have ported several Arma 2 custom maps into the game. A popular one is Namalsk, a connected by a half-kilometer railway bridge. You can spy it and the other four currently-available landscapes here.

DayZ’s biggest innovation is the trust it places in players to find their own fun. Compared to conventional shooters, it’s barren of any cinematic content. But DayZ leverages complex systems and difficulty in a way that produces incredible stories and interactions that don’t exist in other games. Banal tasks like watching another survivor through binoculars and trying to determine where they’re going or if they’re friendly are meaningful safety measures. YouTube is full of funny, scary, and fascinating interactions between strangers and survivor groups, bandits and self-described axe murderers, do-gooders and kidnappers. For the patient player, the search for water in DayZ can be just as heart-pumping as a shootout. It’s the first zombie game to emphasize stories over shooting, and the first that makes human nature an implicit part of everything you do.

Click the next page to read about The War Z

THE WAR Z

A sincere form of flattery

In July 2012, faster than you could horde canned goods, a DayZ imitator emerged. Within a month of DayZ’s flash of popularity, a new studio told the gaming world that it was hard at work on its own player-versus-player and player-versus-zombie, open-world survival sandbox.

The announcement of The War Z was met with skepticism and cynicism flecked with curiosity. Its features were uncomfortably familiar: a huge, verdant open world dotted with mundane and military loot, a first-person and third-person camera, and dedicated servers, all laid out to support unscripted, persistent gameplay between zombies and other players. Even the look of its characters--baseball cap-wearing, backpacked survivors--resembled DayZ’s. The War Z wasn’t being subtle about its inspiration.

Using separate real-money and in-game currencies, The War Z allows players to purchase some basic items—like melee weapons and food—before they spawn into the game. If you die, anything you’re carrying is dropped.

But if this blatant borrowing of ideas resulted in a good game, would it matter? More details snuck out as gaming press got early access. The War Z would include a player-written questing system, appearance customization, the ability to place bounties on other players’ heads, an RPG-style skill system, and a microtransaction store for items. Perhaps most interesting was The War Z’s promise to offer something called Strongholds—small, private instances like a cabin in the woods, a farm, a small town on a cliffside, or a trainyard that clans or individual players can rent for money. Even if these features don’t appeal to you personally, they painted a picture of a game that was less of a clone than originally thought.

“In fact, we’re fans of the mod,” The War Z Executive Producer Sergey Titov said to VG247 in October last year when asked about DayZ. “Ultimately, we hope gamers end up playing both The War Z and the DayZ standalone. It’s difficult to compare at the moment, but although there are similarities, we tried creating a game that was a little bit easier to access and play, and that would allow players to be creative and create their own scenarios.”

There’s some consensus that this isn’t a “there’s only room for one of us in this town” situation, but a sign that this sub-genre is simply in the process of losing that prefix. Competition between companies usually benefits consumers, and The War Z has a lot to live up to. Being built atop a military simulator, DayZ carries a lot of inherent traits that lend itself to survival simulation, and not all of them are easily reproducible. But the other side of that coin is that The War Z isn’t burdened by some of DayZ’s inherent quirks, and seems to benefit from being coded from scratch. It’s offers a few simple antidotes to some of DayZ’s issues, like confusing inventory management, inaccessible weapon handling, and rigid animations.

It’s also favoring accessibility more than DayZ. The War Z does have permadeath--if you die, you lose that character and their items forever--but only if you’re playing with a Hardcore mode character. Normal mode simply temporarily locks your ability to play that character for 24 hours and removes any items they were carrying. Likewise, you can get a leg up on a new character by spending in-game currency that persists across all characters, so it’s easier to recover from a death.

A stamina mechanic is one of the small-but-significant differences separating The War Z from DayZ. You can’t run forever, but the undead can—sprinting into a town while out of breath might be all it takes to doom you.

The focus on accessibility extends to gameplay itself, where weapon behavior is more akin to games like Battlefield 3. An assault rifle or a pistol handles with the lightness and responsiveness you’d expect in an ordinary multiplayer FPS. You’ll still have to keep noise in mind when firing—letting loose with a sniper rifle will make you awfully popular in your part of the map. There are also small but significant difference between DayZ and The War Z in player movement. You can crouch and go prone in both games, but The War Z has a jump button. But more realistically, you can’t sprint infinitely in The War Z—running depletes a stamina meter that recharges over time, so you’ll want to conserve your sprinting until you really need it.

The War Z also features a few imaginative zombie types. “Sleeper” zombies deceptively lie dormant on the ground, but rise if they notice you nearby. The developers have also promised a rare “stem cell-carrying” zombie that only appears at night. “Visually they’ll look very different from other infected, they’re much more aggressive, fast and agile. They’re rare, they hunt only at night, so the best place to find them will be larger cities at night time,” says Titov. Killing one of these superzombies will yield stem cells, which are kind of a special currency within The War Z that can also be used to create a vaccine. Hammerpoint hopes that the relative difficulty of bagging one of these zombies will inspire some creative teamwork and competition among players.

Nighttime in The War Z is inherently dangerous. Flares, chemlights, and flashlights will help you find your way around, but any light sources will inevitably draw attention from other players.

These corpses lurk in a world about 160km² in size—about 70 percent the size of Chernarus in DayZ. Encouragingly, Hammerpoint has said that anyone who buys The War Z will receive additional maps that are released. The game’s stock map is inspired by Colorado, a rocky wilderness pocked with outposts, lakes, and small towns.

Click the next page to read about "No More Room in Hell"

NO MORE ROOM IN HELL

Expect at least half of your team to die.
Unlike The War Z and DayZ, No More Room In Hell doesn’t fit into the newly-born “outdoor survival game” category. It’s fairer to call it an advanced, hardcore take on conventional cooperative zombie games like Left 4 Dead. In development for a decade before releasing over a year ago, the Source engine mod was selected through Steam Greenlight to release as a full, free game on Steam, but you can play it now by downloading it from www.nomoreroominhell.com.

What NMRiH shares in common with DayZ (other than an awkward name) is the unapologetic way that it throws you into a brutal post-apocalyptic scenario with almost no instruction. You’re fragile. Bullets are scarce. And zombies will infinitely spawn until you complete the map’s tough (and partially randomized) objectives, like switching on generators or finding the keycode that unlocks a door. NMRiH’s unforgiving approach to zombie co-op practically guarantees that a few of your teammates will need to die as you trudge from your spawn area to the end of the level. Your eight-person survivor group is twice the size of Left 4 Dead’s, and a given round typically sees your team whittled down as players inevitably get separated, surrounded, and eaten.

Though it resembles Left 4 Dead, what No More Room In Hell shares in common with DayZ and The War Z is that it often makes fleeing from and avoiding the undead preferable to fighting them.

Most of NMRiH’s zombies are of the slow, vintage variety. They’re easy to evade, but much more durable in combat, so the danger arises from their numbers and players’ modest agility. You can only sprint for a brief period of time, so wandering into a cluttered garage with a single exit, for example, is sometimes all it takes to doom you. A handful of speedier zombies jog after survivors (some of which—harrowingly—are children), but NMRiH otherwise lacks any undead with special abilities like leaping, acid-spitting, or tongue-lassoing. This gives the game a more grounded feeling; the molasses-speed creep of the horde gives you room to react, but the absence of a revival mechanic and the relative weakness of weapons has a way of turning small mistakes into permanent death.

Also refreshing is NMRiH’s emphasis on immersion. Like DayZ, the volume of voice communication is based on distance, meaning a far-off teammates’ cries for help may go completely unnoticed. The game also doesn’t place any interface, crosshairs, or HUD on the screen by default, and all of its maps are pocked with corners that are absolutely saturated with opaque, impermeable darkness. A small antidote to this is the flashlight. It mercifully doesn’t require fresh batteries, but just as you’d expect in real life, you can’t hold it and swing a sledgehammer or operate an M16 simultaneously. This design makes the seemingly banal role of “flashlight holder” a vital role for guiding teams through unlit corridors—being the guy responsible for shining the light on enemies while your teammates whack away with shovels or chainsaws is genuinely helpful.

The melee weapons themselves take a lot of finesse to operate. Most of them swing slowly (and with a wind-up animation much lengthier than Left 4 Dead’s), meaning they’re nowhere near the weedwackers you wield in Valve’s co-op zombie game. And despite their decomposing state, the undead are durable, taking multiple hits to bring down unless you skillfully connect with their skull. A typical hand-to-hand fight is a tense tango of bobbing and weaving, angling to position yourself to just the right distance where your axe or machete can clobber a zombie but the zombie can’t hit you. This limited room for error makes individual zombie kills feel like a heroic effort.

Zombies spawn endlessly in No More Room In Hell; this isn’t a game that’s afraid to overwhelm you with enemies. Some maps stack dozens of zombies directly outside the spawn room, only giving you a handful of bullets and melee weapons to deal with them.

Firearms are also handled with a modicum more realism than Left 4 Dead. They’re scarce, and pistols don’t have infinite ammo—when you pick one up, it might have a meager six or seven shots waiting for you in the magazine. More, they’re tough to aim: shots that look like a sure thing through ironsights won’t always produce a kill. And like DayZ, most guns have a discrete ammunition type —you might find handgun ammo, but if it’s .45 ACP and the only pistol you have is the 9mm Beretta M9, it’s not going to help you.

Appropriately enough, a lot of NMRiH’s scares arise from the lack of room in its levels. Structurally, they resemble Left 4 Dead’s meandering, point-to-point sprints, but because aggressive collision detection between zombies and even other teammates means that it only takes a few zombies to block a doorway. About a half-dozen maps, with the community and the development team filling in more.

“Behind you!” The snail-speed crawl of zombies in NMRiH makes room for communication and decision-making in a way that isn’t present in most zombie-themed shooters.

My favorite, called Cabin, begins with a leap of faith. You spawn in a secure attic, and begin by combing dark corners for melee weapons, flashlights, and whatever you can find. But to start the level, you have to drop straight through a hole in the ceiling—a one-way trip that usually makes the first survivor in instantly popular . My usual tactic is to have this leading player lure zombies away from the entrance so the rest of the team can safely descend. They usually get beat up in the process, but it’s preferable to throwing everyone into a crowded, panicked melee.

A final twist on all this layered brutality is NMRiH’s infection mechanic. Zombies will occasionally grapple you, and if you or a teammate is unable to shake them loose, you’ll get bitten. You know what happens next: within minutes, you’ll drop dead, and rise again as an AI-controlled zombie. It’s surprising that the mod is the only zombie game we know of to model this classic horror trope.

NMRiH is a stand-out take on zombie survival, and the scariest multiplayer game I’ve ever played. Unlike Left 4 Dead, trying to kill every zombie you meet is the surest way to have your human card revoked.

Click the next page to read about the five most important zombie games.

THE FIVE MOST IMPORTANT ZOMBIE GAMES

OVER THREE DECADES, THESE TITLES HAVE SHAPED (OR WILL SHAPE) THE ZOMBIE GENRE AS WE KNOW IT

Zombie Zombie

1984 (on ZX Spectrum), Spaceman Ltd.
One of the first games to feature zombies as its subject. Zombie Zombie had a very indirect way of dealing with the undead: You had to lure zombies up to tall buildings and then trick them into falling off to their doom. Coincidentally, it was one of the first games to use two-channel sound.

Resident Evil 4

2007 (on PC), Capcom
The RE4 PC port was particularly bad, but the game still stands as the best “actionization” of the zombie genre. Japanese difficulty, boss design, and pacing tempered by Western playability and an over-the-shoulder camera spawned hordes of imitators. Weapon customization lent meaningful progression to the dozens of brushes with undead creatures.

Left 4 Dead

2008, Valve
The reigning champ in zombie co-op, L4D’s mildly forking level design and “zombie director AI” combined to create movie-like campaigns that wickedly and dynamically threw threats at your survivor group as you progressed through each chapter. Another L4D innovation, asymmetrical multiplayer, has been copied in games such as Dead Space 2.

The Walking Dead

2012, Telltale Games
Telltale’s adventure spin-off of the Robert Kirkman comic book series has taken a novellike, “Choose Your Own Apocalypse” approach to the genre. Though it’s modest on interaction, choices you make—from whom to rescue to which friend should get a candy bar—affect the content of future episodes. The five-episode series has already been renewed for a sequel.

Dead State

2013, DoubleBear Productions
Zombie shooters have been done to death; Dead State is a turn-based RPG. Described as Fallout-meets-The Walking Dead, it’s being helmed by Vampire: The Masquerade writer/ designer Brian Mitsoda. You play as the leader of a group of survivors that’ve holed up in a Texas elementary school. The game earned $332,635 on Kickstarter in July 2012.

Click the next page to read about the five most incredible custom Left 4 Dead 2 campaigns.

FIVE INCREDIBLE LEFT 4 DEAD 2 CUSTOM CAMPAIGNS

L4D2 MAY LACK REALISM, BUT IT’S STILL THE BEST ZOMBIE-THEMED ACTION GAME AVAILABLE. THE MODDING COMMUNITY HAS CREATED HUNDREDS OF FANTASTIC CUSTOM CAMPAIGNS THAT ARE A CINCH TO INSTALL

Questionable Ethics

Fight your way through a white-walled, underground, secret research facility filled with traps (like a ceiling that drops cars on you) and endless tricks. Almost Portal-like in its devious cleverness, Questionable Ethics is the work of a Korean modder. Play the sequel after you’re done.

Helm’s Deep Reborn

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers’ iconic castle siege is reproduced here with almost 1:1 authenticity, with the exception of L4D’s menagerie of uglies swapped in for Uruk-hai. This multistage survival map has you meat-grinding through hundreds of zombies, climaxing in a defense of—and then escape from—the throne room. Nonstop violence and calamity.

GoldenEye 4 Dead

An amalgamation of settings drawn from the 1995 Bond film, including a dam, runway, and a hidden space base in Aztec ruins. G4D is more than a pile of references: It’s a genuinely taxing and creatively designed campaign, and one that takes clever liberties with its source material. Be on the lookout for Easter eggs.

Let's Build A Rocket

Instead of a sprawling campaign that has you racing to the safe room as a finish line, Let’s Build A Rocket gathers the survivors around a small launch pad and hangar. Using a computer panel, you research new technology to unlock L4D2’s weapons as zombies harass, juggling these tasks as you and teammates slowly construct a rocket to escape Earth.

Suicide Blitz 2

A great example of the indulgent set pieces , Suicide Blitz 2 pushes the survivors through a bowling alley, maximum security prison, and finally to the 50-yard line of a football stadium for a titular stand-off against hulking zombie Tanks in football jerseys.

Zombie games have come along way and are continuing to evolve. What's your favorite Zombie game?

Column: Take the Socket Pledge With Me

Gordon Mah Ung — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 23:25:13 +0000

Looking at the future of CPU sockets

The Mainstream tech media declared the PC dead—yet again—and enthusiasts had a full-on freak-out when rumors surfaced that Intel intended to dump socketed processors within two years. You can read the details of the story here, but let it be known far and wide, Intel will support socketed processors for the “foreseeable future.” AMD, likewise, had already taken the pledge, saying it would be offering socketed CPUs, too.

To the casual observer, this may seem like a tempest in a land grid array. It’s not, of course—it’s really about our freedom to build the systems we want with as much price and performance granularity as we can get. Quite simply: We like our ability to choose what we want rather than having it dictated to us. Want to run a $60 motherboard with a $330 CPU? Go ahead. Planning to start your $350 board with a $100 CPU and eventually move up to a $330 part? That’s your decision to make on the PC today.

Intel's NUC features a CPU soldered on to its motherboard

That won’t be the case if the PC transitions to motherboards with fixed processors, as was rumored. Instead, motherboard companies would greatly pare down their inventories and offer just a handful of boards with integrated CPUs rather than dozens of CPU and motherboard choices. Let’s not even mention that if you ever had a problem with the motherboard, you’d have to toss the CPU with it. And who eats that cost? The mobo maker or the CPU maker?

Such a world would indeed signify that PC end times were nigh, so you can see why the nerd rage was flying.

So, what may really be happening? My guess: Intel is signaling an armistice in the performance arms race between the two x86 powers, as both companies concentrate on the real threat right now: tablets and mobile devices.

Rather than the end of interchangeable CPUs, it’s more likely an end to the brutal “tick-tock” strategy for desktops and laptops. Instead, the upgrade cycles could be stretched out from two years to three. Hardly the end of socketed CPUs.

Hell, for all I know, Intel may need to move to a new type of cartridge design à la the Pentium II’s SEC, so it can embed DRAM into the core or use some technique to increase memory bandwidth for the onboard GPU. I’ll also point out that soldered chips have been in use by AMD and Intel on desktops already—in extremely small form factor boxes.

We really don’t know what will happen in three to four years and, frankly, Intel probably doesn’t either. I do know that any path Intel and AMD take for the PC must include end-user upgradability of the CPU or both will suffer the wrath of their strongest supporters.

The Future of Broadband Internet

Marco Chiappetta — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 21:05:30 +0000

Honoring 20 years of the World Wide Web by looking forward at the future of broadband Internet

The World Wide Web has been around for 20 years as of today and broadband internet has evolved considerably over the latter half of that timespan in the US. Whereas just a few years ago, large parts of the country were relegated to pokey 56K dial-up connections over standard phone lines, now multi-megabit broadband connections are commonplace and speed increases are being introduced regularly. In fact, in some test markets, broadband at gigabit speeds is on the way. And yes, that’s gigabits with a “G,” as in roughly 17,800x more bandwidth than 56K dial-up.

Looking at the future of broadband Internet

We also have many more choices today. Connecting to the Internet used to mean firing up AOL for millions of users. Now, though, most consumers can choose between multiple service providers, which offer cable, DSL, or even wireless broadband connections with plenty of bandwidth for all but the most demanding users. Broadband may not be universally available here in the states just yet, but availability is far better than it was, and it’s consistently improving.

Despite myriad advances made to the county’s broadband infrastructure, the story is not all good. According to a few recent studies, the United States still trails some other nations in multiple broadband-related categories, including average connection speed and penetration. For example, South Korea’s average connection speed is more than double that of the United States—16.7Mbps vs. 6.1Mbps—and the United States ranks 36th in overall connectivity.

There’s more to broadband than just bandwidth and penetration, however, and we hope to fill you in on the details here. Our goal is to help you to better understand the various technologies available now and outline some of the advances coming in the future. We’ve also got some practical tips for changing ISPs and optimizing your current broadband connection on tap, as well.

Pick Your Platform

Get connected over copper, fiber, wireless, or satellite

There are a number of different ways consumers in the United States have access to high-speed broadband Internet connections. Some, like DSL, leverage existing telephone network infrastructures, while others, like satellite or LTE wireless, use relatively new technologies. Although broadband isn’t accessible to everyone in the country, there are multiple options available for most consumers and the choices that are available continue to mature and evolve.

The most common broadband connection types in the United States include digital subscriber line (or DSL), cable, fiber optic– to-home solutions, wireless, and to a lesser extent satellite. Wireline solutions like cable and fiber-to-home will typically offer the highest-bandwidth, lowest-latency connections, and DSL is usually the most affordable, but all of the connection types mentioned here have multi-megabit plans available from numerous Internet service providers (ISPs) in many parts of the country. Before we dig in, also note that all of the broadband connection technologies we discuss here are sometimes referred to as “last mile” or “network edge” connections. What that means is that they’re the connection types used by Internet service providers to make the link between end users and the core backbones of the Internet.

xDSL

DSL modems like the D-Link DSL-520B connect through standard copper phone lines to provide broadband Internet access.

According to the most recent data available on the National Broadband Map, DSL is the second most accessible broadband technology in the United States, behind only the various wireless technologies. In the locations where high-speed broadband is available, one form of DSL or another is offered to 88.9 percent of those customers.

Although “DSL” is a term thrown around freely, it actually encompasses an entire family of technologies, which includes asymmetric digital subscriber line (ADSL), symmetric digital subscriber line (SDSL), integrated services digital network (ISDN), rate-adaptive digital subscriber line (RADSL), and high bit-rate digital subscriber line (HDSL), among a few others. DSL leverages the copper cabling used throughout the telephone network to transmit digital data, and as such, the bandwidth offered by the various technologies will vary based on a few factors, like the quality of the physical connection and distance from the exchange, sometimes called the “central office.”

DSL is typically more affordable than other solutions because it’s cheaper to implement over the existing telephone network, versus deploying new, high-bandwidth fiber cables over the same expanse. Though sometimes cheaper, many DSL solutions can still offer significant bandwidth to end users. Sonic.net, for example, is one of the best-regarded DSL providers in the nation, with plans that offer download speeds of up to 20Mbps. It’s able to offer DSL speeds so far above the national average of about 4Mbps by using VDSL2 bonding technology that essentially links dual copper pairs into single connections. Other DSL providers also leverage bonding technology to increase the effective amount of available bandwidth to end users, but the fastest ISPs are typically concentrated in the more densely populated areas of the country, like California and the Northeast.

A typical DSL setup in a home consists of little more than a filter (or filters) that are used to separate voice and data signals between telephones and a DSL modem. The technology hasn’t changed much in recent years, so massive speed increases haven’t been offered by many DSL providers, but the technology is mature and reliable, and should suit the needs of mainstream consumers. In the future, however, large bandwidth gains are still possible with DSL. Alcatel-Lucent, for example, announced that through a technology advanced by Bell Labs, it has achieved 300Mbps over two DSL lines (through bonding) at a distance of 400 meters. The technology works by leverage bonding, something called Phantom mode, and vectoring. Phantom mode creates a third, virtual pair on top of the existing two pairs used in the DSL lines. And then vectoring technology filters out interference and crosstalk among them all. The bandwidth of the two physical and the virtual pairs are then combined into a single, ultra-high-bandwidth pipe.

Cable Internet

The Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification, or DOCSIS, is used by many cable television operators to provide broadband Internet access over their existing network using a cable modem, like the Motorola SB6120 pictured here.

On some level, cable Internet access is similar to DSL. However, instead of using the telephone network, cable Internet leverages the cable television infrastructure to provide a broadband Internet connection. Also like DSL, cable Internet is relatively pervasive and is the next most common wireline broadband connection technology in the United States. In areas where broadband is available, cable Internet access is an option for 85.2 percent of consumers.

Many of the technologies employed by cable Internet access providers are determined by the Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification, or DOCSIS. DOCSIS was initially developed by CableLabs, a not-for-profit research and development consortium founded by a number of cable television providers, along with a host of additional contributors, including the likes of Broadcom, Cisco, Conexant, Intel, Motorola, Netgear, Texas Instruments, and a handful of other companies.

Cable Internet is also one of the more mature broadband technologies offered in the United States and bandwidth available to end users is relatively high. If we disregard some fledgling fiber-to-home solutions, cable Internet is among the fastest in the nation. It is not uncommon for cable service providers to offer premium plans in the 50Mbps to 100Mbps (download) range, at prices below $100 month. It is also common to see cable Internet included in “triple play”–type packages that bundle Internet, television, and phone services on a single bill.

Although fast and relatively affordable, one of the disadvantages of cable Internet is that bandwidth is shared not only on the provider’s core network, but among smaller nodes, or groups of residents, as well, which can lead to slowdowns during peak usage times. If there aren’t numerous users concurrently consuming large amounts of bandwidth, the slowdowns may be imperceptible, but on more congested networks the slowdowns can be significant.

Though already fairly mature, bandwidth gains are still likely as providers improve their networks and implement more features of the DOCSIS 3.0 specification. For example, DOCSIS 3.0 allows for bonding of multiple upstream and downsteam channels to increase total available bandwidth. The specification calls for hardware to support a minimum of four upstream/downstream channels, which can each offer a maximum of 42.88Mbps, but there is no maximum number of channels defined. An eight-channel bonded configuration could theoretically offer a connection speed of up to 343Mbps.

Click the next page to read more about Fiber internet speeds.

Fiber

Fiber-optic cables can carry more data, over much longer distances, than copper wire.

Some of the more recent, ultra-high-speed broadband services being offered to US consumers consist of newer fiber-to-the-home deployments. Although fiber-to-the-home, or FTTH, is the most common term end users are likely to hear, there are numerous types of fiber deployments currently in flight across the country. Fiber-to-the-neighborhood (FTTN), fiber-to-the-building (FTTB), fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP), and fiber-to-the-desk (FTTD) are all terms you may hear bandied about. They’re all fairly self-explanatory; the significance of each deployment type is the peak performance that can be achieved by each architecture.

To put it simply, the closer the optical fiber cable is brought to end users, the faster the broadband connection can be. Whereas DSL providers typically offer 10Mbps–20Mbps and cable providers up to 100Mbps or so, fiber-to-home providers can offer hundreds of megabits or even full gigabit connections. Verizon’s FiOS service, for example, offers a 300Mbps plan in some parts of the country. Google Fiber, which is currently being built out in Kansas City, will offer speeds up to 1Gbps, and Sonic.net offers fiber services in parts of California where users can choose up to 1Gbps services, as well.

Prices for these exotic broadband services vary significantly from more than $200 a month for FiOS’s 300Mbps plan, to only $69 a month for Sonic.net’s offering. These services, however, are available to only a small fraction of Americans at this time, so competition among the various providers is essentially nonexistent. When asked about current fiber-to-home offerings, Sonic.net CEO Dane Jasper said, “None of these competitive efforts have any substantial national market share at this time, and I don't believe they have much influence on the incumbents except in very small regional pockets.” He also said, “Telcos will push fiber closer to the home (or, in the case of Verizon, all of the way),” however, which means some very good things are on the horizon. Because fiber-optic cables offer much more bandwidth than copper wire, over longer distances, it is the most future-proof of the broadband technologies we mention here. Rest assured, it will continually be brought closer and closer to end users, and more bandwidth will be available as a result.

Unfortunately, as of the most recent data available on the National Broadband Map, direct fiber Internet services are only available to 17.8 percent of potential broadband subscribers in the United States. For fiber Internet service to have a more meaningful impact on the broadband market, it’s going to have to reach a much larger audience. That should happen in time, though.

Wireless Broadband

A few years ago, LTE wireless networks didn’t exist. Now they cover more than 75 percent of the nation.

Wireless broadband encompasses a handful of technologies, including Wi-Fi, WiMax, and the various cellular networks, among a few others. By far, the most pervasive of these technologies as a service is the cellular network, which thanks to recent LTE build-outs, can offer relatively high peak bandwidth under certain conditions, at affordable rates.

We’re all familiar with Wi-Fi, which is designed to cover relatively small areas and not really sold as a service, except for temporary hot-spot applications. WiMAX (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access) is a longer-range technology designed to deliver last-mile wireless broadband access to end users at multi-megabit speeds, as an alternative to wireline technologies like DSL or cable. WiMAX is available from providers in about 80 US markets, and a large number of additional markets around the world, but it isn’t very popular as a residential solution. The 3G and 4G cellular networks, however, account for a huge portion of Internet traffic, mostly due to the popularity of smartphones and other mobile devices. 4G LTE networks in particular have been rapidly expanding in recent years and offer relatively high bandwidth. In real-world situations, in markets like New York, San Francisco, and Austin, Texas, 4G LTE broadband can offer upwards of 35Mbps down and 15Mbps up, with much higher theoretical numbers possible.

Taken as a whole, broadband wireless Internet access is the most widely available connection type in the country. According to the National Broadband Map, wireless internet is an option for 98.7 percent of consumers living in areas where broadband connections are available.

As useful as wireless Internet can be, it has some major drawbacks. For one, it is relatively expensive. Wireless data plans typically fall in the $20–$100-a-month range and offer limited amounts of data usage. For example, Verizon Wireless offers a 4GB-per-month shared data plan for $30 and a 12GB plan for $70. Exceed those limits, and you’ll have to pay additional fees and/or contend with data throttling. Wireless Internet is also more susceptible to interference than other connection types, and network performance varies wildly depending on a number of factors, including distance from the tower and network congestion. As such, wireless services are best suited to mobile devices, as a backup to wireline solutions, or for casual users that aren’t likely to hit the imposed data limits.

What comes after 4G LTE is still up in the air. A 5G standard has yet to be finalized and the 4G build-out is still far from complete. We can reasonably expect lower latency and more bandwidth at longer ranges, but we won’t know for sure until a spec is finalized.

Satellite Internet

In areas where wired broadband is unavailable, satellite Internet may do the trick. It doesn’t offer anywhere near the bandwidth of traditional wireline solutions, however.

Satellite Internet is more of a last resort than a viable solution for most consumers in need of broadband. The technology is a godsend for people who live in rural or remote areas where wireline broadband solutions are not available, but residential satellite broadband speeds simply can’t match those of xDSL or cable and costs are usually higher, too.

Typical satellite Internet speeds hover in the 1Mbps to 2Mbps (download) range, through some of the latest technology from providers like HughesNet offer up to 15Mbps down and 2Mbps up. There are monthly bandwidth caps in the 20GB–40GB-per-month range, however, and costs for even the more entry-level plans are somewhat higher than more common wired solutions.

Advancements in satellite Internet will come as compression and bandwidth-sharing technologies are improved, but the most significant gains can only come as newer, more advanced satellite, with higher total capacities, are put into orbit.

Click the next page to read about the broadband of the future.

Broadband of the Future

To get a read on broadband’s future in the United States, we talked to a couple folks well versed on the subject: Patrick Moorhead, founder and principal analyst at Moor Insight and Strategy, and Dane Jasper, CEO of Sonic.net. When asked about which of the broadband technologies available in the United States will be the most pervasive moving forward, Moorhead said, “Wireless broadband will be the most pervasive in the future, given that it touches so many people in so many places. Wi-Fi wireless in particular will be expanded significantly as service providers attempt to string networks together to take some of the traffic off of congested 3G, 4G, and LTE networks.” He continued, “Cable is the winner in terms of the price-to-speed equation, in that most of the investment is a sunk cost. Fiber, as in Google Fiber, is the fastest, but also the costliest to install. Satellite will continue to play a niche role, serving hard-to-reach and rural areas. Its asymmetry and line-of-site requirements outweigh any kind of downlink speed advantage.” Dane Jasper mostly agreed, stating, “Domestically, you will see a continued slow march of the incumbent duopoly; cable will gradually upgrade to higher DOCSIS versions as they become available and feasible, and will split nodes in the meanwhile to avoid congestion—at least to the point of avoiding customer churn. Meanwhile, telcos will push fiber closer to the home—or, in the case of Verizon, all of the way—while rolling out faster xDSL technologies: ADSL2+ and VDSL2 today, with bonding and then vectoring.” Jasper added, “Wireless is also a factor to consider. With LTE's very-high-speed capabilities, and consumers’ interest in tablets and other portable devices, these services are a potential alternative to wireline products.”

We also asked what they thought pervasive, ultra-high-speed broadband could mean for consumers, and Moorhead proclaimed, “New usage models will emerge with the advent of fast, reliable broadband. With faster broadband, most of our computing can be done in the cloud, meaning more consistent, reliable, and less expensive experiences. Low-priced displays able to run any app will be all over the house, so literally, every room will enable access to every app and piece of content, anytime.” Sounds good to us, though we don’t want to downplay the need for fast local storage, as well.

As for why the United States tends to lag behind many other developed nations and what we could do to improve the situation, Dane Jasper put most of the blame on misguided government policies and regulation. He said, “Reversing the course selection of a multi-modal competitive model, which the Republican FCC charted for us in the early 2000s, is the quickest way to resolve the domestic broadband issue. Europe and Asia followed our regulatory course from the 1996 Telecom Act, and stuck with it—while in the United States we faltered, fostering instead a duopoly. While incumbent cable and telcos have made substantial upgrades—DOCSIS 3.0, FiOS, U-verse—we continue to over-pay for under-delivery of speed, generally with consumption caps.” Patrick Moorhead’s view was somewhat different. Moorhead said, “Countries leapfrog each other as it relates to broadband. The United States was viewed as the mobile laggard during the EDGE days, but now has one of the top spots in LTE. Countries like Korea and Japan will continue to dominate with speeds, unless the US government would subsidize fiber rollout. Given the US budget challenges, I don’t see that happening, meaning the United States does not gain leadership footing in broadband.”

The Need for Speed

What is super-high-speed Internet good for, anyway?

Game consoles like the Xbox 360, smart TVs and appliances, Internet radios, and all of the other connected devices in your home, consume bandwidth. Rumor has it that the next Xbox will require an always-on Internet connection.

Netflix recommends 5Mb/s broadband connections for the highest quality movie streams, which can use approximate 2.3GB and hour

In many circumstances, the benefits of an ultra-fast broadband connection may not be immediately apparent. There are other factors besides peak bandwidth that ultimately affect a user’s experience online and if you’re not using the bandwidth you already have available, upgrading to a faster plan isn’t going to make much difference. However, as our needs for more bandwidth increase, the benefits of some of the more advanced broadband technologies become clear.

As we start saving more data in the cloud, streaming more HD content, and increasing the number of connected devices in our homes, our bandwidth needs grow. Just a few years ago, having one or two PCs connected in a home was typical. Today, though, it’s not uncommon to find a dozen or more connected devices, when you account for smart appliances and televisions, mobile devices, game consoles, desktop systems, and laptops.

How much bandwidth you’ll require will obviously vary based on the usage habits of those in your household, but we can give you some rough guidelines and expectations. For example, let’s say you’ve got three users in your home. One is playing a game online, while the other two are streaming HD movies or television from a service like Netflix. For their highest-quality streams, Netflix recommends a 5Mbps connection; a typical stream can consume about 2.3GB an hour. The gamer will use a minimal amount of bandwidth, but the two users streaming video will likely saturate a 10Mbps connection.

The speed differences between mainstream and high-end broadband plans are not trivial and neither is the cost. Actual differences will vary from provider to provider, but we’ll use Verizon FiOS as an example. A basic plan that offers 15Mbps down and 5Mbps up will run about $70 a month. Its flagship plan offers 300Mbps down and 65Mbps up, 20x and 13x increases in bandwidth, respectively, for $209 a month. If you can use that kind of bandwidth, the cost per megabit is much better with the high-end plan. To give an example of how those bandwidth ratings affect download speed, the 15Mbps plan can download a 5GB file in about 44 minutes. The 300Mbps plan can do it in 2.2 minutes.

Bandwidth Caps

In an attempt to curb massive bandwidth consumption, some providers—especially wireless providers—have implemented bandwidth caps that kick in when consumption ticks past a certain level. For wireless providers, that number is usually in the 2GB–4GB-per-month range, while wireline providers like Comcast are in the 300GB-per-month range.

Some would argue that these caps are simply a tool to gouge consumers, while others claim it’s a means to ease network congestion. Sonic.net CEO Dane Jasper said this when asked about bandwidth caps, “I don't see caps as being related to network capacity concerns. To put it simply, the heaviest users, when capped, will still use their service during peak/prime time, and network capacity must be built to accommodate the peak load. The sustained use that the heavy users would make is spread around the clock, and doesn't have any substantial impact on capacity planning.” Whatever the case, if bandwidth caps become the norm, consumers could be in for significant cost increases in the future as our bandwidth needs increase.

Click the next page for tips on switching ISPs.

High-Speed for the Masses

Where is it?

As we’ve mentioned, broadband isn’t universally available across the entire United States just yet. According to a recent study by Akamai Technologies, 81 percent of the country has access to broadband with speeds greater than 2Mbps. That may not sound too bad, but with availability in only 81 percent of the nation, the United States ranks 36th among the countries included in the study. The global average is only 66 percent, which means the United States is decidedly ahead of the curve, but in countries like Germany, the Netherlands, and even Bulgaria, broadband connectivity is in the 94–96 percent range. As compared to the previous year, the United States increased its average by 8.6 percent, which puts the country among the fastest growers, but there is obviously still much work to be done if we’re going to catch the leaders.

If you ask those in the know why the United States trails many other nations in broadband availability and speed, you’ll likely hear three possible reasons: burdensome government regulations, high corporate tax rates, and the relative high cost of bandwidth in the country. Solving these problems is going to take significant action on the part of the government and some initiative and cooperation from the private sector, but it appears we are on the path to success, especially as younger, more tech-savvy legislators are elected. The FCC’s Broadband.gov website has details on the Broadband Action Agenda and lists more than 60 initiatives the FCC intends to undertake over the next few years to implement the recommendations in the National Broadband Plan, which was introduced in March 2010. One of the goals of the National Broadband Plan is to provide 100 million American households with access to 100Mbps broadband connections by 2020.

Tips for Switching ISPs

It’s easier than you think

Switching ISPs is a major concern for some users, but it need not be. Unless you’re locked into a contract with a wretched provider or are married to an email address provided by your ISP, switching to a new provider should be painless. We suppose some users may also be forced to use a particular ISP due to specific work-at-home requirements implemented by their employer, but even then a call to the company’s IT-support department should yield results.

If you’re locked into a contract, perhaps due to a triple-play-type bundle that links phone, TV, and Internet service, there are still things you can do to switch. Although most ISPs don’t make specific uptime guarantees, there is still an implied level of reliability that needs to be met. If service is subpar, start by logging every outage or problem and contacting your ISP’s support team. Run regular speed tests too, and log every result that falls below your expected performance level. At some point after reporting continued issues, it won’t be cost effective to provide support any longer. Call your ISP, ask for a service manager to hear your case, and you’ll eventually be let out of your contract.

Should your ISP-linked email address be associated with numerous logins online, start by setting up a new account with a free service like Gmail and systematically change all of your login credentials. Also, give yourself some lead time and set up an auto-forward to send emails coming into your ISP-linked account to the new account. And check in with your ISP; many will allow access to the email account via webmail, even after you’ve moved on to another provider.

When or if you do make the switch, assuming you’ve got a router in your home network, connecting the new modem to your router is usually all that is necessary. Worst-case scenario, you’ve got to reconfigure your wireless settings in a new router, and maybe a few IP addresses and forwarding rules, but that’s about it.

Three Steps to a Better Broadband Connection

Even your existing broadband service can be made faster with a few simple tweaks

Signing up for a fast broadband connection is an obvious first step to ensuring high speeds while surfing the web. Even with a speedy connection in place though, there are a number of things that can be done to ensure optimal performance and reliability. The routers thrown in when you sign up for service aren’t always of the best quality, and many service providers also have wimpy DNS (Domain Name Service) servers, which are easily bogged down under load and introduce tons of latency. These things can be easily averted, however, and performance and reliability can be increased with just a few tweaks and a bit of reconfiguration.

1) Use a quality router:

The routers bundled with many broadband service plans tend be low-end, dumbed-down products that provide sub-par wireless coverage and are ill-equipped for numerous connections. If you’ve invested in a fast broadband connection, spend a few extra bucks on a high-quality router, as well. A good router will be outfitted with a faster processor, more RAM, and a better network switch. It will likely offer better wireless coverage, too, and provide faster, more reliable service, even if there are multiple devices attached, all sucking down gobs of data.

The Asus RT-N66U is a powerful wireless broadband router, with an integrated gigabit switch, that will outperform most of the routers bundled with residential broadband service.

2) Position your modem and router properly:

For the best possible connection, your broadband modem should be located as close to the incoming feed as possible. For example, if you’ve got a cable modem, and the cable line coming into your home has been split numerous times before the modem is attached, the signal quality to the modem will be degraded. For the best performance, the cleanest signal should be fed to your modem, which means connecting it to the main line, as close to the initial split as possible.

Router positioning is also important if you have devices that connect wirelessly. If your router has omnidirectional antennas (and odds are that if you haven’t replaced the stock antennas, it does), it is best to position the router as close to the center of the area you’d like covered as possible.

The omni-directional antennas included with most routers transmit (and receive) signals in all directions. For the best performance, that signal should be centrally located between devices.

3) Switch DNS servers:

Every time you type a URL into your web browser, a request is sent to a DNS server to obtain the corresponding website’s IP address. If that server is bogged down or just plain sluggish, it can be slow to resolve addresses and introduce unwanted latency. Try running the DNS Bench utility available at www.grc.com to ascertain the fastest DNS servers in your area, and use those in lieu of your ISP’s. You can designate which DNS servers to use in your TCP/IPv4 properties in Windows on each machine, or enter them into the requisite fields in the WAN section of your broadband router’s setup utility.

Using the fastest DNS servers available in your area can significantly speed up web browsing.

Are you happy with your current Internet setup? Or are you still waiting for 4G LTE coverage and fiber optics to hit your neck of the woods? Let us know in the comments below!

External Hard Drive Head-to-Head

Josh Norem — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 18:01:46 +0000

Three USB hard drives: WD My Passport vs Toshiba Canvio Plus vs Adata DashDrive Elite

There are times when a USB key can’t handle the action we’re throwing at it and we need something bigger to step in and get the job done. Like a police officer calling for backup, it’s at these times that we summon a USB 3.0 external hard drive. This latest batch of drives offers something for everyone, from WD’s huge 2TB jobbie to Adata’s super-thin, sexy little thang. Toshiba’s 1.5TB drive is thrown into the mix, too, for folks looking for a basic, affordable, high-capacity solution.

WD My Passport 2TB

At 2TB, WD’s My Passport is the largest-capacity USB hard drive we’ve ever tested, and its four chunky 500GB platters rotate at 5,400rpm. In the palm it feels about as thick as a huge English muffin with a piece of ham in the middle, or a water-logged deck of cards; it’s the thickest drive in this roundup, but only by a tiny margin over the 1.5TB Toshiba. Though this drive is pudgier than the rest at 0.8-inch thick, it’s noticeably shorter than the other two drives at just 4.2 inches long. It comes in a variety of pleasingly subtle, matte color finishes (red, blue, black, gray, white) and is available in sizes ranging from 500GB to 2TB.

Hello, sexy. We’re talking about its capacity, not its looks.

The software package included with the My Passport is well-rounded, and includes backup software, an encryption utility, and a diagnostic tool. It should be noted that software for both Mac and PC are included, though obviously we’re only testing the PC version. The backup software is called WD Smartware and is based on Memeo Backup—it backs up everything instantly without any user intervention, so you just tell it to keep an eye on “Documents,” for example, and it automatically copies any files it sees that are documents. We learned the hard way, though, that “Documents” means .doc files, and not just any files placed into the Documents folder, which was confusing. Adding to the confusion was a lack of information about whether a backup had taken place once new files had been added to a monitored directory. You also can’t create a backup image of your entire drive, which is another flaw. We rarely use bundled software, so this isn’t that big of a deal for us, but it’s a strike against WD nevertheless. The software does include a file-retrieval service in case you lose data, and it works well, letting you put files back into their original location or just dump them into a predetermined folder. Other bundled software includes a password-protection utility that requires a password to access the drive, and a drive-health monitor, which is useful.

To test the drive’s mettle we copied 30GB of media files to it from our desktop PC running a Samsung 830 SSD boot drive, and it took top honors by taking just eight minutes, 46 seconds to complete the job. This was the fastest speed in our roundup of these drives, even though all the drives have roughly the same specs, so kudos to WD for the victory. Its time was almost three minutes faster than the Adata drive and two minutes faster than the Toshiba, so the performance difference is significant.

Overall, there’s a lot to like about the WD drive, but we’re dinging it pretty hard for having flaky backup software. The password-protection function is nice, but our favorite two things about it are that it’s the biggest USB drive available, and of these three, it’s also the fastest.

WD My Passport 2TB

Huge capacity; great speed; full-featured software package

Backup software is not reliable or good for advanced users; can’t make backup images

$150, www.wd.com

Toshiba Canvio Plus 3.0 1.5TB

In this group, the Toshiba Canvio initially came across as the vanilla stepchild—nothing to get excited about, at least in this company, given its bland exterior and specs. We tested the 1.5TB version of the drive, which is the highest capacity offered by Toshiba. Surprisingly, it’s almost as thick as the 2TB WD drive despite its 500GB capacity deficit, so the lesson here is that if you’re going big on a USB drive, prepare to be toting around a Hot Pocket-size enclosure. The 1.5TB drive is only available in black, a decision we are just fine with since we don’t need nor want fancy colors on our USB storage. If you favor a splash of color attached to your USB port, you’ll have to get by with less capacity, as only the 500GB and 1TB models are available in red, blue, and gray (as well as black, natch).

The Toshiba drive wins the contest of lamest names for devices and software, but is still the best drive here.

On the software front, the Canvio comes with a well-rounded package that includes backup software with encryption, drive utilities, a cloud storage option, and a movie-editing app called Muvee Reveal. The NTI Backup Now EZ backup software is for Windows only, though the drive includes an NTFS driver that lets you use it with both Macs and PCs. Despite the software’s odd name, it’s actually our favorite of this roundup, simply because it offers an intuitive interface and many options for configuring backups, whether you want to back up to the Canvio drive itself or to the cloud. You can also choose to back up categories of files, individually selected files and folders, or entire drive images. You just select the files you want to back up and let it run. You can also schedule backups, and see the status of the drive onscreen in the software, which is handy. It’s also easy to password-protect the drive. The only problem we had in our tests was that the cloud option didn’t work for us—you get a 30-day free trial of cloud storage with the drive but we couldn’t activate ours. Note: The Basic model of this drive does not offer cloud storage as an option.

In our file-copy test, whereby we hustle 30GB of data over its fat USB 3.0 pipe, the Toshiba took second place overall with a time of 10 minutes, 34 seconds, which was almost two minutes slower than the WD drive, but faster than the Adata unit.

All in all, this is an excellent all-around backup drive. It’s not the highest-capacity or the thinnest drive ever, but it has great software, decent capacity, and is affordable—we don’t ask for much more in a USB storage device.

Toshiba Canvio Plus 3.0 1.5TB

Sizable capacity; great software, affordable

Cloud storage trial didn’t work, no specs stand out

$110, www.toshiba.com

Adata DashDrive Elite 500GB HE720

The Adata drive is one of the sexiest USB drives we have ever tested, and is certainly the thinnest USB drive too, at just 8.9mm thick. It might not sound like much in today’s world of super-thin everything, but this puppy is thin. In fact, our research indicates it is the thinnest USB drive currently available.

If this roundup were a beauty contest, the DashDrive would easily win.

Since life isn’t fair, there’s a major downside to the drive’s flatness, which is that its single-platter capacity is limited to 500GB. When compared to its 1.5TB and 2TB rivals here, 500GB is but a morsel, really, but that’s the price you pay for its slim form factor. To that point, 500GB is the only capacity available for this model.

Despite its HE720 model name, which to our eyes suggests a 7,200rpm hard drive, this puppy sports a 5,400rpm drive inside its stainless steel chassis. Its physical size is 4.6 inches long and 3.1 inches wide, and it’s less than a half-inch tall. Its exterior shell is made with 9H stainless steel, which is resistant to scratches and looks slick but is too prone to fingerprints. The drive itself has only two mildly interesting features: a small, blue LED for activity and a tiny button located next to the USB 3.0 plug labeled “Backup.” Tapping the button triggers the included syncing software to open so you can configure and run backup routines. It would be handy if the backup button were in a more easily accessible location, as putting it right next to the USB plug makes it hard to reach.

The included Adata Sync software is PC-only and gets the job done for syncing, restoring, and backing up files, but it’s easily the most unpolished software in this roundup. As an example, if you try to open the software when it’s running in the background, you’ll see a pop-up error that contains what we can only assume is either a foreign language or gibberish. The Window also looks like it was built for Windows 98 and lacks the ease-of-use and look-and-feel of modern software, as it just gives you a split-window with “Source” on the left and “Destination” on the right, and you have to check boxes in a Windows Explorer interface to get it configured. This is not software we’d want our parents to use, that’s for sure. That said, we actually appreciate its unvarnished nature. You just tell it which folders you’re interested in and choose Backup, Restore, or Sync. You can then either manually back up everything you want or just schedule the software to run. It’s not glamorous or grandma-friendly, but we dig it.

During testing, the drive was the slowest here by a small margin, taking 11 minutes and 31 seconds to move 30 gigs of data onto its lone platter. We know people don’t buy these drives for speed, and they are all relatively slow compared to our desktop HDDs and SSDs, but we do take speed into consideration.

The DashDrive is a decent package despite its flaws. We like its simple software, hard steel shell, and thin size a lot, making it a solid drive, both literally and figuratively.

Adata DashDrive Elite 500GB HE720

Looks cool; rugged; amazingly thin; software is straight-forward

Software could confuse people; drive is slower than the others; small capacity; loves fingerprints

$150, www.adata-group.com

Virus Protection Guide

Paul Lilly — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 21:07:34 +0000

Best free antivirus programs and virus propection tips

So you got caught with your pants down on the Internet (figuratively, folks) and contracted a virus. That sucks. Or maybe you were wearing protection but still fell victim to some nasty bit of code that managed to slip by your antivirus software undetected. That sucks even more. Either way, it's nothing to feel ashamed about. The web is a dangerous place and even the most tech savvy users sometimes slip up. You can even get a virus through no fault of your own simply by visiting a reputable website that, unbeknownst to you, has been compromised by a hacker with malicious intent. The web is a war zone, and even if you're not a target, you can still end up a casualty.

That's not to say you can't stack the odds decidedly in your favor, because you can. And you should. To help you do that, we've put together a comprehensive guide on how to protect your PC from malware. We cover everything from smart (and not so smart) computing habits, the best free antivirus programs, and what tools work best for removing an infection when all else fails. Don your hazmat suits and let's get started!

If your PC looks like this, you're doing something wrong.

Virus 101

If you're reading this, it's safe to assume you already know what a computer virus is, and certainly the majority of Maximum PC readers are well informed. So, we won't spend a ton of text dissecting the different kinds of viruses, but we do want to quickly cover the basics. Strictly speaking, a virus is a program that can replicate itself and is designed to spread from one computer to another, doing things the end-user doesn't want and/or doesn't know about.

A broader term is malware, short for malicious software, and there are many different forms, including viruses, Trojan horses, keyloggers, worms, adware, and spyware, to name a few. These days, malware is most often spread through web browsers. According to Kaspersky, there were nearly 1.6 billion browser-based attacks in 2012, up from 946 million a year prior.

A common misconception is that only Windows users need to concern themselves with malware, but that isn't true. Malware writers have traditionally focused their efforts on Windows, but have started targeting other platforms as they become more popular, including mobile. Even Mac users have to be on the lookout.

"In early 2012, the Flashfake botnet was discovered, consisting of 700,000 computers all running under Mac OS X," Kaspersky states in its most recent security bulletin.

The bottom line is, if you use the Internet, you're a target.

Safe Computing is a Start

Your best line of defense is still you, the end-user. The less risks you take, the lower your chance of becoming just another statistic, and it all starts with developing smart computing habits. Here are five easy ways you can remove yourself from the line of fire:

Never open unexpected email attachments, even if you know the recipient. If a PC belonging to someone else is infected, it could be auto-generating malicious emails with dirty attachments or booby-trapped URLs.
It's easy to spoof URLs within emails. Instead of clicking on email links, type the URL directly into your browser, especially if you receive a notice that appears to come from your banking institution or PayPal. This exponentially decreases your risk of falling for a phishing scam. You know what they say about a fool and his money...
Stay diligent with updating and patching your software. These updates often patch security holes that malware writers can otherwise exploit. If a program has the option of automatically checking for updates, enable it. We also recommend running Secunia's Personal Software Inspector (PSI) on occasion, which is a free security tool that scans for and identifies vulnerabilities in many third-party programs.
Avoid visiting shadier sides of the web. We're in no way trying to play the part of moral police, but sites that serve up illegal downloads or triple-X rated content are popular places to set digital landmines.
Use Alt-F4 to close suspicious pop-up ads instead of clicking on the X button. Why? Sometimes the X button is really a part of the ad, and clicking it could redirect you to a malicious website.

A Word About Passwords

As much as you might love your significant other, using his or her name as your password is a really dumb idea. It's far too easy to guess, just like "123456," "iloveyou," "letmein," and others found on SplashData's list of worst passwords.

A good password will be at least eight characters long and will use a mix of letters, numbers, symbols, and capitalization. For example, "Ey3LMpC!" which stands for "I love Maximum PC" is relatively easy to remember and much more secure than a word or phrase that can be broken with a brute force dictionary attack.

You also should be using multiple passwords for different websites so that if one account is compromised, your others are still safe. The downside to this approach is that it can be difficult to remember multiple passwords, especially strong ones. An alternative to remembering them all is to use a password manager like LastPass or KeePass, both of which are free. RoboForm is another option, and though it isn't free, it also fills in forms and allows you to access RoboForm Logins and Identities on all your devices, including mobile. The same is true of 1Password, though it doesn't fill in forms.

Second Line of Defense: Antivirus Software

Whenever the topic of security software comes up, inevitably someone chimes in that it's completely unnecessary so long as you surf the web safely. They'll then provide anecdotal evidence based on their own personal experience, and while it's true you can get by without AV protection, it's a constant roll of the dice. And for what? To save a few CPU cycles? It's simply not worth the risk, and certainly not the cost when there are free options out there. Let's focus on those first.

-Avast Free Edition (Free, www.avast.com/en-us/index)

Every year we run a roundup of security software and you can read the latest one in the April issue of Maximum PC magazine. In it we tested three free antivirus programs -- Avast, Microsoft Security Essentials, and AVG -- and out of those three, we found Avast to be the best free antivirus software.

We like Avast because it scans for viruses and spyware, and has a built-in remote support tool that allows you to dish out (or receive) assistance to other trusted Avast users, which is extremely handy if you're the IT guy for family and friends. It also offers tons of fine grain control.

One of our few complaints is that Avast doesn't guard against Potentially Unwanted Programs (PUPs) by default. To change that, click on Security > File System Shield > Settings > Sensitivity and check the box underneath "PUP and suspicious files."

We also recommend doing a full system scan at least once a month. If you keep your PC on 24/7, it's not a bad idea to schedule nightly scans when you're asleep. This ensures that any potential threats are caught before they have much chance to do any harm, provided they get past Avast's real-time scan engine to begin with.

-Second Opinions

No virus scanner is capable of catching and neutralizing every single threat; it's simply not possible due to the sheer number of new malware that is created on a daily basis. For this reason, it's in your best interest to solicit a second and/or third opinion on occasion using a dedicated spyware scanner. How often depends on how risky your online behavior. If all you're doing is surfing Maximum PC, sports sites, and updating your Facebook feed, quarterly scans should be sufficient.

One of the best programs out there is Malwarebytes. It's free (there's also a paid version) and it does an excellent job of detecting deeply embedded threats that other scanners miss. Malwarebytes is also great at cleaning up remnants left behind after you've eradicated a virus, such as lingering registry entries.

Another popular program is SuperAntiSpyware, which is also available in free and paid flavors. Scanning with both Malwarebyes and SuperAntiSpyware on occasion is a potent one-two combo to supplement your daily AV program.

-Internet Security Suites

If you're willing to pay for security software, an Internet security suite offers more robust protection than what's available in any single free program. One of the best available is Norton Internet Security. Put your pitchforks away, if you haven't taken Norton for a test drive in several years, then you have no idea what you're missing. It's not the same bloated program that it was prior to 2009. That's when Symantec re-wrote the software from the ground up with an emphasis on performance. These days it offers top-notch protection with little impact on system performance

Click the next page to see what you should do when your computer has already been infected!

Stick Your Head in the Cloud

A substitute for installing security software is to tap into the cloud. There are several cloud scanners at your disposal, but only a select few will go the extra mile and actually disinfect your machine if it finds something wrong, while others try to upsell you. Panda Security's Panda Active Scan detects and removes, though it only works with Internet Explorer. There's also an option to install a small front-end, but even if you go that route, it's still a cloud-based scanner that won't suck up your system resources.

Another handy bookmark is VirusTotal, a free, on-demand online scanner with a twist. Let's say you downloaded a file or email attachment, but are suspicious of its contents. Before you open it up, just upload it to VirusTotal and it will be put under the microscope of dozens of scan engines. It's the ultimate second opinion for single files and URLs, albeit the maximum file size is 32MB.

Hide Behind a Virtual Machine

Have kids that share your PC? You're a brave soul. Kids have a tendency to click on pop-up requests willy-nilly, but there are steps you can take to mitigate any potential headaches. Here they are:

Teach them smart computing habits. It's never too early to learn, and since their brains are like little sponges, they may surprise you with how much they retain.
Set up a different user account. It won't save your PC from nasty infections, but hey, do you really want to login and find that your Windows theme has been changed over to Spongebob or Dora the Explorer? We didn't think so.
Install Sandboxie, a free application that runs selected programs in an isolated environment. You can configure Sandboxie to run any time a browser is opened, so when your kids inevitably download something they shouldn't have, the changes aren't permanent. This is also a wonderful tool for installing on PCs belonging to friends and family. It works with any browser, too.

If you're particularly reckless on the web, a full-blown virtual machine is the next best thing to a dedicated web box. A virtual machine isn't completely fool proof, but it's close to it. Microsoft's Virtual PC works relatively well, especially if you're mostly interested in surfing the web, and so is VMWare's Player. Another thing VMs are good for is installing suspicious programs and beta software. If something turns out to be malicious, the damage is contained away from your OS.

I'm Already Infected, Now What!?

Despite your best efforts, sometimes the bad guys win. If that happens, or if a family member drops off a badly infected PC, follow these steps to clean it up.

-Scan, Scan, and Scan Again

First, try installing a free antivirus program. If it works, great, proceed to scan the system, and then follow that up with Malwarebytes and SuperAntiSpyware sweeps. This three-pronged approach should rid the system of most, if not all malware, unless it's a particularly nasty infection. If it doesn't, don't worry, we're not ready to throw in the towel.

Before we proceed, are you even able to install security programs? Some malware detects when security software is being installed and stops it dead in its tracks. If that's happening to you, try to disable the offending program. Hit CTRL+ALT+DEL to start the Task Manager and look for any suspicious entries in the Processes tab. Anything that's gibberish -- for example, "mgbelwisfl" -- is probably up to no good. Highlight the entry and press End Process. Are you now able to install AV scanners?

If not, you'll need to boot into Safe Mode, which only loads the bare minimum drivers required to run Windows. To do that, hit the F8 key during boot (press it repeatedly during during bootup if you have trouble with the timing). When prompted, select Safe Mode with Networking. Now try installing/running your security software.

-HiJackThis

If your system's still displaying malware symptoms (slowed performance, random pop-ups, etc), you may need to dig deeper. HiJackThis is a free utility that generates an in-depth report of registry and file settings, but be warned it doesn't discern between good and harmful settings. If you don't know what the settings are, solicit outside help by posting a HiJackThis log to a computer forum like one here at Maximum PC. Alternately, you can post the contents of the log on HiJackThis.de Security and/or I Am Not a Geek for quick and basic parsing, though you should still seek outside help before nuking an entry you're unfamiliar with.

Running HiJackThis is simple. Just click the "Scan" button and wait for it to finish scanning your system (it only takes a few seconds). When it's finished, click on "Save Log" to save the contents to a Notepad file, which you can then copy/paste into any of the sites mentioned above.

Assuming you recognize an obvious malicious entry, check the appropriate box(es) and click "Fix checked."

-Comodo Cleaning Essentials

At this point, we're starting to run out of options, but all is not yet lost. Comodo Cleaning Essentials (CCE) is a tool that any geek should be toting around in his/her tool chest. It doesn't require any installation, meaning you can run it direct from a USB key, which is perfect for making house calls.

CCE digs deep for a variety of infections, including rootkits, making it an indispensable tool. It even scans the Master Boot Record (MBR), so to say it's thorough is an understatement.

Inside the CCE directory, you'll also find an entry called KillSwitch.exe. It's a much better version of the built-in Task Manager because it provides a bunch of additional information, and will even tell you if a program that's running is safe or known to be malicious. If you can't get into the Task Manager to kill an offending program, try using KillSwitch. If you want, you can even have it replace the Task Manager by enabling the setting in the Options menu.

-TDSSKiller

Persistent infections that manage to evade your best efforts to eradicate could be indicative of a rootkit. A rootkit is particularly stealthy, though not entirely invisible. Download and run Kaskperky's TDSSKiller if you think you might have a rootkit. Like CCE, this utility doesn't require installation and can be carried on a USB stick.

-ComboFix

When you're at your wit's end and ready to reinstall Windows, that's when you should try ComboFix, a powerful cleanup tool that can either save the day or leave your PC unable to operate correctly. Before downloading and running ComboFix, backup any data as if you're reinstalling Windows, because in the end, you might have to anyway. Before you proceed, you should also read through the extensive usage guide on Bleeping Computer.

If you've gotten this far and your system is still infected, throw in the towel and start with a fresh Windows installation. Sure, you could keep plugging away in hopes of cleaning up your system, but by the time you're done, you could be rocking a fresh Windows install with no trace of malware.

Know of any tips we missed or have software recommendations of your own? Let us and other readers know by posting them in the comments section below!

Raspberry Pi vs. Intel NUC

Gordon Mah Ung — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 20:50:37 +0000

Raspberry Pi vs. Intel NUC

The unique $35 Raspberry Pi computer set the PC world on its ear last year. Part computer science project and part incredibly cheap PC, the DIY single-board computer is such a hot item, some retailers are charging double what the unit originally cost. Of course, where there’s money, there’s Intel. The chip giant has formally introduced its $320 “Next Unit of Computing,” or NUC, PC concept—basically a bare-bones, hobbyist kit PC. While this is admittedly an apple–to-orange comparison in many respects, we felt that hobbyists deserve to see an accounting of the pros and cons of each in a head-on fight.

Round 1: Size

Intel’s NUC is built around an amazingly small 4x4x2-inch chassis that Intel is hoping to make the standard for subminiature-but-powerful PCs. The NUC isn’t the first we’ve seen this small, though. The Zotac Nano XS is slightly thinner than the NUC, by about half an inch, and VIA has its Pico-ITX boards. Of course, the Raspberry Pi has them all beat. It comes as a single-board computer at just over 2x3 inches for the whole package.

Winner: Raspberry Pi

Other single-board computers have been available, so the Raspberry Pi’s real breakthrough is its $35 price, making it exceedingly accessible for experimentation.

Round 2: Pricing

Intel’s Ivy Bridge chips have been amazingly lean on power consumption for the high-performance x86 chips they are. The NUC ships with a 65-watt power brick, and the dual-core Hyper-Threaded Core i3 is rated at 17 watts. Pretty impressive for an x86. However, when you consider that the Raspberry Pi can run off your cell phone charger (provided it puts out 700mA), Ivy Bridge and even the next-gen Haswell are unlikely to ever compete with the Pi in the power- consumption game.

Winner: Raspberry Pi

Round 3: Applications

We don’t mean applications as in specific apps, but the possible uses for these wee PCs. The NUC can be used as an HTPC, a mini Big Picture Steam Box, or slung behind a monitor to create an almost-all-in-one. The Raspberry Pi, on the other hand, is the perfect hobbyist machine for students and tinkerers young and old. It’s being used to run everything from MAME cabinets to controlling quad-copter drones. As a device intended to introduce folks on super-tight budgets to computing concepts and programming, the Raspberry Pi is a win no matter how you cut it. However, Intel’s NUC is also quite superb at what it’s meant for. With its included VESA-mount adapter, it can be used in signage applications and is basically an incredibly powerful small machine.

Winner: Tie

Round 4: Specsmanship

At $35, the Raspberry Pi is pretty low-powered. As a desktop UI, for example, it’s not exactly something you want to push regularly, with its 700MHz Broadcom ARM 11 CPU, 256MB of RAM, HDMI, and LAN and USB support. The NUC, on the other hand, is like everything Intel does: a tour de force of specs and hardware. The NUC we have here packs a 1.8GHz dual-core, Hyper-Threaded Core i3 chip and has Mini PCI Express slots to run an mSATA SSD and wireless card. With its HD4000 graphics, the box is capable of reasonable gaming with older titles, too. Hell, our version even packs that new-fangled ultra-fast Thunderbolt port. This round is an easy win for the NUC.

Winner: NUC

Intel’s Next Unit of Computing (NUC) is meant to spur interesting and unique uses for Intel hardware.

Round 5: Performance

Again, there’s no debating this. The NUC’s size isn’t really exciting, but its performance is. Most mini PCs have been based on VIA’s CPUs, which aren’t exactly speed kings, or AMD’s Brazos chips, which don’t light any fires themselves. The NUC is really fast for its class. The Raspberry Pi, while incredibly cool for $35, isn’t something we’d be happy pushing all day. Yes, it can run a desktop OS, and yes, it can stream some media, but would you really want it to? The answer is no.

And the Winner Is…

The fact is, both are winners. OK, now quit your bitching; we honestly wouldn’t feel right if we called this for one or the other. We think the Intel NUC is a freaking-cool little box and we can imagine it at the heart of several projects around the house and car. At the same time, the Raspberry Pi has so much charm and the price is so damned good (that’s the Raspberry Pi’s real breakthrough, you know) that there’s no reason not to buy one or two of these bare-bones kits to experiment with. So maybe those of you who thought these two devices couldn’t be compared were right.

Build the Ultimate AMD Gaming PC

Josh Norem — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 19:30:49 +0000

We build a machine that’s red and black to hopefully beat our benchmarks black and blue

Variety is the spice of the Lab, so this month we decided to eschew our traditional builds and go with one you don’t see every day—an all-AMD gaming PC, built with (most of) the best parts we could get our hands on. We’re sure some of you will question the purpose of this build, so our pre-emptive answer is we built it because we could, and we were curious to see how a balls-out AMD build would benchmark, as we haven’t seen over-the-top AMD rig since The Matrix: Revolutions let us down. Plus, everyone is always ragging on us for ignoring AMD, so here you go AMD enthusiasts—an entire PC built just for you.

The AMD Gaming PC

We ended up pairing AMD's relatively new “Vishera” Piledriver CPU, the 4GHz FX-8350 (or “Octomom,” as we like to call it) with a totally jacked HD 7970 from Asus and a small army of AMD-ish components, which we figured would make for an interesting build. Finally, we’ve heard your feedback about how you don’t need to see another picture of RAM being inserted into its slot, so this month we’re going to talk about our component selection and the building process instead of showing you how we actually built it.

It’s Time to Choose

The impetus for this system was the release of the relatively new “Vishera” CPU from AMD along with an updated version of the Asus Crosshair V Formula Z motherboard running the 990FX chipset. We had just received both of these parts, so we knew what we had to do—take a lunch break to consider our options. While tossing back root beers we formulated the basis of the system—an AMD processor and motherboard were a given, but what else? We had yet to sample the overclocked HD 7970 DirectCU II TOP from Asus, so we added that to the equation. We then remembered AMD-branded RAM had just been announced, so we added that to the ticket as we ordered another round of brewskies. To finish the system, we settled on the Thermaltake V3 AMD edition chassis, some red-band Corsair AF120 case fans, and a red Corsair Force GS SSD, as well, to tie the room together.

INGREDIENTS

	PART	URL	Price
Case	Thermaltake V3 AMD Edition	www.thermaltakeusa.com	$50
PSU	Corsair TX750M 750W	www.corsair.com	$115
Mobo	Asus Crosshair V Formula Z	www.asus.com	$230
CPU	AMD 4GHz FX-8350	www.amd.com	$220
Cooler	Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus	www.coolermaster.com	$20
GPU	Asus Radeon HD 7970 DirectCU II TOP	www.asus.com	$450
RAM	8GB AMD Performance Edition DDR3/1600	www.amd.com	$50
Hard Drive	WD RE 4TB	www.wd.com	$460
SSD	Corsair Force GS SSD 240GB	www.corsair.com	$220
Fans	Corsair AF120 Quiet Edition (x2)	www.corsair.com	$28
OS	Windows 7 Professional 64-bit	www.microsoft.com	$140
Total			$1,983

Click the next page to see our CPU, motherboard, and video card specs

1. The CPU and Motherboard

AMD’s new CPU is the first proc we’ve ever seen that comes clocked from the factory at 4GHz, and it’s a surprisingly affordable eight-core processor, too. Though 4GHz is the highest stock-clock speed we’ve ever seen, don’t get too excited. The FX-8350 is not even in the same universe as something like a hexa-core Intel Core i7-3960X, despite having two additional cores and a clock-speed advantage.

The motherboard is the latest version of the Asus Crosshair V and has every feature imaginable, including an actual digital kitchen sink. It’s running the AMD 990FX chipset and dishes up a total of eight SATA 6Gb/s ports and two eSATA 6Gb/s ports as well as a new SupremeFX III audio chip and three PCI Express x16 slots for three-way SLI or CrossFire. Plus, the paint job is totally righteous.

Asus’s Crosshair V Formula Z is the perfect home for a flagship CPU like the FX-8350.

2. OUR TOP PICK

Of course we went with a Radeon HD 7970 for this build—you would do the same thing if you were in our statically shielded shoes. But instead of just going with a Nilla Wafer card, we rang up Asus and requested its overclocked bitch-maker, the HD 7970 DirectCU II TOP. In English, this means the card is a 7970 but it has the company’s ludicrously huge DirectCU II triple-slot cooler, and TOP means its core clock speed is nudged up to 1GHz from its stock speed of 925MHz. This card requires two 8-pin connectors and can power up to six displays at once, and did we mention it’s effing massive?

This overclocked, triple-slot pixel-pusher runs neck-and-neck with the GTX 680 and is totally silent.

3. WE MAKE OUR CASE

We can already hear the smack-talk about taking a $50 case and stuffing two-grand worth of gear into it. Point taken—and yes, we chose it for its color scheme. But since our build wasn’t too ambitious, the case actually worked out OK, though we did experience a few issues. The first sign of trouble was a warning in the manual not to use a video card that exceeds 10.4 inches. We stared at our 11-inch GPU, gritted our teeth, and wedged it into the PCIe slot with... no problem at all. It worked perfectly. The second issue was the rear-facing 3.5-inch hard drive bays, which we haven’t seen in a while and did not miss. Installing drives once the mobo and GPU are inside is a PITA, plain and simple. The biggest issue we had was a lack of holes to route our PSU cables, so please cut us some slack on that (we know you won’t).

Thermaltake’s V3 AMD is specifi cally designed for AMD processors and RAM. OK, we made that up.

Click the next page to check out the PC's SSD, PSU, and RAM

4. STORAGE DUTIES

Our SSD selection will probably be another controversial choice, but we picked it for two reasons. First, it’s red. Second, it’s fast. The second part is crucial, because if the drive was red and slow, it would not be in this rig, period. But since it’s fast, and red, in it went. Though we never officially reviewed this drive, it’s the flagship of Corsair’s previous Force lineup, and features fast MLC Toggle NAND and a SandForce SF-2281 controller, so it’s got some hardware cred. In testing, it hummed right along at 464MB/412MB read and write speeds. Since no man can survive on an SSD alone, we paired it with WD’s cavernous 4TB RE enterprise drive, which spins at 7,200rpm and is big enough to hold our multimedia stash, barely. Since the Thermaltake case only has 4 3.5-inch drive bays, we figured we had better go big on this one.

A SandForce SSD from Corsair and 4TB of rotating storage should serve our file-hoarding needs nicely.

5. MORE POWER

Our PSU choice was made interesting by the fact that the original no-name model we chose failed during testing. The system would boot fine and run normally until we really stressed it out, at which point we found ourselves staring at a matrix of orange squares on our LCD. We tried updating the mobo’s BIOS, updating our video drivers, and even swapping the power cables, but nothing worked. Finally, we grabbed the Corsair TX750M and plugged it into the 24-pin and 8-pin connectors, leaving the original PSU attached to the GPU, and everything worked just fine. Eventually, we yanked the original PSU out and went with Corsair. This just reinforces an ageold lesson: Don’t get cheap when it comes to your rig’s power supply. It’s not worth the headache.

An inadequate power supply put a halt to our benchmarking. Thankfully, Corsair stepped in and saved the day.

6. RED RAM

AMD has begun selling branded memory, so we figured we’d plop some sticks into the machine to see if anything bad would happen. The RAM is made by Patriot and VisionTek but is validated by AMD for use with its CPUs and chipsets, so take that for what it’s worth. The company is offering branded sticks in 2GB, 4GB, and 8GB modules in four flavors: Value, Entertainment, Performance, and Radeon. We used 8GB of Performance RAM, which was clocked at 1,600MHz at 1.5V out of the box. Even though AMD warns users against overclocking, it also indicates on its website that it can be safely run at 1.65V in order to achieve more aggressive timings.

We tried some AMD Performance Edition RAM and are happy to report it was rock solid and stable.

Click the next page to see our overall conclusion and benchmark numbers

1. The V3 case only comes with one 12cm exhaust fan, but we replaced it with two Corsair AF120 Quiet case fans because they look snazzy and are whisper-quiet.

2. We originally wanted a Phanteks cooler in red, but a time crunch forced us to go with our favorite cooler of the past year, the Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus. It’s still the best bang for-the-buck cooler in the land and is amazingly quiet.

3. Thermaltake says this case isn’t made for extra-long GPUs and extra-tall CPU coolers, but both of ours fit with zero clearance problems.

4. The Thermaltake V3 AMD edition lacks holes for cable routing, so we ended up with a traffic jam in the lower quadrant of the chassis.

THE NUMBERS AREN’T PRETTY

As you look at the benchmark chart below, you should hear the sad trombone sound from The Price is Right playing in your head because this system got smoked by our zero-point rig, which has a hexa-core Sandy Bridge-E and GeForce GTX 690 video card. Its best result was in the x264 HD 5.0 encoding test, where our AMD rig lost by 30 percent to Core i7-3930K, its least punishing defeat, which was likely the result of the AMD part’s higher clock speed. In every other test the extra cores and clocks that AMD brings to the table didn't make a difference against Intel’s more efficient microarchitecture, even if it’s an older generation. We witnessed a beatdown in all the CPU-based tests, including Adobe Premiere Pro 6, where the Vishera system took almost 1.5 hours to complete a test that took our SNB-E machine just 33 minutes. We saw the same disparity in every other test, but it’s not a surprise since Vishera was not designed to go head-to-head with a $1,000 Intel Core i7 CPU. Sadly, our HD 7970 also got smacked around in both 3DMark and Batman, where it was picked on by the zero-point’s GTX 690 GPU. You can interpret this two ways: the first is, hey, it’s no so bad, considering that the ZP’s CPU and GPU cost twice as much as the AMD’s parts. The other way is, damn, those Sandy Bridge-E CPUs are fast.

Benchmarks

	ZERO POINT
Premiere Pro CS6 (sec)	2,000	5,160 (-61%)
Stitch.Efx 2.0 (sec)	831	1,489 (-44%)
ProShow Producer 5.0 (sec)	1,446	2,902 (-50%)
x264 HD 5.0 (fps)	21.1	14.8 (-30%)
Batmans Arkam City (fps)	76	51 (-33%)
3 DMark 11	5,847	3,122 (-47%)

Our current desktop test bed consists of a hexa-core 3.2GHz Core i7-3930K @ 3.8GHz, 8GB of Corsair DDR3/1600, on an Asus Sabertooth X79 motherboard. We are running a GeForce GTX 690, an OCZ Vertex 3 SSD, and 64-bit Windows 7 Professional.