Contents Ed Word Building for Katrina Please send feedback and cake to will@maximumpc.com. I ’m sure I’m not alone, but this last month, I’ve been unable to really concentrate on anything but the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. It’s the worst natural disaster that’s occurred in the U.S. during my lifetime, and it’s unbelievable to me. The one good thing that’s come out of it is the incredible display of homegrown generosity.
MAXIMUMPC EDITORIAL EDITOR IN CHIEF Will Smith MANAGING EDITOR Katherine Stevenson EXECUTIVE EDITOR Michael Brown SENIOR EDITOR Gordon Mah Ung FEATURES EDITOR Logan Decker ASSOCIATE EDITOR Josh Norem SPECIAL PROJECTS EDITOR Steve Klett EDITORIAL ASSISTANT Claude McIver EDITOR EMERITUS Andrew Sanchez CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Tom Halfhill, Thomas McDonald ART ART DIRECTOR Natalie Jeday ASSOCIATE ART DIRECTOR Boni Uzilevsky PHOTO EDITOR Mark Madeo ASSOCIATE PHOTOGRAPHER Samantha Berg CONTRIBUTING ARTISTS Morgan Mc
quickstart THE BEGINNING OF THE MAGAZINE, WHERE ARTICLES ARE SMALL Get Your Kicks with Friday Night Fix As the Cartoon Network airs free streamed broadcasts over the Internet, Maximum PC wonders: Are content providers finally seeing Put the kids to bed, and then kick back with Aqua Teen Hunger Force on your laptop. the benefits of digital distribution? F ree broadcasts streamed over the Internet? It almost sounds like a trap.
FAST FORWARD TOM HALFHILL 32GB Compact Flash Cards? It sounds wild, but Samsung has developed a new ultra-high-density flash memory that could make such wildly audacious memory cards a reality in the near future. The new NAND chips achieve a staggering 16-gigabits-perchip density, which is double that of the company’s current highest-density NAND chips. The chips will go into production in 2006 and are made using a 50-nanometer process.
quickstart THE BEGINNING OF THE MAGAZINE, WHERE ARTICLES ARE SMALL GAME THEORY THOMAS MCDONALD To PC or Not to PC I spent the past month doing my annual Game Immersion Ritual, in which I leap into a pile of games and swim through them like Uncle Scrooge going for a dip in his money bin, emerging with a list of the top 100 releases for the year.
quickstart THE BEGINNING OF THE MAGAZINE, WHERE ARTICLES ARE SMALL & A spin-off from LoveSac’s line of “hardcore leisure” products, the GameSac can be upgraded with cup holders and pillows, and even zipped to another GameSac to accommodate an “oversize” gamer caboose. The GameSac I t begins humbly, with a foam-like insert about the size of a small backpack. Punch it, kick it, hump it, and in a couple days it will expand to fill the washable 4-foot square canvas cover.
head2head TWO TECHNOLOGIES ENTER, ONE TECHNOLOGY LEAVES ATI’s CrossFire vs. nVidia’s SLI W hen you need to do something faster, nothing is more effective than doubling the amount of horsepower available to perform the task. And when it comes to making 3D games run faster, nothing has proven to be more effective than dropping two videocards in the same PC. There’s absolutely nothing new about this concept.
FLEXIBILITY Aside from sheer performance, the most attractive feature of a dual-videocard motherboard is that you can buy a single card now, and drop in a second one down the road. ATI’s CrossFire solution trumps nVidia’s SLI on this score: You can pair one videocard from any manufacturer with a CrossFire edition card from any other manufacturer. You can run two cards with different clock speeds, too—each card will run at its native speed.
dog g watchdo MAXIMUM PC TAKES A BITE OUT OF BAD GEAR Our consumer advocate investigates... PApple PGainward PHi-Pot PHewlett Packard Freya, Watchdog of the month IPOD BAD BATTERY SETTLEMENT Apple will issue sent the package back. cash, credits, or Gainward’s response extended warranties to my problems was to some 2 million simply: “Sorry for your iPod owners, followtroubles, please request ing the approval of an RMA.” This was not good enough for me. I told a class-action suit against the company.
tions when trying to support dual-channel configurations.” She added: “Although the memory brand does not need to match, the memory density and memory card configuration must be identical for the full memory amount to be used properly. If this rule is not followed, you are left with either a slight increase, no increase, or even a possible decrease in overall memory capacity. We decided that these limitations and requirements were too complex and were detrimental to the overall customer experience.
Overhaul your computer or upgrade a lagging component with our easy-to-follow, upgrading how-tos U step-by-step BY THE MAXIMUM PC STAFF pgrading your PC is a lot like learning be prepared for what’s to come and you’ll be to drive. It’s not difficult, but the less likely to skip a crucial step by mistake. results can be disastrous if you don’t Trust us—we’ve fried enough hardware follow the proper procedures.
HOLIDAY 2005 MAXIMUMPC 25
Upgrade Your Motherboard Step-by-Step Because the motherboard is the foundation of your entire PC, upgrading it provides many opportunities for you to thoroughly screw up your rig and crush your spirit. But it doesn’t have to be that way. All you need is paper, a pencil, your new mobo, and a Phillips screwdriver. 1 Make sure you’re grounded before you touch any components; it’s as easy as touching the metal portion of your case while the machine is still plugged in.
er ints set up, carefully low With the mounting po and s ew scr the ert Ins the board into place. the don’t screw them all hand-tighten them, but 8 way down. 9 Install an expansion card into the board to check the spacing—nudge the board around until the card is easy to insert and remove. 10 Screw down the board, using enough torque to keep the screws from vibrating out, but not enough to crush the PCB. When you’re done, count the number of screws you used.
Upgrade Your CPU Step-by-Step The first step in any CPU upgrade is to choose the right processor for your motherboard. The safest way to do this is to visit your mobo maker’s website and look for a list of CPUs the manufacturer has certified. If you’re feeling frisky, you can cruise the Internet to see if people are running CPUs beyond what the mobo maker has tested, but we don’t recommend this tack for newbies.
Upgrade Your Hard Drive Step-by-Step The golden rule for buying a new hard drive is to buy as much capacity as you can afford—no one ever complains about having too much storage. Today’s highest-capacity desktop drives offer 500GB but are painfully expensive at about $1 per gigabyte. Our advice is to put your cash toward a drive in the 300- to 400GB “sweet spot.” These drives cost between $150 and $250, which is a mouth-watering bargain considering their prodigious size and lightning-fast performance.
7 6 Once Windows is step installed, the next cne the all l is to instal . Start les fi d an rs ve dri essary 2 (if it’s not with Service Pack your Winin ed lud already inc and then dows installation), ipset, ch ur move on to yo and any , ork tw ne rd, videoca t need. gh mi other drivers you At this point, you should have a fully functioning Windows installation with all your drivers installed, all devices functional, and all systems go.
Upgrade Your Videocard Step-by-Step If your videocard is more than six months old, you can kiss chunky frame rates goodbye by upgrading to a new card. The same goes for PCs of any age that are outfitted with integrated graphics.
Upgrade Your Optical Drive Step-by-Step Whether you’re sticking with traditional Parallel ATA drives or moving to an all-SATA configuration, installing a new optical drive is just like installing a new hard drive—only easier! But that doesn’t mean you can be careless, or that you should whiz through the process; for example, you’ll want to screw the drive firmly into both sides of the case using all four screws.
The Great CASE RACE We pit six premium cases against each other in a battle to determine the caso supremo. With torture tests that get at the nitty-gritty of the building process, you can bet we know which of these beauties handle every bit as good as they look C omputers are expensive these days. Saving your dough for an Athlon FX was brutal, and paying for that pair of GeForce 7800 GTX cards left you with just one kidney and a nasty scar.
ANTEC P180 Virtually silent, except for the sound of our cursing Antec bills its top-of-the-line P180 desktop case as an “Advanced Super Mid-Tower.” We love its drop-dead gorgeous exterior, but there’s much less to admire inside. INSTALLATION Building inside the P180 takes a lot of planning and patience; we found the overall experience to be more frustrating than rewarding.
The Great CASE RACE LIAN-LI PCV-1100 Beauty and brawn—this case has it all This intimidating all-aluminum enclosure is attractive on the outside, and equally tantalizing on the inside. INSTALLATION The PCV-1100’s internal layout is similar to that of the Antec P180, in that it has a separate chamber at the bottom of the case for hard drives and the PSU; unlike the P180, however, this case sports the newfangled “reverse ATX” design.
The Great CASE RACE THERMALTAKE TAI CHI VB5000SNA This case sports new features galore, but its price tag will terrify you The Tai Chi is Thermaltake’s most audacious case yet, with rows of extruded aluminum fins lining the case’s sides. There are also swing-out doors, a set of carrying handles, and optional casters for rolling around the 40-pound behemoth. As exceptional as this case is, it falls just short of perfection.
The Great CASE RACE ANTEC SONATA II It sure is quiet, but still a little underwhelming The Sonata II, Antec’s follow-up to the original “quiet case,” has changed only slightly—for the worse. INSTALLATION The Sonata II is a bit more cramped than most steel mid-towers we’ve seen. Drives use screw-on rails, rendering them easy to snap into and out of their cages.
The Great CASE RACE THE ENVELOPE PLEASE... Though the verdicts in this particular roundup were rather low all-around, don’t lose hope, dear reader. We are harsh critics, and have high expectations for any hardware that darkens the Lab’s door. We’re exceptionally finicky when it comes to cases. While we upgrade our systems fairly regularly, we rarely upgrade our case, so it has to be an enclosure that fits our current and future PC hardware needs. It also has to make building a system as easy as possible.
STANDARDIZED FRONT-PANEL CONNECTOR Is there some reason—aside from the sadistic tendencies of manufacturers—that every PC mobo has a different design and location for its front-bezel I/O connectors? We shouldn’t have to decode these little buggers on every single mobo, because they all do the same thing. Give us a single, unified connector that goes from the mobo to the case, so we can hook up the front-panel power, reset, and HDD LEDs in one simple step.
G ifts G eeks for This holiday season, Maximum PC journeys to a winter wonderland in search of gift ideas for computer enthusiasts I t might seem like the stuff of fairy tales, but there actually exists a far-off arctic enclave filled with fun gear and gadgets for computer geeks. Bound together by their techcentric ways, these products have found fellowship, even romance, among their kind in the bosom of this snow-capped 50 MAXIMUMPC HOLIDAY 2005 hamlet.
DESKTOP MULTI-HUB SPORTSTER REPLAY RADIO 3-IN-1 IPOD MOUNT, TRANSMITTER, AND CHARGER After multiple car breakins an exasperated victim taped a piece of paper to his window that read, “No radio inside,” only to find a note amid the shattered glass the next morn that said, “Get one.” If only he’d had Sakar’s 3-in-1, an adjustable mount for any iPod that charges your player through the cigarette-lighter jack while transmitting your music to your FM radio. $50, www.compusa.
G ifts G eeks for PC TOOLKIT USB CAFE PAD After the USB Lava Lamp and the USB Smokeless Ashtray, this USB-connected cup warmer doesn’t seem so strange. In fact, it seems like a darned fine idea. The warmer keeps tea and coffee at a toasty-yet-comfortable temperature, can be used to melt Cadbury Eggs into dessert topping, and even converted into a mosquito torture chamber with an overturned shot glass. $22, www.thinkgeek.
CODESCOUT If your car was manufactured after 1996, it’s home to a tiny little troll who operates the onboard computer that monitors your vehicle’s systems. Connect the CodeScout to your car’s standard OBD port, and you can actually communicate with the impish inhabitant, who’ll turn cryptic diagnostic codes into plainEnglish descriptions of your car’s maladies! $200, www.autoxray.
G ifts G eeks for EGG AND MUFFIN TOASTER If the founding fathers had been geeks, Thanksgiving would be celebrated today with a bag of Doritos and a tub of French onion dip. Rise, pilgrim, and experience contemporary haute nerd cuisine with a contraption that cooks eggs—hard-boiled, poached, or scrambled—while simultaneously toasting muffins and warming Canadian bacon for LAN-party oohs and aahs. $50, www.eggandmuffintoaster.
TRU-COLORXP LED DISPLAY Real geeks advertise. Most by their indifference to personal grooming and indulgence in Star-anything. But others make a statement with a little more panache. Let your geek flag fly high, LED-style, with this 39.6x5.6-inch 16-color display. “Geeks Do It Virtually,” or any other pithy message, can be programmed via the included infrared remote or the display’s 9600-baud port. Yes, we said baud. $795, www.pro-lite.
IMPROVING YOUR PC EXPERIENCE, ONE STEP AT A TIME how2 Pimp Out Firefox! Extension Junction– what’s your function? Find out what Maximum PC’s top 20 Firefox extensions can TIME do for you! 00:10 HOURS:MINUTES F olks, don’t get us wrong: We’re not Internet Explorer haters. We just love Firefox’s tabbed interface and extensibility (a word that will not be used again in this article).
how2 IMPROVING YOUR PC EXPERIENCE, ONE STEP AT A TIME More Fun with Site Navigation The exceptionally daring might wish to demonstrate their nav fu by ditching the mouse altogether. Everyone knows that the Tab key jumps from one page element to the next—including links—and that pressing the Enter key submits field information and activates links. But the Mouseless Browsing extension completely liberates you from the little rodent by associating page elements with numbers.
how2 IMPROVING YOUR PC EXPERIENCE, ONE STEP AT A TIME Messaging There exists an exotic species of hominid who communicates exclusively through text messaging, and they have the giant thumbs to prove it. You can establish diplomatic relations by sending text messages to their cellphones via email, but it’s always a hassle because you need to know the carrier’s domain, and in turn, the carrier itself.
batteries. After the machine has been running for a while, the entire left side of the screen gets very dark. The right side is unaffected, and adjusting the brightness and contrast has no effect. What’s even stranger is that the problem goes away as soon as I pull the power-supply plug and switch to batteries; when I plug the power supply back in, the trouble returns.
in the lab REAL-WORLD TESTING: RESULTS. ANALYSIS. RECOMMENDATIONS MICHAEL BROWN Benchmarks CrossFire ATI’s dual-GPU launch is greeted by the sound of one hand clapping I t has finally arrived: A CrossFire reviewer’s kit. CrossFire is for real. All I needed to do was build it. I was curious to see how a single X850 XT CrossFire edition card would perform, so I held off installing the companion card. But the first time I powered up the system, Windows immediately bluescreened.
BEST OF THE BEST How We Test Our monthly category-by-category list of our favorite products. New products are in red. Real-world benchmarks. Real-world results C omputer performance used to be measured with synthetic tests that had little or no bearing on real-world performance. Even worse, when hardware vendors started tailoring their drivers for these synthetic tests, the performance in actual games and applications sometimes dropped. At Maximum PC, our mantra for testing has always been “real-world.
reviews TESTED. REVIEWED. Gigabyte GV-3D1-68GT Supersize me! G igabyte’s first single-card SLI trick impressed us as a feat of engineering, but its performance left us cold. This time ‘round, the company’s engineers got almost everything right. The GV-3D168GT is not only faster than a single 7800 GTX, it’s faster than two 6800 GT cards running in conventional SLI.
separate cards (thus overcoming our next biggest objection to its predecessor). On the other hand, you could pick up a single GeForce 7800 GTX for the average street price of $510, or a single 7800 GT for $400, and two of either of those cards in SLI will definitely leave Gigabyte’s board with a poor body image. To be absolutely fair to Gigabyte, however, two 7800 GTX boards cost more than a grand, and two 7800 GT boards will set you back more than $800.
reviews TESTED. REVIEWED. VERDICTIZED Puget Systems Custom PC Upwardly mobile, this rig hints at a promising future for Intel’s Pentium M W hile not officially sanctioned by Intel for desktop use, the Pentium M processor has long been coveted by fans of quiet PCs and small formfactor boxes, for the very reasons the mobile CPU has excelled in the notebook arena: low power usage and minimal heat output.
reviews TESTED. REVIEWED. VERDICTIZED Zalman Resorator 1 Plus CPU and VGA cooling without fans—yes way! T he Resorator’s configuration is simple: a massive 24-inch tall aluminum combination reservoir/radiator (hence the product’s moniker) that holds 2.5 liters of water. There’s a small and silent 5-watt pump inside the radiator, strapped to the bottom of the tank. The 5/16-inch silicon tubing runs from the radiator tank to the CPU water block, then to the VGA block, and then back to the radiator.
reviews TESTED. REVIEWED. VERDICTIZED Getac M220 Built like a tank, the M220 gives you decent performance in a notebook you can’t break T here are two kinds of notebook geeks: the anal-retentive guy who keeps the plastic screen protector on his notebook at all times, and The Abuser. You know the type: The Abuser throws his unprotected notebook computer into a messenger bag and rides 10 miles over a dirt trail to work.
reviews TESTED. REVIEWED. VERDICTIZED WD Caviar SE 16 400 Actually, you can call it a comeback W estern Digital has been sitting on the sidelines of the hard drive technology race for the past year, quietly petting its Raptor, watching the competition ratchet up both capacity and buffer sizes to unheard of levels.
Steel Sound 5H USB By pro gamers, for pro gamers—and wannabes! Every facet of the Steel Sound 5H’s design is geared for gamers. M any a pro gamer or pro gamer wannabe wouldn’t be caught dead at a LAN party without a Steelpad mousepad. Now, the company responsible for this fragging accessory is turning its attention to the headset market. Will the Steel Sound 5H USB headset raise your gaming abilities to “pro” levels? No—that part is still up to you. But it can help.
reviews TESTED. REVIEWED. VERDICTIZED Earnest Burners Sony and Lite-On throttle up their top-shelf burners W ith the failure of the two competing next-gen DVD standards to merge into one consumer-friendly format, and what will no doubt be designer prices on the first drives and media, we’re quite happy to see even modest speed increases in single- and double-layer DVD burning.
PORTABLE STORAGE WIRELESS HEADSET Memina Pocket Rocket 4GB BlueParrott B100 We know Bluetooth technology is capable of producing good audio, because the Toshiba Bluetooth headphones we reviewed in October sound great. The audio quality of VXI’s BlueParrott B100 headset, on the other hand, is on par with two cans and a length of string. The headset can be used with either a conventional analog phone or paired with a Bluetooth cellphone.
reviews TESTED. REVIEWED. VERDICTIZED 3.5" 2.3" Compact Camera Kerfuffle Smaller bodies and higher resolutions do not equal poor image quality and less features I nitially, in the compact and ultra-compact segments of the digicam market, more pixels crammed onto tiny image sensors generally equated to poor image quality—especially at ISO speeds above 200.
3.4" COOL CUCUMBER Small, lightweight, durable construction. Speedy continuous shooting mode. MELTED ICE CREAM Too easy for your fingers to spoil a great shot. 8 CANON POWERSHOT SD500 CORVETTE Durable; intuitive controls; quality lens and pics. $380, www.nikonusa.com PINTO CANON POWERSHOT SD500 At six ounces, sans battery, it would be easy to label the SD500 as the SUV in this lot of sports cars. But that’s not exactly a fair description as it also sports the highest resolution (7.
reviews TESTED. REVIEWED. VERDICTIZED Who Makes the Mightiest Mouse? Logitech’s lovely laser faces off against Apple’s two-button Mighty Mouse P icking the perfect mouse is an intensely personal chore. It’s a lot like shopping for underwear: You frequently need to try on every pair in the store before you find the ones that fit just right. We’re pretty certain that a lot of you are going to think one of these mice is just right, and that while the other looks good, something is definitely missing.
reviews TESTED. REVIEWED. VERDICTIZED Quake 4 For better or worse, Q4 stays true to its roots I f someone were to put together a gaming time capsule and bury it for future generations to find, we’d definitely recommend it hold a copy of Quake 4. The game plays like a greatest hits of the last decade, regurgitating practically every “exciting new feature” we’ve seen in single-player first-person shooters over the past few years, while also recycling the definitive deathmatch title— Quake III.
Black & White 2 It’s a little bit god game, it’s a little bit RTS T he original Black & White was, in many ways, a failed experiment in emergent game design. It attempted to meld god games—where you build a city to help your people grow and flourish—with the pet management games that were all the rage in Japan. You could, theoretically, teach your pet to do all sorts of nifty things—help build your city, harvest resources, turn the enemy into paste.
reviews TESTED. REVIEWED. VERDICTIZED Fable: The Lost Chapters Better than it was on the Xbox, but still lacking F able: The Lost Chapters is far too linear and short (about 14 hours) to be labeled a “must-have,” particularly on the PC. However, on this platform it’s infinitely more pleasing to look at (thanks to the higher resolutions) and easier to play (thanks to the keyboard and mouse) than it was on the Xbox. You begin as a small boy whose family is murdered by bandits.
inout YOU WRITE, WE RESPOND We tackle tough reader letters on... PDell’s 2405FPW PTiming Your Upgrade PCRTs PPlextor PVOIP PJosh Norem THE WAITING REALLY IS THE HARDEST PART After six months of waiting for just the right price/ performance point to upgrade my graying Athlon XP system, I read in your October issue that nVidia is updating its nForce4-based chipsets to include support for dual x16 PCI-E graphics slots. Cool, I can wait another month or so for that.
top rating from the online community. It seems like you’re almost favoring the Plextor brand. —R. L. Das FEATURES EDITOR LOGAN DECKER RESPONDS: “Almost” favoring the Plextor brand? We’ve favored it as long as the drives have delivered Kick Ass performance. Show us a cheaper DVD burner that charts two-digit access times and can burn to 2.4x DVD+R double-layer media at 6x speed, and we’ll rip the tiara off the Plexy’s head and pass it along.
rig rig of the month ADVENTURES IN PC MODIFICATION DONALD ROCK’S Cinematron At Maximum PC we’re all about the cutting edge—the latest and greatest hardware, the never-ending upgrade path. But on the flipside of all that progress is a whole lot of undesirable, has-been hardware, and it’s cool when someone comes up with an inventive way to make use of that stuff. (It all can’t go into the creation of Grandma’s email machine.
