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1. Yes on both radios lt DLNA COMPLIANT MEDIA SERVER lt GUEST NETWORK Yes but on the 2 4GHz radio only GUEST NETWORK IPV6 SUPPORT IPV6 SUPPORT DLNA COMPLIANT MEDIA SERVER UPnP only USB PORTS One for storage only USB PORTS NTFS DRIVE SUPPORT Yes NTFS DRIVE SUPPORT One for storage only WDS BRIDGE REPEATER SUPPORT Yes WDS BRIDGE REPEATER SUPPORT lt maximumpc com AUG 2011 MAXIMUM FG 89 Thermaltake Shock One Gaming Headset A solid all rounder from a newcomer to the field IT SEEMS LIKE THESE DAYS it s just not enough to master the case heatsink PSU trifecta of PC parts In the past couple years we ve seen Corsair Cooler Master and now Thermaltake diversifying their hardware portfolios with gaming mice keyboards and headsets The Thermaltake Shock One is the flagship of the new Tt eSports line of gaming headsets and we got a chance to take it for a spin The Shock One is first and foremost a well built headset None of the materi als from the plastic mesh on the earcups to the cushy faux leather padding to the metal reinforced headband feel cheap and the whole set has a substantial heft to it It looks nice too with glowing insignias on the sides and slick black and red plas tic across the front and top Heavy duty hinges above each earcup allow the entire set fold easy storage The
2. 40612608 Subscriptions do not include newsstand specials POSTMASTER Send changes of address to Maximum PC PO Box 5159 Harlan IA 51593 0659 Standard Mail enclosure in the following editions None Ride Along enclosure in the following editions B1 B2 B3 Returns Pitney Bowes PO Box 25542 London ON N6C 6B2 Canada Future US Inc also publishes Gamer Crochet Today Guitar Aficionado Guitar World Knitting Today MaclLife Nintendo Power The Of Sponsored by Get the latest prices at Newegg com EISE THE REST THE BEST High End Processor Intel 3 46GHz Core 17 990 www intel com Midrange Processor Intel 3 4GHz Core i7 2600K www intel com Budget Processor Intel 3 3GHz Core 15 2500 www intel com LGA1366 Motherboard Asus Rampage Extreme www asus com AM3 Motherboard MSI 890FXA GD70 www msi com Price No Object GPU Asus GeForce GTX 590 www asus com Performance GPU XFX Radeon HD 6970 www xfxforce com Midrange GPU MSI NGTX560 Ti Twin Frozr OC www msi com Budget GPU XFX Radeon HD 6850 www xfxforce com Performance Hard Drive OCZ Vertex 3 240GB WWW OCZ com Capacity Hard Drive Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000 3TB www hitachigst com Air Cooling Cooler Master Hyper 212 www coolermaster com High End Cooler Prolimatech Armageddon www prolimatech com Blu ray Drive Plextor 9405 www plextor com Full Tower Case Corsair 800D www corsair com Mid Tow
3. HG GOOGLE3 0 PC CASES SSS THE FUTURE OF MOVIES 8 NEW CHASSIS Pp MUSIC AND CHROME REVIEWED MINIMUM BS AUGUST 2011 www maximumpc com HOW TO BUILD A h PC REALLY TRULY SUPER FAST 0 5166 8 6 49 FREE APPS EACH DOES ONE THING REALLY WELL where we put stuff AUGUST 2011 the Cover Photography by Mark Madeo 08 14 16 58 59 61 66 FEATURES 24 36 48 PC VALUE CASE LIL MEAL ROUNDUP APPS Cheap and convenient How We evaluate eight new Find out how 49 apps that are to build a 667 gaming PC in chassis of various shapes no bigger than 3MB each can less than an hour sizes and prices improve your computing life 20 94 IN THE LAB 76 85 78 SERENTIY ACER ASUS EEE PAD TRANS MINI HN274H FORMER TF101 A1 maximumpc com table of contents QUICKSTART NEWS The highlights from Google 1 0 Intel s new mobile focus AMD s Llano CPU THE LIST Nine technologies in need of an upgrade HEAD TO HEAD P67 and Z68 vie for performance chipset crown R amp D WHITE PAPER Kinect How does Microsoft s 3D motion game controller work Xbox 360 AUTOPSY Inside a Microsoft SideWinder X8 mouse HOW TO Livestream your games to the web track your stolen laptop for free BUILD IT Transform a typical home office into a full fledged home
4. Protect your PC and data from suspicious or malicious sources The app provides a sandbox in which you can surf the web run programs and open questionable emails with abandon knowing that all these activities are confined to an isolated space www sandboxie com Because we are constant ly swapping out systems drives and components this one s a no brainer Eraser is a highly secure data removal tool 5 ef fective because it doesn t just delete your data it completely nukes it all by overwriting it with pat terns of data generated specifically to prevent fu ture recovery Best of all it s free eraser heidi ie 50 MAXIMUM PG AUG 2011 maximumpc com We all know that we We like uTorrent because We ve been big fans of One of the most common should be using multiple it s a lightweight 400K CCleaner formerly Crap ways for a PC to get passwords for multiple fast simple and easy Cleaner for many years infected with malware Is accounts But do you to use BitTorrent client This application s main through out of date un do it No Why not that boasts many of the appeal is clearing cache patched software Secu Because it s impossible features in bigger clients and other temporary nia Personal Software to remember all the such as BitComet It files to save space It s Inspector PSI makes it passwords KeePass is supports UPnP it auto well worth the install its business to monitor great because it h
5. PREPARE THE CASE First the Rosewill R218 case Facing the front of the case remove the left hand panel by removing the two thumbscrews in back The case features several built in bump type standoffs You ll need to supplement these by installing additional standoffs in three spots image To figure out where to place them place your motherboard in the case and eyeball which holes in the motherboard do not have mounts under them If you re a total newb you should know that the four larger holes around the CPU socket are not for mounting the board Theyare for mounting the CPU cooler The standoffs you need should bein the sealed plastic parts bag that came with the case Screw them by hand and then use pliers to tighten them so they don t back out This is also a good time to remove any expansion card slot covers You need the top two slots for the graphics card in this case Next remove the 1 0 shield the rectangular metal plate that surrounds the PS 2 USB and audio ports Simply wiggle it back and forth until the metal tabs break loose Your motherboard should have come with a metal 1 0 shield fitthis into the open hole With our case we had to remove the rear fan in order to fit itin image After we installed the I O shield image we then reinstalled the fan INSTALL THE CPU Before you install the CPU make sure to touch something grounded to remove static electricity built up on your body If you re truly pa
6. 10 1 1280x800 screen and 5MP camera with HD video recording match up with the more expensive Motorola Xoom yet the 32GB Wi Fi Pad Transformer s price greatly undercuts the 32GB Wi Fi 3G Xoom 800 or 600 with a two year data contract The 16GB Eee Pad Transformer also beats the entry level iPad 2 by 100 smackers Prices aside the Eee Pad stands its own as astrong tablet At about a pound and half and 0 47 inches thin it feels especially good in your hands portrait while the extra width of the side speakers can throw off the grip a little if you re typing with your thumbs in landscape Comparing the Pad s display to the Xoom s which we already prefer over the iPad 2 s display we lined up the same high def images side by side and the Eee Pad clearly shows more vibrant colors and an even greater degree of detail than Xoom Concerning touch response graphics speed the two Honeycomb tab lets perform neck and neck responding to gestures with little to no latency and pro viding smooth flowing graphic refreshes Still the Eee Pad bested the Xoom in two of the three benchmark tests we ran Besides a few assorted basic apps the Eee Pad preinstalls Polaris Office 3 0 a tablet optimized app not available in the Android Market for viewing editing and creating standard Microsoft Office docs spreadsheets and presentation files We re leery of watered down office sui
7. 3 Media programs on this PC and remote connections Customize 9 Me programs A an e connections ustomize Allowed TO SECURE Wee Allowed access using default settings All devices are allowed to access your shared media YO U Choose homegroup and sharing options HARDWARE Choose power options Tell more about media streaming Read the privacy statement online IN THIS MONTH S HOW TO SEC TION describe how you can use a bit of free software called Prey to track your laptop if it ever TURN ON MEDIA STREAMING gets stolen It s a great program but it s not the only way you can ONE OF THE MOST USEFUL FUNCTIONS OF THE WINDOWS 7 HOMEGROUP strike back at hardware thieves SYSTEM IS THE ABILITY TO SHARE MEDIA HOWEVER BY DEFAULT YOUR erede eS ee that can be used to secure your PC WON T ALLOW OTHER COMPUTERS ON THE NETWORK TO ACCESS laptop against theft They re all YOUR FILES TO ENABLE THIS FEATURE OPEN WINDOWS MEDIA PLAYER a CLICK THE STREAM MENU AND CHOOSE TO ENABLE STREAMING Logmein Logmein is a great remote control application on its own As a bonus if your comput MAKE TWEAK USE er gets stolen you can log in to watch what the thief does www logmein com TrueCrypt This one wont help you snoop on a thief but it can save your bacon Use TrueCrypt s full drive encryption to keep all your data protected from even the smartest thieves www truecrypt org
8. APPRECIATING THE PC VALUE MEAL IS A MATTER OF PERSPECTIVE We just got an emailfrom Captain Obvious Avalue mealfrom WacArnold sisn tquitethe same experi enceasamealatthe French Laundry Italsowon t set you backa month s pay So ifyou re expectinga machine that costs 667 to come close to machines whose cases alone cost almost that much your expectations need to be drastically recalibrated We benchmarked our budget rig against our stan dard system benchmarks and all was as expected an ass kicking Our zero point features an original Bloomfield Core i7 920 quad core overclocked to 3 5GHzandadual GPU Radeon HD 5970 card As fine a chip as the Sandy Bridge is our 2100 is still just a dual core and thus has no chance against a quad If wecompare our budget build toa high end gamingrig such as the Maingear Shift Super Stock we reviewed in the July issue the picture gets even bleaker But don t despair Yes the benchmark charts look ugly and horrible but you have to have some perspective For example the videocard in our zero point costs more than our entire machine as does the Maingear s paint job Our gaming benchmarks are also designed to stress maxed out machines with gaming at 2560x1600 ona 30 inch panel which itself can be three times the cost of our budget PC Tosee ifthe PC Value Meal actually had the chops to perform in less lofty circumstances we dialed back the resolution to 1920x1080 the res
9. Sandboxie Control File View Sandbox Configure Program Mame a P Sandbox DefaultBax SandbaxieRpcss exe chrome Sandboxiecrypto chrome exe chrome exe chrome exe SandboxieDcomLaunch exe PID Window Active 3704 1848 1532 3 Tab Google Chrome 3244 4192 5336 5828 Everything Think Windows 7 s built in indexed search is fast enough Think again The Everything utility 15 an ultra lightweight indexed search app that makes looking for files jaw droppingly fast Like instantaneous You can only search by file or folder name but regular expressions are supported www voidtools com CPU Z has grown to be one of the most valuable tools an enthusiast can access It gives you the nitty gritty on what clock speed your CPU is run ning at what it idles at as well as what stepping and revision itis We often use CPU Z to verify that our CPU is running at its rated speed Believe it or not sometimes a moth erboard will incorrectly set the multiplier for a CPU and unintentionally underclock the chip www cpuid com Delayer does what its name suggests and al lows you to create delays in Launching Windows applications handy for running sequences of programs setting up your taskbar icons in a preferred order and even creating pop up reminder messages www cottonwoodsw com Sandboxie
10. applying the configuration and then waiting a minute or so while the instruc tions percolate down to the device level and the software lets you know the array has begun to build Then for 10 or 12 hours you play the waiting game Once the array is configured you can create and format a partition in Disk Management and assign a drive letter thereafter the drive appears as a single volume which can be used normally When connected over eSATA the PopDrive showed sequential read and write speeds of 76MB s and 65MB s respectively a little slower than the raw disk speeds of the 2 5 inch 500WD Scor pio Blue 5 400rpm drives included with our PopDrive review unit but certainly respectable The one advantage provided by the PopDrive s use of the SteelVine software is that software s ability to send email notifications upon critical events This is useful for the hypothetical IT consultant who DHK told us is their ideal client someone who sets up the PopDrive in a small business environment so they can rotate out drives for offsite backup However IT managers have many other speedier easier to configure and more robust backup systems at their disposal NAS devices come to mind For home users the drive management software is much too complex To its credit DHK claims that a simpler software interface for the PopDrive is forthcoming this summer That can t come soon enough If DHK had waited to put its device on th
11. Engine 3 pushing hard for next gen consoles to get here faster quickstart LUE E 11 16 AUG 2011 allg P67 vs Z68 Should your new Sandy Bridge Core 17 be built on the classic performance P67 chipset or Intel s new feature rich 2687 To help you decide we re pitting Intel s top LGA1155 chipsets against each other to see which is most worthy of your affection D IO BY GORDON MAH UNG P67 Intel P67 chipset www intel com maximumpc com Round 1 Performance We normally equate the concept of legacy with hardware perhaps a floppy connector or parallel printer port The truth is the phrase chipset performance is rapidly becoming an outdated legacy term Why The CPU is simply eating all those classic chipset duties that used to make a difference For example today s LGA1155 processor controls E and the memory controller Today s chipset is nothing more than a fancy south bridge chip Thus performance with a chipset is mostly about its native capa bilities such as its SATA 6Gb s performance Since both the P67 and 468 use the exact same south bridge now called the Peripheral Controller Hub and the PCI E and memory controller is in the CPU performance 15 awash One fly in the ointment though is the 268 5 Smart Response Technolo gy SRT which greatly improves disk performance over a stan dard HDD
12. In a conference call nq Inactive 5 mins Windows Phone 7 1 lets you set up groups within your Contacts list Intel Scales Down Power Consumption Intel says it has shaken up its mobile processor roadmap to make notebooks even more competitive with tablets Most of Intel s notebook CPUs are designed to be 35 40 watts Intel says future notebook CPUs from the company will be designed to be 10 20 watts Intel says future Atom CPUs will scale down to milliwatts which will allow them to compete in mobile phone and tablet devices The announcement comes as the company faces continued pressure from ARM based mobile phones tab lets and other post PC devices which pundits predict will put a serious dent in future PC sales GU Malware Comes to the Mac Mac fanboys have long insisted that OSX is immune to malware but the specter of malware has finally come to the Macintosh The MACDefender trojan works by tricking users into installing a fake AV product which then proceeds to find fake viruses and popup porn sites on infected machines MACDefender then asks the user to buy the full version of MACDefender by entering a credit card number Within a day of widespread media coverage of MACDefender an improved version was discovered by security software maker Intego that could be installed on a Mac without entering an administrator password GU lun 13 00 Nm Finde
13. Projector Screen AFTER After shifting the furniture around two times finally locked format that allows the room to func tion as an office home theater and den The window provides natural light for the room while working lounging And using the Longest part of the room asthe theater throw makes for a more cinematic experience Window 13 feet Coffee Table Q o 2 gt gt MOUNT THE PROJECTOR IN AN EFFORT to avoid having to hard mount my projector to the ceiling multiple times used a makeshift series of boxes situ ated in the corner of this room for a few weeks until was abso lutely certain the room configuration was right After examining a series of projector ceiling mounts took a chance a mount a friend recommended Atdec s flush mounting telehook device At 55 it s affordable but also stur dy Out of the box it looks a little bit like a spider this flexible design allows it to easily latch onto a number of projectors The first step in mounting the projector is to detach the ceil ing wall mount mechanism so that you can more easily attach the mount to the projector This is easily accomplished using the included hex wrench image The next step is to determine the center of gravity for your projector This is important because you want to make sure the projector 15 properly balanced when you attach it to the mount You ca
14. R amp D 12810140 1011 LENGTH OF TIME 08 HOURS INGREDIENTS PART URL Yamaha YSP 2200 Digital Sound Projector www yamaha com Epson PowerLite 8700UB www epson com Atdec TH WH PJ FM Telehook Universal Projector Flush Mount www atdec com Elite Screens Manual 120 inch Pull Down Projection Screen 16 9 aspect ratio www elitescreens com Ceton InfiniTV 4 Digital Cable Quad Tuner card www cetoncorp com Warpia StreamHD Wireless PC to TV 1080P www warpia com Logitech Harmony 880 Advanced Universal Remote Control www logitech com Logitech diNovo Edge Bluetooth Keyboard www logitech com Razer Onza Tournament Edition www razerzone com GlideTV Navigator www glidetv com 50x 60 inch vinyl pull down shade www lowes com Cables 2x 35 foot HDMI high speed cables www amazon com TOTAL 66 uum 8 2011 maximumpc com LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY EASY PRICE 715 2 345 55 160 400 140 60 used 155 50 50 60 54 each 4 298 GEORGE JONES EDITIOR IN CHIEF The Home Office Conversion Is It possible to convert a standard home office into a Surround sound home theater with minimal fuss THE MISSION Because we re doing a step by step build of the 667 PC this month s cover story we decided to take a less traditional approach to this month s Build It section by detailing a home office conversion attempted a few months ago
15. and a snip pet of the message bit ly vfdhgj HWMonitot Tm Another of CPUID s gems HWMonitor is like the tricorder of utilities Want to know the maxi mum temp of core 2 or some other esoteric readout HWMonitor probably has it listed www cpuid com 52 MANIMUMPG AUG 2011 maximumpc com Files Settings About News puen _ gt ey aN 598 403 24 2 2 100 Original image Preview output Files of type All images Look in Save in Easy Thumbnails 2001 2008 Fookes Software Updates amp other great software at www fookes com Select the folder that contains your images If you want the full 411 on your graphics card we know of no better app than GPU Z This tiny utility which doesn t require installation supports both Nvidia and AMD GPUs and provides a thorough accounting of a card s specs We re talking clock speed die size ROPs tex ture fillrate release date the works www techpowerup com gpuz Strange things happening to your PC HijackThis from Trend Micro generates a full report of everything that s running on your computer Helpful forum denizens yes such things exist can then help you parse your HijackThis log for anomalies like spyware and malware If you re feeling especially brave you can use HijackThis to r
16. but it s worth noting that you ll also need to get on to the projector As mentioned in my review of 9 9 Pro y anywhere in the house your hands on a multituner CableCARD from your the StreamHD in our June issue some compres 1 1 by splitting the add in bl TR 1 luti card s four tuners among cable provider if you want to use it sion artifacts are visible at the higher resolutions networked PCs Similarly found that Logitech s diNovo Blue but picture quality is surprisingly clean tooth keyboard and Glide TV s remote control Key Steps in Home Office Conversion 68 uum REARRANGE THE ROOM THE FIRST STEP in converting my office into a hybrid office theater was to rearrange the furniture desk and equipment Oh the equip ment Prior to the conversion had a typical office setup with a desk facing the window and an old 36 inch CRT hey at least it was 1080 and stereo system situated on a 7 foot long wooden media cabinet image A Inside the cabinet was my cable box and Play Station 3 One of the goals of this project was to upgrade the CRT to a more impressive looking and larger projection display more suitable for games and HD movies My other goal was to be able to extend my PC s desktop onto a projected image for gaming movies videos and more Secondary goals were to ditch my cable box and enable 53 action on the big screen The worst part about redesigning
17. not seen any 8 DDR3 mod ules that are not registered DIMMS Since the LGA1155 and LGA1156 do not support registered DIMMs you don t really have that option today As far as two 46B DIMMs versus four 208 DIMMs both configurations would yield dual channel RAM support Which would be faster It s a complicated question that depends on the modules be ing used but l d put my mon ey on the two 4GB DIMMs having a very slight edge in memory bandwidth Here s the thing With the large caches and advanced algo rithms used by today s CPUs you are unlikely to see that difference pay off especially at stock speeds Where you will see a big difference from chasing memory bandwidth Is in systems with integrated graphics where bandwidth will have a huge impact on graphics performance Browser War Bumble In the conclusion to your Browser Brawl June 2011 the author Paul Lilly makes the statement Firefox still gets our nod as the best of the best Of the five browsers listed use all of them except Safari decided to check that state ment Using performance figures on page 48 and applying a value of 1 for the best ranging up to 5 for the worst found a tie between Chrome 10 and Internet Ex plorer 9 28 points followed by Opera 11 in third 30 5 points Firefox 4 31 points and Safari bringing up the rear with 46 5 points In light of these rankings submit your questions to comments maximum
18. port that doesn t deliver enough power to spin up a 2 5 inch USB hard drive we tested it with a 500GB Verbatim Clon drive Oh well at least the router sup ports NTSF drives the E3000 didn t Linksys claims the E4200 is capable of a maximum speed up to 300 450 Mbps Translation The E4200 supports two spatial streams with 150Mb s of bandwidth each on its 2 4GHz radio and three spatial streams also with 150Mb s of bandwidth each on its 5GHz radio But as we found with the E3000 the E4200 comes from the factory with both radios broadcasting the very same SSID And while Cisco has made a number of impor tant improvements to its Cisco Connect software which can turn any USB thumb drive into a wireless client configuration tool the utility still doesn t inform you which radio it s connecting the client to Unlike the E3000 however you can easily access the E4200 s web interface and change the SSIDs as well as other criti cal aspects of the router s configuration In addition to assigning discrete SSIDs to each radio we also enabled channel bonding on the 2 4GHz radio an admit tedly neighbor unfriendly move but we wanted to see what it was capable of 88 MANIMUMPG AUG 2011 maximumpc com besides we don t have any neighbors Channel bonding on the 5GHz radio was enabled at the factory We used Trendnet s new TEW 684UB wireless client adapter to benchmark both the Linksys and Netgear routers This is th
19. Chrome primarily because of how it was running Angry Birds for Chrome was built using WebGL a hardware accelerated version of OpenGL built specifically for web brows ers Firefox 4 also supports WebGL but not IE9 Google 1 0 offered sever al sessions on 3D graphics and gaming in the Chrome browser some of which focused on tak ing better advantage of under lying GPU hardware The era of crappy 3D in a browser will be drawing to a close A fully ren dered fully interactive 3D rac ing car demo can be found at www chromeexperiments com webgl Chromebook Nothing illustrates Google s belief that the web is the OS of the fu ture more than the Chromebook which builds on last year s CR 48 developer laptop Both Acer and Samsung are jumping into the fray each with a slightly differ ent spin on Chromebook both are based on Intel s Atom CPU At the core of Chromebook is the Chrome browser which will be the user s interface into the system A Chromebook is an always connected device that relies on Google apps and other cloud services for every day computing The Acer ver sion with an 11 6 inch LCD will cost 350 while the Samsung Chromebook will run 500 in cluding a slightly larger 12 1 inch display But consumer pricing isn t that interesting Google will be pushing Chromebook into corporate educational accounts charging 28 per month business or 20 per month educational institutions lea
20. Internet Ex plorer the extensions library 15 still woefully behind both Firefox and Chrome knock ing it out of contention as the best browser Where to Find Four 8GB Stick Kits have a bit of a conundrum am looking to build a new computer this summer with the Core 17 2600 as the centerpiece All the boards am looking at have four RAM slots and support 32GB of TINY TIMEKILLERS 21 FANTASTIC GAM ES UNDER 5MB RAM Because will be using Premiere Pro and After Ef fects want to load the RAM to the max The problem is that it is impossible to find 32GB kits that have four sticks A local shop was sell ing Patriot Viper RAM that came in a 3x 8GB kit but did not sell single 8GB sticks Online searches did not turn up anything So where oh where can get a kit of four 8GB sticks when it comes time to build Brian Di Cesare SENIOR EDITOR GORDON MAH UNG RESPONDS have not seen 8GB memory modules that do not support ECC The only 8GB modules l ve seen are ECC or FB DIMM Since Sandy Bridge CPUs do not support ECC you re kind of out of luck until some one introduces 86B DIMMs without ECC For you 1608 15 probably as far as you can go today b Modern games don t leave much to the desktop dungeons imagination Sophisticated graphics en gines powerhouse PC hardware and enormous production costs have created games with a level of fidelity we couldn t have even imagined just 1
21. Next slide the harddrive into the hard drive cageand use two ofthecoarsescrewsto lock place Hook the SATA power cables to the optical and hard drives Using the two included SATA data cables plug drives AUG 2011 maximumpc com tothe motherboard andvideocard larger connector isthe power connector It s made up of a 20 pin 4 pin plug Push the two plugs together and insert them into the matching connector on the motherboard The plug is keyed so it will not fit in backwards You should also take the pair of 4 pin plugs and plug one of them into the 4 pin connector that s just above the CPU socket Plug the two 6 connectors into the GPU motherboard The Intel PCH has six ports two are SATA 6Gb s white and four are SATA36b s blue Since both of our drives are SATA3Gb s blue ports Now plug the SATA data cables into the hard drive and optical drive The Gigabyte board defaults to IDE mode in the BIOS We prefer AHCI mode these days to access the more advanced features of SATA3 0 so we went into the BIOS it s a BIOS interface with EFI by hitting the Del key during boot and changed the mode to AHCI While we were there we also changed the boot order to hit the optical drive first Now place your Windows 7 disc into the optical drive and turn the system on If allgoes well the machine should boot and begininstalling Windows 7
22. The TN panel has the advantage of being able to go to portrait mode one of the few bonus features in this display During our testing the XL2410T gave us decent detail and good color however any thing white looked overly bright creating halos the display also produced some no ticeable compression banding throughout the testing The very dark gray levels were yet another issue during our DisplayMate testing we lost detail in the darker images and during our video testing black did not appear as deep or rich as we would have liked There was also evidence of some slight color tracking errors with evidence of faint greens and reds in the grayscale and some high contrast streaking The XL2410T held steady during our Arkham Asylum tests however again the black was a bit of an issue Our 3D test ing went well producing a clear and solid experience Overall the XL2410T did a fair job but didn t thrill us BenQ XL2410T 400 www beng com ACER HN274H Acer s HN274H on the other hand was remarkable Not only is this 27 inch dis play the first to incorporate the 3D Vision IR emitter into the display itself but it also The Acer HN274H s performance is impressive matching that of our zero point machine nearly step for step has HDMI 1 4a so it s capable of being used with a Blu ray deck or PlayStation 3 and a WLED backlight Exciting stuff but it doesn t do much good if the display is a disappointment
23. an office theater room is that you have to spend a whole lot of time unplugging cables After a few 15 feet BEFORE In terms of shape and size this layout worked perfectasa makeshift office However the TV cable box and room layout make it inher ently antisocial The computer Is essentially the center of the room and the weird angles caused by the TV and couch aren t very inviting 13 feet Coffee Table AUG 2011 maximumpc com hours the room was littered with about 45 different types of cables placed them all in a box and set them aside With the hope that never have to use them again removed the TV cable box speak ers and more from the room then set about shifting the furniture around to find the ideal arrangement Ultimately discovered that the most effective configuration for watching media on the projector would be to use the longest dimen sion of the room for theater viewing This allowed for a more the ater like feel and it conveniently allowed me to place my computer in an ideal location on the far side of the room across from the door image Prior to rearranging the furniture measured the couch desk and media cabinet and made some sketches However after spend ing several half days arranging and rearranging the furniture in this room it became clear to me that the only way to find the optimum configuration is to explore as many possibilities as you can 15 feet
24. and flag any problems 54 MAXIMUM PE AUG 2011 maximumpc com HashCalc If you want to make abso lutely sure that a file you download is bit for bit identical to the file you wanted you should get a good hash calculator Our favorite is HashCalc www slavasoft com DSClock This is an awesome way to create a customized desktop clock DS Clock 2 9 allows a remarkable array of configurations including fonts colors transparencies positions and sounds You can also choose to synchronize your desktop clock with atomic time servers and integrate your Google Calendar into the clock as well www dualitysoft com PowerMenw Ever since its debut back in 1998 PowerMenu has been a staple of our Windows environment Once installed it grants you additional right click menu options such as the ability to make windows transparent add system priorities to applica tions and set a window to always remain on top Pro tip for Win7 users You have to hold down Shift L to enable these Strokelt If you re the kind of PC power user for whom even hotkeys aren t fast enough you might want to think about mouse gestures Without even having to reach for the keyboard you can bind pretty much any ac tion you can think of to Strokelt s customizable mouse gestures www tcbmi com strokeit dsclock options in the taskbar www abstractpath com powermenu B CUT TILEHSH KALLISTI Secured with A
25. and two smaller cutouts in the top left of the motherboard tray Three 14cm fans rendered the Arc Midi s cool ing performance among the best of the mid towers we tested This case might be simple but simple can be good AF 1 0 Fractal Arc Midi 110 www fractal design com Associate Editor HOW WE PERFORM THERMAL TESTING TO ENSURE USEFUL thermal test re sults we have to use components that put out a lot of heat Our case test system consists of a Core 15 750 CPU overclocked to 3 26Hz on an Asus P7P55D Premium moth erboard a dual fan Prolimatech Armageddon cooler and an Asus GTX 590 arguably the hottest GPU currently available We use Intel s internal Lynnfield testing util ity to stress all four CPU cores and loop Unigine s Heaven benchmark maxed out at 1920x1200 to put load on the GPU Temperatures are mea sured with HWMonitor after an hour of activity and then again after an hour of idling Our thermal test bed is designed to put out more heat than the ma jority of systems the dual GPU videocard expels air both fore and aft and the overclocked processor would throttle on a less able cool er We tested all cases with their stock complement of fans at their highest settings so if your favor ite case in our roundup has higher temperatures than you d like don t despair a few judiciously placed extra fans and you ll be in business For details of our therma
26. basics like name category and pictures Design to set up the look and feel of your streaming broad cast and Settings to change your broadcast s privacy and chat settings among other options Within the Settings window make sure you click the Advanced Settings drop down list at the bottom of your screen Once you ve done that click the Download the Flash Media Encoder XML file This is your golden ticket to the online cinema so make sure you remember where you saved it to on your hard drive Very important stuff And that s it Don t start broadcasting your show just yet we ve only cracked the surface of what you have to do to get your new gaming stream up and running CAPTURE YOUR VIDEO You ll need a copy of the free VH Cap gt ture www hmelyoff com to begin Unfortunately the official site is frequently down so hit up Google and snag a copy from a download site that you trust Install the app then pull up the oddly named folder Hmelyoff Labs where it sits in your Start Menu and click through to the subfolder of that VHScrCap Run the Config shortcut which will pull up a blank window You ll want to click the Create new one button within the VH Screen Capture Driver instance selection window we ll be establish ing the parameters that the app uses to record your screen in the next few windows If you re curious how this is all going to make It to Ustream we ll later use a Separate program to serve as th
27. bit version of Windows 7 Ultimate The Serenity Mini is the quietest performance machine we ve ever tested mance We re not totally sold on that point If gaming was a factor in the machine s life we d pass on the Serenity Mini in favor of something with more graphical heft such as the aforementioned LAN Party EVO which while not as silent is fast and also quite small But if you re looking for a deadly quiet machine for your cave and the primary purpose is either content creation or ap plication use we don t think you can get a more peaceful machine than the Serenity Mini GORDON MAH UNG Puget Systems Serenity Mini HUEY UH1 Unbelievably quiet solid application performance EL BABY HUEY GPU isn t the best for gamers no Hyper Threading 2 565 www pugetsystems com 3 3GHz Core i5 2500K overclocked to 4 5GHz endi dress STORAGE Two 80GB Intel 320 Series SSDs E CASE PSU Customized Antec Mini P180 Seasonic X 560 watt 76 MAXIMUM FG AUG 2011 maximumpc com 78 MAXIMUM PG in the lab Asus Pad Transformer TF101 A1 This Honeycomb tablets a notebook in disguise WITH OR WITHOUT THE OPTIONAL DOCK Eee Pad Transformer for Android Hon eycomb delivers big time the formance ratio Its 1GHz dual core Nvidia Tegra 2 processor 1GB
28. card retention device that Rosewilluseson gold connectors ofthe GPU should all be hidden by the x16 PCI E slot itscase Once the retention device is out of the way install Reinstall the retention device or use two standard machine screws the card by slotting it into the top slot on the board Thecard to hold the card in place and toss the retention device in the trash maximumpc com AUG 2011 m You re in the home stretch now It s time to install the power sup ply This is done by lowering the PSU into the case and using the four black screws that came with the PSU to secure it in place Note the fan on the PSU should face down in the case If you somehow install it upside down with the fan facing up the airflow into the power supply will be blocked by the case causing the PSU overheatand likely die It s also time to connect the power cables The last step is to install the optical drive and the hard drive in the case It s straightforward To install the optical drive gently pull the front bezel off of the case and remove the drive bay cover where you want the drive to go Remember the front panel controls and lights are hooked up tothe bezel by wires so don t pullit out toofar Push the bezel back in place slide in the optical drive and use two of the fine threaded machine screws to lock it in place This is usually enough but ifyou reanal youcaninstall another pair onthe right side by removing the side of the case
29. class materials essentially quoting and anthologizing They want everything that can be paid for to be paid for Specifi cally professors couldn t use more than 10 percent or 1 000 words of an in print book whichever is less That s about two pages And it s campus wide if use two pages of Robert Jackall s Moral Mazes in my class no student or teacher can use a third page without paying or getting sued by the publisher of Moral Mazes See what s funny there It s got moral right in the title The publishers believe that anything in print isn t subject to fair use a recently made up idea called the Market Failure Theory of fair use But that s not what fair use is about It s a limit to copyright baked into the law In the act itself it cites a teacher making copies of classroom materials as a fair use It s part of the copyright bargain we grant these rights in exchange for mate rial that improves our society as a whole not so a group of publishers can get a piece of that mad college student money These publishers not only want to make educa tion more expensive they want to make the university peer over the shoulders of teachers making sure they don t copy that 1 001st word or risk being sued Hope fully the court will rule against them but even if it does it s a sign of how publishers are treating the society that grants them their rights these days badly Quinn Norton writes about copy right for Wire
30. during our testing It helps that the Rosewill PSU the house brand for Newegg was on instant rebate for 25 So in many ways it s actually a 75 PSU that we got for 50 www newegg com Hard drive Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB 17 269 68 g Ct Jis A With a 10 instant rebate we snagged a massive 1TB of storage for 60 You can t really argue with that www westerndigital com RAM Patriot 4GB DDR3 1333 With the Patriot sticker on it you know there s good support behind it That s more than we can Say for no name generic RAM www patriotmemory com TODAY S PARTS LIST SPECIALS GPU SAPPHIRE RADEON HD 6790 CPU INTEL CORE 13 2100 OPTICAL DRIVE SAMSUNG SH S222A MOTHERBOARD GIGABYTE GA H67M D2 B3 PSU ROSEWILL RG530 S12 RAM PATRIOT 4GB DDR3 1333 CASE ROSEWILL R218 HARD DRIVE WESTERN DIGITAL CAVIAR BLUE 1TB 05 OEM WINDOWS 7 HOME PREMIUM TOTAL 05 667 Case Rosewill R218 _ Believe it or not we spent one third more on this year s case than last year s That s because Rosewill doesn t sell the 20 black metal case we used in last year s budget rig But 30 for an enclo sure is still pretty inexpensive and the Rosewill R218 does the job www newegg com OS OEM Windows 7 Home Premium e to your plified Is there any other choice www microsoft com maximumpc com AUG 2011 the S667 pc value mea
31. expansion slots and supports ATX microATX and E ATX motherboards The motherboard compartment is sufficiently spacious to make installation of even the bulkiest Systems a breeze and the case easily accommodates 12 2 inch GPUs Thanks its plethora of fans and capacious motherboard compartment the Level 10 GT s thermal performance was the second best of any case in this roundup bested only slightly by the Silverstone TJ11 which retails at 600 If you admired the original Level 10 but couldn t stomach its asking price or performance compromises youll find the Level 10 GT more to your lik ing It s less sleek and well design y but in every other aspect it s the superior case NATHAN EDWARDS Thermaltake Level 10 GT 280 thermaltakeusa com 4G unn THE LUXURY SPORTS CAR OF COMPUTER CHASSIS you first see it it s clear that the Temjin TJ11 is Silverstone s balls to the wall attempt to create the best chassis money can buy Silverstone packs in virtually every trick in its arsenal from the mid chassis air intake duct found in previous Temjin cases to the unibody aluminum frame of the Fortress 2 to the ro tated motherboard tray first seen in the Raven 01 The re sult is massive possibly over engineered and awesome At 9 inches wide by 25 inches high and 25 inches deep the TJ11 is a full inch deeper and higher than the Corsair 800D itself one of the largest chas sis we ve ever
32. in 2D Fortunately in that regard the HN274H was stellar From start to finish the TN based HN274H kept pace with our zero point monitor an IPS based Dell 02410 pro ducing accurate albeit slightly cooler colors incredible details and texture It aced nearly every test we put it through save the dark screen test which revealed the slightest touch of lighter spots across the screen In fact the black level was our only complaint and the only area in which the HN274H didn t mirror our zero point but instead produced a slightly grayer black The HN274H also had a touch more moir noise in test patterns which kept us from awarding it a Kick Ass award In our 3D testing the 274 continued to perform admirably utilizing its embed ded emitter with little trouble to produce a crisp quality 3D image Overall this is one sweet setup if you ve got the cash for it Acer HN274H 680 www acer com AUG 2011 maximumpc com in the lab DHK Storage PopDrive POP 500 A good idea hamstrung Dy complex software THE BASIC IDEA BEHIND THE POPDRIVE is a good one a sleek portable external enclosure that holds two 2 5 inch drives in RAID 1 to protect against the risk of data loss due to drive failure Add in support for user notification emails hotswap drive bays and a relatively speedy 36b s eSATA port and it sounds like you ve got yourself a winner And you might eventuall
33. optional and one 12cm rear exhaust fan The top panel can hold two 12cm or 14cm fans not included The Shinobi accommodates ATX micro ATX and Mini ITX mobos and the tray has four cutouts for cable routing It has seven expansion slots and can take videocards up to 12 2 inches It has three 5 25 inch bays one of which includes an adapter for exter nal 3 5 or internal 2 5 inch drive mounting The eight hard drive mounts are toolless Due to the lack of stock fans and cramped inner quarters the Shinobi s temperatures ran among the highest in our roundup in the thermal tests but slapping a few more fans into it will improve that For 70 it s a classy looking and surpris ingly capacious case and a hell of a deal NE BitFenix Shinobi Window 70 www bitfenix com CAN WE SKIP THE GOLD TRIM NEXT YEAR Is the third in the series best known for its rotated motherboard configuration which puts the backplane at the top of the chassis The PSU mounts at the bottom front of the case and the entire mobo setup is cooled from be low using two upward blowing 18cm fans The Raven tallies some impressive num bers There s room for eight PCI slots four 3 5 inch hard drive mounts two 2 5 inch bays behind the motherboard tray and eight 9 25 bays The spacious interior can fit a 12 2 inch GPU with ease Thanks to four cable routing cutouts a cleanly wired build 15 easy And the two 18cm filtered intake fa
34. parts the PC offers loads of options that scale from_oputent to economical Our budget gaming rig is all about instant gratifica for fillyour gaming hunger witha state of the art speedy machine capabte of playing today s games at 1080p resolutions for tess than 700 With our instructions less than hour On top of that we ll tell you how you can easily supersize your with future upgrades Is your mouth watering Let s dig in maximumpc com AUG 2011 MAXIMUM PG 25 the S667 pc value mea ON THE INGREDIENTS THAT MAKE UP OUR 667 GPU CPU Sapphire Radeon HD 6790 8 3 4 gaps 1 d cd The selection of budget videocard these days is embarrass ment of riches We ve never seen such an assortment of truly powerful low cost cards We decided on AMD s Radeon HD 6790 which is capable of 1080p gaming in such games as Crysis 2 Bat tlefield 2 Bad Company and a ton of other premium titles Is it a Radeon HD 6990 or GeForce GTX 590 No our entire system was built for less than the price of AMD s or Nvidia s latest dual GPUs www sapphiretech com Intel s Sandy Bridge chips are truly wondrous for being fast as hell and cheaper than well what Intel could charge For example the 3 1GHz Core i3 2100 dual
35. save your bacon CrystalDiskInfo lets you constantly monitor your S M A R T data as well as graph it www crystalmark info Ultimate Windows Tweaker Internet Traffic Report 1 loads into your toolbar where its icon is the performance rating for the designated Inter net path you choose to monitor using the Configure tab you can choose which region of the Internet you d like to monitor or switch monitoring between servers Find and What do you call an app that lets you change something about the Windows UI that you never knew was changeable You call that a great tweak What do you call an app that lets you make more than 130 tweaks for Windows Vista 7 and Internet Explorer all in a sub 500K package You call that the Ultimate diagnose bandwidth issues wherever you are Alright technically this is two apps but they work together to serve a single purpose taking back control of your context menu For full instructions on using ShellMenuView and ShellExView see our how to article Windows Tweaker bit ly mycgA J Want to know what programs are automatically loading on startup Startup Programs Tracker tells you by scan ning both the Start Menu and the system registry for such items Then it automatically pastes results to the Windows on MaximumPC com Clipboard for easy sharing via email or other documents SPT can also check for disabled startup items and changes to the default Shell
36. set doesn t fall short in comfort either The earcups are sort of an unusual trapezoid shape but they re big and well padded comfortable for long gaming sessions The whole thing is a bit on the large side great for those of us gifted with ample craniums but maybe not the right pick for people on the lower end of the head size spectrum The Shock One is a USB headset and of fers simulated 5 1 DTS surround sound It s ready to plug and play out of the box but installing the included software gives you control over the headset s simulated envi ronments equalizer and surround sound settings In terms of directionality the DTS Virtual 5 1 beats the pants off of any analog headset but falls a bit short of the Corsair HS1 which is comparable in price and uses Dolby Digital technology The set s 40mm drivers are in a word capable The sound isn t going to blow you away but the bass response mids and highs are all perfectly service able and you won t be left wanting 90 AUG 2011 maximumpc com while playing games listening to mu sic or watching movies One gaffe The Shock leatherette ear cushions absorb some of the sound leaving the set sounding a bit muddy Replacement fabric cushions are included in the box and sound substantially better but leave us in the unfortunate position of choosing between quality sound and superior comfort ALEX CASTLE P d Thermaltake Shock One Gam
37. should never be the administra tive account That leaves your data exposed so we recommend the second option creating a password unprotected guest account Creating a guest account is easy just open the Start Menu then right click Computer and select Manage In the Local Users and Groups tab you can right click and create a new account image F Computer Management Local Name Full Name Description a J Sytem T Task Scheduler Administrator Built in account for Users Evere Viewer Guest Built in account for gu Shared Foldert Local Users and Groups Users Groups Fi 8 Device Manager 4 Storage is to tell your computer to automatically connect to in range Wi Fi hotspots This may help Prey send you reports even if the perp doesn t mean to connect to the Internet laptop has been pilfered Or you just want to test out Prey It s time to log in to the control panel and have a look around In the control panel at Preyproject com there are a number of reporting options you can set but the most important is at the top marked Missing If your laptop is stolen toggle this option as soon as possible to tell Prey to start sending reports You can also increase the frequency of sent reports but remember that the free version of Prey stores only 10 reports at a time so if you re not going to be able to retrieve the repo
38. the RAM is getting in the way It s the company s new Ven geance LP DDR3 memory series These low profile kits feature heat spreaders with a reduced height of 1 03 inches 25 25mm nearly an inch shorter than the standard height of 1 87 inches 47 37mm The Vengeance LP kits are available in three different colors including Jet Black Cerulean Blue and a Special Edition Arctic White Like the original Vengeance se ries these are designed to run at 1 5V except for the Arctic White version which operates at the ultra low voltage of 1 35V To kick things off Corsair plans to offer its Vengeance LP series in 4GB 8GB and 16GB kits each one with a rated frequency of 1 600MHz and 9 9 9 24 latencies No word yet on price or availability PL quickstart improving your pc experience one step at a time 101508 151241 9 TECHNOLOGIES THAT NEED AN INSTANT UPGRADE LANDLINES Many landlines are built on ancient wiring some only capable of data transmissions around 14Kb s There s a great opportunity to refresh the archaic network with fiber optic connections TELEVISION REMOTES With today s Internet connected TVs and the digi tal service cable providers use we should be able to use smartphones and com puters to control our TVs CHR AADIOS What we could really FD get behind are Internet based radios working Radio off of mobile broadband services already blan keting most of the world CALCULATOR
39. throughput of 450Mb s We ve been down this road with other new wireless technologies so we know it will pass We only wish we could tell you when MICHAEL BROWN CISCO LINKSYS E4200 DUAL BAND 802 11N ROUTER We weren t impressed with the last Linksys branded router that passed through Maximum Lab North The dual band Linksys E3000 in reality a rebadged Linksys WRT610N delivered humdrum performance and lacked a number of important features we expect to find in a high end router The E4200 fares better but we re still scratching our heads over some of Linksys s decisions The first thing you ll notice about the E4200 is its minimalist industrial design Plug in its inline power sup ply no wall wart and you ll find that it s almost devoid of front panel idiot lights There are no LEDs to indicate an Internet connection which of its radios are operating or even which of its ports are in use The only thing that glows on the front panel is Cisco s logo There are port activity LEDs on the back of the router but even these can be turned off via the router s web interface We like that In fact we liked the entire low profile design at least until we tried to plug in our Ethernet cables That s when we discovered that the top of the router s housing blocked the vinyl hoods covering our cables RJ45 connec tors We had no problem fitting cables outfitted with bare connectors but that s pretty lame Also lame providing a USB
40. vinyl pull down shade for the large window in this room In an effort to keep my girlfriend happy in stalled the shade inside of the room s cur tains Success maximumpc com AUG 2011 67 247 x 57 hi 2 2 2 9 IF YOU REMEMBER last year s 3D HTPC build Home Theater with a Vengeance August 2010 you may recall that we used a number of interest ing accessories transferred a few of the devices we used back then to work with this home theater The no brainer of the batch was Ceton s In finiTV 4 Its four tuner capacity makes it a record ing workhorse and Ceton recently introduced the ability to split the four tuners among other Windows Other Important Components mouse granted me full range of Media Center con trols and some basic gaming controls at a distance Razer s Onza Tournament Edition controller rounds out my collection of input devices More and more Warpia s StreamHD is becom ing an essential part of my home theater It s great because it allows my friends and family to quickly and easily run media including music from their laptops to the big screen and receiver A USB don Arecent software systems on a network which makes for easy live gle plugs into a laptop which then wirelessly trans TW streaming We ll explain how to make this work be up to a 1080p signal to the soundbar and then 4 to stream live video low
41. whatever reason now s the time to set your input size and cropping options This part of the setup is pretty self explanatory Input size allows you to isolate the particular portion of your original stream that Flash Media Live Encoder should use and the cropping options allow you to drill down to a pixel perfect rendition of whatever dimensions you set Before you start your streaming two key steps remain Set the size of your output streamed video under the Output Size option this is exactly what s going to be sent over to Ustream Select the Bit Rate as well So long as your setup can handle it higher bit rates directly translate to a higher quality final product And finally if you want your game s audio to be broadcast to Ustream click the Device menu under the Audio portion of the app and select the option that s either Stereo Mix or What U Hear depending on the specifics of your card If nei BRIDGE THE GAP Grab Adobe s free Flash Media Live Encoder adobe ly BROADCAST TO USTREAM Head on back to Ustream and click the giant Live button in the upper right corner Once your official Broadcast Live window pops up you ll notice that you cant really adjust settings like video quality or audio quality on the web app itself That s because Ustream in this instance is merely the switch that turns your live broadcast on and off All quality set tings are being handled by Adobe Flash Media Live Encoder whi
42. 0 shows who s in charge It s simply a beatdown putting a passively cooled card up against the fastest single GPU card available But let s be honest the Serenity Mini 15 not designed primarily as a gaming rig Yes a Radeon HD 5750 is certainly capable of some gaming duties at lower resolutions say 1680x1050 and even some games at 1920x1080 but it s not a card you d pick if you re expecting to play Battlefield 3 on a 30 inch panel at 2560x1600 Instead you want this GPU and this machine for its acoustics Is the Serenity Mini really that quiet Yes The rig is dead silent which is more of a mind bender than anything You expect a system running at 4 56Hz to make some noise but this is a black hole of silence We originally thought the CyberPower LAN Party EVO was quiet but not in comparison to this You move your head closer and closer to the machine in an ef fort to hear it until your head is against the case Even then you can still barely hear anything That s quite an achievement Puget really hit the mark in noise man agement but there s still that vexing ques tion Would a gamer give up the perfor 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 Our current desktop test bed consists of a quad core 2 66GHz Core 17 920 overclocked to 3 5GHz 6GB of Corsair DDR3 1333 overclocked to 1 750MHz on a Gigabyte X58 motherboard We are running Radeon HD 5970 graphics card a 160GB Intel X25 M SSD and the 64
43. 0 years ago It s a great time to be a gamer Still with all the focus on production values it s easy to forget about what mat ters the most gameplay To help remind everyone that gaming greatness is more than skin deep we ve rounded up 21 games that pack a ton of great gameplay into a tiny package bit ly 5games 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 5 Human Berserker Mana burn Magic resist 50 maximum NEXT MONTH COMING IN MAXIMUM PG s LAMBORGHINI YELLOW SEPTEMBER ISSUE The Dream Machine It s time for our annual indulgence in outrageous performance state of the art components and cutting edge assembly We re going to envelope it all with an awesome cus tom paint job You ll have to read the September issue to find out the rest ARM and the Desktop PC The frenzy around ARM s CPU architecture and the slew of devices incorpo rating it got us wondering What are the greater implications of this mass migration for traditional PC computing We re going to take a deep long look next month Geek Quiz Think you re geek smart Think again As you sit back content in your geek credibility we re devising a list of questions so extraord
44. 2500 an Asus P8H67 M EVO motherboard 8GB of low profile Kingston DDR3 1333 a Gelid Tranquillo cooler two Intel 320 Series 80GB SATA 6Gb s drives 2 WD Caviar Green drive and Power Color Radeon HD 5750 videocard All this is packed into an Antec Mini P180 case The Antec P series 15 already tuned for acoustics but Puget added some additional touches such as AcoustiPack sheets In various spots to make the case even quieter In performance the Serenity Mini s numbers are fair They re not benchmark chart ripping scores but they re not bad either Much of that is thanks to the Core 15 2500 chip Its stock speed is 3 3GHz but Puget overclocks it to 4 5GHz This helps the 2500K overcome the overclocked Core 17 920 in our zero point system in most of our application benchmarks The Serenity Mini also does reasonably well against the similarly priced CyberPower LAN Party EVO reviewed in July which features a stock clocked 3 46Hz Core 17 2600K The CyberPower outpaces the overclocked Puget Systems in our Light BENCHMARKS POINT VEGAS PRO SEC 3 049 2 827 11 2 1 73 _ LIGHTROOM 2 6 SEC 357 0 PROSHOW 4 SEC 839 REFERENCE 1 6 SEC STALKER CoP FPS FAR CRY 2 FPS 114 4 38 3 67 0 10 20 room 2 6 test but even with its Hyper Threading loses to the Serenity Mini in the rest of our benchmarks When we get to gaming though the CyberPower s GeForce GTX 58
45. 3 gt 0 in the lab Lenovo ThinkPad X1 This ultraportable isnt for sissies LAST MONTH WE REVIEWED Samsung 5 Series 9 ultraportable notebook and found that while it offered an exceed ingly svelte and fashionable form factor there was a performance trade off to all that stylishness Lenovo s 13 inch Think Pad X1 represents a completely different approach to ultraportability We re not suggesting that the X1 eschews aesthetics In fact it takes the ThinkPad s classic matte black look and feel and jazzes it up with a few cosmetic updates such as edge to edge glossy screen an island keyboard blue LED keyboard backlighting and angled edges But still the overall motif 15 no nonsense There s no mistaking that this is a business notebook The X1 s build quality is all business as well The notebook might be just an inch thick but it s no dainty flower It weighs 3 pounds 13 3 ounces without the power supply and it feels solid making Lenovo s claims of mil spec compliance wholly believable The edge to edge LCD screen 15 topped with Gorilla Glass meant to withstand the rigors of regular use The X1 s CPU is also pretty burly for this class The Core i5 2520M runs at a 2 5GHz base clock with Turbo potential up to 3 2GHz Not surprisingly it hand ily trounced the 1 4GHz Core 15 2537 in Samsung s Series 9 by more than 90 percent in three out of four content creation benchmar
46. 300 Kbps VP6 ce Integrated Webcam Microphone Line In IDT High A rmat VP6 ormat Mp3 15 00 ze 320x240 NQWUJ install it and fire up the application When it loads you ll want to start by clicking the File menu then Open Profile and then selecting the Flash Media Encoder XML file you previously downloaded from Ustream You ll then want to find the Video section within the Flash Media Live Encod er s configuration screen image Click the drop down list next to the Device entry and select VH Screen Capture or VHScrCap as the device that Adobe Flash Media Encoder pulls from If everything is going to plan a vision of your desktop should pop up in the preview window above the app s configuration options Select the ever awesome H 264 codec as your encoding format and then click the tiny wrench icon to the right of the selection box for Advanced Encoder Settings image 0 StarCraft recording veterans tend to adopt profiles that use more keyframes a one or two second keyframe That s because a keyframe Is a recording of the screen as it looks at a particular time anything up until the next keyframe is rendered as a differential adjustment to the underlying static keyframe image Or to put it another way you ll have less blur and incorrect col oration if you set keyframes to a faster Lower interval Also change your profile from Baseline to Main you re planning to stream a windowed game for
47. 48 MAXIMUM PE AUG 2011 maximumpc com Restoration It s happened to us all You delete a file empty your recycle bin and then later realize you want the file back Restoration s sole purpose is to help you retrieve that data No install 15 necessary Just run the app selecting to scan all deleted files or only those within select parameters You can opt to recover files or select to wipe the files making them unrecoverable to future attempts bit ly jvNksk cdam Pedo E Li MARTE x 1 Nail It Ever notice that it s hard to sleep at night after staring at your computer screen all evening It could be the color temperature of your monitor F lux is a simple app that matches the color temperature of your screen with the lights in your room and with natural light in the morning Go easier on your eyes you only get one pair Presumably stereopsis com flux Nail It installs to your taskbar and basically allows you to nail any given window in your OS What does this mean Well if you nail a window that window will stay on the top no matter how many other windows you choose to open If you re tired of your nailed window you can it and assign the nail to a dif ferent window Greenshot ERES If you take screenshots with any sort of frequency you know that the standard screenshot functionality in Windows just doesn t cut it Greenshot gives
48. 500 is everything we ve come to expect from that company s cases styl ish simple looking and a joy to build into Yes it was trounced in our thermal test by the Silverstone Raven RV03 which takes full advan tage of Silverstone s rotated motherboard configuration and the ease of cooling that allows but we still have to give the nod to Corsair After all it offers plenty of options for more fans THE KINGPIN We ll close with our ultra luxe cases Both Thermaltake s Level 10 GT and Silverstone s TJ11 performed well in our thermal testing though for their asking prices they d better Thermaltake s Level 10 GT isn t exactly the soul of minimalist design but if that sort of chunky sci fi motif is your thing you ll appreciate its cooling prowess ease of build ing and Level 10 styling Silverstone s TJ11 on the other hand strikes a balance between restrained minimalism and extreme overengineer ing If you need 30 pounds of aluminum that stand over 2 feet high and you want a case that unquestionably looks and feels luxurious while having plenty of room for as many top tier parts as you can fit into your shopping cart and you have 600 to spend you ll like the TJ11 It s overkill for the vast majority of people But so s an Aston Martin Silverstone Temjin TJ11 2 6509 STORM BITFENIX SILVERSTONE RV03 BENCHMARKS ANTEC SIX FRACTAL CORSAIR THERMALTAKE SILVERSTONE ENFORCER SHINOBI HUNDRED V2 ARC MID
49. 95 6 6 0080 Intel 556 5 dye Aata binaba MET 2 1 5 Sool Utir Inii Prememork Framework Framewgrk Pr a 2 DB v 5 Merri On torem Vaud Cab Vides s Viol 2 H o Piai 3 Ger jab 20 013001 shows pou ad of the programs 85 and components for both the current and users 1n the Deina view or by contest Thea the cba stop of Fore wth hat ona 58 AutoHotkey Revo Uninstaller VirtuaWin Ever get a pesky application that you just can t uninstall RevoUninstaller is the equivalent of calling Chuck Bronson over to pull a Mr Maj estyk on it Use the hunter mode which lets you point the crosshairs at any icon This lets you uninstall the app from the shortcut kill its process stop auto starting or kill and de lete the process The free vers
50. D 6850 gets you up to the next rung on the perfor mance ladder And for just few dollars more than that the new GeForce GTX 560 Ti isan attractive option If you want a nice uptick in applications the 185 Core i5 2300 gets you four cores at 2 8GHz with Turbo Boost taking it to 3 1GHz The final upgrade for those concerned with long term reliability would be the PSU Normally we d be apprehensive about an extremely low cost PSU but the Rosewillwe rerunningisactuallya 75 PSU not a 50 unit so we re fairly comfortable with it Still we d ultimately like to step up to a 750 watt PSU get ting there means spending about 100 AUG 2011 maximumpc com IMUM PE 33 ASSIS IN OUR LINEUP AL HOMES FOR YOUR NEW RIG EIGHT NEW CH EIGHT POTENTI 36 AUG 2011 maximum WHEN YOU RE OUTFITTING A NEW COMPUTER IT CAN TEMPTING TO JUST BUY THE CHEAPEST NO NAME CASE YOU CAN FIND SLAP YOUR NEW PARTS INTO IT AND CALL IT A DAY ite ANCES i ovd HEHH HEHH maximumpc com AUG 2011 MAXIMUM PE 37 38 GOOD LOOKS LOTS 0 FEATURES LOW PRICE of the Cool er Master Storm Enforcer wasn t great Though the case is only 90 we can t help but feel wary running our hands over a lightweight plastic front panel It s just instinct But after spending some time with the Enforcer we actually came away im pressed mostly The Enforcer comes with two USB 2 0 por
51. DWARDS Silverstone Temjin TJ11 600 www silverstonetek com MAKING POSITIVE ID A PRIME SUSPECT EMERGES IN EACH PRICE CATEGORY For a lineup like this one which features cases of all shapes sizes and prices there s no sense in declaring a single standout How can a 70 budget mid tower ever hope to compete with a 600 machined aluminum behe moth and vice versa Thus we evaluated each case on its own merits to see how it stacked up at its own price point and niche With that in mind here are our conclusions BUDGET BADASS Four of the eight cases in our lineup are mid tower cases between 70 and 110 enough for a mini roundup of their own But despite their similar sizes and prices there s enough variety to distinguish each of them The Fractal Arc Midis less is more interior impressed us with its cooling prowess ease of installation and good looks Both the CM Storm Enforcer and the Antec Six Hundred V2 offered de cent cooling performance as well though between the two we much prefer the Cooler Master for its superior build quality We liked the build quality and soft touch ex terior of the BitFenix Shinobi quite a bit but its dearth of Meant 2 0 hotter than the otheis 19 though its good choice for less demanding hardware THE BATTLE BETWEEN OUR TWO MIDRANGE CASES WAS TOUGH Storm Enforcer MIDRANGE MASTER The battle between our two midrange cases was tough Corsair s 6
52. ES 256 Q Vexatron KALLISTI lt 1 4 This is encrypted chat between two computers Hamachi 2 network 21 1 It sure is little cuttlefish It sure is LogMeIn Hamachi2 LogMeln Hamachi2 is an easy to configure utility that sets up a virtual private network VPN to let you securely access remote networks Simple secure and free for noncommercial use it s perfect for cre ating mock LANs for LAN gaming at a distance or for creating a virtual office network Use in conjunc tion with UltraVPN to securely control your PC from anywhere www hamachi cc Taskbar Shuffle Settings Koscher 4lan Fackler Start with Windows Show system tray icon Check for updates at startup Robert Strohmeyer yecent Buddies lt sidshuman Taskbar Shuffle Like the best wee apps Taskbar Shuffle does a few things and it does them well First it allows you to quickly and easily rearrange and reorganize your Windows taskbar by simply dragging and dropping icons Second you can do the same to ap plications in Windows system tray Third an options menu in the app allows you an even wider range of controls It s also fully compatible with UltraMon Niloneal Bells and whistles ding ding toot toot Elsa Mobile Marshall Group similar taskbar buttons W 15104099913 group tasks in order started default group tasks with this or more win
53. G2 G4 Dropbox A ffinal extra Please choose the reporti visit prevproject com trick Install 2 pec Lapte own computer 21 it ut the Web for Free pater p its log file in your Dropbox folder www dropbox com N submit your How project idea to comments maximumpc com maximumpc com AUG 2011 MAXIMUMPE 61 Livestream Your Games to the Web How you can become the next online gaming sensation for free David Murphy SO YOU WANT TO be a video star You ll have to work on your gaming skills first you wouldn t want to disappoint your future legions of YouTube fans with a 0 64 record in StarCraft Il Wait what Videogame streaming and commentary is a huge deal nowadays and it s a lot easier to get in on the action than you might think And don t forget bragging rights Wouldn t you want to show all of your friends just how well you can wield a zergling Or a portal gun Or a desert bus adventure You don t need any flashy hardware or capture cards to stream your screen and online In fact you can have your Rock at TIE Fighter channel up and running within half an hour at most Acererak Crowds I m In 2 Show Info Edit your show s name category tags and about section Jump to Your Show or create another show Show Name David Murphy Show URL http ustream com myshow Category A Overview Magic Live Broadcasts at type o
54. I 650D LEVEL 10 GT TEMJIN TJ11 CPU Burn 60 5 64 25 56 75 60 25 58 25 62 75 55 75 55 CPU Idle 85 25 36 5 33 75 35 75 34 25 37 25 34 75 35 29 GPU Burn 84 5 85 83 5 85 85 85 5 84 5 84 GPU Idle C 44 5 50 46 5 46 5 49 50 5 48 5 47 5 System Burn 63 67 57 62 62 65 57 59 System Idle 35 36 33 36 35 37 35 35 Best scores are bolded CPU temperatures are averages of four cores GPU temperatures are averages of two cores Our test bed consists of an Intel Core 15 750 overclocked 3 2GHz Asus P7P55D Premium board with a two fan Prolimatech Armageddon CPU cooler GTX 590 dual GPU videocard 300GB Western Digital VelociRaptor hard drive and 850W Thermaltake Toughpower PSU AUG 2011 maximumpc com 5 SMALL C SIMPLE amp 2 Amm e THEY DO JUST ONE OR TWO THINGS REALLY WELL UP HARDLY ANY SPACE AND COST NOTHING our general philosophy at Maximum PC is that bigger is better More speed more mem ory more power as far as hardware goes there s no such thing as excess Software though software s a little different Big feature packed utilities and applications are great but we pre fer apps that show a little restraint That s why we ve put together a list of 49 apps that kick ass without taking up a lot of space Every program in this list can be downloaded for free and is 3 MBor less in size BY THE MAXIMUM PC STAFF
55. L 310 THROTTLE W Asus Radeon HD 6870 DirectCU 4 314 17 041 18 29 42 78 77 34 35 26 54 20 140 252 Asus ENGTX MSI N560GTX 460 TOP 1GB Ti 3 963 4 519 16 226 19 482 18 26 23 29 40 54 83 102 101 127 35 44 35 42 21 32 43 52 15 17 133 130 298 305 Best scores are bolded Our test bed is a 3 336Hz Core 17 975 Extreme Edition in an Asus P6X58D Premium motherboard with 66B of DDR3 1333 and an 850TX Corsair PSU The OS is 64 bit Windows 7 Ultimate All games are run at 1920x1200 with 4x AA unless otherwise noted an HDMI connector and an old school VGA plug It lacks a DisplayPort connec tor though and only two monitors can be active at once The card requires two PCI Express 6 pin power plugs It s a double Palit s card features lots of RAM on a quiet compact design wide full height card but is just 7 5 inches long so it should fit in most PC cases The Palit GTX 560 card is a clear im provement over the GTX 460 1GB It s likely that the 2 frame buffer only has a minor impact most of the improvements are due to the GTX 560 s higher clock speeds and streamlining of the internal circuitry since the GTX 460 Most GTX 560 cards will likely ship with 1GB of GDDRS5 but will be factory overclocked With the Palit 208 card youre trading off core clock speeds for additional fr
56. NK Our retail processor comeswith the stock Intel heatsink fan that includes a thin film of thermal paste already onit image A For newbs This paste helps fillin the nooks and crannies yes like a Thomas English Muffin that are formed when you compressthe heatsink on the CPU Toinstall the heatsink fan line up the four legs of the heatsink with the four holes around socket and push plastic anchor points through the holes by pushing on the knob like top of each until you hear an audible click image Using acriss cross pattern similar to how you would tighten down lug nuts lock each of four legs place Look at bottom of the board and you should see the legs protruding through the bottom image C Also tug on the heatsink from the top to make sure it s locked place Now plug in the fan s power lead image 0 AUG 2011 fits way image A With the DIMM perpendicular to the slot push it straight into the slot until it clicks into place image B The arms should lock in place automatically ifthe arms aren t totally locked in place push them in with your fingers 111811 1 1 NT ity anh 111181 11 th LIONE F 5 It s time to the motherboard Although our I O shield is free of anything that can snag ports it s ve
57. O MUCH FOR not breaking the bank The moment we got our hands on Epson s 8700UB projector we knew it was destined to be the visual centerpiece of this project Truth be told it s not that easy to find high quality 1080p projectors that dont cost a fortune The low end of the price scale in this category includes Optoma s highly touted HD20 900 retail and Epson s PowerLite 8350 1 100 retail The picture quality of the 8700UB is su perb and the 1 600 lumen output which in uses complex algorithms and an auto mated self calibration routine to de termine the acoustic properties of any room and then projects discrete sound channels at walls and other barriers in the room to recreate the surround sound experience Frankly the 5 1 and 7 1 modes really surprised me given the size enough so that it s hard to imagine ever buying a space consuming six or seven speaker set again It also supports HDMI 1 4a making it 3D compatible down the road Not sur creases to 1 830 in Dynamic mode allows it to function surprisingly well with some ambient light present really love two of this projector s fea tures First an adjustable 2 1 1 manual zoom lens allows you to throw a 110 inch diagonal image from variable distances ranging from 11 feet 9 inches all the way to 25 feet 1 inch This allowed me to run a 120 inch image in my 15x13 foot room Second the projector allows you to shift the image position vertically
58. S There s a whole world of new functionality calculators can take on like wireless connectivity color displays physics simulation and gaming Not to mention useful educational applications PRINTERS It s time that printers got smarter We re talking things like drivers with no accompanying bloatware smartphone con nectivity ability to access the print queue from any network attached device and affordable 3D printing 14 AUG 2011 maximumpc com M SS N 222 ee g LAPTOP COOLING Most laptops put their cooling intake vents onthe bottom of the chassis where your lap E blocks them better solution is to draw air down through the keyboard la Asus X DOR THE em 1 INTERNAL ES 1 COMBUSTION Eee 3 A ENGINE It s time for a shift from the old to the new a hydrogen fuel cell electric car The car runs nearly silently and has essentially no emissions save for a bit of H20 YR INTEBRRTED VIDED P ACCELERATORS intel Integrated GPUs have made some surprising performance Sandy Bridge leaps lately particularly in the form of the new APUs from Intel and AMD Great but we want more Is that greedy Yes it is GAMING CONSOLES These 5 plus year old systems are leading to stagnation in the gaming industry Epic Games has already produced a tech demo of its latest Unreal
59. The entire Kinect console sits atop a pedes tal much like those of 1960s lava lamps Unlike most lava lamps the Kinect pedestal has a built in tilt motor that lets the entire console move The tilt range is about 27 degrees and it s used in conjunction with the 57 degree hori zontal field of view and 43 degree vertical field of the console s cameras to give the system a greater ability to track you as you move around IR EMITTER CONTROL SYSTEM MEMORY PROCESSOR INPUT OUTPUT UTILITY SOUND Although you may hear a barely perceptible whir coming from the console it s the only sound you ll hear There are no speakers inside the Kinect Instead the interior sports four microphones three on the lower right end and a single on the lower left side four face downward The quartet composes a spatial sound array that samples incoming audio and compares the four streams separating background noise from speech and different voices from each other It s effective to about 4 meters from the console While noise cancellation microphones have been around for years Kinect faces the unique challenge of typically having TV receiver speakers closer to the mics while the human voices are farther away The acoustic echo cancellation techniques used Nestled alongside the RGB camera are an infrared emitter and an infrared camera The former bathes the immediate area in infrared while the latter collects the radiated and re
60. ame buffer Even without overclocking though Palit s GTX 560 20 card is quite well equipped LOYD CASE Palit 560 2GB PALANTIR Compact low power and good performance for the price EI MAGIC 8 BALL 2GB frame buffer doesn t buy a lot of additional performance 200 www palit biz AUG 2011 maximumpc com mum 81 in the lab Asus P8Z68 V Pro New Z68 chipset makes big improvements over P67 WHEN IS A CHIPSET truly a new chipset That s a question that many enthusiasts will ponder when they see the specs for Intel s 268 chipset which is at the heart of the Asus P8Z68 V Pro board For one thing there s no native USB 3 0 no additional PCI E lanes which are tied to the CPU anyway and still the paltry two SATA 6Gb s ports that Intel included with the original P67 chipset s PCH chip If these negatives are enough to make you skip the rest of this review know that you re mak ing a big mistake That s because the 468 chipset in the P8Z68 V Pro offers several major advances over the P67 the ability to overclock processor graphics the Sandy Bridge CPU Identity Protec tion Technology which is essentially a hardware token integrated into the chipset and CPU Smart Response Technology SSD caching the ability to switch between the discrete and integrated graphics Of these four features the biggest im pact will come from the Smart Response Technology SRT lets y
61. and horizontally which allowed for convenient installation in the corner of my room It s worth noting that using the zoom lens does reduce the bright prisingly given the acoustic quality and reduced footprint this is a category that is quickly gaining in popularity We re starting to see more and more sound projectors on the market every year It s worth noting that Yamaha makes both lower end and higher end sound projec tors as do a number of audio companies including Boston Acoustics and Polk You can find cheaper 1080p projectors but few deliver the sharpness brightness and image throw versatility of Epson s 8700UB ness Projector Central reports that this drop off can range from 18 to 36 percent depending on zoom level spent a lot of time contemplating a wide variety of projection screens to go with the Epson projector drooled over a number of higher end motorized screens dream ing of push button conversion to theater mode before settling on a simple manual screen with a 1 1 gain It works great Gain indicates the reflectivity of any screen or projection surface A 1 0 gain is considered normal Most conventional screens have gains in the 1 0 to 1 3 range Regardless of the lumens and the slightly reflective screen still found that the best condition for the greatest visual quality was darkness With notions of weekend long sessions of Portal 2 and Shogun 2 in mind purchased an inexpensive
62. andles matically adjusts your and it doesn t oversell all the software on your this for you A 256 bit en bandwidth usage based itself as being able to PC and inform you when crypted database keeps on network activity and rejuvenate your sys patch is available all of your passwords you can customize the tem like some clutter locked down and ac client via the uTorrent clearing applications do cessible via Windows or App Studio And did we even mobile devices mention that it s fast This is our default file archive package partially be cause it s free but mostly because it s powerful flexi ble and effective 7 Zip unpacks all manner of archive formats including zip tar gz and many others The application even has its own file format 7z which is remarkably efficient at compressing files It also sup ports 256 bit AES encryption and can be configured to utilize multiple CPU cores Lyrics e Good Job Get em up way high Quote Gimme gimme that high five Stickies is the only software Good time that I ever wanted to marry Get em way down low Gimme gimme that low dough To do list Thank Tony for dinner Post Becky s present Clean out fridge Copy MP3s to phone Send party invites E AUG 2011 MAXIMUM PE 51 small app 215 M 1 SumatraPDF 90 percent of t
63. appy making series of events that this editorial set into motion The short version is that one of our read ers Jim Setele from the Cleveland area saw the story and knowing someone fairly high up the chain at AT amp T alerted the company about my agony over losing my unlimited data plan This person contacted AT amp T s public relations agency which was gracious enough to reach out to me apologize and offer to set things straight Within one week of first contact AT amp T had restored my un limited data plan How great is that An even greater turn of events is that it looks like this series of inci dents may actually help create some meaningful change in the way AT amp T s call centers respond to customer re quests about data plan changes It sounds like AT amp T is exploring ways to ensure that its customers are fully informed regarding data plan changes So from me to you to cor porate America we actually created some real change One of the great truths about Max imum PC is that we re extremely for tunate to have readers like you who are smart understand technology at a deep level and aren t afraid to intervene to help Or ask for help which is often a more courageous act After working in the gaming journalism ranks for years let me tell you The exchanges l ve had with many of you have been more intelli gent by a factor of 10 So it s with a simultaneously hap and heavy heart that I m te
64. argeting is still a mess uninterruptible animations abound and surgical strategy quickly gives way to brainless hacking That s not to say it s all bad The empha sis on pre fight potion popping trap set ting and weapon choices especially could have been amazing if encounters were better designed to take advantage of them Beyond that a few termite size issues threaten to sink the whole ship Quest de sign is often cryptic and confusing inven tory management is a pain and the ending rushes by like it s late for afternoon tea with its awful mother We said threaten however because that s all the game s issues ever do Witcher 2 s highs are still miles above its lows oftentimes rendering them distant memories in mere seconds The game then is an oddity For sig nificant chunks of time we simply weren t having fun Without a doubt however the experience will stick with us for years As a whole we didn t just like it we loved it jagged disfiguring scars and all Con fused Just play it and see what we mean You won t regret it NATHAN GRAYSON UERDICT The Witcher 2 Assassins of Kings EISWORDS SORCERY Incredibly beautiful detailed world choices that really matter mostly excellent writing and characters GUNS ROSES Half baked sometimes frustrating combat terrible tutorial wonky interface and quest design 49 www en thewitcher com ESRB M AUG 2011 MAXIMUMPG 81 maximumpc
65. ch should already be running in the background as you read this Click Start Broadcast to do just that image E and then sit back and watch your rise to Internet superstardom begin And do send us an autograph when you strike it big Final caveats You ll notice that we havent dabbled too much in numerical specifics what to set for your stream s bit rate the size of the video itself what your frame rate should be etc Sadly the best numbers to slap in these fields can vary by a number of key factors not the least of which Is the speed of your computer and the speed of your Inter net connection The name of the streaming game Is experimentation and only you can ultimately deter mine the specific settings that work best for your configuration We can show you how to stream it s up to you to make it look good Advanced Encoder Settings a Gia Pronie Ne mh Main b d me Fre ena c eyue 1 second v ther exists you can always select your standard microphone jack hook up a headset and provide some thrilling audio commentary or foley Ready Click the big green Start button maximumpc com AUG 2011 MAXIMUM PG 63 R amp D mm _ Track Your Stolen Laptop for Free Using Prey you ll have the upper hand over thieves Alex Castle LAPTOP IS A LOT OF THINGS it s a mobile entertainment center a portal to the web and a way to get work done away from home More than anything t
66. com in the lab Lee 101 011865 ALAN FACKLER ONLINE ASSOCIATE EDITOR Buried in Emerging trom the Lab after days of case testing Y What day time is it TO SAY THAT THIS MONTH S CASE FEATURE took a while would be a massive understatement Nathan and spent about a week in the Lab for hours on end building into every single one of the cases you read about thermal testing each one using new and improved meth ods and developing new and more thorough benchmarking tools You could say it served as my rite of passage as Nathan Edwards has been officially relieved of case duty and is moving on to the crazy compet itive world of GPUs But fear not as am proud to report that was taught by one of the best in the business and have built into some of the best and worst in the business as well Moving forward vow to abide by the strict and merciless tests benchmarks and overall values instilled in every verdict we grant I also accept the obligatory back problems that already begun to develop from hours spent hunching over cases with a screwdriver Ow Gordon Mah Ung Senior Editor Having successfully built a pretty decent Sandy Bridge box with intermediate gaming capabilities for 667 wondering if can seriously cut the price to 400 or even 300 think could do it with an AMD E 350 Fu sion but performance wouldnt be tops If AMD s new A series APU is cheap enough we coul
67. core is actu ally faster in most of the benchmarks even those that are multithreaded than the similarly priced Athlon II X4 quad core and even surpasses the Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition in many of our tests Not bad for a 126 chip www intel com Motherboard Gigabyte GA H67M D2 B3 Optical drive Samsung SH S222A nu E RM Talia 5 547 A tech media prediction says that optical drives will go away within five years Sure maybe if you don t actually use a freaking computer for anything Our budget doesn t allow for Blu ray so Samsung s trusty old 22x DVD burner gets put to work yet again www samsung com m AUG 2011 maximumpc com A E We had make tough choices under budget and Gigabyte board was one of them That s not to say that it s a bad board but there were some features that had to be sacrificed First up it s microATX which limits future expansion possibili ties That doesn t hurt as much as the two DIMM slots though Ouch If we had the extra cash we would have ponied up an extra 30 to get a standard ATX board with four DIMM slots www gigabyte com PSU Rosewill RG530 S12 When push comes to shove the PSU budget goes overboard first That doesn t mean the Rosewill RG530 S12 is junk Far from it in fact The PSU features two 6 pin GPU plugs and didn t hiccup once
68. ct same PCH as the P67 chipset performance between the P8P67 Pro or Deluxe and the P8Z68 V Pro is a wash That is until you factor in the SRT SSD caching which is a big boost for folks who intend to primarily run a hard drive If you look at the benchmark charts you can see the impact of SRT which also felt faster in general use than a hard drive alone The best performance will always come from running the SSD as your primary disk but then you are limited by size and are always managing your data between the SSD and HDD With SRT you PC MARK VANTAGE SSD 2068 Intel 311 SRT MODE Off PCM VANTAGE 64 12473 27170111 MEMORIES 9 570 9687 TV AND MOVIES 6914 6 544 GAMING 11 873 19 621 MUSIC 10 541 16 347 COMMUNICATIONS 13 468 17 784 PRODUCTIVITY 9 829 15 799 HDD 6 557 10019 182 Maximized have all the spatial freedom of a fast drive with much of the performance of an SSD One thing to note The Maximized mode gives you the best write perfor mance but you run the risk of data loss should your system lose power or blue screen suddenly during a large write Enhanced mode is safer but your fastest write is at the speed of the hard drive So what do we think of the P8Z68 V Pro board We probably would not up grade to it if we were running a P67 We view SRT and the Quick Sync access as valuable but not quite worth the hassle of an upgrade But this b
69. ction Director Michael Hollister Production Manager Larry Briseno Senior Production Coordinator Dan Mallory Print Order Coordinator Jennifer Lim CONSUMER MARKETING VP Director Consumer Marketing Rich McCarthy Circulation Director Crystal Hudson Newsstand Director Bill Shewey Consumer Marketing Operations Director Lisa Radler Renewal amp Billing Manager Mike Hill Sr Online Consumer Marketing Director Jennifer Trinkner Customer Service Manager Mike Frassica FUTURE US INC 4000 Shoreline Ct STE 400 South San Francisco CA 94080 Tel 650 872 1642 Fax 650 872 2207 www futureus com President John Marcom CFO John Sutton Sales amp Marketing Rachelle Considine VP Internet amp Mobile Products Mark Kramer General Counsel Anne Ortel Human Resources Director Nancy Dubois SUBSCRIBER CUSTOMER SERVICE Maximum PC Customer Care Box 5159 Harlan 51593 0659 Website www maximumpc com customerservice Tel 800 274 3421 Email MAXcustserv dcdsfulfillment com BACK ISSUES Website www maximumpc com shop Tel 800 865 7240 REPRINTS Future US 4000 Shoreline Court Suite 400 South San Francisco CA 94080 Website www futureus com Tel 650 872 1642 Fax 650 872 2207 Future produces carefully targeted maga zines websites and events for people with a passion We publish more than 180 maga zines websites and events and we export or license our publications to 90 c
70. d News and other publications 12 AUG 2011 maximumpc com adding another wire to your desktop might be asking a lot so these new glasses are priced at a buck shy of a C note MSRP PL Microsoft Buys Skype Microsoft shocked everyone in May when it suddenly announced an 8 5 billion buyout of Skype the largest acquisition in Microsoft s history The Redmond behemoth announced that the merger would enable Skype use on Microsoft platforms such as Xbox Windows Live and Windows Phone 7 devices as well as integration with 5 communications platforms such as Messenger Out look and Xbox Live It also announced continued non Microsoft platform sup port for Skype s 170 million users The deal marks the third acquisition of Skype since its 2003 founding and Microsoft s umpteenth acquisition at which the company has had varying lev els of success Microsoft can certainly use any edge it can get in the smart phone market the Skype buyout could help its Windows Mobile Phone 7 plat form compete with Apple s FaceTime NE 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 59 Corsair Launches Low Profile RAM Corsair has come up with a solu tion for anyone having trouble try ing to squeeze a monstrous CPU cooling solution into their rig only to find that
71. d have a very compelling ultra bud get box 92 AUG 2011 me Amber Bouman Online Features Editor l ve been working my way through a ton of displays for review just finished with a BenQ and Acer both 3D capable Next up are models by AOC and LG the NEC PA301W and hope fully a Dell U3011 If anyone sees another slick display that should check out let me know iximumpc com George Jones Editor in Chief After testing Yama ha s YSP 2200 digital sound projector feel like just travelled forward in time The fact that Yamaha is able to create deep bass accurate high and mid tones and full surround sound with 3 inch high soundbar is remark able Suddenly 7 1 speaker sets feel so overbulilt Alex Castle Online Managing Editor This month saw a huge number of high profile PC game re leases including the likes of Brink The Witcher 2 and Fable Il Do you want to know how many played Zero Instead started playing Fall out New Vegas for the first time And poof just like that all my free time disap peared Nathan Edwards Senior Associate Editor love testing cases But after the eight case roundup Alan and just did I m happy to focus on other things for a while Alan will be tak ing over cases for the most part and they ll in good hands In the meantime I m hoard ing games to play this fall The only game can play for the next fe
72. dd 300 to 450 and you get that s right 750 There s no way to bond the two bit streams to deliver 750Mb s of throughput of course but don t let that get in the way of a juicy brand name Bad branding decisions aren t the WNDR4OO0 s only problem This router beat our previous champion Netgear s WNDR3700 on the 56Hz band at two locations but it significantly underper formed on the 2 4GHz band What s more the Linksys E4200 absolutely crushed both of Netgear s routers in most of our test locations in both throughput and range and on both frequencies Physically the 4000 looks al most identical to the aging WNDR3700 The front has the usual status LEDs and you ll find a ubiquitous four port gigabit switch a USB 2 0 port and a power switch in back Unlike the Linksys the Netgear had no problem powering our hard drive so that we could share its contents on the network But like the Linksys you can t use this port to share a printer on the network Netgear hasn t made any significant changes to its browser based user interface either The router arrived with channel bonding on its 2 46Hz radio disabled We turned it on for our benchmarks but Trendnet s TEW 684UB wireless client adapter indicated a link speed of just 145Mb s When we contacted Netgear about this the company suggested that interference from a nearby wireless network might be forcing the router to turn off channel bonding on its own this Is a requi
73. dows C group tasks but never collapse into v Allow middle dick to dose task button gr Enable tray icon shuffing by holding down None drag without key Customize AUG 2011 MAXIMUM PE 55 small ap p Action Settings Help Piriform Defraggler Defraggler One of Piriform s many fine utilities others include Recuva CCleaner and De Drive Local Disk C Used 71 3 GB 52 File System NTFS Capacity 136 7 GB Free Space 65 4 GB 48 Fragmentation Status 18 Defragmenting 15 fraggler does what it says on the tin It de fragments You use defragment IET TENET H 5 88 88 8 88888888 866 69 T Bug mm entire drive drill down and defragment 6 O O TW 1 ma individual folders and files It s more useful for XP or older machines that lack the auto defrag feature of Vista and Windows 7 And of course you shouldn t defragment SSD www piriform com defraggler S
74. e boards such as your P67A UD3 B3 offer Power on by Mouse and Power on by Keyboard options which actually let you boot the computer directly from either device rather than just wake from sleep To activate this feature go into the BIOS and select Power Management Setup then navigate to Power on by Keyboard Change the value from Disabled to Password than enter a password to boot from your keyboard This one to five character password prevents every accidental key press or errant cat from booting your computer while still making sure you can boot intentionally when you need to Right Hand Left Hand Both Hands at Once Is there any way to have two mice on the same computer with different settings use a left handed setup at work to the ire of the IT depart ment and want to start using a trackball style mouse for CAD applications but have a right handed trackball like to have the trackball set up on the right side and the left handed mouse set up on the left side 50 can swap back and forth as needed without Seli MX1000 Laser Mouse uber gt Button Settings changing any settings Is this possible Ben Locke THE DOCTOR RESPONDS Ben the first part is easy just plug both mice into your com puter and you ll be able to con trol the cursor and click with both The tricky part comes when you want to give one mouse left handed controls and the
75. e bridge between the feed created by VH Capture and the web service After you ve clicked the Create new one button you ll want to se lect the Capture tab that appears on the subsequent VH Screen Capture Driver window Click the Track Screen option That s it You might be tempted to fiddle around with the other settings in the misguided belief that you ll be able to specify exact portions of the screen that VH Screen 62 MAXIMUM PG AUG 2011 maximumpc com Capture will pull from Don t bother your settings won t matter as we ll be ping and dicing the recorded feed in a subsequent program Click over to the Settings tab image Within this screen you ll want to set your frame rate to a high number try 60 as you ll want to have the highest quality stream feeding over to the second program in our chain that s where the compression will hit Feel free to adjust settings for displaying the mouse or clicks as you see fit Once you re done fiddling make sure you leave this program open on its Options screen We re on to Step 3 Settings Capture Border color Frame rate 50 Resize to output size Align video Jv ise linear resize 2261 mode Show mouse Show clicks IV aspect Track mouse Maanitude Capture layered windows Specify output size Optimize screen capture 320 240 pixels Register in ROT Optimize screen deliver Medium Bandwidth
76. e card but lacks dual link DVI support The Intel 268 chipset the Asus P8Z68 V Pro brings SSD caching virtual graphics to Sandy Bridge 4 maximumpc com AUG 2011 in the lab Developed by gamers for gamers we expected more from the BenQ XL2410T 3D Display Duel Should you take the 3D plunge with your next desktop monitor A VARIETY OF MONITORS have come out recently touting 3D capabilities But do they really stand up to full size HDTVs And more importantly are they sacrificing quality for 3D features We got our eager hands on two recent offerings BenQ s XL2410T and Acer s HN274H to answer these questions Although the two displays overlap in many places both run a 1920x1080 reso lution and both necessarily refresh at 120Hz they also have their own advan tages and disadvantages The Acer is big ger at 27 inches while the 24 inch BenQ has portrait mode capabilities The Acer is unique in having an embedded emitter while the BenQ was developed by gamers for gamers Would the features even out in light of performance Hours of No BS testing would tell AMBER BOUMAN BENQ XL2410T BenQ developed the XL2410T with the help of two high profile Counter Strike gamers in order to produce one of the first 120Hz LED backlit monitors that is 3D capable although it doesn t come bundled with Nvidia s 3D Vision glasses and emitter You ll need to buy that kit separately for 150
77. e first USB adapter to feature three transmit and three receive antennas Without that third antenna the client can receive only two spa tial streams As you can see from our benchmark charts the E4200 trounced Netgear s WNDR4OOO on both the 2 4 and 56Hz bands at almost every test location Indeed the router delivered the fastest performance at 56Hz of any router we ve tested So why aren t we awarding the E4200 a higher score Three reasons We shouldn t have to jump through hoops to enable the router to perform at its best the router should provide enough power to its USB port to support any 2 5 inch hard drive and we shouldn t be limited to using hoodless Ethernet cables Linksys E4200 160 street www cisco com NETGEAR WNDR4OOO Netgear has developed a bad habit of branding its new routers with two different model numbers Take the WNDRA000 or is it the N750 Both names are printed on the box and the router itself is labeled N750 Wireless Dual Band Gigabit Router WNDRA000 Did someone sleep through Market ing 101 or is this a shameless ploy to mislead uneducated buyers as to the router s capabilities We ask because Netgear s website proclaims Up to 750 Mbps maximum combined speed The dual band chipset inside the WNDR4000 N750 you see delivers theoretical maximum throughput of 300Mb s on the 2 4GHz band and 450Mb s on the 5GHz RADIO FREQUENCIES Concurrent dual band 2 4 and 5GHz band A
78. e market until a good software backend was in place it would have scored higher It also would have scored higher with a USB 3 0 interface instead of USB 2 0 Sure eSATA is nice but not everyone has an eSATA port and using a USB 2 0 connection with this device removes the hotswap capability drops the speed down to 30MB s or so and makes the discon necting process much harder As it is the PopDrive s software is too complicated for home users and its hardware is too limited for most business users Other eSATA RAID 1 bays aren t quite as slim and sleek but are easier to configure offer more storage space and are more robust NATHAN EDWARDS DHK PopDrive POP 500 EJ POP ROCKS Sleek elegant and portable design RAID 1 support PUNK Complicated and unoptimized software base is not particularly stable 250 www popdrive com 86 MAXIMUM FG AUG 2011 maximumpc com in the lab Cisco s Linksys E4200 looks pretty but we value function over form Wi Fi Router Rhumba Netgear s WNDR4OOO looks very much like the older WNDR3700 too bad it doesn t perform like it lime to upgrade your network or stand pat WE TO SAY IT but if you re looking for a new high end router it probably makes more sense to wait than to buy either of these models It seems manufacturers still haven t figured out the best way to deploy the new Wi Fi chipsets that offer three spa tial streams to deliver theoretical
79. e the Gigabyte G1 Assassin The case has nine 9 25 inch drive bays plenty of room for multiple water cooling reser voirs fan controllers and more Three optional SSD mounting brackets attach to the left side of the optical drive bays The 1 0 backplate contains nine PCI expansion slots and can accommodate quad SLl or CrossFireX setups with the removal of a bracket All the front panel cables two USB 3 0 via a pass through two USB 2 0 two audio cables and two power buttons one on top and one on the front and connec tors are routed to the bottom of At 2 feet 1 inch tall the Temjin TJ11 is a monster the motherboard for easy cable management Plenty of cable routing cutouts mean that it s easy to construct a beautiful rig in the TJ11 The case s two 18cm fans are quite loud at full bore but the TJ11 s thermal per formance was the best of any case in our roundup This is an all around fantastic case with superb performance plenty of features and beautiful at tention to detail It s obvious Silverstone has spared no ex pense in crafting the ultimate premium chassis It s easy to spend more money on less case Thermaltake Level 10 ABS Canyon 695 but it s also easy to spend less than half of the price on a case that s more than half as good if you follow us Nobody needs a 600 case But if you re made of money and want to spend it on a great case the TJ11 is our choice NATHAN E
80. eing classy and sleek to boot The only things we could ask for are side intake fans our test build got a little warm inside ALAN FACKLER 42 UGLIER BUT BETTER THAN THE ORIGINAL Lev el 10 chassis was a remarkable collaboration with BMW Design Works in which the companies fundamentally restructured the PC chassis into a series of iso lated compartments suspended from a central load bearing wall It was stunning cost 800 and wasn t actually that practical to use With the Level 10 GT Ther maltake has taken the basic look of the Level 10 slapped it onto a more standard full tower frame and slashed 500 from the ask ing price The end result isn t quite as sleek as its progenitor from an aesthetic perspective but far outstrips the original in ease of use and practicality and is not without a certain sci fi flair of its own At 11 1 inches wide by 23 inches high and 23 2 inches deep and weighing 28 pounds empty the Level 10 GT is a hefty case The case s frame and right side panel are made of black painted steel and the right side has a ridge with a handle cribbed directly from the Level 10 although it s not part of the central pillar as on the Level 10 The front panel is made of plastic and contains four mesh 5 25 inch optical be zels and one 3 5 inch external drive bay The optical drive bays are toolless with the latching mechanisms on the right side of the bays The left side pane
81. emove unwanted files yourself but the software will helpfully remove anything you ask it to including impor tant things So be careful File Edit Image Options View Help 38 9 044 202 92 706 86 4 14 2011 13 11 25 Opening Easy Thumbnails puts you into direc tory navigator where you can select any local image you d like to resize For batch jobs it s a real time saver as you can simply choose a se ries of images pick a new size for them and have a series of thumbnails ready to post wher ever youd like Easy Thumbnails also saves original copies of your images in case you re happy with your resize Decrapifier If you re in the habit of buying new laptops or off the shelf desktops yourre familiar with the stupendous array of bloatware that can ship with new computers PC Decrapifier should be your first download on a new computer Run it once and get rid of all the crap And dream of a future in which software compa nies don t pay hardware companies to include crapware on new PCs www pcdecrapifier com The perfect utility for troubleshooting an ailing system Memtest86 is constantly updated to sup port new processors and chipsets Simply download the prebuilt 150 from the website burn it to a disc or create a bootable USB stick plop it in the ailing PC and boot to it Mem test86 will immediately begin running test patterns across the memory
82. er Case NZXT Phantom Www nzxt com Speakers Corsair SP2500 www corsair com GAMES WE ARE PLAYING The Witcher 2 Portal 2 www en thewitcher com www thinkwithportals com Mount amp Blade Brink With Fire amp Sword www brinkthegame com www taleworlds com ficial Xbox Magazine PlayStation The Official Magazine PC Gamer Revolver Windows The Official Magazine and World of Warcraft Official Magazine Entire contents copyright 2011 Future US Inc All rights reserved Reproduction in whole or in part is prohibited Future US Inc is not affiliated with the companies or products covered in Maximum PC Reproduction on the Internet of the ar ticles and pictures in this magazine is illegal without the prior written consent of Maximum PC Products named in the pages of Maximum PC are trademarks of their respective companies PRODUCED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA For even more Best of the Best entries such as more speakers and budget components go to www maximumpc com best of the best
83. ess and both three tray hard drive bays are removable The plastic latch ing mechanisms within the 627 The eight rubber grommeted cutouts make clean case wiring a snap AUG 2011 maximumpc con Brushed aluminum makes just about any thing look sleeker cages threw us off a little at first though we found them to be easy to use once we started building The hard drive trays in particular had the perfect amount of flexibility without feeling cheap Our test build with the 650D was an absolute breeze The steel side panels pop right off using a set of latches and we had no problem comfortably seating 12 2 inch GPUs The eight available PCI expansion slots are the only slots in the case that arent toolless Cable routing was a Snap utilizing the 650D s eight rubber grommet ed cutouts including a handy cutout in the top left of the case for 8 pin ATX power connecter Corsair 650D 200 www corsair com manufacturers case take note This is rapidly be cables coming commonplace And worry not you ll be able to ogle your highly organized innards thanks to a nice big window on the left panel The motherboard tray which supports and microATX is plenty big and features a huge backplate cutout Corsair s 650D is an elegant refined and extremely accessible case that is easy on the eyes and the wallet For 200 you get a case that s technologically up to snuff while b
84. etic choices are all over the V2 The Six Hundred V2 has room for six HDD and three ODD trays and can ac commodate GPUs up to 11 5 inches so no dual Radeon cards for you We were able to utilize the two cable routing cutouts to tidy things up a bit The front loaded hotswap 2 5 inch caddy is also kind of a cool addition But ultimate ly the cheap build quality abundance of garish plastic trim and lack of stock fans make this a hard sell AF Antec Six Hundred V2 80 www antec com FRACTAL ARC MIDI THE FRACTAL ARC MIDI part of 5 gaming oriented Arc series is a mid tower steel chassis lined with mesh on the front and top panel The surrounding front panel is made of matte plastic though the plastic has a nice brushed texture sur face The Arc Midi has two standard USB 2 0 ports a single USB 3 0 port with an in ternal header and standard power and audio jacks Almost every aspect of the case from the two optical drive bays to the hard drive cages to the seven PCI slots plus one for use with the included fan controller is attached via thumbscrews The Arc includes three fans a 14cm front fan a 14cm exhaust fan and a 14cm top fan Removing the top mesh panel with removable dust filter exposes two addi tional mounts for 12cm fans 240mm radiator Building into the Arc Midi is a cinch thanks to plenty of room and three large rubber grommeted cutouts for cable or ganization
85. f show do you Recorded Videos 132 Show Tags iin Awesome People Hats w words that people might type when Account Settings wil Metrics Channel Picture Manage Your Show Choose File No file chosen Show Info About Design This is going to be an awesome show about awesome things Your Videos 3 www ustream com a free service that offers an effortless method for transforming a live recording of your desktop or laptop PC into an online broadcast You don t have to worry about customizing a spe cial player or futzing around with hosting your feeds in some crazy way or setting up your own server or doing much beyond hitting the giant obligatory Go Live button For those who don t yet have an account you ll start by hitting up the main Ustream site and going through the standard sign up process Once youre activated and logged in click your account name in the upper right corner of Ustream s homepage On the following page click the Create a show button in the upper left corner image A UP USTREAM For livestreaming we prefer Ustream aa 04 17 11 06 254M Hu 01 4 L Live streams of games like StarCraft have become popular online entertainment Voila You re now in your new show s settings screen Adjust your options to suit your preferences within the various tabs on the left side of the screen Show Info to manage the
86. fe Sigh OK Never mind we give up Since the Z68 never had the issue you should consider getting one of those instead Winner Z68 m intel _ 258 Round 4 Availability Features performance price none of that means squat if you cant buy the frakking thing We hit a popular online retailer and found 14 268 motherboards available That s not bad con sidering that the site didn t even include boards from the larg est board maker Asus yet On the P67 side though we found no fewer than 37 motherboards using the performance LGA1155 chipset That s impressive con sidering that were still getting over the Great SATA Port Scare of aught 11 We d be tempted to call this a tie since by the time you read this another dozen or so Z68 boards will be out but P67 has been out the longest and Is simply easier to find The only caveat to P67 boards is that many of the original boards that were pulled and replaced still show up in inventories as not available This makes it seem like there are fewer P67 boards than there are Winner P67 Round 5 Price It s a little tough to compare the P67 and Z68 on pricing alone since there is no way to isolate just the chips And consumers don t buy just the chips they buy motherboards that have value add software and hardware like cool blinged out heatsinks Still there is definitely a cost difference between the two Motherboard vendors tell us this i
87. flected information for spatial analysis The Kinect combines the 2D RGB image with the IR background fill to complete a recognizable object that exists at a distance L from the system and is along the X Y and Z 3D axes 58 MAXIMUM PE AUG 2011 maximumpc com in common speaker phones tend to work well but the recognizable voices versus background noise scenario 15 the reverse of that for the Kinect Software created by the Speech Group at Microsoft Redmond Research solved the problem SOFTWARE The Kinect console does not have a processor which is surprising considering all that s expected of it The console did have one when it was first announced Project Natal in 2009 but Microsoft withdrew the internal CPU and decided to let the processing power of the Xbox handle matters Kudo Tsunoda the mastermind behind Kinect in sists that the add on uses less than one percent of the Xbox 360 s processing power To help achieve that Microsoft dropped the ef fectiveness of the camera down from the 60fps at its announcement in 2009 to 30fps at its commer cial release Still that would put a huge burden on the software efficiency of the algorithms that run the console except that the bulk of the overhead has been mitigated because the algorithms are located in the Xbox console as Kinect drivers These drivers are what describe a 5 position in Cartesian space and they are what handle reverberat
88. great B movies Portal rapidly eclipsed its A list com panions This was something different It was compact flawlessly designed witty and unexpected There wasn t an ounce of fat on it Sure it was a puzzle game but in the process of ushering you gently through the puzzles it gradually transformed into a wickedly funny piece of sci fi storytelling The genius was in the thrill of this discovery as a puzzle game flowered into something amazing and unpredictable And it can never happen again Por tal s appeal wasn t just in the mechanics or gameplay It was in the gradual way GLaDOS went all HAL 9000 while you were busy playing with cubes Portal 2 can t possibly duplicate that thrill of dis covery so it compensates with size and humor 115 a longer game it s a funnier game it s a bigger game But is it a bet ter game No It s great certainly and has some of the best writing and puzzle design you ll find in any game this year But the new bulk isn t muscle It s flab The en vironments get too large The narrative sequences so effortlessly blended into the gameplay of the original now occa sionally stop the game cold Yes know nitpicking on a game that l d gladly rate a 10 but my point is this Bigger isn t always better and some kinds of magic just can t be re created Portal 2 is many wonderful things but it can never be the one thing that made Portal a classic could never be new again Y
89. have an average size spare bedroom that mostly functions as a home office and gaming room and has been used primar ily by me Given the cramped quarters of San Francisco apart ments set out to make the room less me centric and more fam ily friendly by transforming this home office into a home office theater The goal was to create a room suitable for three things normal PC computing big screen surround sound movie viewing with no reconfiguration needed and big screen gaming Ancil lary goals were to make the room feel less like a cluttered man cave and to avoid breaking the bank For the most part think got this one right Component Spotlight Yamaha s YSP 2200 Digital Sound Projector produces accurate tones in all ranges and accurate surround sound effects AUDIO YAMAHA YSP 2200 DIGITAL SOUND PROJECTOR THIS IS THE SECRET sauce of my digi tal home theater build The YSP 2200 delivers big rich home theater sound at what feels like a bargain rate The trick with this build is that want ed to be able to connect my PC as well as my PlayStation 3 to the 1080p projec tor Prior to this l d heard considerable praise heaped on Yamaha s sound pro jector and Maximum Tech editor Michael Brown recommended check out Yama 85 YSP 2200 I m glad did The YSP 2200 consists of two parts a 37 13x3x5 75 inch center unit and a 17 13x5 38x13 75 inch subwoofer VIDEO EPSON 8700UB S
90. he projector it s important to know the limitations Typi cally high speed HDMI cables are capable of longer runs up to 15 meters almost 50 feet They re also able to transmit 1080p and greater signals Standard HDMI cables are not able to transmit sig nals over long distances and top out at 10801 also took advantage of this cable reconnect job to organize my cables a little more effectively zip tied the slack loops on my ca bles and also clipped the Long HDMI runs from my PC to the Yamaha YSP 2200 and from the YSP 2200 to the Epson projector Like many mid to high end receivers Yamaha s YSP 2200 allows you to runall your video cables through the device to the display 70 MAXIMUMPG AUG 2011 maximumpc com InfiniTV Network Tuners 4 TV TUN ER UP AND RUN N ING m InfiniTV Discovery Result The following InfiniTWs are available Ceton InfiniTV PCle 00 80 19 4 tuners 192 168 200 1 INSTALLING AND INITIALIZING the Ceton InfiniTV 4 tuner card was a snap plugged the device into my Intel R 82578DC Gigabit Network Connection rig plugged my CableCARD into the tuner installed What would you like to do the drivers and then initialized the card directly in Windows Media Center image chose to keep two of the four tuners as signed to my office PC and wanted to assign the other two available tuners to the computer connected to the big screen in my
91. he times you open a PDF you just want to look at a PDF You don t need attach rate tracking digital signing password protection DRM an STMP server or any of the mas sive security holes that seem to riddle Adobe Ac robat Reader SumatraPDF Is ber fast responsive and won t bog down your system Also reads xps cbr and cbz files bit ly xsgdrt TeraCopv EasyBCD 2 An award winning utility EasyBCD extends and takes control of the Win dows Vista Windows 7 BCD bootloader allowing you to dual boot between Windows 7 Windows Vista and older versions of Windows as well as Linux Ubuntu BSD and Mac OS X bit ly 2FpG4W ResizeEnable Color Cop Prime95 If you think running your fa vorite game is a good stress test of your CPU you re wrong If you really want to squeeze your CPU hard use Prime95 The app offers a menu of different stress tests for different subsys tems Your system should be able to finish any of the tests without any errors or crashing If something blue screens your box likely has a thermal power or RAM issue bit ly nwajer Paint net Windows file copying and moving can be alittle arcane and the inter face lacks much useful information TeraCopy 1 designed to copy and move files as fast as possible with plenty of options not available in Windows Explorer like pausing and resuming error correc tion and test copying www codesector co
92. her 2 ESSE Assassins Geralt after realizing that he kind of wants an iPad real star of the show and make no mistake This is a game where your choices really matter Geralt may carry two swords but his tongue s sharper than both In other games picking a side might mean a few new dialogue options or a magical pair of shoes In Witcher 2 it means absolutely everything who you meet what you do what you stand for where you go Speaking of where you go the game s world is completely breathtak ing Each location feels like a labor of love alive breathing and brilliantly natural aside from the occasional NPC in dire need of a swift sock in the gut from the Fonz Beyond that however the game marries a bleeding edge engine to lush epic art design and they absolutely live happily ever after Unfortunately when it comes to actually being you know a game Witcher 2 slips on a puddle of its own ambition and occasion ally falls flat on its face Combat ranges from mediocre to downright infuriating with the latter oddly occurring mostly at the start of the game Geralt starts off perplexingly weak you see and copious MO double damage dealing backstabs often put him down for the count in the blink of an eye On top of that the game s a terrible teacher essentially hacking off your wings and then flinging you out of the nest Even after you grow some thicker skin and find an online Witcher 101 course t
93. hough it s a freakin expensive piece of hardware that you absolutely do not want to lose MAKE A GUEST ACCOUNT IN WINDOWS In Windows Prey runs as a service Unfortunately that means that its tracking abil ities will only kick in when a thief Logs into a user account on your computer A truly sophisticated criminal would know to never do this but we re looking to provide protection against your average thug not Of course the best way to keep your laptop is to not get it stolen in the first place But if you do you can be prepared to try and track it down Plenty of com panies are more than happy to charge you a recurring fee for this sort of pro tection but you can actually get it for free A software package called Prey al lows you to remotely monitor your stolen laptop retrieving screenshots webcam pictures and Wi Fi hotspot information that you and the police can use to track down your property It s open source it s free and we ll show you how to use it backs to the online control panel you can only store 10 re ports at once online for but we think the convenience outweighs any limitations Select the control panel method and you ll be asked to create an account The only other setting you may want to change locally Ethan Hunt So the thug has to be able to log into an account You ve got two options First you could remove the password from your primary account which for safety reasons
94. i TV s tuners to my office PC and two to other PCs on my network InfiniTV Network Tuners InfiniTV Tuner Selection vie wv Ceton InfiniTV PCle 00 80 19 Tuner 3 Ceton InfiniTV PCle 00 80 1d aa Tuner 4 ASSESSING THE OUTCOME BETWEEN REARRANGING the furni ture and mounting the projector this project took several weeks to complete which makes the end result all the more satisfying now have a room that is able to function as a basic office and with a few quick adjustments can quickly turn it into a full on 1080p theater with surround sound and a 110 inch 16 9 screen The best part is that can now play games and movies using my PC or the PlayStation 3 The real surprise here is the YSP 2200 Holy cow it s great so much so that am kind of kicking myself for buying a 5 1 system for my living room s sound system last year Also impressive is the Atdec projec tor mount Being able to easily tuck my projector into the top corner of my office frees up lots of space and adds a profes sional touch that enhances the sense of being in a home theater If had to do anything differently l d have used a rigid tension mounted projector screen instead of a pull down one The non tension pull down screen works well but the naturally curved surface produces some slightly distorted images If had used an 800 projector this would be excusable but a 2 200 projector demands a scree
95. inarily challeng ing you might just feel like you ve been busted back down to nOOb status Sorry Not really AUG 2011 MAKIMUMPE 95 best of the best 96 wm D LGA1155 MOTHERBOARD ASUS P8Z68 V PRO a part by part guide to building a better pc While not a huge jump forward we think Intel s new Z68 has enough features that folks building new rigs should opt for it over P67 Asus P8Z68 V Pro gives you access to LucidLogix Virtu as well as In 6 Smart Response Technology and also features Bluetooth And you still get Asus s lovely UEFI inter face and out of the box SLI and CrossFire support It s even a bargain at 209 www asus com MAXIMUM PC ISSN 1522 4279 is published 13 times a year monthly plus Holiday issue following December issue by Future US Inc 4000 Shoreline Court Suite 400 South San Francisco CA 94080 Phone 650 872 1642 Fax 650 872 2207 Website www futureus com Periodicals postage paid in South San Francisco CA and at additional mailing offices Newsstand distribution is handled by Time Warner Retail Basic subscription rates one year 12 issues US 14 95 Canada US 19 95 Foreign US 29 95 Basic subscription rates including monthly CD one year 12 issues 12 CD ROMs US 30 00 Canada AUG 2011 maximumpc com US 34 95 Foreign US 39 95 Canadian and foreign orders must be prepaid Canadian price includes postage and GST GST R128220688
96. ing Headset Solid construction good all around sound quality comfortable leatherette earcups MYSTERIO Leatherette cups hamper sound quality set may be too large for some 95 www thermaltake com The Shock One is better suited to folks with bigger noggins The of Kings Choose wisely INCREDIBLE HORRENDOUS Wow can t believe that just happened Ugh can t believe that just happened Geralt you cheeky bastard Geralt you worth less bastard These are all things we said while playing The Witcher 2 It s an incredibly hot and cold game to be sure One moment it might wow you with brilliant writing or a choice that makes BioWare s fantasy behemoth Dragon Age look utterly toothless The next it ll have you spitting flames over frustrating repetitive combat and design decisions that simply boggle the mind Ignore all that though because here s what really counts We couldn t put it down Witcher 2 picks up shortly after its predecessor but manages to weave a separate largely understandable tale even for those who never touched the first game And storytelling is where Witcher 2 is at its best Geralt and his compan ions are a refreshing departure from the archetypal steroid scarfing princess rescuer or boy whose hometown exploded imploded crumbled under the pressure of a light breeze Ultimately you are the He s probably just napping Witc
97. ion is plenty full featured to make it worth checking out www revouninstaller com Online Help CrystalDiskInfo 4 Don t let the name fool you AutoHotkey 15 good for much more than hotkeys Designed for automating boring tasks AutoHotkey s scripting language has been used to create any number of useful utilities for Windows www autohotkey com Windows 7 has made it pretty easy to keep track of your most used folders with the inclusion of Libraries and the Favorites menu in Explorer If you wish you could get those same useful features in Win dows XP and earlier Folder guide 15 for you Just select your favorite folders and the app creates a custom context menu entry that allows you to quickly jump anywhere you want in Explorer or the Save Load dialogue box bit ly kTYMzu 56 MAXIMUM PE AUG 2011 maximumpc com Multiple desktops area classic form of desktop organization but have never had native support in Windows Of all the third party solutions out there VirtuWin stands out for several good reasons It s open source tiny doesn t use many system resourc es and it gives you all the functionality you need to manage programs across four virtual desktops virtuawin sourceforge net Let s face it monitoring the S M A R T values from your hard drive to head off the next hard drive crash is a bit like trying to predict earthquakes Still the research shows that this data can sometimes
98. ion problems and suppress loudspeaker echoes in the stereo acoustic echo cancellation algorithm They do all this and more based on comparisons to decision forests a collection of decision trees in conjunction with thousands of stored samples CONTINUUM There is no technical reason why a Kinect console could not be attached to any computing device that was loaded with the algorithms it needed to function While that might be slightly difficult for the traditional BIOS OS arrangement found in most contemporary computers UEFI environment would clear the way for the archetypal house of the future run by voice commands and gestures with only its own facial recognition algorithms needed to provide security By the time you read this it s likely that Microsoft will have made some form of Kinect related an nouncement at the 2011 Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles Early speculation is that Mi crosoft s purchase of Skype might herald advanced video conferencing such as predefined avatars with full expressions instead of true video images to keep the CPU overhead down And somewhere in the far out reaches of time and space what might a Kinect for PC Mac be able to do with an ber CPU It s going to be an interesting future b autopsy MICROSOFT SIDEWINDER X8 GAMING MOUSE It s not the newest mouse on the market but the straightforward construc tion of the SideWinder X8 makes it easy to see exactly how a modern high
99. ks It gave the 2 13GHz Core i7 640LM in our zero point notebook 0 10 20 30 a pretty sound beating too for that matter The one anomaly was in Quake Ill which is essentially a CPU test these days Our only explanation for why the X1 performed 30 percent worse than our zero point here is that it s hurt by its single channel RAM All 4GB are on one DIMM and there isn t a slot for second We ve found that for the most part the large caches in Core 2 and Core 1 chips keeps memory bandwidth from being a problem but certain things such as the very old Quake are sensitive to it The improved prowess of Sandy Bridge s graphics processor shined through in our Quake 4 benchmark We re happy to see that Lenovo didn t let space concerns keep it from equip ping the X1 with a 2 5 inch hard dive in this case a 320GB 7 200rpm model This allows for cheaper and more capacious upgrade options than a 1 8 inch drive would We re sorry however that there s no optical drive in the mix particularly when thinner and lighter ultraportables have managed that feat The X1 s battery life was strong in our tests The notebook played a looped video file for three and a half hours on power saving mode before pooping out We were even more impressed with how quickly the battery recharged more than 80 percent in 30 minutes thanks to Lenovo s Rapid Charge technology 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 Our zero p
100. l is where the action is The rear two thirds comprise a hinged door panel that locks with a barrel lock featuring a 20cm color shifting fan with directional shutters like a car s heating vents on the bottom and a clear plastic window on top The front third of the panel is devoted to drive trays five slide out plastic 3 5 inch trays with 2 5 inch mounting holes as well mimic the solid alumi num drive trays of the original Inside the Level 10 GT is almost conventional with plenty of routing options AUG 2011 maximumpc com Like a skyscraper from a sci fi flick the Level 10 GT has a certain gaudy charm Level 10 but feature hotswap SATA pass throughs prewired with a five head SATA power cable The 20cm color shift intake fan on the side panelis matched by another on the front panel as well as a 20cm color shift top exhaust fan which can be replaced by a 240mm radiator anda 12cm rear exhaust fan intake fans as well as the PSU intake feature slide out dust filters The Level 10 GT includes two USB 2 0 ports and audio jacks on the front of the right pillar with two USB 3 0 ports fan controls and one eSATA port above the optical bays The Level 10 features a much easier install pro cess than its predecessor al most on par with the Corsair 8000 Its motherboard tray in cludes eight rubber grommet ed cable routing cutouts plus a large CPU backplane cutout It has eight PCI
101. l test results turn to page 45 Big as itis the Prolimatech Ar mageddon cooler fits into each case we tested we worried that it wouldn t 40 nuum SLEEK REFINED BEAUTIFUL STAY CLASSY CORSAIR to make recom mendations right off the bat part of the fun of reading these reviews we d imagine comes from the buildup ha But the Corsair 650D blew us away in pretty much every category For the 650D Corsair took the guts of its 600T mid tower chassis and married them with the looks of its Obsidian series full towers a move customers and we have been request ing for years The steel chassis features a very pretty brushed aluminum front panel with a removable mesh fan filter and a push down rectangular panel giving you quick access to three USB 2 0 and two USB 3 0 ports as well as the two standard audio jacks The chassis which is painted matte black throughout comes stock with one 20cm top fan a 20cm front fan and a 14cm exhaust fan though you aren t confined to that particular fan setup as there are mounting holes up top for two 12cm or 14cm fans or a 240mm radia tor if liquid cooling is your cup of tea or liquid nitro whatever Also up top a sliding panel revealing a drop down SATA dock The 6500 like its spiri tual antecedents the 800D and 700D seems to go out of its way to remind you that simple 15 better The four optical drive bays and the six 3 5 inch drive trays are tooll
102. living room at the front of my house This would effectively allow my household to record and watch TV shows in two different locations with only a single CableCARD device managing the content The process for accomplishing this was easy Once Windows Media Center detected the four individual tuners the InfiniTV 4 card provided deselected tun ers 3 and 4 leaving only tuners 1 and 2 available for my home office PC image Later after had completed the setup for the of TV Setup fice used the InfiniTV Network Tuner setup on my living room PC First Windows Media Center detected the two available tuners image it showed the two tuners already in use as grayed out quickly selected tuners 3 and 4 image K and was finished ls this Yes configure TV with these results No let Windows Media Center detect again f No let me configure my TV signal manually 4 ra Using the tollowing Metwork Interface Yes configure Infini TVs with these results InfiniT Y Network Tuners InfiniTV Tuner Selection TETM weld LDT Ceton Infim TV PCle DO BO 1d aa Tuner 1 Ceton InfiniTV PCle 00 80 19 Tuner 2 Ceton InfiniTV PCle DO BO 1d aa Tuner 3 Ceton InfiniTv PCle DO BO 1d aa Tuner 4 TV Signal Detection Result lows Media Center detected the followrna Digital Cable CableCARD 2 tuners configuration correct and i was able to assign two of the Infin
103. ll me how this was achieved Luke Layman SENIOR EDITOR GORDON MAH UNG RESPONDS It s been some time since we built that machine but as recall we ended up using a couple of 2 4 pin Molex to 3 pin fan cables available from Tiger Direct bit ly itT9D7 If you want some control over the fan speeds adding a Zalman fan controller bit ly 79ajsa will Let you dial down the speeds You should definitely run all three fans however as you will need some air moving over the PSU and CPU heatsink fan to keep them cool RAM Performance Delta Caused by Configuration was recently doing a comparison of identically configured systems using PassMark noticed that some systems would blow away others with the same amount of RAM in memory performance can only as sume that this is because of dual channel architecture am wondering if there is a performance difference between using one 8CB stick of DDR3 two 4GB sticks or four 20 sticks Can you confirm this and explain why this might be the case Diedrich Guenther SENIOR EDITOR GORDON MAH UNG RESPONDS There would indeed be a difference in memory bandwidth with those various configura tions Assuming you are talking about a dual channel 1155 Sandy Bridge board or a 1156 Lynnfield box a single 8 DDR3 DIMM would put you in single channel mode and give your machine the least amount of memory bandwidth One thing you should know have
104. lling you this is my last issue at Maximum Why going back into start up mode with a new venture hope will help the enterprise world make sense of all this emerging new tech nology I m going to miss working with Gordon Katherine Nathan Richard Jon Kate Alex Amber Boni and Alan And I m really going to miss hearing from you guys Don t be a stranger if you ever want to drop me a line you can find me on Face book or LinkedIn Take care N submit your questions to comments maximumpccom editorial 7 maximumpc com AUG 2011 quickstart L 221805 lt Acer Chromebook ITS ANNUAL 1 0 EVENT Google made its case for a fully cloud based future more pas sionately and clearly than ever The message resonated with the audience of mostly devel opers who embraced Google s case with a fervor rarely seen outside of Apple events Google also announced a number of products and initiatives aimed at consumers and businesses alike Here are the highlights Google Music The biggest and most contro versial announcement was Google Music the company s cloud based music delivery service Google Music is a mu sic storage and playback only service You upload the music you own to the cloud and lis ten to it on your PC or Android qox Google I O The Ma turing of the Cloud Google 5 annual tech fest brings new o
105. m ResizeEnable is interesting in that there isn t even an interface to the program Simply install the small file and suddenly you ll be able to resize nearly all windows on your desktop including the ones that you couldn t prior This helps consolidate all of your open windows without the need to minimize so often bit ly safbew You don t needa to swat a fly And you dont need an enormous and expensive image editing program like Photoshop or even a small free and complex program like GIMP to do basic image editing Featuring layers robust edit history and powerful tools Paint net is a great app that takes up almost no space www getpaint net Color is a multipurpose color picker that al lows you to determine the color and coding of any color on any given selection If you re trying to find the color of something particularly de tailed you can also use the magnifying tool to select individual pixels ensuring that you find the color you re looking for Unread 3 1 Wanna go to the mowes L Hey what s up Welceme to the forum Tasks Compose mail 52 Ge te your inbox 2 Check for new mail Change account settings Gmail Notifier Plus Unpin this prograrn from taskbar Close window Gmail Notifier We ll keep this short and simple Gmail Notifier dis plays an icon in your system tray whenever you receive new messages revealing subject sender
106. n more appropriate for a higher end home theater But in general this project was a rousing success The very best part is that l ve just become a hero in the eyes of my girlfriend who no longer has to wonder why two full time professionals are dedicating an entire room solely to productivity and my friends Movie and game nights way more fun now 1 maximumpc com AUG 2011 MAXIMUM PG 71 reviews of the latest hardware and software 111211 TESTED REVIEWED VERDICTIZED 26 Puget Systems Serenity Mini PC 76 Asus Eee Pad Transformer TF101 A1 Tablet 60 Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Notebook 61 Palit GTS 560 2GB Videocard 62 Asus P8Z68 V Pro Motherboard 84 3D Displays BenQ XL2410T and Acer HN274H 96 DHK Storage PopDrive POP 500 RAID Enclosure 88 Routers Linksys E4200 and Netgear WNDR4000 90 Thermaltake Shock One Gaming Headset 91 The Witcher 2 92 Lab Notes PUGET SYSTEMS SERENITY PAGE 76 maximumpc com AUG 2011 MAXIMUMPE 75 in the lab Puget Systems Mini Serenity 5 It on AS ANY SYSTEM BUILDER KNOWS there s a constant yin and yang balancing act between performance and noise When you crank up the performance you crank up the noise And as you bring down the acoustics so goes the performance That s the delicate line Puget Systems attempts to walk with its Serenity Mini desktop system For this task Puget configured the Serenity with a 3 3GHz Intel Core 15
107. n do this by holding the projector with your hands and sliding your fingers back and forth on the x and y axis until the projector feels balanced Mark these axes with a pencil or pen image D The area where they intersect is where you re going to locate the center of the flush mount Now it s time to attach the mount to the projector To do this you ll need to place the projector mount in the center point and then screw the appropriate length mounting arms to the cen ter mount Once you do this you can tighten up all the mount ing arms and you can then attach the entire mount to the screw holes on the projector image Use the rubber standoffs to ensure a snug connection image You re pretty much done from here All you have to do now 15 attach the ceiling wall mount to your ceiling which is easily ac complished and then attach the projector mount to it The whole process shouldn t take you more than 30 minutes 5 AND CONNECT CABLES THE 5 2200 has three HDMI inputs and HDMI output as well as optical S PDIF and analog audio inputs image This allowed me the convenience of running all my video sources PC PS3 and Warpia StreamHD directly to the soundbar could then run a sin gle long HDMI cable from the soundbar directly to the projector One quick note on HDMI cabling If you re going to have a long run like do from either your speakers to your projector and or from your PC to t
108. ns gave the RV03 the best air cooling tempera tures of any case in our roundup including the premium ones We re not sure how we feel about the RV03 s exterior though Last year s Raven 02 had a similar superhero themed look but was all black This Raven has two gold stripes running up the front of the chassis which strikes us as a bit tacky Overall the Silverstone Raven RVO3 15 a solid case and gets points for ingenuity It may look a little garish and feel a little pla sticky but it s roomy features a stunning amount of ports and slots and offers a crazy organized build and great cooling AF Silverstone Raven RVO3 140 www silverstonetek com ANTEC SIX HUNDRED V2 THE ANTEC SIX HUNDRED V2 retails for 80 At that price it S competing with Bit s Shinobi and Storm Enforc er and losing The interior is unpaint ed and everything feels flimsy from the just pull till it comes loose optical drive bezels to the just bend till it snaps off slot covers of which there are seven Nothing literally nothing 15 toolless ei ther so get that screwdriver handy The Six Hundred V2 comes with two fans a 20cm top fan and a 12cm exhaust fan The case has room for two front 12cm intakes There is a window on the left side panel witha 12cm fan mounting and also curiously a dark window above the optical drive bays so you can well look at your optical drive These confusing cosm
109. oard 1 the clear choice if you re building a new main stream PC GORDON MAH UNG Asus P8Z68 V Pro THE LETTER G Beautiful UEFI interface Intel SRT and Virtu support THE LETTER A Documentation for SRT and Virtu support lacking no dual link DVI support on integrated graphics 210 www asus com 240GB OCZ Vertex 3 240GB OCZ Vertex 3 Maximized Enhanced 20 024 17 910 13 209 12 047 7 306 6 963 22318 22 520 21 790 17 720 19 337 17 520 23 828 22319 35 703 28 010 Best scores are bolded We used a 3 4GHz Core 17 2600 CPU Asus P8Z68 V Pro 8GB of DDR3 1333 a GeForce GTX 580 64 bit Windows 7 Professional with SP1 and a 1 Western Digital Caviar Black drive for our testing CRYSTALDISKMARK SSD N A 20GB Intel Larsen Creek 240GB Vertex 3 240GB Vertex 3 SRT MODE Off Maximized Maximized Enhanced SEQ READ MB S 1353 165 3 383 8 378 9 BI2KREADIMB S 494 140 3 370 5 358 5 4K READ MB S 07 225 283 28 8 SEQ WRITE MB S 1343 1213 250 0 130 0 512K WRITE MB S 80 8 108 0 218 6 4K WRITE MB S 34 7 60 5 MS Best scores are bolded We used a 3 4GHz Core i7 2600K CPU Asus P8Z68 V Pro 8GB of DDR3 1333 a GeForce GTX 580 64 bit Windows 7 Professional with SP1 and a 1TB Western Digital Caviar Black drive for our testing The integrated DVI port can be used in combination with your discret
110. oint ultraportable is an HP EliteBook 2540p with 2 13GHz Intel Core 17 6401 4GB of DDR3 1333 RAM integrated graphics a 250GB 5 400rpm hard drive and Windows 7 Professional 64 bit Gorilla Glass protects the edge to edge screen on the X1 from suffering nicks and scratches Yes the ThinkPad X1 is a serious ma chine for serious ultraportable computing although its ultraportability is on the ler side and its computing doesn t include optical duties KATHERINE STEVENSON Lenovo ThinkPad X1 E XLENT A durable well equipped ultraportable powerhouse E EX LAX Close to 4 pounds no optical drive single channel RAM 1 400 www lenovo com SPECIFICATIONS CPU 2 5GHz Intel Core 15 2520 RAM 4GB DDR3 1333 CHIPSET Intel 67 DISPLAY 13 3 inch 1366x768 LCD STORAGE Hitachi 320GB HDD 7 200rpm CONNECTIVITY HDMI DisplayPort Ethernet USB 3 0 USB 2 0 eSATA USB headphone mic 4 1 card reader Bluetooth 802 11b g n webcam LAP CARRY 3 lbs 13 2 oz 4 lbs 11 7 oz 80 MAXIMUM FG AUG 2011 maximumpc com Palit GTX 560 Fast silent affordable NVIDIA IS STEADILY FILLING the gaps in its product line Late last year it had the GTX 460 768MB and GTX 460 cards Then the latter was effectively replaced at the 250 270 price point by the GTX 560 Ti Now the company is delivering the GTX 560 which will be priced around 200 220 Unlike the GTX 460 768MB cards which offered jus
111. olution that budget PC gamers typically run The latest Steam hardware survey shows 21 1 percent of gamersrunthisresolution with 1680x1050 being a close second at 19 64 percent We then fired up Crysis 2 Left 4 Dead Portal 2 Total War Shogan 2 and Battlefield Bad Company Allofthe gamesranwith more than acceptable frame rates in single player and multiplayer modes The upshot is that our PC Value Meal offers surprisingly satisfying gaming capabilities for most of today s games and leaves you enough money to well have areal meal to boot We had to stick to a strict diet when 2191 1008 111 the PC Value Meal We knew we wanted Intel s second genprocanda GPU capable of playing games at 1080p Everything else was just a means to getting there as cheaply as possible But what would we do if we had just a little more jingle to upgrade Honestly our first upgrade would go toward the motherboard A full size board with four memory slots anda P series chipset such as the Gigabyte GA P67A UD3 B3 for 130 would be preferable The second item that could benefit from more money is the case The 30 Rosewill is surprisingly solid for an ultra budget case but it s not one we think we d keep long term Of the items in your PC that will last the longest the case is high on that list If we had the cash we d also think about upgrading the stars of show our graphics card and CPU Forjustafew more dollars Radeon H
112. onse feels Asus Pad Transformer Android 3 0 1 Honeycomb 10 1 inch 1280x800 16 10 1GHz Nvidia Tegra 2 16 DISPLAY PROCESSOR RAM 16GB 101 32GB 101 1 1 2 5 STORAGE CAMERAS F R WEIGHT DIMENSIONS BROWSERMARK SCORE 89 745 Read our more detailed review at bit ly 3QGs35 1 49 lbs 10 67 6 89 0 47 inches inconsistent Also apps occasionally crash when you remove the tablet from the dock Undoubtedly the Eee Pad Trans former presents a formidable tablet option and we even enjoyed its utility as a laptop hybrid using the dock This kind of package will only become more at tractive as more developers create and optimize existing apps for Honeycomb tablets MARKKUS ROVITO Asus Eee Pad Transformer TF101 A1 E OPTIMUS PRIME Best looking tablet display Polaris Office does a nice job with MS Office files optional keyboard 2 MEGATRON Poor HD video recording connection to powered USB port does not charge the batteries 400 16GB 500 3208 150 for optional dock www asus com Motorola Xoom Android 3 1 Honeycomb 10 1 inch 1280x800 16 10 16Hz Nvidia Tegra 2 1GB 32GB upgradable to another 32GB via microSD 2MP 5MP 1 6 lbs 9 8x6 6x0 5 inches 93 241 j x 79 O
113. other right handed controls You can t do this with Windows built in mouse control panel which assigns the same settings to all mice on your computer But if your mouse has additional drivers e g Logitech SetPoint you very well might be able to do it We grabbed an old Logitech MX1000 wireless mouse and downloaded SetPoint 6 22 24 We weren t able to remap right and left click buttons unfortu Select Task Biton The uberOptions utility unlocks new configuration options on your Logitech mouse N submit your questions to doctor maximumpccom AUG 2011 maximum pc com CK gt THE BUILD A GAMING MACHINE THAT WILL SATISFY YOUR CRAVINGS WITHOUT BREAKING THE BANK nu b n d EE Tiu A ZI 101 5 EN AS 22 u E H s m AUG 2011 maximumpc com 5667 VALUE MEAL The thought of a gaming PC might conjure up images of decadent excess a full course meal of awesome that moves from an SSD consume to a filet of Core i7 990X to quad SLl under glass While that s certainly a feast worth aspiring to its by no means the only fare that will give your gaming needs sustenance And were not suggesting that you ruin your health withanempty calorie console fact like of the gaming world where theresa fixed menu of
114. ou can follow Thomas 2 01 41 on Twitter at StateOfPlayBlog AUG 2011 maximumpc com 10 Microsoft Unveils Windows Phone 7 1 Microsoft recently announced the first major up grade to its Windows Phone 7 operating system Code named Mango and scheduled for release this fall this 7 1 version incorporates more than 500 new features Here are the key new features Improved Live Tiles Mango will permit real time information to be transmitted from apps to tiles Threaded email and universal inboxes You can still use separate inboxes if you prefer Multitasking Finally You can now jump from app to app by holding down the back button which will bring up a screen of recent app tiles It s not 22 Brian Goldstein true multitasking because apps will be frozen in vailable the background but that s better for battery life App Connect Allows app developers to inte grate other apps and search results into their ap plications functionality The example Microsoft used is that if you searched for a movie App Con nect can connect the search results to Fandango Contact grouping You can now set up groups such as co workers friends and more and you can create Live Tiles for these groups Internet Explorer 9 and HTML 5 Microsoft says it s exactly the same as the desktop version including hardware acceleration PL chariots Weiss Available Chris Hill
115. ou use a relatively small low cost SSD to give your hard drive SSD like performance Intel actu ally claims around a 4x improvement with SRT over an HDD alone On the graphics side the P8Z68 V Pro board bundles LucidLogix s Virtu soft ware which lets you switch graphics modes There are two modes available in Virtu on the P8Z68 V Pro i mode and d mode I mode lets you plug your moni tor into the integrated graphics port on the board Most of your chores will run off the processor graphics but kick on game and the discrete GPU takes over It actually works but i mode doesn t support SLI And the main reason to run it power savings isn t hugely mate rial as the GPU doesn t actually turn off You ll also have to wait for profiles from LucidLogix for new games support Another weakness of the feature is lack of support for dual link DVI so you can AUG 2011 maximumpc com rule out 30 inch high res panels Most people however will use d mode which runs off the discrete GPU This mode lets you access the Intel Quick Sync video encoding technology in the CPU In our encoding tests we found Quick Sync to run roughly 30 percent faster than the mighty GeForce GTX 580 when encoding video using CyberLink s MediaEspresso 6 5 Zow The board itself is a near replica of the P67 based P8P67 Pro board in layout SATA ports and slots With the PCI E and memory controller integrated into the CPU and the exa
116. ountries Future MEDIA WITH PASSION across the world Future plc is a public company quoted on the London Stock Exchange Chief Executive Stevie Spring Non executive Chairman Roger Parry Group Finance Director John Bowman Tel 44 0 20 7042 4000 London www futureplc com Tel 44 0 1225 442244 Bath 2011 Future US Inc rights reserved No part of this magazine may be used or reproduced without the written permission of Future US Inc owner All information provided is as far as Future owner is aware based on information correct at the time of press Readers are advised to contact manufacturers and retailers directly with re gard to products services referred to in this magazine We welcome reader submissions but cannot promise that they will be published or returned to you By submitting materials to us you agree to give Future the royalty free perpetual non exclusive right to publish and reuse your submission in any form in any and all media and to use your name and other information in connection with the submission THE END AGAIN IVE NEVER EVER RECEIVED as many emails in response to an editorial as did to my June screed about AT amp T High Speed Greed Our readers are typi cally quite eloquent when they agree or disagree with what we have to say on a month to month basis but was still surprised by your candor verve and level of insight was also surprised at the h
117. p s flat silicon substrate It looks like a tiny fin bisecting the gate structure In contrast planar transis tors are flat devices etched into the sub strate s surface FinFETs can handle higher drive cur rents and switch between their on and off states at lower voltages Chip designers can use those characteristics to reach higher clock speeds or use less power or achieve some combination of those advantages FinFETs also leak much less current when the transistor is switched Intel now has fundamentally supe rior transistor in addition to its 18 to 24 month lead in lithography While Intel IS moving into 22nm production this year competitors are lagging a generation behind just starting 32nm or 28nm pro duction Some companies don t expect to have FinFETs until one process gen eration after Intel 14nm Others have no FinFET roadmap at all It adds up to a four year lead for Intel a huge obstacle for rival chipmakers to overcome Tom Halfhill was formerly a senior editor for Byte magazine and is now an analyst for Microprocessor Report maximumpc com AUG 2011 M quickstart Thomas McDonald Game Theory PORTAL AND THE THRILL OF DISCOVERY THE ORIGINAL PORTAL was not a stand alone game That s important to re member If it had been a movie it would have been at the bottom of a triple bill after Half Life 2 Episode 2 and Team Fortress 2 It was a bonus But like some of the
118. pccom AUG 2011 maximum pc com can you please explain why Firefox received the nod as the best browser The num bers don t lie William Brown CONTRIBUTING WRITER PAUL LILLY RESPONDS Chrome posted the highest scores in Peacekeeper Google V8 Celtic Kane JSBenchmark and Mozilla Dromaeo These are all JavaScript specific benchmarks and the reason we ran so many was to get a clear picture of which browser is truly the best at JavaScript It s pretty much a given that Chrome is going to win Google s own V8 bench mark but because it won several of the others we feel confident in saying Chrome handles JavaScript code better than the other brows ers Firefox handily bested Chrome in HTML5 perfor mance GUlMark and it enables hardware accelera tion by default Even when we 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 5 NOW ONLINE enabled hardware accelera tion in Chrome it still didn t keep up with Firefox So to sum up the perfor mance side Chrome is faster in JavaScript Firefox is faster in HTML5 and Firefox is faster in hardware accelerated tasks With all other things being nearly equal the advantage goes to Firefox but as we pointed out it s not a runaway victory As for
119. precision gaming mouse works SCROLL WHEEL This scroll wheels motion is tracked optically Light from an LED on one side 15 picked up by a photoreceptor on the other The wheel has a ring of tiny holes on its side so that the light is broken repeatedly as the wheel turns allowing the mouse to calculate how fast it s spinning OPTICAL SENSOR A tiny camera watches the surface below the mouse extrapo lating the mouse s movement from the motion it records On this mouse a bright blue LED illuminates the surface to allow the camera to see on a laser mouse a laser diode would be used instead for even greater sensitivity LCD DISPLAY A tiny backlit display provides information on the mouse s current sensitivity in dpi dots per inch SWITCHES Microswitches on the mouse s circuit board pick up the actuation of the external buttons BATTERY This hybrid wireless wired mouse only draws power from its battery when the magnetic power and data cable is detached maximumpc com AUG 2011 MAXIMUM PG 59 R amp D SOW STEP BY STEP GUIDES TO IMPROVING YOUR PC WINDOWS TIP OF THE MONTH d Network and Sharing Media streaming options Choose media streaming options for computers and devices Eh Name your media library acastle 4 Choose default settings ALEX CASTLE ONLINE MANAGING EDITOR Show devices on Allow MORE WAYS
120. ps as fishy so much so that they re asking the FCC to investigate ISP caps in general In their letter to the commission the groups Public Knowledge and New America Foundation point out that Comcast which implemented a 25008 cap years ago hasn t bothered to increase the cap despite continued upgrades to its networks and healthy profits That AT amp T is issuing an even smaller cap at 150GB is further troubling particularly since AT amp T seeks to turn overages into a revenue source Noting that 56 percent of all U S broadband subscribers are restricted by data caps the groups warn that they carry the omnipresent temptation for ISPs to act in anticompetitive and monopolistic ways KS AMD s A Series Targets Sandy Bridge AMD s A series chip will take on Intel s Sandy Bridge mobile chips in a spot they re most weak at graphics AMD officials said the A series of chips previously code named Llano will offer quad and dual core chips with far greater graphics performance than is available on any Sandy Bridge CPU The A series graph ics will offer OpenCL support a new Steady Vision fea ture to fix shaky Internet video in real time and a Dual Graphics feature Dual Graphics is really a more con sumer friendly name for the company s existing Hybrid CrossFire feature that lets you tie the onboard graphics 2 to a discrete A series The A series is being fabbed on Global Foundries dde new 32nm process which AMD says
121. ptions and technologies for consumers and developers alike device You cannot redownload any music youve uploaded and you can t buy music These seemingly severe limitations are how Google plans to avoid litigation with music X publishers though whether this will actually de ter litigation is an open ques tion Google positions Google Music as storage only much like Amazon com s Cloud Play er Unlike Amazon however Google isn t a retailer of music Amazon also allows users to redownload uploaded tracks Google Music is currently live as an invite only beta with an Android client available in the Android Marketplace And Movies Too Google also announced its YouTube movie rental service Google Music now entering beta is Google s entry into cloud based music storage and it s strictly one way 8 AUG 2011 maximumpc com Youll be able to rent main stream movies from YouTube including HD versions for vary ing prices typically 2 99 but current releases might cost 3 99 for a 24 hour rental Like similar services including Am azon Hulu and Netflix Google doesnt offer all movies or TV shows so you ll still need mul tiple subscriptions if you crave access to all movies and net work shows Chrome Google covered a number of features currently integrated into the Chrome browser which the company believes will go mainstream over time One fun preview was Angry Birds running on
122. r File Go Window About MAC Defender rea vs MA MAC Defender is the most advanced virus and the world because it has the largest viruses antivirus systems It can detect and remove from known dangerous software It is possible becausdili s security specialists work all over the word which hours day and 7 days a week Moreover the security specialists of MAC Defender cooperation witht 501 and mathematicians in the world developed a special unit known as Heuristic nals quickstart Quinn Norton Nvidia Offers Wired 3D Specs for Less Wearing a pair of 3D glasses is one thing but would you be willing to keep yourself tethered to your PC Nvidia is gambling that at least some of you will be fine with a Byte wired set of specs and so the graphics chip maker has announced a new addition to its 3D Vision product family Nvidia 3D Vision wired glasses Nvidia realizes that Rights WE CAN T AFFORD NO EDUCATION IN THEIR ONGOING QUEST to punch every puppy they can find rights holders have turned to suing those most rapacious of pirates professors Academic publishers are asking a judge in Georgia for an in junction against Georgia State University for a liberal fair use policy What these publishers are objecting to is unapproved and unpaid for book and article excerpts in
123. ranoid use an antistatic strap First unlock the socket s load plate by opening the little armontheLGA1155 socket image A Now carefully pry the plastic protective cap from the socket image Never touch these extremely delicate pins bending them will kill the board Keep the protective cap you will need it in the event you have to return the board for warranty replacement Now pick up your processor with two fingers and lower it as close as you can get to socket The two notches the chip should match the two notches in the socket Keep the chip parallel to the socket image C Do not drop one side ofthe chip into socket and then dropin the other slide inthe socket asit may damage the delicate pins the chipis sitting flat inthe socket ifitisn t carefully pick up the chip and try Lowering itin again use the arm to lower the load plate and lock inthe arm nm AUG 2011 maximumpc ct the S667 pc value mea INSTALL THE RAM Since the board is out the open let s take this opportunity to install the two sticks of RAM You ll need to first spread open the two arms on each RAM slot Now match the notch in the memory stick with the notch in the slot The DIMM 1 keyed so that it only TATRiIZT HEADER EIL T 0009264 33K P 562 014204 Jr TY VOID IF REMOVED id pl Mit Ui Ul TIN 7 AM 4 AL j NNT TTI INSTALL THE HEATSI
124. rement for gaining Wi Fi Alli ance certification but as we mentioned earlier our test environment is devoid of other wireless networks Besides that neither the WNDR3700 nor the Linksys router had a problem Maybe a firmware update will fix what ails the WNDR4O00 we used version 1 0 0 64 Until that happens there s very little to recommend this router over the older WNDR3700 Netgear WNDRA4000 150 street www netgear com BENCHMARKS 2 46Hz Band 5GHz Band Linksys Netgear Netgear Linksys Netgear E4200 WNDRA000 WNDR3700 E4200 i WNDRA000 WNDR3700 BEDROOM 1 10 iis 113 0 853 163 0 152 0 1080 154 0 KITCHEN 20 FEET 0 899 135 0 126 0 83 4 100 0 MB S PATIO 38 5 108 0 53 8 39 6 90 8 60 5 212 BEDROOM2 60FEET ES 842 395 2415 54 4 465 374 35 09222 64 5 255 35 26 7 53 176 OUTDOORS 85 FEET MB S 249 4 6 42 32 NIC 5 N C Best scores are bolded throughput measured using JPerf indicates no connection at that location Additional benchmarking methodology at bit ly ajskdh TRANSMIT RECEIVE ANTENNAS 3x3 note delivers three spatial RADIO FREQUENCIES Concurrent dual band 2 4 and 5GHz streams on the 5GHz radio only TRANSMIT RECEIVE ANTENNAS 3x3 note delivers three spatial streams on the 5GHz radio only
125. rts over a few hours you might GET REPORTS The unthinkable has happened Your want to set longer interval Beyond that all the options are pretty straightforward they allow you to keep track of networking and geolocation information image so you can find your laptop and to track webcam activity and which programs the thief uses image 1 so you can identify them to the police So that s it sit back wait for the reports to start roll ing in and laugh maniacally b Reporting method setup Please choose the reporting method for Prey If you re not sure what you re doing please visit preypraject com amp Prey Control Panel Recommended The easy and powerful way You manage and monitor this device on the web at preyproject com where you can watch new reports arrive and trigger different Prey Standalone Advanced a Reports fly directly to your inbox but you need to activate Prey by generatina deleting a URL and set up your mail server settings as well INSTALL PREY Now log in to your new guest account and 2 download the Prey installer from www preyproject com Run the installer and when you get to the end choose to config ure Prey now The first thing you ll need to decide is how you want to manage Prey image You can choose to use the online control panel or to set it up in stand alone mode There are a few draw 64 uum AUG 2011 maximumpc com
126. ry common for the little metal fingers to get stuck inthe ports so on your 1 0 shield make sure that the fingers not jamming into the ports when you install the board Now carefully lower the board into the case Use a Phillips head screwdriver to screw the board in place Make sure the number of screws you use matches the number of mounting points in the case In this case we have seven mounting points so we use seven screws If you have seven mounting points but only use six Screws you have mounting point in the wrong place You should remove the motherboard and make sure that all of the mounting points line up with the motherboard s available holes Use just enough force so the screws wont back out from vibrations but not so much torque that it will damage the motherboard You re now ready to hook up the front panel power reset and LED buttons as well as the USB and audio connectors To hook up the USB connectors look onthe board for the headers labeled USB and plug themin Foraudio the header is labeled Audio Hooking up the power LED and reset switches is also fairly straightforward but takes a little more work The power andresetswitches don t have orientation requirements but the HDD and power LEDs do Just so you know the white wire usually indicates negative It s time to install the videocard Before you can dothat you llhaveto should lock into place If you have installed the card correctly the remove the wacky ass
127. s and cause your overall experi ence to feel fast but you d probably be better off with a cheaper RAM upgrade and saving the rest of your cash for a faster computer Acronis s Migrate Easy a free trial lasts for 15 days www acronis com 15 a quick way to clone your old Windows drive into an SSD though an SSD of the same size as your current hard drive will cost almost as much as your computer did If you really want to get an SSD however you have two options You can budget SSD like the 400 Intel X 25V which will run about 100 and just drastically slim down the amount of stuff you keep on your computer Or you THIS MONTH THE DOCTOR TACKLES Twice the Mice gt Wireless Booting gt Voltage Variations can go for broke and graba 500 250GB SSD use it in your current machine and then when you get a new machine transfer the SSD to that Power on via Wireless Keyboard want to be able to start up my computer from my wireless keyboard a Logitech EX 100 have a Gigabyte P67A UD3 B3 motherboard What s the cheapest way to do this Craig Hendricks THE DOCTOR RESPONDS The cheapest way for most users electricity costs aside is to enable Wake on USB in the motherboard s BIOS and then put the computer into sleep mode when you re not using it instead of shutting down completely However due to your particular moth erboard you actually have a better option Some Gigabyt
128. s primarily from two is sues a slightly higher price for the Z68 chip itself and the cost of licensing LucidLogix s Virtu software which lets you switch between discrete and integrat ed graphics For example Giga byte s high end Z68 board the GA Z68X UD7 B3 is going for 350 Newegg com The com parable P67 version the P67A UD7 B3 is going for 315 Winner P67 inte y And the Winner Is It s a close one as P67 has the price advantage and greater availability And frankly for a typical enthusiast setup 268 isnt an overwhelming feature fest Still we have to give this one to Z68 We think the switch able graphics option and the Smart Response Technology are compelling enough to make this the chipset to go with on a new LGA1155 system 1 17 AUG 2011 MAXIMUMPG quickstart improving your pc experience one step at a time DONG ALOR 20 Polishing Turd use a solid state drive a Compaq Presario CQ60 615DX If so can copy my drive data without any Win dows 7 errors and what s the best SSD for my PC Alex Gudenau THE DOCTOR RESPONDS Alex you can use an SSD in your computer but we ques tion the practicality of doing so Your computer cost around 600 when new and hasa 2 26Hz single core proces sor 2 RAM and integrated graphics It s essentially a big netbook Putting in an SSD will decrease boot and load time
129. ses Overall IT costs will be lower due to the simpler sys tem management and migra tion whenever new hardware is introduced It s a seductive pitch for IT departments strug gling with budget cuts but it s unclear whether Chromebooks will really have the horse power needed for most users Loyd Case More Hurt Locker Pirates Pursued No this isn t a rehashing of news from last year Volt age Pictures the maker of the Oscar winning The Hurt Locker has filed a new lawsuit targeting 20 000 more alleged Bitlorrent users The anonymous de fendants are accused of pirating the film over the P2P protocol This brings the total number of users sued by Voltage Pictures to 24 583 The lawsuit seeks to force ISPs to reveal the per sonal details of the users behind all those IP address es It s worth noting that the judge on the case Beryl Howell is a former RIAA lobbyist If Voltage gets the details on users it will send out settlement offers The goal is not to go to court but to intimidate users into paying up Several ISPs have struck deals wherein they will work through a certain number of the subpoenas each month Verizon for instance has agreed to do 100 per month For some ISPs it could take years to go through all of them RW FCC Asked to Investigate Data Caps You re not alone if you think that AT amp T s new bandwidth cap for broadband subscribers is suspicious It strikes two Washington D C tech policy grou
130. setup on P67 Winner Z68 Round 2 Features This one is a no brainer The Z68 is everything that the P67 15 plus the very cool Smart Re sponse Technology that lets you use an SSD to cache often used data from your hard drive This lets you use say a cheap and fast 20GB SSD to greatly increase the speed of your sys tem over using just a hard drive You can learn more about this great feature in our review of the Asus P8Z68 V Pro on page 82 The other feature the Z68 has over the P67 is the ability to finally access the built in graph Ics processor in every Sandy Bridge CPU The permutations of how it works are bewildering but it s a handy feature to have This round is an easy call Winner Z68 Ies 268 Intel 768 chipset www intel com Round 3 Reliability When we get questions from readers regarding Intel s P67 boards the most common one seems to come from the movie Marathon Man 5 it safe What the readers want to know of course is whether it s safe to buy an LGA1155 Sandy Bridge board After all Intel did pull all of the P67 chipsets due to a bug that compromised the integrity of the SATA ports at a cost of about a billion bucks Those chips have since been re placed by the bug free B3 ver sions yet people still wonder Well its nearly impossible to get a non B3 board and if you do the vendor will replace it So stop asking 15 it safe Oh look another email 5 it sa
131. t a 192 bit memory bus the GTX 560 supports a 256 bit wide bus The Palit card is slightly unusual in sup porting a 2GB frame buffer but its specs are otherwise pretty stock It s not factory overclocked but given the tweaking and streamlining that are part of the improve ments to the GF114 560 over the GF104 460 we expect some performance ben efits The GTX 560 does have eight fewer shader units than the GTX 560 Ti We tested the Palit card against the Asus Radeon HD 6870 DirectCU which fits into a similar price point as well as a pair of factory overclocked Nvidia cards the Asus GTX 460 TOP 1GB model and the 5 GTX 560 Ti Twin Frozr card The 560 Ti is more expensive than all the others and thus was included for reference only not as adirect comparison Palit spent some engineering effort incorporating a slightly larger than nor mal 9cm 15 blade fan design into the card The entire affair runs 3dB quieter and 6 C degrees cooler than the reference design The card includes two dual link DVI ports ata rur BENCHMARKS 6 560 20 3DMARK 2011 3 878 3DMARK VANTAGE PERF 16 811 UNIGINE HEAVEN 2 1 FPS 22 CRYSIS FPS 23 BATTLEFORGE DX11 FPS 45 FAR CRY 2 LONG FPS 87 HAWX 2 DX11 FPS 109 STALKER COP DX11 FPS 36 JUST CAUSE 2 FPS 41 ALIENS VS PREDATOR FPS 27 F12010 FPS 45 METRO 2033 FPS 16 SYSTEM POWER fa IDLE W 120 SYSTEM POWER fa FUL
132. tatus 2 WU Defragmenting 15 Analysis results T I ee mj 8 86 6 6 89 8 Divet File list 2 Search Drive 12 112 Fragmented Files 21 3 GB 95 213 Total Fragments 18 Fragmentation Current state 7 553 Fragmented Files 18 5 GB 62 206 Total Fragments 18 Fragmentation C Documen No BS Podcast 138_ The Cheesecake F mp3 Properties Used space Capacity 71 3GB 55 4 GB 76 581 044 736 bytes 70 223 720 448 bytes 146 804 765 184 bytes 136 7 GB zx u Hoc 9 ON Hunter Mod Refoeih Autslpdate Help 1 Pard H o A ma me m B Acrcbatcpm Anobe AIR Adobe Flash Adobe Meda adobe Comma Great Su Paper Mayer 5 5 8 85 Het 5331 Mobit Creator e an Decade fete ampia Weleokkxhs 11 Control Pyne 6 He 2 9 9 9 Creates Gresser Crppudpex CrysteDud Ded Tool File 1 Soest Sound _ ann 3 0 1 30 Fe i 5B 9 6655
133. tes but Polaris gives us a viable way to do real work on a tablet It pleasantly surprised us with the balance it strikes between functionality and ease of use Polaris easily opened the MS Office docx xlsx and pptx files we threw at it as AUG 2011 maximumpc com well as PDFs and older Word docs It had problems opening older Excel formats opened RTFs with unwanted formatting characters You can open files from any lo cation on the tablet or download and open straight from Dropbox It only saves files in the Office 2003 format An optional dock adds a keyboard mouse full size SD card slot 40 pin con nector port for power an auxiliary battery and two USB ports with support for a USB mouse and external drives We confirmed the estimated 16 total hours operating time from both tablet and dock batteries with our own tests and would expect a bit less time under strenuous use The dock s keys don t have the best action and scrunched together layout leads to some mistakes Still the keyboard makes typing much faster than on touch screen and we love the shortcut buttons for Home Back Menu Settings Google Search Browser Launch Wi Fi On Off Bluetooth On Off media playback and screenshots The touchpad mouse lets do two fingered scrolling and swiping but does not include the two fingered zoom in out gesture Tapping the mouse pad acts as a mouse click which is nice when it works but its resp
134. tested Like all recent Silverstone cases the motherboard is rotated 90 de grees so the 1 0 plate and PCI slots point up Unlike the Raven RV03 though the motherboard tray is along the left side panel with the case window on the right panel The TJ11 dual unibody frame the front bot tom and top panels are all a single piece of aluminum with the rest of the case also made of aluminum except for the removable motherboard tray and the mid case fan brackets which are steel There isn t a rivet to be found on the case it s all screws all the way to the delight of any modder The TJ11 is separated into two main compartments The lower compartment contains two three bay hard drive cages Each bay has its own 12cm fan so the hard drives are thermal ly isolated from the rest of the case and each HDD tray has its own hotswap backplate The case can also accommodate two power supplies or one re dundant server PSU The drive trays remove to accommodate a radiator up to 480mm Between the bottom and top compartments are two We ve chided Silverstone for taking few risks with its Temjin lineup Never again AUG 2011 maximumpc con mid case air ducts that feed cool air to the two filtered 18cm intake fans at the bottom of the motherboard compartment The motherboard com partment is generously ap portioned with room for microATX SSI server boards and even XL boards lik
135. thanks to processing overhead and the usual screen refresh timing It s possible to reduce this using a faster CPU but in general 200ms is right on the border of human perception This is basically the same motion capture pro cess that s been used for the last decade or so In among other things sports games to accurately record athletes movement for reproduction dur ing the game s playback But these professional systems use keyframes to flow the motion while Kinect s approach bypasses the static recording of pre existing motion instead reproducing the kinetic motion presented by the live player in 20 points of motion as the action proceeds Perhaps more mundane but nonetheless important the combination of infrared and RGB cameras also allows Kinect to provide facial recognition that can automatically log a player on to the Microsoft network as well as associate the player with a previously used avatar A recent up date called Avatar Kinect gives the console the power to recognize players facial expressions and display them onscreen In context this ability can be used in several preconfigured venues currently all thinly disguised chat room environ ments to communicate with other players both verbally and through facial expressions Apply notions of affective computing which posits that systems will soon be capable of reacting to human facial expressions and emotions and you can see why this is such a big deal
136. theater LETTERS DOCTOR COMMENTS ASUS P8Z68 V PRO AUG 2011 MAXIMUM PG TECH GROUP Vice President Kate Byrne 650 238 2049 Editorial Director Jon Phillips EDITORIAL Editor in Chief George Jones Deputy Editor Katherine Stevenson Senior Editor Gordon Mah Ung Senior Associate Editor Nathan Edwards Online Managing Editor Alex Castle Online Features Editor Amber Bouman Online Associate Editor Alan Fackler Contributing Writers Michael Brown Loyd Case Paul Escallier Tom Halfhill Paul Lilly Thomas McDonald David Murphy Quinn Norton Bill O Brien Markkus Rovito Ryan Whitwam Copy Editor Alexandra Hall Podcast Producer Andy Bauman Editor Emeritus Andrew Sanchez ART Art Director Richard Koscher Contributing Art Director Boni Uzilevsky Photo Editor Mark Madeo Associate Photographer Samantha Berg Contributing Photographer Patrick Kawahara Contributing Illustrator Adam Benton BUSINESS National Sales Director Anthony Losanno 646 723 5493 Regional Sales Manager West Coast Greg Ryder 650 745 9243 Regional Sales Manager West Coast Bryan Plescia 650 238 2523 Account Executive East Coast John Ortenzio 646 723 5492 Account Executive East Coast Samantha Rady 646 723 5402 Senior Marketing Manager Andrea Recio Ang Marketing Associate Robbie Montinola Publishers Assistant Jaime Dioli Advertising Coordinator Austin Park 650 745 9207 PRODUCTION Produ
137. ts and two USB 3 0 ports with an internal header which is uncommon at this price point Other welcome details a removable dust filter four toolless optical bays six toolless hard drive bays two 2 5 inch bays seven standard PCI expansion slots plus an extra one suitable for a fan or light controller and a large CPU cooler backplane cutout The Enforcer looks a little bland until it powers up and the 20cm front fan lights up its red LED which contrasts well with the case s black trim The Enforcer also comes stock with a 12cm exhaust fan and includes additional mounting holes up top The inside of the chassis feels roomy enough and you can remove the top hard drive cage to ac commodate longer graphics cards For 90 you get a solid mid tower that s spacious and offers a broad range of cooling options and looks good doing so AF CM Storm Enforcer 90 www cmstorm com AUG 2011 maximumpc con A RARITY INEXPENSIVE AND ALSO GOOD LOOKING manages to pack a whole lotta class into its miniscule frame At 8 1 inches wide 18 1 inches high and 19 3 inches deep the Shinobi Window is firmly in mid tower territory Its made of steel and is painted matte black inside and out with BitFenixs smooth rubber ized SofTouch coating running up the front and top panel The left side panel includes dark plastic window with a 12cm fan mount fan sold separately and the case comes with one filtered 12cm front fan another is
138. value 1 29 B 1 1 0 84 01 maximumpc com AUG 2011 m 157 R amp D examining technology and putting it to use 208 BA BY BILL O BRIEN Microsoft Kinect Microsofts unique input device for the Xbox has opened up some very intriguing possibilities But how exactly does it work Kinect is perhaps the most significant prod uct Microsoft has developed since Windows itself It has the potential to impact not only gaming but general computing communica tions and media as well It s an evolutionary platform blending sight sound and software that if developed correctly into the future could become a revolutionary Ul SIGHT Kinect s console includes an RGB camera the same type found in webcams and cell phones across the globe Currently it s a device with a 640x480 resolution capable of capturing 30 frames per second It s not 3D An avatar in this context is simply a wire frame representation of the player that has been mapped with recognition points These points correspond to the movement nexus that s avail able from the wireframe wrists neck elbows shoulders hips etc in the case of human be ings and are what allow the system to emulate accurate player motion onscreen in real time Real in this case entails a reported 200ms lag including screen response time
139. w months is Wedding Planning comments 94 uuu you write we respond ale 3C 2018 SS WE TACKLE TOUGH READER QUESTIONS ON gt Commodore 128 RAM Configurations Commodore 128 FAIL I Think Not take deep offense to your inclusion of the Commodore 128 in your 10 Biggest PC Failures list in the June issue The first computer bought was a 128 in 1986 It had built in color 128KB RAM 64KB in 64 mode built in sound and you could usea TV for a monitor bought a 1541 drive and a 1571 with burst mode for half of what an Amiga PC or Mac cost It had tons of videogames available in 64 mode And it sold very well outside the United States Although CP M mode was useless it was essentially two great computers in one Louis J Bang EDITOR IN CHIEF GEORGE JONES RESPONDS We have much love for the Commo dore here at Maximum PC but that useless CP M mode 15 why we placed the C128 on the list Well that and the fact that it sold only 4 million units in four years time with many of those sales occur ring in Europe Home Theater Cooling recently built the Ultimate 3D HTPC from the August gt Browser Wars 2010 issue Home Theater with a Vengeance noticed that you said you cooled the Silverstone Nightjar 5 case with the Grandia 60055 three 12cm fans However there is only one place to plug a fan in on MSI s 890GX motherboard Could you please te
140. will enable the the real chips to offer better life than its Sandy Bridge contempo raries Officials admit that the Intel parts may be faster pd in pure x86 chores but with future applications shift Sandy ing to OpenCL which Sandy Bridge lacks and graphics M c performance becoming increasingly important the A the major series chips will be more than competitive GU 4 of the ie for x86 cores Not to scale Tom Halfhill Fast Forward ANOTHER LEAP FOR INTEL SUDDENLY like a plunging guillotine blade Intel has severed any hope that competi tors will match its chip fabrication tech nology for years to come Last month observed that the rest of the industry was gaining a little ground on Intel by adopt ing high k metal gate transis tors only four years after Intel s HKMG debut in 2007 But now comes InteUs next big leap tri gate transistors Commonly known as FinFETs finned field effect transistors these devices are a radical departure from the planar transistors used in integrated circuits for 90 years Intel calls them the first true 3D transistors but that description and the term tri gate are potentially confusing This isn t 3D transistor stacking which builds multiple layers of transistors on a chip Nor does a tri gate transistor have three electrical gates for controlling cur rent flow Instead a FinFET is a three dimen sional structure that rises vertically above the chi
141. y The PopDrive includes a slim alumi num dual bay chassis 5V AC adapter and USB 2 0 and eSATA ports at the rear of the chassis If the PopDrive s 1 2x3 9x6 4 inch aluminum chassis looks familiar that s because it s the same casing as Silver stone s DS221 dual bay RAID drive Silver stone s device though uses a mechanical switch to change between RAID 0 RAID 1 and JBOD while the PopDrive s configura tion is all done via software And what a joy that software is Just kidding Configuring the PopDrive Is a pain in the booty First you install the included Siliconlmage 57xx SteelVine volume management tool Then you re start your computer slot the two included 2 5 inch drives two 500GB WD Scorpio Blue drives in our review model into the PopDrive and connect it to your computer via USB 2 0 or eSATA At this point it s necessary to consult the 64 page user manual as the Steel Vine software isn t optimized or con figured at all for the PopDrive It gives many more options than the PopDrive actually supports which you wouldn t know unless you ve read the manual Of the six configuration options listed as JBOD SAFE RAID 1 BIG SAFE33 SAFE50 and FAST RAID 0 the latter three are listed as not recommended for the PopDrive in the manual From If only the PopDrive s configuration software was as sleek as its aluminum chassis there it s a simple matter of choosing RAID 1 saving the array configuration
142. you a lot of flexibility in how shots are saved whether they go to a folder the clipboard or straight to Photoshop It also lets you choose exactly how you want to take shots You can assign different hotkeys to take full screen shots custom area shots single window shots and more getgreenshot org SpaceSniffer An essential utility for music fans Volumouse gives you the ability to control the volume on your PC by rolling the wheel on your mouse You define the rules for how the mouse wheel controls volume when the Alt key is held down when the left mouse button 15 pressed etc If those conditions aren t met the mouse wheel reverts to regular scrolling tasks www nirsoft net What the heck is taking up all that space on your computer SpaceSniffer scans your drive and creates a visual representation of all the stuff that s on it so you can see at a glance what s clut tering your boot drive From there you can right click to interact directly with files and folders delete cut copy paste etc www uderzo it small app mannanna TMonitor Fire up TMonitor then load up your CPU with a good multithreaded workload such as Prime95 TMonitor should show all of the cores running at maximum clock speed without any sags Let it run for at least 15 minutes to hour If shows large sags on some of the cores your system has a thermal issue www cpuid com

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