Home

Core2 Mobos Reviewed

1. sysmark2004 SE WNR a Premiere Pro 2 0 1 960 Pee Photoshop CS2 205 sec 227 sec 2 3 Recode H 264 1 653 sec C ISEKI 116 fps 2 C XT 110 5 fps 163 5 fps 0 109 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 Our current desktop test bed is a Windows XP SP2 machine using a dual core 2 6GHz Athlon 64 FX 60 2GB of Corsair DDR400 RAM on an Asus A8N32 SLI motherboard two GeForce 7900 GTX videocards in SLI mode a Western Digital 4000KD hard drive a Sound Blaster X Fi soundcard and a PC Power and Cooling Turbo Cool 850 PSU A new self contained waterblock and cool No need for a 1 000 watt power supply here Polywell gives you two 700 watt power supplies but their 2 66GHz CPUs were overclocked to 3 46GHz While the Poly i680SLI QX makes a chump out of our zero point Athlon 64 FX 60 machine and any Pentium D or Athlon 64 proc there s just no way in hell it can pull down enough numbers to beat the competition The benchmarks are very good excellent almost but against a 3 46GHz quad core it s just an exercise in futility Of course as we noted above there s no risk of this machine sud denly crashing two years from now due to extended overclocking We did experi ence problems with SYSmark but the benchmark has been increasingly flaky for the last few months which we can t fault Polywell for So where does this leave the Poly i680SLI QX In a pretty good place actu ally The Maingear F131 w
2. 58 Gaming system Polywell Poly les 8 elh Rep dq ETT 60 20 inch monitors viewSonic VX2035wm HP L2045w Samsung SyncMaster 206BW NEC MultiSync 2OWMGX2 62 Earbuds M Audio IE 20 XB 64 Backup drive western Digital My BOOK roit eicere 64 Dual screen monitor DoubleSight DS 19008 65 HDV camera Canon HV10 66 Motherboards MSI P965 Platinum Abit AW9D MAX Asus Striker Extreme 68 TV streaming Hava Wireless HD Pinnacle PCTV To Go My IPTV amp Cam Anywhere Deluxe 70 MP3 player TrekStor Vibez 8GB MPS Player eserine onines 72 Contents R amp D How color LCD technology works In the Lab Using the Xbox 360 HD DVD drive on your PC ORE In Out You write we respond Rig of the Month Todd Eisner s Serious Bomb cese oe 2 d m I 72 Skype phone Auvi Phip65 72 Controller Logitech NuLOOQ 74 HDMI switch Accell UltraAV 74 Media drive Kingwin KH 300 76 Hard drive cooler Sytrin Kukoma SHE 155 em erseenr moteur 76 System utilities System Mechanic 7 Professional 78 Media player Kingston ISPEXIDUMCEE SUE EE 78 Music creation software M Audio Session Notion Prot g Rainbow Six Vegas
3. MARCH 2007 MAXIMUM PG 07 Vii e a quicks 3 i THE BEGINNING OF THE MAGAZINE WHERE ARTICLES ARI Microsoft Introduces Windows Home Server One part network storage one part media server and one part centralized backup the new Os could be cool but don t expect to see anything soon t CES this January Microsoft finally announced its Windows Home Server product a Windows 2003 Server variant tweaked for home users Home Server will allow all the PCs in your house to share printers and files but Microsoft has also added several new features that look very compelling including automated remote backup for all your PCs SMALL Home Server is a headless operating system with low system requirements a 1GHz CPU with 512MB of RAM and as much hard drive space as you want While commercial products will ship with Home Server installed it could be perfect on an older desktop PC that you want to switch to server duty The automated backup software is much more intelligent than most consumer level backup solutions Instead of blindly backing up every file on multiple machines the software backs up only one copy of each identical file That means if you have a large music or video collection on each of your three machines you ll store that content only once When a machine dies rather than suffer through a tedious rein stall all you ll need to do is boot from the WHS recovery CD a
4. s a Ifi Ihe lab REAL WORLD TESTING RESULTS ANALYSIS RECOMMENDATIONS The economical Xbox 360 drive does indeed work with a PC driver situation optical drive and CPU as well as query your moni tor and graphics card for HDCP Those with brawny notebooks should be able to run the Xbox 360 drive without an HDCP compliant graphics card and monitor That s because the spec allows for closed box systems without HDCP support almost got it working using an older notebook equipped with a GeForce Go 7800 GTX GPU but ran into driver difficulties So why do think the Xbox drive will affect who wins the next gen DVD battle Except for burning high def content shot with an HDV camera haven t found much use for a high capacity burner yet All really want now is a cheap way to get high def movie content on a system and the Xbox 360 drive does it for an incredibly low price Once a company builds up a user base for HD DVD content they ll be able to sell burners too Lumiere Thermal Testing Compound spread it over the CPU and heatsink and start with unit number one our generic read cheap cooler We use Lumi re because it requires a minimal break in period to reach full effectiveness And then we hang out for half an hour Once the wait is over we measure the CPU s temperature when idle After a quick glance at SpeedFan for the temperature reading on our zero point system we move to round two After firing up two
5. A And the Winner Is Microsoft s Zune software and its Zune Marketplace didn t win a single category in this head to head comparison so it s anticlimac tic to anoint Apple s iTunes the winner Apple s service and software benefits from being in the market longer and that should have given Microsoft a solid jump off point but it doesn t seem as though Microsoft has learned much of anything from Apple The fact that the Zune software doesn t allow you to back up the songs you ve purchased is one of its most egregious shortcomings Microsoft says you can easily restore your media usage rights if you encounter an error message that says you don t have the right to play the music but you re screwed if your hard drive crashes and rounds CREATING PLAYLISTS Both iTunes and the Zune software make it easy to drag and drop songs to create playlists and both offer tools to automate the process ITunes describes these tools as Smart Playlists and Zune refers to them as Auto Playlists We found playlists to be slightly easier to create in iTunes simply because the selection criteria is listed from left to right like a sentence and the selection criteria is more precise If you want to create a playlist consisting exclusively of tracks encoded at 320Kb sec a common choice you can do that in iTunes The Zune software limits your bitrate selection criteria to more specific values at least no more than or no less than
6. There s a prob lem Doc My computer s blowing up Sending you the stats Send your detailed questions concerns and sonnets to doctor maximumpc com Who d have guessed that a botanical discovery from the 18th century would lead to the development of one of the most popular display technologies of the 21st BY GORD GOBLE Awe botanist Friedrich Reinitzer first observed the melting behavior of a plant derived material called cholesteryl benzoate in 1888 A surprised Reinitzer determined that the substance had not one but two melt ing points Reinitzer took his discovery to renowned German physicist Otto Lehmann who investigated further and eventually named the phenomenon the liquid crystal state Practical applications for liquid crystals did not emerge until the 1960s and it took until the last few years for liquid crystal displays to overtake their cathode ray tube counterparts in popularity Just what makes this technol ogy tick The key lies with that plant material cholesteryl benzoate Reinitzer discovered that rather than melting from a solid state in which molecules exist in an orderly station ary fashion directly to a liquid state in which molecules roam about randomly cholesteryl benzoate molecules detoured through a previ ously unknown wholly unique state While in that state cholesteryl benzoate exhibits the orderliness of a solid but also some of the movement of a liquid A P
7. Those of us here with smaller ears were concerned that the Kong like proportions of the XBs would lead to a match made on Skull Island so imagine our surprise when we discovered how comfortable these earbuds are The included fit kit accommodates a wide range of ear sizes and the cables loop over the tops of your ears which keeps them out of the way and prevents the plugs from sliding out The cables are removable too so should they ever be damaged you can replace just the inexpensive cable instead of the entire earphone The IE 20 XBs aren t just bass monsters they re equally adept at delivering crisp highs and well rounded mids While we listened to Warren Western Digital My Book Pro Edition Il The B 17 of external drives is loud large and lit up sing Western Digital s My Book Pro Edition Il external drive is a lot like living next to an airport If you re a traveler the five minute taxi trip from your house to the airport is absolutely ideal provided you don t mind the constant sound of planes buzzing your rooftop Seriously the My Book is about as loud as it is useful buy some earplugs and you ll have a riveting experience Crammed within the device s bulky frame are two 500GB drives spinning at 7 200 RPM in a RAID 0 configuration That means you re getting nearly one terabyte of storage potential provided you don t mind losing your data should one drive cease to work For the less adventurous Western Digital includes it
8. programs such as Roxio Easy Media Creator or Nero Burning ROM and so on To ensure that your data can be easily retrieved drag and drop your files to anoth er drive or burn a CD or DVD rather than relying on a third party backup program which might not be compatible with Vista i 1 awe Du nos Pau ay modem Torg asi uut inis rue ow E d Crean ert L Comm Lum Pm a Deam reste Dares Depto Dur Dev X6 o Mab Pace NEL odd B oret jad Pet IN DVDS ho Dm 0G Fuse in Here we re preparing to copy a folder with Microsoft s Send To function K 9 we maira lar Tranter se Ve a D Van E files E Next to continue Click Browse and navigate to the drive where you want to store the backup and then click Next To transfer all the user accounts on your old computer to your new computer select All user accounts You can also transfer just your own user profile or click Advanced Options to specify exactly MAXIMUMPG MARCH 2007 Select an external drive or removable media drive as the location for the data from your Windows XP installation which profiles to transfer The next dialog box displays the files and folders that will be transferred and tells you how much disk space is required Use Customize to fine tune your selections Click Transfer to begin the file copying process When it s done you can move on to installing Vista INSTALL VIS
9. Likely future partnership endeavors include the delivery of real time weather visualization and forecasting real time tracking of the space station and space shuttle and a massively upgraded Google Moon website Can a collaborative mission be far behind It s only a matter of time before Google will provide crater to crater driving directions MAXIMUM PG MARCH 2007 Good Intentions Run Amok Whether you believe Senator John McCain s proposed Stop the Online Exploitation of Our Children Act makes the Internet a safer more decent place or is simply the first step toward controlling the web depends on your perspective But one thing is sure Blogs and other such sites are powerful devices and the senator knows it Under the sweeping leg islation owners of commer cial websites personal blogs chat rooms and most any other site that allows user comments would be required to consistently monitor that input report illegal material and images and implement effective measures to remove any web page associated with known sex offenders Those who fail to comply with the regulations could face fines of up to 300 000 as well as possible jail time McCain s stated reason ing seems beyond reproach He feels that technology has contributed to the greater distribution and availability and some believe desire for child pornography and he wants to do something about it Yet while lar
10. t particularly impressive Unfortunately we had several issues with the camera We understand the push for smaller video cameras but the HV10 is so small we could barely operate its con trols Fortunately Canon uses a top qual ity optical stabilizer to keep the camera steady even when you re reaching for but tons slapped into its every crevice Canon also leaves out mic and head phone ports That s a big no no for anyone who wants finer control over audio It also doesn t help that Canon placed the micro phone on the rear top of the HV10 we found that the camera picked up our breath ing on occasion D oh There s also no hot shoe for auxiliary lighting the tiny white LED is inadequate beyond a couple of feet Additionally the auto white balance tended to be a bit cool under both incandescent and fluorescent lighting Battery life while not great wasn t bad We recorded around an hour of foot age at HDV res using a combination of the foldout screen and viewfinder Canon says recording at DV resolutions will yield slightly more time on the same battery That said you can t make a camera this small with this much technology with out sacrificing some features but the lack of mic and headphone jacks probably won t matter to the majority of potential customers who will treat this camera as a basic point and shoot And as always you can extend battery life by purchasing a larger battery It w
11. This is the first step toward decrypting high def content for use on all devices While AACS is used in both HD DVD and Blu ray formats the latter contains additional forms of digital rights management that are unaffected by this program In addition to the backup utility users need to obtain an HD DVD s title key to successfully rip the content INTEL S QUAD CORE GOES MAINSTREAM As expected Intel has introduced a quad core CPU aimed at mainstream users but apparently without the mainstream price As the second quad core processor on the market the Core 2 Quad Q6600 is expected to sell for 850 in bulk orders Intel s first quad core the Core 2 Extreme QX6700 con tinues to sell for about 1 000 and initially sold for 1 500 from some dealers The new Q6600 Core 2 Quad is the same silicon as the QX6700 but runs at 2 4GHz rather than 2 66GHz and has a lower thermal rating 105 watts versus the QX6700 s 125 watts head C h ead TWO TECHNOLOGIES ENTER ONE TECHNOLOGY LEAVES ONLINE MUSIC STORES iTunes Store vs Zune Marketplace W it comes to online music sales Apple leads the field with undoubtedly studied Apple s moves and should have learned from the iPod and the iTunes software and music store no one whatever mistakes its competitor has made else even comes close But when you consider that downloads The software and online purchasing experience that go hand in are expecte
12. included seem to have more passion than performance skills software can come into play to help out With it you can rock out and compose without really having to know what you re doing t doesn t matter if you want to be the DAVID MURPHY M AUDIO SESSION Get ready to open up your hard drive and say ahhh as the first thing you create with M Audio s Session is 3 5 gigabytes sees AAT a m dn baea am cm Wot wi iod ad fed ed fk i ved d a aE T TT Herder di o J t X Lj e t sm s e TM uu AT zum INvc eR Fe r B p z a 4 a A hoer i nd m mm Aim oi o f C them into their own com T Me positions Unfortunately Ae that s just about where dcc Session s usefulness is stops Unless you re 4 L tinkering with a MIDI file P Session is a pathetic audio editor you had best play your song s dynamics perfectly as Session doesn t let you adjust the volume of specific parts of a track You get a bunch of effects to play with but the lack of basics is rather surprising no fade in or fade out on individual tracks Even Audacity an open source multitrack audio editing program has that It doesn t get much more basic than Session but if you re starting with absolutely zero experience it could be worth your cash Tunnel in C4 N
13. that includes the wall washer a subwoofer and two satellite speakers with integrated lights and a 100 extension kit that adds the wrist rumbler and two fans If you want to go all out Philips offers the 400 premi um kit that includes everything this is what we reviewed minus the wrist tickler Philips has clearly sunk a great deal of time and effort into the amBX and we re not talking just about marketing hype The company has been working on the idea since 2000 It has developed a sophisti cated user interface that can be used to create custom effects sequences there are plugins for Windows Media Player so you can use the system while listening to music or watching movies and the company is actively courting develop ers to support the technology in new games Gas Powered Games upcom ing RTS epic Supreme Commander will be one of the first Maybe we would have enjoyed Philips amBX peripherals more if we d been in an altered state of 300 www ambx com marcy 2007 MAMI Ha fEVIEWS tesco JIETIZET Polywell Poly I680SLI QX Sometimes it s OK to be boring seen for review rigs overclocked to within an inch of their lives or beyond and those about as exciting as plain yogurt Polywell s Poly i680SLI QX comes from that ho hum school of safe and sane computing It s L7 to the max but that s oddly comforting Lately
14. 3 VALVE PARTICLE TEST CE Best scores are bolded We used a 2 93GHz Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 2GB of Corsair DDR2 800 Dominator RAM a Western Digital 400GB SATA drive a GeForce 7900GTX card and a 1KW PC Power and Cooling PSU for all three motherboards MAXIMUMPG MARCH 2007 This sexy black Abit board features a very user friendly BIOS In performance tests with the memory trimmed to the same latencies as the other two boards the MAX gets squeezed by the Asus and MSI products Although the race is close this mobo generally gets beat by the other boards That leaves it in a tough spot With its funky slot configura tion and premium pricing there are better choices out there in 975X land Asus s P5W DH gives you Wi Fi and more usable slots for a little more cash We are glad however that Abit is back in the hunt ABIT AW9D MAX Tweaker friendly BIOS is easy to use Realtek audio chip doesn t fully support EAX e 229 www abit usa com MSI P965 PLATINUM Among the great mysteries of the universe the Pyramids Easter Island the final season of Seinfeld you can also include MSI s RAM color coding While the rest of the industry has settled on mounting two DIMMs in slots of the same color to enable dual channel mode MSI thumbs its nose at the convention Instead the company forces you to put your RAM in slots of alternating colors to enable dual channel mode Since everybody else does
15. ANTI MALWARE 2 1 When it comes to combating spyware there s A Squared and there s everything else A Squared routinely picks up threats that other programs miss Rather than rely on heuristic scanning alone A Squared monitors for suspicious activity such as transferring data over the Internet without your consent and then lets you decide what action to take You can even manage active processes browser plugins your hosts file and cookies making this the most robust antispyware package we ve ever used If all you need is a capable scanner check out the free version 40 www emsisoft com en QUETEK FILE SCAVENGER 3 We ve all experienced that gut wrenching feeling that follows unexpected data loss whether by accidental deletion a hard drive crash or some other unfortunate calamity But all need not be lost thanks to QueTek s File Scavenger a nifty little util ity capable of recovering files in even the direst circumstances Already reformatted and partitioned your drive No problem File Scavenger can still recover those lost MAXIMUM PG MARCH 2007 files and it works with both FAT and NTFS file systems Play the part of hard drive hero as you wade through a drive with bad sectors or reconstruct a broken RAID array RAID O reconstruction requires an 85 ver sion of the app 49 www quetek com NORTON GHOST 10 0 A picture s worth a thousand words but an image can save you countless obscenities We
16. Autorun exe P Reinstall using recommended settin The Program Compatibility Assistant helps you solve prob lems with legacy applications that don t install properly lt application gt Setup ini Vista s virtualization saves the Setup ini file to C Users lt your_account gt AppData Local VirtualStore Program Files lt application gt Setup ini Note that the AppData folder is normally hidden If you need to make adjustments to the config files for a legacy app or delete a file you may have to access the VirtualStore folder manually Once your apps are installed if you re still having trouble getting them to run try the Program Compatibility Assistant With it you can force Vista to emulate Windows XP always run with full admin istrator privileges or even disable Aero Glass You can access the compatibility settings by right clicking the app s shortcut selecting Properties and clicking the Compatibility tab ep omm dum n The ba Be o Uh feet aod aedi oos TEN am c oom Pagi end oam Th cla oS m npe eo be Anse ei 4 er Oi bah fa M vA W n tape sep t be amp Windows Easy Transfer provides a handy summary of what files have been transferred to your Windows Vista installation After you restart your computer you can use programs that depend upon the settings and files you transferred with Windows Easy Transfer For example when you start Windows Mail mes
17. Console interface to display application security setup system and forwarded events You can customize and filter event views to help you find problems quickly The Reliability and Performance Monitor provides real time tracking of CPU disk drive memory and network performance and its Reliability Monitor tracks application failures hardware failures Windows failures and installa tion failures to generate a reliability index desees aeree MR ott te se Lis RE meee i P A Dine p 8444445 tp T mio OE Soe E E s 0s Mi te atu 4 AAi n la Due Sa Su Sa Vu V V 9 i V 9 9 9 9 The Reliability Monitor tracks system stability in terms of soft ware and driver installs uninstalls app failures hardware fail ures Windows failures and other failures on a daily basis je FIX THOSE PHOTOS Forget to set the white balance LOOK NO FURTHER THAN 32 BIT Why a install the 32 bit version on your digital of Vista if you have a camera Are your 64 bit processor 64 bit pictures too light Vista is simply not ready y for prime time Driver utility and shell extension right click support are still largely MIA Photo make E FIND THE WEAK LINKS The Control Panel s Performance Information and Tools tests graphics CPU hard disk and memory performance to help you find weaknesses in your hardware DO IT WITH DVD Want to share your digital FIRS
18. IEKASS It s big and beastly but the My Book is one of the better storage units we ve seen external hard drive we reviewed in November 2006 And in what we call the Steve Jobs factor or the one additional talking point that really sweetens the deal the My Book comes with a series of blue LEDs arranged in two concentric rings on the front of the device The inner ring tells you the total capacity of the device each light represents 16 percent of your total space The outer ring represents the unit s activity a handy way of immedi ately telling whether the unit is in standby mode in use or failing It s bigger than heck and louder than we like our external drives to be still the My Book delivers a solid backup solution a great doorstop and an aesthetically pleasing design DAVID MURPHY MY BOOK PRO EDITION II 550 www wdc com The DS 1900S gives you two 19 inch screens perched atop a single stand DoubleSight DS 1900S It seems like the perfect multimon solution for about a minute been running dual monitors to maxi mize their screen real estate we ve been longtime advocates of the practice ourselves Now DoubleSight seeks to meet this need by offering two 19 inch screens on a single stand The DC 1900S certainly looks cool and in a way it makes sense most folks welcome the chance to free up some desk space But does the elimination of a monitor base warrant the DoubleSight
19. Still loading the 32 bit version seems like a step backward Mostly want my Vista system to be able to play all the newest games Is 64 bit the way to go I haven t seen this clearly addressed lately Doug Short EDITOR IN CHIEF WILL SMITH RESPONDS Right now l m not recommending that users install the 64 bit version of Windows XP or Vista The problem is drivers there just aren t very many Vista compounds the problem by requiring signed drivers to run making the barrier to driver creation even higher We re sure that 64 bit will eventually be the norm but right now it just creates a hassle without really delivering any benefits THIS HEADLINE IS TOO EASY In your January 07 issue Gordon Mah Ung complained that he couldn t copy 10 315 docs to a thumb drive in a decent amount of time When I need to copy a ton of small files to my thumb drive first add them to a RAR no compression l just use the Store setting This usually takes about 15 to 30 seconds and cuts the write time by at least a few minutes on my aging Kingston 512 Now I can get out of the office before Da Boss wants more TPS reports Stephen Nabholz SENIOR EDITOR GORDON LUMBERG UNG RESPONDS That particular USB test is used to reveal how a thumb drive writes small files Putting the docs in a RAR file would essentially turn it into a large file write test Mmmkay It s all in the memo 14 LETTERS POLICY MAXIMUM PC invites your thoughts and comme
20. and the bundled InterVideo WinDVD BD software Using the DVI interface the content was completely off limits to us Using the ana log interface the movie played but in a minimized screen and at a downsampled resolution Say hello to the future of copy protected content folks This isn t a serious shortcoming in a panel of this size since we re not likely to use it for movie viewing But rest assured we ll be taking a harsher view of larger screens that lack HDCP going forward Decent overall performance Blotchy backlight lacks ergo adjustments 350 www viewsonic com SAMSUNG 206BW NEC 20WMGX2 20 1 inches 1680x1050 VGA DVI 4 S video Composite Component RCA Stereo TV We like the ViewSonic VX2035wm s shiny black cabinet but we could do without the anemic integrated speaker We don t mind that HP s L2045w looks less flashy than the other monitors here because it offers goodness where it counts most HP L2045W The L2045w sports the simplest no frills bezel of the bunch which makes sense since this LCD is part of HP s professional line What this monitor lacks in shiny plastic it makes up for in adjustability options A telescoping neck lets you raise and lower the screen with ease you can also swivel the screen from side to side tilt it to and fro and rotate it into portrait mode Options also exist for the screen itself via the OSD buttons on t
21. bad But we played dozens of games and enjoyed a whole bunch of them So without further ado let s roll out the meta phorical red carpet and begin the annual bestowing of props et s get this out of the way up front This year s Gaming march 2007 MAXIMUM PG gi MAXIMUM PC s LEAST OFFENSIVE IN GAME ADS GHOST RECON ADVANCED WARFIGHTER In game advertising is a necessary evil whether you like it or REGT MI LTIPLAYER not it s here to stay The thing is when done properly you ll barely even notice it The ads in Ghost Recon are placed on BATTLEFIELD E large billboards that are high in the sky Instead of drawing your attention away from the action they add to the game s sense of realism giving you the feeling you are playing in the real world Nokia we noticed your ads and we appreciate you not ruining our game www ghostrecon com ESRB T That s right rub your eyes There s no typo here We spent more hours online in 2006 with Battlefield 2 than we did with any other multiplayer game even though it was 2005 s war EA s release of two lean booster packs kept us hooked on the habit taking the good fight from the Great Wall of China to the suburbs of Middle America We were far from enthralled with its futuristic sequel s obnoxious in game ads and dearth of vehicles real men fly jet fighters Home s gt where the heart is and our A hearts are still bleeding on the streets of Karkand Mashtuur and S
22. car to charge 3 Sorry 4 3 been outsourced 4 Pm going to have to charge you 200 an hour plus expenses 5 You live near a school and my parole officer says can t be within 1 000 feet of one MEE AWARE 2006 BY THE MAXIMUM PC STAFF AND NORMAN CHAN It s time We ve assembled our crack team of gaming experts pored over the very best titles from 2006 and after much bickering name calling and grousing picked our favorite gaming experiences of the year Awards won t include any Duke Nukem Forever jokes We re not going to mock Jack Thompson Hillary Clinton or Joe Lieberman Nor will we take any digs at our console gaming thumb monkey counterparts And we won t even mention the debacle known as the PlayStation 3 launch This year we re simply going to praise our favorite gaming moments from 2006 Last year was a banner year for PC gam ing chock full o amazing experiences that you just couldn t get on any other platform And the PC proved to be the best platform for many multiplatform games Oblivion anyone We also saw a couple of new trends really take root The first episodic games appeared and we reveled in their too short glory We also saw the good and bad of micro transactions with some publishers delivering hours of gameplay for a nominal price while others gouged for tutorials and cheat codes In short 2006 was like any other year Some good stuff happened along with some
23. cover Kingston s K PEX 100 is a case in point this flash media player sat in the Lab unopened and unloved for weeks When we heard that this doodad not only outputs music video and FM radio but also displays digital photos serves as a USB mass storage device and plays games we consigned it to our Bass 0 Matic bin a place for gadgets that are crammed full of features but don t necessarily perform any one of them particularly well But now that the 2GB K PEX 100 which includes a free 256MB miniSD card is street priced at 125 we deemed it worth a look Once we finally opened the box we discovered that the K PEX 100 can act as a USB host which means you can plug it into your digital still or video camera and download pictures and clips straight into the player But the novelty of this feature wore off when we realized the K PEX 100 s two inch LCD is no larger than what s built into most cameras The fact that the screen offers poor off axis viewing and can take up to three seconds to refresh when displaying still photos is a further buzz kill After listening to tunes ranging from Alison Krauss s aching Ghost in This House to the Ass Ponys s raucous Love Tractor we concluded that the K PEX 100 is at best a third string music player Boasting a signal to noise ratio of just 85dB it delivers anemic audio so lifeless it wouldn t MAXIMUMPG MARCH 2007 renee I Lan amp ewer ee ee ao we F owe The main menu
24. e Flashlight e Keyboard and mouse e Floppy drive with floppy cable e Notebook or SFF PC e USB to parallel ATA adapter e Screws of various sizes e PSU tester e Cables IDE SATA power USB FireWire Y splitter crossover LAN and floppy e Jumpers e Motherboard standoffs e DVI to VGA adapter e CD ROM ejector paper clip e Zip ties e Thermal paste e Software e Earbuds LUXURIES e Spare CPUs e Hardware RAM tester e Soundcard e Network card e USB card e Headlamp e USB floppy e Write blocked USB to PATA SATA adapter e Needlenose pliers e Battery operated Dremel tool e Portable monitor e USB portable hard drive MARCH 2007 MAXIMUM PG 37 MAXIMUM PC s 38 Software Stat PC TRAUMA KIT Whether you re working to fix an existing problem or prevent future issues these five utilities can save a system s life KASPERSKY ANTI VIRUS 6 0 Any antivirus scanner is better than none at all but Kaspersky is not just any scan ner Packed to the brim with features we re most enamored with the hourly updates that keep you safe from new viruses almost as fast as they come out And while most scanners offer some form of real time pro tection Kaspersky takes it a step further by also detecting harmful incoming software before it can even be saved to your PC Rootkit protection is included too along with port monitoring email scanning and a registry guard 50 www kaspersky com A SQUARED
25. enable 3D sound at all but the rest of the game will work fine EXPLODING EVGA MOBOS You used the EVGA 680i motherboard for your 1 500 build February 07 and would like to know what kinds of problems you are running into with that board Many people are having problems with the nForce 680i and was wondering if you have had any Jon Novak SENIOR EDITOR GORDON MAH UNG RESPONDS The majority of the EVGA board s issues are related to overclocking with the RAM running at 1 066MHz For all of our tests and the six or seven machines we ve built so far which haven t had any problems we ve kept the RAM at 800MHz even when overclocking thanks to the nifty memory unlocking feature in the BIOS EVGA and Nvidia have told me that a new BIOS addresses the issue for 99 percent of users I m not running 680i on my home machine but I m getting ready to make the upgrade so can put my money where my mouse is MAXIMUMPG varch 2007 We tackle tough reader questions on Y Legacy Games v 680i Problems v Nerdopoly v Adrianne Curry v VT v AGP A MONOPOLY ON MONOPOLY Is that an official Monopoly board in the Nvidia and AMD on the Hot Seat article in the February 07 issue or did you guys just start up Photoshop If it s real want to know where to get one Billy Hanifin EDITOR IN CHIEF WILL SMITH RESPONDS Unfortunately the Monopoly board was the result of Photoshop trickery done by our own Boni Uzilevsky and it
26. even more noticeable with shade transitions appearing blocky and pixilated And in HD the panel s poor grayscale abilities were all the more evident Who even cares if it can play games without ghosting We would have loved for a bigger more feature packed version of the glorious glossy 90GX2 to steal our hearts Instead this LCD has left us bitter and cynical Bright as all get out and loaded with extras Expensive majorly flawed 600 www necdisplay com march 2007 MAXIMUMPG 63 reviews TESTED REVIEWED VERDICTIZED M Audio IE 20 XB Reference Earphones Size matters ne of the most commonly voiced complaints about earbuds is that they don t deliver enough bottom end those tiny drivers just don t have much material to work with when it comes to producing long waves M Audio s IE 20 XBs are the exception to the rule These earphones pump more bass than many full size headphones M Audio went long by going big the IE 20 XBs the XB stands for extended bass are easily the largest earbuds we ve ever seen they re more than twice as large as Shure s E4gs Their bulky nature can be attributed to the fact that each piece houses two speakers an armature driver for producing high and midrange frequencies and a dynamic driver to pump out the lows A built in crossover routes frequencies to the appropriate speaker and a pair of acoustic canals keeps the sound waves separate until they reach your ear canal
27. for my birthday since l ve been a pretty good boy deleted everything from the HD but when tried to install XP Professional the proce dure stalled After considerable investigation realized this happened due to a driver issue that pertained to the Serial ATA controller which you install by pressing F6 during the XP setup proce dure One problem XP will only allow the driver to be read from a floppy disk and this Gateway model came without a floppy drive Stan Evans Fortunately you have three options available Unfortunately none of them is as easy as just copying the drivers to a USB key in place of a floppy Thanks Windows XP Option one Buy Vista Microsoft s new operating system lets you load drivers from a floppy hard drive or USB dongle Your prob lem s gone just like your wallet as your cash flies to Redmond Option two Pick up a Microsoft approved USB floppy drive see http tinyurl com yyfc34 so you don t have to muck around in your case or notebook to install an actual floppy drive This will set you back around 20 a small price to pay for a successful XP installation Finally you can slipstream a Windows installation CD which will automatically install the appropriate drivers sans floppy disk The Doctor recommends using the nLite utility which will do a lot of the heavy lifting www nliteos com C IT AIN T SO My hard drive gave out so installed another one When forma
28. good fight made its way into Sin City we were treated to blisteringly beauti ful levels that included hostage rescue and bomb defusing scenarios inside three MAXIMUMPG MARCH 2007 intricately designed casinos and gaunt let style assaults on the Vegas Strip While the maps are very linear each large room has multiple entry points that set the stage for brilliant firefights The main casino floors filled with slot machines card tables and jackpot car give aways bask in elaborate detail One situation required that we set the team up at a door while we spec d out the room by rappelling down a window After breaching the door the squad took out marked targets but was gunned down by an unseen marksman who was hiding behind a bar A second try with a revised approach remedied that mistake In fact the game encourages you to try out multiple plans of attack a necessity when playing in the ultra difficult realistic mode With the emphasis on action the game does take some liberties with realism to intensify the pace Your buddies have unlimited ammo and grenades which is handy since we seemed to always run out of bullets after prolonged engage ments While you re not bulletproof you can recover from hits just by finding cover and waiting out the damage Similarly teammates can be revived when down so they re never out As a result in normal mode the game feels a little too easy at times which makes us wi
29. is bitching about them on the forums The company still has a website up with MPC reviews Please let your readers know that they should steer way away from this company Flyin B The Dog agrees Although Monarch Computer Systems web store still functions the Dog recom mends that consumers stay away from the com pany as all signs point to it being kaput Monarch certainly wasn t a newbie to the PC business According to credit information company Dun and Bradstreet the Tucker Ga based company first opened its doors in 1993 and employed up to 95 people at one point Monarch is largely credited with moving the chains forward on small formfac tors with its Hornet and Hornet Pro machines which let you run more powerful graphics cards even double width graphics cards at a time when SFF boxes could barely run an AGP card Generally the company had a good reputation and it usu ally handled complaints that were directed to the Watchdog quickly In recent months however Monarch has been undergoing a spell of bad luck Future US the publisher of Maximum PC filed suit against Monarch last year for 61 000 in unpaid advertising bills The Dog has also learned that at least one Monarch supplier also filed suit against the company over unpaid bills Complaints about the company on Internet forums also became more vocal last summer While Monarch had fairly good feedback on ResellerRatings com for most of its existence around Jun
30. it the other way it usually takes us an hour or two to realize we ve set the MSI s 965 board gives you performance and an upgrade path on a budget damned thing up wrong We know we sound like a broken record when we harp on it but MSI uses Realtek for audio and that company has been busted for cheating on EAX Even though the audio drivers report that they support EAX they don t and the result is asstastic audio in some games We re going to keep complaining until Realtek fixes the problem All bitching aside MSI s P965 Platinum has some compelling features for its price While other Intel P965 based boards in the MSI s price range give you but one x16 slot the P965 Platinum features two physical x16 slots spaced far enough apart for you to run dual x16 ATI CrossFire boards To get those features out of a Gigabyte P965 board for example you d have to spend about 50 percent more Of course would you want to Unlike the 975X the second x16 slot on the P965 board is a bandwidth limited kludge While the 975X is configured to give you a pair of matching x8 slots the P965 s second slot maxes out at x4 That limitation will cost you a five percent performance hit in graphically intensive applications That s not a terrible price but it s certainly not something to be happy about either In other performance areas the MSI board delivered very good numbers but was aced by the much pricier Asus board In the end
31. re of course referring to disk imaging and Norton Ghost works so well that ghosting has become a verb among techs After creating a recovery point incremental backups ensure you ll always have a recent snapshot to fall back on should your system end up on the fritz for any number of reasons including a software install gone bad You can encrypt your images too making portable media a viable option for the security conscious And should you need access to a single file Ghost lets you browse the contents of any restore point 70 www symantec com ZONE LABS ZONEALARM Let s face it The built in firewall that ships with Windows may offer Aunt Mabel suf ficient protection for browsing recipe sites and Knitting com but it doesn t give power users that warm and fuzzy feeling that third party alternatives provide While the Windows firewall guards against inbound traffic ZoneAlarm also puts the brakes on outbound requests halting programs from dialing out without first getting your per mission Cast an even bigger shield with the Internet lock which can be activated after a set period of inactivity or when ever the screensaver kicks in ZA even integrates with eBay preventing you from transmitting your password to phishing sites Free www zonelabs com Build a BartPE Disc The majority of calls you face are usually the result of an OS that s been borked by malware or general corruption One of the best tools to
32. s a cultural thing European men of all ages run around the beaches at Cannes wearing bathing suits that would get an American male laughed at Go to Amsterdam and you can smoke hallucino genic herbs at most any coffee shop with out raising an eyebrow Come to think of it Amsterdam s just 66 miles from Philips headquarters in Eindhoven Hmm Could that explain how this bizarre concept got off the drawing board into a factory and onto retailers shelves without someone asking Why Yes we re kidding but bizarre might be too timid a word to describe the amBX it s pronounced am bee ex by the way The wrist rumbler think force feedback 06060690 U You ll need only one cable to plug the entire system into your PC s USB port but you ll have to wrangle seven more into the control unit to get everything working MANIMUMPG MARCH 2007 The white caps atop the satellite speakers house colored LEDs and three more LEDs are in the wall washer control unit on the right for your wrists wasn t ready for prime time but Philips did manage to ship us an amBX equipped 2 1 channel speaker system a pair of desk fans a control unit with a built in wall washer light and the software to go with it We eagerly plugged the entire shootin match into our Nvidia test bed and much hilarity ensued The amBX concept reminds us of the lava lamp of the 1970s except this light show isn t necessarily random Clusters of LE
33. serves up a quick slice of your system s status are on your PC but not what they are or whether it is safe to delete them It goes without saying One program s junk is another program s critical file and System Mechanic lacks selectivity Still System Mechanic is a great solution for novices who want a one stop tune up solution and experts who want some additional tweaking power It s not perfect but hey even by itself apple pie is still good DAVID MURPHY SYSTEM MECHANIC 7 70 www iolo com We d like the K PEX 100 a lot better if it had a faster screen better audio capabilities and a whole lot more storage capacity excite a hyperactive three year old tokin on an Albuterol inhaler We can say the same for the built in games most cell phones come with better titles We d score the K PEX 100 even lower if it weren t for its USB host feature and the fact that its memory can be expanded via a miniSD slot These are good ideas that we d like to see better executed MICHAEL BROWN KINGSTON K PEX 100 125 www kingston com o eviews TESTED REVIEWED VERDICTIZED The Music Man Cometh With a solid program creating your own tunes is easy next Ben Folds or Rachmaninoff or just a simple starving street artist we understand When music s in your blood you just have to do something anything to get your work on a piece of staff paper Since a lot of people this reviewer
34. sessions of CPU Burn in to maximize the load on both cores of our AMD rig we let the machine chug for an hour before reading the temperature This gives us a solid measurement of the cooling unit s performance under high processor duress It also gives us a good indication of the cooling power of the reviewed product however secondary factors such as ease of installation aesthetics and noise also come into play in our reviews We prefer substance over sexiness we re looking for products that deliver the most cooling power How We lest Real world benchmarks Real world results Ce performance used to be mea sured with synthetic tests that had little or no bearing on real world performance Even worse when hardware vendors started tailor ing their drivers for these synthetic tests the performance in actual games and applications sometimes dropped At Maximum PC our mantra for testing has always been real world We use tests that reflect tasks power users perform every single day With that in mind here are the six bench marks we use to test every system we review SYSmark2004 SE This is an update of the SYSmark2004 benchmark which uses a suite of such common applications as Microsoft Word Excel PowerPoint Macromedia Dreamweaver Flash and Winzip to test general performance It isn t heavy in multithreading but it does feature multitasking tests Adobe Premiere Pro 2 0 We finally ditched our old stand
35. shine Extensions add all kinds of functionality from blocking online ads to serving up a daily dose of Dilbert car toons and everything in between To browse the 2 000 plus extensions available select Add ons MOUSE GESTURES Make an easy task even easier Navigate web pages with the click of a button and a simple mouse movement discover the web mozilla PERFORMANCING Blog your every thought with this hotkey accessible editor You can even drag and drop content from the web TAB CATALOG Is your browser overrun with tabs Tab Catalog presents a thumbnail of each one with the tap of a button ee a ee from the Tools menu and click Get Extensions or head over to http tinyurl com phdun Extensions are sorted by category mak ing it easier to find the functionality you re looking for or you can browse the most popular offerings to see what others have found useful Below we list several of our favorites but don t install the whole kit and caboodle and bloat your browser just grab the ones you think you ll use GMAIL MANAGER Keep track of incoming messages for mul tiple Gmail accounts without logging in and out of each one FOTOFOX Don t neglect your online photo album any longer Round up your pics drag and tag em and Fotofox does the rest DIGG THIS Can you Digg it We can and we can do it with a single click TINYURL CREATOR Make mincemeat out of long URLs
36. that sparks budding workplace alli MOST NAUSEATING EXPERIENCE WE LOVED PREY Forget space camp Not since the origi nal Descent has our ability to stomach disori enting environ mental twists and flips been put to such a test The unique combination of grav ity shifting panels that turn rooms upside down and portals that create Escher like spatial puzzles warrants not only special acclaim but doses of Dramamine too The best part about Prey is that its unconventional level design transfers to the multiplayer arena as well We had great times fragging buddies while running upside down and dropping grenades upward Take that gravity www prey com ESRB M BEST GAME ADAPTATION OF A MOVIE ADAPTATION OF A BOOK BATTLE FOR MIDDLE EARTH Il You ve got to love an RTS that lets you slay 10 000 orcs in a little less than two hours that s roughly 84 orcs minute in skirmish mode and that s just one of the reasons we loved The Lord of the Rings The Battle for Middle earth Il This point and click fest beautifully captures the look feel scope and mayhem of the epic battles in Jackson s films and Tolkien s books This could be the best movie licensed game yet and proof positive that coughing up for a major license isn t always a waste of time money DVDs and hard drive space www ea com ESRB T ances and collusion against the bosses In fact the office mode of gameplay forces rounds to run in r
37. the P965 Platinum is a competent board that gets you CrossFire support on the cheap but as Yoda would say a Kick Ass that does not make MSI P965 PLATINUM CrossFire on the cheap and good online update tools for drivers and BIOS Outdated POST LED technology e 160 www msicomputer com ASUS STRIKER EXTREME How much of a badass mother is Asus s new motherboard It s so bad that it doesn t even use numbers in its name Yeah there s no R2 D2 like naming convention here Just call it Striker Extreme or El Extremerino if you re not into the whole brevity thing The Extreme isn t just about marketing shtick though Asus has integrated some pretty compelling features into this nForce 680i based Intel Core 2 motherboard that we hadn t seen before The best example of this is the LCD poster Instead of providing a cryptic POST message the Extreme features a small LCD display that gives you info in plain English The I O shield features electrolumines cent lighting so you can see where your USB or PS 2 ports are And there are even LEDs that can be safely activated when you work around your PC with it turned off It s scary to muck with parts while the LEDs are lit but if you push a switch on the back of the board it cuts power to USB RAM and the add in slots so you can remove or add components without An LCD display that tells you in English what s going on at POST makes this Asus mother
38. the upside The Vibez is one of the few portable players that can handle the ultra high bitrate of music encoded using Microsoft s WMA Lossless codec Not a WMA fan Not to worry it ll also play FLAC WAV OGG and MP3 files And if you prefer to rent your music from an online service the device also supports PlaysForSure tracks We wish every player were as versatile The Vibez sounds terrific with the much better than average Sennheiser earbuds TrekStor bundles with it The player offers 8GB of storage capacity but uses a one inch hard drive in place of the more common flash memory This drive proved remarkably resistant to skipping even as we tossed the device around and dropped it several times onto hard surfaces OK now let s go over the Vibez s many downsides Although it s a half inch longer and wider than SanDisk s Sansa e200 series players its display is nearly one third smaller 1 5 inches versus the Sansa s 1 8 inches You can choose almost any image for background art but the user interface inevitably obscures it What s worse is that when track lists are displayed over album art or other complex images you can t see the art or read the track list In an all too familiar attempt to emulate Apple s control wheel TrekStor s engineers designed a gigantic rubberized wheel for navigating the device s user interface As we rotated the wheel with our thumb we encountered Auvi Phip65 Skype Phone Auv iously someone left the d
39. tore i ager Nr nt e an Im oco 00 T dm Inrs y comguten em a 7M Use the Group Policy Object Editor to enable BitLocker on systems that don t include a compatible TPM migra V meer grin eter w oe o gt miga PU eme 971 geur w rey SNO UAR S P ous eee m tap om M wes ewe owe eee jam erg Before you run the BitLocker setup program on e Coy Tw e lems lrede aod ene peN Ae Do Dm Seve wea Due phronn mat moe you need to determine if your system includes a Trusted Platform Module TPM chip if it does enable it in your system BIOS On TPM equipped systems BitLocker uses a PIN number stored on the motherboard or on a USB key to decrypt your drive so you won t be able to decrypt your data using another machine You can also use BitLocker without a TPM chip a USB flash drive is used for credentials but you ll have to tweak some settings in the Group Policy Object Editor gpedit msc Open Computer Components Administrative Templates Windows Components BitLocker Drive Encryption Control Panel Setup and then click Enable Advanced Startup Options Select the option to allow BitLocker without a compatible TPM To complete the preparation process click Apply and then OK to close the Group Policy Object Editor Once you ve done that you can run the BitLocker setup program in the Control Panel The improved Start menu gives you quick access to pro grams wi
40. unit s up firing subwoofer PHILIPS AMBX one color at a time red green blue consciousness during testing All cyni white and so on These lights don t cism aside we do think there s the kernel THERESE require a vertical surface to bounce off of a good idea here so we ll keep an eye EAM m puppe but they didn t project enough light to on this technology as it progresses We ll on hot days change the environment unless the room let you know if it gets any better for now was almost completely dark it s pretty damned hokey CHEMICALS The self powered speakers in which MICHAEL BROWN Its just not cool enough to warrant the insanely high price Philips has integrated amBX aren t bad the satellites deliver crisp highs and satisfying mids but they re nowhere near the realm of the best from Klipsch M Audio or even Logitech But we have a real problem with the subwoofer not so much with the way it sounds but rather with the way it s constructed The speak er cone faces up to form a perfect bowl in which to spill your refreshing beverage Even if you re a neat freak and never drop anything in there dust will inevitably filter through the metal grill to rest on the cone and inexorably color its sound You can purchase amBX systems in a variety of configurations There s a 200 starter kit that includes the wall washer control unit and two lights sans speak ers a 300 pro gamer kit
41. we ve been get ting SO many machines overclocked too far that the thought of a stock clocked boring box is refreshing We re just shell shocked from seeing too many unstable machines that can POST but then spit up something pixilated and oozing at the first sign of a benchmark or application Of course calling the Poly i680SLI QX a boring box shows you just how quickly we get jaded around here This PC features Intel s Core 2 Extreme QX6700 quad core processor a pair of 150GB WD Raptor 10 000rpm drives in RAID 0 2GB of Corsair DDR2 800 an EVGA nForce 680i SLI moth erboard and the pi ce de r sistance a pair of XFX GeForce 8800 GTX cards in SLI For most people that s fantasy PC hardware you read about but never own So maybe we take back what we said about this sys tem being boring One of the top problems facing system ately we ve been getting two kinds of HOOD BRAINS CPU Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 2 66GHz quad core MOBO EVGA nForce 680i SLI RAM 2GB Corsair DDR2 800 Two 1GB sticks LAN Dual Gigabit LAN Nvidia HARD Two 150GB Raptors 10 000rpm DRIVES SATA in RAID 0 and one 320GB Western Digital 7 200 SATA drive OPTICAL Sony CRX320EE Sony AW Q170A Two XFX GeForce 8800 GTX in SLI 676MHz core 900MHz RAM Onboard Realtek BEAUTY VIDEOCARD SOUNDCARD Cooler Master CM Stacker TX110 21010 HET Te DOWN 12 sec MAXIMUM PG MARCH 2007 builders and consumers
42. 1920x1080 the extra pixels are trimmed so the camera can write to the lower resolution HDV spec which is 1440x1080 Still that s a hell of a lot more pixels than a standard DV s 720x480 and it shows While it pushes the edge on resolu tion the HV10 plays it safe with storage Eschewing the trend toward direct to disc hard drive or flash RAM storage the HV10 uses traditional MiniDV tapes and can record an hour on each tape That s fine by us You can get a six pack of tapes for 20 Tapes are also a good medium for archiving Since they re so cheap you can just toss them into the safe after capturing the raw video to your PC If your hard drive SPECS 10x optical zoom 6 1mm 61mm F 1 8 3 45 minutes PORTS AV in out component out four pin IEEE 1394 mini USB for still camera functionality SCREEN 2 7 inch 210 000 pixels MiniDV DVC cassettes MAXIMUM PG MARCH 2007 Canon With Canon s supersmall HV10 available there s simply no reason not to buy HDV implodes you ll still have your memories on tape as backup The camcorder features a built in 3 1 megapixel camera and integrated flash that writes images to a separate MiniSD card The image quality is just adequate and the flash and flash metering could use improvement We were also bummed that you can t shoot images while you record video You can however shoot still images off the tape after the fact although the quality isn
43. 2007 MAXIMUM PG 45 oom E howe IMPROVING YOUR PC EXPERIENCE ONE STEP AT A TIME Optimize Firefox With a little bit of digging and a modest amount of tweaking you can turn Firefox into a lean mean personalized browsing n the march toward a better browsing experience you ve ditched Internet Explorer and joined the legions of Firefox faithful We have too but chances are our browsers look and function much differently from the one on your desktop Sure it s possible to simply install Firefox and be done with it but you d be missing out on the browser s core appeal the thing that sets it apart from the competition We are of course talking about Firefox s outstanding degree of customizability Nearly every facet of Mozilla s Firefox can be tweaked making this the tabula rasa of browsers Release your inner Van Gogh and spice things up with themes or become a modern day Michelangelo and sculpt a browsing machine masterpiece with the seemingly endless array of extensions at your dis posal If that still feels like paint by numbers you can get your hands dirty 00 56 in Firefox s hidden configuration menu And when you re finished tinkering ae SHBUPSMINITES back up your profile to quickly transfer your settings from PC to PC BY PAUL LILLY Add a Theme You don t need to be proficient at programming to alter Alloy and Doodle Plastik After you have installed one restart Firefox s appearance yo
44. 300Kb sec for example The Zune software on the other hand does provide more overall selection criteria than iTunes In both cases syncing the playlist to the player or burning the playlist to a CD was a simple drag and drop operation WINNER ITUNES th het iee t you can t play the song at all Apple at least allows you to back up your songs to CD or DVD But there is one feature of the Zune Marketplace that we d like to see Apple copy We dig the 15 per month subscription model that allows you to rent music and play it on both your PC and your Zune But is that feature worth buying a Zune for No way And despite the fact that we think iTunes is better than the Zune Marketplace we can t recommend buying music from either service Even if you can swallow their DRM restrictions as a necessary evil both services sell music that is compromised by lossy codecs MA MARCH 2007 MAXIMUM PG 17 ne E walchc C Q MAXIMUM PC TAKES A BITE OUT OF BAD LEAR gt Buster watchdog of the month MONARCH HITS THE WINDSHIELD After reading favorable reviews in Maximum PC about Monarch Computer Systems purchased a computer from the company in September 2005 and waited awhile for it to come wish had gone some where else now had problems with the hard drive so sent it back and received a 103 store credit had until February to use it but guess what Monarch has closed up shop and everybody
45. 56 US funds only Canadian price includes postage and GST GST R128220688 Postmaster Send changes of address to Maximum PC P O Box 5159 Harlan IA 51593 0659 Standard Mail enclosed in the following edition None Ride Along enclosed in the following editions B1 C1 C2 C3 C4 Int l Pub Mail 0781029 Canada Post Publications Mail Agreement 40043631 Returns 4960 2 Walker Road Windsor ON N9A 6J3 For customer service write Maximum PC P O Box 5159 Harlan IA 51593 0659 Maximum PC 4000 Shoreline Court Suite 400 South San Francisco CA 94080 Future Network USA also publishes PC Gamer PSM MacLife and Official Xbox Entire contents copyright 2007 Future Network USA All rights reserved Reproduction in whole or in part is prohibited Future Network USA is not affiliated with the companies or products covered in Maximum PC PRODUCED AND PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
46. A V receiver a video projector a TV or any other piece of equipment in your home theater it seems no hardware ever has enough inputs and outputs Take the 37 inch ViewSonic N3760w LCD moni tor we use in the Lab It s outfitted with just one HDMI input which means we have to unplug our media center PC when we want to use the monitor with another piece of HD video gear There s no shortage of HDMI switchers on the market but Accell s UltraAV HDMI Switch caught our eye because of its price tag It sells for about 100 The concept is pretty simple The device has two HDMI inputs at one end and a single HDMI output at the other Press a toggle button on it or the included remote control and the switch changes from one source to the other Although the switch doesn t require an external power supply a red LED glows to indi cate which source is active Screw holes enable you to mount the switch on a wall or inside your entertainment center and Accell provides an IR extender with a tiny sensor so you can keep the switch out of sight A patch of adhesive on the extender allows you to fasten the device to a convenient surface We found the cable connections to be just a little sloppy even with the HDMI cables Accell provided us so we d definitely recommend anchoring the UltraAV down permanently If the switch is jostled and the cables come loose the A V signal will become 7d MAXIMUMPG MARCH 2007 1 53 Content creators will appreciate the NuL
47. BIOS that s probably the best we ve seen in the 975X boards thus far The BIOS isn t perfect we can t stand the BENCHMARKS ABIT CHIPSET CLOCK SISOFT XI MB S QUAKE 4 1280X1024 FPS 3DMARK2001 SE 3DMARKO3 3DMARK05 3DMARKOG 3DMARKOG CPU FEAR 1 07 MIN MAX FPS PC MARK 2005 OVERALL PC MARK 2005 RAM PC MARK 2005 GPU PC MARK 2005 HDD fact that if your rig fails to com plete a POST it won t let you just reboot again and forget about the last problem No the Abit nags you with a Hey dolt You ve probably screwed up an overclocking run please go into the BIOS and fix it OK those aren t the exact words but the Abit makes you feel like your spouse is telling you to clean out the garage The MAX also includes a two digit POST LED and PCB mounted switches These aren t new features but they re must haves for this class of board What mystifies us a little however is the slot configuration If you re running two double width graphics cards the MAX accom modates just a single PCI E x1 expansion card That effectively eliminates your chances of running a PCI soundcard which is an essential due to the board s gimped Realtek chip Not that Abit doesn t try to do everything for PC audio The actual codec is mounted on a riser board to get it up and away from the electrically noisy surface of the motherboard but what s the point if the codec is funkified Bleh MSI ASUS 545 o ode te pt ae
48. CONSOLES VS PC REVISITED Your Head2Head article in the February 07 issue leaves out a lot in the consoles vs PC debate How about ease of use Every Wii game put into my console works But some top of the line PC games and for that matter some four or five year old games won t work without hardware upgrades and or software emulators How about comfort My console setup includes a big TV a surround sound system and a nice comfy couch My PC is set up in front of a desk with a mediocre monitor a pair of speakers and an office chair Come on know you guys love the PC but there s a reason most people get their game on with a console Dustin Stevens EDITOR IN CHIEF WILL SMITH RESPONDS Reliability is tricky to measure and reports are frequently anecdotal on my home gaming rig a fairly modest rig by Maximum PC stan dards can t really remember the last time had a problem getting a game to run On the other hand every few hours get a Dirty disc error on my Xbox 360 and I ve already sent it in for repairs twice Different machines are going to have different problems whether you re talking about consoles or PCs As for your comfort question there s nothing preventing you from moving your gaming PC into the living room and hooking it up to the same giant HDTV You shouldn t penalize the entire PC gaming experience just because you ve gimped your own setup UPGRADING YOUR LAPTOP I recently purc
49. Ds mounted in the wall washer unit atop stereo speakers and in colum nar enclosures without speakers glow flash pulse and sparkle to add context to what s happening on the screen The small variable speed fans capable of spinning at up to 5 000rpm blow air at you in a similar fashion Philips takes pains to emphasize that games need not be amBX enabled for a gamer to enjoy amBX effects but the experience is clearly well it would be a stretch to say better so we ll just say different when playing amBX aware games Philips sent us one of the only games currently sup ported the old school and piss poor THQ adventure game Broken Sword The Angel of Death It didn t take long for the effects to make their appearance in fact by the time the title character made his ghastly debut the fans had spun up and blown our notes off the workbench Wow Wasn t that exciting We had the same reaction to the lights We placed the wall washer unit behind our 23 inch ViewSonic monitor but quickly discovered that without a white wall onto which it could project its three independent sets of multicolored lights you couldn t even tell it was on We were only mildly more impressed after we stuck a panel of white cardboard behind it The LEDs in the speakers meanwhile glow and flash with varying intensities of only ST f Hey kids You can really fire off an amBX light show by dumping your soda into the
50. I system with five hard drives PSU problems the Doctor usually runs into involve the motherboard not posting and occasional crash ing The Doctor consulted with manufacturer PC Power and Cooling to learn what the top PSU problems are and found out that the majority of power issues are related to how power is distributed in a system Even though a high wattage PSU may be rated for a certain spec that power is often split into compartmentalized rails in the unit Although the total power the system draws may not overload the PSU s rated capac ity the individual rails can still be overloaded In essence your PSU may be fine but how your system is configured to suck power from it could cause failures It is possible there is noise on the line as the power load increases on a PSU noise levels may increase if the unit isn t a high quality PSU SHOT THROUGH THE CORE I recently bought a Core 2 Duo laptop heard about the dual core support issue in Windows and a search online turned up a Windows XP hotfix from Microsoft and a registry hack to properly configure WinXP to better utilize the additional core However after installation found the fix did the opposite to my laptop WinXP seems to have lost sight of the second core Chenyang Xiao There are a few Windows XP dual core fixes but not all of them are required and not all of them address performance per se One XP fix addresses a USB power leak issue that many inco
51. If sound qual ity is your sole concern at least the Phip65 does well in that department but it s hardly a dealmaker It s not a complete stinker the Phip65 is a device that looks crappy yet 72 MAXIMUMPG MARCH 2007 TrekStor s Vibez MP3 player would be a winner if it had a bigger display and a reengineered user interface _ _ DDR detents that required additional pressure to move beyond About 80 percent of the time we d push too hard and click the button beneath the wheel uninten tionally calling up one menu or another We respect the Vibez s agnostic approach to file format support we dig its price tag and we love the fact that we can add features like an FM radio or video player down the road It sounds great too But its usability failings drive us nuts MICHAEL BROWN TREKSTOR VIBEZ 8GB 220 www trekstor de This phone is uggz and we aren t talking about those cute little boots ultimately succeeds at its overall mission But there are better options out there so we re still not biting and neither should you DAVID MURPHY AUVI PHIP65 130 www auviworld com e eviews TESTED REVIEWED VERDICTIZED Logitech NuLOOQ Give your mouse a new friend ue up the theme to The Courtship of Eddie s Father because your mouse has a new best friend At least that s what Logitech calls its difficult to comprehend but nifty to use NuLOOQ naviga
52. OLARIZING CONCEPT In optics a liquid crystal is valued for its ability to affect light like a solid while also maintaining fluidlike malleability But a liquid crystal doesn t produce light on its own it merely redirects it a light source is required if you re going to use the material to build a display In an LCD light is directed at two identically sized clear panes of glass placed back to back The manufac turer outfits each pane with a polarizing filter on its exterior surface One filter blocks the MANIMUMPG MARCH 2007 DISPLAY SURFACE VERTICAL POLARIZING BACKLIGHT FILTER E E T HORIZONTAL POLARIZING FILTER CRYSTALS 711111 EZESEE TFT MATRIX Light passes from one liquid crystal molecule to the next along a helix Since it s oriented in the same direction as the second filter the light reaches the display surface to create a white pixel Apply electrical current and the helix straightens to become oriented opposite to the second filter Now the light is blocked to create a black pixel light source s vertical plane the other oriented at a 90 degree angle to the first blocks its horizontal plane A reflective surface is placed on the opposite side of the light source to bounce the image back to the viewer but at this point none of the light source makes it through because the polarizing filters block it on both planes Sounds strange right Actually this is where the procedure gets interesting
53. OOQ s control over most Adobe applications very few profiles included you ll have some work setting things up Ultimately the NuLOOQ will be most valuable for content creation artists It s not going to cause any artistic revolutions but it s amazingly simple to use and understand However before it will be acceptable for more general purpose use the software needs a lot of work GORDON MAH UNG LOGITECH NULOOQ 80 www logitech com Accell s UltraAV HDMI Switch supports HDCP so it s compatible with HD DVD and Blu ray players corrupted or cut out entirely We d also recommend copying the remote s com mands to your own programmable remote because Accell s wafer size clicker is destined to become lost in your couch cushions The UltraAV HDMI Switch can handle video resolutions ranging from 480i to 1080p and computer resolutions up to 1920x1200 One feature you won t find in this inexpensive device is a signal repeater but we think it s a good deal if you don t need extended HDMI cable runs MICHAEL BROWN ACCELL HDMI SWITCH 100 www accellcables com reviews TESTED REVIEWED VERDICTIZED Kingwin KH 300 King More like Burger King that s been sitting in your fridge for a month et s set the scene You just finished acquiring every episode of your favorite TV show and you re dying for an awesome way to get those files onto your slick new TV Browsing ar
54. OTION PROTEGE We knew something e_m was wrong with mem m l a O E Notion s composition program Prot g when we began to seriously consider using a pencil and some staff paper during our excruciating attempts to transcribe the theme from Halo 3 With just a little futzing around you can create some pretty convincing early 790s alt rock using M Audio s Session of wasted space On the plus side the program comes with a great variety of audio loops enough to fulfill a beginning musician s needs If you can t play any instruments at all then screwing around with the timings and pitches of the premade WAV files is pretty fulfilling especially when you start conjuring up some audio absurdities like a country electronica piece The program gives amateur musicians the chance to record tracks and then blend 80 MAXIMUM PG MARCH 2007 It s not that Prot g is lacking in scale The program comes packed with more musical expressions than there are wet eyes during a showing of Mr M AUDIO SESSION Tons of loops easy to use comes with a USB audio interface Lacks basic track editing functions can t export creations as MP3s 50 www m audio com For all the unnecessary key pressing Prot g will have you doing your first piece might as well be called Carpal Holland s Opus everything from articula tion and expression markings to those little
55. OVING YOUR PC EXPERIENCE ONE STEP AT A TIME Party with Profiles Firefox stores all your customized settings in a profile folder small enough to fit on a USB key so you can transfer your preferences to another PC To get started first enable view ing of hidden files and folders Open My Computer highlight Tools from the menu bar and select Folder Options Click View and check the Show hidden files and folders radio button Next navigate to C Documents and Settings USER NAMEJ Application Data Mozilla Firefox Profiles and copy the contents of the default folder Profiles also come in handy if you share a PC with other family members Profiles allow each of you to have a personal ized browsing experience without cramping each other s style Or you can create a custom profile for the kids that has extra security features enabled and avoid having your own setup filled with links to Nickelodeon com and the Ultimate SpongeBob fan site To create a new profile first close Firefox Click the Start menu and select Run type firefox exe ProfileManager and hit Enter In the Profile Manager click Create Profile and fol low the prompts Be sure to give your new profile a descriptive name such as Test Box or Kids and uncheck the box that says Don t ask at startup What s All This About about config Installing an assortment of extensions and themes is all well and good but this is Maximum PC and that means digging dow
56. T THINGS FIRST As photo collection with the ee soon as you reinstall your technically challenged rew gute i o Weder germ tnt tore nent TT applications and restore Use the new DVD Maker RS bed meine Melniaaeh your files and settings from feature to create a DVD Procamar AAO n 23 Windows XP you should of your favorite photos a SSIES m run a Complete PC Backup complete with menus a Oeeptenw Dese patemone te Wedrerden A JPL Ultimate Business and soundtrack and fancy t gp pcm UU X Enterprise editions only transitions Primary aod dui Dub dato monde to s SU to enable a bare metal restore of your system e KNOW THE SCORE Go to System STANDARD OPERATION Vista sup Properties then ports administrator and standard Windows Experience user levels Unlike Windows XP in Index If your system s EVERYTHING AND THE SYNG Want to synchro which a limited account is practi score is below 3 0 one nize the contents of external drives PDAs and cally unusable a standard account or more of your major media players with Windows Vista Forget the under in Windows Vista works fine for subsystems is slowing whelming Sync Center and download version 1 4 of everyday use We recommend most down your computer SyncToy from http tinyurl com 2meyw user accounts be given standard Time to upgrade level privileges MPC MAXIMUM PG MARCH 2007 MAXIMUM PC S What s in Here Tackle boxes make great storage container
57. TA To start the Windows Vista installation process insert the Windows Vista DVD and reboot your system Press the spacebar to boot from the DVD when prompted On the first dialog you re probably safe sticking with the defaults but if you need to change the install language time and currency format or keyboard layout this is the place to do it Then press Install Now to continue The next screen deals with activation You can enter the product key either when prompted or later Vista will work for 30 days without an activation key When it comes time to activate you ll need to use a key for the version you have installed It s important to note that you can t downgrade from Premium to Home Basic or from Ultimate to Home Premium without a reinstall though There s an option to automatically activate Windows but we recommend against using it in case there are problems with your Windows Vista install on this par ticular system Click through the rest of the prompts until you get to the hard drive selection phase If you are installing Vista on a brand new or empty hard disk select Unallocated Space on the drive you want to use and press Next to continue Windows will handle the rest If you want to use BitLocker hard drive encryption you ll need to follow some different steps check page 29 for more details If you re replacing an existing Windows installation you need BOOT INTO VISTA The first time you start Wind
58. The inte rior surfaces of both clear panes are coated with an electronically conductive polymer which is rubbed on in one direction to create parallel microscopic alignment grooves The grooves on the front panes are perpendicular to those on the rear pane The final ingredient the liquid crystal solution is then sandwiched between the two coated panes A FISH STORY This liquid crystal solution is just a few rod shaped molecules thick and the molecules themselves maintain an orderly but pliable arrangement all on their own not unlike a school of fish One surface layer of molecules adheres to the tiny polymer grooves inside the first clear pane and the other surface layer adheres to the grooves inside the second pane The molecules in the middle form a loosely wound spiral between the two outer most layers The first outer layer of polymer picks up the light as it passes through the first polar ization filter The light then moves from one molecule to the next along the spiral until it reaches the second outer layer of polymer having twisted 90 degrees by the time it gets there Since the light wave has now been twisted opposite to the orientation of the final polarizing filter all the light passes through and a white pixel is created Run an electrical current through the polymer and the spiral staircase of molecules will straighten slightly so that the final layer of molecules nearly matches the orientation of the fi
59. ainbow Six Vegas It s not the first game or the last to require SM3 either Splinter Cell Double Agent also requires SM3 hardware While Maximum PC lauds games that push hardware it would be nice if game devel opers could actually communicate to gamers just what hardware they will need to run a par ticular title For example the minimum require ment for Splinter Cell Double Agent is a DirectX 9 0c compliant Shader 3 0 enabled 128MB videocard While most MPC readers would know what that means the casual gamer or Timmy s mom certainly won t Ubi does list the supported cards but again that doesn t help the casual gamer The industry needs to settle on a better system to describe just how well a machine will play a certain game Jahn your best bet is to shelve the game until you get a DX10 part From what the Dog has seen you ll really want a DX10 era part for the speed anyway as Rainbow Six Vegas needs some heavy hardware to run at full throttle IJH WINDOWS VISTA SURVIVAL GUIDE 5 DATA WD TWEAK THE OS FOR AN vel MAL EXPERIENCE BY MARK EDWARD SOPER comi Pere Seng Sate toas ano mame acean ly 4 d ie gt et MANIMUMPG MARCH 2007 _ ae lt w Ae Wf Wt YN There are two ways to install Microsoft Windows Vista the easy way and the the easy way Boot your system and run an upgrade installation after Windows XP starts E upgrad
60. ales but such issues had no negative impact on real world content From photos to movies to text we were pleased with the DS 1900S s capabili ties Fast paced games also played without incident although we were left thinking that a single 24 inch screen would make for a more satisfying experience KATHERINE STEVENSON DOUBLESIGHT DS 1900S An elegant way to amass screen real estate Good screen quality Not the most ideal or cost effective solution 1 000 www doublesight com e EVIEWS sreo reviewen Canon HV10 Honey shrunk the HDV cam emember the first time you used R high speed broadband Or the first time you fired up a 3D accelerated game You ll experience that same excite ment the first time you plug Canon s minia ture HV10 HDV camcorder in to your 60 inch HDTV Instead of the fuzzy YouTube esque video you get with your current DV cam you ll get video that jumps to life It s like well it s like going from standard definition TV to high definition TV The HV10 itself is an amazing feat of miniaturization and cost reduction Four years ago a similar size DV cam would have set you back 300 more than what the HV10 is selling for on the street today about 950 yet the tiny Canon fea tures a full HD resolution CMOS sensor based on the sensor s native resolution of 1920x1080 1080i Granted that s mostly marketing fluff because even though the sensor captures at
61. all players of the game Howeve bringing the power up from the gan his living room was no easy task Fr start to finish Todd spent 600 hour ting us up the bomb The biggest challenge Todd explained was making the mold for the case He inflated a 14 inch beach ball and then cov ered it with plaster three times the plaster cracked and he had to try again Once the mold set he created the case out of fiber glass and aluminum flashing The fuse holds an 80cm fan to aid cool ing and the back of the rig is inset to make it easy to attach peripherals The teeth are made of balsa wood and the tongue is a CD ROM drive Todd reshaped and then painted pink He even built the drive mechanism himself For his winning entry Todd Eisner wins a 500 gift certificate for Buy com to fund his modding madness See all the hardware deals at www buy com and turn to page 92 for contest rules MAXIMUM PC ISSN 1522 4279 is published monthly by Future US Inc 4000 Shoreline Court Suite 400 South San Francisco CA 94080 USA Periodicals postage paid in South San Francisco CA and at additional mailing offices Newsstand distribution is handled by Curtis Circulation Company Basic subscription rates one year 13 issues US 20 Canada 26 Foreign 42 Basic subscription rates Deluxe version w CD one year 13 issues 13 CD ROMs U S 30 Canada 40 Foreign MAXIMUM PG MARCH 2007
62. an rebuild a drive power connector that s gone bad using pins we bought from Fry s and a quick release Molex from Vantec Software Saviors No trauma tech should be without a healthy assortment of software includ ing OS discs from which to grab vari ous CAB files Other essentials include Memtest www memtest org an up to date BartPE disc see following page a copy of Windows XP Service Pack 2 QueTek s File Scavenger which lets you boot from a floppy and recover data from dying drives includ ing broken RAID O arrays and the free Ultimate Boot CD www ultimatebootcd com See the following page for more must have utilities Scrappy Metal We don t know the technical name for that little slab of metal that covers the unused add in slots in your case but it sure comes in handy You can use the bent side to undo the PCI E graphics retention clip in many motherboards and use the other side as an ad hoc screwdriver to remove stock Intel heatsinks Use Your Head You ll often need both hands to work on a PC soa headlamp like Petzl s TIKKA XP gives you even bright white light while leaving your hands free to tinker 45 www petzl com The Full Load Out Maximum PC s trauma kit checklist MUST HAVE ITEMS e Hard drives both SATA and PATA e RAM all types e Screwdrivers of different sizes e Power supply e Graphics card e Canned air e Case fan e Universal CPU heatsink and fan
63. and a negative charge to one column and the transistor at the intersection will receive the largest amount of voltage and switch its associated pixel on If a transistor fails to switch on when voltage is applied or if it fails to switch off when voltage is removed the pixel it s controlling will remain either dark or lit creating what s known as a dead or stuck pixel respectively Backlighting increases the LCD s overall brightness but the source of this illumina tion must be small enough to fit in the limited space available inside the monitor s frame Desktop displays often utilize one or more fluorescent tubes at the screen s top bot tom or vertical edges laptops typically use miniature cold cathode fluorescent lamps for this purpose In both cases a diffusion panel behind the screen scatters the light in an effort to ensure that the display remains uniformly bright COLOR MY WORLD Black and white displays have very limited appeal so the vast majority of LCDs are color In these types of displays each square pixel actually consists of three rectangular sub pixels one red one green and one blue A monochrome display is capable of producing 256 levels of brightness which translates to 256 shades of gray A color display in turn can produce 256 shades of red 256 shades of green and 256 shades of blue to deliver the familiar palette of 16 8 million colors Combining all available colors produ
64. apphire Radeon X1900XT 256MB Soundcard Creative Labs X Fi Xtreme Music Hard drive Seagate Barracuda 750GB 7200 10 External backup drive Western Digital Dual Option Media Center 320GB Portable USB drive Maxtor One Touch Ill 100GB DVD burner Plextor PX 755SA High end LCD monitor Dell 2407FPW Budget LCD monitor Samsung SyncMaster 206BW A bigger wider screen with HDCP makes this our top pick Socket AM2 Athlon 64 mobo Gigabyte GA M59SLI S5 Socket 775 Core 2 Duo mobo Asus Striker Extreme Plain English POST display LED lighting and nForce 680i We want It HD based MP3 player Apple iPod 5 1 speakers M Audio Studiophile LX4 5 1 LX4 2 1 with 5 1 Expander System 2 1 speakers M Audio Studiophile LX4 2 1 Midtower case ThermalTake Armor Jr Full tower case Silverstone TJO7 Games we are playing Rainbow Six Vegas Supreme Commander Star Trek Legacy World of Warcraft The Burning Crusade Battlefield 2 march 2007 MAXIMUMPG 57 e eviews TESTED REVIEWED VERDICTIZED Philips amBX Gaming Peripherals Would you believe this took seven years to develop e ll try anything that immerses us more deeply in a game We dig hardware that breaks down the barriers between a fantasy universe and our everyday real world But we had to suppress a giggle when Philips first demon strated its amBX system of colored lights whirring fans and vibrating wrist pads Maybe it
65. ard def Premiere test for one that uses high def source material The test is mul tithreaded uses the GPU for transitions and is brutal It takes about an hour on our zero point to render a short two minute 46 second bench mark movie in the program Adobe Photoshop CS2 We start with a RAW photo shot with a Canon EOS 20D and apply a crapload of filters and other tasks from CS2 to see just how fast a rig can chew through the workload Because we use every filter we can the test is more fair and balanced than the usual cherry picking of Photoshop tests Ahead Nero Recode 2 0 Nero Recode 2 0 is one of the fastest video transcoding utilities We copy unencrypted VOB files to the hard drive then convert the movie to an H 264 file for matted for the Apple iPod s screen The version included with Nero 7 5 is the only multithreaded H 264 encoder we ve found thus far and is opti mized for dual core CPUs Quake 4 Based on the Doom 3 engine Quake 4 is a popular OpenGL game We run our test at 1600x1200 with 4x antialiasing and 4x anisotropic filtering Generally more robust OpenGL drivers yield better performance We use a custom timedemo recorded using the 1 2 patch which supports Hyper Threading and dual core processors FEAR Monolith s FEAR is a cutting edge DirectX game that pushes PCs and graphics hard ware to the limit We run FEAR at 1600x1200 with soft shadows physics and audio acceleration enabled using the 1 07 pat
66. board outstanding damaging anything More important though the Extreme gives you more usable slots With two double width GPUs installed there are still enough slots to add a PCI soundcard and a PCI E card The onboard sound which features SoundMax codecs is even passable There s no EAX support but SoundMax still sounds better than the Realtek parts On the performance front the Extreme edges the two Intel based boards by a small margin and comes up short only in FEAR which tells us something is screwy with the nForce 680i chipset and FEAR All three nForce based boards we ve looked at recently trailed their Intel counterparts in FEAR when run at low resolutions Everywhere else this mobo came up smelling of roses So what s wrong The price The board lists at about 330 and was going for 100 more than list as we went to press That s not Asus s fault though You can t blame the company for what others are willing to charge for such a damned sexy beast ASUS STRIKER EXTREME Plain English POST display and useful LED lighting Price are you serious MUMIE e MIEKASS 330 www asus com marcy 2007 MAXIMUMPG 69 e eviews TESTED REVIEWED VERDICTIZED Location Shifter Shoot Out New TV streamers set their sights on the Slingbox hen you re the lead dog every one behind you sees one thing a target Monsoon Multimedia and Honest Technology would like a piece of the mark
67. ces white while the absence of any color produces black LCDs invariably exhibit one major limita tion They look their best only when displaying an image at their native resolution meaning a fixed resolution corresponding to the actual number of pixels in the display If you feed a 1280x1024 LCD a video signal consisting of a 1024x768 resolution for instance the moni tor will scale that image up to fill its native resolution introducing visual artifacts in the process For this and a few other reasons many purists and graphics professionals continue to snub LCDs in favor of CRTs But most computer users gamers included find modern LCDs to be as good or better than the bulkier CRTs UJ L Hardware Autopsy Commodore 64 Personal Computer This installment of Hardware Autopsy is more of an exhumation since we took apart a more than 20 year old C64 Would you believe these computers sold for 595 when they hit the market in 1982 I O PORT CONTROL MOS Technology 6526 Complex Interface Adapter The C64 uses two MOS 6526 chips to manage 8 bit parallel and serial ports One also acts as a time of day clock RF SHIELD This metal plate prevents radio fre quencies from escaping the plastic case and does double duty as a heatsink for the CPU graphics chip and several other components CPU MOS Technology 6510 running at 1 02MHz The 8 bit MOS 6510 SOUND MOS Technology 6581 The was the successor SID Sound interface
68. ch How to Read Our Benchmark Chart Maximum PC s test beds double as zero point systems against which all review systems are compared Here s how to read our benchmark chart The scores achieved by our zero point system are noted The SCOPES in this column They remain the same month in month achieved by the BENCHMARKS out until we decide to update our zero point system being reviewed ZERO POINT SCORES C FRE 275 280 9 The names of the c FRO 2 000 sec 3 010 sec 33 benchmarks usd c Photoshop CS2 290 sec 80 fps 2 648sec 2 595 sec 126 fps 0 10 170i5 tps 411354 20 309 40 50 60 70 80 909 100 Our current desktop test bed is a Windows XP SP2 machine using a dual core 2 6GHz Athlon 64 FX 60 2GB of Corsair DDR400 RAM on an Asus A8N32 SLI motherboard two GeForce 7900 GTX videocards in SLI mode a Western Digital 4000KD hard drive a Sound Blaster X Fi soundcard and a PC Power and Cooling Turbo Cool 850 PSU Every month we remind readers of our Key zero point components The bar graph indicates how much faster the review system performed in respect to the zero point system If a system exceeds the zero point performance by more than 100 percent the graph will show a full width bar and a plus sign BEST or tHe BEST Our monthly category by category list of our favorite products New products are in red High end videocard Asus EN8800 GTX Midrange videocard S
69. d to account for one third of all music sales by 2011 hand with digital music players often get short shrift in reviews but it should come as no surprise that Microsoft created the Zune and it s a critical consideration for consumers This is particularly true Zune Marketplace to grab a piece of the action for anyone who might purchase an iPod or Zune because they both Apple has been in this market for several years so it benefits lock you into purchasing tracks from a single source In the event from long established relationships with the major record labels and you prefer to rip your own music however we ll also examine the is the far more experienced player Microsoft on the other hand has process for importing music from your own CDs APPLE ITUNES WWW itunes com found THE TOTAL CATALOG It s de rigueur for an online music service to boast mil lions of songs in its library but it doesn t matter if there are billions of songs in there if you can t find the music you crave ITunes has mil lions more songs than Zune Marketplace today but that situation won t last And when it comes to support for independent labels and artists the Zune Market place is superior We found numerous out of the main stream acts including the alt country act Trailer Park Rangers and the instrumen tal pop group Blue Star on Zune Marketplace but not on iTunes But iTunes also includes support for Internet radio and Apple has ex
70. device has three pls Pdl independent voices and each voice Which Was can use one of four different wave 2 GRAPHICS MOS used in everything forms The chip was designed by Bob Technology 6567 Commonly from the Apple Yannes who went on to found Ensoniq known as the VIC II the and Apple Il to the birthplace of the famous Mirage acronym stands for video SEU ate keyboard synthesizer and later the interface controller this stem j ES ae y Soundscape soundcard chip is capable of producing 16 colors at a resolution of 320x200 pixels 160x200 pixels in full color mode Any requests What hardware new or old would you like to see go under Maximum PC s autopsy knife Email your suggestions to input maximumpc com march 2007 MAXIMUMPG 55 GORDON MAH UNG Adds HD DVD Support for 300 Microsoft s cheap Xbox 360 drive gives PCs a cheap backdoor to high definition content haven t made any secret about which format thought would probably win Blu ray With its higher capacity and head start on burners Blu ray seemed like the logical victor until now What changed my opin ion Microsoft s external USB Xbox 360 HD DVD reader which costs just 200 Compare that to the 700 that Blu ray burners run Based on a Toshiba unit the Xbox 360 drive is read only and works only with HD DVD and DVD discs Setting up the 360 drive on a PC is a snap Plug in the USB cable and tell Windows XP to update online when it as
71. e e Double Your Pleasure Music Store Face Off Huu27 ita d ud This crazy display gives We tell you which online Three hot Intel boards A A you 2x the screen space music store is best Tested and verdictized i i Ah 1 i 4 MINIMIIM RS e MARCH 2007 The Ultima te SURVIVAL JP NOVAU 7 Install it like a power user 7 Tweak it for maximum security 7 Troubleshoot your Vista problems INg To MD hd RIGE a Ube AY rot VADE Te WE A t4 O Ab AN must have tools to solve every 3 PC problem All the details inside 10 99CANADA 74808 0 5 0 9 think not Please send feedback and pork chops to will maximumpc com Vista a We show you exactly how to survive the switch to Vista Il be honest Steve Jobs introduction of the iPhone in January set my nerd sense tingling at first It appeared to have every feature l ve ever wanted in a smartphone a massive touch screen good phone functionality portable IM and email a world class media player and a decent cellular data connection Of course there s a problem with the iPhone there always is with Apple gear For security reasons Jobs doesn t want the iPhone to be an open platform Users won t be allowed to run third party apps because they could theoreticall
72. e reviews of the company went into MANIMUMPG MARCH 2007 Got a bone to pick with a vendor Been spiked by a fly by night operation Sic the Dog on them by writing watchdog maxi mumpc com The Dog promises to answer as many letters as possible but has only four paws to work with Our consumer advocate investigates Y Monarch Computers v Kleargear com v XPS Gen2 Drivers the toilet The Better Business Bureau also gave Monarch a thumbs down for customer service problems and delivery complaints A tax bill from the DeKalb County tax commissioner just might have put the com pany over the edge After obtaining a tax lien in December for 44 000 sheriff s deputies and officials with the county tax commis sioner seized Monarch s business ejected the employees and locked the doors DeKalb County officials told the Dog However once we locked the doors a bank account was located and a bank levy was successfully exe cuted At that point the county was paid in full and the keys were turned over to management The Board of Tax Assessors has indicated to our office that they are not still in business The Dog spoke with neighbors of Monarch who said that as of early January some people were still in the space but they were apparently just cleaning up the premises What went wrong What put a PC company that had been in business for 13 years out of business That s a mys tery we may never have the answer to Nu
73. e and then assuming the content is not DRM protected burn that recording to a DVD is pretty damned cool Too bad it doesn t work over the Internet But when you re talking about being able to watch TV anywhere there s noth ing quite like watching a ballgame on your smart phone and that s where Sling still has a major edge Monsoon demonstrated this feature for us but the software wasn t available at retail at press time In our mind the ability to watch TV on a smart phone outweighs the benefit of not having to string Ethernet to a set top box and that cost the Hava Wireless HD one point in our final verdict The Hava Wireless HD s software offers some important features you won t find in the Slingbox but it doesn t support TV on handheld devices HAVA WIRELESS HD Component video input and pass through slick multi cast and PVR features Setup can be complicated and awkward only one IR blaster port 250 www monsoonmultimedia com PINNACLE PCTV TO GO If you re thinking Pinnacle s TV streamer looks an awful lot like Monsoon s it s because they re almost exactly the same right down to the software and user manuals The only difference is in the outer shell Monsoon actually makes the PCTV To Go Pinnacle just puts its name on it and provides tech support There s no point in repeating every thing we said about the Hava Wireless HD so we ll mention a couple of features we didn t cover i
74. e installation is a big mistake Here s why Windows Vista is no mere rehash of Window XP it s a brand new operating system in every way As a result to three times longer than a clean install and guarantees that your new whatever s wrong with your current installation Besides you re probak won t work with Windows Vista You re much better off with a clean install If you re worried about wiping your drive relax In the next section we ll tell you how to get your old system ready Besides if you re paranoid you can always buy a new hard disk with plenty of room for Vista for less than 100 How much system does Vista want A 3GHz or faster Pentium 4 or Pentium D a 2GHz or faster Core 2 Duo or a 2GHz or faster Athlon 64 or Turion 64 x2 versions preferred will work Add 2GB of RAM and a DirectX 9 videocard no wimpy integrated graphics please and you re ready to go MARCH 2007 MAXIMUM PG 25 FT RUN THE VISTA UPGRADE ADVISOR Insert the Windows Vista DVD and click Check com patibility online to open the Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor in Internet Explorer In just a few minutes you ll find out whether your hardware can run Vista which Windows Vista edition Microsoft thinks is the best match for your hardware what system upgrades are necessary to make your system compatible with a particular Vista edition which devices need driver downloads for compatibility bene with Vista a
75. e truck that ran him down Then they ll discover what happened at the crazy party he attended before the accident Keep that in mind the next time you do something crazy at a party Tom Halfhill was formerly a senior editor for Byte magazine and is now an analyst for Microprocessor Report XXMIARKM 2007 n 08 Bi QUICK SIT enun oF me cen GAME THEORY hos THOMAS MCDONALD Rainbow 5 2 K so maybe got this whole glorious future of console PC convergence a little wrong still think we ll see games that can be played on either PC or the Xbox whatever and this means more big budget games for an increasingly underserviced PC market It s the glorious part that s beginning to worry me and the cause of this latest concern is Rainbow Six Vegas Don t get me wrong R6 Vegas is a boffo bit of action gaming played it through on Xbox 360 because well all the cool kids hang out there since PC ports generally hit later than the console versions of games like R6 Vegas a lot even though it largely re creates the Rainbow Six PC experience loved sans everything love about Rainbow Six This is a splashy new game for an impatient new generation and the slow methodical simula tion style uber realism that defined the series had an anchor tied to its thoughtful bits and heaved overboard with only a trail of bubbles and some fond memories to mark its passing Gone are those beloved tactical planning ses
76. eaker but this one is even more of an argument against the practice than ViewSonic s version Its sound was pathetical ly underpowered even with the volume turned all the way up both on the speaker and within the PC s control panel There s simply no way this speaker could provide a suitable accom paniment to your TV or movie viewing to say nothing of its abilities with your music The screen tilts back and forth and swiv els on a circular base but does not change height The OSD offers all the usual choices in addition to various content presets Sadly despite its gamut of goodies the 20WMGX 2 s performance is seriously Samsung s screen is a tenth of an inch smaller than the others here but it s still our favorite NEC s bright shiny OptiClear coating can t mask the 2OWMGX2 s serious failings lacking Several shades of dark gray were indistinguishable from black even with the brightness at 100 percent and mind you this screen is already uncommonly bright Grayscale ramps which should progress in a smooth gradual manner were riddled with bumps kinks and banding And color track ing discrepancies were visible in scales of 32 or more steps These issues plagued the screen s performance in our real world tests In high res digital photos and illustrations banding contouring and the presence of dif ferent hues disrupted what should have been subtle shade changes In DVDs the effect was
77. eal time lasting up to six hours Those of you who can devote six hours of an eight hour work day to nuking your communist coworkers are our nation s true heroes www everybody dies com ESRB NR MARCH 2007 MANIMUMPG amp 3 a es al 44 MAXIMUM PC s GAMIN THE SECOND ANNUAL AWARD FOR HUMANE GAMEPLAY REY You guys love repeating the same Micky section of a game over and over st to defeat a challenging boss right either do we Prey tries a new tactic to reduce the death penalty and make ameplay more fun Instead of load ing your last save every time you die Prey has you play a brief minigame to restore your health and vital stats before the game reinstates your cor poreal body right back where you died Any time a dev adds fun where most games add heartbreak we ll salute them www prey com ESRB M THE JACK BAUER AWARD FOR MORAL CONFLICT SPLINTER CELL DOUBLE AGENT We ve played tons of video games that promised to force us to make tough decisions but most of them presented nothing more than straightforward choices between right and wrong Double Agent thrusts multiple moral quandaries upon you Jack Bauer style and forces you to discern differ ent shades of gray Should you kill an innocent man to save thousands of lives Only you can decide www splintercell com ESRB M MAXIMUM PG MARCH 2007 FINALLY PROOF THAT AN EPISODE 1 DOESN T HAVE TO SUCK HALF LIFE 2 EPISODE We
78. ed approach The beta version of Home Sever should be avail able by the end of March By using dynamic disks Windows Home Server users will be able to merge multiple large drives into a single data store and mirror that data so it s protected in case of drive failure all without a RAID controller MAXIMUM PS MARCH 2007 A New Way to Keep Cool The days of loud fans bulky heatsinks and messy water setups might soon be over he term ionic breeze might be associated with late night air filter infomercials but Maine based Kronos Advanced Technologies claims a similar technology might soon find its way into your computer The Kronos technology aims to displace conventional and noisy CPU cooling fans with believe it or not miniature air ionizers The Kronos device consists of an electrode pump that applies a positive charge to oxygen and nitrogen molecules in the air and a negatively charged collector electrode on the other side of the apparatus The flow created between the two will purportedly be strong enough to keep a modern CPU cool Kronos collaborating with Intel says the system is space efficient virtually silent and free of moving parts The company expects the product to be commercially available within two years In this infrared image of the Kronos cooler the dark areas indicate cooler temps 15 Sony Rootkit Comes Home to Roost Sony BMG a partnership of So
79. es for tolerable the device s audio support works quite nicely but that s hardly a saving grace With so many awesome ways to get multimedia from your computer to your TV the only amazing part of the Kingwin enclosure is that someone somewhere actually believed it was a great idea We re speechless DAVID MURPHY 80 www kingwin com m Thanks to the SHF1 your hard drive will never become a computerized Pop Tart one s typical drive usage we got our coolerless hard drive to peak at around 46 degrees Celsius When we tucked the drive into the SHF1 the tempera ture peaked at 26 degrees Celsius not only is that a great temperature drop but the SHF1 accomplished this 20 degree reduction without being overly loud In fact even mentioning the word loud in the same sentence as the SHF1 overstates the device s noise levels Sure there are other hard drive coolers with fancier fans and maybe an LED display or two But if you want something simple and effective the SHF1 is your frosty ticket DAVID MURPHY SYTRIN KUFORMULA SHF1 23 www sytrin com reviews TESTED REVIEWED VERDICTIZED System Mechanic 7 Professional Time for a tune up S Mechanic 7 Professional is a lot like a slice of warm apple pie It tastes pretty good all on its own but without a scoop of vanilla ice cream to keep it company the experience just isn t the same You should pretty much know what you re g
80. esign manual at home emember those boxy bigger than your fist cellular phones of yesteryear While Auvi s Phip65 Skype phone isn t as large as those elder monstrosities the device matches their antiquated design almost to the letter In short the Phip65 is an ugly ugly cordless phone It works well with a few caveats but a dressed up pig is still just that A pig The phone contains the standard set of features you d expect to find in a typical Skype themed phone you can make calls via Skype obviously but you can also plug the phone s base right into a wall jack if you want to use it with your landline connection as well The phone allows you to access your Skype contact list from a pretty hefty range we walked 100 feet away from the base and the phone was still going strong So what then is this unit s major malfunction It s more than just its ugly monochrome screen The Phip65 takes a ridiculous amount of time to charge we never got to full bars even after letting the thing rest on its stand for eight hours Also frustrating is the lack of interoperability between the phone s Skype and normal modes You can t easily migrate or sync up your Skype contacts with the device s shared and private phone books or vice versa The phone s menus are clunky and slightly cumbersome to navigate And we might be sticklers but the device is also somewhat awkward to hold it s akin to talking into a board that you re pressing against your ear
81. et the Slingbox has created Do they have what it takes MICHAEL BROWN MONSOON MULTIMEDIA HAVA WIRELESS HD Is Sling about to be outslung We like to reward innovation and there s no question that Sling Media popularized the concept of location shifting TV with the original Slingbox In fact we awarded the new Slingbox Pro a nine verdict in our February issue Monsoon Multimedia s Hava Wireless HD trumps Sling s product in some very important ways but trails it in others On the upside the Hava Wireless HD gives you the option of connecting a video streaming box to your network either with or without Ethernet cables addressing one of our biggest reservations about the Slingbox line And staying true to the HD in the product s name you don t need to pay extra to feed high definition video to the Hava device and pass that signal on to your TV While Sling charges 50 for an I O dongle Monsoon builds component video in and out connections right into the box The Hava is also equipped with composite and S video inputs and outputs Audio is analog stereo only and the box supports only one IR blaster We found the Hava Wireless HD to be much more flexible than the Slingbox but that flexibility and Monsoon s less than stellar documentation renders the setup much more complicated There are three scenarios for configuring the Hava Wireless HD In a wireless only configuration which you would use if your se
82. ete Click Drive Options Advanced to display Delete Extend Format and New Partition options Click Delete to get rid of the partition then select Unallocated Space and press Next to continue You re almost done After the system reboots you ll need to set up an account Enter your user name and password when prompted and select a picture for your user account before moving to the next screen Give your PC a name and select a desktop background then move on to the next screen and select Use recommended settings to enable automatic security updates for your PC On the final screen you ll need to select your time zone and adjust your system s internal clock before the Windows installer completes t mr heme pm oor Mm sor a om E tem e 5o 44 oe r 0 rec 2 ionu tes gt Use the Welcome Center to finish up your installation and make changes to your network settings check for devices that need drivers and personalize your display and audio settings search for not only a control panel s name but also individual functions inside the panel works very well If you want to change the background simply type background into the search bar We were very impressed with the usefulness of the search feature MARCH 2007 MAXIMUM PG 27 Moving Day INSTALL YOUR OLD APPS After you fine tune your Windows Vista installation it s time
83. etting with System Mechanic by now The latest version of the program again crams a ton of use ful Windows utilities under a single umbrella and seemingly no stone is left unturned with it you can do everything from recovering memory to nuking unnecessary files off your drive to compacting and backing up your registry Power users will undoubtedly appreciate the program s geekier func tions Although it takes a while System Mechanic s built in ability to trans plant an installed program to a new location in your system works like a charm And the applications that come bundled alongside System Mechanic such as DriveScrubber 3 and Search and Recover 4 are a great bonus But System Mechanic lacks that extra oomph the ice cream While the program s lack of printed documentation has been fixed by the addi tion of a handy online help system it would nevertheless be nice to have something tangible in the box Even a brief this is how you get started noob instructional card would go a long way System Mechanic provides users with a ton of information about the overall problems their computers have but it doesn t provide enough detail about what specifically is wrong and what specifically is being done to fix the problem For example System Mechanic will tell you some junk files Kingston K PEX 100 Portable Media Player One feature nearly redeems an otherwise mediocre device e hate to admit it but we sometimes judge a book by its
84. fter a distinguished career in the ser vice of pure PC power Socket 939 was laid to rest with full computing honors last December in its home state of Texas Born June 2004 Socket 939 s career wasn t without controversy as it replaced AMD s previous star player Socket 940 before 940 s contract was fulfilled Fans grew to love Socket 939 which housed Athlon 64 FX 53 to FX 60 CPUs and took us from single core to dual core trim Its final partner FX 60 said of 939 When people think of AMD s ass whooping days against Intel they ll think of Socket 939 AMD took the last Socket 939 orders late last year consumers who want the parts should buy them ASAP Socket 939 is survived by its siblings Socket AM2 and Socket 1207 Everything and the Kitchen PC HP unveils its utilitarian yet stylish computing appliance he living room might be the entertainment hub in most American homes but daily life real ly revolves around the kitchen So HP designed its new TouchSmart IQ770 PC as a digital data center that fits right in the galley This all in one PC melds some of the features of a Tablet PC including a 19 inch 1440x900 LCD touch screen with those of a desk top media center PC With HP s SmartCenter software you can walk up to the machine and utilize many of its features with nothing more than a stylus Tap the screen and you can call up the current weather forecast view your family
85. ge commercial sites may have the manpower and financial resources to handle the censoring job the practical ramifications of regulating virtually all activity poten tially including spam may be impossibly high for per sonal bloggers independent chat rooms and the like Moreover the question aris es Should the government tromp so heavily into one of today s foremost bastions of free speech Contact John McCain via email at http tinyurl com y7tm7z if you have concerns or further questions about this legislation FUNSIZENEWS DVI S DYING DAYS Its been more than a year since the Video Electronics Standards Association VESA announced its plans for a successor to the DVI display interface now it looks like DisplayPort might really truly debut this year In May 2006 VESA approved the digital interface standard which is capable of carrying both high quality audio and video signals as well as copy protection of course and in January 2007 the stan J Aa 4 dards body announced successful completion of its first plugtest The interface has the backing of major industry players including AMD which plans to incorporate DisplayPort into its Fusion platform sometime this year FIGHTING THE FAIR USE FIGHT An anonymous programmer going by the alias muslix64 has created a utility called BackupHDDVD which circum vents the AACS encryption used in commercial high definition discs
86. harqi B www battlefield2 ea com ESRB T E a CRASSEST CASH GRAB RAINBOW 6 VEGAS Surprisingly both the least and most offensive in game ads we ve seen this year were from the same publisher Ubisoft The ads in Rainbow 6 Vegas are both ubiqui tous and intrusive They stand out 444 BEST MMO FUR PEOPLE WITHOUT not just because of the cheesy copy INTERNET ACCESS but because their textures seem to b be fuzzier and of a lower resolution a z IVI 0 N than the surrounding walls Nivea Axe and Comcast your ads are 7 lame and they annoy us That is all www rainbowsixgame com ESRB M If you re stuck in the boonies with lin ited or no access to the Int rnet crying in your 7 O cish Armor of Dread about not being able to join BEST EXCUSE TO UPGRADE YOUR PC the MMO party we have FLIGHT SIM X good news Oblivion is the next best thing if not This award could have also been titled Biggest System Requirements THE best thing This mas Fibber as FSX crawls at near slide show levels on machines vastly l sive RPG has just about exceeding Microsoft s guidelines This might tick off many gamers all tt 2 best MMO gaming but honestly it thrills the masochist in us We just love it when a game elements free form gameplay a huge comes out that punishes world to explore tons of side quests top end PC hardware it gives rideable horses I 5uses and businesses us a new performance benchmark you can own score
87. hased an HP DV1000T notebook with the Intel Core Duo T2500 CPU and 2GB RAM the only major upgrade was a SATA Travelstar K100 I bought it mainly to create DVDs home spun not professional Since your January 07 Head2Head article compared Core Duo to Core 2 Duo and you used the exact same laptop for the comparison was wondering if my laptop could be upgraded to the Core 2 Duo I m pretty handy around the inside of my machine but can t seem to find any info on compatibility on the Intel site and of course HP is no help at all Hikaru Sulu SENIOR EDITOR MONTGOMERY SCOTT RESPONDS Oh me wee brains If your DV1000T sports the 945 chipset there is a good chance it ll work with a Core 2 Duo upgrade as the chipset was made to be drop in compatible with Core Duo or Core 2 Duo One way to check this is to see if HP offers the same notebook with a Core 2 Duo now If it does all HP probably did was flash the BIOS and start cranking machines out with C2Ds If you want to know how to disassemble the notebook look for HP s service manual for your notebook We were able to find a service manual for the DV1600 which we assume has the same chassis as the DV1000 and it explains how to replace the CPU 64 BIT VISTA YAY OR NAY l ve heard that the 64 bit version of Vista doesn t have any apparent advantages over the 32 bit version and that some hardware drivers and many applications lack support for the 64 bit version
88. he bezel or the bun dled software you can adjust brightness contrast and the red green and blue color channels You can also connect the display to your PC by way of an analog or digital port and two built in USB ports will accept your peripheral devices In short it s the kind of well rounded no nonsense package we can really get behind Fully ergo adjustable USB ports fine performer Minor color tracking imperfections 350 www hp com Its performance is similarly solid In our tests the screen produced a deep uniform black with virtually no evidence of backlight seepage Grayscale reproduction was also strong with smooth distinct gradations of shades even at the extreme light and dark ends although we did glimpse subtle signs of color tracking issues at 85 steps and greater Serif text was easily readable at nine points high resolution digital photos and illustra tions looked crisp and color accurate as did DVDs and games played without incident In fact we d say the screen is as well rounded and no nonsense as its trappings Being a professional model the L2045w is not equipped with HDCP and thus like the ViewSonic model is unable to play copy protected high definition content such as commercial HD DVD and Blu ray discs so take heed SAMSUNG SYNCMASTER 206BW In keeping with the prevailing aesthetic of this category Samsung s 206BW is fancily clad in black plastic and brushed al
89. ime phone number no fewer than three high res JPEGs minimum size 1024x768 of your modified PC and a 300 word description of what your PC represents and how it was modified Emailed submis sions should be sent to rig maximumpc com Snail mail submissions should be sent to Rig of the Month c o Maximum PC 4000 Shoreline Court Suite 400 South San Francisco CA 94080 The judges will be Maximum PC editors and they will base their decision on the following criteria creativity and craftsmanship ONE ENTRY PER HOUSEHOLD v contest entry will be valid until 1 six months after its submission or 2 February 1 2007 whichever date is earlier Each month a winner will be chosen from the existing pool of valid entries and featured in the Rig of the Month department of the magazine The final winner in this contest will be announced in the April 2007 issue Each of the judging criteria creativity and craftsmanship will be weighed equally at 50 percent By entering this contest you agree that Future US Inc may use your name and your mod s likeness for promotional purposes without further payment All prizes will be awarded and no mini mum number of entries is required Prizes won by minors will be awarded to their parents or legal guardians Future US Inc is not responsible for damages or expenses that the winners might incur as a result of the Contest or the receipt of a prize and winners are responsible for income taxes based on the value of
90. ion for Vista Business Ultimate or Enterprise editions It restores the backup images made using the backup soft ware included with those versions of Vista Windows Memory Diagnostic Tool tests all system memory offering three test levels and many customization options to help you find memory or CPU cache problems The Command Prompt unlike the limited PROBLEM REPORTS AND SOLUTIONS When you have a hardware or software problem Windows Vista captures information about the problem and uploads it to Microsoft for analysis To view problems and solutions open the Problem Reports and Solutions applet in the Control Panel Use Problem Reports and Solutions to view a history of problems and their solutions configure problem reporting list current problems and upload them and clear the solution and problem history When you upload problems you may be prompted to upload additional information to help find a solution Go ahead and say Yes You can review the details in case you re feeling paranoid tamos mr Lms 8 ao e i d wt ee o o n 0 e s w9 cmm sma coat amp w 5 e o Sep i A Pee fes oF lo ow a uta awa opm Boc me um 5 e m o ap rd wt one amp oc toy 2 2 pe ree b ae re ae ee ire ILL J BL gt e Ao a B E Set Pur e Ro Ow w 999 4 gt prn te e Lage o bee erer a Ue Jiga e e Review the Problem History to learn what issues Windows ha
91. irtualization support AMD V all AM2 procs have it On the Intel side all Core 2s feature it as do the Presler 65nm versions of the Pentium D and Pentium Extreme Edition CPUs The majority of 65nm Core Duo CPUs also support VT STUCK WITH AGP I need to upgrade my Radeon 9800 videocard in my Abit IS7 motherboard I m at a loss as to what AGP card to buy can no longer find Radeon X650 cards or GeForce 6800 Ultras listed anywhere for sale What is the best choice for an AGP videocard Allen Mejia EXECUTIVE EDITOR MICHAEL BROWN RESPONDS Kudos for sticking with your Radeon 9800 for so long you ve obviously squeezed every bit of life out of that GPU But it really is time to move on to the next level of motherboard We stopped reviewing AGP cards almost two years ago because PCI Express had become so pervasive It just doesn t make a lot of sense to sink another 150 to 200 in that architecture especially now that we re about to enter the DirectX 10 era If buying a new mobo is absolutely out of the question you can find AGP cards based on Nvidia s This quad core beast Virtual mi ake Find out mien mone 6 beet slayed oi ur benchmarks troubleshooting e imple buy for Intel s smokin fast CPU DirectX 10 delivers the most realistic graphics you ve ever se n Don t upgrade without reading our definitive review GeForce 7600 GS for less than 150 cards based on ATI s X1650 Pro are slightly cheaper
92. isn t available for purchase We don t want to piss off the Parker Brothers VIRTUALLY YOURS Your January 07 article Virtuality only briefly acknowledges the performance issues associated with running virtual machines How do I know which processor to spec out when engineer my new virtual lab AMD or Intel Do more cores equal better virtual machine performance You don t even so much as mention which AMD or Intel models have hardware virtualization support need answers Matt Shuter SENIOR EDITOR GORDON MAH UNG RESPONDS More cores definitely means better virtual machine performance but it s still a bit early to really talk about hardware virtualization perfor Yo Adrianne The computer generated model on the front cover of your January 07 issue looks just like Adrianne Curry Peter Brady s wife The resemblance is uncanny Her face is not her best feature though perhaps you can show a different angle next time John Slivinski EDITOR IN CHIEF WILL SMITH RESPONDS It was indeed a digitally created likeness of Adrianne Curry Nvidia hired her to serve as its digital celebrity spokesmodel for the GeForce 8800 series of graphics cards Naturally we couldn t pass up an opportunity to put a beautiful woman like Adrianne on our cover mance it s still in its infancy and is very dif ficult to test As for the CPUs that have hardware virtualization it s easier to decipher AMD s list for v
93. isp and clear and content of all stripes including games was reproduced without flaws While this was also the case with HP s L2045w Samsung s 206BW bested that model with a more vibrant lively picture In the end we re pre pared to declare this our new favorite bud get desktop LCD NEC MULTISYNC 20WMGX2 NEC s 90GX2 19 inch LCD has held a place on our Best of the Best list since June 2006 thanks to its fine performance and stun ning glossy screen SO we were anxious to check out the latest model NEC is aiming at gamers the 20WMQGXO2 It too features the patented OptiClear screen technol ogy which stands in stark contrast to the anti glare reflective surfaces on most LCD screens including the three others here The difference is truly dramatic and made more so by the 2OWMGxX2 s brightness rating of 470 nits units of luminance while the oth ers here are rated at 300 nits Colors look more vivid contrast seems heightened and images pop with a dazzling intensity Note however that this mirrorlike screen can suf fer glare issues in brightly lit environments such as an office The price of this pretty boy also stands in stark contrast to the others here but the extra dough does buy you a number of amenities a full complement of audio video inputs four USB 2 0 ports a built in TV tuner picture in picture functionality and a full featured remote plus HDCP support NEC also throws in a built in sp
94. ith its similar hardware smokes the Polywell but it also costs about 2 000 more That makes the Poly i680SLI QX a pretty compelling machine despite its benchmark deficit to the overclocked kids GORDON MAH UNG POLYWELL POLY 1680SLI QX Bling free with stock clock reliability Lack of soundcard leaves you at the mercy of pathetic Realtek audio MARCH 2007 MAXIMUMPG Bl e reviews TESTED REVIEWED VERDICTIZED 20 inch Widescreen Wonderland We explore the changing landscape of LCDs with mixed findings generation so too do LCD monitors Whether you re talking about note books 19 inch jobbies or larger models screen proportions have been stretched to either side giving us room to spread out all our various windows web pages and what not This month we look at what four of the latest 20 inch wide bodies have to offer KATHERINE STEVENSON ust as Americans get wider with each VIEWSONIC VX2035WM The VX2035wm is handsome enough with a shiny black plastic and brushed alu minum cabinet surrounding its 20 1 inch screen Someone with severe space limita tions might see the integrated speaker that spans the bottom edge of the screen as a boon but we re not impressed There s simply no way we would choose built in audio over a stand alone set of speakers Indeed a pair of cheap Labtec speak ers we have in our Lab far surpasses the VX2035wm s sound in terms of volume and q
95. ks for driv ers Although the drive is intended for Xbox 360 consumption Microsoft has slyly added Windows XP drivers to its Windows update site For my testing used CyberLink s PowerDVD Ultra which supports HD DVD and Blu ray formats To complete the puzzle needed a graphics card and monitor with HDCP support as well as the newest drivers used the 93 81 beta drivers from Nzone com a GeForce 7950 GX2 card and a Dell 2407WFP monitor on our standard Athlon 64 FX 60 test bed If you re not sure whether your hardware is up to snuff you can download a CyberLink utility to check your system at http tinyurl com ybhbwx It ll size up your m not rooting for anyone in the next gen DVD war but I Dave Murphy Cools His Procs Want to know how we test CPU heatsinks The Murph gives you the skinny ll be the first to admit that PC cooling isn t the sexiest beat here at Maximum PC At least have yet to impress a girl with the size of my water cooling setup remember that s david mazxi But I m not at all suggesting that we take a half assed approach to the frostier compo nents in the Maximum PC Lab If anything there s a bit more to review ing cooling gear heatsinks in this case than you might think The fun starts with a two step CPU cleaner Arctic Silver s ArctiClean which we use to remove any thermal paste from pre vious testing runs We then toss on a smidgen of Arctic Silver s MAXIMUMPG MARCH 2007
96. merous emails and calls to the owner of the company Richard Trey Harris were The now dead Monarch Computer Systems will probably best be remem bered for the Hornet Pro not returned The Dog was also unsuccessful in reaching other company principals for the inside scoop on what brought the butterfly down THE USE OF USB WEAPONS IS NOT AUTHORIZED In the December issue of Maximum PC you folks fea tured the USB Missile Launcher from Kleargear com Well ordered two from Kleargear and thought you would like to know the company pulled the old we have it in stock until you order it trick Kleargear sent an email asking if had received an email saying it was out of stock but had not Lame Jason Greenwald Jason was the second reader to chime in about Kleargear s inability to ship its rocket propelled toy The Dog attempted to reach Kleargear to find out what the holdup was Perhaps North Korean dictator Kim Jong il bought the entire inventory as stocking stuffers Unfortunately the Dog was unable to reach anyone at Kleargear com aka Havaco Direct Inc The company is new enough that the Better Business Bureau does not have a full report on it Could JFK s blockade of Soviet made USB Missile Launchers be to blame for Kleargear com s lack of responsiveness but beginning in September 2006 problems apparently began The BBB said it received eight com plaints between September and Ja
97. ministrative Tools gt Computer Management to make sure it s initialized and assigned a letter Once it appears in Explorer copy over all the files you want to save from your Seagate to your WD then right click and format the Seagate Once that s done go back and make the Seagate your primary drive and the WD your secondary drive Boot to your Windows CD and you should be able to install a fresh copy of Windows on your new Seagate drive When that s done copy your important files back to the Seagate and you re set PSU FIGHTERS I was troubleshooting my rig and ultimately deter mined there was a problem with my power supply I m up and running with a new PSU now but I m confused Before swapping supplies checked the voltage on the pins 20 24 pin connector while operating under heavy load All the voltages looked good and were within a reasonable tolerance i e 5 was 4 5 08 So how was the supply failing exactly Was the voltage OK but there was noise on the lines Was having voltage fluctuations but they were too fast to see with my DVM What is the MAXIMUM PG MARCH 2007 typical failure mechanism Any insight would be appreciated Glen Miller It really depends on what you mean by problem Is your rig crashing occasionally in games Not boot ing Is there a burned electronics smell This is all complicated by what kind of system you re running Do you have an ancient Athlon XP or a fully loaded SL
98. n that review Everything we said about that device applies to this one and vice versa Both devices have a built in analog TV tuner with a built in splitter so you can connect them to analog cable or an antenna and remotely tune in programming without interfering with what someone at home might want to watch We also like that the Hava and Pinnacle boxes automatically switch their video output to a 16 9 aspect ratio when they receive HD content Unlike Sony s LocationFree TV however nei ther box can currently act as a wireless access point on its own This is a Monsoon Multimedia manufactures the PCTV To Go for Pinnacle Considering Pinnacle is owned by Avid it would have been inter esting to see what the company could have developed on its own feature Hava promises to enable down the road but you know what they say about good intentions Integrated tuner with built in splitter Mobile client software not yet available e MY IPTV amp CAM ANYWHERE DELUXE Honest Technology s My IPTV amp Cam Anywhere Deluxe is one of the stranger SPECS HAVA WIRELESS HD SUPPORTS HD VIDEO SOURCES Yes INTEGRATED TV TUNER 250 www pinnaclesys com devices to land in the Lab lately but you probably guessed as much when you saw the product s name This little device not only streams TV over the Internet but also serves as a motion detecting surveillance webcam Huh Once we managed to wrap our minds a
99. n to the nitty gritty A wealth of advanced configuration options are hidden beneath the surface of Firefox and we know just where to find them Now would be a good time to back up your default profile or create a new one as a test bed before proceeding In Firefox s URL bar type about config and hit Enter This brings up a set of preference keys that should look famil iar to anyone who s ever poked around a system registry Don t be overwhelmed by the number of options we re just going to zero in on a handful of enhancements Let s start by removing the close button on inactive tabs Locate and dou ble click browser tabs closeButtons and change the value to 0 Next being power users we re going to change the width of our tabs so we can see more of them before scrolling kicks in Find browser tabs tabMinWidth and change the value to 75 or less Finally we want to train our download manager to clean up after itself without us having to nag Select browser download manager retention and change the value to O We ve only scratched the surface here but don t worry we won t leave you hanging For an explanation of what each entry does head over to www tinyurl com 8swbh and start experimenting Kiss Online Ads Goodbye We don t mind a well placed ad here and there but who wants to have their peripheral vision bombarded with a flashing banner or Cialis advertise ment when trying to read a website AdBlock Plus nukes these an
100. nal polar izing filter Since some of the light is now able to pass through a gray pixel is produced Increase the amount of current applied to the polymer and the molecular spiral will straight en completely Now all the molecules are not only oriented in the same direction they re also oriented in the same direction as the polarizing filter Since none of the light is able pass through the filter a black pixel appears LCDs with a small number of seg ments think of a digital watch or an elec tronic calculator have a single electrical contact for each segment However this approach isn t practical for powering each of the millions of pixels in a computer monitor In higher resolution displays the pixels are arranged in a matrix of rows and columns In early passive matrix designs each row and column had a single electrical circuit which addressed each pixel one at a time accord ing to its position on the grid The drawback to this approach was that each pixel had to maintain its state in between refreshes with out a steady electrical charge As displays became larger poor response times and lim ited contrast became significant issues Manufacturers developed active matrix technology to solve the problem with the thin film transistor TFT being the most common type These displays consist of a grid of tran sistors arranged in rows and columns over the polymer layers Apply a positive charge to one row of transistors
101. nd which currently installed programs eM J are incompatible with Vista The Upgrade Advisor warns you if you need replace ments or updates for any of your programs RUN EASY TRANSFER To start Windows Easy Transfer on your Windows XP system insert the Windows Vista DVD and select Transfer files and settings from another computer from the Install Windows menu Click Next from the open ing dialog You cannot have any other programs running while Windows Easy Transfer is run ning If you still have programs running a Close Programs dialog appears Click Close to close your programs You can perform direct transfers between old and new computers using either a special USB cable called an Easy Transfer Cable a network connection or a USB or removable media drive The easiest solution is an external USB hard disk which you can choose in the next dialog box You can also select a CD DVD USB flash memory drive or network folder Click Review each section of the report to make sure your system is Vista ready BACK UP YOUR OLD DATA Step two in the Vista upgrade process is backing up your old data While the Windows Easy Transfer program step three will transfer email documents favorites and other files and settings you should also back up any remain ing important files such as email messages from non Microsoft email clients layouts for CD and DVD mastering created with
102. nd restore the most recent backup to your rig Windows Home Server is the first con sumer version of Windows to use dynamic disks for storage Dynamic disks throw out the four E l 4 d d iy HP is one of many vendors that will be shipping Windows Home Server machines in the second half of this year partition limitations of the Master Boot Record MBR and allow you to mirror span or stripe normal drives achieving RAID like functionality without requiring a RAID controller In Home Server you ll run the Drive Expander which will allow you to add more hard drives to expand the maximum amount of storage available to the server You ll be able to add internal or external drives using SATA eSATA or even USB to the server s data store The final piece of the Home Server puzzle is media connectivity Home Server will include Windows Media Connect sup port so you ll be able to stream all the WMV MP3 and WMA content on your rig to an Xbox 360 or other media streaming device without having to leave your other machines running all the time Additionally because it s running Windows you ll be able to run other software on the server box including FTP and web servers We ve been running homegrown serv ers at home for the better part of a decade now and have managed to add much of the functionality that Home Server delivers using kludgy hacks but we re looking forward to trying out Microsoft s more polish
103. nners his isn t the first action game to fea ture Las Vegas or chaos in casinos the last Hitman comes to mind but it sure does it well We re not just talk ing about lots of pretty neon lights and faithful re creations of games of chance either With a revamped squad system and well designed environments Rainbow Six Vegas takes the tactical combat franchise to a new level of intense action Your adventures in counterterrorism begin in a Mexican border town where you re in hot pursuit of weapons smuggler lrena Morales There you learn the ropes of the new dynamic team control scheme The Rainbow assault team is now composed of a single squad of three members down from four which you direct on the fly with context sensitive commands Pointing and clicking sets the squad up to breach a room rappel down a shaft or find cover This simplified system replaces the preplanning stage which means you ll have to make decisions in the heat of battle We found this approach surprisingly easy to master and robust enough to tackle the wide range of con frontations throughout the game Whether we were slowly advancing behind cover in the face of a hail of bullets or rushing around corridors to flank the enemy navi gating the squad was hassle free giving The snake cam lets you target priority bogies for the squad to hit after rushing into a room us a chance to watch our own backs and get in some head shots As the
104. noyance irritation or even the slightest bit of we had to resort to interesting solution x to make things happy Enter Sytrin s KuFormula SHF1 hard drive cooling unit a marvel of simplicity that looks good and cools great There s really not much involved in cooling a hard drive these days but the simplistic SHF1 performs admirably Installing a hard drive into the firm aluminum enclosure couldn t be easier you pop the top and mount the drive with four noise reducing rubber stopper based screws Connect the power and data connectors and then mount the entire assembly in a spare drive bay and you re ready to rock The connector powers the device s two 40cm fans they re of the blue LED variety which add a nice glow through the SHF1 s front grill The fans spin at just 4 500rpm but that s fast enough to move plenty of air After firing up HD Tach a hard drive evaluation tool that nicely mimics DO YOU NEED HARD DRIVE COOLING It doesn t take a great deal of airflow to keep your hard drives cool how ever some cases need a little extra help If your case doesn t feature a fan or intake near the hard drive or if you want your rig to run extra quietly consider adding a hard drive cooler to keep the temps and noise down MAXIMUMPG MARCH 2007 All it has going for it is its looks When the KH 300 is finally up and running the display quality the enclosure spits out is laughable Pictures look horrible and the video barely pass
105. noyances before they have a chance to load Head over to Firefox s add ons page and install the AdBlock Plus extension Restart the browser then click and subscribe to EasyList in the installation window This configures MAXIMUM PG MARCH 2007 AdBlock with filters for many com mon ads though you can still manu ally add specific entries by clicking Tools and selecting AdBlock Plus Next supplement AdBlock with the Filterset G Updater extension As new ad servers are discovered Filterset G updates itself and integrates the new entries into AdBlock and it contains a whitelist of entries to help eliminate false positives HIHHH HIHHHH 107 HEC EIER up CX dS onm mam coe We love that Firefox 2 0 brings tabbed scrolling to the table but the default width leaves us scrolling prematurely By decreasing the size of each tab we can fit more of them into our browser window me 39 ae we bece abem mcos e om omg me em deum mo om oon mom c oo om Ads ooo c e d m n s 4 9 9 o ae Serr lt 2 4 sa MEL a owe Tg e r ee eS UR cA m 6 The one two punch of AdBlock Plus and the Filterset G Updater knocks out most online ads all on their own but should the tag team miss an online nuisance just add a customized filter ee Ww we Se eee Modernize Your Bookmarks e We re living in a blogger s paradise where social web browsing has proven to be more than a passing fad It s for this rea
106. nts Send them to inpute amp maximumpc com Please include your full name town and telephone number and limit your letter to 300 words Letters may be edited for space and clarity Due to the vast amount of e mail we receive we cannot personally respond to each letter PC HARDWARE FACE OFF Does so called fast flash memory offer improved performance over the stan dard variety How does eSATA compare to USB in the benchmarks Which CPUs reign supreme in the budget midrange and high end categories Next month we stage head to head hardware showdowns to answer power users most pressing questions BOF IY AWARDS Who says quality has to cost Join us in our annual celebration of the very best free and cheap software in the world CLEAN YOUR PC You ll be rolling like Felix Unger when you re through with our step by step instructions to achieving a sparkling clean PC We ll even answer the question Is it safe to put a keyboard through the dishwasher marcy 2007 MANIMUMPG 95 5H B rig of the month ADVENTURES IN PC MODIFICATION Sponsored by B U y C Q ni serious Bomb e re fond of the Serious Sam g but then there s Todd Eisner w really loves Serious Sam He knew h wanted to build a mod based on the but he wasn t sure what to make During a heated battle inspiration literally smog him upside the head Todd s inspiration was the Serious Bomb the epitome of Serious Sam ni for
107. nuary but that all eight were settled satisfactorily Over at ResellerRatings com complaints also began to pile up late last year About six people complained that Kleargear com never shipped products and stopped answering queries on the status of merchandise With Kleargear unwilling to contact the Dog the Dog has no choice but to place the company in the Doghouse and recommend that consum ers direct their hard earned cash to stores that are more responsive such as Thinkgeek com Thinkgeek apparently carries the same USB WMD but did not have it in stock at press time Thinkgeek does have the laser guided version available however Just search for missile at www thinkgeek com Woof NOT SO RAPID MR DOG After reading last month s Watchdog column was excited to hear that new drivers were in the works for my Dell XPS Gen2 but upon contacting Dell was quickly disappointed According to Dell there is no information on a Rapid Release Program for the XPS Gen2 only newer XPS systems Also even if there were a program Nvidia is releasing drivers only for the 7 series cards not the standard 6800 cards that the Gen2s came with This makes the entire article that was written in response to the Gen2 owner s question incorrect Patrick Arf Slap the Dog with a rolled up newspaper The Dog goofed badly on this one and didn t realize that Dell had changed the Gen2 s name between models The XPS Gen2 features a GeForce G
108. ny and Bertelsmann Music Group became the poster child for the evils of digital rights management when music CDs it distributed in 2005 were found to contain a rootkit The surreptitious program prevented users from copying music and also made their PCs vulnerable to mal ware The company has paid dearly in terms of public trust and now it will also suffer monetary penalties In back to back settle ments of two lawsuits that were filed on behalf of con sumers Sony BMG has agreed to pay almost 6 million to the 41 states involved in the litiga tion Plus consumers whose computers were adversely affected by the rootkit are eligible to receive up to 175 Visit www eff org sony to learn more about the settlement and how to file an individual claim 44 15 15 FAST FORWARD TOM HALFHILL Tz Is Nothing oecret Fe centuries people have kept diaries giving us valuable insights into historical events and ordinary life in times past Samuel Pepys wrote a harrowing account of the Great Fire of London in 1666 James Boswell chronicled upper class life in Europe in the 1700s Anne Frank recorded her tragedy as a young Jew during the Holocaust Traditionally diaries were very private kept under lock and key Boswell s journals weren t discovered until the 1920s The subjects of a diary didn t know what the diarist wrote about them But in the digital age that s changing Millions of pe
109. o 6800 Ultra while the XPS M170 fea tures the GeForce Go 7800 GTX Although Dell will likely introduce a new driver for your Gen2 when hell opens up an outdoor ice rink you can get unofficial drivers from www laptopvideo2go com You ll lose some hot key functionality but at least you ll get more current driver support The Dog apologizes for the goof and for play ing with your emotions SOMEWHERE OVER THE RAINBOW I bought Ubisoft s Rainbow Six Vegas recently and tried installing it Every PC game l ve purchased in the last couple of years has run smoothly on my ATI Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition until now It turns out that this particular game supports only videocards with Shader 3 0 and my card can handle only Shader 2 0 My fault for not checking the requirements However according to many forums lam not the only one that is disappointed at being shut out of playing this title Buying a compatible videocard for just a single game doesn t make a lot of sense especially when everyone should be hold ing out for the new Vista and DirectX 10 hardware Is there a possibility that Ubisoft will release a patch to make Shader 2 0 cards compatible Or do have to shelve this game until my next big upgrade Jahn Myklebust Click your heels together and say There s no place like DirectX 10 You re likely out of luck Jahn Ubisoft hasn t chiseled it in stone but you are unlikely to ever see Shader Model 2 0 support for R
110. ople are exposing their diaries to the world on websites blogs and MySpace pages Result embarrassments scandals and law suits Young people have lost scholarships and jobs after posting sordid tales of wild behavior often complete with revealing photos and videos Friends caught in these public exposes have challenged their unflattering depictions raising legal questions about libel and privacy It s going to get wilder Improved technol ogy makes it possible to keep digital records of our lives around the clock Cell phone cameras are going everywhere including restrooms and locker rooms Soon it will be impossible to know if a camera is concealed in a wristwatch or piece of jewelry have a tiny MP3 player with a built in microphone that can record 18 hours of audio to just 256MB of memory Nobody would notice the recorder in my pocket If wanted to could continuously record my whole waking day every day A year s worth of my life would fit on a 100GB hard drive not large by today s standards And 100GB of webspace costs less than 100 a year so could share my record ings with the world Before long it will be easy and economical for anyone to keep a nonstop audio video diary of their entire life posting daily updates online When an airliner crashes investigators retrieve the black box data recorder to analyze what happened Someday police will retrieve an accident victim s personal data recorder to find th
111. ould be better if we didn t have these kvetches but we think the HV10 s pluses far outweigh its minuses GORDON MAH UNG Incredibly small one of the lowest priced HDV cams available A bit too small quirky mic placement e 1 500 www canon com e eviews TESTED REVIEWED VERDICTIZED Mobo Madness You have your Core 2 CPU now find the right home for it emember the days when you could R buy a motherboard that actually had a picture of a motherboard on the box Today there s a spaceship bris tling with weapons a samurai or a gun so big it would make Inspector Callahan blush This month we cut through the marketing puffery to find out which board is fastest in a battle royal with cheese between Intel s 965 its 975X and the still hot nForce 680i GORDON MAH UNG ABIT AW9D MAX When Abit hit the financial skids and out sourced its motherboard production enthu siasts turned their mirrors around broke out the whiskey and prepared to mourn Well mourn no more Abit is still kicking and pumping out products for enthusiasts Based on the older Intel 975X chipset the AWO9SD MAX is an interesting blend of future looking features The parallel and serial ports were nixed and Abit relocated the PS 2 ports to make room for a fat heatsink mounted to the voltage regulators A heat pipe black PCB and blue LED perimeter lighting also scream enthusiast as does a tweaker friendly
112. ound the web for a solution you stumble across Kingwin s KH 300 an external enclosure that allows you to play mul timedia files on a hard drive directly to your TV You couldn t be happier Fast forward to the climax You re wrong Kingwin s enclosure is marred by a number of flaws from the device s overall design to its ugly menu system to the absurdity of its controls Add in its inability to play more than a few types of video media some AVIs MPEG DivX and VCDs and you have a doorstop not an innovation Putting files on the device is frustrating For starters you get just a drive enclosure no drive That wasn t so bad until we realized that the KH 300 works with only 2 5 inch drives which no average computer user will ever have lying around Transferring files is done strictly via USB 2 0 which is fine save for the counterintuitive fact that you have to turn the device off for Windows to recognize it as an external drive Connect the device to a TV and you ll first get absolutely nothing Apparently the enclosure is preconfigured to output video through only the VGA cable The only mention of this in the manual is a brief head nod to the fact that you can change the video output using the v mode but ton on the remote control Not Helpful oytrin KuFormula SHF1 It may not look sexy but it delivers big cooling power t s a rarity in the Maximum PC Lab that a product comes in and performs without an
113. ows Vista it takes a few minutes to calculate the Windows Experience Index which will give you a very rudimentary idea of how your computer performs The Experience Index measures your CPU memory disk drive and graphics performance Your first stop in Vista should be the System Properties control panel where you ll find the Device Manager To open the Device Manager click the Start menu go to Control Panel and click System and Maintenance then click System Next click the Device Manager which is on the top left portion of the screen Should you see any exclamation points in the Device Manager window you ll need to determine what the problem is Usually getting incompatible hardware working is as easy as download ing and installing a new driver but it can be more complex than that When you re done you should check your computer s Windows Experience Index base score to make sure everything in your system is working as expected While we re in the Control Panel it s worth mentioning that many of the functions you ve grown accustomed to have been moved around However the redesigned inter face actually makes sense The new design when paired with the kick ass search engine which allows you to You ll need to format your existing Windows XP installation to make room for Windows Vista to delete the old partition first To do that select the drive with your installation and click the partition you want to del
114. panded far beyond music to offer pod casts Hollywood movies and broadcast TV shows If music is all you care about you might disdain the MTVing of iTunes but the service still deserves the nod in this category WINNER ITUNES MAXIMUM PG MARCH 2007 Bh pe ge Dee ghe cm ore 0x e 7e 7 779 eee as es a oe e ebe ripen i i eu am tomm BY MICHAEL BROWN j ee I re m wane eer fround2 AUDIO QUALITY OF PURCHASED TRACKS Theoretically the tracks sold on Zune Marketplace are superior because they re en coded at 192Kb sec WMA versus iTunes 128Kb sec AAC If you can hear the difference between a WMA file and an AAC file encoded at the same bitrate congratulations most people won t be able to tell the difference between tracks encoded at 128Kb sec from those encoded at 192Kb sec Compare a track recorded at 192Kb sec to the same song recorded using just about any lossless codec on the other hand and we d be shocked if you couldn t hear the difference Unfortunately neither iTunes nor Zune Marketplace sells songs encoded with a lossless codec in fact the Zune won t even play songs encoded in Microsoft s own WMA Lossless codec WINNER NEITHER THE PURCHASING EXPERIENCE Leave it to Microsoft to decide that there s a better way to pay for merchandise than us ing dollars and cents In order to buy music from Zune Market place you must first bu
115. pany its marketing department would like you to think it is Look at the iTunes Music Store Apple ties the songs sold at the iTunes Music Store to its player Apple s you can play our songs anywhere you like as long as you use our hardware Fairplay DRM scheme which it won t license to other vendors completely removes the customer s choice once he s built a music collection l m concerned that the iPhone is just going to be another Apple monopoly designed to lock you into Jobs proprietary platform Like any good drug trying it seems relatively innocuous but pretty soon you re hooked f JA 3 i Ww Gaming Awards Our annual awards pick the best moments from the year s games Will your favorite make the cut Trauma Kit Our super toolkit will let you take your repair game on the road MARCH 2007 MAXIMUM PG MAXIMUM PG EDITORIAL EDITOR IN CHIEF Will Smith MANAGING EDITOR Tom Edwards EXECUTIVE EDITOR Michael Brown SENIOR EDITOR Gordon Mah Ung SENIOR EDITOR Katherine Stevenson ASSOCIATE EDITOR David Murphy SPECIAL PROJECTS EDITOR Steve Klett CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Norman Chan Gord Goble Tom Halfhill Paul Lilly Tom McDonald Mark Edward Soper EDITOR EMERITUS Andrew Sanchez ART ART DIRECTOR Natalie Jeday ASSOCIATE ART DIRECTOR Boni Uzilevsky PHOTO EDITOR Mark Madeo ASSOCIATE PHOTOGRAPHER Samantha Berg BUSINESS PUBLISHER Anthony Danzi 646 723 5453 adanzifafutureu
116. perheroes from the Marvel universe but more than 100 familiar Marvel faces make cameos throughout the game It s another reason for geeks to stay indoors sunlight is overrated anyway WWW marvelultimatealliance com ESRB T OK we admit it We thought the WWII gaming horse had been beaten well beyond a bloody pulp and was now best reserved for glue production Company of Heroes proved us wrong dead wrong Extremely clever attack from anywhere mission design read no choke points and over the top sound and pyrotechnics had us capping Nazis with unbridled joy all over again Heck Company of Heroes even had nongamer editors playing We can t wait for the add ons www companyofheroesgame com ESRB M MPG FABULOU T SHORTER THAN THE MOVIE The eponymous movie was an amazing spectacle of grandiose cinema and its game counterpart performs admirably as a complement to the man vs beast mceplay is split between playing as Jack Driscoll leading the daring film crew through Skull Island ong gracefully swinging through the jungle and besting ferocious dinosaurs For those of you who enjoyed the movie us included King Kong clued us in to what was happening behind the silver screen story filling in some plot holes alo the way The brief adventure is capped off with an amp te ending to the movie revising the Kong c Y fans who couldn t stand to see the big guy ww kingkonggame com ESRB T marcy
117. pi cal but the tuner provides the only means of changing channels Unlike all the other streamers we ve reviewed this one doesn t come with an IR blaster for controlling a set top box or any other device If you have digital cable or satellite TV you ll connect the set top box s analog out puts to a provided gang of stub cables con sisting of stereo audio and composite and S video inputs on one end and a mini USB connector on the other Video is streamed using the MPEG 4 codec only Software pretty much limits the web cam to surveillance applications monitor ing up to three cameras You can set it up so that when it detects motion it records video to your hard drive in MPEG 1 for mat sends you a clip or a single frame via email or even burns the video to DVD But it doesn t have a mic or an input for one so it can t record audio and is therefore not suitable for other applications such as online video chats All in all this is a weird little product MY IPTV amp CAM ANYWHERE Inexpensive No signal pass through and no IR blaster video streams are MPEG 4 only No Wi Fi 150 www honestech com vaca 2007 MAXIMUMPG 71 reviews TESTED REVIEWED VERDICTIZED TrekStor Vibez 8GB MP3 Player Half full or half empty Toes Vibez media player has several innovative features we really dig unfortunately these innovations are undone by a few less desirable traits Let s start with
118. rab it and go PC trauma kit these items should enable you to fix the majority of PC problems you ll face in the field If you can t fix a computer crisis with this gear you ll need to medevac that PC to your home for more serious tinkering vaecn 2007 MAKIMUMPE 35 36 So you don t have a USB floppy drive but you need to boot a machine and install F6 RAID or IDE drivers One cheap solution is to grab one of your old 64MB or 128MB USB thumb drives and turn it into a bootable floppy drive We could spend two pages explaining how to do it manually but the easiest way is to download Hewlett Packard s handy dandy HP Drive Key Boot Utility from http tinyurl com kaytz This app takes all the guesswork out of building a bootable USB key and can emulate either a bootable hard drive or floppy All you need is your USB thumb drive an image of the floppy you want to install available from Bootdisk com and a few minutes nm MARCH 2007 Twinhead s Durabook D14RA semirugged relatively inexpensive notebook is a perfect companion for house calls Add a Sprint EV DO PC Card and this stand alone machine lets you search the Internet for fixes download drivers or move files from an ailing PC We keep a random assortment of case keys we ve collected over the years Most of the time one of them can unlock a case when the owner has misplaced his key Various paper clips work great to eject discs from dead optical drives And we c
119. remedy such a situ ation is a BartPE preinstalled environ ment disc which you create with the free BartPE Builder app A BartPE is your own bootable Windows CD or DVD that you can use to troubleshoot a sickly system The basic build gives you file copy capa bilities and some network access But the real magic happens when you add plugins for antivirus programs recovery apps and partitioning tools Many popular utilities feature a special BartPE version or con figuration files meant to run directly from a BartPE disc To build your own BartPE grab your Windows XP disc download the BartPE setup files at www nu2 nu pebuilder follow the instructions for creating the disc and browse the available plugins Clicking the help button on a plugin gives you detailed steps on how to enable it For example to enable McAfee Stinger you download the application install it to the BartPE plugin directory and then enable the plugin Free plugins for many popular utilities and AV programs are available on the web but some may require tweaking Pulling the Plug on Life Support Get the feeling you re being taken advan tage of That can happen when people think you re 1 800 FREE PC HELP ALL THE TIME If you re too nice to say Sorry no try one or more of these one liners to get a clueless computard off your back 1 bought a Mac so I m not up on current PC problems 2 can t come over I m waiting for my electric
120. round this split personality concept we set about testing both aspects of it The product s 150 price tag renders it con siderably cheaper than any other location shifting TV tuner we ve seen but it has so many limitations we just can t recommend it at any price For starters the device is a dead end for A V signals they go in but there s no way to route them back out to your TV or home theater system A mini RF connector brings analog TV signals from cable or an antenna into the device an adapter cable stub is provided SO you can connect it to a normal sized coax cable but you ll have to provide your own splitter if you also need to bring that cable to a set top box or directly to your Analog with built in splitter Analog with built in splitter Analog PCTV TO GO MY IPTV amp CAM O Yes No 1 ANALOG A V PASS THROUGHS ponent and S video Stereo audio composite com Stereo audio composite None component and S video STREAMING FORMAT MPEG 2 locally MPEG 4 to MPEG 2 locally MPEG 4 to MPEG 4 the Internet the Internet BURNS RECORDINGS TO DVD Webcam recordings only WEBCAM INCLUDED o Jo jJ Ye SUPPORTS MOBILE CLIENTS In development Windows Mobile In development Windows No Mobile Putting TV streaming and webcam surveil lance features into one product is like making Oreos out of pickles and mangoes TV The built in analog tuner can t descram ble encrypted channels which is ty
121. rrectly attributed to dual core machines The actual problem was a driver issue with T Window Task Manager fe Opt wem ep Appcemors Processes Peman c i gt Law Tw F NN ape he a ttt Torta Paged orcese Core Charge 0029 246 29 Want to see those cores in action Ctrl Alt Delete click Performance and you should see two graphs under CPU Usage History XP that could occur on a machine with a single core and a particular Intel chipset But the Doc suspects that you re talking about KB item 896256 Computers that are running Windows XP Service Pack 2 and that are equipped with multiple processors that support processor power management features may experience decreased performance From what the Doctor understands this fix mostly addresses prob lems with AMD processors that could suddenly get an extra bit of voltage when coming out of a sleep state You can probably live without this fix installed There is another fix that applies to Intel dual cores KB923231 but this also seems to address a problem with machines coming out of a sleep state Obviously if the hotfix is not working for you you should uninstall it and revert any registry changes you made The Doc knows it s difficult to do but sometimes if something s working you should leave it alone CH Since April is National Poetry Month the Doctor is going to start present ing some of his work in poetic form Specifically haiku
122. s handy RAID Manager software so you can easily switch the drive to a safer albeit half size RAID 1 array We scoff at the external drive s lack of an eSATA connector Although the My Book attempts to make up for the absence of eSATA by including FireWire 800 in addition to USB 2 0 and FireWire 400 ports we d rather see the much more prevalent eSATA connector along with a 50 cent bracket that converts a spare internal SATA port into an eSATA port In RAID 0 mode the My Book performed well on our tests clocking an access time of 13 4 milliseconds and a burst speed of 157 6 MB s Thanks to its pair of drives working in tandem that s faster than the single Seagate eSATA 64 MAXIMUMPG MARCH 2007 ER Don t be fooled by their gargantuan proportions M Audio s IE 20 XBs are the most comfortable earbuds we ve ever tested Zevon s Please Stay the XBs impressed us with their ability to produce Zevon s lead vocals Emmylou Harris s background vocals and Gil Bernal s tenor sax all on an equal footing They re pretty spectacular with games too We d hesitate before using these earbuds as studio monitors though because they really do emphasize lows Use them for mix down work and you might end up with tracks that sound bass shy when played back through other speakers and headphones But if it s bass that makes you boogie you ll revel in these M Audio buds MICHAEL BROWN M AUDIO IE 20 XB 250 www m audio com MUM PS
123. s premium price For starters anyone with an existing monitor is much better off matching it with a second screen rather than scrapping it for a two in one model And even someone starting from scratch will want to consider the fact that two brand new high perfor mance 20 inch models can be had for a similar or lesser price shoot so can a 20 24 inch combo for that matter Still there are folks who will be attracted to the DS 1900S s elegance so let s look at its attributes You ll be tasked with assembly which is a fairly straightforward job of connecting the individual panels to the stand using the included hardware Each panel must be connected to your PC you re supplied with two VGA and two DVI cables and each has its own power cord and power brick so much for minimizing desk clutter The stand sports a telescop ing neck so the screens can be raised or years computer enthusiasts have lowered in tandem and they can be tilted forward and back to a limited degree The hinged middle lets you angle the screens slightly in for more ergonomic viewing Each screen also has onscreen display buttons that let you adjust brightness contrast and the individual RGB color channels Screen performance in our tests was up to par There was some backlight seepage along the lower edge of the two panels and a loss of distinction among shades at the extreme dark and light ends of DisplayMate s www displaymate com graysc
124. s and are found at most sporting goods stores Turn the page to see how we use ours Floppy Lives On Contrary to popular belief Windows XP install discs will support a USB floppy drive for F6 drivers as long as it s one of three specific drive models And of those three you re likely to find only IBM s USB Portable it must have these part numbers ASM P N 27L4226 FRU P N 05K9283 This puppy lets you install F6 drivers via USB without hav ing to build a slipstream disc or hack the INF files Search eBay for this product With the right collection of tools you can tackle any PC problem with utmost efficiency Get in get out and get on with your life BY GORDON MAH UNG AND PAUL LILLY e call it community tech support the use of an informal friends network for PC repair rather than the services of paid professionals In reality how ever that means your entire community of friends and family relies on you to solve their latest computer problems We d never suggest that you harden yourself to the desper ate pleas of a computer illiterate relative no you should just learn to accept that from time to time you have to use your PC superpowers for good But we do suggest that you be smart about it The better prepared you are when disaster strikes the less time you ll spend crawling around under Aunt Kim s desk Over the following pages we show you all the hardware and software tools that fill Maximum PC s g
125. s com ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER Rob Smith 650 238 2503 rsmithfafutureus com WESTERN AD DIRECTOR Dave Lynn 949 360 4443 dlynnfafutureus com WESTERN AD MANAGER Derek Johnson 650 238 2327 djohnsonfafutureus com EASTERN AD MANAGER Larry Presser 646 723 5459 lpresserfafutureus com EASTERN AD MANAGER GAMES Kristin Kelleher 646 723 5491 kkelleherfafutureus com ADVERTISING COORDINATOR Jose Urrutia 650 238 2498 jurrutiafafutureus com MARKETING COORDINATOR Michael Basilio PRODUCTION PRODUCTION DIRECTOR Richie Lesovoy PRODUCTION COORDINATOR Dan Mallory CIRCULATION CIRCULATION MANAGER Peter Kelly NEWSSTAND MANAGER Elliott Kiger PRINT ORDER COORDINATOR Heidi Hapin FULFILLMENT MANAGER Peggy Mores FUTURE US INC 4000 Shoreline Court Suite 400 South San Francisco CA 94080 www futureus inc com PRESIDENT Jonathan Simpson Bint VICE PRESIDENT COO Tom Valentino VICE PRESIDENT CIRCULATION Holly Klingel CFO John Sutton GENERAL COUNSEL Charles Schug PUBLISHING DIRECTOR GAMES Simon Whitcombe PUBLISHING DIRECTOR MUSIC AND TECH Steve Aaron PUBLISHING DIRECTOR BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT Dave Barrow EDITORIAL DIRECTOR TECHNOLOGY Jon Phillips EDITORIAL DIRECTOR MUSIC Brad Tolinski DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL SERVICES Nancy Durlester MARKETING DIRECTOR Shawn Roberts PRODUCTION DIRECTOR Richie Lesovoy Future US Inc is part of Future plc Future produces carefully tar geted special interest magazines websites and events for people who share a pas
126. s detected and their status MANIMUMPE MARCH 2007 Cheeses a recewery nof Ope wig rete Poele fete CONS mede Cmm on oom D Hartig Merwe Atout ais A rotes fur oe prece Pea fur vus tg Sa verre Revtere grtere once 1 an Core Dore 6 ne Wenden mph te A Arnor Aeque 9 eas don Lande Pus a irap Weder Io mon Ugarte T ew Des wow compute fr memor hard evo etree P rgl Dew b canc pong onde Barre The Recovery Environment provides a quintet of powerful repair features to fix systems that won t boot a full featured Command Prompt enables you to run any command line tool including file copy and disk management utilities Windows XP Recovery Console enables you to run any com mand line program needed for system or data recovery including Copy Xcopy and Robocopy a supercharged file folder copy program The Command Prompt can also format CD and DVD media and can copy data to or from USB drives connected to the computer To get help with the Command Prompt enter He1p at the Command Prompt to see a list of commands and add to any command you d like to see specific help for EVENT VIEWER AND RELIABILITY Get fast relief for system problems with Vista s exclu sive combination of ingredients an improved version of Event Viewer and the brand new Reliability and Performance Monitor both of which are found in the Control Panel s Administrative Tools Event Viewer uses the newly redesigned Microsoft Management
127. s of NPCs to interact with which to showcase the most with and downloadable content and cutting edge gear We re sure this none of the nasty side effects glorified game won t run at its maximum chat rooms and annoying noobs talking potential until the release of DX10 about Hilary Duff while you re trying to Spawning a wave of upgrades slay dragons across the country ym ESRB M www microsoft com games ESRB E 42 MAKIMUMPE varcs 2007 a ees oll THE NEXT GEN ASSAWARD pb OBLIVION The simultaneous release of Oblivion on the 360 and PC made the con sole fanboys proclaim victory in the ongoing console vs PC debate But they cried victory too soon Oblivion served to illustrate the fact that the PC remains without a doubt the most powerful flexible and enjoyable gam ing platform on the planet Not only does Oblivion look better on the PC but several free PC only mods have fixed the game s flaws does anyone like the console tastic interface Not only that but we enjoy being able to play without enduring 30 second load times every three minutes www elderscrolls com ESRB M WE SALUTE YOU BOSS KEY DEFCON Our game time with Defcon would probably ECAA EO enjoyable if it weren t a part of our job The gracefully designed stra tegic simulation of nuclear war is fun to play not only for its hidden complexity but also because it s the office distraction This is the kind of game
128. s schedule access your email watch TV or even scrawl a handwritten note The custom interface runs on Windows Vista Premium so the machine will also be capable of running traditional Windows applica tions The whole package along with a hide away wireless mouse and low profile keyboard should be available in February for about 1 800 BEN e pz quicks fa ii THE BEGINNING OF THE MAGAZINE WHERE ARTICLES ARE SMALL UV Hawk Ultraviolet Sunlight Meter SoC are a lifestyle hazard for us geeks we just don t get out enough So we re bringing the UV Hawk to our next beach party This thumb drive size gadget measures the intensity of ultraviolet light and sounds an alarm before you ve reached maxi mum exposure for your skin tone adjusted for the SPF value of your sunblock We ve burned to a crisp for the last time 50 www q3i com opace the Final Frontier Google NASA partnership promises an otherworldly web experience qd by Google bumper stickers on the next space shuttle may or may not be in the cards but the recently announced Space Act Agreement between the search giant and NASA s Ames Research Center is very real Initially the deal will see Google help NASA organize its vast storehouse of information and demystify its most useful web accessible data The upshot Soon web surf ers will be able to take virtual flights over the moon and search science data via Google developed techniques
129. sages from Outlook Express which stores messag es in database files are imported as individual message files into the current user s AppData folder Nor ju GET READY FOR BITLOCKER If you use Windows Vista Ultimate or Enterprise you can protect your system drive s contents from being viewed by laptop thieves or after hours hackers with BitLocker which encrypts the system drive To use BitLocker on your system you must configure the drive properly You ll need to have two partitions a 1 5GB partition used to start the system while the remainder of the hard disk will comprise a second partition and be encrypted using BitLocker Both partitions must be formatted with the NTFS file system In order to enable BitLocker you ll need to perform a clean install of Vista on your system First boot your machine from the Windows Vista DVD and run the Recovery Environment Open the command prompt start Diskpart and perform the following commands Warning This will format your hard drive select disk 0 selects first hard disk clean deletes partition table create partition primary size 1500 assign letter S active creates 1 5GB partition s and sets it to be bootable create partition primary assign letter C uses remainder of disk for c list volume dis plays disk information exit closes Diskpart format c y q fs NTFS format s y q fs NTFS formats parti tions created with Diskpart exit closes command promp
130. sh there was a difficulty setting between normal and realistic One area that definitely needs improvement is the multiplayer interface Connecting and communicating with other players is hit or miss and server pings don t show up in the lobby When it works co op terrorist hunt is very enjoyable though limited to four players The PC ver sion also opts out of the persistent ranking system featured for consoles so all weap ons are unlocked from the get go online behind cover When overwhelmed blind fire around corners to push terrorists Terrorists drop in from all sides so find some cover Rainbow Six Vegas is a shift in direc tion for the franchise but most of the changes are welcome The game suc cessfully ramps up the excitement without sacrificing too much tactical strategy Old school die hards may miss the preplanning but we guarantee they ll still have fun NORMAN CHAN RAINBOW SIX VEGAS Intuitive team controls and smart Al anchor an intense single player campaign Frustrating multiplayer interface checkpoint saves and lame in game ads tarnish the experience 50 www rainbowsixgame com ESRB M Win Rig of the Month AND WIN BIG IF YOUR MODDED PC IS CHOSEN AS A RIG OF THE MONTH IT WILL 1 Be featured before all the world in Maximum PC 2 Win you a 500 gift certificate for Buy com TO ENTER vour submission packet must contain your name street address and dayt
131. sion We aim to satisfy that passion by creating titles offering value for money reliable information smart buying advice and which are a pleasure to read or visit Today we publish more than 150 magazines 65 websites anda growing number of events in the US UK France and Italy Over 100 international editions of our magazines are also published in 30 other countries across the world P nmt future MEDIA WITH PASSION Future plc is a public company quoted on the London Stock Exchange symbol FUTR FUTURE plc 30 Monmouth St Bath Avon BA1 2BW England www futureplc com Tel 44 1225 442244 NON EXECUTIVE CHAIRMAN Roger Parry CHIEF EXECUTIVE Stevie Spring GROUP FINANCE DIRECTOR John Bowman Tel 44 1225 442244 www futureplc com REPRINTS For reprints contact Ryan Derfler Reprint Operations Specialist 717 399 1900 ext 167 or email futurenetworkusa dreprintbuyer com SUBSCRIPTION QUERIES Please email customerservice d maximumpc com or call customer service toll free at 800 274 3421 Maximum PC ISSN 1522 4279 D270 NSi Wie Quick Start Microsoft introduces Windows Home Server Head2Head iTunes Music Store vs Zune Marketplace RE WatchDog Maximum PC takes a bite out of bad gear How To Supercharge Firefox Ask the Doctor Diagnosing and curing your PC problems E Reviews LE Speakers Philips amBX
132. sions where you map routes through hostile territory and issue go codes to remote team members Gone also are real team members who can get terminally ventilated thanks to the smallest miscalculation in your planning We saw some of these changes in the PC port of R6 Lockdown but assumed they were merely a temporary aberration the result of a console incar nation migrating to PC There was some reason to hope for a deeper R6 Vegas PC experience When Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter finally made it to the PC it was a bigger deeper more challenging game than the Xbox version The planning sessions and team dynamics of the original R6 might have seemed like fusty left overs for strat geeks but they marked something new and original on the PC gaming scene in 1998 The hardcore tactical shooter is like a flight sim with legs and the genre now looks to be going the way of the flight sim Perhaps only a small percentage of players actually relished the complex elements that defined the series on PC but that percentage was loyal hardcore dedicated They were the true believers who spread the word about the original Rainbow Six and it would be a mistake for developers to pitch them overboard Tom McDonald has been covering games for countless maga zines and newspapers for 11 years He lives in the New Jersey Pine Barrens MAXIMUM PG MARCH 2007 ARTICLES ARE SMALI AMD Workhorse Dies We ll miss ya Socket 939
133. son that del icio us delights us with its online bookmark organization scheme and its link sharing among a network of users First head over to http del icio us and register an account Once you ve created a username you ll be prompted to install the del icio us exten sion Notice the two buttons added to Firefox right next to the URL bar When you re ready to bookmark a website click the Tag button and enter a description notes about the site and relevant search tags For example popular tags for MaximumPC com include magazine 5 amp t ogy computer hardware and so on When you want to view links in only a particular category click the tag and all other links will be filtered out To share your bookmarks with other users or access them from another computer use your account s URL This will appear as http et oe 7 t reviews technol del icio us USERNAME And don t worry about that Mac Life bookmark just check the do not share box when saving a favorite link you wish to keep private I TO Cm we ewe s um es deea ded a oe cee f Orem A LN LP We ve seen tastier looking interfaces than the one del icio us serves up but accessing your bookmarks from any PC with an Internet connection is a winning recipe nonetheless Ask the Doctor Diagnosing and curing your PC problems FLOPPING MOLLY I recently received a Gateway MX6214 notebook computer
134. t When you install Vista install it to the c drive GET AROUND IN VISTA Windows Vista enables you to go almost anywhere in your system right from the Start menu without the Start menu taking over your screen The right side of the Start menu provides shortcuts to the current user s folder hierarchy as well as direct links to the user s document pic ture music and game folders Each link opens a customized Windows Explorer view For example click Games and the Games Explorer displays installed games including ESRB rat ings and package art Click Music and the Music Explorer pro vides buttons for playing and burning music You can find any type of file by clicking Search and entering text that matches the file name extension or file contents Click Computer to view all your connected drives and get access to sys tem properties drive mapping and other tools Click Network to view network connections and shared resources Click Connect To to connect to a network dialup wired or wireless Fast search even found its way into the Start menu To find and launch a program quickly type its name into the search tool above the Start button and press Enter On the right side of the screen the new Windows Sidebar displays a customizable list of utilities gadgets perfect for making use of the extra space available in a widescreen display However you can also hide the Sidebar or adjust the trans Wma o ter
135. t top box is far from your wireless access point and a hardwired Ethernet connection is impractical all com munications are wireless duh The Hava can stream MPEG 2 video at 720x480 resolution to multiple wireless PC clients on your local network and can stream MPEG 4 70 MAXIMUMPG MARCH 2007 video at 320x240 resolution to one remote client over the Internet PCs hardwired to your network can not receive video streams at all In the second scenario in which the Hava is hardwired to your wireless access point any PCs hardwired to your network can receive MPEG 2 streams and one remote client can receive MPEG 4 video over the Internet Local wireless PCs don t get any video Lastly if you have a mixture of wired and wireless PCs on your net work you can follow the same procedure to configure the Hava as a wireless device and then hardwire it to your wireless rout er In this scenario local wireless PCs get MPEG 2 streams over the air local wired PCs get MPEG 2 streams over Ethernet cable and one remote client gets MPEG 4 streams over the Internet Monsoon s multicasting feature the Hava s ability to stream to numerous local clients simultaneously is something else Sling Media doesn t have an answer for This competitive edge becomes less com pelling however when you realize that all local clients get the same video The Hava s Tivo like ability to record video programming to your PC s hard driv
136. the prize received A list of winners may also be obtained by sending a stamped self addressed envelope to Future US Inc c o Maximum PC Rig of the Month 4000 Shoreline Ct Suite 400 South San Francisco CA 94080 This contest is limited to residents of the United States No purchase necessary void in Arizona Maryland Vermont Puerto Rico and where prohibited by law INOU vou were w RESPON TURNING BACK THE GAMING CLOCK Your January 07 issue did a good job of indicating the scope of the transition to DirectX 10 and Vista But it left me with two questions What about hardware software that is a few years old and what about older games that require DirectX 8 1 or older specs I m not talking about the original Castle Wolfenstein or Doom but what about entertain ing and still fresh feeling games like No One Lives Forever 2 or Papyrus NASCAR 2003 Are we SOL if we want to play those older games Will we need to keep a legacy computer on hand Will we need some sort of emulator If the previous is true III probably be upgrading to Vista about the time its update Panorama comes out in 201 1 Troy Nelson EDITOR IN CHIEF WILL SMITH RESPONDS I ve tested several DirectX 8 era games and was surprised to see that they work reasonably well The lack of DirectSound 3D support in Vista will limit you to stereo sound rather than 5 1 posi tional playback and you probably won t have the option to
137. thout covering up the links to user folders on the right pane or the new Windows Sidebar parency level of the gadgets to make them less noticeable click a transparent gadget to see it in normal mode The Power button on the Start menu actually puts your system into sleep mode but you can change that functionality by going to Power Options clicking Change Plan Settings and selecting Change advanced power settings Then expand the Power buttons and lid section and change the Start Menu power button action MARCH 2007 MAKIMUMPG THE RECOVERY ENVIRONMENT Microsoft Windows Vista includes a comprehensive tool kit to fix a broken Windows installation the Recovery Environment To launch the Recovery Environment boot your system from the Windows Vista DVD select your language time Currency and keyboard settings and in the next dialog box select the Repair option The Recovery Environment includes five tools Startup Repair automatically analyzes boot level problems and performs the appropriate repairs Because startup repairs may require mul tiple passes you can run Startup Repair up to five times before it gives up Run it restart your system and continue running it if the system won t start You can also run System Restore from the Recovery Environment enabling you to undo a software or hardware installation that prevents your system from starting Windows Complete PC Restore is a full blown disaster recov ery solut
138. to reinstall your old applications assuming they re compatible with Windows Vista If you ran the Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor before starting the installation process you know which applications work and which ones need to be updated or replaced Still you may encounter some problems After the installer finishes installing some older apps you ll be prompted by a dialog box that asks whether the app installed cor rectly If it didn t you can attempt a reinstall using slightly modified permissions which frequently fixes compatibility problems that occurred during the initial attempt However if an application installs but doesn t appear to work properly it s helpful to know a few things that have changed between XP and Vista Once the installer has run applications are allowed only read access to files in the Program Files folder they can t write to anything inside the Program Files directory However some older applications need to store data and configuration files such as ini files in the same folder as application files if the app can t write to those files it won t work properly So how does Windows Vista accommodate these apps without compromising security Vista automatically redirects write operations that occur in Program Files to a special folder in your user profile For example if you install an application that attempts to create C Program Files COMPLETE THE EASY TRANSFER MOD To finish moving your data from
139. today is getting a PSU that can drive all that hardware reliably It s become so critical that Nvidia and ATI are testing PSUs for compatibility with their prod ucts and diverging from the approved list usually ends in disaster Polywell s solution to the PSU problem is certainly unique The company side steps the issue by using not one but two 700 watt FSP PSU units in the huge Cooler Master CM Stacker case The FSP PSU is certified only for 7900 GTX cards in SLI but by using two separate units the load is likely so light that power won t be an issue It s different but we d probably rather just see a high end kilowatt PSU in there One of the problems with using dual PSUs is that you can t tap all the power of the second unit Polywell ejects Microsoft Vista from the configuration here The company didn t say why but we suspect it decided to play it safe since 8800 drivers for Vista are still pretty sketchy Polywell also does an interesting trick with its drive configuration Along with the two 150GB Raptors is a 320GB drive for backup it s a little small but certainly better than nothing Unfortunately the Poly i680SLI QX won t set any records for performance The last two desktop machines we reviewed packed the same hardware as the Poly Beauty or the brute Polywell goes for the brute er from Asetek doesn t require you to yank your mobo to remove the cooling BENCHMARKS ZERO POINT SCORES
140. tor Primarily designed for content creators who use Adobe products the NuLOOQ acts as a jog dial nudge tool tool tweaking device and more With the NuLOOQ installed you can for example be zoomed in 300 percent in Adobe Photoshop CS2 with one hand on the mouse applying brushstrokes with your other hand on the NuLOOGQ you can slide the entire image in any direction and zoom in or out without laying a hand on the keyboard Getting acclimated to the NuLOOQ takes a few minutes but once you ve used it for retouching in Photoshop you ll find it hard to live with out Fire up Adobe Premiere Pro 2 0 and the NuLOOQ turns into both a jog dial and a zoom tool You can also use the NuLO0OQ with other applica tions such as games You can easily configure it to act as the zoom and pan tool in an RTS and program the third dial surface on the top of the device to let you say change the game s perspective We also tried the NuLOOQO with first person shooters but the experience is inferior to using the mouse and keyboard While the hardware is generally good the software isn t An early demo of the NuLOOQ s software for the Mac featured a popup control box that made the device much handier but the feature was cut before the PC version made its debut The applet is also clumsy to use and configure You can t for example build one profile by using an existing one as a base With Accell UltraAV HDMI Switch Tiny but oh so handy hether it s an
141. trilly things and Italian words only musicians really understand And yet Prot g manages to take this mighty musical lexicon and completely destroy its usefulness thanks to a few criti cal lapses in the program s basic functional ity Case in point You can t hear the notes you re inputting Notion found it important to record the sounds of the London Symphony Orchestra for a greater degree of realistic playback too bad you have to preview your song or plunk keys on a nearby piano just to find out if you correctly wrote that complex chord It s equally frustrating that Prot g has virtually no automation whatsoever The program won t even create bar lines for you after you ve scribed up a measure s worth of notes Nothing kills creative fervor like being forced to do the monotonous tasks that other music notation programs managed to eliminate years ago Prot g is one sixth the price of simi lar programs such as Finale and Sibelius and you definitely get what you pay for a musical notation program that beats free handing your first concerto barely NOTION PROT G If it s a musical expression it s in here Lacks automation lacks printed manual lacks great functionality doesn t lack annoying copy protection e 100 www notionmusic com reviews TESTED REVIEWED VERDICTIZED Rainbow Six Vegas Counterterrorists crack down in the land of 7 99 prime rib di
142. tted and installed Windows XP Professional didn t realize that my FireWire drive was plugged in Needless to say couldn t understand why I was having problems install ing certain software as well as printers Then it dawned on me The internal drive was formatted as E instead of C How can I restore this hard drive to C without going through hours of formatting and installation kKaren Brown Normally when one of your drives or devices is showing up incorrectly reassigning the letter just takes a few clicks in the Computer Management screen under the control panel s administrative tools Unfortunately there s not much you can do in your case If you try to reassign a drive letter to a boot disk Windows will warn you that Windows cannot modify the drive let ter of your system or boot volume In short installing Windows on a lettered drive sets up a large number of registry settings and configuration files that all point to said drive as the place where Windows is located Changing the drive letter is akin to breaking a ton of shortcuts and would surely cause Windows to crap out Alas the Doctor isn t a fortune teller but he sees a formatting in your future a format ting and a Windows reinstallation Make sure you disconnect all of your external storage peripherals this time BAD TO THE BOOT I recently purchased a new bigger better badder hard drive a 500GB Seagate 7200 9 used the Seagate
143. u just need an Internet connection Firefox and then go back to Add ons to activate the new From the Tools menu select Add ons choose Themes and theme Many themes are works in progress so periodically then click the Get Themes link It takes some digging but check for updates we found some themes we really like including Aluminum eto lett Ab ee eee DI ae ae toe Speed Up Firefox We re always tweaking our hardware in an attempt to eek out the best performance and the Fasterfox add on extends this philosophy to our browser by putting us in control of various networking settings Via the Custom tabs for example you can change the initial paint delay which tells Firefox how quickly to begin render ing web pages or enable enhanced prefetch ing which forces links to download in the back ground albeit at an increased load to the serv er To avoid mucking things up though stick to the presets We saw a decrease from 3 77 to 2 7 7 seconds on our main page s load time just by switching to the Turbo Charged option n Not all themes look as advertised so experiment with different ones until you find a suitable candidate We like Aluminum Alloy 46 MAXIMUM PG MARCH 2007 Customize with Extensions With version 2 0 Firefox storms out of the gate sporting a healthy assortment of tricks like improved tabbed browsing and anti phishing protection but it s the multitude of extensions that really make this browser
144. uality A row of buttons above the speaker lets you change the screen s brightness contrast and individual color channels Adjustments to the screen s physical orientation are limited to forward and backward tilt In DisplayMate www displaymate com the VX2035wm immediately stumbled in the Dark Screen segment of the evalua tion script Large splotches of backlight marred what should have been a uniform expanse of black This unevenness was also manifest in the DM screens that dis play blocks of gray against a black back ground the distinction was muddied in parts In the utility s grayscale ramps the VIEWSONIC VX2035WM VIEWABLE SCREEN NATIVE RESOLUTION INPUTS MAXIMUMPG MARCH 2007 HP L2045W 20 1 inches 20 1 inches 1680x1050 1680x1050 1680x1050 VGA DVI VGA DVI VGA DVI 2 USB VX2035wm recovered producing smooth even gradations of up to 256 steps In real world terms the screen displayed high res still images movies and games without any noticeable flaws and both regular and reversed text were readable at reasonable sizes If you re planning to upgrade to an HD DVD or Blu ray drive in the near future the VX2035wm might not be the best choice of monitor as it lacks support for HDCP high definition copy protection This means your efforts to play commercial HD discs will be thwarted a lesson learned when we tried to play an HD release of Terminator 2 using Plextor s PX B900A Blu ray drive
145. uminum much like ViewSonic s VX2035wm And as with that model you can tilt the screen only forward and back The height stays put A circular base serves as a lazy Susan of sorts for swivel functions In the past we ve taken issue with Samsung s hands free displays which relegate all screen adjustments to software fortunately this model strikes a compromise offering OSD buttons in addition to the soft ware that are discreetly placed beneath the bezel s bottom edge Luckily labels on the bezel help guide your fingers In Samsung fashion the adjustment options are plentiful and include a handful of presets for various types of content movies games text etc We ve actually come to appreciate these presets They make overall changes to the brightness contrast and gamma that would take many more steps to achieve through standard OSD operations HD videophiles will appreciate the 206BW s HDCP support The 206BW s performance in DisplayMate was strong Evidence of back SAMSUNG SYNCMASTER 206BW Superb grayscale strong real world performance No screen height adjustment subtle perimeter backlight seepage IMUM PG IEKASS 350 www samsung com light seepage around the extreme perimeter of the screen was its most notable failing That was sufficiently offset by stel lar grayscale reproduction and marked distinctions between shades at even the extreme dark and light ends Text looked cr
146. utility to migrate everything from my 120GB Western Digital WD1200JB and then set the Seagate as the primary drive and the WD as a march 2007 MAXIMUMPL 49 E E howe IMPROVING YOUR PC EXPERIENCE ONE STEP AT A TIME Ask the Doctor secondary drive Now my previously stable system is not can t even attempt a repair install of Windows as get a Blue Screen of Death stating Unmountable boot drive hgaragon The Doctor is assuming that by migrate you mean moved instead of cloned Either way the solution to your problem a corrupt hard drive is the same Since Windows is going crazy the Doc recommends going with a fresh wipe installation Before we get elbow deep however see if you can get into the recovery console by booting up from the Windows CD When there type chkdsk r and hit Enter When that s done type in fixboot and hit Enter Restart your computer and see if you can run a repair or fresh install of XP on the Seagate drive If that doesn t fix the problem you ll need to reconfigure your Western Digital drive as the primary master and disconnect the Seagate If you haven t already format the drive and install a fresh copy of Windows Once it boots shut the computer down and connect your Seagate as a secondary drive slave Start the computer up again and when you get to Windows go to Explorer If the Seagate doesn t pop up check Disk Management Control Panel gt Ad
147. were afraid that George Lucas had tainted the Episode 1 badge forever with The Phantom Menace But Half Life 2 Episode 1 not only proves that Episode 1s do not have to suck but also gives us hope that episodic gaming will pro vide us more frequent if necessarily shorter tastes of our favorite games Going episodic will force developers to maintain quality throughout their games after all if Half Life 2 Episode 2 sucks no one will buy Episode 3 www half life com ESRB M THE NOLF AWARD FOR INCIDENTAL SCRIPTWRITING HITMAN BLOOD MONEY We love game devs who take the time and money to write and record dialogue for the underappreciated hapless stoog es who are the cannon fodder that make our games fun It all started with No One Lives Forever but this year Hitman Blood Money used stooge dialogue to inject needed comic relief in a brutally brilliant game Creeping through missions we heard everything from Mob bosses calling in hits to mus ings on the meaning of being a professional henchman www hitman com ESRB M BEST COMIC BOOK GAME EVER MARVEL ULTIMATE ALLIANCE Stroll into The Android s Dungeon amp Baseball Card Shop on any given day and you ll find Jeffrey Albertson laying down authoritative verdicts on pop culture happenings But even the Comic Book Guy would have to agree with us that Marvel Ultimate Alliance is the holy grail of comic book games Not only can you control 20 of the greatest su
148. with TinyURL Creator and automatically copy the new link right to your clipboard TAB MIX PLUS Supercharge your X tabbed browsing with a wealth of additional options IMAGE ZOOM Zoom in on any image just like they do in spy movies SPORTSFOX Feed your sports jones with scores from all four major pro sports as well as college football and basketball or follow just your favorite team FOXYTUNES Forget alt tabbing and instead control just about any media player right in your browser Perform lyrics searches too ADD BOOKMARK HERE 2 An easier way to file bookmarks just high light the appropriate folder in your Favorites and click Add Bookmark Here DOWNLOADHELPER No download link No problem DownloadHelper can snag videos from sites like YouTube and Metacafe as well as more ahem adult hangouts SMILEY XTRA Most forums offer just a basic assortment of smilies but with Smiley Xtra you ll be prepared for any posting situation FOXLINGO Is the latest tech rumor posted in another language Translate it and get the inside scoop with the aid of FoxLingo CACHEVIEWER Browse Firefox s memory and disk cache or search for a specific item CacheViewer even displays a thumbnail image of every entry MOUSELESS BROWSING With practice this virtual cure for suriphobia will have you cruising the web without ever leaving the keyboard MARCH 2007 MAXIMUM PS 47 Ti howe IMPR
149. y bring down the cellular network This is shocking news because there are thousands of third party applications available for almost every phone on the market not just smart phones To date there have been no network outages caused by poorly written phone applications Sure a bad app might crash your phone but the networks are robust enough to survive poorly written apps If this is true the iPhone will be more of a dumbphone than a smartphone Third party hacks are what make smartphones smart There s a free or at least cheap app to rectify any platform s shortcoming as well as apps that add crazy advanced features that phone vendors would never include My favorite applet automatically switches my phone s profile based on the cell tower it detects Specifically it switches my phone to silent mode when arrive at work and cranks the ringer volume up when I get home That s exactly the kind of functionality iPhone users will miss out on Longtime readers know I m a big fan of Apple s operating system and applications There s not much l d like to see more than an openly available version of OS X so all PC users can enjoy the power of Apple s operating system However I ve long contended that Apple intentionally builds shoddy hardware It s easily scratched and the batteries it uses seem to have an approximate lifespan of just four charges Here s the secret Apple s not the enlightened consumer friendly com
150. y Microsoft Points in 5 increments You get 80 points on the dollar but since most single tracks cost 79 points you can never really spend all the points you buy When you re buying a track for 79 points it s easy to mentally convert that to 1 00 but how much money are you spending when you purchase an album for 720 points or a box set tor 3 025 points You use real money when you pur chase music on iTunes and you can buy one or many tracks ata time and that s the way it should be WINNER ITUNES ZUNE MARKETPLACE www zune net found 4 IMPORTING YOUR OWN MUSIC If you buy an iPod or a Zune you might never purchase any tracks online but instead buy CDs rip them to your PC and then transfer them to your por table player Given all the artificial restrictions the services DRM schemes impose this is the route we recommend ITunes and the Zune s software allow you to rip tracks using lossless codecs Apple Lossless Encoder and WMA Lossless respectively Ripping tracks is pretty much a point and click affair with both programs but we ran into problems with album art when we imported previously ripped tracks into the Zune software Some art was missing and we couldn t import it from Microsoft s own database Odaly enough it was a snap to copy and paste images from other websites but we had to take the time to hunt them down We didn t have any such problem with iTunes WINNER ITUNES oa eee eet rrr C
151. your old Windows XP install you ll need to run the Easy Transfer Wizard from within Vista When you re in the Welcome Center click Transfer files and settings then click Start Windows Easy Transfer to start the wizard You ll need to provide administrator level credentials when prompted by User Account Control To transfer your settings from XP select Continue a transfer in progress Next navigate to the drive and folder containing the SaveData MIG file Then to properly migrate your profile you ll want to match up the user account on the new computer with the appropriate user account on the old computer Review the selected files and settings then click Transfer to start the transfer process Once the transfer is active you can leave your computer Depending on the amount of data to transfer it could take several hours to complete At the end of the transfer process a Transfer is complete dialog appears providing a summary of the user accounts files folders program settings and system settings trans ferred You should take a look at the detailed Windows Easy Transfer Summary and save it as an HTML file so you ll have a manifest of files you brought to Vista MAXIMUMPG MARCH 2007 Program Compatip ity Assistant F tha program didnt intel correctly try cemateling usmg settings thet sre compatible with thes vernon of edo Program Canon Master Setup Autorun ts Publisher Caron Comguter Systema Inc Locetion 0

Core2 Mobos Reviewed

Contents

Download Pdf Manuals

Related Search

Related Contents