Maximum PC - All Articles
Motorola Launches Second Volley in iPhone Antenna Assault
Thu, 29 Jul 2010 13:21:55 +0000
Apple is doing everything it can to deflect attention away from the iPhone 4's janky antenna design, like calling out other smartphone makers for supposedly being in the same boat, including Motorola and the Droid X. To be fair, Motorola (and Verizon) fired off the first marketing missile by taking out a full page spread in The New York Times earlier this month taking digs at the iPhone 4 in the small print.
Now Motorola has begun rolling out a second ad, and this time, the company is blasting Apple's iPhone 4 in large print by titling it's second spread "NO JACKET REQUIRED." The rest of it goes like this:
"At Motorola, we believe a customer shouldn't have to dress up their phone for it work properly. That's why the Droid X comes with a dual antenna design. The kind that allows you to hold the phone any way you like to make crystal clear calls without a bulky phone jacket. For us it's just one of those things that comes as a given when you've been making mobile phones for over 30 years."
Ouch. It will be interesting to see how, or even if Apple responds.
View the ad here.
Accell UltraAV Multi-Monitor Adapter Review
Thu, 29 Jul 2010 09:00:31 +0000
Driving two monitors is easy enough with most modern videocards; in fact, late-model AMD Radeon HD cards can drive three (although one must be equipped with DisplayPort). Accell’s UltraAV multi-monitor adapters allow you to connect three displays to a single DisplayPort source. The model we examined supports three single-link DVI monitors using a single DisplayPort source; the company offers a second SKU that supports three DisplayPort monitors from a single DisplayPort. Both suffer from the same limitations: Reliance on DisplayPort on the host side, and maximum resolution of 3840x1024 (supporting three 1280x1024 displays).
Connecting the Accell's UltraAV is a dead simple process.
The adapter is extremely simple to set up: Connect its built-in 45-inch locking DisplayPort 1.1a cable to your source and use three DVI cables to connect three monitors. Accell recommends using displays with the same native resolution and refresh rate; otherwise, the adapter will use a resolution that’s common to all three. DVI connector 1 drives the left-hand monitor, DVI connector 2 drives the center, and DVI connector 3 drives the right-hand monitor. The box draws power over a USB connector that splits from DisplayPort cable, eliminating the need for a brick. You don’t need to install any software.
The UltraAV adapter uses an IDT PanelPort VMM1300 chip and reports itself to your GPU as a single output device via EDID (extended display identification data) that supports a variety of resolutions, including 3840x1024, 3840x720, 2400x600, 1280x1024, and 1440x900. Whichever resolution you choose, that number of pixels image gets stretched over the three-screen combo--unlike Matrox's pricier TripleHead2Go product, you can't set up three independent desktops. And while there’s nothing stopping you from using higher-resolution displays that support at least one of those lower resolutions, you won’t want to because you'll get either black bars (if the monitor can display the correct aspect ratio) or a stretched, distorted image.
Windows sees the Accell adapter as one very wide display.
We plugged the UltraAV adapter into an AMD Radeon HD 5870 card and then connected three 21.5-inch Dell LCD displays to the adapter. Each display's native resolution is 1920x1080 pixels. The UltraAV adapter detected the monitors and set the videocard’s display resolution to 3840x720; we had to manually goose the operating system to drive the card at the max resolution of 3840x1024. The entire Windows desktop was stretched across the three displays, including the taskbar, so the system behaved as if it were talking to a single, very wide display.
Once the hardware was set up, applications ran without a hitch. Even games ran fine, though always stretched across all three screens. Benchmarks were typical of a Radeon HD 5870 running at 3840x1024. The Unigine Heaven benchmark, for example, posted 23 frames per second (all settings at normal, with AA off) on our Core i7 965X system.
If you have a relatively new desktop or notebook PC that supports DisplayPort, plus three monitors that support the same native resolution, Accell’s UltraAV adapter is a good solution. If you’ve moved up to higher-resolution wide-screen monitors, the adapter isn’t all that compelling because it can't take advantage of their native resolutions. In that case, one of AMD's Eyefinity videocards might be your ticket to multi-monitor bliss--although that solution is available only with desktop computers, requires adapters to drive DVI displays, and costs three times more than Accell's UltraAV adapter.
Comcast Cracks Down on Customers with a ZERO Balance
Thu, 29 Jul 2010 13:25:04 +0000
Yep, you read the title correctly. Comcast, the seemingly masochist ISP that gets repeatedly beat up in the press, is again taking a flogging, this time for billing a customer with a $0.00 balance and demanding remittance.
"To avoid an interruption of your service, please pay $0.00," the confused customer's bill reads. "As your account is currently delinquent, your Digital Voice, High Speed Internet and Cable services may be subject to interruption. While interrupted, you will retain the ability to place calls to 911 using your Digital Voice service."
According to some readers who caught wind of this quirky bill, this isn't a one-time SNAFU on Comcast's part, as others have reported receiving similar bills. And Comcast isn't alone, either. One reader said he received a notice from Charter Communications to pay a $0.00 balance, and when he failed to return a blank envelope or a check written out for absolutely nothing, the ISP allegedly shut off his service and wanted him to pay a $25 fee for the whole ordeal.
Image Credit: Gizmodo
Has something like this happened to any of you? Tell us your quirky biling stories in the comments section blow.
eBook Reader Shipments Fall Far Short of Expectations
Thu, 29 Jul 2010 13:24:57 +0000
The eBook reader market expanded by 1.35 million units in the second quarter of 2010, and while that might sound like an impressive amount of mobile readers for such a short time span, it's 33.2 percent less than the 2.02 million analysts were expecting, says Digitimes Research.
Digitimes blames the slump in shipments to customers holding out for new models, many of which ended up delayed until the third quarter. One new model that was just announced is Amazon's third-generation Kindle with a 21 percent smaller frame and same 6-inch reading area.
But buyers waiting for the latest and greatest isn't the only reason more eBook readers didn't ship out, Digitimes says.
"Two other factors also prevented shipments from reaching the target. Telecom carrier China Mobile Communications' subsidized sales of eBook readers were weaker-than-expected in the China market, and volume shipments of SiPix's e-paper solutions were delayed," Digitimes Research explains.
Taking the lead in the second quarter was Barnes & Noble with a 33 percent share of the market, followed by Amazon with 27 percent.
Russian Dude Shows Off Awesome CPU Collection
Thu, 29 Jul 2010 13:24:59 +0000
Remember that scaled down replica of Helsinki, Finland constructed entirely of motherboards we showed you two months ago? This Russian guy's "humble collection" of CPUs, as he describes them in a forum post, might just have the motherboard city beat.
"Cat Vaska," as he's known online, listed over a thousand CPUs, or so we're told (it takes long enough just scrolling through the list, let alone trying to count every chip). It's an impressive collection, to say the least, with processors dating back to the 286 era and earlier, and up to around the Pentium III, or thereabouts. He even lists a few fake chips that have been remarked.
Take a look at some more pics here, and scroll through his forum post here. When you're finished, hit the jump and tell us which you think is more impressive, the motherboard city model or the this seemingly ultimate CPU collection.
Image Credit: EnglishRussia.com
EverQuest II Extends into Free-to-Play Market
Thu, 29 Jul 2010 09:02:08 +0000
In the future, old fogeys are gonna get all manner of shrugs and weird looks when they wrap up their “back in my day” speeches with a quick 45-minute bit about subscription fees and MMOs. And if things keep up at their current pace, that “future” could be right around the corner. As in, in a year or two. First it was DnD Online, then Lord of the Rings, then Company of Heroes. Meanwhile, World of Warcraft and a whole spat of other MMOs are considering it, and now Everquest II’s taking the free-to-play plunge as well.
“So, we’re about to launch a bold new service named ‘EverQuest II Extended’ (EQ2X). This is a completely separate service from the standard EQII Live subscription service (EQII),” producer Dave Georgson said on the game’s official site. “‘EverQuest II Extended’ shares all the content and features of Live EQII. It plays the same. It looks the same. It *is* the same, with two obvious exceptions: a) it’s free-to-play, and b) it has a more robust marketplace.”
That marketplace, of course, includes the usual list of not-so-free-to-buy suspects: mid-tier weapons and armor, potions, speed boosts to things like research, etc. So no, you won’t see someone decked out in diamond-encrusted pauldrons, leggings so shiny they make the sun go blind, and obnoxious spinning rims just because their real-life wallet was made from the one hundred dollar bills they deemed “unworthy.”
There are, however, some restrictions on what free players can and can’t do. Sure, you can level your character all the way to 80 and explore the full game world, but your class and race selections have been pared down a bit, and your in-game purse will only be able to hold so much gold before it belches loudly and refuses to eat any more.
Don’t like what you’re reading? Well then, you can also opt to stick with old-school EQII, in which case “your existing subscription, game, and support are unchanged.” If free-to-play sounds right up your alley, though, here’s a handy FAQ for your perusal. Us, we’ll definitely give the game a look, at least. It’ll be a total trip, though. Last time we were in Norrath, Y2K was still considered a legitimate threat, and people actually found Britney Spears to be attractive!
AVADirect Pushes Out Two More 3D Gaming Notebooks
Thu, 29 Jul 2010 16:08:20 +0000
Fleshing out its gaming laptop line, system vendor AVADirect this week added a pair of new mobile 3D setups, the Clevo W860CU 3D and Asus G51JX-3D.
The Clevo W860CU 3D sports a 15.6-inch HD display powered by Nvidia's GeForce GTX 286M graphics. Processor options include chips from Intel's mobile Core i5 and i7 lines, with a bunch of other configuration options, including a whole bunch of SSD and HDD choices, up to 8GB of DDR3-1333 RAM, custom paint, and other odds and ends.
Like Clevo's 3D laptop, the Asus G51JX-3D comes with a 15.6-inch HD display, but pairs the panel with Nvidia's GeForce GTS 360M graphics chip. Otherwise, it boasts similar configuration options across the board.
Both laptops come with a pair of Nvidia 3D Vision stereoscopic glasses with pricing starting at around $1,620 (Asus) and $1,850 (Clevo).
Image Credit: AVADirect
HP Squeezes Fermi-Based Quadro 5000M into 17-Inch EliteBook
Thu, 29 Jul 2010 13:21:49 +0000
Hot on the heels of Nvidia's announcement that it would soon begin shipping its Fermi-based Quadro workstation cards, HP has come out and said it will cram the new Quadro 5000M into its EliteBook 8740w mobile workstations.
The 8740w is a 17-inch notebook that comes to the mobile party looking sharp and dressed in a gunmetal anodized-aluminum finish. It's HP's most powerful laptop to date starting with a range of Intel chips to choose from, including the Core i7 Extreme Edition. The 8740w comes capable of housing up to 16GB of RAM, and according to HP, it's been "engineered to meet rigid MIL-STD 810G military-standard tests for vibration, dust, humidity, altitude, and high and low temperatures, and is also free of brominated flame retardants (BFRs) and polyvinyl chloride (PVC)."
In other words, the EliteBook 8740w is purportedly one tough cookie, but it's the Quadro 5000M that's the real treat here. This mobile Fermi part comes with 320 cores and 2GB of memory, and is a slightly a trimmed down version of the desktop part with 352 cores and 2.5GB of memory.
Pricing will start at $2,676.
Image Credit: HP
The History of a Dream: How the Ultimate PC Has Evolved In 15 Years
Thu, 29 Jul 2010 18:14:38 +0000
As we worked on this years 15th Dream Machine, we couldn't help but think about how far we've come. From the original 200MHz, 8MB-of-RAM 1996 Dream Machine up to this years 12-core, 24-thread, 24-gigs-of-RAM version, the ultimate computer has grown exponentially more powerful. But that's not much of a shocker (we've all heard about Moore's Law, and all) so we decided to delve deeper into the history of the Dream Machine. We collected data about the vital statistics of each years machine, and made a bunch of graphs showing how they've grown. Some of what we found out surprised even us.
Keep reading for all the charts, as well as our thoughts about why they look the way they do. And since it wouldn't be any fun if we couldn't gawk at the old beige-box beasts, we've included a gallery of every year's Dream Machine cover at the end.
Processor
Since almost every Dream Machine has featured the fastest CPU available you can see the influence of clock speeds over the last 14 years. From Pentium to Pentium II and Pentium III clock speeds grew pretty slowly. In 1999, for our basic build it, we used a simple 500MHz Pentium III when a faster 650MHz chip was available. But fast forward to 2001 and you see the influence of the Pentium 4 and the NetBurst microarchitecture. Bred by Intel to climb to higher clock speeds rather pack in more instructions per clock, Dream Machines with NetBurst took off like a rocket from 2001, to 2002, 2003 and finally peaked in 2004. That year, we took a stock 3.6GHz Pentium 4 560 and clocked it up to a stable 3.97GHz. Yeah, those Prescott’s really clocked up something fierce eh? Not.
That 90nm Prescott signaled the end of NetBurst. Intel’s 3.8GHz Pentium 4 570 would be the end of the line for the clock speed race. The next year saw clock speeds plummet back to earth yet we still saw higher performance. In 2005, we built a dual-Opteron machine with clock speeds of 2.2GHz. and the clock speeds have pretty much stabilized since then.
Here we take into account the overclocked speeds of each Dream Machine. It pretty much reflects the same pattern we saw with the stock CPU clocks. From Pentium to Pentium III the clock speeds gradually increased and then took off like a rocket with the Pentium 4. What’s really interesting is the our flatlining from 2008 to 2010 at 4GHz. Much of that is due to the platform we choose. In 2008, we featured another dual-processor machine using a pair of Xeon, ahem, Core 2 QX9775 chips. In 2009, in a world being swept away by financial disaster, we were happy to have electricity to power the Dream Machine. And we were happy to take our 3.33GHz Core i7-975 Extreme Edition to 4GHz – the point where it would pass our stress tests.
Look at this chart and then look at the one that shows the climb of clock speed. It’s no coincidence that in 2004, when the Pentium 4 hit the wall at 1,000MPH that we started to see the push for more cores. In 2005, we used a dual, dual-core machine. The year after, a dual-core Core 2 Extreme X6800. From there, we’ve been trying to get as many cores in the Dream Machine as possible. This year’s is truly triumphant though with 12 cores and well, another 12 virtual cores thrown in for good measure.
RAM
It may look flat, but the chart is deceiving. The amount of system RAM has increased exponentially several times. Hell, 8MB in 1991! Seriously? We do admit, there were some long stretches where system RAM did not increase. It’s one of the things that led Intel to push so hard for Rambus in the late 1990s. You see, since main memory wasn’t going to explode, users were going to need the super duper fast Direct RDRAM which offered incredible bandwidth. Yes, you can be a hater on Rambus and Direct RDRAM (we were once the same) but RDRAM was actually ahead of its time and it is a shame politics and legal shenanigans muddied it up. It took DDR several generations and years to surpass the first iteration of PC800 RDRAM in performance. The Dream Machine actually featured RDRAM in 2000, 2001, and the most insane implementation of it in 2002. That’s the year that we used a crazy 512MB RIMM4200/PC1066 module. In essence, the RIMM4200 module combined two RIMMs into one to give you dual-channel performance in one slot. Ultimately, the idea was to have two dual-channel RIMM4200 modules in a PC that would give you a PC with quad-channel memory. Alas, we know how that ended. By 2003, Dream Machine moved on to DDR and never looked back. Our write up in 2002 even acknowledged that the days of RDRAM in the PC were done for once DDR emerged. DDR, DDR2 and DDR3 are the lingua franca of today’s PC.
You should also note that main memory is tied into the OS. That spike you see in 2005 came from the use of a dual-core, dual Opteron machine (dual’s usually demand more RAM than single processor machines) and our dual booting of Windows XP Pro and 64-bit Windows XP Pro. Of course, 64-bit became more of a reality with the introduction of 64-bit versions of Vista (Windows XP 64-bit was nothing more than a science experiment and even we recognized that) in 2006. But the resistance to Windows Vista was so high, that we bypassed 64-bit Vista in favor of Windows XP Professional. Things were still so bad for Windows Vista in 2007, that Dream Machine 2007 dual-booted the machine with the primary OS being Windows XP. This kept the system RAM down at 2GB, albeit, high-clocked. We weren’t comfortable with Windows 64-bit Vista until 2008 when we finally used it as the primary OS for the Dream Machine. With its 64-bit capability and most of the early bugs squashed by SP1, it was finally the primary OS in Dream Machine 2008 which featured 8GB of RAM for its dual processor configuration.
Up Next: video cards, power supplies, price, and the gallery.
Video Card
Old timers will wistfully recall the late 1990s when the pathetic amount of graphics cards frame buffer sizes led to such ideas as Intel’s direct memory execute which was implemented in many AGP cards. Since, you know, videocard frame buffers would always be so pitifully small, DME allowed textures to be accessed from main memory and directly accessed from the graphics core. This would allow games to grab large textures across the awesome 266MB/s AGP port without the need for huge (and at the time, prohibitively expensive) frame buffers. Obviously, frame buffer sizes have shot up. The big uptick was in 2006 when Nvidia and ATI began a war to see who had the largest frame buffer. From there, frame buffers have advanced at an incredible pace. What’s that 2GB frame buffer tick? That’s ATI’s Radeon HD 4870 X2 which features two GPUs and separate 1GB frame buffers. In reality, the frame buffer for that generation of card was 1GB. Of course, cards with freakishly large frame buffers have been available for many years but for the most part but the frame buffer sizes didn’t always match the GPU’s performance.
Look at this chart and you’d think that Dream Machines have been running SLI or CrossFire since the late 1990s. That’s not actually true though. The 1997 and 1998 machines had dual-cards, but not in a traditional SLI/CrossFire manner. Instead, both of those early rigs had 2D cards (from Matrox and ATI) combined with 3D cards using the Voodoo and Voodoo II graphics. With 3dFX a goner by the turn of the millenium, the world had decided that cards that were fast in 3D and also had 2D functionatlity were the rage. It wasn’t until 2005 that dual-cards made a comeback to the Dream Machine with the GeForce 7800GTX cards in SLI. From there, dual-cards and more have been a standard check off list for any power hungry machine. Here’s a trick question though, which machine had the most GPUs? Not 2010. The correct answer is 2008’s dual ATI Radeon 4870 X2 cards. Each card featured two GPUs and 1GB of frame buffer.
Power Supply
OK. It may not be the internal combustion car that’s causing global warming. Instead, maybe it’s our incessent need to have ever faster computers. From 1996 to 2010, we’ve gone from 300 watts in the most pimped out PC to 1,650 watts. Who do we blame? The GPU. You can overlay this chart with the frame buffer size and number of GPUs and you’ll see that as GPUs went from singel card to dual card and tri-card, the power requirements have seriously jumped up. It wasn’t always so. The 1997 and 1998 machines featured multiple graphics cards too. But by 2005, multicard configurations were a must have in powerful computers. The CPU doesn’t get a total pass though. The spikes in PSU sizes in 2000, 2005, 2008 and 2010 also coincide with our dual-processor builds. Realistically, if this year’s machine had been a single processor box, we could have gotten by with a 1,200 PSU or on the highend, a 1,500 PSU. Still, that’s no salve if you’re looking at a 1,650 watt or 1,500 watt requiement and and you have a wall socket rated at 15 amps. Even those with more modern homes and 20 amp are going to wonder what happens when you have a Dream Machine cranked up on a summer day and someone on the same circuit decides to microwave a Hot Pocket. Poof! We can’t make predictions, but will this year finally be the end of the insane power consumption by the graphics card?
Storage
Oh how far we’ve come eh? From 2.1GB of storage in 1996 for $729. The two 2TB drives used in this year’s machine cost $400. Looking at the chart, you can see that densities really took off in 2005. That year four 500GB drives gave us our 2TB RAID array. By 2007, those four drives became four 1TB drives. In 2008, we actually used five drives with lower density to get to 3.6TB – two were VelociRaptors and three 1TB drives as backup. The financial melt down of 2009 is apparent in our chart where the capacities dropped all the way to a mere 1.7TB of storage using a 1.5TB Seagate and a 256GB Corsair P256 drive. That Corsair drive, however, was the first apparence of the SSD. We actually think that this year would have featured 6TB or 9TB of storage but none of the hard drive vendors are willing to yet ship internal 3TB hard drives due to booting issues with current motherboards.
Price
The pursuit of waton performance. The obsession with computing power. The incredible amount of money you can blow on a computer is easily seen by looking at the ever increasing prices of the Dream Machine. We actually looked at the price of each system adjusted for inflation and even then, some of the prices are hard to explain. So what explains some of the blips? The 1999 machine flipped the standard Dream Machine story on its head and showed readers how to build a powerful (but realistic) PC in step-by-step manner. The price of 2000’s machine broke shattered previous prices though with its $12,000 price tag. The big ticket items were the pair of 1GHz Pentium III processors ($2,200), the 512MB of PC800 Direct RDRAM ($1,980!). The three hard drives also drove prices prices up with $2,115 for the pair of 15K Barradua drives and $615 for the 75GB Deskstar (Yes, the ill-fated 75GXP). Another big ticket item: the Sony F500 CRT for a cool $1,900. Makes you feel pretty good about how much a 30-inch LCD cost today doesn’ t it? The price of the Dream Machine actually settled down from there. The most expensive Dream Machine ever, however, was 2008’s. The most expensive component was the custom nickel plating job at $5,000. That’s not even to mention convincing HP to essentially sell the case from its Blackbird 002. It’s no surprise that the record breaking 2008’s machine was followed by a financial collapse that had us wondering if we weren’t going to be running a Pentium Pro in the 2009 rig.
Finally, the gallery:
1996
1997
Next Page: All the rest of the dream machines!
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
LG Jumps on the Windows Phone 7 Bandwagon
Thu, 29 Jul 2010 13:21:38 +0000
Those of you not employed by Microsoft are on your own when it comes to tracking down a Windows Phone 7 device, and when the holiday shopping season rolls around, you can add LG to the list of potential suitors.
"We have a deep relationship with Microsoft so expect [us] to have a couple [of Windows Phone 7 devices] by the end of this year," said Ken Hong, an LG representative in Seoul.
If you're plugged into the tech news circuit, then you've already seen one of LG's Windows Phone 7-based smartphones floating around the Net. According to LG, that model is prepped, primed, and ready to go.
This doesn't all mean that LG will suddenly put all of its eggs into one basket. The company said it plans to invest into research and development around other mobile phone OSes, particularly Android, but also other Linux distros.
Image Credit: Pocket-Lint.com
