May 2011 | Vol 11 Issue 05
54 The DIY Destroyer We Build Our Best PC Ever 56 Motherboard: MSI P67A-GD80 (B3) 58 CPU: Intel Core i7-2600K 59 Case: NZXT Phantom 60 Graphics Cards: Gigabyte GeForce GTX 580 GV-N580UD-15I
62 SSD: OCZ RevoDrive X2 100GB 63 Mass Storage: Western Digital Caviar Black 2TB 64 Memory: Corsair Vengeance 16GB Dual Channel DDR3
Frontside
25 AMD Radeon HD 6990 26 Optoma GT720 Thermaltake Armor A30 27 Gigabyte G1.Sniper Plextor PX-256M2S 28 Zalman CNPS11X Extreme Ooma Telo 30 Lepa G900 NZXT H2 31 MSI N550GTX-Ti Cyclone II Sapphire Pure Black P67 Hydra
8 What’s Happening 14 Digital Economy 15 Dream Hardware
Heavy Gear 16 Thunderstruck 10 PSUs From 660 To 1,250 Watts 24 Nvidia GeForce GTX 590
66 Power Supply: Enermax Galaxy EVO 1250W 67 Optical Drive: Lite-On iHBS212 12X Blu-ray Disc Writer 68 Cooling: Antec Kühler H2O 620 70 Benchmarks Obliterated
32 In Win BUC iStarUSA BPN-DE340SS 33 Geekbox Ego Maniacal v1.0 34 Thermaltake Level 10 GT Sapphire Pure Fusion Mini E350
Copyright 2011 by Sandhills Publishing Company. Computer Power User is a trademark of Sandhills Publishing Company. All rights reserved. Reproduction of material appearing in Computer Power User is strictly prohibited without written permission. Printed in the U.S.A. GST # 123482788RT0001 (ISSN 1536-7568) CPU Computer Power User USPS 020-801 is published monthly for $29 per year by Sandhills Publishing Company, 131 West Grand Drive, P.O. Box 82667, Lincoln, NE 68501. Subscriber Services: (800) 424-7900. Periodicals postage paid at Lincoln, NE. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Computer Power User, P.O. Box 82545, Lincoln, NE 68501.
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Hard Hat Area
Loading Zone
Digital Living
PC Modder 36 Core i7-2600K Overclocking Souped-Up Sandy Bridge Blows Up Benchmarks 40 Mad Reader Mod Lenovo K320 Ice
72 The Bleeding Edge Of Software Inside The World Of Betas 74 Up To Speed Upgrades That’ll Keep You Humming Along 75 Exploring Explorer Alternatives Third-Party File System Wranglers 78 Million Monitor March Multimonitor Software Stretches The Limits Of Your Desktop 82 DataNumen Advanced Outlook Repair 3.2 Caelo NEO Pro 5.02 83 Avid Studio Diskeeper 2011 Professional 84 Joli OS Fulfilling Its Promises 86 Software Tips & Projects Stop Following Me, Part 2 89 Warm Up To Penguins Sweet Suites For Your Open Office
92 At Your Leisure PC & Console Games & Gear 98 Skill Or Luck? Penny Auction Business Rakes In Big Bucks
42 Encryption Ignition The Difference AES Instructions Can Make 46 Advanced Q&A Corner 48 X-ray Vision: Texas Instruments’ OMAP 5 New SoC Promises To Change Interaction With Smartphones 50 White Paper: Micron ClearNAND New Design Aims To Improve NAND Performance, Longevity
Infinite Loops Strange stats and other oddball items from computing’s periphery. 88, 90
What’s Cooking 101 Technically Speaking An Interview With soundmatters’ Lee Adams 105 Under Development A Peek At What’s Brewing In The Laboratory
Back Door 110 Q&A With Professor Kevin Warwick Meet The World’s First Cyborg
Editor’s Note
W
e’re a stone’s throw from April and we’re putting the finishing touches on the May issue, but a glance out the office windows reveals a gentle but steady snowfall blanketing the streets we’ll soon venture out on to get home. Winter hasn’t yet relinquished its frigid grasp on the North American plains, which means that we’re still not spending a ton of time outside here. What’s left to do but build a monster PC? OK, we’d probably have built this PC even if it was 90 degrees Fahrenheit outside and other types of folk were out waterskiing and having picnics in the park, or whatever it is that regular people do. The point is, we built it, and yea verily, it is good. Ensconced in its MSI B3 P67 board, our Intel Core i7-2600K hit 4.7GHz with the tenderest of nudges, and thanks to our Antec watercooling unit, will very likely surpass that with gusto. Combine this with the performance of the OCZ RevoDrive X2 handling the system’s booting duties and the Corsair Vengeance memory keeping all of that data flowing at Ludicrous Speed, and you have a PC that starts fast, runs fast, and stays cool. (Having a brace of Gigabyte GTX 580s at one’s beck and call doesn’t hurt, either.) Make sure you stop by and take a look, starting on page 54, and if you like what you see, stay tuned: We will be giving this PC away at a major LAN event in the coming months, once it gets warm enough for us to venture outside. In the meantime, we have also put together a roundup of nearly a dozen power supply units (page 16), including five that are rated at either 1,200 or 1,250 watts, as well as a few in the 660- to 850-watt range. If you’re planning a new project or just need to beef up your system’s power, check it out. And just in case your sudden need for more power is related in some way to the upcoming purchase of a new dual-GPU video card, you should also head to pages 24 and 25, where we have the results of our tests of both Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 590 and AMD’s Radeon HD 6990. Both cards have arguments for and against them; picking a clear winner has seldom been this difficult. Enjoy, and we’ll see you next month.
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WD Swallows Hitachi, Expands HD Lead Essentially, we’re down to Toshiba and Samsung as the only competitors to WD and Seagate in the hard drive-making game after WD’s mid-March announcement that it’s gobbling up Hitachi in a deal worth roughly $4.3 billion that’s expected to close in Q3 2011. The acquisition will see WD and Hitachi operate under the Western Digital brand and keep WD’s headquarters in California, although Hitachi CEO Steve Milligan will come aboard as WD president. The deal sees WD, already the world’s top hard drive manufacturer, acquire the world’s third largest, giving WD nearly 50% of the global drive market to Seagate’s roughly 30%. WD already was the world’s top drive maker per units but now supplants Seagate as the top maker per sales. WD hopes to add to those numbers with its new external 6TB My Book Studio Edition II for Mac and Windows systems for $549.99. ■
LaCie Brings The Thunder In other storage news, LaCie recently demoed the Little Big Disk, an external drive using Intel’s super-speedy Thunderbolt interface touting 10Gbps prowess and the ability to support PCI-E and DisplayPort over one cable. The technology recently became available in Apple’s new MacBook Pro. With Thunderbolt support in tow, LaCie says the Little Big Disk can “deliver multiple streams of HD video and offload hours of content in minutes without compromising bandwidth and performance.” Little Big Disk sports two Thunderbolt ports and supports daisy chaining up to six peripherals. Look for 500GB and 1TB versions of the external drive this summer at still undisclosed prices with two SSDs inside and integrated RAID 0 included. ■
WATCHING THE CHIPS FALL
Here is the pricing information for various AMD and Intel CPUs.
* As of March 2011 ** Manufacturer’s estimated price per 1,000
8 May 2011
CPU AMD Phenom II X6 1100T (Black Edition) AMD Phenom II X6 1090T (Black Edition) AMD Phenom II X6 1055T AMD Phenom II X4 970 (Black Edition) AMD Phenom II X4 965 (Black Edition) AMD Phenom II X2 555 (Black Edition) AMD Phenom II X2 560 (Black Edition) AMD Athlon II X4 Quad-Core 640 AMD Athlon II X4 Quad-Core 645 AMD Athlon II X3 Triple-Core 455 Intel Core i7-990X Extreme Edition Intel Core i7-980X Extreme Edition Intel Core i7-2600K Intel Core i7-2600 Intel Core i7-970 Intel Core i5-2500K Intel Core i5-2500 Intel Core i5-2400 Intel Core i5-2300 Intel Core i3-2120
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Released 12/7/2010 4/27/2010 4/27/2010 9/21/2010 8/13/2009 1/25/2010 9/21/2010 5/10/2010 9/21/2010 12/7/2010 2/14/2011 3/11/2010 1/9/2011 1/9/2011 7/18/2010 1/9/2011 1/9/2011 1/9/2011 1/9/2011 2/20/2011
Original Price $265** $295** $199** $180** $245** $105** $105** $122** $122** $87** $999** $999** $317** $294** $885** $216** $205** $184** $177** $138**
Company Pricing* $239** $205** $175** $175** $155** $90** $102** $99.99** $112** $87** $999** $999** $317** $294** $583** $216** $205** $184** $177** $138**
Newegg.com Retail Price* $229.99 $199.99 $179.99 $169.99 $159.99 $89.99 $105.99 $99.99 $109.99 $89.99 $999.99 $949.99 $328.99 $299.99 $594.99 $224.99 $209.99 $189.99 $184.99 $149.99
Shower, Sing, Save Energy Shower radios aren’t anything new. Neither is the fact that shower radios use replaceable batteries. Until now, that is. The H20 Shower Radio (about $57) connects directly to a shower hose and uses the water blasting through it to power the radio. Made by H20 Power and available via Tangogroup.net, the H20 Shower Radio specifically uses “an internal water jet system” that creates extra water pressure inside the radio that operates an integrated wheelturbine to create energy. Thus, in addition to listening to music, news, sports, and more while getting sudsy, there’s no need to worry about changing batteries. Further, extra energy that the radio creates gets stored in the radio’s internal battery so it’s ready to use when the shower isn’t on. ■
H a r dwa r e M o l e Antec Aims To Rock(us)
Is There Hope For The Zune? The Zune’s days appear over. Bloomberg stated as much recently, reporting that because of “tepid demand” Microsoft will stop introducing new Zune hardware and “shift its focus to other devices.” Bloomberg cites “a person familiar with the decision” as its source. Microsoft will, however, work to put Zune software on mobile phones, Bloomberg reports, letting users buy songs and movies and stream unlimited music via subscription plans. Microsoft reportedly responded in an email that it had “nothing to announce about another Zune device” other than it recently introduced “Zune HD to Canada via the Zune Originals store,” it remains committed to “supporting our devices in North America,” and Microsoft’s “long-term strategy focuses on the strength of the entire Zune ecosystem across Microsoft platforms.” It was 2009 that Microsoft released the Zune HD, possibly the last all-new Zune hardware device released. ■
Chances are fair you’re already using an Antec component or two in your gaming or high-end system. Antec would like you to expand upon that in an audio sense by using its new soundscience Rockus 3D | 2.1 speaker system ($249.99). Included is an active subwoofer with passive radiator (“deep bass from a compact subwoofer enclosure, eliminating the need for a larger, bulkier subwoofer”) and anodized aluminum satellites with 3D-tuned drivers producing 150W total of “audio optimized for soundscience’s 3Dsst technology.” According to soundscience, 3Dsst “analyzes the frequency content and pan/positioning of sounds in the incoming audio stream, and then uses certain types of filtering and phasing to widen the sound stage and create the effect of listening to a much larger surround speaker system.” Inputs include 3.5mm, RCA, and optical ports, while a puck-shaped control pod grants control of volume, 3D or music modes, and digital or analog input selections. ■
D-Link Mixes & Matches With Hybrid Router So what does “hybrid” look like in terms of a router? If you’re D-Link, it looks like the Wireless-N PowerLine Router ($129.99; model DHP-1320), an IPv6ready all-in-one Ethernet, Wi-Fi (up to 300Mbps), and powerline (200Mbps) powerhouse. Using Atheros Hy-Fi technology, which “expands coverage, improves performance, and simplifies network setup and management,” the DHP-1320 dons three Ethernet ports and is HomePlug AV-certified. Combined, the connectivity options give users a “simple way to extend their networks into ‘dead zones’ where wireless coverage has previously been limited or spotty, such as a basement, an upstairs bedroom, or other hard-to-reach locations,” states D-Link. Accompanying the DHP-1320 are four new 200Mbps PowerLine accessories, including the PowerLine AV 4-port Switch ($99.99), PowerLine AV Wireless N Extender ($119.99), and PowerLine AV Network Starter Kit ($139.99). ■
CPU / May 2011
9
GNU Promises Open-Source, Skype-Like Project
Android Tops Among Mobile OSes Who is winning the smartphone war these days? If it’s a matter of deciding solely based on operating systems, a poll of 14,000 mobile subscribers that The Nielsen Company recently conducted says it’s Android, which holds a 29% mobile OS market share to RIM BlackBerry’s 27% and Apple iOS’ 27%. When decided by manufacturer market share, however, RIM and Apple’s come out on top because “they are the only ones creating and selling smartphones with their respective operating systems.” Manufacturerwise, Apple and RIM top HTC, which owns a 12% share of all Android OS devices and 7% stake of all Windows Mobile/Windows Phone 7 devices. Motorola claims a 10% share of all Android OS devices and 1% share of Windows Mobile/WP7 devices. Samsung holds 5% and 2% shares, respectively, in both camps. ■
RSA Feels The Wrath Of APT On St. Patrick’s Day, Executive Chairman Art Coviello told users of RSA security products, including scores of corporations and governmental agencies, that RSA’s security systems had identified “an extremely sophisticated cyber attack in progress being mounted against RSA” that was deemed of the “Advanced Persistent Threat” variety. The attack “resulted in certain information being extracted from RSA’s systems,” including data tied to SecurID two-factor authentication products. Last year, Google was reportedly hit by APT attacks originating from China. Although RSA is “confident” the extracted data didn’t “enable a successful direct attack” on RSA SecurID customers, the data could potentially be used as part of a broader attack “to reduce effectiveness of a current two-factor authentication implementation.” Various experts were advising SecurID users to make certain current passwords are strong, set password attempt lockouts, and change passwords for accounts that grant privileges. ■
10 May 2011
/ www.computerpoweruser.com
The GNU Project announced in mid-March a new GNU Free Call project that could essentially see the creation of an open-source Skype alternative that works on all platforms. According to a blog post at GNU Telephony, project coordinator Haakon Eriksen and project architect David Sugar wrote that communication would occur “without requiring a central service provider to register with” and “without using insecure source secret binary protocols that may have backdoors” and without “network control points of any kind that can be exploited or abused by external parties.” Using a peer-to-peer SIP protocol and creating a “self-organizing meshed calling network,” the GNU Project believes it will “eliminate potential service control points,” including those through “explicit routing peers even if networks are isolated in civil emergencies.” Initially, the project will build upon the GNU SIP Witch, a VoIP server already available in some Linux distros. ■
Sof t w a r e S h o r ts Filmmakers Plan To Frighten With BitTorrent We can’t tell you if the Australian horror flick “The Tunnel” is any good. We can tell you the movie contains a nice twist, however. In addition to Transmission Films, a collaborator of Paramount, distributing DVD copies of the film May 19, movie makers Julian Harvey and Enzo Tedeschi will distribute it online free the same day via BitTorrent. On BitTorrent, the duo states “perhaps rather than wasting millions of dollars fighting a losing battle against Internet piracy, we should try and find a way to embrace the possibilities that this new world brings.” By not “fighting the peer-to-peer networks,” they state, torrents “could become the biggest revolution we have ever seen in the way we share entertainment and information.” Harvey and Tedeschi produced “The Tunnel” under the 135K Project moniker, a Microsoft scored a major victory nod to the movie’s 135,000 against the bad guys in mid-March individual frames, which the by taking down Rustock, which filmmakers sold for $1 each according to Richard Boscovich with a promise of randomly of Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit, selecting one on the release was “estimated to have approximately date and giving the owner a million infected computers operof the frame 1% of the ating under its control and has been movie’s revenue. Roughly known to be capable of sending 30,000 frames were sold billions of spam mails every day, as of press time. ■ including fake Microsoft lottery scams and offers for fake—and potentially dangerous—prescription drugs.” The takedown, which occurred through a “coordinated seizure of command and control Did you stop and pay respects to Creeper in mid-March? No? Us, either. After all, servers in multiple hosting locagiving a hardy “Happy 40th Birthday!” to what many experts consider the first tions,” reportedly resulted in a 39% computer virus seems wrong. Created in 1971 and believed to have been dubbed reduction in global spam output “Creeper” in honor of a character from “Scooby Doo,” the virus reportedly traveled soon after. At one point, Rustock was through Arpanet taunting users with the message, “I’m the creeper, catch me if reportedly pouring out 30 billion you can!” So, if Creeper was the first virus, what’s happened since? Plenty. Besides spam messages daily, including 1982’s Elk Cloner, which spread via floppies, there was 1987’s Jerusalem, 1992’s spam that “posed a danger to public Michelangelo, 1999’s Melissa, 2000’s I LOVE YOU, 2004’s Sasser, 2007’s Storm health” by “advertising counterfeit or botnet, 2009’s Conficker, and last year’s Stuxnet among others. Ah, the memories. unapproved knock-off versions Compared to when Creeper was the only nasty one on the block, more than 200 of pharmaceuticals.” ■ million instances of malware were reported last year. ■
Microsoft Thumps Rustock, Cuts Global Spam Nearly 40%
Lordy, Lordy, Look Who’s 40
CPU / May 2011
11
Online News Reigns Supreme If you get a portion of your news online, you’re far from alone. Recent results from the Pew Research Center Project For Excellence In Journalism’s eighth annual “State Of The News Media Report” found 46% of those Americans polled access news online at least three times a week vs. 40% accessing news via newspapers, marking the first time online news has topped print in this manner. Only local TV news with a 50% share is a more popular platform. Further, the center claims that online advertising climbed almost 14% in 2010 to $25.8 billion, surpassing the $22.8 billion it estimates newspapers took in in print ad revenue. Across all media, Pew states that “every media sector,” except online, is losing audience share. For the first time in at least 12 years, for example, “the median audience declined at all three cable news channels,” with CNN’s median primetime viewership dipping 37% in 2010, Fox’s 11%, and MSNBC’s 5%. ■
Despite Settlement, Love Apparently Still Loves Twitter Some people learn life lessons faster than others. Take rocker Courtney Love, for example. After blasting fashion designer Dawn Simorangkir in a series of Twitter rants in 2009, Love recently agreed to pay the designer a $430,000 settlement and avoid a defamation suit Simorangkir filed. It’s believed the trial would have been the first posing the question if tweets could be deemed libelous. On Simorangkir’s behalf, attorney Bryan Freedman stated the case “shows that the forum upon which you communicate makes no difference in terms of potential legal exposure.” He added that “disparaging someone on Twitter does not excuse one from liability.” The entire experience didn’t deter Love from allegedly returning to Twitter under the handle cloverxxxlove in mid-March following the settlement and laying a verbal beat down on comedian Chelsea Handler. ■
Ushahidi Pitches In On Japan Rescue Effort Amidst all the horror that unfolded in Japan following its recent earthquake and tsunami were numerous positives with technology implications, including the use of the free Ushahidi platform, which enables users to “crowdsource information using multiple channels, including SMS, email, Twitter, and the Web” and in turn, apply visualization and interactive mapping functionality to relief efforts. TechnologyReview.com reported that just hours after Japan’s earthquake, Japanese volunteers and the Fletcher School at Tufts University used Ushahidi to create sinsai.info/ushahidi, a Web site people could use to share data concerning the crisis, including helping pinpoint on maps locations where victims could be trapped and locations where supplies were obtainable. ■
Site Seeing What’s Your Wish? Amrit Richmond describes herself as a community developer and creative strategist interested in “exploring the intersections of art, tech, and social change.” Proof positive is her “The Internet Wishlist” project (theinternetwishlist.com). Described as a “collection of ideas for apps and Web sites people are wishing for,” you can also think of it as a “suggestion box for the future of technology.” Beyond sharing abilities via social networks, each wish posted is accompanied by a comment section for others to voice support or provide solutions that already exist. Current wishes at the site include a plea for an app that lets you “find out café crowdedness and seat availability in advance of going,” someone to use the “foursquare API to build a cab-sharing app,” and “an Angie’s List for designers and developers where we could warn each other about bad clients/vendors.” Have a wish of your own? Head to Twitter and include #theiwl in the wish you tweet. ■
12 May 2011
/ www.computerpoweruser.com
Moki.tv Organizes What Cable-Cutters Seek As Moki.tv aptly puts it, the way we access and discover content is “changing radically and fast.” This includes those of us who have cut the cable TV cord and rely instead on Web-based TV and other resources to fill the gap. Not only does Moki.tv aggregate free and paid movies and TV shows from Netflix, Hulu, iTunes, Amazon.com, and others, it lets you manage these sources via your own queue (including content not yet available for viewing), share recommendations and reviews via a profile page, instruct Moki.tv to inform you when queued content is about to expire, and import ratings from Netflix and elsewhere to combine with Moki.tv’s own user recommendation system. (Reportedly, Moki.tv has roughly 40,000 movies and 60,000 TV shows presently, and it is adding titles daily.) ■
Job Of The Month If you just spent March enjoying the high-def NCAA “madness” that streamed online this year, then how about being part of the next Web sports super event? Akamai, the content distribution network that provides streaming services for March Madness, the Olympics, and World Cup Soccer is looking for a Senior Software Engineer to work on HD Live Streaming technologies. You may not be doing color commentary, but you will be designing the underlying technologies and applications that make Web video feel like a home DVR. Those five years or more of C/C++ coding and background in networks didn’t teach you to slam dunk, but it may keep online viewers from missing a dribble or a goal. Your job is to make sure the rest of us get an instant, on-demand TV-like experience when we go to the Web for one of these major sports events. After all, what fun is it to watch a World Cup without hearing (and replaying) that crystal-clear clarion call of “Gooooaaaallll!”?
RAW
The Kids Are All Right
73% Percent of U.S. teenagers who visit Facebook at least once a month (eMarketer)
bit.ly/hkF9aB
The Online Rich Get Richer The Internet is sometimes known as the great equalizer, allowing businesses of any size a chance to gain a following. But when it comes to online ad dollars, eMarketer reports that the top five sites continue to eat up the market. Net U.S. ad revenues at top five online ad selling companies as a percentage of total online ad spending, 2009-2012 2009
2010
2011
2012
34.9%
38.9%
43.5%
47.6%
Yahoo!
16.1%
13.4%
11.9%
10.8%
2.4%
4.7%
7.7%
8.8%
Microsoft
4.7%
4.9%
5.4%
6.0%
AOL
4.4%
3.4%
2.8%
2.4%
Total Top 5
62.6%
65.3%
71.2%
75.5%
96%
Percent of U.S. teens who use the Internet at least once a month (eMarketer)
31%
Percent of 6- to 12-year-olds wishing to get an iPad in the next six months
(Harris)
75%+
Percent of all online entertainment searches by kids that are for music or musicians (Norton)
Most Popular Online Coupons
For The Love
According to digital coupon provider Coupons.com, cold cereal is the most popular category among online coupon clippers. The top 10 categories are:
With Apple’s iPad into its second generation and Android and webOS rivals emerging, tablet fever is being driven by high levels of satisfaction with the platform. Although only 5% of adults 18 to 34 actually own a tablet, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, those who do really like the format. The NPD Group’s survey of tablet owners found that when it comes to Internet browsing, 68% were very satisfied with the tablet experience, compared to only 42% who felt the same way about browsing on a smartphone. Consumers also appeared happier making their digital rounds on tablets where email access (67% vs. 59%) and social networking (60% vs. 49%) were concerned.
1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
Ready-to-eat cereal Yogurt Refrigerated dough Portable snacks Vegetables
14 May 2011
6. Baby products 7. Soup 8. Air, rug, and fabric care 9. Cheese 10. Lunch meats
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Of Tablets
Dreamy weather beckons, so this month’s installment consists of oddities and ends. Enjoy them outside, please. BY
MARTY SEMS
i.materialise DMLS By the Maker! Just when you thought it was shaping up to be a golden age for creators, prototyping service i.materialise (i.materialise.com) throws a titanium curve. The company uses machines from EOS and Layerwise to print a 3D realization of whatever you CAD up. Its DMLS process uses a laser to sinter layers of medical-grade titanium powder. Afterward, technicians cut and polish away the support structures necessary to withstand the heat of the 3D printing process. Don’t get carried away on size, though—i.materialise charges about $132 per cubic centimeter of material. So much for DIY golf clubs, Terminator skulls, and replacement hips. ■ Nokia Ubice Perhaps Pat Benatar was dating a Finn when she lamented a lover who came on like a flame, then turned a cold shoulder. After all, when Nokia researchers in Tampere, Finland ginned up the world’s first touchscreen made out of a national resource, river ice, they invited passersby to leave their virtually aflame gloveprints all over it. The Context-Aware Social Media team from Nokia Research Center (research .nokia.com) used software from the Natural User Interface Group (nuigroup.com) to track near-infrared light reflected back through the ice by users’ hands as they interacted with objects projected onto the “screen.” Check it out at youtube.com /watch?v=bbtrI6GjBsk. Oy! ■ Porsche 918 Spyder We could really get behind this plug-in hybrid thing. Not that there’s anywhere else to be with a Porsche like this—you’re either behind the wheel or simply left behind. We hinted at this concept a year ago (CPU’s May 2010 issue), but now it seems that this Spyder is indeed coming along. 218hp worth of electric motors help a 500hp+ V8 propel this all-wheel-drive bug to 199mph with a 0 to 60mph time near 3.1 seconds. What’s that? Hybrids are supposed to improve mileage and wean us off fossil fuels? Sorry, the limited edition, carbon-fiber unibody can get up to 78.4mpg, thanks to its liquid-cooled Li-Ion battery. All you need to do is be one of the first 918 punters to slap down $845,000, and then, ah, wait two and a half years. ■
CPU / May 2011
15
Thunderstruck 10 PSUs From 660 To 1,250 Watts n the worlds of processors and graphics cards, bigger is almost always better, at least in terms of performance. But when it comes time to choose the right power supply, a little finesse is much more enthusiast-savvy. You don’t just go out there and buy the meanestlooking power supply you can find. You want the PSU with the right output, based on your hardware. That’s how you get peak efficiency out of it. It’s really discouraging that power supplies rarely get any glory. Their cables are usually bent out of sight, allowing sexier components to shine through. That isn’t going to stop us from recognizing some of the most capable power supplies today, though. These 10 products cover the mid-range and high end, enabling some of the most potent overclocked CPUs and multi-GPU configurations currently available.
I
How We Tested We mounted each power supply to a duallevel test bench in order to isolate power supply noise from the rest of the system. We measured standby power consumption with the complete system turned off using an Extech 380803 logger. We tested load
consumption with two and three graphics cards sitting on the results screen of Just Cause 2, which is surprisingly taxing for PSUs because it cranks up GPU and CPU utilization, and checked idle fan noise with an Extech 407768 sound level meter. (Editor’s note: Prices listed reflect street price at the time of this writing.)
Antec HCP-1200 Antec’s HCP-1200 takes the honor of priciest power supply in our comparison. And what does $300 buy? Up to 1,200 watts of continuous output, an 80 Plus Gold efficiency rating, enough PCI-E-oriented plugs to support four high-end graphics cards, a semi-modular cable design, and five years of warranty coverage. But several of the other PSUs we’re reviewing can also claim those features, and at lower prices. For the HCP-1200 to prove its worth, it has to at least show us better performance. That’s exactly what Antec’s flagship does, though, delivering both aggressive idle and load power figures. The HCP-1200 employs a staggering eight 12V rails, each rated for up to
30A. In theory, you’d be looking at more than 2,800W with them all maxed out. But Antec applies a combined current cap of 99A across the octet. It’s unlikely that you’ll overload any of the rails individually, and each lead comes labeled, so you can knowingly distribute power draw across underutilized pipes. We were initially nervous about the power supply’s rear-mounted 80mm cooling fan, which is much smaller than some of the competing top-mounted fans that spin slower while moving the same amount of air. Though the cooler does accelerate when the PSU is under load, the noise it generates is nothing compared to the din of three GeForce GTX 580s working cooperatively. Surprisingly, the fan is one of the quietest in our roundup at idle. The HCP-1200 is technically semimodular, but Antec hard-wires more cable onto its unit than other vendors. The company smartly assumes you’ll need the 24-pin ATX cable, an 8-pin 12V auxiliary plug, and some SATA/4-pin Molex connectivity. Also, if you’re splurging on a 1,200W PSU, there’s a good chance
HCP-1200 $299 | Antec www.antec.com
Silent Pro Gold 1,200W $250 | Cooler Master www.coolermaster.com
Specs: 1,200W continuous output; Active PFC; 80 Plus Gold; 8 +12V rails (30A/rail); 80mm fan; 8 6+2-pin PCI-E connectors; Semi-modular cables; Five-year warranty
Specs: 1,200W continuous output; Active PFC; 80 Plus Gold; 1 +12V rail (98A); 135mm fan; 4 6+2-pin PCI-E connectors; 4 6-pin PCI-E connectors; Semimodular cables; Five-year warranty
16 May 2011
/ www.computerpoweruser.com
you’re driving at least a pair of high-end graphics cards. So, you’ll find seven leads total emanating from the front of the supply, with the option to attach five more modularly (cables for two more graphics cards, plus plenty of additional SATA/4-pin peripherals). All of Antec’s cables are plenty long, but they’re also particularly stiff; maneuvering them around a chassis can get tricky.
Cooler Master Silent Pro Gold 1,200W There’s no room for compromise at the high end, and Cooler Master’s Silent Pro Gold 1,200W attempts to combine all of the qualities we value in a PSU. It boasts an 80 Plus Gold efficiency rating and relies on a single 12V rail rated for up to 98A. Its critical cables are hard-wired, and others are modular. Most of all, its capacity is accommodating. For all intents and purposes, the Silent Pro Gold 1,200W is an ideal piece of hardware, aside from a somewhat lofty price tag. Our most glaring complaint is its hard-wired cables, including the 24pin ATX connector, two 4+4 12V runs, and two 6+2/6-pin PCI-E combo cables. They’re all super-stiff and difficult to get into position. More frustrating, all of the modular connectors are flat and ultra-flexible, facilitating the bendability we wish Cooler Master could have enabled throughout.
Everything else about Cooler Master’s flagship is commendable. The company designed the Silent Pro Gold 1,200W to handle as many as four graphics cards, so it had no problem feeding our three-way GTX 580 setup nearly 900W. Additionally, it’ll take up to nine SATA devices, a quartet of 4-pin peripherals requiring Molex connectors, and a floppy drive. At idle, the supply’s 135mm cooler runs remarkably quiet. Cooler Master claims a couple of different technologies help the Silent Pro Gold achieve its thermal performance: Hybrid Transformer and Heat Transfer Technology. The former consists of a smaller transformer that uses less power, while the latter describes a patented heatsink design that channels airflow more effectively. Given the Silent Pro Gold 1,200W’s premium price and kilowatt-plus output, it’s suited to a very specific demographic— power users interested in two, three, or four very high-end graphics cards to complement similarly demanding processors. If that’s not you, save some cash and spring for a lower-wattage alternative.
Enermax MODU87+ 700W It’s tempting to think that high-end configurations require massive power sources. However, Enermax’s MODU87+ proves you can get away with a lot less if you’re using an efficient, well-designed PSU. An 80 Plus Gold certification indicates
better than 90% efficiency at 50% load and at least 87% efficiency at 20 and 100% load. In real-world testing, the MODU87+ demonstrates the lowest consumption numbers in our roundup. What does this prove? Enermax’s offering turns more power from the wall into useful energy. So, it gets away with drawing fewer watts and generating less heat. That’s exactly what you want from a high-end PSU. The MODU87+ achieves its command performance using three +12V rails, each rated for 25A of current. On paper, the MODU87+ is almost exactly on par with Seasonic’s X660, a single-rail design that costs significantly less. Enermax does a better job with its cables, though. The ATX and 12V auxiliary connectors—necessary in every modern PC—are hard-wired to the PSU. Everything else is modular, spaced far enough apart for easy installation, color-coded, and marked with arrows to make sure you plug in each cable correctly. Enermax is particularly proud of its cooling implementation. A 139mm Twisterbearing fan is remarkably quiet at idle, generating a paltry 41 dB. As load on the PSU increases, the fan speeds up in a nonlinear way, keeping acoustics as conservative as possible until more airflow is needed. Upon shutdown, the fan continues to spin for up to a minute, dissipating latent heat rather than letting it accumulate. Although the MODU87+ commands a difficult-to-ignore premium, it’s also one of
MODU87+ 700W $199 | Enermax www.enermaxusa.com
ZX-Series OCZ-ZX1250W $239 | OCZ www.ocztechnology.com
Specs: 700W continuous output; active PFC; 80 Plus Gold; 3 +12V rails (25A/rail); 139mm fan; 4 6+2-pin PCI-E connectors; Semi-modular cables; Five-year warranty
Specs: 1,250W continuous output; Active PFC; 80 Plus Gold; 1 +12V rail (104A); 140mm fan; 6 6+2-pin PCI-E connectors; Modular cables; Five-year warranty
CPU / May 2011
17
. . . the reasons for buying a top-end PSU narrow down to driving three- and four-way graphics configurations. the most efficient performers. An intelligent modular cable design, quiet cooling, and plenty of relevant connectors make this an attractive option for enthusiasts with a little more to spend on power.
OCZ ZX-Series OCZ-ZX1250W As you crest 1,000W and start approaching the power limits of what a typical household 15A breaker can deliver, the reasons for buying a top-end PSU narrow down to driving three- and four-way graphics configurations. No other component even comes close to requiring so much juice. It’s almost a shame, then, that OCZ’s ZXSeries 1,250W PSU is limited to three-way graphics setups by its sextet of modular 6+2pin PCI-E connectors. Enthusiasts looking to work around that cap can use dual-GPU cards like AMD’s Radeon HD 6990 and Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 590 to get four graphics processors working in parallel. The good news is that, of the 1,200W+ products in our roundup, OCZ’s 1,250W ZX Series supply gives you the greatest output potential for the lowest price. Our consumption measurements show the ZX-Series unit very competitive at
idle, pulling a modest 209W from the wall. It draws a little more power than competing models under load, barely exceeding 900W. Even still, a significantly lower price gives OCZ immediate appeal, overshadowing the loss of a few watts with substantial savings. A completely modular design doesn’t make much sense here, given the number of connectors that get used in a high-end, multi-GPU box. At the very least, the bundled cables are long enough to stretch up to optical drives and down to the third card in a triple-graphics setup. They are pretty stiff, though, and cables with multiple plugs (such as the 20+4 ATX and 6+2pin PCI-E connectors) have slightly uneven wire lengths, making it more difficult to line them up during installation. Our unit had an intermittent resonant buzz, which changed pitch depending on the load being applied. We’ve heard this from units in past PSU roundups, and it’s generally a one-off issue. At the same time, it’s worth noting as a potential side effect of spending a little less on all-out power delivery. OCZ does offer five-year coverage on the ZX Series, so
you’re at least assured coverage on any manufacturing defect.
PC Power & Cooling Silencer 760W Before it was acquired by OCZ Technology in 2007, PC Power & Cooling was known for its enthusiast-oriented power supplies based on principles dear to then-CEO Doug Dodson. The company’s PSUs always centered on a single 12V rail—critical, Dodson claimed, for ensuring reliable power delivery. High-end devices attached to a multirail power supply might overload one pipe, leaving others underutilized. Fixed power cables is another hallmark of PC Power & Cooling. You see, a modular design might encourage cleaner installations, but removable connectors are susceptible to failure. Contacts can corrode. Plugs can come unlatched. The quality of an electrical signal can deteriorate over time. By arming its Silencer 760W with fixed cables, PC Power & Cooling eliminates all of those possibilities. Of course, that leaves you with a lot of cabling to keep neat. The Silencer employs refreshingly long runs, making
Silencer 760W $129 | PC Power & Cooling www.pcpower.com
X660 $159 | Seasonic www.seasonicusa.com
Specs: 760W continuous output; Active PFC; 80 Plus Silver; 1 +12V rail (74A); 80mm fan; 2 6+2-pin PCI-E, 2 6-pin PCI-E connectors; Fixed cables; Seven-year warranty
Specs: 660W continuous output; Active PFC; 80 Plus Gold; 1 +12V rail (54A); 110mm fan; 4 6+2-pin PCI-E connectors; Modular cables; Five-year warranty
18 May 2011
/ www.computerpoweruser.com
it easy to reach remotely-located drives and add-in cards. Tucking away unused cables ends up being a small price to pay for an emphasis on dependability. And PC Power & Cooling takes that trait seriously, backing the Silencer with an unmatched seven-year warranty. Although PC Power & Cooling indicates this unit is only certified to support a pair of GeForce GTX 470s, it had no trouble driving our two GTX 580s well below its 760W continuous power ceiling. We measured respectable numbers from the wall, though it has to be noted that the unit’s 80mm rear-mounted exhaust fan generates more noise than most other units, even at idle. If you have a large case conducive to cable management, it’s hard to go wrong with a battle-hardened design like PC Power and Cooling’s. Noise is a bother, but long, fixed cables and a single 12V rail make this a dependable workhorse.
Seasonic X660 They say it’s what’s on the inside that counts. And inside Seasonic’s X660 you’ll find plenty of goodness. To start, the compact power supply is 80 Plus Goldcertified. Although its peak output figures are the lowest in our roundup, losing less power to heat means the X660 still has what it takes to drive a Core i7-990X processor overclocked to 4GHz and a
pair of GeForce GTX 580 graphics cards in SLI. Impressively, it does so while drawing the least amount of wall power under full load. Seasonic also manages to give us the lowest idle power consumption, and the X660 is the quietest power supply at idle, too. Its fan is actually one of its big selling points. Integration of a Sanyo Denki ball bearing fan purportedly enhances thermal performance, and our idle noise numbers concur; a lot of thought seemingly went into optimizing this power supply’s fan control. At 20% load or less, the cooler doesn’t need to spin at all. Between 20 and 50% load, the fan spins at a fairly constant level, ramping up only to address the heat build-up you start seeing as demands increase above 50%. Those low noise figures and impressive efficiency results prove that once you have Seasonic’s X660 installed, it’s able to handle heavy loads without breaking a sweat. But while we like the PSU’s single rail and 80 Plus Gold rating, we’re not big fans of its fully modular (and uncomfortably stiff ) cable design. To begin, the 24-pin ATX motherboard cable (which should be fixed anyway—you can’t even run a PC without it) is split into two connectors that have to be twisted awkwardly to interface with the power supply. All of the other cables are modular, as well, and the connectors on the PSU are crammed really close together.
A fantastic performer, you pay extra for Seasonic’s high efficiency and premium fan. The X660 can handle a system with dual GTX 580s, but we’d probably save a lower-output unit like this for a fancy single-GPU configuration.
SilverStone Strider Gold ST1200-G The only completely modular power supply to ship with all of its cables attached, SilverStone’s Strider Gold ST1200-G also includes an extra bundle of SATA connectors. If you don’t need as many 4-pin Molex plugs, simply swap them out for more storage-oriented support. This makes the Strider the only unit in our roundup to come with more connectivity than it actually accommodates at any given time—a nod to its flexibility. But SilverStone needs more than just an extra handful of SATA plugs to set the Strider Gold apart. After all, it’s one of four 1,200W+ 80 Plus Gold-certified PSUs in our roundup. And priced at $290, it’s also the second-most expensive. Thankfully, there’s a lot to like about the Strider Gold. To begin, it benefits from a single +12V rail rated for up to 100A of current. Once upon a time, when the ATX standard limited each output to 240VA or less, this might have been a bad thing, as rails were divided up to prevent overheating any one wire. These days, a single rail helps enthusiasts ensure power-hungry devices receive enough current.
Strider Gold ST1200-G $289 | SilverStone www.silverstonetek.com
TOP-800WS $99 | Topower www.topower.com
Specs: 1,200W continuous output; Active PFC; 80 Plus Gold; 1 +12V rail (100A); 135mm fan; 4 6+2-pin PCI-E connectors; 4 6-pin PCI-E connectors; Modular cables; Three-year warranty
Specs: 800W continuous output; Active PFC; 80 Plus Silver; 2 +12V rails (32A/rail); 120mm fan; 2 6+2-pin PCI-E connectors; 2 6-pin PCI-E connectors; Fixed cables; Three-year warranty
20 May 2011
/ www.computerpoweruser.com
Benchmark Results 850W & Below
Enermax MODU87+
PC Power & Cooling Silencer 760W
Rated output (continuous)
700W
760W
Standby power
2.5W
2.3W
Dual-GPU idle power consumption
163.3W
173.2W
Dual-GPU load power consumption
648W
667W
Idle fan noise
41.0 dB(A)
51.6 dB(A)
1,200W & Above
Antec HCP-1200
Cooler Master Silent Pro Gold 1,200W
Seasonic X660
Topower TOP-800WS
XFX Pro 850W
Zalman ZM850-HP PLUS
660W
800W
850W
850W
2.1W
2.4W
2.4W
2.5W
167.4W
170.8W
176.3W
180.4W
649W
654W
676W
655W
42.5 dB(A)
44.5 dB(A)
48.2 dB(A)
44.8 dB(A)
OCZ ZX1250W
SilverStone ST1200-G
Rated output (continuous)
1,200W
1,200W
1,250W
1,200W
Standby power
2.3W
2.5W
2.5W
2.2W
Triple-GPU idle power consumption
206W
213W
209W
208W
Triple-GPU load power consumption
874W
890W
901W
884W
Idle fan noise
41.9 dB(A)
45.6 dB(A)
43.0 dB(A)
43.2 dB(A)
SilverStone also validates the Strider Gold’s capabilities in a more realistic operating environment than many other companies. It claims its PSU can deliver 1,200W continuous (1,300W peak) all day long at 40 degrees Celsius (or 104 F). Indeed, our benchmark results show the ST1200-G to be one of the most efficient units in our 1,200W+ crowd, drawing more power than only one other unit, Antec’s HCP-1200. The Antec supply also does its job a little more quietly. However, you pay a bit more for it, too. Really, both power supplies are exceptional choices. Given that we experienced one competing model afflicted with a distracting whine under load, it’s notable that SilverStone specifically points out the 2,200 microfarad capacitors in its PCI-E power cables, said to help prevent the buzz associated with dynamic load changes. The Strider Gold serves up four 6+2-pin plugs and four 6-pin connectors, properly supporting four-way CrossFire and SLI configurations.
Topower TOP-800WS The dark horse in our roundup, Topower’s TOP-800WS manages to cram 800W of output into a compact
enclosure selling for less than $100. Were we apprehensive about its performance potential? For sure. Should we have been? Apparently not. The TOP-800WS lays down impressive figures that rival Zalman’s expensive ZM850-HP Plus and best XFX’s comparably-priced Pro 850W. This unit offers less continuous output than either of those PSUs but has no trouble driving a pair of very high-end GPUs and an overclocked sixcore CPU. Not surprisingly, the units that outperform this one are 80 Plus Gold PSUs; this one is only 80 Plus Silvercertified. The step down is fairly minor though, and you almost certainly won’t see the difference on your power bill. Topower draws its muscle from a pair of +12V rails, each rated for 32A. Although we prefer single-rail designs, we’re at least pleased with the company’s decision to hard-wire its cables, nixing the possibility of a connection failure somewhere down the line. Each cable is amply long and flexible enough to bend into place. Additionally, the TOP-800WS’ 6+2-pin PCI-E connectors lock, unlike competing designs that have to be mashed together before being plugged into a high-end graphics card.
Test sytem specs: CPU: Intel Core i7-990X @ 4GHz; Motherboard: Asus Rampage III Formula; RAM: 12GB Crucial DDR3-1333 (3x 4GB); GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 580 (two- and three-way SLI); Storage: 250GB Intel SSD 510; Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit
A 120mm cooling fan isn’t the largest or slowest-spinning in our roundup, so it’s no surprise to see competing models generating less noise at idle. At 44.5 dB(A), though, the TOP-800WS remains whisper-quiet. Really, our only reservation about Topower’s PSU is its three-year warranty. Competing models tout five- and seven-year coverage, which inspires quite a bit more confidence. Even still, priced under $100, the TOP-800WS is worthy of consideration.
XFX Pro 850W XFX is very forthcoming about the way it tests and rates power supplies. There’s a lot of fudging that goes on in the PSU business, so it’s entirely understandable that the company is anxious to demonstrate how its 850 watts are different from the competition. First, the Pro 850W is rated to deliver its output at 50 C, a fairly common temperature inside of your case. Many other units are rated at far cooler (and less realistic) temperatures, which help them run more efficiently. XFX also employs a single +12V rail, driving attached devices from just one pipeline. The Pro 850W goes the traditional route, with all of its cables and connectors
SilverStone also validates the Strider Gold’s capabilities in a more realistic operating environment than many other companies. CPU / May 2011
21
permanently attached. Purists will appreciate that approach, since it facilitates secure connections between the PSU and peripheral devices, eliminating one potential failure point. Conversely, this is going to be a challenge for power users who prioritize cable management, unless, of course, you plan to use much of the Pro 850W’s connectivity. In that case, be ready to attach 11 SATA devices, seven peripherals requiring 4-pin Molex connectors, a floppy drive, and two graphics cards with eight- and six-pin plugs. The cables are long and fairly flexible, simplifying installation. As if to make up for the myriad cables, XFX packs everything into a form factor much smaller than Zalman’s competing PSU at the same capacity. The Pro 850W is less than 7 inches long, compared to the ZM850-HP Plus’ 8.5 inches. XFX does sacrifice a little on a smaller fan, but its 135mm cooler still does its job well, albeit at slightly higher noise levels. Certified for both SLI- and CrossFirebased graphics subsystems, there’s a lot to like about this affordable power supply. Its 80 Plus Bronze rating isn’t particularly noteworthy. However, XFX turns right around and covers the Pro 850W with a five-year warranty, indicating the company’s confidence in the way it validates per-formanceoriented PSUs.
Zalman ZM850-HP Plus Generally, we expect the fastest parts to dissipate the most heat and consequently require aggressive cooling to keep stable. Zalman showed us that isn’t necessarily true. And so, it’s hardly a surprise that the company’s ZM850-HP Plus power supply drives high-end configurations without making much noise at all. A handful of different technologies contribute to the ZM850-HP Plus’ inconspicuous presence. Most noticeable when you peer into the unit are its two copper heatpipes, which run through the supply’s heatsinks and terminate in aluminum fin arrays positioned next to a rear-facing exhaust vent. Air is pulled through the sink and dissipated from the power circuitry as quickly as possible. Of course, it also helps that Zalman uses a dual-ball bearing 140mm fan that sits behind a metal grille. Heat output is further minimized by the fact that this is a high-efficiency design. An 80 Plus Silver rating guarantees at least 88% efficiency at 50% load and 85% efficiency at 20 and 100% load. We tested Zalman’s claims by driving a Core i7-990X-based system running at 4GHz, along with two GeForce GTX 580s in SLI. Although its idle power is slightly higher than XFX’s competing 850W offering, it runs more efficiently under load and ends up consuming 21W less, peaking at 655W.
The ZM850-HP Plus employs four +12V rails. Strangely, the PSU offers three different load ratings between them. Two rails are rated at 25A, the third is rated at 35A, and the fourth maxes out at 28A. Zalman breaks down how all four rails are divided up on the surface of the PSU. Still, we’d prefer a singlerail design to keep things simpler. Zalman also chose a semi-modular design, leaving the ATX, 12V auxiliary power, and one 6-/6+2-pin combo PCI-E graphics connector permanently affixed. An additional two combo graphics plugs, nine SATA, eight four-pin Molex, and one floppy power connectors can be attached modularly. The selection there is ample. We just wish the cables were longer and not so stiff. As they stand, bending the braided sleeves is a real challenge.
“E” Is For “Efficient” Power supply efficiency has come a long way since the last time we evaluated this many products. Every model represented boasts an 80 Plus Bronze rating or better, and performance is remarkably similar across the board. In order to get the most out of your favorite unit, shoot for an output ceiling around two times higher than your PC’s power consumption. That way, it’ll run at roughly 50% load—the sweet spot for each of these PSUs. ■ BY
PAUL CROSS
Pro 850W $119 | XFX www.xfxforce.com
ZM850-HP Plus $210 (MSRP) | Zalman www.zalman.com
Specs: 850W continuous output; Active PFC; 80 Plus Bronze; 1 +12V rail (70A/rail); 135mm fan; 2 6+2-pin PCI-E, 2 6-pin PCI-E connectors; Fixed cables; Five-year warranty
Specs: 850W continuous output; active PFC; 80 Plus Silver; 4 +12V rails (25A, 25A, 35A, 28A); 140mm fan; 3 6+2-pin PCI-E, 3 6-pin PCI-E, 3 x 8-pin PCI-E connectors; Semi-modular cables; Three-year warranty
22 May 2011
/ www.computerpoweruser.com
Nvidia GeForce GTX 590 he difference between Nvidia’s original Fermi GF100 and the revamped GF110 is night and day. For Nvidia and AMD, faster, cooler, and quieter are the primary design goals when making a new GPU, and the latest evidence of Big Green’s success is the GeForce GTX 590, the first dual-GPU card from Nvidia since the GTX 295. The GTX 590 features two GF110 GPUs, the same engines that power the fastest single-GPU graphics card on the planet, the GTX 580. Though it sounds like an unbeatable recipe, the GTX 580 is a 244-watt card, and Nvidia needed to make some adjustments in order to run two of these on the same PCB. The core and memory clocks were dropped from 772MHz to 607MHz and 1,002MHz to 854MHz, respectively. The memory subsystem saw little change: The 384-bit bus for each GPU still links it to 1.5GB of GDDR5 memory for 3GB total.
Vision kit is now $149 and the active shutter glasses now have better battery life.
Niche Unleashed Stacked against AMD’s new Radeon HD 6990, the GTX 590 falls just short performance-wise. With both cards priced at a bank-breaking $699, Nvidia appears to be betting that 3D Vision Surround, PhysX, CUDA, and less noise offset the measly performance difference. If you agree, you might consider par-ticipating in some of the riskier clinical trials to fund this indulgence. Do it for the science . . . and the games. ■
T
Two GPUs, One Cool Customer The GeForce GTX 590 has a 365watt TDP, and although Nvidia defines TDP as the maximum amount of power the cooler needs to dissipate when running 3D applications, that number requires a powerful PSU and a pair of 8-pin PCI-E power adapters. Like AMD did with the Radeon HD 6990, Nvidia chose to locate the two GPUs at opposite ends of the PCB, slap a vapor chamber on top of each, and Specs: GPU: Dual GF110s; Core clock: 607MHz; Memory: 384-bit bus, 3GB GDDR5 (854MHz); 1,024 CUDA cores; 128 texture units; 96 ROPs Test system specs: CPU: 3.33GHz Intel Core i7-980X; Motherboard: Gigabyte G1.Sniper (Intel X58); RAM: 4GB OCZ DDR3-2000; Storage: 256GB Plextor PX-256M2S-02 SSD
24 May 2011
/ www.computerpoweruser.com
GeForce GTX 590 $699 ❘ Nvidia www.nvidia.com
BY
use a centrally located 90mm fan to blow air over the vapor chambers. Nvidia’s design also features a 12-layer PCB, with the power and ground layers consisting of 2 ounces of copper. There’s also a 10-phase digital power controller feeding juice to the GPUs and a pair of dual-phase controllers distributing power to the memory.
Aural & Visual According to Nvidia, the GTX 590 is quieter than its previous dual-GPU cards, and only slightly noisier than the GTX 580. In our tests, we did notice some extra noise under load, but it was not much. It is noticeably quieter than the Radeon HD 6990, though, which should be music to gamers’ ears. If two GPUs still aren’t enough, this card is your ideal route to Quad SLI. Although two GTX 590s will display across six monitors, three is the max if you want to keep SLI enabled. Dual-GPU cards are wasted on a single monitor, so it’s nice to see Nvidia ponied up on three Dual-Link DVI ports and a single mini DisplayPort on the GTX 590’s backplane. You can connect three 3D-capable 120Hz monitors to this card and enjoy Nvidia 3D Vision Surround right out of the box. To make this package even sweeter, Nvidia just announced that its 3D
Specs & Scores
ANDREW LEIBMAN
Radeon HD 6990
GeForce GTX 590
Price
$699
$699
Core Clock
830MHz
608MHz
Memory Clock
1,250MHz
854MHz
Memory Interface
256-bit
384-bit
Memory
2GB GDDR5
3GB GDDR5
3DMark Overall
X3289
X2992
Graphics Score
3045
2838
Physics Score
8061
8076
Combined Score
3461
2505
Graphics Test 1*
14.39
14.26
Graphics Test 2*
17.61
14.61
Graphics Test 3*
15.4
14.31
Graphics Test 4*
9.02
8.65
Physics Test*
25.59
25.64
Combined Test*
16.1
11.66
FPS
50.3
54.2
Score
1266
1366
Games
1,920 x 1,200
Left 4 Dead 2 (8XAA, 16XAF)
170.64
166.77
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat (4XAA)
63.5
64.9
Aliens vs. Predator (4XAA)
77.3
66.4
3DMark 11
Unigine Heaven
2,650 x 1,600 Left 4 Dead 2 (8XAA, 16XAF)
140.5
130.88
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat (4XAA)
40.5
40.6
Aliens vs. Predator (4XAA)
48.4
42.2
Driver: Catalyst 11.4 Beta, ForceWare 267.71 *fps
AMD Radeon HD 6990 t’s no exaggeration to say that AMD’s latest dual-GPU monster, the Radeon HD 6990, is the fastest graphics card on the planet, but context is crucial to evaluating what AMD accomplished with this card. The former king of the hill, AMD’s dual-GPU HD 5970, features two 40nm Cypress GPUs down-clocked to keep the card below the 375-watt PCI-E spec. The 6990, also sporting a pair of 40nm GPUs, has double the memory (on the same 256-bit bus) and an additional 32 texture units. Between Cypress and Cayman, AMD also tweaked the graphics architecture, split the graphics engine in two for better vertex and geometry performance, and moved from VLIW5 (Very Long Instruction Word) to VLIW4-based design that significantly optimized the parts of the GPU that worked the hardest. The revamped SIMDs are capable of delivering better compute performance in less space. AMD provided the 6990 with the 6950’s 830MHz core clocks, and the 4GB (2GB per GPU) of GDDR5 memory is clocked at 1,250MHz. And then there’s the second BIOS. Like the 6970 before it, the 6990 features the same dual-BIOS toggle switch, questionably dubbed “AUSUM” (Antilles Unlocking Switch for Uber Mode) which lets you run an overclocked profile at the flip of a switch. When set to the No. 1 position, the Radeon HD 6990 jacks its core clock up to 880MHz and raises the core voltage from 1.12V to 1.175V. At the overclocked settings, the 6990 goes from a 375-watt beast to a 450-watt monstrosity. To cope, your system will need to have two 8-pin PCI-E power connectors; AMD recommends at least a 750W PSU to power one 6990.
AMD Radeon HD 6990 $699 ❘ AMD www.amd.com
around, and it’s priced as such because the equivalent CrossFireX configuration with a pair of 6970s will set you back roughly $640 (after rebates). Oh, and the single-card performance crown? AMD still has it. (See page 24 for Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 590.) ■
I
AMD redesigned the PCB, separated the GPUs with a large central fan, used separate vapor chambers, and stuck them to the die surfaces with a special phase-change thermal interface material. AMD also used a pair of digital Specs & Scores Volterra regulators to Core Clock manage power fed to Memory Clock the GPUs and binned Memory Interface chips for low leakage and Memory 3DMark 11 superior OC headroom. The backplane features 3DMark Overall a single DL-DVI port and Graphics Score four mini DisplayPorts, Physics Score letting you set up a five- Combined Score display Eyefinity array. Graphics Test 1* AMD includes three Graphics Test 2* miniDP adapters (two Graphics Test 3* DVI and one HDMI) to Graphics Test 4* get any three monitors Physics Test* running in Eyefinity right Combined Test* Unigine Heaven out of the box. At $699, the Radeon FPS HD 6990 is soul-crushingly Score expensive; however, take Games 4 Dead 2 a look at the numbers Left (8XAA, 16XAF) this card posts. To really S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: appreciate it, you need to be Call of Pripyat (4XAA) running multiple monitors, Aliens vs. Predator and that ain’t cheap either. (4XAA) This single package is Games the best-performing card Left 4 Dead 2
Specs: GPU: Dual Cayman XTs; Core clock: 830MHz; Memory: 256-bit bus, 4GB GDDR5 (1,250MHz); 3,072 stream processors; 192 texture units; 64 ROPs Test system specs: CPU: 3.33GHz Intel Core i7-980X; Motherboard: Gigabyte G1.Sniper (Intel X58); RAM: 4GB OCZ DDR3-2000; Storage: 256GB Plextor PX-256M2S-02 SSD
BY
ANDREW LEIBMAN
Radeon HD 6870
AMD Radeon AMD Radeon HD 6990 HD 6990 OC
900MHz
830MHz
880MHz
1,050MHz
1,250MHz
1,250MHz
256-bit
256-bit
256-bit
1GB GDDR5
2GB GDDR5
2GB GDDR5
P4263
X3289
X3429
3935
3045
3183
7937
8061
8051
3991
3461
3595
18.92
14.39
15.02
19.23
17.61
18.51
23.96
15.4
15.97 9.45
11.47
9.02
25.2
25.59
25.56
18.56
16.1
16.72
17.6
50.3
52.5
444
1266
1322
95.21
170.64
172.61
24.03
63.5
66.2
25.7
77.3
80.1
1,920 x 1,200
2,560 x 1,600
(8XAA, 16XAF)
64.65
140.5
145.61
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat (4XAA)
14.1
40.5
42.4
Aliens vs. Predator (4XAA)
15.8
48.4
50.7
Driver Catalyst 11.4 Beta * Results in fps.
CPU / May 2011
25
Optoma GT720 ometimes a monitor can’t provide the most immersive gaming experience. And that’s the first reason any serious gamer should consider purchasing the Optoma GT720. With the proper components, you can game on the big screen in both HD and 3D. To view images in 3D, though, you’ll need LCD shutter glasses and a 3D-capable video card. You’ll probably want to rely on a separate setup for surround sound, but there are two integrated 5-watt speakers so you don’t have to subject yourself to a silent film marathon should you find yourself without other speakers. The GT720 is, for all intents and purposes, a portable plug-and-play model
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GT720 Optoma $749.99 www.optomausa.com
that you can slip into the included nylon backpack, strap on your back, and carry with you to any LAN party or friend’s apartment that has a large, white wall. We simply unpacked the projector, connected it to a mid-tower PC via VGA (cable not included), powered it up, and turned it on. Of course, the GT720 isn’t just for Call of Duty: Black Ops in widescreen. With the array of video ports, you can connect the projector to your Blu-ray player, DVD player, DVR, or other components to stream HD video and more. In addition to
these capabilities, the GT720 comes with a remote that’s actually helpful, because you can use it to adjust the many menu options and tilt the lens up or down. If the price is holding you back, first ask your friends to go in on Optoma’s GT720 and host a movie night using your new projector to raise some wellinvested funds. ■ BY JOANNA
CLAY
Specs: Native resolution: 1,280 x 800; Brightness: 2,500 ANSI lumens; Contrast ratio: 3,000:1; Image size: 34 to 300 inches; Projection distance: 1.64 to 18 feet; Aspect ratio: 16:10 (native); Video compatibility: NTSC, PAL, SECAM, EDTV, HDTV (720i/p, 1080i/p); Lamp life: 5,000/3,000 hours (standard/bright); Weight: 6.5lbs; Dimensions: 3.82 x 12.76 x 9.21 inches (HxWxD); Ports: HDMI, VGA, S-Video, Composite, audio I/O, RS-232; remote control; One-year warranty (90-day lamp)
Thermaltake Armor A30 or those who want the compatibility, capacity, and modularity of an enthusiast mid-tower but the smaller form factor and portability of a shoe box-sized system, check out Thermaltake’s A30. Decked out in wall-to-wall mesh and windows, the A30 fits microATX or Mini-ITX boards. Fulllength graphics cards just miss the 3.5-inch drive cage, and you can host up to seven drives, including two internal 2.5-inch and two external 5.25-inch drives. Don’t need so many drives? Feel free to remove the 3.5-inch cage for improved airflow. The A30’s back panel offers four ventilated, full-height slots set within an easily removable drive tray. For ventilation, the A30 sports a 90mm front intake, 230mm top exhaust, and a pair of 60mm exhausts in the back. The low fan hum during operation is
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Armor A30 $119.99 Thermaltake www.thermaltakeusa.com
inconspicuous, and, depending on your config, you might be able to get away with disconnecting the two rear fans.
Thermaltake uses rubber grommets in the 3.5-inch drive cage and rubber pads under the front of the motherboard. The front panel’s USB 3.0 port still uses a pass-through to the back panel so you can loop into the motherboard’s I/O port, but hey—at least there’s a front USB 3.0 port! Overall, the aesthetic is tough and unique. Steel rather than aluminum construction contributes to the nearly 15-pound weight, which makes us wish that Thermaltake had designed in a carrying handle for LAN events, even if the handle is a clip-on. Nevertheless, this is a well-built chassis with an attractive set of compromises between traditional tower and cube designs. ■ BY WILLIAM VAN WINKLE
Specs: Material: Steel, plastic; Motherboard support: microATX, Mini-ITX; Bays: 2 5.25-inch external, 2 3.5-inch internal, 1 3.5-inch external, 2 2.5-inch internal; Slots: 4; Fans: 1 90mm front (blue LED), 1 230mm top (blue LED), 2 60mm rear; Ports: 1 USB 3.0, 1 USB 2.0, 1 eSATA, audio I/O; Dimensions: 10.5 x 11.5 x 18 inches (HxWxD); Weight: 14.8lbs
26 May 2011
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Gigabyte G1.Sniper ere’s an interesting approach to a gaming motherboard: Instead of designing the board for overclocking, build one that has as many optimized audio and networking capabilities as possible in addition to support for powerful graphics and CPUs. The Gigabyte G1.Sniper was definitely developed with the gaming experience in mind. The onboard audio is handled by the Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi digital audio processor along with Dolby Digital Live (the latter of which encodes audio in real time), and a built-in front headphone amplifier. To help prevent client-based network lag, the G1.Sniper has Bigfoot Networks’ Killer E2100 Game Networking Platform
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baked in. The platform includes a dedicated NPU (network processing unit) with 1GB of DDR2 memory, with technology designed to route some network data to the NPU rather than the network stack for a performance boost. The G1.Sniper also supports Intel’s latest six-core beast, the Core i7-990X, as well as 3-way CrossFireX or SLI, 6Gbps SATA, and USB 3.0. This board is a performer, and the bells and whistles contribute to the user experience in a meaningful way. ■ BY SETH
COLANER
hinano Kenshi’s Plextor brand has long graced optical drives with a loyal following. Its new M2 Series of 6Gbps SATA SSDs shows the marque on a more forward-looking storage medium. The M2 line is made with MLC NAND memory and a Marvell 88SS9174 controller. There’s support for the performancerestoring TRIM command and NCQ. Plextor also builds in its Unique Instant Restore Function to maintain speed when the drive’s been used a great deal. In that vein, our test results reflect a couple weeks’ worth of usage on the PX256M2S, being the sole drive in a PC. Note that performance scales by capacity in this drive family, especially with sequential write rates. The 64GB version,
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Gigabyte G1.Sniper
3DMark 11 Overall
X3289
Graphics Score
3045
Physics Score
8061
Combined Score
3461
PCMark Vantage Pro Overall
17879
Memories
11357
TV And Movies
6958
Gaming
18737
Music
18033
Communications
18101
Productivity
18136
HDD
22893
POV-Ray 3.7*
1554.49 PPS
Cinebench 11.5
G1.Sniper $449.99 Gigabyte www.gigabyte.com
Specs: Socket LGA1366; Intel X58 chipset; Max memory: 24GB (DDR3-2200 OC); Slots: 3 PCI-E x16, 2 PCI-E x1, 1 PCI; Ports: 2 6Gbps SATA, 6 3Gbps SATA, 2 3Gbps eSATA, up to 12 USB 2.0, 4 USB 3.0, 2 FireWire, 1 Gigabit Ethernet Test system specs: CPU: 3.33GHz Intel Core i7-980X; RAM: 4GB OCZ DDR3-2000; Graphics: AMD Radeon HD 6990; Storage: 256GB Plextor PX-256M2S SSD
Plextor PX-256M2S
Benchmark Results
for example, has between half and twothirds of the 256GB’s rated write speeds. Retail price for this big drive at launch was $699.99. As of press time, however, we found it for more than $100 less online. A nice, long warranty period and Plextor’s reputation for quality sweeten the deal. ■ BY
MARTY SEMS
CPU**
8.73
Left 4 Dead 2
132.63
Aliens vs. Predator
48.4
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat
40.3
* pixels per second **points Games tested at 2,560 x 1,600. Benchmark Results
Plextor PX256M2S 256GB
Interface
SATA 6Gbps
Iometer (IOps) Workstation
4841
Database
6658
CrystalDiskMark (MBps) Sequential read
371
Sequential write
317.7
512KB random read
279.2
512KB random write
294
4KB random read QD1
13.3
4KB random write QD1
36.2
4KB random read QD32
68.8
4KB random write QD32
46.2
PCMark Vantage HDD score (points)
PX-256M2S $590 (online) Plextor www.plextoramericas.com
Specs: Sequential data transfer ratings: 480MBps read, 330MBps write; Sequential 4KB transfer ratings: 15,000IOps read, 9,000IOps write; Cache: 128MB DDR3; Form factor: 2.5-inch; Power consumption (typical): 0.25W (idle), 0.75W (active); Shock tolerance (0.5 ms) 1,500G; MTBF: 1.5 million hours; Three-year warranty
36647
Defender (MBps)
170.2
Gaming (MBps)
144.5
Photo Gallery (MBps)
231
Vista startup (MBps)
157.5
Movie Maker edit (MBps)
200.6
Win Media Ctr (MBps)
297.1
WMP music add (MBps)
112.6
App loading (MBps)
120.2
NTFS and MBR formatted, AHCI mode. Test system specs: CPU: Intel Core i72600K; Motherboard: Sapphire Pure Black Hydra P67; RAM: 4GB Crucial DDR3-1333; Graphics: Diamond Radeon HD 6870 1GB; OS: Windows 7 Enterprise 64-bit.
CPU / May 2011
27
Zalman CNPS11X Extreme he Zalman CNPS11X Extreme CPU cooler is an unusual-looking beast, with a V-shape that the company says is designed for enhanced airflow. Coupled with its copper composite heatpipes and copper-and-aluminum heatsink, the shape results in optimum cooling, with decreased fan noise. Or so say the folks over at Zalman, anyway. As it turns out, they’re right. We checked out the CNPS11X Extreme on a test system running a 3.4GHz Intel Core i7-2600K on a Sapphire Pure Black P67 mobo. Not a monster of a system, but a respectable performer. We warmed things up by running a series of apps and games simultaneously and finished off by using the PCMark Gaming Suite to stress the system. With the stock cooler, the CPU at idle registered a temp of 31 degrees Celsius. Stressed, the CPU temp jumped to 45 C.
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These are certainly acceptable temps, and we could live with the 45% jump. But still, we all know that cooler is better. Would the CNPS11X cool things down? Oh, yeah. Running at idle with the Zalman cooler, the CPU temp was 28 C, or about 10% cooler than the stock cooler at idle. When we loaded the 2600K, as you’d expect, the temps jumped CNPS11X Extreme $89.99 | Zalman www.zalman.com
noticeably—but not as much as we thought they might. With the CPU under load, the temp jumped from 28 C to 34 C, or about 21%. That 34 C max is a full 25% cooler than the stressed system running a stock cooler. Not bad at all. The CNPS11X is compatible with a wide variety of AMD and Intel CPUs, and features an ultra-quiet 120mm PWM fan. Most importantly, it does a great job of keeping your expensive processor running cool. And with that V-shape, black pearl nickel-plated finish, shiny heatpipes, and blue LED, it looks cool while it cools. ■ BY
ROD SCHER
Specs: Dimensions: 154 x 80 x 135mm (HxWxD); Weight: 600g; Fan: 120mm, PWM, 1,000 to 1,950rpm, 33dB(A) max sound output; Socket compatibility: Intel LGA775/1155/1156/1366, AMD AM2/AM2+/AM3
Ooma Telo ost of us have tried Skype, Vonage, and other VoIP services, but the call quality varies and the monthly charges can add up. In the end, we either do without a landline or we grudgingly pay The Phone Company every month for a mediocre phone that mostly just sits there. Help is at hand. We checked out the Ooma Telo Internet phone, which sits between your modem and your router (no computer required) and lets you make Internet-based calls for nothing. (Well, almost nothing. You do end up having to pay the applicable taxes, which come to about $3.50 per month.) But here’s the important thing: The call quality of the Ooma Telo is as good or better than anything offered by your POTS vendor. And it’s basically free. You pay a chunk up front for the device itself, but that’s about it. The Telo generally
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pays for itself after several months; from then on, you’re calling all over the United States for nothing. The Telo is a router-like affair with a simple setup: Use its two Ethernet jacks to connect the Telo between your router and modem, power it up, then wait for any firmware updates. There are two phone jacks. One connects to a standard telephone, the other connects to your existing landline, allowing you to integrate the landline and the Telo, if you wish to do so (or you could purchase some very cool Ooma handsets for
about $50 each). Log on and set up an account. Start making free calls. You can select a phone number, or, for a $39.99 fee, port your existing number over to the Telo. It’s a no-brainer. Buy one. Install it. Use it to call your POTS vendor and tell them you quit. ■ BY
ROD SCHER
Ooma Telo $249.99 | Ooma www.ooma.com
Specs: Dimensions: 2 x 5.5 x 7.5 inches (HxWxD); Weight: 14.1oz.; Handsets: Supports up to four Ooma handsets, plus corded or cordless POTS phones; Web access: Requires broadband service; Other: Supports caller ID, call-waiting, and 911 service
Gamers focus much of their attention on achieving the best graphics with high resolution monitors and the latest, most powerful graphics cards. All too often, the audio component is ignored. Whether it’s the crunch of a hard hit and the 360-degree crowd noise in a sports game or bombs dropping and bullets flying in an FPS, nothing makes a game come to life more than an immersive surround sound experience. Typically, to get that kind of audio, you need a 5.1- or 7.1-channel system and the accompanying pile of satellite speakers and jumble of wires to carefully place all around the room, making sure you can run wires to all of them without creating a tripping hazard. But the rockus 3D | 2.1 speakers from soundscience, designed by Antec, can deliver that 3D sound with just a 2.1 setup and some brilliant engineering. The speakers feature 3Dsst technology, which uses a suite of DSP algorithms to intelligently analyze incoming audio signals such as frequency, panning, and positioning of
Subwoofer features support for three input types for maximum versatility.
Control pod adjusts volume, mutes and toggles between analog and digital input
sounds, and uses tools such as filtering and phasing to pump out the sound in a virtual 3D field, creating a spatial aural environment with your ears at the epicenter—perfect for gaming and watching movies.
speakers often lose out on audio quality due to cheap or weak construction, but the rockus speakers can crank out 25W per satellite with a 100W subwoofer and are built with anodized aluminum to cut down on vibration and distortion. The subwoofer also boasts passive radiator technology, enabling it to deliver a wide bass range— especially compared to woofers with a much larger footprint—as well as multidirectional output. They really look and feel as great as they sound.
Because gaming audio and music are different animals, soundscience built multiple audio modes into the rockus speakers. The compact remote control pod lets you easily toggle between 3D and music modes, the latter delivering a stereo signal for the ideal balance of highs, mids, and lows. The rockus speakers make the most of their diminutive size. Compact
Great gaming speakers don’t have to be big, require numerous satellite speakers, and cost an arm and a leg. For $199.99, you can have an immersive 3D audio experience with a compact 2.1 system. ■ Advertisement
Lepa G900 epa is a brand that will likely be new to most of you. Ecomaster, a large distributor of Enermax power supplies, started the Lepa brand just recently with the goal of providing eco-friendly products—power supplies, cases, and other peripherals. The Lepa G900, as its name implies, is a 900-watt power supply, and, true to the company’s goal, it sports an 80 Plus Gold certification and claimed 93% peak efficiency. The Lepa G900 is a mostly modular power supply. The 24-pin ATX, two 6+2-pin PCI-E, and two EPS 12V motherboard connectors are hard-wired. The unit is relatively compact at about 7.2 inches deep, and it has a subdued matte black finish, accented by a 139mm gold cooling fan on the bottom and yellow decals and branding. All of the cables are
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braided, and the unit itself feels heavy and well-built. Performance of the Lepa G900 was also solid. We hammered on the Lepa G900 with a rig powered by two 6-core Xeon 5680s, Evga’s 2P Classified SR-2 motherboard, 12GB of RAM, dual 2GB Radeon HD 5870s, and multiple hard drives and SSDs; the PSU never faltered. Even after stressing the unit with 810W+ load for an extended period, it remained perfectly stable. It’s also worth noting that unit’s 139mm cooling fan pushed plenty of air and remained quiet throughout testing. The Lepa brand is new, so it will take time to build a solid reputation with enthusiasts, but the G900 is certainly
G900 $179.99 Lepa www.lepatek.com
a step in the right direction. The unit is nice and quiet, and performance was top notch. And, at about $180, the Lepa G900 is competitively priced. ■ BY
MARCO CHIAPPETTA
Specs: 900W continuous output; Active PFC; 80 Plus Gold; 4 +12V rails (30A/rail); 139mm fan; 6 6+2-pin PCI-E connectors; Semi-modular cables; Three-year warranty
NZXT H2 ZXT has released some very welldesigned cases the last few years, but its newest offering, the H2, may just take the cake. The NZXT H2 is a mid-tower targeted at gamers looking to build a quiet, yet high-performing system that also has some aesthetic appeal. The NZXT H2, available in black or white, has simple, clean lines. In fact, with the exception of a few raised ridges along the top and an angled design element at the bottom of the hinged front door, the H2 is as rectangular as they come. The fit and finish is very good, however, and its modest adornments give it an elegant appearance that’s sure to have mass appeal. The H2 may be rather conservative in the looks department, but it’s overloaded
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H2 $99.99 | NZXT | www.nzxt.com
with features. You’ll find sound dampening material on its side panels and the inside of its front door. The three included case fans are also quiet; they’re linked to a threechannel fan controller mounted in the top panel. The two frontmounted 120mm fans are easily removable from the outside of the H2, giving users access to the case’s eight internal 3.5-inch hard drive bays (all of which can be converted to 2.5-inch bays). Other standout accoutrements of the NZXT H2 include a top-panel USB
3.0 port and hot-swappable drive bay. There’s also a magnetic cover to shield and quiet a topmounted fan (although a fan isn’t included) and direct air flow out the back. A mesh bottom panel allows for easy air intake. The H2 isn’t quite as roomy as some other mid-towers that have fewer drive bays, but there’s still plenty of room to get the job done. The NZXT H2 is a well-thought-out case that offers some features typically reserved for pricier products. ■ BY
MARCO CHIAPPETTA
Specs: Chassis: Steel; Motherboard support: microATX, ATX; Bays: 3 5.25-inch external, 8 3.5-inch internal + 1 external top-mounted tray; Slots: 7; Dimensions: 18.2 x 8.5 x 20.3 inches (HxWxD); Fans: 2 120mm front, 1 120mm rear, 1 120mm top (optional)
30 May 2011
/ www.computerpoweruser.com
MSI N550GTX-Ti Cyclone II vidia throws a bone to budget gamers with its latest GPU, the GF116, which is an evolution of the GF106 that went into the GeForce GTS 450. Compared to its predecessor, the GTX 550 Ti features the same 192 CUDA cores and 32 texture units, but has 50% more ROPs, 24. Nvidia also tweaked the core clock from 783MHz to 900MHz. Many of the same tweaks that improved the performance-per-watt ratio in Fermi 2.0 also make their way to the GF116, including less leaky transistors. The standout feature of MSI’s take on the GTX 550 Ti is the circular Cyclone II cooler, which, according to MSI, offers 20% more airflow and lets the GPU run 22 degrees (Celsius) cooler than the reference design under load. MSI’s specially designed fan blades accomplish this feat by channeling air in a wider arc. As a result, MSI had a large thermal
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envelope to work with, so the core and memory are overclocked to 950MHz and 1,075MHz, respectively. Other things we liked are the high-quality components, such as solid caps and chokes, and the inclusion of MSI’s Afterburner overclocking utility. As you can see from the tests, this card isn’t exactly a benchmark buster, but it will bring higher frame rates to gamers running medium resolutions, such as 1,680 x 1,050 or less. MSI’s version, paired with Afterburner, has what it takes to give you an extra edge. ■ BY
ANDREW LEIBMAN N550GTX-Ti Cyclone II $154.99 MSI us.msi.com
Sapphire Pure Black P67 Hydra apphire’s Pure Black P67 Hydra features a Lucid Hydra chip that lets Nvidia and AMD graphics cards work together, making this board a great choice for those who want future flexibility to blend graphics card brands. The top PEG slot provides full x16 speed, while slots two and three are x8 links; the bottom slot runs at x4 speed. Overclockers will appreciate the Pure Black P67 Hydra’s included voltage measurement pads, which can provide readouts to a digital multimeter. The power and reset buttons each have an informative LED that indicates if the board is receiving power and blinks for hard drive activity, respectively. There’s also a diagnostic LED
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that can display error codes and functions as a CPU temperature monitor. We like the board layout; the space around the CPU let us install a large CPU air cooler with relative ease. The board Pure Black P67 Hydra performed admirably with our system tests, too. We’d recommend it for those in the market for a P67-based board. ■ BY
NATHAN LAKE
Pure Black P67 Hydra $249 Sapphire www.sapphiretech.com
Specs: Chipset: Intel P67; Form Factor: ATX; Memory: Up to 16GB (DDR3-1600+); Ports: Gigabit Ethernet, 8 USB 2.0, 2 USB 3.0, 1 FireWire, 1 S/PDIF coaxial/optical out, 1 eSATA, audio I/O, Bluetooth 2.1; Internal headers: 2 USB 2.0, 7 6Gbps SATA; Slots: 4 PCI-E 2.0 x16, 2 PCI Test system specs: CPU: Intel Core i7-2600K; GPU: ATI Radeon HD 6850; RAM: 4GB Crucial Ballistix DDR3-1333; Storage: 250GB Western Digital Scorpio Blue; PSU: Corsair HX1000
Specs & Scores
GeForce GTX 550 Ti
MSI N550GTXTi Cyclone II
Core clock
900MHz
950MHz
Memory clock
900MHz
1,075MHz
Memory interface
192-bit
192-bit
Memory
1GB GDDR5 1GB GDDR5
3DMark 11 Performance 3DMark Overall
P2480
P2607
Graphics Score
2211
2329
Physics Score
7981
8059
Combined Score
2214
2329
Graphics Test 1*
10.44
11
Graphics Test 2*
10.69
11.27
Graphics Test 3*
13.84
14.49
Graphics Test 4*
6.48
6.84
Physics Test*
25.34
25.59
Combined Test*
10.3
10.83
Games
1,920 x 1,200
Left 4 Dead 2 (8XAA, 16XAF)
54.57
55.96
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat (4XAA)
16.7
17.6
Aliens vs. Predator (4XAA)
17.9
18.6
Driver: Catalyst 11.4 Beta Test System Specs: Processor: 3.4GHz Intel Core i7-2600K; Intel DP67BG Motherboard; RAM: 4GB OCZ Platinum XTE DDR3-2000; Hard drive: 256GB Plextor PX-M2 SSD; PSU: Antec TruePower Quattro 1200 *Results in fps.
Benchmark Results
Sapphire Pure Black P67
3DMark 11 3DMark Overall
X1377
Graphics Score
1232
Physics Score
8318
Combined Score
1553
PCMark Vantage Pro 1.0 Overall
10068
Memories
7156
TV And Movies
5343
Gaming
10838
Music
8401
Communications
12927
Productivity
8274
HDD
4050
Cinebench 11.5 CPU*
6.64
POV-Ray 3.7 Beta**
1162.59
Aliens vs. Predator (8XAA)
18.3
* points * minutes: seconds Games tested at 2,560 x 1,600.
CPU / May 2011
31
In Win BUC ase aesthetics are so subjective. While I prefer smooth, clean lines, I can see how other gamers might favor the fluorescent yellow-and-black motif that In Win’s BUC flaunts. Entirely matte black on the outside and peppered with strategic ventilation, it’s clear that In Win’s focus here is on lots of airflow and more edgy lines. Inside the case, you’ll find the bright yellow highlights, from fan blades to removable drive trays. Though the chassis’ top and front are molded plastic, the side panels and interior skeleton are made of scratch- and fingerprint-resistant steel. The BUC is a mid-tower design capable of taking standard ATX platforms with seven expansion slots. Its motherboard tray isn’t removable, but there are plenty of holes to simplify cable routing and heavy-duty heatsink installation. You’ll find enough room for
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three external 5.25-inch drives and one external 3.5-inch device. In Win builds in five internal 3.5-inch hard drive bays, too. Impressively, the trays also include cutouts for 2.5-inch SSDs. Integrated power and data connectors make it easy to slide drives in and out of the cage at will. Internal storage connectors built into four of the drive cage’s bays are entwined with cables for the case’s front-panel connectivity, which include an eSATA port, two USB 2.0 ports, plus mic and headphone jacks. In Win even had the forethought to include an accessible USB 3.0 port. Our only critiques are that, first, the connector is nearly hidden in one side of the
BUC $110 ❘ In Win www.inwin-style.com
top-mounted tray, and second, it’s powered by an external cable that plugs into the back of your motherboard. Our sample came armed with three 120mm fans, located on the front, back, and top of the case. There are also several other available fan positions, facilitating as much airflow as your high-end hardware needs. ■ BY
PAUL CROSS
Specs: Chassis: Steel; Motherboard support: ATX, mATX; Bays: 3 5.25-inch external, 1 3.5-inch external, 5 3.5-inch internal; Slots: 7; Dimensions: 19.1 x 8.3 x 19.9 inches (HxWxD); Fans: 1 120mm front, 1 120mm rear, 1 120mm top
iStarUSA BPN-DE340SS StarUSA offers a veritable buffet of enclosures for rackmounts, desktops, and towers and doesn’t skimp on its selection of internal hard drive cages, either. We took a look at the sharp-looking BPNDE340SS trayless HDD cage, which is outfitted with four hot-swappable drive bays that can accommodate 3.5-inch drives at 6Gbps SATA speeds, all wrapped in a brushed aluminum shell. Each bay door swings on a durable hinge. At the back of each bay is an ejection mechanism that resembles a pinball machine flipper. And don’t worry about accidentally swinging a door open and kicking out a drive: As a safeguard, each bay door has its own lock, and iStarUSA includes a pair of keys. iStarUSA includes dedicated SATA ports for each bay and tosses in four long SATA cables. The BPN-DE340SS requires two SATA power plugs and
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supports, in addition to 6Gbps S A T A , l e g a c y SATA and 3/6Gbps SAS transfer rates. A single 80mm fan is attached to the back of the enclosure to provide cooling. The fan is detachable, in case you don’t quite have enough clearance to install the BPN-DE340SS in your system (which, by the way, will require three 5.25-inch bays). A two-speed fan controller is located
BPN-DE340SS $110.46 ❘ iStarUSA www.istarusa.com
on the back of the cage, too. We received the sleek, all black unit, but iStarUSA also makes three sister models with blue, red, and silver bay doors. The BPN-DE340SS needs an additional RAID controller for RAID configuration, but on the whole, this heavy-duty storage station gets the job done. ■ BY JOANNA
CLAY
Specs: Material: Aluminum; Bays: 4 3.5-inch hot-swap; Fan: 1 80mm rear; Dimensions: 4.92 x 5.71 x 7.79 inches (HxWxD), requires 3 5.25-inch bays for installation; HDD compatibility: Up to 3TB; Ports: 2 15-pin SATA power, 4 7-pin SATA data
Geekbox Ego Maniacal v1.0 think I just fell in love. She was dressed in stately white with black accents all about, tall yet streamlined, gorgeous yet functional, sophisticated yet more than willing to get her hands dirty. I’m talking of Geekbox Computers’ Ego Maniacal, a custom-built, liquid-cooled, benchmark-crushing beauty that Geekbox CEO Adrian Hunter hopes “establishes us as a premier boutique in this industry” and that to the “trained eye dominates the harsh competition in the system builder market.” The system impresses in nearly every facet, including aesthetics, craftsmanship, performance, and value for the money. Overall, it’s abundantly clear that great attention was paid to each design aspect, as the positioning of the radiator and other plumbing parts, hand crimping and sleeving, meticulous cable routing, and color scheme indicate. Geekbox even tore down the system’s five 120mm fans, including the four butting against the horizontally oriented radiator at the case’s bottom, to paint the blades white, enlist new black Molex connectors everywhere, and desolder the original fan wiring for new soldered wire cut to length. The Ego Maniacal isn’t lacking for components, either. Working on a Gigabyte GA-P67A-UD7 motherboard is an Intel Core i7-2600K overclocked to 4.84GHz, three Evga GeForce GTX 570s in SLI, 8GB of Mushkin Blackline DDR3-1866, a 128GB Crucial RealSSD, 2TB of WD storage, and a Corsair AX1200 PSU all running on Windows 7 Professional 64-bit. Port-wise, you get six USB 3.0, four USB 2.0, two FireWire, two eSATA/USB, two Gigabit Ethernet, S/PDIF out, and six audio jacks. Uniquely, Geekbox’s liquid-cooling approach, which includes a sparkling CPU block and matching hose fittings and white-tinted tubing (no dye used), uses a home-brewed liquid Geekbox dubs “Newbie Tears” (“our system runs on the tears of newbs,” Hunter jokes) that won’t deteriorate loop internals.
I
Geekbox wraps the components inside Silverstone’s new windowed, all-aluminum, rivet-free Temjin Series TJ11 case, which dons an elegant custom dual-state metallicwhite paint job. The case itself is awesome on many fronts, including for the ample room provided to add drives (nine 5.25inch and six 3.5-inch bays). Also onboard are dual 180mm Air Penetrator exhaust fans (700 or 1,200rpm), including one sitting directly below the graphics cards; dual see-through air vents on each side panel; nine top-located expansion slots; and more. Potential sticking points could be that the front and back panels lack any ports, leaving the top panel overloaded. Performance-wise, the Ego Maniacal’s benchmark results pretty much say it all. The system powered through S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat (60.58fps) and Aliens vs. Predator (64.1fps) and showed considerable all-around prowess in PCMark Vantage Pro with a 26,393 Overall mark. This rig doesn’t just roll along; it steamrolls. Better, it steamrolls especially quietly. With the Ego Maniacal, Geekbox hopes to offer the general public a boutique experience that echoes the inspiration it has drawn from the systems VoodooPC and various European and U.S. underground modding communities produced. Based on our experience, Geekbox has succeeded. ■ BY
Ego Maniacal v1.0 $5,499 ❘ Geekbox www.geekbox.com
BLAINE FLAMIG
Benchmark Results
Geekbox Ego Maniacal v1.0
3DMark 11 Overall
P12960
Graphics Score
14402
Physics Score
11168
Combined Score
8818
Graphics Test 1*
62.37
Graphics Test 2*
66.49
Graphics Test 3*
91.9
Graphics Test 4*
46.18
Physics Test*
35.46
Combined Test* PCMark Vantage Pro 1.0.2
41.02
Overall
26393
Memories
19470
TV And Movies
9903
Gaming
29545
Music
26625
Communications
26897
Productivity
33447
HDD SiSoft Sandra 2011 Lite
67158
Processor Arithmetic Dhrystone ALU (GIPS)
186.53
Whetstone iSSE3 (GFLOPS)
114
Processor Multi-Media x16 iSSE4.1 (Mpixels/s)
276.57
x8 iSSE2 (Mpixels/s)
209.37
x4 iSSE2 (Mpixels/s)
114.38
Memory Bandwidth Integer Buffered iSSE2 (GBps)
24
Floating-Point Buffered iSSE2 (GBps)
24
Media Transcode Transcode WMV (MBps)
1.13
Transcode H264 (MBps) Cinebench 11.5
1.21
CPU**
9.31
POV-Ray 3.7 Beta***
1645.03
Aliens vs. Predator (4XAA)
64.1
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: CoP (4XAA)
60.58
Games tested at 2,560 x 1,600. *fps **points ***pixels per second Specs: CPU: Intel Core i7 2600K @ 4.84GHz; RAM: 8GB Mushkin Blackline DDR3-1866; GPU: Evga GeForce GTX 570 (3-Way SLI); Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-P67-UD7; Storage: 128GB Crucial SSD, 2TB WD (RAID 0); OS: Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
CPU / May 2011
33
Thermaltake Level 10 GT hermaltake’s original Level 10 chassis is a head-turner, but at $799.99 its price draws as many double takes as its bold design. Since its debut, many a power user found himself wishing for the Level 10’s visual punch, only in a less expensive, more compact chassis. Thermaltake obliged and even added a few modern perks, including USB 3.0, E-ATX support, and room for ultra-long PSUs and 360mm (14.2-inch) graphics cards. The new Level 10 GT, made of steel with plastic accoutrements, costs much less than its more sculpted, aluminum big brother. It’s lighter, too, at 28 pounds. Its distinctive carry handle is functional, and there’s terrific cable management potential inside. The GT provides more pragmatic ventilation than the earlier Level 10, which segregates its major parts groups. In the GT, big, quiet fans benefit every component with airflow and selectable LED coloration. The filtered, scalloped side fan even has an
T
Benchmark Results 3DMark 11 Entry
Level 10 GT $279.99 Thermaltake www.thermaltakeusa.com
3DMark Overall
externally adjustable louver, so you can direct its cool air at your graphics card(s). We’ve built a few systems in the original Level 10, which has its share of quirks. This new GT, although not tool-less, seems much friendlier during a build. That said, the GT’s hot-swappable drive caddies (which support 2.5- and 3.5-inch SSDs as well as hard drives) can be a bear to remove. Even a third of the big Level 10’s price is a bit much to pay for a case, especially one that doesn’t come with a primo power supply. Still, the stylish GT has the oversized parts support and heat evacuation skills to cover some pretty wild builds. ■ BY
MARTY SEMS
Specs: Case type: Full tower; Dimensions: 23 x 11.1 x 23.2 inches (HxWxD); Motherboard compatibility: ATX, mATX, E-ATX; Bays: 4 5.25-inch external, 5 3.5/2.5-inch internal, 1 3.5-inch external; Expansion slots: 8; Standard fans: 1 200mm front, 1 200mm side, 1 200mm top, 1 140mm rear; Optional fans: 1 120mm bottom; Top ports: 2 USB 3.0, 1 eSATA; Front ports: 4 USB 2.0, audio I/O
Sapphire Pure Fusion Mini E350 he Pure Fusion Mini E350 is based Similarly, Sandra’s Processor Arithmetic TSapphire on AMD’s Zacate E-350 APU, but scores relatively high marks for a lowinstalled a variety of connectivity watt processor, meaning that applications hardware not found on the stock Fusion design, including USB 3.0 support, an eSATA port, integrated Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR connectivity, and an extra 6Gbps SATA port. We particularly like the integrated Bluetooth connectivity for wireless transfer of content on our mobile phones. The wealth of speedy input/output options is also handy for those who regularly transfer files. Note that Sapphire opted to use two DDR3 SODIMM memory slots. Gaming scores for the Pure Fusion Mini E350 are relatively high for a Mini-ITX system, meaning performance should be suitable enough to play older games and somewhat lower resolutions.
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will be slightly snappier than what you’ve experienced on netbooks and other SFF systems. Where the Pure Fusion Mini E350 really excels is media playback. Blu-ray content played flawlessly, as did HD video. If you’re looking to build an SFF media PC, this board is a great start. ■ BY
Pure Fusion Mini E350 $139.99 Sapphire www.sapphiretech.com
Sapphire Pure Fusion Mini E350
NATHAN LAKE
E730
Graphics Score
716
Physics Score
550
Combined Score
417
Graphics Test 1
3.98
Graphics Test 2
3.61
Graphics Test 3
3.67
Graphics Test 4
2.07
Physics Test
1.75
Combined Test
1.94
PCMark Vantage Pro 1.0 Overall
2660
Memories
1777
TV And Movies
1550
Gaming
2246
Music
3061
Communications
2529
Productivity
2167
HDD
3424
SiSoft Sandra 2011 Lite Processor Arithmetic Dhrystone ALU (GIPS)
8.6
Whetstone iSSE3 (GFLOPS)
9.81
Processor Multi-Media x8 iSSE3 (Mpixels/s)
13.76
x8 iSSSE2 (Mpixels/s)
15.4
x4 iSSE2 (Mpixels/s)
12.3
Memory Bandwidth Integer Buffered iSSE2 (GBps)
3.47
Floating-Point Buffered iSSE2 (GBps)
3.39
Media Transcode Transcode WMV (KBps)
95
Transcode H264 (KBps)
86
Cinebench 11.5 CPU*
0.62
POV-Ray 3.7 Beta**
98.05
Aliens vs. Predator (8XAA)
5.1
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: CoP (4xAA)
5.6
* points ** pixels per second Games tested at 1,280 x 720.
Test system specs: RAM: 2GB Hynix DDR31066 SO-DIMM: Hard Drive: 250GB Western Digital Scorpio Blue; PSU: Corsair HX1000 Specs: Chipset: E-350 APU; Form factor: Mini-ITX; Max memory: 4GB (DDR3-1066 SO-DIMM); Ports: Gigabit Ethernet, 2 USB 3.0, 4 USB 2.0, 5 6Gbps SATA, 1 eSATA, HDMI, DVI, VGA, S/PDIF optical out; Slots: 1 PCI-E x16, 1 Mini PCI-E x1
Core i7-2600K Overclocking Souped-Up Sandy Bridge Blows Up Benchmarks
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ntel’s Sandy Bridge-based second-gen Core processor family arrived back in January to much fanfare. The new processors offered significant performance gains over the previous generation, an integrated graphics core that was head and shoulders above anything Intel had offered before, lightning-fast video encoding, and impressively low power consumption. Save for a few quibbles here and there, it seemed that Intel had hit one out of the ballpark. A few weeks after launch, however, troubling news of a defect in the 6 Series chipset that affected the reliability of its 3Gbps SATA ports halted shipments and forced a recall—highly disappointing for enthusiasts itching to upgrade, to say the least. The problem was immediately identified and quickly remedied, though, and by the time you read this, motherboards based on the fixed B3 revision of the 6 Series chipsets should be plentiful on store shelves. Let the upgrades begin! Now that Intel has ironed out Sandy Bridge’s initial wrinkles, we thought it was the perfect time to find out what the platform could really do. Armed with the fastest Sandy Bridge-based processor available, the Core i7-2600K, and an enthusiast-class motherboard from Asus, the P8P67 Deluxe, we set out to overclock the 2600K using nothing but air-cooling.
OC Prerequisites There are a few things prospective Sandy Bridge overclockers need to know. First, much of what we’ve all learned about overclocking with older parts is no longer relevant. Intel has made some changes to the platform that make BCLK adjustments next to useless. The current D2-stepping processors don’t react well to sub-zero temps
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For about $330, the Intel Sandy Bridge-based Core i7-2600K quad-core processor represents an excellent value for performance-conscious enthusiasts. With decent cooling, some tweaking know-how, and a little bit of luck, an overclocked Core i7-2600K can perform on par with or even better than Intel’s current flagship 6-core processor, the Core i7-990X.
or super-high voltages, and disabling sleep states or Turbo Boost isn’t necessary. In fact, it’s the Turbo Boost settings that need to be altered to overclock a Sandy Bridge processor. At this time, users must also have a P67-chipset based motherboard, preferably targeted at enthusiasts, to overclock a Sandy Bridge CPU like the Core i7-2600K. The other members of the 6-series chipset family simply don’t allow it at this time. For the largest speed gains, Sandy Bridge overclockers must also opt for a K series, or fully unlocked, CPU. Non-K series parts are only partially unlocked and can’t be pushed nearly as far with the limited multiplier and BCLK settings currently available.
With the relative immaturity of the platform, it’s also very important to stay up to date with EFI or BIOS updates. With the Asus motherboard we used for this project, each successive EFI update changed the overclocking characteristics, and some of the updates even had features specifically designed to boost the overclocking capabilities. Motherboard manufacturers are still mastering the inner workings of the Sandy Bridge platform, so keeping the mobo up to date is definitely a good idea. Finally, as has always been the case, good cooling is also a must. Sandy Bridge-based processors are particularly power-efficient and have fine-grained clock-gating capabilities, though; you may be surprised how far the chips can be pushed with nothing but a quality air cooler. To prove this point, we stuck with Intel’s XTS100H cooler, which ships with K series Sandy Bridge processors.
Mod Mania With many of the enthusiast-class P67-motherbaords on the market, you can overclock Sandy Bridge processors a couple of ways. On our P8P67 Deluxe, for example, the main BIOS screen has a simple performance option that, with The Intel XTS100H tower-type cooler included with Socket LGA1155 Core i5 and Core i7 K series processors does a respectable job of keeping CPU temperatures in check. Using this “stock” cooler, we were able to push a Core i7-2600K to over 4.6GHz with perfect stability and zero throttling.
a simple click of a button, will push the processor up a few ticks when Turbo is engaged. For more granular control, though, manually manipulating some settings is the way to go. For a straight-up CPU overclock, you’ll need to alter the following three settings: peak Turbo Boost multiplier, CPU core voltage, and, for a bit more performance, the BCLK. Admittedly, BCLK adjustments will offer only minor boosts because most Sandy Bridge processor and P67 motherboard combinations won’t hit BCLK frequencies higher than about 105MHz, a paltry 5% increase over the default. For more aggressive overclocks, you can adjust memory frequencies with K series processors and, of course, a number of motherboardlevel components can also be tweaked in an attempt to eke out a little more performance. By default, the Core i7-2600K has a base multiplier of 34, for a standard frequency of 3.4GHz (34 x 100MHz) and a peak Turbo Boost frequency of 3.8GHz, which is attained by boosting the multiplier to 38. With K series Sandy Bridge processors, although a peak Turbo Boost multiplier of up to 57 is available (for a technical peak of 5.7GHz), you’re not likely to hit speeds that high without some exotic system mods. To overclock the Core i7-2600K, all that is necessary is to increase the peak Turbo multiplier until the maximum stable frequency is reached.
At that point, we backed the multiplier down to 45 and began to adjust the BCLK. The BCLK topped out at only 103MHz, for a final peak clock speed of 4.64GHz. We could have stopped with the multiplier set to 46, but by altering the BCLK, even if only a little bit, we ultimately ended up with a higher peak overclock and a slight boost to memory bandwidth. (Altering the CPU multiplier alone won’t affect memory performance.)
In addition to adequate cooling, overclocking Sandy Bridge-based processors at this time requires one more thing: a P67-based motherboard designed with overclocking in mind. There are a number of quirks associated with overclocking Sandy Bridge-based processors, and if the motherboard isn’t designed to cope with them, keeping a system stable will be difficult.
For our mod, we first entered the motherboard’s EFI configuration menus and boosted the processor’s voltage to 1.35V, a 0.16V bump from the stock voltage. If you want to test the waters with voltages higher than that, we’d suggest using high-end air- or liquid-cooling. With the voltage increased, we bumped the Turbo multiplier to 40, then booted Windows and looped Cinebench 11.5 to fully tax the processor at 4GHz to check for stability. We were good to go, so we re-booted again, raised the multiplier further, and ultimately found a multiplier of 46, for an effective top speed of 4.6GHz, was our max. At 47, the system wasn’t perfectly stable.
Sandy Bridge Rocks Although the overclocking process for Sandy Bridge is somewhat different than previous generations, it’s still quite easy, and the performance gains can be massive. Making a $330 quad-core processor outperform a $1,000 6-core Intel CPU required nothing more than a good motherboard and the stock Intel cooler. Sandy Bridge may not offer all of the overclocking freedom of older Intel platforms, but there’s still plenty of fun to be had and performance to be gained. ■ BY
MARCO CHIAPPETTA
Many enthusiast-class P67-based motherboards are outfitted with EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface), which is a replacement for the aging system BIOS. Some of the EFI configuration menus on these enthusiast-class boards offer simple one-click overclocking options.
No “K”? Still (Sort Of) OK! There is a widespread misconception that Intel has locked down non-K series Sandy Bridge-based processors to prevent overclocking. The confusion partially stems from the fact that Intel has integrated a PLL/clock generator, which historically used to reside on the motherboard as a separate component, into the 6 Series chipset die. That PLL is used to derive the default 100MHz BCLK of Sandy Bridge-based processors, but due
to a number of factors, its speed cannot be increased much past the stock 100MHz. Reports vary on the max BCLK users have been able to hit reliably, but 103 to 105MHz is usually possible. Anything higher than that is a crapshoot. In conversations with representatives from Intel, though, the company has stated that the limited freedom with regard to BCLK adjustments may change with future versions of the 6 Series chipsets
and newer Sandy Bridge processor revisions. For now, overclocking via BCLK adjustments will yield minimal benefits, but there is hope this will change at some point in the future. Overclocking isn’t completely out of the question with non-K series Sandy Bridge-based processors, however. Non-K series chips that support Intel’s Turbo Boost technology are actually somewhat unlocked, just not to the extent of K SKUs. Intel calls the chips “limited unlocked.”
What these CPUs allow you to do is increase the peak Turbo Boost frequency by up to four speed bins. For example, if a Core i5-2500 has a default clock of 3.3GHz and a peak Turbo Boost frequency of 3.7GHz, increasing the peak Turbo multiplier from 37 to 41 will result in a maximum frequency of 4.1GHz. That’s nowhere near as high as K series processors have been known to overclock, but speeds greater than 4GHz are nothing to scoff at. ■
CPU / May 2011
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Performance: Before & After The Mod overclocked to 4.64GHz, and Intel’s current flagship Core i7-990X six-core processor running at its stock speeds. The numbers tell an interesting story. Obviously, overclocking the Core i7-2600K to 4.64GHz resulted in some large performance gains. The overclocked processor outpaced its stock counterpart by margins ranging from 13.3% to 42.47%. The smallest gains were
We ran a handful of popular applications and benchmarks to see just how much additional performance we were able to extract from our overclocked Core i7-2600K-based system. In the chart presented here, we have benchmark scores from the following three test-bed configurations: the stock Core i7-2600K, the Core i7-2600K
realized in the SiSoft Sandra memory bandwidth benchmark and in the less taxing LAME MT encoding tests. The gaming tests and processor-intensive rendering benchmarks showed the largest improvements. Comparing the performance of our overclocked Core i7-2600K to the Core i7-990X processor proves that you don’t need to
spend $1,000 on a CPU to have the fastest rig on the block. Although it wasn’t a clean sweep, the overclocked quad-core Core i7-2600K was faster than the six-core Core i7-990X in four of the eight benchmarks we ran, and in three of the tests where the Core i7-2600K trailed Intel’s flagship, the delta separating the two processors was less than 5%. ■
Core i7-2600K @ 3.3GHz/3.8GHz
Overclocked Speeds Core Core i7-990X @ i7-2600K @ 4.64GHz 3.46GHz/3.73GHz
Percent Difference (Mod vs. Stock)
Percent Difference (Mod vs. Core i7-990X)
1,333MHz
1,374MHz
1,333MHz
3%
3%
Dhrystone iSSE4.2
137.5 GIPS
181.73 GIPS
153 GIPS
32.2%
18.7%
Whetstone iSSE3
83.13 GFLOPS
110.41 GFLOPS
108.52 GFLOPS
32.8%
1.7%
Integer x16 iSSE4.1
201.54 Mpixels/s
267 Mpixels/s
279.65 Mpixels/s
32.4%
-4.73%
Floating Point x8 iSSE2
153.6 Mpixels/s
203 Mpixels/s
209.14 Mpixels/s
32.2%
-3.02%
Integer Buffered iSSE2
16GBps
18.3GBps
20GBps
14.3%
-9.29%
Floating Point Buffered iSSE2
16.16GBps
18.31GBps
20GBps
13.3%
-9.23%
6,788
8,759
7,491
29.04%
16.93%
Memory Frequency SiSoft Sandra 2011c Processor Arithmetic
Processor Multimedia
Memory Bandwidth (GBps)
Futuremark 3DMark06 CPU Benchmark
LAME MT MP3 Encoding (minutes:seconds)* Single-threaded
0:31
0:24
0:34
-22.58%
-29.41%
Multi-threaded
0:20
0:16
0:21
-20.00%
-23.81%
6.86
9.01
9.27
31.34%
-2.80%
4,949.54
6,528.47
6,554.31
31.90%
-0.39%
178.36
254.11
251.97
42.47%
0.85%
Cinebench R11.5 CPU Test POV-Ray (PPS) Multi-threaded Crysis SP Demo (FPS) CPU test (800 x 600, low quality) Test Systems Intel Core i7-990X: Motherboard: Gigabyte EX58-UD5 (X58 Express); GPU: GeForce GTX 280; RAM: 6GB (3 x 2GB) OCZ DDR3-1333; Storage WD Raptor 150GB HD, Windows 7 Ultimate x64 Intel Core i7-2600K: Motherboard: Asus P8P67 Deluxe (P67 Express); GPU: GeForce GTX 280; RAM: 8GB (2 x 4GB) Patriot DDR3-1333; Storage: WD Raptor 150GB HD, Windows 7 Ultimate x64 * Lower scores equal better performance.
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Give Us Your Mod Have a computer mod that will bring tears to our eyes? Email photos and a description to madreadermod@cpumag .com. If we include your system in our “Mad Reader Mod” section, we’ll send you $1,500 and a one-year subscription to CPU.
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Lenovo K320 Ice
E
very month as we sift through the packed MadReaderMod@ cpumag.com inbox, we see lots of black steel and brushed aluminum, and we even see a fair amount of custom wood cases and a bit of carbon fiber here and there. We of course love all that stuff, but once in a while something comes along that pushes the envelope a bit; James “JJ_Sky5000” Fislar’s Lenovo K320 Ice is just such a mod. Prior to building the K320 Ice, Fislar had been attempting to build a case from resin, with less than spectacular results. He managed to piece together a Mini-ITX case in 2009, but Fislar says “it was very sticky and was very bendable.” Back to the drawing board. In 2010, he finally had success with an SFF mold, and this drove him to attempt a bigger version. He understood how to create the ice effect he was after, but he knew doing a full-sized case would be expensive. That’s when he came across Lenovo’s “What’s Your Idea Of Fun” Web site, which offered modders a chance to submit designs for a contest; the top four designs would get a Lenovo PC to mod and $2,000 to mod with. “I came up with a design and submitted it, never thinking I would be chosen,” Fislar says. “When I found out that they wanted me to build it, I really wasn’t sure if I could. Once the panels formed, I knew this was going to be unique.”
Lenovo K320 Ice went on to win the contest, and it’s easy to see why. Fislar used the Lenovo’s original frame but built all of its side panels and top panel from resin, using aluminum foil inside his molds to create the ice effect. Because the resin is translucent, the mod’s interior lights emanate from within, accentuating the textures that are key to Fislar’s design. The mod’s main components are carryovers from the Lenovo PC, including its Intel Core i7-870, its Lenovo mATX motherboard, its Lenovo PSU, and the ATI Radeon HD 5970. Fislar upgraded the system memory with 8GB of Kingston DDR3 and built a custom cooling setup with fittings, tubing, coolant, and a CPU block from Danger Den, plus an EK 5970 waterblock and a custom pump. The Lenovo K320 Ice recently showed up at PAX East, and Fislar says, “You will probably see it at several LANs across the Midwest, showing AMD’s Eyefinity setup in all its glory and lighting up the night sky.” ■
CPU / May 2011
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Encryption Ignition The Difference AES Instructions Can Make ack in our March 2010 issue, we delved into SEDs (self-encrypting drives), which use dedicated cryptographic processors within the drive, and weighed them against the more conventional approach of using softwarebased disk encryption. While we think SEDs are a terrific idea, we recognize that there is another side to the issue. Not everyone is going to pay extra for on-drive encryption, especially since there are very few self-encrypting SSDs on today’s market. A lot of users will continue to rely on their CPUs to shoulder the encryption load. Our question now is whether optimized encryption support should be a deciding factor in your next CPU choice.
B
Encryption In Action We won’t rehash (pardon the pun) why encryption is so important to everyday computing. Suffice it to say that every secure online communication depends on encryption, and not encrypting your sensitive files, especially on a portable system that’s easily lost or stolen, is just begging for trouble. There are many methods of performing encryption in computer systems, and the differences among various encryption algorithms far exceeds what we can tackle here. Our focus is on the AES (Advanced Encryption Standard), which is the standard encryption method for the U.S. government and an increasingly common encryption option for a range of PC applications, such as disk encryption, compression/archiving tools, and LAN communications. If everybody simply used disk encryption from the initial OS installation on, the risks tied to data theft would plummet. AES relies on keys with 128-, 192-, or 256-bit lengths. As we mentioned back in
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March, if every person on Earth had 10 computers, each capable of testing 1 billion key combinations per second and all working in parallel, it would take 7.7 x 1,025 years, give or take, to crack a 128-bit AES key using brute force attack methods. With our sun only expected to last another 5 billion years, you shouldn’t worry overmuch. Rather, you might want to consider the performance impact that using 256-bit instead of 128-bit AES keys might have today. For all its complexity, encryption follows a very established series of operations. To use old mechanical encryption engine terms, the buttons you press and the cogs you turn may vary with each usage, but the ways in which you press those buttons or turn those cogs stays constant—and can be accelerated. Just as MMX and SSE instructions have previously accelerated multimedia tasks and other functions, AES-NI accelerates certain AES encryption operations. Many people approach AES acceleration thinking that if an application uses AES encryption, AES-NI (or VIA PadLock) will simply make it work faster. This is not the case. Just as with MMX and SSE optimizations in years prior, the hardwarebased acceleration features must be called by specific instructions within the application code. As you’ll see in several of
our testing results, an app may use encryption, and even AES in particular, but if the code doesn’t contain those instruction calls, the hardware won’t specifically accelerate encryption performance. With the C5P “Nehemiah” chip in 2004, VIA launched its own set of codes and in-processor circuitry for AES acceleration, and the feature has quietly moved along in VIA’s model stack ever since. Intel didn’t follow suit until over five years later with the launch of 32nm-based Core i5, namely the model 661. It’s important to know that VIA and Intel accelerate AES differently. The methods are not cross-compatible. Back in 2008, Intel proposed six new instructions for the x86 instruction set, and these became known as AES new instructions (AES-NI), or sometimes the AES Instruction Set. Deployment throughout Intel’s current CPU lines continues, but the company seems to be withholding support from the i3 series, perhaps as a differentiator to help upsell buyers into the i5. Be sure to read the fine print, but in general most Clarkdale, Arrandale, and Westmere processors (including the Core i7-980X) now support AES-NI. AMD will start adding support with its Bulldozer core this year. We should add that AES-NI isn’t only about acceleration. While AES may be essentially immune from brute force cracking, a number of “academic” attacks have sought to prove that AES can be circumvented. These attacks focus on the processor’s cache. To help improve computation performance, many AES implementations use lookup tables. These are arrays of values that can be quickly scanned rather than having to compute problems from scratch, but they tend to
become so large that they span multiple cache resources. AES operations will need to use the secret key when accessing certain parts of the lookup tables. A malicious program could, in theory, flood the cache with data, forcing out the cache’s current contents. By analyzing the expelled data, the malware could discover the secret key. This “sideband” style of attack ignores trying to break through the castle gates and instead essentially goes after the guard holding the gate’s bar in place. However, if all of the computation that used to require lookup tables can be handled in the CPU by added AES acceleration resources, there’s no more need for lookup tables and thus no way for cache flushing to yield any meaningful data to malware. Thus hardware-based AES acceleration makes systems safer and faster.
How We Tested Many people who test encryption performance end up working with mismatched processors, as we did in our following netbook tests. As a fundamental chip feature, it can be tough—and closer to impossible, actually, because the feature can’t be disabled in the BIOS—to find two processors alike in practically every way except AES acceleration support. In the following tests, we came about as close as presently possible with our Core i7 setup. We used a Gigabyte X58A-UD7 Socket 1366 motherboard with 6GB (3 x 2GB) of OCZ PC3-12800 Platinum memory in triple-channel configuration, a 160GB Intel X25-M “G2” SSD, Sparkle GTX 470 graphics card, and PC Power & Cooling TurboCool 850W power supply, all running Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit. Our only variable on top of this platform was the choice of processor. First, we used last year’s Core i7965 Extreme Edition, the original topperformance iteration of Intel’s Nehalem architecture, code-named Bloomfield. This
chip is based on the 45nm fab process, runs at 3.2GHz, features four cores, and has 8MB of shared L3 Intel Smart Cache. Next up, we turn to the new Core i7-980X Extreme Edition, often called Gulftown. This chip is based on the 32nm process node, nominally runs at 3.33GHz, has six cores, and sports 12MB of L3 cache. These may sound like apples and oranges, but we chose the Gigabyte board specifically for its BIOS flexibility. One feature we wanted was the ability to disable a given number of cores, and we knocked the Gulftown chip down from six cores to four. We also eased back the clock multiplier from 25X to 24X, thus dropping the Gulftown’s speed from 3.33GHz to 3.2GHz in order to match the i7-965 Extreme. We couldn’t do anything about the 12GB of L3, nor could we magically change a 32nm process back to 45nm. Fortunately for our purposes, though, many applications don’t realize much of a raw performance change when moving from 45nm to 32nm, and some of our data proves this. Other features, such as Turbo Boost, SSE4.2 support, Hyper-Threading, and so on remain constant between the two generations. In the end, we felt that this was as close to a fair matchup for testing AES-NI as we were ever likely to see. With our netbook tests, a looser viewpoint is needed. Our first priority was to give VIA’s PadLock implementation a fair shake. We had a Lenovo IdeaPad S12 (LS20) on hand, featuring the Nano U2250 (1.3+
GHz) processor with 2GB of DDR2, VIA’s VX800 chipset, and Windows XP SP3. Against this, we pitted our DIY OCZ Neutrino, outfitted with a 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270, 2GB of DDR2, the 945GM chipset, and Windows XP SP3. Obviously, this isn’t a perfect fit, but it’s close enough to let us gauge VIA’s PadLock against a similar platform that lacks encryption acceleration. Applications that currently support AES-NI or PadLock remain relatively few, but their ranks are slowly swelling. With Intel and AMD both adding support throughout mainstream processor segments, we expect application uptake will grow more quickly going forward. For now, we know of a few major benchmarking tools that support PadLock, such as CrystalMark, Everest, PassMark 7, and Sandra 2009. Linux kernel 2.6.19 and OpenSSL 0.9.8 both made PadLock support standard back in 2006. VIA maintains that PadLock will accelerate AES performance in the Java Runtime Environment by up to 90 times. On the Intel side, AES-NI support can be found in OpenSSL, Linux, VMware Workstation, Everest, and several other apps.
What We Found Everest Ultimate 5.50 (www.lavalys .com) is one of the quickest tests you can throw down for AES testing. Buried within the program’s voluminous diagnostics and benchmarks is a little routine called the CPU AES Benchmark. This synthetic test isolates AES performance apart from other real-world factors to deliver a “true” benefit result. In this case, our i7-980X shows a nearly 14X gain over the i7-965—a massive difference that gives some indication of what AES instructions can achieve. We see similar results with the SiSoft Sandra 2010 (www.sisoftware.net) Cryptography benchmark, another very popular synthetic test. General cryptographic bandwidth shows a 4X gain with AES-NI.
CPU / May 2011
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Performance specifically of the AES256-ECB encryption mode leaps to 7X improvement. But just to demonstrate that it’s AES that benefits here and not encryption in general, note that the SHA256 algorithm receives no acceleration at all. The identical numbers for SHA256 in three tests tell us that Sandra sees our two Intel chips as being effectively identical, confirming that the 980X’s larger L3 cache and smaller fab process have very little impact on cryptographic operations. BitLocker is available in the Enterprise and Ultimate editions of Windows 7, with Microsoft using 128-bit AES to lock down complete disk volumes. We created a 10GB partition on our Intel SSD, formatted it, and clocked the time needed for BitLocker to encrypt and then decrypt the volume. BenchZone recently posted a collection of benchmarks (bit.ly/bxr514) showing that a BitLocker-encrypted volume runs “approx 10% faster again thanks to the AES-NI instructions.” Sure enough, our test examining volume encryption time mirrors these findings, showing a 10.7% benefit from the AES-NI support in the i7-980X. Interestingly, the benefit on decryption jumps to over 23%. This indicates that BitLocker leverages AES-NI at all stages, not just operations on an encrypted volume but also the actual creation and elimination of that volume’s encryption. SourceForge’s support pages for 7-Zip (bit .ly/cPfrtf) confirm that the compression utility supports AES-NI. However, the improvement seen on the i7-980X is only 5.6%—a number small enough that we might chalk it up to the chip’s cache or fab node benefits rather than AES acceleration. However, running utilities such as 7-Zip and WinZip without compression enabled suddenly reveals an AES-NI benefit of almost 100%. This makes for an interesting academic exercise, but the reality is that nobody uses compression/ archiving tools only to encrypt files and not compress them. If anything, most people likely use moderate to maximum compression for real-world situations. The overhead from this compression virtually erases any performance gains from AES-NI. With PCMark Vantage’s Communications Suite, we jump back to synthetic testing, this
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time in the context of operations that pertain to apps such as VPN connections. Again, the benefits of AES-NI are obvious, improving performance by roughly 3.5X to 5.5X. In our netbook tests, Everest shows a blistering 23X gain for VIA’s PadLock over the non-accelerated Atom. Sandra follows suit with AES gains in the 8X to 25X range. Both tests are known to be compatible with PadLock instructions. We found no such support with 7-Zip, and the results show as much. Without acceleration, the VIA chip falls to Intel’s faster clock speed and perhaps superior architecture for this particular task.
Lesson Learned Today, relatively few applications and even fewer processors support instructions
for AES acceleration. Twelve to 24 months from now, we expect matters to have changed considerably. The need for encryption across many software categories is increasing, and AES-NI’s broad rollout will likely spur quick market adoption. Now that Intel has built it, the apps will come. Between now and then, though, buyers will need to pay closer attention to fine print. Does your prospective CPU support AES acceleration? Just as importantly, do your apps support that CPU’s form of acceleration? If only for future compatibility and getting top performance from your investments, make sure the answer to both questions is yes. ■ BY WILLIAM VAN WINKLE
Encryption Benchmarking Netbook Tests Lenovo S12
OCZ Neutrino
Everest
CPU AES
42558
1839
Sandra Cryptography Results
Crypto Bandwidth
623 MB/s
39 MB/s
AES256-ECB
875 MB/s
35 MB/s
SHA256 iSSE3
372 MB/s
43 MB/s
Crypto Bandwidth
0.39 MB/s/MHz
0.02 MB/s/MHz
AES256-ECB
0.55 MB/s/MHz
0.02 MB/s/MHz
SHA256 iSSE3
0.23 MB/s/MHz
0.03 MB/s/MHz
Crypto Bandwidth
NA
15.18 MB/s/W
AES256-ECB
NA
13.62 MB/s/W
SHA256 iSSE3
NA
16.73 MB/s/W
2GB folder
1hr 10min 37sec
0hr 42min 38sec
i7-965 Extreme
i7-980X Extreme
Everest
CPU AES
26898
374821
Sandra Cryptography Results
Crypto Bandwidth
852 MB/s
3.34 GB/s
AES256-ECB
828 MB/s
5.83 GB/s
SHA256 iSSE3
877 MB/s
876 MB/s
Crypto Bandwidth
0.25 MB/s/MHz
1.02 MB/s/MHz
AES256-ECB
0.25 MB/s/MHz
1.77 MB/s/MHz
SHA256 iSSE3
0.26 MB/s/MHz
0.26 MB/s/MHz
Crypto Bandwidth
2.84 MB/s/W
11.42 MB/s/W
AES256-ECB
2.76 MB/s/W
19.91 MB/s/W
Sandra Performance vs. Speed
Sandra Performance vs. Power
7-Zip w/ AES-256
Desktop Tests
Sandra Performance vs. Speed
Sandra Performance vs. Power
SHA256 iSSE3
2.92 MB/s/W
2.92 MB/s/W
7-Zip w/ AES-256
2GB folder
5min 58sec
5min 39sec
PCMark Vantage Comm. Suite
Comm. 1 Encryption
6.168 MB/s
20.196 MB/s
Comm. 2 Decryption
152.327 MB/s
819.387 MB/s
Comm. 4 Encryption
6.226 MB/s
20.465 MB/s
10GB Volume Encrypt
3min 27sec
3min 07sec
10GB Volume Decrypt
2min 40 sec
2min 10sec
BitLocker
Get informed answers to your advanced technical questions from CPU. Send your questions along with a phone and/or fax number, so we can call you if necessary, to q&a@cpumag.com. Please include all pertinent system information. Each month we dig deep into the CPU mailbag in an effort to answer your most pressing technical questions. Want some advice on your next purchase or upgrade? Have a ghost in your machine? Are BSODs making your life miserable? CPU’s “Advanced Q&A Corner” is here for you.
Joe B. asked: In the March Q&A column, while answering Cameron R.’s question [see page 44], you state that the only difference between the Radeon HD 6950 and 6970 is the firmware. Yet, in the same issue, on page 29, it states that the higher performance of the HD 6970 compared to the HD 6950 is that the former has “additional stream processors, texture units, and higher clocks.” Which one of you guys has it right? A: Well, Joe, both articles are correct. Let us explain. When AMD or Nvidia release new GPUs, these chips will most likely be used on more than one product. For example, the Radeon HD 6970 and Radeon HD 6950 are both based on the same physical GPU, which was code-named “Cayman” throughout its development. The Cayman GPU used on Radeon HD 6970 cards has all of its functional blocks enabled, which is to say it is a fully functional version of the GPU. However, the Cayman GPU used on the Radeon HD 6950, although still based on the same GPU, has parts of the GPU disabled, which results in the lower stream processor and texture unit counts. And the reference specifications also call for lower clocks. Sometimes these disabled blocks on the GPU cannot be reactivated because they
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are “fused” off at the factory for whatever reason. With the majority of reference Radeon HD 6950 cards, though, it appears that AMD has turned off the disabled portions of the GPU through the card’s firmware. And by flashing a reference Radeon HD 6950 card with the firmware from a reference Radeon HD 6970, you can re-enable those functional blocks and increase the GPU and memory clocks, which makes the 6950 essentially identical to a 6970 in terms of its specifications and performance. With that said, there is still one other difference between reference Radeon HD 6970 and HD 6950 cards: their power connector configurations. The Radeon HD 6970 has a single 8-pin connector and a single 6-pin connector, while the 6950 has a pair of 6-pin connectors. Technically, the Radeon HD 6970 will have additional power at its disposal if the need arises; at this point, though, we haven’t heard of any issues involving modded 6950s not working properly due to power limitations
Reference Radeon HD 6970 and HD 6950 cards are fundamentally very similar. In fact, many reference Radeon HD 6950 cards can be converted into pseudo 6970s with a simple firmware update.
resulting from its power connector configuration. Even if there were, lowering the max power through AMD’s PowerTune would most likely resolve them.
Pete F. asked:
I have a question for you guys about SSDs, but not the traditional SATA-based drives that everyone is clamoring over. I do a lot of video production as a side business of mine, and I could really benefit from the screaming fast speeds of a PCI-E SSD card. I’ve been watching various products come to market, from Fusion-io’s ridiculously expensive blades to the more reasonably priced products, such as OCZ’s Z-Drives and RevoDrives. What’s your opinion on what currently is the best value in PCI-E SSDs? Do I really need something with SLC, or will MLC work for what I’m doing? I’m not so concerned about price, but I’m definitely not interested in dropping a few grand on a Fusion-io card. Any suggestions?
A: Pete, the first thing we took note of is that you’re describing a high-end workstation usage model here and not an enterprise server or data center application. As such, we’d suggest going with a less expensive MLC version of whatever card you decide on. Although SLC has much higher write endurance than MLC, it’s highly unlikely that you’re going to run into a reliability issue with the amount of data you’ll be writing to the drive day in and day out. Life cycle data on MLC flash has been mounting for a few years now, and reliability is much less of a concern these days. From a simple price/performance perspective, we really like OCZ’s RevoDrive X2, although it does have a couple of shortfalls.
OCZ’s new Z-Drive R3 will reportedly offer 1GBps read bandwidth and up to 970MBps for writes, for a fraction of the price of an enterprise-class PCI-E SSD.
The product has an issue with not coming out of sleep state should your system go into standby. It also lacks nonvolatile RAM for caching any data that is waiting to be written to the drive in the event of power failure. However, by the time you read this, OCZ’s new Z-Drive R3 should have arrived to market. It not only is supposed to be ridiculously fast with 1GBps read bandwidth and up to 970MBps for writes, but it also has a “supercap” capacitor on board. The supercap is a high-energy capacitor that acts as a short-term power source to let the drive complete pending writes in the event of power loss. It should also resolve the wake from sleep issue that the RevoDrive X2 has. At the time of this writing, OCZ hasn’t set pricing yet for the Z-Drive R3, but the MLC version should fall along a similar price curve, perhaps slightly higher, as the RevoDrive X2 when it was first introduced. The Z-Drive R3 should be available in capacities of 300GB, 600GB, and 1.2TB.
Juan Pablo R. asked: I am on a limited budget and have been upgrading my system piecemeal for a few years now. I’m almost to the point where it’s time for a new processor and motherboard, but my current system (a Core 2 Duo with 4GB of RAM and a GeForce GTX 260) is still serving me well. I’m thinking about upgrading it with a new solid-state drive, but if I do, I want to buy one of the latest models that support 6Gbps SATA, so that when I do finally upgrade my motherboard and processor I’ll benefit from the faster interface. I was wondering if there is any downside to buying a 6Gbps SATA SSD like an OCZ Vertex 3 or Intel 510 series and using it on an older motherboard that only has 3Gbps SATA. Should I just save my money and get a cheaper 3Gbps SATA SSD? Will the 6Gbps SATA SSD still work properly and have TRIM, etc., when used on the old board? A: If you have the funds, we say splurge for the 6Gbps SATA SSD. It’ll offer excellent performance now and even
better performance when you upgrade again. To answer your questions, yes, a 6Gbps SATA SSD will work properly on an older motherboard that only has 3Gbps SATA ports. And as long as your board/chipset properly supports AHCI and you have the correct drivers installed (and you’re running Windows 7), TRIM and garbage collection will function on the drive, as well. You should keep in mind, however, that a 6Gbps SATA SSD will never be able to hit its peak performance when connected to the older interface. In our testing, for example, we found the OCZ Vertex 3 performed about the same as the OCZ Vertex 2 when connected to a 3Gbps SATA interface. That’s still great, but there will obviously be some untapped performance in the Vertex 3. For such a drive to truly hit its peak, a chipset with native 6Gbps SATA support is what you’ll need. ■ BY DAVE ALTAVILLA AND MARCO CHIAPPETTA, THE EXPERTS OVER AT HotHardware.com.
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Texas Instruments’ OMAP 5 New SoC Promises To Change Interaction With Smartphones lthough we’re still 18 months away from seeing products, Texas Instruments’ recent announcement of its OMAP (Open Multimedia Application Platform) 5 SoC (system on chip) looks like one of those technological advancements that will be well worth the wait. The OMAP 5 SoC provides significant architectural improvements over previous generations of TI’s OMAP platforms. Eventually, OMAP 5 should bring full gesture recognition in a 3D space to smartphones and other devices. The gesture recognition could look similar to what was envisioned in the 2002 Steven Spielberg film “Minority Report.” “One of the key things we talk about is it’s not just a faster horse,” says Brian Carlson, TI’s OMAP 5 product line manager. “You’ll be able to do new things with it.”
A
OMAP 5 Architecture TI was the first company to license the Cortex-A15 low-power processor from ARM, and using these chips in OMAP 5 provides significant benefits, Carlson says. TI began working on OMAP 5 in December 2005, and it began working with ARM on the A15 around the same time. “We started talking with ARM about what we wanted,” Carlson says. “We saw even back then that mobile computing was going to come to this point in the market. It takes multiple years to bring this kind of technology to market. It’s a long process, defining what technologies we’re going to need.” In addition, OMAP 5 will feature two Cortex-M4 cores. The M4 cores will not work as well as the A15 cores for general-purpose processing, but TI will use the M4 for fast-response processing needs, Carlson says. For example, the M4 cores may be used
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for faster video encoding and decoding and for image enhancement, allowing smartphone cameras to more closely approach the image quality of pointand-shoot digital cameras. “They’re running very fast from a responsiveness point of view, and they’re very low-power,” Carlson says of the M4 cores. “We use multiple cores to do the work in the most power-efficient way.” With the OMAP 5 architecture, the hardware will make the determination about which cores can best handle each set of instructions, switching between the A15 and M4 cores seamlessly. “We have customers who are taking advantage of using those M4 cores to do things behind the scenes,” Carlson says. “We can make it seamless from a software point of view. We can give the best performance and the most responsiveness.”
New Smartphone Options Another key component of OMAP 5 will be its ability to support multiple operating systems. “We needed to be doing this in the hardware, to very efficiently run multiple operating systems,” Carlson says. “You can run Android and the next generation of Windows and move between them seamlessly. People are using their phones not only for business, but also for personal use, but not necessarily in the same OS environment. They want to keep their data and apps separate.” By using OMAP 5 with smartphones, pico projectors, and cameras, and by supporting 3D video, OMAP 5 could find itself generating interactive 3D environments with gesture recognition. OMAP 5 can support up to four cameras and encode and decode 3D video content at full 1080p HD quality.
“One of the differentiators for TI is that we’re such a broad company,” Carlson says. “We have such diversity . . . we are bringing new capabilities to mobile phones that we’ve leveraged in other areas.” 3D capabilities in smartphones already are appearing based on OMAP 4, but Carlson says the 3D capabilities in OMAP 5 will bring greater options for users, changing the way people interact with their mobile devices. For example, the days of touching the screen on your smartphone likely will be coming to an end, he says. “Once you have 3D, you take advantage of it for a natural user interface,” Carlson says. “With every pixel, we can determine the depth of that pixel . . . the next generation is going to be about gesture recognition, rather than touch.”
Purchasing OMAP 5 Products Carlson says the OMAP 5 SoC should be sampling later this year, and he expects products based on OMAP 5 to be available in the third quarter of 2012, just in time for the 2012 holiday season. Until the OMAP 5 products arrive, consumers will be able to take advantage of OMAP 4 products, which are appearing now, including the LG Optimus 3D smartphone, announced in February. The LG Optimus 3D unit is the first 3D smartphone to make use of OMAP 4. With this type of processing and imaging power showing up in phones and tablets, the migration of everyday computing tasks from PCs to small, portable devices continues. “We are really transforming these mobile devices,” Carlson says. “You’ll interact with them in totally different ways.” ■ BY
KYLE SCHURMAN
OMAP 4 vs. OMAP 5 Although the OMAP 5 platform contains several architectural improvements versus the OMAP 4 platform, Carlson says it’s important to keep in mind that the two platforms are architecturally related, which ensures compatibility. Carlson says the upgrade to the Cortex-A15 processors – along with the addition of the Cortex-M4 processors – provides OMAP 5 a strong upgrade in processing power and efficiency over the OMAP 4 and its Cortex-A9 processors. “A15 brings a lot of advancements in being able to do more in each clock cycle,� Carlson says. “You can’t just compare clock cycles. It’s a big boost in performance.� TI claims a 60% average power reduction in the OMAP 5 vs. the OMAP 4 when performing the same types of tasks. Carlson says much of the power reduction occurs because the OMAP 5 uses a 28nm fabrication process, while the OMAP 4 uses a 45nm fabrication process. “That gives us about a 30% reduction in power alone,� Carlson says. “Internal caching lets us reduce power even more. There are a lot of things
we are doing behind the scenes to reduce power. I have all of this performance on demand when I need it, but I also can use that overhead to reduce power usage.� OMAP 5 also takes advantage of the third version of TI’s SmartReflex technology, which manages power conservation. (OMAP 4 used the second version of SmartReflex.) OMAP 5 will be available in two configurations. The OMAP5432 will be aimed at mobile computing and other consumer products, while the OMAP5430 should appear in smartphones and tablets. OMAP5430 is smaller and uses less power than OMAP5432, allowing it to fit better in the smartphone and tablet market. “The whole key for this architecture is to do things as efficiently as possible from a power perspective,� Carlson says. “It’s about doing all of this from a very low power budget.� ■Source: TI
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CPU / May 2011
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Micron ClearNAND New Design Aims To Improve NAND Performance, Longevity
N
AND flash memory—and the products that make use of it—quickly are becoming some of the most popular products in personal electronics. Solid-state drives, personal media players, and mobile devices are just some of the products making use of NAND flash memory. Part of the reason NAND has become such an important part of
the personal electronics marketplace is because of the scaling behind the technology. As NAND flash memory shrinks, it allows for more storage in the same amount of space, providing more value and performance. But along with this shrink, the possibility of bit errors within NAND flash increases, something that threatens the
ability of NAND to continue to make improvements necessary to maintain its growth. This problem has led memory maker Micron to make changes to its NAND flash design. The company’s ClearNAND uses an innovative approach to tackle the increasing number of errors associated with smaller NAND manufacturing processes.
Raw NAND Vs. ClearNAND The primary difference between raw NAND and Micron’s ClearNAND is the placement of an ECC (error-correcting code) controller on the NAND die. With raw NAND, the host processor performs all of the required tasks, such as supporting ECC and block management, internally. By moving the ECC controller onto the NAND die with ClearNAND and by using new error-correction algorithms, ClearNAND can provide greatly improved performance over raw NAND, Micron’s director of NAND strategic
marketing Kevin Kilbuck says. With the improved ECC under ClearNAND, he says customers who have hit a brick wall in terms of performance using raw NAND will be able to take advantage of ClearNAND. “We have customers today who will use our 25nm ClearNAND who cannot use raw NAND because of ECC issues,” Kilbuck says. “With our error-management algorithm, we can improve endurance over what raw NAND can do.” ■
Raw NAND
ClearNAND
Host Processor
Host Processor
Block Management
Block Management
Wear Leveling
Wear Leveling
ECC
Driver
Driver
ONFI NAND bus
NAND
ONFI NAND bus ClearNAND Controller ECC NAND
ClearNAND
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Single package with controller and NAND die
ClearNAND Endurance & ECC Options Scaling NAND into finer geometries allows for higher capacities and lower costs but also requires more error correction. NAND endurance also degrades along with manufacturing process shrinks. As shown in graph A, as the geometry shrinks, the number of bits required for ECC rises, and the number of P/E (program/ erase) cycles the NAND memory can endure declines. The bits become more tightly packed as the NAND scales down into finer geometries, meaning the memory cells are moving closer to each other, which causes more interference and crosstalk. You can see the smaller gates in each geometry in the photos below. When the manufacturing process shrinks, the memory transistors have fewer electrons per floating gate, which leads to more bit errors. The increased RBER (raw bit error rate) requires more bits dedicated to ECC. Consequently, the number of logic gates dedicated to ECC in the memory must be increased, too, as shown in graph B. For example, 16-bit ECC (marked as “BCH t=16” in the graph) requires about 80,000 gates. A 60-bit ECC would require about 300,000 gates. “We’re starting to reach the effective limit of what standard ECC can do,” says Kevin Kilbuck, Micron’s director of NAND strategic marketing. “It’s starting to limit the adoption for NAND in some environments. . . . Clear NAND can alleviate a lot of these headaches. By using these tools, we can improve the endurances quite a bit over what the raw NAND can do. We can cycle a lot more data through before we wear out the NAND.”
50nm NAND
The ClearNAND controller takes over the ECC and uses improved algorithms for better endurance. Kilbuck says that despite the drawbacks with continued scaling, the current benefits still greatly outweigh any problems. “We do it for cost reasons,” Kilbuck says. “By scaling, we offer new applications. NAND continues to displace other forms of media. . . . ClearNAND helps . . . but the scaling wall is coming. We’re getting to the point where we can count the number of electrons in each cell on our fingers and toes.” ■
34nm NAND
Source: Micron
A
B
25nm NAND CPU / May 2011
51
ClearNAND Introduced Essentially, ClearNAND makes use of a traditional raw NAND interface with an ECC (error-correcting code) processor built into the NAND die. “We put a controller in a standard NAND package to handle ECC,” says Kevin Kilbuck, Micron’s director of NAND strategic marketing. “It’s the same package, the same interface. The controller with the NAND die does all of the ECC management.
“It’s very simple to design, but it does add cost and complexity,” he says. As NAND scales down to smaller and smaller sizes, the number of bit errors increases. And with more bit errors, the performance of the NAND memory suffers. With ClearNAND, Micron is placing the ECC processor and the NAND in the same package, improving performance. The host processor still must perform the other tasks, but it no longer also needs to manage ECC.
Component manufacturers often want to customize the tasks performed by the host processor, allowing them to differentiate their products, Kilbuck says. But with traditional NAND, customizing the ECC controller isn’t an option, because the ECC controller’s configuration is dependent on the NAND in use; any changes to the ECC controller would prevent it from working properly with the NAND.
Future NAND Options Even though advancements in NAND technology, such as ClearNAND, will lengthen the lifespan of the traditional NAND design, Kevin Kilbuck, Micron director of NAND strategic marketing, says that the technology will eventually hit a limit because the floating gates simply can’t be made any smaller. Currently, Micron is exploring two future memory technologies, 3D NAND and Cross Point NAND. 3D. By adding multiple layers to its NAND cells, Micron could potentially increase densities without having to further scale down the size of the floating gates. “With 3D, we’d build layers of transistors vertically,” Kilbuck says. “It sounds easy, but it’s not. It’s very conceptual at this point. . . . We learned a lot of these 3D techniques with DRAM, and we may now apply it to NAND. Cross Point. A Cross Point design potentially would provide greater density with both vertical and horizontal storage. “With Cross Point, we place the storage elements in an X-Y array,” Kilbuck says. “The storage element would have to be made very small and power-conservative.” Micron’s research into these memory technologies will continue, Kilbuck says, but the company isn’t ready to give up making additional improvements to NAND yet. “There is nothing in the next five years that will approach the cost [value] of NAND,” Kilbuck says. “NAND still has a lot of headroom, even if we do nothing more [in terms of NAND research.]” ■ Source: Micron
3D NAND Cells
Top layer
Bottom layer
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Cross Point NAND Cells
By placing ECC on the NAND die, Micron’s ClearNAND lets device manufacturers more easily design the host processor to specifically manage its other tasks, he says, meeting customers’ desires for customization. “The host processor has to do a lot of other functions,” Kilbuck says. “Storage is only a part of it.”
Micron’s NAND Development ClearNAND is close to appearing in products, Kilbuck says. “We’re sampling [ClearNAND] now,” he says. “Our customers are starting to
test it. In the second half of 2011, you’ll start to see some production volumes.” Micron is one of two companies (along with Samsung) that develops NAND, DRAM, and NOR memory. Other developers focus on only one or two memory types. “We think it’s good to be a multi-memory developer for several reasons,” Kilbuck says. “It’s important from a scaling standpoint. It’s important for our customers, as we’re finding they’re using DRAM, NAND, and NOR in the same product.” Another benefit of developing more than one type of memory is the ability to share research successes between groups. Kilbuck
says Micron can borrow from work it has done with DRAM development to make improvements in NAND, for example. “We can share technologies between all of the types, and we think that will be to our benefit,” he says. With ClearNAND and other types of new NAND designs, flash memory components will continue to shrink in size. Consequently, the CE devices that rely on flash NAND will be able to provide more for less, with the increase in value ultimately benefiting consumers. ■ BY
KYLE SCHURMAN
Copyback In Enhanced ClearNAND One area where ClearNAND’s architecture allows it to experience greatly improved performance is in how ClearNAND handles a process called Copyback, which involves moving data from one channel (or package) to another. During Copyback with raw NAND, the host controller issues a read to one of the NAND die, controls and checks the ECC, and then programs (writes) the data back to another NAND die. The external bus is tied up with moving data during the entire operation. With Enhanced ClearNAND, the host controller still handles Copyback. However, ClearNAND’s built-in ECC controller handles the ECC controls, meaning data can be moved from one die to another without tying up the external bus. The error correction can be completed internally. In a large SSD system (shown here), the operation of moving data from one die to another (shown with green arrows) can be performed internally, with up to four simultaneous operations per channel, freeing up the external bus. If the data must be updated or moved between packages or between channels, the host controller and external bus then can be used (red arrows). By freeing up the external bus and using it only for particular types of data movement, ClearNAND greatly improves overall system performance. ■ Source: Micron
CPU / May 2011
53
We Build Our Best PC Ever If you’ve been reading CPU over the last couple of years, then you probably ran across our “PC Challenge” build contests once or twice. The PC Challenge pitted CPU staffers against each other in duels to determine who could create the best purpose-built systems. The competition was fierce, and the resulting systems were great. But we’re left wondering if some of our gladiators took the challenge a little too seriously. The final tally: nine black eyes, four restraining orders, two fractured ribs, and one person now enrolled in the witness protection program. (Your secret’s safe with us, Drew Belmani.)
Past Challenges tested CPU’s system builders with certain rules and requirements that made each build, well, challenging. We frequently required challengers to stay within a certain budget, often forcing them to make compromises in component selection. The sole stipulation with this build: Win. Win at gaming. Win at overclocking. Win at booting. Win at everything. We infused our components with tiger blood and Adonis DNA and then set it loose on the world. We call it CHARLIE (Computer Honed And Ready for Leetness In Everything). Be afraid, Jon Cryer.
In the aftermath of the PC Challenge carnage, we decided that a cease-fire was in order. Instead, we would pool our collective wisdom and expertise to create the most awesome system ever to step into our test lab.
We’ll break down each of CHARLIE’s parts on a componentby-component basis in the following pages, but here’s what you can expect to see: Intel’s top-of-the-line Sandy Bridge chip (watercooled, duh), the Core i7-2600K, with a grade A P67
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motherboard to match, two rip-roaring GeForce GTX 580s in SLI, one wicked-fast PCI-E-based SSD to boot Windows in the blink of an eye, Western Digital’s 2TB Caviar Black to store our stuff, 16 whole gigabytes of high-performance DDR3, a 1,250-watt modular PSU, and Blu-ray burner, all tucked away in a roomy NZXT case that is as functional as it is attractive. Each piece receives its own turn under Spotlight’s spotlight, where we’ll tell you what we liked and why that particular component belongs with CHARLIE. Picking this hardware is equal parts art and science, so it’s quite possible that you could create your own ultimate PC—EMILIO (Exceptional Machine Indubitably Longing for Intimidating Overclocks), for the sake of argument—with a slightly different shopping
list. It’s OK; great minds think alike. Let this be a rough blueprint for your own outlandish build. With all of our hardware carefully installed and tuned to perfection, we unleashed CHARLIE on a rampage that will surely set the world ablaze. CHARLIE binged on a bender of synthetic and real-world benchmarks, turning in a performance for the ages. At the end of it all, we were forced to arrive at the only reasonable conclusion: This rig has a different constitution, a different brain, a different heart. It only has one speed, “Go!” And go it did, ladies and gentlemen. Go it did. So come along with us as we chronicle exactly how CHARLIE came to be . . . if you dare. ■ BY VINCE
COGLEY
CPU / May 2011
55
Motherboard: MSI P67A-GD80 (B3) Although you can swap in this component or swap out that one to improve your system, the motherboard is the piece that holds it all together. If you’re building a killer rig, you better have a commensurate motherboard that can serve as the foundation. The MSI P67A-GD80 (B3) certainly fills the bill, providing ample features to let you hang some serious hardware on it. The socket LGA1155 board supports the latest Sandy Bridge chips, accepts a maximum 32GB of system memory (DDR3-2133 [OC]), and can handle up to 3-way SLI or CrossFireX configurations (although the bottom PEG slot will be limited to a PCI-E x4 speed in such a setup). It also supports USB 3.0 and SATA 6Gbps to take better advantage of attached peripherals and components, such as speedy boot drives. Specifications aside, the true value of a motherboard (as with many things) is often determined by the small touches that display thoughtful craftsmanship, the less flashy but no less important aspects of a product. For example, the P67A-GD80 (B3)’s PCI-E x16 2.0 slots are spaced so that you can set up multiple dual-slot graphics cards. And it doesn’t stop there. The P67A-GD80 (B3) is built with Military Class II parts, including Hi-c caps, which are made of tantalum and purport to outlast a solid capacitor by a factor of 8; SFC (super ferrite choke), which is designed to lower the overall system temperature for better stability; and solid capacitors, to help ensure longer life and eliminate bursting capacitors. When
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P67A-GD80 (B3) $229 MSI www.msi.com Specs: Socket LGA1155; Intel P67 chipset (B3 stepping); Max memory: 32GB DDR32133 (OC); Slots: 3 PCI-E x16, 2 PCI-E x1, 2 PCI; Ports: 2 6Gbps SATA, 4 3Gbps SATA, 2 3Gbps eSATA, 4 USB 2.0, 6 USB 3.0, 1 FireWire, 2 Gigabit Ethernet
you’re pushing your system to its limits, you want to be sure those oft-overlooked components can handle the pressure. For overclockers, the P67A-GD80 (B3) has plenty to offer. The OC Genie, which can be activated by pressing a physical button on the board itself or in the BIOS settings, detects the hardware configuration and automatically overclocks the CPU. With Instant OC, you can automatically adjust the CPU and memory voltage and clocks, too. If, in the course of your tinkering, you do something disastrous, you can fall back on M-Flash, which lets you create a backup BIOS on a USB flash drive. The BIOS itself actually has a GUI, making the traditionally stark environment more pleasing to behold, which you’ll appreciate if you’re spending a lot of time in there.
You may have heard that Intel’s Cougar Point shipped with a SATA bug; well, not to worry—that “(B3)” in the P67A-GD80 (B3)’s name indicates that this motherboard was shipped with that issue fixed. Other choice features of the P67A-GD80 (B3) include THX TruStudio Pro for high-fidelity audio; Super Charger, which routes power to a given USB port to more quickly recharge attached devices; Winki 3, a Linux environment that grants you Internet access while the rest of the system boots; APS (active phase switching) to save energy; and Live Update 5 and Live Update Online to automatically download the latest driver and BIOS updates from MSI. ■ BY SETH
COLANER
Processor: Intel Core i7-2600K
Core i7-2600K $329 (online) Intel www.intel.com Specs: Socket: LGA1155; Clock speed: 3.4GHz (3.8GHz Turbo); 8MB L3 Smart Cache; 95W max TDP; Hyper-Threading enabled; Turbo Boost enabled
As of press time, the Intel Core i72600K was the fastest Sandy Bridge desktop processor available. It offers 8-way processing (four physical cores with HyperThreading) at a standard clock speed of 3.4GHz. The “K” designation also means that the processor and the integrated graphics core is fully unlocked, so you can set the multiplier and base clock as high as the cooling in your system allows you to go. The Core i7-2600K includes all of Intel’s newest goodies. For example, Intel Turbo Boost 2.0 technology automatically pushes the chip’s performance to 3.8GHz when the processor is under load, as long as the CPU stays within thermal limits. You’ll also find Intel’s Hyper-Threading, a feature that isn’t included on the Intel Core i5-2500K. There are built-in instruction sets for SSE 4.1/4.2 and AVX (a 256-bit instruction set extension to SSE for floating point-intensive applications). The Core
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i7-2600K also offers 8MB of shared Intel Smart Cache for fast access to data. The memory controller integrated into the Core i7-2600K supports dualchannel DDR3 clocked up to 1,333MHz for a maximum memory bandwidth of 21GBps. Maximum memory size is 32GB. The base clock speed of the i7-2600K is 100MHz, while the multiplier is 34. When overclocking, we like that you can change the base clock and/or the multiplier, so you can tinker with the settings to find the best speed. Of course, you can also boost the CPU’s voltage to push the limits even further. Most overclocking experts have found that you can hit clock frequencies around 4.4GHz without making any adjustments to the Intel Core i7-2600K’s voltage, and the 1GHz jump in speed is a good amount of headroom when compared to other
high-end processors. In our build, we were able to hit 4.7GHz with minimal effort. Pairing the Intel Core i7-2600K with MSI’s P67-GD80 (B3) disables the chip’s integrated graphics core, but we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention the i7-2600K’s integrated graphics capabilities. Those who picked a motherboard with an Intel H67 chipset will be able to harness Intel HD 3000 graphics, which are capable of playing some of today’s games at basic image quality settings. You’ll also enjoy Intel’s Quick Sync Video (hardware acceleration for image and video editing), Intel’s InTRU 3D Technology (supports 3D playback), and dual-display capability. We also like that the Core i7-2600K is comparably affordable with the rest of Intel’s high-end lineup. The ease and headroom for overclocking makes the Core i7-2600K an even better value. ■ BY
NATHAN LAKE
Case: NZXT Phantom
Phantom $139.99 NZXT www.nzxt.com Specs: Dimensions: 21.3 x 8.7 x 24.5 inches (HxWxD); Material: Steel, plastic; Motherboard support: E-ATX, ATX, mATX, Baby AT; Weight: 24.3lbs; Bays: 5 5.25-inch external, 7 3.5-inch internal (with 2.5-inch adapters); Slots: 7; Fans: 1 140mm front, 1 120mm rear (included), 2 120mm (included) and 1 200mm side, 2 200mm top (1 included, w/LED); Ports: 2 USB 2.0, e-SATA, audio I/O; 5-channel fan controller
The NZXT Phantom is a beauty of a case that’ll put a gleam in the eye of any enthusiast; if you’re looking for an ATX full tower, this one should be on your short list. The Phantom supports E-ATX, ATX, microATX, and Baby AT mobos, and provides plenty of space for dual-radiator liquid-cooling gear (it even comes with liquid-cooling cutouts), multiple graphics cards, several big fans, and stacks of 2.5and 3.5-inch drives. It’s roomy enough to handle just about all the stuff you want to throw in there and still leave you enough room so that you won’t be scraping your knuckles when you dig into the machine’s innards. Some serious attention to detail went into this case. The motherboard tray (with cutouts for easy access to components) features rubber grommets, and there’s
plenty of room to route cables behind the mobo tray. The baked enamel finish is flawless, extending to the inside of the case. (We tested the Phantom case in white, a very cool combination that looks like it could be standard-issue “Star Wars” stormtrooper equipment.) We did discover that we had to use the screws included with our PSU in order to mount the unit in the case, rather than the black thumbscrews that are included with the case. No big deal, and it didn’t really spoil the look. The folks at NZXT take cooling very seriously. In addition to a top panel that’s largely mesh and plenty of space for liquid-cooling gear, the Phantom has room for seven fans, four of which are included with the case. (NOTE: If you decide to add more 200mm fans,
make sure you stick with NZXT’s FN-200 fans to ensure a good fit; the Phantom’s 200mm mounting is nonstandard, so 200mm fans from other manufacturers may not fit.) A five-channel manual fan controller (capable of handling 20W per channel) is included; obviously, that’s handy for balancing airflow with a case this large. There’s also plenty of room for storage, with bays for seven 3.5-inch hard drives (and adapters for 2.5-inch units), plus an additional seven expansion slots. Screwless rails make installing and removing HDDs a breeze. The NZXT Phantom is a beautiful piece of work in which form not only follows function, but complements it. ■ BY
ROD SCHER
CPU / May 2011
59
Graphics Card: Gigabyte GeForce GTX 580 GV-N580UD-15I Both Nvidia and AMD offer compelling options for gamers with deep pockets, which made selecting the graphics cards for our rig a difficult task. Although the GeForce GTX 580 is unequivocally the fastest single-GPU graphics card on the planet, AMD’s dual-GPU Radeon HD 6990 is the fastest card overall. Ultimately, Nvidia gets our nod because the SLI rig can deliver triple-monitor gaming like AMD’s 6990 CrossFireXon-a-card, but also with the added bonus of 3D Vision Surround. Yeah, we know AMD has 3D, too, but Nvidia’s scheme is the more fleshed out of the two. From a gaming standpoint, PhysX is also compelling for supported games. CUDA also offers a few gaming-themed enhancements that stand out, for instance, Just Cause 2’s impressive water effects. The GTX 480 based on the original Fermi architecture had a problem with leaky transistors, but the GF110 GPU inside the GTX 580 is a significantly refined Fermi that solves that problem and subsequently is cooler, quieter under load, and capable of running DirectX 11 games with settings maxed out on even the highest resolutions. The GPU inside the GeForce GTX 580 features 16 SMs for a total of 512 CUDA cores, 64 texture units, and 48 ROPs. The memory subsystem consists of 1,536MB dedicated GDDR5 memory, clocked at 1,002MHz and running on a 384-bit bus. The reference GTX 580 has a core clock of 772MHz, but Gigabyte upped the ante by overclocking the graphics card to 795MHz. Additional features previously touched upon include support for PhysX, SLI, and CUDA-based GPGPU computing. Running a pair of GTX 580s in SLI will generate a lot of heat, so our goal in selecting the graphics cards was to try to minimize the thermal impact on the
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Gigabyte GeForce GTX 580 GV-N580UD-15I $499.99 (online) Gigabyte us.gigabyte.com
overall system as much as possible by selecting a GTX 580 with a better-thanstock cooler. Gigabyte’s GV-N580UD-15I is a GTX 580 with an aftermarket cooler we had to see to believe. The overclocked Ultra Durable VGA Series GeForce GTX 580 straps Nvidia’s current flagship powerhouse to a large copper vapor chamber and aluminum fin heatsink that spans the length of the board. The Windforce 3X cooler utilizes a trio of ultra-quiet PWM fans with specially inclined fins designed to create less turbulence at higher rpms, which results in a card capable of running at higher rpms without producing as much noise as a stock GTX 580 with fans running at similar speeds. A pair of copper heatpipes helps evacuate heat,
and, according to Gigabyte, this card runs 22% cooler than the reference design. Other Gigabyte staples, such as 2-ounce copper PCB, Japanese solid caps, ferrite core chokes, and tier 1 Samsung and Hynix memory also make this an attractive option. Gigabyte also bundles in an HDMI cable, which is a nice bonus. Our goal here is to get any game on the market running blisteringly fast, at high resolutions, with every killer effect enabled, and all settings maxed out. We don’t like to brag, but we think our pair of Gigabyte GTX 580s in SLI can handle that. To see for sure, check out the benchmarks on page 70. ■ BY
ANDREW LEIBMAN
SSD: OCZ RevoDrive X2 100GB You don’t have to give up TRIM-like performance reclamation to run SSDs in a RAID. Nor do you have to put up with a bottleneck in the interface—even the 6Gbps SATA variety. The key is to look beyond SATA SSDs to a PCI-E model. More specifically, a bootable PCI-E model on which you can install an OS. That’s an important distinction, as the OS is a prime beneficiary of the random file writes and reads an SSD can offer. OCZ’s RevoDrive X2 has all of this: RAID 0, idle garbage collection, and bootability in a x4 PCI-E 1.1 package. That’s correct: It’s PCI-E 1.1, but the x4 lane throughput of 8Gbps (1GBps minus some overhead) means that the interface won’t hold back the drive. The 100GB edition of this second-gen RevoDrive can reach 100,000IOps in 4KB random writes, OCZ says. That’s nearly twice the input/output performance of a 6Gbps SATA-based Vertex 3 SSD using the newish SandForce SF-2200 series controller. The drive’s other specs will likewise set your heart a-palpitating. OCZ reports 740MBps reads and 550MBps sustained writes, with peak writes reaching 690MBps. These stem from a 4-way RAID 0 consisting of a Silicon Image 3124 chip riding herd over a quartet of SandForce SF-1222 controllers. The SandForce chips also run built-in garbage collection during idle periods to purge deleted data and restore write performance. Step up to a 240GB ($569 online) or bigger RevoDrive X2, however, and you might need to reach for the defibrillator. You’ll snag higher write performance figures such as 120,000IOps, 600MBps sustained write rates, and peak writes of
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RevoDrive X2 100GB $374.99 (online) OCZ www.ocztechnology.com Specs: Performance ratings: 740MBps reads, 550MBps sustained writes (peak writes 690MBps), 100,000IOps 4KB aligned random writes; Power consumption: 4.3W idle, 8.3W active; MTBF: 2 million hours; Interface: x4 PCI-E 1.1; Form factor: Full height, 5 x 7.1 x 0.9 inches (HxWxD); Warranty: Three years
720MBps. The read speed will remain the same at 740MBps, though.
to 960GB ($3,159 online), and carries a three-year warranty.
OCZ builds the RevoDrive X2 with a double-decker PCB design. The 100GB model’s boards are half-filled with Intel 4GB MLC 34nm chips. All told, our RevoDrive had 128GB onboard, approximately 28GB of which was dedicated to overprovisioning for performance and reliability reasons.
Before you buy, however, do yourself a favor and check your motherboard’s compatibility online (bit.ly/ezB9MA). OCZ notes that you may need to disable other RAIDs if they’re running on an onboard controller.
The shocker in all this is the fact that the X2 is a bit of a bargain, at least compared with the pricing of earlier efforts in the PCI-E SSD space. The X2 comes in capacities ranging from 100GB
Also, be prepared to update your mainboard’s BIOS and supply drivers for the RevoDrive during your OS installation should you want to use it as a boot drive. OCZ says that the X2 is compatible with 64- and 32-bit versions of Windows 7/Vista/XP. ■ BY
MARTY SEMS
SPECS
Western Digital Caviar Black 2TB
Capacity
2TB (four 500GB platters)
Interface
6Gbps SATA
Cache
64MB
Spindle Speed
7,200rpm
Warranty
Limited 5-year
Price
$169.99
While SSDs work great as boot drives or for loading games and other applications quickly, there’s still a place for low-cost, high-capacity hard disk drives that can hold your music, video, photos, and other files that take up lots of space but don’t need to be loaded as fast. Adding Western Digital’s Caviar Black 2TB 3.5-inch hard drive to our benchmark buster as secondary storage provides the rig with a wealth of capacity without sacrificing overall performance. With its SATA 6Gbps interface, 64MB buffer, and 7,200rpm spindle speed, the WD Caviar Black 2TB is a formidable
Mass Storage: Western Digital Caviar Black 2TB
performer. Prior to its introduction early last year, Western Digital added some features to this hard drive designed to improve its performance over previous Caviar Blacks, including dual actuation technology for faster seek times and better positional accuracy, as well as a StableTrac motor shaft that is locked at both ends to reduce vibration. In addition to being faster than its 3Gbps forebear, the WD2002FAEX is also slightly quieter under load, with rated accoustics of 29dBA average in idle mode, 34dBA average in Seek Mode 0, and 30dBA average in Seek Mode 3.
As we mentioned in our original review, Western Digital makes a nice selection of software tools available at www .westerndigital.com. One is the Acronis True Image WD Edition Software that lets you clone or migrate data from one WD drive to another and either keep or erase the information on the source drive. You can also set up image backup and recovery tools using an NAS drive or optical media. And if you ever need to test the drive, you can download the Data Lifeguard Diagnostics for Windows software from the WD site. ■ BY JOSH
COMPTON
CPU / May 2011
63
SPECS
Corsair CMZ16GX 3M4A1600C9
Capacity
16GB (4 x 4GB)
Speed
PC3-12800 (1,600MHz)
Timings
9-9-9-24
Voltage
1.5V
Warranty
Limited lifetime
Price
$269.99
Memory: Corsair Vengeance 16GB Dual Channel DDR3
Have you ever used Adobe CS5? And we mean really used it—opening one Photoshop file at a time doesn’t count, so sorry. We’re talking about true contentcreation multitasking. When you’re working at that level of productivity, it’s blatantly obvious why Adobe’s suite of apps gets its reputation for eating memory for breakfast. Rockin’ graphics will make short work of your video games, and an SSD can blast through boot-up. But when you hit a system memory logjam, things can get ugly in a hurry. It’s time to fight back. For our build, we wanted to break into double-digit RAM capacity. Because the Sandy Bridge platform relies on dual-channel memor y, we selected this 16GB (four 4GB sticks) kit from Corsair. If you’re new to the game, Corsair has several lines of RAM. The company’s Dominator series is at the top of the heap, with clocks and cooling (and a price) to match. Corsair also sells more basic memory, bereft of the typical enthusiast trappings but nonetheless reliable and perfectly acceptable in Mom and Dad’s PC. The Vengeance line, which we opted for, has a Dominator-like bite that didn’t take a Dominator-like bite out of our budget. Check it: The 16GB Vengeance kit (model CMZ16GX3M4A1600C9)
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rolls into our benchmark-stomping party with a rated speed of DDR31600 with 9-9-9-24 timings. And it can hit this speed with a voltage rating of 1.5V. There’s an XMP profile that sets you up with these specs, and if you’re content to run at that clip, know that Corsair backs this kit with its limited lifetime warranty. The aluminum heat spreaders that sandwich the Vengeance modules give each stick a height just a hair beyond 2 inches— not a concern for our Antec Kühler CPU block but nonetheless useful info if you opt for a more sizable air cooler. The results speak for themselves. Using the XMP profile (1,600MTps, CAS 9), Corsair’s kit powered through Sandra Lite 2011’s memory tests with 20.74GBps of bandwidth. It’s easy to
find plenty of reports scattered across the Web indicating the Vengeance’s penchant for overclocking, but because we only had one kit available for our beloved Destroyer, we opted for the utterly stable performance this memory gave us at its XMP profile. Whether a potential performance increase is worth running the Vengeance out of spec (and thus voiding its warranty) is a decision we’ll ultimately leave up to you. We won’t fault you if you prefer to merely observe alligators from a distance rather than wrestle them. Either way, when CS5 puts in its breakfast order, we serve it this 16GB Vengeance kit, the Denny’s Grand Slam of DDR3. ■ BY VINCE
COGLEY
SPECS
Enermax Galaxy EVO 1250W
Rated continuous
1,250W
Rated peak
1,500W
+12V rails
6
+12V continuous
30A
+5V continuous
25A
+3.3V continuous
25A
80 Plus certification
Bronze
SLI-certified
Yes
CrossFireX-certified
Yes
Modular cables
Yes
Cable side
Motherboard
Fan location
Bottom
Fans
1x 135mm
PCI-E 6+2-pin
8
SATA
16
4-pin peripheral
6
Floppy 4-pin
1
Length
7.5 inches
Finish
Black
Warranty
5 years
Price
$309
Our gang of cutting-edge components straight-up dropped the hammer on any benchmark we threw at it, but you didn’t think all of that performance was free, did you? The piper has come to collect, and you should see his bill. Let’s start with the hungriest component, the GeForce GTX 580 twins, which have the potential to pull 244 watts per card. Intel’s Core i7-2600K demands 95 watts at its busiest. Although the other components are considerably less demanding, what happens when we start getting the itch to expand? So, when the time comes for our Computasaurus Rex to munch on a hi-def video encode or slam through Metro 2033’s subterranean playground, we need to start thinking in terms of kilowatts. That’s where Enermax’s Galaxy EVO 1250W comes in. This brute throws down with six +12V rails, each capable of delivering 30A of current; Enermax is obviously of the school of thought that spreading out the load over several discrete rails is better than funneling it all down a single rail. Regardless of your
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Power Supply: Enermax Galaxy EVO 1250W
persuasion, know that the Galaxy EVO handled our system’s draw without so much as a hiccup. More modestly, this power supply supports the C6 CPU state when you step away from your system for long periods of time and don’t want it slurping power. The Galaxy EVO is 80 Plus Bronzecertified, but that doesn’t tell the full story. When Ecos Plug Load Solutions, which maintains the 80 Plus certification process, tested the Galaxy EVO, the PSU was nearly 89% efficient at 50% load. That’s more of a typical usage scenario, truth be told, so the end result here is a power supply that delivers nearly all of the power it pulls from the wall straight to your system. The rear, fan, and cable sides of the Galaxy EVO have a honeycombed mesh for additional airflow; speaking of airflow, a 135mm blower keeps the PSU’s guts cool. Enermax includes its HeatGuard technology, which is really just a fancy way of saying the fan keeps running for
up to a minute after you shut down in order to extend the Galaxy EVO’s life span. That’s a good thing. When it comes to cables, to say the Enermax unit had us covered is really an understatement. There are eight—count ’em eight—6+2-pin PCI-E connectors. That’ll cover even the most exotic graphics subsystems. Similarly, 16 SATA and six 4-pin Molex connectors give us the option to add an absurd number of drives. Only the 24-pin, 8-pin CPU, 4+4-pin CPU, and one 6+2-pin PCI-E cables are hardwired to the unit, meaning, obviously, we only used the cables we needed and left the rest stashed away in the box. The cables themselves are mesh-sleeved, as you’d expect from a PSU of this pedigree. Big, bold, bodacious. However you choose to describe it, the Galaxy EVO is irrefutably able to power the hungriest rig you can imagine. ■ BY VINCE
COGLEY
ODD: Lite-On iHBS212 12X Blu-ray Disc Writer
Lite-On wants everyone to know that its iHBS212 Internal 12X Blu-ray Disc Writer can write up to 25GB on a BD-R disc in roughly 12 minutes (and can store 50GB on a dual-layer BD-R, too). In our lab test, burning 21.6GB took about 23 minutes with an average burn speed of 3.5X, so we expect that upcoming BD media that supports faster write speeds will cut down on burn time significantly. One thing that you won’t have to wait for is support for 3D Blu-ray playback, as the iHBS212 supports it out of the box. Packaged with the iHBS212 is the CyberLink BD Solution Blu-ray Disc suite (more on that below), standard mounting screws, and a SATA cable. The 5.25-inch drive is not only compliant with single- and duallayer formats of all three BD media ( B D - RO M , B D - R , B D - R E ) , b u t it also supports 8cm and 12cm CDs and DVDs. DVD±R writing speed tops out at 16X; CD-R writes at 48X.
iHBS212 12x Internal Blu-Ray Disc Writer Lite-On $159.99 us.liteonit.com/us
Specs: SATA interface; 8MB buffer; 250ms/320ms random access time (SL/DL BD); ABS system noise reduction; Smart-X data extraction; LightScribe 1.2 support; OS: Windows 7/Vista/XP SP2
And, although you need to take into account burnable disc quality, Lite-On has already incorporated Smart-Burn, a feature that selects the most appropriate write speed for the disc to minimize burn failures. The CyberLink suite is the hub for making audio CDs, burning data discs, creating videos (to disc, HDV/ DV, or local storage), and initiating system backups. Through CyberLink, you can access Power2Go InstantBurn for writing folders and files to CDRW, DVD-RW, DVD+RW, and BDRE; PowerBackup for archiving & restoring; and PowerDirector video editor. PowerDVD lets you watch a Blu-ray or DVD flick. In addition, the
software supports Blu-ray 3D playback. Under CyberLink Utilities, you’ll find LabelPrint, which helps you design high-resolution art for your BDs. Whether you want to install the BD writer in your HTPC or pop it in your ongoing build, you should expect minimal vibration and operational noise. Lite-On added an ABS system that tempers the whirr and din of high-speed rotation. If you’re interested in a fast and quiet Blu-ray disc writer, the Lite-On iHBS212 is worth the investment, particularly because of the CyberLink software bundle. All around, it’s a legitimate “best of” optical drive. ■ BY JOANNA
CLAY
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Cooling: Antec Kühler H2O 620 The prevailing notion among builders of high-performance systems made up of carefully selected, expensive components is that stock cooling just won’t cut it. Still, that leaves a question of what aftermarket cooler to use. Provided there’s headroom, a skyscraping, dual-tower unit with snaking copper heatpipes might make sense, for example. For those planning to show off the rig’s internals, a cooler with LEDs or a flashy, chrome-like finish might be in order. Other builders will opt for liquid-cooling but still must decide whether to piece the setup together themselves or buy a selfcontained, closed-loop unit that’s ready to go out of the box. We took the latter route. The all-black Kühler H2O 620 is Antec’s first attempt at a self-contained cooling unit, and it’s a good one, made possible in part by Antec collaborating on the design with Asetek, which has a track record of helping bring other closed-loop units to market. Bundling Intel LGA 775/1155/1156/1366 and AMD AM2/AM3/AM2+/AM3+ mounting kits, the H2O 620 consists of four major pieces sturdily constructed of hard plastic, steel, and aluminum. Among these is a pump unit sporting a copper cold plate underneath. With the extremely low-profile pump (1.1inch tall; 50,000-hour rated life span) in tow, the 620 sends anticorrosive liquid through a pair of 13-inch tubes that are firm yet easily bendable, a trait that makes finding ideal orientation for the H2O 620 less of a headache. The tubes attach to what’s essentially a standard 5.6-inch tall radiator housing a dozen vertical rows of tightly packed fins. A seven-blade, 120mm fan, which you must connect to the radiator yourself and then to the chassis’ backside, blows air outward at 1,450 to 2,000rpm regulated speeds, with the settings being part of Antec’s “Quiet Computing” cooling approach.
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Kühler H2O 620 $69.95 Antec www.antec.com Specs: 120mm PWM fan (1,450 to 2,000rpm); Copper cold plate; Radiator dimensions: 5.6 x 4.7 x 1.1 inches (HxWxD); 13-inch corrugated tubes (prefilled)
Installing the H2O 620 requires roughly 12 individual steps, which really break down into three major movements: attaching the appropriate CPU bracket, mounting the pump, and attaching the radiator/fan to the chassis. Beyond the impressive cooling performance you’re getting for a very fair price, the quickness and ease of the H2O 620’s installation is arguably its most alluring attribute. That ease carries over into maintenance chores, of which there are essentially none, as the 620 comes prefilled and requires no afterinstallation tinkering.
One item of note is that, as is the case with some other closed-looped coolers, the H 2 O 620 ships with a layer of thermal grease pre-applied to the copper plate. (Antec nicely safeguards the grease layer with a tightly secured plastic cover.) This will please some but cause others more particular about such things to reach for some cleaner and reapply a fresh layer. Regardless, the H2O 620 is a no-fuss, top-performing, liquid-cooling option for conceivably any builder. ■ BY
BLAINE FLAMIG
Benchmarks Obliterated Benchmark Results
DIY Destroyer Stock
DIY Destroyer Overclocked
3DMark Overall
X3191
X3466
Graphics Score
2951
3209
Physics Score
8213
10644
Combined Score
3322
3357
Graphics Test 1*
16.42
17.77
Graphics Test 2*
13.98
15.53
Graphics Test 3*
12.73
14.75
Graphics Test 4*
9.93
10.23
Physics Test*
26.08
33.79
Combined Test*
15.45
15.61
Overall
22513
27145
Memories
13815
15925
TV And Movies
7829
8744
Gaming
24078
28665
Music
24455
29872
Communications
19689
26692
Productivity
30936
37899
HDD
56568
58015
3DMark 11
PCMark Vantage Pro 1.0.2
Benchmark Results
DIY Destroyer Stock
DIY Destroyer Overclocked
POV-Ray 3.7 Beta**
1204.4
1595.42
SiSoft Sandra 2011 Lite
CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1 (MBps)
Processor Arithmetic
Sequential Read
622.2
645.4
Dhrystone iSSE4.2 (GIPS)
136.7
183.4
Sequential Write
175.2
176.1
Whetstone iSSE3 (GFLOPS)
80.55
111
512KB Random Read
559.8
579.2
512KB Random Write
176.6
174.2
x16 iSSE4.1 (Mpixels/s)
201.86
270.76
4KB Random Read QD1
27.04
29.38
x8 iSSE2 (Mpixels/s)
152.8
204.65
4KB Random Write QD1
49.33
60.1
x4 iSSE2 (Mpixels/s)
83.17
110.24
4KB Random Read QD32
299.7
305.9
4KB Random Write QD32
178.8
146.9
Integer Buffered iSSE2 (GBps)
20.74
20.8
FPS
61.7
63.6
Floating-Point Buffered iSSE2 (GBps)
20.74
20.84
Score
1554
1602
Transcode WMV (KBps)
943
1130
Aliens vs. Predator (4XAA)
81.8
85.1
Transcode H264 (KBps)
984
1150 85.6
9.16
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat (4XAA)
84.4
6.86
Processor Multi-Media
Memory Bandwidth
Media Transcode
Cinebench 11.5 CPU*** * fps ** pixels per second *** points Games tested at 1,920 x 1,200.
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Unigine Heaven 2.5
* fps ** pixels per second *** points Games tested at 1,920 x 1,200.
If there was ever any question about what exactly this PC destroys, consider your curiosity quenched. Out of the box, the DIY Destroyer posted impressive numbers in 3DMark 11, PCMark Vantage, and Sandra 2011. The OCZ RevoDrive X2 PCI-E SSD propelled this system to some of the highest HDD benchmark scores we’ve ever seen, particularly in PCMark and CrystalDiskMark.
It wasn’t until we overclocked the Intel Core i7-2600K to 4.7GHz, however, that this system truly lived up to its namesake. In every benchmark where the CPU performance matters (read: most of them), there was a sharp rise in our scores. Sandra’s Processor Arithmetic and Multi-Media test scores rose by between 32% and 37%, the Cinebench score climbed by 34%, 3DMark 11’s Physics score increased by 30%, and
POV-Ray showed a 32% bump with our overclocked Sandy Bridge chip. The performance here is undeniable, but on the more subjective side, the system boots in the blink of an eye, runs quietly even under load, and very much looks the part inside and out. Best of all, this system could be yours. Stay tuned for details. ■ BY
ANDREW LEIBMAN
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Inside The World Of Betas Nomad.NET 2.8.7.1725 RC indows 7 has a lot of users of the classic You can set Nomad.NET like a classic W Explorer searching for something two-pane file manager, with or without that looks and feels familiar yet also has a folder tree and either vertically or some power tools to make the switchover worthwhile. We look at a number of such tools elsewhere in this issue (see “Exploring Explorer Alternatives”), but Nomad.NET is currently in a funny position. Nomad.NET is the sequel to Nomad, a well-regarded file manager for Win95 through WinXP written in Borland’s Delphi, which is an evolutionary dead end in the Windows 7 universe. It’s written by the same author, (though this time using, obviously, Microsoft .NET) so it feels like a well thought-out program despite being so “young.” However, being in beta, it still has some glitches and lacks a few features. It didn’t seem right to pit it against its mature (and usually commercial) competition, so we’re checking it out here.
horizontally. Each pane has its own live path name navigation bar, complete with clickable folder names, so navigating around is very quick. Like most modern file managers, Nomad.NET makes use of tabs, but unlike many utilities, tabs in Nomad.NET work on all the panes, letting you quickly set dual vertical panes in one tab, dual horizontal in another, and so forth. Nomad.NET includes a few useful tools, as well. Our favorite is the Search tool, which provides a nice GUI for building regular expression searches, either in the selected folder or in all folders. A few glitches mar the software, however. It sometimes crashes when trying to save its state (allowing it to resume where
Nomad.NET 2.8.7.1725 RC Publisher and URL: Eugene Sichkar, www.nomad-net.info ETA: Q4 2011 Why You Should Care: A new twist on a classic file management idea.
it left off last time), and mouseover effects occasionally leave residual “shadows” that are distracting. Still, we think Nomad .NET has great potential. ■ BY WARREN
ERNST
JunctionMaster 0.10 Alpha ne feature of Linux and Unix power the new one. As an example, suppose O users find useful is the symbolic link, or you have files stored in C:\Program Files\ “symlink” for short, which essentially lets you GreatEditor, and you would rather have reference a file in one location with a link that looks and acts just like that file, but in another location. A little known fact is that NTFS supports symbolic links, and that it also supports what amounts to symbolic links for folders, though they’re named “NTFS junction points” in Redmond-speak. Frustratingly, Microsoft never included any tools for making junction points with Windows. Instead, various utilities have picked up the slack over the years. From the creators of Process Lasso comes JunctionMaster, which makes creating and removing junction points a snap. JunctionMaster combines two functions in one straightforward GUI: It creates junction points and then automatically moves files from the original location into
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them in D:\GreatEditor. Just use Explorer to navigate to the Program Files folder, right-click the GreatEditor folder and choose Move And Then Link Folder to. . . and then type D:\GreatEditor in the dialog box that appears. Then click Move And Link; JunctionMaster creates the folder D:\ GreatEditor, moves the files into it, deletes the original folder, and makes a junction point at C:\Program Files\GreatEditor that points to D:\GreatEditor. Both “folders” (as far as all your software can tell) contain the same files, not copies, so there are no synchronization issues to worry about. Why would you want to do this? Imagine moving certain programs to your new SSD drive without reinstalling them. Store your personal files off the root
JunctionMaster 0.10 Alpha Publisher and URL: Bitsum, www.bitsum.com/junctionmaster.php ETA: Q4 2011 Why You Should Care: Creating NTFS junction points is as easy as making a new folder.
folder of your drive instead of buried deep in the /Users folder, and so forth. The alpha contains dire warnings and cautions, but if you make regular backups, we think this well-crafted software is worth the risk. ■ BY WARREN
ERNST
Upgrades That’ll Keep You Humming Along The big software update this month for Windows is Windows itself. Meanwhile, Google updates both Chrome Beta and Docs. Software Updates FinalWire AIDA 64 1.60 The diagnostic and benchmark suite increases support for Intel’s new Sandy Bridge CPUs and adds support for AMD’s recently released Ontario and Zacate APUs (accelerated processing units). Better support for AMD and JMicron RAID controllers has been added, as well. Version 1.60 optimizes AIDA’s 64-bit AVX-accelerated fractal and security benchmarks. www.aida64.com Google Chrome 10 Beta The latest beta release of the Google browser boasts considerably faster JavaScript execution. This build introduces support for GPU-accelerated video playback, which Google claims can reduce CPU load by as much as 80%. The beta now lets users sync their saved Chrome passwords across computers. www.google.com/landing/chrome/beta Google Docs Viewer Google has added a considerable number of file formats that this handy Web app can handle. With the introduction of Microsoft Excel (.XLS and .XLSX) and PowerPoint (.PPTX) support, Docs Viewer can display files from the three main Microsoft Office apps (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint). Apple Pages, Adobe Photoshop, and Autodesk AutoCad files are among the 12 new formats Docs Viewer now supports. docs.google.com/viewer MouseFighter 5.4.4 This utility replaces many mouse functions with keyboard alternatives for mouse-less computing. The new version corrects a problem with the Advanced
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Settings screen not saving changed settings. The keyboard mouse movement has been changed from a minimum of one pixel to two to make navigation faster. www.mousefighter.com
activity detection, especially in noisy environments. New features include a customizable overlay, recording capability, and speaker prioritization. mumble.sourceforge.net
MSI Afterburner 2.1.0 The latest release of the overclocking tool for MSI-branded video cards introduces an integrated video-capture tool for recording your in-game escapades. MSI also adds support for AMD Barts and Cayman GPUs. Core voltage control for many of AMD and Nvidia’s current reference cards is included, as well. event.msi.com/vga/afterburner/ download.htm
Partition Logic 0.7 The incremental version numbering doesn’t do this update justice. The hard drive partitioning tool now has support for 64-bit disks, UDF file system, and GPT partition table. partitionlogic.org.uk
MediaPortal 1.1.2 The open-source media center application receives a fix to a memory leak in the Texture Manager. Version 1.1.2 also stops instant channel switching after resuming paused live TV. www.team-mediaportal.com Microsoft Windows 7 SP1 Windows 7 gets its first Service Pack. As has been the case for the last few Windows OSes, you probably already have much, if not all, of these updates, because SP1 rolls up previous security patches and other bug and performance fixes. Microsoft says that this update also improves the dependability of connecting to HDMI audio devices, printing with the XPS Viewer, and restoring folders after a restart. windows.microsoft.com/ installwindows7sp1 Mumble 1.2.3 This voice chat client designed for ingame use receives a long-awaited update. The latest version boasts enhanced voice
Pegasus Mail 4.61 This alternative email client has a new HTML renderer based on Internet Explorer. Its graphics and interface have been upgraded, as well. A litany of bug fixes includes proper rendering of HTML messages with long lines and stopping crashes caused by malformed messages, among others. www.pmail.com Trend Micro RUBotted 2.0 Beta Trend Micro’s free tool monitors your PC for bot activity. This build bolsters RUBotted’s detection of suspicious activity and infection cleaning. Status and log reports are now available, too. free.antivirus.com/rubotted Driver Bay Intel X18-M/X25 & X25-V SATA SSDs (34nm) Firmware Revision 2CV102M3 Some of Intel’s popular SSDs receive this new firmware, which corrects enumeration and slow-boot issues on 6Gbps controllers. The upgrade also improves drive health reporting and eliminates possible drive hangs when reading S.M.A.R.T. self-test log. www.intel.com BY STEVE SMITH
Exploring Explorer Alternatives Third-Party File System Wranglers here’s no doubt that Windows 7 is generally more pleasing to the eye than its forebears, and part of that comes from simply reducing the clutter in common windows. Nowhere is this more evident than the humble Windows Explorer (which Microsoft continues to simply and confusingly call “The Explorer”), which in Win7 no longer has teeny-tiny fonts, fussy little plus (+) symbols next to folders, a row of inscrutable toolbar buttons, or even pull-down menus. However, other than moving a few common commands from deep within a menu to a button (“New Folder” and “Burn,” anyone?), Microsoft didn’t really add much new functionality to Windows Explorer, keeping the market for
T
So, to see how far this innovation has come, we invited four commercial Explorer alternatives, along with a free one, to a battle royale on a 64-bit Win7 machine, with spot-checking in good ol’ WinXP, as well. Ultimately, we’re pleasantly surprised at the different slants each of these products has taken within the market, leaving us thinking that there’s something for almost any kind of Windows power user.
GPSoftware Directory Opus 9.5.6 Okay, there’s no dancing around the issue of price: Directory Opus runs approximately $85 (depending on the U.S./Australian exchange rate), or between two and three times as much as its commercial competitors, and it has for over a decade. That GP Directory Opus 9.5.6 $86 GPSoftware www.gpsoft.com.au
high-powered Explorer alternatives alive and well. It did, however, add Libraries to the default My Documents hierarchy, and it encouraged the use of 64-bit Windows, meaning Explorer alternatives needed to innovate for the first time in a little while.
Software has been in business for that long should be an indicator that Directory Opus is extremely good, but what’s surprising is that in some ways it is the least innovative Explorer alternative here. In reality, Directory Opus follows the simple plan of “being familiar” by working pretty much like the Windows Explorer in WinXP, “being flexible” by
being so configurable, and “being featurefilled” by stuffing it with functionality you’d normally need lots of extra utilities to accomplish. It’s a winning combination. The classic Explorer alternative is dualpaned, allowing you to view two folders in one split window, and Directory Opus does this both vertically and horizontally. However, if you prefer the classic “Norton Commander” view, or a clone of Microsoft’s Explorer, or a single window, or a filmstrip view, or a thumbnail view, Directory Opus has tabs to instantly switch. Each pane can itself be tabbed (a common feature among all the products), so really, you can quickly jump to dozens of folders on your drive in a flash. Many Explorer alternatives provide a preview pane or window, letting you select an image or office file and see its contents, but Directory Opus’ is head and shoulders above its competition, recognizing more office, multimedia, and graphics files and displaying them correctly and quickly. Directory Opus includes numerous extra utilities, including an FTP client, a bulk file renamer, a batch graphics file converter, a folder synchronizer, a folder comparer, a find file tool, a file attribute changer, a folder printer, a file splitter and joiner, and a ZIP file utility; each is full-featured. Directory Opus has its own file copying and moving routines that are multithreaded and handle errors and questions much better than Windows’ own functionality. A native 64-bit version is available. In many ways, Directory Opus has become the benchmark against which other Explorer alternatives are measured. After using it, we can see why.
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Total Commander 7.56 $42 Ghisler Software www.ghisler.com
Ghisler Software Total Commander 7.56a You can tell a file manipulation program is old-school when its icon is a 3.5-inch floppy disk, as is Total Commander’s. Total Commander is meant to be the spiritual successor to the classic Norton Commander, which arguably originated the concept of the dual-pane file manager. As such, it embraces shortcuts and methods that Microsoft’s Explorer left by the wayside decades ago. Yes, you can make Total Commander look more . . . “conventional” . . . but if you aren’t willing to embrace the different, Total Commander will leave you cold despite its power and utility. By default, Total Commander looks like a Windows version of any one of a dozen classic “commander” tools, complete with dark, blocky fonts and a row of buttons at the bottom of the window proclaiming “F3 View,” “F4 Edit,” “F5 Copy,” “F6 Move,” and so on. Although you can click these buttons with your mouse to perform the prescribed action (or drag and drop—more on this in a moment) you’re supposed to select source files in one pane, display the destination in the other pane, and then press the Function Key to perform the action. Once you get all the different and unusual (or “classic,” if you rather) keyboard shortcuts down, you really can blaze through your file manipulation tasks. That said, we were able to quickly change fonts and told Total Commander to display folder trees, which then made it aware of Win7 Library folders; we consider this a necessity.
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If you choose to drag and drop, things are different here, too. In Total Commander, you select files and folders with a right-click and select groups with a right-click-anddrag. Want to use another utility that requires the pop-up menu? Look under Total Commander’s File menu. Total Commander is also stuffed to the gills with utilities, including a compression tool, a file splitter and encoder (UUEncode, anyone?), multi-rename tool, a folder sync and comparison tool, a file finder, FTP client, and a preview pane. All are powerful except the preview pane, which basically just displays text and hex. In the end, we suspect Total Commander will really only appeal to users yearning for the Norton Commander experience, or those looking for lots of features for less money than Directory Opus. If you’re one of these users, look no further.
Zabkat xplorer2 1.8.1.2 Sort of splitting the difference between the “make it work like the Explorer” and the “make it work like
tree. The folder tree doesn’t update itself based on what folder pane you’re working in, however, and that leads to confusion and frustration. On the other hand, the folder tree pane is smart enough to scroll horizontally to best display any selected long and nested folder names as if by magic; the competition should all steal this feature immediately. Also handy in xplorer 2 is its Scrap Container concept, which is best thought of as a temporary virtual folder where aliases of files you later want to perform actions on are stored. Suppose you want to zip up several files from many different folders. Just drag them into a Scrap Container, then select them all and drag then into WinZip, and they’re then zipped up together. The software can use several Scrap Containers at once, with each appearing in its own window or a small pane. The preview pane is more complicated, yet ineffectual, than it should be. It contains two tabs, Draft and Native— one works with some file formats and one works with others; it’s up to you to remember which is which and click it. Sometimes Native just opens the file (such as a DOCX file) in its default program (Word 2007, in this example).
xplorer2 1.8.1.2 $29.95 Zabkat www.zabkat.com
nothing else” camps, xplorer2 possesses certain features that are pure genius yet omits others that seem obvious. However, it does so at a compelling price that makes experimenting with it worthwhile. You could think of xplorer2 as a threepane browser, in that it displays two panes for two different folders, but both of these panes share a common folder
Many of the utilities you’d expect (FTP, folder sync and compare, multi-threaded copy routines) are here, as well as some you wouldn’t (SVN icon compatibility, NTFS junction creation). But xplorer2 is missing a native compression tool that’s kind of par for the course in this segment (though it does work with ZIP files as if they were folders).
Xyplorer 9.90 Xyplorer and xplorer2 rather feel like brothers where the family only had enough money to send one to prep school: Both appear remarkably similar, using a similar pane arrangement where a folder tree is shared between two directory panes. However, whereas xplorer2 focuses on main features, Xyplorer focuses a bit more on the smaller details, and we’ll be darned if we aren’t charmed by all the thought that must have gone into them. A little detail that makes a big difference is that the folder pane always accurately reflects what’s currently selected in one of the two folder panes, so you never lose track of where you are in your hard drive. Another is a new list view called Details With Thumbnails, which displays files in a table with the typical “Detailed” information (extension, date modified, file size) but also with a thumbnail next to the file name. Yet another is a tabbed Properties pane, which displays properties, a fully functional Preview, version details, and more information about the selected file, sort of like the Properties panel displays object attributes in Adobe CS5 products. One unique little feature is a command called “Copy (or Move) With Increment” which
FreeCommander 2009.02b Free Marek Jasinski www.freecommander.com
another handy time saver. You can also tag and color-code files or file types, and there’s even a basic scripting language. Sadly, Xyplorer lacks a file compression tool and doesn’t even display ZIP files natively, meaning you need a separate utility to do meaningful compression work. Nobody’s perfect.
FreeCommander 2009.02b FreeCommander suggests two things about itself by its very name, and only one is correct. Yes, it is free (though donations are appreciated), but no, it doesn’t emulate Norton Commander. In fact, it looks and feels a lot like Directory Opus’ default twopane view (which in turn looks and feels like two of WinXP’s Windows Explorer windows pushed together), but without some of the clutter Directory Opus’ overwhelming list of features creates. If what you’re really looking for is WinXP’s Windows Explorer in Win7, then FreeCommander is a fine choice, as it basically just adds a few handy interface tweaks to a familiar Xyplorer 9.90 $42.95 Donald Lessau www.xyplorer.com
adds an “01” or “02” to file names copied (or moved) this way, and is a big time saver if you normally increment file names yourself. Xyplorer also possesses a scrap container of sorts called a Catalog, but its version can store drag-and-drop launchers, display filter icons, and use categories and collapsible menus to keep it tidy. It’s very flexible and
interface, such as lots of toolbar buttons for common commands (such as creating folders, deleting files, filtering the display list, etc.), plus adds common file tools like a compare and sync tool, a multifile renamer, a shredder, and a compression tool. Like all of its commercial competition, it displays tabs to allow the same pane to work with different directory locations, and it has bookmarks for your favorite folders.
FreeCommander also offers a preview window called “Quick View,” but it annoyingly replaces one of the two folder panes. It does a good job previewing text files, graphics files, MP3s, and even PDFs, but it fails completely on Microsoft Office files. The biggest problem, however, is that it doesn’t seem to know anything about Win7’s Libraries, requiring you to drill deep into the file structure to get to your files. Yes, you can (and really have to) add these folders to FreeCommander’s Favorites list, but it gets annoying fast. It also doesn’t have its own multithreaded copy and move routines, relying on Windows’ own. Still, these negatives are hardly worth complaining about given FreeCommander’s price and the lack of any of these features with Microsoft’s own tools. It’s really only in comparison to its commercial competition that FreeCommander seems just slightly lacking.
Your Call Again, we arrive at the unsatisfying situation where the best product for you is the one that works the way you do. Norton Commander clone users won’t find a better ’Commander than Total Commander. Folks who want the utmost in flexibility and extra features, plus those who like their Explorer alternative working like the Explorer itself will prefer Directory Opus, or for those without money, FreeCommander. If the idea of a three-pane Explorer appeals to you, then Xyplorer gets the nod. ■ BY WARREN
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Million Monitor March Multimonitor Software Stretches The Limits Of Your Desktop ith University of Utah research showing that multimonitor setups can dramatically improve productivity, and with the price of widescreen monitors plummeting faster than ever, it’s no wonder that seeing two or three monitors on someone’s desk is becoming more commonplace. Windows has always supported multiple monitors, but before Windows XP, that duty was normally handled by video card manufacturers and drivers, with varying results. WinXP included very basic multimonitor support, letting you set a primary and secondary monitor (at different resolutions, if desired), but not much else. Thus, the stage was set for early multimonitor utilities. Win7 is a little more aware of multiple displays. It lets you set the display orientation of each independently and even has hotkeys to connect to a projector quickly. But it doesn’t add much more than that. Win7 still displays a separate instance of your background wallpaper on each of your displays. It still only displays a Start menu/Taskbar/Taskbar Tray on your primary display, leaving your other screens naked along the bottom. It still stretches a single screen saver across all your displays, potentially distorting images. And, compared to Linux, there are few controls for managing lots of open program windows across all your displays. Multimonitor utilities address these and other problems, but until quite recently, most didn’t integrate well with Win7’s Aero visual effects and could be glitchy with the 64-bit version of Win7. With this in mind, we rounded up five multimonitor utilities, including the granddaddy of them all (UltraMon), two
UltraMon 3.1.0 $39.95 Realtime Soft www.realtimesoft.com
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young upstarts (DisplayFusion and Actual Multiple Monitors), and two that market themselves as doing slightly less than the competition but which turn out to be reasonably comparable (MultiMonitor Taskbar and ZBar). We tested each of these programs with the 64-bit version of Win7 Ultimate running two widescreen (1,900 x 1,200) LCD monitors.
Realtime Soft UltraMon 3.1.0 UltraMon created this market segment, setting the bar that its competitors are aiming for, so it seems only fair to look at it first as a benchmark. It is a role UltraMon fulfills well. UltraMon’s secondary taskbar is automatically set to visually clone whatever the primary Taskbar is set for, and we were hard-pressed to see the difference. The background color accurately followed our cursor as it hovered over minimized icons, even duplicating the background color tint. Sadly, the mimicry is only skindeep: You can’t pin icons to this taskbar or shuffle icons’ order, and there’s no Aero
Peek functionality (that is, a live thumbnail of the running app that appears when hovering the cursor over a Taskbar icon), which we didn’t think we’d miss until it was gone. There’s also no notification area/taskbar tray, clock/ calendar, Start menu, or Show Desktop button. Like most of the other multimonitor utilities, UltraMon adds two buttons to the Title Bar of every application window. One shifts the current window to the next monitor—no dragging necessary—while the other maximizes the current window across all your monitors. Although UltraMon can’t add any more Title Bar buttons, it does have 25 actions you can assign hotkeys to, such as cascade or tile all windows, center the mouse on the current monitor, show the desktop, or launch the screensaver. This is a repeating trend with UltraMon: It covers the basics, uh, basically but nonetheless reliably. We never experienced a glitch or crash with UltraMon. UltraMon also adds some extra features that are slightly unexpected. For example, you can easily specify different wallpaper from your hard drive for each display, or one that stretches across all of them, but that’s it. You can do slightly more with screen savers (such as blank the nonprimary displays and/or set an unlock password), but UltraMon tosses in Profiles (collections of settings saved under a set name), basic
Actual Multiple Monitors 3.1 $39.95 Actual Tools www.actualtools.com
scripting and shortcuts (so a program always starts on a certain display at a certain size), and selective mirroring (displaying only one application on a secondary monitor for a presentation, for example). Overall, UltraMon is a safe and solid way to go, but there are areas where it has met its match, and at $39.95, that includes price.
Actual Tools Actual Multiple Monitors 3.1 Some multimonitor utilities make it obvious that the secondary taskbars they’re creating are really “Taskbar emulators,” programmed independently from scratch to look, feel, and act as much like Microsoft’s own Taskbar as possible. When it comes to Win7’s new Taskbar, at least, Actual’s programmers have done a far better job of cloning Microsoft’s work than anyone else. So if what you really want is the most fullfeatured taskbar on your extra displays, look no further than Actual Multiple Monitors. For starters, AMM’s taskbars look almost exactly like the native Taskbar. The only difference we can see is a tiny row of textured dots between its Start menu and the row of application icons. Yes, you read that right, its Start menu. AMM has one, and it looks and feels just like Windows’ own, including the Search field and application context menus. It even responds to pressing the Windows key, if that’s the display that has the active application. Taskbar buttons are repositionable, pin-able, have all the new subdocument and command context menus, and have Aero Peek. Minimized apps even minimize to AMM’s own taskbar buttons instead of those on the main Taskbar, like all of its competition. Toss in a calendar/clock, Display Desktop button, and even a second notification area/tray, and the simulation is top-notch.
Desktop wallpaper and screen saver options are nearly identical to UltraMon’s, though AMM also offers a wallpaper slideshow option. Just point it to photos on your hard drive, and it cycles through them. It also offers UltraMon’s profiles, hotkey, and mirroring abilities with minor differences not worth mentioning. AMM also (optionally) adds Title Bar buttons for moving windows to different displays and maximizing across all displays, but they can be troublesome. (Although, to be fair, we reviewed a stable beta version in order to experience the latest features.) Most of the Adobe CS5 applications with the new Windows GUI freeze when closing when these buttons are enabled, and all of Paint. NET’s palette “mini-windows” get them, too, but they’re offset until they’re floating in space, so to speak, and sometimes don’t work anyway. You can selectively disable these buttons via AMM’s overly complex GUI. We encountered no such glitches with AMM’s awesome Taskbar, and believe it to be the best choice for those wanting a supercharged set of extra Taskbars.
Binary Fortress Software DisplayFusion Pro 3.2.0.112 (Beta 12) If Actual Multiple Monitors is all about the Taskbar experience, then DisplayFusion
Pro is all about window management and extra features. It also happens to be the least expensive of the three “full-featured” utilities covered here. (Editor’s Note: Although DisplayFusion Pro 3.3 is now available, we reviewed this version at the publisher’s request.) Of course, there are taskbars for the extra displays, and feature-wise, it slots comfortably between UM and AMM. It looks and feels like Win7’s Taskbar and includes a clock/ calendar on the right side that looks just like the original. There’s no Start menu or notification area, but the best features of the native Win 7 Taskbar are there. You can reorder icons via drag and drop, and there’s an Aero Peek clone that works close enough. DisplayFusion Pro also includes a “miniregistry” of a few zillion settings for tweaking it visually and operationally. DisplayFusion Pro can add nearly 20 Title Bar buttons across your application windows if you like. The default Swap Display and Maximize Across All buttons are there, but there are interesting buttons, such as Toggle Window Transparency or Resize Window To 75% And Center, that we never knew we’d use every day until we tried them. You can make hotkeys for all these functions, too. Other neat window tricks include having Windows automatically snap to display edges or other windows (basically like Aero Snap, but configurable on a per-window basis), or having windows automatically position and resize themselves. Whereas UltraMon has lots of little extra features, DisplayFusion Pro goes for fewer extras that do more. For example, DisplayFusion Pro can change the background of the Windows logon screen, sparing you from searching for a second utility to do this. The wallpaper functionality goes beyond just letting you pick images on your hard drive and then alternating them on a schedule: It can grab images from Flickr or Vladstudio.com, either searching by DisplayFusion Pro 3.2.0.112 (Beta 12) $25 Binary Fortress Software www.binaryfortress.com
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account, keyword, or category. There are also cropping and offsetting options the other utilities lack. For screen savers, DisplayFusion Pro lacks the ability to automatically turn off certain displays with a checkbox, but you can manually set Windows’ screen savers to do this and then use DisplayFusion Pro to direct those to the displays you want off. DisplayFusion Pro also undercuts its competition’s prices, sometimes significantly, at just $25.
Mediachance MultiMonitor TaskBar Pro 3.0 Compared to the everything-and-thekitchen-sink philosophy of some of these utilities, MultiMonitor TaskBar Pro feels like a one-trick pony. But sometimes you only want your pony to do one trick. That said, at $28, it’s more expensive than the more capable DisplayFusion Pro. As its name suggests, MultiMonitor TaskBar Pro only provides a taskbar across multiple monitors; if you need screen savers or wallpapers across all your displays, keep looking. Also, if you need your TaskBar to look like a semi-transparent, Win7-esque sheet of glass, you’re out of luck: Taskbar themes include Windows XP, Windows Media Center, Classic Windows Style (think Win98/2000), or Windows Vista, which looks the least out of place in Win7. There’s no Aero Peek functionality, either. So why are we even looking at this product? There are subtle reasons for picking this over the others. For example, its installer is just 454KB, and it consumes just 7MB of RAM; even on slow PCs it works quickly. It includes a built-in Clipboard Expander, which monitors copy actions and lets you paste multiple items at once, and it includes Taskbar buttons for moving app windows and maximizing them across displays. At this point, we’ll mention that most of these products have MultiMonitor TaskBar Pro Version 3.0 $28 Mediachance www.mediachance.com
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a free version, but these free versions basically just let you manage multidisplay wallpapers. They don’t have any multidisplay taskbars. The free version of MultiMonitor TaskBar, however, still has its multimonitor taskbar(s) and only does away with the window-moving buttons and some of the extra taskbar themes. Obviously, the sweet spot of price and features is easier to hit when the cost is nothing, but MultiMon TaskBar Free hits it while UltraMon, AMM, and DisplayFusion Pro don’t. And, after all, maybe you still want your Taskbar to look like it used to.
Zhorn Software ZBar 0.81 Up until now, most of these products have a paid version and a free version, but ZBar just has a free version, a teeny tiny 126KB download that consumes less than 3MB of RAM when running. And yet, with tweaking, it’s capable of creating a Win7 Aero-like taskbar that looks very close to Microsoft’s own. ZBar needs you to pick your theme from the following list: XP Classic, XP Cartoon, XP Chrome, Vista, Zune, Royale, MacOS 10.4 (!), and Windows 7 Large and Windows 7 Small. The Windows 7 Large theme roughly matches the default Win7 Taskbar, but you still need to pick a color from a color picker, click the Glass checkbox, and select a transparency level (called “Visibility” within ZBar) of about 70% to get it oh so close.
ZBar 0.81 Free Zhorn Software www.zhornsoftware.co.uk
Program icons are dragable but lack the slick glowing background color effect with a mouse hover. There’s also an option for a fairly primitive-looking copy of Aero Peek (small windows aren’t magnified enough for optimal visibility, and it doesn’t work when apps are minimized), but it gets the job done. An optional Clock and Calendar can appear on the right edge, and clicking it displays a year-at-a-glance calendar that’s actually more handy than Windows’ own. The Big Guys also offer screen saver managers, wallpaper tools, and functions to manage application windows across several displays; ZBar adds everything except a screen saver tool, but each is a low-rent alternative. Instead of Title Bar buttons to move windows around, ZBar makes do with semi-programmable hotkeys. For picking wallpapers, there are only two zooming/ cropping methods, so you need to carefully size your wallpapers beforehand if you want them to look right. Still, at this price, we’re very willing to overlook minor shortcomings.
Recommendations Ultimately, we found that even though all of the programs here work similarly, each offers different strengths and weaknesses, making crowning a winner challenging. As with many things, the “best” utility depends on your priorities. If you want the best facsimile of the Windows Taskbar on your other displays, you want Actual Multiple Monitors. If you want the most useful window management features along with your spare taskbars, then you want DisplayFusion Pro. And if you just need a Taskbar that works well and almost looks like Win7’s own, and you can’t pay a cent, then ZBar is your best choice. ■ BY WARREN
ERNST
DataNumen Advanced Outlook Repair 3.2 lthough they say you should never store all your eggs in one basket, Microsoft Outlook is especially guilty for ignoring this old axiom. By default, Outlook stores all your email, contacts, notes, appointments, and tasks in just one file, normally named “Outlook.pst,” and keeps it in a hidden folder deep in the bowels of your file system. Should something go wrong with this critical file, Outlook basically becomes useless, unable to access any of your information and offering no real assistance in getting it back. Perhaps because of this, there are many PST repair utilities out there. But we aren’t aware of anything better than Advanced Outlook Repair, which explains its eye-popping price of $250. So just how valuable is your old email and contact list? First, a disclaimer: There are too many ways to count how a PST file can become corrupt, and there’s no way for us to test
Advanced Outlook Repair 3.2 $249.95 | DataNumen www.repair-outlook.com
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every recovery scenario. But with that said, Advanced Outlook Repair takes what we think is the right approach. There’s a downloadable trial version that looks at your damaged PST file and then figures out what it can recover before you buy it. To simulate corrupt PST files, we took old, multi-gigabyte PST files and, with an editor, started cleaving out large sections until Outlook wouldn’t open. Then we let Advanced Outlook Repair get to work. In
every case, Outlook opened again, and the vast majority of our content was restored. We know how much we trimmed out, and the results seemed reasonable. The program itself is slick. It works outside of Outlook and has the right configuration tools, batch options, and even drag-and-drop functionality to make recovery a point-and-click affair. We especially like how it can neatly split (overly) large PSTs into multiple PSTs. It works reasonably quickly, too. So let us put it this way: If we were unable to open a mission-critical PST file, Advanced Outlook Repair is the first utility we’d try, and it would probably be the last. ■ BY WARREN
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Caelo Software NEO Pro 5.02 icrosoft Outlook is becoming the de facto standard in corporate email, and because it comes with Microsoft Office, it’s popular among home users who haven’t gone the Webmail route. Despite the new interface the latest versions are graced with, Outlook’s email management still follows the tried-andtrue (read: ancient) “folder” scheme: New mail shows up in the Inbox, and you’re expected to move messages into folders for filing and organization. Gmail and other programs have shown that tagging, filtering, and instant searching are more efficient, and NEO Pro adds these efficiencies to your Outlook mail store extremely well. You’ll note we didn’t say “adds these efficiencies to Outlook.” Although NEO Pro is an Outlook “add-on,” you typically work with it via its own application window, which appears automatically whenever Outlook starts and looks sort of like Outlook itself. It
NEO Pro 5.02 $49.95 | Caelo Software www.caelo.com
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automatically syncs Outlook’s mail store with its own catalog, first when installed and then whenever Outlook takes mail in or sends it out, so we found ourselves using NEO Pro instead of Outlook for most mailing duties. NEO Pro automatically analyzes, filters, sorts, and categorizes your messages under different tabs, organized by things such as Date Range, Correspondent, Attachment, or tags or flags you’ve assigned yourself. As such, a single message can appear under different
tabs simultaneously, but that’s kind of the point; in Outlook, if you get a message from Dan about a client being late, would you put that in the Dan folder or the client folder? Would it just sit in your Inbox? With NEO Pro, it’s everywhere, and easily searchable. This flexibility leads to a somewhat busy, cluttered interface that takes time to get familiar with (about 90 minutes of video tutorials help, if you can sit through them), but you can always just keep using Outlook when you don’t need NEO Pro’s organizational tools. We found ourselves using it more each day, and if you have lots of mail in Outlook, we suspect you will, too. ■ BY WARREN
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Avid Studio vid Studio is a sophisticated suite of tools for capturing, editing, and outputting video at a level that, with a bit of practice, would be hard to distinguish from that created by a professional videographer. In fact, it’s possible that even some pros will end up using Avid Studio simply because of its power, versatility, and affordability. Like most such apps, Avid Studio starts out displaying a timeline onto which you can drop assets such as images, sounds, and video footage. But with the new release there is literally no limit to how many layers of imagery, video, or audio you can lay down. In fact, you can create complete projects—each with its own layers of assets—and then include those within what become, in effect, parent projects. The nesting of complex media layers is limited only by the horsepower of your Windows PC; you could, for example,
Avid Studio $169.99 | Avid www.avid.com
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create an effects or content loop and save it in a library of mini-projects to be used (and reused) in other, larger projects. Avid Studio also provides in-app editing tools that let you change, clip, crop, or otherwise enhance assets and then reuse those modified assets in multiple Avid Studio projects, all while preserving the originals.
The suite comes with valuable tools to help you create more and better video: effects plug-ins, templates, royalty-free content, video transitions, and more. It even includes a training DVD and a green-screen sheet for chroma-key effects. In the end, of course, all of that does you little good unless you end up with video in the format you need. Avid Studio lets you export to multiple file and disc formats. At less than one-fifth the price of Apple’s Final Cut Studio, Avid Studio gives you professional-quality tools, but with the handholding that most aspiring pros and serious amateurs need. ■ BY
ROD SCHER
Diskeeper 2011 Professional our hard drive, with its electromechanical arms, head, and platter, has always been your system’s Achilles’ heel. No matter how carefully you designed and assembled your PC, and no matter how impressive the quality of your components, you always knew that your drive could give up the ghost and bring everything to a grinding halt. The hard drive is still a weak spot, but the new release of Diskeeper provides defragmentation tools that can help optimize system performance and safeguard the health of your valuable—and sometimes finicky—hard drive. Diskeeper 2011 Professional’s defrag tools are a far cry from earlier, less sophisticated apps that have in the past been included with operating systems. The program’s defragmentation-related options include IntelliWrite, a proactive tool that prevents most drive fragmentation before it occurs,
Diskeeper 2011 Professional $59.95 | Diskeeper www.diskeeper.com
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and InstantDefrag, which works in real time to eliminate any fragmentation that cannot be prevented by IntelliWrite. Many of today’s systems are rarely truly idle, so utilities that wait for an idle period to begin defragging may never get the chance to work. The Diskeeper folks have worked around that issue by designing a system that can work in the
background without starving other processes of resources; the result is that Diskeeper 2011 can quickly and efficiently defrag your drives, with almost no discernible effect on your system’s speed or behavior. Windows XP actually included a licensed version of Diskeeper as its defragmenter, but recent versions of Windows have included Microsoft’s defragmentation tools instead. Diskeeper is admirably suited to taking on the task of defragmenting your drives, having long offered tools that deliver more features than the defragmenters included as part of Windows. ■ BY
ROD SCHER
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Joli OS Fulfilling Its Promises
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lthough there’s not a lot in version 1.2 of Joli OS that, on paper, is particularly earth-shattering, the whole platform feels more mature, faster, and more stable. It feels like it’s ready to be taken seriously as a Web-centric OS.
ChomeOS Joli OS The Jolicloud platform, which includes Joli OS and the optional Jolibook netbook, offers a lightweight operating system that you can install and use locally but is focused on the Web. You can access your own Jolicloud account online from just about anywhere. You can install Joli OS locally as the sole operating system or in a dualboot config with Windows, but it’s also possible to run it in a virtual machine or as a live version from a USB flash drive. The local installation connects with your online Jolicloud account. The online desktop environment is clean and simple and consists of little more than five navigational icons in the upper-left corner of the screen, a search bar, and pages of apps arranged as tiles. Although there are hundreds of “apps” you can install with a click in the Jolicloud directory, most aren’t so much applications as they are links to Web sites and online tools and services. (It’s important to note that you can install a few applications locally and use them offline.) Still, it’s an interesting way to visually collect and organize the sites and services you use. If all of this sounds like a description of ChromeOS with the name changed, that’s because the two are essentially the same idea. However, that’s not a bad thing. First of all, the concept of having a lightweight operating system that gives both a whole computing environment that you can access virtually anywhere
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plus a local installation so you can use a dedicated machine (or bootable partition at least) for it is a fascinating one on its own. Second, although ChromeOS will no doubt be very nice, nobody has it yet, save for the 60,000 or so lucky folks who got a Cr-48 laptop in the mail from Google. Yes, the Chrome Web Store for
A Closer Look Installing Joli OS is straightforward: to set up a dual-boot configuration, you just download the installer, run through a few setup screens, and the program will take care of partitioning for you. If you want to install Joli OS as the lone operating system on a machine, you can download the Joli OS ISO and the Jolicloud USB
Joli OS is a clean, easy-to-use cloud-centered operating system.
apps is pretty much how a lot of people will use ChromeOS, but it’s just not the real thing yet. Joli OS, however, beat ChromeOS to market and is available right now for download. You can grab it at www.jolicloud.com/download. Further, ChromeOS currently won’t let you dual-boot with another operating system. That’s something that may or may not be changed when ChromeOS is finally available to the general public (supposedly sometime this year), but with Joli OS, you can do it now.
Creator. Once you make a USB key and boot to the BIOS, you can install Joli OS from the USB key. Accessing your Jolicloud from the computer on which Joli OS is installed and accessing it from another machine are similar experiences. However, on the Joli OS machine you get the distinct advantage of being able to work offline with some applications and take advantage of local storage. Indeed, a Joli OS machine has a file browser and the standard Desktop,
Documents, and Music folders, and so on. These areas are not available when you access your Jolicloud from another computer, but they’re quite nice to have on your main Joli OS machine. There are several apps that take advantage of this and are therefore far more than just Web links—they let you work offline and save files to your local storage and include the likes of Writer, Audacity, PowerPoint Viewer, Hulu Desktop, and GIMP. You can install any apps by clicking the green plus sign in the upper-left corner of the main screen, choosing from hundreds of apps that are divided into various categories such as Communication, Enterprise, Games, Graphics, Music, Productivity, and more. You can also add a new app (well, a link to a Web site that will appear as an app on your Joli OS screen) by clicking the Add New App button on the bottom left of the screen and entering a URL and description, and uploading an image. (You can access native apps here, too—just click Native Apps on the left side of the screen.) Although you can access several online storage services, such as SugarSync, SkyDrive, and Box.net, Joli OS has built-in Dropbox integration, so you can access your Dropbox files right in your file browser. Even better, it still acts like local
storage when you access your Jolicloud online from another computer in that it appears in the storage area. There’s a MyJolicloud area where you can view and edit your account and the settings for Jolicloud on that particular computer (such as enabling or disabling Auto-Login and the Guest Mode). Of course, when accessing your Jolicloud online from a different machine, you can’t access any settings for that computer. Joli OS has some social features built in, and their usefulness is debatable. The Jolicloud je ne sais quoi is all about the social; it’s easy to connect Jolicloud to your Facebook account, and you’re supposed to invite your friends to the platform, collect “followers,” and follow others in turn. It appears to be a way to stay in touch and also disseminate information on the newest, coolest, and most intriguing apps. Joli users also have a Public Page, which is what anyone can see when they visit my.jolicloud.com/ [yourname]. You can edit the settings for your public page, which displays items such as how many followers you have, how many computers you’re connected to, your name, and which apps are your favorites. There’s also a stream that shows you what your friends are up to on
Jolicloud, and they in turn can keep tabs on your activity. If you’re the type to make new friends online, cajole your existing friends into jumping onto a computing platform with you, or don’t mind all your Facebook friends knowing all about your online computing, then you’ll likely find a use for those social features. If not, you can use Joli OS to your heart’s content while ignoring them.
The Target Joli OS is designed not only to leverage the usefulness of computing online and to run on netbooks, but also to offer a way to resurrect old computers. Although you can drop a few hundred bucks on a Jolibook (a notebook designed specifically for Joli OS), the OS requires very few resources, so it can be installed on years-old machines and run just fine. For many, that’s little more than a novelty, but for plenty of others, it’s a gift. How many people who can’t afford much of a computer can now take someone’s 3- or 5-year-old castoff laptop and turn it into a machine that opens the door of the Internet to them? For those who can afford a decent computer, Joli OS is still a useful addition to their computing life. It’s fun, smart, and easy to use. You’ll find yourself poking around for interesting apps, installing them, and then rediscovering them later on when you’re looking for an app that does something specific. Many of us do that already when browsing the Internet, but we’re more likely to bookmark a site in a browser and forget all about it. With Joli OS, you see those items in your pages, so they’re harder to ignore. The real story with Joli OS is that what was once a neat idea with iffy implementation appears to have matured into something both compelling and stable. And it didn’t take long, which makes one excited to see what the Jolicloud crew comes up with next. ■ BY SETH
COLANER
When you install Joli OS on a computer, you gain the use of local file storage and offline productivity.
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Stop Following Me, Part 2 nline privacy was once a topic reserved for policy wonks and ad technology companies. In the past six months, the issue has vaulted into everyone’s consciousness as the FTC and ad industry groups all focus on the issue. Last month, we looked at some of the third-party ad opt-out tools and sniffing utilities that help a user monitor who is tracking them and manage some of their own data. This time we get closer to the browser. All of the major browsers now seem to be touting privacy protection as a feature of their next generations of browsers. This month, we look at the options.
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Polishing Privacy On Chrome Google entered the privacy wars in January with a new extension for Chrome it calls “Keep My Opt-Outs.” As we outlined last time, a consortium of online marketing associations is offering a centralized optout facility at AboutAds.info. But like most opt-out tools, this one works by using browser cookies to instruct ad networks not to target ads to users. But cleaning out one’s browser cookies can clear this opt-out cookie and leave the browser open again to targeting. Keep My Opt-Outs claims to maintain in the browser a “persistent opt-out” of
Google Chrome offers an extension that will retain your cookie opt-outs from the major ad networks.
all the ad networks and content providers that are included in this initiative. You can double-check the status of the opt-outs by going to www.aboutads.info/choices, where the site will scan your cookies and report on your tracking cookie status. Chrome’s Omnibox feature turns the address bar in the browser into an all-in-one tool that both navigates to Web sites and conducts Google searches. As such, it also uses Google’s predictive technology to
Windows Tip Of The Month All major browsers now have some form of a privacy mode, which promises a browsing experience that does not store cookies or leave traces of one’s surfing history after the session. It’s important to note that it is not always clear what a “privacy mode” really means in browser parlance. A thorough study of the major browsers presented last summer by researchers from Stanford and Carnegie Mellon Univeristy discovered that “private browsing is used differently from how it is marketed.” In fact, browser plug-ins complicate privacy protection. The study found “an extension can completely undermine its privacy guarantees” and passwords and SSL client certificates made in public mode can be available to sites in private mode. In other words, these researchers argued, there is leakage of browsing history even into these supposedly private browsing modes. User beware. The full research is available at crypto.stanford.edu/~dabo/pubs /papers/privatebrowsing.pdf.
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offer suggestions as you search and plumbs your browsing history for suggestions. This is part of the data sent back to Google to improve its accuracy. But predictive searching also can reveal to other users on your PC what some of your frequent online haunts are. Google insists that it records only a “random 2% of this information” and “anonymizes” that data within 24 hours of receiving it. But you can opt out of this process altogether by going to the Chrome Options menu and entering Under The Hood. Here, you will find a checkbox you can uncheck for using a predictive service to help complete searches and URLs in the Omnibox. You will also find in this menu the option to disable sending Google usage stats and crash reports. The other two key areas to check on Chrome are accessible through the Content Settings and Clear Browsing Data buttons. The first lets you set cookie policy, including blocking cookies altogether or clearing cookies when you close the browser session. Another important but often overlooked option involves location awareness, where the browser can use the IP address from
CyberPower has made a name for itself by supplying gamers with high-quality PCs built from the finest components in the industry for years, and that tradition continues with the latest addition to the company’s tech arsenal: NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 590. CyberPower will make this dual-GPU monster available to customers through a variety of system configurations across its product families, starting first and foremost with the flagship of its Fang EVO Series, the Black Mamba. Like all of CyberPower’s custom creations, the Black Mamba comes with a myriad of options at nearly every component slot, and you get the enviable task of picking the parts CyberPower will build into your system. But the Mamba’s default loadout consists of an Intel Core i7-990X (overclocked to 30% or more, at your discretion), an ASUS P6X58D Premium X58 motherboard, 12GB of 1,600MHz DDR3, a Cooler Master 1,000W Silent Pro Gold 80 Plus power supply, two 64GB SSDs configured in RAID 0, and a 2TB data drive, all packed lovingly into Corsair’s gorgeous Obsidian Series 800D Full Tower. And now, with the release of NVIDIA’s newest high-end graphics card, the Black Mamba also comes standard with two liquidcooled GeForce GTX 590s, for a quad-SLI configuration that meets CyberPower’s stringent All Venom OC Certification. Among other things, this means that this monster rig runs at a whisper-silent 18dBA, and you can opt for even more sound-deadening materials in your build if you like. If you’re looking for the ultimate gaming rig, look no further. CyberPower’s Fang EVO Series Black Mamba has the technology, the engineering, and the attention to detail to make it your first choice, and second place isn’t even close. ■
Fang EVO Series Black Mamba Base Price $4,909 Before Applicable Rebates CyberPower www.cyberpowerpc.com Advertisement
would need to be adopted industry-wide to prove effective. But IE9 is also providing a new Tracking Protection List feature that lets users easily import lists from privacy organizations such as PrivacyChoice and TRUSTe to block third-party ad servers from tracking users and serving ads. In IE9, navigate to ie.microsoft. com/testdrive/browser/tracking protectionlists to find the current list of providers. Clicking the Add TPL link beside any of them will add this blacklist to the browser. To get details about what is being allowed in or blocked, open the Tools menu (ALT-X), point to Safety, and click Tracking ProInternet Explorer 9 includes a feature that gives a privacy tection. You will see a list of report on every server that is sending data to a Web page and imported TPLs. Click any one and whether it is also trying to plant cookies on your browser. use the More Information link in the bottom window to call up the filtering list. IE9 checks once a week for given location permissions in the past, updates to the TPLs you have active. so you might want to block it altogether. Another cool way to use IE9 to snoop Finally, if you are unaware of the plug-ins on the snoopers is to access the Web Privacy that may be installed on your system click Policy report, which is in the same Safety the Disable Individual Plug-ins link to see menu. This calls up a list of all the sources what is running on your system. You can of the content being fed onto that page, then disable them individually. including ad networks and trackers, and On the Clear Browsing Data screen, whether you are blocking or accepting them. notice that a drop-down menu can let you target specific time periods, so you Firefox 4 Opts Into Campaigning can scrub the traces of your browsing over the last hour, day, week, month, or since For DNT installation. Notice that Chrome offers Providing a universal Do Not Track more granular control over what kinds of option for Web browsers is clearly gaining data to clear or retain. some momentum among browser makers. Note that we used Chrome 10.0.648 beta. The Federal Trade Commission recently suggested to legislators that a final solution A New Explorer to the problem of online behavioral tracking Microsoft is coming out swinging in may have to come at the browser level. the privacy feature wars with its upcoming In March, Mozilla released Firefox 4, Internet Explorer 9 release. We used the which includes a new option that, like Release Candidate version that was available IE9, sends an HTTP header that instructs in early March. The company made waves the site you do not want to be tracked. In by calling for industry adoption of a “Do Firefox 4, open the Options window and Not Track” browser-level standard. In this navigate to the Advanced section. Under the proposal, a user sets a “Do Not Track” Browsing section of the General tab, a new preference in the browser, and both Web checkbox has been added: Tell Web Sites I sites and third-party advertisers would Do Not Want To Be Tracked. recognize that setting in the browser and For the time being, sending a DNT (Do have to respect the request not to track that Not Track) request to a site seems fruitless user. This is merely a proposed standard that because there is no standard for this header,
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let alone any agreement among leading advertisers and sites to comply with the request. In a blog post explaining the new feature, however, self-proclaimed Mozilla “Security and Privacy Guy” Sid Stamm explains (bit.ly/hGuTrc) that enabling the DNT header now is not in vain: “The presence of the header can be observed by Web sites (in a similar way to a cookie) to help understand how desired opt-out of [online behavioral advertising] is.” In other words, enabling the DNT option helps the online media ecosystem understand how much users want this option. Regardless of what third-party advertisers decide to do, it’s clear that the big-name browser developers have heard users’ calls for more privacy controls loud and clear. ■ BY STEVE SMITH
INFINITE LOOP
To The Cloud! (No, Really, To The Cloud!) In Qatar, average highs push triple digits a staggering five months out of the year. Because of this, Qatari scientists have decided that it’s not too soon to start figuring out how to keep legions of soccercrazed fans from frying when the World Cup rolls into town in 2022. The solution, clearly, is artificial clouds. The endeavor, a joint effort of Qatar University and Qatar Science and Technology Park, will produce the world’s second driveable Stratus at a cool half a mil a pop.
Source: es.pn/gjg1DX
which you are logging in to locate you, both for content providers and advertisers. The default setting for Chrome requires sites to ask for permission, but you may not always be aware of which sites had been
Warm Up To Penguins Sweet Suites For Your Open Office n the Windows world, the dominant LibreOffice. Canonical (Ubuntu), Novell core KDE libraries rebuilt on Windows office suite is Microsoft Office, but (openSUSE), and Red Hat (Fedora Core) so that you can run KDE applications on other platforms, the choice isn’t so have all announced that they’re replacing on Windows. This is a similar concept to clear-cut. Although Microsoft has a Mac OpenOffice.org with LibreOffice. how WINE lets Linux users run Windows version of Office, it lacks some of the applications. Calligra isn’t truly running features of its Windows counterpart. And Other Office Suites on Windows the way OpenOffice.org or Microsoft doesn’t have a version LibreOffice do. of Office for Linux, of course. As Similarly, GNOME Office is a result of these factors, you may often advertised as being a crosswant to think twice about using platform office suite, but it’s really Office if you frequently use a mix a loose collection of applications of Windows, Mac, and Linux. that together perform many office When a cross-platform office tasks. Because it’s a collection of suite is needed, most people applications, rather than a unified choose OpenOffice.org. It’s a suite, only some of its components free, open-source suite that has are cross-platform. Another issue the same features across multiple with GNOME Office is that beplatforms and plays nice with cause it’s a collection of separate Microsoft Office. But when Oracle projects, there is no one place to get acquired Sun (one of OpenOffice the entire suite. You have to go to .org’s main developers), it imposed different open-source project Web some copyright rules that some LibreOffice offers a few distinct advantages over OpenOffice.org, sites and download each component volunteer OpenOffice.org dev- including the ability to read and write Microsoft OOXML files. you want. elopers found objectionable. As a result, in late 2010, a group OpenOffice.org vs. LibreOffice of those developers created an organization You may wonder why we’re only Just how much difference can there be called The Document Foundation. The focusing on these two suites. After all, between OpenOffice.org and a derivate goal of this group was to develop a free, there are other free, open-source, and that’s not even a year old? It turns out open-source, cross-platform office suite cross-platform office suites for Linux. that there are quite a number of things that wasn’t hamstrung by any of Oracle’s In particular, Calligra Suite (formerly different between OpenOffice.org and copyright issues. Their initial release was KOffice), and GNOME Office users will LibreOffice. To be sure, both are very a rebranded version of OpenOffice.org, chime in that their particular products similar to each other, but a number of complete with some fixes that Sun or are viable office suites. It’s certainly true patches and extensions were immediately that those two collections of programs merged into LibreOffice. Most of these Oracle had rejected. This new office suite are popular and have support by their fixes are under-the-hood bug fixes in was dubbed LibreOffice, a derivative of respective organizations. The problem general, but some include better memory OpenOffice.org. is that they’re not as comprehensive as usage and faster startup times. For But just how viable can LibreOffice OpenOffice.org or LibreOffice. whatever reason, Sun and Oracle chose be, given that it will have none of the Calligra Suite touts itself as a crossnot to accept these fixes into the main resources that OpenOffice.org does? platform office suite, except that it really OpenOffice.org code. That answer came in early 2011 when isn’t. Calligra Suite itself even admits But simple bug fixes aren’t going to The Document Foundation’s startup on its own Web site that there’s only distinguish a new branch of an open-source fundraising drive secured enough fi“preliminary support” for it on Mac and project that’s been around for a while. nancing to act as seed money to keep the Windows. Indeed, to run this office suite effort going. Also, some of the biggest on Windows, you have to install the KDE companies with Linux distributions have Windows Initiative, which consists of thrown their support completely behind
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LibreOffice sports some extremely useful features that haven’t been incorporated into the base OpenOffice.org code. Many of these capabilities come from Go-oo, another OpenOffice.org-derived office suite that was backed by Novell. However, Go-oo developers recently announced that they’re stopping work and focusing their efforts on LibreOffice. This shift has brought immediate rewards to LibreOffice. Although OpenOffice.org has the ability to read Microsoft Office 2007’s new Office Open XML files, it doesn’t have the ability to save files back in the same format. Sun had previously made a free plug-in for Microsoft’s Office suite to be able to read OpenOffice.org’s files. But when Oracle acquired Sun, it started selling the same plug-in and requiring a minimum order of 100. Adding to this is that Microsoft Office 2007 SP2 and later provided native, and free, support for OpenOffice.org documents. Novell had long provided Go-oo with the ability to read and write Office Open XML files. When Microsoft and Novell had signed a series of agreements in 2006, one of the aspects was an agreement to improve the interoperability between Linux and Windows. To that end, Novell developed an Office Open XML filter that would let OpenOffice.org load and save the new file formats Microsoft introduced. However, either due to copyright concerns or because of worries over Novell’s agreement with
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dependence on Java, LibreOffice can find a wider audience in the Mac community. OpenOffice.org is the open-source cross-platform office suite of choice at the moment, but LibreOffice is making a strong case for people to try it out. It offers better interoperability with Microsoft Office and promises to be faster and more stable in the future. ■ BY JOHN JUNG
INFINITE LOOP
Just What Do You Think You’re Doing, Little Davey? IBM recently applied to patent a new technology called “Adaptive System for Real-time Behavioral Coaching and Command Intermediation,” or, as Gizmodo puts it, a “HAL-like computer system for stuffed animals.” The idea behind the tech is to incorporate it into some sort of stuffed critter a child is playing with. HAL Bear, as we’ll call him, monitors the child’s behavior and admonishes him when he’s not playing well with other children. If that fails, we suspect HAL Bear will encourage the little rascal to take a stress pill and think things over.
Source: gizmodo.com/#!5777888/ibm-patents-hal+like-computer-system-for-stuffed-animals
Thanks in large part to prior development work Novell brought to The Document Foundation, LibreOffice boasts impressive VBA capabilities.
Microsoft, that code never made it into the base OpenOffice.org code. But with The Document Foundation’s separation from OpenOffice.org, Novell has implemented the filter in the base LibreOffice code. Another feature that Novell provided to the fledgling LibreOffice effort is better VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) support. Microsoft Excel users have long used VBA macros to better manage large and complicated spreadsheets. And although OpenOffice.org 3 introduced VBA support, by most accounts it’s very limited and doesn’t meet the needs of many. Go-oo spreadsheet application, by contrast, has far better VBA support. And with the Go-oo developers moving to LibreOffice, they have brought that better VBA support with them. And so, with these two simple abilities, LibreOffice already leapfrogs over OpenOffice.org’s capabilities. But the features that come from another open-source project and from one vendor are just the beginning. The Document Foundation has already announced that it’s going to be moving away from its reliance on Java for certain OpenOffice .org features. Currently, some file exporting and wizard capabilities are provided to LibreOffice through Java programs. In the future, LibreOffice developers want to replace them with native code. Moving off of Java has a number of side benefits aside from the obvious reliance on Oracle’s Java. One benefit is improved performance overall for LibreOffice over OpenOffice.org. Instead of having to load Java when using one of the features that depend on it, which increases system load, everything will already be loaded. Another benefit is that it’ll be easier to use LibreOffice on Mac, making a better case for LibreOffice as a cross-platform open-source office suite. By eliminating the
Less Blight, Still Plenty To Fight –by Andrew Leibman $59.95 (X360, PS3, Mac, PC) ● ESRB: (M)ature ● Electronic Arts ● dragonage.bioware.com
BioWare’s Dragon Age II sends you to the darkspawn-infested wilds of the Free Marches, a region north of Ferelden where the heroes from Dragon Age: Origins fought together, bantered wittily, fraternized, and died (or not). In this middle chapter of the Dragon Age trilogy, you step into the leather boots of a human named Hawke. You can choose your gender, but your race is set in stone. You can also fine-tune your character’s face and select warrior, mage, or rogue as your specialization. Returning players can also import their Dragon Age: Origins and Awakening saves for added continuity. The events of Dragon Age II take place over the course of a decade as Hawke works his way from a refugee outcaste to the Champion of Kirkwall. But that’s no spoiler; the whole story is told as a series of flashbacks as the dwarf Verric relates the story of your rise to prominence to a Chantry Seeker, Cassandra Pentaghast. Following an action-packed intro, the narrative slows to a crawl as you establish yourself, make friends and enemies, and perform various odd jobs. Luckily the excellent dialogue and deep combat experience will keep you engaged. Act two ratchets up the tension with the enigmatic and fierce-looking Qunari, and the final act quickly escalates as
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mages and Templars struggle with the fallout of the Qunari uprising. The hardcore RPG fans that lauded DA:O for its highly tactical nature may be disappointed at DAII’s more actionoriented combat. That’s not to say tactics aren’t important; on Hard and Nightmare difficulties, scripted behaviors, party movement, spell management, and mana and stamina level maintenance will become a constant necessity. Throughout the game, you’ll need to tackle various personal problems for the characters in your party. Whether you’re helping a widower find new love, avenge a brother’s betrayal, or help a friend cope with being possessed, the companion quests are varied, dramatic, sometimes touching, often humorous, and always result in fleshing out your relationships. The aspects of DAII that don’t work as well are the limited settings; most of the campaign takes place in and around the city of Kirkwall; the dungeons, too, are endlessly recycled for dozens of side missions. Graphically, the game is stunning, and BioWare’s highres texture pack (graphics cards with 1GB of memory
recommended) really adds detail. But despite the impressive vistas, you cannot stray from the path. Armor and weapons also present a problem; early on, you’re left to your own devices when distributing your attribute points after attaining each level. But later in the game, there are several must-have weapons and pieces of armor, but to equip them you need to have high attributes in a pair of categories; magic and willpower for light armor, dexterity and cunning for medium armor, and strength and constitution for heavy armor. But we didn’t find out we should have been pouring our attribute points into these paired categories until roughly midway through the game. In this way, you’re shooting yourself in the foot if you want to create a half mage half warrior class by spreading your points across more attributes. The biggest strength of BioWare’s Dragon Age series is authenticity, and DAII is absolutely soaking in it. This universe is about political power grabs, culture shock, fanaticism, racism, and war; all realities of our universe and instantly recognizable. The fantasy elements are just icing on the cake. It is a magical cake, though. ■
Take Up Arms In The Race War–by Dr. Malaprop $29.99 (PC) ● ESRB: (M)ature THQ ● dawnofwar2.com
You get a lot of content for your money when purchasing Dawn Of War II: Retribution, a standalone series expansion after last year’s Chaos Rising. Highlights include the six playable Warhammer 40,000 factions (with each featuring its own lengthy campaign), as well as The Last Stand mode, which features three co-op players fighting waves of enemies in Horde mode-inspired RTS combat. Both features are welcome additions, and we’d love to see a Last Stand mode in more RTS games.
The “expansive” six faction campaign, however, left us slightly underwhelmed. Having six campaigns sounds great on the back of the box, but playing through said campaigns was sometimes repetitive because each campaign plays through the same maps. Each faction requires different strategies, but we tired of seeing the same locations. As has been consistent with the Dawn Of War II series to date, the game differs from traditional RTS games by not focusing on mining resources to construct buildings and units. Instead, the last two Dawn of War II releases have provided players with mostly fixed resources (your team), which you need to
utilize wisely (for example, take cover and flank the enemy) to complete missions. Retribution, however, let’s you take over existing bases to produce additional units, bringing some pleasant variety to Dawn of War II gameplay. The audio features solid voice acting and effects. Not surprisingly, the visuals are the best we’ve seen in the series, and we loved the detail in unit models. What is still lacking after Chaos Rising is the AI. We’d have preferred more time spent here than on providing the six similar-feeling campaigns. However, at the end of the day, Dawn Of War II: Retribution is an approachable, bargain-priced, and enjoyable RTS game. ■
A Twist On First-Person Carnage –by Dr. Malaprop $59.99 (X360, PC, PS3) ● ESRB: (M)ature ● Electronic Arts ● bulletstorm.com
Bulletstorm feels like it came out of the late 1990s, something in the Duke Nukem vein, only with modern graphics design, violence, language, and adolescent humor. Despite those draws, it’s the skill-based fragging that provides this game’s unique feel. The sci-fi narrative is stale but works for the game’s needs. As Grayson Hunt, a former government spec op, you end up crashing on the planet Stygia. From then on, your objective is to get off the
planet. Many recent FPSes have felt short; Bulletstorm is no exception. Expect six to nine hours of playtime from the single-player campaign. Creative killing is the key to success, and you’ll need to use variety to gain maximum points via the Skillshots. Early on, you’ll get a leash to use extensively throughout the game. It lets you pull enemies toward you so you can kick them away or onto other objects. You can also slide into enemies and pin them down momentarily, keeping them in your sights. You can then use these abilities alongside your weapons and in various environments to dish out punishment to the villainous scourge of cyberpunks you encounter. The graphic engine displays destruction brilliantly, and we like having an FPS that actually uses a broad color palette on cartoonish characters. Music is passable, but it’s the dialogue that can get tiresome much of the time. (There are occasional good audible moments.) So if you can overlook the gore and colorful language, you’ll discover a complex kill system that pumps some innovation into what some gamers would describe as a staid genre. ■ CPU / May 2011
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The Ultimate Turf War–by Chris Trumble Published by THQ and developed by KAOS Studios, Homefront is an FPS that takes place in a near future in which a unified Korea has taken advantage of the United States’ severe economic problems (brought on by massive spikes in oil prices) and occupied most of the country west of the Mississippi River. You play the role of Robert Jacobs, an ex-military chopper pilot who is headed for
reeducation in a small Colorado town when you are rescued by the U.S. resistance movement that uses guerilla tactics to battle the Korean occupation forces, which far outnumber them and have vastly superior firepower and technology. If you’re having flashbacks to the 1984 Soviet invasion flick “Red Dawn,” you’re on the right track; although Charlie Sheen is in no way involved (as far as we know), this game has a number of common traits with the movie, including a shared author, John Milius. Campaign mode is pretty solid technically and is quite a bit of fun to play. Aside from its brevity and some minor gripes with NPC voice prompts (your fellow freedom fighters
$59.99 (X360, PS3); $49.99 (PC) ● ESRB: (M)ature THQ ● www.homefront-game.com
remind you a little too early and often about your current objective, often screaming at the top of their lungs as they do so), we couldn’t find any major flaws. The game’s multiplayer modes are also enjoyable but provide limited options, and aside from a much larger role for vehicles than in the campaign, are pretty standard fare. As much as we enjoyed the campaign, it doesn’t last long and won’t provide a ton of replay value; as such, Homefront’s long-term value for many players will hinge on finding some quality, regular partners for the multiplayer game. ■
Campaign With Purpose–by Dr. Malaprop $59.95 (X360, PS3) ● ESRB: (M)ature ● Electronic Arts ● ea.com/fight-night
The latest game in the series hinges its moniker on the new Champion Mode that most players should be able to complete in less than eight hours. The campaign builds a narrative about a boxer named Andre Bishop. The game starts dramatically, with Andre engaged in a bare-knuckle prison fight. Andre wins the fight but is later ambushed in the shower and has his hand broken. The game then flashes back to how Andre got into prison after such a promising career start. The great thing about Champion Mode is how effectively the narrative works with the gameplay to ramp up players on the skills needed to win bouts. For example, in one campaign sequence, we broke our previously broken hand during a fight. With only one good hand, it becomes a challenge to get a knockout,
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and continuing to use the broken hand leads to regional anaerobic fatigue and speedy stamina loss. Narrative points like these are commonplace for teaching players how to make full use of the revamped Full Spectrum Punch Control system—or the more traditional layout. Completing the campaign sets you up to be competitive in the Legacy Mode, where you can create your own fighter, train, and fight through the ranks to a title. However, we also liked the Fight Now option, which let us pit world champion boxers against each other. It’s the next best thing to our 1970s Ali and Spinks action figures. Fights are visually stunning, with sweat flying and facial bones crunching. We did experience some clipping but not enough to detract from the game. ■
Not Quite A Home Run –by Josh Compton
$59.99 (X360, PS3); $49.99 (Wii); $29.99 (PC); $19.99 (NDS, PSP) ESRB: (E)veryone ● 2K Sports www.2ksports.com/games/mlb2k11
2K Sports has excelled at producing basketball and tennis video games in the past, but it hasn’t quite been able to grasp America’s favorite pastime. The series of MLB 2K games has seen many minor adjustments to its formula, with each new iteration playing a little bit better than the one before it. This year is no different as MLB 2K11 is here, and, while most of it feels unchanged, there are some improvements that make this the best entry in the franchise so far. The graphics in MLB 2K11 hold up well at a distance, but as the in-game camera zooms in closer, you can see that the detail, while better than in previous versions, is lacking. Player movements, especially base running animations, are sometimes unrealistic. But where the game lacks in graphics, it makes up for in presentation. The video replays after home runs are entertaining and bring excitement to a perfectly timed swing. The announcers are great, if sometimes repetitive, and really add to the overall experience of the game. The gameplay is decent as you’ll use the right stick (on X360 and PS3) to hit and pitch. The face buttons are reserved for selecting base runners and throwing the ball to bases using a timed meter. Pitching has been retooled, and you can feel the difference in accuracy from when you start a game to when you make a few mistakes and the pitcher gets rattled. Hitting is very much the same as in MLB 2K10, but we found it to be a little more forgiving on lower difficulties. MLB 2K11 has a standard franchise mode that is organized well but isn’t terribly deep. The My Player mode is the same as last year, letting you take your player from the minor leagues to the majors. MLB 2K11 still isn’t the best baseball game on the market, but it’s a good title for gamers who need a baseball fix. ■
$59.99 (X360, PS3); $49.99 (Wii) ● ESRB: (E)veryone 2K Sports ● 2ksports.com/games/topspin4
King Of The Court–by Josh Compton The Top Spin franchise has been through a few reinventions, and, over the years, developers have experimented with multiple control schemes—some intuitive and others too difficult to master. With Top Spin 4, 2K Sports has gone back to the basics with the game’s controls and over the top (in a good way) with its atmosphere, action, and overall on-court experience. The result is a well-balanced and realistic game that can be challenging enough for hardcore Top Spin fans but is also accessible for newcomers to the series. We started the game by creating a player. You have numerous options for customizing your player, and as you compete in more matches you will unlock new clothes, rackets, and accessories. You can use your customized player in any of the game’s modes, and you’ll earn XP whenever you use this player. Top Spin 4 has easily the best career mode of any tennis game we’ve ever played. You start off playing
at little-known tournaments until you improve your skills and play in Grand Slam tournaments such as the U.S. Open or French Open with the ultimate goal of rising to the level of Legend. You can feel the change in atmosphere and enthusiasm in the crowd as you move from one venue to another. This change creates a sense of grandeur when you play in the more prestigious tournaments. There is a World Tour mode that lets you play online against other players in these same venues. The controls work very well as the basic shots (flat, top spin, slice, and lob) are assigned to the face buttons with optional modifiers available if you choose to use them. Player movement is fluid. The gameplay rewards quick reflexes and smart decisions so you may need to take advantage of the Top Spin Academy mode that will help you learn the basic and advanced controls. 2K Sports has taken tennis games to a new level with Top Spin 4, and it’s an experience that no fan of the sport should miss. ■ CPU / May 2011
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Multiplayer Delights In Store For This Trivia Classic–by Dr. Malaprop $29.99 (X360, PS3, Wii); $19.99 (PC) ● ESRB: (T)een THQ ● youdontknowjack.com
We first played You Don’t Know Jack, the irreverent trivia-quiz game show, in the mid-1990s. By the early 2000s, though, the game’s star had faded. So we were surprised to find ourselves playing a new version of You Don’t Know Jack in 2011. YDKJ now supports solo and up to four players in local or online multiplayer. Each player receives a multiple-choice question with a tongue-in-cheek clue. Console gamers respond by pressing the appropriate button on the controller. The game includes more than 70 episodes. Each player also gets the chance to mess up an opponent in a game
by forcing the player to answer the current question correctly within five seconds. If the player answers incorrectly or fails to answer at all, he loses some of the virtual money he has earned throughout the game to you. If he answers correctly, you get hosed as he receives money taken from your winnings. You get 730 questions with additional (fee-based) downloadable packs, but the presentation minimizes replayability. Gameplay is a blast but not quite on par with our favorite PC releases. ■
No Keeping A Good Game Down –by Dr. Malaprop $10 (X360) ● ESRB: (T)een ● Ubisoft ● beyond-good-and-evil.ubi.com/beyond-good-and-evil-hd/en-US
We completed Beyond Good & Evil on the PC and original Xbox when it was released eight years ago. At the time, we felt it was criminally underrated after poor sales. Since then, the game has amassed a cult following, and anyone who missed the game in 2003 can try the latest version of the game with HD graphics and a remastered soundtrack for $10 on the Xbox 360. (A PS3 version is expected as early as May.) Beyond Good & Evil starts in an idyllic setting as Jade, our intrepid journalist and main character, is found meditating. The peace lasts only briefly before we start to uncover the plot, wherein people of the planet Hyllis are being abducted by aliens. Entertaining gameplay and a budget price for a now-classic game that looks better than ever is welcome. Completing the game requires approximately eight hours. Visually, the game benefits nicely from the HD bump and maintains excellent pacing from start to finish. For such a dated game, Beyond Good & Evil holds up surprisingly well, and the design more than satisfies by offering so many ways to immerse yourself in Hyllis. Even Beyond Good & Evil’s end-game feels rewarding. ■
Loot Done Right Late Into The Night–by Dr. Malaprop
$15 (X360, PC) ● ESRB: (E)veryone Microsoft ● torchlightgame.com
This Diablo-inspired hack-n-slash was well-received on the PC during its 2009 release. The new HD version, now available on Xbox Live Arcade, looks noticeably better, but it’s the gameplay that holds up so well because developer Runic Games opted (smartly) to revamp the user interface to be more consolefriendly. The most noticeable change to controlling your on-screen character was to make your controller sticks move players directly instead of requiring a mouse to point them in the desired direction. Torchlight lets you choose from only three classes. During our first playthrough in 2009, we went with a Fighter for melee combat. To mix things up this time around, we opted to play as a Ranger/Thief. Furthermore, Torchlight is the best game you can play while waiting for Diablo 3. The 35-level dungeon will keep you amply entertained for up to 15 hours. If you’ve finished the PC version, though, this probably isn’t a game you’ll need—especially because it lacks co-op multiplayer. For anyone who has not tried the PC version, this is an A-list game you shouldn’t miss. ■
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Skill Or Luck? Penny Auction Business Rakes In Big Bucks
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oing . . . going . . . gone. Did that $232 Garmin hiker navigation system really just sell at auction for 10 cents at Quibids? Did a Canon EOS Rebel T2i SLR go for $1.66 at BidRivals? And did a bidder at SkoreIt just snap up a $50 Kohl’s card for 13 cents? Indeed, thousands of online auctions are ending with lucky winners, and millions of people are being drawn to the new penny auction phenomenon at these and countless rival sites that promise an opportunity to get iPads, HDTVs, and even cars for a fraction of the retail price. But wait. Nothing is quite that simple, or that cheap. In fact, the penny auction is a controversial online auction model that can cost many bidders more than they bargained for and has raised questions about whether this is auctioning, gambling, or a new kind of entertainment e-commerce.
This Ain’t eBay Unlike a standard auction, penny auctions are a pay-to-bid model where members pay usually about 60 cents every time they bid on an item. “Each auction starts at zero,” says Keith Montanaro, social media and public relations specialist at BidRivals, a company based in Malta that serves 28 countries. “I bid, and the price goes up by one cent. The last person to place a bid on the auction wins.” Montanaro claims that “the average savings in 2010 varied between 60 to 90%.” The potential for massive savings is there, to be sure, but so is a catch. For starters,
The countdown clock is ticking on auction deals that many penny auction players can’t resist.
bidding isn’t free: You buy bids, typically at 60 cents per bid, and can then use those bids on auctions. And in these auctions, which seem to be in their final seconds, any last-second bid will reset the clock back to 15 seconds. The auction and the incremental penny bidding can continue, with the clock being reset to a final, short countdown indefinitely before one bidder emerges victorious by exhausting her competitors’ resilience to keep bidding. But if you do the basic math, it is clear, “the promoters of these things are arguably making a bloody fortune selling bids,” says consumer watchdog and host of Consumer World (www .consumerworld.org) Edgar Dworsky.
“I saw an ad for one yesterday where someone ‘won’ the right to buy a $16,000 car for $1,740.78. Since this was an auction that increased bids in two-cent increments, that means that 87,039 bids were sold . . . totaling over $52,000 of income to the auction house.” That may be why BidRivals grew in short order since 2009 from a few people working in their apartments to 55 staff. Unlike eBay, where the online auctioneer hosts auctions for third-party sellers, many of these penny auction companies actually buy the goods from wholesalers and either store and ship some of the items themselves or have the wholesaler ship the goods to buyers after the sale. The penny auction
Unlike a standard auction, penny auctions are a pay-to-bid model where members pay usually about 60 cents every time they bid on an item.
house may lose money on providing the item to the auction winner at a below cost discount, but it more than makes up for this loss from the bids it sold to all the losers of the auction. Although the model may feel like gambling to some, companies such as QuiBid and SkoreIt boast certifications from the Better Business Bureau.
Bidding Or Gambling? Critics of the penny auction craze argue that the basic lure of these sites
is deceptive, in that the odds are slim that a bidder will win, and it is costlier than many presume just to try. And some believe that the pay-to-play aspect of bidding in a process where the likelihood of winning is so low it makes the model closer to a casino than an auction. “It becomes a very expensive habit for some people,” Dworsky says. “Being the last bidder seems to me more a matter of chance when everyone else has given up than some type of skill.”
QuiBids: In It To Win It Many penny auction sites emerged in recent years, and QuiBids.com is among the best promoted and most popular. With its high profile and millions of monthly visitors, the company has also attracted a class action lawsuit claiming that the company misleads bidders about the nature of its auction model. CEO Matt Beckham insists that penny auctions like his are a new kind of entertainment e-commerce that does involve skill and can be played to win. CPU: How did QuiBids start, and how has it grown? Beckham: A friend of mine and I co-founded it in 2009 after we had seen a penny auction site in Germany. We launched in October 2009 with five of us. Today we have 115 employees. We are in a hyper-growth phase. CPU: How do you differentiate yourselves from others in the market? Beckham: We offer a “Buy It Now” feature. Every bid you spend to win an item can be used as a credit towards the cost of the item. On every auction there are multiple “Buy It Nows.” CPU: How often is it used? Beckham: It is a fairly used feature . . . especially by long-term users who are used to the site and realize it is to their advantage to use it. We’re the only middle-to-large player that offers a “Buy It Now” on every single auction. We are expanding beyond penny auctions to offer achievements and gaming enhancements. We will award badges that give users free bids to use on future auctions. If you win in one bid you might get five free. We see ourselves in the entertainment retail auction space. CPU: QuiBids is being sued for being more akin to gambling than an auction. Beckham: We don’t like to comment on current lawsuits. But my take on people going after these sites . . . is that they are looking to cash in on anything they can. It is typical for a large company to have class action lawsuits filed against them. We don’t feel the lawsuits going around in the penny auction space are legitimate. We will do what we have to to defend ourselves. CPU: One question surrounding whether this is gambling or not concerns skill. Is there skill involved? Beckham: There are techniques for beating the competition. Some bid excessively to scare off others. If you wait for the last second but don’t always bid every time, then you have less chance to win. If you bid a third of the cost of the item, you have a really good chance of winning it. A lot of people just place a bid here and there and not spend. But the people who go in with the mentality that they will buy it if they don’t win it [are] usually . . . the ones that win it. The longer a person uses our site, they get to know how skill does play out. ■
Behind every “penny bid” on the site, someone is spending $0.60. In a flurry of competitive bidding, just trying to one-up another bidder 10 times on a $15 gift card could cost a person $6, and the odds are against him winning in the end. After just a few such auction losses, it’s easy to see how a bidder could have trouble coming out ahead. Whether penny auctions actually constitute gambling depends on how they are run, says attorney Joseph J. Lewczak, partner at the firm Davis & Gilbert who works with clients in the advertising, entertainment, and promotions fields. The legal definition of gambling usually involves people paying to play (“consideration”) for the chance of winning a prize where there is pure chance and no skill involved in the outcome. Some observers claim penny auctions satisfy all of those criteria, although others insist penny auctions are a form of entertainment that does involve strategy. (See Sidebar.) “It depends on how the penny auction is conducted,” Lewczak says. “It’s fun, and you are paying for bids. But unless there is a legitimate amount of skill or a free way to play, there is the potential to cross over the line.” Dworsky argues that consumers may not really be aware of the model. “If an iPad sells for $62, that means there were 6,200 bids put in. How does the consumer know when to come in or not? They are lured by the countdown clock and the seemingly unbelievable bargains.” But with all of the explanatory materials around the sites and the arguments that some skill is involved, it’s not altogether clear whether penny auction sites really cross the line. “The argument that a lot of these operators make is that skill is involved,” says Lewczak. “If you play some of these things, there is behavioral analysis that goes into participation. Who I am bidding against, and what is the analysis on the retail price and threshold in terms of how many bids to make?”
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In many auctions like this one at BidRivals, a last-second bid will set the countdown clock back to 15 seconds so that scores and even hundreds of 60-cent-apiece bids pour in during the final minutes.
“Entertainment Shopping”: You Can’t Lose There have been no major legal tests of this relatively new model yet. A class action suit was filed against one of the market leaders, QuiBids, in late 2010 asserting that the site does not make clear enough to users the low odds of winning. But some of the leading companies contend that penny auctions are skill-based and represent an entirely new category of online commerce. “We focus a lot on education and telling our clients that it is entertainment shopping, not gambling,” says Montanaro. “We try to educate users and try to prevent them from making stupid decisions when they join our site,” says QuiBids CEO Matt Beckham. In fact, many sites such as BidRivals and QuiBids now let bidders buy the products they don’t win. “We see it as a risk-free model,” says Beckham, because players at the end of an auction can turn their losing bids into discounts to buy the item at full price. “The argument I would make is that with ‘Buy It Now’ there is no chance to put up money for consideration and lose it. You can choose not to execute the
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buy, but at that point it is the individual choosing not to use the money.” At BidRivals, Montanaro says that “a high fraction” of the business is coming through the site’s similar “Buy Now” feature that lets a member apply losing bids on an item toward purchasing it outright from the company. He feels that the direct sales component at penny auctions helps change the model somewhat. It begins to feel more like an e-commerce site with a gaming front end. “It is retail with the possibility of getting your product up to 90% off.” Of course, it is unclear how many people actually avail themselves of the direct purchase opportunity at these sites. And after shipping and handling fees, the “buy now” offers at some of these penny auctions can cost more than a smart shopper could find elsewhere online. But Beckham says that many of the rough calculations being made about how much profit penny auctions make off of all that apparent bidding do not really understand the business. Many of the bids are parts of discounted bundles or given away free as promotions to users. Some of the bids are converted into discounts
for buying the product directly. And, of course, there’s the marketing. Sites such as QuiBids are advertising aggressively to draw new members. “All of those things go into the mechanics,” Beckham says. “I wish I could say it is a very, very high profit margin business, but at the end of the day it is similar to many retailers out there.” But in a market flooded with competitors and the possibility of charlatanry, these companies now have to distinguish themselves in the market and earn the trust of consumers. “What sets us apart is our clarity and goodwill,” argues Montanaro. He recognizes that there have been problems in penny auctions with people setting up multiple accounts (each of which may come with promotional free bids) that give unfair advantage. BidRivals will give cheated members their bids back. “We review these cases and we always refund the customer who lost out in any way whatsoever.” The company is also now letting the buyers become sellers. Members can purchase products directly from BidRivals, put them up for auction at the site, and reap 50% of the bids used by others. “We have customers who have made serious money off of those,” he says. For QuiBids, the future of penny auctions is to lean more toward the entertainment side of the experience, with more gaming and player loyalty elements built in. Beckham says that his and other companies in the space represent a new stage in online recreation where old genres start blending together. Just as group buying programs Groupon and LivingSocial combined social networking with shopping into a new category of “social commerce,” he sees the penny auction mixing gaming with shopping. “We are getting into hybrids of e-commerce,” he says. “I think we will be evolving into something that becomes more mainstream.” ■ BY STEVE SMITH
An Interview With soundmatters’ Lee Adams Lee Adams served as director of corporate marketing for Nakamichi and then co-founded Soundstream Technologies in 1984. In 2006, he joined soundmatters as vice president of sales and marketing. BY
CPU LA
When did soundmatters start up?
In 1998, originally as a research and development company in the areas of audio and magnetics. It was founded by, and continues to be headed by, Dr. Godehard Guenther. He’s 70, and has a rather interesting past, having been brought up on classical music with both piano and harpsichord lessons. His musical tastes today include Bach, Sheryl Crow, Sting, and I’ve heard him enjoy techno. Guenther graduated with three Ph.Ds., including one in nuclear physics. He came to the U.S. in the 1960s from Germany, when Dr. Wernher von Braun hired him to work at NASA. Later, in the 1970s, he started a company called a/d/s. It was among the first to pioneer what we might call high quality, palmsized speakers, through the a/d/s 200. Interestingly, they did a powered version of that speaker, the a/d/s 2002, and sold it with a matched cassette deck from Nakamichi, creating the first high-end portable system. Then, in the 1990s, he sold it and started soundmatters.
CPU
When did the company move from research into designing and producing a product, and why?
LA
BARRY BRENESAL
Guenther always wanted to evolve the company into what he calls “three legs of a stool,” as far as a business model was concerned. One
the quantity of our partners pretty limited. We’ve designed and manufactured a range of sound bars that are included in high-end slot machines for the world’s largest slot machine manufacturer. They’ve even gone so far as to have full surroundsound systems with subwoofers in the chairs. Their goal is to keep you sitting there, and any way they can do that— sophisticated sound, video, special effects—they’ll try.
CPU
You’ve mentioned a/d/s. It’s amazing how the mammoth speakers of the 1960s and 1970s began to shrink in size, while still providing relatively comparable sound. Your foxL is a pretty extreme example of this, measuring just less than 6 x 2 x 1 inches. That’s not one speaker, but both together.
LA was pure research, while the second was OEM, designing products for other companies. The third was creating a brand that would allow us to pioneer some concepts that our OEM customers weren’t ready for, just yet. To build some equity in the technology. That approach succeeded well. We’ve got a growing amount of business with other companies, although we keep
It really developed out of Guenther’s research at NASA, where he had worked at making things more compact, and still later, after he got tired of big, expensive audio gear. With soundmatters, he wanted to focus on what could be done at a lower cost, with newer technologies. But the big change has come from the quality of the rare-earth magnets we use—originally samarium cobalt, then moving on to neodymium—along with the availability and costing down of a number of materials that allow the company to create very powerful and focused drivers.
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CPU
Would you try to sell a foxL to a person looking for the audio of an entertainment center, as opposed to someone looking for a set of computer speakers?
LA
I think from a quality standpoint, allowing for certain limitations due to size and portability—how deep it will go, how loud it will play, and given a lack of wide stereo separation—we think it holds its own with pretty much anything out there aside from the really esoteric products.
CPU
You mention stereo separation. Typically, with a pair of separated speakers, you can adjust that separation to take advantage of the characteristics of the room: size, shape, reverberation of different surfaces, etc. Why keep the two speakers in foxL joined together in a single bar unit?
LA
Our goal was to make it as portable and simple to use as possible, while still achieving the sonic standards we desired. We found that when you use separated left and right speakers, you end up with multiple enclosures that increase cost. You’ve got added wires; and if you go with Bluetooth, then you’ve got further costs involved because you need a separate receiver for each side—and that in turn adds enormous complications. Or you run a cable between the speakers, which is clumsy. We wanted a pair of speakers you could slip in your pocket. It’s not much bigger than a Snickers bar, really.
CPU
soundmatters has recently released its second versions of both the standard and Bluetooth foxL. Your marketing materials refer to the bass radiator as being your built-in, rechargeable lithium-ion battery, and that your tweeter doubles in adding bass, as part of the woofer. This seems almost thematic in the foxL, with major sections of the speakers having multiple functions to cut down on space requirements.
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LA
It goes back to our goal with this product: maximizing performance, and minimizing size. We have a tweeter that can woof because Dr. Guenther designed a driver that, despite its size of roughly 25 millimeters, possessed the ability to reproduce between 100 cycles and 20,000 cycles. In turn, our goal with the battery was to use a passive bass radiator, effectively tricking the cabinet into thinking it’s larger than it is, and has more air in it than it does, which allows for deeper frequencies. But in order to save space, we use the mass of the rechargeable battery for the woofer. It does double duty, and instead of keeping the battery inside the cabinet, it’s part of the cabinet wall, enhancing the bass.
CPU LA
So, is the foxL aimed at the well-heeled traveler?
We’ve had the president of a competing company, a friend, who doesn’t sell this kind of product, call it an “audio Swiss army knife” because of its flexibility. If you’re out on the road a lot, the ability to use it for multimedia presentations, watch a movie or listen to music in your hotel room, to employ it as a hands-free speakerphone for impromptu conference calls—if you’ve got the Bluetooth version—all this really sets it apart. One customer told us that he opens a drawer in his hotel room and places the speaker there. He finds the sound amazing, and of course, the bass is taking advantage of the boundary effect. Putting it on a solid wood table is good, too.
CPU
Some of the newer, more environmentally friendly computer accessories and hardware, such as the (re)Drive external drive, sense when a computer has been shut down or gone to sleep, then turn themselves off. But foxL doesn’t do this; it must be manually shut off.
LA
I have to tell you, it’s already on my feature list for the next generation. This hasn’t been done up until now because soundmatters has focused on increasing battery life for these units. You’d think turning off a speaker would contribute to this, but you’re also using up battery power to operate the circuit that senses when to turn it off. My hope is that we will add that circuit, but it’s not in there now. Instead, if you keep the foxL on, at some point it will lose its charge—though the battery on that unit typically holds its remaining charge in a standby situation for weeks.
CPU
Is the foxL available through retail, or just on your Web site?
LA
It’s available primarily online or through catalogs. We are starting to add some brick-and-mortar retailers, but you can buy it from our Web site, or from Amazon, J&R Music, etc.
CPU
to this point?
LA
Have you mostly been relying on word of mouth
Absolutely. We are still in part an engineering firm. While I’m sales and marketing, I’m always struggling to get the word out because we put the money in the product— something a lot of people say, but it’s really true about soundmatters. Typically, when people get the speaker, they’re pretty excited about it. That’s been true about end users or editorial folks, and we’ve been able to grow our business in that manner. It helps that we’re in the right place, at the right time: everything is mobile these days. First thing you read in a review about the new Motorola Xoom tablet is that “It’s a great unit, but the audio is poor.” We’re an ideal complement to that, as a result. ■
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A Peek At What’s Brewing In The Laboratory by Anastasia Poland
Math + Physics = Animation Solutions & More animators have long had issues with creating code that can handle calculating and directing materials (hair, fabric, etc.) through their collisions in movement. The algorithms needed to display “simple” physics are complicated and, historically, do not solve the issues at hand. Dr. Eitan Grinspun’s Computer Graphics Group at Columbia University, however, have boldly thrown out conventional methods of programming and turned to discrete differential geometry to create precise equations that put an end to CGI animators’ coding problems. Says Grinspun, “Geometry is the natural language for describing physics. Our computer algorithms respect geometry as the fundamental language for describing a physical system.” Recent successes have been in developing “computer algorithms that model colliding objects in a way that, for the first time, guarantees the fundamentals of physics—such as
CGI
conservation of energy, momentum, causality—and of computation (the algorithm can run and can finish on a computer without getting stuck),” says Grinspun. The team’s work is a big win for math and science, but they still have plenty to work on. “We still need to figure out what is the right kind of geometry to describe friction,” Grinspun says. Grinspun says that other scientists and researchers are utilizing his and his team’s work already. “Researcher James O’Brien and his colleagues at UC Berkeley use our approaches to develop medical simulators to train surgeons and to work on robotic planning of surgery,” he explains. “Experimental physicist Pedro Reis at MIT is using our computational models of elastic strands to work on problems as diverse as laying down Internet cables on the ocean floor [to] manufacturing stretchable electronics. “Films are just the tip of the iceberg.” ■
Professor Eitan Grinspun and colleagues at Columbia University’s Computer Graphics Group use discrete differential geometry in programming algorithms that solve long-standing issues with materials in motion. Shown here: honey on a conveyor (top) and the Columbia team’s representation (bottom). [Experimental results (gray) courtesy of Sunny Chiu-Webster and John Lister.]
New Cell Software Spreads Emergency Warnings With Wi-Fi t’s sort of ironic that a program similar to the children’s game “Telephone” could be the thing we turn to during an emergency. You know the game—someone whispers a message to the person next to them, who then passes the message to the next person, and so on. Mikael Asplund of Linköping University in Sweden is working on software for cell phones that use this concept to operate
I
when other communication systems break down. Asplund explains how his system would work. “The program (or protocol) works with messages, like SMS messages, and delivers a message to a number of receivers. This could, for example, be useful to send out warnings or requests for help. The software, which is installed on the phone, uses the Wi-Fi module in the phone
to communicate directly with other phones. A message that is sent out is delivered to the closest neighbors, [who] will in turn spread the message to their neighbors.” If there are no phones in reach of the sender, the software stores the message locally and delivers it as soon as the phone finds a receiver in range. The phone-to-phone communication removes the need for a base
station, which can be damaged in natural disasters. Asplund’s team continues to work on the system’s energy consumption, as recharging a battery during an emergency would be impossible without electricity. Asplund currently has working prototypes for Android and Symbian. He’s also working on adding the ability to send voice messages with the program. ■
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Epitaxial Graphene Could End Silicon’s Reign eveloped by Professor Walt de Heer and colleagues at Georgia Tech’s School of Physics, epitaxial graphene is made from simple carbon atoms grown in a lattice framework. Of course, there’s nothing simple about this brilliant breakthrough, as epitaxial graphene could one day replace silicon as the go-to material for all of your micromanufacturing needs. The graphene efficiently conducts electricity with minimal heat production or energy use. Although de Heer has worked through various iterations of graphene development over the last decade, he and his fellow researchers have just recently made a breakthrough that can realistically move the material into the big leagues of manufacturing. They were able to construct an array of 10,000 top-gated transistors on a 0.24cm2 chip by growing the graphene
D
on templates etched in silicon carbide, a new technique that produced a record density for the material. The team’s challenges have been in creating a material that scales up as large as a wafer while maintaining uniformity and strength enough to be run through manufacturing processes. Consistency is also key; the material must remain stable enough for an electronic device to work reliably. The researchers feel they are on the cusp of developing that consistency, scalability, and uniformity. That said, because silicon and graphene don’t play together well, fabrication facilities would have to completely retool to incorporate graphene. De Heer expects that because of this, graphene will be used in some electronics in the next 10 years, but it could be several decades before it is the go-to material. ■
Yike Hu and John Hankinson of Georgia Tech oversee simple carbon atoms being transformed into graphene on a template of silicon carbide. (Photo credit: Gary Meek)
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Video Piracy Foiled By “Fingerprints” ilm piracy makes for a big, black market industry, and even though quality is typically abysmal, business is still brisk. Annual losses in Los Angeles County (the home of Hollywood) revenue add up to $7.2 billion, not counting wage loss, according to the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation. Up until now, catching the criminals has been difficult at best, even with crack Anti-Piracy Task Force teams on the job. Undaunted, Dr. Alex Bronstein of Tel Aviv University, along with his twin, Dr. Michael Bronstein and Professor Ron Kimmel (both of Technion - Israel Institute of Technology), have developed a system, dubbed “Video Genome,” that can not only distinguish pirated material but also compare it to other videos in a larger database to identify a pattern that is common across a pirate’s work. Every film has the visual information you view, with metadata (what cameras are used, how the film is processed, etc.) on the back end. When a film is pirated, more metadata is added—perhaps subtitles in another language, other annotations, or the type of recording device used. Bronstein and team have programmed algorithms that can quickly identify a visual “signature” across a film and match it to the postproduction data left by pirates, thus revealing the criminal’s particular “imprint” on a pirated film. The team began by studying concepts and techniques used in bioinformatics (using computational and statistical theory and methods in handling and analyzing biological data, such as DNA sequencing). As their research has advanced, however, they have developed custom algorithms more appropriate for their work. Bronstein says that their biggest challenge was crafting a small, efficient, and unchanging system. And although Video Genome is currently able to index thousands of hours of video, Bronstein says, “We would like to increase the scale of indexable visual information to millions of hours of video. Many interesting phenomena will happen at these scales.” ■
F
Look For CPU At These LAN Parties
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Would you like us to help promote your next LAN? Give us a call at 1.800.733.3809 We’ll be glad to consider your event 108 May 2011
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Q&A With Professor Kevin Warwick Meet The World’s First Cyborg When Kevin Warwick, a professor of cybernetics at the University of Reading in Berkshire, UK, flexed his hand, a 100-electrode array implanted in the nerves of his forearm transmitted the impulses out of his body, letting him control external devices such as a wheelchair and a robotic hand. He was wet-wired, a cyborg—the first of his kind. One of the world’s foremost researchers in robotics, artificial intelligence, and human-machine integration, Warwick joins the ranks of the few dedicated to preparing humanity for a much bigger and better-connected future.
Q
Your 1998 Gershwyn genetic algorithm for creating new music by analyzing a base of samples seems similar to the Music Genome Project that Tim Westergren co-developed in 2000 to fuel the now popular Pandora radio service. Have you commercialized any of your research?
KW
It’s funny. It seems to be only now that people are realizing what we did with Gershwyn. From what I understand of Tim Westergren’s project, it does sound remarkably similar—good luck to him with it. Partly (at the time) I wanted to show just how creative machines/computers can be. It may sound silly, but there were some philosophers back then saying humans can be creative but computers are simply programmed. I wanted to show how wrong that was. I guess we could have made money from it, but I’m not really interested in the commercial aspects. Life’s too short.
Q
What was your daily experience with being the first person with an implant wired to your nervous system, and how did the project conclude?
KW
Well, what I did was a scientific experiment, so with the implant in my nervous system, I was a walking laboratory for over three months—no down time—[with three] main results. First, I was able to experience an extra (ultrasonic) sense. It gave me a good sense of distance to objects, much like a bat. Second, we linked my nervous system with that of my wife (via electrodes) and successfully
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linked our nervous systems together electrically. In this w a y, w e c o m m u n i c a t e d telegraphically between our nervous systems. When she moved her hand, my brain received a pulse. Third, we plugged my nervous system into the Internet at Columbia University in New York and linked in real time to a robot hand in England. My brain signals controlled the robot hand, but I could also feel how much force the hand was applying. My body was extended via the Internet.
Q
When I asked Ray Kurzweil about the possibility of massive social upheaval during the Singularity transition (see page 110 in the April 2011 issue), he was optimistic yet somewhat evasive. Will those who biologically integrate machine intelligence first have such an advantage that it causes social distress? What is your vision for society at this key transition period?
KW
I think it’s time for Ray to put the rest of his body where his mouth is and carry out some implant experimentation. Let me throw down the gauntlet to him here and now: Come on, Ray! Get on with it! I think the first implanted folk will be largely experimental. This is often how it is, both medically and scientifically. You could say they are the geeks, including me, of the science world, the pioneers. It’s a bit like discovering a new
continent. We can’t be sure exactly what we’ll find. There will be dangers, and sometimes things will go wrong. But there will also be exciting successes and new discoveries. It really is a fantastic time to be alive and to be a scientist. Yes, I think ultimately the social gap will be enlarged much further with this integrated technology. I see society a bit like an elastic band. New technology stretches it more and more. Will the elastic band break, effectively creating two species, cyborg and human? I genuinely believe it will. In that case, I want to be a cyborg. I don’t want to be part of a human subspecies. ■ WILLIAM VAN WINKLE HAS WRITTEN CPU SINCE 2002. CATCH THE BEST OF THESE, UPDATED AND MUCH EXPANDED, AT architectsoftomorrow.blogspot.com.
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