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5522 Windows WashingStreamline Your Operating System

5588 BIOS MagicPulling Extra Performance Out Of A Hat

6644 Hardware Tweaks & MaintenanceGive Your Aging PC Some Extra Juice

Frontside6 What’s Happening12 Digital Economy14 The Saint

Bronx Cheer For Vista Security!

March 2006 • Vol 6 Issue 03

Copyright 2006 by Sandhills Publishing Company. Computer Power User is a trademark of Sandhills PublishingCompany. All rights reserved. Reproduction of material appearing in Computer Power User is strictly prohibitedwithout written permission. Printed in the U.S.A. GST # 123482788RT0001 (ISSN 1536-7568) CPU ComputerPower User USPS 020-801 is published monthly for $29 per year by Sandhills Publishing Company, 131 WestGrand Drive, P.O. Box 82667, Lincoln, NE 68501. Subscriber Services: (800) 424-7900. Periodicals postage paid atLincoln, NE. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Computer Power User, P.O. Box 82667, Lincoln, NE 68501.

®

The Experts

Did you find the hidden CPU logo on our cover? Turn the page for the answer.

Rob “CmdrTaco”MaldaThe DepartmentOf Stuffpage 86

Pete LoshinOpen Saucepage 81

Kyle BennettHard Talkpage 36

Alex “Sharky” RossThe Shark Tankpage 35

Alex St. JohnThe Saintpage 14

Chris PirilloDialogue Boxpage 80

Anand Lal ShimpiAnand’s Cornerpage 34

Mike MageeShavings From The Rumour Millpage 99

Spotlight

Hard Hat AreaPC Modder38 Tips & Tutorials39 Probe Your PC

Monitor System Temps With A Thermal Controller

42 Mad Reader ModKOS-MOS Takes A New Form

44 Advanced Q&A Corner46 X-Ray Vision: Caller ID For Email

Battling Malicious Messages48 White Paper: Netcell’s SPUs

Processing Units Move Into The Storage Arena

Loading Zone68 The Bleeding Edge Of Software

Inside The World Of Betas70 Up To Speed

Upgrades That’ll Keep You Humming Along

72 System Utility SuitesHow Five All-In-One Packages Compare

75 Wonderful World Of WidgetsThree Programs That Put Mini-apps On Your Desktop

77 InterVideo DVD Copy 4 Platinum01 Communique I’m InTouch

5.01 Desktop Edition78 Caelo Software NEO Pro 3.1

Panda Software Panda Platinum 2006 Internet Security

80 Dialogue BoxEternal Sunshine Of The Mapless Mind

81 Open SauceThe Implications Of Open Source

Caught In The Web82 The Great Web Museum

The Medium That Archives Itself86 The Department Of Stuff

identity.txt

Digital Living88 Road Warrior

The iPod Of Ebooks, Pocket-Sized Tablet PCs, A New Crop Of PMCs, Sony’s New Walkman Phone

90 At Your LeisureGames, Gear, Movies & Music

Tips & Tricks95 Software Tips & Projects

DVDs Gone Wild (Part 2)97 Warm Up To Penguins

Making Music CDs In Linux

What’s Cooking99 Shavings From The Rumour Mill

Intel Takes On AMD, Seriously102 Hot Seat

ATI 2006: Don’t Call It A Comeback103 Technically Speaking

An Interview With David Beckemeyer, CEO Of TelEvolution & Co-founder Of EarthLink

106 Under DevelopmentA Peek At What’s Brewing In The Laboratory

Back Door108 Q&A With Max Levchin

The Genesis Of PayPal, The Deal WithSlide & Giving Back

16 Dream Hardware

18 CrossFire Motherboards & Graphics CardsWhat Can Two Radeon X1900s Do?

24 Gotta Get GreenEarth-Friendly PC Parts

28 An IGP Sampler PlateWhich IGP Board Is Tops?

30 AMD Athlon 64 FX-60

Sapphire Radeon X800 GTO2

31 Seagate Momentus 5400.3Tyan Transport GT20 B5350

32 Ultrasone HFI-700Maxtor OneTouch III Turbo Edition

33 Western Digital Raptor WD1500ADFD

34 Anand’s CornerIntel’s Centrino Duo: Better Than The Original

35 The Shark TankATI’s Mobile Toys

36 Hard TalkATI’s New Beast

Heavy Gear

Page 31

Page 32

Dead Or Alive 4: Page 91

CORRECTIONS:In the January 2006 issue, wereferred to the Axcelerate X2’ssound card as a Creative LabsSound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS. Thesystem came with a Sound BlasterAudigy 2 ZS Platinum Pro.

Infinite LoopsStrange stats and other oddball items from computing's periphery

84, 96, 98

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E D I T O R ’ S N O T E

Gotcha.Here it is.

L ast month in this spot I talked a bit about how 2006 was going to be aninteresting year for fans of PC tech. Little did I know at the time what aprofound understatement that would turn out to be.

It’s still Q1, and already we have Intel inside Macs, although Intel isn’t saying“Intel Inside” anymore, now it’s “Leap Ahead.” (Am I the only one who thinksthey were better off with the old slogan?) Rumors are swirling about Dell offeringAMD CPUs in its computers, too, and to underscore the considerably weightyfinancial implications of such a deal, AMD shares reportedly fell 4.2% shortly afterthe Associated Press reported on January 13 that the Dell rumors were unfounded.There’s even a full-blown format war raging between Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD,although at press time neither camp had any actual product on store shelves.

The upshot of all this is that companies are jockeying for position around newtechnologies and partnerships right now in a frenzy we’ve seldom if ever seenbefore. Everyone seems to sense that changes are coming, and nobody wants to beleft on the wrong side of the fault line when the big one hits.

Other signs of change in the PC industry include potential shifts in the balanceof power among the big players in CPUs and GPUs. Most of you can likelyremember a time a few short years ago when no power user would have consideredputting anything but Intel in a PC; obviously, for some time now, the opposite hasbeen true and AMD has owned the high-end enthusiastmarket. But in a year like this that trend couldvery well reverse itself again. Similarly, Nvidia hasbeen the leader in high-end graphics cards for thelast couple of years or so, but ATI’s X1900 ismaking waves, and it would be hasty to assumethat it’ll be business as usual in the graphics mar-ket this year.

If, like me, you’re watching all of this andwondering what your next move should be,the March Spotlight section is for you. Ifyou’re not ready to commit to a powerful butnearly extinct AMD platform or a sort ofinterim Intel one, we’ll show you how tosqueeze every last drop of power out of yourcurrent system starting on page 52.

We’re also serving up the usual complementof product reviews, columns, and interviews, sokick back, put your feet up, and dive in.

Chris Trumble, Publication Editor, CPU

Compiled by Steve Smith

W h a t ’ s H a p p e n i n g • H a r d w a r e

The suitably fiery Dell XPS 600 Renegade cooks on four GPU burners.

Dell & Nvidia Make A Quad-Eyed MonsterDell and Nvidia went officially over the top at the Consumer Electronics Show this pastJanuary with their Quad SLI PC by including four GeForce 7800 GTX cards. The DellXPS 600 Renegade can run game content in what one Nvidia executive described as“extreme HD,” including 2,560 x 1,600 display resolutions with 32X antialiasing and16X anistropic filtering. The system runs on a standard nForce4 SLI x16 motherboard,with two GPUs occupying the pair of x16 PCI-E slots and bridged to the remaining two.As of this writing, there wasn’t word yet on final cost, but the Renegade is designed towork best with Dell’s new 30-inch LCD display, which alone costs $2,199. This videocard business is starting to sound a lot like razor blade one-upmanship; if two cards arebetter than one, then four must be really good, right? ▲

Modders Get A View On Their Hard DriveJust as Dell soups up its desktop speed and design (see “Quad-Eyed Monster”), othercomponent makers are also starting to target us, thehigh-end mod community, this year. Western Dig-ital’s Raptor X line of ultra-fast 10,000rpm SATAdrives cuts a hole in the side of the ebony-toned blockto spy on the platter mechanism itself. As expected inthis latest generation of a modder favorite, WD dou-bles capacity to 150GB and cache memory to 16MB,although it still uses the 1.5GB standard SATA inter-face. The peek-a-boo drives should be available beforethe spring for $349.99. ▲

Get a window on raw speed with the new and visible Raptor.

Media Storage &Serving GoesPlug & PlayAmong the many schemes for homemedia servers and dedicated networkstorage devices we’ve seen lately, wethink the new Linksys Wireless-GMedia Storage Link Router is simpleand elegant. The router with LinksysSpeedBooster technology has a USB2.0 port that plugs any flash memoryor external hard drive directly intothe network. You can access thestored material from a networkedPC, stream the media directly fromany UPnP media adapter, or make itavailable to the Internet. By puttingthe server operation in the router, the$129 WRTSL54GS gives you thefreedom to choose or swap in anysize or type of USB storage device. ▲

Plugging any USB storage device into thenew Linksys router turnsit into a media-servingnetwork drive.

6 March 2006 / www.computerpoweruser.com

W h a t ’ s H a p p e n i n g • H a r d w a r e

HH aa rr dd ww aa rr ee MM oo ll eeIntel Comes Out . . . & Leaps

After 15 years of having “Intel Inside” our PCs, Intel has decided todrop the legendary branding so that it can “Leap Ahead.” The simple logo change (raisingthe dropped “e” and changing the typeface) took a year to develop and is designed to sym-bolize Intel’s evolution into more than a CPU provider. The Leap Ahead tag reflects Intel’srole in advancing personal technology. So now that Intel’s deconstructed this rebranding,can someone at Intel tell us what its home entertainment Viiv label is supposed to mean? ▲

Pioneer-ing Costly Blu-ray Drives

The first Blu-ray drives for PCs and home-theater play-back are hitting the market this spring, but these HD unitsmay cost you. Pioneer is among the first to market with its$995 BDR-101A PC drive that writes up to 25GB of data on a BR disc. Although aimedmore at media pros, the PC drive actually represents the low end of Pioneer’s Blu-ray line; astandalone player for the living room home theater coming in June will run you $1,800. ▲

Seagate’s Big Drive For Dominance

Seagate is enhancing the size of its company and its drives. Shortlyafter announcing its $1.9 billion buyout of rival Maxtor, Seagatepreviewed huge new products. Perpendicular recording technologysqueezes 160GB of storage onto the new 2.5-inch external portableunit, while the novel 500GB eSATA Pushbutton Backup HardDrive is external but uses the SATA interface for transfer rates up to 3Gbps. After thismerger Seagate could own nearly half of the hard drive market. ▲

The Eyebud: I Hardly Know I’m Wearing ItYou probably saw this one coming. In fact, you’ll see anyone wearing the new Eyebud 800coming from a mile away. The head-mounted unit plants an 800 x 600 OLED display infront of one eyeball, virtually the same as viewing a 105-inch screen from 12 feet away, saysmanufacturer eMagin. For any personal video player material (including the new iPod withvideo), the Eyebud’s advancedOLED screen makes it light-weight (3.6 ounces) and fuelefficient (four to six hours on acharge). This weird fashionstatement will be available tothose of us who want to adver-tise our geekiness sometime inthe middle of this year for anunspecified price. Add aBluetooth hands-free earpieceand you’re ready to audition for“Battlestar Galactica.” ▲

The latest in geek chic, the Eyebud is a personal IMAX screen for mobile media.

Is Your MouseLooking At Me?

Creative’s new Fatal1ty 1010Mouse escalates the war overgaming mouse features. Likecompetitors, it’s weight-adjustable, but Creative replacesthat big, red eyeball at the centerwith alternative cores. Variableresolution? Sure, but the Fatal1tyannounces your 400/800/1600CPI (counts per inch) status onan indicator beneath the scrollwheel that changes colors. Withrapid-fire buttons, a gold-platedUSB connector, and SpeedWire,the $49.99 Fatal1ty 1010 is start-ing to scare us. What’s next, aheated scroll wheel for addedgaming comfort? ▲

CPU / March 2006 7

W h a t ’ s H a p p e n i n g • C h i p W a t c h

Watching The Chips FallHere is pricing information for AMD and Intel CPUs.

CPU Released Original Last Month’s Currentprice price price

AMD Athlon 64 4000+ 10/19/2004 $729** $389 $335

AMD Athlon 64 FX-55 10/19/2004 $827** $799 $799

AMD Athlon 64 FX-57 6/27/2005 $1,031** $1,011 $1,011

AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 1/10/2006 $999** N/A $999**

AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core 3800+ 8/1/2005 $354** $315* $322*




AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core 4800+ 5/31/2005 $1,001** $780* $787*

Intel Pentium 4 631 3GHz 2MB cache 800MHz FSB 65nm 12/27/2005 $178** N/A $178**

Intel Pentium 4 641 3.2GHz 2MB cache 800MHz FSB 65nm 12/27/2005 $218** N/A $218**

Intel Pentium 4 650 3.4GHz 2MB cache 800MHz FSB 90nm 2/21/2005 $401** $268* $268*





Intel Pentium D 820 2.8GHz dual-core 2MB cache 800MHz FSB 90nm 5/26/2005 $241** $235* $234*

Intel Pentium D 830 3GHz dual-core 2MB cache 800MHz FSB 90nm 5/26/2005 $316** $305* $316*

Intel Pentium D 840 3.2GHz dual-core 2MB cache 800MHz FSB 90nm 5/26/2005 $530** $518* $529*

Intel Pentium D 920 2.8GHz dual-core 2MB 800MHz FSB 65nm 12/27/2005 $241** N/A $241**

Intel Pentium D 930 3GHz dual-core 2MB 800MHz FSB 65nm 12/27/2005 $316** N/A $316**



*Retail price** Manufacturer's price per 1,000 units

Other current prices, if indicated, are lowest OEM prices available through Pricegrabber.com

Compiled by DeanTakahashi

Planet82 IntroducesLow-Light CameraSensors Based OnNanotechnology

South Korean startup Planet82 haslaunched a new image sensor that cantake high-resolution photos or videosin the dark. With this new kind ofimage sensor, Planet82 says that flashpictures could become a thing of thepast. The sensor uses Single CarrierModulation Photo Detection tech-nology, which is based on a combina-tion of nanotechnology and siliconphotodiode technology that helpsincrease the sensitivity of the imagesensor to detect light in darkness. Thesensor, which is 2,000 times moresensitive than standard image sensors,is built with a standard chip factorybased on CMOS. Planet82 says thechips consume a small amount ofpower, about 82 milliwatts, and willbe priced lower than more expensiveCCD sensors. The company says con-sumer devices such as camcorders,digital cameras, and cell phones coulduse the image sensors. And nightvision systems, medical diagnostics,and environmental detection systemscould also use the sensors. ▲

Broadcom Launches Wi-Fi Video Phone Chipset

Broadcom has introduced a $39 chipset that could enable cellphones that can play video, make VoIP calls, and connect to theInternet at high speeds via Wi-Fi wireless networking connec-tions. The company says that such phones will enable businesstravelers to say good night to their children “face-to-face.” Thechipset includes the BCM1161 mobile VoIP processor, theBCM4318E AirForce One single-chip 802.11b/g Wi-Fi solution,and the BCM2702 VideoCore multimedia processor. The chipssupport H.264 and H.263 video communication standards atrates of up to 30fps, meaning that the video won’t be as jerky asprevious cell phone videos and will be more akin to TV-quality video. The chipset is in produc-tion and was on display at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this past January. ▲

PortalPlayer Moves From iPod To Personal Media Displays

PortalPlayer has introduced a chip that exploits a feature of Microsoft’s upcoming WindowsVista operating system. The SideShow feature lets a battery-operated subsystem known as apersonal media display remain on while the rest of the laptop is off. The subsystem powersa small LCD on the outside of a laptop’s case, and it lets a user scroll through phone num-bers, a daily schedule, and other information all visible through the tiny window. The so-called Preface technology draws much less power than a laptop microprocessor, and itsynchronizes with Microsoft Outlook data. The technology also helps store that data in acache where it can instantly recall it without the need for booting up, says Gary Johnson,CEO of PortalPlayer. The personal media displays will be available on laptops when Vistalaunches later this year. ▲


W h a t ’ s H a p p e n i n g • I n t e r n e t

SS ii tt eeSS ee ee ii nn ggTeach MeSemiconductorPhysics, Baby, OneMore TimeWho better to teach you about semi-conductor physics than the pop prin-cess herself, Britney Spears (britneyspears.ac/lasers.htm). Although thesite’s photos are a bit dated (pre-baby/husband), Britney does her best to help you learn all about lasercomponents. What we truly appreci-ate, though, is the site’s nod to 1930sfilm star and inventor of frequencyhopping, Hedy Lamarr. ▲

What’s Your Hobbit NameWe don’t know why, but we just loveplugging our name (and everyoneelse’s for that matter) into cool namegenerators such as The Hobbit NameGenerator (www.chriswetherell.com/hobbit/). This week we’ve found ourlong-lost Hobbit name (BrambleroseBroadbelt of Buckland) and secretElven name (Eamane Anwamane). ▲

The Poetry ArchiveOn our site seeing tour, we check outnoteworthy “serious” sites. The PoetryArchive (www.poetryarchive.org) letsyou read and listen (free) to poets fromall over the world reading their ownpoetry. Also, check out the historicalreadings of works from the likes ofAlfred Tennyson, Edith Sitwell,Langston Hughes, and many more. ▲

Compiled by Trista Kunce

Rent A Flick At The Google Video StoreWith friends and family in thefilm business, we know how diffi-cult it is to find an audience andfunding for independent films.The Internet has made indie filmdistribution a bit easier, but fund-ing a film is still a lot of work.Google’s Video Store, however,could help indie filmmakers findsponsors, a wider audience, andmaybe even make some money(even if it is only 99 cents per download). Also, the store could help revive interest inolder films and TV shows and provide users videos of programming they may havemissed on TV. Videos range from indie films to older films such as “The Lodger” (anearly Hitchcock film for only $1.99) to episodes of “CSI” to music videos provided bySony. Google says it will offer more than 5,000 titles for sale. So, after you downloadsome of your favorites, why not check out some lesser known titles? (Who wouldn’twant to spend 99 cents to watch the 9th annual World Air Guitar Championships?) ▲

Send A Forward: Go To Jail?If you’re thinking about forwarding that email chain letter, you may want to first check outthe recently rewritten online harassment and cyber-stalking law. In short, an amended sec-tion of the law says that if you anonymously annoy, abuse, threaten, or harass anyone using“any device or software that can be used to originate telecommunications or other types ofcommunications that are transmitted . . . by the Internet,” you could get fined, go to jailfor two years, or both. So, if you’re annoying people incognito via email, instant messaging,VoIP, a blog, or any other communication via the Internet and they complain, you couldbe looking at jail time or a court battle regarding free speech. ▲

Download Alfred Hitchcock’s film from the late 1920s “The Lodger,” for just $1.99.

Download videos at Google’s Video Store ranging from “MacGyver” to the latest NBA game.)

CPU / March 2006 9

W h a t ’ s H a p p e n i n g • S o f t w a r e

Now For A Little Mac Envy

That irritating friend who argues for the technical (nay, even moral) superiorityof Macs just got more ammo from the impressive iLife ’06 suite from Apple. Thismedia makers’ delight upgrades all the photo, movie, DVD editors and burners,of course. But the new iWeb site builder actually got applause at Macworld whenApple CEO Steve Jobs constructed a deft four-page site with an exceptional inter-face in less than two minutes. Blogs, video, podcasts, and even audio playlists thatpoint into the iTunes store for sampling are drag-and-drop simple. No, we won’tbe swapping our fully modded PC any time soon, but you have to admit that nottoo many PC apps get (deserved) ovations. ▲

Taking The Earth’s Pulse

Remember those natural disaster flickswhere geeky scientists monitored earth-quakes, volcanoes, and super storm activ-ity from cool monitors all plugged intoreal-time monitoring stations? That pretty much describes what Earth Alerts3.0 (www.manyjourneys.com) puts onyour Desktop free. The console pullsdown the latest information from theNational Weather Service and U.S.Geological Survey, converts into color-coded maps, and even sends you alerts—that the world is about to end. ▲

Sony Gets Rooted Out, Routed & Spanked

One of the great PR gaffes of tech in 2005 finally came to a satisfactory conclusion at theyear’s end, and it may have implications for future copy protection. Following revelationsthat a DRM scheme from Sony BMG used rootkit tactics and opened a big security hole onPCs, Sony finally took its lumps in court. The class action settlement in late December notonly required Sony to compensate buyers of the protected CDs, but it enjoined the companyfrom using the XCP and MediaMax DRM in the near future. Now we know that intrusiveDRM will cost big media big money, as Sony also agreed to pay these CD owners $7.50 incash or three digital album downloads. Users to media: Don’t tread on our PCs! ▲


W h a t ’ s H a p p e n i n g • S o f t w a r e

BIOS Upgrades Available OnlineBefore you send another motherboard to the landfill, consider upgrading the BIOS and giving your PC a new outlook on life. Here are a few recently released upgrades. Readers can check out www.cpumag.com/cpumar06/bios to see our entire upgrade list.

Motherboard Date Available URL

Abit AW8/AW8-MAX 11/30/2005 http://www.abit-usa.com/downloads/downloads.php?file=/downloads/bios/aw8/aw815.zip

Asus P5GDC Deluxe 12/21/2005 http://dlsvr03.asus.com/pub/ASUS/mb/socket775/P5GDC%20Deluxe/Gdcd1011.zip

ECS A9S 01/05/2006

Gigabyte GA81945P-G 12/26/2005 http://america.giga-byte.com/MotherBoard/FileList/BIOS/bios_945pg_f9.exe

Shuttle SN95GS V3 12/13/2005 ftp://ftp.shuttle.com/BIOS/sn95g5%20v3/sn95s3xa.bin

Tyan Tomcat K8E-SLI 01/06/2006 ftp://ftp.tyan.com/bios/2866_201.zip

Compiled by Steve Smith

Gmail Goes Mobile

If you have a Gmail account and a phone with amobile Internet browser, you may not need thatexpensive BlackBerry account anymore. Enterhttp://m.gmail.com in the WAP address box to goto your (still free) Gmail account, which is nicelyformatted for your phone screen. You can even com-pose mail; search the inbox; and, yes, call up basicimage, Word, and PDF attachments. Gmail Mobilealso has a killer feature that lets you direct dial phonenumbers in your Gmail contacts list. We can’t evenget a dial tone with our desktop Outlook. ▲

Vectorize Your Paint Box

Web builders and image editors of all sorts maywant to try Xara Xtreme (www.xara.com), whichtakes a vector graphics approach to editing every-thing from red-eye to enhanced transparency effects.Eschewing the typical bit-map image-editing ap-proach, Xtreme boasts rendering speeds two to 10times faster than competing products and wildeffects such as water ripples and crumpled page tex-tures. At $79 the program seems to be a bargain-

hunter’s way toget into sophis-ticated computer illustration and have a terrificphoto editor, too. ▲

SS oo ff tt ww aa rr eeSS hh oo rr tt ss

Put An OfficeOn Your Fob

Among its many wonders,the open-source OpenOffice.org productivity suite nowscrunches all its programsand functionality into aportable package that runsdirectly off of a removablestorage device. PortableOpenOffice.org 2.0.1 is notexactly slim, at 74.4MBzipped and 144MB installed,but the executable will startdirectly from that high-capacity thumb drive just as if it were installed on the host system. ▲

http://www.ecs.com.tw/ECSWeb/Downloads/ProductsDetail_Download.aspx?CategoryID=1&Typeid=33&detailid=517&DetailName=Bios&DetailDesc=A9S&MenuID=35&LanID=9

Dial in to your inbox with Gmail Mobile.

Xara Xtreme uses vector graphics to createstriking visual effects.

CPU / March 2006 11

TThhee LLoonngg,, LLoonngg TTaaiill OOff TThhee IInntteerrnneettThe huge economic impact of the Internet is not lower prices or even convenience,but a cavernous inventory that makes the market viable for niche goods that couldnever find a place in brick and mortar stores. Dubbed by Wired magazine editorChris Anderson as “The Long Tail” of the Internet, this phenomenon is apparent atAmazon.com where obscure titles retailers never stock account for 40% of bookrevenues. Likewise, the majority of Rhapsody online music streams come from outside its top 10,000 songs, a far cry from top 40 radio. MIT researcher ErikBrynjolfsson says the Web has permanently replaced the classically short-tailed80/20 retail rule: 20% of products in a store account for 80% of sales.

WWoorrllddwwiiddee PPoorrttaall RReevveennuueess 22000033--22000055 As Microsoft’s and AOL’s old revenue models stagnate, Googleand Yahoo! are riding to riches on the search-ad meteor.


Bronx Cheer For Vista Security!LL ong ago I made the prediction that

Microsoft would take advantage ofconsumer security hysteria to block soft-ware developers from reaching Windowsconsumers on the Internet with productsand services that compete with Micro-soft. Over the last several columns, I’vetried to show CPU readers how Micro-soft has advanced that strategy over theyears by increasingly blocking onlinesoftware distribution in the name of“better security.” One of the commoncriticisms I get from readers regardingthese columns is that all these sacrificesto usability are “worth it” and “a neces-sary evil” to have better security. Thismonth I’m going to show you that it isnot the case that any seri-ous usability sacrificesneed to be made for muchbetter security, and I’mgoing to show you howMicrosoft finally intendsto close the trap on freeuse of your computer inWindows Vista.

First, Microsoft is try-ing to teach you that lotsof pop-up warnings andapplication blocking isequivalent to giving you more “informa-tion and control” over your computer.Second, it hopes all the noise and dramaof constant pop-up warnings makes youfeel like they’re doing a lot of tough secu-rity work for you. Neither could be fur-ther from the truth. As I’ve tried toexplain in previous columns, nearly allmodern applications need access to theInternet for a variety of reasons. Theyneed the ability to actively check for anddownload security and bug patches, andthey need to hook the same features ofthe OS that malware applications typi-cally do to secure their applications ormedia from piracy. Microsoft at nopoint warns the consumer about Win-dows itself relying on this same function-ality for security and maintenance. Andthe idea that having the OS “blindly”

blocking an application’s access to specif-ic OS features without regard to why theapplication is using those features is a ter-rible message for consumers. It’s equiva-lent to recommending that you bang onyour television set to get a better picture.Although it may work sometimes (andalmost always feels satisfying), it’s farfrom being a smart idea.

Microsoft’s approach to security treatsall software applications as malign prod-ucts devised by the worst Eastern Euro-pean virus developers. Under Microsoft’ssecurity vision, Macromedia Flash is justas serious a threat to your computer as anemail from Nigeria with an attachment. Acommon-sense approach to Windows

security would recognize that not allsoftware is a security threat and that it’seasy to identify legitimate software pub-lishers reliably.

Top Five Ways To Know You Can Trust ASoftware Publisher:

1. The publisher is a real corporation,subject to the laws of the United Stateswith a physical corporate address andpublished contact information.

2. The software can easily and cleanly bevoluntarily installed and uninstalled atwill by a consumer using standardWindows install/uninstall procedures.

3. The software publisher does not mis-represent its product’s functionality tothe consumer. It presents a EULA toconsumers during software installationand provides a privacy policy.

4. The software publisher actively sup-ports and maintains its product duringthe program’s commercial lifetime withsupport services and critical patches.

5. The software publisher is willing tosign a legally binding document statingthat all of the above is true and is will-ing to pay an independent certificationagency to hold it accountable to thesesimple standards.

It’s that easy. Certifying legitimatesoftware publishers in this way wouldeliminate 99.99999% of all malignantsoftware distribution and give consumersa simple and clear way to differentiate“responsible” software from “untrustwor-

thy” software. It’s an obviousthing to do, so where is it?Microsoft has run these kindsof certification programs fordevelopers on a large scale inthe past; I used to work onthem. Microsoft could freelyand simply block everythingthat didn’t meet this simplestandard instead of dumpingthe responsibility of guessingwhat software is trustworthyin your lap. Why doesn’t it?

With the arrival of the Vista OS,Microsoft finally locks you in your celland throws away the key. For a fascinat-ing treatise on how this will work, Iencourage everyone to read “WindowsVista Security and Data ProtectionImprovements” at Microsoft’s TechNetsite (www.microsoft.com/technet/windowsVista/evaluate/feat/secfeat.mspx).

It may all sound pretty reasonable atfirst, but let’s take a closer look at theimplications of some of the statementsmade in this article.

“User Account Protection allowsusers to be productive and change com-mon settings without requiring adminis-trative privileges.”

This one sentence contains a world ofimplications for consumers. In WindowsXP Microsoft introduced protected

The Saint

Microsoft is trying to teach you that lots of

pop-up warnings and application blocking

is equivalent to giving you more “information

and control” over your computer.


accounts into the consumer version of Win-dows with the idea that consumers wouldchoose to use their computers in this modeeven though it was highly restrictive inexchange for greater PC security. What hap-pened was that despite enormous and wide-spread security problems with Windows XP,nobody actually wanted to subject themselvesto the restrictions of protected accounts.Microsoft’s conclusion from this is that youare too dumb to have that choice any longerand clearly need to have protected accountsimposed on you as the default account modefor Windows Vista. Microsoft thinks that ifit makes the restrictions more “tolerable,”you’ll happily accept your new confines.

“This prevents users from making potential-ly dangerous changes to their computers, with-out limiting their ability to run applications.”

This is a sly way of saying, “This preventsusers from voluntarily installing applicationson their computers without limiting their abil-ity to run the Microsoft software that camepreinstalled with their new PCs.” This is sillysecurity. After four years of work on Vista,Windows engineers still couldn’t figure outhow to safely install and uninstall software?What have they been working on all this time?

Now here’s my favorite part:“For those times when you do need admin-

istrator privileges, you don’t have to click RunAs because Windows Vista automaticallyprompts you, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Windows Vista automaticallyprompts you for administrator credentialswhen you need them.”

Now this is funny piece of propaganda onseveral levels. For starters, the example soft-ware is an application Microsoft most likelyintends to pressure PC OEMs to ship inorder to prevent them from bundling non-Microsoft software or services on the Desk-top of new Vista machines, so you’ll neversee this dialog for this specific Microsoftproduct. I would also love to see the answerto the question weighing on everyone’sminds: “Why do I need an administratorpassword here?” Because if I have one andthis software is harmless, this exercise is justa nuisance. And if the software is malign,

this didn’t stop me from installing it any-way, did it? Isn’t it a little ironic that Vistaisn’t even sure if Microsoft software can besafely installed?

Here, in a brief moment of clarity, Micro-soft acknowledges what I’ve said all along:Windows itself is responsible for most of thesecurity intrusions it experiences.

“Windows Services represent a large per-centage of the overall attack surface inWindows . . .”

It is Windows itself that makes invadingyour PC easy, but Microsoft would prefer it ifyou blamed other software you might want touse for your problems.

Some folks think that software developersshould just suck it up and adapt their appli-cations to deal with Microsoft-imposedobstructions in the name of better security.However, at the time of this writing, a ver-sion of Windows Vista that implementsthese security policies was unavailable todevelopers. Beta-2 of Vista, which wasscheduled for release to developers inDecember, has been canceled, so developershave no way of testing or adapting their soft-ware to support these declared security poli-cies, which will require sweeping changes tomost commercial software products eventhough Microsoft claims Vista is still onschedule to ship this year! (For more info,see www.windowsitpro.com/windowspaulthurrott/Article/ArticleID/49019/windowspaulthurrott_49019.html.)

If you, the consumer, have purchased anapplication for your computer that Micro-soft breaks in the name of security, it will beyour responsibility to recognize that this hashappened, seek out your publisher, figureout how to manually download and installthe necessary patch, and prove that you’re alegitimate owner of the software. Why?Because Microsoft prevented your softwarepublisher from automating any of this foryou. Microsoft is relying on your fear ofsecurity threats and ignorance about howlegitimate software needs to work to deteryou from trying to consume non-Microsoftsoftware and services. ▲

Microsoft thinks

that if it makes

the restrictions

more “tolerable,”

you’ll happily

accept your

new confines. Send your feedback to [email protected]

Alex St. John was one of thefounding creators of Microsoft’s

DirectX technology. He is thesubject of the book “Renegades

Of The Empire” about the creation of DirectX and

Chromeffects, an early effort byMicrosoft to create a multi-

media browser. Today Alex isPresident and CEO of

WildTangent Inc., a technologycompany devoted to deliveringCD-ROM quality entertain-

ment content over the Web.

CPU / March 2006 15

These GizmosDon’t Sing It,They Bring It

T wo roads diverged in a high-tech store, and you

took the one harder to pay for, and that has made

all the difference. Yet you shan’t be telling this with a

sigh somewhere ages and ages hence, for the expensive

backpack satellite dish you bought will be tough enough

to go anywhere your road may lead. By the by, that road

not taken went straight to a life of sloth on Homer

Simpson’s dream sofa.

by Marty Sems

NNoorrssaatt GGLLOOBBEETTrreekkkkeerr

The GLOBETrekker is either a basketball player who likesto quote Captain Picard or a backpack that turns into abroadband satellite dish (www.norsat.com). Either way,what bliss. Anywhere you roam your GLOBETrekker canautomatically lock onto a Ku-, Ka-, or X-band satellite forup to a 4Mbps connection. Rugged enough for parachut-ing, the weather-resistant GLOBETrekker is easily assem-bled without tools. And while you have your checkbookout for this $80,000 to $100,000 debit, you might as wellhire a lackey to carry your food, tent, and other trifles ofless importance than your broadband connection.

DDoommiinnoo’’ss PPiizzzzaa UUllttiimmaattee MMaann CCaavvee CCoouucchh

The battle of the sexes boils down to this: Man wants to setup his living room for comfort and entertainment. Naturally,this conflicts spectacularly with Woman’s desire for beautyand harmony in the room that every visitor sees. Hence,Woman banishes Man to the basement where he can be aspragmatic with his furnishings as he pleases. The logical con-clusion is the Ultimate Man Cave Couch, which Domino’sPizza attempted to sell for $30,000 as part of a contest(www.dominos.com/Public-EN/Extras/New+Contest).Beyond the dual LCD TVs, beer fridge, and pizza hot bags,there’s a NASCAR headset and XM Satellite Radio tuned tothe racing station. There’s an Xbox (generation 1), DVDand MP3 players, and even a cell phone. The crowningtouch, we think, is the year’s supply of deodorant.

DDyynnaaSSccaann DDSS--33552222

Like Matt Groening’s cartoon rabbit, Bongo, we occasionallydrew up our ideas for a dream house in our preteen years.Behind a shark-infested moat and above a 30-car garage wasoften a round room with a wall that formed a huge, 360-degree TV. In the case of this monster DynaScan, however,360 degrees means a cylinder-shaped display in the center ofthe room (www.dynascanusa.com). $660,000 and nearly 4tons later, you can have a truly well-rounded LED displaywith three 120-degree, 167-inch screens all showing the samething. With proper couch placement, you and yours can relaxaround the room, and everyone will have a reasonable view ofthe TV. There’s no more ideal TV for converted lighthouses.Come to think of it, a lighthouse would give the laser cannonsand armored wolverines a good defensive position . . . ▲


We’ve been rounding up SLIhardware for almost a year,ever since the technology really

started getting popular. If after any ofthose roundups you had asked whyNvidia was getting so much attentionmonth after month, we would haveanswered: availability. Nvidia made it apriority to launch product only when itwas ready to ship, in turn making it easyfor us to get our hands on a bag full ofboards and benchmark the day away.

Conversely, ATI released its competingtechnology, CrossFire, later in the game.A series of hardware delays and first-genlimitations kept it from building enthusi-asm in a market SLI dominated. In-the-know gamers just didn’t want to buyimmature, pricey hardware. Board part-ners responded by holding off on Cross-Fire. It’s been a long road for ATI, but itfinally has a beefy chipset and compellinggraphics lineup worth talking about.Availability of CrossFire-compatible hard-ware is much improved, too. So, it’s timeto give CrossFire a fair billing.

MotherboardsIt really did take awhile for mother-

board vendors to iron out the wrinkleswith their Radeon Xpress 200 CrossFireEdition designs. But it now looks likethere’s a decent spread of mainstream andenthusiast products out there. Two of themost highly respected landed in time forthis roundup, though others are in vari-ous stages of readiness.

Asus A8R-MVP

Don’t let that tan PCB fool you. TheA8R-MVP is bred to breathe life into

CrossFire Motherboards & Graphics CardsWhat Can Two Radeon X1900s Do?

CrossFire. It doesn’t rely on fancy specsor flashy colors to make an impact.Rather, the arguably mainstream boardsets out to enable CrossFire functionalityat an affordable price.

You’ll find numerous Asus hallmarks,including passive cooling across theonboard hotspots, exceptionally cleancomponent layout, and a reasonablyadvanced BIOS. What you won’t find isa superfluous feature set, enthusiast-levelBIOS, or that handy slot-spacing schemethat Asus’ SLI boards feature to keep air flowing between graphics cards. Thatdoesn’t mean that Asus scrimped on theA8R-MVP. A quick online search revealsplenty of praise for the board’s unflag-ging stability.

The A8R-MVP isn’t exactly perfect,though. Those used to Asus’ A8N-SLImay be disappointed at a shortage ofBIOS options, even if basic tweakingfunctions are enabled. A 6-channel audio

codec similarly lags behind the 8-channelimplementations out there, and relianceon ULi’s M1575 southbridge limitsSATA connectivity to four ports. A singleGbE controller seemingly reinforces themotherboard’s cross between mainstreamand high-end.

Granted, the benefit of a more modestdesign is significant cost savings, and theA8R-MVP comes in at an affordable$150. Don’t expect to give up any perfor-mance at that price-point; Asus faithfully

r e v i e w s | h a r d w a r e

A8R-MVP$150Asus

(510) 739-3777www.asus.com

DFI LANParty UT RDX200 CF-DR


preserves a solid user experience, com-plete with quick responsiveness and notone crash during my entire test suite.

DFI LANParty UT RDX200 CF-DR

We reviewed DFI’s LANParty UTRDX200 CF-DR last month (page 29)and liked what we saw, giving it a 4-CPUrating. DFI has a reputation for buildingmotherboards with the enthusiast inmind, and its LANParty family reflectsthis. Thus, you shouldn’t have been surprised to read DFI’s LANParty UTRDX200 is fully decked out. There’s noboring tan PCB here; the RDX200 is allblack with DFI’s signature yellow andorange connectors.

There’s a lot to love about DFI’sdesign, but I didn’t find it as consistent asAsus’ solution. Performance in my real-world Windows Media Encoder andWinRAR tests proved faster than theA8R-MVP. But when it came to 3Dtests, the board behaved as thoughCrossFire was off, even though the fea-ture registered as enabled. No combina-tion of memory, CrossFire graphicscards, or BIOS settings changed the fishybehavior. The one BIOS update on DFI’ssite did make a noticeable improvementto stability. Hopefully, DFI continues itssupport campaign, fixing whatever out-standing issues remain with what couldotherwise be a fantastic motherboard.

Graphics CardsWith a respectable number of Cross-

Fire motherboards on the market, ATI isnow focusing on ramping up availabilityof its compatible graphics cards. Thevideo cards span mainstream to ultra-enthusiast, meaning anyone can get in onthe action.

ATI Radeon X1900 CrossFire

Is the Radeon X1900 XT still a for-eign name to you? In case you missedthe recent launch, ATI refreshed its top-shelf offering with even more powerthan before. The Radeon X1900 XT isan adaptation of the Radeon X1800 XT,modified for much greater shader per-formance. In fact, whereas the olderR520 GPU leveraged 16 pixel shading

engines, this new R580 core wields noless than 48.

The rest of the chip’s specificationsremain the same. You get the same pro-grammable memory controller, 16 tex-ture units, eight vertex shading engines,and so on. Such an asynchronous archi-tecture is somewhat reminiscent of theoriginal Radeon core, which boasted twopixel pipelines with a total of six textureunits. If you remember back, that designdidn’t fare so well against Nvidia’sGeForce2. Thus, we asked ATI why it thought R580’s layout would be bet-ter. Apparently, games never really uti-lized the Radeon’s extra texture units.However, ATI representatives are con-vinced that tomorrow’s titles will makegratuitous use of shader math, evenmore so than today’s. Per ATI’s estima-tion, 100% of new 3D games will usepixel shaders by year’s end. So for everybenchmark the Radeon X1900 XTdominates now, it’ll purportedly do evenbetter in those to come.

In all other aspects, the RadeonX1900 XT is very much like its prede-cessor. You can’t even tell the twoboards apart, actually. Dual-slot cooler,auxiliary power input, gentle howl atboot-up—it’s all there. The high-endcard still sports 512MB of memoryclocked at 725MHz. The core still runsat 625MHz, too, though that is a much bigger accomplishment consider-ing it plays host to no less than 380million transistors.

Display output support persiststhrough the Avivo pipeline. Only now,several months after Avivo was launched,

the driver support is much better, andATI can actually claim dominance invideo decoding compared to Nvidia’sPureVideo solution. At long last, H.264acceleration is part of the package. Plus,you get the Multimedia Center suitewhen you buy a built-by-ATI X1900 XT.

If anything takes Radeon X1900 XToff your shopping list, it’ll be the price. Astandalone card sells for $549, and theCrossFire edition goes for $599. That’smore than a grand in graphics. It getseven worse if your first card is the flagshipRadeon X1900 XTX, a $649 board.Good thing the motherboards don’t costmuch, right?

To ATI’s credit, performance with apair of Radeon X1900s is nothing shortof spectacular. It was noticeably fasterthan the Radeon X1800 CrossFire setupin all my tests, and that’s exclusively dueto the tripling of pixel shading horsepow-er. The most telling result is clearlyF.E.A.R at 1,600 x 1,200 with 4X anti-aliasing and 8X anisotropic filtering,which scores 25% faster than the X1800CrossFire configuration. At 1,024 x 768the performance delta is even larger at60%. ATI obviously found a bottleneckin today’s shader-heavy games andsquelched it.

As with the Radeon X1800 CrossFirelaunch, ATI reps are again claimingimmediate availability. I’ll refrain fromcommenting this time around, just incase some “unforeseen supply issue”keeps the card from appearing on storeshelves right away. With that said, aready supply would give ATI a leg-up onNvidia’s hard-to-find 512MB GeForce7800 GTX.

Then again, Nvidia is said to havesome real heat rearing for exposure. Initialguesstimates suggest it will appear a


Radeon X1900 CrossFire

$599ATI

(905) 882-2600www.ati.com

CPU / March 2006 19

couple of months after ATI’s advance.But in case you hadn’t noticed, ATI stilllacks a Platinum Edition at its high end.Maybe there’s room for a retaliatorypunch. Only time will tell. Until then,ATI’s Radeon X1900 CrossFire is thecard to buy. It is, for all intents and pur-poses, what I had hoped R520 would be.

ATI Radeon X1800 CrossFire

After weeks of somewhat limited avail-ability, the Radeon X1800 CrossFire isfinally out and about on numerous e-tail-er sites. It’s selling for somewhat less thanthe new Radeon X1900, reflecting mar-ginally lower performance. You can evenget secondary Radeon X1800 XT boardsfor about $450. That said, ATI maintainsthat the two high-end models will co-exist for some time, providing a slightlyless expensive avenue to enthusiasts craving CrossFire performance.

Radeon X1800 CrossFire boards lookphysically identical to their RadeonX1900 counterparts, as mentioned previ-ously. You get the dual-slot coolers, dual-DVI outputs (on the secondary cards, atleast), and a raucous fan that slows tomore pleasant speeds once Windowsboots. Don’t keep your fingers crossedfor much vendor differentiation. ATIappears to manufacture all the CrossFireboards and in the odd case where add-inpartners, such as Connect3D, distributecards, all specifications carry over trans-parently. If you’ve seen one of thesecards, you’ve seen them all.

Not that we’re disappointed. Whymess with a good thing? Each RadeonX1800 XT CrossFire Edition card bears

an R520 GPU clocked at 625MHz and512MB of memory running at 720MHz.The secondary Radeon X1800 XT boardsget just a little more bandwidth, with a625MHz core and 750MHz of GDDR3.The R520 core is still plenty fast, too. Itfeatures 16 pixel shading engines, eightvertex shading engines, 16 texture units,

and the same Ultra-Threading DispatchProcessor keeping shader operations asgranular as possible. The only architectur-al element you’d really miss out on withan X1800 XT is the X1900’s massive pixelshading power.

As with the Radeon X1900-series, youmust link up an X1800 CrossFire setup


Go Green Or Go Red?

N ow that we’ve devot-ed significant energies

to testing ATI’s mother-boards and graphics cards,along with a large sam-pling of SLI hardware inprevious issues, it’s time todistill the results down intoa single comparison.

Up until now, Nvidia hasmaintained a very exclusivestranglehold on the perfor-mance market. No matterwhat ATI threw out, Nvidiacould take two of its bestcards and dance circlesaround it performance-wise. The GeForce 6800Ultra ruled its era, and the7800 GTX similarly definedspeed for the better part of a year. Even Nvidia’s “lit-tle brother” cards, the Ge-Force 6800 GT and 7800GT, combined to crush ATI flagships.

The first round ofCrossFire hardware built

on Radeon X850-classprocessors wasn’t enoughto catch up. That annoying1,600 x 1,200, 60Hz limita-tion sure didn’t help,either. But the secondstrike centering on RadeonX1800 certainly madeenthusiasts sit up and lis-ten. Now that RadeonX1900 is out (and suppos-edly available by the timeyou read this), ATI hasdone the undoable, eclips-ing SLI. If you’re a perfor-mance fanatic, RadeonX1900 CrossFire is going to be your choice as ofright now.

Keep a couple things inmind, though. First, there’sa massive constituency ofSLI owners who arealready equipped to sup-port the next salvo inNvidia’s double-barreledlineup. Don’t switch toCrossFire just because ATI

is in the lead today. Nvidiasupposedly has somethingbig in the works, which willhopefully drop right intoyour existing platform.Secondly, ATI is reportedlyputting the finishing touch-es on RD580, its next-gen-eration chipset offering twotrue x16 slots, expected tobest the current dual x8solution. Depending on thechipsets other improve-ments, it might be worth await. Finally (and this oneis much more forward-looking), you have to con-sider the coming of Vistaand DirectX 10. Word onthe street is that DX 10won’t be backward com-patible with previous APIs.In other words, don’texpect a $1,500 systemupgrade today to be worthmuch of anything onceVista ships, supposedlylater this year. ▲

CrossFire Graphics Performance

A TI had the opportunity to watch Nvidia stumble through growing pains with its SLI technology. Although CrossFire came much later, it also managed to sling a

handful of benefits gleaned from the bones of first-gen SLI hardware. As a result, I didn’tencounter any of the compatibility issues related to graphics, power problems, or soft-ware crashes in my CrossFire testing.

My test bed featured an Athlon 64 FX-57 processor, 2GB of OCZ DDR400 memoryrunning CAS2 timings, the requisite graphics cards, a 36GB Western Digital Raptor harddrive, and Windows XP with SP2. The Radeon X1800 and X1600 CrossFire platformsemployed ATI’s Catalyst 5.13 driver pack and a press release driver versioned 8.203.3powered the Radeon X1900. ▲

Graphics Card Clock Speed

ATI Radeon 625MHz core; X1900 XT 720MHz memory

ATI Radeon 625MHz core;X1800 XT 720MHz memory

Sapphire Radeon 590MHz core;X1600 XT 690MHz memory


through a dongle, which is included withthe CrossFire card. That dongle enableshigh-speed communication between bothboards. Ugly as it might be, the solutionworks, and even better since ATI hasupgraded the compositing engine used to combine images from each card.Previously held to 1,600 x 1,200 at 60Hz,the Radeon X1800 setup (and X1900, forthat matter) handles resolutions up to2,560 x 1,600 at 70Hz. Much better.

We have already previewed the perfor-mance of the Radeon X1800 CrossFireand determined that it bested Nvidia’sGeForce 7800 GTX 256MB in SLI(February 2006 CPU, page 29). The512MB cards still aren’t any more avail-able now than they were then, preclud-ing a more evenly weighted comparisonbetween the two heavyweights.Nevertheless, it’s interesting to com-pare the X1800 to ATI’s newestbaby, the X1900. The two actuallyhang pretty closely in most cases.F.E.A.R. is the big exception. Andgiven the X1900’s emphasis onshader math, it’s only natural topostulate on what’s holding theX1800 back there.

So, is it worth snagging a RadeonX1800 CrossFire at this point?

Probably not. ATIdoes say it will bearound for a while,but the X1900 isonly slightly moreexpensive, and it is much more of agraphics card.

Sapphire Radeon X1600 XT

There isn’t a lot of sex appeal wrappedup in the mainstream game. It’s usually alot of high-end technology dummieddown a bit with a nice, juicy price tag.The Radeon X1600 XT is more interest-ing, though, because it’s more svelte thaneither the X1800 or X1900.

Physically, the X1600 is easier to han-dle. It’s shorter, lighter, cut down to asingle slot, and power-friendly. Not thatan absence of an auxiliary power connec-tor makes a difference in your CrossFirerig, but it does simplify the installationof one card in a SFF box.

You’ll also have an easier time buyingRadeon X1600 XT cards. There’s no pri-mary or secondary board with proprietaryconnectors and compositing engines.

One Radeon X1600 is the same as thenext; you just need two for CrossFire. Thelatest drivers allow Radeon X1600 cards tocommunicate over PCI-E, circumventingthe dongle entirely.

Sapphire’s Radeon X1600 XT cards arereference fare, meaning the core spins at 590MHz, while 256MB of GDDR3plugs along at 690MHz. Each boardsports 12 pixel shading engines, five ver-tex shaders, a scant four texture units, andfour render back-ends. That’s quite a cutfrom any of ATI’s higher-end offerings,and the resulting performance is why yousee Radeon X1600 XT cards selling nowfor just over $150.

I was especially hard on the RadeonX1600 XT when it debuted. However,given the ease with which the card slidesinto CrossFire mode and in light of its drastically reduced street price, I’mwilling to accept the card as a solid main-stream contender. It also makes for aninexpensive gateway into the addictingworld of multicard rendering. ▲

by Chris Angelini

3DMark05 v1.2.0

1,024 x 1,600 x768 x 32 1,200 x 32

13192 12319

12495 10905

8562 5379

F.E.A.R.

1,024 x 1,600 x 1,200768 4XAA/8XAF

131 61

82 49

52 40

Quake 4

Custom demo Custom demo 1,6001,024 x 768 Ultra x 1,200 4XAA/8XAF

116.7 107

113.1 100.2

86.3 34.7

Half-Life 2

1,024 x 768; 1,600 x 1,200 4XAA/Custom demo 8XAF; Custom demo

117.61 114.42

116.49 114.53

109.05 41.89


Radeon X1800 CrossFire

$569ATI

(905) 882-2600www.ati.com

Radeon X1600 XT$165

Sapphire (909) 594-0597

www.sapphiretech.com

CPU / March 2006 21

Last year I did the right thing.Because I live near Intel in Hills-boro, Ore., I dropped off two an-

cient PCs, a scanner, and a monitor atthe company’s annual recycling event.But I can’t be too righteous. In a recenthome move, one 14-inch CRT monitorwas idly tossed into a garbage bin.We’ve chucked batteries, wires, kids’toys, and even cheap cameras and audioplayers. You too, eh?

According to a report by the BusinessCommunications Company, e-wasteaccounts for 1% of all solid waste indeveloped countries and is expected toreach 2% by 2010 as product life cyclesshorten and the obsolescence of electronicequipment continues to climb at morethan 10% annually. Some of this materialgoes to responsible recyclers, who willseparate the plastics from metals undersafe, efficient conditions and sell theaggregate materials. Remainder metals areground into fine powder, smelted, andthen mined for valuable metals such asgold, silver, and platinum.

However, recycl ing efforts oftenrequire government-level regulation inorder to be environmentally friendly.Much e-waste is brokered to the highestbidder for processing. One document onactivist group BAN’s (Basel ActionNetwork; www.ban.org) s ite states:“About 80% of the e-waste generated inthe U.S. is exported to India, China,and Pakistan.”

Although the author may mean that80% of exported e-waste is being sent tothese locations, nevertheless much ofour discarded electronics are contribut-ing to a major health hazard for thoseleast likely to be aware of the problem orprotect themselves. The same BAN arti-cle notes, for example, “Many of India’scorporations burn e-waste such as PCmonitors, PCBs, CDs, motherboards,cables, toner cartridges, light bulbs, andtube-l ights in the open along withgarbage, releasing large amounts of mer-cury and lead into the atmosphere.”

The DangerAn average 17-inch CRT contains 2 to

4 pounds of lead, much of which is in theglass. A pile of 100 motherboards will alsotypically contain more than 2 pounds oflead. Lead exposure can damage the kid-neys, blood, central nervous system, andcause a wide range of fetal disorders.

That same stack of 100 motherboardswil l probably also contain about 7pounds of BFRs (brominated flameretardants), which also show up inwiring, cases, and many other compo-nents. There are different types of BFRs,and some are more harmful than others.According to the EPA, BFRs can breakdown cells, inhibit brain functions, andcause other problems.

The cadmium used in batteries canaccumulate in the body and contrib-ute to kidney disease, lung damage, and

osteoporosis. Mercury use is falling, butthe metal is still present in CRTs, switch-es, sensors, relays, and other componentsand is well-known for its harmful effectson the brain. Chromium is used as a steelcorrosion protector, but when absorbedcan cause a wide range of allergic reac-tions and DNA damage. Most electron-ics, from cabling to cases, use PVC(polyvinyl chloride), which releases diox-ins that are notorious cancer sources.

If e-waste were treated like nuclearwaste, there would be less danger. Butbecause the vast bulk of e-waste is dis-carded, buried, and/or burned, thesetoxins escape into our water and air withuncanny ease.

Seeking SolutionsThe EPA estimated that 3.2 million

tons of e-waste went into U.S. landfills in1997: A number the EPA predictedwould up to quadruple in the short-term.Yet ever since the Energy Star programbowed in 1992, the U.S. government hasincreasingly lagged behind its Europeancounterparts in promoting “green”approaches to technology. This is atragedy on many levels, not least of whichis the potential money saved throughenvironmental efforts. In 2004 alone, theEnergy Star program estimates that itsmeasures saved roughly $10 billion inenergy costs, illustrating that environmen-tal risks aren’t only health-related. Goinggreen is also about reducing waste heat,saving energy, protecting the atmosphere,lowering noise pollution, and makingproducts more ergonomically sound.

The Swedish Confederation of Profes-sional Employees (TCO) has developed aseries of certifications over the past 15years designed to instill a high level ofenvironmental and ergonomic quality inIT and mobile electronics devices. TCOcertifications are often seen as being morestringent than U.S. certifications, so ifyou’re deciding between two items andone of them has a TCO sticker, go TCO.

A sea of TV housings, cathode ray tubes, computers,monitors, and other imported electronic waste notsalable at the Alaba market in Lagos, Nigeria, isdumped in a nearby swamp. Source: Basel Action Network



Similarly, and perhaps more influen-tially, the European Union created theRoHS (Restriction of Hazardous Sub-stances) directive, which is slated tobecome effective July 1, 2006. RoHS(pronounced either “roe-hoss” or“rows”) deeply impacts the IT worldbecause it sets l imits on al lowedamounts of lead, mercury, cadmium,hexavalent chromium, and the PBB andPBDE types of flame retardants. RoHSis only a directive, not an enforceablelaw, but because many companies arerequiring RoHS compliance in theirorder bids, manufacturers around theworld are complying.

Go Green!OK, enough heavy stuff. Let’s talk

green gear you can feel good about buy-ing. Obviously, saying that one productis more environmentally friendly thananother can be quite subjective. So con-sider these as examples of green technolo-gy rather than any kind of definitive list.This is to help you think about makingthe environment one of the several crite-ria you ponder before purchasing. Agreen buy might cost you a few dollarsmore or throttle a bit of performance, butit also may save you money and help pro-tect the world around you.

Motherboards

The greenest motherboards I’ve yetrun across are those from Fujitsu-Siemens (www.fsc-america.com). Thecompany has painstakingly detailed thetransitions it’s made in its manufactur-ing processes toward environmentalfriendliness, and the result is a series oflead- and halogen-free motherboards,both in content and in soldering pro-cess. (Cheap motherboards sometimesleave trace materials from fabrication onthe board, making them toxic to thetouch.) One hallmark Fujitsu-Siemens

offers is ISO 14000/14001 certification,the internationally accepted spec for anEMAS (Environmental Waste Manage-ment System), which covers companyprocedures ranging from end-of-lifeproduct recovery to employee trainingon environmental issues.

Look closely at most Intel mother-boards now, and you’ll find the words“Lead Free” on the PCB. Intel started itslead-free movement back in 2001, andtoday the effort spans most of the compa-ny’s product lines, including flash memo-ry and CPUs. According to Intel, all of itsproducts now meet or beat RoHS specs.The company also looks for other greenopportunities when possible.

CPUs

AMD has historically trounced Intelon power consumption, but with Intel’smove to “total performance” over rawspeed, the gap is closing. The Athlon X2,for instance, sports TDP (thermal designpower) ratings of 89W or 110W, de-pending on the part. The Pentium Dstarts at 95W then jumps to 130W.According to AMD spokesman DamonMuzny, AMD gives its numbers as typi-cal power consumption, while Intel specsout maximum consumption, a fact thatmay not always work in AMD’s favor.The Turion 64, for example, comes witheither 25W or 35W typical consumptionwith 533MHz FSB Pentium M sports a27W maximum spec. According to Intel,typical Pentium M consumption’s in thesingle digits. That said, AMD is quick topoint us to independent sources rangingfrom LaptopLogic.com to AnandTechshowing AMD power advantage overIntel, although even Muzny concedesthat Intel’s new Core Duo chip tilts thegame back in Intel’s favor for now. Thus,in the mobile world, I’d still give Intelthe green thumbs up. Under moderate to heavy use on the desktop, though,

AMD’s Cool‘n’Quiet still gets my vote.The EPA apparently agreed when itawarded Energy Star recognition to thetechnology last year. How things heat upwith 65nm and multicore heading deepinto 2006 remains to be seen.

Power Supplies

A-PFC (active power factor correction)gets a lot of buzz in the PSU space. Whenwe asked Antec for a layman’s explana-tion, David Taue, marketing contentmanager emailed back:

“When power was delivered to yourhome from the power plant, there wassome power wasted during the transmis-sion because the phase angle of the volt-age and current don’t align with eachother. Therefore, you don’t fully utilizethe amount of power sent from thepower plant. The power that was wastedduring the transmission is called reactivepower. Active power factor correction isa circuitry that contains MOS, choke,and capacitors. It helps to harmonizethe phase angle and thus minimize thepower wasted. In another word, i tdecreases reactive power.”

Active PFC can achieve a power fac-tor (the ratio of real to apparent power)of up to 0.95, not far from the ideal of1.0. Given that the power companycharges you based on your apparentdraw rather than your real draw, a highPFC can save you some change over thelong term. More important is the overallpower efficiency of a PSU, the percent-age of real power drawn by the powersupply that is passed to the rest of thesystem. SilverStone and Enermax gener-ally do well on this count. Antec has his-torically fared worse, but the new NeoHE (high efficiency) line features effi-ciency up to 85%. (In contrast, testssponsored by the California EnergyCommission found the Neo HE 430had about 70% efficiency. The Coolmax


CPU / March 2006 25

completed its move to 100% lead-freemanufacturing. OCZ’s Alex Mei notes,“We are moving quickly to be 100%green on all products and packaging.This is to ensure that we are ready forRoHS and WEEE [Waste Electrical andElectronic Equipment; the European sis-ter directive to RoHS] directives well inadvance. We have been taking steps forsome time, and you will see all OCZproducts be environmentally friendlyregardless of region. This goes from theenthusiast memory module all the wayto next-gen thumb drives.”

Again, in a space where all productsmay appear environmentally identical, letthe green certifications be your guide.

Monitors

The monitor can account for up to40% of a PCs total power consumption.One of the most environmentally rep-utable display companies is NECDisplay Solutions’ line of LCD moni-tors. NEC predominantly sells intobusinesses, which tend to emphasizetotal cost of ownership much more thanconsumer lines. NEC’s Total Trade pro-gram lets owners swap old monitors(which are then shipped to a responsiblethird-party recycler) and receive credittoward new NEC displays. To date, theprogram has gathered more than 5 mil-lion pounds of displays for recycling. Inaddition to offering power management

software beyond what Windows and theEPA (with its Energy Star Ez Save appli-cation) both provide, NEC is also a sup-porter of the Million Monitor Drive,which aims to save 215 million KWh ofenergy annually.

That said, keep an eye on the specs. Astunning unit such as NEC’s 90GX2consumes 52W in regular use. Sam-sung’s s imilar (and less expensive)930BF chews through only 38W andbears TCO’99 certification. In any case,LCDs consume about three times lesspower than CRTs, and LCDs invariablycontain fewer hazardous materials thanequivalent-sized tube monitors.

MultipliersAlthough “multipliers” may not be

the best term, if you’re a multiple sys-tem user, consider ways to cut down onyour device count through hardware andsoftware options that let one set ofresources serve numerous users. Thinkof KVM switches. Why incur the costand environmental impact of four setsof monitors , keyboards, mice, andspeakers when just one set with a suit-able KVM switch would serve as well?(See our recent KVM roundup on page18 in the November 2005 issue ofCPU.) KVM extenders can push yoursharing range far across a building.

Sometimes this process works inreverse. Linux users can check outUserful’s Desktop Multiplier (www.userful.com). One PC stocked with multiplevideo cards can serve up to 10 sets ofmonitors (including dual-head arrange-ments), keyboards, and mice. ▲

by William Van Winkle


CT-400EE scored only 65%.) PCPower & Cooling’s flagship Turbo-Cool 850 SSI and 1KW boast 85% effi-ciency with 0.99 PFC.

Hard Drives

Truth be told, there isn’t much greenvariance among drive vendors. Accord-ing to Chris Hazen, a principal directorwith the WSP Group, which advisescompanies around the world on envi-ronmental issues, hard drives tend tohave about 80% recyclable content.Most of this is steel and aluminum.Some drives will consume less power.For instance, the Maxtor Diamond-Max 11 500GB averages 13.6W at seekand 8.1W at idle. Seagate’s Barra-cuda 7200.9 500GB sports 12.6W atseek and 7.4W idle. Both drives meetRoHS spec. However, Seagate has been more vocal in promoting its environmental efforts.

Memory

This is an area where many compa-nies are just catching on to environmen-talism. Corsair, for example, recently

Women picking through wires torn out of computers in Guiyu, China. The wires aresorted by day and burned by night in this village. SOURCE: BASEL ACTION NETWORK


Six months ago, I thought ATIwould dominate

the IGP world, and nowI was hard-pressed tofind just one shippingmotherboard newer thanCPU’s last big mother-board roundup. (See theAugust 2005 issue of CPU, page 60.) Mean-while, Nvidia GeForce-based motherboards are debuting left and right. Still, a comparison seemsin order for those whowant to start humbleand upgrade later. Forconsistency, all boardsare microATX and Sock-et 939. So given my limited sampling, whichchipset is tops and whohas the better design?We grabbed 2GB of Corsair 3500-LLPRO memory, a Maxtor 200GBDiamondMax 10, ATI’s All-In-WonderX1800 XL (figuring microATX IGPboards are great HTPC foundations),and an Athlon FX-55 to find out.

Biostar TForce 6100-939The 6100/410 pairing is aimed at

entry-level home systems. The 6100 IGPfeatures a 425MHz graphics clock asopposed to the 6150’s 475MHz, and, as Iunderstand from Biostar, the memorycontroller on the more expensive 430 isalso superior to the one on the 410. Al-though my benchmark numbers mightshow this in abundance, other 6100boards show only a negligible differencebetween the two southbridges. This leadsme to believe there may be somethingamiss either with my board or the early

An IGP Sampler PlateWhich IGP Board Is Tops?

draft BIOS on my sam-ple. Excluding memoryperformance, Biostar’sCPU and HDD num-bers are competitive.Graphics results clearlytrail the Gigabyte board,though, which also usesthe 6100 IGP.

Interestingly, Biostarplants a high number of overclocking featureson this board. You canchange the voltages onthe CPU and memoryand speeds on the CPU,memory, PCI-E bus, andchipset. There’s the ONE(overclocking navigatorengine) tool for newbies,although Biostar does not recommend this forFX-based systems, andyou can store up to 50

BIOS configurations in the CRP (CMOSReloading Program).

The inclusion of a backplane extensionwith coax and optical SPDIF-out jacks isa thoughtful touch, as is the placing of thex1 slot closest to the CPU so your graph-ics card doesn’t snag on open memoryslot retention tabs. But I can’t ignore thatthis board is only $5 less than Gigabyte’s,and, at least with my early sample, youlose a lot of performance for the money.

Gigabyte GA-K8N51GMF-9There are three reasons to opt for an

nForce 430 over the 410: two moreSATA II ports (and the additional 0+1and 5 RAID options they enable),ActiveArmor Firewall, and Nvidia’sGigabit LAN controller. Any one of thoseis enough to justify spending $5 morethan a 6100/410 board such as Biostar’s;

put together, their appeal seems irre-sistible. The 6100 still gives you Pure-Video and Shader Model 3.0, but youlose the 6150’s TV encoder, DVI output,higher-quality scaling, and HD (MPEG-2and WMV) playback decoding. Thus, I’dbe reluctant to recommend this board for a media center box, but it’s excellentfor a budget desktop.

Absent here are the many “dual” fea-tures found on Gigabyte’s higher-endboards, but you stil l get reinforcedSATA ports, 7.1 analog jacks, an inte-grated 6-wire 1394a port, a few frequen-cy overclocking options, and some basicutilities. Why Gigabyte threw in a paral-lel port when there’s no SPDIF connec-tor in sight is a mystery.

Performance on this board is good ifnot spectacular. MSI’s IGP performanceis clearly ahead, but Gigabyte obviouslycomes away with the best mix of speedand stability among our Nvidia entrants.For the money, the GA-K8N51GMF-9is solid value.

MSI K8NGM2-FIDAfter a stellar showing on its IGP scores

(more than is merely accounted for by thedefault running speed of 2,612MHz), I hit an immediate barrier with theK8NGM2-FID when I switched to mydiscrete graphics card. The system bootednormally right up to the point of enteringthe Windows GUI, whereupon the video


Nvidia GeForce IGP Boards

Vendor Model Chipset

Biostar TForce 6100-939 GeForce 6100on IGP nForce 410

Gigabyte GA-K8N51GMF-9 GeForce 6100on IGP nForce 430

MSI K8NGM2-FID GeForce 6150on IGP nForce 430

Radeon Xpress 200 IGP Boards

MSI RS482M4-ILD ATI RS482

on IGP ATI SB450

TForce 6100-939$74.99 • Biostar

www.biostar-usa.com

Specs: Chipset: Nvidia GeForce6100 + nForce 410; Memory: 4

DDR400; Slots: 1 PCI-E x16, 1 PCI-E x1, 2 PCI; Drive ports: 2 PATA, 2

SATA II; Audio Realtek ALC655AC’97 5.1 (inc. SPDIF extension);LAN: Realtek RTL8201BL 10/100


cut out. At first I was stumpeduntil I noticed—for the first timein nearly two years of bench testinguse—the +3.3V rail LED on myOCZ PowerStream had gone red.Without the PCI-E card, it wentgreen. Putting on an X850 XTcard yielded another overdraw.And so I walked away with no dis-crete scores but a couple of ques-tions about which corners MSI’sengineers might have cut.

One thing that wasn’t cut wasvideo output options. In additionto having both DVI and VGA onboard, MSI throws in a backplaneextension for S-Video and compo-nent TV, which is what you wantwith Nvidia’s top scaling, TVencoding, and HD decodingoptions at your fingertips. There’salso a coax SPDIF extension inaddition to 7.1 analog output.MSI’s software bundle is modest.

A board revision that fixes my voltageissue would make this board very alluringfor under $90, so keep your eyes peeled.

MSI RS482M4-ILD The RS482M4-ILD is the ATI twin to

the K8NGM2-FID, right down to thecomponent and S-Video extension. I pur-posefully chose these two MSI boards as anearly equivalent ATI vs. Nvidia squaringoff. And what I found was that theRS482’s really on par with the 6100/430combo in terms of performance. For $5

more, a stable MSI 6150/430 boardwould crush this ATI unit without hesi-tation, and not just because this unit forsome reason wouldn’t load Half-Life 2for me when running the IGP.

That’s not because ATI’s southbridgemissed the SATA II boat. The 3Gbpsship has yet to reach the desktop world.Nvidia can now run side-by-side IGPand discrete video for dual- or triple-head output like ATI. But ATI contin-ues to leave Nvidia’s firewall, advancedRAID, nTune, and similar advantages

unchallenged after having years to fightback. Worse yet, the GeForce 6000 linehas PureVideo while the RS4XX isn’tand will never be Avivo compliant.Perhaps I shouldn’t be so surprised thatall of the ATI chipset news now focuseson CrossFire. The RS482M4-ILD is anexcellent board with good performanceand a smattering of tweaking options,but Nvidia has rendered it somewhatadrift and obsolete. ▲



3DMark05 v1.2.0

Game score 1,024 x 768

7123521

7253649

*725

7187

667

Dr. DivX

845MB VOB at1000/128K, single pass

15:5416:18

14:5515:02

*14:30

14:54

15:00

Doom 3 (demo1)

800 x 600 1,280 x high 1,024 ultra

72.6 72.29.1 N/A

119.9 73.712.6 N/A

* *13.8 N/A

120.9 72.3

13.1 N/A

Half-Life 2

800 x 600 1,280 x 1,024no AA/AF 4XAA/8XAF

87.2 76.87.2 N/A

96.5 79.711 N/A

* *24.8 N/A

97.9 78.5

Won't load Won't load

PCMark 2005

System CPU Memory HDD

4090 3696 2960 54102570 3699 2814 5367

4128 3678 4049 54182963 3679 3940 5424

* * * *3080 3704 4329 5363

4123 3652 3997 4943

2720 3651 3961 4964

GA-K8N51GMF-9$79 • Gigabyte

www.giga-byte.com


DDR400; Slots: 1 PCI-E x16, 1PCI-E x1, 2 PCI; Drive ports: 2

PATA, 4 SATA II; Audio RealtekALC880 HD Audio; LAN:

VITESSE 8201 (Gigabit); 1394a

K8NGM2-FID$89.99 • MSI

www.msicomputer.com


DDR400; Slots: 1 PCI-E x16, 1PCI-E x1, 2 PCI; Drive ports: 2

PATA, 4 SATA II; Audio RealtekALC880 HD Audio; LAN:

VITESSE 8201 (Gigabit); 1394a

RS482M4-ILD $84.99 • MSI

www.msicomputer.com

Specs: Chipset: ATI RS482 +SB450; Memory: 4 DDR400;

Slots: 1 PCI-E x16, 1 PCI-E x1, 2PCI; Drive ports: 2 PATA, 4SATA (150); Audio Realtek

ALC880 HD Audio; LAN:Realtek 8100C 10/100; 1394a

CPU / March 2006 29

I ntel has been tuning up its trumpet toherald the arrival of Presler, and for good

reason. The dual-core Pentium ExtremeEdition 955 is faster and ushers in Intel’slong-developed Virtualization Technology.

AMD isn’t about to let a 3.46GHz chipwith no less than 4MB of L2 cache spreadbetween two cores steal its thunder. TheAthlon 64 FX-60, AMD’s answer to thePentium Extreme Edition 955, representsthe first dual-core model to be granted anFX moniker. In the past, FX chips haveleveraged higher clock frequencies to deliver

the best possible gameperformance. But repre-sentatives at AMD feelthat it’s now worth giving up a little clockspeed in the pursuit of greater parallelism.

In cases, AMD made a good call. TheAthlon 64 FX-60 is a real rocket in media-encoding apps such as Windows MediaEncoder 9. It also smokes past Intel’s besteffort in Quake 4, thanks to the latestthreading-aware patch. Performance gainsare less pronounced in single-threadedgames such as F.E.A.R. and Half-Life 2.

The compromise issmall, though. With aclock speed of 2.6GHz,

the Athlon 64 FX-60 trails the 2.8GHzFX-57 only slightly in some games. Mean-while, it dominates most other apps. Evenmore notably, it rocks the Pentium Ex-treme Edition 955 and the 840.

Enthusiasts may have a hard time swal-lowing the $1,000-plus price tag. And thenew AM2 socket interfaces coming soon. Ifyou really can’t wait, AMD’s Athlon 64FX-60 is tops. Otherwise, hold tight untilthe next-generation platform emerges. ▲

by Chris Angelini


AMD Athlon 64 FX-60

Specs: Dual-core; 2.6GHz; 1MB L2 cache 2; 128KB L1 cache 1; 128-bit DDR memory controller(dual-channel); 2GHz HyperTransport link; Socket 939; 110W max thermal power; 90nm process

memory? Why is Sapphireusing Samsung GC16 RAMrated for 600MHz when the

stock frequency is at 490MHz? It turns out that you can flash the card

with a widely available BIOS file (startyour search at techPowerUp.com) andunlock the four unexposed pixel pipe-lines. It’s then possible to crank the coreand memory clock speeds up higher usingany number of overclocking utilities, evento 520MHz/560MHz, the same speed asATI’s $300 Radeon X850 XT. The per-formance improvements are significant,making Sapphire’s Radeon X800 GTO2

a solid value. ▲

by Chris AngeliniSpecs: R480 graphics core (400MHz); 256MB of GDDR3 memory (490MHz); dual-DVI; 2free games; component output

W e all love to dream about high-end hardware. But when my

friends talk to me about what they’rebuying, rarely do I hear about ExtremeEdition processors or Platinum Editiongraphics cards. Dreamy as that stuff maybe, it’s just too expensive. Enter Sap-phire’s Radeon X800 GTO2, a main-stream board with a price tag reasonableenough for any frugal gamer.

By default, ATI’s Radeon X800 GTOsports 12 pixel pipelines and runs at400MHz. The graphics processor is usu-ally complemented by 256MB of memoryon a 256-bit bus. Naturally, performanceis reasonable. You can pretty much playany first-person shooter, so long as you

don’t crank the eye-candyextras up too high. And at its stock settings, the Sapphire Radeon X800 GTO2 is no excep-tion, easily navigating through today’s most demanding titles.

But at $200, the card is a tadpricier than competing Radeon X800GTO products. Surely there must besomething more to Sapphire’s offeringthan its mainstream veneer would other-wise suggest. Indeed, the GPU under-neath that single-slot cooler is an R480;the same graphics processor you’d find ina Radeon X850 XT. And what about the

Athlon 64 FX-60$1,031

AMD(408) 749-4000www.amd.com

Athlon 64 FX-60 Pentium Extreme Pentium Extreme Edition 955 Edition 840

Dr. DivX (min:sec) 12:00 12:10 13:29

WinRAR (500MB Compression) 3:52 3:42 4:12

PCMark05 6212 5903 5480

F.E.A.R. (1,024 x 768) 107fps 87fps 85fps

Sapphire X800 XT GTO2 12 Pipes; 400MHz/490MHz 16 Pipes; 520MHz/560MHz

Quake 4 (16 x 12) 58.8 71.4

Half-Life 2 (16 x 12) 100.97 110.2

F.E.A.R. (16 x 12) 31 39

Radeon X800 GTO2

$200Sapphire

(909) 594-0597www.sapphiretech.com

Sapphire Radeon X800 GTO2


I t’s easy to create massive storage arraysusing 3.5-inch drives. At up to 500GB a

pop, you can achieve multiple terabytes inan average-sized midtower. But whatabout notebooks, SFF boxes, and bladeservers? Expanding storage space in amore constrained environment isa real problem.

That’s why Seagate ismaking a transition fromthe longitudinal record-ing techniques used todayto perpendicular recording,which effectively increases arealdensity. According to Seagate, longi-tudinal media becomes less stable asdensity rises. The new perpendicular tech-nology reorients the bits in such a waythat density goes up without instability.

Consequentially, Seagate is now hittingfresh capacity heights with its 2.5-inch

drive lineup. Its Momentus 5400.3 isavailable in sizes up to 160GB (40GBlarger than the previous generation). Atthe same time, representatives at Seagatesay the Momentus 5400.3 performs morelike a 4,200rpm drive when it comes to

battery consumption. Add in a five-year warranty, a lower-than-ever

acoustic footprint, and drasti-cally improved shock resis-

tance. The Momentus5400.3 sure looks like itwill be a real winner.

Unfortunately, perpen-dicular recording technology is

still in its infancy and drive manufac-turers are carefully choosing the projectsthat will receive the most distinct benefit.Seagate sees ATA-100 notebooks drives asthe top priority. But between now and2007, manufacturers expect 2.5-inch

SATA drives to become more prevalent. Atthat point, companies will apply perpen-dicular recording there, as well, along with3Gbps, hot-swap, NCQ, and all of theother notable SATA features. Eventually,perpendicular recording should show upeverywhere, overcoming the areal densitylimitations of today’s desktop drives, too.

Seagate has already demonstrated arealdensities as high as 245Gb per squareinch using perpendicular recording andestimates that 500Gb per inch is feasible.At those levels, your standard 3.5-inchdesktop drive will store up to 2TB of dataand a 2.5-inch mobile hard disk will hold500GB. Crazy, huh? ▲

by Chris Angelini


Seagate Momentus 5400.3 P r e v i e w

Specs: 160GB; 8MB data buffer; perpendicular recording technology; ATA-100; 2.5-inchform factor; 5,400rpm; 5-year warranty

Tyan Transport GT20 B5350

software firewall in front of your LAN.And the Adaptec SATA controller enablesRAID 0, 1, and 10 across its four ports.

Noise is probably the Transport GT20’sbiggest problem. A quintet of 40mm fansspinning at 15,000rpm is just loud. Butthen again, I’ve never heard a rackmountserver that wasn’t noisy. Be ready to put thechassis in a tabletop enclosure where itwon’t bother anyone.

By itself, the GT20 costs a little less than$700. Although that price probably won’tlet you roll your own server for under agrand, it’s definitely possible to build apowerful dual-processor box with SATARAID storage for less than $2,000. ▲

by Chris Angelini

Transport GT20 B5350$695Tyan

(510) 651-8868www.tyan.com

Specs: Dual Socket 604 support for Intel Xeon; Intel E7320 MCH; Intel 6300ESB; 8 DIMMslots supporting up to 16GB of DDR333; integrated Adaptec AIC-8110 SATA controller;dual GbE; Rage XL graphics; 500W PSU; 4 hot-swap drive support

S o you build your own gaming boxes,but do you have what it takes to

deploy a 1U rackmount server? Maybeyou’ve struggled to find the right chassis,a motherboard that fit, and so on.Everything’s much easier now. Manyserver board manufacturers have begunpackaging barebones boxes similar towhat you’d find in a SFF system. Thisincludes chassis, motherboards, powersupplies, and cooling solutions. Tyan’sTransport GT20 is such a product.

Everything about the Transport GT20exudes quality. Leads from the 500Wpower supply are already connected to themotherboard and SATA backplane. All ofthe cooling fans are similarly ready to go.In fact, you can literally drop two proces-sors, a couple of memory modules, andyour hard drives into the GT20 and beloading an OS in about 15 minutes.

The system is nicely expandable andflexible, as well. It supports a pair of IntelXeon DP processors right up to the Irwin-dale core (Paxville won’t work). An arrayof eight memory slots accommodate up to 16GB of registered DDR333 modules.Two Gigabit Ethernet controllers give youthe flexibility to operate the server as a

Momentus 5400.3$325

Seagate(831) 438-6550

www.seagate.com

CPU / March 2006 31

U ltrasone advertises the HFI-700 asbeing “wide-screen for your ears” and

calls its surround-sound approach S-Logic.S-Logic has nothing to do with conven-tional DSP-based approaches to surround,but rather uses “decentralized transducerpositioning” to aim sound at your outerear rather than your ear canal, so the nat-ural form of your ear can do its job.

Because of this, each person may per-ceive the HFI-700’s output slightly differ-ently. I tested a set against my SonyMDR-V6s across a wide range of mediapushed through a Sound Blaster X-FiFatal1ty. Ultrasone says that the HFI-700slower sound pressure by up to 40%, and I believe it. Even cranked up, if you set the headphones with the cups together onyour desk, you can barely hear them, and Ididn’t experience the usual sense of listen-ing fatigue after a loud romp through an

hour of music.However, the HFI-700s are considerablymore cumbersomethan the feathery V6s:9.3 ounces withoutthe cord, but it feelsheavier because of thelarger drivers, harderpadding, and stiffertension in the headband.

And the sound? Amazing. I thought theSony set was good, but the V6s soundoverbright and thin in comparison.“Surround sound” is really a misnomerhere. The V6s, like most headphones,have an “in your head” presence. The700s sound much more “around yourhead,” and I far more often found myselfstarting with the sensation that a singer orinstrument was right over my shoulder.

Ultrasone’s bass is con-siderably fuller andricher. To hit Sony’shighs, I tweaked the X-Fi drivers a bit, but theresult was more ragged.Both headphones areequally full through themids. If you preferbright highs, stay with

Sony. If you, like me, prefer more muscu-lar bass while retaining convincing highranges, then the HFI-700s will likely bethe best headphones you’ve ever heard. ▲


Ultrasone HFI-700

Specs: Frequency: 10 to 25KHz; Impedance: 75 ohms; SPL: 94dB; Weight: 9.3oz; Cordlength: 3 meters

nForce 430-based motherboard, a 10GBwrite to the Turbo in RAID 0 over USB2.0, 1394a, and 1394b clocks in at26.0MBps, 28.7MBps, and 62.8MBps,respectively. With RAID 1: 25.3MBps,27.5MBps, and 66.5MBps. These numbersare about 30% under what Maxtor states asits optimal in-house results (attributable tooverhead factors). The interfaces emerge asthe bandwidth bottleneck, even with1394b. You’ll get a minor benefit withstriping until an eSATA version arrives.

The Turbo Edition is the best externalhard drive I’ve seen yet, although the abili-ty to conglomerate drives a la Netgear’sSC101 would be a plus. This is a hot,high-value package. ▲


OneTouch III Turbo Edition (1TB)$899.95Maxtor

www.maxtor.com

HFI-700$249

Ultrasonewww.ultrasoneusa.com

Specs: Theoretical throughput: USB 2.0 - 33MBps, 1394a - 43 MBps, 1394b - 91 MBps;Drive rpm: 7,200; Drive cache: 16MB; Interfaces: USB 2.0, FireWire 400 (1394a),FireWire 800 (1394b); Oxford 924 chipset; Size: 5.4 x 3.9 x 8.5 inches (HxWxD); Weight:5.8lbs; backup software: EMC Retrospect Express HD

T he OneTouch III Turbo Edition isMaxtor’s bow into the add-on RAID

market. In an appeal to video-friendly Macusers, the device comes preformatted forOS X, but it’s nothing a reformat can’t fix.Maxtor’s client application makes quickwork of diagnostics, backup/restore config-uration, synching, and RAID 0 or RAID 1selection. However, the RAID area in mysoftware stated that the UI would returnupon completion of RAID setup for for-matting. This happened when connectedvia USB but not 1394a. I needed to manu-ally create the partition and format it usingAdministrative Tools’ Disk Management.

Beyond that, there’s no bad news here.Maxtor’s design is simple, this is just twodrives (500GB each, 7,200rpm, 16MBcache) in a subdued but sexy, rubberizedenclosure with plenty of ventilation and a

quiet fan. The unit is heavy and brick solid.You can pick striping or mirroring, and youhave USB 2.0, 1394a, and 1394b (Fire-Wire 800) ports at your disposal.

Here’s the kicker: In theory, a stripedRAID 0 should show nearly double thethroughput of a RAID 1 mirror beforeoverhead. But, 10GB transfer tests showonly a few percent benefit from striping.For example, running on a Gigabyte


Maxtor OneTouch III Turbo Edition


Western Digital’s Raptor line ofhard drives have long beenfavorites amongst perfor-

mance enthusiasts forgood reason: They aresome of the fastest desk-top drives in the markettoday. In fact, in lastmonth’s issue of CPU(page 16), we tossed the 74GB WD740GDRaptor in with a bunchof 3Gbps SATA drivesand showed you that the Raptor’s10,000rpm spindle speed offers signifi-cantly more performance over its legacy1.5Gbps SATA interface vs. any 3GbpsSATA drive we compared it to. Theonly downside of these drives, perhaps,is their relatively smaller capacities andhigher costs per gigabyte compared tocompeting drives in the market.

The new Raptor WD1500 improvesupon the Raptor product line in anumber of areas. First, the drive hashigher areal density per platter withtwo 75GB disks for a total of 150GB

Western Digital RaptorWD1500ADFD

of storage (the WD740 has only a pair of 36GB plates). The drive also supports NCQ and has double the

on-board cache buffer(16MB compared to8MB on previous Rap-tor models). Addition-ally, WD incorporatesnew features into theWD1500 series Raptorsuch as RAID-specificTLER (time-limitederror recovery) and

RAFF (rotary acceleration feed for-ward). TLER is a method of signalingthe system RAID controller in theevent that an error-recovery process istaking longer than time-out specifica-tions allow. This prevents the RAIDcontroller from dropping the drivefrom the array during this period,which doesn’t make any difference in asingle-drive config but is pretty handyfor RAID users. RAFF is a method ofsensing RV (rotational vibration) ofother drives in a multidrive installationand then compensating for it by adjust-ing the Raptor’s drive head positionand keeping it within a safe toleranceduring read and write operations.

New features and benefits aside, theRaptor WD1500ADFD lives up to itsnamesake and then some, with the best,single, and RAID 0-based SATA driveperformance we’ve seen to date.

Performance Stats I compared the new Raptor WD-

1500ADFD in single-drive and dual-drive RAID 0 configurations to theolder WD740GD Raptor drive, aswell as Maxtor’s 7,200rpm NCQ-capable DiamondMax 10 250GB hard drive, which is one of the faster

7,200rpm drives currently on the mar-ket. (Check out our benchmarks on-line: www.cpumag.com/cpumar06/raptor . In my HD Tach tests , Iworked with clean, unpartitioned drives. With PCMark and Sandra,however, the drives had NTFS parti-tions and were freshly formatted andleft empty. In my Quake 4 level loadtest, I used full Windows XP SP2installations with only related systemdrivers and the game itself installed.

In virtually every metric I measuredsignificantly better performance with the

new Raptor WD1500 series drives. TheDiamondMax 10 7,200rpm drive couldnot compete, and in some cases the per-formance delta was surprisingly large.With an MSRP of $299 for the standardRaptor WD-1500ADFD, and $349 for aswank new windowed version (RaptorX), you’ll pay over two times the price of7,200rpm drives with similar capacity.But, because a storage volume is easilythe slowest part of any given computingsystem, I feel it’s money well spent. A300GB RAID 0 array with these newRaptors is pure I/O-thrashing bliss. ▲

by Dave Altavilla


Raptor WD1500ADFD $299.99

Western Digitalwww.westerndigital.com

CPU / March 2006 33

Intel’s Centrino Duo:Better Than The OriginalWW hen Intel first launched its Centrino

platform, I literally had no complaintsabout it. It had everything: performance, batterylife, and even the marketing ensured that userswould be guaranteed some minimum level ofperformance characteristics when buying aCentrino notebook. Since the initial launch, thebrand has been diluted a bit of course, and nowthere are good Centrino notebooks and badones. The worst Centrino notebook today is stilla lot better than the worst pre-Centrino note-book, though, so the average is improving. Theother thing the Centrino launch did was reallypush wireless on the market in a big way; Intelspent a lot of money supporting access points,and by including Intel’s wireless adapter as arequirement to receive the Centrino brand,every notebook manufacturer that wanted ashare of the Centrino money had to have wire-less in their notebooks.

Over time, the Centrino platforms got better.The CPUs got faster, eventually getting morecache while increasing battery life with Dothan,and the chipsets got better—wireless power con-sumption went down and overall platform per-formance went up. But the improvements toCentrino after its initial launch were all minorevolutions. In fact, a good deal of Dothan (the90nm successor to the original Pentium M) wassimply a list of features and technologies thatcouldn’t make it into the first Pentium M dueto time constraints. So while Centrino got bet-ter over time, it didn’t really change all thatmuch. The words “until now” should be flash-ing on the screen in front of you because nowwe’ve got a new Centrino, and it’s more thanjust a minor evolution.

Intel’s Centrino Duo, just like the Centri-nos of past, is made up of three parts: a CPU, achipset, and a wireless adapter. In this case,replacing the Pentium M of the first twoCentrinos is Intel’s new Core Duo micro-processor. I’ve covered Core Duo (code-namedYonah) quite a bit here in CPU in the past; it’sbasically a Pentium M derivative that Intelbuilt from the ground up to be a dual-core

processor and with a number of performanceenhancements over its predecessor. I won’tdelve into the actual architectural details here(you can find that on AnandTech), but restassured that the designers did their homeworkon this one. The new chipset is actually amobile derivative of the desktop 945 Expressseries, but as with all Centrino chipsets, it’s justlike the desktop version that uses a lot lesspower. The new chipset also adds 667MHzFSB support and works with DDR2-667memory. The wireless adapter has a new name(3945ABG vs. 2915ABG), but it doesn’tappear to do its job any better or at any lowerpower, so it doesn’t excite me all that much.

The big benefits of the new Centrino?Well, the obvious one is the fact that it’s nowdual-core. And with dual-core you get a seri-ous increase in overall system responsiveness,especially if you like to multitask, which Ido. I’ve always felt that notebooks areextremely disk-bound, but you’d be amazedas to how much of a difference moving to adual-core processor makes on overall systemresponsiveness. The not-so-obvious benefit ofthe new Centrino is that along with theincreased performance, thanks to the CoreDuo processor, you actually get longer bat-tery life. That’s right: You get better perfor-mance and longer battery life.

In my experience with preproductionCentrino Duo hardware, it does provide aperformance increase over the previous gen-eration Centrino platform in single-threadedenvironments where there isn’t much multi-tasking, but with no change in battery life.When you start looking at heavier multitask-ing environments and throw in more multi-threaded applications, the performance gapwidens and battery life actually increases.

If you’ve been waiting to upgrade yournotebook, now is the time. The supply ofCentrino Duo notebooks won’t really pickup until late February/early March, butmake no mistake, it’s just as big of a deal asthe original. ▲

The new

chipset is

actually a

mobile

derivative of

the desktop

945 Express

series . . .Talk back to [email protected].

Anand Lal Shimpi has turned afledgling personal page on

GeoCities.com into one of theworld’s most visited and trusted

PC hardware sites. Anand start-ed his site in 1997 at just 14

years old and has since been fea-tured in USA Today, CBS’ “48Hours,” and Fortune. His site—

www.anandtech.com—receivesmore than 55 million page

views and is read by more than 2 million readers per month.

Anand’s Corner


ATI’s Mobile ToysBB eing on the go so much has always

meant that my gaming time has suf-fered. As much as I love all the SFF gearthat’s been all the rage during the past cou-ple of years, I just don’t want to lug a boxand flat panel around with me.

I have always been an early adopter ofgaming on notebooks, despite the fact thatthe hardware on the mobile side is alwayslagging behind that of a desktop. Maybe Ican always convince myself that taking a laptop on a trip is for “business” as opposedto taking an SSF box, which would clearly be for “gaming.” Justifications aside, gamingon laptops for at least a couple of years hasbeen more than passable, and I have foundmyself playing at least a few levels of whatev-er the first person shooter du jour happensto be. I will always go back to the desktop,but the transition from playing the first andlast third of Half-Life 2 or Doom 3 on mydesktop and the middle sections on a lap-top is A-OK. And with ATI’snewest mobile 3D offering, theMobility Radeon X1600, gam-ing is only going to get evenbetter on mobile platforms.

For the mobile side, ATI out-fitted the X1600 with 12 pipes(three four-pipe shader cores,five vertex shaders, four texture units, andfour ROPS) just like on the desktop version.You also get all of the desktop’s HDR (highdynamic range) rendering features (dynamicsoft shadows, parallax occlusion mapping,volumetric lighting, and so on). Althoughthe clock speed is a tad lower than on thedesktop, it has to be due to the thermaldynamics involved with moving from desk-tops to laptops. Still, with speeds of 500 to590MHz and with up to 246MB of memoryclocked to 800MHz to 1.3GHz, the X1600is juiced up plenty.

The Asus A7G test bed that I’ve beenusing is clocked lower at 470MHz. TheGPU also features ATI’s very nifty Avivoengine and a remapped version of PowerPlayto once again lower the power consumptionand extend battery life (not when I am play-ing games it won’t). To give you an idea of

the stellar performance thus far (because it’s still not officially out), I put it throughits paces in Quake 4, and at 1,024 x 768 it got a respectable 49fps. (Bear in mind the CPU speed of the unit was a Pentium M 2.13GHz.) Turning on 4XAA obvi-ously choked it a bit, and things settled down to 33fps. Clearly that level of perfor-mance is not groundbreaking, but it’ssolid—although it’s not going to cause too much of a stir at Nvidia. Perhaps with ATI’s recent run of late releases, it will not be more than a temporary blip on the green radar. In fact, the initial re-lease date for the Mobility Radeon X1600 was Dec. 5, which has clearly comeand gone.

Expect to see them in the larger and higher-end notebook systems, such as theAsus A7G in Q1 of 2006, but nobody isexactly sure when. ODMs and OEMs willhave a few options in terms of the clock

speed, memory, and packageconfigurations with the X1600and will either come as a stand-alone GPU or a multichipmodule with an included frame buffer memory.

If the preview sample wasanything to go by, the sooner

the better. I’m not saying my desktop gam-ing PC will now be collecting dust (it ab-solutely will not), but I’ve certainly enjoyeda few levels of Quake 4 thanks to the A7Gand its very capable 3D companion theX1600. I’m not sure my customers who see a laptop connected to their OBDII portready to be tuned in the Porsche 996 GT2’swould agree, but it’s amazing what you can do thanks to the power-on offer withthese modern-day laptops and multithreadedCPUs these days. Instead of doing the usual,“I’ll play Quake 4, whilst encoding someMP3s at the same time” scenarios, it’s great to see that whilst “flashing” a car in the background for more horsepower, youcan actually frag a few online buddies inQuake 4. I’m not sure I can create a decentbenchmark out of that one, though. ▲

Being on the go

so much has

always meant

that my gaming

time has suffered.Email me at [email protected]

The Shark Tank

Disrupting Reuters’ newswire witha cheery Christmas greeting at age6, Alex “Sharky” Ross became an

avid computer user/abuser, eventu-ally founding popular hardware

testing/review Web siteSharkyExtreme.com. Exposing

shoddy manufacturing practicesand rubbish-spouting marketing

weasels while championing innov-ative products, illuminating newtechnology, and pioneering real-world testing methods was just a

front for playing with the best toys.The site acquired, he left in 2001.

A London native and LondonSchool of Economics graduate,Alex currently overclocks/tunes

Porsche 996 Turbos withwww.sharkwerks.com when he’s

not tweaking PCs.

CPU / March 2006 35

ATI’s New BeastAA s I write this, Brent Justice, HardOCP’s

senior video card editor, is still pouringover ATI’s new Radeon X1900 XT andX1900 XTX. (The XTX runs at a slightlyhigher core and memory clock than the XT.)The cards represent ATI’s new 3D gamingvideo card technology. If you’re thinking theX1800 series just took its seat on ATI’sthrone, you’re correct. Sadly, a couple prob-lem transistors on the X1800 GPU pushedproduction back far enough that we’re seeingthe X1900 hot on the X1800’s heels.

So, what’s the difference between theX1800 and X1900? Well, if they were sittingnext to each other on a table without anybranding, it’s likely you wouldn’t be able totell the two apart. In fact, before I talk aboutany improvements, let’s look at what’s thesame. Just like the X1800, the X1900 XTand XTX are huge power hogs, except thenew cards up the ante a bit. Under a fullload, they are capable of consuming 150 watts of power. That’s huge and a prettygood increase over the last-generation GPU.Still intact is the double-slot width coolersneeded to cool these beasts. Remember allthe jokes that surrounded Nvidia’s GeForce5800 and its “Dustbuster” phonics? TheRadeon X1900 XT and XTX will produce alot of the same. The X1900 CrossFire (ATI’sanswer to SLI) implementation will drownout a set of Nvidia 7800 SLI cards, alongwith power supplies and cooling systems.The cooling solution on the X1900 XT andXTX are annoying at best and unbearable atworst due to an odd whining pitch. You stillneed the CrossFire dongle cable on the out-side of the case, and it further limits theamount of monitors you can connect. Butunless you need triple-display support, youshould be OK.

With all the “bad” stuff out of the way, let’smove forward to what’s different with theX1900 and why it’s important. The X1900XT and XTX greatly improve the amount ofpixel shader operations that can be handledcompared to anything now on the market.The X1800 XT had 16 pixel shader processingunits. The X1900 XT and XTX pack in ahuge 48 pixel shader processing units, better

known as ALUs. If you’re unfamiliar withpixel shaders, in current games they add thelevel of realism by manipulating the color andintensity of each individual pixel on yourscreen. This might be the water you see on awindow or how a rock looks shiny or theimpression you get when a surface seems tohave depth instead of just a flat 2D texture.Now, if you think going from 16 to 48 pixelshader processing units is a big leap, you’recorrect. Aside from some incremental GPUand memory clock changes, the additionalpixel shader processing units is what makesthe X1900 XT and XTX worthy of their +100model numbers.

If you’re a fan of F.E.A.R., it’s likely theX1900 XT and XTX are the cards for you.F.E.A.R. is a very shader-intensive game and being such, the Radeon X1900 simplyblows away any other video card out there in terms of true gaming performance. Onour test bench, we’ve seen F.E.A.R. runningat an eye-popping 1,600 x 1,200 with 2Xantialiasing turned on. That provides anincredibly detailed and immersive F.E.A.R.gaming experience. Even with Nvidia’s flag-ship 512MB GeForce 7800 GTX, we onlysee playable 1,280 x 1,024 resolutions.Again, as it stands now, ATI’s X1900 XTand XTX are the video cards for playingF.E.A.R—hands down, no questions asked.Looking at all other games, Nvidia’s 512MB7800 GTX and ATI’s X1900 XT and X1900XTX (both 512MB) are worthy competitorsacross the board. Outside of F.E.A.R. it’d behard to differentiate one from the other in a“blind taste test.”

One question that remains is what impactdoes this have beyond F.E.A.R.? To be hon-est, we don’t know. If we continue to seehighly shader-intensive games, the X1900will have very long legs. As I am writing this, Nvidia will show us its counter-punchin the next two months. It’s rumored to becalled the “7900” (but not yet confirmed),sporting double the pipelines of the 7800GTX. This, of course, would make it a hosswhen it comes to putting lots of pretty tex-tures on your display. We’ll surely follow up on this. ▲

On our test

bench, we’ve

seen F.E.A.R.

running at an

eye-popping

1,600 x 1,200 with

2X antialiasing

turned on.You can talk with Kyle at [email protected].

Kyle Bennett is editor-in-chief ofHardOCP.com, one of the largest

and most outspoken PC-enthusiastsites on the Web. HardOCP.com

is geared toward users with a passion for PCs and those who

want to get cutting-edge performance from their systems.

Beware, though, Kyle is known forhis strong opinions and statingthem in a no-nonsense manner

while delivering some of the mostin-depth reviews and PC

hardware news on the 'Net.

Hard Talk


Modding does the body good. A PC’s body anyway, inside and out. Here you’ll findhardware, firmware, tools, tips, and tutorials for modding your rig’s performance andappearance. Send us your own mod-related tips and ideas at [email protected].

Modding enthusiasts have apenchant for the latest toys.Fast processors, powerful

video cards, silent SFF enclosures, and rad-ically lit motherboards are all fair gamewhen it comes to a modder’s creativemind. Recognizing the appeal of uncon-ventional customization, an entire industryhas emerged to support the community.

Mods & Ends

Ultra 550W X2-Connect Titanium Power Supply

Ultra’s engineers and designers hope tobuild on the success of its popular X-Connect line of modular power supplieswith the release of this upgraded model,which improves on the original in manyways. The Ultra 550W X2-Connect Titan-ium Power Supply ($100) includes new fea-tures targeted squarely at discriminatingmodding enthusiasts. The 550-watt PSUfeatures a high-gloss titanium finish andmodular cable design that helps reduce in-ternal system clutter unused PSU leads cancause. To further help reduce clutter, Ultrais also using new FlexForce cabling, whichyou can easily route and hide in a case.

The 550W X2-Connect Titanium’sother enhancements include a 120mmcooling fan, dual 12V power rails, and

power-protection circuitry. The power sup-ply’s 120mm cooling fan aims to providemaximize airflow while generating very lit-tle noise, and the dual 12V rails shouldmaintain stability by providing the CPU adedicated 12V rail. The power-protectioncircuitry should help shield componentsfrom damage due to short circuits, in-rushcurrent overload, and thermal overload.

Danger Den TDX Waterblocks

Danger Den has supported the over-clocking and modding communities forsome time with a diverse line of watercool-ing and case modding-related products.The company recently introduced a newlineup of CPU waterblocks under the TDXbrand name. TDX waterblocks ($52) areavailable for virtually any type of desktopprocessor, including Intel’s Xeon andAMD’s Opteron processors, as well asPentiums and Athlon 64s.

The waterblocks are built from high-quality material and are geared primarilyfor high-performance applications. Thecomplete block is assembled with the coverand O-ring to ensure perfect mating, andthe block is made of 100% Copper 110.TDX blocks also feature 1/2-inch flow or3/8-inch OD fittings, stainless steel hold-downs, and bases that are machine lapped

and polished beyond 1,200-grit. EachTDX waterblock is also pressure tested forleaks at 85psi before shipment.

FlexiGlow Cyber Snipa PC Gaming Pad

FPS gamers feeling limited by their stan-dard keyboards have a new weapon to addto their arsenals in the form of FlexiGlow’sCyber Snipa PC Gaming Pad (about $35).The Cyber Snipa was designed specificallyfor first person shooters and works withmost FPS games that use the standardWASD control layout and all FPS gameswith programmable key mappings. Becausethe USB Cyber Snipa PC Gaming Pad is aPnP device, you don’t need to install anydrivers or proprietary software. The gamingpad is essentially a mini-keyboard with cus-tom keys meant to increase response timeand control. The Snipa works with mostpopular FPSs and can also work in tandemwith an existing keyboard, so swappingcables isn’t required. The Cyber Snipa also

has built-in volume keys and blue LEDlighting underneath, which you can easilyturn off.

Fashionably Fresh Firmware

Sony PSP (V2.60)

This recent update adds numerous fea-tures to the PSP, including support forWMA playback, an RSS channel added to the Network menu, and a VolumeAdjustment added to LocationFree Playercontrol panel.

www.us.playstation.com

Teac DV-W516E DVD-R (v1.0e)

This update to Teac’s DV-W516E DVDburner improves write quality on variousmedia types, including DVD+R SL,DVD+R DL, DVD+RW, and DVD-RAM.

ftp.teac.co.jp/pub/dspd/download/firmware

by Marco Chiappetta

PC ModderTips & Tutorials

h a r d h a t a r e a | p c m o d d e r

Ultra’s new X2-Connect power supply has atitanium finish, dual 12V rails, and easilybendable modular FlexForce cables.

Danger Den’s TDX AMD waterblock ismachined from pure copper and has amachine lapped, highly polished base.

You can useFlexiGlow’sCyber Snipa PCGaming Pad in

conjunction with astandard keyboard.


temperatures. Essentially, a thermis-tor is a special type of resistor inwhich its resistance changes depend-ing on its temperature. As the ther-mistor’s temperature rises, the ther-mistor’s resistance increases, and asits temperature drops, its resistancedecreases. By checking the thermis-tor’s resistance against a knownscale, temperatures are deduced.

Monitoring fan speeds is also relatively simple, provided you useproper fans. Thermal controllersmonitor the feedback signal outputtransmitted on the yellow wire thatis incorporated into most fans usinga 3-pin connector. The red wire isthe positive lead, the black wire the

ground, and the yellow wire the feedbacksignal output. The feedback signal reportsthe fan’s rotational speed.

Hook It UpInstalling a thermal controller is fairly

straightforward. It typically involves mount-ing the thermistors/thermal probes, con-necting fans to components, supplyingpower, and mounting the controller in anempty drive bay. There may also be some

creative cable management involvedif you’re anal about keeping your sys-tem’s internal wiring neat or hidden.

The Logisys FP206 (about $25)that we used for this project fits inany standard 3.5-inch external drivebay. The device has three thermalprobes and can monitor rotationalspeeds of three system fans. TheFP206 also has a clock and an IDEindicator, but we’ll focus here onthe probes and fan speeds.

The Logisys FP206’s three ther-mal probes consist of basic two-conductor leads with thermistors atthe ends. The thermistors monitor

When English authorand philosopher SirFrancis Bacon pro-

claimed “knowledge is power” some400 years ago, we’re certain that hewasn’t talking about a PC. But hiswords are still pertinent in today’sworld of dual-core processors andmultiple-GPU graphics configura-tions. We believe the more youknow about your PC, the betterprepared you are to prevent poten-tial problems and to tweak your system for higher performance.

Most OEMs feel this way, too.Virtually every major componentin a PC now incorporates someform of hardware monitoring cir-cuitry to provide status reports to the system BIOS or other specialized software.CPUs and many newer GPUs use datafrom internal thermal sensors to throttlecooling fan speeds to balance cooling withnoise, and many motherboards incorporatethermal sensors to report internal systemtemps. Data from these sensors is quiteuseful when overclocking or diagnosingproblems. And if you ask us, you can neverhave too much information about yoursystem. That’s why this monthwe’re detailing how to install a thermal controller in your rig.

How They WorkThermal controllers are available

from numerous manufactures atvarious price points in variousstyles. They usually have a fewthings in common, however. Mostthermal controllers mount in anempty drive bay and monitor tempsand rotational speeds that probesand system fans report to the con-troller. You can use controllers tocomplement the internal sensors

most CPUs and GPUs have or to augmentthe thermal monitoring of componentsthat aren’t normally monitored, such asRAM, hard drives, or a northbridge.

Thermal controllers may seem like com-plicated hardware to some, but they are relatively basic and uncomplicated. Con-trollers typically report temps and fan rota-tional speeds, although more advancedmodels monitor various voltages, as well.Thermistors usually are used to monitor

Probe Your PC Monitor System Temps With A Thermal Controller


A thermal controller, such as the Logisys FP206, is a great tool for monitoring temperatures and fan speeds.

A thermistor is basically a type of resistor in which its resistancechanges depending on temperature. The change in resistance iswhat makes a thermistor useful as a temperature sensor.

CPU / March 2006 39

This is an ideal location because it doesn’t interfere with the coolingfan, and it makes direct contact withthe processor’s IHS (integrated heatspreader). If you’re not working with asimilar socket and processor, be awarethat it isn’t a good idea to mount athermal probe directly on your proces-sor’s IHS or die. If you mount theprobe on top, the cooler won’t mateproperly with the processor, whichcould cause it to overheat.

Because our RAM was equippedwith heat spreaders with openings at each end, we threaded a thermalprobe into one side until the probe’send was roughly in the middle of theDIMM. Situating the probe this wayworked well, as we were able to get areading from the heart of the DIMMwhere it gets the hottest and keep theprobe completely hidden. When wefully assembled the system, the onlyhint that a thermal probe was presentin the DIMM was a pair of smallwires protruding from one side.

The passive aluminum heatsinkmounted to our motherboard’s north-bridge also has a retention clip, mak-ing it an excellent location to mount a thermal probe. The northbridgeheatsink’s retention clip is a simple,angled piece of steel that acts like aspring. To mount this third thermal

the temperature of whatever they aremounted to, displaying the tempera-ture on a digital readout. You canmount the leads to nearly anythingusing nothing but adhesive tape, butwe took a slightly more creative andreliable approach. We mounted ourthermal probes to our processor, sys-tem RAM, and northbridge chipwithout any tape and neatly routedthe wires to hide them.

For this project we used an Asus975X Express chipset-based mother-board, an Intel Pentium ExtremeEdition 840 processor, and 1GB ofKingston DDR2-5400 RAM. Becausethis CPU is known to generate quite abit of heat, we wanted to monitor itstemperature with one thermal probeand dedicate the remaining two probesto the northbridge and the RAM, asthey’re both passively cooled and getrelatively warm in a closed system.

To mount each probe, we used a component’s existing mountingmechanism or its preinstalled heatspreader to hold the probes securely inplace. Because our CPU uses Intel’sSocket T (LGA775), there’s a metalretention bracket that surrounds theprocessor holding it in place. We slidone thermal probe under this bracketwhen installing the CPU. This lockedthe probe in place off to one side.


To monitor the temperature of our system RAM, we slid a thermal probe under the DIMM’s heat spreader.

An overheating northbridge chip could cause systeminstability or other random errors, so we mounted a thermal probe to our northbridge’s heatsink using itsstock spring clip as a hold-down mechanism.

There’s a right way and a wrong way to mount a thermal probe. When mounted correctly, a thermal probe won’t interfere with other components, butwhen mounted incorrectly on a crucial component such as a CPU, it can prevent a heatsink from seating properly.


signal output. The Logisys FP206 hasa common 4-pin Molex header thataccepts any available connector com-ing from the system’s PSU. We madethe connection and installed a couplescrews to secure the controller in placein a 3.5-inch drive bay.

Knowledge Is PowerWith the controller installed, we

can monitor the temps of three vitalcomponents and check that three sys-tem fans are functional and rotating asthey should. Using the temperaturedata while we’re overclocking will behelpful to determine if heat is the rootof system instability. For example, ifour system crashes or generates anerror every time the northbridge orRAM hits a certain temperature, we’llknow we’ll have to back down on ouroverclock or more aggressively coolthese components. Additionally, if afan fails, we’ll know immediately andbe able to resolve the problem quickly.We can also program the thermal con-troller to sound an alarm should anyprobes hit a certain temperature.

The data a thermal controller suchas the one we used can prove invalu-able in certain settings. Installing oneis definitely a worthwhile mod.

by Marco Chiappetta

probe, we disengaged the clip and lifted it slightly. Then we slipped thethermal probe underneath and reat-tached the clip. The clip providedenough pressure to securely hold the probe in place, and we couldhardly notice the leads once we routedthem to the edge and underneath the motherboard.

Numerous other system compo-nents are prime candidates for ad-ding a thermal probe to. Today’shigh-end hard drives tend to generatea lot of heat, making them very goodpossibilities. A motherboard’s VRM(voltage regulator module) is anothercomponent that gets quite hot. Partsof some VRMs are now even mount-ed on the motherboard’s undersidewhere little air circulates, so keepingan eye on VRM temps is a good idea.

Make The ConnectionOnce our thermal probes were in

place, we needed to connect our sys-tem fans to the thermal controller,supply the controller with power, andmount it. Connecting the fans was assimple as it sounds. We just had toslide the appropriate fan connectorsover the headers coming from thecontroller. Again, our only require-ment was using fans equipped withthree-pin connectors and a feedback


A motherboard’s voltage regulator module can get quitehot; it’s a good idea to keep an eye on its temperature if you plan to use excessive voltages or overclock.

After we finished the final assembly, temperature data for our CPU, RAM, and chipset and fan speeds for threesystem fans were only a quick glance away.

You typically need to use thermal controllers that also monitor fan speeds in conjunction with fans that have 3-pin connectors: positive (red), negative (black), and feedback signal output (yellow). Fans with only a positive and negative lead won’t send the required data back to the controller.

CPU / March 2006 41

KOS-MOS Takes A New Form

Don’t mess with this rig. PlayStation 2 buffs willinstantly recognize the window etching of KOS-MOS, a particularly tough and powerful android

that plays a large role in the video game Xenosaga. As Bill“Gunsmith” Ryder, the PC’s owner puts it, “KOS-MOS isone of the lead characters from Namco’s six-part RPGXenosaga, an (almost) emotionless battle android designedto combat an invading alien force called the Gnosis.”

As it turns out, the commissioned etching isn’t the PC’smain feature. Ryder added it so people could easily identifythe computer’s theme. Instead, the rig is Ryder’s interpreta-tion of KOS-MOS as a PC. The KOS-MOS-style front panelincludes the android’s model (Kosmos Obey StrategicMultiple Operation System) and Vector Industry (VectorIndustries built the in-game warrior). The panel also sports acustom case badge that resembles a design on KOS-MOS’forehead. “It was quite difficult to design a PC case based on ahumanoid weapon,” Ryder says. “I went through four majorrevisions before settling on this one.”

Ryder didn’t stop with the exterior; he modded the powersupply, routed the cabling to the back of the system, andadded a watercooling setup that handles the rig’s AMD Athlon64 3700+ CPU and Asus V9999 Nvidia GeForce 6800 Ultravideo card. The watercooling setup also cools the GigabyteGA-K8VNXP Ultra’s northbridge. KOS-MOS has more thanhalf a terabyte of hard drive space, thanks to four WesternDigital hard drives. Ryder, who hails from England, spent fivemonths designing, collecting components, and modding theKoolance chassis into KOS-MOS’ new body. ▲

by Joshua Gulick

The front panel USB ports hide behindthe KOS-MOS tag. Because Ryder takeshis PC to LAN parties, he decided againsta gold-plated plaque that might “walkaway.” Instead, he polished the brass to give it a gold appearance.

To create the case badge, Rydermilled the KOS-MOS emblem into a piece of aluminum. He isplanning a future mod that willlight the emblem from behind.

Cover photo by sant-media.co.uk.


Have a computer mod that will bring tears to our eyes? Email photos and a description to [email protected]. If weinclude your system in our “Mad Reader Mod” section, we’ll sendyou a $1,500 Newegg.com gift certificate and a one-year subscription to CPU.

Ryder had the Koolance CPU-300-H06’smounting hardware chrome plated so it better matched the system’s interior.The small fan to the left of the CPUcools the Gigabyte board’s extra three-phase power supply.

Ryder revised the design four timesbefore completing KOS-MOS. “Theplan was to create a design as if it wasKOS-MOS herself as a PC and not asan android,” he says.

Ryder gave the system’s PSU a new window and wiring. He saysmodding the PSU was “the most terrifying and amusing thing I’ve everdone.” Thanks to plenty of wiring and a multimeter, he pulled it off.

Ryder points out that almost every wire in the system “is either red-sleeved or has been replacedwith red wire. In total more than130 feet of wire was used andabout 32 feet of sleeving.”

The Koolance chassis has a built-in radiator andfans. Ryder bought Koolance waterblocks from aU.S. supplier to complete his watercooling setup.

Meet KOS-MOS, the android that inspired “Gunsmith’s” slick mod. Note the emblem on her forehead and take a look at the front panel’s case badge.

Vinyl appliqués that decorate the system’sfront and side panel add some personalityto this android-turned-PC. Ryder designed

the stickers in Adobe Illustrator.

Give Us Your Mod >

CPU / March 2006 43

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 qq&&aa@@ccppuummaagg..ccoomm. Please include all

pertinent system information.

The confusion

stems from the fact

that most of today’s

video cards have

DDR RAM.

“

“

Each month we dig deep into the mailbag here at CPU in an effortto answer your most pressing technical questions. Want some adviceon your next purchase or upgrade? Have a ghost in your machine?Are BSODs making your life miserable? CPU’s “Advanced Q&ACorner” is here for you.

Dylli asked: First off, I would like to thank you for the great site andmagazine. I’m building my own computer for the first time, and you’vereally helped me to understand how everything works and what parts tochoose. I have a question, though. I know that the AMD Athlon 64 X2 won’tsupport many games, yet I see these processors tested with games all thetime, and they always seem to perform well. I’m building this computer justfor gaming and don’t know if I should go for an X2. I don’t have the moneyfor an FX-57, but I’m definitely going to buy a GeForce 7800 GTX.

A: We appreciate your compliments and support, Dylli. Aboutyour question, it’s true that there’s little support for multicoreprocessors in most of today’s games, but that doesn’t mean a dual-core processor will perform poorly in a game machine. It justmeans that your games won’t fully exploit the extra horsepowerthe second processor core offers. Yet, even though the game maynot tax the second core’s resources, the additional resources canstill indirectly boost performance in some circumstances. Whilethe first core is processing all of the game assets, the second corecould be doing other things that would normally bog down a single-core CPU, such as dealing with requests from antivirus soft-ware or from any one of the myriad of other processes running inthe background on a typical Windows system.

We run most game benchmarks on a “clean” system withoutany other applications operating to isolate performance and maxi-mize repeatability of the results. So, on the surface it may seemthat a dual-core processor such as an Athlon 64 X2 doesn’t per-form as well as a higher-clocked single-core processor when run-ning single-threaded applications such as games. This may be truein many situations, but launch a few other applications and keepthem running in the background, and the performance scales willsometimes tip in favor of the dual-core processor, as long as theclock speed disparity between the two processors isn’t huge.

At this point in time, if you’re not the type who upgrades hisPC very often, we’d recommend going with a dual-core proces-sor; it has a much longer viable lifespan. Also, the performanceadvantages of having dual cores will become more apparent ascompanies release more multithreaded applications.

Miko asked: I’ve read a ton of ATI Radeon X1800 XT reviews latelyand am confused by some conflicting information. What’s confusing me


is that some reviews report the clock speed of the Radeon X1800 XT’sRAM as 750MHz, while others report it as 1.5GHz. That’s quite a differ-ence! But all of the reviews I’ve read report roughly the same peakmemory bandwidth (48GBps). So which is it? How fast is the RadeonX1800 XT’s memory? And, can you also tell me why exactly the RAM’sclock speed affects peak bandwidth?

A: This is a question that comes up often, Miko. The confusionstems from the fact that most of today’s video cards have DDRRAM. The reason you’ve seen reviewers report the RadeonX1800 XT’s memory clock speed both ways is because, technical-ly, both speeds are correct. Even though the X1800 XT isequipped with GDDR3 RAM, it’s still DDR memory, whichmeans both the rising and falling edges of clock cycles can trans-fer data in a data burst. The end result is that DDR RAM cantransfer double the amount of data in a single clock cycle vs. stan-dard SDRAM, effectively doubling the memory’s speed. This isthe reason you see different speeds for the Radeon X1800 XT’sRAM; some reviews show actual clock speed, while others reporteffective clock speed. The Radeon X1800 XT’s RAM is actuallyclocked at 750MHz, but because it’s DDR-rate RAM, and trans-fers two bits of data per clock cycle, it’s effectively running at1.5GHz, or 1,500MHz. (750MHz x 2 = 1,500MHz [1.5GHz]).

Once you grasp the concept of DDR RAM, calculating peakmemory bandwidth is easy; however, it’s not only the clock speedthat determines peak memory bandwidth, the width of the mem-ory bus is also a key factor. To calculate peak memory band-width, you need to know the memory bus width in bytes and theeffective clock speed of the RAM. The formula for calculatingpeak theoretical memory bandwidth is: memory bus width (inbytes) x effective clock speed.

Let’s use the Radeon X1800 XT as an example: We know thatthe Radeon X1800 XT has a memory bus width of 256 bits.(Internally it has a 512-bit ring bus memory controller, but exter-nally the GPU communicates with the frame buffer on a 256-bitbus.) Divide 256 by 8 to convert to bytes to get 32. Next, multi-ply 32 by 1,500MHz (1.5GHz) to get 48,000MBps (48GBps).This is why increasing the memory’s clock speed equals morememory bandwidth. The higher the clock speed, the more datathat’s transferred.

Bluedak asked: I’m about to build a system with an Asus P5ND2-SLIDeluxe motherboard and nForce 4 chipset. Most reviews I’ve read say

that the manufacturer installed the thermal compound on the north-bridge heatsink pretty poorly, and I should reapply better compound,which I’ll definitely do. I’ve also read some other reviews that say evenwhen you install the heatsink properly it gets too hot, although this mayhave been during OCing, which I don’t plan on doing. The case I’m build-ing on has a fan port on the side right over the center of the mobo. Whatwould you recommend? Should I scrap the stock heatsink for one with afan, or should a case with good ventilation and a side fan be sufficient?

On another note, are there any thermal-related issues when runninga P4 519 (LGA775) at its stock 3.06GHz with the stock Intel fan? (I won’tbe overclocking.)

A: We took a hard look at this board at HotHardware.comrecently (hothardware.com/viewarticle.aspx?articleid=675&cid=3) and agree with what you’ve read about the northbridgeheatsink inability to dissipate heat properly from the chip under-neath it. The flashy, red heatsink looks pretty spiffy, but there’snot enough mass to it, and it gets extremely hot under load.We’d suggest Asus revise the board with an active fan-based solution for this motherboard, but, of course, there are addedcosts and fan-reliability considerations to make change.

Because your case has goodventilation, you shouldn’thave too much of a problem,

especially because you’ve noted you have no interest in overclock-ing. If it’s positioned well over the northbridge and CPU socketarea, that side intake fan will help thermals and may be all youneed. But, if you really want to take precautions, you might con-sider an aftermarket northbridge chipset heatsink from Zalman orThermaltake. Even the passive units Zalman manufactures are bet-ter sinks than the unit the P5ND2-SLI uses.

On a side note, is that a new CPU you’re going to procure, aswell? If so, why not go for a Pentium 4 630 instead? The P4 630has about the same street price these days as the Pentium 4 519(or even a P4 530) and even comes with a full 2MB of L2 cacheon board. The Pentium 4 6XX series of processors also comeswith a few other tweaks under the hood including EIST(Enhanced Intel SpeedStep Technology) for power savings,which essentially lets the system dynamically adjust processor fre-quency and voltage when under light or no load conditions. ▲

by Dave Altavilla and Marco Chiappetta, the experts over at HotHardware.com

For bonus content, subscribers can go towwwwww..ccppuummaagg..ccoomm//ccppuummaarrcchh0066//qq&&aa

The ATI RadeonX1800 XT comeswith 512MB ofGDDR3 RAM. Butis the memoryclocked at750MHz or1.5GHz? That alldepends on yourperspective.

Keep a close eye on the thermals of Asus’ P5ND2-SLIDeluxe motherboard’s northbridge heatsink; it can get pretty in there, so keep that chassis well ventilated.

CPU / March 2006 45

caller ID for email; they would helpidentify the actual source of a message,rather than the source the messageclaims to have.

TThhee PPrroobblleemm

Email fraud is a growing problem, andit’s undermining the confidence of someconsumers in Web transactions. FerrisResearch says 80% to 90% of email mes-sages are spam, and dealing with suchmessages cost businesses worldwide about$50 billion in 2005. The SpamhausProject reports that spam could make upas much as 95% of all email traffic by themiddle of this year.

In mid-2005, Gartner released a surveythat said three of four consumers whoshop on the Web are more cautious aboutwhich sites they use because of concernsabout fraud. The report also said con-sumers reported receiving 28% morephishing emails in mid-2005 vs. mid-2004, and 2.4 million online consumersreported losing money because of phishingfraud during that same 12-month period(totaling about $929 million in losses).

With a system for verifying the sourceof an email message, companies couldmore easily identify domains known forsending spam. This system would helpeliminate scams in which spammers make

In early 2004 Microsoft’s Bill Gatespredicted during a speech to theWorld Economic Forum that spam

would be eliminated within two years. My current email inbox—and its 34

messages that arrived today about savingmoney on Viagra—says differently.

Although Gates may have been a littleoff on his time frame, Microsoft andmany other high-profile tech companieshave pushed ahead with plans and tech-nologies designed to significantly im-prove filtering techniques for weedingout the most dangerous types of mes-sages: spoofing and phishing. You couldthink of these techniques as a sort of

Caller ID For EmailBattling Malicious Messages

Sender ID combines two technologies, Microsoft Caller ID andSPF protocols, to create a technology that verifies the domainname each email message claims it has come from. Sender IDuses IP addresses to verify the domains.

Domain spoofing is a common tool spammers use to maketheir email messages seem legitimate. By using a verificationtechnique such as Sender ID, legitimate email senders can pro-tect their domain name andreputation among customers.

After the sender publishesits domain name in an SPFrecord in a DNS:1. The sender creates and

sends the email message.2. The recipient’s email server

receives the message.3. The recipient’s server

determines which domainsent the message, basedon the header informationinside the message. Therecipient’s server checksthe SPF record for thatdomain, determining if the

sender’s IP address recorded in the email message matchesthe IP address of any of the domain’s servers.

4. If it finds a match, the email message is delivered to thereceiver. If not, the email message isn’t delivered. That infor-mation is then included with any spam-filtering software andtechniques to determine if the email message is authentic.

Analysis Of Sender ID

Sources: Microsoft, OpenSPF.org

Sender

12 3 4

ReceiverReceiver

PerformsSender ID

Checks


their messages mimic legitimate sendersbecause the source wouldn’t match the le-gitimate sender’s domain.

The three caller ID-type system tech-nologies for email are: Sender ID, DKIM(DomainKeys Identified Mail), andFairUCE (Fair Use of UnsolicitedCommercial Email). We’ll focus onSender ID and DKIM here becauseFairUCE, an IBM technology, is still inthe early stages of development.

SSeennddeerr IIDD

Sender ID makes use of many aspectsof SPF (sender policy framework) tech-nology. Under SPF a domain owner ver-ifies that it only sends email messagesfrom certain servers. When your emailserver receives a message that appears tobe from that domain, it compares theinitial server in the email message to thelist of acceptable servers.

Microsoft leads in the development ofSender ID. Sender ID won’t completelyeliminate spam, but it will considerablydiminish the amount of especially danger-ous spam such as phishing and spoofing.

And when using Sender ID in combina-tion with traditional spam-filtering tech-niques, spam will be almost nonexistent.

One potential drawback to Sender IDis the fact that the sender has to publishthe information the technology requires tomake it operational, which may seem likea lot of work; work that the sender maynot be willing (or able) to undertake.However, Microsoft has created a step-by-step wizard (www.microsoft.com/mscorpsafety/technologies/senderid/resources.mspx) to help users find the informationthey need for the SPF record.

DDKKIIMM

Yahoo! and Cisco sponsor DKIM,which attaches digital signatures to emailmessages to sort out the spam.

Under DKIM a domain owner wouldneed to embed a private cryptographykey in each message’s header. When therecipient combines the private key withthe public key, which is published bythe domain owner, the recipient couldverify whether the domain listed in themessage actually originated the message.

MMoovviinngg FFoorrwwaarrdd

In a November 2005 study, VeriSignand MarkMonitor found that 1.4 mil-lion .com and .net domains had createdSPF records, which was an 87% increasefrom March 2005. VeriSign said therewere nearly 83 million domain namesregistered near the end of 2005, though.

Obviously, there’s still a lot of work todo to make the idea of caller ID for emaila reality. Both Yahoo! and Microsoft saySender ID and DKIM will complementeach other, rather than compete, whichshould provide a benefit to consumers byleading to fewer glitches in overall adop-tion of the technologies.

How quickly consumers will see thosebenefits will depend on how quicklyemail-sending domains create recordsand make use of caller ID-like technolo-gies. With consumer confidence inonline commerce on the line, companiesshould look to put such technologies onthe fast track. ▲

by Kyle Schurman

Spoofing, Phishing& Spamming—Oh, My!Identification techniques for email will helplimit several forms of email fraud.

Spamming. Any unsolicited commer-cial email message, also called junk email.

Spoofing. A form of spam where thespammer forges a sender’s email ad-dress on a message, possibly leading therecipient to inadvertently read and re-spond to it, thinking it has come from alegitimate sender.

Phishing. Phishers often use a fakelink in a spoofed email to direct users to afake Web site where they try to trick theminto revealing personal information. ▲

DKIM Explained

Yahoo! and Cisco combined two technologies (DomainKeysand Internet Identified Mail, respectively) to create DKIM.A. The owner of the domain that will be generating the

email messages creates a public key and a private keythat DKIM technology uses to identify the sender. Thesender publishes the public key on a DNS.

B. The mail server uses the private key to create a digitalsignature, which the sender places within the header ofan email message that it sends. The digital signaturealso will verify that the message wasn’t altered en route.

C. The recipient’s mail server (if it uses DKIM technology)pulls the digital signature out of the header. It thenpulls the public key from the DNS for the domain thatclaims it’s sending the message. Finally, the server ver-ifies whether the message truly came from the sendingserver from which it claims.

D. If the domain sender’s identity is verified, and if themessage passes any other spam filters in use, the mes-sage reaches the inbox. If the message fails the DKIMtest, the recipient’s server can reject the message,place the message in a quarantined folder, or deliverthe message with a flag attached.

Sources: Yahoo, Cisco

A

DNS

B

D

C

Public Key

Private KeySending Mail Server

ReceivingMail Server

Mailbox

CPU / March 2006 47

Netcell’s SPUsProcessing Units Move Into The Storage Arena

Revolution handles almost all aspects ofdata management, freeing the CPU toperform other tasks.

It’s tempting to think of the Revolu-tion SPU as a RAID controller. Net-cell’s SPU does use RAID 3 technology,and both types of products providesome sort of protection against harddrive failures. Revolution, however, of-fers more flexibility than RAID con-trollers and some unique features suchas the easy addition of multiple harddrives and automatic backups.

Revolution also provides severaladvantages over software-based RAID

controllers, including one particularlysignificant benefit: The SPU handles allof the storage-related processing tasks,freeing the CPU for other tasks. Withsoftware-based RAID, the CPU musthandle the RAID software’s requests inaddition to all of its other tasks.

SSPPUUss AAtt WWoorrkk

The SPU serves three primary func-tions: It maximizes performance,increases storage capacity, and protectsstored data.

Performance. An SPU boosts yoursystem’s performance by automatically

h a r d h a t a r e a | w h i t e p a p e r

We all pay for protection andsafeguards in one form oranother. We buy all kinds

of insurance to protect our homes,cars, and other stuff. We buy cars withextra safety features. Some of us evenbuy those performance service plansthat cover repairs beyond a warrantythat retail stores seem to offer with allnew electronics.

When it comes to protecting ourcomputers and data, though, most of usdon’t have enough safeguards. For mostpeople a hard drive crash would be dev-astating. Even if you’re diligent aboutmaking backup copies of your data, ahard drive crash still would be tough totake because you’re at least going to loseaccess to your PC for a while (not tomention the time-consuming hassleand/or reinstalling everything).

Netcell’s SPU (Storage ProcessingUnit) technology provides the kind ofsafeguard you need to prevent a harddrive crash from becoming overwhelm-ing. In fact, you might not even noticethe crash with a SPU.

TThhee SSPPUU RReevvoolluuttiioonn

Netcell currently offers two productsin its Revolution family of SPUs:NC5000 and NC3000. Also, a few part-ner companies and Netcell offer SPUcards that contain Revolution SPUs. (Seethe “SPU Products Compared” sidebarin this article for additional information.)

Revolution SPUs provide benefitsto almost any computer user, fromhigh-end home users to professionalscreating data-intensive content. Toreceive the most benefit from an SPU, though, you’ll need at least three hard drives.

The Revolution SPUs make use of a64-bit data path that can move up to800MBps of data through a chip.

Source: Netcell

2

3

1

The SPU SetupAlthough you can use different brands of hard drives in yourmultiple-drive setup with an SPU card, the overall system willonly be as fast as the slowest of the hard drives. The systemwill run more smoothly if you use identical drivesthroughout the system.

1. Install a Netcell SPU card in an open expansion slot in your computer.

2. Connect your hard drives to theSPU card. You can connectthree to five hard drives.

3. Create your storage array.Because Netcell tries to keepthe overall process simple byusing its QuickConfig technolo-gy, this should only take a fewseconds. You then can run yourWindows XP installation CD toconfigure the SPU to work withthe OS; the Netcell SPU doesn’trequire any special drivers(called Zero Drivers technology),and you can take advantage of the SPU’sfeatures immediately after configuring it. ▲


spreading data among the drives inyour multiple hard drive configura-tion. The SPU also attempts to predictwhat types of files you’ll need based onthe type of work you’re doing. Withthe predicted files located on the harddrive and waiting for the user to accessthem, the SPU can quickly load themwhen required, improving overall per-formance. The SPU works especiallywell with large files, providing fast filetransfer and loading, making it anexcellent option for those who com-monly use video and audio files. (Net-cell, however, says Revolution isn’t aspractical for users who deal mostlywith small files.)

With larger and larger media files inuse, hard drives need to store data as

eff ic iently as possible. The driveshould store data that you need toaccess quickly, for example, near theedges of the platter. The drive shouldstore data that you rarely use near themiddle. Tracking the locations of eachfile and of the best place to store eachtype of file is a complex process, butan SPU performs the calculationsneeded to best store the files withouttaxing the CPU.

An SPU also maximizes perfor-mance in that it lets you keep workingin the event of a hard drive failure. Ifone of your drives crashes, the SPUskips the failed hard drive and leansmore heavily on the remaining drivesin your array until you get the prob-lem drive replaced or fixed.

Storage capacity. It’s easy to addadditional hard drives with an SPU,which of course lets you increase yourstorage capacity. You don’t have toinstall any drivers to make the newhard drives work, and the SPU treatsall of them as one hard drive, makingthe process of organizing your files lesscomplicated. Although the SPU systemworks most efficiently with hard drivesthat are the same brand and size, youcan mix and match brands and sizeswhen connecting them to the SPU.

Data protection. The SPU makesautomatic backup files of your data asyou work without requiring any inputfrom you. Best of all, the SPU com-pletely handles the backup process, plac-ing no additional strain on the CPU.


NC3000 NC5000

Internal 64-bit Up to 3Gbps Up to 6Gbps data path (400MBps) (800MBps)

Plug-and-play hard Yes Yesdrive solutions

ATA-100 channels 3 5

Integrated SDRAM 256MB 512MBcontroller

PCI 2.2 interface 32 bit 33MHz 32 or 64 bit or 66MHz 33MHz or 66MHz

SPU card features Revo SP-PCC5 Revo SP-PCC3 SPU3100PWB SPU5103PWB

Company XFX XFX PNY PNY

MSRP $249 to $299 $149 to $199 $175.99 $199.99

SPU chip NC5000 NC3000 NC3000 NC5000

Internal SATA ports 5 3 3 5

L2 drive cache 64MB 64MB 64MB 64MB

PCI 2.2 interface 32 bit 66MHz 32 bit 66MHz 32 bit 33MHz/66MHz 32 bit 33MHz/66MHz

Max drive transfer 600MBps 300MBps 150MBps 150MBps

Compatibility Windows/Mac* Windows/Mac* Windows Windows

*XFX offers a Macintosh version of both of its Revo cards: SP-MAC5 and SP-MAC3.

SPU Products Compared

SPU Chip Features

Netcell currently offers two SPU chips:Revolution NC5000 and NC3000.

Several companies are using Netcell’s Revolution SPU to create storage processing cards. (Netcell offers the SR5200card, but it’s not a retail product.)

For more information:Netcell SR5200

www.netcell.com/products.html

PNY Technologies SR3100 or SR5103www.pny.com/products/storage/

XFX Revo SP-PCC5 or SP-PCC3www.xfxforce.com/web/product/list

Configurations.jspa?seriesId=66

CPU / March 2006 49

Because the backup process is auto-matic, you don’t have to worry about ahard drive failure. All of your data isprotected; the SPU practically elimi-nates the danger of losing data becauseof a failed hard drive.

TThhiirrdd BBrraaiinn??

Netcell refers to an SPU as the com-puter’s third brain. (Of course, Ageiacalls its PhysX PPU the third brain, aswell, so depending on your point of view,it might be your system’s fourth brain.)

But whereas a CPU is an all-purposemicroprocessor that handles all kinds oftasks from all sorts of hardware andsoftware systems, an SPU focuses onspecialized operations dealing with stor-age, much like a GPU focuses on spe-cialized tasks related to the graphicsyour system displays.

Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang isfond of saying such specialty proces-sors eventually will grow powerfulenough to make the CPU obsoleteand lead to its end. In other words,Nvidia’s GPUs could eventually bepowerful enough to handle the basictasks of a CPU in addition to theirspecialty graphics processing tasks.

We prefer to think of the CPU asan efficient boss. The boss overseesthe work being done and gives special-ized tasks to each worker, matchingthem with the tasks that best suitthem. By delegating tasks efficiently,the boss makes the most of everyone’stime and skills. As more and morespecialty processors appear to takework away from the CPU, it canbecome a more efficient boss.

When the CPU is able to delegateprocessor-intensive storage tasks to an SPU, it can focus on such weightymatters as performing the calculationsnecessary for a game’s intricate AIsubroutines. Such tasks are importantenough that the CPU probably isn’tgoing anywhere for quite a while.

Of course, that could all changenext week if a company develops somesort of AIPU. ▲

by Kyle Schurman


Source: Netcell

You can easily spreadyour existing hard drivedata among multiple harddrives using the DataMigration technology built intoNetcell’s SPUs.

When you want to increase the capacity ofyour system’s storage, you could replace yourexisting hard drive with a newer, larger harddrive. But that solution would require copying allof your data and reinstalling your OS.

By using an SPU card, you can add extrahard drives without hassle. The Data Migrationtechnology behind the SPU makes the driveswork together and automatically spreads yourdata across the multiple drives. You don’t neednew drivers to make the hard drives worktogether, and you don’t have to reinstall the OS.

Data Migration technology and the SPUcard ensure that your multiple hard drives allwork and look like one hard drive—with thecombined storage capacity of all of the dri-ves—to your OS. ▲

Data Migration Technology

Examining A Hard Drive CrashWhen running a system with a Netcell SPU, one of the biggest benefits is the SPU’s abil-ity to let the system recover quickly and completely from a hard drive crash. Without anSPU, the system won’t recover completely, or possibly at all, from a failed hard drive. ▲

Source: Netcell



Source: Netcell

But a computer using SPU technology and atleast three hard drives gives you additionalstorage capacity and data protection. If one ofthe hard drives connected to the SPU card fails,the SPU detects the failure and immediatelyprotects your data. You can also continuallyaccess the computer without performance loss.

The Netcell SPU card provides many of thedata protection benefits you’ll find with a RAIDcontroller, but Netcell says its product signifi-cantly simplifies the process vs. installing theRAID controller. When a hard drive connectedto a RAID controller fails, system and harddrive performance are reduced.

When a hard drive crashes in a computerwithout an SPU card, you lose your data andthe ability to run the computer.

Instant Crash Protection

Netcell’s Revolution SPU makes use of an on-the-fly XceleratOR Engine, which lets it operate morequickly than a traditional RAID 5 card. Revolutionbuilds upon RAID 0, RAID 1, and RAID 5 configu-rations by using XOR-based RAID 3.

The different processes let the XOR Engine workmore efficiently and faster in the read and writesteps than a RAID 5 engine.

The XOR Engine works behind the scenes tobreak data down into small blocks, known aswords (shown in this diagram as A, B, C, and D).The words are then synchronously written to orread from all of the drives.

A RAID 5 card, on the other hand, would uselarger data blocks and write to or read from eachdrive sequentially, which takes longer than theXOR Engine’s process. ▲

Source: Netcell

XOR Technology

CPU / March 2006 51

n the past, getting Windows to run properly was fairly easy. Everysix months or so you just backed up your data, reformatted the hard

drive, reinstalled the OS, and voila! Silky-smooth Windows.Windows XP is a different beast entirely. The very thing that elevates it

above previous versions—stability—means most people can use the OS foryears without running into major system slowdowns. By that time, so much

stuff has accumulated on your massive hard drive that the thought of a reinstall conjuresup visions of weekend-killing tedium. But with a little know-how you can whip WinXPinto shape, and you don’t need a lot of tools to do it. Sure, we’ll suggest a lot of third-party applications along the way, but you can do a surprising amount of tweaking usingonly the software Microsoft provides.

Begin With The BasicsTo perform some of the tweaks here you’ll need to view folders and files that

Windows has hidden. Open any folder, expand the Tools menu, and click FolderOptions. Select the View tab and look for the Show Hidden Files And Folders radio but-ton in the Advanced Settings box. Select it, click Apply, and Windows will expose itsguts to you. While you’re there make sure the Hide Extensions For Known File Typesbox is unchecked, as we’ll be referring to several files using extensions you can’t seeunless this box is clear. And, of course, make sure your antivirus and antispyware programs are up-to-date and run complete system scans at regular intervals.

The final step before making any adjustments is making sure your hardware driversand firmware are new. At the least grab the latest drivers for your video card and use aprogram such as Driver Cleaner Professional Edition (free; www.driverheaven.net) toeradicate any trace of your old ATI or Nvidia drivers before installing the new ones.

Firmware upgrades can add completely new features to a device, plus make it runfaster and fix bugs. For the uninitiated, flashing firmware seems a lot like applying a


software patch, but you’re really overwrit-ing the data stored on a physical memorychip. If the data isn’t transferred properlyor you apply the wrong data to a device(for example, you accidentally overwriteexisting firmware with firmware foranother model number), the hardwaremay cease to function, so use extremecaution. Shut down all running programsto reduce the chance of a system crashand don’t apply the upgrade over a wire-less network for fear of losing the connec-tion. Additionally, check the firmware’srelease notes closely to see if the newerversion causes conflicts with any of yourother hardware.

Streamline StartupRemember when WinXP booted in

seconds after you freshly installed it? Asstartup programs accumulate over time,this process can take minutes, so it pays todelete as much of this junk as possible.Begin with the Startup folder by clickingStart, All Programs, and expanding Start-up. Right-click any entries you don’t needthere and click Delete to get rid of the

shortcut. When you are done, click Start,Run, type msconfig, and press ENTER.When the System Configuration Utilityloads, click the Startup tab and removethe check marks from unnecessary entriesso that they don’t load at boot. Aren’tsure which ones are safe to disable? Seethe comprehensive list of startup applica-tions that Paul “Pacman” Collins main-tains at www.pacs-portal.co.uk/startup_content.php.

Pare Down ServicesSome programs bypass the startup list

by loading as WinXP services. You cancontrol these by clicking Start, Run, typ-ing services.msc, and pressing ENTER.Expand the Description column to getmore information about each entry, andto turn a service off, double-click its entryand use the Startup Type drop-downmenu to select Disabled. Select Manual if

you want to retain the ability to launchthe service yourself if necessary.

Stick with services that apply to pro-grams or hardware you’ve installed and bemore wary about getting rid of WinXP’sservices. Microsoft services you may wantto turn off include Alerter, Messenger (ifyou haven’t already installed SP2, whichdisables this), Remote Registry Service,Help And Support (if you never useWinXP’s built-in help documentation),and Wireless Zero Configuration (if youdon’t use a wireless Internet connection).

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Editing the Registry is easy, and that’s the problem. It’s just a data-base, arranged using nesting folders containing keys and subkeysthat contain all your Windows and application settings. Drill downto the right key, edit the appropriate value, and you’re a bona fideWinXP hacker. Enter the inappropriate value, however, and you’llfind out the hard way what a house of cards WinXP really is.

Backup. Before making any changes, back up the Registry so youcan restore the working copy if your changes don’t work out. ClickStart, All Programs, expand Accessories, expand System Tools, andclick Backup. Click Advanced Mode, select the Backup tab, andcheck the System State box in the left pane. Click Browse to select asave destination (CD and DVD burners aren’t supported), name thefile, and click Start Backup. Click Start Backup again, and theRegistry and your other settings are stored in a handy BKF file.

No such thing as undo. Any change you make to the Registry isapplied immediately. You can’t undo it, you don’t have to save any-thing, and the only way to fix mistakes is to manually edit the keyback to its original value. That why it’s important to write down thekey’s name and the original value before making an edit. Note thatalthough the Registry is updated immediately after an edit, in mostcases you need to reboot to make WinXP recognize the change.

Leave some breadcrumbs. When you select a key, clickFavorites and then Add To Favorites to add it to the Registry Editor

Favorites list. This lets you quickly access all the keys you changedusing the Favorites menu to easily double-check your work.

Beware of Find. Clicking Edit and then Find to lookup keysinstead of expanding other keys to get to them is a great time-saver, but be careful you don’t accidentally edit a key with the samename but that’s located in a different place. The bar at the bottom ofthe Registry Editor always lists the exact path of the key currentlyselected, so double-check that with the text in this article to makesure the two keys are an exact match before editing.

Make some keys. Sometimes, you’ll see a reference to a key thatdoesn’t exist. When that happens create the key by navigating to theappropriate key that’s supposed to contain it, right-click it, expandNew, and click Key. Name the key, and it’s added. If you’re asked toadd a value that doesn’t exist, right-click the key that contains thevalue, expand New, and click String Value, Binary Value, DWORDValue, Multi-String Value, or Expandable String Value as necessary.Most entries are String, Binary, or DWORD values.

Restore. If things go horribly awry, you may need to restore theRegistry backup you created. Load the Backup program as instructedin the first step, but this time, click Advanced Mode, click RestoreAnd Manage Media, and expand the File entry, along with the backupfile you created until you see the System State entry. Check the boxnext to System State, click Start Restore, and follow the prompts. ▲

Risk-Free Registry Editing

Showing hidden files and extensions is the first step in

serious system tweaking.

CPU / March 2006 53

Microsoft services you shouldn’t turn offinclude Automatic Updates, BackgroundIntelligent Transfer Service, COM+Event System, Cryptographic Services,DCOM Server Process Launcher, DHCPClient, DNS Client, Event Log, LogicalDisk Manager, Network Connections,Plug And Play, Print Spooler, ProtectedStorage, Remote Call Procedure, SecurityAccounts Manager, Security Center,Server, Shell Hardware Detection, SystemEvent Notification, Task Scheduler,Themes, Windows Audio, WindowsFirewall/Internet Connection Sharing,Windows Image Acquisition, WindowsManagement Instrumentation, WindowsTime, and Windows User Mode DriverFramework. The Golden Rule is that ifyou aren’t sure, don’t disable a service.

You can get rid of WinXP’s Indexingservice, which constantly scans your hard

drive so it can perform file searches faster.There are better ways to search your hard drive, including the free GoogleDesktop, so disable Indexing to free upsome resources. Click Start, open MyComputer, right-click your hard drive’sicon, and click Properties. Uncheck AllowIndexing Service To Index This Disk ForFast File Searching and click Apply.Repeat the process for any other drivesand launch Services.msc. Double-click theIndexing Service entry, change the StartupType to Disabled, and click Apply.

You also can turn off System Restore toreclaim a lot of hard drive space and avoidspikes in system resource usage that SystemRestore causes by monitoring your drivesfor changes. We’re not knocking the utility,and most people will want to leave it on,but in our experience the few times SystemRestore comes in handy, performing a

complete wipe and reinstall of Windows isa superior option. If you can live without it,click Start, right-click My Computer, clickProperties, and select the System Restoretab. Check Turn Off System Restore OnAll Drives and click Apply. Then runServices.msc and disable the SystemRestore Service entry. Doing this will eraseall the Restore Points that the utility previ-ously created, so there’s no going back.

One more thing to remember is thatsome services revert to their default set-tings when you use Windows Update.Run Services.msc each time you runWindows Update to switch everythingback. Microsoft also keeps a list of thedefault settings at www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/sys_srv_default_settings.mspx if you ever want to manual-ly switch back to the original values.

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Before installing new video drivers, always eradicate the existing ones with a tool such as Driver Cleaner. The System Configuration Utility shows

you startup programs that aren’t displayed in the Startup folder.

Only disable the Windows Services that you absolutely don’t use or need.

Indexing can cause a lot of accessing of a hard drive, so axe the indexing.

System Restore can save your bacon, but it also eats a ton of hard drive space.

Really need an error messageand annoying sound when you’reworking? Shut WinXP up and giveyour hard drive a break by disabling its sound scheme.


Your Hard Drive: Less Is MoreHard drives can be like anchors that

weigh down the rest of the system. Theyare so slow compared to other componentssuch as RAM and CPUs that even smalloptimizations can have a big impact onoverall system performance. We’ll get intofine-tuning later, but the best way to makeyour system run faster is to use the harddrive as little as possible. Disabling the ser-vices listed previously is a good start andschedule antivirus and antispyware scans,defrag sessions, and other disk-intensiveoperations at times when you aren’t activelyusing the computer for anything else.Another trick to take some heat off thehard drive is turning off the system sounds.Click Start, Control Panel, and Switch ToClassic View (if you haven’t already).Double-click Sounds And Audio Devices,Sounds, select No Sounds in the SoundScheme drop-down menu, and click Apply.

Virtual MemoryHard drives spend a lot of time serving

as virtual memory when your RAM banksare overloaded, so it pays to set up yourvirtual memory settings as efficiently aspossible. First, make sure that you haveenough hard drive space free to set up alarge virtual memory area. Click Start,double-click My Computer, click the iconfor each hard drive, and check the Detailsbox to see how much free space remainson each drive. Make sure there’s 2GB ormore of free space on each drive and con-sider installing a second hard drive if youdon’t already have one. Using two harddrives to handle virtual memory is betterthan relying on one drive for everything,and you’ll see a speed boost if you installmemory-hungry programs such as Adobe

Photoshop on one drive but use the other drive to handle theapp’s virtual memory needs.

You can also free up harddrive space by adjusting WinXP’sRecycle Bin settings. By defaultthe Recycle Bin eats up 10% of adrive’s space, which is excessive.Right-click the Recycle Bin, clickProperties, select the Global tab,and click the Use One SettingFor All Drives radio button. Ifyou’re feeling bold, check DoNot Move Files To The RecycleBin to bypass the Recycle Bincompletely. You’ll still see a mes-sage asking if you really want todelete a file as long as you checkthe Display Delete ConfirmationDialog box, but that’s not muchof a safety net. Most users shoulduse the slider to drop the RecycleBin’s maximum size to between1 and 5% of the hard drive,depending on the drive’s capacityand the amount of files you regularly delete.

Once you’re sure you haveenough room, click Start, right-click My Computer, click Properties, andselect the Advanced tab. Click Settings inthe Performance box, select the Advancedtab, and click Change in the VirtualMemory box. Click the Custom Size boxand enter an Initial Size value equal totwo or even three times the amount ofRAM installed in your computer. Enter aMaximum Size value at least 1,000MBlarger than that, and you’re set. For bestresults put the file on a secondary harddrive if available or create equal-sized virtual memory files on both drives, asWinXP can determine which one is mostefficient to use at any given time.

DMA All The WayWinXP has a nasty habit of throttling

down your ATA hard drive’s bus type topokey PIO mode even if the hardwaresupports the much faster DMA mode. To

ensure DMA is in use, click Start, right-click My Computer, click Properties,select the Hardware tab, and click DeviceManager. Expand the IDE ATA/ATAPIControllers entry, double-click the entryfor the channel where your hard drive is installed (most likely the Primary IDE Channel) and use the Transfer Modedrop-down menu to select DMA IfAvailable if PIO Only mode is selected.Click OK, reboot, and recheck the settingto make sure it sticks.

Clean UpObviously, it’s a good idea to keep your

hard drive as free of unnecessary files as possible, but in terms of performance,it’s more about what you delete than howmuch you delete. For example, if youdon’t use some of the startup programsyou have disabled, consider uninstallingthe associated applications entirely. Click Start, Control Panel, open Add OrRemove Programs, and click Change/Remove after selecting an entry to remove.

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Clean Up On Aisle VistaIf what Microsoft claims is true, getting Vista to runas efficiently as possible on your computer shouldbe a breeze compared to the tweaking necessarywith Windows XP. Vista wasn’t feature-complete atthe time this article went to press, but Microsoft ispromising much smoother multitasking and auto-matic hard drive defragging and is also implement-ing an interesting caching technology calledSuperFetch that has the potential to let Vista runmuch smoother than WinXP can.

SuperFetch basically lets you use an externalstorage device as a virtual memory area. Plug in aremovable USB drive, for instance, and Vista will beable to use some of the space to cache files it isusing often. The same goes for external hard drives(as long as they support USB 2.0 or faster inter-faces), and you’ll want to have some sort ofSuperFetch storage available because it has thepotential to make applications load much fasterthan is the case with WinXP. SuperFetch monitorsyour computer usage and keeps a log of the appli-cations and files you access most frequently. Itadds these favorites to the cache, so it anticipatesthe data you need instead of waiting to add it whenyou ask for it. ▲

Turning off the Recycle Bin reclaims hard drivespace, and you can still configure it to display a confirmation message before actually deleting a file.

CPU / March 2006 55

Additionally, click Add/Remove Windowscomponents on the left and axe things youdon’t use, such as Fax Services, OutlookExpress (if you use a different client), andWindows Messenger (if you use a differentIM program).

If your Desktop is packed with icons,they all add to WinXP’s boot time and eatup memory and graphics card resources, sorelocate them to a folder or delete them.You can also configure WinXP to auto-mate this task by right-clicking an emptyarea on the Desktop, clicking Properties,selecting the Desktop tab, and clickingCustomize Desktop. Check the RunDesktop Cleanup Wizard Every 60 Daysbox (or the Clean Desktop Now button)and WinXP automatically relocates unusedDesktop icons to a folder. You can also usethis screen to banish stubborn icons—suchas My Documents or Internet Explorer—that you can’t normally delete. Make surethe General tab is selected and remove thechecks from the appropriate boxes.

You don’t necessarily need to deleteDesktop wallpaper—especially if it’s ani-mated or uses HTML—but switching to asingle-color Desktop will free up resources.Right-click the Desktop, click Properties,select the Desktop tab, and choose Nonefor the background. Use the Color drop-down menu to select a color or click Otherto create a customized shade and click AddTo Custom Colors.

Deleting stray entries in the Registry(more on this later) can slightly decrease

loading times. WinXP unfortunatelydoesn’t come with tools to auto-clean theRegistry, but such software as TweakNowRegCleaner Standard (free; www.tweaknow.com) can do the job. Run it, clickClean Now, and delete any entries it flagsas safe to delete. Leave the others alone;getting rid of entries you’re unsure aboutisn’t worth it in terms of performance vs.having something bad happen.

Clearing out old files is also imperativebefore performing the defragmentationprocedure detailed in the next section.Defragging rearranges all the files on yourhard drive so they can be accessed moreefficiently. If you defrag and then clear outall your junk files, you’ll just have to defragagain to account for the new gaps on thehard drive. WinXP comes with a rudimen-tary tool for cleaning up temporary filesthat various programs generate. Click Start,All Programs, Accessories, System Tools,and Disk Cleanup. Use the drop-downmenu to select the drive you want to clean,click OK, and wait for the scan to com-plete. Don’t bother selecting the CompressOld Files option and don’t delete OfficeSetup Files unless you have your installa-tion disc handy, but delete everything else. And don’t worry about selecting theTemporary Internet Files option because itdoesn’t delete cookies, meaning your storedInternet passwords and other login infor-mation will remain intact.

Disk Cleanup doesn’t get everything,especially if you use an app such as

Norton SystemWorks, which has a Pro-tected Recycle Bin feature. To delete thosefiles, right-click the Recycle Bin and clickEmpty Norton Protected Files. You candisable the feature entirely by right-clickingthe Recycle Bin, clicking Properties, select-ing the Norton Protection tab, andunchecking Enable Protection (use theDrive drop-down menu to do this for eachdrive you have).

(NOTE: As we went to press, news brokethat Symantec was using a rootkit to accom-plish certain functions in SystemWorks. TheNorton Protected Recycle Bin hides itself inways similar to rootkits and may wind upbeing a place for other, less benign programsto hide. Symantec has stated it has updatedSystemWorks to show the Protected RecycleBin in the future, just in case.)

WinXP doesn’t make it easy to findand delete duplicate files, but that is where utilities such as CloneSpy (free;www.clonespy.com) come in handy. Runit, click Add Folder, add your hard drives,and use the Search For radio buttons torefine the search parameters if necessary.Click Start Scanning, and CloneSpy rootsout the duplicates cluttering the drive.

RearrangeEver hear that you don’t need to defrag

hard drives formatted using NTFS? Feelfree to shoot the messenger becauseNTFS drives get just as jumbled up asFAT drives, especially for those whodownload and delete a lot of files or

Enabling Virtual Memory on asecondary hard drive provides anoticeable performance boost.

Always make sure DMA is turned on for drives that support it toensure you’re getting the most out of your hardware.

When you are removing applications to free up space and resources, also make sure that you get rid of any Windows components that you never use.

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install and uninstall a lot of applications.Defragmenting at fixed intervals (everymonth or so works well for most people)will keep related files packed close togeth-er on the drive, and it definitely makesmost games run smoother.

Defragging a hard drive is easy butpainfully slow, especially if you haven’tdone it in a while. First, shut down allprograms currently running so they don’tinterfere with anything or reset the defragprocess. This includes apps that haveicons in the System Tray, such as anti-virus and antispyware programs. ClickStart, All Programs, expand Accessories,expand System Tools, and click DiskDefragmenter. Look in the % Free Spacecolumn to make sure each drive you wantto defrag is at least 15% empty or theprogram won’t run. Once there is enoughfree space, click the drive’s icon and clickDefragment. Don’t bother analyzing thedisk, just do it.

Registry TweaksTo really make Windows sing, roll up

your sleeves and start making manualRegistry edits to customize every aspect ofperformance. Just remember that theRegistry is a critical database. (Windowsstores all its settings and application set-tings here, and if you screw things up,you’ll be pawing through CPU back issueslooking for an article on how to perform acomplete Windows wipe and reinstall.) Ifyou’re new to this, read the “Risk-Free

Registry Editing” sidebar before gettingyour hands dirty. When you’re ready,click Start, Run, type regedit.exe, andclick OK to open the Registry Editor.

Destroy stubborn files at shutdown.Sometimes, WinXP doesn’t want to shutdown, usually because some rogue appli-cation refuses to give up when the operating system tells it to go away. Onesmall Registry edit can banish these hang-ers-on. Expand HKEY_CURRENT_USER, expand Control Panel, and clickDesktop. Double-click the AutoEndTasksstring and change the value to 1.

Always unload DLLs. DLLs eat upmemory and often linger around long afteryou shut down the program that loadedthem. Windows eventually kills them off,but you can speed up the process andreclaim resources faster by expandingHKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, expandingSOFTWARE, expanding Microsoft,expanding Windows, and expandingCurrentVersion. Right-click Explorer,expand New, click Key, and name the newkey AlwaysUnloadDLL. Click Always-UnloadDLL, double-click the Defaultstring, and change the value to 1.

Kill hung applications. Programs thatare stalled out don’t always die swiftly,but a Registry edit can quickly euthanizeailing applications. Expand HKEY_CUR-RENT_USER, expand Control Panel,and click Desktop. Double-click theHungAppTimeout string and change thevalue to 1000. Now, double-click the

WaitToKillAppTimeout string andchange the value to 2000.

Kill hung services. You can do a simi-lar thing for hung services by expandingHKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, expandingSystem, expanding CurrentControlSet,and clicking Control. Double-click theWaitToKillServiceTimeout string andchange the value to 2000.

Speed up menus. Menus in WinXPdon’t expand immediately, but you canmake them respond much faster. ExpandHKEY_CURRENT_USER, expand Con-trol Panel, click Desktop, and double-clickthe MenuShowDelay string in the right-hand pane. Change the value to 100 tomake menus expand almost instantly.

Keep It CleanTweaking WinXP is relatively easy, but

making all the changes last is more difficult.The worst thing you can do is to installapps that load when Windows boots andrun in the background eating up resources.If you use several IM programs, for exam-ple, try to consolidate their notificationicons by using a unifying program such asTrillian. Get your weather reports from the Web instead of a widget that constantlyruns and keep the computer as streamlinedas possible. Only you can prevent WinXPslowdowns. (Subscribers can read our “Windows XP Toolkit” sidebar online atwww.cpumag.com/cpumar06/toolkit.) ▲

by Tracy Baker

Keeping a clean Desktop will helpyour video card put its resourcesto better use.

The most efficient Desktop is a monochromatic Desktop. (Bonus:You can actually see your icons now.)

WinXP doesn’t come with Registry cleaningtools, so aside from a wipe and reinstallation,tools such as RegCleaner are your best bet.

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CPU / March 2006 57

3.4GHz Pentium 4 runs at, well, 3.4GHz. ARadeon X1800 XT scoots along at 625MHz.

With only a few exceptions, those clock speedsare static and don’t budge. Alright, so Intel’s EIST

(Enhanced Intel SpeedStep Technology) occasionallydown-clocks the Pentium to save power, and ATI’s

Overdrive will give you a few extra megahertz under the right thermal conditions. But tothe uninitiated, a PC’s performance should be fairly consistent.

Maybe that’s why your buddies suspect a bit of magic is going on when you diveunder the hood and start generating extra speed by flipping switches and turning knobsin the BIOS. Is it all a bunch of shenanigans? No way. There are real gains to be had atthe hands of subtle adjustments, all for the low, low price of free ninety-nine.

It has been 12 months since we last talked about BIOS optimization, and a lot haschanged on the hardware scene. CPUs are multicore, memory is faster, and graphicscards are being paired up for mega frame rates. Additionally, media-encoding software isgoing high-def, games are getting more gorgeous, and gratuitous threading is helpingmake multitasking as seamless as ever.

Generally SpeakingNo matter what type of motherboard you own, certain BIOS settings are fairly uni-

versal. Sure, one Award setup may differ from another, and you’ll certainly see contrast-ing layouts compared to an AMI BIOS, but either way, cranking up a FSB or applyingvoltage to memory accomplishes the same thing no matter how you look at it.

So, what are some of the more general BIOS modifications you’d see on AMD- andIntel-based boards? How about disk configuration? Most motherboards give you somesort of summary screen that lists auto-detected IDE and SATA drives. They’ll usually letyou manually configure each device, although that isn’t necessary in this day and age.Given the option you may as well leave those settings at their automatic defaults.

You’ll probably also find options for specifying the date and time. Set those two accurate-ly. Nothing is worse than installing trial software, backtracking to fix the date, and findingyour app expired by three years. Nearly all boards also feature a floppy configuration field,yet high-end machines are increasingly doing away with the legacy drive. USB flash drivesare where it’s at. If you’ve already ditched those flaky 1.44MB diskettes, remember to disable your board’s floppycontroller entirely.

Any modern motherboardwill give you several other fair-ly generic configuration pages.There’s usually space dedicat-ed to USB setup where you’llsee switches for turning USBcontrollers on and off, as well

For the best performance, makesure you have USB 2.0 enabled.You might also want to consider

disabling legacy USB support.


as setting their operating mode from v.1.1to v.2.0. (That’s a paltry 12Mbps vs.480Mbps.) The last option generally setsUSB legacy compatibility, dictating sup-port in DOS and other non-Windows

modes. Legacy mode can serve its purposein certain environments, such as upgradinga BIOS from a floppy boot diskette, and itcauses problems in others. Enable legacysupport when you need it and keep it dis-

abled when you don’t. That’syour best bet for avoidingissues with USB peripherals.

Then you have the ad-vanced PCI/PnP settings,often consisting of a PlugAnd Play OS switch, a PCILatency Timer setting, an

Allocate IRQ To PCI VGA option, andPalette Snooping. Many of those are com-mon to nearly all BIOSes because they’vebeen around so long. The Plug And PlayOS option, for instance, specifies whetherthe BIOS or OS handles resource con-flicts. Theoretically, Windows XP shouldhave no problem there. Yet many enthusi-asts continue recommending that youleave the Plug And Play OS switch set toOff or Disabled.

The PCI Latency Timer is also shroud-ed in ambiguity. Some say to keep thedefault 32-cycle setting. Others recom-mend a 64- or even 128-cycle latency,giving each PCI peripheral more time onthe PCI bus before handing control to thenext device. Thorough testing is the onlyreal way to determine which setting isright for you. Fortunately, the latency

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Before you spend hours picking the right combination of BIOS set-tings, it might be wise to verify that you’re using the latest release.Motherboard manufacturers regularly update their BIOS files withsupport for new processors, fixes for existing bugs, and extra soft-ware-based features. The problem is that once you update, you’reusually instructed (or forced) to reset everything back to a defaultconfiguration, overwriting custom settings. Bottom line: Make sureyou tackle the update prior to tweaking.

It’d be great if every BIOS was the same and each manufacturerstandardized the upgrade process. Instead, they are all different.Some are actually pretty backward compared to the ease ofinstalling an OS or modern PnP hardware.

Let’s start with Abit for the sake of alphabetical simplicity. Abit’sWeb site lists a detailed procedure you can use to get current. Itgoes something like this: Check your current BIOS version (you’llusually see it when a board POSTs), retrieve the latest version foryour board from Abit’s site, self-extract it by double-clicking thedownloaded EXE file, create a bootable floppy, copy the decom-pressed BIOS files to it, boot from the floppy, and enter the neces-sary command to begin programming. You can update boards withAMI and Award BIOSes by running Abit’s Runme.bat file bundledwith the downloadable package.

But Abit offers a simpler option, as do most other popular manu-facturers. It’s buried deeper on Abit’s site, but the FlashMenu utilityis a Windows-based application brewed by Abit’s engineers.Through one mouse click, the program compares your BIOS to thelatest revision online, downloads a copy if it’s needed, flashes yourfirmware, and saves the old one. Asus has its own version of thesame type of software called Asus Update. Gigabyte does too(@BIOS), as does MSI (Live Update 3). Even Intel boards are com-plemented with automatic Windows-based BIOS software. These

are the real heroes on the updating scene. They save time, effort,and the real possibility of human error.

Unfortunately, there are still motherboard vendors who haven’tjumped onboard with the whole BIOS software concept. Tyan, highlyregarded in the server and workstation industries, is a prime exam-ple. Although Tyan also sells desktop boards, it forces updatesthrough clunky DOS tools. Soyo puts customers in a similar posi-tion. Biostar is a little more advanced, thanks to a flash utility integrated with the CMOS, but it could use a more user-friendly app,as well. Hopefully, your motherboard maker offers an easy updateutility on its site. If so, the process is cake: click and go, basically.Otherwise, you’ll need to plod through a DOS-based flash proceduresimilar to the one Abit outlines.

With a freshly flashed BIOS, you’re now ready to embark. Set thenew configuration to its default state and begin testing BIOS set-tings, one at a time. ▲

The easiest way toupdate your BIOSis through aWindows-basedutility, such as AsusUpdate, that’scapable of checking for newerversions.

BIOS Updating 101

How often do you really bootfrom CD? Speed up your startup time by going straightto the hard drive.

CPU / March 2006 59

timer is one of those knobs you can turnup or down without hurting anything.

Leave the Allocate IRQ To VGA andPalette Snooping at their defaults.Modern graphics cards do often requiretheir own IRQ, so that one should beenabled. Meanwhile, MPEG-2 decodercards are less popular now that mostvideo cards incorporate their own decod-ing engines, rendering Palette Snoopingfundamentally obsolete.

Boot parameters are also pretty muchuniversal to all motherboards. They canplay a profound role in determining start-up times, too. Let’s say your boot orderlooks something like this: network adapter,CD-ROM, USB-Zip, and then hard drive.The BIOS pegs each option before gettingto the one boot device you’ll want 95% ofthe time. Do yourself a favor and put thehard drive first. If you need to boot from aflash drive or CD down the road, simplyreconfigure the BIOS at that point.

The Quick Boot option you’ll find inmost BIOSes offers another way tospeed up the boot process by skippingcertain tests, namely the extended mem-ory error test. Keep Quick Boot enabledfor best results.

Most other boot options are largelyuser preferences. Some folks prefer a pret-ty full-screen logo, while others wouldrather keep tabs on the black statusscreen. Boot-up number lock is fairlystandard and so is the halt on error fea-ture, which pauses your boot sequence if akeyboard isn’t detected.

Intel D975XBX: Starting With Some High-End MuscleBoot time with defaults: 42 secondsBoot time after CPU optimizations: 31 seconds

You know that tweaking has gonemainstream when Intel starts givingenthusiasts some room to mod its ownbranded motherboards. The D975XBX is Intel’s flagship desktop model centeringon the 975X Express chipset and incorpo-rating full support for all dual-corePentiums, including the 65nm ExtremeEdition 955 at 3.46GHz. The boardboasts three PCI Express x16 slots and isofficially said to support ATI’s CrossFiremulti-GPU rendering technology. (SLI is

s p o t l i g h t

still MIA.) But perhaps evenmore important to enthusi-asts is the board’s surpris-ingly flexible BIOS.

Not that you’d be able totell from most of the setupmenus. For example, thefirst configuration screen isstandard Intel fare: a proces-sor and memory module specificationsummary with a field for changing thesystem date and time.

The Advanced menu that’s one tab overis the key to unlocking additional perfor-mance. Scroll past the Boot Configurationmenu, which you might want to revisitlater for tuning fan speeds. Skip PeripheralConfiguration, too, unless you’d like to disable the secondary Silicon Image SATAcontroller or FireWire chip. Drive Config-uration lets you optimize storage withoptions for RAID and AHCI, providedyour drives are compatible with the Intelspecification. The next four menus, FloppyConfiguration, Event Log Configuration,Video Configuration, and HardwareMonitoring, are of little consequence to theenthusiast. Checking temperatures and fanspeeds may become important down theroad just to verify manageable thermals butdon’t sweat that just yet.

Chipset Configuration is where themagic really happens. The first submenu,called Default Configuration Override,paves the way for ratio multiplier changeson Extreme Edition proces-sors and voltage settingsbetween 1.275V and 1.6V.Another set of options onthe same page, which Intelclaims are for validationpurposes only, facilitate FSBspeeds as high as 1.3GHz,PCI overclocking, PCI-E

overclocking, MCH voltage adjustments,FSB voltage adjustments, and a specialHost Burn-in Mode Percentage spanningup to 30 points.

Back under the Chipset Configurationmenu, select Memory Configuration.Intel again shocks and amazes with com-prehensive timing support, in addition tomemory voltages as high as 2.2V. That’senough to get Corsair’s low-latency5400UL smoking along at CAS 3.

The remaining menus are less aboutperformance and more about functionali-ty. Under the Security tab, for instance,you have the option to enable Intel’s XDtechnology, a rough equivalent to AMD’sEnhanced Virus Protection hardware bit.The Power menu serves up access toEIST for lower-power consumption andIntel Quick Resume Technology, a yetunexploited platform feature that will supposedly make your PC behave morelike a television or stereo receiver—noboot up time required. Finally, the Bootmenu makes it easy to specify the orderin which peripherals are queried for

Believe it or not, Intel is reallyinto this whole BIOS tweaking

thing. Its D975XBX is loadedwith options for overclocking.

Intel serves up just enoughmemory flexibility to tune

a high-voltage kit to its potential, even at 667MHz.


bootable media. That could be a key fac-tor in speeding up your startup times.

As they say, the proof is in the pudding,so we took our Intel D975XBX board anddropped all its settings to their OptimalDefault state and timed a WinXP bootfrom power-on to the logon screen. Thenwe tuned things up a bit, disabling un-needed add-ons, such as the secondarySATA controller, and booting straight to ahard drive. Memory timings were changedfrom their programmed defaults to thetightest supported options. Lastly, theboard got a minor 5% boost, upping thefrequency on Intel’s Pentium D 840 up to3.36GHz. And the results were incredible,too. A 42-second boot condensed down to31 seconds. Plus, stability remained rocksolid. A little BIOS optimization goes along way on Intel’s D975XBX.

Asus A8N32-SLI: A Natural TweakerBoot time with defaults: 44 secondsBoot time after CPU optimizations: 33 seconds

You’d be shocked if an Asus board didn’t show some serious improvementafter a thorough round of optimizations,right? Especially because Asus has a

reputation as an enthusiast-oriented man-ufacturer, and the nForce 4 SLI chipsetsitting on Asus’ A8N32-SLI is an enthusi-ast chipset with enthusiast features.

Fortunately, every bit of the board’sAMI BIOS is receptive to tweaking. Aswith the Intel D975XBX, it all beginsunder the Advanced menu. (The Mainmenu just gives you a synopsis of attachedstorage devices.) Explore the JumperFreeConfiguration submenu and check outAsus’ multitude of configurable settings.AI Overclocking can either speed thingsup statically by a given percentage, auto-matically in a dynamic manner, or com-pletely manually, giving you control overeach frequency setting. Power-hungryenthusiasts should probably go with theManual options for the most control.

The Manual selection gives you accessto a CPU FSB Frequency setting between200 and 400MHz, although AMD wouldprobably rename that to reflect the proces-sor’s HyperTransport bus. A separate SBto NB Frequency setting spanning 200 to300MHz controls the 16-bit Hyper-Transport connection piping data betweenthe board’s two chipset components.

s p o t l i g h t

On one hand, the right BIOS modifications might help solve sta-bility issues or improve system performance. On the other hand,a misstep could lead to a nonfunctional motherboard. For thesafety of your system, keep a couple of points in mind before youstart fiddling around.

First, understand that any attempt you make at overclockingwill probably void your processor and motherboard warranties,even if you don’t change voltages. That is just a risk that’s inher-ent to modification, whether you are talking cars, computers, orconsoles. Proceed only if you accept whatever result comes ofyour tweaking endeavors. Make small adjustments to avoid irre-versibly damaging hardware.

Also remember that a seemingly routine BIOS upgrade couldrender your motherboard unusable. Losing power mid-procedurewould almost certainly end in tragedy. Accidentally flashing toanother model’s BIOS would probably cause you to buy the farm,as well. It goes without saying that any interaction with the BIOSshould be handled with extreme caution. Some boards even havemultiple updates corresponding to their physical PCB revision.Flash the wrong one and, you guessed it, it’s time for an involun-tary upgrade.

Should something go wrong, don’t panic. Many motherboardsare equipped with secondary BIOS chips. In a worse-case scenarioyou could switch to an entirely different ASIC (Application-Specific

Integrated Circuit) and gracefully get back on your feet. If the situa-tion is a matter of over-aggressive overclocking resulting in failureto boot, recovery is usually much easier. Disconnect all power to themotherboard, pop out the onboard Li-Ion battery, short the ClearCMOS jumper (every board has one), and wait a few minutes.Replace the jumper, pop the battery back in, reconnect power, andstart up again. You’ll lose all of your custom settings, but at leastthe board will boot. ▲

Danger, Will Robinson

Next, a PEG Link Mode supposedly aug-ments graphics performance by overclock-ing core and memory frequencies on yourcard. The default setting there is Auto, butit’d likely be better to disable it completelyand try your hand at overclocking fromwithin Windows. A string of voltage set-tings really underscores that Asus meansbusiness when it comes to tweaking.Processors, northbridges, southbridges, theHyperTransport bus, memory modules—nothing is off-limits to the enthusiast witha mean modding streak.

This is overclocker’s paradise, thanks to plenty of options for modding the nForce4 SLI x16 chipset.

In many cases completely resetting your board by removingits battery might help alleviate BIOS-related boot issues.

CPU / March 2006 61

s p o t l i g h t

Exit back into the Advanced menu andchoose CPU Configuration. You’ll basical-ly get a rundown of your processor’s specs.At the page’s bottom under another sub-menu called Memory Setting, however,you’ll find the tools you’ll need to tweakmemory modules up to their best timings.The available options can get technicallyadvanced (much more so than most otherBIOSes), so there may only be a few youcan manually configure. The rest you canleave at their automatic settings. Press theESC key once to go back a page. If yourmemory supports ECC (Error CorrectingCode) operation, that last submenu, ECCConfiguration, lets you set it all up.

Returning to the first page under theAdvanced tab, you can now select theChipset menu. The first four settings yousee help determine the frequency and bus width of the pathways linking AMD’sAthlon 64 to Nvidia’s northbridge andthe northbridge to Nvidia’s southbridge.Because there are two graphics slots, youalso have the option to specify which oneshould act as primary.

Perhaps you’ve noticed the lack of SLI-oriented settings throughout this optimiza-tion process. Asus’ A8N32-SLI, along withthe other AMD- and Intel-based nForce4SLI x16 products, no longer need selectorswitches or BIOS settings to enable thetechnology. The latest Nvidia boards areactually easier to use than ever before.

The remaining menus are standardfare. Disable the onboard componentsyou don’t plan to use, set the boot orderthat will yield minimal startup time, andconfigure the power management settings

to your liking. Features such as Cool-’n’Quiet technology might influence performance in Windows, but it won’t negatively impact boot times.

Asus A8R-MVP: CrossFire LivesBoot time with defaults: 39 secondsBoot time after CPU optimizations: 38 seconds

Is it any surprise that Asus also manu-factures one of the only CrossFire-compatible motherboards out there?Hardly. But the A8R-MVP, based onATI’s Radeon Xpress 200 CrossFirechipset, is clearly less laden with featuresthan its nForce4 SLI counterpart. For-tunately, its BIOS is still flexible enough to be considered enthusiast fare.

Much of what the A8R-MVP offerslooks similar to the A8N32-SLI. You haveanother AMI layout, the same Main page,and Asus’ great JumperFree Config-uration available through the Advancedtab. The settings aren’t quite as plentiful,though. There are still manual controlsfor the HyperTransport bus and PCI-Efrequencies, along with several voltage settings. You will also find PEG options,one being Asus’ proprietary PEG LinkMode overclocking feature. Again, stickwith Windows-based video card tweakingapps, which are more upfront about their functionality.

The CPU Configuration submenu(under Advanced) lets you enableCool’n’Quiet, change the HyperTransportbus frequency, and adjust all manner ofmemory timings. A quick and easy proces-sor specification summary lets you know ifyour Athlon 64 is overclockable throughmultiplier adjustments. Sweet.

Now, jump back to the Advancedmenu. The Chipset submenu there is per-haps the biggest departure from Asus’nForce4 board. Even then, you’ll only findtwo settings: Dual-slot configuration andRD480 HT PLL Control. Asus is no helpdefining the latter option, but the formeressentially specifies whether you’re runningin single-card or double-card mode.

All the other menus are consistent withthe settings seen elsewhere. Make sure to tune your boot order, configure fanbehavior in the Power tab under Hard-ware Monitor, and set up the USB con-troller according to your device setup.

Because the A8R-MVP is fairly light-weight without the extra onboard control-lers and heavy overclocking extras, there’slittle performance to milk from its boottime. You may see a lot more potentialupside by tweaking the board’s BIOS forapplication performance, though. Man-ipulate bus speeds, memory timings, andvoltages. If you’re using a pair of Radeoncards in a CrossFire configuration, graphicsoverclocking might yield solid gains, too.

In RetrospectTo the uninitiated, one BIOS is the

same as the next. Inexperienced users mightbe better off abstaining from hard-coretweaking altogether. For power users in theknow, though, disciplined tuning is analmost guaranteed way to cut down boottimes, improve real-world performance,and optimize for stability. Now go makesome magic happen. ▲

by Chris Angelini

Want flexibility? You got it. Asus’ A8N32-SLI goes so far as to give you control over bus widths and multipliers.

Asus’ A8R-MVP features plenty of featuresready for optimization but not as many assome nForce4 SLI motherboards out there.

ATI’s CrossFire platform still uses two x8 PCIExpress connections, so it’s important that youconfigure them properly in the board’s BIOS.


e don’t blame you if you can’t resist the urgeto snag the latest parts every few months. Our

eyes certainly glaze over when we think about theAthlon 64 FX-60. But not everyone has the cash to

consistently stay on the bloody side of the edge. Andthere are plenty of power users who don’t upgrade quar-

terly because they don’t need any extra performance to get the job done. If you’re itching for an excuse to crack open your case or dive into your PC’s digital

guts, you don’t need to wait for the “time to upgrade” excuse. You can boost your sys-tem’s performance (if only a little) with a few tweaks and keep it running smoothly byperforming some basic maintenance. Some of these tweaks will push your system to itsextremes, so be sure to take a standard precaution before you dive into any of these tasks:Back up all important files to another location or removable media.

Update DriversUpdating your drivers isn’t exciting, but it can provide noticeable benefits. If your

hardware behaves erratically, for example, a newer driver may solve the issue.Hardware vendors release new drivers regularly, which means that the driver CD thataccompanies your hardware may be out of date as soon as you open the box. If youhaven’t updated your drivers since you bought or built your PC, you can give it ashot of youth by downloading the latest drivers.

Start by taking stock of your rig’s hardware. Motherboard chipsets, built-in audio,and Ethernet may benefitfrom new drivers, as willadd-on cards. Keep an eyeout for wireless networkingcards, modems, and soundcards. One of the mostimportant drivers to installis your graphics card dri-ver. It’s also easy: ATI and

Dust buildup in your systemreduces the airflow your PC

needs to stay cool. Spray it outoccasionally with canned air.


Nvidia both offer universal drivers thatcover most of the cards using theirGPUs. Both manufacturers release driverupdates regularly; of all your systemcomponents, you’ll update the graphicscard driver the most.

Determine whether your system hasthe latest drivers by comparing them tothe drivers on manufacturer Web sites.Click the Driver tab in a component’sProperties window. (You can find itemproperties via the Windows DeviceManager.) The tab displays the driver’sdate and version number, as well as thecompany that released it. The tab alsohas an Update Driver button that leadsto the Windows Hardware UpdateWizard. You can use the wizard to lookfor new drivers, or you can head to themanufacturer’s Web site. (Look for aDownloads or Support section.) If anewer version is available, download itand follow the manufacturer’s instruc-tions for installing it.

If you’re looking for your chipset’s dri-vers, you can visit the mobo maker’s Website or the chipset manufacturer’s Web site.You’ll find the latest drivers at the chipsetmanufacturer’s Web site, but you’ll proba-bly need to visit the motherboard manufac-turer’s Web site for other drivers (such asbuilt-in audio and Ethernet), so it won’thurt to check for chipset drivers there.

In some cases the latest driver intro-duces its own problems. This is especiallytrue of graphics cards, in our experience.Typically, you can find older drivers onmanufacturer Web sites, but if you’relooking for a particularly ancient driver,you may need to take to the Web. SeveralWeb sites such as Drivers Collection

(www.driverscollection.com) and DriversPlanet (www.driversplanet.com) offeraccess to their online driver databases.

Clean HouseWhether your PC sits on a desk or on

the floor, it will suck in dust. As thedust builds up, your system temps willrise, endangering sensitive components.Unfortunately, you can’t easily avoiddust; if you put your PC in an enclosedarea, such as a cabinet, the enclosurewill also build up heat in your system asyour computer can’t expel its warm airand suck in cooler air.

If you haven’t seen the inside of yoursystem recently, grab a can (or two) ofcompressed air and then pop off the sidepanel. Start with the PSU, says DavidTaue, marketing content manager forAntec. “I typically remove the PSU fromthe case completely. Go to a well-ventilatedarea and use a can of air to blow the dustout, concentrating on the fan.”

Taue points out that you can alsoblow air into the power supply’s ventsbut says users should focus on the fans.“I start/end with the fan(s) of the PSU,since if the fan fails, your PSU isn’t farbehind,” Taue says.

Whether you’re spraying the PSU orother parts of the system, be sure to holdthe can’s nozzle a few inches from thecomponent. If the can’s nozzle is too closeto a part, you’ll find that it leaves a dampresidue. Spray out large dust balls firstand then focus on particular components.

Some PC cases include filters that sitbetween the front panel and the intakefans. You can remove most dust buildupfrom filters with canned air. If your filter

is particularly grimy, refer to the manu-facturer’s instructions. In some cases youcan clean the filter with water.

You can spray your hard drive’s circuitboard without any damage, according toHubbert Smith, director of enterprisemarketing for Western Digital. If youhave multiple hard drives, make surethey’re not too close together. “Half aninch is plenty of room to allow air to cir-culate around the hard drive,” says Smith.

Dust also builds up in your PSU. Mostpower supplies have stickers that breakwhen you open the PSU case. Breakingthe sticker voids the warranty, so don’topen your PSU unless you’re not worriedabout the warranty. You can blow muchof the dust out of the PSU without open-ing it: Spray the PSU vents and fans.

Cable ManagementUnless you’ve already modded your

case, your system’s airflow is probablymuch like most other PCs. Intake fansnear the bottom-front of the case suckcool air into your PC’s guts, while outtakefans near the top-back of the PC expel thewarm air. Some computers also have a fanon the side panel or a blowhole fan at thetop of the rig. These extra fans (particu-larly the blowhole fan) can alleviate heatproblems in areas of the system that don’tbenefit enough from the airflow. Ifclumps of cables dangle into the path ofthe air, some components may not getenough cool air. The ensuing heat build-up can cause components to behave errat-ically or die altogether.

High-end boutique builders, such asVoodooPC and Falcon Northwest, takecable management to the extreme. Ratherthan push cable out of the way, theysheath, fold, and tie cables so that you’llbarely notice they’re present. This sort ofcable management is an art—unless yourPC has a side panel window and youdemand perfection, you can get away witha bag of plastic cable ties. Use the ties tobunch nearby cables together and to short-en ribbon cables. If your ribbon cable is toolong, fold the unwanted portion and thenuse cable ties to hold the folds in place.

Tuck unnecessary cables out of theway. Chances are you can tuck extra

s p o t l i g h t

You cansecure excesscable length with cableties. Connect two cable tiesso that they encircle the foldedribbon cable and then pull both tie endsuntil the ties squeeze the cables

CPU / March 2006 65

cables into an empty 5.25-inch bay. Alsoyou can remove the side panel nearestyour motherboard to find space behindthe mobo tray.

OC Your CPUYour processor probably has a little

more juice in it than the default clockspeed allows. If you want to squeeze everylast drop of power from your CPU, you’llneed to overclock it. You probably won’tnotice the difference when you performcommon tasks, but your PC’s benchmarkscores will increase (if you have a stableoverclock), and it may produce a fasterframe rate in video games. Keep in mindthat you can damage Windows and yourPC’s components by overclocking (partic-ularly if you raise the voltage). If you’renew to overclocking, be sure to check outour PC Modder 2.1 special CPU issue,which features loads of additional over-clocking tips and information.

Although some motherboards includeWindows-based overclocking software,you’ll achieve your system’s highest over-clock by adjusting the BIOS. Once youenter the BIOS, you’ll need to find theoverclocking options. In many cases,most overclocking features are in a singlesection. In particular, you’ll want to findthe CPU frequency and CPU voltagefields. (AMD processor users can alsotake advantage of unlocked multipliers.)To raise the clock speed, you’ll need toraise the frequency (frequency x multipli-er = clock speed). Raise it only a fewmegahertz: If you raise the frequency20MHz at once and your system crashes,you’ll waste a lot of time trying to back

down to a stable overclock. The babysteps require patience, but they let youbetter pinpoint your system’s highest sta-ble overclock. Once you’ve entered thenew frequency, press F10 to save thechange and exit the BIOS.

Don’t get too excited when your sys-tem boots without trouble, as a successfulboot doesn’t point to a stable system. Ifyour PC is unstable, it’ll crash when itperforms CPU-intensive tasks. You canfind free software online that will stressyour system, including Futuremark’sPCMark05. When the system reboots,make sure the PC is running at the newclock speed (if your overclock is unstable,the BIOS may reset and the PC mayreboot at normal settings) and then runthe CPU-intensive software. If your rigdoesn’t crash, you’re ready to reboot yoursystem and raise the frequency again.

When you find your PC’s breakingpoint, head back into the BIOS. In manycases, a little extra voltage will let you upthe CPU frequency several more mega-hertz. In our experience, raising the voltageis much more dangerous to your systemcomponents than raising the frequency, sotake small steps; many BIOSes let you raiseit 0.025V at a time. Leave the frequency atthe system’s breaking point, raise the volt-age, and then reboot your system. Nowthat the system has reached its max over-clock, you may want to run the stress testfor several hours (to make sure it’s com-pletely stable) before you create new data.

Replace Your HeatsinkBefore you overclock your CPU,

you’ll probably want to replace the

processor’s cooling unit. The heatsinksthat accompany most processors arecompletely aluminum. The heatsink canhandle your CPU at default tempera-tures, but when you speed up (and thus,heat up) the processor, you’ll quicklyreach the aluminum heatsink’s ceiling.Luckily, heatsinks are generally prettyinexpensive: You can upgrade to betterheatsink/fan for $30 to $50. (Of course,you can spend much more than this, butheatsinks in this price range will giveyour CPU some decent headroom.)

Put two items on your shopping list: acopper heatsink and thermal paste.Copper transfers heat better than alu-minum, which means you can (mostlikely) push your CPU a little fartherwith it than with its original aluminumunit. If the heatsink has a thermal pad,rub it off the base of the heatsink with alint-free cloth. (Coffee filters and iso-propyl alcohol work well.) Thermal padsdon’t transfer heat to the heatsink asquickly as high-end thermal pastes.Think twice, however, about switchingto thermal paste on a heatsink onceyou’ve already used the heatsink and itsthermal pad. When the CPU heats up,the thermal pad will melt and fill tinynotches in the surface of the heatsink,which means you’ll have a tough timeremoving the pad, even with alcohol.

Once you’ve removed the thermal padand completely cleaned off the base of theheatsink, apply the thermal paste. ArcticSilver (www.arcticsilver.com), one of thebetter-known thermal paste manufactur-ers around, offers instructions for apply-ing its pastes via its Web site.

s p o t l i g h t

You’ll probablyfind the multiplierand frequency inthe same sectionwhen you enter

the BIOS. Youmay need to hunt around for the CPU

voltage setting.

ATI Tray Toolsincludes a 3DRenderer that spinsan image as the program scans for artifacts thatwould indicate anunstable overclock.


Cool Your CoolingWatercooling users can boost the

watercooling system’s performance byreplacing the distil led water with acoolant such as Zerex Super Coolant orMidwest Cooling Technologies MCT-5.According to Dan Stephens, owner andVP of sales and marketing of DangerDen (www.dangerden.com), MCT-5cools your components better thanwater and is nonconductive.

It also won’t corrode your compo-nents, which means that if you don’tdiscover a leak right away, you may stillbe able to salvage the PC parts that tooka coolant bath. “We have seen a systemthat had a build up of dried MCT allover the video card, which must havetaken two to three months,” saysStephens. “This card still worked formonths with a very slow leak whichwith distilled water the card would havebeen fried in just a few seconds. SoMCT can allow for some mistakes butwith anything like this you still need tostop the leak and clean the componentsto avoid major damage.”

Keep in mind, however, that manycoolants are toxic; if your PC is near kids,you may opt for safety over performance.

OC Your Graphics CardsIf you’re a gamer, you may also want to

overclock your graphics card(s). As withCPU overclocking, your system willbehave erratically and crash if you over-clock your card until it’s unstable. Youmay also damage components, so don’toverclock your PC unless you can replaceparts that don’t survive.

You can overclock both Nvidia andATI-based cards. In both cases, you’llwant to raise the core speed and the mem-ory speed. As it happens, Nvidia’s Force-Ware display properties has a tool that letsusers raise the core and memory speeds.The ForceWare hides the driver bydefault, so you’ll need to download theCoolbits Registry editor. You can findCoolbits online and download it in sec-onds. After you double-click the EXE fileand click Yes in the Registry Editor win-dow, enter your PC’s display propertiesand look for the Clock Frequency Settings

on the video card’s contextmenu. (You may need to rebootyour rig to see the feature.)

Once the Clock Frequen-cy Sett ings appears, over-clocking your graphics card is as easy as moving the Core Clock Frequency andMemory Clock Frequencysliders and then clicking theTest Changes button.

If you have an ATI-basedgraphics card, you can down-load several third-party appli-cations. We often use RayAdams’ ATI Tray Tools ,which is available on multipleshareware sites. The softwarehas an Artifact Tester featurethat lets i t automatical lysearch for the highest stableGPU and memory clockspeeds. You can also changethe speeds manually, thanksto two sliders. furthermore,the program supports gameprofiles. Make sure the Dis-able Overclocking checkbox isunchecked when you run theprogram’s installation wizard.

Software PowerAnother program that will

let you tweak your hardwareis EnTech PowerStrip ($29;w w w . e n t e c h t a i w a n . n e t ) ,which supports every version of Win-dows newer than 3.1. This sharewareutility (you can evaluate it for 30 days)lets you adjust several features.

One of PowerStrip’s most importantfeatures is the Application Profile editor.Thanks to the profiles, you can assigntons of settings, including graphics cardclock speed settings, to a specific appli-cation. For example, a gamer mightleave his hardware at default settingswhen the computer is idle but configurea profile for Doom 3. As soon as hestarts the game, the profile bumps upthe GPU and graphics memory clockspeeds, and PowerStrip raises thegamma settings, so he can see the beastsbefore they get to him (aside from the

cheap demons that jump from behind).When he quits Doom, the system re-turns to its original settings. You cancreate multiple application profiles.

Tweak AwayThese tweaks should give your aging

system a little extra oomph and prolongits life. Unless you take pride in beingknown as an early adopter, don’t be afraidto hang onto your out-of-style but per-fectly functional rig. After all, at somepoint you’ll find that you’re better offbuying an entirely new rig instead ofupgrading, which means you can keep theolder system on your home network. ▲

by Joshua Gulick

s p o t l i g h t

EnTech’s PowerStrip lets you create a variety of profilesthat can enable settings and overclock your video cardwhen you open certain applications.

Coolbits lets you access slider bars that control yourvideo card’s core and memory clock speeds.

CPU / March 2006 67

E verything old is new again” goes theexpression, and this is certainly true

with Mozilla’s Seamonkey, a rebirth of theMozilla Application Suite, which was arebirth of the original Netscape InternetSuite, which was an outgrowth of the origi-nal Netscape Communicator. Seamonkey—based on the Firefox 1.5 browser code, com-plete with the new API and latest version ofthe Gecko rendering engine—combines aWeb browser, email client, IRC client, andHTML editor into one package.

Seamonkey will seem awfully familiar toanyone who has used Netscape since version4 or so, right down to the browser buttonson top and the module selection buttonsbelow. On the surface, most modules seemto have changed little, but it’s what’s under-neath that’s important, and that’s the tightcode base that makes Firefox and Thun-derbird as fast and solid as they are.

You might be wondering why there’s evena need for an all-in-one Internet suite. Theoriginal idea of making a standalone browser(Firefox), email client (Thunderbird),HTML editor (Composer), and IRC client(ChatZilla) was so that a user had to installonly what she needed, saving memory andhard drive space. Ultimately, many Firefoxusers were also using Thunderbird, whichmeant the Gecko rendering engine and othercommon files were being installed and runtwice, which defeated the whole purpose ofsplitting up the apps in the first place. Ad-ditionally, some enterprises still relied on anall-in-one suite. Hence, Seamonkey.

The app works well, though due to itsicons, it feels old. There’s no meaningfulHelp file, and Seamonkey-specific themesand extensions are few. Still, if having justone icon to start all your Internet appsappeals to you, you’ll like Seamonkey. ▲

Seamonkey For Windows 1.0 Beta

T he higher you are on the technologytotem pole, the more likely you are to

dismiss anything that AOL makes. AOLExplorer may change this; it’s perhaps thebest blending of the Internet Explorer ren-dering engine with a Firefox-like featureset. It also has an interface that evenbeginners should find easy to use.

AOL Explorer uses tabs, but it tries toreduce confusion by providing a Web pagethumbnail. Just hover your mouse cursorover a tab to see what that tab’s Web page looks like. Additionally, you can dragand drop tabs. Sidebar functionality is alsoexcellent. RSS feeds appear within onesidebar that you expand or collapse.Unlike Firefox, you can actually see thefirst paragraph of content for each item.Web searches automatically bring up

another sidebar with search results, allow-ing for easier backtracking when you’relooking for something new.

Although IE and security don’t exactlygo hand in hand, AOL Explorer makes aneffort to keep things clean. There’s a built-in spyware checker (which gets automaticregular updates) that identifies andremoves common software problems, ahypertext link displayer (to help avoidphishing schemes), cookie cleaners, Whoisdomain checkers, and more.

The entire package is highly polishedand attractive, but this beta version is stillrather slow and resource hungry. Openingmany tabs increases disk activity and couldeven cause your paging file to expand.Still, if you must deal with IE-only pagesregularly, AOL Explorer is a good way to

AOL Explorer 1.2 Beta

Official product name: SeamonkeyVersion # previewed: 1.0 BetaPublisher: The Mozilla GroupDeveloper and URL: The Mozilla Group;www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkeyETA: Q2 2006Why you should care: If you use all theMozilla apps, why not have them all in one package?

Official product name: AOL ExplorerVersion # previewed: 1.2 BetaPublisher: America OnlineDeveloper and URL: America Online; downloads.channel.aol.com/browserETA: Q1 2006Why you should care: Perhaps the bestInternet Explorer-based browser available.

by Warren Ernst

l o a d i n g z o n e

“

use them safely and effectively. Now, ifonly there was a way to hide the “AOL” inthe title bar. ▲

The BleedingEdge Of SoftwareInside The World Of Betas


O ne can see the humor in Microsoftoffering a suite of utilities to help

Windows XP users avoid problems relat-ing to viruses, firewalls, downloadableupdates, and file backups. Perhaps it’s bestnot to focus on a guest arriving late to theparty, however, but rather that he man-aged to show up at all. Indeed, Microsoft’sentry into the crowded market of utilitysuites has a slick interface and someunique features, although the beta fallsshort in other areas. And of course,OneCare’s still unknown price makes rec-ommending it tricky.

OneCare offers you a nice, althoughnot complete, suite of safety-related utili-ties. The largest component is the anti-virus module that is made possible via technologies Microsoft acquired fromantivirus firm GeCad. The virus scannercovers all the basics, including scanningincoming email, checking backgroundprocesses for virus-like behavior, perform-ing scheduled foreground scans, anddownloading updates automatically.Unfortunately, it’s somewhat slow and lessconfigurable than most of the competi-tion, including such free virus software asAVG Free. OneCare’s virus encyclopedia

provides paltry descriptions of many virus-es, and Microsoft doesn’t offer download-able removal tools.

OneCare expands WinXP SP2’s built-in Windows Firewall nicely withoutadding undue complexity. Unlike SP2’sinbound-only firewall, OneCare monitorsinbound and outbound communication,so if spyware or other nasty-ware managesto get inside, it can’t phone home. Usingthe app’s well-worded pop-ups, you canselectively open or close specific ports,grant access to specific programs, and

determine which new programs can get access. You can also set which comput-er networks can have access to yourWindows-shared printers and folders,which is very useful.

Personal data is probably the most valu-able information on your computer, andOneCare has a mostly painless backupstrategy to protect it. Essentially, you tellthe app what folders and file types arevaluable, and once a week (or howeveroften you configure it to), files are copiedto an external hard drive (ideally) orburned to discs (meaning you will need to stick around to swap discs if necessary).Incremental backups can reduce the disccount for each backup, but you’ll needthem all to restore files later on. There’snot much backup flexibility; you can onlyrestore data with OneCare (either on yourPC or another one running OneCare),and you can’t back up to network drives,Zip drives, USB thumb drives, or sec-ondary internal hard drives. Still, com-pared to standard backup plans most usershave in place (meaning none), OneCare isan improvement.

Every week (or as often as you decide),OneCare performs a tune-up by running a

virus scan, backing updata, defragmenting thehard drive(s), erasing safetemporary files, and down-loading and installing anyWindows updates. Manyof these tasks are probablyalready happening if con-figured properly withinWindows or via third-

party software. It’s nice to have it all happenat once via one program, however. Thisseems a lot like Norton SystemWork’s OneButton Checkup, but with a different focus.

If you’ve spent any time dealing withthe average computer user’s problems,you’ll undoubtedly notice a glaring omis-sion to the OneCare suite: There’s no pro-vision for dealing with spyware. For this,you’ll need Microsoft AntiSpyware, whichis still in free beta form but will likelyhave a yearly subscription fee on top ofwhatever Microsoft charges for OneCare.

And for complete protection, you’ll stillneed a second spyware program.

Generally, OneCare has all the polishand shine of a retail Microsoft product.The installation wizards (performed with-in Internet Explorer as an ActiveX con-trol), the GUI, and Help site all exude“friendly and helpful” via bright colorsand well-written text. There’s no notice-able computer lag with all the bells andwhistles turned on, and it doesn’t interferewith other similar software, althoughthat’s probably because OneCare checksfor competing products during installationand recommends you remove them first.

If you lack any sort of firewall, antivirus,or backup software, OneCare may beworth considering, but if you’ve alreadyinvested in other software, you may be bet-ter off sticking with what you have. ▲

Microsoft Windows OneCare Live Beta

Official product name: OneCare LiveVersion # previewed: Beta Build 0.8.0794.44Publisher: MicrosoftDeveloper and URL: Microsoft; www.windowsonecare.comETA: Q2 2006Why you should care: An easy-to-use Windowssecurity suite for those lacking such tools.

l o a d i n g z o n e

OneCare expands WinXP

SP2’s built-in Windows Firewall

nicely without adding

undue complexity.

CPU / March 2006 69

UUppggrraaddeessAI RoboForm 6.6.2The form-filler and password vault improvesuser-profile management and changes thelocation of its data folder, allowing installa-tion for “all Windows users” on a system.

Get it at: www.roboform.com

Gaim for Windows 2.0.0 Beta 1The all-in-one IM client gets better messagehandling from the same sender, more versa-tile buddy lists, message queuing, and more.

Get it at: gaim.sourceforge.net

MediaMonkey 2.5.1This version of the media organizer sup-ports synchronization with the latestportable players from Apple, Creative Labs,and iRiver and converts tracks on the fly toformats compatible with a given player.

Get it at: www.mediamonkey.com

The Movies 1.1More than a Hollywood mogul sim, TheMovies is a virtual movie set that createsambitious 3D flicks users are posting to theWeb. This patch increases performance onlow-end systems and adds stability.

Get it at: www.activision.com

OpenOffice 2.0.1This major upgrade gets more multilingualsupport, the ability for admins to disableand hide some operations, and the abilityto build custom installation routines. Thisrelease also strengthens Microsoft Officecompatibility, with support now for num-bering and bullet points in Word format.

Get it at: www.openoffice.org

pcAnywhere 12.0 BetaThe remote access app gets better Mac OSX support, a Host Invitation feature, 64-bit

compatibility, Pocket PC remote manage-ment, and CrossPlatform and Gatewaytools in the package.

Get it at: www.symantec.com

Registry Mechanic 5.1Registry Mechanic adds better error-detec-tion algorithms, one-click optimization toaccelerate startup and shutdown, and anew Registry compacting feature.

Get it at: www.pctools.com

SmartFTP 2.0.992.19 BetaThis file-transfer client gets many fixes,including restored missing icons in theLocal Browser box, menu items, and labels.

Get it at: www.smartftp.com

Thunderbird 1.5 RC2Mozilla’s email client gets auto updating,new address sorting options, a Saved Searchfolder, and better integration with server-side spam filtering.

Get it at: www.mozilla.com

WinCleaner 10 This version of the PC cleanup tool nowbecomes the WinCleaner Complete PCCare package. There’s new antivirus tools,spyware protection, memory optimization,

Nvidia and ATI weigh in this month with substantial graphics driver updates thatpump up their dual-card functionality and performance.

and system integrity checks. There’s alsodisk cleaning, file shredding, Registry vacu-uming, and more.

Get it at: www.wincleaner.com

DDrriivveerr BBaayyATI Catalyst 5.13New in this release for Radeon cards isH.264 hardware-decoding acceleration forthe X1800/X1600/X1300 line. The X1800gets dual-card CrossFire support here, too.

Get it at: www.ati.com

K-Lite Mega Codec Pack 1.47The latest suite of video and audio codecshas new versions of the Real and Quick-Time Alternative players, Ogg VorbisDLLs, and XviD codec. K-Lite now puts itsfiles in the Windows system folder.

Get it at: www.codecguide.com

Nvidia ForceWare 81.98Nvidia SLI users get support for mixed ven-dor cards, TV/HD-out, and VSynch inDirect 3D games. Dual-core CPU ownersget performance tweaks. Everyone gets awide range of compatibility fixes.

Get it at: www.nvidia.com

Nvidia Linux Display Drivers 1.0-8178Graphics card drivers fix multiple issuesinvolving stability with Composite Xextension, validating HDTV modes on theGeForce 6200, and detecting older TVdecoders. This release also supports SLI.

Get it at: www.nvidia.com

RadarSync 2006The subscription service for keeping driversand software up-to-date is now compatiblewith Firefox and has a smaller footprint.

Get it at: www.radarsync.com

Realtek AC’97 Audio 3.81For onboard sound chipsets, recent versionsfix noise issues for eight-channel soundwith Nvidia chipsets and World ofWarcraft problems in ATI chipsets, updatesthe Realtek 3D engine, and provides a newRealtek Media Player rack version.

Get it at: www.realtek.com.tw

by Steve Smith

s o f t w a r e | u p g r a d e s

Registry Mechanic’s latest version adds betterone-click optimization and Registry compacting.


System Utility SuitesHow Five All-In-One Packages Compare

O nce upon a time, the only pack-age of programs for fixing andtroubleshooting your computer

had the name “Norton” on it. Now youcan pick from half a dozen or more suitesto clean, protect, tune, tweak, optimize,and defragment your system. But whichones are worth it for you?

It isn’t just competition between vendorsthat has made it harder to choose a utilitysuite. A plethora of free tools have alsoeclipsed many utility suites. Why pay $50to $75 for a suite when you can get thesame functions, some possibly even better,free? One example was Enteractive’s Win-Cleaner Complete PC Care (January 2006CPU, page 77), a $69 program outdone bymany freeware applications.

I tested five prominent utility suites tosee what you get for your money and howthey stack up against each other. I exam-ined Diskeeper 10 as a special case; it’s astandalone utility that in many cases makesa nice complement to the others because itdoes something no defragmentation app inany of these packages can do. One feature I was dismayed to see in many suites was a “memory defragmentation” tool, which tries to second-guess Windows’ ownmemory-management system and onlywinds up making things worse.

Diskeeper 10Diskeeper isn’t actually a full system-

management suite; its one focus is ondefragging hard drives. It does this, howev-er, probably more comprehensively, intelli-gently, and powerfully than anything elseon the market. It’s no accident the existingdefrag tool in Windows was licensed froman earlier Diskeeper version, and every suc-cessive version of the standalone Diskeeperproduct has been ever more ambitious.

Diskeeper directly addresses many thingsthat Windows’ defrag tool doesn’t, such asthe sizing and fragmentation of the MFT

(master file table; NTFS’ version of theFAT), which isn’t normally defragged orcompacted. Diskeeper also records real-time disk performance data to determinehow to best defrag a drive and can defragcontinually in the background while otherwork is taking place.

When you first run Diskeeper, it pro-vides a choice of overviews for home users,power users, or system admins. From thereit becomes easier to sort through optionsand determine what you need to do.Typically, you don’t need to do more thanselect a drive and click Defragment, but formore advanced options, such as scheduling

defrags or defragging a drive’s MFT, theapp supplies walkthroughs for each. The SetIt And Forget It feature lets you createschedules for major and minor defrag jobs,such as consolidating free space as comparedto just defraging individual high-traffic files.

Among the most useful features aredetailed historical records of each defraggeddrive’s performance and defrag stats. Thosedubious about the benefits of defraggingwill want to watch these stats over time andsee how their system behaves.

iolo Technologies System Mechanic 6Professional

System Mechanic 6 has three compo-nents: the System Mechanic toolset andtwo proven third-party apps—Kaspersky’santivirus and firewall products. One disad-vantage of having third-party apps in thepackage is that the update mechanisms forthe firewall and antivirus products aren’tthe same as the main application. Theywork fine in day-to-day use, though.

After installation, each suite componentwill notify you that it needs updated. Forexample, Kaspersky Anti-Virus may need anew pattern file and recognition engine.

System Mechanic’s main screen is a dash-board with data about your system’s overallhealth in six categories: Clutter, Speed,Safety, Fitness, Updates, and Active Care,which is how often the system is automati-cally maintained. Most categories display asPoor until you take action. Clutter, forexample, indexes such things as items intemp directories or the Recycle Bin.

On the main panel’s left side are buttonsthat summon subprograms for various carecategories, including Optimize, Clean,

System Mechanic 6 Professional$69.95 iolo Technologieswww.iolo.com

Diskeeper 10$29.95 (Home); $49.95 (Pro); $99.95(Pro Premier) Diskeeperwww.diskeeper.com

r e v i e w s | s o f t w a r e


Repair, Protect, and Maintain. These leadback to the same functions you summonthrough the system-health scans describedpreviously. This UI can be a bit difficult tonavigate; it’s sometimes not entirely clearhow to get from one screen to anotherbecause of the app’s nonstandard prompts.

Mostly, the utilities are well done, andevery action you take in the suite is loggedand tracked. In some cases, you can selec-tively undo actions. In the System Cust-omizer, for example, you can change thedefault Windows installation path, anoften-obscure setting that might needchanging if you installed from a networkpath that’s no longer available.

Not everything is that useful, though.The pop-up blocker seems somewhat con-traindicated at this point, especially if youhave the most recent version of IE orFirefox. Recovering and defragging systemmemory, which is one of the listed systemoptimizations, hasn’t been proven to doanything other than waste time, and a fewnetwork optimizations are equally dubious.Positively, you can preview every optimiza-tion to be made and selectively disablethem if you don’t think they’re worth it.

Symantec Norton SystemWorks 2006 Premier

Previous versions of SystemWorks werewidely panned as being clunky and show-ing their age. SystemWorks 2006, however,is mostly entirely new from the ground up;it’s more tightly integrated, better written,and generally easier to work with.

SystemWorks has many of the Nortonstaples, including AntiVirus, Ghost (fordesktop backup), GoBack (for rolling backglobal changes or recovering earlier file ver-sions), and Cleanup (for tidying up PCclutter). Firewall, parental control, ad- andpop-up blocking are only available as sepa-rate upgrades. If you install GoBack, it cantake up to 30 minutes and long stretches ofunresponsiveness for the installer to prepareyour computer. Once installed, you’ll getbombarded with a farrago of warnings,such as running LiveUpdate, doing a fullsystem virus scan, etc. There’s no elegantway to deal with these except one at a time.

SystemWorks’ control center consoli-dates all the suite’s functions into one,

cleanly designed area. One Button Checkupwill check and the most common prob-lems—Registry issues, virus definitions,etc.—in one go or let you schedule these torun regularly. You can also change defaultbehaviors for the apps. For example, bydefault AntiVirus scans everything passively,but you can set it to scan on demand.

Many apps are functionally identical totheir standalone editions, including Anti-Virus, GoBack, and Ghost, but they benefitfrom having a central control panel. Manyprograms now also have behavior-drivenactions. For example, if you connect aremovable drive, Ghost displays a windowasking if you want to configure backupoptions if you haven’t done so. If you installa new app via an MSI file, GoBack tells youhow to safely roll back if it goes wrong.AntiVirus scans SMTP traffic passivelywhen you check mail—no app-specificplug-ins needed. (AntiVirus does optionallyinstall scanning plug-ins for MS Office.)

Cleanup has been completely revised andis more comprehensive and intelligent thantypical Registry/system cleaner tools; it’snow a model for others to follow. It canremember how you fixed previously unrec-ognized problems for future use and identifya gigantic range of problems. SpeedDisk,though, is unimpressive, without nearly asbroad a range of options as Diskeeper 10.

SystemWorks’ worst feature is its in-program performance. My system as awhole wasn’t slowed down appreciably

(except at boot, login, and shut down), butlaunching SystemWorks’ control centersometimes took 30 seconds on a machinewith 2GB of RAM (plenty of it free). If youdon’t have a fast or robust system, installonly what you need and turn off the rest.

(NOTE: As we went to press, news brokethat Symantec was using a rootkit to accom-plish certain functions in SystemWorks. TheNorton Protected Recycle Bin, a longtime fea-ture of the Norton Utilities, hides itself inways similar to rootkits and may wind upbeing a place for other programs to hide.Symantec has stated it has updated System-Works to show the Protected Recycle Bin inthe future, just in case.)

TuneUp Software TuneUp Utilities 2006 TuneUp isn’t as extensive as other

suites here (there’s no antivirus, antispy-ware, or firewall), but what it does, it doeswell and unobtrusively. Better, it concen-trates on things actually useful and has aclean and navigable interface that doesn’tget in the way of the program’s usefulness.

Start TuneUp, and you’ll see a mainmenu with five categories: Customize &Analyze, Clean Up & Repair, Optimize &Improve, Administer & Control, and FileRecovery & Destruction. The interface foreach is in many cases patterned after theexisting Explorer window style; you mightneed to scroll down in the left-hand paneto see all the options.

Customize & Analyze lets you changesuch things as the boot/welcome screens,visual styles, and icons and also lets you dosome repairs on visual presentation, such asrepair broken icons or Explorer problems.You can also control which apps load atstartup. Each program is also checked fortrustworthiness, which helps quickly check ifmalware is loading each time you boot.

Disk cleanup functions aren’t quite onthe other suites’ level. There’s no defragger,and the disk cleaning tool doesn’t seem thatsophisticated. The Registry cleaner doesprovide detailed reports about what mightbe wrong in many categories and cleans upbroken shortcuts. The Internet connectionoptimizer can do some fairly sophisticatedand genuinely useful things, such as controlhow much bandwidth is pre-allocated toQoS functions or enable/disable UPnP.

Norton SystemWorks 2006Premier$99.99Symantec www.symantec.com


CPU / March 2006 73

The more I dug around, the more usefullittle tools I found, including Firefox opti-mizations, an outstanding Registry editortool, and a utility for tracking running appsthat lists which files each app has open.

The one gimmick tool here is Mem-Optimizer, another memory defragmenterprogram we can all live without.

Vcom SystemSuite 6 Professional SystemSuite 6 Pro is a well-written and

tightly integrated package that might getovershadowed by its more famous cousins,and that’s a shame. Vcom has includedtools actually worth using and that aren’toften found in other similar programs.

SystemSuite’s tools cover nearly all thebases: firewall, antispyware, antivirus,defragger, and system cleaner. If you’re in ahurry, there’s a set of automated wizardscalled One-Stop Solutions: SpeedUp,CleanUp, and FixUp, plus an All-In-Onebutton to invoke them all. You can alsoschedule the most common cleanup/protec-tion tools to run automatically through thesuite’s System Scheduler; by default the pro-gram’s Checkpoint application (which

backs up key files such as the file allocationtable and boot sector) runs once a weekthrough the Scheduler.

Firewall and antivirus scanning is unob-trusive and intelligently designed. No plug-

ins for email clients are needed; theprogram scans inbound/outboundemail traffic on ports 110 an 25,respectively. If you use Outlook inconjunction with Exchange, thescanner can analyze traffic to/fromExchange servers, as well. Like mostfirewalls today, the firewall can workinclusively or exclusively, blocking or allowing ports or particular appli-cations. I had no trouble getting it to identify a fair mix of network-intensive programs from Web brow-sers to BitTorrent clients.

The suite’s wealth of other tools isno less impressive. SMART stats,disk and removable media verifica-tion, PC hardware diagnostics, over-sized file finder—the list goes on.The existing me-too tools also haveadditional features that make themworthy. The browser cleaner, forexample, scans for unwanted Active-X controls and plug-ins. Windowshas its own time-synch function, butSystemSuite provides a geographical-ly-sorted list of time servers to makesynching up the system’s clock all the faster. Such touches make theSystemSuite 6 worthwhile. ▲

by Serdar Yegulalp


Vcom SystemSuite 6 Professional$59.95 Vcomwww.v-com.com

TuneUp Utilities 2006$39.99 TuneUp Softwarewww.tune-up.com

Feature/Application

Price

FirewallAntivirusAntispywareRegistry cleanerShortcut cleanerEdit system settingsDisk defraggerDisk checkerRemoves clutterMemory defraggerNetwork optimizerBrowser optimizerInternet history cleanerSystem diagnosticsProcess explorerTask schedulerSystem restoreFile undeleterRescue diskUninstall toolsFile compressionCPUs

Diskeeper 10

$29.95 (Home); $49.95 (Pro);$99.95 (Premier)NNNNNNYYNNNNNNNYNNNNN

iolo TechnologiesSystem Mechanic Pro 6$69.95

YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYNYYNYN

Symantec NortonSystem-Works 2006$99.99

NYYYYYYYYNNNYYYYYYYYN

TuneUp SoftwareTuneUp Utilities 2006$39.99

NNNYYYNNYYYNNYYNNYNYN

Voom SystemSuite 6Pro$59.95

YYYNNYYNNNYYYYYYYYYYY

H ere’s a glimpse at how the five system utility suites in this roundup measure up in terms of what they offer and don’t offer, their price points, and more.

What’s In A Suite?


Wonderful World Of WidgetsThree Programs That Put Mini-apps On Your Desktop

B ack in the early 1980s, one of the most popular MS-DOS pro-grams was Borland’s Sidekick.

The idea behind Sidekick was that some-times you don’t need or want to run afull-blown application. Sometimes, youwant a simple program, such as a calcula-tor, calendar, or address book, to pop upmomentarily before you go back to doingwhat you were doing previously.

Fast-forward about 20 years, and pro-grams such as Desktop X, Yahoo!’s WidgetEngine, and AveDesk have reinvented theSidekick idea of offering mini-programscalled widgets that accomplish a single,useful task. Widgets are especially usefulfor users with an always-on Internet con-nection. If you use on a dial-up connec-tion, widgets will be less convenient to usebecause your computer will constantlyneed to dial up and connect to the Internetfor the widget to retrieve the latest data,such as stock information, weather reports,maps, etc.

I looked at three widget programs to seewhat they provide, how well they provide it,and how each compares to the competition.

AveDesk 1.3 AveDesk is basically a one-programmer

operation with plenty of polish but still a lotof rough edges. A tutorial folder for the appcontains a single page reading “placeholdertutorial,” and pressing F1 to access the pro-gram’s help file did nothing. Despite theseflaws, AveDesk performed fine.

Pressing the default F9 key darkens themonitor screen and displays all open widgets on the screen. Pressing F9 againmakes the widgets fade away, returningyour screen to its previous appearance.You can customize the appearance ofevery widget, including adjusting itsscreen position and size, fonts, foregroundand background colors, color saturation,the drop shadow, alignment and rotation,

and even graphic quality. Graphic choicesrange from Low Quality But Fastest toGodlike Quality Only For Fast CPUs.

AveDesk’s Web site offers hundreds ofwidgets for free download, but AveDeskbundles with several widgets, including achalkboard (which mimics scribbling pic-tures on a green chalkboard using whitechalk) and sticky notes (which mimic jot-ting down text on yellow Post-it notes).

With so many technical options fordefining a widget’s appearance, along witha SDK to create your own widgets, Ave-Desk should keep any experienced user orprogrammer busy and happy. For casualusers just wanting convenient access tocommonly used services such as a stockticker or weather report, AveDesk gets thejob done but may take more effort to set

up and use than you’re willing to invest.After all, the program should make yourlife easier rather than overwhelm you withits technical wizardry.

Stardock DesktopX 3.1 DesktopX comes in three versions:

Client, Standard, and Pro. The Clientversion only lets you run DesktopX wid-gets that other people have created. TheStandard version lets you run and createyour own DesktopX widgets. The Proversion lets you run, create, and convertwidgets into independent executable filescalled gadgets that anyone can run with-out needing a copy of DesktopX.

DesktopX provides various options toaccess a widget. You can run a widget man-ually by loading via DesktopX or configureindividual widgets to run whenever Win-dows starts. Once you have loaded one ormore widgets, you can display themthrough the DesktopX program or bypressing F9. To hide all open widgets, press

F10. To access widgets individual-ly, you can assign widget icons toappear in the System Tray or onthe Windows Taskbar.

Having widgets pop up anddisappear at your command isconvenient, but sometimes youwant a widget available at alltimes. To this end, DesktopX canalso create objects, which areimages or widgets that appear onthe Windows Desktop as an icon.By pasting objects on your Desk-top, you can view such things as adigital clock, stock ticker, orweather forecast embedded on the

Desktop. (To see objects on your Desktop,you have to minimize any programs cur-rently running.)

Rather than paste multiple objects onyour Desktop, DesktopX gives you theoption to replace your entire Desktopaltogether with a new one you create.This lets you create custom Desktops fordifferent users, thus restricting their accessto certain programs or providing simpleraccess to commonly used programs.

AveDesk 1.3FreeAveDeskavedesk.needlemen.com


CPU / March 2006 75

Although DesktopX is easy enough fornovices to use, it’s geared especially topower users wanting to create widgets,objects, and Desktops. If you just want touse the widgets, even the minimal cost ofthe Client version ($14.95) can’t competewith the free offerings of competitors likeYahoo! Widget Engine. If you want themost power for creating and using wid-gets and more, however, DesktopX standsin a class of its own.

Yahoo! Widget Engine 3.02 Of the widget programs here, Yahoo!

Widget Engine (formerly Konfabulator) isthe only one that runs on Windows andMac OS X. With more than 20 widgetsbundled with the app and over 1,600additional widgets that you can down-load, you’re sure to find one that doeswhat you need.

After you install Widget Engine onWindows, it automatically runs when youturn on the computer. (With Mac OS X,you have to configure the app to run auto-matically at start up.) Accessing the program is as easy as clicking its icon in the System Tray or the Taskbar. Whenyou do, a menu appears to let you load a widget, retrieve a new widget from the Internet, customize the appearance of a widget, or customize the way the pro-gram works.

Many widgets appeartranslucent, which lookscool over a solid back-ground, but these can be difficult to see when appear-ing over icons or a runningprogram such as a wordprocessor or Web browser.Fortunately, pressing F8 willdim the background imageand display widgets ingreater relief. Moving wid-gets is as simple as draggingthe widget to a new location.

To close a widget, just right-click it andselect Close from the context menu.

If you’re a heavy Yahoo! user, severalincluded Yahoo!-specific widgets let youcheck your Yahoo! email account, usemaps, and search using Yahoo!. Consider-ing Yahoo! Widget Engine is free, theprogram is a bargain. And given Yahoo!’sWeb presence, it’s likely more people willcontinue writing widgets for the app, giv-ing Yahoo! Widget Engine possibly themost widgets to choose from, rivaled onlyby Apple’s Dashboard.

With its free price, slick-looking wid-gets, simple commands, and huge widgetlibrary, Yahoo! Widget Engine is the mostpolished and easiest-to-use widget pro-gram of this bunch.

Which One Should You Use?Yahoo! Widget Engine is

the clear winner when itcomes to being the easiest wid-get app to use. It installs itselfto run automatically at startup (something you had tomanually do with the othertwo apps), and it also offersthe largest selection of widgets.

DesktopX deserves an hon-orable mention for its abilityto create and display widgets

and for its ability to embed widgets directlyon the Desktop or replace the Desktopaltogether. It’s ability to turn widgets intoself-running executables can also turn youinto a widget.

AveDesk isn’t a bad app, but it’s not thefriendliest to use for novices. It’s clearly a labor of love of its programmer, and itscommunity of users testifies to its useful-ness. Still, given a choice among the apps,Yahoo! Widget Engine is my first pick. ▲

by Wallace Wang

DesktopX 3.1$14.95 (Client), $24.95 (Standard),$69.95 (Pro)Stardockwww.stardock.com

Widget Engine 3.02Freewidgets.yahoo.comYahoo!


I f you wait until year’s end whenWindows Vista is expected to arrive,

you’ll get a free version of MicrosoftGadgets (microsoftgadgets.com),Microsoft’s version of widgets. Like thewidget programs here, Gadgets are mini-apps that provide such things as weatherreports, stock quotes, or dictionaries,which you can place in the Vista Sidebar.

Microsoft, however, has also teasedthat its Gadgets can run as Web servicesfor Start.com. Such Gadgets could let youcreate custom Web pages for displayingdifferent content, such as RSS feeds andcustom calendars. Finally, you can alsouse Gadgets to send data to separatedevices such as cell phones or PDAs.

Unless you’re a developer, you prob-ably can’t test Microsoft Gadgets just yet,but by year’s end, you should be able tojudge for yourself whether MicrosoftGadgets is better than Yahoo! WidgetEngine, AveDesk, or DesktopX. ▲

Microsoft Gadgets


InterVideo DVD Copy 4 Platinum

Y ou’re forgiven if you were underthe impression you should be

able to use a product named DVDCopy to copy DVDs, but alas, youcan’t. Well, you can’t copy DVDsthat contain encryption or otherforms of copy protection, at least,which includes just about any DVDpurchased from a store. So, does thismake DVD Copy 4 Platinum useless?Hardly. The program still excels at

converting practically any personal video fileinto a normal, playable DVD or convertingvideo into files that you can take on the roadand play on a video iPod, PSP, or cell phone.

Although DVD Copy 4 Platinum can copyunprotected DVDs (video and data discs, forexample) out of the box, it does a good job ofconverting video files downloaded from theInternet into DVDs that you can play with con-ventional DVD players. MPEG, DivX, AVI, andothers are all valid formats, as are ISO and other

disc image files. Just pick one or more files, selecta destination disc format (such as VCD, DVD,etc.), select the optional fit-to-one-disc feature,and let ‘er rip. A two-hour MPEG video tooktwo hours to re-render and burn on a 3GHz P4test machine.

Need those files converted to something else?DVD Copy can convert video files into MPEG-4formats for the video iPod and PSP, DivX,3GPP, and conventional MPEG-4 files in just afew mouse clicks. These can take some time,however. You can also copy and convert con-sumer DVDs using a disc-decryption programsuch as AnyDVD or DVDIdle, but you’re basi-cally on your own going this route, and theseapps aren’t free. The combination works, howev-er, and the converted files do look excellent.

If you’re willing to do some setup and tinker-ing and don’t mind buying multiple apps to getaround protection issues, DVD Copy 4 may bethe easiest way to convert videos and DVDs intoportable video files or to make DVDs. ▲

T here’s no shortage of remoteaccess software to choose from.

With pcAnywhere leading the mar-ket’s standalone application segment,GoToMyPC leading the online seg-ment, and various VNC programsclaiming the freeware segment, isthere room for another competitor?You might not think so, but I’mInTouch has several new features thatmight cause you to jump ship.

I’m InTouch works by installing a small com-munication module on your PC. This modulespeaks to the I’m InTouch central server via port80 or 443, so you don’t need to monkey aroundwith your DSL router’s firewall, and the app willprobably work through your company’s firewall,too. To access your PC from another PC or aWindows Mobile-based PDA or smartphone, goonline and browse to the I’m InTouch server,type your computer’s name, enter your usernameand password, and you’re controlling your PCremotely. Your connection’s bandwidth limits

remote speed; using a corporate broadband linkto access a DSL-equipped home computer was acompletely acceptable experience in my testing.Multiple users can log in for a group teleconfer-ence, and the app’s security features include 128-bit SSL encryption used during all sessions, andpasswords are stored on your PC. In addition,I’m InTouch doesn’t store sessions on its servers.

I’m InTouch can retrieve files via a built-infile manager; access your Outlook-based email,contact list, and calendar via a Web mail-likeinterface; sneak a peek through a Web cam if youhave one connected; and access files and email viaWAP, enabling Palm OS devices, smartphones,and BlackBerrys to stay in touch with your PC.My Treo 650 had no trouble retrieving MicrosoftWord files using the program.

Acquiring such power isn’t cheap, but I’mInTouch is less than GotoMyPC ($99 a year vs.about $180). If you’re always in need of some-thing from your PC and especially if you have anInternet-connected PDA, I’m InTouch may beyour secret weapon for increased productivity. ▲

01 Communique I’m InTouch 5.01 Desktop Edition

DVD Copy 4 Platinum$79.95InterVideowww.intervideo.com

I’m InTouch Desktop Edition$99 01 Communique www.imintouch.net/what_is.asp


by Warren Ernst

CPU / March 2006 77

Caelo Software NEO Pro 3.1

I f you’re like me, the first thing you dowhen you get on your computer each

day is check your email. Sending andreceiving large amounts of messages iscommon for most of us. The byproduct is that we accumulate a seemingly insur-mountable amount of messages overtime. NEO Pro 3.1 aims to help regaincontrol over your inbox.

NEO is a productivity add-on forMicrosoft Outlook. If you use another emailclient, including Outlook Express, you can’t bene-fit from the software’s management features. Alsonoteworthy is that NEO doesn’t take over Out-look and hold your messages hostage; it’s simplyan alternative interface, and you can choose to useit alongside Outlook or instead of it.

Upon installation NEO Pro synchronizes allyour pertinent Outlook information into itsinterface. While navigating the software the firsttime, you’ll quickly realize why it’s a dramaticimprovement over Outlook’s regular version.All my messages were filtered properly intounderstandable folders that helped me find

what I was looking for immediately. By default,these folders include Correspondent, Date, andAttachment. Messages not addressed to youpersonally (spam, mailing lists, etc.) are sent toa Bulk Mail folder for later review and filtering.

Messages vary in importance, of course, whichis why the app’s Status tab is so helpful. The tablets you easily identify and mark important mes-sages by flagging them with a specific icon andpurpose, which helps develop a method to youremail organizational madness. The app’s built-insearch engine will probably save you the mosttime. No matter how buried messages are, justtype a keyword or two, and NEO quickly findsall messages related to your query. After severaldays of normal use, NEO continued to filter mycontent properly. Eventually, I found myself notchecking to make sure that I was actually seeingwhat I needed to see.

The software’s Pro version is definitely overkillfor those who don’t receive a lot of email or don’thave an interest in archiving messages. If NEO’score functionality attracts you, however, give thefree version a try. ▲

W ouldn’t it be great if you could use the Web in a carefree manner?

Unfortunately, today’s Internet forces youto think about online security—whetheryou want to or not. Panda Software’sPanda Platinum 2006 Internet Security isup to providing some peace of mind.

The software is more than an antivirusproduct, although it does detect andremove viruses well. No antivirus tool isabsolutely perfect, but Panda Platinum

detected some items on my system that the com-petition didn’t. Beyond its antivirus capabilities,this version of software has added new antispy-ware, antispam, and antiphishing protection fea-tures. There’s also a new Wi-Fi feature to blockintruders and lock down your connections. Inaddition, you get a personal firewall, a new priva-cy control feature to protect passwords and personal information, and a Web content filter-ing function to block access to Web sites. Dailyautomatic updates keep the software current.

One of the app’s most impressive features isits use of TruPrevent Technologies, which pro-tects a system from unknown viruses and intrud-ers by analyzing the behavior of files and programs. So if a file is trying to do somethingthat will damage your rig, the app blocks theactivity, effectively stopping new threats beforethey’re discovered or the app has been updated.

Overall, Panda Platinum 2006 did a good jobof protecting my PC from the great unknown.The antivirus tools are the best part of the pack-age. Conversely, the antispam tool could usesome improvement. That said, users are in con-trol of the software, and the configuration optionswill help you tweak settings to work how youwant them to, including allowing you to schedulewhen your virus scans happen, so you don’t haveto sit around and twiddle your thumbs while youwait. If you’ve given the other popular softwareoptions a try but still aren’t satisfied, it’s worthyour time to at least give Panda Platinum’s freeevaluation version a workout. ▲

Panda Software Panda Platinum 2006 Internet Security

NEO Pro 3.1$69.95Caelo Softwarewww.caelo.com

Panda Platinum 2006Internet Security$79.95Panda Softwarewww.pandasoftware.com


by Brandon Watts


Eternal Sunshine OfThe Mapless MindII deas are the lifeblood of this industry. Sure,

executing them is important, too, but whenyou have a great idea and a solid plan of actionin place, you’re prepared to create somethingthat will have an impact. Inspiration will comeand go; it’s just not reasonable to expect thatevery idea surging through your brain will beworthwhile. When the planets align and youmiraculously conceive “the next big thing,”what happens?

No doubt, one of the first things you do ismentally expand on the idea and try your best tokeep the details fresh in your brain. Of course,our memories aren’t always the safest places tostore specific details. You likely rush to find apiece of paper (or a word processor) and jotdown the information about your idea. Whetheryou’re a part of a team at work or have brain-stormed on your own, this process can be veryexciting. Watching ideas take shape before yourvery eyes is satisfying, and the result of yourwork is something to be proud of—hopefully.

When you’re done shaping your concept,what are you left with? Usually it’s a piece ofpaper that contains incomprehensible scribblesor a document that’s badly formatted and inneed of serious organization. For such a goodidea, it’s hard to believe it looks so bad on paper.If you take your information management seri-ously, the days of the pen and paper (and theword processor) are over. Get yourself and/oryour team a copy of Mindjet’s MindManager(www.mindjet.com) and never look back.

It’s a fact that we, as humans, can bettergrasp information when it’s presented in a visu-al form. At least some of us do. Plain text isgreat for basic information, but when you needto organize and refine ideas, it tends to fall flaton its face. MindManager lets you literally mapout and visualize your ideas in a logical andgraphical way, and one glance at a created blue-print is all that’s required to mentally process allthe details of the information. Think of a mindmap as a flow chart for your thoughts.

The software itself is very functional and sur-prisingly intuitive. There’s a lot to understand inthe mind mapping process, but MindManager

gently leads you through the creation of yourfirst map with samples and a very helpful begin-ner’s tutorial. Basically, you start with a centraltopic, which can be about anything and is thefoundation of your whole concept. Let’s say youwant your central topic to be about an upcom-ing company meeting you need to plan. Youthen build off this central topic by includingmain topics. Since you’re planning a meeting,you’ll want to outline things to be discussed,such as financial issues, client needs, etc. Oncethese main topics are in place, you can thenexpound on them with specifics by creatingsubtopics, and it just goes on and on from there. You have full control over the direction of where your concept is heading, and Mind-Manager comes with a bunch of tools that sim-plify and expedite the creation. You really haveto see this one to believe it, folks. After all, mindmaps are very visual.

If you’re thinking that you can do the samething on a piece of paper or a dry erase board,you’re truly not appreciating what the softwareis capable of. For example, you can attach mul-tiple files and links to a topic, display and syn-chronize all your Microsoft Office information,reorganize and reorder on the fly, and deploythe map to your team while at the same timetrack, accept, and reject changes others aremaking. Before giving a presentation, youcould consolidate your entire outline onto onesensible page instead of flipping through anuntold amount of papers just so you can stayon track and effectively make your point.

The software is a little pricey, but if you’re inthe business of information and need to find atool that’s great for collaboration, this is it. ThePro version is $349, and the Basic version is$229. With MindManager seeing is believing somake it a point to download the free 21-daytrial. Some might recommend the open-sourceFreeMind (freemind.sourceforge.net), but it’s1/1000th as good as Mindjet’s leading product.

By experimenting with the software, you’resure to realize its value, and you may even bepersuaded to purchase a copy. If so, your brainwill thank you. ▲

You really

have to see

this one to

believe it,

folks.You can dialogue with Chris at [email protected].

Dialogue Box

Chris Pirillo is a serial thinker. If he's not thinking

about chris.pirillo.com,he's thinking aboutLockergnome.com.

And when he's not thinking about Gnomedex.com,

he's thinking of http://gada.be, his new mega-search service.

His fiancée thinks he thinks too much,

but think about all the great thinkers

this world has everbrought forth: da Vinci,Archimedes, Hawking,

Ptolemy, Yankovic, Pythagoras, Marconi,

Jefferson, Einstein, Copernicus,Galilei, Newton, Palm,

Pocket PC . . . oops, wrong train of thought.


The Implications Of Open SourceTT he C/C++ Source Code Search Engine

(csourcesearch.net) is one of those thingsthat demonstrates how much the world haschanged as a result of open-source software.Robert Schultz, a 27-year-old programmer andself-described geek, decided to build a searchabledatabase of open C/C++ source code. You canbrowse by package, license, or software categoryor search for strings in the code. It’s a simple, yetintriguing, tool for exploring open-source C/C++ software. It’s also the kind of project that anIT department might be asked to build to pro-vide access to its company’s internal code base.

According to Schultz, the idea is to let peoplesearch for “code that they can reuse in their ownprojects, such as math equations and sortingalgorithms,” as well as “for finding examples onhow certain obscure or poorly documentedfunctions can be used.”

It’s an interesting approach to a huge body ofinformation: all open-source programs written inC/C++. You can’t just import a few hundredmillion lines of code from more than 1 milliondifferent files into a spreadsheet and write a fewmacros; you must have a robust database server,plus an assortment of tools for indexing data,formatting output, and managing your database.

Schultz started about two years ago, working“virtually every weeknight for a few hours andthe majority of most weekends.” He guesses he’sspent at least 2,000 hours on the project, with afew thousand more packages still to be added tothe database. Schultz says “the first month ofwork was just writing up design documents onhow it was all going to work,” followed by fivemonths of “setting up the databases, writing thecode parsers, and creating scripts that will do thepackage processing.” He then started scanningcode in to populate the database, a process that’srunning nonstop. He then concentrated onrefining the software and coding the Web site.

This project couldn’t have even been imag-ined without open-source software, not justbecause Schultz cites open-source projects ashaving been invaluable in creating the searchengine. Without hundreds of millions of lines of open-source code across well over 10,000

open-source projects, there wouldn’t be any-thing to search. You can’t build a huge search-able code base just from the raw source code;you need tools for formatting, indexing, andoutputting results. What might have been amultiyear, multimillion dollar project if donefrom scratch was an absorbing hobby forSchultz with the help of these open-source tools:• MySQL (www.mysql.com), a key compo-

nent of the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL,PHP) Web publishing platform

• Apache Lucene (lucene.apache.org), a textsearch engine library written in Java for usewith the Apache Web server; Lucene letSchultz build a more efficient text searchfunction than MySQL offers.

• CodeWorker (codeworker.free.fr), a universalparsing tool and a source code generator; itlet Schultz give his search site “the ability tounderstand C/C++ language constructs” andextract the parts he was interested in.

• GeSHi (qbnz.com/highlighter), a tool forcode syntax highlighting, which is a methodfor differentiating program components withcolor-coded displays; the resulting programoutput is more readable than black on white text.

• Gentoo Linux (www.gentoo.org) “played a criti-cal role” for the site, Schultz says. In particular wasPortage, which simplifies keeping track of whichsoftware packages are installed on the system, atwhich revision, and if they’ve been patched.

Schultz mentioned two open software-orient-ed Web resources: the IRC network hosted byFreenode (freenode.net) for open-source collab-oration, and Flooble.com, which seems a show-case site for Animus Pactum Consulting offer-ing design information and open-source scriptsfor Webmasters and designers.

The startling thing about the search engine is that it demonstrates so strikingly what onedetermined individual can do with some timeand the tools the open-source community pro-vides. It shows how to use a complete open-source toolkit for creative solutions to nontrivialcomputing problems. ▲

What might have

been a multiyear,

multimillion dollar

project if done

from scratch

turned out to be

an absorbing

hobby for Schultz

with the help of

these open-

source tools.You can get saucy with Pete at [email protected].

Pete Loshin, former technicaleditor of software reviews for

Byte Magazine (print version),consults and writes about

computing and the Internet.He also runs www.linuxcookbook.com. Pete owns shares ofboth Microsoft and Red Hat

and believes that Windows isn't for everyone,

but neither is Linux.

Open Sauce

CPU / March 2006 81

P lease stay together and keep yourhands off the museum exhibits.Click to the left (www.lysator.liu

.se/pinball/expo) to see what Web paleon-tologists believe is one of the oldest existingWeb sites. The Pinball Expo 1994 WebSite continues to breathe, if shallowly,more than a decade later, but apparentlywithout an update. Clicking to the right(www.cs.wisc.edu/~kuan/x10.html) will fillyour screen with vaguely familiar images ofX10 pop-up ads, legendary pitches for

wireless video cams that carpet bombed the Web with pop-ups and pop-unders in 2002. And, for some life stories behind the dot-com boom, for instance, the TVAcres (www.tvacres.com/adanimals_petsdot com.htm) site has a detailed biography of the Pets.com sock puppet, that bizarremascot for the doomed online pet suppliesstore that stuffed the TV airwaves with maybe one of the weirdest ad cam-paigns in history.

We hope you packed a lunch for thistour because like theInternet i tsel f , thismuseum of the dot-com era has no wallsor storage limits. Onlya decade old, the com-mercial World WideWeb (remember whenwe cal led it that?) not only produced aremarkably colorfulhistory of boom andbust, eccentric plansand shameful scams,but the medium holdsonto much of thatlegacy in abandoned

ghost sites that remain archived by asmall coterie of digital curators. Many ofthe Web’s early pages, such as 1994’sJuggling Information Service (www.juggling.org), stay live and pristine online.And others, such as Vigilante Electron-ics (www.vigilante-electronics.com), arefunctional ecommerce venues still usingthe one-page, text-only format of theantediluvian Web. The Internet is itsown museum.

Stoke Up The Wayback MachineMany Web fixtures from the past

decade turned out their lights long ago, but s ince 1996 the mammothInternet Archive (www.archive.org) hasbeen storing terabytes of previous ver-sions of Web sites. The nonprofit IAworks with Amazon.com’s Alexa Inter-net search and site ranking tool to main-tain the Wayback Machine, which Alexasays is now the largest, single database inthe world.

With this massive database you canplug any old URL into the WaybackMachine search box. Try www.dotcomguy.com, for example, to see a catalogof the misguided exploits of Mitch

c a u g h t i n t h e w e b

Remember X10 pop-up ads?

The Great Web MuseumThe Medium That Archives Itself


from his personal collection, and endlesscontributions from veterans of the pre-bubble era. Like a good curator, Baldwinnot only provides glimpses of the oldWeb, but also crafts extensive essays onthe companies and personalities behindthe dot coms.

You can go to Ghost Sites’ Museum OfE-Failure for Web elegies on the medi-um’s walk of shame. Here you will findridiculously under-planned projects suchas the infamous Boo.com, which blew tensof millions of dollars in venture capital on lavish offices, salaries, and over 400staffers worldwide for a shopping site thatproved too hip for anyone to frequent.And then there was Beenz.com, an $80million attempt in 1999 to create a Web-based currency that customers could useto shop online. And who could forget thedelivery services such as WebVan.com(groceries to your door) and Kozmo.com(video rentals in an hour), both of whichBaldwin has frozen screens shots of on

Maddox in the spring of 2000. Maddoxwas the fellow who changed his name toDotComGuy and subsisted at home for ayear only on goods and services he couldorder via the Internet. Sponsors signedon, Web cams chronicled his daily life,and a flurry of morning shock jocks calledto check in, but within a few monthseveryone lost interest.

On the other hand, the WaybackMachine also shows how seemingly hair-brained Web schemes bore fruit. Theonce-controversial JenniCam.org startedin 1996, streaming the everyday life oftwentysomething Jennifer Ringley 24/7.At its best, the JenniCam craze ignitedinterest in Web cams, reality program-ming, and the possibility of using theInternet as a personal broadcasting medi-um. Ringley finally closed her site in2004, but you can still access snapshotsof her gallery and diary entries at the IA.

The more ambitious and well-financedcrash-and-burns of the early Web alsoremain preserved at IA. Perusing the 1998pages of theglobe.com seems to show anearnest attempt to build the first communi-ty of personal Web pages, neatly catego-rized by niche interests and geography.When the company went public in late1998, its stock price skyrocketed from $9to $97 on the first day, making this 9-month-old startup with minimal revenuea company worth $1 billion. Neither usersnor advertisers much liked the model, how-ever, and the company quickly deflated.

Having a museum of your own failuresjust a click away is (or should be) a hum-bling experience for Web entrepreneursand even mainstream media. Like the-globe.com, push technology was supposed

to transform news delivery with a desktopnewscast, according to the infamous Point-Cast, which started this charge in 1997.The downloadable client sat at the bottomof the screen and received updates frommajor news and financial services. Unfor-tunately the software was a notoriousresource hog, intrusive, and buggy.

SeemedLikeaGoodIdeaattheTime.comLike the American gold rush, the early

Internet created whole virtual towns onthe speculation of vast riches, only toabandon them once that vein of goldproved elusive. A fitting curator for thesegrand illusions is Steve Baldwin, author of “NetSlaves: TrueTales of Working theWeb,” which chroni-cles the experiences ofstaffers at many earlydotcom companies.Baldwin’s Ghost Sitesproject (www.disobey.com/ghostsites) maybe the most vibrantmuseum of Webdomaround, with about1,200 screen grabs ofdefunct sites, regularblog posts, new items


Steve Baldwin’s Ghost Sites memorializes hundreds of failed dotcoms such as e-currency experiment flooz.

The Internet Archive’s WaybackMachine even holds glimpses of thecontroversial JenniCam circa 1998.

Back in the day Pathfinder editors preparedtwo breaking news pages to accommodateeither O.J. verdict.

And who could forget

the delivery services

such as WebVan.com . . .

and Kozmo.com . . . ,

both of which Baldwin

has frozen screens

shots of on Ghost Sites.

CPU / March 2006 83

altered fake. Munchkin the cat turned outto be real, and its owner sent Boese multi-ple photos of the 40-pound feline.

A Web Before Its TimeChuckle as we might at the excesses of

the dot-com bubble, walking the virtualhalls of the Web’s museums reminds usthat many of this medium’s great ideashad to wait for broadband ubiquity andmore consumer comfort with online com-merce. After all, PointCast’s push modelmay have failed, but the RSS pull modelfollows a similar principle of deliveringcustomized, near-real-time data to desk-tops. Boo and Kozmo are long gone, butNetFlix has certainly proved that dot comscan replace some local brick-and-mortarshopping. Internet video projects such asTheDen and Pseudo TV had embarrass-ing crash-and-burns back in the day, butnow every major media brand, fromDisney to MTV, is streaming hours of TVand made-for-Web programming.

In truth, the Web museum may be moreof a lab, a rich source of good ideas thatwere too far ahead of the tech and culturecurve in 1999. Well, not all of the ideashad promise—we could possibly live with-out a DotComGuy revival.

by Steve Smith

Ghost Sites. And of course there’s a pavil-ion devoted solely to Baldwin’s own almamater, The Pathfinder Museum, whichincludes rarities such as the two breakingnews pages Time Warner prepared toannounce either the guilty or not guiltyverdict in the O.J. Simpson murder trial.

The Not ComsEarly in the Internet cycle, hucksters

and pranksters discovered that anyonewith basic HTML skills could build botha convincing presence and an equallybelievable premise in a new virtual WildWest where distinguishing between hypeand reality was almost impossible. AlexBoese has been cataloging on and offlinescams and jokes at MuseumofHoaxessince 1997, and his Graveyard Of Hoax

Web Sites includes classics such as PsychoEx-Girlfriend, a collection of livid answer-ing machine messages from the host’s exthat the press swallowed whole. The site,however, was later revealed to be a fake.

Being a curator of this sideshow of Weboddities can itself get weird, as some of thesite owners Boese features occasionallywrite in to complain. For instance, theTime Travel Fund site stands by itspromise to invest $10 for you now andthen pull you into a distant future (when-ever time travel is perfected) when com-pound interest has made you a millionaire.But even a dogged myth-buster such asBoese admits that the blurred lines betweenWeb fact and fiction can fool him, too. Animage of an impossibly fat cat circulatedonline, which he tagged as a digitally


I f you’re one ofthose people

who is, let’s say,“addicted” to your snoozebutton, we’ve found an item that mighthelp you kick the habit. For a mere$800, you could add the air sack alarmto your morning ritual to help motivateyou to get out of bed. Place the cushionin your bed, and when your alarm goesoff, it will inflate and deflate every sevenseconds. Although we haven’t tested itout, we’re pretty sure it will make gettingout of bed the better option. (Sea sick-ness pills not included.) ▲

Source: ww

w.engadget.com

/entry/1234000780069356

Wake Up!

Q&A Steve Baldwin: Dot-Com Ghost Hunter

A s a veteran of CompuServe andPathfinder, and longtime curator of

the Ghost Sites museum of dead dotcoms, Steve Baldwin is the Internet’s chiefspiritual medium. He channels Internetevents and people that are still with usand have passed into the virtual hereafter.

CPU: Do any of the Web old-timerscontact you about Ghost Sites?

Baldwin: Sometimes people ask me forvery strange things. I was approachedrecently by Amazon’s attorneys who want-ed to know if I had recorded any shoppingsites that used technology that they werebeing sued for appropriating.

CPU: Who has come back from theashes of a crash-and-burn?

Baldwin: Jason Calacanis, a verysmart guy who really was ‘the king ofSilicon Alley’ a few years back took a realnose dive when his magazine SiliconAlley Reporter closed down. He reinvent-ed himself as a blog entrepreneur andrecently sold his property, Weblogs, Inc.,to AOL for, I think, $20 million.

CPU: And those lost to Web history?Baldwin: theglobe.com founders,

Courtney Pulitzer [dot-com social

columnist], and the Suck.com guys[famed Webzine, now a porn site] have disappeared. I’m sure they’re still walking around, but they sure aren’t doing anything that I find noticeable online.

CPU: What defunct sites and ideaswere ahead of their time?

Baldwin: I’d cite Six Degrees. It wasarguably the first social-networking site.Suck.com was really a blog before therewere blogs. History might even judgeflooz, an e-currency site, ahead of its time.There’s a huge market in virtual currencydeveloping now in the game market.Hearme.com was a pioneering VoIP site.One could argue that RedHerring, TheIndustry Standard, Upside all should berevived and refitted for service. After all,the Web 2.0 is making writing about theWeb exciting again. ▲


identity.txtII dentity online is a tricky proposition at best.

You don’t know if a guy on a Web forum iswho he says he is. Or if a guy posting underthe same name on a different dot com is thesame guy as the first, a coincidental namingcollision, or an impostor attempting to imper-sonate the original and deceive you.

Also online we have a long tradition ofnicknames. From the early days of sharedcomputing resources, user accounts hadabbreviated names. Systems had rules: ini-tials and last name followed by first initial,for example. As the systems grew and theInternet spawned, these names have becomeunrecognizable. JoeBlow93 or Jane823

aren’t particularly memorable when youencounter them on a forum.

My nickname is one I’ve been carrying formore than a decade now. Recently while play-ing World Of Warcraft, I was forced to changemy nickname by a GM who decided that I wasviolating WoW’s naming rules. The rules statethat you can’t have titles in your nickname,and I was CmdrTaco, just as I am on everyforum that lets me. Now never mind thatWoW’s honor system has no “Cmdr” as a title,so there is no chance for confusion. Nevermind that there are countless players using“Mr.” prefixes or even “sensei” as titles for suf-fixes, as well as countless other honorary titlesin use. WoW’s system, WoW’s rules; I acceptthat it’s well within World Of Warcraft’sauthority to make changes such as this.

But this created a strange online dilemma.Friends that I had made no longer recog-nized who I was. In a game such as WorldOf Warcraft, you have only limited ways tocustomize your avatar, and after 10 hours ofplaytime, a medium-level character couldbecome unrecognizable, having replacedthree or four pieces of gear.

The effect of this is that relationships couldbe severed or lost. Histories among friendscould be thrown to the wayside. Now a realmin Warcraft has thousands of players, but thisproblem becomes exponentially more compli-cated when you expand it to include large-scale discussion forums where millions canchat, or email addresses, or IM.

For your close friends, this isn’t necessarilya problem. You can pick them out simply bytheir personality. But for the more casualacquaintances online, you really might haveno way of knowing if JoeBlow93 really isJoeBlow93 when he says he is. And in a day ofincreasingly stringent spam blocking, a name

change in a systemmight mean forev-er loosing touchwith someone.

On a personallevel, we oftengrow attached toour nom de plume;like a signature or a

ham radio call sign. To be forced to change it isa slap in the face. To see another impersonate itcan be very frustrating. And to others, a newname is at best confusing, and updating addressbooks can be very tedious.

I don’t know if there is a true solution to this problem. Uniquely identifying indi-viduals online is virtually impossible.Likewise the privacy implications are sub-stantial. Pretend a registry of nicknamesexisted and major ’Net services authenticat-ed to it. Do unregistered users become second-class citizens, ostracized from ’Netforums because they aren’t willing to betracked by credit card number or social secu-rity number or some other random piece ofuniquely identifying information?

These are all issues that we will need todeal with as the Internet matures. Theimplications to copyright protection, toquality of discussion in public forums, totrusting data on random Web forums aresubstantial. The question is: Who will solvethe problem first? I, for one, really hope thatthe solution is one that is respectful of theprivacy of individuals. ▲

. . . for the

more casual

acquaintances

online, you really

might have

no way of

knowing if

JoeBlow93

really is

JoeBlow93 . . . You can contact me at [email protected], but that forwards to CmdrTaco.net!

Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda is thecreator and director of the

popular News for Nerds Website Slashdot.org. He spends his

time fiddling with electronicgizmos, wandering the ’Net,

watching anime, and trying tothink of clever lies to put in hisbio so that he seems cooler than

he actually is.

The Department Of Stuff


by Jen Edwards

D I G I T A L L I V I N G

SSoonnyy’’ss RReeaaddeerr:: TThhee iiPPoodd OOff EEbbooookkss??

M any dedicated ebooks have come and gone over the years, includingSony’s poor-selling Librie, which was released in Japan in 2004 but

never in North America. Now, Sony is aiming to completely change the experi-ence, making using and reading via an ebook as seamless an experience as listening to music on an iPod. Sony’s new Reader, introduced at CES, has a 6-inch, 800 x 600 screen that uses E-Ink technology. E-Ink uses thousands ofblack-and-white capsules to form text that reportedlyproduces text very close to that of traditional print.

Users will be able to listen to MP3s and viewPDF files, personal documents, blogs, RSS feeds,and content purchased from Sony’s onlineConnect store. Several major publishers have an-nounced support for the Reader, includingHarperCollins, Random House, and Simon &Schuster. Publications will be available upon thedevice’s launch this spring. HarperCollins andRandom House have indicated they’ll eventuallydigitize up to about 25,000 volumes each.

The Reader has no backlight, which can cause eyestrain or flickering, andSony says the display is visible even in strong sunlight. Built-in power-savingfeatures include the display only using power when the capsules arerearranged to display new data, such as when the Reader turns a digital page.The Reader includes Memory Stick and SD card slots and connects to acomputer via USB. The device weighs less than 9 ounces, measures 6.9 x 4.9inches and is only a half-inch thick, making it about the size of a paperback.Display life is expected last about 7,500 page turns, or about 15 books,before the device’s Li-Ion battery will need to be recharged. The Reader willbundle with an AC adapter and USB cable, and prices are expected to start at between $300 and $400. ▲

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A lso introduced at CES was DualCor Tech-nologies’ cPC, a hybrid Tablet PC and

Pocket PC handheld. Measuring 6.5 x 3.3 x 1.2inches (HxWxD), the device has a 5-inch, 800 x480 touchscreen display and dual-processor archi-tecture. The device uses a 1.5GHz VIA processorto run a full version of Windows XP Tablet PCEdition and a 400MHz Intel processor to runWindows Mobile 5.0.

The cPC features a 40GB hard drive, 1GB ofRAM, 1GB of flash memory, Wi-Fi and Bluetoothnetworking, an integrated speaker and microphone,three USB 2.0 ports, mini-VGA port, and Compact Flash slot. The device can run common office appssuch as Word and Excel, as well as enterprise appsfrom SAP and Oracle. Battery life is described asbeing hundreds of hours on standby, with about threeto eight hours of continuous use depending on theapplications running. The cPC’s front has a smallpointer stick and left and right mouse buttons, and afolding keyboard will be available. Future editionswill have 3G connectivity and system-on-chip archi-tecture that’s expected to cut the unit’s thickness inhalf. A version with a larger display for automotiveuse is also expected. The cPC will cost $1,500 and isexpected for release in March. ▲

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T hanks to its impressive and clever design fea-tures, the MoGo Mouse BT ($69.95) from

Newton Peripherals just may become one of themost popular accessories for road warriors in a longtime. The flat, wireless mouse uses Bluetooth toconnect to desktops or note-books, and for notebook users,the mouse stores inside anavailable PC Card slot whennot in use. Inside a PC Cardslot, the mouse recharges inless than an hour. The MoGo Mouse BT’sergonomic design has left and right indentationsfor clicking, plus a unique kickstand that properlyplaces the mouse in your hand for comfort. ▲


D I G I T A L L I V I N G

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Y ahoo! and Sheraton unveiled a Yahoo! Link @ Sheraton partnership in January that provides hotel guests with free Wi-Fi andbroadband Internet access, as well as localized online information. The companies debuted the service at Sheratons in San Diego

and Boston with physical Wi-Fi and broadband computer lounges in the hotels’ lobbies. Guests at a Sheraton in New York and inStamford, Conn., have access to the service from their rooms but without physical lounges available. A co-branded, locally tailored por-tal Web site will have information about local attractions and restaurants, weather, and driving directions and include the ability toprint airline boarding passes. Guests also get an exclusive 30-day trial package of Yahoo! services, including Yahoo! Music, Mail Plus,Games All Star, Finance, and Briefcase. Expansion of the service to other hotels has yet to be determined. ▲

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S everal new Portable Media Centerdevices announced in January at CES

offer something unique in the realm ofmobile entertainment. The LG PM70 fea-tures a 4.3-inch widescreen display and30GB hard drive and will play videorecorded via TiVo Series 2 DVRs or aWindows XP Media Center Edition PC. Avideo recorder function is included, andusers can create photo slideshows withmusic and use an auto-sync function to download PIM data from Outlook.Supported formats include WMV, WAV,WMA, OGG, MP3, DivX, and XviD.Battery life is expected to be about 20hours for music playback and four hoursfor video. Bundled accessories will includeearphones, AC adapter, USB cable, andA/V cable. The LG M70 is expected forsale this spring, but a price hasn’t beenannounced yet.

The Toshiba Gigabeat Series S has a2.4-inch 320 x 240 color display and willship with a 30GB or 60GB hard drive.Compatible formats include WMV, WAV,JPEG, and MP3. Along with TiVo andMedia Center PC integration, the Giga-beat has an FM tuner and TV-out port.The Gigabeat Series S players will come inblue, black, and white and cost $300 or$400 when they’re released this spring.Finally, the Tatung V620 has a 3.5-inchwidescreen display and a 20GB hard drive.It shares many of the same features as theLG and Toshiba PMCs but has a significantly smaller form factor. The V620 isexpected later in 2006, but pricing has yet to be announced. ▲

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S ony Ericsson recently announced plans torelease its Walkman W810, a quad-band

EDGE phone that supports MP3 and AACmusic formats (but not WMA) and comes with20MB of internal memory. The W810, thesuccessor to the W800, includes a 512MBMemory Stick Pro Duo card (upgradeable to2GB), which can hold about 150 songs. HPM-70 stereo headphones arealso included withthe phone, but astandard 3.5mmheadphone jackwill let you useany stereo headset.Disk2Phone soft-ware is included fortransferring music, and a dedicated Walkman but-ton makes music-relatedmenus and playback instantlyaccessible on the phone.

Additional features include a2MP camera with 4X digital zoom and video-capturing capabilities, as well as a music-onlymode for times when mobile connectivityisn’t allowed, such as on an airplane. The 1.9-inch TFT display has a 176 x 220 resolutionand can display 262,000 colors. Bluetoothnetworking is included, and the W810 iscompatible with EDGE data networks foremail and Internet access. Accessory optionsinclude speakers and desktop stands. TheW810 will initially be available in satin blackand should ship this spring. Pricing for thephone has yet to be announced. ▲

LG PM70

Tatung V620

Gigabeat Series S

CPU / March 2006 89

SSeerreenniittyyIn 2002 Joss Whedon (creator of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Angel”) worked withFox to air his best work yet, a sci-fi/western show called “Firefly.” Fox canceled the seriesafter just one season (of course, Fox also canceled “Family Guy” the first time around),and Browncoats everywhere mourned its passing. Late last year, Whedon took “Firefly” tothe big screen, and “Serenity” was the result. If you were a fan of the series, “Serenity” is abittersweet return to the ’verse according to Capt. Malcolm Reynolds that wraps up some

of the series’ loose ends but will leave you craving more. Even if you neversaw the TV show, this film is very entertaining; “Serenity” slipped underthe radar in a busy holiday movie season, but don’t miss the DVD. ▲

FFoouurr BBrrootthheerrss“Four Brothers” is the story of adoptive brothers who return home to Detroit for theirmom’s funeral. Seems she got in the way during a holdup at a corner grocery—or did she?The brothers, played by Mark Wahlberg, Tyrese Gibson, André Benjamin, and GarrettHedlund, set out to learn just what happened and to get justice for their mother. The filmsets a sort of surreal tone early on, as the boys roam the neighborhood waving guns andshouting their names with little or no consequence; the movie almost feels like an old west-ern . . . and that’s just what director John Singleton had in mind. His commentary track

sheds a great deal of light on his approach, and once you figure out what’s going on,much of the rest of the film’s stylistic elements makes sense, as well. ▲

BBRR554499——““DDoogg DDaayyss”” More than 10 years into a career that has seen multiple Grammy nominations, originalband members depart, and a short-term breakup, BR549 is back with perhaps itsfinest collection of songs yet. Recorded under the watch of producer John Keane(Uncle Tupelo, Widespread Panic, REM), “Dog Days” features the beautiful “AfterThe Hurricane” based on Katrina and the legendary Jordanaires (Elvis Presley) doingbackup vocals on “The Devil and Me.” Part bluegrass, country, roots rock, honky tonk,and blues, BR549 is a damn fine American band making damn fine American music

that deserves to be heard. ▲

At Your

Leisure The entertainment world, at least where it pertains to technology, morphs,twists, turns, and fires so fast it’s hard to keep up. But that’s exactly why welove it. For the lowdown on the latest and most interesting releases in PCentertainment, consoles, DVDs, CDs, and just leisure and lifestyle stuff we (formost part) love and recommend, read on.

AA uu dd ii oo VV ii dd ee oo CC oo rr nn ee rr DVDByte

Feb. 14Domino

Proof

Saw II

February 21All The President’sMen (Two-Disc SpecialEdition)

NorthCountry

The WeatherMan

February 28Dog Day Afternoon(Two-Disc SpecialEdition)

Walk TheLine

Lady AndThe Tramp(50thAnniversaryEdition)

March 7Jarhead (2-DiscCollector’sEdition)

Star Trek:Fan

Collective—Borg

See the full reviews from A/V Corner at www.cpumag.com/cpujan06/AYL.

$15Dualtone Recordswww.br549.com

DVDs by Chris Trumble, CDs by Blaine A. Flamig

$19.98Universal Studios Home Entertainmentwww.serenitymovie.com

D i g i t a l L i v i n gGames

Gear

Movies

Music

$29.99Paramount Home Videowww.fourbrothersmovie.com

TThhee SSttrrookkeess——““FFiirrsstt IImmpprreessssiioonnss OOff EEaarrtthh”” In 2001, The Strokes released its gloriously super-charged debut “Is This It,” which manycritics credited as revitalizing 1970s garage rock. The record was short, simple, and sweetand established The Strokes as the best “The” band going. 2003’s follow-up, “Room onFire,” arguably followed “Is This It’s” footsteps too closely, threatening to expose the bandas a one-trick pony. “First Impressions Of Earth” has the band in exploration mode, lyri-cally and musically. While the effort is appreciated, the results are certainly mixed. TheStrokes may never reach the levels of the Velvet Underground or Iggy and The Stooges,but it seems intent on trying. Whether that’s a good thing is debatable. ▲

$16RCAwww.thestrokes.com


PPaaiinn RRaarreellyy LLooookkss TThhiiss GGoooodd

$59.99 (Xbox 360)

ESRB: (M)ature • Tecmo

www.deadoralivegame.com

BB ack in February 2002, shortly after the origi-nal Xbox launch, we reviewed Dead Or

Alive 3. A few years later (Dec. 2004), we lookedat Dead Or Alive Ultimate. Now, slightly late tothe Xbox 360 launch party, comes the anticipat-ed Dead Or Alive 4. At face value, this fightinggame will look awfully familiar to anyone who’splayed through DOA Ultimate, but there’smore if you look deeper.

Let’s start with appearance. Xbox 360 hassome gorgeous games, but DOA4 is by far themost luscious of the bunch. If you want to showoff the graphics horsepower of your hardware,DOA4 is the showcase game. Beauty is morethan skin deep: The frame rates are high with-out any noticeable slowdown, the action is fastand furious, and the interactive backgrounds/environments are more stunning than ever.Characters look very good but unfortunatelynot more lifelike. Graphically, DOA4 on an HDscreen is to die for.

To warm up, we recommend jumping intothe single-player Story mode. It’s a good way tofamiliarize yourself with the fighting styles of thevarious characters, but it doesn’t feature a reallycohesive story (which we fortunately weren’texpecting). However, it would have been fun tobe surprised with a bit more depth. The game’sNormal difficulty level is plenty challenging, butyou can retry lost battles to perpetuity, sounlocking costumes, characters, and movies is aforgone conclusion. Next up is the Survivalmode, which pits your fighter against a nonstopstream of opposing fighters. It’s an enjoyableand addictive single-player option. But eventhat’s something you may tire of within a fewweeks of intense play. Now that you’re well-versed in the solo game, Grasshopper, it’stime to take your skills onto Xbox Live.

The online mode has a rather bizarre lobby, butit won’t keep you from spending lots of timefighting through hundreds of matches. The sin-gle-player AI is challenging, but nothing equalsthe satisfaction of squelching an online oppo-nent. Online you’ll find real gamers playing eachand every character you can find in the game,which speaks volumes in its implications forhaving more balanced fighters

The DOA of yesteryear was often criticized asbeing a fight game “lite” when compared toVirtua Fighter and Teken, but that’s nolonger the case. Developer Team Ninjadelivers in spades and doesn’t disap-point. If you like fighting games, you’d be remiss in passing up DOA4. ▲

CPU / March 2006 91

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TT he Galaxies we reviewed a couple of years ago has now been overhauled and relaunched as anessentially all-new game. The game was not performing up to par subscription-wise with the pow-

erhouse MMORPGs from Blizzard (World Of Warcraft) and NCsoft (City Of Heroes/Villains), so SonyOnline Entertainment/LucasArts made changes to encourage a broader audience to pick up the game.Translation: The companies simplified many of the game’s complexities. With the changes came plentyof controversy, which you can find aplenty online. Sony/LucasArts whittle down the 30 professions tonine, combat is more action-oriented, and it’s significantly easier to become a Jedi. There’s plenty morewhere that came from.

The starter kit includes two earlier expansion packs—An Empire Divided and Jump To Lightspeed,which features interstellar combat—and is priced to move. LucasArts has substantially improved the

UI, updated gameplay to make your character feel much more vital to the Star Wars universe(rather than an extra in a hallway), and now it’s more exciting to be involved in the twitch-

based combat. When all is said and done, the game has bugs aplenty, and we’d recommendholding off a few months before giving the new Galaxies a shot. And, the number of

changes this game has seen over the past cou-ple of years would give us pause before

investing the monthly $14.99 fees. ▲$19.99 (PC) • ESRB: (T)een

LucasArts

starwarsgalaxies.station.sony.com

TT he past few Tony Hawk games have beenworking to incorporate storylines with the

skateboarding. This latest iteration one-ups itspredecessors with a more expansive and interest-ing Story mode. There’s no set time limit, and LosAngeles is your skateboarding playground. Theload times as you move to and from various areasare minimal but not quite as seamless as adver-tised. Still, they’re not so bad as to disturb yoursuspension of disbelief.

As in previous versions, you’ll do tricks and tasksthat show off your skating prowess, all without anybone breaking issues—unless you fall off the couchand hurt yourself. You’ll complete tasks, earn cash,and be able to spend the money uniquely cus-tomizing your skateboarder. You’ll also have theopportunity to compete in challenges to boostyour skill level. So far, Amer-ican Wasteland isn’t that dif-ferent from the original,

which is why the game will feel like the previousTony Hawk games. You can play in Classic mode tobypass the storyline and just get the most out ofthe skateboarding experience. Hopping onto Livewill let you skate with up to seven other players.Overall, the game is fun but not nearly as revo-lutionary as we had expected.

Now for the bad news: Why does a gamethat looks average at best and doesn’t offeranything extra above its predecessors cost $10more on the Xbox 360 than on other platforms?The HD graphics on an HDTV actually make thegame look worse by showcasing its averagegraphics. Your game experience on a convention-al platform with a regular TV will actually im-prove your experience and save you $10. We lookedat a non-360 version of the game and found that we

actually preferred it to the 360version in both price andlooks. You’ve been warned. ▲

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$59.99 (Xbox 360); $49.99 (PC, PS2, GC)

ESRB: (T)een • Activision

www.the-american-wasteland.com


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OO K, stop us if you’ve heard this one: Sometime in the not-so-dis-tant future, newly aligned factions go to war, obliterating the

majority of Earth’s population and rendering the planet uninhabit-able. The survivors head out into the stars,ostensibly to start over, but mostly just sothey can go on fighting on new planets.Only once they get out there, they find outthat there’s something even scarier in thedark reaches of space than missiles and cor-porate greed: bloodthirsty aliens whose goalis nothing short of the complete annihila-tion of the human race.

Yep, it’s been done, and the sense ofdéjà vu you may be feeling right now willonly grow stronger once you’ve perusedEarth 2160’s character art and have playedthrough its first couple of missions. Buttake heart, RTS fans, all is not lost. Earth2160 has several things going for it, includ-ing some pretty impressive graphics, amodular construction feature that lets youdesign your own buildings and base con-figs, and an interactive research tree thatresults in custom vehicle designs. We alsoreally enjoyed the game’s music, whichlends its lengthy battles a nicely epic feel.

The game also has a pretty cool virtualagent feature that adds depth to the develop-ment of your campaign. You can hire agentsto help you spy on your enemies, steal theirtechnology, and boost the speed of your ownresearch efforts. There have been RTS gameswith traces of similar elements, but Earth 2160does the best job of making the NPC advisora worthwhile part of your strategic efforts.

And in the event that the fairly weak storycompels you to lay off of the single-playercampaigns, there’s plenty of multiplayergoodness to keep you coming back. RealityPump and Midway haven’t reinvented theRTS game with Earth 2160, but they didmanage to give it a nice, new paint job. ▲

BByy TThhee NNuummbbeerrss,, BBuutt DDaarrnn GGoooodd

AA t first glance, Wild ARMs 4 is a fairly typicalconsole RPG, with menu-driven combat, ran-

dom monster battles, and a youthful protagonist(named Jude) with awesome power who over time discov-ers his destiny to save the world. Despite its adherence to a good deal of RPGconvention, however, WA4 manages to offer some nice twists in gameplayand story that make it very worthwhile for PlayStation 2 RPG fans jonesing forsomething to fill the void between Dragon Quest VIII and Final Fantasy XII.

Like many RPG characters, Jude grows up in a sleepy, isolated town,unaware of the ominous events taking place elsewhere in the world. Unlikelots of others, though, Jude’s “town” and the surrounding forest are actuallybuilt on a floating platform that hovers over the ocean of his world, Filgaia,protected from the outside by stealth technology. Bad guys show up lookingfor something the people in his town have been hiding, and in the process ofdiscovering his ability, Jude himself knocks out the powerful machine thatkeeps his little world hidden and afloat. Jude’s mom and other townies stuffJude and two new friends into and escape pod, which jettisons down to thereal world, where the adventure begins in earnest.

WA4 retains bits and pieces of the Wild West theme that made previ-ous Wild Arms games somewhat unique, although it’s set in a world withquite a bit more technology. The music, the names of some of the charac-ters (especially Jude, whose last name is Maverick), the game’s jumpingand puzzle-solving mechanics, and various other elements tie WA4 in withthe series, but there’s plenty of new stuff going on here, as well.

The big change is the game’s combat system, which is a sort of turn-based/RTS hybrid that randomly places combatants on a small hex mapat the outset of each battle and encourages strategic

movement and teamwork. As any RPG vet knows,a good combat system is essential in gameswhere battles are frequent, and WA4’s system

does a good job ofkeeping thingsinteresting. ▲

$29.99 (PC) • ESRB: (T)een

Midway

earth2160.midway.com

$39.99 (PS2) • ESRB: (T)een

XSEED Games

www.wildarms4.com

CPU / March 2006 93

H A R D W A R E

Wolf Claw Type II Keyboard Circle Of Death

GG aming keyboards tend to befor just that: gaming. In the

past we have enjoyed the IdeazonZboard with interchangeable key-sets, but not for everyday use. TheLogitech G15 Gaming Keyboardwith special programmable “GKeys,” folding LCD panel, andbacklit keys worked better fordaily use but really wasn’t forsomeone with a penchant for akeyboard as comfortable as theMicrosoft Natural ErgonomicKeyboard 4000. And now we havePD Scientific’s Wolf Claw Type II.

Though perhaps not obviousfrom the photos, the Type II is avery sturdily built unit and exudesthe top-notch build quality you

expect from similarly priced Logi-tech and Microsoft offerings. Thethree-layer silicon under the keysmake them silent, but the keysstill have confident movementand don’t feel squishy. The key-board requires a USB port butalso features two additional USB2.0 ports on its side.

Like its predecessor, the WolfClaw Type II lacks a numeric pad on the right side and shiftssome of the keys normally foundbetween the main keyboard setand numeric keypad to right andbottom-right of the keyboard.The II also omits a right CTRLkey, which may trouble some indaily use. Above the main

keyboard are eight Web-friendlybuttons. However, it’s the leftside of the keyboard, the “circleof death,” that draws the mostattention. This area focuses onbringing the WASD and otherFPS-friendly keys to an area easily accessible by your leftpalm. We played World OfWarcraft, F.E.A.R., and Battlefield2 without any serious adjust-ment period. It’s pretty obviousthat a good deal of thoughtwent into the placement of keysin the gaming section.

The Wolf Claw II is not revolu-tionary but happily does what itsets out to do. That still doesn’tmake this an ideal product forsomeone who prefers anotherkeyboard for daily use and doesnot want two keyboards clutter-ing up a desktop. Fortunately,that will be rectified by theupcoming Wolf Claw Devour,which features the circle of deathas a standalone controller youcan use in conjunction with yourcurrent keyboard. Watch for thereview in these pages. ▲

World OfWarCraft Atlas Gift PackKnow Where You Stand

$34.99 • BradyGames • www.bradygames.com/wow

TThe worldwide subscription base playingBlizzard’s World Of Warcraft surpassed 5 million subscribers in Dec. 2005,

which is an incredible feat when you consider that players buy the game andthen pay $14.95 monthly to play. We’ve been enamored with the game since itsrelease in November 2004. (Yes, at $14.95 per month.) It’s quintessential Blizzard,meaning that the game is easy to pick up and play, entertaining, and addictive.The citizens of WoW, especially the max-level characters, are anxiously awaitingthe release of the The Burning Crusade expansion pack (www.worldofwarcraft.com/burningcrusade) due later this year, but waiting can be tough.

In the meantime, you may have considered other WoW goods to fill thetime when you aren’t leveling. One recent release is the BradyGames’ World OfWarCraft Atlas Gift Pack featuring a 192-page perfect-bound hardcover coffeetable book and eight color bookmarks. WoW. (Um, pun intended.) Unlessyou’re all about bookmarks, you may consider opting for the $16.49 (Amazonprice at press time) World Of WarCraft Atlas instead. Then again, you can findfar more updated and informative info on the game (including its many maps)at sites such as www.worldofwar.net/cartography and www.thottbot.com.However, a Web site will lack the subtle nuances of having your friends share inthe joys of your attractive (if somewhat outdated) WoW coffee table book. ▲

Xbox 360 Play & Charge KitQuit Tossing Batteries

AAs we mentioned in our February issue,we count the Xbox 360’s excellent

wireless controllers among the very bestfeatures of the new system. They eliminatethe hassle of tripping over your oppo-nents’ cords when you come backfrom refilling your beverage, andyou don’t have to worry aboutlaboriously coiling cords forstorage each time you’re doneplaying, either. But, of course,no cords generally means thatyou have to have plenty ofbatteries on hand; nothing kills a marathon Madden NFL orPerfect Dark Zero co-op session like a dead set of controller bat-teries. We love the Play & Charge Kit because it eliminates theneed for batteries altogether. For 20 bucks you get a rechargeableNiMH battery pack that snaps onto the back of your controllerand a USB cable that plugs into the front of the controller. Whenyour battery pack runs down, just plug the cable in and rechargeit. The cable even recharges the battery pack while you play, soaside from work, sleep, and a few other minor irritations, there’sno reason you ever have to stop playing. ▲

$49.99 • PD Scientific • eboutique.wolf-claw.com

$19.99 • Microsoft • www.xbox.com


project and burn it to disc, but by usingthese MM2 output options you minimizedegradation that takes place during there-encoding process.

Make Epic DVD SlideshowsSeveral other DVD-editing suites can

turn your PowerPoint presentation orany collection of images into a narrated,tricked-out DVD extravaganza. This isan excellent way to keep an archive ofPPT presentations or large libraries ofs l ideshows you can play anywherethere’s a DVD player.

Most slideshow makers let you createa narration track to accompany images asthey pass by the screen, but this usuallyinvolves recording a single voice-over inone sitting to a single long track. If youscrew up the narration or decide lateryou want to change the order of theslides, you need to re-record the voice-over. The technique we used in Roxio’sVideoWave 8 editor for DVD slideshowsbinds to each slide a separate voice-over.This way you can fine-tune the length oftime each image displays to match yournarrations and also swap or delete andadd slides as you make your sequence.

To start click Add Photo/Video in theAdd Content window to highlight andopen your static images for this project.VideoWave automatically places them inyour PE (Production Editor) timeline atthe bottom of the screen, which lets youdrag and drop each slide in any order.Double-clicking the slide you want to nar-rate isolates it in the Internal Track Editorand lets you marry narration, music, and

The Movie Maker 2 AlternativeIf you’re on a tight budget, Microsoft’s

Movie Maker 2 program located in theAll Programs menu (if you’ve upgraded toWindows XP SP2) is free. Otherwise, goto Microsoft.com to grab version 2.1.

We won’t go into detail about creatingMM2 slideshows, but you can convertexisting MM2 projects to a format thatburns onto DVDs. Open your project inMM2 and use the Save To My Computeritem in the Finish Movie area of theMovie Tasks pane. Choose your file nameand location and click Next. In the MovieSetting window, use the Show MoreChoices item to reveal and activate theOther settings radio button. Chooseeither DVI-AVI or High Quality Videoto produce NTSC-compatible files in the720 x 480 pixel resolution and 30fps ratein the drop-down menu. Unfortunately,you still need a basic DVD-editing pro-gram to put this AVI file into a DVD

Let’s bump up our slideshows anotch or two with the uniquetools of movie-editing software.This month we make a single

slide into a robust multimedia video seg-ment that you can cut and paste intoany DVD production.

PPT To DVDOne of the most versatile tricks for a

DVD is converting PowerPoint presen-tations to a movie format. First, converta PPT file into image files. In the Pow-erPoint file, click File and Save As. Inthe Save As window, click the Save AsType drop-down menu and choose theJPEG file format. Finally, click Save,Every Slide in the dialog box that popsup, and OK. PowerPoint automaticallyturns each slide into separate image fileswith consecutive file names. You nowcan use these PPT-to-JPEG files as aDVD slideshow.

T I P S & T R I C K S

DVDs Gone Wild (Part 2)

S erious color-printing and publishingusers will want the new, free Color

Control Panel Applet PowerToy fromMicrosoft.com. It adds a program to yourControl Panel that manages color profilesand associates them with connecteddevices such as monitors, scanners, andprinters. This is the way pros can ensurethat the colors they see on their displaysmatch the colors they print out. ▲

This little-known feature in PowerPoint can save an entire presentation as a sequence of JPEGs.

CPU / March 2006 95

effects to it. On the PE toolbar, Show/Hide Tracks, check the Nar and Sfx boxesin the window, and you should see thecorresponding tracks appear below.

VideoWave only records enough narra-tion to fit the on-screen duration you’veset for each slide, so first expand this dura-tion to give you more time to talk. Clickthe slide, the Adjust Duration button, andin the new window use the plus (+) andminus (-) buttons to expand the durationlonger than the amount of time you’ll betalking (try 60 seconds). Click OK. Thisoperation will add a long blue bar to theright of your slide on the timeline to indi-cate the time the slide stays on-screen.

Next click the Add Narration buttonand use the Audio Settings and Level con-trols to configure your own microphoneproperly. Click the Record button, speakyour narration for the slide, and clickStop. A Track with a file name will appearin the Recorded Narrations window. Youcan use the Play button beneath the Pre-view window to check the recording. If it’sOK, click Done. You should see a gray barindicating the narration track and itslength in the Nar track of the timeline.

new project. Click anywhere on the newproject’s timeline to insert the slide withthe Paste command.

Finally, to burn this project to DVD,use the Burn with MyDVDExpress op-tion in the File menu.

by Steve Smith


I f you want to control whether your key-board NUM LOCK is turned on or off at

bootup, first click Start, Run, type Regeditin the Open field, and click OK. Next clickthe HKEY_CURRENT_USER\CONTROLPANEL\KEYBOARD key and double-clickthe InitialKeyboardIndicators value. Type0 in the Value Data field to turn NUMLOCK off and 2 to turn it on. ▲

Roxio’s VideoWave 8 lets you bind a specificnarrative track to an individual slide.

Unlike static slideshow editors, a DVD editorlets you apply digital video effects to selectportions of a slide’s on-screen time.

Luuukkke, IApproved ThisKeyboard

I f youwant to

step your rig up tothe next level, con-sider swapping outyour old QWERTYkeyboard with DasKeyboard. The all-black peripheral’sblank keys are“mounted on preci-sion and individually weighted zones,”providing the ultimate typing experience.The company even claims the keyboardwill improve your typing skills by forcingyou to learn the keys. And as an addedbonus, according to the Web site, DasKeyboard is “Darth Vader approved,” soyou can type with confidence. ▲

Now in order make the slide durationmatch the length of your narration, clickthe far-right edge of the blue bar for yourslide on the video track and drag it to theleft so that the slide ends a second or twoafter the narrative track. Use the playbackcontrols in the Preview window to test thetiming. Generally, you want to build in aslight transitional space so that the voice-over ends just before the slide switches.This gives you time to insert a visual tran-sition and make sure the two narrationtracks don’t collide with one another.

Bind An EffectWhile you’re editing the properties

of your slide, you can also bind a specificvideo effect to it. For instance, click theAdd Video Effect item in the Add Con-tent window and experiment with thevarious digitization effects. Highlight theSphere 3-D effect and click OK. Tell thenext dialog box that you want to InsertOn Internal Effect Track Of SelectedPanel and click OK. The effect shouldshow up in the effects tier of the timelineas a long blue bar of the same duration asyour slide. Now drag and grab the rightedge of the blue bar to the right to makethis effect last for the first two seconds ofthe slide. When you play it back, yourslide will contract into a spinning 3Dsphere and snap back to normal as yournarration begins. You can literally stretch,drag, and drop this effect to any length orspot in your slide segment.

When you are satisfied with the look ofthis slide, click the PE toolbar icon forEdit Internal Tracks Or Entire Produc-tion, which will reinsert your edited slidewith its bindings back into the full time-line. Now you can take this slide and re-arrange it anywhere in the timeline andthe video effect and narration will movealong with it. You can also double-clickthis slide anytime to move back into theInternal Track editor to fine-tune thetracks that are bound to it. Another im-portant benefit is that you can copy andpaste this slide, with all of its existing nar-ration and effects, to another project.Right-click the slide in the timeline,copy it to your clipboard, close outthis VideoWave project, and open the

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right of the speed option to see the avail-able speeds for the device that was auto-detected and select the speed you want. Ifyour burned CDs have errors, try burningthem at a lower speed.

In the Writing Mode section, Auto is agood choice. If you prefer more control,however, you’ll need to understand thedifferences among DAO, TAO, and RAWmodes. DAO (Disk At Once) will write alldata in a single pass. DAO also lets youuse the CD-Text tab (which we’ll discusslater), which TAO doesn’t. TAO (TrackAt Once) writes each track one at a time.If you’re using software that lets you addgaps between songs and control how longthe gaps are, TAO is the way to go. (K3bdoesn’t offer this feature, however.) RAWwrites sector by sector. For music you’lltypically choose DAO unless you have aspecific need for TAO. If you want to addB

urning data CDs and DVDs isa relatively simple operationyou can do in Linux withoutmuch in the way of special soft-

ware. Making music CDs that you canplay in any CD player is a different storybecause you have to format the data in aparticular way. There are numerous pro-grams for this in Linux, but one of thehandier ones is K3b (www.k3b.org).Although K3b is a KDE tool that comeswith most mainstream distributions bydefault or through package-managementsystems, you can run it under GNOMEas long as you also have KDE installed.

Launch K3bThe first time you launch K3b, the

Writer Speed Verification dialog boxappears. The make and model for each ofyour burning devices is listed, along withthe speed that K3b calculates it can burnat. If the speed is incorrect, you can changethe value here. When you’re finished, clickOK to reveal the main K3b window.

To begin setting up your audio CD’scontents, click New Audio CD Projectin the lower pane. The pane will changeto reflect your audio CD project. Next,open a graphical file browser, such asNautilus (in GNOME) or Konqueror(in KDE), and navigate to the basedirectory that contains your music. Hereyou can drag and drop the songs youwant on your CD into the lower K3bpane. As you do so, watch the time linethat’s displayed at the pane’s bottom.

The time line will turn green and fill up as you add more music. As you getwithin a few minutes of the maximum80 minutes, the end of the line will turn yellow. If you go over 80minutes, the end of the lineturns red.

When you’re finished, checkthat your songs are properly rec-ognized by name and artist. Ifnot, select the songs you areinterested in and click theMusicBrainz button (to the leftof the Query Cddb button) to let K3b find metadata aboutthe songs at MusicBrainz.org.Next, click Query Cddb to haveK3b access the Gracenote data-base (www.gracenote.com) todetermine information aboutthe song. It is possible Music-Brainz.org and Gracenote won’tfind any related data. If so,right-click the track and selectProperties to assign the informa-tion manually.

With all your songs added,click Burn, which will openthe Audio Project-K3b dialogbox. If the Burning Devicedrop-down menu doesn’t listyour drive (because you havemore than one CD/DVDdrive, for example), select theproper drive from the list. Tochange the automatic speedsetting, click the arrow to the

Making Music CDs In Linux

The K3b CD and data DVD creation tool is one way to create music CDs and more in Linux.

When you’re creating a music CD with K3b, you’ll see theNew Audio CD Project pane displayed in the lower pane.

CPU / March 2006 97

silence between songs, click Close andright-click the song in the project listingwhere you want to add empty space andselect Add Silence. By default, the trackadds two seconds of silence. You canchange this by clicking the time shown tothe right of Silence in the project listing.You can also make this silence into its owntrack by right-clicking the Silence line andchoosing Source To Track.

Burn OptionsAfter you have selected your Writing

Mode or decided to use the auto setting,look to the Options section. To simulate aCD burn without actually burning data,click Simulate. If you want to create animage file before the burn begins, checkthe On The Fly option. Otherwise, theimage will be created as the data is burn-ing. A Remove Image option also becomesavailable when you unselect On The Fly.If you want the keep the image on yourmachine, uncheck Remove Image. If youdon’t want to immediately burn the CDbut instead create an image file to burnlater, click Only Create Image.

Next, check that the Copies option is setto the number of CDs you want to burnand click the Image tab. If you’ve selectedan option that involves creating an imagefile, you can use the Temporary Directoryoption or Browse button to set where theimage will be saved. Clicking the CD-Texttab lets you check the Write CD-Textoption to specify information about the

CD that should be included in theburn, such as the title and artist.Finally, clicking the Advanced tablets you change such esoteric set-tings as hiding the CD’s first track.

When your settings are com-plete, click Save User Defaults tomake these your defaults, clickK3b Defaults to revert to the

original defaults, click Save to save thesettings for this particular CD, or clickBurn to immediately burn the CD. Youcan access your user defaults later byclicking User Defaults.

After you click Burn, the WritingAudio CD-K3b dialog box appears. Twoprogress bars will display, one for eachtrack and one for the project’s overallprogress. When the burning is finished,click Close to leave the dialog box. Tocompletely change this project, clickProject, Clear Project, and Yes. This willclear the current audio project and let youstart over. This will keep the same filename, however, which may not be whatyou’re after. If you want to start a newproject file, click File, New Project, andNew Audio CD Project.

K3b can also create data CDs, dataDVDs, mixed-mode CDs, video CDs,video DVDs, and eMovix (movix.sourceforge.net) CDs and DVDs. eMovix issimilar to a bootable Linux distro, lettingyou create CDs and DVDs that will automatically play the media on theCD/DVD when the CD/DVD boots.

MP3 PlayersMost of us own large music libraries.

Tools such as K3b let us throw togetherdifferent genres or combinations of songsto create CDs/DVDs. If you want to putsongs on a CD that you want to use in aplayer that can’t play regular music CDs,you will need to do something different.Typically, Linux CD rippers don’t putfiles into MP3 format. Instead, files areusually saved in WAV, OGG, or FLACformats. If your player doesn’t supportthese formats, you can convert the filesinto MP3s using the lame program. Forexample, you would type at a commandline lame test.wav test.mp3 to convertthe file test.wav into MP3 format, creat-ing the new file test.mp3. If you needsupport for other formats, one option is Audio Convert (savannah.nongnu.org/projects/audio-convert).

by Dee-Ann LeBlanc


“RFID Is For Me”

Amal Graafstra, a 29-year-old entre-preneur from Vancouver, Canada,

didn’t want to get caught with his pantsdown, so to speak. That’s why he insert-ed a RFID chip about the size of a grainof rice in his hand. When the chipcomes within about 3 inches of a corresponding receiver (about $50),Graafstra can do such things as unlockdoors, start a computer, and more witha wave of the hand, essentially eliminat-ing the problem of forgetting passwordsor keys. The chips are about $2 each,last about 100 years, and don’t hurt,

according to those who’ve hadthem implanted. For more on

getting your own, head totagged.kaos.gen.nz. ▲

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The Audio Project-K3b dialog box lets you specify additionalsettings and information to apply to your music CD.


Intel Takes On AMD, SeriouslyII continue to use an Intel Pentium M

900MHz Ultra Low Voltage as my note-book of choice because even though it’s longin the tooth, its battery performance is excel-lent, and it’s not a bad performer on most ofthe applications I use, either.

Longtime CPU readers will recall that whenIntel launched the Centrino platform a fewyears ago, I did my best to persuade the firmto use the Pentium M in desktops. While Intelfound that difficult to do then because it wasstill pushing the power-hogging Pentium 4,it’s just released the Yonah Core Duo, and mydreams have become reality.

Now that I have an AMD Turion 64 note-book, as well, let me explain the basic differ-ence between the Pentium M and AMD’soffering. The Turion 64 is nothing more thanan Athlon 64 or an Opteron tweaked for thenotebook market. Although, unlike thePentium M, it does support 64-32 comput-ing, that supposed benefit is almost worthlessbecause Microsoft hasn’t yet provided all thedrivers necessary to take advantage of theAMD features.

And it won’t—not until Vista comes outlater this year.

By the time Vista arrives, Intel will havereleased its Merom notebook processor, sup-porting massively more cache and also a 64-32operating system.

AMD has missed a trick here by using ageneric microprocessor core for notebooks, fordesktops, and for servers. The Pentium M, inits Banias, Dothan, and Yonah flavours, wasdesigned by a gang of crazed geniuses in Intel’sIsrael facilities, and from the ground up. Itspecifically addresses the needs of a notebookin terms of speed, performance, and batterylife, and it’s no coincidence that Apple hasdecided to plump for this CPU for its Intel-based machines, either.

It took Intel 18 months to properly phaseout the Pentium 4 and its derivatives, and thatprocess comes to a conclusion later this year

with the release of its Merom notebookprocessor and its Conroe desktop processor.

These are grown-up dual-core processors,which Intel will be able to produce in vastquantities at its advanced fabrication plantsaround the world. From now on you canmore or less forget the Pentium 4, which hashad its problems but from Intel’s point ofview has been a stunning success. That is tosay, it has made the chip giant lots of money,and provided it with enough funds to go into2006 and 2007 with some new architecturesthat at last will make it worth upgrading yourdesktop or your notebook.

The jury is still out on how good MicrosoftVista will be, but I now believe that you havemore choice than ever before on which com-puter you use, with good CPUs from bothAMD and Intel. The most recent roadmapswe’ve seen from Intel do not give clock speedsfor either its Merom or Conroe microproces-sors, but what is for sure is that rather than thedual-core kludge the firm attempted with itsPentium D microprocessors, the design of thechips will provide you with good computingpower. Throw in a gig of memory, a very fasthard drive, and the incredible inventions thegraphics chip companies have come up with,and you will have a dream machine and at longlast a real reason to upgrade.

I do not propose to get myself a PC for myliving room, whether it’s got a snazzy IntelViiv logo or an AMD Live! logo on the out-side. We’re still a long way away from havinga suitable operating system for granny, despitethe hype from the computer vendors, and notevery household has a resident PC wizard whocan be on hand to clear up the .TMP files,reformat the hard drive, and make sure theplugs are all going into the right sockets.

The last two years have been very wearingas we’ve all twiddled our thumbs waiting forsome real fizz. It now looks as though we canall get reasonably excited about the PC, nowthat Intel’s back in the fray again. ▲

The Pentium M

was designed

by a gang

of crazed

geniuses . . .

Send rumours to “Mad Mike” Magee at [email protected].

Mike Magee is an industry veteran.He cut his teeth on ancient prod-

ucts like the Dragon and theJapanese PC platforms long before

the IBM-PC won. He worked for acorporate reseller in the mid-’80sand saw the Compaq 386 sand-

wich box and every GUI known tohumankind. Mike decided that theway to go was the Interweb around1994 after editing PC mags in thelate ’80s and ’90s. A co-founder of

The Register, Mike started thechip-driven INQUIRER

(www.theinquirer.net) in 2001.He has contacts from top to bottomin the business, spanning the entire

chain, who help him root out inter-esting rumours and speculation.

Shavings From The Rumour Mill

CPU / March 2006 99

ATI 2006: Don’t Call It A Comeback

22 005 was a bittersweet year for ATI. Thecompany realized success with their

mobile phone business and continued to dowell in the areas of integrated and notebookgraphics. Microsoft and Nintendo selectedATI to provide graphics hardware for Xbox360 and Revolution, respectively. We alsolearned that Intel would discontinue usingtheir own integrated graphics in some of theirlower-end boards and would instead use ATIchips for these platforms. Of course, some ofthese successes wouldn’t be fully realized untilearly 2006, but in several areas the companycertainly seemed to be making headway.

On the desktop PC side it was a completelydifferent story. I bet money that ATI wouldn’tmeet their targets, but I certainly didn’t expectthem to be a year late to the party. Crossfireshould have been a very successful launch, butthe company executed the launch poorly byreleasing products in multiple stages, and withdisappointing results. It seemed ATI couldn’tlaunch a product on time in 2005 no matterhow hard they tried.

I lost it when ATI added VoodooPC to thelaunch list for Crossfire and we called them onthe fact that they hadn’t shipped us any parts.We hadn’t even qualified their product yet, sohow could we launch a nonexistent technology?

Needless to say, Crossfire had a rough start,and it was clear in our minds that ATI wasworking to recover from a terrible fall. Whilethe PR people were working overtime to dodamage control, ATI was secretly working onthe X1900 series. Even though I was openlycritical of them throughout most of the year,ATI actually listened to everything we said.It’s hard to believe that a company the size ofATI could make changes for the positive soquickly. Not only did they plan to launch theX1900 series on time, but they actually had acomplete product line on the date of launch.

But the good news for ATI doesn’t stopwith an on-time product launch; the RadeonR580 (X1900) is everything that the X1800should have been and more. With threetimes the pixel shaders, faster engine andmemory speeds, HDR and HQ texture filter-ing, and 6X Adaptive AA, this latest cardlooks to be excellent.

What’s more, the Crossfire chipset (x32) issurprisingly good and the Asus board utilizes adifferent architecture which fixes any USBperformance issues.

Prior to the X1900 launch, I spoke withATI’s Director of Channel Marketing andBusiness Development, Toshiyuki Okumura,regarding this, that, and the other. Toshiyukianswered some pretty tough questions to mysatisfaction, including what he thought ATIdid right and wrong in 2005. He mentionedthat they were very excited with their successwith the Motorola RAZR and Xbox 360, aswell as their successful transfer to 90nm tech-nology. He candidly expressed disappoint-ment in the R520 launch, the fact that ATIsuffered delays on many of their products, andof course the technical issues they experiencedaround Crossfire. (You can view the full tran-script of my interview with Mr. Okumura onmy blog at www.rahulsood.com.)

Toshiyuki also gave me some hints at whatto expect in 2006 (“No more launches withoutproduct availability.”), shared his views onNvidia’s deadly Quad-SLI technology (hecompares it to a concept car that’s “neat, butnot likely to be in your driveway anytimesoon”), and confidently expressed his beliefthat the X1900XTX would be the fastest, mostfeature-rich product available on the market.

Of course, anything can happen in thehigh-tech world, but at this point I can tellyou that based on our tests we’re veryimpressed with the Radeon X1900XTX andCrossfire. In the last couple of years Nvidiahas taken nearly 100% of the premium perfor-mance PC market (last year you couldn’t evenbuy a Voodoo desktop system with an ATIcard in it), but this year you’ll probably seemore of an even mix in the gaming market.

I imagine my peers at Alienware, FalconNorthwest, and some others feel the same way.

Seldom if ever will you see a tech companymiss more than three product cycles in a rowand make a comeback, but I think it’s time westarted to pay attention to ATI again. Theycertainly have upped the ante in high-enddesktop graphics, and all indicATIons say theyhave learned from their mistakes and couldhave a strong 2006. ▲

Needless

to say,

Crossfire

had a rough

start . . .

Send comments to [email protected].

Rahul Sood's love for computersstarted at the young age of 11.

Much to the shock and dismay ofhis parents, he ripped apart his

brand new Apple //c and paintedit red before turning it on. His

parent’s dreams of having a doctorfor a son were shattered when

college drop-out Rahul foundedwhat is now one of the mostrespected high-end computer

companies in the world, Voodoo Computers.

Hot Seat


CPU: What is the problem with VoIP today?

Beckemeyer: VoIP is pretty cool, anda lot of us have been using it in neat waysfor a while, but the real VoIP is still prettydifficult to set up. People have to set upservers and configure complicated devicesand set up all kind of components andpieces. It’s way more than an ordinaryconsumer is going to do. Online phoneservices have emerged to make it easy touse some VoIP capability but they’re stillsort of walled gardens. They’re not reallygiving people real VoIP, if you will. TheirInternet calling capabilities are just sort of taking them to lower prices and aportable wall jack. PhoneGnome is abouttrying to give regular people a simpledevice the size of a couple decks of cards;a simple device that they just literally plugin and it actually takes them to the realVoIP instead of a walled garden world.They don’t need to know how to set up servers and things like that. It almost

surreptitiously gives people a lot of thingsthey don’t necessarily know they haveright at the beginning because we made itvery easy and phone-like, so people justplug it in, dial numbers, and do all thesethings, yet they take it to whatever depthlevel they want.

CPU: We’d wager that most people onVonage, Lingo, or the like think they’repretty cutting edge. They have the wholevoicemail-to-email thing down. But whatare they missing?

Beckemeyer: One is the ability tomake actual free calls. I mean, the mobileworld has all done a great job training usthat free has a certain cost per month. Ipay $20 a month, $25 a month, $100 amonth for free calls. Well, that’s theweirdest thing I’ve ever heard.

The next big difference with PhoneGnome is it’s open like the Web. Whenpeople have PhoneGnome, third partiescan offer the features and services they

want. We offer some of our own things,too—voicemail and things like that—but the idea is that PhoneGnome willlet people pick the services they wantfrom the vendors they want. All theVoIP providers out there today that Iknow of, pretty much like a phone company, give you a menu and say,‘Here are your seven things you canbuy.’ I can only buy the things Skypetells me I can buy. You don’t see Phone-Gnome Out or PhoneGnome Minutes.What you see instead is a list of servicesavailable sold through third parties. Wepresent a few of them that are partnersand are nicely integrated, so it’s easy forusers to select, but there’s another but-ton that lets you select from literallythousands of providers out there. Theidea is that now you can do things likeuse your POTS line for in-country callsand select this other provider that has great prices to Pakistan as a defaultprovider for international calls. Youcould even activate many providers

W hen David Beckemeyer helped co-found EarthLink in1995, the Internet was a cool place to be—if you

could figure out how to get onto it. Of course, you could optfor a “walled garden” service, such as AOL or Prodigy, but at that time, these were still largely self-contained networks,not a direct ramp onto the Internet. Beckemeyer andEarthLink played an important role in forcing the industry tobring true, fully functional Internet service to the masses. Hehopes to repeat this performance a decade later in the VoIPspace with his new company TelEvolution and its debutproduct, PhoneGnome.


TechnicallySpeaking

An Interview With DavidBeckemeyer, CEO Of TelEvolution

& Co-founder Of EarthLink

WWhhaatt’’ss Cooking . . .

CPU / March 2006 103

anti-traditional marketing language.Yet, everybody knows what www is,everybody knows what an email addressis, and someday everybody will knowwhat a SIP address is, too.

CPU: What the coolest geek featureyou’re personally anticipating with VoIP?

Beckemeyer: That’s the impossiblequestion. If somebody asked you that in1990, would you have said Amazon oreBay? But . . . I think the coolest thingwill be the fact that I’ll have this hugeselection of things to do, and it reallywill be my unique phone. I can do thethings I want to do. As an example,maybe I have a simple lie detector sothat when somebody calls me and I’mtalking to them, I get a thumbs up orthumbs down indication on my PC.This kind of stuff. Once you makephone calls accessible as data and let anaverage programmer have access to thatwithout needing to be a math guru, theycan do it with Internet-style develop-ment tools. The creativity of thoseguys—they’re al l smarter than me,

they’re going to come up with betterideas than I have, and enabling that isthe coolest thing about it. I’ll have somuch choice in what I can do. You’ll beable to download apps at sites to try onyour phone. It scares the heck out of thephone companies when we show themthe MyPhoneGnome page and how peo-ple can just click to change something.You just click it and it happens. Youdon’t have to call and wait on hold. Andthis is only a small beginning of what itwill be like.

for different destinations all at the same time.

CPU: Honestly, we’re still a bit commit-ment-phobic on VoIP. How many FTPsessions or HD downloads before we loseline quality? And as we saw with 9/11 andKatrina, if you need to use the ’Net aftera disaster, forget it.

Beckemeyer: Well, the nice thingabout PhoneGnome is that you have thatPOTS line as an insurance policy. Insome sense, you’re paying too much forit, but you get reliability, and if the powergoes out you still have a phone. You getto be in the White Pages. And if you havean Internet outage for a couple of days,you’ll lose the cool Internet features, butyou’ll still have basic phone service. ThePhoneGnome model mitigates a bit ofthat trepidation.

CPU: What’s going on right now toincrease the general level of VoIP QoS?

Beckemeyer: I’ve been an Internetguy for a long time, and QoS is not really

what the Internet is about. It’s about get-ting packets from point A to point Beffectively and changing that routedynamically if it has to. So QoS on theInternet at large is just a gigantic mistake,and I think you completely destroy whatthe Internet is about by trying to do that.But where QoS can factor is closer to theedges. PhoneGnome already tells therouter about the traffic, and if the routerunderstands that packet information, itcan prioritize it.

CPU: Why is QoS for the wholeInternet a mistake?

Beckemeyer: The idea of QoS inthe Internet at large completely breaks

what the Internet is about. The Internetis about doing anything you want. Ifyou make the Internet only good atWeb and email, you break it for every-thing else. If we had optimized theInternet back in 1986 or 1990 to dowhatever it did then, how would wehave ever had the Web as we know it?You can focus on just making it reallygood at getting packets from point A topoint B, at the core, at the backbonelayer, and when you make it good atdoing that, it can accommodate anyapplication. When you start doingthings like QoS and deciding what’s agood app and what’s a bad app thisweek, someone has to decide what’s thelist next week and the week after that,and you’ve grossly changed the eco-nomics of the Internet.

CPU: Vonage, Lingo, and all thesehighly publicized services say they areSIP-based but are actually walled gardens, yet no one ever talks about that.Where’s the noise? Where’s the ‘Open-SIP’ or whatever logo and campaign tochampion your cause?

Beckemeyer: That i s going tobecome a key piece of our messaging.We’re going to actually start talkingabout [SIP]. We’re going to put SIPcalling on the Web site and sort of a‘what is this and why do I need it?’ kindof link. And if you asked any expert,including some of my own team,they’re saying you’re nuts. No onewants to know that; no one cares. But if we do it right, we’re going to get that messaging out there. Who wouldhave said people are going to start using www.anything, right? It is pretty

WWhhaatt’’ss Cooking . . . Technically Speaking

Subscribers can read bonus content with David Beckemeyer at wwwwww..ccppuummaagg..ccoomm//ccppuummaarr0066//bbeecckkeemmeeyyeerr

The next big difference with PhoneGnomeis it’s open like the Web.

—David Beckemeyer



WWhhaatt’’ss Cooking . . .

AA dmit it. Even if you’ve shelved yourdreams of rock superstardom for life

as a desk jockey, it’s still fun to pull outthe old air guitar every now and again for abrilliant, albeit silent, solo. Well, prepareto make some noise. Three students atHelsinki University of Technology havedeveloped a program that will soon let youturn the volume of your air guitar all theway up to 11.

The Virtual Air Guitar, designed by stu-dents Aki Kanerva, Juha Laitinen, andTeemu Mäki-patola, transforms the fret-work and energetic strumming of an airguitarist into real music, letting users createunique guitar solos with only a 10-secondlearning curve. The system consists of avideo camera that monitors the hand move-ments of a player wearing bright orangegloves. Software maps those movements toa library of guitar sounds based on the Eminor pentatonic scale (think DeepPurple’s “Smoke on The Water”).

Players control pitch by varying the dis-tance between their hands (closer together

and the notes go higher) and a foot pedal,which lets players switch between powerchord mode and solo mode. Players can alsoadd guitar effects, such as slide, bending,and vibrato, by simulating those actions inthe air. And in the true spirit of air guitar,the wilder and more frenzied the move-ments, the better the sound.

“It’s not about playing a specific songbut about really working yourself into arock frenzy on stage,” says Kanerva.

Despite the sizzling solos the Virtual AirGuitar is capable of producing, real gui-tarists don’t have any job-security worries.The system is designed strictly for amateurs.Kanerva says, “It’s targeted at people whohave no musical background. We want togive them the chance of experiencing thejoy of playing music for themselves.”

Currently, you can experience the sys-tem at the Heureka Science Center inFinland, but the system’s developers are inthe process of starting a company andhope to have a commercially availableproduct in two to three years. ▲

Under DDeevveellooppmmeennttA Peek At What's Brewing In The Laboratory

Let There Be Rock

II magine a world where you can “smarten”everyday items by covering them with tiny

semiconductors that communicate wirelessly,turning those objects into networked infor-mation appliances. That world isn’t so veryfar away. And those tiny objects, currently inprototype, are called Specks.

D. K. Arvind, computer science professor atthe University of Edinburgh, heads up theSpeckled Computing Consortium, a multidis-ciplinary research group of members from fiveScottish universities whose aim is to advancethe next generation of Specks and Specknets.

A Speck will be a grain-sized (1mm square)semiconductor device that will combine sens-ing, processing, and wireless networking. EachSpeck will be autonomous with its own renew-able energy source. Thousands of Specks to-gether communicating wirelessly will form aSpecknet, a programmable computational net-work that can support various applications.

Arvind likens the potential brought aboutby the development of Specknets to that of themicroprocessor. “The microprocessor com-bines processing and storage on a single chip,which could be programmed for differentapplications,” Arvind says. “Similarly, theSpecks combine sensing, processing, and wire-less networking, and I am positioning this asthe workhorse or the platform for pervasiveand ubiquitous computing where small sizeand mobility matters.”

The first applications of speckled computingare likely to be in the areas of health, safety, andsecurity. For example, Specks could be placedon people to monitor their vitals and sound an alarm if something goes wrong, aroundbuildings to sense hotspots in case of fire andcreate an LED-lit path to safety, or on badges insecurity-sensitive areas to track visitors.

Current research aims to produce prototypespecks that are 5mm square, which Arvindexpects to be ready by the end of Q1 2006.Arvind cautions, however, that the technology“will require several years of refinement beforeit can be commercially viable.” ▲

Here A Speck, There A Speck

Armed with special orange gloves tracked by acomputer system, wailing on your axe has neverbeen as easy as with the Virtual Air Guitar.


photosensor (as is the case witha conventional camera) buthow much light arrives via eachray and the direction fromwhich the light is coming.

With this additional infor-mation available, photo pro-cessing software can then refocus the image at varyingdepths by tracing where thelight rays would have landed ifthe camera had been focusedthere to begin with. Thus,from one shot you could cre-ate several versions of the

image, each with a differentdepth of focus.

While the applications ofthis technology in the field ofconsumer camera design areobvious (who wouldn’t want atruly idiot-proof camera thattakes the perfect shot everytime?), don’t expect to run outand buy your own light fieldcamera anytime soon. Instead,early applications might beexpected in the areas of securi-ty surveillance and medicaland scientific microscopy. ▲

Re-focus Pocus

TT ired of missing out on thatperfect photo moment

because, despite your bestefforts and a top-of-the-linedigital camera, your shot cameout blurry or badly exposed? Ifso, take heart: Researchers atStanford University are work-ing on technology that couldmake fuzzy photos a thing ofthe past.

Although conventional dig-ital cameras require the pho-tographer to make a decisionabout what part of the scenewill be in focus before snap-ping a shot, the “light fieldcamera” that computer sci-ence graduate student Ren Ngdeveloped requires no suchchoice. As Ng states in theproject’s FAQ, “This is a cam-era technology that lets youchoose what’s in focus aftertaking the picture.”

How? The camera that Ngand fellow researchers designedincludes one piece of hardwarethat a conventional cameradoesn’t have: a microlens arraypositioned between the maincamera lens and the photosen-sor. This array, made of nearly90,000 small lenses, separatesthe light coming into the cam-era before it hits the photosen-sor and thus stores a great dealmore light-related informa-tion—not just the total amountof light hitting each spot on the

WW hen it comes to auto-mobile maintenance,

the more warning we have thebetter. Cars have gauges thatindicate when fuel is low andlights that come on if there’s aproblem with the electricalsystem, and some even buzzwhen you are running out of windshield wiper fluid.Now researchers at PurdueUniversity are working on asystem that will monitor acar’s suspension system and

alert the driver to any worn ordamaged components in dan-ger of failing.

“Our long-term vision is to have a light that indicates‘mechanical fitness’ of the sus-pension and other structuralcomponents on the vehicle,”says Douglas E. Adams, anassociate professor and leadresearcher on the project.

Adams, along with doctor-al student Muhammad Ha-roon, put the system to the

test in a recent study using anIsuzu Impulse and a LexusES330. The cars were placedon a hydraulic platform andshaken to simulate the bumpsencountered in a typical carride. Sensors attached to fivelocations on the suspensionsystems recorded the vibra-tions passing through the suspension components. The scientists then simulateddamage by loosening a boltand later removing the boltentirely, while the cars wereshaken and monitored again.When both sets of data wereanalyzed, the system not onlydetected the “damage” but it also determined how the failure of one componentaffected the other parts in the suspension.

This analysis of the inter-dependence of suspensioncomponents may lead to an

industry-wide change in theway suspension systems aredesigned. Historically, sus-pension components havebeen supplied by differentmanufacturers and assembledin the plant, with each partdesigned to be as rugged aspossible. This results in over-engineered, heavy, and ulti-mately less durable systems.

Newer systems could bedesigned as an integratedwhole, taking into accounthow the parts of the systeminteract with one anotherand allowing for those com-ponents that don’t endure asmuch stress within the sys-tem to be made less ruggedand therefore l ighter andcheaper. Adams expects tosee this technology possiblystart to appear in cars on themarket in the next two tothree years. ▲

WWhhaatt’’ss Cooking . . . Under Development

Automobile, Diagnose Thyself

CPU / March 2006 107

MMax Levchin’s family emi-grated from Ukraine tothe United States twoweeks before the 1991coup that toppled the

Soviet Union. Before moving, Levchinwould barter his programming services forcomputer time at various labs around hishome in Kiev. Little did he know that hislove of coding would one day help him toco-found one of the most influential finan-cial companies in the world and may yetreshape how millions of people will sharetheir data and lives across the Internet.

QQ In 1998 you landed in Palo Altofresh from college, adrift in

debt, and addicted to startup compa-nies that usually went nowhere. Fromthat, how was PayPal born?

MMLL That was Aug. 28, and it wasvery hot. I was just trying to find

ways to sneak into air conditioned places. Iwas hanging around Stanford’s campus andsaw a lecture on financial markets given bya guy named Peter Thiel. Afterward I want-ed to go say hello, and it turned out that heactually knew who I was. I said, ‘Hey, I justmoved here from Champagne Urbana acouple of days ago, and I’m going to start acompany in the next few weeks. I just don’tknow which one yet, but I have a bunch ofideas.’ So we had breakfast the next morn-ing. I was late by 20 minutes. I pitched himon two of my ideas at the time, one ofwhich was handheld cryptography. Heliked that, so I started a company around it,and Peter was actually interested enough toinvest $300,000 in the company. I man-aged to convince Peter to be the CEO. Iwas the CTO. We incorporated the com-pany and promptly figured out that thewhole handheld cryptography thing wasnot going to work. We proceeded to fever-ishly change business plans again and againuntil we hit on the PayPal concept.

QQ Why did you get out of PayPal?

MMLL Becauseby then I

realized I was anentrepreneur asopposed to a careerexecutive. PayPalspent a lot of timefighting eBay. Whenwe signed a peacetreaty for $1.5 bil-lion, it became a lotcalmer and less ex-citing for someonewho likes to startthings up. There wasless room for discon-tinuous events.

QQWhere did the Slide idea come from?

MMLL From observing my girlfriendshopping online. The experi-

ence was passive, like catalog page flip-ping. So I thought, well, the most obviousoptimization of this concept would be towrite some code that would scrape the siteand just bring her images from whatevercatalog or site she’s looking at using theold stock ticker concept, where you seethings scroll by, and the ones you want tointeract with you mouse over or you clickon and you interact with. But if you don’t,they just go out.

So then it started hitting me that there’sno way I could possibly be consuming allthe information I wanted even if it justscrolled by me passively. What I reallywanted was something that would justbring me the stuff I’m interested in. Thebranch of mathematics that deals with thisis called machine learning. Instead of mefinding out about the coolest new videoon the Internet from an email forward ayear after it happened, it would actually bebrought to me in Slide simply becausethat’s what everybody else is looking at.

QQ What is Slide’s revenue model?

MMLL Look through all the well-known brands with a strong

online presence, and we probably have anaffiliate agreement with them where wetake their catalog and produce it in Slide,so users can flip through them automati-cally. Any time people go to those sitesand buy something, Slide receives an affil-iate fee because we drove that action.

QQ You’re 30 now. Beyond startingcompany after company, what do

you want to do with your life?

MMLL I hate to pin 30 down as sort ofan age-related causality point,

but this year I realized that I’ve not reallyput a lot of time into philanthropy work.I’ve decided that I’m going to do a lot moreof that going forward. This is what proba-bly happens to most people as they getolder. They sort of realize that they need tostart thinking about the next generation.

Subscribers can go to wwwwww..ccppuummaagg..ccoomm//ccppuummaarrcchh0066//lleevvcchhiinn for bonus content.

William Van Winkle began writing forcomputer magazines in 1996. He was firstpublished in 1990, the sameyear he took his first job incomputers. He and his familylive outside Portland, Ore.

Q&A With Max Levchin

b a c k d o o r | q & a
