CPU Magazine 07 2009

0 474470 81182

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Frontside8 What’s Happening13 Digital Economy16 The Saint

Here We Go Again

Heavy Gear20 Dream Hardware21 HD & Widescreen Abound

We Screen These Screens25 Solidata X2-512 512GB

Seagate Momentus 7200.4 500GB28 Icy Dock MB882SP-1S

Ultra-X R.S.T. Pro3 & QuickTech Pro29 Asus N10JC-A1

AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition30 Wilson Electronics iBooster

Imation M-Class 2.5-inch SATA 128GB Upgrade Kit

31 Commodore Gaming Commodore XX32 Eurocom T890M Element

Archos 5 60GB Internet Media Tablet

34 Logisys Two Color (Blue/Red) Character-Illuminated Keyboard

Icy Dock EZ-Dock SATA HDD Docking Station

35 Solid-State ShowdownTwo RAM Leaders’ SSDs Square Off

36 Sapphire Vapor-X Radeon HD 4870

Auzentech X-Fi Forte 7.1

37 Anand’s CornerWhy AMD Wins At $200 But Loses At $300 & $70

July 2009 • Vol 9 Issue 07®

S P O T L I G H T54

56

Shoestring System SuperchargeBig-Time Boosts Without Big-Time Costs

Windows WorkaroundsDon’t Settle For Default

60

66

BIOS MasteryTweaks That Make The Difference

Gear ShiftSimple Hardware Mods That Produce

Copyright 2009 by Sandhills Publishing Company. Computer Power User is a trademark of Sandhills Publishing Company. All rights reserved. Reproduction of material appearing in ComputerPower User is strictly prohibited without written permission. Printed in the U.S.A. GST # 123482788RT0001 (ISSN 1536-7568) CPU Computer Power User USPS 020-801 is published monthly for$29 per year by Sandhills Publishing Company, 131 West Grand Drive, P.O. Box 82667, Lincoln, NE 68501. Subscriber Services: (800) 424-7900. Periodicals postage paid at Lincoln, NE. POSTMAS-TER: Send address changes to Computer Power User, P.O. Box 82667, Lincoln, NE 68501.

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

p . 9 0

Hard Hat AreaPC Modder38 Tips & Tutorials40 Tri-Core Transformer

Turn A Phenom II X3 Into An X4

44 Mad Reader ModEgypt Mod

46 Advanced Q&A Corner48 X-ray Vision

Fujifilm’s 3D Digital Imaging System Brings Photos To Life

50 White Paper: 6Gbps SATAFrom Iowa’s Speed Limit To Montana’s

Loading Zone70 The Bleeding Edge Of Software

Inside The World Of Betas72 Up To Speed

Upgrades That’ll Keep You Humming Along

73 The State Of Security“Suite” Isn’t A Dirty Word Anymore

80 Eltima Software Application As Service

Alien Skin Bokeh82 Dialogue Box

Why Microsoft Continues To Bleed Mindshare

83 Open SauceOpen Source: Beat Them Or Join Them? (Part I)

Caught In The Web84 Privacy 2.0

Why Anonymous Doesn’t Mean Unidentifiable

88 The Department Of Stuffcloudfs.txt

Digital Living89 At Your Leisure

Games, Gear, Movies & Music92 The Cutting Edge

Far More Than Disney, Part 1

Tips & Tricks94 Software Tips & Projects

Enter The Age Of Twitter96 Warm Up To Penguins

How Linux Boots

What’s Cooking98 Shavings From The Rumour Mill

The Future Is Bright & Shiny100 Wagging The Dog

The Various Ways Of Twitter102 Technically Speaking

An Interview With Troy Schneider, New America Foundation Director Of Media & Communications

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

Back Door110 Q&A With David “Dadi” Perlmutter

The Man Behind Mobility Looks Ahead

Infinite LoopStrange stats and otheroddball items from computing’s periphery

95, 97

E D I T O R ’ S N O T E

T he economic situation of the last year or so has promptedsome pretty profound changes in the way we as con-sumers do things. As I write this, leading economists and

financial indexes alike are indicating that for the most part, thingshave started to turn around and we may be in the early stages of arecovery. But even if the world economy resets tomorrow to its2007/early 2008 state of bullish financial markets, easy job avail-ability, and readily available credit—and that’s probably notgoing to happen—it’s increasingly looking like the current reces-sion has left a lasting mark on many of our habits.

We’re more interested in pay-as-you-go cell phone plans thanbloated, one-size-fits-all contracts with huge monthly payments.We are eager to take advantage of the wealth of surprisingly high-quality TV online so we can save a few bucks on our cable bills.We’re turning off lights in rooms we’re not in, we’re looking forways to do less driving and sharing rides more, and we’re finallypaying attention to the folks who have been telling us for yearshow to save money by clipping coupons.

People in general seem more willing to save and less inclined toborrow, and we are far more interested these days in doing morewith less. This is as true among high-end PC users as it is for any-one; that’s why we’ve dedicated this issue to doing something wecan all agree is worthwhile (making your PC run faster, moresmoothly, and more reliably) without spending a ton of cash.

Starting on page 54, you’ll find14 pages of practical, no-nonsense advice you can useto get your computer(s) inship-shape, including often-overlooked Windows adjust-ments, platform-specificBIOS tweaks you can eitheruse directly or modify to fityour needs, and hard-ware tips straight fromIntel, OCZ, DangerDen, and others.Also, be sure to stopby page 40 and findout how we turned amodestly pricedPhenom II X3 triple-core chip into a fire-breathing quad-core.

Now, if you’ll excuseme, I have to go eat threemore boxes of Pop-Tarts so Ican send in for a free ticket to“Star Trek.”

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Chris Trumble, Publication Editor, CPU

Gotcha. Here it is.

Compiled by Blaine Flamig

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

Blu-ray Sales Climbing; Warner Bros. Offers HD DVD ExchangeConsidering the recession, Blu-ray Disc is doing fine, thankyou. According to AdamsMedia Research, U.S. con-sumers bought roughly 9 mil-lion BDs in Q1 2009, nearlydouble the Q1 2008 total. Theresearch also revealed that thereare now 10.5 million U.S. BDhouseholds (standalone playersand PS3s included). Salesshould only increase if a Blu-ray.com report that the averageprice for entry-level players willsink to sub-$100 levels possiblyby Christmas are true. A majorfactor in the price cut is the no-tion that Chinese makers are preparing to flood the market with inexpensive players. War-ner Bros., meanwhile, recently announced it will support the competing China Blue HD format with titles priced between $7.30 and $10.22. The studio also recently launched aRed2Blu Web site (www.red2blu.com) where unfortunate HD DVD buyers can exchange amaximum of 25 discs per home for the same titles on BD (one copy per flick) for $4.95 plusshipping. Only 125 movies are now available, however. Finally, clues within the upcomingiTunes upgrade already in developers’ hands hint that Apple may finally be adding integratedBlu-ray support in Mac systems, though Apple hasn’t confirmed those rumors. ▲

USA! USA! USA!If you see Jeremiah “miahallen” Allen, givethe award-winning overclocker the patriot-ic salute. He is representing North Americaat Gigabyte’s 2009 Open OverclockingChampionship in Taipei during Computexwith $5,000 and prizes at stake. Allentopped about a dozen other North Amer-ican regional finalists competing near LosAngeles in late April where overclockers ran Super PI (Allen posted a 1:30:969 score) and3DMark06 after overclocking their rigs as highly as possible. Jeremy “sno.Icn” Clifton, who finished second overall, posted the best overall 3DMark06 score, charting 10486 inSM3.0/HDR for a 24869 overall mark. Competitors were supplied a Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD4P board, Intel Core i7-965 Extreme, Gigabyte GV-N26OC-896H-B GeForce GTX260 cards, Kingston KHX16000D3K3/3GX DDR3 memory, 80GB Intel X25-M SSD, and Enermax Revolution85+ 1050W PSU for competition. Dry ice and liquid nitrogen were the coolants of choice. ▲

Is Moore’s LawEnding? OneIBM FellowThinks SoWe know; plenty of prognosti-cators have incorrectly predictedMoore’s Law’s demise over theyears. Still, when a guy like IBMFellow Carl Anderson alludes toas much, he deserves a listen.Speaking recently at the 2009International Symposium OnPhysical Design, Andersonlikened the semiconductorindustry to the railroad, aviation,and automotive industries, stat-ing, “There was exponentialgrowth in the railroad industryin the 1800s; there was expo-nential growth in the automo-bile industry in the 1930s and1940s; and there was exponen-tial growth in the performanceof aircraft until the speed ofsound. But eventually, exponen-tial growth always comes to anend.” Anderson predicts multi-core processors and other cut-ting-edge chips will likely seeanother generation or two ofexponential growth; opticalinterconnect, 3D, and accelera-tor technologies are where theimmediate future lies. A possiblekink in Anderson’s predictioncould come from Ali Hajimir, aCal Tech professor who DARPArecently awarded $6 million overfour years to research self-heal-ing circuit technology. Repor-tedly, the tech would involveworkarounds for defective tran-sistors in a manner similar tohow biological systems in nature“constantly heal themselves inthe presence of random andintentional failures.” ▲

8 July 2009 / www.computerpoweruser.com

Zune HD In The Fall? Say It’s So, Microsoft

The “oohs” and “aahs” floating out of the blogosphere (wmpoweruser.com,neowin.ent, LiveSide.net, Engadget, etc.) in mid-April stemmed from leakedphotos and rumored specs tied to a possible Zune HD release this fall. Amongthe tantalizing features rumored are an Nvidia Tegra processor, a 3.6-inchOLED touchscreen, HD Radio, 720p playback, 3D Xbox games support, andwireless computer syncs. Additionally, an HDMI-out port; 16GB, 32GB, and120GB options; and integrated Web browser in a body smaller than the iPodtouch are predicted. An audio-related product we can confirm is Southern AudioServices’ Woodees ($59.99; www.bazooka.com), which are among the best low-cost sound-isolating earbuds we’ve used. The logic behind the natural wood-constructed Woodees is “the finest musical instruments have always been madefrom wood,” so why not earbuds? After experiencing the Woodees’ stellar, seem-ingly bottomless bass and overall tone, we can’t argue. The Woodees house10mm drivers, sport a gold USB connector, and use a 3.2-foot low durometerresin cord designed to not develop a memory coil or kinks. ▲

Blurry Photos? Use A Heavier Tripod

Is blurriness marring your digital photos—even when using a tripod? Japan’sNishi Lab at the University of Electrocommunications may have a good expla-nation. While testing a new tool that measures camera shake related to mirrorand shutter movement in SLR cameras, scientists found camera shake wors-ened when mounting numerous cameras on a light tripod (about 3.3 pounds)

with image-stabilizing technology turned on and off.Ultimately, Nishi Lab hopes the “measurement tool willbe used to totally evaluate various kinds of vibrationcaused by a tripod, not just camera shake.” In other SLR news, IDC predicts the recession will take its toll on digicam shipments, including SLR units that have

performed strongly recently. IDC predicts totalglobal shipments will dip 6% in 2009 to 129million units, with SLR shipments slipping 5%to 9.2 million units. The decline is expected tolast through 2010, with the entire market fallinganother 1% to 128 million units. ▲

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

H A R D W A R E M O L ESigns Point To AppleDesigning Chips In-House

Recent hires that include former AMDCTOs Bob Drebin (also GameCube graph-ics chip designer) and Raja Koduri havemany industry insiders believing that Appleis amassing the means to design its owngraphics chips. In combination with Apple’spurchase of low-power semiconductormaker PA Semi last year, it’s believed Appleis working toward bolstering iPhone andiPod features, including upping mobilegaming abilities and adding HD support.An alliance IBM is heading up, meanwhile,recently announced plans to output chipsbased on 28nm HKMG (high-k metal gate)technology by next year. The technologywill bump performance 40% while using20% less power than current 45nm chipsand let customers migrate from 32nmHKMG technology already in the works.Elsewhere, Taiwan Economics MinisterYiin Chii-ming stated in April that the government-backed Taiwan MemoryCompany created to help Taiwan’s tankingDRAM industry is still on track despite rumors that John Hsuan, United Micro-electronics honorary vice chairman, report-edly pondered quitting as TMC’s convenerfollowing criticism about TMC’s directionor lack thereof to date. Micron recentlyspurned an invitation to join the TMC, citing competitor Elpida Memory as TMC’s main technology partner as a barri-er. Micron instead formed its own alliancewith Nanya Technology and is seeking sim-ilar support from Taiwan’s government asthe TMC has received. ▲

RadioShack Wants Your Old GearLooking to get rid of your old electronics? Head to a local RadioShack. Theelectronics seller launched a program in mid-April to take unwanted but work-ing cell phones, MP3 players, digicams and camcorders, video games, GPSunits, and game consoles off your hands as part of its trade-in program. If you’resatisfied with the appraisal your friendly RadioShack clerk provides (includingthe original cables, manuals, chargers, and accessories will help your financialcause), you’ll get a Radio Shack gift card in return. A similar online trade-in pro-gram accepts the same electronics, plus car audio head units, notebook comput-ers, HDTVs, and monitors. ▲

CPU / July 2009 9

W h a t ’ s H a p p e n i n g • I n t e r n e tCompiled by Blaine Flamig

S I T E S E E I N GSurfing Good For Productivity;Internet Fraidicats; Politics Popular Good news, Web addicts: Next time your boss catches you watching “FamilyGuy” reruns on Hulu, tell him your questionable work habits will “actuallyincrease our concentration levels and help make a more productive work-force.” So indicates a recent study from the University of Melbourne involv-ing 300 workers. According to Dr. Brent Coker, workers surfing “within areasonable limit of less than 20%” of total office time are about 9% more productive than nonwork surfers. In Japan, meanwhile, a Marsh Researchstudy found roughly 84% of 300 adults have found the Internet scary at leastonce, with 11.7% finding it “really scary” and 72.7% just scary to somedegree. Stateside, a recent Pew Internet & American Life Project survey ofroughly 2,255 U.S. adults found 74% of Internet users, or 55% of the entireU.S. adult population, tapped into the Internet for news, research, and otherpurposes related to the 2008 U.S. election, marking the first time Pew “hasfound more than half the voting-age population used the Internet to connectto the political process during an election cycle.” ▲

Are You A Victim Of Cybercrime?McAfee Wants To HelpWe’re fairly certain McAfee’s new Initiative To Fight Cybercrime—a “globaleffort with a concrete action plan and support for global leaders”—isn’t going toknock the socks off of CPU readers because the information and tools availableare likely matters you addressed long ago. Still, give McAfee credit for reachingout to less Internet-savvy users and small-business owners concerning malwareand other lurking risks and for offering advice on how to seek intervention fromlaw enforcement in cases of fraud and other possible crimes. In addition to pro-viding a free Cybercrime Scanner (Windows and Internet Explorer only) forchecking a system for malware and other risks, McAfee is making its McAfeeVirus Scanner available for “more exhaustive viral analysis.” ▲

Confused About BitTorrent?Get The Big BookYou don’t have to be a grizzled computing vet toknow that ultimately BitTorrent boils down tobeing “just a simple way to share files.” Whatmost newbies and even some otherwise experi-enced vets don’t know, however, are the exactins and outs of BitTorrent, let alone how to usea client to sharesaid files. Well,new help is avail-able in the formof “The Big BookOf BitTorrent,” a28-page, illustrat-ed PDF guidefrom Saikat Basu,author of “TheThings I Do” blog. Hosted by MakeUseOf.com,Basu’s exploration into BitTorrent’s underbellyexplains the pertinent jargon, how to acquire aclient, copyright concerns, torrent storehouses,installations, downloads, uploads, pitfalls,codecs, protocol encryption, creating torrents,and more. ▲

Waste Not, Want NotSome of us donate our old computer gear tocharities, schools, churches, or other good caus-es. Some of us recycle what we can. Others,unfortunately, just dump their systems. Themore creative types among us, however, createworks of art, as witnessed in the recent arti-cle/gallery “20 Amazing Examples Of Art FromObsolete Technology” at WebUrbanist.com, asite dedicated to urban design, subversive art,and strange architecture. As writer MatthewRogers aptly put it, few of us stop to ponder thefate of once-beloved but now defunct techno-logical relics of the past. A growing trend withinthe art world, however, is seeing artists construct“amazing works of art by utilizing the very tech-nology that we let fall into disuse every day.”Among such works is the nearly 23-foot WEEEMan, a “politico-ecological statement againstimproper disposal of our most ubiquitous every-day appliances” that sports computer mice forteeth, washing machine doors for eyes, and mon-itors and other hardware in the skull. ▲


Compiled by Blaine Flamig

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

Who Says ViolentVideo Games AreUnsightly? In positive gaming news, a recent studyappearing in Nature Neuroscience states thatplaying action-based video games can helpadults improve their eyesight. For the study,22 adults gamed 50 hours over nine weeks.A group playing Call of Duty 2 and otheraction titles showed a 43% average improve-ment in contrast sensitivity, while a secondgroup playing Sims 2 and other non-actiontitles showed no improvement. “When peo-ple play action games, they’re changing thebrain’s pathway responsible for visual pro-cessing,” stated Daphne Bavelier, professorof brain and cognitive sciences at the Uni-versity of Rochester. If you’d rather improveyour PC’s gaming performance, meanwhile, IObit released a free, one-click Game Booster app thatwill temporarily close other programs that are currently running, turn off background processes, shutdown unnecessary Windows services, among other things. ▲

iCloud Takes To The, Er, CloudSay hello to iCloud (icloud.com/en), the “world’s first free online computer” that runs within yourWeb browser. Founded in 2001 by Daniel Arthursson and brought forth by Xcerion, the still-in-betaiCloud puts a “virtual computer together with free storage and free apps in the hands of everybody inthe world.” Besides3GB storage anddesktop customiza-tion abilities, iCloudincludes 30 apps(Word-compatibleeditor, calendar,photo organizer,audio player, RSSand Atom feeders,IM, etc.), 20 widgets,free backup, andmore in a Windows-like interface with noinstallation required.Internet and Firefoxare supported, though Firefox is inalpha development, as iCloud is “us-ing a lot of XML technologies due toits XML Virtual Machine.” ▲

Video GameStudy RaisesIre Of ESAThe Entertainment Soft-ware Association isn’t tak-ing kindly to a recentstudy Douglas Gentile,director of research for the National Institute onMedia and the Family,conducted that stated8.5% of the overall pop-ulation playing videogames exhibits “pathologi-cal patterns of play.” Forthe survey, published inPsychological Science’s Mayissue, Gentile posed 11questions via a Harris Pollto roughly 1,200 U.S.gamers ages eight to 18.Those responding to six ormore questions positivelywere deemed “pathologi-cal.” ESA CEO MichaelGallagher, however, laterrequested via letter thatPsychological Science post-pone the study’s inclusion,citing that study partici-pants weren’t selected ran-domly but rather recruitedthrough an online panelthat involved prizes forparticipation. The NIMFresponded, “Regardless of whether you agree withthe exact statistics in Dr.Gentile’s study, it providesthe gaming industry, med-ical experts, and publicpolicymakers with a newopportunity to have athoughtful conversationregarding the effects ofvideo games on kids.” ▲

CPU / July 2009 11

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

S O F T W A R E S H O R T S

SafeHouse Protection & Blazing Mac Backups

We see mucho press releases each month for products promising mucho benefits, but none has ever offered to help us hide “incrimi-nating photos taken at the slumber party” before the recently released SafeHouse Explorer (www.safehousesoftware.com). The freeWindows XP/Vista/Server (32- or 64-bit) app from PC Dynamics uses password protection and 256-bit Twofish encryption to pro-tect files on hard and flash drives, servers, CD/DVDs, and MP3 players. A Windows Explorer interface lets you create unlimited“vaults” of up to 2TB. You can also run the app as a standalone and share protected files with others, provided you supply your pass-word. For Mac users, meanwhile, Backblaze (www.backblaze.com) recently lifted the beta tag off its online backup Mac service,which provides incremental, continuous backups for $5 per month. The program lets you back up an entire system, encrypting fileson the PC before moving them via encrypted connection to Backblaze’s data center. Restoring files happens via downloads orBackblaze overnighting files on CD/DVD or flash drive. ▲

You, Too, Can Give A LineOf Code A Good Home

It’s possible to adopt a whale, star, child,puppy, and even a new lifestyle, so why not a line of code? Well, you can with a $4 donation to the nonprofit ParticipatoryCulture Foundation, which develops thefree, open-source Miro, an app for “watch-ing and subscribing to shows and videosfrom all over the Internet” and which aims to promote “a more decentralizedand democratic way of doing Internetvideo.” Besides watching your “littlebuddy” grow up as the code matures,adopters get a customized Web page dis-playing an adoption certificate, photo,personalized name, widget, and “yourname in the source code and in the Aboutsection on every copy of Miro.” ▲

Concerning All Things Malicious

Hackers compromised 258 million-plus electronic records globally in 2008, according to a recent Verizon study focused on 90 confirmed breaches. Organized criminal groups accounted for 91% of all compromised records, with 99.6% ofrecords being lifted from servers and apps and 74% of breaches resulting from external sources. Elsewhere, U.S. militaryleaders reported in April that the Pentagon has spent $100 million-plus in the last six months responding to and repair-ing cyber-based attacks, though the total is an estimate, as officials have only begun tracking costs. Sticking to the mili-tary theme, Pink Floyd member David Gilmour has reportedly recorded a song for an upcoming CD in support of GaryMcKinnon, the admitted British hacker who cracked DoD, NASA, and Army systems in 2001 while seeking evidence ofUFOs. McKinnon has successfully fought U.S. extradition efforts since 2002. Finally, Symantec’s recent Internet SecurityThreat Report indicates the company created 1.6 million-plus new malicious code signatures last year (more than 60% of all malicious code signatures it has created ever) to address an average of more than 245 million attempted attacks globallyeach month. ▲


IT Spending Can’t Buck The Recession, Either

NumbersBy The

200 MillionFacebook members

(Facebook)

blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=72353897130

10 MillionMonthly Twitter visitors

(comScore)

www.comscore.com/blog/2009/04/twitter_traffic_explodes.html

427%Percent increase in daily uniqueuses of mobile social networks

(comScore)

www.mobilemarketer.com/cms/news/research/2842.html

67%Share of global Internet population engaging in socialnetworks and blogs

(Nielsen)

tinyurl.com/csgshe

Job Of The Month

www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007024

2007

7.6%

2008

8.7%

2009

9.9%

2010

11.2%

2011

12.3%

2012

13.8%

2013

15.2%

NumbersBy The

The Big Ad ShiftThe Big Ad ShiftAccording to eMarketer, the share of ad revenue going to online media will almost double by 2013.

U.S. Online Ad Spending As A Percent Of Total Media Advertising Spending, 2007 To 2013

IT Spending Can’t Buck The Recession, EitherTechnology and IT spending by U.S. businesses and governmentwill decline 3.1% in 2009, Forrester Research reported recently,revising its earlier estimate that spending would grow this year by1.6%. “The capital crunch is still causing companies to dramaticallycut back on all forms of capital investment, including many IT goodsand services,” says Andrew Bartels, VP and principal analyst. Thecompany expects growth in IT spending to start again in late 2009.Hardware purchasing will take a hard hit, however—down 6.8% thisyear. Worse, communications equipment purchases will drop 7.8%.For many of these IT sectors, these trends won’t reverse until 2010.

www.forrester.com/ER/Press/Release/0,1769,1270,00.html

Job Of The MonthRemember those lazy summer days of childhood? You and the kid next door spent

hours rifling through each other’s baseball card collections, comparing and trading.Now you can be part of the company behind those memories and program a virtual version

of those experiences for the next generation. Upper Deck, maker of sports and entertainmenttrading cards for everything from baseball to World of Warcraft, is looking for programmers to trans-

fer that trading card ethos to the Web. The company is expanding into ecommerce, social gaming, andsocial networking and is looking for a Web Developer and Designer with all the usual Flash, JavaScript, .NET,

and HTML skills to bring the Upper Deck brand to the next level online. The Web Developer will be responsible forbuilding Web sites around the Upper Deck brands and creating interactive experiences. You could be the guy behind a

Yu-Gi-Oh! online community or a next-gen virtual world of comic book heroes. Or maybe you’ll introduce another young fanto the wonders of discovering his favorite shortstop’s rookie card.

seeker.dice.com/jobsearch/servlet/JobSearch?op=302&dockey=xml/3/7/37fab755d363cfb274512fb7769d074c@endecaindex&source=3

CPU / July 2009 13

I guess the recession must be winding down. Venture capitalistsare funding huge, crazy ideas again, and the media seems to

have run out of depressing economy news. Apparently, the bignews at the Game Developers Conference in March was a newgaming service called OnLive that is purported to move videogame serving to “the cloud,” thus enabling you to play the latest,greatest video games as streaming video on your PC, Mac, or TV.Rumor has it that they’ve raised enormous sums of capital andare launching the service this winter. I’m going to lay down earlymoney that this offering becomes the Homegrocer.com of thegame industry. As much as it pains me to say this, I love the con-cept. But speaking as one of the guys who made DirectX and thefounder of the world’s largest private online game publishingcompany, it’s not going to work.

I haven’t met the founders of the company personally, I respectwhat they’re attempting, and I certainly wish them the best, butthere are insurmountable hurdles that make this idea implausible toexecute in the end. For starters, there are several criteria users willapply to deciding whether a service like this is as good as or betterthan the current gaming model:• The get-in/get-out experience must be as good as or better than

the boxed experience• The video quality must match the frame rate at the resolution

and image quality of the same games playing locally• The control latency must match that of the local game• The games must cost as much or less to deliver this way

Let’s start with the easy win, criterion No. 1. Yes, it’s true thatvideo streaming should be a much better user experience than theextremely arduous install and patching process users experience onthe PC today. OnLive still needs to install a client on your PC, butat least it’s just one arduous Vista downloadable installation insteadof one for each game.

Next up, item No. 2. Is anybody watching Hollywood movies atDVD quality over the Internet yet at full quality without noticeablelag or frame dropping? The irony of this claim is that OnLive’s pro-motional video proclaiming the brilliance of their company’s solution

for games was dropping frames as I watched it. Forget interactivityand latency issues for a moment; the cost of delivering a continuous,real-time stream of video over the Internet is still excessive.

Consider the Pixar movie “Finding Nemo.” This 100-minutemovie is available for online purchase in several compressed videoformats. At DVD quality, the movie is 1.4GB, or requires 1,239Kbpsto stream continuously at 24fps. In HD, the movie is 4GB. We’llignore for the sake of argument the observation that this movie tookhours of dedicated encoding time to compress into these formats,because OnLive has invented new, magical server hardware thatsolves this problem, giving them superior compression results nearlyinstantaneously. Apparently, this new technology can do all this evenwhen missing some of the video data, since a game obviously won’thave the next frame available to encode until after the user has seenthe current one and reacted to it.

This analysis also assumes that everyone in the gaming world isgood with 24fps, right? The bandwidth-hosting cost of delivering1GB of data over the Internet in real time without including anyother server-related expenses is $1 to $2, so watching streamingDVD-quality video costs the host around 90 cents to $1.80 perhour, and HD video would run $2.50 to $5 per hour. Since theaverage PC gamer plays around 20 hours per month, the servicewould need to cost $17.50 to $35 per month just to cover thebandwidth alone—forget the games, the giant server farm, and themassive amounts of electricity needed to run it.

Now let’s talk about the video quality. The introduction ofJPEG2000 was a major leap in image-compression technology. It’svery hard to beat JPEG2000 for compressing single frames ofimages while preserving quality. JPEG2000 lends itself nicely tohardware acceleration, and if I were really smart, I could use infor-mation from the previous frame rendered to accelerate encodingspeed and decrease the size of the next frame. Also, now that theuser’s GPU is free from heavy 3D rendering, I could put it to workimage decoding and filtering to try to restore a highly compressedframe of game graphics to its former glory in real time. A singleframe of DVD-quality video is roughly 720 x 480 x 24 bpp, orabout 1MB uncompressed. We need to get 24MBps over a 2Mbps

Here We Go Again

The idea that traditional game publishers will abandon their

DRM solutions and risk cannibalizing their deeply entrenched

retail channel relationships by supporting an unproven new

online game publishing service is of course absurd.


connection, and that’s before you factor in data for an audio chan-nel or from an input device. That’s 168X image compression by mycount. Remarkably, even at this compression ratio, JPEG2000-compressed images look OK! So it’s not impossible to look respect-able at this compression level, and it’s not technically impossible todeliver it in real time with magic encoding hardware.

The real catch, though, comes with item No. 3: In order to ren-der 24fps of game video, I need a gameserver with the graphics power to dothat. Of course, I want the game to beresponsive, as well, so the time it takesto send my input over the Internet tothe server, render the next video frame,and send it back to my computer todisplay must be fast enough for thegame to feel responsive. DespiteOnLive’s claim that building anAkamai-style edge network with host-ing centers within 1,000 miles ofgamers will solve the problem, the reali-ty is that exceeding 100ms responsetimes (think 10fps) for gameplay isrisky, especially for FPS-style gamesthat demand extremely low responsetimes. The round-trip speed over a typ-ical Internet connection to an edgeserver may barely be fast enough forsome games, but the consistency formost consumers will be abysmal;responsiveness will most likely fluctuatenoticeably. It’s not going to work for a con-sole-style game experience or any FPS. It’salso very risky for the multiplayer gamestypical of the PC because it adds an extranetwork latency jump to games that werecarefully designed to hide network latencyby knowing exactly what it is on the client.In short, this service will almost certainlyfeel “laggy” for most games.

Finally, criterion No. 4. There is really noefficiency of scale to be gained by thisapproach to game delivery. One might thinkthat since the average gamer plays 20 hoursper month and there are 960 hours in amonth, one great gaming server could serveas many as 48 gamers. But keep in mind thatWindows simply can’t run multiple gamessimultaneously on a single computer, and in

practice, everyone games between 5 p.m. and 10 p.m., mostly onweekends. In order to ensure a great experience for all members dur-ing peak play times, these guys will basically need to host one greatgaming computer per player, or somebody will have to wait in aqueue to play. The cost of doing that is, of course, staggering.

There is also the story out there that game publishers are dying tosupport this service because of its obvious antipiracy advantages. But if

this were true, wouldn’t these publishersalready have ditched antiquated CD-ROM-based DRM in favor of establisheddownload services with huge audiences,such as Direct2Drive, Steam, WildTan-gent Orb, and other online game publish-ing services? (By the way, who’s going tobe swapping the key disks at the serverfarm for these games when you want toplay?) The idea that traditional game pub-lishers will abandon their DRM solutionsand risk cannibalizing their deeply en-trenched retail channel relationships bysupporting an unproven new online gamepublishing service is, of course, absurd. It’smore likely that large VC checks will haveto be written to motivate the big publish-ers to adapt their titles to work in thiskind of environment.

So why would respectable venturecapitalists fund such an obviously flawedproposition? This becomes much clearer

when you consider who OnLive’s biginvestor is: Time Warner, a cable company.These guys have an obvious interest inincreasing demand for bandwidth, and noth-ing sucks up Internet bandwidth like gam-ing. Their hope may be to drive demand forconsumer bandwidth through the roof andbe their own biggest “customer” for thatbandwidth. You’re going to need to sign upfor the best Internet connection money canbuy to have any hope of experiencing thisservice at its full potential. In short, likeHomegrocer.com, it may all seem like agreat deal to you (the consumer) until theVC capital that props it up runs out and itall collapses or gets sold off and reported as a huge success anyway, as happened withMassive and WebTV. ▲

Send your feedback to [email protected]

Alex St. John was one of the foundingcreators of Microsoft’s DirectX

technology. He is the subject of the book “Renegades Of The Empire” about

the creation of DirectX andChromeffects, an early effort by

Microsoft to create a multimediabrowser. Today Alex is President and

CEO of WildTangent Inc., a technologycompany devoted to delivering

CD-ROM-quality entertainment content over the Web.

CPU / July 2009 17

These Gizmos Don’t Sing It, They Bring It

T his month’s haul of Dream Hardware boldly takes

you where no house has walked before. As a bonus,

it’s European, expressed in all caps, or both.

by Marty Sems

Lockheed Martin HULC

Not since CAN-SPAM have we encountered a more inten-tionally evocative acronym. HULC (Human Universal LoadCarrier), a Berkeley Bionics (www.berkeleybionics.com) andLockheed Martin (www.lockheedmartin.com) exoskeletonproject, boosts the wearer’s strength and endurance withoutresorting to gamma rays. The 61-pound, 250W system useslithium polymer batteries and hydraulics for a burst runningspeed of 10 mph. A chief military goal, besides increasing theweight an individual can carry (up to 200 pounds) wherevehicles might not be able to go, is to decrease the amount ofoxygen a soldier must breathe while carrying a load. Reduc-ing oxygen consumption, in turn, reduces fatigue, so forcescan travel farther and still be in good enough shape to throwtanks and rescue the daughter of the general sworn to destroythem. HULC smash, indeed.

TH!NK FROST

Christopher Nolan need look no farther than Norway for hisnext Batman movie. Designer Anders Gloslie has the nextBatmobile covered. The FROST is a concept study underconsideration by the TH!NK car company (www.think.no),which specializes in zero-emission electric cars. Although itisn’t the first sports car for ice, it’s quite possibly the firstelectric one with four-wheel tracks and all-wheel steering.The FROST can hydraulically go wide track when it needsto, such as during a subzero assault on Mr. Freeze’s lair. Andit might go without saying, but had Scatman Crothers had asnow cat like this in “The Shining,” Jack Nicholson mighthave come out on the short end of the axe. Unfortunately,the FROST may get the cold shoulder, according to TH!NKrepresentative Katinka von der Lippe. “Most probably thechance of this project becoming a reality is rather minimal,but the design content and ideas might be used in other con-cept development activities.”

Walking House

Baba Yaga might have been onto something. Her walkingcottage, we mean, not the whole child cannibalism thing.N55 (www.n55.dk), a design group in Denmark, wanted tobuild a modular home that fit its ecological and anti-landownership sensibilities. The group came up with this. The2,650-pound, 11-foot Walking House can be made to con-nect to other Walking Houses honeycomb-style, in caseyou’re a nomad itching to go condo. It moves verrrrryslowly, three legs at a time. Its max speed is 60 mph—erm,that’s 60 meters per hour, not miles. Still, it’s solar- andwind-powered and includes a wood stove, a compostingtoilet, and a greenhouse for food. We’d imagine you couldpot a few innocent, adorable, and protein-rich woodlandcreatures from the roof, too. ▲

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Photos courtesy of Diseno-art.com


GeForce 8800GT, and a 500GB Sam-sung Spinpoint F1.

Acer G24

This glossy-screened orange wonderfrom Acer displayed vivid color, and inDisplayMate’s Color Spectrum test, it fea-tured the cleanest color blending of ourtest group. We also liked that the wide,sturdy stand anchors the 24-inch monitorwithout robbing desk space in front of, orbehind, the monitor. There are HDMI,DVI (with HDCP), and VGA inputs butno integrated speakers. Acer lists a Dy-namic Contrast Ratio of 50,000:1 usingits ACM (Adaptive Contrast Manage-ment), but we tested with ACM turnedoff. (We did notice a slight improve-ment in gradation and detail with ACM turned on when running through Dis-playMate’s tests.)

The G24 offers preset display modes for Work, Graphics, and Movies, amongothers. Many of the preset modes featuredoverpowering red hues, but the colorslooked fine after we configured the monitor.Our test model featured a small amount ofbacklight bleed at the bottom of the moni-tor when viewing darker content. Similarly,colors appeared darker at the top of thescreen than they did at the bottom. Evenwith the color purity issues, Acer’s “Crystal-Brite” screen produced colors that seemedto pop off the screen. The glossy screen wasn’t quite as reflective as other glossymodels in this roundup—most notably,overhead lights didn’t cause any problemsduring out testing. We also felt the G24offered one of the quickest response timesduring our movie and gaming tests.

Backlight bleed notwithstanding, theG24’s detail level and quick responsetimes make this monitor one of our

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

HD & WidescreenAboundWe Screen These Screens

W ith technological improvements inLCD technology filtering down to

consumer monitors, including 5ms orlower response times, displays smallerthan 24 inches with 1,920 x 1,080 nativeresolution, 1,000:1 or greater contrastratios, and HDMI inputs, many monitorsnow offer features similar to what you’llfind on LCD HDTVs. Additionally, sev-eral monitor manufacturers, includingAcer, HP, LG, and Samsung, are switch-ing from the 16:10 aspect ratio to 16:9, soyou can watch movies or TV shows with-out wasting screen space for black bars ordistorting the picture.

A few monitors, including Samsung’s2233RZ and Viewsonic’s VX2265wmseen in this roundup, also feature 120Hztechnology to deliver smooth, fast-motionvideo, as well as support for Nvidia’sGeForce 3D Vision. Both options aretantalizing, but because there’s a dearth of 3D content available, we didn’t factor a monitor’s 3D abilities into our per-formance marks. Our LCD roundup features high-end consumer monitorsbetween 22 and 24 inches, which seemsto be the sweet spot between price andperformance right now.

How We TestedWe used DisplayMate Multimedia

with Motion Bitmaps 2.2 to calibrate themonitors and test the displays’ color accu-racy, contrast ability, scale gradations, andtext readability. Additionally, we watchedclips from “Transformers” and playedCrysis to test gaming performance, DVDplayback quality, and overall real-worldcolor accuracy. The hardware in our testsystem included a 3.33MHz Intel Core 2Duo E8600, 4GB of Corsair DominatorDDR2-1066MHz memory, an Nvidia

favorites. For example, the G24 was oneof the few models that delivered readable7.5-point fonts (Arial) from 2 feet away.If you regularly watch movies or work indark environments, the backlight bleedmay cause a problem. The orange colormay be off-putting for some, but a blackbezel model is available.

Asus VH222H

Although the Asus VH222H of-fered the same 1,000:1 contrast ratio

G24$399.99 I Acer

us.acer.com I ● ● ● ●

VH222H$209.99 I Asus

usa.asus.com I ● ● ●

CPU RANKING ● 0 = ABSOLUTELY WORTHLESS | ● ● ● 2.5 = ABSOLUTELY AVERAGE | ● ● ● ● ● 5 = ABSOLUTELY PERFECT

CPU / July 2009 21

this roundup, and if you don’t work withfine detail on your PC, you may not noticethe monitor’s detail issue. The impres-sive contrast ratio and 1,920 x 1,080

resolution make the VH222H a greatmonitor for those that watch movies andTV on their PC.

BenQ E2400HD

This 16:9 aspect ratio, 1,920 x 1,080resolution features HDMI, DVI (withHDCP), and VGA inputs. BenQ alsointegrates its Senseye+Photo Image


specification found on many of the moni-tors in this roundup, we felt it producedslightly darker darks and brighter whitesthan many of the other models in ourroundup. The 16:9 (1,920 x 1,080 nativeresolution) monitor offers HDMI (bothvideo and audio), DVI (with HDCP),and VGA inputs, as well as a 3.5mmmini-jack input and SPDIF audio output.The SPDIF output is an odd addition,but if you have headphones that can usethe digital connection, you’ll appreciatethe convenience.

Asus does a nice job of concealing themonitor controls, but we think the menuinterface could have been more intuitive.Unlike traditional button layouts, theMenu button sits in between the lowerand raise buttons, so we often deselectedthe option when we were attempting to

bring settings up or down. In terms ofcolor, we noticed that the monitor’s darkblues tended to look muddy in Display-Mate’s Sharpness and Resolution tests.We also noted VH222H lost fine detail inbright colors, such as yellow, magenta,and cyan. Overall, color accuracy wasgood, and we saw no ghosting in ourgames or movie testing.

The VH222H has a glossy bezel thatbrings attention to fingerprints, particu-larly around the monitor’s control panel,but the TFT screen didn’t reflect anyoverhead lighting. Asus integrates fivevideo modes (Scenery, Theater, Gaming,Night View, and Standard) and threepreset skin tone levels (Yellowish, Nat-ural, and Reddish), so you can adjust thedisplay to suit different graphic applica-tions. The color changes in the videomodes seemed appropriate for the pre-set conditions.

The 21.5-inch widescreen VH222H ismore affordable than the other models in

technology, which automatically sharp-ens images, reduces aliasing artifacts,and fixes blurred images. The 24-inchE2400HD delivered a true black levelin DisplayMate’s Gray-Scale test, which

helped produce crisp, intense colors.The E2400HD stood out in Display-Mate’s Color Registration Blink test,where the red and green patterns wereincredibly crisp.

Grayscale performance was good, butwith colors in DisplayMate’s Color Smearand Moire Montage tests, we noted varia-tions in color intensity that appeared assmear and dark smudges. The dark patch-es only appeared in pattern tests, wheredark and light bands are more likely toshow up. For example, in our movie andgame tests, the E2400HD delivered accu-rate color without any banding or other

artifacts. The E2400HD also displayedsome dark shading at the bottom and topof the screen when displaying bright col-ors. Despite these issues, the E2400 dis-played one of the truest black-and-whitegradations of our test group.

The stand for the 24-inch monitor issturdy, but it only allows you to tilt theE2400HD up or down. BenQ integratesfive preset modes, including Standard,Movie, Dynamic, Photo, and sRGB(ide-al for people who use sRGB devicesto match color), and the controls arebuilt onto the right side of the monitor.We had complete control of the bright-ness, contrast, and sharpness, as well asthe red, green, and blue levels on themonitor. We thought the built-in speak-ers produced the best audio clarity andoverall volume of the group. The moni-tor’s subtle dark patches may detergraphics professionals, but the peoplelooking for a monitor for watchingmovies and TV will appreciate the deep

E2400HD$319.99 I BenQ

www.benq.us I ● ● ●

w2338h$299.99 I HP

www.hp.com I ● ● ●

Our LCD roundup features high-end consumer monitors between 22 and 24-inches, which seems to be

the sweet spot between price and performance right now.




dimily lit scenes in “Transformers” andCrysis invited a lot of glare.

Oddly, the w2338h only offers HDMIand VGA inputs, so you may need topurchase a DVI-to-HDMI cable oradapter to see the highest-quality video.HP includes a strong, attractive silverstand that you can tilt up and down. Thew2338h also has built-in speakers, buteven with the audio jacked, the 2-watt,rear-mounted speakers were barely audi-ble. The bezel on the w2338h is just as glossy as its screen’s appearance. If you work in a bright environment, thew2338h glossy screen may become


contrast ratio of the E2400HD’s 24-inch screen.

HP w2338h

If you’re looking for a monitor that’s asattractive when it’s turned off as it iswhen turned on, the HP w2338h is foryou. HP includes its BriteView Tech-nol-ogy in the w2338h, which gives thew2338h a glass-like appearance, includingsignificant reflections in bright roomswhen the monitor’s off or displayingextremely dark video. That being said, themonitor produces bright whites, yellows,and light blues without any blooming,which we couldn’t say for many of themonitors in this roundup. The w2338halso excelled in DisplayMate’s Dot CrawlCheck (a test pattern that will show anyinterference between hue, saturation, andvarious light intensities).

DisplayMate’s Extreme Gray-Scalewith Bar test produced impressively crispgray gradation, and we also noted crispline definition with dark colors in Dis-playMate’s Test Pattern. We saw a littlemoiré effect in some tests, but other thanthe small artifacts, the w2338h producedexcellent, accurate color. The w2338h’sglossy screen proved less impressive withour gaming and videogames tests, where

distracting, but otherwise, we feel it’s oneof the top monitors of the group in termsof video quality.

NEC EA221wm

NEC Display primarily focuses onbusiness users, and its EA221wm offers anumber of usability features, such as itslazy Susan monitor stand and integratedUSB hub. The EA221wm is a 22.1-inch,16:10 aspect ratio monitor with a 1,680 x1,050 native resolution. We appreciatethe display’s thin-frame (a little morethan half an inch) bezel, because it’s idealfor dual-screen setups, as well as thestand’s ability to swivel (360 degrees),raise and lower, and tilt.

In terms of video quality, the EA221wmdelivered true black levels in Display-Mate’s Medium Sensitivity Black-LevelCheck, and we noted impressive color gra-dation in the Low Saturation Colors test.Detail was also good on the EA221wm, asit was one of the few monitors that pro-duced visible pixel dots for all colors inDisplayMate’s Set Up Cross Hatch test.On the downside, our test monitor dis-played a dark bar along the bottom por-tion of the screen in bright and lightvideo. The EA221wm, which lists a 5ms response time, also showed a little

LCDs On DisplayAcer G24 Asus VH222H BenQ E2400HD HP w2338h NEC EA221wm Samsung 2233RZ Viewsonic VX2265wm

Although you'll find a lot of marketing tools within monitor specifications, we've tried to provide all the VESA-based testing standards we could find to give you an accurateidea of each monitor's capabilities.

Screen size (inches) 24 21.5 24 23 22 22 22

Viewing angle (V/H) 160/160 160/170 160/170 160/160 170/176 160/170 150/160

Native resolution 1,920 x 1,200 1,920 x 1,080 1,920 x 1,080 1,920 x 1080 1,680 x 1,050 1,680 x 1,050 1,680 x 1,050

Contrast ratio 1,000:1 1,000:1 1,000:1 1,000:1 1,000:1 1,000:1 1,000:1

Response time 2ms* 5ms 5ms 5ms 5ms 5ms 5ms

Inputs VGA, DVI, HDMI VGA, DVI, HDMI VGA, DVI, HDMI VGA, HDMI VGA, DVI DVI DVI

Weight (with stand, lbs.) 15.9 10.8 15.4 13.2 17.4 11.5 12.2

Aspect ratio 16:10 16:9 16:9 16:9 16:10 16:10 16:10

Hertz 60 60 60 60 60 120 120

Speakers No Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

MSRP $399.99 $209.99 $319.99 $299.99 $299 $399 $359.99

CPU rating ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

*gray-to-gray

EA221wm$299 I NEC

www.necdisplay.com I ● ● ● ●

CPU / July 2009 23


bottom of the monitor, and the controlsare positioned on the far right-hand side.The menu layout is fairly intuitive as we’dlike, and you have plenty of options,including controls (such as Color Tone,Color Control, and Gamma) that weren’ttypical of our other test monitors. Ouronly real problem with the 2233RZ is itsstand, which is tough to adjust, and it’s alittle wobbly when tilting the screen up ordown. Otherwise, we found the monitorto be a great monitor for gaming, work-ing, and watching movies.

Viewsonic VX2265wm

With the ability to produce video at120Hz, the VX2265wm provides a rarefeature that improves the appearance offast-motion video in games and movies.On the flip side, the VX2265wm doesn’tinclude the connectivity options (only


ghosting in our gaming tests. In ourmovie tests, we noted that the colorsseem muted compared to the othermonitors in our roundup, but the colorswere still accurate.

Eco-conscious people will like theEA221wm’s Eco mode, which drops thescreen’s brightness by 60%; NEC indi-cates the screen reduces energy consump-tion from 39W to 27W in Eco mode. We found it was easy to switch to Ecomode and adjust the screen settings usingthe monitor’s 4-way navigation key. Itfeatures DVI (with HDCP) and VGAvideo inputs, as well as four USB ports(two on side, two on back), a mini-jackaudio input, and headphone output. Allin all, the EA221wm has a lot of conve-nience features, and it offers good videoquality to match.

Samsung SyncMaster 2233RZ

This 120Hz LCD monitor fromSamsung features a 1,680 x 1,050 na-tive resolution and support for Nvidia’sGeForce 3D Vision. The 2233RZ pro-duced some of the most impressive blacklevels and brightest colors of our testmonitors. Additionally, the 120Hz tech-nology produced smoother motion in ourgames tests, and we found less judderwhen watching movies, compared to the60Hz monitors we tested.

In terms of video quality, the 2233RZshined in DisplayMate’s black level tests,including the Medium Sensitivity BlackLevel and Static Gamma CorrectionMeasurement screens, where it showedthe best contrast of our roundup. For themost part, the monitor also presentedexcellent color. With our test monitor, we needed to pull down the brightnessand contrast quite a bit to avoid over-saturation in the bright white spectrum.Thankfully, Samsung includes plenty ofcontrols to fine tune the monitor’s con-trast and color. In some scenes in ourmovie tests, we thought that the 2233RZ’scolors appeared more crisp and definedthan many of its competitors.

Although it’s not too flashy, the2233RZ offers an appearance that wethink is elegant. There’s a subtle bluepower light on a thin, clear bar at the

DVI), display adjustments (only tilt), orimage controls (it can only adjust bright-ness) common on the other monitors inthis roundup. It also supports Nvidia’sGeForce 3D Vision, and Viewsonicincludes a dual-link DVI cable that,according to Viewsonic, is necessary foruse with the 120Hz display.

This glossy bezel, 22-inch monitor fea-tures a 1,680 x 1,080 resolution. In ourDisplayMate tests, colors appeared vividand mostly accurate, but we noted someblooming in whites and other brights.The contrast troubles also limited theVX2265wm’s performance in Display-Mate’s 128 Step Gray-Scale test, wheredetails were obscured at the white end ofthe gray scale. Because the monitor pro-vided us no ability to adjust the contrast,we couldn’t resolve the problem. On theplus side, the VX2265wm delivered thebest response time in our gaming andmovies tests. Background content andcharacter movements in Crysis appearedparticularly crisp.

We also tried 3D gaming (thanks toNvidia for providing the 3D kit) inWorld Of Warcraft and thought this fea-ture made the VX2265wm stand out.You’ll need a recent Nvidia GeForcegraphics card and Nvidia’s 3D glasses toview content in 3D, but gamers lookingto enhance their experience will want tocheck it out. Even without the 3D equip-ment, the monitor’s 120Hz technologyand vivid color make the VX2265wm agood monitor for gamers, while thosewho look for smooth graduation andaccurate light colors, such as photographyenthusiasts, may prefer another monitor.

And The Winner Is . . .We’d be hard pressed to pick one

monitor out of the group, but a few standout. Acer’s G24, Samsung’s SyncMaster2233RZ, and HP’s w2338h were all colorful and attractive, while NEC’sEA221wm offered the most conveniencefeatures, as well as good image quality. Ifyou’re still debating, check out our specscomparison chart for some side-by-sideassessments. ▲

by Nathan Lake

SyncMaster 2233RZ$399 I Samsung

www.samsung.com I ● ● ● ●

VX2265wm$359.99 I Viewsonic

www.viewsonic.com I ● ● ●



Solidata X2-512 512GB

S SDs are catching up to hard drives onthe capacity front. Here’s one pack-

ing half a terabyte, for crying out loud. This MLC drive is a 2.5-inch unit,

despite its remarkable capacity. (It’s alsoavailable as a 3.5-inch). At 13mm thick, itwon’t fit in every laptop. The 256GB andsmaller units are but 9.5mm thin.

Solidata posits this drive as an Intelwhupper, but my tests showed a distinctadvantage on the part of the X25-M, evenbefore the recent Intel firmware upgrade toaddress declining write performance overtime. Even without HD Tachwrite results—my X25-M wasborrowed and contained data,so I couldn’t run write tests—the Intel SSD kicked rump.The Solidata scored quite lowin Iometer’s File Server test,

which consists of mostly reads with somewrites. Still, the 100% reads Web Server testlooked much better.

Then again, you can’t get 512GB fromIntel. As Kirk taunted Khan, Solidata mayas well be saying, “I’m laughing at thesuperior intellect. Neener, neener.” ▲

(Special thanks to DVNation.com for theSolidata and to Intel for the X25-M.)

by Marty Sems

P ower savings is the big idea behindSeagate’s newest consumer laptop

drive, but don’t think for a moment thatits performance isn’t up toscratch. Although it won’tmake recent SSDs scurry forcover, there’s a lot to like inthe Momentus 7200.4’sbenchmark results. (That is,if you can push Seagate’srecent firmware debacle with the Barracuda 7200.11and other drives out of your mind.)

The dollars-per-GB ratiostill heavily favors hard drivessuch as this one, even if anSSD such as Solidata’s X2-512 can match it in capacity.And although eminent techjournalists have rightfully

declared that a good SSD is currentlythe PC upgrade with the most notice-able across-the-board performance

boost, most users wouldstill rather pay $145 for500GB than $1,999.

With fluid dynamic bear-ings, a head offload ramp,and various power manage-ment techniques, the 7200.4manages to eke out a livingon slightly more than a cou-ple of watts. In fact, Seagateclaims that it’s the mostpower-sipping 7,200rpmlaptop drive around.

Like its 160GB, 250GB,and 320GB brethren, this500GB Momentus 7200.4(model ST9500420AS) features a 16MB cache.


Specs: 240MBps read/190MBps write, sequential; 130MBps read/35MBps write, random; MLC; 3Gbps SATA; >2 million hours MTBF

Specs: 16MB cache; 7,200rpm; 3Gbps SATA; NCQ; 11ms advertised random seek time;9.5mm thickness; 600,000 load/unload cycles; 0.69 to 2.2W; 23 to 27dBA; 350G/2ms oper-ating, 100G/1ms non-operating shock tolerance; 4 heads/2 disks; RoHS; three-year warranty

Benchmark ResultsSolidata Intel X2-512 X25-M 80GB

PCMark Vantage 1.0.0 (64-bit, Nov 07 patch)HDD score (points) 11893 26193Defender (MBps) 100 134Gaming (MBps) 120 139Photo Gallery (MBps) 165 150Vista startup (MBps) 51 154Movie Maker edit (MBps) 36 103Win Media Ctr (MBps) 55 116WMP music add (MBps) 19 82App loading (MBps) 24 116

HD Tach RW 3.0.4.0, Long BenchRead, avg/max (MBps) 180/198 209/221Write, avg/max (MBps) 149.4/188 n/aRandom access (ms) 0.2 0.1Burst read (MBps) 232 250CPU utilization (%) 4 4

Iometer 2006.07.27File Server (IOps) 22 5860File Server (MBps) 0.2 63.5File Server avg/max response (ms) 773/2976 3/351CPU utilization (%) 0.2 7Web Server (IOps) 4048 13137Web Server (MBps) 62 202Web Server avg/max response (ms) 16/47 5/23CPU utilization (%) 6 18

Test system specs: Vista Home Premium (32-bit),Core 2 Extreme Q6850 (3GHz), 4GB DDR3(1,333MHz), Intel DX48BT2, ICH9R.

Benchmark ResultsSeagate Momentus 7200.4 500GB

PCMark Vantage 1.0.0 (Nov 07 patch)HDD score (points) 4129Defender (MBps) 18Gaming (MBps) 12Photo Gallery (MBps) 42Vista startup (MBps) 17Movie Maker edit (MBps) 32Win Media Ctr (MBps) 95WMP music add (MBps) 9App loading (MBps) 5

HD Tach RW 3.0.4.0, Long Bench Read, avg/max (MBps) 87/110Write, avg/max (MBps) 85/111Random access (ms) 15.4Burst read (MBps) 205.2CPU utilization (%) 2

Iometer 2006.07.27File Server (IOps) 95Web Server (IOps) 121

* Test system specs match those used in the Solidata X2-512 review.

Momentus 7200.4 500GB $145 Seagatewww.seagate.com ● ● ● ●

X2-512 $1,999 [DVNation price] Solidatawww.solidata-usa.com● ● ● ●

For a hard drive, the Momentus7200.4 is quiet, speedy, spacious, tough,and green-ish. ▲

by Marty Sems

Seagate Momentus 7200.4 500GB

CPU / July 2009 25


Icy Dock MB882SP-1S

“ I cy Dock MB882SP-1S” is a longname for a clever little device that

allows you to insert your 2.5-inch SATAnotebook hard drive or SSD into a con-verter that effectively makes the drivephysically the same size as a 3.5-inchhard drive.

The converter solves the problem oftrying to fit an SSD or notebook driveinto a desktop PC case. Indeed, when adrive is safely inserted into the Icy DockMB882SP-1S, the whole shebang will fitinto a drive bay or external hard driveenclosure designed for a 3.5-inch drive.

The converter can handle 3Gbps driveswith a max capacity of 500GB and sportsairflow vents for heat dissipation. Evenwith a 2.5-inch drive inside, the Icy DockMB882 is incredibly light. Altogether, the2.5-inch drive and the enclosure weigh

less than a typical3.5-inch hard drive.

I was impressedby how easy it wasto install the harddrive in the enclo-sure. There are noscrews required. You justslide the top open, placethe drive inside, and slidethe lid shut. Done.

To test whether the MB882SP-1Swould affect read/write speeds, I ran thedrive on PCMark Vantage with and with-out the converter. The resulting scoresshowed a slight but negligible difference inperformance between the two. Withoutthe converter, the hard drive averaged3318 over two runs with an average of3286 over two runs with the converter.

Ultra-X R.S.T. Pro3 & QuickTech Pro

P C enthusiasts love benchmarks. Inproviding hard numbers, benchmarks

allow us irrefutable bragging rights abouthow well our builds perform. Ultra-X’stesting kits go way beyond simple bench-marks: These are serious tools that helpprofessionals test and troubleshoot hard-ware issues to a level of minutiae most ofus have probably never encountered.

Though Ultra-X’s catalog of testingtools is extensive, we tried out two of itskits, the R.S.T. Pro3 and the Quick-Tech Pro. The devices will give you allthe information, but it’s up to the user to make some kind of sense of it.

R.S.T. Pro3The R.S.T. Pro3 comes in a PCI-E

card form factor and is designed to testmemory for servers and workstations,though you can use it for testing any system, really. (Note that the R.S.T. Pro2is ideal for desktop system memory.) To use it, just plop the card into an avail-able PCI-E slot, restart the system, and

configure the card as the first boot priori-ty in the BIOS.

The system will boot from the cardand present you with options for testing.The level of detail to which you can drilldown to test and evaluate is staggering. Ifthere’s any information you care to knowabout your system’s memory, the R.S.T.Pro3 will find it for you.

QuickTech ProThe QuickTech Pro device we tested is

in a USB form factor, and like the R.S.T.Pro3, you can boot directly to the USBdongle after configuring the boot order inthe BIOS. Unlike the R.S.T. Pro3, whichis designed specifically to test memory,the QuickTech Pro tests virtually every-thing—memory (though not in as muchdetail as the R.S.T. Pro3), CPU, hard drives, optical drives, graphics, and more.

Included in the testing kit is a varietyof devices you can plug into the machinefor loopback tests, including ones for a 9-pin serial port, 25-pin serial/parallel port,

network connection, and audio jack. Italso includes a CD-ROM and DVD-ROM equipped with media for runningoptical drive tests. ▲

by Seth Colaner

I pulled the hard drive outof the converter after a few

rounds of PCMark to check the tempera-ture, and I was disappointed to find itquite warm.

The bottom line is that the Icy DockMB882 is a device designed so simply andelegantly that it requires infinitesimallymore effort to swap in and out of a com-puter as any 3.5-inch hard drive. This isdefinitely a product you want to have inyour toolbox if you work with SSDs ornotebook hard drives. ▲

by Seth Colaner


R.S.T. Pro3 $859QuickTech Pro$429Ultra-Xwww.uxd.com● ● ● ●

Specs: Compatible drives: 2.5-inch SATA I/II; Fits into a 3.5-inch SATA hard drive bay;3Gbps transfer rate; Supports hard drives up to 500GB; 145 x 101 x 25mm (LxWxH); 195.3g

MB882SP-1S$24.99

Icy Dock www.icydock.com

● ● ● ●


Asus N10JC-A1

W e don’t care if you call it a net-book or a notebook. The Asus

N10, with a 10.2-inch screen (800 x480), 1.46-inch maximum thickness, and3.1-pound weight, is a slick ultra-portablewith a sweet surprise. Yes, like other net-books, this one uses the 1.6GHz IntelAtom Processor N270 paired with theIntel 945GSE chipset. This means thatthe Intel GMA 950 graphics engine isbuilt in. However, flip a little switch onthe left edge before booting, and you can boot using discrete Nvidia GeForce9300M GS graphics. You pick Intel forbattery life and Nvidia for performance.

How big is the performance difference?Potentially huge. With CUDA-enabledapps, some tasks that would normallybring this netbook’s Atom N270 to itsknees (say you want to transcode yourmedia files with Nero Move or watchsomething encoded in H.264) will beconsiderably better, thanks to the 9300M

I f you just got a brand-new Phenom IIX4 940 BE and are kicking yourself for

not waiting for the 955 BE, you can stop.The 955 is pretty much the same story asthe 940, but with a slightly faster clock(3.2GHz vs. 3GHz, respectively). AMDpulled the same stunt with the PhenomX4 9850 BE and 9950 BE.

It’s not that the 955 is unimpressive,it’s just that it’s not any more impressivethan its predecessor, the 940. The slightbump in benchmark performance is easilyexplainable with the slightly higher clockof the 955. If you’re overclocking, thebump is a bit more noticeable. I hit

P9642 in 3DMark Vantage witha clock speed of 3.86GHz—a sig-nificant step up from the stock-speed score of P6488.

The bottom line is that thePhenom II X4 955 Black Editionis a slightly better chip than the940 and enters the market at abetter price—$30 less, to be exact.We can only assume that pricewill drop with the next batch ofAMD CPUs, so it’s a great dealfor AMD’s best processor. ▲

by Seth Colaner


Specs: Socket AM3; Clock Speed:3.2GHz; HyperTransport 3.0 Link: 4GHzfull duplex; 45nm process; Cache: 2MBtotal dedicated L2 cache, 6MB L3 cache;125W max TDP

Test System Specs: Processor:3.2GHz AMD Phenom II X4 955 BlackEdition; RAM: 2GB Corsair DDR2-800;Graphics: ATI Radeon 4850; Hard Drive:150GB Western Digital Raptor 1500

Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition$245AMDwww.amd.com● ● ● ●


Benchmark ResultsAMD Phenom AMD Phenom II X4 940 BE II X4 955 BE

3DMark VantageOverall P7214 P7488GPU 6564 6767CPU 10260 11009PCMark Vantage ProOverall 5917 5939Memories 4205 4205TV And Movies 4273 4370Gaming 5410 5479Music 5223 5425Communications 5535 5787Productivity 5213 5397HDD 3433 3471

Dr. DivX 2.0.1* 5:04 5:08WinRAR 3.71* 2:30 2:20Cinebench 10Multi-threaded* 1:30 1:24Multi-threaded 9786 10487(score)Crysis 1.1***Low quality 93.81fps 99.95fps* minutes:seconds** pixels per second*** Crysis tested at 1,280 x 1,024

AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition

GS. At the end of the day, though, this isa platform for basic 2D and 3D entertain-ment; the Atom N270 remains a perfor-mance bottleneck.

Our unit shipped an 8-in-1 card read-er, 1.3MP Web cam, HDMI port, Ex-pressCard slot, and fingerprint reader builtinto the touchpad. You’ll have to load appsfrom an external USB or LAN source, be-cause there’s no built-in optical drive.

Honestly, the N10 was a little heavierand thicker than we would’ve liked. Thescreen bezel feels excessively thick, butwe’re guessing this is a concession made byopting for a 10.2-inch screen along with acomfortably broad keyboard. Still, we

found the screen very decent for prolongedviewing, including for video playback. Welove the button above the keyboard for tog-gling between different power/performanceprofiles. In High Performance mode with Wi-Fi enabled and all power-saving fea-tures disabled, we achieved a battery run-time of 4 hours and 54 minutes—nice.

The N10 is convenient, affordable, andeffective for nongaming tasks. We hopethis sparks a trend in pushing the enve-lope for netbook expectations. ▲

by William Van Winkle

N10JC-A1Asus$649www.asus.com● ● ● ●

Specs: CPU: 1.6GHz IntelAtom Processor N270; Chipset:Intel 945GSE; GPU: NvidiaGeForce 9300M GS (256MBVRAM); Gigabit Ethernet,802.11b/g; 3 USB ports

CPU / July 2009 29

In November 2008, I reviewed the Wil-son Electronics SignalBoost Mini-Mobile

Amplifier. (See page 31.) This originalmodel is designed to strengthen the cellularconnection of nearly any mobile phone.Now that this technology has made itsmark, Wilson has committed to providinga signal boost for the iPhone.

The iBooster features similar compo-nents as the Mini-Mobile: a cradle to securethe phone, exterior magnet-mount anten-na, and the signal amplifier itself. The dif-ference between the two amplifier kits,however, is that the iBooster charges youriPhone (via cigarette light power adapter)when it’s in its resting state and pluggedinto the charger and combines the signalamplifier, charger, and cradle into one unit.

When you open the box, it may seemlike the separate pieces will require a stress-inducing assembly, but in reality, it takes a minimal amount of effort to install and

mount the iBooster. Iplugged one end of theDC power adapter intothe amplifier/charger andthe other into the ciga-rette lighter to power upthe device immediately;don’t overlook the powerswitch on the end of thecigarette adapter, indicated by a red light.The amplifier/charger connects to theantenna with a mini-coaxial connector. Iextended the antenna cable behind the driv-er’s seat and snaked it up to the door seal, adiscreet way to install this component.

As far as my experience goes, the iBoosterincreased signal strength in the rural andurban areas I drove through. I didn’t thinkthat it was as effective as the Mini-Mobile,but the precision of the iBooster is some-what difficult to calculate because theiBooster is designed purely for the iPhone.

I t’s one thing to lead the charge into a hotnew technology. It’s quite another to

take a good look at what users really wantand need and then field a kit to fill the bill.

Imation offers several of its M-Class(MLC, or multilevel cell) and S-Class(SLC, or single-level cell) SSDs as upgradekits. You’ll get a SATA-to-USB convertercable and an AC adapter with a SATApower connector. These items let you do anSSD migration even with a one-bay laptop.

Be sure to drop your boot drive out ofAHCI or RAID mode, then boot from theincluded Acronis True Image HD CD toperform the drive copy.

This isn’t the screamingest MLC driveon the market, but it’s a fair value, espe-cially when you consider its hardwarebundle and ease of installation. And aVelociRaptor hard drive really isn’t theprimary rival for this sort of SSD—a note-book drive would be a fairer comparison.Still, we were struck by the give-and-takeof the benchmark battle. In some areas,the Imation seems to dominate; in others,the WD drive lands a few body blows.

In day-to-day use, however, this SSDnoticeably perked up our system more thanthe vaunted VelociRaptor. Vista and appli-cations launched more quickly, althoughcertain file transfers and write operationstook slightly longer. Still, the Imation M-Class seems able to whip any laptop drive,and that’s the primary goal of this kit. ▲

by Marty Sems

It’s tricky to know for certain if this issuecan be attributed to the iBooster itself orthe wireless coverage in our local area.

Keep in mind that the iBooster mustremain in its cradle to operate, so be sureto utilize the speakerphone on youriPhone (or opt for a Bluetooth headset).In the most general terms, the iBooster isideal for anyone who hates poor receptionor inconsistent data rates. ▲

by Joanna Safford


M-Class 2.5-inch SATA 128GB Upgrade Kit$449.99 Imationwww.imation.com ● ● ● ●

Wilson Electronics iBooster$240Wilson Electronicswww.wilsonelectronics.com● ● ● ●

Specs: Dimensions: 2 x 4.75 x 1 inches(HxWxD); 824 to 894MHz/1850 to1990MHz; 1,000mw max output; +30dBmmax RF; 12V power requirement; supportsSMA female connector

Specs: 1.5Gbps SATA; sequential 150MBpsread/90MBps write (advertised), random6,000IOps read/380IOps write (advertised);two-year limited warranty

Benchmark ResultsPCMark Imation Veloci- Vantage M-Class Raptor1.0.0 (64-bit, 2.5" SATA 300GBNov 07 patch) 128GBHDD score (points) 11051 6002Defender (MBps) 80 28Gaming (MBps) 92 20Photo Gallery (MBps) 121 60Vista startup (MBps) 58 23Movie Maker edit (MBps) 33 51Win Media Ctr (MBps) 49 108WMP music add (MBps) 23 14App loading (MBps) 26 6HD Tach RW 3.0.4.0, Long BenchRead, avg/max (MBps) 133/147 106/126Write, avg/max (MBps) 84/88 98/118Random access (ms) 0.2 7.3Burst read (MBps) 168 245.1CPU utilization (%) 3 4Iometer 2006.07.27File Server (IOps) 23 183Web Server (IOps) 3089 1994K Random Writes (IOps) 5 3004K Random Writes (MBps) 0.02 1.24K Random Writes 3515/8592 53/125avg/max response (ms)Boot to Desktop 1:05 1:14(min:sec)Test System Specs: Vista Home Premium (32-bit), 3GHz Core 2 Extreme Q6850, 4GB DDR3(1,333MHz), Intel DX48BT2, ICH9R.


Wilson Electronics iBooster

Imation M-Class 2.5-inch SATA 128GB Upgrade Kit


Commodore Gaming Commodore xx

C ommodore often triggers a sense ofnostalgia for gamers who got their

start in the 1980s. In 2005, the Com-modore brand was reinvented, and now it has a solid lineup of boutique gamingPCs, including the Commodore xx.

The first thing that we noticed when wepopped the Commodore xx open was itstidy appearance, with clean and orderlyinterior cabling. Our attention was quicklyrefocused to the cooling scheme, however,which is one of its biggest strengths. TheCommodore xx includes the CoolIt Cus-tom Domino liquid-cooling system, whichis a bit blue-collar, but it gets the job donewell. Also, there are plenty of fans in all theright places—a 120mm intake fan in thefront, a 250mm side fan, and a 120mmexhaust fan at the rear—producing a niceairflow through the system.

Commodore is looking to distinguishitself with its customizable C-Kin cases.According to Commodore, the artwork isbaked onto the panels in a 350-degreeFahrenheit oven and then painted overwith an antiscratch layer. Although youcan’t submit your own work, Com-modore offers more than 50 designs to


Commodore xx$4,599 (as tested)Commodore Gamingwww.commodoregaming.com● ● ● ●

choose from. The artwork was impres-sive, but we noticed the color patternsweren’t even and looked cheap.

The Commodore xx packs a long listof the best hardware available, whichallowed it to blast through benchmarks,posting a 32513 overall score in 3DMarkVantage, for example. Additionally, theCrysis Warhead (20.81fps), Crysis 1.1(37.95fps), and the World In Conflict(74fps) scores were all blistering, thanksto the trio of Nvidia GeForce GTX 285s(in 3-Way SLI).

The Commodore xx is a great dealwhen you consider that it’s reasonablypriced for what you get. Unfortunate-ly, Commodore has closed its NorthAmerican office, and at press timeCommodore’s site did not include aNorth America-specific online store.According to Taco van Sambeek,Commodore Gaming’s global productmanager, the company shut down thestore temporarily and will be process-ing orders from the United Statesagain soon. ▲

by Tessa Warner Breneman

Specs: CPU: Intel Core i7-965 Extreme @ 3.74GHz; Motherboard:Evga X58 SLI; RAM: 6GB Corsair Dominator DDR3-1866MHz;HDDs: Western Digital 300GB VelociRaptor, 1.5TB Seagate

Barracuda 7,200rpm SATA Hard Drive; GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX285 (3-Way SLI); PSU: Corsair HX Series, 1,000W Modular PowerSupply; OS: Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit

Benchmark ResultsCommodore xx

3DMark Vantage Performance

Overall 32513

GPU 29096

GPU1 82.75fps

GPU2 87.8fps

CPU 50192

CPU1 3221.15 Plans/s

CPU2 160.04 Steps/s

Cinebench 10*

Multithreaded (score) 21,522

Multithreaded (min:sec) 0:41

POV-Ray 3.7 Beta** 4686.42

PCMark Vantage Pro 1.0

Overall 8922

Memories 6889

TV And Movies 5630

Gaming 11363

Music 6715

Communications 7570

Productivity 8406

HDD 5817

SiSoft Sandra Lite XII SP1

Processor Arithmetic

Dhrystone ALU (MIPS) 90,047

Whetstone iSSE3 77,264(MFLOPS)

Processor Multi-Media

Integer x8 iSSSE3 (itps) 617,242

Floating Point x8 431,449iSSE2 (itps)

Memory Bandwidth

Integer Buffered 24.90iSSE2 (GBps)

Floating-Point Buffered 24.89iSSE2 (GBps)

Crysis Warhead (4XAA) 20.81

Crysis 1.1 (no AA) 37.95

World In Conflict 1.005 74(4XAA, 16XAF)

FarCry 2 (4XAA) 94.84

* minutes: seconds

** pixels per second

Games tested at 2,560 x 1,600.


CPU / July 2009 31


Eurocom T890M Element

P eople buy ruggedized computers fortwo reasons: Either they’re clumsy or

their occupation doesn’t tie them to adesk—be it the military, construction, orother field in which conditions occasion-ally get gritty. Enter Eurocom’s IntelAtom-based T890M Element, a die-castmagnesium-constructed tablet that’sdrop-resistant to 4 feet and wrapped inthick, black rubber strips. Additionally,rubber covers the connectors/ports, theshock-mounted HDD is drop-protected,and IP54 compliance signifies the T890Mis splash- and dustproof. The T890M alsoprovides fingerprint and BIOS protec-tion, an RFID or 2D barcode reader,GPS module, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, andWeb cam. Although hefty at 3.3 pounds,my WinXP-equipped T890 performed

lightly on its feet executing commonInternet and mobile tasks.

An 8.9-inch LED-backlit resistivetouchscreen (1,024 x 600) dominates theT890M’s makeup. You’ll also find twointegrated speakers, microphone, Kensing-ton lock, slot, headphone jack, two USB2.0 ports, and menu buttons to accesswireless and other functions. My T890Mshipped with a 1.33GHz Intel Z520 At-om CPU and integrated Intel GMA 500graphics. Eurocom offers configurations of up to a 1.86GHz Z540, 500GB SATAstorage, SDD drive, and Vista Business.

The T890M didn’t blink at basic pro-ductivity and Internet tasks but gulped a bitat more-taxing tasks, including completingcurrent graphics- and resource-hungrybenchmarks. In real-world use, the T890

Archos 5 60GB Internet Media Tablet

T he Archos 5 Internet Media Tablet(PMP, MID, etc., etc.) is getting a

lot of attention lately, and rightly so. Itcombines the performance, function, andcontent most of us are looking for in aportable media device: full Web connec-tivity, PC compatibility, music, video,photos, and games. There’s even morethan that, though.

If you’re not sold on netbooks anddon’t want to give in to a smartphone, the Archos 5 is probably a good fit foryou, especially if you really only careabout the multimedia capabilities.

Starting with menu features, the Playcategory is where you store files from yourPC—you can also access Web Radio(with an incredible 10,000 stations),built-in games, and added Flash applica-tions. PC connectivity requires theincluded USB cable, and syncing the

media from your hard drive is extremelyeasy. Windows Media Player assists youin the syncing process, so you can quicklytransfer MP3s, videos, and your photocollection. Videos on the Archos 5 arecrisp, and the audio is consistent on boththe uploaded content and Web Radio—clear highs and lows provide a well-rounded sound.

The touchscreen is highly responsive,but you do have to tap twice to selectoptions in each media category. If brows-ing via Opera is new to you, be assuredthat there is practically no learning curve.You can also set up a Gmail, Yahoo!, orHotmail account that’s accessible with afew taps.

The cons are moderately annoying atworst. A stylus would have been a practi-cal accessory; some Web pages are diffi-cult to navigate on the touchscreen. (Still,

you can zoom in and out by double-tapping.) The glossy metal finish is inno way a fingerprint deterrent, butArchos does include a cleaning cloth to remove smudges.

By no means have we covered everysignificant feature; however, we can confi-dently say that the Archos 5 is beyondadequate for its purposes. ▲

by Joanna Safford

made fast work of Wi-Fi connections, pair-ing with Bluetooth gear, and running Web-based productivity apps. Multimedia-wise,photos and video were darkish and lackeddetail, but audio (aided by Intel HD Audioand a RealTek audio mixer) was borderlineoutstanding, considering the T890M’stablet nature. The touchscreen was com-fortably viewable indoors and out, thoughyou’ll likely prefer the stylus to fingertipsfor most navigation.

If you make your living in a sometimes-bruising environment, the T890M is builtto withstand nature’s elements while simul-taneously offering solid mobile connectivi-ty options. ▲

by Blaine Flamig


Archos 5 60GB Internet Media Tablet$349.99Archoswww.archos.com● ● ● ●

Specs: 1.2 x 7.6 x 9.6 inches (HxWxD); Li-polymer 6600mAH battery; 10 hours rated life;0 degrees to 40 degrees C operating temp, -20 to -60 C non-operating temp; 20 to 80%operating, 10 to 90% non-operating relative humidity; optional SSD

Specs: Display: 4.8-inch TFT LCD touchscreen (480 x 800); 32-bit ARM Cortex–A8processor; Video playback: MPEG-4/WMV/M-JPEG; Audio playback: MP3/WMA/WAV;Photo viewer: JPEG/BMP/PNG/GIF; PDF viewer, USB 2.0 interface; 3.5mm jack

T890M Element $2,500 (as tested)Eurocomwww.eurocom.com● ● ● ●



sluggish and unresponsive, which meantit skipped a few letters keeping up withthis speedy typist.

Icy Dock EZ-Dock SATA HDD Docking Station

I f you’re like us, you probably have a fewspare hard drives lying around gather-

ing dust. But with Icy Dock’s EZ-Dockdocking station, you can put those idle drives to good use as an external hard drive.

The EZ-Dock’s compact design sup-ports both 3.5-inch and 2.5-inch SATAdrives and lets you choose your interface;USB and eSATA are both supported withthe onboard connectors. If you’re usingthe USB 2.0 interface, the included USBY-cable serves both data and power. Ifyou’re gunning for 3Gbps transfer rates,however, eSATA and the external powerbrick are the way to go.

I transferred 37.6GB of music andvideos from a Vista machine to an 80GBIntel X25-M SATA SSD transferred dataat 28.8MBps over an eSATA connection.As you’d expect, hot-swap is supported,and you can shut down the drive whenyou’re not using it with the integrated

power button. The Windows- andMac-compatible EZ-Dock comeswith an attractive and hefty standfor fixed use and a carrying casewith holes that provide instantaccess to all the necessary ports.The included eSATA cable was anice bonus, as was the single-porteSATA bracket that you can useto turn a spare internal SATAport from your PC into aneSATA port. ▲

by Andrew Leibman


Icy Dock EZ-Dock SATA HDD Docking Station$49.99Icy Dockwww.icydock.com● ● ● ●

Specs: 1.2 x 19.4 x 8.5 inches (HxWxD); backlit keys; 15 hotkeys; soft-touch key system

Specs: Supports 2.5-inch, 3.5-inch HDDs; eSATA, USB 2.0

Two Color (Blue/Red) Character-Illuminated Keyboard$39.99Logisyswww.logisys.com● ● ●

Logisys Two Color (Blue/Red) Character-Illuminated Keyboard

The hotkeys, which are lined up vertical-ly on both sides of the keyboard, add to theelegant look of the keyboard rather thandetract from it. There are 15 hotkeys (whichare a combination of multimedia and In-ternet hotkeys) and a dial that adjusts thebrightness of the illumination. Don’t befooled by what you read on the LogisysWeb site and keyboard packaging, though.The dial doesn’t control the volume, as theWeb site claims; the volume hotkeys controlthe volume. Also, the packaging indicatesthere are application hotkeys for sleepmode, your My Computer folder, and theWindows calculator, but those keys didn’texist on my keyboard.

The red and blue illumination, howev-er, is just as bright as the pricier LogitechIlluminated keyboard (which has whitebacklighting). The PS2 and USB inter-face options, along with the other fea-tures, make the Two Color (Blue/Red)Character-Illuminated Keyboard a decentilluminated keyboard for its price. ▲

by Tessa Breneman

T he combination of the illuminat-ed keyboard and the hotkeys on

the Logisys Two Color (Blue/Red)Character-Illuminated Keyboard(Model KB208BK) makes this anappealing keyboard for those looking tocontrol music on a PC and pull all-nighters in a poorly lit office or dormroom. The slim, black design gives it asophisticated look, and it has a palmrest with tall legs, which makes the key-board comfortable to use.

The keys are arranged well, so my fin-gers didn’t feel crowded as I typed, butthe ENTER key is large, which affects theposition of the keys around it. If you areused to the standard-sized ENTER key,this could take some adjusting. The soft-touch keys, however, were slightly



access time. And although both drives blowpast Intel’s X25-M in terms of average se-quential write speeds, neither could comeclose to the excellent X25-M in randomwrites, as is evident by the Intel drive’sdominant performance in the IOMetertests. Both Corsair and OCZ S drives’ per-formance is a significant step up from tradi-tional hard drives.

One area where the Corsair P256 andOCZ Vertex Series 120GB drives (sort of)blow away Intel is price. The 256GB P256’s$699 and the 120GB OCZ Vertex Series’$345 price tags are higher than Intel’s $31980GB X25-M. Those prices, however,equate to a $2.73 and a $2.87 cost per giga-byte for the Corsair and OCZ drives, re-spectively. The Intel X25-M commands ahefty $3.98 per gigabyte.

Intel’s X25-M drive is still the cream ofthe crop when it comes to overall system


T he solid-state storage market has reallybeen heating up as of late, with a con-

stant influx of faster—and sometimes moreaffordable—drives, in addition to firmwareupdates that enhance the performance of existing products. For example, fiercememory rivals Corsair and OCZ recentlybegan offering new products designed tocompete in a few performance categorieswith Intel’s much-heralded X25-M, theCorsair P256 (model tested: CMFSSD-256GBG2D), and the OCZ Vertex SeriesSATA II SSD (model tested: OCZSSD2-1VTX120G), respectively.

The Corsair P256 and OCZ VertexSeries drives share some similarities, namelytheir 2.5-inch form factors, SATA 3Gbpsinterfaces, and Samsung MLC NAND flashmemory chips that reside at the hearts of thedrives. Setting up the drives was simple andstraightforward. And neither exhibited anycompatibility problems with Intel-, Nvidia-,or AMD-based southbridges on variousGigabyte- or Asus-built motherboards.

But each uses a different controller tech-nology to manage the data being sent toand retrieved from the drive, which resultsin drastically different performance, asyou’ll see in our benchmark results.

As its name suggests, the Corsair P256 isa 256GB SSD. It features a sturdy, brushedaluminum shell, which encases a new Sam-sung S3C29RBB01-YK40 drive controllerand double-stacked flash memory, as wellas 64MB of onboard cache. The OCZVertex Series drives, which are available incapacities ranging from 30 to 250GB, alsosport 64MB of cache and hard metal cas-ings, but the OCZ drives use IndilinxIDX110M00-LC drive controllers.

As our performance chart shows, theCorsair P256 trailed the OCZ Vertex Seriesdrive in average read and write speeds butpulled ahead in burst speed and random

performance, but the Corsair P256 andOCZ Vertex Series drives are excellentperformers in their own right and offerhigher capacities at a significantly lowercost per gigabyte. ▲

by Marco Chiappetta

P256 CMFSSD-256GBG2D$699Corsairwww.corsairmicro.com● ● ● ●

Solid-StateShowdownTwo RAM Leaders’ SSDs Square Off

Specs: Capacity: 256GB; Interface: SATA3Gbps; Storage technology: MLC NANDFlash; Read: 220MBps,Write: 200MBps(sequential); Cache: 64MB; Form Factor:2.5-inch; 1 million hours MTBF

Vertex Series OCZSSD2-1VTX120G$345OCZ Technologywww.ocztechnology.com● ● ● ●

Specs: Capacity: 120GB; Interface: SATA3Gbps; Storage technology: MLC NANDFlash; Read: 250MBps, Write: 180MBps(sequential); Cache: 64MB; Form Factor;2.5-inch; 1.5 million hours MTBF

Benchmark NumbersCorsair P256 Vertex Series CMFSSD-256GBG2D OCZSSD2-1VTX120G Intel X25-M 256GB 120GB 80GB

HD Tach RWAverage read (MBps) 178.1 228.6 235.1Average write (MBps) 152.5 189.4 78Burst speed (MBps) 248.5 193.6 260.3Random access (ms) 0.1 0.1 0.1CPU utilization 2% 2% 1%IOMeter (Default Access Pattern)Total IOPS 4345.79 4850.96 12108.37Total MBps 7.23 9.48 23.61Average response time (ms) 0.29 0.205 0.082Max response time (ms) 6.01 6.32 2.15CPU utilization 1.87% 2.08% 5.21%SiSoft Sandra Physical Disk BenchmarkDrive index (MBps) 235 243.63 234.88Random access time (µs) 10 50 100

Test system specs: Intel Core i7-920 2.66GHz, 6GB OCZ DDR3-1333, Gigabyte EX58-Extreme (ICH10R), Windows Vista Ultimate SP1

CPU / July 2009 35


Sapphire Vapor-X Radeon HD 4870

I t’s evident from the box that the Sap-phire Radeon HD 4870’s Vapor-X

feature is a big deal. Vapor-X is a newerfeature from Sapphire that gives theRadeon HD 4870 superior cooling andquieter operation. Without delving intospecifics, Vapor-X technology is similar toa heatpipe, using a hot, flat surface overwhich a liquid coolant is vaporized andthen condensed, all within a small cham-ber mounted on the card.

The Radeon HD 4870 is built on a custom PCB that adds BlackDiamond chokes and

high-polymer capacitors, which make thiscard cooler, more power-efficient, and morereliable. The Vapor-X also has an HDMIoutput with 7.1 surround-sound support.

Benchmark scores for the Radeon HDwere relatively predictable for a card of itscaliber. 3DMark Vantage ranked at P9936,while Crysis Warhead scored almost 10fpsat 2,560 x 1,600 resolution. Far Cry 2 posted slightly lower than expected, withabout 31fps at 1,920 x 1,080 and almost

23fps at the highest resolution.Overall, Sapphire’s take on

the Radeon 4870 is a winner,especially considering its re-

duced price tag compared to othermanufacturers who are charging as

much or more for inferior specs. ▲

by Kris Glaser

Auzentech X-Fi Forte 7.1

W hether you’re building the ultimategaming machine or configuring the

best movie-viewing setup, graphics capa-bility is likely at the forefront of yourmind. But getting the most out of yourmedia requires a sound card with the bestin audio fidelity, and Auzentech’s X-FiForte 7.1 is just that.

The Forte 7.1 builds on Auzentech’sprevious sound card, the Prelude 7.1. Themajor difference between the two cards liesin the Forte’s PCI-E interface, which offersa higher throughput than the Prelude’sPCI interface. Like the Prelude, the newForte sports Creative’s X-Fi chipset, butreceives a boost with updated circuitry andcomponents, including EAX 5.0 support.

The Forte has a 120dB D/A converter,headphone amplifier, and microphonepre-amp. It also features 64MB of X-RAM.Other worthwhile specs to mention in-clude the 15-pin analog I/O multicable

and replace-able OPAMPs(operational ampli-fiers) for the front left and right audio.

Installation was a cinch. The card isshipped with a low-profile bracket—perfectfor fitting into HTPCs. But we tested theForte in a desktop computer, so we attachedthe standard bracket that is included in thepackage. To switch brackets, we had to

remove a single Philips head screw and two jackscrews. It’s worth men-tioning that you’ll need

a 3/16 nut driver for thejack screws, a tool that not

everyone will have lying around. We tested the Forte 7.1 using M-

Audio’s Studiophile AV 40 referencespeaker system. We were quite impressedwith the clarity and intensity of the sound.There was a significant difference from oursystem’s onboard audio, and by tweakingthe options in the included audio software,we were able to customize the audio.

The software was easy to use, withEntertainment, Game, and Audio Creationmodes. The Entertainment and Gamemodes were pretty intuitive, with a basicvolume wheel and equalizers. The AudioCreation mode was much more involvedand should be reserved for advanced (ormeticulous) users, as there are far moreoptions to configure, including dB levelsfor all speakers and auxiliary effects. ▲

by Kris Glaser


Specs: Interface: PCI-E 1.1; Speaker/headphone connections: Stereo to 7.1; Analog I/OMulti Connector (3.5mm Line In/Mic In/Side, Rear, Center, Front); 64MB X-RAM.

Benchmark Numbers

Sapphire Vapor-X Radeon HD 4870

3DMark Vantage Overall P99363DMark GPU Score 8710GPU1 (fps) 24.95GPU2 (fps) 26.13DMark CPU Score 17106

Crysis 1.1 (no AA) 21.06Crysis Warhead 17.25Far Cry 2 31.09World in Conflict (4XAA) 47

Crysis 1.1 (no AA) 12.1Crysis Warhead (4XAA) 9.92Far Cry 2 (4XAA) 22.72World In Conflict 1.005 (4XAA) 26

Vapor-X Radeon HD 4870$259.99Sapphirewww.sapphiretech.com● ● ● ●

Specs: GPU: Sapphire Radeon HD 4870; Core clock: 750MHz; Memory: 2GB GDDR5 (900MHz; 800 stream processors)

Test system specs: 2.66GHz Intel i7-920; MSI X58 Eclipse; 3GB DDR3-1600, 74GB WD Raptor; Corsair HX1000W PSU.

X-Fi Forte 7.1$149.99Auzentechwww.auzentech.com● ● ● ●

1,920x

1,080

2,560x

1,600


S o, this is kinda interesting. AMD just introduced the Phe-nom II X4 955, and at its price point, it’s very competitive.

The chip retails for $245 and, as it turns out, is faster than anyCore 2 Quad that’s similar in price. Even AMD’s Phenom II X3720 has the performance-per-dollar advantage at its price point.Where AMD can’t compete is atNehalem’s price points, anythingpriced at $284 or higher.

AMD’s dominance doesn’t extend allthe way to the bottom of the price lad-der, either. In addition to the PhenomII X4 955, AMD just released the Ath-lon X2 7850, priced at $69. A veryaffordable CPU, yes, but it doesn’t com-pare well with its closest competitor,Intel’s Pentium E5300, in terms ofprice/performance.

Why is it that AMD is competitivein one price band but not another? Or,looked at from the opposite perspective,how can Intel dominate performance atone end but not at another? As you canguess, it boils down to having a multi-tude of architectures in the market atthe same time.

Intel’s high-end processors are trulynext-gen where performance is con-cerned. The Core i7 starts at $284 andgoes all the way up to $999, and AMD sim-ply can’t outperform those chips. In somesituations it gets close, but overall, Core i7offers a 0 to 40% performance advantageover the best of the rest.

Unfortunately, the Core i7’s underlyingNehalem architecture won’t make its wayinto mainstream parts until the last quarterof this year. It’s unclear what Intel will callthe mainstream version, but most are spec-ulating that it’ll carry the Core i5 name.

The i5 should be able to compete quitewell with AMD’s Phenom II, but giventhat it won’t be out until sometime aroundOctober, that leaves Intel’s Core 2-basedCPUs to compete with Phenom II. Clock-for-clock, Intel has the advantage, howev-er, AMD is very aggressive on its pricing,and Intel fully intends to keep turning a

profit even in poor economic times. The end result is what hap-pened with the Phenom II X4 955; AMD’s 3.2GHz offeringcompetes with Intel’s 2.83GHz Core 2 Quad Q9550. It keepsthe marketplace competitive for the consumer, but AMD turnedin a hefty loss on its earnings last quarter, so it’s not an approach

the company can keep up for long.Move down in price again, and this

time AMD’s architecture is the onethat changes. Phenom II CPUs arebuilt using AMD’s 45nm process on adie that’s nearly as large as Nehalem’s;there’s simply no way they could besold for under $100 at this point.Instead, AMD is rebadging last year’sPhenom processors as Athlon X2s.These things are 65nm quad-corechips with two cores disabled. Thedies are too big to be sold for under$100, but after Phenom II, no onereally wants an original, so AMD hasno other option than to rebrand themas dual-core Athlon processors.

Intel doesn’t switch architectures asyou drop down to the $70 price point.The Pentium processor is a Core 2derivative, albeit with less cache. Ataround $70, you’ve got the Athlon X2

7850 and Intel’s Pentium E5300. Inpretty much all application benchmarks,Intel takes the win there. The notableexception is gaming performance, whereAMD is the winner. Intel has the lowerpower consumption, as you’re getting asmall 45nm die instead of a large used-to-be-a-quad-core 65nm die. I’d say that Intelis the victor at $70, but that all depends onwhether you’re building a gaming machine.

Over the next six to 12 months, we’llsee both manufacturers try to transition allof their CPUs to the same architecture,which may make things more clear-cut.Until then, that’s why the world performsthe way it does. ▲

Talk back to Anand at [email protected]

Why AMD Wins At $200 But Loses At $300 & $70

Anand Lal Shimpi has turned a fledgling personal page on

GeoCities.com into one of the world’smost visited and trusted PC

hardware sites. Anand started his site in 1997 at just 14 years old

and has since been featured in USAToday, CBS’ “48 Hours,” and Fortune.

His site—www.anandtech.com—receives more than 55 million page

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

CPU / July 2009 37

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].

mounting slots. The device supports upto four standard 3.5-inch SATA hard drives, which are secured in place by alu-minum rails with protruding handles. Toadd a drive, simply fasten one of the railsto it, and it will slide into the rack; yankthe handle to pull it out. Smaller rackscompatible with only two (EX-H22) orthree (EX-H33) drives are also available.

Thermaltake S Orb

There is a slew of enhanced coolingaccessories available for high-end graphicscards out there, but cards that fall intomore mainstream market segments don’talways receive much attention. Ther-maltake, however, has released the S Orb GPU cooler ($49.99; www.thermaltakeusa.com), designed for some of themore affordable graphics cards currentlyon the market.

The S Orb has a near-universalmounting bracket design that is compati-ble with a bevy of AMD- and Nvidia-based graphics cards, including Radeoncards dating back to the X800 series (andup to today’s HD 4850) and GeForcecards from the FX 5700 to the 9600 GT.

The cooler features two curved copperheatpipes that run through a polishedcopper base to form what looks like an“S” shape. The heatpipes also have plentyof aluminum fins attached. A quiet80mm fan sits in the middle of theheatsink fins to keep the GPU cool.Thermaltake also includes heatsinks forthe graphics card’s memory chips.

Cooljag Falcon-2 CPU Cooler

Users in need of a high-performing, low-noise, low-profile cooler for Intel processorshave a new option to consider: Cooljag’sFalcon-2 ($39.99; www.xoxide.com).Compatible with Intel LGA 775, 1366,and upcoming 1156 processor sockets, theFalcon-2 features four copper heatpipes, asolid-copper base, and aluminum coolingfins stacked in a low-profile array. A120mm variable-speed PWM (pulse-widthmodulated) fan (approximately 500 to2,000rpm) is also included with theFalcon-2, which, according to its specifica-tions, outputs only 15-25dBA, making thiscooler a good fit for HTPCs or SFF PCs.

Fashionably Fresh FirmwareTrendNet TEW-453APB (v2303)

An update for the TrendNet TEW-453APB enhances WPA2 and WPA/WPA2 mix modes. The update improvesWMM support and adds Universal Clientand Universal Repeater modes.

www.trendnet.com

Thecus N8800 (v2.01.08)

A firmware update for the ThecusN8800 NAS server fixes a CPU fanspeed-detection issue, changes theS.M.A.R.T. information displayed in theDisk Status section of the interface, andadds XFS support while building a RAIDvolume, among other features.

www.thecus.com

LG BE06LU10 (vYE05)

LG’s recent update to the BE06LU10external Blu-ray drive improves write per-formance on new types of BD-R and BD-RE media.

www.lgservice.com

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

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 & EndsLian Li EX-H34

Power users who want the ability toswap multiple hard drives into and out ofa system at a moment’s notice may beintrigued by Lian Li’s new EX-H34SATA hard drive rack ($72.99; www.xoxide.com). The EX-H34, which isavailable with a black or silver finish, is asleek-looking drive rack that mounts inthree adjacent 5.25-inch drive bays.Although the EX-H34’s aesthetics matchmany of Lian Li’s current cases, it is com-patible with most other brands, as well.

At the back of the EX-H34 is a low-rpm, low-noise 120mm cooling fan witha washable air filter. The front is a doorthat opens up to reveal the hard drive

Thermaltake’s S Orb GPU cooler is compatiblewith a broad range of Nvidia- and AMD-basedmainstream graphics cards.

The Lian Li EX-Hxx series of hot-swappablehard drive racks makes it quick and easy toswap out hard drives on the fly.


quad-core CPU from yourPhenom II X3, it will draw sig-nificantly more than its rated95W (expect closer to 125Wunder full load). Enabling thefourth core would likely alsovoid your warranty and has thepotential to shorten the life ofyour hardware. Having saidthat, let’s dig in.

Platform PrerequisitesThe first thing you need is a

Phenom II X3 processor, of which thereare currently two: the 2.6GHz Phenom IIX3 710 and the 2.8GHz Phenom II X3720 Black Edition. We had a 720 inhouse that AMD sent us for the initiallaunch of the series, but we asked the firmto send us a 710, as well.

But not just any old Phenom II X3 willdo. According to the information we’vebeen able to uncover, only 720 and 710processors from batches manufactured oncertain dates have any success with theexploit. Playwares achieved its results usingprocessors manufactured in the fourth weekof 2009, while other sources claimed vary-ing degrees of success with processors datedin the 46th and 51st weeks of 2008 and thefourth and sixth weeks of 2009.

To determine if a given Phenom II X3processor has a good chance of workingwith this exploit, you’ll need to look at thethree rows of alphanumeric characters thatmake up the part number etched into theCPU’s heatspreader. Pay particular atten-tion to the far right block of four numbersfollowed by four letters in the middle row.For our Phenom II X3 720, the number is0849CPMW, while the 710’s number is0906MPMW. The numbers refer to theweek the die was manufactured. Forinstance, our 720 was manufactured in the49th week of 2008, and the 710 was man-ufactured in the sixth week of 2009.

Back on Feb. 9, AMDlaunched a handful of AM3 Phenom II

processors built using the firm’slatest 45nm manufacturingprocess. We came away fromour initial testing satisfied thatAMD had a real winner on itshands in both the Phenom IIX3 and X4 processors. The newCPUs launched at higher initialclocks than their predecessorsand also exhibited significantlymore overclocking headroom. Add themultiplier-unlocked Black Edition modelsand prices that put the squeeze on some ofIntel’s midrange offerings, and you have allthe makings for a successful product.

But two weeks later, the Korean hard-ware site Playwares (www.playwares.com)discovered a somewhat obscure BIOS set-ting available on some AMD chipset moth-erboards that, when set to Auto, wouldturn select tri-core Phenom II processorsinto fully operational quad-cores. As thenews filtered through the enthusiast com-munity, others began reporting successwith certain motherboards and processorswhile sales of AMD’s Phenom II pro-cessors started to take off. DigiTimes(www.digitimes.com) reported high de-mand for AMD’s new Phenoms, andmotherboard makers claimed AMD couldearn up to a 30% share of the global desk-top CPU market in Q2 (up from a previ-ous 20%). There’s no data to show a directcorrelation, but the exploit couldn’t havehurt the Phenom II’s popularity.

We contacted AMD to get its take.Product Manager Damon Muzny re-sponds, “We’re quite excited by the atten-tion and interest folks are showing in thenew 45nm Phenom II processors, especiallyfor our Black Edition X3s and X4s.”

And AMD should be proud of itsPhenom IIs. But if there’s a chance of

getting a quad-core Phenom II for $145 or$125, well, that’s just icing on the cake.Read on as we cut through the speculationand attempt to unlock a Phenom II X3 andshow you what it takes to do it yourself.

Quad-Core Caveat EmptorThis is the part of the show where we

tell you that although it’s possible for youto replicate our successes (more on thoselater), it’s also more than likely that you’llreplicate our failures (more on this, too).Every three-core processor has four cores,but the disabled core presumably didn’tpass validation testing and was disabled forthat reason. Even if you manage to unlockthis core, it may be unstable, negativelyimpact your system performance, andcould cause your system to become un-bootable. Should you be one of the luckyfew who manages to get a fully functioning

Tri-Core TransformerTurn A Phenom II X3 Into An X4


Only certain Phenom II X3 batches work withthe exploit.

The AMD Phenom II X3 die is the key.


motherboards.) At press time, a Germansite (www.hwbox.gr) also reported successusing the Nvidia chipset-based GigabyteGA-M720-US3 paired with a beta BIOS.Because the first site to report the exploit,Playwares, used the Biostar TA790GX128M, we decided to use that mother-board as the platform for our testing.

Try, Try AgainOur system consists of the Phenom II

X3 710 and 720, a Cooler Master V8 CPUcooler, Biostar TA790GX 128M (AMD790GX + SB750) motherboard, 2GBCorsair TWIN2X2048-6400C4 (2x 1GB,DDR2-800) SDRAM, ATI Radeon HD4890 graphics card, PC Power & CoolingSilencer 500 EPS12V power supply, and a 1TB Western Digital Caviar Black

Despite the fact that only the 710’s datebatch had any reports of success, weresolved to try both processors.

Regarding a motherboard, you willneed one with the AMD 790FX or GXchipset, particularly one that features the

SB750 Southbridge, and a BIOS that sup-ports ACC (Advanced Clock Calibration),the feature that enables the system to recognize the fourth core of an X3 proces-sor. (See the “X3-Unlocking Mother-boards” sidebar for a list of compatible


Unlocked & OverclockedWe ran our system through a series of CPU-intensive synthetic and real-world bench-marks to give you an idea of how the Phenom II X3 710 will perform at stock settings withthe fourth core unlocked, and unlocked and overclocked for maximum performance. Thethree columns on the right show you performance increases in green, performance dropsin red, and no change in gray. The leftmost column shows the difference between thePhenom II X3 710 at stock settings and the same processor with the fourth core unlocked.The middle column shows you the dramatic increases you can get from a Phenom II X3 if you manage to successfully unlock it and overclock it modestly to 3.2GHz. Notice theabundance of green? The rightmost column shows you the gains you get between the 710 with the fourth core unlocked vs. the same unlocked processor overclocked.

3DMark Vantage AMD AMD Phenom II X3 AMD Phenom II X3 Stock 710 vs. Stock Stock 710 vs. 710 710 unlocked vs. Phenom II X3 710 710 (unlocked) 710 (unlocked @3.2GHz) 710 unlocked unlocked & OCed 710 unlocked & OCed

Overall P8924 P9750 P10522 9.26% 17.91% 7.92%GPU Score 10024 10020 10338 -0.04% 3.13% 3.17%GPU1 (fps) 28.83 28.67 30 -0.55% 4.06% 4.64%GPU2 (fps) 29.92 30.06 30.58 0.47% 2.21% 1.73%CPU Score 6713 9021 11116 34.38% 65.59% 23.22%CPU1 (Plans/s) 863.67 1159.51 1444.9 34.25% 67.30% 24.61%CPU2 (Steps/s) 10.54 14.19 17.08 34.63% 62.05% 20.37%

PCMark Vantage Pro 1.0Overall 5158 5476 6458 6.17% 25.20% 17.93%Memories 4486 4992 5706 11.28% 27.20% 14.30%TV And Movies 3640 4206 4931 15.55% 35.47% 17.24%Gaming 4908 5382 6178 9.66% 25.88% 14.79%Music 4166 4626 4456 11.04% 6.96% -3.67%Communications 4398 4466 6115 1.55% 39.04% 36.92%Productivity 5110 5129 5675 0.37% 11.06% 10.65%HDD 4772 4851 4817 1.66% 0.94% -0.70%

POV-Ray 3.7 Beta 31 1622.33pps 2142.01pps 2647.57pps 32.03% 63.20% 23.60%

WinRAR 3.71 2:38 2:22 2:12 10.13% 16.46% 7.04%

Dr. DivX 5:49 5:38 4:32 3.15% 22.06% 19.53%

Cinebench 10Multithreaded (min:sec) 2:16 1:44 1:24 23.53% 38.24% 19.23%Multithreaded (score) 6484 8448 10406 30.29% 60.49% 23.18%SiSoft Sandra Lite 2009 SP2

Processor ArithmeticDhrystone ALU (GIPS) 26.62 35.36 43.32 32.83% 62.73% 22.51%Whetstone iSSE3 (GFLOPS) 25.61 34.15 41.72 33.35% 62.91% 22.17%

Processor Multi-MediaInt x8 aSSE2 (MPixels/s) 75.81 101.59 124.57 34.01% 64.32% 22.62%Float x4 iSSE2 (MPixels/s) 33.37 44.51 54.55 33.38% 63.47% 22.56%Double x2 iSSE2 (Mpixels/s) 18.27 24.32 29.85 33.11% 63.38% 22.74%

Memory BandwidthInt Buff'd iSSE2 (GBps) 9.61 9.82 12.57 2.19% 30.80% 28.00%Float Buff'd iSSE2 (GBps) 9.63 9.80 12.57 1.77% 30.53% 28.27%

Games 1,280 x 1024Far Cry 2 48.97fps 50.34fps 64.41fps 2.80% 31.53% 27.95%World in Conflict (4XAA, 4XAF) 32fps 32fps 42fps 0% 31.25% 31.25%

1,02

4 x

768

1,02

4 x

768

CPU / July 2009 41

WD1001FALS hard drive. The Biostarmotherboard’s BIOS is version 2.61, andWindows Vista Ultimate is our OS.

We started with the higher-performingprocessor first, the 2.8GHz Phenom II 720Black Edition. We installed it into the sys-tem, entered the BIOS Setup Utility, navi-gated to the Advanced tab, selected CPUConfiguration, scrolled to the bottom ofthe page to highlight Advanced ClockCalibration, and set it to Auto. After sav-ing the changes and restarting, the PCwouldn’t budge from a black screen, fail-ing to boot or even begin the POST. Wepressed CTRL-ALT-DELETE and tried toreboot, and again, the system failed to eveninitialize the display. This unsurprisingresult is likely to happen when you turn onACC with most Phenom II X3s that aren’tfrom one of the magic batches.

According to a product manager froma prominent motherboard manufacturer,“The original function of AdvancedClock Calibration is to sync the differentspeeds of each core of a multicore proces-sor”—to help when overclocking theoriginal Phenom processors. Prior to thelaunch of the Phenom IIs, and before the

tech press discovered ACC’s special newability, an AMD product manager hadthis to say about ACC: “Things learnedthrough developing ACC with the 65nmPhenom were baked into our new 45nmPhenom II silicon. . . . You can just aswell leave ACC off for Phenom II [over-clocking] testing.”

Our unnamed source tells us his theoryas to why ACC unlocks the fourth core ofPhenom II X3 processors. “These X3 cores

are actually X4 cores, and . . . the ones thatfail in certain cores, instead of throwingthem away, [the chip maker] just disables[the core] with a register that they add in,and in certain date codes, [AMD’s] manu-facturing plant failed to add that register.”Then presumably, stability concernsnotwithstanding, this exploit should workon every processor from those certain datebatches? “Yes. Actually, we’ve known aboutthis for some time.” When pressed forwhen the ACC exploit first came to hisattention, our contact explains, “I seem toremember seeing something about this in . . . November or December.”

Armed with renewed confidence andone more Phenom II X3 processor to test,we cleared the CMOS, removed our stub-born Phenom II X3 720 Black Edition,installed the Phenom II X3 710, switchedACC to Auto, crossed our fingers, andrestarted. Almost immediately, we weregreeted with a positive sign, as the POSTdisplayed our CPU as an “AMD PhenomII X4 10 Processor.” In Windows, a pop-up informed us that device driver softwareinstalled successfully for an “AMD PhenomII X4 10 Processor.” CPU-Z also con-

firmed that although we were running aDeneb-based Phenom II X3 710, it wasequipped with four cores and capable ofhandling four threads.

To determine if a heavy load wouldtrip up our new quad-core, we ranPrime95 on all four cores for anextended period, and it breezedthrough with flying colors. We ran oursuite of processor-stressing bench-marks, and the system remained stablethroughout. Better than stable: Inbenchmarks that scale well betweenmultiple cores, our unlocked PhenomII X3 710 was performing in line with

what we’d expect from a quad-corePhenom II. Check out the “Unlocked &Overclocked” chart to see the numbers.

Having proven that our Phenom II X3710 can be unlocked to take advantage ofits dormant fourth core, we decided topush our luck a bit and overclock it.Although we wanted to get as much perfor-mance out of the chip as possible, we werealso wary of pushing the thermal envelopetoo much. We managed to get stable


X3-UnlockingMotherboardsHere’s a list of motherboards that report-edly feature the SB750 Southbridge andthe requisite ACC setting in the BIOS.

• ASRock AOD790GX/128M

• ASRock M3A790GXH/128M

• Asus M3A79-T Deluxe

• Asus M4A79-T Deluxe

• Biostar TA790GX3 A2+

• Biostar TA790GX 128M

• DFI LANParty DK790FXB-M2RS

• Gigabyte GA-MA790GP-DS4H

• Gigabyte GA-MA790GP-UD4

• Gigabyte GA-MA790GP-UD4H

• Gigabyte GA-MA790FXT-UD5P

performance at 3.18GHz by tuning the CPU HyperTransport clock to245MHz, increasing the northbridge fre-quency to 2,000MHz and giving theCPU an additional 0.125V to workwith. As a result, our unlocked and over-clocked Phenom II X3 710 outper-formed AMD’s Phenom II X4 940 BlackEdition (see page 43 in CPU’s March2009 issue), a processor that—as wewent to press—was selling for close to$100 more than the Phenom II X3 710.

Four Is Better Than ThreeAs hacks, mods, and exploits go,

unlocking the fourth core on a PhenomII X3 processor is about as easy as itgets. Unfortunately, the hard part is justgetting your hands on a processor fromthe batch missing the fourth core disableregister. Unless you can find an onlineretailer that will reveal the batch num-bers prior to purchase, there’s no way toknow if you’re getting an X3 from anexploitable batch. On the other hand,our winning 710 is one of the morerecent X3s to show success, so there’s apossibility that any X3 that has a stablefourth core will work. ▲

by Andrew Leibman

ACC is found in the CPU Configuration menu.


Give UsYour ModHave a computer mod that will bring tears to our eyes? Email photos and a description to [email protected]. We’re looking forrigs that are recognizable as PCs; your Wookieemod won’t find a home here. If we include yoursystem in our “Mad Reader Mod” section,we’ll help you load up your modder’s toolboxwith $1,500 and a one-year subscription to CPU.




Egypt Mod’s front panel doors are elaborate constructs of limestone, gems, and brass, held in place by

hidden magnetic latches.

Egypt Mod

C hris “jadragon” Kramer’sEgypt Mod nearly slipped

through the cracks; he submittedit in August 2007 after complet-ing the work in the summer of2006, and somehow we missed ituntil stumbling across his sub-mission a couple months ago.You can no doubt see why we’reglad we found it.

The aptly named Egypt Modlooks cool at a glance, but unlessyou know what to look for, youmight not appreciate just howinsanely detailed and authenticthis mod is. Kramer researchedhis theme meticulously and foundthat many ancient Egyptiantombs are carved from limestonebedrock, so he found smooth-grain natural limestone floor tileshe could use to build the shellaround the frame of a NZXTNemesis case. The hieroglyphics

are painstakingly carved into thelimestone, inspired by passageslike this one that Kramer discov-ered in “The Egyptian Book ofthe Dead,” by E.A. Wallis Budge:“I am a shining being, and adweller in light who hath beencreated and hath come into exis-tence from the limbs of the god.”

As impressive as the limestoneis, it’s only the beginning. Kramerspent years as a lapidary and jew-eler. He brought his considerableskills to bear in adorning theEgypt Mod with gemstone inlaysof lapis lazuli, opal, malachite,carnelian, turquoise, brass, andgold leaf.

Kramer says he spent about200 hours on the case, preppingthe NZXT frame, affixing thelimestone, creating and hangingthe front bay doors (which closeon brass hinges; the top door

stays closed thanks to a hiddenmagnet latch), carving the hiero-glyphics and the hunt and chari-ot scenes, and crafting the inlays.Kramer attached the limestone tothe case using silicon adhesive;he removed the front bezel andreplaced it with a custom frameof aluminum tubing for the drivebays and wired the Nemesis’power and hard drive LEDs sothey light up gemstones on thecase’s front panel.

Kramer’s third case mod, theEgypt Mod weighs 96 pounds,and Kramer confirms that he’slearned to lift with his legs, nothis back. His other projectsinclude a Tron-themed mod,which trades limestone forPlexiglas, and a steampunk casehe hopes to have finishedby the end of the year.We’ll be watching, Chris.

A case constructed of such precious materials needs a fitting

guardian. Anubis, gatekeeper and ruler of the underworld, will

probably do the trick.

Kramer powers his mod with a

mobile, Socket 479 Intel Core Duo T2300 and

2GB of DDR2 plugged into an AOpen i945GTm-VHL motherboard.

CPU / July 2009 45

Get informed answers to your advanced technical

questions from CPU. Send your questions along with a

phone and/or fax number, so we can contact you if

necessary, to q&[email protected]. Please include all

pertinent system information.

Each month we dig deep into the mailbag here at CPU in aneffort to answer your most pressing technical questions. Want someadvice on your next purchase or upgrade? Have a ghost in yourmachine? Are BSODs making your life miserable? CPU’s“Advanced Q&A Corner” is here for you.

Mike G. asked: I was just wondering what the technical “require-ments” are for an improvement from a previous generation of DDR.What I mean to say is that I have read plenty about DDR3 having little tono benefit from DDR2 in desktops. And when the Athlon64 only had aDDR memory controller (in the Socket 939 days) many people said thesame thing about Intel moving to DDR2.

Now, the contrast of that is video cards. They seem to (or review-ers claim) benefit from a new generation of DDR. For example, inyour AMD Radeon HD 4850 volt mod article (see page 41 in the May2009 issue of CPU), you mention some of the clock ceilings are im-posed by the fact that the 4870 uses DDR5 as opposed to the 4850,which uses DDR3. What is the deal with memory manufacturers andthe seemingly pointless/totally unnecessary march toward newer iter-ations of DDR memory?

A: We can understand your confusion, Mike, but must stressthat there is a point to each new generation of DDR memory. Asyou mentioned, there was little reason to upgrade to DDR2, orto DDR3, when each new iteration was first introduced on thedesktop. When DDR2 and DDR3 system memory first hit thescene, it offered little to no additional performance. But overtime, it became clear why each new generation was introduced.Just look at the maximum speed ratings that are widely availablefor each memory type at your favorite online retailer. StandardDDR system memory peaked at about 400MHz (give or take afew MHz). DDR2 leveled off at about 1,200MHz. And DDR3 isstill going strong at speeds over 2,100MHz.

When used in a platform that can take better advantage of theadditional bandwidth afforded by the higher memory frequen-cies, it absolutely has a measurable impact on performance. Yousee, the changes brought forth with each new generation of DDRwere more about reducing power requirements and improvingsignal integrity, with the ultimate goal of attaining higher clockspeeds. And in that respect, each new version of DDR systemmemory has been a marked improvement over its predecessors.

GDDR5 memory’s benefits over GDDR3, however, were imme-diately apparent upon its introduction. It’s true that GDDR5 is anevolution of GDDR3/4 technologies, but GDDR5 allows for short-er trace lengths, lower voltages, and most importantly, increasedbandwidth. What makes GDDR5’s ultimate bandwidth superior to

“ Anything that

gets in the way

of gameplay and

immersion just

doesn’t cut it.

”46 July 2009 / www.computerpoweruser.com

GDDR3/4 is that it offers double the I/O throughput with thesame interface and clock speed.

For example, the Radeon HD 4850 initially shipped with993MHz GDDR3. The Radeon HD 4870 used “slower”900MHz GDDR5. And both cards had a 256-bit memory inter-face. But because GDDR5 can send twice the data per clock, itoffered 1.8x the bandwidth on the 4870 (3.6Gbps vs. 2Gbps)than GDDR3 did on the 4850. The increased bandwidth offeredby the GDDR5 memory used on the 4870, and the newer 4890,also allowed AMD to implement 256-bit memory interfaces ontheir high-end graphics cards, while Nvidia required 448-bit and512-bit interfaces on the GTX series to offer similar bandwidth.

Shawn T. asked: I have been having graphics glitches recently dur-ing gaming and decided I best get some help on it before it makes mecrazy. Over the past month or so, I started getting issues with some ofmy 3D games with what I would like to call texture skewing or textureartifacts. It started occurring in Far Cry 2, Medieval II: Total War, andOblivion. Unfortunately, no steps I have taken thus far have cured thesesymptoms. However, it doesn’t occur in other games I play (Rome: TotalWar, Unreal Tourney 2004). For graphics, I have a Radeon X1950 Pro256MB card with no overclock on my GPU. I have tried several driverversions with it but with no success (currently Catalyst version 9.2). Myissues never come up immediately upon playing the game, and the onlygames that it occurs in are the ones that are pretty intense on the card.Any clue what might be causing this? I’ve tuned up my machine severaltimes, have updated drivers and OS patches, but it still happens duringheavy-duty gaming with some of the new titles. It’s driving me nuts! Iwant my Far Cry 2 looking as good as it gets.

A: Shawn, that’s just not right. In fact, we’re not surprised thatyou’re reaching the point of frustration. Anything that gets in theway of gameplay and immersion just doesn’t cut it. We feel yourpain. Let’s think about things a bit and back into a solution for you.

The obvious issue at hand here resides with the performance ofyour 3D graphics subsystem under gaming workloads, correct? Inaddition, you noted that this “texture skewing” is only presentwhen you’re playing more demanding game titles, such as Far Cry2, Total War 2, and Oblivion, and not immediately but ratherafter the card is warmed up. Regardless, there are two primary rea-sons for texture artifacts in PC game environments, one of whichis a hardware-related issue. The other occurs more in software.

In terms of troubleshooting, it’s sometimes easiest to remedy the possibility of a software issue, so we’ll tackle that first. We’re notsure what resolution you’re gaming at on your monitor, but it’s pos-sible (though admittedly not likely) that you’re experiencing some-thing called texture tearing. Remedying this situation is a simpleswitch in the game engine to enable Vsync; if it’s not available there,

you can force it on in ATI’s Catalyst driver control panel options.Enabling Vsync will cap the frame rate of your graphics card at60fps, so it will be more in sync with your monitor’s refresh rate.

Now, with all that out of the way, we don’t necessarily thinkthis is your issue. If it were a Vsync issue, you’d see this problemin lower-end games like Unreal Tournament 2004, as well. Younoted your graphics card is an older model Radeon X1950 Pro.Relatively speaking, especially with respect to Far Cry 2, thisgraphics card is getting a bit too old now. As such, we’re moresuspect of overheating issues in this case. The graphics cardyou’re running apparently is having this issue as a result of stress-related marginalities, which basically points to thermals.

A simple test would be to pull the side panel from your systemand blow cool air across the motherboard with a room fan. If thetexture artifacts go away, you’ve found your culprit: heat.

Timbo asked: I’ve been looking through the BIOS of my new Corei7 motherboard, and there sure are a lot of different settings to pickthrough these days. I’m running an Asus P6T6, and it has a lot of tweak-ing options like memory timings, voltage adjustment, and other optionsthat are familiar compared to my Core 2 mainboard. However, there area few Core i7-specific settings that I’m totally unfamiliar with. One ofthem is called the “Uncore” frequency, and I’m clueless as to what thatdoes. Are there performance gains to be had by overclocking it, like I dothe main core speed? It seems like the Core i7 is a fairly complex chip,and I want to tweak with both performance and stability in mind.

A: There’s no question, overclocking the new Core i7 is a differentball of wax, as opposed to Intel’s previous generation of Core 2CPUs. The first thing to note is that your FSB frequency is nolonger a “bus speed” but rather a “reference clock” that providestiming for every other subsystem on the chip including the systemmemory interface speed, QPI link, and Uncore frequency.

You can think of the Uncore frequency as a clock that isderived from that main reference clock but provides a timingsource for other subcircuits of the chip, other than the CPU coresthemselves. The Uncore frequency is the clock timing for thingssuch as the Core i7 memory controller and the L2 cache. How-ever, performance gains as a result of overclocking this section ofthe chip are not worth the risk of instability. It’s best to set the reference clock speed and multiplier for the CPU cores to yourdesired target speed and then dial back the Uncore frequency multiplier to a lower setting that will provide better stability. TheUncore clock speed tends to be a bit twitchy at certain speeds; it’sbest to keep it in check while you scale up the core clocks—wherethe real performance gains are. The same can be said for the QPIlink speed. In general, if you’re overclocking the cores by dialingup the reference clock, select a lower QPI link multiplier to keepthis clock speed on the chip within a more stable range. ▲

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

For bonus content, subscribers can go towww.cpumag.com/cpujul09/q&a.

It’s highly unlikely that aRadeon X1950 Pro is producing

Vsync texture-tearing artifacts in a cutting-edge game engine like Far Cry 2.

We’d suggest looking at heat-related issues asthe possible culprit of your texture anomalies.

CPU / July 2009 47

X-Ray VisionFujifilm’s 3D Digital Imaging System Brings Photos To Life

Digital cameras have become almostsynonymous with photography inthe past decade, supplanting film

cameras. During that time, the quality of digital images has steadily improved as digital camera technology has matured.Today’s digital images routinely contain 10to 20 times as many megapixels as earlydigital cameras could produce.

Digital camera technologies are beginningto slow in terms of adding megapixels andincreasing resolution, though. An OlympusImaging manager said at the PMA 09 trade

show in March that he expects camera com-panies to begin focusing less on increasingresolution in future cameras, because 10 to12 megapixels is more than enough for mostconsumer-level photographers. Such changesmight mean the digital camera market isready for The Next Big Thing, some sort ofmajor technological change that will takestill photography in a new direction.

Fujifilm hopes it currently is working onthe technology that could change digitalphotography, called the FinePix Real 3DSystem. Real 3D involves photographing,

printing, and displaying images in threedimensions. Although Real 3D remains inthe development stage, Fujifilm displayed aprototype camera at PMA 09. (VisitYouTube and search for “Fujifilm 3D cam-era” to find several videos of the prototypein use at various trade shows.)

Working On 3D

Fujifilm has worked on its Real 3DSystem for the past five years. The companychose to move away from other companies’attempts at 3D photography in favor of a

A

B

C

Fujifilm’s 3D Technology

Although the Real 3D Systeminvolves a camera, LCD photoframe, and a printer, most ofthe research information Fuji-film has announced thus farinvolves the 3D camera (A).The prototype is shown here.

The 3D camera makes use oftwo identical Fuji lenses (B),each of which is connected to aseparate image sensor. The twolenses snap two identically timedimages from slightly differentangles. When the images areblended, it yields the 3D effect.

The lenses are about 2.5inches apart, which is similarto the distance between hu-man eyes. The human brain isable to interpret a 3D environ-ment because each human eyesees a slightly different image,

and, when the brain blendsthe images, it can interpretdepth. If you cover one eye,judging depth becomes muchmore difficult.

The camera also can capture2D images by shutting downone of the two lenses.

The heart of the 3D camerais a chip called RP Processor3D. (RP is short for “realphoto.”) The RP processor (C)must blend the images fromthe two lenses to create the 3Dimage. It also must ensuresynchronization of the twoimage sensors in terms ofexposure, zoom, and focus.Finally, the RP processor en-sures the camera’s two shut-ters fire within 1/1,000th of asecond of each other.

Without an image displayed,the 3D LCD looks like mostLCDs, measuring 2.8 inchesdiagonally with 230,000 pixelsof resolution. The 3D LCD canalso display 2D images, and the3D LCD on the back of the cam-era uses a technology similar towhat would be found in Fuji-film’s 3D digital photo frame,also being researched. Thecompany has initially developedan 8.4-inch, 920,000-pixel 3DLCD photo frame.

At the back of the LCD sys-tem (D), Fujifilm uses a technol-ogy that it calls light directioncontrol, which aims light from

each of the two images at eacheye. The two images quicklyswitch back and forth, with atotal of about 60fps. The switchoccurs so quickly that the braindoesn’t detect the switching.With each eye seeing a slightlydifferent image, the brainblends the two images and cre-ates a 3D effect.

Fujifilm also has announcedplans for a 3D printing system,but the company hasn’t revealedspecific details about how the3D prints will work, other thanto indicate that they will requirea special type of paper. ▲Source: Fujifilm

D

3D image

3D LCD

Light direction control system

Images for left eye

Images for right eye


Research costs. In a shaky global econ-omy, Chute says, photography companiesdon’t have a lot to spend on R&D. Per-fecting 3D digital photography techniquescould be an expensive process, he says.

“All of the companies in the photographymarket are in trouble,” Chute says.

New 3D Markets

3D imaging is not new. Various meth-ods of creating 3D images and video have

been around for decades, mostly involv-ing viewers wearing 3D glasses. What’snew in Fujifilm’s Real 3D System is theidea of bringing 3D to consumer digitalphotography without the need for theglasses or the difficult-to-master “cross-eye” technique.

It might not occur as quickly as anyonewould like, but both Wang and Chuteagree that the influence of 3D imaging willcontinue to grow, slowly, in existing mar-kets and in new markets.

“In a decade’s time, my assessment isthat 3D will be part of our lives, but notall [encompassing],” Wang says. “I mightbe a bit pessimistic, but I rememberwatching my first 3D movie when I was14, back in China. Now, it’s more than 20years later, still not many cinemas in theU.S. are 3D, and we still have to wearawkward glasses.” ▲

by Kyle Schurman

LCDs will play a big role in whether con-sumers accept and use them. Fujifilm hasnot announced any pricing expectations forits Real 3D System.

“Overall affordability of such 3D digitalimaging experiences at this point and in thenear future are certainly way beyond whatconsumers are willing to spend,” Wang says.

Ease of use. It’s one thing for consumersto put on the glasses and attend a 3D movie.It’s a whole new concept to ask consumers to

shoot, display, and print 3D photos.Photography companies must make it aneasy process, or consumers will be frustrated,Chute says.

“It’s a much harder sell, rather than justconsuming content created for them,” hesays. “You need an end-to-end solution . . .no one has really approached it from thatangle, other than Fuji.”

File sharing. 3D images will require atype of image file format different fromany that currently exists. However, Fuji-film has not yet publicized the final detailson the new file format. A new formatcould make it difficult to share photos withfriends and family, a process that’s veryeasy with 2D photos.

“I am not sure how sharing is going tobe done with the 3D images,” Wang says.“It requires an entire industry to collabo-rate. Will Fuji’s innovations push others,like photo-hosting services or printer man-ufacturers, to join?”

new method. With past attempts at 3Dimaging, users typically had to wear specialglasses that create or help enhance the three-dimensional effect.

Fujifilm’s Real 3D, though, requires nospecial glasses. Photographers would be ableto view 3D images on the Real 3D camera’sLCD screen. Without the need for glasses,the images seem to truly come alive.

The company hasn’t officially specified arelease date for the Real 3D System, al-though unofficial reports have hinted at alate 2009 release, starting in Japan.

A Realistic Look At 3D’s Future

3D digital photography looks like a veryinteresting technology. However, the con-sumer electronics market is littered withgreat technological ideas that never caughton with consumers. Two analysts are skep-tical about how quickly Fujifilm’s Real 3DSystem or another 3D digital photographysystem could make a significant impactamong consumers.

“It will take the 3D camera technologysome time to resolve all the kinks and meetconsumer expectations shared by today’sstill-camera experience,” says Harry Wang,director of health and mobile productresearch for Parks Associates. “It could befive years away before the technologybecomes mature, stable, and affordable, orit could take even more time.”

Chris Chute, the manager of IDC’simaging program, says he expects it willtake at least a decade.

“3D, in general, is something that a vari-ety of companies are looking at as the next-generation ‘add,’” Chute says. “It’s the nextinnovation. . . . [But] there’s a whole list ofquestions that need to be answered.”

Overcoming Challenges

Obviously, 3D is growing in popularity,especially in video. 3D movies are becom-ing more prevalent, and advertisers evenran a couple of 3D TV commercials duringSuper Bowl XLIII in January. Both of thesetypes of 3D require viewers to wear specialglasses. Successfully incorporating 3D indigital photography—without the glasses—has some challenges to overcome.

Cost for consumers. As with any newtechnology, the cost of 3D cameras and

Beyond 3D• One lens shoots an

image with an appliedeffect, such as sepia ton-ing, while the other lensuses no effects.

• Each lens shoots halfof an ultra-widepanoramic scene, and

the RP proces-sor seamlesslystitches the twoimages. ▲

Source: Fujifilm

a movie as the second lenssimultaneously captures astill image. Other interest-ing ideas include:• One lens shoots a

zoomed image, while theother captures the sameimage with no zoom.

Fujifilm's research anddevelopment department’swork on the dual-lens digi-tal camera has sparkedsome ideas for 2D uses ofthe 3D Real System.

For example, as shownhere, one lens could record

CPU / July 2009 49

6Gbps SATAFrom Iowa’s Speed Limit To Montana’s

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

are already bumping upagainst 3Gbps SATA’slimitations, so the extraheadroom of the 6Gbpsspec will give today’sbest (and tomorrow’smainstream) SSDs more room to run.

Breathing Room

To avoid any confusion, let’s clarify whata faster interface really means. Speaking gen-erally, 6Gbps SATA won’t make your harddrive read or write data any faster, just asthere was no discernible difference between1.5Gbps and 3Gbps SATA versions of thesame drive models back when the latterinterface debuted in 2003.

Instead, you can think of 6Gbps SATAas a higher speed limit on a highway.Sure, a hot rod (a fast SSD) can take ad-vantage of the extra speed the new SATAspec allows, but if a family car (a main-stream 7,200rpm hard drive) couldn’texceed the former 3Gbps limit before, itwon’t run appreciably faster on the new6Gbps thoroughfare.

250MBps) and possibly its theoretical ceil-ing (300MBps), as well, sometime in 2011,according to Seagate Senior Marketing I/ODevelopment Manager Marc Noblitt.

“The math of it brings us back to thepoint of why we’re coming out with6Gbps (SATA) now,” he says. “We wantto (as we’ve been saying) widen thepipeline so that we’re ready when we crossthat bottleneck, and we’re not introducingtwo technologies at the same time, whichusually ends in disaster.”

That said, hard drives’ sustained datatransfer speeds are only now peeking pastthe 150MBps theoretical maximum pro-vided by 1.5Gbps SATA, which was intro-duced way back in 2001. Of course, theimpetus spurring the doubled performancein the new 6Gbps SATA spec has nothingto do with rotational media. It’s all aboutthat new silicon upstart, the SSD.

The SATA-IO may have been trying tomake 6Gbps SATA available well before itwas needed by traditional mass storagedevices, but it has been pipped to the post bytop-end SSDs from the likes of Intel. These

If only everyone had the foresight of theSATA-IO (Serial Advanced TechnologyAttachment International Organi-

zation, formerly known as the SATA IIcommittee). City councils would buildlight rails and freeways before the urbansprawl made traffic intolerable. Sports sta-dia would add overflow seating and sky-boxes before sellout crowds became theuncomfortable norm. DSL, cable, andwireless Internet providers would haverolled out high-speed service long beforethe rise of P2P and video streaming.

The new SATA specification with a6Gbps signaling rate had yet to be formallyapproved by the SATA-IO as this issuewent to press. It’s meant to up the potentialspeed of consumer storage I/O (input/output) before its extra bandwidth over3Gbps SATA becomes necessary to allowcutting-edge drives to transfer data at theirtop rates. The SATA-IO has striven tofinalize new specs one to two years beforehard drives need extra throughput. In3Gbps SATA’s case, hard drives might sur-pass its real-world throughput (about

NCQ Goes QoS For AVCommand queuing technology makes the best of the fact that harddrives’ platters must physically spin in order to give the read/writeheads access to their data. As multiple processes issue read andwrite requests to a hard drive, its native or tagged command queuingfeature (if enabled) re-orders the requests’ priorities from a first-come, first-served basis to an optimized disk access pattern.

In other words, instead of fulfilling task A, then tasks B and C,command queuing may move the heads into position to alternatelyperform a little of all three tasks as the platters carry relevant bytespast the heads. The net effect is to transfer as much data as possiblewith every revolution of the disks. (Because SSDs have no movingparts and are optimized for consistently fast random access, theyneither need nor use NCQ.)

“The downside of this is that one particular request might be deferredslightly in order for the other more favorable requests to be servicedfirst, and this possible delay in the service time can be detrimental to

situations where some of the accesses correspond to media beingplayed,” says SATA-IO President Knut Grimsrud.

SATA Revision 3.0 adds a form of QoS (quality of service) to NCQfor streaming applications such as high-def video.

“Improved NCQ enables fast data-transfer rates for low-endservers, gaming systems, and media machines,” says AMD Global Communications’ Matt Davis. “These new extensions to the command are aimed at improving QoS for high-priority tasks (andinterrupts), such as streaming video and online gaming, where the

content (for example, streaming video) gets a higher I/O priority overother hard drive tasks happening in the background that don’t requirereal-time updates.”

For example, when one of the processes hitting a drive is involvedin video playback, the drive’s NCQ will give it priority over othertasks. The idea is to maintain a smooth, glitch-free streaming experi-ence even during periods of heavy disk access. ▲



And what of a farm truck (your1.5Gbps, 5,400rpm notebook drive from2004)? The ol’ rust bucket will be able todrive down the new road—6Gbps SATAis fully backward-compatible with 3Gbpsand 1.5Gbps SATA drives and cables—butonly at its customary huff-and-puff pace.

“No connector or cable changes wererequired,” says Noblitt. “A 6Gbps [device]will plug into a 1.5Gbps [one]; you can usea 1.5Gbps cable. All the work was done inthe ASIC, and I’m not aware of any majorhurdles to be overcome.”

“The primary challenge in doubling theSATA signaling speed for a second timewhile using the same connectors and inter-connect that was originally defined for the1.5Gbps Gen-1 version was ensuring thesignal integrity,” says SATA-IO PresidentKnut Grimsrud. “This required carefulcontrol over both the transmit amplitudesand the jitter, and those parameters weresome of the most challenging technicalitems that the technologists undertook inensuring a reliable high-speed solution.”

Note that 1.5Gbps and 3Gbps deviceswill drop 6Gbps SATA ports down totheir top interface speeds.

“They negotiate down from the top, soif the drive doesn’t see anything at 6Gb,it’ll start stepping down, and so will thehost,” says Noblitt. “Depending on . . .how they’re connected, they’ll both down-shift to the speed where they can starttalking to each other. Once they see eachother, that’s the speed they lock in at.”

make room for new info streaming in fromthe hard disks. Combine that escalatedlikelihood with 6Gbps SATA’s greaterspeed, and suddenly caches are a littlemore relevant to overall hard drive perfor-mance than ever before.

Outside the box. Another way in which6Gbps SATA will eventually give hard drivesa hand up is in the case of external RAIDenclosures. We say “eventually” because,Noblitt says, “the 6Gbps specification wecurrently have includes the SATA specifica-tions for the internal cabled interconnect,but it does not yet include the definition

You don’t get 187.5MBps from1.5Gbps SATA, 375MBps from a3Gbps interface, nor 750MBpsfrom 6Gbps SATA Revision 3.0.Newbies may have trouble com-ing to terms with this, not tomention the discrepancy be-tween their drives’ advertisedand real-world capacities, but wepower users tend to overlookoverhead and rounding practicesas de rigueur.

“The realizable transfer rateacross a 6Gbps SATA link

depends on the efficiency of thecontroller design on both the hostand device ends of the intercon-nect,” says SATA-IO presidentKnut Grimsrud. “The SATA inter-face transmits the information at600MBps, but some of this is notrealized as part of the user datapayload, since the protocol in-cludes other data and handshak-ing that is also communicatedbetween the host and device.

“This includes transmittingthe command to the device so

it knows what data to retrieve,as well as the device transmit-ting status to the host after thedata is transmitted. In SATA, allthis information is also trans-mitted as data packets over theinterface, and this consumessome fraction of the total inter-face bandwidth.

“[Also, there] are protocolhandshakes between the hostand the device that are used aspart of the mechanism for reli-ably transmitting the various

packets back and forth. When apacket is transmitted, the recip-ient must check the integrity ofthe packet and then signal tothe transmitter that the packetwas received OK.

“550MBps seems like it is inthe right ballpark,” Grimsrudconcludes. “In general, theSATA interface is very efficientin that the realized transferrates are often a very signifi-cant fraction of the theoreticalmaximum.” ▲

Why 6Gbps Equals 550MBps

Bursts. And yet there is one small wayin which 6Gbps SATA can give older drives a boost. If the host computer asks ahard drive for a bit of data twice in ashort period of time, chances are goodthat the datum is still resident in the drive’s cache buffer. (Some SSDs havecaches, too.) The fast DRAM in the cachecan read the information much fasterthan the drive’s heads can retrieve it fromthe spinning platters (hard disks), and thedrive can shoot the data across the SATAcable at a speed almost as fast as the inter-face itself (depending on the performancelevel of the DRAM in the cache, ofcourse). This is called a burst transfer.

Burst transfers are impressively fast,sometimes clocking in at double a drive’sread rate. In a Seagate/AMD demonstra-tion at the Everything Channel XchangeConference last March, the Barracuda7200.12 hard drive’s burst speed leaptfrom 250MBps under 3Gbps SATA to anastonishing 550MBps with 6Gbps SATA.The prototype drive ran on an AMD con-troller the company was still keepingunder wraps at press time.

Unfortunately, burst transfers are alsodisappointingly brief. You can’t count on aday-to-day level of performance anywherenear the burst speed, as they’re sporadicand unpredictable. Still, today’s drives arecoming with larger 32MB and even 64MBcaches, making it slightly more likely thatparticular pieces of data will remain in thesolid-state cache instead of being flushed to

Seagate used a 6Gbps SATA prototype of aBarracuda 7200.12 in its March demonstrationwith AMD, which supplied the drive controller.

CPU / July 2009 51


necessary for a 6Gbps external (eSATA)solution. The external interconnect is morechallenging, since it requires more ruggedconnectors and currently supports slightlylonger cable lengths to provide morecabling flexibility.”

Typically, SATA RAID boxes use portmultiplication to funnel the I/Os of two

or more drives through a single eSATAport. Depending on the hardware, a bottle-neck could be so pronounced that theremay be little difference in performancebetween a RAID 0 and slower types ofarrays in a port-multiplied, single-cableenclosure. Support for 6Gbps SATA coulddilate the neck of that bottle, so to speak.

Speaking of port multiplication, somemotherboard and controller card vendorsalready use it to provide extra SATAheaders that split the bandwidth on cer-tain 3Gbps or 1.5Gbps ports. 6GbpsSATA will simply make port multiplica-tion less likely to incur a performancepenalty in the near to middle term.

PCI-EAs we mentioned, SATA SSDs(and a few RAM disks) are thereal drivers behind the need foran interface speed boost. Infact, with recent advances inmultichannel controllers, writestreamlining, NAND design,and other areas, it’s not out of

the question to assume thatsolid-state storage will be onceagain butting up against SATA’slimits ere long.

That’s why Fusion-io, OCZ,and others are working so hard on SSDs that interface at a higher rate of speed with

the fast PCI-Express intercon-nect. Could PCI-E become aSATA killer?

“PCI-E is not a standard I/Ofor hard drives,” says SeagateSenior Marketing I/O Devel-opment Manager Marc Noblitt.“(It) would require some

investigating. One issue comesto mind: cost.”

Indeed, Fusion-io’s pricingfor its innovative ioDrive is sky-high ($2,995 for 80GB), although OCZ might undercutthe newcomer with 1TB atroughly the same price. ▲

100

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Seagate Momentus 7200.4 HDD

Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 HDD

WD VelociRaptor HDD

Imation M-Class SSD

1.5Gbps SATA (theoretical throughput)

Intel X25-M SSD

3Gbps SATA (theoretical throughput)

Fusion-io ioDrive (PCI-E SSD)

6Gbps SATA (theoretical throughput)

MBps

110MBps

135MBps

130MBps

150MBps

150MBps

220MBps

300MBps

500MBps

600MBps

Maximum Read RatesClearly, SSDs are more in need of a faster SATA interface than hard drives. Note that real-world

SATA throughput is approximately 30 to 50MBps less than these theoretical figures.

SPEEDLIMIT

6Gbps

SPEEDLIMIT

3Gbps

SSDHDD

DVD

SSDHDD

DVD



One thing you won’t see are SATAdata cables with connectors for morethan one device like most PATA ribboncables. SATA’s point-to-point naturetakes this option off the table, which isjust as well: We’d rather not return tothe days of slow devices dragging downfaster ones on the same cables, even ifautomatic negotiation could replace theneed for master/slave jumpers.

Adapters. As you can guess, you proba-bly won’t see any old-school 133MBps PCIcards with 6Gbps SATA controllers onthem. However, an x4 (4-lane) card usingeither PCI-Express 2.0 (500MBps per lane)or 1.x (250MBps per lane) would be morethan sufficient to carry 6Gbps SATA trafficin a typical PC. A RAID enthusiast shouldlean toward the faster PCI-E 2.0, of course.

Tech Details

That grinding noise you hear is comingfrom the gritted teeth of the SATA-IOfolks, who sincerely wish we would stopcalling the new specification “6GbpsSATA.” That’s not its proper name,although it’s certainly the most descrip-tive and concise. It’s probably inevitablethat the industry and end users will callthe new spec something like this, just as most techies incorrectly called the3Gbps version of the interface “SATA II.”

The new specification is known asSATA Revision 3.0 or, more formally andpedantically, Serial ATA InternationalOrganization: Serial ATA Revision 3.0.The SATA-IO group released the PHY(physical) layer of the spec last August sothat members could use the open industry

standard to design new products. As with3Gbps SATA, this was a streamlinedprocess, as the physical connectors andcables haven’t changed since SATA’s debut.By the time you read this, SATA Revision3.0’s first Plugfest, or manufacturer producttesting event, will have taken place in June.

Power management. The latest versionof SATA doesn’t have any new power-saving features, but it does share earliereditions’ ability to power down the inter-face when idle and instantly wake it upwhen needed. Additionally, the newspec’s greater bandwidth can provide inci-dental efficiency, despite actually havingsomewhat higher power requirements.

“6Gbps PHY designs might have higheractive power, depending on the specificdesign and/or implementation,” saysGrimsrud, “but the power efficiency isnot necessarily adversely impacted, sincefor a given amount of data being trans-ferred, the amount of active time toaccomplish that is approximately cut inhalf compared with 3Gbps [SATA].”

Optional features. As many powerusers have learned to their chagrin, notevery SATA controller and motherboardBIOS support all the cool features avail-able in the specification.

“Most features are optional, and they’recalled out in the purchasing specificationby an OEM as to what features they like,or want, or require,” says Noblitt.

Most controllers support native com-mand queuing (see the “NCQ Goes QoSFor AV” sidebar in this article) and hot-plugging, or the ability to attach anddetach drives without powering down the

system. However, staggered spin-up,which powers drives in sequence toreduce the shock to a PSU during boot-up, is generally limited to servers andexternal multi-drive enclosures.

In contrast, 5/12-volt power over eSATA(eSATAp) may become a more commonfeature, as it would enable bus-poweredeSATA backup drives. Currently, the hand-ful of eSATA flash memory drives on themarket rely on powered adapter brackets orsupplemental power from USB ports, bothof which limit their ubiquity and portability.

“(Power over eSATA) has not been fullyunderpinned yet,” says Noblitt. “They’restill working on that in the committees.”

Future

Assuming that June’s Plugfest doesn’tuncover widespread problems, some 6GbpsSATA products may be out by the time youread this. Noblitt says that Seagate’s initialofferings with the new interface will be7,200rpm, 3.5-inch hard drives. SSD manu-facturers will be close behind, and in all like-lihood so will WD, with a follow-up to itsVelociRaptor 10,000rpm enthusiast drive.

You shouldn’t hold your breath for a1.2Tbps version of SATA, by the way.This could be years away, if not super-seded by faster interfaces.

“The SATA group has not yet startedinvestigating a possible 4th-generationSATA development effort,” says Grimsrud.“There are several areas of refinement forthe 6Gbps generation that are the firstfocus,” such as eSATA, he says. ▲

by Marty Sems

SATA’s SASsy SiblingProducts are already appearing with a 6Gbps version of SATA’s serv-er sister, SAS (Serial Attached SCSI). For instance, Atto Technology(www.attotech.com) now sells the FastStream SC 8200 storage con-troller, which features 6Gbps SAS ports along with 3Gbps ports thatare usable with both SAS and SATA drives.

“The SAS 6Gbps spec doubles throughput, obviously, but there areother changes in this generation vs. SAS at 3Gbps,” says Seagate’sEnterprise Storage Product Communications Manager, David Szabados.“Long story short, the driver for these improvements was the need to getdeeper into helping enable SAS storage in the enterprise to coincide withemerging trends such as virtualization. Expander zoning, self-discovering

expanders, improved error management, multiplexing, external cabling,and Data Integrity Field are all part of SAS 6Gbps.”

Despite the fact that some enthusiast motherboards now supportSAS, which allows the use of hard drives of up to 15,000rpm, thistrickle-down feature may be too late to excite power users now thatSSDs have established themselves. In fact, SAS might even be coun-terproductive in a single-user system.

“In many cases, if one was to use SAS in a desktop SATA envi-ronment, performance could even be slowed down for tasks suchas bootup, due to all of the additional functionality within SAS,”Szabados says. ▲

CPU / July 2009 53

Budget. Whether or not you’re sickof hearing this word, the reality isthat most of us have to pay a lotmore attention to our budgets

now than we have for many, many years.We all want new PCs with the latest parts,coolest features, and most bodacious bling.But today, most of us have to find ways todo more with what we have. In the “goodol’ days,” you might’ve had a pile of sparecash for your mondo upgrade. Now, thechallenge is to take a few bucks and stretchthem until they scream.

The good news is that you really can geta lot of fresh performance for only a littleinvestment. In fact, you may not have toinvest anything. While researching oursubject, it became increasingly clear that alot of the arduous steps—fun, but ardu-ous—we used to take in order to squeezemore performance from our PCs have nowbeen built into basic hardware and soft-ware. Believe it or not, power users spoke,and the vendors listened. A few clicks areoften all it takes to hit your old box with200mg of caffeinated madness.

Of course, don’t think that all the funof tinkering has been dumbed down anddone away with. We have a few sugges-tions for your screwdriver to help improveyour performance, and there’s still a chanceor two for some hot action with solder—ifyou have the nerve. But with complexityoften comes cost, so we’re focusing on sim-pler things. That doesn’t mean dumb orinferior. It just means less stuff to buy,more of maximizing what you alreadyhave, and, when you do need to open yourwallet, picking your targets more carefully.This is a time for smart but humble sur-prises rather than sweeping overhauls.

We’re tackling the subject in three bigpieces. First up is our dive into optimizingWindows. Love it or hate it, Vista is thebiggest kid on the block. And you knowhow those big kids are. If you get alongwell, that big kid can be the best thing inthe world. He has all the connections andcan make anything happen. But he’s big,so maybe he’s a little slow. (On his feet. Inthe head. Go on, take a cheap shot.) Notto worry. We have some exercises that’llkick Vista’s keister into overdrive.

Next up, the BIOS. BIOSes continue toevolve, and the capabilities you can find onmodern chips have raced ahead of the func-tionality traditionally seen in years past. Areyou making the most of all those options?If BIOS-based trial and error sounds likemore than you want to bite off, how abouttackling many of the same tasks from GUI-based tools? Utilities on this front continueto evolve at a lightning pace.

Once your BIOS is primed, it’s on tothe hardware. Even in this economy, thecomputer industry doesn’t stand still. Gearkeeps getting better all the time. If youhave a system that’s a year or two old, youcould stick a faster CPU in it, but hey, thatcan cost serious green. We’re going to tryour best not to suggest anything that might

cost you more than $200 from start to fin-ish. Let’s find some clever ways to tweakwhat you have. If nothing else, we candrop your thermal profile, grab some extraperformance headroom, and just maybemake your PC a bit quieter in the process.If you need a more tactical approach toimproving performance—say, in your stor-age or networking subsystems—we’veincluded some ideas there, too. The objectof the game is to find out where your PC isweakest and fortify those key spots.

Miracles do happen. You could win thelottery. You could perform a few of oursuggested tweaks and suddenly find yourdusty techno-slug blowing all your friendsoff the map. In the real world, though,tune your expectations before we starttuning your PC. This is going to be morelike getting toned for a triathlon ratherthan roiding up for the Mr. Universecompetition. Let’s get to it. You’re goingto like the results. ▲



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CPU / July 2009 55

We’re not going to shine you onand say we have the magic cureto replace nuking Windowsand reformatting your system

when the OS gets corrupted or becomestoo top-heavy every few years (or less).We’re not omnipotent. But we do have abig bag of tricks for making your Windowsexperience faster and thus more enjoyable.

So this time, we’re going to not onlytake a fresh look at some perennial advicebut also look at some stuff that we thinkyou’ll find is off most people’s radar. We also think it’s important to viewWindows optimizing from the perspectiveof how little total time you spend waiting,meaning it’s not just about making opera-tions run faster but making sure you useWindows more efficiently.

Back To BasicsWindows Vista has been around sinceNovember of 2006, long enough for

us to assume that you’re a user(although certainly a lot of tips

for Vista also apply to WinXP).It’s also been long enough

to assume that many tips that were once lit-

tle-known have nowpassed into com-

mon knowledge,e s p e c i a l l y

a m o n gp o w e r

user s .

Still, sometimes we overlook the mostobvious things, and sometimes we losetrack of the bigger picture.

Accelerate your total search time withmetadata tagging. Windows Search canonly filter by basic attributes, such as dateof creation, pieces of a file name, or textwithin the file, unless you give it moreability to help you. Say you want to findall of the photos taken at your 2008 birth-day party on your system. If you simplydumped the files into My Photos straightfrom your camera, you may have to burn alot of time sorting through folders, orga-nizing files by date, and browsing throughthumbnails to find what you want.

Try speeding up your searching by tag-ging these photos (or any other files).From Windows Explorer or My Com-puter, look down in the Preview pane baralong the bottom of the window and, ifnecessary, click the Show More Detailslink. Now, click where it reads Add ATag and start typing the keywords youwant ascribed to those files, separatingeach word with a semicolon. Click Savewhen you’re done. To filter for these tags,go to the Search Folder within WindowsExplorer, click the Advanced Search linkin the top right, and fill in your keywordin the Tags field.

Consider (temporarily) disablingSystem Restore points. We remain bigfans of the System Restore functionality inWindows and would never advise you todo away with it altogether (unless you’reusing a third-party alternative). However,if you get in a pinch for system resources,particularly hard disk space, you can dis-able System Restore. Go into ControlPanel, then System. Provide permission to

continue. Within the System area, click theSystem Protection link on the left. Now, inthe System Properties box, go to the SystemProtection tab. You’ll see checked boxesnext to any volumes that currently haveSystem Restore points applied to them.Uncheck these boxes, click Apply, and thenclick OK. Just remember to re-enableSystem Restore when you’re through withyour immediate need.

Less bling can be good. WhenWindows Vista launched, one of its keyselling points was the shiny new interfacecalled Aero, brimming with glowing this,transparent that, and a bunch of 3Dgewgaws. All those funky effects requirea fair bit of system resources, especiallyfrom the CPU, memory, and video sub-systems. If you’re more about functionthan form, you can benefit from turningoff a lot of these extras.

In the Start menu Search bar, en-ter SystemPropertiesPerformance and give permission to continue. In thePerformance Options box that springs up,you can always pick the Adjust For BestPerformance option, but where’s the fun

Just because you install an applicationdoesn’t mean it has to load every time you boot Windows. Use msconfig to turn off what you don’t need.


in that? Pick and choose the effects to dis-able so you don’t lose the few that mightactually matter. For example, we opted todisable Animate Controls And ElementsInside Windows. Animate WindowsWhen Minimizing And Maximizing cango because it’s one of the most demandingeffects and nobody really needs to see win-dows shrink and grow as they’re dismissedor called back up. If you like the glass lookbut don’t really need to see the blurryshape of whatever is behind your windowborders, kill off Enable Transparent Glass.Use A Background Image looks nice whenyou can see it, but it really contributes lit-tle to your experience.

Now, if you just don’t feel your inter-face has gained anything worthwhile in themove from Windows 2000 to WinXP toVista, by all means, gain some real perfor-mance and slide back into the 2000 lookand feel by disabling Use Visual Styles On Windows And Buttons. For a happymedium, uncheck the Enable DesktopComposition option, and you’ll revert to anon-glass interface very much like WinXP.

Trim The FatMany people have described Windows

as “bloatware.” Microsoft calls this be-ing “robust” and “feature-rich.” Eitherway, there are tricks for making Win-dows’ “robust” profile a little leaner andmore efficient.

Dry away that splash screen. OK, sothe Windows Welcome screen only sticksaround for a few seconds, but sometimesseconds matter, and do you really want to

look at that Microsoft logo again? Andagain? Let’s ditch it. Press WindowsKey+R to bring up the Run dialog box,type msconfig -2, press ENTER, andinput your UAC credentials (if applicable).Go to the Boot tab, check the No GUIBoot box, then click Apply and OK. Notethat doing this will prohibit you from see-ing blue screen errors during boot.

Prefetch like a pro. As detailed below,the SuperFetch feature in WinXP can helpaccelerate the operating system’s perfor-mance, as the Prefetcher can in Vista. Bydefault, Windows enables both applicationfetching and boot fetching. But you mightbe able to get faster boot times by turningoff application fetching and going withboot-only fetching. From the Run dialogbox, type regedit and press ENTER to getto the Registry Editor. Navigate to thisfolder: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters. On the right pane of the window, highlight the nameEnablePrefetcher. (In WinXP, this will beEnableSuperfetch.) Right-click the name,select Modify, and then in the pop-up box,change the default value of 3 to 2. ClickOK, exit the Registry, and reboot.

Pass Go, collect faster boot times.How many times have you reset your PCand walked away to go do something elsefor a few minutes while it booted, thenreturned to find it sitting at a logonscreen, waiting for you to select whichuser account you want, even if there’s onlyone user? Until you click that account

icon, none of your background apps willload, which means that instead of gettingto work when you sit down, you get towait longer for Windows to do its loading.So long as you’re the only user on yourPC, and your system stays in a safe placerelatively safe from theft, do this:

Perform a Start bar search for controluserpasswords2, clear the Users MustEnter A Username And Password To UseThis Computer checkbox, and clickApply. A box called Automatically LogOn will pop up. Enter the username youwant to automatically load along with itspassword, then click OK twice.

Ignore unneeded hardware. One ofthe things that consumes time (and sys-tem resources) when loading Windows ishardware drivers. However, many sys-tems load drivers for components thataren’t actually used every time. This is especially true of notebooks. Use the Device Manager to disable these ex-tra-neous items. The quickest way to the Device Manager is to go onto thesearch bar of the Start menu and typedevmgmt.msc. Now, browse throughyour list of hardware devices and look foritems you don’t need. For example, ournotebook had a Bluetooth adapter, fin-gerprint scanner, WiMAX link, and amodem loading, none of which were cur-rently being used. Disabling these devicesmay not yield miracles in system accelera-tion, but every little bit helps. Other like-ly targets for disabling might includeFireWire ports, PCMCIA slots, TPMchips, and extra network adapters.

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You can get a little more performance fromyour storage subsystem by disabling System

Restore, but use this tweak sparingly.

All that Vista eye candy adds pounds around Windows’ waist. Consider a more retro look for faster performance.

CPU / July 2009 57

The service here is a bit excessive. Aswith hardware drivers, Windows loadsseveral dozen services when it boots,many of which you probably don’t needor want. Before we start twiddling withservices, though, set a System Restorepoint, just in case you disable somethingyou actually need. Go into the Systemarea in Control Panel. In the Tasks pane,click System Protection, and, if requested,continue through the password or confir-mation prompt. In the System Protectiontab, make sure that your Windows diskvolume is checked, then click the Createbutton. Give the restore point a name andclick the Create button.

Now, bring up the Services utility bysearching for services.msc. To disable a ser-vice, right-click it and click Stop (or simplyhighlight it and pick Stop from the leftside of the window). Then, right-click thestopped service and select Properties. Inthe General tab, go to the Startup typepull-down menu and select Disabled. Dosome Web searching on Windows servicesto see which you might want to disable.When in doubt, err on the side of leavingservices active. That said, here’s our Top12 list of candidates for getting shut off: 1)Block Level Backup Engine Service (mostdesktop backups are file-level, not block-level); 2) Certificate Propagation (usedwith smart cards); 3) Fax (unneeded if youdon’t do PC-based faxing); 4) ICS(Internet Connection Sharing; unneeded ifother systems on your LAN connectdirectly to your switch/router); 5) MediaCenter Receiver (handles radio and TV

reception in Media Center); 6) MediaCenter Scheduler (for scheduling when tostart and stop recordings); 7) MicrosoftiSCSI Initiator (only used for connectingto iSCSI network targets); 8) ParentalControls (unless you filter content for yourkids); 9) Peer Networking Grouping (pro-vides peer-to-peer networking); 10) SmartCard (pretty obvious); 11) Telephony (forvoice apps using the modem); and 12)Windows Backup (unneeded if you use athird-party backup app).

Halt those auto-starts. This must bethe single most common Windows accel-eration tip of all time, but we’ll offer itagain simply because loads of people(including us) do it once, then forget todo it again for months or years at astretch. In the process of installing soft-ware, you rack up a long list of applica-tions that automatically load whenWindows starts. If you wonder whyWindows takes so long to load todaywhen it seemed fairly quick when it was afresh installation, here’s your main culprit.

From the Start button, type msconfigin the Search bar and press ENTER. Inthe System Configuration window, go tothe Startup tab and browse through yourlist of startup apps. Compared to otherWindows file lists, the Startup list is pret-ty self-apparent, and you should be ableto take a decent stab at unchecking itemsyou know you don’t need present when-ever Windows is on.

Cache & Index TricksMuch as Windows might try to be

organized about how it deals with files,stuff still tends to spread around, not justwithin the operating system but also withapplications and user data outside of it.You can improve Windows performanceby helping it to better know how andwhere it finds information.

Put your thumb drive to better use.Virtually all of us now have USB flashdrives in our pockets, which is a far less use-ful place for them than plugged into yourVista machine helping to accelerate Win-dows. The ReadyBoost functionality builtinto Vista picks up where SuperFetch leftoff in WinXP, learning to anticipate whichdata and files you use most, prefetchingthem, and storing them on an attachedflash drive. (For small random writes, mod-ern flash drives can be up to 100 times fast-er than a hard disk.) This frees up systemmemory and reduces the hard drive load.

ReadyBoost will provide the most bene-fit in systems with less RAM. You’ll alsowant a larger flash drive and to be runningVista SP1. To access it, insert your flash

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The Windows Welcome screen may bepretty, but it’s just one more thing taking

unnecessary seconds away from your computing.

Radically improve the usability of Windows Search by changing where it monitors and the types of files it tracks.


drive, select Speed Up My System whenthe AutoPlay window comes up, and usethe maximum amount of flash capacity forReadyBoost that you’re comfortable with.

Searching a bit less far and wide. Oneday, Microsoft realized that GoogleDesktop was a massively better search toolthan what was baked into WinXP. Thuswas born Windows Vista’s enhancedSearch, which relies on the Windowsindexing service, a database that monitorswhatever file types and locations it’scharged with cataloging. With this,Windows only needs to consult its data-base when you want to find something,not perform a fresh search of your entiredrive. The trouble is that sometimesSearch is too exhaustive. You can improveperformance by tweaking what locationsand which file types are indexed.

In the Start menu’s Search bar, typePerformance Information and pressENTER. Now, click Adjust IndexingOptions in the Tasks bar. If you see aGlobal Settings button (for multiple useraccounts), press that, then click Modify.Otherwise, just click the Modify button.Now, click the Show All Locations button.We were confused for a while as to whyGoogle Desktop continued to return betterresults than Windows Search, and theanswer was here: In the Indexed Locationswindow, the C: volume was unchecked.Search was only tracking Outlook andoffline files, and we weren’t even usingoffline files. So we checked the C: box butexpanded its tree and unchecked every folder that only contained data we knewwouldn’t be needed. In a sense, adding theC: volume increased our performance.

Back in the main Indexing Optionswindow, click the Advanced button andgo to the File Types tab. Here, you’ll finda very long list of file extensions that theindexer tracks. The more of these you canprudently uncheck, the better the index-ing performance will be.

One indexer is enough. If you’ve prop-erly configured Windows Search, youprobably don’t need another search

indexer running, too. Index-ing can consume significant

amounts of time, includ-ing when the system is

idle, and this puts extra wear on the harddrive. (Vista in general is notorious forcontinually keeping hard drives busyaround the clock.) If you’d rather useGoogle Desktop than Windows Search,

you can disable the Windows Search service. There’s little point in run-ning both. ▲


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Windows 7Are you already running Windows 7 beta? There’s a lot to love in the OS, and unlike the usualservice pack update, we actually get a whole new batch of things that can be tweaked and tuned.We’re only just getting our feet wet with Windows 7, but already we have a Top 5 items list foryou to improve in the new operating system:

1. For the first time in over a decade, you can nowuninstall Internet Explorer.The core IE rendering filesused by other apps willremain, but the applica-tion itself can be snuffed.The quickest way to dothis is to go to the Startmenu’s Search bar andtype turn windows fea-tures on or off. This willbring up the WindowsFeatures box. Scroll downto Internet Explorer 8,uncheck it, and click OK.

2. If you do want to run Internet Explorer 8, you may find that new browser tabs exhibit prob-lems, especially with slow load times. So far, this seems to be the result of an upgradeprocess glitch. While running with administrator rights, go to a command prompt (type cmdat the Search bar) and type regsvr32 actxprxy.dll. Reboot, and the problem should be fixed.

3. Few, if any, features in Windows Vista were more maligned than UAC pop-ups, which ask ifyou’re really sure you want to do the thing you just went through several clicks to do. Rejoice,friends. Type UAC at the Search bar to bring up the UAC settings window. The vertical slider hasfour settings. We recommend the third, just above Never Notify. This will still give you a per-missions prompt in case of a really odd request, but otherwise, Windows will leave you alone.

4. Windows 7 changes the Start Menu’s power button from Hibernate to the more commonsense Shut Down function. However, this can be changed to suit your taste. Right-click theTaskbar and select Properties. In the Start Menu tab, use the pull-down menu for Power but-ton action and take your pick of power functions. While you’re there, click the Customize but-ton and look for ways to fine-tune Start menu operations. For example, you can speed upsearches by changing the Search Other Files And Libraries item to Search Without PublicFolders. If you do a lot of video viewing, perhaps displaying videos (look under Videos) as alink or a menu off of the Start menu will save more time than going through Computer.

5. For some people, every fraction of a second counts. You may have noticed in Vista that whenyou mouseover a Taskbar application, its preview thumbnail waits 0.4 second before appear-ing. In Windows 7, you can change this delay period. Go into the Registry Editor (type regeditin the Search bar) and navigate into this folder: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Mouse.Right-click MouseHoverTime and pick Modify. The default is 400 milliseconds. If you crankthis down to 100 or even 50, over the course of a year, you will have saved enough time tohave at least two extra thoughts while staring at your screen. Make ’em count. ▲

Tired of those permission pop-ups in Windows Vista?Windows 7 gives you an easy way to keep them to a minimum.

CPU / July 2009 59

Getting the best performance outof your machine requires a lotmore power user interventionthan simply buying fast hardware.

Sure, the latest components are going tohelp, but the way of the enthusiast hasnever been governed by throwing an exor-bitant amount of money at the horsepow-er issue. After all, anyone can spend them-selves silly. It takes a true technologist toget everything dialed in just right.

We’re going to fast-forward throughbuying hardware, putting it together, andloading up an operating environment.Those steps are child’s play compared tothe configuration tasks in front of us.Our goal: take two separate systems—one Intel Core i7-based and one AMDPhenom II-based—and improve perfor-mance through a combination of BIOStweaks and tuning utilities.

We’ll evaluate our results by testingeach system using its default BIOS config-uration and then again after a bit of tooltime under the hood. Hopefully, when it’sall said and done, we’ll have a reason topat ourselves on the back, and you’ll havea blueprint for tackling your own tune-up.

Getting The Most From X58When Intel’s Core i7 launched, X58-

based motherboards were ridiculouslyexpensive. After a gradual trimming offeatures, though, you can now find anumber of X58 platforms priced in the$200 to $300 range. Asus’ P6T is one ofthose boards, making it a worthy comple-ment to Intel’s entry-level Core i7-920.

Before we jump into the modding, wewanted to take a couple of baseline num-bers to gauge the P6T’s performance right

out of the box, using a Core i7-965Extreme, 6GB of Corsair DDR3-1600with 8-8-8-24 timings, a Zotac GeForceGTX 260 Core 216, and Western Digital300GB VelociRaptor hard drive. From thetime the board’s power button is pressed,the Windows desktop takes 1:31 (min-utes:seconds) to pop up. SiSoftware’sSandra 2009 reports 23GBps of memorybandwidth from our triple-channel kit.And a real-world rendering project in 3dsMax 2009 64-bit takes 24 seconds to com-plete. Now, let’s see where we can improve.

The P6T’s first BIOS screen lets youset the time/date and storage configura-tion. If you don’t have a floppy driveattached, you can disable that settinghere, as well. Take a moment to checkout the Storage Configuration submenu,though. It’s not turned on by default, butyou’ll want to enable AHCI (AdvancedHost Controller Interface) if you’re usingWindows Vista or Linux with a kernelversion 2.6.19 and up, both of whichinclude native driver support. All otherX58 boards are going to have this featureavailable, and while it might not be in thesame place, turning it on adds support for SATA features such as hot-plugging and NCQ (native command queuing; apotential performance-enhancer).

Asus calls the next tab over its AITweaker, and this is where much of theoverclocking magic happens. From manip-ulating voltages to cranking clock speeds,

the most palpablespeed-ups are going to comefrom the adjustments in this menu. And again, you’ll find most of theseoptions in every other X58-based boardout there. Gigabyte calls its equivalentMIT (Motherboard Intelligent Tweaker).MSI calls its version the Cell Menu.

There are a number of different parame-ters used to take Core i7 processors furtherthan their stock settings, including ratiomultipliers, BCLK (base reference clock)frequency, QPI (QuickPath Interconnect)data rate, and, of course, gentle bumps involtage. Because our Core i7-965 Extremeis unlocked and accepts higher clock ratios,we nudged the 24X default (24 x 133MHz= 3.2GHz) multiplier to 27X, yielding a clock speed close to 3.6GHz. We alsochanged the Auto memory setting to amanually defined DDR3-1600. After spec-ifying a 1.64V DRAM bus voltage (Inteldoesn’t recommend overvolting beyond1.65V), we went in and set lower latenciesin the DRAM Timing Control submenu,hopefully paying dividends in our memorybandwidth benchmark. By default, theP6T was using 9-9-9 settings. But weknow from Corsair’s specifications thatthese modules will run faster.

A quick glance reveals an expansive listof memory-related options—far morethan we’ve employed here. Most are usedto fine-tune aggressive overclocks, whereadditional voltage and cooling are needed

Asus’ P6T provides an excellent example of how you can extracttop-notch performance from your Corei7 CPU without extracting too much cash fromyour checking account.


Finally, under the Tools tab, we turned offthe Asus Express Gate feature, an “instantboot” operating environment that alsoadds precious seconds to the boot process.

With all of our BIOS changes saved,we restarted the system to measure theeffects of our tweaks. Right away, we reg-istered a boot time of 1:21, a 10-secondreduction. Sandra 2009 reported analmost 20% speed up to 27.5GBps ofmemory bandwidth, and our 3ds Maxproject shed nearly 10% of its rendertime, dropping to 22 seconds. Clearly,there are some very real gains to be hadthrough simple BIOS-based optimiza-tions. Best of all, the list of tweaks isincredibly tame. We didn’t even have toexperiment with risky voltage settings.

790GX Goes Under The KnifeRegardless of whether you’re using an

Intel X58-based motherboard or a plat-form designed for AMD’s Phenom II, anumber of BIOS features are going to bethe same. Hardware monitoring, bootpriority, integrated peripheral configura-tion—it’s all fairly similar from oneboard to the next. But there are also some

features completely unique to AMDboards that are sure to speed up the bootprocess, improve memory bandwidth, andinject a little extra “free” performance.

We used ASRock’s budget-orientedM3A790GXH/128M as our referenceplatform, and again ran baseline figures todetermine the scores to beat. Armed witha Phenom II X4 810, 4GB of CorsairDDR3-1600, the same Zotac GeForceGTX 260 Core 216 and VelociRaptorhard drive, we were able to register a 1:11boot time, 11GBps of memory band-width, and a 46-second render time onour 3ds Max 2009 project.

ASRock’s AMI BIOS looks very similarto Asus’ at first glance. However, theM3A790GXH/128M’s relevant optionsare much more concentrated. There’s real-ly nothing of value in the default MainMenu, which simply relays system infor-mation. The next tab over, labeled Smart,facilitates a handful of preset performanceand power-saving defaults, making wring-ing out a bit of extra performance easy forthe mainstream user who wants a one-but-ton solution. But it’s of little interest to us,as we’d rather go option by option.

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in order to maintain stability. In contrast,we’re using a more modest arrangement,yielding a bit of free performance as wefurther optimize the P6T’s BIOS.

Moving on, we see the configura-tion’s Advanced tab. The first submenu,titled CPU Configuration, plays host toa number of Core i7’s power-savingtechnologies, such as C1E support andEIST (Enhanced Intel SpeedStep).BIOS optimizations don’t have to centeronly on performance: Maximizing effi-ciency is equally important. In additionto turning on C1E, we also enabledIntel C-State Tech, leaving the packagelimit setting at Auto. Interestingly, nei-ther Intel’s Turbo Mode nor SpeedStepwere configurable options, an artifact ofmanually adjusting the processor’sknobs and dials.

Dropping down to the Onboard De-vices Configuration submenu, we dis-abled the integrated J-Micron eSATA andVIA FireWire controllers, which weren’tbeing used and had been consuming sys-tem resources while left on. With only acouple of BIOS menus left to navigate,we continued to the Boot tab.

Most motherboards are able to bootfrom a number of different devices andmedia. And, by default, Asus’ P6T willlook to CD/DVD-ROM drives andremovable media before it tries bootingfrom your hard drive, unnecessarilyextending the boot process. We disabledall boot devices other than the system’sVelociRaptor and made sure that theQuick Boot, which skips a number ofPOST tests, setting was enabled (On).

Turning on AHCI will enable support for your SATA hard drive’s hot-plug and NCQ functionality.

Disable any onboard extras you don’t need in order to free upresources and accelerate the boot process.

If you don’t need proprietary extras, suchas Asus’ Express Gateinstant-on environment,turn them off to avoidwaiting on features you aren’t using.


AMD’s poor AHCI implementation inchipsets past. However, we had no prob-lem switching the onboard SATA con-troller from IDE to AHCI under the IDEConfiguration submenu. Windows restart-ed a couple of times after detecting newdevices and then continued on its merryway with the storage standard enabled.

Moving on the M3A790GXH/128M’sBoot tab, we disabled all devices exceptthe VelociRaptor, minimizing the numberof components that’d be checked prior toWindows firing up. ASRock arms itsBIOS with the ability to save a handful ofconfigurations as profiles. So, if you’d liketo preserve your settings before restarting,the Exit menu gives you that option.

So, what do you get for your 10 min-utes of BIOS optimization on an AMDconfiguration like this one? We shavedseven seconds off of the Windows Vistaboot time, bringing the process down to1:04. SiSoftware’s Sandra 2009 reported13.2GBps of memory bandwidth. Andour 3ds Max 2009 rendering projectdropped to 42 seconds, shaving roughly10% off of the initial test.

Will Your Mileage Vary?We’ve covered two motherboards from

two vendors running on two differentchipsets. Surely, this can’t be representativeof the hundreds of boards out there span-ning entry-level to high-end, right? To apoint, sure. But the high-level techniqueswe’ve used to coax extra speed from oursystems here are generally applicable to allmotherboards, even those supportingIntel’s Core 2-series chips. In the event thatyour board was manufactured by a differentcompany or is based on a chipset not dis-cussed here, there are a few overarchingthemes to derive from our examples.

First, you want to minimize the numberof devices getting in the way of you andyour operating system’s boot process. If youdon’t have a floppy drive, use the BIOS todisable the floppy controller. If you’vealready set up an operating system, youdon’t need to search an optical drive or thenetwork for boot media before hitting thehard drive. Rearrange your boot orderaccordingly. And if you have unusedonboard peripherals, such as SATA or

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The third tab, Advanced, is whereyou’ll find most of the board’s perfor-mance-enhancing functionality. The CPUsubmenu hosts the longest list of settings,including control over all of the board’smemory timings, performance options,and power-saving features. As we did withthe Core i7, we first sought modest perfor-mance gains through a simple overclock.Our Phenom II X4 isn’t a Black Editionpart, so its multiplier is locked. Thus, wewere forced to rely on a reference clocktweak (operating frequency being theproduct of reference clock and ratio multi-plier), which saw the 200MHz defaultspeed rise to 215MHz. Multiplied by 13,the 2.6GHz chip settled in at 2.8GHzwithout any additional voltage applied.

We also specified DDR3-1333 memoryoperation rather than letting the BIOSconfigure our modules automatically. Thereference clock boost affects Phenom II’sintegrated memory controller, pushing themodules 66MHz faster. This is a particu-larly important point, because it meansspending a little extra money on memorywith headroom built-in. Here, we’re usingDDR3-1600 RAM to support a DDR3-1333 setting getting overclocked toDDR3-1466. AMD mixes in power-sav-ing functionality, so we set Cool‘n’Quiet

and Enhanced Halt State to Enable in theCPU Configuration menu, as well.

Drop to the Chipset Settings submenufor another page of tweakable options.Because the 790GX includes an integrat-ed graphics processor (whereas Intel’s X58chipset doesn’t), you see several GPU-related fields. We’re using a discretegraphics card here. But to the 790GX’scredit, its Radeon HD 3300 engine actu-ally performs admirably in a mainstreamdesktop environment. If you were to leanon the chipset’s GPU, the BIOS lets youset aside a fixed amount of system memo-ry for graphics and overclock the core forbetter performance.

Also available is a setting called ACC(Advanced Clock Calibration), whichyou’ll probably remember as a feature thathelped AMD extend the overclockingheadroom of its first-generation Phenomprocessors. ACC doesn’t make Phenom IIany more overclockable, but it can unlockdisabled parts on a new Phenom II CPU.For example, we tested a pair of X4 810s(4MB of L3 cache) and two X3 720s(three cores). In all four cases, ACC gavethe 810s access to the microarchitecture’sfull 6MB L3 and switched on the 720’sdisabled fourth core, in essence creatingPhenom II X4 900-series processors. Ofcourse, there is a number of caveats here.ASRock doesn’t guarantee this will workwith all 700- and 800-series Phenom IIs,and AMD won’t tell us how to determineif a given CPU can be unlocked. However,we give you the scoop on this unbelievableexploit in “Tri-Core Transformer” on page

40 of this issue. Much noise has

been made about

The ASRock M3A790GXH/128M has plenty ofoptions to make your Phenom phenomenal.

Your biggest performance gains willcome from modestoverclocking efforts.Our 2.6GHz Phenom IIX4 810 hit 2.8GHzwith little more than a15MHz reference frequency increase.

CPU / July 2009 63

FireWire controllers, disable those compo-nents. They consume resources and oftenlengthen the boot process. Those threestrategies are what helped us to shave sec-onds from the time it took both of ourexample boards to fire up.

Next, take advantage of headroom builtinto your motherboard and CPU with amodest BIOS-based overclock. Both Inteland AMD sell certain CPUs with unlockedclock multipliers, which is the easiest vari-able to change for a quick overclockbecause it only affects processor speed. Ifyour CPU isn’t an Extreme or BlackEdition, you’ll need to adjust the reference

clock, the other setting used to determineclock speed. Be aware, though, that mak-ing reference clock changes will also affectother components, such as memory.Nevertheless, successfully overclocking ourtwo processors is what cut down our 3dsMax 2009 render job. If you want toimprove performance once Windows is upand running, overclocking is your solution.

The final approach we used in bothexamples was taking control away from theBIOS. As a convenience, all motherboardsare able to read the SPD (serial presencedetect) chip on each memory module andset up speed and timing automatically. But

enthusiasts often buy higher-end memoryable to run faster than those conservativedefaults. Using the specifications of yourmodules, key in memory frequency,DRAM voltage, and timings to match. Asyou can see from our results, user-definedsettings can make a difference in real-worldbandwidth. The same goes for enabling fea-tures such as AHCI, which are often turnedoff by the factory for compatibility reasons.

Take the reins, get your BIOS dialed-in, and you could see double-digit perfor-mance gains . . . absolutely free. ▲

by Paul Cross

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platform-wide tweaking utility consists of three parts: NvidiaPerformance Group, System Monitor, and System Update. The per-formance and update components are integrated with the sameNvidia Control Panel you’d use to adjust the 3D settings of a GeForcecard, so they’re easy to find and use.

Performance Group is the most relevant to enthusiasts because itlets you tune the same clocks, voltages, timings, and fans as AMD’sOverDrive. Additionally, it enables control over clocks, voltages, andfan speeds of GeForce graphics cards. Of course, CPU clocks andvoltages can only be set if you’re using a motherboard based on annForce MCP. Otherwise, you’ll only get detailed system informationfrom the software.

The strategy here is also going to be similar for BIOS aficionados.Tinker with the best possible setup in Windows and then lock those set-tings in through the BIOS.

Gigabyte Easy Tune 6www.gigabyte.com.us

AMD has its bases covered, asdoes Nvidia. But what if you’reusing a motherboard based on anIntel chipset, such as the X58 orP45? Intel offers its own tuning util-ity called Desktop Control Center;however, it only works on a handfulof Intel’s own motherboards. Third-party vendors have to write theirown tuning apps to make their boards more tweakable in Windows.

We got our hands on Easy Tune 6, Gigabyte’s software-based utility,and used it with an EP45-UD3P motherboard and Pentium E2200 dual-core CPU. The latest version of Easy Tune certainly doesn’t feel as com-plete as OverDrive or System Tools. However, its Quick Boost modedoes make overclocking easy for mainstream users. With the push of abutton and a restart, our 2.2GHz CPU was running smoothly at 2.7GHz,although that doesn’t really help fans of BIOS overclocking graduallytest the upper limits of their processors or memory. ▲

Enthusiasts still prefer BIOS-based tweaking over Windows apps writ-ten to do the same job. A modification in the BIOS just seems more per-manent. It takes effect immediately rather than after Windows boot-up(and by a piece of software running in the background). But we’re notgoing to denounce tuning utilities entirely. There’s a lot of value in thelatest apps, which offer tons of knobs and switches, plus the testsneeded to ensure stability before locking in those modded settings.

AMD OverDrivewww.amd.com

The last timewe looked atAMD’s OverDrivetool, it was still inbeta form. Now atversion 2.1.6, it’sa much moremature tool able toadjust multipliers, bus speeds, voltages, and a slew of memory timings.Though still only compatible with 7-series chipsets on Windows XP andVista, we expect that most enthusiasts with AMD processors are mov-ing in the direction of that hardware/software environment anyway;they’ll be well-served by OverDrive.

Even if you’re a die-hard BIOS tweaker, this app is a great way to zeroin on an optimal configuration without having to restart your system overand over. Make your tweaks in OverDrive and run a series of stress tests,such as Prime95. Onceyou have a solid balancebetween speed and stabil-ity, add those same set-tings into your BIOS.

Nvidia System Toolswww.nvidia.com

Formerly referred to as nTune, Nvidia’s

Tun ing U t i l i t i e s Exp lo red


Of course you want to drop $5,000on a monster box—four CPUs,9-way graphics, and all the diskstorage you can fork-lift. That’s a

nice dream. The reality is you’ve got whatyou’ve got. Maybe it’s new(ish), but oddsare it’s getting a bit long in the tooth.How do you perk up that silverback’shardware with a downsized budget?

Mod Your MotherboardA volt mod is a method for increasing

voltage to chips through means otherthan drivers and BIOS tweaking. Usually,it means grabbing a solder gun, keeping avery steady hand, and having a ton ofbackground knowledge at your disposal.With motherboards, knowing where andhow to apply a volt mod typically requiresthe deepest information, the sort of thingthat only a manufacturer would knowand probably would never publish forpublic viewing. Yet occasionally, thisinformation does slip out.

If you’ve done any overclocking in thelast five years, you know that today’sdesktop motherboards, even mainstreammodels, usually come with some degree ofvoltage tweaking available in the BIOS.Before this was the case, motherboardvolt-modding was more common. Today,the need is diminished but not erased.

So, when would you volt-mod a mother-board? Let’s say you have a motherboardthat predates a lot of the more recent BIOSimprovements that allow for more extensivevoltage adjustment. Or maybe you hap-pened to be walking down the street anddiscover a workstation motherboard, sort oflike the Intel WX58BP we stumbled intoone day—great board, tons of engineeringoverhead, but no BIOS options for playing

with voltage. So off you go to score a $1potentiometer from the corner electronicsstore, grab a multimeter and your solderingrig, and magically obtain the incredibly elu-sive plans for this board. If you’re new tovolt modding and want an in-depth look atprocedures, the best guide we found onlineis at www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=264512.

Now, in practicing this fantasy (andwith a little help from our R&D friends atIntel), we learned that this board needs a10K ohm potentiometer. Others mightneed something like a 1K or 5K unit. The purpose of the potentiometer, as one

engineer described it, is to “alter the volt-age feedback in the VSM [system memoryvoltage] regulator by replacing the voltagedivider with a potentiometer, and then wedial up the voltage to whatever we want.This is done by decreasing the resistancein the lower leg of the voltage divider.”

To start, we took a reading from theboard in its native state: 1.537V. One mul-timeter probe goes to ground, and the othermight go to system memory voltage. This islocated next to the memory and an outputinductor, that post with the copper coilwrapped around it. There are multiple pos-sible locations, but you may spend a lot of

A couple of tapswith the multimeterreveal that our two-minute modhas increased oursupposedly fixedmemory bus to1.65V.

Out of the box,our workstationboard tested at1.536V. Then,

using Intel’sschematics, we

soldered on a $1potentiometer.


area. Use a thermometer, even a cheapnoncontact unit, such as Scythe’s KamaThermo Wireless ($19.90; www.scythe-usa.com). For something a bit more pre-cise with a laser sight, try the pistol-gripMT-EXP or MT-PRO from MicroTemp,starting at about $55.

The obvious problem with these ther-mometers is that they require the case tobe open, which could drop your readingby many degrees. You’ll likely get moreaccurate readings from probes droppedright into the hot zones, which then wireback to a 5.25-inch bay device with aLCD or VFD readout. Because theseprobes are flat, you can also slip themunder heatsinks, but be aware that thiscould impact the heat transfer efficiencybetween chip and thermal plate.

There are plenty of 4-probe, alarm-equipped bay devices on the market. For agood example, check out Thermaltake’sHardcano 12 SE ($59.99; www.thermaltakeusa.com). If nothing else, PC Power & Cooling has its 110 Alert ($10;www.pcpower.com), an alarm speaker andthermometer on a board barely bigger thanthe Molex connector it plugs into.

Shoot The BreezeThe key to stopping this nasty heat loop

is proper airflow. Many people think that

just stuffing a case with fans will resolve allcooling issues, but there’s definitely amethod to the madness of fan placement.The object is to fix problems, not create ahovercraft. Fan quality obviously matters,with dual ball-bearing designs generallyconsidered the best option. But the rela-tionship between air intake and exhaust isarguably even more important.

“You want positive air pressure,” saysMark Friga Jr., president and founder ofFrozenCPU.com. “You want more airblowing into the system than is comingout. This will get rid of warmer air faster.Watch your fans’ CFM. You want frontfans bringing in more air than the rearfans are blowing out.”

Most vendors will state the CFM specsfor their fans, and it’s simply a matter ofarithmetic to find out if yours flow posi-tive or negative. Our favorite method ofassessing net flow is with a match. Find afanless vent on the top or bottom of thechassis, blow out a match right next to it,and see if the smoke gets sucked into orblown away from the vent. If needed,adjust your fans accordingly.

“One of the simplest ways to get moreair onto the CPU is to turn the fansaround, so they’re blowing in,” saysIntel’s Forbes. “Air normally flows infrom the front and the bottom [of the

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time doing trial and error without boardplans to guide you. The target will almostalways be a switching buck regulator,meaning it will have some switching FETsand both an input and an output inductor.

With the aid of board schematics, amagnifying glass, and a bit of solder, weattached the potentiometer to the mother-board. Returning to the multimeter, wenow observed a voltage of 1.650V—a7.3% increase. Not bad for a mod pricedstraight off the value menu!

This was a fun experiment, but nowback to reality. There are two kinds ofmotherboards that would accommodatesuch a hack. The first is really cheap stuff:$50 boards meant to run $50 processors.These are going to be four-layer PCBs,light on copper, with no adjustments possi-ble in the BIOS and very little to no thresh-old for voltage increases. As voltage rises,temperatures go up, and it’s all too easy tofry a cheap board. The other possibility is awell-engineered motherboard able to takesome tweaking yet doesn’t carry onboardtweaking tools. Our WX58BP is a perfectexample, but it also sells for $250+.

Talk About Hot!However you go about increasing volt-

ages and frequencies, whether through amod or more orthodox means, you’re asgood as toast if you don’t stay focused onyour system’s thermals. If you’re pickingup temperature readings in excess of 100degrees Celsius from the motherboard,you’re running too hot and risk gettinginto an escalating feedback loop thatcould potentially destroy components onthe board.

As Brian Forbes, director of engineering,performance, and product development atIntel, says, “We throw up a big red flag ifwe see it exceeding 100 C. It hurts like hellif you touch it and is well on its way todoing catastrophic damage.” For example,the reason Intel implemented a special ductand fan on its Skulltrail (D5400XS) boardis because the nForce 100 chips averagebetween 100 and 105 degrees Celsius.

Divide your motherboard into zones,such as memory, CPU, graphics, powercircuitry, etc., and keep records on each

Cases such as this Cooler Master RC-840, beyond being well-designed for airflow and cooling, are relatively rare in that they have twin, side-by-side 120mm case fan

mounts, needed for some liquid-cooling accessories.

CPU / July 2009 67

Friga. “Air-cooling is getting pretty lowtemperatures today, right upthere with low- to midrangewater kits.”

Which CPU or GPU coolershould you pick? The sky andphysical constraints of your caseand nearby components are thelimit, but decent HSFs tend tostart around $30, and $60

should get you something gen-uinely wicked. If you really are

counting pennies, the extra benefits offins made from copper (a better heat

conductor) over aluminum probablywon’t be worth the added expense. Paymore attention to finding a good balancebetween CFM and decibels.

There are a few interesting exceptionsto our budget-based bias against water-cooling. Probably our favorite is Asetek’sLCLC CPU cooler ($65 without fan andmount; www.asetek.com). This is a com-pact, pre-sealed liquid-cooler system thatintegrates the pump and waterblock intoa single CPU-mounted housing smallerthan most high-end HSFs. Two tubespipe out to a 120mm radiator fan thatmounts to the case wall.

“You can run a Core i7-920 CPU[2.66MHz], and with a stock cooler,you’re not going to get any overclockingout of it,” says Jon Bach, president ofreseller Puget Systems. “With the AsetekLCLC, we can just about get 4GHz.”

According to Bach, the single 120mmimplementation isn’t sufficient for daisy-chaining the CPU and GPU in the cool-ing loop, but a dual-120mm radiator andfan setup is. The trick here is finding acase that can mount side-by-side 120mmfans. Cooler Master’s ATCS 840 is onegood example.

Most coolers ship with a small packet ofthermal grease. This is sort of like theketchup packets you get from a drive-thru.It might not be your favorite brand, butit’s probably good enough for your $5.99burger and fries. Then again, if you’repushing for perfection on pennies, demandthe brand. Consider grabbing a tube ofArctic Cooling MX-2 ($5.60; www.arctic-cooling.com) or OCZ Freeze ($6;www.ocztechnology.com). Although you’ll

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case], past the hard drives and memory,past the GPU area. By the time it gets toyour CPU, it’s warmed up by five or 10degrees. Your CPU is designed to work inthat environment, but if you want to get alittle more out of it, get cold air to it.

“Instead of relying on air from the front,take the air out of the back. That’ll give you up to 10 degrees more headroom,” Forbes says.

Also consider adding some ducting. Astandard 5-inch, 120mm fan duct runs $5or $6, but you might be better off to takesome cardboard and duct tape and buildyourself a duct from scratch. The object isto route air where you want it to go. Youmight choose to direct hot air off of hotheatsinks straight to external vents so theheat doesn’t get a chance to circulate insidethe case. Alternatively, you might placeducts behind intake fans and channel coolair to the parts that need it most, such aspast the memory or into a lateral CPU fan.For a less DIY approach, we like usingThermalright’s HR-01 120mm flexible fanducts ($7; www.thermalright.com).

Just keep in mind that ducting canchange the airflow dynamic within thecase, perhaps causing one problem whilefixing another. If you install ducting, besure to get fresh temperature and pressurereadings to confirm all is well.

If you need more ventilation and simplycan’t afford a new case to replace your her-metically sealed heat trap, consider drillingsome holes in the top. We spoke with anengineer who did this, describing it as

“ghetto but effective.” For a more in-depthlook, see “Thar She Blows!” on page 43 ofthe January 2006 issue of CPU.

Just remember: The more air you move,the more assiduous you need to be inguarding against dust accumulation. Getfilters on those vents. Blow the system outwith a can of compressed air every once in awhile. Because cables tend to accumulatedust, be extra careful in your cable manage-ment. Bundle what can be bundled androute it under the motherboard tray. Thiswill also help keep airflow smooth acrossthe board. (Just be sure to keep cables awayfrom the underside of the CPU area, whichcan get very hot, especially if the systemuses a heatsink backplate.) You can neveruse enough spiral wrap, Velcro, and zipties. And enthusiast outlets will usually haveUV-reactive versions for only a few bucks.

HeatsinksFew minor hardware upgrades can

have the performance impact and physicalbeauty of a new heatsink. Practically anyof today’s premium CPU coolers is goingto give you a major improvement over astock HSF (heatsink fan). In the enthusi-ast world, watercooling is still held to bethe standard for serious cooling, but tradi-tional watercooling is both expensive andtime-intensive. When you’re on a tightbudget, getting 80% of the benefit for20% of the price makes sense.

“You definitely don’t need watercool-ing, especially with the introduction ofheatsinks using heatpipe methods,” says

Four-probetemperature monitoring meetsbay-mounted bling in this ThermaltakeHardcano device, complete with alarm capabilities.


see the most benefit replacing your CPUheatsink’s stock TIM, it’s also true that vir-tually every primary component with aheatsink could benefit from high-qualitythermal grease, if you’re so inclined.

The Other HeatsinksThe same heatsinking attention you

give your CPU cooler can also be appliedto the chipset, GPU, and MOSFETpower circuitry. Thermaltake, Thermal-right, and every other thermal vendor youcan name probably have a complete lineof heatsinks for everything in your PCthat gets above body temperature. It’s agiven that a GPU cooler can help withyour graphics overclocking, especially ifyou’re dealing with a stock cooler on amainstream card. (Top-end cards fromthe likes of Asus, BFG, and Evga willtend to already come overclocked and fea-ture upgraded cooling.) Similarly, you can upgrade the northbridge’s coolingonce you start cranking up system-wide frequencies.

Eventually, you’ll hit a point of dimin-ishing returns for your applications. Doyou really need a hard drive cooler if youhave proper airflow? Probably not. Whatabout MOSFETs?

“For the most part, MOSFETs don’tlimit your overclock,” says Danger DenPresident Jeremy Burnett. “Cooling themdoesn’t necessarily give you more head-room . . . most of the time. Typically,those MOSFET blocks will run you $50or $100. Companies like Intel alreadyoverdesign their MOSFETs, so they cantake quite a bit of load from the overclockside. And popping those off is a challengebecause they use pretty good epoxy.”

Just about every performance memorymodule being sold today comes with anattached heatspreader. You could go nutsand get something liquid-ready like OCZ’sFlex EX, but this is probably overkill. Atthe same time, trying to upgrade a factoryheatsink with an aftermarket one or withindividual “RAM sinks” is probably anexercise in tiny returns. Assuming you

paid a few bucks more forgood overclockable memory,

you’re going to get themost bang for your

buck with a little direct-attach fan, such as OCZ’sXTC ($18).

“Memory runs aboutas hot today as it did 10years ago,” says MichaelSchuette, vice president oftechnology development at OCZ. “Backthen, with an open or well-ventilated case,the temperature on modules was about 60to 65 C, up to about 80 under load, whichis not unreasonable for current high-speedmemory. You can even go above that withhigh-speed DDR3. But when you havefour or six modules together, all slots pop-ulated, they’re tightly packed, and the aircan get very stagnant. If you just have a fanthat blows down between those slots, you’lldrop the temperature down to about 25 to30 C—let’s say five degrees above casetemperature. It makes a huge, huge differ-ence. You should see temperatures withcurrent high-speed memory of 40 to 60 Cunder load with a dedicated fan.”

Odds & EndsThere are other places to look for

improvement, of course. Hard drives area common target. Most power usersknow at least the fundamentals of properdisk care and that approaching capacitycan dramatically hamper performancejust as defragging can help it . Lessknown is the Hdparm command-lineutility, which can alter internal harddrive settings. (Wikipedia actually has adecent entry on hdparm to get started.)As an example, with many drives, youcan accelerate buffered disk read timesby using DMA, 32-bit transfers withmultiple sector modes initiated by a cer-tain Hdparm command. Be sure to readthe Hdparm manual, because althoughsome commands can help performance,others can destroy your data. Note thatsome drives can also have their seektimes adjusted. Accelerating the seek

time will improveperformance but it will also make thedrive louder.

What about the power supply?Although some PSUs have adjustablevoltage rails, there’s really no other feasi-ble way to tweak a unit. You can, ofcourse, replace a power supply, but don’tassume that the biggest, baddest SLI beastis the answer to your dreams. You needquality for true performance, and youneed to mind your dollars.

“Don’t laugh at me, but in most of mysystems, I’m running . . . 520W powersupplies,” says OCZ’s Michael Schuette.“I have no problems running Radeon4890s with two or three hard drives and aCore i7-965. But the problem is I’m run-ning at the upper limit of that power supply, which means my efficiency also goes down. I see people with 1,000W,1,500W, or whatever power supplies, andI honestly think it’s better to go with highquality in a slightly lower total power rat-ing than going for the 1,000W running at20 or 30% load. At that point, you onlyget about 70% efficiency, and the power itoutputs is pretty crappy. When you have alimited budget, go with a high-qualitypower supply and skimp a bit on yourtotal power.”

That should keep you busy for a while.So tweak away, keep your money in yourpocket where it’s most needed, and enjoythe fruits of faster performance! ▲


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Typical airflow in a towercase looks a lot like this,but you can fine-tune yourairflow with customizedducting and by alteringfan direction.

CPU / July 2009 69

The Bleeding Edge Of SoftwareInside The World Of Betas

I f you work in a small network spreadacross a small or medium-sized office,

perhaps you’ve wished for some way toeasily communicate with the group that’sfaster than email but isn’t public like IMprograms. The old WinPopup method ofbroadcasting short messages to everyonein the LAN is still an option, but a betterone is Network Assistant, which has morefeatures than a Swiss-army knife and iseasy to use and configure.

Network Assistant doesn’t require acentralized server to coordinate things: Itjust multicasts over IP or with UDP pack-ets over your LAN, finding other instancesof NA automatically. By default, NA usersare identified by their Windows username,but custom names are available, too. Userson the LAN appear in a list, and by right-clicking a user, you can send a pop-upmessage, initiate a private chat, send a file,or even send a “beep” over his speaker.

Other communications optionsinclude an IRC-style group chat(complete with several channels), ashared whiteboard, and a more per-manent message board.

There are some handy adminis-tration tools, too. Users can be di-vided into groups, making it easy tohandle offices with dozens (or hundreds) ofusers. Operators can share screenshots oftheir desktops and make their Windowstask-list visible, allowing for a basic kind ofremote support option for an IS depart-ment. Certain features can be locked outwith an administrator password, therebyforcing users to utilize certain options.

The pricing for Network Assistantboils down to $30 a seat, and you canonly buy licenses in groups of two ormore. (There are discounts for bulklicenses.) If you’re just looking for a cuteway to chat with your wife in another

I t’s been a long time since Adobe Acrobatwas the only way to generate PDF files,

but the alternatives have normally hadtrade-offs. Some are merely cheaper thanAdobe’s (admittedly high-priced) offeringsbut still aren’t free. Some free options arefairly complicated multistep processes,involving making a PostScript file andthen converting it with GhostScript to aPDF. PDFCreator strikes a nice balancebetween cost (it’s free), ease of use, ease ofinstallation, and configurability.

Once you get past its only installationgotcha (be sure to uncheck the browsertoolbar add-on if you normally avoid suchthings), installation is a snap. The installeradds GhostScript (an open-source Post-Script interpreter), a Windows printer driver, and a print job manager quickly and painlessly, and it even includes a well-written and complete Help file. Like other

tools, making the PDF involves “printing”to the PDFCreator printer driver and speci-fying a filename for the resulting PDF file,and then within a few seconds, the PDF fileappears in your default PDF viewer.

PDFCreator has a few nice tricks. Thereare individual settings for controlling thecompression rates of different types ofgraphics, controls for embedding TrueType fonts within your PDF files, and dif-ferent pathways for directly emailing PDFfiles once they’re created. If you’re tryingto add PDF creation to some sort of work-flow, you can automatically execute scriptsbefore or after the actual PDF file is creat-ed. There’s even an option to create a net-work print driver, letting all the computersin a LAN create PDFs files without in-stalling the program on multiple PCs.

PDFCreator is one of those projectsthat’s been improving for years yet stillrefuses to breach the magic “1.0 Barrier,” sowe encountered what is basically a finished

and polished product, free from the bugsnormally associated with beta software. ▲

by Warren Ernst

PDFCreator 0.9.8Publisher and URL: Philip Chinery and FrankHeindörfer, sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreatorETA: Q4 2009Why You Should Care: There’s no betterfree PDF creator for Windows with thismany options.

Network Assistant 4.5Publisher and URL: Gracebyte Software,www.gracebyte.comETA: Q3 2009Why You Should Care: Add big-networkcommunications to any small LAN with ease.

Network Assistant 4.5 Beta 1

PDFCreator 0.9.8

part of the house, this is probably a tadexpensive, but this is actually a good pricefor small-office, groupware-type software.The 30-day trial should be enough timeto figure out if the expense is worth it. ▲

by Warren Ernst


Software UpdatesAdobe Reader 8.1.4Last month, we featured Adobe’s responseto a security vulnerability in version 9.1of its standalone reader for Acrobat fileswith a critical update. The bug causes theprogram to crash, which opens up yourPC to control by an intruder. For users ofolder versions who elect not to upgrade tothe 9.X series, the version 8.1.4 fix is forthem, Adobe says.

www.adobe.com

Bitcomet 1.10The P2P torrent client adds a tasksearch box in the toolbar and improvesthe file type-filter in the torrent taskproperties dialog. The auto shutdownfeature is also improved.

www.bitcomet.com

Driver Magician 3.42The driver updater, uninstaller, and back-up tool now has a multilanguage inter-face. The program can now find driversfor all operating systems, and Gold Sol-utions Software has updated DriverMagician’s database of drivers, as well.

www.drivermagician.com

FeedDemon 2.7The respected feed reader now gets a “PanicButton” that marks your overwhelmingmountain of new items as “read,” even ifyou haven’t touched them. Performancehas been substantially improved, and thenewspaper interface has been redesigned.NewsGator has also revised offline reading,such as redesigned feed prefetching.

www.newsgator.com

Foobar2000 0.9.6.5The compact media player now has anonline troubleshooting feature. The crashreport system is also upgraded. Also, thebuilt-in album art viewer can view artistimages that are also in the same folder orembedded in tags.

www.foobar2000.org

iTunes 8.1.1Apple updates its multimedia library,player, and store to allow HD movie ren-tals on the PC. Some bug fixes, such asproblems with syncing and VoiceOverwith the iPod touch and iPhone, weretossed in, too.

www.apple.com

Process Lasso 3.54.7This unique tool manages Windowsprocess priorities in the background tooptimize performance. This update addsto the core ProBalance handling of someprocesses. There is also an overall de-crease in the sensitivity of the defaultProBalance settings.

www.bitsum.com

RemoveIT Pro V7 11.4.2009The software removal tool redesigns theinterface and runs under an updatedcore engine. A few helpful bug fixes areincluded, too.

www.incodesolutions.com

Skype 4.0.0.224The IP phone software has a new optionto install to the Google Chrome browser.The update also fixes a bug that correctsvideo-scaling issues with the Skype client.

www.skype.com

Gamers get some treats for their summer of play with a PS3 update,

a new Radeon driver, and improvements to Xfire. Meanwhile, Adobe

fixes a hole in its ubiquitous Reader.

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

Tor Browser Bundle 1.1.12The Tor tools help anonymize your Internet activities. The new version up-dates some of the bundle’s core compo-nents: OpenSSL (to 0.9.8k) and Toritself (to 0.2.1.14-rc).

Torproject.org

Total Commander 7.5 Beta 2The replacement file manager for Win-dows squashes some irritating bugs suchas a tendency to delete the wrong file in a directory in rare cases. Problems withunpacking multivolume RAR compressedpackages also get addressed.

www.ghisler.com

Trillian Astra 4.0.0.103 BetaThe popular multinetwork chat client gearsup for a 4.1 release with a series of beta versions. In this one, the beta testing groupis widened. The new software version ad-dresses a bug involving the Facebook plug-in and using Facebook Chat.

www.ceruleanstudios.com

VLC 0.9.9 The beloved VideoLAN media playergets a bug fix that addresses issues withfull-screen behavior on multiple dis-plays. It also improves performance onIntel-based Macs.

www.videolan.org

Xfire 1.107The in-game client receives another of itsfrequent updates. This time, the UI isupdated to include a fresh status bar andsimpler configuration. A system vulnera-bility involving deleting large numbers ofscreen shots has been resolved.

www.xfire.com

Driver BayATI Catalyst 9.4 New Radeon graphics drivers update the Overdrive overclocking tool (for the HD 4000 series) with an “auto-tuning” feature for finding the best values. World of Warcraft playersshould see better shadow rendering inCrossfire configurations.

www.amd.com



among the forum community that securi-ty effectiveness and ease of use were simi-lar among competitors, so we checkedthem all out against viruses, spyware,legitimate servers, and illegitimate worms.Most users wanted simplicity, but somestill wanted options and detailed controls,so we determined which software hadwhat and how easy it was to use. Wechecked that bundled utilities performedas advertised.

Web-usage statistics, along withValve’s Steam gaming engine statistics,show Windows XP still being used be-tween two to four times as much as Vis-ta. And because Windows 7 will soon bepushing Vista out of the marketplace, wetested with WinXP SP3. Valve showsmore than 50% of users have CPUsranging between 2.3GHz and 3.3GHz,and 70% have 2GB or more of RAM;instead of using a low-powered test sys-tem (which artificially highlights speeddifferences in the products), we chose arepresentative 3GHz Core 2 Duo-basedcomputer with 4GB of RAM and twoSATA hard drives to show the real-worldeffects of installing security software. If you’ve skipped ahead to the charts,you’ve seen that the test system wasnever overwhelmed by any security suite,though there were definitely measurabledifferences in speed with many tests. Forthe record, we also used slower systemsand virtual machines for some threattesting and network compatibility.

(Note: All prices listed are for a 3-PC license.)

About Malware Detection RatesAlthough we’re including the results of

our malware-detection and healing tests(performed against real malware collectedwith our own honeypot and mail servers),it’s time to mention something about sta-tistics and sample size. Outfits such as AV

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

S ecurity software is something thatmost users liken to eating vegeta-

bles: We know they’re good for us, butthey can leave a bad taste in our mouths.A few years ago, security software devel-opers started adding extra layers of secu-rity to what they simply used to calltheir antivirus programs, generally ad-ding so much bloat, complexity, andsystem slowness that users start swearingoff particular vendors and their prod-ucts. Believe it or not, we’re happy toreport that the times have changed. Thevegetables are tasting better.

Two developments account for theseimprovements. The first was massiveuser revolt: Users directed their rage atsecurity software vendors, and the ven-dors have listened, spending seriousmanpower on performance optimiza-tions to keep computers spry. The second basically boils down to the availability of fast, cheap hardware. A$500 computer bought today is five or10 times faster than a $1,400 computerbought three or four years ago, and a$1,500 computer bought today might aswell be a 5-year-old supercomputer. Inother words, the modern computersmost CPU readers have are finally capa-ble of good performance, even whilerunning security software.

How We TestedWe had several conversations on

online gaming forums to get a sense ofwhat power users’ concerns are with security software, and the results wereintriguing. General slowness due to back-ground tasks is always a concern, butscheduled background scans and updatedownloads occurring during gaming,movie viewing, or other periods whenperformance is important is a big prob-lem, too, so we focused on these areasfirst. There was a general assumption

Comparatives (www.av-comparatives.org)have teams of technicians spendingmonths running most of our tested prod-ucts against a malware “zoo” consisting of1.3 million malware samples.

Having decidedly less resources, weselected 25 malware items and one infect-ed thumb drive to test against. There’s notelling if our sample is a representativesubsample of AV Comparatives’, or in-deed, of the types of malware spreadingabout in the real world at any given time,so directly comparing our detection rateswith AV Comparatives’, or anyone else’s(and there are others you can and shouldGoogle for), isn’t terribly meaningful.

AVG Technologies AVG InternetSecurity 8.5

AVG’s free antivirus program is amongthe most popular security products on the Internet, so you’ve probably seen itaround. As such, AVG Internet Securityfeels very familiar, essentially adding atwo-way firewall, spam filter, drive-bydownload and phishing shield, and antirootkit abilities to the traditionalantivirus/antispyware engine. This is amodel most of the security vendors havetaken with their suites, but AVG’s inter-face feels more cluttered than most.

The State Of Security“Suite” Isn’t A Dirty Word Anymore

AVG Internet Security 8.5$64.99AVG Technologieswww.avg.com● ● ●

CPU / July 2009 73


select one of the following options: Moveto Quarantine, Delete, Overwrite AndDelete, Rename, Deny Access (default),and Ignore. If you’re a virus research-er, such options are nice to have, but in almost every other situation it should automatically move the malware into quarantine.

Pop-ups are the standard operatingmode for the firewall, which even man-aged to freeze Counter-Strike: Source inits tracks until we ALT-TABbed to theDesktop to view the firewall permissiondialog box, clicked the Allow button,and ALT-TABbed back. And then wehad to do it again for another compo-nent in CS: Source that wanted to getonline. It also popped up warnings aboutthe occasional ICMP packet beingdetected from the Internet—somethingno other security suite did.

On the positive side, APSS tied Esetfor the fastest PCMark05 score, and itsWeb scanner proxy actually sped up largedownloads from our test server on theLAN. Its AV Comparatives detectionrates were the best. Its interface offeredthe right combination of ease and accessto technical details.

We’d be more willing to overlookAvira’s (and AVG’s) issues if these prod-ucts were free or inexpensive, but thecompetition has it beat here too, withsome being half the price.

BitDefender Internet Security 2009BitDefender Internet Security 2009

feels like the most flexible suite from themoment you fire up its installer, because


AVGIS also feels familiar because itessentially follows the security model ofyesterday—deluge the user with securityquestions all the time, but don’t alwaysbe clear about the best course of action.For example, when it detects malware ina download, a pop-up proclaims “ThreatDetected” and identifies the infected fileand the threat it contains, usually fol-lowed by a Close button. Nowhere doesthe dialog box actually say “threat delet-ed” or “don’t worry, your computer issafe.” On top of this, the dialog stays upindefinitely, requiring you to pause yourwork to click it. For some threats, you’regiven the option of Heal, Move ToVault, or Ignore with a Remove ThreatAs Power User checkbox; it seems sensi-ble until you realize that many otherproducts would automatically move thethreat to the vault and not bother youwith the details.

The firewall pops up similar dialogsabout network access to most well-known programs and Internet games,even going as far as to jump to theDesktop so you can click Allow, al-though launched games resume wherethey are paused. Many other firewalls“automagically” know about thousandsof “known-good” programs and just letthem work.

Other noteworthy aspects include bet-ter-than-average spam filtering, the best3DMark06 score (though they’re all with-in .2% of each other), a default setting toscan within compressed files, and theidentification of a well-known email pass-word-recovery program as a “potentiallydangerous hacking tool.”

Avira Premium Security SuiteAvira distributes what is generally the

second-most-popular free antimalwareprogram, and like AVG, Avira PremiumSecurity Suite feels a lot like its freecousin, but with more features added.Also like AVG, APSS tends to annoy itsuser with a lot more pop-ups than nec-essary, and they contain options likelyto confuse. Upon detecting our infectedUSB flash drive, for example, it poppedup a warning identifying the offendingfile and the infection but made the user

it peppers you with question after ques-tion about your home network, parentaland identity control, and so forth. Mostother utilities make you dive into theinterface to configure these options, orthey just turn them all on by default andassume you’ll figure out how to disablethem if you need to.

Most of the utilities aced at least oneof our performance or security tests, butnot BitDefender, although this is forgiv-able given its low price. Its pop-ups arevery straightforward and make it clearthat it’s on the job and taking care ofproblems as it finds them. The firewalldoesn’t seem to know much about goodand bad applications, as it asked usabout almost every Internet-accessingprogram we had, except for obvious pro-grams such as Web browsers, emailers,and WinZip. One unique option is aremovable disc scanner, which asks torun a scan whenever a new disc or flashdrive is inserted—very handy in this eraof infected thumbdrives.

Most of the utilities have a gamemode, which tells the software not todisplay any pop-ups that would interferewith fullscreen games, movies, etc. Someof the better utilities enter game modeautomatically, but BitDefender requiresyou to enter game mode manually.Background updates sometimes requirea reboot, which interrupted us morethan once.

BitDefender’s main interface has twomodes, Simple and Advanced, and it’s agood way to minimize confusion for most

Avira Premium Security Suite $78Avira GmbHwww.avira.com● ● ● ●

BitDefender Internet Security 2009$39.95BitDefenderwww.bitdefender.com● ● ● ●


PCMark05 score. We were pleasantly sur-prised by its high level of “smarts.” (Butthen again, “smart” is in its name, so weshouldn’t have been.)


users. Simple mode basically lets youenable or disable various areas of protec-tion in a broad stroke, while the Advancedmode opens up all the options and finedetails. We love all the tools available inAdvanced mode, but Basic is a little toobusy, considering the options you can’tselect there.

Eset Smart Security 4Eset’s security programs are known for

being light on resources, and Eset SmartSecurity doesn’t disappoint. It added theleast amount of time to a reboot (justthree extra seconds!) and tied for the best

Better than almost any other suite,ESS knew what to say and when to sayit. When it detects a downloaded virus,for example, it pops up a small red alertdialog box, which identifies the infec-tion, the infected file, and simply says“Connection Terminated—Quaran-tined.” Its game mode fires up automati-cally when it detects programs runningfullscreen. The firewall immediately

Clean System

AVG Internet Security 8.5

Avira PremiumSecurity Suite

BitDefenderInternetSecurity 2009

Eset SmartSecurity 4

KasperskyInternetSecurity 2009

McAfee InternetSecurity

Norton InternetSecurity 2009

Panda InternetSecurity 2009

Trend MicroInternetSecurity Pro

3DMark06:Average ofat leastthree runsat defaultsettings

11752

11755

11735

11736

11753

11731

11748

11747

11744

11734

PCMark05:Average ofat leastthree runsat defaultsettings

8969

8926

8992

8740

8992

8930

8920

8953

8953

8832

Counter-Strike:SourceBenchmarkFrame Rate:Average of atleast threeruns atdefault set-tings of VideoStress Test

279.24

279.02

277.92

277.06

277.97

276.43

278.79

278.2

278.82

279.99

Boot Time:From firstappearanceof WindowsLogo tobeginning ofa 15-secondperiod of lessthan 10%CPU activity,averagedover at leastthree runs(min:sec)

0:32

0:51

0:39

0:42

0:35

0:41

0:40

0:41

0:47

0:49

Web PageLoad:Cumulativetime to loada complexiGooglepage 10times, asmeasuredwithFirebugextension

00:28.0

00:46.1

00:37.0

00:46.8

00:36.9

00:28.9

00:43.7

00:42.2

00:49.6

00:35.1

Copy Files:Time to copy18GB of filesfrom oneSATA drive toanother,including 1GBof office files,7GB of photos,and 11GB ofMP3/AACfiles, averagedover at leastthree runs

4:44

5:01

5:05

5:33

5:16

5:39

5:33

5:51

5:02

5:47

Zip Files:Time tozip up1GB ofofficefiles,averagedover atleastthreeruns

2:10

2:19

2:19

2:22

2:15

2:18

2:15

2:39

2:13

2:35

UnzipFiles:Time tounzip1GB ofofficefiles,averagedover atleastthreeruns

0:34

0:57

1:02

1:05

0:58

1:03

1:10

1:02

1:04

1:26

DownloadSpeed:Time todownload798MBISO filefrom localWeb serv-er over100MbpsLAN con-nection

2:04

1:53

1:39

4:30

36:15:00

1:58

2:10

1:41

1:54

1:40

Scan Speed,All: Time toscan a 5.8GBstatic Windowsfolder and2.6GB staticProgram Filesfolder with soft-ware set toscan all files,copied from a4-year-old sys-tem (46,087files)

n/a

32:01:00

5:13

12:10

7:43

6:54

11:39

6:44

8:55

10:32

Columns Q and R come from http://www.av-comparatives.org/images/stories/test/ondret/avc_report21.pdfColumn S comes from http://www.virusbtn.com/vb100/archive/2009/04Column T comes from http://www.westcoastlabs.com/checkmark/vendorList/?techGroupID=27Column comes from http://www.icsalabs.com/icsa/product.php?tid=dfgdf$gdhkkjk-kkkk

Security At A CostWith only a few exceptions, all of the suites we tested were quite effective at stamping out malware, so the question becomes: How much do you pay in terms of system resources to have that security? We ran each suite through a gauntlet of tests to determine the efficiency of each. Most times are in (min:sec).


Eset Smart Security 4$89.99Eset www.eset.com● ● ● ● ●


hard to locate or simply absent, forcingthe user to rely on ESS to make the smartchoice automatically.

The only glitch we encountered waswith our download speed test. Betweentwo LAN machines, speeds slowed to acrawl (slower than DSL rates), yet wesaw no slowdown on downloads fromthe Internet.

Eset Smart Security’s smarts andspeed make it the most expensive choicehere, but if you don’t want to be both-ered by your security suite, the cost isworth it.

Kaspersky Lab Kaspersky Internet Security 2009

Kaspersky’s security products are gen-erally thought of as the preferred toolfor experts, and we can see why. It


recognized almost every Internet pro-gram, remote-control applet, and onlinegame in our arsenal and let them com-municate with the Internet withoutprompting us, yet it was smart enoughto just block our firewall-leaktest pro-gram. Although our leaktest programwasn’t really malicious (which is im-portant when considering Norton’sactions), we think ESS made the smartcall on this.

The ESS interface has two modes,Standard and Advanced. Standard has thebare minimum of commands, but theyare the right ones a beginner really needs.Advanced adds a few more options frontand center but makes the Setup menuavailable with direct access to configura-tion options. Some options that are typi-cal in other products are either slightly

combines excellent detection rates with veryclear on-screen messages, but makes noattempt to simplify the process of keepingyour system secure. All the settings and

Time ToOpenInterface:Elapsedtime fromdouble-click-ing Trayicon until the GUIbecomesusable(Splashscreensdon't count)

n/a

0:02

00:01.5

instant

instant

instant

:04

instant

:02.5

:4.5

MemoryConsump-tion/NumberOf Pro-cesses:Theamount ofRAM con-sumedwhen theproduct isidle, in KB

n/a

49,736

63,212

9,924

55,696

30,096

75,112

4,461

158,416

53,923

NumberOf Pro-cesses:Thenumberof pro-cessesassoci-atedwith theproductwhenidle

n/a

12

6

4

2

2

9

3

15

9

Down-loadedInfectedExecu-tables:Blocked orDeleted,from sampleof 15

n/a

100%

93%

93%

93%

100%

87%

100%

100%

100%

Down-loadedInfectedZipFiles:BlockedorDeleted,fromsampleof 11

n/a

100%

91%

91%

91%

100%

82%

100%

100%

100%

Price For 3-PCLicense:Priceincludes“discounts”or “specials”with noforseeableend-dateoffered fromvendors’onlinestores

n/a

$74.99

$78.19

$39.95

$89.99

$79.99

$44.99

$59.99

$79.95

$69.95

CPUs

n/a

● ● ●

● ● ● ●

● ● ● ●

● ● ● ● ●

● ● ● ●

● ● ● ●

● ● ● ● ●

● ● ● ●

● ● ● ●


Kaspersky Internet Security 2009$79.99Kaspersky Labwww.kaspersky.com● ● ● ●

AVComparativesFeb 09 On-Demand ScanDetectionResults (1.3million mal-ware samples)

n/a

93%

99.70%

98%

97.60%

97.10%

99.10%

98.70%

Not Tested

Not Tested

AVComparativesFeb 09 On-Demand ScanFalse PositiveResults

n/a

17

24

25

13

14

13

7

Not Tested

Not Tested

VB100Pass/Fail(April 2009Test)

n/a

Pass

Pass

Pass

Pass

Pass

Pass

Pass

Not Issued

Not Issued

WestCoastLabs’Check-markCertifica-tion

n/a

Certified

Not Issued

Certified

Certified

Certified

Certified

Certified

Certified

Certified

ICSA LabsCertifica-tion

n/a

Certified

Not Issued

Certified

Certified

Certified

Certified

Certified

Certified

Not Issued

CPU / July 2009 77


switchover, making it an even betterdeal.

MIS automatically enters game modewhen fullscreen applications are run-ning, suppressing the pop-ups thatwould kick you to the Desktop, but itdoesn’t stop it from performing sched-uled tasks or getting updates, which canslow things down occasionally. Many ofthe suites now duplicate McAfee’s SiteAdvisor, a pioneering service that showsyou how malware-free a Web site isfrom the results of a search enginesearch, though we found it a tad moresensitive than the competition. It is easi-ly disabled if you’re not with the “bettersafe than sorry” crowd and doesn’t takeup a lot of browser space.

MIS does a good job of clearly ex-plaining what it’s doing. It quickly dis-patches viruses with a clear “McAfee hasautomatically blocked and removed aVirus,” and the firewall messages are sim-ilarly clear, although we encounteredthem more than we would have expectedwith popular network applications. Withvirtually no training, the spam filter wasright 99% of the time, obviously benefit-ting from McAfee’s server-side trainingbased on all its users’ input.

Our biggest problem with MIS was ageneral level of sluggishness. It took agood 4 seconds from Tray icon double-click to being able to work with theGUI, whereas a lot of other suites areinstantaneous. Navigating to certainsub-screens takes a moment, too, dis-couraging experimentation.


configuration options are sort of hang-ing off the interface every which way(there’s no basic mode), and currentprotection statistics and live graphs andcharts line every screen in its tabbedinterface.

If you like being asked about almostevery program your security suite en-counters, you’ll love KIS. For example,it identified our gaming keypad’s driveras “a potentially hazardous program,”asking if we wanted KIS to run it, deleteit, or assign it to a restricted group. Run and Delete are obvious, but theRestricted group is something different.KIS can selectively prohibit apps fromhaving access to the network, the filesystem, or the Registry, sort of like“sandboxing” them. None of the testedproducts identified clean-but-not-legalkeygen applets as malware (years agothey used to), but KIS was the only oneto offer to run them in a restrictedmode, preventing them from doing any-thing untoward. Even the excellentspam filter is expert-oriented: It dividesmessages into “definitely spam” and“probably spam,” minimizing the mes-sages you need to double-check once thesystem is trained.

KIS is not without drawbacks. It generated the slowest CS: Source and3DMark06 benchmarks, and, in fact, we had to disable it before 3DMark-06 and PCMark05 would even start. (We manually re-enabled it after start-ing the benchmark programs.) Its fire-wall was slow to react to a port scan, stealthing many ports only after a scan commenced.

McAfee Internet SecurityMcAfee Internet Security is the sur-

prise low-price leader among the majorvendors, with a per-computer price ofonly $15. And although it did relativelypoorly with our relatively small malwarezoo, it has the second-highest detectionrate in AV Comparatives’ more statisti-cally significant test. It receives defini-tion updates almost constantly and willeven update itself to next year’s versionautomatically if your subscription isactive when McAfee performs the

Symantec Norton Internet Security 2009

In the recent past, Symantec was justlytargeted by angry users for bloated ver-sions of NIS that slowed computersdown, sometimes dramatically. NIS 2009is a whole new ballgame.

The main NIS interface has two CPUbars—one showing overall CPU usageand another showing how much CPUtime NIS is consuming, obviouslyattempting to prove that your slow com-puter isn’t Symantec’s fault. Other speed-boosting tricks include never performinga background scan or downloading anupdate unless the CPU is idle, activelyfreeing RAM when the program is idle(its idle RAM footprint is an almostunbelievable 4.5MB), and taking inven-tory of known-good executables on yourhard drive (and recording their check-sums) and then skipping them duringsystem scans to make scans faster. Themain GUI appears instantly upon dou-ble-clicking its Tray icon, and sub-screens open instantly, too.

NIS has just one mode (no basic andadvanced modes here). Instead, the rela-tively simple GUI has multiple Settingslinks that delve deeper into more op-tions. It takes up too much on-screenspace but works well. You may not needto get to detailed configuration settingsoften because NIS is just about as smartas Eset, almost always making the rightchoices about what to block (and tellingyou so unambiguously), what to quaran-tine, and what to leave alone. It let our

McAfee Internet Security 2009$44.99McAfee www.mcafee.com● ● ● ●

Norton Internet Security 2009$59.99Symantec www.symantec.com● ● ● ● ●



ZIP file. When we extracted it andrenamed it back to an EXE file, itworked fine. A manual scan of it result-ed in its being quarantined, meaning thebackground scanner plays by differentrules than the on-demand scanner.

PIS isn’t especially well suited togamers. There’s no game mode (it starteddownloading an update during a CS:Source benchmark; we threw out that testresult), and it consumes a whopping158MB of RAM when idle. The firewalldidn’t recognize some popular Internetapplications and games that other securitysuites simply allowed without a pop-up.

That said, it makes a good securitysuite for the general populace. The clearinterface invites exploration, and itcomes with the most well-written Helpfile. The spam filter’s only mistake wasmarking a few newsletters that hadimbedded ads as spam before training,and PIS’ rescue CD (like Norton’s)makes recovering a thoroughly infestedWindows installation possible.

Trend Micro Internet Security Pro

We haven’t looked at a Trend Microsecurity product for a while and arepleasantly surprised at the innovative features tucked into the current versionof TMISP. However, a general slownessin opening the interface, along with afairly dramatic increase in most file-related benchmarks, has us hoping theengineers at Trend can give TMISP aNIS2009-like speed boost in the future.Additionally, its lack of inclusion in the


leaktest program open ports unopposed,but this, debatably, isn’t a dangerousprogram per se, and NIS’ heuristicsaccurately detected this.

Although NIS 2009 is a spry applica-tion, it’s worth noting that benchmarkswere generally average, and the antispamfilter needed a lot of training before itapproached the effectiveness of the competition’s untrained filters. Still,NIS is an excellent combination ofprice, speed, and features and worth asecond look if you’ve been burned bySymantec before.

Panda Internet Security 2009

Panda Internet Security is a veryattractive, easy-to-use security programthat just needs slightly better pricing, alittle more smarts when dealing withnasties (or, in our case, a false positive),and a bit of a diet.

We have only slight qualms with PIS’detection model. When we tried down-loading test malware, Panda’s concisemessage of “This file was infected withthis virus and was deleted” appearsdirectly in the content area of the Webbrowser window and clearly says what itdoes, which is great. Infected compressedfiles, on the other hand, generated nomessage and actually downloaded andsaved, but the ZIP files themselves wereempty. PIS silently took care of theproblem. Viruses in ZIP files detectedwith heuristics were renamed with a.VIR extension, which is important tonote since our legitimate password-detecting program was renamed in its

AV Comparatives’ (and other large-sam-ple) tests has us wondering about itsoverall efficacy against malware, thoughit aced our limited tests.

TMISP clearly announces when itblocks malware and confirms your systemis safe, so there are no decisions you needto make to stay malware-free. It also wise-ly decides which applications to automati-cally grant network access to and which toblock, though manually overriding thebuilt-in smarts is simple. All the productsin this roundup come with some sort ofWeb filter or phishing filter, but TMISP’sWeb site safety filter actively blocked ourmalware test server on our test machineafter only about eight virus detections.Our other test machines were blockedfrom their first visit to our malware testserver only a few days later. You can’t getinfected from a site you can’t connect to,right? An additional button on the brows-er toolbar evaluates the security of yourwireless connection, handy in coffeeshops and other hotspots.

Although it lacks either an automatic ormanual game mode, some interesting fea-tures include a keystroke encrypter to foilkeyloggers, a remote file vault to back upimportant files, and an Internet filter thatmonitors and optionally prevents the trans-mission of information such as credit cardnumbers, telephone numbers, and so forth.

RecommendationsEach of the suites has its strengths and

weaknesses, but we’re pleased to reportthat none of the suites we tested will slowdown a reasonably modern computer. Forthose seeking a lightweight suite thatdoesn’t deluge you with questions andpop-ups, we recommend Eset SmartSecurity and Norton Internet Security,depending on whether you want theutmost speed in benchmarks or merelyvery good speed with more security fea-tures, respectively. Control freaks andtechies who like lots of options shouldconsider Kaspersky Internet Security. ▲

by Warren Ernst

Subscribers can go to www.cpumag.com/cpujul09/security for additional test data.

Panda Internet Security 2009$79.95Panda Securitywww.pandasecurity.com● ● ● ●

Internet Security Pro$69.95Trend Micro us.trendmicro.com● ● ● ●

CPU / July 2009 79


T here are plenty of ways to make pro-grams start automatically when Win-

dows loads, but most of them offer no control beyond that. Application As Servicechanges that by letting you treat any pro-gram as a Windows system service, provid-ing all of the advanced configurability andother features that system services enjoy.

As an example, say you use a backupprogram that you want to run on a regularbasis, but other people use your comput-er and often shut it down accidentally. Using AaS, you can set up the program soit launches automatically when Windowsloads, runs when you want it to run, andautomatically restarts itself if some bone-head tries to kill it. And those are just someof the things this useful software allows.

Launching the software displays all ofyour Windows system services, as well as aseparate list of Eltima Services you can addto manually. Clicking the Create buttonlets you establish a new service for any

programinstalled onthe PC, andyou don’thave to navi-gate to theexecutable.Select the pro-gram’s shortcut,and the softwareautomatically fillsin the entire path tothe .EXE.

Once AaS creates a service, the GUI provides access to a staggering number ofoptions, and even more are available via thecommand line interface. You can easilybind the service to a particular CPU orcore, assign dependencies so it starts in theproper order if it relies on another service,establish environmental variables, anddetermine how the service reacts when thecomputer loses power or is rebooted. It’s

O ne of the main differences between anamateur photographer and a pro is

that the latter has the equipment and exper-tise needed to make photos really pop byusing an extremely shallow depth of field. Ifyou’ve ever seen a picture where objects inthe foreground are in sharp focus while thebackground is a dreamy haze, you’ve seenthis trick, called bokeh, in action.

The two main problems with achievingpro-quality shots that use this technique isthat it requires expensive lenses, and youmust get your depth-of-field setting justright when the actual photo is taken.Neither of these is viable for amateurs (oreven pros on a budget), but that’s whereAlien Skin’s Bokeh comes in.

This plug-in simulates a wide variety ofreal-life lenses to let you load any pictureinto a supported photo editor, apply thefocus precisely where you want it, andblur the background in a variety of ways.It works best if you are already good atmasking foreground objects from back-ground objects (or have another tool to

commercial lenses, along withgeneric lens types, such as HollowHeart and Hollow Star. Once themain blur type is established, youcan move on to the Bokeh tab for fine-tuning settings such asCreaminess (which adjusts how

highlights appear within the blur), the sim-ulated camera diaphragm shape you wish touse, and whether you want to use a radialor planar focus region, among others.

All said, Bokeh is easy to grasp, highlyresponsive, and, in the hands of someonewho knows her way around a photo edi-tor, can help quickly achieve results thatwould otherwise require a lot of tediouswork. Highly recommended, and a demoalong with video tutorials are available atthe Alien Skin Web site. ▲

by Tracy Baker

even possible toclose pop-up win-dows the servicemay generate when

it loads, and full scheduling is easy toimplement with the GUI.

The software also has functional-ity to manage services on other PCsremotely, and you can password-pro-

tect the software itself so nobody can modi-fy your settings or remove a program fromthe service list. The price is a bit steep forcasual users, but if you manage a lot of PCsor certain programs that run on yourmachine are critical, AaS provides a conve-nient, powerful way to manage them thatgoes well beyond the Startup folder. ▲

by Tracy Baker


Bokeh$199Alien Skinwww.alienskin.com● ● ● ●

Application AsService$79.95Eltima Softwarewww.eltima.com● ● ● ●

Application As Service

Alien Skin Bokeh

do so), but is even useful for raw begin-ners who just want to highlight faces forprofessional-looking portrait shots.

We tested it in Photoshop CS4 (pro-vided courtesy of Adobe) and found it tobe very stable and easy enough to use thatwe were manipulating shots in interestingways within minutes. The interface isdominated by a large preview window onthe right-hand side that responds quicklyto adjustments made from a tabbed paneon the left-hand side.

A Settings tab provides access to a varietyof preset blur types, with each type subdi-vided into settings for various real-world


N obody likes to watch commercials, unless, of course, they’reon YouTube.

By now, you may have already seen some commercials that Mi-crosoft has recently commissioned, aimed to get people excitedabout Windows. However, at no point during these commercials isWindows actually mentioned. I’m not referring to the short-lived(and bewildering) Seinfeld series, mind you.

First up was Lauren. She was lookingfor “these”: “a comfortable keyboard anda 17-inch screen . . . for under $1,000.”Comfort is always relative, which leavesus wondering how she’d find a 17-inchnotebook computer for under a grand.She drives by an Apple store, making a snide remark that she wasn’t “coolenough” to own a Mac. Right, she’s not“cool enough” because Apple doesn’t pro-duce something that she wants at a priceshe’s willing to pay. Fail.

Lauren could have artfully compareda $1,000 PC against a starter MacBookand still made the PC look like a betterdeal (even though no mention of sup-port was made, what kind of softwarethe system came with, or the actual res-olution of the 17-inch screen). But no,Microsoft decided to play on percep-tion instead of reality. Their tactics reekof desperation.

I’ve seen hundreds, if not thousands, ofproduced screencasts or discussions from peo-ple who are absolutely in love with Windowsand the world of PCs. I get emails from themevery day, and more than a few hang out inour respective communities on a daily basis.They’re your real salespeople, Microsoft.They’re who you should enlist to help you getthe message across. Why? Because they’re nothired actors. They’re real people who reallycare about you and your brand.

Even if you know a PC is going to “win”by the end of a commercial, at least make itas fair a comparison as possible. No need to stack the deck, man. Play this fair andsquare, and you’ll win the respect of yourdetractors. The community could havedone, and likely will do, better for Micro-soft Windows. Let them evangelize a prod-uct in ways you can’t begin to imagine.

The Windows 7 beta videos and tutorials I’ve recorded on my ownvolition have been very well received, even by Mac users.

No more of this “I’m a PC” nonsense. Macs are PCs, too, so thatslogan doesn’t even make sense in the first place.

What else could Microsoft do to drive affinity and sales across the board? What about a “WinHeist”? For the uninitiated,MacHeist.com is an online event that happens once a year wherein

the community gathers together, solvesvarious puzzles, and gets registered soft-ware in return. How much software?Well, the third and most recent Mac-Heist gauntlet yielded close to $500worth of software per person for free.And it didn’t cost anybody a thing, otherthan time and attention. Better yet, atthe end of this year’s game, everybodyin the world was given an opportuni-ty to buy $1,000 worth of software for $40.

Microsoft could easily find amazingshareware titles to promote, throw themtogether into a single bundle, and let ’erloose. No adware, no spyware, no nag-ware, just full versions of killer programs.They’d be selling the message that Win-dows is a great platform, promotinga vibrant ecosystem in the process.Developers gain revenue and followers,users get one hell of a bargain, and the

message comes across loud and clear.Lastly, I wish Microsoft would bring

in someone who really, truly understandsWindows and its role in social media. As itstands, these two particular videos representa total failure of understanding of not justthe marketplace but the better-informedconsumer. This wasn’t anything close to aconversation: It was a blatant marketingmessage. Why was it, then, published to aYouTube channel that was linked back tothe Microsoft Windows Twitter team? I’mall for the idea of Microsoft doing morewith the community, but not like this.

They could turn this ship around, but it’sgonna take some really smart (really trans-parent) people at the helm. ▲

You can dialogue with Chris [email protected]

Why Microsoft Continues To Bleed Mindshare

Chris Pirillo is an avid computer user, be that computer a PC or a Mac. He

appreciates software for what it is, no matter the platform. Granted, he likes

software that looks as good as it runs,which limits his choices somewhat. Youcan find all of Chris’ picks on his blog

at chris.pirillo.com or read reviews fromhis community at geeks.pirillo.com. Heposts tech videos regularly on YouTube,

having recorded them in front of a virtual audience at live.pirillo.com. The network of bloggers continues to

expand through lockergnome.com, and if we have to put one more URL in thisbyline, we’re going to force him to write

an article on how wicked awesomeConfig.sys was back in the day.


H ow can kitchen-table commercial software developers competewith open-source software? Is it even possible to get paying

customers when open-source developers are giving comparable soft-ware away for free? The answer is a resounding “Yes” if you askPatrick McKenzie, creator of Bingo Card Creator (www.bingocardcreator.com) and author of the recent article “How To SuccessfullyCompete With Open Source Software” (at www.kalzumeus.com).

McKenzie, a software developer work-ing in central Japan, makes a good casefor six areas commercial developers canoutdo open-source projects: marketing,design, user experience, “speaking theusers’ language,” support, and technicalsuperiority. McKenzie’s case is good, but not great, because nothing stops open-source developers from readingMcKenzie’s article and applying all thelessons to promoting and improvingtheir own products—nothing but theirown inclinations, that is.

According to McKenzie, a fan anduser of open-source software himself,open-source developers “concentrate onthe software, not the problems the soft-ware can solve,” with the result that theyassume their audience consists of theirpeers—software developers—rather thannontechnical users who just want tosolve a problem. McKenzie’s softwaresolves a straightforward problem, creatingrandom and unique bingo cards with cus-tomized content for educators. It’s very difficult to do with the “standard” desktopsoftware most people have, such as Micro-soft Office, and expensive to do with print-ing services that exist to create the cards.

Two open-source bingo card-making pro-grams McKenzie sees as competition,BingoCardMaker (www.bingocardmaker.sourceforge.net) and bingo-cards (www.bingo-cards.sourceforge.net), get the jobdone, but neither has been updated in years.And McKenzie knows his customers. Hismost requested feature, picture bingo cards,is a feature he will not implement. He toldme, “I won’t add picture bingo cards becauseI doubt that it is possible to make the pro-cess of making them comprehensible to myusers, who skew too nontechnical.”

McKenzie said that supporting such a feature means he would “liter-ally have to teach ‘Photoshop for Beginners’ to people who, on aver-age, have difficulty locating the Start Menu.”

However, BingoCardMaker does support picture cards, and it reallywasn’t so bad. But then I’m comfortable downloading Java programsas JAR files and opening them with OpenJDK Java 6 Runtime.

If open-source developers polished their programs to make themtrivially easy to use for the most techno-phobic and offered tech support, theycould easily compete with commercialsoftware. And, being open source, theircustomers could survive if the developerdecides to move on to another project.

But the big difference between themany thousands of one-person open-source projects and one-person commer-cial software projects is that most open-source projects just are. Someone wrote aprogram to solve a problem and thenshared the source code with the world,but no one is actively marketing them.Commercial software developers can easi-ly “beat” open source.

And that’s the whole thing. If you’recommercial, you’re competing. If you’reopen source, you’re writing code. Most ofit sits, some gets used, and a very fewattract a following, not just of users butalso of developers and other contributors.

Those are the projects, such as Apache,Firefox, and Linux, that get big. Deep down,though, most people who write open-sourcesoftware can’t be bothered with marketing ordocumentation or customer support, or evenwith figuring out how to collect for the soft-ware they create. They just want to code.

To the extent they compete at all, open-source software creators compete for anentirely different audience. Open-sourcedevelopers who aspire to build a communityneed to attract more than just users or evencustomers: They need contributors willing towork on the project, too.

Next month, we’ll see how a commercialdeveloper is going about that task by openingup formerly proprietary source code. ▲

You can get saucy with Pete [email protected]

Open Source: Beat Them Or Join Them? (Part I)

Peter Loshin publishesLinuxCookbook.com, a place to learn

even more about Linux. And don’t forget to check out the new

Ninitata.com, Peter’s family-friendly fun and

learning site.

CPU / July 2009 83

will grow exponentially in the comingyears, along with Moore’s Law.”

Domestic PrivacyIn the United States especially, laws

protecting this data and applying standardrules for disclosure and obtaining con-sumer consent to use that informationtrail far behind the technology. Whiledata centers fill with information aboutour whereabouts (from mobile phones)or our buying habits (debit and loy-alty cards, etc.), the Federal TradeCommission is still debating whether sim-ple online behavioral targeting needs to beregulated by government or industry.After a year of consultations, the FTCreleased an update this winter in its ongo-ing policy debate over how online com-panies track us with browser cookies. The new statement, “Self-Regulatory

Principles for Online Behavioral Adver-tising” basically reiterates earlier positionsthat the online publishers and marketersshould come up with their own guide-lines, although the FTC did imply thistime that the failure to do so risked gov-ernment regulation.

Thus far, the only hard laws governingonline privacy protection are COPPA(Children’s Online Privacy ProtectionAct) regulations restricting companiesfrom gathering personal informationabout children under 13 without parentalconsent. But even with this law in place,violations occur. Last December, SonyBMG agreed to pay $1 million in finesfor collecting personally identifiable infor-mation from children at music fan sites.

But according to Touro Law CenterProfessor Jonathan Ezor, new technologiessuch as SMS texting will only make itharder to enforce the few laws in placehere. How can companies know the age ofan SMS contest entrant, for instance? “The[United States] is much behind the rest ofthe world in data protection,” he says. “Inmost of the world, any kind of data collec-tion must be registered with the govern-ment and is much more clearly disclosed.”

The U.S. online industry generally hastaken an opt-out approach to online pri-vacy, in that the user has to consciouslyand proactively go to a Web site or an adnetwork and instruct them not to trackhis online behaviors. Users can go to theNetwork Advertising Initiative (networkadvertising.org) to see which majornetworks have cookies in their browserand opt out of one (or all). Google, whichrecently announced it will track thebehaviors of users across the many sitesthat serve “Ads by Google” contextualads, just launched its Ad Preferences page.Here, users can opt out of the program orrefine their profiles.

c a u g h t i n t h e w e b

D on’t think for a second thatcleaning out your browser cook-ies, hoisting that firewall, and

installing identity theft software makes adent in protecting your privacy in thenew digital world.

Every time we activate our cell phone,swipe a credit card, or use EZ-Pass to sailthrough toll booths, we leave a record ofour whereabouts and clues to our behav-ior for others to tap that never even exist-ed 20 years ago. All that Web browsingyou do on your Android or iPhonedevice, all the weather updates you mayget via that connected GPS unit—thesethings not only tell someone somewherewhat data matters to you but also revealwhere you accessed it. As the Web movesoff the desktop and into every niche ofthe physical world, with it goes all of theprivacy concerns that still aren’t resolvedonline. Clean out those Firefox cookies ifyou like, but Web privacy is only thebeginning. At the same time the privacyfront evolves, experts in the field are alsorethinking the ramifications of thesemountains of data. In the future, theywarn, governments and corporations maybe able to violate your privacy withouteven having to identify who you are.

“It has grown by orders of magnitudesince the birth of the Internet and our useof cell phones,” says Stephen Baker,BusinessWeek journalist and author of anew book on digital data gatherers, “TheNumerati.” From email replacing lettersto downloading music from iTunesinstead of purchasing CDs, our habits,tastes, and movements now are recordedin ways that can be connected.

“Almost all of the information of ourlives now moves through computers andnetworks,” Baker says. “As it does, it allcreates data about our behaviors, ourinterests. And it is only the beginning. It

Privacy 2.0When Anonymous Doesn’t Mean Unidentifiable


Privacy advocates continue to argue thatindustry self-regulation in the UnitedStates not only fails to address the simplestof online tracking but also fails to recog-nize the extent of the data gathering thatgoes on. “For too long [the FTC] hasburied its mandate in the digital sand,”says Jeff Chester, director, Center forDigital Democracy, in response to the lat-est rulings. “The Commission embraced anarrow intellectual frame-work. . . . Unknown tomany members of the pub-lic, a vast commercial sur-veillance system is at thecore of most search engines,online video channels, videogames, mobile services, andsocial networks. We arebeing digitally shadowedacross the online medium,our actions monitored andanalyzed.” Chester’s orga-nization, along with theUSPIRG (U.S. Public In-terest Research Group) fileda complaint with the FTCto demand investigation onthe data gathering and usagepractices among mobilephone carriers and theirmarketing partners. TheCDC and USPIRG claimthat companies like AcuityMobile are planning to leverage the geo-location tracking possible with mostphones to target users with ads based ontheir proximity to retail stores and even tospecific store racks.

“Cell phone users should have theoption of shielding their travels from theprying eyes of mobile marketers,” thegroups say in their statements.

The Myth Of AnonymityCuriously, for all of the data we con-

sumers now leave behind, being followeddigitally is not a chief concern. In a recentForrester survey, the majority of PC userswere concerned about computer viruses(54%) and identity theft (52%), whileonly 13% cited tracking of Web behav-iors, and a mere 7% cited government orcorporate surveillance.


But as our data trails overlap and con-verge, and data miners become moresophisticated in their use of this informa-tion, consumers may find that trackinghas some dire consequences. Until now,privacy advocates and businesses bickeredover the use of so-called PII (personallyidentifiable information), which could tiea data trail to a specific name and addressor even an IP address. But increasingly,

experts worry that cloaking a person’s PIIis not enough.

In a keynote speech in March to theEuropean Commission, Consumer Com-missioner Meglena Kuneva warned that“consumer policy needs to go beyond thatand address the fact that users have a pro-file and can be commercially targetedbased on that profile, even if no oneknows their actual name.” The latestargument among watchdogs is that theweb of data on us has become so com-plex and potentially interconnected, so dense with actionable detail, that digitalanonymity does not protect us fromintrusive practices. Kuneva asks whetherknowledge of an anonymous user’s finan-cial status or health condition could trig-ger predatory advertisers or unfairly cutpeople off from other discounts or offers

simply based on fuzzy presumptionsabout their status.

If an insurance company knows that aninterested consumer has visited liquor-related sites or run searches on specific ail-ments, it might refuse coverage or quotehigher rates. Baker warns that in a worldof interconnected data, “there are all kindsof correlations that can be drawn, but animportant thing to note here is that they

aren’t always right. “The calculations are sta-

tistical probabilities basedon the behavior of a group.[Calculations] do not un-derstand the individual. Youcould have the profile of a drunk driver and not be one.”

Kuneva worries that evenwithout invading a person’sprivacy as we usually defineit (associating actions with aspecific person), the newdata miners could exercisewhat she calls “commer-cial discrimination.” Infor-mation can be “personal”without being personallyidentifiable and still be usedagainst you. She told theEuropean Commission thatgreat harm could be done toindividuals and commerce.

“If this personal information is used toextract the maximum prices possible fromyou or to block your access to some ser-vices altogether, then commercial discrim-ination can damage the confidence indigital trade and services.”

“It’s important to understand that per-sonal and anonymous are not black andwhite,” says Jules Polonetsky, director of the Future of Privacy Forum in Wash-ington, D.C. “Any time there are a num-ber of pieces of data about one user, there is an increasing potential they can be identified.”

In fact, two University of Texasresearchers recently published a papertitled “De-anonymizing Social Networks”in which they try to show how easily onecan overlay anonymized data from multi-ple social networks in a way that ultimately

At the same time Google announced recently it would be tracking users acrossWeb sites to deliver them more targeted advertising, the search company alsoopened an Ad Preferences tool where users could opt out or manage the profileGoogle uses for this targeting.

CPU / July 2009 85

can reveal identities. The aim of theresearch was to extract sensitive informa-tion about individuals (or “re-dentify”them) by cross-referencing thousands ofTwitter users’ social graphs (the peoplethey were linked with) against similarsocial graphs among Flickr users. All auser needs to do is identify him or herselfonce along the way with an email orname, and algorithms these researcherscreated can not only track them on othersocial networks on which they think theyare anonymous but also get on the trail of all their linked acquaintances on the network.

Even the FTC recognized this year thatold privacy distinctions surrounding PIIand supposedly nonidentifiable informa-tion are outmoded, simply because, inone way or another, the technology canlikely track an anonymous data trail backto an identifiable user. Whatever princi-ples of privacy industry self-regulationdevises, the Commission said in itsreport, it “should apply to data that couldreasonably be associated with a particularconsumer or computer or device, regard-less of whether the data is ‘personallyidentifiable’ in the traditional sense.” TheFTC goes on to conclude, strikingly, that“rapidly changing technologies and otherfactors have made the line between per-sonally identifiable and nonpersonallyidentifiable information increasinglyunclear.” In fact, as the researchers atUniversity of Texas indicate in theirresearch, users don’t need to be personallyidentified in order to be affected by digital technology encroaching on their personal privacy. The line between ano-nymity and privacy is a “false dichoto-my,” they say.

“Any aspect of an individual’s onlinepersonality can be used for de-anonymiz-ing, and this reality should be recognizedby the relevant legislation and corporateprivacy policies.” But even legislators andinteractive marketers agree: We are stillyears away from understanding the trueramifications of a digitized world on ourprivacy, let alone seeing regulations orpolicies to address them. ▲

by Steve Smith


Stephen Baker: The “Numerati” Are WatchingThe new world of digitized commerce is grounded in GPS devices and data that will

track our movements in stores and inneighborhoods, says BusinessWeekjournalist Stephen Baker, author of“The Numerati.” For good or ill, get used to the fact that we are being watched.

CPU: One of the things you show inyour book is that there is a massiveamount of data about ourselves com-ing from our cell phone usage, shop-ping loyalty cards, and our Webbrowsing that we give up with con-sent; no one even knows what to dowith it yet.

Baker: A lot of us don’t realize wehave agreed to share this data aboutourselves, and a lot of the companiesreceiving this data are only now com-ing to terms with the fact that theyhave something valuable piling up in

their data centers. The people I have talked to in researching the book, “data miners,”say companies come to them and say ‘Will you help us figure out what to do with all ofthis data?’ Supermarkets have been gathering our data for decades but don’t use it whenit is really important, which is when we come to the store. They are going to try to figureout how to hook us up to some smart card or consumer loyalty card that has an RFIDchip in it. They want to figure out that we are walking in the store so they can hit us withads and bargains.

CPU: Is data such as our grocery store records actually available to someone now? Is thisdigital trail we leave behind being organized by someone?

Baker: They have been so careless with this, according to people I have talked to, that itwould be hard to find the one shopper and go back 10 years and have unified records ofthat one shopper. A lot of our behavior exists in fragments in various databases, and it’snot brought together. It would be like bringing together bits of water in an ocean.

CPU: How accessible is our data to third parties?

Baker: There are companies that amass data about us. I don’t think a lot of people real-ize that anybody can go to one of these companies and pay them $15 or $25 and get adossier on their next door neighbor and that marketing companies and political cam-paigns are using this data to try to predict our behavior as shoppers and voters.

CPU: Is there a real risk of governments leveraging such data in oppressive ways?

Baker: It can be used by an authoritarian government to create a big brother state, tomonitor our activities, to define us in certain ways, and channel our behavior. I don’tthink it is going to happen here. There is a real risk it can happen in other countries.


But there’s a wrinkle: You can send uncom-

pressed Linear Pulse Code Modulation (LPCM)

audio via HDMI from your PC. Thus, technically,

you can decode the audio with your software

and send it out as uncompressed LCPM, by-

passing the GPU (and the need for the Pro-

tected Audio path) altogether. All you need is

the right hardware support.

Enter the Auzen X-Fi HomeTheater HD sound

card. Not only will this device route uncom-

pressed LPCM audio up to 8 channel

24bit/192kHz to your speakers, it will also receive

the HDCP-encrypted video signal from the GPU

and repeat it through the X-Fi HomeTheater HD

sound card, combine it with the uncompressed

audio signal, and output the two together

through a single HDMI cable.

With the Auzen X-Fi HomeTheater HD sound

card, you can finally enjoy beautiful, bit-by-bit

lossless 7.1-channel surround sound, precisely

as the original sound engineer mixed it. It’s the

perfect accompaniment to your Blu-ray movie-

viewing experience.

Problem Solved.

The Auzen X-Fi HomeTheater HD sound card is

coming soon to Micro Center®, Newegg.com®,

NCIX.com™, Canada Computers, and

Memory Express™.

Due to storage limitations of DVDs, they were

never able to deliver lossless audio (nor 7.1

channels of sound); that has changed with the

advent of Blu-ray discs, which can transfer audio

data up to 24.5 Mbps using Dolby® TrueHD or

DTS-HD™ Master Audio, a rate 16-times greater

than the maxumum DVD-rate of 1.5 Mbps. Blu-

ray discs use Dolby® TrueHD or DTS-HD™

Master Audio, which are lossless audio codes

that support audio in 7.1.

Watching movies on Blu-ray disc with full

7.1-channel sound is a tantalizing prospect,

yet users who want to watch (and listen) via

their PCs have historically been hamstrung

because of all the protections embedded on

the discs. Initially, there was an issue with the

Protected Video path, which was finally solved

with the advent of HDCP. Now, all you need

to enjoy Blu-ray movies on your PC is

software to decode the video, such as

CyberLink’s PowerDVD, and an HDCP-

compliant Graphics Processing Unit (GPU)

and monitor. Problem solved.

Getting at the Protected Audio path, however, has

been a different animal. Currently, no graphics

cards support a Protected Audio path, so you’re

limited to either Dolby® or DTS™ audio (which

are lossy and also only support 5.1 audio), or in a

pinch you can output a lossy version of Dolby®

TrueHD or DTS-HD™ Master Audio. These two

formats support 7.1 audio, but because they’re

lossy versions, the audio quality will suffer. Yet

none of these solutions gives us what we want:

lossless 7.1-channel surround sound.

Copyright ©2009 Auzentech, Inc. All rights reserved. AUZENTECH and the AUZEN logo are registered trademarks of Auzentech,Inc. • X-Fi and the X-Fi logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Creative Technology Ltd. • Dolby is a registered trademarkof Dolby Laboratories. • DTS is a registered trademark of DTS, Inc. • Cyberlink and PowerDVD are trademarks of CyberLink Corp.

In addition to giving you the freedom to watch

Blu-ray movies on your PC in their full audio

glory, the Auzen X-Fi HomeTheater HD sound

card has a host of attractive features to

sweeten the package.

• HDMI v1.3a compliant

• Supports PCM 8 Channel, 24-bit/192 kHz

• Support for 24p True Cinema output

• Support for Blu-ray discs via CyberLink’s

latest PowerDVD application

• Support for Non-downsampled Blu-ray Audio

• Support for high bit-rate audio such as

Dolby® TrueHD, DTS-HD™ Master

Audio bitstream

• Developed around Creative X-Fi native PCI

Express audio processor

• Support for Dolby Digital Live for

Windows XP and Vista, and DTS Neo:

PC & DTS Interactive for Vista

• Integrated Headphone Amp and

Professional Mic Pre-Amp

• Connectors:

o HDMI Input

o HDMI Output

o Digital Output

o Headphone Output

o Analog I/O Multi Connector

ad

ve

rtise

me

nt

A few years ago, I wrote a column on these very pages discussingthe limitations of using a browser as a replacement for the

application. My principal problem revolved around the fact thatmodern tabbed Web browsers act as containers of many pages,some of which mirror regular applications (such as Gmail or GoogleDocs). Applications should have things such as Taskbar icons,launcher icons, and key bindings to auto-select them. Finding thatone Gmail tab amidst a sea of Slashdottabs is a pain. Sure, I can put it first,but once you add three or four moreapplications, it all gets very messy.

In the months that followed, severalpeople went down different paths andgot me what I needed. Best amongthem was a nifty Mac program calledFluid. This application is a mini Safaribrowser you can wrap around a URL.It takes seconds, and then you have the illusion of a regular application. It has its own window, its own location.You can launch it when you boot and hide superfluous browser chrome that doesn’t apply to an “application.”Google’s Chrome Web browser hasgone so far as to build this in!

But now I come to you again with arelated problem. You see, I have many,many documents in the cloud. I havemany more on my local file system. Ihave a directory containing countlessExcel or Word docs sent to me by co-work-ers, as well as a slew of Google docs. Keep-ing them all straight is getting increasinglyannoying. I simply want a document; Ishouldn’t have to worry about where it isand what tool I need to get to it.

What I want is a single file system to accessall my contents. My Mac does an excellentjob of having folders and subfolders with vari-ous documents. They are easily searchable.They have pretty preview icons. I can createwhatever hierarchy suits my purposes. Nooffense to Google Docs, but the list of docu-ment types presented by its interface is sorelylacking in a mixed environment.

Now there are many tools that couldstring these systems together. MacFUSE isan amazing application that makes it possi-ble to create loadable file systems on a Mac

based on anything. Several interesting file systems have come along,starting with an SSH file system that saves tons of effort for peoplewho like to muck around on systems behind firewalls. Another engi-neer made an iTunes FS so you could navigate your MP3s within afile system. Alternatively, WebDAV allows any public HTTP serviceto simply export a file system mountable by any desktop.

Next-generation Web applications need to become transparentmembers of your file system. If I drag a.DOC file to my Google Docs directory,I should upload this file to the cloud,and it should seamlessly import. I canalready label my documents, so it seemsonly fair that Google export a file systemwith these labels so I can search for myfiles alongside my local files.

This all gets much more interestingwhen you combine this file system withFluid. Now I can create a special con-tainer Fluid application to a GoogleDoc that knows how to handle the doc-ument on the cloud FS. I can navigateto the file using my machine and thenopen it in Word or Google Docs itself.

The hooks already exist to do mostof these things. Google Docs canimport and export .DOC and .XLSfiles. All we need is a way to map thefiles to our local file systems. Even-tually, YouTube and Picasa can follow

suit, and your shared videos and pic-tures will seamlessly become files on thisfile system. You might still elect to have aprivate file system that you don’t export tothe cloud, but the interface you use toaccess either data set would be the same.

Countless public file system services havecome and gone over the years. Google itselfhas long been rumored to be building one.But the real goal of such a system isn’t justto store your data on the cloud; it’s to makethe distinction between your local systemand the cloud so transparent that where youstore your data is no longer important interms of everyday use. You manipulate itusing the tool you like and store it in theplace you like. ▲

Contact me at [email protected]

cloudfs.txt

Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda is the creator and director of the popular

News for Nerds Web site Slashdot.org. He spends his time fiddling with

electronic gizmos, wandering the ’Net,watching anime, and trying to think of clever lies to put in his bio so that he seems cooler than he actually is.


Bob Dylan—“Together Through Life”Optimistic hope or realistic pessimism: It’s difficult to discern which way Bob Dylan is leaning on “Together Through Life,” a remarkable work drenched in Mexican-border blues, Southernswampy seduction, and romance rotting at the core. Weathered, cracked, and tormented as to how to self-heal in a world seemingly devoid of any wonder he hasn’t already experienced,Dylan croons, bemoans, warns, and recollects as only a troubadour as traveled, experienced,and wise as he can pull off. With his flawless touring band steaming underneath, Dylan turnsWillie Dixon’s classic “I Just Want To Make Love To You” on its head in “My Wife’s Hometown,”breathes fire on “Shake Shake Mama,” and mocks the masses on “It’s All Good.”

Wilco—“Ashes of American Flags”Arguably America’s best working band, Wilco does its flat-out best to prove this point on thislive concert DVD, which finds the six-piece band touring small clubs, concert halls, and theatersin Nashville, New Orleans, Mobile, Tulsa, and Washington, D.C. “Ashes” is as much a road movieas musical recounting, mixing portraits of small-town and urban decay with America’s progressas witnessed through a tour bus window. At the core, though, “Ashes” is a sonically stunningdepiction of what comes about when modern-day musicians embrace America’s musical pastbut add their own spice. Grounded, pleasingly simplistic, and fueled on amazingly tight perfor-mances, “Ashes of American Flags” isn’t a typical concert DVD—and that’s a good thing.

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 (forthe most part) love and recommend, read on.

A u d i o V i d e o C o r n e r DVDByte7/7Kath & Kim:

Season 1

Mystery Science

Theater 3000: XV

John Barrymore

Collection

7/14Eldorado

Mad Men: Season 2

7/21The Great Buck

Howard

Pushing Daises:

The Complete

Second Season

G.I. Joe A Real

American Hero:

Season 1.1

7/28Dollhouse:

Season One

Life On Mars:

Series 1 (UK)

Repulsion

by Blaine A. Flamig

D i g i t a l L i v i n gGames

Gear

Movies

Music

$19.98Nonesuchwww.wilcoworld.net

The Reader Are there sins that are never forgivable, even if the sinner is one we love undyingly and with-out question? That’s one of the many weighty questions director Stephen Daldry (“The Hours”)poses in “The Reader,” a slow-burning but hard-hitting story of an unlikely love affair that HannaSchmitz (Kate Winslet) and Michael Berg (David Kross as a teen; Ralph Fiennes as an adult) share inpost-World War II Berlin. A teenage Michael and 30ish Hanna share a torrid summer affair untilHanna unexpectedly disappears. Years later, while observing a war crimes trial as a law student,

Michael discovers that Hanna was, in fact, an SS guard at Auschwitz. Michael has knowledge thatcould lessen the life sentence she ultimately receives, but his shame prevents him for divulging it.“The Reader” will challenge your ethics, judicial beliefs, and notions on love’s limitations.

What Doesn’t Kill YouSadly overlooked upon release, “What Doesn’t Kill You” tells the gritty, true story of two lifelongfriends raised in South Boston who grow up to squeak out livings as glorified errand boys forneighborhood crime boss Sully (Will Lyman). Though first-time director Brian Goodman doesn’tbreak new ground in terms of depicting the unsavory life of small-time criminals, he deftly man-ages to present familiar plotlines in an entirely new light. As Brian and Paulie, Mark Ruffalo andEthan Hawke masterfully show on their faces the hopelessness that’s inherent to those born into

nothing with nothing to look forward to. For Brian, the hopelessness is especially omi-nous due to his responsibilities to his wife (Amanda Peet) and two young sons. WhenPaulie, Sully, and drug and alcohol addictions all fail to provide relief, Brian ultimately

finds light in his family. Tragically uplifting, “What Doesn’t Kill You” just may make you stronger.

$18.97Columbia Recordswww.bobdylan.com

$29.95The Weinstein Companywww.thereader-movie.com

$24.96Sony Pictureswww.whatdoesntkillyoumovie.com

CPU / July 2009 89

Vin Dieselathon — by Dr. Malaprop

T he last few months have brought us asmorgasbord of Vin Diesel: The Wheel-

man and The Chronicles Of Riddick: AssaultOn Dark Athena games in addition to “Fast &Furious” at the cinema. That’s a lot of Diesel ina short time span.

We did play the new port of 2004’s TheChronicles Of Riddick: Escape From ButcherBay. Graphically, Butcher Bay was one of thebest-looking original Xbox games, with graph-ics that bordered onan early Xbox 360title. Butcher Bay’srelease came at theend of the originalXbox life cycle andended up gettinglost in the shuffle. It was followed by aPC release later thatyear. The game wasreleased alongside“The Chronicles OfRiddick” film andstands out as being a movie tie-in video gamethat didn’t suck. The Chronicles Of Riddick:Assault On Dark Athena contains two gamesin one package. First is the visually updatedEscape From Butcher Bay port, and second isthe all-new Assault On Dark Athena “sequel.”

That Butcher Bay is fun to play more thanfive years after its original release is testa-ment to Starbreeze Studios’ strong gamedesign that seamlessly combines stealth, FPS,fighting, and platforming genres. The graph-ics still look good but are no longer ground-breaking. Animation is clunky compared to

the newest A-listers. Audio effects and voiceacting of all characters, including Riddick(voiced by Vin Diesel) fit the game perfectlyfor the story arc and atmosphere. The storytakes place before 2000’s “Pitch Black” as

Riddick is incarcerated at Butcher Bay, an off-world maximum-security prison. Dur-ing the course of the game, Riddick gains the eyeshine ability that gives him nightvision, which you see used to great effect in“Pitch Black.” The bloody gameplay remainsunchanged, and we enjoyed getting Achieve-ments on the Xbox 360 version.

After your escape from Butcher Bay, yourcraft is pulled aboard a mercenary ship, DarkAthena. Assault On Dark Athena is all-newand independent to Butcher Bay. It also feelslike an expansion pack. It controls identically

to the first game, but the narrative is flat, char-acters are one-dimensional, and game design isneutered. The multigenre benefits of the origi-nal are painfully absent, and the action feelstediously repetitive. This part of the packageholds steady at average but never excels.

One of the biggest complaints about theoriginal Xbox release was the lack of multi-player. Multiplayer debuts on this version,but most of the modes are nothing to write

home about. Theone exception isthe Pitch Blackmode, whichplaces one playerin the game asRiddick and therest as mercenar-ies hunting himdown in darknesswith a flashlight.Not only does thismode create astrong sense of

tension, but it also provides numerous jump-out-of-your-seat moments.

If you already completed the originalButcher Bay on Xbox or PC, it will be a stretchto pay full cost to play it again. Dark Athenaleft us flat and lacks the panache of ButcherBay. Our recommendation would be to take a breather after finishing Butcher Bay beforedelving into Dark Athena. For a first-timeentrant that has never played Butcher Bay,this package provides a satisfying single-play-er experience, but returning players shouldtread more cautiously. ▲

$59.99 (X360, PS3), $49.99 (PC) • ESRB: (M)ature • Atari Games • riddickgame.com


Frustratingly Good — by Chris Trumble

Epic-Scale Strategic Warfare — by Dr. Malaprop

$39.99 (PC) • ESRB: (T)een • Stardock • www.demigodthegame.com

W e were impressed with how accessible FiraxisGames made Sid Meier’s Civilization Revolution

in 2008. We’re equally impressed at Creative Assembly’sunapologetically complex strategy game design forEmpire: Total War. This time around, you’ll be tooling

about in the 18th century. Pick from one of 22 worldpowers and use diplomacy, economy, and com-

bat to achieve world domination, a standardrequirement for any of the games in the TotalWar series.

Gameplay can be broken downinto the big-picture 4X (eXplore,eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate)

turn-based strategy game

and the more granular real-time strategy battles. In addi-tion to the land-based combat options, ETW introducesstunning up-close naval warfare. You may also auto-resolve the granular RTS portion of the game if managingarmies hands-on is not your cup of tea. Our launch titlesuffered from AI issues, but we hope to see this fixed asyou read this.

ETW offers near-endless options for replayabilityand includes a tutorial mini-campaign called Road ToIndependence. It effectively whipped us into shape

and got us primed for the larger campaign. ETW is acan’t-miss game if you enjoy the idea of world

domination in an authentic-feeling historicalstrategy game. We were certainly taken. ▲

G as Powered Games andStardock were really onto

something special when they puttogether the core concept for thenew RTS-RPG Demigod. Unfortu-nately, everything they came upwith to add to that fantastic,gooey center was disjointedand/or broken.

Demigod is a real-time action/strategy game that boils down to arush to control key strategic pointson a simple map and destroy yourenemies’ base. Your avatar is one ofthe titular demigods, creatures ofimmense power who are competingfor the ultimate prize, the right toascend and replace a fallen god.That’s pretty much all the game has in the way of a story, so don’t besurprised when the silly monologue

at the outset of the game ends and you’re left on your own in thisregard. (You can spend an hour or more reading backstory on theDemigod Web site, which seems afurther insult.)

After you figure out how to playDemigod—which primarily involves

trial and error—the game is reallyquite fun. In order to grab resourcesand grow in power, you have tocombat your fellow Demigods (youare divided into even teams, repre-senting light and darkness)and upgrade your abilities,equipment, and min-ions (melee, ranged,and healers) on the

fly. Each Demigod has aunique, interesting collection

of abilities and attacks thatyou can power up using atalent tree as you gainlevels in-game. The gearyou can buy includesarmor upgrades (whichdon’t affect your ap-pearance on-screen,by the way) anditems such as health

potions, mana potions, and trinketsthat do all manner of interestingthings. But don’t get too attached:The time and money you spendupgrading your character only bene-fits you until the end of your currentgame because you start each gameat Level 1 and with only the clotheson your quasi-divine back.

The single-player game is littlemore than a practice mode formultiplayer games, which is espe-cially vexing because multiplayerbarely works. I didn’t try playingDemigod on a LAN, which could bequite good under the right circum-stances, but of the various Internetmodes of play, I was only ever ableto play in a few Custom games, andthe process of collecting enoughplayers to begin was pretty cum-bersome. Once we got started, thegames were great, though, so if youare patient, you can have a goodtime with Demigod, and hope-fully over time, Stardock and GasPowered will iron out the technicalissues hampering online play. ▲

$49.99 (PC) • ESRB: (T)een • Sega • totalwar.com/empire

CPU / July 2009 91

T hey’re not just Saturday morning fare for kids, you see. Animatedfilms at their best offer a blend of film technique, vision, and per-

sonal artistry put to imaginative ends. We’re going to take a brief glanceback this month and next at some of their cutting-edge highlights.

Animated films first appeared at roughly the same time as the earli-est motion pictures. They were a subset of the latter using state-of-the-art trick photography: levitating objects, furniture moving itself into anempty house, gleeful demons appearing out of thin air, and so on.Georges Méliès gave a boisterously cre-ative and satiric tone to this kind ofthing, turning out more than 500 shorts(many of them hand-colored) from 1896through 1913. His biggest success camewith his 1902 “A Trip To The Moon,”with a host of exuberant, pontificating,bearded academician-space travelers,leggy beauties (who do all the gruntwork), hopping lunar demons, and aspaceship landing directly in one of theMan in the Moon’s eyes. It was widelypirated and released without credit byforeign companies, including Edison’s.The film was shot with a single camera,fixed as though viewing a staged play—not surprising, given that prior to his filmcareer, Méliès made a living as a stagemagician. Though now regarded as animportant artist and brilliant specialeffects pioneer, many of his films weremelted down during World War I to helpfurnish boot heels for the French Army.

The other side of primitive film animation,using drawn or painted images projected orcreated on the screen, is best experienced inWindsor McCay’s “Gertie The Dinosaur”series and in the surrealistic efforts of the sadlyforgotten Émile Cohl. The latter’s early work(nearly 80 films made before 1910, most of itlong missing) owes much to the short-livedIncoherent Movement. Deceptively crudewhite line drawings on black backgroundsevoked a wealth of originality. The movementlargely abandoned storytelling, with dreamlikevisual images changing into one another rapid-ly. In a typical example, a pair of people meet,their heads become avian, the “camera” movesin on the eye of one that enlarges into a black-smith’s bellows, etc. That gradual shift from along shot to a close-up in itself marks Cohl ascutting edge, for this piece of now standard

film grammar was first deployed in his films. (It was done for artisticrather than narrative purposes, which may explain why nobody else wasquick to snatch it up.) I think I can see the effects of his work as recent-ly as the ’70s and ’80s in Sally Cruikshank’s brilliant cartoons, especially“Make Me Psychic” and “Face Like A Frog,” but I could be off base.

Another of the most interesting pioneers of animated film wasLadislas Starevich. During the teens in Russia, he turned out satiriccomedies of domestic behavior using stop-motion photography, with

insects in place of people. Their detailedmovements and extraordinarily humangestures made the perceptive cartoonist ahit with audiences and critics alike. Hismost popular film, “The Cameraman’sRevenge,” depicts the philandering Mr.Beetle and the comeuppance he receivesfrom a very angry spouse after he’s caughton film at a cabaret assignation with adragonfly. Starevich moved to France afterthe Bolshevik Revolution, set up a studio,and produced many fine, at times oddlylyrical, cartoons using more standard tech-niques into the 1960s.

At roughly the same time, another greatanimator was developing complex shadowpuppet techniques on film, using segment-ed models. Lotte Reiniger’s intricate, artnouveau cutouts provided both the actorsand backgrounds for her feature-lengthmasterpiece, “Adventures Of Prince Ach-med.” It was an Arabian Nights extrava-

ganza, filmed between 1923 and 1926, andpremiered at Paris’ prestigious Comédie desChamps-Elysées. Achmed was only made pos-sible by an incredible stroke of luck: A bankerfriend had invested in a huge quantity ofexpensive raw film stock as a hedge againstrampant inflation, but the bet hadn’t paid off.He gave it all to Reiniger. Achmed can stillpack a wallop today, especially with its originalscore, and despite recent decades of expensive,computerized special effects films.

With the exception of Cohl’s work, youcan usually find these animators’ films inwell-restored condition on DVDs. Get themyourself or give them as a gift—the kindthat, almost a century after their creation,keeps on giving. ▲

Wax nostalgic with Barry at [email protected]

Far More Than Disney, Part 1

Barry Brenesal has written more than 1,000 published articles and

reviews on electronic technology since1987. His first personal computer

was a Radio Shack TRS-80 model 100.It was last seen functioning

as a boat anchor.


Love it or hate it (or even if you justhate the hype surrounding it),Twitter is going to be an in-evitable part of your online experi-

ence this year. Traffic to the site more thandoubled in March 2009 alone to over 9million unique visitors in just the UnitedStates. Even if you aren’t “tweeting,” someof your friends and colleagues are, so youmight as well learn some of the rules of theroad and shortcuts to effective microblog-ging. To celebrate summer, this month wehave some fun with Twitter.

Phone It InOnce your Twitter account is set up,

you can ditch the Twitter interface prettyquickly and move to one of the manythird-party clients out there. (We’ll get tothat.) For now, keep in mind that the eas-iest way to tweet is from your phone.While logged in, go to the Settings sec-tion and into the Devices tab. Here youwill be prompted to add a cell phone.Once you register the number withTwitter, you can start updating Tweets bysending your messages directly to the40404 short code. Twitter recognizes theincoming phone number and posts yourSMS tweet almost immediately.

You can also use the phone account tosend command line parameters that directmessages properly. For instance, typing dusername message into your phone’s SMSinterface sends a private, direct messagefrom your Twitter account to another user.Also, you can use the basic @ command onyour phone to send a public message to aperson you are following.

Other cool commands you can use viaSMS include:

• WHOIS + username: This commandwill retrieve basic profile informationon a user.

• STATS: Returns the number of people following you and that you are following.

• GET + username: Retrieves the mostrecent Tweet from that person you are following.

Manage The MadnessWe’re not sure if some of the habitual

Twitterholics actually have day jobs, butmost of us using the service need helpmanaging the massive flow of messagesand updates that flow through the system.

Enter The Age Of Twitter

If you use multiple Twitter accounts andneed to send the same message to two ormore of them, we strongly suggest a servicesuch as Splitweet (www.splitweet.com).This free tool lets you register multipleTwitter accounts so you can post one mes-sage and check off the accounts to whichyou want it to post. It’s also an easy way tocombine the incoming feeds to multipleaccounts, although not as elegant as someother standalone clients.

Power Twitter users will want to get asophisticated client, such as TweetDeck(www.tweetdeck.com), which is currentlyin beta. Among the more popular man-agers of Tweet feeds, TweetDeck is anAdobe AIR app that divides your accountinto multiple columns and filters. Onceyou have installed the program and tied itto your Twitter account, the defaultscreen shows posts from All Friends,Replies, and Direct Messages.

Now to the good stuff. To filter postsfrom select groups, use the Group icon.You will be presented with all of the people you follow so that you can checkthe ones you want to filter in and thenname a group. This is a great way to trackspecific subgroups in a more manageableway. Finally, TweetDeck is a superb wayto track searches. Use the Search icon tosearch for a specific term. TweetDeck willcreate a new column for that term thatwill update frequently.

t i p s & t r i c k s

Even casual Twitter users can do much better than Twitter.com’s primitive interface. TweetDeckarranges all of your message types, feeds, groups, and even real-time search updates in neat columns.


Save Your FriendsIf you want to back up your list of the

people you are following or just keep thatlist for reference, here’s a clever way to doit, courtesy of software enthusiast VinceKoser at Kosertech.com.

First, go to twitter.com/statuses/friends.xml. This is a direct call to theTwitter API, so it will ask you to log inwith your account’s username and pass-word. The landing page will be an XML-formatted page containing all of the peopleyou follow, as well as their basic profileinformation. Simply save this page as adocument, retaining the XML file exten-sion. Now, go into Excel and open thatfile. In the next dialog box, tell Excel toopen the file “As An XML Table.” Thenext dialog will tell you that the XMLsource “does not refer to a scheme.”Simply click OK to let Excel apply its ownscheme. The result is a spreadsheet thatgives your friend’s name, screen name,location and profile description, and muchmore detail in a long line of columns.

For those who are following you, use theURL twitter.com/statuses/followers.xml.

The tips above only work for the first100 people in either list. You need toaccess the next hundred with the URLstwitter.com/statuses/friends.xml?page=2


or twitter.com/statuses/followers.xml?page=2 respectively. For even more follow-ers or friends, just change the page=2 por-tion of the address to page=3, etc. You willneed to save each page as a separate XMLpage and then merge the pages into a sin-gle spreadsheet.

Search With PowerThe new search.twitter.com site is much

more powerful than it seems on the surface.In fact, you can use it to create a near-real-time feed of highly targeted informationfrom across the Twitter universe. ClickAdvanced Search to access this function-ality. You can use these tools to search with-in a specific “hashtag.” For the uninitiated, ahashtag (#phrase) is the way users can createan ongoing conversation around a topic inTwitter, whether they follow one another ornot. Groups at an event such as the famousSXSW (South by Southwest) show agree to start all of their tweets with #sxsw, and they become easily searchable on the Twit-ter search engine by searching against that hashtag.

To make a real-time feed from a granu-lar search within a hashtag, go to theAdvanced Search screen and enter the hash-tag you want to search in the This Hashtagbox. Now, enter the specific phrase youwant to search. For instance, we heard onTwitter that an iPhone app for Hulu

(www.hulu.com) was coming soon. Wewanted to make sure we kept apprised ofany news surrounding its release. Weentered “iphone” as the hashtag and “hulu”in the main search box. The results are allthe instances of “hulu” occurring withinthe #iphone group of posts. The searchresults page offers you a button in theupper-right, Feed For This Query. Click itto get an address you can put into your feedreader so that the latest posts for this topicstream to your reader.

Finally, a very cool way to go local withTwitter is to search for terms by city or ZIPcode in the Advanced Search engine. It is agreat way to track local news or a hot politi-cal topic. Just add a ZIP code or city nameto the Places section of Advanced Searchand determine what radius you want thesearch to cover. Again, the results can beconverted into a real-time RSS for constantmonitoring of new posts.

As Twitter evolves, there will be newways of leveraging this real-time microblog-ging juggernaut into a genuine resource.For the time being, however, the commu-nity itself and Twitter engineers are tryingto figure out what kind of power millionsof ongoing conversations represent. ▲

by Steve Smith

Windows Tip Of The MonthIf you are a command line kind of power user who wants quick access to certain ControlPanel applets, here is a way to keep your hands on your keyboard. Use the WIN+R keycombo to bring up the Run command window. To open the Display Properties window,type desk.cpl and press ENTER. For System Properties, use “sysdm.cpl.” For MouseProperties, use “main.cpl.” Not all versions of Windows have the same Control Panelapplets, so check out the “Registry Tip Of The Month” below for another hint about whatcommands you can use with this trick.

The beauty of using the Run box is that it memorizes your recent entries. Once youhave entered one of the .cpl app shortcuts, you can call up the Run box again and just usethe Down arrow to navigate previously entered commands. Again, no mouse required. Ofcourse, once you call up the specific CP app itself, you likely will need to reach for the

mouse to navigate it, so we can’t help you there.

Registry Tip Of The MonthSo where can you find a listing of the most commonly used Control Panel apps that you can access using the Run command tip above? In the Registry Editor, go toHKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\ControlPanel\Cpls. The subkeys in this folder will show you most (not all) the .cpl files you canaccess directly by calling them up in the Run command line. “TabletPC.cpl,” for instance,will bring up the Pen and Stylus Input box.

1% Market ShareIs A Big DealSuch a tiny market share would certain-ly spell doom for any company, but ifyou’re a Linux supporter, having theopen-source OS on one out of every100 desktops or notebooks is a majormilestone. A new report from NetApplications shows Linuxeking out a 1.2% mar-ket share; if that’snot impres-sive, considerthis: Linux usehas essentiallytripled since2005.

Sou

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CPU / July 2009 95


How Linux Boots

Most people don’t understandthe basics behind how theircomputers boot up whenthey first turn them on.

Most Windows users think that when youstart up your system, it runs NTLDR,which in turn reads the BOOT.INI con-figuration file. While this is the mostobvious and observable way most of usunderstand the PC startup process, there’sa lot more going on underneath. And it’sin the nuts and bolts that Linux differssignificantly from Windows when a sys-tem starts up.

What Everybody DoesWhen you press the power button on

your system, it initializes all hardwaredevices and goes through a series of tests,commonly known as POST. These testsnaturally run before any operating systemis loaded. Once the POST is finished, thehardware looks for the first availablebootable device on the available hardware.Systems today let you boot from a CD, hard removable device, or even net-work devices.

A bootable device is something wherethe first 512 bytes contain boot informa-tion about the actual device itself. This isknown as the boot sector of the device;for hard drives, it resides in the MBR(master boot record), which is before thepartition information. Once the systemfinishes its POST, it reads the data in theMBR and then executes the code. Upuntil this point the Windows and Linuxboot up procedures are identical.

What happens next depends not onlyon what operating system you use, butalso, in the case of Linux, which bootloader you use. With recent Windowsinstallations, the MBR code will loadNTLDR, which reads the BOOT.INIconfiguration file. This file contains infor-mation for different installations ofWindows, as well as parameters to bepassed to those installations.

A Linux user has two popular bootloaders available: LILO (Linux Loader)and GNU GRUB. LILO is one of theearliest Linux boot loaders and is rarelyused in newer Linux installations. Most

modern Linux distributions use GNUGRUB, or GRUB for short, as theirboot loader, due to i ts ease of use and configurability.

Boot From LILOBut let’s go back to the beginning

and cover how LILO works, because alot of legacy systems still have it. As withmost boot loaders, LILO is much toobig to fit into 512 bytes and so is loadedin stages. The first stage is when the ini-tial 512 bytes are loaded from the bootsector on the hard drive. The purpose ofthis stage is to get things started and toload the next stage. LILO gives you astatus of what stage it’s in based on howmany letters in its name it’s shown. Thefirst “L” indicates that the first stage has loaded.

Just before LILO is ready to go ontothe loader in the next stage, it displays an“I.” If LILO hangs with just an “LI,” ittypically means that the file that LILO isexpecting can’t be found. The disk mightbe damaged or perhaps the file hasmoved. But assuming everything’s fine,the secondary loader is executed and thesecond “L” will appear.

The second stage boot loader forLILO is where the guts of the bootprocess occur. Here the secondary stage

GRUB’s boot behavior can be controlled with KGRUBEditor.



that require special work before they canbe fully utilized, like booting off a net-work device.

To address these situations, after you’vegone through all of the boot loaders, youhaven’t really loaded Linux yet. Instead,you will actually boot into a very smallLinux kernel with just enough drivers toget the real Linux kernel started. Thissmall Linux kernel is known as the initialramdisk, or initrd for short. Once initrdhas loaded, it moves itself out of the way,loads the real Linux kernel, and thendeletes itself from memory. Only after initrd has freed itself from memory haveyou truly booted into Linux.

Most people have probably neverthought about how Linux boots up, sothey’ve been stuck if it doesn’t boot. Butafter reading this, if your Linux boxdoesn’t boot, you at least now knowwhere to go looking to troubleshoot the problem. ▲

by John Jung

loader reads in the Lilo.conf file, whichtells LILO where its various parts areand different boot options. The secondstage loader also reads in what is knownas a map file. The map file contains acollection of locations for the bootablepartitions, including each partition’srespective disk. When LILO has success-fully loaded the map file, it’ll display the “O” in its name and you’ll see a“boot:” prompt.

At the “boot:” prompt, simply type thename of the operating system you want torun and press ENTER. If you’re not surewhat OSes are on your system, press theTAB key. If you don’t make a selectionafter a little while, it’ll boot the first LinuxOS it can find. If you want to change thedisplay name of the available operatingsystems, or the timeout to boot thedefault OS, you’ll need to modify LILO’sconfiguration file, /etc/lilo.conf.

LILO depends very heavily on the con-figuration file for all of its bootup infor-mation, so any changes to Lilo.conf canpotentially make it impossible to bootnext time. But don’t worry about makingchanges to Lilo.conf; there’s a GUI utilityto help you with those things.

If you’re using the KDE window man-ager, click the KDE icon and then selectControl Center. Expand the SystemAdministration heading and then selectBoot Manager (LILO). This will give youa handy graphical utility with which tomanipulate the Lilo.conf file. You canadd, delete, and edit entries in theLilo.conf file, and it’ll handle the gruntwork of making it work.

Get GRUBbyIn 1995 the Free Software Foundation

created a specification on how boot load-ers should interact with operating sys-tems. To demonstrate the specification inaction, GNU GRUB, or simply GRUBfor short, was created.

Like LILO, GRUB is too big to fit into512 bytes and thus loads in stages.GRUB’s stage 1 loader is functionallyidentical to the first stage of LILO bootloader: Its goal is to load the next stage.But what happens next with GRUBdepends on what type of operating systemthe stage 2 loader sits on. Most Linux

flavors default to using the ext2 or ext3 filesystems when laying out a disk. In thesecases the GRUB stage 1 loader will load upthe stage 2 loader without any problems.

If you have Linux loaded on someother file system, such as xfs, jfs, fat, orreiserfs, then the GRUB stage 1 loaderwill load the stage 1.5 loader. The onlypurpose of the stage 1.5 loader is to act asa bridge between the stage 1 and stage 2loaders. That is, the GRUB stage 1.5loader knows enough about the underly-ing file system to run the stage 2 loader.Once the GRUB stage 1.5 loader has run,it’ll load the GRUB stage 2 loader.

The GRUB stage 2 loader is wheremost of the action happens with GRUB,and it ’ s what most people think isGRUB. Here, the user is given a textmenu with a list of available operatingsystems, and whichever one he choosesgets loaded.

GRUB offers a number of improve-ments over LILO, such as the ability tospecify an unlimited number of operat-ing systems and boot from a networkdevice. But perhaps best of all is that,unlike LILO, you can easily modify theGRUB configuration file without havingto reinstall GRUB or play around withthe boot sector.

Because GRUB is newer, it has its ownset of GUI tools to help modify its con-figuration file. A popular one is theKGRUBEditor, which requires the KDE4 libraries to run. When you run it, all ofthe bootable entries in GRUB’s initialtext menu are shown. As with the KDEBoot Manager for LILO, you can add,delete, or edit entries, and it’ll take care ofthe configuration files themselves.

Still Not In LinuxSo after we’ve run either LILO or

GRUB through its paces to boot theoperating system, the Linux kernel isloaded, right? Wrong. Linux is designedto try and run on as many different sys-tems as possible. It does this by having alarge library of modules to enable differ-ent features. But due to the sheer num-ber and size of modules, they can’tall be available at boot time.Also, Linux has somespecial features So

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Bionic penguinsswim through thewater, huntSarah ConnorIf we had our choice (and it’s proba-bly a good thing that we don’t), wewould’ve requested robotic sharksfrom German engineering companyFesto, the group that made themechanical aquatic avians. The bionicbirds use 3D sonar to avoid smashinginto walls (or other mechapenguins)and have a gripper than can omnidi-

rectionally twist 90degrees, making it ideal

for underwater industrialapplications or grabbingus another cold one aswe’re floating in the pool.

CPU / July 2009 97

I ’m just casting my mind back four or five years ago and reflectingon how the PC industry has changed in that short period of time.I was a regular at the Computex show in Taipei, Taiwan, and in

those days, the number of companies making motherboards waslegion. They’d each try and distinguish themselves by gimmicks,and it wasn’t just motherboard manu-facturers that were plentiful.

You could see countless small compa-nies offering cases of every kind for theenthusiast. Fashioned from beautifullypolished chrome and glass, the kind ofbloke who’d want one of these wouldwant the best of everything. Best graph-ics card, best sound system, best CPU,best and fastest memory with flashingLEDs or not, and of course, the fan hadto be extra cool—cool-looking, that is—because if you had a glass PC case, you’dcertainly want your friends to see justhow super-cool you were.

Those days aren’t quite gone. Lastyear, I judged one set of products forthe “Best of Computex 2008” award,and I’m doing the same for this year’sshow. But the products I’m looking atnow are very, very different from theflash bang wallop bright and shinytrinkets to attract the acquisitive mag-pies of the past.

The magpies got interested in otherbling than motherboards. iPods becameubiquitous, and plasma screens became thenorm for someone who wanted nothingbetter to do than gaze at a huge TV everytime they were home and play some onlinegame to boot.

Then, on the software side, we had andstill have the Facebook fad, while Twittermade its twittish appearance and now is onthe radar of even formerly august magazinessuch as Business Week in the United Statesand the staid Daily Telegraph in the UK.

Yes, techdom is ruled by fads, and themore gadgets vendors can throw at the appre-ciative crowd who are dedicated followers offashion, the better. The phrase “eye candy”was formerly applied to software that looked

bright, shiny, and colourful on the glass, but the eyes are the mirror ofthe soul, connected directly to the brain. And if your first impressionis that something is bright and shiny and, above all, new, you’ll putyour hand in your pocket and buy something before you’ve consid-ered or reflected for a second whether you even want it.

This, I think, is why it’s very hard forthe chip vendors to make things excitingfor enthusiasts anymore. I don’t want toharp on endlessly about the Tower ofBabel that now constitutes the chipranges of Intel and AMD, but the mar-keteers at semiconductor companies aregetting increasingly desperate to find theblue-crystal factor that will excite enthusi-asts about their products. Form used toprecede function as far as microprocessorswere concerned. We were all wowed byIntel code names, redolent of hiddenvales in remote parts of California; wooedby Camino, by Woodcrest; and if wewere in foreign parts, wished we knewwhat a Katmai was.

Dual-core and quad-core micro-processors fail to make our blood raceand our hearts sing now. We want bothfunction and form. However wonderfuland, in fact, miraculous the ability of

the engineers and architects is to shrinkthe die and include ever more transistors ona chip, a package with pins does not holdthe allure it did when you could impressyour friends with your raw overclockedmegahertz in a glass and chromium caseable to play the latest game faster and furi-ouser than any of your friends.

With technology as ubiquitous as it now is,we’re always going to be impressed by some-thing that looks good, but we’ll always be onthe side of a product that not only gleamsand is colourful, but also works the first time,every time and doesn’t need to be upgradedevery six months or so. Good design is impor-tant, and Apple has proved that. But we wantboth, not either. ▲

Send rumours to “Mad Mike” Magee at [email protected]

The Future Is Bright & Shiny

Mike Magee is an industry veteran. He cut his teeth on ancient products

such as the Dragon and the Japanese PC platforms long before the IBM-PC won.

He worked for a corporate reseller in the mid-’80s and saw the Compaq 386sandwich box and every GUI known to humankind. Mike decided that the way to go was the Interweb around

1994 after editing PC mags in the late’80s and ’90s. A co-founder of The

Register, Mike started the chip-drivenINQUIRER (www.theinquirer.net) in

2001. He has contacts from top to bottom in the business, spanning the entire chain, who help him root out interesting rumours and speculation.


T here are many reasons you should think about using Twitter as aproductivity tool, no matter what business you’re in. I will start

by saying that Twitter is as simple or as complex a tool as you want itto be. The typical first-time Twitter user hears about it on the radio oron television or through a friend—they visit www.twitter.com, regis-ter, and wonder “what next?” If I were to guess, I would say that agood chunk of the new Twitter accounts do not become active.

My wife is one of those people whobarely uses Facebook, but she understandsthe need for it. She can’t understand thepurpose of Twitter, and I was the sameway until I started to dig into it further.My Twitter account would have died hadit not been for the constant flow of follow-ers who followed me for whatever reason,but I imagine most first-time users don’tget “automatic followers,” so they need touse the tool in a more proactive way.

Getting Started On Twitter

The first thing I recommend is thatyou do not use Twitter.com as your pri-mary interface. Register on the site, cus-tomize your page, then close that browserwindow and download Tweetdeck.Tweetdeck is a desktop application thatlets you view tweets from many differentstreams at once. You’ll find as you get intoTwitter that you’ll use the Twitter Website every now and then to modify yourprofile and follow recommended users.

For Customer Feedback

You can set up custom search windows withspecific terms. So, for example, if you want tobe notified anytime someone says “mother-board,” you can click the search tool at the topand type motherboard, and a new column willopen up. Now anytime someone types thatword in a tweet, it will appear, and you canchoose to follow them, reply, or pretty muchmonitor the situation. I use this as a great wayto get live customer feedback on my products.It’s a great way to get directly involved withyour customer base without being too intrusive.

For Stock Trading

I have never seen a more effective tool to research stocks in real time. First, go to

www.stocktwits.com and register your twitter account there. You needto follow @stocktwits, as well, if you want to be part of the stream.On Tweetdeck, you can click on the Stocktwits feed to see whateveryone is talking about, and although it’s an overwhelming stream,it will give you an idea of what people are trading. More importantly,you can set up searches for stocks that you’re trading. So, when youclick the search button, type $bac to follow all tweets on Bank of

America. (Always use a dollar sign [$] infront of the symbol to be part of thestream.) As you will start to see, theinformation can be valuable, or not.Either way, it’s the Internet; take it with a grain of salt.

For Real-Time News

This is my favorite feature of Twitter.Click the Twitscoop button at the top ofTweetdeck, and you’ll see a tag cloud ofterms that people are talking about. Thelarger the word, the more people aretalking about it. For example, if theword “earthquake” appears large, there isan earthquake happening somewhere inthe world, and you can click on it to seewhat people are saying. Never before hasthere been a faster way to get news outthan with Twitter.

For Stalking Celebrities

It’s safe to say Twitter has become apop culture phenomenon, and when peoplesuch as Ashton Kutcher, Oprah Winfrey,and 50 Cent are using it to talk aboutwhatever interests them, you can jump inand follow them and even respond directlyto them.

There are many other things that Twitterallows you to do, from searching for specifickeywords and sending messages automati-cally to people (spam could be cut out atsome point) to finding a job in real time. Istrongly urge you to try it, and dig deep intothe tools that make Twitter a powerful toolrather than just a glorified chat room.

Oh yeah, feel free to follow me onTwitter @rahulsood. ▲

Send your opinions to this opinionated guy at [email protected]

The Various Ways Of Twitter

Rahul Sood's love for computers started at the young age of 11. Much to theshock and dismay of his parents, he

ripped apart his brand-new Apple //c and painted it red before turning it on.His parents’ dreams of having a doctor

for a son were shattered when college dropout Rahul founded what

is now one of the most respected high-end computer companies in the

world, Voodoo Computers.


CPU: President Obama has commentedseveral times that he is in favor of netneutrality, but there appear to be severaldifferent definitions being floated of theterm. Could we start out with what youconsider as an expert in the field to be anadequate definition of net neutrality?

Schneider: The basic idea is that, sim-ply put, the providers of Internet con-nectivity should be providing a dumbpipe, an unbiased transmission systemwhere they’re not privileging content.They’re running a toll gate, and itshouldn’t matter what comes through it.If you have your DSL modem or cableline, you have the right to upload anddownload X amount of data—with dif-ferent plans, at different terms of maxi-mum throughput.

It goes back to the precedent of theCarterfone Decision, which forced MaBell to open the telephone system to anydevice for connection, provided it metcertain standards. That opened the doorto doing more than just renting blackrotary phones. You could buy phones atyour local department store; and, downthe road, hook up a fax or answeringmachine, and then a modem. Advocatesof net neutrality want that same commoncarrier arrangement for the Internet.

CPU: What do the people and/or com-panies who own the distribution network

stand to gain by maintaining the role ofgatekeeper over content?

Schneider: Profit margins, certainly,though it’s more complicated than that.There are absolutely reasonable argu-ments in favor of restricting content incertain ways, but even the staunchestopponents of net neutrality will be fairlycandid about wanting to be in a value-added business. They don’t just want tolease a dumb pipe, because then you’remarketing a commodity. And if you’re ina business where anyone can transmitdata in whatever form they see fit, thenthe only way you can compete is on priceand the amount of throughput you canprovide for the dollar. That’s good forconsumers in a lot of ways, but it’s not anideal situation for the providers, who dohave to spend a great deal of money tobuild out and maintain those networks.

CPU: How is this faring in Congress?

Schneider: This has been a long-run-ning battle. It started with old line tele-phones and has progressed to the Internetand wireless issues and what should bedone with the spectrum that the FCC isreallocating and auctioning off. The samevery powerful interests, the big telcos, arelobbying this out, trying to convinceCongress of the wisdom of their point ofview. Verizon and Comcast are huge

players in this and have been for a longtime. The advocates of net neutralityhave gotten more clout in the last year ortwo, because at one time, it was mostlytechnologists and public interest advo-cates arguing their viewpoint. What haschanged, I think, is that there are morecommercial interests arraigned at theirside—Google being first and foremost.And the Obama administration appearsto be significantly more open to the ideaof net neutrality than the Bush adminis-tration or, frankly, the Clinton adminis-tration was.

CPU: Do you have any idea how muchmoney companies such as Verizon arespending on lobbying for net neutrality?

Schneider: Verizon itself spent morethan $18 million on lobbying in 2008,according to the Center for ResponsivePolitics, and gave another $2.3 million indirect political contributions. I cite thembecause they are a huge factor in theWashington area both on the policy sideand as a corporate presence.

And just to be clear: Verizon shouldabsolutely be trying to stack the deck intheir favor. Lobbying to me is not a pejo-rative word. But simply bringing in largerinterests on the side of net neutralitymakes a big difference, because whileorganizations like the New AmericaFoundation, Electronic Freedom Forum,

T roy Schneider is director of media and communications for the New AmericaFoundation. Prior to that, he was managing director for electronic publishing at the

Atlantic Media Company and the founding editor of NationalJournal.com.

by Barry Brenesal

TechnicallySpeaking

An Interview With Troy Schneider, New AmericaFoundation Director Of Media & Communications

What’s Cooking . . .


Congress. What are some of the other bat-tlegrounds it will face in the near future?The FCC?

Schneider: I think the FCC is probablythe primary battleground on this. As thedifferent commissioner positions comeopen, the Obama administration will fillthem with people who reflect its policypriorities. I think it is arguably at least asimportant as what’s going to occur onCapitol Hill in the near term, becausethere are so many questions already outthere that need to be addressed. Whetherthey are rules about how to interpret exist-ing regulations or how to deal with variousblocks of spectrum that are being auc-tioned off, the FCC is really where the netneutrality issue decisions will be made.

CPU: You mentioned the CarterfoneDecision in such a way as to make itsound like the Big Bang, from whicheverything else in online followed. If theDecision never occurred, would we havethe Internet today?

Schneider: Absolutely not. WithoutCarterfone, we wouldn’t have been able to

connect modems to our phone lines.Without modems, there’d have been noCompuServe, AOL, or dial-up Internetservices, and so no critical mass for theWorld Wide Web to take off the way itdid. Now, would the Internet have comealong later in some different form? Quitepossibly, but that initial requirement foropenness was key to getting us to where weare today. And I think net neutrality issimilarly vital to opening the doors forfuture growth and innovation.

and Free Press can put their ideas outthere, the money—the resources thosegroups can throw at this—are nothingmore than a rounding error compared towhat the big telecoms put forth on theother side. It is completely skewed whenthere’s no chance for a fair fight. That’snot in the public interest.

CPU: What, in your opinion, wouldmake the debate fair and balanced?

Schneider: I think we’re creeping inthe right direction. The role that Googlehas played is hard to overestimate. Notthat they placed tons of money into tradi-tional lobbying by Washington standards,but they have such a high public profile.Suddenly, it’s not consumers on one sideand big corporations on the other; youhave big corporations on both sides. Theother thing that helps is that there aremore channels for people to learn what isgoing on, to organize and make theirviews known on issues that matter tothem—including net neutrality.

CPU: When we were discussing the eco-nomic advantages to net neutrality, we

were also acknowledging the presence ofpeople on the other side of the fence whofelt it was in their best interests to contin-ue the status quo. When you switch per-spectives and consider instead issues ofdemocratic involvement through a moreopen Internet, who’s on the other sidethat stands to gain from keeping thingsthe way they are?

Schneider: I suppose I’m being opti-mistic, but I don’t think there are thatmany people who are really on the otherside about this. All of the potential bene-fits to democracy and political discourseonline are just that: potential. A tool,

whose value is that it democratizes access.You no longer require such a vested inter-est that you’re willing to spend hundredsof thousands of dollars to get started orga-nizing. But if you are one of those bigvested interests, these tools are very help-ful to you, as well. I think any sort of hes-itation in the old guard about organizingon the other side is probably tempered bythe knowledge that these same tools canbe used in their own interest. It’s more arace to see who can innovate with them.

CPU: You really don’t think there arepoliticians on the national and state levelswho feel that once they’re elected, they’repart of the elect and those who voted forthem can now essentially retire until thenext time they vote for them, as well?

Schneider: There are certainly peoplein Washington who will roll their eyes atthe idea of citizen input. But most electedofficials that I’ve dealt with want to knowwhat a broad cross section of constituentshas to say. It’s either go to meetings witha select few that have privileged access orsift through hundreds of thousands ofphone calls and emails. I think that’s why

we see a lot of members of Congress rac-ing to join online chats and carving outtheir own space on the social networks.Granted, some are doing it because it’sthe flavor of the month, and they want toshow that they’re current, or because theysee it as another way to get their messageout. But I also think there’s a sinceredesire to engage in these conversations.

CPU: We’ve talked briefly about net neu-trality issues in one potential battleground,

What’s Cooking . . . Technically Speaking

Subscribers can read bonus content with Troy Schneider at www.cpumag.com/cpujuly09/schneider

Verizon itself spent more than $18 million on lobbying in 2008, according to the Center for Responsive Politics,

and gave another $2.3 million in direct political contributions. —Troy Schneider


by Anastasia PolandWhat’s Cooking . . .

A ccording to Iowa State’s NDT (Non-destructive Testing) Resource Center,

the life expectancy of a highway bridge is 70to 75 years. Current methods of bridgeinspection are simple visual inspections ofeach bridge every two years, whether thebridge in question is brand new or decades

old. NDT also reports “it is not uncommonfor a fisherman, canoeist, [or] other passerbyto alert officials to major damage that mayhave occurred between inspections.” Notexactly confidence-inspiring, is it?

With nearly 600,000 bridges across theland needing regular safety inspections, the

Under DevelopmentA Peek At What's Brewing In The Laboratory

“Smart” Bridges Seek To Save Lives

W ith our environments becoming “smarter,” our homes andwork places laced with embedded systems, the eventual

impasse with potential technological bliss will be a failure to com-municate. Networked systems and the wide range of devices avail-able to interact with said systems do not currently all speak the samelanguage. With an eye to serving system developers’ needs, theEuropean Hydra project has created the on-the-fly translators via itsself-titled Hydra middleware.

“The main issues Hydra solves for hardware and software develop-ers is that the middleware [will] address a broad range of heteroge-neous devices on the service level instead of on lower software layers,”explains Dr. Markus Eisenhauer, lead of the project and head ofmobile knowledge at Fraunhofer Institute. “As long as a device canbe addressed via IP and has some processing and memory capabilities,it can be Hydra-enabled. In the case of a simple sensor withno computing power, we can use a proxy that will be Hydra-enabled.”

Hydra Middleware Speaks Smart Devices’ Language

University of Michigan’s new develop-ment in “smart” bridges couldn’t be bet-ter timed.

The $19 million, five-year project (withfunding from a federal grant, the privatesector, and Michigan Department ofTransportation) will focus on cutting-edge

damage detection and facilitating directcommunication between the bridge and thebridge owners. Jerome Lynch, principalinvestigator and UM’s assistant professor inthe Department of Civil and EnvironmentalEngineering, is excited about improving theinspection process and public safety.

“‘Smart’ sensors capable of processingtheir own measurements will be able toalert engineers and bridge owners ofunusual bridge behavior or measurementssignifying the onset of damage immediate-ly. This will then trigger inspection ofbridges to investigate further the conditionof the bridge,” explains Lynch.

Lynch’s team has been working on newtypes of materials to house those sensors, aswell as lowering the cost of production of thesensors themselves. Four sensors are in devel-opment. The first, super-durable concretethat conducts electricity, is fiber-reinforcedand bendable. Sensors would measure electri-cal conductivity, and a change in it wouldsignal issues with the bridge. Another sensor,a “sensing skin” of carbon nano-tubes thatLynch is developing, would be lined withelectrodes and painted or glued on high-traf-fic areas in hopes of measuring small cracksand corrosion. A third sensor would be wire-less nodes that would monitor strain andvibration fluctuations, and a fourth sensorwould reside in automobiles using the bridge.

The biggest challenges for the team havebeen driving down the cost of the sensorsto make them affordable for limited bud-gets and showing bridge owners that thetechnology will create cost savings overall.

Lynch’s team hopes to have a workingprototype, including “placing actual proto-type sensors on bridges in Michigan andCalifornia,” within two years. ▲

The new wireless sensor network for bridges being developed at the University of Michigancould offer bridge inspectors a wealth of information in bridge safety.

CPU / July 2009 105

Micro-Fridges Help CPUs Chill Out

A s manufacturers rose to meet thedemand for faster processors, chip

performance was eventually hampered byextreme temperatures. The solution becamemulticore processors. Of course, we’vedeveloped our own cooling methods, usingwater, liquid nitrogen, or specialty coolants,to bring down their CPUs’ temps.

Dr. Rama Venkatasubramanian, asenior researcher at RTI International,and a team of other researchers at Inteland Arizona State University, havestepped into this hot topic with a unique

answer: micro-refrigerators that target-cool the hot spots. The researchers arelooking at the brink of those multicorespotentially facing similar thermal issues asin days of yore, with traditional heatsinksand fans still lacking the oomph to bringdown temps of densely packed circuitry.

“Our superlattice thin-film thermoelec-tric micro-refrigerators would help solvethe problem of efficient thermal manage-ment of so-called hot spots on a high-per-formance chip,” says Venkatasubramanian.“Typical chips have highly non-uniform

H ydrogel, the matter usedto create soft contact

lenses, has recently beenadapted by Georgi Paschewand Andreas Richter of the Technical University ofDresden to help those withmore severe sight challenges.

The team has created aninnovative visual and tactiledisplay using “smart” hydro-gels—water-filled gel pack-ets that respond to beingwarmed by beams of light byshrinking, hardening, andbecoming opaque.

“The basic material for theactuators is called ‘smarthydrogel’ because it has theability to perform a big changeof its properties according to

small alterations in a certainparameter of its surround-ing fluid medium,” explainsPaschew. “[It has an] amazingability to double its length orheight only within a tempera-ture range of 6 degrees Celsius(43 degrees Fahrenheit).”

Paschew and Richter craft-ed a square display with 4,225packets of evenly spaced, 300-micron-wide hydrogels. Everysquare centimeter of the dis-play holds 297 hydrogel “pix-els,” or actuators. Backed byblack polyester and sealedbeneath a plastic membrane,the actuators can shrink andswell twice per second.

Paschew discusses the pos-sible uses of their innovation.

What’s Cooking . . . Under Development

New Hydrogel Display Lets YourFingers “See” The Picture

In other words, plugging in the Hydra software (with open-sourcetools and libraries available) means developers won’t have to createtheir own software to handle security, device discovery, and commu-nication issues in their systems.

Eisenhauer asserts that the team has faced quite a few hurdles dur-ing the project’s duration. “From a research perspective, there havebeen several challenges, like how to implement a level of security intoa middleware across a plethora of devices; how to implement the

middleware or some of its components on resource-restricted devices;how to discover devices in unknown and dynamically changing envi-ronments; or how to store data persistently, even if the data-produc-ing entity cannot provide enough reliable or secure storage.”

However, the team has found success over the span of the 4-yearproject, which will be completed this year. An SDK is currentlyavailable, with a DDK (Device Developer Kit) expected to launchby the end of this year. ▲

“This . . . can be used ascomputer display for high-resolution tactile informationand not only give blind peo-ple the access to graphic illus-trations but also give you andme, the usual computer user,completely new possibili-ties to see, touch, and feel

[changing] shapes, forms,and structures,” she says.“This is a new communi-cation channel which canchange the human-computerinteraction because the tactilesense of humans is quiteimportant but neverthelessstill not used.” ▲

thermal maps, where some areas of intensecomputation run much hotter than others.

“We can selectively cool these hot spotswith our active cooling while the rest ofthe area is managed with standard heatremoval means.”

The micro-fridges are nano-scale(roughly 10 microns) and can be mount-ed on chips. Remarkably efficient, themicro-fridges essentially cool on demandand only use 2 to 3W when in use.

Venkatasubramanian thinks a finishedproduct could be available in 2011. ▲

The prototype of a hydrogel-based tactile display (showing theshape of a dolphin) could enable the blind to read graphics andchange the landscape of human-computer interface.


05.22.09LANageddon - Calgary, Alberta, Canada

www.lanageddon.comTraverse City Fragfest 15 - Traverse City, MI

www.fragfest.cx

05.23.09BYOC LAN - Bakersfield, CA

www.byoclan.comGaming Northwest LAN: Part Deux - Vancouver, WA

www.gamingnw.comHyperGamez Grand Opening - Fort Worth, TX

www.thetexangamer.comIntel LAN Fest Colorado - Loveland, CO

lanfest.intel.comLower MainLAN - North Vancouver, BC, Canada

caplan-bc.comNCGC LAN Party - Groveton, NH

www.electronicesthetics.com/LANParties.htmWVG Gamers - Eugene, OR

www.wvgamers.com

05.29.09Maryland LAN Gamers - Greenbelt, MD

www.marylandlangamers.net

05.30.09Boro LAN Fest - Springboro, OHittp.springboro.org/borolanfestCatacombz 11.0 - Eldorado, IL

www.catacombz.comE-Town LAN - Emporia, KS

www.etownlan.comExtremeLANKC - North Kansas City, MO

www.extremelankc.comKrosswirz - Quincy, IL

www.krosswirz.netOnTargetLan - Hot Springs, AR

www.ontargetlan.com/news.phpPeace, Love, and Rockets - Keller, TX

www.peaceloveandrockets.org

06.01.09The(S/=\S)Clan-1v1 GunGame Tournament - Houston, TX

the-sas-clan.comICT Gaming - Wichita, KS

www.ictgaming.com

06.05.09FireLANcaster - Lancaster, VA

www.myspace.com/firelancasterPanhandle Gamers LAN - Mobile, AL

www.panhandlegamers.com

06.06.09Atlanta LAN Fest - Atlanta, GA

www.atlantalanfest.comLANManiac - Brea, CA www.lanmaniac.com

NWALAN - Fayetteville, ARwww.nwalan.com

PNP LAN - Largo, FLwww.pnplan.com

06.12.09FGA LAN 2009 - Marion, IL

www.clanfga.comLAN Lordz - Wichita, KS

www.lanlordz.netMainline Gaming Center Summer LAN - Zeeland, MI

mainlinegamingcenter.com/summerlanparty2009.aspx

06.13.09Gamers United-Showdown at Thunderdome - Gray, TN

www.gamersunited.comIntel LANFest Desertbash - Anthem, AZ

lanfest.intel.com MidWest FragFest v2 - Countryside, IL

www.midwest-fragfest.com

06.14.09Anime Evolution - North Vancouver, BC, Canada

caplan-bc.com

06.19.09MetroCon - Tampa, FL

www.seads.org/LANParty/lanparty.htm

06.20.09Bellingham LAN - Bellingham, WA

www.bellinghamlan.comFRAGfinity - Tiffin, IAwww.fragfinity.com

08.07.09AWOL LAN - Wisconsin

www.awollan.com

08.08.09Iron Storm 11 - Castle Shannon, PA

www.pittco.orgLAN Lordz - Wichita, KS

www.lanlordz.netLANmonkeys - Naugatuck, CT

www.lanmonkeys.com

08.13.09QuakeCon - Dallas, TXwww.quakecon.com

08.14.09Carolina Armageddon - North Carolina

www.carolinagaming.com


www.bellinghamlan.comNGC's LAN-A-GEDDON - Greenville, TX

www.networkgamingclub.com

08.16.09Whempy's LAN Party - Columbus, OH

whempyslan.org

08.22.09E-Town LAN - Emporia, KS

www.etownlan.com

08.29.09NCGC LAN Party - Groveton, NH

www.electronicesthetics.com/LANParties.htm

09.04.09Chibi-Pa LAN Party - West Palm Beach, FL


09.05.09LANManiac - Brea, CAwww.lanmaniac.com

09.12.09KC Beatdown - Overland Park, KS

www.kcbeatdown.comLAN Lordz - Wichita, KS

www.lanlordz.net

09.19.09Krosswirz - Quincy, IL

www.krosswirz.netNGC's LAN-A-GEDDON - Greenville, TX


09.20.09Whempy's LAN Party - Columbus, OH

whempyslan.org

09.26.09NCGC LAN Party - Grovetown, NH


October 2009Intel LANFest New Mexico - Rio Rancho, NM

lanfest.intel.com


www.etownlan.comLANManiac - Brea, CAwww.lanmaniac.com

10.09.09UWL LAN Computer Science Club - La Crosse, WI

www.uwlax.edu/csclub

10.10.09LAN Lordz - Wichita, KS

www.lanlordz.net

10.17.09Arkansas LAN - Arkansas

www.arkansaslan.comNGC's LAN-A-GEDDON - Greenville, TX

www.networkgamingclub.comTigerLAN - Hays, KS

www.tigerlan.org

Look For CPU At These LAN Parties Across The Nation—& Beyond!

Would you like us to help promote your next LAN?

Give us a call at 1.800.733.3809 or visit our LAN Yard site at www.computerpoweruser.com/LanYardto input your own information and see your LAN party name in our upcoming issues.

We'll be glad to consider your event!

Ghetto LAN party - Denton, TXwww.ghettolanparty.com

KC Beatdown - Overland Park, KSwww.kcbeatdown.com

Muncie Gamers - Muncie, INwww.munciegamers.comNEXUS LAN - Dayton, OH

www.nexuslan.orgNGC's LAN-A-GEDDON - Greenville, TX

www.networkgamingclub.comWhempy's LAN Party - Columbus, OH

whempyslan.orgWVG Gamers - Eugene, OR

www.wvgamers.com

06.26.09Friday Night Frag Fest - Denver, CO

www.fnff.net/news.php


www.electronicesthetics.com/LANParties.htmPC-Gamers.net Frag-Fest - Fishersville, VA

www.pcgn.net/lanparty

June or July 2009MegaCon - Jacksonville, FL


mid-July 2009Digital Storm LAN - Aldergrove, BC, Canada

www.digitalstormlan.com

July 2009KILANFest Ver 7.0 - Louisville, KY

www.kilanfest.com

July 2009theGXL - Millville, NJ

07.01.09ICT Gaming - Wichita, KS

www.ictgaming.com

07.03.09Lannihilation - Calgary, Alberta, Canada

www.lannihilation.ca

07.04.09LANManiac - Brea, CAwww.lanmaniac.com

07.09.09Lanwar's MillionManLan 8 - Louisville, KY

www.lanwar.com/News.asp?Process=DISPLAY

07.10.09Massive LAN - Hamburg, NY

www.massivelan.com


www.etownlan.comLAN Lordz - Wichita, KS

www.lanlordz.netPeace, Love, and Rockets - Keller, TX

www.peaceloveandrockets.org


www.bellinghamlan.comNGC's LAN-A-GEDDON - Greenville, TX


07.24.09LANapalooza - Aurora, Ontario, Canada

www.zeropingevents.comSuper LAN 2009 - Fond du Lac, WI

lan.kicks-ass.net



August 2009DragonFire LAN - Erie, PA

08.01.09KC Beatdown - Overland Park, KS

www.kcbeatdown.comLANManiac - Brea, CAwww.lanmaniac.com

08.06.09Fragapalooza - Alberta, Canada

www.fragapalooza.com

For our full list of upcoming events,

visit the CPU LAN Yard page at

www.computerpoweruser.com/LanYard.

CPU / July 2009 107

Intel LAN Fest InfernaLAN & Netwar 17.0

Z ombies and raids were the order ofthe day (and night) at InfernaLAN,

but it was Joshua Sniffen’s Seraphim thatbathed the Intel cafeteria in DuPont,Wash., in a heavenly light. Its beauty andcraftsmanship smote the competition hipand thigh.

This 3.5GHz Core i7 mod started outas a Lian-Li PC-V351 micro-ATX cube.Even with the extra room this chassisafforded Joshua over the PC-V300, hestill needed to make room for a dual-pump watercooling setup, cold cathodes,and an EVGA GeForce GTX 260 Core216 Superclocked, not to mention abeautiful, custom Plexiglas GPU waterblock he created. Blessed with a Dremel,he proceeded to make the interior of theLian-Li more holy. Still, Joshua neededthe patience of Job to install everything.

He etched the amazing Armored Angeldrawing by James Dies into his transpar-ent GPU water block cover. To dress thetool marks around the edges of theblock—or rather his third, as the first twoblocks cracked—he touched them upwith a pillar of propane fire. A customLED harness gave this angel its halo.

Next, he mounted the graven image ona Koolance CPU-350 cooling block, which

necessitated the second pump. The copperradiator was a new, unreleased model fromKoolance. (Hey, it pays to have connec-tions with one of the Chosen.)

Joshua nearly had to strike a Faustianbargain to install the big pixel-pusher, andthe integration of the cooling system provedso devilish that he had to snake some of thehoses into place using chopsticks.

Joshua customized and/or fabricatedthe wiring harnesses to be easily hiddenand no longer than necessary. He tookthe same approach with the lengths of thecoolant hoses. Another modification wasto move the drive mounts ahead to allowan 80mm fan to fit flush with the rearpanel. Rubber grommets keep the SATAdrives from passing any vibrations to thechassis. Finally, a cunningly attached baycover completely stealths the Blu-raydrive yet ejects the tray with the touch ofa finger.

Joshua credits Christopher Jahosky andJames Dies for the artwork on the outsideof the case, which he lovingly rendered invinyl. And we couldn’t help but creditJoshua for hand-crafting the top mod inCPU’s InfernaLAN competition. ▲

by Marty Sems

A n impressive 291 attendees regis-tered for an intense 26-hour gam-ing binge at the Omaha, Neb.-

based Netwar 17, held on April 24 and 25.The venue is a large hangar-like buildingtypically used for indoor volleyball, butremove the nets and install a ’Net, andyou’ve got yourself one of the largest LANevents held in the Midwest, with enoughspace left over to keep Crucial’s dodgeballtournament indoors during the rainy, grayafternoon. The stripped-down affair wasfor PC gaming only; if you want to attendNetwar, leave your gaming console and TVat home. Game tournaments were votedon by attendees prior to the event andincluded Call of Duty 4 and Left 4 Dead.Dedicated servers were also available forTeam Fortress 2 and Counter-Strike:Source. Over $6,000 in prizes was award-ed to attendees.

On Saturday, CPU hosted the first-everPC Build Challenge in which 26 DIYbuilders assembled a PC as fast as theycould for a shot at one of 10 prizes. Thefour-hour event ran from 11:00 a.m. to3:00 p.m. Saturday, and in that time, thebuilders blazed through our parts, shred-ded standoffs, and thoroughly impressedus with their screw-spinning skills. Theassembled crowd also got into the act.Builders who managed a flawless build(each error cost the builder 30 seconds)often got a roaring cheer from bystand-ers. One builder had never built a PCbefore and said he now feels confidentenough to try it on his own.

A user who goes by the handle “Bean”achieved the fastest build time at 4:45(min:sec) and walked away with the “Best$500 Family PC” from CPU’s May issue,“PC Challenge,” sponsored by Newegg.The top 10 all built PCs in less than 7 min-utes: The second- and third-place buildersplace got Gigabyte motherboards, thefourth- and fifth-place builders got Ge-Force graphics cards, and the sixth- andseventh-place builders each got high-per-formance memory kits, courtesy of Cru-cial. The remaining top 10 didn’t walkaway empty-handed, either; they each gota free one-year subscription to CPU. Wehad a great time at Netwar, as usual, andyou can bet we’ll be there next time (withmagnetic tip screwdrivers).

by Andrew Leibman


Q Forbes described you as “a relent-less arguer.” Is this accurate?

DPMy assistant nods her head(laughs). I hope I’m not argumen-

tative in a disruptive manner. Call it moreof a debate than argument. “Argument” ismore of a negative. Debate is trying to getthings sorted out and understood frommultiple angles. It’s the Jewish scholar wayof learning. You have this opinion? OK, I’lluse the other opinion. When you havebeen convinced by me, I’ll argue the otherway. That’s a very good way to make sureyou don’t agree on things too soon.

Q Pentium M marked a sea change inthe direction of PC processors. What

was your role in its development?

DP I didn’t come up with the idea.It was a few architects in my

team. My role was to grasp the beautyand importance of it and push it for-ward. Pentium M was built on the ashesof a previous design we tried to do andbasically failed. But we had some basicdesign ideas that we wanted to carry for-ward, and we found a new businessmodel that we wanted to promote. AndI don’t think we could have articulatedit well then, but it eventually turned outto focus on power and performance effi-ciency rather than frequency. It receiveda great deal of pushback throughoutIntel. The only place that liked the ideaat the time was the mobile group. Thiswas the first time they had an optimizedsolution for their program other thansqueezing and shoehorning a desktopCPU into a notebook.

Q The old paradigm was perfor-mance. The current paradigm that

replaced it is efficiency. Is there anotherparadigm coming up?

DP Phase one was to take a desktopproduct and convince people to

buy not based on frequency but on whatwe call the four vectors of mobility: perfor-mance, form factor, battery, and wirelessconnections. We increased battery by 3X,performance increased significantly, and,within a year from the invention ofCentrino, we moved the thickness fromabout 1.7 inches to 1.1 to 1.2 inches.Today, it’s even thinner. We convincedIntel to use this paradigm not just on note-books but also desktops and servers, whichhelped Intel double the pace on introduc-ing new microprocessor architecture fromfour or five years to every two years.

Phase three, which we are now in themidst of, takes this notion all the waydown to what you will call Internet in yourpocket. The first instance of this productline is the Atom, which took power andpower efficiency to way bigger extremesthan the Pentium M. The first iteration ofthis is notebooks, but we have aspirationsto really be big in handhelds and smart-phones. We like to call it Mobile InternetDevice because it’s beyond a phone.

Q You’ve already shown an 80-corechip, but are there limits to the

scaling of parallelism in processors?

DP This is a big debate. I think thathow you power this stuff is going

to be very much limited to very specificusage models. For the day-to-day things

that you do, applications do not tend toparallelize nicely. However, media orgraphics or extremely high-performancecomputing doing linear equation solutions,this kind of thing does relatively well paral-lelized—things that rely heavily on visual-ization, voice recognition, and so on.

Q Look 10 or 20 years ahead. Howwill the everyday experience of

computing differ from today?

DP I wish I knew. I do believe thatwithin 10, 15, or 20 years, the

human interface with computing is goingto be more native and more pervasive.Computers are going to be in anything wedo. Even if you’re not operating them,they will guide us or do things for us, andthe interface is going to be way more nat-ural than it is today. Are we going to havecomputing as part of our bodies, replacingor helping in human vision or thinking orwhatever? I don’t know. I hope so. ▲

Subscribers can go to www.cpumag.com/cpujul09/perlmutter for bonus content.

b a c k d o o r | q & a

David “Dadi” Perlmutter may be the most important man at Intel you’ve never heard of. From the IsraelDevelopment Center, he spearheaded the Pentium M and Centrino efforts and, through them, changed Intel’sentire course of processor evolution. Today, as executive vice president and general manager of Intel’s MobilityGroup, Perlmutter is in charge of product and architecture development across Intel’s entire microprocessor spectrum and thus is pivotal in laying the foundations on which so much of future computing will be built.

Q&A WithDavid “Dadi” PerlmutterThe Man Behind Mobility Looks Ahead


Documents

CPU Magazine 07 2009