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WISE WORDS FROM
THE SARGEDREAM MACHINE LETDOWN
I’ve been reading your magazine
for several years now, and I have
always enjoyed the reviews and
articles. I’m especially excited
about your Dream Machine
every year. This year however,
I was very disappointed in
some of the parts you chose.
For starters, the theme to me
seemed a cheap excuse to use
an Intel platform. A “future-
proof” Dream Machine? If
I were building the best PC
possible, I would not think
about whether it would support
parts three years down the
road. For example, you stated
in your magazine that ISA slots
remained on motherboards for
years after components stopped
being made for them. Why
would PCI-E be any different?
Especially because I have a
feeling AGP graphics cards
will be made for many years
to come. DDR2? Currently,
miniscule advantages to DDR
make it unnecessary, and the
availability and price of DDR
memory don’t help.
Also, there’s no reason to go
with an Intel platform except for
the fact that it may overclock
more than an AMD—I’m sure
you’ve seen the performance
advantage of an AMD system
over an Intel system in games
such as Doom 3. And when I
read which graphics card you
picked, I could hardly sit still.The nVidia-based
cards are currently
more future-proof
than any ATI
product, with Pixel
Shader 3.0 support
and SLI capabilities.
—RYAN FLAGLERI must say, it was a
big letdown to see
that you dropped the
6800UE videocard
from your Dream
Machine just because
it took the extra
slots. I thought the
point of the Dream
Machine was to have
the best of the best—
with nothing holding
you back. The
6800UE was clearly
the better choice
then and definitely
now. I banish you to
the land of Fruitopia,
to make me juice.
—COLIN HARTSENIOR EDITOR GORDON MAH UNG
RESPONDS: So the backlash begins.
No, not against us, but PCI Express,
DDR2, and the Radeon X800. We’ve
been around long enough to have
seen this pattern before: “What?
Why use PCI when VL Bus cards
clock at 40MHz?”; “What? DDR is
a joke, why would I want that over
PC133?”; “What? Why bother with
AGP when PCI cards are just as fast
as AGP if not faster?”
We agree that AGP cards will
be around for many years to come
(shoot, you can still find PCI graph-
ics cards), but we predict that the
ultra high-end cards will need PCI
Express in a mere 12 to 24 months.
Similarly, in 18 months DDR2 will
firmly occupy the high-end for both
AMD and Intel. Believe me, if we
could have secured a PCI Express
chipset and board for Athlon
64 FX and a CPU that supported
DDR2, we would have gone for it.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case.
And because the memory con-
troller is embedded in the core of
Athlon 64 FX chips (one of the keyreasons they’re so freaking fast),
you would have to toss your mother-
board and CPU to switch to DDR2 in
18 months.
As far as our choice of graphics
card, it was a close, close contest.
The 6800 Ultra and X800 XT Platinum
Edition were virtually deadlocked
on performance. We chose the
X800 based on its svelte formfactor
only—the cards performed about
the same.ANOTHER WAY TO GET
‘TRUE’ SURROUND
I have several questions
concerning PC sound, in
particular 5.1 surround sound.
In last month’s Dream Machine
article, you stated that the
Logitech Z-680 speakers were
selected in part because they
have both digital and analog
inputs. This was said to be
the only way to get “true 5.
surround sound” from both
DVD movies and games. Because
you’re using an Audigy 2 ZS
Gamer soundcard, couldn’t you
just connect the analog outputs
from the soundcard to the
analog inputs of any amplifiedmultimedia 5.1 speakers and get
true surround sound? As long as
the speakers have discrete analog
inputs to front left and right,
center channel, rear left and
right, and subwoofer, all of the
decoding would then take place
in the soundcard. Creative says
the Audigy 2 ZS is able to decode
Dolby Digital (AC-3), DTS, and
every flavor of game surround
and enhancement I can think of,
such as DirectSound, OpenAL,
EAX, and A3D. Am I missing
something?ASSOCIATE EDITOR JOSH NOREM
RESPONDS: You’re not missing any-
thing at all, Eric—you’re perfectly
correct. Because the Audigy 2 ZS
soundcard includes a hardware
decoder for Dolby Digital and DTS
audio streams, we could certainly
just plug the analog connectors
from the Logitech Z-680 into the ana-
log connectors on the Audigy and
get discrete sound via the onboard
decoder. Though our write-up
certainly emphasized the presence
of both analog and digital inputs,
that was not the sole reason we
chose the Z-680 system. The primaryI was well aware that optical drive
speeds today are high enough to
shatter a CD but I worried about it
happening to me about as much as I
worry about getting hit by lightning.
Well, it just so happens that I
came across a CD containing some
important data that had a tiny crack
(no more than a centimeter) starting
at the center of the disk. I figured,
what the heck, I’ll just drag off the
CD any files that the drive can still
read and burn a new CD with what
I salvaged. Imagine the look on my
face when I heard a sound like gunfire
and breaking glass coming from my
CD-RW drive. The enclosed image is
what came out of the drive when my
trembling finger hit Eject.
Fortunately, it was a cheap I/O
Magic Magicspin 52/24/52 and not a
prized possession like a Plextor DVD
writer. But I did want to put the word
out to anyone who might be tempted
to try to recover a cracked CD: slow
is better. Nero has a bundled program
called DriveSpeed that I know would
have helped. I hate hindsight.
—SSG JEFFREY JONESFEATURES EDITOR LOGAN DECKER
RESPONDS: You have our sympathies.
Once you hear that awful sound, you never,
ever feel safe again in this world. But take
comfort in knowing that you may spare
countless others the same trauma. Your
suggestion of using DriveSpeed to back
up data from damaged discs is a great
one. For those who aren’t familiar with it,
DriveSpeed is a utility that comes with
Ahead’s Nero ; it limits the read speed of
your optical drive. You can find it on the
installation CD, and also in the Nero direc-
tory on your hard drive under Nero Toolkit.
If you notice cracks or flaws on the surface
of a disc, use DriveSpeed to crank down
the speed of the drive as low as it will go
before attempting to back up the disc’s
contents. And while you’re at it, you may
want to put your pets in the other room.08 MA XIMUMPC OCTOBER 2004
DREAM MACHINE LETDOWNThe nVidia-based
cards are currently
more future-proof
than any ATI
product, with Pixel
Shader 3.0 support
and SLI capabilities.I must say, it was a
big letdown to see
that you dropped the
6800UE videocard
from your Dream
Machine just because
it took the extra
slots. I thought the
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