IN THE
HEY-WE’RE-ONE-HUNDRED!JANUARY ISSUE OF
COMING
NEXT MONTH
MAXIMUMPC
LETTERS POLICY: MAXIMUM PC invites
your thoughts and comments. Send them to
[email protected]. Please include your full
name, town, and telephone number, and limit your
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BIG GIGANTIC
TECHNOLOGY
PREVIEW
Take a look at the gear
of next year! Concepts
that were once little
more than geek bedtime
fantasies are finally
arriving, and Maximum
PC reports on which
ones to expect in 2005,
and how they’re going to
affect PC power users.HALF LIFE 2: THE REVIEW!
Maximum PC staff were among
the first to play the astounding
sequel to Half-Life. We give you
an exclusive look under the
hood of Valve’s Source engine,
and you’ll get our definitive,
no-mercy review of the most
anticipated PC game in history!POWER SUPPLY
TORTURE TEST
Seven big-rig power supplies are
put through a gauntlet of non-UN
approved “interrogations.” We
sweat them, deprive them of sta-
ble power, and stress them to
their very limits. Wait until you
see which manufacturer’s PSU
comes out on top.100 Issues of Unreasonably
Harsh Reviews!
That’s right—January 2005
marks the 100th issue of
Maximum PC! Check out the
highlights.CUT, COPY, PASTE
➤ In our October review of the
Falcon Northwest Mach V Exotix,
the clock speed of base CPU was
incorrectly identified by the ven-
dor as a 3.8GHz Pentium 4. Falcon
Northwest says the CPU it used
to overclock with was actually a
3.6GHz Pentium 4 560.willing to accept, and let our legis-
lators know how we feel about bills
(such as the DMCA and the INDUCE
Act) that restrict our rights in order
to prop up aging business models.
And if you think the recording
industry’s response to online music
sales is pathetic, check out http://www.
cinemanow.com, the first movie down-
loading service to get Hollywood’s
blessing. You can tell how much the
motion picture industry is committed
to fighting illegal downloads with
legitimate purchases by checking out
the premium pay-per-download con-
tent on the front page of CinemaNow’s
web site— Bumfights.DOES THIS MEAN YOU
LIKE THELMA, TOO?
In the verdict box for the AA
Duramax review (November 200,
page 80), you have Ginger as the
“ ” and -ary Ann as the “n“.
These are clearly reversed I’ve
heard there are people who prefer
Ginger to -ary Ann, but they
aren’t normal. Perhaps you could
make the negative -rs. Howell.
That would be pretty clear cut.
—STUART BOREENEDITOR IN CHIEF GEORGE JONES
RESPONDS: Stuart, we went back
to the show’s archives and came
to this conclusion: You’re right.
Senior Editor Gordon Mah Ung
fought us on this one, but after
being forced to undergo a rigorous,
24-hour Gilligan’s Island marathon,
he now admits to the error of his
ways. Unfortunately, during the
course of his reconditioning,
Gordon developed the really
annoying habit of referring to
everyone as “little buddy.”APPLE ERRATA: OUR BAD
I just wanted to let you know
that I spotted an error in your
November issue (“Deciphering
Digital 2ights -anagement”),
where you state that Apple
allows users to authorize up
to three computers for songs
downloaded from the iTunes
-usic Store. While this was
our policy previously, we nowallow users to authorize up to
five computers. And by the
way, was that a scene from
Battle Royale on the screen of
the Portable -edia Center from
Creative Labs (reviewed on
page )?
—JAY DAVIS,
APPLECARE SUPPORTFEATURES EDITOR LOGAN DECKER
RESPONDS: Thanks for writing, Jay—
our apologies. We weren’t aware
that Apple increased the number of
PCs that could be simultaneously
authorized to play back tracks pur-
chased on iTunes. That’s awesome,
and is a more generous policy than
that offered by Napster, for example,
which still restricts your downloads
to three simultaneous PCs.
And yes, that was Battle Royale
(Winner, Best Picture, Maximum PC
Movie Awards 2001-3) on the portable
media center thingy. We don’t know
how those VOB files got on our hard
drive, but there they were, so we con-
verted them to WMV.
Finally, we’re delighted to
acknowledge Maximum PC’s fans
over at AppleCare Support.RAID GAMING PERFORMANCE:
DID YOU TRY EVERYTHING?
This is in regards to your October
200 “In the Lab” story regarding
2AID’s inability to accelerate
game-level load times because of
the CPU-oriented decompression
that occurs in most games. Have
you tried un-zipping all the .pk
files on your Doom 3 install and
then checking level load times?
When Doom 3 is loading, it has to
unzip all those .pk files, which
probably puts a huge load on the
CPU vs. disk I/O.
—JOON YOOSENIOR EDITOR GORDON MAH UNG
RESPONDS: We actually did this for
the RAID test, and it didn’t help. Our
tests revealed that unzipped pak
files actually took longer to load than
compressed files. My suspicion is
that, much like drive imaging, you
get better overall I/O decompress-
ing a file after it’s been moved thandecompressing a file and leaving it
on the hard drive. Say you can get
50MB/s moving an uncompressed
file (the maximum straight through-
put of a single drive). You can proba-
bly get 60MB or 70MB by reading the
compressed file and decompressing
it on the other side. Of course, this
assumes you’re using a somewhat
powerful CPU. We used a 3.2GHz P
with 1GB of RAM for our testing.IN DEFENSE OF TWO
GIRLS KISSING
I’m writing to express my
sympathy to you and your fellow
editors who have to field letters
like the one from Clint Guillory
printed in the Nov. @0 issue. It
truly baffles me how someone
can be so narrow-minded as to
take offense at an excellent and
humorous review (October 200’s
review of Singles: Flirt Up Your
Life ). Who is he accusing of being
“horny kids”? It’s obvious Clint
is the one who needs to grow
up. Trust me, the majority of
your readers don’t agree with the
extreme jerks.
—JOE HARRIGANSAVE THE HIPPOS!
When I opened up the November
issue and turned to the graphics
card review to check out the
hippopotamus trivia ;typically
found in the text beneath the
benchmark chart=, I was shocked
to see that the trivia is being
discontinued. How can you
do this to us? That was one
of the best parts of the whole
magazine. Can there be no more
hippopotamus facts that you
could include?
—YEHUDA CRUZINBRITZHIPPO AFICIONADO WILL SMITH
RESPONDS: I have one word for you,
Yehuda: wildebeests. Oh, by the way,
did you know that hippopotamus
babies are called calves and weigh
about 66 pounds? That’s a big baby. n10 MA XIMUMPC DECEMBER 2004