MaximumPC 2005 11

MINIMUM BS • NOVEMBER 2005 YOUR NEXT SOUNDCARD? Is Creative’s spankin’ new X-Fi better than your Audigy? NEXT-GEN WI-FI EXPLAINE ...

How Windows Won Me Over !IHt?HtM Ed Word Please send feedback and pie to [email protected]. NOVEMBER 2005 MA XIMUMPC  I t’s st ...

Quick Start It’s been real, P4. Sorry to see you go ............................... 10 Head2Head LightScribe or photo printer fo ...

quickstart THE BEGINNING OF THE MAGAZINE, WHERE ARTICLES ARE SMALL S hakespeare himself could have penned the tragic rise and fa ...

Multi-Core Programming FAST FORWARD TOM HALFHILL Next-Gen DRM Sucks! While proponents behind the next- gen optical for- mats hav ...

quickstart THE BEGINNING OF THE MAGAZINE, WHERE ARTICLES ARE SMALL 12 MA XIMUMPC NOVEMBER 2005 What has Ageia been working on s ...

quickstart THE BEGINNING OF THE MAGAZINE, WHERE ARTICLES ARE SMALL 14 MA XIMUMPC NOVEMBER 2005 iBOOKS CAUSE iRIOT A sale of used ...

W e’ve been pretty laid back about it up to now, but it’s time to put the smackdown on bad disc-labeling jobs, be they quick chi ...

PRINT DURABILITY In a perfect world, this wouldn’t even be an issue, because we’d all handle our DVDs and CDs exactly like manuf ...

watchdodogg MAXIMUM PC TAKES A BITE OUT OF BAD GEAR Got a bone to pick with a vendor? Been spiked by a fly- by-night operation? ...

Recall Alert delivery method: You download an executable that downloads the antivirus scanner along with program trials of other ...

22 MA XIMUMPC NOVEMBER 2005 PHOTOGRAPHY BY SAMANTHA BERG ...

XXXXXXX 2005 MA XIMUMPC 00 G ood evening, ladies and gentlemen! Welcome to the main event! Maximum PC’s 2005 videocard show- dow ...

24 MA XIMUMPC NOVEMBER 2005 BUYERS GUIDE The acronym stands for “graphics pro- cessing unit,” which is the integrated cir- cuit ...

XXXXXXX 2005 MA XIMUMPC 00 BUYERS GUIDE NOVEMBER 2005 MA XIMUMPC 25 Your PC will have one of two types of videocard bus inter- f ...

6 MA XIMUMPC NOVEMBER 2005 $300 BROUHAHA If you’ve been waiting to upgrade from an eight-pipe videocard, nVidia’s recent intro- ...

 MA XIMUMPC NOVEMBER 2005 $500 SMACKDOWN This is the price category in which ATI suffers most over the delay in shipping its n ...

30 MA XIMUMPC NOVEMBER 2005 $600 SHOWDOWN Throwing ATI’s X850 XT Platinum Edition into the ring against nVidia’s powerhouse GeFo ...

XXXXXXX 2005 MA XIMUMPC 00 VIDEO QUALITY BENCHMARKS Games are one of the best measures of a videocard’s rendering horsepower, bu ...

32 MA XIMUMPC NOVEMBER 2005 NVIDIA’S SLI VS. ATI’S CROSSFIRE When nVidia announced its Scalable Link Interface (SLI) technology ...