PDigicam Testing PAMD64 Extensions
PLaCie’s Silverscreen PCreative’s X-Fi
XXXXXXX 2005 XXXXXXXXX 107
MAXIMUM
PC
’s
SECURE WINDOWS
NOW
If you haven’t taken a fresh look at your
PC’s security lately, then you might as
well walk barefoot over broken glass
in the middle of the night through the
bad side of town with your cash-stuffed
wallet taped to your butt. Maximum PC
takes you through every step of locking
down your PC, using what the suits call
“best practices.”THE MAXIMUM PC
GAME AWARDS
Think of it as the Cannes Film Festival of
gaming, only it takes place in South San
Francisco, California, nobody dresses
up, and it’s juried by a bunch of dorks.
Still, there’s nothing less grand about the
greatest moments in gaming from the
past 12 months, and it’s no less an honor
to be bestowed Game of the Year.DIGITIZE AND
ARCHIVE YOUR
OLD FILM!
Old photographs. Slides. Negatives.
Transparencies. You’ve got ‘em, and
they’re all just a cigarette butt away
from going up in smoke. Maximum PC
takes the guesswork out of scanning,
digitizing, and archiving your images,
whether they were taken yesterday or
100 years ago.COMING
NEXT
MONTH
INJANUARY 2006 MAXIMUMPC 111
ABSOLUTELY
FRAGULOUS
FEBRUARY
ISSUE
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 letter to 300 words. Letters may be edited for space and clarity. Due to the vast amount of
e-mail we receive, we cannot personally respond to each letter.problems, so it can be done. Some cards may not
play nice with others, but I can attest by experience
that at the very least the EVGA and XFX cards work
together wonderfully.
—B.J. KohoEXECUTIVE EDITOR MICHAEL BROWN
RESPONDS: The print media has its advan-
tages, but timeliness often isn’t one of them.
At the time it was written, our CrossFire vs. SLI
Head2Head accurately stated that ATI’s dual-
videocard solution enabled users to mix video-
card pairs, and that nVidia’s solution did not.
The situation changed after we went to press,
when nVidia released its Forceware version
81.85 drivers on October 20. As long as you’re
running that driver, you can mix and match
videocards from different nVidia partners, if
each card is based on the same GPU. But this
begs the question of nVidia: If all it took to
enable this feature was a driver update, why
was the restriction there in the first place?MORE 64-BIT WINDOWS WOES
I really wish you had included the fact that the
Creative X-Fi soundcard isn’t compatible with the
64-bit edition of Windows XP Pro in the review of
that soundcard (November 2005).
I contacted Creative Labs and was told a patch
would be available by January 2006. Honestly, I
spent $400 Canadian on a Fatal1ty card that I can’t
even use. I even bought new speakers to go with
it, for another big chunk of change. I built my own
Dream Machine and now I can’t use it to its poten-
tial, which sucks.
Please think of 64-bit users in the future when
you’re writing reviews. Don’t worry though, I still
love you guys.
— Neo TsunamiSENIOR EDITOR GORDON MAH UNG RESPONDS:
The X-Fi isn’t incompatible with Windows
XP Professional x64 Edition—the drivers
just aren’t very solid yet. Today Creative just
released an updated driver for 64-bit Windows.
We normally only review products using
the most popular version of the OS, namely
Windows XP Pro 32-bit edition. We just don’t
see enough people using x64 Edition, Linux, or
older versions of Windows to make it worth the
extra time it would take to test multiple OSes.
We also recommended that x64 users dual
boot to account for the lack of drivers for x64.
And we still love you too, Neo.WHERE DOES THE RAPTOR FALL?
In your recent reviews of next-gen hard drives,
you continually state that the WD Raptor has seen
its last days and that people would be better served
with a higher-capacity hard drive. I disagree.
The Raptor has one feature that none of the
other drives have—10,000rpm spindle speed!
When you actually compare benchmarks you
see that the Raptor can still kick some 7200rpm
ass. The only advantage the new drives have over
the Raptor are capacity and buffer size. Secondly,
the Raptor is not designed to be a mass storage
drive. I keep my movies and music on a second,
high-capacity hard drive, as all people should. With
the Raptor performing significantly better than any
7200rpm drive in most benchmarks, it seems a lot
more tempting than your reviews seem to state.
—Andy GifftSENIOR EDITOR JOSH NOREM RESPONDS: This
is a great question, Andy, and you’re not the
first Raptor-owner to write in voicing your
disapproval of our sudden change of heart
towards our old flame, the WD Raptor. The
truth is, for the record, the WD Raptor is still
the fastest single drive on the market, hands
down. We won’t deny that its seek times
destroy those of its 7200rpm competitors, and
that its average transfer rates are also better.
It’s the clear winner when it comes to straight-
up performance, but despite this advantage,
there are still several reasons why we prefer
high-capacity 7200rpm drives to the speedier,
smaller Raptor.
First, the new-generation 7200rpm drives
have a massive areal density advantage over
the Raptor, as well as buffers that are twice
as large. These advantages allow them to
perform at a level that is just slightly below
the Raptor, while boasting capacities up to
500GB (compared with the Raptor’s 74GB).
In our benchmarks, the Raptor is only faster
than these next-gen drives by the smallest of
margins, and some 7200rpm drives have even
surpassed the Raptor in our Application Index
benchmark too. Because these drives are, for
our purposes, just as fast if not faster than the
Raptor, and have enormous storage capacities,
they are inherently superior to the Raptor, in
our opinion. Especially considering the Raptor
costs almost $200, which is the same price as
WD’s new Caviar SE16 400GB drive. If it were
our money, we’d take the Caviar drive over the
Raptor any day.