XXXXXXX 2005 XXXXXXXXX 107
MAXIMUM
PC
’s
CORE
COMPETENCY
CPUs, memory, and mother-
boards—the nerd trifecta, and the
very core of the PC experience.
Learn all about them next month
in this ultimate buyers guide,
almanac, and tell-all feature!GEEK QUIZ
If you thought last year’s test was
too hard, then suck it up, little
man! This year’s test
will be even more challenging,
more interesting, and more geeky!THE FASTEST
BOOT IN THE
WEST
You measure your PC’s boot time
on a calendar rather than a stop-
watch, and you’re sick of it. Next
month we go under the hood to
tune your rig so it boots faster
than a greased chicken!COMING
NEXT
MONTH
IN
APRIL 2006 MAXIMUMPC 111
SO -FUNNY-IT-
MEGAHERTZ
MAY 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.STEVE SAYS PREMIERE ELEMENTS
SUCKS
Shame on Gordon Mah Ung. I take great issue
with his 9 verdict and KickAss rating for Adobe
Premiere Elements/Photoshop Elements
(March 2006). It has been priced for and focused
on the consumer market, but it requires high-end
hardware for Premier Elements to install.
Premiere Elements requires the
SSE2 instruction set, which is only found on Intel
Pentium 4 CPUs made since 2001, and AMD pro-
cessors made in just the last couple of years.
Athlon XPs and even some Semprons
sold today do not support SSE2, and thus will
not work with this product. To make a “home-
user” product dependent on an exclusionary and
performance-insignificant instruction set doesn’t
sit right with me!
—Steve McCurdy
SENIOR EDITOR GORDON MAH UNG RESPONDS:
Premiere Elements 2.0 requires SSE2 to
run, which is written fairly explicitly on the
box. But we wouldn’t exactly call the SSE2
requirement “high-end.” SSE2 was introduced
with the original Willamette Pentium 4 core
about five years ago and has been in every
Intel processor since, as well as every K8-
core Athlon, including the Athlon 64, FX, and
X2 series. As nice as it would be for the prod-
uct to install on ancient CPUs, we generally
applaud applications that make full use of a
newer technology, whether it’s SSE2, AMD64,
or dual cores. It’s kind of like running FEAR
on a GeForce 3 card. The game might load
and it might even run, but why bother?
LINUX THE NOT-SO-EASY WAY
Thanks to Will Smith for his article called “Install
Linux The Easy Way” in January 2006. It provided
the impetus to dust off an old system and finally
give Linux a shot. However, I had a problem when
I was following the instructions.
I couldn’t get my burned CD with the Ubuntu
distro to be recognized as a bootable disk. I kept
getting a “Non-system or disk error.” After much
head-scratching and web surfing, I found a pro-
gram called ISO Recorder.
Using it, I was able to burn the Ubuntu ISO
file to a disc, which booted fine. Did I miss some-
thing? What did the ISO Recorder software do
anyway to give me a valid Ubuntu install disk?
—Lloyd Noel
EDITOR IN CHIEF WILL SMITH RESPONDS:
Your CD mastering program didn’t know
how to handle the ISO file, which is simply
an already-built disc image. If you burn the
Ubuntu ISO file as a plain data disc instead
of as an image, your computer won’t be able
to boot off it. Nero, our burning app of choice,
automatically makes the image file into a
working disc; other burning apps, including
the one built into Windows, don’t.IS AGP REALLY DEAD?
In the March 2006 In/Out section, you recom-
mend against buying an AGP card, instead sug-
gesting that readers save up to upgrade to a
PCI-E mobo and card later on. But what if my cur-
rent card is on the verge of biting the dust and I
only have enough funds to purchase a videocard?
You say that manufacturers won’t put their latest
GPUs on AGP cards, but what about the nVidia
7800 GS? You can get it in AGP trim, and it’s sell-
ing for $300. Is it worthwhile getting that card
over an older 6800 Ultra, or should I go with ATI
and purchase an X850 XT card? I want the card to
last, performance wise, at least one to two years.
What would you recommend?
—Alex PirogovEXECUTIVE EDITOR MICHAEL BROWN
RESPONDS: We were as surprised as anyone
to see nVidia announce an AGP version of its
high-end GeForce 7800 GPU. I haven’t tested
it, because we no longer cover AGP video-
cards, but I would expect it to give both the
Radeon X850 XT and the 6800 Ultra a run for
their money. If you’re on a tighter budget, the
AGP version of the 6800 GS is a terrific value,
too. Here again, however, you should take
my comments with a grain of salt, because
we’ve only tested the PCI Express version of
that GPU.
If you’re a gamer, one of the biggest
reasons to favor either of these GPUs over an
AGP version of ATI’s X850 XT is the formers’
support for Shader Model 3.0. A significant
number of game developers are moving
to take advantage of the additional power
that SM 3.0 offers, and ATI’s chips prior
to the X1000 series don’t support it. That
doesn’t mean new games won’t run on those
chips—developers will no doubt include code
to fall back to SM 2.0 while running on older
GPUs—but you could lose out.