MaximumPC 2007 06

94 MAXIMUMPC JUNE 2007

We tackle tough reader questions on...

PBad Benchmarks PStumbleUpon

PPertelian Revisited PFalse Positives

STUMBLEUPON

In your March issue you listed lots of great exten-

sions for Firefox. Unfortunately, you didn’t put in

StumbleUpon. This is the greatest extension I’ve ever

used; it finds awesome websites that you will like with

the click of a button. It would also be good for you guys

to promote it because it relies on its users to discover

new websites.

—Ian McKenna

IT DEPENDS ON WHAT YOU MEAN BY

‘LAST MINUTE’

I would like to respond to the review of the Pertelian

X2040 by David Murphy in the May issue of

Maximum PC.

Most of the review was fair and straightforward.

Our major point of contention is David’s comments

regarding Pertelian’s stability. In the review, David

noted: “...sometimes the device locks out the entire

keyboard, rendering it useless unless you reset the

Pertelian.... Either the unit or the utility occasionally

forgets the other exists, which forces you to restart

the software....”

We have never encountered these issues during

development nor have they been reported to us by our

customers or other reviewers and are likely an isolated

or atypical issue for which we had no opportunity to

research and correct. Given this, we feel it is unfair to

characterize our entire product as “hacked together at

the last minute.”

—Alexander Jarzebinski

President, ForeSight Systems LLC

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF WILL SMITH RESPONDS:

Perhaps “hacked together at the last minute”

was unfair. However, we don’t use damning

phrases like that until we’ve done significant

testing and are extremely confident in our

assessment. We tested the X2040 on multiple

machines and experienced similar problems

on all of them. I’m surprised you’d suggest you

were unaware of the stability issues with your

SLI

Benchmark

Snafu

I was just reading “Face-Off” (April

2007) and your benchmark num-

bers for the 8800 GTX versus the

8800 GTX in SLI looked funny to

me: You report getting 3DMark06

Game 1 to run at 25.8 frames per

second on a single 8800 GTX but

only 23.7fps with two 8800 GTX

cards running in SLI. And then

you have 46.4fps for 3DMark06

Game2 on the single card and just 43.8 for an

SLI setup. Your table says SLI is slower, and I

know it’s not.

—Kyle Slater

I’ve been reading Maximum PC for a while

now and have almost always been very

happy with what I read. This month’s feature

story, however, was pretty disappointing.

Putting an 8800 up against, umm... other

8800s is a little dry. Did we actually not know

that SLI would be faster?

—Adam Ferenbach, USN

inoutYOU WRITE, WE RESPOND

EXECUTIVE EDITOR MICHAEL BROWN

RESPONDS: Yep, I made a big cut-and-paste

goof in my benchmark chart. The correct

numbers are below. As for comparing 8800

cards, ATI has been so far out of the hunt

in the GPU race that we decided to look at

how different Nvidia cards performed for the

money. First, we wanted to know if buying

a factory-overclocked 8800 GTS could beat

a more-expensive stock-clocked 8800 GTX.

Answer: It can’t. Then we wanted to see if

we’d run into CPU limitations running two

8800 GTXs in SLI. Answer: We didn’t.

CUTCOPYPASTE

In the May issue of Maximum PC, we incorrectly

identified the name of the Alienware Area 51 M9750

notebook computer. We regret the error.

BENCHMARKS

PERFORMANCE

SINGLE 8800 GTX 8800 GTX IN SLI DELTA

3DMARK06 GAME 1 (FPS) 25.8 46.4 80%

3DMARK06 GAME 2 (FPS) 23.7 43.8 85%

QUAKE 4 (FPS) 92.1 143.5 56%

FEAR (FPS) 69 126 83%

Best scores are bolded.