Thomas L. McDonald has been covering games for 17
years. He is Editor-at-Large of Games Magazine.I
’ve been gaming on a jury-rigged desktop
frankencomputer for long enough to begin feel-
ing those ol’ tech-lag blues, so when VoodooPC
offered to loan me an Envy H:171 gaming laptop,
I jumped at the chance. Quad-core processing,
complete with a 17-inch screen and a pair of
GeForce 7950 GPUs, all at less than 12 lbs and
portable? Sign me up, baby.
The first thing I did was fulfill a long-standing
dream of mine to play PC games on my TV. (Hey,
I dream small.) I only recently got a decent HDTV,
and dismantling the desktop machine and hook-
ing it up in the family room was never really an
option. The Envy made it much easier, and I got
down to work playing Enemy Territory, Portal, and
Team Fortress 2. (It’s a hard job, but someone
has to do it.)
All of them looked spectacular, of course. The
frame rates were better and I could finally crank
all the graphic settings up to 11. This is gam-
ing at the bleeding edge. More to the point, the
quadruple fans and the case design kept the unit
cool even through several hours of heavy use,
erasing any doubts I had about the practicality of
quad cores in high-end gamer laptops.
But I play action games on consoles all the
time, and after a hefty chunk of Halo 3, Gears
of War, and BioShock on 360, would the experi-
ence be that different? In a word, yes—but only
in ways a hardcore PC gamer would notice.
BioShock looked great on 360, but a powerful PC
provides deeper colors, better textures, and more
convincing fog effects. This was all obvious in a
side-by-side comparison, but it wasn’t something
that struck me when I simply played BioShock
on the console, which leads to the $5,200 ques-
tion: Does a $5,600 PC outperform a $400 Xbox
enough to warrant the massive added expense?
For the true hobbyist, no question. The
clincher was Medieval 2, a game that gives my
current desktop the yips. Once I cranked the
graphics up to the max and saw hundreds of
detailed units clashing in complex and realistic
battles, I remembered what makes PC gaming so
special. And if that’s your passion, who can put a
price on it?
So, does that mean when my loaner period is
up, I’ll buy one?
Hell no!
Who has that kind of money?Hanging Out
at the Quad
Core
GAME THEORY
THOMAS
MCDONALDquick start THE BEGINNING OF THE MAGAZINE, WHERE ARTICLES ARE SMALL
10 MAXIMUMPC DECEMBER 2007
There’s always more technology news to
read, more hardware reviews to peruse,
more editor opinions to agree or dis-
agree with—more of what you get in
Maximum PC magazine but hate to wait
a whole month for. That’s why there’s
MaximumPC.com. Go there to satisfy your
tech yen until the next issue arrives. And
be sure to check out the No BS Podcast!Visit Us Online!
Some 19 years after independently dis-
covering the phenomenon known as giant
magnetoresistance (GMR), Albert Fert and
Peter Grünberg have been awarded the
2007 Nobel Prize in physics. The technolo-
gy, which describes a decrease in electrical
resistance in the presence of a magnetic
fi eld, has had a huge bearing on hard drive
development. GMR was responsible for
the dramatic growth in drive capacities in
the early 2000s, allowing hard drive heads
to become smaller and the areal density of
platters to increase.
In recent years, GMR was replaced
with an alternative tech, but it appears to
be poised for a comeback. It’s the basis
for a capacity breakthrough that Hitachijust announced. By revisiting GMR,
Hitachi researchers have discovered a
way to shrink drive heads to somewhere
between 30 and 50 nanometers—2,
times smaller than the width of a human
hair. For us it means that 4TB desktop
drives and 1TB notebook drives could be
available as early as 2011.Nobel Prize for Hard Drive Tech
Two scientists get gold-plated medals,
but we get 4TB drivesIt stands to reason you would be able to tackle a task more effectively with
many computers than you could with one—the challenge is getting the many
to work in concert. That’s why a number of U.S companies and universities are
devoting resources to the creation and application of “cloud” computing proj-
ects. Clouds are essentially clusters of computers—numbering from dozens to
thousands—that process data simultaneously.
Google and IBM recently donated 1,600 computers to be used for this
purpose to three universities. One, the University of Maryland, plans to use its
cloud to translate diffi cult foreign language texts. Students there will write the
software to take advantage of the cloud computer. Participants believe such
training is essential for keeping pace with the growing amount of data needing
to be processed.Google and IBM Donate 1,
Computers to ‘Cloud’ Project
,I
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