IT ALL STARTED WITH “Dream Machine”,
on both the cover of the first issue of
Maximum PC and its progenitor, Boot
magazine. Over the years, megabucks
Dream Machines have been just one of
several signature cover features. Other
regulars include “Gear of the Year’,
“Tech Preview” and “Speed up Your PC”.
Head-to-heads pitching Intel against its
rival AMD have been popular down the
years, as have features celebrating or
denigrating the arrival of a new version
of the 800lb gorilla of operating systems,
Microsoft Windows. We’ve enjoyed giving
Microsoft a kicking now and then.
Of course, “Build It” covers of all
flavors represent the beating heart of
the magazine, covering a huge arrayof remits, from sub $300 budget rigs
to special-purpose PCs for everything
from rendering to gaming and music
production. It’s fun to see how the
magazine’s look has evolved over the
years. The early days were high impact
but, let’s face it, low production values.
What’s intriguing is just how quickly
Maximum PC settled on a look that really
worked. Following the late 1998 rebrand
from Boot to Maximum PC, by 2001 the
magazine had settled on the italicized
masthead and cover layout that still
survives today. Just a few years after
that, the internal design of the magazine
and details such as fonts had been honed
into pretty much the same, polished, slick
printed product you see today.SIMPLY THE BEST
With nearly 300 issues to
choose from, here’s our pick
of the best Maximum PC
covers from over the years
SEPTEMBER 1998
It ain’t exactly pretty, but it is the very
first issue of Maximum PC. I ssue 001
showcases a “Dream Machine” up front
and cent er and also touches on Windows
98 as the OS du jour. Our coverage of the
“first benchmarks” of recordable DVD
drives is a reminder of just how cheap
and convenient external storage has now
become. Imagine having to burn data to
disc , now that thumb drives with 10s of
gigabytes of capacity are almost free!JUNE 2006
As Windows 11 rolls out, June 2006 offers
a reminder of the pitfalls of new builds of
Microsoft’s ubiquitous OS. We sampled a
beta version of Vista and found it lacking.
Vista was arguably the first modern
Windows, complete with 3D accelerated
GUI, advanced power management,
new networking subsystem, and more.
But after testing, editor Will Smith was
underwhelmed. Hardly a first for a new
version of Windows and far from the last.HOLIDAY 2010
No PC-related compendium is complete
without a reference to the game that dare
not speak its name, Duke Nukem Forever.
This issue appeared over 10 years ago
when the game was already 13 years in
the making. It eventually appeared in
summer 2011 and is still listed on the
Guin ness World Records website as the
longest development for a video game (14
years and 43 days). As it turned out, Duke
Nukem Forever wasn’ t worth the wait.SEPTEMBER 2011
Don’t judge a magazine by its cover? We
are giving this issue the nod on looks
alone. The killer bee vibe was courtesy
of a then-prototype Coolermaster case
that packed no fewer than three Nvidia
GeForce GTX 580 graphics cards and
an Intel Core i7-2600K chip running
overclo cked at 4.8GHz. Throw in a pair of
240GB SSDs, 16GB of RAM and you have
a pretty beefy machine for $12,888 , with
three 30-inch monitors at $2,300 each.the best of Maximum PC
52 MAXIMU MPC FEB 2022