T
his month’s videocard roundup was planned in
anticipation of ATI and nVidia shipping their next-
generation GPUs. I was really looking forward to
an epic battle, with the two most important companies
in the PC graphics industry arming their partners to the teeth
with powerful new silicon. Alas, the war was over with nary a
shot fired. Unable to provide us with either an R520 GPU or a
CrossFire dual-videocard setup, ATI pretty much folded its tents
and skulked home.
In fact, one of my biggest challenges in producing this story
was convincing ATI vendors to send cards for review. But I guess
I can’t blame them. If I was a videocard manufacturer staring
down the double barrels of nVidia’s GeForce 7800 GT and 7800
GTX, I’d leave my high-end Radeon cards in their holsters, too.
ATI, Connect3D, and Sapphire Technology finally stepped up and
supplied us with five cards, two of which fared very well in our
benchmarks. Who’d have thought that you’d ever be able to buy
a videocard with a 256-bit interface to 256MB of memory for less
than $200? Or that you’d be able to buy a card with that much
memory and a 16-pipe GPU for less than $300? As poorly as ATI
has executed at the high end, its Radeon X800 GT and X800 XL
GPUs are terrific values at their price points.Nonetheless, we all need ATI to pull out of its funk—and by “we”
I mean consumers, videocard manufacturers, game developers, and
even (as odd as it sounds) nVidia. Competition drives innovation, it
keeps prices reasonable, and it moves the industry forward.
Speaking of innovation, I was disappointed that Gigabyte
couldn’t get me its GV-3D1-68GT in time to include in this month’s
roundup—the card showed up two days after I had to close the
story. Unlike the GV-3D1 videocard/motherboard bundle I panned in
our July 2005 issue, this single-slot, dual-GPU card will work in any
PCI Express motherboard, according to Gigabyte. It’s powered by
two nVidia GeForce 6800 GT GPUs with dual 256MB frame buffers,
and it’s capable of driving up to four independent displays (via two
DVI and two VGA ports). You can be sure I’ll have a full review of this
big boy in our next issue.W
ith Plextor’s PX-716 (in both the parallel and SATA versions)
still at the top of our list for optical drives, I get a lot of angry
emails about the slow ripping speed of the drive—sometimes about
the audio ripping, but mostly about extracting the contents of DVD-
Video. When I say “angry,” I mean a string of expletives so creative
and exotic it would make Trey Parker blush.
Plextor’s drives have always leaned toward the conservative side,
especially when it comes to ripping discs, emphasizing accuracy over
speed. This almost always works to your advantage—do you really
want to manually scan every audio CD rip for errors before you file
the disc away? Or have your DVD recompression job stumble on a rip
error two and a half hours into transcoding? What’s more, the PX-716Arestricts CSS-encrypted DVD-Video read-
ing to 2x. No, this isn’t to punish you Netflix
“burn ‘n’ return” types—it’s to minimize
noise when you’re watching movies.
Fortunately, you can disable this
restriction using the bundled Plextools
software. Launch Plextools by double-
clicking the Plextor icon in the System
Tray, select Drive Settings from the
menu, click the Advance tab, and check
the box next to Enable SpeedRead
CD/DVD. If it’s grayed out, update your
drive’s firmware and the Plextools soft-
ware, both available at http://www.plextor.com.
With SpeedRead enabled, a 4.13GB
single-layer DVD that previously took 26:47 (min:sec) to extract was
ripped in only 6:51 (min:sec). Now that’s more like it!
Now I’ve got to go check my email, where I’m sure to begin
receiving angry, expletive-filled messages from the Motion Picture
Association of America.Logan Decker
At tempts to Rip DVDs Faster
Circumventing the speed restrictions of
Plextor’s Kick Ass PX-716A62 MA XIMUMPC NOVEMBER 2005
in the lab
It turns out there was
nothing wrong with the
video ripping on PX-716A
drives—they were just
running slow to maximize
your rip quality.REAL-WORLD TESTING: RESULTS. ANALYSIS. RECOMMENDATIONSGigabyte’s new
single-slot, dual-
GeForce 6800 GT card
is intriguing; unfortu-
nately, it arrived two days
too late to be included in
this month’s roundup.Michael Brown
Surveys the
Videocard Scene
Benchmarking a battalion of videocards was a cakewalk
compared to dealing with some reluctant vendors