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.UPGRADING
A-TO-Z
How strong is your upgrading fu? Newbs
rightly feel a sense of trepidation install-
ing a $600 prize videocard, but even
power users would be wise to refresh
themselves on the basics of choos-
ing, buying, and installing upgrades for
their rigs. With big, colorful pictures
and a minimum of three-syllable words,
Maximum PC goes from component to
component showing you which upgrades
matter the most.THE MAXIMUM PC
GIFT GUIDE
We’re geek on the outside, and if you cut
us in half, you’d see geek on the inside,
too. So you can trust our judgment when it
comes to finding the best gifts of the year
for the geek in your life.* From the Magic
8-Ball of the 21st century to the DIY robot
beer waitress, we’ve got fun stuff for
every budget. Operators are standing by!
* Or for yourself—it’s none of our beeswax.GET ON OUR CASE!
We’re beating the crap out of a new
truckload of new PC cases, including
Cooler Master’s latest flagship enclosure,
the CM Stacker. Check in next month for
the verdicts!PLUS...
Reviewed... Western Digital’s 400GB
Caviar drive and the second rev of
Zalman’s legendary Resorator!COMING
NEXT
MONTH
NOVEMBER 2005 MAXIMUMPC 103
IT-TAKES-A-
VILLAGE-IDIOT
HOLIDAY
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.you reviewed the Cenatek Rocket Drive. I have
always wondered why this pricey piece of hard-
ware has never graced a Dream Machine setup
to host the pagefile.sys. Would you consider
testing this to see if there’s a noticeable enough
performance gain (and what types of applica-
tions benefit most) for the extreme PC enthusiast
with nothing better to do with $3,000?
—Adam Morris
SENIOR EDITOR GORDON MAH UNG RESPONDS:
The primary reason we’ve never used a
solid-state drive in the Dream Machine is
that we haven’t found one large enough or
with enough features to make us sacrifice an
expansion slot. The Rocket Drive is fast but
it lacks a battery backup. We’ve also done
enough game-loading tests from RAM drives
to know that with today’s games, the CPU is
the bottleneck, not the hard drive, because
of all the compressed textures, sounds, and
maps being used.
MEASURING NOISE IN THE LAB
In the September issue you reviewed 10 CPU
heatsink/fan units. You measured the decibel
output of each, and the measurements you
reported were grouped in the 60+dBA range. In
the same issue, in the How2 section, you tout
the Gigabyte G-Power CPU cooler, and state
that it produces 21dBA, yet in the CPU cooling
feature you rate that same cooler at 66/63dBA.
Which is it? On Gigabyte’s website the G-Power
is rated at 21.3–40.1dBA. This tells me that the
manufacturer’s methods are radically different
than your Lab tests. What gives?
—Matthew
ASSOCIATE EDITOR JOSH NOREM RESPONDS:
Measuring sound output from an individual
component immersed in a sea of silicon is
very difficult, and we knew that going in.
Still, we decided to try to make it a “real-
world” measurement of sound output, so we
built an enormous box full of foam, went to
the quietest room in the building, laid the
mobo and fan inside the box, connected our
PSU through a tiny hole we cut in the side,
and pointed the decibel meter at the CPU
cooler from 24-inches away. This is the num-
ber we report in our noise tests.
The dBA measurement provided by a
fan’s manufacturer is the noise a fan puts
out all by itself. The manufacturers aren’t
lying in their assessments of a fan’s noise
output, we’re just measuring noise in differ-
ent ways. As a general rule, we found that
the fans whose manufacturer’s noise rating
was above 40 decibels were comparatively
loud, while anything under 30 seemed quiet
to our ears.STOP YOUR WHINING
I find the editor’s letter in the October 2005 issue
hypocritcal. You gave Windows XP a 10 verdict
when you reviewed it, and now you think it’s crap.
You’re looking forward to Vista, but you want the
old version fixed. What the hell would Microsoft get
out of spending money to fix XP when the company
is going to “upgrade” everyone soon?
So while you’re using XP to view my email, do
us all a favor and get yourself a Mac or something
so you can stop whining.
—Alex PassmoreEDITOR IN CHIEF WILL SMITH RESPONDS: I’ve
gotten more email about my October edito-
rial than any other in the last five months,
and the issue has been on newsstands for
just a week.
The fact is, I spent a little more than eight
months exclusively using Linux last year (see
“Making the Linux Switch,” February 2005).
And I’ve used a Mac for the last seven months
for a similar forthcoming article. So I’m famil-
iar with the alternatives to Windows, and I
know exactly what problems are inherent to
the various OSes.
At launch, Windows XP was the best ver-
sion of Windows ever; there was no way I
could have looked ahead four years and seen
the terrible consequences of a few seemingly
trivial bone-headed decisions (the inability for
normal users to use their machine as anything
but an admin, for instance; or the fact that
XP shipped with its rudimentary firewall dis-
abled by default; or the infection vector that
is ActiveX). Sure, you and I have no problem,
because we know not to install WeatherBug
and not to click email attachments, but don’t
tell me your mom’s computer isn’t loaded with
malware. The problems plaguing Windows
would be reasonably easy to fix—Microsoft
just has to commit to make the fixes.
Will I upgrade to Vista if Microsoft doesn’t
fix XP? Probably not. If Microsoft is serious
about selling people Vista (not to mention the
hardware upgrades they’ll need to get the OS
to run), the company needs to make current
disgruntled Windows users happier.MA XIM
UM
PC
’sIN