MaximumPC 2006 12

W

e know how it is. You’ve heard our warnings that Direct3D 10 is right

around the corner, but your old videocard is sucking wind and there’s

a pair of Benjamins burning a hole in your pocket. What’s a PC enthusiast to do?

ATI owned this price point with its X1800 GTO in our August 2006

roundup, but Nvidia counter-attacked by lopping off four pixel-shaders and

one vertex shader from its GeForce 7900 core to deliver the 7900 GS.

EVGA offers several 7900 GS SKUs, including this wickedly overclocked

Signature Series. EVGA gooses Nvidia’s reference-design GPU clock speed

to 520MHz (up from 450MHz) and its 256MB of memory to 700MHz (up from

660MHz), thanks to the presence of a large copper heatsink and fan.

EVGA’s Signature Series is a marketing gambit that offers several concrete

benefits, including access to a dedi-

cated, 24/7 tech-support phone line

and the option to trade up to a higher-end model within 90 days of your purchase

(you pay the difference in retail cost). Should your card ever take a dump, EVGA

promises to ship you a replacement within 24 hours.

But the program’s basic intent is to make its customers feel as though

they’re members of an elite club. Signature Series cards are sold only in two-

card SLI bundles—with sequential serial numbers, no less—and they arrive in

a large and elaborately embossed carton.

Are these soft benefits a pile of fan-boy hooey or the coolest thing since

Keds’ secret decoder rings? We’ll let you decide, but we think the Radeon

X1950 Pro (reviewed on page 74) is the better value at this price point. ATI has

finally fixed CrossFire, the GPU supports a higher top-end resolution,

and VIVO renders it suitable for

video editing.

—Michael Brown

EVGA e-GeForce 7900 GS

Signature Series

Differentiation is the name of this game

76 MAXIMUMPC december 2006

reviewsTes Ted. Reviewed. veRdic Tized

eVGa’s e-GeForce 7900 GS Signature Series is faster than last

year’s best high-end videocard, and it’s hDcP-compliant, too;

aTi’s brand-new radeon X1950 Pro delivers all that plus higher

resolution and ViVo.

7

evga geforce 7900

$440, http://www.evga.com

F

ew party buzz-kills are more terminal than a cordless phone that shuts

down your wireless music system every time it rings. Soundcast boasts

you’ll never have that problem while using its iCast audio-streaming device for

the iPod, and our tests back up the claim.

The iCast consists of a combo transmitter/iPod docking bay and a wire-

less receiver that you plug into powered speakers or a home-theater system.

The transmitter charges the iPod’s battery while it’s docked, and a 1/8-inch

stereo output enables you to plug in powered speakers. If there’s no iPod in

the dock, the output connection automatically switches to an input, so you can

stream audio from any other source.

You can build a two-room system by adding a second receiver ($130), and

you can connect two transmitters to the same source to create a four-room sys-

tem. To stream different audio to each room, assign each iPod/transmitter/receiv-

er group to one of three channels to operate up to three iPods independently.

Because Apple refuses to open its DRM kimono to other manufacturers,

some of our favorite audio-streaming products, such as the Sonos ZP-80 and

the Squeezebox, can’t stream encrypted AAC tracks purchased from iTunes. The

iCast overcomes this hurdle by taking the analog output from the iPod’s dock-

ing port, converting it to digital, and streaming that to its receiver. The receiver

converts the signal back to analog and outputs it to either powered speakers or

a home-theater system.

Despite these repeated conversions, the iCast sounded nearly as good as

streaming boxes that can’t stream from iTunes. What’s more, the iCast’s use of

frequency-hopping spread-spectrum technology prevented our cordless phone

and microwave oven from interrupting the party, er, music.

The iCast is a fabulous audio-streaming system, but the absence

of a display on the receiver limits you to simple play, pause, and resume

controls and blindly moving up and down your iPod’s playlist. Considering

the $300 price tag, we also expected to find a USB port on the

transmitter—so we could sync

the iPod to iTunes using the

cradle and our PC.

—Michael Brown

Soundcast iCast

A sure-fire cure for rockus interruptus

The icast’s frequency-hopping spread-spectrum technology is

highly effective at preventing other cordless devices from inter-

rupting its audio streams.

8

soundcast icast

$300, http://www.soundcast

systems.com

eVGa aTi eVGa aTi X1950 Pro

7900 GS X1950 Pro 7900 GS in Sli in croSSFire

Best scores are bolded. Refer to http://www.maximumpc.com/benchmarks for details.

benchMarkS

3DMARK06 GAME 1 (fps) 10.0 13.0 18.2 24.6

3DMARK06 GAME 2 (fps) 14.5 14.2 27.2 27.9

QUAKE 4 (fps) 44.0 41.7 81.6 78.2

COMpANY Of HEROEs (fps) 25.0 23.9 23.6 34.5

fEAR (fps) 27.0 24.0 53.0 36.0