I
n my youth, I had the opportunity to crew a few “race” cars.
The races were strictly at the amateur club level and the cars
were far, far away from what’s being built for today’s pros, but
it was still a hell of a good time for a kid.
Which brings me to the subject of the Dream Machine and
what it’s like to be involved with the project every year. Designing
and building a top-class rig is a lot like building a race car, minus
the bad track hot dogs and constant noise.
The Dream Machine has to be competitive as both a gaming
rig and general-purpose PC. It’s not a server nor is it designed for
the living room—and it’s definitely not grandma friendly. Our lap
times are our benchmark scores and the competition is the stable
of machines we’ve reviewed from the pros, companies like Falcon
Northwest, Dell, and Voodoo.
I subjected our rig to the same rules that we hold vendors’
machines to. We’ve been hard-asses on unstable overclocked
machines, and I held DM ’07 to the same high standard. Even though
I could boot and benchmark our machine at 4GHz, it wouldn’t pass
the stability tests we run on every system we review, so I cranked
down the clocks. At 3.66GHz, I’m confident this rig is solid.Another reason the Dream Machine reminds me of my racing
days is the sinking feeling I get when something goes wrong. It’s
inevitable, a critical wire will be too short, a water block will be in
the way of an expansion slot, or the OS will be just plain incom-
patible with the hardware in some unexpected way.
After killing a motherboard this year, I had to do a last-min-
ute rebuild to swap it out and redo the plumbing, hours before
the rig’s big photo shoot. I had to rebuild, bench, and beautify
the Dream Machine before it could be photographed, reminding
me of the time we had to swap an engine out of our car in the
half hour between qualifying and racing. The Lab was a mess of
screws, coolant, and zip ties, but when the hard drives spooled
up, the coolant gurgled, and the rig booted into Windows, I felt
the same sense of pride and accomplishment I did when I pushed
that race car onto the grid.Even after 10 Dream Machine builds, they
never get easier66 MAXIMUMPC september 2007
in the lab Real-WoRld testing: Results. analysis. Recommendations
All the hard work, skinned knuckles, and sleepless nights are
forgotten when your race car hits the track.GORDON MAH UNG
Thinks PCs
Are Like
Race Cars
I
reviewed Netgear’s awesome Digital Entertainer HD EVA8000 and
MediaGate’s schizophrenic MG-350HD (it’s a NAS box! No, it’s a
streamer!) for this issue. Both devices claim to be able to wirelessly
stream high-definition video at resolutions up to 1080p, but neither
is really capable of delivering it without the use of CAT5 cable. The
802.11g standard just doesn’t have the bandwidth for the task.
But here’s an even bigger problem: getting HD content onto
your hard drive in the first place. It’s a massive pain in the butt.
There’s no simple way to convert Hollywood movies released inthe Blu-ray or HD DVD formats into an easily streamable format,
and you still have to break the Digital Millennium Copyright Act
when you bypass the disc’s encryption. But since neither of these
streamers is capable of reading the resulting files and software
capable of transcoding those files doesn’t exist, all you gain is the
ability to watch the movie on whatever monitor is directly connect-
ed to your PC (whether the monitor supports HDCP or not).
A recent study by the Consumer Electronics Association claims
that 36 percent of U.S. households will have a high-definition TV by
the end of this year. If I’m getting HD video delivered from cable or
satellite TV services and I’m producing my own high-def content
with an HD camcorder, why would I ever be satisfied with watching
standard-definition video streamed from my PC?
As excited as I am about having a central home-entertainment
server, I don’t think the concept will ever gain traction until the
problem of streaming HD content is solved.Michael Brown
Tests A/V Streamers
And concludes that wireless HD-video
streaming is a phantom feature