10 Things We Got Wrong
Yes, over the years we’ve made a few bad calls
2002 2003 2004 2005
Radeon 9700
Ushers in
DirectX 9
programma-
ble shaders
(September
2002)We get our first
dose of Nvidia’s
SLI (September
2004)Apple
quietly
releases
iPod
(November
2002)Athlon 64 spanks Intel
(September 2003)http://www.maximumpc.com | SEP 08 | MAXIMUMPC | 57
VISTA We hardly gave Vista a glow-
ing review, but given the magnitude
of the botched launch—from crashing
Nvidia drivers to certifying Intel’s 915
chipset as Vista-capable—Microsoft
got off too easy.GEFORCE 5800 On paper, this was
Nvidia’s fi rst DirectX 9 GPU. In reality,
the company didn’t ship a DirectX
9-capable GPU for almost a full year
aft er ATI. To anyone who bought a Ge-
Force 5800, we’re sorry. You not only
missed the full glory of Half-Life 2 but
also got stuck with a bum card.IBM 75GXP ‘DEATHSTAR’ It
debuted as the largest, fastest IDEhard drive of its time, and we were
smitten. But high failure rates for both
the original models and their replace-
ments left us feeling foolish.TRUEX OPTICAL DRIVES Ken-
wood’s CD burners were fast—when
they worked. We looked past the
original 40x drive’s myriad problems
and gave subsequent models the nod,
only to learn the whole lot of them
were lemons.BTX In 2004, we believed the ATX
formfactor was on its way out and
that by now our motherboards would
look very diff erent. Instead, BTX has
languished in obscurity.LINUX Little did we know that
the quirky OS favored by a fringe
element would take off as it has, to
become the trusty port in the storm of
Microsoft ’s dominance.PENTIUM 4 Put that coff ee down,
P4. Coff ee’s for closers. Unfortunately,
who knew that the Pentium 4 would
never seal the deal? Even worse, who
could have seen that Intel, the king of
the processor, would hit a brick wall
at 1,000 mph and turn the Pentium 4
into one big dud.DIRECT RDRAM Kicking RDRAM
under the bus seemed like the thing
to do years ago, but if we could takeit all back, we would. We’re now con-
vinced that RDRAM’s serial interface
was the right way to go, not DDR.TABLET PC The prospect of pen-
based computing seemed awesome,
and Bill Gates himself was backing
the project. Unfortunately, fi ve
years later, we’re still waiting on
the cheap, powerful Tablet PCs we
were promised.DIRECTX 10/GAMES FOR
WINDOWS We feel like suckers for
buying into Microsoft ’s hype. DirectX
10 hasn’t delivered any signifi cant
innovation, and Games for Windows
has turned out to be a joke.BEHIND THE BENCHMARKS
(^) BEHIND THE BENCHMARKS
12 —Not 10—Years of Kickassedness
September 1998 marks the 10th anniversary of Maximum PC, but
actually the 12th anniversary of our vaunted Kick Ass award. As
our most devoted readers already know, the Kick Ass award fi rst
appeared in the premier issue of boot magazine, which we pub-
lished for two years before renaming it Maximum PC.
In boot, we established much of the content and attitude that
perseveres in Maximum PC today: our no-BS product ratings, our
exacting attention to technical detail, our humor and spontaneity—
and, of course, our overarching credo
that if you’re going to build a PC, you
should always build the absolute best rig possible. In many ways,
the very name of the Kick Ass award embodies much of what
Maximum PC stands for: exuberance, enthusiasm, excess, and just
plain-old best-of-class awesomeness. That’s what we like in our
PC hardware, and that’s what we’ve done our best to provide in the
last 120-plus issues.
Jon Phillips, current
editorial director, former
editor in chief (Oct 1999 to
Dec 2003)
Half-Life 2 receives
the only 11 verdict
in the magazine’s
history (January
2005)
We review
Western Digital’s
groundbreaking
10,000rpm Raptor
(May 2003)
Nothing
of importance
happened
(February 2002)