General Gaming Article |
- Old School Monday: Deschutes - Welcome to Speed Country
- April 2011: The Cheapskate's Guide to Power Computing
- Spotify to Be Invite-Only in the US
- Chrome Web App of the Week: 20 Things I Learned About Browsers & The Web
- Alienware Offering Bigfoot Wireless-N Adapters In Gaming Laptops
- China Shows Off New Petaflop-Pumping Supercomputer
- Dream Machine 2011: How We Created the Best PC Ever
- Researcher Claims Web Surfers Are Suckers For Pretty Websites
- Department of Homeland Security Warns of Imported Electronics Being Spiked with Spyware
- Firefox 6 Reaches Beta Stage, Now Available for Download
| Old School Monday: Deschutes - Welcome to Speed Country Posted: 11 Jul 2011 03:20 PM PDT It may seem quaint viewed from our world of tomorrow, but back in 1998, people got legitimately hot and bothered by Intel's move to an amazing—wait for it— .25 micron process in the second-gen new Pentium II. For those too used to our Nanometer ways, the original Deschutes .25 micron processor would be 250 nanometers. Besides the move to 250 nanometers, Deschutes also ushered in the 100MHz front side bus for the Pentium II ( although the 100MHz FSB didn't make it for this story.) The reign of the Pentium II should be remembered for Pax Intel— a time when its chips would bring fear into its competitors who were still trying to make AGP work with Socket 7.
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| April 2011: The Cheapskate's Guide to Power Computing Posted: 11 Jul 2011 02:59 PM PDT
Click the cover image on the right to download the PDF archive today! | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Spotify to Be Invite-Only in the US Posted: 11 Jul 2011 02:23 PM PDT
Spotify just finished off a $100 million round of financing in preparation for the US launch. So far licensing deals with UMG, EMI and Sony have been finalized. A deal with Warner Music is still in the works, though. Even those lucky few who get invites early may not see all the tracks they want. It's still unclear how this possible invite-only service could work out if Spotify is integrated with Facebook, as previously rumored. How do you think the Spotify launch will go? | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Chrome Web App of the Week: 20 Things I Learned About Browsers & The Web Posted: 11 Jul 2011 11:39 AM PDT
Developed by Google and designed to read like a story book, 20 Things I Learned About Browsers & The Web explains a wide variety of internet and browser-related topics in plain English, making concepts such as HTML, online identities and cloud computing less intimidating. The text is broken down into 20 chapters, each covering a unique topic. The book can be read from end to end, or consumed in smaller sips of specific information as needed.
To make sure that 20 Things I Learned About Browsers & The Web reaches its intended audience, Google was thoughtful enough to include a number of sharing options including links for Facebook, Twitter as well as--and this is kicking it old school--print it out. If your parents still haven't figured out how to program their DVD player's clock or even worse, still call you for advice on how to work their VCR, this app is gonna be your BFF from the get-go. Be sure to check back every Monday for another edition of Maximum PC's Chrome Web App of the Week. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Alienware Offering Bigfoot Wireless-N Adapters In Gaming Laptops Posted: 11 Jul 2011 11:26 AM PDT
Alienware's M18x, M17x, M14x and M11x notebooks will give users the option to upgrade to Bigfoot's Killer Wireless-N 1103 high-performance network adapter, the companies announced in a press release. The adapters offer up to 450Mbps wireless data transfer rates and Bigfoot's "Advanced Stream Detect" technology, which improves network performance by "automatically classifying and prioritizing latency-sensitive network traffic such as online games, HD video, voice and audio." That means that your Battlefield frag fests won't be interrupted by your mom's Netflix streaming. If you prefer a more hands-on approach to network shaping, Bigfoot's "Visual Bandwidth Control" lets you fine-tune bandwidth allocations for individual applications. The truth's already out there, X-Files fans; you can find the Bigfoot-Alienware union for sale on the custom PC supplier's website starting today. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| China Shows Off New Petaflop-Pumping Supercomputer Posted: 11 Jul 2011 10:43 AM PDT
The Tianhe-1 entered service in the Changsa supercomputer center over the past weekend. With a theoretical max speed of 1.1 petaflops, the new computer doesn't run quite as fast as the Tianhe-1A, but if its Chinese handlers feel like rigging it with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 580 and a badass gaming mouse, it could handle Crysis 2 in its sleep. Computerworld reports that the machine should be running at a theoretical 3 petaflops by October, which would make the Tianhe-1 the fifth-most powerful computer on the planet. "It will be used to perform simulations that will forecast the weather, help with disaster prevention and aid industrial fields including automobile manufacturing and medical research," Computerworld says. So what's a petaflop? It's a unit of measurement for processor floating point calculations; 1 petaflop equals one quadrillion floating point operations per second. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Dream Machine 2011: How We Created the Best PC Ever Posted: 11 Jul 2011 10:14 AM PDT Join us as we celebrate another year of Pure PC PowerIn an age of overly synthesized catchphrases ginned up by some suit to commercialize new soda pop or body spray, the term "pure PC power" was never intended to be marketing hype. Instead, it was conceived to describe our obsession with performance computers and it has withstood the test of time. Who would have known that 16 Dream Machines later, the pursuit of all-out computing power could still be viable?
But that's just what this year's Dream Machine again proves: Despite pundits predicting the PC's death many times over—speed still matters. For this year's Dream Machine, we decided to build a rig that balances top-notch performance with the style and elegance of an exotic sports car. The overall package is well-behaved and even fairly modest at power consumption, considering the amount of performance it packs. As always, it's not just about the PC proper, though. For our Dream Machine, we tracked down the best hardware available, such as NEC's freaking-awesome PA301W panels and the wireless Cyborg R.A.T. 9 mouse, to make a lust-worthy setup that any of us would kill to have grace our desktop. So join us as we celebrate another year of the PC's supremacy. For all of this years Dream Machine coverage, click here! Under the HoodTHE ONLY THING MISSING FROM DREAM MACHINE 2011 IS THE SWEET SMELL OF EXHAUST
You Have to Build it or Get Off the PotThe classic dilemma in technology hasn't changed in the 16 years we've been building our annual Dream Machine: Build now or wait for the next big thing? In our case, it's never been so glaringly apparent as this year. That's because the worst-kept secret in the industry is Intel's Sandy Bridge E chip that's coming out in about two months. Sandy Bridge E (for either Enthusiast or Extreme) is a rebadged Xeon chip and is screened to hit high clock speeds. The accompanying X79 chipset will feature no fewer than 12 SATA ports—six of them at 6Gb/s speeds—PCIe 3.0, and quad-channel RAM support, on the new LGA2011 socket. Yeah, your mouth is probably watering already, so why not "wait" for this new CPU and chipset combo? And at the same time, we should probably also wait for the next-generation GeForce or Radeon card. Oh yeah, and while we're at it, let's see what the next round of SSDs, coolers, motherboards, cases, speakers, and mice brings us, too. You see where this gets you? Pretty soon you're waiting for the "next big thing" while driving a Pentium 4 box in the slow lane while your fellow gamers scream at you to get the hell off the server and quit dragging down the pings. In the end, you have to go with the components you have, not the components you wish you had. In the here and now, Dream Machine 2011 is the best PC you can build, and it even has a logical upgrade path as Intel's upcoming 22nm Ivy Bridge chips will drop right into this beauty. Intel 3.4GHz Core i7-2600KTHE CHEAPEST CPU WE'VE EVER USED IN A DREAM MACHINE—AND PERHAPS THE FASTEST, TOO
Winston Churchill once said, "Never in the field of computing was so much power given so cheaply." OK, we're making that up, but if Churchill had access to Intel's Core i7-2600K part, such a proclamation would be inevitable. And it's not just that the Core i7-2600K is so freaking cheap, it's also freaking fast! An overclocked quad-core Sandy Bridge chip will give even Intel's Big Kahuna, the Core i7-990X, a run for its money in many benchmarks. Even better, the chipset for the 2600K is modern, not the old fogey still powering LGA1366 motherboards, and if all goes as planned, it offers an upgrade path to the 22nm-based Ivy Bridge CPUs next year. For DM2011, we overclocked the 3.4GHz part to 4.8GHz, which appears to be the limit of our D2 core sample. That's fine with us. For $317, we'll take it and smile too. Three EVGA GeForce GTX 580 Superclocked CardsTRI-SLI IS READY AND RARING TO RUN UNREAL ENGINE 3
For our GPU selection, we had two possible routes to take: three-single GPU cards or two dual-GPU cards. Dual dual-GPU cards are sexy, but many games simply don't scale to four GPUs. And getting multiple GPUs to behave on a single card often requires clocks to be scaled back. That's not the case with individual GPUs in three-way mode. It's this thinking that led us to select three of EVGA's GeForce GTX 580 Superclocked cards. The cards run fairly cool, even with the factory overclock, and thus don't pump heat into a case. Gigabyte GA-Z68X-UD7-B3RUN TRI-SLI WHILE YOU CHARGE YOUR TABLET
We'll admit that for our purposes, Z68 gives us no performance advantage over P67. We're not, after all, going to run SSD caching since we have two big, fat Vertex 3 SSDs in place. With three GPUs, we're also unlikely to run the integrated graphics. Still, there's no reason to use the end-of-life P67 if Z68 is here. And that's what Gigabyte's GA-Z68X-UD7-B3 gives us. It's pretty much the same as a GA-P67-UD7 board, but with the updated chipset. The board itself has everything we need: the ability to charge high-drain devices via USB, even when the board is powered off; a crapload of SATA connectors; USB 3.0 internal headers; and not just SLI and CrossFire X, but also tri-SLI. Tri-SLI is accomplished by using an nForce 200 chip to balance the load from the single x16 PCIe 2.0 in the Sandy Bridge CPU. Two 240GB OCZ Vertex 3sSQUEEZE THE MOST OUT OF THAT 6GB/S SATA CONTROLLER
What's faster than one SF-2281-powered SATA 6Gb/s solid-state drive? Two of 'em, in RAID 0. A single OCZ Vertex 3 can hit sustained read speeds of 550MB/s and writes of over 250MB/s; we hit nearly twice that using Intel's onboard RAID: 1,000MB/s reads and 500MB/s writes. Two 240GB drives give us 480GB of storage for our OS and any game we care to play or app we care to install. Cooler Master Cosmos II (Prototype)YOU SAW IT HERE FIRST, FOLKS
The case for this year's Dream Machine is so new you can't get it in stores. In fact, we barely got ours in time for this month's issue. Cooler Master's Cosmos II isn't supposed to be revealed at all for another month, but given our fondness for the Cosmos S (the chassis for our 2007 Dream Machine), the company snuck us a preproduction model of the Cosmos II. Since it's not a production model, it still has some kinks to work out, but it's a beaut nonetheless. The Cosmos II is fully 20 percent larger than the Cosmos S, and takes full advantage of four years' worth of improvements in chassis tech. The PSU and six drive bays are sequestered in a compartment at the bottom of the case, while the motherboard compartment features cable-routing cutouts, hot-swap docks, more toolless drive enclosures, and room for a 360mm radiator up top. The result is a roomy, well-ventilated chassis with plenty of space to accommodate our tri-SLI setup, five hard drives, a 240mm radiator, and more, while still looking classy. And that's before we added the custom Smooth Creations paint job. The Crowning Glory: A Custom Paint Job
With any case-painting job, preparation is no small matter. A case has to be completely disassembled to properly prep all the different substrates. But our Dream Machine case presented its own unique challenges. As Smooth Creation's CEO Jim Saling recounts, "We had never gotten a Cosmos II before and it was sent overnight from Taiwan… giving us only two days to paint it and send it out to [Maximum PC]." He adds, "Taking it apart, with all its moving parts, and putting it back together to function properly after paint required a few notes during tear down."
As for the paint itself. It's an automotive paint from Germany called Glasurit, which is used on high-end European sports cars. Our Dream Machine is painted Super Fly Yellow, a true Lambo color. Saling adds, "Will it make the PC faster? That's up to the DM builders." Well, Jim, we think you'll find that we did justice to your handiwork. Corsair 16GB VengeanceWE SAY FILL ALL THE SLOTS AND LET GOD SORT 'EM OUT
How much RAM do you need? Hell, given today's prices, why not max it out? That's what we did with Corsair's 16GB DDR3/1600 Vengeance kit. As you can tell from the name, this set of 4GB DIMMs runs at DDR3/1600—no need to stress out the integrated memory controller with additional voltage. So it's no surprise that it's the only XMP-rated RAM at 1.5 volts. Silverstone Strider ST1500ENOUGH POWER TO RUN TWO PCS OR 300 TABLETS
If you've ever built a fast computer, you know how much of a pain it is to size your PSU for all of the hardware you'll stuff inside. With Silverstone's Strider ST1500, we don't have the slightest worry, even with three GPUs, five drives, and a zesty overclock loading up this 1,500W PSU. Corsair Hydro Series H100THE POWER OF A DUAL-FAN RADIATOR WITH THE EASE OF AN ALL-IN-ONE LOOP
We've long been impressed by Corsair's Hydro Three 3TB Seagate Barracuda XTs9TB OF MASS STORAGE, BECAUSE WE CAN
With three 3TB 7,200rpm drives, we're not running out of storage space any time soon. Rather than run one big array, we've dedicated one drive to backups, one drive to high-def video, and one drive to everything else. Why? Why not?! Corsair SP2500BRING THE NOISE
You probably wear a headset when you game, but sometimes you just gotta go loud. Fortunately, that's what the Corsair SP2500 system can do in spades: Get freaking loud! Yes, it will also sound awesome with Schubert, while you sip white wine, but the SP2500 set is best suited for making your neighbors pound on the walls until their fists are bloody. Plextor B940SALAST YEAR'S BD BURNER IS STILL THE BEST, IN OUR BOOK
Yes, it seems wrong to be outfitting Dream Machine 2011 with the same Blu-ray burner we used last year, but we have yet to encounter a drive that offers better overall performance than the Plextor B940SA. With write speeds of 12x for BD-R and 16x for DVD+R, it handles all our optical chores quickly and reliably. Mouse and KeyboardCYBORG R.A.T. 9 AND RAZER BLACKWIDOW ULTIMATE
In gaming peripherals, we look for a mix of maximum-quality construction and extra features that give us an edge. That's exactly what you get with the Cyborg R.A.T. 9, a wireless gaming mouse with heavy-duty construction that can be customized to fit your hand perfectly. We also love the Razer BlackWidow Ultimate, a keyboard with top-notch mechanical switches, a full set of gaming-grade features, and excellent software to back it up. Three NEC PA301WsGAMES NEVER LOOKED SO GOOD
The professional-grade PA301W not only offers exemplary color and detail, but it also has the unique ability among 30-inch screens to go into portrait mode. This allows us to position three of them vertically for a combined resolution of 4800x2560—and a gaming experience that's unparalleled. In fact, it was the overwhelming favorite in our Multiscreen Challenge. Microsoft Windows 7 ProfessionalTHE ONLY REAL CHOICE
You know what we like about Windows 7? It served up a supersize cup of STFU to that no-talent assclown Justin Long, aka the Mac Guy. Sexiest Rigs in Dream Machine's HistoryWhile unadulterated power and performance are a given in any Dream Machine build, aesthetics play an important part in setting our annual homage to excess apart from the pack. Still, some stand out more than others in looks. DREAM MACHINE 2002
This DM was inspired by BMW's famous 2002 Turbo, which audaciously featured its moniker in reverse to kindly let shepherds in the fast lane know to get the flock out of the way. Besides mimicking the 2002 treatment, this box famously featured the GPU that brought ATI back in front with a vengeance: the Radeon 9700 Pro. DREAM MACHINE 2004
Jim Saling of Smooth Creations is no stranger to the Dream Machine, having custom painted four of our premiere builds, including this year's. DM2004 marked paint job number two in that history, rendering a Silverstone Nimitz SST-TJ03 case all the more impressive. DREAM MACHINE 2008
The year 2008 saw the most expensive case ever used for a Dream Machine. We managed to pull off an incredible deal to procure an HP Blackbird 002 case ($1,000) and then had the entire sucker chromed by Computer-choppers.com, which cost well north of $5,000 to do. It was the epitome of bling. DREAM MACHINE 2012 ? We want to hear from you! How should Dream Machine 2012 look? What should it include? Comment below, or send your ideas to comments@maximumpc.com. But Is It Overkill?Three GTX 580s is a lot, we'll admit. You're not going to find any games out right now that'll push Dream Machine '11 to its limits, but that doesn't mean this system is overkill—far from it. Here's what's going to take advantage of the Dream Machine's power: BATTLEFIELD 3 RAGE UNREAL ENGINE 3 Dream Machine 2011 Hits the Test TrackCAN IT PICK UP WHERE LAST YEAR'S 12-CORE MONSTROSITY LEFT OFF? Dream Machine 2011 looks great, runs fairly quiet, and its parts list is to die for. But it's not just about looks and specs, it's also about performance. Can this machine outpace its predecessor? After all, if technology can't march forward in 12 months, something is drastically wrong.
And we don't say that without first taking a really long, Jim Kirk–style pause to seriously ponder whether Dream Machine 2011 can beat Dream Machine 2010. That's because Dream Machine 2010 was an especially monstrous King Kong of a PC. Just recalling the specs of last year's Dream Machine is enough to make us pucker up in fear: not one, but two 3.3GHz hexa-core Xeon X5680 CPUs overclocked to 4GHz. Three EVGA GeForce GTX 480 Superclocked cards in tri-SLI, 24GB of DDR3/1600, and two 200GB OCZ Vertex 2 SSDs in RAID 0. Dream Machine 2010 was so mean, we had to feed it five netbooks for breakfast and then sweep up the tablets it crapped out all day long. What can a lone Core i7-2600K do against that? A lot more than you'd expect. DM2011's first victory came in our Lightroom 2.6 test where we convert a folder of raw photo files from a Canon 5D Mk II to Adobe DNG format for archival purposes. Fairly limited in threading, the benchmark favored the higher clocks of DM2011, which trounced the older DM2010 by 27 percent. That score is also a new benchmark record in the Lightroom test. We suspect that part of the win is due to the RAID 0 Vertex 3 drives. In some storage benchmarks we ran, the Vertex 3s were pushing in excess of 1GB/s read speeds and 500MB/s write speeds. No, that's not a typo—in excess of 1GB/s read speeds! You can thank the SandForce 2 controller in the OCZ drive and the excellent SATA 6Gb/s implementation in the Z68 chipset. ProShow Producer 4 also gave the nod to DM2011, by 16 percent, surprisingly, despite the application support for more compute threads. Clock speed and disk I/O couldn't help this year's Dream Machine beat last year's in our MainConcept Reference encoding test, however—but the loss wasn't as bad as you'd think. The dual-proc Dream Machine 2010 bested DM2011 by roughly 10 percent. Unfortunately, we were unable to run our Vegas Pro 9 benchmark on last year's Dream Machine because of a bug in one of the app's plugins that affects 12-core machines, but we're pretty sure DM2010 would be favored. Once we moved to graphics, DM2010's tri-SLI 480s ate dust from this year's tri-SLI 580s, with STALKER favoring DM2011 by 24 percent and Far Cry 2 (mostly a CPU test at this point) also taking 15 percent. In 3DMark Vantage, the two machines split wins. In the graphics portion, DM2011 took down DM2010 by a healthy 32 percent. But the 12-core monster came back in the CPU portion, with a score that was three times that of the DM2011. In fact, the only machines we've seen beat DM2010 in that test are other SR2-based machines running on liquid nitrogen. We're happy to report that we're mostly vindicated on our choice of the tri-SLI cards over quad-SLI. Using the brand-new 3DMark 11 test, DM2011 was able to ace all of the machines from our small form factor roundup in the July issue, three of which featured either quad-SLI or quad-CrossFireX, using two dual-GPU cards as well as overclocked processors. In the end, Dream Machine 2011 accomplishes what we wanted. It's the best PC you can build at this moment and it's even fairly well-mannered. It doesn't spool up with the sound of 1,000 fans and it uses less than 180 watts (sans monitors) while idling. We'll call that a win. DM2010 vs. DM2011
Dream Machine 2010 consists of dual 3.3GHz Xeon X5680s overclocked to 4GHz, 24GB of Corsair DDR3/1600, on an EVGA Classified SR-2. It runs three EVGA GeForce GTX 480 Superclocked cards in tri-SLI, two 200GB OCZ Vertex 2 SSDs, and two WD 2TB Caviar Black drives running Windows 7 Ultimate. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Researcher Claims Web Surfers Are Suckers For Pretty Websites Posted: 11 Jul 2011 10:08 AM PDT
The author of the study, Dr. Brent Coker, claims that people are 20 percent more likely to trust a website now than they were just five years ago. "As aesthetically orientated humans, we're psychologically hardwired to trust beautiful people, and the same goes for websites," Coker says in the University's press release. "Our offline behaviour and inclinations translate to our online existence... With websites becoming increasingly attractive and including more trimmings, this creates a greater feeling of trustworthiness and professionalism in online consumers." We're not just suckers for a pretty face, though; even attractive websites get the boot from consumers if they don't give us what we want right now. Coker's study found that if a website loads slowly or doesn't make it easy to find information on the page, online shoppers find what they want elsewhere. Even though we're more trusting than ever online, online brand loyalty has decreased by 32 percent in the past five years. Despite all the low-fi doom and gloom, we're doubtful Craigslist is going belly-up anytime soon. The final version of the study is due to be released at the 2011 World Congress in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, and Applied Computing, held in Las Vegas July 18th through the 21st. Image credit: roflrazzi.com | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Department of Homeland Security Warns of Imported Electronics Being Spiked with Spyware Posted: 11 Jul 2011 07:28 AM PDT
Schaffer didn't go into great detail about compromised hardware and software being imported into the U.S., but did reluctantly admit to being aware of instances where items were purposely embedded with security risks. Possibly related to Schaffer's testimony, FastCompany.com, which first reported the story, dug up a couple of interesting paragraphs in the White House's Cyberspace Policy Review the site thinks is an admission that the Executive Branch knows there's something fishy going on with imported tech. The paragraphs read: "The emergence of new centers for manufacturing, design, and research across the globe raises concerns about the potential for easier subversion of computers and networks through subtle hardware or software manipulations. Counterfeit products have created the most visible supply problems, but few documented examples exist of unambiguous, deliberate subversions. A broad, holistic approach to risk management is required rather than a wholesale condemnation of foreign products and services. The challenge with supply chain attacks is that a sophisticated adversary might narrowly focus on particular systems and make manipulation virtually impossible to discover. Foreign manufacturing does present easier opportunities for nation-state adversaries to subvert products; however, the same goals could be achieved through the recruitment of key insiders or other espionage activities." That was written several months ago, and it would appear that Homeland Security has since found examples of what the White House was worried about all along. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Firefox 6 Reaches Beta Stage, Now Available for Download Posted: 11 Jul 2011 07:01 AM PDT
New to Firefox 6 is an address bar that now highlights the domain of the website you're visiting. Firefox 6 also makes it easier to manage permissions for individual websites. You can access the menu by typing about:permissions, which brings up a straightforward menu to grant individual sites the ability to store passwords, share your location, set cookies, and other functions. The Firefox 6 beta boasts improved startup time when using Panorama, improved usability of the Web Console, improved disoverability of Firefox Sync, and other features, as well as a whole bunch of bug fixes. |
Yet more news on the impending Spotify US launch has surfaced today. This time we're hearing that the popular music streaming service will be launching soon, possibly even this week, but it will be 
There's no shame in not understanding how a computer does what it does. Then again, folks shouldn't feel too good about it either. As desktops, tablets, and laptops become more and more complex, it's not always easy to understand exactly what does what under the hood. The same goes for the internet: Cookies? Malware? Phishing? While the comprehension of topics like these might be second nature to many Maximum PC readers, the same can't always be said for our partners, acquaintances, or family. The next time one of your technologically-impaired inner circle asks you a question about the internet or online security, consider directing them 
For years, if you wanted a cool looking, high-end gaming machine but didn't feel like spending dozens of DIY hours on a badass custom rig, the odds were good that you settled on an Alienware (assuming you could afford one). Now, the gaming PC field has been blown wide open, with several different vendors offering powerful, Battlefield 3-ready set-ups. If you're Alienware, how do you make yourself stand out from the crowd? By staying cutting-edge. Starting today, you can snag one of Bigfoot's "Killer" line of gaming-optimized network adapters with your new Alienware laptop. 
No matter what side of the Google-China shouting match you fall on, you can't help but admire the country's drive towards bigger and badder processing power. China's Tianhe-1A, capable of 2.57 petaflops per second, held the crown as the most powerful supercomputer in the world until Japan's "K Computer" blew away the competition with 8.16 petaflops last month. China's newest supercomputer is the Tianhe-1A's baby brother, creatively named the Tianhe-1.
Acquiring a preproduction model of the majestic Cosmos II was plenty special in its own right, but this being Dream Machine, we had to kick it up a notch. Enter Smooth Creations. The company, which was founded in 1999, is the originator of custom graphics on boutique PCs. Smooth's case-painting masters got their start on automobiles and custom bikes before their love of hardcore PC gaming led them to their present calling.
Your mom may have warned you not to judge a book by its cover, but if Jersey Shore has taught us anything, it's that people will eat up anything as long its wrapped in an attractive package. As it turns out, shiny objects trap the attention of computer users, too. A new study published by Australia's University of Melbourne suggests that even though malware and botnets rear their ugly heads more and more frequently these days, computer users are more likely than ever to trust websites – as long as they look pretty.
A high ranking official at the Department of Homeland Security admitted to Congress that foreign made hardware and software sold in the U.S. are sometimes laced with spyware, malware, and other foul components that can compromise security. The revelation came from Greg Schaffer, acting deputy undersecretary of the DHS National Protection and Programs Directorate, who testified before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
Mozilla over the weekend gave its Firefox 6 browser a groom and haircut so that it can pass for a beta release. The next step is to give the 6.0 release a suit, tie, and spiffy pair of shoes so that it's ready to mingle with the public at large. Until then, you can download the beta build and get acquainted with Firefox 6, which offers a handful of changes and improvements over previous builds.| You are subscribed to email updates from Maximum PC - All Articles To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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