| Blueprints: The Maximum PC Recommended Builds - June 2012 Posted: 19 Jun 2012 02:56 PM PDT In the June issue, we debuted a new section of the magazine: Blueprints. Here's how it works. We've built three rigs at three approximate price points: Baseline, Deluxe, and Ultra. Baseline gets you a powerful, no-compromises rig, suitable for gaming and content creation at 1080p. Performance gets you more, and Ultra gets you into six-core, dual-GPU territory. These rigs are lab-tested and editor-approved, and we'll update them every month. Feedback is, of course, welcome, and we're in the middle of a debate as to whether to include a lower price range into the lineup. Tell us what you think! Baseline 
Baseline
| Parts list | | | Case | Fractal Design Define R3 | www.fractal-design.com | | PSU | Corsair TX750 V2 | www.corsair.com | | Mobo | Asus P8Z77-V | www.asus.com | | CPU | Intel Core i5-3570K @3.4GHz | www.intel.com | | Cooler | Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo | www.coolermaster.com | | GPU | EVGA GeForce 560 Ti 448 | www.evga.com | | RAM | 8GB Patriot Gamer DDR3/1600 | www.patriotmemory.com | | Optical Drive | Samsung SH-222 | www.samsung.com | | Solid State Drive | OCZ Agility 3 120GB | www.ocztechnology.com | | Hard Drive | Seagate Barracuda 3TB | www.seagate.com | | OS | Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit | www.microsoft.com | Approximate Price: $1,340 Now that we've reviewed some Ivy Bridge motherboards, we feel comfortable making a recommendation: the Asus P8Z77-V, with the new Core i5-3570K. And now that hard drive prices have dropped we've gone for a faster, bigger HDD. We've had some readers ask why our Baseline rig costs over $1,300. Maybe baseline is the wrong word—this is a no-BS, sweet-spot gaming machine that's forward-compatible and powerful without being overkill. We can, and do, build sub-$1,000 (and sub-$700) gaming rigs, but they require compromise due to budget constraints. The Baseline doesn't. Deluxe 
Deluxe | Parts List | | | Case | NZXT Phantom 410 | www.nzxt.com | | PSU | Corsair HX750 | www.corsair.com | | Mobo | Asus Sabertooth X79 | www.asus.com | | CPU | Intel i7-3820 @4.7GHz (overclocked) | www.intel.com | | Cooler | NZXT Havik 120 | wwww.nzxt.com | | GPU | Asus GTX 670 DirectCU II TOP | www.asus.com | | RAM | 16GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3/1600 | www.corsair.com | | Optical Drive | LG WH12LS39 BD-R burner | www.lg.com | | Solid State Drive | OCZ Agility 3 120GB | www.ocztechnology.com | | Hard Drive | Seagate Barracuda 3TB | www.seagate.com | | OS | Windows 7 Professional 64-bit | www.microsoft.com | Approximate Price: $1,870 Our Baseline is everything you need for high-resolution, high-quality gaming. Full stop. But if you add an extra $500 to your budget, you get more stuff: eight processor threads instead of four, eight RAM slots, and an upgrade path to a six-core CPU down the line. You also get a Blu-ray burner and one of the fastest GPUs we've ever tested. This Sandy Bridge-E rig has remained mostly the same since it debuted in June, except for the videocard—and the price. We're now recommending Asus's GTX 670 DirectCU II TOP, which outperforms a stock GTX 680 on all of our benchmarks, while being $70 cheaper. Ultra 
Ultra | Ultra | | | Case | Cooler Master Cosmos II | www.coolermaster.com | | PSU | Thermaltake Toughpower Grand 1050W | www.thermaltakeusa.com | | Mobo | Asus P9X79 Deluxe | www.asus.com | | CPU | Intel i7-3930K @4.8GHz (overclocked) | www.intel.com | | Cooler | Corsair H100 | www.corsair.com | | GPU | EVGA GTX 690 | www.evga.com | | RAM | 16GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3/1600 | www.corsair.com | | Optical Drive | LG WH12LS39 BD-R Burner | www.lg.com | | Solid State Drive | Samsung 830 Series 256GB | www.samsung.com | | Hard Drive | Seagate Barracuda 3TB (x2) | www.seagate.com | | OS | Windows 7 Professional 64-bit | www.microsoft.com | Approximate Price: $3,460 Our Ultra configuration is for the Maximum PC reader who needs ultra-fast encoding and rendering, tip-top graphical prowess, and speedy storage. It's a step above what's necessary for 95 percent of the population, but a step below Dream Machine. So it's merely absurd, not absolutely over the top. Speaking of which: Dream Machine is next month! The price of our Ultra configuration is down to just (?!) $3,460, thanks mostly to GPU price drops. Instead of two Radeon HD 7970s, we're recommending a GTX 690. If you're going to have two $500 GPUs in one machine, you might as well put them on the same card and save some room and some power. Intel's Core i7-3930K is $600 worth of six-core madness, and the Corsair H100 cooler makes it easy to push the CPU to 4.8GHz from its 3.6GHz stock speed. Cooler Master's Cosmos II case is huge and luxurious, with plenty of airflow to cool everything, and the Asus motherboard is great for overclocking and will hold another GTX 690 if you go absolutely out of your gourd for power. We're keeping the 256GB Samsung 830 SSD and 6TB of speedy mass storage. Suggested Pairings Kick-ass peripherals for your new rig
Keyboard 
Razer BlackWidow Ultimate $130, www.razerzone.com Mouse 
Cyborg R.A.T. 9 $100, www.cyborggaming.com Speakers 
Corsair SP2500 $205, www.corsair.com Gaming Headset 
Corsair Vengeance 1500 $100, www.corsair.com Midrange Monitor Asus PA238Q $300, www.viewsonic.com Premium Monitor Dell UltraSharp U3011 $1,200, www.dell.com |
| Oh No He Didn't! Nvidia Responds to Linus Torvalds' F-Bomb-Laden Rant Posted: 19 Jun 2012 11:05 AM PDT  Linus Torvalds opened a can of worms when he took verbal, caught-on-video issue with what he perceives as a continued indifference towards Linux by Nvidia. Actually, scratch that -- maybe it wasn't what he said, but how he said it, calling Nvidia "the worst company we've ever dealt with" and extending middle fingers and f-bombs in the company's honor. Yesterday, Nvidia's PR team took time to respond to the allegations.
Unfortunately -- at least for casual observers like yours truly -- Nvidia's comeback isn't on video, doesn't include obscenities or irate rants and generally takes the high road about the whole situation. Still, in the interests of fairness, we thought we'd slap a copy of the retort below. (Sorry for the straight-up cut-and-paste, but hey, we posted all of Linus' rant, so it's only fair to include all of Nvidia's response.) In it, Nvidia argues that the proprietary path the company currently takes on Linux leads to same-day GPU release support and frequent driver updates. The company also points out that it's very active in the ARM Linux kernel. What do you think? Does Nvidia support Linux enough, or can they step things up? --- Supporting Linux is important to NVIDIA, and we understand that there are people who are as passionate about Linux as an open source platform as we are passionate about delivering an awesome GPU experience. Recently, there have been some questions raised about our lack of support for our Optimus notebook technology. When we launched our Optimus notebook technology, it was with support for Windows 7 only. The open source community rallied to work around this with support from the Bumblebee Open Source Project http://bumblebee-project.org/. And as a result, we've recently made Installer and readme changes in our R295 drivers that were designed to make interaction with Bumblebee easier. While we understand that some people would prefer us to provide detailed documentation on all of our GPU internals, or be more active in Linux kernel community development discussions, we have made a decision to support Linux on our GPUs by leveraging NVIDIA common code, rather than the Linux common infrastructure. While this may not please everyone, it does allow us to provide the most consistent GPU experience to our customers, regardless of platform or operating system. As a result: - Linux end users benefit from same-day support for new GPUs , OpenGL version and extension parity between NVIDIA Windows and NVIDIA Linux support, and OpenGL performance parity between NVIDIA Windows and NVIDIA Linux.
- We support a wide variety of GPUs on Linux, including our latest GeForce, Quadro, and Tesla-class GPUs, for both desktop and notebook platforms. Our drivers for these platforms are updated regularly, with seven updates released so far this year for Linux alone. The latest Linux drivers can be downloaded from www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html.
- We are a very active participant in the ARM Linux kernel. For the latest 3.4 ARM kernel – the next-gen kernel to be used on future Linux, Android, and Chrome distributions – NVIDIA ranks second in terms of total lines changed and fourth in terms of number of changesets for all employers or organizations.
At the end of the day, providing a consistent GPU experience across multiple platforms for all of our customers continues to be one of our key goals.
Statement via Phoronix |
| Spotify Brings Free Mobile Radio to iOS Apps, Android Version "In Due Time" Posted: 19 Jun 2012 10:40 AM PDT  Do you like free tunes? Sure you do. Most major streaming services, however, refuse to give up their mobile music for a song, instead opting to restrict phone-based listening to premium subscribers, with Slacker and Pandora being the two major exceptions. Today, a new competitor is entering the ad-supported mobile arena: Spotify. Later this week, an update to Spotify's iOS app will bring you all the free, unlimited, ad-supported tunes your ears could ever want.
There are, of course, some caveats. Unlike on the desktop version, freeloaders will only be able to use Spotify's radio function, which are created based off of artists, albums and playlists of your choosing. There will be ads permeating the experience and you'll be limited as to how many songs you'll be able to skip. All that being said, here's what ad-supported listeners can do, straight from the press release: - Create limitless streaming radio stations from single songs, playlists, albums or artists
- Create an unlimited number of stations and listen as long as they like
- Save tracks to Spotify playlists - any song that users "like" will be saved, so they can find the songs later
- Personalize stations in real time by "liking" tracks to hear similar music
- Browse friends' playlists and create radio stations based on their tastes
- Hear great new songs from Spotify's state-of-the-art recommendation engine, based on what millions of real people are listening to
- Access a catalog of over 16 million tracks
Premium subscribers will receive unlimited skips and no ads, while subscribers to the upper-tier $10/mo. plan will presumably be able to continue listening to songs on-demand as they see fit. We can hear you already: "What, no Android love?" Unfortunately, not yet, although a spokesman told Engadget that "We're looking to bring it to all of the major platforms in due time" when prompted with that very question. |
| Google: 9,500 New Malicious Sites Appear Each and Every Day Posted: 19 Jun 2012 10:15 AM PDT Knowledge is power, and Spiderman always said that great power came with great responsibility, but what we're learning this week isn't making us feel proactive -- instead it's making us want to don our tinfoil hats and curl up in a ball in the deepest corner of our darkest closets. A day after Google filled us in on just how many speech-squashing takedowns it gets from the U.S. government, the company pulled the curtain even farther with a blog post this morning sharing just how many badware-peddling sites are online. It's a lot. 
Niels Provos of Google's security team laid out hard figures in his post. Here's the scariest bit: We find about 9,500 new malicious websites every day. These are either innocent websites that have been compromised by malware authors, or others that are built specifically for malware distribution or phishing. While we flag many sites daily, we strive for high quality and have had only a handful of false positives. Google's doing its part to try and protect users from installing nasty viruses via its various warning systems, which is good, because it sounds like millions of folks are just begging for a Trojan. Provos explains that 12 to 14 million search results carry Google's "This site may be compromised" warning each and every day, with an additional 300,000 downloads being flagged as malicious by Chrome's download protection service. Provos' post breaks things down even further and explains just how many malicious sites contain malware, which are phishing sites, etc. I'd venture that most of the sites wouldn't trip up a tech-savvy surfer, however, especially one with an up-to-date AV app. The company sends out thousands of notifications to webmasters and ISPs on a daily basis to spread the word and maybe clean things up a bit, but 9,500 new malicious sites a day can't be easy to combat. So, aside from your trusty tinfoil hat, what technology and programs do you use to make sure you're staying safe while browsing the tubes? |
| Google, Asus to Tag Team 7-inch Nexus Tablet Unveil Next Week Posted: 19 Jun 2012 08:00 AM PDT  If the latest rumors are true, Google is getting ready to attack the 7-inch tablet (or "tweener," as Steve Jobs referred to them) market in a big way with a Nexus device it jointly developed with Asus. Word on the Web is that the two companies will unveil the aggressively priced 7-inch Nexus tablet at Google I/O, which will take place at San Francisco's Moscone Center next week (June 27 through 29). How aggressive?
Citing sources from upstream component makers, DigiTimes says it will initially cost $199, the same as Amazon's Kindle Fire. Most of the specs are still a mystery, but it's likely the 7-inch Nexus will trump the Kindle Fire's hardware. At minimum, it will bring a front-facing camera to the 7-inch tablet party, which is something the Kindle Fire doesn't have, though don't expect 3G, 4G, or anything other than Wi-Fi connectivity at this price, DigiTimes says. The Nexus tablet is said to come pre-loaded with Google's Chrome browser. Asus, meanwhile, is getting ready to launch its own brand 7-inch tablet later this summer in the $159 to $179 range. Follow Paul on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook |
| Adata Adds Two mSATA Solid State Drives to Storage Lineup Posted: 19 Jun 2012 07:23 AM PDT  As far as Adata is concerned, an influx of motherboards sporting built-in mSATA slots is going to create a demand for mSATA solid state drives (SSDs). The idea behind mSATA SSDs is to provide a fast cache solution to aid the primary storage device, typically a mechanical hard disk drive (HDD), to achieve system performance comparable to running a standalone SSD at a fraction of the cost. Towards that end, Adata today announced the launch of its XPG SX300 and Premier Pro SP300 mSATA SSDs.
Starting at the higher end, the XPG SX300 features a SATA 6Gbps interface and is aimed at power users who want both speed and capacity. Adata rates the read and write speeds at up to 550MB/s and 505MB/s, respectively, along with up to 85,000 IOPS of 4K random write performance. The XPG SX300 series is available in 64GB, 128GB, and 256GB capacities. For those with more modest performance and storage requirements, the Premier Pro SP300 series is built around a SATA 3Gbps interface and ships in 24GB, 32GB, and 64GB capacities. These drives feature up to 280MB/s read and 260MB/s write speeds, and up to 46,000 IOPS of 4K random write performance. Adata didn't say when these new drives will ship or what the MSRPs will be. Follow Paul on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook |
| Intel Spends $375 Million Beefing Up Wireless Patent Portfolio Posted: 19 Jun 2012 06:35 AM PDT  Certain InterDigital subsidiaries will receive a $375 million cash payment from Intel in exchange for handing over roughly 1,700 patents and patent applications related to 3G, Long Term Evolution (LTE), and 802.11 wireless technologies. Intel plans to use its newly acquired wireless patents to help support its strategic investments in the mobile segment, the Santa Clara chip maker said. By adding to its already large and diverse patent portfolio, Intel also puts itself in better position to avoid costly lawsuits.
It's an obvious win for InterDigital, which develops, markets, and licenses all kinds of advanced wireless technologies. InterDigital has built up a portfolio of around 20,000 patents over the past three decades, and is now averaging around 1,000 new patents each year. Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy told InfoWorld that this deal marked "an opportunity to add some value to our patent portfolio. That's over and above what we have." Like it or not, patent law is a game companies are forced to play. According to The Street, InterDigital earlier this year had decided to concentrate its efforts on litigation and further licensing its patents to beef up revenue, so it's a bit of a surprise the company decided to sell off a portion of its patents outright. Image Credit: Intel Follow Paul on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook |
| Sharp's 90-inch Aquos is Largest LED HDTV on Planet Earth Posted: 19 Jun 2012 05:56 AM PDT  Bragging rights don't come cheap, and if you want to own the largest LED-backlit high-definition television on this side of the Solar System, it's going to set you back $10,999.99, leaving you a penny for your thoughts if you've saved up eleven grand. That's the asking price for Sharp's newly unveiled 90-inch LED Smart 3D TV (model LC-90LE745U), which stands almost 4 feet tall, over six feet long, and has a 4.5-inch waistline while tipping the scales at 141.1 pounds.
All that screen real estate goes towards a 1920x1080 display resolution with a 120Hz native refresh rate (240Hz backlight scanning refresh rate). Sharp rates the dynamic contrast ratio at 8,000,000:1. Connectivity options consist of two USB ports, four HDMI inputs, two composite inputs, HD component, DVI, RS-232C, and GbE LAN, along with L/R audio inputs and optical digital audio output. It also has built-in Wi-Fi and is a Smart TV running Sharp's SmartCentral UI. That gives viewers access to apps like Netflix, Hulu Plus, Vudu, Skype, Facebook, Twitter, and several others. And for the less savvy, Sharp says its 90-inch panel automatically downloads and applies updates as they're made available. Sharp's 90-inch monster is available now, provided you have the requisite disposable income and a place to plop it. Image Credit: Sharp Follow Paul on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook |
| Gartner Reportedly Lowers PC Shipment Forecast for 2012 and 2013 Posted: 19 Jun 2012 03:51 AM PDT  As with each new version of Windows, Microsoft is not the only one counting on the success of Windows 8. The entire PC industry is hoping that the next iteration of the world's most popular PC operating system will help lift sluggish sales. But not everyone foresees the launch of Windows 8 later this year stimulating PC sales.
Gartner is said to have lowered its outlook for PC shipment forecast for this year and the next, according to a note to clients by Rick Sherlund, an analyst with Nomura Equity Research. The note, which was first reported on by GeekWire, claims that Gartner published its revised PC shipment forecast in a private report over the weekend. The new numbers paint a very bleak picture, with the change in Gartner's forecast for this year being especially dramatic. The market research firm is said to have lowered its forecast for growth in PC shipments in 2012 to 0.9 percent from the previous 4.4 percent. As for the next year, Sherlund claims that Gartner has revised its forecast to 11.1 percent from the original 11.9 percent. But what could have possibly forced Gartner to make this change? Sherlund cited a number of factors, including the staggered rollout of Intel's Ivy Bridge chips, the current economic environment, and doubts over Windows 8. "There is a transition required and we will likely see continued mixed reactions: more negative on the legacy 'desktop' platform and more positive for the touch 'Metro' platform where all the industry growth will come from. We are still expecting RTM by late July / August, and GA by late September / early October," Sherlund wrote in his note Monday. Image Credit: justlooking/flickr |
