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Maximum PC - Reviews

Logitech Speaker System Z623 Review

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 23:50:58 +0000

Too much sizzle, not enough steak

Logitech astounds us on a regular basis with their ability to produce dirt-cheap yet solid-sounding speakers. We can only imagine how thin their profit margins must be; heck, that’s probably why there are so few other players in this segment. But the quality of their latest offering, the Speaker System Z623, barely passes muster. It also leaves us wondering what value THX certification really holds for the consumer at this price point.

The Z623 is a 2.1-channel system equipped with a 200-watt amplifier that delivers 35 watts to each of the satellite speakers and 130 watts to the sub. The satellites have a single driver each--a 2.5-inch dome with an aluminum phase plug--while the subwoofer utilizes a seven-inch pressure driver with a bass port in its cabinet. As is typical in this category, the satellites have hard-wired cables that plug into the sub, where the amp is located.

Logitech's Z623 is a 2.1-channel system with a generously sized subwoofer.

Logitech offers plenty of analog inputs: The subwoofer cabinet has both stereo RCA inputs and a stereo 1/8-inch jack, and there’s a second stereo 1/8-inch jack on the right-hand speaker cabinet. The power switch, knobs for volume and bass level control, and a 1/8-inch stereo headphone jack are also on this cabinet. Unlike Logitech’s top-of-the-line speaker system, the $400 Z-5500, there are no digital audio inputs and no surround-sound decoder—not that we’d expect those features at this price point.

THX says they worked closely with Logitech during the Z623's development cycle.

What we do expect—at any price point—is good fidelity. THX certification notwithstanding, the Z623 speaker system falls short of that mark. We have no complaint with the system’s performance with movies or games; it delivered dialog and sound effects with gusto. But when we dove into our library of high-definition FLAC files (downloaded from B&W’s Society of Sound), we discovered that the satellites overdrive mid-range frequencies, rendering broad swaths of both vocals and instruments unpleasantly harsh at higher volumes.

Listening to “Arawen,” from the Toumast album Amachal, it felt as though band leader Moussa Ag Keyna was thrashing our ears with his hard-driving guitar work. We had similar experiences with other songs and other instruments from very different musical genres, including the languid piano work on “Slowly,” from Juliana Raye’s retro-sounding Dominoes album, and the vocals on “Nuwaruguma,” from the Aurelio Martinez album Garifuna Afro-Combo. Each of these tracks was encoded in either 16- or 24-bit FLAC with sampling resolutions of either 44.1- or 48kHz, and yet we couldn’t listen to the speakers in a near-field environment for more than 20 minutes before our ears felt fatigued. The problem is related more to the drivers than the amp, because we enjoyed a much better listening experience with B&W’s P5 headphones plugged into the satellite.

The Z623’s low price tag, combined with its good performance with movies and games, saves its bacon. If you’re looking for inexpensive speakers for listening to music, however, we think Logitech’s Z250 speakers are a far better value. They’re not THX certified, they don’t come with a subwoofer, and they’re only $20 cheaper than the Z623, but your ears will be a lot happier.

Logitech Speaker System Z623

Aged Cheddar

Inexpensive, good performance with games and movies; lots of inputs; discrete bass control.

Dull Shredder

Poor musical performance, with an overdriven midrange.

MSI GX640-098US Notebook Review

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 19:47:50 +0000

Underpowered GPU driving a big screen

Neither the MSI GX640-098US’s specs nor its $1,200 price tag necessarily scream “mobile gaming rig,” but the notebook’s highlighted W, A, S, and D keys say otherwise. So when the GX480 showed up on our doorstep, we wondered if the moderately powered notebook could muster up enough moxie to satisfy mobile gamers on a budget.

The 15.4-inch display is certainly not the largest-size screen you’re going to find on a gaming notebook; but when you’re making concessions to save some dough, screen size is one of the easiest areas to cut costs. The display’s 1680x1050 native resolution is a pleasant surprise, though, which is higher than the 1366x768 native res of Asus’s 16-inch N61J desktop-replacement.

Other than screen size, the GX640 and N61J share very similar specs. They are both powered by a 2.26GHz Core i5-430M processor and 4GB of 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM, and both come with 7,200rpm 500GB hard drives. The N61J has at least two distinct advantages over the GX640, however, with USB 3.0 support and a price tag that’s $300 lower.

The two units also differ in their choice of GPUs. The N61J uses integrated Intel GMA and discrete GeForce GT 325M switchable graphics (using Nvidia’s Optimus technology), while the GX640 uses a discrete ATI Radeon HD 5850—the 5850 is currently AMD’s second-highest GPU in its mobile graphics food chain. But the GX640’s 5850 simply isn’t enough to give the GTX 260M in our zero-point notebook much to worry about (neither did the N61J’s GT 325M, for that matter). We had to crank Far Cry 2’s resolution down to 1024x768, turn off antialiasing, lower the quality settings to high, and the performance settings to medium, just to see an average frame of rate of 26.2fps.

Where the GX640 fares better is with content-creations apps that support multithreading. The performance differences aren’t earth shattering, but the GX640 manages to beat our zero-point machine by 13.3 percent in MainConcept and 12.8 percent in Premiere Pro. Even though the GX640’s Core i5-430M processor’s stock speed is 800MHz slower than our zero-point’s 3.06GHz Core 2 Duo Mobile T9900 CPU, the Core i5-430M gets its performance advantage from an updated microarchitecture and its HyperThreading technology. On our single-threaded Photoshop test, however, the zero-point’s faster processor retakes the lead over the GX640. As to overall application performance, the GX460 puts in an almost identical showing to that of the N61J.

Battery life wasn’t much to write home about either. Even with a 9-cell, 85Wr battery, the GX460 lasted only just over an hour and a half on our battery-rundown test. This is nine minutes less than the zero-point and 34 minutes behind the N61J.

The GX640 certainly looks like a gaming notebook with its bright red trim highlighting a black brushed-metal aluminum-alloy chassis. A glossy display, headphone-out jack that supports digital 7.1-channel audio, and HDMI-out add to its potential gaming appeal. Other nice touches are ExpressCard/54 and eSATA ports, as well as a full-size keyboard with a dedicated numeric keypad. And weighing in at 6.3 pounds, the GX640 is far more portable than a larger gaming notebook.

With the economy forcing belt-tightening across the board, plunking down a couple of grand for a gaming notebook isn’t as easy as it used to be—compromises often need to be made. But the GX640’s graphics performance is just not up to snuff for today’s hardcore 3D titles. That said, the GX640 is a more than capable desktop replacement system. This comes with a caveat, however: If it’s a desktop replacement you’re looking for, you might instead want to consider the similarly configured, and $300 cheaper, Asus N61J; that is unless you need the GX640’s larger 1680x1050 native resolution.

MSI GX640-098U

Piranha

Great content-creation performance; highlighted W, A, S, D keys; ExpressCard/54 slot.

Pariah

Anemic gaming performance; battery life isn’t great.

Gigabyte GV-N470UD-13I GTX 470 Review

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 17:30:24 +0000

This Fermi lite uses reference clocks, but it's no reference card

Sharp-eyed Maximum PC readers who care about performance will no doubt notice that Gigabyte’s GV-N470UD-13I GTX 470 runs at stock reference speeds but achieves almost identical benchmark scores to last month’s kick-ass overclocked EVGA GTX 470. Blame it on new drivers versus old.

To be fair, the N470UD-13I isn’t exactly a stock card. While the card ships at reference clock speeds for core, shader, and memory, Gigabyte builds the board using its Ultra Durable manufacturing methods, which includes two-ounces-of-copper PCB technology, Japanese solid capacitors, high-end Samsung or Hynix GDDR5 memory, and low RDS(on) MOSFETs, which are designed to minimize switching resistance for faster capacitor charging and discharging. The PCB itself is blue, unlike many reference GTX 470 cards.

Gigabyte builds robust components into its take on Nvidia’s GTX 470.

In theory, more robust components should make for an overclockable card. But we tested the N470UD-13I at the rated (reference) clocks, because that’s the way the card ships. We used Nvidia’s Release 256 drivers, which dropped just as we were launching into our testing. These drivers offer some performance enhancements, but also add Blu-ray 3D support, new setup controls for multi-GPU, and OpenGL 4.0 support.

Gigabyte’s GTX 470 hammered the Radeon HD 5850, while trading wins with the reference-clocked HIS Radeon HD 5870. At its roughly $360 price point, this particular GTX 470 is priced well against the competition, as most Radeon HD 5850s still cost a little more than $300, while the HD 5870s go for close to $400.

Gigabyte also includes Nvidia’s Supersonic Sled and Design Garage demos. Unlike past Nvidia demos, these are highly interactive. Launching the Supersonic Sled in high-arc trajectories is entertaining in its own right.

Included in the box are the usual set of accessories—power adapter cable, DVI-to-VGA adapter, and SLI connector. Gigabyte also tosses in a 1.5 meter Mini-HDMI-to-HDMI cable (not just an adapter.) That’s handy for connecting to HDMI-equipped monitors.

As with other Fermi products, the Gigabyte card does draw more power at full throttle than its competition. At idle, our test system drew 142 watts, dead even with the same system running a Radeon HD 5850. At full throttle (defined as the Unigine Heaven 2.0 demo running at 2560x1600 with 4x AA), the system pulled down 324W with the GTX 470, compared to the 261W drawn by the HD 5850.

Overall, Gigabyte’s GV-N470UD-13I delivers solid performance at a decent price. While we wish it drew less power, we’re compelled to point out that the overall difference in power cost over a year is only a few dollars at worst. Given Gigabyte’s more robust manufacturing techniques, you can probably expect decent overclockability or a reasonably long life span from this version of Fermi lite.

Gigabyte GV-N470UD-13I GTX 470

Unobtanium

Excellent performance; reasonable price; card will fit in most cases; Mini-HDMI adapter cable.

Balonium

Draws a lot of power; noisy at full throttle; costs more than a Radeon HD 5850.

Asus Eee 1215N Review

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 00:10:32 +0000

Next-gen Ion. Dual-core Atom. Nvidia's Optimus. This baby's got it all.

We’ve been waiting a long time for this. We first heard about Nvidia’s next-generation Ion chip way back in the first months of 2010. They were supposed to ship with Nvidia’s Optimus graphics-switching technology back in April. Okay, June. July at the latest. It didn’t quite happen—those few next-gen Ion netbooks that did launch earlier this year did so without Optimus. At long last, however, Asus’ next-gen Ion netbook—with Optimus and a dual-core netbook Atom chip—has hit American shores, just one day before September.

The Eee 1215N is sleek on the outside and powerful on the inside.

The Eee 1215N, one of Asus’ innumerable Eee PC Seashell netbooks, is the first netbook we’ve seen with Intel’s new mobile dual-core Atom chips—it ships with the 1.8GHz Atom D525, 2GB of DDR3/800 RAM, and most importantly, Nvidia’s next-generation Ion graphics chipset and Optimus technology, which enables Ion when required and switches to Intel’s integrated UMA graphics when Ion isn’t necessary.

If you’ve seen any Asus netbook in the past few years, the 1215N offers few surprises, most of them welcome. At 11.6 inches across, 8 inches deep, and 1.4 inches thick, weighing 3lbs 4oz, it’s has the same height and depths as previous Ion netbooks, but it’s thinner. Like the last Ion Eee PC we’ve reviewed (June 2010’s 1201N), the 1215N uses a full-sized chiclet-style keyboard, as well as a multitouch trackpad that sits flush with the wrist rest and has a single (right- and left-clickable) trackpad button. Unlike the 1201N, however, this year’s model swaps a glossy black fingerprint-magnet wrist rest for a slightly less grease-showing matte, and the grid-of-dimples trackpad for one delineated by metal insets. Unfortunately, the screen bezel and keyboard area (other than the keys themselves) remain glossy and smudge-friendly.

The webcam now has a sliding “privacy cover” for those paranoid about people hacking their cams to take nude shots of them playing Torchlight, which is of negligible value but doesn’t hurt.

Speaking of Torchlight, the hit action RPG from Runic: the 1215N plays it. In the game’s netbook mode, at 1366x768, we averaged 36fps—definitely playable, though framerates can drop to the high teens for a few frames if there are lots of enemies on the screen.

It also plays Portal. And Starcraft 2. Not exactly graphically intense buts, but still actual modern games. While next-generation Ion isn’t that much faster than the first-gen chip, it no longer swipes RAM from the rest of your machine—this platform’s 512MB of DDR3 graphics memory is separate from the main memory. Optimus does a great job of switching on when needed for gameplay or video acceleration. Video acceleration, you say? Yep. The 1215N’s screen is capable of 720p HD playback, and the machine itself can power an external monitor at 1920x1080 via HDMI. We were able to play 1080p Flash videos from YouTube at 1920x1080, thanks to Flash 10.1’s hardware-acceleration support. Local 1080p video will also play, depending the encoding and your player’s codec support—Blu-Ray movies played flawlessly to the external monitor from an Asus USB 2.0 Blu-Ray external drive, while 1080p QuickTime .mov files had some stuttering but 720p Quicktime files played fine.

The 1215N set records in nearly every benchmark we have: 17 percent faster than the next-fastest Photoshop score, 25 percent faster than the next-fastest MainConcept encode; 8 percent faster than the last-gen Ion netbooks in Quake 4. The only outliers are battery life—though at five-plus hours, it’s not bad—and Quake III. Averaging 104 frames per second is still triple what we get from non-Ion netbooks, but previous Ion netbooks have scored between 130 and 150fps on that test.

Once you take away all the things that hamper traditional netbooks—a slow CPU, limited RAM, Intel graphics—and add a 1366x768 screen, Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit, and an HDMI port, is the end result even still a netbook? We say yes: the 1215N is sleek and doesn’t feel cheap, but at $500, it’s not breaking the bank—or, at just over 3 pounds, your back. We defy you to get similar performance from a $500 ultraportable.

Asus Eee 1215N

Gunpowder

1080p playback; HDMI out; great build quality; decent gaming performance.

Creepers

No Bluetooth; USB 3.0 coming later. Battery could be better.

Insignia Infocast Review

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 18:40:48 +0000

Growing up Chumby

If you like the Chumby, you’ll dig Best Buy’s take on the Internet appliance. The Infocast runs the Chumby operating system, but it has a much larger touch screen, a faster CPU, a memory card reader, and 2GB of internal memory.

Insignia is Best Buy's house brand, but the Infocast is no me-too product.

If, on the other hand, the first- and second-generation Chumbys left you shrugging your shoulders, the Infocast will do little to change your mind. Don’t know the Chumby from Tennessee Tuxedo’s sidekick Chumley? Think of a stripped-down all-in-one PC designed primarily for data consumption, versus data production. There’s no mouse or keyboard, for instance; and you can display your digital photos on it, but you can’t edit them.

The Infocast’s eight-inch, 800x600-pixel resistive touch-screen is well suited to the Chumby’s graphical user interface, but you won’t want to use the onscreen keyboard for much more than entering the occasional user ID or password. The device is powered by Marvell’s Armada 168 system-on-chip, which includes Marvell’s Sheeva CPU core running at 800MHz.

The Infocast can run any of the surprisingly diverse collection of widgets—RSS readers, games, and everything in between—that have been developed for the Chumby OS. There are more than 1,500 applications available for free.

The device costs about twice as much as the typical Wi-Fi-equipped picture frame, but it does a whole lot more than display photos. The Infocast can play simple games, display your Facebook and Twitter updates, play YouTube videos, retrieve stock quotes, and stream music from its own memory or from a connected storage device. It can also connect to your Pandora account or play any Internet radio station available via ShoutCast or Chumby’s Blue Octy Radio.

The Infocast's speakers do a poor job of representing its audio capabilities; fortunately, there's a headphone jack for headphones or external speakers.

The Infocast doesn’t have a hard-wired network interface, relying instead on your 802.11b/g wireless connection. In addition to accessing storage devices on your network, the box has two USB 2.0 ports in the rear and two memory card readers on the left side to accommodate CompactFlash, SD, MMC, xD, and Memory Stick flash-memory media. Don’t judge the Infocast’s audio capabilities based on the chintzy stereo speakers mounted behind the display, they sound terrible. We were much happier with what we heard when we connected B&W’s exquisite P5 headphones.

The two USB ports in the back and these memory card readers on the side give the Infocast plenty of I/O options.

Musically speaking, the Infocast is no substitute for a Squeezebox Touch, but it makes a great alarm clock. It’s no substitute for an all-in-one PC, either, because you can’t really produce anything with it. But it is fun and very easy to use, and its $170 price tag is almost low enough to render it an impulse buy.

Insignia Infocast

Chumley

Eight-inch touch-screen, rich collection of free widgets, inexpensive.

Chum

Crappy speakers, resistive (versus capacitive) touch-screen.

HP ZR30w 30-inch LCD Review

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 17:45:22 +0000

Fit for a Dream Machine

You might recall seeing three of HP’s ZR30w 30-inch displays gracing the cover of our September “Dream Machine” issue. Considering our theme for that build was raw, wanton power, picking the ZR30w was an easy decision.

We haven’t been this wowed by a display since we laid eyes on NEC’s LCD3090 WQXi, which we reviewed in our March 2010 issue. But that 30-incher costs nearly twice as much as this one. Both monitors are based on S-IPS panels, as all the best LCD monitors are, and both deliver native resolution of 2560x1600 (a 16:10 aspect ratio). But the ZR30w’s real claim to fame is color resolution of 10 bits per color per pixel (HP defines this as 30 bits per pixel), which enables it to produce 1.07 billion displayable colors. That’s 100 percent of the sRGB color gamut and 99 percent of the Adobe RGB color gamut.

HP's ZR30w is a spectacular value in the 30-inch display category, even if it is missing HDMI and portrait mode.

The ZR30w’s video inputs are limited to a single dual-link DVI port and a single DisplayPort. There’s HDCP support on both of these, but we would have appreciated the inclusion of an HDMI port, too. It’s not that we want to send audio to the display—this one doesn’t have built-in speakers, and we imagine they’d sound terrible if it did—it’s just that having HDMI would be convenient. In fact, we wished this monitor was equipped with at least one more DVI or DisplayPort port, too, since we find ourselves using two computers at once (one for testing, one for writing) on a fairly regular basis. A four-port USB hub rounds out the connectivity features (two ports on the left-hand side of the bezel and two on the bottom, behind the panel).

There are four buttons on the lower right-hand size of the bezel, but they don’t serve the function you might expect; that is, they don’t call up an onscreen display for the purpose of making color adjustments. That’s because the ZR30w doesn’t have an onscreen display. The plus/minus buttons control brightness, while the power and source buttons do just what you’d expect.

The monitor moves with smooth precision on its stand, which has an open base that’s handy for trapping pens and other small objects, but it’s limited to height, tilt, and swivel; you can’t pivot it into portrait mode unless you buy an articulated arm or some other VESA mount. The power supply is integrated into the monitor, so you don’t need to worry about stashing a power brick under or on top of your desk.

One of the first things we noticed when we began evaluating the display using DisplayMate Multimedia with Test Photos Edition (www.displaymate.com) was absolutely no backlight leakage anywhere around the perimeter of the screen. The glass itself has a matte finish, so we didn’t encounter any issues with glare or distracting specular reflections. The ZR30w delivered excellent color uniformity in our DisplayMate tests. And the monitor was perfectly capable of delivering Just Cause 2 action without any signs of motion blur. The ZR30w’s $1,300 price tag doesn’t put it in impulse-buy territory, but it does render it a spectacular value.

HP ZR30w 30-inch LCD

Big Bad Mama

S-IPS panel; great performance with both games and professional applications.

Grizzly Mama

No HDMI; no media card reader; doesn't pivot to portrait mode.

EVGA GeForce GTX 480 Superclocked+ Review

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 16:45:46 +0000

This video devours watts as greedily as it eats benchmarks

After a rocky development period and a delayed launch, Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 480 GPU is finally entering that middle stage: Factory overclocked, not-quite-standard products are emerging, offering better performance, improved cooling, and the potential for even higher overclocks.

This new card doesn’t offer a fully redesigned cooler. EVGA altered the design of the back-plate, enlarging its vents to facilitate more efficient airflow. The back-plate also helps dissipate heat, though there is a small chance that you will encounter thermal issues with some case or motherboard designs.

EVGA's GeForce GTX 480 Superclocked+ is fast, but pricey.

The Superclocked+ pushes the core clock to 726MHz versus 700MHz stock, and memory to 950MHz memory as opposed to the reference design’s 926MHz. This translates to a shader clock frequency of 1,451MHz, which is just a bit higher than the standard 1,401MHz. The higher clock speeds give you more robust performance—and a higher price tag: The Superclocked+ can be found for around $520, while EVGA’s stock design costs less than $500.

Note that while you can find other 480 GTX cards built on the reference design for as low as $460, the extra cost does get you EVGA’s limited lifetime warranty (provided you register the product within 30 days of purchase). If you live with your products for a long time, the extra cost might be justified.

EVGA redesigned the back-plate to improve cooling and boost clock speeds.

Let’s get right down to brass tacks: you buy an overclocked card to run your games faster and to get that last bit of overhead so you can run cool new stuff, like DX11 features. So let’s compare the Superclocked+ to the Asus ENGTX480, which is a stock card. We’ll also compare it to one of the faster Radeon HD 5870 cards, the XFX Radeon HD 5870 XXX Edition.

The overclock doesn’t come cheap in terms of power consumption. The Superclocked+ pushes a whopping 401W at full throttle (that’s the full system power usage), as compared to the Radeon HD 5870 XXX Edition’s 290W. But that’s really the only place the Radeon wins: A one frame-per-second advantage Crysis is essentially a tie. While the card does suck watts from your power supply as if from a fire hose, the noise levels didn’t hit Dustbuster-like levels, probably due to the larger venting in the back panel.

Similarly, the Asus card, which is a stock card running at reference clocks “wins” a couple of benchmark rounds, but those are also essentially ties. Besides, those particular benchmarks are CPU bound at 1920x1200 with 4x AA enabled. So we’re finally hitting the point where a card with a single GPU is hitting the CPU wall with some recent generation titles.

What’s the bottom line? If you want the fastest single GPU card that doesn’t require special cooling (like EVGA’s water-block equipped Hydro Copper FTW GTX 480), then this is your card. It’s pricey and it’s fast and you know you crave it.

EVGA GeForce GTX 480 Superclocked+

Buffy

Top-of-the-line performance; cooler design is less noisy.

Edward

Power hungry; expensive.

Plextor PX-NAS2 Review

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 16:05:42 +0000

My NAS Box has a first name, it’s s-l-o-w

How do you spell slow? P-X-N-A-S-2, according to Plextor. It’s not a proud achievement, but this one-terabyte network-attached storage device is one of the slower devices we’ve ever hooked up to our network. Transferring files is slow. Accessing the Web-based user interface is slow. Formatting the drives to a new storage type is slow. Slow, slow, slow.

We almost couldn’t believe it ourselves—there had to be something wrong with either our test network, a full-fledged Gigabit network run through a single D-Link DIR-825 Xtreme wireless router, or the setup of the two 500GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 drives nestled within this two-bay device.

The PX-NAS2 has two drive bays, but you can't remove the lower drive without removing the upper drive, first.

Subsequent tests on other, speedier NAS boxes ruled out the first, and reconfiguring the PX-NAS2’s internal storage setup only brought additional heartache. You get three storage modes to choose from on the NAS box: a JBOD or a RAID 0 “striped” array, which deliver near-identical, slow speeds, or an ice-age-inducing RAID 1 mirror that’s the digital equivalent of taking the dog on a long walk. The numbers speak for themselves: a wee over five minutes to transfer a 2.7-gigabyte file to the NAS box, and three minutes and 30 seconds to read it.

Even the NAS box’s UI feels sluggish. Plextor includes a handy utility that automatically finds your box on the network—that, we like. Although it had a little trouble actually mapping the drive’s folders within our test system’s 64-bit Windows 7 installation, it did adequately pull up the correct Web-based administration page for the PX-NAS2.

And then you wait. You wait all of the various status screens to load on the primary Administration page before clicking a link, you sometimes wait for the churn of the page for the actual link you’ve clicked on and—if you dare try to reformat your drives into a new RAID setup—you wait even longer. If you’re lucky, the NAS box hangs at 99 percent and doesn’t give you any indication of what you should do in response.

Not content to be slow, his NAS is also loud: You definitely won’t want to put it in your living room—unless you’re watching a show about aircraft carrier takeoffs, in which case the PX-NAS2 will fit right in.

It’s comforting to know that at least all the standard features are present on the PX-NAS2’s Web administration side of things. By that, we mean that the device supports features like the good ol’ create-your-own-FTP-server deal, streaming folders to iTunes or a UPnP-friendly living room device, hosting your own Web page, downloading BitTorrents straight to the PX-NAS2, et cetera. We don’t mean to gloss over these unfairly; they’re just the same-ol’, same-ol’ kinds of useful tools that are common to a number of competing products.

We really like how Plextor makes it super-easy to custom-install new features directly into the software administration system. While it is slightly unnerving that useful elements like backup functionality and SMART hard drive analyses aren’t included in the device’s operating system by default, at least they’re easy to get to, right? Curiously, Plextor omitted these useful additions for software elements like a Flickr/YouTube uploading tool. If you’ve ever wanted to seed the Cloud with the contents of your NAS box, the PX-NAS2 is the way to go.

Upgrading the actual hard drives inside the PX-NAS2 appears to be a tool-less procedure at first. Undoing the case of the NAS box is as easy as untwisting three thumbscrews on the device’s rear. The hard drives require considerable more finesse—and a screwdriver—to remove. Not only do you have to detach four screws per drive, you then have to slam the drive into the front of the NAS box to wiggle it out of its immovable tray. To add salt in the wound, you can’t remove the lowermost drive unless you first remove the top one.
Simply put, purchasing Plextor’s PX-NAS2 is going to be more an exercise in frustration than file-management. We recommend you steer clear of this ice box of a NAS box.

Plextor PX-NAS2

SMB3 World Three

Installable software upgrades; standard NAS utilities; iTunes and UPnP servers slim design.

SMB World Six

Horrifically slow; very loud; annoying drive-installation procedure.

Acer Aspire 5745PG-3882 Review

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 17:45:53 +0000

A very capable multitouch, multimedia machine

The $900 Acer Aspire 5745PG-3882 is an attractive-looking, moderately priced notebook with some nifty multitouch features, a high-quality display, and audio attributes that make it a very capable multimedia system. But with middling 3D graphics performance, it’s not going to make anyone’s top-10 list of portable gaming rigs.

Sporting a 15.6-inch, multitouch-capable, capacitive screen, the 5745PG-3882 is not unlike the iBuypower Armada Touch MT20X we reviewed a few months ago. But while the MT20X includes a useful application that lets you map common mouse and keyboard gaming commands to the screen’s multitouch interface, the 5745PG-3882 lacks any sort of 3D-gaming-specific features for its touch display. It does, however, include some cool multitouch software for more everyday usages, such as apps for watching photos and videos, listening to music, and surfing the web. A couple of touch-enabled casual games are also included, but these titles aren’t exactly the sort of games that make a GPU sweat.

The 5745PG-3882 features Acer’s unique FineTip keyboard design.

The 5745PG-3882’s display is bright and vibrant—a veritable pleasure to watch movies on. Thankfully, the screen doesn’t catch reflections nearly as bad as other glossy displays have a tendency to do; and despite all the touching, the screen never became marred with fingerprints. The display has a native resolution of 1366x768, unlike the full 1080p-capable MT20X (which has a native res of 1920x1080). Audio is equally impressive, thanks to the Dolby Home Theater Virtual Surround Sound speakers. But when the Dolby settings are enabled, the volume noticeably drops—limiting just how loud you can crank the audio.

An Nvidia GeForce GT 330M GPU supplies the graphics power, but this just wasn’t enough to give our zero point’s GTX 260M a run for its money. It was, however, enough to nip closely at the heels of the Mobility Radeon HD 5650–equipped MT20X. This isn’t necessarily saying much, as we weren’t particular impressed with the MT20X’s 3D graphics performance. The 5745PG-3882’s frame rate of 28fps on the three-year-old Call of Duty 4 at 1650x1050 with fairly aggressive settings is playable, but far from the ideal of what mobile gamers aspire to achieve.

On the other hand, when running multithreaded, content-creation apps, such as Adobe Premiere CS3 and ProShow Producer, the 5745PG-3882’s dual-core 2.4GHz Core i5-450M processor was notably speedier than the zero-point’s 3.06GHz Core 2 Duo T9900. For instance, the 5745PG-3882 managed to zip through our MainConcept test more than 20 percent faster than the zero-point. But when single-threaded apps, such as Photoshop CS3, enter the equation, the zero-point squeezes back ahead of the 5745PG-3882 by a small margin. As the MT20X uses a higher-end, quad-core, 1.6GHz Core i7-720QM, it’s no surprise that it handily beats the 5745PG-3882 on all our application tests—especially those that support multithreading.

As for battery life, the 5745PG-3882 lasted two hours and 37 minutes on our demanding DVD playback test, which is much better than what either the zero-point (one hour and 40 minutes) or the MT20X (one hour and 33 minutes) were capable of. This is long enough to watch most of Avatar, but it’s still below-average battery life for notebooks in this class.

And what class is that, you might ask? The most accurate way to classify the 5745PG-3882 is as a mainstream multimedia notebook. As long as serious gaming isn’t on your do-list, the 5745PG-3882 will serve you well with media and nearly any application. This alone presents a great value at less than $900; factor in the multitouch screen and the 5745PG-3882 becomes a compelling option for non-gamers.

Acer Aspire 574PG-3882

Bollywood

Great for movies and audio; strong multithreaded content-creation performance; multitouch display.

Box-office Bomb

Disappointing 3D-gaming performance.

PowerColor Go Green Radeon HD 5750 Review

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 18:13:25 +0000

AMD’s Radeon HD 5000-series cards are already considerably more power efficient than anything in Nvidia’s Fermi lineup, but PowerColor’s Go Green series of cards are engineered to consume even less electrical power than reference design-cards. This passively cooled Radeon HD 5750 (PowerColor part number AX5750 1GBD5-NS3DH, to be precise) draws all the power it needs from the PCI Express bus, so it doesn’t require a dedicated six-pin power cable. No fan means no noise.

The Radeon 5000-series has another major advantage over Fermi cards: They’re capable of streaming uncompressed high-definition audio from Blu-ray discs (Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio) over HDMI. Fermi has the hardware for this, but Nvidia has not yet released a driver that enables it (although we don’t expect that day is far off).

PowerColor's engineers acheived a 21-percent reduction in power consumption compred to a reference-design Radeon HD 5750

But if you’re thinking this and the passive cooling render this particular 5750 the perfect solution for that home-theater rig you’re building, fuhgeddaboutit: The oversized dual-slot heatsink extends far beyond the edge of the PCB. When we installed it in our home-theater PC—an AMD reference design in itself—the card’s top edge stood a full inch above the enclosure’s mounting bracket (the machine is housed in an nMediaPC HTPC 1000 enclosure).

But to be fair to PowerColor, they’re not marketing this card as a home-theater solution. And if you’re just looking for a Blu-ray player, a 5750 paired with a 1GB frame buffer is more than you need anyway. Evaluate the Go Green 5750 as a mid-range gaming card, however, and you’ll see that it’s considerably more expensive than competing cards equipped with conventional heatsinks and fans—in fact, it’s about the same price as conventionally cooled cards based on the more powerful Radeon 5770.

As you can see from the benchmark charts, the Go Green 5750's heatsink does a remarkably good job of keeping the GPU cool. Copper heat pipes wick heat to the fins on the large passive radiator, where it's dissipated into the rest of the case. When we installed the card in a conventional mid-tower enclosure and played Just Cause 2, the GPU's sensors never registered a temperature higher than 74.5 C. And when we moved the card into our home-theater PC and played a Blu-ray movie, GPU temps never moved above 66 C (although we put the lid on the case, we couldn't close it entirely because the card is too tall).

Economically speaking, you’ll likely never save enough on your energy bill to recoup the difference between the cost of a Go Green 5750 and the cost of a more conventional card based on the same GPU. Environmentally speaking, on the other hand, you will be reducing your carbon footprint—and it’s hard to put a price on that.