Maximum PC - Reviews

Asus P9X79 Deluxe Review

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 19:26:12 +0000

A deluxe board with an enthusiast price tag

Let’s be frank: If you’re even thinking about buying into Intel’s deliciously fast LGA2011 platform this early, you are an enthusiast—Enthusiast with a capital-freaking-E, since you can’t even look at LGA2011 without buying a $550 chip.

So if you’re jumping in, you might as well use both feet. Asus’s P9X79 Deluxe certainly fits that bill, delivering cool features and a stout price tag: This X79-based board will set you back a cool $400.

“Deluxe” features on board include digital VRMs, Asus’s trademark UEFI, and built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, with a bundled smartphone app that enables you to remotely overclock and monitor your system. This board also has an all-new feature that lets you use a particular USB port to update its BIOS without a processor installed.

The P9X79 Deluxe offers top-notch performance and all the needed amenities.

The P9X79 is an eight-DIMM-slot board, not one of the weaker four-slot boards that limit your upgrade path. The eight-DIMM design will let you build a 32GB PC for less than $200 in memory cost. Doing that on any four-slot board will set you back more than $1,000. What do you do with 32GB? You set up a RAM drive, of course! We set up a RAM drive on this board using eight 4GB sticks of Corsair Vengeance RAM and saw read speeds of 4GB/s. Take that, SSDs!

But what you get in RAM, you lose in storage. The PCH in the X79 has the circuitry to support many more SAS and SATA 6Gb/s ports, but compatibility concerns caused board makers to “de-feature” it at the last minute. So instead of a board bristling with 10 SATA 6Gb/s ports, we get the standard Z68 layout of two SATA 6Gb/s and four SATA 3Gb/s. Asus tries to beef up the board’s six standard ports (four 3Gb/s and two 6Gb/s) with a Marvell 6Gb/s controller that also does SSD caching. Few of us could afford to install that many HDDs given today’s prices, of course, but that doesn’t render the lack of native support any less of a letdown—this is a $400 motherboard, after all.

We fired up Intel’s new DX79SI mobo to compare its performance to that of the P9X79. While we don’t normally expect to see big performance deltas between boards based on the same chipsets, the Asus board generally produced better benchmark numbers, with one significant exception: Intel’s board delivered much faster SATA 6Gb/s write speeds. We normally use OCZ’s Enyo external drive to test USB 3.0 performance, but the P9X79’s USB controller uses the new and speedier UASP protocol, so we also used an OWC SATA 6Gb/s drive inside a new Asus enclosure. With UASP, we saw USB 3.0 speeds climb to a nice 225MB/s read and 217MB/write. We would have liked to compare this to a USB 3.0 enclosure that doesn’t support UASP, but our generic USB 3.0 enclosures don’t seem to like any SATA 6Gb/s drives.

In the end, The P9X79 Deluxe gives you just about everything an enthusiast would truly want: SLI, tri-SLI, CrossFire X, PCIe 3.0, tons of overclocking features, lots of USB 3.0 ports, and truly fast performance (albeit only in comparison to the limited number of X79 boards we’ve seen so far). Now if only it had more SATA 6Gb/s ports and the price wasn’t so painful.

$400, www.asus.com

Everything You Need To Know About Smart TV

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 20:43:37 +0000

Technology is transforming the humble idiot box into a powerful Internet appliance. Whether you call it “smart TV,” “connected TV,” or “Internet TV,” it has the potential to upend our boob tube experience, letting us watch our favorite shows whenever and wherever we want, and merging TV shows with online content in cunning, clever ways. Smart TV won’t prevent television from rotting your brain (it’s not that smart), but it should empower you to find, and get more from, all the content that’s available.

Hollywood studios and TV networks are finally waking up to the power of the Internet, thanks to pioneering efforts by the likes of Netflix, Hulu, and Vudu. And if you can wait for pay-TV services such as HBO and Showtime to release their original programming on DVD, you can seriously consider ditching your expensive cable or satellite subscription services, too.

In the following pages, we’ll solve all the mysteries of smart TV. We’ll explain every important service and device that falls under the smart TV rubric (omitting only the most obvious players, such as YouTube), and tie everything together into a neat and simple package. It’s time to turn on and tune in. 

Online Movie & TV Services

The Internet has exploded the video-on-demand market, wiping out the cable and satellite companies’ monopoly on which shows are available and when. Sure, the websites of the major TV networks let you watch full episodes of their shows (with varying levels of episode availability, advertising, and video quality), but the services in this section add movies to the mix, and generally improve TV video quality and grant access to greater storehouses of content. If you’re looking to cut your monthly bills, here are all the ways you can watch the latest movies and TV shows without a Comcast or DirecTV in your life.

Amazon Instant Video

What Is It?

Amazon.com’s online VOD store lets you rent or purchase TV shows and Hollywood movies. Most rented videos are streamed, although some can be fully downloaded to a TiVo DVR or to Amazon’s Unbox Video Player on a Windows PC. You can also purchase videos on one computer and download them to another, stream videos from your PC to an Xbox 360, or stream them from the web to Amazon's new Kindle Fire. Amazon will store your purchased videos on its servers, too.

What's Available?

Amazon claims 90,000 titles in its library. You’ll find Hollywood movies (available as soon as they hit DVD), as well as TV shows from the broadcast and cable networks, including Showtime and HBO (although you’ll have to wait a while for HBO’s programs to show up). Videos are streamed at the highest resolution your Internet connection supports, up to a maximum of 720p with a 3.5Mb/s connection. The minimum supported speed is 450Kb/s.

Pricing

Devices with Support Built In

Various TVs from Panasonic, Samsung, Sony, and Vizio; various Blu-ray players from Panasonic and Sony; TiVo DVRs (downloads only, streaming is not supported); Roku media players; Google TV devices; Windows PCs; and the Kindle Fire.

Newly released movies typically cost $3.99 to rent and $14.99 to purchase. Sale prices for older movies typically drop to $9.99 (rental prices remain the same), while some classics can be purchased for $4.99 or less, or rented for $2.99. TV shows are typically sold for $1.99 per episode (with discounts if you purchase entire seasons), but most HBO shows are available only for rental. Amazon doesn’t charge a monthly fee, although subscribers to the company’s Amazon Prime program ($79 per year) can stream (but not download) an unlimited number of movies and videos from a library of about 10,000 titles and TV episodes.

Our Take

Amazon offers great prices if you’re interested in buying downloadable movies, and the option to store your purchases on its servers reduces your risk should you suffer an equipment failure at home. The ability to transfer rented movies to portable devices would be a great differentiator if the list of supported devices included anything relevant. Free video rentals is a great new benefit if you’re already an Amazon Prime subscriber, but Amazon’s library is too small to justify signing up for that service solely to get free video streaming.

Blockbuster On Demand

What Is It?

Blockbuster, now owned by Dish Network, offers two online services. Blockbuster on Demand offers streaming VOD rentals and movie downloads for purchase. Dish Network subscribers can opt for Blockbuster Movie Pass, which includes video rentals streamed to a Dish set-top box, plus DVD and Blu-ray disc rentals by mail (limited to one disc being out at any one time).

What's Available?

You’ll find VOD versions of movies just released to DVD, as well as a deep library of classic films available in resolutions up to 1080i. The service doesn’t currently offer any TV shows for rental or purchase, but Blockbuster Movie Pass does include Starz programming (which consists of some original series and mini-series, plus movies that have already had their run on premium pay-TV channels such as HBO and Showtime).

Devices with Support Built In

Various TVs from Samsung and Vizio; various Blu-ray players from Onkyo, Philips, Samsung, and others; TiVo DVRs; select smartphones and tablets on the AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon networks; networked media players from Western Digital and 2Wire; and Windows PCs.

Pricing

Most new releases cost $3.99 to rent, or $19.99 to $21.99 to purchase. You can rent some older movies for as little as $1.99, but the service isn’t competitive when it comes to selling most classics, with titles typically priced at $9.99 each. There is no subscription fee for Blockbuster on Demand. Blockbuster Movie Pass costs $10 per month in addition to your Dish Network subscription.

Our Take

Blockbuster on Demand isn't any more or less compelling than any of the other movie-rental services covered here, unless you  want to watch movies and TV shows on your handheld device (note, however, that iOS devices—including the iPad—are not supported). If you're already a Dish Network subscriber, on the other hand, Blockbuster Movie Pass is a solid value at $10 per month, especially since Dish doesn't charge extra to rent movies on Blu-ray disc (take that, Netflix!).

---

 

CinemaNow

What Is It?

Operated by Best Buy and powered by RoxioNow, CinemaNow is another VOD service that offers movies and TV episodes for rental or purchase. Regardless of whether you rent or buy, videos can be streamed for instant viewing, or downloaded and watched later (downloads can be shared between five devices). You can also use your smartphone to purchase content and have it downloaded to your Windows PC. This way, you can purchase a movie while you’re at work, and it will be ready to watch when you get home.

What's Available?

You’ll find VOD versions of movies just released on disc, as well as a spotty selection of TV shows from the broadcast and cable networks, including Showtime, but not HBO. New TV episodes—of the select shows actually offered—are generally available the day after they’re broadcast. Videos are streamed at the highest resolution (up to 1080p) that your Internet connection is capable of supporting. CinemaNow requires a minimum connection speed of 1.5Mb/s.

Devices with Support Built In

Various TVs from LG and Samsung; various Blu-ray players from Insignia (Best Buy’s house brand), LG, Panasonic, and Samsung; Microsoft Xbox 360 gaming console (requires Windows PC connection); Mac or Windows PC (via browser).

Pricing

Most newly released movies can be rented for $3.99, while older movies rent for $2.99. Purchase prices for films range from $9.99 to $19.95, although most new releases were selling for $15.95 at press time. TV episodes sell for $1.99 each. There are no subscription fees.

Our Take

Best Buy offers very good prices for movie purchases, but its prices for movie rentals and TV episode purchases are just meh. We like the ability to buy a movie with a smartphone and have it automatically downloaded to a PC—and it would be great if rentals could be arranged this way, too. For whatever reason, Best Buy has chosen to support far fewer devices than the RoxioNow service is capable of delivering (see Blockbuster On Demand for examples).

Crackle

What Is It?

Crackle describes itself as a multiplatform video entertainment network and studio owned by Sony Pictures Entertainment. The service is unique in that it allows you to embed its original programming, "minisodes," full-length television episodes, and feature films.

What's Available?

You’ll find full-length feature films and TV episodes, as well as trailers for coming attractions. Sony owns most of this content, including some entirely original programming. Oddly enough, videos default to 360p resolution, which is lower than standard definition (480p). Crackle offers some content at higher resolution, but it tops out at—you guessed it—480p.

Devices with Support Built In

You can stream—but not download—Crackle’s Flash videos to these connected devices: Sony's Bravia TVs; Sony's Internet TV; most Sony Blu-ray players; TiVo DVRs; Sezmi set-top box; Google TV devices, such as the Logitech Revue; Hulu (and all networked media players that support that service); D-Link’s Boxee Box; Roku devices; the Sony PlayStation 3; Verizon FiOS TV; Android devices; mobile devices on the Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon networks; Apple's iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch; Windows PCs.

Pricing

Crackle is entirely free, but it is heavily supported by online ads and commercial interruptions. You must be at least 18 years old and register with the site to access R-rated movies.

Our Take

If you’re a Netflix subscriber, you’ve probably already seen most of the movies that Crackle has to offer—and without commercial interruptions. The low-res video is another bummer. Some of Crackle’s original content is definitely worth watching, though, especially the female-assassin series Angel of Death. Crackle is a good choice if you enjoy watching videos on your mobile device, too; and it's one of the few services to support the iPad. While we applaud Crackle for enabling its customers to distribute its content relatively freely (through embedding), bear in mind that it’s primarily in the interest of promoting the service.

Vudu

What Is It?

Vudu started life as a movie-download service using a proprietary box with a hard drive. Besides the hardware—and a bevy of deals with movie studios—Vudu's biggest claim to fame was its HDX video-encoding algorithm that enabled it to stream movies in full 1080p resolution. The set-top box eventually fell by the wayside in favor of streaming movies to devices such as Blu-ray players. That removed a significant barrier for consumers, but it wasn't enough to keep the company independent—it was acquired by WalMart in early 2010.

What's Available?

Vudu offers Hollywood movies (and Showtime TV episodes) for rental and sale, typically the same day they become available on disc. Videos are streamed at the highest resolution your Internet connection can support, with standard-definition (480p) video requiring a minimum download speed of 1–2Mb/s. Vudu offers two high-definition streams: HD (720p), which requires a minimum download speed of 2.25–4.5Mb/s, and HDX (1080p with Dolby Digital Plus 7.1-channel sound), which requires a very fat pipe that can deliver between 4.5- and 9Mb/s. This is also the only service that supports 3D video streaming.

Devices with Support Built In

Most newer Blu-ray players, HDTVs, and home-theater-in-a-box systems; a number of networked media players, including D-Link's Boxee Box, Netgear's NeoTV, and Roku devices; Sony's PlayStation 3; Apple's iPad; and Windows PCs.

Pricing

New releases cost $3.99, $4.99, or $5.99 to rent (for SD, HD, and HDX, respectively). Vudu sells most new releases for $14.99 (in SD) or $19.99 (in HD or HDX). Older movies rent for $2 for two nights, with a limited number of movies renting for just 99 cents.

Our Take

Who'd have guessed that WalMart would come to offer one of the best online video-rental services on the market? Vudu is at least as good as Amazon Instant Video, and it supports far more hardware platforms than iTunes; Netflix' movie offerings are downright stagnant in comparison. If WalMart wants to make the service even more compelling—and more profitable—it should enable customers without super-fast broadband connections to download movie rentals in HDX (like the original Vudu box did).

---

 

Hulu & Hulu Plus

What Is It?

Hulu is a content aggregator offering on-demand TV shows and movies from most of the major networks and movie studios. Hulu is the name of the free service, while Hulu Plus offers more features and is subscription based. Major players that own stakes in Hulu include NBC Universal (now merged with Comcast), News Corporation (owner of the Fox network), and Walt Disney Corporation (owner of ABC). CBS (which also owns Showtime and more) is the only major TV network that doesn’t own a piece of Hulu.

What's Available?

Most of Hulu’s content consists of TV episodes, news programming, and a handful of feature films produced by the three major concerns with ownership stakes. TV shows typically appear the day after they’re broadcast, and all this content is supported by advertisements, even if you spring for a Hulu Plus subscription.

So what do you get if you subscribe? Higher-resolution video, for starters. Hulu content is streamed in “standard definition” (a term Hulu doesn’t define), while Hulu Plus video streams in “high definition” (720p). And while basic Hulu is available only on a computer, Hulu Plus can be streamed to an increasingly wide range of devices. Also, basic Hulu delivers only the five most recent episodes of available TV series, whereas you get entire seasons on Hulu Plus.

Movies generally aren’t one of Hulu’s strengths, but cineastes will revel in the Criterion Collection of films available on Hulu Plus. Criterion is renowned for both the impeccable quality of its film-to-video digital transfers and its supplemental material, including deleted scenes, audio commentaries, and more. This supplemental material isn’t currently available on Hulu Plus, but it’s slated to be included in the future.

Devices with Support Built In

Hulu is available on Windows PCs, but you must be connected to the Internet to watch, and you can’t download and store videos on your machine. Hulu Plus has the same restrictions, but can be streamed to a variety of TVs from Samsung, Sony, and Vizio; various Blu-ray players from Samsung, Sony, and Vizio; TiVo Premiere DVRs; Android smartphones and tablets; networked media players, Roku and Western Digital networked media players; Sony’s Dash and Netbox; Sony's PlayStation 3, Nintendo's Wii, and Microsoft's Xbox 360; iOS devices; and—coming soon—Nintendo's 3DS handheld gaming system.

Pricing

Hulu is free. Hulu Plus costs $7.99 monthly. Videos on both services contain commercial advertising, and you’ll need to register for whichever service you decide to use.

Our Take

We loathe commercials, but they’re a reasonable trade-off for getting triple-A content for free. But having to pay for content and still be forced to watch commercials is something else. Hulu’s free iteration delivers most of what you’ll get on broadcast and subscription TV, so it could well satisfy your needs—provided you don’t mind watching standard-def video on a computer and don’t fall too far behind in a TV series season.

Hulu Plus offers a lot more content, and it’s available on a host of devices that will connect directly to your TV. If you’re looking to cut your ties to a pay TV service, it’s definitely worth $7.99 per month—even with the commercials. Aside from the excellent Criterion Collection, however, Hulu Plus can’t compete with the Netflix movie library.

iTunes Store

What Is It?

Available for both Mac and PC, Apple’s free iTunes application lets you play, organize, and purchase digital music and video. You can also use iTunes to transfer your video purchases to an iPod, iPad, or iPhone, or stream that content to all these devices, as well as to the Apple TV media player. Whereas iTunes music downloads can only be purchased, movies, and TV show episodes can be either purchased or rented.

What's Available?

Apple’s media store offers a comprehensive collection of Hollywood movies, plus TV shows from the major broadcast and cable networks, including Showtime and HBO. Many of the films include what Apple calls iTunes Extras: deleted scenes, making-of documentaries, music videos, and so on. Just be aware that iTunes Extras are viewable only on a computer or via Apple TV.

Most movies and TV episodes are available in either standard or HD (480p and 720p, respectively). Unlike most of the other services discussed here, you can download both rented and purchased content to your computer or Apple device. You must watch rented movies and TV shows within 30 days of downloading. Additionally, you must finish watching a rented movie within 24 hours of clicking the Play button. You have 48 hours to finish watching rented TV shows.

Devices with Support Built In

A TV connected to an Apple TV media player; most iPod models (HD content will require an iPod Touch); iOS devices (HD content will require iPhone 4); Mac or Windows PC (via the iTunes software).

Pricing

To rent newly released movies, you’re typically looking at $3.99 for standard-def, and $4.99 for HD. To buy that same content, you’ll usually pay $14.99 and $19.99, respectively. Most TV shows sell for $1.99 for standard-def and $2.99 for HD.

Our Take

If Apple had its way, you’d only be able to watch iTunes content on Apple products. The company’s almost there now, supporting Windows only because of its huge, dominating installed base. Fortunately, you'll find other video-on-demand services delivering the same content on a wide variety of platforms, including the PC, Android, and iOS. We see very little reason to patronize iTunes these days for anything other than music (and we can recommend plenty of alternatives on that score, too).

Netflix

What Is It?

Netflix started out renting DVDs by mail, but now emphasizes its subscription-based video-streaming service over renting physical discs. As a Netflix subscriber, you can stream as many movies and TV episodes as you like, but you can't download the videos to any device.

What's Available?

You'll find Hollywood movies, TV episodes from broadcast and cable networks (including Showtime but not HBO), and original movies and TV series carried on the Starz cable network. Netflix boasts a high-quality back catalog of streaming content, but it takes a long time for new movies to become available for streaming, and TV episodes generally don't become available until after their seasons have been released on disc. Videos are streamed at the highest resolution your Internet connection can deliver, up to a maximum of 720p.

Devices with Support Built In

Various HDTVs from LG, Panasonic, Samsung, Sony, and Vizio; various Blu-ray disc players from LG, Panasonic, Sony, Toshiba, and others; TiVo DVRs; most media players, including the Apple TV, Boxee Box, Google TV, Roku, and WD TV Live; PlayStation 3, Nintendo Wii, and Xbox 360; iOS devices (via an app); Mac or Windows PCs (via web browser).

Pricing

A Netflix “Watch Instantly” account costs a minimum of $7.99 per month. This baseline plan doesn’t include any physical disc rentals, but it also places no limit on the number of videos you can stream. Of course, Netflix continues to offer plans that include physical disc rentals, and each throws in unlimited streaming as a value-added service.

Our Take

Netflix' $7.99 streaming-only plan is a great deal if you don't mind very long waits for newer movies and TV episodes to make their way onto the service. In an effort to appease Hollywood, which apparently fears that Netflix will dominate the post-theater retail movie business in the same way that Apple has come to dominate the music distribution market, Netflix cut deals with most of the studios to not rent new movies on disc until they've been available at retail for 28 days. New movies and current television episodes take much, much longer to make their way to Netflix' streaming service. Meanwhile, pay-per-view services such as Vudu offer new movies online the very same day they're released on disc. Regardless, we still recommend Netflix' streaming-only subscriptions for movies, but we think Hulu Plus delivers a far better experience for TV junkies.

---

 

Yahoo Connected TV

What Is It?

Yahoo Connected TV is an umbrella term for Yahoo’s smart TV initiative. It’s similar to Google TV in that it’s a platform that seeks to integrate the TV-viewing experience with the Internet, but Yahoo’s effort is smaller and more targeted. Indeed, while Google TV attempts to aggregate content from virtually every venue where video is available, Yahoo Connected TV is more of a framework for third-party widgets that leverage live TV and various VOD sources, and bring popular online social media services to your TV.

What's Available?

Widgets from Amazon Instant Video and Blockbuster On Demand enable you to rent and stream movies and TV episodes. Other widgets deliver video content available only on the web, such as Internet TV shows from Revision3. You can also hook into Facebook and Twitter, share digital photos using Flickr, and buy and sell goods on eBay. You’ll also find widgets for weather reports, casual games, and stock tickers.

Devices with Support Built In

As we went to press, the only devices to support Yahoo Connected TV were a handful of TV models from LG, Samsung, Sony, Toshiba, and Vizio. D-Link has demoed a set-top box that you can plug into any TV, but the product wasn’t shipping at press time.

Pricing

Incremental costs are probably folded into the prices of TVs that support Yahoo Connected TV, but there is no direct cost to the consumer. That said, some of the content widgets cost money and are sold through an app store, but these are entirely optional. And, of course, if you use pay-as-you-go services such as Amazon Instant Video, you’ll have to pony up for those, as well.

Our Take

The technology behind Yahoo Connected TV isn’t nearly as disruptive as the tech behind Google TV, and maybe that's why it seems to be enjoying a bit more early success. We’d rather play games on our computers or tablets than on our TVs, but there are plenty of other worthwhile widgets in the service’s universe. For example, it’s much more fun to share Flickr photos on a big TV screen than to huddle around a PC—and this is another reason why we think an HDTV’s visual quality is so important.

MLB.TV

What Is It?

This service, owned by Major League Baseball, points to the future of smart TV sports coverage. Leveraging a sport with lots of teams, a very long season, and an obsession with stats, MLB.TV is a baseball fanatic's interactive dream.

What's Available?

You can watch any regular-season game that’s available in your market in 720p resolution. Games, however, are subject to local-market blackout restrictions. If your game is blacked out, you can’t view it until 90 minutes after the final pitch.

You get in-game highlights, stats, and alternate audio options (you can choose between the home or away team’s audio feed, for instance). A widget tracks the pitcher’s performance in a video overlay, and you can replay any player’s at-bat on demand. A fantasy league tracker alerts you when players you’ve drafted are on-deck, so you can switch to their at-bats via a picture-in-picture.

A premium package adds the ability to watch either the home or away team’s video feed. This package also includes a multi-game mode that lets you watch up to four in-market games simultaneously (using either picture-in-picture or split-screen).

Devices with Support Built In

Various HDTVs from LG and Samsung; various Blu-ray players from LG and Samsung; Roku networked media players; Boxee devices (including the D-Link Boxee Box); Apple TV; Sony PlayStation 3; and Android and iOS devices. Note: Not every feature is available on every device.

Pricing

MLB.TV costs $19.99 monthly or $99.99 yearly. MLB.TV Premium is $24.99 or $119.99, respectively. One subscription can be activated on multiple devices, but you’ll need to purchase and install Major League Baseball’s At Bat 11 app ($14.99 per device) to use the service with mobile devices.

Our Take

Major League Baseball understands what its fans want, and it knows how to leverage the smart TV concept to bring them a great interactive experience—either on the TV or on a second, supplemental screen. Only hardcore fans will be willing to pay the steep entry fees, but there are plenty of those out there.

Google TV

What Is It?

Google TV is an open hardware and software platform designed to combine the power of the Internet with compelling video content—from Hollywood movies and TV shows, to YouTube clips and other viral fare, to personal content on your local network. Think of it as an electronic program guide that lists not only the content that's available on TV right now and in the coming weeks, but also what's available for streaming over the Internet. On top of that, using a picture-in-picture window or video overlay, Google TV can present real-time information about whatever you happen to be watching: player stats if you're watching a game, actor profiles if you're watching a movie, and so on.

What's Available?

Google’s smart TV technology can deliver any content located on your home network, anything on live TV, anything recorded on your Dish Network set-top box, and virtually any content available on the Internet—just as long as the content owner doesn’t object. Right now, however, all the major television networks vigorously object and are blocking Google TV from presenting their online content. And because the networks own a chunk of Hulu, Google TV can’t deliver that, either.

Devices with Support Built In

Sony's Internet TV, Sony's Internet TV Blu-ray player, Dish Network's set-top box, and Logitech's Revue set-top box.

Pricing

Google TV is only available integrated into another product. It’s not sold as an app, so you can’t run it on a PC. While there are no subscription fees, Dish Network will tack a $4 "DVR integration" fee onto your monthly bill if you connect the service to its set-top box.

Our Take

Google set out to change the way we watch TV, combining the power of Internet search with TV content. But the initiative crashed head-on into entrenched interests that fear Google will interrupt their advertising revenue streams. It's too soon to say if the latest version of Google TV will make the service any more worth having, but we do know you still can't get Hulu or other online content owned by the major broadcast and pay-TV networks with it.

NBA League Pass

What Is It?

NBA League Pass Broadband and NBA League Pass Mobile allow you to stream regular-season NBA games to your PC or mobile device. In addition to being able to watch games that might not be broadcast in your area, you also get real-time stats and other features. This service is co-owned by the NBA and Turner Sports Interactive, and games are subject to the same blackout restrictions that you’ll encounter with normal TV broadcasts.

What's Available?

The Broadband package lets you watch as many as 40 regular-season games per week, including up to three games at the same time. Games available in high-def are streamed in an unspecified level of HD to your device, with live stats overlaid on top of the video. A DVR function allows you to produce your own instant replays, and you have access to a full season's worth of archives (on-demand replays are available 48 hours after they've been played). The Mobile package allows you to watch up to 40 games per week on your iOS or Android device.

Devices with Support Built In

This service is available on a Mac or Windows PC, Roku devices, as well as iPod, iPhone, and Android devices (via apps). There is also limited support for Apple TV.

Pricing

An NBA League Pass Broadband subscription is included in the purchase of an NBA League Pass TV subscription (prices vary per cable or satellite provider). If you’re not paying for the TV channel, however, you can opt for a Broadband “Choice” subscription (which allows you to follow up to seven teams) for $24.99 per season. To follow all 30 NBA teams, you’ll need to pay $49.95 per season for the “Premium” subscription. NBA League Pass Mobile subscriptions cost $16.99 per season.

Our Take

The NBA is off to a good start, but pro basketball could take a few lessons from Major League Baseball: The full version of NBA League Pass should be available as a widget in connected TVs and set-top boxes (only NBA Game Time Lite is available on those devices today). Regardless, both the NBA and MLB are way ahead of the NFL, which doesn’t offer interactive squat.

---

 

Smart TV Hardware Essentials

Here's everything you'll need to indulge your interest in Smart TV. Surprise! It's not really all that much.

Broadband Internet Access: Dial-up access isn’t going to cut it. City and suburb dwellers should look into cable modems and DSL. Folks living in rural areas where those services aren't available should check into wireless solutions, such as WiMax. Satellite service is another alternative, although it’s relatively slow and can be very expensive.

A Display: You don’t necessarily need a TV to get smart TV; you can just as easily use the display connected to your desktop or notebook computer. TVs, on the other hand, typically offer bigger screens, and you can connect your existing unit to whichever smart TV hardware you’re using to pull content from the Internet. Newer TVs make all this easier, thanks to their built-in apps and Ethernet support.

A Networked Media Player: If you don’t have a TV with built-in smart TV apps, you’ll need something from this category, which includes devices such as Western Digital's WD TV Live, Netgear's Neo TV, D-Link's Boxee Box, or one of the Roku devices. Most Blu-ray players and home-theater-in-a-box systems include smart TV apps, too. The best solution, of course, is to buy a PC that can be incorporated into your home entertainment system.

Connected TVs & Set-Top Boxes

Did you find one of the video-on-demand or interactive TV services on the preceding pages to your liking? Now it’s time to delve deeper into the hardware that  might support the particular iteration of smart TV that suits your fancy. Here are our choices, ranked from least appealing to most compelling. See the next page for our top recommendation: a home theater PC.

If you don't want to invest in a full-blown home-theater PC, we think D-Link's oddly shaped Boxee Box is the next best alternative.

HDTV

You might think the best way to get smart TV is to buy, well, a smart TV. Think again! Don't toss your current TV if the only thing it's lacking is smart TV features—we'll show you plenty of cheaper—and in some cases, better—alternatives. If, on the other hand, you've been longing to upgrade to a bigger screen, or if you want to move up from LCD to plasma, or to a model that supports 3D, smart TV features will most likely be included. Don't fret about which services are included, though; concentrate on image quality, instead.

Logitech Revue (Google TV)

If you really want the Google TV experience, Logitech is blowing out its Revue inventory—we've seen it selling online for as little as $100 (it hit the market at $299). Logitech CEO Guerrino De Luca recently told analysts that the decision to support Google TV, which he described as a "beta product," cost the company $100 million in operating profit. De Luca says the company has no immediate plans to produce a Revue 2. Ouch.

Apple TV

Even hardcore Apple fans were disappointed with the Apple TV set-top box when it was first introduced. The device was capable of streaming content from only four online services—Netflix, YouTube, MobileMe, and Flickr—but has since added support for MLB.TV and NBA League Pass Broadband. We suspect Apple's real aspirations for Apple TV are focused on making the box a conduit for watching movies and TV episodes rented or purchased from iTunes. Apple TV sells for $99, but you'll find plenty of better products for the same price or less.

Videogame Consoles

Microsoft's Xbox 360, Nintendo's Wii, and Sony's PlayStation 3 gaming consoles all have Internet connectivity, and all are capable of delivering various smart TV elements, including Netflix. The Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 tend to be more smart TV-oriented than the Wii, and the Xbox 360 is even stronger, because it can use your PC as a bridge to connect to online services. You can also play games on these devices, of course, but isn't that what you bought your PC for?

Blu-ray Disc Players

As with new HDTVs, just about any new Blu-ray disc player on the market will include a variety of smart TV features. We love Blu-ray as much for its high-definition audio as its HD video, but we think a home-theater PC makes the best Blu-ray player. Still, most people don't have the budget to put one of those in every room. Netflix support is common, but Vudu support is better if you're interested in renting the latest movies in HD. Prices start at less than $100, but features such as integrated Wi-Fi, multiple HDMI outputs, and SACD and DVD-Audio support will rapidly inflate the MSRP.

Roku

Roku manufactured the very first Netflix streaming box, but the company has expanded significantly since then and now offers four models ranging in price from $50 to $100. Even the least expensive model, the LT, includes an integrated Wi-Fi adapter, 720p video resolution, and more than 350 content channels. A lot of that content is crap, however, and only the top-end product will stream your own content (albeit only from a USB storage device).

Netgear Neo TV NTV200

We like Netgear's streamer just a little bit more than Roku's lineup, almost exclusively because it supports Vudu. It can't stream content you own, but it does have an integrated Wi-Fi adapter and it does deliver video resolution up to 1080p. And it only costs $80.

Western Digital WD TV Live

Western Digital practically owns the networked media-streamer market, thanks to its exceptional WD TV Live product. It supports nearly every important online media service (with the notable exception of Vudu), it will stream all your own content from any network or USB source at video resolutions up to 1080p, it supports every important media codec and container format, it has an integrated Wi-Fi adapter, and it costs just $130.

D-Link Boxee Box

If you're looking for just a little more than what the WD TV Live can do (Vudu support, the ability to send web videos to the Boxee  Box from a web browser, and—coming soon—an optional USB TV tuner), then you should take a hard look at D-Link's Boxee Box. It's priced higher than the Roku, Netgear, and Western Digital products ($180), but the price bump is fully justified by its extensive feature list.

Home Theater PCs

Looking for the ultimate smart TV experience? Pick up a home-theater PC. You can subscribe to any online service your heart desires, stream your own content, and lots more. In fact, these machines can do almost anything a desktop PC can do. Here's a quick look at five classes of HTPC.

All-In-One PC

An all-in-one PC is a great solution if you're looking for an entertainment system for your kitchen, bedroom, den, or even your garage. This class of machine integrates an entire desktop computer, display, and speakers inside a chassis that's only slightly thicker than the typical monitor.

These machines come with everything you need, including an integrated Wi-Fi adapter, a wireless mouse and keyboard, and a TV tuner. Add an aftermarket USB CableCARD product, such as Ceton's InfiniTV4, and you can watch and record digital cable TV programming—including premium channels such as HBO.

Prices vary according to the size of the display, but models boasting large monitors typically also deliver faster CPUs, larger hard drives, and more features overall. Many higher-end models, such as HP's TouchSmart 610, include an HDMI input, so you can use the display with a game console, set-top box, or other video source. Machines in this price range also typically include an integrated Blu-ray drive, which is useful for watching rented Blu-ray movies (we recommend ripping purchased movies and storing them on a central server).

The obvious downside to buying an all-in-one machine is that it will be almost impossible to upgrade it down the road.

Velcro PC

We coined this term to describe a personal computer that's small enough to be attached to the back of a display using that famously sticky fabric (you can read our review of Zotac's ZBox Nano AD10 Plus). Such machines often do not include an optical drive, but they can stream just about any video from a network server or from any of the online media services we've mentioned.

Zotac's ZBox Nano AD10 Plus can be mounted to the back of any VESA-compatible monitor.

A Velcro PC is like a networked media player (e.g., a Roku or WD TV Live) on steroids. Like that class of device, you can connect a Velcro PC to any size display you like—just make sure it delivers video resolution of at least 1920x1080 pixels. Unlike most networked media players, a Velcro PC includes integrated storage, and it will run a full operating system (ranging from almost any Linux distro to any flavor of Windows). And since it's a bona fide PC, online media services such as Hulu can't block it.

Mini HTPC

This class of computer is a step up from a Velcro PC in that it comes with an integrated Blu-ray drive. You might think of it as an all-minus-one, because the only thing you need to add is an HDTV (and amplified speakers if you don't want to rely on the tiny speakers inside the TV). Acer builds our favorite machine in this category: The super-thin Revo RL100-UR20P comes with a Blu-ray drive and a slick, backlit wireless keyboard/trackpad that's easy to use, even in a darkened room.

DIY HTPC

When you know exactly what you want in a computer, there's no better way to get it than to build it yourself. One easy solution is to start with a bare-bones kit, such as the AsRock Vision 3D. This machine includes a Blu-ray drive, an Intel Core i3-370M CPU, and a discrete Nvidia GPU that's sufficiently robust for many newer games. Add Nvidia's 3D Vision kit and hook up a 3D monitor, HDTV, or video projector (our favorite display solution), and you can play games and watch movies in 3D.

If you want to build an all-out home-theater PC that's capable of playing not only Blu-ray movies, but also today's most ambitious games, you can do that, too. We built just such a beast in our December issue, using an Asus Maximum IV Gene-Z motherboard, Intel's Core i5-2500K CPU, and Nvidia's GeForce GTX 560 Ti. Don't have that issue? Just point your browser here.

Boutique HTPC

Want a top-shelf rig for your entertainment center, but don't have time to build your own? That's where boutique PC builders enter the picture. These vendors will start you off with a basic configuration and then let you customize it to fit your precise needs.

The CineMagix HTPC, from boutique builder Velocity Micro.

Take Velocity Micro's CineMagix Grand Theater Entertainment System, for example. This $1,550 rig includes a full-size ATX motherboard with an Intel Core i5-2300 CPU, 4GB of DDR3 memory, an AMD Radeon HD 5450 videocard, and a digital HDTV tuner. Since these machines are built to order, you can substitute and add components as you see fit.

WD TV Live Vs. NetGear NeoTV: Streamer Showdown

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 21:23:40 +0000

One of these things is not like the other

Media streamers like the Western Digital WD TV Live and Netgear NeoTV make just a little less sense than they did a couple of years ago. In those days, they were the perfect alternative to stuffing a home theater PC into your entertainment center. These days, you can get nearly all the same functionality from a new Blu-ray player or a Smart TV.

On the other hand, the latest incarnations of these two products cost less than a new Blu-ray player, and they’re several orders of magnitude cheaper than a new HDTV (or a home theater PC, for that matter). And while they do have some features in common, the NeoTV delivers far fewer features than the WD TV Live and is priced accordingly, so we’re not making a direct head-to-head comparison between the two here.

Western Digital WD TV Live

For a company whose primary business is manufacturing hard drives, Western Digital sure knows a lot about digital media and how to stream it over a network. Each succeeding generation of the company’s WD TV Live product has led the market in terms of features, price, and performance, and this one is no different.

With this incarnation, WD adds several new services (including Hulu Plus and Spotify), a collection of simple online games, an integrated Wi-Fi adapter, and even the ability to decode Dolby TrueHD. Unlike the pricier WD TV Live Hub, which remains in Western Digital’s lineup, this product does not include any local storage. But it is equipped with two USB 2.0 ports, so you can easily connect a portable drive. You can also connect a USB keyboard, which makes initial setup (entering Wi-Fi and network user IDs and passwords, for instance) considerably easier than hunting and pecking using the remote and the onscreen keyboard.

The third-generation WD TV Live is thinner and more capable than previous models, and the remote is significantly better.

Most people will connect the WD TV Live to their entertainment system using the HDMI 1.4 port (you’ll need to provide your own cable), but the device will happily accommodate older equipment with its analog A/V and digital S/PDIF outputs. There’s also an Ethernet port in the back panel, but the integrated 802.11b/g/n wireless client adapter proved plenty fast for streaming video at 720p—an impressive achievement, considering that we tested the box in a room-within-a-room home theater at Maximum PC Lab North. We needed a hardwired connection to stream video at 1080p. Image quality was excellent.

The remote is easily the best that WD has come up with so far, with a molded grip that feels very natural in either hand. We needed to bend our thumb to reach the alpha-numeric keypad on the bottom half the device, but we seldom use those buttons, anyway. We used the home, arrow, mute, and transport (play/pause, stop, fast forward/rewind, and skip forward/back) buttons far more frequently, and those are all within easy reach. The remote also has four shortcut buttons—labeled A, B, C, and D—that can be custom programmed.

Plenty of device support here, with both analog and digital audio and video outputs.

Western Digital offers a strong collection of online movie and music services in addition to the new ones mentioned earlier. You’ll find all the old standbys here, including Netflix, YouTube, and Pandora; but you’ll also get CinemaNow, Blockbuster on Demand, Live365, and several others. Unfortunately, you won’t be able to tap what we consider to be the best online, on-demand movie service of them all: Vudu. Western Digital does deserve praise for its broad media file and container file support, which includes the video standards AVI, MKV, MPEG-1/2/4, h.264, VOB, and M2TS (the container for Blu-ray movies); the audio formats AAC, FLAC, OGG, and MP3 (including 24-bit/48kHz FLAC); and the digital photo formats BMP, JPEG, and PNG. The device supports playlists and subtitles, too.

The WD TV Live is the best full-featured media streamer you can buy today, but we’d like it even more if it included Vudu.

Netgear NeoTV NTV200

Craving a spot at the commercial online media buffet, but not at all interested in ripping your own media? Netgear has just the right dish. The NeoTV taps your broadband connection to serve up Netflix, Vudu, Pandora, YouTube, Picasa, and plenty of other online services; but it can’t tap media stored on your own network, and it doesn’t have any USB ports to access local storage.

We initially considered this to be a major disappointment: If you own a late-model Blu-ray player or a Smart TV, the NeoTV has very little to offer. But plenty of us haven’t made such investments, and if online entertainment is all you’re looking for, Netgear’s device costs $40 less than Western Digital’s. You’re not getting as many features, but you’re  also not being forced to pay for features you won’t utilize.

Anyone considering buying one of Roku's streaming boxes should take a long look at what Netgear has to offer with the NeoTV NTV200.

The NeoTV’s built-in 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi adapter performed just as well as the one inside the WD TV Live—we had no problem streaming Netflix and Vudu movies without wires (although we were once again limited to 720p resolution; we needed to plug in a CAT5 cable to enjoy Vudu movies at 1080p). The only other connectivity features on the box are HDMI and S/PDIF—there’s no support for analog audio or video devices at all.

Netgear provides a very basic remote control with the NeoTV. We have no complaint with the button layout, and we like the clicky, tactile feel it provides much better than the mushy buttons on Western Digital’s controller; but there’s no alpha-numeric keypad for typing search queries (you must use the arrow buttons to navigate an onscreen keyboard), and there’s no mute button. But Netgear redeems itself with a free app that will turn your iPhone or Android phone into a compatible remote. That’s sure to come in handy when the regular remote’s two coin batteries crap out late one evening.

Netgear's app lets you use your smartphone as a remote.

There's also a very good collection of streaming media services on tap. While Western Digital scores a big win with its support for Spotify, Netgear can deliver movies in HD and in surround sound on demand via Vudu. And if you’re a Napster subscriber, you can listen to your tunes on the NeoTV, but not on the WD TV Live. There’s a long list of other less interesting services, including a host of video podcasts (does anyone actually watch those?) and some very basic online games (the same ones that Western Digital offers, including Black Jack Royale, Kaboom, Sudoku, and Texas Hold ‘Em).

Enthusiasts will want more than what the NeoTV delivers, but this is a good product to recommend to friends and family who just want an easy way to stream media from the Internet to their entertainment center.

Gigabyte GTX 580 Super Overclock Review

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 17:32:46 +0000

Will three fans enable Gigabyte to capture the single-GPU performance crown?

We found the Asus Matrix GTX 580 Platinum that we reviewed in the November 2011 issue to be pretty badass: It’s a solid, factory-overclocked card that’s impressively easy to push even harder. But it’s also three slots wide and requires two 8-pin PCIe power connectors. Gigabyte’s GTX 580 Super Overclock (model GV-N580SO-15L) takes Nvidia’s GPU even further, pumping the core from a stock 772MHz all the way to 855MHz, and the card’s 1.5GB of GDDR5 memory from a stock 1,002MHz to 1,025MHz (the Matrix GTX 580 comes out of the box with its GPU running at 816MHz and its memory at 1,002MHz). And the Gigabyte takes up only two slots and uses just a single 8-pin power connector.

Gigabyte, like Asus, provides software to help you overclock the card even more, but Gigabyte’s card lacks the other engineering amenities that Asus provides, including voltage control, insta-max fan speed, and reset-to-factory-settings buttons. This renders Gigabyte’s offering less forgiving when it comes to pushing the envelope. The Super OC ships with three cooling fans, which must be better than the two on the Matrix, right? Well, the card remained cool enough during our benchmarks, but we also found it to be noisier under load than the Matrix card.

Gigabyte's GTX 580 Super Overclock requires just two expansion slots and one 8-pin PCIe power connection.

With those thoughts in mind, let’s discuss performance: Gigabyte’s card edged out Asus’s, but it was by no means a clean sweep: the Asus Matrix card won several benchmark categories, with Unigine Heaven being the most notable. Several other results—including Just Cause 2 and Metro 2033—were essentially ties. So the Gigabyte’s performance is pretty good, but it’s not quite as over-the-top as we had expected. Also, take a look at the difference in power consumption. This is where Asus’s careful binning of GTX 580 GPUs comes in: The Matrix consumes much less juice than the Super Overclock, which likely will leave you more headroom for overclocking.

All these factors are reflected in the card’s street price, which is $10 less than the Asus (and Gigabyte was offering a $20 rebate at press time). So the Super Overclock delivers fewer features and a little less performance and headroom, but also a lower price tag. You’ll need to decide which factors are most important to you.

$520, www.gigabyte.com

Falcon Northwest Mach V Icon 2 Review

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 20:52:44 +0000

It's more a work of art than a PC

You can’t truly appreciate the paint job on Falcon Northwest’s Mach V unless you can fondle it. We mean it—you just can’t comprehend how damn smooth the paint is without lovingly stroking your hand on the side of this beauty as if you were a presidential candidate.

Inside the Mach V, you’ll find a pedigree of hardware to match its stunning exterior. Intel’s top gun—the 3.3GHz Core i7-3960X—gets top billing, of course. This hexa-core chip simply makes all other chips before it—quad- or hexa-core—seem downright weak. Falcon mates the chip with a top-end Asus Rampage IV Extreme board. In addition to sporting the very cool ability to update the BIOS from a USB key without a CPU or RAM installed, the Rampage IV caters to extreme overclockers with such over-the-top tricks as an “overclocking key.” The overclocking key is an external video dongle that lets you display an overlay of any of the CPU’s temps and various voltages on a single-link monitor in real time.

Sometimes, it's the outside…

Why would anyone ever want to do this? Believe it or not, extreme overclockers need the information in real time during their liquid-nitrogen escapades, and this feature can save them the price of buying a very expensive Fluke meter.

The Mach V, of course, doesn’t run on liquid helium or liquid nitrogen; it uses a Cool-It Eco II ALC cooler, which enables the CPU to go from a stock 3.3GHz all the way to 4.4GHz. Falcon takes full advantage of the Intel X79 chipset’s support for eight DIMM slots, too, fully populating the board with 32GB of DDR3/1600 RAM. We know 32GB is overkill, but there’s some appeal to it: We’re talking RAM disk, baby! Sure, an SSD can post read speeds of 500MB/s, but a RAM disk can post a staggering 4,000MB/s! It’s a small RAM disk, but it delivers phenomenal disk I/O. For graphics, Falcon outfits the Mach V with a pair of EVGA GeForce GTX 580 Classified cards. These aren’t just overclocked cards, mind you, they also pack massive 3GB frame buffers—double the size of a standard GTX 580 card.

…AND the inside that matters.

So how does the Falcon stack up? It’s wicked fast and handily pounds the crap out of our elderly zero-point system, as well as the majority of the Core i7-990X boxes we’ve tested in the last year. But how does it stack up against the Digital Storm HailStorm we reviewed in the Holiday 2011 issue? There’s the rub: Digital Storm clocked its Core i7-3960X part even higher, to 4.7GHz. That 7 percent edge gives DStorm’s system a boost in just about everything that’s processor bound. Digital Storm also takes the lead in gaming performance, thanks to its tri-SLI GTX 580 configuration. That design choice endows the DStorm with a 20 percent boost in most high-res games. Yeah, we know, a pair of GTX 580s is crazy fast for every game out today; but three of a kind trumps a pair, no matter how you cut the benchmarks.

We have to note, however, that the Digital Storm rig costs about $400 more than this Falcon. Still, when each price tag is pushing $7,000, it’s hard to snivel over a few hundred bucks. The Falcon Mach V is the sexier beast, though; and make no mistake: She’s fast enough for you, old man; she’s just not the fastest machine we’ve tested.

$6,993, www.falcon-nw.com

Batman: Arkham City Review

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 21:05:42 +0000

The ultimate Batman experience

To say that Batman: Arkham City is the best licensed game of all time is like saying Oreos are the best chocolate-and-cream sandwich cookies; sure, it's praise, but it's meaningless praise given the competition. A more impressive feat is that outside of the comics and graphic novels, Batman: Arkham City is the single best representation of the Batman property ever created.

A veritable who's who of Batman history, Arkham City manages to weave in just about every major Batman character, from Alfred to Zsasz. The main storyline focuses on Batman's fight to take down Arkham City from the inside out, all while dealing with the ever-present Joker threat. The tightly constructed narrative moves seamlessly from story beat to story beat, villain to villain, as it builds to a satisfying and surprising finale. It helps that every member of the voice acting cast is pitch perfect, from the brilliant psychotic lunacy of Mark Hamill's Joker to the gravelly snarl of Kevin Conroy's Batman.

The real star of the show, however, is Arkham City, the walled-off penal colony that serves as the game's setting and expansive hubworld. Arkham City's faded art deco splendor and gritty industrial slums come together to uniquely capture the seedy, noir soul of Gotham. This carefully selected cross-section of toppled landmarks, burned-out tenements, and rusty factories provides the perfect backdrop for Batman to do the usual Batman things.

Batman danced with the devil in the pale moonlight. And won.

And that's the true triumph of Batman: Arkham City—never before has Batman felt more like Batman. The caped crusader effortlessly grapples and glides his way around the city, flits from shadowy rooftops to darkened alleys, and makes full use of an impressive array of gadgets and utilities in his quest to clean up the rugged streets of Arkham City. Traversal is faster than ever as Batman literally flies across the city, and the open nature of Arkham City's world lets you smoothly transition from exploration, to stealth, to straightforward fisticuffs.

The free-flowing combat of Batman: Arkham Asylum makes a triumphant return in Arkham City, and with significant improvements. The core concept is still a two-button, timing-based system, focusing on strikes and counters and quickly moving from one target to the next. This go 'round, however, Batman has brought all his toys to the party. His utility belt is overflowing with handy gadgets which he can quick fire in the middle of combat without even breaking his combo.

Adding to the dynamic feel of both the fighting and the city at large is Nvidia's PhysX engine. Batman's cape clings and flutters realistically, dust and fog swirl around the legs of back alley thugs, leaves and trash float around the dilapidated streets, and shards of shattered glass and rock litter the broken pavement. The additions are subtle, but add significant atmosphere to an already detailed world.

Thanks to Nvidia's PhysX, the terrified look on this thug's face is hidden by a leaf, as guest star Catwoman kicks his skull in.

And yes, even without PhysX, Batman: Arkham City is simply a phenomenal-looking game. The power of the PC is in full effect here; crisp hi-res textures and expansive draw distance ensure immersion even when viewing the entire city while gliding on high. Unfortunately, the game's performance takes a serious nosedive when DirectX 11 functions are enabled. While the game can run smoothly for stretches in DX11 mode, the frame rate will randomly, and fairly frequently, plummet to 5fps or lower, ultimately making the game unplayable. It's a shame too, as the DirectX 11 features look particularly nice, significantly enhancing the look of cloth and skin textures, and making characters appear decidedly less flat and plasticky than in DX9 mode.

There are a handful of other niggling technical issues, as well. The game's keyboard and mouse controls, thankfully, are not among them. The layout takes a bit of getting used to—this game uses a ton of buttons, thanks to 12 gadgets and several combat combo buttons—but feels better than a gamepad in the long run. The annoyance is simply that control settings cannot be changed when the game is running. In fact, no game settings can be changed once the game is launched—they can only be changed through the launcher application, before the game boots. Also, while we encountered no catastrophic errors, the game does take fairly long to boot, and we had several crashes with GFWL, forcing us to exit the program and restart.

Minor technical shortcomings aside, the PC version of Batman: Arkham City is clearly the definitive version of the definitive Batman experience. While it's a shame that the month delay between console and PC wasn't enough time to iron out all the kinks, the PC version still controls the best, runs the best, looks the best, and will provide you with the best Batman experience money can buy.

$50, www.batmanarkhamcity.com, ESRB: T

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Review

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 21:05:29 +0000

Oh, hello, Dragon Age. Didn't see you there. Morrowho?

Skyrim is torn by civil war: A weakened Empire struggles to retain control of the province, while rebel Nords vie for self-determination. Dragons have returned after centuries, and nobody knows why. Undead infest the crypts, cairns, and barrows, and more dangerous things haunt deep Dwarven ruins. Elsewhere, ordinary people are living their lives. Guilds struggle to reclaim past glory, shopkeepers try to scrape by, lovers quarrel, and everyone could use your help. Time to make your mark on the world.

Skyrim is a first-person RPG with a wide array of skills and abilities, loosely clumped under three main archetypes: the mage, the warrior, and the thief. Unlike earlier Elder Scrolls games, though, there are no tagged skills or premade character classes. Play the game how you like, and your character gets better at what it does most. Our first character was a flame-casting, axe-wielding Nord, but there are eight other player races and innumerable play styles, and Shouts add a new kind of mana-less magic to the game. The game’s voice acting (for the most part), interface, and graphics are also leaps ahead of Oblivion’s. Combat is more satisfying, if a bit repetitive after a while. Even killing dragons becomes almost routine as you increase in power.

You saw a mudcrab the other day? We saw this.

Skyrim’s main quest is an incredible tale that brings you from one end of the province to the other, from the highest mountain to the lowest depths, and encompasses stealth, diplomacy, adventuring, exploration, and a lot of combat. But it’s a greatest-hits collection for a prolific band. It’s a good starting point, and you’ll get some of the best content, but if it’s the only album you listen to, you’ll miss most of the material, including stuff that’s better than any of the hits. With superhuman focus you could beat the main quest in maybe 25 hours, but that’s not how you should play Skyrim. Even running from one objective to another, we inevitably got sidetracked for hours by something—a small town, a crypt, a ruin—we spotted in passing. We clocked 55 hours of play time before reluctantly focusing on the main quest and still felt we’d just scratched the surface. One editor has put 90 hours in and has barely touched the main quest at all.

It wouldn’t be a Bethesda open-world game without a heaping tablespoon of weirdness. Animals judder into the landscape or appear hundreds of feet in the air, then fall to their deaths. Every guard you meet complains about the arrow he took in the knee. Books and plates render slightly inside the shelves they’re on, then go flying across the room. A giant’s club rises into the air like a helium balloon. At times, the game would crash to desktop every hour or so. Good thing there’s a mod for that.

Dragons require a lot of percussive maintenance.

That’s one of the best things about playing Skyrim on a PC. In addition to the graphical superiority—consoles ain’t got nothing on Skyrim at 1920x1200 at Ultra settings—the modding community corrects for bugs and idiosyncrasies faster than the developers. Look past the inevitable nude mods, and you’ll see high-res texture packs, patches to fix Bethesda’s blocky faces, interface tweaks, and more. This isn’t to say Skyrim is a really buggy game. The few bugs that aren’t fixed by patches or mods aren’t enough to dampen our enthusiasm for the game world or the story.

If Skyrim was only as good as Morrowind or Oblivion, it’d be unskippable. But it’s much, much better. It’s certainly the best game Bethesda’s ever made, and one of the best we’ve ever played. It’s not without weird bugs and quirks, but the gameplay, story, and amount of content are all staggering, and we’ll be playing it for months to come.

$60, www.elderscrolls.com, ESRB: M

Ultrabook Ultra-Roundup: 4 Top-Notch Notebooks Reviewed and Compared

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 21:24:07 +0000

Will this new class of slim, trim, relatively affordable portables be the Next Big Thing?

You’d have to actively be avoiding the tech media over the past several months not to have heard about Ultrabooks. Their coming has garnered a boatload of buzz, fueled in no small part by Intel’s $300 million fund to get hardware and software makers behind the cause.

Ultrabooks are Intel’s answer to the spread of ARM-based tablets—a way to capture the hearts and minds of the masses with an x86-based portable device (of the Intel persuasion, natch). To that end, Ultrabooks are required to meet a few key “desirability” standards. They must be slim, lightweight, have generous battery life, and boot and resume from hibernation in brisk fashion. It’s also understood they should look cool. As Apple products so clearly demonstrate, style sells. And sure enough, Ultrabooks—at least those that have debuted so far—are heartily infused with MacBook Air influence.

So are these new, “cool” devices the next must-have products? Is all the hoopla warranted? We review the first four Ultrabooks to kick off the category. All are 13.3 inch models, but each brings its own brand of hot-newness to the table, with varying degrees of persuasiveness, as you’ll see on the following pages.

Acer Aspire S3

Priced right, but far from perfect

When Ultrabooks were first announced it seemed doubtful that manufacturers could turn out these wannabe MacBook Airs at the sub-$1,000 price Intel was promising. Acer put those doubts to rest with the Aspire S3, which debuted at $900. Given its relative affordability, it’s not surprising that the Aspire S3 makes a few compromises in its Air aspirations.

Measuring .68 inches at its thickest, the ever-so-slightly wedged three-pound chassis is matte silver throughout, save for its black rubber hinge and gray keyboard. An attractive brushed-aluminum lid lends the S3 a solid feel and a classy countenance—at least when the notebook is closed. The inside and underneath are all plastic. Nevertheless, the S3 feels rigid when held by one corner, and we like that it opens almost 180 degrees.

Overall, the S3’s island keyboard is comfortable to type on, although the key press is a bit shallow and many of the oft-used keys around the periphery, such as Enter, Shift, Backspace, etc. are truncated. That’s particularly true of the arrow keys, which also double as volume and screen-brightness controls. Using the S3’s unified clickpad, which supports multitouch functions, didn’t give us any woes.

Closed, the S3 cuts a more impressive figure, with its handsome brushed metal lid on display.

Port selection is spare, a quality of all Ultrabooks, and here consists of a headphone/mic, a media reader, HDMI, and two USB 2.0 ports—the S3 is the only Ultrabook in this roundup not to feature USB 3.0.

Acer tapped the Core i5-2467M for processing duty. While the base clock is just 1.6GHz, it can Turbo up to 2.3GHz, and thus performed better in most benchmarks than the 2.13GHz Core i7-640LM Arrandale CPU in our zero-point ultraportable rig. The S3’s lagging score in Quake III is no doubt the result of its single-channel RAM, which is particularly problematic in older titles. Conversely, its score in Quake 4 demonstrates the advances of Sandy Bridge’s integrated graphics, although the gaming chops of any ultraportable out right now will be pretty limited.

In our video playback test, the S3’s battery lasted five hours; it recharged to full capacity in half that time. Videos themselves looked crisp and color-accurate on the S3’s 1366x768 glossy screen if the screen was tilted just so. Otherwise, color and detail were diminished to varying degrees.

The S3 is unique among these Ultrabooks for featuring a mechanical hard drive, but it’s paired with 20GB of NAND flash for SSD caching, using Intel’s Smart Response Technology (SRT). Thus, your most-often used programs benefit from the SSD’s faster performance. The S3’s boot time of approximately 39 seconds, however, was a good deal slower than that of the SSD competition.

Acer also offers a $1,300 S3 model with a Core i7 and a 240GB SSD. But truth be told, the body is better suited to the lower-cost category, where it must make due with the modest praise of being a decent budget option.

$900, www.acer.com

Our zero-point ultraportable is an HP EliteBook 2540p with a 2.13GHz Intel Core i7-640LM, 4GB of DDR3/1333 RAM, integrated graphics, a 250GB, 5,400rpm hard drive, and Windows 7 Professional 64-bit

---

Toshiba Portégé Z835

Lightest load, lowest price, least compelling

Toshiba does Acer $100 better, offering the Z835, a Best Buy exclusive, for $800. Its low price is matched by its light weight. At two pounds, 6.6 ounces, it beats all the others here by a good half-pound. But the Z835 also looks and feels the cheapest of the bunch. Its construction seems less solid—particularly the lid, which has a disconcerting amount of flex.

The Z835’s dark-gray and black color scheme is peppered with chrome accents that look a bit dated. All the keys on the Z835’s island keyboard are normal width, but they are also slightly squat, which takes getting used to, as does the shallow travel of all keyboards of this ilk. The keyboard’s backlighting is a surprising feature at this price—and not one currently found on the more expensive Ultrabook models. A traditional touchpad of decent size with discrete right and left buttons stands out among the other Ultrabooks’ clickpads.

The Z835’s hardware specs are another reflection of its low price. The centerpiece is a 1.4GHz Core i3-2367M, which doesn’t benefit from any Turbo boost whatsoever. This renders the Z835 the slowest in the benchmarks of all four Ultrabooks, and even slower than our elderly zero-point, except in Quake 4, thanks to Sandy Bridge graphics.

Only the Portégé Z835 offers a backlit keyboard—a standard feature of the MacBook Air.

The Z835 also skimps on storage capacity, offering just 128GB. It’s full-SSD, but that’s not saying much. The Toshiba NAND flash coupled with a Toshiba controller mustered just 187MB/s sequential reads in CrystalDiskMark—half the speed and then some of the other two SSDs in this roundup. More pathetic still, the Z835’s sequential write speed of 49.23 is 40 percent slower than that of the HDD in Acer’s S3.

On the brighter side, the Z835 offers the most generous array of ports, with full-size VGA in addition to full-size HDMI, two USB 2.0 ports plus one USB 3.0, and an Ethernet port—a rarity in this roundup.

The Z835’s glossy 1366x768 screen isn’t spectacular, but it reproduced pictures and videos without noticeable flaws and the viewing angle is thankfully wider than that of the Acer S3. In our battery rundown test, the Z835 played a continuously looping video for close to five hours. It took about three hours to completely recharge. It booted to Windows in 24 seconds, which isn’t bad.

Even more so than Acer’s S3, the Z835 deserves credit for offering such a svelte and exceedingly portable form factor for its price. But reaching that price entailed compromises—a few too many, in our opinion, to grant this product more than a mild endorsement.

$800, www.toshiba.com

Our zero-point ultraportable is an HP EliteBook 2540p with a 2.13GHz Intel Core i7-640LM, 4GB of DDR3/1333 RAM, integrated graphics, a 250GB, 5,400rpm hard drive, and Windows 7 Professional 64-bit

---

Asus Zenbook UX31E

Now we're talking turkey

With the Asus UX31E, all the fuss about Ultrabooks starts to make sense. Its all-metal chassis, cut from a single sheet of aluminum, is undeniably handsome. And while this attractive metal wedge that’s just .71 inches at its thickest brings to mind the fine craftsmanship of a MacBook Air, it’s by no means a knockoff. The UX31E possesses a unique character that’s admirable in its own right. And at $1,050, it’s $250 less than its similarly spec’d Apple counterpart.

Silver inside and out, save for a black bezel around the screen and black backing to the keyboard, the UX31E sports a faintly etched pattern of concentric circles on its lid, while the deck is adorned with a pattern of brushed vertical lines, interrupted only by a spacious clickpad. While clickpads can be persnickety and frustrating to use, we didn’t have any issues with the pad on the UX31E. As for the keyboard, the size and spacing of the keys feels right, and although the key press is shallow, there’s a satisfying click at the end of each depression.

Another welcome feature of the UX31E is its 1600x900 screen resolution, besting the 1366x768 of the other screens in this roundup and the 1440x900 of the 13.3-inch MacBook Air. Like all the others, the UX31E’s screen is glossy; it produces a bright, vivid picture and holds up well off axis.

The two speakers embedded in the chassis are powered by Bang & Olufsen ICEpower tech and put out surprisingly full audio for a device of these dimensions.

Internally, the UX31E also impresses. Its Core i5-2557M proc is clocked at 1.7GHz, with a max Turbo frequency of 2.7GHz. Combine that with a SATA 6Gb/s SSD and you’ve got a machine that posts healthy gains over our zero-point in the benchmarks and some of the fastest scores in this roundup. To put it in perspective, the UX31E had sequential read and write speeds of 463MB/s and 341MB/s, respectively—pretty darn close to the spec’s max bandwidth. Sadly, the SSD is just 128GB.

The UX31E’s battery life surpassed five hours in our tests. It recharged to 50 percent in less than an hour, and reached a full charge in three. Booting to Windows took 23 seconds.

Asus throws in a tasteful, brown padded carrying case for the UX31E, as well as a matching pouch that holds two connector dongles: USB-to-Ethernet and Mini VGA-to-VGA. Yes, Mini VGA is built into the unit (who knew it even existed?), along with Mini HDMI, USB 2.0, USB 3.0, headphone, mic, and a media reader.

All told, the UX31E weighs in at three pounds, 2.1 ounces (or 8.3 ounces, if you add the power supply). If going toe-to-toe with Apple’s Air on both design and specs, while beating its price, is what it takes to achieve product hotness, then Asus has done it.

$1,050, www.asus.com

Our zero-point ultraportable is an HP EliteBook 2540p with a 2.13GHz Intel Core i7-640LM, 4GB of DDR3/1333 RAM, integrated graphics, a 250GB, 5,400rpm hard drive, and Windows 7 Professional 64-bit

---

Lenovo IdeaPad U300s

Hits all the right notes except price

Lenovo also brings its A-game to the Ultrabook party. And well it should, since it’s asking almost $1,500 for the IdeaPad U300s. That’s premium, business-ultraportable price territory. It’s therefore apropos that the U300s has the most businessy aesthetic, although not at the sake of sleek design. Like the Asus UX31E and the MacBook Air, the U300s is crafted from a single-sheet of aluminum. It eschews the wedge form factor established by Apple and instead uniquely mimics the lines of a hardbound book, with the top and bottom edges protruding slightly all the way around the perimeter, the way a book’s covers protrude past the pages. It makes for a distinct and pleasing silhouette.

Both bottom and top are dark gray—Graphite Gray, to use Lenovo’s parlance (Clementine Orange is also an option)—while the deck and screen bezel are matte silver. The inside is clean and minimalist, consisting of a power button, island keyboard, and large clickpad. The Shift, Enter, Caps, Tab, and Backspace keys are all slightly shortened, but typing on the U300s was a mostly comfortable, trouble-free affair, and the glass-surfaced clickpad is sublime.

We love that the U300s's deck is free of third-party branding, but that tack helps pay the rent.

Ports include one USB 3.0, one USB 2.0, full-size HDMI, and a headphone/mic combo. Lenovo is alone in this pack for excluding a media reader. A small button on the notebook’s left side launches Lenovo’s OneKey Recovery, which walks you through creating a system image that can be launched from the same button should your system fail. The U300s also supports Intel’s Wireless Display technology. So with a WiDi adapter (purchased separately) attached to your TV, you can stream any content from your notebook via Intel’s software.

Enough with the extras, how 'bout the hard stuff? The U300s is powered by a Core i7-2677M, which is clocked just a hair above the Core i5 in the Asus UX31E, at 1.8GHz. The two units traded wins in the benchmarks, although the U300s performed significantly better than the UX31E in Photoshop, for inexplicable reasons. In Quake III, the U300s suffered the fate of all single-channel RAM configs. For storage, Lenovo taps a comparatively spacious 256GB SSD. It’s a SATA 3Gb/s device using a year-old J Micron controller, but it comes close to maximum bandwidth, and subjectively speaking, the U300s feels plenty snappy. It was the quickest to boot to Windows, posting 17 seconds flat.

The U300s’s screen quality is on par with the UX31E’s, albeit at a lower res of 1366x768. Battery life for the two was also similar, exceeding five hours. Lenovo, however, had the speediest recharge, hitting 50 percent in 30 minutes.

So, yes, the U300s offers a good deal of quality for the price. But it’s nonetheless costly, and by contrast, the Asus UX31E is the better Ultrabook value.

$1,495, www.lenovo.com

Our zero-point ultraportable is an HP EliteBook 2540p with a 2.13GHz Intel Core i7-640LM, 4GB of DDR3/1333 RAM, integrated graphics, a 250GB, 5,400rpm hard drive, and Windows 7 Professional 64-bit

---

Inside Out: Anatomy of An Ultrabook

On the whole, Ultrabooks aren't the most upgrade-friendly devices. Of the four we reviewed, only the Asus and the Toshiba models seem to grant interior access that doesn't entail potential damage to the machine—and even those devices each require the removal of 12 screws, plus the use of a tiny security bit, in the case of the Toshiba. Here's what Toshiba's Z835 packs under the hood.

1. USB 3.0: Like most of the Ultrabooks here, the Z835 features USB 3.0. It comes compliments of an NEC controller.
2. CPU: To save space, the Z835's Core i3-2367 uses a ball-grid array, soldered to the board, rather than a higher-profile socket. That negates a future CPU upgrade.
3. RAM: The memory configuration is interesting, consisting of a 2GB SO-DIMM that can easily be upgraded, as well as 2GB of memory soldered to the board.
4. SSD: A standard mSATA drive allows a future swap out—a nice consolation since the 128GB Toshiba drive that comes with the Z835 is small, as well as slow by SSD standards.

The Upshot on Ultrabooks

Where do they stand in the "must-have" product universe?

Now that we’ve seen what Ultrabooks have to offer, we can fairly say the category has promise. Intel’s success with Sandy Bridge, its strong desire to keep the ARM crowd at bay, and its deep pockets have spurred impressive strides in device development—shoot, two months ago, we couldn’t have imagined an ultraportable as capable and attractive as Asus’s UX31E fetching anything less than $1,400. To see a first-gen product of that caliber hovering just above a grand says something.

Are Ultrabooks ready to overtake tablets? Probably not—right now. Granted, even the current crop’s mix of stylishness, generous battery life, fast boots, and real PC performance will give some tablet shoppers pause when weighing the pros and cons of each device class. But the prices of Ultrabooks are still a little high (particularly for the more lustworthy models) to compete with $200-$500 tabbies.

And then there’s that little matter of touch. For the time being, Ultrabooks don’t come with touchscreens—a primary factor in tablets’ appeal. Nor do Ultrabooks hook into an app marketplace. Expect those things to change with the release of Windows 8 in 2012. Win8’s Metro UI will not only look the part of a mobile OS, but also be optimized for touch, and rumor has it the OS will include an integrated app store.

Yes, a touchscreen has the potential to add to an Ultrabook’s cost, but Intel is already working on that. At the Intel Capital Global Summit in November, CEO Paul Otellini made it clear that touch-based Ultrabooks will be a big focus for the company in 2012. Part of that includes getting the cost of touch down. Intel’s $300 million Ultrabook fund will help with that. Ultimately, Otellini wants to see Windows 8 touch-based Ultrabooks starting at $699.

Ivy Bridge will also figure prominently in Ultrabooks’ future. Intel’s next CPU will be manufactured on a 22nm tri-gate process, making it more power efficient than Sandy Bridge chips, and it will feature an entirely new graphics core that’s reportedly going to offer 50 percent better performance than Sandy Bridge in 3D games and feature DirectX 11 support, to boot.

All told, there’s potential here for these devices to be tablet killers—if value and functionality mean anything. For now, though, Ultrabooks should at least make portable-PC shoppers happy. All the models we reviewed here represent a big shift in the laptop landscape, from design, to form factor, to price. Yes, Asus’s UX31E offers the most compelling mix of all these factors, but we believe that Ultrabooks as a whole have serious merit as ultraportable general-purpose PCs.

Western Digital WD TV Live Review

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 20:00:33 +0000

For a company whose primary business is manufacturing hard drives, Western Digital sure knows a lot about digital media and how to stream it over a network. Each succeeding generation of the company’s WD TV Live product has led the market in terms of features, price, and performance, and this one is no different.

With this incarnation, WD adds several new services (including Hulu Plus and Spotify), a collection of simple online games, an integrated Wi-Fi adapter, and even the ability to decode Dolby TrueHD. Unlike the pricier WD TV Live Hub, which remains in Western Digital’s lineup, this product does not include any local storage. But it is equipped with two USB 2.0 ports, so you can easily connect a portable drive. You can also connect a USB keyboard, which makes initial setup (entering Wi-Fi and network user IDs and passwords, for instance) considerably easier than hunting and pecking using the remote and the onscreen keyboard.

The third-generation WD TV Live is thinner and more capable than previous models, and the remote is significantly better.

Most people will connect the WD TV Live to their entertainment system using the HDMI 1.4 port (you’ll need to provide your own cable), but the device will happily accommodate older equipment with its analog A/V and digital S/PDIF outputs. There’s also an Ethernet port in the back panel, but the integrated 802.11b/g/n wireless client adapter proved plenty fast for streaming video at 720p—an impressive achievement, considering that we tested the box in a room-within-a-room home theater at Maximum PC Lab North. We needed a hardwired connection to stream video at 1080p. Image quality was excellent.

The remote is easily the best that WD has come up with so far, with a molded grip that feels very natural in either hand. We needed to bend our thumb to reach the alpha-numeric keypad on the bottom half the device, but we seldom use those buttons, anyway. We used the home, arrow, mute, and transport (play/pause, stop, fast forward/rewind, and skip forward/back) buttons far more frequently, and those are all within easy reach. The remote also has four shortcut buttons—labeled A, B, C, and D—that can be custom programmed.

Plenty of device support here, with both analog and digital audio and video outputs.

Western Digital offers a strong collection of online movie and music services in addition to the new ones mentioned earlier. You’ll find all the old standbys here, including Netflix, YouTube, and Pandora; but you’ll also get CinemaNow, Blockbuster on Demand, Live365, and several others. Unfortunately, you won’t be able to tap what we consider to be the best online, on-demand movie service of them all: Vudu. Western Digital does deserve praise for its broad media file and container file support, which includes the video standards AVI, MKV, MPEG-1/2/4, h.264, VOB, and M2TS (the container for Blu-ray movies); the audio formats AAC, FLAC, OGG, and MP3 (including 24-bit/48kHz FLAC); and the digital photo formats BMP, JPEG, and PNG. The device supports playlists and subtitles, too.

The WD TV Live is the best full-featured media streamer you can buy today, but we’d like it even more if it included Vudu.

$120 street, www.wdc.com

Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo Review

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 17:15:34 +0000

The low-cost champion, evolved

Frequent Maximum PC readers will have noticed our love affair with Cooler Master’s Hyper 212 Plus CPU cooler. The 212 Plus came out of nowhere and captured our hearts—and a spot on our Best of the Best list—with its excellent cooling power and rock-bottom $30 price tag way back in 2009. It’s not the best CPU cooler we’ve tested, but we’ve installed it in virtually every stock-clocked PC we’ve built since, thanks to its unbeatable price/performance ratio. Cooler Master’s all-new Hyper 212 Evo costs five dollars more than the Plus. But is it five dollars better?

Besides the heat pipes, the Evo's translucent PWM fan is the only difference between this and previous iterations of the Hyper 212 CPU cooler.

Like its predecessor, the Evo is a skyscraper-style heatsink with four direct-contact heat pipes rising through a stack of aluminum cooling fins. It’s 6.3 inches tall from the contact plate to the top of the heat pipes, 2 inches deep (3.13 inches after adding one 12cm fan), and 4.7 inches wide. Cooler Master provides a universal mounting bracket that will fit AMD and Intel LGA775, 1155/1156, and 1366 sockets, and a separate one for Socket LGA2011. Four standoff pegs bolt through the motherboard and onto the backplate, and an X-shaped bracket holds the contact plate to the CPU with four spring screws attached to the standoffs. Plastic clips secure the 12cm fan to the heat exchanger in a fashion similar to the most recent 212 Plus coolers we’ve used (the original Hyper used wire clips).

In short, the Evo is identical to its predecessor in every aspect but one: Where the 212 Plus’s heat pipes meet the cooler’s contact plate, small gaps reduce the surface area that is in direct contact with the CPU’s own heat spreader. The bottoms of the Evo’s heat pipes are so flat that these gaps are entirely eliminated.

At our i7-930 test bed’s stock speed of 2.8GHz, it was hard to tell the difference between the two coolers: The Evo ran just over a degree Celsius hotter than the Plus at idle, and just under a degree warmer at 100 percent CPU burn. Both coolers far outperformed our stock cooler, by 4-5 C at idle and by a whopping 14 C at full burn.

The Hyper 212 Evo's flat direct-contact heat pipes increase the surface area that comes into contact with the CPU's heat spreader.

We didn’t notice a meaningful difference until we cranked up the test bed to our overclocking-challenge speed of 3.9GHz. At full burn, the Evo kept our CPU fully 9 C cooler than its predecessor could manage. Neither part came close to besting our air-cooling champion, Prolimatech’s Armageddon, with this stress test, however; and the stock Intel cooler lasted just 20 seconds before the CPU began to throttle itself.

If you’re already using a Hyper 212 Plus, we don’t see a reason to switch to the Evo unless you’d like to crank your clock speeds a little higher. If you’re building a new rig, or looking to upgrade from a stock cooler, on the other hand, the Evo is a worthy successor to the 212 Plus. Five dollars for a cooler that can keep an overclocked proc 9 C cooler? We’ll take it.

We could wish for an easier mounting bracket, but honestly, the Hyper 212 Evo is a damn-good deal at $35.

$35, www.coolermaster.com