The secret uber-weapons of WWII

Id Software didn’t develop the latest Wolfenstein, but the sequel to its genre-founding 1991 classic Wolfenstein 3D absolutely captures the meaning of the studio’s name: an impulsive, stimulating shooter full of gory, colorful, mindless gunplay.

Wolfenstein embraces over-the-top action like a summer blockbuster movie. As U.S. super-operative B.J. Blazkowicz, you’re tasked with foiling the Nazis’ latest evil archaeology: They’ve dug up ancient medallions and energy crystals to build some scary sci-fi weaponry. The medallions let their holders access a shadow dimension called the Veil, and when B.J. gets his hands on one, it grants him a set of powers that augment his gunfightin’—slow-mo, a personal shield, enhanced damage, and turquoise-colored “Veil sight” that lets him see in the dark.

Though these Veil abilities operate similarly to BioShock’s plasmids, they aren’t the focus of Wolfenstein. Nor is B.J. himself. Instead, it’s the arsenal: Nazi-melters like the particle cannon, a Ghostbusters-like hose that sprays gallons of disintegrating blue-green energy. Or the Tesla gun, a spinning iron coil that feels like an exposed power transformer and sends deadly jolts through anyone you point it at. Basic firearms like the MP40 and KAR 98 are also available, ready to pop the limbs off endless identical Nazi privates.

Nazi skeleten-men hate lightning. But they love cinnamon.

It’s a credit to Raven’s effects artists that operating these overpowered guns is enough to make the game worth buying, especially since the game tours B.J. through very familiar WWII set pieces: industrial labs, box-filled warehouses, and stone-cobbled streets dotted with exploding gas drums and squads of Hitler’s henchmen on patrol. That’s by-the-numbers stuff for anyone that’s played a shooter set in the ‘40s, but developer Raven Software manages to make each encounter completely entertaining—partly due to its expressive enemies that leap, tumble, and scream “Mein lieben!” at the drop of a shell casing, and partly thanks to the cast of crazy mini bosses the game puts in your path: Nazi dominatrices with laser whips, radioactive skeletons, and teleporting Axis sorcerers.

Where you fight these fascist foes is also Wolfenstein’s biggest surprise: This is not a linear game. The fictional German city of Isenstadt serves as a hub for everything you do; within it, B.J. can take on missions from a resistance faction, buy weapon upgrades at a black market, comb the city for secret passages and gold, or just ambush Nazi patrols and checkpoints (that respawn when you return to Isenstadt after a mission) on a whim.

Expect random run-ins with the worst of Hitler's experiments in Isenstadt as you progress in the game.

It’s by no means an open-world game like Grand Theft Auto, but this tinge of freedom creates a pace that isn’t reliant on checkpoints to bookend the action. And that perfectly suits the nature of the gunplay: spontaneous, unfrustrating, and bloody. While Wolf’s boss battles don’t attempt the same surprising design that Isenstadt does, campy, conventional showdowns against the worst that Nazi science has to offer still suits the game’s arcade feel.

A warning to anyone looking for a meaningful multiplayer mode from Wolfenstein: The online content feels shoehorned compared to the quality of the campaign, bringing in up to 12 players for team-based modes that ape the feel of Call of Duty, but excluding the exotic power weapons that make the single-player so delightful, and noticeably ratcheting down visual effects to support multiplayer’s larger maps.

Latest version caters with advanced features

We’ve long loved Eye-Fi’s series of Wi-Fi-enabled SD cards that allow you to instantly upload pics from your camera to a website, but it has lacked two key features: the ability to select which photos you want to upload and the ability to perform peer-to-peer transfers from the camera to a computer or laptop. This new card addresses those needs.

An ad-hoc mode in the latest Eye-Fi lets you upload directly to your laptop.

The card continues to support all the good stuff we’ve seen before in Eye-Fi cards: the ability to connect to open access points to upload your photos to a photo service, Wi-Fi-based geo-tagging, and video sharing. But we’re more excited by the improvements in the Eye-Fi Pro. Now, instead of uploading every image on the card, you select which photos you want to upload by checking the write-protect on the files and the card dutifully uploads them. JPEG, video, and even RAW files are now supported, too. And in case you’re wondering whether RAW is too large to transfer via Wi-Fi, we moved an 18MB RAW file from a Canon EOS Rebel T1i to a laptop in about two minutes using the Eye-Fi Pro’s Ad-hoc mode. Not bad.

While the new Ad-hoc mode is one of the improvements we appreciate about the Pro card, it’s also one of our complaints—the long-sought-after ability to upload without the need for an access point is great to have but not exactly easy to set up. You have to dig through the site’s FAQ for a PDF on how to do it, and even then, you still have to fuss with it. Our other complaint is the size. With 16GB SD cards in the $30 range, a 4GB card, especially one aimed at “pros,” with RAW support is just too small. Still, that doesn’t take away from how cool and useful the Eye-Fi Pro is.

Damn-good cheap speakers

We haven’t auditioned many cheap speaker systems lately. Why? Well, let’s just say we don’t enjoy subjecting our ears to the sonic equivalent of waterboarding. But Logitech has a knack for packing big sound into inexpensive boxes, so we agreed to review its new two-channel Z520 system.

You’ll have to decide for yourself if the Z520 system’s $130 price tag really puts it in the “cheap” category, and we imagine the folks at Logitech will cringe to hear us describe them as such; but you can cut only so many corners before we begin to ask, “Why bother?” Judging by these speakers’ performance, Logitech’s engineers know just how low they can go.
 
When we see small speakers, we usually pigeon-hole them as near-field monitors: short-throw speakers that produce a small stereo soundstage that collapses as soon as you move more than three feet away from the cabinets. There’s nothing inherently wrong with near-fields, especially in a PC environment, but they have their limitations. So we were surprised to hear Logitech boast that the Z520 could provide a “great listening experience throughout the room.” We decided to put that claim to the test as soon as we took the speakers out of the box.

An auxilary input on the side of the right cabinet can accommodate an MP3 player; there's a headphone output there, too.

We connected the set to Asus’s kick-ass two-channel soundcard, the Xonar Essence STX, which meant we had to find an adapter to convert the speakers’ six-foot hardwired cable. The cable ends in a 1/8-inch stereo plug, but the soundcard’s jacks are stereo RCA. The six-foot cable connecting the left speaker cabinet to the right, which houses the amp, is hardwired to the left cabinet. We realize that renders setup fairly idiot-proof, but it also limits where you can put the speakers.

We played a number of tracks that we’d ripped from CD and encoded in FLAC, starting with an old favorite: Joe Jackson’s “Rant and Rave” from his Blaze of Glory release. We expected the speakers to be bright, since there’s no subwoofer (and no way to add one), but we were pleasantly surprised with their range and definition. Listen to a song like this on most inexpensive speaker systems and the acoustic piano, horns, and vocals will peel your ear drums. The Z520 produced the congas, acoustic piano, trumpet, and vocal as thoroughly distinct elements. The system even delivered respectable bass response from its three-inch woofers, without having to resort to devices such as reflex ports and passive radiators. The cabinets are fabricated from thick plastic and flare out with a wide bottom that renders them very stable. There’s not enough bass here to satisfy hardcore gamers or movie buffs; but for the price, we think most music listeners will be satisfied.

The Z520’s integrated amp produces just 26 watts per channel, so don’t expect it to fill a large room with sound, especially if you’re throwing a party. With the volume control knob turned about three-quarters full, however, it did manage to fill our 14x8-foot home office. But the speaker’s ability to present a stereo image almost anywhere in the room is what really impressed us; in fact, the soundstage didn’t begin to decay until we were standing at a nearly 90-degree angle to the speakers. Remarkable.

A very necessary evil

There’s no good reason for the existence of Asus’s Xonar HDAV 1.3 Slim soundcard, and yet it’s a godsend for those of us who want to hear the high-definition soundtracks on so many of the Hollywood movies released on Blu-ray disc. Blame Microsoft for the contradiction: No one would need a product like this if Vista provided a protected audio path.

After all, this card doesn’t decode Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD Master Audio soundtracks, nor does it enhance the audio or the video; it just passes the signals through to your A/V receiver. Using the included HDMI cable, the card takes the output from your videocard, re-encrypts the soundtrack so that no one can intercept the bit stream to make a bit-perfect copy, and outputs the encrypted audio and video to a second HDMI port. For those without HDMI, Asus also includes a DVI-to-HDMI cable.

The protected audio path requires a software component, too, so Asus bundles a copy of ArcSoft’s TotalMedia Theatre with the Xonar. Not your favorite media player? Too bad, it’s the only one that’s compatible. For what it’s worth, we don’t have any complaints about the program. There’s nothing objectionable about its user interface; it can handle all the major codecs; and it supports BD-Live, so you can access whatever online content is linked to the movie you’re watching.

Your home-theater PC will downsample Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio soundtracks unless it provides a protected audio path such as Asus's Xonar HDAV 1.3 cards do.

Asus actually has three cards in its Xonar line that are capable of pulling off this trick. The HDAV 1.3 Slim, however, is the only low-profile card in the lineup, and it’s available only in a PCI formfactor. That’s unfortunate considering that our current favorite home-theater PC platform, AMD’s Live Home Cinema, ditched that aging standard.

So we dragged our desktop rig, which is currently outfitted with an HIS Radeon HD 4770, into our home theater for this evaluation. We connected it to a Yamaha RX-V665 A/V receiver, which is in turn connected to a 42-inch ViewSonic N4285P LCD television. We used Klipsch Reference Series RF-35 loudspeakers. In terms of image quality, the PC clobbered the Samsung BD-P1600 stand-alone Blu-ray player we used for comparison. But the Xonar card doesn’t perform any video processing, so we can’t give it credit for that; more importantly, the PC didn’t sound any better than the Blu-ray player. Then again, the PC would be forced to down-sample the soundtrack without the Xonar card in the loop.

To get lossless Blu-ray audio out of your PC, you'll need to also play the movie using the included ArcSoft TotalMedia Theatre player.

The HDAV 1.3 Slim has a front-panel output header that you can connect to your enclosure’s headphone jack, and a four-pin auxiliary input header you can connect to your TV tuner’s analog audio output. The mounting bracket has an S/PDIF output that can accommodate both coaxial and optical connectors (with an adapter), along with the aforementioned HDMI input and output. The card is compatible with the HDMI 1.3a specification and supports all three of its optional features: Deep Color (up to 48 bits per pixel, compared to HDMI 1.0’s 24-bit color), the xvYCC color space (which means the card uses the full range of values in an 8-bit space), and both lossless audio codecs.

Nonetheless, there’s really only one reason to buy an HDAV 1.3 Slim: So you can enjoy the splendor of Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio soundtracks while taking full advantage of your home-theater PC’s video capabilities.

A 15-inch gaming notebook that holds its own in bigger company

From the looks of it, you probably wouldn’t figure iBuypower’s M865TU for a gaming notebook. Its aesthetic is much more subdued than typical representatives of that class. The chassis is covered in a subtly textured black plastic, with tasteful silver trim around the edges and the touch pad. Unlike other gaming notebooks, backlighting is limited to the power button and an unobtrusive iBuypower logo on the notebook’s lid. Furthermore, the 15-inch M865TU is smaller than many gaming rigs and has a more streamlined formfactor.

But despite its smaller stature and no-nonsense appearance, the M865TU’s got game. That’s courtesy of the Nvidia GTX 260M GPU under its hood. Based on a reworked G92 chip, which uses a smaller, faster process (55nm vs. 65nm) and features slightly higher clocks, the GTX 260M proves more capable than previous-generation G92 mobile parts. For example, the M865TU performed almost 30 percent better in Far Cry 2 and Call of Duty 4 than the 9800M GTX-equipped Qosmio X305 we reviewed in June, with scores of 31.3fps and 58.3fps, respectively, at the notebook’s 1680x1050 native res and the highest quality settings. (This month, we jettisoned the games we have previously used for notebooks reviews in favor of FC2 and CoD4, which are far more indicative of a GPU’s prowess—expect to see these titles integrated into our benchmark chart going forward.)

If not for the tell-tale glossy screen, you might mistake the staid M865TU for a business notebook.

In the applications department, the M865TU is also competent. The rig’s 3.06GHz Core 2 Duo Mobile helped it handily whoop our zero-point notebook in the benchmarks by 30-60 percent. Granted, the story changes when you compare the M865TU to quad-core machines. The Core 2 Quad Mobile part in the Qosmio X305, while clocked at just 2GHz, beat the M865TU by 13-18 percent in the benchmarks that scale with cores (Premiere, Photoshop, MainConcept), although lost to the M865TU in Photoshop by four percent. Naturally, the Core i7 AVADirect D900F (reviewed in September) was even more punishing, winning the multicore-optimized apps by upwards of 60 percent and even Photoshop by 38 percent. Of course, the D900F is a mammoth desktop-replacement rig that costs twice as much as the M865TU—it should dominate.

What we like about the M865TU is that it provides decent application performance, a marked improvement in single-card notebook gaming, and a more portable size and weight—it’s lighter by two or more pounds than other gaming notebooks we’ve tested recently. Sadly, its battery life isn’t much better than the pack’s, lasting just one hour and 40 minutes when playing a movie in power-saving mode. Oh, and the speakers suck.

Every computer collects dust over time. When the computer is running, it creates a field of static electricity, which in turn attracts clumps of dust and hair. These cluttering particles can easily collect around your processor, power supply, and case fans, and can block airflow and lead to overheating. This is why an important part of taking care of a computer is making sure that it’s clean.

To that end, we’ve put together a comprehensive guide on how to clean your computer hardware and peripherals to make your rig look as good as new. We took a 4-year-old computer and thoroughly cleaned it using a few household supplies. All it took was a little bit of patience and a few hours and we managed to get some impressive results. Follow along below to achieve the same cleanliness Zen with your own machine.

And once you're done, read our guide to giving your PC a professional wiring job!

What you need:

• Compressed air
• Isopropyl rubbing alcohol
• Lint-free or microfiber cloths
• Paper towels
• Q-tips
• Scissors
• Swiffer Dry Refill sheet
• Masking tape
• Vacuum with a removable handle and crevice tool

1. Start with Cord Management

First, let’s start with the external cables. Begin by untangling any that have become entwined. Now, grab a soft, microfiber cloth and dampen it with a bit of isopropyl rubbing alcohol, then run it along the length of all of your cords to remove any dust that may have built up (image A). Then, grab a few zip ties and begin organizing your cables in terms of their location in your machine: For example, the wires connecting peripherals reside toward the top; the DVI connector and power supply cord are toward the bottom, and so on. This will prevent your cables from getting tangled over time. Don’t group any power cables with speaker wire. Make sure to put on the zip ties toward the middle of the cords to give yourself some flexibility when you disconnect or connect devices (image B). Now, unplug your cable bundles so they’re out of the way while we clean the inside of your machine.

(Image A)

(Image B)

2. Cleaning Your Case

Now, make sure the power supply is turned off, lay your case on its side, and remove the side door. First, you want to inspect the internal data and power cables to make sure they’re all connected and well-fastened (image A). If there are any damaged cables, consider replacing them entirely—do not attempt to fix them with electrical tape. Generally, electrical tape is only used for insulation purposes, not to patch-up wires, and this rule is especially crucial when dealing with the inside of a computer.

(Image A)

Next, you want to get rid of the dust bunnies around your motherboard. Grab a can of compressed air and make sure that the straw is securely inserted. Stand the case upright—when you shoot at it, make sure the can of compressed air stays upright as well (image B). Do not tilt the can on its side or shoot at the computer sideways.

(Image B)

Squeeze the trigger to blast air in the direction of the key components in your case: the crevices in between your fans, the drive bays, connection ports, and any other areas that are plagued by dust and tiny hairs. If you find that you have excess grime or stray dust balls rolling around, you can actually use your vacuum cleaner to deal with them, provided that it’s equipped with a removable handle and a crevice tool. Vacuum away from the motherboard and use it only to eliminate giant dust bunnies that fall to the bottom of the case. Additionally, if you have an air filter in your case, remove it and run it under warm water to remove the dust. Be certain it’s completely dry before re-inserting.

3. Wipe Down Fans

With a different piece of lint-free cloth, wipe down your fan blades, then sprinkle the cloth with a few droplets of 90 or 99 percent rubbing alcohol solution and run it along the inside of your case (image A). Use a Q-tip to clean tight spots like your CPU cooler’s fan blades (image B). When you’re finished and everything has dried, feel free to close up the case.

(Image A)

(Image B)

4. Make Your Own Filter

A great way to keep dust from infiltrating your PC is to create your own air filter using a Swiffer Dry Refill sheet. All you need to do is cut the sheet to fit the grill on the outside frame of your case and affix it with a few pieces of masking tape. In this instance, we pasted it between the outside of the case chassis and the front-frame. Be sure to place this filter only where air is being sucked in and remember to replace it every few months (or as it visibly accumulates dust).

5. Clean Your Mouse

Assuming your cords are still unplugged, dampen a lint-free cloth with rubbing alcohol and clean the outside shell of the mouse, paying attention to any residue on the buttons.  It’s important that you exercise caution while cleaning peripherals like an optical mouse—cleaning solutions should never come in contact with the optical sensor at the bottom of the mouse—it could ruin it. Also, avoid using paper towels; stick to lint-free materials so that you don’t risk leaving behind any fluff that could stick to the sensor.

6. Clean Your Keyboard

One easy way to clean gunk out of your keyboard is to turn it upside down over a sink and smack the bottom to knock out the colony of crumbs that have undoubtedly settled in. Run through the keyboard’s spaces with a can of compressed air to get loose crumbs and hairs out of the way, and then use rubbing alcohol and Q-tips to clean grease off the surfaces and in between each key.

For a more thorough wipe-down, you could even stick your keyboard in the dishwasher, though we warn you that this is NOT a solution for expensive keyboards with LCD displays and USB slots—there is also a very real chance that it will destroy your keyboard. Before placing it inside the machine, bundle the cord and put a plastic bag over it, making sure it covers the USB/PS2 plug and that it is securely sealed with a rubber band.

Situate the keyboard on the top rack of the dishwasher so that it is facing down—we want the jets to hit up against the keys and wash off the residue. If your dishwasher has a speed dry cycle, turn it off—if you let the inside get too warm it could warp the plastic or crack the circuit board from thermal expansion. For the first run, we suggest omitting soap altogether, but to remove tougher stains, a pea-size amount of soap is also OK, but use at your own risk. After running it through a light cycle, let the keyboard dry for several days or until all the water has dried before reconnecting it.

7. Clean Your Monitor

Grab a microfiber cloth and gently wipe your screen to free it of dust, fingerprints, and any other smudges. You can make your own screen cleaning solution using a half-and-half mix of 70 percent isopropyl alcohol and distilled water, or you can pick up a premixed solution from any computer store or office supply retailer. Under no circumstances should you use Windex or paper towels to clean an LCD screens, especially those with anti-glare surfaces. If you’re using a CRT, use a few dabs of rubbing alcohol to gently wipe away greasy spots from the screen.

Next: Give your PC a professional wiring job!

Have any PC cleaning tips or dusty PC horror stories? Share in the comments section below!

How big can a netbook get before it stops being a netbook?

The guts of the Lenovo IdeaPad S12 are virtually identical to the IdeaPad S10 that we reviewed back in 2008—1.6GHz Intel Atom N270 CPU, 1GB DDR2 RAM, 160GB HDD, and integrated Intel GMA950 graphics. The difference is the body. At 11.4 inches wide, this is one of the largest “netbooks” we’ve ever tested. The S12 has a 12.1-inch WXGA screen with a 1280x800 native resolution—far superior to the netbook-standard 1024x600, and much more usable. The glossy screen is impressively bright even at low LED-backlight levels.
 
The S12’s keyboard features large, comfortable keys and is a joy to type on, although as usual, Lenovo has mixed up where the Ctrl and Fn keys should be. The glossy black patterned lid and matte-black ABS frame make the S12 one of the best-looking and best-constructed netbooks we’ve ever tested, although the battery is a little wobbly and the lid is a fingerprint magnet. Both RAM and hard drive are easily accessible and upgradeable.

You'd be amazed how much difference a screen with decent resolution makes.

While some S12s ship with VIA’s Nano platform and an Ion-based version is in the works, ours came with a standard N270, and its performance reflected that. The S12 took 708 seconds to complete our Photoshop benchmark—about the same as the Lenovo S10 and Samsung NC10, two other N270-based netbooks. In Quake III, the S12 grabbed a respectable 60.9fps, slower than the 63.8fps the record-holding MSI Wind U123 managed with the same settings. The six-cell battery lasted a respectable four hours, 15 minutes in our rundown test.
 
The Lenovo IdeaPad S12 is not the fastest netbook we’ve ever tested, nor the smallest—but that isn’t the point. It’s a competent netbook in a much more usable formfactor. The higher screen resolution makes everything better—from browsing the web to editing photos and watching movies. And at a three pound, 6.5 ounce lap weight, it’s only a few ounces heavier than the Asus Eee 1000HE or MSI Wind U123—still light enough to throw in a bag and bring to the coffee shop.
 
Some might argue that a netbook with a 12-inch screen isn’t even a netbook anymore. We think they’re wrong. It’s still cheap (on the low end of $500) and portable, has great battery life, and the combination of a great screen and excellent keyboard means that folks who dismiss netbooks as too small to be usable have another thing coming.

Intel's killer solid state drive gets a capacity increase, but is it still the best?

Last fall, Intel slapped the solid state drive market on the back of the head with the release of the 80GB X25-M MLC drive. That drive absolutely trounced the competition with its 200MB/s read speeds, incredibly low random-access times, and best of all, no random-write stuttering or cache overflows. The first X25-M garnered a Kick Ass Award and defeated all comers in our last SSD roundup (November 2008), but the market has come a long way since then. With powerful competition from drives sporting Indilinx and Samsung controllers, can the 160GB X25-M maintain Intel’s crown?

The 160GB X25-M ships in a silvery chassis, unlike its predecessor’s black, and is 7mm tall—an included spacer accommodates 9.5mm drive bays. Intel’s kicked the flash manufacturing process down from 50nm to 34nm, and retained native SATA and Native Command Queuing from its previous iteration.

The new X25-M ships with a spacer so it can fit in 9.5mm as well as 7mm 2.5-inch drive bays.

First, the good news. The 160GB X25-M is even faster than the 80GB, offering 209MB/s sustained reads and 79.5MB/s sustained writes in our h2benchw benchmark, compared to the 80GB version’s 206MB/s and 64MB/s, respectively. Random-access reads and writes are within .01ms of the 80GB version, and Premiere Pro times are five percent faster. Oddly, though, its PCMark Vantage score is only 23,288—faster than nearly every drive but its predecessor, which amassed a cool 30K.

Unfortunately, the X25-M just isn’t the coolest kid on the block anymore. Not since we’ve seen other drives come along and smash the 100MB/s sustained-write barrier, or which feature either a Samsung or Indilinx drive controller with cache that eliminates the random-write stuttering that plagued early JM602-based drives. Both Samsung’s 256GB drive (reviewed August 2009, retailing as the Corsair P256) and Patriot’s Torqx (September 2009) nearly match X25-M’s read speeds and obliterate its sequential writes, with the Torqx and its fellow Indilinx Barefoot MLC drives (OCZ Vertex, G.Skill Falcon) offering write speeds close to 175MB/s.

The X25-M still reigns supreme in random-write times, though, with a latency of just .08ms compared to the Torqx’s .31ms. And it does so without the Indilinx controller’s 64MB of DRAM cache.

The X25-M remains a rock-solid choice for SSDs, and its read speeds and random-write response times are second to none. But in sustained-write speeds, it’s no match for the Patriot Torqx and its peers. But hey, the 160GB X25-M is $.10/GB cheaper than the Torqx, and 160GB is enough room for your OS and a dozen of your favorite games.

Get a Nehalem and have cash left over

Even we have to admit that in this economy, you have to be thankful if you’re not still driving a Pentium 4 rig. Still, for budget buyers today, the choice usually doesn’t get much better than a dual-core machine that takes overnight to encode video and a GPU that can’t push pixels downhill.

Fortunately, it’s no Pentium Dual-Core or Celeron that CyberPower opts to stick you with. Instead, CyberPower reached into its parts bin for Intel’s brand-new, budget badass: the $200 2.66GHz Core i5-750. This chip is like Chuck Norris in a bar fight: It not only wipes the floor with Phenom II X4, it commits a little fratricide against its Core 2 Quad and Core 2 Duo siblings, too.

To this Two-Buck Chuck, CyberPower adds what is definitely not a budget part: Nvidia’s fastest videocard in the form of EVGA’s GeForce GTX 295. At the foundation is Gigabyte’s new GA-P55-UD5 and 4GB of Kingston DDR3/1600. Storage is left to a 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda and a Samsung 22x DVD burner. A Cooler Master V8 cooler and Scout case complete the package.

The CyberPower Gamer Xtreme 3200 gives you damn-near the performance of machines that cost two or three times the price.

How does it do? Not bad. Against our 2.66GHz Core 2 Quad/SLI GeForce 8800 GTX machine it’s a slaughter, of course. But even compared to its Core i7 contemporaries, the CyberPower holds its own. It’s a bit slower, but for the money, it’s a solid performer.

Compared to other budget machines that we’ve reviewed in the last few months, the CyberPower gives you nearly the same performance for about half the price. You can thank the fact that CyberPower pushed the 2.66GHz Core i5 up to 3.35GHz. Clock speeds alone don’t always pay off, though. The reliance on a single 1.5TB Barracuda, as fast as it is, can’t compare to SSD or RAID 0 configurations on anything that hits the drives a lot. And what about our Budget Surplus machine that the editors themselves configured and built in our September issue? How does this $1,600 CyberPower do against our $1,400 Dream Machine? First, a mea culpa: We didn’t include the price of the OS for our Budget Surplus rig because Windows 7 wasn’t available yet, so the two are really on cost parity once an OS is included.

While performance comparisons are expected, our Budget Surplus rig’s use of Windows 7 RC makes head-to-head numbers unfair. So we’ll base our criticism squarely on the configuration and declare… a tie. Our Budget Surplus featured a single Radeon HD 4870 X2. This elderly dual-GPU card definitely takes a back seat to the GeForce 295 GTX, but it’s also quite a bit cheaper, too. Both systems featured the same 1.5TB Barracuda drive and similar-speed burners, so storage isn’t the difference.

What it comes down to is where you want to go. The CyberPower is likely a slightly better gaming rig thanks to the faster graphics card, but our Budget Surplus gives you the option of upgrading to a six-core Gulftown next year. Then again, if you’re looking at $1,500 rigs, are you really going to buy a $1,000 CPU early next year? No.

When all is said and done, the Cyber-Power is definitely one of the best budget rigs we’ve seen.

From concept to design to manufacturing and everything in between, the processor inside your rig was years in the making

Designing and manufacturing a modern CPU is a huge project. It requires both backward compatibility and an understanding of where PC workloads are going in the future—a delicate balancing act made more difficult by the huge engineering staffs and massive dollar outlays involved. Let’s take a look at the steps needed to build a Core i7 or AMD Phenom II processor.

Before the manufacturing plant starts churning out chips, there are a few critical preliminary steps. Prior to the first circuit being laid out or the first simulation run, the designers need to know exactly what it is they’re designing. This phase takes input from many sources. Marketing gets involved, with predictions of what users will need when the CPU actually ships, usually two to four years in the future. Engineering and performance teams feed in billions of traces of actual applications being run on current-gen CPUs, so the designers can see how existing CPUs perform under real-world conditions.

The Design Process

After the specification phase, the design phase begins in earnest. Design involves creating a design document, validating the design with simulations, and laying out the design.

The architecture team begins by defining how the CPU is supposed to work. How many registers will it have? What’s the power budget? How many cores? How much cache? These and thousands of smaller details are all ironed out in the design document, which becomes the bible from which the final product is created.

Once the design is in place, it needs to be tested. How do you test a CPU that doesn’t exist yet? You run simulations. There are specific programming languages that chip designers use to build simulations of a CPU. Actual code is compiled and run on the simulated CPU, albeit much more slowly than on the final product. Those applications-code traces collected during the specification process are re-run on the simulation to make sure everything works as expected.

In the layout phase, the real process of building the CPU begins. Engineers use special software to route circuits into patterns that can then be processed in the lithography step. With high-performance PC processors, some elements of the logic layout are hand-tuned, while other aspects, such as cache line layout, may be automated. Chip companies often have prebuilt blocks in libraries that can just be dropped into the overall CPU layout.

Today’s processors also utilize multiple layers of semiconductors. Each layer needs to be laid out so that it can be connected to the others. The primary goal of the layout step is to create circuit patterns that are efficient yet simple enough that they can be manufactured. The first draft of the design undergoes verification, which runs more virtual tests on the layout to make sure connections are correctly made and circuits completed. The final layout is known as tape out, where the layout is compiled into an industry standard format and sent to manufacturing.

Note that these design-phase steps aren’t linear. Simulations, for example, will be run constantly, up until the first working silicon returns from the fab. Design is an iterative process, continuing to the point when the first chips come off the assembly line.

The Manufacturing Process

Here’s where we get into the physical processes of building our CPU. First, ultra-pure wafers of silicon are coated with the conductive material that will make up the final circuitry. Then the chip is baked at temperatures above 200 degrees C to remove any water or volatile contaminants.

Building a chip is essentially a photographic process. Photoresist—material that is light sensitive—is applied uniformly to the wafer, usually by spraying it onto the wafer while it’s spinning at high speed. The layer must be thin and very uniform. Once applied, the chip is again baked to dry the photoresist and make it more uniform.

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The lithography step marks the chip’s design on the wafer by exposing the photoresist to light of specific frequencies. These intense beams of light, which shine through masks, define the layout of the circuits on the chip. Note that these beams are very narrow, so either the beam scans across the wafer, or the wafer is moved slightly (stepped) under the light beam. Today’s modern process technologies often use a hybrid of the scanning and stepping techniques. Another bake cycle removes imperfections left over from the lithography process.

The develop step removes the exposed photoresist, leaving behind patterns of circuits. Now the wafer has a layer of material with narrow “channels” laid out in the pattern of the CPU circuitry. But these patterns are not yet circuits. Next, chemicals are applied to the wafer that permanently remove the now exposed conductive material, which was initially coated on the chip in the wafer prep phase. The photoresist still on the chip resists the etching process, so only the circuit patterns are implanted into the wafer substrate.

The final step in the actual chip making process is stripping the remaining photoresist from the wafer surface. What’s left are many dies on the wafer, cleaned and ready to be processed.

Final Steps

Next, the entire wafer is tested to ensure it meets quality standards. The dies are then cut and sent to the packaging line, where the different layers are assembled into the chip packages we’re all familiar with. During the packaging process, function and validation tests are performed, which allow the manufacturer to sort according to clock speed and functional bins. This is where a Core 2 Quad Q9650 may be differentiated from a lower-clocked Q9550, for example.

Of course, this is a simplified overview of the process for building a modern CPU. You can find more details at websites including entries on Wikipedia for photolithography, photoresist, wafer creation, and more. One fairly technical, but still understandable overview of the lithography process can be found at Lithoguru (www.lithoguru.com/scientist/lithobasics.html).