Showing posts with label Digital. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Digital. Show all posts

Sunday, August 24, 2014

Corel Painter 2015 review: Digital art studio betters its best features

Corel Painter 2015 $429.00 It's not a revolutionary update for the world's leading natural-media painting application, but key improvements keep Painter 2015 at the top of its class.

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Corel Painter faces an interesting problem: When you're the best natural-media painting program out there, how do you innovate? What more could you possibly add to get people to buy the new version, Painter 2015?

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Painter 2015 improves on a proven formula.

Fortunately, rather than trying to fix something that isn't broken or add a "groundbreaking" new interface (Ribbon, anyone?), Corel went with incremental improvements. They don't make for a riveting feature list, but they keep what's good about Painter and actually do make it better.

Painter is like an unlimited artist's toolbox—at the heart of the app are its numerous and sophisticated brushes, which convincingly emulate natural media. Previous versions saw the introduction of Real Watercolor and Real Oil brushes, which actually let you watch paint dry (more exciting than most will have you believe). Painter 2015 introduces Particle Brushes.

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You'll find the new particle brushes in a number of categories.

Unlike Painter's usual fare, Particle Brushes do not emulate analog tools. Instead, they give you quick ways to draw wisps of smoke or realistic fur and hair and add swirls of color to your creations. In other words, if you're a purist and you love your paintings to look as if they were drawn by hand, you may struggle to find uses for some of the new Particle Brushes. But for artists who enjoy melding old with new, they open up new possibilities. If you want a hyper-realistic beard for your fantasy dwarf, these are the brushes to use.

Another area that's been improved is speed: Corel says Painter 2015 is about 40 percent faster than its predecessor, Painter X3. Even so, some of the brushes are processor-hungry—especially the aforementioned Real Watercolor. I was still able to slow Painter 2015 to a crawl on a powerful computer by quickly drawing many strokes with a Real Watercolor brush. Once the paint finished drying, Painter was back to its usual zippy self.

Next up in the improved features department, jitter smoothing. This technical-sounding name hides a simple reality: When we draw by hand, no two strokes are exactly the same. A computer's digital uniformity is a dead giveaway when you're trying to emulate natural media. While jitter, or introducing some randomness into the strokes, isn't new to Painter 2015, it has been improved. Newly-introduced jitter smoothing allows finer control over jitter, so you can tune your brush strokes to look just like you want them to.

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Jitter smoothing (right) vs. jitter without smoothing (left).

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Painter 2015 ships with five layouts, but you can also make your own.

If Painter is like an unlimited artist's toolbox, that can be both a blessing and a curse. You can use any tool your heart desires... if you can just find it. With dozens of tool panes filled to the brim with sliders, checkboxes, and tabs, finding what you need can be confusing. Painter 2015 helps by introducing new palette arrangements.

An illustrator doesn't use the same tools as a photo artist, and a novice user would find either one of these layouts intimidating. So when you start up Painter, you can now opt for a Simple interface with just a handful of large buttons or for the Illustrator or Photo Artist one. Another included layout highlights just the brushes new to Painter 2015 for when you want to try out just the latest and the greatest.

While brushes are at the heart of Painter, sometimes you may want to tweak (or radically change) the look of your entire image. This is where effects come in, and Painter 2015 makes those easier to use, too. While previous versions included image-wide effects, they limited preview to a small thumbnail in the effect dialog. Painter 2015 applies the effect to the full image, letting you see exactly what you're going to get and modify effect settings as needed.

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Full-canvas preview makes it easier to tweak effects.

If you're a happy user of Corel Painter X3, I'm not sure any of the new features or improvements should compel you to upgrade. On the other hand, if you've never used Painter, this latest version is better than what came before—not a given when it comes to a mature product like this. Painter was, and remains, a solid and versatile tool for creating digital art.


From PC World. Electronics product reviews and advice for best reference

Digital Storm Bolt II review: Rise of the un-Steam machines

Digital Storm Bolt II $2,857.00 The Bolt II proves that you don’t need a massive gaming tower to get massive gaming performance—as long as you’re willing to pay for the privilege of petite.

“If Valve’s SteamOS isn’t ready, we’ll just make do with Windows,” said gaming-PC manufacturers. And so it was done. Steam Machines have begun to hit retail sans the SteamOS. And if the smallish form factor Digital Storm Bolt II is an indication of what we can look forward to, that’s a-okay with us.

To be fair, Digital Storm’s Bolt line existed long before Valve ever kicked off its Steam Machine initiative. And in terms of its hardware build, the Bolt II is identical to what Digital Steam’s first Steam Machine would have been. It’s a beautiful machine no matter which OS it might run.

In case you can’t tell from the photos, the Bolt II is small: We’re talking 16 inches tall, 14 inches deep, and just 4.5 inches wide. That’s nothing compared to most desktop gaming rigs. And this incarnation of the Bolt II features feet on its left side, so that you can lay it horizontally or vertically against the side wall of your entertainment center without worrying that it will suffocate and overheat. This machine is thinner than my A/V receiver. And that’s perfect for the Bolt II’s mission: bringing high-end PC gaming into the living room.

Digital Storm Bolt II Michael Homnick

Digital Storm's Bolt II is amazingly small considering the power that's packed inside its diminutive case. (Note the elevator feet on the left-hand side.)

The trade-off, of course, is internal expandability: The Bolt II is a tightly tailored machine with absolutely no wasted interior space. It’s not quite as cramped as a laptop, and it’s not as awkward to work inside of as the original Bolt, but it’s far from spacious.

Thursday, March 6, 2014

Western Digital Black2 Dual Drive review: Not the killer storage upgrade it could be

WD Black 2 Dual Drive Western Digital Black2 $300.00 The WD Black2 is faster than a mechanical hard drive, but it's not nearly as fast as a comparably priced 500- to 512GB SSD. Its SSD write speed is particularly disappointing.

Western Digital’s Black2 combo drive—an SSD paired with an HDD—is a great concept: SSD speed and hard-drive capacity in a single 2.5-inch package. But disappointing SSD write performance, a hefty $300 price tag, and the availability of much faster 512GB SSDs for just a few dollars more make the Black2 a difficult sell for laptop upgraders—unless you absolutely need its 1.1TB capacity.

The Black2 is essentially a 120GB SSD married to a 1TB, 5400 rpm hard drive. The package 9mm high, so it will fit in many, but not all laptops (most newer thin-and-lights can accommodate only drives that are 7mm high). The SSD and HDD share the same drive interface, but they’re treated as separate entities, and Windows will assign different drive letters to each of them.

The SSD appears automatically when you attach the drive and boot up, but you must install a software driver to access the hard drive. This makes the Black2 unsuitable for NAS boxes and RAID. It is also not supported on the Mac OS.

WD Black2

The hard-drive half of WD's Black2 provides respectable performance--for a 5400 rpm drive, that is.

The drive delivers decent performance in every aspect aside from its SSD write performance, which is disappointingly slow. It wrote our 10GB collection of small files at just 150MBps, and it wrote our single 10GB file at only 151.1MBps. That’s faster than most mechanical hard drives, to be sure, but we had to dig all the way back to an obsolete Corsair Force drive with asynchronous NAND to fine a slower-writing SSD. 

The Black2’s SSD read performance was a little closer to what we expected: 362.5MBps for our 10GB collection of small files, and 362.1MBps for our single 10GB file. 

WDBlack2

The write performance of the WDBlack2's SSD drive, on the other hand, is among the slowest we've encountered.

Turning to the drive’s mechanical side, the Black2 wrote our 10GB collection of small files to its hard drive at 59.5MBps, and it read those same files at 81.2MBps. The dual drive wrote our single 10GB file to its hard drive at 112.2MBps, and it read it back at 85.5MBps. Those are good numbers for a 5400 rpm drive.

The WD Black2 is faster than a plain hard drive, but it lags far behind a state-of-the-art SSDs. Price per gigabyte--27 cents for the Black2, versus 60 to 80 cents for a good SSD--sounds like a good deal. But if you want the genuine wow upgrade experience that a real SSD can deliver, you'll be happier with a similarly-priced 512GB SSD, such as the Samsung 840 EVO or the Toshiba Q Pro.


From PC World. Electronics product reviews and advice for best reference

Monday, August 19, 2013

Review: Digital Storm's Virtue delivers superior power in a midsize tower

Digital Storm Virtue $2,571.00 Powerful components and room to grow make the Virtue a great gaming desktop if the price tag doesn't manage to scare you away.

What’s in a name? HP goes for an emotion to describe its high-end computers: Envy. Acer conjures aggressiveness for its gaming PCs: Predator. And Dell uses a spelling-challenged acronym for its best PCs: XPS (Xtreme Performance System). What concept does Digital Storm seek to conjure with its pricey ($2200) Virtue midtower gaming rig—moral superiority?

The company’s actual goal isn’t quite that lofty. “We noticed there are not many PC manufacturers designing mid-tower gaming systems with the same ardor and attention that ultra-tower PCs receive,” Digital Storm’s director of product development, Rajeev Kuruppu, said when the Virtue was announced. “As its name suggests, Virtue represents a higher standard of PC gaming, both in terms of aesthetics and performance.”

Robert Cardin"Modest" might have been a better name for this PC, given its unassuming enclosure.

To reach that standard, Digital Storm packed an unlocked Intel Core i7-4770K CPU from Intel’s new Haswell family of processors, 16GB of DDR3-1600 memory, and Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 780 discrete graphics card into a compact steel-and-brushed-aluminum case. (The Virtue also comes with Windows 8.) The result is a compact gaming rig that delivered a very respectable Desktop WorldBench 8.1 score of 399. It fell just short of the cheaper Micro Express MicroFlex 47B’s score of 421, though the latter is a full-size tower and has a more powerful video card. Why? While neither manufacturer elected to overclock its system, Micro Express splurged with a 512GB SSD where Digital Storm provides just a 120GB SSD. As a result, the MicroFlex performed much better on our productivity benchmarks.

The Virtue looks much more interesting on the inside.

On the gaming front, the Virtue bested the MicroFlex 47B on both our synthetic and real-world benchmarks, delivering a 3DMark Cloud Gate score of 26214 versus the MicroFlex's 24864 at a resolution of 1920 by 1080 pixels. With real games and visual quality set to Ultra, the Virtue just missed reaching the coveted 60-frames-per-second mark with Dirt Showdown at 2560-by-1600-pixel resolution (it hit 57.3 fps, versus the MicroFlex 47B’s 41.4 fps). The same goes for BioShock Infinite at those settings: Digital Storm’s system reached an impressive 55.4 fps compared with the Micro Express tower’s frame rate of 46.9.

The Virtue can accommodate a second two-slot video card, but not more.

If you’re considering a midtower system, you probably don’t want a plus-size PC sucking up a lot of floor or desktop space. And if you want something small, you probably expect it to be quiet, too. Digital Storm accomplishes that goal in part with a Corsair H100i liquid-cooling system that consists of a CPU water block and a 240mm radiator mounted to the top of the case. This machine won’t keep you up at night or interfere with movie-watching or music-listening sessions.

Despite its smaller case dimensions (17.7 inches high by 17.7 inches long by 8.3 inches wide), the Virtue has plenty of room for expansion inside. If you want higher frame rates with games, throw in a second graphics card (you can configure the Asus Gryphon Z87 micro ATX motherboard to operate with one x16 PCIe 3.0 slot or two x8 PCIe 3.0 slots, and it supports both Nvidia’s SLI and AMD’s CrossFire multi-GPU standards). The system’s 1050-watt power supply, Corsair’s Pro Series HX1050, provides more than enough juice to support such a configuration.

Our test Virtue came with a 1TB, 7200-rpm WD Caviar Black hard drive in addition to a 120GB Corsair Neutron GTX SSD, leaving room for one additional 3.5-inch drive and three more SSDs. A Blu-ray player/DVD burner resides in one of the 5.25-inch drive bays (the second bay is mostly blocked by the radiator mounted on the top of the case).

Two USB 3.0 ports as well as microphone and headphone jacks are conveniently located on the front of the machine. Four additional USB 3.0 ports, four USB 2.0 ports, gigabit ethernet, S/PDIF out, and the usual analog audio ports are around back. The video card’s mounting bracket has ports (one each) for dual-link DVI, single-link DVI, HDMI, and DisplayPort.

The Virtue is jam-packed with quality components that enable it to deliver the performance of machines twice its physical size. Its dimensions and motherboard won’t let you go beyond two video cards, but it delivers solid performance on today’s games with the one card it has now. Gamers will love the Virtue, even if their wallets won't.


From PC World. Electronics product reviews and advice for best reference

Sunday, August 11, 2013

Review: Appealing GDoc Binder is like a loose-leaf notebook for the digital age

gDoc Binder $10.00 People who work on business projects involving lots of documents will find GDoc Binder’s attractive graphics and robust annotation features worth the modest price.

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People who work with friends, colleagues, or teams on projects requiring lots of documents have many ways to organize and share them, but Global Graphics Software’s GDoc Binder stands out for its use of familiar loose-leaf notebook imagery and strong annotation tools. Unfortunately, it’s not free—and this initial release does have a couple of glitches (but no real dealbreakers).

GDoc Binder creates a table of contents based on a binder’s tabs, and you can see it both within the binder and as a slide-out menu in the Binder view.

Created by a company with a proven track record for PDF tools, GDoc Binder essentially is a document manager on steroids, with a couple of document creation tools as well. Like some e-book readers (most notably Adobe Digital Editions), the application presents content in different hierarchical views: The library view displays all your binders on shelves (the same way magazines and newspapers appear in the iOS Newsstand), the binder view lets you leaf through a binder’s documents much the way you’d click through an e-book, and the document view lets you peruse, bookmark and annotate documents contained in a binder.

Format support is excellent: The app supports everything from Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Visio to Adobe PDF, HTML, and popular image formats including .bmp, .gif, .jpeg and .png. The $10 cost of the application (no trial version is available) pays for 10 binders. You must buy additional binders at the GDoc store (accessible from within the app).

GDoc Binder by default launches in the binder view showing either an included documentation binder or your most recently viewed binder. You generate binders (which start out looking like plain notebook covers) either from templates specifying page size (e.g. A4), number of tabs, and cover color, or from Windows folders.

If you opt for the latter, GDoc Binder uses the folder name as the binder file name, and turns the top level of subfolders into tabs, ignoring additional layers of subfolders and filing supported documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF and popular image files) from all subfolders under the top-level tab. Either way, you can add new tabs to a binder from within the application, and add new documents by dragging and dropping them to the desired tab.

In GDoc Binder’s document view you can add comments, bookmarks, hyperlinks and highlights (shown above) to documents in a binder—but they won’t appear on the originals.

GDoc Binder automatically generates a table of contents showing tabs and documents. You can see it both as the first page (or pages) inside the binder, or as a slide-out menu that you summon in the navigation pane of the binder view. You can click on a tab or document to jump to it.

In the document view, you can zoom in and out of specific areas; add notes; highlight or underline text; create bookmarks or hyperlinks; or even draw on documents using some simple built-in image-editing tools. Because GDoc Binder creates a copy of documents you add to a binder, these annotations don’t appear in the original documents—just in the binder version. However, GDoc Binder maintains a link to the original document, and if you change the original, you can update the binder copy by clicking on Check for Document Updates in the Binder menu..

You can also create new text documents and diagrams using GDoc Binder’s built-in word processing and diagramming apps. They’re not as full-featured as their Microsoft Office counterparts, but they stack up pretty well against the Google competition.

GDoc Binder’s library view shows all your binders displayed on shelves, much the way newspapers and magazines are displayed in the iOS Newsstand.

To share binders from within the application, you can either distribute them via e-mail or use Dropbox. If you have Dropbox installed on your computer, GDoc Binder offers it as an alternative location for the My Binders folder where binder files are stored by default.

I did run into a couple of usability issues. Dropbox setup was not clearly explained in the documentation, but more annoyingly, you cannot create cover art (or even cover text) for your binders from within the application. If you want more than a plain solid colored cover, you must create it in any of GDoc Binder’s supported file formats and then drag and drop it onto the binder. Once you’ve done that, however, you can edit it from within the app, which makes having to create it outside the app all the stranger.

Of course, you can save money by using Google Docs or some other free Web-based service for document sharing and collaboration. But GDoc Binder’s pleasing appearance, familiar loose-leaf notebook metaphor, and great format support might make it worth the relatively inexpensive cost for some team projects.

Note: The Download button takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software.


From PC World. Electronics product reviews and advice for best reference

Sunday, March 31, 2013

Review: MuLab is a little-known gem of a digital audio workstation

At first glance, Mu.Lab from MuTools might appear to be one of those simple, feature-deprived efforts you see from a multitudes of software vendors trying to cash in on Garage Band's success. However, just a few minutes with the free edition of this audio recording and MIDI sequencing program, and you'll realize there's much, much more to it than first meets the eye. Indeed, it's now my favorite track-based recording app--and I've used nearly every product on the market. It's available for both PC and Mac.

Where Mu.Lab shines is in hiding its power while still keeping it in easy reach. The secret is right-clicking--much of the program functionality is found in context menus. Everything looks nice and the use of icons is for the most part spot on--minimal and limited to those that are easily intuited. Too many vendors try to squeeze every feature onto the main screen, use too many similar-looking icons and wind up with a severe case of information overload. The interface isn't perfect, but it's a lot closer to it than the majority of competition.

The session mux lets you see and edit the super flexible audio signal routing.

Mu.Lab supports drag and drop so you can import MIDI and audio files directly from the desktop (there's also an integrated browser). I recreated/imported an entire 12-track MIDI/audio Studio One project in about ten minutes. The program also fully supports VST effects and instruments and includes its own reverb, EQ, sample player, drum set, synth, etc. You must scan for VSTs manually, but I find this approach appealing it doesn't waste time automatically scanning each time the program boots as other DAWs (Digital Audio Workstations) do.

Besides power and simplicity, perhaps Mu.Labs greatest asset is its incredibly flexible routing, which reminds one of a modular synthesizer. You can send signals along any path to any effect, Mu.Lab rack (versatile routing and mixing strips), input, output, etc. You can also view and edit the entire routing scheme in the session mux routing schematic. Once you're used to the power of free-form routing, it's difficul to go back to the stricter mixing board concept.

MuLab is not without foibles. It makes you confirm deleting any object and unlike most programs, you won't see a representation of what you're recording in real time. You get  a visual waveform only after you've finished recording. For those used to programs that provide more feedback on the process, this requires an initial leap of faith, but you'll get used to it quickly and it's less distracting. Some of the visual elements draw your eye to the wrong area, but by and large, the interface is top-notch.

Looks can be deceiving in MuLab. Right-click any object and you'll usually find the functionality you need.

MuLab lacks one feature that some users will miss—audio punch in/punch out. Called punch because the process originally involved a recording engineer punching a button, it allows recording to start when you reach a marker, and cease when it reaches a second marker. You can of course record on another track (MuLab does this automatically where there are overlaps), then cut and paste, and to be honest, I'm so used to this now that I don't miss punch all that much. I'd also like to see Music XML support, but I could say the same thing for nearly the entire industry.

A major Mu.Lab perquisite is portability; you can install it on a flash drive and take it with you for use on any computer. Many competitors hand out seat licenses that must be activated online, which can be a major pain for the musician about town. Mu.Lab is also very light weight for a DAW, weighing in at less than 19MB--including a fair number of instrument samples. And it's self-contained, i.e. it doesn't install any third-party or Microsoft Visual C++ DLLs as some programs to.

Any musician who records audio and MIDI, even if entrenched with their current DAW, should download Mu.Lab and explore it for an hour or two. It's not what you're used to, so give it some time. It's powerful, clean, simple, and the right-click functionality is highly efficient, not to mention addictive. So addictive that you might have a hard time not plopping down 25 Euros for the 8-track/16-bit XT version (not the 70s tape format!) or 75 Euros for the 32-bit version without limits on tracks, effects, or instruments. Consider that fair warning.

Note: The Download button on the Product Information page takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software. The free 4-track version is perfect for small recording projects like the local school play, church choir, etc. but you'll hear intermittent noise if you exceed its (or the XT version's) track, instrument, or effects limits.

Jon L. Jacobi

Jon L. Jacobi has worked with computers since you flipped switches and punched cards to program them. He studied music at Julliard, and now he power mods his car for kicks.
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Sunday, March 17, 2013

Digital Storm Bolt review: small package, small price, big performance

Digital Storm's Bolt doesn't look as intimidating as those ginormous gaming PCs that glow and take up a third of your desk, but don't let this machine's slender profile fool you. This little monster is brimming with powerful components and stands ready to crush any game that gets in its way.

Measuring just 3.6 inches wide, 14 inches tall, and 15 inches deep, the Bolt is the Micro Machine of performance systems.

This sleek rig isn't plastered with decals, and it doesn't boast a fancy paint job or bright LEDs that can double as a nightlight. It's available in just two colors: white or gunmetal gray. The only decoration aside from the stylishly functional black air vents is the Digital Storm and Bolt logos. The design is fetchingly minimalist.

The front of the system houses only the DVD drive, and that's about all that would fit. Two USB 3.0 ports, two USB 2.0 ports, and the microphone and speaker jacks are inconveniently located on the bottom right-hand side of the case, which means you'll be dropping to your hands and knees each time you need to plug in a thumb drive or your headphones.

ROBERT CARDINThe rear of the system has plenty of ports and video options.

Four more USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports, two ethernet ports, and two antenna connections are around the back, along with all the audio ports and more video outputs than you'll ever need. The Nvidia GeForce GTX 660Ti graphics card can drive up to four displays using any combination of DVI-I, DVI-D, HDMI and DisplayPort. However, given that there's no room inside the case for adding storage, it would have been nice to have an eSATA port here.

No matter what type of desktop rig you buy, you're going to crack it open from time to time. Whether you're swapping out components or just evicting dust bunnies, you'll need to be careful dismantling this intricate puzzle.

ROBERT CARDINThe inside of the Bolt is packed tight.

The cover is a pain to remove when cables are plugged into the back. Unlike the typical case, where the side panel comes off, the Bolt's entire shell slides off the back. Cables get caught up in the mix and snag along the way, so it's just easier to open it up when everything is unplugged.

Our eval unit came with a 120GB SSD and a 500GB 7200 RPM mechanical drive, and there was just enough space to accommodate one more SSD as an eventual upgrade. The setup can also be configured to house two full-sized drives if you opt out of SSDs.

Nearly the entire motherboard (a Gigabyte GA-Z77N-WIFI) is covered by the heat sink and a 120mm fan, which you'll need to remove in order to access the motherboard's single PCIe slot and its two DIMM slots.

Enough with the looks, this isn't a fashion show—so let's get to the number crunching. The Bolt's Intel Core i7 3770K and 8GB of DDR3/1600 RAM managed to crank out a whopping 201 on our Worldbench 7 benchmark suite. That's more than double the score of our baseline system from a package nearly half its size. If that isn't enough performance for you, the CPU's multiplier is unlocked and begs to be overclocked.

The Nvidia GeForce GTX 660Ti also produced some impressive benchmarks: We ran both Crysis 2 and DiRT 3 at 2560-by-1600 pixel resolution with settings on ultra to really put the system to work. It averaged 54.1 frames per second on DiRT 3, and 28 frames per second on Crysis 2. DiRT 3 looked silky smooth and nearly hit that coveted 60 frames-per-second target. Crysis 2 struggled just a bit, but remained thoroughly playable. Taking the game's settings down to high produced an average 44.6 frames per second, while dropping the resolution to a much more common resolution of 1920 by 1080 pixels with settings at high produced average frame rate of 80.6 frames per second.

When you put high-end components in a small package and run them hard, heat usually becomes an issue. But the Bolt is dressed to the nines in fans and vents and manages to stay both cool and quiet. I had it running right next to me, at ear level, for an entire day and barely noticed its noise signature.

Digital Storm's Bolt packs beefy power into a slim, sexy package. It's a bit of headache to get inside, but you shouldn't need to upgrade this machine for some time to come. This is a great choice for a PC gamer with a smaller room and a smaller budget. It will fit anywhere, play anything, and it's priced right at $1599.

Alex Cocilova

Alex covers desktops, everything from fancy to practical. He's also an avid (addicted) gamer and loves following the industry.
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Saturday, March 16, 2013

Digital Storm x17: It's a more portable gaming option

Even the untrained eye can spot a Digital Storm laptop from across the room, thanks to the company’s insistence on slapping its huge logo across the lid of each system. The overbranded, gaming-oriented x17 is no different: There’s also a large logo on the wrist rest. That said, at just 8.8 pounds sans accessories, it is actually one of the lightest 17.3-inch gaming laptops we’ve seen.

Our review model, which costs $1777 as configured, packs a third-generation Intel Core i7-3610QM processor, 16GB of RAM, and an AMD Radeon HD7970M graphics card. The system also features a 750GB hard drive, built-in Bluetooth, an 802.11n Wi-Fi adapter, and a DVD-RW optical drive. The x17 runs a 64-bit version of Windows 7 Home Premium.

In PCWorld’s WorldBench 7 benchmark tests, it scored 99 out of 100. This means it’s only one percent slower than our reference machine, a desktop PC with a second-generation Intel Core i5-2500K processor, 8GB of RAM, and a 1TB hard drive. While this is an acceptable score for a desktop replacement—the Dell Inspiron 17R-1316MRB scored just 86 on WB7—it’s a little low for a gaming-oriented desktop replacement. The Alienware M17x R4 and the Samsung Series 7 Gamer both scored decently higher on WB7, with scores of 146 and 123, respectively.

The x17’s performance is just about what you’d expect on individual tests. It starts up in 35.6 seconds, which is about 10 seconds slower than the aforementioned gaming laptops. It manages 15.6 frames per second in our Web Performance tests (just a little slower than the Alienware and the Samsung), and it scores only 2006 in the PCMark 7 Office Productivity tests, compared with the Alienware’s 4549 and the Samsung’s 2513.

Luckily, while the x17 may not have gaming-laptop WB7 scores, it does offer up gaming laptop level of graphics. In our Crysis 2 graphics tests, it managed frame rates of between 44.4 (maximum-quality graphics, 1920 by 1080 pixel resolution) and 94.4 (low-quality graphics, 800 by 600 pixel resolution) frames per second. By comparison, the Alienware and Samsung managed frame rates of between 42.8 and 95.7 fps, and 27.7 and 96 fps, respectively, on the same tests.

In our battery life tests we managed to eke out three hours and 54 minutes of battery life, which is just around average for the desktop replacement category.

Gaming laptops are not known for their sleek profiles or light weight, and the x17 is no exception. This 17.3-inch system weighs just under 9 pounds sans accessories (about 11 pounds with the 3-pound power block), which is average for the desktop replacement category, but below average for the gaming-oriented desktop replacement category.

It comes housed in a solid black chassis with robust hinges, a thick base, and a sturdy, unshakeable lid. The cover features a black brushed-aluminum plate with tapered plastic edges. The interior features more brushed aluminum on the wrist rest area, a full-size backlit keyboard with a number pad, and a medium-size touchpad with two discrete mouse buttons and a fingerprint reader.

The keyboard has regular-style keys with flat, plateau-like surfaces. It's nothing special, the key surfaces are a little small, and the keys offer somewhat stiff tactile feedback. Digital Storm squeezes in a 10-key number pad next to the keyboard. The keyboard is backlit, and you can change the backlighting color scheme. The backlight editor lets you choose different colors for each of the three keyboard sections, as well as different pulsing rhythms.

The touchpad, which is located directly below the keyboard on the wrist rest, is a disappointment. It’s attractive enough—textured with the same brushed aluminum styling as the wrist rest, and it blends right in, but it’s not very comfortable to use. The cursor moves sluggishly, and multitouch gestures are jumpy and erratic. The two discrete mouse buttons are stiff and difficult to press, and because they lay flush with the wrist rest, it’s difficult to distinguish between the two. To be fair, most gamers will use a cabled mouse while gaming, so a crappy touchpad isn’t as much of an issue as it would be on a more mainstream laptop.

The x17 has a 3-in-1 card reader, one combination USB 3.0/eSATA port, two USB 3.0 ports (one of which is a Sleep-N-Charge type), a FireWire jack, and a gigabit ethernet port on its left side. The right side has four audio jacks (microphone, headphones, line in, and S/PDIF) and one USB 2.0 port, as well as the DVD-RW optical drive. There’s a lock slot, one DisplayPort, one HDMI out, one DVI out, and a power jack around the back.

The x17 sports a 17.3-inch glossy LED-backlit display with a native resolution of 1920 by 1080 pixels. The screen is surrounded by a shiny black plastic bezel, which contains a built-in webcam. For the most part, the screen looks excellent, rendering text and pictures crisply with well-saturated colors. HD video plays back seamlessly.

After closer inspection, however, we began to notice issues with darker scenes, a distracting shimmering effect while watching videos containing lots of blacks and dark grays. Apart from that, the screen looks very good, with excellent contrast and brightness.

The x17 delivers very good audio, too, thanks to the presence of Onkyo speakers above the keyboard, near the laptop’s hinge. But laptop speakers can only do so much, given the limitations of the form factor, and most gamers will plug in headphones or a headset anyway.

Digital Storm’s x17 is a good gaming machine that’s lighter than most desktop replacements—but it delivers less performance. If you can plump up your budget by $200, you can grab something like an Alienware M17x R4, which costs $1974.

Sarah Jacobsson Purewal

Sarah is a freelance writer and editor based in Silicon Valley. She has a love/hate relationship with social media and a bad habit of describing technology as "sexy."
More by Sarah Jacobsson Purewal


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Thursday, March 14, 2013

Digital Storm x17: It's a more portable gaming option

Even the untrained eye can spot a Digital Storm laptop from across the room, thanks to the company’s insistence on slapping its huge logo across the lid of each system. The overbranded, gaming-oriented x17 is no different: There’s also a large logo on the wrist rest. That said, at just 8.8 pounds sans accessories, it is actually one of the lightest 17.3-inch gaming laptops we’ve seen.

Our review model, which costs $1777 as configured, packs a third-generation Intel Core i7-3610QM processor, 16GB of RAM, and an AMD Radeon HD7970M graphics card. The system also features a 750GB hard drive, built-in Bluetooth, an 802.11n Wi-Fi adapter, and a DVD-RW optical drive. The x17 runs a 64-bit version of Windows 7 Home Premium.

In PCWorld’s WorldBench 7 benchmark tests, it scored 99 out of 100. This means it’s only one percent slower than our reference machine, a desktop PC with a second-generation Intel Core i5-2500K processor, 8GB of RAM, and a 1TB hard drive. While this is an acceptable score for a desktop replacement—the Dell Inspiron 17R-1316MRB scored just 86 on WB7—it’s a little low for a gaming-oriented desktop replacement. The Alienware M17x R4 and the Samsung Series 7 Gamer both scored decently higher on WB7, with scores of 146 and 123, respectively.

The x17’s performance is just about what you’d expect on individual tests. It starts up in 35.6 seconds, which is about 10 seconds slower than the aforementioned gaming laptops. It manages 15.6 frames per second in our Web Performance tests (just a little slower than the Alienware and the Samsung), and it scores only 2006 in the PCMark 7 Office Productivity tests, compared with the Alienware’s 4549 and the Samsung’s 2513.

Luckily, while the x17 may not have gaming-laptop WB7 scores, it does offer up gaming laptop level of graphics. In our Crysis 2 graphics tests, it managed frame rates of between 44.4 (maximum-quality graphics, 1920 by 1080 pixel resolution) and 94.4 (low-quality graphics, 800 by 600 pixel resolution) frames per second. By comparison, the Alienware and Samsung managed frame rates of between 42.8 and 95.7 fps, and 27.7 and 96 fps, respectively, on the same tests.

In our battery life tests we managed to eke out three hours and 54 minutes of battery life, which is just around average for the desktop replacement category.

Gaming laptops are not known for their sleek profiles or light weight, and the x17 is no exception. This 17.3-inch system weighs just under 9 pounds sans accessories (about 11 pounds with the 3-pound power block), which is average for the desktop replacement category, but below average for the gaming-oriented desktop replacement category.

It comes housed in a solid black chassis with robust hinges, a thick base, and a sturdy, unshakeable lid. The cover features a black brushed-aluminum plate with tapered plastic edges. The interior features more brushed aluminum on the wrist rest area, a full-size backlit keyboard with a number pad, and a medium-size touchpad with two discrete mouse buttons and a fingerprint reader.

The keyboard has regular-style keys with flat, plateau-like surfaces. It's nothing special, the key surfaces are a little small, and the keys offer somewhat stiff tactile feedback. Digital Storm squeezes in a 10-key number pad next to the keyboard. The keyboard is backlit, and you can change the backlighting color scheme. The backlight editor lets you choose different colors for each of the three keyboard sections, as well as different pulsing rhythms.

The touchpad, which is located directly below the keyboard on the wrist rest, is a disappointment. It’s attractive enough—textured with the same brushed aluminum styling as the wrist rest, and it blends right in, but it’s not very comfortable to use. The cursor moves sluggishly, and multitouch gestures are jumpy and erratic. The two discrete mouse buttons are stiff and difficult to press, and because they lay flush with the wrist rest, it’s difficult to distinguish between the two. To be fair, most gamers will use a cabled mouse while gaming, so a crappy touchpad isn’t as much of an issue as it would be on a more mainstream laptop.

The x17 has a 3-in-1 card reader, one combination USB 3.0/eSATA port, two USB 3.0 ports (one of which is a Sleep-N-Charge type), a FireWire jack, and a gigabit ethernet port on its left side. The right side has four audio jacks (microphone, headphones, line in, and S/PDIF) and one USB 2.0 port, as well as the DVD-RW optical drive. There’s a lock slot, one DisplayPort, one HDMI out, one DVI out, and a power jack around the back.

The x17 sports a 17.3-inch glossy LED-backlit display with a native resolution of 1920 by 1080 pixels. The screen is surrounded by a shiny black plastic bezel, which contains a built-in webcam. For the most part, the screen looks excellent, rendering text and pictures crisply with well-saturated colors. HD video plays back seamlessly.

After closer inspection, however, we began to notice issues with darker scenes, a distracting shimmering effect while watching videos containing lots of blacks and dark grays. Apart from that, the screen looks very good, with excellent contrast and brightness.

The x17 delivers very good audio, too, thanks to the presence of Onkyo speakers above the keyboard, near the laptop’s hinge. But laptop speakers can only do so much, given the limitations of the form factor, and most gamers will plug in headphones or a headset anyway.

Digital Storm’s x17 is a good gaming machine that’s lighter than most desktop replacements—but it delivers less performance. If you can plump up your budget by $200, you can grab something like an Alienware M17x R4, which costs $1974.

Sarah Jacobsson Purewal

Sarah is a freelance writer and editor based in Silicon Valley. She has a love/hate relationship with social media and a bad habit of describing technology as "sexy."
More by Sarah Jacobsson Purewal


From PC World. Shop computer and accessories from Amazon here

Saturday, October 20, 2012

Digital Storm Marauder review: Good gaming, little else

Digital Storm’s Marauder gaming desktop is perfectly named, but for all the wrong reasons. The only thing this system is going to plunder is your bank account, and it will leave little to show for the pillaging. True to its design, the Marauder is decently geared for gaming given its budget appeal ($999). And if you're buying the PC simply as an affordable gaming system, you'll do fine. But in nearly every other respect, this system suffers from critical deficiencies that make it less appealing for general use.

In our review unit as configured, a 3.1GHz AMD FX-8120 Zambezi processor and 8GB of memory serve as the brains and heart of the system. However, with a less-than-impressive score of 77 on our WorldBench 7 suite of tests, the Marauder barely had a pulse, as it was soundly bested by comparably priced, Intel-driven budget desktops such as the $999 Asus Essentio CM6870 and its WorldBench 7 score of 106.

Gaming is the Marauder's specialty, though. Armed with a Radeon HD 7700 graphics board, which launched in February of this year and uses a single 28-nanometer “Cape Verde” GPU, the Marauder pumped out 80.4 frames per second on our Dirt 3 benchmark (1920-by-1080-pixel resolution, high quality). On this test, the Marauder even scaled as high as 2560 by 1600 and retained playability, achieving a frame rate of 52.6 fps. Our Crysis 2 benchmark is a tad more demanding: The Marauder was able to run it at a maximum playable resolution of 1928 by 1080 (high quality), hitting a rate of 42.8 fps.

In gaming, at least, the Marauder trounced the aforementioned Essentio CM6870, which eked out only half the Marauder's frame rate on the Dirt 3 benchmark run and looked completely overwhelmed by its trip through Crysis 2.

But when I say that gaming is this system’s only bright spot, I mean it. The single 500GB hard drive in this machine is a low-end choice even for a budget desktop, especially when lined up against the full 2TB of storage that the Essentio CM6870 bestows. And that’s not even the worst item on the Marauder’s spec sheet: This Digital Storm desktop sports a simple DVD combo drive, whereas Asus manages to pack a full Blu-ray player into its sub-$1000 system.

We’re big fans of the Marauder’s lovely Corsair Vengeance C70 chassis. The military theming carries well across the olive-green chassis, up to and including a reset switch (with a finger-flip cover) that makes you feel a little like you’re taking the country to DEFCON 2 instead of power cycling your system; the case’s convenient carrying handles and side-panel latches are a nice touch too. We love the fact that we don’t have to fiddle with screws to pop off the case’s windowed or solid sides, even if it’s a bit loud to do so. Two side fans, two front fans, and one rear fan circulate air around the Marauder’s interior, but you can add two more on the case’s top—or a liquid-cooling radiator—if you want to change up the cooling.

You'll find plenty of room for upgrades within the Marauder, and the Vengeance C70 makes that process as smooth and streamlined as possible. The system’s three 5.25-inch bays (two of which are free) use built-in locking mechanisms to secure your components sans screws. The case can hold a total of six hard drives, and easy-to-operate, slide-out trays transform the process of adding and removing storage into a task you can measure in seconds, not minutes.

A single PCI Express x16 slot remains free on the motherboard (we’d use it to install another graphics board in CrossFire), alongside one open PCI Express x1 slot and two PCI slots. Thumbscrews secure the Marauder’s PCI-based components in place, a practical but imperfect solution for a case that’s almost entirely screw-free.

The biggest drawback of the Vengeance C70 case is that it allows for only two USB 3.0 connections on its front. Four would have been better, and we even could have settled for a mix of USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 ports. The system’s rear is more USB-friendly, with two USB 3.0 ports and six USB 2.0 ports joining an optical S/PDIF connection, a gigabit ethernet port, and connections for 7.1 surround sound. The Marauder’s Radeon HD 7700 graphics board supports one DVI-I, one HDMI, and two Mini-DisplayPort connections. In total, the Marauder presents an average assortment of connectivity; a bit more, and some extra diversity, would have been appreciated.

Digital Storm didn’t include a mouse or keyboard with our system as reviewed, but you can select from a variety of options when customizing a system on the company's site.

You’d have to be a pretty enthusiastic gamer with barely a budget to work with for Digital Storm’s Marauder to appeal to you. Digital Storm has recently upgraded this system to include an AMD FX-8150 processor, so the CPU performance should be marginally, but not substantially, better. Otherwise, there’s little about this $999 gaming desktop that similar systems don’t thoroughly squash. Unfortunately, at the bottom, choosing a PC often involves a trade-off: You get great general performance or good gaming, but rarely both.

WorldBench 7 benchmark results
Games at 1080p Games at 2560 by 1600

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Thursday, September 13, 2012

Lenovo IdeaCentre A720 Review: Full-Tilt Digital Media Maven

Windows 8 is getting closer to release and the amounts of quality all-in-one desktops are on the rise; the Lenovo IdeaCentre A720 is a strong choice. The A720 offers a 10-point multi-touch screen, making it ready for Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 8 operating system.

Big, Beautiful Screen

This 27-inch system ($1599 as of 8/23/2012) strongly resembles a TV; being a digital media machine is its strongest attribute. A Blu-ray drive is included and HD content looks great on the high-definition, 1920-by-1080 resolution screen. As with many all-in-ones that double as a television, a remote control gives you easy access to the Media Center features, and the optional TV tuner gives you access to other TV functions. The A720 uses Dolby Home Theater 4, which produces more-robust sound quality from tiny stereo speakers. However, bass content is lacking since no subwoofer is included. The A720 strives to be in the center of the living room rather than just a PC on the corner desk.

The A720 stops being just a TV once you get your hands on it—literally. It supports 10-point multi-touch gestures and can be angled anywhere from -5 degrees to a 90-degree flat plane. There are few TVs that can claim to be a touchable table, though I don't recommend eating or setting drinks on it.

Having a big, fancy screen is well and good, but it won't mean much if performance is lacking. Luckily for the A720, the included Intel Core i7-3610QM runs at 2.3GHz but can boost itself to 3.3GHz when needed, thanks to Intel’s Turbo Boost technology. And 8GB of DDR3 RAM helps performance by improving response times.

Performance

The A720 managed to score only a 78 on our strenuous WorldBench 7 benchmark suite. This score means the system is approximately 22 percent slower than our baseline system.

The true culprit behind the lower score is the slow 40-second boot-up time caused by the 1TB 5400-rpm hard drive, a problem that's exacerbated by the tons of preinstalled apps that load up when Windows starts. This shouldn’t be a huge issue if you rarely shut down your computer, but it's something to keep in mind if you transfer a lot of data to and from your hard drive.

A key characteristic of all-in-one desktops is their slim profile. This system promotes itself as the thinnest 27-inch all-in-one in production (just 0.97-inch thick). Though extremely thin, it still comes packed with a discrete Nvidia GeForce 630M mobile GPU on top of Intel’s integrated graphics. While that may suffice for less-intensive games, DiRT 3 and Crysis 2 displayed at a maximum resolution of 1920 by 1080 pixels barely managed 29.8 frames-per-second and 13.8fps, respectively. The A720 does manage to reach 60fps on DiRT 3 at a resolution of 1680 by 1050 pixels and low quality settings; but the closest it gets on Crysis 2 at 1024-by-768 resolution with low quality settings is 48.1fps.

Gotta Love Those Apps

Lenovo loves apps, from Lenovo’s signature Lenovo Rescue System to some interesting organizational tools. Lenovo’s Vantage Tools (shortened to LVT) provides two stacks of “cards” that resemble on-screen index cards. These cards represent entertainment and maintenance. All of the A720’s popular applications are there, sorted by category. Think of it as a fancier, touch-enabled quick-launch toolbar. However, it’s slow to launch and not very intuitive. Another of Lenovo’s touch apps resembles a less-refined Windows 8: IdeaTouch 4.5 gives a menu that lists everything from photos to your eBooks in a tile format for some quick touch-based media selection.

Of course you can’t talk about apps without talking about games. There are plenty of fun little time-wasting games that take advantage of the multi-touch screen. Air hockey also spotlights the flexibility of the machine. Laying the system down as a flat table-like surface and situating a second player on the other side nicely simulates a miniature version of those fun nights in the arcade. Most machines like this take pride in being a family-friendly machine. ArcSoft’s PhotoStudio Paint is a more glorified Microsoft Paint for kids that lets them unlock the inner artist. Flipping through the applications page will yield tons of fun little things like these for showing off or killing time.

The A720 comes with a wireless mouse and keyboard that have surprisingly little media capability. They work fine at a distance, but you must use the function button to pause or play. The system also comes with a front-facing 720p camera and a built-in microphone for easy and clear video-chatting or recording fun home movies with Lenovo's “Camera Fun Zone.”

For connectivity, the A720 comes with a standard 802.11n wireless adapter and a Gigabit Ethernet port with Bluetooth enabled. On the base of the system are two USB 3.0 ports, two USB 2.0 ports, a flash memory card reader, and a TV Tuner. Both HDMI-output and -input ports are also included. Hook up a console, or use the A720 to play a movie on a big screen—the ports gives you plenty of options.

If you’re looking for more of a bargain and are willing to sacrifice a little graphics power and screen size, the Sony VAIO L24 would be a good alternative. The L24 costs $1400 (as of May 24, 2012) and scored higher on our benchmarks. It has a 7200-rpm hard drive for quicker booting and file transfers, but it lacks a discrete graphics card, relying on Intel’s HD Graphics 4000 from its Intel Core i5-3210M. The screen is still multi-touch–capable and features high-definition 1920-by-1080 resolution, but it's only 24 inches. Of course, not every room needs the larger screen, and the 3-inch deficit may prove to be worth the $200 savings.

The Lenovo IdeaCentre A720 is the perfect machine for a media-deprived room. If you're on a budget, there are better options out there; but if you want the whole shebang (with the exception of a quick hard drive and graphical power), you will be very happy with this purchase.


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Thursday, April 5, 2012

Marvel’s New ‘Infinite Comics’ Format Makes Digital Superhero Books More Cinematic

Back at SXSW 2012, Marvel announced “Infinite Comics”,  a new format for digital comics that uses tricks like dialogue box transitions, blacked-out pages, and cinematic cuts to go beyond the simple panel-to-panel experience found in on-screen comics as we know them. 

Today Marvel released the first Infinite Comic, Avengers vs. X-Men #1, through the Marvel Comics app/store. Simply describing the new format doesn’t do it justice so we took a few screenshots on the new iPad’s 2048 x 1536-pixel Retina Display to show you just how Infinite Comics change the reader experience in a way paper comics can’t imitate. 

Most of the tricks in Marvel’s Infinite Comic toolbox involve delaying certain elements of the page layout with a finger swipe. Those elements can be dialogue boxes, foreground artwork, other panels on the same page, or a version of the same page drawn a touch differently.  To launch the next element, users simply swipe forward on the screen.

In traditional digital comics, a books opens to a splash page or a single panel littered with drawn action and dialogue boxes. An Infinite Comic can simply launch on a single panel of a starry splash page, and then add in bits of dialogue, small touches of visual detail, more background panels, or foreground action bit by bit as readers swipe to move forward in the story.

Here’s the opening to AvX #1, a four-part sequence that’s complete after three swipes.

Swipe. 

Swipe.

Swipe.

Visually, that sequence isn’t very interesting, but it is a much more direct and active way to read digital comics. Just look at the way a star suddenly comes to life in the fourth image.

Plus, other Infinite Comic tricks can be used to make the reading experience much more dramatic. Just look at the big reveal where we learn who or what is chasing Nova, the star of our comic, from galaxy to galaxy. To enhance the moment, the comic shows one version of the same page followed by a slightly different version that appears after you swipe. In the first image, the background of a critical panel is completely blurred out, and in the second image, the same background is in total focus.

In standard digital comics, the blurred element wouldn’t exist. Instead, the same image would sit in sharp detail as soon as the page or panel loaded on a mobile device. Seeing the blurred version first adds a hint of mystery (even though any X-Men fan could spot the inescapable Phoenix Force from light-years away) and just a touch of delayed realization, much like the moment before a masked villain or hero reveals his identity by pulling off his mask in a movie. 

According to Marvel, the Infinite Comics format is a collaboration between the artist and writer, giving the foremost creators of a book, not the publishers, the ability to shape their story’s digital presentation. On the other hand, one place publishers were likely involved is the behind-the-scenes controls for Infinite Comics. It takes multiple swipes to get from one page to another, so an option to skip forward or back in a book is a must. Tapping near the bottom of a screen pulls up a menu of options, one of which let’s readers do just that.

Since most of the fun in the Infinite Comics format lies on a single page, so don’t skip too far ahead. Otherwise, you may miss the dramatic pauses or cinema-style transitions that are helping craft a new space in the comic book realm.

To check out the Marvel Infinite Comic’s experience yourself, install the latest version of the Marvel Comics app on either your Android or iOS device and purchase the $1.99 issue of Avengers vs. X-Men #1.


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