Skyrim wins Game of the Year at VGAs
RPG sensation, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim was the big winner at this weekend's annual Video Game Awards, scooping the prestigious Game of the Year title.
Bethesda's gigantic release overcame a host of launch glitches to beat the likes of Batman: Arkham City and Uncharted 3 to scoop the main gong of the night.
The title also won Best RPG, while Bethesda won best studio.
Good night for Batman
In other key awards, Uncharted 3 was named PS3 Game of the Year, while The Legend of Zelda Skyward Sword scooped the Wii honour.Despite missing out on the Game of the Year Award, Batman: Arkham Asylum picked up Best Xbox Game, Best Character for The Joker and Best Action Adventure Game.
The ceremony in Los Angeles also saw Nintendo godfather Shigeru Miyamoto entered into the Hall of Fame.
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iPhone 4S cleared for sale in China
Apple's ubiquitous iPhone 4S has been cleared to go on sale in China, a country well-known for its tight controls on the internet and technology.
The country's internet and wireless communications are overseen by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), who granted the iPhone a network access permit on 6 December.
The handset has been granted a three-year Radio Transmission Equipment Type Approval Certificate, essential for it to be legally sold in China.
Lock down
Traditionally phones sold in China aren't locked to a particular operator, but the introduction of the iPhone in 2009 brought with it Apple's requirement for the phone to only be available on certain networks.The 4S will be sold by China Unicom, one of the country's state-operated telecommunications providers. It's expected to be on sale around or after Christmas this year, with the company investing in network testing and staff training.
50 per cent of the world's mobile phones are manufactured in China, and it's an industry that shifts 190 million units a year.
However, theft and counterfeit products are rife, and the country is notorious for its tight controls on social networking and violent enthusiasm for new Apple products,
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In Depth: How to boost rural broadband speeds
How to boost rural broadband speeds
Amazing though it sounds, 4,000 homes in the UK are classed as 'not spots', meaning they have no internet access at all. A further 2.5 million are 'slow spots' that have connections of 2.5Mbps or less.Most of these homes are away from the cities, in rural communities where large ISPs argue it just isn't economical to install the cabling and phone exchanges necessary to provide an internet connection.
Even if you live in a rural area with the basic infrastructure needed for broadband in most places, with problems like signal degradation as you move further from the exchange and reliance on poor quality copper wiring to carry the signal, it's unlikely that you'll be enjoying the high-speed internet so many people take for granted.
The government has recognised this problem, and confirmed in August that it is providing £530million towards funding the rollout of superfast broadband across the UK. A further £300million will be available in 2017 as part of the TV licence fee settlement. Culture secretary Jeremy Hunt said:
"I am absolutely determined that the UK will have the best superfast broadband network in Europe by 2015 - one that we all benefit from. Fast broadband is absolutely vital to our economic growth, to delivering public services effectively, and to conducting our everyday lives. Some areas of the UK are missing out, with many rural and hard-to-reach communities suffering from painfully slow internet connections or no coverage at all. We are not prepared to let some parts of our country get left behind in the digital age."
But three years is still a long time to wait for these rural communities to be able to enjoy the same internet experience as the rest of the UK, and even with this funding, the coverage will not be complete. If you read the fine print, although millions will benefit, there are still many who won't.
This funding is only to help 90 per cent of the people who don't have 'high speed' internet, leaving the remaining 10 per cent still off the grid. What's more, it's down to the communities themselves to alert their local MPs so they don't miss the chance to be considered for the funding.
For those who are still left out by these plans, there are solutions available to connect to the internet, but they aren't ideal. There's mobile broadband technology that uses the mobile phone 3G network to carry the signal, but with patchy coverage and high costs, it isn't always the best solution.
Similarly, satellite broadband, which can cost up to £600 per household just to set up, also has high monthly rates (£30-£100 depending on usage) and only provides low data speeds (typically 2Mbps).
DIY broadband
So what can you do if you aren't covered by these proposals, or if you just don't want to wait?Rural communities who feel ignored by large corporate ISPs are nothing new, and many have already done something about it. In a few places dotted around the country, communities have banded together, decided they couldn't wait for other ISPs to come to them, and instead have installed equipment and set up their own ISP.
Others with partial services have successfully expanded the reach of the connections they already have, extending the Wi-Fi coverage available to them over a much larger area.
Whether you want to set up your own ISP as a private enterprise to ensure your needs are properly realised or you just want to widen the area covered by the broadband you do have, PC Plus is here to help.
Spread it around
If you already have a connection, how about spreading it a little further? Perhaps you already have access to high-speed broadband, but only in one place. Maybe you have it in one building, but would like to share it with others.There's a variety of ways to extend the range of your broadband and share your connection without incurring the costs of adding extra infrastructure like more cabling.
Better antennas
One simple way to extend the range of your broadband connection is to replace your router's provided antenna with a more powerful one. This will increase the strength of your Wi-Fi signal, and therefore its range.How much you can improve it depends on your current setup, so you should start by checking your wireless equipment's manual for the antenna gain. This measures the degree to which your antenna can focus received and output signals, and is expressed in dBi (decibels isotropic).
The higher this figure, the better your system should perform. As a rough guide, the standard adaptor has a gain of around 2dBi, and every 3dBi you add to that will double your range. You can also use high-gain antenna dishes to boost your signal in this way, although these are mostly used to provide a tight band of signal to a specific point, rather than increase the all-round range.
Note that there is a legal limit for how far you can increase the power of your signal. If the range of just one wireless antenna isn't enough to reach all the areas where you want internet access, it may be worth considering setting up a wireless distribution system (WDS). This is where you add another wireless access point that acts as a bridge or repeater to relay the signal to other computers in range.
In effect, you're creating two wireless networks that work as one. This has the advantage of preserving the MAC addresses of client packets across links between access points. The downsides are that, because every access point has to be on the same channel, it can cause interference, and throughput is halved for each person attached to the network.
Be careful when considering this, because WDS isn't a tightly defined standard and different manufacturers' access points may not work together.
Wireless bridges
If the area with which you want to share your signal is too far way for either of these two systems to help, it may be worth investing in a wireless bridging kit. Provided you have a line of sight between the two buildings, you can transfer the broadband signal wirelessly across the gap.Industrial versions of this technology can cost anything from £100 to £500, but will allow you to transmit your signal over a gap of three or four miles, and it can be set up in an afternoon.
If you don't have a couple of hundred pounds to spare, it may be easier to try a home-brew solution commonly known as a cantenna. Yes, that's a high-gain antenna made out of a can, and it's quite easy to make. This lets you focus the usually omni-directional output of your Wi-Fi antenna into a concentrated beam, which can then be received much further away. If you get it right, you can broadcast your signal to a building up to a mile away for the cost of some wire and two connectors.
Again, line of sight is very important, so you need to point it exactly at your PC or laptop's Wi-Fi receiver.
How to make a cantenna
1. Find the right canTo account for the right wavelength, it's important that you choose the best can for the job. Although a lot of people have made their cantennas from Pringles tins, some say that a larger tin like an SMA milk can provides a much better signal. Can diameters of 3-6-inches have provided good results, but everyone who's experimented with this DIY approach agrees that the longer the can, the better the result.
2. Get the right connector
You need an N-type female chassis mount connector, and the appropriate pigtail connector for your wireless card's external antenna connector. The chassis-mount connector will be placed through the side of the can so you can connect the pigtail cable to it, then connect that to your wireless card. You can buy the connectors and cables cheaply from www.solwise.co.uk.
3. Drill the hole in the can
The diameter of the can will determine where you need to drill the hole for the connector. It needs to be positioned a quarter of a wavelength from the base of the can. Luckily, there are calculators that will work this out for you, like the one pictured above from www.turnpoint.net. For example, with a 3.25-inches diameter can, the hole needs to be 2.49-inches from the bottom of the can.
4. Attach the chassis-mount connector
The hole for the chassis-mount connector has to be as tight a fit as possible, so we recomment drilling the hole slightly smaller than necessary and squeeze the mounting through. This will cause the minimum of interference inside the can. You will also need to solder 1.21-inches of wire to the top of the connector to act as an antenna inside the can.
5. Find a cap
A cap isn't necessary, but if you're mounting your cantenna outside, it will protect it from the elements. SMA milk cans and Pringles tubes come with plastic caps, but you need to check they don't interfere with the microwave rays emitted by your cantenna. To find out, put the cap into a microwave with a cup of water, then blast them for 10 seconds. If the water is warm and the cap is cool, it will work fine.
6. Getting the best signal
Once the chassis mount is in place, it's just a case of attaching the antenna to a suitable tripod or wall, and then pointing it in the direction you want to broadcast your signal. Before fixing it in place, you need to rotate the can to find the best signal strength. It's good to get a friend with a laptop at the other end of the setup who can tell you when the signal is highest.
How to set up your own ISP
Is there no broadband at all in your region? If you can't wait for the super-fast broadband rollout to make it to your area, or think that your MP isn't shouting loud enough to ensure your region is earmarked for development, there here is one more option that's worth considering - you could start up your own ISP.There's nothing stopping you going into business for yourself as your own internet service provider - all you need to do is research whether it's a viable solution for your area, find some investors and apply for the funding.
Sound hard? There are people you can ask for advice and communities that have already gone through the same process, albeit before this government funding was available. One community that wasn't willing to wait for broadband to come to its village was Lyddington in Rutland. Rather than waiting for a big company to come to the rescue, its residents banded together and raised the capital to lease BT's services and lay their own fibre-optic cables, turning their internet no-go zone into a digitally connected hub that offers the 200 homes in the village download speeds of up to 40Mbps.
To do this, Lyddington's residents joined forces with a local ICT company, which was able to resell BT's broadband service. Director Mark Melluish said, "For the first time in UK telecommunications history, the telephone lines of customers are completely cut off from the local BT exchange."
Now they use their experience of setting up the company to offer consultancy services for others considering doing it themselves.
How does BT feel about the practice? The company told us that it's happy to help companies set up their own broadband services. "This is a positive development as, to date, BT has been alone in investing in rural areas. In the case of Rutland Telecom, it is buying our Ethernet products such as Backhaul Extension Service (BES) and Sub Loop Unbundling (SLU)."
Be prepared
This isn't a task to be undertaken lightly though - it needs to be a proper business proposition and will require a lot of preparation, both legal and structural, followed by preparing for the costs and provisions of billing, customer service and maintenance.However, it does put you in control of exactly what internet provisions your area will be getting, and if you do it fast enough, you could even take advantage of some of the money put aside for exactly this kind of development of broadband services in rural areas.
Develop a plan
As the Department for Culture, Media and Sport's website (www.culture.gov) states, "County councils, unitary authorities and Local Enterprise Partnerships can apply for a share of the money by developing a local broadband plan setting out how everyone in the area will be provided with superfast broadband access. Once the local plan is sufficiently developed, BDUK (Broadband Delivery UK) will allocate the funding and the work will be put out to tender to bidding suppliers".If your business plan stands up to scrutiny - and there are consultancy services like Rutland Telecom that can help you to ensure you do all you can to make sure it does - then there's no reason why you wouldn't be in the running for funding.
Remember, the government is looking for effective solutions to the lack of broadband in rural areas, so you'll be doing it a favour by taking matters into your own hands. What's more, in order to make setting up an ISP a more attractive proposition to smaller companies and investors, telecoms regulator Ofcom has forced BT to drop its wholesale price by 12 per cent each year until 31 March 2014.
This means that anybody can take advantage of these competitive rates. The idea is to encourage stronger competition between ISPs in areas that have been traditionally ignored by larger organisations because of the costs involved in providing the service.
Money matters
So what are the actual costs involved in becoming your own ISP? Obviously the exact figures will vary depending on the length of fibre optic cabling that needs to be laid down and the number of telephone exchanges involved, but we can take Rutland Telecom's initial setup as an example.In Lyddington, the costs for laying the cable to the village's exchange cabinet and replacing its innards with the latest fibre-to-the- home Ethernet technologies were covered by a £37,000 collaborative private investment - that's about £3,000 for each of the private investors.
As for money coming back in, each of the 200 Lyddington customers is paying £30 a month for the service. This does mean it will take a little while for the investors to recoup on their investment, but the service is doing well and at least they can access the internet while they wait.
How to set up your own ISP
1. Check it's the right approach
The first step is to check whether setting up an ISP is a sensible idea in your region. You can explore your options with organisations like the CBN, BDUK or companies like Rutland Telecom, which can help with the feasibility studies. Then you can work on a business plan so that you can demonstrate how your company is going to deliver its service to its customers and profits to its investors.
2. Organise the funding
It can cost tens of thousands of pounds to set up an ISP and lay the cable. There may be grants available for your region, but private investment seems to be the normal method of funding. This means finding 10 to 20 like-minded friends to invest a couple of grand each. If your business plan is sound, you should be able to off er them a reasonable return over the longer term, if the project is successful.
3. Get the lawyers in
There's a lot of red tape involved in setting up a company. Apart from the usual form-filling at Companies House, you'll need to sort out the planning permission for your infrastructure, the returns for the investors, the contracts with BT Openreach for using or taking over their phone lines and services, and the legal paperwork for the agreements on subscriptions and billing for your customers.
4. Buy/rent the technology
Investing in industrial technology is a costly business, especially if you're planning to future-proof your service. You'll need the latest fibre-to-the-home Ethernet switching technologies to replace your (likely) antiquated BT street cabinet, as well as the networking technologies required to make it all work. Covering the costs for buying or renting these needs to be covered by your business plan.
5. Trench warfare
Next, you need to lay your brand new fibre-optic cable and replace the innards of your village's BT street cabinet. Getting permission to dig up public highways isn't easy, so you'll need to plan for this part of the process a long way in advance. Then it's just a case of getting the workmen in - the whole job only took six hours to complete when Rutland Telecom performed the task in Lyddington.
6. Customer service
Now all you need to do is start billing your customers and provide some customer support should anything go wrong (like someone accidentally driving into your cabinet). Also, don't forget that now the Digital Economy Act is law, you'll be responsible for what your customers download using your servers, so policing their behaviour may be another cost that you need to consider.
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Review: Corsair Vengeance Racing Red 16GB
Not only is a new extreme/enthusiast Intel platform a boon for motherboard manufacturers, it's also very good news for the memory manufacturers. It's been a long time since the memory guys had any good news, so the fact that the X79 platform comes with a special quad-channel memory configuration is great. Isn't it?
Corsair thinks so, and has released a new lineup of RAM modules set up for the platform. The latest range of quad-channel Vengeance kits are rated at 1,866MHz out of the box, with full XMP 1.3 compliance built in.
Like the G.Skill RipJawsZ kit, the XMP 1.3 makes for a slightly tighter integration of the use of memory profiling to make setting clockspeeds, latencies and voltages correctly for any supporting motherboard.
Memory matters
The difficulty for companies such as Corsair is that these days, memory actually makes little difference at the top end. The performance difference between a decent 1,600MHz kit and a pacier 1,866MHz bumper pack is small, especially at this thick end of the memory capacity wedge.With 16GB of DDR3 jammed into your machine, whether it's running at 1,600MHz or 1,866MHz, it's going to be going like a greased weasel down a slide. The difference in gaming is negligible – for example, there was just one frame in it with our World in Conflict benchmark, which can easily be put down to simple testing variance.
More immediately obvious is the difference in actual memory bandwidth. The Corsair Vengeance Racing Red kit manages a whopping 42GB/s against the 1,600MHz G.Skill kit's 38GB/s. Even at the lowest ebb, you're still getting great numbers.
In overclocking terms, the Corsair kit was rock-solid at its rated frequency in our Sandy Bridge E tests, easily getting up to the same 4.8GHz overclock that the G.Skill kit managed. Neither kit will bat above its rated speeds though. As hard as we tried, we couldn't push the Vengeance Racing Red modules up to the next point, 2,133MHz. But really that's just willy-waving. Such speeds don't give you a huge amount of extra real-world performance for your money.
TechRadar Labs
Video encoding performance
X264 v4.0: FPS: Higher is better
Corsair Vengeance: 55
G.Skill RipJaws-Z: 55
Memory bandwidth
SiSoft Sandra: GB/S: Higher is better
Corsair Vengeance: 42
G.Skill RipJaws-Z: 38
Gaming performance
WiC: FPS: Higher is better
Corsair Vengeance: 112
G.Skill RipJaws-Z: 111
And therein lies the rub. This Corsair kit is on the market for around £133 at the time of writing, whereas the slightly slower G.Skill kit can be picked up for less than a ton. Is the extra performance really going to be worth the cash you're stumping up for the extra clockspeed?
As a gamer, the answer will most likely be no. Realistically for us PC gaming folk, even the G.Skill kit is probably overkill, and speeding up those modules won't give you much extra either.
For Photoshop obsessives and video manipulation junkies, £133 for 16GB of superfast DDR3 probably isn't a bad deal. But that's a bit of a niche market for such an enthusiast product. None of that can take away from the fact that these Corsair modules run perfectly at their rated specs, happily keeping the system ticking over during all the overclocking.
But as we've said, it's a niche product. Most of us wont need the heights of this kit, though the same could easily be said of the whole Sandy Bridge E platform. So, in for a penny and all that…
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Tutorial: Best codecs for video and how to encode
Best codecs for video
Our mobile devices are faster, the way we watch videos on our TVs has changed, and the way we buy and store content is completely different from 20 years ago. We're in the middle of a home media revolution, where shelves of DVDs are being pushed into NAS boxes and discreetly hidden away.We're only in the infancy of this revolution, though. That means we've yet to find a definitive method, and there are as many good solutions as there are pitfalls.
Codecs are the best example. If you've had anything to do with digitised video over the last 10 years, you'll know that video performance is dominated by the black art of manipulating these encoding and decoding programs. Finding the right one is a balancing act between the amount of processing that goes into creating the video file and the amount required to decode it.
Too much on the input and you'll be waiting until next Wednesday for your file. Too little and the new generation of HD decoders plugged into your TV won't have enough grunt to reconstruct the video stream at 60fps.
Codecs call for careful consideration. That's why, for high definition, it's often better to use a codec designed specifically for the job rather than one from the '90s shoe-horned into a higher bit-rate and resolution than it was ever intended for.
The same is true for any other disparate playback devices. You get the best results from a movie encoded specifically for your usage scenario, whether that's mobile access across the 3G network or playback on a wireless tablet.
We're going to help you solve these challenges using a mix of hand-on tweaks, free software and plenty of acronyms, taking you from 1990s DVD diva to 21st century streaming media mogul. You'll find everything you need to become an expert over the next six pages.
The best codecs
Best codec for high definition
H.264 & MKV
Before we start, we need to first make a distinction between the codec used to store the video data and the container used to encapsulate everything else, because the two are often confused.
The most popular container for high definition content, for example, is called Matroska, as denoted by its MKV file extension. Matroska isn't a codec in itself, because it doesn't define how to encode and decode the video data - it simply stores the bytes from a codec in such a way that MKV-compatible applications know where to find everything for playback. That could be the video, audio and subtitle data (if present), all of which can be encoded using different MKV-compatible formats and codecs.
That's why you always have a choice of which video codec to use with a container. With MKV files, for example, the choice is usually between H.264, MPEG-4 and VP3, the latter of which is based on Theora. All three use similar technology, but the first two are far better than the third.
For high definition, we'd recommend H.264. This is often represented by x264, which is the free software implementation of the codec.
Bit-rates and resolution are important too. 1080p source material has 2.25 times more pixels than 720p, and higher rates can be harder to decode on your playback hardware. As a rough approximation, we recommend generating a file with a size within the 8-12GB region for a typical two-hour HD movie. To maximise quality, aim for a 12GB+ file with a bitrate of 10+ Mbps.
As for the choice of audio codec, this is down to your AV setup's capabilities. Our preference is not to touch the audio at all and use the 'pass-through' option in your encoding software. DTS and AC3 audio streams can be passed within MKV, and this will embed an exact copy of the audio tracks, as found on your original media, within the MKV file, which should play back on your equipment the same way it would with the original.
Best codec for streaming
MPEG-4
H.264 has become one of the most common codecs for high-quality streaming across the internet thanks to portals like YouTube and Vimeo. It's therefore no surprise that it's good at providing a high quality, homogeneous and predictable video stream across a limited bandwidth.
It's a great choice for streaming too, if you encode your video and drop it into a MOV or MP4 file, but we've found that its closely related alternative, MPEG-4, offers a similar pedigree and is usually a better choice at low bitrates over limited bandwidth.
The relationship between MPEG-4 and H.264 is complicated, as they're both parts of a wider MPEG-4 specification, but it's also a codec that's closely related to the data on a DVD that's streamed as digital television. That means it can produce better and more robust results under bandwidth and processor limitations.
There are as many container formats for MPEG-4 as there are for H.264. They include stalwarts like AVI, MOV and the raw transport stream (TS), which you will often have found dumped from your DVB hardware, as well as newer variants like MP4 and MKV. Which you choose will depend on the compatibility of your playback device, but encoding them shouldn't be too difficult.
The only reliable free tool is the open source FFMPEG utility, which you can use to create MPEG-4 compatible files, although there are plenty of expensive commercial options available that may stick closer to the original specification.
When it comes to encoding, the main limiting factor is available bandwidth rather than playback hardware. You may want to stream video across a wireless-N network, for example, and while its specification may boast a transfer speed of 108Mbps, the results are seldom as fast as promised.
Thanks to the vagaries of distance, interference, other users and hardware, wireless 802.11n is seldom fast enough for high definition video, and anything with a lower bandwidth is going to require a compromise. The same is probably true of your broadband connection. You might want to stream videos across the internet from your NAS, for instance, but this operation will be limited by your broadband upload speeds, which are often far less than 2Mbps.
This means you need to find a compromise between resolution, bandwidth and quality that hits your bandwidth sweet spot, and unlike the limitless world of high definition, you'll also need to compress the audio. The codec you choose will depend on the playback hardware, but the most common options is MP3 encoded through Lame.
Best codec for iOS
H.264 and MOV
Even Apple's portable devices are constrained by bandwidth and hardware. That means you need to make as many cuts as you can without sacrificing quality. If you're encoding video for playback on an iPad, for example, it makes good sense to scale your original material to 1,024 x 768 before encoding.
This is good practice for any encoding job where you know the end platform is the only place your files are likely to be played. You should also consider whether you plan to output the video from the device to a bigger screen. For example, you can connect an iPad to a TV and get 720p output, which may affect your choice of resolution. Apple's mobile devices also combine with the software to provide excellent video acceleration, getting the best possible video quality and battery life from your device.
In order to capitalise on these advantages, your video files need to adhere to Apple's strict codec discipline, which at least makes the job of choosing a codec easier. For best results on your iOS device, you need to choose an MOV container using the H.264 codec. 29.97fps (NTSC) is the best framerate to choose, which you can enter as 30,000/1,001 if you're using FFMPEG, and audio should use the AAC codec with a bitrate of around 160kbps.
Best codec for Android
H.264 or AAC-LC
Android devices don't have the same degree of lock-in as their Apple counterparts, which means you're free to install a media player like VLC that can handle many kinds of video file. There's no standard hardware configuration, so playback performance and capability are specific to each device.
Many will accelerate Flash, or even DivX files, because hardware acceleration is more general and not limited to a single codec, but there are still some Google-endorsed standards based on H.264 and MPEG-4. Google's documentation recommends H.264 with a bitrate of 500kbps, and AAC-LC at 128kbps for audio.
Resolution should be the same as the destination device, and you can use an MP4, 3GP or even a raw TS as a container. Google now has its own container and codec combination in WebM. This is also worth a try, because the VP8 codec it uses is closely related to H.264 and is likely to benefit from acceleration now that Google owns Motorola's smartphone division.
The law
Here in the UK, when you format-shift your CD and DVD collection from the discs you own to another device, you're currently breaking the law. That's because, in legal terms, only the owner of the copyrighted material can permit its duplication.This is also a law that's been openly flouted since the 1980s, when we all started taping singles from the top 40 countdown on a Sunday evening. Music and video players, from Microsoft's Zune to Apple's iPod, have been allowed to flourish despite this obvious flaw in UK law.
This is unlike the US, which has a fair-use caveat that allows personal copying if you're moving the media to a different device for personal use, but things in the UK could be about to change.
The Hargreaves report on intellectual property, a preview of which was published in May [PDF], recommends that the government amends the rules on format shifting to allow for a stance similar to that of the US.
In August, the cabinet declared its full support for those recommendations, hopefully paving the way for a change in the law. Until then, you can't legally copy a DVD or CD that you own and stream it to another device. Consider yourself warned.
Handling audio
We've spent a lot of space discussing video encoding, but in some ways, audio can be even more important. When you're streaming a movie, video data can be scaled to fit the end resolution and format regardless of the input format, but audio isn't as flexible.If you only include the surround channels, and your playback device supports only stereo, you won't typically hear anything. Some players can downmix a surround stream, but not many, and the ones that can are usually PC-based.
The solution is to encode the stereo and surround tracks if you want to keep the surround data, or just the stereo mix if you don't. Tools like Handbrake will let you downmix a surround stream if that's the only one available, or choose the stream you want to encode from the Track dropdown menu.
If you want to re-encode a surround stream, you can usually choose between AC3 and DTS, depending on which codecs are installed, and lower their bitrates. This will preserve the multi-channel aspect of the audio, but you will need to make sure your playback device is connected digitally to an amplifier that can decode it.
How to encode your movies
Encode your movies
Provided you're legally entitled to do so, getting your data off an optical disc and onto your streaming server or portable device isn't difficult. There are two stages.
The first decodes the disc and grabs the raw data from it, so you'll need the hardware required by your media. This step might be redundant if the source of your material is a legitimate unlocked download, or perhaps a recording from a digital television receiver or PC-based DVB card.
The second stage takes this raw data and runs it through the number crunching routines that generate the final file. Success on the first part depends on the protection used by the source disc. If there's none, then you'll be able to copy and encode your movies in a single step. If there's encryption, then you'll first need to remove this from the data before you can begin the transcoding stage.
Selling software that side-steps this protection is legally dubious, especially in the UK, but there are free tools available that will do the job, leaving you with either a copy of the DVD on your hard disk, or a new ISO burned to disk.
The best tool we've found for transcoding is called Handbrake. This is an open source application that harnesses the power of several free codecs, including FFMPEG, x264 and libtheora, and turns your video data into a file you can easily stream or move to a portable device. You don't even need to worry about the intricacies of codec configuration.
Handbrake includes a list of profiles you can use to quickly select the end device to load the best values into the codecs. These can be previewed and altered before you commit yourself to the final process.
Encoding a film, especially in high definition, can easily take several hours. But the length of time is dependent on the power of your system, so this might be a good time to upgrade that aging Core2Duo you're sitting at.
How to encode your movies with Handbrake
1. Select a source
We installed the the nightly build of Handbrake because it often has cutting edge features and speed improvement, but the official release is more stable. When you run it, you need to select the source location for your movie. After clicking in the 'Source' icon, select the optical drive, folder or file you want to convert.
2. Choose a profile
Once Handbrake has scanned for chapter information, select a preset for the destination format and choose a title from the source. If your presets don't include Android devices, choose 'Reset' from the Options menu. Handbrake defaults to the longest title, which is probably what you need unless you're after the outtakes.
3. Tweak presets
Adjust the video and audio encoding options to suit your own requirements (see the main text for some hints), and use the 'Picture' page to change the resolution, if required. You can use the 'Preview' window to generate a 10-second clip with your settings, then click 'Start' to generate the final file.
How to build the best media PC
Transcoding a video from one format to another takes a lot of CPU power, so a powerful machine will save you hours of waiting and, eventually, your sanity. But before you hand over your credit card details to your favourite retailer, you should first consider whether an upgrade is really necessary and how often you're likely to want to encode a movie.
Initially you'll want to transfer as much of your current collection as you still watch to your digital library. That's a big hurdle, but also a finite one. It might not be worth investing in the best hardware if it's only going to save you a couple of weeks of pain.
Your super video transcoding PC might become a costly white elephant whose resources you're unlikely to test again after an initial splurge. If you only buy a few movies a month, there's no real need to upgrade your hardware. Anything from the last five years will handle even a high definition movie overnight. That said, if you want an excuse to upgrade your machine, a big encoding job is the perfect opportunity.
Processor overheads
As with any upgrade, the best place to start is with the CPU. Most of the codecs we've mentioned use the free x264 library, which is widely considered to be one of the best available, regardless of price. It will use as much processing power as you throw at it, so the CPU question is easily answered with 'the best you can afford'.If money is no limit, that means something sporting Intel's Sandy Bridge architecture, with its requirement for a LGA1155 CPU slot and memory accelerating potential of up to quad-speed DDR3-1333. We'd recommend the Intel Core i7 2600k, which can now be had for around £240. It has four cores and it's fast.
If you're looking for something a little cheaper, or a CPU that might not require a complete architecture overhaul, AMD's six-core Phenom II X6 Thuban represents great value for money for that amount of processing power, as it can now be bought for around £120.
Video encoding is also hungry for memory, so fit as much as either your motherboard or wallet can take. The more you add, the less your system will have to read either your slow optical drive, or the hard disk.
Unfortunately, graphics cards don't change the CPU equation, despite the promise of GPU-accelerated movie encoding. Modern graphics cards, and the APIs their vendors have built to access their raw number crunching abilities, have failed to offer the advantages that seemed imminent in 2008.
The current consensus on the encoding software that's able to shoe-horn a GPU into encoding duties is that the quality of the output just isn't good enough. As a result, CPU grinding is still the best route for the serious media collector.
The only good news is that this could save you a few pounds, because the latest Sandy Bridge Intel CPU's offer SoC - systems on a chip - and these include graphics. They might not be good enough for the latest games, but they're definitely good enough to show you what you're doing while you fine-tune your Handbrake codec parameters, and for playback.
It might also be worth investing in a screen capable of 1,920 x 1,080 if you want to check the encoding quality of your high definition material without moving it to your television.
Finally, for the hardware, don't forget to add an optical drive that can read your media. SATA II Blu-Ray players can be bought for as little as £50.
With your hardware sorted out, you just need to choose your operating system. There's nothing wrong with whatever version of Windows you've already got, but you will need the latest updates to version 7 for the modern chip designs and drivers, and a 64-bit installation is essential if you've got more than 4GB of RAM at your disposal.
Storage issues
There's no getting around the fact that movies take up a lot of space, which means your storage provision is just as important as the rest of your hardware. Capacity is probably the most important feature to consider, because you may be storing your entire collection on the same machine.
However, you don't need to store all your films on an internal drive. A portable remote drive attached to a PogoPlug is a great solution, as external drives are readily available with 2TB of space, for example, for about £60. Failing that, look for a NAS that offers streaming built-in.
For the internal drive, speed becomes a more important factor. The faster the drive, the more quickly your super-fast CPU will be able to crunch through the data. The fastest drives you can get are solid state, and while they're relatively limited in terms of storage capacity, as long as you're not planning to store the resulting files on the same drive, you won't encouter any problems. You can now get 120GB of SSD storage with a SATA II interface and a 3.5-inch form factor for £140.
Media playback hardware
The hardware you use to access your newly complied media collection is utterly dependent on the device it's being connected to. Our recommended storage solution is a Pogoplug, which is capable of streaming media using a wide variety of protocols. If you're playing your movies on an Android or iOS device, you can download a free app that can access your data through the cloud and stream content directly from your storage device, for example.Unless you're happy connecting your laptop directly to your TV, you'll need a hardware streaming client. The premium version of Pogoplug, like many other streaming servers, can send video data using the UPnP protocol, and dozens of devices will be able to transform this into high definition video.
You might already have a suitable device sitting under your TV, because two of the most readily accessible devices are Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Sony's PlayStation 3 games consoles. If you do need a separate unit, we recommend investing in one of the latest Popcorn Hour boxes, which are quiet, simple to use and capable of playing virtually any codec you throw at them.
Local streaming and movies on the go
Local streaming
Now you've got your content encoded and ready to go, learn how to stream it across your local network to any device Networking is the most important part of your setup to get right and can easily become the weakest link in the chain, making all those codec refinements you've just spent an hour on redundant.
There are two principle aspects of networking that affect video streaming. The first is bandwidth, because streaming high definition video is probably the most bandwidth intensive task you're likely to perform, short of running a Tor exit node.
The second is reliability. This is important because even if you have the bandwidth, you also need to ensure that packets are transferred not just quickly, but with enough consistency to ensure your player never goes hungry. It's not like web browsing or downloading game updates - video needs to arrive at your playback device as a predictable and constant stream of blocks.
This provision of data starts at the PC or NAS that holds the videos. Data access needs to be quick enough, which isn't always the case with older units or cheaper NAS devices. You can easily work out how much bandwidth you need because the bitrate value for video encoding is often the same metric used for network speed. If your total bitrate exceeds that of the available bandwidth, you're likely to run into problems.
This competition for bandwidth can cause problems with wireless networks in particular. Any 802.11n wireless gateway will have enough theoretical bandwidth, but not if slower devices are connected at the same time, or if several people are streaming video at once. That's what makes them fail.
The obvious answer is to have two networks - one for video streaming and the other for everything else. Both networks could even be wireless, because several modern wireless routers, like the FritzBox 7390, can now run two frequency bands side by side, effectively offering the advantage of two networks without the hardware overhead. This lets you set your family up on one, for example, and your video network on the other.
As the hub of your network, the router is vitally important. You might want to consider using a standalone switch rather than an ADSL/wireless/router combination, because these are less likely to overheat in use and let you siphon off your video network from your standard connections.
For the ultimate in bandwidth provision, we recommend using a powerline network for your video data and a wireless router for everything else. Ethernet through a powerline network is slightly more costly than wireless, as you'll need a plug capable of AV speeds for both the router, your NAS and each playback client. But if you've already spent a fortune on the equipment that can make the most of HD content, as well as the movies to play on it, the extra £100-150 for those three units is worth it.
They're also plug and play, and after a few button presses, you'll have a network that won't destroy the suspense in the gas station scene from No Country for Old Men just because someone else is microwaving noodles.
The final network consideration is the limit on your upload bandwidth. For domestic ADSL installations, this is likely to be the most limiting factor in streaming your movies to your devices while you're out and about. Typical upload speeds are in the region of 500-800Kbps, for example, which is enough for a low resolution, medium quality film.
But even this number can vary, depending on your distance from the exchange. Users of an ISP that support Annex M, like O2 and Be, or BT's new Infinity broadband will have between 2 and 10Mbps, which are slightly more flexible. But it does mean you'll have to re-encode high definition material for both your television at home and for your portable devices, if you want to stream movies to your phone, tablet or laptop while you're stuck waiting for delayed aircraft at Heathow's Terminal 5.
Movies on the go
Getting content off your LAN and onto the internet can be tricky. You could run your own server, forwarding ports manually and ensuring the setup is secure, or you could use cloud storage like Dropbox, but both are convoluted.
The best option we've found is to use PogoPlug. This is a software and a hardware solution, and the best description of its facilities is that it provides a DropBox replacement where you supply the storage. With the desktop software installed on your PC, for instance, you can share specific files and folders with your online account. As long as your PC is on, you can access those files though a suite of mobile apps, desktop tools and web portals without any further configuration.
If you don't want to leave your PC on, you can buy a hardware PogoPlug unit that will connect to a USB hard drive to provide always-on access.
For movie lovers, the Android and iPhone apps will stream your movies from any PogoPlug source, depending on the video format, and you can use the web browser interface for any other device like a laptop. This works brilliantly at home, where fast wireless provides a seamless stream of data to your palm.
But the PogoPlug software can also stream video outside of your LAN. For a one off $29 payment, you can stream data from your LAN through the internet to any other Pogo-compatible device without any further configuration. This is ideal if you don't have the patience for messing with firewalls or setting up your own servers, and PogoPlugs web interface makes managing your content easy.
Just install the desktop client, select the folders you want to share, and install the client apps on your chosen device. As soon as you've created an account, registered the premium upgrade and synced your collection, you'll be able to stream movies and browse your image collection immediately.
UPnP servers
The PogoPlug is a great plug-and-play solution, but there are many alternatives that may not be quite so convenient but might offer greater flexibility.Even Microsoft's default media player can act as a UPnP server, automatically streaming your content to other UPnP clients on your network. But another good option is a modern NAS from the likes of Qnap and Synology.
The latest firmware on these boxes include UPnP, iTunes and web streaming without any extra effort, and both manufacturers also offer iPhone and Android helper applications that can be used to view content and upload data to your NAS box while you're out and about. If you need terabytes of storage, a NAS box is the best option.
Alternatively, you can run a server on a PC. This has the disadvantage of always needing to be on to be accessible, but it is cheap. The free TVersity server, for instance, can stream almost any format to any UPnP client and is also very good at converting between formats on the fly. This is great if you've got an MOV file that won't play on a PlayStation 3, for example, because TVersity will make the changes itself.
Stream movies to your mobile with PogoPlug
1. Install the softwareA PogoPlug source can be either a desktop application for Windows and OS X, or a hardware device connected to some storage. The desktop option is free if you'll limit your streaming to your LAN, and confi guration is easy. Register an account at PogoPlug.com, install the software and select the folders you want to share.
2. Add the content
You can now add the files you want to have access to. If you've shared your Windows 'My Videos' folder, for example, move your transcoded movie fi les into this folder and log into the web interface. Within a few moments, you should see your content overview updated to include the new fi les you've just added.
3. Watch a movie
Now your content is accessible from your desktop and registered at PogoPlug, you can use any access route to play back your collection. On an iOS device, for example, log in with the same account credentials and navigate to the file. You can stream immediately or download to watch later in another application.
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Buying Guide: Top 10 Mac App Store video applications
Best Mac App Store video apps
Whether you want to create movies, edit them or convert them to play on your iPhone or iPad, you'll find an affordable app to get the job done in the Mac App Store.Here is out pick of the best apps for managing your movies.
01. Easy Movie Rotator - £1.49
We've all done it - shot a movie on an iPhone then realised too late that we've filmed in portrait instead of landscape.Simply drag and drop the affected video onto the Easy Movie Rotator window and click one of the left rotate or right rotate buttons in the corners.
Then watch in awe as the movie switches around to its correct orientation. Sure, you could do the exact same thing in iMovie '11 using the Crop tool, but if that's all you want to do then iMovie is overkill.
02. Motion FX - £FREE
Motion FX is a 'fun' alternative to OS X's own PhotoBooth, offering a range of mind- and face-warping effects that will keep you amused for, ooh, at least five minutes. Watch in amazement as your hair catches fire, your eyes turn into glowing orbs and the scenery around you changes colour.
Despite some clever touches, the bundled effects are all pretty samey. And despite the 'motion' tag, you can only take stills of the effects. Shame.
03. Usher - £25
Thanks to iMovie, iTunes and, of course, the iPhone, chances are your Mac is awash with videos that you've either taken yourself or downloaded. But how the heck are you supposed to keep them organised?
One solution is Usher - an iPhoto-style cataloguing app that enables you to see all your videos and movies in one place and then tag them, add artwork and play them back. Its best feature though is its YouTube/Vimeo integration, which makes it a breeze to browse and download movies from both services without ever leaving the app. Recommended.
04. FlipBook Maker - £1.99
Flipbooks are great fun to create, but making them can be so slow. FlipBook Maker gets around that by enabling you to turn any movie file on your Mac into a flipbook - the shorter the better, clearly - and then turns each of its frames into individual pages which you can print out.
The app enables you to change the frame size, print size and border orientation. The only really tedious bit comes at the end: you have to cut out the individual pages you've printed and then stick them together to create your flipbook.
05. StreamToMe - £FREE
This app is perfect for wirelessly streaming movies from one Mac to another or to an iPad, iPod or iPhone. It comprises two separate apps: ServeToMe for the host Mac and a StreamToMe player for each 'guest'.
The two apps can easily find each other over Wi-Fi, with the player able to navigate the folders on the host Mac for maximum flexibility. The only downers are these: movies can be slow to start and stutter thanks to buffering, maximum video resolution is 720p and the iOS versions cost £1.99 each.
06. iVI - £2.49
The Mac and the Mac App Store aren't exactly short of video converters, but iVI does the job right. Its drag-and-drop interface is simple to understand and use, and there's a whole lot of granularity to the application's export settings, which enables you to tweak the final output.iVI even gives you the option to add tags and cover artwork, saving you the hassle of using more than one app to get your movie into iTunes and on to your iPhone.
For even more video conversion goodness, check out the Pro version (£6.68), which is only available from the South Pole store. It adds DVD ripping and support for Elgato's Turbo.264 hardware dongle, which vastly increases movie conversion speed.
07. iMovie - £11
When Apple abandoned the old iMovie in 2007, it had home-movie enthusiasts in fits: all the glorious things about the old version - precise edits, support for third-party plug-ins and so on - were abandoned in favour of a squeaky new interface, new video formats and dumbed-down editing.
But with iMovie '11, Apple has finally caught up with its past and made iMovie worth using again. All Apple needs to do now is iron out a few of its curious bugs.
08. Cosmos - £28
Cosmos is a video and photo manager for your home movies that can be used to store, sort and tag raw footage from your camcorder. Importing is quick; no conversion takes place and your clips are represented by poster frames or as a series of static filmstrips, rather than as video that you can watch.
You send just the clips that you want to keep to iMovie for editing. But note that AVCHD users also need Cosmos' sister app, VoltaicHD (£28).
09. iSubtitle - £14
If you're hard of hearing, iSubtitle is a real boon. It uses Apple's own soft subtitle technology to add resolution-independent subtitles to your favourite movies or TV shows.You can make them magically appear on your Apple TV, or on your iPhone when you're out and about.
Getting subtitles isn't hard - there are plenty of sources for them online - but iSubtitle makes the rest of the process so easy. Highly recommended.
10. Anime Studio - £21
Dreaming of Aardman super-stardom? Well, you've found a great place to start. Anime Studio Debut (a hefty 352MB download) gives you all the tools, effects and layers you need to create your own cracking cartoons.
The learning curve can be steep if you've never used something like this before, but there are lots of tutorials and pre-built scenes and characters to help you along the way. But the biggest fun comes from creating your own characters and scenes, which Anime Studio makes fairly easy to do.
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Tutorial: How to protect your PC passwords
How to protect your Windows passwords
The security benefits from a two-factor authentication system are unquestionable: for online accounts that can be attacked by anyone with internet access, the extra protection is making more and more sense. But what about your home PC?In a way that already has two factors, the first being the bricks and mortar that surround it. Before you can even log in, you have to get through the front door. Even so, many people run their Windows installation with no log-in password or with a weak one for ease of use.
Besides all of that it's easy enough for people to circumvent the whole process anyway, if they're really keen to get at your stuff. So where does that leave your desktop? We talked about one-time passwords (OTP) in our article How to protect your gaming account. So are these applicable to your desktop?
Yes and no is the annoying reply. Online services require a zero-downtime server to be constantly available for when you request the OTP. Happen to have one of those spare? We didn't think so.
Technically there's no reason you can't establish your own authentication server - a product like OpenOTP from www.rcdevs.com is a full enterprise-level solution that happens to be free for deployments of 25 or fewer users and if you have a lot of spare time on your hands.
If you're not an enterprise-level system administrator, true home-based OTP solutions are rare. One we've come across is the £23 Plurilock from www.plurilock.com. This uses a pseudo-random number generator and a key fob to enhance the standard Windows log-in with an OTP. This is locally generated on the PC and is matched by the key-fob.
Its necessity for an offline solution, however, leaves it vulnerable as a recovery master-code will still unlock the system, while the contents of the drive will remain vulnerable if that's what an attacker is after.
Key to safety
Another solution is from www.yubico.com with its Yubikey. It's an interesting product that supports a range of open standards and open source projects, such as OpenID, TrueCrypt, WordPress and the Windows log-in.While it can function at an enterprise level with its support for the Open Authentication standard, it also has a couple of personal-level features. It can function as a basic password key-fob that carries a static password, but more interestingly it works with a number of online password storage services such as LastPass and Passpack. This effectively turns it into a personal OTP for all the various applications and services that are supported.
There is a minimal subscription fee attached to the service of £8 per year for LastPass, but when bought with the key this is reduced to just over £3 for two years. It's one of the few services we've seen that can provide cheap and simple personal one-time password protection.
Safe browsing?
Less well-known are the security features built into Firefox, Internet Explorer and Chrome. You've probably noticed that they offer to store website login details and passwords. It's a handy feature but what happens if someone is wandering by and decides to start poking around with your soft and vulnerable internet sites?
It doesn't matter how secure your passwords are if you've allowed a browser to store them with no protection. You're left doubly unprotected by having no Windows password, as an unattended PC will force the user to log back in but without a password, an intruder is straight in.
Firefox offers good protection in that it can store an encrypted password file on your hard drive, if you ask it nicely. This protects all the log-in user names and passwords with a master password. So if someone happens to be on your computer and fires up the browser, they'll have to enter your master password before the browser starts to automatically fill in all of your bank details without you.
For Internet Explorer there's no such direct replacement. There is a Content Advisor that's designed to block inappropriate content rather than block access to the browser and stored passwords. If you open Internet Options > Content and under Content Advisor click Enable, you'll be prompted to enter a password and hint.
Initially this is massively annoying as it'll prompt you for every website. We suggest you set a homepage, so when the browser is first opened the password will be required and you can allow all the other sites. The alternative is to set up blocks just on sites that require passwords.
When it comes to Chrome, security is even more lax: there isn't any way to password protect access to the browser within Chrome itself. There is an extension called Secure Profile that goes some way to address this. It forces a password to be entered before access to the browser is allowed. However, as it's an extension it can be disabled by knowledgeable people and due to limits on Java it displays the password being entered. But it does block access and is better than nothing.
How to strengthen your password protection in Firefox
1. Meet the master
Letting your browser remember passwords weakens security. Anyone who manages to access your system can log into any shopping site, and possibly your bank and email. In Firefox, add a Master Password by selecting Firefox Menu > Options > Security and ticking Use a master password.
2. Out, damn spotter
There's a prompt to enter the password, click the Save Passwords... button and you're done. Normally you'd be able to browse all of your saved passwords but instead you're confronted by a security check. People can still use Firefox: this just blocks access to the automatic form filling.
3. Extra-strong flavour
A program called FireMaster can locally brute-force attack the encrypted Firefox password file. To boost security, enable the enhanced encryption scheme by selecting Firefox Menu > Options > Advanced > Encryption > Security Devices and clicking Enable FIPS.
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Review: ASRock X79 Extreme4
Everyone and their dog in the motherboard market will be releasing new mobos based on the X79 chipset following Intel's release of the Sandy Bridge E processors. We've already had a play with one of Asus's top boards in the form of the Sabretooth X79, and now it's the turn of fellow Taiwanese outfit ASRock to get in on the action.
The X79 Extreme4 is the company's third tier LGA 2,011 offering after the Extreme7 and Extreme9. Those are the performance boards in ASRock's lineup, with the Extreme4 fitting right in the middle.
It's not the top overclocking board but it's got enough extras in the package to make a fairly compelling argument for itself. But are these features enough when you're still being asked to spend nigh-on £200 on a new motherboard?
False economy?
The value proposition becomes less of an issue when you're spending around £800 on the Core i7 3960X, or £400-odd on the Core i7 3930K. The difference between spending £200 and £250 on a board to get the most out of your CPU then seems less important.That said, there is the notion that if you are spending that amount of money on a chip and need to pick up a bit more RAM for the ol' quad-channel shenanigans the X79 chipset has introduced, there needs to be somewhere you can save some cash in your build.
The thing is, as important as all the other components are, the motherboard is the facilitator. It's the piece of the puzzle that enables the entire machine to run at its very best. Do you really want to stint on that?
If we were still getting the same stock performance then we could probably accept that this was a reasonable place to save a couple of pennies. Overclocking is a relatively niche market after all, and if you're not planning to tweak your CPU's nipples then this won't present so much of a problem for you.
The stock performance of the X79 Extreme4 is fairly close in some respects to that of our favourite X79 board so far: the Asus X79 Sabertooth. There's almost parity in the Cinebench score, and even a serious boost on the memory bandwidth. The X264 and World in Conflict gaming scores suffer in comparison though.
When you do factor in overclocking, things start to look even worse for the X79. In the BIOS you can use the EZ overclocking tag, which will boot into Windows comfortably at 4.6GHz. So far, so good, but unfortunately it wont stay there. We managed a full Cinebench run through, but when it came to X264 the board throttled back all the way to 3.33GHz. Even at stock settings the Sabertooth will run at 3.9GHz when pushed to 100 per cent CPU load.
TechRadar Labs
CPU rendering performance
Cinebench: Index Score: Higher is better
ASRock X79 Extreme4: 10.56
Asus X79 Sabertooth: 10.54
Video encoding performance
X264: v4.0 FPS: Higher is better
ASRock X79 Extreme4: 55
Asus X79 Sabertooth: 59
Memory bandwidth
SiSoft Sandra: GB/S: Higher is better
ASRock X79 Extreme4: 38
Asus X79 Sabertooth: 31
CPU gaming performance
WiC: FPS: Higher is better
ASRock X79 Extreme44: 112
Asus X79 Sabertooth: 117
Another issue involves the memory profiling. The new XMP version 1.3 is meant to be more stable, but when we tried either the Corsair or G.Skill kits using the XMP profile we couldn't boot into our OS. Once we'd manually configured the RAM things were fine, but still it smacks of an immature BIOS.
Unfortunately, as things stand, this cheaper ASRock board isn't trustworthy enough to justify saving money on the platform costs. And we bet there wont be many system integrators picking it up either.
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Available Tags:iPhone , Mac , ASRock ,
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