|  |  |  | | | | | Maximum PC - Reviews | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Stream HD video without wires—for real Many have promised wireless HD video streaming; Netgear is the first to actually deliver it. The 3DHD Wireless Home Theater Networking Kit, which consists of a pair of Netgear WNHD3004s, delivers amazing performance. On the other hand, it's so expensive ($230 street) that you could almost hire an electrician to string Ethernet cable. The kit contains two devices that look much like Netgear's old routers: One functions as an 802.11n wireless access point that you hard-wire to your router, and the other functions as an 802.11n wireless bridge that you hard-wire to your home-theater PC or other device that you wish to add to your network. What makes the 3DHD Kit unique is that each WND3004 uses a Quantenna chipset that transmits and receives four data streams using a 4x4 MIMO antenna array. The boxes are identical, with a three-position configuration switch (Auto, AP, Bridge) and a four-port, 100Mb/sec switch. 
Netgear's 3DHD Home Theater Wireless Networking kit features a 4x4 MIMO chipset from Quantenna. The WNHD3004s come from the factory pre-configured (one as an AP, the other as a bridge) and pre-paired. We suggest you leave them that way. For whatever reason, our eval units stopped communicating when we moved the bridge from one room to another, so we did what we usually do with wireless devices when we want to make a clean start: We used a paperclip to reset them both. Whoops. The documentation Netgear puts in the box covers very little, so we had to troubleshoot the problem more or less in the dark. The user manual did mention that you can link additional bridges to the AP using the Wi-Fi Protected Setup buttons on the fronts of the devices, but that didn't work no matter the distance between our two. So we set about poking around the AP's web interface and discovered that WPS was turned off (the help file in the firmware indicates that the AP will do this automatically if it detects "suspicious activity," whatever that means). Once we turned it back on, we immediately paired the two devices and were back in business. We placed the AP in our closet, next to our router, and put the bridge in our home theater inside a wooden entertainment center with our home-theater PC. The home theater itself was designed to deliver great acoustics, which we accomplished by building a room-within-a-room: The room's exterior shell is framed with 2x6 studs, but there's a second top and bottom plate about an inch away from the first forming a second wall with 2x4 studs. This second wall is canted by about two degrees, so that the room's front and back walls are not parallel (this is to prevent the formation of standing waves). To further deaden the room, the cavities between the studs are stuffed with a double layer of R19 insulation bats, and the interior walls and ceiling are clad with two layers of drywall. Many a Wi-Fi router has had trouble even reaching client devices inside this room (which doesn't matter to us, practically speaking, because the room has four CAT5e drops). You'll find more details about the room here. We ripped our copy of the Blu-ray version of Spiderman 3 and copied it to an Intel Atom-powered Lenovo IdeaCentre D400 running Windows Home Server for our test. We then used SlySoft's Virtual CloneDrive to mount the ISO image on our home theater rig and played it using Cyberlink's PowerDVD 10. At least we tried to. We gave up after just a few minutes because of too many dropped frames and a soundtrack that cut out constantly. Fortunately for Netgear, we decided that the problem was with the home server machine, not the WNHD3004. When we copied the ISO image to a networked desktop PC running Windows 7, watching the movie using the wireless connection was indistinguishable from watching the movie using the clients Blu-ray drive. Impressive. Netgear tells us the WNHD3004 is capable of wirelessly transmitting several high-definition video streams simultaneously, but we did not test this claim ourselves. The only reason for doing this in a home environment that we can think of would be to stream HD video to different rooms in the house, which would entail buying multiple kits, configuring each of the extra WNHD3004s as a bridge, and pairing each of them with the one WNHD3004 configured as an AP (Netgear does package the devices singly, but we couldn't find single units for sale anywhere online). In any event, the WNHD3004 does exactly what Netgear promises: It can stream Blu-ray video, including its associated high-definition audio stream (that's a maximum data rate of 54Mbs/sec) without wires and without hiccups. That it was capable of doing this even in the challenging environment that is our home theater is even more impressive. But the price tag is pretty steep and there are other, less-expensive alternatives—such as HomePlug AV and MoCA—that might work as well. (They at least don't require new in-wall wiring.) These alternatives won't work for everyone, of course: It can be difficult to ensure quality-of-service with HomePlug AV (especially if you have old wiring or are running a lot of Z-Wave devices), and most MoCA devices are designed for CableTV—versus satellite—installations. But we'd suggest looking into them, as well as the cost of installing Ethernet cable, before buying the WNHD3004. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Overclocked card turns heads but drinks power Palit's high-end cards tend to be exercises in extravagance. That's certainly true with its GTX 570 Sonic Platinum. At first, we thought Palit shipped the wrong card, given the 8-pin power connector nestled adjacent to the 6-pin connector, just like a GTX 580. However, it's really a GTX 570—albeit with a core clock of 800MHz (versus the stock 742MHz) and the GDDR5 frame buffer clocking an even 1GHz (versus the reference 950MHz.) Of course, pushing a GTX 570 that hard likely requires an extra current load, hence the 8-pin connector. In fact, our testing revealed that the Palit GTX 570 sucked a stunning 388W at full load, just shy of the EVGA GTX 580 SuperClock's 395W. The Palit's idle number is worse by comparison, though, at 161W—the worst of all the cards compared in our chart. 
Palit pushes the GTX 570 to its limit, but it sucks almost as much power as a GTX 580. But don't assume that the Palit card is equivalent to a GTX 580 when it comes to performance. The Sonic Platinum fell short in the benchmarks compared to the GTX 580 SC. At $370, though, it's also considerably less costly than a GTX 580. On the other hand, the Palit GTX 570 generally hammered the Radeon HD 6970 and generated frame rates about 5 percent higher than an Asus GTX 570 based on Nvidia's reference design—about equivalent to the price margin. Palit uses a two-fan design to keep the card running cool under load. There's a perceptible fan spin-up under heavy load, and overall fan noise is pretty noticeable. It's an attractive card, and looks killer if you like running a case with transparent side windows. Palit also adds a DisplayPort connector to the card, enabling easy connection to monitors using DisplayPort. Note that a single card still only drives two displays; you'll need to run SLI if you want three-panel surround gaming. Still, it's good to see Palit move forward with a more modern display connector. Should you get one? If you've got the power supply to handle it, you'll certainly be pleased with the performance. After all, you're getting 90 percent of a GTX 580 for about 70 percent of the price. On the other hand, that power draw does give us pause—pushing a GPU this hard beyond its rated limits makes us worry a bit about the card's working life. Still, Palit has delivered one of the fastest GTX 570s around. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | If the SteelSeries 6Gv2 looks familiar to you, it's probably because you're already familiar with the 7G, SteelSeries' flagship mechanical-key keyboard. SteelSeries didn't update the 7G this year, and it's still the company's top-of-the-line model. The 6Gv2 is essentially a more aggressively priced (around $100, versus around $150) version of the same keyboard with a few features stripped out. The reason that the 6Gv2 looks nearly identical to the 7G is that it keeps all of the physical features that make its big brother a monster gaming keyboard. The keys use gold-plated mechanical switches with huge travel and no click. You don't have to press a key all the way down for it to register though, so you can either press the keys lightly and quickly, or slam them down, depending on your gaming style and/or current K/D ratio. We've always loved the 7G for gaming, although we've found that the no-click mechanical switches make the keyboard hard to do a lot of fast typing on. 
Visually, the 6Gv2 is almost completely identical to the older 7G model. Also intact is the 7G's amazing build quality. Made with metal-infused plastic and built on a solid-metal plate, the 6Gv2 could serve double-duty as a battering ram. Also, the keys are easy to remove, wash, and put back into place. In other words, you won't have to replace it any time soon. So, all that good stuff is still the same. What do you give up? Two things. First, the 6Gv2 doesn't have a USB or audio pass-through. We can live with that. Second, for some reason, the 6Gv2 is missing about 50 percent of a right shift key. It's about the size of your standard control key, and is flush with the right side of the enter key. This means that trying to type a capital Y with your right hand alone lies somewhere between a difficult act of contortion and a physical impossibility, depending on your hand size. Who knows the motivation behind this decision—but it's obnoxious and very difficult to adapt to. On the plus side, the 6Gv2 now has a full-sized backspace key. Otherwise, our only beef with the 6Gv2 is the same as with the 7G—owing to its super-austere design, it doesn't have some of the features you'd like in a gaming keyboard. Sure, we don't really need a billion macro keys, or a dedicated media controller, but it is useful to have access to at least a few recordable buttons. | | | | | | | | | |  | |  | |  |
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