New Technology Reviews!.: Evolution

On the Origin and Evolution of Computer Viruses

Trends and industry analysts state that the efforts of the propagators will not relent. Last year marked the first ever mobile phone virus and Bluetooth technology, for example, compounds the threats to security. 35% of PCs in the US are infected while in China and India the rates hit 50%.   Experts in the field of security report the first virus was spread as early as 1981. Fred Cohen, however, wrote in his seminal paper that the first virus was conceived as an experiment on November 3rd, 1983. Since then viruses and malware have plagued and wreaked havoc among computer systems worldwide.   Risks through the Internet   With the advent of such communications advances like the Internet, mobile telephony and Bluetooth (a short range radio technology that simplifies wireless communication among devices such as computers and mobiles. It also aims at quickly and easily connect these devices to the Internet) computer viruses have spread at an alarming rate. The downside to such advances is that where before only a few computers would get infected, now thousands, if not millions, are at the mercy of virus authors.   Early Threats Disable 10% of Computers Infected   In 1987 a large network (ARPANET) used by universities and the US government was infected by a virus. Robert Morris, son of a computer security expert for the National Security Agency, sent malicious code through ARPANET, affecting about 10% of the connected computer hosts - at the time there were only 60,000 hosts connected to the network. The code reproduced itself and filtered through network computers; consequently, the size of the files filled computers' memories, thus disabling numerous machines.   An alarming 66% of PCs today are Infected by Spyware and 35% are infected by viruses in the US. Today, an estimated 1.21 billion people (Computer Industry Almanac) are connected to the Internet with millions of computer hosts connected chatting, exchange files, emails and communicating in general. Can you imagine how easy it is to spread a virus or malware?   One anti-spyware developer, reports that the infection rate of malicious spyware at companies is approximately at 7% and adware appears on an incredible 52% of machines. 3 to 5% of enterprise machines had keyloggers. At homes, the percentages are much higher. The same anti-spyware developer reports that 66% of the PCs scanned by its online tool were found to be infected with an average of 25 spyware entities each. If one were to define cookies as spyware than the rate will shoot up to 88%! Adware was found on 64% of the machines. Viruses and Trojans, reports the company, were found on 7% and 19% of the machines respectively.   According to Panda Software, over 50% of PCs in India and China, for example are infected with a virus. In the US and the UK, the rate is 35%. All in all, this means that many people still remain without active protection today.   Anti-virus is not enough   In a study performed by security firm Checkbridge, the company ran 2 million email messages through three famous email scanners. None of the programs tested caught all the viruses. The success rates of the scanners varied from 97% to 64%. The CEO of Checkbridge also states that in many cases using two scanners at the same time does not guarantee pinpointing all the viruses all of the time. Similarly, many computer experts report that using two or three anti-spyware programs usually manages to delete 95%+ of spyware.   Pillars of Security   How can you protect your system and your data in the midst of so many threats to security coming from so many different sources?   Just think, malware (malicious code) has been around for almost 25 years already. Every year, millions of people and businesses lose substantial sums of money in terms of lost and, many times, irrecoverable data. To top it all, some viruses hog system resources and Internet connections making it impossible to work or play. And this does not include the frustration and anger at not being able to pinpoint the source of the problem.   One of the very first steps to protecting your PC is to make sure that the operating system (OS) is updated. This is critical as OS manufacturers such as Microsoft Windows update security features of their products continuously to cover any potential and actual loopholes.   Secondly you should have updated anti-virus software running on your system. Make sure to choose one of the better ones on the market today - a few dollars wont break you but a virus will. Make sure that the anti-virus software is updated frequently (sometimes even daily if needs be) with fixes to the actual engine and to the database files that contain the latest cures against new viruses, worms and Trojans. The anti-virus software must have the ability of scanning email and files as they are downloaded from the Internet to help prevent malware reaching your system.   Many users are using a third component for their home and/or computer system security – firewall software. A good system prevents unauthorised use and access to your computer from external sources (e.g. hackers or hijackers) plus giving you additional protection against the more common Trojans and worms. A firewall on its own will not get rid of the virus problem but when used in conjunction with your OS updates, anti-virus software and processlibrary.com information, it will give you deeper system security and protection.   A fourth component for security is manual intervention. This option may be daunting to any beginner, however, such intervention will definitely help you combat insipid Trojans that may not be removed by your standard anti-virus and spyware products.   I would like to explain two tools that may be used intervene when all else fails – the native Windows Task Manager to help you list all the processes running on your PC and a good online library that explains what these processes are for and whether they are legitimate or not. Of course, you need to use these tools with care. Hit CTRL+ALT+DEL to call up the Windows Task Manager to help you identify most of the processes running on your computer – this is an in-built Windows OS functionality. Go through the processes one by one and then search for the process names in one of the many process libraries available – I use processlibrary.com but there are many others including neuber.com, file.net, and bleepingcomputer.com. In any case, these libraries are directories of information (typically free of charge) with search functionality.   With this information you can immediately identify any possible new threats that may have infiltrated into your system. The definitions will help you cover that window of time until your preferred anti-virus and anti-spyware software vendors update their scanners. When identified just search the process within the processlibrary.com database and you'll have an exact definition and advice on what to do.   Fighting Spyware, Adware and Other Forms of Malware   In some cases, it is not that easy to realize that spyware and related forms of malware are installed on your system.   In other cases, you will almost immediately notice changes to your web browser that you didn't make. These changes include toolbars that you didn't want installed, different homepage settings or changes to your security settings and favourites list.   Other signs of spyware include advert pop-ups which are not related to the website being viewed at the time. Many such adverts usually relate to pornography or emoticons or performance/security optimizers and are not displayed as they are usually shown on legitimate adverts. Adverts may also appear when you are not surfing the web. Spyware is not only annoying but it slows your system performance, causes start-up time to increase, hogs your Internet connection and on occasion will lead to system crashes.   You should install an anti-spyware software package. There are some good ones on the market and many experts go as far as suggesting installing two or three since any single package may not be powerful enough to find all the entries and changes to your registry and other files made by spyware. Such malware is installed like any other application on your system thus leaving traces of itself on the registry files of and other places with your system. Anti-spyware works by looking for these traces and deleting them.   Also beware of what you download from the Internet. Make sure that the sources that you download stuff from are know to you - and even here you have to pay extreme attention. For example, not all companies who claim their software contains adware are really offering adware only! There's always the possibility that there is spyware disguised in the program. Make sure that you read privacy policies and license agreements. Also firewalls should help you greatly in the fight against spyware and malware.   New Forms of Security Threats   Malware authors and hackers are always looking for new ways of disrupting the normal operation of your system and, worse still, stealing your private data. Cross site request forgery (CSRF) is a form of website attack also known as session riding. According to leading security experts (e.g., Jeremiah Grossman) this form of attack is rare yet it is a “sleeping giant”.   Here is an excerpt that explains what CSRF is taken from an excellent CSRF FAQ: “Cross Site Request Forgery (also known as XSRF, CSRF, and Cross Site Reference Forgery) works by exploiting the trust that a site has for the user. Site tasks are usually linked to specific urls (Example: [http://site/stocks?buy=100&stock=ebay]) allowing specific actions to be performed when requested. If a user is logged into the site and an attacker tricks their browser into making a request to one of these task urls, then the task is performed and logged as the logged in user. Typically an attacker will embed malicious HTML or JavaScript code into an email or website to request a specific 'task url' which executes without the users knowledge, either directly or by utilizing a Cross-site Scripting Flaw. Injection via light markup languages such as BBCode is also entirely possible. These sorts of attacks are fairly difficult to detect potentially leaving a user debating with the website/company as to whether or not the stocks bought the day before was initiated by the user after the price plummeted.” <a href="http://www.cgisecurity.com/articles/csrf-faq.shtml" rel="nofollow" target="_new">Click here to read the whole FAQ</A>   So What is the Solution? The solution is to try to work hard to minimize threats to security by using the right tools and by demanding that the websites you use on a regular basis take a similar approach.

On the Origin and Evolution of Computer Viruses

Trends and industry analysts state that the efforts of the propagators will not relent. Last year marked the first ever mobile phone virus...

In Depth: The evolution of the Linux desktop

<img src="http://cdn.mos.techradar.com//Review%20images/Linux%20Format/LXF%20139/LXF139.evolvdesktop.2-200-200.jpg"> Back in 1998 when I started using Linux, it was ugly. In those days you installed it by inserting around 40 floppy disks into your computer and praying that one of them wouldn't be a duffer and make you have to start again. After this lengthy installation process, you were typically presented with this not-entirely-intuitive interface: darkstar login: _ At that time, the dominant operating system was Windows 95, with Windows 98 just getting its wheels rolling – and Linux's Wargames-esque vibe clearly didn't cut it for a modern generation raised on the GUI. As our beardy friends in the Linux kernel world figured out how to get graphics cards working, more and more effort was going into producing a graphical environment that the world was familiar with. This effort started with X – the chunk of software that paints things on to your screen – but it wasn't enough. To get a truly usable GUI, you needed a good window manager to work with. Unlike the Windows world, X enabled you to run multiple window managers, and a plethora of wacky and wonderful attempts were made. Some were simple, some were more complex, some tried to emulate Microsoft's operating system and some were just bonkers. Amid this creative explosion, two graphical environments emerged as the clear popular choices: KDE and Gnome. While both were fully functioning environments and great for users, they were essentially two different walled gardens with little crossover. Both solved many of the same problems, such as presenting ways to launch files and manage fonts, but each did its own thing in its own way. Things had to change. While our community was growing, it was madness that two developers could be solving the same problem in two different ways. Fortunately, the situation was about to get a lot better. Unifying the desktop With more and more chatter about cross-desktop participation, the freedesktop.org project was announced as a desktop-independent place in which software could be developed to benefit any desktop that wanted to use it. The site provided a wiki, code hosting, email discussion lists, IRC channels and more. It had a tremendous impact on desktops. A lot of software was created; some of it reached maturity quickly and solved real problems, while some projects got started but were ultimately never finished. Irrespective of which projects worked and which didn't, freedesktop.org also brought an important message: we should try to collaborate between desktops where possible. The message was popularly received and the desktop continued to evolve. One of the most important pieces of software that came out of freedesktop.org was a unified messaging system. At the time, a key challenge desktop developers faced was how applications could communicate with one other; the web browser needed to communicate with the system keyring, the networking daemon with the icon in the panel, and so on. KDE tried to solve this problem with a system called DCOP, which was an intuitive way for applications to send and receive messages to and from other applications. While DCOP worked well in KDE, it unfortunately didn't solve the wider problem between multiple applications across multiple desktops. And thus the D-BUS project was born. D-BUS is, in a nutshell, a cross-desktop equivalent to DCOP. It provides a facility in which applications can communicate with one other via a common bus and using a common language. D-BUS went through a feverish period of development, ultimately became ratified as a freedesktop.org standard, and the technology was built into both the KDE and Gnome environments. This was a huge leap forward for the desktop, and another strong step in its evolution. Refining the desktop With all this cross-desktop work going on, we saw tremendous developments on the Linux desktop. Many of our long-suffering problems were getting addressed – USB devices were plug and play, wireless networking was only a click away, printing was a breeze, software was simple to install; things were getting better. It felt like we were really becoming relevant, and we had something the competitors didn't: an incredible global community working together. <img alt="Ubuntu unity" src="http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/Review%20images/Linux%20Format/LXF%20139/LXF139.evolvdesktop.1-420-90.jpg" width="420"></IMG> In the world of Ubuntu, we were doing our best to be at the forefront of delivering this innovation to users. We were taking open source software and integrating it, and our goal was to deliver this content in a way that solved real-world problems for people; be it getting your music player to work, getting online or whatever else. Back in 2008, Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu, was keen to ramp up this innovation and focus in Ubuntu, so he founded the Ayatana project. The idea was simple: to recruit a design team and an engineering team, and build a set of user-interface enhancements and improvements defined by a strong sense of quality in design. This was new for both Mark, the company (Canonical), and Ubuntu. We had had a long history of shipping and integrating software, but such a design-centric initiative was uncharted territory. Ayatana When Ayatana was founded, a comprehensive design team was hired by Canonical. The team came from a variety of backgrounds: many came from brand, graphic design, product development, interaction design and other walks of life. The term 'melting pot of personalities' is an understatement, and many were new to open source and still taking it all in, but all were enthused and inspired by the idea of great design infused with strong community. The first project to come out of the team was called Notify OSD and provided a new approach to notification bubbles, which we were all too familiar with in Ubuntu. For years we had seen these boring yellow square bubbles appear in the top-right of the Gnome desktop when an application needed to tell you something. Notify OSD was the same basic concept, but re-imagined. With it, an attractive black transparent bubble would appear, and instead of clicking it to dismiss it, hovering your mouse over it would cause the bubble to fade so you could interact with the application underneath it. <img alt="notification area" src="http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/Review%20images/Linux%20Format/LXF%20139/LXF139.evolvdesktop.3-420-90.jpg" width="420"></IMG> The justification for the design was that notification bubbles should present information to the user in a way that isn't intrusive. With the first version of Notify OSD released and shipped in Ubuntu, the Kubuntu team wanted the technology in KDE too. Fortunately, the Ayatana team had created the Notify OSD specification in a cross-desktop way and the Kubuntu team simply worked on a different GUI that fitted well into the KDE desktop. Like the Notify OSD in Gnome, it was well received; a subtle and gentle improvement to the desktop. The Ayatana team weren't limiting themselves to just notification bubbles, though. The next goal was to fix the system and application notification area; an area that had become something of a wasteland in the Linux desktop. There were multiple problems with the notification area. To start, the notification area typically had a number of notification icons for applications that used it, and you couldn't click once and scrub through the icons – you had to click each individually to use it. In addition, the user interface on these icons was often inconsistent. Some have certain types of menu in left-click menus, some in right-click menus, some had strange and inconsistent widgets, and some had other odd bits. The icons in the notification area were the same as in the application launcher – typically full-colour icons – and this often looks sub-optimal in different themes. As an example, in a dark theme you usually want single-colour icons in the notification area for clarity and definition, but also normal bright-coloured icons in the application launcher. All of these issues caused accessibility problems for blind and disabled users, and made it difficult to navigate the notification area with a keyboard. The Ayatana team wanted to fix these problems in a cross desktop way. To do this they based their work on the System Notifier Specification that was created and used by the KDE project, and created a new application programming interface (API) that developers could use to put an icon in the notification area for Gnome applications. The technology had a number of benefits, including the fact that you can now click one icon in the panel and scrub through the icons and each notification area menu would drop down (similar to how you can move your mouse through the menus in an application). Additionally, applications can set a specific icon in the notification area, which made single colour notification area icons a reality while keeping the application icon a normal full colour icon. Notification area menus were made more consistent. No more confusion about left- or right-clicking to see a menu; you can only left-click, and only standard menu items, checkboxes and radio buttons are supported. This results in a much simpler and more consistent user experience. Everything was made far more accessible, and functions in the notification area can be controlled by the keyboard, which makes it much easier for blind and disabled users. When the technology was ready, it was shipped in Ubuntu and was well received by users. With these indicators being fully open and with APIs for C, Python and Mono, application developers had a field day and more and more applications were adjusted to support the technology. What is particularly interesting from a cross-desktop perspective is that due to the technology being built on a standard cross-desktop specification, KDE applications running in Gnome have their notification menus rendered in the native GTK toolkit and using native Gnome icons. The same works for Gnome applications running in KDE: those notification menus are rendered in Qt. This makes applications that aren't designed for your desktop feel much more native and integrated. System indicators Another feature of the technology is the concept of system indicators: notification icons that group together similar types of content (such as messages) or present system related content (such as battery, power and sound). A key technology here was the messaging menu: a small envelope-shaped icon that presents all of your incoming messages in one place. With it, applications can put content there; you can see how many new emails you have, new social network messages, chat messages and more. Again, due to the cross-desktop specification, any application can put content in the messaging menu and many projects surfaced to bring support in Zimbra, Gmail and more. Other system indicators have also been produced in Ayatana too. A good example is the sound menu, which not only enables you to adjust the volume of your soundcard, but also shows which song you're listening to and gives you the ability to skip through songs when listening. This is handy because typically when you want to listen to music on shuffle, you never need to interact with the music player other than for skipping tracks. With this feature you can hide your music player and just use the sound indicator to skip tracks. Application menus The final indicator-related feature that the Ayatana team have focused on is making an application's main menu also use this specification. The driving influence here was the netbook world. <img alt="App menus" src="http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/Review%20images/Linux%20Format/LXF%20139/LXF139.evolvdesktop.4-420-90.jpg" width="420"></IMG> On netbooks and other small form-factor devices, vertical space is a premium, and putting the application menu in the top panel saves space. This was developed as part of the work on Unity, a new netbook interface. The application menu indicator technology was developed and applies to almost all applications; all KDE and Gnome, GTK and Qt applications get the benefits of the technology without any changes to the application. Consequently, if you run an application with these new application menu indicators switched on, the application's menus appear in the panel and work in exactly the same way. Like the notification indicator icons, this is an entirely cross-desktop technology, so running KDE applications in Gnome means that the application menus are all rendered in native GTK widgets and icons, and vice-versa. It's pretty stunning to run KWord in Gnome and see all the application menus rendered as native widgets; again, it makes applications designed for other desktops feel more native and more accessible. Over the last three years, the Ayatana team have gone from strength to strength and some important lessons have been learned along the way. When Notify OSD was first launched, there was a pretty severe lack of interaction between the Canonical designers and the community, and this rightly caused some irritation among those in that community. However, we took those lessons onboard and now new technologies are not only discussed first in the community, but running code is released as soon as it's available. As an example, when the application indicator work was started, running code was available within a few weeks, and the community could play with it, explore the code and contribute bugfixes and improvements. This improved transparency has its most notable benefit in application support. A number of applications have built support into their projects for the application indicators and Notify OSD, and more and more applications are harnessing these features because Ubuntu ships all this technology, too. Looking forward We've come a long way on the Linux desktop. It only feels like yesterday when having a graphical desktop in the first place was a huge novelty on Linux, and luxuries such as consistent user interfaces, great usability and quick and easy access to devices and applications seemed like a world away. The community has come together, fuelled by inspiration for making a better experience for everyone, and we're seeing the benefits of many these changes. While we have made great progress, the future holds so much more potential. Linux is now an unstoppable force and, unlike back in 1998, we now have a great portfolio of technology that has the ability to touch the lives of computer users around the world. We also have a rich range of hardware to target – laptops, desktops, netbooks, tablets, phones, appliances and more – the world is our oyster, and driven by our continually growing community, who knows what Linux will look like in 2018?

In Depth: The evolution of the Linux desktop

Back in 1998 when I started using Linux, it was ugly. In those days you installed it by inserting around 40 floppy disks into your computer...

Review: The PCO Group Evolution 3D

<img src="http://cdn.mos.techradar.com//Review%20images/PC%20Format/PCF%20246/PCF246.w_rev1.vento3_1-200-200.jpg"/>The £1,000 price point is rapidly becoming the sweet spot for decent machines. With prices on key components dropping, and brand new parts arriving offering impressive performance for relatively inexpensive prices, the power available at this sweet spot just keeps growing and growing. To the point where here we have a new machine, the Evolution 3D, from first-time PCFormat rig-builders the PCO Group, that's a quicker games machine than any other PC we've seen available at this price. The key to the Evolution 3D's performance is a combination of an overclocked Intel Core i5 and a pair of Nvidia's latest GPU, the GTS 450. We checked out the <a href="http://www.techradar.com/reviews/pc-mac/pc-components/graphics-cards/asus-gts-450-top-715663/review">GTS 450 last month</a>, and a decent little card it turned out to be. The first we saw was an overclocked version from Asus, and while it gave decent performance figures, it was still rather too close to the 768MB GTX 460 in terms of price. It also struggled to maintain a clear lead over its real competition, the HD 5770 from AMD. A month later though, and thanks to price wars between AMD and Nvidia, and across the different distributors, you can now pick up a bog-standard GTS 450 for well under a ton. That's a proper Fermi GPU at a quite simply astonishing price – especially considering that this now puts it up against the HD 5750 in terms of price, and way ahead in terms of performance. While that's great news for the gamer on a budget, it's also great news for anyone out there with an SLI-certified motherboard. And thanks to more and more mainstream mobos shipping with that functionality, that's a great deal of us. You see, when you pair up two of these wee fellas in SLI they demonstrate exactly why multi-GPU machines are becoming more popular. SLI – and AMD's answer, CrossFire – now offer the sort of returns that we'd always hoped for. <a href="http://www.techradar.com/news/computing-components/graphics-cards/sli-vs-crossfire-which-is-better-709089?artc_pg=1">Check out our in-depth multi-GPU feature</a> and you'll see what we mean. In terms of decent PCs, that means we can now get the sort of performance out of a £1,000 rig that we'd have previously had to splash out maybe twice as much to get. Dual GPU machines are now where the smart money goes. Everyone loves twins Even just six months ago we'd have always said to just buy the fastest single graphics card your wallet could stretch to. The spectre of multi-GPU driver failures and the diminishing returns you used to get from adding a second, third or even fourth card meant that it was just not worth paying the extra pennies for the hassle it would give you. Now, with two GTS 450s costing less than the price of an overclocked GTX 460 – and consistently out performing it by a long way while it's about it – it makes absolute sense to go for two. Not only have you got two GPUs working away on your game's frame rates, but you've also got double the single card's memory capacity. And when you're talking about big-screen gaming, or the drains memory-intensive effects such as anti-aliasing have on a system, that makes a hell of a difference. The GTS 450 has been kitted out with a full 1GB of GDDR5, and when you've got the graphics pipes fed with a beefy 2GB of graphics memory you're laughing. So, on to the numbers then – and they make impressive reading. The benchmarks<img alt="CPU rendering" src="http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/Review%20images/PC%20Format/PCF%20246/CPU%20rendering%20performance-420-90.jpg" width="420"></img><img alt="Video encoding" src="http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/Review%20images/PC%20Format/PCF%20246/Video%20encoding%20performance-420-90.jpg" width="420"></img><img alt="Bench group" src="http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/Review%20images/PC%20Format/PCF%20246/Bench-group-420-90.jpg" width="420"></img>You wouldn't normally expect a £1,000 rig to be a decent accompaniment to a big-screen monitor, but the Evolution 3D's performance at the eye-popping 2,560 x 1,600 resolution is damned impressive. That's the 2GB of GDDR5 going to work right there. In both DiRT 2 and Far Cry 2 the Evolution 3D was hitting 56 and 61fps respectively at the full 30-inch panel resolution. That's getting on for the sort of performance we've been used to from the full-fat Fermi card – the GTX 480 – and even then in overclocked trim. Looking at the seriously GPU-stressing Just Cause 2, the 26fps score at 2,560 x 1,600 is likewise impressive. When you look at the system raper that is Metro 2033 though, you're starting to see the GF 106 GPU's limits when all the bells and whistles are switched into the 'on' mode. Still, the equally tessellation-heavy program, Heaven 2.1 Benchmark, came back with a score that's almost on a par with the GTX 460 in SLI confi guration. All told that puts the twin GTS 450 setup ahead of almost every single GPU configuration out there, up to the GTX 480. That means that every other Fermi card must bow to this bargain setup, and AMD must be in one hell of a hurry to get its new lineup of graphics cards out of the stable door as soon as possible, because all of its GPUs are left in the dust by this pairing of two sub-£100 cards. That's the graphics taken care of, but the new Core i5 760 is a welcome addition to the mix too. We already know how well this beauty overclocks in a decent P55 board, and the PCO Group has them running at 4GHz. Cooked chips Unfortunately though, our review unit turned out to be a little flaky at this clockspeed, only giving reliable results once the BCLK had been scaled back a couple of notches to 3.8GHz. That's not a massive issue though, as it's still faster than the CPU in the wee CyberPower Game Cube. And the PCO Group will guarantee the stability of your overclock too with a full 48-hour burn-in period carried out on every machine prior to shipping. Unfortunately our review machine had a PSU failure during testing, and the time taken to fit and test the replacement meant there wasn't time for our rig's traditional burn-in. The PCO Group offers a free three-year collect and return warranty on its machines so in the event of an overclock not being stable you won't be out of pocket, and the maximum you'll be without your rig would be three working days. We dropped in one of our own i5 760s, and with the BIOS settings PCO Group's tech team gave us we hit 4GHz without a problem, so it was definitely the CPU itself that was the problem and not the setup. And with the new Corsair H70 closed-loop liquid cooler taken care of it, it's certainly not the heat stopping the previous CPU hitting the 4GHz mark. With that 1GHz+ boost in its stock clock frequencies, the i5 760 manages to provide impressive benchmark figures. Looking at the Cinebench 11.5 index score, it's only just short of a standard Core i7 960 running at 3.2GHz, and that's a quad-core CPU with Intel's HyperThreading tech offering eight threads of processing power against the Core i5's four threads. The other components propping up the Evolution 3D have obviously been picked with care too, hitting an almost perfect balance of power and affordability with a hint of future-proofing added for good measure. <img alt="The pco group evolution 3d" src="http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/Review%20images/PC%20Format/PCF%20246/PCF246.w_rev1.vento2_1-420-90.jpg" width="420"></img>The <a href="http://www.techradar.com/reviews/pc-mac/pc-components/motherboards/asus-p7p55d-e-pro-662877/review">Asus P7P55D EVO</a> motherboard was the obvious choice. Hitting a decent price with an SLI-certified mobo isn't easy, and this board is one of the few around for less than £150. Unfortunately, the price compromise has meant that there's neither of the new I/O interfaces available on this board, so there's no USB 3.0 or SATA 6Gbp/s. Asus is prepping a new revision with both new I/O, smartly titled the P7P55D-E Deluxe, which is due to come in slightly cheaper. So if you definitely want both then it might be worth waiting before placing your order. That said though, add-on boards with SATA 6Gbp/s and USB 3.0 ports are not that expensive and don't offer any significant drop in performance over motherboard-based chips. The future-proofing comes in the shape of the 850W Corsair PSU. That's more than enough to power this setup, and offers an upgrade path going forward. As you can see from <a href="http://www.techradar.com/reviews/pc-mac/pc-components/cases-cooling/power-supplies/corsair-memory-professional-series-gold-ax1200-717088/review">our review of the 1200W model</a>, the Corsair supplies are quality bits of kit. Compact and bijou My only real concern with the component spec of the Evolution 3D is the relative paucity of storage space. At 500GB it's not a great deal of capacity, especially once you start reinstalling your Steam back-catalogue, but it's not terrible. Still, in a £1,000 rig these days you would expect that with terabyte drives being relatively inexpensive, that's the minimum. I'm also not a massive fan of the Asus Vento chassis. I find the plastic tool-less design inside a little flimsy, and the clips holding down the PCI cards are not as solid as I'd like. But if the choice was ours and if we were trying to keep the spec to £1,000 we'd be sacrificing the chassis and the storage too. Hell, we'd build it in a shoe box if it meant we could keep this processor and SLI pairing. This month we've got two machines around the £1,000 sweet spot: this SLI marvel and the teeny-tiny GTX 460 Game Cube from CyberPower. Both offer great performance in two different fields, and both would be a sound investment. The Evolution 3D just has the edge in terms of performance. The twin GTS 450s have completely won us over in SLI trim, offering performance equivalent to the best Nvidia can offer for a long way short of the cost. Aesthetically, it's not my bag, but my PC is always out of sight under the desk anyway. It's what goes on onscreen that counts for me, and the speed at which this rig flies has got us hooked. This is the fastest machine we've ever seen for £1,000. If that's your budget, this is your spec.Related Links<ul><li><a href="http://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/techradar-s-reviews-guarantee-622749">TechRadar Reviews Guarantee</a></li><li><a href="http://www.techradar.com/reviews/pc-mac/pc-mac-desktops">Read more desktop PC reviews</a></li></ul><img border="0" height="1" src="http://rss.feedsportal.com/c/669/f/9809/s/f34cd64/mf.gif" width="1"/><div class='mf-related'>

Review: The PCO Group Evolution 3D

The £1,000 price point is rapidly becoming the sweet spot for decent machines. With prices on key components dropping, and brand new parts ...