DIGITAL L.A. TWO MAGS CONFIGURE `MAXIMUM' COMPUTERS.

Byline: David Bloom 

Maybe inspiration strikes simultaneously, but a couple of magazines have trotted out their visions of the ultimate computer in recent weeks.

Such exercises by serious computer geeks are fun to ponder because of what such dream machines say about where the rest of us will be in a couple of years.

Maximum PC put together a maximum machine that's pretty amazing. Then again, it better be: It costs a shade under $12,000, which would buy either an excellent used car or about 13 of the perfectly satisfactory Dell Dimension L computers advertised on the magazine's back cover.

At $899, the Dell features a sturdy 667-Mhz Pentium III processor, smallish 7.5 gigabyte hard drive and 15-inch monitor, speakers and decent CD-ROM drive. It's pretty good and a reliable enough buy for anyone with modest computing needs.

But ``pretty good'' isn't what interests the Maximum boys. So what ate the cash?

Well, three superfast hard drives, including a 75-gigabyte IBM device that looks like a bargain for serious space needs; a fast Pioneer DVD drive; two very fast Plextor CD-rewritable drives and a Plextor CD-ROM drive.

It has two 256-megabyte memory modules (at $990 apiece, where one is double what most people need), and not one but two 1-gigahertz Pentium III processors (at $1,100 each, again more than double most people's needs), to make everything go, in Steve Jobs' words about his own company's dual-processor Power Macs, ``wicked fast.''

The Maximum machine has other little goodies, like a Creative Labs Live Drive II that provides connections to and from all kinds of audio devices and Sigma Designs' Real Magic Hollywood Plus, which lets you play DVDs at high quality on your computer or television.

Some of the components are cheap, such as the Hollywood Plus ($70) and the Logitech First Mouse Wheel ($20). Others are reasonable, like the fine $250 Klipsch ProMedia v.2-400 speaker set. To Maximum PC's credit, the magazine also suggests budget-priced alternatives.

PC Upgrade magazine put together a more modest super machine specifically for gamers, centered around a 1-gigahertz AMD Athlon processor.

Unlike the Maximum machine, this is a box with a purpose: to play high-end games. That focus reduces the need for lily gilding (such as Maximum's dual recordable CD drives), cutting costs to a more reasonable (ha!) $3,199 (or three Dells plus copies of Diablo II and Deus Ex to get started playing).

To make pretty pictures, they relied on Hercules' 3-D Prophet DDR-DVI graphics card, which takes a big load off the computer's brain in generating all the demanding surfaces, lighting and shading of top-quality games. The Prophet is one of several graphics cards out there that uses the industry-leading GeForce chips from nVidia, combining two of them along with lots of dedicated memory. < They recommend Logitech's Wingman mouse ($99) and Mad Catz's Panther DX joystick ($39) to control the games, and ELSA's 3-D Revelator glasses ($59). So what does any of this supertech have to do with writing a letter to Grandma or checking your e-mail? Not a lot.

But truth is, these machines are where we're going, with powerful electronics capable of handling increasingly sophisticated entertainment of many kinds, supplanting or combining many of the devices we have lying around the house already. Consider these dream machines a peek at our reality, in a few years.

SITE OF THE WEEK

--Daily Anxiety: A spoof of the highly spoofable entertainment trade publication Variety.

--Where: www.dailyanxiety.com

--What's cool: A piece about Universal allegedly bringing in Dr. Seuss to help goose up the latest Shakespeare adaptation, complete with Geisel- worthy rhyming couplets (``I would not, could not, fall for you/I do not like the Montagues ...'')

--Features: The product of two veteran film and TV writers and their spouses, the site feeds the anxiousness a lot of entertainment folks are feeling as the possibility of three separate strikes in Hollywood looms. The site, cobbled together for very little, looks excellent and has a number of funny ``articles'' in its first iteration, though be warned that some of the humor is more adult-oriented. It's not quite the Onion yet, though that marvelous satire site has had several years to hone its spot-on send-up of pretentious daily journalism.

--You'll like this if: you're the sort who reads Variety with your Prozac within arm's reach.

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