Hardware 24 - A Computex-Free Zone

Hardware 24 - A Computex-Free Zone

Posted on 1st Jun 2011 at 15:37 by bit-tech Staff with 4 comments

Paul is joined by Harry and Clive to talk about the latest in the world of PC hardware. This was before Paul jetted off to Computex 2011, so we're debating everything from Nvidia?s naming scheme to Intel?s latest chipset.

For example, why has Nvidia called its latest GPU the GeForce GTX 560? Surely that?s just confusing, what with the GeForce GTX 560 Ti? Also, what?s with the non-standard clock speeds for the GTX 560? The Zotac GeForce GTX 560 1GB Amp! is within the reference range of frequencies and yet it's faster than a stock-speed GTX 560 Ti 1GB, despite its supposedly lesser rank in Nvidia?s range.

We also moan about how this makes our jobs a lot harder, as it?s difficult to recommend one GPU over another without getting into some very techy discussion. Even we struggled to stay interested as we delved into GPU architectures, the merits of having more resources versus higher frequencies and which card is right for certain sizes of monitor. Sheesh. Maybe in future we?ll just avoid the issue and continue to recommend the MSI N560GTX-Ti Twin Frozr II/OC.

We also talk about Intel?s latest Z68 chipset. The hybrid graphics via Lucid Virtu isn?t great at the moment, but Smart Response is better.

Harry also likes the look of Intel?s 3D Tri-gate transistors, claiming that ?they will bring the rain? to AMD? in the face.? Also, here?s a much better explanation of Moore?s Law than we could manage.

Please leave any questions here, or email us at podcast@custompc.co.uk.

As ever, the bit-tech podcast features music by Brad Sucks, and was recorded on Shure microphones. You can download the podcast direct, listen in-browser or subscribe through iTunes using the links below. Also, be sure to let us know your thoughts about the discussion in the forums.

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SteelSeries announces exclusive Diablo III peripherals

SteelSeries today announced a co-branding partnership with Blizzard Entertainment. The result is the SteelSeries Diablo III family of products: the Diablo III Mouse ($70.00 or ?70.00), the Diablo III Headset ($120.00 / ?120.00), and two Diablo III QcK mousepads ($15.00 / ?15.00). All of them were co-designed with technology, hardware, and illumination features that support the look and feel of the third installment of the game. They will be available at game launch, both online and in select retail locations.

The SteelSeries Diablo III Mouse features a laser sensor with up to 5,000CPI, seven ergonomically positioned buttons (all can be remapped) with a guaranteed lifespan of 10 million clicks (more than three times the click lifespan of an average mouse), and an ambidextrous shape with a matte grip coating. In true Diablo III style, the SteelSeries mouse is enhanced with "demon red" illumination in three areas on the mouse: the scroll wheel, CPI Indicator, and Diablo III logo. You can also customize the logo with ON/OFF illumination and three levels of pulsation.

The SteelSeries Diablo III Headset has an over-the-head suspension design that provides players with leather earcups that comfortably surround the ear and reproduce an optimized soundscape through 50mm driver units. The matte-black finish and the "demon red" illumination are meant to match the aforementioned mouse. SteelSeries' first illuminated headset will also offer players ON/OFF illumination and three levels of pulsation options. Coming from a total of 18 LED lights throughout the headset, the red glow is seen in two places each on the right and left side ? surrounding the edge of each ear cup, and the three Diablo slashes. The headset will also include SteelSeries' signature: uni-directional retractable microphone-system for clear voice communication through Battle.net. Its in-line volume and mute controls are on the double-braided nylon cord with a USB connector.

Last and probably least, the SteelSeries Diable III mousepads come in two high-quality cloth designs: Barbarian (deep reds and earthy tones) and Witch Doctor (cooler green and purple tones). The SteelSeries award-winning QcK mousepads have a non-slip rubber base to keep the mousepad from moving and an optimized texture surface featuring Diablo III artwork.

"The level of excitement for the Diablo III release is massive," Kim Rom, SteelSeries CMO, said in a statement. "When the opportunity was presented to partner up with Blizzard for a new family of co-branded peripherals, we knew that they had to be engineered for this particular type of gameplay by being both durable and able to bring out the Diablo III theme onto a player?s desktop. The mouse offers both simplicity for new players and unprecedented durability that will support the series? distinctive mouse-driven gameplay, while the headset optimizes the high, spine-chilling snarls of otherworldly creatures and the booming lows of a barbarian battle cry. Together, the headset and mouse will help immerse players into the game through their extended comfort, compelling designs and high performance."

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Why Didn't Apple Launch a Music Streaming Service?

Many expected Apple to announce a streaming music service today that would allow users to stream songs from iTunes to multiple devices, much as they do with Internet radio services such as Pandora. Apple did launch "iTunes in the Cloud" at its annual developers' conference, but the emphasis was not on streaming music. Instead, as part of Apple's iCloud offering, iTunes will let users buy music once and have it automatically downloaded to multiple devices, as well as backed up on Apple's servers. Apple CEO Steve Jobs made no mention of a Web interface through which users could access this music.

Apple certainly has the technology to launch a streaming music service. In December 2009, it bought the music startup Lala, which sold "Web songs" that users had the right to stream through their browser but not download. In March, Amazon began offering a Cloud Drive that let users access music from multiple devices or stream it through a Web interface. Google followed suit, announcing a music service to allow users to access songs through the Web.

It is possible that the record labels from which Apple has to license the music it sells were unwilling to allow music streaming. But another important factor that could have deterred Apple is mobile carriers' movement away from unlimited data plans. A streaming version of iTunes could have hugely increased the amount of data that carriers would be expected to carry. The largest carriers in the U.S., AT&T and Verizon, both cancelled their unlimited plan in June 2010. T-Mobile and Sprint both still offer unlimited plans. Today, T-Mobile says, the average 4G smart-phone user consumes about a gigabyte of data per month. That number could change significantly if a popular service like iTunes truly moved to the cloud.

"When the iPhone launched, it had no Netflix client, no Rdio, no Pandora, no streaming baseball?and AT&T was still almost brought to its knees," says Stephen O'Grady, an industry analyst at RedMonk. "Carriers witnessed what happened to AT&T. The days of unlimited numbers appear to be numbered no matter what."

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?Culture Warrior? Looks to Broaden the Battle

Rather than discuss his strategy, he critiqued the question.

?Had I not run for re-election in 2006, you wouldn?t ask me that,? he said during a moveable interview in Manhattan as he left a fund-raiser at the Union League and walked across town to Pennsylvania Station, where he was catching a train back to Washington.

Some candidates, he said, did not run for re-election because they would have lost, and yet no one asks them about it. ?Look at Mitt Romney,? he said. ?He served for one term as governor of Massachusetts and didn?t run for re-election. Why??

Mr. Santorum, 53, a former two-term senator, announced his candidacy for president on Monday at the picturesque county courthouse in Somerset, Pa. It is near where his grandfather, who immigrated from fascist Italy, first worked in the coal mines, and the backdrop is meant to visually reinforce his message that hard-working people came to this country to seek freedom and opportunity.

But the setting may also be a questionable choice; Mr. Santorum lost Somerset County, which usually votes Republican, in his 2006 re-election bid. In fact, his viability may be one of Mr. Santorum?s biggest challenges as he joins a field of six declared candidates ? Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Gary Johnson, Tim Pawlenty, Ron Paul and Mr. Romney.

Mr. Santorum said his chief advantage was that throughout all of his campaigns, four out of five of which he won, he remained true to his conservative principles.

?My feeling is, losing an election is not the worst thing that can happen,? he said. ?The worst thing that can happen is not standing up for what you believe in when you?re running for that election.?

Mr. Santorum believes strongly in what he calls the culture of life. He is so well known as a crusader against abortion and same-sex marriage that it may surprise some voters and the news media that his interests in the Senate also included national security, foreign policy and entitlement programs.

?I have one major piece of legislation I passed, on partial-birth abortion, but I had two on foreign policy ? the Syria Accountability Act and the Iran Freedom and Support Act, both of which were opposed by Bush and took me a year or more,? he said. He added: ?I spent the last four years at the Ethics and Public Policy Center giving lectures all over the country on radical jihadism and the ?Gathering Storm of the 21st Century.? I haven?t done squat on moral, cultural issues.?

Nonetheless, the social issues are the ones that fire up the segment of the Republican primary base to which Mr. Santorum most appeals. And he has yet to address fully the issues that likely voters in a general election tell pollsters are most important: jobs and the economy.

His core message now is his belief in American exceptionalism, a philosophy that he says President Obama does not share. The Obama presidency, he said, ?has been a disaster? in almost every respect.

Mr. Santorum has been laying the groundwork for his campaign for some time, beginning with trips to Iowa in October 2009. He has made 14 visits to Iowa, 17 to New Hampshire since April 2010, and 15 to South Carolina since December 2009, a combined total that may surpass that of any other candidate. He has a staff of almost 20 people.

The work brought him early success among the particularly conservative voters in South Carolina. In April, he won a straw poll at the Greenville County Republican Convention, in one of the most evangelical regions of that first-in-the-South primary state. And in May, he won the straw poll at the state party?s dinner, which he was the only presidential candidate to attend.

He also got credit for showing up at the party?s first presidential debate last month in South Carolina. Mr. Cain was proclaimed the runaway winner there, however, and he has also won straw polls by groups that might have been naturals for Mr. Santorum: at the Tea Party Patriots convention in February and the Conservative Values Conference in Iowa in March.

He could lose further ground in that niche if candidates like Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota and former Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska enter the race.

Early polls suggest that Mr. Santorum is gaining little traction among Republican primary voters, though he has spent most of his career in politics. Perhaps his most significant victory came in 1994, when, at the age of 36, he toppled an incumbent Democratic senator, Harris Wofford.

But his loss in 2006 to Bob Casey Jr. was ?very damaging to his career trajectory,? said Christopher P. Borick, a political scientist at Muhlenberg College. ?He was too extreme, too much a culture warrior.?

Tom Jensen, a Democratic pollster based in North Carolina, said that Mr. Santorum consistently registered ?in the zero to 2 percent range? in most states, and even in Pennsylvania, he was running in fifth place.

?He?s not going to have a lot of resources,? Mr. Jensen said, ?and more dynamic candidates are going to be tapping into his niche.?

?The only sign of hope for Rick is what has happened in the last month to Cain, who surged after the debate,? he said. ?That?s the only place Rick is going to get exposure, in the debates.?

Mr. Santorum said that the decision to run for president had been hard, especially because he has seven children, from a 3-year-old with special needs to a 20-year-old in college. But those children also inspired him to run.

?I fear for the future of the country,? he said. ?If I have the ability to shape it, then what kind of dad am I that I didn?t do that, didn?t make the sacrifices that I thought would make the country better??

He called himself a ?plodder? and said he would simply keep plugging away.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: June 6, 2011

An earlier version of this article omitted Ron Paul from the list of declared presidential candidates.

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Blog - Where Did Triton Come From?

One of the puzzles over Neptune's moon Triton is its retrograde orbit: it moves in the opposite direction to the mother planet's rotation.

Many of the small outer moons of Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus also have retrograde orbits, almost certainly because they are captured objects.

But Triton is different. It is the seventh largest moon in the Solar System, bigger even than Pluto. So explaining its origin is not as simple as saying it must be a rock that flew too close. And yet that's what many planetary geologists believe.

The one good look we've had of Triton came in 1989 during the Voyager 2 flyby. It turns out that Triton is an icy body, probably with a metallic core. And it has a thin nitrogen atmosphere

It is also geologically active. One of Voyager 2's most astounding discoveries were nitrogen geysers erupting from Triton's surface. This surface is also relatively smooth, meaning the craters must be have been covered relatively recently.

The current thinking is that Triton was not a rock but probably a Kuiper Belt object that was somehow pushed Neptune's way. But since we don't really know what Kuiper Belt objects look like, it's hard to tell.

So Bruno Christophe at ONERA - The French Aerospace Lab in Chatillon and a few amis want to go and have a look. Their plan is to send a spacecraft to fly past Neptune, take a good look at Triton, and then fly on to find a Kuiper Belt object to study. If they look remotely similar, then that'll back up the idea that Triton really is from the Kuiper Belt.

That's not a bad problem to solve in a single mission (although the choice of Kuiper Belt object will obviously be crucial)..

At the same time, Christophe and co want to use the mission to study gravity at great distances from the Sun. Their idea is to throw some light on the possibility that gravity is somehow different at large distances from the Sun, something that various theories predict and that the Pioneer space probes seem to have experienced, in an effect called the Pioneer anomaly.

That's an ambitious medium sized mission (about 500 kg) .Christophe and co proposed their Outer Solar System Mission to ESA last year in the hope that it would also attract funding from NASA and launch in the 2020 timeframe.

Sadly it seems to have missed the cut this time. ESA announced its medium-sized mission candidates in February and OSS wasn't in it. That's understandable given the similarities to Pluto Express, which is currently en route for a fly past with the dwarf planet and then heading to an as-yet-undetermined Kuiper belt object.

But a journey to Neptune ought to be on the cards at some point in the future. Triton is spiralling into its mother planet. Some 3.6 billion years from now, the giant moon is destined to be torn apart by Neptune's tidal forces, and so will eventually forming a ring.

Which means ESA better get a move on.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1106.0132: OSS (Outer Solar System): A fundamental and planetary physics mission to Neptune, Triton and the Kuiper Belt

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Internet Week in New York City: Three exhibits you can?t miss

As spring melts into summer, there?s been much discussion around New York City?s blossoming tech scene and you can feel the energy in the air as you walk through Union Square.

This morning, I joined a gaggle of Internet innovators for the official start of Internet Week in NYC, a festival of dozens of offbeat, visual events that will bring the Internet to life. (Insert joke about every week being Internet Week. It?s true, but this week there?s free coffee ? the hallmark of any truly special occasion.)

The week?s installations give a wonderful taste of the past, present, and future of the Internet.

The Past

The exhibit I looked forward to seeing most was Digital Archeology ? a walk-thru ?museum? that featured long-forgotten gadgets, web pages, and Internet browsers ? accompanied by a copy of that year?s most relevant WIRED magazine covers. Notably absent was web burnout Julia Allison?s 2008 cover (pictured right).

Over two-dozen now-defunct websites are revived and on display ? appearing on whatever vintage hardware was hot at the time of the sites? launch. Code was drudged up from years ago in order to maximize the browsing experience. The exhibit allows you to experience 1995?s Word.com (one of the earliest and most influential e-zines of the ?90s); the self-destructing website created to accompany Aronofsky?s 2000 film ?Requiem for a Dream?; and more recently, Burger King?s 2004 interactive ?Subservient Chicken? campaign.

This is one instance in which rose-colored glasses are not an illusion ? the early Internet was the Wild West you remember it to be. You?ll dream of resurrecting your iMac G3 for weeks.

The Present

The ?Can You Draw the Internet? gallery gives great insight into the various ways we envision the Internet. UK-based digital agency Saint partnered with ArtWeLove, Deviant Art, The Mayor?s Office of Media and Entertainment and The NYC Department of Education to challenge artists of all ages to depict the Internet using various mediums.

Artwork was submitted by famed artists like Seth Indigo Carnes, Shelter Serra, Shaun Friesen, Douglass Rushkoff and Josh Harris, and is displayed alongside a number of submissions chosen by the exhibit?s sponsors.

The CYDTI exhibit ?freeze-frames? our ideas about the Internet as a tangible object in 2011 and could become an artistic way of archiving Internet culture going forward. Pieces are available on sale through ArtWeLove.com. All proceeds will be donated to The Fund for Public Schools and will benefit arts education in NYC public schools.

The Future

In efforts to collect images for a viral campaign, the interactive ShareThis exhibit asks attendees to grab a whiteboard and share what sharing means to them. The team will snap your photo and stream it directly to their Facebook Page, satiating the egos of tech wunderkinds and media pundits alike ? in real time!

The real ego boost comes later this summer when the photographs are used as part of a music video. If that?s not reason enough to get your picture taken, they?ll hook up participants with free food at tonight?s Internet Week Opening Party.

Also, in case you don?t already know, be sure to read our post on: Why New York City?s tech scene is thriving.

Are you attending Internet Week? What do you look forward to seeing?

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/us/2011/06/06/internet-week-in-new-york-city-three-exhibits-you-cant-miss/

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Hardcore gamers react to Microsoft?s heavy Kinect focus at E3

TNW is not a publication that covers games, gamers, or gaming culture too often, but there are exceptions. We kept an eye on Microsoft today at its E3 keynote because it was important enough to warrant coverage from any watchdog of the company.

We?re glad we tuned in as it was rather eye-opening. Microsoft laid out its strategy for the future of console gaming: the Kinect, the Kinect, and more Kinect. The whole ordeal was a never-ending parade a Kinect-infused gaming.

No one at TNW is big on console gaming, so we were somewhat ambivalent to the new trend. But as it turns out, those who do love console gaming, the people who have owned an Xbox 360 since they first came out, are not ambivalent. Nor are they happy. They seem, in fact, to be up in arms over the Kinect and its, in their view, encroachment into their world.

We sashayed over to the Gaming subreddit, which has over 500,000 members, and took an image of their response to the Microsoft keynote. What follows is a screenshot of the front page of reddit.com/r/gaming as of this moment. Everything that is boxed in red is either a Kinect diss, or a negative reaction to the overall Microsoft E3 demonstration:

We could have gone on, but that was as much as fit into a single browser page load. To supplement the above image, here are two of the best cartoons from the subreddit that we found. Given their massive ?upvote? support, we suspect that their message has high resonance among the members of /r/gaming, and thus gamers in general:

Title: What Xbox is Really Trying to Say [source]:

Title: Microsoft E3 tl;dw [Source]:

That the most hardcore Xbox fans are miffed at how seriously Microsoft is pushing the most ?casual? element of its gaming platform is not surprising. The level of vitriol is.

Sound off in the comments: do you like the Kinect, or just want a dang controller?

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2011/06/06/hardcore-gamers-react-to-microsofts-heavy-kinect-focus-at-e3/

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Thoughts on Clutter and Junk

Thoughts on Clutter and Junk

Posted on 5th Jun 2011 at 11:50 by Joe Martin with 24 comments

I?ve been playing Star Wars: Jedi Academy lately. I didn?t play it when it first came out, but good word of mouth and a budget Steam price proved hard to resist. Overall, it?s a pretty good game too, although I?ll never be as effusive about it as my pals. One thing I can?t get over, though, is how incredibly dated the game looks.

It?s been hard for me to pin down exactly why Jedi Academy feels so dated, as the graphics actually hold up very well for a seven year old game using the twelve year old id Tech 3 engine. Lately, I?ve come to think that it?s the sparseness of the levels that makes it feel archaic. There are too many empty desks in the cantinas, too many barren walls; there?s not enough clutter in the world.



The effect that level clutter has on the feel of a game can be significant. One of the other games I?ve been dipping in and out of lately has been the original SiN, which manages to feel a lot more contemporary than even Jedi Outcast, despite having been released years earlier and using the previous id Tech engine. Why? Because the world seems more populated and involving; there are mugs on tables, books on shelves and posters on walls. It doesn?t change the action at all, but it fundamentally alters your impression of the world.

The importance of clutter isn?t new. I still remember when my young friends and I got our hands on the original Quake shareware. We loved it and played it to death once we overcame our fear of its murky, gothic castles. The only game that bested it was Duke Nukem 3D which, despite being uglier on a pure technical level, was set in a place far more engaging to lazy young minds.

Carmack and Co. may be able to make gorgeous 3D castles, but only 3D Realms would think to stand suits of armour and hang tapestries in the hallways. That was how I used to think of it, as a kid.


Nowadays, nearly all games seed their levels with an appropriate level of junk. It?s one of the forgotten benefits of the more powerful technology in modern computers. We?re used to smashing bits of furniture with stray bullets in Modern Warfare or scouring through medicine cabinets for painkillers in Left 4 Dead. Even relatively modern games can get this wrong, however.

The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion is one of the worst games I can recall in this regard. It was a good game and I have many fond memories of it, but when I look back I don?t immediately recall high points such as the Brush With Death quest. Instead, the first memory that comes to mind is that I must have spent hours of my life just picking up and selling ladles, clay plates and cloth-covered pots. None of these items were good for anything at all and Oblivion wouldn?t have lost anything by not featuring them, yet Bethesda seemed ready to drown players in this junk.

A lack of clutter may make a game feel outdated, but too much of it can get in the way so much that it ends up defining your game. Surely there?s got to be a happy medium?

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Motorola Xoom overclocked to 1.7GHz

The Tiamat kernel has been updated to make it possible to overclock the Motorola Xoom further than ever before. Version 1.4.4 will let you push your Xoom from 1GHz to 1.2GHz, 1.408GHz, 1.504GHz, 1.6GHz, and even 1.7GHz. The Xoom was pushed to 1.5GHz back in February 2011, and only recently overclockers managed to achieve 1.6GHz and 1.7GHz.

Pushing your device to the limits doesn't work for everybody, but it is supposed to be pretty stable. If you manage to pull it off, you will see 70 MFLOPS in Linpack, 1480ms runs in SunSpider, and Quadrant scores approaching 5,000.

You can grab the source for all the Tiamat kernels over at GitHub. For more details and instructions for this particular overclock, head over to the XDA Developers forums. Remember that you are doing these modifications at your own risk and if something breaks, you can only blame yourself.

The Motorola Xoom ships with Android 3.0, but has an Android 3.1 update available for it, (both codenamed Honeycomb) running on Nvidia's Tegra 2 processor, 1GB of DDR2 RAM, 32GB of onboard storage (expandable via SD), a 2-megapixel camera on the front, a 5-megapixel camera with dual LED flash on the back, a micro USB 2.0 port, HDMI out, 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, as well as Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR. The 10.1-inch tablet has a 1280x800 display resolution. Battery life is said to peak at about 10 hours of video playback. The device will launch in Q1 2011 with 3G functionality, later upgradeable to LTE 4G, and will launch with a LTE 4G model in Q2.

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Steeper Pullout Is Raised as Option for Afghanistan

These new considerations, along with a desire to find new ways to press the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, to get more of his forces to take the lead, are combining to create a counterweight to an approach favored by the departing secretary of defense, Robert M. Gates, and top military commanders in the field. They want gradual cuts that would keep American forces at a much higher combat strength well into next year, senior administration officials said.

The cost of the war and Mr. Karzai?s uneven progress in getting his forces prepared have been latent issues since Mr. Obama took office. But in recent weeks they have gained greater political potency as Mr. Obama?s newly refashioned national security team takes up the crucial decision of the size and the pace of American troop cuts, administration and military officials said. Mr. Obama is expected to address these decisions in a speech to the nation this month, they said.

A sharp drawdown of troops is one of many options Mr. Obama is considering. The National Security Council is convening its monthly meeting on Afghanistan and Pakistan on Monday, and although the debate over troop levels is operating on a separate track, the assessments from that meeting are likely to inform the decisions about the size of the force.

In a range of interviews in the past few days, several senior Pentagon, military and administration officials said that many of these pivotal questions were still in flux and would be debated intensely over the next two weeks. They would not be quoted by name about an issue that Mr. Obama had yet to decide on.

Before the new thinking, American officials were anticipating an initial drawdown of 3,000 to 5,000 troops. Those advocating steeper troop reductions did not propose a withdrawal schedule.

Mr. Gates, on his 12th and final visit to Afghanistan as defense secretary, argued repeatedly on Sunday that pulling out too fast would threaten the gains the American-led coalition had made in the 18 months since Mr. Obama agreed to a ?surge? of 30,000 troops.

?I would try to maximize my combat capability as long as this process goes on ? I think that?s a no-brainer,? Mr. Gates told troops at Forward Operating Base Dwyer. ?I?d opt to keep the shooters and take the support out first.?

But the latest strategy review is about far more than how many troops to take out in July, Mr. Gates and other senior officials said over the weekend. It is also about setting a final date by which all of the 30,000 surge troops will be withdrawn from Afghanistan.

A separate timetable would dictate the departure of all foreign troops by 2014, including about 70,000 troops who were there before the surge, as agreed to by NATO and the Afghan government.

Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American commander in Afghanistan, sounded a cautious note about the state of the war in a telephone interview on Sunday. Although General Petraeus said there was ?no question? that the Americans and the Afghans had made military progress in the crucial provinces of Helmand and Kandahar in the south, he said the Taliban were moving to reconstitute after the beating they took this past fall and winter.

?We?ve always said they would be compelled to try to come back,? General Petraeus said, adding that the Taliban would be trying to ?regain the momentum they had a year ago.?

General Petraeus declined to discuss the withdrawal of American forces in July or the number he might recommend to the president. Late last week Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that General Petraeus had not yet submitted his recommended withdrawal number.

The decisions on force levels in Afghanistan could mirror how Mr. Obama handled the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq. Senior Pentagon officials noted that after Mr. Obama set a firm deadline for dropping to 50,000 troops in Iraq, he then let his commanders in Baghdad manage the specifics of which units to order home and when. The argument over where to set those ?bookends? promises to be one of the most consequential and contentious of Mr. Obama?s presidency. It also has major implications for his re-election bid.

David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt reported from Washington, and Thom Shanker from Forward Operating Base Dwyer, Afghanistan. Elisabeth Bumiller contributed reporting from Washington.

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