Vista and Gaming...

If you can wait until summer to buy a new system I highly suggest you do so. I've purchased a couple of stopgap upgrades myself since I'm not doing any serious upgrading until '08 when many more options are available, and for less.

Take nVidia's 8k series. They only have DX9 support under vista and only beta DX10 support under which SLI is NOT supported. This is really worth noting if you are considering plonking down $600 for a GPU. As for a WQHL certified driver for DX10 is nowhere in sight and its release date is "to be determined" and that ain't good. My though is that G80's DX10 support could possibly be broken. The signs certainly seem to point to this otherwise what other excuse could nVidia have for not having a working DX10 driver for Vista upon release other than DX10 being broken in order to beat DAAMIT to the punch with their R600? I may be wrong and am just blowing smoke up your ass, but this is my though since I have followed this fiasco since the beginning and all signs point to this. Either that or it is just insanely difficult to develop stable DX10 drivers. Wait for alternatives or to see if G80 actually works as advertised. For now stick with what you have or unless what you have sucks then get a 7950 GT on the cheap, or a X1950 Pro/XT if you prefer the graphics firm formerly known as ATI.

And once again Microsoft sticks it to us and forces us to upgrade to Vista to get DX10 support knowing damn well they could have released it for XP. If it ain't broke don't fix it. And what is the Vole best at doing? Anybody remember Milennium Edition? I'm sorry but all that crap about DRM infections, and the tight-arsed EULA forcing me to *BUY* a new copy of Vista every time I upgrade my CPU and motherboard makes me extremely angry. That would make me want to switch to a Mac or Linux in a heartbeat if I wasn't a gamer.

As for quad-core CPUs, again I think a wait and see approach is warranted. Hell, even my two year old single channel, single core Athlon 64 3700+ is enough for pretty much any game or app these days. And it's especially enough considering what kind of games that you play. Yeah that will change this year but you shouldn't waste your money until there are more options on the table. Word 'round the campfire is that Barcelona and Agena have vastly superior floating point performance compared to Conroe and Kentsfield. What do games use more intensively than anyting? FP math, of course. Intel may rule the roost for the moment (and I tip my hats at those clever Israeli engineers that built the Conroe giving credit where it's due, and that it's the best thing Intel has made since the first Pentiums) but I think they're going to have a hell of a fight on their hands, even with Penryn and Wolfdale at 45nm. Not to mention the lower latency you will have when you have all four cores churning away working together - they won't have to snoop across the FSB whenever core 0/1 has to talk to core 2/3 or vice-versa. Better bandwidth, and being an FP monster methinks AMD will be the way to go IF and only if they deliver on their promises. At the very least it will be compeditive with Intel, at probably a somewhat better price.

Things will become much more clear towards the end of the summer so with this info - putting this long-winded post in a nutshell - I can only recommend that unless you're dying to play Crysis or such DX10 related madness at launch and it's a now-or-never type financial situation I say wait.

As for Home Premium, go to newegg and grab a OEM licence of Vista Ultimate - it's about the same price if you were planning to buy it at Best Buy or Fry's or such. Better safe than sorry you know. Personally I'm going to wait until I have the hardware to run Vista and the first service pack fixing the first thousand serious vulnerablilities and bugs is out before I even think of taking the plunge. Or maybe I'll download a cracked version off the net to "try before I buy."

I would go with Ultimate instead of home premium just for all the annoying things I could do with dreamscene

Sigh, use danny9894 instead of my lame last name plz

Nah I knew you either knew me in person or you just looked at my cpuid

The system you have right now is not bad at all.

Before you make the mistake of buying the NVIDIA 8800GTX, I would read some of the posts by people that have purchased the card on the nvidia forums. For the most part, they are not happy campers.

Here is a recent article about the drivers availability:
http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/arti [...] VzaWFzdA==

Over at the official Nvidia forum they had to close the thread about the 8800 card because of angry posts to nvidia. They just reopened a new thread about the card.
http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=24917

The thread on my card is still closed for the same reason. Hell, XFX closed the whole user forum.

You have a great rig right now and if you wait for things to mature especially with Vista you will save a lot of aggravation and will save lots of money in the process. Prices will come down quite a bit around June for CPU's and Video Cards.

Right now the best bang for the buck is the duo core because no one is writing code to use all four cores yet. Over at anandtech.com they just finished an in depth review of the performance of the new quad core vs duo core. Across the board,the cheaper duo cores out performed the quad in Gaming.

IMHO-the Vista bugs and drivers will take 6 months to a year to get worked out if ever because of the DRM issues.

I too agree with Mr Bluntman, wait until at least summer. His advice is well founded and the 8800 may not make your world spin but explode.

You must be confused, because the negative posts you are referring to in that thread was from pre-release vista when the 8800 DX10 drivers were NOT available. If you go look, you may notice that since release of vista (with the DX10 drivers actually available) there are ALOT less complaints.

The 8800 series are very nice peices of hardware, and are the best (by far) on the market right now. As for quad cores, games coming out this year will be coded use the cores.

Huh? *comment flies overhead*

At first the whole Windows Vista and gaming experience was horrible to say the least, I have a 7900GT and it did not work well when trying to play games in Vista.

But now it is all sorted thanks to the 100.59 beta drivers. On the first windows drivers every game I tried had big black patches appear, then on the nVidia released 97 drivers I had little errors all over the screen. This got worse if I tried to turn on FSAA, the entire screen would go crazy and if I couldnt alt + tab out then I had to restart the PC.

Uninstalled all of these when I got the 100.59 beta's, put them on and hey presto I have a happy PC again. WoW works fine which is probably good news to you as I see you mention it in your first post, I have tested it extensivly with a 12 hour run on Saturday and it held up great. CS:Source also works fine and so too does HL2: Deathmatch, the weird thing is HL2 itself seems to have an issue. Your ammo guage is in the wrong place and part of it is missing so you cant actually see how much ammo you have reserves but that might be fixed when 100.59 goes full version.

As for which version of Vista, I am using Ultimate 32bit at the moment, I have 2 gig of ram so messing around with 64bit at the moment wasnt needed. Because Dreamscene isnt around yet the only extra I really use is Texas Hold'em in the games but who knows maybe more good extra's will come along in time, I make sure to check everyday.

I get that bug every time I switch resolutions or AA settings on WinXP. On BOTH ATi AND nVIDIA hardware. It's a bug in Source methinks. Just toggle to some other setting and back to where you want it and it goes away.

Hi gamer,

I had a similar system to your P4 3Ghz, 1Gb ram + a 6800ultra (AGP)

I now have a E6600 CPU, 4Gb ram (800Mhz), 680i M/B, 8800GTX (just the one) and a raptor HD. No overclocking, just standard and no problems.

I'm stilling running with XP, cause im not sure if 64bit will be support for games. I do want to play Crysis etc when they do come out.

What I can tell you that BF2 used to run like a dog and now I can run everything on high details and its silky smooth and im one of the first in when a new map loads.

I also play eve-online and I have had 5 instances loaded with no problems and room for more. CPU's at 60% on each core.

It always get better and faster and cheaper if you wait, but if your game experience is lagging.... now is the time to buy.

you will love it!






The 8800GTX rocks

I installed Vista today(Home premium x64) i first read on a couple of forum to know about some problems users experimented during installation process. Well installation was a charm, no problem occured during it(maybe i am lucky), after i installed graphic and sounds cards drivers. First thing i wanted to look at was task switch in 3d mode (lol such a fancy toy) after that i was wondering what Vista is suppose to give me right now that XP isn't ?

Superfetch = Updraged version of Windows prefetch ?
Readyboost = good idea but why somebody would buy a 1gb usb stick to make this function work when you can buy 1 gb of DDR for almost the same price ?(The idea behing this feature is nice but dont worth a lot in every day real life use in my opinion)
Aero Glass interface = good new look for windows

do i miss something ?

Overall Vista experience = better then XP but putting a percentage on it i would give like 5% better lol

Problem encoutered so far

Games Enemy territory dont want to launch at first try giving an error and stop at the console, must run it as an administrator (left clicking on the executable)

Ain't being able to change in game gamma when in full screen(Catalyst 7.1 drivers or vista bug ?)

I have been able to launch everything i tryied so far altought if i am under x64 version this isn't bad at all