yea we'll be gaming till the weeee hours of the night....  I bought the UT3 retail copy and am looking forward to playing at the LAN. 

You should have gotten them when i told ya.  Mine kicks arse!

shoot, by then they might have a new card out.  does that mean you won't be able to play UT# at the next LAN.

I held out for the evga ssc's, I dont think I'll gt one till 08

I just put the 8800 GTS SSC 640 into my system, and it does really well! I can play everything at native resolution on my lcd (1680x1050) the thing with the SSC cards are that they have the same amount of Stream Processors (112) as an 8800GT  versus (96) on a typical 8800gts.

http://www.custompc.co.uk/news/601563/new-8800-gts-with-112-stream-processors-beats-8800-gt.html

also does anyone here game with Windows Vista (32/64bit). We have some good things coming down the pipe for SP1 that should bring some of the issues in check. I wanted to see what vista gamers are out there (if any) and what your system configs are, and how your performance is doing.

Tried Vista Ultimate (32b).  Too much of a resource hog.  Although I have not tried it with my new rig...aaaand probably won't.

Well here in lies the problem. Its based upon the memory usage. Vista (32bit) was designed around a base computing sector (The Home User), as with traditional 32 bit operating systems, you are starting to hit a wall, where your memory is truly becoming the key to performance.

Windows Vista (32Bit) Does a ton of "pre-fetching" of memory, and backloads the Operating system with a Huge Memory Buffer, Now when you go to run a game (which increasingly requires more and more memory), it hit that wall, basically where the Operating system &/or Game thinks the system has "run out of memory" and begins paging to disk. This usually occurs with machines configured with (1or2) gb of ram.

Now is you want to put a band-aid over that, you can get a "Ready Boost" enabled high speed USB Flash drive, and then the operating system will conduct its "pre-fetching" operations to that high speed flash, and free up more RAM for your extended applications.

But the silent killer at hand for an increasingly larger amount of gamers is the (32Bit) operating system itself.

Without writing an entire diary on the insufficiencies of a 32bit operating system, ill keep this short and sweet.

Applications & The Operating system operate usually within the first 2048mb of the system.

Although the performance benefits of 64-bit are somewhat dubious on the desktop, a 64-bit OS absolutely essential if you run applications that need to use more than 2 GB of memory. It's getting more common with games now a days.

If anyone want to discuss issues related to and/or see the performance benefits of a 64 bit OS, pm me or stop by at the next lan.

Cliff Notes  - If you want to run vista, skip the 32bit OS, buy 4gb of Ram and (if your hardware supports it) run Windows Vista x64.

Or stick with Windows XP, until you have the need to move up to an Upgraded OS.

Just remember this, When we made the transition from Windows 98/Millenium to a Windows 2000 Code base built on the NTFS Platform, we hit a huge wall of resistance from users & corporations, it took some adoption time to get used to the in's and out's of the operating system. Hell even hardware manufacturers were not writing drivers for their hardware without some prodding, and that took a while. 

Vista will get there, SP1 holds alot of improvements, but still wont deal with "older" hardware. Its a Next Generation OS, looking ahead to further pc improvements, the standardized use of Multi-Core Processors, etc.

XP x64 is not too shabby if I say so myself.

Quote from: IcarianX on November 26, 2007, 07:52:29 AM

Cliff Notes  - If you want to run vista, skip the 32bit OS, buy 4gb of Ram and (if your hardware supports it) run Windows Vista x64.

Or stick with Windows XP, until you have the need to move up to an Upgraded OS.

There in lies my problem.  I don't have $500+ to a) get the 64 bit version ov vista ultimate and b) get 2 MORE gigs of ram for a system I just built.  Windows XP plays the games just fine and I think I will stick with it regardless of the DX10 support.  Also, the readyboost functions that Vista boasts, really don't provide too much of a performance boost when it comes to games. 

Granted, Vista has its benefits:  it's...pretty, fun to use IF you already know the ins and outs - I was VERY frustrated that my windows vista shares weren't really sharing unless I turned the blank passwords policy OFF, which was NEVER documented (at the time) by M$.  Had to find that one out on my own.

Bottom line, why should we HAVE to buy more ram just to get the OS to run smoothly.  XP does that already with some un-needed services turned off (which most were in SP2 anyway)  But to each their own.

There is definitely not a need "yet". It should be on mainstream support  for another 1-3 years, which is basically an entire pc lifecycle. Some folks have a "need" to be on the latest cutting edge os/hardware, but you are completely right. XP does exactly what you need it to, If you want to squeak more out of the operating system look into the x64 edition of Windows XP Pro.

Some good comments here, dont shoot the messenger, im just gathering impressions (not pushing product) on what the current vista coverage is out there, and taking some notes back to the SP1 Product Team (as ive been asked to do). On a side note. Our major corporate customers who deployed Vista to a subset of their users absolutely love it! I guess the difference there is they are using Operating system centric products (such as Office/Internet Explorer/etc)