Show Case

It was decided to build our first Windows Vista* machine in this Antec model SLK3000B case, which came equipped with a 120mm rear exhaust fan. It was ordered without a power supply because we planned to gain some experience with SLI video card setup.

The front view of this case with the drive access door open. The louvered bottom portion of the bezel allows air intake for a front mounted intake fan, also 120mm. Positioned next to the floppy drive bays are the power and reset buttons. To the right of the buttons is a column of activity LED's. Not quite visible in this photo are the plastic fingers that serve as a door latch. From past experience, we aren't expecting this latch system to hold up very well.

Here the side panel has been removed revealing the roomy case interior. Drives to be installed in the upper bays, first must have rails attached after which they slide into the bay and snap in place. Floppy drives, if you even bother with them, are held in place with screws. Below the bays for floppy drives is a removable 5 drive assembly. Shoulder screws through rubber grommets/bushings hold hard drives in place. Notice the rolled edge at the front of the case. This feature coupled with the front edge of the side panel acts as a hinge making removal and replacement of the side panel a breeze.

Above is a view of the case stripped down for installation of the various components displayed.

With the components installed, it is well on the way to becoming a computer. At this point, installed devices include a 250 GB Western Digital SATA II hard drive, a CDRW/DVD Combo drive, two nVidia* GeForce* 7100 GS PCI-E video cards and a 120mm front intake fan. The processor is an AMD64 X2 4200+ with 2 GB system memory.

The power supply we chose to use is this 500 watt Antec Smartpower 2.0 unit. The reviews and various tech articles indicated that 350 watt power supplies were a bit light duty for an SLI system. Although previous systems we've built running dual core processors have been doing just fine with 400 watt PSU's, they were not SLI systems. PSU's rated at 1000 watts are available and a bit of searching might reveal even higher rated units but seem to be overkill for this desktop system. The point is just as much consideration should be given to the power supply as to other components of a computer system.

Another feature of this case, the side panel which has an adjustable air port and a latch system. Although this case was optimized for Pentium processors, the position of this port might contribute to the cooling of the graphics cards on a main board designed for AMD processors. Because the duct is adjustable in length, an 80mm fan can be mounted on the side panel and the duct then mounted on the fan to increase the over all cooling capacity.

Here it is with the side panel and bezel back in place and Vista installed. Unfortunately, the wait for drivers begins. Fortunately, there are not as many drivers missing as some critics suggested. The first visit to Microsoft Update took care of most of the drivers needed. A web search found drivers for the onboard audio component. Still to be obtained are the utilities for the main board, the Asus Probe utility and nVidia's nView utility. The fan speed and cpu temperature monitor isn't critical, however, the SLI capability of the M2N4-SLI main board can't be accessed without the nView utility.

This close up view of the monitor shows the new side bar gadget selection screen. This screen shows the Aero glass affect much better than windows with solid backgrounds. This configuration received a 2.8 on the Vista scale. According to the help files, the Windows Experience Index base score for the highest performing computers available when Vista was released was 5. The range is 1.0 to 5.9 and is based on the lowest rating of 5 categories, processor calculations per second, memory operations per second, desktop performance for Windows Aero, 3D business and gaming graphics, and disk data transfer rate. As would be expected from a machine lacking the proper drivers, the lowest scores were in the 2 graphics categories. Once the full graphics capabilities of this unit can be enabled the score should take a considerable jump. In the mean time, we may have a chance to do some swapping to check other video cards performance ratings.

Being in the middle of a project, we missed the release of ForceWare version 158.18 on May 2, 2007. This is a 30 some odd mb. download that resulted in boosting the Windows Experience Index base score from 2.8 to 3.0 when in single gpu mode. When SLI was enabled, Windows disabled both the graphics cards or since there was still video partially disabled the cards. This dropped the base score to 1.0 and disabled Aero and the Windows Sidebar gadgets as well. There is nothing like a 3 month wait for a major disappointment.

ForceWare version 158.24 WHQL was made available by nVidia on June 1, 2007. The new version gave the same results as 158.18. Since we have the SLI main board with Vista already installed, we will continue to wait for this company to come up with a solution. In the meantime, we will have to recommend avoiding the use of SLI enabled main boards. The results do not justify the extra cost of these motherboards or the time invested in checking for new versions of the ForceWare product. When and if this situation is resolved we will report the results here.

ForceWare version 162.22 WHQL (windows hardware quality labs) was made available for download on July 26, 2007. This driver version was for GeForce series 6, 7 and 8 gpu's (graphics processing units)with support for DirectX 9 and 10 as well as OpenGL. Hurray! nVidia finally released a working solution. That's the good news. The bad news is that SLI technology had no apparent affect on Vista. The tested computer still received the same Windows Experience Index it did when using just a single video card.

On a different note, I recently ran across a blog defending nVidia's delay in providing functioning SLI drivers by blaming the delay on Microsoft and their inclusion of video encryption in Vista. The author of this blog explained in great detail the problems in including this encryption. However knowledgeable the author might be about video cards, this person was either to lazy to get all the facts or stopped looking for the culprit as soon as the Vista/Microsoft name came into the picture and Microsoft being the authors favorite target received all the blame. Yes, Vista has some tough video encryption included as does any device capable of High Definition DVD playback. That's right, your entertainment center HD-DVD player has built in encryption technology as is required by the RIAA.

I know this sounds extremely pro Microsoft. However it may sound, the RIAA does require state of the art encryption and decryption. Microsoft delayed the release of Vista for nearly 2 years and made driver requirements known to all hardware manufacturers during the development stages of Vista. The question is if functional drivers could be produced 5 months after the official release date of Vista what were they doing before hand. It isn't like they didn't have plenty of time or warning. If manufacturers feel otherwise, then they should take notice that development teams are already working on the next version of Windows.

ForceWare version 163.69 WHQL was released on September 18, 2007. Having had a power failure that crashed the hard drive, it was necessary for us to down load new drivers. Unfortunately, the new drivers do not perform as well as version 162.22 and reduced the Windows Experience Index of this machine to a 2.8 from the previous 3.0. Needless to say, if we run across the 162.22 version we will be loading that version instead.

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