Our second Windows Vista machine was a build-to-order computer. Lots of memory, plenty of speed and within a certain price range. DVD and CDRW but no floppy were also specified. As high performance graphics would not be needed, a single PCI-E video card fills the bill. This saved the cost of the extra video card required for SLI or Crossfire graphics, of the higher priced SLI or Crossfire main board and the extra heavy duty PSU necessary to run a dual video card system. These savings were used for 4Gb of 800mhz RAM and an Athlon64 X2 5400+ processor.
Although there isn't that big a choice on this site as far as enclosures go, it was used by the customer to decide on the case on the previous page. The Athenatech A412 comes with a 400 watt PSU, which has proved to be adequate in similar configurations. As getting a pic of the finished product slipped my mind, we'll have to make do with the link here plus a mention that as a new unit drives with black face plates were acquired.
Almost fully assembled, at this point, there are still a few minor touches we like to add before loading the operating system. The photo here is an overall view of the interior. Memory, processor and Radeon X1550 video card have already been mounted on the Asus M2N-E main board. We were glad to see that Vista drivers came in the box with the video card. The motherboard had Vista "Beta" drivers showing that manufacturers are beginning to catch up. Approved drivers for the main board were available online.
Here is a close up of the memory modules. Four gigabytes of PC2-6400 RAM, which is quite a bit more than Vista's minimum requirements.
From the label on the power supply, there should be adequate power.
This photo is a closer view of the CPU, video card and CPU support chips. The CPU, located top-center of this view, is the under the fan labeled "AMD" and a large heat sink. To the right of the CPU are the Ram sticks. To the left of the CPU you see a finned object with what looks to be a copper pipe coming out of it. This is actually a copper pipe that makes a curve around the CPU and disappears behind the video card. Because of the angle of view, you can't see that this pipe connects to the copper plate below the video card. This is a heat pipe and is used on this motherboard to cool the CPU support chips. Heat pipe technology, which until recently was used mostly in laptops and case modifications, appears to be seeing more use.
Unfortunately, I forgot to take a picture of this computer before delivery. On a support call I was able to get this pic with my cell phone. There was a software problem that needed to be straightened out. Kodak Easy Share to be precise. It just needed to be updated. However, even the update caused Aero to shut down. Hopefully, they will have this fixed soon. It seems that hardware manufacturers aren't the only ones slow in developing for Windows Vista. Although some manufacturers have been making Vista drivers available, there is one company that has as yet not released the software necessary to enable SLI on a Vista based system, at least not in a version that works universally. We are beginning to think that Microsoft catches a lot of flak that should actually be aimed at component manufacturers! A big clue in this area is that the bad guys have shifted from attacking Microsoft Windows vulnerabilities to targeting vulnerabilities in third party applications
At any rate this computer scored 4.1 on the "Windows Experience Index" using a low budget Radeon X1550 video card. So far it has been the video performance that has given the lowest score, which is the score used as the base in the Windows Experience Index. With that in mind, investing a few more dollars on the video card would have put the base score over the 5.0 mark.
Update 10/12/2007
Kodak Easy Share has been updated and now works with the Aero user interface of Windows Vista. We aren't sure when the update was released and the date above reflects the date we became aware of the update.
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