bigchump
01-24-2008, 02:33 PM
I thought I'd share my experience with Vista and system building with those who are contemplating doing such.
I have two identical systems:
I got most of this stuff from Newegg cheap.
ASUS P5N-E SLI
INTEL Core 2 Duo E6850
Dual Hitachi 320gig SATA/RAID 7200rpm.
Two LITE-ON DVD's
4 gigs Corsair TWIN2X2048-6400C5DHX 800mhz. w/heatsinks 4-4-4-12
NVIDIA 8800GTS 320mb.
500 watt P.S. (big mistake - use 750w or more for sli)
O/S Vista32oem Ultimate & Vista64oem Ultimate (both legal)
Both got to POST on first try!
Had a little problem with southbridge overheating, installed xtra fans in case and pci slot to fix that.
I decided to install O/S without any drivers just to see what would happen.
Vista32 installed, found my network(!) and upgraded itself without problems except the Nvidia i650 drivers windows installed were bogus. I formatted and reinstalled turning automatic upgrades off this time. I DL'd the mobo and graphics drivers from Nivida then let Vista upgrade itself. Everything ok.
Vista64 was a different story. It failed to install. Was hanging at 62% every time. I tried the ASUS drivers with no luck. So naturally I do the damn fool thing and start swapping hardware from my Vista32 machine. After lots of hair pulling I found out on Asus's forum that Vista64 doesn't like 4gigs when installing. I pulled two memory sticks out and it finally installed (sort of). Totally unstable without any mobo/video drivers and unable to DL drivers because it found my network but not the internet. So I have to DL the 64bit drivers on a 32bit machine (ironic?). After I got the drivers in I still needed one hand for the mouse and the other for the reset button. I did the automatic update thing and that was a big mistake. When one update "failed" it just kept installing other updates even though some of those apparently depend on the one that "failed". Format and reinstall again, this time with the mobo drivers and doing the upgrading myself one upgrade at a time. Everything ok now.
Bechmarks using 3dmark06 (no OC, conservative 5-5-5-18 lat.+auto defaults)
Vista32=10100
Vista64=8400
I used Vista64 because I wanted to port my horse racing app to 64 bits.
The joke is on me - Visual Studio 2008 Express doesn't do a 64 bit compile.
good luck
bigchump
I have two identical systems:
I got most of this stuff from Newegg cheap.
ASUS P5N-E SLI
INTEL Core 2 Duo E6850
Dual Hitachi 320gig SATA/RAID 7200rpm.
Two LITE-ON DVD's
4 gigs Corsair TWIN2X2048-6400C5DHX 800mhz. w/heatsinks 4-4-4-12
NVIDIA 8800GTS 320mb.
500 watt P.S. (big mistake - use 750w or more for sli)
O/S Vista32oem Ultimate & Vista64oem Ultimate (both legal)
Both got to POST on first try!
Had a little problem with southbridge overheating, installed xtra fans in case and pci slot to fix that.
I decided to install O/S without any drivers just to see what would happen.
Vista32 installed, found my network(!) and upgraded itself without problems except the Nvidia i650 drivers windows installed were bogus. I formatted and reinstalled turning automatic upgrades off this time. I DL'd the mobo and graphics drivers from Nivida then let Vista upgrade itself. Everything ok.
Vista64 was a different story. It failed to install. Was hanging at 62% every time. I tried the ASUS drivers with no luck. So naturally I do the damn fool thing and start swapping hardware from my Vista32 machine. After lots of hair pulling I found out on Asus's forum that Vista64 doesn't like 4gigs when installing. I pulled two memory sticks out and it finally installed (sort of). Totally unstable without any mobo/video drivers and unable to DL drivers because it found my network but not the internet. So I have to DL the 64bit drivers on a 32bit machine (ironic?). After I got the drivers in I still needed one hand for the mouse and the other for the reset button. I did the automatic update thing and that was a big mistake. When one update "failed" it just kept installing other updates even though some of those apparently depend on the one that "failed". Format and reinstall again, this time with the mobo drivers and doing the upgrading myself one upgrade at a time. Everything ok now.
Bechmarks using 3dmark06 (no OC, conservative 5-5-5-18 lat.+auto defaults)
Vista32=10100
Vista64=8400
I used Vista64 because I wanted to port my horse racing app to 64 bits.
The joke is on me - Visual Studio 2008 Express doesn't do a 64 bit compile.
good luck
bigchump