Andy Wood

Do you want to help improve Windows Vista?

Windows Vista Customer Preview Program

We invite you to be among the first to experience the clarity that Windows Vista can bring to your world. The Windows Vista Customer Preview Program makes a pre-release edition of Windows Vista Ultimate broadly available to the public for the first time.

Note: This is beta code and should not be used in a production environment or on a main machine in the home. Beta 2 is intended for developers, IT professionals and technology experts to continue or begin their testing of Windows Vista. Before you decide to use Beta 2, you should feel comfortable with installing operating systems, updating drivers, and general PC troubleshooting. Some risks of using beta operating systems include hardware and software incompatibility and system instability. If you have concerns about installing this beta software on your computer, we encourage you to obtain the final release version of Windows Vista when it is available in 2007.

If you decide to install Windows Vista Beta 2, we would like to thank you for taking the time to test the product. Your feedback is an integral part of our development process. Thank you for being part of the Windows Vista team!

The Official Vista Beta Site

Now that the upgrade is done, all of the games and software is back to where it should be and the system appears to be humming away. The question is: Was the new video card worth it?

The above score is from the 7800 GTX

The above score is from the X1900 XTX

Numbers don’t lie, you can see that the new AT X1900 XTX is faster (slightly), so again was it ‘worth’ it. The price to performance ratio is favored towards the ATI side of the house right now.

With that said, I put the new card to the test. I hopped into some BF2 and saw no degradation in performance when I played a 3 solid rounds on Wake Island 2007. I then fired up COV and decided to check out some of the new Issue 7 content when I started to see spurts of lag as I was super speeding from one mission to another. This lag I didn’t happen with the 7800 and I did use the 7800 on the test server for Issue 7 testing too. Hmmmm

Almost 6 months ago, I upgrade the video card in the GamersCirlce gaming rig to the Nvidia GeForce 7800 GTX, now with the summer here and the release of a BF2 and COV content, it was just time to beef things up a little bit with the ATI X1900 XTX , plus my D drive was starting to show some wear too.

The above images are of the retail box and the new video card

ATI X1900 XTX (top) NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX (bottom)

The above images gives you a little comparison, you might be able to notice that the ATI doesn’t appears to be express a little lower profile and it shows when in the case too.

NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX (left) ATI X1900 XTX (right)

The above image give a little better side by side comparison, as you can see the 7800 has a higher investment in cooling versus the X1900

the Western Digital HD which was replaced too