Windoze boxes

[Trev]

I'm running an Intel Core i7 920 in an Asus P6T Deluxe. Nothing's overclocked, so I'm not really taking advantage of what the Core i7 920 and my RAM are capable of doing. I disabled hyper-threading to get rid of stalls/pauses in both Vista x64 and Windows 7 x64, but I didn't really put any effort into figuring out why they were happening.

Overall, the combo is fine. I'm quite disappointed with the RAID5 performance on the ICH10R, but that will be a problem with all motherboards using that chipset. Need to switch a dedicated controller with cache and battery back-up.

I'm still using a GeForce 8800 GTS 512 for gaming. No complaints.

@LoadWB

A friend of my wife used to work in graphics driver development at Intel here near Sacramento (Intel has a campus in Folsom, just outside the city--worked there myself about 13 years ago). So, I'd disagree with you a bit on the software side. Intel's target market (general purpose graphics) is quite a bit different than AMD's and NVIDIA's, though.

[Trev]

When I first switched from a Matrox Millennium II AGP to a GeForce 256 DDR, I thought my monitor had gone bad. It's taken NVIDIA years to catch up to the quality of output on Matrox cards. I don't think I saw an actual improvement until I switched to a digital LCD, in which case the hardware behind the LCD is doing all the hard work.