I installed Windows Vista on my spare X86-64 box. The interface changes seem nice but unfortunately, I have a GeForce3 Ti200 in that box and it’s not a DirectX 9 part. It turns out that only DX9 and higher video cards are supported as anything better than “Standard VGA” video card. Too bad, since I was looking forward to checking out the “Aero” interface with all of it’s graphical bells and whistles. I hadn’t installed any apps on it before I found this out so I can’t comment on performance. I was interested in possibly keeping Vista on there for “MAME(Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator)”:http://www.mame.net/ and some serious “performance”:http://aarongiles.com/?p=198#comment-6782 “gains”:http://aarongiles.com/?p=201 that are coming from running in 64 bit mode.
“Fry’s”:http://frys.com/ is opening soon in Roseville. Maybe I’ll get a Core Duo 2 with a low-end DX9 card that they’ll be sure to have on sale when they open.
*_Update_*: Turns out I do have a DX9 compatible card, a “GeForce FX 5200”:http://www.nvidia.com/page/fx_5200.html that was in my Windows box that I pretty much only use for ripping DVDs and “Skype”:http://www.skype.com/. I swapped cards and re-installed Vista. The visuals are impressive, but it’s not snappy. I’m sure it works really well with a $400 card. 🙂
