Our $300 PCs are powerful enough to take on everyday workloads, but can they cope with Vista's requirements? It's all in the components.

argh, not again whats up with these articles?

when i read the title i was expecting a nitty gritty look at how the system would perform under windows vista.... not a random number chucked my way with 6 pages of crap text around it. should of just said heres the amd system, then pic of vista rating, then heres intels rating.

for christ sake what about your view point, how do the progs run, does one feel snappier than the other, what happens when the features are turned off? does overclocking the components make a difference to the rating even!

/rant

Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor is not available for 64bit OS systems.

given the discussion on the $300 PC @

http://forumz.tomshardware.com/har [...] 24875.html

it is hard to justify spending almost as much money for windows Vista as the PC itself (xp/vista varies from ~$100 to ~$300 depending on feature)...

so the bottom line is:

If you are building cheap, get a $100 video card and use your existing XP (in case you fried your other rig or something) or linux so to keep cost down. Get Vista when you are rich enough to get the parts to do the test (Vista upgrade advisor) then decide if you still want to have vista given it will suck on most if not all OpenGL games

Did you really expect a VIA IGP to be able to run anything other than XP decently?

This and the previous article we're Intel biased heavily.

Instead of a budget $300 build, let's see an article about pre-built budget PC's from makers like Dell, HP, Compaq, Gateway, E-Machines, Acer, etc.... you know the kind of $300-$400 systems people who spend that much on a computer actually buy.

Benchmark those in Vista and XP.

i am sorry but the K8M890 vga onboard does support Aero glass Please goto VIA web site and get the driver from there and Aero is supported on that card (not that well i must admit but it does work it gets an score of 1 i think on the score heh)

these reviews need reviewing before posting them by some one els sorry

i did not even bother to read the rest of the review once i got to that page but i continue reading now as i complaned

extra complant as its makeing the intel based system look all good agane bad review


if them systems are still built

please test with
http://www.viaarena.com/default.as [...] bCatID=164

never said it couldn't run Vista just said it couldn't run anything other than XP decently, and granted Vista without Aeroglass is just a pretty XP that eats more memory to use.

allso the price Should have the Vista priced in as well unless an illegal ver is been loaded on (asume OEM as no one in there right mind would pay for retail box)

XP be better for this system if your are trying to run Vista tho do not plan on running norton as your boltware anti virus try avg or some other free ones

Yes I'm afraid I have to post a couple of mistakes as well, hohum

Leexgx beat me to the first one the fact that K8M890 can run aero and the WDDM drivers are available.

Also the comment that the P4M890 is the pentium equivalent of the K8M890 is completetly wrong also, the P4M900 is the pentium eqiv of the K8M890 both sharing the Chrome 9 HC graphics core. The P4M890 chipset uses the older Unichrome Pro gfx core and as such will not run Vista.

well i have core2duo e6600 and 1gb ddr533 and when i run the windows assesment utility I see on the sidebar wich has a dual core performance monitor that the processors never get to more than 80 % and they're supposed to be on 100 % if your benchmarking I mean .

Potential Vista users should be strongly advised to research their particular setups beyond the Upgrade Advisor. It will tell you for instance it will run Nf2 but there is no support, or Soundstorm drivers. VIA chipsets unless 2006 or newer might also have issues, it's case by case. Again, the Upgrade Advisor can be wrong!

8O That's a lot of L2 cache!

Do you mean like how it tells you that the ATI ALl in WOnder cards are supported, but neglects to tell you that the Multimedia Center capabilities such as PVR and TV Tuner, aren't? Yes, this is partially AMD/ATI's fault, but the blame also lies with Vista, since as I understand it, it is vastly more difficult to enable these technologies in Vista.

I'm a bit dissapointed by the following statement "The Sempron 3400+, for example, is somewhat equivalent to a first-generation Athlon 64 2800+ (socket 754) or an Athlon XP processor (socket 462)."

This is true only based on processor power however the article made me feel like the author is stating that this computer is equivallent to one of a few years ago. This is not true becasue motherboards and chip sets vary. The AM2 motherboard is much more advanced than the socket 754 or 462 variety unless you have the high end motherboards (not what this article was about). The SATA issues alone will make installation a nightmare. Drivers are coming out but try to install Vista on a SATA drive without having the drivers in-hand because you're looking for a nightmare. Trust me, drop back to an IDE drive if you have an older computer and save yourself the headaches.

The other compaint about the article is the concentration on two specific items, Areo and the lame benchmark score.

cheap systems with 1 GB of RAM are still not common. (in europe)

It's possible to find systems shipped with Vista and 512 MB memory, try running Vista with that amount of memory.

I find it interesting that my processor, an Opteron 148 Venus gets the
same 4.1 rating as the Sempron.

I dual boot XP and Vista Home Premium and I've noticed it pegs my CPU to 100% more than XP.

Seriously..you need better than a $300 PC to do anything worthwhile with
Vista Premium. I suppose if you don't want to watch TV, listen to decent
sound or play games then your report makes sense..

This report is a disapointment. I'd like to see a report on how Vista craps
out your audio and Video and runs everything in software and craps out
even a high end PC processor.

I'd love to run Vista all the time but my Opteron 146 with 1 gig ram and
SATAII drive can barely keep up with audio and video encoding that
now have to be done totally in software. Applications that XP handles with ease cause stutter, dropped frames and audio that is lower in volume and
lacks EAX and 5.1 but still taxes my CPU.

It may all be solved by new drivers..well..some of it.

How about an article about how we were all super powered with XP and now have weak inadequate machines because Vista does everything
in software and requires the CPU to do all the work..

I could just throw my Audigy and Radion 1900xt in the trash now because
they seem to be useless for taking the load off the CPU.

I'd love an article comparing the experience on a mid level Home Theatre
PC XP vs Vista. Vista Home Premium is not ready for Home Theatre!

First off i would like to comment about vista being a memory hog/slow/drive thrashes constantly blah blah blah!

the culprits are services called superfetch and windows search. I don't care how good anyone or microsoft says they are. these 2 services SUCK!

and they gring the harddrive so bad you will have harddrive failure in no time.

i reccomend disabling as soon as the OS is installed.

vista is SOOOO snappy now. im using it on my laptop right now and i only have a amd turion 64 dual core at 1.6 gig. not a very fast CPU compared to my core 2 duo desktop but its fast now. fast enough that i can no longer tell the difference between vista and XP.

here are some very interesting articles about superfetch and windows search and why you should disable it.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000688.html

http://4sysops.com/archives/how-to [...] ws-search/

http://www.nsharp.org/09/vista-tips-and-tricks-1/

all great articles. read with care because very important points are made

after disabling it i cant tell the difference in speed between my laptop with 2 gig of ram and a 7200 rpm laptop harddrive by hitatchi or my core 2 duo desktop with 1 gig of ram and a raptor drive.

well the raptor drive i cand obviously tell the difference but performance is very similar!

SOOOOOOOOOOOOO glad i did this!!!!!

thanks microsoft i wasted 300 bucks on 2 gig of ram and a 7200rpm hitatchi drive for my laptop only to find out that i never needed them in the first place because all i had to do was disable 2 services which take like a minute!!!!!!!!

flakes --- i agree with you. What the hell is going on. Its rather disappointing that the review is coming down to a a number system that is based on a result from microsoft based software. This is hardly a third party review --- it would be nice to get something directly from the author rather than microsoft.

The article states "The system setups aren't exciting at all, especially when compared to Athlon 64 X2 or Core 2 Duo machines with powerful graphics solutions. But they do represent what the vast majority of users actually have"- end quote. I dont think that these two system represent the vast majority of what users "actually have". For example, most people (including myself) do not actually have 2 megabytes of ram nor do they have the cpu power you are representing.

Part of the title also says "even low budget pc's can run vista" --- this might be true but think having this in the title of the article is somewhat misleading as people who buy a budget pc should be running xp based on all information that I have; however, the article seems to want to convey they should be running vista. It may have been more accurate to place a statement saying that "low budget pc's should be running xp".

The article is really vague in a lot of areas --- there is really no defined testing protocol other than you were using microsoft software to perform the analysis. Your article also seems to compare that more recent cpu are equivalent to different past cpu's --- unsure of what all this about as this appears to be an assumption (not on actual testing) on your part.

My overall take of the article is that somehow microsoft influenced the writing so as to convey the message that low budget (as well as the vast majority of existing pc's) pc's can be used for vista while not conveying the message that xp is a better alternative under these circumstances.

On a general note, I have to wonder if this site is controlled by microsoft. Would just like to see impartial reviews ---- please start giving us some good non-biased reviews --- this is all I ask.

This article is really pathetic. not one single comment on how well vista actually ran on either system, just six pages of "we ran a program that gave us a score".......
But my biggest complaint is this

This is a tomshardware article, and you DONT WANT TO PUT IN BENCHMARKS??!!??
And id dispute the claim that they would run at much the same speeds, vista would be using more RAM meaning more page file usage meaning most of the applications would be running slower. and at the very least it would have given us an idea of how well vista would have actually ran on the PCs.
Can we start a vote to get this article taken down/rewriten??
*bleeeggh*

Good Eye! - It also states that an X800 - X850 doesn't have shader 2.0 to support Aero. I think they meant shader 3.0