Uh, the crappy drivers that vendors are writing (not writing) are hurting vista performance. It's an OS, not a graphics card driver.

Ummm... Dont you mean Crossfire instead of SLI?

@SomeoneUKno: Unfortunately the summary is correct. Looks like HP hacked an nForce SLI motherboard's BIOS to accept two ATI cards. I can't imagine that's good for performance...

@Stravos: Are you serious? Wow... Thats... Wow. If you're gonna stick with ATi cards, then stick with an ATi chipset. There's no use hacking (and possibly causing bugs) an nForce chipset that is used for nVidia cards with ATi cards instead... Or, they could be smarter and just use nVidia cards instead! :-P

Yeah yeah. Bring the flames, ATi fanboys!

'Graphics card wishes to draw a green line from 0,0 to 0,100. Allow or deny?'

'Allow'

'Graphics card wishes to draw another green line from 0,100 to 100,100. Allow or deny?'

.
.
.

thats like shoving an AMD processor into an 775 motherboard. WTF were they thinking?!?!?

I get Maximum PC... got it today, actually, have not read the review yet...
But I'm going to go on a limb...
Vista is OK for gaming, XP might be faster, but with today's PC's using high end Core 2 Duos or even Quad Cores (Q6600 = $250), given enough cores, it does not matter which is faster.
No game is written yet to take 100% load of every core, so the performance hit would be minimal.
Also, You know... 300 fps makes no sense.

As far as ATI... HP should have stick to Nvidia.

What a way to kill a good hardware....

@Stravos: it doesn't just 'look like', it's definitely the case.
That's an Asus Striker Extreme in there.

God only knows why, when there's the Blitz Extreme and now the Maximus Extreme which both utilise Crossfire/Crosslinx anyway and are built on Intel chipsets instead of the dodgy 680i the SE has.
And before you all have a go at me, I have a Striker Extreme and I've seen the support forum littered with the weeping shells of what were once human beings before they bought that motherboard...

@smokinjoefission: Its great when i read these brain-washed ass-hats who have completely eaten up every piece of marketing garbage they have seen and actually believe it to be true, or attempt to use a joke developed by these same gurus in a different context, while not realizing that after hearing it 1000 times during every single television program, has become stale and horribly humorless.

As many hardware sites have indicated, Vista performance for games is pretty close to that of XP, due to much improved drivers, which was a massive problem early in its release. Nvidia has done a fantastic job. ATI, while stable, always seems to perform poorly with newly released games. After a driver release or two, that performance is up where it should be.

Oh, and in the last 2 hours of using my PC, i have not had to answer that question once.

Enjoy Crysis on the Mac.

PC Gamer rated the HP Blackbird 002 model at 97% and gave it an Editor's Choice Award.

PC Gamer is a sister publication to Maximum PC.

It got higher 3dmarks than the Dell XPS 720 H2C model, higher FPS in Doom 3, and lower in FEAR and Half Life 2:Episode One.

It was only faster than the Falcon Northwest Mach V in 3dmark score, and was slightly slower in Doom 3 and FEAR (7 and 1 FPS respectively) and significantly slower in Half Life 2:Episode 1.

PC Gamer said the highs were:

"The slickest, most accessible case ever designed for gamers; curiously fast."

Lows were:

"Extremely Heavy; mild fan noise; can't turn off LEDs; doesn't cuddle in bed"

MB was Asus Striker Extreme

CPU Core 2 Extreme QX6850 overcloked to 3.67 Ghz

4GB of DDR2 1066 RAM

and 2 ATI HD 2900 XTX in Crossfire mode.

Oh, and they tested it with Vista Ultimate installed.

Oh... fogot to add.

PC Gamer's Bottom Line for the Blackbird is as follows:

"How do you get the highest hardware score in PC Gamer History? This is how."

Maybe I'm a noob, but I don't get the animosity over ATI vs. NVidia graphics. I don't even really see the difference at all between the two.

@pete_at_brandeis:

It's the same as saying there's no difference between an AMD 5000+ and an Intel Quad Core. Sure, they are both decent processors, but the Quad Core is flat out better. If you want to know why read benchmarks.

The fact that Doom 3 looks the same on both ATI and Nvidia cards is irrelevant (and honestly, does anyone still play Doom??). Try running Crysis on two 8800's or two 2900's. When Nvidia can run it at maximum settings on a 30" screen and ATI can't, that's where you get the difference. If you're not pushing your video card to its limits, then (duh) you won't care.

@sorrow24: To add to that... IMO a lot of the ATi stuff isn't made too well. I've had two graphics cards now go out on me that had ATi chipsets (my 9800 in my old laptop, and then my mom's X800 that came with her computer decided to not work anymore... No overheating problems, so it had to be the chip or card.) but yet with my nVidia stuff I have yet to see a card go out on me (and so far I've owned 3 of them.)

@SomeoneUKno: and I'm sure theres another person that will say that they've had an identical experience to yours, with the only change being that it was nvidia cards dying and ATi lasting long past upgrade time.

As far as the animosity goes between ATi and NVidia fanboys, both have had their ups and downs, and will continue to do so. They willeach be better than the other for a month or so until the other releases their new super $600+ card that provides the most minute performance tweak and you sure as hell better rush out and buy not just one but two or three right now for that super ultra performance boost. Suckers.

I really don't think that having vista impacts game preformance that much. IMO, it's more like 3-5 fps.

64 bit Vista with all the default services left in the originally installed state = SLOW AS HELL.

64 bit Vista used by a "non-idiot" who turns off all of the unneeded services and Aero features = FASTER THAN MY XP INSTALL WAS! (Using the same exact hardware.)

Get to work you lazy bastards! There are hundreds of Vista optimization guides out there. Stop being lazy and laying the blame at MS feet. You had to optimize XP to get it to perform, why is it you are unwilling to optimize Vista?

The question is could you pull out the ATI cards and swap in a couple nvidia cards?

@Abnormal: You would probably have to put the original asus bios on it.

It seems like their biggest gripe is with it being Vista, rather than the video driver bug. Sooo ummmm, why don't they just uninstall Vista and install XP, or better yet partition and then they could dual boot and really test the XP vs Vista performance. Seems like they are making a mountain out of a mole hill here.

A hardware review shouldn't be used to rant about an OS. The performance gap between a patched up vista system and XP is around 10% which is negligible and vista gives you DX10. What's the point spending a fortune on a top of the range system and sticking with dx9?

@marm0lade:

Actually you couldnt be any more wrong.

The motherboard was never designed to handle crossfire, and with crossfire in its amazingly stable state (read: joke), it was bound to fail.

Toss in two GTX's and you have amazing stability.
Or, if you want crossfire, use an Intel board. Its HP's fault for being stupid.

Vista's video card driver problems have been fixed. Stop speaking out your ass.