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OK, here I am, just call ma flamebait! I have just finished installing WinXP on my system with my new 8500DV on an Epox 8KTA3Pro MB with a KT133a chipset. After making sure that i have the latest drivers for all devices and tweaking the OS a little, it is the best system that I have ever owned. WinXP can be streamlined a little using a few tips and tricks I found at TweakXP and videoguys. The biggest improvements were found using X-Setup by X-teq. It puts all of the little hacks and registry edits into a nice little GUI. I used it extensively in Win98 and Win2k. It jst makes life a lot easier and you can undo anything you want.
It is just so solid and easy to get around in once you play with it for a while. Performance is impressive, though I have had a few lockups in a game that is riddled with problems anyway. Al of my benchmarks are great except for one, PCMark 2002. I get very high memory and HD scores, but my CPU resulsts are low for my system. I did some checking and it seems that the text search portin of the test is realy low and drops the scores accordingly. I tried it with all of the eyecandy off and same exact scores. I copared it to other systems of the same (uncluding exact same MB) and they all outscored me by a wide margin in test search. If that is the only thing that is slow, I can live with it. Sandra scored my whole system very high as well.
Capturing and editing is very nice. The real key here is the SC. It just makes life a lot easier with my HW. We all know about the KT133 problems with Creative and other cards. Considering it is using all SW compression for any format I drop no frames. Occasionally a few in the beginnning of a DVD MPEG2 capture then they disappear.
Just wanted to let you guys know that I have turned over to the darkside here and it ain't so bad. If you have an older card and am looking to upgrade to WinXP, it is pretty nice. Just make sure that you have a pretty stout system and go for it. If Matrox comes out with a good combo card, I will switch back, but for now they forced my hand. I am glad they did.
It is just so solid and easy to get around in once you play with it for a while. Performance is impressive, though I have had a few lockups in a game that is riddled with problems anyway. Al of my benchmarks are great except for one, PCMark 2002. I get very high memory and HD scores, but my CPU resulsts are low for my system. I did some checking and it seems that the text search portin of the test is realy low and drops the scores accordingly. I tried it with all of the eyecandy off and same exact scores. I copared it to other systems of the same (uncluding exact same MB) and they all outscored me by a wide margin in test search. If that is the only thing that is slow, I can live with it. Sandra scored my whole system very high as well.
Capturing and editing is very nice. The real key here is the SC. It just makes life a lot easier with my HW. We all know about the KT133 problems with Creative and other cards. Considering it is using all SW compression for any format I drop no frames. Occasionally a few in the beginnning of a DVD MPEG2 capture then they disappear.
Just wanted to let you guys know that I have turned over to the darkside here and it ain't so bad. If you have an older card and am looking to upgrade to WinXP, it is pretty nice. Just make sure that you have a pretty stout system and go for it. If Matrox comes out with a good combo card, I will switch back, but for now they forced my hand. I am glad they did.
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