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680 watts of power is actually reserved for the CPU and other major peripherals like the motherboard and optical drives.

Honeycomb grill for ventilation is pretty conventional, but note the blue power switch that also lights up when it’s on.

The cables can get rather messy, even with the velcro cable ties included by FSP. Modular is really the way to go.

Manufacturers have always tapped the aesthetics factor as an avenue for product differentiation and in recent years, this approach has extended even to seemingly unglamorous internal components, like the humble workhorse that is the PSU. Faced with the choice of including flashing LED lights or LCD displays to compete against other brands, FSP has gone for the understated option of having a blue housing for its new 700W PSU, the Epsilon 700. Even the fins of the fan inside the PSU is a light shade of blue to complement its exterior.Not that it doesn’t feature any LED lights at all, since the power button at the back has a blue LED in it. We didn’t really fancy the plastic shade of blue though, and we think it is really going to be an acquired taste. In any case, most users would be more interested in the capabilities of the PSU and the looks are just a bonus. Here is where the Epsilon 700 gets serious. It’s More than Just Blue The Epsilon 700 supports the latest ATX12V and EPS12V standards and comes with power connectors that fit the newest processors from both AMD and Intel. There are also four separate 12V rails, each rated for a maximum load of 18A and two PCIe power connectors dedicated for graphics cards. Unfortunately, the Epsilon lacks a modular cable design, meaning there will be a large bunch of cables (albeit sleeved) dangling freely from the PSU; less than half of which the average user would probably utilize since there are six pairs of SATA and peripheral power connectors all together. The unused cables then take up unnecessary space in the chassis and can contribute to ventilation issues if not properly managed. Thankfully, FSP has included Velcro cable ties just for this purpose. Ventilation for the internal components of the PSU is aided by a beehive grill at the back. A 120mm smart fan does the active cooling and its speed varies according to PSU load. FSP didn’t provide us with any hard numbers for the noise output but our naked ears would place the Epsilon 700 on par with the competition for silent high-performance PSUs.

Certification Champion Just like how job seekers bolster their resumes by taking up certification courses, so do manufacturers. Firstly, the Epsilon 700 is on NVIDIA’s official SLI-Ready list for power supplies. According to NVIDIA, it is capable of powering a pair of GeForce 8800 GTS graphics cards. A GeForce 8800 GTX SLI setup however is not recommended, as even the total 700W output on the Epsilon is not sufficient for that GPU class.Besides that, the Epsilon is as environmentally friendly as a PSU can get, being both RoHS and WEEE compliant. So when the time comes to toss this PSU, it won’t generate undue amounts of toxic electronics waste. Closely related to the environmental credentials is the issue of power efficiency and here, the relatively high 85% rating on the Epsilon is worth mentioning. According to FSP, the Epsilon 700 consumes less than 1W of power during standby mode. Together with an active power factor correction (PFC) of 0.99, FSP has done almost everything possible to ensure that the Epsilon 700 is as energy efficient and environmentally friendly as possible. Perhaps the next move would be for the Epsilon 700 to undergo and pass the new and more stringent 80 Plus efficiency certification. Our Thoughts There aren’t that many PSUs on NVIDIA’s SLI-Ready list and less so for those capable of powering their latest high end GeForce 8800 series. The FSP Epsilon 700 is one of those powerful PSUs that is actually certified up to the GeForce 8800 GTS SLI. Of course, it would be better still FPS bumped up the specs to meet the requirements for the GeForce 8800 GTX SLI, but 700 watts of power is already immense for today’s needs. The Epsilon scores well in terms of efficiency and its pricing of S$205 (~US$133) certainly makes it a very attractive PSU. Having a modular cable design would have been a great bonus, but its exclusion is understandable and doesn’t detract from its overall value.

DFI ICFX3200-T2R/G

DFI brings the highly anticipated ATI RD600 chipset to the enthusiast. Indeed there is already quite a buzz in the forums concerning this board, but is it really the ultimate Crossfire motherboard or is the aging Intel i975x still king?

Introduction

Diamond Flower International was originally founded in 1981 and over the years DFI has established themselves as a top tier motherboard manufacturer competing with ASUS, abit, and others. DFI is known particularly for their LANParty and Infinity series motherboards. Indeed their UV reactive color schemes are something you’d be hard pressed to forget after seeing them. DFI is also well known for building motherboards that are not only brightly colored, but highly overclockable and packed full of innovative features.

The ICFX3200-T2R/G has been a long anticipated release from DFI featuring the ATI Crossfire Xpress 3200 (RD600) chipset for Intel CPUs. It also uses already released ATI SB600 south bridge chip that came to market earlier this year. The ICFX3200-T2R/G supports the Intel® Core™2 Extreme Quad-Core / Core™2 Duo / Intel® Pentium® Extreme and Intel® Pentium® D processors. . Following Industry trends the ICFX3200-T2R/G requires only a few components to create a working machine. The required components are: Socket LGA775 CPU, DDR 2 memory, power supply, drives and a video card. DFI integrated the following components into the ICFX3200-T2R/G 1 ATA-133 port; 1 floppy port; 10 USB ports (6 on the backplane and 2 headers supporting 2 ports each.) ; 8 SATA 3G ports; (four on the SB600 and 4 on the Promise controller); 2 GigE Ethernet port; Onboard Realtek ALC885 8 Channel Audio Codec; Coaxial, S/PDIF In/out; 2 IEEE1394 ports (1 on backplane and 1 via header) and of course standard PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports.

Main Specifications Overview:

Detailed Specifications Overview:

Packaging

The packaging is nothing special. It’s the standard fair we’ve all been seeing for years. The board is effectively protected during the shipping process and that’s really all you need. Granted nicer packaging and bundles are something we’ve come to expect in premium boards.

Board Layout

The board layout is almost perfect and there are only a few annoyances with the layout. All of which are minor. The SATA ports for the Promise controller are located in a somewhat inconvenient place. The DIMM slots don’t allow the removal or installation of memory with a video card installed. The 24 pin ATX power connector is well placed. The 8 pin connector isn’t. It can be quite challenging to connect this once the board is in the case and when the IO shield is installed. There are a lot of fan headers on the board which is always nice to see. Additionally the Firewire and USB headers are relatively close to the front of the board which makes cabling easier. The expansion slots also are very well laid out. Typically in dual video card configurations where each video card takes up two slots you are lucky to have one PCI slot left over. In the case of the ICFX3200-TR2/G, you would have two PCI slots left over. The only downside to this is that it will be almost impossible in most cases to install three dual slot video cards in the event that GPU physics processing pans out. Installing a third card would also make two of your Promise SATA ports useless. IDE and SB600 SATA ports are well placed as well.

The CPU area of the ICFX3200-TR2/G is clear of obstructions and the largest heat sink and fan units should fit without issues. Water blocks should also be a breeze to install as well. In my testing I used a Thermaltake Big Typhoon which is actually very large. I had no problems installing the Big Typhoon on the ICFX3200-TR2/G.

The board has 4 240 pin DDR 2 DIMM slots and they are located directly in front of the CPU socket as you might expect. Unfortunately, you can not install memory with video cards installed in the primary PCIe x16 slot. This is a typical failing of most modern motherboards. It’s a minor annoyance, but something I wish more manufacturers would avoid.

The north bridge is located just to the left of the CPU socket. There is a large copper heat sink on the north bridge. It’s a plain copper heat sink and has no heat pipes or fans attached to it. Unlike NVIDIA and Intel chipsets, the ATI Xpress 3200 remains cool to the touch even while overclocked. This is quite amazing as it runs considerably cooler than other high end chipsets. ATI claims that the north bridge only requires 9w of power and is quiet efficient. It would certainly seem that their claims are quite accurate.

The south bridge is located in between the first two PCIe x16 slots. The south bridge is cooled passively like the north bridge and always remained cool to the touch like the north bridge did. It’s location isn’t ideal for water cooling, but you really don’t need to water cool the south bridge while overclocking and certainly not in this case due to the lower temps provided by the SB600.

The ICFX3200-TR2/G has 3 PCIe x16 slots, the first and second operate at x8 speeds when two graphics cards are used in Crossfire mode, and the third slot operates at x2 speeds. There are 3 PCI v2.2 slots as well.

The ICFX3200-T2R/G includes the following ports on the backplane: 1 PS/2 mouse port; 1 PS/2 keyboard port; 1 IEEE1394 port; SPDIF out and in port; 6 mini-stereo jacks; 2 RJ-45 ports and finally 6 USB ports.

Samsung Ultra Smart F700

It appears that Samsung will be another name thrown in the hat for direct iPhone competition. They plan to showcase the Ultra Smart F700 at next week’s 3GSM World Congress.

Mobile phone makers have been scrambling to match the iPhone, unveiled last month by Apple CEO Steve Jobs. The device, which will be available starting in June, marks the iPod and Macintosh computer maker’s entry into the mobile phone business.

Sony Computer Entertainment America might have to cut in half the expected allocation number of the highly-anticipated PlayStation 3 game consoles for the market of North America, according to some analysts. The launch of this scale further indicates that the entertainment giant failed to product even half of a million game consoles for the mid-November launch.

Analyst PJ McNealy of American Technology Research said in a recent note to clients that according to his estimates Sony Computer Entertainment America only managed to ship 125 – 175 thousand of the PlayStation 3 game consoles to North America for the launch date on the 17th of November, 2006. That said, the analyst believes that Sony is unlikely to supply 2 million PS3 units in Japan and the North America in calendar 2006.

“After further review, our research indicates that Sony’s PS3 opening weekend shipments were below our already lowered expectations, while Nintendo’s Wii numbers remained in-line… [Sony’s shipment] number is below our previously lowered expectations of 250K to 300K. We previously expected Sony Corp. (SNE) to be able to still make a calendar year 2006 North American and Japan shipment number of 2 million, but those numbers are now under review,” PJ McNealy is quoted as saying by GameDaily.biz web-site.

Back in September SCEA said that only 400 thousand of units will be available at launch in the USA/North America and 100 thousand would be shipped to Japan. Meanwhile, the product launch in Europe is postponed till March, 2007. According to reports, since then the company has further cut allocation for its domestic market to 88 400 units and currently it is said that only up to 175 000 units were shipped for Canada, the U.S. and Mexico.

If both numbers are correct, then in the best case scenario Sony managed to ship only about 263 thousand of PS3s on the market for the launch, two times less than it planned in September, when it said that 100 thousand units would be available in Japan and 400 thousand units would be shipped to North America markets at launch. Therefore, the reports about leading retailers in the USA failing to receive the expected number of the PS3 consoles are not surprising.

“We will continue to monitor the frequency and volume of SNE’s shipments to retail over the next 33 days or so ahead of Christmas, as well as the context of SNE’s ship-in numbers being a factory floor-invoiced number as of December 31st. To be crystal clear, we don’t expect it likely that SNE will update any of its hardware numbers before it reports its December quarter in late January. We believe that the December NPD report of North American November retail hardware is shaping up to be 125k to 175k, but outside of NPD and other local (Japan) market reports, we expect SNE to remain mum and focus on delivering units to retail,” Mr. McNealy said.

Sony PlayStation 3 console is based on the Cell processor developed by IBM, Sony and Toshiba, the RSX graphics chip by Nvidia Corp. and will be equipped with Blu-ray optical disk drive, a hardware part, which is merely available today.

A picture of the graphics card that is claimed to be a board based on the code-named graphics processor R600 from ATI, graphics product group of Advanced Micro Devices, has been published by an Asian web-site. The board seems to be huge and is said to have nearly extreme demands for power.

The picture that that has been leaked shows a special “long” version of ATI’s code-named R600-based graphics card aimed at original equipment manufacturers and system integrators. The version designed for DIY marker will be shorter, according to the report.

VR-Zone web-site claims that there would be two versions of ATI R600 XTX: one is for OEM/SI and the other for retail. Both feature 1GB of GDDR4 memory on board, but the OEM version is 12.4” long, whereas the retail is 9.5” long. The power consumption of the AMD R600 graphics card is 270W for 12” version and 240W for 9.5” version. The difference between the boards is unclear.

Specifications of ATI R600 published by a web-site earlier resemble specs revealed by some other sources back in mid-2006, but are not fully similar:

• 64 4-Way SIMD Unified Shaders, 128 Shader Operations/Cycle;
• 32 texture mapping units, 16 raster operation units;
• 512-bit memory interface full 32 bit per chip connection;
• 230W thermal power envelope;

The web-site also claimed that the next-generation graphics chip from AMD’s graphics division formerly known as ATI Technologies will support so-called GPU clustering, which allows to install 2ⁿ number of GPUs (4, 8, 16, 32, etc), though it is unclear whether this is something new, as ATI’s graphics chips supported multi-GPU capability for professional solutions from companies like Evans & Sutherland for many years now. In addition, Level505 reports that the R600 chip is compatible with “draft DX10.1 vendor-specific cap removal” application programming interface, something, which is unlikely to be utilized for a substantial amount of time.

Officials for Advanced Micro Devices did not comment on the news-story.

Taipei, Taiwan, February 8, 2006 - Since its début at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, the exceptional ASUS-Lamborghini VX2 has impressed the world with its sensational design surpassing all notebooks in the genre, creating a noble class of its own. ASUSTeK Computer Inc. (ASUS) today unveils the final details of the VX2 specifications.

The New Transport Movement
Based on the latest Intel® Centrino® Duo Mobile Technology, Windows® Vista™ operating system and NVIDIA GeForce Go7700 with 512MB video memory graphics power, the VX2 raises the bar on performances all-round. With new levels of sensory pleasure users can enjoy an enhanced computing experience with blistering speed for both work and play.

Visual Feast
The 15.4-inch high resolution glare-type and high brightness widescreen displays vivid colors and sharp details with zero bright dot guaranteed. Exclusive ASUS Splendid Video Intelligence Technology integrates and synchronizes different multimedia data sources to reduce noise and conversion rate. Viewers will enjoy vivid displays with improved image contrast, brightness, skin tone and color saturation with true brilliance.

Solid Privacy Protection
Data security is guarded with built-in fingerprint scanner that reads from the live layer of skin, preventing common skin surface conditions from impairing scanner accuracy.The exclusive ASUS Security Protect Management (ASPM) controls access to the device and network. Users can choose to setup multi-factor authentication requirements for different security levels while enjoying the Single Sign On (SSO) one-time login convenience without compromising security integrity.

Ultra Connectivity
The VX2 accommodates the need for a quick connection of peripherals, power and communication devices. A built-in high-resolution 240∘swivel webcam and microphone offer wire-free video communication without the hassle of external connections. Incorporated Intel® Next-Gen Wireless-N solution ensures wireless Internet access wherever reception is available. Bluetooth 2.0 enhanced data rate provides data transfers at a rate that is three times faster than the standard Bluetooth for increased connectivity and synchronization between digital devices.

Long Lasting Battery Life
Mobility is further fueled with extended battery life that empowers better productivity. ASUS Power4Gear eXtreme power management automatically adjusts CPU speed according to system load. Offering up to 4 operation modes that are designed for gaming, watching DVD, listening to music and word processing, this innovation effectively extends battery life up to 20-25%, providing a reliable and continuous operation power on the go.

Specifications
Intel® Centrino® Duo Mobile Technology
- Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor T7400
- Mobile Intel® 945PM Express Chipset
- Intel® Next-Gen Wireless-N
Microsoft® Windows® Vista Ultimate Edition
NVIDIA GeForce Go7700 512M
SATA HDD 160G
DVD-S-multi Lightscribe
DDR2 667MHz 2GB
3xUSB; VGA-Out (D-Sub); TV-Out (S-Video); IEEE1394; Card-Reader 8 in 1; Line-In; μ-DVI ; Docking Port (hot swappable)
Built-in 1.3M pixel 240° swivel webcam for wire-free video
Dimension: 36.3 x 26.3 x2.5-3.8 cm

Sales of movies on Blu-ray discs have surpassed sales of motion pictures on HD DVDs in the USA, a market study by a market tracking agency claims. But that is not a surprise: Sony has bundled some PlayStation 3 game machines with a BD movie and included a voucher for another Blu-ray disc, essentially shipping several hundreds of thousands Blu-ray movies for free.

A recent market research report from Nielsen VideoScan claims that the numbers for the week ending January 7^th demonstrate that for every 47.14 HD DVD movies sold, there are 100 Blu-ray movies sold, but on the following week, ending January 14^th the amount of HD DVDs sold would be 38.36, for every 100 Blu-ray discs sold, PSX Extreme web-site claims.

This is not the first time when a research indicates about Blu-ray outpacing HD DVD sales. According to 20^th Century Fox Home Entertainment, a studio that exclusively supports Blu-ray format, Blu-ray discs started to outsell HD DVDs in late December and by early January there were 3.5 BDs sold on every single HD DVD movie.

HD DVD manufacturers – primarily Toshiba and Thompson – said they shipped about 175 thousands of HD DVD players in 2006. But while the Blu-ray camp led by Sony Corp. did not indicate how many players were sold, it is known that Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. shipped one million PlayStation 3 gaming machines in late-2006 – early-2007.

Many of the PlayStation 3 game consoles included Talladega Nights movie on Blu-ray and/or a voucher to purchase a Blu-ray movie for free, meaning that there were several hundred of thousands of Blu-ray movies purchased for free during the period.

Blu-ray disc fiercely competes with HD DVD format to replace conventional DVD in future. While Blu-ray offers larger storage space for content, HD DVD drives and discs are easier and cheaper to produce.

Mitsubishi HC5000 Full HD 1080p LCDTV

Managed to get hold of the Mitsubishi HC5000 projector today. This is one of the first few projectors to use the D6 LCD panels from Epson.The specifications of the projector are as follows: Full D6 1920×1080 native resolution x 3 LCD panel Inorganic LCD panel (less likely to degrade vs traditional organic panels) Separate DVI and HDMI input Component input VGA input (doubles as 2nd component) S-video input composite video input motorized zoom lens motorized lens shift motorized focus supports 1080p50 1080p60 1080p24 1080i50 1080i60 720p 480p 480i 576p 576i Built in Realta HQV deinterlacer Setting up the system was pretty easy. Loved the motorized zoom, lens shift and focus controls on the remote. A lot less twiddly than the manual adjustment on the Panasonic AE700. And at max zoom, I was pretty amazed I could match about the same size as the old AE700 which was supposed to have a 2.0x zoom lens (vs 1.6x? on the HC5000). Thought I would have had to compromise for a slightly smaller projected image. Damn, I never expected a quantum leap over my old 720p Panasonic AE700 but this new projector really just wowed me out of the box. Contrast is really good over my older unit. And the image just look more punchy, more 3D-ish. All those posts about not needing 1080p? No way. There really is a difference. I have a sneaky feeling it isn’t as inky black as the DLP unit at Jags, but then this is on a grey wall and not on a screen. With no calibration utility (still waiting for HD DVD Essentials), I could only calibrate by gut feel. Dialed in sharpness to lowest possible setting, dialed down contrast a decent amount, adjusted color down a little and then dialed up brightness a tad. And the projector is virtually silent in operation. Running even in low lamp mode feels much brighter than my AE700. I was running the AE700 in low lamp mode with about 1000+ hours usage. I don’t remember the AE700 ever looking this contrasty.. even when new. I still don’t have a good solution for the PS3 BluRay with my current set up since I never got around to laying HDMI/DVI cables (done in 2003) when I was renovating the place. At the moment, I have an old Yamaha RXV1500 as a component switch (Shinco EVD and XBox360 with HDDVD) and also upscaling video sources (mainly just SCV set top box) to component video out to the projector. I also have an HD MediaBox (PixelMagic) over VGA. These components are in the customized AV rack next to sofa. Projector is in a built in cabinet above the sofa on the upper shelf of the cabinet. Lower cabinet housed a Denon 1920 DVD player hooked to my old AE700 over HDMI. Audio was carried over a coax cable (originally planned as a composite video cable). I replaced my Denon with the PS3. PS3 no coax digital audio out, so audio duty is handled by a makeshift optical cable running loose from the PS3 to the front optical input of the amplifier (dangling). Not pretty or ideal but it works. May have to look for an optical to coax converter tomorrow. Definitely a big wow watching BluRays on the bigscreen. Not entirely sure why but I felt the picture looked more detailed than on the Amoi. For some reason MPEG2 BRs looked softer on the Amoi lacking the detailedness(?) of HD DVDs on the same display (Amoi). With the HC5000, even the MPEG2 BRs looked pretty good. Of course Click 1080p trailer with VC1 still looks like the best reference material on the PS3. HDDVDs from the X360 even at 1080i on component looked as detailed and as gorgeous as BR on 1080p HDMI. The stairs scene in the Vatican in MI3 which shimmered in some displays at 1080i, played back properly on the HC5000. Even Initial D EVD on the Shinco looked way better than I remembered on the AE700. Next I tried some SD stuff over cable (composite video to Yamaha AV amp, then “upscaled” to interlaced component). Just did some quick channel surfing, but overall the deinterlacing seems better, and less prone to artefacts. Picture seems much sharper and clearer with details I never noticed on the AE700. Not entirely sure if this is the work of the Realta HQV chip or if this is because of the added contrast and resolution. Next up was the HD MediaBox over VGA. Surprised that I could output in 1080p over VGA. Wonder if X360 VGA@1920×1080 output will work on this… Tested mainly the DIVX 640×350 clips with similar results as with SCV. Any downsides? I could have sworn I heard an audible click when I switched between Dynamic Iris modes. Maybe it is cos the unit is much quieter than the AE700. Then again, the AE700 never had additional Dynamic Iris modes. It was just on ar off. And there might have been once or twice I thought I saw the DI adjustment. But this could have been the source material so I can’t entirely be sure. As if by fate, my HD and BR versions of Superman Returns arrived today. Can’t wait to put them side by side.

What’s New Since RC1? While we saw a great deal of changes between our initial review of Windows Vista Beta 2 and Release Candidate 1, it should come as no surprise that there have been far fewer changes between RC1 and the final version we are looking at today. For better or worse, RC1 was the last chance for Microsoft to implement any changes in Vista that were design changes; everything since then has been in the realm of last-minute polish and bug fixes. As a result, certainly Vista is in better shape than ever before, but at the same time it means that design issues we identified have not been resolved. Given that, prospective users of Vista are going to find that our previous complaints about the User Account Controls still stand. We still find it’s a good idea and a major improvement over the lackluster security features of previous versions of Windows, but even with the improvements Microsoft has made to it, it’s still too annoying from a power-user perspective. When Vista first entered widespread public testing about a year ago, a series of screenshots were circulated showing the worst-case scenario for the number of operations required to permanently delete a single file. At the time it was six operations ranging from confirmation of the delete to granting security permissions to empty the recycle bin. To Microsoft’s credit they’ve reduced that somewhat, but we can still replicate that situation and come up with a worst-case scenario that takes four steps. Two of those steps are the required confirmation for deleting the item and then emptying the Recycle Bin, but the other two are security confirmation steps and while it’s admittedly nit-picking, it’s overly redundant to require two security steps to delete a file; this makes it twice as hard as it is under any previous version of Windows. UAC security will be accepted up to a point, but even one more operation than is necessary is going to quickly cause UAC to end up disabled by those who know how to do it. Click to enlarge Similarly, launching an application that requires administrative rights is still more difficult than it needs to be. As we touched upon this briefly last time, with the launch of Vista a lot of common 3rd-party applications will continue to require administrative privileges to run correctly, and it will continue to be this way for some time until everyone has had a chance to retrofit their applications for Vista. Unfortunately, every time one of these applications is launched the user needs to approve the application, and like the deletion scenario this gets increasingly redundant as the same applications are reused day in and day out. A pre-approval method or some other system is desperately needed for Vista’s UAC system if the goal is to maximize security while minimizing the number of users disabling these advanced security features. Otherwise there are only so many orange screens that one can stand before UAC becomes a victim of its super-secure design. One of the few noticeable changes since RC1 has been the driver situation with Vista, which has steadily improved since we first looked at Beta 2. Between the final driver submissions for RTM and a much smarter Windows Update, Vista was able to install drivers for all of our hardware in one of our test systems, other than the driver for a PhysX card. Working drivers were found for our motherboard, video, sound, network, on-board SCSI, and even TV cards. This is likely the high point for Vista as newer devices will ship without drivers built in to Vista, but nonetheless it’s a refreshing experience after the amount of work required to completely install a set of drivers on XP. With the ability to load drivers off of a USB drive at installation, it should never be that bad again either. The one weak spot as far as drivers are concerned continues to be audio and video drivers, but that too has been improving. We’ll take a look at later with our benchmarks of Vista, but video performance is much closer to that of Windows XP compared to our first look at Vista, at least as far as DirectX 9 titles go. DirectX 10 and OpenGL are not as clear as there are no DirectX 10 games (and they will require Vista regardless) and AMD is still working the kinks out of their new OpenGL driver for Vista. For audio, earlier concerns about the new audio stack breaking older games has been partially resolved as Creative Labs has released a DirectSound3D-to-OpenAL wrapper that works with some games, showcasing that it’s possible to work around the stack changes. Even with a lengthy preview article, there is still a lot of ground to cover when taking a close look at the final release version of Windows Vista. We have attempted to create a comprehensive look at the new operating system, but even then there are still plenty of items that will have to wait for another day before we can truly evaluate them. The big question that almost everyone is going to want answered is pretty simple: should you upgrade to Windows Vista now or wait awhile longer? That’s a question we hope to answer by the time we finish this article, so without further ado let’s take a look at some of the new features.