Intel vPro (cont’d)

The Intel Gigabit network controller is designed to allow remote management of the system even when it is turned off. While this is cool for enterprise deployments because it allows software updates across an entire network, even if the system is powered down, my main interest in the Intel GigE chip is its dual RX/TX buffers and receive-side scaling, which in theory (with Windows Vista’s TCP stack) allows for the network to take advantage of both CPU cores. The Intel GigE chip also features TCP/UDP checksum/segmentation offload like the nForce 4 did – only these shouldn’t corrupt any data.

TPM 1.2 allows hardware-based whole hard drive encryption via BitLocker and the Secure Startup features. None of these features are immediately useful to me, but the TPM may be useful in the future for TPM-based Hypervisor security.

However, as an enterprise-grade motherboard, Gigabyte has opted to disable any overclocking features in the BIOS. Do I go for the system that’ll let me maximize the potential of my hardware through overclocking or do I stick with the vPro platform for the “potentially interesting features” of TPM and receive-side scaling? The right answer is going for what gives you to best experience today (overclocking). As a FiringSquad writer though, we always have to push the frontier and explore the unknown. That’s the only way we’ll stay ahead of the game and figure out how useful these features may be in the coming years. That’s why we’re testing x64 in full-on production systems.

System 1 Configuration: My Primary Desktop

Intel Core 2 Duo E6600
Zalman CNPS-9500
Corsair 4GB of 6400C4 DDR2
Seagate 750GB 7200.10 SATA-II drives (x2)
Gigabyte GA-965QM-DS2
ASUS GeForce 8800GTX
Dell 3007WFP
Corsair HX620 Power Supply

Despite all of the problems I had in the past, Windows Vista x64 installed without a hitch on this system. Drivers for all of my hardware were present, even my USB HDTV tuner. The only glitch in installation was an unknown device in the Device Manager where drivers could not be obtained via Windows Update; this ended up being the TCP offload engine of the network card. WHQL certified drivers were available on Intel.com. Importantly, while installing the USB/Chipset drivers and Network drivers helped, installing Intel’s Storage Matrix driver in a non-RAIDed system actually prevented me from enabling the write cache. This is a case where the built-in Microsoft drivers are what you want to run.

I ran the Gigabyte system for about a month with essentially perfect uptime. The only time the system went down was when I was rebooting as part of software updates. I was starting to wonder about writers who were complaining about an “unstable” Windows Vista with frequent blue screens of death.

Performance in Vista x64 was another story. While the system was stable, there were clearly performance issues with my GeForce 8800GTX. I’m not talking about trouble with complex games like STALKER… I was having trouble with “Hold ‘Em” the Windows Vista Ultimate bonus game. How could the flagship GPU of the industry with DirectX10 support have trouble with the “new Minesweeper” for Vista Ultimate? In addition, my system refused to resume from S3 suspend. The system appeared to be on, but the screen remained off. These problems were present in the 100.65 WHQL drivers (dated February). Although several beta drivers were available on the ‘net, there were still complaints of BSOD’s or non-fatal driver crashes with the Forceware drives, particularly with GeForce 7 GPUs.

With the 158.18 driver set, these issues appear to have been addressed. There are still a few reports of occasional BSOD’s on the ‘net, but none of these occurred with my system. Nonetheless, it is certainly frustrating when it takes several months from the release of Vista to get what “simple” issues like this resolved.


To NVIDIA’s credit, the Forceware team is clearly focused on Vista 32-bit, with GeForce 8 series taking priority over the GeForce 6 and 7 series. NVIDIA needs to ensure that developers have a stable platform for designing the next-generation DirectX10 games (who’ll typically be running 32-bit Vista), and the most gamers are planning to stick with Windows XP in the short term. That said, NVIDIA has its software development team working overtime to bring the drivers up to par for the complete GeForce 6,7, and 8 lineup while also working toward improving performance. Vista 64-bit is “a priority” for NVIDIA as well, although it’s clearly not as high of a priority as 32-bit Vista right now. I expect feature parity between the two platforms by Fall.