gigabyte ga-p965-ds3

clipped from www.newegg.com JMicron raid controller flukey with Vista. Vista would not completely load using the Raid drivers from Gigabyte's web site, kept getting the BSOD. Had to use the drivers from the JMicron site to get the raid to work. The Gigabyte drivers work great in XP thoug

pc video

clipped from www.anandtech.com It's also worth noting that the new VP2, BSP and AES128 engines are only present in NVIDIA's G84/G86 GPUs, which are currently only used on the GeForce 8600 and 8500 cards. GeForce 8800 owners are out of luck, but NVIDIA never promised this functionality to 8800 owners so there are no broken promises. The next time NVIDIA re-spins its high end silicon we'd expect to see similar functionality there, but we're guessing that it won't be for quite some time.

pc video

clipped from www.anandtech.com Note that the offload NVIDIA has built into the G84/G86 GPUs is hardwired for H.264 decoding only; you get none of the benefit for MPEG-2 or VC1 encoded content. Admittedly H.264 is the more strenuous of the three, but given that VC1 content is still quite prevalent among HD-DVD titles it would be nice to have. Also note that as long as your decoder supports NVIDIA's VP2/BSP, any H.264 content will be accelerated. For MPEG-2 and VC1 content, the 8600 and 8500 can only handle inverse transform, motion compensation and in-loop deblocking and the rest of the pipe is handled by the host CPU; VP1 NVIDIA hardware only handles motion compensation and in-loop deblocking. ATI's current GPUs can handle inverse transform, motion compensation and in-loop deblocking, so they should in theory have lower CPU usage than the older NVIDIA GPUs on this type of content.

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