I have 4.00GB installed but my "Total Physical Memory" is only 2.75GB because that's how Vista Home Premium 32-bit treats it. Still, that should be sufficient for this game, and I don't trust a 64-bit OS because it's not as well supported yet. I'm waiting for the DX10 version to buy this game, however. I'm looking forward to that, but there are other games to play in the meantime.

Finally I can get something that will give me a tangible performance improvement over my pair of 8800 Ultras. The GeForce 9 series was really just a tweaked 8, and should have been called the 8900. The GeForce 200 series is the true successor to the 8 series. I'm only going to buy one of these, however, and leave my second graphics slot open for breathing room. I would buy two, but I don't trust nVidia's drivers to be stable running games in SLI at 2560x1600 under Windows Vista. If I had known how shoddy the SLI support was for Vista, I would've only bought one 8800 Ultra last time I upgraded and saved myself a bundle. Perhaps with the GTX 280 the Cascades demo will finally run smoothly, and Crysis will finally be playable.

I installed SP1 a few days ago. It took about forty minutes and was easy to do through Windows Update. I'm running Vista Home Premium 32-bit. My only complaint is that nVidia's drivers are still not stable in SLI mode when running Vista, with or without SP1. I typically get driver related crashes in most games after several minutes to an hour of play when I attempt to run SLI. Most of the time, one of my graphics cards just sits there idle, because the moderate performance increase from SLI is not worth the headache from repeated interruptions of my gameplay sessions.

Two cores, or at most four, is all gamers need right now. I think the second CPU is largely a waste at this time. By the time more games can use four or eight cores many other aspects of this mobo will be obsolete.

This is good... An ATI card that behaves like a single-GPU card and performs on par or in some cases better than an 8800 GTX. It looks like AMD/ATI is finally back in the race. Of course, the nVidia GeForce 9 is right around the corner, and I have hopes it will perform noticeably better than even this. Currently, I think the 8800 Ultra is still the king of the hill, but the Radeon HD 3870 X2 is a better value.

I'll go back to this game once I can get it to load in DirectX 10. I spent quite a lot to upgrade my system to a powerful DX 10 system this June, but BioShock always hangs on the loading screen when I try to run in DX 10. I can force it to run in DX 9, but even then it still crashes to desktop on a regular basis. At least with the Xbox 360 there is only one basic hardware configuration they had to develop for. With the PC, there are so many different variations of the Windows OS, graphics cards, CPUs, types of RAM, drivers and so on that they couldn't test all of them. However, a few more patches and I'm sure my state of the art PC will run this game better than any console.

nVidia really needs to work on its drivers for the 8800 series. The drivers that support DX 10 SLI are still in beta, and DX 9 SLI is not stable in many games. I have two 8800 Ultras, but most of the time I run on a single one because many games lock up after just a few minutes of play with SLI enabled. Hurry it up nVidia! Get your drivers up to snuff for the DX 10 games coming out, and improve their stability for DX 9 SLI! That said, I can't wait to play Age of Conan at 2560x1600 in DX 10.

Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures... That's your reason for upgrading to DirectX 10. But you can wait at least until the end of October. I don't get that DX 10 is supposed to improve performance for Lost Planet but actually makes it worse, and no fancy DX 10 effects. Lost Planet is really a DX 9 game that can run in DX 10.

ATI cannot presently compete on a performance level with the 8800 GTX and 8800 Ultra, but in terms of price for performance ATI's R600 looks like a really good value, and the dual HD 2900 XT CrossFire-rig beats out a single 8800 GTX in the majority of benchmarks so it can still be used to build a powerful gaming rig. Further performance improvement is likely with future driver upgrades, so if you are looking for a value I would say that the Radeon HD 2900 XT is a good deal.

I always like to max the draw distance. The game's no fun if you can't see the game world around you. I usually like 4x antialiasing, because any more will give you a serious performance hit for hardly any improvement in visual quality, but if you have no AA then it's way too pixelated. You can't see pixels in the real world so you shouldn't be able to see them in the game world either.