Greetings!I am writing in behalf of my computer builder. We have been stuck on this for several days. We have both Vista HP and XP Pro in Dual Boot. Our 3D Mark is about 12,200 in XP but in Vista it is MUCH MUCH lower. Although we did not run 3D Mark in Vista HP... the "Human Head" NVidia test ap... runs like animation in Vista but smooth as glass in XP.Also FSX (RTM) is installed on Vista and I am getting only 10 to 12 FPS on the runway at Seatac with everything at default settings. I have an office P4 2.6 that does about the same or a tiny bit better!I have read all of the things concerning why XP is the better system... for Games and FSX right now.. BUT there should NOT be this disparity. Most users report small FPS hits in Vista but not HUGE. In fact ANOTHER poster (not me) on FSX forum reports the following in Dual Boot:"Intel Core 2 Duo 6700 @3.3Gz, Zalman CNPS9500AT Cooler, Gainward 8800GTX@635/1900, Gigabyte 965P DS4 F8 Bios, Corsair 2GB DDR2 667, Raptor 10,000rpm 150Gb, Caviar SE16 250Gb, Enermax Liberty 620, Matrox Triple Head-To-Go, 3X19inch Iiyama LCD at 3840x1024, TrackIR3 Pro.Vista, FS9, FSX, Adapted Ultimate Terrain, Adapted Ultimate Traffic. (XP 3dmark06 11477; Vista 3dmark06 11721)"Here is what WE have constructed:System: E6700, @ 3.7 ghz; Koolance Liquid cooled, EVGA 8800GTX (slightly overclocked); EVGA 680i mother board, Corsair 2GB DDR2 800, two Seagate 320 gig 7200 drives in RAID O. Running on Vista Home Premium and XP Professonal. Drivers tried: The latest NVidia one for Vista and the current BETA for Vista as well. (I don't remember the numbers) RAM has been changed out... 8800 GTX's will be changed out today (but it works perfect under XP) ... Video Drivers have been changed... Latest DX9.x from that April 9th Microsoft update has been installed. He's probably tried other things as well. We are going to put in an E6600 to day... The reason:He wanted me to ask if anyone has had this experience with E6700 before? This is the first E6700 he has built and all the E6600 machines (about 60 + or -) he has built have had no HUGE performance hits with Vista HP under Dual Boot with XP Pro.Also he wanted met to ask if anyone who is operating smoothly with reasonable FPS and 3DMark on Vista HP with an E6700 is using a CPU Driver that is not included in Vista.Any ideas, my friends? Thank you very much.Steve

All...My brilliant young computer builder "cracked the safe" last night. I thought I would post this for anyone having similar issues.Unfortunately, I'm not very knowlegeable on computer info, but those of you with technical acumen will know what this is about.He changed out the Video Card... no joy.He changed drivers... checked all updates.He even inserted an E6600 instead of the E6700, but it wouldn't go away.He discovered the 3DMark was only a litte lower with Vista than XP which didn't make sense.This is taking too long. The bottom line is, the current state of Vista HP with updates has terrible driver support with RAID O in the NVidia Configuration. He says Games with large Files work well... But games with many little files like FSX... and the "Human Head" app... won't work in RAID O. For you guys who know... Its something about 128 Meg Striping??? Which just won't work correctly.John, my builder, inserted another hard drive besides the two in raid, installed Vista and everything is as smooth as butter even at stock 2.66. So we are going to take RAID O down and reinstall XP and Vista on separate drives.We are getting closer to a great little FSX machine... I'll let you all know how it works when we are done.This may or may not be helpful to someone, but I hope so.Kind Regards,Steve

Sounds like it's still broke. Was hoping they'd fixed it. Oh well. http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/2007/01/03/t...ransferdiagramsThe P35s are here.http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i=3002and guess what? http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2007/06/06/p3...pports_pcie_2/1If there's still time, trade that 680 in on a P35.

I'm becoming more convinced over time that RAID 0 is a fad for desktop machines.scott s..

Looking back at: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/2007/01/03/t...ransferdiagramsMy impression was those four, 10,000 raptors were used to provide entirely More bandwidth than a SATA 2 buss could handle. They wanted to see what the buss limits were and it appears to have worked. SATA 2 has a max BW of 3.0 Gb/sec (aka, 375 MB/sec). Note the measured xfer rate of 350MB/sec in the Intel boards. The buss needs a bit for overhead, so I expect the raid 0 drive set was buss limited. What does this mean? There's no need to spend Raptor $$$ to get this kind of performance. Plain ol' 7200 RPM-ers will get you there. You just need enough of them. For instance, four 7200 RPM 250 gig-er-biters can be had for $200 these days. That's 1 terabite of storage for the price of (count 'em) one 150 gig raptor.Now "Raid 5" the 250s for at least a bit of redundancy and you'll get at least 200 MB/sec transfer rates. Do a good Ultimate or O&O defrag to keep those access times as low as possible and you're in business. Raid really can make a big difference, but you got to have a MoBo that raids well. That 680i appears to still be broke (and the P35 has now added raid 10 functionality).

That computer spec looks familiar.:) Glad I didn't build a raid. I honestly don't think it is worthwhile. Too much trouble for too little gain for me. Worth searching this forum about raid.