Well, the rumors floating around are that Vista went RTM today. I hope to see it in MSDN downloads soon.

On a side note, Jayson and I were talking about hardware the other day and I got all excited and had to build a new machine just for Vista ;)

The first shipment is below

2 Sata drives to set up as RAID (only 7200 RPM as I am going miniITX). Asus P5B-VM motherboard, which isn't the best board out there, but again, the only option for going small on Core 2 Duo. Core 2 Duo 6400. 2 1 gig sticks of OCZ DDR2 800 RAM, which the board supports natively.

I had to wait on the video card as I wanted to go with the new X1950 Pro and it wasn't out yet.

The video card surprisingly came with ever cable imaginable

From the left: S-Video, Power, S-Video to Composite, Crossfire (no dongles on the X1950 Pro), Composite, 2 DVI to VGA (the card has 2 DVI outs), and Component.

The only complexity I ran into was being a miniITX motherboard, Asus decided you wouldn't want 2 internal hard drives, so even though their internal SATA connector supports 4, the RAID controller is set up to support 1 internal and 1 external. Weird. This is the solution I came up with.

This went out in the living hooked up to my projector (113" screen) and replaced a still usable but aging AMD 3200+ with a Radeon 9700 Pro. To say games run a hell of alot better is the understatement of the year, definitely *very* impressed!