Hi people. I'm currently using the following system and was wondering if an upgrade to Vista would show a big difference compared to XP especially with regrads to gaming? I was thinking of upgrading because i want to experience games with DirectX 10. I have been playing games such as Crysis and COH which are DX10 games on XP. I would like to know if there would be a considerable difference in gameplay with my system:

Core2Duo e4500 OC to 3.0Ghz from 2.2GHz
XFX 8600GT Fatal1ty
3gb DDR2 (2 at 800 and 1 at 667MHz)
Gigabyte P35C-DS3R motherboard

I would also like to know if have ram of different speeds, such as i do, is a good thing and which would be better, 2gb at 800 or the above specification.

Thanks!!

There have been reports of reduced gameplay performance with Vista. Most believe that it is related to drivers and not the OS. On multi-core systems, Vista is better able to use the cores more efficiently than XP. Crysis doesn't play well on systems that are more powerful than yours, add in DX10 and the performance drops further. Unless you're willing to lower the graphics quality in Crysis (which defeats the purpose of DX10) or are going to get a quad-core system with an 8800GTX you're not going to be enjoying the beautiful graphics. I don't know too much about RAM speeds, but I think that if you have memory of two different speeds, the speed will drop on all RAM sticks to whichever is the slowest.

I played Crysis on my Vista Ultimate(x86) system with 4 gB of RAM and wasn't impressed by it's performance (despite the performance tweaks on my system). DirectX 10 may be the ultimate in DX - but (IMO) it still has a ways to go. I'd suggest holding off on the Vista upgrade for a while - until the hardware manufacturer's have had a chance to play catch up with the drivers. Eventually you'll have to have it for the latest games - but waiting will let the prices drop some before you're forced to purchase it.

hi ,,, if you have mixed speeds of RAM like you have,, all skicks of RAM will revert to the speed of the slowest stick, so in your case your 800 will be running at 667MHz,,,, also as stated above Vista love's a core2duo processor, it runs alot better with one than without, i got vista on a core2duo E6320 1866MHz 2GIG DDR2 & also tryed it on my Pentium 4HT 3.4MHz 2GIG DDR2,,,,, even though the core2 is smaller its a vast improvement with vista,,, so i reinstalled XP in the Pentium4 machine. hope this helps.