About three weeks later than I had planned, we're finally benchmarking the system. Since PC World doesn't have a lot of data on 4GB vs. 8GB, we're using the Corsair 1600MHz memory in both configurations. I'll have the 2000MHz Crucial Ballistix in tomorrow and I'll make sure that's tested as well. I've mildly overclocked the processor from 9X to 11X (3.666Ghz in honor of the price and difficulty) and everything was super stable all day long. The extra cycles raised the CPU temperature about 1 degree centigrade with the liquid cooling. The fluid is hardly even warm.

Acronis finally got back to me (seems there were bouncing emails) and the boxed True Image and Disk Director are on their way. Dropped System Commander from the build since we don't really need it and it didn't work as well as I would've liked.

All the games run fine on Vista SP1. The various USB devices and controller all work, the sound is great though for some reason via a digital optical connection, the Logitechs only let you do stereo unless it's DTS or Dolby then the other channels kick in. And the coax S/PDIF didn't seem to function. I'm looking into that, it may have been the cable, but there didn't seem to be a manual online for the speakers. I've re-enabled the on-board HD audio so you can do surround via analog connection if needs be.

Adaptec thinks that despite the firmware not kicking in, I should be able to use the 5445 under Windows with the proper drivers and software. I'll be checking that tomorrow. I do know that the 5445 and 3405 showed up under device manager, though trying to access their properties caused DM to hang. I'd actually be happier with it running only under Windows so there's no 30 second boot delay while the firmware loads and arrays are checked. This may mean ditching the RAID 5, but now with four separate arrays on board, there's plenty of redundancy.

By the way, the Patchmix DSP mixing program that comes with the 1616m requires reading the manual. I've used it for over a year now with my 0404 and it still gets me sometimes. Most of you can simply ignore it. Just FYI, for recording folks, there's soft knee compression on the mic inputs and DSP FX on the card that you can use to save CPU cycles, though you've got those in spades with four cores and probably 4GHz (overclocked more aggressively) worth of them. The ASIO latency on this puppy is ridiculously low. If you don't know what that means, you won't care.

More tomorrow.

Jon