ASUS M2N32-SLI Premium Vista Edition Motherboard Review :: General Usage

Setup was interesting for the first time. I have installed Windows XP regularly with multiple hundreds of installs over the years. The hard disk is usually the C drive; making programs work with the hard disk is as simple as installing the F6 SATA drivers off the C drive, installing Windows and installing the drivers. In this case, the 512MB Flash drive kept asking to be the C drive which caused all kinds of issues with Windows. Once I disabled the USB drive, I made the hard disk the C drive and proceeded apace. After installing the drivers I enabled the USB drive.

Vista

ScreenDUO software

The M2N32-SLI Premium Vista Edition board is designed for Windows Vista, so after I ran the tests with XP I installed Windows Vista Ultimate Edition on the computer. Once the drivers were installed, I enabled ReadyBoost on the Flash drive. Vista use of ReadyBoost is useful when the system has limited memory, as USB memory speed is slower than system memory speed in general.

The use of ScreenDUO is easy and intuitive. You can transfer music files over to the ScreenDUO from your computer, email, email contacts, photos with a simple drag and drop interface. The board is designed to operate in SLI mode. Unfortunately, NVIDIA has only released the drivers for supporting 79xx or earlier videocards over the last weekend, too late for the purposes of this review in terms of testing it out, 101.41 and I was unable to test SLI on Vista with two 7900GTs. SLI worked as advertised with the latest XP drivers and two 7900GTs however.