Is Your Motherboard Vista Ready?

Vista is out, as most of you would probably know. While most PC users won’t probably upgrade to Vista anytime soon, Microsoft is banking on new PC buyers and business users to get Vista. But if you’re looking to upgrade your system components, you might want to make sure you would be Vista ready if and by the time you decide to upgrade. In view of this, manufacturers of motherboards, processors, graphics cards and other peripherals, are labelling their products as “Vista ready” as a sign that consumers can expect these to perform well under the various flavors of Vista. After all, Vista comes quite heavy on the hardware requirements.

Extreme Tech reviews two motherboards labeled as Vista ready. One is meant for Intel CPUs, and another for AMD.

We review two boards, one for Intel processors and one for AMD CPUs. These are the M2N32-SLI Premium Vista Edition and P5B Premium Vista Edition mobos. As it turns out, these motherboards really aren’t that new—they just have a couple of extra features grafted onto them.

The main Vista-oriented features of these two boards are Screen Duo and ASAP.

Screen Duo is basically in support for SlideShow, which is a Vista feature that provides for a small, secondary display that displays status messages when the PC is in a low-power state. SlideShow is actually designed primarily for laptop PCs, where the idea is to embed a small PDA-sized screen on the lid of the laptop, which can be activated when it’s in a low-power state, or when the lid is closed. SlideShow uses gadgets, similar to Vista’s sidebar gadgets, which display information like photos, appointments, and the like.

In the case of ASUS, Screen Duo is actually a USB-connected device that acts as the secondary screen to display information.

ASAP, meanwhile, is the ASUS Accelerated Propeller, which is flash memory connected internally via USB, and meant for Vista’s ReadyBoost cache. This is meant to help speed up the system by caching disk reads. If you use the board on OSes other than Vista, these will recognize ASAP as a USB drive. ASAP is only good for 512 MB, though, and is not upgradeable.

The verdict?

While we applaud ASUS for trying to innovate in the crowded motherboard space, it’s our opinion that the two Vista-specific features—ScreenDuo and ASAP—fall a little short. We can understand that a wireless ScreenDuo and a larger ASAP cache would have cost more. But as it stands, these two intriguing features are just too limited.

Great ideas, though. Hopefully ASUS will further develop these, either as optional components, or as improved versions (i.e., wireless ScreenDuo and upgradeable ASAP cache).