Microsoft should soon be making CD’s available with the trial software. According to them it’s supposed to be shipping in mid-February.  If, like myself, you’re the impatient type, you can get the download here for free. With that also comes access to their newsgroups, which have a lot of good information in it.  
 
Driver Support

This is preview software. In other words, there are still a lot of kinks to work out, and very little driver support. ATi has stated their unwillingness to make special drivers for an operating system that is not final, and other hardware vendors have also been slow on the uptake. I can’t really say I blame them–by the time this operating system goes „gold”, they will have spent a lot of time creating drivers and support for very few users.  The only thing to be gained is experience compiling for this modified kernel. 

Thankfully though, VIA, Silicon Image and nVidia have put out some support for RAID and video functionality, so those of us interested in trying out this operating system can at least boot into it without blowing up our hard drive arrays. If you have an nVidia based video card, you can also have access to some normal looking options in the drivers.  hose of us with ATi cards are stuck with a very primitive driver. Thanks to PlanetAMD64, I was able to grab drivers for my onboard LAN. I highly suggest going there first, and ensuring that there are drivers for your system before trying to install the OS. They have drivers for various chips that are found in most K8 boards, so don’t plan on using your PCI cards in the 64-bit environment just yet.

Test Setup

The test setup was as follows:

  • AMD Athlon 64 3200+
  • Albatron K8X800 Pro II
  • Kingston Hyper X 3000
  • 2x60GB IBM 120GXP HD’s in 64k stripe RAID 0 (VIA Controller)
  • Radeon 8500 LE

Benchmarrk Tests

Test includded the following:

  • Super Pi
  • Cipher (Science Mark 2.0)
  • Primordia (Science Mark 2.0)
  • 3DMark 2001 SE
  • Adobe After Effects
  • DivX Encoding
  • LAME MP3 Encoding
  • POV-Ray
  • STARS CFD Solver
  • WinRAR

I’ll be comparing Windows XP-64 to its 32-bit counterpart.