Software Evaluation
As pretty as the hardware is on the inside and outside of the Digital Storm Twister Extreme, it’s only part of the story.  Everyone knows you need software to run all that fancy hardware and Digital Storm went with Windows Vista Ultimate x86 32-bit.

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While I can completely understand using Vista instead of XP, besides the fact that 3-Way SLI ONLY works under Vista, I question the use of the 32-bit version of it.  When I asked Digital Storm about it, they said that since the system was configured with only 2GB of memory and that they said that in general gaming performance was better under 32-bit, they went that route.  While that may make some sense, if a user upgrades their memory to 4GB down the road then the issues involving 32-bit systems are going to pop and cause a headache for tech support if nothing else.

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Looking at the Device Manager we can see the three 8800 Ultra cards all showing up. 

The two 150GB Raptor drives are in a RAID-0 array to improve performance and show up as a single 300GB partition while the two 750GB SE16 drives come up one 1.4TB partition.  That should be more than enough data storage for just about anyone!!

One of the things that we hate about purchased system as opposed to build-it-yourself systems is the amount of bloatware that is typically installed on them.  I am referring to pieces of software that are pre-installed on the computer that slow it down, start on boot up and just in general are a pain in the ass.  Luckily, Digital Storms agrees with us.

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One of the typical places we find this kind of software is in Internet Explorer.  This shot shows the IE window and the extras there are relatively minor.

And that’s about as far as it goes; there were no preinstalled applications that I wouldn’t consider necessary.  A light weight and popular AVG anti-virus application was installed and that’s honestly all I could find.  Digital Storm definitely didn’t want anything hindering the performance of their Twister Extreme system.

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