We waited nigh on a year for any PC innovation and then three things came along at once: Quad Core, the G80, and Vista. Hi-Grade's high-end box doesn't quite reach to the lofty heights of the Greatest Graphics Card Ever, plumping instead for a more-than-capable 7950 GX2 toting a frankly unnecessary 1GB of video RAM, but everything else is present and correct.

Let's start with the traditional Vista pre-release mantra. Yes, we're reviewing this before the official release of Vista. Yes, the drivers aren't quite ready and the performance isn't exactly what we would expect. And yes, we're a bit worried this is the state that Vista is going to be in when it launches proper. It won't be this bad, we trust, but that initial batch of buggy Vista-clad PCs could well upset a few buyers.

Take this one: our first firing of the 1GB 7950 outside of the confines of the Aero desktop consisted of an artefact-covered screen flashing and jerking wildly. While the latest graphics drivers ironed out the bugs we found, there's no guarantee that more bugs won't pop up, and the speed is still way off XP's mark.

We can't test this with every game, every intricate manipulator of polygons, but we at least hope Vista ends up with some decent OpenGL support. Early adopters beware.

Vista's effects

Aside from its graphical flaws, the Tachyon is a sturdy workhorse of a machine. It does offer some measure of validation to the strength of quadcore processing, for a start. We used SuperPi, a benchmarking app which tests the time taken to generate Pi to a given number of places (in this case 32M places, 24 times), to tax the 2.66MHz chip.

This predictably gave us Vista's finest SuperPi result yet. While we're sure the results would have been quicker under XP (notice the recurring theme?) they would have been quicker still under 2000, and absolutely blistering under 98. There's no point in complaining about the fact that bloated software eats performance any more. When the next OS comes along, we'll only have to start the cycle again.