Yesterday Microsoft released the first public beta of the next version of Windows Home Server, currently going under the codename of Vail (or as we like to call it, WHS v2). WHS v2 has been something of a poorly kept secret, as word leaked out about its development as early as 2008. In more recent times an internal beta leaked out late last year, confirming that WHS v2 existed and giving everyone an idea of what Microsoft has in store for the next iteration of their fledgling home server OS.

One thing in particular caught our eye about the WHS v2 beta: the new Drive Extender. Drive Extender is the secret sauce of Windows Home Server that gives it its storage pool and data redundancy features, and now Microsoft has rearchitected it for WHS v2. We'll take a look at just what they did, why it's going to be more compatible and fault-tolerant than WHS v1's Drive Extender was, what the costs of all of this are, and why we think it's a great deal like Sun's popular next-generation ZFS file system.

In keeping with our desire to refresh our GPU test suite periodically, we’re going to be redoing our GPU test suite to rotate in some more modern games, along with rotating in some DirectX11 games capable of taking advantage of this generation of GPU’s full capabilities. And while we already have a pretty solid idea of what we’re going to run, we wanted to throw out this question anyhow and see what responses we get.

What games would you like to see in our next GPU test suite, and why?

What we’d like to see is whether our choices line up with what our readers would like to see. We can’t promise that we’ll act on any specific responses, but we have our eyes and ears open to well-reasoned suggestions. So let us know what you think by commenting below.

Since we published our reviews of the Radeon HD 5450 and the Radeon HD 5570, we have been going back and forth with AMD over the results of our video quality tests using the Cheese Slices test. Our initial results showed that neither the 5570 nor the 5450 had enough compute power to handle the full suite of post-processing abilities on 1080i video, the most important of which was Vector Adaptive deinterlacing. Since then, AMD has let us in on a few things that have changed that significantly, so let’s dive right in.