Asus is rolling out four Vista Edition motherboards, including the P5B-Plus, M2N-Plus, P5B Premium, and M2N32-SLI Premium. These Vista Edition boards brim with buzzwords, packing auxiliary SideShow displays, Media Center-friendly remotes, onboard flash memory for ReadyBoost, and even support for the Trusted Platform Modules necessary for BitLocker encryption. TechReport takes a further look at these features:

ReadyBoost enables USB flash memory to be used as a SuperFetch cache, allowing users to easily add caching capacity to their systems without even cracking the case. Flash memory isn't nearly as fast as system memory, of course, and it's slower than most hard drives when sequential transfers are involved. However, because it's not bound by mechanical latency, flash memory offers much quicker access times than even the fastest 15K-RPM SCSI drives. In fact, ReadyBoost's performance requirements only demand that a flash drive be capable of pushing 4K random reads at 2.5MB/s and 512K random writes at just 1.75MB/s.

Getting ReadyBoost working on the M2N32-SLI Premium is as easy as installing the ASAP driver that comes with the board. ReadyBoost defaults to using 431MB of the onboard flash drive's available capacity, but since this isn't a removable drive, you might as well let ReadyBoost use the whole thing. (Those using ReadyBoost with USB thumbdrives will no doubt appreciate not having to sacrifice the entire drive to SuperFetch caching, though.)

Since ReadyBoost was designed primarily for systems with limited system memory, it's perhaps not entirely appropriate for the kinds of systems you might find using a high-end motherboard like the M2N32-SLI Premium. Indeed, we didn't observe any noticeable difference in load times when we enabled ReadyBoost on our test system. That system was equipped with 2GB of memory, so it wasn't exactly hurting for cache-friendly RAM.

If you're not particularly interested in ReadyBoost, the ASAP module can be used for traditional storage-you know, if you want all the convenience of a USB flash drive without the convenience of actually being able to take it with you. We were also able to format the drive with a standard DOS boot image; you can select the ASAP as a boot device in the M2N32-SLI Premium's BIOS, and we were able to boot to DOS without issue. However, my *nix mojo wasn't nearly strong enough to get a lightweight Linux distro booting from the ASAP module.