Vista or 7 for a gaming machine?

Monday I'm putting together a high end gaming system that will be used almost exclusively for playing games and Internet browsing. That's just about it. I have a simple question. Would Vista 64bit or Windows 7 RC 64bit be better for a user like me? Thanks!

That's what I've heard. Sometimes though the few people with issues scream louder for help than the many people without issues scream for joy. Thanks for the advice.

Oh, really? Punk Buster is in several games I play. That could be a big problem for me. I'll have to do some research on that.

Yeah, I'm really pissed at Even Balance for not supporting the OS, it will make it 10x easier for them when 7 is released. Anyway, I'm just going to dual boot XP-7.

@Senor Snarf

Win7 is a release candidate, its not a finished product, theres no way I'd even consider using it for my main operating system unless you just love trouble, and trying to resolve non resolvable issues.

Gaming wise I'm strictly a FPS [First Person Shooter] fan period, I ran into non resolvable issues with Crysis and Crysis Warhead, and FEAR2 with Steam, so after hours of frustration, for me Win7 is past history.

A friend of mine is a FSX [Flight Sim 10] fan and he has had the best FSX gaming experience so far than any other OP/SYS hes run it on yet, but FSX is a Microsoft Game, so you would expect MSFT to have covered their own product.

I'm sure Win7 will end up being great after MSFT gets all the bugs out of it, some of the AV programs available could be causing some of the issues, it seemed to run best on the Nortons but Nortons is only a 15day trial, so you end up installing others and their baggage, but you have to have some kind of AV protection.

You may even want to consider installing WinXP until Win7 is fully joy, WinXP has zero problems with any game, however your original question was between Vista and Win7, and I'd definitely go with Vista.

Windows-7 rc is free, so it will cost you nothing to try it now. I would do so, unless buying and reinstalling the official release later will be a problem.

I pretty much agree with all thats been said. The RC will cost nothing, so you might as well try it. Perhaps enough games will work on it you can wait for the retail editions to come. (although I understand "favorite game". If TF2 didn't work on the RC, I wouldn't use it.) If you just can't use it, just get a cheap os. The cheaper the better.

+1 for trying Se7en. I've been using it since B7000 and haven't ran into any problems at all since I installed RC; even the bugs I did run into wern't enough of an issue to look into.

If not Se7en, I'd trust XP64 over Vista any day.

Been gaming on win7 for a couple of weeks now. L4D, Fallout3, Everquest2, SplinterCell-DA...all play flawlessly. On top of that the 64bit IE8 actually is a nice browser, and I never thought I would go back to IE.

Guess the OS compatability is very game specific

You do realize that Win 7 is very close to Vista, right? Hating Vista was soooo 2 years ago. Win XP 64 never has enjoyed a great deal of support and it took the release of 64-bit Vista for hardware vendors to wake up and finally start making 64-bit drivers. Compared to Vista 64, however, XP 64 still doesn't enjoy a great deal of support. My vote is for Vista 64 if you want something right now. People hating on Vista and loving Windows 7 (despite 7 being merely an incremental release) are still living in the past and going on all the bad press Vista received upon it's release. Vista is fully capable of running any software that will run on 7... and doesn't suffer from as many compatibility issues. After all, a RC is bound to have it's issues... but a finished product won't have nearly as many.

In that case XP is also an upgrade over Vista, because it can run both ATI and NVIDIA drivers simultaneously.

The concerns are with cod4, not waw.

I have just built a new i7 rig with a tpower x58 and a 920 @ 3.5ghz water cooled with a swiftech ultima setup in an antec skeleton open case and I have tested windows xp sp3 x86, vista ultimate x86 and both had major issues with games locking up and not responding, so I decided to go with window 7 x64 and not only is it amazing but all games tested have had zero issues and actually look and run better now! microsoft has finally got it right!

I've been using 7 for 2 days now, great FPS in Crysis, FC2, CoD4, CoDWaW, and it looks and runs great, right now my CPU load is 2% and im running quite a few apps and playing a video podcast in Itunes, probably not impressive, but it is to me moving from a P4 with 1gb ram, keep in mind I haven't tried Vista 64, so I have nothing to compare to.

I used to think the same thing about XP but all games look so much better in DX10 and even better now in window 7 x64! games in XP look old and Arcadish with bright colors and less detail trust me It was hard to let go of XP for me to but after seeing games in windows 7 with DX10 it is like playing all new games that look so real its unbelievable!