New Computer, Suggestions?

[Trowabarton756]

Sorry Trowa, but most of this information is inaccurate.

In the Pentium 4 generation of computers where Intel decided that higher and higher clock speeds were the way to achieve performance superiority, AMD came along and said uh-huh. We're going to do more work per cycle and beat the pants of of your 3ghz heaters. So after the early generation K6 or K7 processors, but before Intel's Core2Duo, AMD was the way to go. Now however, Intel's design just smokes AMD. The Core2Duo processors run rings around AMD's best processors. If you buy any of the Athlon/Phenom AMD processors, you won't face the problems of the early AMD K4,5,6 processors that would sometimes just not be able to run certain applications, but if you're after performance, then for right now, the Intel is superior.

64bit OS are an evolution from 32bit OS. Just like the 32bit OS was an evolution from the 16bit OS. Usually the first applications to take advantage of a newer OS are applications that have outgrown the capabilities of the old OS. Naturally, high end business applications are some of the first to migrate to a newer OS. Most businesses are still using 32bit OS. 64bit is still pretty relegated to very specific applications. I do agree that 64bit is mostly for businesses though.

All 32bit OS (whether it is XP or Vista) have a limitation of 4gig of available RAM. This is because of the way memory is addressed by the OS. You can visualize this by thinking of a huge grid (kid of like tic-tac-toe only much much larger). If you number the grid down the top and down the left hand side, you'll get a set of coordinates or addresses. Using 32 bits worth of information to number your grid, you get a maximum of 4 gigabytes of addresses. There is a certain amount of lost space due to overhead as well and a certain amount of space that is used for addressing the hardware components in your computer. XP did a fairly good job of leaving a fair amount of the system memory available for applications. Vista on the other hand reserves more of your system memory for the OS to use. There is a thread here on the forum somewhere that has a link to an article on Tom's Hardware. This goes into a lot more detail on how this works.

You can utilize more than 4gb of memory with the 64bit version of Windows XP. My brother has an 8gb XP64 rig that he plays LoTRO on. He read the article on Tom's Hardware and played around with his settings. With 8gb of real memory, he was able to completely disable the Windows paging file. The first time he zones, there is a bit of a delay as all of the new area is loaded into memory (no more than you would notice on any good performing system). But, after that, the next time he zones into that same area, its almost instantaneous.

A 64bit processor is required if you want to run a 64bit OS. The way a 64bit processor processes 32bit code is by using a translator or emulator. In a lot of cases, the user will not notice the additional overhead created by having to translate or emulate 32bit execution on a 64bit system. But gaming is to the computing world as racing is to the automotive world. Games and gamers want all of the available horsepower of their computer to be used to make the game run fast which translates to frames per second (FPS). Any overhead is bad. Now if the game you are playing isn't on the bleeding edge (think Crysis), then you will probably not have to worry too much about the additional overhead of translating/emulating 32bit code on a 64bit computer. WoW falls into this older game category.

So, just to recap, if you're going to need more than 4gigs of memory, then you need a 64bit OS which will require a 64bit processor (I can't think of a modern processor today that is not a 64bit processor). Each instance of WoW that you want to run will need between 300mb and 500mb on average. So you can quickly do the math and see that if you want to run 4 or more instances of WoW, you're going to be hitting the wall on that 4gb memory limit. You can run more than 4 instances of WoW using XP32 or Vista32, but you may see some performance issues as most people are aware of.

Eh the reasonings I gave were incorrect, but the other stuff we agree'd on =P and I was refering to WoW in the instance of my explanation on 32bit vs 64bit. I know I'm not a know it all when it comes to the differences between 64bit and 32bit but I do know that for WoW, there really is no need for 64bit.

[Silly Gooooose]

so if I wanted to try and run crysis on max a 64 bit processor on 32bit vista would hinder it, but not too much?

How do I know what bit a processor is, it doesn't really show it from the newegg specs I am looking at, it just says it's got 64 bit support.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819115029

[Trowabarton756]

so if I wanted to try and run crysis on max a 64 bit processor on 32bit vista would hinder it, but not too much?

How do I know what bit a processor is, it doesn't really show it from the newegg specs I am looking at, it just says it's got 64 bit support.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819115029

That means it can run 64-bit Operating Systems.

And I suppose according to Dezeral, not so much, I personally am going to borrow my friends install discs and see would kind of performance I can get on Crysis using my computer.

[Silly Gooooose]

so the real question is 64 bit or 32?

I plan on getting that processor, or something similar, but I hear so much about how 64 bit isn't really helpful, and how theres no support drives and so on. Should I just stick with 32 for now, or will it be a noticeable hit in performance?

[Bollwerk]

I have a dual boot machine with 32-bit XP Pro and 64-bit Vista Home Premium. I have 4GB of RAM.

If you are going to get XP, just get 32-bit. If you are going to get Vista, you may as well get the 64-bit version (if you don't get Ultimate, you can just mail away for the 64-bit DVD for a small cost if you buy the retail version - but you can't do that with OEM versions). 64-bit Vista doesn't give you any more benefit if you only have 4GB of RAM, vs using 32-bit XP. (yes I know XP will only see 3GB, but Vista uses more RAM, so it's a wash). However, getting 64-bit Vista (retail, NOT OEM) will at least ensure your OS will grow with you as you upgrade to more RAM, etc.

I will say though that my quad-boxing WoW runs a bit slower (maybe 10-20%) in my 64-bit Vista than it does in 32-bit WoW. I assume this is because Vista runs games a bit slower than XP in general for various reasons.

[BobGnarly]

hmm, but what about a 19" and a 21" widescreen, think this would work fine? I think I will go with 1 for now, untill I find out more about SLI.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814130329

Sorry, little late on the response, but yeah, for a 21" monitor (1650x1080 I assume?), 512 should be plenty.