To x64 or x86, that is the question.

[f0rked]

Hey everyone. Been a while since I posted here but figured there'll be some knowlegable people about who can give good advice on this.

Recently built myself a new gaming rig, with top of the range components (i.e x64 compatible processor). Currently running it on XP x86 version, however I've decided to install my copy of Vista that's sitting in my room gathering dust. Mostly for DX10 in games (Bioshock, Crysis Demo ect..).

I was wondering if it'd be worth installing the 64bit version of Vista, or the regular 32bit edition. I know 64bit can cause a lot of headaches with driver compatibility and such, but I'm not sure how much difficulty that would actually present.

Anyone here have any experience with 64bit Vista in comparison to its 32bit equivalent? Is there actually any performance gains to be had, or is it more hassle than it's worth?

 

[No Limit]

Currently its not really worth it for personal use. 64bit will speed things up greatly once programs start coming out for it, until then there is absolutely no speed improvement what so ever. I am not aware of any games or other personal applications running under 64bit, mostly anything new in that regard is currently coming out for servers and workstations.

 

[f0rked]

Thanks for the advice.

Ended up getting impatient and installing x64 version of Vista anyway, just to see what it was all about lol. Figure I'll use my 30 days before having to put my key in to see if it's worth it or not for my individual needs/setup.

So far so good though, all drivers seem to have installed okay. And Vista is really, really nice and responsive. Suprisingly. I'm yet to try anything like playing games on it though. Figure I'll fire up Steam and see how TF2 runs!:cheers:

 

[Sedako]

You only really need a 64-bit OS if you intend on using more than 4gb of RAM. If that is not the case then stick with 32-bit, as you will not have to deal with any of the compatibility issues that may crop up.

 

[No Limit]

Thanks for the advice.

Ended up getting impatient and installing x64 version of Vista anyway, just to see what it was all about lol. Figure I'll use my 30 days before having to put my key in to see if it's worth it or not for my individual needs/setup.

So far so good though, all drivers seem to have installed okay. And Vista is really, really nice and responsive. Suprisingly. I'm yet to try anything like playing games on it though. Figure I'll fire up Steam and see how TF2 runs!:cheers:

If you already installed it you should be okay. I doubt you'll run in to many issues, if any. But never having used Vista 64bit I can't say this for sure, I am just going off of what I've read.

You only really need a 64-bit OS if you intend on using more than 4gb of RAM.

Although in personal computing this is pretty much true in this time period this is changing each and every day. If you do a lot of video editing, compressing, encrypting, decoding, encoding or anything else tha requires a lot of number processing you will see a decent performance increase if the application you are working with is designed for a 64bit architecture.

 

[Russian Mafia]

I had a 64-Bit version of Vista, after about a month I switched to 32-Bit because so many programs didn't work.

 

[Asus]

Crysis fps has been said to improve a lot under x86-64. If you want to go 64bit then Vista is the one you want. Windows Xp was OK but Vista is really the first one where both 32bit and 64bit versions are promoted evenly for drivers and such.