Operating System Question

Nikolis

Okay, I just built a new PC. I finally upgraded to a Core 2 Duo. The last few things I have yet to upgrade are my monitor, video card, and hard drives. I plan on getting a SATA drive, an upgrade from my IDE drives. But my question is, since I'm going to be reformatting, what version of Windows should I run? I could just slap my Windows XP Professional back on, upgrade to Vista, or Microsoft Windows XP Professional x64 Edition. I've heard that now is not the best time to go to Vista, so would the x64 version of windows show me a performance difference?

Dratatoo

Most likley not. (unless you are planning to put more than 4 GB RAM into your machine) 64bit versions of Windows are the devil. Poorly supported driverwise (unless you are going to buy mainstream HW only). New drivers will be released within greater timespans compared to their 32bit counterparts. Certain "system-near" applications won't run. Save yourself the hassle and get the 32bit version of either WinXP or Vista.

Nikolis

Thanks for that. Also, instead of opening a new thread, I figured I'd just ask here. I got a good deal on my CPU and motherboard, both Intel. What I didn't know is that Intel locks out overclocking features, even though the guys at Fry's kept asking if I overclock and that it would be a lot faster if I overclock. My question is, is there a way around this, as in I've seen some programs that overclock while in windows, as my BIOS have no overclock options.

Dashui

I'm running Vista 64-bit, and there hasn't been any compatibility issues or crashes of hang-ups. Game performance has been completely equal with 32-bit Vista performance. This depends, however, on your system. 2GB of memory and a decent processor should eliminate any performance disparities, or so I've read. I had 4GB with 32-bit and 4GB with 64-bit, and there has been no difference.

Also, you should know that 32-bit Windows, XP or Vista, have a limit on how much memory can be used. That limit is 4GB, and if you have 4GB of memory, you won't see all of that 4GB. That limit includes graphic card memory and memory dedicated to other devices, and that takes away from the total. So, on 32-bit Vista, I had 3GB out of 4GB available to me. The other 1GB was used up by the 8800GTX and other devices. 64-bit has a much higher limit, so you can make use of that missing 1GB. Of course, this isn't important if you have only 2GB of memory, but it's something to be aware of.

As far as gaming in the near future, Crysis and Unreal Tournament 3 will take use of 64-bit upon release, out of the box. The developers for Crysis have said that, for each thread, there will be a gain of 10-15% while in a 64-bit environment and CPU. I don't know how it'll effect Unreal Tournament 3, though, but I'm sure there will be a performance gain there, too. So that's another thing to consider.

If you're just using a mild system, though, you may want to stick with 32-bit.

mausmalone

Nikolis wrote: »

Okay, I just built a new PC. I finally upgraded to a Core 2 Duo. The last few things I have yet to upgrade are my monitor, video card, and hard drives. I plan on getting a SATA drive, an upgrade from my IDE drives. But my question is, since I'm going to be reformatting, what version of Windows should I run? I could just slap my Windows XP Professional back on, upgrade to Vista, or Microsoft Windows XP Professional x64 Edition. I've heard that now is not the best time to go to Vista, so would the x64 version of windows show me a performance difference?

Do not under any circumstances run XP Pro x64 as your main OS. It's pretty much been 100% abandoned in favor of getting Vista 64 up and running, which is important to know since it was never really stable.

If you've got 2GB of RAM or more, go with Vista. It isn't quite as fast as XP, and there are some compatibility flaws, but they'll probably be more or less ironed out by Fall. Basically, installing Vista now will prevent you from flattening and re-installing in a year.

I've heard good things about Vista 64, but I don't have my own system to try it on, so I really have no opinion.

Jasconius

XP Pro 64-bit will give you a performance boost in applications that were actually written for 64-bit computing, but most games and apps are not, to my knowledge, and IIRC it's slightly unstable?

Just stick good ol' XP Pro 32-bit on there, it's the best piece of software Microsoft has made.