Differences between 64 and 32

TollhouseFrank said:

64bit is just slower. For example, on my brother's Phenom.... 64bit Win7 took 5 minutes to boot. 32bit? 30 seconds. Both base installs with updated drivers.

Synth Tests? Say, 3dMark2006? 64bit dropped about 1,500 points in score.

Real World Tests? Firefox loaded up in 3 seconds vs. about 6 seconds.

64bit is just slow.

I don't doubt someday it will be much faster once programs are optimized for it. But for now? Unless you need to dedicate more than 4gb of RAM to a single process, there is 0 reason to go 64bit.

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Something is horrible wrong with your 64bit test platform. I think 32 might be a smidge quicker, but the numbers your are describing are ludicrous. The Synthetic tests will be faster on a 32 bit system, unless it is something like Vantage...64bit only.

I'm not being mean, but you guys sound like the 98SE die hards when XP came out...I'm sorry to break it to you, but 64 bit is the future, and soon it will be needed for most users.

Well in total honesty I'm not benching 64 bit right now so I'm just using the ordinary programs I would normally use. Keep in mind I had reformatted only about 9 days or less before I reinstalled this 64-bit OS so it's not as if my computer was bogged down.

In all honesty I'm seeing a performance INCREASE if anything, most programs run a smidgen faster but over all everything seems the same to me. Programs run as directed and at speeds pretty much the same as 32-bit. Just as well the RAM usage is less then 200Mb higher than before and when you're working with 2GB-4GB that's not all that big of a deal, I can see if maybe you were operating on 1GB (honestly who does now days?).

I'm honestly not seeing an slow down or compatibility issues for that matter, I'm pretty happy with the over all result.

xokeman said:

Something is horrible wrong with your 64bit test platform. I think 32 might be a smidge quicker, but the numbers your are describing are ludicrous. The Synthetic tests will be faster on a 32 bit system, unless it is something like Vantage...64bit only.

I'm not being mean, but you guys sound like the 98SE die hards when XP came out...I'm sorry to break it to you, but 64 bit is the future, and soon it will be needed for most users.

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trust me... not a 32bit diehard. i went 64bit on my linux rigs long ago... and accepted the loss of flash/java.... (though that has changed recently).

64bit windows? I've seen nothing but negatives in my experience...well... almost. Most malware I used to have to clean up at the shop i used to work at? Just doesn't affect 64bit systems.... so it's more secure... for now.... and it is nice for people like my brother who needs whopping-amounts of ram for his 3d rendering and such....

Huh?

I keep checking the dates in this thread thinking that it was a necro but guess not!

I ran WinXP x64 for at least a year on a number of my own computers just because and never noticed any sort of performance difference. That includes some pretty heavy hitting games and intensive multi-tasking. I would not doubt that there is a slight performance penalty when the OS has to run a translation layer but again I never saw it in any noticeable form.

Reference for those who are interested in the translation layer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WoW64

On the FOSS side of things where everything is expected to be running native in a x64 OS I can't see how there would be any applicable slowdown at all unless it was a real bad compile.

Finally what kind of obscure hardware are some people running that there are not x64 drivers these days? That is what really has me scratching my head. As I said I ran WinXP x64 and there were drivers for even things like my Airlink WiFi card back then.

x64 has been around a while at this point and, no offense, to say it's slower and still lacking drivers really smacks of FUD to me.

64bit apps on 64bit cpus in a 64bit OS run 10-15% faster.

There's 8 bits in a byte.

32bit means 2 to the 32nd, it comes out to be 4,294,967,296 addresses, each address is one byte, giving 4 gigabytes.

64bit is 2 to the 64th, or 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 addresses of a byte each.
For those counting at home, that's 18 exabytes of data, or if you prefer 17,179,869,184 gigabytes. Yes, 17 billion gigabytes.
Offhand i'd say 64bit will do us for a while memory wise.


Also, read this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/64-bit#Pros_and_cons

Ahhh ****. I knew I forgot how my brother told me. Sorry for the idiotic post.

I just lolz

I knew those numbers were a bit big.

It happens, i wouldn't worry about it too much. I know i've been at least that far out in the weeds on here before

Lol. My brother lectured me on these differences for about a half hour and all that just went in one ear and right out the other I guess.

YoshiMon said:

Finally what kind of obscure hardware are some people running that there are not x64 drivers these days? That is what really has me scratching my head. As I said I ran WinXP x64 and there were drivers for even things like my Airlink WiFi card back then.

x64 has been around a while at this point and, no offense, to say it's slower and still lacking drivers really smacks of FUD to me.

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Many popular (and very expensive) printers, a LOT of popular wifi adapters, a lot of tv/video capture cards, and a lot of popular programs that do not have 64bit versions, or have some very wonky behavior when run in the emulated 32bit layer in a 64bit environment.


No FUD. It still seriously lacks driver support for a huge swath of very usable, and popular hardware.

Speed, again, I've seen 64bit be faster. But in general-everyday-usage? It is slower. For the average Joe User? It's just another thing to frustrate them when they buy hardware/software and it doesn't work because it isn't 64bit compatible.

thideras said:

4gb total. That means if you have 4gb of RAM, your usable memory is 4gb minus video card memory and anything else that needs the allocation space (BIOS, other PCI/PCIe cards, sound cards, etc). On most gaming systems, this places you around 3.2gb of memory.

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That's kinda true... However I have a GTX 480 and 4gig of RAM. XP shows 3.5gig (3.66Gig) or usable RAM. Windows 7 64bit obviously sees it all..