I won a computer with an AMD proc, now i have questions

I've always been an intel guy (nothing against AMD, just never took the time to figure out AMD stuff), so now i need to know some stuff . Ok pertinent specs:

AMD Athlon64 FX-53 socket 939
MSI K8N Neo2 mobo
gig corsair pc3200 ram (cas 2)
geforce 6800 gt

I won it at a farcry tounament (funny, since i don't play farcry). I don't know about the 64-bit stuff, since i wasn't planning on spending a bunch of money on it for a while. Do I need a 64bit OS to run anything in 64bit? Say i wanted to run the 64bit version of farcry; would i need to upgrade from regular old 32bit xp? I can (and will) exchange my copy of windows that came with the comp for the 64bit version, so that'd be no problem.

Right now Doom 3 and HL2 both work at the highest graphics settings really well. Would I see much improvement or anything?

Thanks for the help!

Sorry, but the FX-53 sucks. You didn't win much ....

So just ship it to me and buy yourself a nice new Intel and I'll donate it to some charity in your name - aka my desk.

I don't know much about the advantages of running 64-bit applications on a 64-bit processor, but you can still run 32-bit applications and operating systems, from what I've gathered. Congrats on an awesome prize!!

Nope, you can stay on the 32bit version of Windows. Infact I recommend you stay because the 64 bit version is still buggy and not fully supported, yet! That is a nice compy you got there, you should have some room for overclocking also. It will play all of your games beautifully too, basicly the same rig as I have.

PerlAddict said:

Sorry, but the FX-53 sucks. You didn't win much ....

So just ship it to me and buy yourself a nice new Intel and I'll donate it to some charity in your name - aka my desk.

I don't know much about the advantages of running 64-bit applications on a 64-bit processor, but you can still run 32-bit applications and operating systems, from what I've gathered. Congrats on an awesome prize!!

Click to expand...

hah. well i downloaded and tried the 64bit version of windows (trial version) but was going to format the computer soon after, so i didn't try much. It can run 32 bit programs (installation mentioned that it emulated 32-bit to do it). And i'm definately doing it now !

ziggo0 said:

Nope, you can stay on the 32bit version of Windows. Infact I recommend you stay because the 64 bit version is still buggy and not fully supported, yet! That is a nice compy you got there, you should have some room for overclocking also. It will play all of your games beautifully too, basicly the same rig as I have.

Click to expand...

so does that mean i could run the 64 bit versions of games without the OS? either way i'm still ordering the 64 bit version of windows because i can exchange it for the shipping costs. my little bro is starting college here at a&m this year, and i was about to help build him a new computer. now he can just use my old one which is still a good upper mid range system. so he won't need his $5 copy of XP pro from the school. That way i can have both ! when 64 bit begins to really take hold i'll be ready.

Thats one hell of a pc to win, congrats! Yes you can run the 64bit version of the games with the 32bit Windows. The problem with running 64bit OS is that not all companies have driver support for it yet so I would just stick with the 32bit OS untill Longhorn is officially released.

sounds good, and congrats, just make sure you can find 64-bit drivers for everything you have.

i have both 32 and 64 bit copies of XP. since i got the 64 bit ive used it a total of 3 times, first 2 trying to get my sound card to work, and the third benhing and installing the drivers for onboard. still usin 32 bit for everything, and it still runs dandy.

I tried XP64 and always had problems. In general, the driver support was flakey at best. There really is no reason to run XP64, the advantages are minimal and the drawbacks are significant. Just wait a few years for longhorn.

LoneWolf121188 said:

I tried XP64 and always had problems. In general, the driver support was flakey at best. There really is no reason to run XP64, the advantages are minimal and the drawbacks are significant. Just wait a few years for longhorn.

Click to expand...

I thought that encoding was a ton faster though under the x64?

well thanks a bunch for the help. i'm mainly concerned with installing it or not. so i guess i wont . good thing because i'm getting this one set up like i like it.

Would it help if you could do an upgrade from the 32 bit to the 64? or is the problem not the lack of drivers (i've heard some say), but bad emulators?...or something...?

four4875 said:

i have both 32 and 64 bit copies of XP. since i got the 64 bit ive used it a total of 3 times, first 2 trying to get my sound card to work, and the third benhing and installing the drivers for onboard. still usin 32 bit for everything, and it still runs dandy.

Click to expand...

Do you have Audigy series sound card?

If you have, the driver installation for that thingy is a hell of a job. That is because of Creative's crappy drivers. They can not identify the card properly and the automatic driver installation will fail... You can install the drivers by working a way around the check in the installation program.

I personally like my winxp x64. I have been using it for a month now and only problems I have encountered is by the device manufacturers being so lazy when it comes to bublishing new drivers for this opsys. For example Nvidia's platform drivers for NF3 are some betas from November 2004! But they seem to work pretty well though.

And according to what I have heard that 64-bit programs won't run on 32-bit operating system, due to the wrong (32-bit) versions on dynamic link libraries. (dll:s) At least 64-bit Far Cry Didn't run on my win 2000.

Janus67 said:

I thought that encoding was a ton faster though under the x64?

Click to expand...

maybe, depends on the app. some apps take advantage of the x86-64 extentions that amd procs have even under xp32, i belive.