Sixty-four bits

If someone were to, say, get a computer with an AMD 64 bit processor, would such a computer be compatible with the 32-bit version of windows XP? Is there a discount system for current owners of the 32-bit version of this operating system to purchase the later version which has double the bits?

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"If you talk at all during this lesson, you have detention. Do you understand?"

• My yr11 Economics teacher

You can still run 32 bit, and 16 bit, and 1 bit if you really wanted to if such a thing existed (I'm sure Crono will enlighten us!). Afaik Windows XP64 bit is either released or still in beta- so I'm really unhelpful.

As for usefulness, I think 64 bit is just started to actually be worth while, but most things still don't use it. It was all a marketing scam by AMD- Intel created 64 bit long ago, but saw no potential for it in the immediate future.

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-[Better to be Honest than Kind]-

You can run any 32bit program on a 64bit processor and Windows XP 64bit
has been released it went gold the same day as Intel released the P4E
which is there 64bit processor. I thourght that was a little bit of a
coinkiedink.

[EDIT]

Sorry just found out that Intells 64bit cpu is called EM64T mush have changed the name since the last time I heard it

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Actually, I'd suggest running 32-bit stuff opposed to 64-bit stuff on the AMD64, just because the technology was made to optimize 32-bit applications. If you used XP-64 it'd most likely run slower.

Not much to "enlighten" ... I've said this before, actually. As far as I know, the AMD (and the P4-64bit stuff) is the only 64-bit chip that can even run 32-bit applications. Intel has a couple Itanium and the one gimp mentioned (it's just a P4 with 64-bit ... not to downplay the difficulty of doing that or anything)

Others have had 64-bit stuff for a long time. It just never sped anything up and became harder to write for. (EPIC architecture, which is used by the Itanium is a biotch)

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

My brother has just got a 64-bit AMD processor with his laptop, and the whole thing came with Windows XP x64 Edition. It seems to run fairly smoothly, although programs are divided into 32 and 64 bit folders.

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Personally i want to check win x64 out, to see if its any good.

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I think I'll wait until the rest of the world switches to 64-bit (at least for all the major games) before making the transition.

32-bit suits me just fine right now.

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"The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return." -- Toulouse-Lautre, Moulin Rouge

I love my AMD64. I got the 3200+ about a year and a half ago and its great. It runs 32-bit stuff amazingly. I have not tryed windows XP-64 on my computer, but I have tryed 64-bit linux kernels, and they run much faster than 32-bit ones.

My 3500+ runs smooth and fast. I am not sure if its fas because it is running @ 2.2ghz or in spite of it TBH. All I know is it runs much faster than my old 1.8 P4. Not just 400 mhz faster but MUCH faster, period.

My 3500+ is also a 939 pin processor so there is still room for faster and bigger processors too if need be.

and yes, its supposed to be a 64bit type as well and is running the old XP pro corp edition of windows.

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The best things in life, aren't things.

It's because the 64-bit chips from AMD pipeline current 32-bit applications. The clock speed (thank God) is no longer ANYTHING NEAR what the performance is. I'd say if you really wanted to measure it against clock speeds, that 2.2Ghz 64 would be about the same as a 3Ghz P4 (thus the number 3500, I believe)

As rs6 said, there are many 64-bit OS's out there that run great on this platform, I doubt Windows will be one that runs well though. Think about it. It's Windows, so you're going to want all the optimization you can get. I doubt they've optimized anything for you in XP64. In any case, the AMD (specifically) was made to speed up 32-bit stuff.

What chip were you planning on getting, anyway?

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

My friend had the beta version for windows XP-64 for his 3200+. It worked nicely, but it seemed that even the simplest applications used more RAM than they should have in 64-bit mode. It probalby just window's horrible system for using RAM and pagefiles.

Vista is supposed to have a 64-bit version as well. I used a beat of vista, and it wasn't very good at all.

With todays ability to have literally gigs of ram, how does one determine "horrible?"

I only have 512 currently and zero problems with running out.

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The best things in life, aren't things.

he had 768 megs, and running a few apps was using up a good percentage of the RAM.

Using more than it needs to. Having gigs of ram doesn't solve anything, you'll always need more, so conserving what you have is important. I imagine what they did with XP64 is just "wrap it", and make it the 32-bit version with some overhead to adapt to 64. It's easiest thing to do and no sweat off their sacks.

Windows has always misused the pagefile (ever wonder why your computer runs slow after copying a large file and nothing is being used? Windows dumps the pagefile when it shouldn't be used in the first place for a 1:1 copy.)

Orph, you run out of ram all the time. That's what a page file is for (VMM). As far as the computer is concerned you have 4GB of ram. (not physical ram of course, but this is oblivious to everything except software and the chipset, I suppose.)

But there's other funky things Windows does, for some reason it likes using the pagefile more often than physical ram ... which make everything slower, since it's on the HDD. Just a really stupid system, to be honest.

I think the reason why is the same reason some engine parts in cars are so poorly placed (thus hard to remove and replace), they could have done it in five minutes but wanted coffee instead.

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

You're prolly right. I remember setting my virtual memory myself during my last tweaking.

I guess since I get no messages I just overlook it is all.

I did have better service setting my own. Windows didn't handle it very well on its own.

shrugs

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The best things in life, aren't things.

Yeah. I found out Windows was using it improperly because at one point I had ~350MB of ram (out of 512) free, yet it said I ran out of pagefile and it was being increased from 1700MB to 2500MB. That's about the time I stepped in.

There are some tricks, however, to reset the pagefile, because most of the time (apparently) if the pagefile is acting up like that it's corrupted. In which case, you blank it out (set the pagefile to 0, restart, reset it to what you want and restart again) However, the pagefile gets corrupted just as easily as everything else in the damn system.

Also, the fact that Windows can only handle segmentation faults from software is absurd. If hardware drivers do it ... it's lock up city (instead of just disabling the piece of hardware, depending on what it is of course, and saying, "hey, this seg. faulted, you should check it out".)

DRIVER_IRQL_LESS_NOT_EQUAL garbage. Sadly, changing the IRQ doesn't always work. :\

Piece of s**t.

Sorry about that tangent. Enough hijacking.

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

Windows sucks crono I agree. I was using half of my RAM once(out of a gig), with 3 GB of page file, f*cking windows.

Thanks for the input. The processor we were looking at (this is for a friend, not myself) is the following:

AMD Athlon 64 3500+, Socket 939, "Venice Core", HT2000 MT/s (HyperTransport System Bus), 128K L1 Cache, 512KB L2 Cache, Frequency 2.2GHz, Features Enchanced Memory Controller & SSE3 Instructions

I have another question, this time about video cards. Is the Radeon X700 any good? My friend wants a machine which will run Age of Empires 3. The numbers seem to say the card will do fine, but does anyone have experience with this card?

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"If you talk at all during this lesson, you have detention. Do you understand?"

• My yr11 Economics teacher

I drool at the sight of close to a meg of processor cache. drool

If you plan on getting an ATi card, I'd strongly recommend staying away from nvidia chipsets. Probably either an ATi chipset (they make them now too :\) or a VIA or something as such. Not sure of the advantages there though, I've just heard of many problems when interfacing the nforce stuff with ATi cards. Which, honestly, would be expected.

For the video card, I'd suggest leaning towards the Pro version, simply because it has twice as much memory, you want to make sure it's got at least 256MB of ram, just so the card has some longevity. (This helps with texture compression). More ram, I would personally consider more valuable than slightly faster ram and less space. There's also a version of the XT which has the speed (1050 Mhz ram) and the space (256MB) the review I'm reading, which was written over a year ago, says the suggested price of that is $245 USD, which is about $100 more than the normal X700. The card its self seems comparable to the GF6800 GT, so it's no doubt a powerful card and will run Age of Empires 3 with no problem, perhaps not maxed out though.

I'd say, go for more ram over speed, but pretty much if you had to choose between the four flavors of X700, don't choose the lowest one, it's ram is very slow and half the size. At least chip in for the Pro, which should only be about $50 USD more. (Obviously, all these prices are objective, meaning they should just give you an idea of ratio)

Something that's more important to look at is price though. New Egg has:

X800XT for $269 That's just like the X700 with more pipelines. That should allow for faster rendering. But should is the operative word there.

That's just an example though. Give a look through some sites. The X700 will do the deed just fine though.

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

Nice Processor. I can't say anythign about the video card though, i'm an nvida guy. Personally i would recommend a nvidia card. A 6800, or above would be great and run AO3 with all eyecandy.

X700 ~= 6800 GT

I like nvidia too. No particular reason why. I think it's mostly because I don't like fussing with drivers (this includes when used with Linux), and generally, (or used to be) the nvidia stuff was cheaper. Now they're about the same damn thing, it really comes down to the manufacturer you buy the card from.

I'll stop posting now. :razz:

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

I've not heard it compared to that before Crono - more likely the
6600GT. The 6800GT was near enough nVidia's top of the range card from
that generation, while the x700 was a mid-range card and one that, from
what I read, rarely lived up to the nVidia competition. 6600GT was
generally regarded as the best in its price point, though I think the
arrival of the PCI-E exclusive ATI X800 GTO cards may have changed
that. I haven't really been keeping tabs on the graphics card market
since I picked up my most recent one though to be honest.

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Designer @ Haiku Interactive | ReNo-vation.net

That's just what I read. Perhaps it did say 6600 GT, not sure. Whatever, people should do research for themselves anyway :razz:

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

Given that the 6600 costs $50 more than the x700 at the place were getting this from, I think the x700 is a better deal. To go to a 6800, or x800 would mean going over $100 over budget.

Dont bother posting prices, I'm in Australia.

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"If you talk at all during this lesson, you have detention. Do you understand?"

• My yr11 Economics teacher

wil5on said:
Given that the 6600 costs $50 more than the x700 at the place were getting this from,

.

Also, unless there is a PCI-E version of the 6600 and 6800 you cannot really compare prices.

I have heard that the x700 has bugs/issues. It might do you some good to research the charts on the two Mr. Wil5on. There are some excellent google searches on things like "x700 vs. 6600"
Try some variation of that.

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The best things in life, aren't things.

Of course there are PCI-E versions of those cards, however, that doesn't really come into play here, since the card runs at the same speed on both slot types. The only time PCI-E become "faster", is when the card its self requires higher bandwidth, which is in the case of something like the 7800, or something like that. If there's an AGP version, it would generally run the same overall speed as the PCI-E counterpart.

Is that just another emerging myth now? Just because PCI-E (x16) is faster it's suppose to be all around better in every situation? :razz:

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

I'm only looking at AGP cards. No real advantage in going to PCI-E, as Crono said.

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"If you talk at all during this lesson, you have detention. Do you understand?"

• My yr11 Economics teacher

Once you go 64, you never go back :wink:

I've found it quite hard to find a decent board that supports AMD 64 and AGP. Either that or they're expensive as all hell.

Not to mention, here at least, AGP cards are starting to cost more than their PCI-E friends. Talk about phasing stuff out, they did the same thing to slow ram. PC133 costs an arm and a leg. It is kind of nice when upgrading is cheaper than expanding, though.

However, if the AGP board is what you've got already, funk it. No need to upgrade it'd cost you more in the long run anyway. (You just may upgrade sooner than expected is all, but not likely)

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

I have 64 bit on my new laptop, so... yeah.

Good AGP cards are becoming impossible to get in the UK lately I've
found, so I would never recommend buying an AGP motherboard anymore.
That said, you aren't really getting anything out of the PCI-E
interface unless you are going with an SLI setup, so it's going the
PCI-E route is becoming a necessity with no real benefit for many
people at the moment.

I bought an AGP 6800GT in a sale for an incredible ?160, but
unfortunately it developed a fault and I had to send for a replacement.
Sad news is, they didn't have and couldnt get any more of the card, so
instead they gave me a refund of the ?160. Looking around for a
replacement, I could barely FIND any 6800GT's in AGP, let alone any
going for a reasonable price (ie. under ?230 or so). In the end I
settled for a 6800 standard, which serves me perfectly well and all but
wasn't much cheaper than the 6800GT I had bought :sad: Taking a quick look
around just now, it seems matters are even worse - Overclockers, who
normally stock more graphics cards than anybody, have only one card in
the whole 6800 range for AGP, and only a couple in the 6600 range.
People still looking to snag one last upgrade out of their AGP
motherboards really need to get their skates on before the decent cards
disappear entirely!

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[img]http://card.mygamercard.net/sig/Default/reno84.png[/img]
Designer @ Haiku Interactive | ReNo-vation.net

You know Duncan, the postal service does work over-seas. I have sent, and received postage in that fashion before. You might consider finding someone here that you trust and getting your card sent to you.

Just a thought. Baring mishaps, like the one you already experienced, you could do well by getting a card here.

Bulk rate postage is very cheap. Slow as hell, but cheap.

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The best things in life, aren't things.

Too late now mate, I've already picked one up unfortunately, but I may consider it in the future :smile:

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[img]http://card.mygamercard.net/sig/Default/reno84.png[/img]
Designer @ Haiku Interactive | ReNo-vation.net

tbh, sli doesn't look too impressive to me. maybe i need to see more comparative test results, but the ones that i've seen seem to indicate that a single next generation card will perform better than two of it's predecessors in an sli setup. like the 7800 will perform better than two 6800's linked.

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