State of 64bit?

[Mehen]

I sort of stopped paying attention to what is going on with the "adoption" of 64bit.

Last I heard it was still best to stick with 32bit - main reason being immature drivers etc. (I am a gamer, I need top notch performance).

On the plus side you can use more than 3.5ish GBs of RAM.

Anybody have any input? Seen any good benchmarks lately? Anyone know how drivers are?

[Tjalfe]

no benchmarks, but it seems to work just fine with my setup. the only thing I have so far not been able to run is Xilinx webpack 9.2i

[GT98]

I got Vista 64bit eariler in the year and the driver support for ATI was iffy at best, but in the past couple months the drivers have improved quite a bit. I had another issue with HP and drivers for it..they kept claiming it would be out in July...that came and went...I forgot about it and check again in early October and low and behold they had drivers for it, dated May of 2007 :what:

Overall pretty happy with the sytem...

[Kooldino]

I'm running 32 bit due to driver options and such.

However, ironically, my sound card (Soundblaster X-Fi) ONLY has a 64 bit AMD linux driver, and no x86 32 bit driver.

[Jammrock]

I've been running Vista 64-bit for a few months now with no issue. No 64-bit issues at least. Vista is another story.

[Marshmallowman]

XP x64 pro for near 2 years, I don't have any driver isssues (anymore)
Linux 64bit has been good since I first got the rig.

Its been good for me, and it nice being able to use the full 4Gig of my memory.

Have not even had the urge to download the trial vista 64bit....

[Helevitia]

64-bit Vista here since day 1. Definitely immature still. I actually might switch to 32-bit Vista just so I can use 3 things that still don't have drivers(one never will). I might dual boot as well.

[Jammrock]

64-bit Vista here since day 1. Definitely immature still. I actually might switch to 32-bit Vista just so I can use 3 things that still don't have drivers(one never will). I might dual boot as well.

I've found that Vista 32-bit is actually more unstable than Vista 64-bit. I couldn't go 2 months with Vista 32-bit without re-installing. I've gone a whole 3 months with Vista 64-bit without even thinking about re-installing.

[Helevitia]

lovely

I haven't been able to record any music because Line6 won't release 64-bit drivers for my POD. I miss recording music. My scanner won't work either but that is to be expected from a 7 yr old scanner. It's the first gen Canon LIDE compact scanners. It still works great! And the last annoying thing is the iPhone has no 64-bit drivers. For now, I use iTunes on my work laptop which isn't so bad, i just don't like mixing work with personal.

[Elie]

I've found that Vista 32-bit is actually more unstable than Vista 64-bit. I couldn't go 2 months with Vista 32-bit without re-installing. I've gone a whole 3 months with Vista 64-bit without even thinking about re-installing.

??? I 've been running Vista 32 bit on my laptop for months now with out a single crash, let alone having to reinstall.

What are you doing that causes you to reinstall that many times?

[Jammrock]

Using it for heavy testing.

Interestingly, I have been running Vista with the pagefile turned off for about a month. It is interesting to see how much RAM Vista really uses when it can't hide things in the pagefile.

[Nowhere]

So...how much? :>

BTW, I have few "theoretical" questions about 32bit vs. 64bit...apparently, in case of x86, 64bit actually has potentiall to be faster due to more registers.

But how does 64bit thing affects memory? How cache and memory transfer is affected? And, most importantly...what is the effect on available RAM?

[Jammrock]

If Vista had arms it would slap me. I use 2.3 GB of RAM on average, and when I turn on the virtual server I do testing on that number creeps up over 4. My hard drive thrashes most of the day. I have BitLocker enabled, so every write is encrypted. My company requires a virus scanner, so that's running on top of everything (with full email, internet, active scanning). And then there is server simulation and deployment tested with Virtual Server (because the bass turds at VMware won't make VMware server Vista x64 compatible...the punks). My ISP probably doesn't like me either.

As for RAM. Vista 64-bit in the Business, Enterprise and Ultimate encarnations allow up to 128 GB of RAM. Theorectically it can handle 2 TB RAM, as it's server counterpart can. There is not real difference in RAM performance in 32-bit and 64-bit that I know of until you break the 4 GB barrier. Once you reach that point 32-bit has to use tricks to run higher than that, while 64-bit runs it natively.

Theoretically you can reach 32 GB of RAM with 32-bit when Intel PAE is enabled, but if you need that much RAM you might as well switch to 64-bit.

As for transfer and cache differences...I don't know that I've ever seen a comparison. It would be an interesting test.

[TnT]

Been using 64bit Linux for a long time now. Works great.

On the business side of things we recommend 64bit OS for our server software so that the Java JVM can address more than 2 GB of RAM.