32bit vs 64bit - Why should I consider?

[Gamingphreek]

Sure

http://game.amd.com/us-en/driv...p=win7/windows-7-64bit

That will take care of your Video Card (Catalyst Drivers). The motherboard/chipset drivers should be automatically installed by Vista. AMD/ATI has not released a version, to my knowledge, that provides any additional functionality.

Using Vista drivers on things like scanners and what not to get them working on 7 is not a bad idea; HOWEVER, using chipset drivers should be left alone. Vista, while very similar to 7 as far as the HAL and Userspace/Kernel Space, may have some differences that aren't in the driver.

-Kevin

 

[StarsFan4Life]

Originally posted by: Gamingphreek
Sure

http://game.amd.com/us-en/driv...p=win7/windows-7-64bit

That will take care of your Video Card (Catalyst Drivers). The motherboard/chipset drivers should be automatically installed by Vista. AMD/ATI has not released a version, to my knowledge, that provides any additional functionality.

Using Vista drivers on things like scanners and what not to get them working on 7 is not a bad idea; HOWEVER, using chipset drivers should be left alone. Vista, while very similar to 7 as far as the HAL and Userspace/Kernel Space, may have some differences that aren't in the driver.

-Kevin

Do you mean the chipset drivers are automatically installed by Windows 7? (NOT Vista)

 

[StarsFan4Life]

I think what I am going to do (to verify that it is NOT hardware) is format and install Windows XP Professional 32bit. We all know that drivers are stable for that OS. I'll test it out for a day or two....then move on to Windows Vista 64bit.......do the same with that OS.....and see where I stand after that.

 

[mechBgon]

Originally posted by: Gamingphreek

I think one of the mods mentioned that Windows 7 64 bit has better security than 32 bit version.

Well not really. The only more "secure" feature in 64bit, is simply that you cannot install unsigned drivers on the computer at all (Whereas in 32bit, you can install any driver that you want and force it to continue).

-Kevin

For those who are interested, here's some info as it pertains to Vista, and I think Win7 as well. Microsoft's Security Intelligence Reports have been showing that 64-bit Vista has significantly lower infection rates than 32-bit, incidentally.

64-bit security enhancements: Kernel patch protection and driver signing

Some of the most serious security issues can arise from malicious software that manipulates the operating system kernel to render itself undetectable to anti-virus software and to run unnoticed on a user?s system. This type of malicious software is known as a rootkit. Rootkits are often used to cloak other potentially unwanted software, such as bots and spyware. Beyond the serious security implications of rootkits, this class of malicious software can reduce the stability, reliability, and performance of the entire computer.

Kernel patch protection. The 64-bit versions of Windows Vista support Microsoft?s kernel patch protection technology (sometimes referred to as PatchGuard), which prevents unauthorized software from modifying the Windows kernel. Kernel patch protection works by preventing kernel-mode drivers from extending or replacing operating system kernel services through unsupported means and by prohibiting all software from performing unsupported patches in the kernel. In addition to improving security and making it more difficult for hackers to modify the kernel for malicious purposes, kernel patch protection also greatly improves the security and reliability of Windows Vista and enables future improvements in the kernel environment that can address the evolving landscape of malicious software.

Mandatory kernel module and driver signing. To give users visibility into the source of drivers and other software running in the operating system kernel, Microsoft introduced the concept of ?signed drivers? with Windows 2000. Unsigned drivers could be prevented from installing, but the default configuration merely warned users if they were about to install an unsigned driver. IT administrators could also block installation of unsigned drivers with Group Policy, but the large installed base of unsigned drivers made this impractical in most situations. Malicious kernel software typically tries to install ?silently,? without notifying the user or asking for approval, so malicious kernel software was still likely to run successfully.

With Windows Vista on 64-bit systems, security at the kernel level has been significantly enhanced by requiring that all kernel-mode drivers be digitally signed. Digital signing provides identity as well as integrity for code. A kernel module that is corrupt or has been subject to tampering will not load. Any driver that is not properly signed cannot even enter the kernel space.
Signed drivers help identify and prevent many malicious attacks, while allowing Microsoft to help non-Microsoft developers improve the overall quality of drivers and reduce the number of driver-related crashes.

 

[1LordEmperor1]

Originally posted by: StarsFan4Life
8GB

64 bit.

 

[StarsFan4Life]

Really?

 

[Gamingphreek]

Originally posted by: StarsFan4Life
I think what I am going to do (to verify that it is NOT hardware) is format and install Windows XP Professional 32bit. We all know that drivers are stable for that OS. I'll test it out for a day or two....then move on to Windows Vista 64bit.......do the same with that OS.....and see where I stand after that.

Drivers for XP, inherently, are absolutely horrid despite what most people say. They are all in kernel space - thus - if the driver crashes in anyway shape or form, the computer blue screens and then restarts. Going to XP will do absolutely nothing for you.

As for isolating hardware/software - there are 2 places, in this instance, where hardware could be failing (Since you have already checked memory):
a.) A sector on your disk could be corrupted
b.) Overheating

If it isn't doing either of those, it is a software problem. Given the error you posted, it is clearly something that ATI produce, limiting it to Chipset/Video drivers. Since you installed Vista chipset drivers I would be willing to put a lot of money that they are causing problems.

If you are that concerned that it is Windows 7's problem, then go down to Vista 64bit and test it out.

Well, I suppose I kind of got both of them, mechBgon - I didn't know about the patch protection- though since Video and Audio drivers were moved from kernel space, there was really no reason not to require everything to be digitally signed.

Do you mean the chipset drivers are automatically installed by Windows 7? (NOT Vista)

Haha yea - sorry for the mistype.

-Kevin

 

[StarsFan4Life]

Kevin,

I think tonight I will run a Memtest overnight to see if anything shows up. Tomorrow, I will reformat completely and install Windows Vista Ultimate 64bit and see if I get the same problem.

 

[Gamingphreek]

Originally posted by: StarsFan4Life
Kevin,

I think tonight I will run a Memtest overnight to see if anything shows up. Tomorrow, I will reformat completely and install Windows Vista Ultimate 64bit and see if I get the same problem.

Memtest is a good place to look. Also, running Prime95 or some sort of FFT (Seti or F@H) are good stress tests.

You might try uninstalling the chipset drivers and letting it grab the default ones instead of the ones you provided. That way you can get the Vista ones out of there; however, a reinstall might be a more solid indication of that.

Best of luck though! Let us know if you get held up on anything!

-Kevin

 

[StarsFan4Life]

Ok....a bit of an update.

I reformatted and installed Windows 7 RC1 Build 7100 straight up....let it sit for an hour or so (since the majority of the time my computer BSOD on me, it was sitting idle)...and no BSOD's. This is with all Windows 7 drivers for everything. No updates, no drivers downloaded.

I am going to download the 9.6 ATI drivers in just a sec, install them and see how they work out. Any other suggestions?

Now, after looking at this page (http://www.amd.com/us/Pages/AMDHomePage.aspx) if I select either my video card or the motherboard / chipset (onboard HD3200) they both point to this page (http://game.amd.com/us-en/driv...=win7/windows-7-64bit). So, apparently I did it this way before and downloaded drivers from Gigabytes page too....which could have screwed up everything from the beginning.

I am going to install the 9.6 drivers WITHOUT ccc (catalyst control center) and see how this does.

Update in about an hour!

 

[Gamingphreek]

Originally posted by: StarsFan4Life
Ok....a bit of an update.

I reformatted and installed Windows 7 RC1 Build 7100 straight up....let it sit for an hour or so (since the majority of the time my computer BSOD on me, it was sitting idle)...and no BSOD's. This is with all Windows 7 drivers for everything. No updates, no drivers downloaded.

I am going to download the 9.6 ATI drivers in just a sec, install them and see how they work out. Any other suggestions?

Now, after looking at this page (http://www.amd.com/us/Pages/AMDHomePage.aspx) if I select either my video card or the motherboard / chipset (onboard HD3200) they both point to this page (http://game.amd.com/us-en/driv...=win7/windows-7-64bit). So, apparently I did it this way before and downloaded drivers from Gigabytes page too....which could have screwed up everything from the beginning.

I am going to install the 9.6 drivers WITHOUT ccc (catalyst control center) and see how this does.

Update in about an hour!

Thats good news!

You can probably install the ATI Drivers safely. If you looked on Gigabytes site and installed Vista drivers, it was probably for chipset.

Both point to the Catalyst drivers because they are a unified driver package for all Video Cards.

CCC could very well be the program that was crashing as well. Did you google the file from earlier that was crashing and see what it was?

-Kevin

 

[gsellis]

The only caution you should have 64-bit vs 32-bit is if you use a Break Out Box for video. Most video related BOBs lag in 64-bit device driver support. Since Vegas tends to be DV or HDI and you do not specify any special devices, it sounds good.

If I had seen this earlier, I would have recommended an nVidia based video solution with your Vegas suite, but you should be OK. Some of your performance may be slower with the ATI solution (if it was Pinnacle Studio or Avid Liquid with the latest DX10 patch, you would be good, but >2GB is not much improvement, so 64-bit is meh at the moment.)

Consider adding more drives too.

Note to those about to say MORE MEMORY - NLE's have been designed since day 1 to deal with sparse memory in computers. 1 hour of DV is 13GB, so the editor has to do "load from disk" continually. With the more advanced editors, this is better controlled by using 3 seperate channels for tasks. The OS and App is on one drive system. The source is on another. The workspace is on still a third. When the NLE then shuffles video onto the play line, it reads both the source and any rendered effects from different sources and can better stream it. Now that Adobe and Sony are catching up with Pinnacle, the GPU is being used to render effects on the fly without pre-rendering them (FCP v1 had to render everything before playback - not sure V2 has fixed this and don't really care at the moment). So, video cards are becoming more and more important for performance for software based solutions. All along, there have been some specialty cards that work with systems hammer this home. But initially, they were used as capture engines.

 

[StarsFan4Life]

Originally posted by: Gamingphreek

Originally posted by: StarsFan4Life
Ok....a bit of an update.

I reformatted and installed Windows 7 RC1 Build 7100 straight up....let it sit for an hour or so (since the majority of the time my computer BSOD on me, it was sitting idle)...and no BSOD's. This is with all Windows 7 drivers for everything. No updates, no drivers downloaded.

I am going to download the 9.6 ATI drivers in just a sec, install them and see how they work out. Any other suggestions?

Now, after looking at this page (http://www.amd.com/us/Pages/AMDHomePage.aspx) if I select either my video card or the motherboard / chipset (onboard HD3200) they both point to this page (http://game.amd.com/us-en/driv...=win7/windows-7-64bit). So, apparently I did it this way before and downloaded drivers from Gigabytes page too....which could have screwed up everything from the beginning.

I am going to install the 9.6 drivers WITHOUT ccc (catalyst control center) and see how this does.

Update in about an hour!

Thats good news!

You can probably install the ATI Drivers safely. If you looked on Gigabytes site and installed Vista drivers, it was probably for chipset.

Both point to the Catalyst drivers because they are a unified driver package for all Video Cards.

CCC could very well be the program that was crashing as well. Did you google the file from earlier that was crashing and see what it was?

-Kevin

Kevin,

Although this was something I took for granted in the past, I left the PC on all night to come into my office this morning to find it still on and kicking.

I believe we resolved the issue...and I could NOT be any happier!

 

[StarsFan4Life]

Originally posted by: gsellis
The only caution you should have 64-bit vs 32-bit is if you use a Break Out Box for video. Most video related BOBs lag in 64-bit device driver support. Since Vegas tends to be DV or HDI and you do not specify any special devices, it sounds good.

If I had seen this earlier, I would have recommended an nVidia based video solution with your Vegas suite, but you should be OK. Some of your performance may be slower with the ATI solution (if it was Pinnacle Studio or Avid Liquid with the latest DX10 patch, you would be good, but >2GB is not much improvement, so 64-bit is meh at the moment.)

Consider adding more drives too.

Note to those about to say MORE MEMORY - NLE's have been designed since day 1 to deal with sparse memory in computers. 1 hour of DV is 13GB, so the editor has to do "load from disk" continually. With the more advanced editors, this is better controlled by using 3 seperate channels for tasks. The OS and App is on one drive system. The source is on another. The workspace is on still a third. When the NLE then shuffles video onto the play line, it reads both the source and any rendered effects from different sources and can better stream it. Now that Adobe and Sony are catching up with Pinnacle, the GPU is being used to render effects on the fly without pre-rendering them (FCP v1 had to render everything before playback - not sure V2 has fixed this and don't really care at the moment). So, video cards are becoming more and more important for performance for software based solutions. All along, there have been some specialty cards that work with systems hammer this home. But initially, they were used as capture engines.

I have another WD Caviar Black 1tb drive that I just got in yesterday. I will be installing tonight.

 

[gsellis]

Originally posted by: StarsFan4Life
I have another WD Caviar Black 1tb drive that I just got in yesterday. I will be installing tonight.

I don't own Vegas, but I suspect that you can change your render path in the options without reinstalling. So look for that when you get it in.

Don't partition it either. Just 1 big volume and of course, NTFS.

 

[StarsFan4Life]

Originally posted by: gsellis

Originally posted by: StarsFan4Life
I have another WD Caviar Black 1tb drive that I just got in yesterday. I will be installing tonight.

I don't own Vegas, but I suspect that you can change your render path in the options without reinstalling. So look for that when you get it in.

Don't partition it either. Just 1 big volume and of course, NTFS.

But of course!

 

[Gamingphreek]

Congrats StarsFan! I'm glad you like your new computer and new OS. Enjoy it, Windows 7 is one of the finest OS's Microsoft has made (Give Linux a shot sometime - it rocks )

 

[Tequila]

Originally posted by: StarsFan4Life

Originally posted by: Gamingphreek

Originally posted by: StarsFan4Life
Ok....a bit of an update.

I reformatted and installed Windows 7 RC1 Build 7100 straight up....let it sit for an hour or so (since the majority of the time my computer BSOD on me, it was sitting idle)...and no BSOD's. This is with all Windows 7 drivers for everything. No updates, no drivers downloaded.

I am going to download the 9.6 ATI drivers in just a sec, install them and see how they work out. Any other suggestions?

Now, after looking at this page (http://www.amd.com/us/Pages/AMDHomePage.aspx) if I select either my video card or the motherboard / chipset (onboard HD3200) they both point to this page (http://game.amd.com/us-en/driv...=win7/windows-7-64bit). So, apparently I did it this way before and downloaded drivers from Gigabytes page too....which could have screwed up everything from the beginning.

I am going to install the 9.6 drivers WITHOUT ccc (catalyst control center) and see how this does.

Update in about an hour!

Thats good news!

You can probably install the ATI Drivers safely. If you looked on Gigabytes site and installed Vista drivers, it was probably for chipset.

Both point to the Catalyst drivers because they are a unified driver package for all Video Cards.

CCC could very well be the program that was crashing as well. Did you google the file from earlier that was crashing and see what it was?

-Kevin

Kevin,

Although this was something I took for granted in the past, I left the PC on all night to come into my office this morning to find it still on and kicking.

I believe we resolved the issue...and I could NOT be any happier!

Good to hear Kevin got you straightened out on the correct video driver and you are crash free now. If you are feeling brave go ahead and try CCC, I haven't had any problems with it.

 

[StarsFan4Life]

What exactly is the need for CCC?

 

[Gamingphreek]

Originally posted by: StarsFan4Life
What exactly is the need for CCC?

Catalyst Control Center provides AVIVO and other Video Control Tools (Application level AA, Image Quality, Force Resolutions). It also provides Temperature Monitoring tools.

You should have it installed unless you have problems.

-Kevin

 

[StarsFan4Life]

Kevin,

Alright....I take it back....we are still having an issue.

I downloaded and ran Furmark 1.7.0. On 1900x1080 running defaut stability test, it ran decently, the temp reached 75c and then CRASH within 30 seconds.....screens went blank but no BSOD.

Ran again at 1280 x 1024, it lasted 116 seconds and same thing happened.

Can we now say "hardware issue" or is it still the lack of good drivers for Win7 64bit?

 

[StarsFan4Life]

Let me also add:

I ran Memtest for 2 days straight....no errors at all. Ram is in check.

Been running prime95 for 3 hours.....no problems with it at all.


Furmark killed my machine......so I am at least guessing the gpu needs replacing....

 

[dawp]

Have you disable the onboard video? it could becausing problems because, if i remember right, hybrid crossfire is only supported by the low end add-ins and you have a 4870.

I have a 790fx(ASUS M3A32 MVP deluxe) board with a 4870x2 and do not have problems like you are.

Also onboard shares memory whith the system mem and if you diable the onboard, it will free up system memory.

 

[Gamingphreek]

Originally posted by: StarsFan4Life
Kevin,

Alright....I take it back....we are still having an issue.

I downloaded and ran Furmark 1.7.0. On 1900x1080 running defaut stability test, it ran decently, the temp reached 75c and then CRASH within 30 seconds.....screens went blank but no BSOD.

Ran again at 1280 x 1024, it lasted 116 seconds and same thing happened.

Can we now say "hardware issue" or is it still the lack of good drivers for Win7 64bit?

Well 75C is extremely hot. Because the screens went blank its clearly the overheating protection kicking in and killing the power (The BSOD's from earlier were obviously driver problems, but with no BSOD, and with that high of a temperature, you can see that it is overheating now).

-Kevin

 

[StarsFan4Life]

Originally posted by: Gamingphreek

Originally posted by: StarsFan4Life
Kevin,

Alright....I take it back....we are still having an issue.

I downloaded and ran Furmark 1.7.0. On 1900x1080 running defaut stability test, it ran decently, the temp reached 75c and then CRASH within 30 seconds.....screens went blank but no BSOD.

Ran again at 1280 x 1024, it lasted 116 seconds and same thing happened.

Can we now say "hardware issue" or is it still the lack of good drivers for Win7 64bit?

Well 75C is extremely hot. Because the screens went blank its clearly the overheating protection kicking in and killing the power (The BSOD's from earlier were obviously driver problems, but with no BSOD, and with that high of a temperature, you can see that it is overheating now).

-Kevin

I do have very good and proper cooling going on here. My CPU's max temp is only 47c, idle about 35-40c. Should I just scrap the 4870 and go back to nvidia?