- Jul 27, 2002
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Thanks to an 'acquaintance' who works for MS, I've got myself a copy of Vista Ultimate for free. (Please don't PM me about this 'acquaintance' 
) As been reported, the retail version came with both 32-bit and 64-bit version of the OS. After a few hours of thought, I decided to pull the trigger and installed the 64-bit version. The biggest factor in the decision-making was, of course, RAM.
I've purchased my DDR2 sticks before Core 2 Duo came out. (i.e. they were cheap) 2GB kit I bought were only $187, and those sticks are top-of-the-line by even today's standard. It's just that DDR2 didn't really catch on at the time. And later I bought another 2 GB kit (Crucial 10th Anniversary, this was an impulse-buy) so I ended up with total 6 sticks. So I needed to find a way to justify my purchases, and installing 64-bit OS fit the bill quite nicely.
Another factor that forced me to 64-bit computing was the ridiculous ammount of RAM that today's games tend to eat up. Check this out.
Memory Usage: Company of Heroes
Well, it turned out to be more than nice. Vista 64-bit didn't have, to my surprise, too many surprises in store. Everything installed correctly and everything worked fine, except those without 64-bit driver support. Notably, Acrobat (needs to install printer drivers) and Alcohol 120 (needs to install virtual drive drivers). Any software that doesn't deal with these 'virtual' drivers installed without a hitch. Even games (well, games that I installed and play - Company of Heroes, Oblivion, and Flight Simulator X) didn't give me any trouble for having a 64-bit OS.
I was able to overclock my CPU and memory to the same extent that I was, with 2 GB memory, albeit with slightly more vDIMM. I had given 2.25V for DDR2-800 / 3-3-3 with two 1GB sticks, and for the same frequency / timing, four 1GB sticks required 2.30V. Contrary to the AT's review, my 64-bit OS experience with 4GB of memory was quite joyous so far. Hell, even the 8800 drivers haven't given me any trouble as of yet. Below are some of the benchmarks I've ran with a Xeon 3060 @3.60GHz. Memory, as stated above, @800MHz/3-3-3. There is no means of overclocking 8800 at this time so it's at the default speed. I set the control panel default to 'High Quality'.
3DMark01: 50556
3DMark05: 18424
Super Pi 32M: 13m 58s
Everest Cache & Memory
A few things to note:
1. 3DMark01 doesn't seem to play nice with ForceWare drivers (100.59)
2. Note the astonishingly high 3DMark05 CPU score. I've run it multiple times to make sure, and the results were the same.
3. Super PI is known to benefit from 64-bit OS, so no surprise here.
4. The bandwidth loss and latency increase, according to Everest, seems minimal.
My overclocking and general experience with 64-bit Vista is quite the opposite of AT's review. As you can see from above screenshots, Vista will use as much as RAM you feed it with and with 4GB of data residing in fast memory, everything seems to take place instantaneously. I've never seen photoshop loading so fast. There was no HDD access while loading Oblivion! (Can you belive it) Games didn't feel slower at all. If anything, it was smoother.
So here is my 'ment: If you have an access to an 64-bit OS and more than 2GB of memory, don't hesitate to try them out. Especially if your setup is from scratch, all you can possibly lose is about an hour of time in your life. (20 mins for OS installation, 40 mins for drivers/apps installation and customizing) I was able to achieve same memory frequency/timing with mere 0.05V extra vDIMM and the end result was 'smoothness itself'. Vista with highly overclocked Core 2 Duo and 4 GB of memory is the biggest change that I've experienced in my desktop usage.
) As been reported, the retail version came with both 32-bit and 64-bit version of the OS. After a few hours of thought, I decided to pull the trigger and installed the 64-bit version. The biggest factor in the decision-making was, of course, RAM.I've purchased my DDR2 sticks before Core 2 Duo came out. (i.e. they were cheap) 2GB kit I bought were only $187, and those sticks are top-of-the-line by even today's standard. It's just that DDR2 didn't really catch on at the time. And later I bought another 2 GB kit (Crucial 10th Anniversary, this was an impulse-buy) so I ended up with total 6 sticks. So I needed to find a way to justify my purchases, and installing 64-bit OS fit the bill quite nicely.
Another factor that forced me to 64-bit computing was the ridiculous ammount of RAM that today's games tend to eat up. Check this out.
Memory Usage: Company of Heroes
Well, it turned out to be more than nice. Vista 64-bit didn't have, to my surprise, too many surprises in store. Everything installed correctly and everything worked fine, except those without 64-bit driver support. Notably, Acrobat (needs to install printer drivers) and Alcohol 120 (needs to install virtual drive drivers). Any software that doesn't deal with these 'virtual' drivers installed without a hitch. Even games (well, games that I installed and play - Company of Heroes, Oblivion, and Flight Simulator X) didn't give me any trouble for having a 64-bit OS.
I was able to overclock my CPU and memory to the same extent that I was, with 2 GB memory, albeit with slightly more vDIMM. I had given 2.25V for DDR2-800 / 3-3-3 with two 1GB sticks, and for the same frequency / timing, four 1GB sticks required 2.30V. Contrary to the AT's review, my 64-bit OS experience with 4GB of memory was quite joyous so far. Hell, even the 8800 drivers haven't given me any trouble as of yet. Below are some of the benchmarks I've ran with a Xeon 3060 @3.60GHz. Memory, as stated above, @800MHz/3-3-3. There is no means of overclocking 8800 at this time so it's at the default speed. I set the control panel default to 'High Quality'.
3DMark01: 50556
3DMark05: 18424
Super Pi 32M: 13m 58s
Everest Cache & Memory
A few things to note:
1. 3DMark01 doesn't seem to play nice with ForceWare drivers (100.59)
2. Note the astonishingly high 3DMark05 CPU score. I've run it multiple times to make sure, and the results were the same.
3. Super PI is known to benefit from 64-bit OS, so no surprise here.
4. The bandwidth loss and latency increase, according to Everest, seems minimal.
My overclocking and general experience with 64-bit Vista is quite the opposite of AT's review. As you can see from above screenshots, Vista will use as much as RAM you feed it with and with 4GB of data residing in fast memory, everything seems to take place instantaneously. I've never seen photoshop loading so fast. There was no HDD access while loading Oblivion! (Can you belive it) Games didn't feel slower at all. If anything, it was smoother.
So here is my 'ment: If you have an access to an 64-bit OS and more than 2GB of memory, don't hesitate to try them out. Especially if your setup is from scratch, all you can possibly lose is about an hour of time in your life. (20 mins for OS installation, 40 mins for drivers/apps installation and customizing) I was able to achieve same memory frequency/timing with mere 0.05V extra vDIMM and the end result was 'smoothness itself'. Vista with highly overclocked Core 2 Duo and 4 GB of memory is the biggest change that I've experienced in my desktop usage.
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