Which OS?

[CoyKili]

Hey,
I'm building an htpc, planning to use
AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ 1GHz FSB 2 x 512KB L2 Cache Socket 939 Dual Core Processor
I'm going to use this for games, multimedia, and a heck of alot of encoding.
I won't be overclocking. I'm going to try to use Raid0 for my OS, and another big drive for media storage.

Which OS would you chose? What OS issues are there for the dual core processors and/or the 64bit processors?

My current choices are:
$116 Windows MCE
$143 Microsoft Windows XP Professional X64 Edition 1
$135 Windows XP Pro (free, since I already have a spare copy)

 

[spherrod]

You should search the forums, this topic has been discussed a lot recently

 

[TonyRic]

any of them including Home will detect and use both cores.

 

[CoyKili]

What's the benefit of using the 64bit version of windows? I never really understood the big bonus.

 

[Canterwood]

Originally posted by: CoyKili
What's the benefit of using the 64bit version of windows? I never really understood the big bonus.

There isn't one unless you have software that uses large ammounts of ram.
Servers can benefit from going x64, but desktop users really have no need to use it.
There really isn't good enough support either to consider using XP x64 atm.

 

[PingSpike]

Originally posted by: CoyKili
What's the benefit of using the 64bit version of windows? I never really understood the big bonus.

There isn't really one, unless you like being on the bleeding edge. Personally, I got over paying to be a beta tester years ago.

 

[alent1234]

I've noticed Dell and HP pushing MCE on their newest models. If there aren't any compatibility issues, I'd say go for it.