64Bit OS.

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zedman3d

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Okay its driving me insane. I cant find a 64Bit OS to install on my friends new E8500/9800GTX+/4GB DDR2 system in time for building it and such.

Explain for me once more if its even worth buying him the extra 2gigs if he's using the 32bit XP...

I could have put on for him Server 08 from DreamSpark but you guessed it.. there are no validation systems for Australia if your school isnt listed and my IST admin is to put it lightly... not so smart.

What should i do and will there be issues i need to know about.
 
Its not unless he is a cad man or a media editor. 2gb 32bit xp will be fine and play all games well, you might want to chuck in an extra 1gb for 3gb if he is into games that have massive open spaces with complex physics like total war
 
Okay but if i pop a full 4 it will just not use it right. (Yes. Its that bad.)
If that's the case then ill just pop the full 4 in and let windows figure out whats available to it.

I know its been answered before and such but with this guy i need everything perfect because one slip up and im gone. lol.
 
ok... let me lay this out for ya...

32bit OSes allow 2^32 bytes (4GB) of physical memory to be addressed, 64bit OSes allow 2^64 addresses (17.2 billion gigabytes). If you install a device which has any physical memory onboard (eg video cards, sound cards, even HDD caches), windows must use some of these addresses to allow use of these expansion devices... therefore you will be able to use that amount less of 4GB of RAM on an x86 system. This probably won't amount to more than 600MB, leaving you 3.4GB to work with, which really is plenty. Plus, you can always upgrade to an x64 OS later on to fully utilise the RAM.

4GB is getting more and more necessary, especially for multitasking and switching large apps on and off (eg if you wanna play Crysis then switch to browsing the web quickly)... if you wanna do some more reading on this, there's an article here (http://www.corsair.com/_appnotes/AN804_Gaming_Performance_Analysis.pdf) that is quite informative, but kinda biased.

Also, interesting to note, that the larger int value employed in x64 OSes slightly increases the amount of RAM used on any given app, but it is quite insignificant (usually less the 2-3%).
 
Install the 4gb of memory, it'll read around 3gb after you install the video card and all will be fine with the world.

My machine here at work is reding 3.24gb, i think its only got a 256mb 8600 video card though.
 
Thanks. Btw i just got my friends Armor+ MX case in and all i can say is: Bowchikawowwow.
 
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