Hi there. I was wondering if I needed to pick up windows vista 64bit to take full advantage of my quadcore or can I use windows vista 32bit. I appreciate any help. Thanks!!!!
quad cores work fine on 32bit systems. you only need to go to 64bit if you're planning on using more than 4gigs of ram, but anything over 4gigs is unnecessary for normal use.
Agreed - you're still better off using 32-bit for now, but you do have the option to use 64-bit later if you desire.
After an initial nightmare to get Vista 64 Ultimate not to crash with my selected hardware I would say I agree with the two previous opinions and would like to add that if you do a lot of video enconding(one of my hobbies) then 64 bit is considerably faster (that is after a nightmare to get it stable of course).
I appreciate the advice. Some advice on these two computer builds then if noone minds. I'm not quite sure on what direction to go. Both are going to run me 900 dollars. Option 1 comes with a 19in 5ms refreshing monitor as well. Option 1 CPU: Intel QuadCore Q9300 2.5 Gighz RAM: 4 Gig's of RAM upgradable to 8 Gig's Hard Drive: 320 Gig 7,200 RPM Hard Drive Video Card: ATI RADEON HD 3870 Option 2 3ghz intel core xeon dual core gforce 8800 gts 4gigs ram 500gig hd Now, I do mostly encoding movies and playing video games. I don't have many applications running at the same time. I was told that the xeon would be best performance wise if doing less things at once. On the other hand, i was also told the quadcore was the way to go. Any opinions on this. Again, thanks a lot for the help.
If I remember correctly, there's not really much advantage to be had with having the Xeon brand this time round, all you're getting is extra clock speed, and you an overclock your CPU anyway. If you're only going to be using a 19" monitor, the HD3870 will be plenty fast enough as well. I'd say the first option.
