Off Topic Productions

I've been running an Athlon 64 based machine since last summer and it has been fine. I'm using Windows XP 32bit.

My favourite bit about my newest system is SATA. It's just so much neater than those old IDE cables *shudders*.

Psst - Oblivion went gold

@ EER

Cool, thanks for the info. So your games still run faster on a 64-bit chip if you run XP 32-bit?

@ Lofaesofa

Yeah it was very nice to switch to a SATA drive, takes up so much less space in the machine.

As for Oblivion... I'll reserve my judgement until I've played it.

No conflicts yet. I don't have XP 64, so... yeah.
Also, I have sata cables... and the mobo supports them... but I don't know anything about them. Being that they replace IDE, I assume the hdd/cdr has to support sata?

I bought 64bit, and installed win 2k3 64bit. Man, was that painful. One set of drivers wouldn't work, about 6 of my must-have applications refused to install or work (Windows installers are often 16bit crap), and the "well, I guess I don't _need_ that...."'s kept piling up. Back on 32bit. Unless you use your machine for very few things and you know they work in 64bit, don't bother. That was in the first while of 64bit in Windows, so things will have improved, but probably not much. If you run Linux, then it'll be almost a seamless upgrade, just download the 64bit ISO of your distro.

I like things like Altivec, Dual Core/multiprocessing, 64bit, etc more than pure speed. When the fast processors now are outdated, the ones with extra "features" will be getting faster and faster as the software progresses. Example, GCC 4.1 suddenly makes old PPC G4's faster with optimized autovectorization.

Jonas wrote:@ EER

Cool, thanks for the info. So your games still run faster on a 64-bit chip if you run XP 32-bit?

You only get a speed increase with 64-bit windows. And that speed increase won't be worth it for driver and application problems (like justanotherfan described). I've got a PentiumD 2.8ghz proccesor, and it's 64 bit, but I don't want to run it on 64bit windows.

Also, there is little speed increase on games. 64bit is extremely overhyped unless you're proccesing data.

x86-64 isn't overhyped, but perhaps it is in the mainstream. It can lead to a decent performance increase, but if you're on Windows, it usually isn't worth the hassle (yet) of new drivers and broken applications. If you have a 64bit processor and you're on Windows, you probably don't need the performance increase yet.

x86-64 fixes a number of the worst problems with the x86 arch by adding more general registers etc, but it's still not PPC.

Again, if you're on linux, x86-64 is here and now. Not only are you getting away from the i386 binaries of Windows and UNIX, but you're jumping to binaries for the most modern x86 arch.
(
I'm being told Windows 95 can run on a 386, 98 on 486 (the installer refuses 386), it seems XP requires at least a 7mhz Pentium (i586)
http://winhistory.de/more/386/xpmini_eng.htm
)

It is overhyped for gaming. There is very small performance increase unless you're proccessing lots of data. Plus there's the hassle of drivers etc.

It was an easy choice for me...

There was nothing else to buy as they have phased out Socket A processors and their motherboards. If you wanted PCI-E, SATA2 and NForce4, then you needed to get a 64bit processor.

For a gamer there is little choice but to embrace 64bit CPU based systems. But why do you need to have a 64bit OS yet? As for compatibility I've had no troubles at all. I've been playing UFO: Defense, Ikari Warriors, Stonekeep, all my troublesome games. Even the original Z works well.

With a 32bit OS I have no crashes or hardware problems. Infact I have never had a problem with XP ever.

Perhaps I should switch from the server versions.

There are still Socket A motherboards, but they're usually somewhat lame....a 333mhz bus would be an upgrade but not by much. ISTR one could use Sempron processors still with Socket A, but that could have changed. AMD has been screwing around with sockets for a while now, and I'm sick of it. I'm upgrading my s939 machine now, and I think I'll skip EM2 until they use FB-DIMM. I don't see why any upgrades will be necessary for some time, unless Direct X 10 brings amazing new features, or if nVidia creates a videocard virtualization mode to work with AMD's Pacifica (hey nVidia, don't like DX10? Implement virtualizition, make OpenGL standard in games).