nice, gonna check my win version

Rath said: @Uber. Doesn't 64 bit also require far more address space though? Also does 64 bit mean double word size?

64-bit instructions allow for a virtual address space of 2^64 bytes so you don't necessarily need 4GB+ to take advantage of it.

A major disadvantage is that all pointers now take up 8 bytes instead of 4 bytes. A linked list could theoretically take up twice as much memory in 64-bit mode.

The real advantage of using 64-bit instructions is the increase of directly addressible registers. The HPC people like it for it's high precision friendly features, for example it also eliminates alignment issues with doubles.

Another benefit of 64-bit is for gaming. 32-bit only allows any process to use 2GB of memory, without using a workaround.

When me and a friend were playing Supreme Commander, after an hour or so of playing we neared the 2GB limit and our games always crashed, without fail.

@NewUser. That sounds like an awful memory leak doesn't it? Like - really poor programming?

64 bit is the way to go, and drivers havent been an issue for quite some time now. I have been running 64bit for 2 years or so now without a hitch, its quite speedier in reality - not necesarrily in terms of FPS but in terms of "snappyness"

Basically if you are running less than 4GB of RAM these days, you are gimping yourself for no good reason given how cheap RAM is these days. 8GB is the new norm.

It does make a difference, especially when heavily multitasking and/or running real memory hog software. Not ever really having to access pagefile is definately a performance enhancer.