Don't get me wrong. I'd like to move to 64 bit Vista just to "get er done", but the computer industry as a whole, is in no big hurry. You can tell this by the lack of 64 bit applications and hardware drvers. Depending on your current hardware, moving to 64 bit Vista might be easy or a complete nightmare.

The only software that benifits from 64 bit are games and scientific apps. Most of the other apps you use from day-to-day, would be happy under 16 bit software so 64 bits wont matter that much to them. The reason for this is for floating point calculations, specificly, division. Example 343.23 / 145.46 = 2.3596177643338374810944589577891.

Games don't need more precision but they will get a speed boost because even in 32 bit software, floating point calculations are done in 64 bits. See how big that number got when you divided it? Requires a lot of bits just to hold part of that. It takes more work to do 64 bit floating point calculations on a 32 bit cpu. So with a 64 bit CPU, the same floating point calculations don't require that extra work. Ta-da!

Scientific apps won't gain speed but will make use of more precision. Just like 32 bit software will do 64 bit floating point calculations, 64 bit software will be able to do 128 bit floating point calculations.

So I'm just waiting for 64 bit versions of games to be the norm then the exception.

why ram speed doesn't really affect gaming at all unless your overclocking...mastershake575

That's not completely true. Right now he doesn't have enough ram so depending on the game, there will be less disk swapping and if you're going to add ram, might as well do it right. Also, games that are heave with physics, shadows and AI will improve based on the speed of your ram and CPU. And if you want to overclock and squeese out an additional 300 to 500 mhz, why not?

build your own.. build your own... build your own...

A true pc gamer builds his own rig. It's not that hard.

Just saw this card on newegg...

It's an agp directx10 card. It migt be better then the x1950. Can't find any benchmarks but it's only 83.99.

I have the Radeon Sapphire AGP X1950 PRO 512. Got it at newegg.com.

It's a good mid-range card. I get over 30 fps with the settings at medium with Crysis but shadows on low. Also got a good frame rate with the these listed demos: Hellgate London, COD4, Time Shift, UT3.

You won't be able to max out todays games but you'l still be able to enjoy them.

If anything, add that extra gig of ram.

If your motherboad doesn't support the DDR2 800 ram or greater, I would upgrade to a motherboad that does and replace all the ram with the fastest ram. Motherboads and ram are cheap.

All I know is that 64 bit will utilise your 4gig of ram.Grayzer

That is actually because of XP and not the 32 bit CPU. Here's an example. On a 16-bit CPU, the highest number it can hold in one register is 65535 so in theory, you can only use 64K of ram assuming it's a flat memory model. K = 1024 bytes so 64 * 1024 = 65535.

So in 32 bit flat memory, 4,294,967,295 (= 4 gigs) is all the ram you can address. Even today, most computer users don't need more then 2 gigs on XP.

XP doesn't see all 4 gigs of ram for software issues. It's not the hardware or the 32-bit cpu that's the problem. Win95/98/ME are 32 bit systems and they only saw about a gig if you messed with the settings.

Chances are XP has these software limitations hard coded in and they will leave them in because they want you to move to Vista. Just like DirectX10 will never run on XP.

The other thing to note is that most of that market place is XP so games aren't going to expect you to have a full 4 gigs of ram available. I would argue that most games don't need more then 2 gigs. I know it's disappointing to have purchased all that ram and XP doesn't see some of it. No software would be using that much right now anyways.

So that's why I say, until 64-bit versions of games start shipping, there's no reason to move to 64-bit. To be honest, for the whole 64-bit thing to work well, the computer industry as a whole needs to move there and no ones in a hurry right now.

I'll go 64-bit when I start seeing games offering 64-bit versions of the software. Until then, there's no point in it.

what is 64 bit? like whats the real difference?Cajones_Del_Mar

This will take a bit to explain, but it's an overly simplified explanation.

This boils down to the number of bits the processor can hold in one given register, to then do operations on that one register (+-*/). Think of the register as one box that can hold all 64 bits. The number of bits determines how big the number can be. For example, an 8-bit CPU register can hold a number from 0 to 255, a 16-bit register, 0 to 65535, 32-bit register, 0 to 4294967295 and last but not least, a 64-bit register can hold a number from 0 to 18446744073709551615. This is why going from 16-bit windows to 32-bit windows was a huge thing but 32-bit to 64-bit is not that huge because we have't maxed out 32 bit yet. Look at the size difference in the numbers from 16 to 32 bit.

In your average applications, 64-bit doesn't mean that much. Please, hold your hate mail, I'll explain why. Most apps do very little floating point calculations or needs to hold a number as high as 4294967295. Scientific apps and games are the exception. Now, a 32-bit CPU can work with a 64-bit floating point number (1234.6784) but it has to do extra work because it's registers only hold 32 bits. This is one of the reasons floating point calculations are slow.

64-bit will be a big help for games because all floating point calculations can be done in one 64-bit register without any extra work. Right now, in your 32-bit game, the floating point calculations are done in 64-bit to preserve precision, which is slower, because two registers need to be used. For scientific apps, the 32-bit CPU can simulate an 80 bit floating point number but forcing a 32-bit CPU to work with 80 bits is very slow and scientific apps could benifit from more bits and higher precision. So just like a 32-bit CPU can manage 64-bit floating point numbers, a 64-bit CPU will be able to do the same with 128-bit floating point numbers.

So until games start shipping with 64-bit versions, your web browser, word processor, vidoe player, chat program and the such don't care and won't make use of 64 bits.