I was totally relating to you...right until that very last phrase...now I just think you are bat ****

Pff, going from the Commodore 64 to the leet Commodore 128 was my own first.

/but yah, the sheer awesome of going from a 386/whatever to a 486/80 to play doom...magnificient

You make it sound like switching to a 64bit OS means all 32bit apps will immediately make use of more than 2GB each *that's* 'misinformation'.
Each app and each game needs someone to produce a LAA exe and that just doesnt happen.
A 64bit OS just means you get an extra 500mb or so of RAM to play with (providing you have 4GB).

As long as we are on the de-rail train, I learned on the PET...when my father bought me the 64 to learn progamming on a truly fast machine, I thought I had just walked onto the deck of an Imperial Cruiser. hehe

No, I make it sound exactly as I stated, EACH 32-bit app can use UP TO 4GB of RAM for itself so there is clearly a benefit of running 32-bit apps on a 64-bit OS contrary to what you stated. That does not mean every 32-bit app WILL use 4GB, but in the case of Skyrim it can and certainly will push over 2GB which is why Skyrim4GB and the LAA patch were welcome by many. But more importantly as I stated, all the software and hardware on your system will not be competing for THE SAME 4GB addressable space in a 32-bit operating system environment, which is closer to 3GB for actual software after your system hardware reserves what it needs. So in a 32-bit OS you have up to 2GB for a 32-bit Skyrim, 500-800MB for your OS, and 200MB for everything else, and people wonder why performance tanks or the game crashes after a few hours of playtime with everything in your system competing for scarce resources.

There's nothing about what I wrote that can be construed as misinformation, this should be common knowledge for anyone interested in modern computing or PC gaming, but clearly its not.

Guy how are you on here trying to push, for something obsolete.

yes the app needs to be made to use larger amounts of the ram. having more ram that the system doesnt have to share is the point the guy is making....which guess what means when your running multiple apps there more resources to access.

also why does eveyone make it out like upgradeing and reinstallin the os is a major undertaking. the damn thing is automated....takes like 30 mins to insatall, maybe another for your apps....

if your gonna get the windows for your new comp, why not get it now and upgrade your old comp? or better yet get linux...

Ive been in arguments about that! apparently "common" is misused...

...and then the ultimate upgrade: The *second* 5.25 drive!!!!1!1!! Great little system those guys were, its really too bad their Amigas didn't sail. I heard the company was reborn and they're trying to sell nostalgiatically inclinced c64 look-alikes again, not sure how brilliant it is to still be putting all of a computer's most important guts directly beneath a keyboard but all the power to 'em for trying.

When we got that 5 1/4, and it took a blazing 10 minutes to load a game, instead of the 30 minutes from the cassette, it was Blue Max and Epyx Winter Games all the way...then I was sent to summer computer camp to get my bona fide geek card stamped. And after a while, I even learned what that big yellow thing in the sky actually looked like.

You know what'd kill on the Wii? A re-release of all those '* games' series, like seriously those were probably some of the best parties game ever and I will always fondly remember playing them back in the day with my extended family during those sorts of events. Poor joysticks never stood a chance though what with all the 'left-right-left-right rapidly = win' events

/also I think we're still more on topic then those two guys talking about 32bit vs 64bit, at least we're referencing stuff that actually impacts computer's speeds here

Thanks for the laugh....I was thinking that about my comments...at least it was about speed of the CPU...hahahha

And yes i kept that chip(486dx2)...it was expensive!! Think it needs to be in a Museum tho...lol

And the great irony here is you guys are talking about storage, which is all RAM is.....which brings us full circle to the bloated OS discussion. Go back to 1GB and a 32-bit OS and see if it impacts your computer's speeds when you start hitting that page file with just 1 instance of IE open.

Those joysticks took a beating...I eventually just stopped cause a part of my pubascent brain thought I might go blind.

Windows vista/7 x64 with 1gb of ram performs exceptionally well.. BETTER even than windows XP with the same exact system and specs...

Oh what a efficiency in modern OSes can do hey?...

http://www.msi.com/product/mb/K9N6PGM2-V2.html#/?div=CPUSupport

O.P., you can use some 125W processors. The X4 955 is on the list and I can run ultra with high shadows smooth as butter with a GTX 460 1GB and that CPU. They run about $125 for the Black version and are a snap to overclock (mines at a fairly conservative 3.6 Ghz). Would be a huge increase in performance over your old Athlon.

I call [censored]. Your FPS drops in cities because your CPU is the bottleneck and you increased the graphical settings further bottlenecking the CPU. As far as the "smoothness" it would actually be less smooth since the difference between average, max and min frame rates would be greater. Periods of 60fps (Vsync cap) and then 40 fps as you mention is not "smooth".


The H80 and the H60 are massive. They provide little cooling performance for the money. A high end air cooler would be cheaper by a few dollars, cool better and be quieter. Why? Because they use 140mm fans now and the heatsink has a greater surface area and there's no need for a noisy pump to move the heat to the cooling fins. Heat pipes are dead quiet.

Look into the Thermalright Archon and Silver Arrow. Noctua also has a big ass cooler which is quiet.

You get watercooling when you do it properly. Custom setup with a nice large radiator to vent all that heat. A 120mm like on the H60 and H80 rad will not cut it, no matter how thick. The thicker it gets, the higher pressure the fan has to output and the noisier the fan gets as well. This is why the H80 has two in a push and pull operation to move all that air through. Noisy like a leafblower on high and still not as good as the Thermalright Archon.

Evidence: http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/coolers/display/corsair-h80_3.html#sect1

Notice how the Archon has the lowest Idle and Load temps on that processor compared to the H80? Even with the single fan operation it's close by two degrees to the H80s max performance with two fans on extra high and extra noisy.


True. I bought a high end Core2Duo at the time with plenty of memory. Happy with Vista. Once you give it enough horsepower it really shines. Same with Windows 7, but even the low end hardware now is pretty good so people don't complain. Back in the Vista days you had manufacturers installing it on systems with 512MB of ram and slow single core mobile chips.



I'd say it's more management than developers. They're not the ones making the decisions, they do as they are told and make the product as they are told. In the smaller companies they get more freedom but with Adobe? Corporate as they come.

I watched a few install vids for the corsair H60 and the Antec H20 620 and also seen more then a few pic's of installed air coolers like the Noctua NH-D14 and the Cooler Master V8 and to me the Air coolers were much larger by far and the water coolers looked pretty small actually. The v8 isn't super wide but it is very tall and the Noctua is just massive and looks like it would end up being one of the biggest parts in the tower. As far as noise, my current tower came with 4 fans already in it, add that to the cpu and gpu fans and my PC sounds like a jet or some kind of hovercraft lol. I have never heard a water pump on a pc before but i cant imagine it being much louder than what i am already sitting next to, BUT it all comes down to cooling so i will take a good look at your link, thank you for providing it.

I dont think you will easily find a phenom II 960 for sale, not new anyways. The Athlon II 640 (no lvl 3 cache otherwise pretty much the same silicon) is available however. I upgraded to an Athlon II 940 not to long ago (based on the 95 watt limit) and find my performance in Skyrim to be very good. Your vid card and mobo will affect this as well however.

I should note I am no longer running the M2N32 SLI Deluxe WiFi Edition with the Athlon II 640, I migrated it into an Asus Sabertooth 990fx. Just changing the mobo and ram (ddr2 to ddr3) using the same GPU, CPU, Etc my 3d Mark score went up by a little over 50%. Note I had the FSB pushed up about 15% on the M2N and had the 990fx at stock speeds.

With this system I get very strong performance in Skyrim and everything else I choose to play.

Eventually I will upgrade the CPU to the AMD FX-8150 or something similar. I am waiting for some of the bugs in both the silicon and how windows uses the new architecture to be worked out. I've read some new 6-core Cpu's are on the way from AMD as well, if they turn out to be solid I may go that path as well.

Actually Amazon and Newegg both say they have them in stock new.
AMD Phenom II X4 960T Zosma 3.0GHz Socket AM3 95W Quad-Core
is the model im looking at.

Specious reasoning.

Regardless if a given app uses LAA (and many can simply be edited to do so if one wishes) the ecosystem the 32 bit app is inside is more efficient and runs better. Simply being bale to stick 6 or 8 gigs of ram into your machine and have it work will make a huge difference, even if your app is stuck with addressing only 2 gigs, windows itself is not as well as many other concurrent threads like video/sound/mouse driver. In addition the 64 bit CPU has additional registers and features not on the 32 bit part of the CPU which can and do execute 64 bit code faster. With the system spending less effort to run the OS it has more time for your application 32 bit or otherwise.

Of course, this can be argues for days and days just like the Vista arguments. I used Vista 64 from the first week. Other the driver issues at the beginning, due to partner problems not the OS itself, it is a good strong stable OS. Most people I have talked to about Vista who were hating it didn't even realize that was what was running on my computer as they had never seen or used the OS before, the rumor mill had just told them it was bad and like good little followers they believed without testing for themselves.

Cool! When I went looking -about 6 months ago- the only 95 watt CPU I could find was the Athlon II 640. I'd of rather had the lvl 3 cache even though about half the games/applications dont use it well... the ones that do get a significant boost in performance.

If your looking to upgrade more slowly you could pick up the 960 and a sabertooth 990fx board that should get you a performance boost, you'd need to buy some ddr3, that is however almost dirt cheap right now. Eight gigs (2*4) can be found for about US $40 (or less).

Of course going the Intel route is just as viable. Just depends what you want. Intel does have the faster high end consumer CPU's for the time... at a price of course.

Win7 maybe since it cut its memory footprint down so much, but Vista....no way. I tried Vista on a Dell E1505 (1GB) when it first came out, on a fresh boot Vista uses nearly 1GB and opening a single instance of IE explorer brought the system to a crawl. And coming back from hibernate, wow 5-10 minute affair before the HDD stopped thrashing. XP uses much less memory however, only 400-500MB. Only after I upgraded to 2GB could I run Vista with adequate performance on that laptop.

Your talking Dell... likely a dell model that dell themselves doesn't even bother making decent drivers lets alone support for.

I'm talking real hardware.. something available in the retail space per component. Something lets say from Asus for a motherboard.... and a decent hardrive not the typical green garbage.

The windows xp ~> vista efficiency was improved considerably.... obviously disabling super fetch on a 1gb or less system for vista would be not a bad idea if you want to improve startup times considerably (this explains hardrive thrashing). Otherwise even with superfetch... the speed of the machine AFTER everything is loaded..... is quite impressive....

There was no need to install any of the Dell drivers except for the touchpad, all the guts were Intel mobile 965 centrino. The laptop was fast for its time (2007), Core Duo 2.0GHz and ran great on XP with only 1GB. It didn't run well on Vista because of the increased memory footprint, so I had to upgrade to 2GB before it ran similarly. The reason for the HDD thrashing is simple, when the system goes to hibernate and its already having to store so much to the page file, its basically copying to and from itself instead of copying from HDD to RAM if there were more memory available.

I noticed this wasn't busted with the other bull.

Not true at all. Well, if he has a 32 bit OS, then ALL of his software is 32 bit!

But I think you meant that 99% of Windows software, in general, is 32 bit.

You know there are generally 2 downloads available for a large amount of software. 32 and 64 bit EXEs.


On my Windows 7 64 bit, I have (61) 32bit programs installed, and (30) 64bit programs installed. Yes, I counted.

Just a few years ago, all of our programs were 32 bit. You can see where this is going. 32bit is legacy. There is little sense in installing a 32 bit OS on a desktop computer, unless you don't have a 64 bit CPU. In that case, your CPU is pretty old and slow.

64 bit can run 64 and 32 bit applications, whereas 32 bit can only run 32bit and 16 bit applications. In the past 10 years, I've only come across one 16 bit Windows application, and it wasn't a very important one. I found an alternative.