Ok it's getting to that time of year again when I look at upgrading my computer. I'm using P6, Vue 4 pro etc.

Current system is AMD XP 3200+, 1 gig PC 3200 ram, Radeon 9800 128 mb, 180 gig hard drive spread over 4 partitions, dual monitors.

Where does one go from this - is it worth going to 64 bit just yet as I have no 64 bit programs will I see any benefit? Should I wait until 64 processors drop in price and just go for an upgrade on ram and more hard drive space, a lcd monitor?

It's just that I like to pass on the upgrades through the family and while I am happy to wait a while and just upgrade ram - I keep looking at my 9 year old with his poor old AMD 900 with a gig of ram and a 20 gig hard drive and feel sorry for him...:) Edited - Just to say no advice to go Pentium Please! - I've been with AMD for too long now

Message edited on: 05/10/2005 15:27

Attached Link: http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/ProductInformation/0,,30_118_9485_9487^9505,00.html#9103

Message edited on: 05/10/2005 15:59

maybe double your RAM but other than that it would be basically a waste of money to upgrade much from there at this time.

Adding RAM is definitely a good idea. A second, very fast hard drive to store your swapfile (WD Raptor 10,000 RPM) also helps. And - maybe wild - you could upgrade your graphics card to an nVidia Quadra. That Radeon is a good game card, but OpenGL sucks on it. The nVidia Quadra series has excellent OpenGL support - but DirectX sucks on them, so they're lousy as game cards. If you want both game performance and OpenGL performance, nVidia 6600 or 6800 might be a good choice. As for upgrading the whole system, I'd advise waiting for the dual-core Athlon64s, they're due this fall.

It will take a long time until 64 bit programs will exist, of course that you will have Windows64 that in real life will be only 32 bits, the same story with Win3.11 and 32/16 bits. Windows only became fully 32 bits with XP. The only advantage of 64 bits is for breaking the 4 Gigs memory limit barrier, don't expect any increase in performance.

Athlon 64 (K8) does have a couple of big advantages over the K7 chips; the integrated memory controller and SSE2 support are pretty important improvements, not even counting the 64 bit support. My desktop system is an Athlon XP 1800 (Nforce2 MB) w/ 1 Gig of RAM and my laptop is an Athlon 64 3200 w/ 1 Gig of RAM. In side by side renders, the XP will take on average 3x longer than the 64. Since you already have a pretty high end XP, I don't know if the improvement would be that dramatic, and I don't know how much of a boost OpenGL really gives Poser (the desktop has a 64mb GeForce4, the laptop has a 128MB Radeon 9700), but the Athlon 64 should still give you a big performance boost just owing to the better architecture. In every benchmark I've ever seen, the lowest end Athlon 64 destroys the highest end Athlon XP (and the Pentium 4).

What bluecity said. Plus the fact that the current socket 939 motherboards will be able to use the X2 dual core Athlon 64's with just a BIOS flash. The only thing you have to watch with the Athlon 64's is memory quality; but Kingston ValueRAM works just fine, so you don't have to go for Crucial or Mushkin, unless you intend to overclock. But getting the memory controller off of the northbridge really speeds things up. If you do upgrade, plan to go ahead and bite the bullet and get a PCI-E motherboard. The low end Nvidia cards have a 'smartcache' system built in; a $70 card only has 64 megs of ram, but can borrow up to 256 megs of system ram on demand. And the cheap cards, not having tremendous amounts of memory on them, don't need external power connectors or even active cooling. Passive heatsinks work just fine.

AFAIK, Windows64 is fully a 64 bit OS (and requires 64 but device drivers), though of course it runs 32 bit applications in 32 bit mode. The first 32 bit OS from Microsoft was NT.

Message edited on: 05/11/2005 19:06

"Windows64 is fully a 64 bit OS" The same said about Windows 3.1 with 32bit mode, then again that Windows 95 was fully 32 bit, etc, etc and etc.

I can only say that no one who knew what they were talking about made those assertions, Microsoft certainly didn't. Windows XP Professional x64 nrun 32 bit applications using a subsystem (WOW64), in the same way that previous versions (NT, 2000, XP) used WOW to support 16 bit applications in an emulated mode. Actually, x64 is Microsoft's second 64 bit OS. They had a version of windows for Intel's Itanium. Using emulation to support a previous architecture is not uncommon. Usually, you take a performance hit, as in Itanium's 32 bit emulation mode. AMD's extention of the x86 architecture avoids that problem.