How much of a performance gain from moving to Vista 64bit

[resident56]

I have a great opportunity to upgrade both my RAM and OS cheaply.

See my signature for system specs, im running Vista Home Premium 32bit, and Im contemplating getting Vista Ultimate (64 bit) from the Ultimate Steal program and using the full install trick. Ill also be adding 4GB of RAM (for 6GB total).

All of my games run fine, although I would prefer some extra performance out of Crysis and I know that the 64 bit executable for Crysis makes a significant difference in gameplay.

What about the rest of you guys? What kind of performance increase can I expect from these upgrades and is it worth the money?

$70 for Vista Upgrade, $10 for 4GB OCZ RAM after MIR through Tiger.

 

[lxskllr]

I didn't notice a difference when I switched to Vista64. I'm not a huge gamer though, and haven't played much in the way of modern ram hungry games. You should notice a little boost in the speed apps open due to superfetch, but I don't know that it's $80 worth of improvement.

 

[kantonburg]

I'm curious about this too. I'm in a similar boat. I installed ultimate 64 today (dual boot for now) and added 2GB for a total of 4 GB. I only partitioned 30GB of my hdd. I'm going to clean install in a few days. Just wanted to get the feel for Vista.

I'm trying to decide which version to use. The Ultimate Box I got has the 32 and 64 bit DVDs in it. I mainly want to go to 64bit to be able to use Solidworks when I work from home.

 

[lxskllr]

If you have a free choice, I would go with Vista64. That's the future of computing, and more apps will take advantage of it in the future.

 

[postmortemIA]

improvement? you already have 4GB (probably around 3GB recognized in Vista) and there's small number of apps that use more than 2GB RAM today that require 64-bit OS. If you are gamer you won't notice a difference.
Thing is if you needed it - you'd know, you would be using apps limited by RAM, you wouldn't ask us.

Beside, your weak point is not your RAM, but your graphics.

 

[sswingle]

More memory is always good, but I would not expect games to use it yet.

 

[Jeff7181]

Don't count on receiving your rebate from Tiget Direct. I made that mistake three times... never agian.

 

[Flipped Gazelle]

No performance improvement at all going from Vista 32 to x64. Unless you need to address more than the 3.x GB RAM that Vista 32 can handle...

Of course, there's no point in having more than 4 GB for Vista 32.

Are you sure that Crysis 64 performs better than Crysis 32? According to here and here, that is not the case.

 

[postmortemIA]

... if you get the Steam version, they won't even provide 64-bit version.

There will be time when 64-bit games will dominate; but that time is not now; and probably you will have completely different rig then.

 

[LumbergTech]

Originally posted by: postmortemIA
... if you get the Steam version, they won't even provide 64-bit version.

There will be time when 64-bit games will dominate; but that time is not now; and probably you will have completely different rig then.

some valve games have a 64 bit executable