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Is my processor 64-bit?

johntmanic

johntmanic

johntmanic

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Joined
27 Oct 2005
Posts
1,170
Location
Auckland, New Zealand
Hi people its been a while since i've played around with my PC etc and lost touch a bit!

At the minute I have Windows XP Home - 32bit version on there but I've got a copy of Windows 7 Home Premium coming tomorrow and was wondering if I could use 64 bit on my set up as below:-

CPU:
Name Intel Core 2 Duo E6600
Codename Conroe
Specification Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU 6600 @ 2.40GHz
Package (platform ID) Socket 775 LGA (0x0)

Motherboard:
Mainboard Model AB9 QuadGT(Intel965+ICH8)

Any feedback will be good!

Thanks!
 
johntmanic said:
Ahhh right good stuff! Will I see any benefits over the 32 bit version?
Click to expand...

Really depends on whether the applications you use have x64 support. I'm running both, the apps that have x64 support run slightly faster than the x86 versions.

The 64bit can run 32bit applications as well, you may be better off installing the 64bit, I think 64bit OS's will become the norm. Not had any driver issues running the 64bit.
 
johntmanic said:
Ahhh right good stuff! Will I see any benefits over the 32 bit version?
Click to expand...

From XP to Win 7, you will see a big difference as win7 is very smooth to operate. As for going from 32-bit to 64-bit, you can use more than 4GB of Ram and there should be noticeable increase in performance for programs that take advantage of more ram.
 
64bit windows does use a lot more ram than 32bit though, 4GB is essential imho, and I prefer to run with at least 6GB ram when running win 7 64bit.

Just to boot up my laptop with W7 home premium, anti virus, and 1 web browser (plus drivers for everything of course) and already 1.6GB of ram is being used.

But thats just how it is, and as long as you have enough ram to keep everything running smoothly, 64bit is great.
 
My W7 installs have all idled at 1.6gb with 4gb of RAM, but when I was testing my RAM so had 2gb installed it would use less, around 0.9gb.

I reckon it just doesn't bother scrubbing and organising the RAM as much if you have more of it?
 
Well at the minute I've got 3GB of Ram, i'll see how that goes and if needs be i'll upgrade to 4GB or something along those lines?
 
johntmanic said:
Well at the minute I've got 3GB of Ram, i'll see how that goes and if needs be i'll upgrade to 4GB or something along those lines?
Click to expand...

I've got 3GB on the laptop running W7 64Bit hardly had any issues although I don't overly multi task with it, for my day to day and doing my work on it runs very smoothly. I haven't come across any problems also while using Photoshop x64. You should be fine with 3GB depending on what you'll use it for.
 
malcolm said:
Win 7 Pro with 4Gig of RAM here, all default services running plus one IE window, I have 1240 MBytes ram used.
Click to expand...

Muel said:
My W7 installs have all idled at 1.6gb with 4gb of RAM, but when I was testing my RAM so had 2gb installed it would use less, around 0.9gb.

I reckon it just doesn't bother scrubbing and organising the RAM as much if you have more of it?
Click to expand...

Turn all foreground applications off and put the system into sleep state. Leave CPU Meter on to monitor idle RAM usage. Put the system back on and see what happens. Windows 7 uses superfetch to load applications faster, you can always disable it. I'm putting my system constantly into a sleep state, browsing now with more than 10 tabs open in Firefox, my system uses less than 1.1GB RAM. Shut firefox down and it will be down to 0.8GB or so.

My other PC with 2GB DDR2 has Windows 7 32-bit on it and even though it shows almost 30% RAM usage in idle, games are smoother than on XP.
 
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Mr Krugga said:
Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit doesn't use more than 0.75GB RAM with antivir loaded.
Click to expand...

Had this debate last year, I reformatted my PC to prove a point, Fresh install Windows 7 64bit Ultimate, ATi Drivers, Soundblaster drivers, Microsoft Security Essentials, 1 web browser open, boots up at around 1.3Gig in use.

If you use the resource monitor I am pretty sure that "superfetch" is classified as "Standby" rather than "In Use".

Im not saying its a problem, or that it makes the system slow.. As long as you have enough ram, 64bit windows is damn fast :)
 
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Corasik said:
Had this debate last year, I reformatted my PC to prove a point, Fresh install Windows 7 64bit Ultimate, ATi Drivers, Soundblaster drivers, Microsoft Security Essentials, 1 web browser open, boots up at around 1.3Gig in use.
Click to expand...

So? RAM is there to be utilized, I would be ****ed if they made Windows 7 use less than 0.5GB RAM only and everything felt sluggish. It's not the case though, superfetch works a treat and as soon as you hit a memory intensive app(s), you'll experience a drop in Windows 7 memory usage. Hard to understand, isn't it? Better example, run IntelBurnTest with maximum memory available and see how your free amount of ram increases :p
 
Sorry, but with 2 almost identical computers, only difference was the ram (2GB V 6GB) and the 6GB computer gave a far better experience all round. 2GB just isnt enough imho for 64bit windows.

I have no problems with how much ram Windows grabs, as you say, superfetch works well (far better than the Vista attempt at it), its a good fast OS, if you have a reasonable computer.

Yes, of course if you run a very large app, it will start to swap out large chunks of the OS(and services) to the pagefile, temporarily reducing the amount of used memory when you shutdown the app. The point is, if you have enough ram that Windows doesnt need to swap, it will perform so much better.
 
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