Install Win 7 Ultimate x86 or x64 with 4GB RAM?

AdrianR said:

...What's the 'sweet' spot in max ram capability where one would be better off using x86 vs x64?...

2GB.

That's the minimum value as quoted by Microsoft though? Companies are usually very forgiving when stating their minimum values.

Antman said:

2GB.

I have read and re-read the questions posed by AdrianR. I am attempting to frame a response that matches his frame of reference, and I cannot.

It is as if we are being asked to compare a straight 6 engine with a V8 - which one will consume more or less fuel for the relative work performed. It would come closer to a valid analogy if we were to compare a steam engine to internal combustion.

AdrianR - I apologize that I cannot frame an answer that you can easily digest. I can assure you that your concerns about the page file hindering performance are weighed on the wrong scale.

"Unless I'm missing something, even Microsoft says you need 2GB minimum RAM for x64 and only 1GB minimum RAM for x86. That means, according to Microsoft, x64 uses (reserves?) 1GB more RAM than x86, right off the bat." Yes, you are missing something and I do not know what to say - it just doesn't work that way.

I am not hard-capped at 4GB - but I am virtually capped. I will not put any more money into this machine. My largest consumers of RAM - CS4 and Premier - simply blast through the work I subject them to - and I often run them concurrently.

USB 2.0 throughput is more of a hinderance to my platform performance than my memory capacity.

1) Thank you for your post, and your screenpic. That's the kind of hard data I was looking for.

2) My career is as a computer programmer, currently working with Java. In fact, my whole 19 year career has been as a programmer in Java, PowerBuilder, Visual Basic, C++, C, C#, and others. I realize we are strangers, and you don't know me, and these are the Internets, so I have no way of proving this, but I do have an understanding of how operating systems works, how much memory they allocate, and how many applications can run simultaneously before real memory is used up and the OS starts paging out applications memory to/from the hard drive.

What I DIDN'T know, and was asking about, was how x64 works, as all of my knowledge is x86 based. As far as I know, at the end of the day, an app, no matter what kind of OS, needs to run on the RAM chips that are installed on the mother board on the computer, and the OS handles the management of the memory it uses. That the difference has to do with memory address sizes than anything else. If this is wrong, I'd LOVE to learn about it, hence my creating an account and my original post here about that. I came here to hopefully learn, not be talked down to.

I STILL haven 't seen anything by anyone that says that with x64 you don't need to worry about how much RAM is left over for applications. At the end of the day, the OS needs RAM for itself first, then it allocates RAM for apps that are running. I was just trying to figure out how much REALISTIC overhead x64 Windows 7 has vs. Windows 7 x86, in determining if I have enough 'elbow room' on my PC with 4GB worth of RAM to run MULTIPLE LARGE applications simultaneously without paging to the hard drive. From running the Eclipse and NetBeans IDKs to World of Warcraft to Firefox with 15 tabs open, I use my PC, and I use it hard.

Using Microsoft's minimum numbers, is it better to have 3GB of RAM for applications in x86 vs. 2GB of RAM for apps in x64, that's what I was trying to figure out. That's all. Wasn't trying to start a x64 vs x86 fight.

Anyway, I'll stop here, before someone sends the x64 police to my house.

johngalt said:

I have posted a screen shot in another topic about what I have running on my system. You can easily verify my system specifications to the left there under my user name. And yet, even with what I currently have running I have over half my RAM available. I have a lot of things running right now, and if I were to kill a good many of my processes down, I can easily achieve 2.5 GB or more free.

TBH, what Antman wrote was not only perfectly logical but astutely correct. You simply do not have enough of a basis in the programming world to understand the differences between 64bit processing and 32bit processing, and if you think you are ever going to run out of RAM with 4 GB installed, then you'll be facing the same problem regardless of whether you are using a 32bit OS or a 64bit OS. W7 is far more advanced than you think it is in terms of the aggressive paging system as well as in terms of making use of other resources available to it to make your application usage, switching and mutli-tasking as seamless as possible.

Check out my screen shots to prove it:

84 processes running - and that is without my Saitek Cyborg Rumble Pad (controller) utility....


over 2 GB free...


Trust us when we say that going 32bit will hamper your ability to use the OS as it was meant to be used.

Antman said:

I have read and re-read the questions posed by AdrianR. I am attempting to frame a response that matches his frame of reference, and I cannot.

It is as if we are being asked to compare a straight 6 engine with a V8 - which one will consume more or less fuel for the relative work performed. It would come closer to a valid analogy if we were to compare a steam engine to internal combustion.

AdrianR - I apologize that I cannot frame an answer that you can easily digest. I can assure you that your concerns about the page file hindering performance are weighed on the wrong scale.

"Unless I'm missing something, even Microsoft says you need 2GB minimum RAM for x64 and only 1GB minimum RAM for x86. That means, according to Microsoft, x64 uses (reserves?) 1GB more RAM than x86, right off the bat." Yes, you are missing something and I do not know what to say - it just doesn't work that way.

I am not hard-capped at 4GB - but I am virtually capped. I will not put any more money into this machine. My largest consumers of RAM - CS4 and Premier - simply blast through the work I subject them to - and I often run them concurrently.

USB 2.0 throughput is more of a hinderance to my platform performance than my memory capacity.

Thank you for replying and trying again to help out, sincerely do appreciate that.

By hard-capped, I meant the maximum amount of RAM that the motherboard of the PC can take. I do understand how OS's can virtualize more than the max hardware RAM by paging to/from the hard drive, but that virtualization takes a performance hit, so I try to NOT page to the hard drive if possible.

You mentioned you run two apps. Maybe that's the crux of the issue. I run a slew of applications simultaneously, both as part of my job as a programmer, as well as just someone who likes to multitask. I already mentioned this in a post I just did, but I run multiple programming IDKs (Eclipse, NetBeans, Visual Studio), large gaming applications (World of Warcraft, Sims 3), Firefox browser with 10+ tabs, email, IM client, plus all of the little apps (like Microsoft Search) that get start automatically.

Because of this, its important for me to know how many apps can be running at the same time before the OS starts virtualizing and pages to the hard drive.

To try and use your car analogy, I'm saying that how much more gas does a V8 use over a V6, because I can only afford to put so much gas in the car before I run out of money, and need to know how far I can travel before the car runs out of gas.

Anyway, I'll just leave it at that. I didn't want my introduction to this community to be one of conflict. I was just trying to find out the memory overhead of x64, as I never believe the amounts stated by the manufacturer, since they usually understate to generate more sales.

Take care.

No conflict detected at this desk - just a high level discussion. Welcome to SF.

TYVM!

banderz777 said:

I am running 64 bit with 4 gig's, here is my ram usage.