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

Hello. New to these forums, hoping I can get some good advice from you all!

I have a Dell M1710 laptop, with 4GB of RAM. Currently I'm using Windows XP, which sees 3.2GB of RAM. I have a choice of installing either the x86 or x64 version of Windows 7 Ultimate.

I'm trying to decide which to install based on the 4GB RAM hardware ceiling that I have (motherboard can only accept two 2gb SIMMs max).

Would I get better performance (less hard drive paging) with the X86 version using 3.2GB of RAM, or the x64 version using 4.0GB RAM? How much overhead does the x64 version of Ultimate have, vs. the x86 version? Is that overhead more than 0.8GB of RAM?

Thank you in advance for your time and advice, it is appreciated.

AdrianR said:

Hello. New to these forums, hoping I can get some good advice from you all!

I have a Dell M1710 laptop, with 4GB of RAM. Currently I'm using Windows XP, which sees 3.2GB of RAM. I have a choice of installing either the x86 or x64 version of Windows 7 Ultimate.

I'm trying to decide which to install based on the 4GB RAM hardware ceiling that I have (motherboard can only accept two 2gb SIMMs max).

Would I get better performance (less hard drive paging) with the X86 version using 3.2GB of RAM, or the x64 version using 4.0GB RAM? How much overhead does the x64 version of Ultimate have, vs. the x86 version? Is that overhead more than 0.8GB of RAM?



Thank you in advance for your time and advice, it is appreciated.

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If your capable of running 64 bit then I strongly advise it. You'll see far greater performance for sure.

tw33k said:

If your capable of running 64 bit then I strongly advise it. You'll see far greater performance for sure.

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Agreed, native 64bit will run smoother and more efficient so to speak on a 64bit processor, and you also mentioned about the 4gb of ram, definitely go 64bit. just make sure there is no drivers issues with your hardware on win7 x64, do a bit of research on your particular laptop model and see what others have to say about win7 64.

Thanks for the replies. The thing I'm thinking about though, is running out of RAM in x64 and having Win 7 swap to hard disk allot, which kills performance.

I had heard that x64 needs more default RAM than x86, and I'm trying to figure out if it needs more than 0.8GB RAM (over x86).

I realize that if I had lots of RAM x64 would definately be the way to go, but since I have a hard cap of 4GB, I don't think that x64 would be the way to go if it uses most of the 4GB just for itself (not leaving any RAM for applications, etc.).

Specifically, how much overhead in RAM usage does x64 have over x86?

Thanks.

64 bit all the way. No question about it

Doesn't anyone know the overhead in RAM between x64 and x86?

I don't think that the RAM overhead is enough to lose the 800MB that you gained. I've switched to a 64-bit OS on my boxes with 4GB of RAM and I have been extremely happy with the performance and haven't run into any reasons to make me want to go back to 32-bit. My latest box has 8GB of RAM and I'm not moving back obviously on this box.

There is no answer to the question as posed. And the basis of the question is flawed.

There is really no starting point from which to address your concerns. There are volumes upon volumes of science to consider, which all illustrate that 64-bit processing is to 32-bit processing as flying is to driving.

You have to abandon your prior concepts regarding memory usage. After a minimum configuration is obtained for a particular system, to include potential application demand, free RAM is wasted RAM. Free RAM is not a goal to be pursued. A 64-bit system utilizes more RAM due to way it handles addressing. But when it handles it, it is substantially more efficient.

One area of FUD against 64-bit Windows is the backward compatibility support. Borderline nonsense - but you will need to understand more about the science than I am will attempt to illuminate here.

The world is moving forward to 64-bit processing not because it is somehow flawed - rather because the forward progression is what it is. An advance.

Antman said:

There is no answer to the question as posed. And the basis of the question is flawed.

There is really no starting point from which to address your concerns. There are volumes upon volumes of science to consider, which all illustrate that 64-bit processing is to 32-bit processing as flying is to driving.

You have to abandon your prior concepts regarding memory usage. After a minimum configuration is obtained for a particular system, to include potential application demand, free RAM is wasted RAM. Free RAM is not a goal to be pursued. A 64-bit system utilizes more RAM due to way it handles addressing. But when it handles it, it is substantially more efficient.

One area of FUD against 64-bit Windows is the backward compatibility support. Borderline nonsense - but you will need to understand more about the science than I am will attempt to illuminate here.

The world is moving forward to 64-bit processing not because it is somehow flawed - rather because the forward progression is what it is. An advance.

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I'm not sure if I agree with you assumption that the basis for my question is flawed.

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.

If an OS runs out of RAM (I don't care if its 'free' or previously 'reserved' by the OS for app usage), it starts to page out memory to the hard drive, and swaps back and forth, as apps are brought into the foreground and/or moved into the background. I'm assuming this is still the case with x64 OS; if not, then please let me know.

So, if you need 1GB RAM for x86 and 2GB RAM for x64, and if I have a hard cap of 4GB RAM total on the system I want to run Windows on, in theory I'd rather use x86 and have ~2.5GB of RAM left off for apps, vs. x64 and have allot less RAM left off for applications. If my hardcap max was > 4GB, then yeah, x64 all the way.

I'm trying to make an intelligent decision on how much free RAM I'll have left to run applications, after the OS is done starting up, before the OS starts to page memory to the hard drive. What's the 'sweet' spot in max ram capability where one would be better off using x86 vs x64?

If this question is a "flawed" one to ask, then why the minimum memory discrepancy stated by Microsoft?

For what its worth, I'm not trying to argue. Believe me, I WANT to move to x64, but I won't bother doing it on a PC that can't have enough RAM for the OS to run without performance hits from paging memory to the hard drive. That is what I'm trying to determine, and was hoping those who are knowledgeable here will know the 'overhead' that x64 Windows 7 has (vs. x86).

Thanks.

pparks1 said:

I don't think that the RAM overhead is enough to lose the 800MB that you gained. I've switched to a 64-bit OS on my boxes with 4GB of RAM and I have been extremely happy with the performance and haven't run into any reasons to make me want to go back to 32-bit. My latest box has 8GB of RAM and I'm not moving back obviously on this box.

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Thanks for the reply. Have you noticed if you are seeing page memory paging to the hard drive since using Win 7 x64 than your previous x86 OS?

Wish I could use 8GB RAM, be sweet. Don't know why the M1710 has the 4GB max RAM cap, since its not a very old PC, but meh. /shrug

AdrianR said:

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

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2GB.

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

Antman said:

2GB.

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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.

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....
View attachment 22498

over 2 GB free...
View attachment 22499

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

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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.

Click to expand...

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.

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

Now that you have qualified yourself, it will be a lot easier to discuss things.

We realize that no one comes here to be talked down to, but until you establish your credentials, we don't know if we're dealing with a computer illiterate person who does not know device manager from system properties, or if we are dealing with a hardware OEM employee / tier II tech support employee / anything else.

We have no *choice* but to talk down to a person at their level b/c the only common denominator is that everyone will be able to understand it if we use rather simply terms. remember, even though you may be asking he question initially, others will be coming to the forum as well, here to read about various issues and / or to see if there own particular question has been answered or to ask similar, yet not quite identical questions.

That being said, I can install the latest NetBeans Full IDE (although the servers will be turned off as I have no use for them right now) and I always run Fx with multiple tabs open, plus my desktop gadgets, plus Thunderbird, and I can install a game or two as well (although, to be honest, I don't game when I am working and vice verse - I usually reserve my gaming time for a time when I can knowing shut down some of my apps for a smoother game play, as I like to amp games to the max settings whenever possible) and give you a fair run - but I don't know if my machine is comparable to yours, or if it is much more powerful, or much less powerful. These sort of qualitative answers cannot be given simply because W7, but its very nature in terms of the number of lines of code in the OS and the things that it loads, will always be paging. in another thread (the same I alluded to previously) a user with 12 GB of RAM was complaining that he had very little free RAM - I tried to make him understand that since he had so much more RAM than Windows was normally accustomed to it was paging a lot less, and since he had an SSD and had turned off Paging (which the guides say turn off paging for the SSDs only - if your entire system is SSD-based, it's rather pointless to try to do things like game, etc, when it is always going to use an enormous amount of memory and will inevitably page) that his RAM usage was going to sky rocket abnormally.

Similarly, since you only have 4 GB, it is gig to page. There is no doubt about that.

However, the memory management in 7 has come a long way from Vista, and is so far removed from XP and previous OSs that it's like comparing apples to turkeys.

High memory use applications will always, by default, cause a lot more paging. W7 is the most efficient Windows OS when it comes to resource management and paging that I have used - and I used them all except ME, W2.0 and w1.0. This is by far one of the most resource efficient OSs out there.

I cannot say much more - if you have specific queries please feel free to ask.

TYVM!

banderz777 said:

I am running 64 bit with 4 gig's, here is my ram usage.
View attachment 22504

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