What hardware need to be 64bit for building a 64bit system?

[XZR]

I know OS have to be 64bit, but I'm not sure about the hardware, what hardware need to be 64bit capable to fully support 64bit applications, OS etc?

thanks

 

[Ritwik7]

There's no hardware as such that you need to run a 64Bit OS. It's generally recommended that you have a reasonably fast system with 4GB or more RAM as 64 Bit applications are able to make use of it. More importantly, not too many 64Bit specific applications are available right now. However, that will increase in the near future as more and more people adopt a 64Bit platform.

Are you looking to build a new PC to run the new OS?

 

[XZR]

Yes a new built

Im planning to get all hardware and build it myself, I know the os have to be 64bit, i guess all hardware is 64bit capable then..??

 

[yangly18]

pretty much. not that all hardware will run fast with it though. like ritwik said, just make sure you have 4g of ram and you should be all set. I know my laptop is capable of 64 bit operation, but it only has 3G of ram, so i went with 32 bit.

 

[Ritwik7]

What's your budget for building the PC?

 

[captaincranky]

There's no hardware as such that you need to run a 64Bit OS. It's generally recommended that you have a reasonably fast system with 4GB or more RAM as 64 Bit applications are able to make use of it. More importantly, not too many 64Bit specific applications are available right now. However, that will increase in the near future as more and more people adopt a 64Bit platform.

Are you looking to build a new PC to run the new OS?

From a historical standpoint, this is completely untrue. Chipsets as "recent" as the Intel 915 were 32 bit hardware. As a consequence of this, even certain Pentium 4 CPUs (Cedar Mill) were not compatible with these boards.

It is (agreed) almost certain that any board you buy today would be 64 bit hardware. This is due to the "EMT" (extended memory technology) in Intel CPUs. To get a memory capacity of 8 GB, you only need to go to 33 places in binary math to reach that total number value. AMD CPUs have been 64 bit for quite some time also. Just for discussion's sake, 64 binary places equal 1 terrabyte

 

[Ritwik7]

Thanks for that Captain. Will keep in mind.

 

[P4PC]

pretty much. not that all hardware will run fast with it though. like ritwik said, just make sure you have 4g of ram and you should be all set. I know my laptop is capable of 64 bit operation, but it only has 3G of ram, so i went with 32 bit.

I have 64bit win 7 OS running 3GB of ram dual C. you recon I should go with 32 bit instead? my performance has increased running 64bit OS and i'm not eating close to 1GB of ram.

 

[Ritwik7]

I have 64bit win 7 OS running 3GB of ram dual C.

How are you running 3GB in dual channel? I don't think it's possible to run dual channel without even number of memory modules.

Anyhow, if you say that your performance has increased, stick to the 64Bit OS.

 

[P4PC]

How are you running 3GB in dual channel? I don't think it's possible to run dual channel without even number of memory modules.

Anyhow, if you say that your performance has increased, stick to the 64Bit OS.

Well, when i boot up my pc says dual channel mode i assume its working but with cpu Z says single. my xfx has 4 sockets. 2 green, 2 black, i tried 2 on green sockets and 1 on green and 1 on black, cpu z still says single. so really i dont know if i am running in dual channel or not. i have Xfx 750i sli

 

[LNCPapa]

A pair of 1 GB dimms and a pair of 512 MB dimms would give you dual channel equivalent to 3 GB total.

You have to have a Pentium D or newer processor to support 64 bit OSes - or one the the AMD 64 or newer procs.

If you're getting better performance running on x64 why would you downgrade? Keep the x64 OS and maybe one day you'll upgrade your RAM.

 

[Archean]

From a historical standpoint, this is completely untrue. Chipsets as "recent" as the Intel 915 were 32 bit hardware. As a consequence of this, even certain Pentium 4 CPUs (Cedar Mill) were not compatible with these boards.

Also, little addition to this fact is that in the X86 architecture, there are 2 types of devices that are mapped into processor address space. The first type is physical memory. The second, and perhaps less obvious, type is device memory or device address space. Since the system BIOS does not know what operating system will be booted it must setup the system in 32-bit mode. This means that memory and all device address spaces must be mapped below 4GB.