I realized last night that my CPU is one of the first 64-bit ones and I've been using 32-bit Windows 7 the entire time!

I've also recently acquired 4GB of ram (installed already), so I'm wondering it is worth it to sacrifice 32-bit program compatibility for the 700MB of RAM or so past the 3GB barrier. I still play some older games from time to time, so this makes compatibility an issue for me.

Thoughts? I ask here since of anyone you guys would seem to be the type that deals with this problem...

For playing new games and developing games, yes it's worth it.
I do miss my ability to play 16-bit games though.

The number of 16-bit Windows games is pathetically small anyway. DOS stuff will work fine in DOSbox. 32-bit stuff will work just as well as it already does. Do the upgrade.

I've been running Windows 7 64-bit for a while now, and I haven't had any notable problems running 32-bit apps.

On the other hand, if your system has one of the first 64-bit CPU's, memory probably isn't going to be the bottleneck on your system. My previous laptop is just shy of five years old now, and it's running Windows 7 32-bit with 4GB of RAM. I never felt like it was suffering memory-wise. However, the CPU and particularly the GPU were starting to show their age with newer games.

For a better answer, you should probably post your system specs, but right now I suspect that your system isn't new enough to really benefit from gaining access to the full 4GB.

My mom has an old Pentium D @ 3.4Ghz with an nvidia 7800GT. That's one of the first intel EMT64 processors and she has x64 windows 7. Though there's only 2 gigs of RAM. That old moster is able to run most current titles at acceptable FPS.
So if your spec is somewhere nearby, or even higher - upgrade is worth it for sure. You'll also notice small boost in overall system speed due to x64 architecture.(actually very small, I've expected much more)

But the amount of 16-bit games isn't that small. Many games, mostly from 1995-2001 have compatibility issues because they are 16-bit software. But as far as i know you can't run most of them on Win Vista/7 32 either...

Oblivion's DLC installers are incompatible with 64-bit.

Of course you can just set the Universal Extractor on them and get the .esp/.bsa files, without going through the whole antipiracy security routine. Awesome copy protection work, guys!

You may run into some such pesky issues from time to time, even with 32-bit applications.

That said, you can always have dual-booting to go back to 32-bit quickly when you actually need it.


One last thing to know is that performance-wise, 64-bit is a bit slower. More overhead. Of course it's quickly mitigated for any resource-hungry application where the gain in data access time from having less need to swap stuff between RAM and disk more than compensate for slightly slower CPU instructions. So if you do stuff that require a lot of CPU use but not that much memory, you can as well stay on 32-bit.

Err, i've played Oblivion on x64 w/o troubles with (mostly) all DLCs.

Depends on what version your got I guess. Those people got from the obliviondownloads.com site back when it still existed couldn't run it on 64-bit systems. Apparently the issue has been fixed in newer versions.

See here for more info.

I was debating whether or not to post in here, and I think I will, even if this thread is getting old.

I have an AMD Athlon 64 X2 5600+ (2.80 GHz). I also discovered I could possibly use my old ram I took out to get 6 GB total... perhaps? They are the same speed but I don't know about the timing yet.

I don't really have enough space right now to dual-boot... maybe with a different version of Windows.

So, how much slower will 64-bit stuff run? Since my CPU is already starting to be a limiting factor (I think), I don't want it to be an issue.