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64-bit OS's (specially for Bob2002!)

Bob2002 (and anyone else who's using 'em!),

Just wondering what OS you are running your opterons on ... I'm guessing from your sig it will be *nix based ;)

Can you post your spec's too for the opteron machine! :D

ta,
:)
 
Well, and I hate to admit this in public :rolleyes: , for the past month or so I`ve been using Windows XP Pro on the Opteron beastie and running my various Linux distros in Virtual PC 2004 (works excellently BTW). The reason being that I have a single SATA drive installed and my older versions of Linux don`t recognise it properly- even XP needed a special driver disk during installation. I`m also waiting for the AMD 64-bit distros to mature a bit (they are still fairly recent) before a native install.

The rough specs are -

- Dual Opteron 846s (eBay (U.S.) got them for around 250 each, less than 246s, - at the time the U.K. retail price was 900+ each )

- A Tyan Tiger K8W motherboard (doesn`t officially support 846s so don`t try this at home !) - also wanted 8 gigabyte capacity for future expansion.

- 1 gigabyte of OCZ PC3200 RAM (eBay (U.S.))

I mainly upgraded for running virtual machines (though it spends it`s spare cycles doing Grid computing for cancer research) and am very happy with the performance. :)

For anybody thinking of going 64-bit these are interesting times with new 939 chips from AMD, and chipsets from nvidia - I`ve even heard that socket 940 (Opteron) is going to be compatible with AMD`s dual core chips coming up next year.

Hope that was vaguely interesting ! :)
 
What a wicked machine Bob2002. My brother's built a few machines now with 64bit cpus. Surely though, its still early days i.e. software is non existant for 64bit.

:)
 
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No, if you run Linux or *BSD you can run full featured 64-bit distributions now. No doubt you can also get the 64-bit version of Windows from P2P now, or wait for the official version. I think SPARC (Sun) has been 64-bit for a long time too so it`s just new for the consumer desktop (Windows) really. :)
 
Do you see any real differences running a 64bit machine? I suppose it'll be faster but what's the need for the speed on a domestic market? Is it really for hard working business machines?
 
The problem you have with 64Bit on PC's is all down to transition. To get any benefit (e.g. Games) the OS must be 64Bit, the graphics drivers etc. must be 64Bit and, most important of all, the third party software itself must be using a 64Bit coded .exe.

Until everything is streamlined then you're better off running games and other demanding software in 32Bit mode. FYI - I have the free WindowsXP 64Bit (like 32Bit ver, only thinned down) installed for fun on one partition and am planning to try a 64Bit ver of linux in the near future (based off Athlon64 3200+).

32Bit coded games run slower on WinXP64, quite a bit slower in some cases, so clearly MS need's to do a little more work on their 32Bit morphing code. People won't bother swapping unless they can see a universal benefit along with proper backwards compatibility that retains speed.

Having said that, WinXP64 is still a few months off, so hopefully MS can resolve all this in time.
 
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Possibly even more.

The 386 was the first 32-bit processor. How many years was it before we saw a 32-bit operating system (Win95) ??

We still have 16-bit software for windows floating around. Infact, we still have to compile to 16-bit in uni!!
 
i wouldnt mind having a 64 bit machine - twice as many bits on the bus must be good... though not many (if any) software titles to go on it yet :( maybe i will wait till new windows version comes out in 2 years ish - when i supports 64bit - cos whatever windows supports - you can bet software companies will also want to support
 
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