Upgrade to 64bit OS?

[Soriak]

I have an older Athlon 64 dual core processor and installed the SMP client. It seems to do ok, finishing a WU in about 2 days.

The OS on the machine is Vista Home Premium 32bit and I'm wondering if I would see a performance increase with the SMP client if I bought the 64bit OS. The vista SMP client doesn't seem to have a 64bit version yet, but I presume if it did, I can't run it without getting a 64bit OS first. Would the speed increase be noticeable?

As the machine is only used for browsing, I'm not worried about compatibility issues with other programs.

[Ren02]

There won't be any speed increase as FAH uses mostly floating point registers and their performance and capabilities remain unchanged when running in 32-bit or 64-bit mode.
Furthermore, the new version of WinSMP (5.92) doesn't currently support 64-bit OS.
However if you want to use more than 3GB of memory then 64-bit OS is not a bad choice. FAH doesn't have any projects that want that much memory.. yet.

[Baowoulf]

You'd probably be better off getting Vista Ultimate instead of going to a 64bit OS. From everything I've seen for the normal user it's just not worth it. Like the previous poster said you probably won't see a gain in F@H nor would see a gain in gaming or other normal computer things. Except for a few games which have tried out 64bit in certain ways. But you might not be able to use a lot of 32bit programs thou.

So unless you have a specific reason to go 64bit I've noticed that your better off staying with 32bit. At least I'm stayin with 32bit OS.

[Soriak]

Thanks for the replies, I'll stick with the 32bit OS then!