Folding Forum

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.

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.

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.

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