Is Vista 64-bit worth the upgrade from 32 with this new system?

yes i would do that. with the newest drives vista 64bit seems to be working very well. and you would take better advantage of the 4gb of ram.

Have you already built this system?

I'm not entirely convinced by 2x 9800GT. You could have a pair of 4850's for that much money, which will perform better or a 4870. Equally you can then go with an Intel chipset which gives better performance that NForce offerings.

What sort of games are you playing and at what resolution? That will give you an idea of how much graphics horsepower you need.

Edit: Got slightly side tracked - yes go 64bit.

Jeremy

Very short answer: Counting 75 Megs for the system, I see roughly 5.75GB worth of devices using memory mapped I/O. A 32 bit OS can only address 4GB worth. So the answer is "Yes, you should switch to a 64 bit OS if you wish your computer to be able to use everything you're putting in it."

I would upgrade, 64-bit runs good, it will let you see your whole 4gb and you can upgrade to 8gb later without any worries.

do you already have the system built? Look under the "system" in your control panel to see how much memory you have available. If that is enough to run ALL of your applications, I'd say stick with what you have until you need to be able to access more RAM.

That probably won't happen until windows 7 or later comes out so you can upgrade then. Unless you need all 4gB NOW (which you probably don't b/c if you did, you'd probably need more than 4), I'd stick with 32

but then again, I'm cheap and I'm still running windows xp home. I tried vista 32 and 64 but had driver issues with my wireless card with 64 bit... 32 worked fine. I had to constantly install the driver for 64 bit.

to scot eq,

75mb does not equal .75gB. if you add up all of his memory from both cards 512 + 512 + 75 this is just above 1gb. he should see close to 3GB

Vista 64 works great for me, and with an SLI setup your system make make better use of RAM with 4gb or 8gb if you choose to expand later. When I installed by 2x 8800GT Vista 32 showed only 2.75GB of 4GB RAM because of addressing. Moved to 8GB and Vista 64 and I haven't looked back.

If moving to Vista x64 just makesure your printer, scaner, etc have Vista x64 drivers, if they do, go for it.

You're right about the 4850's, but you can't argue with free. I inherited 2 pretty much new 9800GTs from an insane friend who already upgraded.

No, the system is not already built, but I just ordered the processor/mobo/ram. It looks like I might as well go with Vista-64.

Well how could I predict it was free!

Jeremy