Vista Workshop: More RAM, More Speed - Page 2

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http://www.tomshardware.com/2008/0 [...] page9.html

I understand peoples complaints about a this article not necessarily being objective and not showing any real data... but how did linux and leopard get brought into this?

I run Vista64 on an x38 chipset mobo with 4GB ram... The system is awesome! I would never go back to XP OR Mac. And for the last time, please stop talking about how windows gets "infections". I NEVER get any viruses because I spent 30 minutes setting up a firewall, anti virus and a couple anti spyware programs to update and run automatically... problem solved! The only BOSD's i get are when I'm playing with my overclock... try doing that on your mac pro.

People say vista 64 is bloated and doesn't run all of your apps. Well, what apps? I'm playing the freakin warcraft 2! So far the only things I have found will not run are my sandbox programs for surfing and rootkit detectors/removers, supposedly none of this is necessary with vista64? As for the bloated thing... this is 2008... spend a few hundo on a decent processor and at least 4GB of memory. the people that have problems on vista are running older machines. once true 64 bit apps are made we will all see how much faster vista is than xp.

Anyways everything runs great and pretty speedy too. My computer doesn't take 40 seconds to get the desktop though, and waking up from hibernate is almost instantaneous! However, I too would like to know if 8GB will help me or not.

to the proud mac pro owner: Get a life. no one cares that you spend $4,000 on your computer and it works real good. I spent a quarter of that and got a machine that is faster than yours... cept yours has twice the cores Oh... or can you make your quads run at 3.6ghz on a mac? It's good to see that when you bought yours you opted not to get the standard HD 2600 pro or whatever (HAHAHAHAHA). Glad to see you still need windows to have fun with your machine... i know you can run multiple instances of photoshop, so, good luck with that. Maybe with the money I saved I'll buy your special lady friend something nice the next time I see her.

I'm comparing vista64 vs xp 32bit, fully patched with latest drivers last week, LOL.
For the games I play, it is not even close.
And I'm talking about a E8400, with a 8800GT. Not exactly low spec??? So, "your machine sucks" guy would be ... wrong...

Just bought my second set of that same Patriot 2 x 2 this afternoon! This article sparked my interest. Now I got 4 gigs of perfectly good Super Talent PC 800 (4 x 1) just gathering dust.

Sheesh, I've never seen such effort to hype Vista and now the effort to hype Vista 64-bit OS.

Just keep throwing $$$$ at it and it eventually will run as fast as XP Pro. LOL

They need to provide benchmarks, no doubt. They also need to include ReadyBoost benchmarks, which they didn't even mention. I installed ReadyBoost on a USB Memory stick 4GB and noticed improved performance starting big apps like loading games and whatnot..


Windows Xp has supported 64bit since the first 64bit athlon came out.

I have run Vista 32 and 64 since day one of release. I honestly don't see why peeps are complaining about upgrading to vista and saying XP is better lalala.... It's was the same with windows XP when it first came out, whining "windows 98 is better!" boohoo, are they still running 98? doubt it. Just adapt people.

I dig vista, i think we are way passed do for some native 64 bit apps. We have had 64 bit hardware and software for 6 years now. Shame on lame developers.

At 52 anything with heat looks good to me.

You answered my question, I was going to ask about that as I never pay for the full retail versions. Upgrade FTW!

BF2 works fine now, don't know about Civ 4 or baldur's gate. They should have fixed up PB manually.

Ok, now he's blaming drivers. Well I'm willing to bet it's nvidia's drivers that are to blame. Considering the most recent drivers for the FX series are from 2006

I just think this is funny, considering lame has been 64-bit for years also

Linux= next to no games

Mac = Stupidly expensive pricing
Ultimate can be had for LESS than 200$...
You arent trying to spread some FUD are you....

BTW, I am one of those people who have Vista x64 with 8 RAM and quad-core Intel chip, and my Vista also works very fast and very smoothly.

When I bought the box from my OEM, it was very slow, though, and I was very disappointed, because I chose my hardware carefully to work with Vista. I updated the whole machine with no luck. In the end, it was BIOS re-flash, which helped, and the difference was like between night and day. However, when I thought about it later, I discovered that the problem was caused by wrong BIOS settings, so it was the OEM's mistake and that it had nothing to do with Vista or the hardware.

I had two errors with Vista over the past six months or so. One was a BSOD caused by excessive overclocking. The other error was that I could not get into a Device Manager, which was caused by my tinkering with Vista, but I managed to repair that. And that's it. Speaking of tinkering, in the end I found out that it is best to leave Vista to its own devices (unlike XP), which is a good thing.

Speaking of performance and hardware requirements, when I compare my current Vista computer with a PC that I bought for then-new Windows XP (which cost more), I must say that Vista has an upper hand both in how fast the applications run and in how comfortable it is to use and how stable it is. At the same time, the difference between DOS and Windows 3.11, Windows 3.11 and Windows 98 and Windows 98 and Windows XP, was in all cases much bigger than the difference between a finely tuned Windows XP SP2 and Windows Vista.

Interesting that Tom's has ignored this article thus far.

First off, im glad from reading some of the previous posts that you can agree this website is going down the tubes faster than Brittany spears career. Its quite apparant from all the ads plastered here that Toms has sold out and is more concerned about the almighty dollar than doing real benchmark testing. I guess the article I read a few years back about Tom threating to sue the guy that took a picture of him while he was drunk at comdex should have woke me up then to what a pompous ass he is and it sounds like the rest of the reviewers are right behind him. (if the previous posters post was any indication).

Where are the benchmarks? Geez, i guess were just supposed to take his word for it. I mean, he wouldnt lie to us would he?

Whats up with the quote about how amd chips dont need the memory hole mapped in the bios? Thats funny, because on my supermicro dual opteron board with 2 dual core 285's , I had to enable memory hole before it saw all 8 gigs of my ram. Other than that, it was 3 gigs.

Also, where is the native 64 bit photoshop? Do they even offer it to do a benchmark? What about benchmarking photoshop 32 bit with 4 and 8 gigs as well with x32 and x64?

Oh, and dont let me forget to add about their raid controller card roundup. Funny how they mention to buy the ICP 5085BL card over the adaptec because they are supposedly the exact same card and price, yet the ICP has a faster processor (it does) but what they FAILED to tell us is that if you buy the ICP card in the USA ADAPTEC USA WILL NOT SUPPORT IT. You have to contact Adaptec European, where the ICP card is sold. Nice job again toms! You the man!

I noticed no difference in gaming performance with Vista 64 or XP 32... why do people make this stuff up...bioshock, crysis, cod4, witcher, dirt, etc.

I doubt M$ paid anything for this article, same as I doubt Intel paid for all the "biased" articles about their chips.

I've used XP, XP x64, and Vista Ultimate x64 using the system in my sig. Most of the games I played *did* have a performance hit. Of the ones you mentioned the only one I've played on more than one OS is Bioshock and that one didn't have a performance hit, but many, especially Oblivion ran worse. Another was Guild Wars which runs flawlessly under XP, runs less than that in Vista. I could blather on but won't...

-mcg

I have to install some RAM and set up an XP notebook for a friend tomorrow. I noticed she doesn't have SP2 loaded. I'm going to fix her up with SP2 and all the updates she is missing (650 at least). Regarding my system, I hope Vista SP1 can tweak up the system RAM even more(Superfetch upgraded) and further take advantage of my system hardware. I'm waiting for the day I can install my entire OS in my RAM.

Aren't most games developed with XP?

Sweet article, i particularly liked the benchmarks, the consistency of topics and general coherence of it....

This is such a standard M$ Vista review that all say "it just feels better and more responsive" with absolutely nothing to back that up. I don't care how nice the Vista DVD feels as you stroke it waiting for your OS to boot up, appz to eventually get going and as you watch your games go by in slide show mode as your FPS slow to a very pretty halt.

EXACTLY, havent you noticed? Everytime one of us list hardware and/or games that run great the topic gets changed? Not that I care, it will be funny in a year or so when they use Vista and recommend it to their friends just like they did with Windows 98, 2000, XP... LOL

as much as i wine about Vista i run Vista 64 Ultimate on my gaming rig with no swap file and it runs fine, i barely ever go over 2 Gb of used ram even when gaming, so if you only game or use your PC for everyday applications then 4 GB is plenty, if you do use memory intensive applications such as video or graphics editing you may well need more than 4 Gb, it's all up to how you use your PC at the end of the day.

8 gigs of memory makes Vista run like XP does under 2 gigs.

Awesome! I haven't seen progress like this since OS2.

I can only imagine how much that mac cost you. Parallels for 99.99? There goes 4GB of memory I could have installed.

Well I have this weird issue with games that seem to take up a lot of CPU resources, when i switch from some of these games to otehr applications or internet browsers and so on. I just want that scrren that comes up like the pc is overloaded or soemthing when that ahppens to stop, i figure maybe it was the page file kicking into gear but with 3 GB, it jsut didnt seem likely...

I second geofelt's observations. I was able to install Vista Ultimate 64-bit off of Vista Business 64-bit upgrade DVD using Vista Ultimate 32-bit keys. I run VMWare Workstation on my computer so having access to 8GB of memory's worth it for me.

Dear Tom's I have some questions in reagards to this article.

First about the "memory remap feature" in the BIOS of an ASUS board.
Am I correct in the assumption that with an MSI P35 Neo 2 FIR I will not find or even need such a feature in the BIOS because the machine will automatically remap the memory?

Secondly you showed screenshots about process details like for Photoshop and the explorer, to get this data you used a software that is not included but needs to be installed named process explorer? Where can I find this software please?

And thirdly and MOST important to me, you said that with a few special settings it is possible to grant 32 bit applications more than 2 GB per process namel 4 GB and then you show a screenshot where you gave photshop 3GB memory. Can you please let me know how I can do that?

Thank you very much for your help.