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I've recently purchased Windows 7 Ultimate. I have an AMD Athlon64 X2 5000+ with 2GB DDR2 RAM. I know RAM has gotten much cheaper, I know, I know, but I am not going to be able to upgrade my RAM for about a year.
My question is obviously this; will I get any benefit from installing 64-bit Windows over 32-bit if I'm only using 2GB of RAM?
As I understand, the minimum requirement is 2GB & max is 192GB so if the minimum for 64-bit is 2GB & the minimum for 32-bit is 1GB will I lose performance if I chose to install 64-bit at it's minimum requirement over 32-bit whose minimum is half the amount?
I would like to install the 64-bit edition if only because it's the future. 192GB of RAM! that's incredible! Plus I've heard it simply performs better. But that is with a larger amount of RAM.
I've tried to make this question as easy to decipher as possible. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
1Don't forget that programs written specifically for 64-bit Windows will be faster, although the effect will only be noticeable for certain types of programs--mainly video and things that do a lot of math like WinRAR. – Sasha Chedygov – 2010-08-31T22:28:02.490
possible duplicate of How much faster is a 64-bit CPU than a 32-bit CPU? I only mention this, because this question is like comparing a car with a 50 liter tank and a 100 liter fuel tank. They both work, and they can both do the same things, but the smaller tank is faster in some cases (less fuel weight), and the larger tank is faster in some cases (less time spent re-fueling). There is no benefit unless you require the use of 64-bit computing.
– Breakthrough – 2012-03-02T13:50:00.060You will soon find that Windows 7 runs a lot better starting at 4GB. At which point you will be upgrading both. Depends on whether you want the 32 to 64 rip'n replace headache now or later. RAM's the easy part. – Fiasco Labs – 2013-05-25T16:50:52.483
I disagree with the " There is no benefit unless you require the use of 64-bit computing.". a 64 bit OS allows for much more address space randomisation and much more mapping than you can do in 32 bit. YOu really should not use more than 512 MiB with a 32 bit OS. (and 2GiB is way more than 512MiB). – Hennes – 2013-06-29T16:17:33.237